by Aeon Authors
And when I reached 6, I stupidly wandered around until I found the self-possessed little girl I’d seen there yesterday, early this morning, whatever. She was sleeping in one of the exposed beds in a narrow sleepway. Baby Anne, that was what she’d called herself. Just lying there, all peaceful and happy, like I always imagined I had as a little girl before my parents vanished in a mine blow up. My daddy had been an engineer, my mom a doctor. Did Baby Anne know who her parents had been?
I reached down to touch her face and stopped myself cause other kids in the sleepway were already starting to stare. Any minute now one of them might remember me. I had to go.
I kissed my fingertips and blew it at Baby Anne, thinking that if Spartacus was on the level, she’d be one of the two from 6.
Then I ran through the back ways just like all the other decks above it, and found the door that went to damaged. Holding my breath, because Spartacus had never meant for me to go here and hadn’t given me the code, I dropped down the next number in the repeating code pattern and punched it in.
There was a gentle click, then a thunk, and I jerked the handled down hard, pulling back with all my strength. This back door hadn’t been used in a long time. No one went to damaged by choice.
Like the other levels, this one was dark immediately past the back door, but unlike the others, it wasn’t deserted. Shapes came shuffling towards me out of the gloom, curious. Dangerous? I’d never know because I ran from that tunnel tee so fast you’d think I’d overslept feeding time. I was heading for the sleeper rooms nearest damaged’s updeck lock. That’s where they would have brought Squirrel.
Except he wasn’t there. There were just a lot of vacant eyes, a few chatterers, a few hooting violents that were semi-restrained in private cells, and, most frightening of all, older kids who looked perfectly sane but simply too broken to respond to anything. The smell of waste was thick in the air. Some no doubt from malfunctioning shitters and residents who just didn’t bother. The rest from what, on every other level, would have been the sexkids’ “recreation” area.
6 or 7 had a place for kids to play tag and throw stuff. 8, 9, and 10 had that and wrestling mats. 11 and up was like a cheap lounge. Lots of hanging out, flirting, sex games.
Damaged had the sieve.
The entire area was taken over by the inward curve of the shitter tube and three wide display windows wrapping round it. Also monitoring equipment, mechanical controls. More technology and actual brainwork here than in any of the upper levels, and they’d assigned the work to damageds. As I walked around it hopefully, it made no sense to me until I saw a damaged scramble frantically through a narrow tube below one of the windows. Through the window I could see her emerge into an attached thick body suit that let her walk out into the muck of the sieve. The sleeve from the wall stretched behind her as she dropped to her hands and knees to go after something she’d seen.
Transfixed in front of the middle window, I watched her dig through clean-green garbage and shit until, with a groaning creak and a visible shake inside the tube, the entire lake seemed to suddenly split in two and go slurping down the divide, sucking everything after it—lake, wall shit, air, and the damaged in the retrieval suit.
For a second there was only blackness, then the sleeve holding the damaged’s suit sprang her back up—I heard her shriek and giggle—the sieve snapped closed, and the choppers and grinders below ground into a terrifying commotion.
I swallowed, picturing the little kids I’d been asked to send into there from above. Where was the failsafe switch in there? I couldn’t see it.
“S’over there, Mags,” slurred a voice by my ear and I spun around. Only one person had ever been able to read my mind like that. Your brother. Squirrel!
I grabbed the front of his suit and almost pulled him over as I half-scrambled up to kiss his face and grab his bleached blond hair and hit him on the shoulder as I choked over all the scrapes and bruises he’d let them give him.
“Hee-hee-ee-ee-hee!” shrieked the damaged girl who’d managed to climb back out of the sleeve down near our knees. “Got it! Got it!” And she crawled over to a complicated mini-airlock on the tube that must have been a cleaning conduit for stuff dragged out of the muck.
Squirrel tore his face away from my kisses and pointed again at the shitter observation window. “Just over the curving sieve lock.”
I looked, squinting. Even though they’d brought the lights on in there, streaks of crap and paper and…stuff that had withstood the suck smeared everything. But I finally saw it, right where he’d said, a distinctive button with all sorts of writing around it.
“What’s it say?” I asked, because, like I said before, Squirrel was the only 13’er I knew who was good at reading. He’d tried to teach me, but I’d never seen the point.
“Lights…and….” he began, but his voice and eyes had gone so hollow I figured they must have given him chems to get him down here.
The damaged girl cut him off by dancing up and waving the floral-patterned shirt she’d pulled from the muck, obviously three or more sizes too small for her. Ripped off a young sexkid? Maybe Paula? Had she stripped it off and hooked it over a jag in the wall somehow before she’d been sucked into the chopper? To remember her by.
“Go away,” I snarled at the damaged girl and she did.
When I turned back to Squirrel, he was pressed up against the shitter tube window, rubbing his nose against it, back and forth, like he didn’t understand why he couldn’t go through. “Clips of frozen kiddies,” he said. “Floating around. Ay madre.”
“Are you popped?” I said. Because shit and uni-praise I needed Squirrel’s good brain here, not his noodle head, tough times or not.
Then I saw the crusted blood at the back of his head, the side of his head, and the feeling I’d had when I’d first learned he was in damaged came back to me. I jumped forward behind him, pressing my body to his back, and felt all the bumps in his head, the places where his skull had been so badly fractured it was amazing he was even standing.
Then he wasn’t.
I half caught him as he fell and he dragged me down to the steel deck with him. The deck was wet. It smelled like shit. Had smears of shit all over here. Now all over Squirrel.
Sorry, Eduardo.
One last time Squirrel’s dark brown eyes seemed to focus on mine. Then he died.
Keep a cool shell. Never let them get to you.
That’s what Squirrel used to say. And he touched me with his long fingers. Tried to teach me things. Called me smarter than anyone.
Keep a cool shell.
“What?” The guard at updeck access 13, just starting his night shift, looked through his window at me like I’d just barfed on his shoes. I was glad I had on my cleaner suit and mask. Cool shell. Just get up there.
“I need to go up early. Forgot to put some tools back into my cart before I came down last time.”
“So?”
“The longer I leave them up there, the more chance someone else could find them. Take them.”
“Yeah.”
“My boss would hate that.”
The guard smiled. “Really.”
“Spartacus.”
“What?” He frowned through the window at me and I knew that while this was right, I couldn’t be too obvious either.
“Um…Spartacus wants to see me?”
The guard frowned deeper and checked something on his screen and it suddenly clicked it was a frown of not understanding.
“Maybe it’s…just the name he uses with me?” I said. “He’s a reporter. You know. In the big room with the view screen and massage soaker.”
Understanding dawned, then a sneer. “One of you kids talked your way up this morning, attacked the man, had to be put down. You really think he wants another of you just now?”
Attacked the man….
I took my cleaner hood and mask off so he could see how the blood had drained from my face. Vulnerability. He wouldn’t know why. “He’ll see me,�
� I said quietly. “He has before. Check your tapes. Ask him.”
The guard paused. He frowned uncertainly again, then turned back to his console. He scanned through his tapes and made a call. Spoke silently and intensely with whoever was on the other line. When he turned back to me, he shrugged like he’d meant to let me pass all along.
“Go. Margaret 1315.”
I went, stopping at my usual cupboard to drag out my clean-green cart. I clipped it on and pulled it with me across the Princess Deck. Then up to Prince. Down the corridor to Spartacus’s room. I knocked and he opened. I walked in with the cart and he barely looked at me. He was nursing a swollen eye, his other was bloodshot, and he limped as he returned to his viewer desk in a loose-hanging robe. I could see bruises across his pale, sunken chest.
The door closed behind me and I got out of my cleaner suit. I cleared my throat until he turned and looked at me. I was in just my singlet. Concealing nothing. His red eyes flicked over me without caring and he flicked back his long hair. “What is it? Are the children ready to go?”
“How are you going to be able to take the suits down to them with a bad leg?” I said.
“Ah. Perhaps it is you who must take them down.”
“Where are they? The suits.”
He waved his hand jerkily in the air. “Hidden. Ready. They take up no space, eighteen suits. I told you. They are special.”
“You mean they don’t exist.”
“I mean…” he snarled. Then he let go what little energy he had left and collapsed back in his chair. “They do not exist.”
Maybe it was because I was trying at last to understand other people, grownups, but when he collapsed, my own knees went weak too and I sank to the floor of his quarters. “And you’re a fake. A fake who tried to pretend that someone somewhere cares about us and how we live here. Stupid. I knew that. I just… I don’t understand why you did it.”
It took almost a minute for Spartacus to pull himself upright in his chair, and when he did, I saw that his eyes were not only red, with one swollen, but wet too. He had been crying like a child and still was.
“You do not understand, ma chère. People care. I care.” He took this deep, shuddering breath. “But there is no easy way out for you children. Much of what I told you is true—how the suit works, the failsafes, getting out. But my ship carries only two passengers—my pilot and me. It is like that for almost every ship that stops here. Unless…”
He leaned towards me in his chair, clearly wanting me to ask. “Unless what?”
“Unless we make the worlds care. You see, I am a reporter. I record things that are seen by all the worlds of Earth. And if I can shock them, make them realize what goes on here…”
Clips of frozen kiddies. Floating around. Ay madre.
Oh unified mother.
“You were going to have me send all those kids down the shitter, stop the choppers, and record them shooting out into space.”
“Yes.” The man’s pale lips were trembling now and point his finger at his temple. “With my Live-On filaments. I would go out the waste tube with them. Show the worlds what the little children will brave to escape their horrors here. This would change things. Vraiment.”
I fought down the sourness in my throat and held his eyes as I reached for my cart to help me stand. “You really believe that?”
“Yes.”
“You thought killing a bunch of kids…” Something clicked for me. “I bet you laid this out for Squirrel before you ever met me, didn’t you. He was so smart. You figured he’d see it just like you. But he didn’t. He walked away.”
“What?”
“Then he found out you’d gone from him to me.”
“I do not—”
“Daniel Ramírez. The blond sexkid you bashed up this morning. My love.”
Understanding dawned on the man’s face now, just like it had on the guard’s and on my own. Oh, goody. And what did all that get us?
“Maggie,” he said to me now with the old commanding rasp in his voice, holding out both hands with his palms down. “It all sounds cruel, yes. But it is the only way. Or else this station will keep on and on. There will be other stations like it. It must be stopped.”
“Not this way,” I said roughly and reached with my left hand into my clean-green cart for my laser-saw. “What’s your real name?”
He looked to the saw and smiled, knowing of course that the saw only worked on things that stayed still long enough for a laser to cut. “Auguste Lachance de la Fer. Why do you ask?”
“Fair trade for giving you the name Daniel.”
He must have sensed something because he was leaping even as I braced myself and, with my right hand, swung up my clean-green hose, turned on full bore.
It hit and drove him back, enough off-balance enough for me to jump forward and kick him in the balls, then smash the laser saw into his head to put him out cold. Once he was still, the laser saw worked just fine.
You really want to hear the rest, Eduardo? How I cut him up, then ripped the top off his personal shitter and stuffed pieces of him down the pipe to make sure I’d fit myself? How I took his spacesuit and gun, then went down his shitter, all off-camera? I hit the sieve and stuck to the wall while I hit the failsafe. Then I crawled out and up the side of Station, which looks like some great nubbly ball slowly turning round and round with its levels all cockeyed. It took me almost to the end of my suit’s air to locate the only docked spaceship that could have been Auguste’s, and I would have died for sure if the identifiers in his suit hadn’t gotten me access.
But they did. I surprised and got the drop on his pilot. Turns out he was no great fan of Auguste Lachance de la Fer, anyway, and he’s become a willing helper in my escape. I think.
Don’t know what my chances are from here, though. The chances are good that they’re onto me already, so I can’t go back. We might not even make it through the jump gates. Or we might make it, only to get taken out Earthside. Or just not get the grown-ups to listen. Or, even if I make it and get them to listen, they could still take months, years, before Earth does anything.
That’s no good. This stuff has to end now.
Which is partly why I sent this little crawler to your sleeper. Not just to tell you about your brother, but to tell you, by my example, by Squirrel’s, what you’ve got to do. At the end of this, I’m going to give you all the downdeck lock codes. And it’s going to be up to you to get to each level, pick the most together kids you can find (that’ll be Baby Anne on 6), tell them what’s what. The next big arrival of ships, you have to find a way to get your selections picked to go updeck at the same time. Coordinate. Hijack your patrons. Grab their guns and suits. Leave their rooms the same way I did.
The kicker? Even if you do that and get space-side, you can’t take the ships; you’d be split up and too weak and they’d stop you for sure.
You have to go to Queen Deck where Station’s command crew lives—only eight people, Auguste’s pilot says. They’re all “pansy officers” not soldiers. His words. Which means if you send in the little kids first—no codes needed on the airlock; more of this failsafe shit—they can distract them with a sob story while the rest of you get in and surround ’em with guns. Kill them if you have to.
From Queen Deck you lock every hatch and take over all the Station systems. Kid named Mule on fourteen knows tech. Make sure he’s on the team.
Then you hold it and all the docked ships for ransom. You’ll have major broadcast gear. Someone somewhere has to listen.
Always assuming, of course, that you all make it down the shitter in the first place. And manage to turn off the choppers.
I’m sending another proximity crawler down there with some last minute directions to find that failsafe, find the Queen deck entrance, and work as a team. Rah-rah stuff.
Eduardo yanked himself out of recall to hear the last words the chica que partío had left for them here. Now. Pasted to the shitter’s inner wall which still hummed with the actio
n of the choppers blades under them. Eduardo had found nothing! Every child he’d chosen for this had come through, yet here they were stuck. The children’s air was running out.
“You find that failsafe,” Maggie’s voice commanded, “hit it, and it’s just a matter of guts and glory. Out like shit and back in like people.
“I’m praying for you.”
The humming stopped.
In the eerie silence, the lights flicked on around them. Eduardo could see the opaque rectangles that had to be the windows on damaged looking in at them. He thought the 13’er called Blow was supposed to have distracted them. Had he failed? Were the damaged about to restart the cutters or simply report what they now saw?
Suddenly Baby Anne squeaked from farther right than where she’d been, “Hey! Me! I did that! There’s buttons right here like she said.”
“Not bad,” said the 14’er called Mule. “Praise the madre,” Eduardo said. “Yay, Mommy!” said Baby Anne, with the echoes of twenty more children laughing with her where they stuck to the walls.
“Told ya!” shouted the one who called himself Nervy. He raised his fist. “My man Blow!”
“And my little brother, Squirrel,” Eduardo said quietly. “Him too!”
Giddy, laughing, all the children began to crawl across the shit-covered walls towards Eduardo. They met up and Eduardo gave them each a stern look. The stun drug he’d dipped their fingernails in to help them disable their patrons would be wearing off soon. Alarms would sound. They had to get moving.
He turned and led them down through the choppers and crushers and blast pads and exit doors to the sight of two suns sliding past…and their first outside look at a station waiting to be taken.
Zeno Digs a Rabbit Hole—Brave Achilles Falls In
One pill makes you larger, and one pill makes you small. And the one that mother gives you should at least alleviate that headache you get from contemplating the flip side of scale. The Universe is a vast coalescence of mostly empty space. Structures and superstructures trace across the night sky in glowing tendrils of milk and lace. These effects left from the gravitational forces in place since the beginning of time are the fossil remains of the Big Bang seen through the enhancing eyes of our machines.
