Tides of Hysteria

by Adam J. Smith

  Are you going to be trouble? He put his glass on the counter with a resounding thud and studied Rylan in profile. Unhurried, Rylan carried a natural smirk. His dark hair had out-grown its barber-cut, and his eyes stared forward at the mirror behind the bar. Holden glanced that way and caught Rylan’s gaze.

  “These are dishonest times.”

  Rylan nodded, expressionless.

  “Fire with fire.” He really was a walking cliché machine.

  “I knew someone, once. Well – they came as a pair in actuality. Mother and daughter. Twin sisters, they were so alike. Forgetting the age.” Rylan watched himself in the mirror. “Both dead now for standing up to the authority. They made mistakes and they were punished. I loved them both. They each showed more courage than I ever had, but stupidity in equal measure. Or perhaps naivety. They made mistakes. That’s why if we’re going to play this game of ours, we have to be one step ahead. Always. Extra vigilant.”

  “Game?”

  Rylan continued right through Holden’s question. “Misty used to say; There ain’t nothing more powerful than the truth. Lies and distortion ain’t nothing but smoke and mirrors, and smoke fades and mirrors break. The truth stands tallest of all.”

  “Was she the mother or the daughter?”

  “She was Clarisse’s mother. Do you understand what I’m saying?”

  Was this a random meeting or had he been targeted? Holden’s heart began to stammer the way it sometimes did whenever he had to take anchor, and though these lights were nothing compared to the studio, he felt a creeping heat in his face nonetheless.

  “Who are you, again?”

  “Perhaps we should go outside.” Rylan finished his drink and stood, heading for the exit.

  Holden watched, contemplating following.

  “That was quick,” said Alannah, returning with empty glasses.

  “Do you have anything on that guy?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Check the security logs. ID.”

  “Why? Everything okay?”

  “Just check, please. He wants to talk outside and I want to get an idea of what I’m walking into.”

  The empties clinked on the bar. Momentary silence filled the gap between songs, floor no longer thrumming. “Well that sounds like a stupid idea.”

  He wasn’t much of a glarer, but he guessed he was doing that now. When she didn’t move, he turned to leave.

  “Wait, wait, fuck sake, Holden.” She disappeared into the backroom, throwing a towel down on the counter. She wasn’t gone long; just long enough for Holden to conjure fantasies that involved baseball bats, knuckle dusters, power tools, cheese-wire, hammers, pliers, and good old fashioned fists. The authority must have had his face on their radar for a long time now – from way before any of this recent bullshit – and now it was time to cash in his chips.

  Alannah returned, shaking her head. “Nothing. Man’s a ghost.”

  Holden nodded, gave her a kiss and said; “I’ll be back in a minute.”

  Rylan

  In the shade of pink neon, Rylan donned his hat to keep the rain from his eyes. He pulled on the collar of his trenchcoat-style overall and waited. The early morning needed a cool down. It had taken a while but he was just about getting used to the feeling of being aboveground; far away from the maintenance sections of the towers that had been his whole life, and his father’s before him. Far away from the chaos his bomb had caused, while somehow escaping capture. All those days and weeks losing his mind in Misty’s backroom had taken him to the edge, only for Caia to bring him back. What a ride! Rain infiltrated his collar and ran down the skin of his neck like a lightning bolt, a jolt that reminded him he was alive. A jolt to remind him to be thankful not to be living in the pits, or working that dead-end cycle in the factories and maintenance crews that kept the city running. Its silent hand.

  Well, his silence was ending. It was time for the secrets – all of them – to start coming out.

  “Why are we out here?” Holden asked when at last he showed up. He tried not to let the rain bother him as it soaked his hair.

  “Too many eyes and ears. Rule number one; never trust anyone.”

  “Even you?”

  “You can judge for yourself. Make a judgement call. Seems you already made one just coming out here.”

  “I’m a journalist. How could I say no?” Holden relaxed visibly, and suddenly, didn’t seem so out of place out here in the wet shadows of the early hours. Almost as though this was a daily occurrence.

  “You made the right choice. You see, you recognised my honesty. Truth is incorruptible, and when the truth is enough, you don’t need to weave hearsay or paint false impressions. When the truth comes out, it needs to come from a reliable source for the greatest impact. The muddier the water, the longer it will take to surface.”

  “What truth? Who are you?”

  “A messenger. You have influence. You must use this influence to put a stop to the falsehoods. If Nash kills a hundred guards, you report it, just as you would report a dozen protestors being mown down with live ammunition. You must be objective. None of this will work otherwise.” Rylan’s breath cascaded from his mouth in soft swirls. The dawning day began to wake around them, shadows retreating. Auto-bots came out of hiding to sweep the gutters and pavements, issuing the occasional warning beep-beep.

  “To what end? We have the authority doctoring video, posting propaganda – we have to counteract the lies.”

  “But not with more lies. The networks who report the truth – they don’t have your kind of resources, or else perhaps they too would fake the news to their favour. As it is, the city doesn’t know who to believe. If everyone not parroting the authority just told the truth, however; the difference would be stark. Your media would become trusted. And then…” he smiled. “We can hit them hard. So hard, the puppets and soldiers would start to look at each other and question everything. Then through their weakened defences, we could take over.”

  “Take over? What good is taking over when the city is verging on extinction?”

  “Extinction? It will be our extinction if we allow the authority to regain control again. The insem clinics will be nothing more than reprogramming stations. For the whole, sorry cycle to begin again. This is the war we are fighting, Holden. Are you in?”

  “What is this truth you want to hold back until the right time? Who are you?”

  Rylan turned to the side and leaned against the brick building, scanning the street. A surveillance drone had done a couple laps already, high and almost undetectable. Just as well he was a ghost.

  “I’m no-one. I used to be a cog, but I got out. It’s not enough to know you’re a cog, you’ve gotta take a chance. I should be dead, but I’m not. So listen to me, if you want out too. I needed a friend. You’ll need a friend. I could be that friend, but only if you trust me. When the time is right, you’ll learn the truth at the same time as everyone else, and by that time you’ll be ready. You’ll all be ready.” Rylan watched Holden closely, almost with pity. The frustration on his face was clear, but so was the fatigue. This was a heck of a time to confront him, after a late shift. Entirely orchestrated, of course. “Sleep on it. Dream on it. Wake up refreshed with a new certainty: nothing but the truth. It’ll make your job – and mine – a whole lot easier.”

  He pulled his collar together and ducked his head into the rain. As he walked away, Holden shouted “Wait!”

  “I’ll be watching,” he called back, and then disappeared around the corner. The door to an autocar opened and he stepped inside, where Caia waited. They moved away, filing into the centre lane of the street. Holden appeared at the corner in the rearview mirror and watched them depart.

  “How’d it go?” she asked.

  “I spoke, he listened. How much sank in remains to be seen.” He leaned across the interior divide and bit into her neck. “Your turn.”

  She shrugged him off. “It’s late now. Holden, and Sabri and Genevieve earlier, all over
ran. We should head back.”

  “You’re the boss!” He stretched his legs out in the spacious footwell as they sped down the avenue, a rainbow of colours slapping the dashboard. The electric motor hummed with Caia manually controlling its movements. Nondescript, they easily blended into the everyday traffic still passing through Neon, though it was noticeably quieter these days. There were the people out fighting, and therefore neglecting their work; but there were also those too depressed by the state of the city and the state of its fertility to do anything but lie in a permanent vegetative state in the link, carers looking after them. Or not, and dying connected. He didn’t like to think about some of the tales Annora had passed on; however, the trend was clear – the numbers of linked had never been higher.

  They rode in silence. The stories rose to either side until they hit the towers and left the low town behind. It was like re-entering the night with the black windows oppressive and dominant, the pale morning too high to make any impact. The pavements were quiet though not empty; cocktail hour was over and the odd trainlink carried colourfully dressed people back to their homes. Steam rose from the drains. The rain gave a shine to everything and trickled down the windscreen. Rylan opened the window to savour the smells and listen to the slick sound of tyre on hardtop.

  After a while they took a right, and then continued towards the edge of the dome. The high wall loomed towards them with the home tower standing near it on the left. The trees and foliage of the Agridome were pale, green silhouettes.

  “I don’t know what’s worse; living down below or up here, so close to the trees and vegetation, yet never to touch it.”

  Caia shrugged. “They may look at it every day, but they don’t see it. It’s like a painting.” She swung beneath the tower into the parking lot and found a spot in the distant corner. Then they exited and Rylan opened the fire exit door for Caia, who gave him a squint and disappeared into the stairwell.

  The door closed behind them and locked them in darkness. Caia pulled out a torch and they descended into the darkness, winding their way to the bottom. All the cameras and lighting systems were deactivated here, to discourage use. It was one stairwell of two-dozen, and wasn’t missed – perhaps it was on a maintenance schedule somewhere but it was hardly a priority. Rylan knew this passage as well as he’d ever known the walls and corridors of his old apartment complex; together with Caia they had brought through power tools and a whole host of other materials to make themselves a new home. He still couldn’t believe how well they were able to evade the city’s cameras, even when their vehicles were loaded with planks of wood and sheets of plasterboard.

  At the bottom they arrived at a dead end. A sliver of metal on the floor slid beneath the wall, and when Caia pressed down on it, it hooked across the far side. Caia pulled it towards them and a door swung open. “After you.”

  Rylan walked by into the tunnel and the door thudded to a close behind him. Torchlight lit the way ahead, with a breeze pushing past against him. Far above, the perimeter road would be silent, unaware of this subterranean tunnel running through it.

  “Remind me to build a buggy or something,” he said. The concrete tunnel continued on into the distance, and reminded him of the maintenance tunnels threading through the bases of the towers. In an odd way, this reinforced his feeling of ‘coming home’ – that this was the route he had to take to break through to the other side.

  “Do you miss the outside?” he asked.

  “Like a boil on my ass. Do you miss your old life?”

  “It’s different for you – you were free.”

  “I wasn’t free. I’m freer now than I ever was before.”

  Their words fell flat on the air, as though the tunnel was a secret between place, between worlds. “I can’t imagine… looking up… seeing only sky.”

  “It loses its charm, believe me.”

  At the end of the tunnel they were met with another dead end, with one difference; a padlock at waist height was almost hidden where the walls met on the right. Caia pulled out a key and unlocked it. Sometimes the old fashioned ways are best.

  There was such little fanfare in crossing to the other side – what should’ve have been met with tributary gunfire was only silence and a barely noticeable difference in temperature. Was it warmer? As you walked further on, the door padlocked again behind, did the air change? Did it smell… greener?

  Rylan was used to it now; that first time, though… it had been revolutionary. Evolutionary. He never thought he’d ever leave the dome – okay, the Agridome was hardly the biggest departure – yet for the first time in his life he hadn’t been surrounded by concrete and the glaring colours of the city.

  They traversed the remaining corridors until arriving at metallic rungs embedded in the wall. Up these rungs was a spinlock. Rylan lead the way. “We didn’t need anything, did we?”

  “Like what?”

  “Milk? Coffee?”

  “I think we’re good.”

  He turned the lock and pushed open the hatch, and the sickly sweet scent of life fell in. This was what he had come to think of it as. He stood atop a tower that prodded into the centre of the Agridome, the morning light blooming through swooping vines glistening with green slime, that themselves hung like Nature’s celebration banners between colossal redwoods and evergreen spruces, and other giant sequoias where a hundred metres was considered a sapling. With bases as wide as forty metres, they wrestled each other for space; barely an inch of groundspace anywhere to be seen, just dunes of soft pine needles and decayed leaves turned to dirt where the worms and insects thrived. Periodically, the autobots swooped by; hovering harbingers of death, spraying insecticides on the slowly moving carpet that halted a whole generation at once. The irony had not been lost on Rylan.

  This area of the Agridome carried no nutritious responsibility; that is to say the fruit and vegetable farms were on the opposite side, bathing in hydroponic fluid and bog-like soil under baking hot solar reflectors. This area of the Agridome was untamed, unwatched, unexplored. Some trees, overwhelmed or undernourished, had petrified in place, or fallen, or twisted with others; forming great natural caverns with walls almost as hard as rock. One such network of hideaways sat just two hundred metres from the exit tower, reached by a series of planks fitted to make a pathway, cut and carved from the forest around, stapled with supplies from the city.

  Outside the entrance sat a solar generator – it charged slower than a snail, but their needs were modest, and it could be topped up with biofuel siphoned from the recycling pipes of the home tower. A transformer kept the makeshift entrance door propped open, with the cables threading inside tacked to the walls, argon and neon light sconces flinging soft light upon the varied grains. The walls had texture, something that made Rylan smile for no real reason he could think of. Perhaps it was the simple fact that this caveman existence was so far removed from anything he, or anyone else in the city, had ever known. Walls were meant to be smooth; instead he could create pictures by dragging his nails through the grain.

  Caia had carved a face into the bark outside the entrance, saying it reminded her of a place called Sleepy Batton out on the sands. So it couldn’t have been all bad out there.

  “Do you want to report, or shall I?” she asked.

  “I’ll do it. Meet you in bed.” He watched as she ducked her head and retreated to the sleeping sections further into the hollow, where they shared a ‘room’, and where Elissa, Uldous, Nuke and Slay also slept. Quite the little community they had here; Misty and Clarisse would have loved it. If only Clarisse hadn’t gotten involved with that reactionary fool, Corbin… then again, maybe without Corbin he wouldn’t be here. He’d still be cleaning fatbergs from pipes, up to the elbows in shit.

  Speaking of which. They had a men’s and a women’s toilet room with thick, hollowed out rounds that acted as toilet seats, attached above a deep well of a scentless chemical that broke it all down. After urinating, he washed in the sink (another round hollowed into
a smooth bowl) with water collected in a condenser hung in an adjacent tree. The humidity in the Agridome was 90%, so it wasn’t difficult. Rylan had set up silent dehumidifiers in each of the sleeping quarters to help counter any negative health effects, and to stop mould and fungi blooming.

  Speaking of which, he checked the cold store to ensure they had a good supply of mushrooms for the next few days, or if it was time to go foraging again. There were plenty – and milk.

  In one of the rooms off the main living space, they had erected plasterboard and plastered in proper electricity sockets, and compiled a solid, concrete floor. It had a rubber seal door and air extraction to keep the machines inside cool and as moisture-free as possible. Most of the set-up was thanks to Uldous, who had been planning for such an eventuality half his life. He’d always imagined infiltrating one of the authority’s farming factories and making a new life for himself within the dome, far from the maddening crowd. The details were sketchy, but the intent had been there, and strong enough that he’d hoarded a few supplies.

  Rylan sat there now, sweat beads deforming from his brow in the coolness, and turned on the main computer. The link permeated every atom of Neon, even here, so getting a signal was not difficult. Staying connected to Neon in general had not been an issue, and with Annora’s help, they couldn’t be detected.

  Sorrow burrowed in. It always did when he thought of Annora; how she was trapped there, her body slowly disintegrating. He didn’t like and had never liked the link, so he could only imagine a horrible kind of purgatory for anyone who had no choice but to remain there. Worse though, she had chosen it – just like Calix. Two idiots short of a prattle.

  At least with Annora he never felt that same unease he always felt; of an uncanny kind of reality. If anything, that unreality vanished completely with her, as though her presence somehow exulted the experience. Perhaps it did. He didn’t understand. She was capable of such things that he could only imagine.