Drips

The Megastructure leaks. It’s a fact we’ve all accepted. From the dregs to the penthouses, the whole damn thing echoes with drips. This isn’t a maintenance issue, of course. The Lord has a whole army of pipeworkers on retainer. We scurry around in the walls, tightening bolts and patching cracks. Just as surely as the wireheads keep the lights on, us wallrats keep a hundred thousand souls from drowning in their own shit.

I was sitting in the dark, down in the dregs. Folks from the tenement blocks find the quiet unnerving, but I think it’s a nice place to sit between shifts. Whole thing’s about two dozen levels of maintenance tunnels, so all you hear are the machines humming and the drips dripping.

I’d found a pretty little thing sitting in a puddle of dripwater. I turned on my little gadget cooked up by the goggles in central and put the nodes in the water. A bunch of chemicals and minerals were swimming around in there, stuff that must have been picked up from almost a hundred levels over my head.

I sighed. It was shaping up to be a long shift.

I unlocked an access hatch and shimmied through. The leak dribbled down a pipe from farther up the shaft. Easy to follow. I clicked on my headlamp and started climbing.

The shaft ended in the tenement blocks. I crawled out, locked the grate behind me, and got my bearings. I wasn’t too far from my apartment, come to think of it. I had some time to kill. Why not.

The overhead flickered on in the little box of a room. My bed was folded up against the wall. The floor was cluttered with clothes and those trinkets you pick up and never really put down again. Tinny water sputtered from the faucet as I washed out my only cup. Footsteps passed by. A child’s cry echoed from somewhere else.

My only destination was up. So I kept going.

Next stop was the market. The corridors were crowded, they always are. Doesn’t matter the shift. Everyone’s working on a different clock, and they all have credits that need spending.

I followed the tide of people til I reached my favorite peddler. His wares were small, just scraps of metal bent out of shape, but they had a way of speaking to a person. They speak to me, at least.

“Morning,” I said. “Got anything I’d fancy?”

“Here I thought you weren’t gonna show!” The peddler smiled with all twelve of his teeth. “I got some nice ones, yes sir. Frogs, butterflies, even crafted an octopus no bigger than your palm.”

“They sound awfully nice, but can I get one for less than a credit?”

“Figured you’d say that, yes sir. Hoping you buy yourself a penthouse with all the credits you’re saving.”

“When I do, you’ll be sipping bubbly with me every night.”

“Keep your bubbly, I’m just fine chugging the dregwater those squatters cook up.”

“Sure, sure. Lose the rest of those teeth while you’re at it.” I said, and two bits on the table.

He looked at the bits, then up at me. He chuckled. He pulled out a tiny little thing, badly made.

“A flower?”

“Yes sir. Just like one you’d find in the greenhouses.”

I’d never seen the greenhouses, and I don’t think he had, either. But the way it shined in the flourescents was damn pretty. I fixed it to my lapel and bid my see-you-later.

I climbed back through a hatch and–

The leak was gone.

It was the damnedest thing. It was right there just a few minutes ago, but I couldn’t find it. I pulled out another little gadget from the labs and tested the walls for residue. Nothing. I thought, maybe it fixed itself. Then I thought, that would be a shame wouldn’t it?

It really was a pretty little thing, that flower I’d found growing all the way down in the dregs. The trinket fixed to my lapel was as close as human hands could craft, but that sprout in the dripwater glowed with a light of its own making.

I sat in the dark, listening to the babble of the crowd. I figured it to be a stream of noise telling a story of people living.

Under all that noise, I started to hear that drip again. Steady as a clock.