MINDLYFT

CHAPTER 27

I left Ollie and Wizard to work out the details and then I got busy adjusting to life in GutterVille. In many ways it was like adjusting to life a hundred years or more in the past. No printing bots, so just about anything I needed I had to go looking for. There were underground shops for most things. That was if you couldn't find it beneath some pile of junk laying about on the street.

I didn't need much. Dad gave me back my old bed, but things like hygiene products, clothes, and basics like soap, I had to scrounge for. Most of the places took bitty but some only exchanged through barter. Since I didn't really have anything to barter I used my bitty allowance at first. My only real skill was TechnoHacking, but since we were mostly OffGrid, no one had any use for that, unless they worked for Nash and were trying to overthrow the system. Far as I knew, there were no rival syndicates.

Once I bought an assortment of clothes, a toothbrush, soap and some linens for my bed, all used, and some rather filthy, I looked to find some things to eat. The bitty allowance provided access to the FoodBots, but the ones in GutterVille only sold little pasty blocks of nutrients. They were engineered to taste like different kinds of food, but the taste was pretty dry, and the meals unsettling to the stomach. I found an underground grocery store that sold fresh fruits and vegetables, an assortment of spices, and fresh fish and poultry. Even in the SkyTower I was eating genetically engineered meats, so this was kind of a treat, and a pretty ironic place to find it. Nash also clued me in on a place to buy refined liquors.

GutterVille was not without its hip nightclubs either. Since there wasn't much to do aside from the small underground economy, drugs, plotting to overthrow the system, art colony candle making, and more drugs, having some nightlife helped deal with the boredom. There were three nightclubs that looked descent in the dark with red neon lights. It covered the fact that the walls were molded with a black slime and the floor was draining some nasty liquid left by melting rats. After a few martinis or gin tonics, the place looked even better. And there were plenty of musicians living in the gutter to make it a real renaissance in original music. Instruments made out of just about every thrown out piece of scrap metal and obsolete fabric you could imagine, along with the old traditional ones brought in from the outside. An old synthesizer filled in for the rest and there were more than a few lyricists on hand. We had some amazing parties. Hands down, OffGridders know how to have fun. Everything from the music they make, to the way they dance, to their bar conversation is fresh, funny and inspiring. Never dull, like the cap-nailed nodes I was used to hanging out with. For once, I had to think hard and careful about carrying on a conversation.

There was an energy about the place that I envied and clung to all at once. As if I'd dreamed about it over and over throughout my life, but always awoke having forgotten, still wanting for it, as I drudged through my ordinary, predestined, overly controlled life. It was dangerous, creative, savage and new. The lights, the music, the outlandish people, and the mess of a world that already seemed post-civilization. As if the war already happened but somehow they survived it. Revolution in the air, like the song goes. I'd missed it all my life, but was never really here yet, and now I never wanted to leave.

I was in a booth drinking martinis with some newly made friends, listening to jazz and watching the gogo dancers peal off their underwear, in the midst of a long toast, while a man named Samual was roasting my jetting nose and scraggly hair, that I decided I wanted no part of a revolution that would make me leave this place. Sure it was the liquor talking, and the next day with a hangover I'd lament my thoughts, pulling myself through the damp smelling corridors and down the melting pavement, but for this moment the thought was pure. I wanted a revolution that would remake the whole world this way. One big creative mess of a party, where anything could and did happen, and we were all better for it.