Upon Stilted Cities - The Winds of Change

by Michael Kilman

  Only two kinds of people enjoyed the alcoves on a regular basis: Uppers and Runners. She didn’t think the Runners much enjoyed them because it was a part of their prison sentence. She imagined that after years of being out in the wastes, a Runner would hate their longevity. In fact, she was certain that some of them would have preferred not to stay young and healthy, many of them would welcome death; that is, if it weren’t for recycling.

  Recycling was a nasty business, one that even Tera did not care for. Especially after... the incident... No one knew for sure if a person’s consciousness was in a recycled body. After a Runner died in Manhatsten, and perhaps in the other cities, their body was taken away to some underground facility. If their brain and body were mostly intact, they would appear again within a few weeks. But when they reemerged, they were different, passive and unresponsive. No one knew what happened down in the depths of the sub-level of the engineering section, but there were rumors.

  A memory from several months earlier clawed at Tera, mixing with the semi-consciousness of the alcove experience. She saw images of the Runner Dock take shape in front of her open eyes. She knew what was coming, and she tried to stop it, but she couldn’t move, not until the alcove cycle finished.

  2.

  “What brings you down to the docks, Senator?”

  “Oh, I am checking on the status of a new Runner, the one that struck me.”

  “Ah, you must mean Runner 1862,” said the dock supervisor. His nametag read “Marty Stroeman,” his title below it in thin white letters. He was a short round man with dark bushy eyebrows. Tera’s immediate impression was that he was repulsive. A big mole stood just to the left of his nose, where the tiniest hint of a mustache was trying to emerge unsuccessfully. His squashed face and beady eyes worked their way up and down her body. It made her uncomfortable, and she wasn’t used to that feeling.

  “Forgive me, Senator, but he’s in the medical bay at the moment, recovering from his muscle augmentation.”

  “Good. I want you to march him right by me before you put him in storage.”

  “I’m sorry Senator, but he won’t be going into storage yet. He’ll be trained in an EnViro suit for several hours this afternoon and then put back into the medical bay to ensure he heals from training. Creating a Runner is a several-day process.”

  She looked at him furiously. “I know that,” she would never admit to this fool that she didn’t. “Just make sure that he sees me on his way to his training session. I want him to know what striking a Senator means.” Her voice was almost a growl.

  The fool’s name was Louis Gardner, a middle-aged high school teacher from the Mids. He had spurned her repeated sexual advances. She had threatened him and his wife and children, and he had slapped her with the back of his hand, knocking her over. Striking a public official was forbidden, but that hadn’t seemed to sway this fool. In a few hours he was convicted by the Supreme Justices and sent to the Runnercore.

  Overhead, the AI said, “Recycled Runner number 107, please step forward and adjust the rear right arm of EnViro Suit Assembly on platform number 9.”

  "Why do they announce it like that instead of just transmitting straight to the Recycled Runner?" Tera asked.

  "So we know what the recycled are doing. They're creepy as hell, and we instructed the AI to announce all their orders, so it doesn't scare the inspectors. The last thing you want to see is one of those things walking toward you without knowing why. Didn’t you hear about that incident a few decades back with the suit malfunctions?”

  "No.” She rolled her eyes. “I didn't know you were all such cowards down here." she scoffed.

  "You might not say that if you got near one. There's something... unnatural about those things. I don’t know why security insists on using them. Especially after the mess we had to clean up after the incident. We should have expelled all of them then."

  Then Tera saw him, or it. The once-man stepped forward in rhythmic footsteps. The movement was so unnatural that Tera could hardly believe that this... thing, had once been human. It wore a combat-ready EnViro suit. Only the helmet was missing. Its thin white hair was frayed and patchy. On the left shoulder, etched in the metal of the suit and catching the occasional glare of the harsh fluorescent lights, was ‘RR #107’.

  To her horror, she recognized the face, though now it was thin and pruned. His pale skin was outlined by blue lines. His once-sparkling eyes were solid white on white on white. The pupil was missing.

  He had been a part of that uprising a few decades back. His name had been... what... Aaron? She couldn’t recall his surname.

  “What...” she turned to address Stroeman. “What in the name of the gods happened to him?” She pointed, but it was a half-hearted thing. She didn’t want to draw its attention.

  “Oh him? He got caught in a Sandstorm on his second run.”

  “Is that why his skin looks like that?”

  “Well, that and the chemicals used to reanimate the muscles after death, at least, that’s what the AI says. None of us know what they do down there.”

  Tera felt uncomfortable. Her intuition screamed at her. She needed to leave. She needed to run. She couldn't move. She looked around and realized the room had tinged a reddish color.

  “Apologies Senator, but I have to attend to 1862. I will...” he seemed to be looking for the right word. “Parade him by you as you requested.” He disappeared toward the medical bay.

  RR #107 came closer. Tera looked around and realized that she was standing next to platform 9. Then, just before it walked past her, it stopped. Its head turned toward her, and its eyes fixed on hers. Without a pupil, she had no way of knowing for sure it was looking at her. Yet, it was, and there was something horrible there, something fixating on her. For a moment, she imaged a pupil locking onto hers. She shook. Her legs almost buckled.

  It wanted to hurt her, she could feel it. She could feel the depths of its rage, its madness, its desire to tear her apart. She knew that if she didn’t move, it would reach out and grab her and begin its terrifying work of dismantling her physical body in an orgy of blood and pain. She wanted to scream, but nothing came. She wanted to run, but couldn’t turn away from its locked eyes. It had her, and she knew it. There would be no escape. She would pay for her crimes of casting so many down into the Runnercore.

  In her mind’s eye, she could hear it whispering to her with a deadly, terrifying song of suffering. Images of what it had gone through flickered in her mind. The storm, the uprising, the torture, the chemicals, all of it penetrated her, illuminated by a red light.

  Its lips did not move, but she heard a voice. “Soon you will become one of us, soon you will be with us, and there is nothing you can do.”

  She saw images of it tearing off her limbs one by one and leaving her body and brain intact. Then it would carry the pieces down a long corridor and into the room with a sterile steel table. It would lay her body down and then the machines would come, putting Humpty Dumpty back together again, and the process of recycling would begin.

  The voice whispered in soft tones. “You will share in our fate; you will do your part. We will be one. We are all one. Join us, Tera.”

  Its whispers were ringing over and over again in her mind.

  “You will do your part.” She knew it would grab her now and begin the process.

  “You will do your part.” She felt her skin crawl, and her limbs went numb in anticipation of the tearing sensation they would soon feel.

  “You will do your part.” She could not resist. She could not run, her mind was emptying and so was her bladder, soaking her long green dress. A smell of ammonia. Fear engulfed her, a vortex of nothingness, so complete, so total that she knew she could never escape it.

  Then RR #107’s eyes unlocked from hers, and it turned its head forward and marched for the EnViro Suit Assembly Platform. Tera looked down at her green dress and acknowledged the wetness running down her thigh, but it didn’t matter. Nothing except escape from this plac
e mattered; nothing except putting space between her and that thing mattered. She pivoted, just as Runner 1862 emerged from the medical bay. She broke into a run toward the door. Her limbs were still numb as she left the Runner Dock and did not stop running until she found her security escort to take her back to her chambers.

  3.

  After the incident, Tera never went down into the Runnercore again.

  Tera shivered, she didn’t know why her thoughts were drawn to the Runnercore so much in the past six months. Perhaps it was because she had encountered the infamous Runner 17 just a few weeks before the incident. 17 was famous even among the Uppers; he was said to be unkillable, she had even heard Daniels say as much when he had addressed the Senate. As a little girl, one of her favorite films on the vidscreen told the story of how 17 had singlehandedly stormed Mex and saved Manhatsten from total destruction. There were often even bets on his activities outside of the walls of Manhatsten. To so many living in the top of the skyscrapers, 17 was an amusing athlete, a spectacle, a curiosity to live through vicariously.

  But Tera wanted him, wanted him badly. The thought of him made her loins burn with lust. But even with all of her power, the city protocol prevented her from getting close to him. She wanted what she couldn't have, and she knew it. It did nothing to assuage the ache. Besides, this was one person who she couldn’t threaten with the Runnercore if he didn’t comply with her wishes. She had no leverage over him. But she had thought that any man would fuck a woman like Tera after all that time alone.

  There was also the fact that everyone knew Runners were beasts, and some part of her feared that he would try to kill her if unleashed from the tether of his security chip.

  “You must do your part, Tera.”

  Tera opened her eyes in the alcove and could see nothing or no one. Had someone spoken to her?

  “The eyes of the Recycled watch you always.”

  It was a whisper, a barely audible phrase that sent Tera into almost a panic. She wanted out of the alcove immediately but realized she had set it to delay opening for another fifteen minutes. Trapped, she now felt the echoes of her fear from the incident. Who was watching her? Who was speaking to her?

  “Your part, Tera, the eyes of the Recycled know you aren’t doing your part. Those dead eyes are my eyes, and we are watching you. Do your part, Tera, or else.”

  Tera’s whole body shuttered, goose flesh pimpled on the pores on her soft, silky skin, making it as rough as sandpaper.

  “Watching you.... Always watching you...”

  Then it was gone, the voice, the fear, everything returned to normal. She felt every muscle relax, her mind relaxed. It was over. Perhaps it was nothing more than stress or something like a bad dream. She had, in fact, heard of people having bad dreams or visions or whatever you call them, inside an alcove. She heard that the Runners had very different experiences during their long hibernation periods. Yes, that was it, it was just a hallucination.

  A thought occurred to her, what was her part? What could the nightmare voice have meant when it said that she wasn’t doing her part? She tried to push the thought out of her mind, but it wouldn’t leave. The thought was sticky and thick with something that felt like cotton candy pressing into her brain. What could she be forgetting? Her subconscious was trying to tell her something, but she wasn’t sure what it could be.

  Time went quickly in an alcove. The semi-stasis made the rest of the time pass in a flash. She felt the green stem-cell-based goop drain. The alcove swung up vertically from its typical horizontal cradle, and hot water again rinsed Tera until all traces of the goop was gone. She stepped out of the alcove, the water stopped. She moved toward her closet, the door opened.

  “Senator’s robes.”

  A machine came to life, whirring and buzzing, bringing forth her Senator’s robes. She selected her dark red dress robe and slipped it on. A machine came down from above and sprayed her with a mist of Rose and Lilac fragrance. It was her favorite scent, the one that she felt the most feminine in, the one that caught all the young men in her web of lust. Tera slipped on her white sash, which marked her a senator, and headed for the door, where her fine leather sandals waited for her to slip on.

  She walked to the food dispenser and ordered a muffin. The dispenser went to work printing a muffin from the raw organic materials that came from some deep underground facility.

  Tera turned and headed for the exit to her chambers. The door opened. What she saw startled her. A poster, one of the standard propaganda posters that hung throughout the city, now hung right outside her door. She had mistaken the poster for a person. It was lifelike and was almost life-sized.

  She exhaled, blinked a few times and stared.

  On it, a man stood with a sledgehammer slung over his shoulder, grinning widely, his teeth showing. She counted them. Even his eyes smiled. In the background of the poster was the simple gray brick of a sky-rise apartment building.

  Tera could imagine the kinds of people that would live in the empty boxed patios that jutted out from the building. She could see parents yelling at their children not to play too close to the railing. A woman hanging laundry out to dry, or teenagers leaning against that railing and chatting about who was dating who. Perhaps a man, who, after a long day of work, taking slow drags of a cigarette; only his small circle of fire and a hint of a peppered mustache visible in the evening light. Somehow the artist had captured all this without showing a single person in the background. She could feel it, all of it. Electrifying.

  Her attention turned back to the man in the foreground, and she gasped all over again. Gods, the man in the poster was so real. Tera could swear he was breathing. It was a well-drawn piece of propaganda, and Tera thought that the artist was enormously talented. Still, it had no business being here, just outside of her quarters. A Senator hardly needed to be reminded of her duties. Nervous laughter escaped her lips.

  She thought hard for a moment and wondered when the poster was put up. It had not been there last night; at least, she didn’t remember seeing it.

  The poster itself was benign until she read the phrase just above the smiling face. It opened her like a knife would open her flesh. It started with a chill. Then, violence. She shook from head to toe. The words read: “You Must Do Your Part,” the same words she had heard from the Recycled Runner down in the docks. At the bottom of the poster, it read, “If We Want To Keep Our City In Working Order,” but Tera hardly noticed those words. Her eyes locked on the poster. She could not unhinge them.

  The poster changed. The man’s nose rotted off. His eyes glowed red, and strange, black, tree-like limbs grew up behind him and merged with some of his skin. Blood bloomed in the background, and the leering smile of his white teeth seemed to widen.

  “You Must Do Your Part,” he seemed to whisper. But the mouth did not move. The smile did not change. Electric. A putrid rotting smell filled Tera’s nostrils. It seeped from the poster.

  Again, the words, “You Must Do Your Part.” The voice echoed and rang in chorus until a thousand people were speaking the phrase over and over again. Shrieks and whispers. Half-mad laughter and desperate pleas.

  Tera caught the eyes of the man in the poster, and she felt him lock his gaze on her. She knew those eyes. Those eyes belonged to the undead recycled Runner. They possessed her and try as she might, she could not look away. Something brewed inside of her. Something was coming apart.

  Thump Thump... her heart pounded. Chest heaving.

  Thump Thump... she felt her blood rising and bubbling inside her. She could feel every single blood cell as it worked its way through her body.

  Thump Thump... She felt her terror turning into rage and then into hate. There was so much hate that it bubbled over like a cauldron overflowing.

  Thump Thump... She felt every inch of her twitching; her heart pounded in her temples. The pressure mounted.

  Thump Thump... Her head would explode, leaving nothing but a bloody stump where her neck and skull joined.

/>   Thump Thump... The agony was growing, the eyes... oh, those horrible eyes. Her heart beat so fiercely it would burst at any second.

  Thump Thump... Rising, screaming... oh, what a fantastic horrible madness. It was taking her, taking her to the edge. She opened her mouth to scream, to give in to the complete and utter insanity that had possessed her. She felt herself falling over the edge and...

  “Senator? Senator, are you all right?”

  Normalcy returned. Tera was only centimeters from the poster. Her nose pressed against it. The scream choked back into the rear of her mouth and she swallowed it hard, the lump moving its way down into her stomach. She suspected that, later, she would have a stomach ache.

  The poster looked normal again, and Tera searched frantically over its surface for any sign of what she had just seen. She reached her hand up and touched it, making sure that it was real.

  “You look a bit pale, Ma’am; can I get you some water or tea or anything?”

  It was Vala, her secretary. She was sitting at her desk only a few meters away. How long had she been standing there in front of the poster? Was it only seconds? Minutes? Or perhaps she had been standing there for an hour? Tera didn’t know. She only knew that she needed to shake off this horrible feeling. She never wanted to feel anything like that ever again.

  “Oh... I’m fine, just... didn’t sleep much last night.” Tera mustered all her strength to put a smile back on her face and give Vala a nice “if you know what I mean” wink. But masking her fear was no easy task.

  “Ah, I see. Well, Senator Green is waiting for you, Miss, he said he has been trying to reach you on the vidscreen for twenty minutes.”

  Tera couldn’t have been standing there for long then; it must have only been a few seconds before Vala had spoken up.