“Don’t need no plumbing today, Skeet.” The man at the podium is communicating with a worker named Ansel Skeeterman down in front whose skill set only lists plumbing-related services. The name hanging over the man at the podium reads D. Pike. His title is listed as Chief Foreman. He scans the room again, processing titles and skills off the myriad floating resumes.
A yellow button flashes in the corner of my goggles’ view screen and, when I focus on selecting it, I hear the crackle of a connection being made.
“’Bout time you checked in.” Rixon’s voice fills my head in stereo sound. “What’s the point of me helping you if you never turn your coms on? Now listen. Don’t get picked.”
“What?” I say.
“Don’t. Get. Picked.” Rixon’s voice is a dagger, each word a distinct jab. “We want you staying with the leftovers. I never wanted you to get this far in. Can you see your buddy?”
I scan the room for Carson. It’s harder than I’d expect. At 6’3” I’m usually one of the taller heads in a given room, but not here. Either the human race has evolved to be a lot taller in last hundred years or a bunch of these workers have had body augmentation to make themselves bigger. Quite a few of the workers nearby dwarf me by comparison. Carson, who might be 5’9” on a good day, is especially hard to spot in this crowd.
“Tell him to get his eyes on,” Rixon says.
As if on cue, the foreman points to a space below his podium. “You. Red.” He jerks his thumb toward the doors.
I can just make out the top of Carson’s head, moving toward the vehicles. True to his competitive nature, he’s made his way right to the front, and despite the fact that he’s got a fake name and his meta resume merely reads “General Labor” he’s gotten himself picked. I try to attract his attention by waving at him. His goggles are dangling around his neck and he’s got his hardhat under one arm. He looks back when he makes it up the steps near the doors, clearly looking for me, but I’m forced to stop my waving because it has attracted the notice of the foreman.
“Shit,” I mutter.
“What are you doing?” Rixon asks.
I keep still and avoid eye contact with the foreman. “What do we do about Carson?” I whisper.
“Hey, keep talking, He’s processing your resume,” Rixon replies. “Talk loud. Flail around a little bit. Yell something.”
“Yell what?”
“Anything.”
“YO!” I shout, toward no one in particular and throw out a few nonsensical hand gestures. “What’s up, ya’ll?”
A few of the faces around me turn to look. The foreman, who had been studying me, gives a slight shake of his head and moves on. He makes a few more selections, including Greg from the hallway, but then concludes, “That’s it for today.” A collective groan goes up from the remaining crowd. “I’ll be taking on about thirty more general laborers tomorrow. Get here early.”
Carson has finally spotted me due to my shouting, but he’s already standing inside the vehicle at the door, having been pushed forward by the latest surge of lucky selectees. He lifts a hand, asking what he should do, and I tap the goggles on my face. But by the time he get the goggles on, it’s too late. The doors of the pod he’s in slide shut and the vehicle rockets upward on a track and out of sight.
A moment later I get the ping in my goggles and Carson’s voice comes through. “Hey, what happened to you? I lost you back there.”
“All right, you two,” Rixon’s voice interrupts. “Way to complicate things on day one. Carson, I’m patching you through to Eon. He’s got experience working the high lifts. Looks like you’ve got a day of hard work ahead of you. Might play to our advantage though if we can keep you alive. Expand our contacts into the regular day workers. Travers, you stay with the reject pile. That’s right where we want you.”
“You don’t have to sound so happy about it,” I reply.
I can almost hear the smirk in Rixon’s voice. “You want to hunt riffraff, you gotta be riffraff.”
“Where do I go now?” I ask.
“Follow the crowd. Try to look disappointed, but keep your eyes open. Let’s see where this day takes you.”
It’s clear after a few minutes why my random outburst in the auditorium got me disqualified from selection. A lot of the ‘rejects’ around me are likewise prone to fits of conversation with nonexistent persons. It seems that shouting and gesturing to thin air are fairly common behaviors with this group, but more so with the most derelict of the bunch. The benefit is that whenever I need to ask Rixon for guidance, no one pays much attention.
The exodus from the auditorium happens at a more relaxed pace than the press to get in. Many individuals have taken the time to chit chat with fellow applicants. A small contingent of more determined laborers have rushed off to the next loading platform where one of the other foremen is rumored to take longer to make selections, but for the most part, those rejected from this morning’s activities resign themselves to the day off.
I meander out the side door and along the docks, taking in the sights and sounds of the space elevator and all of its related industries. The elevator itself is more than just a lift to the upper atmosphere, it hosts multiple platforms and build facilities, and has tracks that run out of them and up the structure. I pause at a tourist guidepost and watch the meta video explaining the importance of the structure and how it functions.
The Skylift space elevator is a multi-national facility where various civilian companies can lease hangar or production spaces and use the carbon nano-tube tethers to ferry their products up into space. The New Space Coast is not about the roaring rockets of my era hoisting heavy spacecraft aloft. There are no launch pads on the surface. Instead, each vessel is manufactured in modular sub-assemblies, run up the elevator tether in small pieces via cars called climbers, and assembled in space where the weight of the completed structure is no longer a factor.
The real marvel of the space elevator is not so much what it does, but that it has been able to be built at all. The engineering feats involved in getting the structure assembled, counterweighted in orbit, and operable by so many different entities, makes its title as a man-made wonder of the world indisputable. The advanced carbon nano-tube technology is the star of the show, since nano-tubes comprise the main elevator tethers themselves, but the structure at the surface and in space are impressive too. Even strolling around the base of it, I’m able to witness the advances in engineering. Some of the pilings anchoring the elevator extend miles out into the Gulf, making the overall footprint of the structure enormous.
Walking along one of the piers underneath the Skylift, I notice lights beneath the surface and realize it’s a hallway with people walking inside it. The pedestrians seem intent on their destinations and oblivious to the fish and other sea life swimming past. They’ve taken their marvel for granted.
I don’t make it much farther down the pier before a giant of a security guard accosts me.
“If you don’t have a work assignment, you have to clear out.” The huge woman is reading the air above my head. She looks like she was born in a gym and weaned on protein and steroids. Whatever information she sees above my head clearly tells her that I’ve not been employed today. “Next shuttle back leaves in fifteen.” She gestures toward a walkway that leads to where the buses had dropped us off. I nod and head that direction under her watchful scrutiny.
So far, I haven’t made much progress toward locating any Eternals or determining where they might come ashore with Mym, but the fact that there are even tunnels underwater on this structure makes my job that much harder. It’s possible the submarine may not even have to surface to dock here. There could be elements to this facility miles out into the harbor for all I know. Simply searching docks that would fit a sub is not a good enough plan. I definitely need to make contact.
I don’t know much about the Eternals’ plan, but considering the fact that they’re sailing across the Atlantic and coming here to Port Nyongo, I can make the
logical assumption that it has something to do with this space elevator. There are plenty of places to hide a submarine, so taking it to the world’s tallest structure is hardly the most subtle of options. I can only wonder how any of it fits in with their kidnapping of Mym and their plans for Doctor Quickly’s equipment.
The crowd around the bus stop is thinner now and more heavily dominated by rough-looking characters. I pass under a catwalk where more upscale citizens are being shuttled along a moving walkway. The meta signs point the way to platforms farther up the elevator that offer restaurants with scenic views of the harbor. Down on the ground floor the security presence is heavy, ensuring that persons without the right meta credentials won’t be bothering the other clientele.
The security force looks largely trans-human, given away by their tight shirts and super-sized muscles. Some of them boast enhanced height, and a few even have synthetic appendages or armor plating. I wouldn’t want to scrap with a single one of them. The rest of the workers must feel the same way, because everyone is on their best behavior.
I shuffle aboard a bus with the rest of the unemployed and we are dumped off at a few locations downtown. The majority of rejected workers exit at Tarpon Station, so I follow them off and make my way down the hill to a local park where they’re congregating. My presence as a newcomer goes largely uncommented on, though I do get a few suspicious glances. I try to imagine an angle to use to approach the clumps of workers, but it feels like a childhood dance, my ten-year-old self attempting to find a chink in the clusters of giggling grade school girls.
It’s only after ineffectively milling around the park for about fifteen minutes that I spot Sonia Davis, the crazed woman from the corridor at the work platform. She’s lost her air pack, but the loose oxygen hose is still tangled in her hair. She’s standing in an open patch of sunlight, gesturing toward the sky and talking to herself. Curious, I wander closer. She makes a few more wild gesticulations, then attempts to stride forward across the grass. She looks like she’s trudging through mud, each footstep deliberate and difficult. She shakes her head after a couple of steps, then backs up. She’s muttering at first, then starts to shout back and forth at herself.
“WE NEED TO GO BACK! We’ll fix it. Fix it.”
“No! They’re the ones who did this to us. They won’t help. Can’t help.”
Her face scrunches up and she wags a finger at the air. “They can. We saw it work on the others. They weren’t any better than us. We’re smarter than them. We should have been chosen.”
“They’ll just make it worse. We lost our job. No. My job. I don’t need any of you! I just need to get back to work.” She strides forward again, intent on gaining the sidewalk at the edge of the grass.
“You can’t go without us,” she declares. “And we’re. Not. Going.” With each word her pace slows. Her final step freezes in mid air, her foot hovering above the grass.
“Get off me!” she shouts. The struggle going on inside her is so great that she loses her balance and falls, crumpling to the grass.
The scene is familiar. Watching her fight with her own limbs, I can feel the soreness in my own muscles. The fight with my other self inside my head left me aching and drained both mentally and physically. This woman on the ground is waging the same war.
“You bitch!” She yells, fingers clenching grass and struggling to get back up. “See what you did? We need to be working. You’re the reason there’s no money left. It’s all your fault.” As she climbs to her feet, she notices me watching her. Her expression changes from angry to embarrassed and back to angry again.
“What? You never tripped before?”
“I fall down all the time. Had a bad one this morning,” I reply.
This seems to placate the woman slightly. “Well, don’t fall on me. I won’t help you none.”
“You mind if I ask you a question?”
“Already are, aren’t ya?”
I smile. “Clever. Look, I’m not trying to cause you any trouble or anything, but what happened to you?”
“Fuck off.”
I cross my arms. “I will in a minute, but I think that maybe . . . whatever’s happening to you, could be happening to me. Can you help me?”
“What are you playing at, Travers?” Rixon’s lazy voice comes in over the metaspace. “This crazy lady isn’t going to be docking any submarines anytime soon. You should be pumping the regular dockhands for information.”
“I’m working on something else. Give me a minute.”
Sonia squints at me. “What’s he saying to you?”
“Nothing,” I mutter, and slide the meta goggles down to my neck. “He’s not the problem.”
Sonia lifts her chin and studies my forehead. “How many you got in there?”
“When they try to take over, who is it you’re fighting with?”
“That’s none of your business,” Sonia spits.
“It’s you, right? Another one of you, from a different time?”
Sonia scowls slightly, but doesn’t look away. “They conned you too, huh? Told you they could keep you working? Make you smarter? What was it you wanted?”
“I’m not sure if—”
“Told me I’d be a chief foreman. They told me I’d know the future. Be so smart that I’d never need an upgrade. Should’ve known better. You should’ve, too. My granddad always said there’s no cure for stupid.”
“Why did they recruit you? What was in it for them? Did you have to pay?”
“You think they’d get a single chit’s worth of cash out of South Dock? You must be from some glam neighborhood if you don’t know what it’s like round here.”
“They had to want something,” I say.
“They wanted me to listen,” she replies. “They said I’d just have to listen to a message from the future. Then do what it said.”
“What message?”
“Shut up!” she shouts, hands suddenly clamped to her head. “I wasn’t talking to you!” She teeters back and forth a few times. “What does he want?” she whispers. “Who is he?” She snarls a few times and shakes her head. She pounds on her skull with her palms, then spits once, as if to expel the voices. When she finally looks back up, her eyes are surprisingly clear. “Hey. You want to know? If you want to see, I’ll take you. Maybe they’ll listen to us—take the others away. But we have to go quick. I’ll be back soon and I can be a real bitch when I’m angry.”
She lunges forward and grabs my arm, shoving me toward the sidewalk. Once we reach the concrete, she releases my arm and lopes ahead, laughing. I hesitate briefly, but my curiosity outweighs my concern.
As I run to keep up, following her down the twisting park pathways, I slide the meta goggles back over my face. Rixon’s voice fills my head again. “This is on you, Travers. I’m not getting paid to clean up your murdered corpse. If this chick turns on you, you’d better be ready.”
“I thought you were supposed to be tough guys and back me up,” I reply. “You wanted me to make contacts, didn’t you? I’m making contacts.”
Rixon sighs into his microphone. “All right. I’m going to get my guns loaded, then I’m coming down there. If you’re dead by the time I get to you, it’s not my fault.”
Sonia pauses near a footbridge over a stream, looks both ways for anyone paying attention, then leaps into the gully below. When I get to the bridge, she is scurrying underneath it. She looks back once and gestures for me to follow, then vanishes out of sight. I ease myself gingerly down the embankment and climb under the footbridge after her. My work boots keep out most of the ankle high water, but I still get a bit soggy sloshing through the stream. Ducking under the concrete bridge, I locate the run-off pipe that Sonia has apparently climbed into. I can’t see her, but I can hear her clomping steps and occasional mutterings inside the corrugated pipe.
I frown at the dark opening and toss my hardhat to the stones outside, a clue for Rixon to follow if necessary. There aren’t a lot of dry stones in the creek bed, but I cl
imb up on top of one and look for something farther up the embankment that will make a decent anchor. I select a stone that is high enough that if I reappear it will keep me out of the water. I stuff the stone into my pocket, note the local time on my meta goggles, then step inside the pipe.
“Hurry,” Sonia calls back in a half whisper. “I don’t know when I might lose control of myself again.”
“Don’t worry,” I mutter. “I’m clearly losing my senses, too.” I duck lower and follow her into the darkness.
Chapter 16
“Time travel, like all travel, broadens your horizons. It also reaffirms your appreciation for modern plumbing.”-Journal of Dr. Harold Quickly, 1688
Port Nyongo, 2165
In my century, the name Florida and the word underground don’t commonly get used together. Florida is flat, and if you dig a hole very deep, eventually you’re going to hit water. That’s not to say there’s nothing interesting down there. You might hit a sinkhole. Near Jennings, Florida, there is a sinkhole so broad that it swallows an entire river.
The Floridan aquifer system channels various underground rivers beneath the entire state and supplies most of the major cities with their drinking water. The aquifer is an ecosystem all its own. If you happen to be a crayfish or an albino lobster, you might just hang out down there all the time. If you are a tall, human man who forgot to bring a scuba suit, the environment is less than ideal.
Some things have certainly changed in the century and a half I’ve skipped over. Technology has leapt ahead. I’m viewing this tunnel through digital meta goggles and a super-fancy space elevator looms outside. What hasn’t changed is that rainwater runoff pipes and underground waterways are dark and smelly. I’m sure there is some meta app I could be using to make the tunnels smell like rose petals, but I don’t mess with the settings.
Following Sonia through the labyrinth of pipes and caverns under Port Nyongo makes my skin twitchy. Each new splash in the darkness makes me think of alligators and pythons. Sonia clearly knows where she’s headed, but the odds of her leaving me here alone increase with each passing minute. She doesn’t seem to fear the wildlife, though she does stop us once as an electronic drone goes skimming down one of the perpendicular passages. She waits till the drone is out of sight before moving on.
In Times Like These: eBook Boxed Set: Books 1-3 Page 140