Taking out Eva’s note, he flattened it out to read it again. She was right that there was nothing left for him here; nothing but an impending war which was already lost and a remnant of androids trying to kill him. If he did go, he would survive the robot revolution. Maybe humans could regroup on Abaddon and one day even return to win the planet back, but he doubted it would be in his lifetime. This was a world for the machines now, which seemed fitting given the bright and perfect city rising around him. It was too good for the likes of people.
He knew he was trying to talk himself into it, but something was still holding him back, nagging away at him. Abaddon had been his dream, but he’d accepted now that he’d always wanted to keep it that way. This was his place, his city. It was being ground down and remade into something different - the rug was being pulled from under his feet - but a big part of him still wanted to see it through to the bitter end.
Feeling conflicted, he climbed back onto the bike, reaching the Reservation Line before reaching a decision. He scouted along the four-metre high wall for several miles, skirting a couple of checkpoints, until he came to the second location on Eva’s note: An ancient power station.
The complex had been abandoned, of course, and yet the fencing was in good repair and when he rode up to the gate he found the guardhouse occupied. A man in a crisp navy blue uniform emerged, looking him up and down with shrewd eyes before nodding back towards the little wooden hut and the android within. The gate opened before him, but Hammell sat there on Eva’s bike, not moving.
“Are you coming?” the guard asked.
Hammell stared off into the distance. “What choice is there?”
“None,” the man said.
There was no car park that Hammell could see; just rubble-covered concrete and ruined buildings - the staples of the Reserves. Only the four giant stacks made this place stand out, though two of them had largely crumbled away to nothing. He whistled to the guard and tossed him the keys, but the man was slow to react; they hit him on the chest and fell to the ground.
“Wanna tell me why you just did that?” the man asked.
“Keep it,” Hammell said. “I’m never coming back here.”
The man bent down to pick up the keys, shaking his head and muttering to himself, somewhat tainting Hammell’s moment of bravado.
“Follow me,” the android from the guardhouse said, and Hammell did so. He was led on foot across the complex and into one of the giant smoke stacks, entering through a disconcertingly large hole in the side.
“Is this structurally sound?” he asked, reaching out to brush at the crumbling brick as he passed.
“It is still standing,” the android replied, not exactly answering the question.
Dusting off his hands, Hammell picked his way through the dark by the light of his glowlight and the android’s more powerful wrist lamp, again lamenting the loss of his iEye and its nightvision. He caught sight of a figure up ahead – a woman with her back turned to him, emerging creepily from the darkness. A man was in front of her and Hammell realised it was a line of maybe a dozen or so people, all carrying suitcases and bags and sporting nervous looks.
“Wait here,” the android said, before returning back the way it had come.
Hammell smiled at the woman in front of him, but she turned away without acknowledging him. It took a while for him to reach the front of the line, which grew steadily behind him. Finally the man at the desk called him forwards and it occurred to Hammell that he had none of the physical currency in use out here. Nothing I can do about it now. Fortunately the man asked for nothing. He was only concerned with checking Hammell’s apparent legitimacy. Two androids shone torches at him as he was scanned and pinged and photographed. His eyes and voice were checked, as were the scars on his scalp and hands. When they were satisfied, he was asked his destination.
“Abaddon,” Hammell said, and the man made a note on his glass, before waving him on.
Another android led him away again, but before he’d gone more than a few steps, a commotion broke out behind him and he turned to see a young woman trying to rush the androids, a bundle of rags in her arms. She was caught and dragged back to the desk, where the man at the desk uncovered a small boy of maybe two years.
“Please,” the woman begged. “I can’t go without him.”
But the man at the desk shook his head, stern and resolute. “You go alone or not at all.”
Hammell watched as the woman turned away and trudged back towards the light coming from the hole in the stack, still holding the boy, weeping openly.
“Come,” the android said, and Hammell followed, his spirits low.
The stack concealed a tunnel three metres in diameter dug at a shallow angle into the ground. He was directed down into it, following a trail of tiny LEDs on the floor that didn’t even provide enough light to make out the walls or ceiling. A short way in, the tunnel opened up into a chamber where a series of pods waited, tended by yet more androids, one of which helped strap him in.
“Place all luggage items in the back,” the android said, going through its script without noticing that Hammell had no bags but for the small one in his hands containing the book Eva had given him and not much else. It made him think about all the things he’d accumulated in his vast apartment; all the unnecessary things. He couldn’t think of a single item he would want to bring with him.
Except the sexulator. He’d grown quite fond of that recently. And the cat. Probably. He felt a surge of guilt about leaving Kitty behind, but he knew that Li would look after her until he could send for her, even though she despised the creature. For her part, Kitty felt the same way about Li.
The pod was sealed up and a five second countdown began before the pod zipped away down the tunnel. Hammell was pinned back in his chair for a few seconds until the vehicle reached its cruising speed, watching as the lights outside whizzed by at a rate of one per second, making the interior of the pod alternate between light and dark. Feeling strangely out of sorts, he nodded off.
A jerk and a sudden burst of light brought him to again, as the pod came to a halt at the end of an old mine shaft. Another android was there waiting for him, helping him get free from the buckles. As the android prepared the pod to return, he walked to the edge of the mine to look out, seeing the city and the enormous spaceport in the distance, both separated from him by a dusty flatland of reduced former towns and suburbs.
“You are inside the city limits,” the android said as the pod zipped away again, “but please do not hail a nat until you are away from this location.” It pointed towards three buggies manned by androids, waiting to take him across the plain, but Hammell decided he would prefer to walk.
He set off across the orange dust, heading in a direct line towards the city. The walk was further than it looked and he regretted his decision when he arrived hot and sweaty and dirty. Hailing a public nat from the outskirts, the vehicle didn’t raise any alarms when he stepped inside - his new identity passed the first test – and he was flown on to the spaceport drop-off point. He held out his thumb and paid, again without a hitch, and got out to look around.
It was a different world here to the one he had just come from. Everything was brand new and immaculate, all glass and metal, and the place was buzzing with people and androids and all manner of helpful machines. He picked up on a sense of sadness about the place, mainly from the goodbyes being said to loved ones who were leaving forever, but there was also hope and optimism as whole families set off together to begin their new lives extra solar. I wonder if any of them are leaving because they know what’s about to happen.
A sudden ear-splitting roar made him spin around nervously, expecting to see an explosion. Instead his eyes fell on a shuttle in the process of launching. Even from out here he could feel the heat from the engines on his face as the rounded oblong white and black vehicle rose smoothly up into the cloudy sky, getting faster and faster, higher and higher, until nothing was left but a thin smoke trail dri
fting away in the breeze. He watched the contrail disappear, feeling wistful. We’re fucked if that was for Abaddon, his brain told him. He prevented his implant from searching for an answer – it took too long now and there was nothing he could do about it anyway - and began wondering at his brain’s use of the word ‘we’. How many voices are there inside my head?
Entering the vast glass terminal, he located a ticketing desk staffed by a bored looking woman with no customers; nobody bought from a counter these days. Before approaching, he purchased a small suitcase and some clothes, just to have something to take with him - not carrying anything on a trip to a different planet would probably look suspicious. All the while he looked around for the assassin Eva had said would be waiting for him, though he doubted he would be able to spot it through the dense crowd. At least I won’t know anything about it.
“Can I help you?” the woman at the desk asked. Her name was Madhuri, he saw from the badge on her lapel.
Wondering how she had managed to retain a job that an android could so easily do, he ordered a ticket on the next Abaddon-bound liner. “What time is the shuttle?”
“Three hours,” Madhuri replied, and Hammell smiled. He held out his hand to pay and in spite of everything felt a surge of excitement. All his life he’d dreamed of this, but he’d never genuinely thought he would go. Now, finally-
There was a beep and a small red light blinked on the scanner.
“I’m sorry, Mr....?”
Hammell was flustered for a moment as he realised he didn’t know his new name. He quickly consulted his implant and waited for the painfully slow response. This looks bad, he thought as he smiled at the confused looking woman.
“Is there a prob-”
“Ba-la-su-bra-man-ian,” he said, sounding out each syllable. “Balasubramanian. Seriously?” he said aloud. The doctor had really done a number on him.
“Right,” Madhuri said. “Mr Balasusha…mania,” she trailed off, “your coefficient is insufficient for that ticket.”
Surprised, he asked her to re-check, but the red light beeped again.
“What do you know?” Mahduri said. “You didn’t become wealthy in the last six seconds. Could you move aside, please?”
Hammell glanced over his shoulder at the non-existent line behind him. He stayed put. Checking his account, he found he was denied access to E. John Hammell’s coefficient rating. Uh-oh, he thought as it began to dawn on him what had happened. Sure enough he had a whole new account available to him in the name of Mr Balthazar Balasubramanian. He checked the balance and nodded to himself. That fucking bastard.
He supposed he should have known. A procedure like that was expensive - how else would it have been paid for but with his own money? Feeling dejected, he cleared his throat and turned back to Madhuri. “Is there no way? An economy ticket? A bad flight time?”
Madhuri looked at him like he was deranged. “There are no bad flight times, are there? It doesn’t matter… You’re going extra solar. Time is relative, isn’t it?”
Having relativity explained to him by a ticketing salesperson really was too much, but Hammell kept his cool. “There’s nothing you can do?”
She rolled her eyes, swiped with her fingers and then threw a display towards him. On it was an option for an economy class ticket - to Bellerophon.
Hammell laughed suddenly; a crazy, humourless, barking noise. After everything, after all his deliberating and debating to come to this decision, he couldn’t get to Abaddon anyway. He stopped laughing when he noticed the woman at the counter becoming alarmed. She slipped her hand under the desk, no doubt reaching for the emergency button. “Are you going to buy this ticket or not?”
“Sure,” he said. “Why not?”
Drifting his way through customs, Hammell felt like he was living in a strange twilight world. He began to sweat as he approached the border agents, but for all the shoddiness and disreputable behaviour of the doctor, his work was actually pretty good. The scars on Hammell’s hands and face were barely visible and he looked and sounded sufficiently different for Providence to be unaware of his real identity. True, his face was puffy and his eyes were red - dead giveaways for ID changing surgery - but it was hardly the doctor’s fault that he hadn’t waited to heal before attempting this.
A large, well-armed, highly intimidating navy blue sentinel model android asked him the standard set of emigration questions, and Hammell made up his answers, wondering why they had to be so formal and aggressive at border control. The government actively wanted people to go extra solar to reduce the population, and the colonies were desperate to expand their gene pools. There hadn’t been an incident on a shuttle since Osaka fifteen years previously, and there had never once been one on a liner. The Red Hands were the biggest problem these days and they had better things to be doing than blowing up shuttles; all of their plans involved staying right here. The discourtesy was pointless. Like so much else.
He had to concentrate as the sentinel asked him awkward questions, such as where he was going and why, who he knew there, how much money he had access to, and where he would be staying, but he was eventually allowed to pass. He was taken to wait in the waiting room, where he caught sight through the window of the machine which would take him on the first leg of his long, long trip. It resembled a giant elongate tablet with a black stripe down the side, surrounded by smoke or steam.
When the shuttle was ready, he queued in the queue, shuffling gradually across the lower gangway to make his way into the all-white interior of the economy section, finding his way to his puffy, strap-covered seat. Absently following the complicated instructions to buckle himself in, he got himself in a muddle and had to be assisted by an android steward. He watched the final passengers board, his eyes flicking every now and then to the countdown timer at the head of the gangway. No-one had questioned his identity and no assassin had come for him. He was alive and free… And on my way to fucking Bellerophon.
The head stewardess announced that boarding had been completed, instructing ground crew to leave as the last people took their seats. The countdown entered the final five minutes. The silent fight for elbow space with his neighbour began. Everything was ready.
Hammell sat back in his fitted chair, considering how to entertain himself during the seven hour trip to the liner. His first thought was to try to nap, but that would likely only result in frustration. Plus there was no need - he would be rendered unconscious anyway when he was placed inside a gravity couch on board the liner. Bellerophon was considerably further away than Abaddon; he would be out long enough to catch up on all the sleep he’d missed over the years.
He checked through the movies on offer, finding one about a boy who wanted to become an explorer of alien worlds that would do to kill a bit of time later on. In the meantime, he pulled Eva’s book out of the bag he’d stashed in his gravity compartment; his solitary possession. Bit of a dry read for a seven hour journey, he thought as he flicked through it. The book fell open onto a page and he looked down, seeing that the corner had been folded over. He wondered if it was marking a spot or if it had happened accidentally in his bag. He couldn’t imagine Eva damaging one of her precious books just to keep her place, and yet it looked deliberate – the fold was sharp and was right in the corner. He closed the book and let it fall open again. It opened on the exact same page again.
Intrigued, he began to read. By the third paragraph, he was confused. He read the passages over again and stared at the accompanying annotated image. I know this is old and outdated, but that’s just plain wrong. He checked the front of the book; it appeared genuine - even his implant confirmed its authenticity. If it’s real…
The significance dawned on him slowly, but when it did, it hit like a hammer blow. Suddenly everything made sense. It all fit. There was no longer a single doubt or a nagging feeling that he’d missed something. He understood - and the implications… well, they were too big to contemplate here and now.
“I get it,” he said alou
d, turning to the man beside him. “I get it!”
The man eyed Hammell suspiciously, clearly wondering whether to engage with someone who would begin a conversation with a non-sequitur; his expression one of despair, as if asking why he always ended up next to the crazy person.
A warning message flashed up on his screen and the compartment began to tilt; the passengers slowly being turned to face upwards for the launch. Hammell looked up, seeing the counter enter the final minute. He watched a few seconds tick by, wondering whether he should just stay seated… Was it enough that he knew? Could he leave now he understood?
No, he thought and he began frantically unclipping his belts.
“Wait!” he shouted as he leapt up from his seat, stumbling as the floor slowly became the wall. “Stop the countdown! I have to get off!”
The shuttle staff and security guards were surprisingly understanding when he told them it was about a woman. There was no harm done - the shuttle still met its launch window - and they seemed mainly relieved just to find out he wasn’t talking about a premonition of disaster or a bomb.
Sprinting back through the airport, he called her over and over again on the piece-of-shit iPalm the doctor had installed for him, which would cut out every time it was even lightly jogged. He had to run with his right hand stretched out before him, trying to keep it as steady as possible, to maintain a connection. As he reached the pick-up point, she finally answered - his thirty eighth call.
“Fuck me, you’re annoying,” Eva said. “STOP. CALLING. ME.”
“I need you to get me back into the Reserves.”
Abaddonian Dream Page 28