"We are like animalculae in a drop of water . . ." Fredric Brown
AN UNDERGROUND TRANSIT System operated for twenty-four years through President, Calaveras, and Snohomish Counties without suffering a solitary mishap. The Regional Transit Authority's "Vision 2020" had been well realized. Sat 4 JUL, 2044, President County's Chief Exec Cho-M'Bobea lasercut the SoulGold(k) across Pioneer Square Main Station's . . . and Sealth's . . . newest public toy.
Convertible Changing Table
The former King County had been renamed after President Rice, first USA black president, died during the Virus Riots of 2017.
Literally thousands of "shoeboxes" dotted the landscape of "Pretzel" County, 1342 in the City of Sealth alone. The eighty Underground Access Elevators of Pioneer Square propelled twenty thousand people an hour through SEAPAC's three levels of transit, linking the rail systems, van transit, the flyways and the new underwater marine channels to cities all over Western Washington and downcoast into Oregon, California(k), and well into Mexico.
CE M'Bobea, a naturalized human Pan-African, spraypainted her name with harmless vegetable dyes outside Main Station's shoebox, or UAE, on the ever-changing Rainbow Motion Board. ComPugenta(k) cool air, sights, sounds, smells and textures emanated from the board, overpowering a crowd of metallically dressed men, women, kids and natuchildren(k) gathered to watch as members of SEAPAC's Planning Committee prepared to ride the giant "Levitator."
"You wouldn't believe our track improvements," murmured Zien Pea, a grown natuchild of ten and comember of 2044's SPC, to a Globavid reporter from East Kenya, then a white-held territory.
The reporter, David Hopdotter, an Anti-Sectionist Jew, was a known crusader on behalf of brown nationalist groups, and a Western Bloc government-paid news agent. He was nearly keeling over himself from Compugenta's Virtual Reality show, while most of the crowd could barely converse, even in TAP.
"Isn't work boring you?" David mouthed back. He hated TAP.
But Zien, eyes large and blue-green, TAPPED slowly, in a way sure to enforce her ideas SOUNDLY into David's mind, that she LOVED the shiny clothes generated for comembers by Seabell/the Coastal Transit Project. "I HATE autoleather. It's SQUISHY, growing viraclothes in labs. They mined TONS of Snohomish County gold building the tracks!" She pulled his sleeve, signaling "NO WAY." Always TAPPING the latest permafrozen slang, Zien.
You TAP using the other person's whole body. That lets in the Deaf-Blind. Zien could see and hear, some, but used a Chair.
The entire crowd surged forward when the huge Main Elevator doors opened, letting everyone into the biggest shoebox in town. Zien and fifty other Chairpeds backed in. Padded grabbars merged as the thirty-foot wide doors whispered shut on the hunplus-foot deep shoebox. A natuvoice came on, explicating the UAEs.
"Built to accommodate Sealth's six-and-a-half million people, not to mention the two million traveling through, the shoeboxes also help generate energy, pumping out excess water from First Level. A circulating hydraulic system drives the new, totally safe, pollution-free Levitator . . ."
The leviathan elevator swooped around in loopdyloop passages. "We're going through the pretzel now," David gently TAPPED on Zien's right shoulder, "if my stomach survives all the twisting."
Sure enough, the UAE inserted into the Water Table, the very first Underground restaurant in Sealth, just waylay enough to switch corridors while inundating all 328 passengers with gentle virtual reality tastes and aromas, one meal with drink at a time on "hunger display." Only Tokyo's cafes surpassed its quality.
The giant elevator then merrily zoomed along sideways, its foot-thick Plass front allowing full display of THOUSANDS of tiny restaurants/drug bar fronts, markets and businesses, the six-mile Mall River Forest Park, the PoliBuilding, and Sealth Aquarium's Salmon (Coho, Chum and Steelhead) Causeway on Mezzanine Level.
David loved the salmon causeway, mouthing and TAPPING at Zien constantly about fishing privileges and waiting lists. "Next month, honey, when I drop in from Qakar (Kenya's new Pan-African name) I'm gonna take you fishing, up-up-up, I promise!"
Zien didn't care. David's third daughter, via fertilization of two women and much frantic labwork to fuse her halved body parts-David had been overtested for IDC (k) (Immune Deficiency Condition) during the Virus Riots of 2025-had a mission. Her singleminded purpose was to promote awareness of genetically altered people as legitimate human beings, in spite of their strange looks, multiple disabilities, and scary potentialities.
Other than that, she ECSTATICALLY loved organic beancream!
But she was more worried than excited about her entry into Underground Sealth's "Hell Realm," her Chinese aspect appalled by the special closing in around her, the lack of a beautiful blue sky overhead. She knew no color but loved blue. She was able to sense its vibratory pattern the best of all. She leaned against her IDC-treated father, a man who'd grown up in hospitals, screaming his lungs out to leave.
Care providers of the 21rst Century were a grand delusion of medical skills and elemental soul-casting, taking life quickly with huge doses of poison when it became unpalatable, steadily experimenting with people's bodies. "They force us to be made sick and well," according to megacare reformer Flo Ware X-806 .
Very few comembers were worried about this, Zien found, as she TAPPED on them; SPC Shirley Fung believed care an attempt "to help, not harm." Bored with phrases, Zien wanted full citizen's rights. She was already mayor of her Aboveground urban village.
Zien's village led SeaTac region's disposal of wastes into utilizable natural and methane gas pockets. Meanwhile plants, Earth's chief oxygen source, had cornered AMCA's inarable land. Disabilities, racial/sexual issues and animal rights remained as distantly soluble problems for AMCANS after the World Bank released Engas, the special bonds freezing funds of all countries in Interchange, the major global work of the tens, twenties and thirties. But money as a concept was finally destroyed by computer exchange systems. They couldn't keep track of theft!
Only human, natu, and animal efforts, computer signals and group co-op signatures were needed to start projects anymore. That meant a multilevel Washington connected by rail to upper Canada, the southmost Baja tip, and all points east by 2039.
Rail would have been global if not for planecars. Licensed drivers still flood the buzzing skies over most urban centers. They wiz around each other at lightening speeds.
Ten minutes after taking forty-three planned angle turns, the west coast's tenth largest UAE phwoomphed to a gentle, caressing stop at the Third Level's biggest platform, Denny RetroParque.
Right under the Upper Queen Anne Transit Island, the parquet was delineated by universal animal and plant symbology, as well as local Sealth landmark symbology. Aboveground, Metro TransVans provided all short trips within President and Calaveras Counties.
Ever one disembarked, some onto the moving platform, others onto the tree-lined walk/bikeway below. Zien chose the walkway, subfluorescence pulsing robin's egg blue from the rounded walls. Third Level's ceiling was an incredible 550-feet high, solar subfluorescence pulsing robin's egg blue from the rounded walls. Light-emiting diodes wrapped each comember in a unique, 500-tone rainbow that caressed one's body with orgasmically liquid warmth.
Much is being done at present to help prenatu eyes that reflex poorly against indoor light, disabling children from normal sight. Nowadays natus have all the worst vision problems as keratotomic surgery, widespread since the late '10s, has corrected all human vision problems. Some AMCA laws bar natus from the upper levels of the AMCA Armed Services, government and the private sector.
The Jewish father and daughter team deboarded with a knot of twenty comembers, shimmering to the tune of rainbow lights and foggy background attracter music wheezing from sardine-packed restaurants/drug bars, and arrived at the commemoratively named Belated Health Bar. The recessed front of the eight-foot wide, sixty-foot deep, hunplus-level, hydraulic transfloor Bar (stand on the Chairped-access leftpad hologrammed Sealth's famed ruddy terrace-cotta. There David bought them one of the only family of drugs proven to benefit the human central nervous system by encouraging regrowth of damaged myelin tissue. They sipped twin cool sprinkice freshments with whipped cranboysenberry syrup, and felt the soothing effects of...PPOOOPPPPPPPP ! ! !
Both of them looked up as all light around Third Level boomed off. The last thing David saw was the glimmer of a pretty remate human's . . . or was she natu? Silvamesh, pinfeather-lined dress.
A human-sounding voice vibrated their table as Zien clung to David, TAPPING frantically; the voice echoed like the usual David, TAPPING frantically; the voice echoed like the usual public address PoliSystem Regional Transit operative. But David sensed something amiss. Transit usually hired natus as Vocals.
"Do NOT panic. Your transit system and Underground parquet are SAFE while service repairs are made. You will experience TEMP darkness . . ." Troping the story to Globavid as he carefully listened, David also touched his cellwave phone, capable of wave rescending through fifty thousand miles of concrete, and called Field Supervisor Terno Farquar-el-Grey. A Pan-Arab infused with Korean body parts, Farquar was an old friend of David's from the Virus Riots. "Far" accidentally took a viral explosion that saved David's life by swerving his Boeing Eagle convertible, a flying car, into an oncoming blast of fuel, aimed at David, a war analyst for the Redmond Massacre.
"FARQUAR! My daughter is up a tree! She's practically climbing into my outer pockets. Why's it taking forever on this?"
"Tell your daughter to calm down, and press the receiver of your ear. Stat? Good. Third Level is being held by pro-Kenyan terrorists." David stoked the word "safe" into Zien's silver hair. Zien never believed anything but her own Formachair's computer-laden Envir(k) was safe. But she kinda liked danger. Her chair did not have normal legs. It was not a Spider Chair. It hovered over the grown on a cushion of air, and the legs were receded into the frame.
"Oh, Garamond Adonai, yer HOLLOW!" David laughed.
"Nopers. We have about an hour to track down a team of White Party Nairobeans before they blow up Third Level with a SUBGUM of a thermo-nuclear explosion, imploding SEALTH. Y'COPY???"
'NAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHH." Zien could tell something was wrong. Everyone else was pulling out pocket lights and marijuana (filtered) lightups, creating a flickering candlelit glow. She finally grabbed David's pocket lighter and beamed his face.
"If you don't tell," she TAPPED, all over his body, turning on her background noise inhibitor so she could hear him, "I'LL TICKLE YOU ! ! !" That was Zien's most dreaded trick.
Farquar steadily intoned David's doom into one red-veined ear, giving him details the Metro PoliSafety Teams had uncovered through multicam TV detection systems. They'd spotted two alien men clothed head-to-toe in light-absorbing black Starcloth(k) when one of them idiotically lit an unfiltered hash joint.
"We turned on all the sprinkler systems to dampen their clothes so we can ranar 'em better. The Purple Team saw them in Zone 14. Definitely the body shapes of human pro-phobics.
"Phobics" were what media called "white" people scared of racially merging with brown people. Worldwide. There were plenty of these, holding assets of resources in centers of power, since the Virus Riots; and the Darwin-based pleas for supremacy from the former rich wielders of money and securities. David, a former phobic, hated it passionately since natu Zien was born.
Zien's mothers were the only match possible out of available candidates for BirthQuest(k) from David's tired, medic-tampered body. By the time he pushed to have kids he had to face that. Two Szechwan women selflessly tolerant of his Life Profile were needed to combine every sustainable, undamaged chromosome.
"The City is the place where the diffused rays of many separate Beans of Life fall into focus . . ." said a Chinese proverb in 1994 on the wall of a Metro office. "Far, how in HELL does a Jew and a disabled natu enter Zone 14, alone and unaided, when we're all the way . . . Zien, gimme light . . . IN ZONE 36 UQATI?"
"You don't, we do. We're in Zones 12 to 16, searching, and we've got 'em surrounded. There go the batteries," Farquar sighed as hundreds of backup superconductors flooded on. "They have a combined life of about a million years. Since the world lost money as a concept we can use either system anymore. But I lost money as a concept we can use either system anymore. But I guess we'll pull easy handle on Third Level's generator soon . . .
"Yup. McCaulough says they submicrowaved terminals in the fused Permaplates(k). One of the Green Team must be THEM. Oops. There's only . . . all twelve of them just surrendered . . . their liason says Nairobi used to be allies with my old country!
"We have the thermo-nuclear BOMBO ! ! !" Enda problema.
Farquar's words, reassimilating in David's recording cells, pared down to an essential story. David troped film/voice to Globavid pretty much like sneezing. Smiling at his relieved daughter and their refreshing drugs, he touched the phone off.
MANY THANKS TO JOE AND YOSH AT METRO, PHYLLIS MILLER AND OTHERS AT SEATTLE'S CITY PLANNING DEPT, FOR THIS STORY'S BACKGROUND AND THE CLEARANCE TO HAVE IT PUBLISHED BY ME!
Sealy Posture Mattress Desk Shelving Unit Bookshelf Toy Storage
