Up The Tower (11 page)

He needed to get in shape, dammit. If he got out of this, shapes would be got into, by God.

Stone fell from the Dam like scabs shedding off skin, like labels eroding off from bottles in real time. He saw men and women smashed underneath these long sheets of rock—it looked so unreal, even just a hundred yards away. The sheets so large, the people so small. Water spurted after the stone, long cracks spilling down from their fountain points.

Oh, right, thought Gary, preparing another scream. The Dam is a piece of crap twenty years behind on repairs.

He turned and ran back over a series of banged-up metal carts, stumbling through the holes in their handles and sprinting with all four limbs engaged. He let out the ear-punching scream he had prepared. He could barely hear his own roaring voice over the cacophony of the disaster plowing through the area.

Up! He had to get up. There was no way he was going to get far away enough to get out of the flood. Away from concrete. Away from gut-bursting pipes. Outside of the riot of people amassing as far as he could see. His only hope was to get up.

Ahead of him. The Tower. Yes. He had to get there.

In the quake, the outer-innards of the Tower streamed down, air ducts and wires twisting from the motion like a whirl-go-round.

Down an alley ahead of him, the quake had left a building crumpled down onto a dumpster. He could climb up onto the defunct subway line between the buildings, twisting and curling but staying upright—and then climb again.

* * * * *

A
s you may or may not already be aware, holographic records pose a certain amount of difficulty when it comes to the matter of obtaining and experiencing them. These difficulties arise both from the strict limits of our Halls—all of which I agree with wholeheartedly, of course—and from the nature of the recording technology presented to us from the past.

Both Tri-American and Groove holowrist technologies possessed solar-powered fusion batteries that left them powered on constantly. As a result, their recording technology stayed on indefinitely, uploaded across the country and stored in ever-growing mountains of servers and datapiles. The holowrists recorded everything—
everything
—in the three-hundred sixty degree radius around a person for up to twenty feet, all the time. This is great today for personal records, if somewhat overwhelming to process. Through them it is possible to get a great many first-hand accounts of events as they unfold (so long as we can
find
the holographic records in question, which is not always possible, especially after disasters).

But even before trying to disseminate all of these nigh-endless amounts of information—a titanic process unto itself—one must gain
access to
the information. First, a petition must be made to the Hall of Records, which then must petition the Hall of Security, which then must file a grievance with the Hall of the State for forcing the Hall of Records to petition the Hall of Security...and so on. It is a process, in other words, and I tell you (as humbly as is possible) that it is rather impressive that so many different forces operated to allow me the unrestricted access which I have been able to enjoy.

At the same time, I would be remiss if I did not emphasize the fact that my record here, even with as narrow a focus as it has (comparatively speaking, to the epic histories that have been put down about this event in the past), has a distinct amount of bias and shaping to it. There is much that I have had to intuit, much that I have had to do the bulk of crafting all on my own. Some sort of saying exists, I believe, explaining that fiction begins the second someone tries to write down any story—even one as non-fictional as this.

There are a great many reasons this happens.

One is just the volume of material there is to work with. There is the argument made that the San Madrid Terror (i.e. Tri-American's End, the Tower Breaker, the Midwest Splitter, and—no doubt to some—simply the Big Quake) could be seen as the end of the corpocracy which ran the whole of the Earth for nearly one hundred years. Other, more popular ends are Yolach's Rebellion in the East or the proliferation of the Petrovian Republic toward the mid-point of the century, nearly forty years after the San Madrid Earthquake. It's interesting then to imagine that the beginning and end of the quake is also called into question all by itself.

The beginning, of course, has a much smaller question, with some historians debating over a matter of minutes—the records of the first vibrations of the tectonic movements are placed at different spots around ten in the morning, for instance.

The end is a more fascinating article of discussion. Some say it is obvious—the earthquakes all stopped, the final aftershocks stopped, at about seven in the afternoon, some five hours after they began. Others say that the disaster was not fully completed until the whole of the Mississippi was redirected into the canyon that the earthquake developed through the path of the city. Others insist that the aftershocks that hit Oklahoma City and Dallas should be included, citing tectonic shifts and falling buildings that occurred days after the initial quake that ripped through Junktown.

It is possible to imagine that, at one point, there were millions and millions of hours of footage on this catastrophe. Let us not forget the human element (at least, the element of humans that are not focused on here). More than seventy percent of the population possessed some form of recording device, most of them holowrists. For a population of ten million, that is just at seven million people. If then, we have a disaster that is recorded anywhere from six to twenty-four hours long...well. You do the math.

It's rather amazing, when you think about it, the casualness of all this holographic technology which is lost to us now. From our records, it appears as though even the most divinely poor person was capable of possessing this technology, and more than that, some even made quick dollars by replicating it. There was such a surplus that some made their livings by creating content for these devices.

As a quick aside, that is rather why I think this book is important—we must know our past, and with the past's own manner of recording gone to us, we must make do with writing as so many of our ancestors did. For, as incredible as these holograms are for first-person accounts, they are not as good for an aggregate understanding of a disaster, or a barometer for the pressure the disaster exerted on society at the time.

The other reason that fiction enters the equation of these sorts of historical records is that it is simply a by-product of writing to embellish in an attempt to engage that most elusive of prey—the captivated reader.

For example, Ore’s transit when the earthquake first breaks out, engaged in a few pages hence, is an aggregate translation of many different scenes where she is seen. I saw her on a child’s holowrist, hopping across the roofs of several overturned cars. The next time she shows up is on a male survivor’s hololog—he was across the road from her, on top of a building, when she and the other impromptu members of the Earthquake Six try to get into the Tower. He tried to signal her with her holowrist. She does not appear to have seen him. Was I to write her intentionally ignoring him? Was I to write that his signal flashed, but she paid attention only to her current task of traveling from one roof to another? Or was it best, as I did, to ignore this piece of actual history altogether for the sanctity of economic language?

This is a story, after all, and of all items in creation that are divinely stricken with poverty, certainly a story ranks high on the list. From what else has there been so much taken away? What else is distributed so freely, taken as our own possession so eagerly, and reproduced so handily without any thought outside of making its number more while its value is less?

The truth, perhaps. It is not for me to say. All I do mean to say is that all of this data has been recorded and translated as close to the truth as I can make it.

The record is a creation. The disaster is a creation. The Tower, the mega-corps. It is all one on top of the other, each swelling for new relevance in its own rhythm.

* * * * *

O
re wanted to stay alive. More than she wanted to stay alive, she wanted Samson to be alive.

Almost as much as herself and Samson, she wanted Wallop to be alive. If the earthquake killed him, then she wouldn't be able to.

Everything was breaking. Out from the debris of her fight with the idiot boy, there was more debris waiting. The shanty-pueblos around Ore swayed and shifted, and she knew immediately it was a choice between being caught underneath them or shattered on top of them when they fell.

Ore climbed one upended car and then another, grabbing the loose, swaying struts of the railway over the streets and working to get on top. Her tech hand helped, whirring, clicking, ignoring the grease-and-grime lined pipes in finding a sure grip. Then she was on top of a small corner grocer, a water tower tipping down and pulling up swathes of the roof with it. The streets flooded with water—other falling water towers, perhaps, or maybe the Dam was busting already.

The abandoned tenement that Ore had planned to break into had a hatch from the top floor that led to the roof. It was one of the few buildings in a two-mile radius around The Tower that had unguarded access to the roof.

Guards or no guards didn't seem to matter anymore. The street where she had found Jonesboy selling drugs rolled upwards and sideways, like a whip, cracking through Junktown's only gym.

“Goddamn.”

Above her, the Tower was swaying, but standing tall. She could hear the song of its steel as it shifted and twisted, calling out through the din of the breaking streets.

To her right, a tall tower of wood and concrete collapsed into a neon-lathered casino. Sparks flew all over. She hopped from the top of one building to the next. In the streets, everyone was running, rioting. Enterprising souls on the rippling streets broke store windows, carrying off the bars and chains of barricades and stealing holowrists and screens.

A man swept up by a sudden flood of water from the sewer got knocked down by a car smashing him against a building. He tried to move, ribs most likely broken, watching the water approach.

There would be more water coming, from the Dam. No way would it last this. The skin of the earth rolling up like sleeves underneath the roads and buildings.

If anything might last through this quake, The Tower would.  There had been acres of money poured into it from the Five Faces, and she had to think it could last.

Not so very long ago, someone bombed the bottom of the Tower to collapse it. The crater was still there on the south face of the building.

The bomb failed in its purpose, of course. It was set off by some gang trying to literally push over the Five Faces. After the offenders were rounded up, strung up, and hung up by their guts from out the twentieth floor—three dozen of them in all—the Faces invested in fortifying the Tower. It was built as earthquake proof, but they wanted it to withstand a nuclear war. Maybe it could. Petrov and his little loudspeaker messages constantly vaunted the safety of Tower living—not just against other gangs and thieves, but even against nature.

Ore shook herself from her frozen shock at the scene. She had to move. She had to keep following the plan:

There were two equally good reasons to do it this way.

Without the plan, Wallop might die because of the quake. He might die because of old age. The only certainty of his death was carried in every action she took, and every action put her on a line, and that line ended with her hands wrapped tight around his horrible throat.

Without the plan, Ore might never see Samson again. She would never hold her brother. She would never tell him she was sorry.

If Ore was not dodging rubble, she might have felt bad because she did not know which was more important to her: killing Wallop or finding Samson.

She ran—hopping from the top of the leaning grocer to the next building. And then from there, scattering her legs out for support, she did the same thing again. She hopped under clotheslines, over walls, broken glass on top of the buildings digging into her tough pants and boots.

Two younger girls and their small brother tried to hop up on a building as Ore had done—using the railway struts as a way up. But something broke or twisted in the struts, and the children fell hard to the debris below.

Ore looked away.

There was no telling who would live and who would die. Odds were that all her Haulers were dead already—they lived underground. That Ore was alive still was due to forces far, far beyond her comprehension or control. She would not waste them.

Ahead of her was the building she wanted—Radio Place. Unused in recent years except to amplify Petrov's signals as he broadcast his messages. A series of planks and plastic tubs formed a sort of walkway up to the top of the building, falling apart underneath her as she hopped from point to point.

On top already were two other people. People she knew, sort of. She felt surprise, distant and old, like remembering something you had to learn about yourself, like if you forgot that you ran better than you walked. The pretty girl, the one who had been with the jazzkid slock who attacked Ore. The other looked something like the dead man she had crawled over in that basement she crawled out of.

Lots of crawling, lots of running, lots of climbing. That was Ore’s day so far. Just the start, from the looks of things.

The man pushed against the antenna. Testing it. He already had Ore's idea. She didn't wonder why—the Tower was still standing, and everything else was falling. It seemed logical enough. The man turned at Ore's presence, brandishing his gun. She put her hands up..

“I want in there, too,” she said. “I can help.”

Shrugging, the man said, “Come on if you're coming, then. Stay out of the way.”

“I’m Ana,” said the pretty girl. “This is Victor.”