149: Nightingale

There are tales of flight, tales of unchecked ascent, and tales of sweeping loss, but for most of us, it is a hidden hand that guides the comb over the city’s knotty strands. Up in the lower eighties, The Nightingale whirrs a slo-mo gasp as it ascends another three storeys: 83, 84, 85, picking out one of the live-work modules that jut out up here where the oxygen gets thin. It circles, its oculus scanning through windows awash with clouds. Yes, up here where the oxygen thins of its own accord, where The Nightingale can stream realtime footage of over-insured executive bodies, splayed out and quivering over marble tabletops as their brains tear themselves free of retinal nerves and leg it down to the catatonic panic room, sealing the vault door and flipping on all the alarms. Those that can, stagger around near-empty spaces looking for a surface to rest on, eager to catch a phantom breath, but the meetings in their memory were done standing up: even the hot desks were seatless, the desk staff were pant-less, and now, bent double over the marble partitions, the ex-staff pant absently. A single trolley slowly drifts across the floor on the currents from the blown out windows, its cargo a nameless project manager and the outgoing head of HR, both flaccid in the black hole of asphyxiation, smiles dripping from their faces like hot fondu from nubs of skewered bread. No more necktie coverups of mistimed motel auto-asphyxiation; the mysteries of corporate decision-making have long been in the public domain. The recovery team watching the stream are poised for action. Timing the thrice-daily retrieval of executives requires a keen eye, the ability to open an app on a phone and swipe through expensively illustrated documentation, a military-style uniform with all the relevant accessories, but most of all, a belief that those staff slumped over the velvet rope separating life from death might be actually worth saving, at least for the gristly pickings they might offer The Nightingale. As another body slips from the grasp of the giant pneumatic talons and plummets gruesomely into the dark depths, I slam the laptop shut. None of these primary gurgles of approximate sentience ever interested me, whatever level of elevation their vacant bodies may have ascended in the foam of artifice! No. It’s the lower forms of life, hidden and sleeping among the rafters of the ruined operations room that I have sent The Nightingale up to investigate. I steer it around to a vantage point where I can see a whole ruffle of personnel officers lounging in their cast off 6 k office chairs, their feet up on stacked boxes of photocopier paper as they scroll through the live roll of digestive data sets beamed back by dinner bees on a recce. If you’ve ever been stung by one of these, anywhere between the oesophagus and the fundus where they really pull a finch, you’ll understand the depths of my grievance. I go to the shuttered windows, fling them open and release the scout swarm of dinner bees. In fifteen minutes a single bee will return, perform a cryptic waggle dance in front of my eyes, before launching itself onto my ear canal where it will begin its navigation prompts. At this point, all the other bees, some fifteen hundred of them — minus one — will have begun to succumb to the digestive acids of the diners in whose stomachs they were now entombed. You see, after forcing their way down the gullets of some fifteen hundred diners across the metropolis, the bees begin a networked exchange of qualitative data extracted from the digestive tracts of the dining population. There are around 30,000 different metrics: variations of sweetness, saltiness, sourness, bitterness, astringency, umami, pungency; …. — data points of determinate magnitudes, which are cast out in a comparative sweep across the network, returning a food performance vector back to each bee. The bee with the biggest vector simply maintains its counter-acidic shield and burrows its way through the intestines of the winning diner, exiting through the anus, usually unnoticed, and back to the apartment. As for the other bees with the underperforming food vectors, they turn off their shields and are simply digested along with the food they were analysing. Then, as mentioned previously, starts the victor bee’s navigation guidance…