Year of Storms, Chptr 5 – Xperience Fiction – by Liam Sweeny.
Cellie’s hands and arms were filled with airgel bags that wrapped around the refuse she’d accumulated since she got out of jail, which admittedly, wasn’t much. Unity, like all cities in the world, survived by creating within themselves a delicate ecosystem of rationing, minimizing, and above all, recycling. Only the very important could have first-run items made for them; the rest of the population started with second-run items and lower, until the items came up from recycling as ‘last-run’ and upon its lifetime of use, usually short, it would be discarded, or ‘retired,’ its components broken down to whatever raw materials could still be salvaged. By the time something was ‘last-run,’ it was practically dust.
She caught the elevator down to the cylinder’s sub-basement, where the recycling chutes stood in a row against the cylinder’s core. The other wall contained seating, since the sub-basement contained all of the living services equipment; the laundry, the simple medical station, and the entrance to the transport area, all of which occupied the bulk of the sub-basement. The seats were filled, not by laundry-goers, for there were far too many seats for the facilities, but by those who residents of the cylinders collectively referred to as “specs,” short for “spectators.”
“Hey girl.” An old Black woman with thick braids tucked under a scarf and deep cracks for features sat one leg over another, both covered by a flower print dress stitched together with silver-colored knitting yarn. Cellie tilted her head because her hands were filled with bags.
“Girl you ain’t been down,” the woman said. “They can site you for that much trash in your unit, you know, don’t ya?”
“I know, Miss Ezzie,” Cellie said. “Just got a little sidetracked.”
Miss Ezzie was ostensibly the leader of the specs, though Cellie learned that outside the cylinders, she cleaned ExP ports at hypno banks, which was equivalent to cleaning hypodermic needles at a heroin dealer’s house. But in the sub-basement, it was she that told all the other specs what dinner fork went with what dish.
“You know, honey, I seen your boy wand’rin the hall on your floor. You gotta’ be careful he don’t wander over to the east none. You know Mr. Tawley, lives by the status pad? He got a story on him, a kid story.”
“If he had a kid story, he wouldn’t be able to live around kids.”
“He ain’t,” Ezzie said. “Well, he wasn’t. But your little one’s here now, he’s likely to have to move.”
“What do you want me to do?” Cellie said. She picked apart her refuse, tossing each item in its appropriate chute. She frequently had to get 2nd and 3rd-run items for her art, and she hated to get rid of them, but her apartment was already at twenty-eight percent capacity by habitat regulation. Thirty percent would make her eligible for a charge of hoarding, which would make her less in the eyes of Post society than the kid story made Mr. Tawley. She found it odd that possessing a trunk full of child pornography could be tolerated more than two trunks of papier Mache costume masks.
Cellie finished depositing her refuse and waited for the system to update her unit capacity. Some people didn’t bother to wait around for confirmation, a luxury Cellie didn’t have, being so close to the other side of what was really the cardinal law.
Since the Year of Storms caused the Collapse, the cities held close to ninety-nine percent of the global population. The rest of the planet had only one purpose, reforestation, trees and vegetation planted over nearly every surface to pull the carbon out of the air. None of this could be possible if people kept living the way they did before the Collapse. Greed, gluttony; so prized in the world before, was a direct threat to the health of the few dozen cities that held everybody. The city could survive an illegal gambling operation or a narcotic distribution network, even a molested child before it could survive even a handful of people holding onto things and filling up their living spaces.
“Celli, honey, you still doing blue feeds?” Ezzie said. “You so pretty, you don’t have to do blue. How’s a man to marry a blue feed girl?”
“I’m already married, Ezzie.” Was. “And I don’t work blue. I don’t take my clothes off. No smut, just doing fun stuff and sharing it, that’s all.”
Ezzie cast her eyes beyond Cellie as she spoke. “You know that woman Camda in apartment W17, she can’t be more than a couple doors down your way. You know she jacks her dreams, right?”
“No, didn’t know that,” Cellie said. “Good for her.”
“I can’t imagine jackin’ my dreams. You know she tried to offer me a dream she had about me, said she only wanted two hours hypno for it. Can you image two hours for a dream, like she’s some kind of psychic or whatnot?”
“Maybe she is,” Cellie said as she drummed her fingers on the edge of one of the chutes, wondering what the hell was taking the system so long to update. So what if her neighbor was jacking her dreams? It was risky, since no one knew what embarrassments they were going to trawl up and put in the Exchange. But some people, especially lucid dreamers, took the chance. It was seen as a pretty low-brow way to earn hypno.
The status panel over the chutes refreshed, which meant it had updated. She only went down point-five percent of capacity. She knew what was coming; a good old fashioned unit sale. If she was going to have Podre, and she was, she’d need new stuff. Different stuff.
“You ready for the new Exchange list, honey?”
Cellie turned around. “They’re doing it today?” She said. “I thought it wasn’t for another week.”
“It was on the news today, this morning,” Ezzie said. “They had to move it up on account of something in the supply line. City President was talking shared sacrifice, so we know that means the hypno going weaker.”
Cellie hadn’t heard the news that morning, and as much a busybody as Ezzie was, Cellie knew she was right. Whenever the City President had a bitter pill to sell, he wrapped it in municipal patriotism and sacrifice.
“Maybe you’ll do okay” Ezzie said. “If you want to sell yourself to keep ends meeting, you’re already in the right feeds.”
