Chapter 0 #

“Order up! #103?”

The cook’s gray apron and red polo shirt were soaked through with sweat, and his thin mustache and long black hair curled from the humidity behind him. Steam and smoke emerged from the small noodle shop’s front window like ghosts escaping the underworld. The short, stocky asian man leaned out, underneath the bright orange neon sign, Lu’s Noodles, and looked around.

“Tonketsu Ramen, extra egg, extra meat! #103!” Lu said angrily, slamming the vinyl menu below the counter to make a harsh plastic clattering sound.

That was his signature move. When a customer wasn’t fast enough, he’d pound that sign with his palm to make a giant racket. You had to do that in the sweeps, otherwise people would just walk all over you. People down here weren’t as polite as on the skyway.

A small crowd had formed in front of the noodle joint. Each had placed their order electronically by sending them in through their comms-link wrist transmitters. The orders came in instantly, as did payment. This wall shop (and there were many more like it nearby) could run with only a single employee. But it was hard work staying on top of so many customers.

The dinner rush had brought in plenty, and it was standing room only around the popular eatery. There were bums, vagrants, exotic dancers, peace-keepers. a priest, three homeless children in rags, delivery drivers, mechanics, a private school teacher, a couple net-addicts with bloodshot eyes and dangling headsets, a pair of street horror actors dressed as freakish clowns, a dozen or so middle-management types wearing sleek suits, and lastly, one young man of note.

Yuri Asimonov. 18. Cadet, grade 3. Dark hair, brown eyes, pale skin. At 5’7”, he stood a few inches shorter than most men in the crowd. His military-style canvas pants had the word CADET sewn length-wise into the leg. The pants may have been part of his uniform, but the light boots and jacket weren’t. His headphones covered his ears and his music played so loudly he almost didn’t hear the plastic sign banging.

“#103, order up!!” The cook shouted again.

Yuri walked towards the hole in the wall noodle joint, ignoring the whizzing, popping, shlacking electronics that marched and gyrated around it. They were old toys that had washed in and been repurposed as “eye-catchers” to lure in new customers.

“I’m #103.” Yuri said, rolling up his sleeve to show the order number on his transmitter screen.

“Finally, it’s always you, kid! Take your headphones off while you wait!” The chef said, practically throwing the bag at him, before rushing back to his kitchen.

“You hold up the line for everybody else!” He called angrily from inside, as if he was ranting to himself.

Yuri didn’t reply. He just took his food and tried to escape nearby scowling customers. The boy’s head drooped and he tried quickly to get away.

The cadet squeezed through the crowd and started walking back down the alley he’d come from. It was cramped, dark, and dripping with sea water. Practically everything was in the sweeps. It was the New Miami underground, quite literally. New was built on top of old like a pier or boardwalk, and that meant water when the tide rolled in through the ruins of the old city.

Yuri was headed up to the skyway, the portion of new development that was built on risers and support beams. Layer by layer, New Miami rose vertically and crept inland. Rising sea levels had eventually demolished most of the original city, just like neo globalism had demolished the city’s blend of southern-cubano culture.

Now, it was just like all the other super cities. Swollen with people and overdeveloped by feverish greed. However, the sweep held onto the last breaths of counter-culture. Food was still homemade down here, even if the restaurants had no seating and had to hermetically seal themselves closed every few hours with the tide.

Yuri climbed and old metal staircase at the end of the alley, followed the platform through two giant cylindrical struts, and continued following the scaffolding to a coil of rope-lifts. The young man picked up a red one, looped his foot and hand through the cords, and hit the climb button to be pulled up higher through the sweeps.

The next level had more light, and more people too. A small band of punks had a couple of suitcase stands open, selling zines. The small, handmade booklets recycled the discarded paper products from the skyway to package art, poetry, and political essays.

They were more than that, of course, but that’s how Yuri had explained them to his father. Back in Kiev, he’d never been exposed to indie publishing, but here, on his own in this strange American supercity, he had discovered an insatiable appetite for them. He chose three, and he and the vendors took turns connecting the cords from their gate banks to make the transactions.

He hid the zines in his jacket’s inner pocket and continued, ramen in tow. The next rope-lift took him to a level with lots of seedy shops. A trio of old buskers watched him walk past another restaurant. They all had high-end instruments despite looking like bums. The auto-samplers for drums, guitar and piano were connected to a single central speaker. As the trio played, the sounds would remix and feed into the output.

The music it produced was a jazzy rock, and was very unique. Their “tip jar” worked the same way the noodle joint’s did. An open comms-link channel could redirect the user straight to their gate bank transfer. People just had to tune in and choose how much to donate.

Yuri didn’t feel like giving, and he could feel them glaring at him all the way to the service elevator at the end of the mall. He climbed in alone and rode the huge elevator up to the top floor of the sweep, the old horizon floor.

Old horizon was the original skyway, but ironically was quickly built over by current skyway developers. During the massive population explosion earlier in the millenium, article 1448 was introduced, allowing real estate developers to buy the air rights over properties from the government instead of the property owner.

Article 1448 would have been hugely unpopular and never passed in another era, but most of the FTA was starving at the time. Super cities like New Miami allowed greater density of agricultural spaces across the globe. As horrible as living there was, the consolidation probably helped humanity survive total collapse under its own weight, as arable land continued to shrink every year.

Old horizon was the most dangerous level in the whole city, as it was the largest continuous level and the last non-patrolled level before the modern skyway began. The skyway was highly policed, and calm, but grifters patrolled old horizon, looking for easy marks.

Luckily, Yuri didn’t need to go far, and quickly found the escalator to take him into the basement of the skyway. Riding it up, graffiti faded into scratched chrome walls, and the scratched chrome walls were eventually covered over by faded seafoam plastic panels.

Basement 2, as it was called, had plenty of traffic. The mass transit trains took people wherever they wanted to go, on an easy to follow grid system. Other, vertical tracks existed to lift citizens higher, but were only just beginning to be built. Eventually, a new skyway would replace the current one, and more vertical infrasturcture would be built. Since Article 1448’s adoption over 250 years ago, many more planning and zoning regulations for vertical space had been introduced.

Yuri stepped foot into the small, single-cell train car with a few others and found the comms-link frequency to select his destination. He chose the very farthest drop point to the east, Terminal M20.

As he rode, a Vodspot tv in the corner of the car was tuned to local news. On screen, a white man, black man, and asian woman were having a heated discussion. It was annoying everyone in the train car.

“We need to strengthen our trade controls with the Durok amd Zard empires. We cannot keep trading with them at a deficit!” The white guy raved.

“You’re out of your mind! The more we trade with aliens, the better our technology gets every single time. We can’t let them out develop us!” The black guy yelled back.

That’s all politics coverage ever was in this country. Yelling, yelling, yelling. Nobody ever listens to each other.

“I think you both make good points. We’ll pick back up after a short commercial break, but stay tuned for our next talking point: The 3926 midterm elections are in full swing for North America. How will voters respond to more policy changes from the FTA?” The asian woman said, closing the segment.

He rode that train car all the way to the east edge of the city, where he found hopped on a different train car to take him south. The eastbound trip had more traffic. Train cars would autonomously dart on and off the main grid line tracks, to make stops for their passengers. Apparently, lots of people wanted to head west on that line, so it took longer to redirect.

After about 45 minutes, he had reached the south-eastern edge of the metropolis. Ruined skyscrapers from the old city of Miami stood out of the ocean for miles farther beyond, like the last fingers of a drowning hand.

Yuri walked towards the hole in the fenceline and the edge of the skyway. He stepped through the fence hole, then around the orange construction barriers, so that nothing stood between him and the edge of the superstructure. Hundreds of meters below him, the ocean rolled in and under the massive metal supercity.

Locked into one of the mounting points for the construction barriers, was a rope-lift retractor engine. One he’d installed himself. He picked up the hand cord and looped his foot in, before slowly easing over the edge.

He rode the rope-lift down, past the vertical layers of New Miami, which receded back from the skyway’s edge in a concave curve. Faded plastic and greased rail lines blended into exposed steel and rust, garbage, and thick support structs.

Birds of all kinds flocked in the massive concave canopy, their nests interspersed with torn wire bundles and insulation. Below, the ocean swirled and rippled around the struts and random platforms, many of which were covered in moss or algae of some kind. These platforms were the roofs of submerged buildings in Old Miami’s periphery.

The bottom of the rope-lift was fixed to one of these platforms, hooked around the base of a dirty satellite dish on the flat roof. Perhaps the building below had been a small radio or news station, before the ocean rose.

Yuri plummeted toward the roof of the building, until finally, at the last second, he dialed back the descent speed and touched down on it. From there, he unhooked himself from the rope lift, and left it behind.

Beside this building, standing waist-deep in the ocean, was a giant metal robot. The boy had left it there earlier, before going into the city. It was his, on loan from the FTA military academy he was attending, but he felt a sense of ownership over it now. He’d been training in it for the last 3 months.

The mech was painted a beige tan and stood nearly a hundred meters tall. Its arms, legs, and torso were thick and boxy steel plate armor. Elbows and knees and other joints were covered in a flexible, semi-translucent, black mesh. That mesh kept the circuitry contained, but you could still see a faint rainbow of tiny LED lights inside when the mech was running.

The head was based on a helmet design from ancient Sparta. It was meant to inspire a sense of indomitable power. Sixty years ago, when FTA-contracted designers were developing it, they named the model series AJAX, after the ancient Greek hero. It was now the series that made up the majority of FTA mech units, though this was an older retired model, with plenty of visible wear and tear.

The mech stood in the water beside the building, and Yuri walked towards it. With his transmitter, Yuri opened the chest door of the mech and pulled his red and yellow beach chair out of it. Then, the boy laid out a little picnic for himself on the roof of the submerged building.

As he slurpped and read the zines he’d purchased earlier, he thought about how he’d spend the rest of the day before returning to the academy. His day off was almost over, and tomorrow he’d be back to movement and combat drills in the mech. He wanted to make the most of his free time. Maybe he would swim or watch the sunset from the beach.

Being stationed near the Gulf of Mexico had its perks.