Neo-gothic culture.
A lightless sky, clouded in dreamlike velvet-black
and scarred only by the occasional pinpoint of a brave artificial star whose power source
had not yet failed.
Dismal. Beautiful.
We live in this world that you made for us,
Mother. You and billions of others. Faceless.
The weapon was cold in his hand. Colder still was
the body of the wire junkie sprawled across the floor.
We live in this world, and we survive in it.
War danced outside of the abandoned low-rise
apartment complex, and its sounds drifted through the panes of shattered reality that were
the windows. An explosion rocked the sprawling City, far to the west--near the Copper
District. He approached the window, as though he could look through the clusters of
blackened hulks to watch the destroyed fall, and rebuild itself again within moments.
A self-contained City.
A monster of living technology. A fungus comprised
of circuits and wires--growing, always growing, mindlessly following set patterns,
repairing damage, devouring itself only to feed further growth. A dim memory of pre-school
told him that it had once been a green continent called Eurasia.
He turned to face the sound behind him as the body
on the floor twitched spasmodically. The microscopic nano-sprites had already burrowed
their way into the lifeless corpse and were multiplying in its cooled blood like digital
viruses. Soon the molecule-sized machines would reanimate the body, and it would walk
stiffly to the underground disposal area, its dead eyes staring blankly at the world and
head lolling grotesquely on a rubbery neck--destroying its pale beauty of death through
the enforced motion.
Only more matter to decompose and recycle. Cold
efficiency.
Raze crouched next to the pale, lifeless body,
watching distantly as it twitched and writhed like a dying insect pinned beneath the
microscope. Leather creaked, cool against his thighs, hugging his lean legs and angular
hips, black against the paleness of his emaciated, almost wasted body, starkly contrasting
a nearly bare torso, its ghostly whiteness broken only by the haphazard strips of shiny
black tape criss-crossing his chest, arms, and neck. His boots squeaked against the
rubble-strewn tile floor, echoing in the death-like silence. Every sound that the dead
woman made as she flopped against the plastic echoed in the ruined chamber that had once,
in some recent antiquity, been a center of domesticity.
He touched the eyelids, stilling their convulsive
fluttering, the action born from a memory whose source he could not remember as more than
a haze, a distant recollection of more colorful times. Then he bent and kissed them, first
the left, then the right, before he stood and walked out of the doorway to be swallowed by
the blackness of the stairwell, never looking back.
Goodbye, Mother.
Symphony.
It burst around him in the silence. His shoulders
hunched against the crackling onslaught of soundless music, and he pushed his gloved hands
into his pockets. He was the only organic on the dim street, moving down the cracked
sidewalk and guarded by the glowering, dark hulks of the Iron District's ruined buildings,
long abandoned by the Corporations and providing homes now for the human dregs of the
City. Those that lived below the Level.
Things moved around him, snakelike and sinuous,
silent in their mechanical perfection. They seemed to threaten, although he knew that they
were incapable of deviating from their programmed tasks. They lacked the consciousness,
the imperative, and yet they still chilled him as they slid through the shrouded darkness,
enigmatic and sinister as they went about their functions--functions that he did not
understand, considering that routine maintenance had long been abandoned in this district
of the City.
Sometimes he wondered if they were more alive than
he.
The walking was slow, but he could not catch a
transport until he reached the Bronze District; they didn't run here anymore. He couldn't
remember when they had.
The air smelled of machine oil.
He thought of spiders as his darkly stained golden
eyes traced the webwork of cracks lacing the concrete beneath his feet. The machines
reminded him of spiders. He wondered what a real spider looked like up close.
The scanner at the entrance to the Bronze District
flashed a swiftly snapped image of Raze upon the vidscreen as he approached within range
of its "eye". A soft buzz of complaint rose from its interface when a match
could not be found for the youthful, jaded features shielded by a shock of shaggy white
hair, and he silenced it with a touch of his glove-shielded fingertips to the circuitry
casing. Microfilament wires laced with infinitesimal chips extended from their weave
within the black nylon, and with a soft crackle an electrostatic feedback temporarily
shorted the device. The gate opened for him.
Here, the machines were greater in number--but so
were the people. All alone, all keeping to themselves and eyeing him warily as he passed;
the simple presence of so many made him quietly uneasy, and he returned their wary stares
with his own guarded aloofness. He obviously did not belong there among the middle class,
with their barely-maintained housing structures and meagerly lit streets.
He made his way swiftly through the avenues,
surrounded by sparse masses of humanity and the constant motion of sleek machinery. They
always moved out of the corner of his eye, disjointed and liquid, too cold to be living
and too sinister not to be. Again, he felt threatened. Hunted.
The Level was more visible here than it was in the
Iron District. It was visible everywhere in the City, with its domed enclosure of
white-polished metal raised high above the common masses on a slender pedestal of plated
chrome, smooth and gleaming brilliantly even in what little light the faltering false-sky
provided. It was the Mount Olympus of the shielded City, where unseen and fickle gods
decided the fates of the unsuspecting, unworthy humans below. It was said that the
Corporations were housed there.
Nothing ever came in or out of the Level, save for
the machines; dark, gaping mouths would open in either the dome or its supporting
pedestal, spitting out coldly glittering metal beasts only to devour them again when they
returned. The Level never changed; no one ever entered it, or if they did, they never
escaped to tell about it. Those within the Level were above even the higher classes. Those
within the Level were gods.
The shining pinnacle of enigma disappeared as Raze
wandered into the enclosed stairwell leading to the underground transport system, obscured
by a ceiling of gravel-pitted cement scrawled with scribbles of magic-marker graffiti. An
already dark atmosphere descended to further blackness, and pupils dilated against acid
gold to gather what little light remained into the cat-like slits. He felt like a ghost
wandering a wrecking yard.
The transport station was empty save for the lone
wraithly figure, stark in his sunlight-starved paleness. Raze felt the echoing chamber's
hollowness swell to envelop him, attempting to transform him into an echo as well. He
resisted with a silent shriek, and the echoes fell to heel like well-trained dogs.
The waiting was not difficult. Standing still, his
nearly bare back pressed against the coolness of a cement support pillar, he drifted. His
mind was a strange place of orbs and shadow that he did not understand, and became easily
lost in. Words did not do much to clarify, and only saved him from drowning.
There was no sound, and yet he knew when the
transport drew near. As sleek and ominously silent as every other machine, the fully
automated transport swept through so swiftly that the individual cars were impossible to
distinguish; it was only a single lengthy blur of grey, another ghost within this darkened
hell. This ghost bore many mouths of cold white light upon its smooth sides, and the boy
stepped without fear into one rectangular maw, seating himself within the electronic
demon's cramped gut.
Even the transport was empty. He could be the only
living being within the City, and for a moment within that sterile enclosure he imagined
it so. The thought did not stir him.
A small yellow light blinked in the rear of the
cabin, and for a moment he thought that he was looking in a mirror. They were approaching
the underground entrance to the Silver District, and if he did not possess the proper
identification to satisfy the sweeping scanners then he would not be allowed to proceed
further. He did not.
He hid.
The seats were constructed of thick plassteel, and
his vaguely structured thoughts guessed that it would be thick enough to shield him from
the heat sensors that triggered the identification scanners when a human warmth was
detected. Perhaps its synthesized psuedo-intelligence would equate the mild hot spot with
an engine coil.
The storage compartments beneath the seats were
roughly two feet by two feet, forming a cramped square separated from the next by a thin
plastic wall, easily punched out. Raze removed the separations between three compartments,
and then crawled in and laid down.
The darkness was complete, and he was comfortable.
He rested as he would in a coffin, and felt peace.
The transport entered the Silver District without
incident. The chime marking the passage past the border drifted dimly through the walls of
his claustrophobic prison, and he listened with a dull, clouded sense of anxiety for the
Gold District to either pass or refuse him.
Ultrasonic technology took him across the vast area
of the Silver District, and as the next chime tumbled through the air with acrobatic glee
he rose from the dead and took a breath of the stale oxygen within the enclosure. He would
have to exit the transport when it stopped at the Platinum District, for this particular
vehicle would move no further within that exalted realm.
He felt nothing as the transport abruptly stopped,
despite its speed of only moments before. Technology was beautiful.
Vertigo sent him reeling momentarily as he stepped
into a station identical to his boarding location. Technology, and conformity. Uniform
confusion. Secure instability.
He emerged into the eternal twilight, so close to
the granite wall enclosing the Platinum District that its ancient coldness scraped his
shoulders like a rough cat-tongue. It could not be real granite, but rather the identical
molecular composition synthesized by nano-sprites, but it still bore the same aura of age,
as though it had been excavated from the ruined, ultraviolet-soaked earth itself.
The gate was only a moment's walk. This scanner
would be "smarter" than the one outside the Bronze District, and harder to short
out.
His mind sharpened momentarily, thick liquid
crystallizing into rapid calculations. The scanner produced an image of him, and Raze
lifted a hand to let the gloves attempt to do their work once more--and then paused as a
gentle blue hum trickled through the air.
"Raze Ikawa, S9-106-K27. Enter." The
synthesized voice chilled him in its cool feminine seduction. It always had.
The gate lifted before him, and for a moment it
occurred to him to be surprised. The thought was quickly abandoned.
He was expected. He tried to remember if similar
instances had occurred upon other excursions. He couldn't.
A rabbit in Wonderland. Or perhaps Alice in the
rabbit's fur. Here, now, was the difference between the classes. The Platinum District
dazzled his apathy,
He slunk through the streets like a ragged white
alley cat, booted feet silent against immaculate pavement of cement so white and cleanly
smooth it could be ivory. Even without light the cubes of metal around him shone with
their own radiance, as blinding and brilliant as mirrors beneath direct sunlight. Around
them twined massive coils of the dragon reborn in white chrome, machinery more complex
than any he had ever seen, and yet it twisted around an image in his mind, obscuring it
even as it highlighted the oily similarities.
A single cube, indistinguishable from the others
and yet picked out unerringly, opened for him without any action on his part, and he
entered its cool recesses. The Doctor was there, waiting.
This, he remembered. He supposed it was necessary
for him to recall the man in order to continue to trust him; he doubted that the Doctor
realized that Raze cared so little that such measures were not necessary.
He didn't know the man's name. "The
Doctor" served well enough for the reedy man with his sparse brown hair, flaking
olive skin, and odd, tumbling accent. The man led him down the hall to the familiar
examination room; Raze followed in silence, as was their routine. Vaguely he wondered just
what The Doctor might do to him today, but with the same clouded vagueness the realization
came that he still did not care.
Clothing piled black and oozing liquidly on the
floor, and Raze laid upon the unfeeling white table, wondering why it felt like a part of
him. Hands slipped easily into the wrist restraints; ankles followed, and he laid there, a
bound cadaver.
The instruments were cold on his body, but hot
underneath his skin. He supposed that was pain, red pain, imposing a misty cloud of blood
over the hazy world of his thoughts. Blood and crude oil, and again that mechanical
smell.....
Time disappeared. The blinding lights goring his
photosensitive eyes vanished, and he floated. Where, he did not know. There were
orbs--more orbs, there were always orbs. Glittering, crystal-clear and filled with a
shimmering, glowing blue-green liquid. He thought of them as spider's eyes.
A spidery limb stroked his body, the bristles on
the chitinous exoskeleton evoking that same rippling cat-tongue sensation, and he licked
his lips swiftly, retinas howling in pain as the hot lights above him resolved themselves
into reality once more. The jointed limb continued to stroke him, touching his exposed
flesh, and he twitched in revulsion and a strange sense of burning just beneath his skin.
He parted his lips, and the unfamiliarity of a moan rolled past them like sand tumbled by
the washing of noontide breakers.
The spider became the Doctor, and the limb became
an arm, and a five-fingered hand. Two fingers slipped inside of him, and he drowned in
pain. Screaming did not come naturally to him.
More memories lost. Only pain, and shuddering, and
a blinding white-hot physical flash. Wetness, and then he was standing outside of the
silver cube, his clothing wrapped plastic-tight to his gaunt body, strips of tape clinging
to his ribs and the small plastic card holding his payment credits clinging to his
fingers. A small red bump on the side of his neck ached from the insertion of the
nanoprobes. Its twin, used for the extraction, was missing.
Within the Level, a minute jolt of electric current
toggled a long-dead control circuit, activating its processes.
