Underground Airlines(11)

Four thousand, two hundred and thirty-one, I thought. As of Sunday night, 4,231.

There was an aerial photograph of the facility in there, too, a smudged satellite image with every blurry rectangle numbered and labeled. Thirty-two separate structures. I let my finger move from rectangle to rectangle. I traced the lines between the buildings, along the service roads and gravel paths connecting them, fighting off a burst of dread imagination, me down in there, running in slave grays from building to building, from shipping and receiving to facilities maintenance, bare feet slapping the paths.

The population center was five buildings arranged in a semicircle around a courtyard labeled RECREATION, five grim rectangles of identical dimensions, arrayed like soldiers. Past the pop center was building 20, labeled DETENTION/RECONDITIONING, which would have been known in the land of my own youth as the shed.

I paused, just a second, just a half second, my forefinger pressed into building 20 until the blood had left it and it was white as the fingernail.

Some things on the map I could not understand, and I noted them all, put them aside to discuss with Mr. Bridge later on. One building, just behind the Institute for Agricultural Innovation, was unlabeled and blacked out, a redacted rectangle, hidden from the eye of God. And there was a whole set of lines on the map I could not explain, a broken black line making a loop around the periphery of the campus, just inside the line of the fence. Was it an extra line of fencing? A kind of shock collar around the whole place? I didn’t like it, that line. I felt sure it was connected to the PB population. Some new innovation in the control of men.

I wondered. I clenched my jaw. I memorized the map and moved on.

Not to page 7, though. Not yet.

My eye slid over the gap in my grid where page 7 should have been and arrived at the relative safety of page 8, a dry recitation of facts, detailing the events of the escape as presently known. The runner, service name Jackdaw, registry PIN 78312-99, had been roused from the pop center on Sunday morning, marked present at muster (confirmation from multiple sources). He was scanned into stitch house 2 (building 27) at 7:30 a.m. (visual confirmation from two PB overseers and a Free White Worker on the floor). Jackdaw had performed his shift, twelve hours on a stool, trimming stray threads from collars. GGSI ran its PB population on the eight-twelve-three system, in accordance with the Labor Practices Act: eight hours in population for every twelve on the floor, with a mandated job change every three years at the minimum. BLP agents regulated the shifts, checking everyone in and out, enforcing all the rules: breaks to be taken as scheduled; punishments to be humane and proportional to infraction. Violent slavery is against the law.

The file didn’t say how deep Jackdaw was into his rotation, because the file was a goddamn mess.

I put myself in the man’s shoes, imagined the man’s day. Jackdaw perched on a backless stool; Jackdaw at his small steel table with his tiny pair of scissors; Jackdaw, squinting through a magnifying glass, clipping the impossibly small and delicate threads, tidying up the black or red or blue collars, collar after collar, thread upon thread. Jackdaw’s cramped fingers and tired eyes. His pile slowly shrinking until the moment, every half hour or so, when the buzzer shrieked and a warehouse forklift would arrive from receiving, and the PB or the Free White behind the wheel would dump out a new load of collars.

I turned the page.

7:30 p.m.: 78312-99 shift ends, scanned out (multiple sources), returned to Pop Center B

7:47 p.m.: 78312-99 self-reporting “stomach pains.” Responsible on-call party admins 750 mg NSAID in situ

8:17 p.m.: 78312-99 self-reporting stomach pains + vomiting + diarrhea. ROCP transports TM to worker care



I nodded to myself a few times. I closed my eyes. The scenes came in to me as red flashes, summoning themselves from between the words of the file.

The boy in his cot, adrenaline flooding his veins. Jamming on the red button for the trusty: “I’m sick, man; I’m real sick.…” Thirty minutes later, 8:17, calling again: now he’s puking. Now there’s shit on the floor.

8:35 p.m.: 78312-99 admitted to worker care (building 47) for treatment by staff on call



And on and on. PIN 78312-99, taken from his bunk in “heavy restraining garments” (per protocol), moved in a one-man mesh transport containment unit (TCU) to the worker-care facility in the western section of the campus. Brought up via the elevator, gravely ill, removed from the TCU and restrained (per protocol) with zip ties to the examination table, and left in the care of the on-call nurses: Monica Smith, age twenty-four, and Angelina Croth, age twenty-seven. When the guard returns an hour later (protocol, protocol, a small contained universe of protocols), he discovers a horrifying tableau. Blood splattered on the floor of the worker-care unit; blood on the walls; blood on the rear wall in two descending smears, as if the helpless nurses had been slammed into the wall, then left to slide down slowly. The four zip ties that had been used to bind the patient to the bed by the wrist and ankle were snapped, as if by violent strength. Not just one but all the windows in the examination room were shattered, presumably by the wheeled examination cart, which was found upended in the hedges six stories below.

The subsequent fate of the nurses, or their bodies, was not noted. Also not noted was how the perpetrator of this ferocious act had managed subsequently to disappear. A very sick man, two nurses attacked, then poof. Thin air. The invisible man.

I got down off the chair and paced the room a little. I thought about going out onto the balcony and smoking a cigarette, but then I decided not to. I was boxing page 7. It was daring me to look at it, and I was turning away. I was going to have to look at it sooner or later. I skimmed the last part of the file, and it was just the usual paper-chase bullshit. Even that, though, even the basic paperwork, the warrant and the authorization, the judge-signature pages…all that was a mess, too, a mess of potholes and question marks and uncleanlinesses. I recorded these to bring to Bridge’s attention later on. If I was going to do my job, he could do his, for God’s sake.