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Post by mic on Nov 22, 2019 7:47:31 GMT -6
Ford's Escape: Prologue
Following PP2’s advice, here are a couple of paragraphs that would not appear in the final text submitted to Amazon for publication. The title of this book isn’t the final (thus far) version either. You can skip the rest of this prologue if you want. It is mostly here to confound Amazon’s bots.
As mentioned earlier, this story is a bit of a departure from the norm for PAW fiction. It set several generations in the future, so “their world” isn’t this one, in the same sense that “our world” is not Benjamin Franklin’s world. What Ben would do in a given situation is not necessarily what we would do and vice versa.
The impetus for this story came years ago but was a back burner notion. As I started to flesh out the story, there were many opportunities to meld in contemporary issues with an eye toward, “If we keep doing X, what might that become?”
All that aside, I do appreciate your comments and feedback as I develop this story.
First Chapter — Part 1 Ford acted as if he had not noticed Ada sitting on the park bench. He could only see the back of her head and shoulders. The longer curl of hair, below the edge of her short haircut, was unmistakable. Her bench sat at the end of the Women’s Park that filled the commerce-level roof deck between apartment buildings number four and six. Even though he and Ada had arranged several of these surreptitious non-meetings without getting caught, Ford’s hands felt cold again. Contact between men and women was illegal – even with the lower classes of women like Tenders and Carriers. Ford had a fairly comfortable life. The Matri (the ruling class of women who ran The City) provided his education, his job, housing, food, clothing, healthcare: everything, actually. He was risking all of that, and yet he was not entirely sure why. Were a few illegal words really worth the risk? He glanced, as casually as he could, at the faces of all men in the Men’s Park. Were any of them showing any interest in his movements? It did not seem so. He deliberately kept the center of his visor’s view trained on trivial things within the Men’s Park, nestled between Building Three and Building Five. As a child, it never bothered him to know that someone was monitoring everything he looked at. His teachers always said it was for his own safety. To a child, safety is golden. As a young man, he began to resent the intrusion even when he followed all the rules. After discovering Ada, he resented the intrusion intensely. Ford was careful to look at anything other than Ada. A scraggly tree in a concrete planter was safe to look at, as were two men seated on benches sipping on bottles of water. Several men ambled aimlessly in different directions across the concrete roof deck. Maybe no one was monitoring what he was looking at. Perhaps they were. Why is the park so full of people today? Mondays were usually quiet: not this one. Citizens often preferred to stay indoors, to eat, sleep, or entertain themselves. Whether it was the summer sun or some sudden, shared impulse to shuffle and slouch someplace other than in their dreary apartments, the result was the same – too many people for Ford’s liking. The crowd was actually both a plus and a pain. The extra men complicated his talking with Ada, but they also made it easier for him to look inconspicuous among them. One such person-in-the-way was a man in rumpled gray overalls and unruly hair who sat listlessly on the men’s-side bench that backed up to the tall pipe fence. Ada sat on the other side. Ford sat on the edge of a concrete planter to wait. He stared into the middle distance, bobbing his head slightly, pretending that he was listening to music. In reality, he could hear only a faint buzzing from his visor’s earpieces. He had intentionally misaligned the audio stems to eliminate the constant audio feeds playing through his visor. The sounds of birds, or wind, or even footsteps scraping on concrete had become much more fascinating to him. They were real. When the rumpled man finally walked away, Ford strolled over to the bench, looking as disinterested as he could, keeping his gaze to one side. He sat almost directly behind Ada. Streaks of rust mottled the many layers of gray paint on the steel pipes that separated the Men's Park from the Women's Park. The fence, with its back-to-back benches, was the only spot where the two parks touched. Someone told him that years ago, long before he was born, there used to be only one long park between the concrete apartment blocks. Some crisis or scandal that no one would discuss caused the pipe barriers to be installed, creating two separate parks. That crisis might have been why it was illegal for men and women to talk. Given how important city leaders regarded the separation laws, it mystified Ford that the authorities allowed some Men’s and Women’s parks to be so close to each other. He was glad the parks did touch, as it made clandestine conversations with Ada possible. There was always the thought that the proximity was a trap for those who failed Awareness Training or were "too weak" to live up to The Rule of Proper Separation. Whether trap or test, he could not afford to let his guard down. The stakes were much higher now. He did not want Ada to get into trouble. Ada sat, bent forward, with her head in her hands. She was not wearing her visor. Ford adjusted his own visor before taking it off. The displays on the inside of the glass jumped before disappearing. The rim of his visor flashed red. A gentle voice said, "Your visor is not positioned correctly. Please adjust your visor. Your visor is not…" Ford stuffed his visor into a reflective mylar bag to prevent it from sending an alert to the server. He bent over, his face toward the ground. He massaged his temples as if discomfort was the reason he took it off. “You haven’t been in Hall of Heroes for three days,” Ford said quietly. He kept his face toward the pavement so the cameras on the buildings could not see his lips moving. “My account is suspended for at least a week,” Ada whispered back. “Why? Do they suspect?” Ford replied. “I don’t think so. It’s just my floor supervisor. She’s making trouble for me in any way she can." Ford half turned to steal a peripheral vision glance at her little curl of brown hair. “I really miss talking to you,” he said. His emotions in the past two months had confounded and confused him. He knew he should be afraid of her, not attracted. His teachers had always told him that men and women had to live separately because women were dangerous, like high voltage. Ford asked his teachers why. The older ones, who may have heard whispered stories about the times before The Cleansing, would look around nervously before reciting official answers. None would offer an actual reason why women were dangerous: only that they were. “They could get you killed,” one of his teachers used to say with such zeal that his jowls quivered every time he said it. They would all repeat that The Rule of Separation was for everyone’s safety. Even as a youngster, Ford could tell that they were not sharing the real reason. Ada seemed fragile and friendly, not at all dangerous. He was not sure what exactly he felt, but he knew that he missed their secret messages back and forth as her wraith character and his ice-troll pretended to battle the Armies of Hate together in Hall of Heroes. He thought about her often during his day. At times, it seemed like Ada was the only other conscious person in the entire city. “I miss you too,” Ada said, almost too softly to hear. “It’s too crowded here. I’d better go. Let’s do Wednesday. Same time, Equality Park? There’s a women’s bench near the street. You could pretend to be walking by.” She stood up and smoothed out the wrinkles in her baggy pale-blue pantsuit: Tender clothing. “Wednesday,” repeated Ford. “Equality Park.” Out of the corner of his eye, he could see Ada take her visor out of a bag and put it on. There could be no more talking. He felt a sinking sadness as she slowly walked away. His own visor beeped louder and louder within the mylar bag. He took out the curved glass visor and nestled the plastic earpieces on his ears until he felt the little magnets snick onto the chip beneath the skin of his right temple. The beeping stopped. Numbers appeared in the corners of his vision. The face of what Ford had named The Wellness Bot appeared onscreen. Ford expected him. He knew that the faint buzzing from the misaligned audio stems was the Wellness Bot nagging him not to take off his visor because of the many health risks. “The visors are for our own good,” the bot always said. “We must wear our visors at all times.” The bots wore visors too, to set a good example. Ford heaved a sigh and leaned back in the bench, adopting a slouch similar to the man who sat there before him. He could not leave too soon after Ada without inviting suspicion. He pretended to have other things on his mind by asking his visor for the nearest supply store that had red-sauce meals in stock. He asked about his account balance and (just for random effect) how hot solar panels got in the full sun. Images and charts scrolled into view in his visor. It did not matter to him how hot solar panels got. He figured that searching for random facts helped maintain a level of data noise in his records. Avoid patterns. On his way out of the park, Ford noticed a bald man hunched over on a corner bench. The skin of the man’s head had peculiar light and dark blotches. What little hair the man retained was thin, wiry, and white. The bald man cried silently: his face buried in gnarled hands whose skin was so thin you could see the dark blue veins. Ford stopped and stared. This was the first person he had seen crying since he was a boy. Everyone in The City was calm and unfazed. This was also the oldest man Ford had ever seen – in person – in all his twenty years of life. He must be a Gen Z, Ford thought, in awe. I didn't know there were any of them left. The realization that the bald man might have lived during The Dark Time sent a shiver down his back. What horrors did he see? Is that why he’s crying? “Are you okay?” Ford asked. He moved toward the man to ask what might be wrong, or perhaps console him. Before he reached the crying old man, his visor began to display a rapid series of video images. Men in long coats and pans on their heads climbed out of a hole in the ground and ran across uneven terrain. They carried long guns. Explosions threw earth up in all directions. Some of the men fell, their mangled bodies draped over coils of barbed wire. In another video, a line of skulls stared at him with empty eyes. Ford stood motionless, paralyzed by the images on his visor. The words of his second-grade teacher echoed up from his memory, like a voice from the bottom of a stairwell. "Before The Triumph, The Haters savagely killed one another every day.” Another video showed a young woman sitting in an ancient automobile. She smiled at a young man standing nearby. Angry men surrounded the car and shot them both. His teacher’s voice continued. “The Haters destroyed youth and joy wherever they found it.” The video showed dozens of shots being fired. Spots of blood appeared all over the woman as her body shook from the bullet impacts. The fact that the Haters shot holes in the car had bothered Ford when he first saw the footage as a young boy. How could men hate so much that they tried to kill something that was not even alive? It made no sense. Another video took over. A swarm of young men surrounded an absurdly large red truck. They pulled a man out the red truck, beat him, and danced over his fallen body. One of The Haters even tried to smash the truck man’s head with a brick. Blood. People ran through trash-cluttered streets. Some of them shouted and waved large knives in the air. Others threw rocks, fired guns, broke windows, and set fires. Buildings burned beneath plumes of black smoke. Bodies lay crumpled in the street. Blood pooled amid the litter. Such was a typical day in the era of The Haters, his teachers told him. He had not seen those images since he was a boy. Ford could feel his heart racing and his breathing becoming fast and shallow just as it had when he had first seen the images in school. He felt like a frightened little boy who wanted to run and hide, but he had no idea where to run. How could men hate so much? The old man’s sobs caught his attention again. Ford looked through the video images to focus on the old man. Was he reliving those terrible times? How awful it must have been to have lived through all of that. Every day you could be chased, beaten, and killed. Ford turned away, leaving the old man to cry alone. He felt guilty about not being able to console the man, but how could he? The awful deeds of the past could never be undone. Why did I get those videos? I didn’t ask for them. Ford replayed his actions. Could the old man have triggered them? How did he do that? To quell his own feelings of fear and panic rekindled by the images, Ford summoned up a defensive line of thought he had developed as a boy. Who built the red truck? It had occurred to his second-grade self that everyone could not have been a Hater. Some people were not destroying things; they were making things – like the red truck. To combat the images of hate, he thought about The Makers. His visor interrupted his chaotic thoughts. “It is almost time for supper. Store Fifty-One has red-sauce meals in stock. Only 1.65 Shares for 250 grams! It is only six minutes away from your present location.” A map appeared on his visor with a green arrow pointing the way. Ford jumped at the chance to think about something else. The task of finding the store was a welcome distraction. As he walked, his visor played informative videos about how delicious and healthy red-sauce meals were — made from ethically-created food on The City’s scientific farms. The video praised him for how smart he was for choosing red-sauce meals. Store Fifty-One was not crowded. Walking up and down the aisles of mostly-empty shelves provided Ford a quiet place to let his heart rate and breathing settle down. Text appeared on his visor to identify the products on the shelves even if the shelves were empty. Labels for brown-sauce, white-sauce, and yellow-sauce meals floated over empty spaces. He found the stack of red-sauce boxes and took the top one. Several men, roughly his own age, stood in line ahead of him, each was awaiting their turn at the exit hoop. They all wore the same light gray overalls that Ford wore: worker clothes. Ford held his box up at chest level as he walked through the hoop. His visor displayed his new account balance after his purchase. A video came on his visor extolling the virtues of hard work and healthy food. The images showed three young men in short-sleeved gray overalls smiling as they finished their red-sauce meals. They then carried lengths of pipe on their shoulders. Muscular arms stacked the pipes onto a flat-truck. They smiled at the camera as the truck pulled away. “Your hard work makes GranNor prosperous for all!” said the voice. Ford shook his head as he walked down the long concourse toward his building. That’s dumb. Men don’t load pipes. Lift trucks do that. And, those pipes wouldn’t stay on that truck. No one locked them down. Promo videos are stupid, he thought. He also scoffed at hearing the name GranNor. It sounded pompous when anyone other than city officials used its actual name. Everyone else just referred to it as The City. The walk up the five flights of stairs to his floor set Ford to grumbling. He would only have to walk back down them in an hour or so when he had to go to work. Nonetheless, he needed the opportunity to check his rooftop garden and refill his water bottles. At his apartment’s little round table sat Ford’s roommate. Ford called him Ninn since his ID number ended in a nine. Ninn never acknowledged the name, nor did he call Ford, Ford. For efficiency’s sake, everyone had a number. Someone in his first-grade class called him Forty since his own ID number ended in 40. He dropped the cutesy y-ending to make “Ford.” It had more dignity. He liked having a name, so he kept it. He had given Ada her name. Her number ended in 81. Ayde-won was quickly shortened to just Ada. She liked having a name too. “How’s it going, Ninn?” Ford did not wait for a reply. Ninn did not look up from his meal box. Ninn seldom spoke. Other than going to work, Ninn seldom moved either. That was why Ninn preferred the subscription meal deliveries. Ford saved a little of his pay by picking up meals from the store. Ford put his red-sauce meal in the meal warmer. The heater unit read the codes embedded within the box and automatically set the temperature and timer. He had five minutes and fifty seconds. He took two water bottles from the cabinet and held them out so Ninn (and his own visor) could see them. “I sure got thirsty today, Ninn. I will need twice as much water for my shift tonight.” Ninn continued to poke absentmindedly at the half-eaten brown disk in his meal box. His head bobbed subtly to music in his visor. Ford smiled as he turned toward the door. He knew Ninn was not listening. Ford said what he said for the algorithms that were listening, more than he had for Ninn. An advantage to having his apartment on the fifth floor was that the elevator core’s roof was just one more flight of stairs up. Ford pushed through the heavy steel door and stepped onto the flat, pea-gravel roof. He took a deep breath of fresh, hot air. The heat was real. The sanitized, filtered, and conditioned air in all of the buildings had a tasteless quality to it. Along the wall of the elevator mechanical housing, Ford had placed several planter boxes with edible plants he had discovered in park planters and relocated to his roof garden. He pulled off a ripe blackberry from his single cane and popped it in his mouth. The juice was warm but sweet. He brushed his hand over a clump of oregano and a spray of chives. He rubbed a basil leaf between his fingers and breathed in the sweet musky smell. He let out a slow, satisfied sigh. Ford had never noticed the world of smells until he stopped drinking the bottled water supplied by The City. He stopped a year ago out of rebellion, mostly. All of the nagging auto-reminders and lectures by Wellness Bot to drink his three bottles a day rankled him. Why was his water intake any of their business? He vowed to spite them. He would drink none of their bottled water. He tried drinking tap water, but it tasted very bitter and gave him painful cramps. Ford theorized that they put something terrible tasting in the tap water to ensure that people drank the bottled water. Tap water was too predictable as an alternative to the rebellious – like himself – or the lazy, like Ninn. Rainwater running down his window one day gave Ford the idea for a solution. He started a rooftop garden as a plausible cover. The roof of the elevator mechanical shed provided a good supply of rainwater from its downspout. It was only a week after drinking just rainwater that Ford noticed that nearly everything had a smell: wood, soil, rusty steel, even concrete. He had no way to test his theory, but Ford wondered if city administrators infused the bottled water with something that dulled the senses. Perhaps the infusion also dulled people’s ambition or zeal for anything. It certainly seemed like everyone in his building, everyone at his job — indeed, everyone he ever met, except Ada — seemed mildly content, easily satisfied, and slightly insipid. Ford made sure that the center of his vision was on his herbs or at the sky as he twisted off the caps of the water bottles and poured their city water onto the gravel roof. With his fingers, he felt for the little rubber hose at the bottom of his rain barrel. He filled one bottle, then the other. Up on the roof, the prospect seemed slim that cameras were seeing his sleight of hand. The real danger was his own visor, transmitting whatever he looked at. None of his quarterly status reports had ever mentioned his little rooftop garden. Wellness Bot had admonished him for his attempts to drink tap water and taking his visor off too much but never anything about his garden. Ford had to assume they knew about his herb garden since he looked directly at it with his visor. With four-hundred million people living in The City to monitor, maybe it was too trivial to fuss over. His little herbs were not disturbing the orderly business of The City, after all. His rainwater tended to have a slightly earthy flavor. Several months ago, he developed intestinal cramps and a fever. The pains were not the same as what the tap water caused. He suspected there was something in his rainwater that might be the cause, but he refused to give it up. The cramps passed, as did the fever. Ford returned to his apartment and pulled up a chair to the table. Ninn sat, staring at the table with his unfinished meal remaining in the box. Around Ninn’s glazed eyes was a faint rectangle of blue light. Must be a good video. Ford opened his meal box and cut a bite of the steaming brown disk, soaked in thin red gravy. It tasted like warm, wet cardboard. Ford shuddered as he forced the bite down. “I'm having a red-sauce meal too," Ford said for any algorithms listening. "What did you think of your meal today, Ninn?” Ninn did not answer. Ford tapped his fork on the table near Ninn’s elbow. He slowly looked up. “Huh?” Ford pointed with his pressed-fiber fork. “Your meal. How is it?” “Uh. Good? Uh, yeah. Delicious and healthy.” Ninn parroted the promo videos. He resumed eating the cold meal. Ford sprinkled some shredded oregano and basil over his red gravy and stirred them in. Fresh herbs helped make even wet cardboard more palatable. His taste buds might not have been thrilled, but at least his stomach felt full. That was some compensation. He sat on the end of his bed and leaned back on his elbows so he could gaze out of his window. He looked forward to a half hour of rest before his evening shift began. Images of the Hater videos crept back into his thoughts. Why was he crying? What happened? “No,” Ford said out loud. He did not want to think about it. He wanted to clear his mind and relax. He sought escape in mindlessness. The view out his window was poor — primarily windows of apartments in the north wing of his building. North wings were always three floors higher so that their solar arrays would not be shaded by the south side. He watched the reflection of a small white cloud drift across one window and into the next. It was playing peek-a-boo with him. Ford relished the quiet. “There is a new video,” announced his visor. “A dramatic retelling of the Great Triumph through the eyes of a young boy. It is both heartwarming and encouraging. Would you like to view this video now?” "No," said Ford, flatly. His eyes searched the windowpanes for the next white cloud. “Miracles of Science has a new episode,” said his visor. “See how our scientists have perfected recycling the crude concrete of The Haters into the modern miracle composite, Flexcrete, from which the ultra-modern towers of GranNor are built. Would you like to watch this video?” “No.” Ford already knew about Flexcrete. He worked in a panel factory. “No videos,” said Ford. His visor was quiet for several minutes. He could tell it was going to speak again when a list of words scrolled up on the right. “You have not played The Peace March or Freedom Chorus in…four months. Would you like to play them now?” “No. No music,” said Ford. The list of songs disappeared from his visor. For several long minutes, his visor was only clear glass — no stats in the corners, no scrolling lists of songs or videos: only the clock. Ford let out a slow sigh of satisfaction. He loved quiet. He was startled out of a half-sleep when a face appeared in the center of his visor. It was the Wellness Bot again. The bot’s face resembled a youngish middle-aged man with short brown hair. Ford could recognize the faces of bots from the faces of real people because bots tended to turn their faces slowly from side to side as if something would not look right if they were not in motion. “Hello: GK-501-74-0840,” said the bot. “Are you not feeling well?” “I feel fine,” said Ford. “How was your day, today,” asked the Bot. Ford was familiar with the Wellness Bot’s conversation feature. Whenever he had not logged the recommended number of hours of entertainment, or some other deviation from the expected norm, the Wellness Bot would enter its conversation mode. The questions were designed to triangulate in on any simmering discontent. The system could then recommend (insist upon) a solution. “My day was fine,” said Ford. He tried to look through the Wellness Bot’s face to see the clouds reflected in the window glass. “I am glad to hear that,” said the bot. “A friend of mine was saying that he dislikes his job.” Right, like bots have friends. “I’m sorry to hear about your friend,” said Ford. He knew how to play along. “My job is engaging and fulfilling.” Those were the words the algorithms wanted to hear. "Oh, that is wonderful," said the bot with a little nod. "How are you getting along with your roommate: 0679?" “Ninn? He’s great. We just had a lively conversation over lunch. We agreed that red-sauce meals are both delicious and healthy.” “That is great to hear. I like…red-sauce…meals too.” Uh huh. Bots eat. “Did you know that the video library has many new features added?” asked the bot. “You have not watched a video in…three months.” “Not true. I watched a video about red-sauce meals an hour ago,” said Ford. He was toying with the bot, knowing that promotional videos did not count toward the recommended daily hours of entertainment. The face of the Wellness Bot stopped its left-right oscillations for a full second before it resumed. “We mean a feature video. Entertainment is food for the mind. A healthy mind is the foundation of all the good things of GranNor.” “I don’t want to watch any videos,” said Ford. The Wellness Bot slowly panned back and forth without speaking. Ford amused himself by counting down to the eye blinks. Five, four, three, two, one, Blink. Five, four, three, two, one, Blink. "You also have not self-pleasured in…six months," said the bot with a momentary compassionate expression. In the background, behind the bot's face, the abstract animation began to play. It was the scientifically-designed visual stimulator. Circles moved up and down as if bouncing. Curved lines straightened out and curved again. Rhythmic music began to play. “Would you like to pleasure yourself now?” asked the bot. Ford closed his eyes. There was something hypnotic and irresistible about the animation. When he was younger, he never thought about resisting. He simply went with the induced feelings. At one point, apparently six months ago, the whole thing struck him as absurd. He stopped requesting the animation. “No,” Ford said, his eyes still clamped shut. “I should remind you,” said the bot, “that health officials strongly recommend that it is especially important for young men like you to self-pleasure three times a week or more to maintain proper health. It is for the good of all GranNor! It is your duty. Now would be a good time to take care of this duty. Would you like the light or the dark?” “Neither.” Ford kept his eyes closed. After ten or twenty seconds, the pulsating music faded away. Ford cracked open one eye to see if Wellness Bot was gone. His face was gone, but his whole visor was filled with the dark animation. The music resumed. The circles bounced at a faster tempo. The image transitioned to the light-colored variation. He could tell his body wanted to respond. “No. I have headaches,” Ford said with his eyes closed tightly again. “It hurts to do that.” In truth, he had no headaches. He had learned that headaches were a plausible excuse that the algorithms accepted and vague enough that the medical sensors could not easily refute his claim. Through his eyelids, he could tell that his visor went dark. The music ceased. The animations were gone. The face of Wellness Bot returned. “We are sorry to hear that you do not feel well, 0840. You are scheduled for a clinic visit tomorrow at seven hundred hours, Concourse C, suite 560.” “I’m still at work tomorrow at seven,” said Ford. “We have arranged for you to get off work early,” said the bot. “You can be there at seven.” Ford let out a sigh of resignation. “Fine. Tomorrow at seven, Concourse C." “That is a good citizen,” said the bot with a hint of an approving smile. “Our whole city is strong when we are individually strong.” Ford's visor screens went blank except for the clock in the upper right corner. Its numbers flashed. Time for work. Quiet time was over. He placed his two water bottles in his cargo pockets and said goodbye to Ninn, who still sat at the table.
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Post by texican on Nov 22, 2019 14:00:31 GMT -6
Ford's Escape
Mic,
Thought this was going to be about a smart car which really are not that smart, but is about a guy and a gal which always works depending on the guy and gal....
Now since I haven't read the chapter, but the title, will go and read the chapter and kibitz when finished with Chapter 1....
Chapter 1 down....
Have read a similar story, but that story is not yet completed....
Moar chapters are needed for an honest appraisal....
Texican....
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Post by mic on Nov 22, 2019 14:32:14 GMT -6
Tex, That was actually just half of Chapter 1. They tend to be about 7,000 words, which seems like too much for a single forum post. Part 2 coming up soon. By all means, kibitz!
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Post by mic on Nov 22, 2019 14:40:54 GMT -6
First Chapter, part 2
Air rushed up the tube of the escalator that carried gray-clad men down to the men’s tram node. The air was warm and moist. It carried the smells of body odor, oil, and ozone. Men shuffled sideways to permit latecomers to enter the tram before the doors slid shut. Ford glanced at the faces of the men around himself. Some bobbed to their music. Some stared with the vacant look of a video-watcher. A few simply stared into the distance with slack jaws. Ford saw no light reflected onto their eyes. They were not watching anything. Approximately one hundred men were packed into the same tram, yet each was mentally alone. Ford felt a strange sort of comfort in that anonymity.
A young man’s voice announced through Ford’s visor that the doors would be closing. The tram’s next stops would be Nodes K51, K53, and Artery B. His stop was Node KI-3, beyond Artery B, in the industrial triangle.
Most of the men exited the tram at the KI-3 station. Ford tried to emulate their listless trudge so he would not stand out to the cameras. The video algorithms looked for unusual movements. His recent visit from Wellness Bot reaffirmed that he could not afford to stand out to the algorithms needlessly. Before he began drinking rainwater, he fit into society reasonably well. He always scored well on his vocational skill tests. He was pleased that he had been granted a two-person apartment instead of the usual dorm room for six or eight. Work in the panel factory was relatively clean compared to the jobs most worker-class men were given.
Yet, after the rainwater, he began unwittingly to do small things that were socially wrong. He had no idea there were rules against running in the parks or playing practical jokes. The memory brought a smile to Ford’s face. Seeing Ninn’s befuddled face when his freshly heated meal box was empty was worth having to watch Order And Respect for the umpteenth time, or watch city politicians give speeches to a sea of cheering men all waving blue flags.
Talking with Ada was a far more severe infraction than pranking Ninn. He needed to keep a lower profile. No jokes. No running.
Ford stood in line behind two other workers at the workers’ door to the panel factory. A large red X stayed on his visor until the man ahead of him moved through the hoop. The X changed into a green arrow. "Proceed," said his visor.
After passing through the hoop, his visor announced, “0840 has successfully logged in." The interior of the panel factory was dimly lit. The autonomous trucks did not need light to navigate the corridors. As a concession to human eyes, intermittent yellow light illuminated ladders and catwalks that the workers used. It took Ford's eyes a minute or two to adjust.
“Proceed to station C,” announced the voice. “Further instructions will await.”
“Station C?” Ford’s posture sagged. Watching trucks come and go was so dull. Feeding the grinders at Station A was much more interesting.
Once he had arrived at Station C, Ford stood near a yellow pole beside the receiving door. “0840 on station,” Ford said. A green square appeared in his visor.
“Confirmed,” said the voice in his visor. “Incoming shipments arrive in…1 minute. Monitor.”
“Monitoring,” Ford said with a sigh. There was little to do in monitoring. Yellow trucks brought in bins of crushed concrete or salvaged plastics from The Outside. The containers were shifted onto the smaller transfer trucks that shuttled the material to the appropriate machine. There was little for Ford to actually do unless something went wrong. He would have to be diligent about not letting his mind wander to thinking about Ada.
While he watched the line of trucks roll slowly through the receiving door, his mind did begin to wander. What sort of trouble was Ada having with her floor supervisor? Ford was not sure he would recognize his own floor supervisor. He spoke with him the day he moved in, but never after that. Would Ada's difficulties prevent her from traveling to Equality Park next Wednesday?
He hoped they would have more time to talk. Even if their conversation was over trivial matters like the smell of basil, or the vivid yellow of daffodils, or the sound of geese overhead, he looked forward to sharing the joy of living with someone. Ada understood. Ever since she started drinking rainwater too, she enthused over vivid, if common, sensations. His favorite memory was hearing her laugh when she discovered clay soil in one of the planters of the Women’s Park. She giggled as she squished the gray ooze between her fingers. He had not heard giggling since the first grade.
Ford heaved a deep sigh. Wednesday was such a long way off.
His visor flashed red bars across his field of view. “Malfunction,” said his visor. “Malfunction in staging area C-16. Collect data.”
Ford’s boots made the metal catwalk clang as he ran to the staging area. He found the problem. Three trucks had stopped in the corridor in a misaligned cluster. Their marker lights all flashed at different speeds. Ford climbed down the ladder and walked around the group of motionless vehicles looking for a cause of the stoppage.
“0840 Reporting at the malfunction,” said Ford. “One of the transfer trucks has an unsecured load.” He turned on his visor’s forward lights and aimed his cone of light at the vehicles. “The load must have been too high during transfer. The locking pins did not engage. See? The holes were too high.” Ford aimed his visor at the overhanging cargo bin sitting atop the locking pins.
“The loose bin must have shifted when the truck turned toward the grinder,” said Ford. “The bin is now hanging over the side. I think it will stay on the truck, but it is sticking out. It must have tripped this truck’s sensors and made it stop. The overhang must be triggering this other truck behind it too. Now, none of them will move.”
“Report,” said the computer’s voice.
“I just did,” said Ford. “Look right there. See? The load has shifted. The pins did not engage.”
“Report vehicle IDs,” said the voice.
“Oh. Right.” Ford moved around each of the vehicles so that his visor could see the ID codes mounted to the sides of each vehicle. A green square appeared around each ID panel as he sighted them in.
“A lift truck could reposition the load,” suggested Ford. “It would clear this up fast.”
“Stand by,” said the voice. “Engineering will determine corrective measures.”
Ford’s postured sagged. Engineering? They take forever.
“Actually, a lift truck is all it would take. Have it reposition this load and…”
“Engineering will determine corrective measures.”
Ford leaned against the wall in resignation. As he stood beside the stalled cluster of trucks, a new transfer truck pulled up and stopped behind them, unable to pass. Its marker lights began to blink.
This is turning into a big mess. What’s taking them so long?
“Control, this is 0840. What is the status of the fix?” He received no answer. A second truck pulled up and stopped behind the first one. Its lights began to blink.
Man, the hoppers for the grinders are going to run out of material soon if we can’t get these silly trucks moving. If production is stopped, they’ll blame Receiving – they’ll blame me. I don’t need any more reprimands.
“Control, please advise.”
“Uploading patch to vehicle 23,” said the voice. “Report status.”
Ford saw the lights on the vehicle 23 blink quickly several times then stay lit. The wheels of the truck twisted left and right a few times but the motors never engaged. Nothing else happened.
“It looks like the update completed, but it didn’t work,” Ford said to his visor. “I think the load is tripping 23’s own sensors. It still won’t move.”
Ford heard nothing for several long minutes. The lights of the truck behind truck 23 blinked rapidly. It was getting an update too. Its wheels turned tightly. The truck’s motors engaged, causing it to turn until it scraped against the back of truck 23, forming a T. The truck then stopped. It’s lights resumed blinking.
Ford’s shoulders slumped. “That just made it worse, Control. Now, none of them can move.”
“Engineering is studying the problem,” said the voice. “Stand by.”
“What’s to study? It’s this one truck with a shifted load.” Ford waved his arms at the stalled vehicle. The solution seemed obvious to him. “Look, maybe if you make truck 23 ignore its sensors, it can turn hard left and drive to the opposite wall of the corridor. It will move out of the other trucks’ sensors. They could go about their assignments. A lift truck can quickly correct the shifted bin, and all would be running smoothly again."
“Stand by, 0840. Your task is to monitor. A service technician will arrive in…five minutes.”
Oh right. Five minutes. Ford quoted in his mind the circular-reasoning of plant protocols. Technicians can only be dispatched to verified malfunctions. A malfunction must be verified by a technician. It usually took far more than five minutes for the algorithms to break the loop and act.
As he paced back and forth beside truck 23, another loaded truck joined the line behind the malfunction.
Ford glanced at the clock in the upper corner of his visor. He waited until it had been six minutes. "Control, this is 0840. Status on the technician for truck 23?"
“All technicians are currently assigned,” said the dispassionate voice. “The next technician will be available in…forty-five minutes.”
“Forty-five minutes? There are already a half a dozen trucks lined up behind this mess. There’ll be twenty trucks stuck here in forty-five minutes. The grinders will run out of material soon.”
“0840. Your task is to monitor. A technician will assess.”
“Oh, for crying out loud,” Ford muttered as he threw up his hands. If the grinders run dry, we’ll miss our numbers again. Everyone will get lectured and penalized.
Ford recalled the event several months before when two of the four grinders went down with maintenance issues. It had been clear that management found no one specific to blame. Instead, they blamed everyone. They had all thirty workers gathered in the meeting room, so a sour-faced woman on a wall screen could lecture them about diligence. All of the employees were told they could purchase only no-sauce meals for one week and that they would be confined to the basic-level video library for one week. Ford recalled how everyone around him accepted the punishment with bland resignation. No one else seemed incensed at the injustice.
Now, it appeared that the factory workers would be facing another week of no-sauce meals and boring videos.
Or, Ford thought. He glanced around as if expecting some camera might see him. What if the problem just, kind of, fixed itself?
Months before, a co-worker had shared a secret with Ford before the older man left forever in some sort of early retirement. Ford had only done it once before, and then, only to see if it was true. It was true. The trucks had an undocumented manual override.
Let’s just see if we can get this mess cleared up before everything chokes up.
As Ford walked up to truck 23, he kept his visor looking up the corridor at the backed up line of transfer trucks, their lights all blinking at different rates. “0840 Monitoring,” he said as casually as he could.
“Control, I think the software update might be working. Stand by.”
Using only his peripheral vision, he pulled open the service door on the side of the truck. With his fingers, he counted the little control module boxes on the panel. Third from the left, second row down. He pulled out the white plastic cube. Out of the corner of his eye he could see that truck 23’s lights blinked twice then began a slow pulsing blink to indicate manual mode.
“Yes. Something seems to be happening with truck 23,” he said.
Ford held onto the front locking pin to steady himself as he positioned his feet on the side rub rail. His free hand reached inside the service panel. To the rear of the control modules array were two horizontal paddles. He tipped the upper one down. Motors whined as the front wheels turned left several degrees.
Need a tighter turn.
He tipped the lower paddle. The rear wheels turned several degrees too.
Ford felt in his pocket for a U-shaped piece of copper wire his former co-worker had given him. It was that same co-worker who told Ford not to let his visor “see” what he was doing. The visors could only see ten degrees left or right of center. The older man advised Ford to never look squarely at anything he did not want “them” to see; always to use his peripheral vision.
Now, for some forward motion.
Ford inserted the ends of the copper into a pair of holes he located with his index finger. After a momentary push into the holes, the drive motors engaged at a low speed.
“Oh. Oh. Control, the update is doing something. Truck 23 is moving.”
Truck 23 began to creep out into the corridor with Ford riding on the rub rail. He pressed on the upper paddle to make the wheels steer sharper. The misplaced load scraped the metal corridor wall.
Once truck 23 was across the corridor, the sensors on the truck stuck behind #23 blinked the all-clear. That truck proceeded down the aisle to pick up a load. The line of vehicles backed up in the corridor began to move along to their destinations.
There we go. Everything’s getting back to normal.
Ford inserted his copper U into an adjacent pair of holes to stop the drive motors. He reinserted the little white cube and closed the service door. Truck 23 blinked back to its normal autonomous life. It dutifully waited for the technician.
“0840 reporting,” Ford said. “It looks like the software update was successful after all. Truck 23 is out of the way and waiting for the technician.” Ford began walking back to the receiving door.
Glad that’s cleared up.
“Stand by, 0840,” said the voice in his visor.
Stand by for what? Oh, maybe they want me to confirm when the technician comes.
“Okay, 0840 standing by,” said Ford. He leaned against the catwalk’s railing.
After a few minutes, a black shuttle entered the corridor. Ford was expecting the yellow technician’s cart, if anything, although not nearly so soon. He had seen the black shuttles operating between buildings but not within the grinder plant. The shuttle stopped at the bottom of the catwalk’s ladder.
“GK-501-74-0840: enter the shuttle,” said his visor. The black car’s side retainer bar swung up. “Enter the shuttle.”
My full number? That’s not good. Guess I wasn’t as careful as I thought. They must have figured out that it wasn’t the update.
Ford reluctantly took a seat in the shuttle.
-- end chapter 1
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Post by mic on Nov 22, 2019 18:56:55 GMT -6
Chapter 2 – Banished (part 1)
The shuttle brought Ford to a region of the fabrication district that he had never been in before. The shuttle steered itself around a tight turn and drove up a long indoor ramp. The lighting was dim, like that inside the panel factory: no windows.
At the top of the ramp stretched an extended concrete platform. The shuttle pulled up beside the platform and stopped. The side bar rose. “Exit the shuttle,” said the voice in his visor. After he stepped out, the shuttle sped away, leaving Ford alone on the dark landing.
He paced back and forth. I should have just left those trucks stuck. Why did I risk anything for those guys? They'd have no idea anyhow. Why is manual override such a big deal? I fixed the problem. They should be happy. He tried to make himself believe he was being summoned for a note of praise at solving the problem quickly. His cynical self knew better.
Two steel doors that Ford had not noticed earlier, separated with a faint whir and a scraping sound. The hallway within was darker than the landing. Visor lights could not penetrate far enough into the horizontal pit. Ford doused the lights and set his visor’s displays to a minimum to help him see better in the low light. He peeked through the doors without committing to passing inside.
“Proceed to the end of the hallway,” said a voice in his visor. A small yellow light winked on at the end of the hallway.
The reflection of the yellow light on the polished concrete floor provided some sense of orientation. Ford studied the walls as he slowly walked down the passage. He could see no doors, openings or markings. At the end of the hall, a door slid open spilling bright white light into the hallway. Ford squinted as he entered the small room.
The walls and ceiling were white. The light came from everywhere. A single black chair stood in the center of a pale gray floor. On the wall facing the chair, stood a dark display screen.
Hmmm. A screen in front of just one chair? This seems awfully formal.
City leaders made speeches to crowds from big screens. Meetings with leaders from the other seven cities were conducted via screens. Routine interactions between lower-level management and workers were all conducted with the visors. Someone talking to you from a screen on a wall had an archaic and ceremonial feel to it. Ford knew that this was something beyond the reprimands he had received before. Those had been delivered via his visor by what Ford had named Rules Bot – a frowning version of Wellness Bot.
Ford sat in the lone chair without having to be told. He hoped that appearing cooperative would work in his favor. He sat before the dark screen for what seemed like forever. His mind raced to second-guess what this reprimand was about. The manual override was the most likely proximate cause but it did not seem egregious enough to merit being talked at from a screen. He worried that they had decided his rooftop garden was illegal, or was not drinking city water, or far worse – they had discovered his talking with Ada. He rubbed his thumbs over his clammy palms to dry them.
Admit only to the override. Let the override be the crime. Maybe that will be enough.
The screen flickered to life, revealing a blue screen and the seal of the city of GranNor: a large letter N superimposed over a triumphantly raised fist, the thumb of which wore red nail polish. The seal cross-faded to the face of a middle-aged woman staring down at him.
Whoa. A real person – and a woman too! Ford averted his eyes. This is worse than I thought.
Her visor made her eyes look especially small. She had thin lips and a square jaw. Her hair was pulled back so tightly that she looked bald. Her dark blue tunic had the tall, stiff collar of a city official.
He kept his eyes looking down and to one side. While not technically a crime, it was considered impudent for a man to look directly at a woman – especially a lower class man such as himself and a ruling class woman. He could not risk adding impudence to his crimes.
“GK-501-74-0840,” said the woman in a stern tone.
“Here?”
“You know why you are here,” she said.
Ford rushed to confess to something other than contact with Ada. “This about the manual override, isn’t it? I only did it to get production running again. That’s all. A co-worker showed me how to do it a long time ago. He’s gone now. He didn’t say it was against the rules. I thought it was okay. How was I to know? I was only trying to help get production back running. Nothing more. It was for the good of The City. Yes, to keep panel production up for the new districts.”
Ford hoped to catch some glimpses of her expression in his peripheral vision to gauge her reaction to his confession. Had he sounded contrite enough?
“You knew you did not have authorization to touch equipment,” she said dismissively.
“Well…I…I was only trying to help. They were stuck, and the update didn’t…”
“You have been taking your visor off far too frequently,” she said.
Uh oh. This isn’t about work protocols. His heart sank. This IS about something else.
Ford noticed that her little eyes glanced down for a moment. His throat tightened as his thoughts imagined the worst.
“You talk too much and are too inquisitive for public safety. You continually fail to consume the minimum requirement of videos and music and have repeatedly failed in your duty to self-pleasure.”
“I…um…that’s because I have headaches.”
“Medical scans found nothing,” she said flatly. “What is most serious…”
Ford tried not to wince as he anticipated hearing her mention Ada. He could not claim he did not know interactions between men and women were illegal.
“…is that you requested forbidden videos of The Haters.”
“I what? No. I didn’t request those. They just came. I have no idea why. I just saw this old guy and…” Ford’s voice trailed off.
Something was wrong. He knew he made no request. He was certain that he had not said anything out loud about the Haters. He only thought that the old man knew The Haters. A cold shiver ran down his back. Could the visors read minds? If so, they already knew about Ada. “I…I didn’t request those videos.”
“Your biometrics tell a different story,” said the woman. “You’re lying.”
“No. It’s true. I didn’t request any videos,” said Ford. “I saw this old man crying, and before I could get to him, the videos began. I never asked for them. Never!”
“Citizens are forbidden unsupervised viewing of images from those terrible times. Only certified instructors and government historologists have access. Unauthorized access is punishable by…"
“But I didn’t request them,” Ford pled. “I don’t know why they played.”
“You have displayed a pattern of disruptive, non-compliant behavior for a long time. Such disregard for the proper order is a danger to the health and safety of all GranNor’s citizens. We cannot allow unhealthy conditions to continue. We have a sacred duty to protect our citizens from disruptive behavior.”
Ford sat in silence. She had not mentioned Ada. Was she just laying the foundation for it? His heart pounded in his chest. His hands gripped the arms of the little black chair. He tried to think about anything other than Ada – concrete panels, white walls, red-sauce meals, anything – in the event the visors could read thoughts.
“Leadership has invested twenty years worth of city resources in you, 0840,” the woman said with slow gravity. “You had shown promise and were tracked to become a plant technician. You have selfishly betrayed our generosity.”
Ford stared at the lower corner of the screen in silence, keeping her face in the corner of his eye. Her words sounded like the preamble to his elimination. No one ever talked openly about elimination, but it was real. Ford had noticed over the years how some residents in his building simply disappeared. He asked where they went, but no one knew. They were just gone. Was he about to become one of them?
Wait, thought Ford. Why she is telling me all of this? If I was only a health threat, I’d be quietly eliminated. There’s no need to tell me anything, and yet she is. Why? He waited in silence. Ada had not come up. He was thankful for that.
“You have been assigned to Marking Crew 265,” she said.
“What?” Ford asked reflexively. Then he realized it was dangerously rude to ask questions of city officials. “I mean, Okay: a Marking Crew.”
A marking crew? What exactly IS that? It’s a punishment for being a health hazard so it must be bad.
He rummaged through his memory to recall what marking crews did. One of those boring documentary videos they showed in class came to mind. It was about the construction industry. Markers searched through the vast wild lands of The Outside for remnants of The Haters settlements. To preserve the Earth, the seven great cities were built out of materials already stolen from the earth.
Automated machines could locate iron and steel left behind by The Haters, but concrete and plastic had to be found by human eyes. Marking crews placed beacons to guide automated crushers that would break up the ruins and haul the chunks back. The old concrete was then ground into a fine powder in factories like the one Ford worked in. The concrete dust was combined with plastic fibers to create resilient concrete. Most of The City was built of Flexcrete panels.
The woman spoke. “If…your performance on the marker crew is exemplary, and you have learned proper respect for the rightful order, your assignment may be revisited,” said the woman. “This is your only opportunity to prove that we have not wasted our investment. Do you understand? We will not waste resources on non-compliant men.”
Ford nodded. I’m being exiled. If I do everything right, I can come back.
The room’s sliding door hissed open. Two tall men in black coveralls entered and stood on either side of Ford. The screen went black. One of the men clamped a stiff plastic collar around Ford’s neck. It locked with a metallic snick. The other man waved for Ford to stand up and leave. Ford walked ahead of them to the dark landing. A black shuttle rolled up: its presence betrayed only when it eclipsed the little yellow lights at the ends of the dock. The men placed him roughly into the shuttle’s seat and locked the door.
While the shuttle carried him on surface roads between city blocks, Ford felt both apprehensive and yet relieved. The official did not mention Ada. Surely his list of crimes would have included breaking the Rule of Separation if they knew about her. He wanted to take that as a good sign. His pessimism worried that they might still know about Ada, but his exile to The Outside was solution enough. Women – even lowest classes like Tenders and Carriers – had legal advantages that men did not.
Even if Ada were not exiled, as he was, would she be punished in some other ways? Would they demote her from Tender to Carrier? The few Carriers that Ford had ever seen looked haggard and sad. He felt terrible at the thought of getting Ada in trouble. Their meetings had been his idea, after all.
As the shuttle maneuvered through the surface roads, it was clear that he was not being taken to his apartment block. His only personal possessions were his plants, containers of soil, and a rain barrel. Everything else had been issued by The City. He lamented that his garden would die of neglect. To the people in his building, he would be one of those who simply disappeared. Ninn might not even notice that he was gone. Ada would. That thought stung his heart.
Ford pressed his face against the window to look up at rows of apartment buildings gliding by. She would come to Equality Park on Wednesday, but he would never show up. There was no way to get word to her. Even if somehow he could – while on a marking crew – get access to play Hall of Heroes, Ada could not. She was still suspended. Ford felt terrible thinking that Ada would feel abandoned.
The shuttle left the narrow canyons of the surface roads and turned onto a broad expanse of concrete. In the afternoon daylight, the interior of the shuttle looked dirty and worn. In the center of a triangular concrete plaza sat a smallish white lifter. The four fans were horizontal and the passenger door open. Ford had seen large lifters whirring overhead occasionally. This was the closest he had ever been to a real one.
The shuttle’s door hissed open. “Exit the shuttle,” said his visor.
A cluster of men stood in the shadow of the lifter’s back wing. All of them looked at Ford as he exited the shuttle. They all wore the same black collar he did, all but one. Three of them wore gray overalls like his own. One wore the beige of an office worker. The man without a collar wore the blue-gray of management.
“Finally: our last crewmember,” said the man without a collar. He was a bit taller and older than Ford, with darker skin and many tiny wrinkles on his face. "Okay, everybody inside." He waved his arms to herd the men toward the lifter’s open door.
The last available seat was the back row, left side. Ford had to climb over the legs of the man in beige who took the seat near the door. The interior panels of the six-passenger lifter had a grimy patina. Darker stains betrayed where many hands had rested, braced, or pushed. Sand and small rocks lined the edges of the hard rubber floor. An acrid plastic smell dominated the usual scent of body odor, ozone, and oil.
The older man turned in his front seat. “For the new kid, I am 1099. I am the foreman of Marking Crew 265. You will do exactly what I tell you and exactly the way I tell you to do it. Understand?
Ford nodded, but no one else did. His eyes glanced from person to person, trying to gauge their reactions. They only lowered their heads.
“You will do as I say,” continued 99, “because I have the power.” He held up a small remote and pressed a button with his thumb.
A hot, quivering pain shot from Ford’s new plastic collar, through the back of his neck and down his spine. He sat up stiff: arms limp at his sides. He could not move anything, not even his eyes. The displays in his visor scrambled into diagonal lines before disappearing.
The searing pain stopped after a long second but seemed to echo around inside his body for several more seconds. Ford slumped in his seat. He could see the others had gone limp briefly before sitting up and adjusting their clothes. They grumbled to themselves but otherwise seemed to have taken the experience in stride.
“Remember that,” said 99. He turned forward in his seat.
The motors in the four fan rings began to whine in a low, guttural tone, slowly rising in pitch. Text on the glass of Ford’s visor announced that the system was reloading. Stand by.
“99 isn’t shy about using the button,” said the man in the beige jumpsuit who sat beside Ford. He looked to be about the same age as Ford, though a bit shorter. He had a round face and inquisitive eyes. Most citizens had dull, unfocused eyes.
“Good thing is,” said the round-faced man, “most of the time, he leaves it on three.”
“Oh?" Three out of five? Three out of ten? Three was plenty.
“So. What did you do wrong?” asked the man in beige.
“Wrong?”
“You’re on this crew,” said the man. “You had to do something wrong. Oh, it’s okay to talk for a while. Activating the collars scrambles the visors. Takes 'em a few minutes to come back up. We can talk freely until then."
Ford could see a countdown timer in the lower right of his screen. He had never seen that before. Two minutes, thirty-five seconds.
“I’m 1701, by the way. In the seat ahead of me is 22. He’s okay.” He patted the man on his broad back. “He’s here because he repeatedly zeroed out his account buying meals. He was even stealing meals from his roommates.”
“I wasn’t stealing,” said 22 as he half turned. “When they left some in their boxes, I finished it for them. That’s not stealing.”
01 continued. “The guy beside our beloved foreman up there is 53. He got into fights a lot. Didn't like what people were doing so he'd slap 'em around. 86 there in front of you, well, he didn’t work enough: just played Hall of Heroes all day. Threats and demotions didn’t help.”
01 leaned close to Ford so he could speak quietly. “They even demoted him to the mines and the basement wards but he still wouldn’t work.”
Ford felt a cold shudder across his shoulders. He had heard of the wards but never been in one. Each ward, the lowest grade of housing, held two-hundred men all living in the same windowless chamber. The wards were a favorite threat wielded by teachers. “You’d better learn to work harder or you’ll wind up in…the wards.”
“Even after that,” continued 01, “He wouldn’t show up for work. He’s been banned from Halls for life, so he gets a little crazy sometimes.”
The pitch of the fans had risen so high as to be almost inaudible yet still somewhat painful to Ford’s ears. The lifter rocked a couple times on its wheels before slowly rising in the air. Ford felt woozy and unsteady as if he were going to fall out of his seat. He gripped the arms of the seat tightly. He watched the concrete squares of the plaza get smaller as the lifter climbed steadily. They rose above the buildings that surrounded the open area. Ford’s stomach seemed to rise inside his chest.
“So, as I was saying,” repeated 01 loudly. “What did you do wrong?”
Ford was not about to fully confide in his new acquaintance. He would stick to what city officials already knew. “Um. I…she said I accessed Haters videos.”
“Whoa. Really?” 01 leaned closer. “How did you manage that?”
“I don’t know. I didn’t ask for them. They just came when I was looking at an old man.” Ford was careful not to admit guilt for anything. Indeed, as far as the videos went, he had nothing to confess to.
“You said ‘She said’?” asked 01.
“The official on the wall screen. She said I broke some rules and accessed the videos.”
“Hmm. Boxy-faced woman with little-tiny eyes?” asked 01.
“How did you know that? You know who she is?”
“I don’t know her number or anything, but she’s the current Assistant Secretary for Peace. Interesting that she was the one to banish you.”
“Oh. She didn’t say who she was. How do you know all that?” asked Ford.
“Political speeches,” said 01. “Don’t you watch the political speeches?”
“Um. No? It’s all just a bunch of blah, blah, blah. None of it matters.”
01 shook his head and muttered to himself. “They do their job well. Gotta hand 'em that. No one even cares about history, let alone knows anything. You see, in the early speeches, reading between the lines, there are hints of what the world was like before… Uh oh. The visors are almost back online. We’ll talk more next time.” 01 turned to look out of his window.
Next time?
Ford peered between the scratches on his little round window. Clusters of taller buildings stood in the center of the hexagonal urban unit. Rows of gray apartment buildings ran east and west to fill the rest of the hex. Identical city hexes stretched as far as Ford could see: ahead, behind, beside him. He had never seen the city from the air. It was far more extensive than he imagined.
The lifter’s fan rings began to tilt forward. The lifter leaned nose-down and gained speed. The vertical fan ring near Ford’s window was more visible than before. The white paint had flaked off in several patches, revealing dull aluminum skin beneath. The air within the lifter’s cabin developed a strong smell of ozone. Cool air blew in his face. As the lifter gained speed, a rhythmic vibration made everything shake subtly: 86’s disheveled hair, 22’s neck flesh, 01’s pant cuffs.
“Is that normal?" Ford asked. He pointed with his eyes at his hand, jiggling on the armrest.
“The shaking? Not usually, but this unit has always had a shake to it. Sometimes we get assigned a second-series lifter. They’ve got nicer seats. This one is an original series, so it's got a lot of hours on it. Salvage crews get the older equipment, of course.”
Ford watched the cityscape slide beneath them. The rows of apartment buildings reminded him of the steel grid of the factory’s catwalks. From his window, the whole world looked like an endless sheet of catwalk.
Everyone else in the lifter seemed uninterested in the sights out of the windows. The two men in the front seats exchanged a few words, but the cabin was otherwise filled with only the din of the four fans.
A dark line in the horizon haze ahead of them piqued Ford’s attention. What’s that? He squinted into the grayness, trying to make out what the dark zone was. As the minutes slowly ticked by, the dark region grew. It was no longer a faint stripe but had become nearly half of the ground below them. The lifter flew above the outermost row of city hexes. Tall cranes lifted Flexcrete panels into place on incomplete apartment blocks. Beyond fences lay a mottled sea of green: trees as far as Ford could see.
Ford sat in silent awe. The edge of The City.
He had never thought much about The City having an edge. It always felt like the entire world. On an intellectual level, he knew The City had to have an edge. On a few occasions, his teachers pointed to maps that showed GranNor – the grand city of the north – in the center of the northern continent. The City was surrounded by a vast wilderness free of civilization: The Outside. He was about to enter it.
Geography was seldom taught in school. Maps were rare. If a curious boy pointed to the dark green beyond the gleaming white circle and asked what was out there, most teachers poo-pooed such questions. Boys were expected to learn more important things: city ways. If the curious boy persisted, his schoolteachers described The Outside in tones of awe: pure, and wild, and beautiful. Yet, they also described it dangerous, fierce, and deadly. As a young boy, Ford could never reconcile those two conflicting images: beautiful and dangerous. Perhaps that was why he could not imagine Ada as dangerous even though she was a woman. She was beautiful, not at all like the austere and scowling political leaders. They seemed dangerous. Ada did not.
As the lifter flew beyond the construction zone, Ford felt an odd fluttering in his stomach. He was no longer in The City. Somewhere, back in the field of gray concrete, was everything familiar and Ada. He needed to think about something else.
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Post by NCWEBNUT on Nov 22, 2019 21:20:08 GMT -6
interesting tale of the future More Please
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Post by 9idrr on Nov 22, 2019 22:39:40 GMT -6
So far, Mic, I'm likin' this every bit as much as Martin's adventure. Here's hopin' it lasts at least as long. Thanks for postin' it.
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Post by mic on Nov 23, 2019 7:20:25 GMT -6
(chapter 2, part 2)
“Where are we going?” Ford asked.
“What?” 01 shouted.
Ford raised his voice to be heard over the whine of the fans. Discussing their destination seemed like a safe topic, even if they were being monitored. “Where are we going?”
“Don’t know,” said 01. “North is all I can say so far. Someplace puny, most likely. It’s always someplace puny. The easy sites with lots of Hater stuff all in the same place, well, they got harvested years and years ago. Those spots are all picked clean. As a matter of fact, we’re flying over one now. Look out your window. See?”
Ford looked but saw only extensive patches of gray dirt amid low green scrub. Here and there, a few birch and pine trees grew. “See what?”
“That big patch of nothing with no forest,” said 01. “Takes a lot of years for trees to grow where Haters lived. They tell me that down there was one of the first easy spots that they harvested. Right near The City. Tons of Hater concrete, steel, glass, and plastic. Harvested clean in just a few years, they say. After they harvested all of the other big easy spots, crews had to travel farther into the wilderness to find other big harvest spots like that one. Got to keep the grinders grinding, you know.”
“Yeah,” said Ford with a nod. “I know. I work…well, used to work…in a grinding factory.”
Ford’s eyes followed the line of a blue river that meandered through the expanse of gray and green patches. He wished he had paid more attention to the few times he got to see a map. Curiosity was met with frowns. Ignorance elicited smiles. On the scanty memory he had of geography, and that 01 said they were traveling north, he guessed that he was looking at River Two. It started in the northwest and flowed generally eastward to merge into River One. That great river started in the central north and flowed south to a round piece of ocean.
The twisting river seemed disorganized and almost wasteful. Canals in the city were straight and efficient. Both ends of the river were lost in the haze of the horizon.
“After all of the big easy spots like that one were harvested,” continued 01, “They had to find the medium-sized patches. They got all those, it seems. Nowadays, we get sent out to the small patches. Takes thousands of little sites to equal one of the big easy ones. Since I’ve been on the crew, that’s all we’ve ever done: puny patches scattered way out in the nowhere.”
Ford twisted in his seat so he could look back through his window. The City had become a faint gray line on the edge of the horizon. Lumpy green was everywhere beneath them.
“Hey, Owen,” said Ford. He had decided his new acquaintance needed a name if he was going to keep talking to him. Owen was pretty close to 01. “How long do you work in these puny places?”
“About a week. That’s about all the supplies are good for. These little lifters can only carry so much gear.”
“And you go back to The City after a week?”
“Yeah.”
A week? That would be next Monday. If I work hard on this outing, maybe they’ll let me return. I might still make it to Equity Park. The thought gave him hope.
Ford imagined that they would arrive at a bare patch like he had seen along the river. The thought of such openness felt odd. The City was an array of millions of rooms. Everything had a room: autonomous trucks had rooms. Cases of meals had rooms. Even human waste awaiting transfer to the farm district had a room. Were there rooms in The Outside?
“When you’re out at a puny place, where do the crew…sleep and stuff?" asked Ford.
“There’s an inflatable shelter packed in the back of the lifter. We set it up and live in there,” replied Owen.
Ford frowned. “Inflatable” sounded flimsy. His teachers had described The Outside as a vast labyrinth inhabited by thousands of fierce animals. They spoke of animals with both an adoring reverence and a great fear.
“What about things like…well, animals?” Ford asked. “Have you had to deal with wild animals?”
“Not really,” replied Owen. “I’ve seen a couple in the distance. We set up an electric wire around our shelter. That keeps them away.”
Ford sensed that Owen was confident in their electric wire for safety. Given the look of fear on his teachers’ faces when they talked about animals, a simple wire did not seem like enough protection. He turned back to the window and tried not to visualize long teeth and sharp claws.
Scattered throughout the carpet of green were little squares of white, or gray, or sometimes red. His teachers had spoken of The Outside as an uninterrupted expanse of Nature: nothing but trees and animals.
The schoolbook version of The Outside did not include a ubiquitous sprinkle of little white squares. “What are the little dots of white down there?” Ford pointed.
Owen leaned over to look out his own window. “Those? They say those are old Hater apartments.”
“They’re scattered all over the place,” said Ford, “and so evenly spread out.”
“Yeah. Apparently, Haters couldn’t stand each other so badly that they spread out – like an oil slick on canal water. That’s why they lived all over the planet as far away from each other as they could get. Pretty wasteful, huh?”
Ford stared at the little white squares nearest them. They must have hated being close to stores too, and close to their jobs, and even hated seeing each other.
He had a hard time picturing how people could live so far away from everything. Back in his apartment building, Ford did not care all that much about the other residents, but he did not hate them to the point that he wanted to live as far away as possible from them. He liked being near the food stores, and only a few tram stops away from his job. How could those people live like that?
“How long have you been on this crew?” Ford asked.
“Not long. This is my seventh time out,” said Owen.
“And you do go back to The City after each time out?”
“Kind of,” said Owen. “We’re confined to the air-node.” He tugged at his plastic collar as a visual aid. “We’re in The City – technically – but not really. We just wait for the next assignment.”
“How many times do you have to go out before you’re done? I’m looking forward to getting back inside The City,” said Ford.
Owen snorted but erased his amused smile. “Done?”
“What?” Ford felt indignant. His hope was not a joke.
“Well,” hedged Owen. “We’ll talk about that later.” He tapped his finger on his visor.
Ford grumbled about ending the conversation on a dark innuendo. He resumed watching the green landscape. The world was huge. He watched the variegated patches of green drift beneath them for over an hour. It just kept coming. The only change he could see was when they passed over a twisting river with many islands in it. On both sides of the river stood forested bluffs. Those gave way to hills and valleys. After that, the land resumed its flat and wooded sameness. The sun was settling closer to the haze of the horizon.
The pitch of the fans’ whine changed. The tone grew lower. The lifter was losing altitude. The fan rings were starting to rotate out of vertical. As their speed slowed, their course paralleled an old double roadway – a Hater road – running north. A line of greenery stretched down the middle between the roadways. Trees leaned over the broken pavement.
Ford could see broken branches and leaves strewn in the road. His eyes followed the trail of destruction to a pair of automated crushers that were busy dismantling the remains of a bridge that used to span over the double roadway.
The crushers resembled yellow mechanical crabs. One articulated arm terminated in massive pliers. The plier's arm pushed and crushed the remains of the concrete bridge abutment. The other arm ended in a sort of bucket-claw. That arm scooped the broken chunks into waiting transports. As the heavy equipment slipped out of view from Ford’s window, he wondered if his crew would be marking concrete for those particular machines.
99 turned in his seat. “Okay boys, wake up! We’re almost there. New kid.” He pointed at Ford. “Open up that panel between your seats. Hand out the breathers.”
Ford pulled open the tall hatch between his and Owen’s seats. Several white and clear plastic breathing masks were tucked into shallow shelves. Ford passed them forward.
“You other guys already know, but for you, new kid, wear your mask whenever you’re outside the lifter or the shelter. The air out here in the wild is full of pollen and spores and airborne germs. Maybe it was germs that made The Haters hate everything. Who knows? Wear your breather whenever you’re outside, so you don't get sick and die.”
Ford watched how the others put their masks on. He placed the clear cup over his nose and mouth and pulled the strap behind his head. Exhaled air vented out through a circular port in front. Inhaling came through two round filters on either side.
Spores and bacteria? Hater germs? Why aren’t those a problem in The City? There’s no dome or anything to keep them out. Isn’t it all the same air? Ford decided that the spores must be more concentrated near the source, and therefore dangerous. Nonetheless, it seemed odd.
The fan rings had rotated to nearly horizontal. The whine grew louder. Ford watched the ground coming up to meet them. They left the double road and followed a thinner road, almost overgrown with shrubs. Ford could see a section of rooftops amid the trees. They were much closer together than the specks he had seen earlier.
The lifter hovered over a gray rectangle of ground crisscrossed with dozens of irregular lines of weeds and shrubs. Clouds of dust swirled up from the pavement as the lifter settled onto its wheels.
Everyone sat in the lifter as the fans continued to spool down. The cloud of dust dissipated. When the door popped open, everyone made their way between the high seatbacks, out the door and gathered in a cluster beyond the fan rings.
“Now we set up camp,” said 99. His voice had a buzz to it as it came through the breather. “I’ve got a job for everyone, but first…”
Ford saw everyone quickly sit on the ground. What’s that all about?
“Don’t nobody think about running off,” said 99. He pressed the button.
Pain shot down Ford’s back. His knees buckled. All he could do was watch helplessly as the landscape tilted sideways until he hit the ground.
After a moment, he could breathe again. The side of his head stung from the impact. Both his arms and legs tingled but responded to commands.
Man. I hate that.
“Now that the lesson is over,” said 99. I want 86 and 53 to get out the solar sheets. 22, you get out the supply box and set up the wire. New kid and 01, set up the shelter.”
99 walked over to the tail of the lifter and said, “Aft cargo door: open." The bottom half of the tail section began to hinge down. Before it reached the ground, a ramp extended the rest of the way to meet the pavement.
“Solar sheets are on the top shelf. Supply box on the middle shelf. Shelter kit below. Now get moving." 99 stepped back to watch with his arms folded across his chest.
Ford and Owen each took a handle at the ends of a yellow fabric case. They hauled it a few meters from the lifter before setting it down.
“We use these little tanks to inflate the panels then assemble them into a cabin," said Owen. "It's easy. You'll see." He pulled out several tightly rolled yellow bundles.
Ford saw that his visor would be back online in two minutes and twenty seconds.
“Why did you laugh when I asked about returning to The City?” Ford asked.
“Cuz a work crew is pretty much a time-delayed death sentence.”
"The woman said if I was a diligent worker, I'd be allowed to return," said Ford.
“Well, sure. They couldn’t say that you’re being sent to your death, could they? Who’d work? They told us all that too,” said Owen. “They told that to 64. I’m a replacement for him. He fell off a bridge and died. 22 here, is a replacement for 18. He fell down a hole. They never found his body. Working crew is dangerous stuff. Rather than just kill us outright, they figure they can get some work out of us first. They’re all about the efficiency, you know.”
Ford frowned at the ground and felt naïve for believing the false hope.
“You don’t seem bothered with your death sentence,” grumbled Ford. “Why not?”
Owen smiled. “I plan to outsmart them. I’m going to NOT do something stupid and die.” He winked.
“You didn’t say why you’re on this crew,” said Ford.
“Heh, well, my story is kind of like yours, except I was actively looking. I always wanted to know what went on before The City. No one would tell me. Anything from back then is forbidden.”
“Yeah. I know,” said Ford.
“So, I tried to figure it out, like solving a puzzle. I watched a lot of political speeches. Seemed safe. City types, they all know what it was like in the before-times, but they're not saying. However, they do like to make long speeches. In lots of them, they referred to things like The Triumph, and The Grand Reward, and Earth Cure. They brag about those but never say exactly what they were…not really. Had to be something, since they kept mentioning them. So I watched earlier and earlier speeches and tried to figure out what they weren’t saying. You know, like when they’d say that we’re all equal now, you could figure that in the Dark Time, people were un-equal – although I’m not quite sure what that meant.”
Ford recalled how officials boasting about equality was so ubiquitous that he never thought it about it. “Equality” was some abstract advantage that everyone had, thanks to their benevolent city leaders. Now that Owen mentioned it: equal in what way?
“Hmm.” Owen got that middle-distance stare of someone reading their visor displays. “Only fifteen seconds left. We'll talk again later. The short answer is, they didn't like me looking at all the old speeches. Must have dawned on them that I was figuring things out. So, they put me on a crew.”
Ford’s visor chimed as it came back online. Owen showed him how to inflate the yellow panels. Once full of pressurized air, the panel took on a stiff shape, gently curved and narrower at the top. They were lightweight but rigid. In the middle of each panel was a small vinyl window. In a half hour, they had the cabin assembled on its rigid inflated floor. It resembled a plastic loaf of bread.
While Ford and Owen worked on the cabin, 86 and 53 had unrolled the solar sheets on the ground beside the lifter. 86 seemed to do a lot of standing around watching 53 work until 53 told him something specific to do. They hooked up the thick black cables that trailed out the back of the cargo hatch.
“Not much daylight left,” said 99, “so I’m just gonna show you grunts the work site for tomorrow morning. See that pointy thing over there?” 99 pointed to a thin spike of a structure visible above the trees. “Head for that. I’ll tell you when to stop.”
The crew trudged single file toward the distant spike. 53 led the way. 99 followed behind them all. Between gaps in the foliage, sections of broken wooden walls leaned against tree trunks.
“That’s far enough,” shouted 99. “That’s it.” He pointed toward the ruins of buildings entangled with trees.
“I don’t expect we’re going to find all that much here tomorrow, but as a reminder to you all and especially the new kid, we’re looking for cast concrete first. That’s the good stuff. Mark them with the yellow disks.” 99 held up a flat disk the size of a fist. "Make sure you lay 'em at the corners. The crushers aren't that smart. If the crushers can't find their targets, management will know which crew screwed up, and I can tell you I will NOT be happy if you guys screw up." 99 held up the shock remote. Everyone cringed and sat on the ground.
“Nah,” said 99. “I’m just saying I won’t be happy if you screw up. That’s all.”
Everyone began to stand up but suddenly collapsed to the ground in pain. Ford dropped to his knees then fell forward. His face landed in a dense tussock of grass. 99 tossed his head back and laughed long and loud. "Oh, man. That just never gets old."
As the crew picked themselves up off the ground, 53 glared at 99 with half-squinting eyes. The look reminded Ford of Hall of Heroes and the look that Hater Zombies got just before they swung their swords.
99 glared back at 53 and shook the remote at him. “That was just a reminder, grunt,” snapped 99. “You watch yourself and stay in line.”
“Now, as I was saying,” continued 99 in his lecture tone, “your secondary target is concrete block. It’s not as good. However, that’s probably all we’ll find out here. These Haters were lazy and cheap. Still, the crushers will take block too. Mark them with these red disks.”
“Does he do that a lot?” Ford whispered out of the side of his mouth to Owen. The visors were offline again.
“More than he should,” said Owen. “So, tell me. What did you see in those Haters videos?”
Ford shrugged and shook his head. “Does that matter?”
“I think it does,” said Owen. “Come on. Time’s short.” He tapped his visor with his finger. “What did you see?”
“I don’t know.” Ford shrugged again. “The same stuff they showed you in school when you were little: stuff to show us how bad things were back then.”
“Yeah, but when we’re little, we don’t notice much,” said Owen. “The teachers always told us how awful and scary everything was in the before-times. So, that’s all we saw. No one wants to know more about scary stuff. As grown men, though, we can notice more in videos than we did as kids. Think now. What did you see?”
Ford tried to replay the images in his mind. “Well, there was this one with a woman sitting in an ancient automobile. She smiled at a man outside of the car, then some men came and shot them.”
Owen closed his eyes. “Hmmm. I think I remember seeing that one. Describe more of what you saw. What stood out?”
“Well, I remember thinking it was odd that a woman wasn’t wearing blue: either the light blue of the lower classes or the dark blue of a city official. She was in some long white shirt thing.”
“Interesting. What else?”
“I remember that it looked odd that the woman and the man weren’t wearing visors. Of course, that’s just because The Haters weren’t as advanced as…wait…they were in the same place…together.” Ford had always been so fixated on the men shooting the car that he had skipped the fact a man and woman were together. "Is that why they shot them?"
“Maybe,” said Owen, “but I remembered seeing in other videos, men and women were together and they weren’t getting shot. I think that in the before-times, men and women used to mix in the same spaces.”
“But, what about the laws?” began Ford.
"Alright, you grunts," said 99. "Stop your talking. Head back to the cabin. It’ll be dark soon.”
The interior of the inflatable cabin was lit with two light strips along the curved ceiling. Each man had a narrow raised platform to sleep upon. They ate their no-sauce meals in silence. It had been a long day. Ford sipped sparingly from the water bottle in his pants pocket. He had only three-quarters of his bottle of rainwater left.
They all placed their visors on the charging plate before settling down and covering up with a thin gray blanket. The ceiling lights went out. A small yellow light prevented the cabin from being totally dark. The hum of the air filter fan kept the cabin from being totally silent. The soft light and gentle noise were reassuring. Nonetheless, Ford felt lost and exposed. The savage and dangerous image of Nature prevailed in his mind. He had not given much thought to dying before. Owen’s words haunted him.
(end chapter two)
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Post by bluefox2 on Nov 23, 2019 8:59:31 GMT -6
Interesting (and scary) concepts being shown here.
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Post by texican on Nov 23, 2019 12:52:45 GMT -6
Out of the prison city into the near freedom of the wild....
99 needs a block dropped on his head....
Texican....
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Post by mic on Nov 23, 2019 17:43:24 GMT -6
Chapter 3 – Discovery (part 1)
Ford awoke suddenly from a kick to the back of his head. He quickly turned to face his attacker, but no one was there.
“Get up,” bellowed 99.
Owen shifted on his bed to face Ford. “That was setting number one.”
Ford grumbled and rubbed the back of his neck. It was a minor consolation that it was the collar and not one of the other workers.
“Line up for the blue-water,” said 99. “I’ll hand you your meal as you come out.”
53 was the closest, so he got into the small hygiene booth first. 22 stood by the door. 86 stood behind him.
“Does he always wake you up that way?” asked Ford.
“Afraid so,” replied Owen. “It’s rude but efficient. No sleeping through that.” Owen took a bottle of water from the bin on the floor.
“Um…” began Ford in a whisper. He pointed to the bottle. “That’s actually not….good…” He glanced up to see if 99 was listening. He was not.
“What, the water?” asked Owen. “I know. I’m pretty sure they put stuff in it.”
“You know?”
"Well, I can't prove anything. It's just a personal theory." Owen opened the bottle, and despite Ford's gestures of protest, took a swig and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “My theory is that they put something in here keeps people dumb and happy.”
“But, you’re still drinking it?”
“Yeah. It doesn’t seem to work on me. Immune, I guess. When I was younger I noticed that no one ever wanted to talk about anything interesting or was the slightest bit curious about stuff. I suspected it was the water. That’s part of why I got into trouble. My curiosity wasn’t suppressed.”
“I wonder if I was getting immune to whatever was in the water too,” Ford mused to himself. Was that why he had developed a rebellious attitude in his later teens? In the event was not entirely immune, he vowed to refill his pocket bottle from one of the small pools he had seen. He could not afford to have his senses dulled now.
“Shut up, you two,” bellowed 99. “Put on your visors and keep quiet.”
After breakfast, everyone lined up in front of the cabin. The morning air felt damp and cold after the filtered and moderated air of the cabin. Ford glanced around at the surrounding woods and the thin silver wire at ankle height that circled the clearing containing cabin and the lifter. The wire defined the safe-zone of their camp.
“53, you and 22 are one team,” said 99. “Check your visors for the maps for your work area.”
Both men looked down slightly as their eyes darted back and forth, reading the maps that appeared on their visors.
“01 and 86, you’re the other team,” said 99.
“Aww. Why?” whined 86. “Make the new guy go on a team. I wanna be Gofer.”
“Don’t argue,” said 99. “You’re gonna work team. Last time you were Gofer we found you sleeping in the cabin. The time before that, you were sleeping under the lifter. You're on a team."
"Aw, mannnn." 86 kicked the ground, swung his arms in protest, and grumbled.
"New kid," continued 99. "You're Gofer. When a team is running low on disks, you fetch 'em from the lifter and run 'em over to 'em. The directions will come on your visor. Come lunchtime, you’ll bring everybody a meal box and a water bottle. Bring 'em fast, or I'll lay you out. Understand?” He shook the remote at Ford.
Ford nodded quickly. 86 glared at Ford with a jealous frown.
When the five other men disappeared into the foliage, and he could hear their noises no more, Ford felt an odd tingle ripple up his back. He was alone. Living in The City, even when he was by himself in his room, or tending his rooftop garden, he always knew that someone else was just on the other side of a wall. Even though he did not know the person on the other side of the wall, just knowing that someone (anyone) was there had apparently been secretly comforting since their absence was unsettling.
Standing in The Outside, an endless expanse without walls, visions of animals with sharp teeth began to commandeer Ford’s imagination. To distract himself, he walked around the lifter, forcing himself to focus on details of manmade things. The black paint on the fan blades had worn off of the leading edges, revealing dull gray aluminum. Several of the blades had dents and nicks. The white paint on the top of the lifter’s body had no shine. It left a chalky residue on his fingers. The paint on the underside was still glossy. Streaks of black oil stained the flaking paint on the wings near the thrust rings. The whole machine seemed too massive to float in the sky.
He wondered if he could work hard enough to satisfy the small-eyed woman’s definition of diligence during this one outing. If so, would he be allowed to keep his job? Working in the panel factory was the only reason he got the double apartment in Building Three. If he lost the factory job, what other sort of work would they give him? Would he have to work construction on the perimeter? Would he have to clean sanitation tanks? The next step down in housing was a quad. Do construction workers get quads?
Ford did not want to fall so low as to be living in the wards. He recalled the documentaries he had seen about the salt mine workers. Hundreds of stooped and somber men all housed in one long room lined with cots. Despite the narrator’s cheery tone, the video was designed as an object lesson; follow the rules or wind up working in the mines and living in the wards.
Even if he did not sink so low as the wards, where would his new housing be? How far away from Ada would he be moved?
As he walked around the lifter, his boot caught on a loose board in the dirt. The layer of dust on the board shook free revealing letters. Ford turned his head to make the faint white letters more right-side-up. SAUK L KE WISCONSI. That made no sense. He stooped to brush away more dust in hopes of seeing more letters. The ends of the board were broken or the paint completely scuffed away. None of the other board fragments had any letters on them.
He tried to sound out the words. “Sowkle? Sawkolke? Wisk-onsy?” Those were not normal words. Did the people who used to live out here speak a different language?
99's voice startled Ford out of his musing. "More red disks." A map appeared on Ford's visor. He grabbed a box of disks from the locker and hurried to follow the green arrows that floated in front of him.
The arrows led him through overgrown ruins of a small town center. Tree branches grew through square openings that once held glass. Broken brick walls rose above an irregular hedge of bushes and weeds. None of the ruined structures had roofs. As he continued to walk, he entered an area of wooden ruins. Collapsed walls still had patches of colorful paint. It struck Ford as barbaric that The Haters constructed homes out of strips of trees. From the collapsed ruins, it was apparent how flimsy and temporary tree strips were as a building material. Why would they do that?
“What took you so long?” grumbled 53. “We could have done a dozen more spots if you weren’t so slow.”
“Sorry,” said Ford. “I’ll try to be…”
53 snatched the box of disks from Ford’s hand. 22 shrugged at Ford apologetically.
“More red disks for 01’s team,” said 99 through Ford’s visor.
He jogged back to the camp, pausing to lean against the lifter while he caught his breath. With another box of disks under his arm, he moved through the brush as quickly as he could.
The green arrows led Ford in the other direction through the remnants of the town. A few of the brick structures reminded Ford of the line of skulls from the Hater video. Empty windows were eye sockets. Open doorways were gaping mouths. Another shudder ran up Ford's back and made him quicken his pace.
“Hey Ford,” called Owen as he waved. He stood in front of a long square building with patches of gray paint still clinging to the concrete block walls.
Ford smiled at hearing his name used. “I’ve got your disks.” He held out the box. “Where’s 86?”
“Oh, he's looking around. We found this complex of buildings. Look at 'em all. It's all made of block thus far. We used up our box of reds. This was probably a little factory setup.”
“A factory way out here?” Ford asked. “To make what?”
Owen gave a quick shrug and shook his head. "No clue, but I've seen little factory complexes like this before, situated beside one of their steel rail roads. One of those came through here too. See that wide stripe of rocks on the ground? It starts over there, runs between these buildings then it disappears back that way. The steel was probably harvested long ago. My theory is that the Hater leaders put these little factories all around in the wilderness as punishment sites. Prisoners had to work making hate-stuff. They built crude shelters around the factory.”
“Why would they make all these small apartments and not just build one big ward?” asked Ford.
Owen frowned, realizing that his theory did not have a handy answer. “I don’t know. The teachers always said The Haters were crazy. Maybe that was part of them being crazy.”
Ford shook his head, skeptically. He had no better theory, but irrationality did not fit with what he saw: structures arranged in a tight and orderly grid. He felt that there had to be another reason the buildings were constructed where they were. He looked up at a trio of large cylindrical towers, perhaps twelve or fifteen meters tall and four meters around.
“It’s amazing that these big things are still standing,” said Ford. “Everything else around here is broken and crumbling.”
“Yeah,” said Owen. “I don’t see many of these big round things, but I've seen a few. They used 'em for storing stuff, I think. They’re made of blocks too – just different kinds of blocks. These three towers have big holes broken in their bottoms. I think some other Haters must have done that to get at whatever was inside. Come, I’ll show you.”
Rounding the corner of the blue-gray painted structure, Ford had a better view of the three round towers standing apart from the other buildings. Thin rusty bands held the curved blocks in stacked rings. Half of the bottom two or three rows of blocks had been broken away from each tower. 86 braced himself with one hand on a jagged block along the top of the hole in the first tower. He peered into the dark void.
“You’re not just looking for somewhere to sleep, are you?” joked Owen.
86 flailed a rude gesture at Owen and ducked into the tower’s interior. The block he had been leaning against fell to the ground. Ford felt an inaudible groan through his feet.
“Did you feel that?” Ford asked.
“Feel what?”
A thin trail of dust fell from the top of the tower.
“Something’s happening with that tower,” Ford said.
“What?” asked Owen. “What’s happening?”
“Look.” Ford pointed at the metal dome atop the tower. It was clearly starting to move sideways. “I think that thing is falling over.”
“86!” Owen shouted as he ran toward the black opening. He skidded to a stop as more blocks fell from the iron band, blocking the entrance. “Get out of there. It’s falling.”
Owen stepped back and called again. 86’s face appeared in the opening. He climbed over the rubble, looked up at the tower leaning over him. He ran. The tower fell and collapsed at the same time. Fast and faster, each ring of concrete blocks slid forward and crumbled apart. The scene was like that of a giant concrete animal pursuing a very small 86. Steel groaned. Blocks rumbled. A dense cloud of dust rose into the sky.
A wave of dust engulfed Ford and Owen. Everything grew silent.
Ford shifted his stance from side to side, in hopes of seeing 86 emerge from the cloud. As the dust slowly blew away, only the mound of jumbled blocks and bent iron hoops stood before them.
“99. This is 01. We’ve got a problem. You need to come right away.”
“Do you see him?” asked Ford. “Did you see which way 86 ran? I lost sight of him in the dust. Maybe he ran back behind this other building.”
“I didn’t see him go that way.” Owen shook his head, solemnly.
“What? What’s the problem?” asked 99 as he ran up.
“We were marking these block structures when one of them fell over,” said Owen. “We saw 86 running away, but…”
99 approached the rubble with one hand on the side of his visor. 53 and 22 came running around the corner of the long building. Owen repeated the events for them. 99 climbed onto the debris and waved for the others to join him.
“His signal is coming from somewhere down here. Pull these away." 99 and the four men lifted broken blocks out of the tangle and rolled them aside. They eventually created a shallow pit within the pile of blocks.
Ford braced his feet atop the uneven slope of debris and pulled up on a loose block at the bottom. In the gap where the block had been were grass and blood.
“Hey…um…” He stopped and stared. The only time he had seen that much blood was in the videos. It was much redder than it was in the videos.
The other workers scrambled over to Ford’s location and pulled away a few more blocks. They, too, stopped and stared. In the void, grassy stubble poked up through a layer of bright red blood. An arm bent the wrong way at the elbow, stretched across the ground. The unkempt hair was certainly 86's, but his head looked deflated – like a sock without a foot in it.
The only dead people Ford had ever seen were in the videos. From the way Owen, 53, and 22 stood and stared at the blood, it was apparent that they were not accustomed to death either. The dissonance paralyzed them.
99 pushed through the four young men. He stared at the blood and hair for a moment. “Yep. He’s dead.” He reached down between the concrete slabs, pulled up on the bloody hair with one hand while retrieving 86’s red-soaked visor with the other.
“Glad I could retrieve this.” 99 stood up and wiped the visor on his pant leg. “This will make filing the work report much simpler." He climbed out of the rubble and pushed between Owen and Ford. "Back to work. We’ve still got to get the rest of this site tagged before dark.”
“What?” 53’s jaw dropped. “You’re not just going to leave him under there, are you?”
99 turned, a genuinely puzzled look on his leathery face. “Well, yeah. What were you going to do with what’s left of him?”
53 sputtered and looked around as if an answer might be lying on the ground nearby. “I don’t know. Maybe we could…like…take his body back to The City. Yeah. We’ll take his body back. We could use one of the plastics bins. We can’t just leave him under all that junk like he was old trash.”
“Why not? That’s all he was,” said 99. “He was trash before this. He’s literally trash now. No one in The City is going to want a bin of his blood and bones. There isn’t enough for the composters. Look, I’ve seen lots of guys lost out here. No one back in The City wants what’s left.”
What DO people do with the dead? Ford wondered. In the videos of the before-times, dead people were always left lying wherever they fell: the soldiers on the barbed wire, the riot victims in the streets, the red truck driver on the pavement, the woman in the car. What happened to dead bodies afterward? Would city officials just throw 86’s body away?
“I know he wasn't the best worker, but he deserves better than that.” 53 flailed his arms at the rubble.
“Deserves?” 99 stood taller and put his fists on his hips. “None of you deserve anything. What do you think you are, Matri, or something?”
Ford scoffed quietly at the foreman’s absurd comparison. 53, as a worker, was not even a member of the higher class of men, let alone a Matri, the ruling class of women.
“Don’t get to thinking all high and mighty of yourself," snapped 99 as he jabbed his finger toward 53. "You were bred for just one purpose: to work. If you can’t work, you’re trash.”
“I don’t believe it. We’re more than that,” shouted 53. “We have to be.”
Ford, Owen, and 22 shared worried glances. The foreman was getting visibly angry.
“Look, you.” 99 faced 53 with a scowl. “Don’t get loud at me. You are what they say you are and nothing more. You eat, you sleep, you work, and eventually, you die. That's all there is. In fact, when a building falls on you, I’m not even gonna look for your bones.”
53 let out an animal-like shriek and tried to jump at the foreman. His foot slipped on a loose block. Instead of grabbing 99 around the neck, he fell at the foreman’s feet. 99 took a step back and hit the button on the remote. Pain shot down everyone’s back. If he could have moved his facial muscles, Ford would have winced as he imagined falling onto the jagged corners of broken concrete all around him. One of his knees braced against an upright concrete block, preventing Ford from falling forward. As he slowly titled sideways, the pain subsided in time for him to put an arm out to break his fall against other blocks.
Owen and 22 were not so lucky. They fell onto the broken shards of the tower. Their visors and breathers prevented them from getting worse facial injuries.
99 backed up two more steps, fussed with his remote for a moment, then aimed it at the prostrate man before him. 53 shook and jerked as if being kicked by many invisible men.
“Don’t you ever make a move at me, you stinkin’ piece of trash.” 99 pressed the button again. 53 arched his back as if being lifted by invisible hands. He collapsed to the ground, screaming.
As soon as Ford’s arms and legs responded, he rushed over to help Owen and 22 up off the blocks. Owen winced as he watched 53 writhing on the ground. “That must be on five,” he whispered.
“He’s been asking for it,” mumbled 22. "I tried to tell him to go easy, but he's so stubborn.”
“Alright,” shouted 99 to the rest of the group. His face was deep red and his eyes as furious as any Hater Demon in Halls. “I will have NO more trouble from any of you. Do you all understand?” He waved the remote at them. “You two. Get back to work marking. 22, you come help up this sorry sack of bones. I’ll give you ten minutes to get him together then both of you get back to your assigned zone too." 99 stomped off, taking big strides.
“Does that happen a lot?” Ford whispered to Owen.
“No, and I’m sure glad for that. This has been coming for some time, though, like 22 said. 53 has always been a hothead. It’s pretty clear that the water doesn’t work on him either. Come on. Looks like you’re working with me now. We’d better get started.”
(end 3, part 1)
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Post by texican on Nov 23, 2019 22:40:15 GMT -6
mic ,
99 definitely needs a block parting of the hair....
When we read a story, we read with our beliefs, knowledge and what we believe is right and wrong and respond to the story as if we were there instead of how the natives were raised.... Pain collars are a staple in SiFi....
Thanks for the chapter....
Texican....
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Post by mic on Nov 24, 2019 8:11:21 GMT -6
Texican,
Yes. 99 is nasty enough. He fleshes out a bit more in the next chapter -- not 100% nasty.
Per your point about today-readers bringing their 2019 knowledge and beliefs to the characters, how would you have seen the characters react differently?
Per pain collars, yeah, I recall them being part of an old Star Trek (original series) episode. Not new, but appropriate for how a modern tyranny would manage "chain gangs".
Thanks for the input. It's all helpful.
-- Mic
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Post by texican on Nov 24, 2019 13:31:26 GMT -6
Texican, Per your point about today-readers bringing their 2019 knowledge and beliefs to the characters, how would you have seen the characters react differently?-- Mic Americans have a belief that others are like us which is not true even for Europeans.... Different socio/economic influences impact people differently in different parts of the world.... The rape and attacks by the muslims in Europe are not put down as Americans think these POS should be put down.... We are seeing the same European attitude growing in America which will explode one day.... Multiculturalism is the death knell to Freedom.... A rosy future is not our future....
We are being driven into war and it will not be between the females and males, but between religious and political belief systems, freedoms, economies and food.... The world will not exist as it does now.... Food, fuel, medicine, ammo and weapons will disappear and you will only have that which you have put away.... There will be scattered clusters of people that band together for survival and daily life will be a struggle to grow sufficient crops and animals to survive on.... So you have put up ten years of supplies, what happens at year 11 when your supplies are essentially gone? Have you been farming and ranching, have you learned? How many raids have you repealed? How many folks have you lost? If you survive, you will only be surviving and not living.... When civilization fails and it will fail across the world for the world is dependent on the world for everyday life even in America for so much of our manufacturing has been sold out of America.... Civilization will never return to what we have now....
Most people including Americans do not understand the complexities of our world.... They believe that when ever they throw a switch lights come on and they have no idea of the complexities of delivering electrical energy to their homes or fuels for their homes and vehicles. sThey believe that there will always be food in the stores for there has always been food in the stores and they have no comprehension of all of the steps and time that it takes for food to be put in grocery stores.... The biggest belief is that the federal and state governments will come to the rescue and they will be stunned and then dead when governments do not help for they can not help with such devastation.....
Just maybe, President Trump can help to diminish these impacts in America if the democraps can be taken out of the equation.... If you believe in God and Jesus Christ, you know what is coming and it is war.... but peace will finally prevail.... Texican....
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Post by mic on Nov 24, 2019 18:53:22 GMT -6
Texican,
Can't argue with all you say. The modern drive toward a super-PC culture creates a tyranny of its own. You also make a good point about what comes after the stashed supplies are all gone. Long-term survivors will have to have learned the old skills of growing their own food and making their own things. Too many have grown complacent to the point of becoming helpless. In that sense, the helpless become slaves to those who provide their 'needs.'
I tried to make that point via my character Ford. He recognized that everything he had, came from City leaders. Everything was issued by the state: food, clothing, jobs, housing. The people of The City were, in effect, slaves without the shock collars. Indoctrination since childhood taught them that their current state of affairs was the best of all possible worlds (so why fight it?)
So, back to my question: How would you think the characters would (or should?) have reacted differently to their circumstances? I appreciate your insight.
In the meantime, the rest of chapter 3.
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Post by mic on Nov 24, 2019 19:01:10 GMT -6
Chapter 3 (part 2)
Ford and Owen marked the corners of many ruins that lined a long overgrown street. The structures they checked had all been wooden. Their foundations, visible behind the shrubs and tall weeds, had been made of block. Most of the time, it was apparent. Ford noticed that all of the ruins had collapsed in the same direction. Their walls had all fallen to the right. Their roofs – some broken, some intact – sat to the right. They did not look as if they had collapsed of decay but had been pushed.
“So, Owen, I noticed that all these apartments look broken in the same way. Doesn’t that seem odd to you? I mean, if all these structures had fallen down from rot, wouldn’t they be just lying in heaps, this way and that? It's like they all got pushed over and in the same direction. On top of that, they all seem to be about the same amount of broken: not some more and some less. Is it like this in the other Hater villages you’ve seen?”
Owen looked up and down the street. “Hmm. Now that you mention it, I see what you mean. At some of the other salvage sites, the apartments look like something pulled them toward the street. Other times, they all had a big bite taken out of their left sides or middles.”
Ford wondered out loud. “Do you think this village was one of the places where The Redeemed lived? I mean, after The Triumph, when they started building The City and moving the good people into it, those people had to come from somewhere, right?”
“Huh.” Owen stared at the ground. “I never thought about where The Redeemed actually came from. If anything, I pictured them just walking out of the woods to board the trams to The City. Villages make more sense.”
Ford nodded. History lessons told about the first wave of residents in The City being gathered from all across the continent. Where The Redeemed came from was never mentioned in detail. The stories always focused on the gathering and the journey to The City.
Memories of class plays to celebrate Cleansing Day floated to the surface of Ford’s memory. He always seemed to get the role of a tree. His part was to hang his head and branch-arms in a sad way because people were living nearby. When the kids playing The Redeemed marched across the stage and through the fiberboard city gate he would raise is branches and smile. The trees were happy now that all the people lived in The City.
Ford blinked away the memories. “That doesn’t explain why they’re all knocked down like this. Maybe Haters broke these apartments after the trams – out of spite?”
Owen shrugged. “That’s a good theory. I like that. The teachers were always saying that The Haters lived only to destroy.”
While Owen was correct about the teachers – they did say things like that – the concept of non-stop destruction did not fit well with the scene before him. Ford wanted to talk about his doubts about the “truths” their teachers had taught them but their visors had come back online. Even in this remote corner of The Outside, their visors were linked to servers back in The City via the relay in the lifter. An algorithm was monitoring everything they said, ready to flag any unauthorized phrases. Letting the topic go was probably the behavior they desired but Ford’s curiosity was stronger than his caution. He decided to continue obliquely.
“Yesterday in the lifter, you said that the Haters lived far apart because they couldn’t stand each other.”
“That’s what they say,” said Owen as he placed a red disk at the corner of a house’s foundation.
“But, these apartments are close together,” said Ford. “Do you think The Redeemed lived close together and Haters far apart?”
Owen shrugged again. “They said all this junk out here was a contamination by The Haters.”
“Even villages with apartments close together? That doesn’t make any sense.”
“They were irrational, uncivilized brutes. Maybe they did stuff that didn’t make sense.”
That answer did not solve Ford’s puzzle either. Building neat rows of apartments did not seem like the behavior of irrational people. A village of The Redeemed did not quite fit either. History always said that they cherished a pure earth and respected all the animals so much that building their apartments out of tree-strips did not seem consistent.
What if these apartments belonged to The Makers? Ford wondered. Maybe they liked living near each other.
“Could they have belonged to…I don’t know…someone else?” asked Ford.
“Who else?” Owen stopped to face Ford with a confused look.
"Oh, well…they're…" Ford realized he had never really fleshed out his notion of who The Makers were. "When I was a kid I used to wonder who…I mean, someone had to make things, or there would have been nothing for The Haters to destroy. Know what I mean?”
“Hmm.” Owen blinked as he processed the thought. “Couldn’t people make stuff because they hated? What about guns and knives? The Haters made those. They were the tools of destruction, the teachers always said.”
Ford frowned. His vague theory did not do well on its public debut. Rather than humiliate himself further, and risk alerting the algorithms, he kept quiet and placed disks around ruins.
Owen lingered in front of a ruin with flaking pink paint on its foundation. “You’re gonna have to go inside for this one.”
“Why?” asked Ford.
“Well, because I can’t tell what that foundation is made of. It could be block. It could be cast. They put stucco over it so you can’t tell from out here. You’ll have to go inside and see what it is.”
“Me? Why do I have to go inside?” Ford was not eager to enter the ruins. The teachers told stories of how the evil of The Haters permeated everything they touched. Even the structures they built were infused with their hate. That was why the First Wise Leaders constructed a whole new city for everyone to live in: a city free from the contamination of the before-times. What if all the stories were true and not merely tales to frighten young boys? What if Hater ruins did have some lingering evil inside them? Would it rub off if he touched something?
“You should go because I’m…the more senior member of the team and… It's not a big deal. I've done it lots of times.” Owen affected a dismissive wave but Ford could tell that Owen was afraid to go inside too.
“You need to learn the job. Yeah. That’s it. You need to learn too. You go down inside and see what’s on the inside of the walls – block or cast. You’ll learn something. Then we can mark it correctly.”
Ford swallowed hard. He did not want to go inside but he did want to prove how diligent he was if city officials were going to allow him to return. He refused to accept Owen’s earlier assertion that a work crew assignment was a death sentence. He would work hard and impress the officials. He would come back. As much as he disliked the idea of dark and dirty spaces, he would do it for Ada.
“Sometimes there are windows around the outside,” offered Owen. “Sometimes it’s a hole in the floor. Go on. We’re falling behind schedule.”
“Okay, okay.” Ford gingerly stepped between some faded yellow boards that framed a gap in the broken wall. He was careful not to touch them. The roof sat on top of half of the floor. Ford expected to see rubble: broken furniture and abandoned belongings. Instead, the floor was only a patchwork of grass, weeds, and a few spindly shrubs. There were no personal objects, only broken boards.
Maybe The Haters broke the apartment so they could take whatever The Redeemed left behind.
A dark rectangular hole in the floor offered a way down. When Ford approached the hole, he could see that stairs led down into the darkness.
He swallowed hard again and turned on his visor’s front lights. The wooden steps protested loudly with creaks and groans. He was careful not to touch the railing. The second step from the bottom broke sending Ford sprawling onto a soft mat of moss and ferns.
So much for not touching anything. He paused, wondering if he would feel haterism – or whatever it was called – flowing into his body. He waited a full minute but felt no different.
Probably just stories to scare little boys. He picked up the thin board his hand had landed on. He could use it as a prod. He scanned the dark basement with his visor lights. Whoever had stripped the house of anything of value had not come downstairs. Square-ish shapes – some as tall as himself – sat around the periphery of the basement. They were covered in moss. Roots hung down from between the joists.
“Well?” asked Owen via Ford’s visor link. “Look for the walls.”
“Right. The walls.” Ford’s light revealed that the walls were all covered with paneling. It looked vaguely like wood but was lumpy and blistered.
“The walls are all covered with something," Ford said.
“So, pull it down and tell me what’s inside. We’ve got to get moving.”
Ford used his stick to pry at the paneling. It fell away in a thousand chips and chunks. The falling fragments made a drumming sound as they landed on the top of a metal box that sat on a narrow table.
What’s this?
Ford brushed away the fragments with his stick. Despite a thick layer of dust, he could see that there was image on the lid. He pulled up his breather so he could blow the dust off. Something inside the box clunked as Ford lifted it. Barely visible on the lid, amid the splotches of rust, was the picture of a small red truck with rounded corners. A man sat inside, smiling and waving.
“The Makers?” Ford asked himself.
“What?” asked Owen.
“Oh. Uh. Nothing. The walls are…cast,” Ford said. “Yes. I can see it on the inside now. See?" He aimed his visor lights at the bare patch of wall. "0840, link 1701. Five seconds: live."
“Hey, that’s great,” said Owen. “At least we found one good one. Now get back up here. We’ve got two dozen more to do before dark. You don’t want to get 99 mad at us, do you?”
“Coming.” Ford aimed his visor at the stairs in case he was being recorded. He pulled at the box’s lid with his fingertips. He wanted to know what was inside. He told himself it had to be something special. The rusted top resisted several pulls, yielding at last with a loud squeak. Inside the box were squares of paper covered in squiggly lines. They crumbled into tiny flakes when Ford tried to pick them up. Beneath the documents was a fat little book that was sturdier than the fragile papers.
The thick pages of the book each held two or three images. Most of the pictures were of people. One image was of a woman who wore a long white shirt thing. She held a baby in her arms.
“What’s taking you so long?” demanded Owen.
"Um…nothing? Ford stuffed the little book into his cargo pocket. “It's …uh…slow going down here. Lots of…er…debris.”
The rest of the ruined structures in Ford and Owen's area were concrete block. They were down to two red disks, and the sun was going down behind the trees. They headed back to the cabin.
That night, everyone stared at the floor as they chewed their no-sauce disks. All of their visors were lined up on the charging pad. 99 sat in one corner of the cabin, well apart from the others, scowling.
“He wasn’t that bad,” said 22 at last. He glanced at the empty sleeping platform.
“He was a lazy shirker,” grumbled 53. “Even so, it doesn't seem right just to leave his body out there.” 53 shot a quick glance at 99. The foreman scowled back at him through narrow slit eyes.
“Yeah, I know he always tried to get out of work,” said 22, “but he was amazing in his own way.”
“Pfft. Yeah, amazing.” 53 rolled his eyes.
“No, really. He was. 86 was…the Red Dragon,” said 22 with awe.
"Oh, stop it," said 53. "He couldn't be. No one knows who The Red Dragon is. Besides, the Red Dragon has been up on Fire Mountain for months.”
“I know. That’s because they banished 86 from logging in, so the dragon wouldn’t move. He was telling me all about it the other day. They can’t delete his character because he had amassed too many stars. He had achieved permanence.”
“The Red Dragon never lost a battle,” said Ford. “I was on his team a few times. He was unstoppable.”
“You’re not falling for this too, are you?” scoffed 53.
“You don’t have to believe me,” said 22. “He didn’t want me to tell anyone, but he’s…well, he won’t mind now. I’m just telling you because I think you’re right. 86 was not just a skin bag of bones or just a shirker. He was also the Red Dragon.”
53 chewed the last of his brown disk with a pensive frown.
Owen leaned over to whisper to Ford. “As much as I didn’t like 86’s always trying to get out of work, him secretly being the Red Dragon kinda proves 53’s point, don’t you think? We’re not just disposable workers.”
An odd feeling flashed across Ford’s mind. Permanence? The man they knew as 86 was dead and gone but part of him – the Red Dragon avatar – remained. Even if it never moved off of Fire Mountain, it continued to exist.
“That’s enough chatter,” bellowed 99. “Last trip to the blue-water, then lights out in five minutes. Hop to it.”
After the lights had been out for a while, and the breathing sounds of the others became long and slow, Ford quietly pulled the little book from his pocket. His eyes had adjusted to the soft yellow light of the air filter’s “on” light.
He wondered if the people in the images had lived in the ruined structure he found the box in. How long before the end of The Haters Era had the little book been inside that metal box? Square-cornered automobiles appeared in the background of a few of the images. They were similar to the burning cars in the Hater videos. The box must have come from the Hater era. The people, however, did not look crazed or angry. Were they some of the Redeemed?
Beneath most of the images were more of the squiggly lines. Ford assumed they were words, but he could make no sense of them. A few captions had recognizable numbers. Almost every image puzzled Ford. Men and women stood together. Old people and little children together. The house with the pink foundation sat in the background of many of the images.
Some of the pictures had little women in them – less than half the size of the adult women. One image showed the little women running beside some boys, chasing a ball.
Ford stared into the distance. On an intellectual level, he knew that everyone started as babies then grew larger. Small boys turned into men. He had never seen a little woman before. They had separate nurseries and schools. His classes were all boys his own age. His teachers were all men. All of their lessons featured images of boys or men – never of women. Ford’s limited examples of the other gender were restricted to somber-faced city officials giving speeches and the few gaunt Carriers or sad Tenders he could steal glances at as they trudged through the women's park.
He stared at the image of the woman holding the baby. She had an oval face and pale brown hair that hung over her shoulders. Her smile was soft, and her eyes kind. Her image stirred Ford’s first and oldest memories. When he was four years old, he had been declared old enough to leave the nursery and enter school. He remembered one of the Tenders carrying a baby in her arms, much like the woman in the image. The Tender had a soft smile. She looked sad to see Ford leave. Most of the Tenders that worked in the nursery were gentle and kind, but that last one stayed in his memory. Was the woman in the image a Tender? Haters must have had Tenders too. Just like in The City, someone had to take care of the babies that their Carriers incubated. How else could things work?
The people in the pictures were smiling. Where was the anger, rage, or destruction? Nothing about the people in the images fit what he had been taught in school. Ford felt an intellectual vertigo, as if his entire understanding of history was crumbling beneath his feet. He had never questioned what they taught.
Ford shook his head to chase away the dissonance. Twenty years of hearing about how awful the before-times were would not go away quietly. The videos showed someone behaving terribly. Someone back then was hateful but was it most of them, or just a few? He had already imagined a third class of people in the before-times: The Makers.
What if this was a whole village of Makers? Did Haters come in to destroy them? He felt sad at the thought of the smiling people in the images being killed and their bodies left on the ground. His new theory did not comfortably fit the facts either. Even if animals ate the carcasses, would there not still be some bones scattered around? Ford saw no bones.
He rubbed his dry eyes. Better theories would have to wait for tomorrow.
(end chapter 3)
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Post by texican on Nov 24, 2019 23:13:57 GMT -6
Texican, So, back to my question: How would you think the characters would (or should?) have reacted differently to their circumstances? I appreciate your insight.
Ford is awakening, but still needs a few more shocks to bring him out from under a lifetime of propaganda.... He understands a lot, but just hasn't connected all of the dots.... 01 will help.... As would finding a fully furnished bomb shelter.... Now having Ada out in the waste land with him would help a lot.... Texican....
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Post by texican on Nov 24, 2019 23:31:03 GMT -6
What if this was a whole village of Makers? Did Haters come in to destroy them? He felt sad at the thought of the smiling people in the images being killed and their bodies left on the ground. His new theory did not comfortably fit the facts either. Even if animals ate the carcasses, would there not still be some bones scattered around? Ford saw no bones.
He rubbed his dry eyes. Better theories would have to wait for tomorrow.
A male thinking for himself.... The females will be livid when they find out and the execution squads will flow out of the cities....
One box found, thousands of others to go....
Tanks mic for the chapter....
Texican....
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Post by mic on Nov 25, 2019 11:23:20 GMT -6
Chapter 4 – Attacked (part 1)
“Bah!” Ford awoke from a blow to the back of his head. Knowing what it was, he rolled on his back and let out an exasperated sigh.
“Blue-water,” barked 99. “Get moving. We need to break camp and get to the next site. Move it, you slugs!”
Ford felt another kick to the back of his head. He grumbled as he rolled out of bed.
After breakfast of a cold brown disk, everyone began breaking camp. The sun had not yet risen above the trees. Ford shivered in the cold, damp air. Working helped provide some body heat against the chill. Ford and Owen disassembled the cabin. A deflator vacuum turned each of the cabin's rigid panels into soft fabric again. They rolled them up and stashed them in the yellow fabric case.
53 rolled up the solar sheets while 22 gathered the perimeter wire.
Ford stepped through the lifter's door to take the same back corner seat he sat in the day before, but 99 was already sitting there.
“You sit up front.” The foreman pointed to the empty seat beside 53.
“But I don’t know how to…”
“You don’t have to,” said 99. “It flies itself. I’ll tell you what to say when it’s time.”
“Figures that he’d sit back there,” muttered 53 as Ford took his seat. “Big coward. If he didn’t have that remote...”
“Yeah, well, it’s not doing any of us any good when you make him mad,” Ford whispered.
“Okay, new kid,” said 99. “Say 3884. Go to next stop. Say it slowly and clearly.”
“Um… 3884. Go to next stop.” Ford looked around. Nothing seemed to happen.
“I could have done that,” muttered 53 under his breath. “I knew what to say.” He glared at Ford.
After a pause, he heard the door hiss closed and latch. The fan motors began their low tone, rising to a high pitch. Dust flew up all around them. Small rocks and sticks pelted the windows and metal skin of the lifter. The machine rocked on its wheels once then bounced into the air. It rotated as it rose above the trees. Ford held onto the armrests.
The view from the front seat was much better. Ford saw the broken roofs and walls of the village they had just marked. The lifter passed slowly over the former factory site. The tops of the two standing towers were lit by the sunrise. The rubble of the fallen tower still lay in the blue-gray of twilight. Ford had only known 86 for just one day but felt it was proper to mutter a silent goodbye to the place where he died. The Red Dragon deserved at least that much.
The lifter did not climb as high as it had before; Ford estimated that it went only fifty meters up before the rings swiveled to vertical and the craft sped away. It followed the double road for about fifteen minutes before the fans began to slow and rotate back to horizontal. The machine, guided by preset instructions, hovered over a grassy clearing. It adjusted its heading a few times before settling down onto its wheels. The prop wash kicked up a furious swirl of straw fragments.
The foreman and his four workers filed out onto the long grass. 53 unfurled the solar sheets by himself. 22 strung the perimeter wire. Ford and Owen set up the shelter as best they could.
“What’s with the sloppy seams?” ranted 99. He pointed at the joints between shelter panels. The top of one panel had too much overlap. The bottom had barely enough to make the connection. The adjacent panel had too much overlap at the bottom.
“The ground is really uneven here,” said Owen. “We tried to…”
"That's just an excuse for sloppy work." 99 stripped open one seam and pulled. The two panels were no closer together. He pulled again until his arms quivered, and his face turned red. When he laid over the flap, it was no closer than what Owen had done.
“Well, it’ll just have to do,” grumped 99. “If you grunts get your sites marked quickly, we’ll only be here one night anyhow. Alright, now all of you listen up!”
Ford saw the foreman’s hand grip the remote a bit more tightly. He knew what the upcoming announcement would be. This time, he sat on the ground as quickly as the others did.
“Yeah. That’s right,” bellowed 99. He pressed the button with a theatrical flourish.
The pain felt like instantaneous fire melting Ford’s spine. The shock sucked the air out of his lungs. He wanted to inhale but had no control. Even his earlobes burned. What he could see of the long grass ahead of him went black. His ears felt they were stuffed with cotton.
After what seemed like many minutes (but was probably only a few seconds), Ford was able to gasp in a quick breath. His arms and legs did not respond. They tingled like they were still on fire. He lay on the grass: as inert as the shelter panels had been.
“That was only on four,” growled 99. “I will NOT have another outburst like yesterday. Do you all understand me?”
Ford, Owen, and 22 nodded. 53 glared with his demon eyes.
“I said, do you understand me?” The foreman spoke directly at 53. “I’ll give you another reminder if I have to.” He held up the remote. “Do you understand me?”
“Yes,” 53 hissed. His jaw muscles looked like tight bands beneath his cheeks. He kept his demon stare locked onto 99.
“Good. Now get out there and get to work.”
“Um…sir?” asked 22 timidly. “Our visors aren’t working yet. How will we know where to go?”
“Oh for crying out loud!” 99 threw his arms up in exasperation. “The work site is right in front of you. Use your eyes. Those ruins right there…in plain sight. You two take that side of the brick building. You other two take the left. Now, get to work.”
Ford’s legs felt rubbery and unsteady. Nonetheless, he was eager to put distance between himself and the foreman. Owen wobbled behind his workmate, trying to keep up.
“That shock hit my visor hard,” said Ford. “I don’t even see the countdown numbers for the restart.”
“Yeah. 53 said his visor was out for an hour yesterday,” said Owen.
Ford peered over his shoulder to see if they were out of sight of the camp. “Look, Owen. While our visors are offline, I’ve got to show you something.” He pulled the photo album from his pocket and flipped it open.
Owen gasped. “Where did you get that?”
“In that house you made me go into,” said Ford.
“So that’s what took you so long.”
“Look. All these people are happy. Look at this; little women – I’ve never seen little women before – playing some sort of ball game with boys.”
Owen stared at the images with his mouth hanging open. He slowly turned the pages. "Whoa. If they ever find out you have this, you'll get sent to the mines, for sure.”
“I know, I know. That’s why I’m showing you now before the visors come back on. I was thinking about this a long time last night. These pictures don't fit what they always taught us.”
Ford’s mind quickly replayed a synopsis of world history as he had been taught it. The enlightened Greeks arose from the brutalism of cavemen to establish a just and equitable civilization, ruled by wise women. The Greeks lived happily – men on their own islands and women on separate ones. The beauty of Greek culture was ruined when hoards of cruel men swept in from the wastelands and destroyed everything. The crude, fur-clad men, enslaved women, hoarded all possessions to themselves and fomented hate to prevent anyone from challenging their rule. At The Great Triumph, the two-thousand-year reign of darkness ended, and civilization resumed.
“All the history videos I ever saw about the Haters Era, depicted twisted, angry faces of men,” said Ford. “The very few women in those videos were terrified or dead. But look at her, or those old people, or those little women. They all look happy being together. How can that be?”
Owen rubbed his forehead as he studied the pictures, “It shouldn’t be. I never saw a picture of a man and a woman together unless it was in Hater Era footage. All our school lessons had pictures of men – no women.”
“True,” said Ford. “Documentaries, promo videos, even the bots are all men.”
“Heck,” said Owen, “the only women I ever saw were the officials who gave speeches.”
“I saw some women in the Women’s Park near my apartment building.”
“Really? There’s no Women’s Park in my district.” Owen leaned close, eager for news. “Do they all look stern and plain like city officials?”
“Well…” Ford tried to think of apt descriptions. “They did look kinda plain, like thin men. The Tenders wore light blue pants suits. The Carriers wore loose blue-gray robe things.” He almost mentioned Ada but decided against it.
“That’s it?” Owen sounded disappointed. "For all the warnings I got, I expected something…I don’t know…more. Flashing demon eyes, or claws, or something.”
“No horns or anything, just plain skinny people in baggy clothes. I couldn't get a good look, though. You could only sneak glances in their direction. One guy got caught holding onto the fence and looking right into the Women’s Park. The black shirts carried him away. I never saw him again.”
Owen tapped with his finger on one image in the photo album. It showed a man with his arm around the woman who held the baby. “From what I had been able to infer, this was the problem.”
“What?” Ford squinted at the photo. Nothing looked like a problem; everyone was smiling.
“Right there. Look at his arm.” Owen pointed. “He’s touching her.”
“So?”
Owen shook his head like someone having to explain mathematical fractions for the tenth time. “As near as I’ve been able to piece together, after The Triumph (when women consolidated ruling power) they allowed men and women in the same spaces. The earlier speeches talked as if they thought that rule by women would prevent the evils of men. Apparently, it did not. Co-mingling men were touching women.”
Ford’s face scrunched up in disbelief. “What do you mean, ‘touching?’ Like that guy? An arm over her shoulder? I know it’s illegal, but why? She doesn’t seem to mind.”
“How should I know? None of their speeches ever spelled out why. There was some horrible touching event by men who belonged to the elites. No one would describe it but after that, a man merely brushing past a woman – like in the subway trams – or even a man looking a woman in the eye was pronounced a violation of Woman’s Rights. Their solution was a law to keep men and women apart so it would never happen again.”
Ford stared at the ground. He had never thought about trying to touch Ada, only to talk with her and share the little joys that no one else noticed. After seeing the photo, Ford wondered what it would be like to put his arm around Ada’s shoulders. Would she smile like the woman with the baby or would she shrink away in horror? Having Ada flee from him was the last thing he wanted.
"Uh, oh," said Owen. “My visor just started to countdown. “Only a few seconds left. You’ve got to keep that book hidden,” said Owen. “Let’s talk next time.”
“What does it all mean?” asked Ford as he pocketed the little album.
Owen could only shrug and shake his head. The visors were back online.
“Listen, you can’t keep doing that,” whispered Owen as Ford pulled himself through the window of a ruin’s foundation. “We’ve got a lot of ground to cover before dark.”
“I know,” Ford whispered back. In a louder voice for his visor, he said, “We do want to make sure we do a good job of marking for concrete.” He gave an exaggerated thumbs-up gesture so his visor could see it.
Owen rolled his eyes and shook his head.
At the next house, a portion of the block foundation had caved in. Grass-covered earth sloped into the hole. Ford pointed to the gap with his eyes and smiled.
Owen’s shoulders slumped. His eyes begged Ford not to go, though his half-grimace betrayed that he knew Ford was going to go anyhow.
"Oh my!" said Ford, theatrically. "I have fallen." Ford rolled on his shoulders down the slope and through the broken wall. "Oh, no. My visor has fallen off too," he announced.
Ford turned on his front lights and set his visor in the corner of the basement. The red light blinked, and the beeping began. In the glow from the visor, Ford moved through the debris in the basement. Most of it was junk: broken chairs, boxes made of spongy wood that contained rusted lumps of something mechanical.
A set of shelves lined one wall. They were mostly empty, so a dark box on the top shelf caught Ford’s eye. He had to stand upon a piece of some rusted machinery to reach the box. He hoped to find more images of the before-times. Instead, he found a loosely folded rag stiff with tar. The cloth broke away in slabs as Ford tried to unfold it. Each break sent up swirls of cotton fibers. In the center of the rag was a knife. Tufts of fabric stuck to the blade where the tarred rag rested against blackened steel.
A knife? Images from The Haters videos came to mind: silhouettes of young men running through fire-lit streets waving knives like this one over their heads. The teachers always said that knives and guns were tools of hate. Ford never imagined that he would be holding one.
The blade was as long as his hand. The black handle felt sticky with the tar-like residue. Ford expected that the edge would be sharp, but he found out how sharp when he rubbed his thumb across it.
“Ow!” A bright red drop of blood oozed out of the slice in his thumb. “That was dumb.”
But now, what do I do with this? Years of schooling told him to recoil in horror from it, yet his mind would not let him put it down. The handle felt strangely comfortable in his hand.
I can’t just put it in my pocket. He felt along the top shelf to see if there were more of the tarred rags that he might wrap it in. His fingers found something hard. It was nearly black, flat, and shaped like the blade – straight on one side, curved to a point on the other side. The top was open, so Ford carefully slipped the knife in. "It's like a sock."
He slid the knife and knife-sock into his pants pocket and hurried back to retrieve his visor that was beeping loudly.
“I…hope you were not hurt in your…fall,” said Owen with an exasperated look.
“Oh. Yes, I did get hurt, but we must press on with our work nonetheless,” Ford said as he rubbed his shoulder with a bit too much melodrama.
Owen rolled his eyes and made a show of looking at Ford’s hands as if to ask if he found anything in the house.
Ford smiled and rubbed his hand across his pocket.
As they marked the next dozen foundations along the street, Ford was bursting inside to show Owen the knife. He felt exhilarated and nervous. Having images from the Dark Time was risky enough. Having an actual tool of hate was probably punishable by death. Should he leave it behind? His fretting was interrupted by something unusual in his visor’s displays.
“Hey, Owen. My visor is flashing little words I’ve never seen before. What does ‘Services Unavailable’ mean? The signal still seems stable. What services?”
“It happens out here sometimes,” said Owen. He grabbed a handful of yellow disks from the box and walked up to the next ruin. “We’re all connected through the hub in the lifter. It’s the lifter that loses its uplink back to city servers sometimes.”
Ford stood up straight. “You mean they can’t listen to us or see through our visors right now?”
“Not without the uplink. Why?”
Ford dropped his handful of disks and dug deep in his pants pocket. "I’ve got to show you something. Look at what I found in that basement back there.”
Owen took a step back. His mouth hung open. “That’s a…”
“Yeah, a knife. Cool, isn’t it? It’s really sharp, though.” Ford held his thumb up as a visual aid.
“Only Haters had knives,” said Owen, parroting lessons drummed into schoolboys’ heads.
“Well, that’s not true anymore, is it?” said Ford with a wry smile. “I’m not a Hater, and I’ve got one.”
Owen waved away Ford’s logic. “What in blazes are you doing with that? If they find out you’ve got something like that they’ll…”
“Kill me? You said yourself that this crew is a sort of death sentence anyhow.”
“Yeah, okay, whatever, but what are you going to do with that? You can’t just carry it around. What if 99 catches you with it? I thought your picture book was trouble. Oh man. If he finds out you’ve got a…a knife. He might just zap you on full five for an hour, or something.”
“Then he just can’t find out, that’s all.” Ford wanted to sound confident, but the image of 53 writhing on the ground was a sobering prospect.
“Well, put that thing away.” Owen pointed frantically toward Ford’s pocket. “There’s no telling when the uplink will clear up.”
Ford and Owen ran from ruin to ruin to do their marking quickly. That way, Ford could get a few minutes of search time. As worried as Owen sounded, he also seemed intrigued at what else Ford might find.
(end ch.4, part 1)
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smitty60
New Member
Posts: 28
Member is Online
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Post by smitty60 on Nov 25, 2019 13:42:08 GMT -6
Outstanding story. Thanks
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Post by texican on Nov 25, 2019 14:18:20 GMT -6
Knowledge and relics building up....
The threat to the status quo is growing slowly but will cascade....
Thanks Mic for the chapter....
Texican....
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Post by 9idrr on Nov 25, 2019 20:41:01 GMT -6
Well, sir, I'm guessin' you've got me hooked or at least another fifty chapters.
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Post by mic on Nov 26, 2019 11:59:01 GMT -6
(chapter 4, part 2)
“We walked all the way down this stupid little dirt road, and the foundation was made of rocks?" Owen threw up his hands in frustration. “I was hoping we’d find some nice cast back here. 22 and 53 found two cast sites. We’ve only found one so far.”
“There’s nothing interesting here,” said Ford, “just a few boards, rocks and lots of moss. What about that big structure back there?” Ford pointed to a half-collapsed building fifteen or so meters behind the collapsed house. It was made of weathered gray boards. Bushes surrounded the walls. Two tall trees grew through the weathered rafters.
“We don’t have time for that one,” said Owen. “We’re falling behind.”
“But look, half of it is still standing. There could be more…you know, inside.”
“Yeah, and maybe not too. I don’t want to be zapped to the ground, do you?”
“No,” said Ford. “So I’ll just have to be fast.”
Ford sprinted through the tall grass toward the half-barn. Owen started to object, but Ford was gone.
Ford stepped through the large open doorway. Despite the structure missing the back half of its roof and walls, the dark-gray wood made for a dim interior.
I’ll just give it a quick look. Ford had to temper his curiosity with self-preservation.
In the relative darkness to the right, Ford could see a half-opened door. Jagged spikes of glass lined the door’s window. The room looked like a tool room. Inside, the air smelled of damp wood, dust and the heavy musk of old motor oil. No moss grew on the wide floorboards because they were so oil impregnated.
A quick look through the empty workbench and shelves offered no clues to the past. Dust fell on Ford’s shoulder. He looked up to see a couple threads of dust trickling from between ceiling boards. Reminded of the dust falling from the tower before it fell, Ford thought the structure might be collapsing. He had to go.
He stepped back through the open door, careful not to disturb anything like 86 had. As he approached the large door’s jambs, a glint of color caught his eye. In the gap between two wall boards, Ford could see a stripe of a colored photograph and some text. All he could make out was: Wiscons…
There’s something in this wall. It might have more about the Wisk-onsy. I’ve got to have it.
He pried at the board with his fingers. The board was dry, hard, and refused to budge. Ford remembered his knife. He slipped it out of its case and started to pry at the open end of the board at the jamb. The nails creaked as he pushed.
Another creak came from behind him. He felt a cold shiver across his shoulders and a sinking feeling like when he realized he had missed a camera and was being watched. The hairs on his neck stood up.
He turned his head slowly to look for the camera with his peripheral vision. Above the workroom, he saw two yellow eyes glowing in the dark. Realizing that it was an animal that was watching him, Ford quickly spun to face the creature. Before he could complete his turn, the animal leapt from its perch.
It knocked Ford to the floor. All he could see was a furry white muzzle and terribly long teeth. Ford let out a shout and raised his left arm to protect his face. The teeth sunk into his forearm. The animal tried to shake its head in an effort to tear off a piece of Ford’s arm. The fabric of his coveralls was the usual safety synthetic that work clothes were made of. It could not be torn or punctured. The frustrated cat glared into Ford’s eyes for a chilling moment.
The big cat swiped at Ford’s face with its free paw, sending his visor clattering across the boards. Ford tried to pull at the animal’s ear. Maybe it would be painful enough to make it release his arm. The cat’s eyes grew angrier. A big paw swung and knocked Ford’s breather off of his face. Ford knew the next swipe would mean claws tearing through his flesh. The cat paused, distracted by Ford’s visor at the base of the wall. The visor began blinking its red lights.
Taking advantage of the moment, Ford struggled to force the cat to use both front paws to keep its balance. Ford glanced around for anything on the floor beside him that he might strike the animal's head with – a board, a rock, anything. He saw his knife. It was just out of reach.
The big cat returned its attention to Ford and reeled back a paw for the next strike. Ford rolled toward the paw as much as he could. The cat refused to let go of his arm, so Ford’s roll upset its balance. The cat scrambled to reset its stance. Ford reached toward his knife. His fingers closed around the handle.
The cat lifted his paw again. Ford kicked and twisted the other way. The cat clamped down harder on Ford's left forearm. Ford swung the knife up to try and cut the animal's face and force it to release him. Instead, the knifepoint sunk into the cat's muscular neck.
This infuriated the cat. It shook Ford’s arm fiercely, trying to tear off his whole arm. Ford stabbed again and again. Why won’t it let go?
The cat's next shake was weaker. It growled, but its eyes seemed to look through Ford instead of at him. In the pause, Ford noticed blood running onto his arm and over his shoulder.
At last, the animal released Ford’s arm. It staggered back a step, stumbled, and fell onto its side. Ford quickly scrambled to his feet. Breathing fast and deeply, he held the knife unsteadily in front of himself, pointed toward the fallen cat. His left arm throbbed and burned.
“What’s going on in…” began Owen.
Ford did not move. He would not take his eyes off of the animal.
“Oh man,” gasped Owen. “What happened to you? You’re all bloody…”
Ford glanced down at his forearm. Deep indentations lingered where the cat’s fangs had been. The blood on his right arm and shoulder was from the cat. He held up the knife for Owen to see. The blade was red, as was Ford’s hand. His eyes turned to the dead cat.
“Agh! It's a… It's dead! You killed it? You killed it with the knife?” Owen’s tone was almost accusing. They both knew that city policy considered animal life inviolate.
“I had to,” gasped Ford between deep breaths. “It had my arm. Wouldn’t let go.”
“99 is on his way.” Owen rubbed his forehead. “I heard you scream. I didn’t know what happened. I called 99. If he catches you with that knife, you’re as good as dead. And you killed an animal too. Do you know how much trouble that is?”
“I didn’t mean to kill it. It wouldn’t let go.”
“Well, there’s no hiding a dead animal that big. Maybe they’ll consider self defense but no one will overlook that knife.” Owen looked around the derelict barn until his eyes settled on a long, triangular shard of glass.
"Here. Take this. Give me the knife," Owen said.
“No!” Ford pulled his hand back.
“We don’t have time for this,” pled Owen. “99 will be here soon. You can’t be seen with that knife. If you won’t give it to me, then toss it in that grass over there. Either way, you can’t have it in your hand. Take this piece of glass in your hand and tell him you used it to kill the animal.”
“I didn’t mean to.”
“That doesn’t matter now. It’s dead. That’s bad enough without him catching you with that thing.”
Ford knew Owen was right. He reluctantly tossed the knife into the tall grass near the open end of the barn. Owen smeared some blood from the floor onto the shard of glass. “Now, remember. You used this. You were only trying to get the animal off of you, not kill it. Right? You can tell him that?”
“Tell him what?” said 99 from behind them.
“Agh!” Owen jumped and spun to face the foreman.
“What the Ell have you done?” thundered 99 as he spotted the dead cat.
“It…it jumped on me,” stammered Ford. “I was…I came to…foundations…and, it knocked me down and bit onto my arm.” He held up his forearm, the dents still plainly visible in his sleeve. "I…I found this…" He held up the bloody shard. "I only wanted to hurt him…make him let go of me. I didn't mean to kill him."
"Well, you did," said 99 as the carefully walked around the motionless creature. "This is big trouble, you know. All animals are protected by intercity treaties. Do you have any idea how much this screws up my workload?”
“He didn’t mean to,” offered Owen. “He was only trying to get away from it.”
“Maybe,” said 99 skeptically, “but either way, an animal is dead and you know what they’re always saying: Animals are the planet’s most precious treasure. You’ll be turned over to the Gaia Committee. If you had killed a dozen men, they wouldn’t care. If you killed one sparrow, it would mean demotion. But this?”
Ford rolled up his sleeve. The fangs had not penetrated the fabric, but they left four big purple patches in his skin. The bruises were swollen and throbbing. Ford's arm felt weak and hot.
“Look, we’ve got to finish this site before we go anywhere,” said 99. “The uplink hasn’t come back online yet, so no one in The City knows about this…not yet, anyhow. When the uplink comes back, do not talk about this. Understand? Finish your quadrant, and we can talk about this more tonight. You can clean up too. Look at you, all covered in blood. Where did it get you?"
“Only my arm.” Ford held up his bruised forearm as Exhibit A.
“Good, then you can still work.” 99 strode toward the barn door. “Come on. Finish your quadrant.” He ushered them toward the door.
Ford and Owen followed 99 out into the tall grass.
“Wait,” said Ford. “My visor and breather are still in there.”
“Oh, for crying out loud. Hurry up,” 99 flailed an arm impatiently. “The sun’s going down.”
Ford ran inside and looked around. He found his visor quickly since it was flashing red lights and beeping. His breather was less straightforward. A glint of white in the tall grass caught his eye. The tall grass reminded him that he had thrown his knife into the tall grass. He glanced over his shoulder. Owen and 99 stood waiting a dozen meters away but not watching closely.
Ford saw stripes of blood on some grass stems to his right. He dug through the thatch. The knife stuck into the sod. Ford wiped the blade on the dried grass, and slipped it back into its case. As much as possessing a knife was deep legal peril, Ford felt things might be more dangerous without it.
The sun had gone down behind the trees by the time Owen and Ford finished their assigned sector. They trudged back to the camp.
“I never thought I’d say this,” began Owen, “but I’m so hungry, I’m looking forward to one of those tasteless brown disks.”
“Heh, I know what you mean. I think I’ll…” Ford slowed his pace. He pointed to the cabin and the three men standing beneath the lifter’s tail. Each of them was gesturing and pointing in different directions. “What’s all that about?”
“This all you guys’ fault,” blurted 53 as Ford and Owen approached. He pointed to the shelter. Two of the side panels had been pushed apart, leaving a triangular breach in the wall. "If you had put this thing together right…"
“We did the best we could,” said Owen defensively.
“What’s going on? What’s all this?” Ford pointed to litter scattered all over the ground in front of the shelter.
“We just got here a minute ago,” said 22, “and found all this. Something ate all our food.” He held up a shredded meal box.
“What did?” asked Ford.
“From the black fur stuck to the binding strips, I’d say it was a bear,” said 99.
“A bear?” 53 and 22 said in unison.
Ford peered through the opening. Meal box remnants lie strewn over the cabin floor. The lid of the storage bin was broken off. Ford examined the binding strips on both sides of the breach. "The strips don’t seem torn or damaged. I think we can get the walls back together.”
“What good will that do?” said 53. “It will just tear its way in again.”
“It already ate all the meals,” said 22. “Why would it bother?”
“Maybe to eat you!” snapped 53. “You’d make a fine meal.” 53 thrust out his belly and rubbed it with both hands.
“Hey,” protested 22. His arms slowly crossed over his midsection.
“Now stop it,” interrupted 99. “I’ve got enough trouble to deal with without you all going at each other.”
“You’ve got trouble?” said 53. “We’ve all got trouble. There’s no more food.”
99 stood up straight, touched the side of his visor, and announced, “Log Entry: Due to a sudden shortage of supplies, I’ve got no choice but to cancel the rest of this mission. We will return to The City tomorrow morning.”
“In the morning?” said 53. “What makes you think that thing is going to leave us alone all night? These thin walls can’t stop it. That hot wire out there was no use. Let’s leave now!”
“These older lifters use optics,” said 99, shaking his head. “Not safe at night. We could fly into the side of a hill or crash on landing.”
“Maybe they could send a small cargo drone?” offered Owen.
“Yeah. Yeah,” 99 nodded and stroked his chin. “I could call for a drop-ship. Did that once. It took them a day to approve the request. Management doesn’t like additional costs. Then it took them another day to schedule a drone. Those little drones aren’t fast. It took nearly a half a day for it to get to the site. You want me call in a request and wait three days or leave for The City tomorrow?”
The four men looked at each other and muttered. 22 was especially grumbly.
“That’s what I thought,” said 99. “We sleep here tonight, then leave in the morning.”
“How about if we all just sleep in the lifter?” offered 22. “It’s stronger than the shelter.”
“With the door closed, you’d all be suffocated by morning,” said 99. “I’m not running the vent system all night. We’re only up to 48% battery as it is. That’s just barely enough to make it back. We were supposed to be out here recharging for five more days.”
“So we just lay around here waiting to be eaten by a bear?” protested 53.
The foreman's face contorted from an inner debate. “Oh, alright,” he snapped. “Wait here.” He stomped up the lifter’s ramp and ducked into the aft compartment, grumbling to himself.
“What happened to you?” asked 22. He pointed at Ford’s dark-red shoulder and sleeve. The dried blood had stiffened the fabric of his overalls.
“It’s kind of a long story.” Ford was distracted by his visor display. It flashed that services were unavailable.
99 stomped down the ramp. “It looks like the uplink has failed…again, which means word can’t get back to anyone, like the Preservation Committee. The reason the bear won’t come back tonight is because we’re going to build a fire and keep it going all night.”
All four young men stared or blinked at the foreman as if he had lapsed into speaking Greek.
“A fire,” repeated 99. “Crackle, crackle? Oh, come on. You have to know what a fire is.”
The only fire Ford knew was from the Hater videos. Fire had always been a sort of evil-spirit of destruction. It consumed overturned cars and damaged buildings. Heat for city buildings came from vents. Meals only needed electric warming.
“Well, you’re going to learn,” said 99. “It’s getting dark, so you’ll have to hurry. All of you go out into the forest around here. Break off dead branches and bring back as many dry sticks and branches as you can carry.”
“Break off pieces of trees?” 22 looked worried. “Isn’t that against the…”
“Yes, yes, I know.” The foreman shook his head impatiently. “It’s easy for committee members in the middle of The City to make fancy rules about protecting trees. We’re out here…with wild animals. Would you rather be eaten by a bear?”
The four young men took a quick poll of each other with their eyes. No one raised any further objections.
“Good,” continued 99. “Look for branches as big around as your thumb up to as large as you can break off and carry. Now, get started!”
“Hey, if we’re gathering wood, what are you going to do?” asked 53 with his hands on his hips.
“I’m going to save your undeserving butt from being eaten by a bear.” The foreman raised his remote and pressed a button.
Ford felt a kick to the back of his head. The other three men recoiled from similar jolts.
"Now, stop whining like a baby and get started while you can still see,” said 99.
53 muttered and scowled at 99 as he turned away.
“You gotta stop doing that,” 22 whispered as they walked toward the darkening woods.
Without discussing it, the four men paired off to search for firewood. Beneath the canopy of leaves, night had already fallen. Ford and Owen used their visor lights to search for dead branches. After a half hour of gathering, Owen’s arms were full to the point that he could not prevent some of his load from falling off. Ford carried what he could and followed behind Owen to pick up what he dropped.
53 and 22 were already at the cabin with their bundles of sticks. 99 had a circular patch of bare ground cleared of grasses. In the center of the dirt circle stood a little cone of twigs interspersed with shreds of meal boxes. The foreman took a handful of dry grass and rolled it vigorously between his palms. He then teased out some fibers, making the ball of dry grass fluffier. He set the ball near the cone of sticks and pulled a short blue rod from his pants pocket. Two shiny metal spikes protruded from the end of the plastic rod.
Ford recognized the device as a shock prod. In a documentary about the Hutchinson Mines, he had watched overseers using shock prods to force lethargic miners onto the transports. 99 touched the spikes to the fluffy grass ball. Blue sparks jumped between the electrodes, igniting the grass. He quickly pushed the flaming grass inside the cone of twigs. Licks of bright yellow flame reached up between the sticks as if the fire was trying to get out of a wooden jail. 99 gently placed a few larger sticks on the flames.
“This is why the bear won’t be back tonight,” 99 said. “Animals don’t like fire. Two of us will stay awake for a couple hours, making sure the fire is fed while the others sleep. We’ll take turns. I’ll start. Which one of you is going to volunteer to stay out here with me?”
The four young men looked at each other with wide eyes, hoping someone else would volunteer. Staying outside at night sounded risky enough. Sitting with 99 doubled the lack of appeal.
“Fine,” snorted 99. “Then I’ll volunteer the new kid.”
“What?” Ford gasped.
The other three sagged a bit in relief and quickly pushed through the shelter’s entryway to disappear inside before the foreman changed his mind.
Ford swallowed hard and slowly took a seat on the opposite side of the fire from the foreman. They sat in silence for a long time. Ford watched how 99 fed the fire some new sticks when the yellow flames began to grow shorter and less numerous.
"Don't let the flames die out or it's more work to get it going again," said 99. "If that does happen, don't just dump big sticks on there and hope for the best. Toss on some little stuff first and blow on the coals, like this." 99 leaned down, his face near the fire. He pulled down his breather so he could blow on the glowing orange coals. The new little sticks erupted into flame.
“Make your fuel last by putting it on a little at a time. We’re not looking for a big fire, just enough bright flame to spook the animals.”
After another long silence, Ford’s nagging thoughts forced him to speak. He was not sure he heard the foreman correctly back at the barn. “You aren’t going to report that I killed that animal?”
99 pushed burned-through ends of sticks back into the fire. "Not if I don't have to. More follow-up reports: reports that I filed the other reports. Total headache. But, if you make sure the work gets done without any guff, I won’t file any animal contact reports." The foreman raised his head enough to make eye contact with Ford.
Ford felt some relief but also apprehension. Guff? Was 99 implying that Ford had to restrain 53’s temper? Could he even do that? They were returning to The City in the morning. What more work would there be to get interrupted? That sounded like he would not be done working on the crew after just one outing. He would not be seeing Ada on Wednesday. He did not like the feeling. Once back in The City, could he find another way to contact her? His mind ran down a thousand dead ends.
(end chapter 4)
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Post by texican on Nov 26, 2019 18:56:31 GMT -6
Overt paper work has killed more reporting than has been been filled out....
Thanks mic for the chapter....
Texican....
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Post by mic on Nov 27, 2019 7:29:37 GMT -6
Chapter 5 – Deviation (part 1)
Ford jerked reflexively from the virtual kick to the back of his head. Time to wake up. He slowly rolled over. Was he beginning to accept the shocks as routine?
99 stepped into the shelter, letting a waft of cold morning air.
53 sat up quickly and faced the foreman. "Why can't you just shout ‘Wake up!' instead?" 53 recoiled from a second shock. He scrambled to get his feet on the floor, but they were tangled in his blanket.
“I let you babies sleep in your little beds while I stayed out to tend the fire all night and this is the thanks I get?” 99 caught Ford’s eyes and pointed with his eyes at 53.
Oh no. He does expect me to keep 53 in line. Ford leaned over to put his hand on 53’s shoulder.
“What are you doing?” 53 shook off Ford’s hand and glared at him.
“Hey,” Ford tried to sound soothing, “We’re going back. Let's get packed up and get out of here without getting shocked a dozen more times."
“What? Are you his little stooge now?” snapped 53.
“No.” Ford squirmed. “It’s just that none of us like getting extra shocks just because you’re angry.”
“He’s right, man,” added 22. “You might like it, but we don’t.”
53 grumbled and stomped off to the hygiene closet.
22 held his grumbling stomach with both hands. “Oh, man. I am so hungry now.”
“Then let’s get this thing packed up as quickly as we can,” said 99. “The sooner we get back to The City, the sooner you can eat.”
“Right! I’m gonna roll up that wire right now!” 22 pulled on his boots and rushed out of the door without his breather.
“Maybe you and I should start rolling up the solar sheets,” offered Owen. He lowered his voice. “53 usually takes his time in there when he’s mad.”
Ford and Owen disconnected the black cables and rolled up the dark blue sheets. Owen whispered. “Why are you getting between 99 and 53? That’s just asking for trouble from both sides.”
Ford could feel his face beginning to blush, so he turned away. "It's like 22 said. I don't want any extra shocks just because 53 is a hothead. That’s all.”
"Uh, huh. Well, don't get too helpful."
“Okay everybody,” bellowed 99. “All hands help take down the shelter.”
“But we didn’t get a chance to…” interjected 22.
“No time for that,” said 99. “Go pee in the woods.”
“But…”
“Just do it. The trees will be fine.”
“It’s not the trees,” 22 added. “What about the bears?”
99 rolled his whole head, not just his eyes. "If you see a bear out there, pee on him. Bears can't stand to be peed on."
“Really?”
"Oh, get out there and get your business over with. I want to get going before the day heats up and crosswinds develop. No extra battery for crosswinds."
“We’ll go with you,” said Ford. “We’ve gotta pee too.”
The three young men stood at the edge of the woods, relieving the pressure from the night's build-up. 22's eyes darted nervously from one shady zone to the next. Owen gestured to Ford that he wanted to make a roaring noise. He nodded eagerly for agreement. Ford looked back imploringly and shook his head. 22 was jumpy enough.
22 zipped up and ran back to the grassy clearing.
“That would have been hilarious,” Owen said in a sullen tone. “He would have peed all over himself.”
“I know,” said Ford. “And we’d be stuck inside a small lifter for hours with a guy covered in pee.”
“Oh...right. Good call.”
The four men took less than ten minutes to get the shelter disassembled, rolled and stowed inside the lifter.
As they climbed into the lifter, 99 was seated in back again. He pointed Ford to the front seat beside 53. "When everyone's in and buckled up, say ‘3884. Close door. New course: Home. Eco-mode."
Ford sighed and pushed between the seatbacks. 53 sat with his arms folded across his chest and a scowl on his face. Ford repeated what the foreman told him to say. The four fans began to spool up as the door clicked shut.
The lifter rose out of the cool blue morning light of the clearing. Golden sun streamed through the windows. The machine turned to face south. Ford was growing more accustomed to the floating sensation but still held tight to the seat’s arms. The fan rings rotated into a vertical position, speeding the lifter over the sunlit treetops. The whine was not as high pitched, nor did the lifter rise as high as it had before.
The monotonous tree canopy below offered little distraction. Conversation would help pass the time on a long flight. Ford glanced at 53 to check his mood. He still looked sour, but Ford decided to test the waters anyhow.
“It’ll be good to get back, huh?” Ford said.
53 said nothing. He turned his head just enough to glare at Ford out of the corner of his eye for a long moment before returning his scowl to face forward.
Hmm. That didn’t go too well. Is he cranky in general or angry at me because he thinks I’m 99’s stooge? Ford had to do some soul searching. He decided that a true lackey would do whatever his master wanted in order to curry favor. Ford vowed that he would draw the line at only trying to curb 53’s temper – not for 99’s sake, but for the sake of the rest of the crew.
His ethical calculations were interrupted by a flashing message on his visor. Services Unavailable. Ford turned to look between the seatbacks.
“Um…Sir?” Ford had to talk louder to be heard over the whine. “99, sir? My visor says that the uplink is broken again. Will that affect our lifter?"
“Nah,” said 99. “It’ already got the course data. Don’t worry about it.”
Ford turned back, somewhat comforted by the lack of concern on everyone else's faces. They had made many more trips than he had. They should know. Ford decided to use the temporary gap in surveillance by the algorithms for a bit of honesty.
He spoke quietly enough that only 53 could have heard him over the fan noise. "Look, I'm not 99's stooge. I killed an animal yesterday, and 99 said he wouldn't report me for it if I helped…" Ford fished for words. "…helped everyone keep calm.”
53 looked Ford up and down from the corner of his eye, lingering on the residual blood stains on Ford’s shoulder. “Killed an animal?”
“Yeah. A big cat jumped on me in one of the broken down apartments. It had my arm in its mouth.” Ford discretely pulled up his left sleeve to reveal the extensive bruising. “I had to do something.”
“Killed it, how?”
“Doesn’t matter.” Ford rolled his sleeve back down. “You know the laws. 99 said he wouldn’t report me if I helped us all avoid fights.”
“What makes you think he won’t report you anyhow?” 53 raised one eyebrow.
“I thought about that,” said Ford. “Still, helping us all not get shocked seemed like a good idea on its own.”
53 rolled his eyes and snorted. He turned away to stare out of his window.
“So?” persisted Ford. “What’s the deal?”
“What’s what deal?”
“You know. Why do you keep antagonizing 99? All you get for your trouble is shocked.”
“What do you care?” 53 said with a subtle challenge.
“Every time you lose your cool, I get sent to the ground too. That’s why I care.” Ford held 53’s stare. He would not be the first one to look away.
“Fair enough,” said 53 as he looked forward. “He’s been getting under my skin cuz’ he talks just like the rest of them: always telling me I’m worthless. All my life they’ve been telling me I’m nothing.”
He turned in his seat to better face Ford. His voice was angry, yet restrained. He looked Ford in the eye with a sincerity Ford had not seen in 53 before.
“I am not worthless just because I’m a man. It was a hundred freakin’ years ago, okay? How could any of that be my fault?” He jabbed his finger at his chest for emphasis. "I had nothing to do whatever ticked off those women back then. I haven’t done anything to them. The only people I’ve smacked down are other men, and they had it coming. Ell, I haven’t seen a woman in person all my life. What the ell did I ever do to any of them?”
“Shhh." Ford glanced between the seatbacks. "Don't get all worked up."
53 flung himself back into his seatback. "Never done anything to any of 'em, yet they’ve been telling me for my whole freakin’ life that it’s all my fault – whatever the ell it was. I don’t even know what’s my fault, but they keep sayin’ it.”
He leaned back toward Ford. “On graduation day, the Principal’s speech amounted to how everything that was wrong with the world was the fault of men – men like us – and how we had a debt to the world – to work hard our entire lives to repay the world for the evil caused by men. What burned me up was how all my classmates just bowed their heads in shame. They all just accepted it.”
Ford nodded. He heard a similar speech at his graduation.
“And that butthead back there says it too, even though he’s a man like the rest of us. I’m tellin’ ya, I’ve had it up to here with it all.”
"Okay, okay, I get it," said Ford. "Keep it quiet." Ford had heard the same messages all through school too. Where Ford had always understood the indictments to be for all men – as a class – and there was really nothing he could do about it, 53 had obviously taken it personally.
“So, maybe they’ll get their way and kill me,” 53 continued, “but I’m not gonna bend and grovel for stuff I didn't do. That's not fair, and I'm not gonna put up with it anymore. I've got my dignity if nothing else.”
Ford recalled the sight of 53 writhing on the ground under force-5. Was that what awaited his defiance? City officials had no tolerance for anything they felt hinted at disrespect, let alone outright refusal to obey.
An odd vibration distracted Ford’s thoughts. He looked around the cabin of the lifter. Nothing seemed unusual. This new vibration was a harmonic to the left-rear fan’s usual shake. The four-part chord of the fans’ whine added a fifth tone: a low rumble.
"Um, 99, sir?" Ford shouted. "I think something might be wrong with our lifter.” He pointed out the window.
All eyes followed Ford’s pointing finger. Out of the portside windows. The left-rear fan ring shook. A louder grumbling sound vibrated through the cabin. As they watched, the fan shuddered to a halt.
"Whoa," said 22. "Now, what happens? Will this thing try to land now?"
"Land, where?" asked 53. "There's nothing but trees down there."
“No,” said 99. “It’s still got three motors. This will slow our speed some. The fans will tilt a bit if they have to maintain lift. Seen it before. We’ll be fine.” As if responding to his voice, the whine of the other three fans rose one note in pitch.
“You said we had just barely enough battery to make it back,” said Ford. “If we’re going slower, we’ll run out before we get there.”
“No,” said 99. “There’s one less motor using power. The batteries will last longer. We’ll get there eventually, just not as fast.”
“You buy that?” 53 asked Ford.
Ford shrugged. “What else is there to do?”
Ford watched the fan ring outside of his window. Instead of being set straight vertical – as they had been during their previous flights – the ring was canted back several degrees. By noting particular chips in the white paint, Ford could see that the ring was not stationary but slowly tilting back.
“The ground seems closer than it was before,” said 22.
“And we’re not going as fast,” said Owen.
"I told you that was how it would go," snipped 99. "It's going to be a longer ride. Don't spend it worrying."
“Can we worry about that?” 53 pointed to his window.
Everyone jockeyed for a look through a starboard window. Gray smoke trailed back from the hub of the right-front fan. A discordant whine joined the other fan noises.
“I think this one is failing too,” said 53.
22 threw himself back into his seat, clutched the armrests and scrunched his eyes shut. “We’re gonna crash!”
"Bah," said 99. "These things can fly on two fans. That front one will dial back to provide stability."
“Maybe,” said Ford, “but we are still going down.”
The fans had rotated to nearly horizontal. The lifter was trying to maintain lift as best it could.
“I think it’s trying to get to that grassy hilltop.” Ford pointed out the front windows.
Ahead and below them, several semi-flat bluff tops rose out of the irregular tree canopy. The lifter was making slow headway toward the nearest bluff top. Forward motion came at the expense of altitude.
“We’re not gonna make it,” said 22. “We’re going down too fast.”
“We’ll make it,” said 99. His voice did not sound entirely confident. “Just the same, everyone make sure you’re buckled up tight. This might be a bumpy landing.”
The grassy patch grew closer but the trees below them grew closer faster. The lifter shuddered as the landing gear lowered into place.
“We’re not going to make it!” said 22. He clutched his armrests tighter.
“We’re almost to the edge,” said 99. “We’ll make it.”
The lifter’s belly brushed a treetop. The grass was only twenty meters away. The starboard wing snapped off a tall treetop. The impact caused the lifter to begin a right turn and lose more altitude. The grass was five meters ahead and five meters down.
“We’re not slowing down,” shouted Ford. “Hold on!”
The lifter hit hard with a sharp thud. Ford felt the impact in his neck and shoulders as he was pressed into his seat. The whine of the two functioning fans began to fall in pitch.
“We made it!” exclaimed 99. “We’re down and on the grass, just like I…”
The lifter suddenly tilted to the right.
“Did a wheel break?”
The nose of the lifter began to rise. Metal groaned.
“What’s going on?” asked Owen. “What’s it doing?”
The nose tilted higher until blue sky and clouds were all Ford could see.
“We’re sliding backward,” shouted 22. “We’re falling off the hill!”
The lifter went nearly vertical – nose up – for a moment, then shuddered and bounced as it slid down the face of the bluff. Ford glanced out of his side window in time to see the rear wing sheared off by a tree. Then, there was nothing but rushing leaves. The fuselage bounced and started to roll on its side. Impact with something reversed the roll. Each time the cabin hit a tree or a rock, it sent a shockwave through the floor and seat backs. Ford had to clutch the arms tightly to stay in his seat. With a sudden, crunching jolt, the lifter stopped. Ford's head slammed against the seatback.
Silence. Leaves sprinkled down onto the front windows.
--(end 5, part 1)
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