Work. Rest. Repeat. A Post Apocalyptic Detective Novel

by Frank Tayell

  “I see you’re on 10,073 points.”

  “I’m on the ballot for the first colony ship.” Defiance flared for a moment, before Grimsby added, in a more subdued tone, “Or I was.”

  Good, Ely thought, the man understood. Points were the only currency the City had. They’d once been awarded for inter-Tower competitions. A long time ago, before Ely had left school, there had even been tournaments between the cities. Sporting, music, arts, anything that could be competed in, was, as long as it could be done virtually. Even then there had been no energy to waste transporting people halfway across the planet or even on frivolous trips to the other Towers. And then there had come the rains, and there wasn’t the energy or time to waste on the competitions. But the points had continued even though there were few luxuries on which they could be spent. They were still one of the factors used to determine who was issued a breeding licence, but principally they were used to allocate places on the colony ships.

  The first ship only had places for one thousand citizens. Those places were to be determined by a ballot, scheduled to be held shortly after the election. The threshold for entry into that ballot was 10,000 points.

  A point could be earned for every extra hour spent in Recreation. That was how most citizens accrued them. Grimsby, Ely noted, was different. He’d earned his through popularity. Every six months, each citizen was given five points that they could award to someone else. Grimsby had procured more than three hundred of his that way.

  “You are currently seventy-three points over the threshold. You know the law. I’m meant to dock you one point per hour lost.”

  “I was just defending myself,” Grimsby said “I didn’t—”

  “I know you didn’t throw the first punch. I saw. But I also saw you kick the man when he was down. That kick is the reason he was transported to Tower-Thirteen. One worker’s lost labour whilst he recovers works out at two hundred hours, and that’s before adding in the energy cost of transportation, the labour of the nurses here, the doctors over on Tower-Thirteen—”

  “Hang on, that’s not fair,” Grimsby protested. “I mean, what are the nurses going to do otherwise. That’s what they’re here for, isn’t it?”

  “You think that their time is better spent taking care of you when it could be spent in Recreation or down on one of the Assemblies?” Ely retorted. “And what of the loss to Tower-One. The man won’t be sent back here. Most likely he’ll be sent to the launch site for his part in the riot.”

  “But then he’ll still be working, won’t he? Whether it’s here or at the launch site, he’ll be productive,” Grimsby argued.

  “That’s not the law. The labour has been lost to Tower-One. And the law says I can fine you one point per hour lost. And that worker has been lost for good.”

  “What are you saying?” Grimsby whined.

  “It’s rather poetic,” Ely said. “It will take seventeen years and nine months to breed up a replacement for Mr Carlisle. That was what you were fighting about, wasn’t it? Breeding up more unproductive mouths. Well, thanks to you, that’s what we now need. Those seventeen years and nine months represent nearly fifty thousand hours of labour lost.”

  “You’re fining me for fifty thousand hours?” he stammered in shock.

  “I could do. That’s what the letter of the law allows.” Ely let the words hang there, waiting to see if Grimsby would notice the branch being held out for him. He didn’t.

  “I’m inclined to be lenient,” Ely continued. “Enough labour has been lost to this Tower today already.” Ely glanced at the two bodies lying on the stretchers in the middle of the room. Grimsby didn’t follow his gaze. The man was so lost in his own wretchedness, he hadn’t even noticed them. “I’m docking you seventy-two points,” Ely went on. “The rest I’m holding back. One more infraction and I’ll charge you immediately. You won’t make it onto any of the colony ships. You’ll be left here on Earth. Do you understand?”

  “Yes. Thank you, thank you. They always said you civic servants were…”

  Ely waved him into silence. He was about to send him away, then he remembered that he’d allocated the man’s ‘home’ to one of the Durhams for the night. He glanced over at Nurse Gower. He’d never got on with the nurses. Or to be more accurate they, who had been working in the civic service long before he was appointed, didn’t get on with him. He picked up his helmet and stood.

  “You can stay here for the rest of this shift. Try and get some sleep without one of the machines. Consider that…” He glanced at Nurse Gower. “An extra punishment.”

  He headed out the door.

  Chapter 3 - Control

  Twenty hours before the election

  “How could you not have noticed the camera was pointing at the wall?” Ely asked.

  “Because it’s just me down here to watch 12,000 citizens,” Vauxhall said.

  “I know that there’s just you here.” The other two Controllers had been re-assigned at the same time as the other Constables. “But I thought the video feeds were sent to Tower-Thirteen. I thought that was the whole point of having the cameras; that the prisoners on a short sentence went through the footage.”

  “Ely,” she said with puzzled patience, “there aren’t any short sentences. Not for the last three years. Didn’t you know?”

  “What? In the last year alone, I’ve sentenced seven people to three months or less.”

  “No, Ely. You recommended that. Your judgement is only a recommendation. No one gets three months.”

  “That’s…” he stopped himself. He was going to say that it was criminal, but that was sedition, even if said by him. He glanced over to where he’d left his helmet. There were no cameras in the Control Room and the helmet, in the absence of an iris to scan, would have switched itself off. Nevertheless, Arthur had taught him to always be cautious. “That’s something I didn’t realise,” he finished.

  “When was the last time you came in here?” Vauxhall asked.

  “Last month?”

  “It was last year,” she said.

  “Really? It’s the patrols and the Recreation and, well, there’s just so much to do,” he said, weakly.

  “Right. Exactly. Which is why, when the worst crime we usually have to deal with is some stupid fight over nothing, it would be utterly redundant to have useful workers spending precious hours just going through camera footage.”

  “So what happens to the felons? Where are they?”

  “They go to the launch site. Don’t get me wrong,” she added hurriedly. “They’re all volunteers. They’re given a choice, their sentence will be commuted, and they can go back on the ballot for the ships.”

  “I knew the sentences were just a recommendation, that it was down to the authorities in Tower-Thirteen to ratify it, I just… I mean, someone should have… I…”

  “Look, if it makes you feel better, I only found out by accident,” Vauxhall said, taking pity on the younger man. “Most of what I know I’ve found out that way. I don’t think this is something that’s exactly hidden from us, but it’s not the kind of thing they want going public. I mean, it’s basically saying that if you commit a crime, no matter how severe, you’ll be sent to work outside where the only real punishment is having to wear thick protective clothing in case the wind changes to blow in from the north. And despite the clothing, the altitude, the heat, and all the rest, imagine being able to work outside. So no, it’s not a surprise this one was kept hidden from us.” She leaned forward. “The real question, though, the one I can’t work out, is why they suddenly needed all the extra personnel down there. What changed?” She let the question hang there for a moment before she leaned back and went on. “But as I said, that’s something I can’t work out. Anyway, it wouldn’t matter even if there had been a couple of other people watching. Here.”

  Against two of the four walls were rows of screens. She tapped out a command. The giant pictures of the victims that had been filling the displays were replaced by hundreds of far
smaller images.

  “There are 12,029 workers in this Tower, right? Let’s just forget about the other Towers and the work I end up having to do for them. 12,029 workers, two thirds of whom could be awake at any one time. That’s 7,184 visor-mounted cameras I’ve got to look at.” The images on the screen changed. “Now factor in the cameras in the Assemblies, the Twilight Room, the ‘farms’ and all the corridors in between.” The images on the screen changed again. “That’s 15,901 cameras for me to watch, assuming I’m not doing something else, such as…” The images changed again, and this time Vauxhall pointed to one. “Guiding in a transport, for instance.”

  Ely peered at the screen.

  “Where’s that? It’s all dark.”

  “That’s the transport pad. It’s night outside. Even when it isn’t, I’ve got to guide the transport in through driving rain and one hundred mile an hour winds.”

  “But you can’t see anything.”

  “There are lights,” she said, exasperation dripping from her voice. “I’m not turning them on now, that would be wasteful. My point is that it usually takes an hour to bring one in, load and unload it, and send it off again, and for all that time I’ve got to be focusing on the transport and nothing else. We’ve got the daily shipment of new components for the Assemblies and the dispatch of the components that have been checked. Then there’s the food to be sent to the launch site, and on top of that, there’s the traffic to Tower-Thirteen. And for each I’ve got to work out flight trajectories and—”

  “Okay, I get it,” Ely said, raising his hands in surrender. “There’s just you and you’re overworked. You don’t have time to notice that one camera in one unit isn’t pointing the right way. But isn’t there some algorithm you could use? Some way of getting the system to find out if a camera is off-centre or something.”

  “Right, like I didn’t think of that. Here.” She tapped out another command.

  “None of those screens are blank,” Ely said.

  “No, but each of them has been knocked ‘off-centre’, as you put it. Most of the time it’s done by one of the cleaning drones, and most of the time it’s only by a few millimetres.”

  “A few what?” he asked.

  “Less than a fraction of an inch, it’s an old form of measurement. That’s not important. Then there are these.” She tapped out another command, the screens changed. “The fixed-position cameras. Each of these has a scratched casing or a damaged lens. You see? Someone has to go through and find the cameras that aren’t focusing correctly. That someone has to record them and then put in a request for a repair and a replacement. I’ve been doing that as often as I can, but do you honestly think that will be approved now, this close to the launch? What would be the point? What, really, is there for the cameras to see?”

  “Up until now.”

  “Right, yes. I know, I know. Look, Ely, there just aren’t the resources to spare.” She gestured to a mattress held above the floor on a plastic frame. “I don’t use the machines. I sleep here now, so I’m only a few seconds away from the screens.”

  “Fine. I get it.” Ely stared at the array of images. “But surely, even if we don’t have an image of the killer inside the room, we must have an image from one of the cameras in the corridor. I thought that every inch of the Tower is meant to be recorded.”

  “Almost every inch. Almost,” she admitted.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I’ll start with the good news. This was the last time the camera was facing into the room.” She tapped out a command. The image of a family jostling for position as they got into bed filled the central screens.

  “Who are they?” Ely asked.

  “Just watch. There. They’re all in bed. Now I need to fast forward… to… here. There, see.” The camera slowly swivelled to face the wall.

  “When was that?”

  “Two weeks ago.”

  “Someone went into the room to move the camera, but then waited two weeks before they took advantage of it. How many shifts is that?”

  “Two hundred and eighty-seven. It’s not exactly two weeks, but the point still stands.”

  “That has to be the killer.”

  “It has to be, yes,” Vauxhall said. “But think of it this way, two hundred and eighty-six sets of families slept in that unit before the Greenes were murdered.”

  “And were there any useful images from the corridor outside on the night the camera was moved?”

  “No, Ely, that’s what I meant when I said nearly every inch was covered. Look.” The image changed again. “We know that the door on the night-side opened, both when the camera was moved and when the Greenes were murdered. Right?”

  “Right.”

  “So what do you see?” she asked.

  He stared at the screen. There was a section of hallway with a series of doors leading of it. Then he realised it wasn’t what he could see, but what he couldn’t.

  “You can’t see the door to that unit,” he said.

  “Exactly. Here, this is the next camera along.” She tapped a command and the image changed, showing a slightly different angle of the same stretch of hallway.

  “You still can’t see the door.”

  “The corridor curves. Add that to the support strut there, and the view of the door is blocked.”

  “Well, what about one of the other cameras?”

  “I’ve checked. None of them can see the door to that unit.”

  “How is that… no, it doesn’t matter. To open that door the killer had to walk along the corridor, there has to be a picture of them.”

  “No, Ely, that’s what I’m telling you.” Her fingers moved. The screen split. “These are all the cameras along the corridor, in both directions. This is just after shift-change. You see, there? There are the Greenes. Now watch.”

  The corridor filled with people and, one at a time, they drifted into their unit for their shift’s sleep.

  “This will save some time if I just speed it up.” She began tapping out another command.

  “It would save even more if you just told me,” Ely said.

  “Sorry. Okay, basically no one went along that corridor until the next shift-change. No. Sorry, no, what I meant to say is that no one is recorded going along that corridor.”

  “You mean this is a ghost?” Ely asked without trying to hide the scorn in his voice.

  “You mean do I think this is the descendent of someone who got stuck outside after the Towers were sealed and somehow managed to survive down in the tunnels? No, of course not, that’s just a story. Besides, the tunnels are flooded. No, I meant that I’ve been looking at it over and over again, and I think you can get down that corridor, all the way to the door to that unit, without being recorded by any of the cameras.”

  “But we’d still have a record of their position in the Tower.”

  “Not if they went off-net. That’s what I’m trying to tell you. We don’t monitor the people, we’re monitoring the wristboards. That’s how we know where everyone is, what their heart rate is, when they ate, when they’re at work. When they sleep, the pods take over. But if they take the wristboard off, the system doesn’t know where they are.”

  “So, to become invisible, all you would have to do is take off your wristboard?” Ely asked.

  “Well, yes and no. I mean, the cameras would still record that part of the corridor. So you’d have to know where they were and, for instance, that these two, here, rotate, and you’d want to know the timing, but you could watch it and learn.”

  “And you knew about these blind spots?” Ely asked, failing to hide the accusation in his voice.

  “I knew there were some, sure,” she said. “But I didn’t know there were so many. I mean, no one could, not unless you went through the schematics and crossed off every inch of corridor against an image.”

  “Or if you stood in a corridor,” Ely said, “and looked up, saw the camera move, and realised that you were no longer being recorded. It would take years
of planning.”

  “Even then you’d have to have access to the system,” she said.

  “Which we know the killer did, don’t we?” he asked. “No alarms went off.”

  “That’s a different part of the system.”

  “If our killer had access to one part, then why couldn’t they have access to all of it?” Ely asked.

  “Because they moved the camera. So we know they don’t have access to everything, we just don’t know how much.”

  “Right.” Ely felt a flush of embarrassment that he hadn’t realised that himself. “So let me get this straight. They can access the alarms and turn those off, they can open the doors, but they can’t erase the camera footage?”

  “That’s what it looks like,” Vauxhall said.

  “And there are, what, two hundred and fifty families in that shift eligible to use that room?” Ely asked.

  “Two hundred and sixty-seven.”

  “So, statistically speaking, having moved the camera, the killer wouldn’t have to wait more than ninety days for any one family to use that room.”

  “Yes, they’re allocated randomly to ensure no one develops any attachment to them.”

  “Interesting. And it’s been fourteen days. Maybe this had nothing to do with the Greenes then. Maybe…” he didn’t finish the thought. It was to terrifying to say out loud.

  “What?” Vauxhall asked

  “Well, what if the Greenes weren’t specifically targeted. What if it was just about disrupting production?”

  “You mean sabotage? Why?” she asked.

  “I don’t know,” Ely said.

  “Well, where do we go from here?”

  “There’s something I read once.” It was one of the few things he could remember from the forensics textbooks. “Absence of evidence is evidence itself. So the killer can turn off the alarms, they can hide from the cameras, they can make it seem as if they weren’t in that corridor but,” and Ely smiled as he realised he was right, “they can’t hide their presence from the system.”

  “You mean the wristboard data? I told you that no one was recorded using that corridor during the time of the murder.”