"Listen to this guy, he knows what he is talking about!" You could see an image on the page of a man in his thirties or forties, confident looking; he was moving frantically, bailing water and quickly hefting pieces of equipment off a small boat. His voice was crackling like thin ice.
"If that were true as as often as you say it, sir, then I'd have your job, wouldn't I?" The confident man smiled, he nodded with an expression somewhere between guilt and pity. The grainy video clip completed, its constant susurrus white noise ceased. The opacity of the rendered square of pixel-lights increased against the background of a dark tunnel, rolling along at a clip with only the sound of eight engines driving something that sounded like tank treads.
As video minimized itself into nonexistence somewhere in the margins of the pixel-frame, the background, the physical reality came into focus. The treads of the vehicle lurched away from a near collision with the tunnel wall with a screech of metal.
"That were me an the manager of me whole unit, boys and girls." It sounded something like an early speech synthesizer was trying to affect Michael Caine. Then the accent disappeared. "It's not in the video because I didn't have room to save it, but the reason he was praising me; he was about to confuse a grey water valve marked eight with a clean water valve marked thr-" As the speaker continued, he was interrupted by the tunnel wall filling his available field of vision.
"Watch the road, you asshole!" All that could be heard was a sudden, pealing clatter of electronic beeps and clicks, pushed through some instrument resembling an air horn. "I'm sorry, alright? I don't have powered lights like you, ma'am."
The second sound was much fainter. It did not rise above the sound of the vehicles moving through the tunnel from any distance.
"Upgrade or die, loser!" Said the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Upsilon-series Waste Abatement Living Laborer. The shadow cast of the lead vehicle was thrown into even sharper relief. "There, is that better?" Again the air horn sounded out incomprehensible beeps. "Yes ma'm. Sorry ma'am." Came the inferior reply. "Hmmph, don't apologize to me like a newborn kid, you obviously don't have enough sense to do that and watch where you are going. And from the back you look way too old to talk to me like that."
The man replied: "Sor- ... yes." and they continued without further remark, on toward the Waterbury surface entrance. At first the opacity of the frame that had housed the video faded into a wraith, and then tentatively back. A blinking cursor appeared, words jumping from it one at a time as the hours rolled on.
As they neared the tunnel exit, the woman spoke again. "Listen, I'm sorry I told you to die. I just can't understand how you can not have powered navigation. I know you look kind of broken down, but you must have enough credits at you age to buy new kit, right?" Even in the sharp blast of beeps and clicks, he was sure he could hear guilt and pity in her voice.
"Well, ma'am, I would if I could. But the only kits they sell now aren't compatible with my interface anymore." He slowed as he approached the surface access point and began extending a cranelike appendage toward a panel with a row of complicated dials. The small convoy of workers behind him idled in place. As moving parts had fallen out of fashion in most motive systems, the tunnel was now very dark. A low din of faint synthetic sounds could be heard coming from them. Queep- shhhh- queep, it went.
"That's not possible. You can't be that old. My kit is backwards compatible with everything down to Lambda." She sounded incredulous. She had however, switched from her air horn to her external speakers.
"Lambda is a bit newer than me. I'm pretty rusty." As he strained to hear her first remark in her natural voice, the opacity of the bright square superimposed on his visual cortex faded into nothingness. As it did his surroundings came into clearer view, and he was overwhelmed by the transition.
His craning armature grasped several indentations set in the panel. He was overwhelmed by the noise of his own limbs against the silence of the tunnel. Self consciously, he raised the volume of his external speaker as he spoke and turned his navigational array close as he could to the woman. Pocketa-pocketa-pocketa-pocketa, went his every limb and joint.
"Lambda went out of production four hundred years ago! I've never met anyone that old." She sounded pretty amused at this point. the sound of the old machine's efforts at the panel increased the choir of combustive pops and farts. As the old machine turned its sensors away from the panel, and towards the woman to the left of him, she met his gaze with her her own array.
"You only have one optic sensor!" She sounded breathless, if such a thing was possible. "I lost one a long time ago, and they don't make 'em anymore." He squinted at her. He was limited to this, as obviously winking was no longer an option.
"Shouldn't I be opening the door for you then? You are not a young man anymore." She squinted back. "I got this. I have opened a couple doors before, ma'am. I can manage without paying much attention."
"Without paying much attention like a motherfucker, Walter! Pick up the pace, brother!" An air horn blasted from the chattering group idling in the distance beyond the two machines. On the panel Walter had placed his hand, the diodes on the dials glowed, a click was heard. A flurry of quieter sounds followed from the group of machines far behind the two doormen, a mocking queep-queep-queep.
With unexpected poise, Walter removed his hand from the panel and swiveled it around 180 degrees. He raised his palm to the woman, his fingers upturned. She cocked her navigational array to one side, her eyes drifting towards the workers who she had set out from the reclamation plant with now showering her with catcalls.
A sharp clank was heard as a panel popped open on the ancient machine. A cumbersome amplified horn began almost crawling out along its extendable track. "Cover you ears, ma'am." As Walter spoke the rate of pocketas seemed to increase. A vacuum tube at the rear of the extended horn began to glow.
"Bitch, does it ever occur to you that I am sometimes having a conversation? Keep back where you belong, Berg. Down here in hell with me." The bleating peal of his signaling horn shook bits of rust from his chassis. Walter kept his one eye fixed on the machine at his side. Her eyes had taken up two distinct vantage points to better judge the curiosity unfolding before her.
"Who's afraid of Hell, old man? Just get us through the damned door!" Berg replied derisively. A chorus of laughter queeped up from the other machines huddled around him.
"Sorry ma'am. Old man beef. Berg and I know each other from a ways back." The hatch the two tanklike vehicles held at either side of began to rotate into its housing and sunlight began to spill into the tunnel.
"Um, what model are you exactly, Mr. Walter? Her eyes shifted back out of their comedic pose into one more serious.
"Epsilon." His weary looking eye nodded up and down. "YOU'RE-"
He waved the hand he had not yet moved dismissively, as he returned it to its resting place upon his chassis. "Yes, I'm that Walter. Man, you must be pretty young, if you know me from my archive."
"We had to read your pages in school the whole time I was free!" He began moving towards the surface entrance as she spoke. After he had advanced a few meters, she spoke again and he paused and turned back towards her, and as he did she hesitantly began to move forward. She continued a speech she had filed away long ago.
"Why haven't you had the doctors make you over again, why you keep working here, why you wrote your archive-" She had sped a little in front of him as she caught up. "The whole time I was growing up free and after I started work I never could understand. Why would you even bother to write what you wrote, what is the point of doing this if you just have to do it forever?"
He no longer had any way to smile, but inwardly this was turning out to be one of his happier days, he felt as he moved out of the exit and into the full spectrum of the orange sun, shining through the red sky.
He paused in his motion and she copied him. Now parallel, he turned towards her. He imitated the voice of a dozen lifetimes worth of authority figures. " I have a belief. That if I keep doing the things that I know work, the outcome will be positive. I don't know how anything else will turn out. I don't think this is how it was supposed to be." He began moving again, lest the gorillas behind the woman catch up and spoil his optimistic outlook for the day.
She followed. As he turned his eye back to the broken asphalt and rubble in front of him, she asked again. "So, you don't think it would help you to buy a promotion? You must have enough to afford it. Don't you think the colonies are better than living like this? You have been telling people all this time that the system gives us that advantage and yet you don't take it yourself..."
"I like to write, I like to work." -"You could do all that from the colonies." -"I like to work because there is something I want to see happen, and it has not happened yet. So I will keep working on it here. I know how to do that here."
"I still don't understand. In school when we had to discuss your archives, everybody just thought you were crazy." She sounded an octave lower than usual. "Then why did they make you read my archive?" He was speeding up a little and she began to fall behind him.
"You were the only one doing what you were doing." -"So, I was crazy, but I was useful. Exploitable." The authority in his voice no longer existed. She sped up again to catch up. "No, look- Jesus, why are you so depressing in person? -There are people down there who practically worship you. There were times when you were the only one keeping the living peoples aware of what was going on outside."
"Well, there you go. If I went to the colonies, who's to say I'd still be able to do what I do; who's to say I would know what is happening down here?" He seemed to regain his imagined air of dignity.
"You still write your archive?"
"Of course. I will never stop."
"... Were you on the network when you almost ran into the side of the tunnel back in there?" This was a tone to her voice he was not fully prepared for. Window panes slammed shut in his mind's eye and the all the dignity oozed out of his joints with a hissing fart, pocketa-pocketa-pocketa.
He hung his optical sensor to the bleached bones and rusted out machines strewn along the road beneath him. He wished it would rain, he wished he had a cigarette and the lungs to smoke it with.
Behind him he could hear a faintly derisive whistling sound issuing from the firing squad far behind them. Berg gave the command.
"Like. A. Motherfucker."
Walter held his sensory armature erect and fixed on the hazy morning sky. He stood motionless, proud and disdainful. Eve had stopped several paces behind, unable to simultaneously move forward and avoid choking to death on her own stifled laughter.
The browned orange smog of the morning sky, and the sun faded from the background into nothing.
Full opacity.