World of Glass Page 3
A whirring roar swelled to life around them.
"It's lifted," he texted, his voice inadequate over the roar.
"Good," the owner replied, watching the young man he'd just fired walk away in despair. "Here's your pay."
He stood, face neutral. He did not give thanks.
The owner immediately posted a replacement job opening, sending it out to layabouts waiting hungrily in alleys nearby. "You can find your own way back to the street."
His feet took him down the grated steps, and his legs moved him along the massive pipes and vats, but his guarded eyes were on the workers watching him pass. Their breathing masks hid their expressions, but their manner seemed defeated. He'd expected resentment, but he had no explanation for their slumped shoulders.
Leaving the azure chem-complex in silence, he did not look back.
"Done already?" Og greeted him as he emerged from the crowd.
Elizabeth grimaced. "What's that smell?"
"It'll pass."
He followed closely behind the two of them, keeping his head down and his mind aloft. Riding the currents of data, he walked with his eyes half-closed, navigating the increasingly dense crowd purely by map. A few kilometers ahead, a massive cleft in the map cut through the architectural morass.
Seeing a text message reach Og, he read it. “Welcome back, son.”
“Hey, my dad’s awake,” the young man said aloud, glancing back over his shoulder at the two of them.
Access notifications passed through Rolf’s vision as the distant Scientist, Ragni, skimmed over transcripts of their arrival and recent conversations.
“So you two are coming here as well?”
Moving directly behind Og as the crowd grew too thick to progress otherwise, Elizabeth texted her response without hesitation. “Yes, definitely.”
A moment later, Rolf added his response, entering the letters on his visual keyboard with hesitant swipes of his eye. “Yes.”
“Good, we can always use more Scientists here,” Ragni continued. “Any idea what you’d like to work on?”
He opened his eyes again as they entered the direct line of people heading for the Rails. A few blocks ahead, the tremendous superstructure ran perpendicular to the street.
From their perspective, it looked like a series of heavy horizontal cylinders supported by gigantic steel triangles, all shining at sharp angles with the reflected light of the Unsetting Sun. Flanked by high multi-colored buildings, the Rails stood out as starkly chrome and mechanical, cutting through civilization as part of a massive distribution web.
“You know my project,” Og sent back, his demeanor momentarily grim.
“Are there any pressing issues?” Elizabeth asked.
Ragni scanned their backgrounds and listed skills. “As always, the more minds on the solar cells project, the better. We could use Rolf's programming and your engineering skills, both.” A link followed his message.
Elizabeth examined the project’s files and progress, hesitating for a moment.
Rolf waited, his eyes on her grey-shirted back as they shuffled through the crowd. He knew she was waiting to see if he was going to join - it seemed she was seriously intent on finding a project separate from his, as Og had suggested.
“Sounds interesting,” she finally texted back. “I’ll join that.”
Her choice made, Ragni’s examination of his data deepened.
He tried not to betray his anxiety. He had a tense notion that the distant Scientist was going to see his background and suddenly grow negative - but Ragni either didn’t notice, or didn’t care. His interest seemed caught by something else entirely.
“Oh, you've played it before,” the old man texted, and Rolf’s heart froze. “You know, we’ve had a programming project request on backlog for quite some time. No Scientists with the necessary experience or time to waste on fixing a game. You seem uniquely suited for this.”
He viewed the accompanying link, running through the request.
It seemed that something was subtly wrong in his childhood haunt…
Fighting to keep his vitals neutral, he carefully considered his options. Ragni was right; he was uniquely suited for the task. It would be suspicious if he chose some other project instead… and, being who he was, he already had all the suspicion he could handle. “I’ll take it."
“Good, good, good. I’ll see you three when you get here, then." To one of them, he added another line. "See you soon, son.”
Og's gait took on a highly positive up-step.
They reached the end of the waiting line of people, and, subsequently, the beginning of the food-bearing Rail cars. Taking turns interacting with the dispensary on the front of the rectangular chrome car, they each bought half a loaf of cricket bread from the automated stores within.
He stared at the screen. “Is this right?”
Og glanced over. “Hmm?”
“The price. It’s like twenty percent higher than two years ago!”
“Oh, I hadn’t noticed.”
A grumble traveled around the people behind them in line. He turned back to the ordering screen, intent on hurrying it up, but the discontent was - for once - not focused on him.
"Squeezing us for every bit we've got," a glowering teenager muttered.
A grizzled senior shook his head. "It's because the Peak's so low. Tough times mean tough prices. Just the way it is. I've lived through worse. You should have seen the Tyrant days."
The young malcontent made a disgusted noise, and the two began arguing. Others in line watched them, nodding along with one or the other.
Eager to get away from anything that might bring unwanted attention, he finished ordering, grabbed his food from the dispenser, and moved on after his companions.
He wolfed down his chunk in seconds, satiating his desperate body. He shivered once it was all gone, fighting the incredible urge to spend the last of his money on another half-loaf… but that meal had already been one of excess. It was dangerous not to carefully calculate every bite, every movement, every expenditure… and the unexpectedly higher price had left him subtly shaken. The pay for the chem-complex job had been effectively worth much less than he'd anticipated…
They moved down the platform and entered a dim compartment. Formerly stuffed with cricket bread loaves from the Fields, but newly empty after selling out its inventory, it now served as passage for a large number of people. An enormous press of bodies crowded in behind them, all heading for various destinations down the line.
Tucked in the corner, lacking any room to sit, the three Scientists stood and gripped a vertical bar.
Elizabeth's hand brushed his. She gave him a brief mean glare and moved her hand away.
Giving her no care, he leaned his shoulder against the shaking wall of the car, relishing the dimness and overpowering noise of travel. All things considered, the Rail's roaring sound and shifting darkness came as a blessed respite.
He let the mental stresses of the world at large fall away.
As his body calmed, his thoughts traveled outward.
He found himself idly skipping across the lifelogs of men and women a few blocks away from that mysterious giant back at the Edge. He kept his accesses distant, skirting around those people the man might know personally, avoiding leaving any overt clue as to the true target of his study.
They called him the Islander.
That made sense, at least as a nickname based on the popular theory of his origin. Somewhere, they gossiped, there had to be an Island… a living landmass rife with food, where life ran healthy and fat. That conjecture made perfect sense, given the man's height, musculature, and unknown origin.
Leaning against the wall of the swaying Rail car, relishing in the dimness and sense-numbing mechanical roar, he could almost believe it himself. That was the insidious nature of the rumor… he could fully understand how
everyone would want to believe it; that somewhere out there was a wonderful place with bountiful food, free from ills, free from pain…
But - judging by the visual logs of men who were there at the time - when the Islander had washed up to the Edge a few months ago, half-drowned and burned deep red by the Unsetting Sun, he'd had no possessions hinting at any such place. He'd never said or written anything in all his time since. He'd given no grounds for such an idea.
The only support for his supposed paradise origin was his strangely healthy physique. His calorie balance just didn't make sense… with only his earnings from laboring as a construction worker at the Edge - barely more than the calories expended in the job - he'd somehow remained as muscular as the day he'd washed up.
He began guessing idly at explanations for the man's impossible calorie balance. Maybe growing up healthy had positive effects… maybe his gut bacteria were more efficient…
Or, maybe, he was secretly a very lifelike machine in disguise, a probe sent to spy on them in the best manner possible - by getting a cell and contacts like everyone else, and then watching society from the inside.
He shook his head and snorted, dismissing the unlikely notion. Too much science fiction, he told himself, pushing aside half-remembered stories from bygone days.
Shaking back and forth with the car's clanking rumbles, he let his real vision trace across the gloom-shadowed patterns on the patterned metal ceiling. No, as much as he wanted to believe it, the Island was just a dream; a false hope born from the wishful thinking of a starving society…
…and his conclusion had come to