Alt.History 102 (The Future Chronicles)
Page 22
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The Black Network
by Adam Venezia
In a world where modern computing power exists, but is tightly held by the elite—who use their control of information reinforce their status—how far will the common folk go to have access to technology, and ensure their own empowerment?
Some years back, I took a job at the Bannister Shipping Yard. The western edge of the property was a harbor, and the eastern edge was a cargo train station. It was a simple operation. Our main business was transferring cargo from ship to rail, and from rail to ship. I worked a crane. It was rigorous and exacting work, but I had it easy next to the guys lifting crates, hitching train cars, and working in the sweltering hot garage.
We worked there—we lived there. The owner, Mr. Bannister, provided housing. Nothing special. The compound was cinder block with tiny windows. The rooms were small. The bathrooms were shared. The cafeteria served wait-in-line, take-a-tray slop. But it was free. The building was clean and maintained. Children could play outside.
It was almost impossible to live off-property. The rent in the shipping district was high, the apartments were rickety and cold, and the streets were risky to walk after dark. Workers who chose to live this way, to bus in, never stayed long.
The one commuter was Mr. Spivey. Spivey was a computer operator, a man of rare and mysterious talent. He was paid many times more than even the overseers and businessmen. A driver brought him to the property four days each week, rarely more than 45 minutes after his assigned shift.
For the rest of us, the compound was the best option. People came and went, but there were old timers, who had lived there for 20 years or more, and younger men who had grown up on property while their parents worked. The work was hard, but life on property was steady. We were comfortable, and over time it is easy to mistake comfort for happiness.
My first taste of the difference came when my friend Roderick failed to show up one morning. Roderick was one of the old timers. In 18 years, he’d only ever had one job: laborer. He pushed carts, lifted crates, dragged fuel hoses, and mopped floors. He simply didn’t have any desire to do something more. But he was a hard worker. It was a point of pride that he never stayed home sick. I once saw him hit by a careless truck driver. He showed up to work the next morning with a broken wrist and blood in his eyeball. He didn’t complain.
So, when he stayed home, I spent the whole day worrying what could possibly be the reason. When I knocked at his door, he opened it and leaned against the jamb, blocking me from entering. He was a short man with a grizzled beard, old beyond his years.
He didn’t have to ask. He knew why I was there.
“It’s not a good time,” he said.
I looked him over and he looked healthy. He looked tired, but he always looked that way.
“What’s wrong?” I asked, shouldering past him into the apartment.
He didn’t put up much resistance and didn’t answer my question.
“You look fine,” I said. “Family okay?”
I turned and walked down the hall and called to his wife. There was no answer except for a soft groaning sound from the bedroom. I opened the door and went in, with Roderick following behind.
Mrs. Roderick was kneeling next to the bed, where their nine-year-old daughter Hanna was lying. Hanna was partially covered but restless, continually throwing the blanket off of herself. Her night gown was soaked with sweat, clinging to her body. Her hair and face were wet. There was a bandage on her left forearm.
“She got hurt at work,” Roderick said.
The Yard doesn’t employ children, but they do hang around. The housing compound is on property, and so to step outside is to be at the job site. The children do occasionally get minor tasks to keep them busy - things like delivering messages or stepping and fetching.
I sit in my crane for four hours at a time, coming down only once in the middle of the shift. Sometimes someone has to hoist water up to me with a rope and pulley. That’s an easy job that makes the children feel useful. When Roderick said Hanna was hurt, a dozen ways it might have happened sprang into my mind.
I put a hand on Hanna’s forehead and it burned. I could feel the heat radiating from her.
“How are you feeling?” I asked.
She seemed to hear me, but had difficulty trying to answer.
“How long has she been like this?” I asked Roderick.
“A couple days,” he said. “She has been getting worse. “We cleaned out the cut, bandaged it. Not much else we can do.”
“How about taking her to the hospital?”
“Can’t afford it.”
“They might help her anyway,” I said. “You’ve got to try, right?”
He was slow to answer. “I don’t know. It might be too risky to move her if they don’t wind up helping.”
“What about Bannister?” I asked.
“What about him?”
“He’s a doctor. Let’s take her to him.”
“Bannister isn’t under any obligation to us.”
“You’ve worked for his family for two decades. You think he won’t do you a favor?”
He didn’t answer and Hanna didn’t have time to wait for me to convince him.
“I’m going to take her to Bannister,” I said, and stepped in to pick the girl up. He started to stop me, but his wife looked into his eyes and he was paralyzed.
She helped me swaddle their daughter in her blanket, and I scooped her up under the shoulders and knees. Hanna whined in protest.
“It’s okay, sweetie,” her mother said. “Everything is going to be fine.”
I walked out, and nothing more was said. Roderick and his wife followed behind me to the door, but didn’t go any farther. They stood in the doorway, holding one another. They watched us go as though I were taking her away to be buried.
* * *
Bannister’s home sat just north of the Shipping Yard, separated only by a narrow road. I crossed that road, carrying Hanna. She had gone quiet and her eyes were fluttering, half open. The manor was bigger than our whole housing compound, white, brightly lit, with grass and shrubs all neatly tended.
The front door opened as I approached, and a servant greeted me. “What is the meaning of this?” he asked.
“This girl is hurt,” I said. “She’s sick. I’d like Bannister to take a look at her.”
He looked the girl in the face and grimaced with indecision. “Perhaps you should take her to the hospital.”
I didn’t want to burn time trying to explain her father’s position on the issue. “She may not have the time,” I said. “She’s in a bad way here.”
He stuck his head out the door and looked back and forth for anyone who might be taking notice, and then waved me in, whispering, “Okay. Be quick about it.”
I put her down on a sofa, and the servant told me to wait there with her. Bannister entered a few moments later, yawning and rubbing his eyes, carrying a black leather satchel in one hand. He wore what might have been scrubs or might have been his pajamas. “All right, I’m up,” he said. “What’s going on out here?”
He saw Hanna on the sofa, and his sleepy eyes instantly focused. His brow furrowed. He went to her side and put a hand on her forehead. “What happened to her?” he asked, in the flat voice of a man hard at work. I explained what I knew of what had happened.
Meanwhile, he opened the bag and took out a pair of shears, cut the sleeve of her gown in half, tore off some fabric, and tossed it aside. He put on gloves. His fingers probed over the surface of the bandage on her arm, making note of where blood seeped through. He worked a finger under the material - just shop rags really - and methodically peeled it free, inch by inch, revealing a long, jagged gash. It was all clotted blood and pus.
“The wound might not have been cleaned at all,” he said.
He pressed on the sides of the wound, and Hanna awoke with a scream and jerked the arm away. Bannister held
it firmly and put a hand on her chest, easing her down onto the sofa. “It’s okay sweetie. I’m going to help you. Can you lay back and try to relax?”
She kept fighting. Bannister asked me her name, and then said, “Hanna, can you look at me? Try to look at my eyes.”
She turned her head to him and tried to force her eyes open, but kept kicking and pulling her arm away.
“I need to take a look at your arm, okay? It’ll only take a second, but I need you to hold still. Can you do me a favor?”
She nodded a little.
“Can you take a real deep breath and hold it for me? Close your eyes and lay your head down for just a minute.”
The wound ended at her elbow, but there were red lines under the skin, almost to her shoulder. Bannister traced over them with his finger. “This is called blood poisoning,” he said. “It’s almost to her heart. If it gets there….”
Hanna let out her breath in a scream. She pulled her arm back and rolled away from him.
“I’ll have to irrigate the wound to get a better look,” he said.
He took two syringes and two glass bottles from the bag, checked their labels, uncapped one syringe, and began drawing liquid from one of the bottles.
“A little something for the pain,” he said, carefully measuring the dosage. He wiped a clean spot on the shoulder of her healthy arm and slowly injected the liquid. He set the syringe aside and took the other, and the other bottle.
“This one is an antibiotic,” he said, filling the syringe. “We want to stop that infection as soon as possible.”
I sat and watched, and he seemed to suddenly become aware of it. He turned to me and said, “I’ll take care of her. You can go. Let me work. I’ll keep her here for the night.”
I nodded, thanked him, and turned to walk away. The servant, who I hadn’t realized was in the room, gestured for me to go with him. I followed, and he dismissed me.
* * *
Roderick was not at work the next day, and I didn’t have the heart to knock on his door knowing as little as I knew about Hanna’s condition. I slipped a note under Roderick’s door that just said Bannister was taking care of Hanna. It didn’t say anything else because I didn’t know anything else. I went to work as normal, went home as normal, went to the weekly poker game as normal, and spent the whole time feeling perfectly helpless.
Three days passed, and then a message came to me at work while I sat in the crane watching a barge anchor into the port. The message only said to come to Bannister’s home after my shift.
Bannister greeted me with a smile. “Please, come in,” he said.
He was younger than I was. He inherited the business from his father, but never cared to run it himself. He became a doctor and hired businessmen to run the company.
He showed me to a room with nothing in it but chairs, small tables, books, and a fireplace with a small fire going. He invited me to sit and offered me tea.
“Where is Hanna?” I asked. “How is she doing?”
“She is doing well,” he said. “She’s playing with Claire. They should be along any minute now.”
Claire was Bannister’s daughter. She was five or six. They came in right on cue. She was leading her little brother around, holding both of his hands, helping him learn to walk. She was a head shorter than Hanna, and though she was younger, she was teaching the older girl what to do. “Don’t carry him,” she said, demonstrating. “Let him hold himself up as much as he can. Want to try?”
Hanna’s arm was in a sling. She wore a tee shirt and jeans which were brand new and fit her well. “I don’t think I can with my arm,” she said.
“That’s okay,” Claire said. “You take one hand and I’ll take one hand.” She hadn’t seen us, but then she looked up and said, “Oh, hi daddy.”
“Hi, Claire,” he said. “They’ve been playing all day. Hanna is doing much better. She took some stitches in her forearm, and I put her in a sling just to make sure she doesn’t pull them out. It might be overkill, but it’s not my specialty so I just wanted to be sure.”
“What does that mean?” I asked. “Not your specialty.”
“I’m a neurosurgeon,” he said. “I mostly deal with the brain, spine, and nervous system.”
“So then, how did you know how to help her?” I asked.
He shrugged, and took a moment to answer. “It was a pretty standard infection,” he said. “The treatment is routine. Any doctor could have done what I did.”
I was stunned. I hadn’t had much experience with medicine in my life. I thought Hanna’s infection would kill her, and yet Bannister shrugged the whole thing off. I couldn’t help but ask how it was possible.
“How did you learn all this?” I asked. “School?”
“Medicine, you mean?” he asked. “No. I went through a private training program. Med school is fairly outdated. I mean, there are still a few schools, but it’s hard for them to get good teachers. Any serious student goes through a private program.”
“And how does someone get into such a program?”
“Someone like you?” he asked, snickering. “You saw me fix up one kid and suddenly you want to be a doctor?”
He made light of it, but that is exactly what happened. I looked around at his home, his family, his life. I saw the sense of ease in his face. I am not so naive as to believe his life is free of worry or problems, but I had seen him laugh off troubles that might have destroyed the Roderick family. And the only difference between us, as far as I could tell, was that he knew things I didn’t.
“Maybe I was meant to do something more than work a crane,” I said.
He nodded. “Perhaps. I won’t lie to you, though. It would be difficult.”
“You’ve got to be pretty smart, huh?”
“Oh, not at all,” he said. “That’s not what I meant. The real trouble is the cost.”
“How much are we talking?”
“More than you or I could afford.”
I didn’t believe him, and I’m sure he sensed my doubt. He looked around, as if pointing to the house itself with his eyes. “I may seem wealthy from your perspective,” he said. “But there are people far wealthier, and some of those people control things like my medical training. To afford it, I had to sign a term of indenture, which means I have to work for them for thirty years to pay it off.”
I didn’t think much of his comment at the time. He had shown me just a glimpse of a world I didn’t know existed. It suddenly seemed possible that I could have a life like Bannister’s, and all I had to do was sign half of it away, just as he had done. But as I looked around, half of his life seemed significantly better than all of mine.
“So then, how can I get into one of these programs?”
“It’s hard,” he said. “They get far more applicants than they can accept. The most reliable way involves some dealing under the table. We’re talking about money that took my dad years of running the business to accumulate. To be frank, I’m not sure what to advise you, but if you do think of some way I can help, all you need to do is ask.”
I was silent. I didn’t know what to say, not just because I didn’t expect his generosity but also because I had no idea where to begin.
“I’ll tell you what,” he said. “Go see Spivey. For what I’m paying him, we can keep him busy. If you have questions about how the training programs work, or anything else really, he has a massive database at his disposal.”
I didn’t have much experience with computer operators, so I didn’t know what they were capable of. Spivey was a central player in the Shipping Yard. All communication, and all ship’s manifests and train cargo logs go through his equipment. We kept hard copies of everything, of course, but generally only referred to them when there was a discrepancy. The Yard could do business without him but his job would take several people to replace. Even though replacing him with ten people would save money overall, a lot of our business would go elsewhere to avoid the hassle of dealing with such an archaic system.
I was still considering this oddity when Bannister said, “I’ll tell him to help you out. Now, he’ll whine about surcharges and extraneous duties and such. Let me deal with that. And second, don’t give him any extra work when the Yard is busy. He can barely tread water during peak time as it is, and I won’t have you jeopardizing business. But if you can keep your requests to slow times and you can use him as much as you like.”
* * *
Hanna went home, and I went back to work. Overnight, the place had turned poisonous. Everyone I saw seemed a victim, and I was just like them. I could have quit my job at the dock, but where would I have gone that would have been any better? There was nowhere else for someone like me to go.
Spivey worked in a building called the control tower. It was the tallest building on the property at eight stories, with windows angled down in every direction so that he could simultaneously see the docks, the train station, and all points between. It was a pretty view, but I didn’t see what value this view provided him.
He was surrounded by machines. He sat and pressed keys, like those of a typewriter but with no mechanical parts. He read from screens, which displayed glowing amber letters and numbers on a black background. The rest of his equipment was all boxes, fans, and lights. At a glance, there was no making sense of them, and I’d never given them more than a glance.
A security guard had to escort me onto his level of the control tower. The first time I arrived there, Spivey greeted me with, “Bannister sent you, did he? What does he want?” He didn’t look away from his monitor, but he wasn’t working on anything either.