Artificial

Chapter 1

“The beginnings of stories are always the thing that troubles me the most, because, even when it comes to the tales of my own experiences and deeds, I seem to find it hard to find a place good enough to start from. That’s why I always tell tales from their very beginning.”

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Along the banks of the murky Grey River lay a small collection of cottages and grain warehouses huddled together, a small image of population against the bleak nothingness that were the Great Northlands. The lands this far north were sparsely populated, and most of it was just a long, wind-pined tundra, marked every two-hundred mile or so by the occasional stagecoach station, where the travelling messengers and tax collectors (the only ones who would travel this far out into the wilderness, not out of free will but out of duty) could swap their tired horses, along with the occasional actual stagecoach that came this way heading for New Reach or Entanell in the Northeast. However, traffic in these regions went mostly by the dark waters of the river, and the few who actually lived up here had made a living out of supplying the great riverboats with new stores of food and fresh water, and as such, they had become a necessary part of the great, symbiotic network that made up the Grey River Shipping Company. However, the poor excuse for a village that lay hidden in shadows beside the great river does not play any significant part in this story, and yet still the story could not have been born without it, because it is here that the story (or at least the parts of it that are worth mentioning without making it unnecessarily long and dreadful) begins, with the end of another story that, perhaps, shall be told another time. It all began with the departure of a prison ship, destined for Deapaga…

The ship, a big, ugly steel-creation with pipes and funnels sticking out of it from every possible angle, some draining the river of its unclean water to cool the big engines underneath the hull and others dumping used, now kettle-black water back into the river, further polluting it and causing a trail of dead fishes and other disgusting sights in its wake, set out on the morning of the twelfth of Second Red Sun’s Month, with a loud, wallowing sound from its horn to warn other travellers on the river to make way, lest they’d be mangled by the two large waterwheels or shred by the propeller in the middle of the aft, right bellow the rudder. It was as if the officers operating the large vessel thought the few others who travelled the river at this hour blind, or perhaps deaf, so that they would not notice the large, grey clanking thing that just had entered the main rut of the river. The rules of traffic on the Grey River were brutally clear: leave way to those bigger than you or you’ll get mercilessly torn, shredded, mangled or otherwise destroyed and left in the wake of said larger vessel without as much as a thought of regret or pitying glance backwards. On the river, as everywhere else in the World, efficiency was the Ruler, and everyone measured and were being measured by its standards – if you didn’t produce, you didn’t exist. Productivity included travelling from point A to point B by the fastest possible route, which de facto made making these travels as efficient as possible a necessity if you wished to continue being productive, which in turn was required if you wished not to end up on such a ship as the one now announcing its departure, one of the Company’s feared prison ships.
Deep below the main deck, in a few tight cells situated directly above the thrashing engines lay a man suspended with a tight needlesuit, designed not only to keep him from moving but to make every movement, even the slightest breath, as painful as it was possible. There was no mercy for his kind, because in terms of efficiency criminals were negative numbers in the statistics, and to be negative was the same as to question the system. As if to make things worse, this man’s crime was the worse that there was: he was an agitator, an Enemy of the Government, an Unwanted. His name had been erased from all official records along with his imprisonment, his identity vanished, and he was now only known as Prisoner no. 1466-A56QR. Only he, in the back of his semi-unconscious mind, was aware of his true identity, clinging desperately to one of the prayers for freedom he used to shout to the people who’d attended to his masses in his small shack-church in Old Reach. Repeating his old name like a sacred mantra, convincing himself that he still existed, that he still breathed, the constant pain reminding him of the impossibility of this being a mere dream. He was just about to take yet another slip into the sweet, blissful darkness that were unconsciousness when he heard a small voice in the back of his mind, calling to him.
“…up, Mister! Wake up!”
He stirred, lifting his head in the direction of the sound as far as he could go without breaking his neck, grimacing as the pain hit him full force, something that resulted in even more pain he realized as the contractions of muscles caused the needles imbedded in the wrappings around his face to scratch his face viciously. He finally found himself looking into the dark, ruby eyes of a small child, her pale skin and dark hair betraying her heritage from the Remnants. While his cell was small and cramped, hers seemed to be big and comfy, but that was probably just the proportions playing tricks with him. The girl seemed a tad bit sated when she saw that he was, once again, conscious, and took her time looking at him, examining the few things she could see, probably (if he guessed things right from where he felt the dirty, hot air hit his naked skin) some of his facial features and the colour of his hair. After a while, he felt the some of the former, dull pain return and, knowing that it would only be a matter of time before the sharp stinging sensation in his breast caused by breathing begun again, he spoke, his voice raw after hours of shouting and whimpering.
“Who are you, little one, and what do you wish out of me?”
“I just wanted some company,” the girl answered simply, her voice still the small, fragile sound he’d heard before, but now with a clearer quality, as if his hearing was enhanced by the pain, “this cell is so lonely, and it doesn’t answer when I try to talk to it. The Other one, in the other cell, doesn’t breathe anymore, so I can’t talk to her anymore. She stopped breathing quite a long time ago. You looked lonely Mister, even though you were sleeping. What’s your name, Mister?”
He blinked at this rapid stream of information and questions, and it took him a little time to sort out the information worth knowing from that which was just childish gibberish.
“I’m… Joshua. Josh to my friends” he managed to croak out. “And what is your name, little one?”
“I don’t think I have a name” the girl answered with a shrug. “The Other called me Catherine. I guess you can call me Catherine too. I miss the sun. Why is it so dark in here, Joshia?”
“It’s Joshua” he corrected, before realizing that it was pointless to correct someone about a name that was no longer really his, and continued, “and it’s dark because the ceiling blocks out the sun.”
“I asked the Other why we couldn’t see the sun anymore, and she said it was because we had done Bad Things. I don’t remember doing any Bad Things; I don’t think I did any Bad Things because I am a good girl. Catherine is always a good girl” the last was said with a clear and certain voice, as if the girl was simply stating a well known fact.
“I believe you, Catherine. Now, I am starting to feel very, very sleepy, so if you would kindly let me sleep, I’d be very glad.” At the end of the sentence Joshua absentmindedly noted that his words became slurred and he felt the pain in his neck and chest increase. As his eyelids slowly, mercilessly closed and his consciousness rapidly decreased he heard that small, frail voice one last time.
“Good night Mister Joshua. Please don’t stop breathing; it would be so boring to have no one but the cell to talk to.”
And as the grey, bizarre ship clanked down the river towards its destination, former street preacher Father Joshua Greywater fell back into the blissful oblivion of unconsciousness.

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The ironclad ship continued its journey down the river and, after a couple of hours of slow, steady movement it reached its delta, which was the only place where there grew anything at all alongside the Grey River, mostly because of the waves of the Eastern Sea that swept in and mixed with the River’s water, removing some of the pollution caused by all the traffic that traversed it. The ship turned southward at this point and began to follow the coast towards its ultimate goal, the city of Deapaga, which could be seen at the faraway horizon like a great, looming beast of prey waiting for the landscape around it to become slightly ignorant to its presence, so that it could devour some more land into the enormous mass that already was the city. The prison ship was by far the only ship travelling this route, and as they closed up towards the dark shadows of the famous Twohundredstorey-towers, the shoreline became harder and harder to navigate, small fishing boats flocking together with the great, marine beasts that were the Coastal Fleet Guard and the long, flat-decked ships of different trading companies, all on their way to the great harbours of Deapaga.

From the deck of one of the ships entering the Harbour Quarters, Deapaga was truly a sight to behold. The tall, white towers in the middle of the city stood as a testament to all that this was, indeed, the last true bastion of civilization in these parts of the world, all the rest of the small towns and cities be damned, and some quick-witted bard had a long time ago, at the rising of the first Tower, written a poem that had been banned by the government just as quickly as it had been learned by all the unfortunate ones living in the slums below it

As the great men in power rise their great manhood
Standing proud in the sky
Can we, who’re less fortunate in our destinies
Upon this anecdote smile

For without any workers’ and labourers’ hands
It would never have come to stand
And while they keep on spewing their foul discriminations
We know where the problems lie

See, it took them some real men and women, that’d seen one
A proud one that stands strong and tall
And not just some political half-man without proof
That he is any man at all

This glorious symbol of noble ambition
Of pride and of glorious gods
Is yet to be named, so I do it this instant
The Phallus of Workers Unknown

Since then, there had been numerous towers added to that first one, with two of them standing higher than the rest. The first of these two was the temple of Chtev, the protectorate God of Deapaga, Lord of Law and Justice. This served both as a place of worship and as a court of law, and it was the duty of the priests to pass judgement on any and all that violated the laws that bound the society together. With their usual sense of irony, the slum-dwellers that lived in the great towers shadow had formed their own congregation, praying to Adùn, the nemesis and half-brother of Chtev who ruled the thieves and gamblers and the men-to-be-hanged. There were also rumours of numerous thieves’ guilds hiding in the shadows of the Plate under the white towers, but every raid the Metropolitan Squad directed towards this area always came back without any evidence at all.
The second of the Twohundredstorey-towers where the Palace of Government, where the Chief President of the Party, Elmswood Nigel Heavenscrown resided along with his fellow party members. Elmswood had been in charge of the city government for the last twenty years, and although rumours had spread that the real power nowadays lay with his Secretary and Vice President, Michael Vanders, he still maintained the public façade required for his work and did, on occasion, still speak to the citizens via a great balcony, situated approximately five-to-six hundred feet above the slums, right under the solid steel bars that made up the underside foundation of the Plate.

The Plate was the real reason that the inhabitants of the Slums hated the Rich. It was a fifty feet thick, two miles wide circular iron construct, lined with security posts and docking-stations for aeroships. It was also from the Plate that the several sky-cabs that the Squad used in order to strike fast at almost any given location in the city departed, square-shaped cable cars weighing around two tons, each with room for four to five militiamen, hooked up to great, black and brown cables of twisted steel. These cables ran through the entire city, and at any given point a car could come swooping down one of them, suddenly detaching and crash straight down into the street, something that always caused civilian injuries. Not that the Squad’s members cared, they were simply doing their job. Apart from these things, the Plate also housed various important city buildings, such as the great offices of industrial magnates, the Common Aeroport, the housings of all the top politicians et cetera et cetera.

The rest of Deapaga could be described quite easily in a layers-upon-layers method, where the innermost layer contained the plate and the Deep City Slums, followed by the Outer City Slums and the housings of the Middleclass Citizens, situated on each side of the Mudflow. Three bridges were used to move from one side to the other, the Great Steel Bridge between Steelers’ Bend and The Smogpit, which stood like a gateway for all the small boats that travelled down the river inlands, towards the Blackden or Jhavier’s Island, situated in the middle of the crossing where the Mudflow split and became The Upper Mud and The Great Mud. This island was also the site of the second bridge, the Three Points Bridge, that crossed from Redforge to Jhavier’s and from Jhavier’s to Blackden. There was also a small bridge leading from Jhavier’s to the military camp of The Finger, situated on the farthermost shore, in between of the Great Mud and the Upper. The last bridge was in the middle of between the Great Steel and the Three Points, the Jaw, and it lead from Redforge’s easternmost edge to right under the Plate and the Deep City Slum. Most of the Citizens lived in Redforge, or in Seaside or Forestside, whilst The Mudside was filled with strange, alien creatures such as the garpaga, great men and women whose bodies where like those of a crocodile standing on two long legs, but with the head of a snake, and the djiis, the desert people from the Far South, a small population that fled the Plague as it came to their cities. Their skin was grey, and generations of adapting to the harsh desert climate had made it hard as leather, with less pores than the ordinary human and a strange ability to control their perspiration. They wore traditional, light clothing, and since most of them didn’t even speak Common, they preferred to keep to themselves and as such, the two streets in The Mudside that they kept as their quarters where filled with the alien, rasping noises of their harsh language.

On the other side of the river, there were the districts of Blackden, The Smogpit, Blackmarsh and the Waterside. These were the slums, where the lowlifes, the outcasts and the manual labourers resided alongside with the criminals, the gamblers, the burglars, the pickpockets and the thieves that made up the good-for-nothing cast of Deapaga’s population. These were the quarters most frequented by preachers that prayed to the Forbidden Gods, the agitators and the strikers. These were also the quarters where more than seventy-five percent of all the Squad’s raids had been directed during the last years. It was a haven of misery, of lawlessness and of prostitution.

On the third bank of the river separated from the rest of the city stood a single, tall tower known to all as The Finger. It was the Squad’s headquarters, where prisoners that were accused for crimes against the government were held until judgement could be passed on them. Mostly, it was anarchists or Unwanted that dwelled in the deep dungeons bellow the Finger, however, in the recent years a few more or less organized strikes and rebellions against the Party had led to the instigation of a new type of lawbreaker: the Anti-Peaceful. To be Anti-Peaceful was to go against all of the things that the Party held holy, such as strong leadership and unification. The Anti-Peaceful was described as rioters worse than any other, and every lawful Citizen were encouraged to report any and all Anti-Peaceful work that they happened to come across.
The Finger was connected to a number of small, squared buildings at its base, giant steam pipes running through their walls providing them with energy. These were the Laboratories, where prisoners met there sentences at the hands of the ill-famed Doctor Roger Greyfriar and his fellow scientists. There was indeed a reason as to why so many breakthroughs in research had been made during Elmswood’s rule: he had permitted the likes of Greyfriar to make use of prisoners as human experimentation material. Disgusting as it might seem, it helped the research to make progress and it kept the Population from breaking the law. And that was all that mattered.

It was to this place, the home of twisted sense of justice and perverted science that the big, grey prison ship finally arrived, bearing another half-a-dozen of serious criminal and a hundred or so of minor convicts. They were gathered in groups and then led down the gangplank by the violent shoves of their guards, into their new, inescapable prison.