Celeste put the phone down.
She sat down, breathed, and then said the words. “There’s no place like home… no place like home…”
No glitch. No degradation that she could see. No sign or sense of disconnect.
This was Real.
She was back in her module.
Should’ve stayed sober, she thought.
A vibration passed through her surroundings. She shouldn’t be here.
Celeste dressed quickly, in a fresh fibe-suit, and punched her airlock’s exit code.
The airlock wouldn’t let her out.
Now they had her, they would drop her. It was over.
The shutters lowered, darkening the space. Her module was going into lockdown. Another tremor. She hurried to look outside. There were the red lights, blinking away, and she could feel the servos trembling as they shook off rust and crud that’d built up over decades of inactivity.
Celeste Walker had become a zero.
The hub-car was idling at the platform. Her hub-car. The one she always caught and would never catch again. The 8:31. She could see the faces of the commuters inside watching as she’d watched so many times before. Pity. Fear. Sorrow. Despair. The faces were masks carved by silence from these four emotions.
Her module disconnected and went into freefall.
Celeste could feel it, creaking and grinding against the infrastructure of the Crawl. The vibrations became so intense she thought the module would be ripped apart by the stress. Her own screams matched with those of the straining cube that’d always been her home.
The module came to a stop.
She sat on the floor, surrounded by the fallen and broken pieces of her existence, listening to metal, carbon and plasticised elements settle. Celeste looked out through a porthole to see what was there. Down here, in the lo-secs, everything was one bloc. There was little to no space between. Wires, cables and tubes hung in dense umbilical clumps, feeding whatever was needed into the modules. She could hook into the Flood and stay there, along with the rest of the people here, living out the rest of her lifespan in a perma-bliss state.
So much for being a revolution.
She was trapped, the same way everyone before her had been. Through the portholes in her module she could look in on the four that adjoined her own. Each contained an occupant wired in by numerous cables and IV connectors that delivered the required nutrients and proteins. Their eyes were glazed over. They saw only whatever heaven-state the Flood was generating for them. They’d never leave this place. Not even when every surface was slick with excrescence, and they were reduced to dull mounds of coarsened meat barely illuminated by failing lights. Obese. Past the point of incapacity. Fused with their surroundings. At one with the Crawl.
A lot became clear in the dark. The zeroes were core-code, renewed generation after generation as people in the mid-secs were dropped. The system was rigged. This was why they worked so hard, slept so little, and burned out. The lo-secs were neither a threat nor a punishment; they were every mid-seccers’ future, one way or another. The Crawl was being optimised. Natural-born was time-consuming. It was a waste of resources to support indefinitely. The decision had been made, somewhere, that old-fashioned humanity’s time was up. Rendered obsolete. V-born were more efficient, harder working, less prone to breakdown and decay, and eventually, disposable. A v-born’s life was twenty-five years. The same material could be recycled and refreshed as a new v-born after being cleaned of memory in the tanks. There’d be no n-borns left.
How many are left? Celeste wondered. How many are still natural-born?
And, am I one of them?
She didn’t know. Couldn’t answer herself.
With the CIs access to the Flood, it was not a difficult to think how they could easily implant memories from everything floating around in there as they pleased. Chasers did what they did, but she was sure it hardly made a dent in the amount of free-format data available to be manipulated. V-borns were generated from the tanks mature, post-adolescent. No years of incubation necessary. They’d never know whether they were born that way or not with the right memory-feed to simulate an early life. But efficiency couldn’t be the whole story. There must be another reason for this cycle of existence. There was no such thing as perpetual motion; this was not sustainable indefinitely. The cycle must have been put in place with an end in mind.
She sat there, stubbornly letting the hours tick by, listening to the sounds the Crawl made this deep. She was in its guts. Here was artificial life’s age. Here was rust. Here was loss and decrepitude. The deposit pipe hummed into life as a nuke-pac was fed through. The console on her comp-couch chimed and spat out a glistening strip of blacks. Food, and narcotic oblivion – how very tempting.
Celeste was able to ignore both – until her stomach stopped rumbling and began to ache too painfully to bear. She swallowed the nuke-pac’s processed contents in a series of short gulps. Then she munched the entire strip of blacks and dry-swallowed the granular mash they made in her mouth.
The connect hit her powerful strong. She left her body and the Crawl behind; far, far behind. She chased herself out through hyperspace, plummeting through wormholes, stargates and galaxies before she came to rest on another world. Three moons hung suspended over a delicate cascade of stars that looked completely alien to her eyes. A bruise-blue nebula dominated the vista, along with a triad of moons – one small, obloid and dirt-grey, caught between its larger turquoise-amethyst brethren. She was barefoot in bone-white sand, but when she dug down a little with her toes, she found layers that shimmered black and dark blue underneath.
Celeste turned, and turned again on the spot, taking in all that was around her. The desert was flat, stretching on in most directions without being broken up. To the south-east of where she stood was a collection of incongruous dome-like structures.
Whatever passed for civilisation, or its remnants here, she thought.
Looking up again at the stars concentrated into a cascade, she guessed that she must be on the fringes of some distant galaxy, nowhere close to the Milky Way. Celeste walked towards the settlement, still high off the buzz of the blacks. She felt no trepidation or concern as she wandered through a night-shrouded landscape that dared not even breathe. The light from the moons was as strong as a sun, painting her surroundings in melancholy shades.
The structures became clearer as she came closer. Swirling alien sigils were worked into the clay domes, no doubt by hand. The broad sweeps and pitted marks of the sigils made her imagine their makers with super-long, thick, multi-knuckled fingers. She held up her own hands and spread her fingers wide. Looking down, she did the same with her toes, splaying them in the sand.
Will I be a goddess here, she wondered, with my tiny fingers and toes?
She couldn’t resist laughing at the idea.
It was the first sound she’d made since arriving, and there was something strange in how it travelled around her, moving like a free-roaming spirit that dissipated somewhere in the distance. The domes were taller than she was, and they seemed to be simple dwellings. The people had to be primitive folk. Celeste saw no sign of them, though.
Each dome had a low, circular opening at its highest point. She’d assumed they were chimneys but, walking around first one dome and then another, she surmised these must be doors for the people who lived here. There was no opening at ground level.
Reaching up, she felt along the rim of one of the sigils with her fingertips, and then tried her weight on one of the lower depressions, balancing on her toes. They were not decorations at all; these were ladders, in and out.