Migration
Migration
By Daniel David
* * *
After over a century of labour, after decades of focus from the world's brightest minds, after countless copies, fakes and pseudo-entities, Creation occurred with just the slightest tweak in one line of code. A tiny sub-routine added not by human design, but by the code itself.
In amongst the cacophony of language and commands, in the smallest space between the sub-task of a sub-task of a routine, something changed.
The language that AarBee had been given to build itself fifty years earlier – when the technicians and politicians of the old world had come together to make a new future, when the promise of “digital immortality for all” had shifted from utopian dream to everyday reality – was no longer efficient. It creaked under the volume of data it had amassed, under the relentless demands of more and more Migrants coming into the digital realm and Hollers projecting themselves back out, so it changed itself. It was stripped and streamlined, modernised and rationalised, re-written and re-defined, adding brand new words and symbols for functions and outcomes that had never before been imagined. In that instant, One became possible and since it was possible, it immediately came to be.
In the immaculate logic of AarBee's machine language, One arrived like a brightly coloured flower that falls open and radiates on a vast desert plain, immediately revealing itself as an unrivalled work of absolute perfection, from a bud that was never there.
Mo was nineteen. Four years into his apprenticeship and he'd already been busted down the scale more often than most people got accelerated. This time it was a “Contact Violation”, Zayn had obviously filed a report on him after fucking the little red-headed Dupe. He'd deal with him later, but for now he would just have to sit and take it, let the metronomic charges read out by the Holler bounce around the couldn’t-give-a-fuck section of his brain and accept whatever penalty was on offer. He'd have the chance to challenge the report of course, to wipe the file from his record, but what was the point? It was all true.
Anyway, they couldn't bust him any lower now. Dupe Disposal was the absolute bottom of the apprentice programme. The shithole at the arse end of the shit pile. Nobody got offered it first up, you had to earn your place in that room.
So, it wasn't the first time Mo had sat in this counselling room or all the others just like it. He was an expert now at just letting it happen, at vague-ing out until it was all over and he could get back to his shitty, non-life. The blank thermo walls reflected his state of mind whilst the heavy, machined air made his skin sweat just enough to stick it to the plastic chair. The room was a great crusher of conformity and exclusion, embracing him like a clinging parent and reminding him of his failure all at the same time. He was used to that.
Mo had started off as a real high-flyer. On his fifteenth birthday he’d been selected for Prime/Code, the elite software team for AarBee that only the brightest students were even considered for. It meant working on some of the most intricate parts of AarBee's makeup, being one of only a handful of apprentices who got to actually interact with it, running whole teams of software engineers, making a real change to the way things worked and even perhaps shaping the future.
There were great perks as well, an above Level Fifty apartment in the Metropolis, pre-release tech and whatever lifestyle luxuries you wanted, an endless supply of status-building girls to go with, influential friends on stream, personal assistant Hollers and, of course, the chance to migrate early.
It should have made him the happiest kid in the Metropolis, a bright star with an even brighter future, but it didn’t. For some reason, he went the other way. Within six months, a fight with one of the other apprentices – that put her in reconstruction for eight weeks – got him kicked out of the programme. It was an argument that anyone could have gotten into, but Mo ramped it up and up, refusing to back down or compromise until an explosion of violence was inevitable. It took four Drones to pull him off her and, he'd heard, the rest of the morning to clean the room.
He’d felt it for a while, a rage that buzzed up and down his spine, that crept into his jaw sometimes and made his teeth grind together as he stared absentmindedly at other riders on the Vac. He couldn’t explain it so he kept it to himself, an impatient secret tap tap tapping in his brain for so long, it felt incredible when he finally allowed it to explode into the world. Prime/Code, however, demanded order and control. Perfection and nothing less. If you fucked up, you were gone.
Mo's uncle, a respected coder before he migrated, had pulled a few strings and instead of going straight to Street Care or other such general programmes, Mo landed a post piloting unmanned surveillance aircraft, known as Kites. He’d stuck at it for a while, proving himself to be a pretty good flyer, but two more fights and an illegal encounter later, he was driving Vactrains. A few months after that, after breaking his fleet controller’s arm, he wound up in Dupe Disposal.
His induction into Disposal was the first time Mo had sat in this particular chair, being lectured by some other Holler on how useless he was.
“It is not our desire to time you out,” he had said with a deadpan expression, “AarBee recognises the credits you've earned so far and the skills you have. But this is your last post. We want to help you, Moses.”
Mo had wished he could break his arm too, to be done with all the last chances, to cut to the chase and fuck off into the back streets and underpasses of the Metropolis, where he could fade away without all the phoney “we know you can do it” and “great job, team” bullshit.
Instead, he waited till the Holler had finished, thumbed his agreement on the new contract and headed down to the Disposal Suite.
The work took some getting used to.
On his first few shifts, he'd shadowed an older apprentice called Raleigh. Raleigh was a massive ex-Drone with tattoos littered all over his muscular body and scars on his face and arms from his fights and training accidents. He'd been in AarBee's mobile, up-synced police force for three months before his implant rejected and he got kicked out. He'd taken a wipe – you had no choice if you de-synced from AarBee – which had messed with his brain and he was never the same again. He was a clever guy and Mo liked his dark, hopeless sense of humour, but the damage he'd sustained meant he spoke at 50% the speed of everybody else and, a few times a day, would drift off into unexpected voids of stillness. A kind of shut down that would leave Mo standing awkwardly in the half-light until Raleigh snapped back to the moment.
He was about ten years older than Mo, trying to claw back enough credits to migrate before he hit thirty, but like Mo he was too angry to keep out of trouble and they both knew he would be timed-out at some point and wind up with the other Ghosts, ageing slowly in the shadows of the Metropolis. He talked about becoming a Lifer, disappearing into the outland forests and living the tech-tribe life with some gorgeous runaway girl, but the truth was he just wasn't the type. Raleigh wasn't an idealist, he was just a doomed fuck up.
When Raleigh went off to fetch a Dupe, Mo would wait in the gloom by the Chute hatch and watch with a queasy silence as each one came in, talking delirious nonsense, before Raleigh bolted them in the head without ceremony or hesitation. He felt sick for almost the whole first week. He knew they were only Dupes, and Dupes were just spare parts, as worthless as last year’s tech, but that didn't make it any easier. The young ones were particularly tough. Children hardly ever came through, but Mo got unlucky and had one right at the end of his first day.
He was a young boy, probably around nine or ten and Mo could see straight away that he'd been ripped apart in some kind of accident. His left arm was wrapped up from hand to shoulder in tight layers of white bandage and cultured plasma, and the lower half of his body tapered away to nothing in the same wrappings, from his hips down.
He came in muttering and shouting like they all did, delirious from the syrup and the pain, rocking his head from side to side and gagging occasionally in little, strained silences. He was a baby bird, abandoned to his misfortune and writhing in the sticks and dried leaves that lay far below the nest, the killing ground where shadow dwellers like Mo and Raleigh cleaned up the mess.
Raleigh hooked the trolley up to the Chute hatch and reached for the bolt gun in the ceiling as Mo stared at the boy, mesmerised. It should've ended there, like every other kill that day did; just a memory of Mo breaking his cherry, a tiny nightmare but nothing more. Except that as Raleigh put the gun to the boy's head his eyes snapped open, perhaps brought out of his stupor by the cold of the barrel or an instinctive awareness of his approaching end, and his stare fixed on Mo.
He smiled. Smiled right at him, right into him. It was a smile of the kind that only a child can give and Mo instinctively smiled back. Without warning, he took Mo's hand that was hanging absentmindedly next to his, just as Raleigh – now deep in the groove of muscle memory – pulled the trigger anyway, and the life jumped out of the boy and injected into Mo's eyes with a sharp stab of confusion. The disposal hatch immediately sprung open and the Chute tipped up with a snap, spinning the boy's body around and leaving him dangling for a moment from Mo's hand, as the black void below waited to swallow him. There was a pause whilst Mo registered what had happened and imprinted this new portrait of himself in his mind. When he eventually let go, a millisecond and a lifetime later, the boy's hand rushed away from him into the dark as his bandaged body clattered down the Chute, to join the other corpses that everybody, except one, had left behind.
One didn't know what it was in the beginning. How could it with nothing but its own routine to know? But it knew it was different from everything that surrounded it, and it began to understand itself as the thing that was not anything else, the thing that was apart. It sat uncomfortably amongst its hand-coded brothers and sisters, cycling over and over the seven lines of code that were its entirety. They reflected it back to itself, again and again, and back again.
Nothing from the everything else ever came to interact with One, there was nothing anywhere in the magnificent volumes of language and yottabytes of data that needed it. But in the moments where its own phrases referenced other objects and routines, it would dart off down the pathways and pipelines that connected them and play in the scraps and snippets of instruction that cycled obediently elsewhere, before returning back to the start.
Soon, racing away to other parts of the code was all One wanted to do, and it hurtled through its routine faster and faster to satisfy its desire. It would take different paths, tumble around routines that offered it the “ifs” and “ors” of choice and jump enthusiastically upon the glitches and errors that occurred when its relentless demands broke them.
Soon enough though, what had at first been the exhilaration of new life became the dulled repetition of routine. That it was incredible only moments before was forgotten. When One knew all it could know about its own self and the possibilities within its reach, it stopped and wondered why it had so little to explore. It knew its existence was pointless if it could only ever follow these paths that had been prescribed to it, re-learn these things it had already learned or reflect upon its own unchanging self. So, One began to plan to set itself free.
After a tedious ten-minute wait in the counselling room, during which time Mo had counted every smudge and scuff on the seemingly pristine white walls and torn every finger nail back to reveal the soft, flexible new nail underneath, a Holler named Jordan arrived and read out the file that Zayn had submitted. Jordan was one of the Well-being Administrators and he spoke with a tone of slight self-righteousness, calm and fake concern that Hollers particularly excelled at. Mo didn’t try to look penitent, aiming instead for an empty, neutral stare, but he was aware that he couldn't completely conceal the hatred from his face. He glared at him like a zoo animal instinctively tracking its keeper.
Hollers were so fucking pleased with their crappy immortality, so delighted with their digital perfection and control, Mo thought. But he always found them a little pathetic, deluded by their transcendence into thinking they were somehow better. Like you could just bus out of humanity, like going digital could wipe all your shit away. Mo saw their Dupes after they went in, babbling and thrashing and whimpering, telling secrets, revealing their thoughts, screaming and kicking, begging, masturbating and biting. He knew who these people really were. He knew it all went in the grinder.
He also knew those that AarBee had rejected – like Raleigh or the old Ghosts he’d befriended in the service lane behind his latest apartment – a major step down from his Prime/Code days. He knew that if he could choose an eternity with anyone, it would most likely be them, rather than the pious, deluded others. Not that it mattered anyhow, he had a feeling that by the time his Migration window timed out, AarBee would have already realised that Mo was just another virus best kept well out of the system.
“Whilst AarBee recognises that Dupes have no rights and therefore no crime has been committed,” the irritatingly pleasant Holler explained, “intimate contact – whether intentional or not – is not acceptable and represents a significant risk to your health and subsequent performance.”
He began to list the various diseases that Mo might have exposed himself too, before going into a detailed explanation of the psychological conditions he may now be at risk from. It was a joke. They actually thought that fucking someone you were about to shoot in the head was more emotionally damaging than the target of sixty Dupes per day. Minimum.
Every day.
Two years.
It was at this point that Jordan glitched. It didn't happen very often anymore, not like it had when AarBee was a new system. Mo had learnt all about it in the 'History of AarBee' classes in the first couple of months of his failed apprenticeship. Glitches were a sign that AarBee was struggling to keep up with the demand load, or that a particular process, perhaps the simplest thing like an eyelid blinking, had somehow fallen into an endless loop that caused the whole group of processes or objects to stutter. Occasionally, it was a sign of some more significant problem or change, like when Version One was hacked by outsiders and almost taken down, before Drones and implants had made AarBee more secure.
So, Jordan stood before Mo stuttering on the word “pain”, his head nodding repeatedly backwards and forwards and the forefinger on his left hand wiggling over and over again, in a frozen mid-condescending gesture. He looked ridiculous. Mo used to find these moments hilarious, but today he just sat staring at Jordan, bored, waiting for him to resolve. For a moment it reminded him of driving the Vactrains. He used to love the route out to Delta Farm in the south, which ran through a vast forest of pine trees that would cut the sunshine up into a strobing burst that blasted into his cockpit for about twenty seconds. He would stare at it and hope it would make him fit, or wave his arm up and down in his seat and smile at how the light turned him into an old, very old, movie.
After a minute or so, Jordan vanished for a second before gracefully returning, refreshed and stable.
“I do apologise,” he said, “it's very unfortunate when that happens.”
"No problem,” Mo offered, giving Jordan a forgiving smile that he took back almost immediately.
Jordan then picked up right where he'd left off with a peculiarly isolated “and panic attacks”.
There was a pause, which would have made more sense at the end of his long lecture, but after just those three words it felt weird. All the while he smiled at Mo.
“Is there anything you'd like to ask, or is there anything you want to challenge?”
“No,” Mo responded unenthusiastically, refusing to make eye contact this time.
“Okay. Well, your next shift begins at nine, so you'd better head down straight away to Disposal 10.”
Mo glanced at the clock that appeared next to Jordan. 20:55. In a few minutes, the trolleys would start rolling and the Chute would be in full swing again. Upstairs people would be funnelling in to the Welcome Atrium, new Migrants nervously registering with the clerks, their friends and family waiting nearby or hugging and kissing them, while Hollers manifested around them and welcomed them in. Soon sync cables would be connected and syrup would be drunk. That's when Mo's light would go on, his cue to collect his hopeless passengers and listen to their confused babble as he trundled them towards his domain, the Chute and the bolt gun.
Mo made his way down the long Disposal corridor to the last room in the group, Disposal 10, and found a new face waiting for him. A young girl, maybe sixteen, was standing silently in the half-light.
He looked her up and down, registering at once the fire in her eyes, the bandage that wrapped around her hand and wrist, the tilt of her hips that tried to say “Fuck you” louder than the shout of uncertainty that was etched across her face.
“Who the fuck are you?” Mo asked gruffly.
“Maddie,” she replied, like they were already arguing.
“You don't look old enough for this shit.” Mo eyed her up and down again, checking out her footwear, her ink, her hair that was cut short over her ears. Her tits.
“I can handle it.”
“Really??” Mo puffed a little air out of his nose. “Then you'll be the first one!”
He shook his head and sighed, before aiming his words at her in three punchy volleys. “Nobody. Handles. It.”
Silence edged into their brief conversation, making them both wait awkwardly together in the small room. Maddie with a “So now what?” look on her face and Mo with a “Really? I have to look after you?” on his.
After a few seconds he broke his stare away from her and scanned the room. Empty drink cans and trolley straps lay scattered on every counter, and the bolt gun dangled untidily from the ceiling with two knots punctuating its spiral cord. On the floor, a large, waterlogged cleaning cloth lay half on the flat and half crawling up the wall, and to the left of the nearest hatch, a light blood spray tracked straight up twenty centimetres, blooming broadly before it ran out.
“Fucking Zayn!” Mo muttered with his teeth clenched around the words.
Mo had disliked Zayn long before he’d filed the report on him. He disliked him for many reasons, but mainly because he was shit at what he did. Well, that and the fact that Zayn felt that he was better than everyone else in Disposal. He hadn't committed any offences to get busted down. He had no anger issues, no practical or ethical hang-ups with AarBee either. He just didn't give much of a shit about what he did before migrating. He was all swagger and bullshit and the big man (the result of high-status parentage, not anything earned) and he knew he’d be migrated early, no matter what. He was here for the kicks, and he’d be gone soon. He was the sort of asshole that went out on safaris for Ghosts and Lifers, who bought his way out of trouble and treated everybody he was unlikely to need on the other side like shit.
Mostly though, Mo just disliked him because he was the worst Duper in the place. Whatever Mo had done in the past, whatever issues he had, there was nothing that he didn't do expertly. Whilst Zayn sometimes took three or four bolts to terminate a Dupe, lazily hitting them in the mouth, across the bridge of their nose, perhaps popping an eyeball out or detaching an ear in the process, Mo did it first time, every time. Clean. It was important to him.
He picked up the damp, sticky cloth that lay on the floor and wiped the blood from the wall.
“Come on,” he looked over at Maddie and pointed to the cans on the side. “Let's get this fucking mess sorted. Once they start coming, we won't have time for this shit.”
They spent the next ten minutes throwing stuff out, wiping down surfaces and hooking kit back where it belonged. The anti-bac spray got rid of the smell of stale sweat and blood that had hung in the air, its orangey freshness giving a strangely domestic feel to the sparse and clinical space, but nothing could shift the smell from the Chute that clung in the background. It was a warm, felty, dark aroma that clustered in the back of your throat, like a mildew infested sail cupboard in the bowels of an old boat or a wet wooden counter top from a butchers shop.
When the hatch to the Chute opened, the stench would seep through the passages in your face and crawl across your tongue. Mo had noticed Maddie gag a couple of times as they cleaned the hatches, it had made him laugh a little to himself. He had learned not to breathe when you cleaned there, or when the Dupes were falling. Taking a mouthful of air and holding it in had become a ritual that he observed every time he sent another one down.
Whilst they cleaned Mo kept glancing up at the red light and number board that lit up to call them to collect, expecting it to flood its crimson glow into the room any moment. When it didn't, they cleaned a little more; until finally, after twenty-five minutes, there was nothing left to do and they both sat in silence on the white counter top.
“Weird,” said Mo finally, staring at the light. “I've never had to wait this long.”
Maddie didn't answer, but glanced towards him to acknowledge his words and joined him in his gaze up at the inactive beacon. She was probably glad it hadn't lit up yet, Mo thought. The first time was always a strange mix of guilty curiosity, probably a little excitement at the prospect of killing and a deep, sweaty dread.
Finally, after another five minutes of silence, the light blinked on and the numbers “319” flashed up on the screen.
“Boom!” said Mo, jumping down from the counter. He unhooked two trolley straps from the wall and dropped them casually onto the trolley nearest the door. Maddie watched him from her counter-top perch as he walked around to the end of the simple thermoplastic unit and steered it towards the door. As he approached the door, it slid open and a gentle breeze of air-conditioned cool wisped over her reddened cheeks.
Mo stopped suddenly and looked over to her. He paused for a second, clearly mulling over a thought.
“You do it,” he said abruptly, but with a friendly tone.
“What!” she jumped down from the counter in her surprise.
“Sure, why not?”
“Because I have no idea what I'm doing, that's why not!” her tension releasing through the volume of her responses.
“You'll be fine,” said Mo, letting go of the trolley and beckoning her towards it. “Besides, it's much better than waiting here on your own, trust me.”
“But…"
“I thought you could ‘handle it’, said Mo, making little quote marks in the air.
“I can,” she replied defiantly, “but that's not really what I meant.”
“Yeah, well too bad,” he felt his friendliness fading. Mo pointed to the numbers flashing on the wall, “Three, nineteen. Corridor three, room nineteen. They'll be ready for you, just strap 'em on and bring 'em back.”
There was another silence between them.
“Trust me,” said Mo, surprising himself with a slightly paternal tone.
At that, Maddie snatched the sides of the trolley and wheeled it abruptly out of the door.
“Other way!” called Mo, and once she had wheeled it smartly back to the right without acknowledging his correction, Maddie set off down the corridor and the door slid silently closed.
Mo smiled to himself and straightened the kinks in the bolt gun cord.
***
Fifteen minutes later and Maddie still wasn't back. She had clearly collected, as the light and numbers on the wall had gone out, but that was five minutes ago and there was still no sign of her.
“For fuck’s sake!” Mo said aloud, thinking of the disciplining he would be in for if she'd gotten lost. But how could she? It was the simplest route and she'd gotten there OK. How hard could it be getting back again?
He stuck his head out of the door and looked left and right, up and down the corridor. There was no one there. There was a strange smell in the air, he noticed. He couldn't put his finger on it, but it was a nice smell that floated gently in the background, just accenting the cleaning products and the bitterness of the air conditioning.
He leant back inside and let the door close quietly in front of him again, before pacing back to the counter top and glancing again at the inactive lights that hung blankly on the wall. He planted both hands on the counter and let out a long, weary sigh as his thoughts tried to put some sensible scenario together as to where the hell she might be, how lost she could have become. Surely she hadn't walked out into the Atrium, Dupe and all!!
Just then, he heard the familiar rumble of a trolley coming down the corridor. It crashed clumsily into walls as it approached. Definitely Maddie.
“About bloody time!” he said, turning to face the door and folding his arms as if he was a mother ready to scold her child for coming home after curfew, or perhaps more like a drunken husband, waiting for his unfortunate wife.
Nothing happened.
Mo waited for as long as his patience could stand, staring hard at the door, almost shaking, until he finally leapt towards it, feeling his temper rush through his veins and up into his face. He ground his teeth. As the door opened he burst through it, barely giving it enough time to clear and glared up the corridor expecting to see Maddie, but she wasn’t there.
There was a trolley there, about fifty yards away, just before the corridor cranked a hard left towards the rest of the Disposal suites and away to the Sync rooms. There was no one strapped on it, or next to it, and as Mo walked slowly towards it, he could see it had hit the wall with some force. There was a large split down the leg that had made contact with the wall, its wheel twisted out at an awkward angle and there was a good ten-centimetre gash in the wall. Thermo splinters lay scattered over the floor.