Silence

Silence was a blessing. Space in this world was a rarity; something to be treasured like a precious flower. I always craved to be away from my life, from the dirt and pollution, the endless people packed into smaller and smaller spaces. I wished to lie in a great open field, in a cave, to let the sounds of nature penetrate me, and wash me away, leaving something fresh and untainted behind. When I finally found silence; there was no cleansing, no release or freedom; there was only the madness in my head running laps and screaming gibberish. My ego fought to its last to keep the delusions that haunted me intact. Silence became a curse.

I existed in the Floods, an area that used to be the demarcation between the Capitol and docks. It now acts as host to a mix of refugees, transients, dock workers, failing religious, political groups, smugglers, and anyone else unable or unwilling to live in the city proper. I resided on the upper floors of houses that were semi-submerged by the vengeful sea and I embraced whatever solitude I could. I lived by smuggling contraband off the ships and into the city. I am not a particularly strong or quick-witted man but my father taught me to be methodical and precise in my endeavours. To plan with redundancies for every possibility. I hated the man and his lunatic religion but his lessons allowed me to survive these insane, brutal decades whilst so many perished around me.

The job was not from my usual fixers. I had been out the night before, burying bad memories and regrets. I awoke to a hazy recollection of drugs, a fight, dancing, and copulation. Tainted mist had drifted off the sea and blanketed my apartment. When I awoke I could barely see the back wall of the old loft conversation. My AVR switched to IR vision but I flicked if off immediately, too hungover for technological invasion of my senses. A stranger was searching through my kitchen, her back to me. She was tall with an incredible figure and was immaculately well dressed. Even from the other side of the room, with only her back visible to me she radiated beauty. Beauty in the Floods was a rare thing; here the damp and rot penetrate all aspects of life. To live here is to decay. I decided not to speak until I had some clarity. I stood up and numb pain sang out across my body; especially in my right arm which had a four inch long wound in the bicep that had been clumsily stitched. As I started to walk over to the kitchen area, the figure turned and my mind fell over itself and then tried to implode. The stranger was Sarah, my truest love, fellow smuggler and utter bitch who had left me to be killed ten years ago. I had no recollection of being with her the previous night but I frantically searched my drug corrupted recollections of the last 12 hours. She must have seen the confusion on my face.
“You were asleep when I found your place, so I just crashed on the couch. You look pretty terrible.”
I nodded. I felt terrible. I offered to make coffee.

We chased the coffee with a fist full of high-grade super blue capsules; all pains and doubts were consigned to the past. I drank Sarah in, her motions were as graceful as ever, her voice smooth and assuring with just a hint of a south-eastern accent if you knew where to listen for it. Like most women with money, she hadn’t aged a day over the ten years since I had last seen her, as if the stresses of life just slipped by, leaving her untainted. Sarah was beautiful in a classical way, high cheekbones, and deep brown almond eyes but it was her smile that people always noticed first. A wonderful smile isn’t possible to describe in any meaningful way. The smile itself is less important than the response it evokes and Sarah’s smile set dopamine transmitters off in the brains of people who saw it.

We made small talk, dancing around the elephant in the room for a while, waiting to see which of us would find it the pretence too tedious and get on to the real issues at hand. Sarah broke first, but only just.

“Anyway, nostalgia be damned. I have a job Ping, and I need you, I need that mind of yours.”

I should have been furious about the money, about the debt she had built up in my name, about the three years of high-risk work that I’d been forced to take to clear the tab, but honestly, I just didn’t care. Maybe it was the super-blue, maybe it was the hangover, maybe I was happy to have her back in my life, maybe I just didn’t care. Whatever the reason was, I didn’t say a word, I just smiled. She always loved my smile; loved it more than anything I could say.
“You still grin like an idiot”, she said laughing. “Let’s go and get some food, then we can go somewhere secure to talk.”

The rows of terraced houses towered over us as we rode a water taxi down into the city proper. The stench of the ruinous water and the overcrowded waterways were oppressive in the humidity and heat. I had my AVR play me some chamber music and watched a small swarm of inspection drones head out to the incoming super-tankers to scan for radioactives. Where the Floods ended, we switched to cab and cut through the slums of District Four to the Financial Sector.

Sarah took us to an unreasonably expensive Nu-Tropix restaurant. The place was like a spaceship, staff in immaculate uniforms, hydroponics covered every wall, hung from the ceiling and climbed to the upper floors in great misty columns. The clientele was mainly suits from the nearby financial houses but also some well-heeled art types. Everyone sported ostentatiously visible mods that were all too new for me to recognize. We took a window seat upstairs and I watched as clouds broke and the crowds dispersed into buildings, out of the acidic rain. Bringing me here was Sarah making a point; she was big leagues now and I was still just local action.

We ate the best food I had ever eaten; fruit and vegetables that I had no name for, prepared in ways that I didn’t understand. Every single component of every dish was vital and intense but in the most pleasurable way; it was the first time that I truly understood what it meant to be rich. It wasn’t about money, it was about mind-set, about demanding excellence in everything, right down to the sprigs of parsley.

With the Food finished we took another taxi south to a secure faraday facility that rented meeting rooms by the hour. The cab took us into the ground floor parking area that had fully enclosed parking spaces. Sarah explained to me that there was a lift for every room. There were no shared corridors, lifts or reception areas. There was no receptionist, no CCTV, no accidental witnesses to anything, anywhere. A small swarm of drones followed us out of the car and into the lift, removing and destroying any skin, hair or fibres that we shed along the way. Check in was via a password that Sarah punched into an unadorned keypad in the lift. The room itself was tailored to the successful organized criminal; over designed, just the wrong side of garish with lots of black and gold trim. A large conference table sat in the centre of the room with sofas and armchairs placed strategically around the edge of the room.

“Well Sarah, I don’t know what you did with my money but you certainly made it work for you.” Just like that, my humours had risen and I was lashing out. I was furious with myself for saying it but there it was, out in the open like a new-born baby. Sarah pushed me over another handful of super-blues and I downed them with a paper cup of water from the carbon and gold water dispenser in the corner of the room. I sat down at the conference table and Sarah looked me in the eye. “That’s fair”, she said, her voice soft, smothering my rage like a fire blanket.
“I left you in a tight spot and I’m sorry. I thought long and hard about coming back. I knew you would be angry but this is a big payday and I wanted you to be a part of it. My way of trying to undo a little of the damage I caused, you know?”

A set up from start to finish. She had timed her arrival when I was a horny, sedated mess and she showed off her wealth by taking me to a fancy restaurant knowing it would get my collar up and make me blow the only card I had over her. Then she finished the job by pretending she was doing me the favour. Stitched up like a kipper, just like a decade ago.

“I’m…sorry I bought it up. I guess I’m feeling last night’s excursions.” Now I was apologizing for being upset that she had very nearly destroyed my life. I was not in control with this woman; I never would be. I knew that I needed to walk away from this one. Sarah must have seen this in my face as she either dropped her manipulation or tried a different approach. At the time I believed it was the former but I’ll never be sure.

“Ping, seriously, I’m sorry. I don’t want to explain why I did what I did, because it won’t help but I do wonder why you didn’t see…look, I wish I didn’t do what I did but necessity is what it is. Besides, things are catching up with me Ping, sooner or later someone from my past is going to find me and kill me. Help me with this, give me the opportunity to start afresh.”

Maybe it was a lack of imagination on my part because even though I didn’t entirely believe her, I couldn’t think of anywhere else I’d rather be. I decided to let her have her say because I wasn’t going to be able to keep going as I was forever. Smugglers get caught and die in prison; they get jumped by a gang and murdered; their fixers get arrested or killed; at best they get old and slow and business goes elsewhere. I couldn’t say no to a possible escape without at least doing due diligence first.

“It seems that we are both painted into our own corners, so let’s talk turkey” A smile broke out across her beautiful face and even though it didn’t fill me with any joy, I was pleased that I had had some effect on her. She was human at least.

“It’s potentially a very simple run Ping. I need to move a case of designer hallucinogens from a container ship directly into the city. It’s a concentrated synthetic derivative of an incredibly rare mushroom that once grew in a small area of what used to be Peru. The manufacturers have been targeting the kids of the super-rich with this stuff and it’s taking off. They’ve branded it as Ghost and are pushing it through all the social media and streams. Minor celebrities dropping cryptic hints about it in their posts; articles about its potential for spiritual awakening are doing the rounds in the fringe media; all that good stuff. They’ve manufactured a market for it, demand is intense and only one outfit has the original DNA sequence needed to produce it. You know that these kids of the elite have unlimited money, they’ll spend what most people earn in a year on a Tuesday night at the Spire. Best of all, despite its strength it’s entirely non-toxic. I don’t think it’s possible to die from it so there will be no backlash over a rich dead kid. I know I owe you Ping; you’ll be well paid.” She was daring me to ask how much, so I did. More than I had earned in the last five years, probably more. Insane money by anyone’s standards.

“Appreciating that you’re doing very well for yourself Sarah, and appreciating you are suffering a little with your guilt, there is no need for you to pay me, or anyone like me anywhere near that much. What’s the catch?” No smile this time; letting me think I was onto her deceit, playing me, always playing me.

“You’re wrong Ping, I do. The catch is that this package is everything I have. If it’s picked up, I won’t care about jail; I will be in debt for obscene sums of money to some very bad people. I won’t even be charged; I’ll be dead on my first night in a holding cell. So yes, I need to pay this much because I need you to be as invested in this as I can afford to make you. I need you to pour your heart and soul into this. It should be simple but the stakes are too high for this not to work. If there’s a problem, I know you will have fifteen backup plans and contingencies ready to go. I know you will see this right.”

“Things haven’t been going so well then.”

“Not especially Ping, not especially. But if we pull this off, all that goes away. It won’t even take a year to have so much money we can leave, go and start somewhere fresh.”

There it was, the subtle, vague promise of ‘we’, dropped into the conversation. A single word that could be forgotten or built upon as she saw fit. I would like to say I barely flinched, but I knew I was as easy to read as a neon sign to Sarah.

“Shit or bust then.”

“Shit or bust.”

“We’d best not fuck this up then.”

We spent the rest of the day and a lot of the night in that conference room. We ate expensive delivery food. We planned. We picked holes in the plan. We changed the plan and picked more holes in it. Sarah got us a room in a place next door and we sleep for 12 hours. Then we came back and did it all over again. I spent another three days on dry runs. I paid bribes and got the inside news from the police, customs, local gangs, vagrants; everyone I could think of. I did everything except for the most obvious thing. I didn’t check Sarah.

Drugs are smuggled into the Capitol every day, but not psychedelics. Uppers and downers are the lifeblood of the city; they let it function and they paper over the cracks of our barely functional society. They allow financiers and CEOs to be sociopathic, they keep people in the Spire for days at a time, they give office drones an escape and they make sure that everyone is too scared to demand real societal change less their supply disappears along the way. Psychedelics however are off the table and everyone knows this. Penalties for dealing are draconian and the rewards for turning a dealer can make even the most loyal foot soldier consider his options. So, no one bothers, they aren’t habit forming, they attract lunatic customers from the fringes of society, there’s no motivation to go near them. I checked out Sarah’s claims of the social status of Ghost and she wasn’t exaggerating; this stuff was the drug of choice for the rich kids globally but the politicians in the Capitol were parading the fact that we were Ghost free. A lot of people that would lose face if we succeeded.

Two days before shipment arrived, I got a message from one of my customs contacts. He told me they were expecting a lot of psychedelics to arrive in two days. I didn’t even bother to tell Sarah, the look in my eyes was enough. She gave me the wad of cash I asked for without a word.

I met my contact in a sprawling day club; it took the entire top three floors of a row of terraced houses that had lost their lower stories to the waters. Water taxis were kept busy with a continuous flow of patrons arriving and departing. I disliked day clubs personally, they seemed to upset the natural balance of the universe. I made my way up the tiled stairway. The filthy cracked tiles had been covered in a thick layer of a clear sealant to slow the inevitable rot. Inside the music was all bass and the lighting was subdued. The crowd was respectable for the floods; a mix of the skilled, legal freelancers that sometimes found the flooded zone a convenient place to operate out of.

My contact was at the bar unwinding after his night shift. He was a slight, dull man who dressed badly and seemed to derive no joy from having a job that most people around him would kill for. He’d always been happy to take my money, but he didn’t hide the fact that he disliked me on a personal level. He’d been deeply unhappy about meeting me but there wasn’t much he could do about it. I eschewed any theatrics and sat down at the long bar, laying my jacket on the stool between us, Sarah’s wad of money inside.

“Fuck off Ping. I don’t need this.”

“There’s ten big ones in the inside pocket of that jacket. You can keep the jacket too. I just need to know where that tip off came from.”

He looked into his drink as he spoke.

“I don’t know Ping, it’s all processed by the AIs, they just serve up what they think is a good lead.”

“Now you’re insulting me”, I told him, surprising myself with how pissed off I suddenly felt and sounded. “I know exactly how that office works and this wasn’t something that was dredged up by AI crawlers, this was a direct tip. Ten big ones, right there and I know you’d tell me for half of that. Look after me over the next few days and I’ll be a very good friend to have.”

He downed what was left of his drink but still didn’t look at me.

“It was from the first mate of the ship the package is on, the Null Horizon. You know crews are always scouring cargo looking for something they can profit from. He’s in line for a fat reward.” I left without a word and without my jacket.

I had the water taxi take me home the long way around so I could get some peace and had my AVR play some jazz. I ran over my plan for this eventuality and it still seemed like the best move on the board.

“How fucked are we?”, Sarah asked.

“Pretty fucked but a lot less so than we were a few hours ago. The authorities have a tip off from one of the crew but I can save this; I have a plan already in place.”
Sarah nodded, “It’s why I came to you Ping. What do we do?”

I outlined the plan, she looked pale.
“That was the last of the cash Ping, my credit is all tapped out.”

Sarah had wanted me invested in this thing and she had succeeded. I wanted some of that good life for myself now. If I’m honest I wanted Sarah, I wanted a fairy-tale ended in a new city with a family and her and why the fuck not? If a man is too cynical to even dream, he’s not alive in any meaningful way. I took my savings from my floor safe and went and to find some pirates.

I’d wanted a crew who claimed to be descended from pacific islanders, loyal men who could probably sail a dingy through a typhoon without any fuss but it was clear they were laying low and wouldn’t be found. Defeated I prowled the docks sizing up my options and it turned out that I had exactly one choice: Bergman. Bergman’s boat and crew were known to be good, dependable and were the only crew that had the boat and skillset that I needed who were sitting in dock scratching themselves. I sat down with Bergman right there and we hammered out the details, the price, the bonus; it was the fastest deal I’d ever done.

I was back at the apartment within the hour. I’d picked up a bottle of Burmese whisky on the way back and was sitting on the bed drinking it over ice and enjoying the peace when Sarah returned. It was at that moment that I really understood how much she meant; my precious peace broken but not missed. I didn’t want solitude when I could be with her.

She sat with me on the bed, curled up into me. We shared the glass, drinking slowly, the whisky was poor; it numbed and burned in all the wrong ways, but I didn’t care; I had reached some degree of peace with myself for the first time in many years. I explained the plan to Sarah again and she asked me questions and made suggestions and we reformulated it again and again just as in the faraday facility. It no longer mattered if we were being surveyed, we were too far in with too few options to do anything other than press on at full throttle. At dusk I boarded Bergman’s ship and we set off to hijack the Null Horizon.

Bergman subbed out the research on the Null Horizon to a few data crews I knew and trusted. The ship was a low-rent cargo ship for low-value goods. It had no defensive capabilities or anything so dramatic. The crew likely had personal side-arms but they wouldn’t be expecting any visitors this close to shore; no one was stealing a whole ship and getting it out to international waters before the authorities caught up with them and there was nothing worth stealing; well not unless you knew Sarah’s dirty little secret.

The run to the Null Horizon was short, barely giving me enough time to brief the crew, hand around a mugshot of the first mate and reiterate my desire to have this kept to plan. Our fake Captain, Luca, looked ill.

Ten minutes after boarding the Null Horizon it was ours. Credit to Bergman, his crew were good. All 8 crew were tied up in the small mess hall. We took them outside one by one, asked about the diamonds that they were smuggling, adding in a few slaps and punches for authenticity. The first mate however we had a different set of questions for. He was no fool, he took us down to Sarah’s gear without any complaints, ‘Easy come, easy go’ was all he had to say. I admit I kind of liked the guy; he understood the nature of material wealth better than I did. Ten minutes later the container of Ghost, a large black pelican case the size of a small fridge, was being loaded onto Bergman’s ship. Securing this stuff, splitting it up and keeping it moving and away from the law would be a full-time job; one I planned to be a major part of.

The last part of the plan was the least pleasant. One of Bergman’s ex-crew Luca, stayed on board. He’d played the leader, screaming about the diamonds. He announced his plan was to hijack the ship, take her to one of the Polynesian islands and have his tribe strip it. Once we had the drugs, he’d pretended to turn on us, to chase us off, firing wildly like a rabid lunatic. Lucas hijacked the ship at gunpoint that night, steering her back out to sea with a gun to the captain’s head. Of course, he’d be caught before he’d gone any distance at all and spend upwards of twenty years in prison, but he didn’t care; he had months to live and a family to support. They would see a lot of money from this and if it all worked, I’d be personally delivering that family a monthly stipend. Once away, I heard the gunshot, saw the first-mate’s body fall from the side of the moonlit ship into the sea. No loose ends.

The hijacked Null Horizon was now our decoy and sure enough a good chunk of the local forces raced past us to assist her crew and claim that nice fat bonus the insurance company would pay them. With them out of the way it was a cakewalk back into the docks where Sarah was waiting in a speedboat. Usually, I like to repack goods, split them up into smaller containers and have mules move it into the city over a few days or even weeks. They’d forget their bags at bus stops, on trains, in stores or have them snatched. The bags would be picked up by my people on the other side. Nothing passes between anyone, no one knows anything, everything flies under the surveillance radar and we all get paid. Sarah though had other ideas; the people she had bought the Ghost from, they had contacts high up in the Capitol and had arranged for her to take the entire load through the desalination plant a few clicks along the coast; no checks no police. It would be fast and we would have the whole city to hide it in rather than the cramped square mile of the Floods. It goes without saying that this was an unknown quantity to me but Sarah said she knew it was solid and seeing that she had more to lose than anyone, I went along with it but not before securing five different sites to stash the Ghost, arranging the speedboat and hiring three water taxis to be on standby in case her plan went sideways.

We didn’t talk much on the way to the desalination plant as I recall. The electric engines were nearly silence and a mixture of tension, tiredness and a premature relief numbed me. The plant fell under naval protection; no one went near it, so this whole strip of coast was unknown to me. As we approached Sarah gunned the speedboat, hugging the shore tightly; more than once I thought she was going to ground us. She saw my expression and offered an explanation.
“The short-range security is down, but we have a small window. I’ve got a contact on the inside but an alert is an alert, there’s no covering that up.”

Drones patrolled further out to sea but we were so close to the shore that we went unnoticed. As we approached the plant itself, a guard saw us and I tensed until he turned his back, moving along to patrol the wall facing the sea; Sarah’s contact. We cut the engines and drifted in silently. A large gate on the outer perimeter had been left ever so slightly ajar for us. We slid in, loading the crate onto a collapsible trolley we had bought. Sarah knew her way, I followed closely, the trolley humming as it hovered few inches above the ground. We passed through another doorway, this one taking us into one of many the large structures.

Inside was hideously loud, the roar of water was deafening. Sarah darted down a long descending corridor that ran along the coast. I wanted to ask what she was doing but it was dark, it was noisy and she was moving quickly. The damp glistening on the walls, the smell of brine enveloped me and I realized that I had, for the first time in my career, lost control of a mission and it had happened without my noticing. Sarah run straight under a CCTV camera but she seemed not to care; alarms started to sound in the distance. It was then that we finally exited the corridor and entered a huge room taken up almost entirely with a large walled canal, the water moved at a brisk pace. I stuck my hand over the wall and licked my fingers; pure clean drinking water heading straight into the city.

“Help me Ping. We need to get this stuff into the water quickly.”

I rubbed my face.

“It’s confession time Sarah, what’s the game here?”

“Enlightenment cannot come without questioning. Freedom cannot come if people don’t know they aren’t free. These are psychedelics Ping but they’re not for the brats, they’re for the people. We dose this whole city and we get enough people to start asking questions, to start wondering, and we can make some real fucking change here.”

I stared at her slack jawed. “Politics? Revolution? From you?”

For the first time ever, I saw rage in Sarah’s face. “Of fucking course politics Ping. It’s always been fucking politics; you would know this if you actually watched what I was doing rather than just watching me. I took you to those places, the restaurant, the hotel, the faraday rooms because I wanted you to notice the inequality, the injustice of it all because I wanted you understand me. But you didn’t, did you Ping? You just wanted some of it for yourself; that’s why I never told you the real plan. I left you all those years ago to seek out the Ministers because you didn’t see how bad things were then and you still don’t see it now. All I ever wanted was for you to have a fucking soul, Ping. If I’m wrong and you do have one, then please help me now.”

Before I could respond, there was a crack and Sarah’s leg exploded in a cloud of blood. She dropped to the floor, we looked into each other’s eyes for a fraction of a second before a bullet ripped through her head and gunshots began to rain down in volume. I couldn’t really tell you my reasons for what I did next; maybe it was to avenge her, maybe it was panic, maybe I just wanted a fucking soul. Whatever it was, I grabbed the container and pushed it up on to the canal wall. A bullet missed my leg by inches; I jumped up next to the container, popped the lid and pushed the whole thing in; little brown balls of power dissolving and disappearing as they raced downstream into the city. As I stood watching the liberated Ghost a bullet hit me in the shoulder and I went into the canal, right on top of the container, the contents of which were still pouring out of it.

I was charged with being part of a terrorist group, the Ministers, and found guilty. I did not attend or give evidence at my trial. I had received a massive dose of Ghost when I fell into the water, my sanity washed down that canal along with the tainted water. I don’t know if Sarah’s plan succeeded, if we had any effect. The madness that engulfed me after I ingested many thousands of doses of Ghost nearly resulted in my death. My being was unable to cope and I was classified as catatonic; kept alive only because the law demands that criminals be given all medical assistance to ensure no one can skip out on their sentence. The silence and solitude I had craved became a prison, I was trapped in my own personal hell of doubt and regret and impotent frustration. Eventually my mind exhausted itself and I slipped into a coma for several years. As my body slowly removed the Ghost, molecule by molecule I regained consciousness and recovered my physical strength. Mentally I began to rebuild my understanding of the world through the thick lens of the changes the Ghost had made to my neurology. I saw beauty and wonder in all aspects of existence. I shed my ego as readily as I gave away my coat in the club all that time ago. Now I am old, I am still imprisoned and alone but I see wonder in all things and I can say that maybe now, I have the soul that Sarah had always wanted me to have.