He used up the last of his toothpaste brushing his teeth in an alleyway behind a diner. He rinsed his mouth out with a portable bottle of mouthwash and spat it onto the window next to him. The man shovelling a forkful of egg into his mouth jumped and stared at him like he was some kind of foaming-mouthed animal. He caught his reflection in the glass and remembered that he needed a shave.
He bought a disposable razor and a small tube of gel at a corner shop with fizzing lights that swayed back and forth on thin chains. The guy behind the counter looked like he might be suffering from some type of skin disease, and conducted the entire transaction with his face screwed into such a mean squint you could have mistaken his nose for a prolapsed anus. The razor had eight blades, a wireless connection, a connector port in the bottom, a tiny screen that flashed a smiling face emoji with an elaborate moustache every two seconds. Then he found a bar, bought the cheapest drink they had, which was still twice as much as he’d have liked to pay for a beer, and headed to the bathroom.
It was thankfully empty. The walls were coated in a sort of noisy acrylic panelling that made his eyes defocus when he tried to focus on any one spot, divided horizontally with a sickly cream on top and a pelagic blue on the bottom. The taps didn’t have hot water, but he hadn’t expected any different. He pumped gel into his hand, almost losing his grip in his slick hand and dropping the cannister into the sink, and slathered the gel across his face. He set about de-fuzzing his chops with the kind of harried but cautious strokes that only a man trying to shave in a barroom sink can manage. A pudgy-faced man with a sagging gut bulging through a sweat-stained grey t-shirt slammed through the door, unbuckling his belt as he went. He paused briefly and looked Caleb up and down with a bemused smirk and then meandered past. Caleb pawed at his bleeding face. He’d jumped like a clown at the sudden entrance and given himself a nasty nick across the bottom of his left cheek. He finished up the last of his shave, trying to avoid catching the cut and still get all the hair. Behind him, the pissing gentlemen slapped his hand against the wall repeatedly, sighing and gasping with exaggerated relief.
Caleb washed his face off, tried to dry it as best he could, reflecting that he should have brought a travel towel and kept it in his attaché. He headed into one of the stalls to find some paper that he could staunch the bleeding with and mop up the trickle of blood that was running down his neck into his collar. Two of the three stalls were empty, but he found some paper in the third, and after shedding a few layers from the roll, hoped that applying this to an open wound wouldn’t result in some horrific infection. Behind him, the flabby pisser sauntered out into the bar without washing his hands, humming contentedly with himself as he slammed back through the door.
Through the window, he watched people churn back and forth in hunched miasmas of commerce, drained and pallid, shuffling between pod and gig and pod and gig. A charcoal arc of metal vertebrae bisected the sky overhead, a vast spinal column of girder and rivet between angular tangles of manufacturing. When the message came through, it made him jump. It was just a set of co-ordinates. He tapped them into his map. He sat and looked down for a minute, using the experience of being homeless, the insecurity and the danger, the hunger, the looks people tried to avoid giving you, trying to find somewhere to sleep that wasn’t likely to be trawled through by the night patrols, and wasn’t utterly filthy or a million miles removed from anywhere that might resemble functioning civilisation. He pushed himself to his feet and trudged out the door towards another winding jaunt across jagged deja vus of urban calamity.
On one street he had to detour. A small protest had broken out about something. He climbed a nearby set of stairs and watched from a catwalk. Private security officers in Kevlar, shields, wielding stun batons lined up opposite a crowd of protestors. A woman with a camera and ‘Press’ stamped across the back of her orange jacket in block capitals stood filming. As the private security officers went on the offensive the protestors shrank back. The journalist, focussed on her work, was left exposed. One officer made a grab for her, she dodged left and backed away towards the side of the street, filming all the while. The officer ran after, aimed a swift kick at her, his boot slamming into her stomach. As she doubled over, he swung his baton around, but the proximity resulted in him merely punching her in the head. She sprawled backwards and lay unconscious on the pavement.
Security and protestors descended on the abandoned camera. A brief tussle broke out and broke apart again as the protestors scattered. Judging by the body language of the protestors and security, the protestors had managed to secure the camera footage and make off with it. In retaliation, security forces pushed forwards, slamming their shock batons into anybody they could. Screams erupted from the crowd as they fell back and scattered again, reforming further away. Egos saved, the security forces held their ground.
As people swarmed for the camera, the officer who’d attacked the journalist turned on his heel and jogged away back to security lines. An enterprising protestor took advantage of the man’s poor discipline and stuck a leg out. The officer tripped and sprawled on his face, his baton clattering from his hands. Other security immediately surged forward, but a second protestor was faster. Leaping into the air with one leg raised high, he brought his heel down hard as he landed. His full weight slammed into the back of the officer’s helmet. There was a crack that Caleb could hear even at a reasonable distance. Other protestors surged forward to meet the security forces. The downed officer was obscured by a swirl of bodies, a brief one-sided melee erupted, the security forces driving off the protestors and a gap cleared in the space, revealing the downed officer lying still, prone and completely still. Security brought their lines forward to shield the officer as his body was dragged away by two other men.
A wall of pipes and scaffolding. Towers of smoking metal climbing up through the tier plates. A section of stairway staggered down into a foggy abyss, the floor that it should have connected to having long since fallen away, now just a sagging memory of broken scaffolding, piping and wires dangling above a sheer precipice.
His path led him down another set of long narrow rusting, just wide enough for a single person, tracing a haphazard cooked path between sublevels. They were lined on one side with tiny crooked shops, nail salons and beauty parlours, with their windows covered by thick steel grating, and gaudy incongruous signs out front. Followed it down to a narrow path scattered with broken glass, discarded scrap iron, and the windblown trash of millions, winding alongside a waterway. On the wall there was a poster. “Nobody wants you.” A picture of a broken green glass bottle standing out against a small pile of rubbish, and “This is not a surprise.” beneath. He turned to look up and down the gulley within a gulley, the poster was a tiny vestige of humanity flickering between the vast unbroken walls of the grinding urban indifference. In the distance, through the fog, the hazy shadow of a colossal pipe suspended thirty feet above the grey canal poured kilometres of backwash down on the section, where it was dutifully funnelled along. The canal, a series of concrete wine boxes joined end to end into a curiously segmented eel. On either side of it, vast edifices of nondescript blocks covered in pipe outlets, fan boxes, and more grated windows. Not a window in the place that didn’t look like the outside of a prison cell.
He headed along the embankment, in one unending line between unbroken chunks of construction for what seemed like hours, until, unexpectedly, the solid wall broke off into a narrow alleyway. He checked the map. Sure enough, it told him to turn off so he turned off. There were enough stories of people blindly following map directions disappearing or getting hurt or killed. He gave the embankment a last look up and down its bleak monotony and its sludge-liquid river, half tempted to just keep heading along it to see where it spat him out, and headed up another shadowy claustrophobic staircase with walls that climbed upwards for miles before they levelled off into another street or a rooftop or a café balcony.
He emerged into another alleyway behind a chain link gate with the ends of a flaking broken chain dangling from a buckled loop of wire. The alley continued for a good hundred feet, the deepening gloom swallowing it in the absence of functioning light sources, until it disappeared around a sharp right-angle. He hesitated, wondering if there might be a better way to his co-ordinates that didn’t route him through every dingy passage in the city. He thought back to the riverbank, concluded that there didn’t seem to be much chance of that and grunted at the stale air. He took the knife he’d dragged out of the dock worker’s chest from his inside pocket and stepped forwards.
The gate opened with a scream of protest, juddering inwards on its cracked hinges and rattling shut behind him. He started walking before he lost his nerve. Around the corner the shadows thickened. It reeked of stale piss. The walls seemed to deteriorate more the further he travelled into it. The occasional stagnant puddle, discarded cans, and incomprehensible graffiti, became more broken metal and glass shards. The walls were smeared with streaks of thick unidentifiable grime and substances he didn’t look too closely at. The passage was barely wide enough for him to walk between with scraping his shoulders and the walls continue unbroken, upwards without deviation in their black uniformity until, somewhere far above, a faint echo of light broke through.
The claustrophobic corridor twisted and turned on itself seemingly without rhyme nor reason, he seemed to lose sense of time, surrounded by the faceless walls. It was like a solitary confinement stretched along a line into a random infinity. He shuddered through it, feeling like his mind was playing tricks on him, wondering if he should turn back. He checked his phone to see if he’d made a mistake, but the map screen just gave him his location dot lost amidst a faceless grey expanse of nothing. He seemed to fallen off the map, somehow. So he pressed forwards, wondering how long he’d been walking, or how far he’d walked or whether there was anybody else in here with him, and thinking maybe he should have bought some water.
And then, unexpectedly, the narrow confines broke out into a slightly larger space. It wasn’t quite a courtyard, it wasn’t remotely big enough for such a title, but the buildings around the opening seemed to have taken a breath. Compared to cramped paranoia behind him, it was almost a relief. In the miserable square opening, a series of pipes and gutters funnelled an overly viscous runoff into a small open drain hole that stank like a thousand decaying rats in a vat of shit. There was a battered pallet forgotten against a wall and a section of torn and rusting corrugated sheet metal on the floor nearby.
From the far corner, a rhythmic squeaking noise and a soft sickly panting underwrote the dismal aperture. An old dilapidated and stained wheelchair sat facing the corner. Its occupant was oblivious to Caleb, the wide greasy bald spot on the back of his head apparent through the oily strings of grey hair smeared across it. He jerked his arms up and down in a spasmodic rhythm. His gnarled hands clutched a greying block of polystyrene foam that seemed as decayed as everything else in this wretched hole. Caleb leaned to the side to get a better view and quickly righted himself. The panting man’s unwashed trousers were crumpled around his ankles. He twitched and shuddered as the decomposing polystyrene block rose and fell. Caleb decided to simply leave the stranger to himself and hoped the man didn’t notice him. He edged around the enclosure, trying to keep as much much distance between himself and this unsettling figure, stepping deliberately over the sheet of corrugated metal, and as he reached the opposite alleyway, back into another suffocating crawlspace he was unsettled to hear the squeaking from the mildewed polystyrene cube speeding up.
He trawled the alleyway for an unknown amount of time before it spat him out under a wide underpass flanked by grey buildings. After the pervasive pressing of the walls, the road seemed like an unfathomable gulf. He stood for a minute looking around, marvelling at the wide open expanse of tarmac, taking deep breaths of stale oil-streaked air, and resisting the profound urge to run into the road or turn cartwheels under the industrial beige goliath of motorway carving between skyscrapers above him, drinking in the unexpected relief that the large blank windows set into the nondescript office blocks brought him.
His phone chirped. He’d arrived at his co-ordinates. It was empty. Hadn’t been lived in for an age, but then again it was always difficult to tell. There was one large old lorry with scratched faded grey side panels that gave no indication as to who the lorry belonged to. His phone buzzed again. A license plate and a new set of co-ordinates. He headed over to the lorry, sure enough the plates matched. He got in, found the key fob in the dash, and started the engine. It coughed and sputtered like a dying man, but eventually it rumbled into life. He pulled up his phone, punched the new co-ordinates in and pulled out.
On the way there, NewTomorrow reported that MeasureGroup had suffered a spate of attacks to their surveillance network, destroying hardware worth a significant sum of money. Nobody had been intercepted, but MeasureGroup representatives and their clients suspected one or more groups of anti-surveillance activists. The news anchor was quick to point out that this was not the first time MeasureGroup had faced this kind of challenge. They had appeared in the news earlier in the year after their PMC, MeasureGroup SecOps, had hunted down and systematically eradicated an activist collective. Fatalities had totally over fifty people. No wounded were recovered and no casualties had been recorded on MeasureGroup SecOps side.
The next leg of the journey proved to be relatively straight forwards. It took him down another level, but it was over with in a couple of hours. By the time he pulled into another lot and killed the engine it was evening. He looked up and down a wide crumbling avenue, lined with flaking shop fronts that were forty years out of touch and people who shambled along in an unseeing daze. They seemed divided into two categories depending on what they were wearing. The first set wore dirty drab tracksuits that hung off of them like loose skin. The second wore cheap faux-chic apparel in blazing primary colours daubed with huge logos and overcompensatory branding, that seemed almost hostile in the otherwise muted peeling monotone around them.
Fifty years ago, C25-U16-M-C-L5 held the facilities housing Alexander Shepherd’s Long Sleep Booths. On opening them, there had been a great deal of argument, concerning the moral and commercial advisability of such a venture. Shepherd had shrugged it off and stated simply that the market would decide. Six months later, Shepherd’s facilities has processed 5 million customers. Following this, The Mountain stepped in and brought out Repose Industries for an undisclosed sum. Rumours circulated at the time suggesting the sum had been extortionate, and even so, Shepherd would have turned it down had the “offer” come from anywhere other than The Mountain. The Mountain had subsequently closed the business and sat on the property for a decade, while the building had sat vacant.
20 years later, Abraham Torquemada had opened a new, more or less identical venture in N9-O7-M-C-L6, under Placidity Ltd. A similar bout of public discourse followed and Torquemada gave the same response as Shepherd had. 437 Entertainment immediately set up a betting pool on the number of customers the business would attract over the course of its first year. Placidity Ltd’s facilities processed 11 million customers over their first 6 months. Following this, The Mountain once again entered the picture, purchased Placidity Ltd., and immediately closed the business.
Following this, The Mountain had taken the unusual step of purchasing the patents for ‘euthanasia facilities’. This had sparked a number of high-profile legal battles and commentary, as opponents argued that the terms of the patent were so vague and all-encompassing that they effectively shut down all further attempts to create new business in the sector. Courts cases were overseen by Warrick & Sons had upheld these rulings, and seemed inclined to support them in the name of the free market. Following this, Warrick & Sons very suddenly found itself subject to a series of attacks on its properties and staff by an unknown organisation. Simultaneously, they were bombarded by a flurry of legal battles and public scandals. This ultimately led to the closure of Warrick & Sons, and all commercial rights to the euthanasia facility patents had subsequently been purchased by Emory & Garret. All legal battles had subsequently swung in the favour of The Mountain. News outlets and commentators argued that this kind of financial domineering went against the spirit of the free market. The Mountain ignored all of them and there was nothing that the free market was able to do.
Torquemada’s operation had included an extra step in its process that Repose Industries’ services had not. Prior to self-termination, customers were required to fill out a series of short forms. The forms required the customer provide their ‘reason for self termination’. This allowed Placidity Ltd to gather market data and launch new services and products based on their data. They also sold the data to various research firms and data brokers. This produced a number of research papers, amongst them one by J. Hambleton, B.Y. Barlow, and R.N. Garnett, which sought to explain the shocking and controversial success of both instances of suicide as a customer service business. Their paper summarised the foremost reason provided by customers as: ‘Life having an unsatisfactory return on investment’.
Looking at the slab of rotting construction emerging through the distant haze, he felt a stab of envy for all of those people. Exhaustion lived in his meat. It would have been nice to just lie down and not have to deal with it anymore.
Another message broke through his fog of ennui. An address, a four-digit number, followed by a second four-digit number.
He followed the directions to another brutalist slab of concrete and followed a faceless hallway into a warehouse-sized room containing row upon row of identikit steel lockers. He found the locker that corresponded to the first set of numbers and punched in the second set. He wasn’t sure how he felt about the fact that the lock deactivated with an electronic chirp. With a disgruntled growl he opened it up. Inside was a wide neon blue wire shaped like a noose. The ends had been fastened together with a thin steel band that followed into a rough metal minimalist figure of a pregnant Vitruvian Woman. She splayed in concentric rings, fists clenched, face distended into an endless scream, distended belly deliberately accentuated. He held it up at arms length, squinting at it.
Words and Chaos 
Leave a comment