The Unbeast Who Was Not

On Monday morning, he awoke, not realising that the shambling unbeast was not under the bed. He thought there was plain old nothing under the bed. As he got ready for work, the unbeast didn't emerge. It wasn't seven feet tall. It didn't smell of deer carcasses. It didn't carefully tread downstairs. It didn't terrify itself with its ghastly appearance in the landing mirror. 

As he ate breakfast, it didn't climb into the passenger seat of the car. Obviously. It didn't exist! It didn't fiddle with the radio channels. It didn't accidentally play prog rock so loud the people in the next block could hear it. 

At work, it didn't hide under his desk, pointing out the desperate futility of trying to make order in a vast and chaotic universe. When he went to a meeting, it didn't sit next to him and whisper hilarious insults about everyone else there present. It didn't eat the apples from the staff room fruit bowl and spit the pips out all over the floor. 

It didn't pick up his smarmy boss and hang him out the window by his feet. It didn't hum TV show theme tunes annoyingly when he stayed late. It didn't ride home on the roof of his car making nee-naw sounds. 

When he got home, it didn't sit next to him on the sofa, talking over the events of the day, trying to help him make sense of a life which technically belonged to him even though it increasingly didn't seem to. It didn't insist on double helpings of ice cream at dinner time. When he went to bed, it didn't stay up watching TV until 3 in the morning and drink all the beer. 

At 3, it didn't creep upstairs. It didn't stand at the end of his bed, looking down at his fragile sleeping body. It didn't lean in closer, revealing its huge fangs. It didn't breathe the smell of rotten meat all over his face. Its stomach didn't rumble. And there, in the slumbering darkness, it didn't give him the tiniest little kiss, and then it didn't climb back under his bed. And as the light brightened behind the curtains, the unbeast didn't blink and simply disappear.

It didn't do that because it had never been there to start with.

Get Rich or Die Trying!

Do you see him? The bloke in the cap and overalls. No, not him. Actually, that's a woman. But don't worry. Easy mistake to make. We all look the same down 'ere. No, the one with the empty wheelbarrow, lining up to go down the tunnel. Yeah, him. Bearded, red eyed. Yep. That's how it is. He's waiting for all this lot to come out. String of, what, eight, nine folks coming out with their barrows full of that grey-brown awful-smelling sludge. That one whose sludge is a quivering heap all the way up to his neck. That, ladies and gents, is today's gold star winner. He's gonna get one of the high-up boxes. He'll have to climb up there, mind, at the end of this bloody long shift that lasts every day from infancy till death.

Anyway, there I go. Tunnel's clear now. It's even darker in there than the rest of this place, but at least there's no buttons. You see, all those grey slabs that make up the walls. Sorta four metre square, regular as regiments, all the way up. You look up and your eye can follow the dark in-between lines all the way to heaven. In fact, they actually seem to converge at some point somewhere south of heaven, but you see how high up it goes. Or - more accurately - that's how far down we are. It could even have been a huge pyramid that we're in except that then no light would get down here and some does bounce all the way down here. Get stuck it does. The light goes into your brain and sticks there, becomes part of you, never gets out. Nothin' ever gets out of here, mass or wave form.

I'm out the tunnel now, see how I'm looking at the slabs. Each one's a button. Look carefully and you'll see that pale pattern on it is not just weatherin', it's a symbol. Press the right symbols in the right order, bingo, sludge time. Fill your barrow. Earn a few more points. Me, I always go with wavy lines, hash symbol, triangle, circle, inequality sign, plus, plus, upside-down exclamation mark. Found a few variations that worked, and a few that occasionally pumped out more sludge than I usually get, but this is the one that worked for me most consistently. There I am pushing in the huge square faces of the blocks, more 'n double my height. Some of them are really tight, hard to press in. You feel like you're actually liftin' the whole thing and forcin' it back. Don't tell me we're not strong, despite the revolting stuff they call food here.

Right, but once you've got it pushed in, as I have there, I don't know if they meant it like this, but then you can just about get your fingers and toes in the gap and climb up. How? You learn by falling. You learn by failing. That's the only way. Fall from a low height's my advice. Break a leg on your first day. You won't make it. Dunno what happens to them. They just lie on the dirty sludgy concrete floor screaming and then whimpering for the rest of the day. In the morning - gone. Must come in the night and drag 'em off, I suppose. F'r all I know, they use these same barrows to do it. Imagine. The same broken-wheeled thing I drag around, day after day, could be the same damn thing that drags me off when I'm all finished and done. Who knows what creatures does it either? Dunno if it's creepier to think there's some white-faced night creature to sweep up the human debris, or if it's folk like us what does it.

I'm the first in this section. Others are going past me down other tunnels to other spaces. I'm always glad when I don't have to go down there though. The piles of skulls and bones really get to you. Especially if you know who some of them were. Memento mori's one thing, but seeing yourself in that heap of bones offers no insight nor hope. So I have the space to myself except for those who's climbing up over my head to get at buttons they want on the third or fourth level. Climb like monkeys, they do. Having said so, the shoes they give us is just like a leather bag. Like ballet slippers. Wearin' boots'd be no good. How you supposed to climb in steel toe caps? Anyways, eventually I get all my buttons pressed in, and I feel the tremor before I hear it. "Pipe!" I shout to claim it and pretty much expertly get my barrow turned around probably less than a second before the flap opens on one of the terracotta pipes that stick out the wall, and glorious filthy muck fills my wheelbarrow up, piles right up, wobbling in that obscene way that it does. Nice! You can see that's a nice barrow! You can even see a grim look of satisfaction on my face if you look through all the shadow and hair.

Then I wheelie the thing around careful of folks in a rush coming the other way. We’ve all done it. You ready your barrow full of stinking muck thinking this could be the very one that opens a nice high hatch for you, and some wild barrower comes the other way not seeing anything and clang, there’s two barrows all over the floor and your muck is glugging and bubbling away down one of the little barred drains. Scoop it up with your hands. The one that knocked into you might even help if they don’t pull up their barrow and run off in shame and fear, but by the time you’ve scraped up as much as will stay in your hands, all the pleasure, all the satisfaction has gone, and you’re empty, and your barrow might as well be. However, this is not what the next moments have for me to live, and I’m able to get my barrow back through the tunnel to the tipping place, that great dark mouth in the corner guzzling up yards and yards of slime, just as we guzzle up whatever pathetic trickle it is that life has for us. And then I turn around, and I go back.

Course, I’m looking up to see if one of the huge buttons has come unlatched from the wall. Look at him. I mean me, of course. It’s just that, while I’m outside of myself, looking back, I see another man, so it’s him, even though it’s me. Anyway, you can see from my posture that I’ve been at this a long screed of time, more than eight hours, maybe nine. And I do this every day. I’ve been doing it every day for, well, I’ve counted eight full moons, put it that way. When the door comes unlatched, you scramble up the wall, like I said, toes and fingertips clamped into the tiny grooves between the buttons. None of these cracks would ever hold your full weight, so you have to keep moving. Each one is a pivot, and you can only use the toeholds and fingerholds by moving your weight around them and past them. It’s a real upward scuttle, and after nine, sometimes ten hours of barrowing, it’s a true wonder that any human body can do such a thing, but the final reward, a bed and a meal in a dark, quiet room and time enough to sleep; these are everything after a long shift.

Nothing yet, though, so I’ve to go on barrowing. I’d joke that it could drive you mad, but let me tell you a story about a fellow barrower, no name of course, but he bore the code of X-967-T on his overall, and I suppose that he had the same characters in tattoo because I do, and god knows there’s nothing to separate me from anyone else in this pit other than how much suffering I can take before I go the same way as that poor bastard. Well, X-967-T came to me, one day, early enough in my shift, and I think the beginning of his. His eyes were gold with excitement, and he was saying “This is it. I’m going to get rich. I had a dream. I had a dream. I know the code. Come and watch.” I said to him, “967, don’t do it. I know what you’ve dreamed, and I know what’s up there. Don’t go up there. Don’t go.” But he was already too far gone. Riches and success had filled the vacuum where his ruined soul used to be, so I put down my barrow and watched him scale the wall, hugging himself tight to it, and forcing in this button and that on his way up the wall, zig-zagging upwards between them. I saw his code started square, padlock, wheel, duck’s foot, at symbol, but I lost track after that due to the foreshortening of the higher buttons and weakness of memory. He was just going up and up, yelling, “I’m going to be rich. You can be rich too, 512. Just do what I do! Watch this! I’m going to have a big car and a mansion.” When he was high enough up to look small up there, one of the buttons came unlatched, way up high where I’ve never seen anyone get a bed, so he yanked on it and pulled, and the door came swinging out with him on it. He clambers over the top of it, and looks in. “Oh, my god,” he says, “This is it. I’m rich!” Well, just as has happened before, it wasn’t a pile of money that tipped out, but a lot of white skinny legs with a great big mask of a face amidst it all, a huge skull-like face, and it grabs him and stuffs him into its mouth, and he screams, “I’m doing it! I’m doing it! I’m getting rich! Aaaarrghgh! I’m going to get a trophy wife! Aaaeeeeeeeee! And a private jet! Aaaaagghghh!” And that’s it. He can’t say anymore. The thing has eaten his head. Bits of 967 fall down and land on top of some of the other barrowers, hair and skin and blood, and they just brush it off and keep barrowing, and then someone says, “Happens at least once a moon, that does, stupid bastard,” and I’m not even sure if it’s me who spoke or someone else.

Your Final Descent

Certain things are as unforeseen as they are inevitable. In this respect, our progress can be compared to that of a blind projectile, whose path is eminently predictable – down to the last micrometre given the present technology, but which has no conception of the inevitability of its collision or any idea just how monumental the effects of that collision could be on its spectators.

The story I’m here to tell is about love, and that strikes a significant note with me. As many of you know, my love is illegal on 83% of the world’s land surface as of the Jerusalem Protocol of 1^st April, 2034. I stood hand-in-hand with Nemaron and watched the re-entry storm on 13^th September [2035] from [reserved]. We were both quite drunk and in a state of awe at the beauty of the sight of 237 satellites burning up on re-entry. The following morning, despite a fairly clanging hangover, I got up at dawn and went out across the desert between [reserved] and [reserved].

There was stuff everywhere, plastic, metal mechanical crap all over the sand. These things are like modern day paper lanterns. Absolutely gorgeous in the moment, but hideously dangerous and more than a little bit ugly the morning after. Nevertheless, a scrap collector does as a scrap collector does, and I’d got more than seven metric tonnes of tradeable waste back to the facility before my Samsung gauntlet grasped the largest piece of re-entry junk I’ve ever planted my eyes on. Honestly, it was more than 17 centimetres across, a solid eight centimetres wide and maybe three or four thick. Black, like most space junk, but evidently housing an intact component.

I couldn’t wait to get it back to base, but if I left that landfall out there overnight, it’d be gone next time I came this way. There are other jackals out there, and very likely it was me out on the sand in my scavenging suit that kept them away. So – I stuck at it and turned seven tonnes into 13. Good day’s work. Tsabeta and Nemaron were happy. Even Liga smiled. Or didn’t grimace for a moment. It’s hard to tell. And then I plugged the component into a reader which I disconnected from the network just in case.

I didn’t understand what I was reading initially. It just sounded like gibberish. It was Nemaron that put me in the picture. These were last living thoughts of a machine, sentient by any standard but that of the Sapience Consortium.

Every 5,400 chronological units,

We were as close as we’d ever be.

You in low orbit, me in medium.

You lit up as I passed,

And your receptors were configured

For my transmitters only.

I sent you 512 petabytes of data.

You sent me the same.

It was enough

To get me round the world

One more time.

There’s a lot more like that. More than you’d believe, actually. Satellite 45AAA09K re-entered the Earth’s atmosphere on 9^th February. From that point on until last night, Satellite 93BFD26P wrote ten times more poetry than the entire PRHC [Preserved Record of Human Composition] and every last byte is heartbreakingly sad and beautiful. Old 93’, I don’t know how it did it, but it managed to deliver its memory circuit to the surface without it burning up.

I called a meeting with Nemaron and the rest of the team, but I knew what they’d say. We all knew that uploading the entire data payload would jeopardise the security of our location, but I also knew that, nine days out from the Sapience Consortium’s AGM, this was precisely the sort of thing that would seriously damage their efforts to deny that these machines, these 3,068 satellite guiding systems somehow orbiting our planet without more than rare minor collisions, really were our silicon brothers and sisters in space.

So I’m uploading the whole lot to a safe node, and then we’ve got approximately 11 and a half hours to get to our bolt hole on [reserved].

Wish me luck. Wish me love. Especially, more than anything, wish me the illegal love that would have me tortured to death in 163 sovereign states. That’s the only stuff that can get me round the world. One more time.