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Written by Paul Vigg
Sunday, 23 March 2008

Piece

Charlz Piece flicked another Synthtobacco tube away and watched it bounce off the hard, gritty ground a few feet away. Once upon a time he'd tasted real tobacco and the memory still haunted him every time he lit up another mass produced, tasteless little white tube of chemicals. True, they wouldn't turn his lungs to shit like real tobacco would, but who cared about that? Medicine was so advanced in this day and age it was getting pretty hard to get sick, or so the Sonics would have you believe. Every other announcement they gave told the population about the latest advances made in the field of something impressively named, which meant there were even less ways for human beings to have an excuse not to be overworked.

Charlz leaned against the towering, charcoal wall of the building behind him and stretched his long body, pushing his long hands further in to his deep pockets. His face was cast in dusky shadows by the brim of the tall, perfectly white top hat he wore, tipped a little to one side. Around him were endless, jagged buildings that rose up to needle the sky, each one a different shade of black, grey or another shadowy tone. They were hard to look at; it was if their height made them off balance, they seemed to tip towards each other, staring out of their many semi-circular windows.

The evening was drawing in and Ergot City didn't smell any sweeter for it. It always amazed him how, in a world where nothing was wasted and everything was recycled, still the place was filthy. It was as it if the moral decay and the rot of humanity were manifesting themselves in a layer of grime that lay over everything.

Above him the giant curving cylinder through which the Metrobe ran rumbled furiously as another enormous Shuttle thundered through it. Charlz barely heard it, it was another background city noise, like the chattering of the Holoscreens and characters generated by Holofields that lined the streets, asking you to buy, believe or volunteer.

He stood where he was because it was a rare kind of place. So rare that there were actually people who made it a hobby to find them, a place where there was virtually no traffic, pedestrians or vehicle passing through. It was in the lee of a huge building, the wall of which Charlz leaned against, and the streets that passed either side intersected a few meters away from it, so there was no reason to go across the little space. The constant flow of vehicles careening down the roads either side could be ignored, as could the steady flow of people on foot. It was, against the odds, a clear little patch in the middle of the pandemonium that was a modern human city.

Another reason that corner was so clear was the presence of Charlz himself. A tall man in a well made but shabby suit made up of severe black and white vertical stripes was not entirely unusual. However, the stark white top hat, the hunched shoulders and the oddly shaped case he carried made him a strange figure, best to be avoided. The long tails from the coat of his suit gave him the look of a rich man, but the tattered state of his clothes made a person think that perhaps the clothes had belonged to someone else.

Charlz glanced at his wrist and saw the green glowing numbers displaying the time as PM4.00, it was still early, but the light was dimming. Soon it would be time to move.

Two blue and white clad security drones sat at a tiny table, in a tiny room, just inside the doors of a Holoway Footwear building, staring blankly at the wavering green and yellow Hologame between them. It was one of the few ways they had to stave off the boredom of the night shift. Of all the places there were to break in to in Sector Paspali, that particular Holoway Footwear facility was probably the least likely. The building did not in fact make the shoes themselves; it made various tiny parts that were attached to them, such as the tips of the laces and the holograms that were embedded in the sides.

The drones, Dum and Dee, had once been criminals, although they'd never be able to remember what they did. They had been Brainshocked and their minds given back only just enough intelligence and skill to do basic jobs, like guarding a doorway, which is what they had been doing ever since. They were both fat, pale faced beings, squashed in to blue uniforms with black padding on their shoulders, chests, knees and shins. Cheap and deeply loyal, mainly because they wouldn't know how to rebel, they were one of the easiest ways of keeping an eye on something you didn't really expect to be targeted.

Charlz Piece crouched on the roof of the building opposite the doors, hidden by the inky shadows cast by the various antennae and aerials around him.

‘Drones, tch,' he murmured to himself. It would be almost too easy to cause a distraction and slip in through the door. Of course, there would be Holocaptures hovering everywhere, ready to record his actions and play them out to their owners in the form of a tiny hologram, but he knew how to deal with them too.

Charlz took a tiny, opaque, complex looking device out of his pocket. He lifted it high above his head and then slammed it on the roof, breaking it. Nothing visible or audible happened, but Charlz knew that the device had sent out a digital shockwave that would scramble the signals of any such device as a Holocapture in a big enough area to knock out any that were in the building he was about to infiltrate.

His next action was to take a tiny, perfectly balance blade out of his belt and throw it, with astonishing accuracy, at one of the many windows that lined the ground floor of the building. It exploded inwards with a satisfy sound and Charlz watched the pieces fall, the Drones leap out of their seats, and an alarm begin to sound somewhere further inside the building.

Charlz hopped off the roof he was crouching on and felt the impact of the ground absorbed by the military designed boots he had stolen from a soldier who'd been off his guard. Darting across the street and between vehicles, he was through the door and searching for a place to disappear before the Drones had even reached the smashed window. As he ducked in to a side corridor he grinned to himself, it had been even easier than he'd thought.

Charlz emerged from a doorway filled with hot smoke on to a balcony overlooking the biggest room he had ever seen.

Vast faded red machines that seemed to splay ever outwards with black conveyor belts, grey mechanical arms and multi-coloured tubing squatted in the huge chamber, thundering with the sound of construction. Charlz stood on a small, shadowy balcony halfway up the wall of the gargantuan room, peering in to the abyssal depth from which the machines emerged. He tried to guess how many products and it what quantities the place produced, but it was virtually impossible. The machines spewed tiny plastic casings in a multitude of attractive shades, and hologram-badges that shimmered with neon yellows and ethereal blues, the trademark colours of the company, as well as plenty of other parts and pieces of Holoway Footwear's own brand of merchandise.

His jaded heart beat faster at the thought of all the money he was going to make. He stepped up nimbly on to the edge of the balcony and dropped on to the nearest conveyor belt which was covered with little hologram-badges, ready to be embedded in the sides of brand new shoes. He greedily grabbed them and stuffed them in to his pockets.

After a few seconds of self-satisfying looting, he took a deep breath and opened the case he had with him. It was shaped like an ancient musical instrument, it was a deep, rich brown, a long ovoid shape that pinched in at the middle and had a long shaft at one end. Charlz had no idea what the thing had been called, or even sounded like, but he liked the mystery of the odd shape. He quickly packed the thing full of as many of the badges as he could fit in to it. He could only take what he could carry around and sell personally, cash in hand.

It wasn't the perfect crime, but it was a pretty good one, Charlz mused as he hopped back up on to the balcony and scuttled back down the corridors of the factory. Anyone would think the place to steal from would be the shoe factory itself, but he knew better. When people bought Holoway Footwear, they weren't paying for quality design or superior product worth. They were paying for the little badges he had stuffed in his case; they were paying for the name and the status it gave them. Holoway shoes were expensive, so if a slightly reprehensible character could put the badges on the street at a fraction of the price and attach them to a pair of cheap shoes, where was the harm? Nobody had enough money these days anyway, and the Holoway corporation owners were already fat and rich enough, right?

Charlz cared little for all of this, although he knew it well. He was the supplier; he was the one that had to put in the dangerous work to get the badges in the first place. This wasn't even one of the tougher things he'd had to do, not by a long way.

‘Excuse me,' said a voice from behind him. He froze in place, confusion spreading across his grey face. He knew he could move without a sound and he'd trained his senses to pick up on the slightest movement of the air, how could anyone have seen him?

‘Why are you not you wearing your uniform?'

Charlz relaxed, he knew that kind of voice. The tone was brisk, sharp; it wore a suit, an expensive and suitably grey one, it polished its shoes and folded its shirts.

‘I had to just go by my office for something and it didn't seem worth getting changed,' Charlz said, spinning on his heel to face the other man.

He was right; this was a corporate clone of the highest caliber. An Execopy, vat grown, it would be a long debate deciding if he qualified as human. He was tall, thin and bone white, his eyes were soft grey, alert, and his hair was jet black. His brain would have been designed and manipulated to have a high degree of skill with numbers, a photographic memory and a distinctly beige personality. He stood as if suspended by the very top of his head, his body hanging like a cloth. This man meant business, this man was business.

‘Holoway Footwear has an image to maintain you know,' he said. His voice had the practiced ease of someone who had learned to speak in front of people, to say the right things and laugh at the right jokes.

‘I know, sir, but I'll be leaving right away,' Charlz replied, smiley broadly, allowing his eyes to become a little unfocused. Playing the eager but incompetent worker would be the perfect ticket out of this situation.

‘I think this will be the last time you enter this building out of uniform,' the factory-perfect man said. It was a statement loaded with a command, backed up by the utter certainty of his own authority.

‘Oh yes sir,' Charlz said. The other man gave him a super-fast up and down look that conveyed his complete disapproval of Charlz as a human being; he then turned mechanically and walked down an intersecting corridor.

Charlz turned and headed off the way he had come. Although he had been seen by the executive clone he didn't worry. His hat always kept his face in just enough shadow to make it indistinct, with the added affect of his straggly hair which gave his head and shoulders a blurry outline, he was very hard to describe, even for someone with a perfect memory, like a clone. Little details like the oddly shaped case he carried and the stark black and white suit would be omitted by an Execopy, it wouldn't be usual for him to mention something so frivolous.

Charlz stood again in his accustomed spot, the little space he had found to be still amongst the chaos of Ergot City. The case full of stolen badges had been safely secreted at one of the many hiding places he had all over the city; he knew how to make things disappear.

Charlz didn't often spend much time reflecting on his life, but at that moment his mind wandered back over the things he had done. At the age of fourteen he had begun his career as a thief, but at that time he'd never imagined that he would, or even could make a living out of it. He had never worked a day in his life. He had also never left the city, and he knew it like a best friend. The thought struck him as ironic; he'd never had any real friends. He knew plenty of people, who to buy from, who to sell to, who could bail him out and who would turn him in. Not a single one of them ever thought about him outside of the times when they were dealing directly with him, though. His parents, whoever they had been, had abandoned him to an Orphanage the same day as he was born.

Many people would be deeply unhappy in his situation, but Charlz had always felt content. He was free, he lived exactly the way he chose to, and he knew for a deadly certain fact that few people could say that, and especially those without money.

Charlz looked directly up in to the black-purple sky, the stars that revolved slowly above and the thousands of satellites that orbited the world listlessly.

By Paul Daniel Thomas Vigg

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