Nesson is a serial novel about living with technology and sprawl in the near future. Learn more or start from the beginning.
No amount of staring made it any clearer, yet Justin looked on and waited for some dawning of understanding. It was hypnotizing, this loose web pattern. It could be a toddler’s scribble or a fine fractal. It could not really be a map, could it? It was a static, printed. There was no way to zoom in or out; the scale was what it was and no matter how much Justin wanted to zoom in on this region or that, he was stuck on this broad view. It was odd, but odder still was the meaning of all those lines and circles. The interconnected destinations were completely alien to him, yet they overlaid a familiar geographic setting.
It was clearly North America. The red star indicating his location had to be somewhere in Indiana, but something was missing. For all the lines on the map, there was not one of the expected political lines. Justin was able to draw them in mentally; perhaps they were not exact, but he knew the general jigsaw pattern. Why were there no state borders on this map? The rivers and mountain ranges were still marked, as were lakes and deserts. Why all that detail about geography, but not about political lines? The Canadian and Mexican borders were not there either, there were a few points that we was not sure if they were in the US or not.
Lines radiated from point to point, destination to origin, but they were all named Neopolis. The only thing that distinguished each name was a string of numbers. So what, was it supposed to be one big city? Each place was so concentrated and so far from anything else. There was no fading in and out of Neopolis, you were there or you were not. The only connection between the disparate locations was rail, at least according to the rail map. Perhaps there was more to the story; perhaps the rail map was only advertising the relevant details.
Justin felt a hum bubbling inside of himself. The direction of the wind changed and a near silent train entered the station on the tracks below. Where was that one coming from? More importantly, where was it going? When he left the hotel room that morning, he walked straight to the railroad overpass. He was more concerned about seeing a real, functioning train station than taking a train out of town. He had found his way to the station by following the tracks and getting occasional directions from pedestrians. Everyone could tell he needed help and stopped to point him the right direction. He did not even have to ask them to repeat a direction or speak slowly; they knew the pace he needed in order to understand. These were kind gestures and Justin was afraid he did not know how to respond. He had interacted with strangers before, but always online and in a different context. There was something different about meeting new people here. No one seemed offended by his awkward replies; they actually seemed pleased, as if this was a rare an experience for them as well.
It was a short distance from the hotel to the station, but it took two or three times longer than it should have. Besides having to stop for directions, Justin was tired from the previous night’s walk and was moving slow. He also stopped from time to time to look at a building or admire a bicycle speeding by. The occasional eye contact with young women walking the opposite direction nearly paralyzed him. Every time it happened a whole life with that particular woman flashed before his eyes. What would it be like to stay here? Could he get a job and find a girlfriend, maybe find a way for his parents to visit in a few years? Maybe Allison found a place like this to lay low and start over.
From the outside, the station was like those he had seen in twentieth century period pieces. Grand yet inviting, all brick and glass like the rest of Neopolitan Architecture. Inside it was Spartan and brisk with human movement. There were several platforms leading Justin to assume the track he followed here was just one of many. The scuffle of feet and a murmur of low voices bounced from the roof back to the floor. He experienced a sensation that he had done this before, but in a holoroom. It was a cold feeling, numb. He had visited virtual train stations in games set during the industrial 19th century. He had also watched plenty of holomovies where characters traveled by train. Rather than make his current situation more familiar, though, he felt a creeping alienation.
Holorooms were supposed to be a substitute for real experience. They were convincing, safe, and cheaper than taking vacations. Justin had never felt forlorn about living in a virtual world, but now that he was in a real place and surrounded by strangers, he began to wonder if he had been living at all. He had real experiences and real relationships with other people on the holonet. Time in the room was a valuable commodity in the house. He coveted it. Now though, the value of holoroom time was depreciating.
Justin tore his eyes from the map and began to assess his immediate options. Before the paths split off to the platforms labeled with a single letter was a block of kiosks where a steady stream of passengers stopped and tapped away before finding a platform. Between every fourth kiosk was a map, such as the one which had transfixed Justin for close to half an hour.
He was making no progress looking at this map. He knew the way out of town he needed was on here somewhere, but he could not talk to this map and have it trace out the perfect route. His mobile did not seem to know anything about the train system; it was no help. Justin traced his eyes over the westernmost portion of the map and side stepped to an adjacent kiosk. He found a touch screen surrounded by several slots. On the screen was a list of options: Buy Fare, Check Departures/Arrivals, Customer Service, Information. The purpose of this screen was clear, but why was it dedicated? Could not everyone save time by purchasing tickets through their mobiles?
Justin tapped “buy fare” and found himself facing the same map surrounded by menu options. Justin’s eyes stopped at the options: “one way” or “round trip.” With a hard swallow, he pressed “one way.” He felt the ghost of his sister, of something she had done before him and now came his turn. Ok, so maybe ghost was not an appropriate word, she was alive. He was also pretty sure she had not been to this place. Still, had she not set off on a one-way trip herself? Her life since graduating high school was a one-way trip, always moving further from home and further from the life her family was living.
On the map, one station was red while the rest were blue. He assumed this red station was his current location, smack in the middle of the continent. Trusting fate and his understanding of his sister, Justin selected a station that looked to be in California. Neopolis 93041 it read. Instantly his station turned green and illuminated a series of lines in purple that passed through several stations, most of which turned green but two of which turned red. Finding a legend at the top corner of the screen, he discovered the red dots were layovers. At the bottom of the screen a summary of the route presented itself, noting one stop of about an hour and another of twelve hours. Not knowing enough about rail travel to use the adjacent route button, he simply confirmed and found a steep price tag on the next screen. He could not afford this, not using his own account. Justin was getting the feeling that eventually this search would break him. He knew these tickets would overdraw his account. For now though, he did not think twice about pulling out his mobile and transferring a payment. He was a minor, and what did a few numbers that lived on the net matter in this context? As soon as the kiosk registered his device, a screen appeared advising him that payments in virtual currency were twenty-five percent higher. This did cause Justin to blink, but he proceeded anyway. A series of tickets shot out of the machine. Justin could only hope they were in order. His departure time and platform flashed on the screen. He had less than fifteen minutes to board.
Fortunately, the lettering system was easy to navigate, but after finding his platform, he was not sure how to enter the shining white metal tube before him. After a few moments doubt, a porter emerged from the next car over to shout: “All Aboard!” Justin ran to him and presented his stack of tickets. The man frowned, but upon inspecting Justin further adopted the same knowing smile as the people that stopped to direct him on the street had. The porter pointed a few cars down where another man in the same uniform stood and made a friendly ‘hurry’ gesture. The next man looked at his ticket and rushed him into one of the doors. The hissing of breaks signaled imminent departure. Once inside the man led him to an empty cluster of seats by a window. Three seats faced the front of the train and three the rear. Justin sat in the window seat facing forward, preferring to see what came rather than where he had been.
To say the windows were large would be inaccurate. The wall space not occupied by windows was minute. This was unusual. Justin had seen very few real windows, and certainly none this size. Cars had windows, but he was not in a car that often and there was little reason to look out of a car window. His house had no windows. There was no need with high definition video walls. If you needed to see the oversized unkempt lawn and the distant road outside of your home, all you had to do was switch to your house’s exterior cameras and you had a full wall showing what was immediately outside, which was exactly nothing of interest. If people ever played at having windows, it was usually only for the rare in person guest. These were usually sections of wall with a faux-frame and a pane of glass. It always looked out on some other, more interesting place. Views of volcanoes in Ohio, rain forest scenes in Kansas, that kind of thing.
Justin could not stop looking out of the train windows. The other passengers must have thought the view was a bit dull, they all had their faces in their readers, but Justin was mesmerized. Here there were no cars; grass and weeds were covering what roads were visible. The occasional small tree stood in the middle of the road, its roots making a convex burst of concrete. It was wild here, between Neopolises.
First, he thought how great it was that there was nothing out here. It was not truly nothing; there were hills and trees. There were wild flowers and meadows. There was life, just not life as he understood it. How long had it been since a human foot trod on those fields? What could he find in places like that?
Looking at his map from time to time, watching himself speed along, he was gathering some idea of how this world was hidden. He was not, in truth, all that far from a neighborhood like his own at any given moment. Looking in a large radius, he could see a gradient he never noticed before. He found one of the old cities, St. Louis which now had a sort of donut layout with a light cluster of communities just outside of the city limits, mostly low income. From there the radius expanded into the more populous middle class neighborhoods, the kind of place where he grew-up. Just outside of the ring were the larger estates of the wealthy with their seemingly undefined property lines, which blended with some other wealthy family estates, which then shrunk back to the middle class suburbs. Eventually these suburbs gave way to the denser, poorer towns and back to a city, in this case Chicago, which Justin understood still had some life to it. In some way, he already knew this structure existed, but he never thought about how different life must be in each place. He assumed everyone lived on the net the way his family did and that their real world locations were irrelevant. His information streams were narrow, customized to the point of confirming that the world was uniform. He had assumed everyone was living more or less the way he was because that was the only picture of the world his networks presented to him.
From what Justin could tell, he was traveling between large estates and his destination was in one of those rare wildernesses between. He was traveling in a hidden network of cities buffered by the wilderness. But, how hidden was it? Sure, he had never heard of Neopolis, but it was not as if there were guards posted on its borders. How long had it been here? Were these people as unaware of his world as he was of theirs? He could not imagine that, he lived in the real America did he not? Having no answers and feeling more unpleasant questions rising to the surface, Justin turned his attention back to the wild grass and the edge of a forest. There were small creatures scurrying in the grass and bumblebees floating over flowers.
***
Justin punched a button on the newspaper box just outside of the train station. The box was labeled for the station name, Neopolis 67468, but the paper was titled simply: Neopolis Courier. Justin, having never seen a newspaper before, he only read about them in older books and in history class, and was drawn to, what was to him, a novelty. The machine took his payment through a retrofitted mobile detector just above a slot intended for coins and another for paper money. A sign next to the detector informed him how much the machine was overcharging him. The thought of diminishing personal funds flashed only briefly before he submitted his payment.
The first thing Justin noticed about the paper was the weight. He knew it would have to be heavier than his mobile, but he had no idea how much more it would be. It was baffling that so many small light pieces could make something so thick and heavy. He also found that navigating a newspaper could be surprisingly difficult for the uninitiated. Justin was used to being able to read on the move. He found himself forced to sit on a public bench a few feet from the paper dispenser just to be able to hold the thing and change pages. That was the other thing; He could not just pick a story and read it. He had to stop in the middle and find the rest of the story on another page.
Still, something about the paper was comfortable and he found himself more engaged with the news than normal. Reading this way felt different, though he could not explain how. Was it because of the unfamiliarity of the paper, the novelty of the place, or a desire to shake a creeping loneliness? Regardless, he found himself absorbed.
One story in particular caught his eye. At the bottom of the front page ran the headline: Japanese Diet Reviews Sovereignty request, Denies.
The Japanese legislature has refused a Links Corp request to acknowledge the sovereign status of the recently built trans-oceanic development now severed from ties with the USA. A representative from Shizoka Prefecture told reporters, “The integrity of the Japanese coast is of the utmost importance to the Japanese people. This encroachment [by Links Corp] threatens our very identity as a nation.” These sentiments were common as shown by the overwhelming opposition to the proposal; The relationship between Japan and Links Corp… Continued on A10.
Justin fumbled with the paper and thought about Allison. It seemed unfair that she was a fugitive for a crime against what was now to a large portion of the world a rogue state. He read the rest of the story, which discussed the once amicable business relationship between Links and Japanese companies and the initial excitement about the Trans-Oceanic development. The original understanding, according to the undisclosed sources, was that the US and Japan would split the new land almost in half. They would both have an equal share but the junction point would be controlled as an independent holding by Links himself. That junction was the location of the previous week’s explosion. Justin set the paper down on the metal bench.
He looked at this new city. Nominally it was the same city as the one he just left. Was it the train system that allowed shared identity and way of life to exist between places hundreds of miles apart? Or, was it just a decision made in mass? Something about this question lead him back to the article he just read. Something about the flow of events leading up to and after the explosion seemed strange. Why were people bombing an uninhabited island and why was the whole world talking about it?
A few bicycles passed and a bus that was silent except for a kind of artificial whistle. He was thinking about the reporting style of the paper. While intelligible as news, it was different from what he was accustomed to. For one, it was clearly not meant to be entertaining, or rather, while each story was interesting in its way, there was no contrived attempt at entertainment. More than this though, another difference was nagging Justin. The news sources with which he was familiar had a way of distinguishing between the US and other countries. Nothing specific, just a general sense that there is there and this is here. Not so in the Neopolis Courier. Again, nothing in particular, nothing he could point to, but references to the US seemed in no way different from references to other countries, say Japan for instance. Not that it appeared an attempt at objectivity, but rather that it was all there. Here was separate. That was the impression Justin had all along, that he had somehow left the US while remaining inside of its physical borders. His currency was accepted but not treated as standard. The cities were a system unto themselves, not connected to the world he knew.
He was feeling severed from his family and country, but he could not feel at home here. He was too much in motion. He would stay here tonight, in what was the center of the US according to his map, and move along in the morning to the next Neopolis and the next. In which one would he pick up Allison’s trail? Did she even know about these places? Maybe there some other network of places she had followed that he did not know about. Certainly Justin was not encountering anything in the Neopolitan atmosphere that would lead someone down the path to international crime.
To get updates on Nesson and my other works, follow me on twitter: @aanderson2323
You can also 
Subscribe
Nesson is an ad free serial fiction project. If you like what you have read, please leave a comment and share! If you’re feeling extra generous, donate to help me keep the story going and build this site!