Illegal

Cli-fi | Biopunk | Thriller

Welcome to Story Voyager, your home for climate and fiction. This cli-fi short story based on a dream I had last year won the Lunar Award for science fiction.

There’s no doubt that Claudia is depicting a parallel, albeit fictional society, but her storytelling forces us to draw our own conclusions. We are astute observers, pulled into a tale of class struggle, with a dose of nearly spiritual agnosticism. This is fiction that makes us question our position in life and gives us an exhilarating narrative, one that allows us to discuss reform without loaded polarizations. At its heart it’s hopeful, which is a theme that can speak to anyone.

—

Brian Reindel 👾⚔️

of Lunar Awards

Illegal

A smuggled climate refugee must survive her first day in a high security city.

The time is 8:58 pm, and the alarms are blaring. I run through the empty alley, looking for the shelter entrance. 84A. 84B. 84C. The gates are in front of me, within reach. I look at the strange device beeping insistently in my hand. 8:59 pm. The gates start to roll down. On the screen of my device, I see a list of red entries. Late for check-in. 11 times out of 12. I throw myself on the concrete floor and slide underneath the closing gate. It’s 9 pm. The irritating beeping on my device stops, and a warning is shown on the display. You have one credit left. I’ve got the identity of a serial offender.

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Earlier in the day.

It’s 5 am. The air is fresh, and the sweet dusk light sifts through the glass dome encasing the city. She walks past a football field where teenage boys play an early game under a couple of street lamps. The clean alleys lined up by real trees look pretty in the dim light, and she feels safe hidden in the semi-darkness. People walk by in a hurry. She has nowhere to go, so she decides to follow them. She needs to blend in. The giant silhouette of a white building towers over the landscape. The letters across the facade read: Tesla Dome City - Sky Train Station. There is a long queue of people waiting to enter the station. This will give her some time to think about her next move. She will jump on a train and see where it takes her. The queue moves quickly. She just needs to look normal. There are about twenty people left in front of her. If she gets out of the queue, it would look dubious.

Suddenly, she feels something wrapping around her wrist. A hand. She freezes in place. ‘Don’t turn around. Keep moving.’ She moves along in the queue. ‘The gates have an ID verification sensor. If you pass without a permit, you’ll be arrested.’ Two persons were left in front of her. ‘I slipped a device with all the digital paperwork in your pocket. It will synch with your chip. Come evening, look for shelter 84C.’ She feels a tingling sensation at the back of her head. Then, her wrist is free again, and she stands in front of the gate. As she walks through the gate, she hears a voice, ‘Good morning, Anita S.,’ and sees her photo with the personal details of a stranger displayed on a virtual screen. ‘Move along.’ She walks inside the train station.

The cathedral-like hall with walls of pink marble leading to twenty sky platforms is bustling with people walking briskly to their known destinations. She doesn’t know where to go. Anita S. must have a destination, but she is not Anita S. A passerby bumps into her, muttering, ‘Fucking immigrants.’ For a moment, she feels naked, standing there, stared down at by that stranger by the whole station, by the entire holy grail city encased in a protective dome with breathable air and clean drinking water and food and transportation and education and jobs and civilization. She wants to scream that she had no other choice, that it’s a desperate starvation out there. People are choking on the putrid air and melting in the heat with no water while you’re stuffing your fat bellies with food and plumping your skin with water. Instead, she bows her head and marches away to platform one.

‘Ms. Anita S., you seem to have walked on the wrong platform. The train to your job leaves in 3 minutes from platform 20. If you don’t hurry, you will be late for work.’ A voice from the ether, the station AI, is guiding her steps. She turns around, hurrying through the crowd to the other end of the cathedral hall, careful not to bump into anyone or attract unwanted attention. She tries to run up the stairs to the sky platform twenty but is too weak. She hears the train arriving and leaving the platform. No other way. She will be late for whatever work Anita S. does in this city.

The train hovers over the magnetic tracks, and the stainless steel doors slide sideways. She takes a window seat and looks at the circular, high-tech city sparkling in the crisp morning light. The well-kept buildings are laid out in concentric circles, with the mother station and servers at its core. Sky train lines run in a radius connecting the core with the outer circles. Beneath the skylines are paved pedestrian streets lined with trees and flowers. Her eyes well up with tears. ‘Are you feeling well, Ms. Anita S.?’ The train AI speaks to her. She touches the back of her head, where the wound from the chip implanted in her skull is still fresh and tender. If she doesn’t make it on her first day, they will recycle the chip for another immigrant desperate enough to risk her life to enter the marvel city. ‘Ms. Anita S., this is your station. Hurry up before the doors close.’ She rushes out of the train and into the fresh air of the sky platform. What to do now? Where does Anita S. work? She takes out the device from her pocket. It needs a fingerprint for access. She tries the index of her right hand, the thumb of her right hand, and the index of her left hand. That one works. There’s a notification: Late for the morning shift. And the address on a map. She can work with that.

The workplace is a small eatery beside the train station: Panda Noodles. ‘You’re late for work again!’ The short middle-aged cook peaks at the virtual screen on the kitchen door. ‘Anita S.’ Her body sinks into itself as if wanting to become invisible. ‘Are you gonna stand there the whole day? Let’s get going! The work won’t do itself.’ The smells of the tiny eatery are strange and inviting. She looks fascinated at the crystal-clean water running at the kitchen faucet, and her tongue feels dry and parched. The cook fills up a glass and hands it to her. ‘Here!’ Her voice is small, a mere whisper, ‘Thank you,’ but her fingers fiercely lock onto the glass of water. She lifts it to her lips, careful not to waste a single drop and drinks a long sip. Then, she offers the glass back to the cook. ‘All for you.’ She bows her head. Then she takes a small bottle from her pocket. ‘I wouldn’t do that.’ The man shakes his head. ‘Sure giveaway. Just drink it. There’s enough water.’ Later, after she’s done chopping vegetables, mopping the floor, and preparing the tables, she fills her bottle in the little sink in the toilet. Better safe than sorry.

Lunchtime comes with crowds, and she is busy serving bowls of noodles, ice teas, and napkins. She does the dishes, wipes the tables, refills the stations with salt, pepper, and spicy sauces, and wraps cutlery in napkins. By late afternoon, she is bone tired and so hungry. She looks at the customers’ lunch leftovers in the compost bin. She watches the cook opening the bathroom door from the corner of her eyes. There are no customers, and the street is empty. She takes a pair of chopsticks and digs into the compost, scooping out some noodles. She’s about to take a bite when she hears people nearby. The toilet flushes. Two men in uniform enter the eatery. One is talking on the phone, and the other looks at her. The bathroom door opens. She drops the noodles back into the compost bin. The cook stares at her for a brief moment. ‘Go do the dishes in the kitchen.’ Then he turns around to the guests. ‘Officers, welcome. Early dinner?’ She turns on the faucet and pretends to wash the soup bowls that are already clean. ‘New girl?’ There’s laughter.

‘Looking for a date, mate?’ The cook clears his throat. ‘What? No, new haircut.’ She wipes the sweat gathering on her forehead. ‘Lots of illegals smuggled in lately.’ The wet bowl slips from her hands into the sink. ‘Better stick to what you know. Pork belly and extra noodles?’ The cook enters the kitchen and prepares two bowls of soup without looking at her, and then he exits. Her heart is pounding out of her chest. The guests slurp noodles, chat and laugh in the restaurant for what seems to her like an eternity. Someone lets out a loud burp. ‘Alright, time for the evening patrol!’ Then she hears the door opening and closing, and they are finally gone. ‘You can come out!’

When she leaves the kitchen, cold sweat runs down her spine, and she feels like the little noodle stall spins around her. ‘I hope you learned your lesson!’ She sits on a round stool at one of the tiny tables. The cook goes to the kitchen and returns with a fresh bowl of hot noodles. ‘Eat.’ He nods his head and goes back into the kitchen. Green seaweed pieces and orange slices of carrots swim in the steamy clear broth on top of the thick, long noodles at the bowl’s bottom. She closes her eyes and inhales the warm fragrances, tears streaming down her cheeks. She gulps down the soup, burning her tongue, the inside of her mouth, and her throat down to her stomach until her shaky body relaxes, nourished and satisfied. With an empty bowl and a full stomach, she watches the sunset on the skyline, the people walking on the street, some hurrying to the station to catch their train. ‘What are you doing? Your shift is over,’ the cook says, taking the empty bowl from the table. ‘You’ll be late!’ She looks at him, not understanding. ‘For the shelters! You have to go back!’

Fear creeps into her heart, and she rushes to the station, cutting her way through the peak hour crowds, runs up the stairs to the platform and jumps on the magnetic train. It’s a long, cramped ride, and by the time she exits the pink marble end station, it’s already dark, and the alleys are almost empty. She sees a couple of people running by the now-empty football field toward a patch of grey buildings and follows them. The noodle soup jumps up and down in her stomach. Feeling sick, she buckles over and throws up in the grass. She resumes running, and the alarms are getting louder as she runs into the empty alleys of the shelter complex. The device starts beeping in her pocket. She takes it out and reads the warning notification. You are late for check-in. Where to go? She looks at the numbered entrances, and then she remembers 84C.

///

I lay down in Anita’s upper bunk bed. The large room is quiet, and the lights are dim. ‘Are you Anita?’ It’s merely a whisper, and for a moment, I think I’m hallucinating. ‘The previous eleven Anitas didn’t make it.’ I hold my breath. It’s the person in the lower bunk bed. ‘Don’t worry about the strikes. They are reset every six months if you behave well. Sleep now. Waking time is at 4 am.’

I let out a long exhale. I’m in the system.

Author’s notes

This is a standalone short story based on a dream. It is set in my cli-fi storyworld before the events in the series There Is Hope. Fun fact, the first story in the series, Human Island, is also based on a dream. Illegal is a memory log entry in the Museum of Life, a curated collection of lives uploaded to the Deep Dive metaverse.

My storyworld, tentatively named The Deep Dive, spans more than 1,000 years between 2400 and 3500 CE. My attempt with this storyworld is to depict a realistic transition to a better world following a 5°C global warming at the end of the 21st century. It gets worse before it gets better, and the narratives from this storyworld are both dystopian and utopian in nature.

I wrote Illegal as an entry to the sixth season of Lunar Awards, the literary awards for science fiction and fantasy on Substack run by

Brian Reindel 👾⚔️

.

I hope you enjoyed this story and would love to hear from you in the comments section.

Thanks for reading

If you enjoyed this, you might also like Welcome to gulmohur, a short story about a young teacher at a school for gifted children who is looking forward to getting her first student. This story takes place roughly 1,050 years after Illegal.

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Welcome to gulmohur

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Story Voyager is where we explore climate change through the lens of climate fiction or cli-fi. Under the motto ‘travel your imagination’, we embark on a journey of reading, researching, writing, and exchanging ideas with like-minded people. Let’s change the narrative about the future of humankind together. If you’d like to support this space even more, please consider becoming a paid subscriber. Your financial support will go toward commissioning illustrations for my first cli-fi series, There Is Hope.