The Thousand Year Fall

Chapter 2-1

2

Since I could not run from the inferno, I thought I may as well just jump right into it, so the following day I walked into Lincoln’s office and sat down in the chair in front of her desk.

“Good morning,” I started as Lincoln looked questioningly at me. “You looked very happy last night, and Reyan is very impressive. I am concerned that you will find yourself brutally hurt. Reyan is a professional campaign worker for a political party that specifically represents bottle born, I am concerned that she is using you to brush up her credentials. Having a relationship with a bottle born is a clever way to do this.”

Lincoln had become dangerously alert as I was speaking. I recognized it which means that it was a high threat level.

“…and I solemnly promise to always keep my nose and my prick out of places they should not go. You would slice one off, and Asher the other, then Petra would fry both for breakfast,” I added.

Lincoln waited for a beat or two then smiled at me accepting my abject retreat for what it was as well as, I suspect, understanding she had put me into this position. I had been included the previous night to draw Hiral’s attention, but I think that Lincoln had not expected me to jump so heavily on the source of concern. For myself I had done my duty to Hiral and not blown up my relationship with Lincoln and that was a huge win that I was happy to leave with.

“I am sorting out the Hartigan information. It is quite the stash and will give the department and the two of us a significant public win. What are you up to?” Lincoln was back in boss-mode, which was fine with me.

“I got a tip I would like to follow up.”

“Anything interesting or are you trying to be busy?”

“Possibly very interesting, the source is very reliable and the information is curious.”

Lincoln looked at me for a moment. “Curious?”

“The message said, ‘Harmon Stucco didn’t fall, he was pushed.’”

“That’s the tip? Someone is polishing your scales. Part of the event we were at last night there was a little interval piece, it had a bunch of lifeforms standing around and someone comes over and asks what they are doing. They are told that the crowd is waiting for a lifeform that opened a door a thousand years before to step through it. Then a door appears in the air, it opens and a natural in old-fashioned robes takes a step, trips, falls and breaks his neck. Then one of the lifeforms turns and says to the audience, “Holo Stutter did not fall, he was pushed.” Everyone bows, including the natural who has got up, and they all file off the stage. Someone has captured the line and is using it to fish for…” Lincoln did not complete the sentence which should have ended with “fools”.

I had a different view. I thought that the little scene was a signal that released the message to me. I would tell Lincoln everything when I was sure there was a bit more to this than a message. The systems were crowded out with active dead lifeforms, a lot were delivering messages of some sort at any given time. What made it special was that the dead lifeform was Arran Sindar. Getting a message four years after Arran had died and been disposed of in a Harvester feeding vat as he had requested, direct to my new work account was a cause for worry. Any message from Arran was important. He had followed dark trails and found hidden information. The message was a reminder of a shared past and unfinished business. I could not ignore it.

We all spend much more time worrying and planning for what will happen to us after we die than we do about being alive. It may be the sense of powerlessness that inevitably follows dying, probably it is just naked fear. No one wants to end up being an IPS. That is the actual bottom of the heap. There are other possibilities that are hairsbreadth above it which are, frankly, a lot more palatable for pretty much everyone. If you are short of cash on an ongoing basis or simply making enough without having something to spare the chances are that you will be sold to the Kulvian. They pay a fair price for a non-descript body of any origin and exactly what they do with them is happily out of sight and mind. As far as I am aware, no one has returned to explain what happens, so it is simple and effective.

Moving up the economic scale you can donate your remains to science. This only works if there is a hefty donation to grease the process. The money is spent, the body is subject to a series of non-revival activities related to training and research, and the final leftovers are sold to a compost factory. If you can afford it, you can insure your remains for a disposal. Essentially you are funding the fee for the compost farm to take you. The demand is so great that compost farms can charge what they want and still have a significant oversupply and storage can be expensive. One of the major perks of the Public Relations Office work is that compost insurance cover is included in the benefits package. Finally, if you are insanely rich, you can be buried in the ground and left to compost naturally with a marker to point to the spot where you are being recycled.

With that, I left Lincoln’s office and headed for my own space where I found Rosby and Akion my Information Specialist. They were a hugely incongruous pair even in the Mengchi Public service. Rosby was a tall, olive-skinned, female lifeform with large, working, white feather wings growing from her shoulder blades. Akion was a short, upright, fat, white worm with a round head, round feet, stick arms, and a book bag, which is why they were known as the Bookworms. By accident I had become very important to the Bookworms, which was good and bad depending on the mood I was in at the time. Seeing them together in my office space was unlikely to be good news. Rosby started shooting first.

“I have been contacted by Staff Allocations who tell me that I have been assigned as the front support to the Knob. I was also told that you have agreed to this.” Rosby’s wings had a very faint pink tint to them which indicated that she was in a killing temper and barely holding it in. She would be really upset to think I would do something like this and even more so do it without talking to her first. Akion stood by blinking slowly behind her glasses. I was not entirely sure how they would respond if Rosby did move to kill me.

I held up my hands and said as I moved over and sat at my desk, “No, I have agreed to nothing. As far as I am concerned you are not going anywhere, I need you here. In any event I would never hand you over to the Knob. The Knob has been positioned to block the UPCR and I know they are looking for a way to manage him. You did a very effective job previously and your name must have come up in a review. Staff Allocations and Resource Management will be falling over themselves to ingratiate themselves with their new masters, so they have rushed to this. Please leave this with me and I will stop everything.”

Rosby’s wings became bright white as I spoke, and she listened and settled to give me the time to make good on my promise. She smiled at me which caused a reaction that made me very glad I was sitting down. I was not wholly sure if Rosby knew what she was doing, I strongly suspected she did and used it carefully to remind me that trouble could flow both ways.

“Akion, I have a request…” I trailed off as Akion handed me an info crystal from her book bag and said, “Harmon Stucco information.” Sometimes having your entire life being observed can be useful, other times less so.

“Thank you,” I said.

Akion blinked at me and turned to leave. Rosby considered me for a further moment before nodding and leaving as well. I put the info cube on the desk. I planned on interrogating it later, but first I wanted to have a talk with Starlight. This required a little advance preparation, so I headed for the staff wet rooms where I had a full wash-down and put on neutral deodorant and a freshly laundered set of robes. I slipped on a protective overskin and headed out.

Starlight was the pride and joy of his family. He was fatally allergic to a huge and ever-expanding range of ordinary environmental items, could not walk unaided, and could see and hear only by wearing charms. They could not be embedded in his skull as the bones were too fragile to bear the surgery. All of which proved that his family was 100% natural all the way back to creation. No “back alley editing or enhancement” for them, they were natural lifeform elite because they had demonstrable proof of it. I had asked Starlight what he thought about it and he told me, “Everyone wants me, and no one wants to be me. Being a trophy is a pain at times. Still it is the deal I had been given, and the only thing that I really care about is pushing ahead on my own terms for the life I have.” I understood what he was saying, I had no control over the process that made me. All I could do was push ahead with my own life.

Starlight developed an intense interest in charm fails and their results. He explained his interest saying:

“I am the result of a process failure. No, don’t wave at me, the process is supposed to produce a natural lifeform that can survive in its environment and breed successfully with a compatible lifeform. I cannot do either so therefore I am the result of a process failure. As such I have a strong interest in process failures, their causes and results, and as it would seriously upset my family if I started to investigate my process failure, I have to look elsewhere, and charm fails are a big subject.”

Starlight had spent decades studying and cataloguing charm fails and had the largest reservoir of information in the systems about them, across all the systems. It was very difficult to refuse an information request from an icon like Starlight.

I arrived at his space and entered the airlock where my overskin was sprayed and cleaned before I passed through it. Once through I took the overskin off and hung it up and walked up the stairs to Starlight’s impressive work area. Starlight wore an external metal frame that allowed him full motion in all his limbs. This was covered by an exclusion suit that protected him from the environment. Even so it was polite to bring as few toxic factors as possible with you such as wiping your shoes before entering a private living space. Starlight was standing at the beautiful, wooden desk that had been crafted for him. It was glowing rosewood and simply looking at it rested your eyes. It was tall, Starlight liked to stand up for working, and wide enough to contain the twenty wooden boxes of papers placed on it.

Starlight had a three-meter-high bank of information hubs that were constantly chattering with each other and with other hubs across the systems. They trawled for and freely shared information about confirmed and suspected charm fails. It was his willingness to share freely that gave Starlight the extraordinary access he had over and above what he could command. The walls of the workspace were covered in dark wood panels. The tall units used for storing the boxes of papers not currently in use were metal and stone, products of Stonebeater craft. Everything in the workspace was beautiful and fatal to Starlight. He had decided if he could not touch then he was going to see.

“Ah, Shakbout, hello, lovely to see you. Sludge?” Starlight had turned around at the sound of my climbing the stairs and greeted me with a smile. Inside his exclusion suit and metal frame, he was a meter and a half tall with the pale orange skin of some naturals, bright red eyes, and a skinny body. His legs were out of proportion to his torso. They were too big, laced with fibres rather than muscle.

I accepted his offer with an internal grimace. Sludge was a carefully calculated mixture designed to ensure that he got all his nutritional requirements. It was a chewy, semi-liquid that had a very strange flavour. He told me previously that it was Foamberry, which is a particular favourite of mine. I told him it must be a variety I was not aware of.