In Kolkata, when long and miserable days dismantling the dead city ships slipped into cooler evenings, we would all pause in our work to smoke and watch the sun as it bloated, reddened, and plunged into the wine-dark sea. The cigarettes were old and stained and tasted too much of nicotine, and nobody wanted to be caught doing such an illegal thing — regulations don’t permit it on the ships, gas pockets and all that. We’d lay our tools to rest for the night, letting our collective, silent gaze fall over the horizon before beginning the long rappel down. On some nights we worked late, under floodlamps that brought the living snow of dancing white insects. We’d smoke every night regardless, and still none of us knew where old Gupta got the cigarettes from. None cared. They were good and they meant relief and an end to toil. I liked to strain into the sky to see the orbiting cities and shipyards, to wonder about the men and women who toiled above us to fashion the vessel carved from asteroids that would spirit us away from this world. Some of us, at least.

But this was all before I joined up. Before I died.

Back then we would dangle our legs two hundred feet in the air over the side of the rotting ships as they lay still in the night so heavy and hot, watching as the ants of the night shift scurried across the muck beach in the low light. One cigarette per man per shift, and that was all. Guaranteed, as long as Gupta was there. The day Gupta burned to death when he ignited the gas pocket while disassembling the engine shaft was a sad one. We lost Gupta, and there were no more cigarettes.

Work began at sunrise. A few would snap open their prayer mats with a pleasing crack and lay them on the beach. I wasn’t one of them. I preferred backgammon. Gupta and I would begin the day with a few rounds, finding ourselves temporarily indebted by a credit or two to each other, the balance returned by later favours. When I think of Gupta, I remember his eyes drooping low, bottom lids the colour of the red backgammon pieces. Always that wry grin, that little finger wagging in faux reproach, his silver hair falling all over, yellowed teeth jutting and criss-crossed.

Our work should have been performed by machines. They rebuilt Kolkata using assemblers — rebuilt all the world’s cities that way — so why not gobblers for the city ships? Why the toil of human labour, squeezing us into the same work endured by our ancestors hundreds of years past, manually cutting and handling the materials of those steel castles, every one of them a behemoth to carry a quarter million people, deposited like dead fish at the mouth of the Ganges? Manpower in the absence of machine power. When every high-tech worker and automated drone is busy putting together all the harvested scrap metal to make the evacuation fleet, there isn’t much left for the grunt work.

So they tell us. Me, I think someone will come up with an excuse to continue cheap, unpaid labour until the end of time.

We would don hip waders to reach the behemoths. Our feet sank into the mud, saturated black with chemical muck, up to our knees — hands gripping rusted iron chains strung out from ship to shore to keep our balance. The essence of low-tech. People speak of a time after the Impact, when great care was taken to eliminate poverty, all human misery. That was a luxury. Now there’s a job to be done.

So they tell us.

No gobblers keeping the beach clean, either, eating up the pollution. Can’t have them running amok while the work is going on, disassembling hapless people by mistake. Years from now, when Gupta will have been in his grave for decades, and his children have their own, and the ships have been fully transmuted into the shining fleet we hope we’ll never need to use, then they’ll seal up the beach, deploy the gobblers to tidy it up, and you would never know we had trod here.

In the meantime, we sloughed through the muck each day, there and back.

I wonder, when they were readjusting the Earth’s temperature, zone by climate zone, why they couldn’t have been more merciful. Given us the cool breezes. They put everything back exactly as it had been, before the Impact. Minor variations, but that was the goal. Everything back to rights.

As we suffered in the muck, so we suffered in heat. Through the slop and stomp our faces burned and flowed with slick sweat under the unceasing sun. The heat plays tricks on you, drains you. Mistakes are made. Work becomes sloppy. Sometimes people died. Like Gupta.

I did try to save him. I wasn’t the closest, but I should’ve been: we were paired for the day. Tired from the heat, I took a break topside. I fell asleep, roused only by the blast from inside the ship. I knew the instant I woke — we’d been working the tough spots in the belly. A lot can go wrong. I cut my hands on the ancient gangways, made of materials meant to last but still rotting and jagged with age, flying down flight after flight against others flying up. Rigged up fire apparatuses spewing white foam everywhere. Yellow-clad emergency control crews muscling their way in to the scene, turning me around and showing me the way out. I was half dead from smoke inhalation by the time I got out, didn’t realize. They pulled out Gupta, two others, and laid him on the deck, in the sun.

I spent the next morning rubbing two backgammon pieces together before donning my hip-waders, trudging out into the muck again.

***

I shouldn’t make it seem like this was slave labour. I had a list kept in my pocket of all the other things I could do.

Delivery man. Glorified drone pilot. Growing a fat ass in a recliner with eyephones on, playing the equivalent of a video game. Credits per hour: seven, eight if you were efficient.

Granny boy. Someone had asked me once if I would be interested. A beautiful face, just the right mix of masculine and feminine, hair thick and lush. You’re tall, but not tall enough to be intimidating. Perfect demeanour, neither grating nor ingratiating. Credits per hour for prostituting one’s self: at least ten, but not much more. Definitely not enough.

Collector. From what I know it used to be as simple as asking for money. Collecting on debts. I imagine it takes a special kind of person to be all right with taking out another’s organs and other synthetics in arrears. Legal, moral to some, but not for a measly fifteen credits per hour.

Incorporator. I’ve never understood why people choose to incorporate, myself. Or why there seems to be a need for someone to persuade them to do so. Good benefits, but thankless work going around getting people to swear fealty for the equivalent of twenty-five credits per hour. Not to my taste. Plus, I didn’t own a suit.

Army man. It was written just like that. Not ‘Enlist,’ not ‘Forces,’ but ‘Army Man.’ Such was my knowledge. I knew it paid, and damned well. And I knew it was the only way to clinch a spot in the (pathetically small) lottery offered to the masses at large, provided you lived. But I had enough street smarts to recognize that as a scam, and just enough knowledge of science to know about the twin paradox — that I would come back from the war young, only to find Nikhila and Nithum old. Or dead. It was the only one on the list actually crossed off.

Farmer. I still laugh when I think of that one. No one farms. The vertical towers that dot the skyline farm themselves. Even the solar panels are kept spic-and-span by fleets of tiny drones firing tiny water cannons. The ‘farmers’ just handle various bullshit soft skills jobs that the automation can’t. But the holo-poster down around the corner from BB’s, perched over our hovel and beaming its message of a beautiful future day and night through our south window at all hours, still showed those glorious farmers, holding baskets plentiful with grain. In the end, only nine or so credits per hour.

Castle Man. Circled on the list. Stinking, rotting beaches with chemical effluence. Toxic materials handling. Tight spaces with sharp edges, risk of maiming and explosion. Humans, being a cheap and easy labour source for this menial but essential task in a time of crisis, do the grunt work, preparing large sections to be craned away for recycling to feed the maw of the ever-growing evacuation fleet. Private enterprise operates with special license to keep the costs down, and the speed high. To make it attractive, the pay is a whopping forty credits per hour.

A slum kid just cannot beat that kind of money.

***

Nights in Kolkata. Open shop fronts bleed silver and orange light onto ground-level streets, puckered and muddied by unceasing rain. Clusters of men dangle on stools under swollen plastic awnings, playing cards and sweating the night out, while ladies with kerchiefs tied around their heads chop and pound flat spiced meats, tossing them into the cauldrons of street stalls. On the corners, lady boys and femme synthetics linger. Even in the deafening rain a trickle of scooters flows through roads; when it ceases the scooters become a torrent of red and white light. The occasional Incorporators saunter through in pairs, like lone white cells among reds, pausing every now and then from their hushed conversations to look up at the towering, spiraling hulks of the arcologies and vertical farms, as if asking for forgiveness for descending to the lower depths for a night of debauchery and cheap shawarma.

BB’s occupies a corner away from the streets. No pavement, just gravel and mud. Palms grew through the floor and extend through the roof. When it rains water pours down the holes in the ceiling, pooling at the roots. The game of choice - pool. The drink of choice - rye whiskey.

I was at BB’s two nights after Gupta died, lungs still raw from the smoke. BB had just finished administering his famous BB shots. Administered, because they tasted like medicine, and the only way you’d be made to drink one was from BB’s outstretched hand, his face one enormous smile. Fluorescent pink. Only BB knew what was in them, and BB wasn’t telling. By the time you’d had four visits from BB with the shots, you couldn’t stumble home if you tried.

BB’s is a place for regular characters. The Global Armed Forces troops that night stuck out like clean white linens in the middle of a shit-filled street. No GAF-types called BB their watering hole, and unlike the rest of us, they were clearly from all over: a couple of them New London Compact, maybe, or Van-Seattle Ring. Another two, Korean maybe. Other three were standard blend, Sub-Saharan Africa or what used to be the Middle East. All of them falling over the table, a graveyard of empties, with raucous laughter. All of them assured of an easy confidence.

I tried to keep my eyes firmly fixed on my drink, perched myself on the stool at the bar. The image of Gupta’s tangled body, still smoking as he lay in the open air, loomed large in my mind. My eyes would flick over now and again at the rising laughter. It was impossible to express to these people that I needed this bar to be mine, and to get the fuck out.

My palm buzzed - Nikhila. I ignored the call and kept my gaze on the drink. I startled at the sharp crack of falling glass, one of the soldiers stumbling to his feet, jostling the table. The others had their hands outstretched in typical self-record style, arms around shoulders, heads bobbing, shooting strings of selfies.

“Here we are,” said one of the women, through a burp and a hiccup, at the pinprick recorder embedded in her outstretched hand, “slumming it. Ack-choooo-lee, worse than that. This is like if — if the slum, had a slum —”

“We’re on the ass of the slum’s slum!” cut in one of the others.

“Pimple on the ass of the slum’s slum.”

Now they were falling all over themselves, pissing themselves laughing. From behind the bar BB kept his gaze friendly, dispassionate, but I could see the flicker of shame. The soldier who’d knocked the table came fumbling back from the men’s room, groping at unoccupied chairs for balance. He mumbled “Fuckwhut I heard n’body —” and landed face first on one of the tables, upending it. The rest of them roared. BB raced around the bar to help the man up. The GAF waved him off and slumped back down in his seat, bleeding from the lip.

BB went back to washing some glasses and leaned in.

“Mustn’t give them a reason,” he whispered with a wink. Table slamming and chair scraping, more hoots and hollers, guttural grunts as one of them imitated a gorilla to the others’ delight.

I tapped a finger to BB’s pad, settling up.

“No more?” he asked, feigning hurt. My turn to force a smile.

“A quieter night,” I said, sliding off the stool. The GAF that had fallen was joining in the ape imitations at the table, doing his best Chimp, puckering his lips out as far as they could go.

“Problem?” he called out to me, as another said what’s he looking at? I must’ve let my gaze linger too long and too sharply.

“No problem,” I said to them.

The GAF stood, planting his hands on his table to keep himself steady. He dabbed a sleeve to his lip as he approached. He was a full foot taller, full fifty pounds bulkier. Gupta’s body in the sun. I made sure to keep my eyes locked on his.

I fully expected him to come in with a haymaker, to make a mess of my face and of BB’s establishment. Instead he stopped a foot away from me, pulled out a stool at the bar, and beckoned for me to sit back down, ordered two more drinks. I sat. BB poured us.

“You locals-s.” he started, drawing out the s, “don’t appreciate what we do. Flippin’ glances. Which of us gonna start the brawl? Hm? Which of us sold out?” He shook his head, sipped the drink. He had a young face, stubble coating fine skin the shade of coffee, that sheen of sweat from heat and booze and too much street meat. “Oh yeah, we’re crass mother fuckers. No apologies. Tonight’s our last night. Shipping out.”

“Where?”

He looked at me as though someone had just spiked a hammer through the top of my head. “Kenya. Where else, kid?”

I didn’t know much about the war, or about colonial geography, but I knew enough to know Kenya System meant a twenty-year round trip.

“You know why you don’t see gangs of GAFs like us, just returned from tour?”

“Why don’t I?”

“There aren’t gangs of GAFs, just returned from tour. We trickle back in, like spiders into the nooks. You never notice. Don’t want to be noticed. These guys,” he wiggled a thumb at the others, lost in their own beer-fueled world, “they won’t come home and do this. They come home and hole up. Never see ‘em again. Leave whatever family going in to this business, and you never want one coming out. So. . .”

He knocked back the rest of the drink.

“You’ve been before?” I asked.

He nodded. “Second time.”

“You don’t seem to be hiding in the cracks. What makes it different for you?”

He tapped the glass with his fingernail. Bobbed his head back and forth. “Well. . . I like it. I handled it better’n most.” He turned to face me. “I got a question for you, bud. What do you people think about it? Bout what we do?”

His question gave me pause. The war was something happening to others, far from here. Something that would be sorted out, taken care of. The evacuation fleet was just a precaution. Wouldn’t need it. But it was also like termites in the wood, the war against the Scyphons. Eating away at everything, unseen. You knew it was there, if you cared to remember. You knew the Scyphons were out there killing us.

I settled on saying, “Ubiquitous, so. . . forgotten.”

He chuckled. “More educated than you look.”

“I read. Can I ask you a question, then?”

“Shoot.”

“What’s it like?”

The question felt childlike, grasping, futile. I sensed I’d probably offended him. I didn’t even know his name. He surprised me a second time by answering.

He opened his mouth two or three times before settling on an answer. He turned to me like a conspirator, sharing a secret too funny for his compatriots to hear. “That’s ballsy, kid. Well. . . It’s a joke. They call it a war, I guess. It’s more like a. . . a party. Starts orderly, gets wild as people get hammered, then it’s night and you’re all spilling into the backyard tripping on bottles and puking and shitting yourself in the grass. And people are there for all different reasons. You’ve got the ones who just need something to do, ones who definitely want to get laid or just fuck anything that moves, ones that hang out on the wall and don’t get involved, the ones get ripped and dance on the table, middle of things, ones who start shit and knock teeth out, ones who want to be there to hurt and get hurt.” He frowned, reviewing the profundity of his words. “Yep. Forty years back when things started, thought we had things figured out pretty well.” He laughed openly, warmly even. “But, no. Now we’re all in the backyard puking what we binged on.”

“Did you sign up for the lottery?”

“Kid, do the math. Ten years out, two years on the ground, ten years back. Only three subjective years for me. Could’ve stayed on Kenya but I prefer home. So that’s twenty-two years right there. Back then the war was just starting. You probably weren’t even born. When I signed up, there was no lottery. This. . .” He gestured grandly around the bar, to the street, to everything. “Things were top-notch before they figured they’d better put every man, woman, and child in the human race to work 24-7. Not like now.

“But look. Better question is,” he pointed to his comrades again, “why’d they join? They got maybe a one in a thousand shot at making it through in one piece, then another one in ten-thousand chance of getting a lottery pick for their families. Do the math. Odds ain’t great.” He called for another from BB, pressed his thumb to the pad to pay, and drank it down in one gulp. “Then again, better’n nothing. You look like a good kid and all, but forgive me for saying you look ineligible for the draw. Right?”

I nodded.

“These guys, they got a bit of hope.”

“Lots of people do.”

“Look around, kid. Watch the news. You believe that?”

I didn’t say anything.

He stood, clasped my shoulder, said, “That cloud’s coming, kid. Maybe we stop it. Maybe not. Think about where you wanna be when it gets here.” Then he rejoined his group.

I watched the young men and women around the table enjoy their last night on Earth for another minute before stepping into the looming white screens and pounding rain. I pulled that tattered list from my pocket and began to wonder.

Next Chapter: 4. Petty