Chapter 1 - The City

I can feel the city.
It's been five years since I was last here, even now, sitting in my favourite coffee bar, the way people move, the shadows falling down from the skycrapers all around, I know that nothing has changed. The portions are smaller, the price a little higher, but the city remains. I've been back for two hours and it's like I had never been away. That's where the first bad feeling kicks in, I've spent five years isolated, away from the noise, the mix messages of this dirty, downtrodden and desperate place and the moment I step into the familiar routine of this coffee shop, the place where I made the decision to walk away. The feeling isn't worry, concern or fear like I would've expected. If I had to put assigned a feeling to the sensation, it would be depression. Five years, and nobody has made a difference, nobody has changed anything, it's heads down, keep it simple, just like it always was. Just like it always will be with everybody.
There was a time I believed differently, a time when I figured I could change things, make a difference somehow to these people, but it became clear they didn't want any help, they didn't want to understand the depths of their situation, the reason why this city is such a trap, such a place.
Sometimes I envy them, but only sometimes.
My name is Eldin Cale, the last time I was here, in the city, it nearly killed me, this time, there's a good chance it'll finish the job, but I had to come back, at least for a while, because of Sasha.
Sasha wasn't the reason I left, but she had been involved back then, writing for the networks, as I had been years ago, required an assistance, somebody to trawl through the newsfeeds, websites and information dealers, when you went live with a story, you needed the ammunition to make sure that you nailed it, given the sheer numbers of newsfeeds and how most of the population had them on ten seconds rotation, you had those few seconds to grab a viewer, ten seconds to make them sit up straight and stretch for the remote or to commit the energy to tell the autochanger to hold on the channel.
Somedays it was quite a challenge.
However, Sasha was always good at getting what I needed, even when the networks through me off the air and forced to go underground, Sasha stuck with me, when I left, it was her and only her who tried to get me to reconsider and stay, to fight on. Perhaps she had been right, I was back here again and it hardly seemed like five minutes.
Sasha was nineteen when I left the city, I'd recruited her from one of the underground feedsites, the ones that hacked airtime on the public channels during the ad breaks. I had heard her stories, read her articles on the web and she had talent, she hit stories and got closer to the truth than anybody else I had known, I knew journalists four times her age who didn't understand what she knew. After I left she got picked up by one of the major networks, as much as they hated me, they appreciated her talents. I'm not sure how she convinced them that she was on their side, but during the newscasts she had been the city reporter for NewsCorp, outside of the newscasts, she switched handles on the web and the feedsites and kept writing, using what she found out on hours to get the truth out off the main networks. It's tricky to get the city broadcasts when you're two thousand miles in a dense forest, but enough satelite dishes meant I got hold of what I could, and there were always transcripts available on the net, she hadn't lost her skills, the network tried to tame her no doubt, but Sasha knew how to play the game.
I guess she must have felt betrayed when I left, I suppose I couldn't have blamed her, I couldn've stuck it out, I'd gone up against the corporations many times before, death threats had hardly been a new thing either, but, when one of those threats kicks your door down and leaves you little choice but to send it thirty-six stories down to the pavement, you tend to evaluate the situation in a different light.
Sasha would kick my ass if she knew I was thinking that.

The coffee bar was bustling, it always did good business, it was a good place to sit and be lost in the crowd, too much going on, too much movement in such a crowded place to notice anybody. It made a great vantage point for watching the city, it was two storeys up, overlooking an automatic pavement heading down the street towards the Plaza district, beneath it, the steady stream of vehicles drifted by next to the busy sidewalks. You could see the corporate district in the distance, a huge looming skyline of gleaming white and glass, on a clear day the giant logos of the corporations could be seen, at night, their illuminations dominated the sky, even this far away.
The city was formed by the corporations, governed by a board of directors made up from the major corporations, NeuroPharm, NewsCorp, Blue Technologies, InfraTech. It was meant to be the city that worked, sold on the idea of no administration by self-serving politicians. What the population got instead was the bottom-line ethos of a group of multi-billion pound companies. Instead of a group of self serving politicians you could vote out for another group every five years, the city ended up with a board of directors that had stayed relatively unchanged for over twenty years. Needless to say, it was a journalist