by Frank Tayell
“You really don’t want to ask who I am or what this has all been about?”
He did, but more than that he didn’t want to play her game.
“You can answer questions later.”
“If you won’t listen,” she said, as she moved over towards the wall, “then I’ll just have to show you. Keep your mouth open.”
“I said don’t—”
Her hand moved. The doors to the airlock exploded.
All he could see were lights. All he could hear was noise. All he could feel was air rushing past him. He tried to move. His legs didn’t work. No, he realised, they did but he was on his back. There’d been an explosion, and the blast had knocked him down. As he rolled onto his side, a jagged piece of metal sliced across his cheek, and the pain from that cut through the fog. He pushed himself to his knees. ‘Breathe,’ he told himself, ‘breathe’. And he was breathing. It wasn’t hard.
Bracing himself on the wall, he stumbled to his feet. Then he remembered the ghost. Expecting her to attack he turned, lashing out blindly with his arms. She wasn’t there. The corridor was full of dust and dirt, but the ghost had gone. He realised his hands were empty. He’d dropped the gun. He looked down, saw it, bent to reach it, and half fell after a sudden spasm of pain from his leg, but when he straightened he had the gun in his hand. The ghost had gone. Could she have got past him and run back into the Tower? No.
Steadying himself with one hand on the wall, he moved towards the airlock. His vision began to clear. The explosion had been small, its effect magnified by the close confines of the corridor. It had been very small, he realised. All it had done was blow a neat hole through the central locking mechanism. The doors had been pushed apart.
Ely limped into the airlock. A message came up on his wristboard. ‘I can’t see you. What happened? Where are you?’ He ignored it.
The outer doors seemed undamaged. As he got closer he saw why. There was no lock on them. Nor, like the other doors in the Tower, did they slide back into the wall. They opened outwards, on hinges. Bracing himself for the cold and rain and suffocating wind, he pushed the doors open.
Light.
That was the first thing he registered.
It was everywhere.
As his vision slowly adjusted, he saw blue.
Blue sky.
There was no wind, just a gentle breeze.
There was no rain. The air was filled with a dry heat. Automatically, he took a breath. The air was sweet, rich, with a beguilingly unfamiliar fragrance. Gun in hand, and for the first time in his life, he stepped outside.
It was a transport pad. Or it had been, long ago. The roof was flat in one corner, and jutting out over the edge of the building stood a raised area of cracked black asphalt. On it, bafflingly, someone once had painted a letter ‘H’. Out of the middle, its purple flowers and wide leaves waving back and forth, grew a spindly eight-foot high shrub.
Something buzzed past his ear. He jerked out of the way. A small, mostly orange insect hovered in the air a few inches from his face. He marvelled at it for a moment until he was distracted by the noise. His ears were still ringing. No, not ringing. There was another sound, a low steady drone. He looked up and saw four large windmills towering above him. Their white paint was chipped and stained with rust. Only three of the turbines were moving.
“Welcome to the real world, Ely. What do you think?” It was the ghost. In his shock, Ely had temporarily forgotten about her.
“The rain…” was all he could find to say.
“It’s the summer,” she said. “It hasn’t rained much for months. But it will. Give it a few weeks and the rain will come back. After that, there will be snow, but then the sun will come out again. It always does. It always has.”
Ely turned slowly around. She was leaning against a wide metal vent. He began to raise the gun.
“Don’t, Ely,” she warned. “Just look around.”
“I’ve seen outside,” he said. “Down in the Twilight Room.”
“And was there anywhere more aptly named? They’re just screens, Ely. It wasn’t real. Don’t take my word for it. Just look for yourself.”
He did. He looked down at the dry grey roof, at the thriving shrub, at the yellow-flowered weeds growing out of the cracks around the metal vents.
“Who are you?” he asked.
She told him.
Chapter 11 - Death Comes To Us All
Election Day
Twenty minutes later Ely walked back through the airlock. He hesitated at the end of the corridor. He didn’t think she was lying, but he had to see for himself.
A voice in his head told him there wasn’t time. A louder, newer voice said that, now, there wasn’t anything but time. He turned left and kept walking, past the infirmary, until he reached the doors of Councillor Cornwall’s office.
He’d seen the doors before. Not often. He wasn’t meant to patrol Level Seventy-Seven, but on a few occasions when he’d had to visit the nurses, he had gone to look at the doors to the office that he hoped would one day be his.
The doors themselves were identical to all the others in the Tower, save that there was a small plaque affixed to the wall next to them that read, ‘Office of the Councillor. Meetings by Appointment Only.’ He’d never been inside. He’d never tried to make an appointment.
There was no panel by the door. Nor was there one of those old fashioned handles he’d seen down in the tunnels. He tried to lever the doors apart. They didn’t move. He rapped his knuckles against the metal. They rang with a dull, solid, thump.
He nodded to himself. Now he knew. There was nothing behind the door but a few inches of metal, and then the outside. Ely looked at the door for a moment longer.
His wristboard chimed. It was a message from Vauxhall, ‘Where are you Ely?’ He looked up at the camera in the ceiling of the corridor. Slowly, he took his wristboard off and laid it on the floor. He ignored the elevators, made his way back to the access ladder, and began to climb down.
Each time he reached the bottom of a ladder, and had to go out into the corridor to find another hatch, he found the hallways full of workers. A few, not many, still patiently queued. Others, and again, not many, looked as if they were trying to record and upload the event. Most were talking heatedly to one another, tapping out messages or throwing angry questions up at the cameras. When they saw him, some approached. When they saw his expression, they backed away.
He paused briefly at Level Three. The doors to the Control Room were open. He went inside. The room was empty. The screens were blank. He had been expecting that. It didn’t matter, he knew where he was going. He made his way back down to The Foundations.
The flashlight he’d taken from near the ghost’s body was where he’d left it, next to the panel leaning up against the Tower wall. He took it and climbed down the ladder.
At the bottom he didn’t head towards the hall where he had fought the ghost. He turned the other way. Using the light, he followed the corridor. The passageway appeared blocked after twenty yards. He played the light up and down until he found the old metal filing cabinet. He pushed it out of the way, revealing a narrow opening just wide enough for a person to squeeze through.
Beyond, the corridor was far cleaner, covered in the same white panels he knew from the Tower above. He counted out the distance as he walked. After two hundred yards he stopped and examined the wall. He found the hidden door. He opened it. Inside was a stairwell. He shone the light down. Five steps below, water lapped against the stairs. He went up. After two flights, the stairs ended in a short landing, with another door. He opened it.
He stepped outside. This time, there was no moment of blinding light.
It was the smell that struck him first. From the roof it had seemed almost fragrant. Here at ground level, it was far richer, with a darker, earthier tone. It was so intoxicating it filled his senses, yet it was forgotten a moment later when he heard the sounds. There were so many, and they were so alien it took him a few sec
onds to realise they weren’t all one sound, but many hundreds of smaller ones. Birds, he thought, birds and insects, chirruping and singing and calling to one another. They sounded nothing like those pale imitations he’d heard on the old movies.
But the street did look almost familiar. He’d seen it before, somewhere, sometime, perhaps in a photograph, though in that memory it looked achingly different to what he saw now.
The street, stretching off for a mile in either direction, was at least forty feet wide, bracketed on either side by the ruins of once tall buildings. The roadway was broken with grass and weeds that had spread up and over piles of rubble. He looked to his left and saw a tree growing up out of the concrete. Its branches had pushed through the windows of a nearby building. As the tree had grown, the branches had ripped up through the brickwork, causing the facade to fracture and break. The fallen masonry now lay in a jumbled heap at the tree’s base.
Beyond the tree lay other mounds of broken masonry and twisted metal, all covered in the same irregular sea of green leaves and flowering colours. It was the second most beautiful thing Ely had ever seen.
“Who are you?” he had asked the ghost.
“I was like you,” she had said. “Or I was a worker, anyway. Up until four years ago I worked down in the Assembly.”
“I don’t recognise you.”
“How many workers would you recognise?” she had retorted. “The three of us were recruited to go out and see what had become of the world. We weren’t the first. But we were determined that we would be the last.”
“What does that mean?” he had asked.
“Go to the edge of the roof and look down. You’ll see for yourself.”
Warily, still expecting some kind of trap, he had inched his way over to the side of the building and peered over the edge. It was both the most terrible, and the most beautiful, sight he had ever seen.
“There’s no water. No flood,” he had said. Below him were the ruins of buildings, stretching off as far as the eye could see.
“The city, the real city,” she had said, “was built by a river, long ago. It does flood, occasionally, but after a few days, the water level drops, and the streets clear again.”
“They said it was built in the most remote part of the country. They said, before the rains began, before the flood, that there was a great toxic desert outside.”
“I think,” she said, “that was partly true. It was never a desert, it was always like this, but it was toxic. There was some Great Disaster, though I doubt it happened quite as they told us. People did die, and they died suddenly. We found their remains in buildings and houses across the city and far beyond. We don’t know what killed them, not exactly, but we suspect it was done by the same people who originally built the Tower.”
Ely turned and looked up at the Tower that had been his home, his life. It wasn’t the gleaming edifice depicted in the pictures. The solar panels still covered the walls, but they appeared dented, some were cracked, others were clearly damaged beyond use.
“If there was no flood,” he’d said, looking down at the ruined city below, “then there’s no tidal barrier. So, where does the Tower get its power from?”
“Solar panels. Body heat. The turbines.” She pointed at the giant wind turbines towering over them. “And the machines in that Recreation Room, of course.”
“They said the solar panels were replaced with panelling that captured the kinetic energy of the wind and rain.”
“They said a lot of things, Ely.”
“And I should believe you, and not them?” he had asked.
“You should believe the evidence of your own eyes,” she had said.
He looked up and down, and around. “How long?” he asked. “I mean, if there was no Great Disaster, then has it really been sixty years?”
“No,” she said, “it’s been a lot longer than that. The Tower was built as an enclosed system. It was a marvel for its time, designed to be a net producer of energy and heat. Those who constructed it utilised the most advanced technologies of their age. And those technologies were developed to take our species to Mars, that much is true. But turbines break.” She gestured to the idle windmill. “The self-cleaning system for the solar panels clog, and the panels become obscured by dirt. It was meant to last one hundred years. Exactly how much longer or shorter than that it’s been, we can’t be sure, but the technology is finally failing.”
“Thanks to your sabotage,” he had said.
“No, it was falling apart long before we returned. It was like this long before we left. It was why the microphones were turned off, why most of the servers are silent, there isn’t the energy to keep them going. That was why the Recreation Room was created. It is why the population keeps getting smaller.”
Ely looked along the road at the broken buildings. The city was a ruin. But it wasn’t dead. Birds and insects meant food. A broken building could still offer shelter. A river meant water. There was life. More than that, it was a place in which people could live.
“Some people must have known, they must have learned the truth,” he had said.
“Of course. Or they realised that something didn’t add up, and they would talk to one another, and they would ask questions. But that’s sedition, isn’t it, Ely? And what happens to people who demonstrate seditious behaviour?”
“They’re sent to Tower-Thirteen,” he replied automatically.
“Look around. Look behind you. Look at the skyline. There are no other Towers. There is no launch site. There are no transports. Look down, Ely, that is the city.”
“What happened to them? To all those people that I sentenced?”
“I told you,” she had said. “It’s an enclosed system. Energy. Water. Food. You can only get out what you put in.”
“I didn’t know—”
“No, you didn’t. And you didn’t even suspect. They chose you a long time ago, Ely. They trained you for this. They bred you for it. You had no friends growing up, no attachments, no family, nothing but the Tower and the City and your belief in it. They needed you, or someone like you, because they knew that the time was coming when people would have to leave the Tower.”
“Who? Who chose me?”
“You know the answer to that,” she had replied.
“Hello, Ely,” Arthur said.
Ely turned around. Arthur stood in the shadow of a doorway thirty yards up the road.
“There’s no Chancellor,” Ely said. “No Councillors.”
“No,” Arthur said.
“There’s just you?”
“More or less.” The old man spoke with a casual lack of concern.
“The colony ships, the elections, none of it was real?”
“Not quite,” Arthur said. “The elections were real enough. Everyone voted and every vote was counted.”
“But the candidates were fake?” Ely took a step away from the Tower. Arthur stayed in the shadows of the doorway.
“I tried having a real candidate, once. It didn’t work. Some people don’t know how to follow orders.”
“And the newsfeeds, were those fabricated too?”
“Some. Some. Just enough to keep the debate heading in the right direction. But most of it was the same rehashed rumours repeated day in day out, created by a populace eager to have the same olds in their news. It was ever thus.”
“Is that a joke?” Ely asked.
“I’m just trying to lighten the mood,” Arthur said. He was grinning Ely saw, but there was only a dark menace to the older man’s expression.
Ely looked away, turning his gaze to the building opposite the Tower. It was vast, stretching perhaps a quarter of a mile. The ruins were dwarfed by the Tower, but somehow that made the older building seem more impressive. Through the broken windows, Ely could see that the roof had collapsed. Inside, taking advantage of the sunlight and shelter, grew a forest of those same purple flowering shrubs that he’d seen on the Tower’s roof. Ely took a few steps out into the street, to
wards the ruin.
“Well, boy, don’t you have anything you want to say? Anything you want to ask?” Arthur called out.
Ely took another step towards the building. With a cacophonous flapping of wings, a score of small red-breasted birds erupted out through the broken windows. He watched as they circled up the street, coming to land on the roof of a building further up the street.
“I said, don’t you have anything you want to ask?” Arthur called out, this time with irritated impatience.
“Are they robins?” Ely asked.
“What?” Arthur replied.
“Those birds, are they robins?” Ely asked again. He glanced back down the street towards Arthur. He took another step, and the old man was out of sight.
“Those? No,” Arthur said, stepping out of the shadow of the doorway. “They’re starlings, I think.”
“The woman. The ghost. Robin, that’s her name.”
“Her name is Oxford,” Arthur said. “Considering the location, I’d say that’s almost poetic.”
“She changed it. They all did. Her name’s Robin. The man who killed Gower and Bradford, his name was Gabriel. The woman who died in the elevator shaft, she was called Fern.”
Arthur snorted with derision.
“So you spoke to her, then?” he asked.
“A little.”
“Where is she?”
“Dead. She fell off the roof. Her body should be around here somewhere.”
“I see.”
There was a moment’s silence. Ely turned to look up at the Tower once more.
“Why did you do it?” Ely asked.
“Why? What do you mean, ‘why’? Look about you, do you actually think people can live out here, in this?”
“I think they can try,” Ely said.
“And they’d die. That’s what would happen. So you spoke to your ghost. Did she tell you what she was meant to do? Her and the other two? They were meant to go out into this wasteland and find out whether our species could survive. Is the water toxic? Is there food we can eat? Those were the questions she was meant to answer. She didn’t though. We thought we saw them die. We were convinced of it. Very clever on her part, that was. Far cleverer than I thought she was capable of. But it was a betrayal of everyone in the Tower. A betrayal of her species.”