SCS-Sidestory - Elegy Marie

Hi! So, I've been writing a story as part of an SCS Quest over on SpaceBattles. Mostly because... I miss writing Quests? But also, I need to test out Hope//Punk, and this seemed like a cool way to do it beyond the weekly playtests.

There's a link to the SB page here, if you want to join in: https://forums.spacebattles.com/threads/hope-punk-a-stray-cat-strut-squest.1228535/

Anyway, if you Hate AI, then you might dislike this. I used AI to turn the text from Second person to First, and then from Present Tense to Past. Obviously I can do that myself, but I always miss a few 'yous' in there. Plus it's faster, and I just need to give it a quick editing pass after to make sure it's all in order and then it's good.

Anyway, here's the fic... it doesn't really have a name, so I've been using the Main Character's for my files.

Part One - The Artist - /

I was an artist.

I didn’t know why, but something had called out to me. It started when I was young. Across the apartment I lived in, back when I lived in one of those pre-built seven-floor housing complexes, there had been a wall. It had been visible through a window that was just barely low enough for me to see out of when I was no taller than my mother’s hip.

That wall had been a canvas, though at the time I hadn’t known what that meant, exactly.

Every morning, at the crack of six-thirty, a cleaner drone would come out and spray the wall down with something caustic that stank so badly it made my eyes tear up whenever I was near.

The paint on the wall would flow down in little rivulets, spinning around a nearby manhole and down into the sewers.

Then the artists would come out.

They had to be fast. It was spray cans and stencils, sometimes pre-programmed ‘paint burners’ that would splash art onto the wall, but more often than not it was just someone with a couple of cans of neon, with quick feet and quick skill.

They painted, and I watched.

Some days it was dragons and creatures of fantasy, some days horrible depictions of the Antithesis, some days politicians and gang signs. I had liked the cartoony ones when I was young. I had adored the depictions of Samurai, standing tall and proud, the heroes and symbols of hope that I couldn’t quite understand, though I still grasped that they were important.

Once, someone painted a mural of Silver Hoop the day after he had died.

That art stayed there, untouched by the cleaning drones for three weeks. Some artist came and added to it, turning one image into a mural... until someone came and covered the mural in poorly-painted gang tags.

That wall had been more important to me than my own room, my own home.

At some point, when I was a teen, it had been torn down. And in its place rose Mega Building 501. My new home.

I woke up to a ping on my jailbroken augs and realized that I had several messages waiting for me.

The first was from the Adobe Corporate Police Force. They were demanding that I send in copies of all the software on my augs, all of my personal files, and my banking information. They thought I had copies of their products obtained by illegal means.

They were right, but I had been receiving the same message every day for years.

I stretched, then took in my room. It was a rent-a-day apartment. Four square metres of home sweet home.

The second message was marked as urgent. The apartment’s automated payment processor had been sending me messages all week, but...

I opened one and read it.

To: Elegy.Marie579@FreemiumMail.com
From: MB501 Payment Processing
Subject: //PaYmeNt NotIf///cation – UNit 72-G

Hello [RESIDENT NAME ERROR: NULL ENTRY],

This is a fr//iendly reminder that your RENT payment for APR███ has not been received. As of [DATE NOT FOUND], your balance is:
PAYM█NT DUE ████████
PENALTY INITIATED ███
HALLWAY ACCESS—DENIED
TOILET PRIVILEGES—PENDING REVIEW

Please remem███ all paymen███ ███ made in-person at Kiosk 9-C or via certified Mesh paylink. Attempting to spoof transfers or burn tokens from expired ledgers may result in:
████ational eviction.
Repossession of █████ (INVENTORY LOST)
████ESS to ████life su███▖▘▚▚▚▚▚

I was pretty sure that someone in the building was a clever little Mesh hacker and that they had decided to play silly-buggers with the automated payment processor. So... free rent for a bit? I took it.

The last bit of mail was from my Art School, a friendly reminder that 22% compound interest added up.

I sighed, sat up, and picked up some slacks off the floor. Clean enough, I supposed. Time to get started for the day. Maybe I would even earn a few credits. Or maybe some super-rich corpo-type would decide to commission me?

I snorted. Unlikely.

After a good stretch and my morning ablutions (I still had a box of Grasshopper cereal left over. No milk, but water was... well, it worked, I supposed), which included a quick wash of my face in the sink and some dishes, I finally decided that today was going to be a productive kind of day.

There was a lot of work to be had in Mega Building 501. I wasn’t suitable for most of it, but sometimes someone needed something drawn or painted, and they wanted that authentic touch. Or it was cheaper to hire a proper artist instead of using one of those subscription AI art things.

Besides, I could paint on things. I had done a few cars here and there, some doors, a few bits of... creative marketing on mega building walls. That usually required being quick enough not to get caught in the act by MB501 security, but they were mostly lazy anyway.

With a jaw-cracking yawn, I hopped into the Mesh. Not the deep Mesh, where all the hacker-y sorts were, but the surface. I made a conscious effort not to get distracted by social media stuff, then I browsed a few older forums.

None of my posts had really caught any attention, not even the Hungry Artist requests for work. Not that my posts on there stood out from all the AI bots and other, even hungrier artists.

But... maybe I would find something deeper?

It took a couple of hours, but finally, I found something. In fact, I found a few somethings.

As it turned out, there was a small community of graffiti artists I hadn’t been familiar with. That was to say, I had seen their work here and there around Mega Building 501, but I had never met them. They happened to have a social media group where they posted pictures of their latest work and talked between each other. Nothing too special.

But while perusing, I noticed something. They had been hired recently to tag some buildings. In fact, a lot of their recent work had been for the Happy Gang. They were... a little strange. They lived mostly on Floor Thirty and maybe a floor above and below that. I didn’t really have too much of a reason to venture around there, except that there was a really nice Indian place on Floor Thirty-Two that I stopped by sometimes. I had seen their tags in person there.

In any case, the media posts I saw were a little bummed out. The local graffiti club, or whatever they were, had lost a member recently. He had been shanked by a member of the Fisters for some reason.

That same member had had a pretty nice gig working for the Happy Gang, painting their tags here and there, and covering some walls in art that fit their theme. He had bragged about how much he had been bringing in.

It was just about three hundred credits an hour. But... that would mean that two hours of work would cover a day’s rent and food. A third hour would cover the cost of painting supplies, and if I could work four or more hours... maybe the compounding interest on my bills wouldn’t hurt quite as much.

I was a little hesitant, however. That job would mean heading up a dozen floors from my comfortable place on lucky Floor Thirteen to the Happy Gang’s bar up on Floor Thirty to basically beg for work.

It would mean working for a gang, too.

There was another option. I had come across a post for a warehouse on Floor Six. Three workers had died the day before in a tragic forklift accident, and now they were looking for replacements. It was physical labour, moving a box from A to B all day for thirty credits an hour.

It was... an option. Technically, it was even a corporate job, though as a gig job there were no benefits. At least it was honest work, but there was no soul to it.

The last option was... maybe begging? No, not begging... I didn’t have much musical talent, but I could paint pretty quickly and do some sketch work. If I went to one of the busier intersections, I might have been able to do some sketches for the public for change. I had done it before, and... usually made a little more than what my art supplies for the day cost.

It wasn’t good money, though. Worse even than warehouse work, and some gangs sometimes told me to piss off from their turf.

I had a switchblade I had found on the floor one day to defend myself with. It wasn’t enough to intimidate anyone, and I didn’t exactly look scary either. Not on a diet of low-carb, low-calorie, low-flavour ramen noodles.

***