Spares - Michael Marshall Smith [1]
Heaven on earth, or cruising just above it: all of the good, clean, buyable things in life crammed into a multi-story funhouse.
Eighty-three years ago, MegaMall Flight MA 156 stopped for routine refueling on the site of old Richmond, and never took off again. At first, it was merely a bureaucratic problem—the kind that the massed brains of all time could never have gotten to the bottom of, but which some poorly paid clerk could have solved instantly. If he’d had a mind to. If he hadn’t been on his break.
After a few hours, the richer patrons started leaving by the roads. They didn’t have time for this shit. They had to be somewhere else. Everybody else just complained a little, ordered another meal or bought some more shoes, and settled down to wait
Then, after a few more hours, it transpired there was a minor problem with the engines. This was a little more serious. When you’ve got a problem with a car, you open the hood and there it is. You can point at the errant part. When the engine’s the size of the Empire State Building on steroids, you know you’ve got a long night ahead. It takes fourteen people just to hold the manual. The engineers sent repair droids scurrying off into the deep recesses, but eventually the droids came back, electronically shaking their heads and whistling through their mechanical teeth. It was only a minor problem, the engineers were sure, but they couldn’t work out what it was.
More passengers started to leave at that point, but on the other hand, some people decided to stay. There were plenty of phones and meeting rooms, and the Mall had its own node on the Matrix. People could work. There were enormous quantities of food, consumer goods and clean sheets. People could live. There were, frankly, worse places to hang around.
They never got the engines going again. Maybe they were fixable, but they left it a little too late. After a couple of days, people started to make their way in from the outside; people who’d been homeless since old Richmond went up in flames; people who lived in the backwoods; people who’d heard about the food courts and just wanted a spot of lunch. They came off the plain and out of the mountains and hammered on the doors. Initially, security turned them back like they were supposed to, but there were an awful lot of them and some were pretty pissed. For them the only thing worse than having to live in Richmond had been not having it to live in anymore.
The security guards got together and came up with a plan. They would let people in, and they would charge them for it.
There was a period, maybe as long as six months, when Flight MA 156 was in flux, when no one was really sure if it was going to take off again. Then the tide turned, and people knew it was not. By then they didn’t want it to. It was home. Areas inside the ship were knocked through, torn down, redeveloped. The original passengers staked out the upper floors and began to build on top of the Mall, competing to see who could get farthest from the mounting poor on the lower levels. A secondary town grew up around the Mall at ground level—the Portal into the city.
Eventually, the local utility companies just plumbed the whole lot in, and New Richmond was born. Apart from its unusual provenance and extreme oblongness, New Richmond is now just a city like anywhere else. If you didn’t know, you might think it was just a rather bizarre town-planning mistake.
But it’s said that in a lost room, somewhere deep in the bowels of the city, there remains a forgotten suitcase, left there accidentally by one of the first families to leave old Richmond, a mute testament to the city’s birth. Nobody knows where this room is, and most people believe it’s just an urban myth. Because that’s what Flight MA 156 is, these days. Urban.
But I’ve always believed in that lost room, just like I wonder