Descent.

Ken MacLeod.

To the memory of Iain M. Banks.

0.1111 Recurring.

The trouble with my job is that far too often it lets me lie late in bed, watching my ex-fiancee. I don't blame the job, you understand. I blame myself, even while I'm doing it.

Especially while I'm doing it. This is an activity so futile, so self-destructive, so time-wasting, so unethical and unprofessional and unproductive and downright unsafe that I hate myself for indulging in it, as if I were addicted to some harmful and expensive drug (I am, to several) or fixated by a kink so innocuous yet ridiculous that it doesn't have a porn site let alone a pride march to call its own (that, too) or obsessed with a conspiracy theory so elaborate yet so tenuously supported and so self-centred and self-serving that I'd blush to outline it (but you're ahead of me, right?) or ... ah, fuck it. Compared to all the other things I have to be ashamed of, what I'm doing right now is a foible.

So, here I am at, let's say, eight thirty on a Tuesday morning, leaning back against the headboard of a bed in a flat near Haymarket in Edinburgh and hovering over a Kelvinside canyon of sandstone tenements in Glasgow. I have tree-top-height line of sight on a door at the top of a dozen worn stone steps, cast-iron railings on either side, man-high weeds sprouting from between the flagstones of the carpet-sized front yard.

The door opens. Gabrielle steps out and closes it behind her. Her red hair flicks as she turns. She's pert and petite. Her belted coat looks a size too big for her. I'm not getting much in the way of sound other than road thrum and beep but I fancy I hear her boot heels tick as she skips down the steps and sets off up the street towards the main road. I zoom after her, lose resolution, and for a moment consider renting some time on the drone and sending it drifting after her. Then I decide this might be too risky and I just let the app flick and a new view pops up, this time face-on and from lower down, probably from a traffic cam at the junction.

God, she's pretty. Bright wide eyes and big wide lips in a small face. Not perfect: she has the brow-ridge, barely noticeable except in profile, and the slight fleshiness about the nostrils that trace her descent and, to the discerning, mark her kin, but these make her all the more beautiful and fascinating to me. Her eyes and lips are narrowed at the moment. I wish I knew what she's thinking about. Probably work. It's less than ten minutes' walk from the steps of her flat to the swing doors of the biology building. Lucky her that she has such a brief and brisk commute. Lucky me that I can follow her all the way.

I watch her until she disappears into the ground floor foyer. Another moment of hesitant consideration, this time of linking to drone cameras that can see her through the ninth-floor windows. I've done this once or twice a well, seven or eight times a over the past few months, and I've got away with it so far, but for today I decide not to push my luck. If she ever found out she could call the police. Well, maybe she wouldn't, all things considered, but others might. Then, whatever the outcome, the least that would happen is I wouldn't have the job. End of problem. There are times when I think this would be a solution.

But I do have the job, and with it a big and busy day ahead. I catch up on the news, knock out a few instant reactions, then take the iGlasses off. I consider visiting a few of my favourite sites, then a to compensate for my earlier indulgence a decide not to, and to get up. I have to be at Holyrood for ten thirty, and I want to be there early or at least in good time.

Just before ten, any day in the middle of May, the street at the top of the Mound is crowded with men in black. This disturbs me less than you might think. They're ministers of the Church of Scotland, here for the General Assembly.

Men in black, I think. Ha! The thought makes me smile.

In my early teens, after I got into all the flying-saucer rubbish and a as I thought at the time a out of it unscathed and unsullied, I read science fiction on my father's old Kindle. I'd outgrown kids' books, YA was embarrassing, and the classics prescribed at school were boring and about girls. The SF novels on that antique device with its red leather case were labelled 'classic', but my father persuaded me not to let that put me off.

This is why, as I walk up the Mound and down the High Street, the alternative Edinburghs I distract myself by calling up in rapid succession on my glasses aren't just the standard historicals, entertaining though it is to stroll the main drag of Hume's and Smith's Athens of the North and watch the chamberpots tipped from upstairs windows to splatter heads below, or to scroll the city's growth from Neolithic settlement to modern capital, or let the smoke of Victorian lums and Edwardian slums rise to swamp the streets and then, with quite surprising suddenness, disperse the miasma with a wave of the Clean Air Act.

I play with overlays of alternate pasts and possible futures, with steampunk and cyberpunk, utopia and dystopia. Looking down towards Waverley Station, I replace its long sheds with the Nor Loch, stagnant and stinking. I swing by the Victorian eminence of the Bank of Scotland and see it blazoned with the banners of John MacLean's 1919 Workers' Republic. The vista along George IV Bridge gets an instant make-over as a Blackshirt mob storms the National Library, then I time-shift the street to the metropolis of concrete, glass and steel the agitators fancied themselves fighting for. Before I turn into the Royal Mile, past the verdigrised statue of Hume with its pilgrim-polished toe, the whole fascist facade crashes under USAAF bombs, and I smirk in smoke so thick it almost makes me miss my footing and so vivid I can smell it.

The view, now downward to the sea, is of the High Street in yet another unlikely mash-up of possibilities. The houses and shops and churches retain their higgledy-piggledy sandstone granularity, but beyond the Old Town new towers rise, spindly, improbable constructions of materials that suck sunlight and burn breezes, lively as trees. The flags that hang from poles jutting over hotel and shop doorways are the saltire of St Andrew and the cross of St George, Europe's star-circled banner and Ireland's starry plough, the Maple Leaf and the Stars and Stripes, and the red flags of the workers' republics (unimagined by and unimaginable to MacLean) on whose trade and tourism and tat the street relies. Above are, of course, the airships without which any such alt-historical scenario would be incomplete a no lumbering gasbags these, but silver-skinned streamlined shapes that bore through the air with drill-bit determination. Between the airships' altitude and rooftop height the air is speckled with the dots and flashes of drones occluding or reflecting light.

As above, so below: form follows function in every outre retro style. Nothing is ironic, nothing tips a wink to the past. Men's broad-brimmed hats shield from unforgiving sun or lashing rain, and block surveillance from above; dandy shirtfronts, long flapping coats and wide lapels soak energy from the air and information from the ether. The face-framing, profile-hiding visors of the poke bonnets affected by fashionable young ladies are transparent from within, opaque from without, giving augmented peripheral vision on the inner surface, and conferring privacy to and from the sideward glance as well as shade; floor-skimming full skirts might look like clumsy crinolines in a still picture, but in the moving image they balloon and glide, hems rippling autonomously like the lateral fins of flatfish to avoid toes and heels, obstacles and dirt, and their extravagant yardage of sun-drenched or wind-stirred fabric powers that motion as well as warming or cooling threads and a panoply of coms with every flounce; lacy parasols uplink to satellites and drones, and dainty handbags encompass libraries by default.

Vehicles on the street whizz by silently but for the whir of rims on cobbles, powered by legs and light, solar battery and hydrogen tank. Urchins scamper unhindered through the throng, watched over by the automated benevolence of the distributed panopticon stare and protected by loitering overhead drones like time-shared guardian angels poised to pounce. Layered in and imbricated with the new, of course, are the strata of earlier looks and times: diesel-belching buses, petrol-burning taxis, trouser suits and short skirts and jeans and skip caps and bare heads and bare legs, airliners coming in with metronomic regularity above the North Sea and then the Firth to sink above Cramond and touch down at Turnhouse, or still climbing from far to the south to head out over the Atlantic high above the airships, and so on and on, but here it is nonetheless, an iffy skiffy future like none I would or could have imagined in my teens.

Oh, wait. That's reality.

I've never had a problem with reality. I've had a problem with dreams. Sometimes I think I still do.

I have a recurring dream. The details vary, but it's always the same dream. It's so vivid it doesn't feel like a dream. It feels real at the time. I told it once to a man who knows about these things, and he told me what it means. It means they'll stay with you, he said. They'll always be with you. You'll take them with you to the stars.

This is how it begins.

I'm falling out of the sky. All I can hear is screaming. How much of it is from the air and how much from the other hundred-odd passengers I can't tell. We're hurtling straight towards the ground, at free-fall speed from twenty miles up, in a needle-nosed, narrow-winged arrowhead. From the window I can see a blue curve, an arc of a vast circular target whose centre is dead ahead. It's impossible, at some primal level of my primate brain, not to be convinced we're going to hit.

At such moments your life is supposed to flash before your eyes. It does, if you're flicking back and forth through decades of visual capture on your glasses. The rational layer of my mind is as terrified as the monkey module. I'm not afraid of dying. I'm afraid of judgement.

A shudder goes through the craft, and the screaming is drowned out by a steady roar as the ramjets ignite. I'm pushed against the back of my seat. We're still going straight down, no longer free-falling but accelerating. The scream's pitch and volume rise above the roar, which continues unabated. My weight's axis swings, pressing me down hard on the seat then again and more strongly back as the spaceplane swoops its hairpin turn around the end of its drop and begins to climb on a course that is not vertical but feels like it. The sky goes from blue to black as the blood returns to my eyes.

I look out, over the slanted sliver of starboard wing. We're climbing above the ocean. Far below us, pillars and castles of cloud are lit and shaded by the early sun. Not far to the west, a huge brightly lit sphere rises on a parallel course, gradually falling behind: it is the balloon that carried us up and from which we dropped a couple of minutes ago.

It passes out of sight, and I continue to stare out. A smaller, dimmer light rises from below us, overtakes, then drops back into view and paces our ascent for a few seconds. No one else seems to notice. I can't look away. It dances, then darts off, dwindling to a point, then nothing.

I blink and replay the past ten seconds in my glasses, zooming the view. In close-up, it's evident what the source of the light was: a fragment of fabric from the now burst balloon, caught in an updraught and then in our slipstream until a random gust whipped it away. I'm unconvinced. Some code in the spectrum of its colour taunts me and tells me I've seen that light before.

The ramjets choke off as the air thins and there's a second or so when I feel as if I'm falling, as indeed I am but on an upward trajectory, then the main engine kicks in for the final push to orbit. For a few minutes I'm pressed back harder than ever, and then without warning or transition we're in free fall. In the sudden silence I hear fellow passengers gasp or squeal with delight.

I have no time to share the thrill or enjoy the view. For me, this is judgement day. Within a few hours, I have to justify my life. What I'm searching for, in the back captures and the memories they evoke, is anything that will serve as explanation, as exculpation, as excuse.

PART ONE.

1.

The thing is, we weren't supposed to be on the hill. Our parents thought we were at Sophie's with Ellie and Aiden, revising for our maths exam. Sophie and Aiden had a grip on topics the rest of us flailed for, and improved it by matching wits with each other and us. Also, helping classmates counted for Social, so they offered. Incentive problem right there, you think. But they were too competitive towards each other to play tricks.

About half past two Calum leaned back from the table and stretched. He looked out of the window and then he looked at me.

'Cut?' he said.

The Cut is a walk, along the bank of an obsolete aqueduct that follows a contour around the hills, from the loch and the reservoirs to the town. Out of nowhere, my legs ached for it.

I shook my head. 'My dad'll kill me.'

Calum nodded down at the table. His phone and mine lay with the others', sustaining the trigonometry problem that shimmered in the midst.

'OK,' I said, standing up.

Ellie gave Calum a look. He smiled at Sophie.

'Fresh air,' he said, chair scraping. 'Back in a bit.'

Sophie said nothing, Aiden didn't notice as usual. Ellie pouted. Then all three heads bent again over the five phones.

I followed Calum through the hallway and out. He closed the front door with barely a click, then capered down the steps and clanged the gate. Across a quarter mile of descending rooftops we looked to the moor and the hills.

'Wa-hey!' Calum said.

'It'll do us good anyway,' I said.

'Aye,' said Calum. 'Mens sano in whatsitsface, yeah?'

'Yeah,' I said.

(The experience began, I think, between the moment we both wanted the walk and the moment we decided to leave our phones behind. That's how it always begins. You wanted a walk. It was a wet afternoon and you fancied a drive. The night was vile and you were minded to check on the cow.) It was a Saturday afternoon in May, the air damp under bright low cloud. Gorse on the hillside opposite blazed like surrogate sunshine. A faint smell and haze of burning tyres hung in the air. The smirr gave us a good excuse to have our hoods up, which was handy just in case our parents were relying on more than our phones to keep tabs on us. We walked down to the main road and over the footbridge, barely looking down at the stalled traffic, then over the railway bridge at Branchton and up the foot-worn zigzag path through gorse and bramble to the Cut. I glanced each way for thoughtless mountain bikers, took a step or two across the broken tarmac and looked over the Cut's bank. The past week's rain had raised the water level, but the flow was still sluggish, barely stirring the clumps of algae upon which froglets and tadpoles pulsated, blobs of black jelly with a double sheen from their skins and from their surface-tension meniscus cloaks.

We set off to the right, westward, facing a view out along the Kip Valley across the Firth of Clyde to the hazy hills beyond. The weather had kept all but the most determined of the usual weekend walkers and cyclists away. Old folks in singlets and shorts, grimly power-striding past us; lads and the odd lass on mountain bikes, spraying us with gravel. A police drone drifted around the shoulder of the hill, then turned away over the valley. Along the same flight path a few seconds later came a smaller civilian drone, swooping close enough for us to see the solidarity sigils on the underside of its wings. The smoke column from the blockade on Inverkip Road wavered into the air in front of us. As we drew level with it we could see the burning tyres heaped across the middle of the road, bracketed by oil-drum braziers at the kerbs. The narrow passages left for vehicles to snake through guaranteed each driver an earful of harangue along the way. A police car parked on the verge, blue light flashing, meant that the cops intended only to sit and watch.

'Wonder what it is this time?' I remarked.

Calum grunted. 'Disnae matter, it's all the same.'

We mooched on, agreeing that the country was in a terrible state and that something should be done about it. In the light of what was to be done, and so soon, you might imagine us quivering with radical zeal. You would be wrong. Sixteen years old, smack in the middle of the pissed-off mid-to-late teens demographic, our generational rebelliousness consisted of a yearning for order. We'd had years of what seemed like its endless, pointless opposite.

'Bet you the revolutionaries are behind it,' I said.

'Aye, nae doubt there's one or two in there. They're aye stirring things up.'

'They wouldn't have anything to stir up if people didn't have legitimate grievances,' I added, trying to be fair, 'like not getting paid for weeks on end.'

'All very well tae say that,' said Calum. 'But people have legitimate channels tae take up that kindae thing. No need tae make things worse for everybody else.'

I laughed. 'Except the revolutionaries a for them it's a case of, "The worse it gets, the better"!'

We shared dark chuckles and knowing looks. We thought ourselves wise to the ways of the revolutionaries because we knew all about their claptrap, dangerous, discredited ideology and cynical tactics from school assemblies and from the news services. As good sixteen-year-olds we treated these with about as much respect as we gave the likewise pervasive warnings about smoking, drink and drugs, but even so the exposures had an effect. We'd seen the revolutionaries' leaflets and their irregular bulletin, What Now?, and we'd even occasionally seen revolutionaries themselves, handing their agitprop out at railway stations and bus stops, but like most people we ostentatiously binned the sheets unread. I had secretly read one once in the school toilet and found it so boring that I'd been tempted to use it as bog paper.

Despite their manifest unpopularity the revolutionaries seemed like an invisible army of tens of thousands, and their hidden hand was seen behind every strike, road blockade, power cut, net outage, traffic snarl-up and workplace occupation in the country. No one caught actually involved in any of these had ever been proved in court to be a revolutionary, and the only thing the police could nail the overt revolutionaries for was littering.

'If the filth are nae up to the job,' Calum expounded, 'it's time they made way for the army.'

'Aye, right,' I said. 'And if the soldiers aren't-?'

Calum glanced sidelong at me, and jerked a thumb over his shoulder at the blockade. 'A few good blokes with spanners and tyre irons could scatter that lot.'

'Like your dad's three mechanics and two apprentices, you mean?'

'Maybe not, but guys like them. Well, like them but ...'

He waved his arms and shrugged at the same time. We both laughed.

'Ah, fuck all that,' said Calum. 'So long as the fucking teachers aren't on strike for the exams.'

'Watch it,' I said. 'My mum's a teacher, and she'd never go on strike.'

'Ease off, man, you know what I mean.'

At a shoulder of the hill, we came upon a beam of wood thrown across the Cut, just downslope from the ashes of a recent small fire and a clutter of empty cans. A microwave mast broke the skyline. Calum turned and marched across the narrow bridge, arms outstretched, pretending to slip and sway. I followed, less ostentatiously. By unspoken consent, we set off up the hill. The summit wasn't far, and we reached it after a few minutes' walk through soaking heather and long grass. We stood by the square of barbed wire around the mast and gazed around at the moorland behind the hill and the expanse of sea and shores below.

Calum took a long breath. 'Feels cleaner up here.'

'No stink of tyres,' I said.

My face felt chill and damp. I looked up. The cloud was low enough to make the top of the mast indistinct. Within a minute, mist had descended on us. Visibility dropped to ten metres.

'May as well go back down,' Calum said.

I shrugged and agreed. But going down the slope wasn't as easy as coming up had been. We couldn't walk straight down, and turning this way and that to cope with hummocks and terraces meant that we weren't entirely sure which way we were facing at any given moment, and that a downward course wasn't necessarily taking us straight back to the Cut.

'We should have reached it by now,' I said, stopping.

Calum peered into the now pervasive and swirling whiteness.

'Aye, maybe wait till it clears.'

We stood still. The fog seemed to be rolling downhill. Before long we were suddenly under open blue sky, above the layer of cloud that had now settled over the Kip Valley. Looking about, I saw that the microwave mast was in a quite different direction from where I'd thought it was. We'd worked our way down the hill all right, but into a saddle between two summits.

'Fuck,' said Calum. 'Trust this tae happen when we don't have our fucking phones.'

'You wouldn't have a compass about you, by any chance?' I asked, mimicking an English accent.

'Why the fuck would I have a compass?'

'On a keyring, or a knife or something?'

'Nope.' He shook his head.

'Not to worry,' I said. 'Sun's in the south and west, just keep it behind us and we'll be going in the right direction.'

Calum gave me a sceptical look. 'We'll be lucky to dae even that with fog all around us.'

'Yeah,' I said. 'Like in that physics thing about diffusion.'

'Like common sense.'

I shrugged. 'Best we can do, unless you want to just wait it out.'

'Nah a folk's'll be worried. Cannae go far wrong anyway.'

I glanced up and to the side just to check where the sun actually was in the sky, and saw a pinprick of light at the zenith.

'Look!' I said, pointing. 'What's that?'