I lived in a burb my entire life. I was born in a burb-adjacent hospital, my school was squeezed into that intersection between four minor burbs, where every unaffiliated shop and store is.
Burbs are strange. They’re tiny little worlds. HOAs taken to the logical, extreme conclusion and empowered by whichever corporation runs them.
Being from a burb means something. It means that your life was rigid and fixed and had clear, impossible borders where everything within was ‘just right’ and everything without is ‘wrong.’
I’m glad my dad insisted that we drive around and see the rest of the city and the world so much. I wish I could say that I couldn’t live as one of those drones, but the scary thing is that I think I could live that way very comfortably.
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March 21, 2064
It was easy to get lost in the burbs, where endless rows of identical houses stretched out on either side of cracked and broken asphalt streets. Sidewalks weren’t part of the designs when the burbs were being installed around Badgerfield, though it had never been clear to me if that was because they didn’t want to waste the money or because they wanted to force everyone to buy a car. God knows public transit is a concept Old America never got the hang of, at least not away from the corpo towers.
At some point, some smart middle manager figured out that if everyone had GPS in their brains, they didn’t need to waste money installing street signs. It didn’t help that every home here was an identical copy to its neighbor. Apparently all the homes here were built in South America, then shipped over to here in parts to be assembled on-site by construction drones over the course of a week or two.
It all added up, turning the average burb into a labyrinthine trek that was damn near impossible to navigate without outside assistance. They’d practically need to send a Secutek Extraction Unit to find anyone who’d forgotten to pay for their 12G sub and lost access to their GPS, not that anyone who lived in a burbyrinth had enough money to afford that kind of service.
I trudged home on the side of the road, ears open for the electric hum of car engines and the sound of shocks absorbing the impact of every little pothole that littered the street. It was a walk of about four kilometers, one I made five days a week, every week, for the last two years. Twenty seconds past each house, ten houses to a block, over and over again. Every fake plastic shutter was the same color. Every weed-choked flowerbed was the same size, in the same spot. Every roof had the same pitch, with the vents on the same side.
I could have gone into any random house and known where every room was, because they were all laid out the exact same as the box I lived in with my mother. And it just stretched on, kilometers upon kilometers of dead, soulless cubes built, owned, and maintained by Secutek.
Well, built and owned at least. I wasn’t sure ‘maintained’ was a word that could be used to describe whatever it was Secutek did with the burbs besides collect rent and taxes.
My DAC guided me home after precisely forty-nine minutes, just like it did every day. Perhaps inner-city traffic had been lighter, or I’d just taken too long trying to get myself cleaned up after Liz’s harassment, but Mom’s battered red Line Rider was already parked in the driveway. I paused upon seeing it, but there was no avoiding the inevitable. At best, I could delay it, but that would only make it worse later.
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Home was a three bedroom, two bathroom, with yellow-beige type-two siding and a type-B front lawn, the sort with the twin rows of perennials next to the driveway and the auto-sprinklers.
“Why are you so late?” Mom asked as soon as I walked through the front door. She was on the treadmill in the living room, just walking while some news report played on the TV. She didn’t even look my way, eyes glued to the screen as she walked and walked and went nowhere.
“I stayed after school so I could submit my history paper directly to SchoolOS,” I told her. It wasn’t even technically a lie. It just wasn’t the whole truth.
“I thought that was due weeks ago.”
“It was. SchoolOS kept messing up and saying it had it, then losing it. Mr. Hadley gave me an extension to rewrite it,” I said. I stood by the entrance of our living room, shulling from foot to foot while mom’s exercise machine kept humming along.
I’d already told her this, but I knew better than to remind her. Mom wasn’t a mean person, she’d just gotten a lot more impatient with everything after Dad died. I tried to be understanding, but it was hard sometimes.
“Cherish, you can’t keep making excuses and asking for special favors. That shit doesn’t fly in the real world.” She wasn’t even looking at me, eyes still fixed on her screen.
I shook my head. “I’m… I’m not. I did do the paper. I have the receipts for it and everything. It was a system error,”
“I’m not saying you didn’t. I’m saying you had a problem and, instead of solving it, you went and begged your teacher for extra help. When you graduate and have to go get a job, your boss isn’t going to care that you had a problem. He’s going to care that you solved it without bothering him, and that you did it on time without costing the company extra resources.”
I swallowed. This was how things went with mom. She was loyal. Dad always said that was the best thing about her. Loyal unto the end. But she was loyal to the company first.
“I’m sorry,” I said, my voice very, very small.
“Don’t apologize to me. I’m not the one you made extra work for. You need to be smarter than this, or you’re going to be stuck as a D-class citizen forever. No one wants to promote someone they have to micromanage to get good work out of.” She paused her machine, the hum slowing down until she turned my way and stared, as if to make her point all the more poignant.
“Yes, Mom.”
Mom had that expression on her face, the one she always had when she looked at me, the one I’d started translating as disappointment and frustration all mixed together. I wasn’t the daughter she wanted, and she knew deep down that no amount of lectures and punishments was going to turn me into that person.
She made the noise to go with the face, a kind of growl mixed with a sigh. Mom was complex like that. Back when Dad was still alive, he could kind of get Mom out of her moods, but now… Well, it would be best to stay out of her way for the next few days.
“Sorry, I have homework to go do,” I said. “Was there anything else, or…?”
“Just. Just go, Cherish.” Mom pinched the bridge of her nose and waved me off. Before I’d even left the room, she was already back to staring at the TV. The channel had changed, and there was the Secutec logo in the corner. Probably work stuff. Just because she was home from the office didn’t mean she was done for the night. “I’ll cook something later!” she called out.
At least that was one thing to look forward to. Pre-packaged microwaved meals for supper, again. At least it was something. She did care, enough to make sure that the cupboards were always stocked. It was nice, in its own little way.
There was a lot that wasn’t so nice, but I shoved that thought aside as I ran up the stairs to my room.