Ben had been jailed for nearly a week, without pay, for brawling with a site foreman at the sewage processing plant where he’d been assigned. This was Ben’s second offense that year. It had been nearly twelve months since his assault on the graduation administrator. A third workforce related incident would result in a penal reclassification and he would be shipped to one of the mining compounds that clung to the various moons and asteroids that filled the Baen system.
Something about Samuel’s posture as he waited for his friend had struck Sura as indicative of life in Grotto as a whole, and she needed to capture it. At first, she snapped several photos before approaching him, and then the troubled young man had agreed to remain and allow her more photos.
“I don’t have a license for it, so no quality control division or public surveillance office is going to hire me to gallivant around the Baen system,” she had said, brazenly snapping away at Samuel as he sat on the concrete steps of a Grotto executive office spire, “But I just love doing it, so when I’m off shift I just travel wherever the metro takes me and shoot what’s interesting.”
“What do you do with your photos after you take them?” Samuel had asked incredulously as he did his best not to stare at her. She was easily the most attractive woman who had ever spoken to him. “I’ve never seen anyone take photos for no reason.”
“There’s plenty of reasons. To see things in a different way, maybe show people something new.” She had laughed easily as she snapped a few more before sitting down next to Samuel and showing him some of the photos in her digital display, “Have you ever seen yourself? Like through someone else’s eyes?”
“I’m nobody special, why would it matter?” Samuel asked, trying to follow her logic, until she came upon a particularly stark photo of him that she had taken before speaking to him. Samuel was taken aback at how haggard he looked. With the hard edges of the Spire in the background, and her black and white filter, it was a grim image.
“I see a man who knows that the universe is a hard place, that life under Grotto Corporation is a heavy thing,” Sura said as she showed him the photo, seemingly so caught up in the shot that she didn’t notice as Samuel looked at her, “But he strives to carry on. There’s power in that.”
Samuel looked at himself in the mirror of the tiny wash unit that occupied a corner of the bar he had asked Ben to meet him at for a drink. Two years on the assembly line and to his eyes he looked far older than twenty.
There was a toll being paid by his body and mind, he thought to himself, and it wasn’t until now that he realized just how telling that photo Sura had taken really was.
He and Sura had continued talking, and over the next few weeks found themselves enjoying each other’s company more and more as their budding friendship transformed into more.
Sura saw the world so differently from Samuel, and he felt as if she was a sun around which he was an orbiting planet. Sura also worked in food service, though she often had to push for re-assignment due to unwanted attention from co-workers or site foremen and she always teetered on the edge of financial ruin as a result.
Samuel was their foundation, and though they often found themselves having to make hard choices about their life-style, they managed to be as happy as a Grotto couple could be. She often told him that she thought it no accident that they found each other among the swell of humanity, and together, they strived to make the best of their lot in life. They had lived like that for just over a year, until last week.
Sura was pregnant.
Samuel walked back to his table, where Ben sat nursing a beverage so day-glow green it looked radioactive. The other man had a similar weary look despite his young age, understandably so, since Ben had been working in waste disposal.
It was a grueling, physical job, and since Grotto Corporation had determined that manual labor was a cheaper alternative to high-end machinery, whenever possible, assembly lines, factories, and in Ben’s case, waste disposal, used hard physical labor in place of machines.
Ben had echoed Samuel’s father in his frustrated indictment that Grotto had intentionally regressed and eschewed technological advancement in favor of further expanding the Great and Holy Bottom Line.
“So what did you want to talk about, man?” asked Ben as Samuel sat down and took a furtive sip from his own glass. “I know you only drink like, once every hundred years, so I figure whatever you’ve got to say it’s big.”
“Do you remember that REAPER card?” Samuel said after knocking back his entire drink and gesturing to the waitress for a second round. “It’s been on my mind lately.”
“Brother, you invite me out to a bar, which you never do, you get three drinks in before saying anything other than small talk and then you open with that?” laughed Ben as he took a swig of his drink, “Seems like you’ve been thinking real hard about it.”
“Sura is pregnant,” Samuel stated, then paused as Ben took another swallow while the waitress brought Samuel’s refill.
They sat in grim silence for a full minute before Ben finally spoke, “You’re going to do it, aren’t you?”
“It’s already done,” stated Samuel as he took a strong pull from his drink, “I signed the contract this morning.”
“Whoa, man! Hold on a minute. Does Sura know? Did she see this coming?” sputtered Ben, baffled at his friend’s casual delivery of such grave news.
“The physician confirmed it two days ago, we’re having a boy,” rasped Samuel, as if Ben hadn’t spoken, his voice choking up with emotion as his eyes began to moisten, “His name is going to be Orion.”
“I mean, congratulations brother, but seriously, Sura has no idea what you’ve signed on for? What you’ve signed her on for?” Ben asked.
“She won’t like it, but she’ll come around. You’ve said it yourself a thousand times, Ben, we’re born into a life we can’t escape from, just like our parents. If I don’t do something to change that, then Orion is going to end up just like me,” Samuel growled in frustration, the edge of his voice hardened by the alcohol. “You were right to punch that son of a bitch at graduation. This was a raw deal from the start.”
“So why are you telling me and not Sura right now, huh?” Ben retorted just before draining his glass and gesturing to the waitress for another.
“The recruiter said that Baen system is one week away from a new fleet founding. If you sign on now, we’d end up in the same unit,” Samuel said, his gaze downcast and his foot tapping nervously on the floor. “I didn’t want to tell Sura until I could also tell her that you had my back. She’s always thought the world of you.”
“I’m one fist fight away from a penal colony, not sure what she sees in me,” Ben laughed.
“That’s my point. You don’t back down. That makes you a crappy janitor,” Samuel insisted, “but I bet that would make you a hell of a soldier.”
“Now you sound like a recruiter,” Ben growled as he accepted the new drink from the waitress and sucked down half of it in one strong pull. “There a signing bonus if you get me to come with?”
“This is Grotto, of course there’s a bonus for convincing your friends to sign on the dotted line,” snorted Samuel as he finished his drink, “Look, just think about it. Being line workers and shit shovelers on Baen 6 is no kind of life, not for us, and not for our families. We could do this, and make something better for ourselves.”
Samuel finished his drink and set a disposable credit stick on the table to cover the tab. He patted Ben’s shoulder and left the bar.
Ben sat alone for quite some time, saying nothing. Eventually, he finished his drink and pulled a brand new REAPER card from his jacket pocket, turning it over and over in his hands before slotting it into his handheld data-pad.