for suicides, also because, in zones like that, watchmen or Keepers of order were hardly ever seen. Nobody seemed to care about the fact that suicides happened almost daily.
Maybe the sadder thing was that, at the bottom of the slope, where the dead bodies of the suicides fell, a small crowd gathered every day to compete for the few belongings of the corpses. Oftentimes these quarrels ended up in a brawl, and the brawl in a homicide, which roused new brawls to grab the belongings of the new victim too.
Then every day, at dusk, the Free Phalanx passed, a debated volunteer organisation who always operated at the edge of legality. Inconvenient for many, but still very convenient for things like that. Probably that was why the Regents of the Governance hadn’t dismantled it yet, even if Fred was persuaded it would happen sooner or later. One day they would tread on the toes of a friend’s friend and… voila! The end of it! Like most of the good things in this world.
Fred smiled to himself, it was like the lyrics of a song by that old artist that, probably on purpose, had thrown himself down the Tower Tunnel with all his currency on him. “Why must I do myself harm to do you good?”
“My life will be better than that!” Fred told himself, biting the last bit of his fibroburger and then heading home.
Five minutes later, he was in his neighbourhood. A normal social neighbourhood, the copy of many others scattered all over town. A maze of dark streets surrounded by thirty-plus store building. About ten apartments for each floor. All of them occupied. Every building also had an underground parking area, stably occupied by tens of homeless people and where nobody had parked his vehicle for years. At times, observing some of them he had know for a long time, he wandered why they were still called homeless. They did have a home, indeed: the parking places of the buildings. They used their energy, diverted their water, in short, they lived down there like he lived twenty-three floors above.
Walking towards his flat, he noticed a new graffiti on the wall. A sort of dark representation of a bride. Nice. Someone in this scum is really gifted, he always told himself, looking at the drawings. Especially daring too, considering the height reached by the graffiti. How they could draw them without an apparent support point had always puzzled him, as well as when they drew. He had lived there for many years, but he’d never seen a writer at work, still the graffiti kept on popping up like mushrooms.
When he reached his building’s entrance door, he tried to see if the fingerprints scan would work. He placed his hand against the display on the wall. It flashed and then turned off. No way, it still didn’t work. Nothing surprising. He was about to search his pockets for the key, but he immediately changed his mind. There was no need. He put his hand into a few years hold hole in the security door and opened it with the handle on the other side.
When he got in, he was welcomed by the hum of the lights turning on with difficulty and the crackle of the alarm that tried to click on and then went silent with a loud crack. As usual.
He walked along the narrow hallway, where two people could barely pass side by side, reaching the elevator. This was maybe the only decent thing in this building and surely the only one receiving maintenance. It was large, fast, with mirrors on the side walls and the ceiling (unfortunately all broken) and a capacity of at least thirty people; it could bear up to almost five thousand kilos. It reached the twenty-third floor in the blink of an eye.
A hallway even narrower than the one in the ground floor. Standard security door with fingerprints, iris and personal chrono-chip recognition. Apartment 23/9. He entered. The door lead directly to the small kitchen-living room. From there, a door led to the bathroom, another one to the small bedroom (with disappearing bed in the wall) and so much for his house. All his life. Nothing more. He was obviously on rent. A house, even this apartment, would be too expensive for a normal guy like him.
He headed straight to the fridge. He took out a bottle of low quality beerotch and fell on the old broken couch. He turned on the virtua-TV, staring the three-dimensional holographic images in front of him without seeing them. He slowly gulped down the bottle, without thinking about anything, then he decided, while staring at the merry white-haired and bearded man on the label “I’m not going to work until I get my results.” he declared, before slipping into a dreamless sleep.
The following days passed slowly and lazily. Fred spent most of his time looking at stupid pointless programmes, listening to music, playing and most of all sleeping. As he’d told at work that he wasn’t fine, he couldn’t go out. These days every company would activate the “illness assurance” provided by the neighbourhood Keepers: an automatic face recognition programme that used the thousands of cameras scattered all over town to catch you anywhere you might go.
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