Upon Stilted Cities - The Winds of Change

by Michael Kilman

  Zelda bent over and picked it up. She said, “And I bet he walked away with his tail between his legs, like all the other Uppers in your stories, huh?” She passed the note back to the Frank, who, despite Zelda’s attempt to deflate him, still grinned.

  Frank said, “You bet your ass, Zelda. When I get through with ‘um, all them Uppers walk away with their tails between their legs.”

  Jose smiled and did his best to show the note to Frank, but he still wasn’t paying attention. So, instead of writing another note and hoping Frank would respond, he walked over to Frank, his feet echoing against the metal grating. He pointed to the note.

  “What?” Frank looked at his left hand for the first time and noticed the note. “Oh, sorry Jose.” He put down the wrench and read the note.

  “Gods damn, really? Again? That’s the third time this week.”

  Jose nodded.

  “Zelda, Jenny... Jose says we got a blockage again.”

  Jenny said, “Figures, what do you think the damn Uppers put in the line this time?”

  Zelda said, “We should start a pool, see who guesses right.”

  “Ha, yeah,” said Frank chuckling, “Then maybe one of us could get our asses out of the Lowers, huh?”

  Jose pulled out his pad of paper from his breast pocket again and wrote. When he finished, he tore off the piece of paper and handed it to Frank.

  “Jose bets it’s hospital waste again,” said Frank.

  Jenny said, “I wouldn’t bet against that. Those Uppers never recycle the bio-waste. Somehow they think they’re too good to recycle their shit and blood like everyone else.”

  “More like they don’t like the idea that all of their bio-waste is fed back to them through the food dispensers,” said Zelda.

  Frank said, “Yeah they’re too stuck up, I guess. So stupid. Not like they are eating their own shit. By the time the deatomizer gets done with all that stuff, there ain’t nothing left to be worried about. It’s all just raw material. Just atoms.”

  Jose scribbled something else down, tore off another piece of paper and handed it to Frank.

  Frank took it. “Why do you always hand your notes to me?”

  “’Cause he knows you’re the one with the big mouth,” said Zelda. “And if he handed it to anyone else, he’d never be heard.”

  Frank looked around with an inquisitive look on his face. Then he stopped, smiled, and belted out laughter. “Ha! You’re probably right.”

  “The note, Frank?” said Jenny, a tinge of impatience in her voice.

  “Oh, right?” Frank paused, read it and stopped for a moment. “Hey Jose, I’ve always wondered, and I have to ask, why do you spend printer rations on making paper? Why not just use your data tablet?”

  Jose shrugged and made no indication that he would respond, he indicated the note in Frank’s hand, but Frank made no effort to read further.

  “It’s cause of the uprising, isn’t it? Cause that Senator took your tongue?”

  Jose shrugged again. He didn’t want to have to explain himself to Frank. He liked the guy, but he didn’t want to talk about the uprising. He didn’t even talk about that with his own wife. But Jose wouldn’t use a tablet ever again if he could avoid it, at least not for personal use. For work it was fine, but he never wanted to leave any record again. You could burn paper, you could shred it, but data, well the way Manhatsten dealt with data, it was forever. It was no secret that the AI kept logs of everything, but as a foolish teenager, Jose and his friends had never considered it and his friends and family had paid for it, dearly.

  Multiple copies of his shadow cast themselves on the grated floor. The fluorescent lights flickered overhead, and the stale smell of sealed air filled his nostrils. His short dark hair and brown skin always looked strange under the bluish glow of the lights. His face lined and creased, but not from age, not yet, though that wasn't far off. It was the face of the man who had lost much, who had barely hung on.

  Working in the sanitation department underground was hard work, but it was steady work, more than he could get in most other places in the Lowers. For that at least, Jose was grateful. It was a family legacy.

  Again, Jose gestured toward the note, and Frank eyed him for a moment, hoping for an answer. Finally, he looked down and finished reading the note.

  “Jose says, two steam valves are popping already, and we better get moving. The AI confirms the blockage. Zelda and Jenny, you two get the hatch and the safety lever, Jose and I will get inside and check it out.”

  “Shit, no argument from me, last time I went in pipes I couldn’t get the smell out of my hair for a week,” said Zelda.

  "That's the advantage of my beautiful pate," Frank said, pointing to his comb-over.

  Jenny said, “We're probably going to have to recalibrate it. AI, will you alert sectors 2, 6, 8, and 4 that we are investigating a blockage and to halt the bio-waste recycler and the deatomizer?”

  “Yes, Miss,” said the AI.

  The all waited for a few moments in silence, listening for the temporary break in the constant hum of the machinery.

  “Hey, you guys remember when the Lincoln building went out?” Zelda said and grinned.

  “Ha! Yeah, how could I forget that.” Frank said.

  Even Jose had grinned a little. But Jenny, the newer member of the crew, didn’t get the joke, and Jose noticed that she had a blank stare on her face. Frank looked over at her and noticed too. Frank was smiling ear to ear. Jose knew it was because he had a story that someone hadn’t heard before.

  “You don’t know this one, Jenny?” said Frank.

  She shook her head.

  “Aw, this is a good one." Frank didn't wait; he launched into his explanation. "Okay, so you know how when the power goes out down here in the Lowers, sometimes it’s out for days before someone gets ‘round to fixing it?”

  Jenny nodded.

  “Well, a few years back, me, Jose, and Zelda were down here doing our usual thing, and we got a call over the vidscreen to come check out this power outage. And I says to the guy, buddy, I don’t know jack shit about electrical, and he said to me that he knew that and he thought it had something to do with a sewage line. So we head up to 60th and 42nd, and were given a pass to up to the 53rd floor—"

  “Wait, you actually got to go into the Uppers?” asked Jenny.

  “Yeah, and let me tell you, it’s not everything they say it is. Anyways, we get up there, and this Upper is flipping his shit. Turns out the power had been out for a few hours, and he was screaming something about his souffle or some shit not being ready in time for some big date. Which was funny enough, but we looked around and...” Frank laughed and couldn’t get the words out?

  “Zelda...” he said through fits of laughter. “I can’t... I... you tell it...” He was practically falling over he was laughing so hard, and even Jose was chuckling low in his throat.

  Zelda, who was also laughing a little and grinning broadly, did her best to continue. “So we looked around the room and checked out the pipes, and it turns out that this guy’s dog had dug into the wall behind his couch. It had pulled out some wires, which is why he lost power.” She could barely hold back now.

  She took a breath, snorted out laughter and then continued. “But the dog... it... it also blocked some sewage pipes. And this guy didn’t tell us that his sink and toilet were having a flow problem, so we worked on the pipes and I... removed the... blockage...” Zelda laughed hard, her thin, wiry frame vibrating. “Frank... you... you have to finish.”

  “Okay... okay...” He calmed himself for a moment, wiping a tear from his eye, and took a few deep breaths and stopped laughing. “So this guy was on the can when we were doing all this, and Zelda removes the blockage and turned the line back on. When she did...” Frank laughed again, grabbing a pipe above his head to steady himself. “The godsdamn toilet blew up. We heard someone screaming in the other room and went to check it out... The guy was covered head to toe in shit. The whole room had exploded a
nd... You know what he said... You know what that bastard said to us?”

  Jenny shook her head; she was laughing now too.

  “He says, Shit. Shit. Shit. Shit. He screamed the word, and he kept repeating the word over and over again like it was some kind of prayer until he was shrieking it at us. And the three of us busted up laughing so hard that he had to call security to escort us out. And when security got there, even they couldn’t stop laughing when we told them what happened.”

  They all laughed for another long moment and even Jose, who hadn’t had much to laugh about in a long while, made audible clicks with the stub that was once his tongue.

  “You know whatever happened to the guy?” asked Jenny.

  “No idea,” Frank shook his head. “But I’ll tell you what, every time I feel a little down about this place, I think of that guy screaming the word shit over and over again at us, and it gets me going every time.”

  There was an audible shudder and a gradual winding down of machine noise. The system had shut down the lines. The silence expanded when the machines stopped running, and Jose could hear the void reverberate in his eardrum.

  “Gods, this place is eerie when it’s quiet,” said Jenny.

  “You should have been here during the uprising,” said Frank. “When we went on strike down here, the whole place was dead silent. Sometimes I could swear I heard something moving in the pipes and it sure as hell wasn’t that Upper’s shit.”

  They all smirked again, but there was something less lighthearted about that smirk.

  Jenny and Zelda moved across the room to a far corner. The two women lowered themselves, and with some difficulty, crawled under the small space beneath the network of pipes. They disappeared from sight for a moment and then came up on the other side; their bodies masked in part by pipes and electrical lines of various thickness. They put their hands on a massive red wheel and turned it clockwise.

  Both women were thin and wiry with strong arms. You needed strong arms for this job, and if you didn’t have them when you got down here, you would soon. Out of the group, Frank was the only one who had any kind of mass to him. And that was surprising because most people who worked in sanitation had to be skinny to get into the various nooks and crannies required to do the job, but Frank, who had a significant belly on him, somehow had made it work.

  Zelda had dirty blonde hair and aging features. Jose had thought many times that though she had a tough exterior, there was something soft and easy in her face. She was the oldest of the group at 182, and approaching retirement. With her access as a Lower to the alcoves, she could probably hope to live to be 220 or 230, if she was lucky.

  Jenny was new. She was dark-skinned, dark-eyed, and dark-haired. Upon first meeting her, Jose had thought that besides the ugly scars that crisscrossed her left cheek, she was far too beautiful to be working down in Sanitation. There was something hard about Jenny, and those scars had hinted at something awful in her past. Frank had asked after the scars on a number of occasions, but Jenny always deflected the conversation. Jose could understand that. He did the same thing whenever Frank tried to bring up the uprising. He has lost too much, and all the emotion behind those memories was like a huge body of water threatening to burst through a dam. Sometimes with deep wounds, it was only a matter of pressure and time. Lately, it seemed the cracks were widening.

  Jose turned and watched as the hatch behind him, a giant gear-like wheel, slid open, spinning counter-clockwise. He braced himself for the rush of sewage that often accompanied opening the hatch, but nothing happened.

  Frank said, “Man, the blockage must be bad, last time we opened this thing we were knee deep in sewage for the rest of the day, remember? Took some of those hazmat bots to get this place tidy.”

  Jose nodded. It only meant that when they removed the blockage, they would get showered with sewage. He made a mental note to message his wife; he’d probably need to go into decontamination for an hour or two. It was almost quitting time. Jose grabbed a face mask placed it over his head. Two silver air filters protruded out of either side of the black mask, and Jose slid it over his face before he handed one to Frank.

  Frank said, “Good idea, when this thing opens up, we don’t want to get any of that stuff in our mouths.”

  Most of the time, working in sanitation wasn’t so bad. The machines and various little robots took care of most of the work, but some things they weren’t so good at. Blockages were one of them. Jose didn’t mind the work. It was steady, reliable, and permanent. Most Lowers spent their time moving from job to job, trying to scrape together a living. The food dispensers made sure no one starved to death, but that was about it. Most people struggled to make it to the next paycheck.

  In the Lowers, access to alcoves and other goods were limited. Everything had to be recycled and reused. No one could afford to throw away anything, which is why when Frank or Jose or any of the others down here found something like bed sheets clogging the system, they all felt a tinge of anger.

  What was worse was that in the Lowers, you were docked credits for wasting anything precious. Somehow the Manhatsten AI always seemed to catch on even if you threw it in the neighbor’s waste chute. Jose had always suspected there was some surveillance system that was monitoring the Lowers, but if there was, no cameras were visible. He wondered, and not for the first time, if the Mids and Uppers lost credits for wasting goods. Most of Manhatsten lived in the Lowers, so it was probably only the majority of the population that was monitored.

  Frank climbed up on a short stool, loosened a few bolts that led to the main sewage duct and handed them to Jose, who moved a few meters away and put them on a tray. He walked back over to Frank and waited.

  “You ready?”

  Jose nodded.

  Frank pulled off the exterior of the sewage duct it popped with a metallic clang. Then he reached up inside, and as he turned the gear that would open the main pipe, Jose prepared himself for a flood of sewage.

  Again, nothing happened.

  “Hey, what gives?” asked Frank. “I was sure we’d be knee-deep in Uppers’ shit by now.” The sound of his voice was tinny through the mask.

  Jose shrugged and shook his head.

  “Jose, I’ll boost you up, you can take a look at the mainline. Frank put his gloved hands down toward the floor, crisscrossing his fingers. Jose stepped one foot on his hands and Frank heaved him up until he stood on Frank’s massive shoulders.

  “You see anything?”

  Jose rolled his eyes. Frank should know better than to ask him a question he couldn’t answer. He looked around for a moment and then he spotted it. A thick white object covered in various stains was clogging the line. Jose reached for it and could just barely scrape it with his fingers.

  Jose pulled his head out and snapped at Frank. Then, with his thumb, he tried to tell Frank that he wanted him to push him all the way inside.

  “What? You want all the way in?”

  Jose nodded.

  “Are you nuts? What if you get stuck in there? How the hell are you gonna tell us if you need help?”

  Jose shrugged.

  Frank sighed. “Alright, but don’t say I didn’t warn you, huh? I’m getting tired of having your scrawny ass on my shoulders, anyway.”

  With some effort, Frank heaved Jose a few inches higher. Jose caught the lip of the main pipeline and pulled himself a little further in. The space was tight and cramped, but Jose didn’t think it was tight enough that he would get stuck. His feet and lower legs still dangled downwards, but now he could reach the blockage. He pulled at what he now thought was a bed sheet. It didn’t budge. Jose frowned under his mask. There would only be one way to unclog it, and it was going to be messy. He would definitely need decontamination after.

  Frank was gonna hate him for this, but he had no way of warning him to get out of the way. With the space as small as it was, there was only in or out of the pipe. He had to hope that Frank had enough sense to move out of the way.

&nbs
p; Jose grabbed the sheet with his right hand hard and then, wiggling his way backward, he got himself just to the edge of the entrance. He could feel gravity tugging at the lower half of his body. He freed a little more of the bed sheet and wrapped it around his right forearm and then prepared himself. Despite the mask, he was going to get a face full of sewage. No, he would be lucky if that was all. He closed his eyes, took a deep breath, and with a little effort, let gravity take him.

  He fell one of the two meters to the floor and then for a second, he dangled by the dirty, sewage-tinged bedsheet.

  Frank said, “What the hell are you—” But he never finished.

  Jose felt the bedsheet release, and as his feet connected with the floor with an audible click, the bedsheet came wafting downwards. For a moment, just a single moment, Jose thought maybe they were home-free. Then, before the bedsheet could even hit the floor, a wave of half-treated sewage came flooding out of the pipe. It poured so hard it knocked Jose off his feet.

  Frank ran and grabbed Jose by the hand and tried to drag him out of the way of the fountain of sewage but slipped and fell on his back in the ever-growing puddle of waste. There was no refuge from the smell.

  Frank rolled over and got to his hands and pushed himself up. He shouted at Zelda and Jenny, but Jose couldn’t quite make out the words. He was trying like hell to get up, but the sewage just kept knocking him down.

  He could hear laughter. Probably both women were laughing their asses off at the sight of Jose and Frank, fighting just to stand up. But at the moment, it didn’t feel very funny.

  Then, the sewage stopped. Jose, exhausted from trying to stand up, just lay there for a moment catching his breath. Frank’s shadow covered him, and he extended his hand.

  Jose took it and stood up. Green goop and liquid rolled off him.

  “You crazy son of a bitch,” said Frank. His face was stern, angry, and, like Jose, covered in sewage, except for under the respirator which had somehow stayed on. “What the hell was that, huh? Couldn’t have figured out some way to warn me? Now look at us? We'll have to spend two hours in decontamination. Sally’s gonna be pissed when I show up late again.”