“The point is that you can’t just drop a city onto a new planet and expect it to work.”
“I can see that,” Jed said.
Dawn continued. “The government thought that the old world system could just be duplicated and transferred into the new world, but in this thinking they’d missed one very important fundamental truth: without several millennia of the compounded productive labors of individuals who’d systematically made goods and products by hard work, using raw materials gleaned from the real, tangible world… your cities aren’t going to make it.
“The leaders of the world forgot where real wealth comes from. It’s like thinking that you can take all of the flesh, sinews, ligaments, and tissues that make up a human, and just stick them all together in the right places and somehow you’ll have life. You won’t. You’ll have a reconstituted corpse that’s still dead.
“The nuts and the bolts of the issue,” Dawn explained, “comes down to this: if the people of New Pennsylvania don’t work with their hands to create the means of survival, production, and expansion, this world will collapse and regress. The only thing they’ll be left with is the ancient Roman model of empire-building: endless war, slavery, and oppression. The people who have rejected the cities seem to grasp this. They’re out there, beyond the Shelf, working, living, and surviving. Everyone else doesn’t have a clue. This difference was the root of the war between TRACE and Transport,” Dawn said. “In the countryside, TRACE is embraced and supported. In the cities, Transport is idol, king, and god.”
Dawn was biased, and she admitted as much. According to her, TRACE wanted to free people from oppression so that they could work and produce and survive. According to her, Transport wanted to enslave generations of humans and force them to maintain a system that was already crumbling from its own internal corruptions and contradictions.
And whenever Jed was just beginning to get a modicum of understanding, the darkness and the sleep would overwhelm him again.
This became his pattern: sleep, training, long visits and conversations with Dawn. The information, relentless in its assault, pouring into his mind like water filling a cup. His thoughts alternated between murky confusion and stunning clarity. It became more and more difficult for him to keep track of what was real and what wasn’t. Time passed, but he had no idea how long this pattern continued, until finally, something changed. He felt himself coming out of that deep and bottomless slumber, his consciousness returning to him only in fits and starts. He was disoriented, and awareness of his surroundings was slow to return to him. He struggled to focus his mind, to concentrate on anything at all that would help him gain some kind of center.
After a few long moments of nothingness, Dawn appeared in his mind. Not in his vision, but it was her essence, incorporeal. She didn’t speak until his focus was entirely on her and not on his indistinct surroundings. When at last he’d cleared his mind enough to hear her, she spoke.
“Here we go.”
Dawn was gone. But Jed knew that he was coming awake. He realized—almost as an afterthought—that he was very cold, but concurrent with that thought he began to feel warmth expand and spread throughout his body, tracing along his veins and arteries. The warmth brought his consciousness into greater clarity, and he heard an unlatching sound, and then the sound of air escaping. He opened his eyes and the lid of the pod rose slowly and light penetrated the darkness around him and he felt himself stirring into consciousness. There was a voice speaking…
“…Medical for a release before entering the station. Do not be alarmed. The process of reanimation is proceeding normally. You will feel confused, lightheaded, and weak at first, but normal function will return quickly. Your muscles have been continuously stimulated during your voyage, and will function normally after a period of acclimation. After a short episode of reorientation, you will begin to be able to feel and move normally. Take your time exiting your pod. When you do exit, you will find Medical on your left as you disembark the ship. Everyone must stop at Medical for a release before entering the station. Do not be alarmed. The process…”
He realized that he was in the Transport station: he’d arrived in New Pennsylvania. He reached down into the tight joint between his seat and the frame of the pod. For some reason he couldn’t grasp, his hand searched there for something. Something that should have been there. But he found nothing.
What had he been looking for?
(18
MRS. BEACHY
From his desk in his office aboard the Tulsa, Amos Troyer could glance up and see a dozen paper-thin screens that fed him information from everywhere that TRACE had a presence. Whether he chose to receive his intel from the screens, or from the BICE in his head, was a matter of multitasking and how deeply he needed to examine information. Sometimes the BICE was too cumbersome and resource-dependent for regular, everyday jobs. For a cursory idea of what was happening in the war, the wall screens were sufficient. But if something really needed his complete attention, then he would use the BICE.
It was interesting to note that the BICE, designed to be the single most efficient means of gathering and utilizing information, was often too unwieldy for the job when it came to the millions of bits of ordinary information humans gather casually every day. The BICE had become—for many people, including the head of the insurrection—something that was for entertainment, for escape, for personal or sensitive communications, or for deeper research. But the system proved to be less than ideal for the multitudes of daily transactions and computations that didn’t require full concentration.
The human mind simply couldn’t function well with ten programs running in the brain at one time. In the exterior world, men and women could perform quite well working with a wall full of monitors offering different flows of information. The brain’s latent inhibitions sorted the information and threw most of it out as useless, focusing attention on what was most likely to be important. But the BICE system bypassed these latent inhibitions, and force-fed all of the information directly into the consciousness. Too much of that could cause insanity. The Q helped, but it couldn’t help everyone.
Amos sighed. Ages ago, humanity foolishly believed that with the advent of the digital age their lives would soon be paper-free, but that dream had never been realized. Quite the opposite, actually. It took more paper than ever to support the paperless society. Likewise, many people once hoped that integrated computers—brain chips—would one day replace all stand-alone processing stations and displays. Nope, Amos thought. We rely on them more now than we ever have.
On one of the heads-up wall screens, a remote camera displayed what was happening in a sector a hundred miles south and west of the City. Amos watched as four TRACE units engaged and destroyed an armed Transport convoy—most likely transporting goods confiscated from the small towns and villages of the frontier.
The tide of the battle on every front had turned. TRACE was no longer just a gadfly and a nuisance. Everywhere, people were starting to realize that Transport was on the run, and the resistance was rising.