Black Glass by Mundell Meg;

Author:Mundell, Meg;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction
Publisher: Scribe Publications Pty Ltd
Published: 2011-02-28T05:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 8:

NO TRESPASSING

[Silvacom Tower, Elizabeth Street, Commerce Zone: Milk | commuters]

The rush-hour traffic is building to a critical mass. Glass winks as the revolving doors spill out a stream of pedestrians, faces tired in the autumn light. Some glance up, doing a mental umbrella check; it would be the golden hour, but the sun is hidden, the sky a muddy mauve. A storm is coming.

Milk has been sitting for an hour on this bench in the lee of an office tower, newspaper on lap and briefcase at his feet. His nondescript suit, standard model for a million civil servants and company drones, is the exact same grey as the footpath. He blends perfectly into the background.

The mood of the street is chilly and flat. Traffic lurches and brakes in its sulky way, obeying the lights. More commuters join the pedestrian flow, scurrying along with heads down and bags jammed under arms, faces set in the blankness of transit. They’re already dreaming ahead: the scrape of key in lock, a familiar face in the kitchen, a pot boiling on the stove. Or an empty room, the sagging lap of a couch, an evening spent in front of the box with the lone red dot of the remote control. The people march at a steady pace, ignoring the man selling magazines, his singsong chant: Biiiiig Isssh-yoooooo; ignoring the blank-eyed woman moaning on a milk crate, filthy and barefoot, just another lost soul who’s wandered into the wrong zone. Drizzle starts to fall in messy gusts. Umbrellas bloom open, leaves shine wet on artificial branches.

This is research, with fringe benefits. The price of the experiment is close to zero: Milk’s time and expertise are the only real costs. Humankind gets something for nothing, he gets better at his art form, and meanwhile racks up a few more karma points. Not that he expects anything back, of course; altruism doesn’t work that way.

Milk runs a fingertip down one seam of his briefcase, tinkers with the catch. Remember to look up, folks. Yesterday he’d shot a scatter of light nodes up onto the building’s glass facade, invisible dots now awaiting his signal. His fingers twiddle with the briefcase, and the nodes blink on like stars, a constellation of amber light. The building’s facade softens, losing its harsh edges. A few faces tilt upwards, and colour washes over skin. Lights. Camera. Action. The effect is so subtle you wouldn’t think to question it: just one of those mysterious moments of beauty that well up in a city then fade out unexplained. The nodes, a cheap but reliable brand, will eventually be swept away by a window cleaner or succumb to gravity and grit.

Now he brings in another change, just below the threshold of consciousness — a barely audible retreat of static, like a radio station finding a clear space on the dial. A surround-sound ripple seems to pulse out from the air itself, a warm murmur with snatches of laughter and voices, greetings and farewells. The collective hum of humankind with all the shady notes removed.

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