And how wide the influence of whoever had sent the rapid-strike squad to murder me? Possibly that individual was even more powerful than a Grey. Why hadn’t they managed to locate me yet?
Unknown.
So far I seemed to be evading capture by moving quickly and blending in. However, those tactics would lose effectiveness over time, and no doubt the circle would tighten around me the longer I stayed in New Dublin.
That meant the only logical course of action was to find a way to leave the city.
Could I leave? And if so, where would I go?
Was it expensive? How much credit could I expect to amass in a few days time?
Excellent questions. But I would not find any answers until the following day.
I’d chosen to weasel my way into an archive position because, with that level of access to data, I would be able to answer many of my queries. And it didn’t offend me to wear black, the color of the professional class.
I took a moment to examine my unexpected emotional resistance to wearing blue, brown or even red for that matter. Wearing brown repulsed me. Blue elicited a feeling of disdain, and red, the medical level, made me feel slight contempt. Pink, representing the childcare level, was something I simply could not take seriously. Wearing black was tolerable, but only just. Green, the enforcement color brought me no feeling whatsoever. It gave me a neutral emotional response. Had I once been in enforcement?
There was no way for me to know.
Until I had more facts, formulating a plan would be useless. My only goal at the moment was to hide, stay inconspicuous, and work my way up to as high a level as possible using whatever means necessary. The higher my level, the more protection I’d have, and the less likely I’d be discovered.
Rank would protect me, of that I was certain. I needed to make it my mission to reach 49 as soon as possible. Level 49 was the highest rank I could ascend to and still be counted as an average citizen. Enforcement and leadership levels started at 50. Although the thought of reaching level 50 or above was appealing, my instinct was that it would be a dangerous mistake. I would be noticed if I were too high in profile or started mingling with enforcement officers.
My tired mind wouldn’t work any longer and I suddenly felt overwhelming exhaustion wash over me.
The room faded away and I was asleep before my eyes were fully closed.
∆
I awoke in the same position. I hadn’t moved once all night. Would this unusual sleep cycle persist? It was more like a coma than rest.
The time indicated that I’d once again slept twelve hours. Parched, I rose and drank a copious amount of water and ate a hasty meal before preparing for work. Puzzling out my nightly blackouts would have to wait.
Time to find out what an archivist did.
I used the hair color and dyed my brown locks black, pulled them into a tight bun and slipped into the black dress. The cosmetics enhanced my eyes and mouth and brightened my skin, as well as making me look slightly less like me, which was the goal.
The shoes were adequate, but not up to the image of a professional level 40 so I searched for local shops on my screenboard to locate a place that stocked the appropriate items before leaving the building to enhance my wardrobe.
The city center shops opened one hour before I was required to report to Arches Archives, so I located a huge, poorly staffed clothier, and raided them for supplies. In a few minutes, I traded out my shoes for a pair of sensible tall black boots with low heels, supplemented the black dress with a sleek black jacket with professional tailoring and loaded with pockets, and managed to take a heavy, well-constructed black leather carry case. The case was entirely empty, but my new employer wouldn’t know that.
The silver ring I’d snatched along with my food the previous evening gleamed on my right hand.
As I walked to my appointment I caught my reflection in a window and had to stop for a moment to stare.
I looked nothing like the disheveled, haggard girl I’d first seen staring back from the mirror almost two days ago.
I didn’t recognize myself.
Hopefully, neither would Flick.
The Arches National Archive building was a twenty-minute walk from the city center and I appeared promptly at my scheduled arrival time.
No one was waiting to greet me, so I strolled confidently to the reception area and lingered by the desk.
It was deserted.
The archive building’s ceiling loomed overhead. The reception area was huge, mostly empty, and constructed of different combinations of wood and sculpted taupe steelfoam. It boasted enormous inviting windows that let in vast quantities of light.
It was welcoming if somewhat minimally furnished.
After I loitered for a few minutes beside a massive blood-red marble desk, footsteps alerted me that someone was coming. A woman, dressed in blue, popped up seemingly from nowhere, and I realized there was an inconspicuous recessed stairwell leading to a lower level behind the desk.
“Dess Steel?” she asked.
“Yes.”
Her forehead creased. Surprise/consternation. “You are the new archive technician?”
“Yes,” I said with a friendly tone.
“Really?”
She had lively features and was slightly plump. Her pale blonde hair moved around her face like a halo of cotton fluff and she studied my black clothing openly. “What level are you?”
“40,” I said. “But I’ve only been a 40 a few days and I’m not quite sure I’m doing it right.”
She grinned and jerked her head at the stairs. “Come on. I’ll show you around. I’m Ajel.”
Ajel looked like a 29 to me, but it was obvious from her confidence she had a lot more authority than her level suggested.
We descended the stairs together and she chatted along the way through the sprawling underground complex.
“The archive sub-level is twice as big as the main floor, and most of our data is stored here.”
I marveled at the rows and rows of orange steel cabinets.
Orange, like a blowtorch. I stared at them.
“I know, the color is obnoxious,” Ajel said. “It keeps us from going to sleep while we’re working.”
I laughed and she gave a slight smile.
“These are all a standard archive file system. Chronological. We store older files in the back, newer in the front. We keep everything. Public speeches by the area Governor, daily immigration statistics by name, place of origin and gender. Property transfers, important dates and city-sponsored events are all recorded.”
“Paper records?”
She bristled slightly as I touched a cabinet. “Of course.”
Hostile/protective flashed over her face.
This was her archive.
I took a step back. “Listen, Ajel. I know this is inappropriate of me to suggest such a thing, but honestly, I am very new to my level and I don’t have as much confidence as I should.”
Her features softened. “You want to do something less… archivey?”
Was that a word? “You seem to know so much about this area, and I am better suited to research than storage.”
She brightened. “If you wouldn’t mind, we do have the hotboards to manage.”
Hotboards, hotboards… My mind scrambled to make sense of the term but I didn’t recognize it at all. I beamed at her in spite of that fact. “I’d be perfect for the position.”
She hesitated. “It’s beneath your level, but Arches is anxious to make a good impression, and if a citizen sees a professional sitting at the hotboards it will make us look superior.”
“Show me the way,” I said.
She took me back up the stairs and waved grandly at the reception desk. “Here you go.”
It was my turn to hesitate. The desk was quite visible. “Do you think I can handle this?”
“You are a level 40,” she replied. “You’ll be fine. Besides, we might get one live request a week. Most of them are remote requests don
e digitally and you never see the person, so you don’t know if they are disappointed or not.”
I tentatively sat at the desk and Ajel palmed the screenboard. She hurried through the activation process and nodded at me.
I obediently palmed the screenboard and the smooth surface glowed to life.
WELCOME MADAM STEEL.
“There you go. Now the system recognizes you. If you have any questions, I’m just downstairs.”
“Thank you.”
Ajel patted my shoulder. “You will find all of your enrollment data in your file. Set it up when you have the time.”
She vanished back down the stairs, and I took a moment to study my surroundings.
The desk was large enough to support a helicar. My screenboard occupied only a fraction of the space, and the rest was gleaming blood-red colored marble inlaid with the logo of Arches National Archives, which was an unimaginative copper image of a stone arch.
I accessed the screenboard, located my personal file and spent ten minutes determining my wage, noting the frequency of payment of credit, and initiating a credit account at a local exchange facility.
Then I scanned my personal file and noticed with some bemusement that I could alter the information myself. The only restricted data in my file was my level assignment, but otherwise, I could alter address, descriptive information and personal relationships such as family and close contacts, anytime I desired.
“Good.”
The screenboard chirped. A message appeared.
KILLIAN IS COMING. LOOK BUSY.
I stared at it and then typed.
AJEL?
The screen went blank.
A man, dressed in a long white coat and white slacks, breezed through the front doors and stopped when he spotted me.
I smiled.
He frowned. Irritation/confusion. “Who are you?”
Obviously, he was the director of the facility. White indicated leadership, which I recognized and understood instantly. His casual demand of information from me, a level 40, told me his station was secure enough he could afford to be rude, even to a professional.
I kept smiling. “Dess Steel. I am the new hotboards monitor.”
His eyes crinkled. Smug/superior. “Well then, welcome Madam Steel.”
He folded his long arms behind his back and strolled past the desk, turned a corner and casually strolled down a high-ceiling corridor off to the left. After he was gone my screen blazed to life again.
RELAX. YOU WON’T SEE HIM FOR THE REST OF THE DAY.
I allowed myself a sigh.
THANKS.
GET BACK TO WORK.
In spite of the situation, I found myself liking Ajel and her abrupt sarcasm.
After locating the nearest bathroom, determining how many exits I had access to if I needed to run, and fiddling with my chair until it conformed to my smaller body than the previous occupant, I located the query screen and activated the search function.
Time to get some answers.
The query results presented abundant material.
Fortunately, for the first time in 42 hours, I seemed to have a legitimate platform from which to do nothing other than gather data.
I started at the beginning.
The city of New Dublin had been established seventeen years ago after the plague wars had finally ended.
Plague wars sounded ominous.
I kept reading.
The population of the city was 17, 511. Minuscule compared to the size of the infrastructure. It was obvious the devastation from the virus and then the resulting plague wars were responsible for this abundance of land and scarcity of individuals. A near extinction level event, lasting approximately fifty-five years, had managed to kill 87 percent of the human population of the entire planet within the first dozen years.
“Of the planet?” I said out loud.
Astonishing, considering the level of technology in use.
Viruses had a way of adapting that was sometimes far superior to medicine. Still, the death toll was shocking.
The subsequent redistribution of fleeing people had resulted in armed conflict, naturally. The wars had eliminated another 8 percent of the survivors, as if humanity hadn’t faced enough hardship without the fighting, and population numbers shrank even further.
The wars continued for a decade before subsiding.
Currently, nation-states were relatively stable, but leaders on different continents were wary of each other, and usually uncooperative when it came to trade or migration and had little face-to-face contact.
This did not bode well for my plans to escape, but perhaps I did not need to flee to another continent. Maybe another city would suffice.
New Dublin was one of six recently founded coastal cities on this continent, while the interior towns and cities were now completely abandoned.
New Dublin was not an easy city to immigrate to, according to everything I could find concerning the topic, but recent exceptions accommodated the arrival of refugees.
Who were these refugees and where were they coming from?
I changed my search parameters.
A group of islanders had recently been discovered who possessed a type of natural immunity to the virus, and refugee centers handled the meager influx of people from that place, perhaps forty or so every few months, helping them to integrate into the city and find housing, employment, and medical care when needed. These immune refugees were the reason I was able to enter the city with little scrutiny. Island evacuees were expected, and welcome additions to a decimated population.
The virus, appropriately, was called Obsequium.
Obsequium; Latin for submission.
A certain percentage of the general population was naturally resistant to the virus, but no one possessed actual immunity like the islanders. People still succumbed from infection today, occasionally, but those deaths were evidently quite rare. The remaining individuals were far less likely to expire since all of the vulnerable people had already died years, and in many cases, decades ago.
Health protocols were in place to prevent viral spread if another outbreak occurred, and some progress had been achieved toward developing a vaccine, but the vaccine was weak and often ineffective. Therefore, population recovery was still very muted; urban centers were only now beginning the long process of recovering.
This explained the vast infrastructure of the city that held relatively small numbers of citizens, but what about the city itself?
The bureaucratic structure of New Dublin was typical and based on a hierarchical system. Levels of rank, clearly identified by clothing color, provided the framework of social order. The incentive to advance in rank was non-existent. Professional levels received no greater credit compensation than lower ranked individuals. No matter what your level, the credit advancement you received was the same. So supervisors and professionals had more work, but the same pay.
It was no mystery now why I had managed to advance so quickly in level. It seemed the only motivation for attaining rank was a selfish desire for social superiority.
That made me an elitist.
I allowed myself to wallow in guilt over that shameful fact for approximately sixteen seconds before shaking it off and accepting my avaricious nature. If rank preserved my anonymity and contributed to my survival, then I planned to embrace my snobbish side, and indeed, cultivate it.
I hesitated before searching for data about the enforcement division. What if searching for this type of information drew attention? The risk was necessary, and I queried the relatively benign terms of “enforcement” and “duties”, similar to the type of questions a child might use.
The results were not very helpful.
Enforcement division officers had access to non-lethal crowd control weapons, could arrest people or detain them for security purposes and had the responsibility of maintaining order and protecting the governor. They reported directly to the governor and no one else.
The governor report
ed to no one and was, therefore, the ultimate authority in the city hierarchy.
An image of a man dressed in white flashed in my mind.
Another memory? Was I beginning to recall my past, or were these simply random bits of data I’d absorbed through exposure to the city screenboard?
There was no way to answer that question and I searched on.
Any remaining information about the enforcement division was meaningless. There was no mention of the fact that enforcement division doubled as a private assassination squad for the governor, which I knew to be a fact, and I concluded any other data was probably propaganda.
I did not attempt to retrieve any information about the Greys. Some warning deep inside my brain told me any mention of a Grey would instantly trigger some sort of alarm bell and I would be seized immediately.
Instead, I randomly scanned relevant and recent events, noticing that there was no mention at all of any sort of enforcement action occurring recently on an abandoned ocean base just off the coast.
No great surprise.
What about the other cities?
Information concerning them was scarce. Of the twelve capitals that apparently still existed on the continent, only a few of them allowed immigration: Bay Harbor, and Sington, were two that stood out.
Now I had a rough plan.
Since I had no intention of listing myself as an immigrant, that designation was irrelevant and I didn’t necessarily need to limit myself to one of those two. But it might be easier to blend into a place that accepted newcomers when I was ready to leave, so I vowed the following day to gather what data I could on those two locations.
Presently, the best course of action was to maintain my position in New Dublin and behave inconspicuously. Until I could determine which of the two cities had the highest population and closest proximity, forge documents, and find a way to travel there without being detected, my primary goal was to avoid discovery.
Simple.
A chime interrupted my searching and a pleasant voice echoed through the atrium, informing me that we would be shutting down the archive early today, as the governor would be making a public speech and citizens were encouraged to attend.
The New Authority Conspiracy (The Keeley Dorn Adventures Book 1) Page 6