Chapter Twenty-Three – Phones

Chapter Twenty-Three – Phones

“Phones! For well over a hundred and fifty years, humanity has been brought closer together thanks to the wired, and eventually wireless, communication networks that followed wherever we congregated.

Having your eyes shut off for missed payments is no joke!”

–Part of Freezerburn Electronics ‘stealth’ advertising campaign of 2031.

***

“Windows it is,” I said. I patted myself down, making sure everything was in place and stepped out into the little lobby we’d dropped down to. Myalis’ waypoints led out ahead and to the left, and I wasn’t about to argue with that.

Finding your way around in a mega building was a strange sort of skill you needed to hone pretty well if you were going to live in the bowels. There were some efforts to make things fit a certain mold, but those usually fell flat when every other building had a different company building it.

It reached the point where you could kinda tell who built what based on the way the building’s innards were arranged.

I couldn’t name any of those construction companies, of course, but I could recognize a pattern. Some had lots of tight corridors in the centre and bigger rooms on the outside, others the opposite. One group had a sort of open space in the middle that often reached out all the way to the sky above and was used as a sort of extra space for walkways.

It never ended up as fancy as it sounded.

I kinda recognized where we were going a few corridors down. I’d never been here, but I’d been in enough places like it that it wasn’t hard to figure it out. We crossed through one passage with peeling wallpaper set over cement walls and shoved through a doorway into a street.

Not a street in the old sense, like a passage on ground-level where cars went, but a proper modern street. That was a place with shops and houses along both sides, and enough foot-traffic to keep things lively.

Myalis’ waypoints hovered a little higher, pointing to the end of a long passage that, under the banners, stickers, holographic ads and shop fronts, was little more than a wider corridor under all the dressings.

A few auto-shops were selling stuff from ramen to microwaved meals to anyone with the credits to spare. There were bigger lines at the stalls with actual people behind the counters though. Something about being served by a machine always felt wrong to me, and it was the same for a lot of folk.

Vending machines spamming incessant jingles tailor-made to act as earworms and a few unmarked doors leading off to who-knows-where lined the sides. In the middle were a few squared off plant boxes with benches on their sides. Not that I’d be caught dead sitting there. Judging by the deadness of the plants, the place wasn’t exactly maintained all that often.

Gomorrah reached up and pushed her mask in. “I can never get used to places like this,” she said.

I turned, walking backwards a few steps. “Why’s that?” I asked. “These places are filled with life.”

“They’re… I don’t want to say filthy, but, well.” She turned to the side, and I could tell she was looking over to a pair of girls, teens if I had to guess, both in neon shorts and bikini tops and little else. Joygirls, probably. Looking for a gullible Joe to fuck and/or rob.

“It’s a bit low-class for you?” I asked.

“I’m hardly from a rich background,” she said.

I shrugged. A place like this had a community around it. The folk here knew each other, even if just in passing. They wouldn’t stop to help if one of them was bleeding out, but they might spare a friendly nod or something.

The story has been illicitly taken; should you find it on Amazon, report the infringement.

It was the kind of place I’d wished I’d grown up in. The lower-middles, where there was still work around if you knew where to look, and where the occasional idiot who’d pulled in a big win would spread the joy around a little.