Fish Swim in the Lake

Part 3.2 | The train moves, not the station

Lola had a third floor condo at 7 Suxxes Drive, downtown Ottawa, a large stone's throw from Parliament Hill. It wasn't hers exactly, it was on permanent loan from a nameless deputy technology minister. The entire building was only three tall stories high, a hair shorter than the Chateau Laurier. Not even mindless moneylust had overcome natural delicacy about the Peace Tower skyline.

Not even the Prime Minister lived so well, nor so close to work. 7 Suxxes Drive was built by the civil service, for the civil service, and was one hundred per cent deductible. Each apartment had its own private train car with absolute right of way on freight, passenger and light rail track, nationwide. But not all condos overlooked the Ceremonial Route, and Lola had the best view of all. She was perfectly positioned to see the aged, cantankerous, grimly alive Queen belch and fart -- constantly since the last RIRA assassination attempt, beyond even the best surgeons in Hong Kong to repair -- her way through downtown Ottawa, in her bulletproof, bombproof, gasproof, Queenmobile.

Perspective tricks and deliberately shrunken ornamentation made 7 Suxxes -- like Cinderella's castle -- appear taller than it was. Yet because it was a civil service project, this concept had gone wrong: the structure's delicate etchings and arabesques made it look feeble and unwieldy, like a drunken old countess about to pull out baby holograms.

alphaDana shoved her thumb in the outermost lock for a tissue test, stared briefly into a retina scanner, and breathed into a tube. She sucked her bloody thumb while she waited for the checks to clear. Typical government: high grade verification inputs with an obsolete engine running the actual matches.

Six ten-car light rails passed her before the door iris opened and a scratchy female voice invited her to make the most of her sixty seconds of clearance. She entered into a foyer imprisoned in golden marble shoddily covered in plastic. Only after they'd installed separate zap tubes for each apartment -- a faintly ridiculous expense as zap tubes were intended for corescraper underground buildings of a hundred levels or more -- it was discovered that the zap radiation, harmless to humans of course (of course) was flaking the marble, which not only damaged the very structural integrity of the condominium complex, it made the entryway appear to have golden marble dandruff.

alphaDana presented her bloody thumb to the scanner on Lola's private tube and stepped inside. She waited fully six minutes before it reached enough charge to fling her up one, two, three storeys. Zap tubes relied on kinetic recharging -- that is, they extracted energy from their own movement. Which, alphaDana reflected, made them particularly pointless in a three storey condo. Stairs would have been faster.

She was expelled, blinking and queasy, into Lola's marble and malachite foyer. "Come in here," Lola shrilled. "Tony's completely useless."

Posted by gtaylor at April 23, 2002 07:13 AM