by Frank Tayell
Ely looked from person to person to see if anyone would argue. No one said a word. Most looked resigned, some indifferent, others dismayed, their reactions determined by how many points they’d had at the start of the shift. He tapped out a command, logging the sentences, and then distributed them to each citizen.
“You have a right to appeal,” he said, formally. “Appeals must be lodged within the next twenty-four hours. Failure to appeal will be taken as an admission of guilt.” He paused for a moment before continuing. “This lounge is now closed until shift-change. It will require hours of labour to repair the damage you’ve caused.” It wouldn’t. The drones would have it cleaned and ready for the next shift in under thirty minutes. “It’s only fitting, therefore, that you go now and queue for your ‘home’, and,” he added as there was a whisper of grumbling from the back of the crowd, “I suggest you go now, before I change my mind about the charges.”
The grumbling grew louder as they headed out the doors. Ely ignored them.
As the last of the mob left the lounge, Tower-One’s two nurses, Bronwin Gower and Geoffrey Bradford entered, each pushing a stretcher before them. Like the other civic servants, their material-efficient jumpsuit was dyed blue, though of a lighter shade than the one Ely wore.
Nurse Bradford moved to the men on the floor, whilst Nurse Gower moved straight to Grimsby, whose moaning, Ely thought, was louder and more theatrical than before.
“It’s fractured, but not badly,” Nurse Gower said. “You’ll need a cast. Can you walk?”
“I don’t know,” Grimsby replied, his voice weak.
“I thought you said you were for Production First,” Ely snapped. “And now you want us to waste more hours pushing you up to the infirmary.”
“Alright, I can walk,” Grimsby said, getting to his feet with an exaggerated show of discomfort. Ely smiled at the nurse in a gesture of knowing solidarity.
“Good,” she said, ignoring the Constable. “Then make your own way over to the elevators. We’ll meet you there shortly.”
“How long will you need to treat him?” Ely asked, loudly.
The nurse made a point of taking her time in answering.
“Transferring the other two will take half an hour,” she said. “Call it two hours. Perhaps three.”
Ely nodded and checked the time. It was two hours until the end of shift. During shift-change, the elevators were reserved for the sole use of workers.
“I’ll be up half an hour after shift-change to sentence him,” he said.
Sentencing Grimsby could wait. Sentencing Mrs Carlisle could not.
“Mrs Geraldine Carlisle, for your active part in the hospitalisation of two workers and the loss of production that will cause, I sentence you to death.” The woman didn’t even flinch. She knew what was coming. “However, due to the current labour shortage of which you are now a cause, and if you waive the right to appeal, I am inclined to give you a choice. Death or 100,000 hours service on the penal gangs at the launch site. The choice is yours.”
“Some choice! 100,000 hours? How long is that? Thirty years?”
“It’s still a choice,” Ely said. “For the record, do you accept the sentence or do you wish to appeal?”
“Fine, fine. I’ll accept,” she said despondently. “What does it matter? I won’t be having any children, will I?”
“Not now, no.”
“But, perhaps we will,” she said, her defiance returning once more, “when we get to Mars.”
“Perhaps,” he allowed. “The punishment will be ratified when you reach Tower-Thirteen.”
He turned to Nurse Bradford who was bent over two unconscious men.
“How are they?” the Constable asked.
“There’s nothing we can do for them here,” the male nurse replied. “They need the hospital. Did you remember to call Tower-Thirteen for a transport?”
“I can’t,” Ely said slowly, through gritted teeth, “not until you confirm it’s necessary. That’s procedure.”
“Well, I’m confirming it now,” the nurse retorted.
“Control,” Ely said, turning his back on the nurses and injured felons, “I’m confirming we have two patients who need emergency transport to Tower-Thirteen. One felon is being transported with them, her sentence is to be ratified at the prison.”
“Of course,” Vauxhall said. “What about the man with the injured arm? He doesn’t look too serious.”
“You’re watching?” Ely glanced up at the nearest camera.
“Of course. It’s not like there’s anything else going on in the Tower right now.”
Conscious that everything was being recorded, and knowing that a Constable was far more easily replaced than a Controller, Ely kept his remarks strictly professional.
“That man, Grimsby, can be treated in the infirmary,” he said.
“Fine. Transport for three,” she said with a tone that Ely thought didn’t match the gravity of the situation. He didn’t comment. Nor did he say anything to the two nurses as they loaded the injured felons onto the stretchers and pushed them out through the doors with Mrs Carlisle following close behind.
Another thought struck him. The nurses might be able to treat Grimsby in the infirmary, but that didn’t mean the man would be able to continue working with his arm in a cast. He pulled up footage from the man’s last shift. Ely relaxed again as he watched Grimsby work.
A piece of circuitry came in across the conveyor and stopped. The man bent over it, a thin metal wand in his right hand. He touched it against a piece of wire. A light on the wand turned green, the conveyor belt moved, taking the now-approved component up to the sorting room on Level Seventy-Seven where it would await collection and transportation. Ely didn’t bother to check what the circuitry was being used for. It didn’t matter. Grimsby could perform his duties with one hand.
Ely looked around the now empty lounge. The place was a mess, but no more so than usual. He stepped outside and swiped his hand down the panel on the wall. The door closed. He tapped out a command, and a moment later he heard the sound of the drones coming out of their concealed crevices to clean and sanitise the room.
He tapped out a requisition for a new chair. He doubted it would be approved. Almost as an afterthought, he tapped out another message, placing a requisition for a new helmet. He doubted that would get approved either.
A green light blinked at the bottom of his vision. He had a call coming in. It was from Chancellor Stirling. He answered.
“Yes ma’am.”
“Why aren’t you on patrol, Constable?”
“There was a disturbance in the—”
“I know that. You think I wouldn’t know?” she interrupted. “You’ve sentenced the suspects. Whilst this might have been the most serious incident in some time, the crime is now over. I can see that. What I can’t see is why you are not on patrol.”
“I’d finished my shift, and was on Recreation when—”
Again, she didn’t let him finish. “The police need to be seen,” she said. “I’ve told you this. Or do you think I can be disregarded, eh? The election hasn’t occurred yet, Constable. I am still Chancellor. Useful workers, productive workers, vital citizens.” She put an emphasis on the words to make it clear she did not count Ely as one of them. “Need to know that the energy they expend to ensure your comfort is well spent. Justice needs to be seen to be done, so go and be seen, Constable.”
“Yes ma’a…” But she had already clicked off.
Ely briefly closed his eyes. In just over a day the election would begin. It didn’t matter what she said, Stirling was going to lose and Cornwall would replace her.
Four years ago Cornwall had been a worker in Tower-Four. There was an explosion in one of the Factories, and Cornwall had run into the fire to rescue the components from inside. That was a week before the election. During the aftermath, when various citizens approached him looking for a story to post to the newsfeeds, he gave his speech on Re-Organisation. He spoke of rem
embering the past but focusing on the future, on putting Production First as the only way to ensure humanity reached Mars. The sentiment, and his heroics, struck a chord with the electorate. Though he wasn’t an official candidate, when it came to vote, over 80,000 people, nearly eighty percent of the City’s voting age population, wrote his name onto their ballot.
Chancellor Stirling, re-elected by the slimmest of margins, then adopted his policy of Re-Organisation. Everyone saw through this transparent attempt to benefit from Cornwall’s popularity. The Chancellor’s poll numbers had been sinking steadily ever since.
Ely was an avid supporter of Councillor Cornwall and his theories of Production First. It was his aim to one day follow the man into politics and become a Councillor himself. Though he doubted whether anyone would vote for someone as universally reviled as a Constable.
Putting thoughts of sleep on hold, at least for a few more hours, he walked over to the elevator to begin his lonely patrol.
He started up in the classrooms of Level Seventy-Five. Ely opened the door quietly, and began to walk slowly between the rows of desks.
“The City of Britain has a population of 159,097.” The Instructor pointed to each word on the screen as he read the sentence out. Most of the class, aged between six and nine, struggled with the stylus as they copied down the words as best they could.
“The City of Rights has a population of 143,890,” the Instructor continued. Ely tried not to smile as he walked past a girl battling over the direction the letter ‘R’ should face.
Ely’s fingers twitched with reflexive guilt. He’d not practiced with a stylus since he’d left school at seventeen. Writing was one of the key skills, not necessary to everyday life now, but which would be essential on Mars. Even the most optimistic estimates predicted there would be a decade’s long gap between the current stock of wristboards and screens wearing out, and the colonists establishing the mining and processing industries needed to replace them.
“And The People’s City has a population of 128,700,” the Instructor finished. “Now calculate the total number of humans left on the planet.”
A hand went up.
“Yes, girl?” the Instructor snapped.
“Please sir, does that count the people working on the launch site? Or is it just the people living in the Towers?”
The Instructor’s nostrils flared.
“Stupid girl! What have I told you about thinking before raising your hand? With four thousand people on each shift and with thirteen Towers in the City, there wouldn’t be enough ‘homes’ to go around if that didn’t include the people striving at the launch site.”
“Sorry sir,” the girl muttered. She bent her head, her cheeks flushed with embarrassment as some of the more daring students sniggered.
“Silence!” the Instructor bellowed. There was a sudden shuffling as the class buried their heads in a show of studious calculation.
Ely allowed himself a smile. Fifteen years before, he’d been sitting in one of those very same desks, and he’d been the one to ask that very same question. He didn’t recall if he’d had the same Instructor. He was tempted to check, but the right hand side of his display was currently filled with the paperwork from the incident in the lounge.
Paperwork. That was one of the many words that had stuck with them from the old world. No one had made any paper since the Great Disaster, sixty years before. Very little of anything was made except that which was needed for the ships. Technology had frozen, stuck at the level when the wars began all those decades ago.
As he continued his slow walk around the classroom, he returned his attention to the recordings of the brawl. For each felon that he’d sentenced, he had to find two pieces of camera footage, each from a different angle, to add to the file as evidence. Unless one of the citizens lodged an appeal, something that hadn’t happened in his five years as a Constable, those files would never be opened again. Nonetheless, the laws had to be followed. The City of Britain was a nation of laws. It was written into the Constitution and always had been. That was what Ely had been told.
He completed his circuit and made his way out into the corridor and along to the next classroom. There he got a disapproving glare from the Instructor as the students, all aged twelve to sixteen, turned to see who had come in.
“Eyes to the front. Now! A faulty wire might cause the entire ship to explode!” The Instructor kept her eyes on Ely as she said it. He didn’t care. Under his helmet and behind his visor, his expression was unreadable. The Instructor went back to reading out a speech, and the class went back to copying it down.
Ely listened long enough to gather it had something to do with how to create oxygen through electrolysis, then went back to collating the evidence. He’d tagged another two felons by the time his slow walk had brought him to the front of the classroom.
“If the first ship brings 1,000 people,” the Instructor intoned, “the second 10,000, then calculate our total oxygen requirement before the second ship has returned to Earth. I will award a bonus point to the first student who can calculate the energy requirement for scrubbing the carbon dioxide from the air.”
Heads bowed and frantic calculations began.
Ely had hated his time in school. He’d hated it almost as much as the six months he’d worked on the Assemblies before Arthur appointed him Constable. He hated coming back, shift after shift, just to show the uniform of authority. He left the classroom and looked down the corridor. Opposite were the classrooms for the older children, with their more rigorous technical training. Further along was the crèche, and beyond that, the nursery. Ely imagined he could already hear the crying. He decided he’d been seen enough on that level. He turned and walked back towards the elevator.
On the level above the classrooms was the museum and the Twilight Room, home to the retirees who volunteered to stay in Tower-One. Ely didn’t need to patrol there. Arthur, his former supervisor and the oldest of the retirees still living in Tower-One, kept a close eye on that level.
Above that was Level Seventy-Seven, home to Councillor Cornwall and his two assistants, the infirmary and the transportation pad. The Councillor had made it clear that he wasn’t to bother patrolling up there.
Ely tapped a command into his wristboard, and the elevator descended to the food-vats. Since the Re-Organisation, everyone was supposed to call them ‘farms’. It was meant to train people to think more like future settlers and less like prisoners trapped in the Towers on a world their ancestors had made uninhabitable. Ely still thought of them as the vats, for that was what they were. Each grew a different type of algae that some old world scientist had genetically engineered to be rich in vitamins, proteins, or carbohydrates. Once grown, they were processed, dried and turned into a fine powder. That was piped to the dispensers in the ‘homes’, lounges and break-rooms, ready to be mixed with water and flavouring according to each workers own personal taste. To Ely, no matter what was done with it, it still tasted like a flavourless, textureless, gloop.
He exited the elevator, walked along the hallway, and peered through the small window to the first ‘farm’. He didn’t go in. He didn’t need to. The vats were almost entirely automated. Only thirty people per shift worked in the ‘farms’, their job being to check that the numbers on the gauges matched the figures the system gathered from the array of sensors lining nearly every inch of every vat.
In turn, the system used the scores of cameras in the room to monitor the workers. Each citizen had been trained to perform their task with a specific series of movements, each in a specific order, to ensure maximum accuracy and efficiency. Should a worker deviate from their set routine, the system would send them a warning. If it were to happen twice within a shift, their supervisor would be alerted. Only if it happened three times in a shift would Ely be notified. That hadn’t happened in two years. On that occasion, it was due to a worker collapsing from a brain aneurism.
Ely walked slowly down the corridor, peering into room after room, paus
ing at each window just long enough to be noticed by the supervisor.
Each year, two hundred and ten people were bred. No, Ely corrected himself, they were born, that was the term they were supposed to use now. They spent the first year in the nursery, then two in the crèche, before they began their formal schooling. That lasted until they were seventeen when they joined the workforce. If Councillor Cornwall was elected Chancellor, everyone expected the age for graduation would be reduced to fourteen. Factoring in the Instructors, the two weeks of maternity leave that each mother now received, and the energy and food cost of so many unproductive mouths, the population rate was one of the most contentious issues in the City.
Not that two hundred and ten people died every year. Some retired to Tower-Thirteen. Others were transferred to one of the other Towers or were sentenced to hard labour at the launch site. And sometimes there would be calls for volunteers to assist them. That had happened twice last year.
Few people just died with the random lack of forethought that the man who had dropped dead in the food-vats had exhibited. Most died in their sleep, just like the records showed they had done in the old world.
An image of Mrs Carlisle came up on his screen. Ely agreed with most of Cornwall’s policies, but felt that some workers used the breeding licences as a way to get out of Recreation. That was the case with the Carlisles, he decided. They were two people who’d had some chance meeting and decided they’d have children for the perks that parenthood brought. Had they both not already lost their licence, he would have been inclined to put in a motion to have it rescinded.
He took another turning and found himself back at the elevator. He went down to the Assemblies. As with the food-vats, he would be alerted if there was an incident he needed to attend. Unlike with the ‘vats, Ely wasn’t allowed inside except in a dire emergency. The Assemblies were clean rooms. As Ely knew, as everyone knew, the merest speck of dirt could cause a circuit board to fail. If that happened in the depths of space the ship might be lost, imperilling the hopes of the entire species. Or, as the digital poster outside the room stated, ‘Dirt Kills! Are You Clean?’