by Alex Scarrow
‘Hi Dad, it’s me.’
‘Ellie? Oh, for God’s sake! Ellie?’
‘Yes Dad.’
‘It’s been nearly a month, we were getting worried!’
‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry. It’s just…it’s these damn call-units are so expensive.’
Jacob Quin smiled sadly at her. ‘I know love, I’m sorry. I…we just worry.’
‘Well… look Dad, things are still okay. We’re both working in a burger bar now, the money’s much better than the old job. I’m serving on the counter, Jez does deliveries.’
‘Jez? Is that your friend you told me about last time?’
‘Yes….Jez. We’re cube-chiks.’
‘Cube-?’
‘We share a cube.’
‘Ah…okay. She nice?’
‘She’s great, Dad. Like a big sister. She’s looking after me really well.’
‘I’m glad,’ replied Jacob. ‘I’m so glad you have someone there with you.’
‘Yeah, we’re doing okay. Any news from Sean yet?’
‘Yes. Yes, we did hear from his Dad, he got a vidmail. He’s on the army planet and training hard. He asked after you. So we told his Dad to tell him that you were in New Haven and having a high old time there.’
High old time? Ellie smiled. She was doing okay.
‘You want to speak to your Mum? She’s right here.’
Maria Quin pushed Jacob out of the way. ‘Ellie? How are you girl?’
‘I’m good Mum, really good.’
‘We’re missing you Ellie. Please come home,’ she said. Ellie could hear a tremble in her voice.
‘I can’t Mum, not for a bit. It costs too much by shuttle. But I’m saving, so maybe soon, huh?’
‘I hope so. We all miss you. It feels like you’re on another planet.’
I might as well be. ‘How’s Ted, Shona?’
‘They’re great. I’ll shout them.’
‘No! Mum, no. I gotta hang up any second, I can’t wait for them. Look, give them both a kiss from me. And tell Ted I bought a Podkin.’
‘A what?’
‘He’ll know, there’s a cartoon series with them on.’
‘Oh, okay.’
‘I really miss you too, and I promise I’ll save as much as I can and hopefully I can come out and see you soon,’ said Ellie, realising that was a rash promise.
‘Please do my love,’ said Maria.
‘Okay, I have to go Mum…this is costing.’
‘Yes dear, I understand.’
‘Love you.’
‘We love you too.’
Ellie watched the grainy vid-image of her parents waving frantically flicker and fade as she disconnected the call. It suddenly sounded very quiet inside the cube. Jez was on her shift and the toob was turned off for once. The only noises she could hear were the rumble of airborne traffic outside, the faint warble of a marshal’s siren bouncing off the tenement towers and the distant clacking of someone’s heels in the passageway beyond their cube door.
Not for the first time, she looked at the scuffed plastic walls of their little cube and felt like a podkin herself.
*
Jez gunned the throttle on her d-ped as she sped down the pedestrian walkway en route to her second delivery of four. This one still had just under five minutes on the delivery-promise timer. She had to deliver it to a habi-cube on the fifth floor of New Hampshire Tower.
Jez weaved around several clusters of pedestrians who made little or no effort to move aside for her.
‘Yeah, thanks a freg,’ she shouted out as she whizzed past, flipping a finger at them.
New Hampshire Tower lay dead ahead, a bronze coloured cone that shimmered in the late afternoon haze. She noticed there were several ramps up to a raised pedestrian plaza, approximately twelve stories up.
Take the ramp up, and an elevator down to the fifth…quickest way.
She leant to her left, swung off the crowded ground-level street and took the ramp upwards. The d-ped whined with a higher pitch at the upward incline. Jez cursed the StarBreaks mechanic for equipping her d-ped with a duff thruster unit.
As she climbed upwards along the ramp, by-passing a grossly overweight couple that were wheezing and puffing from the exertion, she cast a glance outwards across the urban carpet sliding away below her. She looked for her next delivery location; Law Marshall Precinct 76. Jez quickly spotted the rotating blue holographic sign, a shield, but couldn’t see the squat precinct building itself. She checked the display on the saddle between her legs; the third order still had twelve minutes on it.
More than enough time.
As she drew up towards the plaza above her, she cast a glance to the left at the bronze semi-reflective portholes whipping past her. She loved snatching a glimpse into other people’s cubes. As each porthole passed, she caught a momentary snapshot of other private lives; a young buck standing naked in his bedroom, staring out. The next window…a family with young children, all of them staring listlessly at their toob; a man and woman fingers raised at each other, clearly in the middle of a row; another couple staring at the toob, and another, and another.
She turned to look where she was going, just as the d-ped came to the end of the rising ramp and rolled onto the plaza. It was just like any other mid-level pedestrian platform; a few shops, a fast food joint, milling people and more importantly, entrances to the tenement towers that surrounded it. She spotted the New Hampshire entrance and weaved across the plaza towards it.
As she drove into the entrance she spotted a sign on the wall forbidding the use of d-peds and other micro-vehicles inside.
‘Yeah, right,’ she muttered as she rolled inside towards a row of lifts within the foyer. She hit one of the lift’s buttons and then checked the saddle display once more.
Three minutes and fifty-five seconds.
Loads of time.
She looked up when she heard the ping, only to see a Law Marshal coming out.
‘Hey! Take that outside, before I impound it,’ he said gruffly.
Jez cursed under her breath. The chances of running into a marshal in the street were pretty damned low, let alone one actually bothering to visit a tenement tower. She spun the bike round and prepared to take it out.
‘Walk it out!’ the marshal called after her.
Jez slid off the saddle and wheeled it outside, muttering through gritted teeth as she did so. She leaned the d-ped against the wall and then opened the warm-box to pull out the order.
‘Hey, marshal guy!’ she called out as the Law Marshal emerged from the entrance beside her. ‘Could you watch this for a minute?’
He turned towards her and walked over. ‘A minute you say?’
‘That’s it. I’ll be right up.’
‘Sure yeah, alright then,’ he said nodding.
Jez slapped his arm, ‘thanks.’
‘Hey chik, want me to wax it for you too?’
Jez stopped, realising there was a hint of irony in his voice. ‘You’re not actually going to watch it, are you?’
‘What do you think?’ he said shaking his head and laughing as he turned to walk away.
‘Well can you just hang around the plaza for a minute? Go get a doughnut or something,’ she called out after him.
The marshal looked sternly back at her over his shoulder for a moment before proceeding on his way.
With one last, hasty look around, Jez took the StarBreaks order inside, ran across the foyer to the lifts and dived into the first one that arrived. She jabbed at the fifth floor button and cursed with frustration as it slowly rumbled downwards. The doors eventually slid open and she ran out into a passageway lined with the numbered oval doors of habi-cubes.
Number 157 was towards the other end. Of course it was. She set off at a sprint, counting down the last minute in her head as she did so. She reached the habi-cube as she hit the last twenty seconds and pressed her palm against the door-chime.
As she counted down the last ten she heard some movement from
inside and finally the door hissed open.
‘Your StarBreaks order, ma’am,’ said Jez breathlessly.
The woman standing in the doorway looked at the order with an expression of disdain. ‘You’re late. I’m not paying for that.’
‘No. Actually, I’m not. I’m exactly on time. To within five seconds in fact,’ replied Jez, her face stiffening with irritation.
‘It’s late I tell you. I timed this order on my own clock. And it says you’re late.’
Yeah, like hell you did.
‘Well according to my clock it’s on time ma’am, and therefore a refund doesn’t apply.’
The woman reached out and grabbed the order. ‘Fregg it, I’ll have it anyway. But I won’t be using StarBreaks anymore.’
Jez tried to contain her disappointment. ‘No?’
‘No,’ she replied. ‘You took far too long.’
She sighed. ‘Just to be clear…you really won’t call StarBreaks again?’
‘No! Never!’
Jez smiled. Good. ‘In that case, I hope you choke on it you miserable, ugly, fat mother-freggin’ bitch.’
The woman’s eyes widened.
‘That’s right. Enjoy eating that crap. You really wouldn’t want to know what goes into it, but I’ll tell you this for nothing…I spat in it, so did the food-order chef, and several of the other girls in the back kitchen. Enjoy.’
Jez emerged from New Hampshire running as fast as she could. By her calculation she was going to have to make up some time for the next delivery to the Law Marshal’s precinct building.
Relieved to see it still resting against the wall, she jumped astride the d-ped and pushed the joystick down.
Nothing happened.
She tried again, but the thruster didn’t even offer its trademark throaty cough. She turned round in her saddle to give the damned thing a well-deserved slap, only to find the propulsion unit was gone. ‘Ahh, what the fuggin-shizt! I don’t believe it!
Somebody had lifted it.
She looked around for the marshal she’d spoken to earlier. Nowhere to be seen of course. She checked her saddle display again. She still had five minutes left on the next order and twelve on the final one.
If she missed on both of those Noah would chew her out big time. Thrusters were cheap enough, but losing a big order to the local Law Marshal precinct - and those boys in there really enjoyed their fast food - would mean losing a lot of repeat business.
She had no choice.
‘I …I…I…UGHH!!!!’ Jez growled with frustration, smacking her fist against the wall several times, climbed off, went round the back and detached the warm-box. Then she unclipped the saddle display. Carrying the box under one arm and holding the display in her other hand, she jogged across the plaza towards the ramp she had come up only minutes earlier, and began to make her way down to street level.
She reached the street with only four minutes left on the next order and carried on jogging as best she could between the milling pedestrians, anxiously glancing at the display every few seconds.
The Law Marshal building was only two or three hundred yards down the street on the right. As she weaved in and out of the crowd, she caught the occasional glance of the rotating blue holographic display between the flitting aircars and rumbling skyhounds descending down to street level to drop off and pick up.
She looked down once more at the display…three minutes.
And then all of a sudden, she was flat on her face, the warm-box skittering across the plastimac pavement, kicked around accidentally several times by the passing forest of legs.
‘Oh for f-….what now?!’ Jez howled with frustration.
She looked around to see what she had tripped over. It was a construction jimp. It cowered guiltily on the ground surrounded by a ring of marking tape clearly warning passersby of ‘maintenance work in progress’. It watched her warily, its two all-black eyes nervously darting one way then the other in a face with no nose and a slit for a mouth. Above its eyes, on the forehead, Jez could see the manufacturer’s logo ‘GenIndo’ in a dark blue pigment that stood out crisply from the jimp’s pale corn-yellow skin tone.
Jez angrily made a move towards the creature, raising one leg to deliver a swift, hard kick. As she did so, it curled its four arms around its head and curled into a vaguely foetal position. Jez hesitated. She knew Ellie felt sorry for these pathetic automatons. She hated the way people in the city casually lashed out at them for little or no reason, often just for laughs. Ellie said she thought that was because people like to kick at something they considered to be lower down the pecking order than their selves; jimps fulfilled that role nicely. Jez lowered her foot to the floor. Maybe Crazy-Ellie was right. Maybe these poor little freaks had a tough enough time as it was, without her adding to it.
Jez nodded at the creature, and muttered a chastened ‘sorry’ before dusting herself off and retrieving the warm-box that had been kicked to the side of the street. She cast one more glance back at the creature. It had resumed its task of digging an access hole in the ground to some junction box or other. Jez was bemused by Ellie’s attitude towards jimps. Being a farm-chik she was probably unused to being around them, not really aware that they were little more than genetically-engineered construction tools….organic robots.
She shook her head. Ellie was a funny girl sometimes.
Two minutes left on the order. If she picked up the pace and this time kept an eye on the damned street ahead, she calculated she might just about make it in time.
She barged her way through a tight knot of people waiting patiently to squeeze through a narrow bottleneck in the street, receiving a salvo of curses in return. Finally pushing herself out through the other side and disentangling herself from them, she could see the precinct building directly ahead of her. It was a low box-shaped, dirty, plasteel structure squatting in the shadows of a tower either side and a pedestrian plaza some fifty feet above it. Hidden from the filtered afternoon sun in this permanent semi-darkness, it looked like a forgotten box-shaped toadstool living at the base of some giant trees.
She redoubled her flagging pace, her breath rasping and coarse from the exertion of her four and a half minute sprint down from the New Hampshire tower. Last time she had been this out of breath the man trapped beneath her had begged her to let him go.
Her feet pounded the pavement with the determined rhythmic clack of her platform boots.
She threw one more, hasty glance at the display…it was counting down the last minute.
Come on, you lazy thigh-slapper!
She picked up the speed once more, closing the final hundred yards with an athletic sprint that drew a passing glance of curiosity from the shuffling pedestrians she swept by.
She took the three steps leading up to the building’s entrance at a leap and burst inside through plastic-flap draft excluders that swung in noisily, slapping and scraping across the grimy vinyl floor as Jez collapsed across several orange bucket-seats opposite the entrance.
The marshal standing behind the glass security-screen above the counter recoiled in shock at her explosive entrance.
‘What the…?’ his voice crackled over the speakers on Jez’s side of the screen.
Jez bent over double, fighting for breath for a moment before pulling the battered and dented warm-box out from under her arm. She opened it wordlessly and presented it towards the officer behind the screen.
He looked at the churned-up mess inside, lit by the flickering blue tube light above the counter. He wrinkled his nose. ‘And this is?’
Jez took another moment to catch her breath before offering up a reply. ‘Four Double-slab StarGurters, a Star-Proti-beef Rib salad, five orders of StarCarboCurls, and three white coffees.’
The marshal studied the contents in silence, then finally shook his head. ‘Uhh…not any more it isn’t.’
OMNIPEDIA:
[Human Universe open source digital encyclopedia]
Article: Ellie Quin > Myths from New Haven
The story of Ellie Quin, being so poorly documented, is predictably confused by many myths and fictions that have grown and evolved over the centuries. They serve to drown out what we really know about her with tales we would perhaps like to believe.
So let’s have a look at some of the more established myths.
One of the earliest to come out of New Haven not many years after Ellie’s death was that of the alien fortune teller. For many people, this myth expanded and became folklore. The myth changed over generations, mutating into various different versions, in some cases becoming the cornerstone of some minor cult-like faiths. One has to dig deep though to find the original tale.
The original tale goes something like this;- that during the period of time Ellie Quin stayed in this long gone city, she visited a fortune teller, an alien. It was a member of the now extinct species referred to back then as a Boojam. The myth relates how the alien foretold her future in precise detail. That looking only into her eyes, it could foresee the enormity of her destiny, what awaited her and what awaited all of mankind, and then proceeded to explain this to her. So it is said, from that moment on, she was a woman with a mission, with an understanding of what she had to do, and most importantly, a woman with certain knowledge that she would one day have to give her life to save humanity.
It is tempting to believe that the fascinating story of Ellie Quin’s life was somehow authored by her foreknowledge of the destiny that awaited her; that every decision she made in her tragically short life was intentional, driven by what she knew lay ahead. Driven by what she knew she had to do.
Another popular myth that emerged from the city in the years after The Event was the Crusade Myth. The myth tells how she led a crusade through those ancient city streets, a crusade that united the poor, the disenfranchised, the ill and the infirm against the greedy corporations and the money-makers who ensured that the people of Harpers Reach were anchored to servitude by poverty and debt.
A third story tells of how, in the short period of time that she lived in the city, Ellie Quin amassed a fortune by setting up and running a business empire that spanned the planet. That she ruled the world for a few short years, setting to right all the evil that she found in the two cities. The tale goes on to tell how she grew weary of her fabulous wealth and power and left Harpers Reach for the wilderness and anonymity of space to discover her greater destiny.