Tidelands: I-Six (11)
Voices. Silent Cousin.
The other voices only ever come at night.
Why is that?
Because that’s when her defences are down, when Eva feels her most vulnerable, with no sunlight to sanitise and protect her.
But it is not a dream. Because a dream you can wake from. A dream will bend to a lucid mind, or dissolve under its scrutiny – and she is now, as much as in daytime, awake. But there is no waking from this, no bending or shaping its form to her will. She is merely its unwilling witness.
It starts subliminally, an aura of unease, like an unacknowledged itch, a discomfort barely registered. But slowly she begins to hear it, a thin complaint, like a whining, a keening, issuing through some crack in her mind. Just a twittering, at first, like bats or the skittering of insects, like rats clawing at a window pane or the distant scrape of steel on glass. But growing, swelling, finding volume and voice, until the sounds are a symphony, a chorus of torment and misery.
She could call out, of course, summon Azimuth, but what good would that do? That way only brings sedation, a chemical lullaby to push her back down, submersing her beneath somnolent waters – beta, alpha, theta, delta – down through the levels of thought and feeling, past REM, past half-snatches of wakefulness, into depths of unthinking oblivion. And next morning when she does awake, it will feel like her limbs are full of lead, like the world is coated with a plastic film, and she will be sluggish and detached, unable to focus. And when the voices come – those other, daytime voices, with their questions and their games – she will find herself unable to enact the ritual of the sun, and have to face the day unprepared and unprotected.
So she does not call for Azimuth, but tries instead to stay calm, to not panic – for signs of distress will summon it anyway (she imagines it striding across the invisible threshold of her mind, its bag of instruments and implements, antipsychotics and soporifics, swinging metaphorically at its side).
It is the same place, always: an enormous enclosed space, the low ceiling and the periodically placed lighting giving for some reason a sense of being underground, of being somewhere … secret. And before her, stretching off into infinity, row upon row upon row of semi-opaque glass tubes, in each some shadowy form, marking dizzying progress toward some indiscernible terminus.
She calls them the Sleepers.
She has never been here, in real life – it is not a memory – is it? Or at least, not hers. But then again, maybe it is. For her memories are such slippery things, coming and going, popping up or disappearing: the mislaid hairbrush she knew was on the desk; the unfamiliar book that appears out of nowhere, dog-eared and well-thumbed; the things said and done, the things not said and undone, and often no way of telling one from the other, of telling which thoughts and actions have been hers, and which have been inserted there by others playing games – The Game. She has long ago learnt not to trust her memories.
But for a reason she cannot articulate, she knows this to be a real place.
She has only ever seen them from the balcony – the Sleepers – but tonight something has changed, and tonight she is down among them, free to wander among the glass cases themselves, their semi-translucent surfaces of watered-down milk, of grease-stained paper, only half concealing the indistinct forms below (which something, some sense of foreboding, cautions her against examining too closely, pulling her eyes away … from the centre, too, where some dark presence tugs at her awareness …). And so she walks on, head up, averting her eyes to the neat rows beyond, following them across the mist-lagged floor, and into the disappearing distance.
But wherever she looks, wherever she walks, the voices come and go, her passage through the space bringing this or that one to the fore, fading in and out like whispers on a silent wind.
“… and then, when we got there, it was just like I’d seen it in my dream, and there wasn’t any job – at least, not the one he’d promised – and the man had stopped being nice. Why don’t I ever trust my instincts? ‘Crying won’t do you no good,’ was all he said. ‘You think I haven’t seen crying before?’ And just like that, he hit me, with the back of his hand, like he was swatting a fly. ‘This isn’t real,’ I kept telling myself, ‘this isn’t real,’ over and over, like a mantra, like it would make a difference. ‘This happens to other people.’ I had a life! I had a gym membership! Before the invasion. But it’s funny, the things you think you can’t bear, until, somehow, you do. So we just stuck it out, didn’t we, made the best of it. Thinking, any day now, it’ll stop. Just waiting, waiting for it to end, to wake up; waiting our chance to get out. But there was no getting out, no waking up from it; there was only …”
And as she walks, that voice fading, and its theme taken over by another.
“…and the days coming and going, and not knowing which they were, and eventually, not caring either. Only caring about getting things to sell so I could buy more gear. And when I took it there, they gave me a pittance for it, and I was like, ‘You’re fucking kidding me.’ ‘That’s all it’s worth,’ they said. ‘It’s not enough,’ I said, ‘I need more than that.’ ‘Then you need to get more, don’t you?’ But that’s when I got caught, trying to do just that, to get more stuff to sell, and they’d put me – well, you couldn’t even call it a cell, which would have dignified it – and I’d begged and pleaded, knowing the cravings would get bad soon, begging them to give me something, anything, but they’d just laughed. Except for one, who’d leant in and whispered that he would get me some, if I was nice to him, he said. But I could hear in his mind that he was lying, and told him so. And that’s when everything changed, and he…”
And another.
“…and the fumes made you ill, if you hung around – even if you didn’t. They made you shower, but you could still feel it, like it had seeped into you, bonded with you. But they didn’t care – cared more about the fucking robots, which the gas corroded, made them break, because we were cheaper than them; cheaper even than the decent masks and gloves that would have protected us properly. ‘Always get another you, can’t we?’ But it got in your lungs, made you wheeze, making your skin crawl like there were insects inside it, and go all red and raw and blotchy. And the ones who’d been there when you started, you saw them getting worse, like they were getting old right in front of you. I could hear them screaming in their dreams. They were like mirrors – because there were no actual mirrors – but like mirrors from the future. Just a few months is all it took. And staring into their faces, day in and day out, as they slowly fell apart, you started to realise what you were going to look like to the newcomers. But then someone must have seen what I can do, told someone, for then they’d moved me somewhere else, started being nicer – for a while – tried to get me to…”
Eva walks on, trying not to listen, trying just to breathe, to keep calm, waiting for the stories to stop, for the nightmare to come to an end.
Though really she knows it’s no nightmare, not literally; knows that it’s not any sort of dream at all.
Unfortunately.
Caulden heads toward the lift – a private perk of the job, conveying him with incredible rapidity to any floor. Quite the feat of engineering – ensuring gravitational forces do not concertina him into a pancake – and which most days he takes unthinkingly for granted. An unnecessary perk, really, purely for show, to be seen capable of being everywhere in a heartbeat, to fix, to troubleshoot and arbitrate; to be on call for every petty dispute, every noise complaint, every blocked toilet. When actually, thanks to Azimuth, with its many eyes, its many ears and hands, the arcology mostly runs itself, and there is rarely anything so urgent that requires his actual physical presence anywhere. But people are still reassured by the human touch. So perhaps the perk is a necessary one after all.
The doors close silently and he watches the floor numbers begin to tick down in the periphery of his interface.
The human touch!
But the truth is, we're all more automated than we like to think, for in most things consciousness plays a surprisingly marginal role. When learning new skills, yes, there is always a period of concerted struggle, where each step must be consciously overseen, practiced, adjusted; until one day – as if by magic – something is mastered, becoming no longer conscious, no longer a struggle; becoming second nature. Learning to drive, playing the cello, speaking Mandarin. Until one day, like an understudy, some part of the mind that has all along sat just out of sight, in the shadows, dumbly steps in and does it all for you. It is still you – isn’t it? – just not a part that—well, he finds all that a bit unnerving; that somewhere inside him sits a silent cousin, watching, learning, just waiting to take over the reins. But what if it decides one day to take over other things too? Things he might not want to give up? What if it begins to make decisions without him? Perhaps already has.
The floor numbers tick down.
He has been more agitated of late.
Yesterday’s meeting had been a disquieting one – more disquieting than usual.
He closes his eyes, slows down his breathing, watching the blood pulse against the inside of his eyelids: in, out; in; out. Watching as gradually the darkness begins to shift and morph, to coalesce into patterns, its womblike black veined through with tendrils of red and blue.
His eyes snap open.
People tend to think that arcologies are all about environmental management. Inside the Arc itself, there is the recycling, the waste control, minimising the carbon footprint, optimising production and consumption – energy, food, materials, clean air and water. Outside, of course, there are other responsibilities – the technological price the Company pays the city for its licence to exist – the tidal and the meteorological controls, the immunological protection against contagion and disease, the shoring up of infrastructure and civic services. So even those who cannot afford a place Inside, who might rail about economic privilege or question the Company’s true motives, cannot deny that, without the Arcs, without the Company’s technological assistance, the little bubble which makes their lives bearable – makes them possible – would not even exist.
And all that is important – he doesn’t mean to underplay the ecological and technological issues. But fundamentally, day to day, running an arcology is really all about the people: managing their behaviour, their expectations, accounting for their frustrations, their irrational urges. Control all that, you control the world. For it is people that determine what gets used (and wasted), what needs growing and culling, what needs adjusting and tinkering with. And of course, all that lovely automation, which frees up so much time in people’s lives, has its own consequences, and therefore the real challenge is to manage what people do with that free time.
An example: The man who lives in 13.12 is having an affair. His wife doesn’t know this – not consciously, anyway, but part of her must do, is in fact relieved, freeing her finally from an intimacy that long ago lost its youthful appeal (she is 42, now, though she has contrived to look 26). This frees up energies she can now redeploy to other things – by accident or design, they have no children – to spa days with friends, to reading. She has even taken up watercolour painting. But every act has its consequences, especially in an environment so causally enclosed, where each little butterfly flap is capable of rousing up a storm. What if the wife were to find out about the affair? (Or the other woman’s wife – for she too is married.) What if she were forced to confront what she now only subconsciously accepts? Would she kick him out? And where then would he live? Another apartment would have to be found, their communal life dismantled (and a couple always consumes fewer resources than two separate individuals).
In an arcology, nothing is ever an isolated occurrence.
And so it must all be managed, accounted for, accommodated. Some reconciliation may be attempted, perhaps, a rekindling of the former marital flame – or even perhaps subliminally to suggest a ménage à trois, or à quatre (these work sometimes, depending on the psychological profiles of the parties involved) – but it is always much easier to accommodate disintegration than to rebuild what is broken, to go along with natural entropy than to fight it. The heart wants what the heart wants, after all, regardless of what the head may consciously wish for; and the heart doesn’t really care about air quality, or cubic living space, or average calorie allotment per capita.
And so Azimuth must ensure that the infidelity goes undetected, must monitor whereabouts, comings and goings – that there are no inadvertent in flagrante discoveries. Which entails a lot of juggling – creating diversions, delays, rearranging calendars and appointments. It has sometimes been a close call – as close as the delay of a lift, a message that doesn’t send, a door that refuses to open (it would help if the man were more intelligent, less reckless – it’s almost like part of him wants to be caught – but Azimuth has to work with what it’s given). Think of the logistics! Far beyond the organisational capacity of any conscious human agent, even for this one situation; and Azimuth juggles a thousand such situations every single minute.
But not everything is automated. As Director, Caulden must still make occasional decisions regarding day-to-day running, refer tricky cases to the Board or the ethics committee, but these mostly concern specific applications of general principle. For though a lack of privacy and autonomy are the unacknowledged prices the arcologists pay for their privileged existence (though it’s all there in the small print, of course), there are sometimes questions as to how far these intrusions should extend. Would it be allowable, say (one particular day, where an assignation might entail too many disruptive knock-on effects), to manipulate our wayward husband’s mood so that he might become temporarily disinclined? To chemically cool his ardour? Or even to create a temporary illness? All very tedious, and something Caulden would gladly hand off to some automated decision-making algorithm, were that allowed (which, constitutionally speaking, it isn’t – as yet). And so, humans such as himself are still needed. For now.
Which draws his mind back to Friedler, that other temporarily necessary human. How did he know about the engineer before Caulden did? Before even Azimuth? He has his own AIs, of course, his own little Azimuths (though nowhere near as potent, as omnipotent). For knowledge is power, and old school that he is, Friedler isn’t fool enough to leave such valuable toys on the table. Toys, no doubt, acquired discreetly, off the books. AIs for whom there is no Board to answer to, no corporate constitution to be bound by, unencumbered by anything so inconvenient as scruple.
There is a slight change in the temperature as the lift reaches the bottom floor of the Arc, but continues to descend – to floors that no one else knows of (none outside the Project, anyway).
He wishes he didn’t need Friedler. It’s bad enough the man knows the Project exists – though not what it’s really for. But how else could he find them? Make them? And so he needs Friedler’s illicit connections, his resources, his unscrupulous methods.
And Azimuth’s too.
The AI is sitting there, now, his own silent cousin, listening to his thoughts – though how much it can read of them he is never completely sure.
“How is she today, Azimuth?”
[A little restless while the new meds are still bedding in, but we have already begun the new Sabotage scenario.]
“OK. Keep me posted on that.”
Thank God for Sabotage.
Tidelands is a weekly sci-fi & fantasy serial that publishes every Friday, emailed straight to your inbox. Part 1 is free to read, but you can keep up with the story by signing up for exclusive access, or buying ebook or paperback editions of the collected instalments as they appear.