Why?
Because blood never lies.
Chapter Ten
Celeste caught a hub-car to one of the grav-elevators. These ’vators only went to and from the hi-secs. If you lived up there, you had no need to use hub-cars and do the dirty-long commute. They were guarded by laser grids and military drones. The only way into one without being fried was to have an access strip.
Celeste kept an eye on the commuters around her as the hub-car murmured along. She had a feeling of being watched, a creepy-crawl in the skin that wouldn’t depart even when she scratched at it. There was something she’d forgotten. A break in the pattern. A mem-lapse. She couldn’t put her finger on it. She sighed and cycled through music streams on CrawlSpace to gain some distract, but it all sounded the same to her. Her forehead ached, and she rubbed at it with a forefinger.
The hub-car came to a halt at the ’vator platform. She disembarked.
Celeste joined the end of a patient queue of hi-seccers. She could see the tell-tale signs of their superiority over mid-seccers like herself. Most of them smelled good, like they cleaned themselves every morning with real water, rather than chemical vape. Some had mods that were expensive and frowned upon in the mid-secs: precious metal eye-tints, off-world jewellery studs, and decorative skin grafts that mimicked animal hide. She wondered how many had designer organ implants as well, and other improvements that couldn’t be seen in public. Their fibe-suits were immaculate; probably came with nano-cleaning tech. Most of them wore management black. She kept her eyes ahead, feeling small, different, and out of place with her dirt-brown fibe-suit and her malfunctioning mood hair, which was currently broadcasting a low-level rasp of ‘tween-channel interference.
A few were looking her way – she was sure – but they said nothing. No-one could get in a ’vator without correct access. There was nothing to fear. The routine would go on. It would overcome all errors and glitches. There would be no disrupt, only synergy and continuity and due process. The queue moved slower than slow, small groups boarding the ’vator at intervals. The rest left waiting for the next time. This was nothing like a hub-car, where everyone jammed in and the only way to separate yourself into own-space was to activate an overlay and disconnect.
The last person ahead of Celeste boarded, and the doors slid closed with oiled silence as she found herself at the front of the queue. The military drone’s eyes were blinking chips of sodium light. She fed the access-strip into the scan-point by the ‘vator’s entrance and waited. The drone exuded a strong odour of stale sweat and over-ripe pheromones. She could hear it making low, impotent growls in the root of its throat. A bio-construct designed for a war that never came forced to spend its life-cycle as a glorified doorman. It was either perverse justice or a sick joke: she wasn’t sure which.
The long moment of quiet that followed made her wonder whether she’d been given a dud strip. Was this some twisted prank by Simran? The v-born was young, after all; they were all hatched young, never old. She’d heard tales about hi-sec young and what they did to unwary mid-seccers: capture, torture, rape, murder. Lo-sec, mid-sec, hi-sec: each a level above the other with those below seen as less than human, less than animal, less than real.
They can do as they like with us, and we have to take it. Last Moments was a well-popular channel. Always on overshare, in close-up, what happened when you stopped watching your own back and someone got to you. She looked around to see if there was a cam-drone humming nearby, semi-hidden by the clouded air. The queue of hi-seccers sighed and muttered at her back.
The scan-point chimed and spat out the access-strip. She took it with shaking fingers. All was well. No incinerating blast from the laser grid system. She walked past the drone, holding the strip like a warding talisman.
The door to the ’vator opened. Unlike the pressure-vators, the interior was pristine. It rose effortlessly once activated. She would barely have realised she was moving at all if she hadn’t watched, through a narrow, plas-steel aperture that ran from floor to ceiling, the passage up through the Crawl’s multitudinous levels.
She was not alone in the ‘vator. A man who must’ve boarded at a lower level stood by her side. There was room for two or three people in here. She was glad of the little bit of space between them. In her periphery, the man seemed to fade out, becoming indistinct like old, flickering film.
Celeste was aching to ask, Are you real?
But she went on staring dead ahead. To question would be a form of admission. It would concede she’d done something outside boundaries, that she had bad code inside her. There would be feedback units in a hi-sec ’vator. If she said anything, it would be recorded and she could face the consequences.
A hand, old and heavily-wrinkled, closed over her shoulder and squeezed so that she could feel the strength in it: augmented, more than human. It was a gesture that felt… familiar. There was déjà vu in it. Some latent trace-crud being activated?
“Do I know you?” she asked.
“It would seem to me that we are bound together, you and I,” he said, “and there will be no severing of this bond until one of us is kind enough to cut the cord.”
“Who are you?”
“The man in the moon sends his regards.”
Allah! She’d heard that name before. Old rumours. CrawlSpace talk. The architect – the man who designed the Flood and built the Crawl. His data-ghost was still around, undeleted, so it was said.
“You’re not real,” she said.
“Who is anymore?” he replied.
The hand released her shoulder. Celeste turned, but the man was no longer there. Gone – as if he’d vaped right out of existence. She didn’t feel the ’vator halt. She was notified by an oil-smooth, masculine voice, “You have reached your destination. Please disembark. Good night. Have a pleasant sleep.”
The doors shunted open, and Celeste stepped out onto a hi-sec platform. It gleamed like polished obsidian in steady light cast by fixtures made to resemble old-fashioned Victorian street lamps. The air was clearer here, and the modules were all well maintained. Footsteps cracked on the surface of the platform up ahead. The retreating back of a man dressed all in black was vaguely illuminated for a second – then gone. Near where he’d been, another ’vator’s door shushed closed. Celeste stared at where the man in black had been.
Couldn’t be the man from the ’vator, could he? No.
That’d been a projection, a holograph. Some glitch set up to spook people. All he’d said was her name, and identity was an open secret in the Crawl. A trick, a prank best forgotten – that was the best way to think about it – except he’d mentioned the man in the moon.
Could he be real and true?
That was a question for another night. She had an appointment to keep if she didn’t want to be zeroed and dropped by morning.
There were no blocs here, as far as she could see, only strips of modules organised along connecting platforms with mechanised sidewalks to take you the short distance from one level to another. Fewer people. More space. No need to clump up. She’d heard that some hi-seccers owned more than one module and had them rebuilt into something that resembled old-time houses. Bigly own-space. The dream of every Crawl-born.
She was trespassing where she did not belong.
Celeste did not want to do this, but had to. ‘No’ was a disallowed concept. Acceptance was due and expected.