I wanted to take a taxi, but I knew better than to make any conspicuous display of wealth, so I walked down to the railroad station and boarded a train to my home city. I had been brought up in Albuquerque since I had been very young and I hadn’t seen anything of the rest of the planet. I’d seen more of Terra Nova than I had of Earth. The UN kept telling us all about the fantastic improvements it had made in defending the Earth’s biosphere, but if that were the case, why was the air so polluted? I didn’t want to think about what was powering the train, but it seemed to move all right, even though it was packed. I dreaded to imagine what would happen if I had been a pregnant woman. No one cared on Earth.
It wasn’t easy, but I pushed the thought aside and thought about my family instead. I’d sent several messages to my parents, telling them that I would be coming home for a visit, but they hadn’t replied. I found that worrying, but Mom had never been one to learn how to use a communications terminal properly. She knew nothing — and I had known nothing, until I boarded the Jacques Delors — about how the terminal really worked. It was quite possible that one of the many computer filters built in to prevent the spread of hate speech had eaten her messages, although I hoped not. Sending more than a handful of hateful messages — as defined by the filters — meant a mandatory class on avoiding hate speech. One of my friends from school had had to sit through one and he’d never been quite the same since.
I didn’t dare sleep on the train — too many of my fellow passengers looked desperate enough to steal what little I had on me — and so I watched as the massive habitation malls of Albuquerque came into view. They’d been built at least a hundred years ago, I’d been told, each one capable of housing thousands of people in reasonable comfort at the time. They weren’t now. The vast majority of them were effectively governed by petty criminals and corrupt policemen. No wonder that the people wanted to escape the cesspool, whatever it took. It had taken me to Luna Base and the Academy.
It looks worse than I remember, I thought, as I stepped off the train. The railroad station had actually been linked to the underground system for reasons that I’m sure had made sense at the time, but now no one with any brains would go into them for fear of his life. When I’d been younger, we had used to run through them on a dare, before being exposed to more adult pleasures like drugs and girls. A handful of my female classmates had become prostates before even reaching the legal Age of Consent, just to keep their boyfriends (and pimps) happy. Others had cheerfully rolled their clients for money. I was tempted to walk through the tunnels anyway, for old time’s sake, but it wouldn’t have been wise. I walked through the streets instead.
My family had always lived in Harrison Ford Mall, named for someone who had otherwise been removed from history. I’d looked him up once on the Internet and found nothing, although the deeper levels of the net had suggested a movie career. It towered ahead of me as I walked through the grin streets, noting with disapproval how much litter had simply been dumped there, but as I drew closer, it became apparent that something was seriously wrong. Half of the Mall was a burned out ruin, populated only by louts and drunkards. The remainder looked deserted.
I stopped and stared, helplessly. Where were they? I wanted to run forward and search the entire mall, but even as I moved forward I knew it was a fool’s errand. The whole mall should have been torn down and rebuilt, but instead… it had just been abandoned. What had happened, I asked myself desperately; where was my family? What had happened…?
I felt two fingers sneaking into my pockets and caught them, hard enough to hurt. I turned to see a young boy, barely nine years old if that, staring up at me. He might have been handsome under other circumstances, but one of his eyes was missing, replaced by a cloth patch. He opened his mouth to scream and I squeezed harder. I wasn’t going to let him off lightly.
“All right,” I said, picking him up effortlessly. He weighed barely anything. I knew how his life would go in the future. He’d die, soon enough, or be sold to a pimp to satisfy the really unpleasant set of customers. “If you scream, I’ll snap your neck, understand?” He nodded, terrified. No one would have stood up to him before. The odds were that he was giving some of his loot to a more senior gang. “What happened to this place?”
He stared at me. “I don’t know,” he said. I started to squeeze harder. “There was a fire and the place burned down and everyone was killed…”
“That’s impossible,” I said, shocked. There had been tens of thousands of people in the mall. There were also fire-suppressing systems and…
I cursed. What was I thinking? This wasn’t the Jacques Delors, with Captain Harriman and the Senior Chief and the Engineer and the rest of the crew. This was Albuquerque, a city in the Pan-American Union, controlled by people who didn’t care what happened to their citizens. The brightly-coloured posters on the wall advertising the wonders and glories of the People’s Progressive Party, the National Socialist Workers Party and the Communist League of Freedom meant nothing. The real rulers of the city were not chosen in anything so droll as an election…
The little thief wiggled free and ran. I let him go, knowing what it must have been like for anyone caught in the blaze. If I’d stayed, maybe…no, that was foolish. Once the fire had started, it would have spread quickly, particularly if the systems had failed completely. If I had been there, I would have died with the others of my family…
The bastards didn’t bother to even tell me, I thought, angrily. There had been some updates from Earth, but none of them had been addressed to me, nor had they discussed disasters like a fire that killed tens of thousands. The media wouldn’t have mentioned it at all. No one on Earth, apart from those in Albuquerque, would have known about the fire; they certainly wouldn’t have realised that it could have been prevented, if proper maintenance had been undertaken. Suddenly, everything fell into perspective; the men and women I’d recovered from the freighter were needed here, because Earth no longer produced competent minds! I hadn’t understood just what the Senior Chief had meant, until now.
“There he is,” someone shouted. I turned slightly to see the little thief. He wasn’t alone either. “I told you he was here.”
A gang, I realised. There were only four of them, but they swaggered along as if they owned the place, and, in many ways, they did. They wore red shirts, the better to mark themselves as members of the Bloody Blades, and carried metal sticks on their backs. They wouldn’t have any firearms, of course, or energy weapons, but they were quite intimidating enough to the average citizen. I knew what I was meant to do; run, throwing my wallet on the ground behind me, but somehow I no longer cared. I watched them swaggering closer and I realised, with a flicker of delighted amusement, that they didn’t have the slightest idea of what they were doing.
And then I recognised one of them. “Hello, Jase,” I said, calmly. He’d been a bully back at school, despite the best attempts of the teachers, and somehow I wasn’t surprised to discover that he’d joined a Gang. There were thousands upon thousands of kids like him; too under-qualified to get a job or go to the Academy, too smart or cowardly to be attracted to the Infantry, and otherwise without prospects. They wandered the streets, extorting what they could and dealing in drugs and prostitutes. My family were dead…and he had survived? “Journey’s end in lovers meetings, as they say?”