Page 30 of Grimdark Magazine Issue 48

Vivian counted the buildings, seven on this block. A decade ago, in another life, she'd lived here with her wife Brooke and their child, Cass. The second building from the corner was theirs. Generic Citizens--in the featureless silvery-gray overlays worn by anyone who had enough points to not be a Shade--walked along the sidewalk on their way home from work. They gave Vivian a wide berth. She saw them as Citizens, but they saw her as a dark shadow, an unsightly blemish in their otherwise beautiful world. They were guessing at her crimes, judging her, avoiding any semblance of contact for fear that mere association with a Shade would cost them precious points.

They were right to do it. Vivian didn't belong here, but sometimes she needed to return, to be close to her family, even if she couldn't recognize them. For all Vivian knew, they might have moved to a new neighborhood years ago. But when she and Brooke had come home from the hospital with baby Cass, this was the home they'd gone to. Where Cass had taken their first steps and drawn crayon pictures on the entire inside of their closet. Where, as a teen, Cass had painted their landscapes, and portraits, and endless variations on sunflowers.

Vivian still had one of the paintings, though now she couldn't see anything but a blank white page. That change had happened here, too, more than a decade ago. She'd pulled Cass out of a protest and been thrown into shade, and the next day Citizens voted to make the shadow prison experiment permanent. They'd condemned her to an existence of neverending shadow to protect themselves. So she'd packed up Cass's painting of sunflowers and walked out. To protect her family.

In the distance, the tall silver form of a Shadowkeeper approached. Vivian hurried away. It might be Brooke, and she couldn't bear for her wife to see her this way. Keepers were not as tightly bound by the filters, and without an overlay she'd look somewhere between ragged and half-dead.

She ran her fingers over the uneven stubble of her hair. She'd shaved it herself, by feel since she couldn't see her own scalp. Brooke had loved her hair, before. She'd been jealous of the length.

Well-maintained gray buildings gave way to dilapidated gray buildings. Like most Shades, Vivian lived on the outskirts of the city. She was fresh off her shift at the ZimCorp assembly line, her hands stiff and sore from repeating the same motions for hours on end. Placing metal plates half the size of her palm into a slot on the work base, watching as a thick needle punched through the plates, piercing them with holes. Removing the plates from the machine and placing them on the belt that carried them to the next station. It was hard to say for sure what she was making--Shades only did early stage production, never anything that would provide an opportunity to steal a finished or near-finished product. But there were whispers that it was a new kind of PIP, something even worse than the current ones.

Information was hard to come by. Shades only got the prison net--she couldn't even access Citizen-level news feeds, biased and skewed as they were. If she could get her hands on some beer, she could trade it to Auntie Yang for a peek at the rumornet, find out what terrible tech she was helping create. In theory the Keepers could see anything she did by reading it off her PIP, but with so many Shades to monitor they'd largely abandoned the raw sensory data for shadow prison algorithms that wouldn't recognize a terminal as ancient as Auntie Yang's. Probably.

For the first time in years, Vivian was accumulating points, creeping back up towards the citizenship line instead of plummeting inexorably to zero-point termination. If she kept her head down, maybe they'd set her free. She could have sunlight. See her family. Have some semblance of her old life. Shades were disappearing, hitting zero or killing themselves with illegal surgeries to try and remove their PIPs. Maybe it was better for her to work with the system but no, that mentality was what let the system thrive.

She had to keep fighting. For Cass. She had to find out what ZimCorp was working on.

Maybe Jazz would let her moonlight a shift at the Blind Tiger and pay her in beer.

She cut across an alley that ran between a ration room and some run-down apartments, then knocked seven times on a nondescript gray door. It opened a crack, and a Generic Citizen peered out at her. Citizens and even advertising bots all wore that same generic silver body, making it impossible to know who she was talking to. Only Keepers looked any different--bigger and a slightly paler shade of silver--and even they could broadcast a Generic Citizen overlay if they wanted to.

Vivian had been a Shade so long that she struggled to remember even the most familiar faces. Brooke. Cass. Her child would be nearly thirty now. Vivian might have grandchildren that she'd never met. Might never meet. The only person she ever saw as an individual was Auntie Yang, who had managed to hack the system and present herself as a grandmotherly woman with a bun of silver-streaked black hair.

The Citizen stared at her and said nothing. It could be Jazz, or a customer, or an undercover Keeper waiting for her to make a mistake that would cost her precious points--she had no way to know.

"Jazz working tonight?" Vivian asked.

"Who wants to know?"

"24601." Vivian couldn't tell people her name. If she tried to reveal personal information it got filtered out so they simply didn't hear it. It wasn't as bad as the first few months in shadow prison, when it had been impossible to have conversations because the filters were so aggressive. Shade labor was more useful with at least some communication, thank goodness. But she was still a Shade, not a Citizen, and all prisoners were interchangeable within the system. Over time she'd built up some codes with regular contacts, an almost-identity.

"Yeah right, and I'm Javert." Jazz opened the door. "You looking for work again? It's been slow and B.B. doesn't have the credits. Keepers have been cracking down hard on drinking It isn't as trendy as a minor act of rebellion these days."

Vivian flinched at the word rebellion, but Jazz wasn't a Shade, so in theory her speech wasn't being tracked by the prison algorithms. "I'm looking to score a six pack of beer for my auntie."

"Dishwasher's broke again, so B.B. will probably do you a sixpack of the cheap shit if you take care of those." The silvery arm of Jazz's overlay pointed to a mountain of dirty dishes overflowing out of an industrial size sink.

Auntie Yang would complain about not getting better quality beer, but Vivian had seen her drink cooking wine. Even the worst beer was hard to come by these days. She found herself half hoping that Auntie would offer to share, though she'd been dry since the prohibition came down a few years back.

She passed the bar where a handful of Citizens ate plates of flavored nutri-bricks and sipped at drinks programmed to taste like beer or whiskey or fruity cocktails. She went straight to the back, where B.B. was throwing more dishes onto the already precarious stack.

"Who the hell are you?" he demanded.

"Jazz said you need a dishwasher. I'm a dishwasher."

"And how exactly does she plan to pay you? I'm not made of credits."

"I'll do it for a couple sixpacks." She held out her hand, palm up.

He scanned her chip to make sure she wasn't violent or otherwise unsuitable to hire. The scan gave him a temporary Shade ID number in case he wanted to file a report, her current point total, and a list of violations. He looked her up and down, as if he could get information from the generic dark outline Shades projected. "All the dishes. One sixpack when you're done. Drink it somewhere else--the bar is for Citizens."

"Yeah, no problem." Vivian started on the giant mountain of dishes. Periodically B.B. came in from the bar and loaded her up with more. He'd keep her busy until closing time, all for one goddamn sixpack.

A targeted advertising Generic appeared next to her and started a conversation. "At five thousand points, Shades are eligible for coursework at Juan Pedro Tomas Community College. With work packages and loans, an education is within your reach."

"Thanks," Vivian said, knowing the Generic would stick around if she tried to argue. It'd been a year since she'd had five thousand points, and she'd lost all hope of getting back that high. Now her life was a matter of hoarding the points she had, keeping herself above zero, doing what she needed to do to stay alive. Working for beer to bribe Auntie was a terrible idea, except that it might help break the system and make a better world for Cass.

The stack of dishes shifted in the sink, and Vivian wasn't quick enough to catch them all. Two glasses slid to the floor and shattered.