“It seems that there was a mix-up yesterday with one of your reports. You submitted them all to me, but it seems you forgot to hit the submit button on one of them to central security. I have addressed the issue already, but I thought it was important to remind you to double check that all your reports are marked as received before you leave for the day.”
“Oh... well... I’m sorry, Marty. It won’t happen again.”
“Fantastic.” He smiled at her. There were a lot of teeth in that smile, too many teeth.
For a moment they both stood there in silence. Alexa swallowed. She didn’t need to skim the surface of this man’s mind to know what he was thinking at that moment. She recognized at once why he was acting so kind. In his mind, he had found her in a compromising position, one that may provide certain possibilities. She pushed past him to leave. The sound of her flat shoes scuffed against the thick concrete of the docks. She hustled, hoping against hope that her boss wouldn’t pursue.
“Alexa... one moment.” His voice echoed in the room.
Here it came.
“Would you like to get breakfast with me?”
His voice was confident. Why shouldn't he be? He had thought he caught Alexa with her pants down. He probably reasoned that she was easy, that he could slip into her as easy as an old pair of pants. Alexa felt a tinge of rage bubble. She turned and forced a smile.
“I’m sorry Marty, I am just going to go home and go to bed. It’s been a long shift with all those Runners we needed to process.”
“I’ll buy you breakfast; you deserve it, you're right it has been a long shift. Have I told you how excellent of a job you’ve been doing?” His smile didn’t falter, and he took several steps closer.
“That’s kind of you, but I think I’ll pass.” She kept her voice sweet and level.
“Are you sure? I’ll take you anywhere you want to go. Think of it as my way of... welcoming you to the job." His smile broadened, he was almost drooling. "I think that we might have gotten off on the wrong foot.”
She was certain what kind of foot Marty want to get off on now. Alexa felt the anger rise to the surface. It bubbled over like a cauldron and then, she was inside of Marty's head.
“You have a wife.” Her words were strong, and she enunciated every syllable.
Marty stepped back; it was as if someone had punched him in the gut.
“Excuse me?” he said. He was blinking rapidly.
“You didn’t see what you thought you saw. No, I’m not that easy. No, I am certainly not interested. No, it’s not okay because you checked and your wife is at her job this morning. No, I will not go to breakfast with you, and no I will never go back to your office with you and pull down the shades like you think I will. You haven’t just hit the jackpot as you told your friend Phil, and no I wouldn’t like to sit on your face.”
Marty’s mouth opened. It did not close. He was a fish gasping for air, he squirmed and walked backward. Tripping and falling on his ass, he looked up at her like a petulant child. Her blue-green eyes blazed. She wanted to go deeper, to expose his darkest secrets to the open air. She wanted him to feel exposed and vulnerable the way that he was making her feel. But something stopped her, some small voice in the back of her mind told her she had done enough already. She turned and walked toward the exit to the docks. It was a long walk, and she could feel Marty's eyes on her the whole way back. She didn’t think he would bother her again. He had thought he caught her with her pants down, but it was the other way around.
As she walked up the long stairs to the exit, she thought of something. This was the first time she had ever used her talent intentionally without getting a headache.
2.
Alexa boarded the people mover. It wasn’t a very long ride or walk back to her place, but she was eager to get home. The one problem she had was that once she used her talent, she had a very difficult time turning it off. At almost 6:45 a.m., several workers were on the people mover and headed toward work. Alexa tried her best not to look directly at any of them. She took her seat in a middle row. If she looked at them, she might accidentally use her talent and peer into their mind. She could only see what was on the surface for the most part, but people had a lot of weird and creepy thoughts just floating around on the surface, like ducks on the water squawking and flapping their wings. Sometimes they seemed to have a kind of thought war going on with themselves, and Alexa wasn’t interested in being a soldier in one of those opposing armies. So if she could focus forward until her stop, she would avoid any stray thoughts. Besides, she believed people deserved their privacy, and with a few exceptions, she avoided using her talents to honor that.
The seats were old and faded, once a deep green color; they were now a pale gray. Many of the seats had burn marks, and graffiti etched into the fabric. She wondered, not for the first time, if the sky bridges transport system were as old and worn as these. She doubted it. Yes, much of the city was old, and many systems were in need of repair, but the Uppers seem to spare no expense to keep their lives more comfortable at the tops of the skyscrapers.
“Fare, please.”
Alexa blinked and looked right up at the security officer. His thoughts leaked into her. His voice took over.
"... So damn tired of this job... I've always known it was a dead end. Damn that Judy. It was her who had insisted it was just one step toward better things. Easy for her to say, all she did was stay at home with the kid, that ungrateful piece of shit. And all he ever did was sit around and..."
Alexa looked away and reached into her pocket. She tried to disengage from his mind. Without looking at him, she handed him her badge from the Docks. Everyone who worked in the Docks or Security received free public transit. He grunted and moved on, but she could still hear a few stray words leaking from his mind. He bitched about how Dock workers think they're better than everyone else.
She said her mantras again. She felt a click in her, a change and a disconnect. Those mantras and her meditation practice had been a lifesaver. She wasn’t sure how she could have ever managed without them. The ability to focus and clear her mind was the only way for her to disconnect from someone.
Once, when she was only eight, she accidentally connected to a mother who was depressed and angry about her husband being sentenced to the Runnercore, leaving her to raise her child alone. Alexa wasn’t sure why she had connected to this woman, but for days after she would get occasional snippets of the woman’s thoughts, particularly when the woman was feeling strong emotions. As a curious child, this prompted a series of questions to her own mother, like what’s suicide and several questions about sex, which the woman had engaged in to deal with her grief. Alexa had asked other questions an eight-year-old shouldn’t have been asking. Alexa chuckled to herself. Now that she was much older, she couldn’t even imagine what it must have been like for her parents to field some of those questions.
The people mover stopped, picked up a few more passengers, and the security officer got off to wait for the next vehicle. They resumed their journey.
She never told them where the questions came from. Somehow, she knew intuitively that telling her parents about her talent would scare them. She worried what they might do if they ever found out. A few times, Alexa peeked inside of her mother or father’s brains and realized that they were sometimes suspicious of her, but most parents try to deny that anything is wrong with their child until it becomes obvious. It was with her parents that she learned the importance of privacy and staying out of other people’s minds when possible. There were at least two occasions when she peeked into the minds of her mother or father that was the equivalent of walking in on them naked, mid-coitus.
Her mind turned back to the night's events. 17 again. She wondered what it would be like to skim the surface of his mind. Maybe she would next time? The way he was trying to flirt with her, she doubted she would see anything that surprised her. Was there something deeper to him? Or was he just an old criminal and a pervert? Maybe he was just
that. But part of her suspected another layer, maybe several more. She thought she might be just rationalizing because she found him attractive. She had to admit at least that much to herself, but maybe there was something about him that had brought her to the Docks in the first place?
Alexa had chosen the Runner docks for a specific reason. It was a reason that her parents and, so far she knew, no one in the world knew about. In addition to peeking into people’s minds occasionally, Alexa sometimes had special dreams. She had dreamt that she needed to be in the Runner dock, working as an inspector, and so she had simply done as the dream had suggested.
During the short tenure of her life, disaster had only come when she hadn’t listened to the dreams. It was when they recurred that she knew she would have to listen.
She had thought many times of telling her parents, of telling her Buddhist teacher, or of anyone who would listen. But there was a fear that if she revealed her skills to anyone, to which she could easily demonstrate, she would end up as some test subject, or worse, forced to work at the will of one of the corrupt Senators. Instead, she kept what she saw to herself and did the best she could to navigate it. One day she would have to tell someone, but she thought the day was still far off. Maybe it would be 17? She felt a shiver run down her spine.
Like the oracle she had read about in Oedipus Rex, she could see the future. It wasn’t always clear, and it filled with symbols and images that she didn’t understand. Usually, things came through in dreams, but occasionally, she saw things during her meditations at the Buddhist community center. One thing was clear; she only saw things when her mind relaxed.
So far as she knew, there was no one else who had her depth of talent. True, most adults gained some enhanced intuition with prolonged use of the alcoves. It wasn’t anything spectacular, or so she had been told in her psychology courses at scholar school. Most people had just occasional flashes of insight. There was something about the way the alcoves renewed your neurology with prolonged use that allowed for a kind of expansion of consciousness. Thus far, no one was sure how it worked. There had been studies on it over the centuries by a few in the scholar school, but no one had found any definite answers. Dr. Noatla Lightfoot had once suggested that children might have innate intuitive abilities that disappeared after puberty. She had said that perhaps there was something in the regenerative properties of the alcove that either preserved or renewed those earlier brain patterns.
Alexa’s abilities were different from what Professor Lightfoot had discussed. Sure, she had occasional flashes of insight, but she also had dreams or flashes of entire scenes of future reality. Usually, they were mundane moments. Her walking to the people mover, working as an inspector or brushing her teeth. Sometimes though, they would show important events or begin to repeat over and over. Those are the times when she listened.
From what she heard, the best intuitives, the ones you could find in the side alleys down in the Lowers, could only grasp vague impressions of the future. It was rare that anyone would take those people seriously, but there was something appealing to a small portion of the population, people who just wanted to find comfort in something.
Alexa imagined what it would be like to reach out to grab 17’s long dark braid and feel his coarse hair in her fingertips. Once again, her mind drifted southward down his naked form. She felt her heart beat harder as she imagined what it would be like to stand naked pressed against him, tracing her fingers up and down his scars and feeling those rough lips on hers. His body might be scarred, but his face was handsome and clean-shaven. She wanted to touch his face. A surge of pleasure shuddered through her body.
She closed her eyes and let her thoughts of him flood through her. “Gods of earth and sky, you’re so... enticing, 17,” she said.
3.
A sudden sense of spacelessness swept over 17 as he walked through the Barrens. He looked down at his gloved hands and turned them over. A wave of dizziness swept over him, and he felt almost as if he was floating outside of his own body.
“What the hell? AI, do a vitals check, will you?”
“Sir, all vitals appear normal, though you have an elevated level of dopamine in your system.”
“Yeah well, I feel strange.” He shook his head vigorously. Then, he heard a voice; it didn’t seem to come from anywhere, in particular, it was just there. It was in him and outside of him all at once, and the words echoed over and over in his mind.
“Gods of earth and sky, you’re so... enticing, 17.”
“What’s that, AI? What the hell are you saying?”
“Sir, I said nothing. Perhaps your elevated dopamine levels are causing you to experience minor hallucinations? Should I inform central security?”
“No, just... just give me a minute, would you? I want to get some fresh air.”
“Fresh air is ill-advised, Sir. The methane levels in this region are—"
“I’m just gonna take my helmet off for a second.”
He pulled the helmet from the top of his head and let the putrid air fill his nostrils.
He had heard something, a voice maybe, but he couldn’t be sure. He turned back around toward the storm. It was further in the distance now but still blocked his view of the city.
The ringing voice faded, and 17 looked around and noticed the deadness of the air. He put his helmet back on and resumed his march forward toward the ruins.
4.
In shock and horror, Alexa reeled back and opened her eyes. Had he heard her? She closed her eyes again and tried to fix on his image, but it was gone. What had just happened? Had she somehow transmitted to him or was it another vision? It had been so clear, as if she was watching the entire scene on a vidscreen, but she could even smell the methane in the air. Panic almost swallowed her. She didn’t understand what was happening to her. Lately, things were much more intense. Her dreams, her visions, they were becoming clearer, more powerful, and she lay awake in tears some nights with the awful things she saw or felt. Sometimes she felt the weight of the entire city pushing down on her.
She put her head in her hands and waited for the ride to be over.
5.
Later that evening, Alexa lay in her bed and closed her eyes, trying to force sleep. After a few moments of tossing and turning, she opened her eyes and glanced over toward her pill bottle. She hated taking sleep aids, but with a whole city full of thoughts and ideas and dreams, sometimes a torrent of psychic impressions would wake her from sleep and keep her awake. She hardly ever used the sleep aid, meditation often worked to soothe her, but lately, things had been different. The sleep aid was there as a reminder that there was a method for turning it all off.
Alexa rolled onto her back, her nightgown clinging to her skin and outlining her slender body. The fabric was an imitation of silk. She loved the sensation of it moving against her skin. It grounded her, kept her from being overwhelmed. Alexa breathed, in through her nose and out through her mouth as the Buddhist monk had taught her years before. She felt a wave of calm settle over her. Her muscles relaxed, and she could feel herself drifting toward sleep.
The vision-dreams came then, and she knew that if she could bring just a few pieces of those dreams back to the waking world, she could save the city from destruction. But she wouldn’t remember them in the morning.
Chapter 9
The Sanitation Department
“So I says to the guy, who the hell do you think you are, an Upper? And guess what? Turns out he was.” Frank laughed. The deep, rasping boom of his laughter filled the room, not sparing single corner in its jubilant reach.
“And I was like whoa buddy, don’t want to step on your golden toes or anything but down here in the Lowers we use the people movers. You know what the guy said?”
Jose shook his head. He listened, but Frank’s stories were all the same. He gripped the lever, lifted and then tried to rotate the piston. It caught halfway through its movement. He tried to shake it loose, tried to find some play in the gears, but the more
he wiggled, the more it jammed. It was stuck again.
Frank continued, “He says, ‘No Upper in their right mind would take a people mover.’
“So I says, it ain’t no hair off my back pal, you’re the one who will have to walk twenty blocks to get to the next sky lift.” Frank forgot that in his right hand, he had a wrench, and almost hit Zelda as he waved his hands in the air.
“So what did he do?” asked Jenny. A station down from Jose, she turned the wheel to open the air pressure release valve and then turned back to look at Frank.
One of the many long pipes overhead hissed and leaked steam and Jose, watching it, frowned. Something was obstructing the line. Jose pulled out the small pad of paper and pen in his front breast pocket and scribbled a few words. He handed it to Jenny, who handed it to Zelda, who held it out for Frank to take, but Frank didn’t see it. He wouldn’t notice it until he finished his story.
“I’ll tell you, the balls on some of them Uppers. He actually asked me if I would escort him to the sky lift. So I said, sure, I’d be happy to, on one condition.”
Frank’s smile broadened as he paused for effect, and Jose knew the punch line was coming. Another pipe above hissed, and Jose shuffled his feet. Whatever was blocking the line was big. They had to move fast.
“And he looks at me and says, what’s that? You know what I told him?”
“Christ, Frank, just tell us already,” said Zelda
Frank’s smile widened.
“I told him, I’ll take you all the way to your sky bridge, hell I will even carry you there, but you got to give me a week's access to your personal alcove. And the look on his face, I mean, I would be offended if it wasn’t so damn funny. He looked like I told him I knocked up his sister or something.” Frank chuckled, grabbing his large jiggling belly with one hand and pushing back the scraps of hair in his comb-over with the other. As he shook, he dropped Jose’s note.
Upon Stilted Cities - The Winds of Change Page 13
