Hellsborough Exposed — technology

Order a vipe cartridge from a park bench in Hellsborough and you will have it in your hand before you have finished swearing about the empty one — thirty seconds between a request on the hivemind and a clown pressing the package into your palm and vanishing again, no receipt, no goodbye, no time even to ask his name. The transaction runs itself: a fifty percent non-refundable deposit taken the instant the order lands, balance settled on delivery, the whole exchange logged and closed before you have had time to sit back down. Between the The Nascenti, the fungal network, and the clowns who do the actual running, delivery here makes the off-world's idea of "fast" look like something out of the last century. And it is not expensive — sixty ¢hit for that cartridge is a few pounds in off-world money, cheap enough that nobody stops to ask what infrastructure makes thirty-second delivery possible, or what it costs the clown who ran it. That incuriosity, I have come to think, is the actual product being sold.

My humidity plant is on the blink again -- over-hot one hour, silly-cold the next, neither one thing nor the other. You come to live alongside Hellsborough's machines the way you'd live alongside a bad-tempered animal: half-working, never wholly trusted to keep you warm or keep you breathing.

There is no engine inside a Gruizer - only bioengineered muscle fibre, packed into the bay and fed nutrient solution from filling stations along the Hellsborough margin. What you feel through the decking when one runs at speed is not vibration: it is muscle working. Van calls the fuel juice and says the feeling passes, with the tone of someone who has had to convince themselves of it.

Hexikid were engineered by the nascenti as street cleaners, road clearers, and heavy-duty dray vehicles for virtually any purpose requiring massive force and bulk — a brief that they execute at the size of a bin lorry. They are, the files note, an intelligent species with access to the hive mind, though their remit involves little need for creative thought, which is a sentence I have also seen applied to several middle managers.

A gruizer is a living vehicle, and this took some time to understand and considerably longer to accept — Van described his first encounter in terms of ships, and then mentioned, almost as an aside, that the craft were alive. Hull plates overlapping like scales, an organic drive that throbs through the decking, and a flank that flinches when struck by funget fire. Field note: speak to it before you touch anything. It responds to voice before controls. The alternatives are not good.

Seven sky gruizers sailed over the xin camp the first morning Van was there — long, gray-green craft, each the size of ten gruizers lashed together, banners from stem to stern and folk crowding the decks. The xin disabled the sighting equipment on every one before the formation finished turning, and sent the fleet back limping. Van describes this as the first morning he understood what the xin were for.