Industry Standard

{Waste Management:}

"The openings in chainlink are shaped like diamonds. It's like walking through a curtain of diamonds. Just think of that while you're stepping over a pile of moldy textiles or threading your way around a sprung chair just on the other side."

Jad Filo and Yenni Mender slip through a gap in the fence, on into the junkyard. Here, a mass of brittle plastic pipes the size of smokestacks and in a variety of surprisingly vivid colors are stood on end, arranged somewhat like the ramparts of a cartoon fortress. With scarcely a thought for any hidden defenders who may be lurking, the two pass through to the moguls of castoff chattels beyond.

"Yep, you're a nudger through-and-through, Jad." Yenni smiles amusedly as she watches the fastidious way Jad picks through a ziggurat of shattered milk crates. Jad, balanced shakily atop a hollowed-out TV set and scrabbling toward someplace above, looks back at her and taps the nudger badge on his chest in mock reverence.

While performing their professional work, Jad and Yenni articulate with one another, as nudgers and flaggers typically do. Yenni's the flagger in this equation, and she and Jad belong to the same TotalTong known informally as "Bond Barbian and the Blond Barbarians". Bond Barbian is a real person, the topper of Jad and Yenni's TotalTong in fact, but the official designation of their organization is only alphanumeric, and it achieves an identification which, though regulation-unique, is evocative only of nameplates, employee manuals, industry awards, and other administrative pap. The unofficial names, the ones anyone ever knows a TotalTong by, are usually established early on, after hours, around campfires or fight-pits.

Yenni leaves Jad to a slow-motion pole vault of some particularly foul-smelling carpet-rolls, or whatever it is he's doing, and follows the path recorded on his positioner from the last time he was at the place.

"Yeah, it's not over here," Yenni hears him call, just as an aperture in the piles of debris opens in front of her onto a plausibly structural-looking mound. It actually does resemble a "Tupperware megalith", just as Jad had described it to her a few days ago.

"This looks like it must be what you're looking for here," she calls, but then already hears the rattling of Jad's spraycan as he approaches, having slid gingerly down the face of a slowly-cascading wall of mismatched boots, expired phonebooks, and plastic guitars, all in various stages of decomposition.

"Yenni!" he exclaims, "That's it! Fantastic! You're the devil's mouthwash!"

Jad shakes his spraycan vigorously, and sprays a test line on some solid-looking junk at the base of the structure. What comes out is a spiky-looking cloud of . . . Something. Not paint, exactly. The spraystuff looks silver and reflective from some angles, flat dull blue from others. It fades in a few seconds leaving no visible trace, but Jad and Yenni have their imaging specs on, and they can see what Jad's rendered. It's a simple yet precise curlicue. A signal to someone with the ability to receive it. Jad flips his spraycan to auto and waits for a reply.

The spraystuff is an electromagnetic aerosol which a whole culture of peeps like Jad use to make art, or to communicate in other ways, usually across very long distances. One tags one's design or message on an alley wall here in town, and someone whose imaging specs are tuned in from halfway around the world sees the tag pop up like old-school spraypaint on their bedroom wall, practically at the same time one is spraycasting it.

Jad's been a spraycaster just about long enough now that he's begun to discern different shades of meaning in the very texture of the spraystuff images he picks up.

It somehow always works out that Jad's hobbies have something to do with remote influence. Spraycasting's just the most recent, and the one he's pursued with the most resources. The greater the influence exerted and the increasingly remote whatever the thing may be, the more beguiling it is to Jad. When he was a child, he'd designed kites that could navigate as high as the stratosphere and could shift between windborne and windless flight. A bit further on, by the time he'd put away about 1,500 school lunches, he'd worked as a student adjunct with an important geological survey on a project which compiled a glossary of vibratory "words" derived from data of periodic frequencies emitted from the planet's iron core, along with a syntax for the words, in order to "communicate" with the core. His favorite stories have always been those whose heroes operate from distinctive and idiosyncratic lairs, and whose incessant and fantastical adventures range from those lairs across the known continents and beyond. The foods he finds the most appetizing are those which are brought from across tectonic plates. Surprisingly, perhaps, Jad hasn't realized this thing about himself, this compulsion he has for remote influence, but he'll come to realize it yet. Maybe even in this story.