Friendlytown

[rrrrrr]

inspired by the stuff batra is writing. should be about a 4-5 minute read. boldly tries to answer the questions "what is life in a very bad industrial-zoned dome on the moon like"

Spoiler

SSFR LUNA, FREUNDLICH CRATER, 2461

Life is beautiful.

You are blessed to have been born at the end of days. Beyond the firmament. Terrible things happen without explanation but you are continually born again in the blood of Christ Jesus. All sin is washed away, each error and violation and nasty thing and soon, very-very soon, the cosmic balance will be restored and the universe will open wide and all pain and sorrow will be forgotten. Christ will come from beyond the Orion-Cygnus Arm, out of Sagittarius, and uplift all righteous sophonts to the next stage of evolution. Anno domini 2500. (Come soon, Jesus.)

At night, you dream of fascist military officers and debts erased. Hopperites in deceptively beautiful uniforms. During the day, you are, for reasons beyond your control, assigned relatively light work cleaning air ducts and doing general maintenance around the colony. Home is where the heart is. Your heart is in Freundlich-IV. “Friendlytown.” The happiest place in the known universe. A satellite of a satellite of a satellite of one of the great lunar cities: something that never quite got off the ground. Unfinished. A small dome, half-sunken into the lunar surface. Meant to be temporary. Covered in regolith to ward off radiation. Networks of tunnels and compartments whose intended purpose went unrecorded. Most of the industrial equipment here is, despite being endlessly fawned over and blessed and marked with talismans and protective sigils, nonfunctional and hopelessly out of date.

This was all supposed to be a ³He refinery but history decided that it was economically nonviable in your region and things really never did get off the ground. The money never came. Too few parts per billion and it made more sense to do it on Pluto, anyways. Bad timing. It was purchased by the government from the Soviet Union sometime around the start of the 22nd century and zoned as an industrial city; the primary export, these days, is algae, synthetic meat, and municipal contracts to provide low-cost maintenance technicians to nearby cities. Guest work. The margins are thin. You and your mother are the only members of your immediate family who still live here. Your family here, who number in the hundreds, well---

well, everyone has problems (two murders and four suicides last year; everyone gets cremated and you aren't supposed to ask stupid questions) and you aren’t exactly in a position to judge others, given how you’re a net negative on a number of already strained resources. This is something that they’re trying to change. To help you with. It’s easy to become a net positive. It’s all mindset, see.

You like to think that you have a number of good traits. You’re good at ping-pong. You can play the banjo. You have less trouble in tight spaces, of which there are no great shortage.

You also like to think that you’re less socially inept this financial quarter.

For example: Brother Francine (actually your second cousin and a woman, but ‘brother’ is a title that inculcates a good sense of community, family, and preemptively works to abolish both man and woman as meaningful distinctions, apparently) has appreciated your sense of humor this past week. Knock-knock jokes are “in.” You admittedly have trouble grasping some of the cruder jokes that your cousin-brothers tell, but you’re certain that you’ll get the hang of it, eventually. Brother Francine is, you think, your fifth favorite cousin-brother, friend, and-or sophont, sandwiched between Brother Henry (who has sworn you to secrecy regarding his hidden supply of chewing gum, which is banned) and Brother Jun (fond of slapping you but otherwise kind.) In a distant five-hundred-and-ninth place is Brother Sheila (for reasons you try not to think about.)

She seems mostly unbothered by your peculiarities and is generally willing to speak to you. The bar is low. You try to ignore the stories she tells, all of which are designed to scare you, most of them about unregistered people living in the tunnels but a handful of them about ghosts, ghouls, demons, et al. You try not to think about it.

At church, you are asked to pray for the release of all political prisoners and for our Heavenly Father to soften the Prime Minister’s heart. Secretly, with some small amount of shame, you pray to become a high net-worth individual and a productive economic unit within your larger family. The choir sings Babylon is Fallen. All wishful thinking.

You scrub fungal rot from the inside of an air duct, suspended by a harness, the only thing keeping you from being mutilated (not killed, mutilated) by the creaking fan blades twenty feet below you. The ways to become a net positive are variegated and wonderful and lie not too far in the future: you are due to marry Brother Franco, a crèchemate of yours. His blood family is economically viable and does remote software engineering work for one of the major intersolar corporations. The only issue is that you don’t particularly like Brother Franco.

You dream that your father is alive. In one of the colony’s many-many tunnels, one of the deeper ones, you share with him and the Prime Minister a meal of liquefied algae and cultured meat. A fan spins overhead, circulating air up towards the primary habitat. Pipes like entrails.

You play ping-pong with the Prime Minister. His talents are preternatural and with each serve and swing the medals on his uniform shift, cling, catch light, distract you: party paramilitaries watch with spiked clubs and dress daggers. They’ll beat you to death if he wins. They’re going to do unspeakable things to you when you lose. They'll never find your body. If they do, they'll have to use dental records to figure out who or what you are. They laugh because you think you deserve to live.

After you’ve lost, your father comforts you, the air heavy with expelled waste. Like after he died.

You wake up with a start. Brother Francine is squatting over you, close, her oil green coveralls smelling of sweat. You’re in a tunnel. One of the deeper ones. Her hands move: you’re alright. You passed out. Sick. I pulled you up. So many rats, anymore. I kept them from biting you. While you slept. You sign back that you do feel sick, nauseous, very-very bad. She tells you that you’ll be fine and that you’re not that sick, anyways. So many rats, anymore. You sit up and vomit on yourself.

 

Edited March 2 by rrrrrr