It’s moored out in the Atlantic off the Eastern Seaboard this month.
At street level the Gulf Stream winds kick through the downtown buildings of Eleytheria. Your oilskin duster takes on a life of its own, bucking, trying to pull you off course as you make the usual staggered path, random jigs, sudden stops in front of reflective surfaces. It’s not even a conscious thing, checking for tails.
Monotone pedestrians in business camouflage, the grays and blacks of their seemingly timeless and conservative professions, mill past you.
It isn’t New York, but any of them could have been plucked out and placed in that environment without even noticing. No, just a few miles away the salt clears the breakwalls in clouds of mist and hovers into downtown.
Eleytheria is a giant bowl riding the large open ocean. Free to go where it pleases. Do what it pleases.
Many things start in Eleytheria.
Like yourself, years ago, deep in the bowels of one of Eleytheria’s denizen companies. You’ve found old archived public camera pictures of yourself walking down the streets, into the center of ShinnCo, to sign your self, this self, into what you know now.
Sometimes you hate your old self for selling you into this bondage. You wonder what he got? Lots of money? Some last great fling? Or were you just desperate, a wandering piece of hardware abandoned by some former First World secret gov project made obsolete by the Pacification?
You’d like to think you did it for some great cause, like helping your family out of a dire situation. But late at night you doubt it and think there was some stupid, selfish reason for doing it.
They’ll never tell you. Because if it was something like a family, you might try to contact them.
No. They have your memories. You’ll get them back when you serve your contract.
It always comes back to Eleytheria. When your feet hit the seacrete, your nose fills with misted salt, and you have returned to the only home you know. All your recent memories, everything that is you, starts here. Ever since you woke up behind a garbage dump in the back alley of ShinnCo.
And they’ve never let you back in through the front doors because they know full well what kind of monster they created. They control you, but they don’t sleep well at night. If you were to ever get near a door the automated security would hit you with an EMP pulse that would pretty much liquefy the machines in you, then the guns would reduce you to bloodied ribbons of flesh.
You won’t be getting your memories back using the new skills they’ve grafted into you. No way. And they still have one final trick, to keep you close, to control you.
So you stand in front of a small food cart. A faded orange umbrella hangs limply over it. When you palm the metal rail, the countdown inside you resets. You’re allowed to live for another week. A pointed way of letting you know you’re motherfucking
The edges of the umbrella flutter in the cold breeze, and on the other side of the cart an old Greek stands up.
“Morning, Kouroupas.”
“Morning, Pepper,” he says, looking you up and down. “The usual?”
“The usual.”
The front of the cart has a faded poster of a model with a strained smile, flat white teeth, holding up a gyro in perfectly manicured hands. They’re ‘heeeeros’ she says.
“Lettuces, mayonnaises . . . ” Kouroupas’ crazy white hair flies all over the place in the wind. It makes him look like a mad scientist.
He slaps the flatbread down. A cloud of flour tickles your nose.
A few browned strips of meat, some folded metallic paper, and you have your gyro, along with a small napkin neatly slid between your fingers.
You look at it, your eyes adjusting to the fibers, mapping out a pattern along the embroidered edges, translating the woven picture into words.
Susan Stamm. Ten thousand. Location. Eleytheria.
Ten thousand closer to getting yourself back. To freedom.
And she’s
You fold the napkin and its encrypted directions into your pocket, pick up the gyro. Kouroupas smiles.
“Good day,” he tells you. “Be careful.”
You nod and slide a few bills over to him.
“You too.”
Be careful. It’s the first time Kouroupas seems to acknowledge that this isn’t just a gyro purchase. Seems to be telling you something’s not quite normal this time.
Out of sight of the gyro stand you toss the gyro into a trashcan that thanks you and trundles away.
Not nearly enough raw sugars in gyros for you. Takes too long to metabolize. What you need now is something to spike your blood sugar to combat levels.
Susan Stamm has done many, many unique things to hide her presence. But she’s on the run and wants off the planet. To do that she has to come to Eleytheria. Once an hour, every hour, a capsule is launched into low Earth orbit.
To really get far away, Stamm has to get Out There from Down Here.
So you sit and flip through pictures of embarkees who’ve been photographed at all three entrance points. One by fucking one. And these are just the ones the Port Authority computers have served up as possible matches. ShinnCo is being very generous with info and resources right now. They really want her back.
You’re sitting in a small outdoor cafe, eyes closed. On the right eyeball is Susan Stamm’s corp ID photo. On your left is some random face pic snapped by the Port Authority entrance machine.
Then another random face.
You reach for the sugary soda, take a long cold sip, and the next picture comes up.
Another sip of sugar water. Gotta keep the machines inside you running happy.
You flip to another pic.
Ha.
She looks thinner than the last official photo. She’s still five-nine, but now has a recently bobbed haircut and green eyes.
Four hours later you’re in the lobby of a smaller Eleytheria hotel, looking up at the atrium eighty stories above you, licking the icing off a Danish. In the background, over the hum of people, over the echoing shouts of kids screaming and waving from several floors above, comes the explosive whip-crack of a capsule being thrown into space.
There was this mugger that jumped you a year ago. Before you even realized it you’d spun, broke both his arms and a leg, and the man lay in an unconscious heap by the side of a brick facade.
His clothes were ragged, he was thin, and when you held his gun in your hand, you realized that it was unloaded.
Ballsy. And pathetic.
By going through his wallet you found out that his name was Jack Connely. He had three kids and a very attractive blonde wife. Jack had been a spacer entrepreneur of some sort, reduced to Earth living after the Pacification.
Now all the businesses could buy a ride into space. Move their offices up into alien stations, use alien services, buy alien products, machines. Not much use for small guys, you could hardly scrape together the price. But multinationals can, and now that they’re all in orbit, or beyond, the pretense of even caring about the world they originated from was thrown out.
You could have used the money you found in his pocket, his day’s take, though you couldn’t use it toward paying off your ShinnCo contract. They only accept their own in house credit.
You couldn’t even use the money to disable the shit laced all through your body. You tried that once before. Almost killed you on the table.
Instead, you sent his wallet and the money back in the mail to his family. And you added some of your own.
You’re a good person, you tell yourself.
But it’s very hard to believe when it was so easy, so automatic, to have grabbed that man’s gun and pull the trigger, right down to within a hairtrigger of firing, before stopping.
