The Last Place to Stand

by Redshaw, Aaron K.

  The Last Place to Stand

  Aaron K. Redshaw

  The Last Place to Stand

  Copyright © 2013 by Aaron K. Redshaw

  Smashwords Edition

  All rights reserved

  Scripture quotations are taken from the Holy Bible, New Living Translation, copyright ©1996, 2004, 2007 by Tyndale House Foundation. Used by permission of Tyndale House Publishers, Inc., Carol Stream, Illinois 60188. All rights reserved.

  This is a work of fiction. All the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  Cover design by The Cover Collection (http://www.thecovercollection.com)

  Dedication: For those searching for a place to stand

  Chapter 1

  X213 thought she would feel better in the morning, but the jittery feeling and the nausea continued. Unsteady, and somewhat sick to her stomach, she rolled out of bed and proceeded to sterilize herself. She began to feel cleaner already when the feeds began: today’s news, communications from friends, some feeds from work, studies about new uses for technology. This part of the day was easy. Her chip would catch all the pertinent info, process it and store the most valuable data that would apply to her.

  After she was done, she went to the medicine cabinet and pulled out her meds. Even as she did so, her hands shook. She wished she could get rid of that, but it didn't seem to be getting any better. There were so many pills to take these days. At the medicine cabinet, a tingle announced that more feeds were coming in. More information. Her chip, which had been receiving information all along, started flashing important notices for work. Summaries from the day before, new product announcements, due dates for new products. She saw these lists as though they were right in front of her eyes, yet her surroundings were still clearly visible.

  This was one of the many improvements newer technology could afford, but she remembered after the surgery, several months back, being told the feeds would take some getting used to. Not everyone had the new chip, but it was getting more common all the time. Current statistics were that 93% now had the feed technology. This was expected to reach nearly 100% by the end of the month as the old chips were being phased out. Of course the datachip had been implanted for everyone, but this one was more interactive, a clear upgrade, and could receive new information via the airwaves. Something the old datachips couldn't do.

  Sitting down to eat her breakfast, she received a notice from Techcorp that they were doing some much needed upgrades to the security system and she should come in fifteen minutes later to work. Fifteen more minutes, maybe now she would have time to catch up on some of the requests she had been behind in processing. She finished her breakfast and began to focus on work in earnest.

  Her job was to process requests to use the facilities of the company to create new technology that someone else had invented, then to schedule facility usage and help them with broadcasting that data of newly available technology to others. There were many requests, but only about .018 percent of those she received were ever approved. Techcorp was extremely expensive and elite, created by the government originally for research and practical applicability of new technologies. It had only recently started opening its doors to the general public.

  Another notice: She was now to report to work immediately. By the time stamp, she would be at least eight minutes late. She should have expected this. The first message was for all employees, but she was at a higher level of responsibility than most. She had to move out now.

  Putting on a sweater, she stepped into her pod, set the destination for work, and continued to process new requests as the automated pod raced down the road. Two minutes thirty-two seconds later she arrived. Techcorp stood looming as the largest structure in the city. It should be, much of society was built on its technology.

  She took three lifts and one tube before arriving at floor 398, section D. She walked up to her desk. So much for the passive work, now it was time for full immersion. Still receiving feeds through the airwaves, she plugged the chip imbedded in the side of her head, behind one ear, into a thin cable. Once the connection was made, images and data began to flow at a tremendous rate. Each submitted document by individuals was processed and a summary of only the most important aspects was shown to her. Her job was to make the decisions for whether each request was to be denied, or sent to her superior. She had to make four such decisions per second in order to make her quota. Before the chip, it would take seconds to make a decision. The progress of technology certainly was amazing. Now her mind’s raw input and output was accessed directly.

  While doing this, she was also sending out notices to those individuals or companies that had applied, letting them know the status of their request. This was an outgoing feed which could be sent with little input from her. Just tweak a form letter here or there as needed. At times quick notices from her superiors would prompt her for her attention and she would pay extra attention to these.

  A tone rang over the feed signaling that it was time for a break. Now she could rest. When she got up to get a cup of coffee, she switched on the newsfeeds again.

  She stood with a cup of coffee in her hand next to several other employees, but no one talked to each other. She was busy sending messages to friends through the feed link, while she caught up on news developments. This all occurred faster than anyone could ever talk, at the speed of thought.

  “Y578, are you there?” she sent.

  “Hi, X213,” Y sent back.

  “On coffee break yet?” said X.

  “Sure, I'm walking to the restroom. Hey, I had the best gathering last night. Some guys from Australia crashed the party, I think they hacked in. It was loud but a blast. I am so glad I got the upgrade. My virtual gatherings are so much more real now. I could even smell the cologne one guy wore.”

  “Great, Y,” X213 sent back. Just then she heard the familiar tone indicating the end of break. “Gotta go, talk to you later?”

  “Sure.”

  Chapter 2

  He didn't know where he was. The last he remembered, he was doing his job, but now here he was, but where was that? He looked around at his surroundings. It looked and smelled like it must be a refuse dump. All kinds of loud banging, and the sound of heavy machines all around him. No one seemed to notice he was lying there. He looked down at his hands and saw blood. Where was that coming from? He touched the side of his head, but there was no chip. No chip! How then could he keep the flow of information? A panic started to rise up in him. Then as if a switch had been flipped, he began to shake. This was what happened last time. He could feel more blood, but from somewhere else. It was coming from his eyes now. He couldn’t see. The shaking got worse and then he again blacked out. His body relaxed.

  A couple of minutes later, two men took his body and carried it a little ways away so that he was not in the way of their dump truck. They left him there, another Burned Out. This used to be extremely rare, but they had noticed it occurring with more regularity lately. They thought this to themselves, but not out loud. Never out loud. Meanwhile, they received more notices of work to be done.

  Chapter 3

  At night a small family, a husband, wife, two sons, and one daughter were hiding in their own house. The father knew it was just a matter of time before they were caught, but they were still living in hope. The father, a small man with dark brown hair and a pair of glasses, sat in a snug corner of the house in a wooden chair with the rest of the family gathered around him. The glasses could have gotten him into trouble if anyone saw him using them. Glasses were low tech and there were far better solutions, not only to nearsightedness, but now even to sig
ht as a means of navigation at all. He handed his oldest son a book.

  The son took the book with solemnity, opened it to the bookmark, and began to read. “If I could speak all the languages of earth and of angels, but didn’t love others, I would only be a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. If I had the gift of prophecy, and if I understood all of God’s secret plans and possessed all knowledge, and if I had such faith that I could move mountains, but didn’t love others, I would be nothing. If I gave everything I have to the poor and even sacrificed my body. . .” Bang!

  They turned immediately toward the door, but the small personalized tank came through the wall. The man rode atop with guns trained on them. “You must be detained temporarily, please come with me,” the man said.

  The father turned to grab a hidden stunner he kept behind the chair. He knew this was foolish, but he was desperate. Before he had even raised the stunner, the tank fired its own stunning blast. The whole family fell limp.

  The man in the small tank started sending, “Let the record show that the man was reaching for a stunner when we shot back in self-defense. They will be brought back for realignment.” Two robotic arms reached out of the tank to pick up the limp bodies and carry them back. Before the last body was loaded up, there was another explosion and a loud screeching sound. The man in the tank turned around.

  As he began turning the turret to aim his stunner, he heard a voice yell out, “Not today, you won't.” There was a blinding flash. He tried to get the tank to move, but that last shot must have been a disabling device. It wouldn’t budge. There was another blast and the man in the tank fell limp.

  Six or seven people, dressed in dark loose clothing, disengaged the bodies from the arms of the tank and personally carried them away into the night.

  Chapter 4

  As she was delivered to her door by the pod, X213 felt physically tired, but her mind was still racing. She called her friends and they chatted while she was getting dinner ready. At the same time she read the personalized messages that had accumulated while she had been working. She was used to doing all of these things simultaneously. When she got run down due to the mental stress, she took one of the pills she had been prescribed and she started to feel a lift. That was what that particular medicine was for. “This is just the brain adjusting to the extra sensory input. It will get easier over time,” her doctor had said. Her doctor was not flesh and blood, but a computer interface accessed through the feed. This way she did not need to go anywhere to get a diagnosis. Time wasted was a waste to society.

  “What if I do not get used to it?” she asked him.

  “There have been no significant studies showing the interface to cause permanent damage to normal brain functions,” the doctor had stated. She heard the same exact phrase the day she had the interface installed.

  She called Y5728 back. “What are you up to?”

  “Not much,” Y replied. “I am having a virtual get together with a few friends in an hour though. Hey, want to watch a quick vid before they get here?”

  “No thanks,” X213 said, “I think I'll stay in tonight.”

  “Oh, come on. It'll be fun. I have one I've been wanting to watch since yesterday, but it expires tomorrow.”

  “Well, alright,” said X to Y5728. Soon she joined her friend virtually in her living room and they put in the vid. They both watched this while receiving other feeds and messages from friends. The vid, using direct input, took a little over 10 minutes, however it seems like at least three hours, much the way a dream that is only a few seconds long may seem like hours.

  Just as the credits were rolling, they both received a message from T42-18. “Hey guys, how are you doing? I isolated your signals and discovered you were both hanging together. What's up?” An image of him appeared, but instead of his actual image, he chose a hairy gorilla. They both laughed.

  “Want something to eat?” said Y.

  “Please,” T said. “These bananas are getting old.” He held up a banana, half squashed. “I know I can't actually get any nutrition out of this food, being sent over the feed, but I can taste it, smell it, and sometimes that actually fools my mind into thinking I'm not hungry for hours.”

  “That can't be good,” said X.

  “Yeah,” Y chimed in, “You need to take better care of yourself. What do you have to eat in the house?”

  “Eat? Is that what people do when they go home at night?”

  “I recommend it,” said X, “it makes you feel so much better. I mean sim food is great for what it is, but it's not really the same thing.”

  “Is that why every couple of days I just fall down and quit functioning unless I eat a case of spam? I thought I just needed more coffee.” At this, his virtual self changed into a Chihuahua, shaking like a leaf with a cup of coffee in each paw.

  Y turned to X and said, “I'd better go, my party is scheduled to arrive in 57 seconds. I still need to make sure they all have seats, even if they will all be virtual.”

  “I’d better go too,” said T42-18, “I have other people to pester. See ya!”

  From the moment X213 walked into her apartment to now, about 12 minutes had gone by, and 10 of that was just the sim. The rest of the night was very similar, different people, different events. Messages, feeds, news, entertainment. She barely had time to eat with it all. Into the night she bounced from one feed to another until she couldn’t focus anymore.

  As she headed for bed, she put on the subliminal programming feed which assured her that her life would be more fulfilled if she would live in the new, better world of technological advances and savor all of the progress being made. After all, technology is the highest achievement of man.

  Chapter 5

  Morning light began to fill up the valley. There were no trees and no grass. The landscape was filled with recycling and refuse dumps in profusion, mostly piled high with electronics that had either gone bad or been outdated. Everything was a mixture of dull gray and shiny gray with some reflective surfaces. The skyline had a brilliant red hue coming from the waste gasses escaping old products. Red reflected in buildings and machines busy at work, and there were many busy machines. For one tenant this society held fast to was that if a task can be done by a machine, it ought to be. So robotic units outnumbered humans.

  On the outskirts of one of the garbage heaps, some dark shapes began to move. One coughed, “Where are we?”

  “At Refuse station 216,” said a voice that had just awoken as well. It was a man with dark skin, wearing what looked like a scarf wrapped around his head and face. He also wore loose fitting clothes, dark gray or brown. It was hard to tell in the early morning.

  “What happened back there?” asked the first man. “I feel like I was beat up pretty badly.”

  “You were stunned. They planned to have you refitted. That means they would have put a chip in your head that would limit your possible responses. You would have essentially lost free will.”

  “I didn't know they could do that yet.”

  “It's experimental at this point, but that wouldn't stop them from making you part of their new program. You're sore because of the stunning and also because we had to carry you for quite some time while trying to avoid them. I don't think we were always gentle with you or your family. We were trying to save you back there.” The man looked a little embarrassed for a second, “You did want saving, didn't you? I mean, they wouldn't have killed you, but—”

  “Yes, absolutely,” he said. “We have been living in fear of discovery for a long time. We have not always held to the tenets laid down by the leaders of the city.” He coughed again, “What are you called?”

  “Samuel,” he said.

  “You use a name, like in the old days, rather than an ID signature?”

  “As do you,” said Samuel.

  “How did you know that?”

  Samuel stood up and scanned the valley. “You may have been hiding from the authorities, who keep a general eye
on things, but we have been seeking specifically for people like you for some time. We're pretty good at reading the signs, and we've been watching you ever since we were suspicious.”

  “My name then, is Odysseus,” he said, still laying down on one side. “It's from an old story.”

  “Yes,” Samuel said. “The master mariner and hero of the Trojan war. A good choice.”

  “And your name,” said Odysseus, “comes from the Bible, doesn't it?”

  “That's right,” Samuel said. “That would make us both readers, rather than only consumers of information. And that makes us prime targets for realignment. Or as I said, perfect candidates for their new refitting program.” Samuel squatted down beside Odysseus and his gaze fell near his right ear. “So what did you do to your chip? It looks like you still have it.”

  “Ah, yes. If I had taken it out completely I’m sure I would have been captured. The whole city is slated for the new equipment by the end of the year. With the new system, they would be able to monitor us directly through the new feed technology. We wouldn't be able to hide anything. So I just filed down the connectors so they would not even get an 'urgent update' signal from my chip.”

  “Good idea,” said Samuel. “Why did you do it though?”

  Odysseus scratched his chin, “It wasn't that it was a bad thing having access to the database. I mean, it made some things more convenient, but it was what it did to my mind that bothered me.”

  “Yes,” said Samuel. “As you can see, I've removed mine entirely. Did you get effects of having the chip, like memory dulling?”

  “That's right. I remember once trying to recall my times tables so that I could figure the area of my floor and realizing that unless I got it from the chip, I couldn't do it. I had relied on the chip to the point that my own memory grew almost useless.”