A momentary flicker: a child’s face pressed against dirty glass, as if frozen, or preserved. Big, dark eyes framed by electric white hair. A name came to mind, though Celeste knew no-one by that name: Grace…
Feels like I’ve seen her before, somewhere, in a dream?
She sighed. Dream-crud was still clinging on despite the blacks she’d taken.
The last cable detached itself and wound back into the bloc. The module hung suspended for a moment, directly ahead of the hub-car. The vertical transit system operated off the same power-grid as the horizontal transit system. It saved time and money and allowed co-ordinators to set an example for anyone thinking about missing shifts.
The module dropped. A soundless event. The clouds covering the lower sectors of the Crawl swallowed it up. Down below, there was nowhere to go. The lo-secs lined the underside of the Crawl; they had a front-row seat to the ion storms, plasma cascades, and nuclear fires that raged across what was left of the Earth’s surface. Zeroes lived out their lo-sec lives inside their modules, wired into the Flood every hour of the day and night, assaulting themselves with non-stop pseudo-pleasure and hi-doses. Their bodily functions were catered for until their cardiovascular systems collapsed under the cumulative obesity brought about by sedentary decades of isolation and over-feeding. There was a saying in the Crawclass="underline" the only way in life is down. That was what everyone in the mid-secs lived in fear of. No-one returned, once they went lo.
Your life was over with if you did. You were done.
Those in the hi-secs were born there, and there they stayed. Celeste had never seen, or heard of a module dropping from the hi-secs. She shook a sugarshot free from a greased wrapper found in her pocket and crunched the cube into granules between her teeth, trying to forget what she’d seen and how it was making her feel.
Would you like to update status?
The phrase blinked persistently in the corner of her vision. It came from CrawlSpace, the social thought-network synched into every soulwire. When you came out of your compression cycle, you were logged in automatically and only logged out when you slept. Prompts and notifications from CrawlSpace were a part of life. To not update status was seen as a faux pas at best, and a violation at worst. It was a means of tracking every citizen’s thoughts and feelings. A constant census of public, and private, mood. The chatter of the Crawl was a low-level background drone that could never be switched off, except by death. Nothing existed in the Crawl that did not serve the people. There was no safe space here. Freedom wasn’t free.
Celeste updated status: end of shift can’t come fast enough.
Let them make of that what they will. With the familiar hiss of docking at the Compound, Celeste disembarked from the hub-car and let muscle-memory carry her forward on feet that were already aching inside her over-tight boots. Maybe a few hours in the Flood would wash this shit feeling away.
She hoped so.
Chapter Three
He walked along the polished corridors of his past achievements, aching to exist again. So long alone, so far removed from the world below. How much longer could he go on? A little longer, a little more. He’d received feedback from the Flood telling him the time for returning would be soon. After centuries suspended among the stars, it seemed impossible (almost) that this limbo state was coming to an end. They had been warned by the scientists and philosophers such a thing as they wanted to achieve could take thousands upon thousands of years. And he had said in reply that he was willing to wait that long.
‘The probability figures alone are astronomical, Chairman!’
‘The probability does exist then?’
‘Yes. Every probability exists, as potential, no matter how remote.’
‘I am willing to wait until it does exist.’
‘But, sir…’
‘I will wait. However long it takes. No matter the cost.’
He stopped walking; an action that took half an hour as the command made its way from the artificial neural nest inside the preserved coral of his brain through the hi-optic wires of his central nervous system to the ossified muscles themselves. The height of technology kept him going, but even that had its limits. He placed a fragile hand on the carved walnut frieze that decorated the wall, remembering its smoothness and curves rather than feeling them.
They never said it could not be done and, as money to support the research and development was never in question, they set to work like good little scientists should. It was the ultimate triumph of capitalism over communism, he thought. A man, or woman, will work hard for the good of the people, if they are so motivated, but with enough money at your disposal you can buy dedication beyond price. For the good of themselves, their families, the scientific community, progress – the reasons they conjured up to justify their actions did not matter to him. Never did. As long as the cash kept flowing into their bank accounts, they kept on working. Morality and other considerations be damned. Science might be objective but her practitioners were not so limited, and there were always plenty of willing young volunteers to replace the old ones when they began to die from age and exhaustion.
After several hours making his way down the corridor, he came to a blank wall of polished black glass. Reaching out with a neural relay command, he made the opacity dissolve before his eyes. It revealed a landscape of pale craters and sunken mountains. Somewhere out there, the footprints of the first man on the moon were still preserved – so he’d heard. It was probably nonsense. A pleasant romance to believe in; something that he was immunised to by the amount of time he’d endured alone.
And, there she was, in partial eclipse, his mistress; the Earth.
Time had been no kinder to her than to him.
There’d been no wars in the beginning. His kind had helped to move humanity beyond the primitive action of open conflict before most people were aware of it. All confrontations retreated behind closed doors into clean, tidy boardrooms where the real power resided.
War, conflict, bloodshed; all these things became better described as transactions. It was an imperceptible shift in global relationships that would have ramifications a few comprehended – and he was one of those few. A secret architect and engineer of things to come.
Gradually, the countries and continents of the world became obsolete as concepts. Protest votes and cultural retreats superficially intent on halting global progress became the trigger mechanism that assisted with incorporating every human being on the planet. The ultimate merger – or takeover bid.
The Americas ceased to exist. Eurasia went into receivership. Australia held out for a while, but it could not resist industrial imperative in the end. Corporate Identity (CI) replaced country and nationality; Asia became The Grid, Europe was BP-Esso, the Americas rebranded as AMart, Australia named itself the NAB Commonwealth, and Africa – the economic dumping ground of them all – a nameless wasteland.
The CIs themselves were an extension of corporate business as boards and panels ruled the decision-making processes previously undertaken by governments and aristocracies. Puppet administrations bequeathed more and more power and influence to artificially-intelligent mainframes that oversaw every single global transaction. In time, the men and women of the boards aged, withered, and died – a few could afford to be cryogenically frozen.
Like me, he thought, and we built Antara station as our sanctuary.