by Huskyteer
He picked up his glass, and I felt a surge of happiness. He needed it. He lifted it up to his eyes and looked through suspiciously. I hid my smile in another sip.
“Tegi, let me see your cup, please?”
She had downed a quarter of her glass already. She smiled and shrugged, holding out her glass. Her gums were looking better already—fuller and darker and wet the way they should be. Matt didn’t bother comparing. Instead, he just held his cup above hers and started to pour.
I could see Tegi’s arm twitch. She wanted to pull away, I could tell, but she couldn’t. She was too smart and too thirsty to chance letting any go to waste. “Matt! Don’t. Please, you need it.”
“Not as much as you do. You lost a lot of liquid, and you’re still recovering. Drink it—”
“Stop! Matty, I—”
“No, I won’t reconsider.”
Tegi glared down into her glass. I felt a bit sorry for her. She looked miserable, but she knew as well as I did that arguing wasn’t worth the effort. Matt won. He always did. That was just Matt: the smart one, the kind one, the winner. Sometimes I think Tegi hated him for it—for being everything she wasn’t. But then the lights would dim and the world would turn off until the morning, and she would melt into his arms and I couldn’t imagine that there was anything there but loving worship.
“Finish it, little vixen, every drop. Then go get more sleep. I know you need it.” She nodded and finished the cup in two gulps. With a broad grin, she leaned up and pulled his head down to kiss him. When they parted, Matt was licking his lips. They were wet where she’d kissed him. She spun on her heels, and with a flash of her brilliantly red brush, she stumbled back inside.
Matt stared after her as she disappeared. I could see the longing in his eyes. He hadn’t… Well, none of us had, not since water had started to run low. It had been Matt’s opinion as a physician that we shouldn’t. “Waste of precious fluids” he had said. That didn’t get rid of the urge, though, the longing.
“It’s only going to get worse, Matt.”
“I know.” He sighed and sat back down in front of the fire. “We’ll go tomorrow.”
* * * *
Back before it had all happened, two forty three had been beautiful. We didn’t get any sunlight this deep except for little slanted rays here and there that managed to peek through the corrugated bulks of the districts above. Even with that lack of sun, ours was still a green sector. Flickering fluorescent lamps shone fake sunlight down on us. The ravenous creeping vines thrived off of it, turning what would have just been featureless gray into pervasive deep greens. It had been a common hobby during off-days to trim and hedge the masses of ivy into amusing and artful shapes. It had been an ephemeral art—the stuff grew so fast that what had been the sculpted shape of a curvaceous vixen one day would be a bloated hippo the next. That suited us, the district’s residents, just fine. We accepted impermanence. We embraced it.
If only we’d known just how impermanent it all was. We had been the lords of our little world, happy and carefree, and occasionally drunk and stoned. We were artists and thinkers, thespians and lovers. Even now some of the things we’d made had outlasted us, sculptures in scrap metal and refuse and discards from the System. Life was carefree, pleasure interrupted only by the Duty, when we were called by the System to work in the manufactory. It wasn’t an onerous chore—just the cost of our carefree lifestyle.
Then the manufactory had shut down. It had started with the alarm, heard and felt like a grim omen. Then the walls started to fold. That’s not an analogy—they hinged and twisted about. You’d think a building would move ponderously slowly, but within just seconds the top floor had folded away, much to the displeasure of its workers. A steady stream of people ran from the manufactory, until the bottom floor section swung inward and blocked the door. Most of the facility came away in large pieces, entire sections of wall lifting and folding away into the floor of the districts. It was purposeful and orderly, starting at the roof and cascading down the six factory floors in a medley of clanks and grinding and ratcheting noises so loud that it almost covered the sound of its panicked occupants. It was all precise and deadly efficient, computer controlled and exact to the millimeter. Just barely, over the ‘clack-clacking’ of the manufactory disappearing into the depths of the System, I could hear the screams from inside.
* * * *
We started in the morning, before the sun-lamps began to glow. We had our gear—all the toys multi-trillionaires like us could afford. Traveling from district to district simply wasn’t done—at least not by anyone smart enough not to try. It wasn’t meant to happen, so there were no bridges, no stairs, no ladders. Only the overseers traveled at all, and then it was on the back of techno-magical hovering disks that whisked them away like floating demi-deities. We hadn’t seen an overseer since it had all started—no need, I guess. They must assume that everyone down here was gone.
There were ways, though, for the brave, the resourceful, and the desperate. At this point, we were at least two of the three.
For us, it was grip-graps and gecko boots, going arm-over arm up the support. Up was the only option. Down would be no better for water, and though we could see the next districts over to each side once we’d climbed above the district barriers, we had no way of spanning the hundreds of meters of empty air between us and them. I’d used to climb for fun—up the sides of buildings and watching from on high where no one thought to look. Oh, the things I’d seen from the rooftops. All those little secrets and stories, played out soundlessly from fifty meters away. Sometimes I’d try to make up the words to fit their moving lips, imagining all the intrigue and drama I could fit to the distantly glimpsed figures.
What a difference a few months and just a gulp of water a day will make to your muscles. Before we’d even reached roof-height, my arms had felt like concrete weights. It was a real effort to even get them above my head. I couldn’t imagine what it was like for Tegi. I had put her above me in the vain hope that if she fell I could catch her. Realistically, that wasn’t even a remote likelihood. I was thirsty and malnourished. Even though it’d built so slowly that it was almost unnoticeable, these days I was almost constantly light headed and a little dizzy. If that’s how I felt, then how was Tegi, who was just now recovering from being sick, able to handle the heights and the ferocious winds? How would she cope with the strain of muscles as you forced them to pull you the wrong way against gravity?
The answer was frequent stops and a little bit of crying, from what I could tell. I stayed just a body-length beneath her. When she stopped, I stopped, and beneath me, Matt stopped. There were no complaints, no terse suggestions that she get a move on. We went at her speed, whatever it cost us. We hadn’t even considered leaving her behind. Not down there in our old home, with the ghosts of our friends still haunting every little crevice of memory. She hadn’t offered, and we hadn’t asked.
Not that I was sorry for the breaks. My arms felt like they were on fire every time I lifted them above my shoulders to wrap the heavy grip-grap gloves around the ‘I’ fold of the steel beams. As my knuckles bent for each lurching tug, the servos in the gloves clamped down on the metal, and wouldn’t budge until I pressed the button in the thumb. My legs ached too, especially my feet. The toes of the gecko boots would retract the billions of tiny fibers in the sole, and the boot would slip until I lifted it up to my waist and pushed it firmly back against the steel. Then the fibers would extend again and, through some magic of technology I didn’t understand, would adhere like the stickiest of glues. We had all the gear we needed to make the climb—if only our bodies were on par.
We stopped again when the steel gave way to some carbon-plastic mix. Tegi called down to us, then climbed just far enough to make sure the boots would work. They slipped once, then stuck. She wiggled her hips to try and dislodge them, then nodded down at me. I couldn’t help it—my mind was somewhere else entirely. Even thin and malnourished, she was a gorgeous vixen. She was the typ
e of girl that a guy like me could only have when she was on her second tab of Moan and everyone in the club had already had her. Of course, my chances had risen significantly since all of that competition had disappeared, but she still burned across my libido like a chemical fire in the manufactory outlet. Clinging to the beam with my nose stuffed beneath her tail while she wiggled those hips…
“Hey, slinky! Let’s go on. I want off this beam before the light goes out!” Matt goaded me on from below, last in line. Tegi had already moved on, hand-over-hand and foot-over-foot, and Matt was stuck beneath daydreaming old me.
With my urges buried, up I went with arms burning and legs sore. We stopped for half an hour when Tegi caught an errant sunbeam, undisturbed and unmolested by the hulking blocks of the district above us. I think she fell asleep. Good. She was safe with the grip-graps locked and the gecko boots engaged. She needed every bit of rest she could get. I didn’t mind waiting. It gave my arms a rest. The next push took a full hour of tortuously slow progress, but by the time it was over, we had climbed over the last lip and were in one twenty seven.
None of us had ever been in another district before. It was creepy the way everything was so familiar—yet alien. We surfaced by climbing over an unguarded railing. In the middle of what appeared to be a leisure park was a hab-complex that could have been a carbon copy of the one we’d left half a day beneath us. Yet the roads were different, and where I expected to see the imposing bulk of the manufactory was instead something else. It was still imposing, at least, that much I could see, yet it was covered in transparent tubes and egg-like pods, littering the outside of the building like ivy climbing up a wall. There was one other detail, though, that was identical: the district was uninhabited. Matt tried to hide his disappointment, but I could see it in the way his ears swiveled towards any wayward sound, quickly followed by his head. I think he expected at any moment for his friends to come around the corner and proclaim that it had all been one elaborate joke. Hah hah. They’d say after the worst practical joke ever devised. In a month you’ll laugh about this.
I didn’t need to search to be sure that this place was just as deserted as our district was now. I could tell just by the sad little piles of personal belongings, scattered around right where they’d all collapsed when it’d happened. Just like ours, this district was home to nothing now but ghosts, except here we didn’t even know their names.
“Come on. Let’s check it out.” Tegi gave us a brilliantly false smile before she tromped off into the hab complex.
It felt like a mystery. Everywhere we went, we found the remnants of what had been an entire population, caught in a single moment wherever they happened to be, and at whatever they’d been doing. Sometimes, we could piece together the secrets, like disparate pieces of a puzzle. We found a dok-dok game in progress, and after a little bit of thought, Matt said that the one that’d been wearing the crimson cloak was going to be the winner. We found piles of leisure clothes around a table with now-empty cups. It must have been a good way to wind down an evening. We even found a tangled collection of two people’s clothes crumpled in a stairwell off of an alleyway. That must have been an even better way to wind down an evening. It was delightfully voyeuristic, right up to the point where I remembered how it’d all ended for them.
Messily. That’s how. In agony. They’d probably had as little warning as we’d had. One moment, it was another wonderful evening, with good food and good booze and a tab of Moan. The night was young, and we’re all reckless and stupid. Let’s do something to remember. Let’s get drunk on the roof, blow all our mass credits on some new useless toy we’ll break before the night’s out, then end up fucking in the park because no one minds and no one cares, and everyone’s just as young and stupid as we are. That was the life. Then there was an alarm. And then something gnawed at your belly, and it felt as if everything was on fire, and dissolving from the inside out. Why does it hurt? What did we do wrong?
I shut down my memory to keep it from making up stories and started searching in earnest. I might as well not have bothered, though. No one was left, and only survivors would have hoarded water. There wouldn’t have been any need beforehand. Fresh water was pumped up through the System, available at just the touch of a panel any time you were thirsty, day or night. Who in their right mind would store it? Who in their right mind could imagine that someday the factories would be shut down, and all the manual resources would be recycled, and the power would be cut and the water would be shut off? Who in their right mind would do that to living beings? Who would do that to us!? Who—
I was okay. It was okay. There wouldn’t be water here, but we’d counted on that. At least, Matt had. We still had the last drops of water from the bottle, enough to see us through to tomorrow, when we’d climb up to eleven. They got sunlight up in eleven, so it made sense that they also got rain. Maybe there’d even still be people there, people still living and going about their Duty. Maybe the water still ran.
We bedded down for the night in a small abode close to one of the massive supports that held the next district aloft. Everything would look better in the morning.
* * * *
The screams had been bad, but it had been nothing compared to what else had been triggered outside the manufactory walls. The recycling had started as soon as the last wall had folded, puzzle-like and ponderously large, disappearing into the empty hole left by the complex. Some cute girl I used to know—a little mouse named Carly—had just dropped where she stood. Not with a disease, over days or weeks, but suddenly and instantly. One moment she’d been part of the crowd, watching the bulk that had been our livelihood gobble up all of its workers and disappear down towards the world below. The next, she’d been groaning, and she fell over. People cleared away from her, and one of Matt’s fellow med boys who’d come out to see what was going on ran over. It’d been quick—mercifully quick, I heard. I didn’t see it well, I’d been at the back of the crowd. I could fill in the blanks, though, since I’d seen it so many times since.
I’d only seen the dust she’d left after she’d been recycled, the flowing and shimmering stream of goop she’d dissolved into flowing towards the closest recycling vent to disappear forever down to the downworld. We called it dust, though it wasn’t like regular dust. It formed in pools that looked like liquid, but if you dipped your finger in you wouldn’t get wet. It flowed with a mind of its own, crawling over surfaces and even running up vertical climbs without any apparent difficulty. It was matter in potentia, the embodiment of creation. With the right schematics, the overseers could make anything out of it. Even the birth centers used it to create us, fully formed and adult when we were spat out into the district. When we died and were recycled, it’s what we became.
Then where he’d been kneeling over her, the med boy fell over. And then, one by one, like the loser’s figures on a dok-dok board, the crowd began to fall. A few, then a dozen, then everyone seemed to be toppling over and writhing. Everyone but me.
Recycling is something artificial—something that’s unique to us, I’m told. The overseers programmed it into us when we’d been built. Normally, it only started after we’d died. The pelt would start wrinkling and sink over the bones, as if the body had been deflated. Then starting with eyes and nostrils, the pelt would melt into that grey slime, a mobile puddle of the stuff that would slink away under its own power to the closest recycling vent and disappear, presumably to be used somewhere else, or even in someone else. For someone who had died, it seemed an efficient and clean way to go. It was as final as it got, and it gave a certain amount of closure to anyone who had known the recently deceased.
But not while they were still alive. It’s not supposed to happen then. It wasn’t efficient or clean or stately, it was…When they’re still alive, and they’re screaming, you can see their pelt slowly close in over their organs, then the screaming stops as their lungs disintegrate. That’s even worse—then, it’s soundless when their vocal cords melt, with just dry air b
eing pushed out by their quickly shriveling lungs. Within seconds, the rest of them melts away, decaying muscles grabbing at the ground, or at the park benches, or at you. And holding you. Like my lover Stef. He’d grabbed me. I’d watched as he melted away. Him, we’d done everything together, and then he just melted away in front of me, and his scream went on and on, even after it stopped, because the scream was inside my head.
* * * *
In the morning, we woke early. Tegi acted convincingly better. She even managed not to stumble too badly as we prepared to climb. The day passed in a blur, arms and shoulders aching, legs on fire. I ignored them. The need for water is a powerful motivator. Thirst overruled all the lesser pains. Up, and up, while the air got colder and it seemed to do less and less for my lungs with each struggling inhalation. By the time we reached the top, I was feeling decidedly dizzy.
But we were here. Finally. Eleven. It all looked the same, but in the light it felt so different. It was a shock, seeing the parks and complexes and houses, all lit by sun. I’d lived my whole life with just little glimpses of it, here and there between the vast array of districts above us. Now, I stood in it. The air was cold, but the sun warmed my fur the way the day-bulbs down home never did. It felt wonderful.
And where there was sun, there would be rain. Clean, fresh rain. Water straight from the sky, instead of dripped down through every contaminant the manufactories could produce. The anticipation made me giddy. Or maybe that was the altitude. Either way, I felt positively buzzing.
“Jay.”
I turned around. Matt was frowning. Why would he frown, when the world was bright and the sun was warm? “What?”
“There’s no one here either.”
He was right. I’d spent so long now with just the three of us, it didn’t immediately click. Whatever happened to us, it had happened all the way up the stack. Were we the last ones alive? It was sobering. All that giddy elation melted.
