Digital Venous (5 page)

The Renewal Paradigm

NAPEANS DECIDED EARLY on that without a mortality rate, there could be no birth rate. Life was “extended” indefinitely. People were not dying; resources were limited, so International Napean law criminalized reproduction; children were banned and euthanized if discovered.

The Service kept an eye on female fertility during telepathic exchange and upload periods. Napean women could become pregnant, but were unable to produce a placenta. Changes in female hormone levels were monitored automatically; if pregnancy hormones were detected, a foetal termination would occur via a renewal paradigm during Telesync. This was a digital signal that triggered nano cells into delivering an electrical impulse to the ovaries, which then released hormones to fool her body that she was not pregnant and the embryo was lost. This kept women strong, healthy, and focused on the moral imperative of saving humanity.

Many women were not even aware that this was happening. Some, well attuned to their bodies, sensed their pregnancy and the hormonal changes occurring within them. Mia was like this; she had been pregnant seventeen times. The last time this happened, she had been taking the illegal blocking agents, to mask her pregnancy and protect her from the renewal paradigm. But the pills hadn’t worked. She had woken one morning, feeling more than usually exhausted, thinking that she’d wet the bed. She had, only it was blood—white and oily with large fleck of red through it.

Mia became bedridden, falling into a depression. After a fortnight of barely any communication, as Shane was getting up one morning she murmured, “I’ve made a decision. I’m going in on the first.” That was three weeks away.

“You don’t want to do this, Mia. It will pass. There’s so much we haven’t done. We have another life in front of us! They say we’re close to leaving. We could see the universe together...” Shane pleaded, but Mia had heard it all before.

“How can you be so gullible? We’re never getting off this planet. I’m sick of living in this petri dish.”

The Black Market

IT TOOK SHANE two weeks to find the Sub worker who had sold Mia the two-month supply of hormone-blocking agent. Workers were only allowed to work in Napea for several days at a time; it could be weeks or months before the same person came in again. It was an involved process, but finally Shane was able to get the man alone. He had come in through the Crafers Gate to work in the Americana precinct. Just as the workers were packing up for the day, Shane quickly and quietly maneuvered the suspect into the alcove of a building, his bolt gun a silent third party.

“I want back every single traded item, you scumbag.” Shane stood close, barely whispering.

“Really?” replied the worker, forcing a nonchalant smile. “It’s against the law to request or obtain anything from a Sub worker.” Shane’s attitude radar was finely tuned. Turning his weapon sideways, he pushed forward, forcing it upwards under the man’s chin.

“Guess what? I am the law, dickhead! I can have you killed like that!” Shane clicked his fingers.

The man knew that it was true. There was even an ETP game, “Death to Subs,” that Napeans did for fun. The Sub had a rethink: “I can get you the real thing.”

“What?”

“I can get you a child.”

“From where?”

“They’re born sometimes... parent can’t look after it… unwanted... single—life’s not easy down there. You gotta pay, though. Bolt pistols.”

“You’re a funny little man! I’m not paying you anything. Like I said, all I have to do is give the word, and you and your little job up here are over!”

“All right. One bolt gun—but I’m not bringin’ in a child.”

Shane allowed a long pause.
Gee, I’m good at this!
he thought. Then he said, “I can let you have a phaser rifle if you bring it to me.”

“How am I gonna get it in here, though?” said the man desperately.

“Not my problem.” Shane stepped back and allowed him some air. “Do it, and you get paid. Don’t do it and see what happens. Know where I work?”

The Sub was a grey-white color, and just rubbed his forehead. Shane showed his little badge.

“Oh, great! You work for them... brilliant… arse’oles…” The final word, he said under his breath. Shane ignored it and said, “If you’d like to get to know me and my colleagues a little better... otherwise, I shall see you here in forty-eight hours...”

“Forty-eight hours are you...?”

“I know your name, Mark. Mark Luhrman. Don’t let me down.” This was the final straw. As Shane released his hold, Mark ran. He had about ten minutes to make it to the city sponsored, out-road, which lead down to the underground city of Belair. If he got locked in the city he could expect a night in a cell with no food or drink. If he got out but didn’t make it to the tunnel, he’d be frozen stiff as night fell, brutal and hard straight from the cold depths of outer space.

Shane, on the other hand, had a pleasant, brief, high-speed magna-rail journey back to the inner-western side of the spiral precinct.

Architecture in the city was limited only by plumbing—and the imagination. Generally, Napea was arranged in architectural precincts. Popular designs for precinct areas ranged from the human body, the most famous being a naked woman leaning back with hands on hips, to extinct animals: dolphins, snakes, rhinos, and the famous forty-eight-metre eagle house. Other areas favored more classical forms of architecture, notably the Egyptian sector and the ancient Orient featuring beautiful Chinese pagodas. One cooperative had built a huge V; twin towers angled backwards at a forty-five-degree angle—looking straight into each others’ lounge rooms.

Shane decided to wait and surprise her with the baby—if Mark Luhrman did not come through with the goods, there would be no added disappointment. But, thought Shane,
She needs good news and she needs it now!

The next day a fertilizer bomb went off just inside one of the entry points, rupturing a section of the Blackwood Gate at the base, upward about twenty meters—providing Mark Luhrman with the necessary diversion to pass into Napea with one large backpack and a bag.

A Present

“HELLO?” SHANE CALLED out from the huge circular atrium to the bedroom above. “I’m back!” There was no reply.

Shane put the backpack down and walked through to the bedroom, holding his other bag. Smiling, Shane said jokingly, “Honey, I’m home.”

Mia didn’t lift her head from the pillow and made no answer. He tried again. “Guess what I’ve got?”

A groan came from the bed.

“Drop the clown show.” Mia’s dry, wooden voice croaked, “I’m going, Shane. There’s nothing for me here.”

“Okay, well, let me put it this way… when you find out what I’m holding and you still wanna kill yourself in three days, I’ll top myself as well.”

Mia’s head lay between two pillows. From under a tangle of yellow hair, a hazel eye squinted. “Okay, I give up.”

“At least sit up,” he said.

Her curiosity finally piqued, she raised herself onto one elbow.

“What is it?” She saw something she’d never seen before—a tiny little hand.

Mia hissed through her teeth, “What have you done?” and, wide-eyed, sprang out of bed like an athlete.

“It’s what you always wanted,” he said. Whose is it?”

“Yours, now.”

She saw a button nose, the eyelashes, and her involuntary finger came up to touch a pudgy cheek.

“He’s still asleep,” she said dumbly. “How’d he sleep through all that?”

“He’s drugged.”

“Oh, Shane, no!”

“Just light. A very light sleeping medicine—for babies. Had to.”

“And they feed all the time! What are we going to feed him?”

“Got it.”

“What?”

“In the bag. Enough milk for an army of these little things.” She went across to look in the bag. Six months’ supply of concentrated dried human lactate.

“I don’t want to bring him up in our world—what will he think of us? I mean, look at us! Look at him! Shane, he’s so different to us! He’s real! Oh my God, he’s got blue eyes! We have to take him back!”

“Can’t…”

“We can’t keep a child locked inside forever.”

“We have to. Someone’s gotta look after him now. Whoever brought him in risked his life for us. They won’t take him back. Not now. Not ever. You don’t know how lucky I was to get this up here.” Shane shook his head “I must be the only one in Napea that actually looks at other people,” he said incredulously. “No one batted an eyelid at me on my way up here!”

“He’s going to need real food, Shane! What then?”

“We’ll work out a way of swapping him over to N.E.T. It’s doable. We wouldn’t be the only ones.”

Shane stared at Mia. Mia stared at the child. It was a crime of the highest level. Punishable by death. Mia smiled.
A baby
, she thought.

Subterranean Female Blues

IN AUSTRALIA, ALL Napean cities had Subs living underground in satellite ghettos. Most were there because they couldn’t afford the N.E.T. in 2110 when the solar flare happened. Some had just never believed in the Napean way of life.

In the real world, while a number of different types of coins were in circulation, the barter system was preferred. Each underground settlement had resource delegates—energy and water managers who, together with managers from the other settlements, maintained the grid and water distribution.

The underground cities were powered through the transformation and storage of solar power—now in abundance: twenty-five kilowatts per square metre, which was far greater than in the twenty-first century. The sun’s energy rained down on the planet’s surface, unfiltered by the atmosphere, three hundred and sixty-five days a year. If there had been a cloudy day, no one in the present generation had ever seen one.

Water was still a major concern. A single spring flowed fairly consistently from the depths of the Mountain, and storage tanks helped to maintain the supply. All human waste was effectively recycled into drinking water and all water used in hydroponic production was filtered and recirculated.

But despite all this, the real people couldn’t prevent the loss of their most treasured resource: their children. The childless Napeans from the surface had been stealing Sub babies for years. Although there had been strong resistance in the 2260’s, reprisals for that had devastated the real population and the small rebel groups. Ten years later a group of four women and a man secretly formed to find the weaknesses in the Napean underbelly.

The people of the underground cities around Napea didn’t have time for monogamy, and when children were born they tended to be raised by those who’d given birth to them.

Alia Bokovski was exceptional in many ways. Charismatic, one hundred and eighty-one centimeters tall, and with a quick wit, she looked like something out of a Greek myth. Long black hair, a small, slightly aquiline nose, dimples and dark features that could have been painted with fine brushstrokes. To top it off, she was athletic and voluptuous. Yet despite her wealth of unfair advantages over the rest of the feminine world, no one seemed to resent her for it because she didn’t rely on her looks to get by. Alia had been pregnant when she and her husband had attempted to steal N.E.T. from the Napeans. She escaped. He did not. Someone had tipped off the Napean guards that day; they had known her surname. But there were no ID databases in the real world. She’d never even signed her name—not on anything official. Guards had searched all seven underground cities for a female Bokovski, but being pregnant, Alia was living the quiet life.

One morning, while she and her housemate, Sylvana, were home, Alia went to check on her two-year-old daughter, Wanda. It was unusual for her to sleep so late. To her horror she found the room empty and the front door ajar. The precocious child had recently worked out how to open the front door and had even ridden her little trike out onto the street. Today, however, the tricycle was still in the hallway.

Alia started yelling, “No! No! No!” as she tore from room to room, looking under and behind every single object, calling out “Wanda! Wanda! Wanda!” Sylvana, who had just woken up, stood helpless, watching the chaos. For Alia, the terror in the shadow of her mind came crashing through into the light of reality and she screamed, “They’ve taken my baby! I’m getting her back—they’ve taken her! Let me go!” Sylvana tried to calm Alia, grabbing her shoulders, but in the struggle, Sylvana slipped and fell. Alia ran out of the house into the underground street, up to the surface to the Blackwood gate. As she passed from the transdome under the walkway canopy to the gate, she saw a group of a hundred or so local men moving in through the gate. She had no skin ID but in desperation hoped to enter Napea by blending in with them. The closer she got to the front of the queue, the more she realized the insanity of what she was doing. She looked back toward the transdome and saw Sylvana come barging through the double doors. Guards’ and workers heads’ turned to look towards the commotion.

Sylvana had spotted her. “Alia!” she called. “Alia!” Guards walked straight passed Alia, guns raised towards Sylvana, ready for an attack. Alia, sensing her moment, broke and ran in pursuit of the first group of workers who were now disappearing down the road into Napea. She made it about thirty paces before she was dropped by a paralysis dart.

A stunt like that would normally see a Sub taken to the life center. Napeans looked for any excuse to reduce to the population; they were obsessed by it. Most people couldn’t believe they didn’t just shoot to kill, as per normal. But today she was lucky—there were far too many witnesses, and by the look of it, she was a well-known lady. Fearing a revenge attack, the guards allowed two male workers and, with Sylvana, they took her home.

Sylvana and Alia’s relationship soon ended; Alia’s grief was insurmountable. She became impossible to live with. Her personal habits deteriorated. Her spark and sense of humor vanished. The old Alia was gone. Sylvana left to be with family in Greenhill.

For Alia, the obsession to find her child became intertwined with the struggle against the Napeans. It became the central focus of her life. Naturally, in time, she met others suffering the same affliction, and together they thought about ways of wreaking havoc in the world above.

Bes Zini, a twenty-two-year-old Blackwood woman, had been looking for her child for forty hours when she was found by friends curled up next to a Stirling gate skylight. Suffering from exhaustion and dehydration, they couldn’t get her to talk. Her baby had gone missing on a Tuesday and they had found her Thursday morning.

There were no police in the real world. No one to go to for help. People had to fend for themselves.

Bes lived and worked as part of a growers’ cooperative, which meant that she shared housing and food and the hard work in the hydroponic gardens. She had struggled at night to maintain her sanity, looking after the baby on her own.

When her boyfriend died in an accident while working in Napea, Bes was numb with shock. Her friends at the co-op talked her through it, but in between looking after the baby and working, there was no time to grieve.

Then her child went missing. Bes had nothing left to hold onto and nothing left in her emotional tank.

She had a breakdown and went wandering, searching for her child. She was eventually found and transported back to the commune—now just another statistic. In fact, the third baby in as many weeks. Everyone knew where the children were going, but there never seemed to be any witnesses. There never seemed to be any proof. And in any case, there was no one to tell.

It was twelve months before she could talk about it to anyone. But when she met Alia and her small group of friends, she drew strength from their desire for justice and retribution. Joining them may not have been the healthiest option for the recovery of her mental health, but in reality, as they all found out, one doesn’t recover from that kind of loss.

Big, bold, blonde, and brash, Madi Johnson was the last one anybody ever thought would be the maternal type, but when she suddenly became pregnant, the excitement and joy seemed magnified by the unlikely nature of the whole situation. The fact that there didn’t seem to be a man involved at all was not surprising, nor was the fact that she gave birth to a big and brash baby boy.

Like all the real people, as they called themselves, she lived on a subsistence level, underground, where survival was a full time occupation. The average life expectancy was fifty.

As a young girl Madi was seen as being highly intelligent—she was quick-witted and bright, but as she grew older her intelligence was wasted, and she grew bored, often taking out her frustration on others. Although she could be fun and funny, her bitterness manifested in a cycle of cruelty and guilt, both conditions being aggravated by drugs and alcohol.

Her aggressive “attitude” was sometimes euphemized by friends in terms of her being “the wild one.” She was not unusual in her sexual proclivities or her drug or alcohol intake. That’s what people did in the real world, especially at twenty-two years old.

Real people tended to live in growing communes; underground hydroponic food production was labor intensive, and the work was claustrophobic and exhausting. They didn’t work set days or hours; they just worked when they had to—and it was often.

Whatever the activity, people spent their free time doing it in pubs, and often the children followed. Childhood was no longer a magical fantasy constructed by adults. They worked from a young age and went to school one or two days a week.

When Madi’s baby arrived, there wasn’t room for it. The child spent each day in the communal crèche. She would pick him up after work—sometimes not until after she’d been “out” first.

Madi had never felt “needed” by anyone or vice versa. Her parents had passed away when she was young, so the language of intimacy was never learned. Male behavior associated with attachment was seen as “creepy,” and such characters were quickly dispatched.

With the baby there had not been any powerful bonding at birth; she had simply been too exhausted. The relationship between mother and child started to grow more through an intellectual process. But just as this understanding began to blossom, the baby disappeared from the crèche. Madi had been working only fifty meters away.

Her grief was her own private black hole. Like Bes, she never spoke about the loss until she met other women who had been through the same thing.

Claire had been teaching the day the gas was dropped. The school rooms, under a northern transdome in Blackwood, were well-ventilated. But her house, where her small son had been looked after by her parents, was in a lower section of the street, where the gas seemed to concentrate. She lost all three of them and still carried the guilt with her everywhere. The horrors that had unfolded that afternoon, the chaos and the body count, was payback from the Napeans, in retaliation for the anxiety bug introduced months earlier.

Prior to the gas drop, Alia had been a friend of Claire’s. They knew each other socially but, as a pacifist, she often argued with Alia about how to deal with the Napeans; Alia was for resistance in any form, whereas Claire always advocated non-violence.

Claire never wanted to know the full extent of Alia’s role in the sabotage of the Napean network that had caused the reprisals leading to the death of her family. She knew her friends targeted Napeans in ways that were morally questionable. But they were still her friends.

Alia and Madi had known Wez for years. Although he wasn’t always around, he was an important member of the group. Alia and Madi had taken a shine to him after finding out that he had a kid that he’d never seen. When the kid was abducted, for some reason the mother decided it was a good time to tell Wez that he was a dad—to a little girl that he’d probably never see. Emotionally he was a broken guy, awkward and shy, but a victim of the same injustice as they were. Although he was a listener rather than a talker, one didn’t have to know him long to see that the desire for revenge burned within him.

It was only later that they found out what he was capable of.

Alia met Wez at her work and discovered that he had an amazing double life. He could write in any digital language, and understood the coding behind synapse imaging and the Napean network. Such pursuits were an anathema to the real lifestyle. Wez didn’t talk about it much, but when he and Alia began to see more and more of each other, it was difficult for his “hobby” to go unnoticed.

Wez’s achievements were all the more remarkable because real people had minimal technological resources. They had a primitive, hardwire computer network, but not everyone had access to it. Many of their computers were of the desktop variety. Some had later handheld or wrist-bound devices, but these were for storage only and could not be used on the real network. They did not have their own subcutaneous implants or remote, wireless connectivity.

Real people who worked up in Napea had mandatory sub-dermal ID tracking devices inserted.

Wez was not the only one in the real world to have acquired the hardware and the know-how to externally run a Napean-style machine. The only problem was that their “Iris Navigation” (IN) system could only be accessed through a Napean eyeball.

To hack out an eyeball and hack into the network was possible but, once there, time was limited—a dead Napean’s ID was usually good for just a few hours, if you were lucky. At the suspected capture of a Napean, his or her ID would be deactivated.

To make it even more difficult, a pirate user had to be within three hundred meters of a T-dock. The Iris navigation system would pick up the T-dock, and a number of different pathways became available.

Alia had been the first guinea pig to wear a Napean lens and, with the help of Wez and Madi, they had developed the anxiety bug. It wasn’t designed to be lethal, but for many regular users of ETP in Napea, it proved to be the end.

Although the three of them were never caught, when they found out the huge damage they had caused, they didn’t see each other for months. The real world turned into a place consumed with death. But when the child abductions started up again, they began to meet and discuss what might be done.