by G R Matthews
The flat screen came to life with a few flickers and a buzz of interference. It was tempting to put a note on for city maintenance to fix it. Do my civic duty, even if this city had sought my death. Thankfully, you didn’t need to log in to use the city panels, but the price you paid was limited access and lots of adverts to entice the poor worker into parting with their hard earned cash. What the companies give, they take away even quicker. A few swipes of the touchscreen, followed by some more aggressive stabs, and I brought up the newsfeed. I checked back a day, scanning for any mention of a tragic airlock accident and the death of a man.
There it was in the glorious picture of an airlock and the five lines of text. I was officially dead.
Great.
Chapter 32
I could, I should, go and hide. Sneak onto a sub and make my escape.
Common sense and I met once. We didn’t get on. Flicking through the menus and following a few links, I found the address I wanted, checked it on the map and re-joined the flow of workers. They bustled to and fro, back and forth, sporting that vacant expression you only see on the early morning commute. The one that says I am going to work but I want the world to know I am not happy about it. It isn’t a look I’d seen in a while. I was usually too busy throwing up or popping pills.
I had to stop a few times at other City-web stations, just to get my bearings, but no one gave me a second glance. Noses in coffee, eyes on Pads or just dreaming of another twenty minutes of sleep, the corporate zombies walked their pre-ordained paths.
Once in the commercial and office district I started to look a little out of place. Suits to the left of me, power dressers to the right, here I was, stuck in the middle of them all. They paid little attention. Even offices need cleaners, janitors, interns and other invisible workers just to keep the building going. Given the right job, and the right desk, I reckon a lot of folks could clock in, do nothing, clock out, get paid and still win employee of the month.
Rounding one corner, I saw the office building bearing the name of the company Rehja worked for. Whether it had much to do with me, I couldn’t be sure, but now I knew where he worked I felt better. There is just something about locating your enemy, knowing their geographical location births a sense of security. It is the ‘I know where you live’ kind of power that you suddenly wield over them. Of course, I didn’t actually know where he lived or even if he was in work today, but I knew I could come back if I needed to.
It was a crumb of power, an atom in its potential to produce fission or fusion, the potential energy of a small child at the top of a slide. One push on either and the power would be released. I felt better. First time in days. Sadly, I was still dressed like a maintenance engineer in an area where there were few of us around. And I had the wrong shoes on.
“You buying or just gonna waste my air?”
“What?” I turned to see the owner of the voice glaring at me. The dark blue apron with the name of the eating establishment ‘Fageants Feast’ and the word ‘Manager’ stencilled upon it gave me the clues I needed. There were no other staff in sight and I’d no idea what a Fageant was, unless they’d murdered an apostrophe.
“You going to buy anything? If not, clear off. I’ve got to clear up after the morning rush.”
“Customer service a speciality of yours?”
“Smart mouth, one of yours?” he said and took a threatening step closer.
I’d been hit, shot, punched, and drowned too much in the last few weeks to even think about getting into another fight. Cowardice is often the better side of valour and I exercised it now. Raising my hands in the universally recognised gesture of ‘don’t hit me’, I backed away.
One more thing to do before I could follow the next part of my plan. Plan? Who was I kidding?
I needed to make sure Rehja worked there, so I headed across the street and in through the automatic doors. In the top corner of the spacious reception area, a camera. There was likely more than one dotted around the room. Companies usually make sure one camera is visible as a deterrent. Still, no point in giving them clear footage of my face. I ducked my head away and raised a hand to scratch the very real stubble on my chin. Not perfect, but better than nothing.
“Can I help you, sir?” the receptionist said, wrinkling her nose at me.
“Hi,” I smiled. Cheerful and polite, not my natural demeanour and after the last day or two much harder to achieve than I’d expected. “I’ve been sent to make sure my boss’s appointment with Mr Rehja is still on for today.”
“They couldn’t call?” she said.
“Old fashioned.”
She snorted and tapped at her screen. “Mr Rehja has appointments all day. What’s your boss’s name?”
“More money, more trouble for the workers. Isn’t it always the way?”
“Tell me about it,” she said, resting her finger on the screen.
“I’m supposed to be off shift now, but down she comes and says to me, ‘go and find out if my meeting is still on’, ‘collect my dry cleaning on the way.’ I mean, really? I’m a highly trained sanitation engineer. I’m better than this.” I gave a vague flutter of my hands to indicate the everything around us and kept on talking. “But, you have to earn money to survive in today’s world don’t you? No one’s going to help you unless you help yourself first. Isn’t that the way of the world? Go and check the appointment. Get my dry cleaning. Don’t be late back. You’ll be fired if you are. On and on and on. Never stops going on. You know how that is? Working every day for someone...”
The receptionist raised her hand above the parapet. “Dry cleaning?”
“Sorry, what?”
“The dry cleaning you had to pick up. You don’t have it?”
I made a show of patting myself down and went for a shocked, confused expression. “Fuck. Sorry. Lovely to chat. Got to go. Thanks.”
Sliding on the polished floor, I raced out of the reception area. Stopped, looked both ways and took off down the street.
Around the next corner, I stopped and wheezed. My shoulder hurt, my leg hurt, my ribs hurt, my hand hurt, and I was out of breath. So, Rehja was going to be in the office all day long. Good. That gave me time to think.
Chapter 33
I could do with a wash and a change of clothes. Something that didn’t make me look like a sanitation engineer with poor taste in footwear. And where would I find some clothing? Back in the apartment they’d stashed me in just a day, two days... was it three days ago? I need some sleep.
A quick glance around the street, just to make sure no one was giving me too much attention and I set off. A casual walk, a man going home from work after a long night shift. I yawned. That wasn’t faked.
Turning a few corners, gazing up at the street signs, the offices and companies, I almost missed him. That would have been a mistake. A terminal one. The one you don’t come back from.
He was alone. No one else sat next to him and, from what I could see as I ducked back behind the frond of a plastic plant that rose from a pot outside a restaurant, he wasn’t waiting for anyone. The Pad he had propped up on the table in front of him was his sole focus. There was a cup of something, tea, coffee, strychnine, growth hormone, on the table and I watched him take a sip without looking away from the Pad.
Kade. Rehja’s right hand thug. A man who’d thrown me into an air lock and flooded it. Not a kind gesture in anyone’s book and the author of mine was a right evil sod.
I didn’t want him to see me. He thought, I hoped, that I was dead and if not buried, at least food for the fishes and other scavenging beasts of the deep. For a while, until I could figure out a way to deal with Rehja and his bosses, I wanted them all to be sure I was dead.
He stood. No warning. No packing away or last draining of the cup. Just pushed his chair back and stood up. I ducked behind the frond and Kade looked my way. A strange sight. A man whose neck was so thick he actually had to turn his upper body to look in the desired direction. It wasn’t a focused gaze. He wa
sn’t searching for anything in particular. It was the simple, instinctive action of a mind realigning itself the world.
When you’ve been focused on something for a long time, giving it all of your attention, the world fades away. When you come back, it can be disconcerting. You have to sync your brain to the real world. I’ve known people who’d chosen to live their lives in an alternative reality. Some did it through drugs, some alcohol, some had minds that simply couldn’t cope with the reality of life beneath the waves and had broken, and some found lives inside computer systems. Life, but not in a way I understood.
It was that kind of look. Kade had been focused so totally on something that everything else had vanished. Now he was back and I’d missed a chance. I could have sneaked past the café when he was staring at the Pad. I could have sat next to him, asked to borrow the sugar from his table, and he wouldn’t have noticed.
Now, he was back and only the green frond of plastic protected my face from his view. I watched him pick up his Pad and tuck it into a pocket inside his jacket. He waved at the waiter who gave Kade a smile and rushed over to retrieve the cup. If the bulky thug left a tip I didn’t see. What I did see was him leaving the little enclosed seating area outside the restaurant. I know it’s called Al Fresco, education raising its ugly head, but it doesn’t seem to fit anymore. Cool air circulates courtesy of the ever moving fans and scrubbers, but outside is really a misnomer. Now I’m just showing off. Procrastinating and Kade was heading my way.
There was nowhere to hide. The plastic leaf wasn’t going to cover me for long. Ten metres away and not looking in my direction. Yet. I cast around. There had to be something to do, to avoid detection. The crowds were sparse and there were only a few customers in the cafés near me.
A menu. I could use that. I quick-stepped over to the screen set into the wall beside the doorway and, holding a hand up to my face in what I hoped was a gesture of thought, focused on it. In the reflection, I watched him come closer.
Kade’s head turned in my direction and, maybe, his step stuttered a moment. Just a twitch. A slight raise of an eyebrow. I might have imagined it. Perhaps. The fingerprint smears on the screen distorted the reflection. It could be any of those things or more, but I tracked him as he moved on.
The breath I’d been holding rushed out in one sharp exhalation and I plucked at my overalls, freeing the material from my sweat soaked skin. Actually, the food looked good, but the prices were a little steep for my current budget of precisely nothing. Something else I needed to sort out. Clothes. Money. Sleep. Food. Not necessarily in that order.
With the way clear, and my stomach rumbling its discontent, I headed down the street towards the boxes and the apartment. By lucky coincidence, the opposite direction to Kade.
Off the main streets and through the first proper bulkhead into the boxes it all changed. The lighting dimmed, the air didn’t smell as fresh and there were the groans and creaks of pressure on the hull.
Boxes, cheap housing for people the city wouldn’t miss. They did their bit. Built the apartments, tried to keep the sea water out and the air in. There was lighting, just, and fresh water to drink. Some of the apartments, those on the top levels, close to the bulkheads, were spacious and well maintained. The further down you go, the worse they get and the more desperate the people become. At home, in my city, I existed quite far down. I’d lived higher up, had hopes and seen them crushed.
There weren’t many people about as I made my way down the metal staircase between levels, counting off the floors until I found the bulkhead door I wanted. It wasn’t closed. It should have been. In fact, the City-AI should keep them closed. A safety feature. But who cares for the poor in a company city? Not many, including themselves a lot of the time. When you have nothing, nothing is worth saving.
A bedraggled soul hurried past as I stepped through the bulkhead onto the floor that housed the apartment. She must have been late for work. In a city that could mean the sack. Getting fired, even from a menial, poorly paid job, meant time in the scrubbers or on a waste barge. You had to work to earn the air you breathe and the small room that you lived, existed, in. Life on a waste barge could be short. I stepped aside, her head didn’t lift and she didn’t even give me a second glance. Poor sod.
The apartment door was closed. I took that to be a good sign. It wasn’t like me to be optimistic so I also figured they’d cleaned the place out, chucked my luggage down a tube and onto the barge that the woman was about to make her place of employment.
Fishing out the Pad, I checked my surroundings and pressed it to the lock. When I got back to my city, I’d have a lot of explaining to do. The Pad would link to the military system in my city and upload its usage log. There was no way to stop it, but at present it was either use every resource I had available or get killed. Out of the two, I’d plumped for life in prison. At least I’d be fed, watered and clothed. Or on a waste barge.
It was hard to tell.
Chapter 34
There is something about wearing your own clothes that makes you feel better, confident and ready for the world. A weapon wouldn’t have gone amiss, but the only thing I could find in the apartment was a plastic spork. Deadly to re-hydrated noodles. I discovered a pot at the back of a cupboard and some boiled water rejuvenated them into something edible. They didn’t taste of anything in particular. Certainly not the spicy prawn the pot declared.
As an added bonus, I managed to get a few hours of shut-eye. A thin blanket kept me warm. The fact that my cases were still here meant, at some point, they would be back to clear them out. Or, and this is where I had to trust to luck, they had decided to leave my stuff out of the way, in the apartment, until a later date. It was hidden and there was, as far as I knew, no link between Rehja, Kade, the company, and this apartment. It had been good to sleep.
Right up until the point I shot bolt upright. “Fuck!”
Cameras. The city was riddled with them. I must have been seen by them at some point. In the corridors. At the airlock. Somewhere. They must have some footage of us together. The bugger of it was, I wasn’t sure if that was good news or not. I might be able to find it, maybe, possibly, and use it against them. I might not, which was more likely. I couldn’t get back to sleep, so I washed and dressed.
There wasn’t a great deal to put together at the moment for the simple reason that I didn’t know much. The theft was one thing, but that other job? I wasn’t entirely sure what I had done. It must have been illegal and would get me into trouble. A deep and stinking to high heaven level of trouble. I needed more information. There was a way out of this. There had to be.
Money. I needed some money, but I couldn’t access my own account. A great big red flag would wave on every screen in every security station between here and home. Gone were days of paper and metal money. You could see some of it in the museums. Derva had spent an evening telling me all about it. Thrilling stuff, especially when mixed with a beautiful woman and a bottle of wine.
A few gulps of water, swirling the last around my mouth and spitting it into the sink, and I checked my appearance in the mirror. Sadly, I didn’t look my best. Dishevelled, bruised and leaning, slightly to the side, favouring my injuries. There were times, some not too far in the past, when I’d looked worse, but I’d have to make do. It was nothing a few months’ of rest, relaxation and alcohol wouldn’t cure. The face, I was stuck with. No amount of healthy living, skin care or reconstructive surgery would do much about it. I’ve grown used to it over the years. Can’t answer for other people.
I closed the door and locked it with my own code. They’d know someone had been inside because the bed had been slept in, food had been eaten and I’d changed my clothes. And the apartment would log the entries. Nothing I could about that.
The military programs were good for big systems where they could hide amongst the tangles of code, subroutines and systems. An apartment system was simple log and control, nothing to really use against it, to confuse it with, to trick i
t. I settled for locking them out.
Banks are a fact of life. Like the common cold, flu, the plague, tax, work and adverts for things nobody really needs but everyone buys. I needed a bank to set up a credit line into this city. I couldn’t use my own, but the military, in their wisdom, had left me a little something to help. Goodbye, for a while, Corin Hayes, Fish-Suit expert and alcohol taster extraordinaire and hello ‘Peter West’, mechanical engineer and all round boring guy.
We’d all been given another persona, another identity to use. The thinking went, from what I can gather, though thinking and military aren’t comfortable bedfellows, that a Fish-Suit soldier was viewed, by all sides, as a terrorist. Although we’d been sent against military targets, the collateral damage was always high. There was no way to avoid it. One crack in a city shell, certainly the older, cheaper, quick built ones, spelled doom and destruction for everyone. We’d lost towns and cities in the war, so had they.
When a Sub does it in ‘honest’ warfare, in a straight up fight, people seem to find a way to forgive, to accept it as a part of war. When we did it, not that I went on many missions, it was terrorism. Struck from the dark of the ocean, undetected, no chance to protect yourself, no knowledge that you were even under attack, and the idea of a noble war went out of the window. Often accompanied by a whole lot of blood, flesh, gore and debris.
So, they’d given us a second identity, in case there were repercussions. I don’t know of many who’ve used them which is, I suspect, the point. For the most part, there was little chance to use mine, even if I’d wanted to. My face, in my city, was too well known and I couldn’t go anywhere else. The package had sat on the Pad since it had been issued. Now though, in this city, where I wasn’t known it would be useful. Soon as I used it, the flags on military system would go into overdrive, but that was still slow. The military did nothing quickly. I had time.
