Even before I moved to the concrete forest, I had grown up in a factory town to the north, up in the mountains. Sunrises were more common back then, but flat land was something I had only seen in pictures. Witnessing it with my own eyes, live and in person, was a different experience entirely.
I heard Cassdan begin to stir, taking in a deep breath before his eyes blinked open. “Somebody smack you in the head?” he asked.
“What?”
“You look kinda frozen with surprise.” He was stretching and setting his seat upright.
“It’s so flat,” I said. “So flat.”
He looked around at the world outside the windows, rubbing his right eye. The low hills were already turning into fields so even and uniform that you could build a house without ever bothering with a level.
“Yep,” he said, through his yawn. “Tends to be that way. I guess we must’ve gone south.” He took a long look at me, cocking his head slightly. “You don’t get out of the city much, do you?”
“Like you do?” I snapped back.
“I spend a lot of time on the fringe, right at the edge of the city. I see a lot of things most people don’t.”
The sweeper wasn’t moving quickly, but it was maintaining a pace faster than it had in the city. Another windmill came and went to our left as an old house approached from the right. It sat roughly fifty feet from the road and looked like no one had lived in it for a century. The roof had caved in, the walls were rotten, and if there ever had been a driveway, it had long ago grown over.
“Any idea how much longer this ride is going to be?” I asked.
“Not much longer,” he said, gesturing toward the front window.
Distracted by the sunrise and windmills, I hadn’t noticed the skyscraper on the southern horizon, but in my own defense, it was practically invisible. Roughly fifty floors tall, the exterior appeared to be made entirely of glass, with no visible interior support structure. If it hadn’t been for the greenery growing on each floor, I may not have been able to see the structure at all. From the distance we were at, I couldn’t tell what was growing in the building, but the intense green of it put the surrounding unkempt grasses to shame.
As we drew closer, I was able to get a better view of the structure. As wide and tall as an apartment building, it seemed enormous in the near empty landscape. I could see an entire forest’s worth of life inside the thing, not just basic crops, but vines trying to scale the walls, brightly colored fruits hanging from squat trees, and what may well have been an entire vineyard on the twentieth floor.
As the sun rose higher, orange light began to reflect off the windows of a few of the floors. It hadn’t been noticeable at a distance, but each floor was a few feet offset from the one below, shifted just slightly in a spiral to the left. I imagined the design was intended to add to the structural integrity without blocking the light the plants needed with thick walls or large columns. The unusual architecture gave the entire structure the appearance of an enormous spiral staircase, reaching up into the sky.
The lines on the road came to an end as we reach a large circle of asphalt surrounding the building. Other sweeper trucks were parked around the outer edge, with plenty of space left between them. As we entered the lot, the sweeper to our immediate left started up and moved toward the exit. I watched it drive off down the road, back toward the city, while our truck squeaked and bounced its way around the circle to the back of the building.
“Should we go ahead and jump out?” Cassdan asked.
The ground floor seemed to be an endless series of glass panels, each one about eight feet wide, eight feet tall, and maybe six inches thick. There was a slight ridge where each of the glass panes met the next, but none of them seemed articulated or hinged, and the plants inside grew right up to the glass, giving no indication that they had ever been pushed aside to make way for humans or sweepers.
“I’m not seeing a front door on this place,” I said, “and if there is one, it’s probably locked. Let’s finish the ride.”
We rounded the back corner of the building, and our truck suddenly shifted angles. Cassdan and I both leaned back in our seats, bracing with our legs to keep from being thrown forward as we entered the yawning mouth of a rectangularly cut chasm. The blackness enveloped us as we left the growing light of sunrise behind, passing unnervingly deep into the earth.
Thankfully, the darkness didn’t last long. The steep ramp took us to what looked at first like an underground factory. The distance from ground to ceiling was about twenty-five feet, with eight thick columns spread evenly around the room, to support the weight of the building above. At the center of the room was a large steel bin, the two halves of its lid hanging by their heavy hinges on either side. The shape of it seemed familiar, but it took me a minute to realize it was the back of a sweeper truck, detached from its vehicle.
Four large arms reached into the bin over and over gathering bits of refuse to place onto dozens of conveyor belts, each one slowly carrying its objects to be dumped in smaller bins around the edges of the room. Except for the cameras at their centers, the mechanical hands reminded me of the arms inside the old arcade claw machines. These claws weren’t grabbing at cute plushies, though. I nearly lost my meal when I caught a glimpse of one of them lifting the back half of a dog out of the open container.
In an empty space next to the bin, our truck conducted a perfect three point turn to back itself up next to where the claws were working. “This looks like our stop,” I said, already opening the door.
The smell was intense, like rotten meat and two month old fruit. The aroma of coffee from an uncountable number of discarded paper cups stood out from the rest, yet didn’t quite cover what I could only identify as two day old urine. I tried not to think about the fact that somehow the mixture of all of this produced a subtle hint of the scent of cheap chocolate.
I reached into the exterior pocket of my jacket to retrieve a small device made of rubber and glass. Pressing a button on the side, I released the latch, allowing it to unfold to its natural shape, a simple filter mask designed to cover the mouth, nose, and eyes. I quickly cleaned the glass of the goggles with the edge of my shirt and pressed the mask to my face, forming a seal that held it on firmly.
I took a few deep breaths through the filter. The air was too thickly saturated with garbage for the mask to filter out everything, but at least the stench was brought down to tolerable levels.
“You happen to have one of those for me?” Cassdan asked, his voice muffled by the cloth of his shirt as he held it tight over his nose and mouth.
“Sorry, but it’s the only one I have.”
“And here I thought I was paying you to protect me.” His tone said he was only half joking.
The lighting in the basement factory was far from daylight bright, but it was enough for me to see the labels on the sorted bins. From what I could tell, the sorting process seemed to focus on basic materials, with names on the bins like “RUBBER” and “STYROFOAM.” There didn’t seem to be a bin labeled “HUMANS,” but there was one labeled “ROADKILL.” While trying to prepare my stomach for the unfortunate job of looking inside that one, I began to wonder who the labels were actually for. The mechanical arms certainly didn’t need or use written labels as they moved refuse from the sweeper bin to the conveyor belts.
The noise of machinery interrupted my thoughts. Sounding like a diesel powered industrial vacuum, an articulated hose lowered from a steel box attached to the ceiling at the center of the room. As it drew closer to the open sweeper bin, the volume grew to dangerous levels. Cassdan and I covered our ears to protect them, which unfortunately left him with no hands to cover his mouth and nose.
As wide as a man’s arm, the hose began to move around the interior of the bin, bending like a snake to get the corners. The power of the suction pulled the heavy bin around on the floor, adding to the array of tiny scratches on the concrete underneath it.
The vacuum did three thorough sweeps around
the bin before retracting again. Once it was out of the way, the claw arms swung the lid halves closed and turned a latch that seemed to lock it. Grabbing the corners of the steel box, the mechanical arms lifted it off the ground, making room for the sweeper truck to eject its full bin into the vacant space.
In seconds, the cleaned bin was loaded onto the truck and locked into place. Cassdan and I stood out of the way as the vehicle began to accelerate back toward the ramp. By the time I looked back at the claw arms, they were already at work pulling trash out of the bin we had ridden in with.
I had already turned back to working up the bravery to check the roadkill bin when I heard Cassdan call out my name. When I again rounded to look at him, he pointed my attention back to the claw arms. Moving slower now, almost gently, all four arms reached down into the open bin.
When they again came out, the claws were lined up into a single row, all carefully holding a slim form wrapped in an old bed sheet. One claw alone had been assigned to hold the head. However that person had died, they at least looked comfortable now.
Cassdan and I followed the mechanical pallbearers to the far side of the room. Between two of the larger sorting bins labeled “CIRCUITRY” and “STEEL” a door opened with a ding. As white light from the small room beyond flooded into the sorting factory, a narrow table dropped down from its back wall and extended outward, just a few feet above the concrete floor. While the claw arms lowered the body onto the table, I considered our options, and the dangers that might await us wherever the bodies go.
“You think it’s going up or down?” Cassdan asked.
“I don’t know,” I said, through the filter of my mask, “but I think this may be the only way to get to where we need to be.”
Cassdan didn’t wait to assess the danger. The claws released the body onto the table, and as soon as they were out of the way he slipped beside the table into the elevator.
“I just hope it takes us somewhere I can breathe,” he said.
I took the opposite side, allowing the table’s extension arm to stand between us in the small space inside the elevator. “This could easily be dropping us into a furnace,” I said, as the table retracted back into the elevator.
The doors closed, and the room filled with cool, fresh smelling air. Cassdan put his shirt back in place and inhaled deeply. I removed my mask, putting it away as I took a few intentional breaths to clear the foul air from my lungs.
“There’s no way we’re getting dropped into a furnace,” my client said, with a broad, white smile. “All this biomass is quite valuable. It’ll probably just drop us into some buzz saws to be chopped up for mulch.”
I heard the soft hum of a motor as the elevator began to move, upward from the feel of it. Not having to go deeper into the earth gave me at least a small bit of hope, though there still remained no promises of safety. Cassdan seemed preoccupied looking down at the covered face of the body.
“Something wrong?” I asked.
“Do you think the sweeper picked it up before we hitched a ride, or while we were asleep?”
I didn’t like the thought that this person’s friends or family had been having such an intimate and emotional moment, putting their loved one out on the street to be picked up, and only a few feet away we were snoring like nothing was happening at all. But, that’s life in the city. People have dinner, go to work, or play with their kids, all while a small army of prisoners are being worked to death making armor to protect the cops that locked them away.
Things needed to change.
As the elevator rose above the basement level, morning light spilled into the tiny box. Other than the silvery strips of steel supporting the weight of the body table, all four walls were made of glass, including the inner set of doors and the elevator shaft we moved through, giving us a good view of the life growing on each floor. The bottom two floors seemed to grow nothing but grass, naturally short and uncut. Then came several floors of what may have been peas, cucumbers, okra, eggplant, onions, and even corn. Whatever systems were keeping them alive were invisible, run under the soil if I had my guess.
Around the twentieth floor, grapes were being plucked off of vines by flying drones. Thin arms placed each of the delicate fruits into small baskets hanging on the undersides of the robots. In the brief look I got, I could tell that these were nothing like the origami police drones used for surveillance throughout the city. These were the old six rotor type, built for stability rather than quick movement, and they looked like they had been repaired a dozen times, rebuilt from spare parts and scrap.
On the floors above, I saw oranges and apples growing, as well as lemons and raspberries. I think I may have also seen kiwano, but I couldn’t be sure, having never seen one in person before. All manner of other greens grew below the soil of several floors. I couldn’t identify any of them, but their bushy verdant tops were interesting to look at.
Where we finally stopped was not the top floor, but it wasn’t far from it. The nearest windmill seemed to be at eye level, and no details were visible on the ground far below.
This floor wasn’t like the others. There was no green here, no vines growing up the walls, no earthen floor. Steel cabinets lined the east and west walls, blocking out much of the natural light. The door to each cabinet was a little over two feet wide, leaving little doubt as to what lie behind them.
Another machine greeted us as the glass doors opened. Getting around on four sturdy rubber wheels, the robot was little more than a scissor lift with a stainless steel slab table on top. On each side, four spider-like arms hung. Cassdan and I stepped back to avoid getting in the way as the elevator table extended outward, over the top of the robot's smooth surface. The spider arms reached across the body, taking hold of it as the elevator table retracted and lifted itself back to its upright position. We took the hint and slipped out before the doors could close us in.
The air in the room was cold and stale. Industrial refrigerators at the ends of the cabinets kept the bodies inside from decomposing, but also kept the entire floor cooler than the October air outside. I zipped up my jacket and pulled my collar up to hold in as much heat as I could. Cassdan barely seemed to notice the temperature as he began his work.
“Seems like we’ve found the right place,” he said, pulling open the nearest freezer and drawing out the slab within.
A male body stared up at the ceiling. His eyes were dull and his brown skin had gone pale with a lack of blood. A digital readout scrolled across Cassdan’s eyepiece as he gazed down at the man’s face. After a moment, his computer chirped.
He slid the drawer back and closed the door. “This could take a while,” he sighed.
“What exactly are you doing?”
“Scanning and photographing their faces.” He pulled out the next drawer. “If we want to do this right, we should make a record of everyone here and take it back for comparison.”
“Can’t you just get into the city’s prisoner database and do a live comparison?”
“My signal is too weak this far outside the city, and besides, staying linked into one of the city’s systems while we slowly go through every one of these drawers would draw too much attention.” Again, the computer chirped and he moved on to the next body. “If the wrong police officer or even Ultramarine’s corporate hackers caught wind of it, they might cover their tracks, might even purge the dead prisoners from the database like they never existed.”
I opened the next drawer for him as he finished another scan. “Should we be concerned that they may have already done that?”
“It’s definitely a concern, but my understanding is that Ultramarine is actually being paid by the city for housing inmates. On the books, their lower floors have been designated as a privately owned prison. And, like any other privately owned prison, Ultramarine has the right to put the inmates to work. The running hypothesis is that the reason no one has been registered as dead is because Ultramarine is keeping them on the books so they can keep their numbers high,
and the payments rolling in. But yeah, it’s possible they have connections in the city or a good enough hacker that’s just been erasing them when they die. We won’t know for sure until we’re finished.”
“How many bodies do you think are here?” I asked, raising my voice to be heard over the racket the spider table was making on the far end as it put away the newest of the collection.
“I suppose that depends on how long they hold them here, before they’re recycled.”
“One week,” came a voice from behind us, distorted by static.
I turned to find a rotor drone hovering a little over ten feet away. Larger than the ones in the vineyard, this one easily supported the weight of the two narrow gun barrels hanging below it, attached by multi-jointed mechanical arms. A round loaded into each of the chambers as they took aim, one at me and one at Cassdan. In my haste, I had forgotten to check the ceiling for cameras, and sure enough, when I looked up, there was a small camera watching us from beside what looked like the drone’s charging station.
Despite my surprise, I continued absorbing information about the situation.
The drone was in good repair, a sign that it probably wasn’t used often, which could mean that the controller was more likely to miss with the first shot. Likewise, the voice I had heard from the speaker embedded in the core of the machine sounded like that of an older woman, making her statistically less likely to want to kill us, but also more likely to be worried about intruders. Either way, she had the upper hand, making negotiating a much better option.
“If you harvesters came all this way for some free bionics,” she continued, “you’re going to be disappointed. People don’t leave valuable parts on sweeper bodies.”
I stepped forward, blocking the line of fire to my client as I raised my hands. “Ma’am, my name’s Jackson Bell.” I didn’t break out “ma’am” very often, but the age and natural authority of the voice told me it would be appreciated. “We’re sorry to intrude, but my client is here trying to solve a murder.”
Skyway Angel Page 13