Kill the camera

I crossed several regular clients on the way up. I was now kind of used to the sight of selective nudity, but it was still like meeting them again in a dream; you know the face, but everything about the person, their demeanour, their appearance etc. say they are somebody else. It was surreal.

Between decks 5 and 6 I stopped. Just then I had overtaken a lady who was faithful to the hardback sections in 5, 14 and 19. The volume of her exposed breasts was shocking compared to what her old clothing hinted at, but it was the nature of her visiting preference that gave me an idea. I was going to need privacy to establish trust with the stranger. There was no way to tell whether someone was watching the monitor screens in Reception, but the odds favoured there being no one for a least a few minutes. The stripper took her time with everything, and with the stack she’d been wheeling into the basement, she’d be a good while sorting them into processing. This meant I may have an opportunity to create a little privacy. I set out back for deck 5.

After getting another eyeful of the lady’s bosoms I made my way to her precious hardback section, and looked around for an item with a bit of heft. I took a book called “Star Trek: Role Playing game – Players and Narrator’s Guides Condensed”. I picked it both because of its sheer size, and because it reminded me of when I was much younger. A friend who moved to the Northern Icecap shortly after my family arrived in the City used to invite me to play games like this. We even had some of his friends joining us at a distance all the way from Earth. I thought fitting that I should materially weaponize an object that had only ever given rise to purely immaterial weapons.

I was going to use a book to smash the life out of one or more of the myriad spy cameras throughout the library, in order to tell someone I thought was inclined not to have lots of random sex that I was not inclined to have lots of random sex. It occurred to me I might be absolutely off the mark; simply because the stranger had the common sense to wear clothes that don’t expose her lady-bits to the freezing cold didn’t mean she was any less of a raving sex-mad coot than everyone else. She might simply be from somewhere really hot. Her body might be ill-adapted to the cold, even with whatever redistribution of heat might have happened when she turned into a sex-fiend. Perhaps she actually needed proper covering more than anyone else.

Upon arrival on deck 12 I set aside my doubts. I had to act, and if I fell in the shit, at least I tried. It took a few minutes to find a path to the little room with a window in the North-West face of the building. There were huge amounts of clutter up here, every item that no one knew how to categorize; every item that was in some way avant-guarde, dating from any moment after 2000AD, everything that was vaguely written-word-like but not much else, each abomination against coherence and understanding was dumped up here. There were walls buried behind dusty bookshelves, doors condemned unintentionally by abandoned stacks of... whatever they were. There were doorways permanently open because there wasn’t enough space for a door to swing open and shut in, and there were danger zones, places where shelves had rotted on one side, fallen mutually against each other, and resumed rotting. No one cared enough about any of the exhibits to come and put them out of their misery and destroy them, but no one was willing to risk destroying an item that might be of unbelievable value to some prestigious archaeologist who hadn’t visited us yet.

As I arrived within visual range of where the stranger was, I saw she had done some of my work for me. The lights were out in the little room with the condemned balcony. Stood in front of the body-length window, her cloaked figure made an ink black stain on an already dark triangle of light. The sun was long gone, behind the horizon and the clouds, so only the weak orange of the lampposts outside illuminated the world now. The only pin-prick of light from inside the room was the little red indicator on the spy camera in the middle of the ceiling, blinking constantly.

After I squeezed through the gap between the real wall and a stack of forlorn shelves, I stepped on something. Glass under my boots popped as my weight crushed it. Most likely it was the remains of the light bulb, a promising sign of initiative. The inky stain in front of me briefly changed shape just a little. I didn’t even hear the sound of feet, so it was impossible to tell what had happened in front of me. She had her hood up since I last saw her on the monitors, so I couldn’t see anything of her head anymore.

“What do you want?” a voice spoke from the shape.

“Trust me.” I said. Without another word I took my first swing at the tiny red light up above. There was a spark, and then an object no one could see clattered to the floor in pieces. The blinking red eye vanished.

“That was the camera I found you with.” I said, “Now no one can see us. So if you’re not a fucking human succubus like every other mad cunt I’ve met today, now’s the time to spit it.”

“Why should I trust you?”

“Oh come on! You can’t afford not to. I can’t afford not to. I’m already gambling on no one having seen me pick up this book and take it here, and seen the feed from this spy eye here go dead. Call me stupid, but I already trust you, damnit.”

The shape was silent, perhaps considering my words, perhaps toying with me, perhaps still unconvinced. There was no way to divine what was going on in there. Then the voice said “It doesn’t matter. When they see the cam is dead they’ll review the footage and see all they need to know.”

“I won’t give them the chance,” I said.

“Oh really, do you control the network?”

I had spoken without thinking, and now I was the one late answering as I raced to find a way to make my words true. How was the footage recorded?

“There’s a computer terminal on every deck, even this rubbish dump. I could wipe the files before anyone sees them. They only even check if there’s been an incident like a robbery or a fight or something. Who’s going to fuss about a dead camera on Deck 12? If we knock a shelf over it might even look like a complete accident.”

“You could wipe the files? So you don’t know?

It was my first year learning anything technological at school, after quitting the humanities. Just a few months ago I had started learning about computers. Perhaps I could scrape together enough theory to make some know-how?

The glass under me gave me an idea. “Look,” I said, “You started before I did anything rash. Or did a spirit kill the light here?”

“You have a point,” said the voice. The stranger moved and the shape shifted again.

“Well? We both know we’re sane, but are you with me or not? You know, this isn't all too bad on the surface but I would really appreciate having someone to trust, to talk to, without the expectation that meaningless rutting could kick off any minute. Throw your lot in with me or at least let's make it look like this conversation didn’t happen.”

“All right.” The shadow of a hand appeared, back-lit by the orange glow from without. It pulled and the hood fell back. “My name is Amina. Pleased to meet you.”