Frank Tayell - Work. Rest. Repeat.

Ely ducked, and the fist sailed past his face. As he straightened, something struck the side of his head. His helmet took the brunt of the impact, but he staggered forwards, knocking two of the brawling workers to the floor.

Half turning, he lashed out and grabbed a fistful of arm and cloth. He didn’t know if it was the person who’d struck him. He didn’t care. He threw the felon to the ground as his other hand scrabbled for the truncheon on his belt. When he pulled it out he found the grip unfamiliar. He’d not used the baton for years, not even in practice. Another blow struck him, this time to the back of his neck. The truncheon fell from his fingers and was forgotten as his helmet was dislodged. His display pixelated as it tried to reset. He was blind. Roaring with anger, he tore the helmet off and began swinging it left and right. With his other hand, he grabbed and pulled the brawling workers apart.

Someone screamed in pain. He didn’t see who, but the noise reminded Ely that he was the Constable of Tower-One. He was responsible for maintaining law and order. He was responsible for keeping the workers safe.

“Stop!” he yelled, turning his incoherent roar into a barked command. “Stop! I order you to stop!”

Cowed more by his berserker thrashing than by his words, the fight broke up and the workers moved apart.

“Stop.” This time the word came out more quietly. Ely was breathing hard. He’d finished his fourteen hours on duty and had been halfway through his six hours of Recreation when he’d received the alert.

“No! No one move. Don’t even think about it, unless you want me to charge you with fleeing a crime scene as well.” He addressed this to those edging towards the doors at the back of the crowd. It wouldn’t matter if they did try to creep away. The cameras would have recorded their actions, the chips in their wristboard computers logging their presence in the room at the time of the fight. There was no hiding from guilt, no escaping justice.

The crowd stopped moving and, one by one, turned their collective eyes on the three people lying prostrate on the floor.

Ely cursed as he looked down. One of them seemed… not too serious. The man was rolling from side to side clutching his arm, his eyes tightly shut, his teeth gritted against the pain. A break, Ely guessed. Probably just a fracture. The man was bleeding, but only from a shallow cut on his forehead. No, it was nothing that couldn’t be treated in the infirmary up on Level Seventy-Seven. It was the other two who’d captured the attention of the crowd. Neither was moving.

Ely put his helmet back on. It took a moment for the retinal scan to log him back into the Tower’s surveillance system. He pulled up the camera feeds for the privacy rooms around the lounge’s perimeter to check that no one was lurking within. They were all empty.

A moment after that, two alerts came up on his display, one for each of the two prone men. Their vital signs, monitored by the wristboard computers, were shallow.

As per procedure Ely checked to see if the infirmary had been automatically alerted. It had. The two nurses were already on their way down, yet Ely could tell that the two unconscious felons would require more expert treatment. They would have to be transported to the hospital in Tower-Thirteen.

He cursed again, but feeling that his duty of care had been fulfilled he turned to look at the mob. As he moved his gaze from worker to worker, a tag appeared on his display, giving their names and criminal probability. For each of them, that number was set at one hundred percent.

“Do you know what you’ve done?” he asked the crowd. “Look at them. Do you know what this means?”

No one spoke. Some looked shocked, others ashamed.

“You know that when they recover they won’t be coming back here,” Ely said. “They’ll be re-assigned to one of the other Towers. Where will that leave our production targets?”

The City of Britain consisted of thirteen Towers jutting up out of the rising sea. Each was home to around twelve thousand citizens. Tower-Thirteen contained the hospital, the large retirement home, the prison, the advanced training school, and the administrative hub for the City. Towers Two through Twelve were the Factories where the components for the colony ships were made. Tower-One housed the Assemblies, where each of those components was checked and rechecked before being transported to the launch site. There, the first three colony ships were in the final stages of construction.

Work in the Assemblies of Tower-One was hard, but unlike labouring in the Factory-Towers, it wasn’t dangerous. Not a shift went by without the newsfeeds reporting a serious, or sometimes fatal, injury from one of them. On leaving the hospital, workers from Tower-One, and those felons who’d completed their sentence working on one of the penal gangs at the launch site, were always re-allocated to one of the Factories. In terms of Tower-One’s productivity, being sent to the hospital was as good as being dead.

“It’s one year until the first ship will be ready to launch,” Ely growled at the mob. “One year! The ballot will be held next week, and you all jeopardise your chance of winning a place on it by brawling like… like…” He couldn’t think of a word that appropriately expressed his disgust. A sudden, terrible, thought struck him. “No one move,” he snapped, unnecessarily as he pulled up the footage from the fight onto his display. He quickly cycled through the recordings from the different cameras, switching between the ones affixed to the ceilings and doors, the ones worn on the visors of the individual workers, and the one in his own helmet. He relaxed. All the people he’d hit were still standing.

“Control,” Ely spoke into the ever-open microphone on his collar.

“Constable?” The soft voice of Vauxhall, Tower-One’s Controller, came clearly through his earpiece.

“I need to report an affray. Lounge-Two.” Except it wasn’t called that anymore. “The uh… Sailor’s Rest,” he corrected himself. “It’s under control, but at least two workers will require hospitalisation.” There was a shuffling of feet. He raised his voice. “Inform the council.”

“Of course,” the Controller said. “But if they’re awake they’ll already have received the alert sent to the infirmary.”

That was true enough, and they would all be awake. The election was just over three shifts away. It was a foregone conclusion that Councillor Cornwall would be elected Chancellor by a landslide.

“Do any of you wish to admit your guilt?” Ely asked the crowd. He doubted anyone would, but it didn’t matter. He had the camera footage. Up until the Re-Organisation four years ago there had been the audio-feed as well. Then the right to privacy had been amended to the City of Britain’s Constitution, and Ely’s job got more time consuming, though not more difficult. Other than maintaining a watch against sedition, sabotage, and recidivism, the only crimes the Constable usually dealt with were the occasional fights. This one was more serious than any he had dealt with before, but he saw no difficulties in resolving it.

He turned his attention back to the images projected onto the inside of his visor. The system had already finished a preliminary analysis of the footage from the past thirty minutes. It had tagged each occasion when a citizen had hit, collided, pushed, or in any other way interacted with another worker.