Transmuta staggers to her feet and surveys the wreckage.
A minute before they were all there with her, all the other Super Friends, enjoying another comfortable long day. Green Arrow was making them all espressos. Wonder Woman was knitting an invisible scarf. Superman had gone into the toilet and was staying there far too long. Aquaman was ordering pizza and forgetting the anchovies. Evil had been defeated so long ago everyone had almost forgotten about it, but they still liked to watch mnemes of the good old days when they had fought the good fight.
Now they were all dead.
It wasn't something they were coming back from. Body pieces were everywhere. They had all blasted out from the inside.
Why had she alone survived? It wasn't fair. There was no reason for her to be spared when all those she loved were taken.
Tears drip down, sizzling through the pavement.
Who had done this? Her fists steeled, ready to strike but there was only the wind and the sun and her.
The dark ball in her heart pulsed and she regarded it coldly as she always did, keeping it under control.
Then she knew.
The others had forgotten where evil truly lived and were unprepared for its sudden blast with their souls.
Transmuta hung her head in grief as she wandered away, trudging through the asphalt down the road, and leaving the wasteland of her love behind her.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
The hour before sunrise had been the least unbearable of the day. Bending before the dawn’s promise of another pitiless assault by the rising sun, Francesca Xavier Salvador dropped another sapling down the planting tube into the parched soil, and brushed compost and straw into the hole around it with her foot. Pulling another length of microdrop irrigation tube from the spindle on her belt, she carefully encircled the fragile sprig of green, anchored a sun screen in place, and documented the planting with her neurovisor, which recorded the placement, size, and species of the tree. As it grew, surviving a thousand threats to its existence, the tree would continue to dribble ecos into her account.
“Salvador, that is the fifth Polymorpha Oak you’ve added in your row. It will shade out my whole stand. If you don’t take it out the register supervisor will debit you.”
And you are some idiot with no other purpose than to make a miserable day completely impossible? “Pull it out yourself, or do you need someone else to protect you while you do?”
The sweaty guy with more stomach than guts almost made a move to take her up on it but pouted instead. “You know, I could come back later and do it.”
Francesca growled in response, something beyond language but more effective at expressing her complete disdain of such a wimpy threat. “And I could come back later too. You have to sleep, don’t you?”
“Bitch.”
The loser couldn’t even risk an exclamation mark with that. Pathetic.
The sun began to burn over the Sierras, melting the landscape back into rippling mirage. Why did daylight always have to be so excruciating? Francesca only hoped that the drip feed from the microdrop would be enough to keep that tree alive, so its carbon could earn her ecos to give in thanks for food. Because, if she didn’t she might be seen as ungrateful, which was a recipe for becoming even more hungry. Funny to think they used to grow food this far south in the Valley. If they still were able to maybe she could fill her stomach without feeling grateful to anyone. Funny to think that money didn’t use to have memory.
The supervisor walked by and leered at Francesca, but from a safer distance this time. He’d learned first and second hand that you could look at fire from a distance, but that it could be painful to touch.
Another tree in the ground after a few shrubs. A mesquite whose thorns could penetrate the soles of anyone who might come to claim her nest eggs as firewood. Francesca documented the planting and waited for the calculated ecos earnings over the 40-year life of the bush to appear in her neuroview. She bent to pack the dirt and plant the microdropper, orienting it so it’s funnel might extract the maximum condensation from the atmosphere to feed her plants until they had long enough roots to tap into the ever-retreating groundwater. Her shirt stunk from too many days with too little of a water ration to wash it or shower. The number of ecos from her plantings that finally manifested in her mind was depressingly low.
When the sun had risen too high to be workable, Francesca trudged back to her tin box and wiped the bird shit off the solar panels to push up her eco count, and nudge down the Hub upside down thermometer at the entry gate. Inside, under the flaccid swish of her fan, she relaxed in her hammock and fantasized about who she might sleep with next for his shower allocation. The trouble with that strategy was other girls were onto it, and so the guys who looked the best always stunk the worst. Fortunately, the guys were less discerning because Francesca was sure she wouldn’t want to sleep with herself. She washed as much of the morning’s grime off her body as she could with nanosorbs, but there were parts that she had wasted precious roof water getting to. All for the privilege of returning to stew in her own sweat until the fire in the sky sunk into the evening and she woke herself up for a dinner of beans and rice and green weeds from the roof garden. Same thing as yesterday and every year.
Almost nothing sucked more than being poor, except for idiots complaining about how good she had it. At least the entertainment was cheap. Francesca zoned out and let her mind float free in an ocean of hallucinations that projected from the collective minds of human animals on the neuronet. In seconds she was hurtling through the universe, overcoming evil in the defence of truth and justice amidst the ruins of the American Way. Comics. Francesca, more than anything, enjoyed inhabiting the oldies when people had better imaginations of what prosperity could look like. If people these days had as much as they had daily wasted before, they wouldn’t know what to do with it. Of course, as the footage from the past revealed, it hadn’t been enough to earn most people a smile.
Francesca assumed the role of Jenny Quantum, the too hopeful spirit of a pre-collapse 21st Century, from someplace called Singapore that had by the 22nd Century largely slipped beneath the rising waves. All the villain's plots seemed so quaint compared to what had already happened. Cities sinking below the oceans and others being emptied out as everything dried up. Whole countries of people on the move chasing whatever was left to live off while real villains, ones too bad to imagine, stole whatever was left. It wasn’t until the Ecolution sorted that shit out, creating money from fixing the planet, that it all started to settle down into something people could live with. If you could call surviving off tree breaths and intercepting the stink off your own shit living. Even on the neuronet you couldn’t ever get away. You couldn’t eat the cake you didn’t really have.
Francesca was halfway through saving a fake universe full of tragic entitlement when her efforts were interrupted by a message. She winced and left it for later because, having no real friends and being rejected by her family, it could only be some kind of hassle. When she did look sometime after midnight, it wasn’t the kind of news she was expecting. It wasn’t bad, and, in fact, it was so good she was sure it would be some kind of joke if anyone would give a shit enough about her life to mess with her. The truth was, no one did, and so she spent the next hour screaming in disbelief and drinking those last bottles of crappy home brew she had saved from some wedding.
The next morning Francesca did not wake early to head for the forest farms. Instead she slept longer than she could stand, opening her eyes every half hour only long enough to rethink the message and recheck its signatures to be sure it was real. And only when the heat became impossible to resist did she pull herself out of bed to face the crazy news.
She had a job! Not a community improvement project, not a Hub obligation, not a ‘thank you for nothing’, not some drip-feed from a failing planet, not a favor for a ‘friend’, not a Net business where you had to pay your clients for the privilege of serving them. A real job with a real Com; a job
with a regular salary in ComScript you could use in a real Com store. Francesca wasn’t sure if she actually knew anyone who had ever had one.
And not with just any Com - with Mirtopik, the best, the one promising everyone everything. Francesca remembered applying. It had been a dare to herself on one of the most awful days. Some link she saw on a comics site that she thought herself into before her sense of the futility of life could close it off. She’d filled it in as X-Woman ‘Jean Grey’, as a joke, and changed the name to her own at the last minute. Which made it even funnier that someone in human resources would believe that an applicant would have the power to read thoughts and bend reality with her mind. Maybe it was some other fan who enjoyed the joke. It didn’t really matter. She, Francesca, a woman that life had tried to rub into nothing since she had come into it, had finally been handed something.
She had a job. An actual job.
Francesca realised with horror that her shower water was still contaminated and unusable. The nanosorbs would only take off the outer layer of grime, but not the smell. Hopefully they would have a shower she could use at Mirtopik, otherwise they might think twice. She ordered take out with delivery using a chunk of her savings - because - why not? And, when she opened the door to receive the pizza, a package she hadn’t noticed on the way in was there too. Inside, her very very own superhero costume - a Mirtopik Comsec uniform and dropstick. She ripped off the packaging and pulled up the leotards and slid the shirt down over her lanky, smelly, figure. At least she wouldn’t show up dressed like a beggar. Francesca sucked down the protein shake that had come with the pizza and yanked her black tangle of mane harshly into shape. Her sharp Latin eyebrows furrowed, and her angled features composed themselves into a disciplined ferocity that disguised their youth. She decided against lipstick. Everything on the outside was straight and clean as a razor no matter how cut up her insides could be. That was for her to know and no business of everyone else.
Francesca snarled at the mirror and admired her fangs, excited to get them stuck into the first new thing in her life. And then she resolved to stay up for her last night, freaking out while keeping her cool at the same time. Working it out. Crunching her abs and pumping out the push ups. Readying herself for anything.
When the alarm clock in her head rang to tell her the sun was mere hours from rising, Francesca’s feet hit the floor so hard the mirror fell off the wall and smashed into a billion tiny fragments. She shook her head at the wreckage and stepped over it as she headed for the door. She wasn't coming back.
Francesca worked the bolt on the front door and found to her disgust that the thing was broken, again. Why did they always have to build the inexpensive units out of the cheapest shit? Didn’t they know los pobres like her appreciated quality too?
Then she whiffed it, up there in the gutter, she didn’t even have to look. Then she did because she couldn’t stop herself. Ugh. The dangling putrid tail of the rat that had died last month up in her rainwater gutter. And that skunk of a landlord didn’t have the shame to do anything about it even though it had defiled her rainwater tanks and had forced her to pay ecos for bottled water. And speaking of ecos, that rainwater tank had been leaking over her panels and the slime build-up was severely reducing whatever ecos she could claim from the electricity produced by the flat. The lousy shit owed her. She banged the door, so the asshole could notice her leaving.
“Hey,” Sue Zims, the one neighbor Francesca actually liked, shouted down her, “do you know what time it is?”
It was only then that Francesca realised she was actually leaving for good and taking three months unpaid rent with her to replace her deposit plus what the scumbag owed her. Everything she had worth owning was in her backpack since her comics were in storage. So, what was the point of anger towards all the people in this place in which fate had stranded her for far too long?
Francesca felt almost guilty, slinking down the dirt track alley leading through the units and forest farms towards the SkyTran station, hoping to make a cleaner getaway. Maybe some people, maybe those born here or something like that, maybe they might feel some connection to this absolute hole of a place. But the rest, like herself, had been trapped by the tree planting project that offered a chance to generate ecos. Poor suckers. Too bad they all couldn’t share her ticket to freedom.
After a few clicks of hiking through the trees, Francesca reached a transit node and queued in line at the base of stairs leading up to the SkyTran. Above her whizzed the traffic on magnetic guides, individual passenger gondolas and flyseats slowing to drop off and pick up passengers at the top of the stairwell, as well as freight containers and empty container claws.
Many in the line looked away at the sight of her uniform, even though she was only Comsec and had no authority here. Somehow anyone’s cop was everyone’s cop. That could be good news for her or bad depending on who was checking her out.
Like the bloodstained junkie eyes glaring at her from a few places back in the line. Some big white Rev head decked out in dreads, which just looked stupid, if anyone asked her - another freak looking for trouble and trying to stare her down like he was as big as he thought he was. He was high or crazy or both - she could tell by the way he kept blinking his eyes.
Francesca, alter ego to M’gann M’orzz, with her x-ray eyes, looked straight into this guy’s internal organs and considered, which she would target if he got out of line.
She knew the type, the desperate stench of failed manhood looking for any angle of attack. She felt the usual anger, a wary snake sliding up her neck.
“Yo ComSec. You in the wrong Hub. Hey.”
Francesca couldn’t give a shit about this loser nuisance guy unless he came closer, so she breathed, clenched her fist, and let it go.
Especially because there were kids around, fussing about because the line was too long. They should have two lines, a special one for the families and the kids, like that one sharp girl in a red sweater tugging on her brother’s hair and looking for her momma's reaction. God, she looked so much like Elena.
Francesca was overcome with the desire to reach forward and hold tight around the little girl, to wrap her cape of invisibility over her and never let another cruel eye fall upon her. Tears welled up and she pushed them right back down where they came from.
The freak maintained his position in line behind her going up the stairs and Francesca almost forgot about him. The little girl was now purposely plucking the back of her brother's jacket, almost but not quite causing him to fall back with every forward step. Her momma was focused on ordering her route through her neurovisor, intentionally oblivious to what was going on.
Francesca followed suit, focusing her mind on her account balance, which was, as usual, next to nothing, and transferring a significant proportion to the SkyTran ticket for her visualised route. She was almost about to ask the family if they wanted to share a gondola, if they were going in the same direction, but that was so completely unlikely, so she didn't. As she moved into the flyseat queue and the family into the gondola queue her peripheral vision picked up the shuffling freak move in between them.
Pop. Pop.
Que pinga? The asshole, closer to her now, was obnoxiously blowing gum bubbles. Pop. Pop. He stunk like a toilet, like he was high on toilet bowl cleaner or something, and he began to giggle in a dangerous way. He was setting off all sorts of total psycho alarm bells.
Pop. Pop.
Francesca could forgive him for being a psycho because that was just something dick cheeses like him couldn’t help, but stupid irritating habits like that were just cause for murder.
POP.
Then it happened. The little girl with the red sweater backed right into him in a reaction to her mother wheeling around to scold her.
The freak rounded on the girl.
"Watch who you are touching," he screamed down into the little girl's face.
Her mother was in shock, stepping in between the freak and her son, like her daughter wasn't in the mo
st direct danger. It wasn't a decision the poor woman made, just a natural impulse, but she'd never forgive herself. And that was the thing that set Francesca off.
What happened next was just automatic. Francesca's skin hardened into cold stone. "Yo," she shouted.
As her flyseat started to move down the ramp towards her Francesca prowled straight into the freak with an almost provocative gait and, while he was momentarily disarmed by the unexpected motion, she flicked her dropstick neat up under his nuts.
“You want 20,000 volts?” she asked while staring dead eyes up into his glazed ones.
“No.” The freak surprised her by having some sanity left that she didn't expect, and this stopped her from killing him, which was what was maybe going to happen in the first place. The snake in her neck coiled back and her mind went all cool and razor sharp like it always did when it needed to.
A flash of red laser light came from her neurovisor and scanned his. As expected, the freak's SkyTran ticket mneme was sitting there for anyone to rip off his visor. People always stored things that they weren’t going to keep, like tickets and receipts, right up front without security. She activated the app that copied the ticket mneme to her neurovisor and deleted his out of his brain.
“What? Ah.”
Zap. Francesca hit the freak with just enough charge from her drop stick, enough to hunch him up like an armadillo, hopefully enough to keep him from ever adding his lousy jerk junk to the gene pool and shoved him into her flyseat as it rolled past. She mentally changed the route to take him to ghost town El Centro and since she had locked the ticket he wouldn’t be able to change it.
The little girl was bawling. Although Francesca wanted more than anything to comfort her and her family, to share a little moment of love and appreciation to take with her on this lonely journey, she instead did what she always did. She ran.
Francesca jumped on the freak’s abandoned flyseat and changed the route on his ticket she had stolen to take her to LA, to Mirtopik, and far away from here. As her flyseat paused before jumping from the platform, Francesca stole a last glance at the girl in the red sweater, rubbing her eyes as they followed her rescuer. They made eye contact for a moment until Francesca flinched. I'm leaving you again.
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