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A Very Good Day

Find out what is truly valuable in the world of the future.

By JM SolomonPublished 3 years ago 10 min read
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Your heart punches you in the back of the sternum and you jerk awake suddenly, gagging on a scream.

The first thing you notice is the air. It’s thick and damp, and choked with a smell so dense you can actually taste it - like eating a spoonful of rancid peanut butter and not having anything wet to wash it down with. You smack your tongue desperately against your palate, searching for a pocket of saliva to soften the grimy film coating your mouth. It almost works, but not really.

The next thing you notice is the light. Or rather, you notice that there is none. You grind the back of one wrist into your eye sockets, and are rewarded with dim blotches of almost-color on your retina that disappear quickly, leaving you in the same moist darkness as before.

The only thing to see is nothing. The only thing you perceive is the wet, cloying stench of the blackness around you. The feeling of it crushes in, baleful, relentless, as if it would grind you into nothing and subsume you in the limitless heft of its own void.

This is all very regular.

You roll over and feel for the body next to you. Your four-fingered hand finds the familiar lump of Uriah right where they always are – curled tightly in a ball, their rough, plasticky blanket pulled up over their face as though they were trying to shut out the light. Which is ridiculous, because there is none. You poke them gently in the back of the shoulder.

“Uriah,” you whisper, “Morning.”

“Mmph,” they grunt uncooperatively.

You prod them again, a little less gently. “We only have a few hours before the rain starts again. Get up.”

There is a crinkle as Uriah curls a little tighter, opining into the muffle of their own elbows, “Mmmmpffff…”

“Uriah, unless you want to eat wet dirt for lunch today, you have to get up.”

The crinkling stops for a moment, while Uriah weighs the pros and cons of getting up against eating wet dirt. Finally, with a childish reluctance you can sense through the darkness, they uncurl and sit up. You can’t see them, but you know they probably look terrible, their strange, dust-colored eyes bloodshot and decoupaged shut with rheum. You hear them smacking their tongue roughly against their palate to clean the scum. You know it almost works, but not really. Finally, they reach out and push a hand against your chest – you cup your five-fingered hand around their hand loosely.

“Where?” you feel them sign sloppily. They’re still not completely alert.

“I think there’s a newer wreck on the other side of that place we went yesterday. We should check there first, and then we can take the long loop around to avoid the checkpoint. I only have enough money for a half-cycle of Vit D and a shot of lighter fluid, so I really, REALLY don’t want to give up half of it to those idiots.”

Uriah puts their hand back up against your sternum – “Too far walking.”

“It’s not if we start now and move quickly. Get up. Where’s the lantern?”

“Need batteries.”

“Ugh. I guess we’ll add batteries to the list, then. Hopefully we find something good to sell.”

You gather up your sleeping area as best you can in the pitch black and feel around for your boots. One of them is almost entirely constructed of cheap duct tape at this point, the metal toe cap rubbing stubbornly through no matter how many layers you add. But if you can’t afford more than two weeks of vitamin D, you definitely can’t afford new boots. You lace them up tightly, wrapping your ankles and shins carefully in homemade plastic-bag gaiters. The rainy season means extra steps have to be taken to keep everything dry – a damp sock will mildew swiftly in the perpetually humid air, and only the rich have enough money to blow on the extra heat it takes to dry things out. Most people have lost at least part of an extremity to wet rot. Toenails are a luxury.

Once you’ve finished swaddling yourself in polyethylene, you wrap your face scarf over your nose and mouth and buckle a ragged fanny pack around your waist. This bag was probably pink at some point in its life, but it is now a dingy mauve. It also has a white cat face emblazoned on it and a greeting written below in puffy glitter letters. It might be your favorite possession. Uriah found it in an abandoned campsite and gave it to you for your birthday a couple years ago.

The outside of your favorite bag is just cheap nylon, but the lining – which is miraculously intact – is at least partially cotton. This makes it extra valuable, since plant-based materials are almost impossible to manufacture – nothing much will grow outside of the government’s artificial environments, and anything that does decays almost immediately in the foul wetness. Sometimes you slip your hand in the pack just to feel the softness of the natural fiber and imagine a long-gone world where entire shirts were made of cellulose.

Now that you’re fully outfitted, you crouch and push through several layers of heavy rubber sheeting until you emerge into the thin light of day. You scramble up the muddy embankment and out of the putrid sinkhole you call home, being careful not to catch your jacket on the jagged tibia of rebar that jut up out of the muck. On the one hand, it’s a shit place to build a shelter. On the other hand, the terrible location means nobody will look for it.

Uriah peers up at the rancid underbelly of the cloud cover. The air is a soupy yellow-gray.

“Nice day,” they sign, without irony. You pull down your scarf for a moment and inhale deeply – it smells like someone vomited old milk into a rubber tire and then set it on fire.

Not bad, really. A good day for foraging.

It’s a decent distance to the new wreck you want to hunt, but there’s a fragment of broken highway you can take part of the way, which speeds your progress considerably. It only takes about an hour of steady walking before you see it peeking through the haze. As you get closer, you realize it’s not as ideal a location as you’d hoped it would be – the three-story building has collapsed in on itself like a cheap umbrella, with piles of metal and rotten brick tipped precariously against one another like playing cards. A hovercopter that has crashed into it is charred and twisted, but not yet eaten away by rust, which means it’s still fresh enough to hold the possibility of value.

Uriah makes a dubious sound in their throat.

“Don’t be a baby,” you scoff, wending your way towards the semi-structure. “It’s just a little wobbly. I think we’ll be fine.”

Your companion shakes their head at the sagging cavern. “That’s a deathtrap,” they sign emphatically, “There’s probably already a corpse trapped under there.”

“A corpse with money in its pockets?”

They roll their funny-colored eyes at you.

“C’mon, we’ll just be super careful. Look how fresh it is. I’ll bet we find useable batteries still stashed in some shitty coffeemaker. There might even be emergency rations in the ‘copter – unless you still had your heart set on wet dirt.”

You step carefully over a jumble of masonry and make your way into the dim grotto of the wreck. Uriah sighs their “you are a complete idiot” sigh behind you. But the thought of rations is a strong motivator, and they eventually tiptoe in, ducking a little to avoid remnants of shatterproof glass dangling from the upper lip of the window.

Once inside, you start pawing delicately through the piles of rubble. There’s a lot of mushy particleboard, a smashed computer monitor with genitalia spray-painted on it, a novelty water bottle (score!), a myriad of cheap pens with a pleasantly generic company logo on them ... You hear Uriah whistle behind you, and you turn to see them balanced on the cockpit of the hovercopter and holding three jumbo-sized ration bars over their head in triumph.

“Fuck yeah!” you shout. “Told you!”

Uriah stuffs the bars into the oversized pockets of their coat and starts to clamber down from their perch, but as they step off the landing skid onto the remnants of the floor, the craft behind them makes a faint, high-pitched groaning sound. The tiny whine quickly crescendos into an angry roar of metal on metal on masonry, and before your mouth even has time to form a warning, the twisted wreckage tips sideways into the opposite wall, which immediately surrenders to Newtonian physics and begins to fall. It leans over in a strange, slow curve – like a tidal wave made of cinder blocks – and relinquishes support of the ceiling, which capitulates completely.

“URIAH!”

You feel yourself scream, but it’s inaudible over the crunching howl of the second floor collapsing. You squeeze your eyes shut against the blast of brick dust, then open them again to a swirling haze of particles.

“Uriah! Shit fuck! Uriah!”

You scramble towards the place they had been standing. You begin to wrench rotten studs off the pile of rubble, bracing for the worst, prepared to see their thin, lifeless body muddled into pulp under a slab of cement.

Finally, your bloodied hands come upon a cold rectangle of metal. It’s a filing cabinet. It caught itself on a spar of wall mid-plummet, and in doing so shielded a low triangle of empty space below it. And in that empty pocket, crouched in a ball and completely unharmed, is Uriah.

“Oh my gods,” you heave in relief. “Fuck me. Are you okay?”

Uriah lifts their head cautiously, cheeks chalky with dust and pupils like hubcaps. They raise a hand from the floor and sign shakily:

“I’m fine. What’s up?”

“You’re an asshole, I hate you. Thank god you aren’t dead.”

You kneel down to help them up, your boots crunching on a scatter of office supplies that has exploded over the scene. An electric pencil sharpener lies splintered near Uriah’s left knee, and they pick it up carefully as they emerge.

“Hey look. Batteries.”

“Oh, well thank goodness. At least your brush with death wasn’t a total waste.”

As they emerge from their miraculous cubby of life, you both look over the items that have fallen from the mangled drawers. It’s mostly small useless metal things – staples, brads, binder clips – but you also notice something black and square tucked down under the lowest edge of the cabinet. You flatten your chest against the floor and stretch your arm out to investigate.

It’s a book.

You wipe it off carefully with your sleeve. The cover feels heavy and organic. You open the front and gently blow the dust from the inside.

… It’s a real book.

“Hey … “ you breathe. “Is this … ?”

You hold it up in a dingy sunbeam. Uriah takes it from you and looks at it carefully. They turn it over in their hands, open it, push their nose into the inner spine and inhale. They freeze. They sniff again, more deeply. They close it very slowly and look at you.

“This is paper.”

“Are you sure? It’s not just a poly flimsy?”

“No. This is real plant fiber. This is PAPER.”

You snatch the book back and leaf through it. It’s pristine, filled with heavy, creamy leaves of perfectly blank paper – not a mark of ink or spot of mold on it. It must have been caught behind a drawer in the cabinet and then knocked free when it fell through the ceiling.

“You know what this means? Real paper goes for $200 a page on the black market. If that thing has 100 pages, and they’re all perfectly clean …”

You look up at them in awe.

“We’re fucking rich.”

future
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About the Creator

JM Solomon

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