Praveenthi watched the hen party push clumsily through the doors ahead of her. They were busy making noise and, less busily, trying to get out of the bar. Each of them was pulling in a different direction, women acting out the random movement of molecules in a gas. Their privacy veils were set to transparent. They wanted people to see them having a good time.
With an almost audible pop they were through the door with a shriek of pleasure and, after a moment in which they threatened to splash in several directions, pulled themselves together and turned right.
The pinks and browns of holographic penises, resolutely thrusting from all around them like day glow porcupines, was enough to keep Prab from following lest she get caught in their chaos. Their clothes were shielded beneath see-through umbrellas. Slips of waterproof fabric unfurled under the soles of their wildly inappropriate shoes before rolling up and around their calves to keep their feet dry.
Wherever they went next they’d arrive dry with only their unabashed joy and the alcohol in their veins to give their hosts a sense of trepidation. Day trippers from inside the Arcology living it up in the physical world, just because they could.
Prab was drunk enough that no onboard AI would let her anywhere near a vehicle, and she had no intention of sobering up.
The hen party’s screams and laughter faded until only the static of the rain remained before she stepped out after them. There was an unexpected scent in the air, acrid and nasty in her nose, like something was burning. Prab ignored it and, turning left, splashed onwards. The rain was heavy enough that the street had an inch of standing water.
The first time she ever stepped out in her printed body, she’d relished the feel of rain on her skin.
Everyone did. It was a thing. Rain in the physical world felt less real than experiencing it inside the Arcology, yet, at the same time, the greasiness of it was instantly distinct from the smooth sensation of being rained on inside the electronic worlds of her first home.
As ever the sky over Sirajah’s Reach was the boring grey of rain clouds. The sun showed its face here less often than a wayward father returned home.
When it wasn’t raining there were thick black ash storms.
Prab wasn’t thinking about the weather. She was trying very hard not to think at all, and certainly not about the monthly mini-intervention by her family, who were determined to mix things up in her affairs. One step then another was about the desired level of consciousness. The world might be ending and she’d still be determined to keep it at arms’ length.
She was doing her best to prepare for her brother, because her brother was a dick. And not the kind the hen party were so interested in.
It also didn’t single him out as far as the rest of her family were concerned.
It’s only once a month, she reminded herself. You’ve got thirty days before you have to talk to them again.
There was no rule saying they had to stay in contact. No law stipulating family time. The next couple of days would be arguments with herself over why she hadn’t cut them off years ago.
No more demands that she rejoin the Arcology, no more requests for her to store her biome’s imprint in the Arcology’s systems so she could, when she was ready, translate and rejoin them in whatever paradise they were fucking about in currently.
Prab wasn’t ever going to rejoin them. The body she had was the one she wanted to live in for the foreseeable.
The idea of surrendering and translating back into electronic life made her actual fake printed skin crawl.
argument had been rehearsed so many times Prab had long ago abandoned reason in favour of letting her frustration and anger shut them the hell up. Except it didn’t. They’d adapted, coming sideways at the question of why she continued as an Excluded when all of time and opportunity awaited her if only she’d accept a virtual body rather than a physical one.
Her mothers would talk about worlds they’d seen, places they’d visited, achievements they’d encountered. Her fathers about music they’d listened to, concerts which had reduced them to tears. Of their own symphonies, written to be played by orchestras of hundreds with instruments that needed two mouths or eleven fingers and three arms.
Atul, her eldest brother and the only one of the three of them who thought he had a say in her life, was less subtle but just as on point. He’d ask if she wanted to make a difference, if she understood just how little her physical life was accomplishing.
“If you really want to be stuck in one place at a time, you could pilot,” he said. “That would be in the physical.” As if encasing her body in inorganics normally reserved for criminals was a concession he was willing to make on her behalf if only she’d do as they wanted.
These days Prab got mind-numbingly drunk on the neighbourhood micro-distillery’s gin before a call. She would then do her best to sit and nod as if she were listening, while they rabbited on for their agreed time.
They never noticed or remarked on her mental acuity during their time together. Perhaps they thought it a natural consequence of living in a printed body.
Today’s call had ended like most of them when her mothers had run out of things to suggest Prab think about. Her career, her reputation, her opportunities, her unnecessary aging. This list was extensive, detailed and repetitive.
Strangely her fathers were absent, but there’d been no explanation offered and no room for her to ask. Inquiring would only have encouraged them and Prab found the hour they spent with one another each week more than enough time as it was.
There was no question of cutting them off despite her fantasies of waking up on the morning of a call and realising she didn’t have to answer to anyone. They could, if they wanted, make her life actually, properly difficult. The Arcology had no known limits on what it could achieve when it set its nodes to it.
From their perspective Prab was one of the Excluded. Not even one of the Arcology’s myriad citizens who chose to spend time in the physical for reasons as varied as art, construction, pleasure or curiosity.
To be Excluded was to have set aside all the Arcology had to offer. To have rejected it. Truth be told, although the Arcology made a show of allowing people like Prab to walk away, to self-exclude as they put it, it took every opportunity to reel them back in.
Prab’s family could have made a fuss and the Arcology would have come calling.
Instead they’d adopted the role of passive-aggressive good intentions, and despite the incandescent fury and excessive drinking to which their behaviour drove her, it was better than them lodging a formal request for an intervention.
Her role as an Interlocutor helped. A go-between for the Arcology and its citizens in the physical, as well as counsel for others like her; people who’d rejected the Arcology which had given them life. Occasionally she was required to sit between the Arcology and those cultures and civilisations beyond its walls.
“Praveenthi. Darling. When will you be done?” her mothers would ask as if it was just a phase. A four-decade fad from which Prab would eventually emerge, an Arcology butterfly after decades of obstinately weaving herself into an Excluded cocoon.
The lights of the city were darkened. It took Prab a while to ask why.
The local network was stuttering too, refusing to report if there were any issues. Shaking her head as if the malfunctioning streetlamps proved her entire argument about why she wasn’t part of the Arcology and its sprawling galactic reach, Prab shut off her access and continued on her way home.
A certain kind of isolation was joy.
Sirajah’s Reach was a planet at the edge of the Arcology. Not so far out as to be at risk of some other polity or commercial interest claiming the place as their own, but sufficiently marginal that the people living here wondered exactly what it was they were paying for.
Not that anyone paid for anything. The Arcology had no money, no currency except for what it needed to bargain with outsiders. Its
Its people were beyond that kind of nonsense. At least as they saw it.
Prab liked money. She liked looking at her accounts and seeing the numbers, knowing it gave her an independence from the community in which she’d grown up and which, gently and without malice, refused to let her go.
Stood outside the door to her apartment building, the white-and-blue swirls of its walls running slick with rain but shining from an inner light the architect would have specified in line with the Reach’s design standards, she realised there was no noise.
She’d been so lost in replaying her conversation with her brother and mothers she’d not been paying attention to the world at her feet.
A sigh. Prab would tell her clients that paying attention mattered. She would say the Arcology bred inattention into its people, positively encouraged them to be self-absorbed. She said it made them vulnerable and wondered how they’d survived this long with such wilful naivety.
Most of her clients were those who’d done similar to her, walked away. Others were excluded on social or legal grounds. If they made the majority by number, they were rarely the most interesting. Those she was excited by were citizens of other polities, from worlds and societies bordering the Arcology and whose people spent their time in its space trying to live their lives. All too frequently this second group of clients came in misunderstanding the point of the Arcology so that they ended up needing someone like her to help them navigate its societies, its customs, its rules.
Inevitably some of her clients approved of her rants – allowing to go unmentioned the truth that it was the Arcology’s substrate and its nodes which kept them safe; a second society within, around and through everything the Arcology believed itself to be.
Few of her clients thought about who and what kept the Arcology running, fewer still those who’d exited from the Arcology itself.
“Smart,” she said, admonishing herself for being so much like those she profited from criticising. Hand on brow she gazed up at the overcast sky and confirmed what she already knew.
There were no vehicles. That smell was back. Definitely something burning. A creeping sense of the world being off by a few degree
degrees wouldn’t leave her alone.
It wasn’t that this time of day should be busy. It wasn’t. No matter where in the galaxy they ended up, people tended to regulate themselves by sleeping at roughly the same time as those around them.
Her neighbour, a strange man called Ben who’d left the Arcology a lifetime before Prab, needed only one hour’s sleep a week, but even he arranged to snatch it in the middle of what passed as night on Sirajah’s Reach.
Despite his oddities he was a good neighbour. He made sure the common areas were clean and the waste disposal was working without making a fuss or trying to have the rest of the building’s tenants applaud his efforts. There were rumours, started by the triplets in flat seven, that he spent hours on the roof garden fiddling with the hedging and staring at the sky.
Prab didn’t mind that kind of weirdness. You were absolutely a certain category of weirdo to choose to become Excluded. He’d never been rude or inappropriate with her, never brought up the Arcology and had not, once, asked to borrow something and then forgotten to give it back. Unlike the triplets who still had several books of hers.
Because books were Prab’s thing. Real books with pages and words in a single language and actual pictures that didn’t move or change and couldn’t be withdrawn by the publisher if they decided they needed to change them. She had books that were decades old. Each supply ship arriving at Sirajah’s Reach brought her more.
There were no book binders here on world. She suspected no one apart from her cared enough to consider setting one up, and there certainly wasn’t the demand needed to sustain one if they did.
She frequently worked with a lawyer called Marinique. Mari was a specialist in concept law, a field which dealt with definitions of individual sovereignty and how they applied to rights and access to services. Her clients were often, at some point, Prab’s clients too.
Marinique did not care about books, but she appreciated Prab’s devotion.
“It’s very you,” she’d said once, flicking through a brick-thick history of the Errent Protectorate, tracing its eventual decline and fall under the weight of its own isolationism.
pictures and paintings. A home, where her flat was little more than the place she slept.
In the silence of the city she could have heard pages turn.
She realised the street was empty too. There was nothing overhead. No one anywhere. Prab was the kind of person who found herself endlessly irritated by vehicles landing in the middle of the street to drive along at ground level and then taking off again for reasons known only to themselves. She regarded it as the height of selfishness, but now their absence chilled her right up and down.
Right now it was as if everyone else had received a message she’d managed to avoid.
Which wouldn’t be a surprise.
A single vehicle passed her on the road, but as they glided along she sensed there was an unease in their movement. Like people who’d been forced to walk, blind, into an unknown room. Then it drove into the corner of a building, the front end crumpling and bursting into flames before fire suppressants doused it.
Prab ran across, the alcohol in her stomach heaving at the effort. To her astonishment no one was inside. She cast an eye at the empty sky. How many others had come crashing down? Had people died?
Prab stood, hands thrust into pockets. The rain was lessening, which meant ash storms were on their way. The city’s environmental controls worked to keep the worst of it out but a fine layer of grime would still cover them all by the time the next rains came.
Prab pushed aside thoughts about the weather, resisting the urge to investigate whatever was happening. She was on leave. It wasn’t her concern.
But the car had still crashed. The sky was still empty.
There was a grocery across from her apartment. Although, like many of those in the city, it was run by an Excluded, it supplied to those of the Arcology who wanted to dip out of the endless supplies and resources of their empire.
You could spot them, tourists of the physical, walking like they’d been issued chickens’ legs and giraffes’ necks, stumbling from the warm embrace of the Arcology to engage in physical pleasures. His place was split into two sections, the novelties all tourists came for and then grocery aisles for everyone else, Arcology and Excluded alike, who lived in printed bodies in the physical.
Slumming it, they said. Fleshly delights in printed bodies that seemed, somehow, different from those same experiences encountered within the endlessly high fidelity of the Arcology. An empire which knew no boundaries except the imagination.
There were no slightly guilty Arcologist day trippers with their newly printed bodies and their network access dialled down to minimum settings on the street today.
The crash was probably down to a shitting mistranslation, she thought. It wouldn’t be my problem even if I was on call. Sirajah’s Reach was an Excluded enclave, within but not of Arcology space. Prab’s role was never about the politics of how the Reach and the Arcology engaged with one another, never about the institutions, except as her individual clients needed to navigate them.
Besides, no message had pinged into her vision demanding to be read. No one was calling on her. If there was an emergency then, unsurprisingly, they didn’t need her help.
She frowned.
Her inbox opened by willing it. There were no messages. Her feet twitched, she turned in the street. The grocer’s lights were out. They couldn’t be shut. They never shut.
Then he was there, in his doorway, head tilted back as if the sky would explain what was going on.
“Morris,” she called.
Morris, the grocer, stepped out into the street and she crossed over to meet him, hands still in her pockets. He was much shorter than her, thicker too, with a long face and no neck to speak of. At some time he’d come from a high-gravity environment and, coming here, had never bothered to change his body.
A nod one way then returned. He had the best moustache; thick, blond and unruly, like an enthusiastic puppy.
“Any ideas?” he asked.
“Power’s out?” she replied, still not drawing it in despite the nervousness in Morris’ eyes.
“Everything’s out,” he said.
Still no messages. No announcements from the city. Nothing in the last hour. Fifty-three minutes and eight seconds if she was counting. She’d been wrapping up with her family, had been one hand around a gin and the other holding her chin up off the table lest her mouth get ideas of its own and utter something she couldn’t take back.
“No messages though,” said Morris. He flashed up his own. It was spotlessly clean and well kept.
“How do you manage that?” she asked, stunned and slightly awed.
“I bin pretty much everything,” he grinned. “A hundred people send me shit all day long. My actual messages go somewhere else.”
A look was given.
He shook his head. “Just as empty, but I’m not showing you that one.”
“Any of them in tonight?” she asked. Investigative muscles twitching without being asked.
“Only one,” he said. “Came in moaning that his privacy veil wasn’t working.”
Prab stared at Morris.
“It wasn’t either. Never seen the like.”
Neither of them mentioned it, but Prab knew Morris had already understood something she was only just coming to realise. The city ran on the Arcology’s power grid, on its technology; it was theirs despite them tolerating a remarkable degree of dissent, disaffection and multiculturalism. She bitched about the Arcology, but the luxury of her complaints were bathed in its indulgence.
Sirajah’s Reach would be an unsettled ash-covered rock if not for the Arcology who perched over them all like a patient parent. Even if this was a temporary failure, the empty skies spoke of damage already done.
A lack of a privacy veil sat in the guts like a stone. It was the one thing Prab missed about belonging, the ever-present ability to hide herself from those who might look. It was the one item she’d instinctively reached for in the months after she’d first left the Arcology. Even now, decades later, she could feel the sense of its absence like a missing limb.
For a tourist to have come to Morris’ place without their veil spoke of something deeply wrong with the city’s infrastructure. Something much worse than empty skies.
It seemed impossible that the Arcology wasn’t present.
The lights in his unit flickered and came on.
“Ah,” he said. “Panic over.”
Prab, who’d left her connection to the city’s network open, was flooded with messages.
Then the lights went off again.
“Well, shit,” said Morris.
Prab wasn’t listening. Every single message had the same headline.
Emergency call-in. With her name in the headline. No images. No audio. Just those words.
Morris was peering into his store, but she was on her way. It was a long walk to the office. As she went he called after her, but Prab felt like a tidal wave was cresting just behind her and she needed to be doing something, trying something, to make her world better.
She tried several times to reconnect to the network, but that one brief flicker of life was all the city had to offer. By her reckoning she was two hours away. Her feet hurt contemplating the distance, the idea of sweat running across skin enough to make Prab shudder.
The only upside being it was time enough to sober up.
The call-in demands hung in her vision like old washing left on the line too long, but she refused to take them down in case they disappeared for good. The fear was irrational, they were in her personal space and wouldn’t go anywhere unless she deleted them. Yet a gnawing pessimism had taken hold and wouldn’t leave.
Prab wanted to stop on the way, to check on friends whose homes she’d pass on her walk. Someone would have more information, would be able to tell her what was going on. As she made to divert to an old lover’s place the first people appeared.
In ones and twos, looking dazed and frightened, they came. Coalescing into crowds without thought or direction.
inger on the street, drifting this way and that, random particles buffered by invisible winds.
Prab had no answers but no one seemed surprised at this. Who would know what to do if the sun went out? That panic hadn’t descended on the people around her was the only upside Prab could divine. She could feel the shock, the sense that what was happening couldn’t be real. It wasn’t like she could even contact people she knew in the Arcology – there were no links, no network. As if it had collected its things and left without warning.
What had happened to the hen party?
She hoped they were all right. Not enough to engage and do anything about it though. Head down, eyes on her feet, she kept walking, thoughts of diverting to friends’ apartments put away. No one called out, no one tried to intercept her, but the crowds didn’t thin out until she reached the Arcology’s towers.
It was only a matter of time before they followed on and found their way here. If there was something wrong, love them or hate them, the city would ask the Arcology proper to fix it.
Prab’s office was on a shared floor in a tall thin building that reached up to within a whisker of the city’s ash shield. The role of an Interlocutor wasn’t important enough for the Arcology that it could warrant the lofty heights of the upper storeys. Hers was the joy of a lifeless room in the mid-teens. About as low as one could get before plant and machinery took over the floors.
The tower itself was in the heart of the Arcology’s presence, one of a dozen buildings reaching up above the rest of the city and whose materials luminesced with a faint white light.
The landscape of the city meant the towers were visible from just about everywhere. Out at the edges where the ash would seep through the shield into the air and coat everything even on rainy days, they were about a thumb’s height above the horizon, but Prab spent her life with them arcing over her head.
You could have left Sirajah’s Reach, she told herself regularly.
You could have left Arcology space entirely. There were plenty of other cultures with just familiar enough physiologies and customs. It wasn’t lack of choice that kept her close.
Instead here she was, walking towards it to see what was wrong.
There was little freight between the Arcology and the rest of the city.
The vast majority of the Arcology’s people remained in the worlds they’d manufactured in information space, disembodied from physical flesh even as they wore versions of the same in the boundless sufficiency of the Arcology’s network. They had no need for a physical city beyond the infrastructure needed to run their worlds. If it wasn’t for the Excluded who outnumbered the printed bodies of Arcology members ten to one, Sirajah’s Reach would have been a flat disc of power grids and computational processing power buried under the surface of the planet.
Arriving, she found the building unresponsive. The elevators refused to come, the lights refused to light and the air was growing warm and thick as it languished unconditioned inside air-tight offices.
“Because of course they’re not working,” she complained to a building which could no longer hear her. There was a stone in her stomach now, a fear she refused to confront. It would be fine, she told herself. Get to the office and this will all be fixed soon enough.
On any normal day, Prab kept her network access to a minimum. An unprepared person entering the Arcology’s towers would be bombarded with advertisements for worlds to explore, offers of citizenship exams, directed requests for former members to come home, news of new games, new ideas and new experiences at the sole cost of uploading properly. It could get so a visitor’s vision was fully obscured by these intrusive offers and demands.
Having worked as an Interlocutor at the tower for close to two decades, Prab didn’t need to see the same messages every day. In lieu of having surrendered her privacy veil, she’d gone the whole next step of disconnecting entirely apart from essential services.
The doors were unlocked so it was simple enough to make her way through the eerily silent building to the stairwells and start climbing.
About halfway up it was clear
that stairs were a form of torture device.
At floor fifteen she had to stop for a rest, unable to continue despite her office only being two floors further up. She wiped sweat from her lips, the sides of her nose and from across her brow. She couldn’t bear to touch her neck or think what was happening under her clothes.
As long as no one saw her like this it would be fine.
Emerging onto her floor was an exercise in finding her breath and waiting for the world to stop threatening to fade into the narrow tunnel she’d been experiencing for the last few steps.
With a big heavy gulp she pushed across the floor to find it entirely empty. No one at home.
Granted, it was late, but there was usually someone around.
Prab had been hoping to find Mari. It would have given her someone to lean on, someone to laugh about this with.
Right then she felt alone in the worst way. It would have been great to be able to look out over the city night, to remind herself there were people out there who were experiencing the same as she was. All her office offered was bookcase-lined walls stacked with her books.
For the first time she looked at the shelves and couldn’t see any point in anything she’d collected. Self-indulgence masquerading as genteel rebellion.
The question of what to do next hung in the air.
The messages made no mention of who to contact or what protocols were in play.
Prab had no idea what the Arcology wanted her to do.
Turning around a couple of times, once to face the door then her shelves a second time then back to the door, Prab had no sense of what was expected. It was as if the Arcology was a catacomb from which the bodies had been removed.
If there was no one to talk to, there was no action she could take. Was this what the emergency call-in had been aiming for? That made no sense.
If the Arcology weren’t there to be spoken
with, the city was on its own. Are we going to die alone and in the dark?
Her stomach turned over at the thought.
How long before the ash shield failed? How long before the people went hungry?
Were ships still in orbit waiting to land? There had to be a way off planet.
It was all but certain that the departure halls with their translation machines were idle. Prab thought about heading to the nearest one, down on the edge of Lake Trasper, a beautiful spot where those going off world queued outside among flowers and trees, landscapes manicured under artificial sunlight to resemble the idylls of worlds where the stars were visible and ash didn’t render the sky an angry charcoal smear.
Then she knew where to go. The dockyards. The emergency call-in’s origin couldn’t have come from within the city’s architecture. It had to be someone whose comms were still online, which meant one thing: she’d been called in by a ship. A ship in orbit wouldn’t be any use to anyone, so they’d be planetside where she could reach them.
People didn’t travel on ships. Translation meant they could step from one world to another without having to leave their gravity wells, without having to worry about a void intent on killing them for the slightest misstep.
Ships weren’t unhappy about this state of affairs – they were the nodes of the Arcology’s network of existence; a population of citizens embodied as ships and, as such, members of the Arcology’s ruling class. If the substrate were those who formed the foundation of the Arcology, the nodes were its realisation in physical space.
Carrying passengers was both passé and demeaning from their point of view. Like a whale being asked to give passage to a snail.
So if someone was waiting for her, they’d be at the docks.
A small voice in her head muttered she might not have to die here on Sirajah’s Reach. She knew it was likely impermanent, that everything should and would be fine, but a tightness in her chest told her to be afraid, that if this was happening, it was because there was an emptiness where the Arcology should be. Unspeakable, unthinkable and yet there it was in her veins.
Spiralling terror.
Skin prickling with guilt and relief and hope and shame, Prab started down the stairs on wobbly legs, determined to reach the docks and find someone to get her off world before the city was buried beneath ash.
She got two flights down before turning around, returning to her office and filling a backpack with a small collection of books.
The docks were the very definition of a shit hole. Most freight came in through the translation gates and those, even the big ones used for cargo, were in more populated parts of the city.
By contrast, the few ships which still flew were either military or carried bulk cargo of the kind where it was pointless arranging translation to send it where it was going.
Of course, the third kind of cargo delivery was of the suspect variety, but Prab knew of that only by reputation. The closest she’d ever come to circumscribed goods were books talking about the success of cultures other than the Arcology.
Disdain breeds a lack of investment, emotionally and, in this case, economically. The docks were buildings which didn’t shine and which didn’t keep out the ash. They were made from local materials rather than printed and had all the charm of an overgrown fingernail.
Entertainment about gangsters and troublemakers featured docks the same way as romances featured the final happy ever after in the paradises offered by the Arcology.
Prab knew they were as safe as anywhere else in the city, but she still felt the frisson of danger in her blood as she approached. ...
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