New Dark Age: New Dark Age, #1

By Ted Pepper

NEW DARK AGE

 

All technology failed and the world crumbled. Years later, Karo finds a dead boy in the woods.

 

Humanity rose for hundreds of years from Industrial Revolution to Digital Revolution to the point where those that could afford to would live forever. Then, the whole structure of communications, power, control all failed. The world crumbled.

 

A century later, scattered groups of people cling onto some of the old ways, while a few others work to invent new ones. Resources get ever scarcer, and the world has become a fractured place of ignorance and danger.

 

People such as Karo and Trey still travel from place to place to trade. They carry knowledge and ideas along with them. They risk and they hustle.

This trip to the Free Market is to pay a debt and negotiate a deal for enough energy to sustain their community for another few months. It should have been routine, but it will set off a chain of violent events that make this new dark age darker still.

 

New Dark Age is an epic adventure story, exploring a compelling world where technology has failed and people battle to cling onto civilisation.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Ted Pepper
• Release date: Oct 26, 2023
• ISBN: 9798223691617

Book preview

Chapter One | Pebbles & Meat

Naked in the Woods

Karo, Next Summer

I shave my body with my dead mother’s knife. The same blade that she tried to kill me with. Shaving is just a matter of ten calm minutes of work in the cool dawn air. Sharp metal edges up my legs and over my scalp. In mid-winter it was a laborious tussle of awkward fumbles and small bloodied nicks, now my hands are confident and business-like.

Gulliver hovers above, keeping watch. The woods may seem silent, but they won’t be safe for long. The hunters are still a few minutes away. Their employer, probably Iddra, can’t be much further behind.

We will need to make this little morning dance a quiet one.

I hold the blade with finger and thumb as I sit, cross-legged on my field-effect mat. A tiny amount of imprudently spent power makes the cool air bearable on my naked skin. From habit I finish with the back of my head. Slow, purposeful sweeps of the fine-edged blade remove every trace of three-day-stubble.

I feel ready. I feel clean.

There are many people who want me dead. In truth, of the people who know who I am, practically everyone wants me dead for one reason or another. I cannot hide by growing a beard, and there is no time to grow my hair long enough to offer any kind of disguise. My clean-shaved skull and flat chest makes me look boyish. It would not fool someone close up, but when they get that close it will be too late for us both anyway.

Shaving became an obsession. It itches when I miss a day. Just another end that is forever loose. Like completing the Pattern before breakfast, it is part of me. The compulsion of survival.

This blade never seems to dull. I think of Mara every time I draw it from my pack. Not the moment where I severed her head and threw the body into the raging fire. I just remember the good times.

I sense the hunters now. These three men are probably just carrying out a sweep of places they suspect I might have passed through, hoping to find a trail. Someone guessed well. Or they had tracking data of some kind. The last time I was here, things happened that changed my life forever. I found the dead boy in the woods.

My own knife, a wicked 40cm plasteel blade and a couple of nice smooth pebbles are never out of my reach. My sidearm is neglected, over with my ready-bag and pile of clothing. I have nine needles left, enough to deal with this problem from the comfort of a warm mat, but they are probably the last ammunition I will ever have, so in my prudence, I will have to use more modern methods.

Gulliver’s feed shows them 200m of undergrowth away. I gather the camouflage blanket over my head and power it up. Feel the slight tingle of static as it adapts to mask me against the soil and undergrowth. Active camouflage, my advantage, my edge, magic and science. Now I can only watch through my drone’s unblinking eye as they stumble forward in a ragged line.

From the edge of the clearing, I will be invisible.

From ten metres I will be the slightest of shimmers.

From still closer, a pixelated blur against the forest floor.

A year ago, this would have been a real dance with death. Despite my confidence, I’d have gone into this encounter knowing there was a definite chance of sustaining harm. A year ago, I would have had a partner and weapons and the protection of an innocent belief that I was doing the right thing.

Now, I’m alone and I have neither illusions nor compromises. This is no more than light butchery before breakfast.

The first to see me is the wild-haired one with the blue-facial tattoo and faded orange dungarees. I cannot imagine the danger he must have gone through to loot them from some abandoned home or storehouse. Century-old fashion wear is hard to come by. He is my prey now.

I had intended to let fly with a stone to catch him in the eye, but his mouth forms a perfect O of surprise as he makes out my shape. I let the blanket fall aside, lower my aim a fraction and snap-flick-throw a pebble from my fingers and wrist.

He is barely into a warning when the missile cracks on his teeth and rebounds into the soft tissue at the back of his throat. He manages a gulp, gurgle and plop as he starts to fold down, clutching and retching.

The second hunter is nearer, but he barely registers the naked woman suddenly exploding to her feet. It is an easy knife throw from here. My blade pierces the spot just above his collar bones and sends him into a spiral-fall to the dry sandy soil.

The third does see me, but he also sees his two friends dying. He should have paid less attention to them and more to the pale-skinned fury closing with him at speed.

He has weapons so I take care to put him down safely. I choose a hard open-palm to his left ear that leaves him shocked, offended and vulnerable to the three punches that follow and finish him.

Daisy? He just watches the whole thing. Bored. They didn’t even see him. He snorts to clear his nostrils, closes his big brown eyes and pretends to go back to sleep, accustomed to my rituals and violence. He knows we will have work soon.

These three scavengers were easy. The hunter they work for will be anything but simple. If he can find me. I am avoiding incredibly dangerous people. I say that as a dangerous person myself.

We need to move before they are missed. I recover my knife and wipe it clean on a threadbare jumper. ‘O boy’ is still with us, but he hasn’t got long left as he twists and writhes on the floor, puce-faced. I don’t want him making a stain on those clothes, so I unfasten them and pull them off him as he chokes. He lost a front tooth when I landed that stone. That must have hurt. The clothes are too large for him and they’ll be way too big for me, but they are exactly the kind of thing I would never wear over my skintight black technicals. So they will be perfect. I pull them over his hips, knees and ankles. Roll them up and shove them into my bag while his strong hairy legs kick and twist along a path only he can see. I will want these orange dungarees later, to wear and to trade.

I pat his shoulder softly as he mewls his last.

The silence feels even heavier without him. I feel the coolness of the air now, shiver.

As I pick up my technicals I feel the soft purr of the fabric. They vibrate to lose any dust or dirt that stuck to them yesterday. It’s a tiny but extravagant use of power, but I have plenty. There is enough energy in my kit for the rest of my lifetime which may be very short, or may be very, very long.

Mr Daisy will lead the way. He’s moving off in the right direction as soon as I even think it, muscles corded under black fur. Gulliver goes swooping to take up position half a click ahead. I feel like I’m going home.

Wrong Door

Deus, Last Winter

This will be the furthest any Norvolker has managed to penetrate into Powerhouse. Of all the pre-Crash buildings that scavengers have picked over and emptied for a hundred years, this one place remains the most stubbornly intact and impenetrable.

A vast monolith.

Myth has it that this building powered the vast monorail tracks than span the country. When people needed such things. When people could afford them. It provided the energy needed to lift the freight sleds laden with heavy goods. It lifted them just far enough from the ground to allow small electric motors to propel them at speed from North to South, from East to West. Night and day, tirelessly. The tracks, unbroken strips of cleared hard ground continue to be the most important trade and travel routes available, but the magic that made them sing all those years ago has gone and people have learned to rely on foot and hoof power today.

But those that know, and those that dream, reason that some of that wealth of energy must be left in the Powerhouse for the taking, if they could only find a way in.

There are many people who would risk their life for a fully charged power-cell. The Norvolkers make it a profession.

Their find, a closely guarded secret, is an access hatch some 5km from the building itself. It leads to the maintenance tunnels under the tracks. Lying as it did, just a short walk from the Summer Fair, made any hope of secrecy depend on them only working the site during the darker months of each year. Cut turf and carefully adjusted undergrowth hid the metal square from other crews as well as any innocents that could be abroad.

After a generation of furtive effort, it had been Deus that has contrived a twisted metal bar into a shape that turned the mechanism that locked the hatch in place. That click of the hatch’s release assured his place in the crew pecking order for the days ahead.

It led, as they hoped, to a gentle plascrete incline down below the tracks. It took them into a long low tunnel stretching dark and dry into the distance of either direction.

Each scavenger crew has its insignia and model of behaviour. For the Norvolk it is the bright splashes of hair colour, a result of their near-monopoly on pigments and dyes thanks to a lucky find a generation ago. That, and a measured cautious approach. Some crews value the acquisition of wealth and the acceptance of risk. These yellow and red-haired seekers take their time, conceal their finds, sell only when the price is high and the need is great.

Under the code that governs the group’s behaviour, Deus’ success with the door means that he has first choice of whatever they find for that season, so he leads from the front as the small party crouch to traverse the low concrete tube, making their way with a mix of burning torches and small electric lamps, flickering white light and guttering orange fumes.

They note, try and then pass a locked side door and move steadily on towards the main prize of the Powerhouse. After sixty hopeful but calm minutes of sliding, scuffed heads and whispered echoes they end in mute frustration.

By Deus’ reckoning they stand within 100m of the main building overhead, but the way is blocked by a forbidding metal door, featureless other than for a smooth black central panel.

They’ve seen these before. They were common before the Crash. Some kind of display and access screen. The kind of lock that is either left open by the loss of power at the death of all things digital, or resolutely shut. This is the shut kind.

The obvious methods to open it all fail. Deus tried a pressed palm to the cool surface, known incantations, wake words followed by commands. There is the tiniest pinprick of white light in one corner, so somewhere in this complex there is still power, and there is still a way to open this fucking door. They just need to find it.

This.

Fucking.

Door.

The others make themselves comfortable, they know this work takes time, that persistence and a methodical approach pay dividends greater than inspiration or force. Deus has earned the right to be first, even though a couple of them know wake words and commands he hasn’t tried yet. These are patient people. The space begins to fill with acrid smoke from their torches and one by one they extinguish them until only a few pale luminescent lamps remain. Norvolk are accustomed to the dark places.

Abandoning efforts to gain access by persuasion, Deus starts to explore whatever the fallback must be. Even in those golden days, things would go wrong. Every computer had a reset of some kind.

He carefully works his clever fingertips around the rim and reverse of the polished rectangle. Feels for anything uneven or with the slightest give or take. Feeling doesn’t mean pressing. Again, the crew have learned that where there are certain patterns of controls. Particular actions that may work. He hopes to find two buttons close together. Holding them both and then releasing one until something happens is the most common way to reset the sleeping machines.

There is only one small area, a corner that seems to have a little give.

He consults with the others.

They agree that holding it while he counts to ten is the most likely action. He feels that just a simple click would be a better first choice. They agree on the long press as the safer approach.

But there is a reason why Deus is in the lead.

He closes his eyes and slips his finger into the space behind and instead of the long, slow, firm press he gives it the barest of clicks. Feels it give and spring back.

There is a sound. A hum. Just on the edge of perception. There is a smell. A familiar smell of electronics waking from slumber. Nothing more, but he can sense a reaction from the crew behind him.

He opens his eyes.

The corridor is lit.

He blinks his eyes clear.

It isn’t much light. It isn’t even good light. For several hundred metres, as far as the side door behind them, two thin strips of light have appeared at the top of the cylinder, and one on either side at ankle height. It is beautiful. Nothing in the world is so smooth, so perfect, so clear. Even for people who are used to dealing with the work of the World Before, something as simple as a perfectly straight tunnel with smooth walls, lit perfectly, is breathtaking.

Beauty depends as much on where you stand as what you see.

They enjoy the moment.

Of course, he can’t waste the power, they are here for the power. He gives a second sharp click and as expected the lights cut. The darkness returns.

Hours pass.

They try every wake phrase, every command, every press sequence until they admit defeat, but it has still been a good day. There is still the side door. They can consider things they may have missed and try again tomorrow.

They are neither tired nor disheartened as they relight their torches and return along the shaft.

As their leader Deus brings up the rear, and it is only by chance that he stops them.

The side door. Some kind of light that wasn’t there before. The glow is only feint. If he had been carrying a lamp or a torch, he would have missed it. If he was in the middle of the group, he would have missed it. A keypad, a familiar grid of twelve rectangular buttons, inscribed with the numbers, * and # with a single green button beneath.

These are easy. Their crew know how to do these.

One of them has studied their notes on common entry codes and the over-ride patterns that are used until she can do them in her sleep.

It takes her five minutes of examination and three attempts. Three sets of six soft bleeps.

On the third a heavy click. A lock unlatched. A sigh of the seal around the door. Years of tension loosened. Deus nods to her. She is now the lead. She will have first choice on the other side. She will open the door.

So it goes, that is the way. Success takes the point.

They space out. Take a moment of reverence. Some of them had never been present when a locked door was opened before this day, now they will all be veterans.

She tries to pull and push the door, but it was only when she slides it from right to left that it gives, creaking and complaining as it tracks along dry metal rollers into position.

Darkness on the other side. A bad sign. It speaks of lost power. But there is a sound. Such a strange sound down here.

Panting. A sound like a living creature. A dark corridor going ahead into something new and undiscovered. A soft panting sound.

Deus does a double take. A triple.

There, sitting on the other side of the door is a dog. A large black hound. It stops panting. Tilts its head to one side. Regards each of them for a moment.

The Norvolk love dogs, they have many and this crew would value an animal as beautiful as this in their company. The beast however has other ideas. It rises to its feet and pads between them, not even wagging its tail in thanks as it vanishes into the shadows towards the exit ramp they opened up that very morning.

Fuck me.

They watch it go. They are not here for animals.

The crew find real riches behind that side door. Neatly packed supplies, clothing, some batteries. It ends with a flood-pool and drying in the dirt there are a few smeared footprints that seem to show the dog had come from that direction.

They never stop talking about that dog. Inventing explanations and tall-tales. None could explain what they had seen. Few believed them when they told the story, judging it an embellishment to enliven a good but routine find. It was more than a year later when they heard of that dog again.

Well, a mystery that old and that peculiar would hardly vanish forever now, would it?

Those late morning times in our Big House kitchen became my most precious memories. I was still a young girl then. Mind you, I was already the strongest, fastest and longest enduring of my cohort in the Patterning. After the final run of each session over the hills near the outer ring and then back to the Big House, always the same, we would push into the kitchen for hot broth and fresh bread. We only had a little time before we had to go to the class with Jeffers.  Some would sit steaming on the edge and the lucky one or two would squeeze onto the bench by the fire cupping that fiery-fierce chilli soup with numb lips.

Chilli. Harcourt is the only place that grows them, and we put them in everything.

That run, at first it killed me. Years ago now. Everyone ahead clustered as a group with me walking the last click behind. The next morning I’d be so stiff I could hardly move. I learned though. I learned to stretch and found ways to recover and then how to run like you really needed to get somewhere.

Then, one day I was first. Every day I tried to finish further and further ahead of the pack. I raced against myself.

Funnily they never liked me when I was the slow one and they liked me even less when they just saw me vanish ahead. I’ve always liked to be alone, the other children were just dull. Being first meant I got to pick where I sat in the kitchen, right up close to the glowing logs on that green plastic bench. I think it was made in the old times, it was certainly the most elegant and well-made piece of furniture I knew. All elegant lines and no joints. None of us could make anything like it today.

Mind you that year, nobody else would have sat there, on that bench by the fire anyway. Except me. That was because Dr Mara had taken to sitting there, sipping her herb-tea between meetings and workings. Everyone was terrified of her, unlike her husband Jek who was Dr Popular. The others would be gutless and silent in her presence, piling into the room laughing and cheering, quickly falling into a companionable but sullen silence as soon as they sensed her presence.

Yet to me, to me she was unfailingly pleasant. She would shift up to make room for my skinny arse, ask me about the training. Never obvious questions. Always something perceptive as if she’d been watching and just wanted a few details clearing up. She’d tell me stories of the old times if I asked, and I always asked. She’d talk for a while in that whispering sing-song voice of hers, never loud enough to be heard across the room.

It was strangely intimate. She never made eye contact. Her gaze would constantly shift to take in every detail in the room and the hundred other places she can always see. She had eyes everywhere. We all knew she could see everything, reach into any moment. She was ever seeing. I knew somehow though, that a little of her attention was on me.

She always wore black. People joked she was the only Prior to be a full paid up member of the Brethren. That was another one of those jokes nobody ever told in her hearing although she had a trick of always being around the next corner when you were about to tell the punchline.

Her red hair, vivid Norvolk-dyed, was long and loose. Her skin impossibly smooth and with that deep glow of health people never have anymore. Except Priors. Eyes almost entirely black. She must have been nearly two hundred summers old by then, and although she looked like a young woman there was something ancient, something timeless, something deeper than you knew in the way she spoke and looked and held things for inspection.

Everyone had Mara wrong. They called her Ice Queen behind her back. She knew, she even called herself that to me in one of her rambling stories. With me she was thoughtful, kind, patient. She made me feel special. Of course, this also marked me out as even more of an outcast from the group, but I hardly cared. All winter when she was around, I’d be left out of conversations, never ostracised but never included.

I missed Mara so much in her long sleep every summer when Jek walked the Big House, joking, making things, and talking big plans.

He was strong and lovely to us all I’ll admit. He was older than Mara. Well, he looked it. I suppose they were both about the same age. When she awoke each year at the Fire Festival it was so special. The next morning-after, with everyone nursing hangovers and the other children even further behind me on the long run, she would always take up the conversation exactly where we’d left it off at Springtide.

So, although I was a foundling, in a way I was loved. Loved, or at least tolerated with kindness by all the adults in the House that I attached myself to, and I think loved by Mara. I felt so, and I loved her like no other, a big sister, an inspiration, a woman with real power. Although Jek often talked of his love for her, typically before bedding someone else from the settlements for a few weeks, I think I loved her more than anyone else in Harcourt. Nobody outside could be said to do anything other than utterly hate her, but they did not know her like I did.

Winters filled with a patchwork of conversations. Summers laden with boredom and anticipation.

Sweaty in the Green

Danathans, Last Winter

The room is musky, damp. Tainted with green light.

Outside it is snowing, inside stiflingly hot.

A large oil-black machine hums and whirrs. A pipe feeds anonymous pink pulp into a mesh of tiny weaving barbs as two perfect human feet take shape beneath them. It radiates heat and wasted power as it vibrates and stamps fibre after fibre into place. Still barely legible the letters KR1 in old print are smudged over its covers. KR for KARPUL, a household name in 3D printing only a hundred years before.

Why are we using the big printer? Doesn’t it use a lot more energy?

KR0 is fucked, we’ve had two misprints dead on arrival this year. Tried cleaning it out, makes no difference.

Baby-faced man’s high pitch squeak of a grunt conveys an irritated acceptance. Another important tool they can’t replace.

He is one of three men gathered around the long, scarred plastic picnic table, across which they have spread a mass of maps and documents, cut, pasted and marked up in thick lines of black and red ink.

Without doubt he is the youngest. His frame is tall and slender, his skin impossibly pale and smooth. Baby smooth. He is naked and his skin shines as if oiled. His voice is cracked and breaks into squeaks at the slightest provocation. He struggles to suck in enough of the hot fetid air to breathe properly. The finest colouring of soft downy hair marks his scalp.

The second is weatherworn and covered in dirt from the road. His technicals are pure black, speckled with moss and dirt. He looks like he has lived in the undergrowth for weeks, and indeed he has. He is as tall as the first. Exactly the same height. Indeed his face is identical but his features are darkened by the sun. His voice is quiet, as if having remained in silence for so long he has become a habitual whisperer.

The third is ancient. Should he stand-tall he would be identical in height to the others, for he is a third twin. His eyes are yellowed and marked with cataracts, his face lined and darkened, his left arm twisted and deformed. His shoulders are piled with a thick wrap of blankets. Even in this furnace of a room he shivers with discomfort. His hair, grey-black, pushes out from his head, his ears, his nostrils. His nails are broken and long. His body is riddled with cancers and he has weeks to live.

Baby smooth leads the debate, controlling the arguments, inviting opinion and consent.

To business, brothers. Can you summarise for us what we actually know? Spare us guesses. What we know for certain? From this mass of inference and fakery, we made a persuasive case, but can we rely on it?

Road-weary brother picks up the sentence unbroken. We argue the case to risk everything. We should use all our remaining energy and resources and make our move now. We should work the remaining printer around the clock.  Build brothers. Or, the alternative, we can wait, learn more.

Wait another lifetime? The expression of disgust on greybeard’s face betrays an impending outburst. His hands clench as best they are able, he pulls the blanket around himself and moves to straighten his back with an audible click.

Baby-Smooth stops him with the gentlest touch to his chest. We know you have lived nearly 16 years watching this tale. Brothers older than us have done the same. The question is, have we learnt enough to do something. Can we take a risk? Can we act, but ensure that if we fail other brothers can continue after we have gone?

All three nod.

Old brother speaks to Road-weary. State the case. Make the argument.

Power.

Everyone buys it, nobody knows where it comes from. A small trickle of new energy. Year after year.

We depend on it.

We know now where it does not come from. So, the proposal is we look seriously for where it does, and then we take it.

When we have strength to look, we will take enough power to replace whatever we use.

In this way we will either resolve our energy problem, or we will give ourselves more time to look.

Old brother gives the reply they all have on their lips. Or we will fail and not have the power to continue, and so we will end.

There is no power from over the sea. We know this is true. We can find where it comes from. That, we can do.

They nod. Greybeard raps his knuckles on the table in agreement.

Baby Smooth smiles. It is an odd smile. A baby’s smile on an adult face. Then it’s agreed.

In the room next door, the Dutch trader who gave them the last information falls into an exhausted, final sleep.

KR1 keeps printing the new brother, a cell at a time.

There was no set age when you started Patterning. It depended more on whether someone thought you were ready and where you lived.

Everyone living at the Main House or Kitson House would be enrolled at some point between when they could manage to not shit their pants and when they hit puberty. From the settlements that are further out, it really depended whether you were marked out as having some special potential. Some just went to work the land. The kids from Kess were often the best of us, simply because for them to be let off work there, and to walk to the Main House and back every day, on top of an exhausting day’s training, they had to be either strong or clever.

Strong or clever. That is what we always looked for.

Mornings were for strong. We would drill with Jess. Always the same routine. Each day picking up a new point here or there, learning by watching and doing. Pre-programmed steps and moves repeated endlessly. Exercises. Drills. Bout after bout. The daily run. We would always finish sweaty, scuffed, breathless and empty of energy.

Afternoons were for clever. Jeffers would tutor us as best he could, but he always struggled with the way his students would come and go, enrol, and graduate without any rhyme or reason. The stink of our sweat can’t have helped but I guess he was used to it. Lessons tended to be either working in a small circle to develop basic skills or working through the library. We had two view screens and thousands of hours of video, audio and text material that he would draw to our attention and discuss. He tried to be strict, but Jeffers was a kind soul and we were feral.

When there was an odd number of people, it was always me with no partner.

That suited me on the view screens. I could wander through the materials and soak up things nobody else seemed interested in. Jeffers left well alone, always seeming a little tentative around me. Other times I just squatted down with the manual for the Pattern, page after page of handwritten notes and drawings. I’d ignore the chat and just focus on the wealth of knowledge there. Suck it up. So, I consider myself to be self-taught. Page after page in dark blue ink and the same handwriting, meticulous, without a single correction or error. I always wondered about the hand that wrote that book.

The end of the day was my favourite. Before a communal meal, where we took it in turns to serve each other, we would gather in the yard and run through practice for our morning Pattern. We would train together every evening so that when we were alone the next morning, we could complete our Pattern perfectly. That was the theory, most people only completed the first two sections in private.

The steps and shapes were identical every day. A complex, repetitive, rhythmic set of moves that placed the body in a series of stressful lock positions and fluid changes of posture. Shadow boxing, we would brace, punch, block, kick, and each time restore ourselves to equilibrium ready for the next sequence.

We would compete for who could complete as much of the Pattern as possible without error. Each day, a grown-up from the House would be the demonstrator and call out the changes as we each moved, while our teacher, Jess would tap out time with her staff and pace through the ranks watching us. If anyone made even a tiny error, she would lay her hand on them gently as a signal to sit out and watch the people that were better.

Rain or shine, heat or cold, every evening the same.

My memory is good. I practiced alone for my spare hours. Learned to lock in every move, to the point where I could go further than the other students, further than the adults who would demonstrate. I could reliably go as far as Jess herself. To the end. It was only eleven minutes of movement, but every day it allowed me to measure myself against a standard, and win.

That sense of victory didn’t come early on though. The first year was tough.

On my first day, I remember shivering cold in the roll call. Everyone already knew who I was from difficult encounters earlier in the year.  I’d been the snotty kid watching them train and going through their things when they were busy. Only one person was glad to see me, Col.

Col was the weakest in the group and the target for every joke and comment that was heaped his way. He had born it silently and in good humour. The way of it was that the instructors encouraged an element of what they called banter and competition. I would call it collective bullying.

The moment I joined, the load fell off Col’s shoulders. No longer the target, he learned to disappear a little deeper into the fabric of the group. Nobody would pair with him still, except when the alternative was me, but nobody had the energy to insult or hurt him either. I was the new target for bullying and I took all the energy they had.

The main difference was that right from the first day, I hit back. A pinch was answered with a punch. A subtle hard elbow in a training bout was returned with something worse. A harsh joke with an insult. I still had to put up with pepper in my food and other nonsense, but I just learned to like pepper.

Col, bless him, tried to be kind. He knew what it was like to be the bottom of the inverted pyramid, but I didn’t want or need any of that. I let him know his kindness was appreciated but of no interest. The day he finally graduated, three years ahead of me, I put him down hard in the training yard. Well, the others were watching, and I had a reputation to build.

Chapter Two | A Dead Boy

In Which Karo Encounters Death

Karo, now

Although this is by no means the first dead body I’ve seen, it is the first corpse I’ve found on my way to the shops.

Our destination is the Free Market in Boston. That is only about 5 clicks of woods and boggy land down the road we’ve been following.  Dead boy isn’t going anywhere and until I’m sure there’s nobody else around, neither are we. I’ve twisted myself into a hollow at the base of an old tree. It gives me good cover. My camouflage is powered and active. Against the ivy and bark I’m little more than a softly shimmering shadow. I am probably a lot safer than I feel right now.

Gulliver circles idly above, slow, and silent. It may be a waste of power, but I will get no satisfaction from knowing my drone’s battery was fully charged right up to the moment of my untimely death. The whirr of his motors is the only sound in the trees. No birdsong, not even a brush of wind.

The dappled autumn sunshine, soft shadows and gentle silence that felt so comfortable only a few minutes ago have suddenly gained an oppressive and suffocating menace that presses me to make myself as small as possible.

I make hand signals to Trey, gesture for him to take position high and to the left to cover my approach. It is going to have to be me that gets in closer. There are some jobs you can’t delegate.

The dumb fuck isn’t even looking in my direction.

He stays belly to ground, watching everything except the hand signals directing him to move.  The problems of management.

Never mind. Irritated, I switch back to the scene.

There are no traces of heat or signs of movement. In fact, there is nothing that Gulliver’s jaded excuse for artificial intelligence recognises as being any kind of threat nearby. My overlay shows me that in the years before the Crash, this place was what they called a Maker Park. There was a big pipeline of plas-stock flowing in below the ridge line, huge printers spewing out small plastic-ceramic goods to improve the lives of the fine people of Lincolnshire. It all used to quietly work its magic, night and day, in that low lying and artificially flat space now overgrown with goat willow and lime trees.

My visor is as always my faithful friend in the wild lands. My UnderSense, overlaid onto it, provides me with maps and overhead photographs from the years before the Crash as well as live footage from my drone or gunsight.

Helps me with my research.

So, enough prevarication. There is nothing to suggest I need to stay prone. Except every instinct for self-preservation I have. I risk a hiss to Trey.

He sees my signal and nods making that calm and thoughtful face.  He sees it again, coupled with a ruder gesture and makes his pouty face. He starts to belly crawl down-range. He does it so badly that he will probably draw any fire before he makes twenty metres.

Which would be the first useful thing he’s done today.

I know they assigned him to work with me as a moderating influence. To keep an eye on me. They certainly didn’t give him to me for effective protection.

I let him traverse fifty before I make my own move. By then I’m pretty sure that if anyone was going to shoot, Trey would have taken a bullet, a rock or an arrow for me. From there he can deploy his weapon and be ready to take a shot if anything hostile happens to be waiting.

That isn’t as great a comfort as you might think.

He’s such a liability with his rifle that I had Jacob in the armoury issue him with blanks a while back. It’s a rare calibre of weapon and we only have one full box of blanks and five good rounds left. The good ones need to be saved for someone who might use them to better effect one day down the line. Or until someone finds more of them. Why waste good bullets that nobody is capable of making any more of?

Anyway, like most guns, it’s more for show than use. Even so, if things do get kinetic, a loud noise and a plume of smoke may still buy me a moment to act. Probably best that Trey keeps thinking he can fire real bullets though.

I rise up, saving the energy left on my camo. There is probably only a minute’s worth of charge left at best. I keep to the shade and approach from upwind in 15 metre hops. I break them up with mouth-open crouches to listen for anything that all my technology missed.

The only sound is a crunch and gasp from Trey. I pause. Listen to the silence. Not even a bird squawk.

Out of habit I check how many shots I have left.

5:1:1. Five little baby deaths, one medium mummy death and one big, bad, daddy death.

5:1:1 says the small black-on-grey display. 5:1:1 says the light blue overlay at the edge of my heads-up-display. 77% power. I can afford to waste some of that. I switch to active targeting and the gunsight cross shimmers into view and follows my eyes as I walk the last few steps. If anyone is lying in wait and was prepared to expend resources to surprise Karo of the Harcourt House, well this is when they’ll do it.

Nothing.

Of course, there is nothing.

This is just a dead man in the woods.

I stretch my back and feel the tension leave my shoulders. Push back my hood and adjust my hair, tied back hard against my scalp.

The dead man, I’m currently calling him Bob, isn’t doing much.

Bob did not go easy.

Puncture wounds to his limbs and side show through with patches of rust red on his clothing. A half-arsed garrotte hangs around his neck with some serious bruising. Lots of bruising. It looks like it was tightened and released, tightened, and released.

Apart from the blood and probably some messy trousers, his clothes look good. Not Prior-good. Bob didn’t live at one of our Houses, he’s not one of my kind.

He’s an Outsider. But for someone living out in the wide world he’s in good shape for a dead man. Some kind of woollen cloth, carefully stitched patched and dyed. Proper shoes.

The belt webbing and a few other tells make me think he’s a scavenger of some kind. They almost always belong to a crew, and they will identify themselves with a crazy array of adornments.  We study their insignia back at Harcourt. His isn’t familiar to me though. I thought I knew all the groups that operate between our House and the Free Market. It’s my business to know as some are friendlier than others. Feathers, twined together to make some kind of wristband. Remarkably low-key. Either he’s not from a local group and he is far from his home. Or he’s in some wannabe start-up crew. They pop up and vanish like flowers every springtime.

A footstep and rustle of leaves.

I direct my target cross to the body mass-centre of the figure walking in from my left. Select ordnance. Stop just short of the release command.

You’re aiming at me aren’t you Karo? You know how that freaks me out? Will you ever stop with this showing off?

Trey is at least keeping his voice measured and low. I reward him with a smile and switch my visor from active targeting to threat detection. I tell Gulliver to ascend and hover and slowly scan in all directions for any movement further out that we may have missed.

Trey’s right, I am showing off. The adrenaline has passed and is being replaced by a slight sense of boredom.

I look more at Bob.

I don’t get much free time. Doctor Mara keeps me busy and likes to have me out in the world working for my rent. When I am at home though, we have probably the best library of media content in the world, and I’ve been working my way through it from an early age.

Late twentieth century comedy is currently my viewing of choice which is where I got Bob from. Everyone unknown is a Bob until proven different. I make the sound of saying it with that plummy rounded intonation that amuses me.

Nobody talks with that precision anymore.

Well, I find calling him Bob funny. I’m my audience of one.

Interestingly, he has an empty fresh leather sheath at his waist. So, this boy had a nice knife and he had it long enough to get a nice custom-made holder for it. Classy.  Only the Brethren make nice things like that these days, and this wasn’t pre-Crash gear.

Not like my blade.

His was made by someone living and breathing right now, mine was spaffed out by a machine before any of our great grandparents were born.

We always say that the Brethren bring the worst kind of luck. I spit at the thought of them stitching the leather with their eager little hands all the time to ward the jinx off. I think of them praying for the end of my kind and our way of life. Obsessive fuckers. I know spitting makes no difference, I’m a rational creature. But I still fire one off. Hey forest, enjoy my DNA all you like.

Best mate Bob is cool to the touch. By the look of him he probably passed on early this morning or, more likely, in the night before. It will be dark soon and I already had plans to push to the Free Market, sleep in a proper bed and eat hot food. Suddenly sleeping behind a wall in a room with a closed door seems like an even more sensible idea.

I risk a fingertip search to the ready bag, seemingly undisturbed at Bob’s waist.

There’s a book. I like books.

Whoever played the tight neck game with Bob wasn’t looking to steal from him seemingly, well except for his missing blade. The book is faded and worn but surprisingly intact. It will be the third in my small collection. A man’s face stares at me from the grey cover. ‘Believe Me’ in white script.

Can’t you just leave it? Won’t we have the text in our system? queries my helpful idiot companion. We disagree on the value of printed words. I’m the eccentric on this one. Until a few months ago I only had one book and I know every word printed in it. Now I will have three. I slip it into my thigh pocket.

Whoever made these technicals filled them with an array of pockets and flaps, and most of the little equipment I have matches its allotted space to absolute perfection. But there are many more spaces than there are things. So, the thigh pocket is now a book pocket.

Sorry Bob, I’m neglecting you, thank you for the book.

I do a good five-minute pass over Bob, the tree and the ground around and take in as much detail as I can, scan and record it all for review if I need to. There was certainly only one, or at most two, people other than our unfortunate friend pacing over the grass here. But who kills a scavenger? It’s just too wasteful.

He’s a scavenger. He must be. The gear, the feather insignia, the better state of health. Well apart from being dead. Scavengers accumulate stuff. Like the book. Sell it for energy or food. Pick over the oldest bones for the tastiest treats.

Why kill Bob?

A hundred and fifty years ago there was an expression: to ‘waste someone,’ meaning to kill them. Now it is quite literally true. Why waste him? Basic economics really, the main resource our culture lacks is people. Warm bodies with a pulse. We still have enough wreckage of dead civilisation left to pick over the bones of, for people like Bob to fill a valuable niche for a few hundred years. But day to day survival depends on more than sifting through leftovers. We need farmers. We need people.

We only just have enough people producing food to feed us to starvation level, and way more land to clear and plant if we only had the muscle. A few places have specialists that can make things, like Bob’s missing knife. Very few can afford to feed and clothe someone like me or my idiot partner. The supply of people with my skills is so low that anyone half decent would never lack a berth.

Travellers, traders, messengers, enforcers are all an expensive luxury.

Bob had a few years’ experience, a strong back and for all I knew a great work ethic. Who kills that? Maybe scare him shitless. Even maim him a little if his dick has gone where it shouldn’t, or to make a point about ownership of some asset or other. But death? Death?

Killing is for amateurs, or the people who kill amateurs.

Someone, within a day’s walk of here, is happy to tie Bob to a tree, do the stabby thing and then strangle him by instalments. I’ve done my share of killing but never like that and always for the best of reasons. Never wastefully.

Of course, the same argument tells me that I need to get my shit together and move on before my own considerable economic potential gets spread over the forest floor.