Categories > Original > Sci-Fi > Rhevireon: The Hermetic Elders of the Black Sun
4. The Taxicab 744
0 reviewsAt the crack of dawn, the thread of falling snow had petered out into droplets of dew...
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Chapter IV
THE CAB 744
March 23rd
Juneauton Weltzentrum.
At the crack of dawn, the thread of falling snow had petered out into droplets of dew, faint lines of light dissipated throughout the room. Hoyden raised the window shutter, another overcast day, inspired dubious optimism in her, she who less than often reveled in sunny ones!
5:50 am, there was damp on the walls, damp spread havoc on the bathroom walls. Her bleary eyes had flecks of hazel ripple smoldering beneath her bristling brows, caught in her sultry reflection against glass of the cabinet above the sink, Hoyden carried out her oral hygiene. At the other end of the bathroom, as the hair clipper changed pitch, Dusk tapered his head temples into an Ivy League cut.
Later on, dressed in his uniform, from under the bed towed he the only pair of shoes he owned, and a Bowie knife.
“The big glacial or what! What a piss.” Hoyden heard someone say, bystanders unhappy with the hard weather condition of that early morning. She put on her leather gloves, a worryingly sick Dusk who stooped himself against one of the cars parked along the curb line, coughed he and spat, tightened the faux fur trimmed hood of his parka around his neck, getting a bit lukewarm, they walked down the narrow sidewalk.
The first peak hour had just hit the streets, the dump truck racing against time, applied salt on the sebaceous hoar. And it’d been a steady scamper, until Dusk spotted one, on tap.
He blew a wolf-whistle hailing the taxicab; it took a u-turn before hauling up inches by their feet; distinguished by a chequered pattern fimbriated on a load of orange paint, cab No. 744. There they got in.
The scuzzy smirk he routinely threw at the face of every new customer, unveiled the metal foil, his gold tooth, in direct contradiction to his cheap pegleg, the man behind the wheel wore a freaking pegleg! Hoyden had the twitching sentiment telling her, she didn’t know why, this person was the prognostication of suffering.
“Well, well,” drawled he, “look at who we’ve gotten here, Aletheia, bingo?!” sort of lending self-proclaimed credence to his assumption, as he glimpsed through the rear view at them.
Here we go, this is not my lucky day! Dusk told himself, taciturnly he reacted to the man’s absence of reserve, “yeah, exactly!” he barely mouthed, just so that after a while the taxi driver, snoopily shot back at him, “for the moment I presume,” he said, “you gotta wonder how the hell of a cow have I guessed your destination? You obviously let it slip off memory, don’t cha?”
“Here’s the thing,” Dusk told him, “I definitely did, what’s your secret?” he bore out, though that plain statement had gotten not bit of a truth.
“Say a month ago,” the driver, with a legendary capacity to gabble on and on and on, set forth in a spree of spittle, “same hour, same place, must’ve been you the guy asking me to drop him off the Aletheia building! You didn’t got enough money on you, so it was my turn then to say it, keep the change, kinda being nice to a college tutee. But hey, I’m a face-rememberator, huh!”
“This is the kind of scenarios I despise about this city!” Dusk retorted.
“No dur.” Offended by his repartee, the man grumbled the two syllables, no extra balderdash.
Then out of the blue, the cab’s clapped out radio went brattling, the radio waves transmitting the foremost infamous soprano in the Zentrum, Magistrate Elle Ciel who long imbued millions, now she harangued. “The Juneauton Weltzentrum city-state, must and will by all means maintain its neutrality as long as international conflicts are concerned; a critical element of our national security and economic prosperity, I have no fancies, whatsoever, to engage us in the tug of a proxy warfare. Nonetheless, by name of the noble tenets that bound our city with the greater Occidental Regnum, our glorious second nation, I am pleased to declare the successful attainment of our joint expedition to the reclusive and highest country in the world, Tibet, under the incontestable leadership of Commodore Therese La Margrave. The hand in glove cooperation in exchange of communication material and expertise, was crowned, with the unearthing of the pride of Tibet, envy of the world, the technological paragon from sunken Agartha, the ne plus ultra of the arts of war, Rhevireon. What is the Rhevireon? Who made the Rhevireon and what for? That I am not permitted to disclose my dear people, till the right time comes of course. Sufficient to say our expedition, warmheartedly received by the local populace, was commissioned by his majesty Reting Rinpoche to bring the mysterious object home, to the care of the most acclaimed research organizations in the field, where it is to be subjected to extensive experimentation, for the greater good of the human race, and we shall prove to the world, this young nation nurtured by the odium of our enemies has grown strong, this Occidento-Zentrum State, will spearhead the next stage in human evolution, but if we fail, and we fall, let them know we only fall on their bodies…”
“Seriously though?” jumped in the malcontented driver.
“Shhh!” the other person riding shot gun foully exclaimed, too heedful of the speech she didn’t afford to miss the line of gab.
“Nei, we are not victims to their compulsive hatred for our alien cousins,” the spiel ran on, “a hate we attribute to a chronic envy for the magnificent achievements of this magnificent creation of God, it is high time the rest of humankind follow our example, we people of the Zentrum, and recognize the reciprocal right of those with whom we share this cosmos, so to share with us quarters of this earth, the era of Homo Sapiens monopoly of this planet is over, nolens volens…” Straightaway, the radio knocked off.
All the way on course of setting up girders for a new order on this land of the midnight sun, the political and military tension between those involved has always been around, escalated into climax with establishment of the Occidental Regnum; the new homeland of the alien race, proceeded to embrace a jingoistic sort of transitory policy nigh to autarky, so to forefend itself against the undying animosity of a league of rogue human-ruled states, starting from armistice agreements with allies part of the game, the Greater Occidento-Zentrum State ended up with the definite withdrawal from the United Nations. This measure in particular, had had ruinous effects on the org in its entirety; reaching a zenith in the forthcoming years with the liquidation of its affairs, toward the foundation of a new legal successor, the Terra Sphaira Alliance, a spectacular success for the Occidento-Zentrum State’s soft power on a global scale.
The TESPAL, no other than a front organization hammering out statutes on behalf of the Universal Council, quite fared in veering the ongoing hostility spot light over its founding state members, the Occidento-Zentrum State’s bloc of the UN’s expatriates.
“You piece of junk!” Back to the kvetch, after a quick failed attempt at mending the receiver, the driver relaunched the prattle loudly, “Magistrate Elle Ciel, what an enfant terrible! Skipping our will on purpose, will of the people.” He grumbled, and she was arguably, the second most powerful woman in Juneauton Weltzentrum for the fifth consecutive year of her second term, Magistrate Elle Ciel, incumbent of the satellite state; elected by the popular vote on the surface, blessed by the ulterior motive of the Patriarchs Jurists, the Assembly of the Theocrats. However, the uplift apropos this organic law still, the populace really appreciated what the ring had come up with this round, Elle Ciel leader of the Neopatrician Party; the Neopatricians, strong advocates of Pan-Americanism, were seen by many as the progenies of the defunct reactionary Folksy Whips Party. “I mean, what do they think we’re? Sheeple? The Zentrum’s impartial to any faction out there they say, at the same time, permitting the alien state to benefit from our minds, for their own glory. I perfectly understand the theory behind the Concession treaty; we impart you the ranch to rule over internally, but your foreign relations policy ain’t your business—but c’mon, her talk of neutrality didn’t have a speckle of truth to it, just a pars pro toto of something bigger maybe! Rhetoric, arrivistes’ rhetoric! To hell with this Rhevireon, what is it anyways? will it pay my pension? What this nation desperately lacks is some dignity!” How dead serious was he about it.
“You know what?” the lady besides him, while easing her protruding jaw, she too appeared to have something to patter about, “I unanimously approve of you mentioning this sir, logically, we shan’t go any further through this, what would our distant neighbors’ reaction be? We sent an expedition to disputed territories, without the authorization of the internationally recognized administration under which Tibet has forever been a protectorate. The expedition’s team members whom I know by name all are natal Juneautonuan citizens, financed by the Occidental Regnum they basically encroached upon the sovereignty of a country with whom we have a terrific record of trade relations, that’s jeopardized with such stupid move, and for what! I’m no captive mind but all the talk of this Rhevireon of which we’ve heard naught before, feels nasty, sinister!”
“That’s it ma’am, the whys and wherefores dictum!” he blundered out, doing his best to cope with the wheel, in parallel with the vulgar polemic, “it’s ipso facto, taking the wrong step in the game of geopolitics is a point of no return.” He declaimed.
“You bet! Heh heh!” returned she with a streak of spastic laughter, her trademark.
“I believe this will ultimately result in long term embargo on trade unions, or even worse lest the war creeps over here!” that expression on his face was priceless, as if fancied himself for a great wit, “and supposing that ever happened, you both ought to volunteer for my friends.”
“Is he talking to us?” Hoyden looked daggers at him.
“I don’t think we’re the ones to count on,” Dusk said to the man, his tone tinged with a stain of deceit, “I wouldn’t fight a Neopatricians’ war at any rate, nor lose a limb for their false gods.”
“Good for you!” the driver responded unaffectedly, “never pissed excellence myself in the business of war not even with a map and compass, when it was all about conscription back in my heydays. But let me take a shot at your reproach of the Neopatris, you’re not one of those Mug Libs, the students’ wing God forbid?”
“Wrong, I’m something of an abstentionist in fact.” Dusk kept on the guile, saw fun in him after all, a simpleton beyond repair! Hoyden quietly slurred her last impression of the cabby, and their manners had gotten just too brusk.
“Well, I’ve casted my ballot for the Mugwump Libs,” the woman admitted unashamedly, she went on enquiring without constraint, “in any case, why all the inimicality from your part towards the Mugs, huh?”
“Chill out ma’am, to each their own!” the driver in containing the miscalculated statement, “that’s what you’d expect from my likes, a goddamn patrician partisan by birth. A great deal of my kith and kin are half-breeds, never been to college, most chucked up the sponge, couldn’t afford that lux, so you get the big picture, they saw in adherence to one of the two majors the expiation for their social mobility fiasco, their highest hit point on the status class ladder.”
“Ah, certainly__” and so she simmered down, “just reserve the ebullience for the election day, you’ll need it then before now, the campaigns readily set out, I cross fingers that we beat you in the Plebian by the popular vote, the Magistrate for the nonpartisans, if you know what I mean. Hmm! by the way, you do have a lot to say for an uneducated person, respect!” said she, giving him tasteless props in bonus though.
“Wow, you hold on right there,” the cabby protested, “when did the uni mean education? and what education! To meet, eat, bleat and retreat. Just for the record, I’ve got a high school diploma which I also use as a loo cover.” Talking about the toilet in the tenement he apportioned with many others; before swinging back to the harsh reality, “and we are who we are, nothing whatsoever, no one whoever gonna change it! say I’ll never cotton on to it, what’s that? Our two-party system of flawed democracy, the media feed us the hokum! Every time I’m driving this junker, I bet myself, the next person will settle by my side, either a Mugwump or a Neopatri!” As it heated, Dusk and Hoyden sat back, watched and listened to the bunkum.
“Still by far and large the vox populi, and by extension rule of the people technically speaking,” the lady remonstrated, “though in end of the day, when every choice’s taken awaits for the middleman’s approval, oh well! heh heh!”
“The middleman?”
“Them, you know!”
“Oh yeah, the middleman, gotcha!” returned he, and jumping from one subject to another, “oh by the way, what do you do for a living, if I may?”
“Sure, nothing wrong with asking,” prone to express her open heartedness, “well, I’m a directress at an orphanage!”
All along the boulevard, the hack-driver and the unidentifiable passenger reeled off their sardonic rant, until the taxi reached the Rontgen passage 5. A vehicular tunnel and one of the twelve underground rapid transits, ingress-egress, to-and-fro the old Juneau borough, their shortcut to downtown Juneauton Weltzentrum.
The Rontgen underpass, made civilian check points, gigantic backscatter X-ray units in charge of imaging whichever machine traveling in or out of there. A subordinate aspect of a much thorough web of decentralized surveillance. The scheme had its origins way back to somewhere in between the Divide Et Impera’s dossiers. A constituent part of the ASTHE’s quest after secret of the divine on streamlined data mining of the masses on the long run. For this very specific purpose, the Overseers’ Arm of Ubiquitous Information Extraction was installed, by necessities of the purges.
Punctually, the cab was permitted access into old Juneau, the blue-collars’ home ground, stagnant in time. Penetrating the warren streets of the borough, interlaced in washing lines. Helter-skelter manifolds of clumpy tenement houses, built in the unique and sensational Jugendstil, Art Nouveau architecture; jutting out roofs of acclivitous bronze-clad conical spires, charcoal smoke coiled up into the air out of breathless flues, stuck out of penthouses, fabricated of ceramic bricks, mid-reliefed with foliage patterns entangled, the cornices’ gargoyled with fiendish figures; some of the older houses emitted a grunderzeit ambiance engulfed in the profusion of Art Nouveau.
Dusk lowered the cab’s disjointed window, the flagstone footpaths swarmed with modest men next to crestfallen women, on daily basis pursued the way to hope against hope, the canned crab factory. Below minimum wages, beyond a shadow of a doubt; yet, it’d been for many a generation the only Atlas around to carry the struggling economy of the enclave on its stinky shoulders, albeit their biggest issue was, their own crab mentality. Down the same track, the school kiddies on their route to the sole school there in existence, seemed not to give a toss as they gathered around the refreshment stalls, or jaywalked they back and forth the shrunken road, where the snarled up vehicles squawked in a cacophony of honking horns.
“Lovely mornings shan’t be wasted over this!” cried the driver, “wasted among the gridlock? jeez no!” flummoxed, jabbed he the throttle, freaking his client out when he set to thread his way through, in sinuous stitches.
“Whoa, lo and behold! sir, don’t tell me that’s a pegleg!!” the woman, whose name should in some way match Rosie O’Donnell, at last noticing the atypical leg she whooped astounded, “how on earth you’re driving with such thing?! Just drop me by, please!”
“Don’t vex ma’am,” sought to allay her worries, “Imma deviate for a shortcut nearby, that’s it, I’m done with this black hole of Calcutta.” He gruffly said.
“And I took the shanty town for a cutoff, here you are, it proved the contrary,” she nearly spat out the words, “just please be cautious, is this legal in the first place?”
“Of course it is, this is nothing compared to the rage on the American roads; ours quite sanctioned in comparison.” The man was keen on preserving the image of the gentleman to whom life was unfair. “No, seriously, it’s always like this at seven ams, people stock racing towards their workplaces or whatever aim in mind! I hate it. But hey, what’s up with all the sensitivity, nothing wrong with an artificial limb; ma’am sorry to say it but I found your concerns unsubstantial, and that overreaction offensive, this is blatantly a form of ableism.” He gave to rave.
“Holy moly, my bad, shouldn’t have acted such_”
Sometime later, hardly managed they to procure a pass out of the enclave. Heading towards locus of the financial district, home to the stock market, and many a citadel of those multi-billion firms that sell people promises to pay them later, but the promises are never fulfilled, when the insurer decides to forfeit the business since management spent all premium on floozies and private jets; for the most part of it, insurance companies.
THE CAB 744
March 23rd
Juneauton Weltzentrum.
At the crack of dawn, the thread of falling snow had petered out into droplets of dew, faint lines of light dissipated throughout the room. Hoyden raised the window shutter, another overcast day, inspired dubious optimism in her, she who less than often reveled in sunny ones!
5:50 am, there was damp on the walls, damp spread havoc on the bathroom walls. Her bleary eyes had flecks of hazel ripple smoldering beneath her bristling brows, caught in her sultry reflection against glass of the cabinet above the sink, Hoyden carried out her oral hygiene. At the other end of the bathroom, as the hair clipper changed pitch, Dusk tapered his head temples into an Ivy League cut.
Later on, dressed in his uniform, from under the bed towed he the only pair of shoes he owned, and a Bowie knife.
“The big glacial or what! What a piss.” Hoyden heard someone say, bystanders unhappy with the hard weather condition of that early morning. She put on her leather gloves, a worryingly sick Dusk who stooped himself against one of the cars parked along the curb line, coughed he and spat, tightened the faux fur trimmed hood of his parka around his neck, getting a bit lukewarm, they walked down the narrow sidewalk.
The first peak hour had just hit the streets, the dump truck racing against time, applied salt on the sebaceous hoar. And it’d been a steady scamper, until Dusk spotted one, on tap.
He blew a wolf-whistle hailing the taxicab; it took a u-turn before hauling up inches by their feet; distinguished by a chequered pattern fimbriated on a load of orange paint, cab No. 744. There they got in.
The scuzzy smirk he routinely threw at the face of every new customer, unveiled the metal foil, his gold tooth, in direct contradiction to his cheap pegleg, the man behind the wheel wore a freaking pegleg! Hoyden had the twitching sentiment telling her, she didn’t know why, this person was the prognostication of suffering.
“Well, well,” drawled he, “look at who we’ve gotten here, Aletheia, bingo?!” sort of lending self-proclaimed credence to his assumption, as he glimpsed through the rear view at them.
Here we go, this is not my lucky day! Dusk told himself, taciturnly he reacted to the man’s absence of reserve, “yeah, exactly!” he barely mouthed, just so that after a while the taxi driver, snoopily shot back at him, “for the moment I presume,” he said, “you gotta wonder how the hell of a cow have I guessed your destination? You obviously let it slip off memory, don’t cha?”
“Here’s the thing,” Dusk told him, “I definitely did, what’s your secret?” he bore out, though that plain statement had gotten not bit of a truth.
“Say a month ago,” the driver, with a legendary capacity to gabble on and on and on, set forth in a spree of spittle, “same hour, same place, must’ve been you the guy asking me to drop him off the Aletheia building! You didn’t got enough money on you, so it was my turn then to say it, keep the change, kinda being nice to a college tutee. But hey, I’m a face-rememberator, huh!”
“This is the kind of scenarios I despise about this city!” Dusk retorted.
“No dur.” Offended by his repartee, the man grumbled the two syllables, no extra balderdash.
Then out of the blue, the cab’s clapped out radio went brattling, the radio waves transmitting the foremost infamous soprano in the Zentrum, Magistrate Elle Ciel who long imbued millions, now she harangued. “The Juneauton Weltzentrum city-state, must and will by all means maintain its neutrality as long as international conflicts are concerned; a critical element of our national security and economic prosperity, I have no fancies, whatsoever, to engage us in the tug of a proxy warfare. Nonetheless, by name of the noble tenets that bound our city with the greater Occidental Regnum, our glorious second nation, I am pleased to declare the successful attainment of our joint expedition to the reclusive and highest country in the world, Tibet, under the incontestable leadership of Commodore Therese La Margrave. The hand in glove cooperation in exchange of communication material and expertise, was crowned, with the unearthing of the pride of Tibet, envy of the world, the technological paragon from sunken Agartha, the ne plus ultra of the arts of war, Rhevireon. What is the Rhevireon? Who made the Rhevireon and what for? That I am not permitted to disclose my dear people, till the right time comes of course. Sufficient to say our expedition, warmheartedly received by the local populace, was commissioned by his majesty Reting Rinpoche to bring the mysterious object home, to the care of the most acclaimed research organizations in the field, where it is to be subjected to extensive experimentation, for the greater good of the human race, and we shall prove to the world, this young nation nurtured by the odium of our enemies has grown strong, this Occidento-Zentrum State, will spearhead the next stage in human evolution, but if we fail, and we fall, let them know we only fall on their bodies…”
“Seriously though?” jumped in the malcontented driver.
“Shhh!” the other person riding shot gun foully exclaimed, too heedful of the speech she didn’t afford to miss the line of gab.
“Nei, we are not victims to their compulsive hatred for our alien cousins,” the spiel ran on, “a hate we attribute to a chronic envy for the magnificent achievements of this magnificent creation of God, it is high time the rest of humankind follow our example, we people of the Zentrum, and recognize the reciprocal right of those with whom we share this cosmos, so to share with us quarters of this earth, the era of Homo Sapiens monopoly of this planet is over, nolens volens…” Straightaway, the radio knocked off.
All the way on course of setting up girders for a new order on this land of the midnight sun, the political and military tension between those involved has always been around, escalated into climax with establishment of the Occidental Regnum; the new homeland of the alien race, proceeded to embrace a jingoistic sort of transitory policy nigh to autarky, so to forefend itself against the undying animosity of a league of rogue human-ruled states, starting from armistice agreements with allies part of the game, the Greater Occidento-Zentrum State ended up with the definite withdrawal from the United Nations. This measure in particular, had had ruinous effects on the org in its entirety; reaching a zenith in the forthcoming years with the liquidation of its affairs, toward the foundation of a new legal successor, the Terra Sphaira Alliance, a spectacular success for the Occidento-Zentrum State’s soft power on a global scale.
The TESPAL, no other than a front organization hammering out statutes on behalf of the Universal Council, quite fared in veering the ongoing hostility spot light over its founding state members, the Occidento-Zentrum State’s bloc of the UN’s expatriates.
“You piece of junk!” Back to the kvetch, after a quick failed attempt at mending the receiver, the driver relaunched the prattle loudly, “Magistrate Elle Ciel, what an enfant terrible! Skipping our will on purpose, will of the people.” He grumbled, and she was arguably, the second most powerful woman in Juneauton Weltzentrum for the fifth consecutive year of her second term, Magistrate Elle Ciel, incumbent of the satellite state; elected by the popular vote on the surface, blessed by the ulterior motive of the Patriarchs Jurists, the Assembly of the Theocrats. However, the uplift apropos this organic law still, the populace really appreciated what the ring had come up with this round, Elle Ciel leader of the Neopatrician Party; the Neopatricians, strong advocates of Pan-Americanism, were seen by many as the progenies of the defunct reactionary Folksy Whips Party. “I mean, what do they think we’re? Sheeple? The Zentrum’s impartial to any faction out there they say, at the same time, permitting the alien state to benefit from our minds, for their own glory. I perfectly understand the theory behind the Concession treaty; we impart you the ranch to rule over internally, but your foreign relations policy ain’t your business—but c’mon, her talk of neutrality didn’t have a speckle of truth to it, just a pars pro toto of something bigger maybe! Rhetoric, arrivistes’ rhetoric! To hell with this Rhevireon, what is it anyways? will it pay my pension? What this nation desperately lacks is some dignity!” How dead serious was he about it.
“You know what?” the lady besides him, while easing her protruding jaw, she too appeared to have something to patter about, “I unanimously approve of you mentioning this sir, logically, we shan’t go any further through this, what would our distant neighbors’ reaction be? We sent an expedition to disputed territories, without the authorization of the internationally recognized administration under which Tibet has forever been a protectorate. The expedition’s team members whom I know by name all are natal Juneautonuan citizens, financed by the Occidental Regnum they basically encroached upon the sovereignty of a country with whom we have a terrific record of trade relations, that’s jeopardized with such stupid move, and for what! I’m no captive mind but all the talk of this Rhevireon of which we’ve heard naught before, feels nasty, sinister!”
“That’s it ma’am, the whys and wherefores dictum!” he blundered out, doing his best to cope with the wheel, in parallel with the vulgar polemic, “it’s ipso facto, taking the wrong step in the game of geopolitics is a point of no return.” He declaimed.
“You bet! Heh heh!” returned she with a streak of spastic laughter, her trademark.
“I believe this will ultimately result in long term embargo on trade unions, or even worse lest the war creeps over here!” that expression on his face was priceless, as if fancied himself for a great wit, “and supposing that ever happened, you both ought to volunteer for my friends.”
“Is he talking to us?” Hoyden looked daggers at him.
“I don’t think we’re the ones to count on,” Dusk said to the man, his tone tinged with a stain of deceit, “I wouldn’t fight a Neopatricians’ war at any rate, nor lose a limb for their false gods.”
“Good for you!” the driver responded unaffectedly, “never pissed excellence myself in the business of war not even with a map and compass, when it was all about conscription back in my heydays. But let me take a shot at your reproach of the Neopatris, you’re not one of those Mug Libs, the students’ wing God forbid?”
“Wrong, I’m something of an abstentionist in fact.” Dusk kept on the guile, saw fun in him after all, a simpleton beyond repair! Hoyden quietly slurred her last impression of the cabby, and their manners had gotten just too brusk.
“Well, I’ve casted my ballot for the Mugwump Libs,” the woman admitted unashamedly, she went on enquiring without constraint, “in any case, why all the inimicality from your part towards the Mugs, huh?”
“Chill out ma’am, to each their own!” the driver in containing the miscalculated statement, “that’s what you’d expect from my likes, a goddamn patrician partisan by birth. A great deal of my kith and kin are half-breeds, never been to college, most chucked up the sponge, couldn’t afford that lux, so you get the big picture, they saw in adherence to one of the two majors the expiation for their social mobility fiasco, their highest hit point on the status class ladder.”
“Ah, certainly__” and so she simmered down, “just reserve the ebullience for the election day, you’ll need it then before now, the campaigns readily set out, I cross fingers that we beat you in the Plebian by the popular vote, the Magistrate for the nonpartisans, if you know what I mean. Hmm! by the way, you do have a lot to say for an uneducated person, respect!” said she, giving him tasteless props in bonus though.
“Wow, you hold on right there,” the cabby protested, “when did the uni mean education? and what education! To meet, eat, bleat and retreat. Just for the record, I’ve got a high school diploma which I also use as a loo cover.” Talking about the toilet in the tenement he apportioned with many others; before swinging back to the harsh reality, “and we are who we are, nothing whatsoever, no one whoever gonna change it! say I’ll never cotton on to it, what’s that? Our two-party system of flawed democracy, the media feed us the hokum! Every time I’m driving this junker, I bet myself, the next person will settle by my side, either a Mugwump or a Neopatri!” As it heated, Dusk and Hoyden sat back, watched and listened to the bunkum.
“Still by far and large the vox populi, and by extension rule of the people technically speaking,” the lady remonstrated, “though in end of the day, when every choice’s taken awaits for the middleman’s approval, oh well! heh heh!”
“The middleman?”
“Them, you know!”
“Oh yeah, the middleman, gotcha!” returned he, and jumping from one subject to another, “oh by the way, what do you do for a living, if I may?”
“Sure, nothing wrong with asking,” prone to express her open heartedness, “well, I’m a directress at an orphanage!”
All along the boulevard, the hack-driver and the unidentifiable passenger reeled off their sardonic rant, until the taxi reached the Rontgen passage 5. A vehicular tunnel and one of the twelve underground rapid transits, ingress-egress, to-and-fro the old Juneau borough, their shortcut to downtown Juneauton Weltzentrum.
The Rontgen underpass, made civilian check points, gigantic backscatter X-ray units in charge of imaging whichever machine traveling in or out of there. A subordinate aspect of a much thorough web of decentralized surveillance. The scheme had its origins way back to somewhere in between the Divide Et Impera’s dossiers. A constituent part of the ASTHE’s quest after secret of the divine on streamlined data mining of the masses on the long run. For this very specific purpose, the Overseers’ Arm of Ubiquitous Information Extraction was installed, by necessities of the purges.
Punctually, the cab was permitted access into old Juneau, the blue-collars’ home ground, stagnant in time. Penetrating the warren streets of the borough, interlaced in washing lines. Helter-skelter manifolds of clumpy tenement houses, built in the unique and sensational Jugendstil, Art Nouveau architecture; jutting out roofs of acclivitous bronze-clad conical spires, charcoal smoke coiled up into the air out of breathless flues, stuck out of penthouses, fabricated of ceramic bricks, mid-reliefed with foliage patterns entangled, the cornices’ gargoyled with fiendish figures; some of the older houses emitted a grunderzeit ambiance engulfed in the profusion of Art Nouveau.
Dusk lowered the cab’s disjointed window, the flagstone footpaths swarmed with modest men next to crestfallen women, on daily basis pursued the way to hope against hope, the canned crab factory. Below minimum wages, beyond a shadow of a doubt; yet, it’d been for many a generation the only Atlas around to carry the struggling economy of the enclave on its stinky shoulders, albeit their biggest issue was, their own crab mentality. Down the same track, the school kiddies on their route to the sole school there in existence, seemed not to give a toss as they gathered around the refreshment stalls, or jaywalked they back and forth the shrunken road, where the snarled up vehicles squawked in a cacophony of honking horns.
“Lovely mornings shan’t be wasted over this!” cried the driver, “wasted among the gridlock? jeez no!” flummoxed, jabbed he the throttle, freaking his client out when he set to thread his way through, in sinuous stitches.
“Whoa, lo and behold! sir, don’t tell me that’s a pegleg!!” the woman, whose name should in some way match Rosie O’Donnell, at last noticing the atypical leg she whooped astounded, “how on earth you’re driving with such thing?! Just drop me by, please!”
“Don’t vex ma’am,” sought to allay her worries, “Imma deviate for a shortcut nearby, that’s it, I’m done with this black hole of Calcutta.” He gruffly said.
“And I took the shanty town for a cutoff, here you are, it proved the contrary,” she nearly spat out the words, “just please be cautious, is this legal in the first place?”
“Of course it is, this is nothing compared to the rage on the American roads; ours quite sanctioned in comparison.” The man was keen on preserving the image of the gentleman to whom life was unfair. “No, seriously, it’s always like this at seven ams, people stock racing towards their workplaces or whatever aim in mind! I hate it. But hey, what’s up with all the sensitivity, nothing wrong with an artificial limb; ma’am sorry to say it but I found your concerns unsubstantial, and that overreaction offensive, this is blatantly a form of ableism.” He gave to rave.
“Holy moly, my bad, shouldn’t have acted such_”
Sometime later, hardly managed they to procure a pass out of the enclave. Heading towards locus of the financial district, home to the stock market, and many a citadel of those multi-billion firms that sell people promises to pay them later, but the promises are never fulfilled, when the insurer decides to forfeit the business since management spent all premium on floozies and private jets; for the most part of it, insurance companies.
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