Pullman had met Henry Fango six months previously, he had met him because past a certain point, his plan would need money and influence to be completed.
He couldn’t risk meeting Fango at the FabTech offices or in any of the restricted zones. The Southern Derestricted Zone, which they had chosen as their clandestine meeting point was often referred to as the forgotten zone and it was easy to see why when you got there.
The area looked as if it had been through some kind of riot half a century ago then left to rot. One of the news bloggers Pullman followed had once said that the SDZ reminded him of a room at a party that had been trashed, which the owners, rather than clean up afterwards had instead shut the door and forgotten all about it.
Then over the years, they had subsequently used the room to throw all of the junk that they weren’t quite ready to get rid of yet.
Pullman found an auto-taxi belonging to a company that didn’t mind allowing its vehicle to operate inside the SDZ, which in itself was no mean feat. There was a running joke about how fast air traffic could be grounded and stripped just by having a Southern Restricted Zone address punched into the terminal.
Pullman tried to remember the punchline as the taxi flew over what used to be the river Thames. As they crossed into the forgotten zone Pullman thought that he could detect a change in the colour of the sky. It was almost as if the squalor from the ground below had leaked into the sky and leeched the brilliant blue he’d witnessed a few minutes earlier leaving just a dull grey pallor.
Pullman’s gaze was drawn to what looked like a crater left behind by a not too insignificant explosion. At the lower levels of the cavity he could just about make out the remnants of old streets containing ground vehicles that had stopped working decades ago.
The higher slopes of the crater seemed to be manufactured from material that had been made a lot more recently than the very bottom. Unidentifiable pieces of machinery protruded from the road, half buried by whatever process had caused such a huge hole to open up in the first place.
Pullman could see at least five or six dozen people scratching around the various steeped levels of the crater, apparently engaged in some kind of industry. He craned his neck to keep watching as the taxi banked away from the scene, he wondered what they were all doing down there, a lack of cohesion in their movements suggested that whatever the tasks were, it was every man and woman for themselves.
Violent crime in the SDZ was an everyday occurrence there were no human police patrols and even the robot ones came under constant attack. If he’d been mad enough to take ground traffic into the forgotten zone he wouldn’t have lasted five minutes.
Pullman’s stomach lurched as the auto-taxi dropped abruptly down to an altitude of fifty feet as soon as they’d crossed the border. Air attacks weren’t uncommon and at five hundred feet they would have been a prime target for any goon using an EM Jammer and a jacked terminal looking to knock the vehicle out of the sky.
Pullman sat back and allowed the grey cityscape to fill his periphery as it blurred past the car's windows. Occasionally noticing a scurrying figure going about their no doubt criminal business. Pullman reflected on how easy it was to forget that real people lived in this government forsaken place.
The auto-taxi slewed to a stop and set him down in a clearing in the middle of a building that wouldn’t have looked out of place in a 20th century war zone, there was little of it left but Pullman theorised that it once had been a school.
The place where he’d been set down had faint markings which could have easily been some kind of games arena, if Pullman had been a historian then the forgotten zone would be a very interesting place as very little had changed in the last century or so. But he wasn’t and so the SDZ was a very scary place.
Pullman took a deep breath and opened the auto-taxi door, he told it to hold a fifty foot parking orbit and to expect him back in fifteen minutes.
The ground was broken and uneven; another sign he was not in his usual territory, it played a melodic two-tone crunch under his feet as he made his way to the main building.
Fango had assured him that he had the place jammed so no one would know they were there and the auto-taxi’s onboard travel log could be hacked easily enough.
Pullman stepped through a hole in the wall that could have once been a door. He found the stairs Fango told him would be there and made his way up.
As he climbed the stairs he remembered an extract from an ancient text that had so gripped him the first time he had come across it.
That Geryon, seeing the cord, ascends, expecting to find some moine defroque, and carry him down, as Lombardi suggests, is hardly admissible; for that was not his office.
The spirits were hurled down to their appointed places, as soon as Minos doomed
them.
Title image: Tam Wai on Unsplash
