The Insane City

by Kenneth Bulmer

Genres: Science Fiction; Alien Contact; Space Opera

Synopsis

An all-powerful computer takes control of a great metropolis as a man and a woman are drawn into a love affair that may save - or destroy - their world.

Release date: July 25, 2013

Publisher: Gateway

Print pages: 172

Sample

He could not sleep. Some malign maladjustment of the bed subtly eroded his peace. The bedclothes tangled. He turned on his right side and felt forcibly contorted. He turned on his left side and heard the manic ker-thump, ker-thump, of his heart. He just could not get comfortable.

He sat up, rigid and unrelaxed, resigned. The double bed mocked him with its immense emptiness.

If he were married now, with a soft rump to snuggle against, a cohabiting body to curve the bed into matrimonial lushness, he might be able to sleep.

Luminous and mindlessly cheerful, the clock showed three in the morning. He hit the pillow viciously and thumped his head down, closed his eyes, tried to calm the tenseness. Useless.

How many other men lay awake and sleepless, fretful, tense for no reason, disassociated from everyone else, alone, forlorn …

It was no good, he gave up. He’d make a last try before even thinking about a sleeping pill, but he’d do it his way. What his way would be he was not too clear about—he was so damned tired.

He groped out of the bed and stood up, not clearly comprehending what he was going to do, despite his inability to sleep, a long distance from oblivion and yet not fully awake. A cup of coffee seemed the most likely idea. He turned up the lights manually. His mouth tasted vile. He stumbled toward the kitchen.

He, Frank Arthur Ridgway, felt abandoned.

Any detailed and personality-picking review of the previous day was out of the question. It had been a day like any other to start with; well, almost any other. He pressed the kitchen equipment’s buttons to prepare the coffee in a waking somnambulant trance. Now that he was up he felt incredible weariness, but he knew that the moment he put his head on the pillow he would be tossing and threshing and awake.

What had happened, then?

First, Duncan had implied he should go easy on Hanlon, the production manager. With his overlarge head and wizard’s cap of white hair, and his capacity as organizer of men tried to the utmost in the chair of Duncan Electronic Systems Services, Jim Duncan had ambled into Ridgway’s office like a large and probably friendly polar bear.

“You’ve got to try to see Hanlon’s point of view, Arthur,” Duncan rumbled.

“I’ve tried! But I thought we worked management by objectives—”

“That’s right. But—”

“That means that aims are declared and substantially agreed upon throughout the chain of command. Good Lord, Jim, you introduced the system yourself!”

He called James Grant Duncan, Jim, because Ridgway’s status in the company required that degree of familiarity with the chairman and because he had known Duncan as his father’s friend. Anyway, he lilted the tough old buzzard for himself.

“At the last regular meeting in which we discussed progress today, Hanlon indicated a potential exhaustion of long-lead items and a marked lateness of delivery on all components,” Duncan pointed out. “We’re eating up the material at an amazing rate.” He was clearly worried and yet tried to conceal it.

“The programmes are running to schedule, aren’t they?”

“Yes. DESS keeps printing out reassuring reviews, but the materials keep getting tighter and tighter.”

“But that’s only temporary,” protested Ridgway. “You hired me to help indoctrinate a new public to robex service, Duncan’s robexes in particular”—he waved a hand as Duncan tried to cut in—“I know you call it PR but that’s what I’m doing. I’m not responsible for selling, thank God, except to personal contacts. But I can’t promote, explain and educate when you can’t produce.”

The coffee pot cheeped in the kitchen and Ridgway poured himself a cup, preoccupied with his half-dreaming reverie and so cut in before the robex. It bleeped an electronic reprimand, and scalding coffee overflowed the cup and dripped to the floor.

“Oh, confound it!” wailed Ridgway. He yawned. Maybe he did have reason to be unable to sleep at that. He took the slopping cup and crawled to the lounge; the lights went on as he entered, and he flopped down into a chair by the window.

DESS was a fine outfit to work for, or had been, up until a week or so ago. And, inevitably, he’d always been proud of DESS the computer. The best in the business he said, and meant it. Now he didn’t know what to think. Oh, DESS the computer was fine; but Duncan, there lay the problem.

The coffee was gone although he didn’t remember drinking it. A strange state overtook him as he stared vaguely through the glass at the lights and darkness of the city, as though he had withdrawn into some secret haven of mystic contemplation, as though he had at last found a pseudo-sleep.

He dressed somnambulantly.

With unhurried movements he entered the elevator and descended from his fifteenth floor to the dim discreet foyer, where trailing fronds of vegetation looked sinister in their crouching postures by the doors. No one saw him leave the building. He sauntered along in the nighttime streets with his hands in his pockets, his face half-turned away from the lamps, his mind a cottony surface of immediate impressions pierced by the sharp unpleasantness of the day before.

He drifted along a part of the night yet separate from it. Reality and dream impinged like an eutectic region of the mind.

Computer services were remaking the world, weren’t they? Everywhere about him the city thrummed with electronic life, as nearly every nighttime need was automatically attended to. DESS could have dispensed a hypnotic sleep as well as a pill had he a mind to do it. His trouble probably was that he was too intransigent.

His footsteps carried him eastward along the north side of Hyde Park, whose dark illumination-splotched immensity showed formless and wind-blown, a place of rushing sound and gusty space. A trickle of cars passed on the roadway with thick light reflections streaking and gleaming from their polish. He hunched deeper into his coat collar.

Life should have been good and full of promise even though Duncan’s attitude worried him. After all, it was only because his father had been a lifelong friend of Jim Duncan’s that Ridgway had gone to DESS at all. He’d sworn, after kicking his educational bucket over, never to mix with technology again. But here he was, using his undoubted persuasive skills to acclimatize people to the idea of using robexes. Had he not felt right now as though his head had been stuffed with old socks, he would have chuckled a little at the absurdity of it all.

Away beyond the second new Post Office tower to the north and beyond the confines of the park to the south, the lambent and twinkling lights of relay towers starred the night sky dark with cascades of clouds. With radar reflectors providing brilliant displays on aircraft warning boards, those blinking lights might be unnecessary; but regulations demanded them. That typified the way society inched along; most people had come to accept the robex revolution but still the laws demanded outmoded concepts be followed in society’s dealings with the new ways.

Contractors built and operated and maintained the relay towers for companies like DESS to broadcast their computer services from their own Headquarters buildings.

DESS might be a small company compared with giants like Serven and, up north, Midserv; but DESS was expanding. In all the richer and progressive countries of the world it was the same. He could be walking in almost any synthesized city on the globe now, strolling in New York or Zurich or Saigon or Quebec or a hundred others, consciously aware of the strands of electronic power as an intangible web apprehended only through the mind. Webs and strands of power flung from the broadcasting towers to the peoples of the cities all over the earth, power that had changed their lives as they had been living them, the electronic robex services provided instant and perfect service to all who could afford it.

Ridgway heard the sickly squeal of a car’s tires slithering on macadam. He turned to look back. A dark frieze of bushes showed in cut-out silhouette against the lights of the hotels on the opposite side of the street. A honking yammer of horns burst out.

Standing in his half-bemused state, Ridgway was aware of the thought that this hullabaloo could only be caused by a human driver. The robexes in their fraternal togetherness simply never permitted accidents. Only human drivers had accidents.

Beneath the dark cloud-blotched sky above, the lights of the hotels and road formed a shell of illumination, a cave of brilliance, a lime-lit lifesize set fronting the darkling immensities of the park.

A car skidded broadside on the road. Other cars going in the opposite direction moved smoothly out of the way as their robexes guided them with automatic skill into open spaces between the oncoming traffic.

The out-of-control car lurched along by itself like a leper, its tires shrieking, lights slick on its polish. Brilliant scarlets and emeralds and royal blues struck back hush highlights. Chrome gleamed like knife blades.

The car struck a light standard, a door popped open. The light standard, (designed in the days of predominantly human-operated traffic, bent but did not snap off to crush down on the car. The light dangled and swayed like a dervish’s lantern. The car’s side shone fractured and silvery-splintered.

Other traffic slowed and as a traffic-police robex descended on shilling blades, its official blue paint dulled and its staring white lettering brutal with authority, single-line traffic formed and kept moving past the accident. Red and orange lights began to flash. Ridgway not altogether unreluctantly moved further forward. Accidents were rare enough. He had his own worries, any anyone was welcome.

A wind had risen, gusting uneasily along the pavement. The sough of the trees in the park sounded like wave-raped shingle.

The police robex would deal with the incident. Efficiently and unemotionally the machine would clear away the roadblock and resolve the various components of the accident. Through his own stupor of foggymindedness, his own problems and his preoccupation with himself, Ridgway realized he wanted to see how the robex would handle the situation. The police robex contract had gone to Serven. They had lifted most of the plum contracts. Nicholas Rogan, despite the fact that his board of directors was the factual dictator of Serven, had been ruthless in competition. Maybe, tonight, Ridgway might learn not why but a small fraction of the whole that made up why.

At first he did not see the girl lying against the curb.

He became aware of her only when the red and orange lights blinked on in phase and snatched her face out of the shadows like a Mardi gras mask leaping flamelike at him.

She lay crumpled, twisted, in an abandoned posture. She lay abandoned to the final fate as he had felt abandoned to his. He bent down. She was dead.

Her evening dress was unmarked and perfect, not soiled with a single stain of mud or blood. Her white face, painted by the blaring lights, showed composed and calm, her eyelids demurely shut, her mouth fractionally parted, pink and moist and soft. Her hair, dark red to blackness beneath the lights, lay luxuriously across the paving. The hard curbstone edge and the concrete were covered by the hair like an auburn waterfall. Her legs were twisted one over the other and both shoes were missing, and—the single sign of disarray and spoliation on the body—Ridgway saw a ladder running in the nylon from one knee up the thigh to vanish beneath the skirt.

An ambulance siren wailed down the sky.

Ridgway looked up, startled. White light from the ambulance lacerated the reds and oranges, for a moment turned the girl’s hair into a torrent of blood.

The wind gusted more strongly, shadows moved uneasily, the stark lights streamed away along the concrete and macadam. The dark immensity of the park beckoned and warned across the street.

The robex in the driving seat of the ambulance pulled up, doors opened and a stretcher slid out. Its wheels burbled over concrete. Its sensors gleamed. They surveyed the scene, swivelling to take in all of consequence, lingering long on Ridgway, who drew half back, as though under suspicion. The stretcher moved again. It chittered along the road. Arms unwound from its sides and lifted the girl respectfully, placed her on the stretcher. Other arms tucked in the blanket covering her.

Ridgway recognized the ambulance outfit. He had helped persuade the morgue services that they needed a DESS robex in preference to a Serven. He could recall the drinking work Joe Harrison, boss of sales, had put in on the contract. Neither of them had at that time actually witnessed a scene like this, a stark bloodshot accident, with a dead girl to be disposed of discreetly.

The stretcher’s eye sensors, its spy-eyes, revolved slowly, peering at Ridgway, standing there staring back at the stretcher and the girl’s dead body. A strange and somehow unpleasant chill seized Ridgway. He shivered. The eyes veiled themselves and retracted, and the stretcher chittered back to the waiting robex-driven ambulance.

Now another ambulance whined up, a Serven job, and parked beside the DESS ambulance. A Serven stretcher slithered out for the driver of the wrecked car. He had remained strapped in the driving seat. Now he was extricated by metal tentacular fingers with their plastic tipped and padded strength gentled for the simple task of unsnapping seat belts. Ridgway looked down at the driver as he lay on the stretcher.

Two or three other people had walked up by this time: a couple of human night porters, a young man and his girl, a human policeman. The driver lay on the stretcher and breathed through his mouth. Hi face looked bloated and flushed. He lay crookedly. His nose looked squashed. He smelt.

“A drunk!” the young man said, holding his girl more tightly. “A goddam lousy drunk! And he’s killed that girl!”

“They shouldn’t let human drivers on the road,” his girl said in a thin voic. . .