The Transdyne Awakening, page 1
CONTENTS
The Pickup
The Drop
Outland
Jacob
The Way
Ahab
Toxout
Timecheck
In Another Land
Skye
Yuri
Whitney
Adam-son
The Waters Below
Alistaire
Caught
Ghost
Resurrection
Preparations
The Waiting
The Professional
Recce
Underzone
Aftermath
Outbound
Memorial
Kairos
Copyright
To Kathy,
who understands what it means to live in the moment.
“The unexamined life is not worth living.”
Socrates
THE PICKUP
The hydrant near the corner of Altram Avenue had burst.
In the mid afternoon sun it threw out a silver spray into which children ran shouting and laughing. Passing, he slowed the terraglide and watched their soaked antics. He remembered a time when Joey and he had been those same careless kids; caught in a moment when a broken hydrant was an invitation to a makeshift carnival. He wished he could join them and soak his own shirt. A skinny boy with a bucktoothed grin waved at him. The boy’s hand showed six fingers. He guessed he should have been used to that kind of thing by now, but he still shot a second glance. On the tinny terraglide pod they were singing something about the ‘heatwave in the megacity’. They’d got that right. Man, it was hot. He realised that he’d been trying to take his time. When you have to try, it’s not going to happen. Better stop fooling around and get on with it.
Altram was a particularly decayed part of the Citizone. Way out past the vast Transdyne Corporation factory complex, it was right on the ragged edge of things. 10238 was the number he was looking for and the huge permasteel door to the apartments was dark and weathered. He pushed ‘entry request’ on the wallmounted panel. There was no vox-res, but someone was waiting for him because the portal emitted a tired squeal and opened almost immediately.
It took a moment for his eyes to adjust to the gloom. The whole place spoke neglect as he checked the resblock numbers along the hall. The door at the end buzzed and a voice from inside said, “It’s open.”
The speaker came into focus. A big, unshaven man chewed on the remains of a cigar as he finished loading the large case on the bed. He wore dirty combat leggings and one of those oldtime Polibro issue vests.
The heavy odour of cigar smoke and stale sweat filled the dingy room.
“Don’t you ever open an airfen?” Clay grimaced.
The other man was intent on his counting and didn’t look up. “The stuff is all here - you wanna check?” he asked.
Clay looked at the neatly packed rows of merchandise and ran a finger over the edges, counting before he clicked the container shut. Usually he picked up direct from Ahab’s place, but when demand was running high overflow contacts like this came into play.
Outside, he threw the case up onto the passenger seat. Today’s wasn’t a heavy payload but it was worth a stack of credits. He settled into the cockpit and adjusted the jet noses of the aircon right up into his face. Time to drive, time to think. How had he got into this in the first place? He tried to recall. Some people whine about their tough childhoods. He hated hearing people drone on about the lousy hand life had dealt them. He’d never complained. His youthful enquiries into the laughing irony of the human condition had been met with a smile and a cliche; “Life’s a bitch - and then you die!” Even now he found that line darkly amusing, along with some of the other oldtime expressions his denfather had used.
They say you can take the boy out of the Tenacamps, but you can never take the Tenacamps out of the boy. Sure, he had come up the hard way, but then again he didn’t actually know many who hadn’t. The sweet life was for another breed; people he didn’t meet except in passing. He knew the other world existed, that it was real, but it was kind of like a parallel dimension. He wondered into which dimension Joey had disappeared. Often on a drop, he found himself in this other world, sitting on expensive furniture surrounded by those with the juice and the pull. Sometimes, when he caught a glimpse of himself in a reflectoglass, he felt like he had actually passed through the surface into a dream. He knew that once business was concluded, he would walk across the palatial room and out of that bubble into the real world, his world, once again.
THE DROP
Anodyne was hosting a party when he arrived. Synthetic soundsheets were pumping out of the wall systems everywhere. Conversation wasn’t a problem, despite the volume of sound. Trans could decipher speech patterns from your lip movements and their own built in lingual decoders. The whole scene took a lot of getting used to, but he’d learned to speak at a quiet, conversational level even when he couldn’t hear his own voice above the cacophony.
He’d never been comfortable with Trans. It was a reaction he had sometimes tried to analyze. They looked human all right; that wasn’t the source of his discomfort. They were just too human. All those perfectly proportioned bodies and beautiful faces, those languid, graceful movements and impeccable manners. They were just too ultra polite, always addressing him in measured, velvety tones of voice. He’d talked with designers from the Transdyne Corporation. They said that there was an area of human psychological response to their products that they called ‘the uncertainty’. Most people were at ease dealing with the droneclone types but found close proximity with synthetic highbreeds unsettling. For that reason the designers were constantly honing their repertoire of idiosyncracies in order to factor in what they called ‘perfect faults’. The main source of Clay’s unease was their eyes. It was just like staring into a dark reflectoglass. He’d learned to hide his dislike of them, but privately he’d tell you that they gave him major creeps.
On the basement level the pleasurepit was a mass of writhing bodies, some human, some synthetic. He could never get used to that either.
Trans participating in these extremes of sensuous activity? That stuff was just off his scanner frequency. He’d heard that the recreational merchandise he’d come to deliver had been in big demand even before the Great Crash. Apparently it stimulated human sexual appetites if taken in the right quantities. He still didn’t understand how it was such a big deal with these cyberdolls. Maybe the Transdyne programmers set them up for this stuff. Anyway, he told himself he wasn’t here to philosophize about it.
Anodyne was tugging gently at the case but Clay kept his grip.
He needed to see 18,000 ticks transferred before he was going to let go of the stock. He wasn’t worried by the Tran’s impatience, more slightly amused. He’d never had any trouble in all the time he’d been involved in this business. Any Tran must have known, in whatever excuse for a cyber ‘soul’ they possessed, the consequences of any mendacity in a business deal. Anodyne handed him the portable comp and he watched the countoff as the credits stacked up on the tiny screen. The sub frequency was known to both of them and he could see the readout in the top left corner.
So far this month it had remained undetected and the deals had gone along unhindered. In a couple of days it would be time to reassign the codes, before the government hacks figured things out. There was a gentle bleeping sound as the credits maxed up. Clay couldn’t hear it above the tumult of the soundsheets, but he saw the readout flash on and off as it totalled. Anodyne smiled one of those unnerving, Tran smiles.
“Thank you,” Clay said. He looked around him at the decadent elegance of the apartment as he retrieved the case and snapped it once again shut.
Back at his place, Clay took a Permaplast jar from the metal shelf and poured three fingers of dark liquid into a drinker. By contrast to the luxurious den where he had just been, this place wasn’t pretty. It was functional all right and a lot better than the Tenacamp where he had been raised. He couldn’t help comparing his present surroundings with the opulent apartments where the highbred Trans lived. Those inhuman things dwelt in the same sort of luxury as the overmen. Nothing made sense. He reached back and removed the bulky pulserod from its sheath in the rear middle of his belt. Still, he had walls around him and a roof over his head. The door on the dwelling separated him from the ratlife on the streets outside when he needed to be alone to eat and sleep.
He pushed a button to start a soundsheet playing gently from the wall system and threw himself on the somacot.
His collection of forbidden viewing and listening was considered pretty unusual, even among his fellow couriers. He gazed at the ceiling as the soundsheet began to gently echo around him. This one was really old but still on the state blacklist. He had access to all the usual entertainment including a huge stash of humanporn. These days, when he was on his own he preferred to turn off the viewscreen and listen to this stuff. The faded container read ‘Agape’. They employed instruments he had never heard elsewhere. He had seen underground phootage of these musicians strumming and plucking at bizarre looking constructions which had vibrating strings attached to them. The strings were often paired so that they resonated slightly differently. They produced a sound unlike anything he had ever heard on the Netgrid. There was a haunting beauty in the music. It spoke to him of something indescribable lost, yet there was also longing, an air of hope within it.
He thought back to his last meeting with Joey. That guy had certai
Clay remembered the first time they had met. Joey was probably a little younger than Clay, but he was sharp as a pulse beam. The younger man had taken him on his first drops and shown him how to play the game. In the sector where they had worked back then, some of the clients were seriously threatening. It was dangerous territory and the muscle these guys employed could be deadly.
Once he’d seen a client’s goon try to mess with Joey on a drop. Without hesitation Joey had pulled up a pulserod and crippled the man, not thirty feet away from his boss. He had just stepped over his prone, twitching victim and waited for the comp to finish calculating the transfer. As it bleeped he had picked it up, all the time smiling at the startled onlookers. No one stood in his way as they left.
Joey always closed.
For that reason, Ahab gave him a little more room for manoeuvre than other couriers. Even so, not collecting on those latter jobs must have stretched the very limited boundaries of Ahab’s patience. It had only been over those last few months that Joey had started to act strangely. He’d gotten kind of introspective and thoughtful. Once he had asked “What do you think happens to you when you die?”
It had taken Clay by surprise, but even as he was processing the question, Joey had changed the subject and shot off on another tangent. Another time he’d said, “There’s more to life than this, Clay, there’s definitely more to life than this.” At the time Clay had just laughed. What did that mean?
How could there be more to life? They were both out of the Tenacamps. Both had come through the same deprivation and hardship. There was always a razor thin line between hesitation and death in the areas where they had been raised. Now they had dens of their own, enough to eat and drink, terraglides and all the girls and gadgetry they wanted. All they had to do was play the game and do their jobs. As long as they made the drops and collected the dues, they were free and clear. Clay couldn’t think what more you could ask for. What more could there be? A better apartment maybe. He was pretty sure that Joey had been driving at something deeper. Clay wasn’t in the habit of doing much reflection. He smiled to himself as he remembered again his denfather’s words; “Life’s a bitch and then you die, kid!” ‘It is what it is,’ he thought. He was grateful for what he had.
It had been hard to adjust to Joey not being there. One day he just didn’t show up. In fact he hadn’t shown up for a few days. In this line of work it was healthier not to get into the habit of asking too many questions. Clay just went on about his routine drops and pickups, trying to act as though nothing had happened. He got the word from Ahab to cover on some uncollected deals. After that, he thought he knew pretty much what had gone down. You simply didn’t mess up on work you had been given by Ahab, not even if you were Joey. He wondered just what they would have done to him. His feelings surprised him. He was taken aback by how upset he was at the thought of Joey being hurt. He’d never been really close to anyone. There wasn’t much scope for friendship in the Tenacamps.
He turned it over and over in his head. Maybe Joey and he had actually become friends. They’d certainly shared some good times. As couriers it was wiser not to mess with the merchandise and neither of them had been users on any level. Apart from the odd binge on loonjuice they were both pretty straight. It was in those afterhours spent together that Joey had begun to talk to Clay about his thoughts, his views on life and all.
Joey had spent a lot more time in studylearn than he had. He’d taken in a pretty wide sweep. If he had been on the upside Joey could easily have gone to one of the State Academies. Somehow, Clay couldn’t envisage Joey jumping through their carefully contrived hoops and parroting the sort of stuff required to get a societally accepted business rating. Joey was more interested in other areas of thought. He called them ‘Science’ or ‘Philosophy’. He could get quite animated when he spoke about ‘Theology’ or ‘Religion’. Clay wasn’t too familiar with the terms, but he was pretty sure they would have been thought zones considered off limits for most citizens. There were strict codes governing human thought, behaviour and interaction. Ordinary citizens were not supposed to involve themselves in certain studylearn areas.
Clay had never even been to the elementary Government Compracamps. As soon as he was able he’d taken the opportunity his denfather had arranged and gone to work for Ahab. He’d heard from others a little of what they taught you at the Compracamps. Along with letters and numbers they instilled conformity to the social codes and respect for the prevailing order. Private thought or reflection was discouraged. Most of the time was spent in enforced social groups. Tutorlearn took up most of the day in bright, crowded rooms where you were taught acceptable behaviour and responses to life situations. You practiced nontouch and never looked directly at another for too long.
Joey, on the other hand, had always looked directly at a person when he was addressing them. That was probably one of the reasons most citizens who had been to state Compracamps found him such an intimidating presence. Clay had seen very big men lower their eyes and back away from Joey when he spoke to them. He told himself that episode was over and he had to try to forget. He needed to rest. Two drinks later he was asleep.
OUTLAND
There was a heat haze shimmering on the deserted throughway. It looked like white fire, obliterating the horizon line. The aircon was flat out but he was still sweating. It ran down his back as he steered the terraglide out of the megazone into the outlands. Just below him, along the main drag, moss had grown thick on the bricked up offramps and exits. He could have switched to autonav but he liked to travel on manual. Not many people did that routinely any more, but he liked the feeling of controlling his own journey.
Much of the outland had been designated as forbidden zones. The state called it ‘re-wilding’. They told people that these areas had been isolated for the protection of rare species of endangered plants or animals. Clay knew better. Most people did. These regulations had been steps along the way to herding people into the megacities. If the population could be crowded into urban spaces they were much easier to control. After all, it was expensive and troublesome for the state authorities to send crews of Polibros into the outzones to quell troublesome lowbreeds. Much easier to pack them all in like those little sardine fish he’d seen as a child.
He remembered one of the oldtime phrases about ‘shooting fish in a barrel’. Yes, easier to shoot fish in a barrel. They were all r.f.i.d. chipped too. Personal data from birth date to current tick credit status was on those things. The authorities could track them, wherever they were, just by zoning in on their hand or head chip. Clay didn’t have a chip. He’d gone ‘under’ as soon as he was able. Unlike the rest of the lower orders, Clay and his fellows operated outside of the bubble most thought of as urban civil society. Another one of his denfather’s sayings ran; ‘Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely.’ He thought that pretty much summed up the world he had come into. The thing about corrupt state power, he reflected, is that it usually wants to appear uncorrupted. Behind the facade, it employs and deals with those it has officially outlawed.
Ahab was a case in point. Powerfully connected and well informed, he had dirt on all the key political monkeys. They could strut and make speeches about reform and righteousness in public, but in order to maintain their ruthless control they used the Ahabs of this world. He could get certain things done efficiently, as long as those creeps cut him enough of the pie to keep him happy and quiet.
Clay remembered a timepiece he had seen in Ahab’s private collection of ancient machinery. Ahab had told him it was called a clock. He thought the State was just like that old timepiece. The hands of the clock had moved smoothly over its beautiful white face. From number to number, around and gracefully around they travelled, indicating what used to be known as minutes of day or night in old time. He had stood before that timepiece for a long while. Noticing his fascination, Ahab had opened up the casing to show him the interior mechanism. Clay was enthralled by the intricate clockwork. Out of sight behind the clock face, all that complex, delicate machinery was in constant motion: cogs turning wheels. If he had never been shown, he could never have envisaged just what was going on beneath that beautiful fascia and that quiet, ordered ticking. Behind their rhetoric and posturing, the overlords and their politicos turned a blind eye to the very existence of people like Ahab, and hence people like Clay who worked for him. They could deny any involvement as loudly as they wished to those they had managed to dupe. In reality, they were as joined as that clock face was to the mechanism it concealed.
