A Splendid Future

He looked up at the dark sky where the clouds, loaded with rain and smog, prevented from seeing the stars and the moon. The stars. He’d seen only a few times. The few times they’d accepted his request to buy a ticket (at an exorbitant price) giving access to the highest skyscraper in town. Only from there could you see them, and only if the sky was clear, of course, which didn’t happen very often, actually hardly ever, to tell the truth.

It started raining. Fred pulled his coat tight, raising the hood. It was almost nine pm. He hadn’t realised that he’d been in there for more than two hours. In a while the caustic (or salty? he’d never really understood) fog would descend and he had forgotten the regular respirator. He looked around. Some people were already wearing it. A small silicon mask with a purifying valve to be applied on the nose or on the mouth, as needed. An essential tool for long term survival, but with such a high cost that not everybody could afford it. He himself had been able to buy it just four years ago. The private health companies obviously didn’t give it for free and, by the way, they said that it wasn’t necessary to stay outside after half past nine pm and, statistically, after that time there were more victims from crime than those from caustic fog. No one believed it, but the health companies were simply too powerful to counter.

Anyway, it was time to go back home, so Fred set out, letting himself be carried by the human river, until he reached the first Airtube entrance. He climbed up the wide metal spiral staircase. He reached the second floor and waited with tens of other people bundled up like him and like him looking for shelter from the hot rain loaded with desert sand.

The Airtube arrived, announced by a short siren sound. Fred lifted his eyes. The big metal tube, a little more than ten metres above his head, opened. A long articulated wagon started coming down. The gears that moved the cables supporting it screeched and seemed to scream, praying to be lubricated.

Fred looked at it, recalling how it frightened him when he was a child and he believed it to be a monster snake that ate people. He smiled. Actually, it did look like a snake and, as he discovered years later, his design was inspired by that animal.

The Airtube stopped next to him. Some coils receded to let him in. The seats were very few, but there were a lot of poles and handles on the low ceiling. The coils closed. There were no windows; they were useless. The snake wagon went up again, the tube closed. They left. It felt like a ride on the rollercoaster and every time there was someone falling. No one ever helped up the unlucky. Neither did he. Those who fell knew it and didn’t complain; by the way, they had surely been among those who didn’t fall as well and, just as surely, hadn’t lifted a finger to help those who had fallen. Nevertheless, occasionally, someone complained about it, but he was inevitably stared at as if he was crazy. Nothing unusual.

Five stops later Fred got off and he came back down to the level of the street and the ubiquitous crowd. He had almost arrived but, passing by a small kiosk, he realised he was hungry, remembered he had nothing to eat at home and stopped by. He ordered a seaweed fibroburger and fried jellyfish sticks. He sat on one of the few stools of the kiosk and waited.

“Hard day?” asked the sweating and busy cook in the kiosk.

His face was dark and marked by deep shadows. His long and untidy beard hid a pitted skin. His flabby belly, typical of a beerotch abuser, didn’t improve his already squat silhouette. He really looked like a person who didn’t sleep enough.

“Not as yours.” Fred answered frankly.

The cook laughed “Cook in the day, security in the evening, doorman at night” he exclaimed, lifting his eyes in glory, then he slapped his own belly “woe betide if I didn’t have this to sustain me” he laughed.

It took Fred just one look at his shiny slimy temples to understand why he was in such a good mood. “You should quit” he whispered, pointing at his temples

The cook, rudely but meaning no harm, threw in front of him the food he had ordered. “Yes, and then maybe I’ll climb up on the Tunnel Tower and fly away!” the cook laughed again, wiping his hands and his sweaty face with the dishcloth before going to serve another client who had just arrived.

The Tunnel Tower. Nothing more than a pole, a little more than twenty metres high, overlooking a precipice at the edge of the poorest part of Neo Apuania. It should have been the starting point of a new Airtube line serving those poor people, but at a certain point some bureaucrat decided the project wasn’t convenient nor profitable, so there was just the pole left, with the stairs climbing up to its top, reminding forever those derelicts that they’d been forsaken.

That pole overlooking that disadvantaged wasteland, dwelt by invisible people, had become one of the favourite destinations for suicides, also because, in zones like that, watchmen or Keepers of order were hardly ever seen. Nobody seemed to care about the fact that suicides happened almost daily.

Maybe the sadder thing was that, at the bottom of the slope, where the dead bodies of the suicides fell, a small crowd gathered every day to compete for the few belongings of the corpses. Oftentimes these quarrels ended up in a brawl, and the brawl in a homicide, which roused new brawls to grab the belongings of the new victim too.

Then every day, at dusk, the Free Phalanx passed, a debated volunteer organisation who always operated at the edge of legality. Inconvenient for many, but still very convenient for things like that. Probably that was why the Regents of the Governance hadn’t dismantled it yet, even if Fred was persuaded it would happen sooner or later. One day they would tread on the toes of a friend’s friend and… voila! The end of it! Like most of the good things in this world.

Fred smiled to himself, it was like the lyrics of a song by that old artist that, probably on purpose, had thrown himself down the Tower Tunnel with all his currency on him. “Why must I do myself harm to do you good?”

“My life will be better than that!” Fred told himself, biting the last bit of his fibroburger and then heading home.

Five minutes later, he was in his neighbourhood. A normal social neighbourhood, the copy of many others scattered all over town. A maze of dark streets surrounded by thirty-plus store building. About ten apartments for each floor. All of them occupied. Every building also had an underground parking area, stably occupied by tens of homeless people and where nobody had parked his vehicle for years. At times, observing some of them he had know for a long time, he wandered why they were still called homeless. They did have a home, indeed: the parking places of the buildings. They used their energy, diverted their water, in short, they lived down there like he lived twenty-three floors above.

Walking towards his flat, he noticed a new graffiti on the wall. A sort of dark representation of a bride. Nice. Someone in this scum is really gifted, he always told himself, looking at the drawings. Especially daring too, considering the height reached by the graffiti. How they could draw them without an apparent support point had always puzzled him, as well as when they drew. He had lived there for many years, but he’d never seen a writer at work, still the graffiti kept on popping up like mushrooms.

When he reached his building’s entrance door, he tried to see if the fingerprints scan would work. He placed his hand against the display on the wall. It flashed and then turned off. No way, it still didn’t work. Nothing surprising. He was about to search his pockets for the key, but he immediately changed his mind. There was no need. He put his hand into a few years hold hole in the security door and opened it with the handle on the other side.

When he got in, he was welcomed by the hum of the lights turning on with difficulty and the crackle of the alarm that tried to click on and then went silent with a loud crack. As usual.

He walked along the narrow hallway, where two people could barely pass side by side, reaching the elevator. This was maybe the only decent thing in this building and surely the only one receiving maintenance. It was large, fast, with mirrors on the side walls and the ceiling (unfortunately all broken) and a capacity of at least thirty people; it could bear up to almost five thousand kilos. It reached the twenty-third floor in the blink of an eye.

A hallway even narrower than the one in the ground floor. Standard security door with fingerprints, iris and personal chrono-chip recognition. Apartment 23/9. He entered. The door lead directly to the small kitchen-living room. From there, a door led to the bathroom, another one to the small bedroom (with disappearing bed in the wall) and so much for his house. All his life. Nothing more. He was obviously on rent. A house, even this apartment, would be too expensive for a normal guy like him.

He headed straight to the fridge. He took out a bottle of low quality beerotch and fell on the old broken couch. He turned on the virtua-TV, staring the three-dimensional holographic images in front of him without seeing them. He slowly gulped down the bottle, without thinking about anything, then he decided, while staring at the merry white-haired and bearded man on the label “I’m not going to work until I get my results.” he declared, before slipping into a dreamless sleep.

The following days passed slowly and lazily. Fred spent most of his time looking at stupid pointless programmes, listening to music, playing and most of all sleeping. As he’d told at work that he wasn’t fine, he couldn’t go out. These days every company would activate the “illness assurance” provided by the neighbourhood Keepers: an automatic face recognition programme that used the thousands of cameras scattered all over town to catch you anywhere you might go.

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