Living Hell Read Free Page A

my designated Big Brother, already had his own cabin. He’d had it for two years. It wasn’t one of the spares – it had actually belonged to a deceased crew member – but it was still wholly desirable, in my opinion. Of course, there wasn’t much you could do to stamp your personality on any part of Plexus. Not if you hadn’t boarded the ship with a few souvenirs from Earth. On Plexus, there were very strict rules about property, and very few personal possessions. Pointless energy consumption was also frowned on. That’s why Sloan hadn’t arranged any knick-knacks beside his bed, or installed a pretty picture on his Interface Array. But his cabin, despite its standard fixtures and fittings, still seemed to reflect his character – perhaps because his character was so calm and controlled.
    As for me, I had plans for my cabin, when I finally got one. I was going to grow a plant. (That was allowed, provided you cleared it with Sustainable Services.) I was also going to hang up my great-great-great-great-great-great-grandfather’s wristwatch, which I would be receiving on my eighteenth birthday. And I was going to invite Caromy to inspect my new quarters. That was definite.
    Perhaps, when she saw that I had finally grown up, she would look at me in a different way.
    On the day of Haemon’s party, however, I was still living with my parents. Our cabin designation was C9A69 (cabin number nine, A deck, sixty-ninth street). Cross- passages joining the tubes were always called streets, when I was young. As for the tubes, they were our highways. They contained the tracks for our On-board Transport Vehicles (OTVs), which used to carry us from one point to another around the entire circumference of the ship’s drum. By slapping the little red panel at any junction – wherever a street met up with a tube – you could make the next OTV that came along stop for you.
    There were never any accidents involving OTVs. I once saw Yestin fall off a platform into the path of an oncoming vehicle, and it stopped instantly. That was when he was still having dizzy spells; after that, my mother insisted that he stay well away from the platform edges, unless accompanied by someone of superior height and weight. But he was safe enough, really. We all were. The long-range sensors on the OTVs, and their extraordinary hair-trigger braking mechanisms, ensured that no one was ever hit.
    I think there were twenty On-board Transport Vehicles altogether: five for each tube. The port-tube OTVs travelled clockwise; the starboard-tube OTVs went anti-clockwise. You could catch them in either direction on both A and B decks, continuously. And if you wanted to get from the port to the starboard tube in a hurry, every street had a street shuttle.
    The street shuttles were like mini-OTVs. They weren’t enclosed, though. And they didn’t contain seats. They were just moving platforms with hand-grips. It’s amazing to think how easy we had it then. Imagine! A special vehicle, just to carry us from one end of a street to the other! Not that most of us used street shuttles. We were supposed to walk as much as we could – and sometimes we even ran. Sometimes the younger Shifters would race the street shuttles, which weren’t very fast. That was one of the attractions of racing, I guess; the fact that you would generally win, if you were competing against a street shuttle.
    It was always hard to stop the little kids from running in non-designated areas.
    Speaking of non-designated areas, my family’s cabin was in a residential pressure cell with a lot of other large cabins. Haemon’s family lived on our street. Yestin’s family lived just above us, on B deck. Our cell wasn’t far from pump station number two, with its air pump, its filtration pump, and its photosynthesis machines. Oh – and it didn’t take us long to get to the Health Centre, either. That was in an open deck cell, free of streets and bulkheads. On both decks of this pressure cell there