Inner City

by Norton, Scott

  “When I realised where I was I tried to go back. I’d rather have faced the knife inside than the Outlocked savages, but I’d lost a lot of blood and I fainted. I was in the Outlocked lands, unconscious and only seven years old.

  I was taught I should be dead. And I believed what I’d been taught. But I didn’t die. I was operated on in a hospital, an Outlocked hospital. When I returned home, the doctors said I’d dreamt it, but the way I was fixed up wasn’t like any City person has ever been fixed up. I had stitches sticking out of me, which doesn’t make it like any dream I know.”

  Snickers were beginning to pass around the hall. Professor Klim’s reputation for unorthodox ways was well known and the students were starting to suspect Callen had been put up to telling this wild account in order to provoke thought within the class. Only Klim realised the seriousness of Callen’s introduction and he was quick to get to his feet and move to a small control panel to the side of the room.

  “What are you doing?” Callen forcefully asked.

  “I’m switching off the viewer-cam.”

  “I don’t want it switched off. I want everyone to hear this.”

  “But they’ll come for you. They’ll arrest you.”

  Callen knew what he was risking.

  “How long have I got?” Callen asked.

  “I don’t know. Maybe ten minutes. It depends who’s watching.”

  “Ten minutes is all I need.”

  It took Klim a moment to realise Callen wanted him back in his seat. Once he had, he returned quickly. The audience was growing more and more unruly as their conviction grew about being the victims of a ‘Klim’ orchestrated practical joke. Callen continued, this time raising his voice slightly in order to be heard.

  “Almost two weeks ago, I set out to prove, once and for all that I didn’t dream that first journey like they tried to tell me.”

  There was now audible laughter and discussion breaking out about the truthfulness of their speaker. Callen could tell he was losing the crowd’s attention. He walked to Eve and put his hand out, helping her to her feet. He returned to the podium with Eve at his side, but it did little to settle the crowd.

  “This is Eve. She’s an Outlocked. We’re together and we’ve made love many times, without a simulator.”

  Callen spoke clearly and slowly so every word could be heard. It had the desired effect. There was absolute stillness in the hall following the statement. Eyes were glued to Callen. Eve looked at her feet as her face lit up red in embarrassment to the declaration. Callen had just made a statement that every person in that room knew he could be arrested for. It wouldn’t matter if the statement was true or not, saying it was enough for a person to be arrested.

  Those listening had a duty by law to report Callen to the authorities if the authorities weren’t already watching. If they didn’t every person hearing him speak could also face being arrested. Callen had just made himself the most wanted man in the City.

  Callen held the silence for a good length of time.

  “Nothing we have ever been taught about the land outside the City, or the people who live on that land, is true.”

  A young woman near the back of the hall got to her feet. She’d heard enough and in disgust was off to do her duty.

  “Sit down! No-one leaves until I’m done!” Callen screamed.

  The woman stopped where she stood. She slowly returned to her seat. Callen had everyone’s full attention. The students shared the viewer cam’s focused and unblinking gaze. Now all Callen had to do was say what he’d come to say.

  “The Outlocked live with nature. They have abundant natural resources and communities. They are ruled by a council of Elders. Their food is amazing and most important every one of them is allowed a family.”

  The way Callen told it, the Outlocked had the reality of the simulated world of the city. When he finished his account, he was met with a room of shocked faces. Callen looked to Klim with some uncertainty. Klim had a look of victory about him - he was excited by everything Callen had said.

  “We’re going to leave now,” Callen said quietly to the Professor, who was suddenly treating the couple as if they were visiting dignitaries.

  Klim nodded and led them to a door at the side of the room. They passed through to a landing outside.

  “Where will you go?” Klim asked.

  “We don’t know.”

  “Maybe home,” Eve added.

  Klim understood immediately which home she was referring to.

  “The Outlocked land?”

  “You believe me, then?” Callen asked with excitement.

  “I do,” he said as he handed over a crystal.

  “This is a master key to the university. It opens every door. In case you need somewhere to get lost for a while.”

  Callen took the crystal.

  “Thank you,” he said with sincere gratitude. “Do you think they believe me?” Callen asked.

  “No-one’s ever believed me,” Klim said. “But then, I never thought of using sex to get their attention.”

  Klim wasn’t mocking Callen, he was quite serious. In all the years of lecturing, the Professor had never pushed his suggestions past the law. Callen had done that in one brief and devastating outburst. It had been an admission of enormous disobedience against a system not used to being disobeyed.

  Callen and Eve walked quickly down the corridor to the light of day brought by an open air doorway in the distance. They had to find themselves a place to hide for a while. Callen wanted to lie low and gauge the reaction of his first attempt to reach his peers. He also needed to think about what to do next.

  Chapter 18.

  The university campus was alive with movement. Police and government authorities outnumbered the students, who were being largely ignored. Media had streamed to the site. There were broadcast transporters taking up every possible vantage point and everywhere, another journalist, with jacket pressed, stood, microphone at the ready, each delivering a slightly different editorial on the same subject; the student who defiantly stood and corrupted everything ever taught by the City. Callen was the modern serial killer and his victims included the most basic and fundamental laws of society, the moral right and simple good taste. He was painted as psychotic, as a radical, as a defective member of a society which had long since found ways to guard against such deviant behaviour.

  While the laws of sexuality and breeding were often broken, such breaches were quickly covered up and the perpetrators tried and punished without any undue attention. The persecution of the few wrongly accused, was an accepted consequence of the need to maintain order and control in the over populated city. Any weakening of this stance would lead to an uncontrolled increase in population, which would bring about the end of the City and dismantle the structure upon which the powerful stood to conduct their grand lives.

  The hunt was on to find Callen and make an example of him and his partner, be she an Outlocked, as claimed, or another City protestor in what was already being editorialised as a young man’s grand hoax. To one side, Professor Klim was being jostled and grabbed as police led him away to be questioned. He walked amidst the sea of reporters and cameras. Every student was talking of the incident. They all realised they’d been at university on a day that would long be remembered and those who were actually lucky enough to be inside the hall were commanding centre stage, not just with the other students, but also with the media. Of all those present, only three remained outside the excitement of the moment.

  A little way to the side of the media circus, Jenny, Jay and Simone, stood in shock.

  “Why would he do something like this?” Jay wondered.

  “He’s been gone a long time,” Jenny said.

  “What’s that got to do with anything?”

  “Maybe he said those things because they were true.”

  Jay and Simone both screwed up their faces, finding the thought very unlikely.

  “Have you ever known Callen to lie about anything?�
� Jenny asked in his defence. The question was met with silence. Jay and Simone thought it over. Callen was a lot of things, but not a liar. Nor was he a storyteller and the tale he’d told in Klim’s class was one of the most elaborately fanciful stories they’d ever heard. So fanciful they were sure it couldn’t have been hatched in Callen’s imagination.

  “He told me he was going outside the City,” Jenny said.

  Jay and Simone couldn’t believe such a piece of information had been kept from them.

  “When?!” Simone asked.

  “A few months ago. I never thought he was serious.” The threesome stood in silence watching the chaos for a while longer. They were all thinking the same thing, but each was fighting against saying it out loud.

  “They’re going to kill him, if they find him,” Jenny said, finally breaking the deadlock of silence.

  “What do you expect us to do about it?” Jay asked.

  “Help him, maybe,” Jenny fired back.

  “They could kill us,” Simone said.

  “So you still think he’s lying about what happened to him?” Jenny asked pointedly of Simone. Simone didn’t, and the look on her face answered the question for her.

  “Then why wouldn’t we help him? If we believe what he said about being outside the city and the way they live out there, we have to help him.” Jenny’s point was not lost on the others. If Callen had discovered a way of life that they’d all only dreamt of before, the only barrier to obtaining that life, was their compliance with the rules of the city. Most of the city’s population were dissatisfied with their lives in some way and these three were no exception. If the things Callen claimed were even partially true, then to do nothing would be to turn down an opportunity to improve their own lives alongside everyone else’s.

  “I don’t care what you decide to do, I’m helping him.”

  With that Jenny began to walk away.

  “Hang-on, I didn’t say I wouldn’t help,” Jay called after her.

  “Neither did I,” added Simone.

  It was enough to stop Jenny and bring her back to the group.

  “So how do we go about it?”

  Simone and Jay looked at her with blank faces. They turned again to look out over the multitude, already in a life and death hunt for the young man in question. Before the three could even think about helping Callen they’d have to find him, and they’d have to do that before anyone else.

  Callen passed the crystal key across the lock of a plastic door. He poked his head inside and stopped. The room was perfect. It was a cleaning storeroom, large enough to store any number of electronic cleaning implements. But best of all, it had a large grill in the ceiling that led to a heating shaft and the duct was easily accessible from the large plastic storage shelves that climbed their way to the roof like a ladder. Together, he and Eve had looked through almost all the rooms in this particular university building; an old building, little used. A building on the very edge of the university perimeter. To this point they had taken up camp and been forced to flee from oncoming searchers almost a dozen times. The only reason they’d managed to stay ahead of those looking for them was thanks to the chaos and manner in which the search was being conducted. The presence of the students was also helping to cover their tracks. At one point they actually ventured into the open and linked themselves to a large group of people moving out from a lecture. But Callen knew, once the authorities cleared the grounds, they’d need all the help they could get to remain undetected. Callen was certain, that in this room, they’d found their best chance.

  The powers that be kept to the exact script that Callen imagined. They emptied the university of students and began to search the grounds and the buildings, inch by inch. Rumours were circulating that Callen and Eve had already left the city and returned to the life they’d boasted of.

  Hastily called meetings between high ranking officials and power brokers within the city were called and the threat Callen posed was being treated as their most serious concern, but there was more argument to assign blame than there was about the validity of Callen’s story. The only significant thing to come from any of the dozen or more meetings convened over the few hours since Callen had spoken was to restore order at all costs and the death of one foolish young man and his partner was something deemed necessary to attain it.

  Eve jumped with fright as Callen opened the door to the storeroom with his foot. He carried with him a viewer from one of the nearby rooms. He set it up on the shelves and plugged it in. Every station was running their story. He jumped back and forth between channels. The updates screamed banners of sensational new developments and then sung the same old news, unchanged from the first hours of the story breaking. Callen was painted as a crazed young man, thrown out of home for disciplinary problems and bitter at having failed to secure a place in the education system. They explained his presence at the university over the past year as a result of his refusal to accept that he hadn’t qualified for even the most basic course as a home student. They told the pathetic tale of Callen’s daily charade - heading off to university - unable to accept the reality of his situation. His undoing had supposedly come at the end of the academic year when he knew his grades would not be published and his pretence as a student would be revealed. The reports told how Callen realised he’d be humiliated when the truth came out and this had pushed him to try and make a name for himself in some other manner. Eve wanted Callen to protest against such lies, but he knew better. He knew the power of the media and the legitimacy it instantly gave to any revision of history.

  Callen flicked the viewer off. He’d heard enough. What he’d said hadn’t been believed and he needed to continue to speak to people in order to convince them of what was outside the city’s walls. Eve wasn’t surprised by his attitude. She was getting used to his determination and knew he was in this fight to the finish.

  The main door to the building was rattled open. Callen had made very sure every door had been locked or obstructed in such a way it couldn’t be opened without making considerable noise. Callen and Eve froze. Callen pointed to the duct above them and as Eve moved, he quickly made his way to the door and peered out. Their storeroom was down a long corridor and around a corner in the ‘L’ shaped building. It allowed Callen the benefit of being able to head down the corridor to the thermostat and remain undetected by anyone entering from the main door. He quickly hit the controller and watched the liquid crystal display flash its numbers upwards. Twenty-Two, Twenty-Three, Twenty-Four. He hoped the heat moving through the shaft, would mask their presence. It would be their only hope of remaining undetected.

  He dimmed the display on the thermostat and then moved from it, back to the storeroom that was now empty. Eve peered down from the open duct in the ceiling. Callen moved a box up against the viewer to make it look unused and climbed up beside Eve. They crawled as far away from the vent as they could manage, forcing themselves past a bend in the plastic shaft. There, they waited as the building was searched.

  It took almost thirty minutes for the searchers and their equipment to move through each room. Finally the door opened and a lone guard stepped inside. With a control pad and a small hand held pointer he made a sweep of the room. The guard aimed the pointer across the shaft and then swung it back again. The display lit up with a piercing beep emitted. Callen and Eve held their breath as the guard put their hiding place under greater scrutiny. He climbed the shelves and flashed a torch into the shaft, seeing only plastic as it bent its way within the roof of the building. The couple remained undetected.

  The heat in the shaft had camouflaged Callen and Eve’s presence, just as Callen had hoped it would. While the room was no-where near the temperature of the human body, the air needed to travel the shaft in order to heat the building to the level shown on the thermostat, was warm enough to conceal them from the guards scanning equipment. The guard replaced the vent and moved out of the room. The moment he was gone, Eve repositioned herself. She and Callen were sweatin
g profusely and Callen gave her a sympathetic smile, understanding her discomfort. He was feeling the heat too, but for the sake of remaining unfound, it was a necessary evil.

  Half an hour passed before Callen felt safe enough to drop from their hiding place. He tentatively looked down the hallway, disappearing a moment later. He quickly returned and climbed back into the duct.

  “They’re still there?” Eve asked with some concern.

  “No,” Callen answered, “I just turned the heat down. I don’t know how much longer we’ll have to stay here.”

  Eve was far from impressed, but having been trained as a guard in her own world for all manner of situations, she understood the need for caution. Together, wet and sticky, they lay back down in the duct. The lack of hot air blowing over them was a relief. It allowed them to pass the next few hours in each other’s arms in a light drifting slumber. Around them, the search of the university grounds continued into darkness and without success.

  For two days the university lay empty, the grounds off limits to all students and even the media were relegated to the sidelines. The storeroom which Eve and Callen had made their own was only searched once more in all that time and this was by a junior officer who never even put foot in the room. On the third day of hiding, the police moved away and students resumed their studies. While some media units persisted, shooting post mortem wrap ups of the entire event, people honestly felt the matter closed. The media’s grand hoax theory had swept the city and Callen’s name was being sullied at every opportunity. He and Eve watched their viewer to keep up with reports. Only once was Callen left at a loss for words, ashamed by his own people. The viewer sung of the discovery of Eve’s true identity. They interviewed her parents, showed photos of her as a youngster playing contentedly with her friends in school. They gave her a history, complete in every detail and even showed recent photos that were unmistakably Eve. The story completed with an impassioned plea from her parents, her ‘mother’, Mrs Bestnell eventually breaking down and pleading into camera to her ‘little girl’.