Luke. 2057, Lake Washington Underlake, Cascadia Megacity, Cascadia Free State. Three days before the Montreal Incursion.

The Lake Washington Sanitation Project is one of the wonders of the world. During the construction of the megacity structures which now make up the unified Cascadia Megacity, a need for new and enhanced sewage and recycling infrastructure was identified as a critical necessity. Existing sewage infrastructure in the area was entirely insufficient, but an unsightly recycling compound and sanitation district was deemed as detrimental to the new city’s tourism prospects. And tourism was good for business.

Thus, the Lake Washington Sanitation Project was initiated. An impermeable, meter-thick layer of high density polycarbonate glass substitute was placed 1.5 meters under the surface of the lake, and the water under that layer was drained. The bottom of the lake was dried over the course of a month, relocating much of the mud to certain areas on top of the polycarbonate to form biological refuges for the wildlife of the former lake and to preserve fishing. Once the bedrock was exposed, it was quarried to a depth of two hundred meters and leveled. And in the freed space, a cavernous set of sanitation facilities were constructed.

The Underlake, as it is known by megacity inhabitants, now processes the sewage for the entire former Bellingham, Vancouver (both in the former state of Washington and the former province of British Columbia), Seattle, Tacoma, and Olympia metropolitan areas, as well as the non-sewage waste produced by those areas and the Portland and Victoria metropolitan districts. A gigantic hollow tower rises just North of Mercer Island, over two hundred stories into the air, belching invisible waste gases into the upper atmosphere where they will not disturb residents of the city above. Air intakes push air from the surrounding areas into the Underlake, and exhausts in the tower pull waste gases up, separating out flammables and volatiles for reuse and burning particulate matter to reduce air pollution.

The Underlake is officially run entirely autonomously. In fact, however, it is an open secret that the Underlake runs on a backbone of independent contractors and grey market labor. After all, any man-made piece of infrastructure must be maintained. Due to the officially uninhabitable nature of the Underlake, because of the noxious gases which make up the atmosphere, only the most desperate make their homes here, working as subcontractors for CWM operations or even just trying to find useful scraps in the garbage from Above that they can sell to agents of secondhand stores or industrial outfits in the greater megacity.

It is not a good life, but for those who are officially stateless, or those who refuse to comply with the rules and regulations of Free State government policy, it is one of the few alternatives to living in the Eastland wastes which offers freedom from control as well as gainful, if unofficial, employment. This is made possible by the fact that the Underlake is a Corporate Autonomous Zone, administered and wholly owned by Liberty Waste Management. LWM does not care who lives in the Underlake as long as the infrastructure is maintained, materials are recovered in economically significant quantities from recycling material, fertilizer is exported from the compost pits and sewage reclamation facilities, and no one in the Underlake leaves.

* Excerpt from the Lake Washington Sanitation Project, A History. Report commissioned by the now-defunct Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, 2045, one year before the Foundation was nationalized for publishing “subversive content.”

Luke was still tired. He woke up tired, spent a day working in this damn shithole, ate some food he didn’t want to think about the source of, and went to sleep even more tired. It seemed like every day, he got more exhausted.

The Underlake was no place for a 52 year old man, but he had nowhere else to go, so there wasn’t any point in complaining about it, he told himself. At least he had food, a few credits to his name, his shop, and his Mesh connection. He even occasionally got real paper letters from his old flame, Sarah. She was doing fine, he knew. Found a guy with citizenship, found a low level office job working for some megacorp or other, even had a couple kids.

But Luke? All he had was bitterness and exhaustion. And his shop. It was shit, but it was his. He'd built a fresh water tank into the roof for running water, sectioned off the back ten feet of the recycled shipping container for a basic living area, added a bed and a door for his personal effects, and even made it air tight to keep the bad air out. This let Luke position his shop in the midst of the compost pits, near the center of the Underlake, only half a kilometer from the base of the Big Suck. Nearly everyone lived in clusters around the air intakes from the outside world, but being the first stop for salvage or repair or emergency first aid meant business was steady.

Luke hauled his ass out of his salvaged bed and towards a tank of purified water he kept over his shower. Toweling the night’s sweat off of him with a wet cloth, he looked at himself in the cracked mirror. The years hadn’t been kind. Worry lines creased his wrinkled, pallid skin, which hadn’t seen real sunlight in quantity in a decade or more. An expanse of black-turning-gray stubble graced his chin and upper lip, and his hair hung down in a shaggy mane to his shoulders.

“You look like shit, you old fuck. Another day, another bag of crap from the Pits. Let’s do this.” Luke stepped under the water tank, briefly showering and shaving, and toweled himself off. His shop didn't really have running water. There was just a five hundred liter water tank on the roof of the converted shipping container, and gravity fed it down through a spigot into the shower, then out past a U-bend through the floor to dump onto the ground. But it worked, and that was the point.

Luke’s shop was dominated by an old dentist’s examination chair in the center of the small room. His pride and joy, the exam chair was the perfect piece of equipment to allow Luke to practice his craft. His clients were the gangs of the Underlake, who inevitably squabbled over turf or fell and hurt themselves on a sharp piece of salvage, needed someone to maintain their breathing gear, or needed to swap in a better bootleg aug upgrade to their existing equipment so they could escape just a little easier from their hellish lives. The only thing he didn't do was surgery beyond emergency first aid.

He built guns for the muscle, patched up everyone who needed it, and helped tinker with the prosthetics and equipment of anyone who wanted that. In the back of the room sat a sizable collection of spare parts for various bits and bobs. On the wall, projects in various stages of completion, from odd-looking limbs with exposed hydraulics to breathing gear undergoing overhaul and even a couple of firearms and knives, and in the back of the room the display screen for a large 3D printer glowed on standby.

Working his shop sucked, but it was steady work, and it let him earn enough creds to spend his time reading or in the Mesh.

Luke’s thoughts were interrupted by a pounding at the door. followed by a familiar young voice. “Old man! I need your help! Something bit me in Pit 7! Oh, fuck, man, I don’t feel so well!”

Luke yelled back: “Cycle the fucking airlock, then! I’m not getting shit air in my shop!” He was rewarded by the clunk of industrial valves and the noise of a tired compressor humming into life. Five seconds later, the airlock indicator flipped from red to green, showing that the air inside his shop’s vestibule was clean enough.

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Walking briskly to the door, Luke opened it to see the pallid face of his young friend, Zim. Zim was just a kid, but he’d fallen afoul of P&L’s corporate cops after his parents had been fired from a factory controlled by one of the corporations which manage farming in the Alaskan Province. His dad had mentioned to his supervisor that working conditions might be worth fixing after one of his coworkers had committed suicide while on lunch break. Zim, at thirteen, had gone straight to his parent’s old work and punched their boss, a dour-faced fat man named Greg, in the face, and had his citizenship revoked, just like Luke did after the Strike. Luke had found Zim two years later when he hit the Underlake after getting run out of the Undercity for not being able to shut his mouth, and had vouched for him with the leaders of a small time salvage gang. They were decent enough people for criminals, and had treated Zim good, since young meat was rare in the Underlake.

Zim looked even worse than he usually did. Blood was running down his leg through a hole in the industrial waders all the salvage crews wore when working the Pits. It didn't look good, like a puncture wound from a stray piece of rebar. That kind of damage could quickly lead to a massive blood infection. Some of the crew members would just slap some duct tape over a puncture and pop antibiotics, but if the bugs were resistant, it could be game over. And if he'd really been bitten by something living in the Pit, Luke didn't want to even think about what lived in that mouth.

He made his way quickly over to Zim’s side, grabbing antiseptic and a set of clean, recycled bandages. “Zim, tell me what’s going on. What bit you? How long ago was it?”

Zim gasped in relief as he settled down into the chair, took off his SCB environmental recirculator, and breathed the filtered air of the shop. “Fuck. It’s been about an hour. I think all the guys got bit, but most of them wanted to finish the salvage shift before they packed it in. I ain’t taking chances, though. You taught me that. Don’t fuck around, and you won’t find out, right, gramps?”

Luke gave a dry, rasping chuckle. “Sometimes, you still do, you little shit. But I’m glad that the three rocks in your head you bang together to imitate thought managed this much. You did the right thing. Just last week, one of the Rat Nest’s crew ignored a scrape for half a shift and I had to cut her leg off to fight the infection. Almost lost her.”

Zim shuddered. “Anyone I know?”

Luke shook his head. “Nah, just some fresh meat from East. Thought she was tough enough to not pay attention when her shift head told her she needed to stop and clean it. Learned her lesson the hard way. Now shut up, before I have to do the same to you.”

Zim nodded. “Okay, Doc. Fix me up.”

Luke turned to his side, grabbing a knife and the bottle of diluted methanol he kept as a disinfectant at all times. “This might suck, kid.” Seeing the young man’s determined expression and nod, Luke soaked a bandage in the methanol, wiped the knife blade clean, and cut off Zim’s right pant leg just below the knee and above the slowly spreading blood stain, pulling the fabric of the rubber overalls down over his boot.

What he saw didn’t look good. A puncture wound in the meat of his calf, right into the muscle, about one centimeter wide and circular. “Shit, kid, what bit you here? A 9 mil round?”

The young man shot back, with a snort, “No, you old dick, I’m too tricky to get shot. You know me. It was in the ‘mess. I was sorting through it, trying to find some electronics in a new shipment they didn’t sort properly, and it just happened. It’s not stopped hurting, and now my leg’s going numb. Fuck, man. I don’t feel too good. I barely made it here.”

Nodding, Luke didn’t warn his young friend before he dumped a few milliliters of disinfectant right into the open wound. It always went faster and cleaner if he didn’t warn his patients of what he was going to do, but they did tend to complain about his bedside manner. Zim grunted. He’d always been tough. It’s why Luke was taking this seriously. Some people who came into him complained about every little thing, but Zim was a pretty tough little bastard.

Except there was a problem. When he dumped the methanol into the wound, Zim’s leg started twitching, almost like Zim was undergoing a seizure. Holding down the leg, Luke yelled at his friend and patient to keep still so he could see, but nothing changed, and Zim didn’t respond. Alarmed, Luke glanced at Zim’s head. His eyes were rolled up so that Luke could only see the whites, and his mouth was open wide in a silent scream. Zim's breath came in shallow, involuntary gasps, as if his body wasn't working right.

Acting quickly, Luke used the straps he had engineered into the exam chair to restrain first the leg, then the rest of Zim’s body, so that he could immobilize his patient. After he managed that, Luke grabbed forceps from the exam table, hastily wiped them with the methanol cloth, and jammed them into the wound. If something was lodged in there, it could be causing a blood infection, and the only way to start to fix the problem was to get it out. The twitching got worse, he could tell, but the restraints were doing their job. Luke felt something in the wound which shouldn’t be there. It didn’t feel like muscle, and it didn't feel like metal or wood. It felt spongy, almost soft. Grasping it with the forceps, he clamped and pulled. There was a tearing sensation from the wound, and out came a small piece of white flesh. A parasite?

As Luke held the mystery piece of flesh up for closer inspection, a thud impacted his little shop and he saw what looked like the head of a sledgehammer pierce right through the thin steel of his shop’s outer airlock door. The environmental contamination alarm started blaring, noting infiltration of noxious contaminants from outside the building, and Luke dropped his forceps, moving with energy he hadn’t felt in twenty years as he slammed the inner airlock door shut and grabbed two Scub masks from his display case, fitting one over his head and then the other over Zim’s, making sure the elastic was tight on the back of Zim’s head and that the mouthpiece was clamped between his clenched teeth. When he knew for sure that both of them could breathe safely when the inner door failed, he glanced back at the door, looking through the vestibule at the outer airlock.

He didn’t know what the hell was going on, but it didn’t sound like anything good. A gang attack, maybe? Luke had agreements with all of the major and minor crews in the area and they all knew to not mess with his shop or he would cut off their supply and increase that to their competitors. That, and his refusal to give a shit about who he worked for, had helped keep him out of the petty gang wars which always plagued the Underlake. Still, there was always the possibility of some people from the Undercity trying to push into the Pits, or maybe even some new thug who didn't know the rules yet out to rip off his shop.

As another thud shook his building, Luke reached under Zim’s exam chair, grasped his insurance policy, and pulled. With a sound of ripping tape, a steel object came up. Luke tugged out the metal arm brace for his personal, 3D printed and handbuilt World War 2 era M3 Submachine Gun, pulled out the 32-round .45ACP magazine to make sure it was loaded, checked the chamber to ensure it was empty, rammed the magazine back into the well, and cycled the bolt to drop a round into the chamber. The little weapon sat nicely in his hand, and the metal brace was reassuring as it pressed into his shoulder. He kept it around his shop because it didn’t look, at first glance, like anything other than a grease gun. That grease gun, of course, was deadly if used properly.

“Who the fuck is stupid enough for this shit?”

The only answer was the scream of bending metal as the lightweight exterior door bent, then broke, and he saw three people stumble in towards the inner door through the window on top. One was holding an axe, another a sledgehammer, and the third an aluminum baseball bat. But that wasn’t the most disturbing thing.

None of them were wearing Scubs. And they didn’t move quite right.

Luke had a sinking feeling that his day was about to get worse.