Severance (5 page)

“What?” Hogg asked, genuinely baffled.

The man’s eyes watered. “The Breeders. I didn’t know it was
them. They didn’t tell me.
They didn’t tell me.”

Oh. He had worked for the Breeders?
Hogg hadn’t known
that. He didn’t actually know why they were removing the man from his home, hadn’t
even considered that he should care. It seemed a little late to be beating on
Breeders; that had been settled years earlier. But orders were orders. He took
one step towards the man, digging something out of his pocket. He thrust a terminal
onto the man’s chest.

“A map to your new home. Your possessions will be delivered
shortly.”

The man clutched at the terminal as Hogg released it,
bobbling it slightly. Hogg pivoted and walked back towards the apartment, knowing
he would have to keep an eye on the security men lest too much of the family’s
possessions go missing in transit. But before he reached the door, he stopped,
an amusing idea having revealed itself to him.

“Stop!” he said, turning around to face the family again.
They hadn’t actually moved anywhere, but upon hearing his command, somehow
moved even less. Hogg walked slowly towards them, eyeing the young boy standing
at his mother’s side. Hogg opened one of the cargo pockets on his trouser leg,
fishing around for something. Finding it, he bent down in front of the boy and
offered him what he had withdrawn. A plastic security badge.

“Here you go, son. Maybe you’d like to be a security officer
some day?” He waggled it gently in front of the boy, who hesitated a second
before snatching it from him. Hogg nodded curtly at the parents, before turning
away from their gaping faces. He returned to the apartment, a grin spreading
across his face.

§

The rest of Stein’s day had not gone smoothly. After
dropping off the robot at the recyclers, her terminal informed her of an urgent
request in a hydroponics pond, and she’d spent the rest of her shift ankle deep
in water and cucumbers.

After changing, she left the maintenance office and walked
down Asia to the nearest escalator, her feet squishing as she went. The streets
on the Argos were laid out in a grid, those running the length of the ship
named after continents, historical leaders, and interesting plants, with the
cross–avenues assigned more mundane numbers. All four of the inhabited levels
of the ship had identical layouts, with escalators running up and down at major
intersections. Stein caught one of these escalators up to the third level.

Here, she crossed the street and waited for the Argos’ dully
competent mass transit system to arrive. Trolleys ran down tracks mounted in
the center of the major streets and avenues of the third level, allowing people
to move about the ship with some semblance of rapidity. The trolleys themselves
were autonomous, and didn’t actually require the tracks to operate. They had
managed just fine without them until a hundred years earlier, when a lunatic
managed to hijack one, crash it into every damned thing on the third level, and
only
just
fail a spectacular attempt to move it down to the second level.
In response, the government of that era decided to mount the cars securely to
tracks running the length of their dedicated routes. It was the greatest public
works project Argosians had ever initiated themselves, a feat which had
inadvertently made that lunatic the most influential person in the ship’s
history. There had been some talk of putting up a small statue of him. Stein was
relieved — and a little surprised — that it had yet to happen.

One of the leashed and humbled trolleys arrived in front of
Stein, which she boarded by the rear doors, glad to see it was mostly empty for
the trip around the ship. She was going to the Prairie to meet Ellen, or — she
glanced at the time on her terminal — to try and catch up on the head start
Ellen had established.

Stein sat, observing the world as it passed by. Another
ladder crew busied themselves repairing the ceiling handholds that had served
as monkey bars for generations of daring children. It had been easy to ignore
for a while, but that certainly drove the point home: the ship was stopping,
and soon. The ladders would be a necessary element of navigation once
deceleration began. When the engines fired up again in a little over six
months, the concept of down was going to get a little confusing. And dangerous.
She hadn’t seen them install any net riggings yet, harnesses that would string
across the massive north–south streets that would become well shafts when the ship
started decelerating. She decided that the nets probably wouldn’t come until
the last minute. The ladders at least were vandal resistant. Once strung, a net
was likely to get shredded and turned into some sort of distressing male
lingerie within minutes.

She loathed them, her fellow travelers, and had long since
given up feeling guilty about it. The majority of people who shared this space
with her were colossally, flagrantly, mouths–hanging–open–while–they–read
stupid. Worse, stupid with nothing to do. A variety of different ways to close
the gap between the amount of work that actually had to be done and the number
of man–hours available to do it had been invented over the past centuries, each
one championed by a different species of moron. Video game addicts, body
modifiers, roaming dance troupes, anarchists, bearded anarchists (they did not
get along), and a panoply of sexual fetishists were amongst the most visible,
but there were hundreds of other overlapping groups and clubs and sects active
at any given time.

On a street corner, a crowd of people surrounded two grown
men dressed as babies, who had evidently agreed to meet there to wrestle. The
crowd surged and pulsed, exchanging wagers and hurling advice at their chosen
champion. The trolley crept past before the fight began, but judging by the
roar that went up a few seconds later, Stein could tell that something stupid
had happened.

She set her jaw and turned away from the window. She used to
be worse. She’d hated everybody when she was younger, though had granted a half–dozen
or so exceptions as she mellowed with age. Perhaps by the time she died she
might genuinely like someone.

“Would you like me to tell you about the cutting?” a voice
above her asked, jolting her out of her thoughts. Standing over her, a man with
wild hair and strained eyes peered at her, smacking his wet and chafed lips.
Scars lined his hands and arms, and were it not for the blessed presence of his
clothes, she knew she’d see scars on every other part of his body as well. A Cutter.
Worse, a proselytizing Cutter.

“Please, don’t,” she said through gritted teeth. She had
heard the Truth of Pain before, even dated one of its prophets briefly. Once he
had gotten his hooks sunk in, he’d been impossible to get rid of. Anything she
did to get him to go away caused him pain, which only delighted him. Reverse
psychology worked, but only until he realized what she was doing. She had
needed Bruce’s help to finally get rid of him, and even he had to set the guy
on fire a little bit.

“But you look like you know something of the Pain yourself,
young lady. You deserve to know the truth of it,” the Cutter rasped, leering
down over her.

Stein glanced to her side, looking out the window. “Perhaps,”
she said. “Perhaps, indeeeeeeeeeeeed…” she held the last syllable, stalling,
while the trolley pulled to a stop. Leaning back in her seat, she raised a leg,
and planted her foot in the Cutter’s chest. She pushed, sending the man
backwards out the just–opened trolley door. Seeing the shocked looks on the other
passengers, she growled. “What? I waited till we stopped.”

The trolley continued on its way, though by now Stein wished
she had simply just gone up to the garden well and walked. The trolley seemed
to bring out the worst in people, a symptom of mass transit systems which had
survived the trip to the stars. A mass transit system within a mass transit
system: Russian nesting dolls stuffed with awful, awful people. She shook her
head and looked out the window as they pulled into another stop with another
confrontation, this one more one–sided.

A man pushed down to the street was being kicked by three
others, one of whom she recognized as Sebastian Krol, the alpha–Marker whose
living room carpet she had befouled. Which would make the sorry figure having the
piss kicked out of him poor Gerald. As the trolley pulled away, her smile faded
as the attackers began urinating on the defenseless man on the ground, streams
of piss trailing away into cracks on the grated floor. She flinched and looked
away. “Well, of course that’s what they were going to do. And I guarantee there’s
something underneath there that I’m going to have to fix.” She shuddered. “You
dummy.”

§

The Argos sunset entered its most attractive stage, the
banks of lights in the enormous light towers dimming, the yellow light fading
to orange, bathing the entire garden well in a warm glow. In the park, everyone’s
skin took on an orangish hue as they laughed and chatted in the evening breeze.
Stein sat on the grassy area outside the back deck of the Prairie, her
preferred watering hole. Of all the places on board the ship with other people
in it, this was by far the most tolerable. Here, the edge to everyone’s manic
behavior felt duller, and Stein’s general loathing of humanity waned.

The Prairie was located in the garden well, the large open–air
cylinder in the center of the Argos. The well’s outer surface, covered in parks
and boulevards, took up most of the fourth level, aside from a few blocks near
the bow and aft of the ship. A handful of apartments, stores, and other low–rise
buildings lined the streets within the well, forming the ship’s high–rent
neighborhood. Stein had mixed feelings for the people who lived amongst the
tree–lined streets here. They were substantially more sane than the bulk of the
population, due to some ancient instinct for wanting to appear more proper than
ones lesser, but this in itself irritated Stein. She found it awkward, feeling
better than someone who in turn was clearly confident that they were better
than her.

“Hey, buddy.” Ellen appeared behind her, interrupting her
thoughts. Short and loud, Ellen Katsushiro wore her adjectives proudly. To her
side and a little behind her stood a young man. “I want you to meet a friend of
mine. Kasey, this is Laura. Laura, Kasey.”

“Hello, Kasey.” Stein stared blankly at the young man.
Seeing Ellen’s pained expression, she forced a thin smile on her face.

“Hi,” he replied.

“Kasey here is thinking of applying for a job with the navy.”
Ellen sat down in the grass beside Stein, gesturing for Kasey to do the same. “I
told him you had done a bit of that yourself.”

Stein half opened her mouth, managing to fight off an urge
to moan. “Not quite.” She stared at Ellen. “You know that.”

“It’s all the same to me,” Ellen said. “Plasma and robots and
such.”

“So, uh, what do you do?” Kasey asked.

“I’m an assistant engineer in the maintenance department.”
Seeing Kasey’s expression, she added. “I fix the heat.”

Stein watched the drive train in Kasey’s brain slipping
gears. “So, like a plumber?”

“Sure.”

“Huh. I was thinking of applying to be a naval engineer.”

Stein looked at the ground, suddenly fascinated with the
grass. In anticipation of their arrival at Tau Prius, for the last two decades
kids had been encouraged to take up skills that would be useful on the ground.
And, as was their custom, the kids had done anything but.

“So, you don’t want to land either?” Ellen asked.

“I dunno. What’s the rush, right? The planet’s not going
anywhere.”

Stein plucked some of the grass, twisting it in her fingers.
The whole ship had a case of separation anxiety. The psychologists on the feeds
all had excellent explanations for this. Agoraphobia. Santiago Syndrome. Big
Scared Baby Condition. Whatever it was called, with less than a year to go until
the most fundamental change of address possible, every person on the ship still
went serenely about their lives, pretending that nothing was about to change.

And she couldn’t admit to feeling much different herself. She
too had had a hard time wrapping her head around the idea of living on a
spinning ball. Topography, for example, was pretty fucking crazy. And the sky?
She could never visualize the geometry of it. When she closed her eyes to try, more
than once she felt an enormous sense of panic, eyes opening wide, heart pounding
at the vision of the ground curving
away
from her. Easier to just not
think about it.

Kasey continued, “Besides, they’ll need people to keep the
ship running. I think it’d be cool to work with the engines. You know.
Vrooooooom.”

Stein continued fidgeting with the grass, not looking at him.
“You should definitely do that.”

“I heard it’s tough, though.”

“Oh, it is.”

“I heard they only take the best. I wouldn’t want to waste
my time.”

Stein examined the little braided loop of grass she’d made,
before crushing it into a ball. “I wouldn’t worry about that. That kind of
consideration hinges heavily on how valuable your time is.”

An exasperated look descended on Ellen’s face. Kasey smiled
tightly, his eyes casting around the rest of the park. Seeing something behind
Stein, or maybe just pretending to, he stood up. “I’m going to go get a drink.
I’ll catch up with you later, Ellen. Nice meeting you,” he said to Stein, doing
a passable job of faking it. He walked back into the crowd.

The two women sat there in silence for a while. Finally,
Ellen said, “I think he’s in love with you.”

“Ha.” Stein shook her head. “Where did you find him? You
wearing those short shorts around playgrounds again?”

Ellen scoffed. “I’ll have you know I’m a happily married
woman, Laura. And as a happily married woman, I’m perfectly entitled to let a
young man buy me a drink, provided I have no intention of doing anything other
than drink that drink and make polite chit chat and maybe make him buy me
another drink. Thanks for your help with the polite chit chat, by the way. I
think you’re really starting to get the hang of it.”