Cyberpunk on Mars
How spectacularly things shine when viewed from the darkness, she thought as she looked up through the crisscrossing walkways at the glittering Canopy of the City. An inverse spider’s web, lines of shadow against the light. But there were no spiders here to spin their gossamer tapestries. Even the arachnophobes missed them on some level. Homo sapiens were the only representatives of the Animalia kingdom, the lonely leaf on their branch of the tree of life. Their microbiomes were poor company. Artificial intelligence was stalled at the notably artificial stage, rendering humans the only sentient creatures within millions of kilometers. They were also more genetically homogenous than ever, although diverging in other ways. And lack of biodiversity was not a hallmark of a healthy ecological system.
She would have killed for a real dog. She had killed for other things, but those days were long behind her now. At least she hoped they were. Recent events made her unsure.
It was in fact quite dark where she stood. Unless one counted graffiti, no one bothered with advertisements on the Floor anymore. They started one hundred meters up in the Understory, putting to shame the dim memories she had of Times Square and Shinjuku from a different life on another world. She felt at least partially culpable. Society had tried not to repeat that mistake, but some business models just refused to die.
She recalled the sex workers she had passed moments before and smirked.
At night the only light emitted on the Floor came from the faint, tinted glow of the dying bioluminescent trees, relics of another time when the aesthetics of the Floor mattered to those whose opinions mattered. People like her. Tonight the trees were violet and magenta. During the daytime it wasn’t much brighter given how little sunlight made it all the way through the sparse skylights and upper layers of the towering metropolis. Those in the Emergent no longer even had to look upon those who were literally so far below them. All they could see was the radiant Canopy sprawling in every direction, and the desolate red Martian landscape — the Savannah — beyond, dotted with energy receivers, batteries, and the rocket fields. She chose not to remember what it was like.
A loud crash brought her attention back to the immediate surroundings. A pod that must have come from the Understory — the insects that flew through the spider’s web — had smashed into the empty path fewer than thirty meters in front of her. A rare, but not entirely unheard-of occurrence. I really need to pay more attention, she thought, though realistically she knew it was a lost cause at this stage of her life. Old habits died hard. Maybe even harder than her.
Through the splattered, shattered glass she could see that one of the vehicle’s occupants had clearly not survived the impact. The other was wearily climbing out of the wreckage. The piloting systems were so good and the speeds traveled at so high — people were still inexplicably and perpetually in a hurry — that similar to the airplanes of the past, if you hit something at full speed while in flight the laws of motion all but assured death. Crashing at lower speeds usually meant a loss of lift and a plunge to the Floor, where many would encounter the same fate. The quick way out was preferable. Like in the rainforests of Earth, things from the upper layers fell down here to decay. The Floor dwellers — the fungi in this circle of life — broke down that which fell from above, ensuring it did not pile up unsustainably.
Nothing was wasted in the jungle.
This is an excerpt from my debut science fiction novel Mind Painter.
