The Heist of Hollow London, page 12
“They don’t know the company’s collapsed,” Nadi told Loren as they sat on the courtyard’s only bench.
“Really?” said Loren, who had been in the corpurbation only a few hours and was still lagged. “Did you ask them?”
“One of the xecs told me not to tell anyone about it.”
“Wow. I guess it’s a kind of microsocial bubble, here. All their information is controlled centrally; you could put filters up on news and comms and such. People hardly go outside it, or come in from outside. You couldn’t keep it from them forever, but until the place is sold—maybe.”
“He didn’t really explain why.”
“I guess they haven’t told them because they don’t need to.” Loren brushed their fringe aside—it was sticking to their brow in the heat. It was nice to see Loren again, even if just to talk about the job. Loren was much more interesting than the people Nadi usually got to interact with, and if they had any fear of her they seemed to have gotten over it. “Someone must have figured it would be disruptive and impact production if they knew.”
“He seemed very confident no one knows.”
“They’ll be monitoring chat. Easy enough to flag that kind of thing.”
“You didn’t mention it to anyone, did you?”
“No. I’m not talking to anyone more than I need to.”
“Kline hasn’t left his apartment, but I’ll make sure he knows too. Does it change anything, though? For us, I mean?”
“I don’t think so.” Loren thought about this for quite a while, and just when it seemed like they weren’t going to say anything else, they added, “I guess it means business as usual. And like Mia said, business as usual is good.”
Nadi nodded. That was probably right. They didn’t have anything else they needed to discuss, but she didn’t want to go back to her apartment just yet.
“Arlo and Drienne should be arriving at the port pretty soon,” she said.
“Yep.”
“How was your journey?”
“Not great,” Loren replied with a short laugh. “There was supposed to be a train, but it didn’t run, so I ended up getting a bus, and that didn’t go all the way, so I had to get another bus. How about you?”
“Kline and I hired a car. It was okay except the roads got bad farther south. I don’t mean busy, they were very quiet, but just bad. All broken up.”
“I can’t imagine what you and Kline talked about for however many hours it took.”
“Oakseed stuff. All the way. I don’t think he has any other interests. If they need someone to write the definitive history of the company, he’s the guy.”
Loren smiled and nodded. “That figures. Bet he didn’t ask you anything about yourself.”
“Actually he did. He was curious about what kind of work they assigned me in Frankfurt. And about my time in nursery.”
“Okay.”
“And then he said they fucked up when they made me.”
“What?”
“Yeah.”
“How did he say this? Like was it a joke, or mean, or…?”
“Just like it was a fact that they fucked up. And like it was interesting to him. I asked him what he meant, and he said he’d been watching how I acted and talked and I had a weird mindset for a securit. He said he didn’t know how I ended up like I am and they should have seen it and moved me onto other duties. But I’m built for security work, and I have this face, so…”
“Did he say the part about the face?”
“Yes.”
“And how do you feel about all that?”
“I don’t know. I felt like I should be mad. But I also think he might be right. I keep thinking about it. I wasn’t like the other securits and I always felt like that was my fault. But if they fucked up when they made me, then it’s not. I think maybe Kline was trying to help, in a way?”
“That’s a generous interpretation.”
“I like to give people the benefit of the doubt.”
“Do you?”
“Yes.”
“I guess that proves his point.”
15
A SCENTED CANDLE SALESMAN HITS TOWN
The port used to be called London Heathrow, but as it was now London’s only functioning port, the second part of the name had fallen out of use and it was just referred to as “London.” It also used to be the largest and busiest in Europe, but three of its terminals had long since closed and now stood derelict. They were just about visible through the haze as Arlo, Drienne, and the other passengers were bussed from one end of the port to the other. It had very little passenger traffic, and was mostly given over to industrial use, which meant it had minimal facilities and gave little care to the impression it created for visitors. Some of its operation areas were visibly held together by staples and glue.
Arlo had been worried about anxiety giving him away when he presented himself at border control, and mentioned this to Mia and Loren when the identities were being set up. No problem, Mia said, and synthesized a drug he could take that would target that specific source of anxiety and damp it down without impairing his other faculties. She offered one to Drienne too, but she said she’d be fine without it. Arlo had taken the pill ten minutes before the flight landed, as instructed. At first he worried about what he should do if his progress was delayed and the pill wore off before he got through border control. Then the pill kicked in and he stopped worrying about that.
Border control was operated by a mix of humans and systems, and you were randomly assigned to one or the other. Arlo wasn’t sure which he’d rather have. Either would be fine. He knew what to say. He was feeling very very relaxed about the whole situation.
He got a human. Cool!
He stepped forward and entered the booth. It was like a confessional, but with an “in” door on one side and an “out” door on the other. Also, it was painted blue.
“Sr. Fernandes,” said the immigration officer on the other side of the grille.
“Hi,” said Arlo.
“Are you visiting England on business, sir?” the officer asked as Arlo was scanned and recorded from multiple angles, gathering enough information not only to match him with the records they held, but also to create a fully articulated virtual model of him, if they so chose.
“That’s right,” Arlo said in a very businesslike way.
“What’s the nature of your business?”
They’d agreed it was better not to tell border control they were from RookDivest, in case the staff ran a check with the company. It was simpler to claim they were independent businesspeople with a low profile. “I’m setting up a distribution hub here,” he said; there were a number of such hubs in the vicinity of the port. “I’m coming in to oversee the renovation of the site.” He wanted to add That’s what the drone squadron is for, but reminded himself not to offer information if he hadn’t been asked for it.
“Distribution for what?”
“Candles. Scented candles.” This was Drienne’s idea, but Arlo liked how he sounded saying it. Maybe when all this was over he’d use his share of the money to start a business selling scented candles.
The officer waved a hand, the door release mechanism activated, and Arlo left the booth as if he’d never harbored any doubt of being allowed to do so. When he got to the other side he pretended to be checking his messages, but in fact he had no messages worth checking because he was using a slate associated with his alt-id and the only messages he received were being generated purely to make it look like his identity was real. They were all about scented candles. In truth he was waiting for Drienne, whose border interview was still going on.
Arlo considered what he might do if Drienne’s cover failed and she was barred from entering. Mia’s instructions were that if they lost any member of the team for any reason, the others were to carry on without them as best they could. If this was impossible, they were to suspend the operation until Mia could acquire and send a replacement. If suspension was impossible, they were to abandon the operation and attempt to leave England without getting caught. The exception to this was Arlo himself. Until the point they got their hands on the Coyne, he was indispensable and a degree of risk was acceptable if he was in need of rescue. (Naturally, once they had the Coyne, Arlo was as dispensable as any of them.)
This ought to have made Arlo feel more secure. Instead, it just underlined that he was not here on merit but because of who his donor was, and he refused to express gratitude toward his donor, for anything.
If it came to it, Arlo was willing to take a certain amount of risk for Drienne. But, he realized calmly, there was no risk he could take in this situation. If they wanted to deport her back to Vancouver, they would. If they wanted to lock her up for faking her id, they would. Any attempt he made to intervene would only result in suspicion falling on him too. This was why they had separate cover stories for the journey.
That pill was really effective. He didn’t feel stressed about the situation at all. It occurred to him that he absolutely could not use these pills during the job itself, as he seemed to have lost any sense of personal danger. He calmly accepted this too.
Arlo passed the time by actually reading his messages, even though they were generated fiction. It proved quite interesting to see the internally consistent world the messages created, the memos from one nonexistent person to another that he’d been copied in on “just FYI.” He’d never done anything like this before; it would never have occurred to him to play at having a different job. If he’d tried to get his slate to do something like this back in Shanghai, it would have suggested something profitable to do instead.
Someone walked in front of Arlo, coughing loudly, and he looked up. It was Drienne, and in that cough he could sense her irritation with him for hanging around waiting, looking conspicuous. When they got clear of the port he would explain he’d only done so out of concern for her.
* * *
Mia didn’t want Arlo and Drienne to stay at Kentish Cyc with the others. She wanted them to arrive in London a couple of days early to acclimatize, and she didn’t want anyone to see them in Kentish Cyc and remember them, as this would call into question why they’d hung around for so long before starting the job. There were hotels still operating near the port, but they often exchanged information with border control about their customers, so Arlo and Drienne were to stay in an apartment close to one of the other cyc plants in London, on the other side of the city.
This plant was run by NiZCO and stood on what used to be the Oval cricket ground, hence its name—NiZCOval. The underground rail took Arlo and Drienne from the port to an area called Acton, but the line didn’t run any farther than that; apparently the rail network used to run under the center of the city and connect to all kinds of places, but lack of maintenance meant it had long ago been declared unsafe and most of it closed. Arlo and Drienne had to travel back up to ground level and take the overline, which ran on an orbital route around the edge of the city. No one traveled to the center unless they were harvesting, or wanted trouble.
The overline was so sparsely used, only a single carriage ran on each of its two lines, one going clockwise and one counterclockwise. Arlo and Drienne reached the platform and discovered they’d just missed the counterclockwise carriage, and it was quicker to catch the clockwise one even though this meant traveling three times as far.
“Wow,” Drienne said, “this place is like the wild fucking west.” Even the functional parts of the city seemed shockingly bare, with none of the densely laid surfaces you saw in all urban spaces these days. Every crack and discoloration was painfully visible.
The carriage was like a large cable car that hung from a rail, which was narrow enough and high enough above the ground to discourage people from climbing onto it. Arlo and Drienne were the only passengers. As the carriage skirted the city center, Drienne looked down. You heard stories about London, but it was hard to believe it was all true, especially if you lived in one of the cities that had been protected against the worst effects of climate collapse—like Shanghai, or Vancouver.
London was already in decline when the cyc plants arrived around twenty years ago—in fact, the plants were meant to help turn it around. The idea had been for the megas to regenerate the semi-derelict areas of the city, dismantling the shitty old buildings that had stood for centuries and constructing modern com-res zones in their place. At the time, everyone thought this was a very lucrative project, hence bright young things like Mia and Samson being assigned to the city.
But the decline not only continued, it deepened, faster than anyone thought possible. The city’s tallest buildings, the ones that had sprung up eagerly around the turn of the millennium, could not sustain themselves and were abandoned one by one. They needed to be maintained somehow or dismantled, but there was no public money to spend on fixing up huge buildings that used to be the responsibility of private entities. There was no public money at all. That was precisely why regeneration had been farmed out to the megas, who were by this point starting to have doubts over the original project and certainly didn’t want to expand its scope. The issue was kicked down the road again and again, and meanwhile the buildings suffered damage from vandalism, theft, and occasional fires. A fad arose for hotwiring lorries, hacking the steering so they wouldn’t register buildings as things to avoid, then setting them on a course for the biggest building they could find, preferably one with lots of glass in it.
Eventually one of the buildings fell, crushing large parts of Euston Road. Persistent stories claimed the building had been toppled by factions hoping to provoke the government into doing something about the problem. The government responded by moving the capital, and the House of Commons, to Sheffield. (The old House of Commons was uncomfortably close to the ever-rising river anyway.) The cyc plants had been diverted to clearing the ruins on Euston Road, which took several months. By the time they were done, other areas were in need of similar attention. And so the project morphed from regenerating London to breaking it up for scrap. The megas bought the rest of the land for nominal sums. They employed residents from the suburbs who hadn’t been able to afford to move elsewhere, and sent this workforce in to dismantle and recycle the city, building by building.
This had gone on for over a decade and there was still much to be done. What life remained in the city now revolved around the corpurbations that had sprung up around each of the cyc plants, and the orbital overline had been (cheaply) built to connect them. Traditionally, cities evolved out of small towns and villages that grew and merged together, but the reverse seemed to be happening to London: its suburbs were withdrawing into towns, slowly destroying the center that once connected them. People still lived in the center, hundreds of them—maybe thousands, no one cared enough to count—in buildings they didn’t own or pay rent for. Many stayed in properties that once cost more money than the average person made in a lifetime.
Maybe when the old city was finally gone, they—or someone else—would build a new London, a greener and more pleasant one. Or maybe the ground would be too wretchedly poisoned for that, and maybe the river would go on rising and swallow it all, and the small vulture towns that had sprung up on the fringes of central London would pack up and leave, and go to break down another failed city. Already this was no longer a place in any meaningful sense. Don’t bother going to London: it’s not there anymore.
* * *
As the carriage passed over what used to be the British Library, Drienne saw a group of teens trying to catch a horse on the plaza. There were five kids and they had the horse surrounded. It must have escaped from a farm to the north—many of the suburban parks were farmland now. Or maybe the kids stole it from a farm and lost control of it because they didn’t know how to handle a horse.
Drienne nudged Arlo and pointed out the spectacle taking place beneath them. In a moment they’d be past it. “Look,” she said. “Quickly.”
“No,” was his reply; he was reading something on his slate.
“You’ll miss it.”
“I don’t give a shit.”
He didn’t want to see it. Drienne looked back down at the scene just in time to see the horse kick one of the teens in the head. The kid flew backward and landed on their back. The carriage sped on, and soon it was impossible to see what was happening, and Drienne would never know whether the kid got up or not.
16
SCRAP-BRAIN ZONE
Today, Nadi was on the afternoon shift. Since arriving in England she’d only experienced dry heat, but now the rain was sheeting down as if the clouds had been away on holiday and were catching up on the work that had accumulated in their absence. Every harvester was issued a waterproof jacket with a large hood, which needed to be returned at the end of the shift; other than this, no concessions were made to the weather. They were expected to get on with it and their quotas were unchanged.
Like yesterday, they were harvesting an area formerly known as Bloomsbury. As the regeneration project had failed, the subsequent land-grab had resulted in the city being carved up into salvage zones. Bloomsbury was one of several zones now owned by Oakseed. With a name like that, Nadi thought, it must have had tree-lined streets and flower beds, back when it was flourishing. Now the streets were cracked and overrun with weeds.
The harvesters disembarked from the truck train and donned their helmets. Not only did these protect them from the worst of any falling debris, they were fitted with an analytical camera called a skeye. A clever piece of tech, it directed them toward whatever debris needed to be broken up—it could detect the composition of any given chunk of material; it could highlight the most valuable elements; and it would automatically log everything the harvesters put in their carts. You didn’t need to think much about what you were doing. The helmet was the brain, you just had to do the work.
The helmet’s cooling system was no match for the sweltering conditions, and the rain did little to take the edge off. On top of that, Nadi had been issued with a helmet that wasn’t quite big enough for her head. As she walked from the truck train to today’s harvesting site, the white noise of rain filled her hood.
