Red City Blues

Science fiction short story

Cyberpunk 2077 screenshot - ArtStation

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They called it Red City, on account of the buildings.

It had a different name back in the Before Times. Something long, something with meaning, something with history. Something that people recognised.

Red City, now.

It was something in the light, or maybe just the way the sun was setting, that painted everything red around us. Multi-stack buildings climbing skyward but cutting off short, like an orbital hopper that ran out of juice halfway through its burn. Cracked foundations, battered walls, jagged roofs where billboards had blossomed and then faded. I sometimes watched the rockets climb up overhead, blinks of white and blue climbing into orbit on fusion pillars, and I looked north over the salt flats to where the Blue Bay was, and I wondered.

Red City, Blue Bay.

Death and Hope. End of the line, start of the journey. So different, so…

Opposites.

I heard the stories when I was younger. We all did. The fighting, the war, the bombs. The sky burned, the buildings melted, and things changed. We never knew the Before Time, we just heard the stories that had been passed down to us. Passed down and repeated and recited, until everything became one long Yesterday. The books we had were all gone by now, their pages withered, their spines shattered, their words and wisdom spilled into the sand that encroached from the salt flats. The stories in the data-vaults were not the same, and the old computer screens were cracked and sickly by now, making it hard to see what was written and what had been meant.

What had we done to deserve this?

Were we even responsible?

Frankie said we were being punished for the sins of our forefathers. Frankie spent a lot of time in the old data-vault on Main and 47th, where the Reznecs had their shop. They let him read in the vault in exchange for hauling meat up and down the express stairwell, and he liked to read the old works that were in the Religious category. No-one else read those, and he had them all to himself most of the time. I went there from time to time when I had spare credits, and read about the spaceships, but everything about Blue Bay was forbidden, and most of the articles from the Before Time did not make a lot of sense now.

I needed to know, though. The stories were not enough for me.

We picked chrysalis buds at the Chorg-Amon plantations, twelve hours a day, and used those credits to make the other twelve hours go away. Synth sticks to wake up in the morning, algo-stimmers after work to get a buzz, and then dancing and chem-buttons and sparkling water at the trance halls: Poshwood, Neuro-Wipe, Golden Trance, Felix Funtown, and that new place out at the industrial plants on West and 7th. We slept four hours if we were lucky, in the barracks at Rangoon and 23rd, and then the new day began.

Red City was Death, Red City was in us, Red City had a steel claw on our necks and a Bogater blade in our bellies, and the only thing we could do was dance and keep that knife away for one more day.

We were not supposed to look at Blue Bay.

The Reznecs were part of the Bogater Council. Them and the Archduke and Old Man Gunston and the Trex Riddlers, and those sweet, smiling bald guys from Chem-town. Food, water, power, guns, drugs - they controlled everything, and they controlled Red City, and they owned - us. They kept us in Red City because they owned us, and because they did not want us thinking of leaving. Blue Bay was a distraction, a blip on the horizon, something we were not supposed to notice while we spent the days hunched over with the chrysalis buds and the pruning knives.

I noticed.

At night, sometimes, I would leave the trance halls early and go up the side of the ruins on 50th Avenue. There was a tower there, one specific building, that had a path that led up and up until you eventually ended up on the roof. A hundred floors up? A hundred and twenty? It was high, and it had a view to the north that was clear and cold and blue, and I could see Blue Bay from there. From 51st onwards it was all just brick piles and concrete tumbles, and the salt flats began where 53rd was meant to be. The Bogater goons patrolled there, and the fences were up and rusty and full of tangle-wire - but on 50th, from atop that tower, none of it mattered.

I could look at Blue Bay, and wonder.

I had learnt about fusion drives in the data-vault. Something that they figured out in the Before Times, and which no-one in Red City had ever heard of before - but someone had figured it out, and had remembered, because when I watched those lights lifting off from Blue Bay, I knew those blue trails had to be fusion plumes. Someone there still had the technology.

Someone there remembered the Before Time.

In the salt flats, there were a lot of dead people though.

It was something in the soil, they said. Old Man Gunston had laughed one day at the plantation, talking about lead being a magic metal. Good for bullets, good for radiation - it could kill and save at the same time. Depending on how you used it, and how much, it could change everything. Fat Phil at Gurney’s made stone-eye beer that had lead in, and it was the sweetest thing you could get for under five creds at the trance halls. Doc Mendy warned us about it, said it would make our gums black and give us the desert fever that makes people crazy, and then Fat Phil and his men took Doc Mendy out into the salt flats one night, and we never saw Doc again.

Salt, lead, dead people - north of Red City was not somewhere we were meant to go.

But Blue Bay was there too, on the other side of the salt flats.

The Bogater sent things north though. There was the rail line on Kingsley that headed north-east and then looped back to the west, heading towards Blue Bay somewhere beyond the foothills of the salt flats. There was a slow train that ran at night, sometime after midnight, and then there was a fast train that ran during the day - although that one I had never seen myself.

Daytime was shift-time, when we belonged to Red City.

But the night train, that one I had seen: a blacker-than-black line in the night with a white light in the front, curving off into the salt and getting smaller and smaller until the hills swallowed it. The Bogater filled it with cargo - the same food, water, guns and drugs that kept us here - and then it went north to Blue Bay, and came back empty later.

I knew the salt flats would kill me, once I was past the Bogater patrols - but that train…

I kept my plans to myself. Felix and Max would not understand, and Sky was lost to the chems and that black crap that Julian kept pumping into her veins. She had been wasting away for weeks now, and her head was just filled with all the stories Julian had been whispering to her as he put first his needles and then other things into her. I was alone now.

I got a survival bag from one of the Trex Riddlers, and extra rations from Gustavo after winning that street fight at the CopHag Bio-Clinic. Doc Chrisos wanted to test those new muscle grafts, so I showed him how they would survive in the street. He was not happy after I put his man down, but a deal was a deal. Gustavo said I should come back again, fight some more, but I could already see where that would end up. Red City took you deeper if you let it, and you never got out of that hole.

I got a gun from Clicks, after I fetched a girl for him. I did not want to ask questions about that, and Clicks did not explain, and after I dropped her off at the shop Clicks came out the back and gave me the gun before disappearing again. It was a ArmaTec KK-9, and ugly as a burnt foot, but it worked, and came with a plastic packet with forty bullets. I tested it out on the edge of the Chorg-Amon plantations one night, next to the spotlights, and after the fifth shot I ran away when the security came sniffing. The KK-9 worked well enough.

My last shift at the plantation felt like it took forever. Felix and Max were upset about some stupid fight from Golden Trance the night before, and Max had a black eye that almost made him cut his finger open a couple of times while we worked. Sky was quiet, her face all slack and puffy as the black stuff in her veins thinned out, and when I said goodbye she just nodded and asked if I knew when Julian was coming. I wanted to hug her one last time, and I wanted to scream at her and throw her off the tower on 50th at the same time. She could not see what was happening, and I was already late.

The train loading yards were waiting for me when the sun set and Red City came alive.

I was going to Blue Bay.

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