Jon and Petor looked at each other. Once again, Doc had lost them. But it was no matter, the movement of the caravan in front of them meant they were spared the possible long winded explanation that would follow asking him what the hell he was talking about.
The Gate had begun to enter the settlement that might be the place where they met with their destiny.
THE FIRST LEVEL BEGAN more than a hundred feet below the surface. It was a warren of small offices and work spaces, divided and soundproofed to enable the chatter and hum of electrical and computer equipment to stay muted, and not to build to an intolerable level of noise. Within these small units, a single operative monitored a single camera, with a vid machine recording on slow speed—with a jerky, almost surreal playback when required—any activity.
There was hardly any activity that took place on the outside, and most of the tapes used in the vid machines had been recycled so many times that watching the relatively dry and warm outside on tape playback became transformed into watching a winter scene, dappled with the snow of overused tape. Not that it mattered much, as the most they ever recorded was a bunch of altered stickies returning to where they had been released, hungry and tired and trying to find a way back into the womb that had birthed their even more mutated mutie forms.
The watchers worked in shifts, and were allocated other tasks every few calendar months so that they didn’t burn out to the point where nothing on the screen could register anymore on their vid-fried synapses. They had a full life—or at least, as full a life as was possible when most of their existence was beneath ground.
And that was just as well, for when they were on sec-monitor duty they had to endure the most cloistered and mentally debilitating of environments. They sat in a molded chair, in front of the vid screen, the only sounds the loud whir and clank of the ancient vid recorders. Over the decades, these had grown louder and the machines more erratic. There were priorities, and even though there were plentiful supplies to keep the settlement in good condition, they existed in a perpetual state of emergency where only the things deemed necessities were allowed to be kept in A-l condition. The rest existed in a make-do-and-mend state. And because there had been so little threat from aboveground for so long, the sec-vid machines had slipped further and further down the priorities list until they had almost disappeared off the bottom.
Which was why sec-vid observer Simon Rack sat impassively in front of his monitor, in a darkened room lit only by a dull red glow, humming tunelessly to himself to try to blot out the noise of the machine. If this one machine had not been separated by the partition walls, and the noise had been amplified by that of the other vid machines, then the hideous racket would have been enough to drive a man to insanity. As it was, Rack felt sometimes close to the edge just in his small room, hemmed in by walls that were drab and barely visible in the semidarkness, the only distractions from the screen being the intercom system that connected him to the main sec force control room, the small chemical toilet in the corner of the room and the jumble of wires emerging from a cavity in one corner of the room, leading into a shaft. Sometimes, when he was really bored, Rack wondered what the jumble of wires had been connected to and why it had been removed. But as that had occurred long before his time, it was idle speculation, with nothing on which to base any guess he might try to make.
The toilet was in the room because the operative placed in the room was secured, locked in until the shift was over. It was something the operatives accepted, even if they didn’t like it. The job was so tedious, so mind-numbingly boring, that an unlocked and open door might have proved an overwhelming temptation.
So he sat, humming noisily and badly, bored, and wishing that his shift would end. There was never anything to see, anyway.