His phone was an orgy of rejection and spam. He scrolled through it on an automatic loop, grinding his teeth and frustrated. He’d presumed there was some system or method, some means of carving a groove into the salt and iron flesh of industrial nihilism. That had been a mistake. He watched videos and read articles between flurries of refusals. He’d taken courses on amateur data-crunching that taught him little he didn’t already know. He’d learned about application tips, interview techniques, and an endless pathetic cacophony of games played by overpaid man-children with private offices, secret tests by sociopaths, and the omni-mutating irrelevant quirks of recruitment algorithms and the narcissistic circus freaks who played caretaker to them. They asked unprofessional personal questions and made statements with double meanings that had nothing to do with the functions of their jobs. They played games with coffee cups, condiment dispensers, and vending machines. He ingested all of their inept, relentless filth until he could drown them all in bile and vomit.
He’d taken to tying the case to his belt using a small wire clip, and it thumped against his thigh as he lugged it around with him, wondering all the while why he was still carrying it. He’d snatched it up without thinking when he was turfed out of the crates, but now the action seemed stupid. He’d put it down on a bench and then sat beside it for an hour. Then he’d gotten up and, gritting his teeth, awkwardly stepped down the road. And then he’d taken a corner. And then another corner. And then another. And he’d found himself standing in front of the case again. He’d turned his back on it. And then turned back. Now it dangled from his belt. He begrudged its awkward weight.
There were three useful conclusions:
· That you could take nothing seriously;
· That nothing had any value;
· Nothing anybody did had any connection to anything else.
Of course, everybody had the same answer. Regurgitating chatbot responses about how he should have done this, or he should have done that, or he should have done something else. Everybody had an answer that they were all self-righteously self-assured was the be-all-end-all solution, and that if it didn’t work then it was just proof that he wasn’t doing it in their vaguely expressed right way. Detached from reality, safe for the moment, they were all content with any number of theoretical variables that they’d constructed in the vacuum-sealed idealist hypotheticals that they trotted out with faux authority.
He wanted to rip open their chest cavities and fist fuck their lungs until his hands burst through their shoulder blades. To tear their grinning faces from their feeble skulls, wear them like a mask, and lecture them in their own self-superior tone through the ragged remains of their vacuous mouth holes, while they gurgled and pissed blood out of their pores. Well, there they were. No use whining; their position was their own fault. Maybe they should have made better choices.
The world was an ocean-scale cesspool. It served no purpose, it made no sense, it produced nothing of use and was gatekept by vermin wrapped in folded silk. Sometimes he mused that the only way forward was to purge them. That maybe they all deserved to die. Not because they were evil; they weren’t, they were just stupid and self-important. But they were in the way. A clog in a sewage pipe. A clog that operated through mindless pettiness, chicanery, and a collective desperate clawing for tiny scraps of status and power at the expense of anything around them. They were pathetic. They were a problem. And the most effective way to solve the problem was to kill them in vast bloody swathes, scything through that army of idiots like the hand of rectification.
There was a steady oppressive weight to the interminable pointless spam loop of application and rejection and course taking and presentation and pseudo-self-improvement and on and on and on. It seemed like a ridiculous contradiction. The city demanded he contribute to it, but when he tried, it rejected him. And when he adapted his tactics, it told him he wasn’t good enough. And when he tried to learn how to be good enough then it told him that he should be yapping to pointless meat holes instead. And when he yapped to the pointless meat holes, they smiled and then to him he wasn’t wanted. And he thought that perhaps they hated him, but the rules of the game dictated that they must act as if they liked him while finding reasons to throw him away in the hopes he would die before they encountered him again. All the while he was locking into playing the role of the smiling meat automaton, grinding through the motions in the rotted hope that he could survive by sheer numerical volume of interactions.
Having tried to be productive, and wondering how he was supposed to prove any of this to anybody when they inevitably demanded that he submit himself to the arbitrary judgements of arbitrary people, he slept. Unable to stomach the teeth grinding rage and the omnipresent sense of pressure, he slept. If he couldn’t sleep, he scrolled through endless reams of pointless slurry on Placement, or found a bar and drank until his mind was fogged. Anything to make the pressure go away. Anything to shut the world out. Sometimes in bouts of drunkenness, he’d find himself on the edge of an empty shelf of the city looking down into the maw of metal and concrete, with the ocean waters surging far below between the massed artificial islands. He’d find a bottle or a rock or something else and drop it off, watching it tumble end over and end until it disappeared into the metal void.
In his mind’s eye he envisioned a vast iron field that stretched from horizon to horizon. In that field there would be gallows. Great arrays of gallows. Row on row on row of old-school frames and within marched a battalion of nooses. They creaked and groaned, swaying with the collective weight of the legion of superiority complexes that swung from them. That was the true vision of the Elysian Fields. That was paradise. He could dance through a red glade of the dead, a quantifiable economic gift to his city, purified of an excess of feculent conniving detritus.
Beyond this beautiful plain lay progress.
On a day he couldn’t name, he awoke, groggy from a deep sleep full of shadows and claustrophobic corridors. A woman lurked at the bottom of an abandoned stairwell and called him down into it. And he went, descending with a knife in his hand, knowing it was a trap and that she wanted to kill him, but he had to kill her to escape the stairwell. And his attack had gone badly and he’d fled, leaping bloody and wounded to cling, out of reach, to the ragged end of the stairs suspended above her trash-strewn pit, with her screaming in fury and hatred into the dull strip light above them on the mould-covered walls.
His phone light blinked. He rolled onto his side with a groan and picked it up, squinting at the over-bright screen. The pods had messaged him.
“Dear 9703894176,
We regret to inform you that your legally allotted period of residence with Carter & Sons Temporary Residential and Accommodation Services Ltd, is due to end at EOB 7 days from the sending date of this message. You may not re-apply for residence in accordance with Act 17823 B paragraph C of the Industrial Residential and Accommodation Unit Rendering Markets Act. You may not return to this residential facility within 6-months of contract termination. Please seek accommodation elsewhere.
We would be grateful for a five-star review on Placement. Every five-star review automatically enters the reviewer for a chance to win a 1-week accommodation contract at a randomly selected pod outlet owned by Carter & Sons Temporary Residential and Accommodation Services Ltd.
Carter & Sons Temporary Residential and Accommodation Services Ltd thanks you for your patronage.
Kind regards,
Carter & Sons Temporary Residential and Accommodation Services Ltd.”
He flopped onto his back again with a groan, squeezing his eyes tight shut against the world. He put his phone back on the bedside table and tried desperately to go back to sleep, willing himself into oblivion. An hour later it hadn’t come. Jaw clenched, he dragged himself out of bed, threw some water at his face, and brushed his teeth while avoiding the mirror.
He staggered out of his pod and slumped down the stairs. In foyer, he stopped to watch an irate woman yelling at a customer service assistant with a black eye and dressed in a tacky uniform that was attempting class but looked more like someone had crossed a baked Alaska with a parade costume. He looked as exhausted as Caleb felt. She wore the same copy-paste veneer of self-righteousness that everyone else donned at the drop of a hat.
They all paused as two women descended the stairs at speed, one brunette in a practical cerulean dress, one blonde in carmine form-hugging office wear. They made a concerted effort to mask their powerwalking behind an air of composure, but the brunette was several paces ahead and the blonde was not happy about this. Her face flickered from neutral composure to feral hatred and back again as she stared at the back of the brunette.
As the brunette reached the middle of the foyer the blonde ordered her to stop. The brunette ignored her. The blonde repeated her order, pitching her voice with an impressive edge of authority, “I have the more expensive pod. You will let me through the doors first.”
“Survival of the fastest, darling,” the brunette tossed over her shoulder.
The screaming resident and the service assistant had moved out of their way and over to the edge of the room. Caleb sidled in their direction, but kept his eyes on the two women.
The blonde, realising the brunette was not going to let her past, dropped the pretence of civility, and launched herself at the back of the other woman. She clamped her hands on the brunette’s shoulders and yanked her sideways. The brunette stumbled and sprawled across the floor. The blonde glared and then turned toward the door. She managed two steps before the brunette, with surprising agility, sprang to her feet, yanked the blonde around by her arm, and punched her across the face. The blonde staggered, the brunette launched another fist at her with a snarl. The two women went down in a shrieking tangle of limbs.
“My money’s on the brunette,” Caleb said to the service assistant.
“You think? Blonde’s got more to defend,” the service assistant replied.
“They’re really going for it…”
“Always do. You serious on that bet?”
Caleb shrugged, “Sure.”
They tapped phones and tapped in the bet.
“What is wrong with both of you?” the irate woman demanded, swivelling her head back and forth between the fight and them. They ignored her.
The service assistant shook his head and grimaced, “Men fighting are manageable. Women are a whole other mess. The cleaning drone is going to be scrubbing blood and hair out of that carpet all day, and I’m going to have to clean up the drone afterwards…”
Caleb nodded, “let me know how it goes…”
He slouched into the adjoining restaurant. He punched in an order for a large coffee and a protein and vegetable panini, and scrolled through Placement while it did whatever it did in the back. The morning’s trending topic was a viral argument as to whether black people had deliberately crashed the stock market to undermine The Mountain. The proponents argued that, while scientific eugenicist theory clearly stated that their skin colour determined that they lacked the capacity to engage with the stock market in the first place, they had still somehow managed to come together into a hive mind to cause a market downturn. Possibly by psychically forcing white women to make bad trades. He was grateful when the dispensary pinged and coughed up a tray containing a cup of coffee, a sachet of calcium powder, and a sachet of sweetener. Next to this, a flat rectangle of lightly singed panini sagged against a plate, a layer of bloodless protein slice oozing from the sides.
He flipped from the Placement’s trending topics to the real estate and pod finder section and slumped into his coffee. The news was in uproar because someone had shot a CEO. The dead man had been the head of a fishing company that controlled several tiers of the U5-B17 stack, and had recently stepped down from his position to join an arms manufacturer with close ties to autonomous mining operations across the globe. They seemed hell bent on establishing a pattern in the days leading up to the attack, but according to his social media, family, and friends, the lone gunman had betrayed nothing to anyone about his intentions. The officials seemed more terrified by this lack of self-reporting than the death itself.
In other news, rent prices had risen 20% in the time he’d been staying at his pod. Half of the pod listings were other renters trying to rent their spaces out of a higher price, or rent a space on the floor without the pod companies knowing. Some rented out parking spaces in garages, others tried to sublet illegal space in storage crates in warehouse complexes. Some enterprising office workers even tried to sublet the area beneath their desks as sleeping space. Apparently, several of these were hot-desking situations as Caleb ran across the same desks in the same buildings being offered for different prices by multiple separate individuals.
He was there sending off applications and messages long after he’d finished his meal. The interminable monotonous process dragging out in inches of time. He only looked up when his phone buzzed at him angrily to deliver an automated message reminding him that he was sitting in a private restaurant and had not ordered anything for two hours, three minutes, and forty-three seconds. He had to order something else or be “escorted from the premises” by security.
She might have been lower down the pay grade, but the brunette won. It paid for his meal. Someone told him later how the blonde had apparently set her pod on fire and then stormed out of the building in a fury. When he walked past her door, no significant damage seemed to have been done, and so he guessed that, at best, she’d managed nothing more than superficial scorching. The pods wouldn’t care much. Like the people they rented space to, their products were easily replaceable, and they could cash in on the subsequent lawsuit and the insurance claims.
Days went by, rejections came in. All of them were automated. It was, perhaps, better to receive an automated rejection than to simply be left in the dark, as was the case with most of his applications. If you didn’t hear back after a week, you assumed they didn’t want you. Which was fine, except frequently companies would get back to applicants weeks or months later, which threw the general rule of ‘forget it after a week’ into uncertain territory and it was hard to know whether to strike something off or keep an eye open. After each heap of rejections came a heap of scams and spam messages. Dubious people with no identification claiming he’d applied for vacancies he hadn’t, or making too-good-to-be-true offers he didn’t believe. A depressing number of messengers offered the option of paying for shelter with sex or prostitution.
The day before he had to move out, he received a message about a pod application he’d made. He was invited to compete for a place. They’d had such overwhelming numbers of applications that they were going to hold a set of trials and those who ranked would receive pods. Seeing few other options, he accepted. The day after this, he moved his few possessions out of the pods and into his storage container. They looked sad, squatting there in the corner of a large converted shipping container in the middle of a vast storage facility ringed by a secure armoured perimeter and patrolled by the company’s battalion of private security forces. It made him chuckle to think about guys with sub-machine guns shooting someone over some old clothes and a handful of personal possessions.
Because nobody had a permanent residence, nobody had anywhere to keep all their things. Apart from storage. Some people spent huge amounts of money on furniture, only to cart it back and forth from storage to pod, selecting and customising as they went. Inevitably there were arguments when a table or chest of drawers would not fit in a lift or up some stairs, or could not be angled around a sharp U-turn into a narrow box that passed for living space. The drones would have to carry it all the way back to storage again and that wasn’t cheap.
Entire fleets of drones meandered back and forth across the city carrying belongings and items from vast warehouses owned by guys like Stowaway Industries, to anywhere the person renting the storage unit desired. Each trip cost money. It was a service and time was money and deliveries took time. If you ran out of money, they sold your possessions to an auction house until they’d covered the cost of rent or you ran out of items and the storage container was put up on the market again. If your possessions got lost, it was like they’d been repossessed by an enterprising marketeer who made their living sniping drones out of the sky, cracking the containers, and offloading the goods before anybody could find them. As far as the storage firms were concerned, if it didn’t happen on their premises, it wasn’t their problem.
He tried to stow away in his own storage crate, but they found him on the first night and kicked him out. They threatened to destroy his possessions if they found him trying to sleep there again. They’d never do it, of course. While he still had money, they’d threaten and even beat him, but as long as he could pay, the few things he owned were safe. If he ran out of money, they’d just reclaim his possessions and then sell them to cover the costs. So he was back to wandering the streets, now with an empty attaché case in one hand. It wasn’t a comfortable reintroduction to homelessness, he’d been secure for too long, but it wasn’t a surprise either. Everybody operated with the presupposition that they’d be homeless at some point in their lives.
He made his way down to one of the miniature docks and embarked on one of the long peeling shuttle ships that meandered between the stacks, their automated paths picked seemingly at random. He joined the various people drifting across the city, sleeping across rows of seats, and tried to get as decent a kip as he could. The attaché was uncomfortable and one corner dug into his stomach, but he refused to leave it out of his sight. He tried sleeping on top of it but that was even worse, so he went back to hugging it like a child’s doll.
When he woke up, it was still there, which surprised him. Outside, the bottom of the city looked like the bottom of the city. Between the ruin, sludge, and a carpet of climbing seaweed, he could be anywhere at all. This didn’t bother him as much as he thought it should.
Without checking a map or the time, he made his way to the onboard bathroom. It was a small ugly cubicle streaked with grime and not big enough to raise his arms in. The toilet was missing a seat, the bowl was smeared with a cacophony of shit, and the floor was damp. When he went to piss, the boat lurched on a rough wave, and he doused the wall next to it. Someone hammered on the door, bawled something unintelligible through the plastic and metal barrier. He ignored them, turned to the sink. It was cracked and as filthy as anything else in the cramped room. He ran the tap and splashed some discoloured water across his hands and face. He punched the soap dispenser while the idiot outside punched the door some more, and was unsurprised to find that it was empty. He shook his head, wiped his hands on his trousers, picked up his attaché case, and opened the door. Some kind of bedraggled hobgoblin stood in the aperture. It leered at him from a screwed-up face behind blonde hair so greasy that it had moulded itself into dreadlocks on its own. It might have smelled worse than the bathroom. The hobgoblin shrieked something at him, but it was no more intelligible for having removed the wall between them. He shouldered past them and took a seat near an exit.
He got off at the next pier and consulted his phone. Apparently, it was midday, but time was meaningless at the bottom of the city. He grabbed the location of the pods and started walking, stopping at a recharge station to wash his hands and face with some thin sludge that might have been soap, and then at a vending machine to grab some hand sanitiser. Three hours later, several stacks over, and several levels up, he arrived at a narrow street. The buildings stretched up and then lurched outwards at an angle, making the street look like a series of capital Ys that straightened out into a sheer unbroken grey façade. A grey soupy haze had swept off the ocean and swallowed the road. Dull blotches of neon shivved through the murk. There was a burst of gunfire from somewhere and he dropped into a crouch, wheeled, but could not locate the source. Everyone else in sight seemed unphased. He came to a narrow point where the street caved in on itself and narrowed from three lanes to two and then to a single lane that funnelled him towards a couple of brutalist pillars that spiked, unblemished, into the air high above and were lost in the smog. Between the two unadorned towers, two gaps in the walls in which a deep recess hid a glint of dull steel inset into a track that ran from one side of the street to the other.
An emaciated man with a dry hacking cough wandered back and forth along one wall, mumbling to himself. Nearby, a small group of roughly dressed men barked at one another, jerking erratically and jabbing fingers at each other’s faces, provoking a return volley of barks and growls. Rising to his feet, Caleb sighed, averted his eyes, and hoped they were too busy with their confrontation to be distracted by the stares of passers-by. Besides an overturned bin, someone had set down, upright, an empty bottle of mouthwash. On the wall behind, someone had daubed: “Make life easier: kill yourself” in bright yellow letters.
Ahead there was a barrier of battered railings and a thin line of people leaking through like sand from a cracked hour glass, held at bay in front of a scrap-heap ramp by a ragtag band of gun-toting toughs in masks and scavenged street armour. Beyond them, a yawning gap plunged into one of the many throats of the city. An entire level had been torn apart, somewhere in the past. The ragged edges of the rent in the stack were largely built over now, but here and there a mammoth knife edge curled and puckered into the air, a grimy taper carving the neon-soaked haze around it.
In the vast crack was a churning chaos of construction and destruction, a wide slash of space criss-crossed by strands of metal and wire like the branching strands of a cancerous mass. On either side of this gap a strange kludged-together ramp of hammered steel and melted debris, piled inexpertly into an uneven angle that reached out over the chasm. In the middle a raised platform suspended between the two sides of the narrow street by thick grey girders. Below the platform were sets of rungs forming a strange horizontally distended ladder. In front of them, another singular bar, suspended between the ramp and the ladders, parallel to the bars and little way above. Far below the gaps in tier plates divided the stack into sections, and between them a multitude of levels. Lattices of walkway and outcrop. And far below that, the distant grey churn of the ocean, raging white around the bottom of the city. Between a sheer concrete gulley, peppered by pillars and landings, further on, one wall veered off at a 45-degree angle, creating the impression of a blocky concrete wine glass. More ivy tangles of piping and cable creeping up the impossible verticality, criss-crossing across the chasm, looping and coiling through gaps and cracks.
A short line of people waited before the ramp. A series of heavyset guys watched on as a tall lady with a sharp ponytail and a mask with lines of studs down one side, called people forwards in small clusters. The group at the ramp shook themselves a bit. A guy standing on a stack of crates raised a machine pistol into the air and sent a hail of bullets skywards. He ducked instinctively as the group pelted towards the ramp and it thundered under their pounding feet. Caleb watched in disbelief as they launched themselves off the edge and over the wide gap, catching onto the single pole and using the momentum to swing forwards and catapult themselves onto the ladder. They climbed to the top and wandered towards the right. Caleb followed their path and realised that the platform turned along the wall and then dropped down on a raised platform he’d mistaken for part of the construction. It joined the street by another narrow ramp. If a person could jump high enough, they could theoretically skip the pit altogether and just climb up onto the middle section. He turned back. The other crossers had finished crossing and there was a new burst of gunfire and a new group of people were making the jump. He wondered whether he could clear the bar, and decided the risk wasn’t worth the effort.
He backtracked five minutes and checked the two narrow alleyways coming off the street, but they just led to dead ends and sketchy people. When he returned to the pillbox and the two towers, he found the street closed by a looming gate that seemed to be made of solid concrete, sliding across the tracks on steel wheels. At a loss, he headed over the blunt concrete kiosk sticking out on the left-hand side of the street. It was a small concrete oblong without windows and a heavy riveted door. He shouldered it open with a grunt and stepped inside.
It was little more than an oblong and a single flickering strip light. A pale emaciated figure slumped in the shadows against the far wall, its arms outstretched behind it and a pipe dangling from the ceiling. Caleb moved further in, cautiously, gave out an overly loud greeting, aiming for cheerful and self-assured, but his voice was unconvincing and the shabby interior ate his words. The figure looked up. There was a gas mask-like unit affixed around its jaw, some kind of port for the tube dangling from the ceiling and two jutting panels that might have been speakers. Greasy coils of black and grey cables burrowed into the back of its head, and rose up behind it into the wall and ceiling, fanning out behind it like the trail of a bridal gown. The poor bastard had been embedded into the rusting grey metal of the back wall half way up the forearm, leaving the rest of the discoloured lower limb flexing and twisting from the elbow to the shoulder. Caleb flinched back with a yelp. The gatekeeper regarded him from two opaque blank ceramic plugs that had been grafted into its withered face over the eye sockets. The rest of it twitched and writhed in place, the hideous distorted flesh contorting against its fixtures in the wall.
For a long minute they regarded each other in corroding silence. Finally, he gathered himself and stammered out a request to open the gate. The thing in the wall made no response. It just stood there and twitched and watched him. He backed away, unwilling to turn his back the figure, until he hit the edge of the door behind him. Then he shuffled out of the shack and yanked the door closed and stood trying to get his nerves back together.
With few other options he returned to the crack and joined the line of people slouching towards it, overseen by the strange collection of guards. From somewhere in the chasm, unseen, the shrill hoarse screams of a child floated up to them on the acrid coils of vapour from unnumbered pistons and vents hissing out their toxic breaths.
Ahead, a thick purple braid caught his attention. He resisted the impulse to call out. She was only a couple of bodies away and they stood stagnating. There was time. She turned, yawning, and belched. She caught his eye and stiffened as she recognised him. She span away, then turned back, but looked away to the side at the guys brawling in the background, instead of at him. The guy with the machine gun rattled off another volley. The line moved forwards. She remained in place and they trudged past her. A piercing shriek raked the greasy walls, and faded as quickly as it had come. Meera faced him, her ochre complexion becoming slightly pasty under the glare from the harsh lights, and then slowly lowered her eyes to the floor, and cleared her throat. He waited. She got herself together. “I don’t usually come…” she trailed off “I, well, you see, I haven’t been…” there was a long pause. Caleb suppressed the urge to laugh at her, “Not usually this low down.”
It was a curious fact. What was someone like her doing wandering around here? He stepped towards her, “Are you following me?”
She leaned back, regarding him uneasily. Her shirt strained against her bulging stomach. He opened his mouth to gurgle something more to her, but she laughed at him. Taken aback, he straightened, trying to hide the wave of indignation that swept over him. She fished about in an inside pocket of her pale green jacket, and held up a vial with a single anaemic twisting mushroom. “There must be something to be extracted from these proliferating pests. I’ve been practicing power words. Search engine? Brain? It’ll work. See if it won’t.”
“I remember a sublevel consumed. I witnessed them bloom. A cloud of spores filmed the breakers.” He scowled up at the cracked spires and rooftops, then looked away and spat.
“My toothbrush is dying. I charge it longer, it fizzles faster.” She shook her head and rapped her knuckles against her thigh. beneath the thin fabric of her trousers there was a dull metallic thunk. “I’ll throw it away. Will the multiplicities take it?” She shrugged to herself and fiddled with the vial in her pocket. “Larisa hasn’t answered any messages. I told her to do coffee. She left it unread. That’s no way to get ahead in the world; everyone knows that it’s who you know that counts.” She watched him from the corners of her eyes and flicked at the end of her braid. “Has she disappeared into some data pile somewhere? She doesn’t like me. Maybe she dislikes Harry. What’s she plotting?”
He rubbed at his jaw, studied the gap. The guy with the machine gun rattled off a series of shots and he flinched downwards. He untensed his jaw as another handful of people hurled themselves off the edge and swung out onto the central platform, limbs pinwheeling and bodies contorting like torn flies. He stuck one hand inside his jacket and wrapped his fingers around the knife handle for comfort as they moved forwards.
“Fortune favours the fiendish,” Meera muttered, rubbing her belly. “I could use a drink.”
The guard let everyone through up to Caleb and stopped him. He watched Meera and her mushrooms take a position, wait for the gun. While she was waiting, she rolled up the right leg of her trousers to the knee. The hollow yellow light caught the curve of the black metal, continuing up through the knee into the thigh. Why had she agreed to jump across? Could she make it with a full-limb prosthetic? Even a high-end limb might be a handicap. Not that the crossing guards cared.
A hail of bullets cracked across the sky like bottle rockets; he ducked instinctively again. As he stood, he caught a glimpse of Meera pounding up the ramp and launching herself off the edge. She made it across with an ease he hadn’t expected, hurling herself into the bar and letting the momentum carry her up, almost too far. He gripped the knife handle tighter as she disappeared out of sight. The guard stared at him as he hit the front of the line. He stared back. The guard jabbed a scanner at him and he realised there was a charge to continue. He opened his mouth to argue, but realised it was pointless. He turned his head back up the street, surprised by the growing line of people looking to get through. Where had they all appeared from? Had the haze deepened? The guard with the scanner barked something again. It wasn’t really a word, an aggressive jumble of sounds, but he got the gist regardless. He passed his phone over the scanner heard the electric bleep as they extracted the funds from his account, and shuffled to a free space along the ramp.
They waited along the edge, shuffling feet or rolling shoulders. He didn’t know what to do with himself, so he just stared into the fog ahead, wiped his hand on his thighs and tried to mentally stop his palms sweating. The burst of gunfire, when it came, was louder than he expected. A hail rounds aimed overhead at random. Despite himself, he reflexively he started to dive to the ground, head snapping around. In the next instant realised that everyone else was running for the gap. As he scrambled forwards, off-balance, trying to regain his footing, heart hammering in his chest, he wondered if the starting gun had ever accidentally killed someone. The ramp was barely supported, the sheet metal bounced and sprang under their pounding feet and then the edge was there and he hurled himself forwards for all he was worth, locking his eyes on the bright red bar ahead of him, throwing his arms forwards, splaying desperate fingers out.
They brushed the flaking red paint. He curled them reflexively, tightening for a grip that wasn’t there. Feeling his nails dig into the flesh of his palms. And then the bar was rising and rising and passing overhead and he had missed it. There was a slow-motion dawning horror as he felt his neck creak backwards and his eyes roll in their wind-slashed sockets as if sight alone could grip the red steel behind. And then it passed from view, it was behind him and reality reasserted itself as his stomach tried to punch through his abdomen and the air screamed up at him and he screamed down at the air and he fell. The buildings on either side tore past him and he could only fixate on the swirling chaos far below and then something ripped into his chest and his arms snapped closed reflexively and his fingers gripped a solid object and his head snapped back and his stomach rolled again, and his eyes were forced closed, as something crashed and somewhere and he was falling at a new angle and he careened into a new surface, slamming into it like a plane crash. His arms wrapped around the new thing and the world span and he realised he had stopped moving.
Breathe shaking through his chattering teeth, he coaxed his eyes open to find himself clinging for dear life to the corroded railings of a long wide empty balcony. He was interrupted by something whipping at his clothes. A length of black hurling through his arms. The end caught the side of his face, he cried out and jerked back and the railings rattled. He looked down and watched a long strip of cable falling into the abyss below. Above something sparked in the fog. He hooked a leg over the railing and tipped himself onto the abandoned balcony. He landed on his back and the impact drove the air out of his lungs and he lay there staring fixedly at the ceiling and hacking up his guts. When that finally subsided, he started laughing. He didn’t stop for a long time. Not even when his ribs cursed fire through his chest and he rolled over onto one side and coughed up blood. He threw up a couple times and then he finally stopped and got himself together.
It was evening when he got to the pods. They were more or less what he’d expected. A series of shabby boxes, small windows, and steaming grating connected by rust and cracks.
They were surrounded by piles of trash. Bags that had split, their foetid contents spilling across the compacted heaps of filth below. Huge scabrous rats crawled around the filth in plain sight. Off to one side near a corner of the building, several gnawed at the carcass of dead animal. He brought a stale sandwich from a cracked vending machine and chewed at it, mashing the unidentified gristle between his teeth, while he looked the place over. The people scattered about were mostly minding their own business, mostly alone, a couple of small clusters talking amongst themselves. He headed through the entrance and into a wide atrium with an indent housing a bunch of computer panels. At the other end of the atrium, a narrow, splintered doorway led into an unlit passage. Somewhere above, a smoke alarm cried for batteries. He stood around for a minute, wondering what he was supposed to be doing. A couple of people eyed him warily as they passed and headed outside. With no better idea, he headed to a panel and punched in his name. It blinked and whirred and then his phone vibrated. New message. Hidden number.
“For a chance at obtaining this pod, you are required to complete a series of small tasks. Are you physically fit?”
“Yes.”
“Can you find your way to a provided set of co-ordinates?”
“Yes.”
“Await further instructions.”
Words and Chaos 
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