Up The Tower (9 page)

“I’m sorry, Boss Crash. It was a mistake, Boss Crash.”

“Mm. Sort of like when you got my Crowboys killed, huh? And now Storey’s boys too.”

“What?”

“Storey’s boys. You sent ‘em into those booby traps of the Crowboys. Didn’t you know about them?”

“No.”

Samson was mortified. He hadn’t wanted anyone to die today. And now there were more.

“Well. Storey thinks you did, baby. That ain’t good news for you. Someone’s got to talk that woman down. I thought maybe it should be me, but you seem to got such a mouth.”

“Please, Boss Crash.”

Crash waited.

“I got the copbot. You saw how I got it. I can, I don’t know. Whatever you want with it, all right? I can add on to it, maybe. Give it those rocket packs—”

“I want it melted down, like the others.”

“Really? It can...it talks, though! Didn’t you see it? It could be a discovery. If we had someone who understood artificial intelligences...”

“I know all the hell I need to know. It’s made of valuables, but all unrefined. Sort of like you, baby. You saying I ought to melt you down instead?”

“No, Boss Crash.”

Crash stepped to the door, shaking his head.

“Copbot that talks. What I want with a copbot that talks? The whole damn appeal of the things is that they don’t talk back. My engineer gets all excited about taking away its best feature. Goddamn, baby.”

He shut the door behind him. Partner stayed outside, not called in yet.

Several minutes went by with Samson just looking at the door, feeling alone. There was no one for him to turn to in this place except for Jackson Crash, and he wasn't much more to Crash than...than...he didn't know. Not much more than a tool, like the many strewn about his lab.

He picked up his blowtorch, tapping it against his knees.

“I wish...” He gripped the metal harder, pushing in dents in his palms. “I wish...”

He knew the words he wanted to say. He knew them better than anything. They cradled his thoughts as he went to sleep; they were the tidal forces behind every wave of tears he ever had. They tightened every screw on Jackson’s suit. He slipped down to a junk-infested corner, putting his head in his hands.

Go on, he dared himself. Say them. Say them. See what changes. Go on, you loser. Say it, say it, say it,
say it—

“I wish I could have somebody.”

There. Out of him, now.

He took a breath and called out to Partner; he told the copbot to come inside.

* * * * *

I
t is important, I think, to ensure we are all on the same page when it comes to the lay of the land. St. Louis at this time was a unique city, and its surrender to the corpocracy that shaped its destiny so extensively was never pre-ordained.

Through the course of my extensive research—and I tell you it
was
extensive—I have found that The Gateway Tower was supposedly one of those earthquake-proof buildings. But, rather than truly being a safety-measure against an earthquake, we can surmise via a number of sources that this manner of construction was adopted due to the fact that St. Louisians at the time were terrified of a nuclear attack. Enormous amounts of money and commerce flowed from their city hub due to their near-monopoly on the water boom (a result of the accidental discovery of the Mississippi River's incredible aptitude to create power for an entire generation—a record better explained elsewhere, by others more suited to the task).

There was, in fact, so much commercial success that talk of secession was a regular part of the public discourse, and in some communities the inevitability of such a decision was taken almost as a matter of course.

At some point, Federal money stopped flowing into the city (the Federal government itself absorbed by Groove and Tri-American), but it hardly mattered—everyone in the Western hemisphere depended on St. Louis water plants for energy. The stretch of St. Louis's influence stretched all the way up to Canada, following the Mississippi river, and the Rammin' Regulars—as the Missouri National Guard came to be called—came to guard every inch of the Mississippi's long stretch.

No longer was that the case at the time of the disaster which I have recorded in these pages. Tri-American’s grip was solid when the earthquake hit. With the bursting of the water boom bubble—replaced years before with potent combinations of wind and solar power coming in from every part of the world, all owned unconditionally by the powers of the mega-corps—St. Louis's power had diminished.

There is the argument made from time to time that during this in-between period, when St. Louis ran itself and still resisted corporate dominance, the city was the last bastion of real governmental power in the United States. Even if that was true, it was a period like any other. By which I mean to say, it did not last.

Tri-American and Groove, seeing the fertile commercial territory of St. Louis, did everything they could to buy influence. First, bribery was the name of the game—which had worked well in nearby areas like Cincinnati and Kansas City. But any technology that these mega-corps could offer was already affordable by even the poorest of the city’s voting bloc, thanks to the leftover wealth from the water boom.

Offers of Corporate Citizenship were dismissed as similarly useless, and the only real bargaining chips left were Corporate Shares—though neither corporation wanted to actually set that precedent. Corporate Shares gave individuals enormous amounts of wealth (and so therefore, in this time, power). Giving an entire city even fractions of a percent of a Share would make those denizens more wealthy than the rest of the continent combined. Today, we would find such extravagance thoroughly obscene; but, it is difficult to sit in judgment of another time.

The only real effect either corporation could hold on any population was on the city’s poor in Junktown, between the highway rings of the Divide and the long Mississippi Dam. Certainly, the corporations didn’t need the poor’s popular opinion—where was their money, their power? So, the poor became a tool—they were to be used to scare the affluent into doing what the mega-corps needed.

Weapons were distributed amongst the lower class, and seminars organized on how to use them. Steel and plastic-eating bacteria were released in their living areas to degrade their slum conditions and make them that much more desperate. Plagues were created and medicines offered.

It was this last tactic that actually won the bidding war for Tri-American. They did something very crafty. Through a series of probably-very-brave counter-intelligence missions, they found out the nature of Groove’s cures and remedies—they knew, in essence, what Groove could and could not handle when it came to disease. With this knowledge, they unleashed a plague on the populace which had no actual cure that Groove could provide.

On the surface, of course, the new affliction looked like your standard blood plague, boiling the body’s t-cell supply. Caused lots of bursting sores and ruined skin, a nasty business. Kendra Muldone, a journalist of the time, explains:

After the plague hit its highest point, Groove strolled in with its cures—which weren’t cures at all, because Tri-American knew what methods Groove was going to try to use (a type of retrovirus that was very effective for other blood plagues), and so Groove only served to hasten the death of plagued individuals. On-the-ground reports indicate that people actually began exploding, their diseased blood flying everywhere, further encouraging the spread of the disease.

Citizens of St. Louis, many of them, were well-aware of what Groove and Tri-American were doing in their lab experiments with the poor. You can imagine our horror today at such a thing, when to be poor is divine. In our Republic, wealth is uniformly frowned upon; pumping homes and businesses full of unnecessary glut and currency are seen as the reasons for the considerable problems of the past, problems that we have tried to evolve from and escape.

But, in this time, the poor were many, and so they were utterly expendable. Compare that to today, when all are the poor, and so all are essential. It was a different set of values altogether.

By and large, we have seen the merit of placing caps on wealth and, of course, technological study (even with however difficult it makes studying the history of the past and all of its holograms). But, as I said before, it is difficult to judge the governments of the past through the lens of the present. The long Petrovian revolution allowed us to consider that nothing impedes liberty quicker than a plutocratic technocracy, which is why we frown so deeply at the corpocracy today. Perhaps another revolution will change our opinions again.

Not that I am encouraging one, mind you.

At any rate, this latest Tri-American tactic—the plague—scared the affluent like nothing before. When Groove failed to solve the problem, the affluent turned to Tri-American, who had a cure—a real cure—waiting in the wings. And so, Tri-American became the mega-corp that owned the city up until the Quake.

Through the course of creating this record, I was able to visit St. Louis in person. It was a long road, and to my enormous luck I was able to meet with many of the sanctified poor on the way who had memories of memories of their elders telling them the stories of The Tower's demise.

If you were to visit St. Louis now—or even if you live there today—you may find it difficult to believe, as I did, that the Gateway Toll Bridge, engineered by enterprising scavengers trying to set up one hell of a toll road, had ever been the Gateway Tower. At two thousand feet tall, it would have been at one point the tallest building in the continental Americas.

In our time, now, St. Louis does not so much thrive or survive as it does exist. From the ramshackle lines of its borders, industry is gone, corporations are gone, economy is gone. People barter for living space and live off of travelers—either by trade or by the gun. There is not much reason to do anything else. Outside of the lines of the Republic, these unfortunate, undomesticated souls have not yet decided to cleave themselves to the noble principles of divine poverty.

In the period between the fall of the corpocracy and the rise of the Republic, with everyone so scared of another quake, St. Louis became a haven—as it had been long ago—for the more enterprising souls left in between the Atlantic and Pacific. Because of this, the area has become home to one of the more successful anarchies in the continental area, a collection of interconnected and interdependent democracies of little more than fifty people to a group. Each makes their fortune, such that it is, around the Gateway Toll Bridge in one way or another.

The Bridge crosses the chasm of the Mississippi Canyon expertly, far above the thundering river, with plenty of room for two-way traffic on bike and foot. There are even extra dug outs for rest stops and picnics for travelers floating or riding by. The only hint that the Bridge had once stood, in fact (as it was long ago stripped of its surplus of glass and various electric components, as well as all metal plumbing and piping),  are the intractable, twisted edges of steel from the foundation sailing skyward on the East side of the chasm, now uprooted forever after it fell in the San Madrid Terror.

But the Gateway Tower did stand, once.

And it did fall.

––––––––

T
his is how the morning went for Ore:

It did not go so well.

She woke a little before dawn with three men dragging her from her small home near the Dam.

“What the hell happened?” they asked her, kicking at her back. “Where the hell is our money?”

Always questions, never answers.

Nobody ever dragged anyone out of their homes to give them answers. Wouldn’t that be something. I know where the money is, punch smack. Here’s where we buried your family, punch smack.  In her dreamy, half-awake state, even while being pummeled, this is what she imagined.

She tried to grab them, her tech hand whirring and snapping, but they knew her game and stayed well out of reach. More blows landed—though it felt like they were taking it easy on her. Thugs like these—she recognized them by face and by reputation more than name—thugs like these could have taken her out easy. They could have killed her in the night if they were going to kill her. This was about sending a message.

Finally she grabbed one, caught him on the ankle and tripped him up. In two seconds she had the metallic tips of her fingers around his skull, ready to crunch.

“Back off. All of y'all.”

Footsteps coming in from the darkness. A man approached, wearing a brown pinstripe suit, shoulder pads of tech stretching out in long wires to enormous grips around his hands.

Punchee Wallop. Dread descended into the cave of Ore's chest. Usually, the Five Faces didn't come out on their own.

Wallop ran labor, which meant he ran theft. Once upon a time, Wallop was the CEO of a group called the Gatewaters; he gave that up once he was elected as the Face of Labor. Now, as such, he oversaw the Haulers in Junktown. Last night, Ore had a job go wrong. The Haulers had hit up a Holowrist warehouse, and left all the merchandise left on the floor. It was her first bad job in many years, and only happened because of bad luck. A hack had returned to the inventory well before he was due, forgetting his keys. Ore and her Haulers had fled with their lives and no goods to speak of.

She let go of the man she had, pushing him over to the rest. Wallop held them off with a gesture.

“I like this place. Look at them lights there. That’s sort of pretty. You rent this place?” He didn't wait for an answer. “I like it. It's got...character. You know? Up in the Tower...I mean, you seen it. Crash has got everything mechanized. All this goddang chrome. It's all sliding panels this, hologram that. You know? No character to that. It's just this big metal orgy. But here...this is nice.” He tapped one of his men on the shoulder. “You see that there? That's gun barrels in that wind chime. And what's that? You see them bones slinking over the door? What are those? Are those dog? Chicken?”