The Unwired - http://theunwired.posterous.com 11

Chapter 1

The crime that landed Axel Hegwir in the prison system of the Sibe-

rian wastelands had been to smuggle data across the ‘Stream and into

the best bidder’s hot drives through the tiny cracks he’d found along the

Firewall. A modest living could be made on the fringes of a society hungry

for unfiltered data, assuming that every day could be your last. A smug-

gler’s existence would be erased from the Archives and wiped from the

memory of anyone they had ever met, and his sorry bones thrown into

foreign prisons. The illusion that Axel was too small for the authorities

to pursue was finally shattered.

As careful as he was, an automated security upgrade blew his cover.

Minutes later the Peace Force was blasting him out of his apartment and

into the bullet-proof van that would take him away for good. Download-

ing or smuggling any non-filtered content was considered treason, and

the work of a hater.

Hater. The all-encompassing definition for an information society

terrorist, underserving of rights or courts of law.

Axel would spend the rest of his rotting life in the Central Prison

of Siberia, working the radioactive Russian soil until his body became

an almost liquified walking corpse. Replacing haters was cheaper than

repairing expensive androids in outdoor maintenance work, and good

for the booming economy of private prisons.

But that was not Axel’s concern right now. Under the vicious stare of

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the guards menacing under their black body shields, he was being pushed

out of the building and into the mobile unit that would take him and his

work team to the fields. A black void had turned up overnight on the

brightly lit power grid near the prison. A perfect, round absence of light in

the middle of the night worried Central Command and warranted further

investigation, so it was Axel and another five inmates sent to investigate

and repair whatever had damaged the lights or power cables.

When they arrived in their flimsy protective suits and examined the

terrain they never expected to find an actual round, black hole burrowing

through the power grid. The working crew gathered around the edges

of the massive crater laid in front of them and stared in disbelief. Axel

calculated roughly a 75 meter diameter hole, deep enough to lose the

bottom of the hole in darkness.

Tonnes of cabling and machinery covered the deserted land in intri-

cate patterns, like a giant circuit feeding off the generators and shooting

power through massive bodies of superconductor. The cables were so

massive they required ladders to go over them. But on this perfect hole,

the cables stopped and a deep dark cavern started. Axel pointed his head

camera towards the hole so the engineers back at the plant could see it.

The voice of the engineer crackled back from HQ through the Inter-

Com, breaking their trance.

‘Yeah, I see it. Biggest hole I’ve ever seen, like an open quarry. Here

is where the North Link is supposed to go through. Oh wait – it’s a bit

further South… this must be a branch of the North Link. Wait… what

the hell is that coming up... ‘

13

Silence. The rest of the transmission had been interrupted or censored

by the watchmen, and Axel and his working crew could see nothing

beyond the dark hole. Not that it mattered. Their job was to repair the

cables and get out of there before the radiation took its toll.

They set up camp and got to work. They would only be picked up

again once the job was done, so they got down to business fixing the hole

in the ground, binding reams of heavy cable and working themselves to

exhaustion. It took a week to build a bridge across the hole, and another

week to start binding the broken cables.

Two weeks of the hypnotic buzzing of the heavy machinery was

enough to break a man’s will. With tired, angry eyes Axel greased up his

gear and double-checked his tools, ready to start on the final procedure

joining the two ends of a cable that spanned across the hole. Climbing

onto the eight-meter diameter cable he watched the surroundings quickly

getting darker as night approached. Around him, nothing but zero degree

temperatures and the invisible souls of the prisoners who had laid down

those cables fifty years ago.

‘God-damned cold’, he muttered. He hated the miserable weather,

the cumbersome protective clothing, the lack of social communication

with the rest of his crew – all magnified by the high-pitched lament of the

drills and power tools that were getting the job done. The Unity crucifix

around his neck gave him little comfort. He went to wipe the starch from

his stubble with a gloved hand and puckered his dry lips just to feel them,

rough and raw, but his hand stroked the breathing mask instead.

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He walked the length of the cable, now a sort of bridge across the

gaping hole until he reached the midpoint. He stared into the emptiness

on either side of him while he calculated his next manoeuvre.

And suddenly, it all went quiet. A deafening, almost unbearable

silence froze Axel in his position. The machines had stopped. After weeks

of listening to the constant buzzing, the silence became unbearable and

gripped Axel by the throat with force. He swore loudly, as dead machines

meant a delay in leaving this place. He looked around the edges of the

hole and saw his crew, looking around nervously.

Surrounding them, a thick heavy fog that gained on them, falling into

the hole and rendering everything at zero visibility. Nothing happened

for a few seconds. Then, Axel noticed flashes and strange colours coming

from the fog. There was movement and shadows, and he squinted hard

to see what was approaching. All around him, as far as he could see, the

drilling site was surrounded by figures draped in heavy snow robes with

a subtle green glow around them. They appeared out of nowhere and held

their position with no visible intentions to move until the silence became

thick with foreboding. A woman’s silhouette appeared through the fog,

moving her arms slowly as if waving at invisible points in space.

An irrational paranoia crept up Axel’s mind. He felt increasingly

uneasy, his heart racing, while a primal fear took hold of his senses with

no apparent warning. With his heart beating his chest as if trying to break

through his ribcage, he fell to his knees.

There was a blast of sound exploding from the ground below. The

piercing sound of a million suffering human souls voiced in a single,

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powerful sound, welled up and exploded all around him. The screaming

echoed in sharp outbursts around the well, followed by an increasing

amber glow coming from the deep.

The screaming waves of sound shot up from the ground and through

his feet, sending shocks of fear through his body with every massive

scream coming from the well. Axel felt his throat choke and his stomach

burst as he fell, grabbing onto the cable for his dear life, digging his nails

into the rubber. Unable to hold any coherent thoughts he let himself loose

in a world of agony, let go of his grip and fell into the flaming well.