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Science Fiction Stories

Discards

Written by Nina Kiriki Hoffman

Illustrated by: Ian Nitta

Rosetta found the cleanbomb under the squashed skeleton of a runabout. She and Scorpion spent a lot of time creeping under or into broken things, looking for valuable stuff that got thrown out. Scorpion and Rosetta were the smallest people in their families; they could slide into and under things other people were too large to search.

Almost everything on ReWork got thrown out by somebody, sent down the chutes, out of somebody’s life or backyard or city dump, right off their planets to here. The whole planet was made of things people threw out, if you counted the dead moon at its core as a discard. Scorpion’s dad said ReWork started out as God’s shit and people just kept piling more shit on it. Scorpion and his dad lived pretty deep under the surface in a laser-carved cave inside what used to be a small airship. Nobody lived on the surface. New chutestuff fell all the time, so the landscape constantly changed.

Scorpion’s dad thought ReWork was a pile of shit, but Rosetta knew it was full of treasure. Rosetta's job was salvage, which she figured was the most fun job in the world.

At midmorning, Rosetta and Scorpion took their mesh bags of new stuff up onto a beached train car carcass into the light of day.

Nobody spent much time in the open. You never knew when the skychutes would come; your only warning was a faint clattering rumble and a shadow in the sky before another load of whatever someone on one of the sixty-three other inhabited worlds didn’t want came tumbling down on top of you.

Every time Scorpion and Rosetta went up into direct sunlight, they felt like they were having an adventure. They felt even wilder if their gauges said the air was clean enough for them to take off their masks. People died from getting dumped on or suffocated from gases or toxins. There were lots of ways to be stupid on ReWork, most of them leading to death. Rosetta figured she was doing well to be alive at thirteen.

The train car was her and Scorpion’s new temporary favorite sunperch. They had discovered it five days earlier, and knew they wouldn't be able to use it long; junk placement was only semi-random. Most places got a new supply every seven days or so.

Two of the train car’s windows were broken out. Rosetta and Scorpion figured if they heard chutesign, they could duck down into the car.

“What’d you get?” Scorpion asked. His mask was down around his neck. Today was sunny and clear; their gauges said they could breathe without danger. Scorpion took an energy bar from a vest pocket and dissolved the wrapper, then bit off the dessert end.

Rosetta took out the boring stuff first. Six pieces of memory plastic she could reprogram—she had a talent for decoding other people’s command language. A silver chain with a firejewel pendant she had found inside a smashed handbag, but she suspected the firejewel was fake. Three tiny travel-safety charms she’d found in the cushions of a wrecked familycar, so how well could they work? She saved the cleanbomb back. “You show me yours.”

Scorpion chewed his way through his entree before he opened his sack and pulled out a plastipet. It was a purple one shaped like an animal Rosetta had never seen before, but she could tell it was missing a limb—there was an empty socket where an arm ought to be. Its other three arms had two elbows each, and the hands had forests of tentacles instead of fingers. The two feet were flat on the ends of three-jointed limbs, with bending plates instead of toes.

“I think I’ve got an arm that’ll fit,” she said. She had a whole stock of spare parts for things back at the family complex, a warren of caves and tunnels a few layers lower than Scorpion's home. “Not the right kind of arm, but something that should work.”

“Here’s the good part.” Scorpion poked the plastipet’s head. Its eyes glowed orange. “Still a full charge. Some kid threw it out just because it got a little broken.”

“They’re so dumb. But then, we’re so lucky.”

“What’s your name?” Scorpion asked the pet. “Tell Rosie your name.”

“Kick,” said the pet. Its voice sounded human and female.

“I found it because it was talking to itself,” said Scorpion.

“Hi, Kick,” Rosetta said. “You have cool hands. What kinds of things can you do?”

“Greetings,” said the pet. “I cannot answer questions without proper authorization. Where is Master? I must find Master. My seek function is supplying invalid data. It says Master is not on this planet.”

“Needs a restart and realign,” Scorpion said.

“Let’s debonk its info filters and question it first. Find out about Master. Don’t you wonder about the people who throw all this good stuff away?”

“I know everything I need to know about them just looking at their discards.” Scorpion turned the pet over and found the touchpad that opened its control hatch. He pressed a sequence onto the bumps, but nothing happened. “Coded. I’ll figure it out.”

“I could do it for you,” Rosetta said.

“Worry about it later.” Scorpion pressed the button on Kick’s head. Its eyes flickered out. “What else you got?”

Rosetta set the mesh bag on her lap. She pulled out the cleanbomb.

“You’re kidding,” Scorpion whispered.

Rosetta set the ball between them on the train’s striped siding. They both stared at it.

It was about the size of a human head, coated in dull white dust that bent the light into microrainbows and made the ball look bumpy and less than round. Rosetta’s hands still tingled from having touched it. Something shifted around in her chest. A cleanbomb could blow up anything within about a thousand feet of it. Anything. An explosion that didn’t pollute, just utterly destroyed, carved out a ball of space a thousand feet in diameter wherever you put it. It was one of many things she’d read about on the E-net but had never seen before.

“You know who you’re going to sell it to?” Scorpion asked after a moment.

“No.” Rosetta hunched forward and stared at the ball. She could sell it to the Wreckers. They were always looking for ways to sabotage the Enclosed, the people who lived in the cities and worked at the recycling factories or the air and water plants and aped the ways of life on other planets. A cleanbomb could wreck something at Central Transport, or some kind of support system for the Enclosed, destroy a water purifying plant, a power plant, a library, a supply chute from another planet, or even the central computer system that ran the dumpchutes.

She could sell it to somebody in the Tunnelrat government, the people who made the rules, hired enforcers, ran bargain sites so nobody got cheated so badly they couldn’t go on salvaging and rescuing and providing. The Gov would probably use it to clear an area for a new market, or start a new reservoir, or kill off a nest of bandits or antrats.

She could sell it to Crazy Eli, who had his own religion and kept looking for converts and talking about miracles. Eli had found and stashed more great trash than anybody else Rosetta knew. His skill as a finder was only surpassed by his skill at making you feel weird and wrong.

She could keep it. Even though it was probably the biggest score she’d ever made, she could keep it—just in case she needed to destroy something someday.

She picked up the cleanbomb and hugged it. It vibrated on a low note that made her stomach shake and sent a hum through her hands. There was an activation site on the cleanbomb, four raised bumps and two recesses. Rosetta already knew the sequence she would need to press to start the ball’s internal timer ticking. She wasn’t sure how long the delay was.

“You win this time,” Scorpion said. He put the plastipet back in his bag.

Rosetta collected her finds too.

They were already a few feet down the access tunnel on their way to a semifresh collection site when they heard chutesign above them. They pulled up their masks and attached their oxytanks. “Go on,” Rosetta cried, and Scorpion ran ahead of her. She stopped long enough to spike a disruptor into the tunnel wall before rushing after him. Behind her, the tunnel collapsed before new garbage could come down and clog it.

They came to a nexus of three tunnels and took the down one; at the next branching, they took a side one. The world shook as new garbage piled on top of old above them. The traincar wouldn’t work as a perch anymore.

They stopped and waited about eight layers down in a kink of the tunnel. The air was bad, heavy near the floor and stale. Rosetta set a “fix” beacon in the wall so a repair crew would stop by and drill a circulation tunnel to keep this area safe. Scorpion shone his headlight on the tunnel wall in sweeps, looking to see if there was anything valuable previous salvagers had missed, but it was mostly compacted plastic, nothing exciting to dig out, no special sparkles.

When nothing shook or fluttered in the walls anymore, Scorpion glanced at his watch. “Fifteen minutes,” he said. “About right for a standard drop.”

“I’ve got a carve laser. You have tunnel props?” asked Rosetta.

“Yeah.”

They grinned at each other through their masks. “Let’s go.” New garbage was the best place to find good stuff. They headed up the way they had come.

At the branch three or four layers down, they took a side tunnel to find a topside exit that would still be open. Better to approach things from the side than from below. Other tunnelrats would be headed this way to look over the new fall; some of them had seismic sensors that could pinpoint new drops from miles away.

Scorpion and Rosetta had a small window when they had first pick; after that, it would be back to scavenging in places other people couldn’t get to.

They had to watch out for bandits. Tunnelrat patrols cracked down on bandit activity, but there were always new people so disgusting their communities cast them out and they had to raid to survive. The buyers at the recycleworks didn’t care who they got things from as long as there was a steady supply. One tunnelrat looked just like another to the Enclosed. Buyers at tunnelmarkets were pickier, but they would buy really rare things from anybody who had them.

When they reached the surface, the reptilian gulls had already blown up in a huge dark gray-and-white flock to land on the new drop. It was a giant mound of white and red and clear and steel, small plastics, broken devices, and worse.

“Ick,” said Scorpion. “Medical waste.”

Rosetta followed Scorpion’s masked and hooded form across a few pieces of debris she remembered from before this fall, and then they hit the new stuff, stacks of used, labeled containers, some still full of cast-off body products; single-use med injectors, emergency room garments and wipes, bedding contaminated with blood and body products of people who were probably already dead; and then the mounds of things cut off of people, replaced with new vatgrown body parts or prosthetics.

Rosetta checked labels on the containers to find out which planet had sent this load to ReWork. Some planets had developed clean incineration for toxic, dangerous stuff like this. Others had trash-chute deals that made it