Human Resources

Human Resources

by Ion Fyr

(C) 2021

Disclaimer: This is a work of fiction. All characters and events are likewise fictitious. Any similarity between real individuals, living or dead, or events is entirely coincidental.

In addition, part 2 of this short story may contain situations or descriptions that certain readers may find offensive. If the reader is of a sensitive nature, I suggest only reading part 1, which could easily be its own stand-alone story.

This story may not be copied, either physically or digitally, either in whole or in part, without the express permission of the author.

Something About Nosrit

I

The street was cold and hard. Autumn had set in early this year. The ocean wind from the west had blown most of the smog inland. Nosrit could only smell the local funk rising from the debris and detritus swept by countless footsteps into the crags and corners of Londbridge.

She pulled the zipper of her jacket further up so that the collar was rubbing her chin, then pulled on of her chromatically dyed braids out from where the tip had gotten caught up at the base of her skull in the back, between the upper rim of the vat-leather and the bottom edge of her protruding jack, just behind her ear.

Taxis and a handful of private cars wizzed by ten meters above, narrowly avoiding contact and each other’s turbulence with semaphoric hand-shakes as they passed.

Londbridge sucked in the winter. There were colder places and damper places, but no city she had ever been in combined the two qualities in such a shitty, painful way. Her bones were chilled.

Under the luminescent flickering of an ever-present food stall, a car settled to the ground, legs extending, supporting its quivering bulk within seconds. It was badly painted matte-black and had ugly, swapped-out Naskovich nacelles sticking up like four shifty eye-stalks. The door swiveled up. Nosrit slipped inside.

She smiled when he faced her.

Luc Eluskonios, blond hair and beard. Three skull jacks and a rampage of tattoos down his arms. There was a handgun on the seat next to him—not a driver’s seat, per se—the car didn’t need one.

The door locked closed.

Somewhat anxiously, she spoke: “So, you want me to hack something?”

“Ever heard of InphoKon?”

“The social credit assholes?”

“Yeah.”

Depending on where you were, where you lived, what city you were consigned to, InphoKon tested you, judged you, gave you a rank on a five-point scale. Four was the top, aristocracy. Nosrit had never met a four. Fives dwelt somewhere in the lofty heavens.

One was street trash, homeless and unemployable, untouchable. There were rumors that there were zeroes as well. She had never met any of them before either.

“We want you to go to Newland. And we don’t want you to be traced back here. The connection will be more immediate there as well. Much less lag.”

Nosrit had never been to Newland before, but understood Luc’s meaning. There was one known undersea wire connection between Europa and Newland west across the Atlantic and its endpoints were heavily guarded by the WCC.

“I’ve got travel docs and this,” he produced a grey, gummy twenty centimeter disk with some holes in it with the look of a dead silicone jellyfish.

“What’s that?”

Luc unwrinkled it, splayed across the palm of his hand, then suddenly slapped it up, onto his face.

Nosrit was a bit thrown by the action and the subsequent deformation of Luc’s face. The thing was apparently a mask. It quivered for a moment and then settled on a shape that was not Luc, not at all. The grey flesh took on a skin tone that exactly matched his showing around the edges and on his neck.

Her mouth fell open. She had heard of tech like this, but had never seen it in action, at least not that she had been aware of. Even his beard was changed, down to the lower edge. The blond fringe hung out underneath and behind a shaven face that wasn’t his.

He peeled it off from the side edge and it lost its structure and returned to a flat disk-like blob of rubbery fabric.

“It breaths and can adopt multiple faces, within limits. It will fool cameras in regular spectrum and infrared, though I suggest avoiding ultraviolet. No clubbing with it on; it will glow like a motherfucker.” He laughed with the memory of a painful personal experience, and produced a toothy, snarling smile.

He tossed it to her. It was gummy but light. As she watched it smoothly matched the skin pigment of her hands as she held it in her fingers, the color quickly matching her own. North Faradian, Vandalian, the medium brown of Tripoli and Carthago.

“It was created with you in mind. It’s programmed with several IDs, which you’ll find in your internal momentarily. It’s obviously wireless. Each also comes with credit for expenses.”

They were there. Files, encrypted and dropped into her internal drive. They presumably would go with material documents for intercontinental transit. Leaving one’s home district required hoops to be jumped through.

“You’ll go to Port Arthur, north of New Belaziz. The target is in Puapolis.” The car moved through traffic. Luc wasn’t driving. It was navigating a preprogrammed course.

“Are you up for it?” Luc asked with genuine concern.

“I think so…,” Nosrit answered, unsure.

After a short time the car settled on its legs on to what turned out to be the roof of a building. They exited the car and Nosrit followed Luc across the rubberized roof, here and there pooling with unshed water, to an access door under an awning. There was a mechanical tumbler lock that he quickly rolled his fingers across, before opening the door to the dark maintenance stairwell beyond.

She didn’t think it looked very secure.

Inside the air was slightly warmer and smelled of uncoated concrete, but the damp followed them in and stayed with them after the door was shut with a heavy, metallic grind.

The building was old, retrofitted many times, warehouse spaces had been divided and subdivided leaving a honeycomb of cells.

She followed him through a maze of narrow hallways hung with bundles of wires and interspersed with wireless nodes, down more steps, and then through a room that looked like a moth-balled machine shop. Obscure metal-working stations had been moved to one side and cables hanging from the ceiling had been tied off to the railing of a raised walkway to one side. Finally, they arrived at a kind of apartment space. There was a kitchen and living room and a series of side rooms. He led her to one room that looked as if was a nest constructed by a giant robotic bird.

The walls were covered in screens and monitors and the floor was encircled with coils of wires. The whole thing oozed a flickering, bluish light from the screens and a constellation of light-nodes in the ceiling. The heat from the dozen screens and powered devices at least drove out the damp cold, but left a faint burnt-plastic smell, although that could easily be coming through the air-scrubbers from outside.

“Puapolis is a kind of model city build by a consortium in the middle of nowhere in the northern part of Newland,” he started, and with wireless commands from his internal drive a holographic display appeared in the center of the room. “Oh, sorry.” He grabbed an arm full of wire bundles off a couch nearby. “You can have a seat if you want.”

She took him up on his offer and unzipped her jacket as she studied the large angular building projected into the air in front of her, motes of dust flaring as they passed through the construct. It rose before her, a tall, twisted pyramid. It was an arcology, a single, extensive structure meant to house and employ thousands in a closed ecosystem.

“Puapolis was intended to isolate its population when it was build. Unlike all of the old cities of Europa and Asia, it didn’t grow organically from earlier towns and villages. It was build from scratch in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by nothing but fields. There isn’t even any ground transport connection.”

She had never heard of it before. Arcologies, yes. There were several in Londbridge, all quite a bit bigger than this one, but it seemed strange that there would be a city so disconnected from the rest of the world.

“InphoKon not only runs one of the major social credit systems in the world as well as being a leading vendor of facial recognition technology, but they also have just gotten into the business of producing food additives that we think make people docile,” he continued.

Nosrit knew of the social credit system—she was nominally ranked as a two—and she was completely aware of the ubiquitous surveillance of the population, as everyone was, but the drugging of people to make them docile was new, normally the preserve of fringe conspiracy theorists on the lower end of the intellectual scale—maybe that wasn’t a fair assessment, she thought. Higher on the gullibility scale.

“I’m in. What do you want me to do?”

Luc smiled. “Because of the tight controls on wire-traffic on the undersea cable, we don’t think it is safe to connect from Europa. The lag in the traffic could potentially lead them to extrapolate our location. Instead, there is an old agricultural station about 20 kilometers away from Puapolis. It’s just an automated charging station for harvesters, so there shouldn’t be any people there. It may have security cameras—we’re not sure—but it does have a semaphore connection to the arcology, retrofitted as a relay. At that distance the connection may not be solid, but it will be quicker than from here and look much more local.”

The three dimensional projection of Puapolis disappeared and was near-instantly replaced by an eight-pronged disk-shaped building with a mast tower rising from the center. The scale was hard to determine but if was meant to service harvesters, it was probably two stories tall. The mast could be 30 or 40 meters at least. It was hard to tell from the perspective.

The mast would have the sensitive telescopic light-sensors and light-emitting nodes aimed at the arcology, semaphores. Wireless communication beyond 100 meters was limited to high speed light pulses with target in light of sight.

“It is identified as charging station 13368. Once you get to Port Arthur, there will be a car waiting for you, modified to look like a Northern Agricultural Corp maintenance vehicle. You’ll fly that to the charging station. You’ll also have the ID of someone who will show up in their contract database,” he continued. “Once you’re at the station, which I admittedly haven’t been able to get schematics of, you can access the Net from the employee work area within.”

“So, now the targets. First, this is InphoKon’s security officer…” a projection of a plump and greasy looking man in his fifties appeared in place of the charging station. He was speaking to a gathering of around fifty people. “This is Scab Umanculo.”

Nosrit coughed at the name. “Really!? Who would name their kid Scab?”

“We all can’t be named Luc, can we?” This was a reference to their mutual friend who was also named Luc. “I don’t know. It is probably short for something. It may not have the connotations that we associate with the word in Brethmanic Standard.”

“Anyway, moving on…Umanculo is a technological security officer at InphoKon and a corrupt player, but he is not our target. We managed to get an encryption key remotely off his scroll at this very gathering. Our actually target is his partner, one Shea Lyre, who is Over-director of Facial Identification and Categorization Services at InphoKon, and most importantly, has access to the entire employee database.”

“I know. Don’t ask me why the security officer doesn’t have access—he may very well have it, but could be too deeply encrypted for us to even see it for what it is. It wasn’t my decision, but I got the impression that there’d be more risk trying to get it through his credentials. So, instead, we’re going to use his messaging with his partner to get into her less secure system.”

The video shifted to a static image that looked like it had been pulled from a security camera. Tell-tale signs that it had been enhanced from infrared to standard visual spectrum gave it a slightly cartoonish appearance. Nosrit saw before her the projected image of a long-faced woman with close-cropped hair and whose ears spread out like the frills of a dragon lizard.

“This is Shea Lyre. She is involved with Umanculo and holds a relatively higher rank in InphoKon.” Luc left the static image hanging in the center of the room. “We want you to go to Newland and hack Lyre’s database, via Umanculo. The employee database is your primary objective—we need to know who to target in that organization—but information on their brainwashing chemicals or facial recognition tech would be useful as well, so in your spare time feel free to poke around.”

Nosrit had been thinking while Luc spoke. Planning her approach. “Is there any particular method you want me to use?”

“Use your intuition. That’s all. Just don’t go to Puapolis itself and avoid contact with people on that side of the ocean as much as you can.” Luc answered, giving her no real direction. “When you are done, use the credit packet that is in the cache—ID3—to book passage home, but don’t come directly back to Londbridge. Go through Lusitania before coming back to this city. At some point, after Luc H will come for a debrief.

“Oh, is he back?” she asked. Luc H or Luc from Hellas spent a lot of time in the southeast, usually in Tesifon.

“He will be. I don’t know exactly when, though.”

Nosrit scrolled through the files on her internal—the tiny embedded drive in the base of her skull and saw that there were credit packets associated with the ID files. She saw also that the image files that Luc had just shown her were there too. No physical documents after all.

“Nosrit,” Luc said, “just remember that we’re sending you because you are an unknown. This does not mean we don’t have complete confidence in you. Also remember that once you board the transport, you’ll be beyond our reach and out of communication.

II

Nosrit boarded Passenger Ship Intercontinental 2018j2 at Londbridge south terminal, wearing the mask Luc had given her and wirelessly presenting the primary ID given to her as well.

She coughed at the air inhaled in the seconds between the open door of the taxi and the ground level airlock of the terminal, before nervously walking in to the awaiting security checkpoint.

The mask was light on her face and barely noticeable. Luc had warned her against touching it and checking to see if it was still there, assuring her that it would remain on and in place for weeks without needing to be reset, if necessary. It was wireless and connected to her ID, as well as being hardened against spoofing broadcasts aimed to disrupt such mimicry.

Nosrit sought a glimpse of herself in the grimy glass of the airlock door and was surprised when she didn’t recognizer herself were it not for the particular man standing next to her. It also didn’t help that her hair had been dyed back to its natural black. Her admittedly pretty features were obscured by an uneven set of cheekbones and a nose that looked as if it had been broken several times.

She held it together and calmly stroked the rough canvas of her bag under her right hand as she shuffled forward through security screens and scans. People were too close together, threaded through barriers like ancient livestock, and the air was thick with their nervous pheromones.

The MetSec officer checking IDs barely looked at her as she uploaded her ID, transit permit and credits and held still for the face scan. She could barely see his eyes behind the tinted plastiglass of the helmet. Instead, he just stood there, hands resting across his rifle against his body armor.

Relief flowed through her when the light node turned green. With a slight sideways nod of his head he ushered her forward.

The corridor was grey metal and the floor had been polished to a mirror finish down the center by countless feet in contrast to the filth and accumulated grime of the edges where the floor met the walls.

It was a long corridor that sloped gently upwards before a hub radiated several dozen other similar tunnels. Passengers stood and gaped upwards, searching for their vessels from among the glowing panels above each one. Nosrit found PSI 2018j2 on her left. Before long she was standing in the cramped airlock waiting with dozens of other passengers.

When the airlock had reached some seemingly arbitrary number of passengers the door behind them closed and the one in front opened. They pushed forth in search of their assigned seats and strapped in.

This particular vessel did not have windows, instead providing passengers with a screen blasting an unending stream of advertisements and lifestyle advice courtesy of the World Congress of Commerce. Nosrit closed her eyes and tried to ignore it.

She must have fallen asleep, for she was jolted awake by the sudden sensation of acceleration. The din and glare coming from the screen in front of her carried on, however, so she closed her eyes again and ran through the files on her internal, then read a novel that she had downloaded months ago. I should get a visual cortex implant, she thought. Then I could at least watch movies.

The acceleration was gradual, barely noticed as PSI 2018j2 fell forward on the field of manipulated gravity, pushed forward by pseudo-gravitic propulsion once it was away from the transit hub.

Midway across the Atlantic Ocean, chased by the sun, the vessel shuddered slightly from the turbulent air that it pushed through; it was not an aerodynamic ship. It consisted of two levels of passenger benches and three meters of cargo space below, all crammed into an eighty meter box with protuberant Naskovich nacelles and the twin rear push drives.

They had been cruising at around 1000 kph for hours and still had an uncomfortable, cramped three hours remaining. Nosrit wished they would have put windows in these things. They don’t want people traveling between cramped cities to see all of the unoccupied space between, she thought.

This was true. The World Commercial Congress, the World Congress of Commerce (depending on your language), or just the WCC had, for the last century and a half, been moving populations out of towns, villages and rural areas in general, both to better control and monitor them, but also to utilize as much of the arable land as possible. The corporations of the WCC had separated people from the land and resources so that only they would profit from it, leaving the citizens—if they could be called that—dependent on their overlords for food.

Dense urban populations lived in poverty and unemployment, crammed into towering cities, living off subsidized food and entertainment. The 20% of the population that did officially work, provided the economy with enough drive to keep the captains of industry in their cloud castles. This is not to say that the officially unemployed sector didn’t have its own thriving economy. In many places it was taxed just as much as the official economy was.

Nosrit slept again, making up for the agitated, restless night before. She had been worried about making it through security with the mask clinging to her face, afraid that she’d be seen through and caught. She didn’t know what the penalty for using a false ID, but guessed that it was probably debilitatingly severe.

The man next to her shifted his weight. She woke to the sensation of a rapid deceleration. Twenty minutes later, she felt the distant thud of docking clamps on the ship’s hull.

Port Arthur, a coastal city on the eastern edge of Newland. It was founded on the southern tip of the New Mercia district years ago, part of the partitioned land of Algonqua, which occupied the northern third of Newland.

Nosrit didn’t know what to expect.

It took another half hour to disembark; thousands of pushing and shoving passengers squirmed to exit through the inadequate docking tunnels locked to the sides of the ship.

Smells of plastic and the ozone smell of heavy-lift Naskovich fields permeated the docking tunnel, leaking in from outside. The tunnel was in even worse shape than their Londbridge counterparts. There was one segment where rust had eaten all of the way through, revealing a dizzying drop below.

It was warmer as well.

From the tunnel and then after, from the transit port’s main hall, she could see little of the outside. Skylights let in a hazy light. The sun had followed the ship across the sea, so it was only a little later in Port Arthur than it was in Londbridge when the ship pulled out.

Her instances of sleep on the vessel hadn’t provided much more rest than she had had the night before and the tiredness was eating at her concentration. She looked around and tried to orient herself.

Nosrit had a car waiting for her, but her stomach had other plans. It growled angrily at her. Her bag diagonally over her head and shoulder, she started winding through the chaotic crowd.

Is that food? There was collection of kiosks with jumbling crowds pressing in around them under blinking lights and automated hawker-voices immersing them all in a cacophony of advertisement. It only got louder as she got closer. Next time I travel I’m bringing earplugs, she thought, irritated by the jarring kaleidoscope around her, partially due to the pangs in her stomach.

After a few minutes of being jostled back and forth, and having piping hot coffee splashed on her leg, she poked at the screen, selecting coffee herself along with a legume sandwich of sorts, finally paying wirelessly from her fake ID’s small stipend.

She’d have to stock up with more than just a sandwich for the trip to the agricultural charging hub, but this was a more pressing need and the transit port was certainly not the best place to purchase food in any case.

She turned with her purchases, trying not to spill the coffee, only to witness a young, rather homely man spitting a brown, lumpy liquid into a bottle, before drinking from a different bottle of orange liquid. Nosrit winced and looked to the right, making for a gap in the mob.

She ate standing up, leaning against a wall in an unused Network Access kiosk stall. She could hear the woman in the next stall over, arguing in hushed tones with someone on the other end of the screen in Sinese or Khmer, one of those tonal Asian languages she didn’t understand. After finishing her sandwich and coffee she went to find a map.

The display showed the entire transit hub. On the glowing, wall sized screen she found the car park.

The car park was separated from the main terminal by a security checkpoint. Each point had an armed and armored security guard. Nosrit’s paranoia and anxiety washed back in. Her heart rate increased and her mouth became dry. She wished she had gotten some water back there. Now her mouth was dry—made distinctly worse by the coffee—and the aftertaste of the sandwich was less than pleasant. Don’t touch your face. Relax. Deep breaths. She tried to calm herself. Play the part.

“ID.” It came out muffled and somewhat metallic through the helmet’s visor, perhaps through an unseen speaker.

“She unnecessarily touched her finger to a spot above her ear, indicating a low-end subdermal chip that were commonplace among travelers. She didn’t have one, but the character she was playing probably would have. She sent the ID over to the checkpoint’s waiting database.

The character’s credentials appeared on the screen facing them, along with her assumed facial features. Nosrit couldn’t see the woman’s eyes, but guessed that they would have checked her face against the one the ID presented. The visor probably had a display as well.

There was a moment of uncomfortable silence, a pause a little too long.

Nosrit nervously glanced around at the other travelers. Those nearby were passing through their checkpoints more quickly. She stopped herself and looked back at the guard, who was now tapping at a tablet, her gloved finger thudding against unseen icons on the screen.

Nosrit looked past the checkpoint, down the wide corridor. There were hundreds of people. She knew that there would be countless security cameras. She also knew that the vehicle that had been arranged for her was tied in to her current persona. It wouldn’t need to be checked out.

There was nothing between her and the corridor to the car park aside from the guard’s authorization to proceed.

“Wait here,” she said, setting the tablet down on the counter before walking off to the security office on the left, on the other side of a dozen similar checkpoint stations with a dozen similar security guards, and a dozen similar travelers being waived along much more quickly.

Quickly, and as subtly as she could Nosrit looked at the upside down face of the tablet. In front of her character’s inauthentic credentials there was a banner. Hold for Level 2 Questioning. Beneath that there were two more buttons. Process and Override.

She must be new, thought Nosrit. She quickly glanced at the retreating back of the guard, her holster bouncing with each step. Then, with a fluid motion, she reached over and tapped the Override button with her index finger’s knuckle (to avoid leaving a fingerprint) and then strutted forward as if nothing was amiss.

She turned toward the car park’s entryway and walked through the door.

III

The door slid sideways and Nosrit walked through. The space smelled of damp concrete with a hint of sweat and dumpster. There were people in the distance beyond several rows of parked cars, sitting like ranks of dissimilar insects on their outstretched landing legs.

Connect-device -face | change-face -ID2

Change-ID -ID2

Change-credit -ID2

In a matter of seconds the plain, almost unattractive features that she had been wearing since she had left her squat in Londbridge, morphed into a completely different form.

In the back of her mind she was wondering what it was that set off the security alert. What was it that gave her away? Did she look out of place? A Vandalian in Newland? Did the face give her away? Nosrit continued to dwell on it as she walked the length of the long garage. Her footsteps echoed.

She glanced over her shoulder, back toward the entrance. The doors were still closed. There were no alarms. She pulled her braids up and stuffed them into the collar of the jacket for the time being.

Northern Agricultural Corporation. Nosrit looked at the variety of cars. Some were for passengers, others cargo. Most were within range of her wireless.

Access-device -device12 key=40bxA2bnY | Open-door

There was movement the next aisle over.

She weaved her way between the vehicles, exiting the first aisle—the one the entrance doors opened onto—just as a pair of guards came in. Nosrit hunched down a little.

The movement had come from ten meters further down the second aisle.

There it was. A dirty brown color bearing scrapes and scars and possessing a crust of dried mud around each of its four feet. The side was emblazoned with the NAC logo, consisting of a badly stylized ancient plow pulled by a robotic equally ancient bovine.

Nosrit stepped over the slanted rods connecting the nearest foot to the side of the craft. The thing was bulbously oval. Each foot had a wider than normal pad to prevent it sinking in wet soil. The passenger doors both opened upwards from the sides of the cab—this was what she had triggered over the wireless. The aft end had two doors which also had opened, much like a beetle’s wing-cases (elytra), revealing a selection of tool boxes, cases and a telescoping ladder.

She saw that there was light-node semaphore unit there as well. Just in case, she thought.

She got in and set her bag down next to her.

It had a bare-minimum of screens stretched across the dashboard. The seats were uncomfortable, unpadded formed plastic, but superior to the one she had been stuck with on the transatlantic voyage.

Close-door -device12 -all

Activate-drives -device12

Course-plot -ChargingStation13368

The maintenance car lifted, the retracting legs making a whirring sound followed by three clicks and a fourth grind. It glided out of the space in which it had been parked, turned and slowly made its way down the aisle, before turning to the left. An iris opened in the wall automatically, discharging it into the vehicle corridor where it made a series of turns and altitude adjustments. All of it was automatic and Nosrit assumed that it had been preprogrammed to be self-driving, at least in the vicinity of Port Arthur.

The air was much clearer here than she expected. The plastiglass windscreen was heavily scratched and had two cracks along the right edge, and it was smudged, even in areas where it would be difficult for occupants to touch. Everything was covered with a film of grime. Now that she was out in the open, Nosrit could see that the seats were covered in mud, dirt, sand and a rainbow of food stains. There was a trowel and a pair of wire snips on the floor, half concealed under some wadded food wrappers in the first stages of biodegrading.

Charging Station 13368 was 1687 kilometers north.

Nosrit used the dashboard to search for a place to get food in Port Arthur.

Course-plot -new

Course-plot -Wu’sFoodEmporium

Half an hour later she loaded a case of spun-metal water bottles, two loaves of bread, protein spread, vitamin tablets and instant coffee mix, along with a pair of sunglasses.

She and her ugly car were then back on course.

After leaving the perimeter fence of Port Arthur she saw nothing resembling human life, just the never-ending stretch of corn and soy, running over the hills to the horizon, tended by crawling machines here and there. She landed twice on the trip to squat in the fields.

By mid afternoon the lack of sleep and time zone shift was wearing on her. The sun was bright in the September sky and and the air was still warm.

Though she had flown over a stretch of rolling hills and a region with winding rivers and scattered lakes, but when she finally arrived at Charging Station 13368, the landscape had returned to a generally flat expanse.

Puapolis jutted up in the hazy distance, a lone outcrop of glass and metal. Purple-black against the horizon.

Nosrit came in low as she approached, not wanting to be noticed by cameras on the arcology if she could help it. She circled the charging station skimming the waving sheaves of wheat in a wide arc.

There were three giant multi-use behemoths cabled to the hub’s branching arms, like parasites on a giant metal spider. Fresh tracks in the muddy earth traced the routes other recent visitors had made to the station, wide-set swaths cutting through the corn.

The core of the eight-limbed structure consisted of a dome that sloped down to a flattened surface with a large red ‘x’ painted on it, like a warning mark on the back of a spider. The other end held the tower jutting straight up, with guide wires cabled to the extremities of the station’s arms for support. It had an exposed vertical ladder enclosed in a mesh safety fence from its base to its pinnacle.

There was a rectangular opening in the slope of the dome. As Nosrit directed the maintenance car to land on the x, she saw the simple, steel door at the end of of the opening. There were no other vehicles that she could see.

She got out. The warmth of the afternoon still radiated from the surface of the station, but Nosrit could feel the chill of the approaching evening on her skin, even through the mask she still wore. The sun would still be up for another two hours or so. Time to check this place out while I still have light.

She popped the hatch opened. The beetle wings lifted up on their hinges with a low whir.

She found amongst the storage and tool boxes a container that held an NAC badge with her assumed face on it. Cassandra Thistle. Nosrit had hardly thought of the name of her disguise, except briefly at the security station in Port Arthur. Araman Voosa was no more. I don’t feel like a Cassandra Thistle either.

She took the badge and clipped it to her jacket. She shouldered the semaphore unit next to her own bag, and grabbed the tool box dedicated to electronics work.

The door to the station was unlocked and rusting at the base, leaving brown metal flakes on the pock-marked sill. There was a numeric key-code box on the wall next to it, but it was inert.

Inside, lights switched on automatically at her entrance. Motion sensors, perhaps thermal. She would keep an eye out for cameras, but Luc didn’t seem to think there were any networked ones here.

“Hello? Is there anyone here?” She called out. “Northern Agricultural Corp here for maintenance.”

She listened for a response but heard nothing other than the hum of an air circulation unit.

The entrance into the dome opened on to a predictably round space with corridors leading off in the eight directions of the station’s arms from the lower level. The center of the space below held an off-center two meter per side cube of a battery pack. Wires ran along the floor to each of the arms from it, and a heavy ninth wire curved up out of the concrete floor into its base. Light nodes on a panel at its side blinked a complicated pattern, indicating use and power level.

The circular opening in the floor of the second level was blocked by a railing that encircled it entirely, except for a metal-grate stairway going down. Opposite the door, on the second floor, was an open kitchen area on the right side and another room on the left. The door of the latter was open but the lights were off. There was a corridor between them.

Nosrit walked to the kitchen area, comprised mostly of dirty grey plastic. There were a sink, a stove, a refrigerator and numerous cupboards above and below. There was a table with a disorganized collection of chairs and a screen on the wall to the side.

Someone had left a plate, fork and mug on the table with some dried lump of food covered in green and black mold, which kind of looked like a face. There was a pan and two more plates in the sink.

Nosrit set her bags down on the table. She turned on the tap. It burped out a spray of air before water trickled out in erratic bursts. Somewhere below pipes groaned eerily.

The fridge was empty except for two containers of uncertain provenance. She shut it. The cupboards held an assortment of canned food, dehydrated food and just plain dry food.

The room next to the kitchen was a bunk room with a dozen beds on racks of three each two on the opposite wall and two on the wall to the left of that. Again, the lights automatically came on to illuminate the drab interior. The right side had a minimal bathroom, sink, toilet and shower stall, all crammed into two square meters. There was no sign of any current occupants, though three of the beds were unmade, tussled and rolled blankets sat in heaps. The others seemed unused.

Nosrit left the bunk room. The lights went out behind her. (The main room of the dome and the kitchen had remained on.)

She turned down the corridor between the bunk room and the kitchen. It’s lights came on as she walked forward.

It proceeded 15 meters or so and ended with a door and a ladder. The latter, she thought led to the communication tower above, beyond the trapdoor in the ceiling three meters above. The door to her left opposite the ladder was locked, and the access panel had a dormant numeric key pad like the defunct on one at the entrance.

It looked like some one had tried forcing the door at some point. The metal door and frame bore pry marks. The marks were old, though; corrosion had set in.

She would hack it in the morning.

As exhaustion took over she moved her bag, the tool box and semaphore to the bunk room, and then her food and water to the kitchen.

Before she locked the maintenance car, she extended it’s proximity sensor’s range so that any other vehicle landing would trigger the alarm and notify her via wireless as it didn’t actually have a security system.

Then Nosrit ate a quick bite and went to sleep.

IV

Nosrit awoke, but it was not morning. She vaguely remembered a loud bang, at first thinking it had been a dream, but then when it repeated, she became alarmed. Her internal drive told her it was two in the morning. There had been nothing from the car; its dim signal told her the NAC vehicle was asleep.

She forced her limbs to come to life. The movement triggered a dim set of lights. She pulled her pants and shirt on. The temperature was lower than what it was when she crawled into bed eight hours ago.

She looked at her bag and knew she had no weapons. Even if she had wanted one, she would never have made it onto the transport in Londbridge in the first place, and even a simple handgun didn’t jive with Cassandra Thistle’s identity.

Nosrit opened the tool box. Wire strippers and cutters and joiners. Binders to bundle them together. Tape. An assortment of plugs, and wireless emitters. A pair of basic external drives and an induction charging stand. A furled and uncharged scroll.

There was nothing.

Still barefoot, she padded to the kitchen. The lights in the main room of the dome and kitchen were still on. She quickly opened the drawers under the counters and in the third found some dull knives. Choosing a big one, she carefully walked around the ring of the second floor.

There was no sign that the entrance door had been opened and no sign of others present. When she had almost completed the circuit, and a few meters from the stairs, she heard it again. A heavy metallic clanking. The floor vibrated beneath her bare feet. The sound had come from one of the tunnels that gave access to the charging points of the station.

Nosrit descended the stairs.

She hadn’t explored the ground floor before, thinking the access tunnels wouldn’t hold anything of interest, and also being slightly freaked out by them, so the noises now echoing from one of them was quite disturbing. She had been to too many b-grade thrillers in her short life.

The ground was cold beneath her feet. Half of the lights didn’t come on as she approached the groaning tunnel. With the knife out in front of her, Nosrit threaded herself between coils of wires and four centimeter thick pipes, trickling water from joints, sometimes other fluids.

Fifty meters of anticipation in the half dark corridor, and all it was was a new agricultural machine attaching itself.

There at the end, she could see out a small window that a light had come on, showing that NAC combine #78013 had docked, its number lined up with the window. A small display showed via blinking indicator lights that it was charging, taking on water, fertilizer and lubricant, and downloading crop statistics for whatever territory it was programmed to roam.

There was a door next to the window. She tried it; it wasn’t locked. Opening it slowly, Nosrit looked out. The combine was massive and blocked most of the view.

In the reflected light from the docking port, she could see corn waving in the cool breeze of the night. It was very quiet aside from the wind in the fields.

Being out in the open was a strange enough feeling, but the utter darkness beyond the weak light of the station, coupled with the all-too-natural sound of the wind was too much. She could imagine things moving through the corn, following the undulations, the sounds of footsteps hidden by the rustling of the wind.

The docking light went abruptly out, and, with that, Nosrit shut the door behind her, looked for a way to lock it, but turned up nothing, so she quickly retreated upstairs and found a way to at least lock the bunk room door.

She left the knife lying beside the bottom bunk were she had been sleeping and huddled beneath the blankets for the remaining hours until dawn, drifting in and out of sleep.

Nosrit woke again. It was dark in the room when she opened her eyes. A habitual quick wireless probing told her that there were no wirelessly controlled lights. It did not matter, though; as soon as she moved to get out of the bunk, the light-nodes switched to their dim mode.

She pulled on her clothes from yesterday and left the bunk room, to again make sure that she was still alone. She walked out on to the landing pad. The sun low in the east, painting the ugly structure of the charging station with golden-red light. The underside of the otherwise overcast sky was rippled with the same tint of light, but smelled of rain and damp earth. The pad was wet beneath her feet.

She was still alone.

Nosrit again glanced eastward, knowing Londbridge was well behind the horizon. She turned and went back inside.

She showered in the cramped plastiglass space allotted in the tiny bathroom. Finding no towels she used a sheet from one of the other unused beds to dry off.

With clean clothes on now, she fed herself a piece of bread smeared with the protein spread. Then she found a pot and stirred a spoonful of the coffee mix into some water and heated it on the stove.

Now, the job. Nosrit took both her bag and the tool box down the hallway to the locked room.

The numeric keypad was encased in a raised metal box attached to the wall with four screws. It was meant to keep nosey people from straying inside, but wasn’t exactly high end security.

The screws were removed easily enough. The protective box came off, leaving the keypad itself partially hanging.

Lucky me. There was a docking port scrunched up behind it.

A quick search in the toolbox produced a compatible cable, and with Nosrit’s own adapter, she connected the locked room’s keypad to one of her two small rectangle external drives. She held her unfurled scroll in her hands with the external sitting on the floor while she sent her commands wirelessly from her internal.

Open-connection -external1

Connect-jack | read-system -output -scroll2

Nosrit was used to more complex systems than this. The were only one file.

Open-file

Again she laughed. The code was four digits and stored in plaintext.

Why even bother using an electronic system? A physical combination padlock would have been more difficult to crack.

The keypad made silly and completely unnecessary beeps as she pressed 3-6-1-4 and the door’s lock made an audible click.

She turned the knob and opened it.

The room’s lights automatically came on when the door was opened. There were two monitors on a sparse desk, at 45 degrees to the table and 120 degrees to each other. A handful of bundled wires plugged into a dusty cylindrical external drive placed between them.

Setting her scroll down on the table, she tapped at one of the screens, then the other, then finally tapped the top of the cylinder. First one, then the other monitors woke up while a green, projected keyboard appeared on the space in front of work station, missing it’s lower right corner.

Scoffing, she wiped the dust off the projector on the facing side of the cylinder. The rest of the keyboard appeared.

She tapped through some maintenance icons on the screens. One of them brought up a rendering of the top view of the charging station, showing all four of the combines docked and which arms they were attached to. It also showed the car on the pad outside, in the most basic of presentations, a rough egg shape with the car’s ID code squashed into it.

Tapping the combine shapes brought up their power levels, contents and scheduled departures.

The information was sent at regular intervals back to a central location. She didn’t know where it was, only that it wasn’t Puapolis. Since the station’s own semaphore wasn’t pointed at the arcology on the horizon, Nosrit would have to do what she had hoped to avoid.

V

The 75 centimeter long metal tube with it’s small wide angle cameras and specialize high speed pulse light-nodes banged against the back of Nosrit’s jacket, strung by an improvised cable tied around both ends, looped under the projecting cameras. The mounting clamps dug into her back with each movement.

Her hands were cold and her arms were sore. Nosrit paused to first move one carabiner to the next safety rail, then the other. She had had to do that five times already. Looking up the tower she counted four more above her. She knew not to look down.

The sun had disappeared behind thick clouds while she was inside and the rain had started falling again right after she had started the climb up the cold, metal rungs, as if to taunt her.

Her arms were killing her by the time she reached the narrow grated platform which encircled the top of the tower. She was now above the level at which the top four of the eight guide cables were attached. The anchor points other four she had passed halfway up. She fed the semaphore unit up through the opening before clambering through herself.

The railing was just low enough to not be comforting in the least.

She looked at the semaphore units already attached to the tower. There were four. Three level with the platform pointing toward the east and southeast where the coastal cities were. There would have to be relays on the way, probably dozens; they would be too far and too close to the horizon for her to see without binoculars. A fourth was higher up and pointed south.

None pointed northwest to Puapolis. She looked up. There was space at the top of the mast, but to reach up, to get her feet on rungs half a meter higher than the platform, level with the railing, she’d have to disconnect the safety harnesses from the vertical safety rail beneath her.

Lovely, she thought. In the rain, too. Luc is going to owe me more than a few drinks.

She could already feel the damp seeping through her now-wet jacket, and she had rivulets of rain running through her hair and down her neck.

She disconnected the two harnesses from the rail beneath the open hole in the platform and quickly attached their respective carabiners to each other around the narrowing tower.

Nosrit again shouldered the semaphore unit, only over one shoulder this time. She pulled herself up until she was standing on the highest rung available with her left arm wrapped around the mast as far and her face pressed against the wet surface.

I’m not cut out for this shit.

After a necessary deep breath, she raised the unit up to the clear area of the mast, with it’s camera’s facing as near as she could manage towards the dark spike of the arcology jutting up from the endless green fields.

Darker, lower clouds had rolled in and she could see heavy rain approaching. There was a flash of lightning, followed immediately by a crack of lightning. I’m going to die here, Nosrit thought grimly.

With a grunt, she reached her left hand up and wrapped her right leg around the mast. With her hand she found the far end of the bottom clamp and pushed it towards its mate. She then switched arms and legs and managed to get the lower clamp locked in place.

She repeated the process with the higher clamp. It was easier because the lower clamp held the device in place so she only had to switch arms.

One final push and the manual installation was finished. With trembling, numb fingers she fished a power cable out of her pocket and plugged it into the device and the other end into a socket on the mast itself, lowering the weather shield over the socket. She pressed the ON button on the bottom of the semaphore.

Shivering now and with her feet back on the platform grate, Nosrit, reattached the harnesses to the vertical safety rails within the ladder cage. One section at a time, she descended the slippery rungs.

After a hot shower and a change of clothes, she felt better. The dome didn’t have any windows but she could hear the thunder outside. Just in time.

The station’s external unit in the formerly locked maintenance room only had wireless connection to the one semaphore unit that was part of the its particular charging station network. The others were clearly relays. Nosrit couldn’t help but wonder why Puapolis wasn’t connected to the wider network, when it would have made sense to use all of the connection points, especially the charging stations, which had very little traffic most of the time.

It seemed as if Puapolis was purposefully left unconnected. Was this why I had to come out here in person to get in?

For this to work there has to be a semaphore receiver facing this direction. Maybe there was one and it was removed, she speculated. Why?

Sitting in the uncomfortable desk chair in front of the twenty year old monitors, pecking alternatively at the virtual keyboard projected on the surface and the primary monitor’s screen, she reached out for Puapolis.

High up on the mast the cameras searched incrementally and auto-focused when they detected a response from the shard on the horizon. While the cameras searched she connected her other external to the dusty cylinder on the table.

Read-connection | Confirm-connection -PuapolisLocal

>Connection-confirmed

Search-network -InphoKon

>InphoKon-confirmed -encrypted

Access-network -InphoKon | search-network -ScabUmanculo | access-messages key=ds90UI90175m

>Access-granted

>Access-granted

Nosrit sat back, proud of herself and took a breath. Umanculo’s key had worked. Some security you are Umanculo, she thought and laughed out loud.

She scanned Umanculo’s message cache for sent video messages, projected holograms of sorts. Fortunately, there were a variety to choose from. She copied all of them onto her own external, the more powerful of the two she had brought with her. It had vastly more processing power than the table top monstrosity.

Run-process “ImageSplice”

It would take a few minutes to extract the video and audio details representing Umanculo’s identity. She wouldn’t need a lot of it, only commonly said words, and a facsimile of his image and demeanor.

When the process finished she puts some words in his mouth and watched the render play out on the right monitor.

“I am a corrupt and not entirely competent technical security person,” said the life-like image of Umanculo on the screen. She’d given it a two-dimensional display as the default, just in case Lyre, the actual target wasn’t in the vicinity of a projector.

Open-messages -ScabUmanculo | Create-message -new -video | Message=

“Hey, hun,

We’re running a new security protocol and you need to review the information on this site: link.

Thanks. I’ll talk to you later.

Nosrit ran through the video message a couple times. She couldn’t tell the difference between the fabricated fake render and the original video messages, but the man’s partner might be a little more conscious of details, so she added some interference, just a touch of choppiness. The link was clearly visible. It would hang in the air if projected.

Send-message Sender=ScabUmanculo Recipient=SheaLyre

Nosrit went to have a snack and get a drink. There would probably be a wait. The link would actually send Ms. Lyre to the other tiny external wired into the charging station’s control unit, where she had crafted a fake security protocol update, really just copied from some other corporation’s security site. The site would even tell her Lyre that there would be a slight delay, due to heavy traffic.

When Nosrit returned by way of the landing pad (to make sure she was still alone), Shea Lyre had already followed the link and clicked on all of the necessary buttons, to demonstrate she was, in fact, up to date on the security protocols required of her. With each click slightly different versions of spyware downloaded to her devices, each attuned for internals, externals and scrolls of various models, each also designed to hide themselves and gradually seek out particular kinds of files and relay them to Nosrit’s waiting external over several days.

After an hour she checked the progress. Yes, there were already hundreds of personnel files, possibly thousands; these she filtered for rank, keeping the upper management and senior staff and retaining system administrators as well (always a security weak spot).

Something that struck Nosrit as odd, was that, while most of the files were fairly small, one for each individual with basic biometrics, clearance levels and job history, there was one individual in particular that had hundreds of hours of video recordings associated with his file.

Guy Eiecto was only a second tier systems administrator and yet Lyre had compiled a deeply thorough dossier on him. Nosrit looked at a selection of video files. She watched as Eiecto went about mundane tasks, sat at his desk pecking at his own projected keyboard. There were scenes of him in some living area, his flat maybe, clearly unaware that he was being recorded. Shots of him talking to some woman in a corporate hallway, by the drab beige coloring. He was not intrinsically important in terms of the corporate hierarchy, and not in the division that Shea Lyre was primarily responsible for. Her division had only just absorbed something called the Neuronal-Gizime 8 Unit, where Eiecto worked.

Not seeing anything else of particular interest, Nosrit let the malware on Lyre’s devices do their thing, while she kicked back and read.

After Nosrit checked the progress down in the maintenance room, she stepped out onto the deck of the landing pad, zipping up her jacket against the brisk wind. It was mid day and had stopped raining, and a bit of sun pushed through the passing clouds. Just as she was looking towards the jutting shard of the Puapolis arcology, there was a brilliant flash of light,

The arcology was shaped like a faceted spike rising from the corn and soy fields around it. The flash, which lingered longer than the light from a blast, was an unnatural greenish-blue in color. When it eventually did dissipate—and it was difficult for Nosrit to tell at this distance—it seemed to leave behind a roiling, dense white smoke that flowed like liquid down the sides of the structure from a shattered hole in the upper walls.

What the fuck, she wondered. There’s no way that I did that. That’s got to be a coincidence.

That’s going to attract attention. I gotta get out of here.

Nosrit ran back inside, down the hallway to the maintenance room. The connection with Puapolis was dead. Nothing.

She quickly gathered her equipment and shut down the machine. The keypad cover was screwed back in place. She retrieved her bag, the tool box and the food that she had brought in and got it all onboard the maintenance car.

After doing a walk through to make sure that no trace of her remained (ignoring the semaphore pole attached to the top of the mast above and the wet sheet on the floor of the bathroom) she climbed in the car.

She tried to connect to a public channel in Puapolis, but again got nothing. The semaphore via the car’s wireless was sending unanswered pulses of light towards the arcology. Then, on the dashboard screen, Level 5 alert. Puapolis quarantine perimeter set at ten kilometers. Do not approach. Violators will be sought and tried.

Nosrit wasn’t going to challenge that. She directed the car to take her to back to Port Arthur, concerned that a sizable portion of the files she had just collected were just rendered useless by whatever it was that happened in Puapolis.

Part 2

Stalker

VI

The tube dropped Guy a hundred meters or so from the security checkpoint of his division, the office space he worked out of. The gods-forsaken arcology sat starkly, a twisting spike of metal and glass amidst endless, flat corn and bean fields in the hot and humid climes of northern Newland.

He’d rather be back in Londbridge, his home town of sorts—Guy was really from a smaller city, but had lived in Londbridge for the 13 years prior to his transfer here.

The Puapolis arcology was entirely owned and staffed by InphoKon employees. There were, of course, contractors who shipped in and out regularly, but most of the permanent residents were employees, working for various divisions and subsets of the global corporation.

The gurgling and babbling of the artificial water feature greeted him on his walk from the tube station. It was more of an elevator than an urban subway. The tubes ran vertically and horizontally around the massive building disgorging busy little workers at each stop.

Guy’s job was pretty dull, minor project management and assorted repetitive daily tasks, like pushing a figurative button to check the tank pressure of InphoKon’s Neuronal-Gizime 8 production facility, built into one of the twisting corners of the arcology.

Mostly they ran servers that the WWC used to assess the value of citizens. People around the world were given rankings on a 5 point scale based on their usefulness to society. Fives were the elite who made all the decisions, ones were essentially lowlifes and zeros just kind of disappeared.

Guy got to his office’s checkpoint and upon scanning his iris and hand print he was immediately approached by a security goon, who brusquely pushed him against the wall and told him to stay right where he was.

Not used to such treatment, Guy protested and was subsequently threatened with the business end of a stun baton. The burly uniformed guard then backed up touching his neck, which apparently contained a subvocal comms device.

Guy stood there against the wall, watching, rather trying not to watch, his colleagues pass by. They too tried not to look. Everyone except the guard averted their eyes.

Then it appeared. The big head.

The projection was easily two meters high, from chin to short cropped hair. The ears stuck out like one of those extinct long nosed beasts from centuries ago. (There was a movie about a magical flying one.)

Guy was struck by the image, especially given his past connection with the woman attached to the head.

Years before, in one of the more pleasant neighborhoods of the greater metropolitan region of Londbridge, he had known her.

Not just known her but known her.

Flashes of memory ran through his mind while he wondered if this was all a misunderstanding or cruel joke. They had met at a cafe across the street from a cinema. They both lived in the neighborhood, a few block apart. For some reason Guy didn’t understand at the time, she wore a blonde wig. Inconsequential small talk passed between them, usually as he watched her down weighty and incredibly expensive real-ham sandwiches.

Three “random” encounters later, after a couple espressos followed by a couple glasses of wine at the attached wine bar, they hooked up. Guy found it odd that she insisted on a hotel that was ten times further away than either of their houses. Later he found out she was partnered with a petty local political wannabe, so her place was understandably out. It also explained the wig, and sometimes sunglasses. In retrospect the silly disguise was pointless, as she had a rather distinctive nasally voice that would be noticed by anyone who had ever heard her speak.

The “affair” lasted only a few months, with the two of them getting together every week or two.

Guy ended it.

After a while her whiny voice, trumpeted through her nasal cavity was just too much. It wasn’t the wig, which he suspected from their first meeting…it didn’t sit quite evenly on her head, and sometimes later looked like it was a rush job, like a potato rolled in glue and then a bucket of feathers.

The increasingly petty vindictiveness of Big Head also quickly became too much for him, as did her complete lack of depth. As her relative comfort in his presence increased, so too did her shallow gossiping and blatant narcissism.

The sex was ok, but after the first couple times, mechanical. The wig changed a few times: blonde this week, black the next.

Guy and the Head parted ways.

Four years passed.

He found a job, running an alleged project management position across the sea. A week into the job, after the red-eye monthly supply ship transit, he discovered that she was head of Human Resources for one of InphoKon’s other divisions, soon after for the entire corporation.

Guy didn’t think much of it. It was just a coincidence, he told himself. When they had been hooking up, he had never asked about her employer, and she had never asked about his. At the time it wasn’t even the same for him.

His first hint that something was wrong when he was chatting with a woman from the other side of the office while on break. This woman was young and cute and Guy may have over extended his five minutes break by two or three additional minutes. The young woman was transient and ultimately fickle and spent more time imagining yoga positions than thinking.

The thing was, though, while he was in the hallway chatting with the young woman, Big Head walked past, in person, in the flesh—not some fleeting projection, not some on-screen blathering, but clopping by with her 15 centimeter platform heels, her ears flapping in the turbulence behind her.

The scowl Big Head gave him was chilling. It was accompanied by pursed lips—lips he had seen in different shapes years ago. This time they were prune-like, pinched and crevassed. Her over-applied eye make up could have been training for counter-insurgency militia camouflage.

She had made brief eye contact as she whooshed by. The broad projections of her business attire brushed his head in a clear attempt at disgust and intimidation. Clop, clop, clop she went, her sagging ass flopping back and forth down the corridor.

Now, she, or at least a projection of her big head—her giant head—was hanging in the space in front of him in the lobby adjacent to the security checkpoint.

“You, Guy Eiecto, have violated company and corporate policy by talking too much to coworkers outside of your business-derived role and position. For this reason you are hereby terminated and your social worth ranking will be demoted.”

“You are confined to your housing unit until the next supply ship departs. You will be on it. InphoKon hereby terminates you.”

Guy, taken aback and in shock by the suddenness, was speechless. It wasn’t until the hunchback office assistant arrived carrying a box of Guy’s office debris that he started to comprehend what was going on.

After the guard shoved him out into the corridor opposite the checkpoint, the assistant pitched his box after him, spilling its contents under the passing feet of other workers.

Guy collected his debris from the floor—half of it wasn’t his and half of what was his wasn’t in it—maybe it skittered off and down into the atrium?

The way the tube works—the near vacuum tubes of the transport system—is that the cars are pneumatically driven through a low-pressure networks of tubes. They feel like your typical elevator inside, or maybe those railed shuttles at air-transport hubs, but it’s quick and silent, and importantly, well sealed against the near vacuum of the tubes.

Guy was alone on this one after the second stop when two other passengers got off.

The doors closed with a sucking sound as the seals engaged, then accelerated. His stop was two up and one over. He could feel the pull as it shifted to his left. (The passenger seats were against the sides.)

The shift upwards did not come; the power cut out, then the car dropped to the floor of its tube.

Guy’s box spilled again with the drop. He looked forlornly at the distribution of his office crap, sprayed across the floor of the car. Books, earphones, and coffee mugs….

Guy wondered at the sudden loss of momentum, the dying of the car, and possibly the entire network. Then realized that, if the InphoKon hadn’t found an immediate replacement—someone who would run the daily pressure monitoring and balancing code—the Neuronal-Gizime 8 tank pressure would exceed structural norms and possibly rupture.

Neuronal-Gizime 8 is a chemical additive that is inserted into the drinking water supply for all WWC urban areas. It’s known effects are that it reduces the propensity for anger and provides people with an elevated sense of satisfaction. In cities like Londbridge with a population of roughly 35 million, a few hundred liters are enough to mollify the population.

Here, in InphoKon’s arcology, the primary tank holds a hundred million liters. This is the reason for Puapolis being in the middle of nowhere.

When it’s left to itself Neuronal-Gizime 8 breaks down into Gizime 6 and copious amounts of CO2. One of Guy’s job requirements had been to run a daily daily script to purge the tanks of the CO2. It wouldn’t have been too much trouble to make it automatic, but he hadn’t yet done it, because a two line command line phrase every other day wasn’t much of an effort.

Until now.

Initially unbeknownst to Guy, the rupture of the tank had broken the vacuum of the tube network. Nearly a half hour had passed, and he became vaguely concerned about the air of the tube capsule. Normally, it would be refreshed at each stop.

The capsule’s internal battery had kept the lights on, but it didn’t occur to him for a while that the mag-lev had failed (the reason for the drop to the floor of the tube.)

Guy had spent twenty odd minutes picking his office crap off the floor, but then gave up and spent the rest of the period looking at the windowless wall of the car. His coffee cup was still lying under the seat opposite him.

He got up and went to the door.

The doors’ indicators suggested that the pressure in the tube had normalized, so he was going to pry them open and get back to his flat, while he still had the chance, with or without his box of office shit.

The doors were stiff. They split in the center and moved each to its side. With some effort, Guy managed to force them apart. The tube tunnel was dark and smelled like a musty basement. Guy used his scroll—a cylinder roughly 16 cm long with a flexible unfurl-able screen, open 3 centimeters to light the path to the next station. It was with good fortune that they were in a horizontal tube when the power shut off.

The arc wasn’t that big. It took them 15 minutes to get to the next station and pry open the doors there. He would still have to climb hundreds of meters up but at least he would be out of the tube network.

The station was covered in a 5 centimeter thick layer of NG8. It was everywhere. Guy’s first thought was the tank ruptured and he was correct.

I can’t let it touch my skin, he thought. He would have to through out his shoes when he got back to his flat.

Guy found a vertical maintenance shaft that could take him up to his level, which happily was free of the Neuronal-Gizime 8 sludge of the lower levels.

On his way to the flat he looked over a balcony in horror at the collapsed ceiling of the arcology over the atrium and at the lake of NG8 below in the vast courtyard. Hundreds of seemingly dead bodies lay in it like insects in hardening wax.

It was a clingy glue-like substance, milky white with hues of yellow. It was not odorless. On first smell it was fairly mild, like unscented soy milk, but after a couple hours the smell turned into a flop-house funk.

That smell now permeated the entire arcology

Guy holed up in his flat, ruminating over the fact that everyone he had known was dead or at least likely dead. Venturing out occasionally he heard sounds. There were possibly others that escaped the deluge, though he never saw anyone and no one responded to his calls.

He watched from the window of his flat, looking over countless miles of soybean fields. Sometimes automated watering machines would roll by. He expected some sort of emergency response. That was the sort of thing that the movies made one expect. There was nothing.

On the inside, beneath the shattered ceiling, the late summer heat soon faded to the coolness of fall. When it rained, it rained inside as well.

Guy could see the stains from NG8 on the atrium and the internal park below. Dried Neuronal-Gizime 8 hung like candle wax from the twenty balconies below the rift which, either tragically or ironically was centered on the offices of his division. The summer heat and humidity had made the air foul with the rotting corpses of thousands of dead, but this passed after several weeks with the natural ventilation above.

One thing he was not expecting came the following morning.

Guy opened the door to his flat—he needed to find some food supplies and thought to raid his former neighbors’ pantries…

There she was…Big Head, in the flesh.

She looked starved…dead even…and had a layer of Gizime plastered over most of her face. The garish face paint she used to wear was still visibly staining the the congealed fluid. An unpredictably large blob hung like a dangly earring from her right ear.

She was wearing the same outfit that Guy had seen while she was firing him. It hadn’t aged well, being now, quite soiled and for some reason wet. Maybe she had been spending time in the now open sky atrium. She stared at him with unblinking, absent eyes with her mouth agape.

He slammed the door. When he peaked out again a while later she was gone.

There were others. Guy saw them here and there. He reasoned that the few survivors of the NG8 explosion were somehow still alive, but thoughtlessly reliving the patterns of their lives. The mind-mollifying effects of Neuronal-Gizime 8 had been so concentrated that for the survivors sprayed by it, it had had a clear stupefying effect. They would eat when they could, drink pooling rainwater, or even from the pond/stream at the bottom (full of ooze from the decaying non-survivors) and go about their business, albeit in a really slow, non-conscious sort of way. They were repeating the patterns of their former lives.

Several days later Big Head was there again. She didn’t and couldn’t say anything, and smelt like filth. Whatever she had been eating had been secreted through her pantsuit. The coagulated Gizime was still covering half her face. Guy was revolted.

She seemed to be mouthing something. Guy was curious, but could only focus on holding his breath, before slamming his door.

She was stalking him.

They followed the patterns of life, he had reasoned, observing them for weeks. What else would explain Big Head showing up at his flat two days in a row?

He took precautions after that. No just opening the door to the stink. He found a nail and an improvised hammer and made a tiny peep hole in the door. It wasn’t ideal, but he would be able to see the immediate hallway and also be able to cover it with some tape.

There were sounds of movement every night. After five weeks, there was still no sign of help from the outside. The Net had been severed—for some reason—less than an hour after after the accident. It could have been simply the power going down, or perhaps there was a quarantine—he had heard about such things happening.

Guy had scavenged enough food for a while, but eventually the water ran to a trickle, before ceasing altogether. He would have to find another source. He had been forcing his way into flats around this level and the levels above with a fire axe, but feared going down to the contaminated levels below. He need water though, soon desperately.

The tape over the hole peeled back easily. With his eye pressed to the cold metal of the door, he peered out.

She was there again. Big Head looked increasingly gaunt; it was unlikely she was properly feeding herself and the dark hair of her upper lip had grown, perhaps from the increasingly desiccated lips, giving her a mustache like a fourteen year old boy.

Guy had watched other of the Neuronal-Gizime 8 zombies as he now referred to them, gnawing on birds that had flown in through the gash in the glass ceiling and subsequently battered themselves to death against the mirrors and glass walls of the interior—the birds not the zombies—maybe both.

She was just standing there, half in view through the impromptu peephole. The Gizime had nearly solidified and had turned a dark yellow. Her lips, which had already been overcome with age, were now ribbons of peeling flesh reminiscent of shredded bacon.

Oddly enough, Guy could still smell her perfume through the tiny opening. Its floral acridness stung his eye before violating his nostrils. She also appeared to have given up blinking. Her left eye was covered in a layer of pussy mucous, while the right one was out of view.

It’s hard to attack the intellectual prowess of a zombie, who even at her prime was in no way intellectual, more doltish and unencumbered by deeper thinking. Now her drool trickled over her bacon-lips and ran down the stalactites of Gizime hanging from her chin. A low bar for humanity, to say the least.

Guy was still not sure whether or not these remnants—revenants—of the corporation, rotting coprolites that they were, were technically alive. He had spent days running through scenarios, where he debated fighting them physically, evading them or just running away (since they tended to move rather slowly.)

Days passed. Guy essentially did nothing and merely waited it out. His food was always running low. The stalker, Big Head, came to his corridor less and less often.

Frankly, Guy was surprised that she—or any of the surviving gism zombies—had lasted as long as they did. Weeks had passed. Aside from the assorted birds, living or dead, that they had picked up and gnawed upon, they didn’t exactly frequent to the company cafeteria and graze the salad bar—which by now would be inedible.

A strange side effect of the NG8 contamination he noticed, was an extremely low metabolism. The zombies moved very slowly, so slowly that some of those birds that they had been attempting to eat had now taken to making nests—not really—it’s a quirk of storytelling—on their decaying heads.

So, now a month and a half after the catastrophic explosion, Big Head had started falling apart. She would still stand in the hallway by his door, and despite her obvious decay—one of her ears—which had been like sails that drew her on in the wind, like one of those ancient sailing ships—fell off.

The days grew colder.

The collapsed arcology wasn’t even that far north, but eventually winter still came. And when it came, it came through the shattered glass ceiling with a kind of pathetic low-level vengeance.

The zombies just stopped working. Their limpid, flaccid flesh hardened and semi-froze, rendering them nearly immobile.

The crows, which held the dominant position in the avian society of the ruins, and, who had made homes on the heads of many of the zombies, now began picking at them.

Guy would often go out and check on her now, reversing their respective roles.

Big Head had solidified near the balcony overlooking the atrium. She had become as repulsive as she once—or so he imagined—had been sexy. Two crows had made a nest on her head, weaving bits of agricultural debris, mostly corn husks, from outside the hole (as he referred to it.) They had also taken to pecking at her scalp, leaving strings of tiny perforations across her expansive, Neanderthal brow.

He knew it was finally over when one winter day, he went down to the courtyard and like many of the Gizime zombies, Big Head had lost most of hers. The crows—not just the two that lived there, but many of the broader community—had devoured the top half, leaving only her gaping, pinch-lipped mouth hanging open. On warmer days the gaping maw with shrunken gums attracted tiny ephemeral flies.

One crisp winter day, Guy noticed a WCC cruiser in the air hanging high above the ruined arcology. Since there had been no attempt to rescue him—he had even waved frantically at a drone that flew past him several days prior—Guy had a sinking feeling in his gut.

He quickly grabbed a few belongings, a warm coat in particular, one which he hadn’t touched since Londbridge, and made his way down maintenance tunnels to one of the few doors to the outside world.

Running as fast as he could he passed over kilometers of brown soybean stalks. Looking briefly back over his shoulder he had noticed that the cruiser had moved to maybe ten kilometers away and was still receding.

Fortunately, for Guy he wasn’t looking back when the flash of the nuke illuminated the fields all around him. His black shadow stretched out to the horizon and threw himself to the ground in anticipation of the shockwave.

Guy would eventually find his way back to civilization and move on with his life. The threatened demotion of his social credit score had apparently not gone through and there were no visits from any authorities, corporate or otherwise.

Part 3

Assholes

Nosrit sat at Luc from Hellas’ right hand at a sleazy, loud bar just inside the protection wall surrounding Londbridge. Luc Eluskonios sat on the other side. Lights flashed blue and pink to the droning caterwaul of a rather bad trio of performers who went by the name In the Company of ‘Holes.

She looked at Luc, who winced at the cacaphony on the teetering dilapidated stage. Spun aluminum beer bottles lacked the impact of glass, merely bouncing off the edge of the stage and the chainlink fencing protecting the musical assailants from the audience. One lucky bastard managed to wedge a bottle neck first through the fencing were it hung like a mic pointed at the lead sleaze, Backstab Slob.

The drums were pounded without rhythm by a lanky, dark-haired junky and the guitar by a gaunt, deaf wraith.

“You know,” said Luc H. “These fuckers wanted to play at Skullfuck” (his club in Tesifon). “I wouldn’t let them.”

He stopped, as he tended to do. She knew he would continue later, in a minute, in an hour.

The band, if it could be called that, played.

…petty playground princess, queen of all the kids…

There were other lines, but the content was lost in the noise.

“They all have herpetic syphilis. I couldn’t have then anywhere near my clients.”

“…From sharing groupies between them. That’s why they’re all covered in those warts and pocks. Disgusting. Especially the singer, if he can be called that.”

The singer that Luc referred to was a grey-haired slouch who reclined in a sagging deck chair with a mic hanging over him as he mumbled the lines of the current song. He looked like he was being pressed by massive weights from above, like he should have been in an office somewhere shuffling, shoveling paper around until he keeled over, but here he was, behind a chainlink fence, protected from a hail of bottles, mumbling bad poetry at an unconvinced audience.

“They get their clothes from dumpsters,” added Luc E. “Or so I heard.”

Nosrit thought, that explains it, the look and the smell.

Over the pungent rank smell of stale beer and cigarettes, the funk of the band wafted cloyingly in the air.

“Covers up the sick-smell of the contagion.” Luc H was especially harsh tonight.

“You know, Nosrit, there was nothing you could have done about Puapolis. All you did was get the data. It just happened to be a coincidence that the accident occurred at that same moment.” Luc H looked like he was talking to his bottle, rather than her. Out of curiosity, he had looked into the bizarre nature of the events.

“Still, though,” his faint Mediterranean accent seemed more pronounced when he was drinking. She noticed this years ago when she was still a baby-hacker. “…despite the rather high—and I want to stress this—not your fault at all—death toll, it is still a win for us and a loss for the WCC. As I’ve been able to find out, Puapolis was the primary source for that chemical.

Nosrit was listening to him, but looking at the stage the way a bystander watches a land-vehicle accident. Metal and plastic and blood and bones.

In this case, however, it was irregular drums, pounded synth and mumbled vocals.

The alleged singer slouched under his weight. His dumpster shirt a light purple clashed obnoxiously with his light blue balloon pants. For some reason, unbeknownst even to him, the number 12 was embossed above the breast pocket. Spittle sprayed and glittered in the light as he mumbled at the mic.

“These guys are all assholes,” finished Luc. “Let’s get out of here.”

The End