It resembled a frozen waterfall of twisted metal, the head of the magtrain had derailed and plummeted the fifty or so metres to the track below. As it hit, it buckled and twisted the track until that gave way as more of the train came down from above, allowing the head carriage to plummet even further. Almost all of the train's two hundred and twenty metre length was stretched over three and a half levels, only the very back of the train had come out of it relatively unscathed. Just two carriages left sitting on the track, lying on their sides, but otherwise looking in isolation at these two carriages you wouldn't have guessed at the devastation below.
Titanium Biomesh ™ scaffolding resembling a thick black spiderweb covered the entire surface of the train, adding to the waterfall effect. From his position on the topmost track, Johan could see tiny maintenance bots crawling along the various strands of webbing, each on a separate mindless task. It was Johan team's job to recover and separate the souls. The ones to be revived were to be transported down to the Waylum Industries hospital where their filaments would be scanned and copied and any salvageable body parts recycled.
The others were separated into the DNRs (*do not resuscitate) and the DIs (deceased indentures). Sometimes a person would think they were a DNR but if they died whilst in debt, they were converted to a DI, meaning they would have to work off their debt in virtual. Sometimes the bodies for the DIs were kept, more often than not though that wasn't the case. Johan didn't take too much time thinking about things like that.
He attached his climbing rig to his modified brakesuit, as he approached the two carriages left on the track. The mesh webbing attached to distant anchor points kept them in place. Johan clicked the safety line out of its housing around his waist and attached it to one of the thicker mesh struts, before lowering himself down to climb into the first dangling carriage.
Each one of the train cars was around forty metres long with five long windows along vaguely ribbed sections. Johan climbed down to the third one along and started attaching his smart-cutters to the four corners of the window. He raised himself back up a few metres before starting them. Bright blue flashes were muted by the dark blue translucent casing of the cutters. Johan let himself back down and gave the window a gentle kick, it fell inside and hurtled down towards the upended head of the carriage. Johan muttered to himself, that could easily have damaged one or more of the corpses, he'd be in trouble if that were the case. He pulled himself inside, the maintenance bots had created a crude ladder system on the floor and ceiling. Johan attached another safety line to a rung just by his head and started to descend to the end of the carriage.
He could see now that there were no bodies in this carriage. Of course, by the time this carriage derailed most of the energy of the crash had dissipated through the train. Most of the people in this carriage would most likely have survived with not too much injury. The next carriage however had come all the way off the track and was hanging on internal cables another seventy five metres below. Johan had seen this type of accident before with the magtrains, most of them had been put in place over a century and a half ago, to call them obsolete would have been kind. The Skyvacs were clearly the way to go, but that was reserved for the Topworlders, so the magtrains keep getting patched up and jury-rigged. Johan got to the end of the carriage and let himself out through the wrecked adjoining door. Straight below him was the next carriage, the webbing was thicker down there but he could just about see through to the end, what looked like a dozen bodies were piled up against the end door.
He made his way down and as always with these recovery jobs Johan did a virtual check on his own death insurance. As ever the payments had been made on time and the next ones were scheduled to leave his account exactly when they should. Johan had wondered from time to time what would happened if he died at the exact microsecond between one policy expiring, and the other being renewed. He had tried to find such instances where this had happened before, but his clearance was nowhere near the level he needed to access such information. When Johan had asked his boss what would happen in such a circumstance, she just laughed at him and said that the odds of such an event were too small to even contemplate, which did nothing to reassure Johan.
He descended through the thickening scaffold mesh down towards the temporary tomb. Once there he secured himself to a number of rungs, leaving him to hang free above the morbid pile, shaped like some macabre sculpture, the soft green glowing emergency lights of the carriage gave the cadavers the appearance of being on display.
Johan pulled his handheld scanner from his utility belt and switched it on in one fluid motion. The information fed directly into his own filament inside his head. There were thirteen people here, five male, eight female. As he flicked from person to person Johan scrolled quickly past personal information. When he first started the job he'd found it fascinating to look into a person's life in such detail. Then the nightmares started, they would come and visit him in his dreams, DIs doomed to work on the Shadow Servers. Now he didn't even want to know their names, it was better he thought of them as corpses, lifeless cadavers, mere biological waste.
Johan signalled the heavy lifter waiting for him above, a twenty-five metre machine with three long coffin-shaped segments, resembling an odd-bodied spider with too many legs. It stood up and scuttled off the track onto the webbing, crawler-bots scurrying out of its way as it descended.
Four of the women and three of the men were Untagged meaning they didn't have any filaments. Many people wrongly believed not having a filament meant you were completely off-grid and therefore outside of the influence of The Holy Order. However unless you also didn't have an eyepiece and never spent digital cash - which as far as Johan was aware stood right next to impossible - then you were always beholden to The Order. Which ultimately meant that whether you had a filament or not, you could always become a DI, just another Indent like the rest of the damned.
The lifter had pinpointed Johan's location and had begun to insert various bits of equipment through the mesh scaffold. It begun by cutting out a large side section of the carriage, sucking it out, and allowing it to be caught by the mesh. Johan's scan was complete, out of the thirteen, only two were to be revived. The rest were to become DIs. Johan pulled on the multi-articulated, telescopic arms of the heavy lifter, attaching them to the neck and ankles of three bodies at a time. He watched as the lifter pulled the first few bodies free, Johan flipped the mask that he'd forgotten open on his face, closed as a sharp smell of faeces and urine assaulted the back of his throat and nose.
For the next two and a half hours Johan worked his way down the train, each carriage showing slightly more damage as he descended. Dozens of heavy lifters crawled all over the mesh, some operated by him others by people just like him. Some carriages had more than a hundred and fifty bodies to go through, the train had been packed with commuters and had been travelling a good few hundred miles an hour when it derailed. Survivors had already been scanned for and removed long before him and his team got there. Johan knew from experience that most of the dead would end up as DIs. The mere fact that you had to travel on a magtrain in the first place indicated that you were most likely up to your eyeballs in debt. The average Indent recovery rate was around ninety-seven percent.
Johan had one more carriage to deal with before he could go back to Waylum. Excess damage meant he had to access this one from underneath, above the webbing of the mesh had grown too thick as it grew more strands to deal with the added weight to its structure. This carriage thankfully only had a handful of bodies within. As with all the others, the corpses were piled up against the emergency doors at what was now the bottom of the carriage.
Midway from removing his scanner from his utility belt, Johan froze, he recognised one of the faces staring lifelessly back at him. The odd angle the head rested at told him her neck was broken, the right side of her face was caved in, dried blood obscured her features. Johan tried to remember her name unassisted but failed. He scanned her, just about catching his automatic reflex to scroll past the personal info.
Her name was Belle Gedes. She had lived in the same apartment complex as Johan after moving in a few years ago. He had first been attracted to her because of her natural beauty, living where they did she clearly couldn't afford expensive cosmetic body augs, but she still stood out in a crowd. Johan had talked to her a few times, never quite getting up the courage to ask her out. Not because he was sexually prudish or anything like that, it was that he was ashamed of his job. Which was a source of bitter irony to him because it was why she had found him so fascinating. Few people had real world jobs, and even the ones that did were really just virtual jobbers posing. Belle had noticed that he came and went at fairly regular times and often had work equipment with him. Johan had told her that his job was akin to manual labour, hoping that the vague replies to her constant questioning would satisfy her. But they only served to pique her interest, what possible manual labour couldn't be done entirely by machines? She'd asked him. Again a noncommittal answer.
Johan started speaking to her less and less, until they were reduced to exchanging awkward glances as they entered and left the apartment complex. He could see the questioning in her eyes, but he couldn't bear to tell her what he did.
Those same eyes staring up right through him now. He scrolled the rest of her file, she was to be indentured. She'd told him what her job was, but he couldn't remember, something virtual, obviously.
Johan scanned her file, she was in serious amounts of debt, depending on who she owed the money to, and the debt structure, Johan figured she would get at least five years of objective-real time for such an amount. Which of course was no indication for how much subjective time that would be.
Maybe he should free her. His mind raced. How would he do such a thing? Perhaps he could "lose" the body, or maybe just destroy her filament, maybe by incorrectly attaching a heavy lifter arm to her head. Even as he half-heartedly contemplated the options he knew that even if one were to work, it would simply mean that he would take her place. There was one thing that everyone in the Mega City knew, debt is always paid, that and, the company is everything.
In all things Johan did, he strived to not become a Deceased Indenture. Belle had lived in their apartment complex because she had to, he lived there because it was cheap. Becoming an Indent for someone he liked but was never actually romantically involved with seemed insanely frivolous.
He couldn't take tear his eyes away from hers, the bright green irises had paled and the eyeball was beginning to mist. Johan signalled one of the heavy lifter arms. The arm snaked and twisted through the gaps below, Johan lowered himself and pulled it up level with Belle's head.
He still didn't know what he was doing, he activated the claw at the end of the arm and attached it to her skull. One single command would cause the claw to clamp shut, another would activate the cutting equipment used to cut through metal. If he left it on long enough it would turn her head to mush, destroying her filament and setting her soul free.
Johan remembered the dreams he used to have, before medication and mental avoidance techniques shut them off. The Indents always asked him the same question; "Why?"
He looked down at Belle's lifeless body, her head crooked in its unnatural position. Johan was barely aware of the thought command he sent to the lifter.
A terrible high-pitched whine issued from within the claw. Johan wondered how long it would take them to come and arrest him. Whilst he waited he worked out that with his current wealth and cashed-in insurance bonds that he'd be able to pay off about thirty percent of Belle's debt, but surely they'd find a way of adding on more. After all, he had just destroyed property of the Holy Order of Banking and as anyone with half a brain knew; don't fuck with The Order.
Johan hung there, the slight creaking of the webbing outside the only thing breaking the silence within.
Cryptogee
Previously in Mega City Tales
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