by Brian Savage
The history feed was great, Jack thought. So much knowledge, and yet, so few viewers.
“Are you hungry?” Brant said, interrupting his disappointed amusement.
“No, not really.” Jack stopped beneath the towering, twisting triangle of grey metal. He turned and faced Brant.
“Well, this fat kid is hungry,” Brant said. “I’ll meet you back at the office, if that’s okay?”
“We shouldn’t split up, at least not until the Second Ring,” Jack said reluctantly.
Solitude would be nice, though…
“Come on, an agent hasn’t been attacked in like ten years; not since the Purges.”
The Purges. Jack wished Brant hadn’t mentioned that. “Fine. Two hours, back at the office.” Jack turned to go.
“You need anything?” Brant asked, half turning and starting off the opposite way.
“No,” Jack said sternly, not bothering to turn around. “Two hours.”
Chapter 3
Jack made his way through the park, pausing at the side of the street to check both ways. Seeing nothing but people, he jogged across, cutting slightly to the left, aiming for the entrance of the coffee shop he frequented in the First Ring. He stopped jogging when he hit the sidewalk, sidestepping a couple of Corporate suits, before ducking inside the shop.
The air inside smelled of freshly ground coffee beans. It was warm with an almost steamy feel, the door being opened just often enough to allow a constant flow of the outside humidity. There were quite a few people inside, the lunch hour its busiest, but Jack noticed there wasn’t much of a line at the counter.
Already slightly sweating from the long walk, Jack slipped his jacket off and slung it over his left arm. He could conceal most of his weapon this way but have quick access to it if needed. He made his way to the counter. A woman in a red dress, with blond hair piled high above the shaved sides of her head, was paying. He stepped behind her, as she hit a green button that said “Confirm” on the small display facing her. The screen went blank for a split second before flashing, “Thank you for your payment, Karen!” in a cheery, artistic script. She turned around, briefly making eye contact with Jack, before a forced smile and an, “Excuse me.”
Jack smiled back, taking a step back and allowing Karen to squeeze between him and a young guy who was talking too loudly, with his seat pushed too far from a table of what Jack gauged to be environmental designers. The Corporation had made a huge push lately in redesigning Corporate property to be more pleasing to the eye, more comfortable, and more green. The draft paper in front of the guy had what looked like a park bench on it, except every other seat back was opposite the other. Jack shook his head at the absurdity. If only to make sitting beside a stranger on a park bench more awkward, you’re forced to face them with just enough space, if you sit all the way back, to be unable to avoid the inevitable eye contact.
Jack turned back toward the counter. Stepping forward, he attempted to block out the loud laughter coming from the environmental designers. He tapped the dark screen, waking it up. “Welcome,” flashed briefly on the screen before the price options appeared. He liked this coffee shop for the sole reason that the cheapest bean it sold was a fully organic bean. The most expensive one, they guaranteed that the manure used to fertilize the bean was also from organically raised and freely ranged animals. Jack chose the cheaper option. He reasoned that if the shit his coffee was grown in was what killed him, it was probably just his time to go.
The screen then switched to drink options. He chose a 20 oz French press, no room for cream or sugar. The payment screen was next. Asking, “Pay Swift?” it gave the options to “Confirm” or “Choose a different method of payment.” Jack selected to choose a different payment method. Swift was the implant program that allowed the coffee shop to wirelessly bill you through the banking information saved on your implant. Jack didn’t think the small coffee shop in the First Ring had the proper security access to wirelessly pair with his implant, but even if it had, he wouldn’t have used that method. The internet access at places like coffee shops was notorious for hacking incidents. Jack wasn’t going to chance it. The worst would be a deliberate hack, which could possibly kill him; the very least would be a spamware virus that would play a male enhancement ad every time he turned on the feed. Either way, it was death or death by suicide from too many jingles about male genitalia.
The next options for payment were “Quick Pay” and “Eco Charge.” Jack chose “Quick Pay.” Eco Charge would ask for his personal identification number, verify his identity using the national I.D. database and the camera on the display, then charge the bill to his next paycheck. When this type of pay option rolled out to stores, restaurants, and entertainment venues, the feed was full of stories about poor, impoverished people whose paychecks for the next three months had already been spent. Quick Pay was easier and only allowed you to spend the contents of your account. Still dangerous for some, but safer than charging future paychecks.
Jack reached into the front pocket of his slacks and pulled out the small black rectangle, about two inches wide, three inches long, and an inch thick. “Make Payment” appeared on the screen and a small red square appeared. Jack took his digital wallet and placed it on the screen, holding it there until the box turned green and the screen displayed, “Thank you, Jack.”
Jack stepped to the left, moving along the counter until he came to the chairs placed along the bar. Thin glass stood between him and the baristas preparing his coffee. The glass served two purposes: keeping sneezes, coughs, and unwanted conversations away from the baristas and the coffee, and as a heads-up display, or HUD, that held all the information for the orders put in at the kiosk. A barista looked intently at Jack as he sat down. Jack knew she was probably just reading his order displayed on the HUD, but he smiled politely anyway.
He watched her making the French roast he’d ordered, pressing the grounds down with the spoon, without stirring. She placed the lid on the glass cylinder and left it sitting there, brewing as she continued making other patrons’ coffees. Jack sat back and turned toward the entrance. He decided he could check the feed as long as he kept an eye on the one way into the coffee shop. The feed was the streaming service that could be accessed by a subscriber’s implant. The implant input sense stimuli directly into the brain. This allowed listening to or even watching things without any actual audio or visual stimulation from the outside world. The issue was, the stimuli overrode the actual senses of the user. If you tuned in to a visual feed, you couldn’t see the world in front of your face. An audio feed likewise blocked all outside audio input; extremely useful, living in a huge city that never slept.
Anyone who was watching a visual feed could be seen just sitting and staring, eyes darting back and forth rapidly like a wide-awake REM cycle. Jack utilized the thought commands necessary and called up the News Feed. In an instant, the noise of the full coffee shop disappeared, and the voice of a male news anchor could be heard, mid-sentence: “…which seems like a huge miscalculation on the part of the defense, don’t you think? He had whatever evidence he is suddenly bringing forth for his client’s innocence, but it’s too late; his client was fired.”
Another anchor, a female with a deep voice, said, “That’s right, Tom, legal experts are saying this could change case law for how termination judgements are handled. Possibly even create what is being called a ‘cooling off period’ between judgment rendered and the actual termination process.” She paused here.
Jack looked around the room, mouths moving, but no sound coming out. He caught some movement to his left—the barista waving at him. She mouthed what appeared to be “Jack,” pointing at the French press, plunger now all the way depressed. Jack nodded his head up and down and apologized. At least, he hoped he apologized; he couldn’t hear himself say it. She picked up the class cylinder and poured the dark contents into a coffee cup made from a light-weight, glass-like material. From the moment the coffee entered the cup, the clear material cha
nged into a cloudy white-grey; the heat-activated, color-changing property of the cup alerted the user to how long they had before the cup would break down. Changing color over time, once the cup was a pinkish color, the user would have just one hour before the cup disintegrated into dust.
“Thank you,” he hoped he said, as she handed him the cup over the glass divider.
Catching the feed again in mid-sentence, he heard, “…John Lawson’s attorney just opened himself up to some serious civil litigation with this, didn’t he?” Jack made a face at the mention of that name.
“Absolutely,” continued the female reporter, “experts are saying the civil settlement could reach up to or over hundreds of millions of dollars. His partners at the firm are not going to be happy.”
“Thank you, Trisha,” Tom said. “In sports news…”
Jack gave the thought command, shutting off the feed, and waited in utter silence for the few seconds it took for the sounds of real life to fade back in. He was glad for the most recent feed upgrade. The deafening sound of the real world coming back in immediately after listening to the feed had actually damaged people’s hearing, prompting a software patch that created a soft fade in. Slowly, the clinking of glasses, the steaming of milk, and multiple conversations greeted his ears.
After taking a sip of his coffee, Jack set it down and put his jacket back on. He swept the cup back up in one motion as he moved toward the door. Out in the street, he cut back left, heading for the park and the next gate in the multilayered security.
Brant was sitting in a booth in one of the First Ring’s greasy spoons, the kind that blue-collared workers of all types came to during their lunch hours. He found that the blue-collared workers, those in trade jobs and responsible for the maintenance around the rings, were less unfriendly toward the agents. They had a stronger sense of the necessity of the agents’ position, and many times were even openly friendly toward him, offering to buy him drinks every now and then. He took a bite of the double cheeseburger, washing it down with ice water.
Ever since becoming Jack’s partner, he had cut back on eating a lot of the crap he had before. It was easier than listening to his partner’s comments about the poison contained in every bite, and it held him accountable. He worked out twice a day, so becoming obese wasn’t an issue…the chemical additives could affect him, but he wasn’t really sure. When you grow up eating a certain way, you never truly know what it is like not eating those things. Much like how druggies can hardly remember what it was like to breathe a breath of fresh air without the shit coursing through their veins.
He looked around the room. There were beefy men, slim boys, and the ones that were in between; the ones he knew were on some sort of junk. The living skeletons all huddled together under the weight of life, which threatened to collapse their frail, unhealthy-looking bodies. Under the new capitalistic system, all illicit drugs had been legalized. The reasoning was that it was your choice what you put in your body. Why should the government have a say?
The effect of the legalization was immediate, starting with a spike in violent crime. The legalization had dropped the price of all drugs on the black market, and dealers, hurting from the change, had turned to more violent crimes to pad their wallets. This soon tapered off and reversed. The corporations came in, each competing for a drug market. Advertisements started popping up on the feeds in the poorest parts of the city with slogans like, “It’s just smart math to go with Club Meth, with the highest production safety measures in the industry.”
Brant hated companies like that. He had watched his single dad get eaten from the inside out, legally. His dad hadn’t been poor, but he hadn’t been rich, working for a company installing wireless networks for businesses in the First Ring. Brant could still see the scabs that had formed around his dad’s white implant, from the incessant scratching and picking. This culminated when Brant was nineteen and just starting at the police academy, and he came home one night to see his dad collapsed in a pool of blood, the white implant smeared with bloody fingerprints set on the dinner table. His dad spent three days in a coma before he let himself die. Brant had thought, bitterly, that he had been holding on for one more hit; hoping to get one last fix.
His stomach turned. Brant paused, looking at his food, clasping and unclasping his hands beneath the table. My dad chose his path in life, and I have chosen mine, he thought bitterly to himself, looking back up to the skin-and-bones addicts at the far end of the tubular diner. He hoped they didn’t have kids. He hoped the disease would die with them. He hoped that the last of them would be wiped from the face of the earth.
He took one last, reluctant bite of the burger before setting it into the center of the eco-friendly paper wrapping and smashing it into the smallest ball he could. He dropped the ball into his cup, and shoved the rest of his fries and their container in as well. He got up from his seat and made his way to the entrance, located in the center of the diner on the opposite wall from the bar. He tossed his trash into a waste bin and pushed through the first set of doors.
“Time,” he said aloud. A small digital clock appeared in front of his eyes, just floating on the back of the glass door in front of him. It glowed “13:37” in large, digital block print. He blinked, the numbers disappearing as he pushed through the door and back into the rain.
“Should have just enough time,” he said to himself, heading for the entrance to the Second Ring. “Your days are numbered; down to the last second,” the whispering voice spoke inside his head; a wisping thought that curled around his emotions. He shooed the mental smoke away, trying to blow out the small flame of an idea that threatened to burn black everything inside of him. He held to hope, but knew that without hope, there could be no despair.
Chapter 4
“Time,” Jack said aloud as he exited the gate into the Second Ring. “13:42” appeared on the sidewalk just in front of him as he walked briskly to the left, following the high silver wall. The silver wall of the Second Ring was an entire story higher than the white wall of the First. Other than that, and the color, it shared the same characteristics. Metal, solid, semi-impenetrable. Jack reached his left hand out, running his fingers along the smooth surface out of habit. He counted the spaces between the sheets of metal under his breath as he passed them.
“One…two…three…four…” and so on until he reached sixteen.
At sixteen, Jack turned sharply to the right and jogged across the street. There was much less foot traffic in the Second Ring, and even less buildings than the First. A few specialty shops, mostly carrying items used in work, a few small gift shops, and the occasional restaurant and bar. Jack snaked his way between a bar with Japanese characters and a sushi roll on a sign and a floral shop with orchids in hand-carved wooden bowls in the windows. The alley between the buildings was about two shoulder-width’s wide, and took an angle to the left. He passed other buildings, most likely apartments for the owners and employees of the shops he passed.
He passed another row of apartments before emerging from the alley between a tailor and another restaurant. Jack could smell the peanut and sesame oil wafting on the breeze from the restaurant, a sure sign that it held Chinese cuisine. Jack’s stomach grumbled. He hadn’t had anything since he finished the coffee back before he even made it all the way to the entrance of the Second Ring. He reminded himself of the food he had brought from home, sitting almost forgotten in his office. Besides, he was almost late. Looking up, he could see the black glass spire which was the capital building for City Prime and CSA. It stood sleek and unflinching, pointing straight up into the sky over a hundred stories tall, the top obscured by the low cloud cover. It reminded Jack of a large stake, carved into a long, pyramidal shape. The stake was from an old vampire movie he had seen. It had been plunged into the heart of the undead blood sucker. This building had been built to plunge defeat into the socialists’ hearts. He didn’t know if it had truly worked.
At the base and just a couple blocks down, he could see th
e black wall that signified the farthest most everyday citizens could venture toward the capital building; its sleek glass sides sparkled with rain water and held the mysteries that were the inner workings of the CSA. Inner workings that only a few truly held the secrets to.
Jack jogged across the street. He could see the security checkpoint that served as an entrance into the third and final ring. In the Third Ring, no aerial traffic was allowed, and gasser traffic was restricted to the agents. All people who lived outside of the capital building walked to the Second Ring, then were able to catch rides from there. The President and CEO, Josh Dent, and his wife, lived in a suite near the top of the spire. His office and workspace were directly below, and an entire floor of personal security lay just below that. Jack knew these things because he had, at one time, been investigating socialist infiltration of the CEO’s security team. It had earned him a meeting with the most untouchable man in the country, and a personal letter of thanks from that same man when Jack uncovered a plot to kill him. It turned out that a socialist cell had kidnapped the son of one of the lead security team members, with the promise of safe return if the member was able to kill the CEO.
The socialist cell had been found and exterminated. The team member’s son had been, it turned out, killed in the kidnapping. The team member had been fired. Jack was grateful that it had not been his day at the termination hearing. He felt bad for the guy. He imagined he would have done the same if he had been in that situation.
He snapped himself out of his reverie and slowed to a walk as he passed below some large trees. All the way around the Third Ring wall was open space and at least one hundred massive oak trees. Each tree towered far above the heads of the few pedestrians that milled about, and caused the rain to collect and before it fell, not quite as frequently, but in larger drops. The drip dropping was loud enough to be noticeable and was more frequent whenever a breeze stirred the leaves.
