“Last Days At Coconino Seven”
~The mag-lev car to 'The Nines', the nine Coconino Towers, was empty except for Jane Mimsdottor. It was clean and well maintained, but shabby with age. “Rides empty a lot these days,” Jane thought.
Just at that moment she 'heard/felt' a soft chime deep in her temporal lobe, the standard message alert from her neural nanonics, the CompNet embedded throughout her cerebral tissues.
A pleasant voice whispered, “This is a reminder from the Electoral Directorate. Voting in the General Plebiscite regarding the question of the admission of the Siberian Confederacy into the Union of Matrilineal Republics will be closing in two hours. If you have not yet voted, please do so now. Thank you.”
Jane could have turned the Alert Function off, but like many Sisters, she was closely following this GP, though its outcome was almost certain. And also, like most of The Sisterhood, she could easily determine that Yulia Prokharovka, the Siberian Prime Minister, had done an excellent job of preparing Siberia for annexation and integration into the UMR.
Jane had voted Yes, for admission, two weeks ago when the Loop Ship she served aboard, the SFS Maathai, was still on approach to the El Five Complex.
It was easy to tell Jane was a 'spacer'. After decades in service under unfiltered UV, her reddish blonde hair had been bleached white and her fair skin tanned a honey brown. However, her eyes were still the same sparkling green they'd been the day she was born in a deer hide tent in the Outlands.
She was wearing her Space Force Walking Out Dress uniform, a black one piece with white trim and soft boots, with the trio of six pointed silver stars of a Senior Lieutenant on each side of her collar.
She also wore a Mark VII impeller on her hip, a mini railgun with two thousand frangible ferroresin darts. They'd ruin flesh, but powder against a pressure hull.
These days one did not go into Tower Seven unarmed.
She could see the Coconino Towers a few miles away looming in the afternoon sunshine. Nine arcologies, each over a half mile high, a quarter mile wide at their base.
Once they had housed a half million people each, non-citizens who would not, or could not, become Initiated Sisters. Many were originally Ferals from the Outlands, with some immigrants from beyond The Union. The Sisterhood housed and fed them, provided clothing, basic medical care, and entertainment systems. In perpetuity.
In exchange, the residents gave up the ability to reproduce.
When The Towers were first being built and occupied over seventy years ago, a vibrant and exciting culture began to grow up 'in the Nines'. Many Sisters would also pass through to participate and study. It was a golden age that lasted nearly a half a century.
Jane spent her 'shore leaves' there and had known some of her happiest days back then.
But non-citizens did not get the type of advanced life extending augmentation received by Initiated Sisters. That would have defeated the entire purpose of The Sisterhood and The Union of Matrilineal Republics. The most advanced augmentation was reserved for those who Participated and Served.
Jane was going to be ninety two in a few months and in all probability had only lived roughly a tenth of her total possible life span. The Sisterhood did not yet know the upper limits of their augmentation technology.
Many Ferals were prematurely aged by their upbringing and even with the high quality base line health care they received, they died 'young', on average in their mid to late eighties. And with their deaths, the Nines began to empty.
Ten years ago Tower Five had been the first to empty and be converted into an agricultural tower, a hydroponic megafarm. Its produce was flash frozen in its massive basement and shipped off world. It would be another few decades before a fully terraformed Mars could begin suppling the food needs of the central and outer system.
Other towers followed quickly as the population shrank. Now only Tower Seven still remained occupied, surrounded by her converted sisters, and even she was barely at half capacity.
The car pulled up to the base of Tower Seven, stopped. The doors opened smoothly.
At the station exit was a Ground Force Military Police check point. It was added about ten years ago, just before Jane shipped out for the Asteroid Belt. They checked Jane's ID. These were not 'greenies' doing their Universal Service, but long term professionals.
The sergeant in command noted Jane's Mark VII, nodded approval.
“If you get in trouble it will take us about five to seven minutes to get to you,” she said.
“Roger,” Jane responded.
They exchanged salutes and Jane passed through into the lift lobby. She was not afraid of course. Having been born Feral herself, this was just passing from her new life back into her old one.
Not that any of that mattered. She was here to visit Susan, her kid sister, one last time, and she would not let any type of danger stop her from doing so.
Mim, their mother, was around ten when she had been 'acquired' by the clan of The Brute, who styled himself The King of Oklahoma, and who may or may not have killed her parents. That was never clear. What was clear was that Mim was pretty and become one of The Brute's 'wives' two summers later.
Her first child was Jane. The Brute was pleased that she had borne him a child. Four more summers passed, then came Susan. The Brute was not pleased with another daughter. Mim and her children were banished to 'the dog tent', with the old and the 'odd'.
They spent three summers there...until one night, for no apparent reason, The Brute hacked Mim to death with an axe in full view of her daughters.
Jane gathered her sister up and fled. She knew where the Amazon Horse Clans traveled. After ten days they were found by the Sisters of Red Epona, big, rough, weathered women, full of scars and tattoos. They were quite familiar with The Brute's clan and welcomed these ragged children warmly.
After a few weeks with Red Epona, Jane and Susan were dropped off at a Karaal of the Cult of Hathor. Those Sisters fed them many wonderful cheeses and yogurts and then they sent the two still underweight but now less malnourished children to SoCal, the heartland of The Sisterhood.
Decades later Jane anonymously received an old photo showing some of the Sisters of Red Epona grinning broadly while holding up a severed male head. Even in death, she recognized The Brute's face. She showed it to Susan, who looked at it quietly for a while, then just said, “Thank you.”
Jane took to The Sisterhood with ferocious enthusiasm and flourished.
But Susan never seemed comfortable. Maybe she never really recovered from the trauma of Mim's murder. When she reached what had been decided was her fifteenth birthday, The Sisterhood's Age of Majority, she declared herself a 'non-citizen' and became one of the first residents of Coconino Tower Seven.
Jane was away at the time doing her Universal Service with Sea Force and was very hurt by her sister's choice. But when she visited Susan, it was obvious that she felt more comfortable among 'her own kind' and and gave her blessing freely.
That was over sixty years ago, or Solannums as Space Force was beginning to call them.
Jane visited at least once a year until she joined Space Force and then would still visit every time she made planet fall. When Jane gave birth to Ostera she was taken to see her Aunt Susan as well.
Susan became an accomplished jewelry maker, working with leather and ceramic beads she made herself. Even now, as she ascended in the main lift to Level 816, Jane was wearing a bracelet Susan gave to her thirty years ago, thin brown shammy with bright blue beads, that had traveled as far as the moons of Neptune and back.
The lift stopped and the door opened. There were a dozen men in the lobby, 'middle aged', rough looking and shabby, each carrying a weapon made from construction material. They automatically moved toward her...then stopped dead when they saw who and what she was.
“What do you want here, spacer?” half snarled the largest of the group, his eyes carefully avoiding any glance at her impeller.
The combat programs in her neural nanonics had already tracked and targeted the lot of them. Even without the impeller, her muscle and bones being at least triple the density of these Ferals, she could most likely kill all of them in under a minute. And they had to know that.
“I'm Jane Mimsdottor and I'm here to see my sister Susan,” she stated firmly.
One of them in the back laughed and said, “Who sells seashells down by the seashore.” That got all of them laughing in what seemed a good natured fashion.
Her combat program told her their heart rates were going down. She smiled brightly.
The Large One stepped back and bowed slightly. “Welcome to Eight One Six, Jane, sister of Susan.” He gestured as if ushering her into a palace. The others all followed suit in their own way.
“Thank you,” she said with soothing undertones pushed into her voice box. For good measure she added a mix of pregnancy/breastfeeding pheromones to her natural scent. That would re-enforce their feelings of protectiveness.
She walked through the lobby, smiling serenely, and down the corridor to Susan's quarters. From the lobby she could overhear whispered appreciations of her ass. The biocontrols that had kept her heartbeat normal logged off.
Jane was heading clockwise, so the central shaft wall was to her right and the residential ring was to her left. The Towers were really 'tubes', hollow in the middle, with all the apartments facing outward.
The shaft wall was covered with beautiful murals, both paint and mosaic, done by the many artists who lived, or had lived, here in Tower Seven. Jane recognized some of their work, had known a few of them. She was pleased to see that even the gangs had respected them and tagged their turf with markings on the corridor's floor.
The floor tagging had become a chaotic art form itself, tagging over tagging, in some places painted over entirely, and then more tagging on top of that.
The corridor itself was in decent shape, Eight One Six being almost fully occupied. The motto of The Nines from the beginning was “Sweep in front of your own door.”
Jane was recording all of this with a neural program and would upload it into the Main Archive when her visit was done.
About a dozen doors down from Susan's, the tagging trailed off, replaced by a subtle wavy/swirly texture that she knew was her sister's signature style. She'd used a thin layer of concrete as her medium, etching the pattern into it while it was still wet. It complemented the overwhelming patterns of bright colors upon both walls and the ceiling, millions of ceramic beads that rushed and twisted and curled, each placed by hand over many years.
Even the gangs knew this was Susan's turf.
The apartment door's biometrics identified Jane, and opened. “Susan?” she called as she entered.
“Living room,” her sister's voice came back.
The apartment was a standard Tower Single, two thousand square feet with ten foot ceilings. Susan had filled it with the paintings and sculptures of her friends and lovers, floor to ceiling shelves full of hard copy books, gorgeous hand made rugs, large comfortable furniture. The place was always welcoming, even now.
Jane found her sitting in her 'thinking chair', a plush recliner that faced the floor to ceiling living room window with a prefect view of Tower Eight. She wasn't surprised at how Susan looked. She watched her weight loss on the vids she regularly sent her while she was on the Maathai . But here, in the same room, Susan's impending death was palpable.
Jane knelt by her, gave her a hard hug and a kiss. “I'm glad you waited for me,” Jane said softly.
Susan made a mischievous face. “Gave me an excuse to experiment with various opiate compounds.”
“As if you needed an excuse.”
“Ah, nothing is better than a guilty pleasure indulged in without guilt.” She turned serious. “I know what you've been planing.”
Jane's control of her facial expression was absolute. Her neural nanonics could create a perfect poker face.
“Now don't give me that Gorgon face,” Susan said with a hint of petulance.
“It's the right thing to do,” Jane said flatly.
Susan grinned like a loon. “Of course it's the right thing to do!”
Jane relaxed. “I was concerned you'd be embarrassed.”
“One cannot embarrass the dead. And a museum with my name on it is also a museum with our mother's name on it and I could never object to that.”
“We're taking the entire corridor, too,” Jane said, “Just removing the panels themselves.”
“You're not going to make some kind of a shrine out of my apartment, are you?”
Jane smiled. “No, just the corridor and the exhibits of your work. We've been gathering the pieces for a while now.”
“You Sisters are a morbid lot.”
Jane shrugged. “We think in the long term about everything. It's our nature.”
Susan laughed. “I can hear the caps in 'long term'.” She patted the broad arm of her chair. “Come. Sit down. It's almost time.”
Jane sat on the arm, took her sister's hand, leaned against her. She'd seen the Medi-Patch on her other arm. It could administer a lethal cocktail at a set time or be triggered manually.
They looked out the window at Tower Eight. Susan had carefully picked this apartment those sixty plus years ago. During certain times of the year, the sunset reflected an amazing array of reds and golds off of Tower Eight. They and her friends had watched that show so many times.
All of those friends were gone now and this would be the last time for both of them.
“Jane, I have one last favor to ask of you. In my desk you'll find about six hundred hand written pages,” she made a little laugh. “You're probably the only human who can read my scribble.”
“What do you need?” Jane said, holding her sister's hand a bit tighter.
“They're notes for a history of the horse clans. I started with Red Epona, but got carried away. I never finished because it needs field research and...well, you know.”
“Yes,” Jane kissed her sister's hair. “I've missed them anyway.”
“Thank you,” Susan whispered.
At that moment, the setting sun slashed across Tower Eight and the room was filled with a reddish golden cascade of light.
Jane held Susan's hand even after it went limp, held it until that light faded to a soft glow.
Later, as she emerged from the lift on the ground level, she 'heard/felt' a soft chime deep in her temporal lobe.
A pleasant voice whispered, “This is an announcement from the Electoral Directorate. Voting in the General Plebiscite regarding the question of the admission of the Siberian Confederacy into the Union of Matrilineal Republics had been concluded. Admission has been approved. The tally is as...”
Jane shut off the link. She knew it was a wide margin. And The Sisterhood had just absorbed nearly a quarter of the Eurasian landmass. She and the GF/MP's smiled knowingly at each other. They all were conscious of the threshold that had just been crossed.
She heard Susan's laughter in her head; “I can hear the caps in 'long term'.” Jane's smile got just a little bit deeper.
Just at that moment she 'heard/felt' a soft chime deep in her temporal lobe, the standard message alert from her neural nanonics, the CompNet embedded throughout her cerebral tissues.
A pleasant voice whispered, “This is a reminder from the Electoral Directorate. Voting in the General Plebiscite regarding the question of the admission of the Siberian Confederacy into the Union of Matrilineal Republics will be closing in two hours. If you have not yet voted, please do so now. Thank you.”
Jane could have turned the Alert Function off, but like many Sisters, she was closely following this GP, though its outcome was almost certain. And also, like most of The Sisterhood, she could easily determine that Yulia Prokharovka, the Siberian Prime Minister, had done an excellent job of preparing Siberia for annexation and integration into the UMR.
Jane had voted Yes, for admission, two weeks ago when the Loop Ship she served aboard, the SFS Maathai, was still on approach to the El Five Complex.
It was easy to tell Jane was a 'spacer'. After decades in service under unfiltered UV, her reddish blonde hair had been bleached white and her fair skin tanned a honey brown. However, her eyes were still the same sparkling green they'd been the day she was born in a deer hide tent in the Outlands.
She was wearing her Space Force Walking Out Dress uniform, a black one piece with white trim and soft boots, with the trio of six pointed silver stars of a Senior Lieutenant on each side of her collar.
She also wore a Mark VII impeller on her hip, a mini railgun with two thousand frangible ferroresin darts. They'd ruin flesh, but powder against a pressure hull.
These days one did not go into Tower Seven unarmed.
She could see the Coconino Towers a few miles away looming in the afternoon sunshine. Nine arcologies, each over a half mile high, a quarter mile wide at their base.
Once they had housed a half million people each, non-citizens who would not, or could not, become Initiated Sisters. Many were originally Ferals from the Outlands, with some immigrants from beyond The Union. The Sisterhood housed and fed them, provided clothing, basic medical care, and entertainment systems. In perpetuity.
In exchange, the residents gave up the ability to reproduce.
When The Towers were first being built and occupied over seventy years ago, a vibrant and exciting culture began to grow up 'in the Nines'. Many Sisters would also pass through to participate and study. It was a golden age that lasted nearly a half a century.
Jane spent her 'shore leaves' there and had known some of her happiest days back then.
But non-citizens did not get the type of advanced life extending augmentation received by Initiated Sisters. That would have defeated the entire purpose of The Sisterhood and The Union of Matrilineal Republics. The most advanced augmentation was reserved for those who Participated and Served.
Jane was going to be ninety two in a few months and in all probability had only lived roughly a tenth of her total possible life span. The Sisterhood did not yet know the upper limits of their augmentation technology.
Many Ferals were prematurely aged by their upbringing and even with the high quality base line health care they received, they died 'young', on average in their mid to late eighties. And with their deaths, the Nines began to empty.
Ten years ago Tower Five had been the first to empty and be converted into an agricultural tower, a hydroponic megafarm. Its produce was flash frozen in its massive basement and shipped off world. It would be another few decades before a fully terraformed Mars could begin suppling the food needs of the central and outer system.
Other towers followed quickly as the population shrank. Now only Tower Seven still remained occupied, surrounded by her converted sisters, and even she was barely at half capacity.
The car pulled up to the base of Tower Seven, stopped. The doors opened smoothly.
At the station exit was a Ground Force Military Police check point. It was added about ten years ago, just before Jane shipped out for the Asteroid Belt. They checked Jane's ID. These were not 'greenies' doing their Universal Service, but long term professionals.
The sergeant in command noted Jane's Mark VII, nodded approval.
“If you get in trouble it will take us about five to seven minutes to get to you,” she said.
“Roger,” Jane responded.
They exchanged salutes and Jane passed through into the lift lobby. She was not afraid of course. Having been born Feral herself, this was just passing from her new life back into her old one.
Not that any of that mattered. She was here to visit Susan, her kid sister, one last time, and she would not let any type of danger stop her from doing so.
Mim, their mother, was around ten when she had been 'acquired' by the clan of The Brute, who styled himself The King of Oklahoma, and who may or may not have killed her parents. That was never clear. What was clear was that Mim was pretty and become one of The Brute's 'wives' two summers later.
Her first child was Jane. The Brute was pleased that she had borne him a child. Four more summers passed, then came Susan. The Brute was not pleased with another daughter. Mim and her children were banished to 'the dog tent', with the old and the 'odd'.
They spent three summers there...until one night, for no apparent reason, The Brute hacked Mim to death with an axe in full view of her daughters.
Jane gathered her sister up and fled. She knew where the Amazon Horse Clans traveled. After ten days they were found by the Sisters of Red Epona, big, rough, weathered women, full of scars and tattoos. They were quite familiar with The Brute's clan and welcomed these ragged children warmly.
After a few weeks with Red Epona, Jane and Susan were dropped off at a Karaal of the Cult of Hathor. Those Sisters fed them many wonderful cheeses and yogurts and then they sent the two still underweight but now less malnourished children to SoCal, the heartland of The Sisterhood.
Decades later Jane anonymously received an old photo showing some of the Sisters of Red Epona grinning broadly while holding up a severed male head. Even in death, she recognized The Brute's face. She showed it to Susan, who looked at it quietly for a while, then just said, “Thank you.”
Jane took to The Sisterhood with ferocious enthusiasm and flourished.
But Susan never seemed comfortable. Maybe she never really recovered from the trauma of Mim's murder. When she reached what had been decided was her fifteenth birthday, The Sisterhood's Age of Majority, she declared herself a 'non-citizen' and became one of the first residents of Coconino Tower Seven.
Jane was away at the time doing her Universal Service with Sea Force and was very hurt by her sister's choice. But when she visited Susan, it was obvious that she felt more comfortable among 'her own kind' and and gave her blessing freely.
That was over sixty years ago, or Solannums as Space Force was beginning to call them.
Jane visited at least once a year until she joined Space Force and then would still visit every time she made planet fall. When Jane gave birth to Ostera she was taken to see her Aunt Susan as well.
Susan became an accomplished jewelry maker, working with leather and ceramic beads she made herself. Even now, as she ascended in the main lift to Level 816, Jane was wearing a bracelet Susan gave to her thirty years ago, thin brown shammy with bright blue beads, that had traveled as far as the moons of Neptune and back.
The lift stopped and the door opened. There were a dozen men in the lobby, 'middle aged', rough looking and shabby, each carrying a weapon made from construction material. They automatically moved toward her...then stopped dead when they saw who and what she was.
“What do you want here, spacer?” half snarled the largest of the group, his eyes carefully avoiding any glance at her impeller.
The combat programs in her neural nanonics had already tracked and targeted the lot of them. Even without the impeller, her muscle and bones being at least triple the density of these Ferals, she could most likely kill all of them in under a minute. And they had to know that.
“I'm Jane Mimsdottor and I'm here to see my sister Susan,” she stated firmly.
One of them in the back laughed and said, “Who sells seashells down by the seashore.” That got all of them laughing in what seemed a good natured fashion.
Her combat program told her their heart rates were going down. She smiled brightly.
The Large One stepped back and bowed slightly. “Welcome to Eight One Six, Jane, sister of Susan.” He gestured as if ushering her into a palace. The others all followed suit in their own way.
“Thank you,” she said with soothing undertones pushed into her voice box. For good measure she added a mix of pregnancy/breastfeeding pheromones to her natural scent. That would re-enforce their feelings of protectiveness.
She walked through the lobby, smiling serenely, and down the corridor to Susan's quarters. From the lobby she could overhear whispered appreciations of her ass. The biocontrols that had kept her heartbeat normal logged off.
Jane was heading clockwise, so the central shaft wall was to her right and the residential ring was to her left. The Towers were really 'tubes', hollow in the middle, with all the apartments facing outward.
The shaft wall was covered with beautiful murals, both paint and mosaic, done by the many artists who lived, or had lived, here in Tower Seven. Jane recognized some of their work, had known a few of them. She was pleased to see that even the gangs had respected them and tagged their turf with markings on the corridor's floor.
The floor tagging had become a chaotic art form itself, tagging over tagging, in some places painted over entirely, and then more tagging on top of that.
The corridor itself was in decent shape, Eight One Six being almost fully occupied. The motto of The Nines from the beginning was “Sweep in front of your own door.”
Jane was recording all of this with a neural program and would upload it into the Main Archive when her visit was done.
About a dozen doors down from Susan's, the tagging trailed off, replaced by a subtle wavy/swirly texture that she knew was her sister's signature style. She'd used a thin layer of concrete as her medium, etching the pattern into it while it was still wet. It complemented the overwhelming patterns of bright colors upon both walls and the ceiling, millions of ceramic beads that rushed and twisted and curled, each placed by hand over many years.
Even the gangs knew this was Susan's turf.
The apartment door's biometrics identified Jane, and opened. “Susan?” she called as she entered.
“Living room,” her sister's voice came back.
The apartment was a standard Tower Single, two thousand square feet with ten foot ceilings. Susan had filled it with the paintings and sculptures of her friends and lovers, floor to ceiling shelves full of hard copy books, gorgeous hand made rugs, large comfortable furniture. The place was always welcoming, even now.
Jane found her sitting in her 'thinking chair', a plush recliner that faced the floor to ceiling living room window with a prefect view of Tower Eight. She wasn't surprised at how Susan looked. She watched her weight loss on the vids she regularly sent her while she was on the Maathai . But here, in the same room, Susan's impending death was palpable.
Jane knelt by her, gave her a hard hug and a kiss. “I'm glad you waited for me,” Jane said softly.
Susan made a mischievous face. “Gave me an excuse to experiment with various opiate compounds.”
“As if you needed an excuse.”
“Ah, nothing is better than a guilty pleasure indulged in without guilt.” She turned serious. “I know what you've been planing.”
Jane's control of her facial expression was absolute. Her neural nanonics could create a perfect poker face.
“Now don't give me that Gorgon face,” Susan said with a hint of petulance.
“It's the right thing to do,” Jane said flatly.
Susan grinned like a loon. “Of course it's the right thing to do!”
Jane relaxed. “I was concerned you'd be embarrassed.”
“One cannot embarrass the dead. And a museum with my name on it is also a museum with our mother's name on it and I could never object to that.”
“We're taking the entire corridor, too,” Jane said, “Just removing the panels themselves.”
“You're not going to make some kind of a shrine out of my apartment, are you?”
Jane smiled. “No, just the corridor and the exhibits of your work. We've been gathering the pieces for a while now.”
“You Sisters are a morbid lot.”
Jane shrugged. “We think in the long term about everything. It's our nature.”
Susan laughed. “I can hear the caps in 'long term'.” She patted the broad arm of her chair. “Come. Sit down. It's almost time.”
Jane sat on the arm, took her sister's hand, leaned against her. She'd seen the Medi-Patch on her other arm. It could administer a lethal cocktail at a set time or be triggered manually.
They looked out the window at Tower Eight. Susan had carefully picked this apartment those sixty plus years ago. During certain times of the year, the sunset reflected an amazing array of reds and golds off of Tower Eight. They and her friends had watched that show so many times.
All of those friends were gone now and this would be the last time for both of them.
“Jane, I have one last favor to ask of you. In my desk you'll find about six hundred hand written pages,” she made a little laugh. “You're probably the only human who can read my scribble.”
“What do you need?” Jane said, holding her sister's hand a bit tighter.
“They're notes for a history of the horse clans. I started with Red Epona, but got carried away. I never finished because it needs field research and...well, you know.”
“Yes,” Jane kissed her sister's hair. “I've missed them anyway.”
“Thank you,” Susan whispered.
At that moment, the setting sun slashed across Tower Eight and the room was filled with a reddish golden cascade of light.
Jane held Susan's hand even after it went limp, held it until that light faded to a soft glow.
Later, as she emerged from the lift on the ground level, she 'heard/felt' a soft chime deep in her temporal lobe.
A pleasant voice whispered, “This is an announcement from the Electoral Directorate. Voting in the General Plebiscite regarding the question of the admission of the Siberian Confederacy into the Union of Matrilineal Republics had been concluded. Admission has been approved. The tally is as...”
Jane shut off the link. She knew it was a wide margin. And The Sisterhood had just absorbed nearly a quarter of the Eurasian landmass. She and the GF/MP's smiled knowingly at each other. They all were conscious of the threshold that had just been crossed.
She heard Susan's laughter in her head; “I can hear the caps in 'long term'.” Jane's smile got just a little bit deeper.