by Frank Tayell
Work.
Rest.
Repeat.
Frank Tayell
Synopsis
It is sixty years since a great war made the Earth uninhabitable. The few survivors took shelter within towered cities. They, and now their descendants, have only one goal: to construct colony ships so that they can leave the ruined planet in the hope of establishing a settlement on Mars.
The first of those ships is nearing completion. If the species is to survive, then nothing can interfere with this last great effort. But the city is not a dictatorship. An election is to be held to choose a new Chancellor to lead the exodus.
With only twenty-four hours until voting is due to begin, two bodies are found. There is no question that they were murdered. It is the first serious crime in generations, but even the young Constable Ely knows the motive is obviously sabotage. The killer must be caught. The election must go ahead. The ships must be launched. Above all, production must come first.
Dedicated to family and friends
Copyright 2014
All rights reserved
All people, places and events are fictional.
Other titles:
Surviving The Evacuation
Book 0.5: Zombies vs The Living Dead
Book 1: London
Book 2: Wasteland
Book 3: Family
Book 4: Unsafe Haven
Book 5: Reunion
Book 6: Harvest
Book 7: Home
&
Undead Britain
(A short story in the anthology; ‘At Hell’s Gate 1’)
History’s End
(in the anthology At Hell’s Gate 2)
For information on old, new, and upcoming releases, please visit
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Table of Contents
Prologue - An Ordinary Shift
Chapter 01 - The First Murders
Chapter 02 - The Civic Service
Chapter 03 - Control
Chapter 04 - Children
Chapter 05 - Retirement
Chapter 06 - The Infirmary
Chapter 07 - Clean-up
Chapter 08 - Interrogation
Chapter 09 - Ghosts
Chapter 10 - Underground
Chapter 11 - Death Comes To Us All
Prologue - An Ordinary Shift
Twenty-six hours before voting begins
Ely ducked, and the fist sailed past his face. As he straightened, something struck the side of his head. His helmet took the brunt of the impact, but he staggered forwards, knocking two of the brawling workers to the floor.
Half turning, he lashed out and grabbed a fistful of arm and cloth. He didn’t know if it was the person who’d struck him. He didn’t care. He threw the felon to the ground as his other hand scrabbled for the truncheon on his belt. When he pulled it out he found the grip unfamiliar. He’d not used the baton for years, not even in practice. Another blow struck him, this time to the back of his neck. The truncheon fell from his fingers and was forgotten as his helmet was dislodged. His display pixelated as it tried to reset. He was blind. Roaring with anger, he tore the helmet off and began swinging it left and right. With his other hand, he grabbed and pulled the brawling workers apart.
Someone screamed in pain. He didn’t see who, but the noise reminded Ely that he was the Constable of Tower-One. He was responsible for maintaining law and order. He was responsible for keeping the workers safe.
“Stop!” he yelled, turning his incoherent roar into a barked command. “Stop! I order you to stop!”
Cowed more by his berserker thrashing than by his words, the fight broke up and the workers moved apart.
“Stop.” This time the word came out more quietly. Ely was breathing hard. He’d finished his fourteen hours on duty and had been halfway through his six hours of Recreation when he’d received the alert.
“No! No one move. Don’t even think about it, unless you want me to charge you with fleeing a crime scene as well.” He addressed this to those edging towards the doors at the back of the crowd. It wouldn’t matter if they did try to creep away. The cameras would have recorded their actions, the chips in their wristboard computers logging their presence in the room at the time of the fight. There was no hiding from guilt, no escaping justice.
The crowd stopped moving and, one by one, turned their collective eyes on the three people lying prostrate on the floor.
Ely cursed as he looked down. One of them seemed… not too serious. The man was rolling from side to side clutching his arm, his eyes tightly shut, his teeth gritted against the pain. A break, Ely guessed. Probably just a fracture. The man was bleeding, but only from a shallow cut on his forehead. No, it was nothing that couldn’t be treated in the infirmary up on Level Seventy-Seven. It was the other two who’d captured the attention of the crowd. Neither was moving.
Ely put his helmet back on. It took a moment for the retinal scan to log him back into the Tower’s surveillance system. He pulled up the camera feeds for the privacy rooms around the lounge’s perimeter to check that no one was lurking within. They were all empty.
A moment after that, two alerts came up on his display, one for each of the two prone men. Their vital signs, monitored by the wristboard computers, were shallow.
As per procedure Ely checked to see if the infirmary had been automatically alerted. It had. The two nurses were already on their way down, yet Ely could tell that the two unconscious felons would require more expert treatment. They would have to be transported to the hospital in Tower-Thirteen.
He cursed again, but feeling that his duty of care had been fulfilled he turned to look at the mob. As he moved his gaze from worker to worker, a tag appeared on his display, giving their names and criminal probability. For each of them, that number was set at one hundred percent.
“Do you know what you’ve done?” he asked the crowd. “Look at them. Do you know what this means?”
No one spoke. Some looked shocked, others ashamed.
“You know that when they recover they won’t be coming back here,” Ely said. “They’ll be re-assigned to one of the other Towers. Where will that leave our production targets?”
The City of Britain consisted of thirteen Towers jutting up out of the rising sea. Each was home to around twelve thousand citizens. Tower-Thirteen contained the hospital, the large retirement home, the prison, the advanced training school, and the administrative hub for the City. Towers Two through Twelve were the Factories where the components for the colony ships were made. Tower-One housed the Assemblies, where each of those components was checked and rechecked before being transported to the launch site. There, the first three colony ships were in the final stages of construction.
Work in the Assemblies of Tower-One was hard, but unlike labouring in the Factory-Towers, it wasn’t dangerous. Not a shift went by without the newsfeeds reporting a serious, or sometimes fatal, injury from one of them. On leaving the hospital, workers from Tower-One, and those felons who’d completed their sentence working on one of the penal gangs at the launch site, were always re-allocated to one of the Factories. In terms of Tower-One’s productivity, being sent to the hospital was as good as being dead.
“It’s one year until the first ship will be ready to launch,” Ely growled at the mob. “One year! The ballot will be held next week, and you all jeopardise your chance of winning a place on it by brawling like… like…” He couldn’t think of a word that appropriately expressed his disgust. A sudden, terrible, thought struck him. “No one move,” he s
napped, unnecessarily as he pulled up the footage from the fight onto his display. He quickly cycled through the recordings from the different cameras, switching between the ones affixed to the ceilings and doors, the ones worn on the visors of the individual workers, and the one in his own helmet. He relaxed. All the people he’d hit were still standing.
“Control,” Ely spoke into the ever-open microphone on his collar.
“Constable?” The soft voice of Vauxhall, Tower-One’s Controller, came clearly through his earpiece.
“I need to report an affray. Lounge-Two.” Except it wasn’t called that anymore. “The uh… Sailor’s Rest,” he corrected himself. “It’s under control, but at least two workers will require hospitalisation.” There was a shuffling of feet. He raised his voice. “Inform the council.”
“Of course,” the Controller said. “But if they’re awake they’ll already have received the alert sent to the infirmary.”
That was true enough, and they would all be awake. The election was just over three shifts away. It was a foregone conclusion that Councillor Cornwall would be elected Chancellor by a landslide.
“Do any of you wish to admit your guilt?” Ely asked the crowd. He doubted anyone would, but it didn’t matter. He had the camera footage. Up until the Re-Organisation four years ago there had been the audio-feed as well. Then the right to privacy had been amended to the City of Britain’s Constitution, and Ely’s job got more time consuming, though not more difficult. Other than maintaining a watch against sedition, sabotage, and recidivism, the only crimes the Constable usually dealt with were the occasional fights. This one was more serious than any he had dealt with before, but he saw no difficulties in resolving it.
He turned his attention back to the images projected onto the inside of his visor. The system had already finished a preliminary analysis of the footage from the past thirty minutes. It had tagged each occasion when a citizen had hit, collided, pushed, or in any other way interacted with another worker.
One of the unconscious men twitched violently. Ely ignored the distraction, as he went through the footage, identifying which of those occasions constituted an offence.
Most of the crowd had launched a kick or thrown a punch, but there were seven people who’d done more. Leaving the two unconscious men and the third man still whimpering in pain aside, he focused his attention on the other four.
Juliana Dundee had thrown the blow that had dented his helmet, but it was clear she’d done it accidentally whilst trying to escape the melee in the centre of the room.
The other two, Ashford and Leeds, had initially acted in self-defence, then kept going when instinct overtook reason. He docked them forty points each. That left the other four.
Edmund Lundy, one of the two men on the floor, had thrown the first punch at Gerald Carlisle. Mr Gerald Carlisle, Ely corrected himself, seeing the annotation indicating the man was married. Carlisle had retaliated but neither quickly nor forcefully enough. Before he had landed two blows, Lundy had managed five. Carlisle went down.
And there, Ely thought, the fight could have ended. It would have ended if the woman, now kneeling next to the unconscious Mr Carlisle, hadn’t picked up a chair and swung it into Lundy’s back.
Ely winced as he replayed footage of that blow. It might be a spinal injury. He hoped not. That would mean months of rehabilitation, possibly even a year before the man was productive once more.
The evidence was incontestable. Once Lundy was down, the woman had swung the chair at his head, twice. There was no question that this warranted a custodial sentence. The only possible mitigating factor lay in the reason why she’d gone to the aid of Mr Carlisle in the first place. Sadly, Ely thought he already knew.
“You picked up that chair and hit him. Why?” Ely asked the woman.
She raised her eyes from the man on the floor.
“Because he…” She swallowed, and her tone became loud and defiant. “Because he hit Gerald. My husband.”
Ely nodded. The display recorded her name as Mrs Geraldine Carlisle. The two had been approved for breeding three days ago, registered their marriage during their next free shift, and officially changed their names twenty minutes later.
Marriage wasn’t compulsory, nor was changing one’s name, but both were strongly encouraged since the Re-Organisation. Adopting the names of old places now lost beneath the waves was a way of holding onto the past, of remembering those billions who had died, and carrying their memory onwards to Mars. That was what Councillor Cornwall had said. Ely didn’t disagree with the policy – he’d adopted one of the old names himself – he just didn’t understand the importance of it. Not that it mattered to his job. A citizen could change their name everyday, but that wouldn’t stop the system from tracking their every waking moment.
“Why were you here this evening?” he asked Mrs Carlisle.
“Why shouldn’t I be?” she retorted.
“A good citizen like you, why weren’t you in Recreation?”
“We already did our time there,” she said.
Ely checked the records.
“It says here that you did two hours,” he said.
There was a murmur of disapproval from the crowd.
“So? It’s not like it’s compulsory,” she stated, belligerently.
“No, it’s not,” Ely said. “And the only reason it’s not is that most workers know to do their duty. All we need is for each worker to spend four of their off-shift hours exercising on one of the machines in the Recreation Room and we’ll generate enough electricity to keep the Tower working. And the only reason that malingerers like you don’t cause the lights to turn off is that most people do five or more.”
There was a mixture of self-righteous nodding of heads and shame-faced downcasting of eyes from the crowd.
The Tower’s citizens were split into three shifts. Whilst one third worked, one third slept, and another third were free to do what they wanted. Each shift lasted approximately seven hours, with an hour in between for the workers to get from one part of the Tower to another. During that time, the drones cleaned and sanitised the Assemblies, ‘homes’, and lounges, getting them ready for the next shift.
Theoretically, every citizen had seven hours each day to do with as they pleased. And they had, up until fifteen years ago. That was when the rains had begun.
Whether the rising seas had brought the rains, or the deluge had caused the flood, no one knew. That the water had risen up to lap at the walls outside Level Three, and that the constant rain made the solar panels useless, was indisputable.
“You changed your name to that of your husband,” Ely said to Mrs Carlisle. “Indeed, you chose to get married, yet you waste all this energy here when you should be contributing to the greater good. I find that suspiciously inconsistent.”
“They were celebrating,” the man with the broken arm, Roger Grimsby spat out.
“Celebrating what?” Ely asked, but again, he thought already knew.
“That we were going to be able to have a child,” Mrs Carlisle stammered, her defiance beginning to crack under the withering stares of the mob.
“See?” Grimsby said with zealous indignance, “That’s as good as treason. Production must come first, that’s what Councillor Cornwall says, and he’s right. People like them.” He spat again. “They have no thought for the future, no thought about the society as a whole. All they care about is themselves.”
“Quiet!” Ely barked, as he quickly ran through the footage working out Grimsby’s part in it.
Lundy had knocked Mr Carlisle to the ground, but not knocked him out. Ely watched as Grimsby waded into the melee, shoving Mrs Carlisle out of the way. The woman blocked his view. He switched to a different camera. He saw Grimsby kick Mr Carlisle in the head. Ely pulled up the footage from Grimsby’s visor and replayed the scene. He was clearly responsible for knocking the man out. The question was whether that kick was intentional.
“We just wanted to spend time together,” Mrs C
arlisle said, this time quietly.
The tutting from the crowd, now collectively relieved that their sins were minor compared to hers, grew.
“What use are children?” Grimsby asked, sensing that he had the support of the mob. “They’re just more unproductive mouths to feed. And what use is that when we’re so close to leaving the Earth? Seventeen years is what it takes to breed someone up until they can be productively useful. That’s a seventeen-year drain on resources. How does that help when the first ship will launch in a year’s time? Can’t you wait?”
“Seventeen years, plus the two weeks maternity leave for her,” Juliana Dundee said, seeking to gain some of the crowd’s favour. “And count the energy lost in running the crèche and the school. We’d be on Mars already if it weren’t for the likes of them.”
Whether to have a moratorium on population increase was a debate that had been raging since the launch date had been announced, and one Ely expected to continue until the last human stepped off the planet for the last time.
“And what,” he asked the crowd loudly, “about the two people we will now have to breed up as replacements for these two who are going to the hospital? You didn’t think about that, did you? No, I’ve seen the footage. You can spout whatever high-minded rhetoric you want, but none of you were acting in the interests of production.”
That shut them up. He glanced down at Mr Carlisle. The injured man was looking increasingly pale. It was possible, Ely thought, that the nurses wouldn’t arrive in time.
“Dundee, for damaging state property, I’m docking you sixty points. Leeds, Ashford, for wilful assault you’re docked forty points each. As for the rest of you, none of you tried to stop the brawl. That makes you equally culpable. I could dock each and every one of you for the loss of labour.” He paused. “But I won’t. I’m inclined to be lenient. I’m docking you twenty points each.”
