by Ignatius Reilly
Caleb pushed open the rusted steel door to the room and peered inside. It was just bigger than a broom closet with concrete walls, floors and ceilings. A bank of five monitors lined the center of the far wall. Two rows; three monitors in the first, two in the second. A small plastic chair sat in the middle of the room facing the monitors. Bare fluorescents hung overhead, flickering slightly, casting the entire room in an unhealthy yellow pallor. The room had a faintly musty odor like all the rooms and tunnels in the Undercity, but appeared dry and clear of dust.
Confident no one else was present, he quickly entered and shut the door behind him. A thick steel dead-bolt - as rusted as the door - was attached to the steel door frame. The lock slid with difficulty through the sleeve when he pushed on it, effectively locking him in. Caleb wasn’t the least bit concerned that he was trapped in a room nearly a mile deep under the city. It was just a part of the job one got used to.
Caleb’s slim external went dark the moment he stepped into the chamber. A yellow warning sign, a hollow triangle wrapping an exclamation point, blinked in the lower-right corner of the lense, telling him he was off the city grid. Every few seconds it would try to connect and flash yellow again when it failed to find a signal. He knew it was a lost cause, not only was the room well below ground and encased in concrete but there was probably anti-grid mesh buried in the walls. It didn’t matter, his connection to the grid had been spotty ever since entering the Undercity. He didn’t need to be connected to give his report.
The journey through the labyrinthine Undercity had been harrowing. The worker’s that lived their entire lives under the fluorescents, engulfed in the constant thrum of machinery, had been unaware of his presence. Given how they had no idea that a whole world - teeming with millions of people - existed above their heads, it was all for the best. He had prepared a cover story in case he was caught but it would have come off weak given his clothing: polysteel-toed boots, new black synth-leather pants, and a button-up red polymer shirt, whole and unpatched unlike the threadbare synthetic clothing worn by the workers on this level. That alone would have been enough to bury him, let alone his external and other devices, like the Hasting’s pulse pistol he kept holstered under his jacket. But he was nothing if not silent and good at hiding in plain sight. That was half the reason he’d been picked for this job.
A slight hum preceded the monitors blinking to life. Someone was aware of his presence. He took a step closer to the bank of monitors and waited. Four of the five lit up with a dark silhouette, head and shoulders of the person on the other end. The fifth stayed completely off with no signs of life. Interesting, though Caleb. So, someone couldn’t make it.
He’d been hired through a series of agents, each one more shady than the last. This would be the first (and if he gave them what they wanted, the last) meeting with his employers. He’d had his suspicions about his employers for some time. This helped confirm a few of them. Four of the Five Families had hired him to find some information.
But what? he thought. What I was asked to research is mostly common knowledge. What are they really after?
The images of the four persons on the other side of the screen were darkened and blurred to the point that they were nothing more than asexual blobs. He flipped his external to record anyway, just in case one of them said something he could use later. It always paid to have information cached and ready in the event one found a buyer. They might be his employers but he didn’t feel a high degree of loyalty. Then again, he almost never did. Once the credits hit his account, all that mattered was finding that next job.
A speaker mounted in the upper-left monitor crackled. “Please sit Mr. Parsons,“ said dark figure on the other side. The voice was filtered and distorted beyond recognition, barely discernible. Another trick to hide their identities but Caleb figured he could eventually crack that. There were transcode algorithms that could break through voice distortion, providing he had enough time and hardware.
Not that their identities were a complete mystery. These were obviously representatives of four of the Five Families, the corporate heads that controlled Portland. But why not the fifth? he thought. That made figuring out which four they were a tad more difficult but he didn’t think it was a strategy targeted at him - the fifth member was obviously being left out for a reason.
He made to sit in the black plastic chair. It was small and hard, thrust up on aluminum legs like the ugly, uncomfortable carapace of a cockroach. You’d think the founding families could afford something with better back support, he smiled to himself.
“And lose the external,“ the voice added. “We’d like to see your eyes while we chat.”
Not likely, Caleb thought. But he complied as he sat, casually removing his external and slipping it into the chest pocket of his overcoat. He made sure one lense still pointed outwards, uncovered, towards the monitors. It would continue to record while they conversed. He doubted it would work, they probably had enough distortion on the signal to disrupt recording, but it was worth a shot.
“We take it that you have completed your assignment Mr. Parsons,“ continued the voice.
I wouldn’t have reached out if I hadn’t, thought Caleb but he responded, “I have. And I trust you have my credits?”
“Assuming you have the information we asked for,” answered the voice, “they will be moved into your account when you leave here.”
“I wouldn’t mind checking to see they are there first,” countered Caleb. A weak ploy, he mused. But let them think I’m just after the credits. Maybe they’ll slip up and give me something to work with.
“You’ll see your credits when we have our data Mr. Parsons and not a moment sooner,” the voice responded curtly, the tone evident despite the distortion. “Our agents assured us that you understood the terms of our arrangement. We hope you are not reneging on your contract.” The last sounded almost like a threat, even through the distortion.
Caleb let it hang in the air a moment before answering. “No, I keep my word. Our agreement, and contract, still holds.”
“Then give us your report. Leave nothing out, even if you feel it is of little significance. We will decide what is important.”
Caleb settled back a bit in the ugly little chair. It dug uncomfortably into his back but he smiled inside. This is what he’d been waiting for. A chance to meet his employers, give his report (as mundane as it seemed to him), and maybe learn a little something to help him earn some extra credits down the road.
“If you don’t mind, I’ll walk you through through the various levels of the dome I find it helps my memory if I revisit where I’ve been sent.”
A slight pause on the other side. “Proceed.”
“Well, as you probably know…”
Caleb began to recite a well-memorized speech. This was his own personal mnemonic; his own version of a memory palace. He wound the details of the job throughout the layers of the dome, Portland’s unique society interweaving with his own memories. He unfurled the story of the dome from the bottom up, through layers of wage-slavery and victimization and casual violence.
From the thundering machines of the Undercity with its ant-like workers who have long-forgotten why they continue to care and feed for these gnashing, hissing metal masters. With designations like Omega-Z302 and Alpha-G543, they were born to work from the time they could lift a wrench. Generations of inbreeding has blurred any ancestral claim to race and even dulled the differences between the sexes. Now it seems only the fading colors on their patchwork and stained overalls - designating their work sectors - set them apart. Electricity, sewage, recycling, and water-reclamation were among the few necessities their machine gods controlled. If those drones ever awoke to what they were and who their true masters were, Caleb could barely imagine the havoc they could wreak on the bowels of their dome city.
Caleb wove his story through the canyon-sized corridors and warehouses of Distribution, dotted by security bots and drones in two-by-two patrols. Thousands of meters of white and gray polysteel corridors crisscrossed at every elevation, linking warehouses to lorrie docks and lifts to the upper levels, broken only by conduits carrying sewage, water, or electricity. A person living off the grid - a true ghost - could get lost in Distribution and die of thirst and starvation before ever finding an exit. That is if security bots didn’t first find them and execute them for their intrusion.
His story continued up through the human detritus populating Buckman and the drab proles of Albina. The poor souls in Level One living perpetually underground in their claustrophobic apartments, with only artificial lighting overhead; fighting over cheap bottles of Eto and numbing tea, victimizing each other for a handful of credits. Their homes were constantly under threat of being demolished and pushed further under by the levels above. And those in Buckman were still further persecuted by their own police force, the infamous Level One Authority. The L1A being nothing more than thugs in riot gear and carrying pulse rifles. More likely to rob you for your credits as you lay dying then to call in an ambulance.
Caleb spoke more, his memory born through to the above-ground in Central City and its puppet government, where the weak light of the sun finally broke through the polymer dome. There the political trappings of the old world still hung like aging propaganda posters, nailed up by a city government so weak that it may have well not existed at all. Its only purpose now was to provide jobs to tens of thousands of bureaucrats and corporate lawyers, whose sole function was to uphold rules and regulations written long ago by the elite who funded this vertical city.
On this level a verdigris patina ravaged the old Portlandia statue, worked from copper in repoussé, the glorious old lady still watches over it all with a disapproving glare. Once mounted on an old city municipal building, she has long been transplanted to a concrete park. Now her outstretched hand reached downwards only a few feet from the city level deck below. Perhaps to pull her fellow man up from the hell of Level One, perhaps to hold them there in perpetuity.
Next came Irvington, the last section of Level One, where the bureaucrats and government officials and lawyers made their home. Newly-minted condominiums and apartments two to three times the size of those in Albina with plush amenities paid for from corporate salaries. Tea-houses that played light classical music and Eto bars that sell nothing but the finest liquors from the finest distilleries. Here the well-off of Level One gather and converse about their place in the social order. At punchbowl socials and masquerade parties they try and work their social status to gain even more personal power and credits. But even flagrant lifestyle of these nouveau riche of Irvington paled in comparison to the truly wealthy.
Caleb’s mnemonic narrative swept past the no-mans land that ringed the dome interior and up ten thousand meters to Level Two, where - if not for his specialized skills - a man of Caleb’s station would normally never be allowed. Lavish mansions and replica beach houses, sleek aircars large enough to hold a dozen tea-headed socialites, and gold-plated statues of men and women long-dead but revered by the rich for their capitalist foresight and aggressive dominion over their fellow man. They made the dome - they saved the world from an eco-disaster they themselves wrought - and so were cast immortal in enough gold to feed the entire population of Buckman. Here the heirs to their empire spent long nights at dance clubs drinking flavored Eto and black-market teas. The credits flowed up from below in a flood and there funded a lifestyle unheard of in the densely packed levels below.
Onwards then and upwards past silent amusement parks, the verdant, empty woodlands, and the monumental full-scale replicas of the old world that the lords of this place built at the highest level of the dome, Level Three. Red-stone pyramids and tall towers. Stone coliseums and colossal statues. Floating islands on manufactured clouds bejeweled by forgotten, rotting silken pavilions. All unseen and unheard of by the masses below. Even Caleb entered these places quietly and illegally. On this isolated, private level one misstep meant an ignominious death at the end of a security drone’s segmented tentacles.
He wisely glossed over the last piece, only hinting at what was whispered at among the elite in Irvington. Caleb knew the reality behind the wealth and excess of that highest place could never be allowed to trickle down to the masses below. Even a suspicion that he knew more than rumor would end him, too, job or no. These new gods, those that lived high in the dome, jealously (and wisely perhaps) guarded their secrets and their station.
But, even there in that hidden place, Caleb had placed memories that he now needed. He laid them out like puzzle pieces and, by the end, a complex picture came together for his employers. The dome city they controlled had been navigated and observed and that information relayed. To Caleb, this was nothing more than they could have gotten from their own spies and informants. Even from the digital recordings of drones that they undoubtedly could tap on demand. But he was nothing if not discreet. No reason to set them on edge by asking questions he wouldn’t receive answers to.
So there he finished his tour of the dome. He had laid bare the levels and the people therein and their daily toils. The men and women these four members of the corporate elite controlled so thoroughly even if the proles were unaware of it. Because if you controlled the dome, you controlled the food and the water, the teas and the Eto. Your media outlets controlled the messages and vids you relayed to your subjects. Your bureaucrats determined who could be licensed to breed and who could not. Your pocket politicians ran for office in the empty elections that dictated who would rule over the levels below you. Like the pre-Enclosure gods of old, you controlled life and death in more ways than anyone bowing under your foul auspices ever imagined.
But, was that the whole truth or a well-maintained illusion? Caleb might have thought the former once, before he began his grand tour of the dome. Now he wasn’t so sure. He had heard whispered questions at the dining halls of the Undercity workers, subjects once forbidden were being openly - if not quietly - discussed. How did their ancestors come to be here? Where did their water and food come from? What was above the machines, where the pipes and conduits ran through the ceilings only to carry water and electricity upwards? It seemed those men and women, so much alike, were not mere flesh and blood drones after all.
In Buckman, he had seen a gang of mercs calling themselves “dragons” after some mythical beast - tattooed street-toughs in polysteel polyleather boots carrying plasma pistols and lightblades - save a homeless woman from a sadistic L1A patrol. There he had seen a small boy elevated from orphan to oracle, with a whole borough following him like the saints of old. Peace and kindness and compassion had flowed from the boy like a conduit, so much so that even Caleb was almost swayed. Almost. But even he could not deny the light in the boys eyes when they had spoken nor the good deeds his followers wrought in that wasted level.
Albina had held it’s own surprises. There he had been invited to eat with a prole family so poor, it had pained him to take from their table. But the laughter and warmth emanating from their small apartment was so infectious, Caleb had laughed out loud for the first time in years, deep and honest and not limned with motive. They had let him sleep on the floor in their common room where he had stayed awake for hours listening to the nighttime peace and quiet of their little home. He had slipped out in the early morning hours before they awoke but the feelings their show of generosity had awakened stayed with him for days afterwards.
He’d traveled through Central City quickly with his forged ident card, expecting at any time to run afoul of their police force who were well-known sticklers for rules enforcement. And though he was being especially careful, he was almost caught by a foot patrol in the same park that housed the green-skinned Portlandia. As they closed in on him, a cabbie had spotted his trouble and, waving him quickly into his sky cab, flew Caleb off before he was captured. The man, Wu by name, had risked everything to save a man whose crime could have been murder for all he knew. He’d simply done it because he hated the rigid, bureaucratic authority that enveloped everyday life in Central City. Caleb had tipped him well for it.
And even in Level Two, a soulless level normally bereft of any true human interaction beyond empty vanity, Caleb had met a middle aged woman who spent her evenings not at one of the hundred of raves or teahouses across that level, but who, instead, descended into the lowest levels of Buckman to do charity work in the hospices there. She had been the most unassuming person he had ever met. So much so he had already forgotten her name but not the gentle tone of her voice when she spoke of her work in the Buckman.
These things Caleb did not relay to his employers - they were his stories, not theirs and would add nothing to his report. Instead he watched closely as he wrapped up. The figures on the screen shifted a bit, blurred images barely registering the movement. It was quiet for a minute or more. Caleb waited patiently.
“Thank you Mr. Parsons.” spoke the figure in the upper-left again. “Your credits will be in your account by the time you leave this room.”
Caleb frowned inside. That’s it then, huh? He hadn’t really learned anything new about his - now former - employers. But that was okay. He’d been paid and he knew a bit more about them just from this interaction. And he could always pore over his external footage later and see if anything stood out.
He stood up to leave. One of the figures sneezed twice, rapidly. The sound and video remained distorted but Caleb could see who sneezed by their reflexive movement. The person in the lower row, right-side jerked their head twice. Even through the distortion, Caleb heard how high-pitched and horn-like the sound was. A decent tell for him to try and spot later.
Smiling inside he swept his external out of his outer pocket and put it in place. Maybe he’d end up getting a bonus out of this job after all.
“Thank you gentlemen and/or gentlewomen.” Caleb said bowing slightly towards the monitor. “This has been a most lucrative venture. Well, for me at…”
All four monitors went dark at once.
“...least.”
Caleb shrugged at their impatient snub and headed towards the door. It was a long trek out of the Undercity to Distribution and above. Then off to Distribution where he’d stop and visit an old friend for a bit. He had plenty of time before he was due in Albina for dinner.
He was grinning merrily as the door swung shut behind him.
[The story of Caleb will continue in Selena]
© 2014 Spider House Games, LLC