Exile: Arc

by Jack Lance

  It was a beautiful machine; a sleek, brown sports automobile with low back and modest spoil. At the front the bonnet curved over the brims leading to the seal-eyed lights.

  Responding to his biometric dna touch he opened the driver side door and slid into the wood and leather furnished interior, kicking up that newly refitted smell as he did.

  We can’t dawdle. We need to get out into the city as fast as possible, preferably without anyone here noticing.

  “Relax.” Bailey said, as if to himself. “They are all tucked up nice and cosy in bed.”

  “Are you addressing me, sire?” the inbuilt robo-consciousness within the car said in an electronically drowned male voice. “Where would you like to go?”

  “Err. Gen Colec, please?” Bailey said while wiggling his fingers.

  A search result was displayed in the windscreen opposite, with only one exact match for ‘Exile: Gen Colec’ reading his address and date of death.

  Date of death: 72551.281. That’s three days ago.

  Bailey frowned and said “They left him lying there for a day?”

  Place of residence: Apartment district E-19, Block K, Floor 18, 5-E.

  “Is that East Syndicate?” Bailey said, and was replied by the male voice of the cars navi-com.

  “Affirmative.” it said.

  “And how do I get there?” Bailey asked, realizing how ignorant he was of the lay of the city.

  “Would you like to take the upper or lower highways.” it said.

  “Err. Not the crystal highways. I don’t like those.” Bailey stammered, remembering that dizzying height.

  “Lower city highway route found.” it said, and the windscreen filled with a transparent overlay of the road, filling in half or unpainted signs and covering the road surface with lines for speed and etiquette. There was also a prominent red line bisected by arrows, indicating that this was the first route to take.

  “Manual or Auto drive?” it said

  Auto. Auto!

  “Err, manual I think.” Bailey said, and a green light came on beside the gear stick.

  His feet and hands found the right places and he took the car along the street. At the end he saw a group of men and women talking outside of a house and hoping that none of them were the Beldins or anybody related he speeded up on the junction and away along the road from the village.

  After taking the car around the road at the cavern wall he found a tunnel leading East and started on the first highway out into the city.

  The small highway ran over the cemented grounds in the tunnel and then raised up to the main motorway system that streamlined traffic through the districts. He took the car up onto them and drove between the top halves of apartment blocks bathed in the blue and white streetlamps from below.

  It was mostly dark however with very little electricity visible and only the odd window illuminated. He took the car through district after district, using broader tunnels cut only for those carriageways.

  This place was a science outpost once? I wonder what they’d think knowing their homes had been built upon countless times to house scum in these apartments. Well I guess its all part of the imperial council’s plan.

  It probably took longer than it would have done on the upper highways over the biosphere but Bailey was interested in the city. It seemed far quieter than he had expected and feared. There was an electric tension in the air, but he wondered now if it were coming only from himself.

  Maybe it won’t be so bad.

  A few districts out from the destination he saw a static flash in one of the back streets below and then a plume of flames roll up into view at the height of the motorway. He passed by it and into the next district, realizing that it must have been some sort of terrorist strike, or perhaps something drug related. Either way he had no interest in it and continued on to the district containing Gen Colec’s apartment.

  There was a strange activity coming from the streets ahead and the navigation arrows seemed to be pulling him toward it. As he journeyed through the dark apartment buildings and drew closer to the lights he found them to be spotlamps shining up to the ceiling and moving around to the thick beat of what he believed to be Spunker music.

  This is it. Here we can achieve miracles. Just do as I say and stay safe. Get into the apartment building as quick as you can.

  “Who the hell is this?” Bailey said as he indicated to pull off the highway, following the red arrow down a slip road to ground level. “You didn’t answer me?”

  Who I am? Who are you?

  “You’ll tell me.” Bailey smirked, as the car left the slip road and drove out into the darker highstreets.

  Following the guide he drove around and into the glare of the party that he now saw to comprise of a town square filled with jumping hooligans, some in cheap cars that they were wheel spinning or crashing into public property. He drove along a street just out of the way of it all, and by one of the huge floodlamp boxes.

  The guide brought him around onto a broad street and stopped before steps leading up to one of the larger apartment blocks.

  Bailey got out of the car, feeling the harsh blast of the music from the party, that was now still in sight just meters away. He was standing on one of many white boulevards bathed in the blue streetlamps and the pink from signs over the bars around the square nearby.

  He heard someone shout “Whoah! Fuckin’ nice wheels man! Whooo!”

  Looking in the direction he couldn’t see who had shouted it through the bright glare and the jumping mass of flesh.

  Park the thing and get inside. Quick!

  “Park?” Bailey said to the car, and the door pulled gently out of his hand and closed.

  “Parking in A17 Stable 3.” the drowned voice said on the outside of the car this time.

  It then pulled away on its own and drove along the street, by the party, and then turned along another road out of sight.

  You need to get out of here!

  Bailey then walked away from the steps, and along the street slightly so that he was in a better view of the violent partying. He stopped at a lamppost and leaned against it, and glanced casually around it at what was causing this voice so much distress.

  “I want to know.” Bailey said.

  I’ve brought you this far. Showered you with things this riff raff only ever dream about. I will explain all, but inside.

  “That’s all you had to say.” Bailey said and then walked back and up the flight of white stone steps to the doors.

  You will learn not to question me. It’s either work with me or join with the riff raff. You’ll work like a dog for chicken feed. And dogs can’t live on chicken feed.

  “Wise words.” Bailey said sarcastically as he entered and glanced at the robot guard that stood century.

  “Pass?” it said, and Bailey held up Gen Colec’s ID card that he had doctored with his own image earlier.

  There was no objection from the snake eyed droid and so Bailey strolled into the opaque lobby and waited.

  A holo plate for control appeared beside him, hovering over the worn red carpet. On it were the numbers of each floor to be chosen by touch.

  He tapped the floor required and below him a sheet of glass merged from the floor and began lifting him up through a tunnel in the ceiling. There was the distorted glow of antigravity at the edges that cradled him on his journey up and slightly along to be then lowered down onto another red carpet.

  The glass disappeared into the floor again, and Bailey found himself to be standing in a wide corridor at the back wall of the apartments. There were windows here looking down over what seemed to be a spaghetti junction, leading off in many directions to other tunnels and districts. There was a little traffic down there but little enough to remind him of how late it was getting.

  At the other side were a series of nicely carved doors, in an equally nice chocolate coloured stone wall. It had the mark of somewhere that had had a lot of money spent on it, with the intention of it lasting a long time
without maintenance.

  Bailey found the door to Colec’s apartment but as he stepped up to it Bailey felt a flush to his head and a dizziness that made him reach for a thick radiator on the wall.

  He tapped it gently before righting himself and stepping on through the corridor toward the door.

  Bailey pressed Colec’s home keycard to the magnetic plate of brass and the door clipped open slightly. A bright light from within spilled through the crack, and on opening it he found it to be from a harsh bulb on a tall pole.

  He heard a rasping snarl and through the blinding light fur and teeth and claws grew in size as something quite deadly jumped at him.

  Without any conscious thought but for an instinct fuelled by shock, Bailey found he had swung his foot up and booted it into the oncoming face of the beast.

  He stumbled back slightly into the corridor as the dog, or was it a cat, flopped onto its back and twitched its legs through its carpet of fur.

  Bailey seeing this all now twisted away holding a hand over his mouth to muffle any cry he might make. He looked at it and crouched toward it, feeling slightly sorry for the thing, since he had rendered it unconscious.

  A Romano fighting dog, and a big one. Maneaters. Colec must have expected us, or someone. There’s something to find here, no doubt.

  Bailey reached to touch its fur but as the thing snarled out in its sleep he pulled his hand away.

  Drag it inside. Tie it’s mouth to something with wire.

  Bailey, still somewhat shocked and on the verge of crying pulled the knee high lump of fur and teeth into the landing and up a step onto the wood floor of Colec’s front room.

  Switching off the bright lamp near the front door, he closed it then began scanning over the dark, dusty interior of the place. There was an extractor fan in the wall slowly turning and an old clock ticking each second away. The man, Colec seemed like quite a gentle soul from his antique décor, and love of old fashioned books.

  Bailey walked around the half dead dog and toward the windows looking out over the cityscape, and the fingers of light reaching up from the now muffled party below.

  Panting slightly, he surveyed the similarly panting hound, then seeing a small harp in the corner of the room took one of its longer strings and rapped it around the Romano’s flat face. The jaws were easy to open but not so easy to feed a wire through since the teeth were all long and pointy and shooting off at irregular angles.

  He tied the other end to the pipe behind the toilet which was a room far away and out of sight of the front room. As he stood back up from the dog his own reflection caught him again in the huge washbasin mirror, only this time dizziness and rage welled up inside himself and he lashed out, punching into the center of the glass. It shattered inward held together by a plastic preservative film. After another glance at the fragmented reflections of himself he stepped away from the mirror, toilet and the snoring animal beside it. He just hoped he didn’t need to go while he was here.

  Pull yourself together, child! We can use this place, but we need Colec first. Bring anything you can find to this room regarding Gen Colec.

  In a kind of daze, Bailey looked around and began fishing through drawers, cupboards, and coats. Having piled everything he could find from the front room onto the floor where the dog had been, he proceeded to the bedroom and study, finishing up with the kitchen. In the end he had accumulated a waist high pile of papers and info-needles. Gen Colec's multi-com was also salvaged which he threw on a thick wood table before the window.

  Now the fun. Open Colec’s multi-com, and surf to his business’s login page. We will need a password. The password is somewhere in that pile.

  Bailey looked at it, his eyesight shaking slightly, as it had before the dizziness.

  “I’m a little tired. What’s happening to me?” Bailey asked as his eyesight hazed and faded, and the wood floor rushed closer.

  Bailey looked around suddenly, half realizing that he was now in a kind of dream. There were slimy, vacuous clouds swirling around him, close to him like a mist he could touch. After turning a couple of times, and not getting his bearings, he saw a shade growing behind the mist.

  You’re becoming more like me. Or maybe I’m becoming you. Either way I think I’m stuck with you.

  “Arc?” Bailey asked, then wished he hadn’t.

  I am Arc Micormic, or what used to be Arc Micormic. I am what I do, and so are you.

  “You were a terrorist. A thief!”

  This world stole from me first.

  Bailey listened and saw the shade grow larger and lean at him through the mists.

  You have no idea what they did to me. How could you know?

  Bailey saw momentarily his indignant face, before it returned back to the shade and mist. His own face, only different. Another life.

  “I guess Aaron Bailey never really existed. I’m a joke... an insane joke.”

  You are just what you do.

  Bailey heard the words in his wet ear as if they had been spoken in the room a moment earlier. His eyesight cleared, seeing the words of an East Syndicate invoice close up. He leaned up gently, finding he had slumped over the paper pile he had created, and now drooled over in his sleep.

  He looked at the clock standing by the wall, seeing that it was now late into the night. A tropical Lantis lizard that Colec had apparently kept as a pet stood atop it waving its long antennae in his direction.

  Standing, he looked down at the pile and sighed “So a password. And then what?”

  He heard nothing, but then he guessed he had something to do.

  Spelling Mistakes.

  Bailey sat in silence with his feet on the desk beside the lizard that had joined him. They sat watching the holographic display above the multi-com as Bailey took it to the internet sites Arc had advised. Hours had passed during his quest to safely steal Gen Colec’s possibly unneeded identity, and he was starting to get very tired.

  He sat in an old rocking chair Colec had put beside the window, where he could look out through the wood blinds at the town square below. During the day it might actually look pleasant, but now was filled with the noisy ‘riff raff’ as Arc had called them.

  Colec’s multi-com had not been passworded, so Bailey had used it to wirelessly cloud dial the login page for business affiliates of East Syndicate, that overall had the corporate guise of Sagar Warehousing. Since Colec’s own business was part of the criminal enterprises of East Syndicate he thought it might be a good site to start the hack.

  Where a gene print for the city grid itself would be valuable, an East Syndicate gene print would be more so, and so with time as a factor it had become tonight's priority.

  He had been going through the pile, searching for possible passwords each page at a time, scanning them with a speed that alarmed himself. Each time he found something that resembled a name or repeated string of letters he tried them in the password field of the profile page for Sagar employees.

  Nothing had worked and he had already gone through half of the pile. He now knew a great deal about Gen Colec's Import/ Export business, like how it was a front for mass drug distribution to smaller gangs in the east. Much had been gleaned from the documents, but not how to bypass his security clearance. He doubted that there would be anything new in the rest of the pile, just the same information repeated over and over.

  Bailey then caught sight of a thick book with a very elaborate hard cover. He had dismissed it before due to its gaiety, but now he took it to hand and found it to be Gen Colec’s personal diary.

  He shut down the multi-com to standby mode and pushed it to the back of the desk. Beside the lizard he opened the book, and found it to be a hologramatic recorder. He had expected it to be like the rest of the belongings that had all been made in the old fashioned method of wood based paper.

  As he opened it he saw the face of a man projected over the flat pages, with the high definition hologram attracting some affectionate attention from the lizard. He placed the book flat on
the table and looked over Gen Colec’s features.

  He was a kindly man but old and worn out. He had a sly smile on his lips like someone ready to tell a joke.

  “Here are three options.” he said in Gen Colec’s voice. “One, recording. Two, scroll to date. Three, delete date.”

  “Err. Two. Two weeks ago.” Bailey said, in awe of this new development.

  “Lord Date 72551 point 270.” it said, and was then replaced by a front on recording of Gen Colec, sitting at roughly the same position as Bailey like an off centered mirror image. He leaned at the diary as if confiding with some beloved confidant, or maybe just himself.

  “It’s a weekday and I can’t bring myself to go to the warehouse. Francine can handle the books today. My plan has failed. I have been unable to raise the cash needed to pay back Old Gang, and now it’s just a matter of time before they discover this. I’m getting old. There are many things I find I cannot do any longer. Francine joked that I should submit myself to the South Syndicate combat league. I can’t bring myself to tell her how serious things are for me. But I will not sell the firm. Too many of my workers rely on it, not to mention the gangs… I will leave it and the warehouse lease to Francine in the event of my death. I will now never tell Francine how I truly feel for her, after so many times I have spoken of it. I see no way my love can bloom, but then it never does in this place. Maybe Francine’s idea wasn’t so crazy after all.”

  They screen blinked and with a static bleep, the hologram was replaced the menu hologram.

  Bailey reached over and rebooted the multi-com. He leaned inside the encircling holographic icons to the central terminal and typed “Francine.”

  “Access Granted.” the Sagar Warehousing internal network replied, and the display filled with a complex economic menu system.