“…the wheels on the bus go round and round all day long…”
And then… nothing. Everything switched off like a dead television channel.
Chapter Two
Celeste Walker’s life was not the one she wanted. It was a Monday morning, one on which the molecules felt itchy, loose and over-grey while the sub-atomic burned bright and violent on the edges of her periphery. Every morning unfolded like the same dream: wake-up, wash, dress, swallow a lukewarm nuke-pac, and catch a hub-car into the Compound.
Before dressing, Celeste looked at herself in the holo-mirror. Her face was finely-boned with a beauty spot on her chin that would’ve been considered a blemish and lasered away by most. Her hands and feet were small, unmodified sculptures. Her body curved in ways that were no longer on trend. Her long dark hair was interrupted by a barcode-wide stripe of mood-print that changed its shade according to hormone levels; it had degraded a few nodes over the last twenty, but she liked its distortion and the occasional hissing ripples of white noise it gave off. With more and more designer vat-born operatives dwelling in the mid-sectors, she felt increasingly different and out of place. Being human was going out of fashion. ‘Difference’ had become flaw and would soon be upgraded to full deviation. Would it be punishable enough to be zeroed one day?
Who could tell?
It was a reflection of how life went in the Crawl. Before the first v-borns, there were the vat-grown upgrades: bones, internal organs, and skin grafts. What began as surgical and medical became purely cosmetic: custom hearts and tobacco-resistant lungs. Still, everything degraded in the end, sometimes horrifically. The v-borns started little different from early military drones, until there were too many to deny them citizenship.
Everything was steadily replaced, redesigned and made more beautiful on the surface, only exacerbating the painful reality aching underneath – the aging, broken-down grinding existence that was the Crawl. And, through the Flood, there were so many escapes that reality no longer served a meaningful function – except to remind one of the ugliness and awfulness underpinning existence.
Celeste had decided to hold onto her own difference. In a place where beauty is a skin graft away and ecstasy always on discount, ugliness became purity and imperfection became a form of transcendence. She rubbed a thumb against an ache nestled deep inside her forehead and breathed out; remembering strange, ovular eyes, bright light, pain, being unable to move.
Leftover dream-crud. Best flush it out before it full-ruins the day. She punched a sequence into the keypad by the head of her compression-couch. The processor sang a one-note chime and spat out a strip of perforated gloss-black squares. She snapped off one, then two, and dry-swallowed them. A couple of blacks first thing in the morn would give enough buzz to make it to the Compound. The rest of the strip went into her plastic jacket’s pocket, and she tapped the cracked button that air-sealed it with a light hiss.
After wiping the night’s condensation from the data-screen next to the module’s airlock, she read up the latest atmos-info: nothing much to worry about. Light precipitation with low acid and median toxin levels. She unhooked a lightweight breathing mask from its hanger and strapped it on before operating the airlock.
Outside, the sky was the colour of unprocessed faeces. The blocs and strips of habitation modules were stained even darker with unappealing shades of neglect, rust, and decay. The only vivid colour in the mid-secs was cast by salvaged neon signage people fixed to the casings of their modules. Even with a mere two hundred and fifty square feet allocated per fam-unit, the urge to make a home endured. It didn’t matter what the signs said: it was the light and colour people wanted. She glimpsed advertisements for Tsingtao Beer, Huawei Tech, Trump Org and Coca-Cola. People needed to feel they weren’t stranded in hell, even when all the evidence suggested they were. A little light helped reinforce that false notion.
How many modules were there down in the lo-sectors, she wondered, all stacked on top of one another. The mid-secs were getting thin. In a generation or two, would there be anyone left up here? The hi-sectors up above the localised atmosphere belt shimmered like a hidden constellation. Each strata of the Crawl was dependent on what rested below. If the mid-secs were decimated, what would happen?
Celeste had a deep feeling nothing much would happen. The hi-secs would cut loose and move to the moon with the rest of the rich, leaving the Crawl to fall apart.
With that grim thought nestling in her mind, Celeste caressed the nodule underneath her right earlobe. The soft nub of matter hardened and her own breathing heightened, as the world around her became a momentary blur of shape and sound. Time and space resolved with a sky of airbrushed blue with scattered cloud formations. The modules remained, but their scuzz had been deleted, leaving shining chrome exteriors that burned with effervescent rainbow hues whenever the light of an unseen sun caught on them. This would be her reality today.
She was standing on the platform that ran alongside the airlocks for her strip of modules. It was, in a way, like a street from old-time – except that it was suspended in the Earth’s troposphere on the back of the Crawl.
The 8:31 hub-car pulled up to the platform, and Celeste climbed aboard. The driver greeted her with a broad smile that wasn’t really there. A blink of pixellation gave her a glimpse of dirty, threadbare overalls and a face carved into ridges by sleeplessness. She could almost hear the rattle, scrape, and grind of the hub-car’s chassis as it chugged off from the platform even though, in her dialled-up perception, the departure was smooth, the engines were silent, and the air-conditioning did not smell of whatever vermin had trapped itself in there, died, and slowly rotted away.
In her periphery, Celeste’s reality faltered. Her fellow travellers were slumped, worn-out by the perpetual repetition and exhaustion of their lives. A few bent forwards, wracked by violent coughing fits that ended in bile and blood spattering on the floor, adding to stains that had accumulated over the decades. Their one-piece fibe-suits were varying shades of unwashed. Reality compensated – buffering hard – until the commuters appeared as svelte creations drawn from data-memes of antique beauty commercials and romantic comedies. She’d dialled things up way too high: always a risk after a bad night’s sleep. There was only so much reality one could take.
I’ll just have to put up with it until reset.
They were almost at the Compound when the hub-car lunged to a halt. It sent Celeste stumbling forward, scrambling her reality overlay completely. She landed roughly, swearing. When she regained her feet, the Crawl was as it was once again – red lights radiating out along the gridlines of its infrastructural web, each winking on and off in sequence, under a dismal sky.
The sonorous drone of a siren could be heard. Everyone in the hub-car, seated and standing, fell silent. A few of the older men took hats off in respect, pressing them against their hearts with wire-knuckled hands.
Someone was about to be dropped.
Celeste moved to the front of the hub-car, ignoring comments and mutters from the older commuters as she tried to peer out of the grubby windows. There it was – a module steadily separating itself from a bloc. It slid out in jerky slow motion, each pause enabling the essential pipes and cables to be detached and withdrawn. Through the small, square windows of the module cube, Celeste could see lights flickering on and off as the power inputs died. They would be re-routed and re-connected once they reached their destination, but that was no comfort. Their destination was below. The lo-secs.