Night Sessions, The by MacLeod Ken

Author:MacLeod, Ken [MacLeod, Ken]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Prometheus Books
Published: 2012-04-02T22:00:00+00:00

Ferguson walked down a street four metres wide between buildings thirty metres high, each consisting of nine or ten storeys of adapted shipping containers. Above him, across this canyon, were strung electricity cables, rope-and-plank walkways, fat fibre-optic high-bandwidth pipes, and washing lines. Canopies flapped above the ground-floor shop windows and entrances, sheltering even smaller commerce in their shadows. Around him the pedestrians and shoppers surged in slow motion. Ostensible idlers in doorways chewed stimulant-sticks or took slow, watchful drags on cigarettes, while their eyes tracked him like surveillance cameras. Bicycles and mopeds snaked amid stalls, avoiding the grooves of the railway line. From the gleam of its rails Ferguson suspected it still functioned. At the end of the street was the canal and the Old Coal Wharf, and beyond it the cranes of the busy dock and the ruins of the abandoned dockside developments of Leith.

The Edinburgh City Council had solved the problems of its own displaced citizens with the new-tech housing schemes of Turnhouse and Tranent. The new population that had grown up around the revitalised docks had solved the problem of cheap, fast modular housing for themselves. The prevalent accumulation regime in the Leith docks being capitalism with Russian characteristics, the container blocks’ inhabitants paid over the odds for their living space and often found their security providers were people they needed security from, but aside from that the place worked.

Ferguson moved through the crowd as if he knew exactly where he was going. He did, not from any familiarity with this particular street but from the constant input to his contacts and phone clip from Ogle Earth, Paranoia, his colleagues and the lekis in and out of sight and earshot, and the flotilla of midge-sized surveillance microdrones stotting about in the downdraughts between the container stacks and in the thermals above. Ogle Earth let him see the most recent record of what any building or module he glanced at was like inside, and the identities of its current owners and renters (there were often wide disparities between this information and what he could see with his own eyes); Paranoia warned him of any associated illegal activities and told him which watchers to watch; he had split-screen views available at a blink from the cops up and down the street and on the walkways and balconies, and from the lekis likewise, deployed to sniff for danger and to watch the humans’ backs; the midge-sized drones gave an overview and sniffed for suspect molecules. This was a mental zone that was rare and satisfying to get into: everyone sharing the same headspace, eyes and hands and boots on the street working together like the senses and effectors of some super-organism, a hive mind on the march. It wasn't sustainable for long—it ate human energy and machine processing-power like this year's software on last year's hardware—but while it lasted it made you feel invincible and as often as not it did the job.

If beards, dark glasses and hooded tops were

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