Adam Mason

Five hundred credits for a cheeseburger. I stared at the flickering LED menu until my eyes felt like they were bleeding. They said moving to a digital currency was going to fix the inflation issue. They said a universal income was going to help get people back on their feet. At least we don’t have high immigration anymore. No one wants to live in the Democratic Union.

But it was five hundred credits for a cheeseburger, and I couldn’t rack up anymore debt on my E-ID.

I was standing in a grimy fast-food restaurant. I had just been kicked out of my bunk-house in the Burrows. Now you might ask why a guy would choose to live in the dilapidated subway tunnels underneath City 57.

Because that’s the only place where UBI is going to cover rent.

Only problem is that you better get in good with the Gouging Clans. Otherwise, they’ll rough you up and take everything but your clothes. And some will take those too. All in all, I was lucky getting off with my winter overcoat, but I tell ya, with several hurting ribs and a face more blue than a blueberry—I didn’t feel so lucky.

Any minute now, I was expecting to see a pop-up on my phone—don’t ask me how I hid it—telling me I was fired from my government assistance job. That was the only way this day could get any worse.

And after all that, I just wanted a cheeseburger. A delicious, factory processed, greasy slab of meat loaded with preservatives and seed oils and heart palpitating chemicals. But a cheeseburger was five hundred credits. And I had jack.

It was one of those times I wished I had a superpower. Yeah, getting placed on the Registry probably isn’t all it’s cracked up to be, but the cool stuff seems an even tradeoff. If I had super strength and bullet proof skin, I would—well, first I would get my fucking cheeseburger—but after that… it wouldn’t be dumpster diving for scraps.

Hey, before you judge, try being a low priority for a while. You’ll be eating banana peels within the week. But come to think of it, I haven’t seen a banana in a long time. I wonder if they even import those anymore.

I didn’t know why I tortured myself, standing in that feces smelling restaurant that was barely big enough to cram ten people inside. I remember five years ago that some of these places were still served by people. At least then you could spill your heart out, and maybe, just maybe, they would give you some food. Not anymore. It was all automated these days. The guy taking orders was a tin-can with a zany mustache, and he wasn’t programmed to hand out freebies. I thought automation was supposed to improve the economy? They keep saying they’re hitting a record GDP.

My stomach growled. I looked down at my phone. It was my very last possession of any worth. It was also the one thing connecting me to my E-ID. Funny story about that. Ten years ago they tried to transition over to completely electronic identity records, some whole newfangled system for tax purposes. But there was so much fraud they then keyed everyone’s ID’s to their phones, which was a whole nother mess.

But long and short of it, the phone was the only reason I could get a job, make payments, and just keep on the struggle. But I gotta tell ya, when you haven’t had anything to eat for three days, and you’ve been drinking runoff from a gutter, it’s hard to keep caring about the future. I was dizzy and tired, and I just wanted food. Oh how I just wanted something—anything. One little, tiny… delicious… scrap of…

You know what? Fuck the future Adam Mason! I just want a cheeseburger!

“Hey.” I tugged on some guy’s coat. He was a balding man in his late forties. He hadn’t shaved in a few days, but he was still looking a lot better than me. At least his clothes weren’t covered in layers of caked sweat and dirt.

I held up my phone. “Get me a cheeseburger with fries and a soda. I’ll trade you this.”

The man glanced from the phone to me and then back to the phone. He shrugged his shoulders.

“Sure.”

…

Five minutes later, I was munching on the most delicious cheeseburger I ever had in my life. Fifteen minutes later, I was picking at the crumbs. Half an hour later, I was still licking the grease from the wrapper.

I stayed in the restaurant for a full hour until the tin-can told me to buy something else or leave. I miss the days when being arrested guaranteed you a meal. Now they just throw you in a CitySec cell, and after that, it’s off to the rehabilitation centers.

I stepped out of the heated restaurant and into the very cold city. Winter was only halfway over. It would be a few months before things heated up again, and I didn’t know which was worse. People really come out in the Summer months. There was a lot more gang fighting, a lot more violence. But I also just didn’t like crowds. People swarmed, junkies hitting it up on street curbs, scammers trying to hawk baubles everywhere, and sweet mercy, the slop sellers.

If you’re a tourist and you’re visiting City 57, take it from a guy who lives here. Anyone who’s selling food on the street is trying to kill you.

So while the cold sucked, I felt a lot more free during the winter. People are clannish, they give the evil eye to low priorities. During the winter, they don’t care as much so long as you don’t stick around wherever they’re holing up.

I didn’t see many people as I walked down a street full of boarded up stores long converted into living spaces. The entire area was former medium to high rise buildings now shantytown. There weren’t a lot of cars in this part of the city, though you could stop here with a reasonable expectation of not getting mobbed. It was poor, but it wasn’t bad as some other parts of City 57.

You could walk and feel like you’re not being followed. And as it happened, walking was the only thing I could do while I went over options.

A low priority vagrant in City 57 had few choices when he hit rock bottom, and at the top of that list were prostitution, gang-life, or enlistment. I suppose there was also rotation to the exclusion zones, but being handed a grubby hazmat suit and told to collect samples in a mutation area wasn’t exactly my idea of fun. It was just marginally worse than getting shipped off to a forever war and told to fight some drugged up super soldier.

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Gang-life wasn’t a great option either, not for an outsider. You have to be born in it. Otherwise, you’re little better than a disposable mule. I wasn’t ready to start swallowing plastic bags full of synthetic cocaine. Besides, low priorities were cracked down on the hardest. Unlike everyone else, we weren’t allowed to do crime.

And, thinking long and hard about this, I didn’t want to whore myself out either. I might not have much dignity left, but I knew there were some things too low for me to do.

Suppose I take door number four and just try to rough it out? The Scavs got their own clans. You think you can just roll up into any empty building? Yeah, that’s not how it works. There are territories, at least for the livable areas. Everywhere else is either too far from the hubs or full of asbestos, mold, and radioactive dust.

Onto damn door number five, try my luck at the mugging game. If you weren’t in a gang, that just put you on a timer, not that I had the build for it anyway. I was freaking 5’5”! I wasn’t going to be intimidating Miss Red Riding Hood, let alone anyone wandering City 57 alleyways!

Door number six. Sell my body—and not like door number three. They went hardcore in Manhattan. Illegal organ trade was alive and well down there. I didn’t know whether the rumors of cannibalism were true, and I didn’t want to know. But I knew they did ritual scarring and branding, some kind of Voodoo shit. They never show it on the news, but everyone knew you did not go into downtown if you could help it.

I paused on the sidewalk, and honestly I needed a slap in the face. What the fuck was I even thinking? Selling my kidneys? That was the dumbest idea in the world! They’re just going to carve you up when they have you under! And if I really was considering that, if things were really that bad, maybe… it was time for door number eight, or whatever number I was on now. It didn’t matter. There wasn’t going to be another door after it.

Groaning, I rubbed my head. I really did like that cheeseburger, but it was a crummy last meal. My feet dragged as I started walking to the nearest suicide clinic. I had always known they were going to get me eventually. I was just hoping it wasn’t going to be today. I had a terrible life, but maybe at least I could go out quietly.

…

“What do you mean you won’t kill me!?” I shouted at the obese woman manning the front counter. Her rolls of fat obscured the used office chair under her, and I’ll spare you the rest of the details. Whatever your thinking—it was worse.

I had waited in a grungy clinic filled with mold and cracked blue wallpaper for three hours. The lobby stank, and half the lights had been blown out. They didn’t have a tv for announcing ticket numbers, that would just get stolen. Instead, they paid a guy in a stained janitor uniform to do it. And I knew there was no fucking way he spoke English.

And now this!

“You don’t have your state mandated phone, sir.” The woman didn’t hide the snark in her voice. “No E-ID, no serum.”

“Why do you care about my E-ID!? You’re supposed to kill me!” I slammed my hands on her plastic desk which had a screen of plastic taped to it.

She clicked her teeth. “Serum is in short supply. You want to die? Go jump into the East River. The cold water will kill you in a few minutes.”

“No! I wanna be shot up with morphine! I wanna be high as a kite before I die!”

“Suicide clinics are a privilege, sir, not a human right.”

“Screw you! You get to stuff your face because you’re a high priority! The rest of us have to eat scraps from the street. Just let me die!”

“Sir, if you continue yelling, I’ll be forced to call security. Either provide me with an E-ID or leave.”

I gave her the middle finger as I stormed out of the clinic and back into the freezing streets of City 57. Pacing angrily, I didn’t know whether I wanted to barge right back in there or run cursing down the street. It took me a good while to get my head clear—as clear as it was going to get.

Now it was on to door number nine, which was a variation of door number seven. I go to a junkie den and steal their drugs. Hopefully, they would have some fentanyl to overdose on. If not, well, I was going to go out in a blaze of glory one way or another.

That was the second time that day I stopped in my tracks and realized just how screwed I was in the head. To be honest, it did not bother me one bit that my corpse was going to picked up by garbage collection and cremated. But that would’ve bothered my parents, and that’s strangely the thing that hurt worst.

I don’t remember when the nukes fell. I think I was two at the time. I remember growing up in refugee camps, and later, resettling into city-life. They always held their heads up high, and not in the pretentious way, which made them all the more insufferable. But they never seemed to get it—that their world was over.

My mother sat me down in a tent and tried to go over the fifty American states with me. Yeah, they were that kind of people. But damn if something of them didn’t rub off on me. I never was able to fit in wherever I went, even when I really wanted to be.

Whenever I got food in my belly, I started thinking again. I started wanting something more again. And then….

I sighed, glancing back to the clinic. There was nothing stopping me from running back in there and jabbing myself with as much morphine as I could get my hands on. Let them do the work of tossing my body into the river. And part of me felt tempted to do that.

But then there was the annoyingly reasonable side of me, the side that told me I wasn’t going to make five feet before security would be on my ass. And it wasn’t like I knew where they kept the morphine. Best case scenario, I wind up getting shot. That wasn’t the worst way to go out, but that wasn’t what I wanted either.

Just above me was a news billboard covering the recent raid on something something street. It’s always funny how they have to place those things like fifty feet in the air, otherwise someone will come around and try to scrap em for parts.

But I watched the news broadcast. Yellow Bolt was holding some dude up by the hair, and he was smiling for the camera. Nighthawk didn’t look too hot. I think he had a bad nose bleed or something, but he began flexing his nonexistent muscles.

I gotta be honest, I didn’t pay too much attention to them. But behind them, CitySec guys were carrying crates of stuff. They posed with confiscated AK-47s and explosives. Looked professional and shit too.

And then I got one of my ideas—one of the really awful ones. What were the chances CitySec missed something in their bust operation? What were the chances I could steal it? I knew where it was, but it was on the other side of the city. It would take all day to get down there, and I would have to get past the roadblocks and checkpoints CitySec would’ve set up.

ASA might be swarming around there too. They tended to do that, acting like they owned the city when technically their only jurisdiction was capturing abnormals. And those guys brought the really high-tech stuff…

I shook my head of those thoughts. Okay, maybe it was a long shot. I would have to be on my A-game. But if I made it past the checkpoints, if I snuck in, if I found anything, and if I could get out… Yeah, I know, a lot of ifs there, but…

I just needed to get away with something I could barter. Maybe a discarded pistol or one of those food packages or even some clean water. And I could trade that for some drugs. Maybe—just maybe—my dream of overdosing into the next life was still possible.

But if I was going to get anything, I had to start moving there now. If there was anything left, it would be gone by tomorrow. And there were probably other people prowling around, thinking the exact same thing I did. I had to get there first, and I had to get out.

My feet started moving on their own. It was one of those dumb ideas that was bound to get me killed, but for some reason, it just made me want to do it all the more. I wanted to do something that I wasn’t allowed to do. Hey, I might’ve even get on the news. I could just imagine the headline.

Homeless vagrant killed in shootout. Took twenty guys with him and was an absolute badass.

Oh, I really was fucked, but I giggled anyway. Gotta take it as it comes, you know? And besides, I had absolutely nothing left to lose.