by Frank Tayell
“I… but… I…” The man stammered, and he started to back away from the Constable.
Ely had had enough. He grabbed the man’s right arm, twisted it up and behind his back. “Go on, I’ve questions you need to answer,” he said, pushing the man towards the door. Conscious of the cameras, he didn’t do it gently.
“What are the charges?” a woman asked. According to Ely’s display she was the Assembly overseer.
“This is in relation to the murder of Alphonse and Finnya Greene,” Ely said. The supervisor backed away.
Ely frogmarched Glastonbury out of the Assembly. It was only when he was in the corridor that he realised his mistake. He’d nowhere to question the suspect. The last time, the only time, that he had conducted an interview had been shortly after he’d begun his career as a Constable. That had been a matter of sedition based on evidence recorded on the other-net. Of course, Ely couldn’t let the agitator know that the other-net was constantly monitored. He hadn’t known himself until Arthur had told him.
The interview itself had taken place down on Level Two in the small cell that they’d then had. Ely remembered the experience well. It had taken a whole shift to break her, but he had, and then sentenced her to 10,000 hours on one of the penal gangs. That had been his first proper case.
And then, almost a year later, there had been the Re-Organisation, and the small office, and the smaller cell, had been re-allocated. Up until now, that hadn’t mattered. He thought quickly.
“Don’t move,” he snarled, pushing the suspect against the wall.
He tapped out a command onto his wristboard, commandeering an elevator. That would get him into trouble, he knew, but he couldn’t see an alternative. As an afterthought, and as he waited for it, he tapped out a message to all the workers who were queuing for it below. It simply said ‘requisitioned for use in the interrogation of a suspect in the murder of Finnya and Alphonse Greene’. That, he thought, would add to the public interest, keep the story rolling, and help him keep his job. The elevator arrived. He shoved Glastonbury in, then tapped out a command to take them up.
“Where are we going?” Glastonbury asked. The red light on his visor was blinking. Ely accessed his account and turned the man’s camera off.
“Level Seventy-Seven.”
“To see the Councillor?” If the man had sounded scared before, now he sounded terrified.
“No. You’re not worth Councillor Cornwall’s time. I’m taking you outside.”
“What? But no one can survive out there. We’ll die.”
“Not we. You.”
“But I haven’t done anything.” It was a weak protest.
“That’s it. Keep lying. It won’t matter. I have my orders. There’s been too much disruption.” The elevator doors opened. Ely pushed Glastonbury out in front of him. “Deducting points won’t work. Not anymore. An example needs to be made. Of you.”
The man continued stammering out a protest as Ely pushed him down the hallway, and towards the airlock that led to the transport pad. He stopped at the end of the corridor.
“Through there is the outside,” Ely said, pointing at the grey metal doors of the airlock. “Rain so heavy you won’t be able to breathe, wind so strong you’ll be blown up, and off, and over twenty miles before you hit the ground.” Everyone knew what life was like outside.
“Please…” the man whimpered.
“Unless,” Ely said, then paused, waiting for the dim prospect of hope to take hold.
“Unless what?”
“State your name.”
“What? You know my name.”
“For the record,” Ely said. Unlike the workers, his cameras were always recording and had no light to indicate as such.
“Record? My… my name is Silus Glastonbury.”
“Age?”
“But…”
“What’s your age?” Ely demanded.
“Thirty-nine.”
“Occupation?”
“I work in the Assemblies. You know that.”
“Yes,” Ely said. “And those were the easy questions. Did you kill Mr and Mrs Greene?”
“What? No. Of course not.”
“When did you first meet them?”
“I didn’t, I mean, I’ve never met—”
“Really. What’s this?” Ely tapped out a command. An image came up on Glastonbury’s display showing him sitting at a table in one of the lounges next to Mrs Greene. “And this one.” Ely tapped out another command. The image changed to a video from the Recreation Room. The two Greenes were pedalling away just like the hundreds of others. To the left of the victims were their children. To the right was Glastonbury.
“I mean, but that’s…” Glastonbury took a breath. “So we work the same shift. So do four thousand others. I mean, I was bound to be standing by them, or sitting next to them, or something at some point.”
“So you do know who they are. Why did you lie?”
“What?”
“A moment ago. You said you’d never met them, now you admit you had.”
“I didn’t…” Glastonbury stammered. “I didn’t know they were the two who died. I saw some rumours during the break, but I’ve been on shift, haven’t I? I haven’t had a chance to read any articles or anything.”
“And you admit now you’ve met them before.”
“No, I meant I knew that they worked here, of course I did. I didn’t know their names. I just knew their faces. I mean, I know what dozens of people look like—”
“And they’re your next victims are they? That’s your plan is it? You stalk the corridors and seek out good, diligent workers. Why do you do it? Why do you kill?”
“It’s not me. I didn’t do it. I’ve never done anything.”
“You’re lying.” Ely grabbed his arm and shoved him a few feet closer to the airlock. “I don’t have time for this. If you’re not going to answer truthfully, I’m not going to bother asking any more questions.”
“But I am, I’m innocent. I haven’t done anything wrong. I didn’t kill them.”
“But you know who did,” Ely said.
“How could I?”
Ely slammed the man against the wall, hard.
“Where were you when they were killed?”
“It happened last shift, didn’t it? I was asleep.”
“Really?”
“Yes.”
“This is your final chance,” Ely said. “The next lie will be your last.” He tapped out a command. Glastonbury’s face screwed up as he focused on the string of data that had just appeared on his display.
“I don’t know what any of that—”
“For five and a half minutes last night you went off-net,” Ely said. “At the same time that the Greenes were murdered. Either you killed the Greenes or you know who did.”
“I don’t.”
“You were asleep. You woke up. You got out of your pod. You didn’t put your wristboard on.”
“I… there’s… there’s no law about waking up.”
“No, you’re right, there’s not,” Ely said. “Nor is there a law that says you have to wear a wristboard at all times. But you went off-net at the same time as the Greenes were murdered. Do you have another explanation?” He paused a moment and saw the hesitation in the man’s face. “No? Fine. The charge is sabotage.” He began to drag the suspect the last few yards to the airlock.
“No. Stop. You can’t.”
“I can. I have my orders. No trial, just the execution. No more wasted hours. I’m sick of people like you. Everyone else is able to sacrifice and strive in order for there to be a future for the human race, but you?” He slammed Glastonbury into the metal door of the airlock. “You think you’re above the law. No, I’m not going to have any more of it.”
The man started to cry. Ely moved over to the panel to the side of the door.
“Silus Glastonbury, for wilful complicity in sabotage, I sentence you to—”
“No, wait. Please. I’ll tell you. It’s th
e water.” The words came out so quickly they were barely coherent. “There’s a way to get more. The system doesn’t work, not properly. Everyone knows.”
“Stop,” Ely said firmly. “Start again. Slowly.”
“The water for the showers. The hot water. Everyone gets one issue of three minutes per day. The system resets itself at three a.m., once a day. I mean, once every twenty-four hours, when it’s three a.m. for our shift. It’s meant to do it just at shift-change, but from three a.m., for half an hour, you can have another shower and that’s not logged.”
Ely stared at the man, disbelieving.
“Hot water? You force yourself to wake up in the middle of the night just to have an extra shower?”
“Yes! That’s what I’m telling you.”
“Shut up.” Ely pulled up the records for water usage for the Tower. He checked the figures for three a.m. There was a discrepancy.
“Control?”
“Yes, Constable.”
“Did you hear that?”
“Oh, yes. I’ve been watching since you arrested him. You should have warned me.”
“Can you confirm what he said?”
“Yes, I think so. Give me a moment. Yes, there’s an increased water usage during that time.”
Ely turned his attention back to Glastonbury.
“You said everyone knows. Who’s everyone?”
“Everyone. I mean,” he added, hurriedly, “it’s just one of those things that people know. Like how the purple flavour has more sugar or how the eighth row of machines in the Recreation Room are slightly easier than the rest.”
Ely stared at him. He knew about the purple flavouring and the eighth row in the Recreation Room, but he also knew that those were rumours with no more truth to them than the ones about ghosts. The glitch with the hot water, however, that clearly wasn’t a rumour, nor was it something that he had ever heard or read before. If it was known and discussed, it wasn’t done online, not even on the other-net. That was a chilling thought. He wondered what other conspiracies were taking place without his knowledge.
“I swear, that’s all it was,” Glastonbury babbled. “I just wanted a hot shower. I didn’t have anything to do with the murders.”
“How long has this been going on?” Ely asked quietly.
“A year,” Glastonbury whispered back. “But I wasn’t greedy. I only spent three minutes in there.”
“A year. Three minutes a day, three hundred and sixty-five shifts.” Multiply that by forty-seven, though Ely wasn’t going to tell the felon how many others had done the same as him, “Do you know how much energy you’ve wasted? We can’t afford to squander a single joule. Everyone knows that, everyone except you.”
“What are you going to do to me?” Glastonbury asked, “It’s not sabotage. Not really.”
Glastonbury was wrong. It was sabotage, but it wasn’t murder. Production had to come first, and Ely doubted that either Councillor Cornwall or Chancellor Stirling would allow him to deport Glastonbury. If they did it for one, they would have to do it for the other forty-six.
“I’m deferring sentence until a full assessment has been conducted into how much damage your greed has done.”
Ely grabbed the man’s arm and hauled him back to the elevator. He pushed him inside, and sent him down to the Recreation Room.
When the doors closed, Ely leaned up against the wall and breathed out. It was a serious offence. Had it not been for the murder, it would have been the most serious crime he’d ever discovered.
“Control?”
“Ely?”
“Can you look at the other forty-six suspects? Check the water usage for them and—”
“And see if they were doing the same as him. I’ve already done it. They were.”
“Thank you,” Ely said.
“What do you want me to do next?”
“Just… I’ll be in touch.” He clicked off.
He had no suspects in the murder. No leads left at all.
He saw that there were a dozen blinking lights at the bottom of his display. They must have been there for some time, but he’d not noticed them. Most came from various contributors to the newsfeeds, and most of those came from Tower-One. He tapped out a short reply; Glastonbury had been questioned in connection with the murders. The investigation was on-going. More suspects would be questioned shortly.
He hesitated before sending it. The message seemed inadequate, it implied his uncertainty, yet he could think of nothing else he could say. He sent it and blocked all future messages asking for information. Only then did he remember that he should have informed Chancellor Stirling first. He tapped out a slightly longer, but no less vague, message to her.
He looked down the corridor. To the left was Councillor Cornwall’s office. Ely had never been inside before, but he was tempted to ask to speak to the man. Perhaps the politician would have some advice. No, Ely thought, today he would only be concerned with the election.
He sent the same message to the Councillor and headed back to the elevator. He did need advice, and there was only one person who could give it; his former supervisor, Arthur.
Chapter 5 - Retirement
Sixteen hours before the election
“You should have come to me as soon as it happened, my boy,” Arthur said, reproachfully.
“There’s hardly been time, and I didn’t want to bother you,” Ely mumbled. Arthur always made him feel like the seventeen-year old he’d been when he was recruited five years ago.
“You mean you wanted to prove you could handle it on your own. I understand lad, and you wouldn’t be bothering me. Do you know how dull it gets up here?” The old man gestured at the doors behind him. “All that lot ever want to talk about is the past. It’s like they’re already dead. No, any distraction is welcome. Well, there’s no point talking out here, come on in.”
Taking Ely’s arm with one hand, he waved his other by the sensor. The doors opened.
Up until the rains began fifteen years ago, the whole of Level Seventy-Six had been given over to the retirees. When the solar panels became useless, the museum was moved out of Level Nine - that space became the Recreation Room. Level Seventy-Six was split in two and most of the older residents of the Twilight Room had moved to Tower-Thirteen. The smaller half of the level became the new museum, though the rarely visited artefacts were so crammed together that the space would be better described as a storeroom. The larger half of Level Seventy-Six was still occupied by the retirees, but with the increased urgency to establish a working colony on Mars, most of the space was given over to row after row of earth-filled allotments.
Tending these was the retirees’ continued sacrifice to the good of the Tower. Some were open to the room’s atmosphere, others were enclosed in opaque plastic panelling. A mess of wires and pipes snaked into those simulating, as far as possible, the conditions the settlers would find on Mars.
Some plants arrived as sprouting shoots, others as seeds, and all came from frozen storage in Tower-Thirteen. It was one more vital part of the plan to establish a thriving colony; after terraforming, would anything from Earth grow on the red planet?
The rewards for those who volunteered to eschew the luxuries of retirement in Tower-Thirteen were privacy and respect. The City had nothing else to offer them. Yet, with fifty-three ‘residents’, the Twilight Room was nearly at full occupancy. Though they were allowed to visit the lounges lower down the Tower, they rarely did. It was just as permissible, as long as an appointment was made forty-eight hours in advance, for workers to visit their aged relatives, but that was equally rare.
Ely, as a civic servant, didn’t need to make an appointment to visit Arthur, but he had his own reasons for not visiting as often as he knew he should.
“I thought that having family to visit was the reason why people opted to stay here rather than going to Tower-Thirteen, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone visit,” Ely said as the two men walked into the room.
“Really? I think
that just shows you don’t visit often enough. We had a girl in here, oh, let me see now… yes, about three weeks ago. A visitor for Violet Truro. Her grandaughter, I think it was. Nice girl. Very polite. Didn’t like the view, though.”
Arthur gestured towards the exterior wall. Unlike everywhere else in Tower-One, the windows weren’t covered in the piezoelectric panels that captured the energy of the wind and rain. Ely watched the incessant raindrops impact against the glass in an explosion that seemed almost to have a pattern to it.
“But then,” Arthur went on, “how many people really are close to their families? I mean, take you for example. Your parents were up here, weren’t they?”
“I suppose so.”
“Did you ever visit them?”
“Well, no. I was moved into the apartments when I was twelve. I don’t think I saw them after that. Except in passing, of course.”
“Exactly. We’re all family now,” Arthur said. “Those old bonds, they don’t mean as much as they did. I think that will change for those of us who get to Mars, but for now, it’s just one more luxury we can’t afford. I know Cornwall wants to change things. Getting everyone to change their names, that’s part of it. But it’s going to take more than that to create bonds of affection. It’s sad, but necessary.”
“Hmm,” Ely murmured noncommittally. “But you have to admit that view is off-putting.”
“Don’t tell me you’re going to start with the whole ‘it’s unnatural’ business again. That’s the problem with young people today. You don’t think about the past. To you it’s just words in books and pictures on screens. You don’t remember what it was like.”
“Of course not. We weren’t there.”
“I was speaking figuratively. You don’t need to remind me that I’m the last person in this Tower old enough to remember the Great Disaster.”
“There’s a few others here who were bred before, though,” Ely said, looking around at the retirees tending the allotments.
“Born, Ely, not bred,” Arthur corrected him. “But they were just children. All they’ve ever known is the Tower. For them, life hasn’t changed much these last six decades. They’re just the same as you. They speak of the Great Disaster as if it was one single cataclysmic event. It wasn’t like that. We weren’t living in luxury one day, with the world collapsing the next. Invasion, occupation, civil war, drought, famines, and plagues. Each year it got worse, but it happened so slowly that no one noticed how bad it was getting until it was too late. And now there’s nothing but rain.”