Standard Quadrant communications screen
RECON 5
From "The Quadrant" novel (C) 1999 by
Richard Gabrio
The speedtube car came to a sudden, jarring,
stop, and the doors hissed open. Only a few people were left this far out,
and they rose from their seats sadly, like resigned sleepwalkers. When the
cold swirling air hit the inside of the car, everyone shook, drew their
clothing up around themselves, and swore. Tal was the last one out. It was
cold and dark and the elevator wasn't working, so he took the stairway with
the others. No one spoke. After a few minutes he reached the street level,
and watched as the others, each heading in a different direction, faded
into the gritty darkness.
It would have been nice to jump a pedway
and ride the three kilometers to the sector where his father lived, but
the ramps had long since frozen in place due to lack of maintenance. Recon
5 was known as the "junk board." Here, on the outer strip, almost
nothing worked, including the climate control equipment. Few who had the
skill and training to maintain Quadrant systems on the periphery could be
induced to work in such inhospitable surroundings. Still, over a million
people lived and worked here, if you could call it that. They were the dregs
of Quadrant society -- outcasts, criminals, freaks. Most of them had used
up the chances they had to make it on the inner boards and now merely waited
for downshaft or death. Life on the edge of the Quadrant was hard, cold,
and deadly.
As Tal walked toward the lone sodium light
marking the entrance to Sector 7, a few hundred yards ahead, he remembered
the first time they had come to this place. He was a young boy and his father
took him to the shower on a lower floor where the water was rusty and tepid.
Someone else who was waiting in the hall to use the water screamed at them
when they came out, and his father became angry and knocked the man down.
When they got back to their flat several floors above, his father and mother
argued, and his mother broke down and cried. It was an unhappy memory. He
tried to recall happier times before they had been forced to come to Recon
5, but all he could remember was the glint of the afternoon sun on a glass
table in a carpeted room and the look on his mother's face as she smiled
at him on the floor. Suddenly, he heard voices. The memory vanished.
Three forms emerged out of the mist in
front of him. They were older men, all wearing shabby looking overcoats.
One of the men shined a minilight in his face, and they all laughed.
"He's only a pup!" Whaddaya
doin' out here, pup?"
Tal relaxed immediately and put his bag
on the ground. These were not dangerous men, but they could be easily provoked.
He had taken care to wear old clothing for his trip here so he could blend
in. He shaded his eyes slowly and looked at the men.
"I'm headed for Sector Seven to see
my dad. I've been at school on Recon 1."
The man holding the light lowered it slightly
and pointed in the direction Tal would have to go.
"There's been trouble out there.
The Stunz an' Blades 'av been fightin' each other for the last month and
there was a power failure a couple days ago. I'd go careful like if I was
you, son."
"I'll be allright," Tal answered.
"Go up the west end o' Six, then
cut over," one of the men said. "The Blades took out most o' the
lights on the main way in last week."
"Thanks."
"G'night now, pup."
"Good night," Tal repeated.
As the men disappeared into the fog, Tal
pulled back the coat sleeve on his left arm to check his screen. He was
surprised at how lax he had become from living on the inner boards -- It
was still on suppress mode from the speedtube ride. He immediately activated
it, punched in the Recon 5 security monitoring codes for Sectors six and
seven, and left his coat sleeve up. He wiped the cold sweat from his face
and exhaled, watching his breath dissipate into the night air, then picked
up his bag and headed quickly for the dim lights in the distance. In an
hour he would be at the outer edge of the Quadrant, looking up at the decaying
20 story cement monolith where his father lived in a one room cold water
stop. It was not a pleasant thought.
* * * *
Tal heard his father cough softly in his
drugged sleep and turned away from the sound instinctively. The air was
heavy and he found it hard to breathe. He had tried to talk with his father
earlier, but could not get beyond the usual small talk about school and
the continuing food shortages on the outer boards. When he tried to turn
the conversation to deeper issues, his father became irritated, and took
several small red pills. Not long afterward, the old man fell forward in
his chair, lapsing into oblivion. Tal carried him to his little bed in one
corner of the room and covered him over, and then had fallen asleep himself.
Now that he was awake, he thought for a moment about school, his girlfriend
Ari, and then his father. Finally, feeling only frustration, he pulled the
ratty blanket up around his ears and tried to forget.
Without warning, a violent scream exploded
from the floor below. Then harsh voices and thumping noises, and then the
screamer again, screaming like he wanted to die but couldn't. Tal shot up
off the mattress in an adrenalin rush. The screaming continued, becoming
a strange animal wail. He pulled on his pants, grabbed his father's brodstik
and ran out of the room.
Darkness. A flickering yellow light lit
the top of a stairwell approximately fifty meters down the hallway. The
screaming was louder. Tal made for the stairwell at the end of the hall,
jumping over garbage and swatting at scurrying rats with the brodstik. He
reached the stairwell, grabbed the railing, and swung himself down the stairs
as far as he could, then jumped the rest of the way to the floor.
Turning into the hall, he saw four young
men with brodstiks at an open door. One of them held something up toward
the light flooding out of the doorway, and laughed at the screamer inside,
then slammed the object down on the floor and smashed it with his brodstik.
"Welcome to downshaft, brother!" The others laughed and banged
their stiks against the walls and floor, then, together they all turned
and fled down the hall, disappearing into the shadows at the far end. The
screaming inside turned to low dispairing moans.
Tal ran to the open doorway and looked
down at the object on the floor. It was an AV screen smeared with blood
crushed beyond repair.
"Shit!" He said, looking into
the room, dropping the brodstik. A girl sat on the floor cradling a young
man spattered with blood. An older woman was hunched on a couch behind them
sobbing quietly.
"Please help us, please!" The
girl, barely into her teens, tried to comfort the young man writhing on
the floor. She turned up toward Tal imploringly. "They ripped out his
screen and he's going to die!"
The young man had been beaten badly, and
the inside of his left arm where his screen should have been looked like
bleeding raw meat. Tal grabbed a pillow from the dirty couch and put it
under the man's head. He continued moaning, trying to speak, but the words
were incomprehensible. Tal raised his left arm, checking his own screen.
It pulsed, showing a Recon-5 security alarm signal for their sector in a
tiny corner of the screen. He looked up at the girl.
"Enforcers will be here in a few
minutes. What the hell is going on? Who were those men?"
"The Stunz. Dag pubbed their chat
in the sector and they took him down." She looked up at him, teary
eyed. " He's my brother, the only family I got! Why'd they have to
do it? Why?"
Tal looked at the girl. She was upset
but not hysterical. In a strange way, something about her attracted him.
He felt an overwhelming desire to assure her that everything would be allright.
"Look, your brother's been beaten
up, but he's going to make it. Security will reconnect him to Nowtime and
he'll be as good as new."
"Dag's Recon 5," she said. She
was quiet now, oddly resigned.
"But he can't be, he doesn't even
look twenty."
The words sounded hollow, like they had
been pumped through an acoustical tunnel. After 5 disconnects, nobody could
be reconnected to the System. The only alternatives were death or downshaft.
When you were shipped downshaft you lived with the disconz and anteeks out
of tech -- off The System -- forever. He looked back up at the girl.
"I'm sorry . . ."
"Not as much as we are, pup."
The voice had the distinct sound of authority, but was not imperious. Tal
spun around and saw a small, balding, solidly built man of about sixty at
the doorway. He heard the sound of sirens below and began to sweat. It would
only take about two minutes for the security teams to get to the fourteenth
floor. The man at the door bent down and scraped what was left of the ruined
screen apparatus into a plastic sack, stuffing it into his tunic, then spoke
first to the older woman.
"Don't worry, Vera, Dag'll be allright.
We'll take care of 'im."
The woman looked up through bleary eyes,
wanting to believe what the man said, but she was overwrought and couldn't.
"Ohh, Bertie, "ees gonna die,
They're comin' to take 'im away. I know it! They're comin' to take my Dag
away!"
The man became much sterner now. "No
they're not! Shut up, woman and stay shut! This is business!" He turned
directly to Tal, pointing to the young man on the floor. "Grab his
arms and be quick about it!" To his amazement, Tal found himself helping
to lift Dag up. Together, at the lead of the older man who grabbed Dag's
legs, they began to carry the young man out of the room, stopping for a
moment at the doorway. Bertie fixed his eyes keenly on the young girl, then
at her mother slumped on the couch.
"When they get here you tell 'em
Dag was taken away by the Stunz. That's it. He was taken away. Tell 'em
that and nothing more. You got it!"
The girl nodded through her tears, glancing
quickly at Tal before Bertie shut the door. Now, with his eyes on Tal, the
older man motioned with his head at the floor. "That yours?"
Tal recognized his father's brodstik.
"Yes." He bent down, supporting the now unconscious Dag partly
with his knees, and picked up the weapon, laying it on the young man's chest.
Bertie flashed his eyes up the hall. "This way!"
* * * *
Tal watched as two men worked on Dag on
a mattress in the back of the dingy apartment. One of them cleaned off the
wounds on his chest and began bandaging them while the other carefully cleaned
the young man's left forearm, injecting it with something from a pneumatic
syringe. They were deliberate and professional. Bertie stood over them for
a moment, saying something quietly to one of the men, then turned to Tal.
"Hand me that bag behind you." Tal turned around and found a small
carrybag sitting on the floor by an old overstuffed chair. He walked over
to the men at the mattress and handed it to Bertie. Before Bertie took the
bag, he grabbed Tal's left arm and pressed the AV suppress mode button on
his screen. The screen visibly dimmed.
"What are you doing?"
"We're in downtime now, pup. Understood?"
Bertie took the bag, unzipped it, and
pulled out an AV screen unit. He held it up. "Get it." Tal simply
swallowed and said nothing. Except for the smashed device retrieved outside
Dag's stop, he had never seen a screen that was not connected to someone.
Bertie handed the unit to one of the men who immediately began pulling several
tiny hair-like wires out of one end of the device. The other man who had
been preparing Dag's inner arm, rapidly measured the length of the wires
with a micrometer. Bertie pulled Tal aside, walking him toward the door.
"Let's let them do what they do best,
eh?"
"This is anti-Korpus, you know that,"
Tal said with as much conviction as he could muster.
"There's a lot that's anti-Korpus
out here, pup. We have to trash reg to survive and that's how we'll continue
to survive." Bertie placed his hands on the young man's shoulders and
looked directly into his eyes.
"You've helped me and people I know,
and you've got our thanks. But you've seen nothing here and you'll say nothing
ever about it, allright?" Tal looked at Bertie and slowly nodded his
head.
"Good," the older man said,
putting his ear to the door. "Now it's time for you to go back where
you came from." He opened the door and motioned Tal out into the shadowy
hallway.
* * * *
As he stretched out on the mattress, Tal
heard his father's breathing mix with the sound of sirens fading into the
distance. He was exhausted and elated at the same time. The twenty minutes
downstairs rushed back into his brain, filling it with images and possibilities
he only half understood. Why had the Stunz wanted to kill Dag? Why was the
man called Bertie so interested in saving him? Who was Bertie, really? And
who were the strange men in Bertie's stop? He had heard of the so called
Netherites -- people from the 'underground' who did offpattern reconnects
-- but he knew of no one who had ever seen them. He and his friends speculated
that they were criminal creations used by the Directorate to justify tighter
security measures in the Quadrant, but now maybe they were real. And the
girl? She was hurt by all of this and he felt her hurt.
As these and other thoughts raced through
his mind, he slipped into a dream that seemed nonsensical, even as he dreamed
it. Millions of long extinct creatures called penguins walked calmly to
the edge of a great precipice, and, for a silent moment, all raised their
left wings up to check their screens. Then in a monumental roar, they jumped
in unison to the roiling water far below. Tal fell for a long time before
he hit the water, then sank deeper and deeper into fathomless indigo.