Chancellor Stirling, re-elected by the slimmest of margins, then adopted his policy of Re-Organisation. Everyone saw through this transparent attempt to benefit from Cornwall’s popularity. The Chancellor’s poll numbers had been sinking steadily ever since.
Ely was an avid supporter of Councillor Cornwall and his theories of Production First. It was his aim to one day follow the man into politics and become a Councillor himself. Though he doubted whether anyone would vote for someone as universally reviled as a Constable.
Putting thoughts of sleep on hold, at least for a few more hours, he walked over to the elevator to begin his lonely patrol.
He started up in the classrooms of Level Seventy-Five. Ely opened the door quietly, and began to walk slowly between the rows of desks.
“The City of Britain has a population of 159,097.” The Instructor pointed to each word on the screen as he read the sentence out. Most of the class, aged between six and nine, struggled with the stylus as they copied down the words as best they could.
“The City of Rights has a population of 143,890,” the Instructor continued. Ely tried not to smile as he walked past a girl battling over the direction the letter ‘R’ should face.
Ely’s fingers twitched with reflexive guilt. He’d not practiced with a stylus since he’d left school at seventeen. Writing was one of the key skills, not necessary to everyday life now, but which would be essential on Mars. Even the most optimistic estimates predicted there would be a decade’s long gap between the current stock of wristboards and screens wearing out, and the colonists establishing the mining and processing industries needed to replace them.
“And The People’s City has a population of 128,700,” the Instructor finished. “Now calculate the total number of humans left on the planet.”
A hand went up.
“Yes, girl?” the Instructor snapped.
“Please sir, does that count the people working on the launch site? Or is it just the people living in the Towers?”
The Instructor’s nostrils flared.
“Stupid girl! What have I told you about thinking before raising your hand? With four thousand people on each shift and with thirteen Towers in the City, there wouldn’t be enough ‘homes’ to go around if that didn’t include the people striving at the launch site.”
“Sorry sir,” the girl muttered. She bent her head, her cheeks flushed with embarrassment as some of the more daring students sniggered.
“Silence!” the Instructor bellowed. There was a sudden shuffling as the class buried their heads in a show of studious calculation.
Ely allowed himself a smile. Fifteen years before, he’d been sitting in one of those very same desks, and he’d been the one to ask that very same question. He didn’t recall if he’d had the same Instructor. He was tempted to check, but the right hand side of his display was currently filled with the paperwork from the incident in the lounge.
Paperwork. That was one of the many words that had stuck with them from the old world. No one had made any paper since the Great Disaster, sixty years before. Very little of anything was made except that which was needed for the ships. Technology had frozen, stuck at the level when the wars began all those decades ago.
As he continued his slow walk around the classroom, he returned his attention to the recordings of the brawl. For each felon that he’d sentenced, he had to find two pieces of camera footage, each from a different angle, to add to the file as evidence. Unless one of the citizens lodged an appeal, something that hadn’t happened in his five years as a Constable, those files would never be opened again. Nonetheless, the laws had to be followed. The City of Britain was a nation of laws. It was written into the Constitution and always had been. That was what Ely had been told.
He completed his circuit and made his way out into the corridor and along to the next classroom. There he got a disapproving glare from the Instructor as the students, all aged twelve to sixteen, turned to see who had come in.
“Eyes to the front. Now! A faulty wire might cause the entire ship to explode!” The Instructor kept her eyes on Ely as she said it. He didn’t care. Under his helmet and behind his visor, his expression was unreadable. The Instructor went back to reading out a speech, and the class went back to copying it down.
Ely listened long enough to gather it had something to do with how to create oxygen through electrolysis, then went back to collating the evidence. He’d tagged another two felons by the time his slow walk had brought him to the front of the classroom.
“If the first ship brings 1,000 people,” the Instructor intoned, “the second 10,000, then calculate our total oxygen requirement before the second ship has returned to Earth. I will award a bonus point to the first student who can calculate the energy requirement for scrubbing the carbon dioxide from the air.”
Heads bowed and frantic calculations began.
Ely had hated his time in school. He’d hated it almost as much as the six months he’d worked on the Assemblies before Arthur appointed him Constable. He hated coming back, shift after shift, just to show the uniform of authority. He left the classroom and looked down the corridor. Opposite were the classrooms for the older children, with their more rigorous technical training. Further along was the crèche, and beyond that, the nursery. Ely imagined he could already hear the crying. He decided he’d been seen enough on that level. He turned and walked back towards the elevator.
On the level above the classrooms was the museum and the Twilight Room, home to the retirees who volunteered to stay in Tower-One. Ely didn’t need to patrol there. Arthur, his former supervisor and the oldest of the retirees still living in Tower-One, kept a close eye on that level.
Above that was Level Seventy-Seven, home to Councillor Cornwall and his two assistants, the infirmary and the transportation pad. The Councillor had made it clear that he wasn’t to bother patrolling up there.
Ely tapped a command into his wristboard, and the elevator descended to the food-vats. Since the Re-Organisation, everyone was supposed to call them ‘farms’. It was meant to train people to think more like future settlers and less like prisoners trapped in the Towers on a world their ancestors had made uninhabitable. Ely still thought of them as the vats, for that was what they were. Each grew a different type of algae that some old world scientist had genetically engineered to be rich in vitamins, proteins, or carbohydrates. Once grown, they were processed, dried and turned into a fine powder. That was piped to the dispensers in the ‘homes’, lounges and break-rooms, ready to be mixed with water and flavouring according to each workers own personal taste. To Ely, no matter what was done with it, it still tasted like a flavourless, textureless, gloop.
He exited the elevator, walked along the hallway, and peered through the small window to the first ‘farm’. He didn’t go in. He didn’t need to. The vats were almost entirely automated. Only thirty people per shift worked in the ‘farms’, their job being to check that the numbers on the gauges matched the figures the system gathered from the array of sensors lining nearly every inch of every vat.