And, despite it all, I'm starving.--
Neural Log: 23:63-12-
--My neural implant is not working right.
I can feel it not working. Painful clicks deep in the meat in my brain. Intermittent, inconsistent. It doesn't feel like it's broadcasting-the familiar hum of the advertisements and orders, the policies and prayers, is now only static. I feel emptier than I've ever felt, more isolated than I could imagine ever being in this or any other life.
Cold and alone.
The bad news is, that without my neural log functioning, no one will be able to find me down here. The good news is, that with out my neural log functioning, no one will be able to find me down here.--
Neural Log: 23:63-35-
--I try again to climb the slick, sheer walls of the Refuservoir, but the chemical slime burns my fingers and seeps under my nails and I can't get a grip. I only get so far before the slope becomes too steep and I slide back down into the muck.
Even if one of the eyes of god (placed on every street corner, always watching, recording, reporting) had seen me fall, they wouldn't know who I was, or where I had landed-not with my neural net broken. I can hide and they can't find me.
I know this is true-I am alone and lost, unfindable and free, out of sight and out of mind…--
Neural Log: 23:63-50-
--But as the neural net goes quiet and the voices fall silent, the paranoia settles in. The eyes of god, on every corner of every street on every level, look always downward on us. And even though I know that they can't see down this far, don't look in this direction, and don't care about the vermin down in the Bath, I can imagine their metal necks twisting and turning, creaking and groaning, stretching to peer over the lip of the Refuservoir-blinking, scanning, scoping, searching-hunting for me.
In the deafening silence of my broken neural implant I can still hear the echoes of the man who pushed me, the geek who'd made me fall.
"You's a gonna be down there awhile!" he'd called after me as I accelerated down the steepening slope. "See how the other half lives…!" Damn Dexter! Damn him to-well, damn him to the lowest rings!-Damn him to the Pit, the Bath…
Damn him to the Refuservoir.--
Neural Log: 23:63-87-
--I'd made an error in checking and rechecking my lists. A typo, a slip of the finger, a hiccough of the eye, a lapse of the mind. An 8 instead of a 3 while punching my data, crunching my numbers. Repetition is god's own grace and Knowledge is a gift, the Net scholars tell me, voices in the neural foam, whispering in my brain's ear. And Fatigue is the devil's breath, a ticket south. I'd made a mistake and I deserved my demotion, those inarguable voices decreed.
Demoted to next level down. In life one can only go down, never up. Only in death, in the next life, might a soul ascend, and then never more than a level.
These are the rules.--
Neural Log: 23:63-98-
--The pinheads are one of those things that everyone knows about and no one talks about-not in public, not in private, never mentioned on the neural news-but everyone pays to the Pinhead Prevention Fund, listed in fine-print with the multitudes of other taxes and required donations deducted from every citizen's pay.
Few but me have ever even seen one, or would've known what one even was. I was just lucky, I guess. I'd seen Dexter from time to time-sleeping in an alley, or begging on a corner. Always carefully positioned just out of sight of the eyes of god. Knowledge is a gift, they say, but no one wants to see that.--
Neural Log: 23:64-56-
--Dexter was a pinhead. He was taller than me, and broader of shoulder-despite his tendency to slouch and skulk. And he was also one of the most intelligent people I've ever known-despite the fact that his pointed head was not much larger than a soda can. Yes, he was one of the smartest, sneakiest, and most cunning men I've ever had the misfortune to meet. Full of wisdom, he was, full of knowledge. Always pushing advice, dispensing anecdotal tidbits between begging for credits and scraps of food.
"Crack City, as the historian's tell it, wasn't named for the fact that it was constructed within the walls of a gigantic, volcanic fissure in the Earth-one of many such fissures scarring the surface of what's left of our once blue (if you believe the historians) rock of a planet," Dexter's endless monologue rose from the depths of the disposal bin he was rummaging through, immersed to his waist so that only his filthy legs protruded from the thing's mouth. I assumed that Dexter knew the recycling schedules and routines-he would have to, living the way he did-and that the energy dislocater ring in the disposer's belly wouldn't activate while he was in it.
My fears proved unfounded when Dex emerged triumphantly with the uneaten half of a discarded spiced-meat tube. He grinned, "But rather, the city was named for the perceived crack in the soul of its citizenry, cemented bugs that they were, addicted to a mythical drug that firmly placed the physical bodies of the undeserved in their lower-class status, but freed their minds and souls to the concept of ascension," Dexter poked the meat tube into his tiny mouth and licked his filthy lips. "Sound familiar?"
He would ramble on like this for as long as I would let him. A lot of what he said made sense, but a lot of it seemed little more than the delusional raving of a madman. Genius, lunatic, or both? While his history (I had no way of checking it) seemed sound, if somewhat blasphemous, this was also the same homeless mutant who spread rumors of a great, red, pot-bellied dragon living at the floor of the city.--
Neural Log: 23:64-84-
--When I told him I'd been demoted, Dex insisted on a tour of the lowest levels. I tried to refuse. I tried to fight him. "It's illegal," I complained, "How will we get back up?" But he would not be deterred. His strong fist clamped upon my arm, he tugged and pulled and laughed and implored me to go with him.
"It should be mandatory upon any demotion to go down and see just how bad it can get, how much worse it could be," he explained, dragging me into the nearest downward flux-shaft.
I was despondent and vulnerable. I should have struggled harder, I should have refused. I should never have let him take me down. I should have walked away.
But I'd already been demoted, and I would be sent down a level anyway. Better sooner than later, I rationalized, and of my own volition than at the hands of armed soul-guards. "All right," I told him. "Just one level."
Dexter just winked.--
Neural Log: 23:64-98-
--Crack City raced upwards past us, as we descended. The inertio-grav inhibitors tingled my feet and the wind mussed my hair. My ears popped. The walls of the city grew darker, more stained with age and rust and soot the deeper we plummeted, caked with slime and filth. It was noisier down there, cacophonic music and hov-cars honking, people screaming and cursing in a language that seemed like a bastardized version of my own familiar tongue.
Despite my protestations, we didn't stop until we'd reached the Red Ring. I'd heard about this ring, down just a stone's throw from the city-floor. It's decrepitude is infamous, it's crimes fill the neural news-tales of the violence of the impoverished, cannibalistic masses are whispered into our brains along the neural net feed, horror stories to keep us working hard, looking crackwards, focused on the rings above and fearing those below.
The Red Ring is Hell, it's Babel, it's Damnation Alley. Throngs of degenerate stragglers, the damned and the wretched and the cursed, the sick and the poor, the vile and the undeserving all mill about in criminal mobs. I'd been here before in a past life-everyone had-but I don't remember it, and I don't fear it any less for having risen above it.
Dexter saw the fear in my eyes as the flux-ramp slowed to a halt. "Here's to you, kid," he smirked, clapping me hard on the back. "And here's to life lessons learned the hard way."
"What-?" was all I could stammer as the pinhead turned and disappeared into the crowd, laughing as he went, leaving me alone, terrified, confused.--
Neural Log: 23:66-14-
--Three weeks after Dexter abandoned me, I lay huddled on the sidewalk sleeping and begging for food with the rest of them-lost in my own nightmare of despondent depression. Lost and alone among the bile and acid and garbage of the city. The Red Ring was slowly digesting me, melting me, eating me alive. I could barely remember the view of the bottom of 24-G from my cafeteria window. I longed for my cubicle, my numbers, my data, my job, my life…
The chatter of the neural net chided me, mocked me, laughed in my brain and told me that it was a long climb back up-ages long. Lifetimes long. My soul felt as empty and mechanical as the pair of decrepit junk-bots that had taken over the corner of the sidewalk, next to me. One of the 'bots dragged itself slowly, deliberately across the filthy grime-walk towards the grid locked traffic, filthy rag in hand-a vain attempt to smudge-wash windows for a credit. The other hadn't moved in days. There was nothing to indicate that it wasn't dead, broken, dysfunctional. Leaning against the slick facing of the lower level fuel-storage aquariums, it's empty, soulless eyes turned crackwards. Looking at it I was overcome with remorse and sorrow. Tears welled up in my eyes, and I lowered my head into my hands and slumped to the sidewalk.
Cyber-sluts ho-ho-hoing and whore-whore-whoring down the track sidestepped me. Coal-black plastic legs poured into ratty fishnet stockings stepped over me. The cyber-sluts goggled me, ooohing and aaahing, but I ignored them, my body wracked with sobs. Vacu-pump hoses and other various accoutrements of pleasure, degradation, and release were barely concealed on their plasti-flesh torsos, in open and obvious display. The cyber-sluts are the horrid vermin of the lower levels-loud and overbearing, relentless in their pursuit of credits, offering unspeakable depravities in loud mechanical voices-but the human whores are the worst. And human is too kind a word-misshapen half-lives falling out of their rags and crawling and dragging themselves along, desperately grabbing and clawing at the pant legs of drug-addled passers by. Begging for credits and food and sex and drugs, offering dirty sucky-suck access to every natural or augmented festering opening in their ransacked bodies. I'd never seen anything so depraved up on level 12, never heard of such atrocities in the neural news, never knew that such ugliness could exist.
And that's when I decided that I'd had enough. I peeled myself up off of the ground and walked over to the guardrail marking the edge of the central city-shaft. Looking down, I took a deep breath and-
"So tell me, how's it feel to see how the other half lives?" Dexter clapped me roughly on the shoulder and I spun around, startled and unbalanced.
And that's how I came to slip, to fall, to jump, to be pushed out of the Red Ring and down into the Bath.--
Neural Log: 23:66-78-
--And I'd landed in a toxic puddle, which itched and burned my skin. I'd broken my neural link when my skull smacked against the slime-coated cement of the Refuservoir floor. And in the choking, smothering quiet that followed I almost didn't notice as my clothes began to disintegrate, soaked in the chemical filth of the Bath.
I was naked, alone.
And now, with the neural net gone quiet, the paranoia settles in. An ad-barge floats by, far overhead, almost lost in the mist and gloom of the city, selling trinkets to the uppers and motivation to the lowers. Though I know that I'm too far away to be seen, and that it's eyes are turned towards the waving customers on the various rings and not the Refuservoir floor, I cower behind a hill of cluttered garbage and wait for it to pass.
Tatters of my melted clothes drip and hang from my shoulders and arms, and the chemical slick stings. My skin erupts in swollen, rosy patches. My nose begins to run and when I make the mistake of wiping it with my forearm I can smell the toxic fumes as the ooze burns my cheeks and nostrils.
Then the ad-barge passes and I begin a desperate search for something to wipe my skin. There are several large puddles of water about, but they are sticky and green with the same chemical ooze. Everything is. The itching, burning is becoming unbearable, and in a futile attempt I chase after a clean-looking food wrapper that has been caught in the wind. BEEF-STUFFFF! MMMMM! it reads, and it looks, if not clean, then at least not covered in the stinging chemicals. But it proves too small and too non-absorbent to be of any use.
It strikes me that this is the end. The End. The rules of life and death and reincarnation in Crack City apply in the Refuservoir as much as anywhere else: In life you can only go down, never up. In the Refuservoir there is nowhere left to go. I've reached the bottom and could descend no further, in this or any other life. But more importantly, down here in the Bath, there is no means of Ascension, no work to justify my soul's promotion to the next level. I'm trapped.
For me, there is no salvation.
Oh, how could I have fallen so low…--
Neural Log: 23:70-45-
--Something pinches the small of my back, and then my thigh, startling me from my despondent slumber. By now I am a swollen, infected mess. I haven't eaten in days, and had barely eaten in the weeks that preceded my fall. There'd not been a peep from the neural net, and a growing electric pain deep in the meat of my brain has begun to worry me. I have no idea if the neural log is recording, but the net wasn't broadcasting.
I'm starving, alone and waiting to die.
Another pinch, this time on my neck, rouses me fully and I open my eyes. In my slumber I'd disturbed a nest of… something. Tiny, segmented double-clawed creatures, leaping up out of the muck with stinging needle-tongues and a chitinous, toothy grip. They swarm up out of the ground and over my fevered body.
I shriek and jump to my feet, awake and brushing them from me. The tenacious ones cling like the devil, pincers locked onto flesh, probing tongues flicking and licking. No sooner do I pry them off and toss them away than others leap up to replace them.