The Biomass Revolution (The Tisaian Chronicles) (2 page)

    
Chapter 1: The Past Unveiled

“Reality is only an illusion, albeit a very persistent one.”

~
Albert Einstein

Time
: 10:14 a.m. January 19, 2071

Location
: Sector of Governmental Services. Lunia, Tisaia

It was mid-morning and Spurious Timur sat in his cubicle, staring at his goldfish, Archie. Slowly the small fish fluttered his fins and swam about the bowl. Sporadically, he peered through the glass with interest at the outside world, a place so large the small fish could never comprehend its complexity. And yet, the goldfish stared back at him, his gills puffing in and out, as if he was trying to understand what lay beyond his glass walls.

Ironically
, Spurious lived primarily in a space equivalent to that of Archie’s. The only difference was the young man was surrounded by four white walls connected to form a cubicle, where he worked 10 hours a day, 60 hours a week.

Archie darted towards the surface of his glass home as Spurious reached over and dropped a pinch of
food in the water. He smiled, watching his fish peck aggressively at the small morsels.

“So that’s what you wanted. No wonder you were staring at me. I bet you were pretty hungry,” Spurious whispered
, too quietly for other pods to hear.

Forgetting his small friend, he turned and faced his
blue screen, slouching in his plush chair. The scent of bleach and paper prompted him to sneeze. The odor was something he had never gotten used to, even after his five years of working in the same place. There were always service workers in their ocean blue uniforms, cleaning the work spaces with bleach in hope of preventing germs from spreading.

The smell never ceased to remind him of his first day at SGS.  He
could still remember the floors of windowless rooms with artificial light and the stuffy tunnels below the building—their twisted pipes lining the thick concrete walls like synthetic veins. And he certainly would never forget the first time he entered his office, sitting down only to see the web of ventilation above like bars on a holding cell. It was then he knew his cubicle wasn’t a work station—it was a prison.

The clock struck 10:15
a.m. and Remus, a service worker, showed up with his small cordless vacuum cleaner.

“Good
morning Spurious,” he smiled, pushing his tiny vacuum into Spurious’ workstation.

“Do you min
d if I vacuum in here right now?”

Spurious didn’t need to look up to see the crooked grin painted across Remus’ face. It was the same grin he saw every morning, a grin that
repeated itself day after day like everything else. He simply nodded and motioned Remus into his cubicle. 

Remus
, like many of the other service workers, was developmentally disabled. In fact, most of the service workers employed at his office suffered from some condition preventing them from obtaining other work. Their attitudes, however, did not reflect their miserable jobs.

The only thing
Remus and Spurious seemed to have in common was their unique family stories. Both of their parents were killed by a bomb during the early years of the Biomass Revolution. And every day Spurious saw the young service worker’s crooked grin he was reminded of it.

“All done, Spurious; you have a good day now, you hear?”

“You too Remus, see you tomorrow.”

Spurious watched Remus drag his vacuum down the hall towards the paper stations. He stopped to replace the disappearing stacks of yellowed paper with more stacks, reminding Spurious of his aging childhood book that survived the wars.

“Good morning Remus,” chirped Zaria, a secretary that worked
just down the hall from Spurious.

“Well hey there
, Zaria, how are you doing? Did you watch the last fight at the dome? I heard the Samoan warrior put on a great show,” Remus said, putting a stack of papers back onto the table.

“No. I couldn
’t make it, but I have heard a few people discussing his victory this morning. I overheard he has won the past four fights and if he wins the next one, he will gain his freedom. Is that true?”

“Get back to work
, Remus! Don’t bother other employees,” shouted his supervisor, Mr. Sturm.

Remus looked back down at the carpet and pushed his vacuum cleaner out of Zaria’s office, acknowledging his supervisor
’s request with a simple nod.

Sturm followed Remus and the other service workers every
where, hunting them with a clipboard and checking off the tasks they performed with the same methodical stroke of his pen.

Spurious never heard anyone call him by his first name
, and all of the service workers referred to him specifically as Mr. Sturm. Some days he wondered if Sturm wanted them to suffer.

The
slow tick from a nearby clock echoed in his ear, reminding him of how structured his life had become. Having lived his entire life in Tisaia, Spurious knew nothing else. The world beyond the great steel walls was as foreign to him now as it was when he was a child. Like other State workers, he only knew what the State taught him and what he saw with his own eyes.

He could remember only a few things about his childhood. He knew his father
was a factory worker in one of the first Biomass factories. His mother was a boarding school teacher for immigrant children before the State had passed Law 99 in 2051. The law deemed any immigrant taken in through the gates of Tisaia in the last decade to be an illegal citizen. The result was deportation back into the Wastelands—a virtual death sentence. A Justice committee was established and a squad of Royal Knights was dispatched throughout Tisaia to find all illegal immigrants and transport them to the camps to process them for deportation. After Law 99 his mother had been out of work.

Spurious frowned, re
minded that he could scarcely remember his parents faces. It wasn’t the only thing he had forgotten. It seemed he could not recall what it was like to be happy; his purpose was only to provide administrative support to his superiors. Over the years he had come to accept his fate, but deep down he had always wished there was something more to his life.

Spurious swiped
at his holographic blue screen to transfer data from a file he had received to a spreadsheet. As he finished up his report, the crystal blue screen began to pulsate, indicating he had a new message. He swiped the screen with his index finger to unlock the incoming message, watching the blue background fade and a white screen emerge. “Sound,” he commanded.

“Spurious,

We
have gotten an influx of new tunnel projects—priority red. I’ll need you to get started on mapping them as soon as possible. Make no mistake, this comes from the top.

Regards,

Miria”

“Beats the plumbing projects,” Spurious said, quietly. With another swipe from his finger, a 3D image of the tunnels underneath Lunia emerged from a tiny opening in his desk. He rotated his chair, and began to study the red holographic lines snaking their way across his table.  

The tunnels had always interested him
. They were the grand engineering marvels from the early 21
st
century. And there were so many of them, like the never-ending entrails of a snake, winding their way deeper and deeper beneath the city. What little he knew came from what his father had told him when he was just a child—a fascinating story about the old world. It was a tale about how things once were; when governments sent their emissaries to meetings where they discussed solutions to the laundry list of problems the world faced. They talked about the dwindling supply of oil, global climate change and rising sea levels, but the talks never materialized. Temperatures rose, oil disappeared and the polar ice caps slowly melted. In a last ditch chance to protect cities from the scorching sun and gamma rays, the United States embarked on an engineering feat not seen since the creation of the New Deal and the building of the Panama Canal. They created new cities, completely underground.

Spurious thumbed through the holographic lines and enlarged a section of tunnel underneath Rohania, a suburb of Lunia. It was here, where he was born,
that the tunnels were the deepest. It was going to be a daunting mission to map them all—a mission that supposedly came from the top.

He stared at the
contours, watching them snake deeper into the ground. What was so important about the tunnels? Why were his superiors so interested in what lay beneath the city streets?

Spurious
shook the curious thoughts out of his mind and continued to study the holographic lines crawling across his desk. He knew not to question his work. Mapping the tunnels was going to be overwhelming, but it was his job.

By the time
he was done analyzing the new data, it was time for lunch. He looked down at Archie, who peered back with his oversized eyes, his small gills flexing in and out.

It’s
pretty amazing that I can’t breathe in there, and you can’t breathe out here.

Spurious smiled at his small companion and stood, stretching with a long groan before shutting off his blue screen and
heading to the cafeteria.

Saving energy had become law in the year 20
61. The State rarely arrested workers for small offenses. More likely, were write-ups which could cost an employee a promotion. He’d seen it happen to his old pod mate, Paulo.

Spurious thought of
his old friend as he made his way through the corridor of cubicles. One after another, the white structures of cubicles lined the walls. All cages, housing people just like him. He never liked to peer into these work stations as he passed, hoping others would respect his privacy as he respected theirs. There was one cubicle he could not restrain himself from looking in. It was that of Lana Padilla, a 25 year old dark-haired secretary with piercing brown eyes. Spurious heard the only reason she was given the prestigious and well paying job was because of her beauty. This was one situation where resumes, experience and name dropping didn’t matter. There had been only one interview before her supervisor, Varius, hired her as his assistant.

Spurious paused for a moment as he passed
the manager’s office. He was a disgusting man, sitting in his plush chair, his gut hanging over the same pair of desert tan khakis he wore every day. And then there were his glasses. They were as thick as a magnifying glass, the rims coated with dandruff flaking off his receding and graying hair.

Spurious
frowned and continued down the hall towards the cafeteria, his head down, while he contemplated what he would say to Lana. As her workspace came into view, he brushed a strand of his brown hair back into position and cracked his unmistakable half smile. “Hey Lana…” he said, his voice trailing off as the quiet tick of a clock filled his ears.

He craned his neck further into the office to see it was empty.
The only explanation he could gather was she was at home with a cold. There was a virus going around the office—a virus not even the gallons of bleach had been able to prevent.

Spurious
shrugged her absence off and continued down the hall towards the scent of food, trying to conceal his disappointment.

The cafeteria was busy for a Wednesday. Most people brought their
lunch from home to save credits, but today the dining hall was doing well.

There were two lines: one for deli sandwiches, and the other for salad and porridge. These were
some of the only foods the State deemed healthy enough for employees to eat. The entire list could be found in Law 204. It was yet another edict on state workers he had memorized.

Spurious got sick of having the same thing every day, but it was better than what t
hose trying to survive outside the protection of the great Tisaian walls had to eat.

H
e approached the white, shiny counter, blinded momentarily by the reflection off a metal tray. His vision quickly came back into focus and the toothless grin of one of the cafeteria assistants came into view.

“Hey there
, Spurious, what’s it going to be today?” she asked.

He
gritted his teeth and tried to hide his disgust. “I think I’m just going to have my usual.”

“
All right. One tuna salad on white, with one slice of cheese and tomato.”

“You know me too well,” Spurious
said, with a smile, grabbing the tray from her.

The
pungent smell of tuna entered his nostrils, reminding him of the smell of bleach. These were two smells he would never escape; another two pieces of the monotonous puzzle making up his life.

He stared down at the sandwich
, realizing that, over the years, tuna had become almost tasteless to him. Sometimes he even wondered if it was really tuna, having never seen one in his life. Ever since the Biomass Wars ended, the boundaries around Tisaia were fortified. No one was allowed to leave and no one was allowed in. He knew it was impossible for the State to ship tuna in from the ocean. The only explanation he could deduce was that the State had massive stockpiles of canned goods stored away in vaults underground. Like many State workers, he had heard of these vaults, but never seen one in person, or in any of the engineering design work he analyzed.