A first encounter

The hollow, skittering squeaks of metal on slate tile filled the long, cold corridor. I peered around the corner to see two boys hunched over, chipping at scraping the tiles and grout, aimlessly engaged in their task. One of them looked ruefully upwards and saw me, saying, "Hello, teacher," and giving a slight nod before continuing at what was a common punishment for misbehavior.

They seemed to make little progress. and at the angle they were working it must have been impossible to actually remove the gum and grit that they were supposed to.. but their aim was to work as slowly as possible and thus miss as much class as possible while accomplishing as little as possible.

I walked over, and leaned down, motioning to hand me on of their thin, warped chisels. I said, "You've got to make like you're prying it up, go in like this," showing them a different way which effortlessly lifted a grey mass of filth from the floor tile. They hummed in mumbled agreement as I handed the chisel back to them, leaving them to wonder why I should know how to clean the gum from floor tiles. It should be beneath a teacher to know such things.

I stood and walked off as they said, "See you again," and got back to scraping the tiles.

I have been here for about three weeks, having been recruited from an intermittent assistantship to a full-time assistantship aiding teachers and office staff at the main community college in the Outer City, the one place where one might have a last chance to gain entry to the Inner City. My tasks are simple, mainly clerical, and occasionally I fill in for one of the instructors, as I have discovered that there are certain subjects in common with the education one might receive in the outer township.. Primarily this similarity is related to subjects like philosophy, literature, and music.. the sciences of the Outer Township which are presently delineated into two schools, that of the Void and that of the Eie, are, or would be regarded with suspicion here, as cults of any kind are unlawful. Some churches of the archaic persuasions remain, temples and mosques here and there as well, but they are largely cultural gatherings with no spiritual identity.. they were too easily regarded as cancerous at the City's inception, and so were stripped of anything which might differentiate one from another.. texts were re-edited, and now one may attend the fundamentalist orthodox Our Lady of Eternal Sorrow on Third and Euclid and hear the same message as the evangelical microchurches which are often held in the basements of individual residences. (Though evangelism is no longer practiced, nor would it be permitted if anyone bothered to express such a vocation anymore.)

But a crucial difference in that one bron in the desert learns from birth.. natural birth is no longer practiced in the city, but has long since been replaced with labnaisence, or conception and cultivation from gamete-lines constructed and stored in for-profit retailers scattered about town. People who are born and raised in Autopia are naturally sterile, and therefore the population is very much a controlled genetic experiment, not in crossbreeding but in metagenetic actuation, the way in which phenotypes interact with the physical environment.

When one dies in this city, the body is reclaimed by the labnaiscent techs, and evaluated by comparing the initial genetic structure of the pre-conceived organism and the resulting individual body, complete with social history and epigenetic markers which indicate how one's behavior implemented or ignored certain genetic traits or predispositions.

None of the Outer Autopians know this, however, though this is common knowledge in the Inner City.