Shelf Life

by Bob Crosley

  BICE users generally had two ways to deal with the massive flow of information that a direct Internet connection to the brain entailed. The first was Q, a mild sedative that helped the brain handle the immense amount of activity and information on the net. The second was more personal. Users would customize their workspace to represent something they were comfortable with that allowed them to categorize the information and apps they were using. Like any diehard gamer, Jacob was comfortable with the just-in-time information that gaming provided, so he designed his workspace accordingly. In addition to the relics, potions and dragons, his workspace was designed to present notifications and alerts only when he could actually act on them. They’d pop up in the periphery of his view, and he could select or ignore them as he wished, never taking all of his focus off his main objective.

  He picked up and swallowed from the potion of knowledge, which was Jacob’s way of launching a search. He began searching for the history of Transport, seeking something besides the basics taught in school. His results came up as a series of caves and castles in front of him. He entered the castle of the official history of Transport. He already knew the Transport Authority was formed on Earth and tasked with policing all forms of transportation to stop terrorist activity. The official history from Transport didn’t go much beyond what he had learned in school. The Authority became the controlling force of government worldwide after the First Transport War. During the Second Transport War, emigration to New Pennsylvania got underway. Many moved from Earth to New Pennsylvania to be free of the terrorist group, TRACE. Transport thought they could leave the war behind by preventing TRACE from emigrating. But they failed, and now the war was here as well. As he read the history of the war, he found himself in the middle of critical battles. Drones and fighters filled the air, and bullets from ground battles zinged past his ears. Looking at any one aspect of the scene around him would show him details. ‘Selecting’ a detail with his thoughts would take him deeper into the history.

  He emerged from the official history and turned to one of the caves that contained an unofficial history. Where the entrance to the official history was framed with a cut stone archway, this entrance was marked with graffiti from those who had left comments behind. He entered the cave and started reading from the scrolls stored inside. The author of this history claimed that Transport started out as a secret agency that operated outside the law, until the Transport Act made the Authority official and outlawed private transportation. According to him, the main purpose of Transport was not to stop terrorist activity, but rather to control the citizens by making it impossible for them to travel without the government knowing about it. He claimed that the TRACER drones that were a constant presence over the city weren’t looking for terrorists, but were monitoring the actions of regular citizens. He also claimed that the Amish Zone wasn’t established to maintain a tradition from Pennsylvania on Earth, but rather because the Amish could produce enough food to prevent an uprising. According to this anonymous author, Transport oppression on the Shelf lessened for a while after an assistant director, known only as MW, had something called a ‘road to Damascus moment.’

  Jacob was ready to find out what a ‘road to Damascus moment’ was, but then those initials caught his eye. It couldn’t be a coincidence. Dr. Antonov had talked about a Transport agent with the same initials. Jacob’s avatar took the potion of knowledge from his belt and took another drink as he searched for ‘Marcus Weatherly.’

  Jacob found himself ripped from the cave and thrown into a blank room that had no doors or windows. Floating across the white wall directly in front of him were the words “Search Blocked! Search terms prohibited by the Transport Authority under section 742.3 of the Transport Act.”

  No sooner had he finished reading those words than he was thrown out of his BICE session.

  “Oh shit!” He sat bolt upright in his chair. “Oh shit. Oh shit. Oh shit. They know what I was doing. They terminated my session. I’m in so much trouble.” Jacob tried to initiate a new session, in case it was just to prevent him from reading about Weatherly. No luck. He couldn’t get back into the net. He started pacing quickly around his mother’s room, convinced that Transport was going to bust down the door at any moment. Sweat beaded up on his forehead, broke loose and started running down his face. He put his hand on his forehead and swiped it up and across his hair, his usual nervous tic. He caught a glimpse of the time from the clock on the nightstand. The sudden realization that it was almost three in the morning, the fact he needed to be up to turn and feed his mother at seven, the long day, and the adrenaline rush and crash all suddenly made Jacob seriously tired. Knowing there was nothing he could do now to prevent Transport from showing up, he sat back in the chair and tried, in vain, to sleep.

  He had finally drifted off when the noise of an airbus, close enough to rattle the windows, woke him. He looked out the window and saw the bus hovering over the street, in front of his building. A transport agent in full battle gear slid down the cable hanging from the ship. The agent stopped right outside the window, planted his feet against the wall and shone a light right in Jacob’s face.

  “Freeze! Do not move by order of the Transport Authority.” At that moment, Jacob heard the front door crash open and troops enter the apartment. They must have been going room by room because he would hear them yell, “Clear!” as they checked each room. He saw the lights moving down the hallway and stood frozen in fear.

  As two officers entered the room, the first moved quickly to grab Jacob by the back of the head and force him to the ground. As the agent pushed his face into the carpet, he felt a warm wetness start in his crotch and run down his legs. “Jacob Alders, you are under arrest for violation of Transport law. As of now, all civil rights are suspended and you are being taken into Transport custody.”

  Jacob heard a moaning scream, and fought against the hand holding his face to the carpet so he could turn his head and see his mom. She was screaming, but since her jaws had already locked up, it came out through clenched teeth sounding like a moan. The second transport agent yelled at her to shut up, but she didn’t stop.

  “She’s sick!” Jacob yelled. “She doesn’t know what’s happening. She can’t understand you!”

  “Shut up!” the agent holding Jacob yelled, forcing a knee into his back and pinning his lower body to the ground.

  The second agent kept yelling at Mrs. Alders. Finally, frustrated, he swung his rifle around and smashed the butt into her mouth. Jacob heard a sickening, wet crunch as he saw blood and a tooth fly from the impact.

  ***

  “No!” he yelled, sitting bolt upright in the chair. There was no agent outside the window. No agent pinning him to the ground, and no agent smashing mom’s mouth. He was dreaming. His yell woke his mother as well. He turned on the light to tell her what happened and saw that her mouth was tense. Lips pulled back, teeth bared. She was moaning. The medicine had lost its effect.

  Jacob looked at the clock, and noted the time. 4:15 am. Barely fifteen hours since her shot, the shortest time yet. She was worse, a lot worse.

  Chapter Six

  The next morning, Jacob found his BICE access was restored. The block was only temporary, unlike his response to the nightmare. His hands shook, and he felt the need to constantly check on his mother. He kept checking out the windows, looking up to the sky and down to the streets below, reassuring himself that Transport Police weren’t coming to collect him, or worse. Jacob understood it was just a dream, but it troubled him on a much deeper level.

  Never in his life had he seen Transport Police do those things, not even in movies. Why would he dream that? What made his brain think they could act that way over a net search? What did his brain suspect about Transport when he was asleep that he wasn’t aware of when he was awake?

  It was time to put those thoughts out of his head for now. Jacob had a busy day ahead. He needed to prepare his mom’s meals, send the logs to Dr. Antonov, pick up a few things from Mr. Abbas�
�s store, and go to the labor center to see if he could find half a day’s work. It was the longest he could be away before he needed to be home to tend to and feed his mother.

  “Time to get to work,” he announced to the empty kitchen.

  ***

  That night, with the scent of oranges fresh in his nose, Jacob settled into his favorite chair and prepared to enter Gorath. His goal was to track the legendary dragon, Xyrkex. But as he entered his workspace, he noticed the time. It was almost nine, and time for Marcus Weatherly’s net show.

  Jacob considered whether to sacrifice some game time to watch the net show. Wouldn’t hurt to watch for a little while. I’ll still have plenty of time to play after I see what this guy is like. Probably a first class crazy. Jacob reached into his pocket and pulled out the paper from Dr. Antonov. His avatar grabbed a map scroll from the table in front of him and used it to navigate to the address.

  Jacob watched the plains of the Northern Territories dissolve in front of him, replaced by a solitary man standing in front of a wall on which headlines and what looked like political slogans scrolled past. The man, Marcus Weatherly, wore black pants and a black t-shirt, almost identical to what Transport Police wore under their body armor. He was trim and fit, with chestnut skin, brown eyes, and short, curly, gray hair, cut close to his scalp. He began to speak.

  “My friends, you all know who I am. I’m Marcus Weatherly, and I’m here tonight to share with you the truth. The truth about what’s happening in our neighborhoods, our cities, and our world. The truth about the Transport Authority and the lies they spread to keep us afraid and compliant!” His voice had a rhythmic, almost singsong quality, like he was reciting a poem. The closest thing Jacob had seen to Marcus’s style was the preachers on Earth that his mother would watch in old videos sometimes.

  Marcus continued. “Looking out into our audience, I see some new faces.”

  Jacob issued the mental command to go anonymous, to hide his avatar and any identifying information. Marcus’s server wouldn’t allow it, and Jacob cursed under his breath.

  “I see we are joined by a dragonslayuh. Marcus’s accent pronounced the ‘er’ as ‘uh.’ Northern Territories, if I’m not mistaken. I want to extend a special welcome to our dragonslayuh, for I am a kindred spirit. I am a dragonslayuh of another kind, slaying the dragons of propaganda and lies spread by our ‘friends’ at the Transport Authority.”

  Jacob felt embarrassed that the outward appearance of his avatar was from a game and not something more mature. But he realized he couldn’t see the avatars of the other viewers, and imagined some were more embarrassing than his own.

  “Because we have some new people here tonight, let me give you a little background. My name is Marcus Weatherly. I used to be the assistant director of the Transport offices located here on the Great Shelf. And let me tell you, during that time, I saw things, terrible things. I did things, terrible things. But one day, eight years ago, like Saul riding on his ass on the road to Damascus, I saw the truth. And no, my friends, I did not learn that I was the ass.” Marcus laughed quietly at his own joke. “No, rather the truth was this: TRACE is not here on the Shelf! There is no terrorist threat to our beloved Shelf cities! When you are told we can’t get groceries, or medicine, or building supplies here on the Shelf because of TRACE, that is a LIE!” Marcus yelled to punctuate that last point.

  “No my friends, we have to dig beneath that lie to uncover the truth! And when we dig, we learn that our travel restrictions, the mandated relocations, the drones in the air above our heads, and the narrow roads beneath our feet are all there for one reason and one reason only. Control! They want to control us, the law-biding, hardworking citizens of the Shelf.”

  Marcus went on for over an hour, and Jacob listened intently. In that hour, Marcus went through the history of the Transport Act, the Transport wars, and current events, each time presenting his interpretation of the reasons and meaning of each. Jacob was fascinated by his claims that the original transport restrictions and security measures were driven by actual terrorist activity. But over the years, the Transport Authority continued to expand those restrictions and further restrict the movement of citizens, to control them, so that Transport knew where they were at all times.

  As Marcus neared the end of his show, Jacob noticed something different happening on the wall behind him. In addition to the headlines and slogans, numbers appeared. He watched for a few moments, until he was certain he was seeing a repeating pattern. Some of the numbers appeared to be part of a net address, much like the address Dr. Antonov had given Jacob, but others were not. It took just a few minutes for Jacob to identify the first numbers as a date, then a time, and then the familiar eight numbers that made up a raw net address. Jacob noticed it wasn’t the same address as the one he’d used tonight. Mr. Weatherly was changing his net address for each show, presumably to keep Transport at bay.

  Jacob automatically opened a note in his personal workspace and almost entered the date and time in that space. He caught himself as soon as he realized the potential disaster that could result from storing that information on the net. Instead, his vision swam briefly as he left his net workspace and made his way to the kitchen junk drawer, fished out a piece of paper and a pen, and wrote the numbers down: two nights from tonight, nine o’clock, at the new address. Jacob would be there, but in the meantime, he had some research to do.

  Chapter Seven

  Over the next two weeks, he didn’t miss a show. On nights Marcus didn’t broadcast, Jacob spent the time doing research, and the research often backed up Marcus’s version of events. Jacob became quite adept at finding information on sensitive topics without tripping the Transport Authority blocks. It was like completing a difficult quest in The Dragons of Gorath. You couldn’t always come at your objective directly. If you did, something or someone would stop you, usually in a fatal way. Instead, you needed to come at it from a new angle, chip away at it, without being so aggressive that you triggered defenses.

  Jacob had recently found some references on a few message boards to a new material Transport was pursuing. One called it a new energy source, and others called it a new weapon, but both referred to it as originating in Oklahoma. Checking Transport listings, he saw job openings for mining engineers based in Oklahoma. The contact listed on the job openings was an officer named Lindsay Roberts. Jacob knew that most people liked to help when asked, and he could take advantage of that. He made an anonymous connection to a Transport directory and contacted Officer Roberts.

  “Hi, Lindsay. This is Jeff, in accounting. I have some invoices for the job postings for that um… the um… whatchamacallit mine in Oklahoma. They need your approval.” Jacob knew that anyone going back through the logs would know his message wasn’t legit, but he hoped it wouldn’t seem unusual enough to investigate.

  “The okcillium mine, you mean. Yeah, it’ a mouthful. No problem. My approval code is R4878.” Everyone liked to help, even some Transport officers.

  “Thanks, Lindsay.” Jacob cut the connection as quickly as possible.

  Now he had a name, okcillium, and he could dig deeper. With this approach, Jacob was able to access huge amounts of data about the Transport Authority, TRACE, the settlement of New Pennsylvania and the Transport wars.

  He became so caught up in his research that he almost forgot tonight was a show night, not realizing until five past nine. He didn’t even need to reach for his paper that contained tonight’s address. Two shows ago, he realized the addresses Marcus used followed a pattern. It wasn’t an obvious pattern, but it was there. Jacob was always good at puzzles and problems that involved patterns, a skill that helped him with solving in-game puzzles. Jacob activated his BICE, already prepared for the sudden flash of light. Once in his workspace, his avatar unfurled the map and Jacob entered the address.

  “… so ask yourself, my friends, ask yourself, is Q really necessary to be able to access the net safely?” Jacob’s hand went reflexively to his forehead whil
e he nodded yes. “Or is there another reason? A hundred and fifty years ago, we had ‘television.’ You can look it up if you’re not familiar with it. Television predated the net and trids, and certainly came before the BICE, but it had the same effect. Citizens, and even entire families of citizens, would sit in their living rooms at night, staring at a glowing box that showed them programs designed to use just enough brainpower to keep them from thinking about bigger issues, like ‘where are my tax dollars going?’ and ‘is the government restricting my freedom?’ We all know these are useless questions, don’t we? From time immemorial, we’ve known that our tax dollars are always going to line someone else’s pockets, and that the government is always restricting our freedom.”

  “But I digress, my friends. Let’s jump ahead to today, to the Q. What does Q do to help us access the net safely? It numbs our brain, just a little. It also makes us just a little bit happy. Have you noticed that, folks? Going to spend some time on the net? Pop a Q, and suddenly you just don’t really care that much anymore, do you? Do you think that’s by design?” Marcus dropped his voice a bit, like he was sharing a secret with a friend. “Don’t spend too much time on that question, folks. It is by design.”

  Jacob knew from personal experience what could happen if you spent too much time accessing the net without Quadrille. And he knew first-hand the other effects of Q, since he used it when necessary to help his mom forget her pain. But was the ‘don’t care’ part of Q necessary to access the net? Or was it put there on purpose? You can’t be a functioning member of society without a BICE and net access. Is Q designed to use our need for the net to get us to pop a pill that made us not care what went on in the world?