It’s hot. Like, damn hot.

I watched the new guy move slowly to the other side of the yard, his three ton mech loader clunking along while he used his basic training to its max and his God-given brain to no effect. Suddenly, it sped up, and both hydraulic claws started clamping open and shut and whirling out of control.

“No, Joe!” I hollered at him, leaning over the controls of my own mech to wave my arms in hopes he’d see me. The hovercrafts worked non-stop above us and the whirring noise of the quad fan jets buzzed to distort all sounds. “Fuck,” I cursed and sat back to punch the controls to wake up so I could follow.

I caught up to the kid with his mech wedged deep into a pile of fuck knows what, a tangled mess at its feet. Scrap metal of some kind. That’s what we sorted and delivered to the refinery from the open yards. It’s hot, dusty, loud, and smelly work. It’s also the only prospect I have until I earn enough hours to move up to a level four, a load operator on a hovercraft. Realistically, I should be around fifty when that chance comes up; I’m twenty-seven.

“Joe!” I hollered again, moving up smoothly beside his, scratched and dented, yellow machine. I stared at him, dumbfounded as to what the hell he was trying to do.

“Sorry, Cheet, man,” Joe said, his eyes darting to the controls and away from my irate stare. “I dunno what happened. I was gentle on the stick like you told me. It just wouldn’t stop!”

I continued to stare, too fed up to answer. We’d been at this all day and still the kid could not drive the machine in a straight line, let alone pick anything up.

“I’m really sorry, Cheetah. I promise I’ll practice some more. I’ll get the hang of it! Please don’t report me! I can’t go back to the sifters, man. I can’t!”

I took a deep breath. Lifting my face shield, I wiped the copious amount of sweat from my forehead before replacing it. I looked at him. How old was he? Twenty-four? Maybe twenty-five? He’d worked since fifteen, starting from the bottom like every single one of us. But he was late for joining a level three.

First level are the runners. Kids with good endurance run fuel and power packs around the warehouses. It’s back breaking load work. Then, you get promoted to the sifters, level two. Great big rooms of conveyors where you sort the scrap metal and shit that comes down for processing, emphasis on the precious metals like titanium and gold, used in sensitive stuff. The conveyors load the docks where the hovers pick them up and take them to the yards outside. From there, scrap is air dropped into sorted piles and we, the junkers, level three, pick them up with huge mech units, which are just oversized, people-shaped forklifts. Load by load we deliver it all to the designated hoppers that feed the smelters.

If you want to make more money, you work in the toxic environment of the smelter floor that guarantees you’ll die early for the extras. That’s what my mom did. And she died early. But she had a kid to feed—me. She’d wanted to give me a bigger dorm unit, and enough food to maybe grow.

No, I would not report this kid. But if he didn’t get it and I signed him off, I could get in trouble.

“Joe, you gotta pull your shit together,” I said and moved back to start cleaning up the mess he’d made.

He nodded and at least managed to back up to clear out of the way. “I know Cheet, I know. I got this, I do! I’m gonna stay tonight, take a night shift and work slowly. Tomorrow, I’ll be better.”

“Yah, OK,” I said, but I doubt he heard me over the noise and I’d pulled my radio com off.

We worked, me trying not to get in the kids’ way so he could practice, but it was near the end of my shift and I was dying from the heat.

A hovercraft had been idling above us, sending hot exhaust and stirring dust and sand that hissed and blasted everything, including us. I looked up after too long of it sitting there and glowered at the pilot. I saw a perky hand wave through the windshield and frowned. I pulled my coms back on and switched to the frequency.

“Cheet! I’ve been calling you for the last hour!” Mayan said.

“Training,” I replied and lifted a hand to shield my eyes from her obnoxiously bright belly lights.

This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

She giggled through the comms. “Sorry to hear!”

“Yah, so are you going to sandblast the rest of my paint off or have you something to tell me?”

“Ask! Will you be around later? At home? I have something to show you,” she replied.

I looked at Joe, his massive claw clamping uselessly at dead air in an attempt to pick up a gigantic piece of aluminum I could manage from my ten feet away.

“Home, I gotta work late tonight,” I replied finally, not able to hide the heavy exhale of resignation watching Joe.

“Kay, I’ll see you then! Bye for now!” Mayan replied with a cheerful send-off. Her hover tilted abruptly but incredibly smooth and I swear she even flew chipper. The noise and sand storm died immediately, and I dug in with Joe, again, to show him the controls.

---

“‘Night Cheet-ah, man!” Doug waved as he passed me three hours later in the locker room. I waved back and tried to offer a smile, but I couldn’t say if I pulled it off. He wasn’t making fun of my name, just having fun with it. Doug was a good guy.

After three hours with Joe, we finally cleaned up the mess. That was it. No deliveries and he still got it stuck going back to the warehouse. The doors are a hundred feet wide. He got jammed in the corner.

I wiped my hand over my face again, grateful I could shower today. It wasn’t allowed every day, but after nearly fourteen hours in forty-degree heat, I was a goner. Every muscle in my body ached. I was dehydrated and exhausted. I could not remember the last time I ate.

Slowly, I lifted my tired butt off the bench and slammed the metal locker shut. I checked my bio band was back on and headed back to the tram that would take me home.

Waiting on the platform, I palmed my wrist on the water ration machine. A cup of water in a glass bottle tumbled out, and I opened it to finish it immediately. The screen confirmed it had docked me one credit followed by flashing my name.

Cheetah Hobbs.

Yah, it’s a weird one.

My mom loved nature shows and especially big cats. Her favourite? Cheetahs. Dad used to joke about toddlers being fast or some shit, but that's where it started. She would call me Cheetah as far back as I could remember, and it stuck. No one remembers my real name, John, James, whatever. Something common. Even my Junker id says, Junker 3rd Class, Cheetah Hobbs. That's me. 

Up until a year ago, I was the reigning weirdo for names down here. But then I met Mayan. A pilot temp from Sky City. And yep, that's Mayan with an "N".  Her folks were descendants of a long-lost people called the Mayans and it was their way of honoring that. Different maybe, but I thought it was pretty, and it suited her.

I laughed now to remember her obnoxious interruption earlier, but that was Mayan. Super smart, uber-positive, keener than anything I'd ever met before. Born and raised in sunshine and privilege, I hadn’t expected to find any sort of commonality with her. But she was a bouncing ball of infectious energy, an expert pilot, and mad advocate for Junker rights. I never messed with the politics, but Mayan kept up with it, and regularly joined sit-ins and followed me around, trying to get me to sign shit.

Dragging my ass onto the tram to stand against the wall and hold a looped handle for support, I cursed the company yet again for building transport with no seating.

Ah, The Company.

Aptly named, it is the life-sucking, no-face, two-face piece of shit that runs all the industry in what remains of our pathetic little world. There are two parts to it, the up and the down; the five Sky Cities and their supporting five Complexes: Junkers. I looked out of the window. Never dark, you never see stars. The blinking lights of Phoenix Sky City flashed in slow colours on its underbelly above and obscured any and all natural sky.

Looking down, I saw the ever lit massive outdoor yard of the recycling complex smack in the middle of the larger covered factories to the west and the living and working complexes opposite to the east. Giant tower lights lit the yard and though infrequent, I could see there were some mechs up late, pulling doubles. Down here, we did the grunt work of the economy. Up there, giant floating cities lived above the clouds in high-tech, clean and fully supported utopias of ingenuity and prosperity. They had free education and the good stuff too, not the basic three Rs and brainwashed propaganda we got down here. They ate the best food, water, and it was cooler up high. The cities were so large they floated hundreds of square miles above the earth’s surface, casting likewise massive shadows on the ground. Almost nothing grew down here anymore, anyway.

Governing us all was the Unified Confederacy of Earth Nations. We called them Uni’s for short. A huge logo etched into the glass of the tram doors never let us forget what a wonderful, happy family we all were now. After years of global warming and climate fuckery, humans had fucked earth into a cocked hat, and now, the rich prospered and governed ‘fairly’ in a city where they never saw dirt, smelled pollution or their own shit. Seven hundred years or so ago, we’d lost vast areas to temperatures and sea levels rising. We’d warred ourselves into destroying what remained of the good land, so they’d moved everyone into the five biggest and strongest remaining cities. Junkers like me never left the complexes they were born to. I’m from Phoenix. I will die in Phoenix.

I nearly missed my stop in my exhausted stupor. Whenever I was at my lowest, my mind would wander to the mistakes of the past and the people who’d made them. That they could have so little foresight to what a shithole they would leave behind left a maddening knot in the pit of my stomach that never went away. I know no one cared about me, but people as a whole, was a hard one to swallow. How could you knowingly and purposefully fuck an entire species to suit yourself?