In turn, the system used the scores of cameras in the room to monitor the workers. Each citizen had been trained to perform their task with a specific series of movements, each in a specific order, to ensure maximum accuracy and efficiency. Should a worker deviate from their set routine, the system would send them a warning. If it were to happen twice within a shift, their supervisor would be alerted. Only if it happened three times in a shift would Ely be notified. That hadn’t happened in two years. On that occasion, it was due to a worker collapsing from a brain aneurism.
Ely walked slowly down the corridor, peering into room after room, pausing at each window just long enough to be noticed by the supervisor.
Each year, two hundred and ten people were bred. No, Ely corrected himself, they were born, that was the term they were supposed to use now. They spent the first year in the nursery, then two in the crèche, before they began their formal schooling. That lasted until they were seventeen when they joined the workforce. If Councillor Cornwall was elected Chancellor, everyone expected the age for graduation would be reduced to fourteen. Factoring in the Instructors, the two weeks of maternity leave that each mother now received, and the energy and food cost of so many unproductive mouths, the population rate was one of the most contentious issues in the City.
Not that two hundred and ten people died every year. Some retired to Tower-Thirteen. Others were transferred to one of the other Towers or were sentenced to hard labour at the launch site. And sometimes there would be calls for volunteers to assist them. That had happened twice last year.
Few people just died with the random lack of forethought that the man who had dropped dead in the food-vats had exhibited. Most died in their sleep, just like the records showed they had done in the old world.
An image of Mrs Carlisle came up on his screen. Ely agreed with most of Cornwall’s policies, but felt that some workers used the breeding licences as a way to get out of Recreation. That was the case with the Carlisles, he decided. They were two people who’d had some chance meeting and decided they’d have children for the perks that parenthood brought. Had they both not already lost their licence, he would have been inclined to put in a motion to have it rescinded.
He took another turning and found himself back at the elevator. He went down to the Assemblies. As with the food-vats, he would be alerted if there was an incident he needed to attend. Unlike with the ‘vats, Ely wasn’t allowed inside except in a dire emergency. The Assemblies were clean rooms. As Ely knew, as everyone knew, the merest speck of dirt could cause a circuit board to fail. If that happened in the depths of space the ship might be lost, imperilling the hopes of the entire species. Or, as the digital poster outside the room stated, ‘Dirt Kills! Are You Clean?’
As Ely looked in through the window a worker glanced up. It was hard to read an expression underneath that mask, but Ely knew what it was. Frustrated anger at the waste of labour Ely represented.
The supervisor, alerted by the sudden drop in productivity, hurried over to the worker. The citizen returned his gaze to the piece of circuitry on his conveyor belt. Then it was the supervisor’s turn to glare at Ely.
Ely shifted his helmet, trying to find a position where its new dent didn’t pinch the back of his close-cropped head. It would only take a few minutes to print a new one, and barely longer to transfer the visor and other electronics from the old one, but he would have to wait until the requisition was approved. If it was approved.
Every joule of energy, every minute of labour, now had to be accounted for. More and more workers were needed at the launch site, and that meant fewer and fewer people in the Towers, yet the workload remained the same. Ely knew it and secretly shared the frustration of that worker - that he, as a Constable, was nothing but an extra mouth to be fed.
For sixty years everyone in all three of humanity’s remaining cities had been striving towards the same goal, the evacuation of the species to Mars. The focus had been so intense that few workers had given much thought to the struggles that would face them once they arrived. There, survival would be reliant on the technologies developed long ago, before the Great Disaster.
Those, Ely knew, had never been tested outside of the lab. Terraforming, agriculture, mining, and so much more besides, it would all have to be experimented with, and it would all have to work. There would be no room for failure. Nor could there be any delay in departure. The water levels were still rising. The City had no more than ten years left.
The situation had not always been so desperate. Fifteen years ago, whilst Ely had been a student in that classroom, the sun had shone outside. But it had shone on a barren lifeless land, plagued by the stray winds that brought toxic gasses with them from the old battlefields to the north. Thanks to the solar panels, no matter how inhospitably desolate it was, energy had been abundant.
Then the rains began, and the solar panels failed. The sea levels rose, and the tunnels connecting the Towers, rarely used since the years immediately after the Great Disaster, were flooded. The transport pads became the only way to move people and supplies between the Towers and Cities.
There was an energy crisis. Workers from Tower-Thirteen were re-assigned to construct a giant tidal barrier to hold back the sea and harness the power of the waves. Most of them died in the process but the barrier was built and the sea kept at bay, for a time. It had begun to rise again, and it was estimated that within a decade the barriers would fail, the Towers would be swamped, and everyone would die. Mars had become humanity’s only hope.
Ely moved on, pausing at the empty break area where workers spent their statutory fifteen-minute lunch break. He checked. It had been six hours since his last meal. He was eligible for another. He took out a cup and placed it under the dispenser. A thin, gloopy liquid poured out of the nozzle. He downed the gruel in one gulp. Unlike some of the citizenry, he saw no reason to savour it.
Cornwall had been responsible for extending the break time to a quarter of an hour. Ely sometimes thought that the man’s policies were coloured by the time he had spent as a worker in the Factories.
Looking down the long corridor at door after door, Ely decided he was wasting his time. He returned to his paperwork. Once he was finished, he could sentence Grimsby then go and get his four hours sleep.
Unlike the workers, Ely didn’t have much free time. Civic servants didn’t work a shift pattern, but spent fourteen hours on duty. He tried to fit in six hours of Recreation each day, he felt that at least that way he wasn’t a net drain of energy on the Tower. It wasn’t always possible.
That only left four hours for sleep. Though the workers were told that six hours per day was needed, Ely knew that only four hours of the machine induced lucid sleep was technically required. Technically.
He liked Recreation. Like everyone else, as he peddled away turning calories into electricity, he had his eyes glued to his display, lost in the movies, reading the books, and scanning the archives that had survived from the old world.
Ely had seen every one of the four hundred and ninety-eight films that had survived often enough to know every line that each actor spoke. He’d found it odd that since all their technology came from the old world, and that all the screens in the Tower had colour displays, no one had thought to make colour movies. It was equally odd that none of them portrayed the technology that he was familiar with. He had a theory about that, connected with the old world’s strict censorship during a time of war. He hoped, some day, that he’d find time to write a paper on it. All the successful political candidates had contributed pieces to the archives in Tower-Thirteen. He sighed. It wouldn’t be anytime soon.