Upon Stilted Cities - The Winds of Change

by Michael Kilman

  Alexa put down the tablet and glanced at the time; it was 2 a.m. She felt disoriented and confused. She had never been called into the docks outside of her shift before. Intuitively, she knew something was wrong. Perhaps that was why the turtles had appeared tonight.

  She stood up and quickly changed from her nighttime undergarments to her full daytime dress. She put on a long, deep blue dress that clung lightly to her slender form. It fell just below her knees and bounced and flicked outwards as it settled. She moved toward the bathroom.

  She thought of 17. She wondered where he was and what he was doing. Would she see him down at the docks again? Her stomach tingled a little. She just wanted to see his face, needed to see his face again. She wanted to trace those scars with her finger, wanted him to tell her the story behind every single one. She put on a little makeup, just in case 17 was down there after all. She normally hated wearing makeup, and she knew it was crazy to have any kind of romantic thoughts about a Runner, but she couldn’t help herself, she couldn’t get him out of her head. There was something so familiar about him, something turtle-like. She shivered at that thought.

  Inadvertently she started reaching out to him. Alexa wanted badly to touch something in his mind as she had done earlier. It was almost a need. Before she even knew what she was doing, she found herself calling to him in her mind’s eye. She wanted to feel him thinking, even if she didn’t like what he was thinking or feeling. Damn the consequences.

  Nothing happened.

  Why had she been able to reach out to 17 like that? A sudden exciting thought occurred to her. Perhaps 17 had a similar talent as her? Maybe, just maybe they shared in the talent. Her attraction to him deepened at the thought, and she allowed her mind to wander a little into a daydream. She saw her and 17 kissing and then making love. Then they stood together in front of a crowd of friends and family as they married. She saw herself pregnant with one of his children and then raising a family in the Uppers. She thought about how she had been so drawn to the docks and thought that maybe he was the reason. In her daydream, they were so deeply in love and so happy that she almost shivered with delight.

  “Alexa Turon, please move with greater haste toward the docks, you are needed immediately,” said the AI.

  Alexa finished up her makeup and walked toward the food dispenser. “AI, bagel with peanut butter to go, please.”

  Behind a thin glass, a thick glob of green goo spit out of the food nozzle. It lay motionless for a half of a second before it began to take shape. First, the color changed from deep green to a pale brown, then the shape rounded and grew solid and finally the hole in the middle formed and the brown layer of chunky peanut butter appeared. The glass slid open, and Alexa reached in and grabbed it and began eating it at once as she walked toward the door.

  She knew she was foolish. Even though she knew better, there was a part of her that wanted to believe that the programs on the vidscreens were right, that love could conquer all. But her experiences with her visions and her talents had taught her, time and again, that life was a lot more complex than what you saw on a vidscreen program.

  Alexa also knew full well that Runners were never pardoned. 17 had been a Runner for a very long time. Short of becoming a Runner herself, she was never really going to be able to interact with 17 for more than a few minutes. It was one thing to work in the docks; it was another to become a Runner. That was something she absolutely refused to do. It would kill her parents. Besides, she had heard that female Runners never lasted long out in the Barrens, and no one ever volunteered to be a Runner, they would probably lock her up, think her insane.

  Alexa exited her apartment and headed for the people mover. She started walking down the stairs. She hated taking elevators when she could walk herself. She needed the exercise anyway. There were so few opportunities to exercise and stay healthy in the Upper Lowers.

  Alexa had read in her courses on ancient history that not long before migration, cities had installed people mover shuttles. They were an attempt at dealing with the dwindling oil supplies and streets overcrowded with cars. Most of the first generation of migration had never owned a car, and since there were none after migration began, the memory of automobiles had gradually faded into the ether of memory and history. The place where all obsolete technologies and experiences disappear to in time.

  There were a few air cars and emergency vehicles of course, but those were either run by central security or belonged to powerful Uppers. Even in the Uppers, most people walked along the sky bridges, or took the sky bridge trams.

  A strange scent came to her nose. It was the smell of summer. She didn’t know how she knew that since she had never experienced summer before. It was the smell of endless forests and fields of grass. Of sprinklers on lawns and the chlorine scent of a pool. It was a smell of childhood, someone else’s childhood. Some part of her knew she saw a sliver of memory, a slice of the ancient past, a time before migration. She wondered whose memory it could possibly be.

  She reached the bottom of the stairs and walked out of the building. Her timing had been perfect, and the people mover pulled up just as she arrived, despite the odd hour. As she boarded the people mover, she took a few deep breaths and focused on the olfactory memory fragment. Controlling her breathing was something she had learned early on as a means to explore her flashes. No one had told her to do it; it simply seemed like the right thing to do. With each breath, she felt a kind of lightness begin to come over her. She was there, and yet not there. Alexa was perfectly capable of functioning in the real world while she dove deep into her impressions.

  Children, several of them, mostly boys but a few girls, appeared in her mind’s eye. Some were hiding as if afraid for their lives, but there was laughter and joy in their eyes. This was some kind of game. One child, in particular, was seeking out the others and when he found them, they ran to some sort of silver object and kicked it. Sometimes they weren’t fast enough, and the boy seeking them out touched the silver object and then the other children had to sit down. The bizarre ritual seemed to occur over and over again until the boy seeking the others had made all the other children sit.

  “What a strange ritual,” Alexa said to no one in particular.

  Despite the hour, there were several others on the people mover. It occurred to her that engineers and sanitation workers worked odd hours. Someone had to. Each gave Alexa furtive glances. But, after they had investigated the source, they turned their attention back to their tablets or whatever their interest was.

  Her thoughts returned to the strange ritual. Where had the memory come from? It had to be very old, because even with all of her interest in ancient pre-migration history, she had never heard of such a thing. There were only a handful of people left in the city that were old enough to be children before migration. A thought occurred to her, could it be 17? He was probably old enough to be that child. She grew excited, perhaps he did share her gift and was reaching out to her with this memory rather than allowing her to probe his mind.

  Alexa smiled and took another deep breath, releasing her exhaustion from only a partial night’s sleep. She leaned her head back so that she was facing the roof of the people mover. She wanted to close her eyes, but instead, they caught a glimpse of a poster. It was one of those standard propaganda posters that she disliked. “Everyone Must Share and Care for Our City and Do Their Part,” the main headline of the poster read. There was the image of a smiling sanitation worker picking up garbage on a street corner. It was strange though, what in migration was the poster doing on the interior roof of a people mover? It didn’t seem like very effective propaganda if it was in a place where no one could see it.

  Alexa looked closer at the image, and she felt intuitively, that there was something malevolent about this poster. There was power hidden in it, and its location was certainly not an accident. She felt the poster watching her and felt a cold chill down her spine. It was the same feeling she had in high school when she knew, just absolutely knew
that one of the boys were undressing her with his eyes. She hated skimming high school boys’ thoughts, they were disgusting and always made her feel dirty. The poster was worse. It made her feel violated, as if someone had torn off all her clothes and left her naked on the people mover for all to see.

  It was calling to her, beckoning her without saying a single word, without changing at all. She wanted to stand and put her hand on it, to feel its warmth. Part of her wanted to give in, to be drawn into that poster and lost in its vile promises, but she couldn’t even understand what it was promising. Everyone must do their part; its core message played in loops in her mind. It was drawing her in, taking her as its own, the message filling her with ideas and thoughts about what she ought to do and where she should go. It wanted so badly for her to go somewhere.

  “No,” she yelled and briefly elicited the attention of a few other passengers of the people mover.

  She shifted back to her mind’s voice, the one she could use to speak outward without using her mouth. The poster was drawing her in harder now. A black hole. The eyes of the sanitation worker on the poster glowed.

  “I will do my part,” she said in her mind’s voice. “I'll tear you down and throw you in the garbage where you can’t hurt anyone.” She mustered her will together and sent those thoughts deep into the eyes of the sanitation worker, striking at it with all the ferocity of her focus. Her will was a flaming lance, she felt a kind of red power leave her mind and thrust itself at the poster.

  3.

  Screams filled the cramped space. Pain illuminated the darkness. Rage quickened in her bosom. Then a necessary disconnection. This one was powerful. But she did not understand her strength, and so, there was still time to consume her. Miranda was hungry.

  A cruel smile turned up the corners of her mouth. Recycling, yes, Alexa Turon was a perfect candidate. She would provide power and strength, and when Miranda was finished with her, she would join her other children.

  4.

  Before her eyes, the poster vanished. It occurred to Alexa that the voice she had heard just before drifting off to sleep had suggested that there were others out there with her abilities. Was the maker of that poster the same as the voice she had heard? She didn’t think so; the tone of the poster was different. The poster must have been some kind of psychic projection.

  The people mover came to a stop at the entrance to the docks. Alexa stepped off and entered.

  When she descended the stairs, she saw pure chaos. Someone had kicked the hornet’s nest. Runners, inspectors, security, and even a few of the Recycled were rushing back and forth across the dock. Every single platform was up, dressing Runners in their EnViro suits. She started to try and count the number of Runners emerging from their tubes but gave up quickly; there were far too many to count.

  She made her way through the flurry of people and entered her office, grabbed her tablet for inspection, and turned to walk toward her usual station. She looked down to her tablet. On the front screen was a message indicating that standard paperwork for Runner procedure was not required and that an expedited form would be used in this instance. Alexa frowned, did that mean things were going to be busy?

  “AI, just how many Runners are in the activation process?”

  “All of them.” said a voice behind.

  Alexa whirled around to find the owner of the voice.

  “Mr. Dean, oh... I didn’t realize you were there, I...”

  “It’s Lieutenant Dean, Ms. Turon. I expect you to remember my rank as well as my name.”

  “Oh, I’m so sorry Sir, it won’t happen again. But Lieutenant Sir, did you say all of them?”

  Dean frowned, Alexa could skim that he was annoyed at the misuse of his rank. “Orders come down from the Top. Daniels himself ordered the entire Runnercore activated.”

  “But why? Did he give a reason?”

  “When orders come, we don’t question them, Ms. Turon. We simply obey them.”

  “But all the Runners...” she said mostly to herself.

  “Well Ms. Turon, there have only been a few instances in history when all the Runners were activated, so I bet we can guess what’s going on.”

  Dean waited for Alexa to respond with a gasp or some sort of shocked surprised, but instead, she simply listened intently. Alexa skimmed his mind and saw that he was caught a bit off guard by her behavior. She would have to do better to emulate surprise in the future. People became uncomfortable if she never acted to their expectations.

  “The last time any city activated all of the Runners was when Mex fell, if that’s any indication,” he continued.

  He paused for effect, still waiting on her surprised gasp, but it didn’t come.

  “So a city has fallen?”

  She already knew this was coming, the fallen city was the most striking image from her dream, and it seemed one of those rare straightforward images. It made her feel a bit queasy, but she didn’t doubt it was true for one instant.

  “Seems like it might be the case.”

  “So why activate all the Runners, then?”

  “Cause when a city falls, a war comes.”

  “War?”

  “Yeah, a war for all the salvage. Do you have any idea how many decades of resources are in one collapsed city? Hell, I bet you could get a whole century’s worth of the basic stuff and a few centuries’ worth of the advanced stuff. Solidsonium isn’t easy to synthesize you know, now that we don’t have moon fragments lying around.”

  Alexa frowned, when she thought of a city falling, she thought of all the people who were killed, not about the resources that could be found pillaging the city.

  “So who are we going to war with?” Alexa asked.

  Her lips sagged further down into a frown like melting butter merging into the bottom of a saucer. War was such a stupid thing that human beings did. Of all the history she read, war was the thing she hated learning about most.

  “No one knows what’s happening. This is all just speculation, of course. Major Daniels doesn’t reveal much of anything until he feels the time is appropriate. But obviously, activating so many Runners has to mean something, and pictures are floating around the infosphere of Langeles in ruins. Looks like one of the Senators might have leaked it. I saw one this morning with the words ‘The End is Nigh’ plastered over the top of the image. It’s making the usual rounds through everyone’s tablets and vidscreens. Can’t stop the blogs.”

  “Is there another city nearby?”

  Alexa had never seen another city up close. She was far too young.

  “There’s a rumor floating around about that. Apparently, 17 saw a runner by the Langeles ruins. But I don’t think anyone knows which one it might be.”

  “17?” Alexa felt her frown turning to a smile. She couldn’t help it. “Is...is he back?”

  “Nah, he is going to be out for gods know how long now. Why?”

  “Nothing, I...” Alexa looked for something to shift the conversation. “Can’t we just share salvage with the other city? I mean, why does there have to be war?”

  Dean laughed. Was she mistaken, or did he really think she was joking? She skimmed his mind again and felt uncomfortable.

  “Oh... you're serious. I mean... it’s just that... well, no two cities have ever shared anything like that since migration began.”

  “Well, why can’t we share now?”

  Dean was silent. Alexa listened to his silence. He was wondering, why does this little girl always ask such silly questions? Is she really that naïve? No wonder Marty can’t stand her.

  Dean said, “You’ll understand when you’re older.”

  Alexa’s face flickered. “When I am older? What is that supposed to mean?”

  “Never mind that, Miss Turon, we’ve talked too much already. Get to your station. There are over a dozen Runners in the queue waiting for inspection over there.”

  Alexa eyed him a little longer; she knew exactly what this one was thinking without skimming anything. She hated i
t. She was young, she was a woman, and she was out of place down here. Mr., or Lieutenant Dean, or whatever he wanted to call himself, had very little respect for her. Women, in general, weren’t treated very well in security, the docks, or any other places like them. There was some sort of notion that women couldn’t really be protectors or scientists or anything that involved complex thinking. Even the female senators were occasionally looked down upon, although, part of that was because of that horrible Senator Reevas, who gave all women a bad name.

  She sighed, turned from Dean, and headed in the direction of her station. She could tell it was going to be a long night. She made a quick detour to the food dispenser.

  “Coffee, please,” she told the machine.

  “Please specify temperature and strength,” responded the dispenser AI.

  “50 degrees Celsius and extra strong, please.”

  The machine’s front panel closed and a light switched on. The coffee cup began to print, and Alexa absentmindedly watched the machine work. She needed to ask one of her friends in engineering school how these things worked. It was easy to take things for granted living in this city, but Alexa was always curious about the inner workings of things. The cup finished printing, and green goop dropped in the cup, turned black and grew until it became coffee. The clear front panel circled open, and the sweet smell of coffee drifted up into her nostrils. She had never had the genuine article, but everyone seemed to think that for the most part, the food dispensers did a good job in mimicking taste, though there was always the hint of algae in the flavor.

  Alexa took a sip and walked to her station. It wasn’t far from the dispenser, and the small podium gave her a place to put down her coffee. A dozen or so Runners stood in their undergarments, waiting for her inspection. She noted, quite clearly, that none of them were naked as 17 had been.