by Marko Kloos
The food is lousy. It’s merely a slightly more flavorful version of the processed soy crap in the BNA rations. Compared to military food, it’s barely edible, but Mom tucks in like it’s a gourmet meal. I eat a little bit to give my stomach something to work with, and then mostly push the food around on my tray while I watch Mom eat.
“Do they feed you like this every day?” she asks between two big bites of soy chicken. I haven’t eaten a piece of processed soy since I joined the service, but I don’t want to remind my mom that we get to eat actual food while she has to live on this recycled and reconstituted garbage.
“Yeah, kind of,” I tell her. “We burn a few more calories than civvies, ’cause we run around with guns and armor a lot.”
“Last time I got a commissary voucher, beef was up to five hundred dollars a pound,” she says. “That was over a year ago. God knows what it’s up to by now.”
“I saw what they did to the voucher booth. So what, they just don’t issue vouchers anymore?”
“They don’t do anything anymore,” Mom says. “Trash only gets picked up once or twice a month now, and they skip it altogether when there’s a riot. You hardly ever see a cop anymore, either, except when there is a riot. Then they show up by the hundreds. It’s like war every month. People get shot on the street corner, and nobody picks up the bodies for days.”
“They don’t do safety sweeps in the tenements anymore?”
Mom shakes her head.
“They’re afraid to walk the streets. It was pretty bad for a while with the hoodlums, but it’s a little better now. You can buy security escorts now, you know. A thousand calories for a day, you get a guy with a gun to walk around with you. The cops don’t care anymore.”
“Jeez, Mom. Who’s keeping the peace now?”
“Nobody,” she shrugs. “Everybody, I guess. Everyone’s got guns now. Hell, I got one. I keep it in the apartment, though. It’s not like I get to go out much anyway, except over to the civil center to read your mail, and they still have gun detectors at the door there.”
When I still lived at home with her, Mom hated guns. I suspect that if she had ever caught me with one, she would have turned me over to the public-housing police herself. If Mom is keeping a gun in the apartment in violation of the law and her old philosophies, things must have become very grim indeed.
We finish our meal and clear the table for the people waiting in line for seats. As we walk out past the two security guards checking ID cards at the door, Mom looks around in wonder.
“You know, I’ve never been up here. Above the public platforms, I mean.”
“Really?”
“Really. I’ve lived here for almost twenty years now, and I’ve never had a reason to come up these stairs.”
“You’ve never been out of Boston, Mom?”
“Oh, sure,” she shrugs. “When I first met your dad. Before you. We went down to the Cape for the day a few times. He took me to New Hampshire once. But we took the hydrobus back then. The one that used to leave from North Station.”
I turn around and go back to the security guards at the entrance to the canteen.
“Excuse me, sir,” I address the higher-ranking one, a thin, sour-faced guy with a sergeant’s shoulder boards. I outrank him, but this is his turf, and he wields more clout down here than I do. The HD sergeant raises an eyebrow.
“What can I do for you, Staff Sergeant?”
“I’ve been off-world for too long,” I say. “Could you tell me what the rules are these days for taking relatives with you on private transportation?”
“That your mom over there?”
“Yeah, she is.”
“Dependents can ride along for free, up to five thousand kilometers per year. She’s gotta be on your card, though.”
“What does that mean?”
“That means,” he says, in a tone that reminds me of a drill sergeant explaining something obvious to a slow recruit, “that she has to be in the files as your official dependent. No pals, no girlfriends, no other relatives.”
“She’s on my card,” I say. “Thank you, Sergeant.”
I walk back to where Mom is standing.
“What was that all about?” she asks.
“You want to go up one more level to where the private trains are? If you’re not in a hurry to go back home, we can go for a little ride.”
CHAPTER 6
Mom studies the train schedule like someone perusing the menu at a fine restaurant. Up here, where the private rail network trains are, the security is even tighter than down in the public station. The public trains are free, but the private regional trains cost real money, and there’s no way for a welfare rat to sneak a ride on one. There are guards checking boarding slips and ID cards, and the private security goons look even more cantankerous than the public transit cops and HD troopers in the station below.
The Regional Express station is the only part of South Station that gets to see any sunlight. It’s perched on top of the many subterranean layers of the public-transportation system. Above ground, everything is a little cleaner, brighter, and less noisy than below. Technically speaking, the regional maglev network is public as well, since it’s subsidized by the Commonwealth, but the trains bear private corporate logos. Riding the maglev out of the city costs money—real currency, not public-assistance credits on government cash cards. Back when I was a civilian, I never really thought about the reason for that, but now I know it’s a way to keep the welfare rats from spilling out of their habitat.
“Where should we go?” Mom asks. The options before her seem to have stunned her into paralysis. The regional maglevs go all the way up to Halifax and down to the old capital, DC, and there are dozens of ways for paying customers to get out of Boston.
“What do you want to see, Mom? Mountains, ocean, big metroplex, or what? Sky’s the limit.”
“No big city,” Mom says. “Somewhere where they have some trees left, maybe.”
She studies the pictogram for the different regional routes again for a few moments, and jabs the screen with her finger.
“There. Let’s go there.”
She points at one of the northern stops of the Green Mountain transit line—a place called Liberty Falls, Vermont, right between Montpelier and Burlington.
“You sure?”
“Yeah. I’d like to go see some mountains and trees.”
“Okay, then. I’ll get us some tickets.”
The departure hall is palatial compared to the cramped and perennially crowded underground platforms of the public system. The ceiling up here is thirty feet high, and there are tall picture windows lining the walls that are obvious projections, because they show a lightly clouded blue sky above Boston, instead of the shroud of smog and dirt that has been covering the city for as long as I’ve been alive. The back wall of the departure hall is taken up by a huge display listing destinations, departure times, and platform numbers. Underneath the display, there are rows of automatic ticket dispensers and a pair of information booths. We walk over to the info booths, and I speak our destination.
“Liberty Falls, Vermont.”
A moment later, the screen in front of me displays an itinerary and a direction diagram. A pleasant female voice speaks out the text on the screen.
“I suggest the Green Mountain Line to Burlington, with stops in Nashua, the Concord-Manchester metroplex, Hartland-Lebanon, and Montpelier.”
I select the “ACCEPT/PAY” button on the screen. The display flips to show me a variety of payment options: “CREDIT CARD,” “GOVERNMENT ID,” “FOREIGN CREDIT (EUROS, ANZAC DOLLARS, AND NEW YEN ONLY),” “OTHER.” I choose the second option, scan my military ID, and enter “2” in the field labeled “NUMBER OF PASSENGERS.” The terminal spits out our plastic boarding slips, and I snatch them out of the dispenser and hand them to Mom.
“Courtesy of the Commonwealth. Tomorrow morning, you’ll be breathing some clean mountain air.”
The maglev system was built long bef
ore I was born, back when the Commonwealth didn’t yet spend every available dollar on colonization. That makes the newest trains in the system forty or fifty years old, but they’re in much better shape than the ones used in the public system. The maglev train cars have compartments, each with seating for six or eight people, and there’s a small restroom at the head of each car. The public trains smell of burnt rubber and piss, the seats are nearly indestructible polymer shells, and their ride is bumpy enough to shake loose ceramic tooth fillings. The maglev train cars merely smell like aging fabric, the seats are comfortably upholstered with antiseptic nanofiber, and the ride is so smooth that I can barely tell we’re in motion. We claim one of the empty compartments, and have it entirely to ourselves.
The Boston metroplex stretches all the way to the New Hampshire border. For the first thirty minutes of our ride, all we see outside is a dark landscape of concrete, row after row of tenement high-rises, broken up in regular intervals by the dimly lit intersections of the planned street grids, like clearings in an urban forest. The maglev rides on titanium arches that rise thirty feet above the forest of concrete. As we get closer to the outer suburbs and away from the tenements, the buildings get smaller, and the streets wider and better lit. It’s not until we’ve crossed the state line into New Hampshire that we see the first large patches of green between all the urban sprawl.
“So many people,” Mom muses. She has been studying the world outside of the double-layer polycarb windows since we left South Station. “Think about all the people living on this patch of ground.”
“Sixty million,” I say. “And that’s just Boston and Providence. New York’s up to over a hundred million now.”
“Oh, I know the numbers,” Mom says. “It’s just one thing to read them on a screen, and another to actually see it with your own eyes.”
“The whole Eastern Seaboard is like that,” I say. “One metroplex blending into another. We got too many for little old Earth. The colonies are mostly empty, still.”
“What’s it like up there? Do you ever get to spend any time on those planets?”
“I’ve been to most of ours, and a lot of the Chinese and Russian ones. It’s different. Wild, barren. Harsh places to live.”
“I used to put our names in the hat for the colony lottery every year, you know,” Mom says. “Until they shut it down. I can’t believe they stopped the colony flights.”
“We’ve lost more than half of our colonies to the Lankies, Mom. I think Team Red didn’t fare much better. You don’t want to be a colonist right now. Those things show up in orbit, everyone on the planet is dead four weeks later. You can’t fight back, and running and hiding won’t do you any good. They just gas every city, like a bunch of rat nests.”
“Maybe we deserve it,” Mom says darkly, and looks out of the window again, where the city of Nashua is sleeping a restless slumber. Even little Nashua, with its million and a half residents, has a sizable public tenement on its outskirts, unmistakable clusters of tall, starkly utilitarian residence towers bunched together on the shittiest real estate in town. “Maybe we should all be gassed like rats. I mean, look at what we’ve done to this world, and now we’re spreading out to others.”
“Everyone wants to live, Mom. They’re just a little better at spreading out than we are.”
“You think they’ll come all the way to Earth?” she asks. Her expression tells me that she’s not particularly afraid of that prospect.
I consider her question, and shrug. “Probably. I don’t see why they’d stop, now that they’re on a roll.”
I gaze back out at nocturnal Nashua, one ant hive among tens of thousands on this continent alone, stuffed to capacity with human beings who are just barely clawing out an existence. I imagine a Lanky seed ship in the sky above, raining down pods of nerve gas onto the city streets below. The Lanky nerve gas acts so quickly that people fall over dead just a few seconds after inhaling a milligram or two, or getting just a microscopic droplet onto their skin.
I want to disagree with Mom, but part of me concurs that a Lanky invasion of Earth would be a mercy killing of our species. We’ve spent most of our history trying to exterminate each other anyway. This way, we’ll at least have some dispassionate outside referee settling all of humanity’s old scores permanently. No more generational feuds, no more ancient grudges, no more pointless revenge carried out against people who inherited some old guilt from their great-grandparents. We will all just go down the path on which we’ve sent so many species ourselves, and we’ll just be a note in someone else’s xenobiology textbooks, listed under the header “EXTINCT.”
It’s not the first time I’ve wondered if there’s a point to our struggle against the Lankies, but as we glide through the night above the sea of barely fed, discontented humans in the city spread out underneath the maglev track, I conclude for the first time that there probably isn’t.
We both fall asleep in our comfortable seats before the maglev reaches the Concord-Manchester station. When I wake up again, the world outside is a tapestry of green and white, and the sun is just peeking over the horizon. I check the moving map display on the wall of the compartment. It’s almost seven o’clock in the morning, and we’re on the last leg of our trip, fifteen minutes from the stop at Liberty Falls. We’ve slept through Concord-Manchester, Hartland-Lebanon, and Montpelier.
Mom is still asleep in the seat across from mine. Her head is on the padded headrest, and she looks peaceful and relaxed. There are more lines in her face than I remembered, and her hair has gray streaks in it now. Mom’s only forty-five years old, but she looks like she’s pushing sixty. When you have access to private hospitals, your life expectancy is over a hundred years, but welfare rats tend to die at younger ages, due to the cumulative effects of bad nutrition and the stress of day-to-day life in the tenements. The public hospitals have long waiting lists for anything more serious than a nosebleed. When Dad died of cancer, they just gave him a bunch of DNA-coded painkillers to make his transition to recyclable biomass easier.
I reach out and touch Mom on the shoulder to wake her up. She opens her eyes slowly, and looks around.
“Are we there already?”
“Almost, Mom. Fifteen minutes to go. Check it out—it’s snowing out there.”
I point out of the window, where the wind is making bands of fine snowflakes dance among the trees as we’re passing through rural Vermont at two hundred kilometers per hour. The train could cover the distance from Boston to the fringes of Vermont in less than two hours at full throttle, but they have to go slowly through all the urban centers, and New England is all urban centers until you’re right on the edges.
“Well, will you look at that. I haven’t seen this much snow on the ground in ages.”
The snow that falls in a PRC is already dirty before it hits the ground because of the perpetual layer of smog and dirt in the atmosphere above the big cities. Out here, the snow looks pure and white—clean, untouched, inviting. The world outside looks like a snapshot from a long-forgotten past: untidy rows of trees covered in white, and only the very occasional wireless power transmitter spoiling the scenery.
“Beautiful,” Mom says. “Like an old oil painting. I had almost forgotten that the world isn’t all covered in concrete.”
“Most of them aren’t, up there,” I reply.
Liberty Falls is so small that we pass through the outskirts only a few minutes before we reach the station. There are no tenement high-rises here, just neat rows of single-family houses lined up on tidy streets.
The train glides into a clean and well-lit station that has a transparent roof. I see patches of snow on the polycarb dome above us, and a blue and gray sky beyond. The sun is mostly above the horizon now, and the clouds are painted from below in a pale shade of pink.
The transit station is an airy structure, widely spaced support struts with large windows in between. There is plenty of daylight, and unlike the windows at South Station, these aren’t projection scree
ns that give people the illusion of a clear sky outside. We step out of the train and into the station. There’s no heavy security out there, just a bored-looking civilian guard loitering on the platform and a pair of smartly dressed city cops standing at the entrance to the station. They give us friendly nods as we walk past them into the street.
When we walk out of the station, the air is so clean and cold that it hurts my nose. I had only been back in Boston for a few hours, but my nose had gotten used to the bad air in the metroplex again. Out here, it smells as clean as it did out at NACRD Orem, my Basic Training depot in the middle of the Utah desert.
Liberty Falls is a mix of old and new architecture. Out on the street in front of the transit station, the buildings are a blend of brick houses from the last century or the one before it, and modern polycarb-and-alloy structures. The older houses are well kept, renovated and restored, not crumbling and covered in spray paint like their counterparts in Boston. There’s a snow-covered green in front of the station, and it has real trees on it. The streets here are lined with little stores—books, groceries, auto-serve restaurants—and few of those stores have a security guard at the door. There’s no litter on the sidewalks, and the people walking around look better fed than the government employees at South Station. We’re only two hundred miles from the Boston metroplex, but this place feels like a different world altogether. Now that we’re out here, I’m once again glad to be wearing my fleet uniform, because my old civvie clothes would have me sticking out like a dirty rag on a dinner table.
Mom wanders over to the little green in front of the transit station and walks across it, ignoring the cleared sidewalks that line the green. The snow on the green is knee-deep in spots, but Mom plows through it, undeterred. I join her as she makes her way across the green, leaving a narrow rut in the clean snow. When we reach the other side of the green, she stops and leans against one of the trees that stand around the edges of the green like an orderly row of fence posts. She bends over, scoops up a handful of the pristine snow, and holds it out for me to see.