I’m a very angry person. Over the last five years I’ve lost touch with my passion for anything because, for the most part, I felt that there was no point in trying. I realized this somewhat recently and thought long and hard about the condition of my life, where I want to be, where I was, and how close I was to my goal of writing full-time. Not very close. I have wasted the last ten years of my life working for jobs that I have hated, that have left me tired and humiliated and a little broken. Not because of any overt oppression, but the implications of the work and how it effected everyone I worked with and me. When I thought about it long and hard, it made me realize just how angry I was about the situation I’ve put myself into this whole time. It’s my fault for putting up with these jobs, sure, but I learned something in the process. I saw how the corporate world is, I know how these people think. So with that in mind, I have set to using that as inspiration to make one last attempt at reaching my ultimate goal.
So bear with me over the next few months, I will only be writing about stuff that I can use as material for my work, and I will only be posting sample chapters. If I do not have this book finished by the end of the year, or at least the first draft, I will officially give up my goal of being a writer. So, one more time, from the top. Here… we… go.
1: Telling Lies
A bullet capsule arced slowly around the frame of a superscraper before being flung upwards, breaking cloud cover. It gently orbited the flank of the building, a rail alongside glowed a faint blueish green as it passed by. Like a planetoid escaping orbit the arc grew wider until the capsule was tossed with significant velocity out skyward, lazily flying several hundred meters before gravity began to take hold sending the capsule in a downward trajectory towards the top of another building. A few feet before collision the capsule straightened out and began it’s slow orbit of the tower, winding upwards.
The capsule may have been shiny and new once, but has long since corroded into that typical dirty rainbow smear, like looking at an oil slick after the rain, it matched the sides of the building it was moving around in it’s slow meandering path perfectly. The building matched the streets, that matched the entire skyline that matches the sunset that matched the very clouds themselves. Everything stained, everything breaking down slowly, the magnetic rails for example, when first constructed lit up in purple following the pathway of the capsule as the magnetics both held and repelled it, humming along gently, if you pressed your ears to them you could hear them hum as they carried current. Now the lights were off in spots, others merely fired off sparks, others didn’t work at all. They called that a ‘drop’ you find those closer you get towards the street level, when a capsule drops it’s grabbed by a nearby line, if that line is derelict you end up taking a skyward dive towards the street. If you have insurance for drops the capsule service will temporarily overload the defective line and you’ll be saved. No insurance means a near seventy five mile per hour drop to the surface, maybe another rail will pick you up but you get to enjoy the knowledge that the lower you go the less chance you’ll be picked up by a savior line. In all likelihood you’re going to die. The capsule’s lone screen, the windshield, will try to sell you death insurance as you plummet, the capsule corporation will try to have you upgrade to the premium lines, if you can’t afford it then you have the option to have a rail burst the lines you pass by, for a fee of course, which will reduce the decent velocity of your capsule significantly, that way there’s a chance you will only be severely maimed or crippled instead of dead.
I rode on the premium lines, of course, everything I use is premium. The government services all worked this way, you could risk the free services, but if you wanted to actually have a good chance of going through your day without several near-death experiences then you better pay and pay good. People go into debt everyday just to pay the premiums of ten different kinds of insurance and be able to afford the premium rail lines so that they don’t end up a three second fireball on the catch plates that extend from buildings, forming a canopy for the urban jungle comprised of five foot thick reinforced titanium. These plates are placed, not so much in any logical order and in reality all they are there for is to maybe stop something that’s falling from doing catastrophic damage to the buildings of which they are attached. Of course we’re talking class D, D as in decommissioned, or to put it in more plaintive terms, no longer economically viable objects.
Like a capsule that can’t afford the prem rails.
Like an old satellite.
Now, if you were to ask me what class A is, my response would probably be that you wouldn’t have to worry about any class A object falling for very long.
Class B is ballistic, maybe an old orbital weapons platform disguised as say, a weather satellite or relay, over time the computer systems may die or the lock mechanisms may cease to function. Most of the time this is a bored hacker, or someone who’s hoping that the payload hits a predetermined object. Now, when this happens, several plasma rods fall out of orbit. The air friction will heat them up in no time, by the time they hit anything, you can say goodbye to a couple city blocks. Not that you really would have to worry about this happening, as these types of ‘arranged accidents’ are pretty rare, most of the time the platform ends up being a dud, or, in an instance of bad luck, your timing of the orbital release may be a bit off or the platform doesn’t release it’s payload right away resulting in a very spectacular, if unintentional suicide.
Class C is any civilian utility, like, say, a satellite dish or sky cart or an old bridge that the wind and swaying of the sky scrapers eventually wore down to the point where it simply snapped off.
Sometimes these objects are large enough to knock the catch plates clean off, if this happens you have a ball of wreckage the size of two city blocks slowly tumbling towards the street layers. The people, of course, get a good fifteen second warning to scramble out of the way before one of these balls of steel and concrete slam into the streets, smashing anyone too slow or whoever got partially trampled during the rush to escape or anyone who may have missed the warning commercial. You can tell where this has happened, you’ll pass a few of the catch plates missing from buildings as you glide along, large holes carved into their sides as though the fist of a very old and very angry god came down to punish the sinners who failed to obey the ancient laws of whatever.
Now during those fifteen seconds you have time to attempt to run, which, unless you’ve got some bionics or are just lucky, you might make it out in time. If you can’t do either you can pay a rather large sum of money and the Police, if they are close enough, will attempt to destroy the falling object. It’s easier to survive a few fist-sized balls of concrete and steel as one large god’s fist the size of half a block barreling down at you. The police charge for everything, and will, for enough money, do practically anything. The cost, for example, of saving the lives of people is very high, or so they tell you. You have to pay for the man hours to clean up the mess, the cost of the ballistics used to destroy the object, and any other expenses. Sometimes other expenses means lunch for the officers. If you’re an attractive, unmodified, female, then you don’t want to know what some of those ‘other expenses’ may end up being. Also, if the cost is too high to stop the object, or if you can’t pay the full amount, there is a quick calculation to determine if the cost of saving your life is going to be more than you can pay. If it’s determined that it will indeed be too expensive, well then you’ll get a nice prompt on your Hipside or Shadewear that will kindly inform you that your account balance is not high enough and to not be upset, followed by the number for customer service and a polite ‘please use us in the future.’ Proof that the cops at least have a sense of humor.
The whole city was falling apart like this. When you set off to build something everyone makes money. The construction workers, any off-duty police you hire to guard the place, the investors, the shareholders, people are attracted to new buildings, to new places, so your rate of business traffic goes up. There’s plenty of money to be made in making something new, it’s when it’s lost it’s luster, when it’s got old and needs repairs that it starts to become an economic burden. Once the cost of fixing something is so high that you could easily fund the beginning of a new project, then the only logical step, as it’s determined, is to simply use the old building until it is literally impossible to do so anymore, save up your profits, buy a new building, rent out the old one until it falls apart, repeat. Nothing stays the same for long, but nothing changes. In the past when a brushfire would start it would wipe out the parts of the forest that were drying up, the burning would make the soil fertile, over time it would grow back new and fresh. Hence, the allowed and encouraged decay is often refereed to as ‘gardening.’ What, I suppose, is not considered, is that unlike in nature, the ruined husks of these once great industrial complexes and shopping malls are abandoned, neither destroyed nor scraped for materials to build new buildings. They just pile people in them, and who cares what happens after that? In this way this city has expanded exponentially to encompass almost the entire northeastern portion of North America.
From my view on the premium lines, the city just doesn’t seem to end, even this high up it’s a panorama of billboards, sky signs, and buildings that obscures the horizon. There is a haze as well, the setting sun paints the mists and steam in that corrupted rainbow of colors. I have been told everything about this from ‘the colors and mist are intentionally produced to create ambiance for the rich districts’ to ‘wear a gas mask before you breathe that air’ from a cop, of all people. Cops aren’t little people, most of the time if I want the truth about anything I’m told from The Commission I have to ask a cop off the record. Cops, well, they won’t say a damn thing unless it’s off the record. They never speak otherwise, to avoid saying anything that will be a liability to their job. This means that if, for example, a police officer is hired to give you a thrashing you can’t ask for mercy unless you want to buy time off the record, what that means, basically is that you pay a flat rate for any time you don’t want to be recorded or watched. This also means, of course, that you’ll still be recorded and watched by the cops, but no one else. Cops don’t spy on other cops, this is a known fact. To them everyone else is ‘little people.’ Cops protect cops, no one else. You want to be safe, you join the cops. Unless your too empathetic, then you probably won’t be able to handle some of the rougher assignments. A cop won’t speak to you, they won’t even look at you directly. They wear visors, which tech for sensing weapons, scanning of your finances, scans for insurance that would prevent them from being able to touch you. You can’t see their eyes, but whenever I see a cop looking at someone, I always feel like they are looking at something they think of as pure shit. No, less than shit. Shit you clean up, flush, sanitize, whatever. Scum, scum you just leave to rot. You only attempt to clean it when it’s in your way, when you have no other option than to get rid of it.
So my capsule comes around a wide arc, below me and to the right, I see a line go out. Two capsules fall, one is picked up, the other keeps falling, until it disappears beneath the clouds. I sigh, then, after a moment, tap the console, find the dropped capsule. For the rest of the occupants life, they ride premium. This is handled anonymously, so I don’t have to deal with the awkwardness of a thank you, or the much more likely, being knocked up for more prems or credits. My arc leads me downward, at a slight angle, around the circumference of a conduit tower, which will accelerate me in increasingly distant passes until I am traveling at about mach three. This is the worst time to drop, if the conduit has trouble you’ll notice because the tower will flash in red instead of the purple trail signifying a healthy line. If that happens you’ll get about three seconds of air time till you are flung from the pull of the building in whatever direction. At that speed you would be like a spike out of a rail cannon, you wouldn’t feel the speed due to the pressurized cabin, so you’d be fully aware when you would see the side of a building get close until you crash. It would be a very quick death, if that’s any consolation. Odds are you probably wouldn’t kill anyone where you hit, because most buildings kept the flank that is exposed to the conduits reinforced to avoid having to repair the occasional horizontal crater. As you orbit these buildings you’ll see the smooth tarnished onyx sides of all the buildings facing you with the occasional pockmark where an unlucky prem user was flung. As I round the last line of the conduit I am thrown outwards and upward at a forty-five degree angle. I will glide a mile or so higher up, where for I’ll be able to actually see the very top of the city briefly. Then there’s the drop. During a fling the capsule screen will go black, you won’t be able to look outside, this is because even though the cabin is pressurized when you finally stop traveling upwards and begin to fall you will experience as close to zero g as you will get without going orbital, this sensation combined with being able to see your fall will be not unlike being in a motion sensor ride. People have gone into shock over less. People have died. Prem users dying is bad for business. If you want to be able to see outside during a fling you have sign a waver. I just have to press a button. In case you haven’t figured it out by this point I’m not listed as a prem user. I’m considered vital. There is little that will not be done to ensure that I never get drooped, that I never am put in danger. Up here, above the clouds being flung in a controlled arc, well… I look outside because it’s the only time I feel like all control has ceased, all responsibility cast aside, and the feeling of just falling and thinking for a moment, that I just might hit bottom this time. I lie to others all the time, it’s my job, so it’s no surprise that I can just as easily lie to myself.
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Cool.