Places in the Darkness

by Chris Brookmyre

  “I thought the reason people paid hookers was so they didn’t have to talk to them after they fucked.”

  Candy sits up in bed, wide awake now. Pissed.

  “Oh, you’re gonna pay me for last night, is that what you’re saying? Because I thought it was something else.”

  Nikki shrugs.

  “Whatever it was, it don’t make you my goddamn confidante, like I’m gonna share my emotional burdens with you.”

  “You were happy enough to share plenty of other things just a few hours ago,” Candy replies, voice all coy and sing-song.

  “Yeah, well, don’t flatter yourself. Pussy is like fried chicken from Monty’s Late-Nite Take-Out. I only feel like eating it when I’m drunk.”

  Candy looks pityingly at her. Candy. The hooker.

  “That line would only work if you ever fucked somebody sober. I work the Vault, remember? I seen the number of guys you leave with. Seems to me when you’re drunk you got just as much an appetite for cock as for chicken.”

  Nikki knows she’s got no come-back for that.

  “I guess we’re all lonely up here,” she offers, pulling a shirt over her head. “Even a cold-hearted bitch needs to feel somebody likes her now and again.”

  Candy shakes her head.

  “They don’t like you, Nikki. It just seems that way because they don’t hate you as much as you do.”

  FUTURE INVESTMENT

  After the g-forces and the sheer counter-intuitive strangeness of the elevator ascent, the shuttle flight is remarkable in presenting so little sense of movement. It is silent and smooth, the distances covered making progress almost impossible to register via visual cues. It is, consequently, a little boring. Alice has no idea what time it is in New York, the last place she started a day by waking up in bed, or in the Pacific archipelago where Ocean Terminal is situated; she only knows that it no longer matters. She is tired but not sleepy, unable to concentrate on her work for the squeals inside the passenger cabin and the constant threat of collision with a small human missile.

  The cabin is kitted with sim-tech options for the amusement and distraction of those lacking the discipline to apply themselves more constructively throughout the journey, but nothing to compete with the novelty of microgravity. An overhead panel warns passengers that they should remain seated and secured at all times, and before launch the pilot made an announcement to similar effect. Nonetheless, as soon as Mr. Uslam enquired as to whether his children might be permitted to regard this “more as advice than instruction,” Tony Chu was quick to acquiesce.

  It is a small form of corruption, unacknowledged by either party. Often the very wealthy do not even need to spend their money in order to purchase special treatment.

  Each of the other passengers has been kicked or thumped at least once as the children swim and swoop back and forth between the facing rows of jump seats, yet Alice appears to be the only one prepared to register her displeasure.

  “They’re just kids,” says Deveraux, in response to Alice’s sigh of exasperation at the latest near-miss.

  Alice does not understand the relevance of the point she is attempting to make. Children should not be exempt from safety considerations merely on the grounds of their age; indeed, the necessity of obeying such instructions should be driven home to them at every opportunity during these formative years.

  Tony senses the rise in tension and intervenes by attempting to broker conversation between the adult passengers.

  “I’m not sure how much you all got to talk before your ascent, but Dr. Blake is with the FNG and will be working with the Security Oversight Executive, is that right?”

  They had exchanged polite small-talk on the ocean platform but Alice had not volunteered any information regarding her new job. This was due to having been warned that CdC personnel could be prickly about the issue of federal oversight, or “undersight” as they preferred to call it, in reference to the FNG being based on Earth.

  It would not have been top of her list for an ice-breaking gambit. She wonders if Tony chose it deliberately, what private resentments are concealed beneath his professional smile.

  “It’s really just a fact-finding and observation brief,” she says, aware that nobody here has clearance to be told what her true role will be. They are unlikely to guess, either. People tend to underestimate Alice’s age by at least five years, and that is not the only reason they would be surprised by her seniority. She stopped being bothered by it long ago; these days she appreciates how she can make it work for her. Her remit will be to root out corruption, and in her experience people are far less circumspect about such things when they don’t believe you have any power.

  “You’re here so the FNG can tell the Seguridad how to do their job,” says Ikicha, his back stiffening. “Fact is, the governments down below should be learning from how security does things up here, not the other way around. This is as close to a city without crime as mankind has ever seen.”

  Davis Ikicha is a senior engineer working on the ramjet engine project. Seated next to him is Emmanuelle Deveraux, a physicist attached to the laser propulsion team. Professionally speaking, she is his rival, but it is clear that it is Alice who is perceived as their enemy.

  “There is no such thing as a city without crime, Davis,” she says, fixing Alice with an insincere smile. “Or, at least I’m sure the doctor will be able to find some so that the FNG has a pretext for sticking its nose in and replacing the Seguridad with its own law enforcement agency. They’ve been looking for a reason to do that since this place began.”

  With the Uslams conspicuously oblivious to their fellow passengers, Alice casts a glance opposite towards Kai Roganson, who said little on the ocean platform and volunteered nothing regarding his own position on CdC. He does not contribute to the discussion regarding Alice’s perceived role, but it is clear he is paying attention and he wants her to know as much. His eyes glow pink as he stares directly at her.

  The rec light in a lens originally functioned as an automatic notification to let people know they were being recorded, but it was quickly hacked and bypassed to the point of being redundant, particularly given how many people were recording close to permanently. These days, if somebody flashes the rec light, it is by way of reminding you that your actions are being committed to data. It is usually a polite warning, but in this case Alice interprets it as a gesture of passive-aggressive intimidation.

  “Believe me, nobody is more enthusiastic than me about what we are doing on CdC,” she insists brightly. “I am here as a wholehearted believer in the Arca project.”

  “Yeah,” replies Ikicha coolly. “The FNG always say that. Right before they choke off funding to something.”

  She knows this is an argument she cannot win. A tense silence might ordinarily have ensued, but there is too much noise from the kids for this to be the case.

  Alice detects an upwards shift in the pitch of their squeals as something new piques their excitement.

  “Daddy, Daddy,” the little girl shouts. “I think I see it.”

  Unfortunately, nobody else can while the kids are obstructing the windows, a state of affairs that finally prompts a command from their father.

  It proves too much to hope that they will strap themselves into their seats, but at least they hover in one place for a few blessed moments, long enough for everyone to get a look at their destination.

  It is still just a grey shape against the black, but it is large enough to be distinct from the white dots that are stars or other shuttles.

  “We’re going to a real spaceship,” the little boy declares boastfully.

  “We’re not going to a spaceship,” his sister corrects him. “The CdC is a space station.”

  “Daddy said it was a spaceship,” he counters aggressively. He clearly doesn’t like big sis having the upper hand.

  “No, Zack, darling,” says his mother, with the urgency of putting out a fire before it really gets blazing. “I’m sure Daddy said they are build
ing a spaceship.”

  He still looks pissed, like he doesn’t appreciate the suggestion he picked it up wrong. Mom shifts tactics and moves to distract.

  “Why don’t you ask these people who work there? I’m sure they could tell you everything about it.”

  The kid turns to look at them.

  “Are they building a spaceship?” he asks everyone and nobody in particular.

  “Yes,” answers Deveraux. “The CdC is the space station where we are building lots of spaceships, testing out their designs and learning step by step. It is a very long process towards ultimately building a super-spaceship which will be called the Arca Estrella. It is going to take our explorers across the galaxy in search of new planets we might one day call home.”

  Deveraux’s tone is assured, someone used to talking to young children. Perhaps she has had some herself, though they would have to be grown up by now; the CdC is not a place for home-makers but for people committed to their work.

  “Why?” the boy asks.

  Deveraux laughs, sharing a look with Ikicha.

  “Good question,” he says.

  “We’re building it because our Earth won’t last for ever,” Deveraux answers. “One day the sun will expand to a hundred times its size and gobble us up, so we need to be someplace else before that happens.”

  The boy looks appalled, genuinely afraid.

  “When?”

  “Not for a few hundred million years,” she assures him, but it doesn’t appear to offer the kid any comfort.

  “The sun is going to explode? Our planet is going to be gobbled up?”

  Tears form in his eyes. He looks to his parents like he’s appealing for them to say it ain’t so.

  “Don’t worry, Zack,” his father tells him. “Listen to the lady. She is talking about hundreds of millions of years from now.”

  The boy’s lip is quivering. Alice knows how he feels, having gone through the same thing when she was around that age. He is too young to grasp the distinction between the vast timescale Deveraux is talking about and his own lifespan. The only thing he is taking in is that the world he takes for granted will one day be gone. It is his first encounter with his own mortality, which is why it won’t help to explain that he will not be around to worry about the death of his native solar system.

  His sister’s expression is more thoughtful. She has run the numbers and come up with a different query, one that a great many people have been asking throughout the decades since this undertaking began.

  “If we will be safe on Earth for millions of years, why are we doing this now?”

  “Another good question,” Ikicha observes. “As the people Dr. Blake works for might ask, why should we be spending colossal amounts of money, pouring so much of our time and resources into reaching another planet when we still have so many problems to solve on the world where we already live?”

  Alice says nothing. She doesn’t mind being misrepresented, for if this is all Ikicha sees, her true self will remain camouflaged.

  The little girl gives her a thoughtful glance as though impressed by the point Ikicha is making on her behalf. A good straw man should seem impressive though, so that its creator looks all the stronger knocking it down, which he proceeds to do.

  “But what if the first men had all said to themselves, if it’s safe in here, why leave the cave? If it’s safe on our little patch of land, why cross the river? If it’s safe in our little country, why cross the sea?”

  “Every time we explore further, we make a bigger world for ourselves. A better world,” Deveraux says warmly.

  Karima looks sold. The Ikicha-Deveraux double act works nicely, and Alice is content to have played her silent losing role if a valuable lesson has been learned.

  “So where is this new world, this new planet?” asks Zack, an explorer’s curiosity overcoming his first encounter with inevitable death. “When can we go there?”

  “The Arca Estrella will take a very long time to build,” Deveraux answers. “We don’t even know what form it will eventually take: we are learning as we go. Merely building CdC to its current state has taken decades. But even once the Arca is finally launched, it will take many more decades, maybe centuries to find a new planet where humans can settle down. That is why it’s such a vast project: people will live their whole lives on board without ever getting off. Some will be born there and die there. It will be their children or even great-great-grandchildren who reach the new world.”

  The boy frowns, sussing that this means it won’t be his next vacation destination. His sister looks unsatisfied too.

  “But if nobody alive now will be around when the ship reaches another planet, why are they doing it? I mean, what’s in it for them?”

  Deveraux looks to Mr. and Mrs. Uslam and wins a knowing smile for her efforts.

  “Parents do these things for their children, and for the children of the future—even a thousand years in the future. You wouldn’t be flying in space right now but for the efforts of all the people who worked on problems that they knew would never be solved in their lifetimes. Do you understand?”

  She nods solemnly, the pleasure of microgravity suddenly taking on a greater significance than if Deveraux had put some dizzying dollar value on it.

  Meantime, the CdC is close enough for Alice to make out its shape. It looks a lot like a barbell: two great wheels either end, rotating around a long, narrow central structure known as the Axle. This part is mostly cylindrical, a labyrinthine zero-g complex the equivalent height to a five-storey building, and once comprised the entirety of CdC before the first wheel was constructed. From this distance she can’t visually discern which is Wheel One and which is Wheel Two, but she knows the latter’s construction benefited from decades’ worth of experience (i.e. mistakes) accrued on its predecessor. Consequently Wheel Two is the more affluent habitat, where the rich and connected live and the Quadriga companies all have their HQs. Between them, they accommodate a hundred thousand people. Each of the wheels has four spokes connecting to a central hub that rotates around the Axle. On the outside, the wheels are flat, grey and uniform. On the inside, they look like somebody cut a long rectangular strip from a city and rolled it until the two ends met in the middle. This far out Alice can only see the indistinct twinkling of lights, but she knows that if you look directly up through the canopy, you will see the rooftops on the other side. The canopy itself is one of the engineering advances that made CdC possible, a super-strong transparent nanocarbon that lets through certain light frequencies but crucially blocks radiation.

  Other shuttles appear like dots on a diagram, their flight lanes pointing to the destination. They fly back and forth twenty-four hours, the constant delivery of materials and supplies.

  Parallel to the Axle, a pair of slim arms connect to a platform two-thirds the length of this central core, forming the “dry dock” jetty that tenders the many test vessels in various stages of construction. It looks so still, so peaceful, but Alice knows she wouldn’t be bound for it if that were true.

  “In the original plan,” Chu informs them, “a construction platform was intended to move back and forth along the Arca as it was put together. This was back when they said the project was going to take twenty years. Now the CdC dwarfs the structures it was intended to build. Mothers do tend to swell when they are pregnant, after all, and it’s not all the bump.”

  As they approach close enough for Alice to make out the skeletal forms of partially assembled craft, the sight triggers the memory of a dead lizard she saw when she was seven. It was alive when she first encountered it, being tortured by some older boys who had caught it by the edge of a pool. Alice had run away, disturbed by the eager pleasure of their cruelty, and it had gone from her mind until she happened upon its sad corpse near the same spot a couple of days later. It was part flesh, part skeleton, missing sections where the ants had stripped it. The test vessels are similarly incomplete, her mind having to fill in the blanks in order to imagine what they mig
ht eventually look like.

  The flashback is unwelcome, almost obscenely inappropriate, and she wonders what perverse function of the subconscious vomited it forth at this time. As Deveraux just explained, the Arca represents the noblest of aspirations and the most selfless of endeavours: nothing less than the apex of human civilisation and the pinnacle of human achievement.

  Perhaps this memory has surfaced now as a warning against complacency, reminding her that civilisation as a process is not irreversible. Even as we build the Arca Estrella, our primal state still lurks dormant beneath the surface, ready to rise if we are not vigilant.

  CHAOS AND ETERNAL NIGHT

  Nikki pulls on a jacket as she descends the cramped staircase, brushing her elbows against the walls. The air temperature seldom fluctuates between twenty-two and twenty-three degrees, but she’s not wearing it to keep warm. It’s to cover up what she’s got strapped underneath.

  She slips out the back entrance and stops to grab a shot from a vending panel. She knows it will chemically neutralise the effects of the alcohol on her system far more effectively, but if she had the choice she’d still sooner have a double espresso than this shit.

  She throws it back and winces at the sickly flavour. Tastes like medicine and guilt.

  Twenty seconds later she’s turned the corner and is walking down Mullane. The streets and passageways around here are all narrow, the buildings crowding in on either side. If you look straight up you can just about glimpse the canopy, but you’re only going to see a sliver of black.

  The earliest parts of Seedee are all like this. The apartments are little more than pods, the ceilings eight feet high apart from inside some of the ground-floor public areas. The streets here on Wheel One are all named after early astronauts, indicating that this was one of the first phases of Seedee’s construction. Before it was part of Wheel One, it was the first large-scale art-grav area ever built, whirling around the central trunk on the end of an arm to generate the centripetal forces that kept its inhabitants on the ground. Out here amidst such endless emptiness, ironically space remains a precious commodity.