Taking the Tube to the Outer Limits

by Darren Humphries

  “You’re loud this morning.”

  “Am I?” Alex also inclined his head slightly, adjusting the volume of his headset microphone. “Sorry. There was a dorm party on my floor last night and it was the only way to get heard over the music.”

  “That must have annoyed a few people,” Pavel suggested, thinking about how much it would have annoyed him.

  “What? No,” Alex denied straight away. They had moved together through the mass of people on the walkway, unconsciously using the small spaces that opened up to drift into a closer proximity. It was second nature to everyone and the patterns of movement were as natural as thinking. “There was plenty of warning and the sleepers switched racks with partyers from other floors.”

  “That makes sense,” Pavel allowed, though he would have been annoyed at having to give up his rack to someone else just so that he could get a good night’s sleep in theirs.

  “And today is Lottery Day,” Alex chattered on, ignoring his companion’s dour tone. “I have a good feeling about today.”

  “You have the same feeling every Lottery Day,” Pavel pointed out, “and it never means anything. Face it, the odds against you winning are huge. The odds against anyone you know winning are huge.”

  “It has to be somebody,” Alex pointed out, undaunted by his friend’s negative attitude. They reached the junction they needed and stepped off the walkway onto the one going down the side street, barely registering the action. The flow of people was such that once they had entered it they couldn’t have fought against it anyway.

  “It’s been nearly two years since a Brit won it,” Pavel reminded. “We’ve had what, three Chinese winners, two Indian, one Canadian, one Venezuelan, one Dutch, one Norwegian, two Russian…”

  “That one from the Federated States of Micronesia,” Alex put in.

  “The point is that it is never, never going to be you,” Pavel insisted. “The odds are literally billions to one.”

  “It’s the same chance as everyone else,” Alex’s optimism was not going to be dampened.

  Pavel could not refute the logic of that and decided that it was not worth the effort to try, so he changed the subject, “What have you got happening today?”

  “Travel document checks for the sea platformers,” Alex said with a grin. Since that was his job and what he did every day, the question and response had become something of a daily ritual.

  “Sounds like a tough day,” Pavel joked. A job shuffling electronic signatures was his idea of Heaven, but also of Hell. Maintaining the underground network of freight transport tubes was much more to his taste, more varied and more physical. Not that he had been given much of a choice about it. Zero unemployment there might be, but zero choice in your career starting point was the price. Breaking out of an assigned job role once established was not a situation with zero probability, but the chances were as low as that of winning a lottery played by everyone on the planet.

  “Actually, not as tough as it used to be,” Alex commented with a slight frown. “We almost reached our target last month.”

  “You got extra resources?” Pavel asked, surprised.

  “Nobody gets extra resources,” Alex scoffed at the suggestion. “You know that.”

  “Yes, I know that,” Pavel agreed with feeling.

  “There just seem to be fewer requests,” Alex said and then shrugged. “Maybe it’s a seasonal thing.”

  “I suppose that they still do have seasons out on the ocean,” Pavel guessed.

  “Anyway, I’m not saying anything or they’ll find me something else to do,” Alex said, the momentary cloud lifting from his face and the sunny grin returning.

  “That’s for sure.”

  “This is me,” Alex said; another part of the daily ritual. He stepped off the moving walkway into the mouth of his work building’s doorway and narrowly missed being knocked over by a young man who was barely working age and clearly not used to the walking flows of the area.

  “See you tomorrow,” Pavel said as he was swept on past. Only the connection of the headsets allowed Alex to hear him over the morning street rumble.

  “Don’t forget your lottery ticket,” Alex’s voice warned.

  “As if I could,” Pavel grumbled, but he had moved beyond the headset connection range and was grumbling to himself.

  About half a mile further on, he stepped off the walkway himself and into the much smaller doorway of his own workplace. Since his work took place in the miles of caverns underneath this section of the South Country conurbation, the entrance needed was small and took a bit more skill to walk into. It had taken him a week before he had got the timing right and didn’t find his nose squashed against the door frame. The entranceway led to several drop chutes, but the queue was relatively short and he quickly descended to the freight levels, retuning his headset to the company setting as he fell.

  “You are reminded that it is rack reassignment at the end of the month,” an anodyne female voice was saying without much interest. “If suitable racks are available more locally, then you will be reassigned automatically. Watch your band for updates.

  Pavel couldn’t resist the immediate urge to look at the band on his wrist. It wasn’t something that he often paid that much actual attention to. Like the headset, it was as much a part of him as his eyes or his tongue. He didn’t give it much thought until it went wrong, which was pretty much never. It was currently reading the time and date and local temperature, which wasn’t much use to Pavel this far underground. As he looked at it, a message ran across the face of it, reminding him that he had not collected his lottery ticket for the day.

  He jostled with all the others as he struggled out of his suit and into his working coveralls. Then, he stood to attention with all the others as the foreman squeezed into the locker room. His headset overrode the general company setting to a local one.

  “Right, listen up because we’ve got a full day for a change,” the foreman said in everyone’s ears. Nobody laughed because they had heard that joke too many times and it was not any funnier for the repetition. It was always a full day. Pavel thought enviously of Alex mentioning that his workload had reduced. “The network’s operational today, so we’ll be working in pairs, trying to keep each other from doing something stupid and reducing the world’s excess population by one. Your assigned partner and task list for the day should be on your bands…”

  The tingle in Pavel’s wrist told him that the information had been downloaded. He glanced down and saw that he had been paired up with Joel. If there had been any way that he could have cursed without it being heard, he would have.

  “…so get to it ladies and gents and please try not to get dead in the process.”

  Pavel enjoyed his job. Unlike Alex’s desk job, which could have been done by the computer systems in microseconds, fixing the machines in the subterranean supply systems was something that had to be done by human hands. That meant that he could get more satisfaction out of completing a task than his friend, because he knew that it was worthwhile. With the whole population hemmed in so closely together, everyone had to be kept busy and so if a job could be done by a person then it had to be done by a person, even if technology could do it faster, more efficiently, cheaper and with a better-quality finish. Pavel’s job, though, couldn’t be done by technology, at least not all of it, and that meant that he was necessary. Well, not him exactly, but someone and that someone happened to be him at the moment. That led to a sense of purpose and wellbeing that some people missed.

  The world underground was as cramped and noisy as the one above, but for entirely different reasons. The crawlspaces had been constructed to be no wider than a worker’s shoulders to leave as much space as possible for the actual transport tubes. They were much larger, especially the main trunk tubes, but to stand in one of those was to be hit by pods travelling so fast that you would be left as no more than a smear bonded forever into the paintwork on the pod’s nose. The noise down here was also different, not creat
ed by human voices but provided by the electrical circuits and magnetic fields that combined to fire the pods around under the conurbation at speeds that only computers could understand and direct. That was one job that no human could have managed.

  Of course, there was one voice down here in the dark with him and that was Joel’s.

  Joel was a regular enough guy, and a conscientious enough worker that Pavel had no concerns for either of their safety, but he liked to talk. He liked to talk so much that he did it incessantly. He talked even when he had nothing to talk about and today he had something to talk about.

  “It’s going to be somewhere in Europe,” he confidently predicted as he stripped down the housing of a magnetic field coil that had somehow become misaligned or defective, slowing down the passage of pods through that section of tube, not a lot but enough to affect the smooth running of the conurbation’s critical supply system. People were much happier when they got what they were supposed to when they were supposed to. “That last advert had trees in it and they weren’t any tropical kind of trees. It definitely had a certain European feel to it.”

  Pavel ignored him and kept on working. Nobody knew where the lottery would take them. There were few enough wild places on the dry face of the planet and the world governments weren’t about to go giving away their locations. It wouldn’t do for millions of people to stream out of the cities and overwhelm them. They wouldn’t stay green and pleasant for long, that was for sure. Some of them still produced food, in small quantities. The vast majority of mankind’s sustenance now came from the sea and from the huge floating platforms that tended the algae farms and the sea creatures that were now the human race’s staple diet. The UN insisted that none of the foodstuffs that were produced were green. They also controlled the names of the organisations that produced them very closely. The land areas that could now only be visited by winning the lottery were held and maintained out of a sense of nostalgia and an innate need to preserve what little of the natural environment remained. And so, the secret of their locations was kept by a very few people at the very top of the pyramid.

  Which was fine with Pavel, who had never felt more than mild curiosity in terms of the question.

  “That last one was obviously a jungle, very much a tropical, or even subtropical, location, possibly South America, maybe Sumatra, Sri Lanka, somewhere like that.”

  Pavel knew well enough where South America was, but the other names meant little to him. Geography was taught only as part of the history syllabus now. What was the point of knowing about other places when you had no chance of ever going there? They were all pretty much like home anyway – huge sprawling conurbations that rose up inexorably higher because it was the only direction in which they could expand. Different people, perhaps, but the same crowds, same noise, same problems.

  Same lottery.

  So many things were global now. They just couldn’t be dealt with at a regional level. The population situation had ended war by effectively ending any advantage in invading neighbouring countries. When they had all the same deprivations as yourself, they became much less attractive as targets. Crime was almost unheard of now. When everything that you did was observed by, at the very least, dozens of other people it was impossible to commit an offence and get away with it. Even slacking off at work was a thing of the past because half of the jobs that existed were checking the work of someone else. It wasn’t a golden age, to be sure, but it wasn’t the hell that had been predicted in so many bad science fiction movies from earlier times.

  Pavel allowed the part of his mind that wasn’t required for the repairs to meander about aimlessly. The unstructured thoughts kept Joel’s inane chattering at bay, even at lunch, which they took by the machines since the crawlspaces were too narrow to manoeuvre a sandwich in.

  “Are you coming?” Joel asked him abruptly, sounding more annoyed than annoying for a change. “Shift’s over. We’ll be late getting back if we don’t hustle.”

  Pavel checked his band and saw that Joel was right. There was barely enough time to get back to the locker room and wash the grease and sweat off his body before the next shift showed up. Nobody would be pleased to be fighting for space with people who should already have been on their way back to their racks.

  “Yeah, sorry,” he apologised to his team-mate and quickly screwed the inspection panel back into place. The job was done, but he was forced to leave the wiring a little less neatly arranged than he would have liked. He told himself that he would find time to come back and tidy it all up on another shift, but knew that the constant demands made that unlikely. It was probable that the next time that particular unit failed he would come back and wonder who the hell had left it in such disarray.

  Joel was almost bouncing off the walls by the time that Pavel joined him and he set a quick pace through the crawlspaces and passageways.

  “Thought I was going to have to come in after you two,” the foreman commented as they finally reached the locker room and started to strip off the disposable coveralls. The work clothes would be completely recycled into new ones. In fact, they probably had been a hundred times before.

  Pavel eyed the man and wondered if he could still fit in the narrower spaces. His midriff wasn’t as slight as it used to be. He said nothing and hit the shower instead.

  “Hey, Kosinski,” the foreman called as Pavel was shuffling the jacket over his shoulders in preparation to depart.

  “What?” Pavel asked, expecting a lecture on leaving it so late before reporting back.

  “It says here that you haven’t taken a lottery ticket yet,” the foreman said, waving his clipboard, which had nothing to clip anything onto it and obscure the touch screen.

  “I wasn’t aware that it was legally mandatory,” Pavel observed.

  “It’s not,” the foreman replied. “Just something to be noticed, you know.”

  Pavel did know. Everything was noticeable and anything out of the ordinary was remarkable. If it was remarkable then it was certainly remarked upon by someone and the authorities were acting on it before you were even aware that anyone considered it noticeable.

  “I always get it on my way home,” Pavel lied, knowing that even if the foreman believed him, the band would know better.

  He hurried out of the building and managed to make the walkway just before the new shift started to clog up the narrow exit, slipping his headset on against the steady roar of so many hushed voices. He pushed his way into the flow of humanity and was carried away back toward his building and his rack.

  For a short while, he wanted to rebel. He wanted to refuse what was expected of him, what was actually required of him, and not take a ticket in the lottery. There must be others like him, possibly millions like him, who weren’t driven by blind desire to ignore the ridiculous figures of probability that stood between them and the last wild places in the world. It was a brief moment, though, and he whispered into the microphone, “One lottery ticket.”

  The band vibrated at his wrist to signal that the request had been successfully carried out, as if there was ever an occasion when it failed.

  At various intervals along the walkway, screens hung above the commuters, each of them showing a constant countdown to the drawing of the lottery. There was still time to eat before the global telecast began, so he consulted his band and found an eating hall where the queue was moving quickly and there would be capacity in a short enough space of time. He switched walkway with only a little difficulty and let Alex know where he was going to eat.

  The eating hall featured a cuisine that had once been called Chinese. All the constituent ingredients were sea-farmed and heavily processed to mimic the traditional dishes, but the flavourings that were added to create the illusion were to his liking and his band showed no health limits to the menu choices that he could make. His preselected options were presented to him on arrival, along with his seating assignment and allotted time span. As he sat down to eat, the headset announced Alex connecting in. Pavel l
owered the lenses into place in front of his eyes and saw his friend as though he was in the seat opposite, despite his being in what appeared to be a French-influenced hall.

  “So, did you have a nice day at work, dear?” Alex asked with a grin as he set about his food. The seating time allowance was shorter for him than Pavel and so he ate steadily to ensure that he didn’t overrun his allocation. “Or were you on tenterhooks all day for the lottery?”

  “I wish they would just call it,” Pavel complained. “All anyone seems to be able to talk about is the lottery.”

  “Well, not every day is lottery day,” Alex replied. His microphone was set a little too high and Pavel could hear the clattering of hundreds of knives and forks against plates and cups against saucers.

  “For which I am profoundly grateful,” Pavel thought of saying, but didn’t. He already had the foreman noticing the way he was acting and he didn’t need to raise any suspicions in anyone else.

  “They announce just before my seat runs out,” Alex told him. “You want to watch it together?”

  “Sure,” Pavel agreed without enthusiasm. It wasn’t as though he had anything else to do before going to sleep other than watch old movies in his rack. The screen fixed into the bottom of the rack above his had developed a colour shift that made anything other than black and white films impossible to watch and the repair wasn’t scheduled for three days. Perhaps, he thought idly, if Alex didn’t have enough work to do he could always transfer over to the video equipment repair business.

  There was a palpable sense of anticipation in the eating hall as the time of the lottery transmission approached. The rumble of conversation grew into a tsunami of noise as voices increased in volume due to the increasing excitement. The noise-dampening effects of Pavel’s headset struggled to keep it to a manageable level. Despite himself, Pavel was caught up by the wash of emotions and was as eager as all the others when his band warned him that the transmission was starting. At his slight head movement, the headset lenses flickered and the image of the nearby Alex, and the even closer table, faded to be replaced by the logo of the World Lottery Foundation, incorporating the venerated UN laurel leaf and world motif. There was an audible sigh that was probably being replicated across the world as Humanity breathed out in unison.