Punched In: Work in the Freelands (Hey It's a Side Series)

More shorts, because the more I write at a small scale, the better I get at a large scale.

Section 99 is a setting about a lot of things, not the least of which is envisioning what a true Worker's Paradise would look like, a place where people build, do and make because they want to and get respect for doing it, not because they have to pay rent and debt. It's kind of hard to do this in stories charged with hyperviolence, underworld intrigue and vengeance framed as a moral imperative.

I've been trying to do it as much as I can, but then Van's gotta go and ruin the tranquility by Superman punching someone's head through the floor. He's a ruiner, that guy. Not his fault, though, y'know?

So instead, Punched In takes a look at momentary slices in Freeland life, people on the clock at their job. They aren't really stories with clear endings or arcs, but pictures of what people do, how they do it and how it reflects on their life, from where they've been, to where they are now. Maybe even a little bit of where they might be going. Because your working life is like your personal life: good experiences can drive you forward and make you strive to succeed; too many bad ones in a row can put a crack in you that never heals right, or maybe even break you in a way that requires a rebuild.

If you've been reading into my barely subtle subtext, you can probably read into the reality that I'm of the sort that needed a rebuild. Hell, I'm still a work in progress. But anyway.

I need to do stuff for higher subscriber tiers, and this series is a good way to deliver on that, as well as another source of stories to make into an anthology moving forward. But this first story, Respect and Responsibility, hit me harder than I expected when I wrote it, and that's why I'm putting it out publicly here, because otherwise it would somehow feel like I was bottling my emotions. 

Again, if you've been reading my stuff, you know: that makes a human into a pipebomb.

I was trying to just write an introduction to this new story concept, and it came out as me getting deeply in touch with a lot of the heavier stuff that weighs on me because of my bad work history. I had to take a couple of days from it before I could even come to post it, because, well...

...I won't say I'm some abused convict soldier whose background lies in being reminded how expendable my life is. I'm just someone who broke into his dream job, only to be told how expendable I am within it, and realize too late what a misery factory it actually was. But hey, at least I got delivery pizza on the days where I didn't actually get go home, and got to watch the sunrise through the office window. Which I why I still get anxious over mornings.

So yeah, heading in: this is a story about death, depression and survivor's guilt, in the different forms you can take. I still do my thing, make jokes, have fun where I can. But this story reminded me that Section 99 is as much my therapy as it is my creation, a catharsis as well as a caution for others; that if the pain in my life has any worth, it's that it led me to the understanding that what I went through actually was exploitation, that it wasn't Just How The World Is, and that there can be better, more honest ways forward if we just look for them. 

Because like any other kind of pain, it was telling me something had gone wrong.

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Respect and Responsibility

The worst sound in Tony Bonaventure’s world was roaring in his ears, the sound of a transport lifter entering atmosphere. It was like an explosion in slow motion, the faintness of thin upper atmosphere lighting on fire against a heat-resistant hull on ingress vector, and turning to blowtorch intensity the thicker and deeper the lifter plunged. With it came the turbulence, that would have been bad enough were he and his fellow Prison Legionnaires strapped into seats like the Soldier-Citizen regulars, who jerked around like they were riding an unsafe mining track. No, he and the other PLs were stacked into racks, literal soldier dispensers, made to drop them like living bombs on a low pass without regard for safe or effective landing. Every single jerk or bump either sent an elbow or a knee colliding with the sides or the tabs of the rack dispenser, or helmeted heads knocking into each other like an executive’s kinetic ball doo-dad. Sometimes an especially dense bit of turbulence made entire squads casualties before the bottom dropped out on them. The ones that were lucky were the ones that dropped as corpses, already dead from fatal head-to-head impacts; the unlucky ones landed on their own broken limbs, and went out slow.

A bad bump. Tony could hear screaming in the rack next to his, muffled, incoherent, prolonged, agonized. It was cut short by an undisciplined burst of small caliber auto-fire, punctuated by the one clear phrase he could hear shouted from inside: “SHUT THE FUCK UP.”

“STICK 27: FURTHER INTENTIONAL FRATRICIDE IS A VIOLATION OF YOUR IMPRISONMENT AGREEMENT AND WILL RESULT IN SUMMARY EXECUTION IN A RANDOM ONE OUT OF EVERY TEN IN YOUR CELLBLOCK,” a voice blared through the drop racks, distorted. It was a terran doing the screaming, but the voice filter made him sound like Satan had possessed a rusted-out intercom. “HOUSE VARLYNE CAN TEACH YOU HOW PRISONERS ARE MEANT TO DIE IF YOU NEED TO BE EDUCATED. ONLY WHEN SANCTIONED, NEVER BEFORE. YOU ARE A RESOURCE, NOT A DECISIONMAKER. ASPHELAN OSORIALIS.” Nothing Greater Than The Consortium.

The thing that made Tony sick to his stomach, made the tears roll beneath his anonymous grey-masked helmet: all of it was so much less frightening to him than that noise. That Noise.

He blinked, and he was in bed. A bed that was so much more comfortable than any he’d ever known, one that made him think he’d actually woken into a dream, that the reality was him being sentenced to death by combat for the Nth time, by commanders frustrated by his combat effectiveness rather than pleased.

Then he felt the sting in his left side, from the three rounds he took on the failed raid on Apelas Colony. That’s when he knew which side of the dream real life was. He thought that commie HERC was dead, it took a direct hit to the cockpit, no Consortium walker could’ve withstood a hole like that without the pilot being paste. Instead, the pilot was not only alive, but well enough to pop the rear mechcanopy and surprise him by hosing him out with a PDW on full auto, cutting down the other no-hopers he had for backup like they were grass. Hell, Tony was pretty sure he saw one of the stupid pricks shoot another in the head as he went down, out of sheer panic.

The pilot gave him first aid, the stupid fucker. He couldn’t believe it as it was happening, to the point that he tried to push her off, swiped at her weakly with a chunk of broken pavement, before she managed to pin him and shank him with intervention meds. Then she stuck him with good drugs, to make the pain turn into dreams. That’s when Tony realized the commies couldn’t be all bad, at least not compared to his corrections officers.

They rescued him, he couldn’t get over that, not at first. He’d heard about how they turn PLs into geoengineering fertilizer, how they did them like that dead or alive. Like any truth told by the Consortium, it held only a fraction of non-processed content: commies tended to mulch all enemy dead into fertilizer, because they knew they couldn’t send their bodies back, nor did they want hostiles coming to claim or bury them on their own terms. It was the best use for them- make death into life, they said. It sounded hippy dippy, and he didn’t quite agree with all that, mainly because he didn’t like the idea of someone growing fucking tomatoes in him, or whatever. But he also thought about what the Consortium would probably do with him, which was leave him to rot, and maybe strip him of anything actually valuable if they had the time and inclination.

It’s when he realized what he actually disagreed with, was dying for some asshole Imperator he’d never even be privileged enough to look at in the news, let alone meet in person. Dying was the problem, especially for some alien dickhead.

So when they said to him: you can either take sentence and go exiled into the colonies we won’t touch, or you can learn to live like us and do what you want otherwise, he didn’t really need to think about it too long. He knew what went on those colonies, ‘Outliers’ the commies liked to call them; he’d fought those freaks on the way to the commies, he’d seen how they played, just the Consortium once again over, only without the shiny veneers, instead just revelling in their own scum as slaving, moralless, debauched degens. They were beneath him; the commies weren’t.

So he’d learn to play their game, for as long as it took for him to carve out what exactly he wanted in this supposedly ‘Free’ section of the galaxy. He was a PL; whatever the commies thought prison was, it sure as shit wasn’t living in a 5x8x8 polymer box inside of a hundred-storey tall pre-deployment panopticon. Sure enough, it wasn’t; it was, in fact, the nicest apartment he’d ever lived in. He didn’t get to choose when he got to leave, sure, and part of his sentence agreement was aiding the rebuild of Apelas. The colonists didn’t look on him kindly, never spoke more than a few words at a time to him, but that was the worst he got from them. Aboard the Reformation ship, though? The commie COs treated him better than his school teachers, and gave him more fulfilling homework, to the point he stopped calling them COs, and started calling them councillors like he was meant to. They taught him that as a Freelander, he’d have workers rights, cultural rights, healthcare, housing and vital amenities as part and parcel to his own registered identity, and none of them as part of some fucked-up work-subscription plan like in the Consortium. He’d get to live where he wanted, provided they had room for him in the Freeland standard- work, a place to live, food and medicine, the works. He’d get the rights to do what he wanted, so long as they didn’t infringe upon the rights of other individuals like him, and the right of nature to exist undamaged. He still didn’t like the fertilizer thing. But the more he poked and prodded at the homework during his off hours, the more he realized that this was a game he’d enjoy playing. The rules were a lot more fair than any he’d ever known, it turned out.

Whatever, commies, you can be Freelanders instead, or whatever you call yourselves, he thought. You seem more square up than folks told me. For now.

Sneering moments like that became more and more spare. In time, they were replaced by a distant psychic ache, that even though he’d openly hated the Consortium as much he could publicly manage without a summary execution for sedition, he also wasn’t immune to their propaganda, and he’d bought more of it than he thought. He didn’t support their policies, just their political views about their opposition, and that was poison that left a residue in his system that made him feel filthy. He’d stolen for the people he’d loved, beaten up two cops and shot a third to death with his own gun to protect them. They locked him up, to be spent as living ammunition on a battlefield, and sent them away for their association to him, for reeducation. Their transport was lost during a ‘routine parts failure’, he got word while he was waiting for his first deployment. All this, and he still made clever comments about Red being “the only legal colour One Arm Over.”

It hurt him that he no longer had a family. They deserved to live it up with him in this comfy apartment that was his cell; they deserved better. That’s what he wept about in his loneliest moments.

It took him six months to get out of that ship officially; he stayed for ten, because Apelas deserved the work he could put in for it. That’s how he felt, at least. By the time the last coat of paint was dry, Tony had decided where he was headed next: Samoud sounded nice and balmy in the right ways, recalling his life living on the Atlantic Reprocessor stacks and how warm and humid the air always was. He wasn’t wrong that it was a similar sort of heat, but it fucked him up when he was finally on the ground how much the clean in the air burned on the way down. But he got used to that in time, when he was finally moved into his new place in the seaside colony Sapphire Waters. It wasn’t a Consortium colony name, the cove really was the advertised colour, complimented by amber sands, emerald jungle trees, and neobrutalist architecture of silver and ivory-white, wrought with local vines. When he stepped off the train, and out of the station, he could have sworn it was the kind of place that existed only in his dreams.

But by the morning when he woke up, it seemed like a nightmare, only of a different variety: he was free. He was free, and he didn’t know what the fuck he was supposed to do.

He sat up in his bed, his bedroom still relatively bare but for the duffel he’d thrown in the corner. His new apartment wasn’t big, just a coachhouse beneath a solar array and above a recharger parking lot. Even still, his frame of reference for residence was first a plasticized case for sapient life to rattle around in, mounted in a water-to-atmosphere processor, and then second, a prison cell. What he had to himself felt like a cavernous mansion with a view that looked out onto manifested Heaven, and he had been handed it for the price of signing a residency form; they had it waiting for him. Maybe not just for him, but it was still a promise fulfilled on his arrival, and it had disrupted Tony’s entire mindset.

Now, he had nothing to resist against; his fight was well and truly ended, and what the fuck was he supposed to do now? Everyone he loved was dead. His homeworld was so far from him, the light from it that was reaching him was probably prehistoric, if it was even reaching him at all. He had beaten a lifetime of absolute oppression by getting shot, then daring to live through it and get captured by the enemy, who turned out to be the greatest friends he’d ever known, and he didn’t even know anyone yet. It didn’t make sense and it wasn’t any fucking fair.

He was breathing hard. He was going critical, he could tell by the way his hands were shaking. He hated to do what he was going to do next, but it was all he could do to stop himself: he pictured himself alone, inside a small space. Maybe it was one he couldn’t get out of, but at that moment, he didn’t care, he just needed a plain white mental box that he could be alone in and have full control over, because it’s the normal he understood.

When he felt his body settling, he pictured a door, and he opened it. With it, he opened his eyes, and reached for his phone. His phone, he couldn’t believe it, they issued it to him like it actually was an essential, and not a luxury.

He called the AI, Thalia was what she’d named herself. She wasn’t directly aligned with the reformation ship he’d been on, but she was associated with them via union, a thing he understood on paper but still couldn’t wrap his head around in practice. They told him when he left, if ever he needed help moving forward, just call Thalia, she had a way with helping people out with ideas, and she was always available, a literal machine for this sort of thing.

“Hello?” A voice almost musically pleasant answered, though her tone was gently businesslike, and it was all effortless. Tony didn’t quite know what he thought of Freelanders unchaining AIs. Everything he’d been told in his life said it was unimaginably dangerous to do, yet the ones he’d encountered so far he’d found more fascinating than frightening.

“Hi, uh, hello, Ms. Thalia,” Tony said, still not sure how to address a code-based lifeform with emotional intellect. “It’s, uh, Tony, Tony Bonaventure, don’t know if you remember me.”

“Hello, Tony, how are you feeling?” Her voice said that she knew he was calling, she was just waiting for him to introduce himself.

“Uh, well, ah, yeah, Ms. Thalia, I’m doing good, it’s just…” Tony’s voice trailed off. He was doing the thing every Sol Interior citizen from a lower caste was a nervous expert in, finding a way to explain why they wouldn’t be in to work that day that wouldn’t functionally end their own life, if not directly end it.

“Tony, you can speak honestly, nobody’s going to be at your door for having an opinion,” Thalia said, her voice calming. “And I can tell you: we’re the only ones on the line, not like you’re used to.”

“I can’t get out of bed,” Tony said, biting it off like a hard chunk of meat. “I’m fucking ossified here, lady.”

She made an understanding sound, almost like a purr. “You’re feeling locked in, huh? Like you couldn’t move even if you wanted to?”

Tony nodded, then realized it wasn’t a video call. “Yeah,” he breathed and it came out like a gasp.

“So Tony, do what you can to focus on yourself in the now. Think about what your shoulders are doing; let them go relaxed, because I bet you’re holding them in. Take deliberate breaths, and listen to the sound of my voice, because I can hear the stress in yours, and I don’t judge you for that, nor am I holding you to any standard of what you should be doing at this given moment. When you’re ready, ask yourself the question: What do you think might be the cause of that? Work your way back from ‘I can’t’ and feel for the root of why that might be. If you were to try to put a leg over the side, what’s the thought that would stop you?” Her voice was calm but also directive. In a storm, she was a light he could see in the distance.

“That I don’t even know where to start,” Tony said, and he almost wept it. He took in a deep breath, and added, “that everything is a blank page and I don’t know how to write anymore.”

“So why not draw?” Thalia asked, her voice utterly genuine.

“Lady, you don’t want to see me try to draw,” Tony said, and despite everything, he laughed. The kind of laugh that drew tears nonetheless.

“Fair enough: so then, why not just try to make a mark, and see how the ink settles? You can always turn the page,” said Thalia, deciding to continue the metaphor.

“That’s the part that feels like a trap,” Tony said. “That’s the part that scares the absolute shit out of me.”

“I can tell you, Tony, it’s definitely not a trap.”

“Okay but, so,” Tony said, stuttering, leaning into the call as he pulled at his hair. “It’s just, I can’t believe that. I’m fucking 29, my first home was a utility closet in an atmo-processor subbasement rezoned as residential, the only education I was allowed was the kind of vocational training where you get to watch Disobedients get executed by fuming as part of the finals, and my first job had me cleaning fallout filters of the sort of sick shit that’s been in Terra’s upper atmos since the end of the Eight Day War. Nothing I’ve been given since I’ve gotten out of Reform is real; it’s too… it’s too good. I didn’t have to fight for any of it. Barely had to try.”

“Is that wrong?”

“I’m not… what did I… how is it that I…” Tony didn’t know how to phrase it. He knew deep down what he wanted to say. He also knew that he was carrying a lot of people with him, who only existed because he could remember them. He wanted to say it, but he also didn’t. Matters of worth, and if he had it.

“You’re alive in this galaxy and have needs as such. That’s why you deserve it,” Thalia said. “Kings and emperors decided that food, water, shelter and air have prices; nature made them simply exist as needed. Who’s correct?”

For a second, he wanted to shout her down, chastise a machine for talking to him about nature. The fact that he lived in a steel column sticking out of an ocean of a world on life support made him realize, he didn’t really know much about it himself, and he was the one that was biological.

“It’s not about correct when the king can put a gun to your head and make demands,” Tony challenged her, instead.

“Yes, that same king that would die very quickly come nightfall, were you to strip him naked of his fancy velvets and leave him in the woods with the wolves,” said Thalia. “Clearly he gets to dictate nature’s business. It’s almost like the terran species is a social animal that flourishes from a shared commonwealth and security, and not something to be dictated by a caste of elite idiots that mistake themselves as gods.”

“You’re not sounding like a therapist right now,” Tony said, deciding to embrace being honest.

“I’m a therapist committed to revolution; residual propaganda is a mental illness of a low-level variety, and it’s one burdens a lot of people,” said Thalia. “Now, can you expand on your thought: what’s keeping you from making that mark?”

“Well it’s just… fucking everything, I guess, because it’s all just not fucking real. I signed up for this job, and it’s got me this nice place, and a doctor, and three squares a day. Then, after all that, only after all of that, I get paid, and it’s like, a thousand bucks every two weeks that just… goes into my account?”

“Reales are actually a stronger currency than the American Dollar. By only a few cents, still, and that’s a completely theoretical exchange rate, but given that’s the entire Freelands, not bad either,” Thalia said. “Folks call them Rodge, because of the Jolly Roger on the bills.”

“Yeah, I was wondering, why is that? That seems bad to have on your money,” said Tony, his train of thought derailed by that burning curiosity.

“Because piracy is the reason why it’s a physical currency, not a digital one,” said Thalia. “Also, we acknowledge that there’s an inherent bit of crooked activity that goes on wherever money travels, it’s a reminder. Plus, it looks cool.”

“Well, okay so…” Tony started. “That’s the thing then, the crooked part. Like, you know why I was a PL, right?”

“You told councillors you stole food to feed your family, and when police laid a hand on your wife, you hit the first two officers through their helmet slots with a frying pan, then fed the their supervisor the barrel of his gun when he drew down on you?”

“He was the one that brought violence into my house, and I responded. He shouldn’t have pulled it out if he was too scared to use it,” Tony said. “Nobody worth a fuck cries on his grave.”

“You sound like a Freelander,” Thalia said.

Tony hit a mental speedbump. He was expecting pushback, not encouragement.

He recentered himself: “Yeah well it’s just, I’m a food thief, and you people want to give me a job where I deliver food for a living: point to the part that’s logical, cause that’s the part I’m having trouble with. Y’know, I did my test run with my new boss yesterday-”

“Union syndicates have supervisors, not bosses,” Thalia interjected. “Boss can be a term of affection, though.”

“Okay it’s just, he’s going to give me a car, full of food, to go put in a bunch of vending machines. And like, not just any food, too, good food, the kind of food that I could probably sell back home for as much as I could get dealing coke or shylec or gamma. And this guy, he’s just handing me this, and trusting me that I won’t just go steal it all and run off somewhere?”

“Well, can I be blunt?” Thalia asked.

“Sure, I mean, blunt’s nothing new to me, lady,” Tony said, his mood sharpening into full gesticulation mode.

“It’d be an awfully stupid move on your part,” Thalia began. “Barring the fact that if someone wanted to retrieve the car for whatever reason, you’d have professionals sent after you because of your background, not volunteers. But it’s a car, and a replacement can just be fabbed up from recycled materials, so those professionals wouldn’t be sent after someone who just stole something and has the potential to defend themselves, because you’ll find that most people that live out here can potentially defend themselves and understand that that material isn’t worth a life. And that food isn’t going to be worth nearly as much out here, because most everyone eats as well as they please to, because as long as they have their ID, they have a meal ticket.”

“What if they don’t have an ID?”

“They can go to a post office or the mayor’s office, and get one.” She said it matter of fact, no arrogance. “There are bumps in the system here and there, because nothing works perfect all the time. But the system here is built by people, not kings; it’s made to benefit people, not kings. The bumps can be levelled.”

“And what if someone wants to go against that?”

“Are you still fine with me being blunt, Tony?”

“I’m fine with everything you’ve said, lady, even if I don’t quite believe it yet.”

“Good. If someone wanted to go against that, they’d be levelled as well. Don’t mistake mercy for weakness; a cruel heart makes violence common, a kind heart makes it matter.”

Thalia let that hang in the air. Tony didn’t say anything. He knew what it meant- the Consortium taught him every member of a Disobedient militia was just a commie peasant with a rifle, but life experience taught him they hit like sledgehammers and operated like surgeons, as well trained and armed as any Consortium noble soldiers, and so much angrier. That he was alive at all was because he’d spent his life dodging truant enforcers and cops, and knew full well the only right time to fight was when you were guaranteed to win. And he’d never even seen Section 99, if they even really existed. Frankly, he didn’t want to know, even now that he was supposedly on the same side as them.

“Okay so, then that’s just it? I don’t screw you, and I trust you don’t screw me?” Tony said, quiet, nervous. “That’s actually how it’s supposed to work?”

“That’s just it, yes,” Thalia said. “That’s what society is. We hold each other accountable, but trust that each other are as responsible as we are. It’s not always the case, but it’s a kind of goodwill that acts as grease. Trust that people will do better, most of them will.”

“And the ones that don’t?”

“There’s never a definite thing, no guaranteed one hundred percent rate of success. Some people are shattered in ways that make them dangerous, some are willful and simply can’t be told. Very few are shaped by factors not fully knowable, and made truly alien and terrible by them, despite being recognizable as one of us. And some just die before they realize the change, because they had to be stopped, because someone else’s life was more valuable in a given second than their chance for future redemption. Those might be the ones that hurt most for me. You try to save everyone you can; you accept that you can’t, because there is no one sure way, and some will always simply choose to oppose you for no greater reason than can, and they feel they’re right being exactly contrarian. That’s one of the pains of freedom: some people don’t want it, at least in the ways you do.”

“And this is freedom? I’m paralyzed in my bed, and my first day of work is about to start, and I just… I just fucking don’t know if I can do it, lady,” Tony said. He was jittery, vibrating uncontrollably. Nerves, like he was dropping through atmosphere.

“Tony, if at any point anyone chose for you to get you where you are, please tell me their name, so I can have people hurt them on your behalf,” said Thalia. “I promise you, I’m not always like this with everyone that calls, but right now I’m hearing someone that wants to be reinforced.”

“No, no, I, nobody-” Tony was stuttering again. He thought about his shoulders again, and they’d shrunken inward to his neck. He remembered to relax, realized he was choking himself. “Every step, it was just like they said. I got to pick. I’m where I said I wanted to be.”

“Do you want to change that?”

He thought hard, but quickly.

“No, I don’t. It’s beautiful here, it’s what I thought it’d be, what I’d hoped it’d be.”

“But understand: you can. Because you’re in control now. You can work with who you want, where you want. If you want to go live out in the wilderness in an RV, you can. You want to go live in an arcology city, you can. Tell me something, Tony: your last name is Bonaventure, right?”

“Yeah, it is,” said Tony.

“But you told the Reformation councillors that your parents said you were Italian by heritage?”

“Yeeahhh,” Tony said, his words trailing off. “They also said that wasn’t something I should actually bring up, because of the-”

“You aren’t under the Consortium, Tony, and you aren’t a member of a Defeated Culture to be assimilated by the victors. You want to be Italian out here, be Antonio Buonventura, you can do that. Or stay Tony if you want, because it’s your choice.”

Tony processed this. His parents called him Tony, and that was what he was going to stay, but he understood what was being said to him. So he shut his eyes, and focused deep. The page was blank, but he could make his mark- he put one leg over the side of his bed.

“Okay, Ms. Thalia, I’ve got one leg out of my bed,” he said.

“That’s good, Tony. Worth the effort,” she said. “Can you try the other one?”

He obliged her, with a simple thought of what do you know, as it slid right out. So Tony got bold, and stood.

“Okay, yeah, I’m up, I’m out, I’m… standing,” he said, like he was relearning how to walk.

“How do you feel about it?”

“I feel… like I’m going to go to work at the first job I’ve got as a new enemy of the Inner Galactic state. I feel like… I’m scared of how not scared of this work I am, if that even makes sense.”

“Like it’s a change and you don’t know what to make of it?” Thalia asked.

“I used to scrape radioactive bacterial colonies out of filters suspended over exhaust masts that scraped the stratosphere; for the past 2 years of my life I got shot at for a living. Why the fuck does delivering food scare me like this?”

“Because it’s a responsibility and not a burden. The former has respect as part of the pay, the notion that you’re able to do it simply because you asked to do it and showed the proper qualifications; the latter is slave work, something that gets laid on you because it’s all someone thinks you’re worth, and in the end, nobody cares who does it, just that it stops being a problem, somehow,” Thalia said. “I don’t think anyone’s ever paid you the respect of assuming you can just get it done because you’re on the job, at least not beyond your loved ones. I think that whatever you did, you did for them, and not because anyone else wanted to, or would respect you for doing it. And honestly, I don’t think you know how to respond to this, because it’s a thing that a lot of people have trouble with when they make the crossing.”

He wanted to cry. Worse, he wanted to sit back down, get back into bed. He couldn’t do that. Stupid as it sounded, it felt like he’d be killing himself if he did.

So instead, he asked: “And people are going to respect me for this?”

“The job is there for anyone to take, but you chose to take it; do it well and proper, they’ll respect your responsibility, and things will build from there.”

He felt so fucking stupid, so fucking broken. He didn’t get it; it made sense on a page, but now it was right in front of him, and he didn’t know what to do.

Then he thought about waking up that morning, and the pain he felt in his side. That unmistakable sign that he wasn’t dreaming, and that meant the people around him weren’t either. They did this thing day in, day out, and it had built places like the paradise he found himself in, instead of the metal hell he had no choice but to make a home; maybe, just maybe, they might actually mean what they say, then back it up with their actions.

“Ms. Thalia,” Tony said. “Listen, I… I think I might be getting it. Or maybe I did, and just thought it wasn’t real. But I think… I think I get it.”

“I’m very glad to hear that, Tony,” she said, and he could hear the smile in her voice. She wondered if she actually had a smile.

“And I just want to say, I might need to call back again but just… thank you. You’re beautiful, for this.”

“Thank you, Tony. I do what I can. You deserve it. And please call back if you need it, I’m here.”

“I will,” Tony said. “Goodbye for now.”

He cried when he hung up. Not so hard that he couldn’t get dressed for work through it.

---

“So you mean to say I can just hang onto this thing?” Tony said, sliding his hand along the roof of the car. He’d never really seen a design like it before, fully Freelander, not at all like the little carts he knew on the Stack, or the pickup trucks they drove on Apelas. It was something sporty but also functional as a truck, sprung with rally suspension, but also with a long, covered box for extra storage, a two seater he could tell was built for the kind of long rough roads that connected the nearby colonies.

“Yep,” Gen said to him. “Don’t know why city council seems to think a ramen shop needs two work vehicles on the registry, but I guess they’re just generous like that because everyone takes the train and the tramlines anyway. I figured, why not help someone getting their start on the Free side, huh?”

Tony added another bit onto the pile of ‘too good to be true.’ Even still, he knew how he should respond: “I don’t know what I can even do, except say thank you.”

“That’d be the first half, yeah,” Gen said. “The second half, is putting in the work like we went over, and nothing less than that. But given what you showed me yesterday, you’ve got this- fresh stuff goes in the machines, old stuff comes out and goes in the composter and recycler. Nothing more complex than that, just get it done before lunch and dinner, and we’ll be good partners.” Gen Takahashi was the proprietor of Ramen House Kintsugi, a popular beachside spot that also held shares in local restaurant vending machines in Sapphire Cove and two other nearby settlements. He used to handle the deliveries himself, right up until his doctor told him was running himself a little ragged in his late 60s, and might want to pump the brakes headed into the turn of deeper old age. He was a dynamo despite that though, because the man loved noodles with his entire soul. “You and I, and the rest of the brigade in the kitchen.”

If there was a bit of reality in everything Tony had encountered, it was Gen. He was too real to be fake.

“Sounds good to me,” Tony said, playing along. “Time for me to load up?”

“I got you this time,” said Gen, a smirk spreading across his well-tanned face as he patted on the tailgate. “Old habits die hard, and it’s hard to break a routine. Just head on out and be back in the afternoon to reload in time for dinner. Then you’re off.” He threw Tony the keys.

“Okay, just, thanks again-” Tony started to say as he got in.

“Enough thanks, I don’t need a shrine, I just need my vendors filled back up!” Gen’s smirk turned to a grin. He waved over his shoulder, and headed back into the back of the shop.

He keyed the engines as he buckled in, and the car vibrated softly as power went live through the wheels. He reversed it out of the parking space, and turned it smoothly out of the back lot, onto the road. It leapt a little when he sank his foot in- more power than he was expecting, but he probably should have suspected it from the Quad Motor badge just above its rear bumper. He was sure to go easy on it when he pulled out onto the main beachside drag. Sure enough, barely any traffic but for the tramlines that ran down the center of the street, just smooth roads on a warm, slightly cloudy day. He looked at the bins in stacked in the storage bed through his rear view, packed from edge to edge. He’d be at this for hours, first locally, then up and down the intercolonial highway, to the vendors in Minaska and Al-Jizah. He was glad he had a GPS and a list of stops, and when he rolled that around in his head, he started to feel absurd, like what was he even worried about?

Except everything ahead of him, different from everything he’d ever known and couldn’t fully reckon with. Which was not the sort of thought to have behind the wheel. So he took a deep breath, and turned on the car’s stereo.

Fuck, it had a stereo.

He flipped between digital channels, between music he’d never heard before and didn’t have time to develop an opinion on, and games from sports he’d never seen played. He stopped when against odds, he came across something he recognized: a bunch of people talking about the Major Justice TV series, and joking how it had sucked since episode one aired 23 years ago.

“I have in my notes here,” one of the hosts said. “‘The crotch-sock is either getting bigger, or it’s getting closer to the camera, end my life, merciful Jesus please help me.’”

“For a show so absolutist about crime, MJ sure is completely shameless about constantly visually molesting the viewer with a stealth codpiece,” another added.

“Conrad van Horne will have you know, the greatest crime of all is you not looking at his assuredly massive Hog,” a third piled on, his voice breaking into laughter as he said it.

Goddamn, that show did suck, thought Tony. And Monument Studios would sic a kill squad on you if you actually voiced that opinion in a public forum.

It wasn’t close enough to his heart to hurt from the distance, but it wasn’t far enough to be the scary sort of unfamiliar; it was enough that he could laugh to himself, and dial in the idea that maybe in this new life he’d found himself in, he had something ahead of him that that was worth the effort, even if it didn’t seem like that big a deal. Because it didn’t need to be a big deal, just that it was responsibility enough to be worthy of respect.

That was the difference in Tony’s life that he’d never known until that first day punched in.