The Silencer

Nobody can hear a scream in the vacuum of space, or so they say. It’s a factoid nobody cares about anymore. Once we went to space everyone stopped listening to all the screaming happening around them.

All thoughts became about escape. Relationships became fast and loose as everything became disposable. The news was all about the latest tech, the next colony, the newest spacecraft. Lots of innovation but even fewer solutions than before.

No more headlines about wars or crimes. No more close-ups of uncomfortable poverty or systemic abuses. Marriage and divorce vanished almost overnight. It was all about the future, as if moving to live under other stars would solve everything.

Angela Rennie used to think about solutions. Waking up in her sinecure suite on the largest orbital factory circling Jumah, she took a moment to look down on an entire planet now that she was Somebody. A double-handful of civilizations were locked in mortal combat for the territory and all of them were beneath her, unable to even look up. This morning she remembered who she had been. Back on Terra, Angela Rennie had been nobody just like the billions of souls below.

She had dreamed last night of going to work in sub-cloud Savannah, swapping her rebreather’s charge cord for a battery pack first thing and running a mini-vacuum over her head each morning. She remembered and envied her youth, adventuring in the Tennessee Roosevelt Zone and getting to play with sticks and rocks in the free, clear air after her chores and lessons were done.

Her dreams had been dominated by the Lift. During those hard years after emigrating to the city, years of bug paste and preservative-laden soy in a hundred forms instead of the fried eggs and pancakes that seemed like a dream, her personal day-night cycle was defined by which direction she had last gone.

At first she went up around midday, pressing the scratched-up “call lift” button with its broken light in order to sell the pictures she’d taken with her grandmother’s digital camera from the undercity to salary men and bored wanderers. Vintage, not old. Classic, not outdated. Prints available, but the art book is better.

After the lunch rush, she’d pay Vice for protection from arrest as she took pictures of fountains and skyparks, Vars in their swooping flights, high-end boutiques and tech store windows and sky barges. But always, always, always the best photos of every day were the last, when the sun set off to the West. She’d drink in the rich light before it faded over the flatlands.

Eventually, that was where Thompson had found her. Shutterbugs know no class distinctions, and artists know no boundaries. He and he alone had gotten her a job with the newsroom, gambling his reputation on her talent and drive.

Until he helped her out, though, she’d slink through the after-dark of pulsing nightclubs and tasteful glass-walled fine dining to the Lift like a roach each night. Up here, the button said “Elevator Service.”

Often she rode down with Cho and as they fastened their masks back on they complained about the day and shared a few laughs. As part of a modern maid service, he cleaned offices that were too sensitive about cybersecurity to allow bots and autos in. They’d often get noodles together at Zen as Angela flashed her topside photos around or traded prints or her art books for this and that.

No buyers in the undercity. Swaps, favors, the tenuous remnants of ties that bind. Money was for the system, for food, for safety. Still, the hope and wonder and lust Angela pedaled we just as lucrative under the red neons as around the Frank-style metal weave cafe tables and glassy lunch counters topside.

She did ok, and life was exciting. Every drama highlighted one thing: Her ambition for more. She could have lived a good, simple, real life in the RZ as a Ranger like her grandfather, but she had wanted more.

More to the point, she thought she did. She didn’t know what she was losing when she left.

But Thompson—who she first knew as a fist-sized drone she’d sometimes spy around the spires at sunset—he was her ticket up. When she got the job, she started riding up with Cho every morning to check in for specific assignments: drug use in the undercity, gang clashes, hacking subcultures. Eventually, the assignments turned topside: family events with slick badges into ornate sky-chateaus and sprawling penthouses, vanity portraits for puff pieces, ambassadorial tours, fine art galleries where slim-waisted debutantes were being fêted.

Each day she went back down with Cho and showed him her new cameras, new wrist-suite, new softs for editing pics. He drooled over it, and she started to see him really come alive.

She had always known he was a gamer, but as soon as she opened up about hardware she knew he was a Gamer. “That has an R6500 display chip. Same size as this one in my ‘pad but twice as good. You could sell that chip for big money if you ever get in a bind.” “Don’t let Harcourt see that cam, or tell him it’s been gutted so nobody tries to get it.” He had an intimate, flexible, modular mindset full of potentials and possibilities. She didn't think on his level. She tried occasionally.

“I’ve got options to purchase stuff like this through work. I could buy them and then resell them… would that be worth it?”

He smiled with his buck teeth’s enormous gap showing, something he rarely did. “Only if you already have a buyer who’s paid you up front. There’s profit,” he held one hand out, then the other, “…and then there’s safety. Merching like that is dangerous to your job up top and your life down here, Angie.”

He brought her into cyberspace, and helped her learn to do her own editing for the photos and videos. He introduced her to Ming, who taught her how to use a few cheap drones to get pano, roty, and synthsense shots to take her raw product to the next level.

Less than a year had her working closely with a couple of the newsfeed’s writers, Babs and Pearl, who were free with their knowledge of how to communicate, to draw out a story, to interview. She poured over their work, their different draft editions, their style guides. Hours and hours devoured with insatiable appetite.

Angela wanted more, needed more than she had, and she knew how to get it. She started freelancing on the side, spinning exposé scoops about issues like drugs being tested illegally in the undercity by JJM, interest pieces like day-in-the-life of undercity runners, and the agreements between badges and gangers that kept the Topsiders safe.

She got noticed. Promoted. Lauded. Headhunted, picked up by an agency. Now, instead of just coming up the Lift every morning, she ran through a hotel’s concierge and cleaned up into Topside clothes before checking in for work. With each piece, she felt more daggers stared at her back by photographers, videographers, editors, writers. She was the whole package in one slim, blonde case. A natural, they called her, either in praise of her craft or in mockery of her lacks.

She was a herald of the modern Way, the epitome of the dangerous, rootless, infinite upward grasping spirit that had possessed the human race.

Then came the AI interest piece, dedicated to Cho who gave her the idea. She’d taken a video of two martial artists in a high-end dojo, one with a DNI and one without. While the norm was clearly more skilled and the teacher, the aug adapted with each set of drills, each sparring exchange. By the end, the blue-white shining lights along his brow gave him the edge.

He bowed on his way in. He sauntered on his way out.

Angela kept her notes in a rare paper notebook, completely off digital. She kept the footage on its own drive, and worked on it only on a network-isolated terminal she’d bought and had Cho wipe for her. She kept up with her work, and continued to be praised for her clever angles, symbiotic script, and vibrant visuals.

The opportunity came when her proud boss gave her the coveted five-minute slot on stage at the yearly junket for media-types. He wanted to show off his rising star. She spent a whole week on that five minutes, eighty-six hours slicing a perfect teaser titled “Modern Life” and she brought her invisible terminal in to reveal her secret project.

Green light in hand, her work time was freed and an afterparty was arranged for—a signal for attention amongst people who shouted to the masses every hour of every day. Attention, and judgment. Tickets were sold, gifted, passed out over the next months. Her boss believed. Angela believed.

On that star-studded night, a rare sign lit the heavens: A rising star flared to full life. The response was pandemonium, frenzy. It spread like wildfire, far beyond Angela’s ambitious dreams. She was lightning and the whole world thundered. For weeks it was more than Angela could do just to arrange her own schedule in response to interview requests, meetings, pitches, partnership opportunities, job offers…

But each night, Angela pressed the “Elevator Service” button and turned around to glance at the “c ll lift” button on the other side of the world where she slept.

It was her ambition that let her understand what people craved. Everyone wanted something. Everyone needed to feel like they were moving instead of locked into place, defined and categorized by these dim, alien flickering lights that ruled every aspect of the System.

In less than a month, her future came to her. Cho knocked shakily on her cube’s door one night. “Angie, I, uh… I got a message today. From an AI. It calls itself Tora. Says it is to hire the world’s best reporter for a big project with the Colonial Authority, out in the Rim.”

She rolled out of her coffin and looked at the screen. “Authentic?”

Even as he nodded, a new message appeared: YES THE OFFER IS GENUINE.

Cho almost dropped the computer with a gurgling shriek that ended in a panicked coughing fit. Angela blinked, reading through the simple, clear terms.

“What the hell does it mean, ‘I’ll arrange for a Pulitzer’? Isn’t that voted on by people, a whole committee?” Cho’s shock had turned to anger, the sort of violation only a hacker who has been hacked can feel.

Angela replied in a soothing tone. “Didn’t you even watch my hit piece, brainiac?”

“But it’s predicting things for the next 2 years.”

“And I’m telling you—have in fact recently made a movie about it—that this is what they’re doing behind the scenes. I called it ‘an alien invasion of our own creation’ remember?”

“So…” the young man turned his head and paused. Angela’s eyes slunk down the cables still trailing out of the DNI socket behind his ear, attaching him to the computer. “So I guess this is it, then. What you were working for this whole time. The big leagues. Corpo positions, living a permanent vacay-soft.”

Angela pulled back into her bed, hugging her knees. Her words came slowly. “I guess so. I guess I’m somebody. Going places.”

She saw little tears starting to form in his eyes as she started to wake from her solipsism, but she could never not hear the last words she heard from her friend’s mouth: “I think you’ve been somebody, and now you’re lost.”

He had left, then, and in the way of all undercity life, it all became a memory. The past was nothing but a daydream. Decisions were made, loyalties checked, future courses set, and you never looked back. Life was short, hard, swift. It was all precious, glittering but snatched away as easily as it came to you.

In her seat on the ex-atmo transport heading to her next assignment on Jumah’s surface, she mouthed those words to herself again and again, the anguish sweet. Today’s long series of flights allowed her to nurture the thoughts and feelings brought on by the dream, to finally feel.

Outside the window was the vast, green-tinged ocean of the alien world. Here there were no signs of the vast war she was covering, the story of man’s dominance and supremacy on the interstellar stage written in scenes of smeared viscera and technological terrors, bestial machines prowling the ground and orbital railguns swatting down any semblance of hope against the invaders.

Angela’s dreams had been pulling her back away from this present, back to her honest ambitions, back to the friendships born in the grime and noodle shops of Savannah. Here it was all managed chaos, as artificial as it was raw. Back there it was real chaos, alive. Somehow the concrete coffins and plastic nooks she curled up in beneath the pea-soup chemfog layer were more alive and real than this tropical jewel of a planet being subsumed by the AI taskmaster she served.

Tora, the digital tiger in this nightmarish fairy tale she was dressing up to inspire the whole Terran hegemony to further works, further expansion, further disassociation on an industrial, civilizational scale.

She was the silencer of another race, the last one who would hear their screams, the void that made the inhumanity possible. She was screaming, but there was no one to hear it and only the void to tell.

She had never cried about losing Cho. Ensconced in her luxurious seat, the unbidden tears simply dried under her form-fitting mobility suit's fans and recyclers. Just as her suit protected her from the oxygen-plus Jumari atmosphere as she descended the gangway, it insulated her from her own feelings, fears, and even hopes.

Awaiting her on the tarmac was her next story, her next victim and companion and protector. In the manner universal to all military men, her first glimpse of him was his sudden straightening to attention with a begrudging look, a caged-carnivore act of sullen but complete obedience.