This Automatic Eden

by Jim Keen

  Alice awoke to find a water bulb and tube of red liquid had been placed inside her pod. She gulped the warm water, and her body shivered, her stomach cramping so she slowed and took a small sip every few seconds. The bulb emptied fast, her thirst untouched, so she opened the red tube and drank that. The liquid was sweet and thick like cooking oil, but she drained every drop. Her stomach churned as energy spread through her. She had no watch—no idea of the time—so she peeked through the thin curtains and looked up at the roof light. The small patch of sky was a deepening blue tinged with red; the sun was setting, another day passed in a blur.

  Alice lay back and considered her options. Neither she nor Xavi had considered the camp might be of this size and complexity, but she had to follow the plan. Julia, Five Points, and B13 had smuggled illegal objects through the ports and delivered them here. She needed to find out what they were, and why the secrecy. With a little luck, that would lead them to Julia’s killer, Xavi’s payback, and her freedom from the FBI’s arrest warrant. The longer she waited, the greater were her chances of discovery, and the weaker she would become. Time to move.

  She rolled back inside her pod, drew the curtain, and removed Four’s parcel. The brass rod had a convex bump; she pressed it, and the package split into three smaller devices. The first she recognized at once—a stimulant slug. Placed on bare skin it secreted stims for an hour, enough to keep going. The second had to be the MI contact device. It enlarged as she watched, sucking air to expand its pen-sized body. Made of perforated brass, one end terminated in a diamond spiral like a corkscrew, the other had a black rubber tip—an antenna of some sort. The final piece was a flat card made from crystal with a droplet of brass in the middle. As she held it, Four’s voice drifted from an invisible speaker.

  “Hello, dear. I hope the journey wasn’t too distressing. Cortex handles security system design and management for the government, so I assume the camp will follow standard protocol—DNA coding on track pads next to secure doors. If you find yourself stuck at a door, hold this card on the plate and wait. The hacking system is smart but not invisible; they will know something compromised the door, but it’ll get you through. I’d expect them to come fast, so use only if you have to. Good luck, stay safe.”

  Alice pressed the three pieces back together, and they reformed the single brass block. She put it in her pants, then swung her legs out to dangle over the drop and looked up. The roof seemed the best way to get a feel for the surroundings, and there had been no aerial security on the way in. Like the interzone warehouse, it looked as if the whole camp relied upon human guards. In this digital age, biological was the last refuge for the paranoid.

  The roof lights cut long blue slashes across the gray metal soffit, each one paired with a maintenance gantry that ran to an external access door. She looked to the ground. As the sun set, light levels dropped fast and low-level spots glimmered to life, filling the gloom. Rows of packaged humans traced away from her on either side as her alley ran to a distant perimeter wall.

  She swung over to the ladder and worked her way to the floor, breathing loud in the quiet. Nothing moved. Music started in the distance, followed by a shout, then silence. Alice looked behind her. She was the only one on the floor, so she sprinted for the wall. The building was large and it took a few minutes to reach it. There was no ladder or way up to the access door, so she retraced her steps and tried another route, then another. The third try worked; this path lead to an alarmed fire escape below a ladder that vanished into the growing dark.

  Alice stepped backward and jumped to grab the ladder’s bottom rung; after that, it was just an endurance test to reach the top. The air was warmer up here, the ladder ending at a gantry and egress door. It wasn’t alarmed, so she elbowed it open and slipped though.

  The last flashes of the sun flickered on the horizon, and a cool breeze picked up in its absence. She stood there for a moment, eyes closed, luxuriating in the simple pleasure of cool air on hot skin. Enough. She looked around. The roof was flat and featureless, a low perimeter wall surrounded a white plastic screed designed to reflect the daytime heat. Only the maintenance stairs and air-handling systems broke its geometry.

  She shuttled across to a neighboring condenser and crouched, listening for drones. Her breath was loud as the sky became a black dome above her. She waited, motionless, but heard nothing. Crouched low, Alice crabbed toward the roof’s edge, then lay on her front and peered over the low perimeter wall.

  The city was planned on a relentless grid, windowless prefab boxes stretching along either side, identical buildings on and on. Only the roads were lit, their geometries indicated by dim orange lighting. Patrol cars cruised past, their whine echoing from the hard surroundings. Alice crouched and moved to the rooftop’s other side. At first, the view looked the same—miles of blank boxes—but then she saw a break in the pattern. In the far distance, a row of upload towers jutted into the sky. The towers were of a size and design she’d not seen before; typically, they were an overwrought nest of cabling and supports, but these were silver needles that pulsed red in the dark. As her eyes adjusted, she picked out an electrical glow that up lit their metal forms.

  They were miles away; she would need a car. She ducked back inside and climbed down to the alarmed exit door, took two deep breaths, and pushed it open. A low warble broke the silence as she climbed back up the ladder.

  It didn’t take long until shuffling steps and heavy breathing came from outside. A tall, thin man entered below, dressed in full black riot gear—stun baton in one hand, shield in the other. Alice let him walk a few feet into the space and check the door. The guard pushed open the door, looked outside, then reentered and closed it behind him. The alarm shut off, and his shoulders dropped an inch as he relaxed, so she took her chance and jumped. She landed hard and knocked him to the ground with an oomph. He tried to right himself, but the shield was trapped under his body so he only had one hand free. Alice got her left elbow under his chin and lifted his head in a choke hold. He struggled and kicked, feet slapping against the concrete floor, but it was obvious he had no combat training, that he was just some dope pulled from the line and given a day’s wage. Within a minute, he was unconscious.

  A tired man’s face peered through the thin yellow curtain of the pod next to her.

  “Keep it quiet, will ya?”

  “You want a pod higher up?”

  “Sure, who wouldn’t?”

  “Okay, use mine. It’s ZK-B.”

  He looked at her like she was the world’s biggest idiot, ignoring the unconscious guard she was sitting on. Alice nodded, and he scuttled out, body thin under blue rags, and jogged away.

  Alice rolled the guard over and stripped his clothes with military efficiency. His shoulder radio asked for an update, voice crackling from its cheap speaker. She picked it up and gathered herself. Everything about this camp was optimized to expedite people processing, the protocols set. There was no way she could know the codes or how to answer, but the guard was human so liable to get tired and emotional.

  “Hang on, hang on. I got a busted door, okay? Let me fix it,” she said, trying to deepen her voice.

  “You have five minutes to report back or we’re sending help.”

  Alice didn’t bother replying, just concentrated on dressing herself with the guard’s uniform. It was a sloppy fit, the fatigues hanging like a scarecrow, but in the dark, it might be enough. She searched for a cigarette, but no luck, then tore her denim overalls into strips, tied up the guard, rolled him into the free pod and closed the curtain.

  Outside, an empty patrol car sat by the low curb. Like the small train that had brought her here, it was more a metal bathtub than a real machine. She looked left and right—no one around, just other cars passing by—so she walked over and climbed in. The car had one wide seat in the front with a single black joystick and brake pedal. The dash held a small terminal. She picked it up and saw the guard’s patrol number.

  She grabbed her shoulder m
ic. “Hey, sorry about before. Long day. This is Guard 39675. Door repaired.”

  “Roger. Continue your patrol.”

  Alice clicked off the mic and studied the tablet. It came from the same minimal design school as the car, only containing the guard’s orders and a two-dimensional map of the city. Once again, the master plan’s geometrical purity, the optimized street grids and building forms, stood clear. The whole design acted as a funnel to allow access to the transmission towers: streets narrow farther out, widening to accommodate more traffic the closer they got to the upload station.

  She pressed the tablet and the car came to life, rose three stories into the air and, with a buzz, accelerated through dark, silent streets toward the distant towers.

  44

  The car gained speed with a slow, relentless push until the cool night air whistled through the visor of Alice’s helmet. At first, the streets were narrow and deserted, but as the transmission towers grew in size, she saw lines of people filling the roads; squads of black-clad guards herded the unemployed forward.

  The shuffle of feet and low murmur of conversations rose over the wind roar, voices growing in volume as she approached the transmit station. Her hands twitched on the controls with the desperate need to turn the car left and flee, find a town to hide in with Xavi. But then she thought of Mark Rothmore dying on the carpet in front of her, blood bubbling from his mouth, and forced herself onward. She removed Four’s package, split it into pieces, and slapped the stim slug on her neck. There was a momentary flash of pain, then giddy energy poured through her, making her legs bounce and her heart thud. This was military-grade shit, fun now but with a hellish hangover down the line.

  She counted ten towers ahead—nine new and clean, the tenth older, girders and cables intertwined like an ivy-strangled tree. She slowed the car and flew over the last perimeter building to enter Transmission Plaza. Alice had seen pictures of Mecca’s Grand Mosque and the Kaaba Stone, the thousands of worshippers swirling in a tight pattern as they closed in. Laying before her now was that on a citywide scale. The open area looked to be a match for Cortex Park, at least three miles long and one wide. The transmission towers rose from a lake that glimmered like black oil under the night sky. Steam rose from its surface; Alice knew this had to be a cooling system similar to Cortex’s tower in New York and that somewhere close by machinery was generating enormous amounts of heat.

  Shuffling crowds of sardined people covered every spare inch of the plaza. Alice couldn’t put a number on them but it had to be in the hundreds of thousands, the surrounding roads open like mouths disgorging an endless throng into the great space. Massed ranks of guards guided the crowds to wide boulevards that angled down beneath the lake to disappear.

  She smelled the crowd now, an organic bloom that warmed the air as she flew toward the lake. She circled high at first, then seeing an empty landing pad, she brought the car down in a spiral and exited. For a moment Alice stood still and soaked up the beauty of her surroundings. The water was a steaming mirror that reflected the transmission towers, their rods divorced from gravity, steel needles hovering in blackness.

  The flight had taken a half hour; the unconscious guard could wake soon, and she doubted his makeshift bonds would hold for long. Time to go. The only exit from the pad was a steel door to a concrete tube that ducked underground. She ran over to find a DNA lock, just as Four had predicted. Alice took the bronze wafer from her pocket and placed it on the DNA sampler. There was a click and she pushed through to enter an industrial staircase that wound downward. She recognized the aesthetic from her Southern Wall tour of duty—prefab steel treads and concrete paneling the children of military efficiency. She went down fast, stimulants powering her through, but her legs had a rubbery feel she didn’t like. Overworked and malnourished—if she stopped, she’d never get going again.

  Her steps echoed from the walls as she reached the bottom. To the right, a hallway ran twenty feet then turned from view. A squad room sat to the left, long metal tables crewed with guards talking bull. As she paused, unsure, a group stood and slapped on helmets and riot gear. It must be changeover soon; the clock ticking at the back of her mind ran on relentless. Hurry.

  She turned right and ran along the hallway. The floor angled down again, black rubber tiles silent under her feet. As she moved deeper, a series of large pipes joined her to run along the ceiling. She knew their color coding from the Marines: blue for cooling, red for power, black for data. The size and number of the conduits grew until the corridor became more a duct than a space. The cooling and power systems were larger than anything she’d ever seen. Only the data pipe remained thin, barely larger than fed a typical Brooklyn apartment building.

  The corridor opened into a room arranged like an airport station; a long glass wall spanned its full length to show a crowd of people waiting at a checkpoint, a row of technicians monitoring displays and watching from this side. Alice paused. At first, the members of the crowd looked identical—with their bald heads and blue stripped uniforms—but after a moment she picked out individuals: a well-built man with a reprinted arm talking to a small girl; a young couple arm in arm as if they were on a first date; a heavyset man with a cane, full of determination.

  The checkpoint contained a series of hooped ceramic portals for people to walk through; guards stood in front and behind at wide benches. The portals checked people for inorganic objects, and the guards sorted any hidden possessions into piles staked on tables. The number of uncovered watches, rings, and gold must run into the thousands, the piles taller than she was. An autonomous system clicked from a wall to suck the material away, and the system started again. Against the far wall, a surgeon was removing someone’s gold teeth; the table next to him covered. Beyond the benches, people stripped naked, then crossed from sight.

  “How’re we doing with Syntheol?” one guard asked another.

  “Still at fifty,” his colleague replied. “The next shift can change it.”

  Alice knew Syntheol from the NYPD riot squad. It was a powerful airborne tranquilizer. No wonder everyone looks so happy, she thought, they’re doped to the gills on smile gas. With a jolt, she thought of the red drink left in her pod, the one she’d guzzled so fast. Made sense it was loaded as well, to keep people docile while they waited. Was that why the suburbs were so quiet? Everyone knocked out? Her stimulant patch had to be fighting it, for now at least.

  She crossed to the far end of the room and let herself though another door. Her neck itched, her body tight with tension. She made herself move faster, hurrying without being obvious. This corridor was different, the side walls switching from blockwork to a steel truss, the structural members zigzagging either side. A window was set into the wall halfway along. She ran across to gaze out—the corridor had become a bridge spanning a giant hall. The space below was at least ten football fields in length; the ceiling glowed white over a soft gray rubber floor. Rows of body scanners lined up, their cylindrical ten-foot-long tubes catching the overhead lights with a metallic sheen. Like the transmission towers, these scanners were of a design Alice hadn’t seen before: simpler, cleaner, free of cabling or ornamentation. The gleaming sarcophaguses fading to sparks of light in the distance.

  As she watched, technicians wearing soft white paper gowns brought a new batch of people to the machines. They scanned each person’s bar code, helped them into the machine, and closed the iris hatch. They turned in unison and crossed back to the perimeter of the hall then ferried over more people, the process repeating. Alice had only ever known scans that took tens of minutes, whereas these completed in seconds.

  Adrenaline flooded her body as she realized this was it, the reason for everything. Her heart thudded so hard it was difficult to breathe. She clenched her fists and forced herself to remain calm. The UN kept a rigid control over the number of scanners and printers each country had access to, their possession treated as seriously as MI registration. The fear had been the weaponization of the technology, that any o
ne country could print millions of soldiers in a few hours and destabilize the entire world. The government’s plan was smarter than that: they would flood the solar system with people and claim it for themselves, sidestep the rules and regulations of Earth in one quick move. The president’s much-lauded agreement, her Piece of Paper signed by the UN regulating uploads, was nothing but that: ink on a document. If Harper accomplished this, she would control everything the solar system offered; from minerals to water to food, she’d rule it all.

  If any other country discovered this, the result would be an immediate, devastating war, the desperate need for resources driving the fire until nothing remained. Julia and Five Points, Xavi and B13 were hired to smuggle in equipment undetected, then killed to keep it quiet.

  Why hadn’t anyone noticed? If hundreds of thousands were being transmitted outward, they had to appear somewhere else. Was this why off-world communications were so restricted? Were those returning videos even real? She shivered, ice filling her.

  Another row of people entered the scanners, then another, the speed of the operation faster than she would have thought possible.

  Two technicians walked past on the bridge and gave her an odd look before moving on. Alice forced herself to turn and follow them. She still felt the hall was only part of the picture, that she’d missed something. No time; she had to find Four’s ghost MI then get out of here.

  The technicians walked to the far end of the bridge and through a heavy door with a fusion-reactor warning sign stenciled onto its white surface. Alice caught the door and slipped through to find herself on a new bridge that spanned another hall equal in size to the one she’d just crossed. This was built to house nothing but machinery; several enormous fusion reactors filled the space, their torus’s connected to a collection of power cables that crossed the floor and entered the wall of the scanning room. The room crackled with an insistent background popping, and her hair lifted with static electricity.