“Why’s that?”
“He takes some… getting used to.”
“But how does he do it? Remove the wire?”
“He’s got ways. That’s all you need to know.” Perl said, passing Celeste another beer.
Okay, I guess that question can wait ‘til tomorrow.
Besides, there were no comp-couches. No regulations. No strict day and night cycles. This was like nothing she’d ever experienced before. Analysis and understanding could go hang, better to enjoy the moment.
They talked. Plenty of talk about the Crawclass="underline" how it was built, and how it kept going. Old-time words were bantered around: Roswell, Area 51, Dyatlov Pass, the Black Knight Satellite. None were conclusive, all easy speak and rumours, because the truth was no-one knew for sure. The answers were in the hi-secs, and the moon. No-one from up there came to talk down below, so the yarns kept on spinning, theories fabricating and refabricating to no end. Celeste didn’t think there was a simple answer or a complex conspiracy behind it. Once tech became advanced enough, it became the same as magic.
People had forgotten, that’s all. Life on the Crawl dulled memories, and nothing old was preserved. There was no history outside of the working day. There was no thought that didn’t originate in a pod, cubicle, module or compression couch. The old-time people had gotten the Crawl up on its legs and set it going, but that kind of knowledge, and memory of it, was long gone.
Except for – the man in the moon.
The moon came into view as an off-white disc through a shifting fog-cloud of data conjured by Grace from a toy holo-scanner. There it was. The last place where there might be history and thought.
“Can you get there?” Grace asked.
“I don’t think so,” Celeste said.
“Head in the sky,” Perl said. “Always has been for one buried so deep under.”
“You’ll get there one day,” Grace said.
“How’m I gonna manage that?” Celeste asked.
“Ingenuity.”
Celeste raised her beer and chinked it against Grace’s. “Sure. Ingenuity. We’ll do it. Together.”
“I’m serious. You will get there, and sooner than you think,” Grace said. “I’ve seen it in my dreams. It’s out from my reach. Most people, but not yours. You’ll get there, someday.”
Celeste didn’t know what to say. She’d seen Grace so many times before coming here. Now, she was being told that she’d been dreamt of, or seen in the same way?
How much of me am I? How much of her is me? How many other people am I made up of? How many thoughts, memories, and dreams are behind my eyes? Who am I? And would there be anything left of me if someone took everything that’s not me away?
They were questions she didn’t know how to answer, so she drank more beer.
After another hour of inhibitions steadily dropping away, Celeste and Grace kissed for the first time. It was much, much better than in the trace.
Real will do that to you.
Chapter Nineteen
Celeste watched Grace sleeping next to her. The heat of their love-making had long since cooled and the zero-sec atmos-plant had shut down for the night. She huddled under blankets and thermal-wraps with eyes closed until she realised that sleep was eluding her for reasons other than cold.
She dressed, teeth chattering, and, wearing a thermal-wrap like an overcoat, went for a walk around the sector. It was small compared to the above secs, all of which were an exercise in redundancy whereas the zero-sec was compact and unique. She was here with the few who’d been saved from the Roaches. Walking through the make-shift streets between the bivouac hovels, she saw lights hanging in the windows that hummed and buzzed with low wattage. There was a warmth here that did not exist above. A feeling of something. A word that felt old, antique and rusted, like something abandoned in the attic of human memory. The same word the man in the shack, Duke, had used – community. These people depended upon on another and could not hope to survive unless they worked together. Need was demand and demand was need.
“Up late, Walker?”
She turned around and saw the Perl sauntering towards her as if it were still the middle of the day.
“Different down here, isn’t it?” he said, “everyone sleeping natural. No dope or comp-couches to help you into the arms of Morpheus.”
“Old-time god of sleep, yeah?” Celeste said, a datum-fragment she’d picked up years ago.
“There’s plenty of the old-time we could do with here. You see it and feel it, don’t you? Not in your upstairs head but in your gut. The feeling of all these people together, helping one another out by choice. No Flood. No soulwires. No being forced together into the non-stop chitter-chatter everyday bullshit fucking mess.”
“Nothing good comes of things being done by force.”
“Good one, Walker. I like that. You’re getting it. Starting to.”
Celeste shook her head, “No, it’s not that. It’s more like I’m… remembering.”
“Huh,” he said, “I heard you were a special one. That there’s something in you might help make things betterer than they are.”
“I’m not so sure about that,” she replied, “they put something in me. I thought it was a trace but now, I think it’s a true memory coming through. I don’t have many of those. Can’t even remember my family, if they ever existed. Then again, maybe I’m a long-lived v-born, who knows? It’s possible.”
“We got v-borns in the sec,” Perl said, “nothing wrong with that. So, you’re maybe not human? Jus’ means you’re another form of life like the droids and bots, like the animals there used to be below before we trashed the planet.”
“But how do I know this is real and not another trace, Perl? I could be jacked in and rotting away somewhere, oblivious to the truth. I’ve only met you today and I feel like there’s some trust there between us but is that real or some programmed data-shit?”
“You think too deep about it,” the Perl said, “we’re made and fabricated whatever level of real this is and we’re stuck with it. Flood, trace, nightmare, nirvana, whatever. It doesn’t matter, that’s the thing you forget. Thing most people forget. However real this is or isn’t, your expiration date is still due. Maybe we are these machines of meat and blood we imagine, maybe we’re living dreams sound asleep. Point is, if you die by a bullet in the head or the trace you’re trapped in being dissolved, would you ever know the difference between one and the other?”
“I guess not.”
“It’s how I see things because this is all we got. We’re one sector against all of the above and we’re not gonna last long. We might as well be a trace, trying to survive with chasers on our tail. I’m gonna die down here, Walker. Maybe tomorrow, day after, and the sec will get wiped out the same. It could be in ten years or a hundred but it’ll come to an end eventually.”
“Why?”
“Because the good shit never lasts.”
“And you’re okay with that?”
“Part of me maybe doesn’t want to be, but I have to be because we’re different here. Where you’re from is the end of what was begun a long time ago. People wanting to go on and on and on forever. Eat healthy. Marry. Have the kids. Do the job. Get the mortgage. Invest in this. Profit from that. All supposed to be worth something, isn’t it? All supposed to give you immortality. But there’s none to be had anywhere, not even if you ground the universe down to dust and sifted through every last speck of it.
“We woke up one day and we started thinking too much. Simple. That’s all there is to say about us. We die, we’re over, done, and someone else comes along and takes over. Hell, something else will come along when we’re all done and that’s that. No more people. Every story should have its ending, Walker. Otherwise life becomes something that hurts too much and for no good reason. We know we end and we accept it better down here.