ZEITGEIST - prologue + I:1

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13/12/2005: Small bits of dialogue changed; numbers deleted; introspection showing Scriabin's drug addiction; spaces in between paragraphs to make easier to read


--

PROLOGUE

Has it always been this way? Scriabin tried to think back. So many things to think about. Burning and confusion, the rubber creatures that descended onto the world, making things disappear into anti-being, the rebel groups running back and forth, chasing, imprisoning and killing by both sides of a war or several wars. Have I always been like this? I can barely remember when I joined.

Scriabin looked up at the man with eyes concealed by dark shades.

“Do you have a question?” he asked Scriabin.

Scriabin had his hand gripped around the holy symbol –a circle and crossing lines— feeling its edges. It used to symbolize his religion. Now it was something completely different: proof of the lies and opportunity to reach the truth he was offered. The other man could show him the truth.

“I’m just trying to remember. Has it always been like this?”

The symbol’s edges were razor sharp. They used to be blunt.

“Do you think it was?” the other man asked, looking at him behind dark shades.

Scriabin thought back.



--
PART ONE
--
CHAPTER ONE
--

In the streets, the lamppost’s lights dimmed and went out. The sun began to rise behind the seemingly endless rows of buildings and lit the red sky, setting it and all its clouds afire. The sun’s rays did not penetrate the blinds of Scriabin’s apartment and the darkness continued, uninterrupted, except for the glowing numbers on the screen of his alarm clock.

The room was messy, the floors strewn with wrappers and the tables covered with papers, books and disks. The walls had a great number of posters on them of many different things and they included a moving picture of this year’s Sexiest Bathing Body, photographs, maps and advertisements for some of the latest releases in technology. The bed in the corner was empty. Scriabin had fallen asleep in front of his computer again.

The numbers on the clock flickered to 0630 and an electric, shrill, continuous beep beep beep interrupted the silence. Startled, Scriabin woke up with a start, causing his chair to roll back and himself to fall out. He groaned and threw a book at the alarm clock. The machine fell off the bedside table and thunked onto the floor, but the alarm didn’t cease its high-pitched beeping. He felt for his glasses on the table and forced himself to go across the room and turn it off.

He prepared for work hastily, eating his breakfast—a single, half-frozen, compressed sugar toaster tart that had been lying on the kitchen counter for who knows how long— as he dressed. Some of his kitchen appliances weren't working; he hadn't paid the bills. He couldn't pay them. He had been spending the money on something else. Something that he needed but didn't need and that wouldn't let him go.

Tabs are more important that warm food.

He looked outside the window at the still mostly-empty street. Outside, parked across the street, he saw a dark van. He turned away from the window, worried and tied the knot of his tie tightly. That van had been there for a week now. What were they doing there anyway? He didn’t like thinking that they were spying on him, but he had seen the same van parked near many of the place he stopped. Maybe he should call the authorities.

He gathered his work form the table and floor and groaned as he noticed a coffee ring that went through some of the pages of the copy of the Your Fetters essay he had been assigned to read. It was a socio-political essay and highly controversial. It denounced the political regime of Wolfgang, called all its projects a farce to steer attention away from current troubles like the Salieri rebels –which the author claimed were in the right— and the almost constant, reasonless wars. It had three pages against neoreligion, putting it in the same category as the government sponsored Musik shows and the Fight-Fightdome events. His hand had tightened around the neocross that hung from his neck when he read that and immediately covered all the lines in red. It had filled him with fury. Your Fetters was definitely too dangerous and offensive to publish and was written by an anarchic, paranoid, terrorist-promoting, anti-neoreligionist loon. It was obvious from the first page of the essay that this had to be safely stored in the Banned Archives to never be read by the public. Although, judging by the errors in spelling and grammar, he couldn’t assume that the author was very well educated and that took credibility from the paper.

He stepped out into the street. There were few people and cars outside. He glanced at the black van on the other side of the street. He saw the dark shapes shift within. The van started up and left. Scriabin remained suspicious.

--

The location of the Banned Archives Library was a secret and only the highest members of the censorship committee knew where it was. There was an average of one location holder of the Banned Archives per five cities. Scriabin was not one of them. He read the written works he received and helped in the process of whether they should be restricted from the main population or completely removed, but he was kept in the dark about the works’ end point. Frankly, he was glad that they were gone. The Banned Archives had several buildings located throughout the country with countless workers working their way up through the ladder from small things such as the appropriateness of cartoons or small works of fiction to the dangerous things such as metaphors and underlying symbolism in artwork or the good use of rhetoric in essays.

Somebody was forming a ruckus in the entrance today, slamming his fists on the front desk, waving a paper in his hand and yelling at the woman, a bio-robot programmed to serve the function of directing newcomers to parts of the building, sitting there.

“This is an outrage!” the man yelled at her, waving the paper around. “I received this-this pre-written, Banned-prepared letter saying that my short story may not be published on ground of it having deep, hostile metaphors against autocracy! Underlying metaphor? It’s something directed towards ten-year olds! They don’t even know what a metaphor is!”

“Sir,” the bio-robot said calmly, already programmed to respond to these sorts of people, “if you have any queries as towards why your short story has been banned, you may take it up with the complaints department. Floor number 12, room A, sir. Thank you.”

The man continued to rant. “This is ridiculous! It boggles the mind! A children’s book and you ban it? This is precisely what those rebel groups are fighting against! Against this overzealous, nit-picking way that you try to find something that’s not there!”

“Sir, you are being disruptive. This is a government building and silence is appreciated. You can go to the complaints department and file your questions or kindly vacate the building. I would not like to call security. Heavy fines are placed upon those that are uncooperative and disruptive, sir. Thank you, sir.”

“I shouldn’t have to complain!” the author yelled at her.

“Please, sir—”

“Don’t ‘please’ me!”

The bio-robot must have issued a signal because slate on the wall behind he slid upwards. A dark-coloured android stepped out from behind the wall, walked towards the desk and stood beside the artificial human. Its arms were folded across its chest and his fingers sparked menacingly with electricity.

“Sir, this is your last warning.”

The man grew quiet and stared at the android and its white-glinting, sputtering fingers and emotionless ‘face.’ He sighed and his shoulders slumped, defeated.

“No,” he said quietly. “It wasn’t a very good story anyway. I’ll try to write something with less metaphor next time.”

There was no sarcasm as he said that, but he wasn’t confessing to trying to subliminally corrupt young minds. There was only surrender.

The author turned and the building, not even bothering to go to the complaints department to have the matter of his story straightened out. Very few people went to the complaints department anymore. The dark android went away, its services no longer needed, back to its compartment behind the wall. The bio-robot woman continued to sit behind the desk, not moving, with a fake, faint smile on her face.

Scriabin has watched the whole scene and for a moment felt that something was wrong. He shrugged off the feeling and continued into the building. The bio-robot’s face turned towards his and he felt her electronic eyes scan for his identity.

“Good morning, Mr. Scriabin,” she said. “How are you today?”

He didn’t respond. He didn’t need to. She returned to her previous motionless position.

As he went through the halls and into the elevators, he felt more ID scanners on the walls scan his eyes so the doors before him could open and grant him access to the floors above. He felt upon him security cameras like countless eyes. When he pressed his hand against the print-scan of the elevator, it immediately shot up to his floor without waiting for him to specify.

--

“You’re not supposed to take those out of the building, you know,” someone said behind Scriabin. He didn’t recognize the voice and didn’t care. “You could get into trouble for that. You could be accused of espionage, you know. What if somebody found it and was influenced. That’s what were hired to prevent, Scriabin.”

His co-worker had noticed the coffee stain of the Your Fetters essay. Scriabin didn’t respond and resumed typing up his review of it. Both the essay and the review would be sent father up in the system. Both works would be re-typed and stored. The original things would be destroyed.

“I’m actually surprised you manage to sneak your work out,” he continued, thinking little of Scriabin’s silence. “Doesn’t surveillance catch you? I tried to bring coffee from the lounge to my desk once and they caught me. Think it was on a Tuesday. Anyway, they said they didn’t want anybody messing up their stations by dripping coffee everywhere. Didn’t drop any anyway. Didn’t get a big, brown ring on my work like you did, but they still caught me. They caught me with a new camera they’d installed right over my desk. It was posing as a light bulb. Crazy, huh? Said they’d fire me if I did it again. It was just some coffee; I was going to work late.” He laughed nervously. Maybe he thought that there were more cameras recording him. They probably were. “Similar thing happened to one of my kids at school. He was in the halls one day—”

He hit the keys harder in frustration as his co-worker continued to talk. Ignoring him wasn’t going to work.

“Don’t you have work to do?” Scriabin said icily, not looking up from his screen.

The co-worker’s seemingly endless chattering stopped, much to Scriabin’s comfort. He heard him mumble something, most likely an insult, and then leave. Scriabin continued to work silently.

--

Scriabin went up to the beverage machines at the Spot. Each one had a picture of the kind of drink it gave, mostly teas and coffees, some juices, nothing carbonated, with the name underneath. He went to the machine with an ESPRESSO sign over it, hit the ‘doppio’ and ‘accept’ buttons and pressed his finger against the small print-scanner pad next to the zee token and card slots. It turned green when he pressed the ‘accept’ button. The small screen above showed the amount of money withdrawn. The screen showed ‘have a nice day’ followed by the Smile logo as a cup dropped out of the machine and was filled with dark coffee.

He liked to drink coffee at Spot after work. There was an added incentive to going there, other than the excellent drinks. Liszt, a purple-haired girl, also went there. They had both gone to the same school and hated each other. She hated him viciously and Scriabin got a great amount of joy from increasing that hatred. For some reason, even though Scriabin never missed a chance to irk her, she continued to go to the same coffeehouse, knowing that he would find her there.

There was something suspicious about her, like she was hiding something.

She was sitting in a corner of the café, nursing a cup of black coffee in front of her and flipping through several papers and disks in front of her. She had a reader, a hand-held information-storing device, turned on in front of her. She was pressing the scrolling buttons and inserting disks into it furiously. The blue glow on the screen shone on her already pale skin and bounced off the lenses of her reflective orange goggles.

“Is the cyber-vampire look the ‘in-thing’ this season?” Scriabin asked with a sneer.

She turned to face him and spat at him, “Don’t you have anything better to do than fuck with me today?”

“As a matter of fact, I don’t. I just spent the whole day listening to chattering bastards and I would like to be on the other end of the Chattering Bastard-Severely Annoyed Victim relationship.” He paused for a second and grinned maliciously. “What are you doing hiding your beautiful green eyes from the world? Let’s uncover those darling orbs.”

She smacked away his hand angrily.

“Go away,” she hissed.

Scriabin took a seat opposite to her. Liszt bristled.

“Seriously, don’t you have anything better to do?”

She started putting all the papers and disks in front of her into folders.

“What are you hiding?” Scriabin asked, feeling suspicious.

Liszt carried weapons with her in her bag. Scriabin knew this, but wasn’t worried about it; it’s illegal to carry weapons and the law is enforced strictly. She wouldn’t risk being sent to the prison camps. She turned her face back down to her work with a frown. Scriabin was surprised she was giving up to easily.

“Steel-toe boots,” she growled, and kicked hard.

Scriabin jerked in his seat and suppressed a yelp. Liszt snickered.

He lifted a hand to pick up one of the disks left on the desk. She slammed her fisted hand down on his. He grunted and gripped the paper in his hand. Liszt grabbed his wrist. She didn’t notice how a mini-disk on the table slipped over the side. Neither did she notice Scriabin stealthily sneak it into his pocket.

“Let go,” she said. Her gaze snapped up. “Satie,” she said.

Scriabin looked behind him at a man in black with dark sunglasses and a red piece of cloth tied around his arm.

“Is he bothering you, Liszt?” he asked.

“It’s pretty obvious that he is.”

He only slightly shorter than Scriabin, but he was wider, more muscled than he was. Military dog tags hung around his neck. Trying to fight him probably wasn’t a good idea.

“Oh, I’m just playing,” Scriabin said as he let go of the paper. “We do this all the time. Don’t we, Liszt?”

She snorted derisively as a response.

“Don’t make me have to report you,” the man called Satie warned.

Scriabin narrowed his eyes and looked back at Liszt. She smirked and waved goodbye at him. Disgruntled, he picked up his cup of espresso and left.

Satie sat down in the seat Scriabin had now vacated.

“Do you have any zees for the coffee machines?” he asked Liszt.

“Listen, that’s not important, Satie. There’s a reason I called you here.”

“And this whole time I thought that you just wanted to have coffee.”

“It’s never about coffee,” Liszt said irritably. She lowered her voice so nobody would hear her. “The guys at Symphony are starting to suspect me.”

Satie paused and rubbed his temples. “How do you know?”

“Talk around work. Bugs I set up in the cafeteria and some offices. They’ve always marked me down for suspicious behaviour, but they’re sounding more serious this time. I’ve been seeing these people hang around my apartment building. They’re police bio-robots. I did a scan on them. Symphony has started to fucking spy on me. It’s only a matter of time. I can still work for the tech unit of our group, but I won’t be able to gather information for you if they find me out. Hell, I won’t be able to do anything if they arrest me.”

“Liszt—”

“There’s no way in hell I’m letting them take me to one of those labour prisons.”

“Liszt, be quiet for a moment and let me think.”

She removed her goggles to rub her eyes. They were bloodshot and sleepless. “God. I wish I could have on of those tranq tabs right now.”

Satie looked up at the orbs protruding from the coffeehouse’s ceiling. They houses surveillance cameras.

“Let’s go outside, Liszt.”

--

The Salieri usually had many bases of varying size and use in each city. They made use of abandoned buildings and, outside the cities, built their own underground bases that didn’t run the same risk of being demolished as the city bases did.
One of the bases was located in the working class area of the city. It was located in many of the sub-levels of a shop of information disks.

Some other Salieri members were there discussing plans as well. Their hands quickly went to their weapons when they heard the door open –there had been a recent raid by the police at another base; caution had been proved necessary— but they withdrew them and relaxed when they noticed they were Satie and Liszt. Nothing to worry about.

“You should prepare in case Symphony tries to arrest you,” Satie said as he sat down in one of the chairs there.

“No shit, Satie.”

“We can set something up so you can get away if the police come. There are cameras and ID scanners everywhere. Connect yourself to the security and you’ll know if they’re coming.”

“Already done that.”

“Then what’s the problem.”

“Identity scramblers. Symphony’s defence researchers have been working a lot identity scramblers. I gave you the file. Do you even bother to read the stuff I give you? Spider.

“Anyway, they’ve been developing these suits, right? Like flexible displays, only in fabric. Your surroundings are taped by nanocameras on the suit and are then projected again: what’s behind you is projected on the front of the suit and vice versa. In other words, you become invisible. I don’t have the details, but the main concept already says that this is bad news. Anyway, they’re incorporated some ID scramblers into the suits so you really become invisible; can’t be seen, can’t be detected by machines. Symphony’s begun selling them to the armies and security forces. That’s why I’m worried. I won’t know when they come until they get me.”

“Mm. Do you have a plan of Symphony labs.”

“I told you I gave you some documents. Why don’t you carry them around?”

“Precaution.”

Liszt snorted and took out a folder with several Symphony plans. They worked on the plans, marking possible escape routes, locations of employees that were also Salieri members and places where she could set up distractions in case she had to escape.

“Out of curiosity,” Liszt said, “would you have really called the police if Scriabin had stayed?”

“There’s no way in hell I’m coming in contact with security forces.”

“Thought so.”

--

The neotemple was tall and dark, illuminated by blue and red neon lights. The inside was large and empty, full of columns like the ancient temples are, and smelled of burned incense. There were very few people inside. Scriabin prayed to the Intergalactic Spider, it’s image on a stained-glass window above the altar, and his Neocross was pressed protectively between his hands.
Out of the corner of his eye he saw someone dressed in blue. He didn’t give it any thought.

--


“We’ve been watching him, you know.”

“Who?”

“The guy you hate. Scriabin.”

“Why would you do that, Satie?”

Satie smiled as he drank some coffee from the small machine located in the basement/Salieri base. Artificial powder coffee bean substitute. Not nearly as good as the Spot’s coffee bean substitute. Oh, well; caffeine is caffeine.

“He’s a good source of information.”

“Tell me you aren’t considering it.”

“Considering what?”

“Having him join.” A moment’s pause. “Dear Lord.”

“Oh, come on. He can’t be that bad.”

“You haven’t talked to him. Arrogant, self-centred, condescending prick…” She continued to mutter under her breath.
Satie shrugged and picked up some of the plans. He flipped through some of the weapons files. “…always made fun of me at school and still does in adult life. Bastard. I just hate the way he acts. I don't get so mad when he just doesn't say anything."

“It’ll be useful to have him in the team though.”

“Why? Why him?”

--

He got more bills in the lobby. He should pay them. He really should.

There he was again: the guy dressed in blue. Right there leaning against the wall of the hallway right next to his door. That apartment had been up for rent lately.

“Evening,” the stranger said.

“Evening,” he reciprocated. “Are you the new neighbour?”

“Yes.”

Short answer. Not very satisfying.

The new neighbour was shorter than him. Short for a guy, even. His hair was blue, cut short along the sides. He noted a cyberhuman plug on his neck. He kept staring at him from behind dark shades. Creepy.

“My name is ‘Zart.”

“’Zart?”

“A shortened version of Mozart.”

“Oh. I’m Scriabin.”

“Scriabin,” ‘Zart repeated, still staring at him.

Weirdo. He had a religious pendants around his neck. The Neocross was printed on the front of his shirt. Well, at least he wasn’t a Salieri weirdo. He can relate to religious people.

“You are having problems paying bills.”

“It's nothing I can't handle. Nice meeting you,” Scriabin said and entered his apartment.

Religious imagery , that guy was a freak. He hoped he wouldn’t have to see him much.

--

“We’ve been running background checks on anybody that could be useful to the cause. He works in the Archives. Definitely useful.”

“You could have picked anyone else.”

“He doesn’t have family and no girlfriend –or so from what we have observed— nor many friends, for that matter.”

“How surprising,” Liszt said icily.

“Nobody will notice if he works for us.”

“Take a risk and recruit someone with a family.”

“Sorry, Liszt.”

--

He loosened his tie and sat on the couch. In his pocket he felt the disk he had taken from Liszt. Small numbers were marked on the disk’s surface.

He took out his Reader, and older model. He’d have to get a new one soon. This old thing was embarrassing. Those ones with the flexible display looked pretty cool.

He put the disk in and the screen lit up with a soft blue light. The numbers flashed briefly, but flipped to reveal that they were a code for real words.

SALIERI RECRUITMENT DISK: A GUIDE TO THE PHILOSOPHY OF SALIERI.

Scriabin grinned.

Oh, Liszt, you’re in such deep shit.

--

“Fuck.”

“What’s the problem?”

“I’m missing a recruitment disk.”

Satie paused for a moment. “Maybe we’ll get a new member.”

“Shit. What if it was Scriabin?”

“Then we won’t have to sneak him a disk.”

“He’ll know it was my disk! Like hell he isn’t reporting me!” Liszt groaned. “You better find me a spot in the group’s Tech Unit. My face is going to be up in on the Wanted screens so fast.”

--

The Salieri text appeared on the screen. He wondered whether he should click forward. This was dangerous stuff he was reading.

Screw it. He read dangerous stuff for a living.

He clicked ahead.