Of Babel

The tower

Babel Exchange opened eleven years before the Parousia as the tallest building on Earth, with two hundred and twenty-six floors on a spire at the head of the bay and a beacon at the top of it to warn aircraft. The Charter Company built it over six years to be the one place where the eleven cables met, and every one of them terminates in its vault, six levels below the street. Between the vault and the crown were the exchange floors, where traffic was sold by the millisecond, and the offices of the companies that came to be near the cables. What Babel sold was nearness, and its floors were priced by how near they stood to the vault, the lowest dearest. Brightwall wrapped its lower forty floors in screens, and the city called that the face of Babel.

Most of the planet’s traffic passed within two kilometers of it until the night the sky opened. Its builders named it as a boast. The city took the name as its builders meant it, though the older Babel had also stood for a while before anyone came down to look at it. The Cainites reckon the tower in Shinar the first network and Nodus the second, and they say the Throne has attended to both.

The vault

In the vault, where the cables end, eleven trunks of glass fiber, each as thick as a man’s leg, opened out into the racks that joined them to one another and to the world. Line engineers kept it running in shifts around the clock, and the charter’s light law forbade any of them to read what passed through it. One of them was a woman who would later be known on the Mesh as vesper.

The night shift

The Exchange never closed. Traffic was sold on its floors by the millisecond in every time zone on Earth, and at night the upper floors were kept by a shift of traders and the minds that priced for them, by the security staff, and by the cleaners, who came up from the Wards on the last trams. The cleaners knew the tower better than anyone else who worked in it, since they walked it floor by floor, and they had their own names for its four service stairs, the Long Wet, the Cold, the Short and Lena’s, after Lena Varga, who ran the night shift, and chalked the names on the landing doors.