Disclosure
Rylan’s shift was about to end but there was a leak somewhere between the R85 and R86 stanchions, and as much as he liked the thought of pissing off Wally – not his real name – and seeing his face as he told him the news; one favour given was a favour to be returned. It might not be tomorrow, or even this year, but at some point he’d find himself in Wally’s position, role reversed, having to clean up shit left behind by the previous shift.
So the search for the leak continued.
Oh, but he’d make a point of it to Wally, make sure he wouldn’t forget the courtesy.
The pipework section was narrow and lit intermittently by autolights, and Rylan had to squeeze himself between the wall and the jutting metalwork. They fed the city; or rather, the one tower that rose like a startled hair from its foundation down here in the city’s subdermal roots. Copper and asbestos piping twisted and turned, entering and leaving walls as he shuffled along. Droplets of condensation fell from pipes carrying cold water in the vicinity of pipes transporting hot water, and the asbestos pipes were thick and indifferent of the gas that travelled within. His rubber-soled boots stuck to the floor, lifting with a thick-sounding schhkt at every side-step. Sweat poured down his red face.
You better thank me.
In general, the pipes in this section were all input, feeding the lion that was tower E35, but there were also output pipes, such as sewage and exhaust. Luckily the leak was an input – he didn’t fancy cleaning out literal shit just now.
Just ever.
“Now, where are you?” The chance of a gas leak, though possible, was extremely thin. There were no bridges in this section between the asbestos piping; just a single mould with branches. Nevertheless, upon entry, he had turned the isolator to shut off the supply, and the holo-readout on the wall flashed 0.0 for gas in the pipework, and the same for the outer detection unit. The warning light still flashed, which meant the leak was in either the cold or hot pipework. He could’ve checked this before isolating the gas, but better safe than sorry.
“If you’re having a cookout, sorry, but you’re gonna have to wait,” he murmured, selecting the pipe network on the readout.
Somewhere, a splash plinked on the floor.
“Gotchya.” He bent down to his knees to peer beneath the maze and spotted a very small wet patch evaporating before his eyes.
Plink.
Another drop. And another.
“Damn sake.” He stood and shuffled along until he was adjacent to the leak. “Fuck,” he said, seeing that he’d have to reach between two hot pipes to get to the valve. He pulled on his gloves and stretched his arms out to unroll his sleeves. That should give some protection, at least.
An alarm blared from the holo-readout just as he was reaching between the pipework, and he startled, for a second looking around thinking; “So this is the last thing I’ll see before I die.” Then rationality took over and he realised it was the end-of-shift alarm.
“Everything okay?” asked Wally over intercom, his voice tinny. “You usually can’t wait to leave.”
“Just doing your job. You can come and swap if you like,” grunted Rylan. He swept his hand beneath the offending valve and it came away dripping.
“I’m sure you’ve got everything in order.”
“I –,” Rylan began, but there was a click. “Ass.”
He shuffled back across to the control panel and isolated the water flow – there was a whine as buffers moved into place at the end of the section, and a squeal followed by a whooshing noise as the flow halted, then stopped.
In another menu of the control panel he found the vents, then opened them up. A grating echoed around the room as vents placed at intervals along the floor opened. Unfortunately the next step was manual.
He issued a service order through the control panel to let the tower occupants know that gas and water would be out of action for – and he always over-stated – approximately thirty minutes. Fuck would he take that long though. There were no tangible rewards for overtime.
He pressed his back against the wall, grabbed a cloth he kept handy on his toolbelt, and wiped his face. His water bottle was empty. “Maybe I’ll grab a beer when I’m done,” he said quietly, the thought of a glass of cool liquid more appealing than a synth-shot. Moving along the wall, he made his way back to the source of the leak and ducked. It was too far back to reach through any pipework; he’d have to reach from below.
As he neared one of the output vents in the floor, he could almost see the heat emanating out from below. The shaft beneath had open access to the furnace rooms, and perhaps it was psychosomatic, but the slightest orange hue was perceptible. The beating heart of this sector.
Beneath the offending valve, he stood and squeezed between the pipes, bending like a straw to fit the gaps available to him. “There you are you little bugger.”
He grabbed a socket wrench from his toolbelt and adjusted the size to fit the bolt, and turned, loosening the grip until he could release the pivot that supposedly kept it tight. More and more pivots lately had begun to fail; a mixture of age and continuous pressure to blame.
There was a group in the link who met on a regular basis that called themselves The Surgeons. Rylan had never attended, but often thought of his fellow compatriots. Knowing that at any point on his shift there were hundreds of others just like him, walking their own passageways, fixing their own broken pieces. They claimed the city would fall apart without them.
Times like this he was inclined to agree.
He opened the pivot and the pipe junction came loose in his hands, water gushing over them and onto the floor. Steam began to rise, and what water didn’t evaporate disappeared into the vents. Rylan turned his head to watch and seared his cheek on a hot pipe, and yelped. Cursing, he grit his teeth and inhaled, before managing to splash some of the water onto his face.
“Idiot.”
He tried to shuffle closer, wriggling to get his hands free to complete the job without any further mishap. This was not a job for the claustrophobic.
Or me.
His eyes drifted to the open vent and the water gushing down.
“Learn the job, get set for life,” he mocked, thinking about his father. For life.
The exhaust pipes from the tower above linked with the shaft below. He could smell it; the city’s effluvium, the smoke from hot fires cooking food beneath the ventilation intakes, the acrid waste of the furnaces lower down.
He had to admit, Corbin’s plan for maximum disruption was a good one. Take out the sector’s main exhaust flue and all that waste would have nowhere to go but out into ether. The furnaces would have to be shut down until the waste could be diverted, which could be days, if not weeks. The whole sector would come to a grinding halt. Air would fill with black smoke that had nowhere to go. People would be forced outside.
And then what?
There was Corbin’s problem. There would be no point in committing the act unless it coincided with a message: unless it was made crystal clear that it was the beginning of an uprising.
And that’s where Corbin thought he was stupid. “Get away with it. They’d never suspect it was you. That’s the whole fucking point, isn’t it?”
And what after that? Security would be tightened. Eventually everything would get back to normal, and if somehow he, and everyone else, avoided arrest – avoided death – then what?
Now, if somehow it could be a co-ordinated attack with other sectors...
He realised the faulty T-bend was in his hand – You spaced out there, buddy – and started to examine it. And the closer he looked, the more he could find nothing wrong.
***
“Just been having a nice chat with Wally here,” Clarisse said as Rylan entered the locker room. “You trying to earn some brownie points? Get a little taste of it on your tongue? You know your bosses don’t give a shit.”
“He’s just puckering up, ain’t that right, Ry?” laughed Wally.
“Just
saving you from yourself. Your fat ass can’t even get at R85. They ought to declare you unfit for the job, get you shovelling the shit out of the sewage output. Maybe then you’d lose some weight.” Rylan tore the front of his bodysuit open and unzipped it to his shorts, and sat, chest exposed.
“Geez, someone get that man a bucket of cold water. See ya later!” Wally opened the exit and left.
“You’re welcome!” Rylan shouted after him.
Laughter came back until the door swung shut and cut it out.
“What’d you do to your face?” asked Clarisse, standing over him.
Now that he was cooling down, the sting of his cheek became more prominent. “Got a love-bite from your mom, what’s it look like?”
“Misty would’ve had your whole head off.”
The soft spot reared up again. “Leave Misty out of it.”
“You brought her up!”
“No, I don’t think I did. I’m taking a shower. Gonna join me?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Alright then, piss off.”
“I’ll see you outside.”
He pushed his boots off with his feet and stretched his legs, before standing and stepping out of the suit. The door closed with a thud and he realised she had gone – Too bad, could’ve done with a back scrub – and so he made for the shower cubicle in the corner, undressing on the way. He turned the light on above it and stepped inside. His whole body was on fire, blotched patches of red blinking through where his thick black hair had yet to thicken. He rubbed a hand across his stubble and peered up into the showerhead. When the water came, it was cold and delicious all at once, and instantly his tension relaxed. Skin cooled. Tendons unknotted. He opened his mouth and let the water fall into his mouth.
Nothing but the cold water, the gentle hiss of the stream, and the pattering on the tiles. White noise. “I could just stay here,” he thought. Give it half an hour. An hour.
What did she want anyway?
I’ll give you one guess.
He turned and let the stream fall on the back of his neck.
Then he got out, dried, and changed.
***
“Home from home, eh? Feel better?”
Rylan looked out across the platform with its latticework grid of metal, workers scurrying from one connecting bridge to another. Argon lights at the end of tall spotlamps traced heads and swinging arms in silhouette. The rain never fell here, so the framework beneath their feet was especially grubby from decades of feet, even where it should have been polished white. Hand-rails were sticky, and he avoided touching them. There was a cool breeze however; for ten minutes of every hour the air conditioning kicked in to move stale air from one place to another.
He didn’t know why they bothered. Probably just facilitated infection. The spread of germs.
“Hungry.” He walked past the waiting Clarisse.
“Great,” she said, catching up with him. “I’ll join you.”
The March of Progress anthem blared from loudspeakers hidden in the shadows. A slow, dreary drum-beat beneath encouraging words. They’d change it up – the speech – but after a few weeks beneath the pits you’d have heard every word to the point you could tune them out. “... bring it home for your brethren, give one-hundred-percent and we’ll soon be one united mass heading towards our shared goal.” Bla, bla, bla.
“I know why you’re here.” They stepped up to one of the many elevation platforms and joined the queue to go up. In the open, with people all around, his mini-meltdown fixing the pipe was put into perspective. That’s all it was; a fantasy, an explosion lacking primer, or a detonator – it would never happen.
“Can’t a gal surprise her friend?”
“The surprise would’ve been if you’d joined me in the shower.”
“I’ve already showered today.”
A few feet ahead, someone said “Matilda Matilda is broadcasting tonight from Sampson’s and it’s going to be wild.” Somewhere to the left: “Did you catch that new show, Round up?” A reply: “Which one’s that? There’s so many these days I just end up watching the old stuff.”
“It’s great. You’re an extra but instead of just walking around in the background, you get to ride a horse. There were so many for the last episode that we caused a stampede, killed half the cast!”
For a second Rylan almost asked what that would mean for the rest of the show, but he regained sense at the last moment. It didn’t matter. It wasn’t real.
He sighed and looked down between his feet. People glowed on the deck far below; an orange and red hue from the river of magma that fed the furnaces and heated the water. Not so much a river really; here it was just a tributary branched off from the main source, the heart, somewhere more central to the city.
Destroy that and you really would be causing some damage.
To people’s lives.
They may be idiots lapping up the latest craze, but it wasn’t their fault. If he could give a shit about anything he too would probably be linked between shift hours, day after day. And let’s face it, who was the real idiot anyway? The one who wanted out, stepping into a complete unknown, or the one who chose to remain in this underground prison with cushioned walls?
“I can’t do what you want me to do, Miss Decker. It would affect too many lives. Could kill.”
“I’m not sure what you’re talking about, Mr Preece, but you were hungry, if I recall. Maybe we can discuss it at the bar.”
“No one cares. Everyone’s too far into their own business to take notice of ours.”
At the top, the workers dispersed towards various waiting trainlinks before filing on. It wasn’t raining, which meant the heat was cloying. Collars were flapped and buttons undone.
“Can you imagine coming out of work to blue skies?” said Clarisse, stepping up and grabbing a handrail above her head.
Rylan joined her. “Only in my dreams.”
The ride was smooth; the transitions between stopping and starting, slow and gentle. He’d been on worse. Whoever maintained this track and trainlink were doing a good job. A good job. Good little worker.
He looked around at the faces of his fellow workers. Maybe one of them maintained this track. Maybe it was the guy with a buzz Mohawk. Think of the disruption to his life; coughing up fumes while bleaching the track free of the filth that would get thrown into the air should the exhaust pipe explode.
He didn’t much look like the type though. His hands were clean and dextrous-looking. Perhaps a factory technician.
They came to a stop and Rylan and Clarisse stepped out into what passed as daylight. The corner flanks of the towers were brightly lit in strips right the way to the top. Rylan could barely make out the day-lights hung from the ceiling, both because of the distance and the hanging mist. Faces and clothing became surrogate platforms for the neon hoardings splashed up the nearest tower. Orange played with purple; green with blue. The red of a bikini on some girl who may or may not have been real. The gold of a sporting team’s emblem. The grey of noise.
The trainlink lifted away with an electric whirr.
The air smelled of the pits, not far below if he were to peek over the handrail.
“You have a place in mind?” asked Clarisse.
He still wanted that beer, and whatever would chase, but it had been the solitude of a bar stool in his mind at the time.
“Home. Pick something up on the way.” He lead the way, leading with his shoulder past a group of kids running in the opposite direction, a school teacher wearing a monitoring headset walking quickly behind them. Their hollers faded away, and with it, the street opened up.
They came to an arch four storeys high and just as wide, of solid concrete, serving as the lowest entry point to Rylan’s tower. Ground zero. It was all up from here. Until the divide, of course.
As they passed beneath the archway, everything changed. There was a perpetual dusk with row upon row of vendors beneath lights of their own engineering; cool blues and orange
s in constant downcast while the distant walls existed in shadow, the shaft of lifts in the centre stretching up into darkness.
This was the Dakar Exchange. Not every tower had one, but there was usually at least one ground zero exchange for every sector, and where one didn’t exist, the space became a playground for the kids of the lower levels, hooping basketballs or kicking around footballs.
Or a place to get mugged.
Security didn’t tend to pay much attention to ground zero.
It was amazing it was this civilised, thought Rylan. Each sector – each tower – had its own self-policing set of rules and guidelines, and some sectors were worse than others.
Rule of thumb: keep to your own sector. Rules for fingers one, two, three and four: keep your fingers.
“Hey, Rylan,” said a tall redhead wearing not much of anything. She stepped forward from some not-so-glamorous XXX striplighting, a string of other prostitutes all lined up behind her, pouting and pointing at those walking by. Rylan looked down at her heels, then a foot above him to her red lips and white teeth.
“Delete my face from your database.”
The smile turned into a scowl and she retreated to her line.
“Hmm, I wonder where she got your face from in the first place?” teased Clarisse.
“She’ll have yours in there somewhere too.”
“Come on, I’m getting hungry.”
***
“Got a maid, I see,” said Clarisse, pushing a pile of clothes from the breakfast barstool and sitting down.
“It’s on holiday at the moment.” Rylan dropped the bag of Chinese on the counter and searched through the cupboards for clean plates. Perhaps the bar would have been a better option after all, he thought. “There’s no awards for cleanliness.”
“Not here.” She took the offered plate and said thanks.
Neon Sands Trilogy Boxset: The Neon Series Season One Page 41