“If there was no flood,” he’d said, looking down at the ruined city below, “then there’s no tidal barrier. So, where does the Tower get its power from?”
“Solar panels. Body heat. The turbines.” She pointed at the giant wind turbines towering over them. “And the machines in that Recreation Room, of course.”
“They said the solar panels were replaced with panelling that captured the kinetic energy of the wind and rain.”
“They said a lot of things, Ely.”
“And I should believe you, and not them?” he had asked.
“You should believe the evidence of your own eyes,” she had said.
He looked up and down, and around. “How long?” he asked. “I mean, if there was no Great Disaster, then has it really been sixty years?”
“No,” she said, “it’s been a lot longer than that. The Tower was built as an enclosed system. It was a marvel for its time, designed to be a net producer of energy and heat. Those who constructed it utilised the most advanced technologies of their age. And those technologies were developed to take our species to Mars, that much is true. But turbines break.” She gestured to the idle windmill. “The self-cleaning system for the solar panels clog, and the panels become obscured by dirt. It was meant to last one hundred years. Exactly how much longer or shorter than that it’s been, we can’t be sure, but the technology is finally failing.”
“Thanks to your sabotage,” he had said.
“No, it was falling apart long before we returned. It was like this long before we left. It was why the microphones were turned off, why most of the servers are silent, there isn’t the energy to keep them going. That was why the Recreation Room was created. It is why the population keeps getting smaller.”
Ely looked along the road at the broken buildings. The city was a ruin. But it wasn’t dead. Birds and insects meant food. A broken building could still offer shelter. A river meant water. There was life. More than that, it was a place in which people could live.
“Some people must have known, they must have learned the truth,” he had said.
“Of course. Or they realised that something didn’t add up, and they would talk to one another, and they would ask questions. But that’s sedition, isn’t it, Ely? And what happens to people who demonstrate seditious behaviour?”
“They’re sent to Tower-Thirteen,” he replied automatically.
“Look around. Look behind you. Look at the skyline. There are no other Towers. There is no launch site. There are no transports. Look down, Ely, that is the city.”
“What happened to them? To all those people that I sentenced?”
“I told you,” she had said. “It’s an enclosed system. Energy. Water. Food. You can only get out what you put in.”
“I didn’t know—”
“No, you didn’t. And you didn’t even suspect. They chose you a long time ago, Ely. They trained you for this. They bred you for it. You had no friends growing up, no attachments, no family, nothing but the Tower and the City and your belief in it. They needed you, or someone like you, because they knew that the time was coming when people would have to leave the Tower.”
“Who? Who chose me?”
“You know the answer to that,” she had replied.
“Hello, Ely,” Arthur said.
Ely turned around. Arthur stood in the shadow of a doorway thirty yards up the road.
“There’s no Chancellor,” Ely said. “No Councillors.”
“No,” Arthur said.
“There’s just you?”
“More or less.” The old man spoke with a casual lack of concern.
“The colony ships, the elections, none of it was real?”
“Not quite,” Arthur said. “The elections were real enough. Everyone voted and every vote was counted.”
“But the candidates were fake?” Ely took a step away from the Tower. Arthur stayed in the shadows of the doorway.
“I tried having a real candidate, once. It didn’t work. Some people don’t know how to follow orders.”
“And the newsfeeds, were those fabricated too?”
“Some. Some. Just enough to keep the debate heading in the right direction. But most of it was the same rehashed rumours repeated day in day out, created by a populace eager to have the same olds in their news. It was ever thus.”
“Is that a joke?” Ely asked.
“I’m just trying to lighten the mood,” Arthur said. He was grinning Ely saw, but there was only a dark menace to the older man’s expression.
Ely looked away, turning his gaze to the building opposite the Tower. It was vast, stretching perhaps a quarter of a mile. The ruins were dwarfed by the Tower, but somehow that made the older building seem more impressive. Through the broken windows, Ely could see that the roof had collapsed. Inside, taking advantage of the sunlight and shelter, grew a forest of those same purple flowering shrubs that he’d seen on the Tower’s roof. Ely took a few steps out into the street, towards the ruin.
“Well, boy, don’t you have anything you want to say? Anything you want to ask?” Arthur called out.
Ely took another step towards the building. With a cacophonous flapping of wings, a score of small red-breasted birds erupted out through the broken windows. He watched as they circled up the street, coming to land on the roof of a building further up the street.
“I said, don’t you have anything you want to ask?” Arthur called out, this time with irritated impatience.
“Are they robins?” Ely asked.
“What?” Arthur replied.
“Those birds, are they robins?” Ely asked again. He glanced back down the street towards Arthur. He took another step, and the old man was out of sight.
“Those? No,” Arthur said, stepping out of the shadow of the doorway. “They’re starlings, I think.”
“The woman. The ghost. Robin, that’s her name.”
“Her name is Oxford,” Arthur said. “Considering the location, I’d say that’s almost poetic.”
“She changed it. They all did. Her name’s Robin. The man who killed Gower and Bradford, his name was Gabriel. The woman who died in the elevator shaft, she was called Fern.”
Arthur snorted with derision.
“So you spoke to her, then?” he asked.
“A little.”
“Where is she?”
“Dead. She fell off the roof. Her body should be around here somewhere.”
“I see.”
There was a moment’s silence. Ely turned to look up at the Tower once more.
“Why did you do it?” Ely asked.
“Why? What do you mean, ‘why’? Look about you, do you actually think people can live out here, in this?”
“I think they can try,” Ely said.
“And they’d die. That’s what would happen. So you spoke to your ghost. Did she tell you what she was meant to do? Her and the other two? They were meant to go out into this wasteland and find out whether our species could survive. Is the water toxic? Is there food we can eat? Those were the questions she was meant to answer. She didn’t though. We thought we saw them die. We were convinced of it. Very clever on her part, that was. Far cleverer than I thought she was capable of. But it was a betrayal of everyone in the Tower. A betrayal of her species.”