Migration

Mo

Mo was nineteen. Four years into his apprenticeship and he'd already been busted down the scale more often than most people got accelerated. This time it was a "Contact Violation", Zayn had obviously filed a report on him after fucking the little red-headed Dupe. He'd deal with him later, but for now he would just have to sit and take it, let the metronomic charges read out by the Holler bounce around the couldn't-give-a-fuck section of his brain and accept whatever penalty was on offer. He'd have the chance to challenge the report of course, to wipe the file from his record, but what was the point? It was all true.

Anyway, they couldn't bust him any lower now. Dupe Disposal was the absolute bottom of the apprentice programme. The shithole at the arse end of the shit pile. Nobody got offered it first up, you had to earn your place in that room.

So, it wasn't the first time Mo had sat in this counselling room or all the others just like it. He was an expert now at just letting it happen, at vague-ing out until it was all over and he could get back to his shitty, non-life. The blank thermo walls reflected his state of mind whilst the heavy, machined air made his skin sweat just enough to stick it to the plastic chair. The room was a great crusher of conformity and exclusion, embracing him like a clinging parent and reminding him of his failure all at the same time. He was used to that.

Mo had started off as a real high-flyer. On his fifteenth birthday he'd been selected for Prime/Code, the elite software team for AarBee that only the brightest students were even considered for. It meant working on some of the most intricate parts of AarBee's makeup, being one of only a handful of apprentices who got to actually interact with it, running whole teams of software engineers, making a real change to the way things worked and even perhaps shaping the future.

There were great perks as well, an above Level Fifty apartment in the Metropolis, pre-release tech and whatever lifestyle luxuries you wanted, an endless supply of status-building girls to go with, influential friends on stream, personal assistant Hollers and, of course, the chance to migrate early.

It should have made him the happiest kid in the Metropolis, a bright star with an even brighter future, but it didn't. For some reason, he went the other way. Within six months, a fight with one of the other apprentices – that put her in reconstruction for eight weeks – got him kicked out of the programme. It was an argument that anyone could have gotten into, but Mo ramped it up and up, refusing to back down or compromise until an explosion of violence was inevitable. It took four Drones to pull him off her and, he'd heard, the rest of the morning to clean the room.

He'd felt it for a while, a rage that buzzed up and down his spine, that crept into his jaw sometimes and made his teeth grind together as he stared absentmindedly at other riders on the Vac. He couldn't explain it so he kept it to himself, an impatient secret tap tap tapping in his brain for so long, it felt incredible when he finally allowed it to explode into the world. Prime/Code, however, demanded order and control. Perfection and nothing less. If you fucked up, you were gone.

Mo's uncle, a respected coder before he migrated, had pulled a few strings and instead of going straight to Street Care or other such general programmes, Mo landed a post piloting unmanned surveillance aircraft, known as Kites. He'd stuck at it for a while, proving himself to be a pretty good flyer, but two more fights and an illegal encounter later, he was driving Vactrains. A few months after that, after breaking his fleet controller's arm, he wound up in Dupe Disposal.

His induction into Disposal was the first time Mo had sat in this particular chair, being lectured by some other Holler on how useless he was.

"It is not our desire to time you out," he had said with a deadpan expression, "AarBee recognises the credits you've earned so far and the skills you have. But this is your last post. We want to help you, Moses."

Mo had wished he could break his arm too, to be done with all the last chances, to cut to the chase and fuck off into the back streets and underpasses of the Metropolis, where he could fade away without all the phoney "we know you can do it" and "great job, team" bullshit.

Instead, he waited till the Holler had finished, thumbed his agreement on the new contract and headed down to the Disposal Suite.

The work took some getting used to.

On his first few shifts, he'd shadowed an older apprentice called Raleigh. Raleigh was a massive ex-Drone with tattoos littered all over his muscular body and scars on his face and arms from his fights and training accidents. He'd been in AarBee's mobile, up-synced police force for three months before his implant rejected and he got kicked out. He'd taken a wipe – you had no choice if you de-synced from AarBee – which had messed with his brain and he was never the same again. He was a clever guy and Mo liked his dark, hopeless sense of humour, but the damage he'd sustained meant he spoke at 50% the speed of everybody else and, a few times a day, would drift off into unexpected voids of stillness. A kind of shut down that would leave Mo standing awkwardly in the half-light until Raleigh snapped back to the moment.

He was about ten years older than Mo, trying to claw back enough credits to migrate before he hit thirty, but like Mo he was too angry to keep out of trouble and they both knew he would be timed-out at some point and wind up with the other Ghosts, ageing slowly in the shadows of the Metropolis. He talked about becoming a Lifer, disappearing into the outland forests and living the tech-tribe life with some gorgeous runaway girl, but the truth was he just wasn't the type. Raleigh wasn't an idealist, he was just a doomed fuck up.

When Raleigh went off to fetch a Dupe, Mo would wait in the gloom by the Chute hatch and watch with a queasy silence as each one came in, talking delirious nonsense, before Raleigh bolted them in the head without ceremony or hesitation. He felt sick for almost the whole first week. He knew they were only Dupes, and Dupes were just spare parts, as worthless as last year's tech, but that didn't make it any easier. The young ones were particularly tough. Children hardly ever came through, but Mo got unlucky and had one right at the end of his first day.

He was a young boy, probably around nine or ten and Mo could see straight away that he'd been ripped apart in some kind of accident. His left arm was wrapped up from hand to shoulder in tight layers of white bandage and cultured plasma, and the lower half of his body tapered away to nothing in the same wrappings, from his hips down.

He came in muttering and shouting like they all did, delirious from the syrup and the pain, rocking his head from side to side and gagging occasionally in little, strained silences. He was a baby bird, abandoned to his misfortune and writhing in the sticks and dried leaves that lay far below the nest, the killing ground where shadow dwellers like Mo and Raleigh cleaned up the mess.

Raleigh hooked the trolley up to the Chute hatch and reached for the bolt gun in the ceiling as Mo stared at the boy, mesmerised. It should've ended there, like every other kill that day did; just a memory of Mo breaking his cherry, a tiny nightmare but nothing more. Except that as Raleigh put the gun to the boy's head his eyes snapped open, perhaps brought out of his stupor by the cold of the barrel or an instinctive awareness of his approaching end, and his stare fixed on Mo.

He smiled. Smiled right at him, right into him. It was a smile of the kind that only a child can give and Mo instinctively smiled back. Without warning, he took Mo's hand that was hanging absentmindedly next to his, just as Raleigh – now deep in the groove of muscle memory – pulled the trigger anyway, and the life jumped out of the boy and injected into Mo's eyes with a sharp stab of confusion. The disposal hatch immediately sprung open and the Chute tipped up with a snap, spinning the boy's body around and leaving him dangling for a moment from Mo's hand, as the black void below waited to swallow him. There was a pause whilst Mo registered what had happened and imprinted this new portrait of himself in his mind. When he eventually let go, a millisecond and a lifetime later, the boy's hand rushed away from him into the dark as his bandaged body clattered down the Chute, to join the other corpses that everybody, except one, had left behind.