The mainframe

A Story by Pitbull1000

He woke in the cold as he so often would. Winter nights, cutting in deep on weary bones. He could see that the tent flap had come open and was flapping in the wind. He hauled himself up and could feel the hard ground, then shifted himself on the old broken mattress that he had found a few days ago, pulled himself up and zipped it up, then lay back down and tried to find sleep. After a while, it came and he dreamed his dreams, mostly of the life that he used to have, or thought he had.

The morning came with its usual piercing glare and he wondered if it was time to find some place else to go, some other bridge to park himself under, and yet the idea of moving on didn’t appeal all that much either. He heard someone yelling from somewhere: ‘Hey, Johnno, you wanna drink?’ The other tent wasn’t that far away from him, close enough so that he could hear where the voice was coming from.

Since staying here, he had befriended the locals and heard some of their hard-luck stories, stories not unlike his own, and yet, he knew, within himself, that it was time to move on, knew too that vagrancy was a crime, and that if he was caught, they would haul his a*s in jail. He crawled to the front of the tent and unzipped it, stood and stretched his back out, looked out at the day. A train roaring past and he fell back down on the tent with the shock of it, lay down, staring up at the blue sky and wondered how it had come to this.

The ever-present search for food and shelter was the new imperative, but he knew too, that he had to keep away from the city; maybe, even, he would have to move out to the country, for fear of the cops. And yet, everywhere he turned, he saw people begging on the street, more and more, every day, and he wondered how it was that they weren’t just thrown in jail. He thought about it and wondered whether or not the cops themselves couldn’t bring themselves to charge them as they were directed to, after all, cops were people too, weren’t they?

He sat and looked around, a view of the city from their bunker by the train tracks. Held up his arm and inspected his wrist. Even now, the dint where the microchip had been inserted was there. How much did they know about him? He looked around at the other tents dispersed around him, and wondered how and when protests, had become homelessness, and at how quickly it had happened: almost overnight. He looked back down at his arm again, and wondered if the computer chip had anything to do with it and suspected that it had.

He looked over at the other tents standing precariously in the wind; remembered the strikes and rallies that he had attended: just like this, camped out in an area, staking out the government, trying to get a better pay, and then, how effortlessly they had been moved on and been disbanded by the police, and how it was that no so long after that, he had lost his job.

He looked back down at his arm, and then, the familiar sounds of a police car’s roaring engine, and then an amplified voice, barking orders from inside the car: ‘Attention, you have been caught loitering, move on, now.’

The roaring of the engine came closer, flung dirt around the place, enough so that he had to cover his eyes. A white light emanated from the hull that was hovering a few feet away, and then, unable to stand the roar, he covered his ears. The thing drew closer.

‘Attention, you have been caught loitering, move on, now!’

A giant hull, hovering in the air, drew closer, blocking out the sun and everything else in its path, and he wondered if it was going to crush them where they stood and suddenly realised that, for them, for those controlling the mainframe, it would be no loss, that, for them, it would be expedient, and so, like the others, he began to move, hauling himself away from the gigantic hull that was set to land on them and the nothing that they owned.