The Thousand Year Fall

Chapter 1-1

1

The journey to work was very frequently the best part of my working day. My default was a public transport. Travelling in my own vehicle would have been faster, which was the reason I did not use it. I used public transport so that I could simply sit and not have to do anything else except let my mind wander as it wanted. We had moved from my hideaway to a space more suited to the three of us, close to the Circle where Asher did most of her work, close to the education centre for Petra, and far enough away from my work to give me a long lead up to the troubles of the day. The transport looped and spiralled across most of Mengchi so I had the pleasant illusion of taking the pulse of the city as I travelled across it.

Mengchi is a vast triangle with the point resting on the sliver of land that had survived the climate control debacle. It was not a high-rise city full of crystal towers like those that made the Penck such a tourist attraction. Mengchi spread out into the space that had been created and maintained by enormous charms that were hidden within other spaces for security reasons. If you approached the land from sea, you would just see a rising spinal of land, step onto the dock and you entered a megalopolis. My daily commute crossed most of the city, jumping from one stretch of rail to another so that it was the best way to get a sense of the city.

The starting point for Mengchi was the Old City, the capital of the Empire when Ingea was carving up the systems like a butchered Clighorn. Now the Old City was a sliver of the Mengchi, happy to be forgotten and keeping its own secrets. While the constantly shifting population on Mengchi sorted themselves by every conceivable criterion, the major ones were the same in every population in the systems: bottle born or natural, rich or poor. It could be as little as a row of public plantings that separated them. It did not matter how physically flimsy the dividing line was, what was important was that it was present and clearly identified by all concerned. The public transport system was one of the few components of the city that served everyone with the same indifferent efficiency. Via an unspoken and unshakable agreement, it was neutral ground for all the residents. Outbreaks did occur; they received swift and nasty summary punishment.

I have spent a great deal of time on public transport, short journeys to get lost as quickly as possible or to lose others. This was the first time I had an extended journey and the chance to look at the city. Gravel is where the bottle farms are, all of them. The track runs through deep canyons with blank walls on either side. This stretch has the most stops on the whole journey, the greatest number of passengers boarding and leaving. Somewhere there is the farm where I was brewed. The jump from Gravel to the bright, open parkland of Hebb is welcome. These are the lungs of the city, there are no stations here. Any lifeform stepping out would be dissolved by the atmosphere and drunk by the plants. Cleaning the air in Mengchi is a harsh task.

A jump through the layered business districts displays and hides the money as required unlike the journey through the residential locations. Here money and the lack of it is prominently on display. Here the rich naturals can be free of the sight of the poor. Poor naturals can be shielded from the presence of the bottle born, and the bottle born can be full citizens, workers, or mistakes, rich or poor, it only matters to them.

Mostly I just spent my time happily lost in fantasies of better lives for Asher, Petra, and myself. A frequent favourite had me as a Tamwal grower out on the Ghtur system, reclaiming a substantial area from the ruins of the war and cultivating the five strains, mashing, and blending them to sell for a happy profit. I could spend a whole journey just deciding how to build a wall or why exactly I had chosen that planting for an area in the first place. The details delighted me; they were so far removed from everything that was actual and were so amenable to my control.

The transport always arrived at the final stop and I left my farms, bridges, houses, space explorations behind me as I exited onto the platform and rode the steps up to the Governing District. The public chamber of the Standing Committee was here. Stacked above it were the individual suites for the committees, stacked below it were the confidential offices for the committee members. Along a wide, crooked street that gave no clean sightlines of the buildings that lined it were the headquarters for various departments, including the Public Relations Agency. Like all the buildings in the area, it had no trace of magic in its construction. It was all built by direct labour, from the carving of the blocks out of seastone quarries to laying the deadwood tiles on the roof, through to all the interior work. Nowhere would provide a possible point of access for someone to trace a path along a trail left by the residual power from the construction. It was as blatant an expression of natural born power as could be publicly made, and it made it loudly and proudly. I was happy to poke it in the eye every day I walked in.

I had returned to my job managing a maintenance section for the Mengchi city sewer system. I had rescued my daughter and stopped a plan to return the Empress Ingea from wherever she had been hiding for the previous two thousand years, and I was really looking forward to the calm boredom of work. Instead, my boss, Allson Gala, was in my office with Rosby, my assistant.

“Shakbout, how are you? I have some news for you. Most unexpected news I have to say. I have been informed that you are being transferred to the PRA effective immediately.” He handed me a small yellow cube. “This is your authorisation. I should be glad that they have heard of the good work you have done here and want you, I am very sorry to lose you.”

Unexpected was an interstellar understatement. The PRA had an informal and strictly enforced policy of employing only naturals, completely illegal, but who was going to take them on. Transferring in a bottle born lifeform was unprecedented, pulling a nobody from the s**t pots was ludicrous. Allson Gala showed why he was destined for the heights in the Public Service; he did not question the decision and he was nice to me on my way out. Then he sucker-punched me. “The transfer includes Rosby. Apparently I am to lose on the largest possible scale.” With that, he shook my hand, then Rosby’s, and left.

“What the f**k?” was Rosby’s response as the door closed. I think she saw that my stunned incomprehension was entirely genuine as she then continued, “We best be going. They are not known for being tolerant of latecomers.” With that we headed over to the PRA building where I was shown my space, Rosby was shown to hers, and I was introduced to my new boss, Lincoln.

Lincoln walked into my workspace and, sitting down in the chair in front of my desk, said, “Come on, Screw Top, time to be going. No time for sitting and thinking about what might have been, wheels to turn.”

Any hopes I had that Lincoln’s deep enjoyment of becoming my direct manager would reduce had finally faded away. Lincoln was wearing her full-dress Public Relations Office agent uniform. It was form-fitting, and it displayed her strong, athletic body and brought out the blue of her skin nicely. It had cost her a lot to have it made exactly to her specifications. She was always meticulous about her weapons. I was wearing my working robes; it was a plains clothes job and I was wearing the plainest clothes I had. They suited me, at a height of two metres, pale skin and dark-red hair, sage-green eyes, and ordinary features.

I stood and followed Lincoln out of the space, and we rode the tube in silence down to the transport bay. A large transport was waiting. Lincoln climbed in and sat at the controls while I sat beside her. Lincoln liked to be in direct control of any transport she was in rather than have a driver. She relished the cut and thrust of the traffic, which Lincoln said was the best strategy school in the systems.

After we had exited into the mainstream, Lincoln, looking straight ahead, spoke, “I am having a bit of an evening tonight at mum’s, and I was wondering if you would like to be there.”

Lincoln’s mother, Hiral Lakeview, was one of my personal heroes as well as being warm and welcoming, and I was always glad to have a chance to meet her. It was the singular invite that alerted me. Lincoln had invited me, not me and Asher, my wife, otherwise she would have said, “You two.”

While I miss considerably more nuance than I capture and misinterpret a lot of what I do, with Lincoln I had enough experience to be able to guess at the context. As far as I was aware, most lifeforms seemed to have distinct preferences for s****l partners and pretty much played within those preferences. Lincoln appeared to have no fixed preferences. I had met a few of her choices and it was always in the context of dinner with her mother. I would sufficiently distract Hiral to let Lincoln fulfil the “meet the parents” social obligation without having too much scrutiny.

Not including Asher could only mean that the choice of the moment was a little more unusual than normal. Asher would cheerfully dive into the tension and ask all the awkward questions that Lincoln wanted to push away, while I would politely be quiet. I was trying to think what could be so unexpected in a lifeform that Lincoln was taking home that she needed cover from me when Lincoln spoke again, “She is a natural.”

There is no legal restriction on intimate or romantic relationships between bottle born and natural citizens, there was thousands of years of disapproval instead. Much more effective in the long run. Lincoln was pushing the limits of everyone’s tolerance with this choice, and her choice was taking a huge social risk as well. Lincoln was not a low-profile lifeform; a bright blue Aquatic Ornamental Lincoln would have stood out even before her personality made her someone hard to ignore. Without mentioning her new role in the PRA.

“Don’t worry. You will like her; she has a great sense of humour,” Lincoln offered.

“It is your mother’s sense of humour that I am concerned about. She will think that I have encouraged you. She has some utterly mad idea that I have some influence over you.” I paused and let the full implications of the situation catch up with me.

“Lanken’s Tears, Hiral will give me the lecture, she will take me aside and give me the f*****g lecture. No wonder you’re not including Asher, she would be laughing so hard your mother would come and visit me at work to continue and then she would find you on your own as well. Well played, well f*****g played, Lincoln.”

“I’ll take that as yes. Food at eight, please be there for seven-thirty.”

I sat in grumpy silence as we made our way to Security Holding Block 7 where we parked and made our way to the meeting space and waited for Wellsprung Sotash to be delivered. Sotash was a mid-level career criminal who was about to start his indefinite sentence as an Involuntary Public Servant, and we were here to see if he had any last-second revelations to disclose in exchange for a better placement. Sotash was a deeply unpleasant lifeform, a natural who decided at an early age that hurting people and making money for doing so was what he had been born to do. Intelligent enough to ensure that he did his dirty work at one remove, he blighted as many lives as he possibly could before he made a mistake and appeared in person to hurt a decoy set up explicitly to bring him into the light.

The controllers delivered Sotash, and he sat down in the chair opposite us. The controllers stood behind him in case he decided to use his last moments of life trying to damage either of us. He was tall, two and a half meters, and very clearly worked hard on his body. For a big man, he looked supple and fast, his light brown eyes were calculating, and his handsome face was struggling to be blank. He had been expecting PRA agents, not us.