A pulse runs through the rock of the Eaststone, like a gigantic heartbeat keeping time, audible and tactile: thump, and the ambient lighting begins its ramp from night-phase to day-phase, and the day begins.
Quartz-Boron-Quickdamp 561 wakes groggily and climbs from beneath the covers, unwilling but dutiful; their assigned pair bond, Tungsten-Sapphire-Vitriol 622, makes a sleepy noise and rolls over, not yet properly woken. The standardised pair-quarters have the usual number of wall niches, which can be purposed in various ways with modular racking, and also serve as beds with the addition of sleeping mats. Both of theirs are pushed together in a single niche, though getting along so closely with an assigned pair-bond is not required; they have occasional friendly sex, which is also in no way mandatory, though it’s counted as a success of social policy and cause for personal congratulation to be so close. Designated together after their crèche years, they quickly grew into close friends. Perhaps one day one of them will form an elective pair bond with someone else, and apply for housing redesignation, though it’s hard for Qubiq to imagine living with someone other than Tausev.
Tausev works in the Policy Bureau — though that’s not saying much; some substantial percentage of the population do, some way or another — processing news reports into policy-compliant, style guide-adherent, socially constructive framings, for general release. They are often called in early or kept late to deal with breaking stories, for which they are showered with fractional days in lieu or social credits; last night they trailed in yawning and sleepy, after the night-pulse sounded and Qubiq was already lying in bed, so their undutiful sleepiness is entirely forgivable. Qubiq’s own work is much less exciting, for all that it falls under the umbrella of Endeavours of Prioritised Social Importance; they go in at a regular time, come home at one, and in between largely tabulate data.
They set out two mugs, two waxy sachets of drink powder, a brick of dense, dark bread, and the square block of the runic hotplate on the table, duck into the wet nook to fill the kettle from the artificial stalactite of the water outlet — nozzle controls nudged with a sleepy hand to make sure they’re all the way over to cold and solid stream, no accidental slapstick showerhead incident — and sets the kettle of water to boiling.
“Just checking the mail,” they call softly, shuffle their feet into slippers, and duck out of the pair-quarters. The pigeonholes are at the arterial end of their cul-de-sac gallery of identical units; missives may be personal, but few are truly private. She nods to several of their neighbours, likewise shuffling to or fro, or setting out to work.
Along with the routine mail — daily public bulletins, citywide and district, and biosupplement packages for every occupied unit — everyone on their gallery has a red-bordered special dispatch, today. Even without Tausev’s I-shouldn’t-repeat-this pillow murmurs, everybody already knows, through the endless seep of gossip: there’s been another round of purges, up on the political undercabinets, factional jockeying come to blood. An unplanned population shortfall. Some of their neighbours’ dispatches will tell them they’ve been selected for the opportunity to bid for certain pheromone suppressants to be omitted from their biosupplements for a while, should they and their pair-bond wish to undergo the combative pheromonal lottery of sex expression — one, decided by the inscrutable vagaries of biology, to temporarily become an impregnator, the other to grow within them and ultimately lay a single, soft, pearl-white, sausage-shaped egg, to then be conveyed to crèche for the most scrupulous tekhnikal care through hatching and beyond. There is no greater mark of service to the Eaststone than the permanent physical marks of motherhood: the characteristic fat deposits at belly and thigh, the swaggering skew of the hip joints. As with impregnators, the primary sex expression itself is temporary; but the signs, and the valour, remain. Participation in simple biological continuity, the survival of the people, undertaken.
Quartz-Boron-Quickdamp’s, instead, will say that they cannot be spared, even temporarily, from an Endeavour of Prioritised Social Importance, for any such process. Their pair bond’s biosupplements will continue to include pheromonal suppressors, and they may not, at this time, have any sanctioned break from them. It gives them a weird feeling, somewhat disappointment, largely queasy and undutiful relief. To have one’s internals squirm into new configurations which compel one to rut — to take a gamble on having one’s body further usurped, however gloriously, forever, in service of reproduction — it’s somewhat horrible to contemplate.
(They’d both been extremely drunk, one official Solstice festival, and Tausev had held their wrists down on the sleeping mats and growled in an almost threatening way that they’d fuck them fertile, put an egg in them, and fucked them so hard; and they’d both climaxed shatteringly hard and then been unable to look directly at each other in the morning. Eventually they’d both stumbled through the embarrassing conversation, like a stereotypical comedy skit, that it’s a terribly common fetish and neither of them actually wanted that, let alone wanted to discuss submitting to the population planning lottery to go off suppressants, and perhaps they could simply forget all about it ever happening? So, with great relief, they did.)
They take the mail indoors, and kiss the top of Tausev’s head, where they’re finally sitting up in bed, stretching and yawning. Qubiq stirs up two cups of hot nutrition drink, and sits shoulder to shoulder with their warm and cozy pair-bond, dropping their day’s supplements into their hand, then handing them a slice of bread after they diligently swallow the capsules.
“Don’t forget to go to work on time instead of falling back asleep,” Qubiq says, dunking their own bread to soften it to a slightly less chewy consistency.
“Once!” Tausev protests, mouth full, nudging their shoulders together affectionately.
“Only because I remind you,” Qubiq says.
“Oh, leave me those,” Tausev tells them, when they put the cups in the washing-up basin, “I’ll do it before I go.”
“Thank you,” Qubiq says, and shrugs into their coat instead. “Have a good day at work.”
“You too!” Tausev tells them, and gives Qubiq a little hug before they set off.
Their pair-quarters are located high within the Eaststone’s walls, near Qubiq’s place of work, so they need not wait for a tram or travel many floors, merely take one of the communal elevators of the original Eaststone fortress upward and walk a little to the Agritekhnical Bureau Research Facility, where Qubiq is a Chemotekhnical Laboratory Attendant. They sign in, marking the chemokana of their name into the logbook, and walk into the labs just at the floor’s faint shiver, the traditional workshift-start pulse.
The other lab attendant grunts at them as they make their way between bins of trimmed plant matter in various stages of wither and decay. This lab doesn’t work with the growing foliage directly, but foliage is the reason that the top of the fortress was first repurposed for the Facility; direct sunlight. “Better make sure we’re on best behaviour today,” the other attendant says.
A changing of the political winds means posturing and reprioritisation. Agritekh is safe, always — nobody interferes with food production, but there will be the traditional swagger around, the new padbellies looking for prideworthy things to take credit for, harder-to-concisely-explain projects to sniff at and imply would be to the public benefit to cancel.
“All right,” Qubiq sighs. “I’ll push the broom around, you polish some benches?” and the morning goes like that, cleaning up around the reality of the work, making it look spotless and gleaming and terribly tekhnical. They carry some of the big weighscales and a chemofractionator out from the store room to put on empty spots on the benches; swaggering political uniforms love important-looking machinery, much more than they love detailed logbooks of composting.
They’re as ready as they can be, when the trooping footsteps echo in the hall outside, in white tekhnical surcoats and wielding clipboards, as if they spend all day walking up and down and looking very hard at things and going mm-hm! in serious voices, marking down little numbers and ticking little boxes; and sure enough, their Divisional Director opens the door and ushers in a stream of sneering uniformed politicos, openly sporting factional iconography; Pezmik-Tungstenists all, volatile and belligerent.
Qubiq concentrates on looking over the nearest compost bin, mm-hm, and making serious little notations on their clipboard.
“This is the Accelerated Decay Laboratory?” one of the swaggerers says, loud and confident and unusually well-informed. They are not usually terribly interested in the process of refining the tekhnical arcana which make composting more rapid and efficient, only graphs which suggest the end result is better food yields.
“That’s right—” fawns the Director, and the politico cuts him off, turning away to snap peremptory fingers several times.
“Alright, bring them in. Show me the development, then.”
Qubiq fails to suppress an alarmed sideways look, only to find the Director likewise failing, and giving them an alarmed look. A terrible feeling pools in their stomach.
The door bangs as a squad of enforcers drag in — Qubiq almost drops their clipboard. A monster, their brain wants to gibber, a mutant, a — a fairytale? But their giant stature and weird gait resolves in Qubiq’s wide-eyed peripheral vision to a person merely tall and beaten, and a glimpse of ears redoubles the terrible feeling.
Elf?
Qubiq has never seen an elf before. Qubiq has never seen anyone who’s not a dwarf; others are for outside, for the other Endstones, for the horrors of rampant ideological foolishness, of doubling down on the apocalypse with ecocidally reckless disregard for the new material reality.
Other tekhnicians, whom Qubiq is unfamiliar with, whose work they do not know, march in with an arcanotekhnical device. Qubiq recognises some of the work, the composting runics, can guess that this is an experimental very-high-speed decay inducer; but their mind rebels at the obvious conclusions, right up until the elf shouts, “I am the Ambassador to the Eaststone from the North, I am a diplomatic envoy—” and one of the enforcers takes the experimental device from tekhnical hands and brutally rams the effective end into the elf’s gut.
The elf makes a terrible noise at the audible sear of the device’s operation, and then gags continuously, collapsing between confining hands. Released, they tumble to their knees, eyes rolled up, face contorted with anguish. They heave, and a fine mulch trickles from their mouth.
It is, Qubiq notes numbly, because their innards are being rapidly decomposed. They are vomiting the compost of their own organs.
The thought has scarcely flitted into their mind, bouncing around and unable to roost in any position of comprehensibility due to its innate horror, when the elf slumps. Not posturally, but stucturally; like a split bag of wet earth, they collapse into a spreading cone of stinking black rot, unravelled, their unmoored bones sliding out at all angles to rattle on the floor.
“Yes,” the politico says, with bloodthirsty satisfaction. “Excellent. See these tekhnicians awarded social credits for their work!” and strides for the door. Their boot squishes in the edge of the damp mess; they trail a line of partial footprints across the spotless lab. “Now, Director, the project coordination with the Mechanotekhnical Bureau on dispersal delivery—”
The door bangs closed behind all the marching feet, and Qubiq turns, drops their clipboard, and vomits into the nearest bin of shrivelled leaves.
