The Wall Story

The Wall 11

Penultimate part folks...

           ~"Tiny, tiny mother fookers!" said Jack Whittaker as he stared through his mirrored glasses at the landscape below. Towns and villages filled his vision. Not an unusual sight in itself for a pilot, but for a helicopter cruising at just one hundred meters, it was.

            Jack had made routine police inspection flights before, but this was his first over the 'tiny' settlements. He'd transferred to the country to get away from the stress of the big city. The vista below was an added and unexpected bonus.

            Little people live there, thought Jack. Too small to be seen from this altitude but they're there alright and I'm making sure no normal human crooks bother these deceased citizens. The thought made Jack feel good. After all he'd be a 'tiny' one-day. Most likely he'd end up in a decent private afterlife settlement not one of the government ones below. But wherever he retired to after death took him, he'd expect it to be kept safe from the predations of the living.

            "New to you is it then, the settlements?" Asked Flight Sergeant Art Clarke nudging the joystick so that the copter's flight path turned to the right.

            "Yep," said Jack, tucking into a doughnut. "Of course I've seen documentaries and dope like that, but not the real thing. Not until now."

            They all give me the creeps," said Clarke. "Do you realise they're like little computers with fast clock speeds? They operate at speeds a thousand times quicker than we do. That makes them dangerous."

            Jack snorted. "There's laws to keep them in control. If they were as savvy as you seem to think we'd be protecting the living from them, not the other way round. Anyway, stop thinking of them as if they're machines, they're someone's ancestors, each one of them."

            "Tell me this," said Clarke. "Our job is to protect them from human gangs, yes?"

            Jack swallowed his doughnut and grunted. "Yeah."

            "You tell me of one bust there's ever been against humans for crimes against those things? It ain't happened. They're not under threat. These patrols are just political correctness. Good taxes are wasted paying us to do this when we could be stopping real criminals. No ones prepared to speak up though. Politicians stay in their jobs by knowing when to say the right thing at the right moment. It's trendy to bang on about tiny rights at the moment so no self respecting politician is going to speak out against it."

            "What's that?" said Jack?

            "Probably a master criminal human vacuuming up a load of tinies so he can sell them to third world countries as cheap labour."

            "No, I'm serious, Art. There's something there, bearing 10 degrees east of north, about fifty yards away."

            "New heading assumed," said Art, flicking switches above his head and tapping the joystick. "This'd better be good."

            Jack Whittaker had spotted a small shape on the green surface below. A faint white lined 'drawing' that couldn't be more than a metre across. "I almost missed it," he said. "It's only because compared to everything else down there it's massive, that it caught my eye."

            Clarke put the copter into hover near the shape and let out a whistle. "From their point of view that drawing must be huge."

            Jack took out a notepad and began making a sketch. Why build it? "Do you think it's some sort of art, Art?"

            "Very funny. I think it's more likely to be a religious thing. I hear that people get religion bad when they become tinies. You know it reminds me of those land drawings at Nazca. Those the hippy-type freaks said were landing pads for aliens. If I remember rightly one of those was a spider shape just like that thing."

            "Perhaps the tinies got to like our weekly tour and decided to give us a wave, in the only way they could," said Jack.

            "Dunno," said Clarke. 'We'll stick it in a report anyway. Give us something to write about for a change. Maybe they'll give that settlement down there a snap inspection or something."

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