Monolithic Horizon; Act 1: Heathen – Chapter 2: Behind Blue Eyes

The capsule screen is black.   I haven’t pressed the button yet.   When the screen is black you get a decent reflection, it’s the kind of black mirror you envision in children’s stories.   The colors are faded enough to mask how thing really are, but enough to give you the details.   My face stares back at me, with it’s cut-too-short brown hair, it’s slightly wrinkled brow, and bright blue eyes.  Bright enough to almost negate the toned-down colors reflected in our makeshift black mirror.

I lean forward, press a button.

The sky opens up around me, the only structure that still stretches up higher than my current position is the Demer Complex.   It’s one of those arcologies, the kind that were ripped off from old oriental architecture.   It’s a self-sustaining structure.  A self-contained city.  The standard rails won’t operate on it, you’ve got to get on the one railway that goes around the circumference of the tower, which, from this height looks like a mountain of steel    Tall and angular.   They call the railway system for the complex the stairway to heaven.  Once you’re rich enough to ride it, you won’t be coming back down to gallivant amongst us mere mortals.

The capsule takes a dip.   They call these capsules Circas.   The kind I use, because it’s got a duel piloting system.  That means that I can control where I go to a degree, I can choose routes, and change them on the fly by touching the screen and pointing to a different building, rail, whatever.   The conduit towers are supposed to be used for two purposes, to catch people coming back from orbit and to place people in orbit.   You can only use it as a quick jump halfway across the city if you happen to press the release at the moment it is about to pull you upwards and inside the tower.    Inside your vessel is subject to what a spike would be inside a rail cannon.

During the decent I get a slight case of vertigo, this is all right and perfectly normal.  When you lose the sensation of gravity and then are quickly reminded of it’s presence you tend to have moments like this.   This is my vacation.   This is my therapy.   Thinking that I might die, it’s not as frightening as you may think.  Especially when there’s always the prospect of my job looming in my mind’s horizon, making my thoughts of the future only of two things, which I’ve already had in ample supply in my life.   Dread.   Regret.   The important thing to remember is, I’m not a monster.   My job is the president of The Commission.   You look at my face on the news every night, you hear my voice in every national address and speech.   I show no emotion other than optimism, and what I say never has any true meaning.   You see, there is an arrangement to ensure this is the case.

Before I can adequately explain this arrangement I must, in some way, address history.  The Commission is a collaboration of monopolies and large businesses that have acted as the defacto government for the past… who-knows-how-long.   The public doesn’t really know this.   It’s one of those open secrets, you know, the kinds of things that everyone knows deep down but saying anything about it in public will just get you ostracized because no one wants to admit that it’s the truth of the matter because the lie is so much more palatable.  Well The Commission is the government, any statement otherwise is obviously spoken from either the eternally gullible or those too damn stupid to know any better.  The thing to remember is, that there is always an ample supply of idiots, and especially gullible idiots.  So my job is to take the heat.   The Commission offers free public services, such as the rails… the free ones that drop people and kill them.   The free water that occasionally lets loose a lethal toxin or two to the public and informs them after a day or so.   The electrical service that overloads on occasion causing a fire that may or may not burn down the dozens of old shopping malls and corporate offices that were sold off as low-income housing.  The phone service that voice recognizes children and re-routes them to phone sex lines and white noise packed with advertizing and commercial jingles.   The air purifiers that malfunction only slightly more than the premium ones.   The cable service that projects ads in random bursts too fast for you to notice.   Anything and everything that you would use on a daily basis that breaks, nearly kills you, or gives you friendly reminders after it’s failed such as ‘your Circa appears to be falling, please buckle your seat belt, tuck your legs in and have a pleasant day!’   All those things are ‘government services’ and thus an example of the incompetence, stupidity, and avarice of yours truly and my ‘cabinet of cronies and crooks’ consisting of randomly interchanging heads of state and defense blah blah blahs that come and go so fast I barely ever exchange a word with any of them or even know their names half the time. Not that I would say much except ‘Hello’ and maybe ‘Good job on not laughing out loud reading that line to the public.’  The government is me, and therefore I am to serve as a constant example to the public of how worthless the government is and how the corporations are actually selflessly selling them premium versions of government services in order to ‘protect’ them because they care oh so much about the safety of the average man.   The average man needs a champion after all.   A one-thousand credit a month champion.

So my job is to lie, and never, ever, ever,  break character.   Hello kids, I’m the president, I’d like to read you a story today, oh what’s that little Timmy?  You say I’m holding my book up-side down?  Oh ho ho, how embarrassing.   Cue photo shoots and tabloid headlines.  The reason that this job was appointed to me is because I don’t feel anything.   Not sadness, or regret, or even really hope.  Definitely not happiness.   The feeling, deep in my heart of hearts, down in the very vestiges of my spirit is nothing.   Like a big black pit, never getting bigger and never filling up.   A kind of spiritual black hole.  This makes me the perfect liar.  Even the most industrious conspiracy theorist can subject my recordings and my public speech to a million different voice analysis and facial reflex tests and never get any result but that I was telling the absolute truth.  This is a useful skill amongst liars, may of whom try to lie by simply telling themselves the same story over and over till they themselves believe it, which is dangerous because they do no know what the truth is anymore or forget important details and thus can be tripped up.   In my particular case none of the details of the truth are lost to me, I just don’t really give much of a damn about anything to really care about what I’m saying.  Once the emotional investment is gone, lying is easy.

Now, the thing about being appointed, well that is an interesting way of putting it.   Eyes opened.   Lungs breathed.  Heart beat.   There was light.   Bright light.  The way you think staring into Heaven with night vision glasses would be like.   My first real memory is of the military academy.  Flashes of people’s faces after that.   Events disconnected and random, possibly friends, possibly family.   All dead, or so I’m told.  Bombs dropping.   Then darkness, then light.  Blindingly bright light.   Then there was a medal, and talks of great deeds that I supposedly did.   Great blows I struck against the enemies of the state and the almighty dollar.  Socialists, liberals, communists, sadists and degenerates of the lowest kind.   They blamed my lack of any real memories, and the fractured images of a past that cannot be connected to a present on post traumatic stress disorder.   There was no argument from my side.   Something was gone in me after the bombs dropped, after a crash maybe.   The memories say nothing of how point A connects to point B. All I know is that there was an election, in so much as you can call it that, which was handled via television, holoarray, dive feed, what have you.   President Adamus was born.  He was born unfeeling and hollow, and his mission was to get the public to love him and his past deeds so much that as the ‘government’ continued to degenerate they would hate him all the more.   They would love the alternative even more.   Any other election they would put me in a vote against a psychotic, or an ex-convict, or a poverty-stricken family of incestuous deregulated zone residents.   To ensure that it was a lifetime post.   Ten years of this and nothing has changed.   Things have not got any better, nor have they became any worse.   Essentially the whole world has remained at the same level of total shit regardless of my lies.

Oh well, the elections are soon, and the one thing that isn’t so hollow is my own dreams.   On that land’s horizon the giant visage of the word retirement lies in repose amidst soot blackened fields and fragments of memories.  One can always hope if one so inclined to act the fool.   Though, truthfully, the idea of retirement fills me with a sort of dread.   When you retire you’re essentially throwing in the towel on the rest of the world.   You have done your part and now it’s time to move on over and let others pick up your work where you left off.   The idea of me damning another poor sucker into this position merely by my absence doesn’t sit well on my conscious.   There also brings another hidden dread to mind, and that would be the idea that there is a very good chance without protection there is a good chance that someone would try to kill me and may very well be successful.

I lean forward, press a button.

The world becomes a corkscrew panorama for a few moments.   No drops.   The Circa is caught by a breaker line, designed to catch any sub-orbital or thrown capsules.   This trip feels like it could go on forever, but in all likelihood it’s been little over ten minutes.  Normally, without the needless throw side trip that I opted into, it takes four.  My destination this evening is a meeting with a Police Detective named John Seifer.   The man in charge of the corporate crime task force, the largest sector of the police.

When there is a designated Corporate crime case, it takes a lot more than one person to head up the investigation, there are whole fleets, squads and cleaning crews dedicated to the task.   This is totally necessary because corporate crime is almost always a very large scale operation that could involve things like several terabytes of shady accounting data that needs to be untangled, massive refunds that need to be triggered,  legal fees that need to be distributed, or for clearing out the quarter mile crater left over from the end result of about three thousand pounds of hostile takeover that was strapped to the supports of a competitors building during normal office hours.  The one thing to remember is not to panic.  These things happen all the time.  Nothing to see here folks, move along.  Do not allow me to give you the false impression that the police are in the business of catching criminals, or that the idea is to protect the innocent or anything like that.  Whatever the previous incarnation of the police force was responsible for ended when this new order took over.   The only reason the police get involved in an ‘incident’ anymore is to secure and distribute assets.  Maybe cart off any survivors to who-knows-where.

A man of my supreme importance gets unlimited time off the record.

The Circa disappears into a tunnel inside a sky dock.   The metal here is stained in that same flush of a dirty rainbow.   The side opens and then I’m out and walking across the floor, my shoes echoing off into the distant walls of the structure.   What could easily fill a quarter of a mile of space and only two living souls in it, that’s the funny thing about the upper levels.   There’s so much space for people, as though the building’s designers had expected the rates to be low enough that people could actually afford to dock here with Circa’s just scooting around every which way, it’s just those with a premium account that are ever allowed in.  So you just have these clean, beautiful, empty spaces.   With intricate designs etched into the metal, fountains, tile floors in the lounges, concessions with real live plants hanging off them giving the illusion that you’re in a market in some old ancient city and not in the belly of the beast.  All these thought out and wonderfully appealing things and hardly a soul to enjoy them.   What a waste.

There’s a gun in my spine as I round a fountain of an angel peeing on to a globe, like god is taking a leak on the world.   There’s an iron voice, ‘don’t move, it’s over.’   It says.   I put my hands up, I say, “John stop screwing around.”   Seifer laughs and puts the gun away, I hear it click into place in the magnetic holster around his waist.   I turn around and face John Seifer.   With his crooked nose and boyish blonde hair, unkempt and cut short.   He always wears a nice clean white uniform, all the buttons polished, creases in all the right places, badge always perfectly centered over his left breast.   Dressed sharp, clean, precise.   This is the kind of look you’d like your executioner to have, all business, no pleasure, just doing his job.

“Hey you miserable bastard,” I say.

“Hello, Mr. President.”  Said with just a hint of sarcasm. Seifer ushers me over towards a table in a deserted food court.  Along the way he says, “I designated this place as a crime scene, no one’s going to be here to bother us.”

We both sit down, chairs made of actual wood, the stuff of the posh.   The stuff you see in magazines and broadcasts always on sale but just out of your price range.   There’s enough of them, and enough tables like them to  fill a parking lot, all unoccupied.

He starts off by saying, “You know, I’m not your therapist.”

“Cut the shit will ya?  You’re not helping.”

“Oh sorry Mr. Sensitive!  I didn’t know you couldn’t handle a damn joke.”

“Hey I’m not in the mood right now okay?   I’ve got a lot on my mind.”

“Yeah I suspect you do.”   He leans in, smiles a wry smile.   Smug bastard.  Smug useful bastard.  He must know something.  “Look, this information you requested from me… I did some digging… the records are a mess.   Nothing makes sense.   Here.”   He slides a box on to the table, black cube, two ports on either side, it’s a remote storage device.   Small as hell.  There is a pop, the computer on my hip gets placed on the table, and after some fidgeting with the laser sensor, they interface.  My hip computer clicks over almost instantly, and projects three records on the table.   Seifer points at the first one, which is a bunch of those boxes you used to see on the old tax forms, when they used to collect them that is.  “This is your validation form for your memories, after performing a full brain scan with nano assistance you see these forms popping up.  Basically to ensure that your memories were reconstructed after your accident to the best of their abilities and no new memories were introduced.”

“Yeah,” I say with an air of disappointment.  This is nothing new to me, and is starting to pan out like our last meeting.   When all that was learned on my end was that whoever is in charge of record keeping for the Commission is a bastard.

“Hold on, before you get too concerned there.  This isn’t like last time, this is good info so let me finish before you get that look like a damn lost puppy.”   He then points to the second document, it unfolds out in the air into about seven pages of legal gobbledygook.  “This is also an memory form, but for a transfer.   The previous document denies a transfer, and indeed this transfer isn’t for you.   It’s for the nano culture itself.”

“Which means what exactly?”

“You know how nanotech works in these procedures, they are programed to merely transfer electronic data into your brain tissue.  They are supposed to leave your system after they are done, self-destructed and flushing out when you take a leak.   These nanos didn’t do that.  They did something to your memories when they brought you back.”   He reaches out and grabs the projection of the final document and thrusts it in my face, with his other hand he points to a line in the dead center of the document, “read this.”

My eyes scan the page, and I find myself saying, “military grade shield tech, nano serial 555-896-32451-Class Z.”   The page is jerked back.

“Yeah that’s not normal, and the final piece of the puzzle lies here.”  He taps the table near the projection of the third document.   As he does so the floating image of the spread out pile of documents from before unfolds and goes back to it’s static position. “This is a release form, standard when you come out of the hospital.   However, it also doubles as a contract, they started adding these in hospitals so that when you left they still maintained property rights on certain tech in the instance you decided to abuse it.   You know, you go in for artificial heart and you keep eating garbage they can come and take it out.”

“I assume by ‘take it’ you mean…”

“Yeah, they kill you.   Well… ‘repossess the device.’   They don’t really care if you die in the process or live.   There’s not enough tech like this to go around, if you aren’t gonna take care of it, well… you know.   Anyway, that’s not the point.  The point is that this is one of those kinds of release forms.   You signed it agreeing in the case of ‘the device’ being tampered with you could be repossessed.”

“What do you mean, ‘you could be repossessed?’  That doesn’t make any sense at all, there’s no tech in my body at all, you know I hate that shit.”

“I know, I know.”   He throws his hands up in apparent confusion laced with a hint of frustration.  “Which is why this makes no sense.  These types of contracts are pretty well thought out and reviewed by panels of highly overpaid lawyers.  There’s no way the language isn’t a typo.   Your whole body isn’t tech, as a matter of fact, you may be the only fully organic human I’ve met.  No alterations, no implants, no tech of any kind.”

“So what does all this mean?  Shield tech nano is for covert ops solders.  Memories with limited durations, designed to make it impossible for a captured solider to give any details except minimal mission objectives.   It’s only used for corporate espionage nowadays.  There’s absolutely no point in giving them to me.”

“Well I don’t know about that.”  Seifer leans back in his chair, it creaks slightly.   Real wood.  His brow furrows.  “Seems to me…  seems to me if I wanted to make someone do the job you have, I wouldn’t want him to let his conscience get in the way.  If there were memories from your past that could conflict with your job performance, maybe they locked them away.  What it looks like is that they put nano in you when they brought you back from near death that was supposed to repair your memory, only it never flushed out of your system.  So it’s still in there playing with the wiring.”

“Maybe,” I say.  An idea slowly dawns on me, crushing down on me at once.   I feel my heart rate go up, and this is the first time that I can remember feeling fear.  Fear because with this knowledge I know that I will be unable to stop myself from digging into what exactly my memory is hiding from me.  Doubt is a disease, and once you feel doubt it eats you up inside.   With doubt comes the search for knowledge.  A desire to know the truth out of the erroneous belief that the truth will save you.   No one has ever been happy with the truth.  Some can accept it, but for most people they find slipping back into the world of the lie they doubted before to be much more comforting.  “Maybe, it means that if I try to remove the nanos from my system they’ll kill me.”

Seifer doesn’t say anything just gives me a slow nod.   We sit there for a while, contemplating.  Not really speaking.   Then it’s time for him to go, “another takeover, a man’s work is never done when there’s money to be made.”  I’m alone, and I’m staring at god taking a piss on the world in an empty dock.   Outside there is a roar of wind, outside maybe a mile below, there is a room like this one.   Not as clean.   Crammed with people, as numerous as grains of sand on a beach, and I wonder if in that multitude, there is a person who is looking at a fountain similar to this one.  I wonder of they are thinking along the same lines as I am.   One day I’ll piss on this world too.

This delightful nugget of information was brought to you by:  The site's wanna-be author, professional jerk, monster who's dead on the inside and semi-proud owner. More from this author

Popularity: 1% [?]