Digital Venous by Richard Gohl Read Free Book Online Page A

, she thought.
     

Chapter 13
    Subterranean Female Blues
     
    IN AUSTRALIA, ALL Napean cities had Subs living underground in satellite ghettos. Most were there because they couldn’t afford the N.E.T. in 2110 when the solar flare happened. Some had just never believed in the Napean way of life.
    In the real world, while a number of different types of coins were in circulation, the barter system was preferred. Each underground settlement had resource delegates—energy and water managers who, together with managers from the other settlements, maintained the grid and water distribution.
    The underground cities were powered through the transformation and storage of solar power—now in abundance: twenty-five kilowatts per square metre, which was far greater than in the twenty-first century. The sun’s energy rained down on the planet’s surface, unfiltered by the atmosphere, three hundred and sixty-five days a year. If there had been a cloudy day, no one in the present generation had ever seen one.
    Water was still a major concern. A single spring flowed fairly consistently from the depths of the Mountain, and storage tanks helped to maintain the supply. All human waste was effectively recycled into drinking water and all water used in hydroponic production was filtered and recirculated.
    But despite all this, the real people couldn’t prevent the loss of their most treasured resource: their children. The childless Napeans from the surface had been stealing Sub babies for years. Although there had been strong resistance in the 2260’s, reprisals for that had devastated the real population and the small rebel groups. Ten years later a group of four women and a man secretly formed to find the weaknesses in the Napean underbelly.
    The people of the underground cities around Napea didn’t have time for monogamy, and when children were born they tended to be raised by those who’d given birth to them.
    Alia Bokovski was exceptional in many ways. Charismatic, one hundred and eighty-one centimeters tall, and with a quick wit, she looked like something out of a Greek myth. Long black hair, a small, slightly aquiline nose, dimples and dark features that could have been painted with fine brushstrokes. To top it off, she was athletic and voluptuous. Yet despite her wealth of unfair advantages over the rest of the feminine world, no one seemed to resent her for it because she didn’t rely on her looks to get by. Alia had been pregnant when she and her husband had attempted to steal N.E.T. from the Napeans. She escaped. He did not. Someone had tipped off the Napean guards that day; they had known her surname. But there were no ID databases in the real world. She’d never even signed her name—not on anything official. Guards had searched all seven underground cities for a female Bokovski, but being pregnant, Alia was living the quiet life.
    One morning, while she and her housemate, Sylvana, were home, Alia went to check on her two-year-old daughter, Wanda. It was unusual for her to sleep so late. To her horror she found the room empty and the front door ajar. The precocious child had recently worked out how to open the front door and had even ridden her little trike out onto the street. Today, however, the tricycle was still in the hallway.
    Alia started yelling, “No! No! No!” as she tore from room to room, looking under and behind every single object, calling out “Wanda! Wanda! Wanda!” Sylvana, who had just woken up, stood helpless, watching the chaos. For Alia, the terror in the shadow of her mind came crashing through into the light of reality and she screamed, “They’ve taken my baby! I’m getting her back—they’ve taken her! Let me go!” Sylvana tried to calm Alia, grabbing her shoulders, but in the struggle, Sylvana slipped and fell. Alia ran out of the house into the underground street, up to the surface to the Blackwood gate. As she passed from the transdome under the walkway canopy to the gate, she saw a