Going Harvey in the Big House

a novelette

by Douglas Smith

Big G's first thought each wake time was how much he missed his drawer in his old sector of the House. His new cube was too big.

Rubbing his eyes with a beefy hand, he sat up on his sleep shelf, ducking his head needlessly from habit born of years of waking in a drawer. Triggered by his movement, the ceiling tiles glowed to full brightness.

Big G looked around his cube. Dull green walls. A floor covered with a gray coarse carpet. His private in-chute and dis-chute in the opposite wall, with a hidden compartment big enough to make his few personal items seem lonely lying inside. He shook his head. All of this luxury still made him uneasy.

But what bothered him most was the size of the cube. Six and a half feet long, and five feet wide, with a ceiling so far overhead that he had to stand to touch it.

He sighed. Too much space. It wasn't right.

Sometimes now, he'd wake in sleep time, reach out, and feel nothing. He'd panic then, flinging out his arms and legs, snapping his neck back, only to thump his head and crack his knuckles on the walls beside him.

Falling reflex. That's what Tapper, his partner, called it. From when our ancestors built the House generations ago to shelter us from the poisons of the Outside. The Builders would fall sometimes, Tapper said, and they'd throw out their arms and legs, trying to catch a girder or a beam to save themselves.

Tapper used to work in Archives, so he had lots of stories of Outside and the Builders and the House. Big G didn't know about those things. He just knew his new cube made him nervous.

But the Inners had made him a Smoother, and the Inners were the direct descendants of the Builders. The House protects the People, and the Inners protect the House. And Smoothers were the arms and legs of that protection. Smoothers needed to be respected and feared, so the Inners gave them cubes. Big cubes.

His ID chip pulsed in his head, signalling an incoming call. Grabbing his specs from where they hung above his sleep shelf, he slipped them over his eyes. The word "Dispatch" flashed in red on the left lens. He touched a finger--the one with his Smoother chip imbedded in the tip--to a stud on the temple of the specs.

"Yeah?" he answered, sounding groggy even to himself.

"What 'yeah'?" snapped the voice in his ear. It was Marker. Marker was an asshole, even for Dispatch.

Big G bit back a retort, glad that ID chips could only transmit basic biometrics, and not thoughts. Still, it wouldn't do for his readings to show him getting angry. He swallowed hard. "I mean, Smoother on shift, sir."

"Better be. Got a Harvey for you and Tapper. Here're the cords." The coordinates for the Harvey's location in the House flashed on his lens as they stored themselves in his specs: Sector E7-S8, Block D32-W26-S33, Cube U19-N7-W28.

The com light winked out, as Marker ended the call without another word. Big G sighed. He'd pissed off a Dispatcher. "Got off on the wrong floor with 'im," Tapper would say. Plus he'd been stuck with a Harvey. Great start to the shift.

Beside his sleep shelf stood the flush. Despite protests from his bladder, he just stared at the facility with distaste. His own flush. Before, he'd shared one with his whole block, lining up to use it or to dump his bag. He even missed the smell. Now he only had to bag up for time outside his cube.

Tossing the specs back onto their hook, Big G got up to use the flush. The sleep shelf folded up into the wall, making the room seem even larger.

A soft "hiss-plop" signaled his tube of glop arriving in his in-chute, prompted by his use of the flush. He squeezed the glop into his mouth, enjoying its familiar chalky taste. After his promotion, he'd tried other flavors available to Smoothers, but had quickly gone back to the standard citizen issue.

Glop should taste like glop, he'd told Tapper. Tapper had laughed. "Think it's standard issue? The citizens get No-aggra in their glop. We don't. The Inners want us aggressive," he'd said. "And happy," he'd added, making a gesture at his crotch.

Big G finished his tube and dropped it into the dis-chute, reminding himself to request a conjugal visit for his next off-shift. Another benefit of being a Smoother.

After wiping depil cream on and off his face and head, he took a quick buzz bath, passing the electrostatic wand over himself. He bagged up and shrugged into his red one-piece. Yeah, his cube was too big, but he still grinned when he put on his reds. Red said Smoother. Red said, "Don't mess with me."

He retrieved his specs and stepped onto the flow disk in front of his door. Calling up the Harvey's cords on his specs, he spoke the "Go" command. As the disk received the destination from the specs, the door to his cube "shooshed" open, and the smells and sounds of the House assailed him.

A rhythmic pulse on her chip awakened Laryn. One slow, two fast. She sat up on her sleep shelf, fully alert. Her illegal trojan programs were warning her of a status change for one of her people. Brushing long dark hair out of her eyes with thin fingers, Laryn donned her specs and spoke the display command.

And swore. Another recent recruit for the Movement had gone Harvey. A Smoother team was already on its way.

After ensuring that her trojans had given the call to the right team, she flagged the file for tracking. She would watch the progress of this one until she went on-shift in an hour.

Laryn sat back, biting her lip, no longer able to ignore the pattern. This Harvey pushed the regression rate in new recruits to over thirty per cent. Has humanity lost so much, she thought? Is it already too late for us?

Or were the Movement's selection criteria flawed? Laryn herself had programmed the trojan that searched for recruits. The trojan constantly scanned the terabytes of data on citizens flowing through the House, searching for a specific mix of intellect, initiative, and motivation, expressed via complex psychological patterning algorithms. She'd based her trojan on software her fellow Inners used to find their own new initiates.

And she was living proof of the flaws in that process.

The citizens believed the Inners to be direct descendants of the Builders themselves, believing it because the Inners told them to. But the family social structure that could have supported that myth had died soon after the birth of the House.

In reality, the Inners chose who would enter their circle, selecting candidates at a young age after careful screening and then subjecting them to intensive indoctrination.

Not for the first time, Laryn wondered how she'd slipped through. How she had become an Inner. If the Inners can choose so badly, then so can we, she thought. Are we doomed already?

To restore her resolve, she opened a hidden compartment and removed the object that had become her touchstone. She sat back on her sleep shelf, telling herself yet again that she held the power to free the people in her hand.

The object she held was simple enough: an image of a thing, a thing her fellow Inners told the people no longer existed.

In her hand, she held the truth.

Staring at the image, Laryn realized that perhaps the Inners had not erred in choosing her those twenty years ago.

They'd chosen her to be a leader.

And a leader she would be.

She imagined again that she could see it all happen. In her mind, cracks appeared in the walls, in all the thousands, millions, billions of walls of the House. Next, the ceilings began to sag under the weight of the truth they hid, struggling not to fall, straining not to reveal the thing waiting above.

But she knew that they would fall. They would all fall. The House would fall.

As the people rose up.

In the hall outside Big G's open door, a river of humanity flowed by him in both directions at a steady twenty miles per hour. Each person stood on their own flow disk, each disk moving over the magnetic flow fields below, programmed for a wake or sleep time destination.

Big G's cube sat on the east side of an EW-hall. The hall, like most in the House, was twelve feet across with two main central flows running in opposite directions. On each side, short merge paths led from the cube doors lining the hall to the central flow for that side.

Before he was a Smoother, Big G had been in Flow, assigned to Block U7-W23-N14, Sector W3-S8. He'd been in Flow since being certified Clean--no retro traits--at nine calendars of age. But Big G had grown, into his name and out of a job. He could no longer squeeze his bulk through the access doors in the floors and along the maintenance tunnels that ran two feet high below the flow tracks that moved the citizens through the House.

As Big G's flow disk accelerated smoothly forward from his doorway into the merge path, he weight-shifted by habit, not even holding the balance bar that formed a half-circle at waist height. The east-flow adjusted, creating a space between two white-garbed Techs into which Big G's disk slipped with no noticeable change in speed for the other east-side travelers. Big G thought of his years in Flow and felt a stab of pride at his small part in how the House worked, how the Flow kept flowing, moving the people to where they had to be.

The ever-present buzz-hum of the Flow that was the song of the House washed over him. He breathed in the people smells he missed in his new cube, thick and pungent, and tinged here with a sting of ozone. He watched the travelers passing in the west-flow, mostly white Techs and blue Makers in this sector, some gray Crats, a black Recycler. Each person looked away, avoiding eye contact with a Smoother. He had their respect, their fear.

After ten minutes, his disk entered the flow circle in the intersection with a NS-hall. It orbited, queuing for the down-side of the UD-tube at the circle center. He checked the Harvey's cords. Down sixty-two levels. Flush it, he thought. He hated big drops.

His turn came, and his disk slid onto the next empty slot on the down-side of the tube. Big G swallowed and forced his face to relax as the slot clamps stabilized his disk. Not good to let the people see a Smoother sweat over something as common as a drop. But he still counted every level as they flashed by.

He knew that Tapper would be on his way to the same cords. Tapper was his partner, and Dispatch always sent two Smoothers to a Harvey. Never knew how bad these calls would be. He hoped the Harvey would already be dead. That happened a lot.

He'd asked Tapper once why they called them Harveys. Tapper had said that it came from an alcool drink the Builders had made--Harvey Wallbanger, they'd called it. Wallbanger, get it? Then he'd laughed. Even Tapper didn't believe that one.

Well, Harveys did generally start with banging the walls of their drawers. Frowning, he checked the Harvey's cords again. This one was in a cube. Harveys were usually in drawers.

His disk reached the Harvey's level and slid out of the down-tube into another traffic circle. It looped around to the north-flow, rode that for ten blocks, then demerged and slipped into the small, dimly lit access lane for the cubes on the inside of that block. Six cubes along, it slowed and stopped.

Tapper was waiting, his small thin frame leaning on the wall, bony fingers drumming a rhythm on his thigh like a mech-claw in a loop. That's how he got his name. But the Inners didn't name him. Inners knew you by your ID and called you by your job. People you worked with, they gave you your name.

"Took ya enough," Tapper said with a sharp-featured grin. "Whadya do? Try to find a route with no drop?" The grin disappeared as he dodged a cuff from Big G.

"So why didn't you clean it up yourself, shorty, you in so much of a hurry?" Big G growled.

Tapper sniffed, faking all serious. "Against the regs. Going solo on a Harvey."

Big G laughed. "When'd you ever stick to regs?"

Tapper's grin returned. "When I'm first at a Harvey call."

Snorting, Big G touched his Smoother finger to a small indentation beside the door of the Harvey's cube. The snoop spot irised open, and he bent down to peer in. He moved his head back and forth, and then straightened. "Can't see a thing."

"Dispatch thinks he covered the lens with glop."

"That's a new one."

"Guess he got sick of that one flavor you like so much."

Big G chuckled, relaxing a bit when he heard that it wasn't a woman. Female Harveys were the worst, at least for him. He didn't like having to hurt them.

"You activate his camera?" Big G asked.

All cubes, except for Inners, contained cameras, as did all intersections, supposedly capturing each citizen's every action. As a Smoother, Big G now knew that it would be impossible to monitor such displays or even store an hour's activity in the House. The ID chips were far more efficient, tracking movements and restricting access to areas as needed. But cameras could be activated for a specified ID chip at the request of a Smoother.

Tapper shook his head. "Covered that lens too."

"So how do we know he's in there?"

Tapper touched a stud on his specs. "Central says his chip's inside. So unless he's carved it out of his head--"

"Been done before."

"In which case, he's bleeding to death somewhere else."

"At least that wouldn't be our call," Big G muttered.

Tapper's face went all smooth, calm. He reached up and squeezed Big G's shoulder. "S'okay. Just our job. Harveys, well, they're already gone once they get to this stage. Nothin' we can do. Nothin' anybody can do. Just gotta finish the job."

"Just our job," Big G repeated, trying to believe it.

"That's right."

"Nothing else to do."

"Nothin'."

Big G sighed and glanced at Tapper. "Ready?"

Nodding, Tapper moved to the door, taser in hand. Big G didn't use a taser, preferring his size and strength in Harvey calls. Besides, Tapper said a taser in Big G's hand was like a warning sign on a hallway riot cannon. Redundant, he called it.

Big G touched his Smoother finger to the cube's door lock. The door slid open, and Tapper dove inside first, Big G shouldering through behind him.

The stench of the room hit him almost as hard as the Harvey. He had just enough time to see Tapper slump to the floor before a naked whirlwind of flesh slammed Big G into the wall beside the door. Something metallic bright, metallic sharp glinted in the hand that flashed up at his throat.

Big G shot out his left arm, blocking the thrust, and drove the heel of his right palm up and hard into the Harvey's nose. He felt the bone give under the blow. The man's head snapped back, long dirty hair flying, and he crumpled to the floor. A foot-long piece of jagged plasteel, which Big G recognized as part of a sleep shelf support, dropped from the man's hand.

Big G hauled Tapper to his feet with one hand and started checking for blood. Tapper slapped his hands away.

"I'm okay. I blocked him with my taser arm," he muttered.

Big G felt relieved. Partners looked out for each other. It wouldn't look good to have your partner go down. Besides, Tapper was his only friend.

"So why'd you...?" Big G frowned, and then started to laugh. "You zapped yourself!"

"He knocked my arm," Tapper said reddening, and Big G laughed harder.

"Shaddup," Tapper said, but he was grinning. He knelt to touch the Harvey's neck as they'd been taught. His grin disappeared. He stood, shaking his head. Pressing a stud on his specs, he spoke, "One unit for recycling, these cords."

Big G turned away, wanting to throw up but not from the smell. He'd used a killing blow by reflex, from training. It had been self-defense, but that didn't make him feel any better.

Tapper spoke finally, low and quiet. "Y'okay?"

"Yeah," Big G replied, just as quietly.

Pause. "Nothing else you could do."

"Yeah." Big G wanted to talk about something else. He looked around the room. "Most Harveys are in drawers," he said, cursing the quaver in his voice.

Tapper nodded. "Some're in cubes, but never this big."

"Even bigger than the ones we get."

Tapper grinned, then spread his arms out to each side and spun around, doing a little dance, oblivious now to the body at his feet. "Yeah. Ain't it great? All this space?"

Big G stared at Tapper as if he'd just gone Harvey himself. "You like big cubes?"

"Sure do. Ya don't feel like the walls are closin' in." He shivered, but then grinned. "Hey! Maybe we'll get one of these if we do good."

Big G just shook his head. He knew that he wouldn't like an even bigger cube. His walls were already too far away. He continued to survey the room.

To avoid looking at the body, he looked up. Glop covered the ceiling as well, except for a clean circle about a foot across with a small square of color stuck in its center. He reached up and tugged at the square. It came away easily, leaving behind a dab of dried glop.

The square was a pictab, a piece of plas-per with an image encoded into its surface. Big G blinked, trying to make the image come into focus, to make sense. It seemed to be a mass of white swirls and curls and curves hanging in a blue nothingness. He'd never seen anything like it. It fascinated him.

"What do you think it is?" Big G asked.

Tapper started to shrug, but then his eyes locked on the image. "Dunno. Let's see," he said, reaching for the pictab.

But Big G pulled his hand back to stare at the image again. "Think it had something to do with him going Harvey?"

"It's a flushin' pictab. Toss it in the dis-chute, and let's get out of this stink before I puke," Tapper snapped.

But Big G continued to study the image, struggling to make sense of it. Tapper sighed. "Okay, tell you what. Give it to me, and I'll check with Archives to see if they know what it is." He held out his hand to take it.

Big G hesitated, reluctant to part with the strange vision. "You'll give it back after?"

"Yeah, sure." Tapper plucked the square from Big G's fingers and slipped it inside his reds. Big G watched it disappear. "Now let's go," Tapper said, stepping out the door.

Big G looked down at the body, then around the cube, and finally up at the ceiling. "Wonder why he put it up there?"

Tapper didn't answer. Tapper was gone.

Still in her cube, Laryn cut her illegal link to Central. Nothing more to discover there. The situation was controlled--the Smoother team had killed her recruit. After sending a coded update to her cell members, she sat back, biting her lip, this time aware of the habit from the pain it caused.

She'd found no trace of interest in her direction, but how long would it take them to see a pattern? To find a connection?

To find her?

She needed to scrub the Harvey's file of any links to her or the Movement. But her spec display was counting down to her work shift. The scrub would have to wait.

That sleep time, Big G didn't dream of falling. Instead, he floated in white swirls and curls and curves hanging in a blue nothingness. The image in the pictab. No straight, sharp, hard lines of floors meeting walls meeting ceilings running on and on and on forever. He felt scared but also excited.

His first call next wake time was a flow break. An easy shift. A sector had lost east-west flow, and he and Tapper had to lead stranded travelers along dim Smoother corridors to the next hall. When he saw Tapper, Big G asked about the pictab.

Tapper looked away as they walked. "Archives had nothin'."

Big G waited for more, but Tapper just kept walking, staring ahead, grumbling about how small the corridors were.

"So where is it?" Big G asked finally.

"Where's what?" Tapper asked.

"The pictab! You said you'd bring it back. It's mine."

Tapper glanced up at Big G, but then quickly looked away again. "They kept it. Gonna add it to the Harvey's file."

Big G stopped walking, and somebody bumped into him. He turned and glared, and the line of faces behind him, Crats mostly, cowered back. He started walking again.

"It's mine," he repeated.

Tapper swallowed and kept glancing up at him, but Big G ignored him. He was thinking of what Tapper had said, about the Harvey having a file.

Things were not going well for Laryn. She'd drawn a double shift, delaying her scrub of the Harvey's file. Now back in her cube, she sat at her secure link and called up the file. Her breath caught as the status flag flashed on her specs.

Someone else was accessing the same file.

Forcing calm on herself, she quickly spoke the command to start the scrub, praying that she wasn't too late.

Off-shift, Big G sat in his cube searching the Harvey's file on his specs. New to being a Smoother and the power it brought, he'd expected an "access denied" message. But after a delay of a heartbeat, the data began to scroll down his lens.

The Harvey had been a mid-level Crat, with a clean work record, no flags anywhere on his file. Big G kept scanning, not even sure what he was looking for.

Until he found it: a repeat visitor, irregular but at least once per seven-shift for the past cycle. A woman. Conjugal visits? But the Recycling autopsy showed that he'd been taking his No-aggra, so it hadn't been sex. Work relationship maybe.

He spoke the command to link the woman's ID to her file. The screen flashed "Link Error." He scrolled back through the Harvey's file to pick up the ID code and enter it directly. No luck. He did a search command then scrolled from beginning to end and back again before he accepted what had happened.

All evidence of the woman's visits had disappeared.

Big G never thought he might have imagined it--he didn't credit himself with having imagination. Shrugging mentally, he spoke the cords of the woman's cube that he'd seen on the file: Sector E8-S8, Block D13-W25-S30, Cube U6-N2-W23/24. Few people could have recalled one of the cords, let alone all eight, but Big G had worked in Flow for fifteen years before Smoothing. Both jobs meant memorizing cords several times a shift.

Storing the cords, he scheduled a visit to the woman for his next shift. An official visit as a Smoother investigating a Harvey, he thought. But then an image of white on blue swirled behind his eyes, and he knew he was lying to himself.

Laryn sighed in relief as the scrub completed. But her respite was short-lived. The in-com light flashed on her specs. She swore as she read the message. A Smoother was requesting a meeting. An unknown Smoother, not the one she expected.

She cross-linked the Smoother's ID to the recent Harvey call. And got a match. No coincidence then.

Fighting down the panic that tried to rise in her, she sat back, frowning. If her fellow Inners had discovered her role in the Movement, they'd move immediately with no warning. But this Smoother was simply requesting a meeting, a full shift away. No sign of urgency. So there was no need for any rash action by her. No need for what had first flashed through her mind.

To run.

In a way, she felt disappointed. For a heartbeat, her fear of capture had overwhelmed another, much older fear.

A fear of the only place to which she could run. A place of legends, legends from childhood and childhood's nightmares.

Laryn sighed. No need for escape yet. Or to wonder how she would lead the people to a place she still feared herself.

Before his visit, Big G tried to discover more about the woman. To no avail. The system refused to provide any details concerning the occupant of the cords that he'd memorized.

What the cords themselves told him did not sink in until the time for his visit arrived. Standing on his flow disk, he called them up on his specs. And froze. He stepped off his disk and sat heavily on his sleep shelf.

The woman's cube was U6-N2-W23/24. He stared at the last portion. W23/24. Not just W23 or W24. She had a double cube.

She was an Inner.

Big G sat thinking, already over the shock. Things didn't throw him for long--one of the reasons he'd been picked as a Smoother. "If you met a two-headed citizen," Tapper had once said, "first thing you'd do is check if both heads had a chip."

This explained why he had found nothing on her. He ran a big hand over the smooth skin of his head. He probably should cancel. An Inner's business with a Harvey was none of his.

No. He'd better make the call, if only to explain his mistake. He stepped onto his disk and spoke the "Go" command.

Laryn sat watching the big Smoother as he apologized rather than accused. He spoke in short nervous sentences, looking around her cube, not meeting her gaze. He'd have been amazed to know how much she'd learned of him since he first contacted her.

She'd run her trojan that profiled possible recruits against Big G, and found him suitable for the Movement--not as a leader, but as a follower. He fell below the desired level of intelligence. But he was fiercely loyal to a cause that tied to his belief system--a key trait for the Movement.

Some of his indicators were ambiguous, especially those reflecting his views on personal freedom versus authority. Still, she could only believe that anyone, once they knew the truth of the House, would rank the right to freedom for billions above maintaining the status quo.

Her last concerns gone, her mind focused on the man. He wanted something and was about to tell her what it was. There was opportunity here. She smiled at him. He seemed to like that. She smiled again. Yes, definitely opportunity.

Big G wanted to be anywhere but sitting in front of this beautiful woman in her far too large cube as she played with her long dark hair and smiled at him. Any Inner he'd ever met had been stern and frightening. To his surprise, she had told him to call her by her name, Laryn. She wasn't even wearing her Inner golds, just off-shift stripes like a normal citizen. Her golds hung by the door like any other garment, and somehow the casualness of their display made him even more nervous.

But as he explained his visit, he realized that he'd come here not to apologize, but to learn. Knowing then that all his discomfort would be for nothing unless he found the courage to ask his question, he stumbled on.

"...since you knew this Harvey, I mean, this man...that is...see, I found this thing in his room--" Big G stopped.

Laryn had straightened slightly, her smile freezing like a seized servo-lock. "What kind of thing?" she asked.

He swallowed. "A pictab. It was...it..." He struggled to describe what still haunted him every time he closed his eyes.

But before he could find words, she produced a pictab from somewhere he didn't catch and placed it on the small table between them. "Was it like this?"

He stared down at the image, different but the same. More blue in this one, but still the swirls of white, still the feeling of floating in something, the absence of the straight hard lines of the House. He swallowed. "Yes," he whispered.

"What do you see?" she asked.

"I don't know. Something blue covered by something white. Or the other way around."

She smiled at him. Big G felt his face burning. He'd made her smile. He wanted to do that again.

"White on blue," she said.

Big G nodded, praying she'd say more. She seemed to be studying him, judging whether he was worthy of a great secret. For he was sure the pictab involved a great secret.

Finally she spoke. "Enough for now. But I'd like to meet with you again, here in my cube. Every off-shift for the next two cycles. To prepare you to receive the answer you seek."

Big G swallowed. That meant committing his free time for over fifty off-shifts. But he nodded his agreement.

"You will make no further inquiries into the Harvey that you killed..." She paused as he flinched, then continued, "or regarding this." Here she pointed at the pictab. "You will do nothing out of the ordinary, nothing to attract attention to yourself. Is that understood?"

He nodded again. And their first fateful meeting ended.

Over the following cycles, Big G complied with Laryn's instructions to the letter, driven to learn the pictab's secret. But soon his compliance owed itself as much to another reason.

As a Smoother, he could request a conjugal partner any off-shift. But this was different. No woman had ever initiated sex with him or made him feel desired. Her interest in him excited him as much as her body. He thought of her even while on-shift. And off-shift, instead of watching a realee on his specs, he'd lay there thinking of her, waiting for their next time together.

Strange and new to him, his feelings for her confused him.

But not as much as the true history of the House confused him, as Laryn slowly taught him during their sessions together.

"It was the greatest undertaking in history," Laryn began his first lesson. "To build a safe haven for billions from an environment that had finally lost the war we'd waged on it for centuries. An environment of deadly toxins, depleted ozone, and mutating retro-viruses spread by multiplying parasites."

The House began, Laryn said, as a "military" "project" by the "government" of the "country" that first conceived the idea.

Big G struggled with these strange concepts, especially with people choosing their leaders. Laryn said that, before the House, the people used to have freedom to make most decisions in their lives--their jobs, where to live, what to eat, how to dress, how to spend their time. Big G didn't see how such a world could even function. It seemed so disordered.

In a later session, Laryn explained how the environment's death led also to the death of something called the "economy."

"Industries failed. International money markets and trade collapsed. Free market capitalism fell," she said. "Relations between nations died as each fought its own internal battles."

Laryn spent several sessions explaining these ideas. Big G pretended to understand, but all he could really grasp was that more and more people had come to work on the House project, even from other "countries," as their old jobs disappeared.

"The House paid only in shelter, food and protection," Laryn explained, "but these people had no other options."

What else, Big G thought later, would you want?

"When industries necessary for the House failed--food, high tech, steel--the government took them over, absorbing those workers too, until they controlled all sources of production for the House. The government itself shrank, lopping off branches no longer needed or not essential to the project."

Laryn had paused then, sighing. "And so, a once great country reduced itself to one single purpose: build the House."

Something new was puzzling Big G. In recent sessions, as the strange, disturbing world Laryn had first described grew closer to the one he knew, he had become more excited. Here was the true story of the Builders! Yet Laryn seemed more concerned, even sad, over the strangeness that had been lost.

But he forgot about it as he learned more each session.

"Hundreds of millions of people now worked on the House," Laryn explained, "all under a strict project hierarchy, each with a specific role on sub-teams under teams under team leaders under project managers, all reporting up to a small program committee that was the remnant of the once-elected government."

Big G nodded. The words were strange, but it sounded very much like the House today. Tidy, orderly, efficient. Laryn's next comment echoed that thought.

"We had become the House," she said.

Again, he sensed her sadness.

"Elections were postponed so as not to disrupt progress. Dissent was minimal--the need to complete the House was too great." She stared at him intently. "Can you guess what happened next? What had to happen?"

Big G's heart jumped. Was this his test? If he failed, would the secret of the pictab be lost to him? To his relief, Laryn answered herself.

"All talk of elections, of democracy, gradually died away. The very project structure that had given a small group the power to direct millions of people to build the House was used by that same group to keep that power. To rule those millions."

Laryn paused. "Billions now," she whispered, her eyes no longer on him, unfocused, seeing something he could not. Then she seemed to come to herself and fixed him with a stare. "Do you know who that small group was? Who they are still?"

Big G swallowed. "The Inners?" he said. Laryn nodded, and he relaxed.

"Should a few have the right to direct the lives of billions?" she asked quietly, her eyes not leaving him.

Big G squirmed his bulk on his seat. To even ask that question seemed...wrong. But Laryn was an Inner. Surely the Inners were allowed to question themselves. Perhaps that was how the House stayed strong. Still he struggled for an answer.

"The House protects the People--" he began to recite.

Laryn sighed. "And the Inners protect the House. Yes, yes. But what if the world has changed? From when the House was first built? Wouldn't the House need to change too?"

What did she mean? The House was the world. Big G wished this lesson were over. "How would it change?" he asked.

She leaned forward, taking one of his large hands in both of hers. "To a world where people are free again."

The world before the House that she had told him of, he thought. That strange world of chaos and disorder.

Then the pictab flashed in his mind, with its random white and blue soft swirls, its own chaos and disorder contrasting with the clean predictable lines of the House.

For the first time, Big G felt a twinge of fear of the secret he chased.

The end of the two cycles of teaching Big G was nearing, and Laryn was crying.

She cried a lot lately. At first, she had cried because she was using him. But she'd used others in the past and had used sex as a means before. So why did it bother her this time?

Part of it was Big G himself. To her surprise, she'd grown to care for him over their time together. He was a clumsy lover but gentle, simple but honest, with none of the cynicism of the others in the Movement. Trusting and malleable, he was a child, believing what he was told, believing the lies the Inners fed him, just as she had believed as a child.

He was the people, embodying all that humanity had become.

But soon, he would be ready for the great truth. And that was why she cried. When she told him, that child in him would die, and with it, the last remnant of the child she had once been. But it was too late. Whatever he felt for her--and she was still unsure if he felt more than lust--she knew the blue and white vision still burned in him. He would not stop until he found the secret. She had seen this before.

Better, she thought, to have him with us when he finds out.

The next session, Big G arrived at Laryn's cube to find her dressed in her Inner golds.

"It's time," she said, once they were safely inside.

Big G's heart jumped. "You're going to tell me the secret?" he asked, his voice barely a whisper.

"Better than that. I'm going to take you to it," she said.

He opened his mouth but then just nodded, afraid to say the wrong thing and prove himself unworthy after all.

"First," Laryn said, "we must ensure that our movements don't attract attention." She handed him a pair of specs. "Put these on. They block the signal in your ID chip, replacing it with one that says you're still right here in my cube. You won't be able to be tracked, and you won't trip any cameras."

After a moment's hesitation, he took the specs from her. It bothered him to glimpse a system inside a system, one designed to hide. Who did Laryn fear? Surely not the Inners? Laryn was an Inner. But then who?

Laryn knelt and popped the cover off his disk. "I must also program your disk, so that it leaves no record of this trip. Notice anything unusual about these cords?" she asked.

Peeking over her shoulder, he watched her punch coordinates directly into his disk. "Only that I've never been that high."

"Right first time," she said. She smiled at him, and his face grew hot. "In fact, you can't go higher. Not in the House." She stood, wiping her hands on her golds as if they were just the whites of a Tech. Motioning him onto his disk, she stepped on hers and spoke the "go" command. The door to Laryn's cube slid open, and their disks slipped into the Flow.

Their route confused Big G. It looped and crossed itself and even dropped levels. But always it rose again, higher each time. They rode in silence, Laryn in front, an Inner with a Smoother escort. As they rode, Big G struggled to make sense of what she had said: You can't go any higher. Not in the House. That seemed to mean that you could go higher if...

He stopped that thought, shying back from it, from an idea so impossible, so forbidden that it froze him with fear. If...

...if you went outside the House. But the Outside was poisoned. No one could live Outside. That's why the Builders made the House. The Inners said so. But Laryn was an Inner...

He had no more time to ponder. They reached the upper level of the cords and began moving along an empty EW corridor. He checked NS halls at every intersection, but never saw another person. He realized then that he heard only the sound of their own disks. The normal background buzz of the Flow was missing.

As if reading his mind, she spoke. "This level is accessible only to Inners. No one lives or works here."

But as they neared the cords, Big G saw a thin, red-clad figure leaning on a wall. A block away, he knew who it was.

"Pull up that chin of yours 'fore ya trip over it," Tapper said as they stopped in front of him. He grinned but kept kicking the floor with a toe. He did that when he was nervous.

Big G looked at Laryn. She nodded. "Tapper's been with us for some time now. That's why it will be so wonderful to have you join us. We'd have a complete Smoother team."

Big G turned to Tapper. "You kept my pictab."

Tapper jerked his head in Laryn's direction. "Orders."

"Sorry," she said. "We don't want that in circulation. Now, are you ready?"

Big G was still trying to understand Tapper being here, and what Laryn meant about "joining" and "a complete Smoother team." He and Tapper were a team. But he said nothing and just nodded.

Tapper turned to the wall and touched his Smoother finger to what must have been a hidden security spot. A door slid open to reveal a small closet-sized space with a series of metal rungs attached to the facing wall.

Laryn stepped forward, grabbed a rung, and began to climb. "Let's go," she called. Tapper clambered up behind her.

Big G followed, barely able to squeeze his way up the narrow chute, but finding the closeness comforting after the strange emptiness of the corridors below. He'd never seen that much open space before, and it had frightened him.

His comfort didn't last. The rungs ended near the top of the chute, which was just a square hole cut in the floor above. Tapper scrambled out. Big G grabbed the side of the opening and hauled his bulk over the edge onto the floor.

And gasped.

There were no walls. Slender columns marched in east-west and north-south processions into the dimness of distance, supporting a ceiling covered in crisscrossing jumbles of pipes, ducts, and glow tubes--a ceiling that hung far too high above.

Tapper was jumping up and down, skipping and laughing. "Isn't this great?" he cried. "Lookit all this space. No walls. Nothin' to close you in."

Big G was well aware of the lack of walls. He was still lying on the floor, afraid to get up, ashamed of being afraid, especially in front of Laryn. Groaning, he crawled to the nearest pillar and wrapped an arm around it, clutching its closeness to him as he clamped his eyes shut against the space.

"Big G," Laryn said softly, her voice close to his ear.

He forced his eyes open. Laryn knelt beside him. She was biting her lip. He knew she did that when she was nervous, like Tapper kicking the floor.

"We're almost there," she said, pointing to a pillar with another set of rungs leading up to what appeared to be a trap door in the ceiling, almost hidden by ducts and cables.

"Is it...like this?" he gasped.

She bit her lip again. "It's what you saw in the pictab." She knelt beside him. "It's the secret I promised."

Her closeness helped him push the terror of the open space from his mind. Locking his eyes on the nearness of the floor, he stood on shaking legs and let her lead him to the ladder.

The climb seemed endless. Finally, he bumped into Tapper's feet. Above, he heard a screech of metal grating on metal. He hung there, eyes shut, surrounded by more emptiness than he had ever known, gripping a rung, hugging the pillar, until he heard the thud of something heavy falling on the ceiling overhead.

At first, he thought that they'd opened the cube of some gigantic Harvey. A roar, as from a great mouth, erupted above. The air came alive. It clawed at him with cold fingers. It choked him with strange smells, thin and sharp and cutting, none of the thick muskiness of the House. The shock snapped his eyes open, then his fear of the space around him overcame his fear of what lay above, propelling him up and through the opening...

And into a light brighter than any he'd ever seen. Eyes scrunched tight again, he crawled from the hole to fall panting on his back. Finally, his eyes adjusted, and he opened them.

He lay under a great bowl of blue in which billows of white swirled above him. The image from the pictab. But the white shapes in the pictab hadn't been alive, hadn't writhed like mouths ready to devour him. The air tore at him as if it had claws and wished to pluck him from the House and feed him to the mouths above. The blueness and its twisting white monsters surrounded him in all directions, dropping finally to meet the distant edges of this strange highest floor of the House, a floor that curved down to disappear at those edges as if they now sat on some impossibly huge ball.

"It's called the sky, and those are clouds," Laryn said, but her voice seemed stripped of its usual power. Up here, it was a tiny thing, swallowed by the vastness engulfing them. She named other things--wind, roof, horizon. "And that is the sun."

He looked to where she pointed. A cloud, chasing others across the blue, glowed as with some hidden light. The glow grew along one edge, and then a ball of indescribable brightness burst forth, burning his eyes with light and his skin with heat.

He cried out like a child and hid his face from the thing. Blinded, panicking, he flailed about for the trap door as the wind kept clawing at him. Grabbing an edge, he hauled himself head-first through the opening, catching the ladder at the last moment. He half-climbed, half-fell, first to the floor below, then down the other ladder to collapse on the empty House floor with its familiar halls, the comforting solidity of a wall at his back and a ceiling above him that didn't move as if alive.

After a time, he felt a touch on his arm. Laryn sat down beside him. "That is what the Inners hide from the people," she said. "The old legends of the Outside may have been true once, but no more. There's a world out there again--with air we can breathe and water we can drink--a world to which we can finally return. We're not ready yet, but we will be."

She talked on. Big G listened but didn't hear, unable to grasp what he'd seen. Despite all of her teaching, he had never believed until now that there was an Outside. The only world he knew was here, in the House. He lay drinking in the comforting closeness of the dimly lit ceiling, tracing where it met each wall in clean, straight, hard lines, feeling his breathing slow, trying to forget what he'd seen, just happy to be home.

Being back in the House was having a different effect on Tapper. The smaller man sat huddled on the floor, shivering, his eyes darting around the corridor. He mumbled something.

"What?" Big G said, grabbing at something else to focus on.

"Get up, Tapper," Laryn said, rising herself.

Tapper got up, but he just stood there hugging himself, shoulders hunched, head tucked down as if the ceiling was too low and he didn't want to bump his head. "Small," he whispered.

"Let's go," Laryn snapped, stepping onto her disk.

"What's wrong, Tap?" Big G asked, putting a hand on Tapper.

Tapper shivered again. "Too small. In here. Too small." Tapper turned to him. Something familiar but out of place peeked from behind Tapper's eyes. Big G had seen that look before, but he couldn't remember where. Head lowered, Tapper stepped on his disk and moved down the corridor after Laryn.

Big G looked around. It didn't feel too small to him. The walls, the ceiling--especially the ceiling--all felt wonderfully close.

Laryn knew that it hadn't gone well, that she'd pushed Big G too fast. He'd barely slept since the trip to the roof four shifts ago. He lay beside her each sleep time, staring up at the ceiling. He said whenever he closed his eyes, it was always there--the sky, writhing like a thing alive.

And she worried about Tapper, who was showing much different signs. Different but familiar.

Big G left her to start his shift. Just then, her trojans warned her of activity concerning one of her people.

The news was bad. Very bad.

Feeling ill, she stopped the display, wishing she could stop what would happen next as easily. And she found, to her surprise, that it was for him that she was afraid, not herself.

What had she done to his world?

To start his next on-shift, Big G was ordered to another Harvey call. He rode the Flow, his thoughts still on the sky, aware of, yet oblivious to, the call's familiar cords. Until he arrived. Until he saw another Smoother team outside Tapper's cube, saw the black-garbed Recyclers carrying out his body.

A gold-clad Inner, a small man with eyes as cold as scan cams, turned and locked those eyes on him. The Inner mouthed a command, and Big G knew that he was scanning Big G's ID chip. The man walked over, looking up but making Big G feel like he was looking down on him.

"Your partner's dead," the man said.

Big G blinked, still trying to make sense of the scene, aware of the Inner's eyes on him. "How?" he asked, ashamed at how normal his first words were. As if this was no big deal. As if you lost your best friend every shift.

The Inner shrugged. "He went Harvey. Notice any unusual behavior recently?" he asked, burning Big G with those eyes.

Big G remembered Tapper huddled inside on the floor after seeing the sky. Guilt swept over him. He'd known something was wrong. Now he recognized the look he'd seen in Tapper's eyes. He should have understood. He should have been able to stop this. He should have done something. Instead, he'd done...

"Nothing," he whispered.

Taking that as an answer, the Inner nodded. But those eyes still burned into him. Big G just stood there, more in grief over Tapper than in fear of the Inner, a small voice whispering to him that right now grief was good, that safety lay in grief.

The Inner reached into his golds and withdrew a pictab. "Do you know what this is?" the man asked.

Big G knew what it would be before he looked down at the blue and white swirls. He took the pictab, because he knew he should, even though he wanted nothing more to do with it. He turned it over, and on the back was the remnant of dried glop. He handed it back.

"We found it in a Harvey's cube. Tapper took it."

"But do you know what it is?" the Inner repeated.

Big G looked at the Inner. "No, sir," he said, and that was true. He really didn't know what the thing called sky was.

The Inner stared at him, but Big G felt no fear, only an emptiness, as he thought of doing his next shift without Tapper.

"You can return to your shift now, Smoother," the Inner said finally. "You've been assigned a new partner."

Big G asked who it was, but the Inner just shrugged, so Big G stored the cords for his next call and left.

That night, he dreamed again of falling. Not down a drop tube, not as a Builder falling from the still-being-born House, but of falling through a swirling blue and white void that went on and on. He fell and fell, a blue-white, white-blue mist hiding what he fell towards. And then he knew, in the way one knows in dreams, that the House was gone as Laryn had planned, that he was falling towards nothing, that the blue-white, white-blue was all there was, and he would fall through it forever.

He woke up screaming.

When his next shift started, he turned Laryn in.

Laryn waited for him in her cube, waited well past the end of his shift, well into his sleep time when he should have been there with her. She knew then, as she lay awake staring at the ceiling so close above her in the dark. She knew it was over.

She rose, blinking as the lights came up. Taking a pictab of blue and white swirls from its hidden place, she inserted it in a device and spoke the words she wished written on its back.

"I forgive you. Remember me. Remember the sky." She paused, then added, "I love you." Placing the pictab in a mail pellet, she coded a destination and dropped it in her out-chute.

They were outside her cube now. She activated her illegal security measures, knowing that it would only slow them down.

She wondered if he was with them.

When Big G had scanned on-shift that wake time, the call was on the board at Dispatch, a red "X" beside her name. A kill mark. And his name assigned to it, his name beside hers.

But Squat was on Dispatch, so Big G had asked him to give it to another Smoother. If it'd been Marker, he wouldn't have asked. Marker would've made him do it, made him be the one.

Squat had stared at him, and Big G had wondered if his name being there wasn't a random thing, if the Inners wanted him to do it. But then Squat had nodded. Said he was sorry about Tapper. Told Big G to scan off-shift and cube down.

So that's what he'd done. Back to his cube, to walls and floor and ceiling that had once been hard and strong and sure, but now seemed so fragile, ready to be blown away by a thought.

Or by a vision.

A vision on a pictab that appeared in the tray of his in-chute. A vision of white swirls and curls and curves hung in a blue nothingness. No straight, sharp, hard lines of floors meeting walls meeting ceilings running on and on and on.

Big G took the pictab from the tray and held it in his large hands. He read her message on the back. He stared at it for several labored breaths and then, with great and careful precision, he tore it slowly in half. Covering the face of one half with that of the other so that the image was hidden, he again tore the pieces in two. One final time he tore them.

He did not even need to move to reach the dis-chute. So efficient a design, he thought, so practical and proper. He opened the chute door gently, as if removing a garment of a lover. Letting the fragments slip from his hand into the blackness, he held the chute open for a moment, listening for the small "poof" that the pieces made as they vaporized.

He closed the chute again and for a time just stood there, running his hand over the wall, stroking it, taking comfort in its coldness, its solidity. He turned finally to his tiny sleep shelf. Lying on his back, he pressed the top of his head against the wall above his pillow, then stretched out his legs until his feet touched the opposite wall. He placed his left hand on the third wall to which the bed attached.

The humming of the block, of the entire House, sang through the skin of his hand, up his arm, into his chest. It filled his skull and echoed in his mind. This was as it should be. Here lay solace from the void, from unending blue emptiness.

He closed his eyes, and for a moment, the thing called sky hung above him once more, impossibly distant, untouchable. Shuddering, he opened his eyes to the closeness of the ceiling before him and slowly, slowly reached out a trembling right hand to feel for the last wall.

© Douglas Smith 2005, 2007.
"Going Harvey in the Big House" first appeared in Cicada (Jan/Feb 2005) and was a finalist for the 2006 Aurora Award for best short fiction by a Canadian.