bloodyrosemccoy | The Geography of Main Street: Civic Hygiene

Here's the prologue, and the index page!

I have no idea if I'm going to update on a schedule; signs point to no. Sorry about that!

Assuming good faith bites me in the ass all the time. Took me a lifetime to realize that was the problem.

I'm avoiding physical descriptions in the actual text because I am led to understand that readers have difficulty connecting with alien main characters. Regardless, if you're wondering, koranos are not actually humans, but they are human-equivalent: furry humanoid aliens who resemble archaic humans and might be mistaken for large, fuzzy Homo habilis. You know, space gorillas.

Paquos resemble rubber-hose cartoon characters. They're bipedally humanoid, shortish (around 4 feet), ambiguously mammalian, red-green colorblind, dark-furred, and have high-contrast light markings on their faces. They also have highly mobile, expressive ears.

Both species are native to Feavah.

---

Dad's experiments didn't have many outliers like the Palbert boy. The pilot trials for the implants ended by the next school cycle, and the experimental groups joined the public schools.

Technically, so did the control groups. Though the experiment was over and unblinded, it wasn't necessary to tell nonparticipants who was in which group—but it was easy enough to figure it out by the classes the teachers placed them in. The control participants, the ones without the implants, were disruptive, unfocused, unable to consistently do school work, antisocial, and messy—overall, leaning toward delinquency.

Maybe his being in the experimental group was why it was hard to reconcile the amiable-looking Palbert boy with the delinquents we saw in Civic Hygiene videos: hoodlums who threw cigar butts on the ground, stole packets of settling dust from the store, and scribbled rude things on bathroom walls and diner booths. Maybe he would have been more like them if he didn't have an implant.

Nielli Brones wasn't part of Dad's trial, being a korano, but that was pretty much all I knew about her until one day when she suddenly became relevant by sitting in my recess Quiet Spot.

Recess was another one of those things I did wrong, but how was I supposed to play with others when we had to spend so many hours trying to hold our attention on boring things? How did the other kids not need to relax their brains with a nice walk or a few minutes sitting in a copse, a Quiet Spot, staring at the sky panels or examining blades of grass while they contemplated the universe?

Nielli was not examining grass. She was fiddling with … something. Something small and shiny that cast a flicker of colorful light across her face.

It beeped.

A needle of icy recognition hit my sternum.

"You're not supposed to have that," I said.

Nielli jolted, hastily shoving the thing into her pocket. "What?"

I pointed "That's tech."

"Is not."

Her pocket beeped again. Her hand twitched.

"Where'd you get it?" I asked. Whichever Focal Citizen had left it around was probably going to get bumped out to Arc.

"Docks." She said it so casually. "I checked 'em out one day after practice, and an alien—an arhod—asked me to run an errand. He gave me this as a tip."

The docks? Aliens?

I shivered. But the thing was, I was ready. This was it. All the warnings about what to do if someone found tech, all that mental rehearsing and miserable forced roleplaying, it was about to come to fruition. It was time to take action.

"We should turn it into Mr. Sordell," I said.

"What? Why?"

"It's tech," I said impatiently. "Don't you pay attention at all?"

She rolled her eyes. "It's not even a tablet or anything. It's just a stupid game."

"That's the point," I said. "Any tech is a slippery slope to trouble."

"Shut up, Dreedo."

"No way." Now I was mad—and incredulous. Civic Hygiene was always saying that we'd be facing Peer Pressure, that our friends would try to convince us to make bad choices, but I always imagined the culprits as hypothetical stranger kids—kids who hadn't been sitting next to me in class watching the same exact videos. How could they have missed the messages?

And yet here was Nielli, falling prey to tech's seductions right in front of me.

"Nobody asked you," she said.

"It's the right thing to do!" Did she even watch the videos? Or read the posters? They were everywhere, constantly bombarding one with colors and words, demanding one's attention.

Why would she be hesitant? Maybe she was afraid of the consequences?

"Just tell Mr. Sordell you found it," I said. "You won't get in trouble! This is what they tell us to do. I'll go with you." I hated taking people's hands, but it worked for the kid in The Problem with Pills. I held mine out.

She slapped it away. "Don't you dare!"

I had no idea how to respond to that.

My body did, though. It started yelling.

Fortunately, Mr. Sordell was on recess supervisor duty. "What's going on?" he demanded, looming over us.

"Nielli has tech, sir," I said. "And she hit me."

Mr. Sordell frowned. "Tech?"

"I told her she should turn it in," I said.

"I was going to," Nielli protested.

"You hit me!"

Mr. Sordell gave her a stern look. "Let me see, Nielli."

She glared at the ground. "It's just a stupid game." She pulled it out of her pocket. "I was just curious."

"But it's already causing problems," our teacher said reasonably. "See how you hit Dreedo because of it? This is why we have to control it, until we learn to control ourselves."

She kicked at the dirt. "I guess, sir."

He nodded. "Now apologize to Dreedo and hand it over," he said.

She dropped the game into his hand. "Sorry," she mumbled.

"It's okay." The ball of anxiety inside me swirled away, leaving behind a warm glow of solidarity with her. It was just like in the videos. We had faced a near thing, but we had triumphed in the end. All was well.

#

My sense of triumph lasted through the day, bolstering me through even the miseries of Gym and Music and, especially, Civic Hygiene. I didn't need to discuss Problems In Group Living today; I had nailed it already. I tried to catch Nielli's eye and share a comradely smile during that class, but she was chatting with her own friends and didn't see me.

She did give me a smile when I waved to her after school, though. She was carrying a duffel bag; she played on Thoren's team and was probably on her way up the spokelift for Ball practice. (I hadn't tried out for the team this cycle. My reasoning was that it was probably healthy for us twins to have diverging interests, and my other reason was that trying to pretend I cared one iota about winning was even more exhausting than ricocheting around in near-freefall. And also I had broken my leg playing the last cycle and it had been a relief, which might have been a sign it wasn't for me.)

Maybe I should ask Nielli to drop by after practice. Thoren's friends did that all the time, after all—

I stopped walking so abruptly that my thoughts piled up on each other and I had to disentangle myself from them before I could figure out what I was seeing.

My bicycle was still on the rack. But its tires were slashed.

Delinquents! They'd never targeted me, but they were lurking everywhere, sowing random chaos.

I spun. Nielli was still smiling at me.

"What's the matter, Dreedo?" she said sweetly. "Somebody mess with your stuff?"

At least I had a new friend to commiserate. "Yeah," I said. "Did you see who did it?"

Her smile got wider. "Wow, what a mystery." She peered over my shoulder. "It looks like they wrote something."

Wow, she had good eyes if she could see it from there. But she was right. When I got closer, I saw that the slashes formed words: "Tattl" on the front tire and "tale" on the back.

It took me a moment to connect the words to myself.

Once I did, I was surprised to be still standing on the pavement; I felt as though the whole station had stopped spinning and flung us into a jumble of our own momentum. Nielli? Why? I had reminded her how to do the right thing!

We were friends now.

It occurred to me that the grin she was still aiming at me was almost … nasty.

Mabe we weren't friends, after all.

"You didn't even spell it right," I said, packing as much contempt as I could into the accusation.

She shrugged. "If you didn't tattle, people wouldn't have to write things like that."

"It's my bike!"

"It was my game!"

"Oh, I'm sorry," I said, the hurt morphing to anger. "I didn't know you had a dispensation for tech. I didn't realize you were such a distinguished Focal Citizen! Did the Director write your permits himself? Should I tell Mr. Sordell there's been a mistake?"

"You tell him everything else."

"Yeah, and I'm gonna tell him about this, too." But she had to know the depths of my fury, so I added, "You know what, Nielli? You're antisocial!"

"And you're a goody-goody!"

"Yes," I flung over my shoulder as I marched back toward the school building, "I am!"

The classroom door was open. Before I approached, though, I heard a noise that confused me even more: a beep.

"Mr. Sordell?"

A muted scramble was the only response. By the time I had a line of sight to him, he was slamming his desk drawer. A corner of a packet of settling dust caught it half-open.

"Is that Nielli's game, sir?" I asked.

He glanced at the drawer. "No—"

The drawer beeped. His ears twitched.

"I mean, it was," he amended hastily. "I was inspecting it. It's important to properly identify the types of tech we find. Know the enemy and all that."

"Oh." That made sense. I realized I didn't know much about the process. "Do you have to make some kind of report on it, sir?"

He sighed. "Yes. Yes, I was just getting to the report. Don't worry about it, Dreedo. I'll take care of it."

I wasn't worried; I was curious. But I also had other things to talk about. "Okay, but—"

"I'm sorry," he said. "But it's a lot of work, so if you don't mind, I'd better get to it."

"But Nielli—"

"We'll talk to her about it."

"But, Mr. Sordell, she slashed my bike tires!"

He sagged. I knew how he felt. The sense of betrayal was still raw for me, too.

"Did you see her do it?" he asked.

"No, sir, but—"

"Did she say she did it?"

I tried to think back. Obviously it was her, but had she come right out and said it?

I must have taken too long. "If you didn't see her and she didn't admit to it," Mr. Sordell said, "then I'm afraid there's nothing I can do."

"Really?" I was never clear on some of these policies.

"Really," he said firmly. "I'm sorry about your bicycle. I'll ask her when I talk to her." He glanced back at his drawer. "Now, if you'll excuse me, I have a lot to do …"

"Okay." My heart sank again, but of course he was doing his best. "Thank you, sir."

#

I walked my bicycle home, analyzing where I'd gone wrong. The day had begun with a battle against the forces looking to undermine our society—and had ended with someone falling to those very forces. It was sobering to realize how truly insidious tech was.

It wasn't a long way home; from the school, our roof was visible rising along the curve toward the vanishing line. But it was slow going with my wobbly bike. I took one of the maintenance roads behind the shops; I didn't want to walk out on Main Street and have anyone see me. The evidence of societal degradation was here, too: despite the very tidy lineup of various waste pods awaiting collection, a good deal of junk lay in loose piles instead.

Nobody cared except me, I decided bitterely. Grandma was right. Decent citizens were few and far between, even on Bright Beacon. It was all lazy delinquents and shiftless troublemakers, apathetic loafers whose heads were on so backwards that they'd slash a guy's tires for trying to uphold morality, or dump an entire recycler's worth of junk in the alley—was that a typewriter among the wires and miscellanies? And a toaster?

"The recycler is right there," I said to the toaster, leaning my bike against the back wall of Plim's General. "Who dumped you next to it?"

I scooped up the pile of stuff. It was surprisingly heavy. I hauled it to the junk pod.

The bio pod squeaked.

I did, too, dropping the junk, which made a loud clatter almost like a grunt of pain.

But the frantic noises emitting from the bio pod were more concerning. Somebody hadn't latched it properly, and something had gotten in. Standing on tiptoe, I lifted the lid—wrinkling my nose at the dark, dank smell—and peered inside.

A tiny, ragged little sixcat, barely the size of my palm, sat on top of the grass clippings and lunch leavings.

I'd never seen one so small. Probably a feral; they were another problem in Bright Beacon—not as bad as delinquency, but still an issue.

"Hello," I said to zem, gently lifting zem from the pod. Zey were very wiggly, but as soon as I pulled zem close, zey established a death grip to my shirt—and me underneath it, making me wince—with all six limbs.

I looked around the maintenance alley at a loss. This thing was still pretty much a baby, but there was no sign of any other sixcats around. I was no sixcat mother. What did they eat? Didn't they need litterboxes or something? And this one definitely needed a bath after zeir adventure in the bio pod.

Okay. Okay. Time to stop and think. Who could I ask about this? I'd have to look up the local veterinarian. I could pick up books about sixcats from the library. But first, where could I get supplies?

My eyes fixed on the wall my bike was leaning on.

Mx. Plim was behind the counter, reading the paper. "Well, hello, my boy," zey said. Zey always spoke loudly to me; I didn't know why. "Here for a soda?"

"No, thanks." Thoren had soda all the time, but I still hadn't worked up the nerve to try it. "Do you have any—"

The sixcat in my shirt mewed again.

Mx. Plim raised zeir brow. "What have you got there?"

I looked at zem helplessly. "I found zem. Do you … do you know what they … do you have any …"

"Pet supplies? Aisle 7."

I nodded gratefully. "Can I …" I gestured at my tiny charge. "Do you mind?"

Zey sighed, laying down the paper. "Come on," zey said. "We've got carriers, too. I'll show you."

#

"She looks kind of anemic, doesn't she, Dad?" I said, peering into the nest-box we'd set up in the utility room.

Dad let out one of those short laughs. "Where did you learn that word? School?"

"I'm studying," I said. "Your books. I hope you don't mind."

"Put them back when you're finished with them," he said absently. "She does. Excellent predators, sixcats, but not native to our ecosystem."

"Nothing's native to our ecosystem," I pointed out.

"No. But the Founders based the original ecology on our home planet's. The sixcats came later, and they're not native to Feavah—they're from Kalkurru. Their blood is based on a different compound than our fauna's, so station mice don't provide all the essential nutrients. Bright Beacon's feral sixcat population is quite malnourished."

Kalkurru? A thrill went through me. The only place to find even one or two of Kalkurru's native sapients—hulking, dangerous four-armed aliens, with big fangs and bigger claws—on Bright Beacon was the loading docks. Would I have to go ask one of them for help? Suppose they kidnapped me, or beat me up?

I swallowed. "The food I got at Plim's—"

"Specifically designed for them," Dad said. "She'll be back to health soon enough. Probably better health than she's ever been in. Have a glossy, silky coat in a little while."

Well, that was a relief; I wouldn't have to confront any violent aliens to get her properly fed. And her coat could use some perking up. "Then we can keep her?"

I could feel the weight of his calculating gaze.

"I mean, if I don't find an original owner. I'll use my pocket money to buy her food. I'll change her litter—"

"I certainly, won't," Vilda called from the kitchen. "And keep the little beast out of the garden."

Dad smiled whimsically. "When I lived planetside, sixcats had to be kept inside to stop them from killing native wildlife. Had to entertain them with toys and laser pointers."

"You and Mom?" I asked.

"Yes," he said, after a moment.

"Ah," Vilda said. "More information on the elusive Ms. Grewell."

"Yes," Dad said again.

As always, he seemed a bit bemused at the mention of our mother. She was another thing that people seemed to think Thoren and I shouldn't know about; we didn't remember her any more than we remembered life on Feavah. (Well, I remembered random moments of Feavah—splashing in a rain puddle with pink boots; breaking a teacup on a blue floor; shrieking with delight when Dad dropkicked a ball and it seemed to fly up forever toward a sun—but my mother wasn't among these snapshots.)

"You're not worried about them messing up the ecosystem here?" I asked instead.

"Hah! Hardly. They were brought here to control the station mouse infestation. The whole environment is artificial, and they are a part of it." He considered. "But they have become an unbalanced part of it. We should have her spayed when she's a little older."

"Can I watch that procedure?"

The noise Vilda made suggested I shouldn't have asked. But Dad was calculating again.

"I'll ask Dr. Kellek," he said.

#

Nielli continued to harass me for weeks, showing, if not creativity, then a dogged perseverance when it came to inventing inconveniences for me. Whenever I told Mr. Sordell, he advised me to ignore it. I tried, but it was difficult to ignore my bookbag flung in the circumferential creek, juice dumped on my head, or my locker jammed shut.

"Just tell her to knock it off," Thoren told me one night as I cleaned my skinned knees—she'd clipped me on her bicycle and knocked me onto the park path.

"I do," I said. "She just tells me it's accidental."

"What, you believe her?"

"Not anymore. I'm not stupid. But it's plausibly deniable. There's not much I can do." I looked ruefully at my knees. "Except start carrying a first-aid kit."

He rolled his eyes. "I'll talk to her tomorrow at practice."

It must have been a rough practice; he swaggered home afterward with a busted lip, asking if Nielli could stay for dinner. I was apprehensive, but Nielli—whose black eye got progressively more livid through the evening—was polite to everyone and downright solicitous to me.

I was never sure what he said to her, but she was mostly nice to me after that, so I only felt a little sorry that she wound up being Thoren's friend instead of mine.

And it only strengthened my resolve to always have a first-aid kit handy.

#

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