Excerpt: World 2

I always thought the security system on the door was too complicated. Seven. One. Five. Nine. Nine. Two. Four. Type "JTLPKM". Four dash one dash six. And then the letter "H". My thumb print on the dusty little panel. Then a packet of encrypted data from my inboards, a pause and a confirmation scrawl across my sphere. Really, the code could have just been the print and the signal, that was hard enough to intercept and crack. It was still early, just before six, and most sensible people would still be an hour away from waking to the happy tones of Mike Sealard on Morning Today, telling them all the latest news on which celebrity was in rehab and who was cheating on who. And all in the same cheerful monotone, delivered from finely sculpted lips and pearl implant teeth. It was early enough that I wasn't picking up many people in my network, just the usual hardpoints radiating news and advertising and people wandering home after night shift. I was sure Dalton would be inside, probably asleep, since I often found him that way. I often wondered if the corridor alarms would wake him from the normal stupor he ended up in.
Atreides Teller, that's what I'm known as to the world at large, the legal, safe, nice world. I'd apologise for my first name, but my parents, God rest their souls, had a fondness for Frank Herbert's books. I have a brother named Dune, living in a private agricology somewhere, so I guess mine's not so bad. I didn’t live the quiet rural life. This city was not the quiet wind swept fields of western New South Wales, more like the dingy underbelly of some ship that had been floating through sewage for some time.
This city was a victim of progress. I haven’t lived here my entire life, but the entire time I have been here it’s been in a state of flux. Whole neighbourhoods had been torn down since I moved here, renamed, rezoned, and new ones built in their place. Roads ripped up and re-laid, even after the big tariffs on cars stopped them being quite so common. New residential towers ringing the city to cope with population explosions. Councils spending their allocations from sponsors on things that didn't need to be done so they wouldn't lose whatever excess they had at the end of the year. I don't think there's a single place or street that has the name it did twenty years ago. So much for a sense of tradition. Still, the city had more than enough people, a legacy of the massed migrations people made a few decades ago, when we took pity on the millions of North Koreans who could no longer cope with their shattered country after the Kims. We still have a government and we apparently have elections every few years or something. But the government doesn’t do much for the common people these days; they'd sold everything off to the private sector and really didn't do welfare any more. Instead they busied themselves finding new ways to take a little bit extra from your pay packet each week.
My parents used to complain about the way the world was going. Petrol prices and water charges. People taking no responsibility for themselves. Tolls on roads and taxes and the blurring of news with advertising and all those little things that make up the wonderful panoply of life. They’d hate it here now if they didn’t like paying a few bucks to drive down some new freeway. Everything costs you something now. Even the air you breath.
The door slid open, finally satisfied by my codes that I was a legit person to be entering. Hydraulics hissed, and I walked in. There was a thud of locking as it smoothly shut, and it sent me a cheerful report of it's metal fatigue and corrosion levels, colour coded for my convenience. I made a mental note to check the programming on it. It was getting slow.