On the Metro - Excerpt from Damaskopolis
It was late when Yossi got to Ummayad Square terminal and he had missed the last regular train by fifteen minutes.
A smart-looking train attendant gave him a polite nod. 'You’ll have to use the night service now. We call it the graveyard shift.'
'When’s the next vac-train?' asked Yossi.
The attendant looked to an old-fashioned wrist-watch, 'Another thirty minutes, I’d say. There’s a cafe you can wait at if you like. Or you can use the taxi terminal to call for a ride. You walked past it on the way into the station.'
'Thanks, I’ll wait,' said Yossi. He didn’t feel like spending his hard earned credits just yet. At least not until the job was done and Maya was back in whatever golden cage her father had planned for her. He walked across the cavernous station, marvelling at how empty it seemed at this time of the night. The Ummayad Square was the central terminal for Damaskopolis proper. The inhabitants here referred to anything outside of these ten square miles as the suburbs. Naturally, the Marjeh didn’t even exist in their vocabulary. The miserable rich shits.
In spirit he had every sympathy with the protestors getting their heads blown off far down on the lower street levels, where people still used wheeled transport or walked. The more he thought about it, the more he felt he had in common even with the Marxists in Cairo. Aleppo had changed all of that for him.
Promise me you’ll come back.
“Fuck!” he muttered to himself. ‘Get out of my head.’
He looked around to make sure there was nobody else around. Ovi remained silent. Unless he started the computronic monologue unit, there was no chance it would communicate with him, which, he discovered when he first installed it, saved him a maddening cacophony of questions and confirmation requests firing straight into his mind.
Large parts of the international terminal had been abandoned since the start of the war with Cairo, with only a limited service to Istanbul every Tuesday. The boarded up shop fronts still had remnants of their past glory, the faded and tattered posters with special offers for well-heeled travellers still clinging to the painted white glass vitrines. He walked past a life-size holo-display of a smartly dressed, smiling man wearing a purple fez and white gloves. It was stuck in a loop that repeated before the sound could start, but Yossi knew from other adverts that it was a holo-display for Sarkissian Industries’ latest version of its popular hajeb artificial intelligence. Broken, he thought, just like the rest of this damn city.
#An inferior model, by all accounts, said Ovi.
‘That’s come out of the blue. If I didn’t know any better, I’d say you were jealous.’
#If they had superior heuristic algorithms and logic routines, I would not hesitate to recommend an upgrade.
‘Isn’t that what Sarkissian wants us to do? An upgrade?’
#That is an update. An *upgrade* is a complete overhaul and replacement of the existing code. Whereas an update is just that. An improvement on certain core logic modules and communication modules.
‘Well, if it’s any consolation, I’m not going to have you replaced any time soon.’
#Thank you, effendi.
The waiting area smelled of stale cigarettes and dust, and there was a faint whiff of body odour lingering in the air. Someone had hung up a stick of air freshener by a coffee kiosk in a vain attempt to mask the musty smell of people in transit. Yossi keyed in the number 7-Ã on the soy-cafe dispenser. There was nobody in attendance, it was all self-service.
The whirring of machinery and a faint click told him his drink was ready. Real coffee was a luxury in this city, and you had to be connected way up to afford it. Still, with the right amount of sugar added, soy-cafe didn’t taste too bad, and you learnt to appreciate the taste after a while. He grabbed the steaming hot cup, taking care not to spill the scalding hot liquid onto his fingers, and walked up to the grimy fridge unit displaying an assortment of travel snacks and sandwiches. None of them seemed appealing, and he wasn’t that hungry yet.
A faded paper was stuck on the wall with a long-forgotten train timetable. It had indecipherable markings in pencil made by some long-forgotten engineer that were now almost faded away.
He sat down at the formica table in the corner of the waiting area, the rumbling of the track machinery echoing across the station as the night shift set out to repair various sections of the hoop track linking Damaskopolis Metro with the other cities of the Levant via fast moving trains that hurtled through vacuum tubes.
A gruff man with a beer belly, dressed in orange overalls, walked in. Yossi nodded to him. The man grunted an acknowledgement and walked back out with a cup of soy coffee.
Yossi took small sips of the coffee, stretching it out for as long as he could bear before it went cold. He found himself thinking about Maya Sarkissian. Why would she have taken off and disappeared like that? Maybe she was just a messed up poor little rich girl. But he hoped that she wasn’t. He had been looking at her picture from the case file more than he should have. There was a gentleness in her eyes, and, yes, a bit of naivety. Maybe he was reading too much into it and he was imagining things about her that weren’t there.
He’d met classy girls before, even dated some back when he was younger. And then there had been the whores on the outskirts of the Marjeh when he’d been lonely enough for that. But not someone like Maya. Like countless generations of men before him, he wondered what it would be like to lie with a woman like her, young and fresh and in her twenties, and from that fabulously wealthy class of people who lived in a world he could only imagine. Why did she run off? Why not try to improve the system from within? He realised he was sounding like Paulina now and that annoyed him. Which reminded him; he had to talk to Paulina about whoever was tailing him, and if it’s her, then she had to stop that shit. He took another sip of the coffee and grimaced. It was cold now.
The station began to fill up slowly with a more rugged, working class crowd of people. The graveyard shift workers had been using these trains for a while and knew when to arrive at the station to catch their trains. He poured the cold soy-coffee down a sink and chucked the plastic cup into the open waste bin.
There was a digital clock suspended at the top of the station. Five minutes.
He walked over to the now crowded platform of men and women. Some were quiet, with tired, subdued faces. Some stood alone at spots they knew would be where the train doors would be when the train arrived.
There was a gentle breeze as the train emerged from the vac-seals underground, pushing the surrounding air. It juddered to a halt in front of them. A group of loud workmen and women in yellow fluorescent work vests were laughing and slapping each other on the back as the doors hissed open.
He hopped onto the train and found himself a seat, folding his arms together and trying to blank out the loud workers.
A crackle in his ear made him wince. He rubbed it hoping that would make it better. The train stood still, waiting for its departure slot. More and more workers trickled on, some running, some walking, and the carriage was getting crowded.
The crackle came back, this time in both ears, and he felt a splitting headache. This didn’t feel right. Garbled sounds filtered through his consciousness, making him sit up on the train seat’s edge.
The train took off. He’d be home in exactly seventeen minutes.
Fzzzzt - Fzzzzt - Phhffft - fff - offf…
A faint human sound emerged from the static. At first he thought it was from the surrounding people, but there was no mistaking it. It was in mind-speak.
Fzzzt - offff - Fzzzt - Get—Phhtttt - fff -
The automated train announcement came on:
Effendis and Khanums, Abu Rummaneh Station coming up. Please ensure you have all of your belongings - Effendis and Khanums, Abu-
'What the hell is this?' he muttered to himself. He looked around him, but the other passengers were oblivious to what was happening in his head.
Get -
The train pulled into Abu Rummaneh Station, and the doors slid open. Nobody got on.
’Thirty-seconds till departure. Please ensure that you are seated, or holding on to the straps on the ceiling,' said a robotic voice over the train’s loudspeakers.
off. Get off. Get off the train. Now.
'Ovi, is that you? Who is this?'
There was no response. Only the words repeated over and over in his mind.
Get off.
Get off.
Get off.
He stared at the doors of the train and a part of him told him to not be stupid.
Get off.
If he got off now, and it turned out to be nothing, it would be another hour till he got home.
‘Fifteen seconds till doors shut. Please stand clear’ said the train announcement.
Get off. Get off. Get off.
‘Five seconds till departure. Please mind the doors. The doors are closing. Please mind the doors. The doors are closing.’
He watched, as if in slow motion, the first judder of the doors as they started to slide shut.
Get off.
He leapt to his feet and dashed through, hearing the doors slam shut behind him as he stood sheepishly on the empty platform.
Some passengers stared at his face with puzzled expressions. The messages stopped. There was only silence.
As the train began to push away, there was the muffled sound of a pop from within the carriage. He looked at the passengers as they turned to look at something, and then in the next instant, their mouths hung open and their tongues lolled. He blinked, as if he couldn’t understand what was happening. One woman in a high-visibility vest clawed at her throat and slammed at the door window. He saw her white hand press against the glass and then slowly slid down.
The train stopped moving. It had stopped half in and half out of the vac-tunnel. At the far end of the platform he saw a young man standing with a dazed look on his face.
‘Hey, you okay?’ shouted Yossi. If the man heard him it didn’t show. He dashed out from the nearest exit, ‘Hey!’
‘What the hell just happened?’ a station attendant came running behind him.
'Call the Securitat!' said Yossi, turning to him urgently, 'Call them now! Tell them there’s just been a chemical attack.'
The man stared at him, mouth wide open as if he was trying to process what he just heard. Yossi grabbed him by the collar and yelled in his face, 'Do it now, you fool!'