“Control, come in.”
“Constable?”
“We’ve a malfunction on Unit 6-4-17. It’s registering as in use. Can you check on the location of the previous occupants?”
“Sure. That was… the Greenes. Alphonse and Finnya, and two children, Simon aged eleven and Beatrice aged nine. The children are both logged as having had breakfast and are on their way up to school.”
“And the parents?” Ely asked.
“They’re…” He had to wait whilst she ran a scan of the Tower’s occupants. “They’re not showing up. Anywhere. That’s odd.”
Ely frowned. It was more than odd. As far as he knew, it was impossible. He tapped out a command, bringing up the image from the camera inside the unit. The screen was blank.
“Control,” he began, but Mr Durham interrupted him.
“How long is this going to take?” the man asked.
Ely glanced over at him and his family.
“We need our sleep,” Mrs Durham said, then almost as an afterthought added, “Our children need their sleep. Like you said, an hour’s lost sleep is an hour’s lost production.”
Ely regretted having used that slogan. He thought quickly. Grimsby was still up in the infirmary. The Carlisles, with no children were still allocated to the ‘Apartments’, so was Lundy, and with those three now on their way to Tower-Thirteen, that meant four pods had suddenly become vacant. He tapped out a command, double-checked he was correct, and allocated those pods to the Durhams.
“I’m assigning you to Units 7-15-4, 7-18-6, 7-20-2, and 7-21-3,” he said.
They looked at him blankly. He’d forgotten, again.
“Pine Lodge Apartments. Here.” He tapped a command onto the screen at his wrist. “Follow the lights on your display.”
“Apartments? We’re a family. We’re entitled to a family room,” Mr Durham said.
“It’s just for one night,” Ely said then, remembering one of the Chancellor’s recent edicts on ‘civility and civic duty’, added, “I do apologise.”
“Just come on, Alfred,” the daughter said. “I’m tired.”
Interestingly, Ely noted, though she looked as if she was engrossed in her display, according to the system, it was switched off. He checked. She’d not turned it on since she’d left the classrooms. Ely flagged her details so the system would monitor the girl more closely. Deviation from the norm in youth was usually a sign of criminal recidivism in later life. He’d read that in one of the papers in the Tower’s digital archive.
The parents relented and the family headed off towards the ramp that would lead them to the level above.
“Control,” Ely asked, when they had gone, “can you give me a remote override on the door?”
There was a click as the locks disengaged. The narrow door slid open by half an inch. Ely pushed it into the recess in the wall.
The space inside was dark.
“Lights.”
Nothing happened.
“Control. Lights.”
“What? Oh sorry,” the Controller, Vauxhall said. “I got distracted, there’s a—”
“Just turn the lights on,” he interrupted.
The lights came on. Unit 6-4-17, just like every other family ‘home’, was twelve-feet wide by ten-feet deep by ten-feet tall. On the left, stacked one on top of another, were the ‘beds’, a double pod for the parents, and two individual ones for the children. All were seven-feet long and three-feet high. The two individual pods were three-feet wide. The double was seven-feet wide. The moment that an occupant’s head hit the small metal contacts in the cushioned pillow, a carefully modulated six and a half hours of lucid sleep would be induced. To get in or out the pods would lower and rotate according to the pre-programmed rota of who was scheduled to wake first, thus reducing congestion with the unit’s basic facilities.
Ely had entered through the night-side door. Directly opposite was the day-side door. Workers always entered through the night-side, where the corridor lighting was subdued. They always exited through the day-side, where the corridor leading to the elevators was always bathed in a soft yellow-white glow. To the right of the door were the shower, the toilet, the food-bar and the printer. The unit the Winchesters had gone into, ‘Wisteria Lodge’, was the mirror opposite but otherwise identical.
‘Pine Lodge Apartments’, to which he’d just sent the Durhams, had six individual pods per room. Those were modulated for only six hours of sleep per shift due to the extra demand on the shower, printer and toilet. That extra half an hour of sleep was one of the benefits of having children, one that he personally thought was offset by having to share that pod with someone else.
“A place to sleep, not to live,” was how Arthur described it. “Living’s a luxury for the future, and our job is to make sure there’s a future generation to enjoy it.” For now people worked, and work should be enough.
The children’s pods were empty, as Ely had expected. Neither had been sanitised. He glanced at the wall. A series of digital frames still showed the Greene family. One, a very popular picture at the moment, showed the four of them, all with fixed grins and glazed eyes, set against a reddish-dusty background of Mars. Underneath was a split frame. The right hand side showed a boy, Simon, sitting in a row with two dozen, much older children. His eyes obscured by a visor, his hands frozen in mid motion. On the left side of the frame was a piece captured from a newsfeed. ‘11 year old wins National Diligence Award.’ There was a lot of text underneath, but it wasn’t important. The pictures wouldn’t change, nor would the pods be sanitised until a family, the whole family, had vacated the room. Ely thought he knew what had happened.
Conscious that he was only delaying the inevitable, he glanced over at the small shower and toilet cubicles. If they were in use, the doors would turn opaque. Both doors were transparent. It was as he’d expected. No one had ever died in the shower. That death in the Assembly had been rare. Most people died in their sleep, but two deaths in the same pod was unprecedented, and it couldn’t have happened at a worst time. Five lost producers in one night.
There was no point putting it off any longer, he decided. He swiped his hand down a panel to the side of the pods. Nothing happened. Ely frowned. He tried again. The pods should have rotated, bringing the double unit down to eye-level.
“Control. Can you override all locks and doors in this room?”
There was a series of clicks. Ely grabbed the double-sleep-pod, pulled it out and down. The panel covering the top half of the unit was opaque. Taking a deep breath, he pressed the emergency release and pulled the top up, and along. The moment the seal was broken, the cover turned clear, and Ely saw what was inside. There were two bodies, but they hadn’t died in their sleep. Their throats had been cut. Blood had pooled around their arms and necks. The wounds were identical, the cuts so deep that Ely saw flecks of white bone amidst the congealing blood. Looking down at those terrible wounds, there was no doubt in his mind. It was murder.
There hadn’t been one as long as he’d been a Constable. He didn’t recall there ever being one before, not since the Towers were sealed off from the outside world.
He pulled up the records for the couple, maximising them so they filled his display and hid from view the sight of the two bodies. Alphonse and Finnya Greene. Married for twelve years. She’d taken his surname when they got married, but neither had changed their names during the Re-Organisation. It wasn’t compulsory, of course, but the only other person Ely knew who hadn’t adopted one of the old names was Arthur.
Perhaps there was a place called ‘Greene’, Ely thought, as he scanned through the rest of the couple’s record. He knew he was just trying to distract himself, trying to avoid thinking about what was in front of him. He told himself to focus. Then he saw something else. Finnya Greene didn’t wear a visor. Around ten percent of the City’s population didn’t. It was one of the few defects that couldn’t be identified before birth. Some workers reported motion sickness, others were just incapable of managing the fine focusing skills required to operate the display. That wasn’t the case with Finnya Greene. She had worn one up until six months ago. And then Ely remembered the woman. Instinctively his eyes flicked to the corner of his display. The screens cleared and he saw her lifeless, almost wax-like face, and this time he knew where they had met before.