Look Up - Part 1 of 3 (A "Sunlight" short-story)

Part 1

Arfid was pulled out of his dreaming by the shrill beep-beep of the alarm. Groggily, he raised his wrist to his face, and stared at the offending wristwatch. The ancient chronograph blinked back dull numbers: 06:45. He clicked the alarm off, and swung his legs off his creaking bed. Immediately, he was overwhelmed by a coughing fit.

As he coughed, and sneezed, and wheezed, and prayed for deliverance, tears gathered in his eyes and fell to the ground. He remained there on the bed for a long while; sitting and coughing. It was a misery that no medicine he had tried could solve. His cough, indeed the coughing of anyone unlucky enough to breathe without a respirator in New Bombay, was thick and ceaseless. It formed as balls in his throat and each fit was like breathing fire, as the body expelled the pollutants. It was a losing battle. There was always more coming in, more than the body could ever pump out.

But Arfid rose out of bed, face red from the stress and throat burning from the fit. Last night, the window in Arfid’s room had broken; the pane had fallen straight down into the chasms of the concrete city, into the darkness below. It had taken with it the only filtration unit that Arfid still had. The filthy air of the city, the smog, dust, and the concrete rain, had streamed in through the opening. His room was on the lower levels of the city of towers, deep in the bowels of New Bombay. Fighting back a white-hot rage, he left his room locking the door tight behind him.

8 of them shared that small flat, but only Arfid made enough to afford his own room. Still, they had to share one bathroom.

“Sorry man,” said Fatuh, a girl of about 22. “I’ve got dibs.” She pointed at the locked bathroom door.

“I don’t care,” Arfid spoke with a hoarse voice. “I’m on call.”

“Yeah, on call. Like a doctor,” Fatuh quipped, with a dim grin on her face.

“Fuck off, dude,” Arfid said with a sigh. “I gotta go. Jeeva doesn’t give a fuck if I’ve showered or not.” He turned for what was the living room. Instead of a couch and coffee table, the room had two bunk beds with the curtains still drawn shut. He tiptoed past his sleeping flatmates, and made for the door.

“Not gonna brush?” Fathu called back. Her volume earned her a “shut the fuck up” from one of the sleepers.

“It’s in my bag. I’ll brush on the way,” Arfid replied.

“Disgusting.”

“Whatever, I gotta go.”

The metro was packed, as always. Overhead, on the ceiling, led screens blasted out advertisements; advertisements played in the corners of the windows on InivisiPixels; Arfid could see them play on peoples’ eye-implants. Hell, Arfid figured, they probably played ads through CNS implants, too.

Glaring sunlight dragged Arfid out of his trance. The sun, hazy gold in the smog, shone through cracks in the New Mumbai skyline. He was dozens of levels above his own now, and the smog here was thin. Even then, he was nowhere near the top of the city, and the industrial run-off from the non-stop construction still poured like concrete rain. Great splodges and tiny globules of concrete stuck to the window every now and then, as the train dashed from tunnel to tunnel. The speed of the metro meant the concrete didn’t stick very long, but it was still a disheartening sight. The city had grown around the metro, and the train passed through dozens of buildings designed to accommodate it. Some of the stops were in such tunnels.

As the train stood still, Arfid stared out the window. People sat there, in suits and ties and business dresses. Their windows had no ads. The air they breathed passed through air conditioning. They worked at desks. Arfid stared at them such that a passer-by might have confused his stare for longing. In reality, it was a hatred which burned inside of him.

Then, the train would get going again. The sunlight would break through, and his heart would sink from the peaks of hatred to the troughs of sadness. Always he had looked up. Always he’d wondered what pure sunlight felt like. The metro was the closest he’d gotten. At that moment, as Arfid was on the brink of tears, the train entered the final tunnel.

Offices and bedrooms whizzed by as though on fast forward, and the train came to a screeching halt at Station B56.

Station B56, one of the last stations before the A-levels, was a maze. For the inexperienced, it would have proved labyrinthine and even for Arfid getting through it was a struggle on bad days. And today was a bad day. The moment he stepped out of the air-conditioned bogey, he was assaulted by the poison gas that was New Bombay’s air. Around him, people walked – they strutted, he thought, in their clean clothes and with their manicured look – with respirators fastened to their mouth and nose. He had no such luxury, not since last month.

The fit that assailed him was particularly bad, causing him to double over and fall. He dragged himself to a standing position and hobbled over to a wall. Still coughing, he pulled out an injector. It was small, fit into the palm. The body was blue, and the details were white. The plunger was stainless steel. On it, in bright yellow, were printed the words “CLEANLUNG 650”. He plunged it into his chest and immediately, he felt like he was breathing pure air. Every time he’d done it, he wondered if the air in the Circle or in the Plains or in Northern Europe felt like this. Fuck those rich pricks, he thought to himself, and set off through Station B56.

The station was unique in its construction. Nearly all other stations of the Sabdis Metro were enclosed in smartglass, creating crystal prisms that dotted the concrete of the city. They were open and vast, and light poured in like rain. All of them, even the ones on the lower levels, were built like that. Each was a temple to the glory of Sabis Group, as though SG needed any more temples or glorification. But Line B5 was different; nearly all B5 stations were built inside of massive towers. So instead of seeing the city, all Arfid could see about him were offices, and desks, and bedrooms. Some walls were taken up by ads, others were bare concrete. It was insufferably hot, as the bodies of thousands of commuters were stuck together in that hell-maze.

Finally, Arfid broke through into the city. It was the only time he was ever happy to be breathing in the smog.

“Didn’t shower again?” Jeeva asked without looking up. She was at her desk, as usual. “I could smell you from here.” She looked up and smiled wryly. Arfid gave her a dumb grin and sat down in front of her. She pounded a couple times on her chest with her left hand; the sound of the impact was hollow.

“Yes, I know, I’m sorry.” Arfid rolled his eyes.

“Don’t worry,” she said with a chuckle. “I’ve turned off my plant’s olfactory receptors. I knew you wouldn’t shower again.”

“Brilliant,” Arfid’s response was light but insincere. “What do you have for me today?”

“Always straight to business with you. Y’know, the rest of my runners talk to me a lot? Takes me 10 minutes to get to the day’s work.”

“They just like the A/C,” Arfid remarked, and Jeeva laughed. She was a pretty woman, about his age. Like most rich natives of the city, she was fair-skinned, with auburn hair, and dainty hands. Unlike most rich natives of the city, she’d had little to no chromium installed in her. Hell, even her nose was the same one she’d been born with. Aside from the CNS and lung implants, she was more flesh and bone than even Arfid.

“Oh, I like you,” she mumbled to herself. She bent down beneath her desk and opened a drawer. From it, she retrieved an injector and a couple memory cards. Without thinking, Arfid pocketed the injector but his gaze lingered on the cards.

“Two today? Got a big gig, eh?”

She gave him a knowing smile. “Oh!” she exclaimed suddenly and ducked down again. “Here, I almost forgot!” she retrieved a respirator from the drawer. “You’ll need this.”

“Need?” he asked, but took the respirator without question.

“Yes, you’re going down to the U-Levels today,” she said firmly.

“Fuck sake! Another black run?”

“Yup. And dangerous. Very, very, dangerous.”

“Look, I’m still pissed that you stuck me on T.H.’s gun route the other day – an SG fixer nearly goddamn killed me – and now this? What could be more dangerous than smuggling that nut’s guns? What? Real cocaine, maybe?” he laughed incredulously.

Jeeva gave him a rocky stare. “It’s important.”

“Oh, fucking great, it’s another one of your smash-the-system moments,” he said with contempt. “When will you realise that this misery is all there is?”

“Arfid, listen to me,” she leaned in and called him closer, as if afraid of being overheard. When he bent in to listen, she still whispered, “with what this job pays, you can buy a one-way ticket out of this shit-hole. Passport, visa, permit – everything. You’ll be kicking rocks in Oslo this time next week. If you play your cards right.”

“So what am I smuggling? A fucking nuke?” Arfid was still incredulous.

“No. Seeds.”

Arfid’s smile dropped.

“If I get caught, Jeeva, they’ll make me wish I was dead!” he half-exclaimed. Memories of the work-camps came flooding back to him. Jeeva only shook her head.

“Don’t worry. You won’t get caught. You can’t,” she said with a twinkle in her eyes. “You still got that deactivated chip in your brainstem yeah?”

“Yeah, why?”

She slid a third memory card over to him. “Daemon. T.H. cooked it up. Slot it in and there is no surveillance system on this earth that can recognise you.” Arfid studied her eager eyes with uncertainty. She was beaming like a school-girl. But then… the money… he reached out and picked up the third memory card gingerly. It was a standard 5TB microcard. With trepidation, he raised it to the back of his neck and groped for the jackpoint that led directly to his brainstem.

“Just…” she raised her hand as if to stop him, and he did. “Just know that it’s very dangerous. It won’t kill you, but you’ll wish it did. Then, a few hours of pass of unimaginable pain. I’ll sedate you, don’t worry. When you wake… you won’t leave behind fingerprints, the dead skin cells you shed won’t have DNA, your hair will evaporate before it touches the ground, your face will be a void on cameras. Not even RAI, the superintelligent asshole, can see through it.”

The card was millimetres away from the jackpoint. “Unimaginable pain?” Arfid asked, his voice cracking. Jeeva nodded solemnly. Arfid blinked, and in that split second, he saw his room thick with smog, the metro packed with people, he thought of his lungs slowly dying, the chems pumping through his bloodstream. He wanted to see pure blue skies, he decided, and slipped the card into himself.

Immediately, he felt pain sear through his body. It was like every part of him, every cell, every mitochondrion, was being burned from the inside. He couldn’t even open his mouth to scream, for his lungs were collapsing. Or maybe he did scream. He didn’t know. He couldn’t know. All he saw was Jeeva rush to him with a transparent injector in her hand. She held him, cradled him like a child, and said something. She was weeping, he noticed.

“It’s okay!” she mouthed, “it’s all going to be okay!”

The last thing he felt was the injector piercing his thigh. Then, blackness.

==============================================================================

NOTES:

This is part 1 of 3 of a short story with a strict word-limit of 5k. I plan to submit this to magazines, and it's also an exercise in keeping things SHORT!