Doctor Who_ Transit - Ben Aaronovitch [1]
Credit Card winced. Talking to Ming the Merciless was a pain face to face, going direct was like rubbing his brain on a cheese grater. 'Keep it down,' he sent, 'I'm plugged in.'
Ming the Merciless had a problem, mainly a brown-out on the Central Line which was knocking fifteen seconds off transit time station to station. Ming was very democratic: if she had a problem she liked to spread it around.
'We're on a break.'
Ming didn't care. She wanted the problem sorted out - now.
Credit Card pulled his finger from the socket and watched Ming doing goldfish impressions on the screen, her mouth silently opening and closing.
'What's Ming want?' asked Lambada.
'Brown-out on Central.'
'Again?' said Lambada.
'It's the regulators,' said Old Sam. 'They're bloody antiques.'
'Twenty-bloody-five years old,' said Dogface.
Old Sam sat down opposite Dogface and chewed the end off a fresh eastwood. 'Got a light?' he asked Dogface, who tossed the lighter to him. Old Sam snatched it from the air, insect fast, just to show that forty years hadn't slowed him down none.
Credit Card plugged his finger back in. 'It's the regulators,' he told Ming.
'I know it's the regulators,' screamed Ming, 'of course it's the bloody reg ...'
Credit Card yanked his finger out again. 'She says she knows that it's the regulators.'
'I hate that Ming,' said Lambada.
'Yamatzi series five,' said Dogface. 'It's the coupling on the field controller.'
'Always dropping out of line,' said Old Sam. 'Two, maybe three, angstroms.'
'Five angstroms,' said Dogface.
'Very dodgy workmanship,' said Old Sam.
'Not like the new Nigerian regulators.'
'Japanese got no idea how to make precision gear.'
'It's not in their culture.'
'Not like the Africans.'
'Now they understand interstitial dynamics,' said Dogface. 'All that mystical stuffs second nature to them.'
'You can't swear undying loyalty to your company and then build something that relies on the transient nature of reality as a basic operating principle,' said Old Sam and blew a smoke ring at the ceiling.
'Common sense, innit?' said Dogface.
'So what do I tell Ming?' asked Credit Card.
'Tell her we'll get round to it later,' said Old Sam.
'Much later,' said Dogface.
'Don't you ever worry about getting the sack?' asked Lambada.
'Nah,' said Old Sam. 'Me and Dogface are the only ones who know how the system really works.'
'I could fix them,' said Blondie.
'Shut up, Blondie,' said Dogface.
STS Central - Olympus Mons
Ming the Merciless decided that banging her head violently against the console was not an effective method of stress management and consoled herself by screaming at the next person she saw. Once the young technician had fled into the corridor she sat down and considered her position.
The duty office overlooked the master control room. Colour-coded holograms displayed the system in its entirety. Red for the mterWorld lines like the Loop, Central Line and Outreach, orange for the commuter networks, blue for the feeders and yellow for the branch lines. A three-dimensional tangle of colour, each subsystem descending into a fractal infinity while data streams in white light marked the passage of a hundred thousand trains, fifty-six million passengers at fifty thousand stations.
It was an animal, Ming had decided a long time ago, a vast organism with a multitude of orifices that swallowed people and spat them out elsewhere. Grown up from an embryo over two centuries, it encompassed the solar system and stopped the ancient motion of the planets. In subspace all distances are the same distance so distance became meaningless. Orbits became an abstraction, the distance to Mars was a function of how far away the nearest station was. For most people the map of the system was the map of the universe.
And now the system was ready to eat up the light years between Sol and Acturus. Amongst the tangle of light, a new thread, picked out in silver, and a new station - Acturus Terminal, a new line, the Stella Tunnel, the Stunnel. The beast had yawned and stretched out to annihilate another frontier.
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