The AI mainframes were left in charge and through augmentation, took over management of the Earth and thereby the recently-constructed Crawl. It wasn’t long before there was no division between AI and CI. They became the companies, and for the citizens who dwelt in the Crawl, the CIs might as well have been gods. The rich of Antara were content for this situation to continue as it did not disrupt their closeted lives one iota. As long as trace elements were mined from the Earth and the people of the Crawl knew their place, there was no cause for concern.
Now, the Flood was the masterstroke and the unexpected key to achieving his goal. It had its roots in the earliest social media platforms launched in the 21st century. With progress came the increasing integration of those platforms not only with one another but also with the Flood’s nascent form: the internet. The wealth of data being generated indicated digital communication had a particular, unexpected effect upon its global audience. The ease and ability to widely share the details of one’s own life were out-distanced in value by the global audience’s ability to self-regulate and cognitively isolate ‘unwanted’ dissenting elements.
Popular fears had historically been centred around government and corporate oppression of free thought and expression. The success of social media and the internet showed that the people were far more adept at achieving this on their own. Dissent was steadily reduced to private channels that dwindled over time until compliance and apolitical escapism became the norm.
There had been no plan to start with, no hidden agenda, no conspiracy by the powers that be. The people had done it to themselves, willingly. With free speech outmoded, nationalities and all other boundaries practically eliminated, the Crawl became inevitable; a mass integration of humanity steadily travelling a path to an end only he had guessed at – and his scientists had argued was practically impossible. It was close now, almost within his grasp. He had been there when the first anti-grav stanchions were erected and would be there at the end – for the final ascension. Placing two withered hands against the glass, wishing to feel its coolness, he quietly addressed the Earth, “What I have done, I have done alone. For you. For us. For one and all.”
Thus spake the man in the moon.
Chapter Four
Each mid-sec had a Compound. A narrow, cylindrical structure striped with fluorescence where all transit links, horizontal and vertical, connected. There was nowhere to go except to work. An honest day’s work for an honest day’s pay. This is what everyone lived for, whether they liked it or not. On the surface of things, the people ran the sector: accounting, processing, resources, everything was handled at the Compound. Every data-stream originated there. Every stream carried more than a hundred thousand programme channels: WarZone, SpeakPeace, FakeNews, OpinionEd, Transfigur8, Re:Cycle, Last Moments, SexAde and many, many others. The streams stayed live day and night, flowing out to the populace constantly. Without the streams, there would be discontent and infraction. Everyone who worked in the Compound knew this. Everyone who worked was reminded of this on a regular basis. Everyone who worked in the Compound worked harder and harder and then harder still, believing they were all that stood between order and chaos.
Each Compound had co-ordinators who set the deadlines for task completion. To miss deadlines meant increasing the risk of being reset to zero. Miss too many and your module would be dropped. Every worker had a pod, where they spent eighteen hours of each day wired into the Flood: an ocean of data that comprised the daily interactions of every living soul in the Crawl. Every thought was an undercurrent, every feeling a potential riptide. Every worker was tasked with preserving Crawl stability through their assigned tasks.
Celeste was a seer-class chaser. When she plugged in, it was her job to defuse traces – rogue memories polluting the Flood. With eleven billion people in the Crawl, that was a lot to deal with. She knew the chasers didn’t even come close to defusing all the traces loose in the Flood. But it was a job that had to be seen to be done. Like everyone else in the Compound, Celeste was analogous to Sisyphus; cursed with a task that would never be completed.
Celeste ascended to the third level of the Compound in a pressure elevator, which groaned and hissed with age. Its retractable doors stuck when they tried to open. Celeste gave them a shove, making the mountings creak under the unexpected strain. She was heading across the level to her pod when Breda, her co-ordinator, got in the way. “You’re late for shift.”
Celeste sighed. “There was a drop on my route this morning.”
“There’s always a drop on your route. There’s always a drop on everyone’s route,” she said, pointedly. “These things happen and are invalid reasons for being late.”
“There’ve been a lot of drops in my grid over the last month,” Celeste said.
“Then I suggest you move to a better grid.”
Celeste scowled and pushed past Breda. There were no better grids. All were the same. The mid-secs were an exercise in redundancy. Every bloc and strip was a copy of its neighbours. Only the lights and the graffiti people used to mark their territory differed. Breda was right about one thing though: she was slacking off.
I could’ve taken an earlier hub-car. The 8:12. I’ve been cutting it fine for the best part of a month.
But, Celeste felt no inclination to improve.
I’m tired. Dead tired.
Crawl-life was a grind. It was half a life, if that, and there was nothing to be done about it. There was no job security, and the increase in v-borns meant the competition to stay above zero was growing harder. If you did not perform as required, you would not be in work the next day. There was always a younger, spryer v-born waiting to replace you. Simple.
The process of being reduced to zero used to be based on performance patterns over weeks, months, even years – if you believed what elder Crawlers had to say. Now, it was all fast-tracked. One bad day, and you could be done. Some would say it was because she was getting old, but Celeste was sure they were working everyone harder and harder. The pace was relentless. The pressure unyielding. The reason: integrity of the Crawl had to be maintained at all costs. What those costs were, no-one explained, or knew. To ask the question would result in a lecture about adding value, high-performance indicators, business drivers and all the other meaningless buzzfeed phrases.
At least, Celeste thought, I have the Flood. It was the one thing that kept her going, that made work endurable. She stripped off her fibe-suit and began the familiar process of plugging herself into the pod’s matrix. As she did so, Celeste gazed out over the level. Each pod was a tarnished black egg. Arranged in rows, as they were, they made the area look like the nest of some gigantic alien insect. The plexiglass exterior of each egg was semi-opaque, enabling her to make out the shape of other chasers but none of their features. As with so much about the Crawl, here was redundancy and anonymity; people reduced to vague shadows and empty ghosts. Someone was coming down the row of pods towards her. She didn’t recognise her, only the body type: dull eyes, glossy lips, light brown skin and a childlike, stick-insect body – a v-born. The butterfly-fragile creature stopped by Celeste’s pod. She was wearing a fibe-suit that was barely dirty, coloured with a spectrum design that slowly shifted through every colour in prismatic variations.
Not cheap. Heavy sheckle goods.
Celeste suspected someone else had bought that suit for her.
Big favour return.
She knew which department this girl-child was from before she spoke. “Hi. I’m Simran from HR. Can I check your connections please?”