The Dreams of the Eternal City Read online

  Copyright © 2018 Mark Reece

  The moral right of the author has been asserted.

  Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study, or criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, this publication may only be reproduced, stored or transmitted, in any form or by any means, with the prior permission in writing of the publishers, or in the case of reprographic reproduction in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside those terms should be sent to the publishers.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  Matador

  9 Priory Business Park,

  Wistow Road, Kibworth Beauchamp,

  Leicestershire. LE8 0RX

  Tel: 0116 279 2299

  Email: [email protected]

  Web: www.troubador.co.uk/matador

  Twitter: @matadorbooks

  ISBN 978 1789012 989

  British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data.

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  Matador is an imprint of Troubador Publishing Ltd

  Contents

  Everything Burns

  The Eternal City, 2040

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Everything Burns

  The Eternal City, 2040

  The airport burned surprisingly quickly, transformed in a moment by deft hands and hidden purposes. Ethan Thomas stood when feeling smoke in his nose, the smell a solid lump, as if he had inhaled coal dust. He followed his self-defence training, which had taught him to never stay still in an emergency. He knew what to do; civic duty had compelled him to violence before.

  As he turned a corner into the area between the departure lounges, feedback echoed over the public address system, sounding like the screech of a dying eagle. He stumbled back and jammed his hands over his ears, imagining that blood was pouring from them. A woman bumped into him as she ran the opposite way carrying a baby. Other commuters looked around silently, trying to comprehend, or else screamed, screamed. Black tarpaulins fell over shop fronts, covering the brand logos with stitched ‘I’s, the ends of which were looped. Ethan felt a wisp of breeze on his cheek that suddenly melted his flesh. He rubbed his face and his skin pulled. With a painful tear, he removed a burnt piece of paper. He recognised a few words that told him that it had been torn from a copy of the Sleep Code. He looked up to see shreds of flaming pages fluttering from the roof.

  He wanted to spit out smoke as he stumbled along but his tongue was too scorched. A thick red cloud emerged from benches before him. Ethan realised that he had reached the area where he had sat with his girlfriend, Aislin, only an hour before. He stumbled forward and stepped on something that pressed into the ground, making his feet slide. He broke his fall by pushing out with his left hand, as per his training, but still hit the floor hard on the small of his back. He groaned as he felt pieces of smashed plant pot stick into his ears. Dazed, he tried to stand, to see a figure on some sort of raised dais, illuminated by a series of flashes, wearing loose black trousers and a t-shirt with the same ‘I’ symbol that hung over the shops.

  “Your civilisation shakes, men of the Sleep Code! You have forgotten that what is made by men always burns! You’ve fooled yourselves into thinking that the weight you place on your rules has made them part of the nature of things! But everything burns, you are one match away from total loss!”

  Ethan navigated around the benches by holding his arms out like a blind man. His heart leapt when a security guard appeared – he must have been hiding in the smoke – and shone a torch in the preacher’s face. The violent light made him squint. From his angle, Ethan saw him pull his arm back. The preacher grabbed the guard by the shoulders and pulled him aside. Ethan was dazzled by the glimmer from the shard of glass he clutched, which made blood drip from his palm. He moved to the side too slowly, and the preacher drove the point into his shoulder. He felt no pain, nothing at all, but could not move his arm and dropped to his knees.

  The preacher stood over him, muttering furiously, his face distorted into a blur. Ethan held out his good hand. He saw Aislin without looking at her.

  She hit the preacher’s jaw with the bottom of her palm. The blow was perfectly timed and knocked him to the ground. Aislin checked that he was unconscious before examining Ethan’s shoulder. “Terrific,” she said.

  They stayed at the scene until more guards arrived. Lights flickered on within a few minutes, showing Ethan that his senses had exaggerated the destruction. As soon as the tarpaulins were removed and the scraps of paper swept away, only the acrid smell and a few abandoned pieces of luggage betrayed that an incident had occurred. Some of the guards took the preacher away while others took them to a back room. When Ethan and Aislin showed them their identity cards, they were ushered through to the airport’s Security Commander, who shook their hands and said, “I’m sorry about this but I’ll need to take a quick statement from you both, and your branch details, please. Don’t worry, your flight won’t leave until you’re on it.”

  “Of course,” Ethan said.

  After taking their accounts, the Security Commander insisted that Ethan see a doctor. His wound was superficial and required only antiseptic and a dressing.

  Aislin was sitting swinging her legs when Ethan came out of the medical office. “Come on then, I think we’ve earned this,” she said.

  “But what about… it can’t just have been that one, there must have been loads of them to have set up something like this.”

  “Ethan, you’re not taking on this job now. Am I going by myself?”

  “But isn’t—?”

  “No. You’re not going to make me have your suitcase.”

  Ethan smiled. “I bet you could carry both.”

  “Come on, we’re keeping everyone waiting. This is what happens when you spend too much time at your desk. You’re getting soft.”

  “What can I say? I agree with you.”

  “Finally, you’re making sense. Now let’s go on holiday before the next thing happens.”

  The plane departed shortly after they boarded it. News of the incident was not reported until two days later, when no mention was made of Ethan Thomas or Aislin Doherty.

  One

  Ethan shook his work mobile as he walked from the train station to his office, feeling the cold from melting snow for the first time that morning. It had been playing up all weekend, meaning that he had not been able to find out how many new cases had been reported since he had been away. Messages often took a long time to reach it, as the mobiles issued to agents used the archaic cellular network. That was supposed to prevent them from being hacked, as only the very poor still used cellular mobiles, meaning that they were rarely targeted by criminals anymore. However, security was not ideal, it never was. Aislin had not allowed him to take it on holiday, meaning that he was two weeks out of date.

  After giving up on the mobile, Ethan observed the general stupor around him. Everyone he passed had the same glazed look of the half-awake commuter, their Monda
y morning sleep having been interrupted so violently that they had left parts of themselves behind in roughly made beds. The city itself seemed weary after the short lull from the underworld of its night-time economy. It too, perhaps, wanted to sleep. Ethan hurried around a huge circular fountain, always bubbling, the heights of which were covered with posters that gave colourful depictions of the developments taking place: skyscrapers that would make ants out of all existing structures. The same words were on the top of each one, visible from every angle: ‘The Eternal City’.

  Ethan flitted through the drowsy commuter procession. Men he passed fiddled with their ties without making any discernable difference to their appearance; women shuffled their handbags into a more comfortable position, only for them to drop back two steps later. Ethan’s groggy sense of early morning meant that he struggled to distinguish any details of the people he passed; they were like dream figures in the way he could discern only their outlines.

  He made his way past a line of shops, the signs of which were so dirty that they were only useful in so far as one could infer the nature of the businesses from the pictures. Their dilapidated state was typical of premises in Central Zone. Ethan had walked past them most days since he had started his job, eight years earlier. He had recommended several times that they be closed due to their suspected links to subversion, and the fact that he had been ignored made the sight of them a recurring irritation. Tattered posters fluttered against their windows, displaying cars with speed lines behind them, and future developments of statues gleaming in crowded squares.

  After the shops, Ethan cut through a field. There never seemed to be anyone else going through it at that time in the morning, and he floated across its vast distance. Then he navigated through Central Zone, the amount of roadworks enabling him to move faster than those travelling by car. A coppery butterfly followed him from the field, its colour camouflaging it in the urban decay. It spiralled around him awhile before being unable to keep up with his steps. He felt driven by his surroundings, as if a figment of the butterfly’s dreams.

  Finally, after those long ten minutes, Ethan arrived at the headquarters of the Sleep and Dreams Monitoring Agency (SDMA), ‘the trading standards of the mind’. If the shopping centres were often called the heart of the city, then the SDMA was the blood, supplying the oxygen of well-regulated sleep. The building was so tall that one could only see it fully from several roads away. It was surrounded by a concrete pavilion twenty metres square that was filled with prongs and spikes designed to stop terrorist attacks. Ethan paused to adjust his bag; from his distance he could see only as far as the clouds that were painted on the tenth floor, beneath which were the letters SDMA, sky blue over blacked out windows.

  After getting inside, Ethan felt a heavy, onerous sense of reality. When he had first received his security clearance, one of the senior agents, Daniel Lee, had led him into the building and said that the agents who worked there were on the front line of protecting society, regardless of what the ignorant or naïve decided to believe, and he had never forgotten his words. In fact, he had paraphrased them several times, both in reports and in arguments.

  Ethan was peppered by a series of multi-coloured dots as he walked through the lobby. He had never asked what they were, nor had anyone ever spoken about them to him, which had made him assume that they were a restricted technology. No unauthorised tablets, Internet-based devices, cameras, or anything that could record, would work inside the building, and he had always been content to assume that the dots were something to do with controlling those types of security risk.

  He went through a second set of translucent double doors, which strained his muscles to push open, muttering ‘morning’ to the security guards; he had never learnt their names. He pressed his identity card against a barrier, and when a light flashed green, a section of it parted, sounding like a giant sucking lip and leaving only the SDMA clouds logo visible at the top. His card was so heavy that it had long since ripped the inside of his coat pocket. They were always described as ‘state of the art’ in SDMA literature, although their bulk made them seem obsolete.

  When he entered a lift, he pressed the button for the tenth floor and stretched his arms. In the few seconds it took to get there, the soreness of his feet, unused as he was to the walk after two weeks away, and a flash of pain across his forehead, proved that he was awake; he could still hear the cruel ringing of his alarm clock, beating its legally obligatory drum.

  At his floor, Ethan walked the two metres of corridor allowed him before reaching another security barrier, with a scanner before it. For that one, he had to place his finger into a slot after sliding his identity card through, and felt a momentary sense of dread when it did not immediately register; the last time the machine had broken, he had spent an entire day walking back and forth between SDMA technical stations around Central Zone to re-register himself. However, perhaps the machine was still waking up; the barrier parted a few seconds later.

  Ethan’s office was at the far end of the tenth floor. Each section had a security barrier with a noticeboard beside it that gave a list of the people who worked there, their rank, information about social events, instructions about the proper usage of the gym, and summaries of workplace regulations. There were long stretches of bare corridor between the sections, punctuated only by service lifts. Ethan had to walk past countless such entrances and the distance seemed as long as that from the station to the SDMA building.

  The door to his section was covered with the same posters as elsewhere, although prominent amongst them was a sign in thick black lettering that read:

  ‘This is a paperless office. All printed materials must be destroyed at the end of the working day.’

  The moment he opened the door, he frowned when seeing stacks of paper in irregular piles, from floor to ceiling in one corner, overflowing from desks elsewhere. The problem was that despite the security advantages of electronic files, the SDMA had to deal with numerous organisations large and small, only some of which could interface with their computer systems, with a few that could only reliably handle printed records. There were secure cabinets at various places around the room, taking up large amounts of space, most of which were empty. Despite the excuses different agents gave, Ethan knew that this was because most of them cared more about leaving early than protecting the organisation. He angled himself through the morass, nodding when making out colleagues. His desk was tidier than the others as he had finished and filed all his assigned cases before going on leave. There were a series of framed awards at the back of his desk, discretely hidden by his in-tray but visible from his seat. They were as familiar and comforting to him as old family photographs were to others.

  “All right, mate?” Mohammed, who sat opposite him, said, his thick hair sticking up as though electrified, his grin as wide as that of a cartoon character.

  “Hi. How are we getting on for cases? The work mobile’s playing up again.”

  And with that, Ethan was released from early morning sleep deprivation. When he spoke, the weariness that had seemed as if it would last forever moved to the back of his mind, in the same way that one is entranced awhile by sunbeams bouncing off one’s bed on a warm Saturday morning, until one gets up, at which point, one’s consciousness of the sun fades until it barely exists. Sleep deprivation was always present when he was at work but not as a nagging presence like it was at home, and that was only one measure of its injustice.

  “Yeah, good, mate. It’s gone to hell since you’ve been off. You won’t believed the bags of shit we’ve had to deal with.”

  “The bags of shit?” Ethan raised his eyebrows, making Mohammed hunch his shoulders to laugh.

  “That’s just what it’s been though. I’ll go through that crap in a bit. First, more importantly, did you enjoy going away with your mother-in-law?” Mo parted his lips, and Ethan knew that he was going to laugh whatever he said.

  “They’re
not your in-laws until you’re married. Before then, they’re just interested parties.”

  Mohammed could not contain himself any longer, his head rocking back so far that Ethan saw his permanently stubbly neck.

  “‘Interested parties’, that’s good man. Whatever the fuck they are, did you manage to get through in one piece?”

  “They were fine. Well, nothing beyond the norm anyway. Ash did her usual thing of getting up early with her dad to run God knows how many miles around the hotel. And Ash’s mother talked about nothing but weddings and marriage the whole time.”

  Mohammed laughed again, and although Ethan had crouched down to switch on his computer, he could see his glowing face as clearly as if he were looking at him. Ethan suppressed a sigh. Looks like I’ll have to read the new files myself, he thought.

  “Fuck me, you’re caught in the web now. Once you talk to her mum about it, that’s it. I tell ya, when Hasna’s mum mentioned marriage for the first time, she didn’t stay an interested party for long. This is getting serious.”

  “We’ll see. Who can know what’ll happen in five years’ time?”

  “That’s good stuff, man. I like it. That’s what I should have said. When I was—”

  “Has anyone found out what’s wrong with Si since I’ve been away?”

  “No, mate, no one’s heard anything.”

  “Have there been any cases with press interest?”

  “A few. There was an Ick who’d gone mad and smashed a school up. We were all running round for a few days but it’s under control now. I’ve sent you the file to look over, I knew you wouldn’t want to miss out.”

  “Good.”

  Ethan went to the end of the office to check whether anyone had bothered to print off the performance data that compared their team to those based in other city zones. No one had, and he added it to his mental list of tasks before returning to his desk. Mohammed had already wandered off.