Vita Aeterna

by Jay Allan Storey

  “Hold it,” Fatso said.

  He reached up and pressed a button on his comm-glasses. His eyelids fluttered like he was having some kind of fit while he accessed the net.

  “Wow, you are dead,” he said.

  “I told you…”

  The eerie light from his glasses scuttled across his eyelids like a crawling caterpillar. A thin smile formed on his lips.

  “What are you doing?” I said.

  “Nothin’.”

  “You called somebody.”

  “Bullshit.”

  I turned to run. He tried to block me, skipping into my path like a spider and extending his arms like metal pincers. I jumped aside and managed to skirt around him. The tricked-out performance of his exoskeleton gave him a huge speed advantage. There was no way I could hope to outrun him. Again, sirens wailed in the distance. He easily caught up with me.

  I noticed that he was careful to never turn his back to me, and when I took a good look at his suit I figured out why. A thin bundle of wires, almost hidden but accessible if you approached from the right angle, ran from his hips up to a single filament running up his back. As he reached to grab me I jumped sideways, dove to the ground between his legs, and reached up under him.

  He twisted around so fast I couldn’t believe it, but not before I’d curled my right index finger around the exposed section of his wiring harness. I screamed, as searing pain shot through my finger, but something gave, and his legs started twitching grotesquely beneath him. He staggered in place, legs spasming, unable to move. I took off as fast as I could down the alley.

  “Get back here,” he screamed. “They’re gonna get you anyway. Might as well let me make a buck off it.”

  I stopped. The sirens were getting closer. There wasn’t much time. I needed the phone. I rushed back toward him.

  “That’s more like it,” he laughed.

  He lifted his pincer-like arms to grab me. I jumped out of the way. His legs were still convulsing and he couldn’t keep up. I reached down into his coat pocket. He saw what I was doing.

  “Get out of there!” he screamed.

  I grabbed the phone and held on. He wrapped a vibrating arm around my head. Even with the damage he was incredibly strong. I stomped as hard as I could on his sandaled foot.

  He screamed and let go. “You broke my foot you little shit!”

  The sirens were around the next corner. I reached down with my free hand, grabbed his left ankle, and pulled as hard as I could. The foot lifted, and Fatso started to sway. I jumped out of the way as he crashed to the ground. I took off. He lay there, thrashing like he was having a seizure.

  “Get back here!” he screamed. “Help me! I’m gonna get you, you bastard!”

  I flew out of the parkade. A SecureCorp squad car passed me but I was hidden in the shadows.

  ☼

  In our old Cam-surfing game, nobody was actually looking for us. Cameras randomly picked up stuff all the time, but the crime detection algorithms weren’t that accurate, and rumour is that normally, not many of the camera feeds had anybody actually watching them.

  Now, my gut told me there’d be an army of eyes scouring every camera. I couldn’t afford to be seen. It was slow navigating through the camera footprints, but I’ve done it enough times. I felt safe on that score. When we played the game, there was always some kind of time element involved. Now I could take as much time as I wanted, so in theory I should be able to Cam-surf indefinitely. I traveled for about half an hour, to the deepest reaches of the Quarters, desperate for a place to hide.

  I was exhausted, about to give up and just collapse in a corner somewhere, when I spotted an abandoned car factory. I prowled around for about ten minutes before I found a loose panel I could use to get in. It was still night; this deep in the Quarters there were no streetlights — even outside you could barely see where you were going.

  Inside, it was black as a cave, but after a few minutes my eyes adjusted well enough that I could navigate. I had to pick my way over the piles of debris on the floor, terrified of making any noise. I reached what looked like the factory floor. The skeletal remnants of the construction robots cut into the darkness. I couldn’t be sure there was nobody there. The only sounds were the scurrying of rats up and down the hallways.

  I could make out a room off to the east side, and I headed for it. It looked like it had once been some kind of office. There was an overturned desk, half-demolished. Somebody had already scavenged it for sellable metal.

  A couple of chairs lay in one corner. I grabbed a plastic one that would be less likely to be infested, stood it up, sat on it, and pulled out the phone.

  The crypted phones foiled the SecureCorp location software by randomly switching between cell towers all over the city. They never stayed with any one station for more than a few micro-seconds, so there was no way for the software to triangulate a position. They also encrypted all messages so they couldn’t be read from outside.

  What they couldn’t do was hide what information you were trying to access. Since any information SecureCorp was worried about was flagged and would send an alarm somewhere when anybody tried to access it, I still had to be careful about where I surfed. Right now, I figured that trying to do a search on Vita Aeterna would be a real bad idea. It was probably a search term that almost nobody but me would use. I had a feeling I wouldn’t come up with anything anyway.

  In fact, I wondered what I could access without triggering some kind of response. In the end, I decided I had no choice but to trust that the phone was secure. Like I expected, there was nothing on Vita Aeterna. I checked on my Uncle Zack. Officially, he died in an accident with a RoboTaxi. I’d been right before. He was sixteen, the same age I was supposed to have ‘died’. I did a search for Dr. Charles Knowles. I got a slew of results. I sifted through some of them. Chuck was a mid-level drone at the Appraisal section of MediCorp.

  I opened my eyes wide when I read one line in Chuck’s list of roles: Special Liaison to the CCE.

  The CCE, the Council of Chief Executives, is made up of the CEOs from all six Corps. They’re kind of folk heroes for most of us. Everything we hear on the HUD or on HoloTV points to government waste as the root of all the misery and poverty we deal with every day. The CCE are constantly recommending ways to reduce red-tape and eliminate regulations, based on their massive experience efficiently running the Corps, but the government never seems to listen.

  Charles Wickham, the CEO of SecureCorp and one of the most famous people in the world, is also the head of the CCE. If the CCE are folk heroes, then Wickham is their Robin Hood. He’s the public face of the organization, and his picture is everywhere.

  An election is coming up in a few months. The public can’t wait. The polls say the Freedom Party is more hated than any in living memory. All kinds of negative stuff has been coming out about them for the past year or so: party officials caught redirecting government money to themselves, accepting bribes, eliminating opposition. As always, it’s not the stealing and dishonesty that’s the problem — after all, if you can make money doing something, there’s no rules — by definition. What infuriates people was that the Freedom Party were stupid enough to get caught.

  Anyway, we’re itching to vote so we can throw out President Foster and the Freedom Party and give the Enterprise Party a chance to clean things up. The Enterprisers also hint that they’ll give more power to the CCE, something everybody wants, but that never seems to happen.

  Let’s face it — the CCE are the only ones you can believe, since they’re not actually part of the government. Charles Wickham has proved time and time again how government waste, inefficiency, and red tape are strangling the economy and keeping the common people in poverty. The CCE have worked their asses off trying to do something about it, but the government blocks them at every turn.

  The new Enterprise Party leader, Dan Holloway, sounds like a good guy. He swears he’ll clean up the ‘rot’ created by the Freedom Party, and cut through the masses
of red tape like the CCE are always recommending. He’s even hinted that he’ll consult with Charles Wickham about how to run things, but we’ve heard all that before.

  There’s a movement to try to ditch the government altogether and let the CCE run everything, with Wickham as leader, but whenever anybody mentions the idea, the CCE themselves shoot it down. They say it’s important to preserve democracy and let whatever government we’ve elected rule. I’ve always respected that about them.

  It’s every parent’s impossible dream for their child that he or she would grow up to be a member of the CCE. I’ve never heard of anybody in my neighbourhood getting up that high, but they say it could happen.

  Everybody’s hoping that Holloway and the Enterprise Party will finally give the CCE more control, and we’ll have the prosperity the CCE always say is just around the corner.

  It was insulting that an asshole like Chuck would have any connection with the CCE. I searched for a picture of Chuck and found one. There he was — same smarmy, arrogant sneer on his face. I thought about Walter and wanted to reach in and wrap my fingers around Chuck’s neck. He’d gotten his, anyway.

  I poured through the web chatter for any news of Cindy. It was sketchy, but from what I could find, she’d OD’d on some kind of street pain-killer, during the time I’d been held prisoner at the clinic. They tried to say it was an accident, but I knew her better than that. I hadn’t been there to help her or comfort her. She’d died alone, not knowing where I was, or what happened to me.

  On top of all this I was still trying to deal with my Appraisal. All this had gone down right after I’d gotten it. It had to have something to do with that. But what did Dad mean? What did he know about it? The image of his body smashing through the window and onto the pavement resurfaced, and suddenly I was crying. It was like the tears just flowed out of me spontaneously.

  Dad and I had never been close. In fact, I always thought he hated me, or at best didn’t give a shit. Now he’d given his life for me — the second of two people to do that in the past few days. It was all too much.

  I hung my head and cried until there were no more tears left. I didn’t even care if anyone was around to hear. I cried for my dad, cried for Cindy, cried for Walter, cried for all the people who’d been screwed by the Appraisal. I cried and cried, then collapsed from exhaustion on the filthy concrete floor.

  CHAPTER 15

  Into the Unknown

  When I opened my eyes the next morning it took me a while to remember where I was. I turned my head and scanned around me. I was still lying on the floor of the office where I’d passed out. For a few seconds I dared to imagine it was all a bad dream. Then reality came rushing back.

  I sat up and rubbed my back and my eyes, and tried to piece together all that had happened. My dad had been so panicked about Vita Aeterna. I guessed that it was some kind of organization. I figured the first thing I had to do was find out for sure. But even before that, I needed food, and water, and I needed a safer place to hide.

  I got ready to move. It was a pain carrying around the folded chunk of metal that shielded the cards. I decided to look for something better. Even in daylight the inside of this place was gloomy, but I could see well enough to have a look around. I’d been lucky so far; I hadn’t seen another soul. Still I tried to step lightly through the dust and debris in the hallways.

  In the southeast corner, I found a room that looked like some kind of electrical repair shop. Workbenches lined three of the walls, and smashed circuit-boards and pieces of broken equipment were lying around. I sifted through some of the junk and hit pay dirt — a conductive bag used for holding static sensitive parts. I’d seen them before in the computer shops in the Corp Ring.

  It was just a little larger than the cards and flexible, like an ordinary plastic bag. I checked the bag for holes, brushed the dust off a nearby stool, sat down at one of the benches, and opened my metal shield just enough to get the bag in. There was no sign of a light on the MoneyAll card, so it wasn’t getting to the outside.

  I slid the bag over all three cards and folded the top over. Then I pulled the metal shield away, ready to put it back if the MoneyAll lit up. Nothing happened. I smiled. For the first time since my escape, something had gone right.

  Holding up the transparent bag, I examined the black card I’d taken from Cindy’s dad, and my heart just about stopped. It had turned a deep blue, almost ultra-violet. I didn’t have the owner’s finger to open it up, so I had no way of figuring out what it was. Part of me wished I’d pulled a ‘Walter’ and taken the finger with me, but I don’t think I had the stomach for that — not yet, anyway.

  Worse still, the ultra-violet card now seemed to be stuck to the SecureCorp card I stole Cam-surfing, which now had a line of moving light flashing up and down one side.

  Shit! They were talking to each other. I had no idea what they were saying, but there was no way it was good. I kept the bag sealed, but worked the two cards around and gripped them, trying to pry them apart. No way — they’d somehow melded together. Travis talked about this ‘nanotechnology’ that made stuff like this possible, but I’d never seen it.

  The joined cards were a bit thicker than a normal card, and I could still see a thin seam between them, but they were now a single unit. I guessed that by the time they finished whatever they were doing, the end result would look like a regular card. But — a card that did what?

  I was about to toss them in a dumpster some place and get as far away as possible, but when I pressed on the black/ultraviolet one the same butterfly logo I’d seen at Cindy’s place swirled into view, with the same two letters — VA. I remembered where I’d seen the butterfly before — on the SecureCorp card, and Chuck’s smock… Then I realized why the letters were familiar — VA — Vita Aeterna. I was pretty sure they couldn’t communicate outside the bag, so I decided to keep them.

  I found an elastic band and wrapped it around the bag, to make sure it couldn’t fall open accidentally. Now I could tuck the cards, inside their protective bag, into my pack. I doubted if I could ever use the MoneyAll card again, but kept it, just in case. As if to remind me of the situation, I heard another siren in the distance, heading my way. It wasn’t safe for me in the Quarters.

  I found a regular plastic bag, stuffed the four hundred into it, then stuck it in my shoe. I switched off all the messaging functions of my HUD. From now on, the only way I’d communicate was with the crypted phone. I confirmed that the phone was still in my pack and headed out, boarding and Cam-surfing northeast.

  There was only one place I might have a chance of escaping my pursuers. When I hit the farthest edge of Tintown, for the first time in my life, I kept going.

  CHAPTER 16

  Benny

  There’s no distinct boundary between the Quarters and the Dregs. The garbage just gets deeper, the streets are more broken down, and the atmosphere is more desperate. My plan was to venture a little way in — far enough to be out of sight of SecureCorp, but close enough to dash back to the Quarters if things got too rough.

  From what I’ve heard, the Dregs is basically empty, so there’s fewer cameras, and hardly any SecureCorp patrols. It’s probably as dangerous as everybody says, but it’s also the place I’m least likely to get caught.

  I pushed on, still heading northeast. The buildings I passed were crumbling: shards of glass lining the window openings like broken teeth, walls black with mildew, moss, and even plants sprouting from every available crack. Most were ancient skyscrapers, so many that the streets were in shadow, even though it was still morning.

  My HUD picked up the occasional camera, but they were so far apart that Cam-surfing was a breeze. Good thing, because I couldn’t use my board. My footsteps crunched on a fist-thick layer of dust, garbage, chunks of cement, and broken glass.

  I had no idea where I was going, or what I was looking for. Right now, I just wanted a hiding place — somewhere I could take a breath and think about what to do. I headed down one of the
main streets, sticking to the shadows.

  I’d walked for about twenty minutes when I saw an orange glow spilling from around the next corner. I snuck along the wall toward it. When I got closer I could hear voices — at least two — both male. I crept up to the corner of the wall, leaned out, and poked my head around.

  Two guys in rags were sitting around a fire they’d built on the sidewalk next to a skyscraper. A couple of broken wooden chairs — their fuel — lay on the ground beside them. They were both holding sticks over the fire with some kind of meat skewered on them. The savoury smell wafting over reminded me how hungry I was. I thought about how I could get some. Maybe if I just introduced myself…

  I jumped when a third guy appeared around the corner behind them. I jerked back, and a chunk of the brick I was gripping broke off and thudded to the ground. One of the seated men lifted his head, saw me, and pointed. As he turned, his stick moved closer to the flames, and I lost interest in sharing — what was skewered on it was a rat. The two seated guys jumped up and dropped their sticks, and all three ran toward me.

  I took off. They followed for a while, but soon they were staggering, not running. After a few minutes they gave up and I was alone. I decided I had to get to someplace inside. I kept going, on edge, ready to run and hide at the first sight of danger. I was surprised to see an entire family – mother, father, kids, scurry into a doorway and slam the door as I rounded one corner. I saw kids and old people alone. Once or twice they saw me, but we both kept our distance.

  I walked for an hour or so, until there were no more people around. I spotted a dilapidated building that looked like a good prospect for a hideout. Like all the others I’d come across here, it was worse than any in the Quarters — filthy and surrounded by piles of debris. I found an entrance that had once been boarded-up, but the boards had been torn away and lay in a pile just inside. The open door made the place easy to get into, but raised the question — who removed the boards in the first place?