EP317: Boxed In




Escape Pod show

Summary: By Marc-Anthony Taylor Read by Barry Haworth Discuss on our forums. First appeared in British Fantasy Society Winter Journal 2010/2011 All stories by Marc-Anthony Taylor All stories read by Barry Haworth This one isn’t for the kids, because of references to sex workers and acts. Boxed In by Marc-Anthony Taylor My sister had me boxed when I was four. She said she would have had it done to herself but she didn’t want to risk losing me, that it was the only way. I think she just hated the idea of renting her body out to the rich folk in the domes. Don’t get me wrong, she did good by me, I didn’t have to work till I was nine and in that time she studied hard and became a data-pimp herself. It was the only way she could keep us housed and fed after mum and dad had died. It must have been hard for her, if mum and dad had made it she might have made something of herself. If she hadn’t have had to look after me she would probably be in a dome herself by now. She once told me she had big plans; that she wanted to make things better. My only plan was to make enough cash to get us both out of the business. I never noticed the tiny implant at the base of my skull, the nano circuitry must be some of the best though, the tattoo circling my right eye is almost perfect. Kara controlled who, what, when and where. She made sure we got paid, and that I didn’t do anything too bad. She was a clever cookie. My sister looked after me. She did good. * Black leaves hung limply from the trees, refusing to fall despite the time of year. We were lucky to have trees at all; there were places on the other side of the city that had nothing living, except perhaps the odd person. Or so I was told, I had never ventured that far out and thankfully none of my clients had ever requested it. Kara didn’t think it was right to use vehicles. Even if they were meant to be eco friendly now. We would only ever use them if it was an emergency, she said. Everywhere I went, I went by foot, and I had come to know the city just as well as the grubby little apartment that my sister and I shared. My boots left imprints in the fine black powder that coated everything. The sky ships were under way again, every six months they would come out for a week, their massive air scrubbers extracting the carbon from the CO², supposedly leaving us with fresher air. Most people believed they took the oxygen and pumped it into the Eden-domes. The carbon was probably used to construct whatever they needed. The dust was excess that happened to shake loose from the giant machines. Already a couple of people were out with their vacuum cleaners, sucking up what they could of the carbon to sell on the black market. One or two had even rushed out with brush and pan in hand, carefully shaking their winnings into plastic bags. Kara had never done that, she said once we started collecting that stuff, it wouldn’t be long till we started getting sloppy and before you know it our lungs would be coated in gunk, bringing us that much closer to death. My sister, always the optimist. The mask I was wearing was about three years old, long past its renewal date but Kara had kept it in good working order, another one of her many talents. She knew how to break the manufacturing codes so she could regulate the functions. She would probably have been some big-shot programmer or hacker back in the old days. Now, she was just a skin-flint. “We gotta save our cash kid. Money doesn’t fall from the sky, no matter what the carbon monkeys think. And besides, we don’t repeat the mistakes of the past Nate, that’s what got us all into this mess. Recycling is the way to go baby bro, and if I can fix it, you’ll use it. ‘K?” She was always coming out with stuff like that. It might have helped if I had gone to school like her, but they stopped taking boxed kids not long after I got mine. Bad influence supposedly. Still, I could feel a rasp starti[...]