Dark Blue Monstropolis

The tunnel, wide enough to allow for large service vehicles, dipped down to what must have been the first sub-level of I-75 and then began to slant back upwards again. The four walked in the middle of the space.

Argo noticed that they had sealed off the rest of the sub-level, which was for the best. If you grew up anywhere near an interstate that was still standing, you couldn’t help but go exploring. He had heard some of the old stories about how people used to believe that houses could be haunted. His friend Rik had even found half of a shit-quality video on a simputer–some television special on the subject.

Interstates were easy replacements. When the Exodus happened, most interstates were positively packed with vehicles, the slower ones going in excess of eighty miles an hour on the higher levels. When everything Heavy decided to get the hell out–either in one way or another–the passengers in these vehicles found themselves travelling in a system that was no longer smart enough to maintain the three-foot safety space between each vehicle. These were people, of course, who didn’t have implants which had already committed suicide deep within their skulls, taking most of their involuntary physical systems down with them.

As a result, the interstates were a graveyard of twisted metal guaranteed to make children piss themselves, nowhere moreso than below the ground. The lower levels were self-contained and designed for those making the long haul cross-continent. You could drop down and push your speed up to two hundred miles an hour easy. You could take a nap and let your vehicle drive itself, waking you up just to inform you that your destination was coming up at the next exit. If you could get down to such a level, you could easily find crumpled vehicles still carrying the jumbled and fractured skeletons of their occupants. The meat was all long gone, of course, and very seldom did you find anything other than fragments, but it was an experience you never forgot.

The ten-year-old Argo had managed to get a door open on one moss-covered grayish-green vehicle, only to have what must have been three skeletons tumble out and become dust at his feet. In the light from his electric torch, he saw that the upper half of a skull’s face had remained intact, with both of the empty sockets staring up at him…

Argo shook his head. No need to keep thinking about that.

He did wonder absently if anyone still thought about haunted houses anymore. He thought probably not.

The whole world’s fucking haunted now, he told himself. Why bother?

As they started up the slope, Argo heard a pinging coming from his pack. He reached back, slipped on his visor and saw that his firewall was holding steady, but being positively savaged. A quick glance to Mayster showed the same thing happening there.

Welsh was watching them both, one eyebrow cocked, smiling. “Firewalls, right?”

Argo nodded.

“Well, they should be fine for the short haul,” he said. “We’ll upgrade you when we get home. That way it’ll go from denial of service levels to a dull roar. But you never get rid of it.” He spied a piece of masonry lying in the dust and snatched it up. As he placed it in his left trenchcoat pocket he remarked, “Some of it’s just Sneakernet traffic and harmless. Most of it’s spam, though. Just for fuck’s sake don’t accept any pop-ups or attachments if anything gets through.”

At the end of the tunnel was a large metal door with a ring in the center of it.

“Well, boys,” Welsh said, “welcome to civilization. Or the closest thing we could approximate.”

Then he pulled the door open and the lights came streaming in.

In the end, it was everything they expected and yet, it was nothing like they had expected. Indianapolis had possessed very little in the way of multi-story buildings. If you had a five-floor building you were doing fairly well, to be honest. What the Exodus hadn’t destroyed, the violent weather of the Bowl had finally eroded and whittled and pushed until they collapsed. The building Argo and Mayster called home–had called home, he corrected himself–had been five floors not counting the dome. And that had been pushing it.

Even though he had never seen a skyscraper before–not in real life, anyway–it wasn’t the tallest of the giant gleaming towers off in the distance that caught his eye first. Even on street level, you could see them above the tenements.

It wasn’t the buzz of skytrawlers and airseds using the roads overhead while their slower, treaded cousins moved in less auspicious ways below.

It wasn’t the people, or even the feeling of the people. While the bustle of humanity was slim here right inside the borders of the Atlantic Union, there was the overwhelming feeling of being in a real city, a real honest to God megalopolis. Argo couldn’t tell what formed that picture, that intuition of the millions of people who lived between here and the ocean. Maybe it was the smells, maybe it was all five of his senses telling him the same thing that his pack’s firewall was: Holy shit, man, what the hell?

They stepped out into the light, left the underworld of I-75 behind, and right in front of them was a tenement building. Up one corner of the structure was the most godawful shitcobble of an antenna Argo had ever seen. It was this that drew his eyes first, and then followed it down to something that looked incredibly out of place.

It was a Nodebooth. Significantly less beaten up than the one in their hometown, but it was virtually identical. And behind it, two men were stacking cases. There was a hodge of different types of cases, but a good number of them were strikingly similar to the metal storage container that they would see turn up at the Nodebooth they frequented.

“That’s right,” Welsh said, following his gaze. “Welcome to Sneakernet at the end of the world. This is where things are converted from Sneakernet 2.0 back down to version 1.0.”

“File sharing the old fashioned way,” Argo said.

“The old old fashioned way,” Welsh countered. “Hang on a second, would you?” He reached into his right coat pocket and produced a small device that looked like half of a silver pen. He held it up to the side of his face. “Yeah,” he said and paused.

“Yeah, we’re back,” Welsh continued, and Argo quickly realized he was hearing half of a conversation. “Right outside the I-75 tunnel. Yeah. Okay, well come on.”
He put the device back in his pocket.

“Cell phone?” Argo asked.

“What?” Welsh looked at him. “Oh. No, not a cell phone. There’s no cells anymore. And not a satellite phone. Because God knows there aren’t any satellites anymore. Well. Mostly. No, it just does voice over IP.” He pointed to the shitcobble antenna. “Reception’s great standing right here.”

Welsh nodded over to Threnody. “That was Simon. He’s on his way.” Threnody merely nodded back and stayed standing as she was. Argo noted that when something was going on that didn’t concern her, Threnody almost seemed to become very easy to overlook–a statue, almost. A statue that can come to life and kill dozens of skinheads while breaking very little sweat, he reminded himself. The picture in his mind of her soaring over the heads of the crowd back at the Lodge was quite clear.

Argo looked over at Mayster, who had been very quiet since stepping out of the tunnel. Argo had chalked this up initially to the shock of finally being where they had always wanted to end up.

Instead, Mayster had his visor on and his earpieces in. He looked through the readings on his visor at Argo, brow furrowed. “I’ve been tweaking my firewall. They have music on demand channels here, man. A minute ago I was listening to somebody playing some fucking twenty-four/seven polka station out of his bedroom. And then I finally found some live DJs spinning from a club over in Boston.”

“Yeah?” Argo asked.

“Yeah,” Mayster said gravely, “place is open twenty-four seven. Spinning all day and all night. Then I switched over to something called Sonic Sphere One, playing trance mashups. And then I switched to a station out of Tampa, Techno Wall to Wall.” Mayster stopped talking. Argo guessed another station was coming up.

“And?” Argo finally demanded.

“Most of it is shit,” Mayster said. “Most of it is absolute fried shit on a bun with a side of fries.” Mayster put a hand on Argo’s shoulder. “We got here just in time. This place needs us, man.”

Welsh, who had been watching all of this from behind a halo of smoke from a recently lit cig, chuckled to himself. “We’re on a mission from God,” he said.

Neither Argo or Mayster knew what the hell to make of that and Welsh, of course, refused to explain.

The thing about Simon was that you heard him coming long before you saw him.

The taxicab hovered around the corner, giving a bit of a terrible lurch and belching a small cloud of inky smoke as it did so. As Argo listened and watched the vehicle struggling to come closer to them, he could swear that the cab was actually chugging in their direction. He didn’t think it was possible for a sky vehicle to chug.

The cab touched down in front of them. Simon pulled himself out of his driver’s side door and sat in his open window, folding his arms on top of his own roof. He was a relatively small man with blond hair and a van dyke that was an orange-red. It was impossible to tell which was his natural color.

“Threnody!” he called out, grinning. “Hullo, love! Might I say that if you were looking any better, you’d be against the law?”

To Argo’s surprise, Threnody smiled at Simon. “Well, you’ve already said it. So I guess we’ll just have to cope somehow, won’t we?”

Simon gave a bark of laughter and slapped the top of the cab, making the poor thing shudder violently. Argo and Mayster exchanged a look. The question passed between them silently, We’re really going to climb into that shitpiece, aren’t we?

They threw each other a mental shrug.

Simon turned his attention to Welsh. “So, what’s the story, big man?”

Welsh grunted and pulled out another cigarette. Where the hell does he get all the smokes? Argo asked himself.

“Home, Si,” Welsh said simply.

Simon gave a sweeping gesture with his hand and the trunk lid rolled back. The four travellers stowed their gear and moved to enter. Mayster turned to Threnody. “Front seat?” he offered.

Threnody shook her head. Was she actually touched at the chivalry of it? She was smiling, after all. “No, go right ahead. I don’t like to sit up there. The door’s up there.”

Mayster shrugged and moved to take the place up front. Argo climbed in back with Welsh and Threnody, wondering, This thing has four doors…what the hell is she talking about?

With everyone in and strapped down, Simon popped in. He pulled his harness in place across his orange-padded jumpsuit and stepped down on the accelerator while pulling his steering wheel backwards.

The cab, with a protesting groaning squawk that sent forth another plume of smoke, rose into the air and into a through-lane, gaining speed.

“There we are, love,” Simon told the cab, patting the steering column with some affection.

“I’m amazed,” Mayster began. “When I first saw this thing I figured it wouldn’t do over seveeeeeee AHHHHH SHIT, WHAT THE FUCK IS THAT?”

Mayster had thrown his arms up over his head and was leaning back into his chair as far as he could.

Argo strained to look over, as he was sitting right behind Mayster. Welsh and Threnody didn’t seem to be reacting in the same way, neither was Simon, so whatever it was it couldn’t be too serious.

Sitting in Mayster’s lap was a gleaming silver robot, resembling a cross between a small dog and a huge beetle. It was sitting up in Mayster’s lap, as though begging for a treat. It clicked its mandibles together in something that Argo supposed was a greeting, seeming to disregard Mayster’s reaction to its presence.

Simon glowered at the thing. “Go on, you little bastard: get to work,” he called.

And the thing did. It disappeared back through the cab’s dashboard through a small door, moving swiftly on chittering legs.

Mayster looked at Simon, incredulous. “What…the fuck was that thing?”

“Popbot,” Simon said. “He’s my mechanic popbot. They’re supposed to last for a year but I swear I can only get seven months out of them.”

The popbot in question was now moving across the hood at a high rate of speed. Argo had noticed some rattling going on there. Only stopping for a moment at each connecting bolt, the popbot threw out a leg, snapped a tool into place, and then tightened the bolt.

“Disposable robots for specific tasks,” Welsh explained further. “Simon’s cab is a hunk of shit, so the popbot’s all that keeps him in the air at times.”

“He’s only joking, honey,” Simon said, stroking the steering column again.

“You coulda warned me!” Mayster complained.

“Lady said that’s where the door was,” Welsh said, forcing back a smile.

Argo watched as the popbot finished ensuring the front of the cab wouldn’t fall off, then disappear under the vehicle, where he heard rattling and whirring take place. Seven months, he thought to himself. Amazing.

Then he looked out across the Atlantic Union, which, as he understood it, was nothing but buildings from here to the ocean. Incredible. And the air here was alive with information. He could almost imagine the open spaces around them throbbing with it, every machine passing data to every other machine, tying them all together. Once he understood that the Internet had evolved as the primary means by which the world communicated, over all manner of copper wire and fiber optics. And now that all of that infrastructure was gone, all everyone had was each other.

He let his visor flip over to watch all of the traffic that he was filtering out and all the traffic that was, even at this speed, driving stories above the ground, passing through his pack and to the rest of the Union.

“How about some music, Si?” Welsh asked.

Argo almost missed it, but a look passed between Simon and Welsh. Simon smiled and threw Welsh a wink in the rear view mirror. “Coming right up. Let me just find it.”

Mayster noticed it first. Argo took a second because he was almost hypnotized by the stats of what his pack was passing. “This is Circus Eclectica out of Richmond,” Simon said, then turned up the volume.

“Holy…” Argo began and Mayster finished it for him in the front seat, “…shit.”

The song coming out of Simon’s speakers was “Open 5 A.M.”