05-27-2310
Well, I didn’t get a new comm. There were too many other things that came up this week that demanded even larger portions of my latest paycheck than I anticipated. Besides, I can’t decide if I really want to upgrade to a smarter device or not. My workstation has been acting up an alarming amount recently, which only makes sense since I’ve had the thing for almost three years now—that’s like 60 in computer years. I’ve been wondering, as it looks like I’ll be replacing the loyal Z-140x, if I shouldn’t just stick with another dinky little texti and use that money to instead invest in a more advanced and portable porti.
From what research I’ve done so far, whether I’m upgrading or continuing to use both devices simultaneously, it would be a lot more cost effective to have a comm that didn’t have so high of a monthly upkeep, instead of getting a communicator that required a data service plan as expensive as a full sized computer would require you to run. I could also cut down to a smaller bag to carry my daily necessities around in, I wouldn’t even mind sporting one of those typical single-shoulder cases that look like a murse, as long as it housed some sort of elaborate electronic device.
As much as I might be trying to consolidate tools and gizmos for a more portable lifestyle, I still don’t want to whittle myself down to one solitary device. I know what it’s like to invest your entire life and identity into a single object, and then watch yourself deteriorate to shambles the moment it isn’t readily accessible to you. And of course, I’m afraid of what would happen if the gadget I’d been relying upon all day suddenly felt it appropriate to run out of power, especially if I still needed it; or in the case of the crippled Z-140X, what would happen if I wanted to use the workstation beyond the reach of its umbilical energy cord?
Needless to say, the debate on whether to upgrade my personal communicator and portable computer workstations, or whether to just get one machine to perform the duties of both gadgets will have to continue another time. I still have work to do.
Unfortunately, the malfunctioning swivel-style texti in my hands is all I have to rely on to find where that work was. The government-issue PDA, enshrouded in the Census Bureau logo-embossed bag over my shoulder, can’t help me find where I need to go; some regulation about protecting information from falling into unauthorized hands prevented them from being able to preinstall even a simple GPS app onto the same handheld they gave us to manage a checklist of which units remained to evaluate.
The only reason I bring up the need for newer gadgetry is because my gorking comm is getting all buggy on me. The stupid scroll wheel, invented ages ago to replace simple directional pads and improve navigating long menus, isn’t working: disabling my ability to choose anything but the first selection from any option menu, which was luckily the GPS app cause I use it so much. Free-Browse is the only available mode, so I can’t actually get directions to any of my assignments.
The Census did provide me a hard copy of the maps for my area on a large card with mapspots programmed in for addresses in the assignment; so if I could find something to identify where I was, or at least identify north, I might not be in bad shape. Not too long ago, it would have been easier to read a map like this, but I’m so used to the mock-3D display and semi-interactive interface now that a static map, even one you can zoom in and out on, just seems weird. Still, I’m confident I’ll be able to make some sense of it after I climb this huge hill and get a good view at this place.
From the looks of it, it will be a few minutes before I reach the summit at the pace I’m taking, so I’ll read over whichever blips my comm does allow me to select as I climb above one of the finer, upscale communities in Caspian to look over the rest of the city. I just hope I don’t trip over anything while I gazing into this tiny screen.
Reading the first blip sends my heart into my throat. It says: 2308- City of Caspian voted 4th Best Place to Live in the UTE, a distinction previously awarded, if you would believe it, to my hometown, back in 2305 when that newsource began the annual evaluations of which small towns in our nation were the most peaceful and had the most prosperous people inhabiting it. Not that I really had any sense of pride in Vine, but I felt appalled to think that a prize my town seemed to work so hard for could easily be bought by the underhanded City of Caspian.
The next bubble is more basic info, it’s what I was hoping to start this segment with. After Gams Caspian Sr. passed away, his son, Gams Jr., incorporated the land his father and associates had purchased from Duraton into The Caspian Company. He developed the area with olive and citrus crops, and allowed the construction of a magnetic rail station, post office, and military space station in what became known then as Caspian, and another station in what would even later be known as Rustin. When Junior passed, the company went to his son, Mybrook, who took it in a more urban direction. This third Caspian died mysteriously in 2259, right before the company signed a deal with University of Mars to build a school on some of their prime coastal land.
Strange, yes, but a different story altogether. Family lines are interesting and all, but this rant is about their city, not them. And I know the rest already, though I examine a marker with almost identical information to one I’ve already seen as it passes by; after construction was over, the higher ups of both parties involved then sat down and discussed what to do with the remaining land acquired by the first Caspian. The culmination of their meeting became the Caspian Ranch Master Plan, and determined which individual tracts of land would be developed as enclosed villages, separate from adjacent neighborhoods with their own themes, styles, room configurations and pricing scales, amenity grids, gardening and waste management schedules, club houses, jogging trails, pet parks, directories, home owners associations, housing societies, neighborhood watches, and–if they cost enough–dividing gates and embellished signage displaying the cookie-cutter community’s unique name.
This is nothing new to Mars, and these housing communities, with their nearly identical units, perfectly manicured lawns, pristine swimming pools, and three-ship landing bays are popping up all over the solar system, anywhere there used to be undeveloped space too near to the spreading clutches of capitalism’s tempting infection. I can remember both of Rip Gozo’s homes being just like the place I’m walking through, particularly the one that has its own golf course intertwined into its layout. I’d love to say that it’s a vulgar representation of the idyllic suburban homestead, lacking the soul of something crafted painstakingly by hand, and not mass produced and set up in a series, but not even my hometown can avoid this discrimination.
Vine was part of many areas our government filled in with victory homes for veterans of the Solar Wars, rolling them out over any flat surface they could find. Even though I’d like to believe my house was raised with tenderness, love and care, I realize it too is nothing more than the turnout of some heartless assembly line. The green, foresty hill settlement did have its blend of colonial- and civil war-era dwellings, still standing in whatever sectors of town stood before they installed a terminal of the rail line from the capital, and after its addition, respectively. The style of houses used to be a lot more quaint and eclectic.
But everything in my hometown changed after someone decided it was the 4th best place to live in The Union. Skyrocketing housing costs, stricter ordinances about appearance and other aesthetic bullshit, and a crackdown on law enforcement were just a few of the things I noticed ensue during the last year I lived in Vine before moving to Mars. From what I’ve seen on trips back home and reports from family and loved ones on Earth, it’s apparently beginning to look a lot more like this place every day.
On one side, public amenities have been upgraded, outfitting the town with improved crosswalks, historical site renovations, a nice town green where a needless strip mall used to be, new utility lines, better park upkeep, Wi-Fi hotspots, and a brand new fleet of municipal service vehicles, including a whole wing of Tiger Shark police interceptors and a detachment of the brand new Hornet motors I had thought they only had here on Mars.
On the other side, more strip malls have been built, along with more business and shopping centers, which brings more traffic and pollution to the town, and reduces jobs available to locals by magnetizing workers from other surrounding suburbs who don’t want to commute all the way to the capital. Soon, they’ll build more shops and fast food restaurants on any unused stretches along all the main roads and major side-streets, then all the unincorporated space that exists between town centers will fill up with more soulless housing, lined with more stucco shopping complexes, and my Vine will be nothing more than a Martian copy.
In the past five years my hometown has seen many of the charming little cottages, which made it cozy and appealing in the first place, get outright demolished and replaced by the same kind of obscenely large mass-mansions that adorn every hill, coastline, and crater bluff in southern Amazonia, but without so much of the red clay-tile rooftops and ironwork. The changed city has been descended upon by realtors, developers, contractors and construction workers, like a cloud of capitalistic locusts trying to take advantage of the hype, and the resources, and what was then a powerful economy. It was as if we’d discovered gold and everyone came to town to set up shop and catch the rush.
Often times, the construction agents would attempt to buy up two adjacent properties, tear down both the houses and build three even larger ones in their place. The company that purchased the land next door to my mother’s unit wanted to do the same with her lot, and offered her a reasonable amount of money to take the property off her hands. I’m not sure whether my mom just wasn’t ready to move at the time, or if she felt as if she was doing her part to preserve the history and esteem of our town by not letting something newer, bigger, and faker prevail, or if she was holding out for a larger offer, but I’m sure she regrets not taking it every time she looks out the kitchen window at the artificial monstrosity towering over us, or wishes she could sell the old house to move to a cheaper place.
I finally reach the top of the hill I’ve been slowly mounting for the past five or ten minutes, and take a break to catch my breath on the only level part I’ve come upon, before climbing the last few feet to the summit. As soon as I cease moving my muscles start burning, but I finish the climb and resist the persistent urge to sit down and rest longer, lest I cover my work pants in red, sandy dirt. After a moment of mental recovery to absorb a climb too taxing for an empty stomach, I take in the view and try to orient myself by identifying surrounding landmarks.
I see one of the main roads leading to Allan’s house from this area, that huge building still standing at the neighboring military space station in Rustin, the office buildings and corporate headquarters in the crowded business district, the campus with its town center, and against the coast the familiar shapes of the oil refinery and Style Isle. Which is nice and all, but it doesn’t really help me find out how exactly to get to the first address of my assignment. I reluctantly unfold my texti, knowing I’m gonna get distracted from my task even if I can’t navigate a cursor through the app’s GUI, and locate north.
An enormous info cloud occludes my sight of most of the city on the map screen, so big that it has to be a sponsored link; and somebody paid a lot to have this one show up from even the most distant zoomed-out view, and if I could zoom out I’m sure I’d see it rivals Novus Angelicas. The supposedly trending blurb states that Caspian is the safest city in The Union. I just begin to laugh out loud at this point and put the comm down for a second. It was obvious for me to see right through the subterfuge, I wouldn’t even need to adjust the transparency to know that was a lie; I know it all already.
A preplanned community like Caspian may have low-income option sectors, but there aren’t any slums or ghettos here, so it is true that its generally a safer place, but not all crime stems out of just the bad parts of a town. The hard working, dedicated, vigilant and bored police force keeps a tight grip on everything: frightening the sheepish citizens into submission like wolves, which is coincidentally the same thing I used to say about Vine’s finest. Whatever crime does get reported is ultimately in control of those who fill out the paperwork, and though I don’t know if this would or wouldn’t happen in my hometown’s police station, I have reason from many sources—ranged from fanatically to passively convincing—leading me to believe that the Caspian police department often throws out most reports on crimes of proprietary, sexual or violent natures to keep the books clean and in their favor.
I’d like to note now, though it is merely speculation on my part and backed by no fact from any source greater than my intuition, that there is no difference between The Caspian Company and the City of Caspian. I haven’t confirmed this at all though, it’s not like I checked and saw the same names on the seats of CEOs as on the chairs of the city board. But in my mind, I can only assume that in a place so inclusively belonging to one corporate entity, which can create its own outrageous prices because owning so much land gives them a monopoly over the market and which still maintains its control over any property it leases out by having a hand in all utilities and services provided for it, that their interests, resources and tactics are one in the same. The Caspian Company created, raised and nurtured the settlement which now allows it to thrive, which makes it less like a parasite or even a symbiotic relationship, but two organs of the same being.
That being, whether it prefers to be acknowledged as a city or a corporation or something entirely different, is a clever, sneaky and conniving one. When I began working for the Census, our old superior escorted a group of enumerators to perform an overnight operation in one of the unsheltered areas notorious for having a population of homeless individuals frequent it at night. He had personally been there earlier in the week to scope it out at day and night, to estimate how many workers he would need to bring, and handpicked several enumerators to accompany him to what apparently was a barren park on Census Day.
Not even the scraps that signified an encampment remained; the park had been scrubbed clean of nearly every trace of the homeless population that our boss knew was present. He thus suspected the city was up to its usual tricks of record smudging and gave the large group of destitute people a one-night hotel voucher to not be counted by The UT Census, if that even makes a city look bad. All it really did was disable those people from receiving the shelters, programs and whatever other aide they would need, and leave a community with a sizable homeless issue bereft of the facilities necessary to deal with it as it grows over the next ten years.
Yes, whether I refer to the city or the company, Caspian likes to keep things secret; but I haven’t even gotten to my big point yet. Which is sad, cause I’m already a chapter deep on this transmission and wondering if I should have broken my expose on this town up into four parts, instead. Anyway, on top of all these things Caspian would rather stayed hidden from public knowledge, the most concerning and irresponsible thing they keep under wraps is exactly what is right under your feet.
What, no one informed this was a native burial site before? The realtor didn’t mention that strange odor that comes about every once in a while might be escaping gasses from a hastily capped landfill still decomposing beneath your neighborhood? Well they must also not have told you that the whole community may be ready collapse into one of these reclamation projects if a big enough Marsquake struck. And they definitely didn’t even bring up the fact that the corrosive carcinogen trichloroethylene is seeping up into your village from a contaminated water table.
One of the drawbacks of letting the military construct a space station on your land, it seems. The toxic hazard stems from below the Il Tor Marine Space Station, where the industrial, triple-chlorine solvent was used for decades as a degreaser and cleaner for spacecraft, fighter jets and any number of other airborne vessels serviced at the station. There, the aquifer is saturated with the nasty TCE, which the UTGS, or whatever agency the government contracted to study their old bases, discovered to be noticeably spreading towards the center of Olympus County at an alarming rate. The northward drifting cloud has also been found pluming up beneath one of Caspian’s more noteworthy villages, Treeford.
The poor denizens of Treeford have no idea there are hazardous levels of this life-shortening chemical bubbling up below the many fountains, water features and green turfs filling in the spaces between their units. Their plants and lawns are sprayed with water reclaimed from this very source, as well as any produce or crops grown in the area, making it even harder to avoid exposure to it by you or your loved ones.
There’s no info bubbling up on the haywire gadget in my hands that discloses any information about TCE. It seems to be wiped from all the pedias and main info sources that supply the most popular results to this app, but even if I could navigate the interface—or if I had a better comm—I wouldn’t find very many instances of it being mentioned in conjunction with the name Caspian. Either the source that reports on the chemical and its cause of cancer in Marines and family members of those serving live in or around bases all across the UTE is wrong or someone’s done a good job of editing any info about it. It’s not really something that’s good for business, so anyone not wanting to lose money because of, or be liable for the mess, won’t want them to know.
Especially with the ground breaking on Caspian’s new project; a repurposing of land to build a great park. It will include sports fields and parks, and hiking trails through a picturesque, artificial canyon and botanical gardens, a museum, a library and a veteran’s memorial, a giant, communal social-terrace dotted with cafes and restaurants for visitors and locals. It will also include a thousand acre farm to help produce food for the eateries and grocers there and in the surrounding areas, with a very large portion set aside to be of a wildlife area, reintroduced into an important Olympus County watershed, as well as a few pockets of housing communities to flush with the surrounding villages. And best of all, the infrastructures already laid out because it will be located on the waste yard of the decommissioned Il Tor station.
They ensure us the site will be safe and for humans by the time the begin construction, but when they’ve done so much to mitigate this issue and keep it as small a deal as possible, I don’t think they can be trusted to wait until the land is entirely harmless and the toxic waste cleaned thoroughly before they’ll sink their shovels into all the money to be made. I wish I could find an entry on this so I could back it up with fact.
Hey there’s something! Wait…no, damn it…it’s a blip that has TCE in the beginning of the sentence but there’s no way for me to move around one of the larger bubbles in the way, advertising new space available for lease. I’ve really had it with this gorking comm and its busted-ass scroll wheel. Apparently I get cranky and ranty when I’m upset about my possessions. I just wanna get my work done and get out of this terrible place, but I still don’t even know where to start.
Oh yeah; north! I turn myself around in a circle watching the tiny compass in the corner of the screen rotate until the N is on top. Of course, It has me looking straight down the road I’m desperately wanting to take back home. I root through my bag for the hard copy I had out earlier, and compare it to where I was standing.
Well, if that’s north, and that’s the freeway, then across that strawberry field is the hill where I’m standing, and then I’m in the entirely wrong neighborhood. Gork.
Alright, all the way back down the hill…all the way back to my crawler. I hope I can get paid for all the time I’ve spent gallivanting along this pleasure trail.
