The Last City on Earth

The sun, relentless and unsettling, slipped slowly behind the horizon beyond the walls of the walled city that had once been Wichita, Kansas, now home to more than seventy million women who had come to see the sun as their enemy. The outer walls glowed burnt orange as bicycles hummed and lights flickered on. Seventy million women, and zero men, lived inside the dome, stacked in towers that climbed all the way to its steel-ribbed ceiling, making it the most densely populated city the Earth had ever known.

After Alice Springs sank deep into the Southern Ocean and El Alto went up in flames, this once humble city became the last center of intelligent life on a slowly dying world. Its citizens, the only women left after years of war, renamed their new home La Ultima Ciudad.

In 2120 it was the Last Great City. A city to dwarf the vibrance of Shanghai at the turn of the century or the importance of the Big Apple to the ending of the third world war and its total destruction that started the fourth; the Great Corporate War, the one that ended the world.

Rachel47, the forty-seventh clone of her line, was having a solitary moment, something she had only read about in books. She was experiencing privacy for what she thought was the first time.

She felt alone, and she had never known what it was like to be alone. No one was ever alone in La Ultima Ciudad.

If she had stepped out of her two-bedroom apartment into the corridors of the largest building in the Capital Complex, she would have been surrounded by people. There was always someone moving back and forth through the capital. There was always movement in the center of the walled city, even at this late hour.

Outside The Capital Complex, under the daytime patterns of the steel lattice framework that held the tempered glass in place, the shadows spread from the central hub like intersecting triangles across what had once been downtown Wichita. But when the lights came on and the sun was gone, the shadow pattern faded, and it felt like a different city altogether. If Rachel ever bothered to venture out of the capital, as far as the inner rim, she would have found only a few women on the streets. It would have been quiet, but she certainly would not have been alone.

What Rachel47 felt in her moment of privacy was very different from the quiet of the inner rim. It was stillness and calm. She could barely believe it. It almost didn’t seem real.

“No one is watching me,” she whispered incredulously. She was smiling, almost giggling, to herself. Just the thought of no one, absolutely no one, watching was strange and exciting to the new girl.

Rachel had never known anything about tech stuff. She could barely melt a block cheese in a microwave. She couldn’t know for sure without asking someone, if her living room camera had gone dark, and talking to anyone except an authorized operator about a camera was a felony. If she did talk to an op, they would dial her up, and send out a tech to fix her problem, and Rachel didn’t want them to fix her problem. She would no longer have privacy then. And this privacy felt so… peaceful.

In The Walled City, there was always someone watching you. Even out on the rim, there were cameras everywhere. There were cams in every home, in every corridor, on every street. There were cams in every office, in every store, and every place a citizen could legally go.

Breaking a camera intentionally was punishable by death. It seems harsh but death, for a citizen, wasn’t permanent. They were always brought back. So that the worst thing that could happen to a girl who had died was a total loss of memory.

Rachel had been brought back forty six times, though she had no idea how she had died before any of them.

Other cam felonies included: blocking a camera, destroying a terminal, or interfering with the signal from a cam or to a terminal. All of them were punishable by a death that was temporary and a loss of time and memory that was very, very permanent.

Every cam had its own signal, its own number, and its own location identifier. And everyone, everywhere, could dial anyone at any time and see everything. The entire population lived their every waking moment on camera.

Most of the women, the citizens of Ultima, didn’t care. They had nothing to hide and there was nothing to see. While others put on shows for endorsements or sponsorships and a few dozen women a day became accidental celebrities for fifteen minutes at a time. There were seventy million channels and always something on.

Rachel47 liked to watch the mayor sleep and a woman from the East Wall who played the violin at around the same time every day. She was very popular.

Rachel’s two-bedroom apartment actually had four rooms: a bedroom, a living room, a kitchenette, and a bathroom, each with its own cameras and monitors. There was at least one camera in every room, in every home, in every building, in the city. However, in this eerily private moment, as long as Rachel remained silent and in her living room, with its malfunctioning camera, she was completely unseen.

Rachel, the forty seventh of her line, believed herself to be a fully upright citizen. She was certain that she was a good person. She rode a bike to pay her bills and she donated any extra miles to charity. She never feared the cameras, the constant surveillance, the Unyielding Static. She had nothing to hide and she rarely questioned the Authority; the last great corporation, that was her parent company so to speak. There was always someone watching, and that was simply the way it was.

A woman could watch four different feeds from her portable, and from a home system she could pull up twenty at a time. From any public terminal in the parks or around the city, you could people watch anyone doing anything with just a few clicks. You could watch people eat, sleep, argue, play games, masturbate. Or simply watch people watch other people. You could see them live, at any time, no matter where they were or what they were doing.

Anyone could be dialed up, from the mayor of the last city on Earth to the president and CEO of the Corporate Authority itself. From an ex-girlfriend to a current crush. From your next-door neighbor to your neighbor’s boss’s doctor’s hairdresser’s best friend. As long as you knew their name and number, the Unyielding Static would find them and put them on a screen, or put you on theirs.

The lack of privacy drove some girls crazy but nothing ever bothered Rachel47, not enough for the kind of disobedience that would bring out the Dogs.

Even death was against the law in the last city on Earth, and they always, nearly always brought you back, because immortality was the price of scarcity. At its height the world’s population reached seven or eight billion but in 2120 the final humans, the seventy million or so left, were not allowed to die.

It’s nothing like where I’m from. I’m from a planet and a time where life is cheap. Not like here where life is expensive and bodies are printed and reprinted, and recent scans and uploads are downloaded into new brains. They called it recycling and upcycling and nothing was lost but time. It’s amazing to think that we were once from here.

It was highly recommended by the Corporate Authority, in ads read by shills in their bedrooms, to keep a consistent back up schedule, so that little time was lost, but you know how people are, nobody had time for that, and frequently years were lost to tragic accidents or timely executions.

The lack of privacy bothered some girls enough to take a bat to a camera or throw a chair through a terminal, but that sort of behavior would definitely bring out the Dogs, and no one, and I mean no one, wanted that. Besides, the cameras, the terminal, the Static would be back up in no time. And the new girl with similar features and the same trauma wouldn’t remember a thing. Effectively losing the memory of everything that had happened since her last upload.

But who were the Dogs you ask?

Good question.

The Dogs were the city’s protection. Not the people, they kept the infrastructure safe. The only real thing to fear for an immortal population in a city of seventy million was a violent, painful death. There were gangs. There was a black market. There was murder. There were crimes of passion. There were accidental deaths by the thousands. But the worst offenders were the Dogs themselves.

They were like animals, but technically they were human drones. Biologically empty vessels that had male bodies and simple minds. They were manufactured the old-fashioned way; in test tubes and laboratories, and forced to do the dangerous and messy jobs that few women wanted, working outside the wall, or deep in the mines or in the slaughterhouses or patrolling the streets.

They weren’t human at all. A human was a singular consciousness. They weren’t real, like really real. Because real people had souls. The Dogs were just copies of a template of a soldier from the late 1990’s, built from a diagram and a formula. They didn’t sleep. They didn’t eat. They had no inner child. They were emotionless, compassionless, thoughtless killing machines. All of the mushy stuff had been scienced out of them, along with the heart and guts and the things that make a human being human.

But frankly, the jury was still out on whether the seventy million so called citizens left on Earth were human or not. That was precisely why I was here; to decide on whether there were any humans left or if this planet had been abandoned and its resources up for grabs.

I’ve studied the Earth for centuries and have since fallen in love with the place. I love the stories of these people, their music and art. I love the ways they love and they way they have overcame everything but a love of money and an irrational need to compete with each other. I’d hate to see this planet strip mined and sold for parts. However, I will do my job, father. I will earn your respect. I will make you proud.

Dogs.

We were talking about Dogs.

Initially, they were designed to be grunts for the war effort. As more of the population died from preventable diseases, fewer people were willing to risk their lives in the endless conflicts. Still the major corporations wouldn’t stop the fighting because it was good for business. They were wrong. And when they finally went bankrupt, and the last war ended, the Dogs were repurposed. They became the law keepers; the weapons of the Authority, originally made, as it were, in man’s image.

Man.

The last natural-born man to exist on this planet, besides me, died more than half a century ago. Radiation poisoning and air pollution from chemical weapons designed to emasculate the enemy spread across the globe and the Y chromosome became a death sentence.

Men were effectively eliminated from the war effort through genetic diseases, and eventually the planet. Only X chromosomes were allowed to be fed into the body printers and these machines stitched cells and proteins together to create new female bodies for everyone with a brain scan on file.

In some cases, a single X cell was copied to an inactive X, and those who had once been male were reincarnated as female. I know it’s not good science to call it reincarnation but it was, after all, the same consciousness just in a new form. I think.

The argument begins when you print a second person from the same scan and now you have two people with the same consciousness. Or three. Or four. That’s what I’m here to find out through basic experimentation. First with identical clones from the same scan and next with reincarnated humans plucked from different timelines. I’m going to see if there’s a significant difference. And I’ve already got my three picked out. You’ve met them.

Rachel, the forty seventh, and not the forty-sixth or the forty-eighth, would be my control group. A clone who was the reincarnation of a homeless black man from the 1960’s who was the reincarnation of a Buddhist nun from the late 1800’s who had been many great people in history but I only needed the three. I just have to observe them as they lived and snatch them from their timelines immediately after they’ve died. If I can remove them from the past and present them to the council as a set, the council would decide whether they were the same soul in different bodies or the same bodies with different souls. Or if what was left was just soulless flesh. And if so, if they were just soulless flesh, then by galactic law they could not hold ownership of a world, and the Earth could be dismantled and sold.

It’s very patient work but I have all the time in the universe, and in the meantime, I get to watch their lives play-out while I wait for my moment to shine. My people conquered time travel long ago, from my perspective, centuries from now, from yours, so I can watch them all from my paradox engine. I can watch their lives unfold and…

I’m sorry, I was talking about Dogs.

Dogs were not men. They were more akin to flesh golems or lab grown automatons with blind obedience baked in. They were repurposed as expendable unpaid laborers after the wars. Just like the slaves of old, they built three remarkable cities from out of the wreckage and the mud but were not allowed to enjoy the fruits of their labor.

They were warriors once but then they became slaves. They were slaves once but then they became prison guards. They were guards once, but then they became executioners.

There were no lawyers or prisons anymore. There had been, but most of the so-called criminals welcomed a jail sentence with a smile.

“Alone at last,” a woman would say as she were carried off. Alone at last tattoos became all the rage among the people of the rim. Incarceration wasn’t much of a punishment, and soon the only prisons were at full capacity.

The Authority, the last of the corporations, shut down their corporate prisons, absorbed the lost of profits and the only punishment left was swift execution.

The Dogs had originally been made for violence, so it came naturally to them. Police brutality was standard operating procedure. With the cameras off or on, with everyone watching or not, the savage beating of criminals proceeded each and every execution. The women had no memory but their audiences did. No one’s reputation survived a run-in with the Dogs. Not many wanted to experience something like that, and every city’s crime numbers fell sharply.

In Ultima, there were hundreds of cameras in every building, sending live feeds of every person in every room up to the Static. The Unyielding Static became a living record of everything that happened in the city in real time. No one got away with anything because the U.S. had eyes and ears in every home, everywhere. There was always someone watching, except, of course, when there wasn’t.

No one was watching Rachel. Rachel47’s living room camera had gone dark, and it clearly wasn’t her fault. The lady from across the hall had once warned her that if her cameras went out she needed to report it immediately, or they would send in the Dogs. Rachel was in no hurry to report it. She was enjoying being unseen.

She was enjoying it so much that she couldn’t bear to move from the spot. She would eventually have to call it in… but not yet. Not quite yet.

In the next room, a tiny light on her bedroom terminal turned from yellow to red, flickered twice and then held steady.

Unfortunately for her, Rachel did not see it. 

Rachel47 sat in her comfortable chair. She only had one. With her bare feet on her living room lawn, she was enjoying a rare moment of privacy. She didn’t notice that her bedroom terminal was actively flashing a warning that her current activity was unsanctioned. Privacy in La Ultima Ciudad, the last city on Earth, was not allowed and could result in punishment, even death. Although death, for the seventy million, virtually immortal citizens – the women who encompassed the last of the human race – wasn’t a permanent state, but the loss of memory sure was. The hazard light flashed an urgent warning but by the time she noticed, it was too late.

BUZZ! BUZZ!

The buzzer in her bedroom was turned up louder than it had ever been. It made the room shake and Rachel nearly jumped out of her skin. She had only just noticed the tiny red light on her bedroom rack and wondered why someone would buzz her in a room she wasn’t in and then all hell broke loose.

She checked the living room terminal again. The screens were working fine maybe only the counter was broken. Zero connections had to be a mistake. No buzz. Sweet silence. She didn’t want to move.

BUZZ! BUZZ! BUZZ!

The party was apparently in the bedroom and the woman on the other end was not patient.

It nearly gave Rachel a second heart attack when, suddenly her living room screens went bright white with a light that shattered the silence and disturbed her peace. Rachel held her hand in front of face and wondered if she needed sunscreen. Pale and redhead by choice, she didn’t even know that the screens could do that. It was a brightness assault.

The operator’s voice came through loud and clear from her bedroom speakers, and Rachel was sure that it could be heard on the other floors. This was a quiet neighborhood.

“Rachel Forty-Seven!” The voice boomed through her bedroom and echoed down the halls. “You have five seconds to get to your bedroom terminal!” Then the operator began to count. “One, two…”

Rachel jumped out of her recliner, sprinted past her stationary bike, and ran into the bedroom faster, she thought than she would ever move. She didn’t know the future like I did. She was wrong.

Fucking operators!

The operators were the workers who watched the Static for signs of broken terminals, and it was the operators who called out the Dogs. They could turn you in for the slightest infraction or hint of disobedience. They were citizens just like Rachel, but they had extraordinary powers. Some say they could read minds. Sure, there were cameras pointed at them as well, but why would you invite that sort of scrutiny. Only weirdos watched the watchers. I mean, they just sat there. Who would do that?

The operator was counting way too fast! Each number landed like a hammer blow, as Rachel wondered if her bedroom had always been this far from her living room, and she felt each and every number in her chest.

“Four. Five.” The operator sped through the sequence like she wanted Rachel to be in violation. “Rachel Forty-Seven?” She barked again from the bedroom terminal.

“I’m here! I’m here!” Rachel said, catching her breath. “You can see that I’m here.”

The operator ignored her and continued. “There is an error with your apartment cam numbered two, five…” She fired off a stream of digits that seemed to never end. “Located in the sitting room of apartment number seven, zero…” More numbers. This girl really loved her numbers. “You are ordered-” She stressed the world ordered like it was a magic spell. “Ordered to remain in the bedroom until a technician can be dispatched to fix the problem.” There was a long pause like someone else was talking to her and then she continued. “She will be there shortly. Do you understand the order you have been given?” Again she stressed the word order like it was doing all the work.

“Yes, I do,” Rachel47 answered in her most compliant voice. “But I didn’t get your name.” She tried to joke with the girl, but the line went dead. It was a savage click. “Well, this is exciting,” Rachel thought aloud. She had never had a cam error before, at least none that she could remember.

So she had been alone in her living room after all. No one could see her. That was pretty cool, she thought. She should have picked her nose.

She certainly wasn’t alone anymore. That operator was definitely watching to make sure she obeyed. And by now there were probably a couple hundred amateur scanners who had witnessed the op-call and called their friends who were all waiting for her to screw up and get brought down by the Dogs, live on cam.

Rachel47 was now officially a source of entertainment. She had watched plenty of these episodes herself. There were entire feeds devoted to them, chatrooms and discussion groups. Every citizen potentially had a show on the Static. Big Sister was always watching for nudity, cooking mishaps, performance yoga, hidden camera porn, except the cameras weren’t hidden, and violence. The word would spread fast.

Rachel47’s favorite show was the voyeuristic Train Wreck where dumb citizens got caught doing dumb things. It was finally her turn. Or maybe it wasn’t. She knew the drill. Only the stupid girls failed to comply with an operator. She knew better than that. “Sorry, ladies,” Rachel said aloud. “This one is gonna be boring.”

By the time the technician would arrive, she was sure to have a couple thousand more viewers. It was too bad she couldn’t juggle. Moments like this made her wish she had a talent and a sponsor. When a cam became popular, some corporations would pay you to do stunts on camera, as long as you used their product while you did it. It was like a game show but real; a reality show, if there was ever such a thing.

She looked down at her terminal. At the base of each deck there was the number of requests; the number of other citizens who were requesting connections. For Rachel, those usually fell into two groups. Girls who knew her, and girls who wanted to hook up with a redhead. Red hair cost a little extra on the bike but she always chose ginger. She burned easier but she could count the amount times she’d been outside this month on one hand. She liked the way it looked on camera. Some colors showed up in the Static while others didn’t. Most others didn’t. The Static presented the world like a dream in black & white with only a splash of color now and then.

There were nine hundred and ten incoming requests. The most she had ever seen at one time was one hundred fifty-three, and that was during the week she was all depressed after a break up. Some women liked to watch other women cry.

She scrolled through the list of names. Friends. Former friends. Lovers. Former lovers. Enemies. A whole collection of strangers. She pumped her fist once in the air when she saw it. It was Water Co., one of the city’s bottled water companies. Excellent. A sponsor. She tapped it right away.

“Rachel,” the message began. A little informal, dropping her number, but fine. “This is Water Co. If you finish the quart of Lemon Water that you have in your freezer, your next case is free.”

It wasn’t at all strange that they knew she had water in her freezer. Every item in the world had a tag that sent out its own Static signal. Every item and every person was represented in the U.S. by a number and a dollar amount. The Unyielding Static was a four-dimensional map of the entire city with a few dark spots near the rim. Everything was accounted for. Every building. Every woman. Every appliance. Every bottle of water.

Fantastic, she thought. Free water. All she had to do was run through her now dark living room, the room she had just been ordered to stay out of, get to her kitchen, grab the water, and then run back to her bedroom before the operator knew she was gone or alerted the Dogs. The Dogs, who could legally to beat her to death in her own home. For what? For nothing.

There were four thousand seven hundred and fifteen incoming requests now. She was trending. They said that for every buzzer on your episode, at least a hundred more were trying to connect, and that bottle of Lemon Water in Rachel’s freezer had cost her four miles. Good, drinkable water was expensive. Hydrate, the cheaper competitor, was an injection of a saline solution that left a bad taste in her mouth. Clean water was a luxury. Lemon Water was her favorite and no one she knew had ever chugged a half bottle of Lemon Water and gotten a free case.

“I’ll do it,” she said softly to herself.

She ran through her living room, heart pounding, laughing at the absurdity of risking her life over water. This is gonna make one hell of a commercial. She made it to the kitchen without a buzz. The kitchen’s camera was still working, so technically, she was not hiding. She relaxed and opened her freezer.

When another citizen buzzed you, it did not actually make a sound. They just called it that. Rachel didn’t know why. But only the operators caused that loud, sharp, buzzing sound that sent even a law-abiding citizen into a panic. This was Rachel’s first time with an operator, that she could remember. She never even questioned whether she’d remember it this time.

She pulled the water bottle from the freezer. Rachel47 didn’t know why they called it a freezer either. Nothing inside it was frozen. The air inside it wasn’t even cold, but somehow everything you kept in there was. She did not know how it worked, only that it kept food fresh and drinks cold. There was even a tiny cam inside the freezer. She smiled and waved at it. There was nothing like a citywide audience to turn a mild-mannered woman into a daredevil.

She had wine. She had cheese. She had cake. She grabbed the bottle of Lemon Water and shook it. It was gray and rather boring. It showed a waterfall, and next to that, a lemon. There were no words on it. She had never seen a waterfall, not a real one, but she had seen lemons. There was a fruit farm on the fiftieth floor of her building. She would go down there sometimes to walk in the artificial sun. She kept a bag of lemons in her kitchen. She would add them to the city’s tap water after she boiled it, but it never tasted like the real stuff with its artificial flavor.

The bottle was more than half empty. That made her smile too, because she knew they would soon be replacing it with a full case. There were four in one case and maybe she would get two cases or even more if the ratings were good. However, Rachel had to get back to her ordered position, or she would be in a case herself.

Rachel47 gripped the bottle and hurled herself back into the living room and ran. She could hear the technician at the door as it opened. There were no locks in the capital, and no doors the Authority couldn’t open. She had read about locks in a novel once. It confused her so she had to consult the Pedia. Back when there were men, the entry said, there were locks on doors, men lived outside and women inside behind doors with keys. Only a man with the proper key could unlock it. She had never seen a man either.

Rachel47 ran through the living room. She leaned back in her stride and slid, feet first, across the grass floor and through the doorway into the bedroom. It was real grass. She could have had any surface she wanted. She liked the smell of the grass. It felt good on her bare feet. She skidded to a stop in front of the bedroom terminal and twisted open the bottle of Lemon Water. Her front door flew open and slammed into the wall. The Authority creeps were not subtle. Even the technicians had an attitude.

She drank the rest of the bottle in one long gulp and held the label up to the bedroom cam with a bright smile for the money shot. She hadn’t known that she was a natural performer until then. She would have broken out in song for a second case of Lemon Water.

She looked up at the terminal. Five thousand nine hundred requests and rising. The counter was going crazy. Wow, she thought. Just… wow. She began to shake, and she didn’t know if it was out of excitement or fear.

It was fear. It was definitely fear, but it was not the number of watchers that frightened her. There was only one reason this many women would be watching her. And it was not the empty bottle or the fact that she might not ever get that case or remember that she was owed it. And it was not even the knowledge that the next sensation she might feel could be the taste of blood filling her mouth.

What had made her knees quiver and her solar plexus ache was the sound of steel-toed boots running down her hall toward her door. Rachel47 felt a mix a Deja vu and existential dread. This fear was oddly familiar as if she and been here dozens of times before. Forty-six… forty-seven. Her name and number suddenly had new meaning.

The technician entered first and walked straight to the living room cam and began to quickly install a replacement. Tech girls knew their stuff. Rachel’s first girlfriend had been a tech. She wondered whether Diane was watching her episode. Maybe cheering her on. or rooting against her. But none of that really matter.

The technician entered first… followed by the Dogs. ||