FSE

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Prologue

Up above me now are the eternally lit megalopoli where they have cars flying near the speed of light, doors that are always open for you, and interactive chairs that adjust to your comfort level when you sit on them, all with the touch a finger. Everyone's dreams are laid out for them, and the pursuit of happiness is a conveyor belt that gratifies the senses, and everyone's invited. Time is only a mere afterthought, because up there, you've already reached your goal.

I've grown content with my position here on the bottom, down in the earth's muck. It's decidedly less nice than it is up above, but here is where I belong. Kicking around the sludge and damp, unidentifiable debris turns up more thoughts than anything useful, but there's not much else one can do with one's time when they're a thousand feet below the dimmest lights of the city.

If things are soft here, then they're limp and soggy. If they're hard, then they're sharp and rusty and heavy. These mere irregular and obtuse shapes encroach everything as they spill out of their hundred-foot-tall dumpsters, so that there's barely a patch of identifiable ground between the overflowing metal cages.

So of course I don't play in them. I try to stick to places that look like they have more level ground. I'm sure that up top they make waste management sound complicated to the point of professionality, but from down here it's all just random garbage dumping with cascades of refuse raining down on my dwelling from above. That's followed by enormous hissing clouds of white-grey smoke to dull the rank stench of refuse.

It was natural for society to build upwards when they ran out of room, but since they didn't find it practical to bulldoze every building on earth first, they simply built on top of what was already there. That's why the fierce, black lines jut upwards from the ground. Giant garbage depository chutes stick perpendicularly from the ceiling above into random buildings like enormous staples stuck through the middle of a page.

I wander a claustraphobic darkness amidst periodic avalanches of reeking trash. But it's lonely down here at the bottom. Who'd want to join me down here, when all the necessary pleasures of life are provided for free up above? They think that the air is poisonous down here, but the truth is it just stinks really bad. The waste management crews that sometimes come down here wear masks and sterile suits.

They also think that it's bottomless down here between their sky-high homes. But here I am, walking a putrid ground.

Chapter 1

I've learned that when I actually have to live in a place and experience it, the major questions seem to get forgotten. Instead of wondering how it's possible that the infrastructure left behind from two hundred years ago when people lived on the ground could still function when it had been abandoned, I instead find myself pondering where the occasional constant dripping of fetid liquid leads to, and where it came from.

Now that I no longer live up above, I find myself questioning how they can stand it up there, existing according to lying, paranoid, ignorant politicians and lying, condescending, conniving businesspeople. But I suppose they can stand it as long as they get fed and endlessly pursue happiness. Provide infinite varieties of synthetic health foods and walls that can be limitlessly decorated by touch, and the government can work the civilians ever deeper into debt.

It's hard to track all of the time I've spent wondering, when I'm always so busy being hungry. I follow one of the drips down through a rivulet that leads into a pool of something. I hesitate to call it water, because it has a thick, fuzzy orange layer on top that resembles spores seen through a microscope. I've never had much taste for moldy water.

The real stuff though, I can't get enough of it. Literally. I glance over to a tall, narrow building with an asymmetric sloped roof, where I'd been staring in the recent months. This building doesn't have a trash pylon sticking out of its top, but instead arcane and unfamiliar decorations some of which include gargoyles. Even though this building in no way reaches up to the mechanical ceiling of the world above, it still towers imposingly as it looms over its beholder.

I know what gargoyles are from a book I found down here. It was an old manual book that I hadn't recognized in the digital reading database, though with all the books to read, who'd miss a couple thousand? The book was some kind of ancient dictionary that was short on words but crammed with bizarre still photographs, some of which showed animals I'd never seen before. At first I thought a gargoyle was another type of animal, or some kind of "atomically disanatomic" creature, as we referred to the mutants that were rumored to scavenge down here. Certainly the animals in the picture dictionary are a lot more aesthetically pleasing than what I was told was down here. Gigantic parasitic insects and grendels, to name a few.

I wonder if those other creatures I've seen, like lions, which are large cats that look like poodles, or wolves, which are large canines that have pointy ears, are the same creatures that lurk around down here with me in the depths. I've never actually seen anything up close, but there's always this feeling that I'm being watched by some malevolent force, which I find surprising whenever I consider how all of the government surveillance never bothered me quite as much before.

The only other sign of movement, which isn't really a sign of life since they aren't alive, are the waste droids sorting through heaps of refuse to create a more evenly distributed space. A waste droid is a kind of robot with four long radiating legs which allow for vertical terrain travel, and two manipulator arms which carry up to precisely ten kilograms. I avoid them not only because I suspect that like everything else produced by the city above they come with surveillance equipment, but also because they feel threatening in some way that I simply can't explain. The fact that they never patrol outside a kilometer radius from their assigned waste pylon is another benefit from taking shelter in the building with the gargoyles.

The strange, glossy doors have to be opened manually, and for added measure they're quite heavy. But after some time, they open with greater ease than they used to. The inside of the building seems much narrower than outside, but the ceiling is so high that sometimes I feel like I might fall upwards forever into the featureless, widening above. I don't really like the interior. There are two sets of fourteen long benches, but unlike the classrooms from the city I abandoned, there are no desks aside from one large instructor's desk at the head of the class. Of course, there aren't any interactive terminals for whatever students there would have been and the benches were so glossy and hard it must have been ridiculous trying to teach to a class that would be concentrating more on their seats.

When I first found this place, there were also things called cobwebs which I had read about in the picture dictionary. They looked quite small in their picture in the book, but the ones that had occupied this place before me were enormous so that they stretched from the domed ceiling lights to the benches. I berthed them apprehensively at first, but after having become accommodated to their filthy presence, I discovered I could easily knock down the flimsy things with my arms.

It wasn't the cobwebs and it's not the lack of modern domestic comforts that disturbs me, though. It's the benches and the room's entire similarity to the classrooms that I betrayed. Where they pump your brain so full of knowledge I thought mine would explode. First you learn arithmetic and then algebra, all in the same class? Maybe if they'd stretch that out to a week, it would be better. And then they program you with all sorts of propaganda that no matter what you say, you'll be wrong. Still, I survive.

The gurgling of my stomach is deafening. Sharp pangs of hunger feel like an implosion in the pit of my abdomen, and if I don't fill the perpetual void soon, I think I'm going to fold in half. I walk into this little side room beside the entrance, but I've already searched the non-digital cupboards at least a hundred times. All that's left are empty plastic bags, and I've used up all of the paper cups.

After running the sink long enough for the brownish water to turn to a white flow, I lean my head down to drink, guzzling down the water. It has a metal taste to it, but I cope. I splash some of the water on myself, and shiver from the coldness. How people ever learned to wash themselves without a shower, I have no idea. All the rest of the cupboards hold metal knickknacks and silverware.

I walk back to the benches. Behind the desk is a wooden wall which juts out from the wall, then turns at an angle to cover a portion of the wall. Even though I've already explored behind there, I step cautiously behind it and find a door, which leads to a smaller room.