Wandering

After ending the call I shook off the layer of snow that had packed onto me while I was still, and looked around at the ever busy City wondering how the hell I was to occupy myself now I could neither hide home or go to school. If Carmen hadn’t called then I might have come in late and said I was a bit sick earlier, but that was off the cards now. If only I’d waited for Mother or Julie to wake and asked them if they were going out today and when – although had I done that, one of them might have fucked me.

I resumed my aimless trek through town. In places I knew well I allowed myself to ogle the myriad near-nude women passing me by. I saw it was true what they say about our City; the girls on average have mountains’ worth of tits. Almost every lady I looked upon was substantially endowed, handfuls of softness flopping side to side with wildly varying degrees of sag. I was tempted to stop some woman there and then and ask if I could just touch, but I couldn’t see it not escalating from there. If I dropped myself in it and tried to abort out here, where everyone can see or hear, I was bound to have my mind scrambled like poor Elizabeth Morgan.

Quickly the sight of huge hanging and bouncing melons bored me, though I hate to say it. I ended up paying more attention to the minority of flat-chested gals. And as I was looking for small breasts, I began to notice more of the oddities in general. In Kraken Square I walked by a girl who looked like a faerie, skin a very light shade of pink, huge orange curls, and an overall tiny frame. She kept her pussy hairless, which was odd given her apparent youth. Not long after that I crossed a full blooded Terran, short and stocky. She walked with the characteristic jerk in her step of someone constantly holding back from exerting their full strength. She must have been born on Terra herself. For all that her breasts and genitals were out you couldn’t see anything. The contrast between the snow and her dark skin was too much.

That last person I mentioned got me thinking of the colour brown, and stuff to do with Terra, formerly humans' sole nest. I recalled there was a café in the Burrows, where you could get hot chocolate from that blue planet. It wasn’t socially acceptable to go there much, first simply because it was in the Burrows and the people down there are weird, and second because no one knows whether the folks procuring the chocolate are even remotely remunerated. All we know is it’s the natives doing all the work, and that’s a bad sign. Still, I thought, perhaps it would be just as well for me to go there. The contents of my mind were no longer socially acceptable anyway, so why pretend?

I got on my way toward where I reckoned the nearest entrance into the underground would be. I passed through a few streets completely alien to me, with some weird architecture. Some of it was clearly trying to mimic old town with the step-by-step upwards protruding façades and visible wooden beams, and some of it clearly didn’t give a shit. There’d be a couple hundred yards of mostly consistent looking vintage stuff, and then the cobbles would turn to tar or flagstones, or there would be a big creamy grey stone house with huge glass windows and a clean tiled roof slap bang in between two of the crooked ones. In one place the ditch down the middle of the road just ended, and so all the crap that people lose in the street, little bits of paper, lost ID, fags, and even poo from the giant pet beetles or dogs was bunched up in a horrible stinking pile. Maybe if the design wasn’t fucked a cleaner would be out of a job. I don’t know.

I arrived within sight of a large black building, some sort of urban hangar. It housed all the different-sized lifts for carrying people, vehicles and other heavy resources down into the Burrows. The hulking mass had one side on a small square, and in that face of the building were all the pedestrian entryways.

The spot appeared familiar to me, and I lingered on the spot, looking around. Far to my left, the square gave onto the edge of what used to be the uppermost reservoir for the canals, dried up ages ago, and like most trenches not dug too deep, now filled with streets. On that edge was a glass and metal box full of escalators leading down to the platforms of a small overground railway station. The tracks went east into the Argyre, passing through that original opening in the old shield wall. Behind me and facing the lifts into the Burrows was one of many municipal police headquarters. Opposite, on the other side of the main road, was a huge and ancient church likely built by some of the last Christians to have arrived with the colonists, hundreds of years ago. The gargoyles were both in the shape of old earthly monsters and the local wildlife, including the giant ant-like beasts which still roam the southern wastes to this day.

The fact that I could name and tag all of my surroundings meant I must have done something important in this spot before, but it wasn't jumping to memory. My stomach rumbled half-heartedly, and I pushed the mild annoyance aside, continuing towards the downward lifts. A door slid open, a man stepped out, and I swiftly took his place in the cabin. Between the door shutting and the descent I just had time to note the smell inside: a thick yet stinging odour, like hot mint. Even this tiny segment of public transport had hosted sex in the short time since the change.

The downward plunge is consistently stomach turning, even when you have a relatively short distance to travel. In this case, the drop was sudden enough that I felt the floor fully leave my feet, and the effect was worsened by my neglect to grab one of the handlebars jutting from the wall. Within ten seconds later, the lift halted dead, decelerating just gently enough to avoid harming most humans, and I went to my knees.

A lovely lady helped me get back on my feet and out of the elevator. She held me steady until assured I was good to carry on, smiled at me and got on her way, disappearing into the cabin moments before it shot up to the surface again. At no point in that minuscule interaction did she make me need to think any more than fleetingly of her exposed, and quite generous breasts, or her clean-shaven pussy. By some miracle, meeting her had done no more than inform me without possible doubt that the Burrows were every bit as changed in their mores as the surface.

The Burrows were exactly what the word suggests, a huge network of tunnels deep underground, built to allow the City to continue expanding when it was no longer possible to do so horizontally, and when the upward climb had gone far enough. Over time, the place had grown almost into a separate entity, continuously developing itself to provide more and more of the basic needs of humans. Now there were folk down there who never ever had any need to climb to the surface, and except while on vacation, never saw direct sunlight, or not our version of it. Just underneath their immense maze of what looked like an extended, enormous supermarket housing entire streets instead of mere aisles, were six huge chambers called the Paradise Caverns, tiny pockets of nature about big enough to swallow a small suburb, each lit up in the blinding, burning glare of the same six fusion reactors that our megalopolis drew most of its power from. You might think such caverns would draw surface dwellers in like moths, especially in winter, but the truth is they held little appeal for us. The light was too bright, and the atmosphere too thick, the whole environment altogether too much a reproduction of Terran climate.

To my chagrin, the café I knew about was closed for maintenance. I knew another acceptable place to go, of course, and set out right away, but it appeared I was doomed not to have a nice rare beverage, either as consolation for my woes or as the last sane thing I did before someone inevitably saw inside my head.

They had quality croissants down there, so there's that. I didn't starve, what with the stuff I'd packed earlier.

My lunch while hidden underground was without upset, although I made one worrying discovery while trying to plan for my escape. Via my portable computer, I saw on the web that there was something wrong with the Mag-Lev to Lacus Solis. Effectively, except for a trip of hours and hours on a tiny overground railroad stopping at every little town in the mountains, there was no swift way out.

The real disaster only came after I returned to the surface. After jumping out from the depths, I came onto the square again, and this time, seeing it from a different perspective, there was no mistaking where it fit in my memories. Just beyond the church in the direction I'd come from, was an apartment building for the mildly well-off, whose entrance was set into a recess with two shops facing each other, and where you had to open a big opaque door with bars to enter the bottom floor atrium. Someone I knew lived in there, and had a window in their room from which they could see everything from the old church to the rails of the electric slow-coaches beyond police HQ. I checked the time, panicked, and hurriedly made to leave the area.

I was just beginning to think myself safe, having moved a few streets away, when my phone rang as Carmencita called me again.