Up The Tower

Title Page

Copyright Page

I | Junktown

II | Disaster

III | Collapse

Stay Connected!

Further Reading: Dust Bowl

Also By J.P. Lantern

About the Author

––––––––

H
ere is the day we are looking at:

It has your basic average morning. A Wednesday. There is not a lot happening so far that was different the day before. There is a high of seventy-six degrees and a low of fifty-five. Later on, there will be a cold front running through. It is August; everyone would love a cold front. The air is clear and about as clean as it can get, as it has been for the past three months, with a nice orange rating. Drone presence is high, tiny eyebots constellating the skyline as they zip from one end of the city to the other.

Then, at around one-thirty in the afternoon, an earthquake will rip a canyon through the earth of the old city of St. Louis.

Before that, though, parents in the suburbs—which are past the tall, reinforced barriers that line the border of the St. Louis slum of Junktown—drive their children to school. They kiss their kids goodbye or they don't. There are good parents, bad parents, and you have known both kinds. Maybe if the bad parents knew what was going to happen with the quake, they would kiss their children goodbye. Perhaps the children are sick with the flu, and even the good parents are leery of kisses in such a case. Probably, if these families knew the quake was coming, they would all be gone entirely, taking off out of town; even a bad family wants a legacy. Or, even if they did know the quake was coming, maybe they would have driven straight into the epicenter anyway to volley with the waves of concrete and sink down into the earth. Even a good family goes crazy once in a while.

Other things happened too. You want specifics? All right. That’s what holographic records are for, after all, and I have most of them.

At ten-thirty, there is a man, middle-aged. He tosses himself out of the window of his Junktown apartment because he was denied a food loan and would rather not starve to death in his closet apartment. Two women have children and give them the same first and middle names—Hector Davis, after the tech-laden athlete of the day—even though the boys were born minutes apart at different hospitals and the respective mothers had never met one another.

A thirty-six year-old woman named Martha Parison falls in love for the first time—the absolute first (and last) time—with a man she had met the night before at a legal rights parade championing all those poor lawless souls in Junktown. These charity events are sponsored by the Cops-For-All corporation; a sub-corp of GuaranTech. Any legal presence in the enormous slum of Junktown is relegated largely to guard duty for commercial transports. The parade’s intent was to encourage more police presence within Junktown, hoping to spread the boon of law and order. Of course, the protest was held outside the Junktown barrier, safely within the confines of the suburban county. The man Martha Parison took home is married and would never love her back, but she doesn’t care because she feels good holding him in her arms and being held in his.

Near the border of Junktown proper, three boys play kickball in a dangerous street around eleven in the morning. The street is a smuggling route for the gangsters out of Junktown, and so there are frequent firefights between the hacks and the gangsters. The hacks, cops in robotic suits with long batons and guns, would no doubt come by later and scare the boys off—hired by the rich woman at the end of the street who made her fortune from trading on water batteries. The boys know that this or something like it will happen, and they do not care. They are boys.

The mega-corp Tri-American sends out its screen messages, informing denizens of the weather and the expected stock and bonds prices for the day. Their daily salaries will be deducted according to the flux of the market. The price of foodmatter falls to seventeen dollars a pound. Tri-American’s sole competitor, Groove, has a better day—their foodmatter raises its price to twenty dollars a pound.

A few hours before noon, the Tri-American stores open with their newest holowrist on sale. It is seven times faster than the previous model and takes holograms so accurate that they could appear, from many angles, to be actual people or objects present in a room. The flicker-rate is down to seven nanoseconds per minute, which is considered pretty good, but disappointing compared to some early predictions. Someone got a raise for the improvement anyway, not that it ended up mattering very much. Tri-American, global behemoth, closed its doors within just a few years of the disaster.

The new holowrists are sturdy, and how. Much of the surviving records from that day are intact due to this release. High impacts, intense pressures, water submersion, and long bouts of smoke and fire were all forces that the holowrists could (and luckily for this historian, did) withstand.

Around St. Louis, Groove's version of the same holowrist product is said to be better, but St. Louis is a Tri-American town, and that kind of greener grass talk is just the way. Chicago, a Groove city and not very far away at all, always speaks of how Groove is falling behind, and how Tri-American is where all the real tech is.

Anyway, all of this is screwed. It's a rather big earthquake that's coming.

Like most tragedies, most disasters, it is banal in the morning. There is a long period, several hours sometimes, where there is nothing happening. Everyone is worried about what they will have for dinner and whether it will break their diet if they have some sweets in the afternoon. Cravings develop and do not pass. Someone brings a cake to work, and everyone is a little mad at the temptation it presents, a little relieved for the excuse it allows. People plan their evening schedules around binges of screen programs that they woefully interrupted the night before with necessary sleep.

Then, there is a period of hours where everything is happening. Buildings falling. Cars crushed. Explosions from the meeting of stray sparks and leaked gas mains. Death. Heroism. Sacrifice.

Then, nothing again. Nothing but watching and wondering, thinking. Trying to start putting it all back together. In some ways, this is the period that lasts forever. Certainly, I am guilty of trying to parse this whole mess out, and it has been quite a long while since it happened.

This is a disaster, to begin with. But disasters precipitate tragedy, just as they precipitate heroes and goodness and intelligence and guts and nobility, just as later on, upon examination, they reveal cunning and cowardice and fear and evil. As for which of these carries the most weight, it is not for me to say.

But here, let's begin. It was your basic average day, and some people are getting upset, like they do.

* * * * *

O
re leaned on her table, head heavy. Stained blueprints stuck to one hand. Across from her were four young men, none of them older than fifteen. Outside, eyebots droned by, speeding through the small Junktown slum.

“I raised all y’all. I did it myself. Took you up outta that muck and slime and gave you jobs. I brought you wealth. I let you know what you were good at. I got you passage into the Tower. That was
me
who did that. You all woulda died without me on your side. I know, because I saw. I passed up other boys for y’all. I seen them die. I kept tabs. And now this.”

Ore banged the table. They all jumped, bumping into one another. Georgeson. Jonesboy. Figueroa. Konnor. All of them traitors.

“Now this. You can’t do this one damn thing for me, when I need you.”

“You don’t need to kill—”

She banged the table again. “You don’t
tell
me what I need, Konnor! You don’t tell me that. None of y’all.”

Ore had just one eye, half her head too scarred to hold any hair, the other half thick with black dreadlocks. Her forearm to her hand on the right side was wrapped in tech—hydraulics, pistons, clamps. She tilted her head and took a moment to herself, trying to calm down.

It didn’t work. Instead she gripped down on the table harder, the thick tips of her tech hand tearing into the surface easily. Her fury bubbled over and she ripped a big section out from the table. Blueprints and plans scattered around. For a moment, she thought about overturning the table as well. A big gesture. Too much effort. She tossed the broken bit of table away and sat down in her recliner.

“Get out of here. I don’t want to see y’all again.”

Her place was not very large. The apartment—she would call it an apartment but in reality it was a shack, one in a string of many such shacks that she had made her home—was overcrowded with useless implements. Hanging over the door was a collection of gun barrels, strung together like wind chimes. In one corner stood a barrel, inside of which were smaller barrels full of smaller containers. Flyers for nightclubs were spackled to the wooden floor and ceiling, doing a poor job of keeping the water out. Ladles filled with fermenting potatoes and corn took up the back wall, each ladle with a different flavor and effect. She would sell them in the times when she couldn’t pick up a job with her Haulers. Or at least, she used to. Maybe that would be her job now: fermenter. Brewer.

In St. Louis, as in any city, there were four different kinds of people. There were Shareholders, who profited directly from Tri-American and never had to work for anything. There were Citizens, usually the higher-ups in companies and corporations, who voted and received access to benefits like free healthcare and tax cuts—their cut of the taxes that everyone else paid. Beneath the Citizens and the Shareholders were employees. Regular folk working the regular shifts, putting in their seventy-seven hours a week.

And then, there were gangsters. Everyone who wasn't a gangster would tell you that gangsters were on the bottom of the food chain; everyone else would tell you that the gangsters were outside the food chain altogether.

The gangsters in St. Louis were all in Junktown. Everyone in the slum had a hustle. Citizens didn’t even step foot inside unless they had to. Employees worked there and sometimes lived there, but only in well-fortified buildings with machine-gun nests and shock-moats circling their buildings.

Ore was a gangster. A copbot would shoot her on sight; they had tried. Ore survived. She survived and she thrived, pulling job after job with her Haulers.

Now, one by one, they left. Georgeson, Jonesboy, Figueroa. All of them with their heads full of the promises of Punchee Wallop. Ore didn’t begrudge them their ambition, just their timing. But maybe that would have been what she thought no matter the time.

Konnor stayed for a moment. He was the oldest of the four. Ore had known him the longest of any of her boys—she herself was eighteen, and she had met him when she went onto the streets to find her fortune at the age of ten. He was almost like her second-in-command, if she ever were to rely on such a thing, though Ore never did. Command was always hers. If it wasn’t, then she couldn’t trust a plan to go right.

“You don’t gotta kill Wallop, Ore. You don’t.”

“What did I just say about telling me what to do?”

“He’ll kill you first.”

“I guess he’ll kill me, then.”

“You know we gotta go tell him.”

“I know.”

“If he finds out we knew you’d try, and then you try, and we didn’t tell him—”

“The hell is this? Repeat day? I know. Go on and tell the man, then. Tell him I’ll have bells on.”

Konnor tapped the table and shuffled a few blueprints around. He held up one to the light. He carried himself with a certain amount of maturity. They all did—all four of her Haulers, and Ore herself, even though none of them had lived two decades. Junktown matured people. Every day, you made decisions that saved your life or ended it. That kind of environment grew someone up fast.

“This would have been a hell of a plan.”

He wasn’t leaving. Probably had something to say. Fine, then.

Ore leaned back. “Yup.”

“I’m sorry we couldn’t do it, I mean. It would have worked.”

“Yup.”

He set the blueprint down. “Look, I got something to tell you.”

“Come on with it, then.”

Ore expected an apology. She downright wanted one. None of her boys had bothered to apologize when they told her they were all going to work for Punchee Wallop of the Five Faces. Wallop ran the labor racket in Junktown; he had all but put a price on Ore’s head earlier that very morning after waking her up with a beating. He did this because she had planned one bad job. And so, she had made plans to kill Wallop. Until this.