WHALE FALL EXCERPT

Fuck, what a mess, eating the same shit every day, looking out the same window, constantly seeing what a good-for-nothing I am. I hate it here, I hate that this place has buried me, smothered my potential with petty jobs like scavenging old farm robots.

I always wanted to join the Legion or at least the Lower Protectorate. But women, drugs, quick money were always too much of a distraction; the prospect of eventually getting my life together was always enough of a solution for me.

'Come on, Yukio, if we don't leave soon, we won't get a single gold circuit.'

Mar and I essentially have the same routine every day: she checks the small crash landings of farm robots, harvest drivers, ore miners, and all that other crap, and uploads it to my neuroframe. Then we eat cheap artificial cornflakes, grab our gear, and ride with two-step motorcycles and trailers into the Protectorate territories to fight other scavengers over who gets there first and who can dismantle and take which part fastest before Protectorate troops arrive.

Basically, everything in our cities consists of electrical and metal scrap from 'Little Angels' – that's what we call the huge machines that automatically control some coordination, land there, and do their work. Wooden objects only exist for the upper nobility; we live in a world that smells of melted plastic and blood.