Jen did put in an appearance, as a mermaid washed up on the beach. Her hair was entwined with seaweed, and she stared up at me with sightless eyes that were like holes in the fabric of humanity.
Paula stepped over Jen as if she was a stranded jellyfish. She tugged my hand to get me to follow, but I was transfixed by those sightless eyes that were seeing nothing and everything.
I don’t know how the dream would have ended, because the imaginary Paula jerked my hand hard enough to wake me up.
When I got to the station house I didn’t mention the dream to Paula. Or the fact I’d fallen over while getting dressed. I didn’t mention the syringe, either. Since the case was closed she would have asked me to hand the syringe over for recycling, and I didn’t want to do that until I’d had it checked for prints.
Because it wasn’t strictly official business I had to conduct the check in my own time. Lunchtime, to be exact. While Paula headed to the haven canteen—all meals are served there, to simplify food rationing and distribution—I headed for LogiPol HQ in Community Central.
It’s quite funny; I can remember hearing a line in an Olden Days movie where an office worker says he’s stepping outside for ‘a breath of fresh air.’ Nowadays if you step Outside for anything more than a few breaths the air is so far from fresh you need a filtermask. There’s a dispenser next to every Outside door. The dispenser looks like a box of paper handkerchiefs tacked to the wall, and the filtermasks are like ultra-thin tissues. You spread one out on the palm of your hand, put your hand over your mouth and nose as if you’re about to sneeze, then breathe on it. The heat and moisture of your exhalation softens the mask and turns it into a translucent membrane that lets you talk and breathe but filters out the worst of the pollutants in the air. After about thirty minutes you notice an acrid smell and a metallic taste, and that tells you the filter’s saturated with toxins. If you don’t change it, the protective membrane darkens, dries out and falls off, and the same things that turned it toxic go straight into your body.
Prolonged exposure to those toxins does all manner of nasty things, from impairing your lungs to screwing up your immune system and DNA. That’s why Numbers and the more sensible Names never go Outside unless they have to. It’s also why the Ecosystem has designed havens to be as self-sufficient as possible, and laid out each community to make sure its central zone is within a short walk of all surrounding havens. These central zones contain all the things that won’t fit in a haven. Like a hospital, university, pleasure dome, and the civil service building. The latter houses, among other things, the Justice Department, including the Community Police and LogiPol headquarters, and the forensic labs.
There was no queue at Haven Nine’s filtermask dispenser. It’s only at night, in the hour before the Pleasure Dome opens, that a queue forms. I slotted my card in the reader. Ten points came off my account and a filtermask came out the dispenser. I slapped the membrane over my nose and mouth, fought back the urge to gag at the antiseptic smell, then retrieved my card and waited for the first set of doors to open. When they did I walked through them. The inner doors closed behind me before the outer ones opened. There was a slight hiss as the pressure equalized; the havens are sealed units. There’s only one air intake for each haven, and all of the air it takes in is purified before being circulated.
The filtermask had softened by the time I walked through the outer doors, and I’d all but forgotten I was wearing it.
Apart from the occasional hover freighter, the streets of the communities are almost as eerily deserted as those of their abandoned counterparts. I’ve read Olden Days travel articles about places like Hong Kong, Marrakech and Istanbul, and how you could hardly move for the crowds; how you smelled food being cooked on every street corner, heard buskers making music, saw color all around you in the clothes people wore, the displays in shop windows, the signs advertising every product under the sun. Now the only smell is the antiseptic of your mask and the acrid accumulations that build up in it when you’ve worn it for too long. The only sound is the wind. Most of the time there’s little more than a breeze, and it’s like the whisper of distant, ancient voices echoing through the concrete canyons formed by the apartment blocks. But, when there’s a superstorm on the way, the whisper gets steadily louder until it’s like the screaming of a banshee and you can hear it even inside the havens. As for color, well, there isn’t any—everything’s logica gray. Even the sky. Leaden, oppressive and suffocating, it looks like it might fall to earth at any moment. It’s as if you can see an accumulation of all the toxic fumes spewed forth from car exhausts, factory chimneys and airliner engines during the Old Days.
As I walked up the hillside the city was built on, between the gray, ten-story blocks with their tiny, storm-resistant windows, I wondered what it had been like to live under a blue sky. The only good thing about the superstorms is they sometimes thin the haze enough to reveal a hint of what lies beyond. Word spreads when it happens and people—Names, that is—hurry down to grab a filtermask and gather outside the havens to get a tantalizing glimpse of the pale blue sky impossibly far above them. I can’t help thinking if only people a hundred years ago had felt the tiniest fraction of the awe we feel when we look up at times like that, we’d be living in a very different world. A world of big skies, far horizons and bright colors.
I can’t help wondering what it would have been like to lie in a field of tall grass with my arms and legs spread out and the stalks caressing my skin. If I’d lived back then I would have spent an entire day and night doing just that. I would have listened to the quiet, rhythmic language of living things all around me: the lulling susurrus of the growing crops; the chirruping of crickets; the scrabbling of field mice, and the lyrical songs of unseen birds wooing a mate or warning a fledgling… Feeling the planet turn beneath me; gazing up into the boundless blue high above and making shapes from pure white cumulus and high cirrus clouds. I’d turn the clouds into everything from far-off mountain ranges of the kind that might conceal Shangri-La, to ships that sail across the vast ocean of the sky.
And all the while I’d be vaguely aware of the rise and fall of the sun, and intuitively I’d understand why people in the past had worshipped it with awe and wonder.
Closing my eyes when the sun got too bright I’d soon doze off, and in my dreams I’d visit the Shangri-La in the mountains and sail on the ship of clouds.
I’d wake as the sun fell slowly from the sky, and watch blue change to the glowing red and amber that love would be if it was something you could see.
Then I’d let darkness and the night cast a spell over me, watching the stars come out one by one and feeling like I was looking at infinity and eternity.
At least, that’s what I like to think I would have done if I’d lived back then. But in all likelihood I’d have done the same as everyone else: consumed conspicuously, polluted with carefree abandon, and not given a used filtermask about the moral high-horses I mowed down with my SUV and the little living things I trampled with my disproportionately large environmental footprint.
I felt a catch in my throat as the slope steepened: maybe a sign all the lonely Saturdays I’d spent exploring the old city with a camera for company were catching up with me. Filtermasks help, but they can’t keep all the toxins out. The only way they could do that is if they kept all the air out, which would kind of defeat the purpose.
I know I’ve spent more time Outside than I should have over the years, but I don’t regret a moment of it. For one thing, I’d go nuts if I had to live my whole life in the haven. It’s comfortable enough, but dull and predictable. Life for me only comes alive Outside. You never know what you’ll find when rooting through the half-flooded or storm-damaged ruins. Every building is an Aladdin’s cave, every room a treasure trove. To a Number, the stuff those buildings contain is worthless junk—which is why you never find them in the old cities. But to someone like me that ‘junk’ is priceless. When I stand on the threshold of a building in the old city I feel l
ike Heinrich Schliemann must have when he dug for Troy, or Howard Carter uncovering the tomb of Tutankhamun. I find fascination in everyday things, in picking up once commonplace objects that are now only found in history books—everything from tin-openers to telescopes. I leave most of the stuff where I found it, for other people to come across and wonder at. I want someone else to pick up the telescope and think about who once gazed through it, and what they might have seen—from Halley’s Comet passing overhead, to a distant star going supernova. There are two things I keep, however. The first is cameras. It’s crazy, I know, but I love to collect old cameras even though you can’t get film to take photos with them any more. Every Name I know wants to collect something or another. Usually the things we collect are completely useless, but that doesn’t make our desire to possess them any less powerful. Maybe we draw comfort from the link they provide to the past; or it might simply be that looking for such objects gives us something to do. Whatever, they give us a disproportionate amount of pleasure.
My other weakness is for diaries. This is a whole lot easier to justify than collecting old cameras. By adding diaries to the Ecosystem database I’m increasing The Sum Total of Human Knowledge, so I earn pleasure points to supplement the ones I get from working with LogiPol. That’s not really why I go looking for diaries, though; I just love to find out what life was like for ordinary people during the Old Days. I learned about the big picture at school, like every youngster does; but to my mind history is way more vivid and engaging when it’s seen through the eyes of people who were alive while it was being made.
I was nearing Community Central, which is something of a misnomer. It’s not physically at the center of the community—its buildings are near the top of a lee slope, safe from flooding and sheltered from high winds, and the apartment blocks radiate down the hillside—however it’s the center of the community in every meaningful way. It’s where the power that heats and lights the havens is generated, and where the civil service administers the Ecosystem directives which determine the details of daily life. It’s where you’ll find the university and hospital; the retail zone with its little luxuries like plants, priced so high consumption can never be conspicuous; and the Pleasure Dome.
The dome is meant to be a place where movement to music melts away the distinction between Names and Numbers. In reality, it’s anything but. Numbers only get up for rhythmic synth and drum tracks. The rest of us request hard-driving rock to dance to, or schmaltzy power ballads of the kind that apparently used to make ‘tired and emotional’ bikers weep into their Budweiser at the end of heavy metal discos back in the Old Days. The last time I was in the Pleasure Dome they made us listen to the same electro-techno track a dozen times. But it was worth it, because one of us got to choose the last song and picked a stone-cold classic from the Old Days—Winds of Change by the Scorpions. Just thinking about what happened that night makes the hairs on the back of my neck stand on end. We stood around the dance floor, linking arms and swaying from side to side as one while we belted out the words to
Winds of Change like an anthem to something we’ve lost and might one day find again; they sat there looking totally bemused. For once they’d no idea what was going on. A few of them laughed at us. A lot of them sneered. Most of them looked on in bewilderment, knowing they were witnessing something spiritual that moved us deeply—and probably wishing they could feel even of a little of it themselves.
The Pleasure Dome caps the hilltop and seems to grow out of it, like a rounded summit of granite stripped bare of the heather scrub covering those parts of the lower slopes that haven’t been built on. The other buildings follow the contours of the hill, using the slope to shelter them from the wind. Those higher up, starting with my destination—the civil service building, known as C-Serv—are lower and longer and more curved than the havens.
You can’t actually see the most important part of the community, the power plant, because it occupies a chamber quarried into the rock. I’m not sure if the safety of its location reflects human paranoia—the rapid breakdown of society caused by power-cuts resulting from the floods and storms that became such a feature of early 21st century life must have been truly terrifying—or if the plant’s position was determined by some survival instinct in the Ecosystem itself. After all, energy is its lifeblood.
I’m much more interested in history than science, but even I’m fascinated by the way the aforementioned energy is generated. There’s not enough sunlight for solar power to be an option, and either too little or too much wind to harness. The jagged stumps of wind farms dotting the horizon bear mute testament to that. As a result, an entirely different approach to generating energy was taken in the wake of the Hydrocarbon Holocaust. The process has its origins in a phenomenon called sonic fusion. As far as I understand, it involves passing sound through liquid, generating bubbles which give off incredibly intense bursts of light as they implode or explode or, well, burst. Like so many scientific discoveries, this one was apparently made by chance. In the 1930s someone came up with the idea of putting an ultrasound device in a tank of photographic fluid to see if the resulting agitation would speed up the development process. Examining the negative afterwards, they saw it was covered in curious marks which indicated light had been produced by the waves of sound.
Nothing much came of this chance discovery for the best part of a hundred years. But, as the need to find alternative sources of energy became increasingly urgent, scientific advances led to better understanding and control of the phenomenon, and allowed the development of what’s come to be known as sonic fusion. I’m no expert, but it seems that passing sound through liquid generates bubbles which are continuously expanded and compressed by the motion of the sonic wave. Each bubble contains gas—I suppose that’s what makes it a bubble—and, under the right conditions, the compression of that gas generates a heat matching the temperature at the heart of the sun. The heat is released in ultra intense flashes as the bubbles expand. You can control the process by varying the frequency of the sound, the composition of the liquid, and the shape of the container. Doing so allows you to harness the heat, providing a safe, endless power source. However it’s not the sort of technological miracle men dreamed of back in the early 21st century, because it only provides relatively small amounts of energy. That’s why the Ecosystem has energy thrift down to a fine art and rewards you with pleasure points for doing things like taking the stairs rather than the lift.
Having said that, by the time I got to C-Serv my legs felt pretty much the same as when I got off the exercise bike the night before—so, after passing through the airlock and ditching my filtermask in the recycling bin, I headed for the lift.
A minute later I was in the forensic lab, and ten minutes after that I had the results of the fingerprint test.
Common sense had told me we’d find Doug MacDougall’s prints on the syringe.
A mix of instinct and wishful thinking made me hope we’d find someone else’s.
The one thing I hadn’t figured on was what we actually found.
In light of what I’d learned I had to make my pitch to Paula just right. I used the walk back from C-Serv to Haven Nine to think it over. I’d get a flat refusal if I asked her straight out to reopen the MacDougall case. I had to be a bit more subtle. Unfortunately, subtlety’s not my strong point. Come to think of it, I’m not sure what my strong point is. That’s what working so closely with a Number does—destroys your self-confidence.
There were ten minutes of the lunch break left by the time I got back to the haven, so I headed for the canteen. Without time for a proper meal, I grabbed a protein bar. It’s the sort of food Numbers usually favor. They take nourishment in its most easily digestible forms. They don’t have much appreciation of things like flavor, texture, smell and color. I pulled a face as I bit into the off-white bar. It wasn’t that it tasted bad, it didn’t taste of anything at all. Nitrogen, sulphur and carbon compounds collected from filters in the community’s air-purifi
cation systems are used to synthesize sugars and amino acids, which feed cultures of meat and plant life in the food factories of the Outer Limits at the foot of the hill. The food situation is similar to that with power generation—the supply is inexhaustible, but there’s a limit to how much can be produced at one time. As a result, food and fluids are rationed to the optimum daily amount. Your allocation in its most basic form—the sort of bland protein bar I was struggling to swallow now—doesn’t cost any pleasure points. But if you want it in a more appetizing guise, you have to pay for it.
I looked around the canteen for Perfect Paula as I munched away on the food bar, and tried to think of what to say if I saw her.
There’s a de facto segregation in the canteens—as there is in every other aspect of community life, even though the Ecosystem has done everything it can to lessen the genetic divide. Numbers always choose the nearest empty seat at a table with no Names, and sit an exact distance apart from each other. They silently cut their food into precise mouthfuls—which they quickly chew and swallow with no sign of relish or distaste—and leave whenever they’ve finished eating; whereas we chat and laugh, complain, argue and sometimes even agree. We hesitate with fork or cup halfway to our mouth, let our food go cold or eat it while it’s too hot. We stay at the table long after our meal is finished, exchanging opinions or chat-up lines, or just listening to the conversation around us and drawing comfort from the presence of other people.
Looking around the canteen, I saw that half the tables had animated figures sitting around them: gesturing with their hands and talking louder than was necessary to be heard—two things Numbers never do; or leaning back in their chairs and laughing—another thing Numbers hardly ever do.
The rest of the tables were either empty or hosted solitary figures, each spaced at a spookily regular distance from the next, chewing away and looking like they couldn’t wait to be doing something else. There were several dozen women with hair the same color and style as Paula’s. And eyes like hers. And the same perfect posture. But none wore LogiPol blue coveralls. I wasn’t surprised. Paula wouldn’t hang around after eating lunch, and the sort of lunch she favored didn’t take long to eat.
Tomorrow’s World Page 6