Doctor Who_ So Vile a Sin - Ben Aaronovitch [87]
Simon waggled his head. ‘I guess I see what you mean,’ he said. ‘ We were the threat.’
‘Now the threat comes from inside the Empire, not outside,’
said Miroka. ‘We must act together to protect Earth.’
‘Not just to protect it,’ said Simon. ‘Things are going to be different.’
Port Elizabeth, Skag, 8 July
Vincenzi opened his eyes. The alarm would go off in four minutes.
He was remembering when the world had been much smaller, a single corridor, on Level 113 of Sir Guilliam Habibi’s stack, Spaceport Six Overcity.
Presumably there had been a time when his entire world had consisted of his family’s apt, but his earliest memories were of the corridor, particularly standing on the stoop while his mother gossiped with Mr Bobindinga from across the way.
He remembered the smell of long-chain polymers as their cleaning bot described a precise rectangular pattern on ‘their’
section of the floor. He loved to get up early on a Saturday morning and watch the cleaning robots come out of the apts, each one scrubbing the corridor in front of its owner’s door. The cleaning bots were all different, different makes, ages and customized, optimized and painted in bright colours. Some families went as far as to get sophisticated software plug-ins to make their bots move just that little more smoothly and stylishly than their neighbours’.
In his first memories Vincenzi didn’t know what the bots were, just that they were bright and attractive and moved in an interesting manner. He wished the bots would come up out and dance every morning. When he asked his mother why they didn’t, she shrugged and said that everyone had always cleaned the corridor on Saturday morning.
202
‘What everyone?’ he asked.
‘Everyone round here,’ said his mother.
As he got older, he began to realize that the dance of robots was more than just a community ritual – it was a contest. An unspoken competition between the families on the corridor to see whose cleaning bot was the best and who kept their patch of floor the smartest. And although it was hard to see how the final result was arrived at, everybody seemed to know the final score.
It was from this that Vincenzi learnt that some of the most important things in life are never spoken of.
Three minutes.
He was older by then, and his life had expanded beyond the corridor, to encompass other corridors and the Janinski Galleria and the place called Halfapark because it was obvious when you looked at the plans that it was supposed to be twice as big but had been chopped in half by a design error.
His school, LocEd 113HBSP6, was just off the park. That was where he learnt vital things, like it was better to get smacked twice on the hand by a human teacher than to get one static shock from a profbot, and the words to all six verses of ‘Let the Goddess Watch Over the Empress’. He learnt to salute the flag and swear his fealty to his liege lord. As he was to remark on his second tour of duty on Orestes, ‘There was an education in there somewhere, but I’m buggered if I know what it was.’
He said this to a Skag maiden, who looked at him with pretty, uncomprehending eyes, and persuaded him to buy another bottle of overpriced, watery brandy.
He grew older. Bhubba, the senior of his two fathers, updated the holographic image of the family that adorned their doorway.
Then he took Vincenzi aside and, opening a bottle of ersatz Chianti, gave him the standard warnings against sex, drugs and loud music. And like the warning given by the first upright primate to its child, it was about a year too late.
For there was already loud music, and drugs of a kind, and even sex, albeit still only at the level of theory. Vincenzi’s adolescent world was the whole North-West quadrant of Level 113, and sometimes up to 114, because there was a way past the ID checks if you were fast and clever, and Vincenzi was both.
203
But 114 was overrated, he thought, much the same as 113 only different