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Mosaie was truly happy to be in bed this morning. She did not sleep well last night and was troubled by the dreams that she had. Dreams influenced by her environment. Horrible dreams that would stay with her for a lifetime. She lived in a section of the Habitat that was less than desirable. A place infested with stagnation and decay of broken dreams and broken hearts.
It was bad enough to be exiled from the Earth, so the elders say, but she had never known any other life. She knew nothing of the Artificial Intelligence called GAIA or the Great Expulsion that was to allow the blue orb below to return to its original ecology. Or of the fear and terror that the exiles felt, even though the old orbital had been disinfected of hostile nanites by GAIA's blue goo. They said that anything that could destroy human civilisation as easily as the nanoswarms couldn't be deactivated so easily. And why trust GAIA anyway? They would take back the Earth, they cried, and become master of it again, and destroy all the machines for ever, and all the googols and metalheads and freaks and hippies and the rest.
But these were just words, words and slogans of the Ludds and Anthropists and Christians and Moslems and all the others, who daubed their slogans everywhere and were so ready to fight a war to reclaim Earth, but so slow to clean up their own home, to establish some kind of order here.
For three generations they had ranted and raved and bickered among themsleves, lacking the technology, the resources, and most of all the unity to put their plans into action. And each generation life on Von Braun Habitat, as it used to be known, deteriorated further.
The housing modules were located in what was once a warehouse section of the Habitat. They were shabby and run down from a lack of enthusiasm and the Habitat Council never seemed able to find the materials or the inclination to repair or upgrade the modules with newer and better quality building materials. The residents were poor and lusterless, lacking in dreams, ambitions, and determination to succeed. Actually there were no guidelines to help them or to teach them to succeed. No role models to learn from. Even the Anthropists never came here anymore.
There were a few people wanting to succeed to get out of the units and migrate to some of the more comfortable parts of the orbital. They devised plans to save money each week from their paychecks. The money was practically worthless of course, just a crazy scheme instituted by Willard Harmer III, an ex-corporate raider who had lost everything when he, along with the rest, were herded into the transports, and who, arriving at Von Braun, quickly started running things along lines he knew. Making people work, although the work was useless, and the equipment didnt work. Mosaie sees his image everywhere, a hero they call him. His stupid holographic images - the smiling too handsome face - seemed to be the only things taht still worked around here.
Some of Mosaie's neighbours have worked hard to plant a few flowers and bushes and other photosynthetics to improve the oxygen content, to fix up their little places with scraps of moldo fabric here and some video paint there. But somehow the Willards - that is what the money was called - would always go to pay for getting a body part mended or a recycler unit fixed. Sometimes a family would succeed and leave going to the next place in the stratified society of the Station. A feeling of hope would replace the total despair. This hope would last for a short period of time only to be booted out by depression of spirit.
In the day cycle, when the sun shone weakly through the vast grimy mirrors that focused light along the great length of the habitat, the units did not look so bad. In the middle of the day the people would walk up and down the walkways in between the units. Making noise and conversation as they ambled briskly or just shuffled by the little dwellings. They did their best street business at this hour. At least the honest type of street business. Selling in stalls along the walkways or trading with each other whatever surplus of goods they had.
Some of the men made a whistling sound. This helped them to block out the thoughts that tormented them. They would do this while going to buy booze. The booze helped them ignore the fact that their dreams had died. It wasn't so much that they were lacking in dreams but as they matured the dreams were quieted and stifled until they were fragments of memory and nothing important to worry about.
The unbalanced microclimate of the Orbital, and the poor atmospheric circulation of the warehouse sector meant the air became stifling hot, and for all the grime and layers of encrusted algae and dirt along the internal mirror facets, the sun would shine with a glaring white light that gave little to warm the hearts of the baselines living on this Space Station. The housing units painted white in color reflected this light. Each one looking the same as its neighbor. Between the brightness of the sun and the color of the units the humans were blinded as to what was necessary to do about their horrible living conditions. Truly a lifestyle of squalor producing a sense of defeat and pessimism was felt amongst the population of this section of neglect in the Orbital.
The day cycle was a lot safer than the night hours in this neighborhood where Mosaie lives. Although horrible incidents did occur that stand out in highlighted aspects each one with surrealistic qualities. It is always sticky and hot in the daytime with a stickiness that clings to humans like insects to nectar. Violent men stay indoors during these hours cooling in their fan blown units. Blue smoke of their cigarettes hanging above their heads producing a fog that never lifted.
It was the attraction of darkness that lured them outside of their reeking little units. Nighttime when the roaches would fly about the units and feed on the scum that is littered throughout. The roaches were stowaways on the original transports from Earth. They came here along with the people. They multiplied fast in the heat and the squalor. At times they provided a sport to the residents to see how many could be killed at one time.
Mosaie doesn't talk much about the blightness that is her life because it is the same blightnes that others share around her. She gets up in the morning and eats a paltry amount of food and dresses her small frame in some cast off clothes. She walks to the local education center organised by a local Buddhist group and a couple of data miners, and keeps her head down so as not to see the ugliness around her. But occasionally a sight becomes visible in her peripheral vision and without wanting to her eyes are diverted to the scene.
One day she saw two gang members grabbing the legs of another young man and with a concrete pole in between the victims legs they pull and pull until his testicles are smashed. The screams are ringing in Mosaie's ears as she hurries past the scene knowing that to look intensely at it will bring violence to her own body. The victim had made love to one of the gang member's sister.
It is one of the dreams that never leave Mosaie at night that wake her up dripping in sweat and screaming herself into a state of delirium. She wanders through this dream trying to decide what to do. If she goes for help the gang members will be gone when the help arrives and the victim maybe hurt worst than he already is. If she screams right there on the walkway then she could be attacked and brutalized as well. It is a dichotomy that haunts her in waking hours as well. The question being could she have done something, anything to stop the horror? The answer is always looming up before her and it is a glaring white NO!!!
She takes a transport one day - it is one of the rapid transit vehicles that move along a tube of evacuated air - and sits in amazement as a young man runs down the aisle and collapses at her feet. He is in a seizure and is frothing at the mouth. Others run up the aisle and yell he is their friend and just leave him alone until the fit is over. Two girls and another boy, they bend over their friend with a worried expression and then they see Mosaie and ask her for her wallet. If he can bite on her wallet then he won't swallow his tongue. She is naïve and takes it out of her pocket and hands it to them. They place it in the young man's mouth and hover over him patting him and soothing him. They suddenly the transport comes to a stop, the doors open, the young man who is lying on the floor twisting and jerking about jumps up and runs out the door followed by the others. They are all laughing as they run rapidly away with Mosaie's food money.
All she can do is cry and go hungry for the next week. The group is caught on another transport on another day with someone else's wallet by the transport patrol but it is too late for Mosaie. All the same she is glad that they are caught and will be punished.
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