Saving the Cyber Soaps by Mike Morris (fiction novels to read TXT) 📖

arm, and his finger was curled into a trigger. Folks around here seemed to have picked up some bizarre medical practices from the mad Doctor Payne. Behind the man, neatly stacked, were shelves with all sorts of nails, screws, wiring, old-fashioned locks, and hand tools. A lot of the merchandise was recycled, but some of it was new. All in all, it was quite impressive. The other three walls, and a center counter were very different. My shoes crunched on broken glass, shelves had been torn down, appliances and light fixtures were scattered everywhere. The man’s battered face was grim, his eyes bored into me.
“You got my answer,” he grated. “I don’t have any choice. Your boss gave me three days, and I’ll be out in three days. Now you get out, I got work to do.”
“I’m tired,” I told him. “Tired of having guns pointed at me.” The mad doctor and the wretched bartender had leeched away most of my capacity for fear or any other emotion. I was living on borrowed time. I made an effort. “Look,” I told the man. “I’m not threatening you. I’m not holding a gun. I came in here for directions.” I looked around again. “I’m sorry about whatever trouble you’re in, but all I want to know is how to get to the nearest train, or bus, or subway. I’m going to talk to the City Authorities.”
“City authorities,” he said incredulously. “The city authorities did this.” His shotgun arm swept the chaos, and I ducked wearily.
“I don't mean the local gangsters,” I told him. “I'm tired, not crazy. I'm going to see the Mayor, or the City Manager.” A horrible suspicion penetrated my tired brain. “They are still alive? I mean, there is still some sort of halfway lawful government here, isn't there?” I realized I'd given myself away, but I was too tired to care.
“My name is William L Jones,” I said. “What’s yours?”
He looked at me disgustedly, and the prosthetic shotgun retracted with a snap. “I don't believe it,” he sighed. “The Moles are dumping their crazies and criminals up here! You took what was left of the talent and buried it, left us with nothing, and now we get your rejects.”
“Hold on,” I said hastily. He was working himself up, and the shotgun arm was only the flick of a switch away. “I'm not a criminal. I'm an Ambassador from underground.”
His eyes had stopped appraising my torn clothes and worn shoes and were fixed on my face. “Yeah, I know you,” he said slowly. “I used to watch the Big D channel till the Ward Boss started collecting TV fees.” He considered for a while. “Big D was always a little better that the other garbage we got served up. Almost as if the folks there realized we were capable of rational thought.” His voice hardened. “Of course, your show was always a load of crap.”
The Soaper in me started to formulate a sneering speech, but the part of me that had survived the past month knew he was right, and the sneer turned into a rueful smile. “She tried, for a long time,” I said, “but I, we, the soapers, and the suits, nobody gave her much help.” I looked at him. “I used to be her friend, before the world ended. I let her down. We were as bad as you Topsiders - worse. We had more to work with, and we've almost thrown away our last chance.” I had told him I was a Mole, I had admitted that, by his standards, I was a rich, well-fed sellout. He had every reason to hate me. “Look,” I told him. “You can disarm me. Take me to the Mayor as your prisoner. I've got papers from Big Dee. All I want to do is talk to whatever lawful authority there is up here.”
He relaxed and lowered the shotgun. “I got nothing to lose,” he said. “I thought I could make it out here, spread some order a little further out, but I guess this part of town’s not ready to settle down yet.” He started to sort some tools into a backpack. “What are we waiting for?” he said.
The storekeeper was a pretty decent guy, and I think he was quite impressed that I had made it as far as his ruined shop without getting killed. He left everything but a few tools and a huge chunk of cheese, and we set off quickly for the skyscraping spires of the city. I was leaner and fitter than I had been since the Early days, and after a couple of miles, he gave up all pretense of guarding me. We shared a sizeable chunk of cheese and I produced a flask of Dr Payne’s liquor and a package of his freeze-dried beef (or dog, or cat) jerky. Soon, we were talking like old friends, and I got to know a few things about Topside that even Dee had been unable to learn.
The news wasn’t exactly good. Quite naturally, the Topsiders hated our guts. After all this time, I was attempting to talk to the leader of a once proud city that we Moles had kept starved of capital, educated manpower and hope for two hundred years. Just a few years ago, they would have been beggars, hating us, but cap in hand for any scraps that we could spare. Now, a daily shuttle plane flew between Chicago and Boston and New York, and the cities had begun to pull themselves up by their bootstraps. They still needed us, but they could smell success and they were proud of it. A lot of Topsiders wanted to take what we had by force.
“The Mayor’s a decent guy,” the shopkeeper told me. “And the chief of police.” He looked at me somberly. “But there’s a lot of pressure, William. We’re a democracy now, and it’s not easy to persuade hungry folks to be patient.”
“I never fully realized,” I started to say, “just how much…” for once I was tongue-tied. “I still don’t know your name,” I said, but he was lost in thought, not speaking for hours.
It became obvious as we got closer in that the citizens of Chicago were fighting hard to resurrect a functioning city. Some buildings were patched up, and even sloppily painted. Curbside stalls gave way to shops, graffiti was painted over. For every Topsider that hid in a television set, or crawled into a bottle of the raw home-made booze that served for alcohol up here, there was another who, against all odds, retained some drive and determination, and even humanity. There were schools, and laboratories, and hospitals, run by self-taught engineers and scientists and doctors, men and women who, before the Fall had been janitors and bus drivers, and insurance salesmen. The cream of the crop had been taken away, and then Moles like us, with a reasonable amount of education had burrowed into the ground and left the dregs to starve. I began to see just how much damage we had done to the people here, while we wasted our time in the stale comfort of our burrows. I had thought in my arrogance that I was quicker and cleverer than these ragged Chicagoans, and that the Burrows held what was left of the cultural and scientific heritage of the human race. I had thought that Dee was hopelessly naïve, but she alone in our underground bunker had realized that we needed each other.
Finally we came to the terminus of a functioning bus service, a brick blockhouse with a big sign, guarded by a grim man in clothes probably borrowed from what was left of the central Transportation Museum. The storekeeper handed over a few tokens, and I said “thanks….,” and he turned away without giving his name. After a long wait a battered old bus coughed to a stop, choking on whatever passed for fuel up here. I thought about how our little electric cars in my safe city below would have helped these people. But the bus and its driver had heart. We struggled inwards over the pot-holed roads, and the city gradually began to pull itself together in a weird sort of way.
The bus meandered round several piles of rubble, always coming back to a wide road that was pretty well cleared. It pounded on, scattering cyclists like fish, laboring past a converted auto that appeared to be running on wood chips. A wide, ruined building blocked the road and I kept wondering when the driver would divert, until we dived under it.
“Old Post Office,” the driver called. We had picked up several passengers and many of them scrambled off the bus and wandered away among the ruins.
When we came up again I got a clear view of the river and the ruined city center with its stunted skyscrapers pointing arthritic fingers at the sky. I stared straight ahead, deliberately avoiding a sight I’d not seen in two hundred years. “Soon enough,” I thought.
The city center had been badly damaged in the first few years after the exodus, when we all lashed out in frustration, before the big corporations started to burrow beneath the ground for safety. Chicago had been a city of spires, but the big towers suffered when rival warlords fought for territory, first with planes and bombs, later with bazookas and guns, and finally with knives and rocks. The old, proud skyscrapers were reduced to jagged splinters, pointed defiantly at the stars, to where the travelers had sucked out all our drive and talent. A few days before, when I had emerged blinking into the light of late winter, they had been giant ice stalagmites, sparkling in the distance. Now the ice had melted and they were broken skeletons, weeping rusty tears.
But the remains of local government refused to abandon Chicago’s heritage. The Xerox Center building, ruthlessly beheaded at the twentieth floor was the headquarters of the local police/militia, who obviously commanded a large chunk of the city budget. Despite their black uniforms and boots, however, they were approachable. I was heartened to see a stunted civilian in work clothes arguing furiously with a bored-looking cop twice his size.
The bus trundled down wide city streets past ruined skyscrapers whose bottom floors had been patched up and put to use. The pattern seemed to be ten floors or so of grimy, gutted space, crammed with old machinery, topped by one floor of office workers and managers, who lived unconcernedly under the crushing weight of the thousands of tons of twisted girders and crumbling masonry of the wrecked and abandoned upper floors. We circled around, slowly approaching my destination.

CHAPTER 8 – The Big Tower
“Sears Tower,” the driver called, looking at me curiously. “City Manager.” I got out, the storekeeper treading on my heels, and we both looked up into the early spring sky. It was all there, stretching impossibly upward, one hundred and ten floors, still intact, stripped bare of concrete in places, blackened by old fire at the top, still straight and strong, the legacy of all of us survivors, a defiant arm raised to the sky. The storekeeper beside me gazed upwards expressionlessly and I saw a tear slide down his face.
“What’s your name?” I asked him.
“John,” he said, “John Doe.” He laughed for the first time I'd known him. "I guess my folks had a sense of humor."
We walked into the atrium and I realized what all of us Moles had been missing. This was a massive, airy, and beautiful sculpture. Down below we were warm and comfortable, living in warm, comfortable caves. We were meant to live in the open air, under the stars. We Moles had grown old and sour