(A short story I have been working on for far too long, and kind of need to release to readers for my own sanity. Available to Patreons now, will be released to the public in about two weeks.)
Visage of a Vermin Vandal (Vermin Vandal Veritas)
By Malcolm F. Cross
*
Hartley stopped dead in the office corridor, staring at Rick’s arm. “Is that shit?”
“Uh, no, sir.” Rick covered the stain with his hand. “It’s iodine. We had to clean up after the gullets were flushed.”
“Iodine gets into the shit, so, that’s shit.” Hartley paused again at his office door, glaring at Rick. “Go get cleaned up.”
“My promotion application review—”
“Isn’t for five minutes. Get properly cleaned up.” Hartley sneered vaguely, before slipping inside.
Properly cleaned up. A statement dripping with human privilege – bare skin could always look clean with enough abrasive scrubbing, but white fur never looked clean. Not without regular bleaching and rebleaching and weekly, if not daily, spa treatments. At least Rick could keep his hands clean – they were partly unfurred, one of the very few advantages rats had.
A trip to the washroom and another round of furious scrubbing with his hydrogen peroxide spritzer didn’t do much to get the yellow-brown iodine smear out of his fur – faded it, some, but this was his third attempt at spot-cleaning after post-shift scrub-out. Maybe it wasn’t just iodine, but it certainly wasn’t gullet-waste. Nothing he could do to hide it, either, his work shirt was short-sleeved.
Hartley, across the desk from Rick, wrinkled his nose as if he could smell something. He couldn’t – Rick was certain of that. The remnants of peroxide that weren’t overpowered by Hartley’s cologne were all Rick could smell, so the only source of bullshit in the office was Hartley’s management style.
“You really need better hygiene practices,” Hartley said.
“Yes, sir,” Rick replied, because bringing in the sample swabs to prove he was sterile might have proved him right and Hartley wrong, but proving Hartley wrong would get him fired.
Hartley flicked Rick’s file onto a sheet of smart-paper sitting on his desktop, picked it up, and leaned back to peruse the document.
The silence grew, and stretched, and Rick broke it by murmuring, “Sorry about the stain. It’s definitely sterile – I swabbed it after scrub-out. Might be a chemical reaction from one of the solvents.”
Hartley’s face was blank. He made eye contact, and slowly composed a smile. “Fairly strong solvents you need to use, cleaning bioreactors.”
“Yes, sir.”
“You know, you’re in the perfect position where you are.” Hartley put down the smart-paper, and Rick knew he wasn’t getting promoted. “Human staff need to have their immunizations boosted, seasonally, to work in biohazard cleanup. There are risks to that. Your production run are naturally immune, aren’t they, Hendrix?”
“Rick is fine,” Rick said, quietly.
“You are immune to biofallout, aren’t you?”
“Yes, sir,” Rick agreed. Most of the mass cloned and gengineered furries were, to one extent or another, but Rick and his hundred and six brothers had their immunity certified.
And Hartley knew that, but didn’t know why it was inappropriate to leap to the conclusion of, “Were they testing your immunity, before the Emancipation? Like, ah, lab rats?”
Rick tried to remain neutral. “No, sir. When we were in high school I and almost thirty of my brothers and our foster-parents jointly paid to have our production run’s immune system tested. For the work-opportunities.” Rick tried to smile.
“Well, it’s certainly helping you. Is this sort of work what you were designed and trained for, pre-Emancipation?”
People who worked with furs – or more accurately, people who cared – usually understood that it was distasteful to try and gather salacious details about pre-Emancipation life. But Hartley didn’t care, and he forced Rick into a reflexive search for an acceptable answer to deflect the question. But Rick’s reflexes weren’t fast enough to avoid remembering, just for a moment, being denied food and sleep until he’d been able to cut metal within tolerances or put down a weld bead correctly.
In effect, being tortured. Until he was eight.
Even Hartley wouldn’t do that to him, if he couldn’t come up with an answer. Rick knew that. But his please-the-boss smile shook as he said, simply, “We learned practical skills. A lot of working with our hands.”
“That makes sense,” Hartley said, glancing back at the smart-paper sheet. “No wonder you excel in this position.”
There wasn’t a way to protest that. Not without losing his job. “Thank you, sir.”
“I’ll be direct.” Hartley put the smart-paper down, and leaned over his desk, as if taking Rick into his confidence. “You haven’t been selected for shift-supervisor. Your metrics are average.”
“That’s why I applied for training – I thought if I could get trained for the role I might be able to…” Rick struggled to find the right words, the corporate propaganda and jargon that might mean a few more New Dollars an hour. “… Contribute to the company’s culture of responsibility, opportunity, and personal excellence.”
“I like that attitude,” Hartley said, patronizingly, with an inexperienced attempt at a fatherly smile. “Unfortunately, if we promoted based on attitude, GaleHome’s sanitary services management team would have a wealth of enthusiasm, and be experts at cleaning their own offices, but lack management skills entirely. I’m sorry, Rick.”
“Yes, sir,” Rick murmured.
“On the bright side, you’re a perfect fit for the role you’re in. After all, you’re a rat, you were made to work with your hands. If you let it, cleaning out bioreactor sewage lines can be your happy place.”
*
A lot of people ignored how hard cleaning was, mentally. Aside from retaining focus during repetitive tasks, they had to safely handle industrial cleaning products powerful enough to burn skin on contact. A good cleaner needed enough chemistry to balance dissolving stains against dissolving whatever had been stained.
An inexperienced or undertrained cleaner, for instance, might try an ammonia based glass cleaner on the bioreactor tubes.
Rick sighed, and kept the hose playing over the glass-looking tube filled with cloudy whorls of liquid. “Well, at least you didn’t mix it in with the bleach.”
It should have come up in the pre-job brief. Sandalio knew that, and hadn’t flagged it, which was why he was angry with himself. Unfortunately, that anger spilled out on Melisa. “Don’t you understand that this equipment has special coatings? The glass cleaner is for the uncoated glass on the observation windows!”
“Si, si, I’m sorry,” Melisa said, head bowed under the weight of her protective hood and Sandalio’s disapproval.
“Ammonia can destroy the coatings on this equipment!”
“I think we got it in time. Probably. I don’t see any damage,” Rick said.
Sandalio glared at him.
Rick didn’t say anything else. Sandalio was the shift-supervisor. He was personable and friendly – when he wasn’t pissed off – and he’d been shift-supervisor for all the years Rick had been working for GaleHome. But Sandalio was forgetful when onboarding new staff – preferring to reassure them that they’d pick it up as they went with a friendly smile.
Most of the time that worked, but most of the time GaleHome didn’t send cleaning staff to Bestgreen Bioagricultural’s core factories in their first week.
A small voice in the back of Rick’s head reminded him that he knew that, and if he knew that, he was already better qualified to be shift-supervisor than Sandalio was.
Rick played the water over the tube, and one of the unnaturally serpentine turds the gullets produced began to twine through it, leaving grimy brown smears along the interior. He turned his head to watch it go, the endless length gradually uncoiling and breaking into sections as it hit the next pipe elbow.
Maybe this, watching the dancing effluvia produced by the gullets digesting agricultural waste into nutrients for cloned tissue extruders, was his happy place. Or could be. If he let it.
Today a gullet had died, and bioengineers getting paid ten times what Rick made would install a new one. Later that day, taking out the old one was his job.
Someone halfway between a veterinarian and a software engineer had to make sure the tumour-like heap of viscera was actually dead and open up the bioreactor cradle, but Rick had to take it out.
In chunks.
Gullets were derived from ultra-efficient gengineered cows, before being spliced and cut down and surgically rebuilt to serve as truck-sized digestive tracts metabolizing sugars and proteins into extracellular fluids for use elsewhere in food production bioreactors. Not unlike the way furries like Rick and Hank had been made out of rats, and Chuck out of wild dogs, and Tilly out of quolls, all of them manufactured as slaves then repurposed as people.
At least Rick didn’t have to cut the gullets into chunks, just take the chunks away after the vet/software engineer had finished with a portable bandsaw.
Ordinarily the food factory would just feed the dead pieces of gullet to the other gullets, but despite the iodine flushes Bestgreen Bioagricultural were still struggling to control contaminant outbreaks in the factory’s bioreactors. That meant Rick had to heft the sloppy chunks up over the rim of the disposal dumpster, which always leaked half-digested faeces, or trailed tangles of viscera, or oozed blood.
Sandalio needed a break to throw up – their masks weren’t quite good enough to keep out the smells. Rick didn’t, even though the company masks didn’t fit as well on him as they did on Sandalio. Rick didn’t like the smells, but he didn’t mind them, either. Maybe because he was a rat, and this was his happy place.
After clearing up after the disposal, getting rid of everything that had leaked, he hosed himself and his personal protective equipment off thoroughly. But the protective equipment didn’t fit right, like the masks it was off the shelf and designed for human beings – not furs like him. So he cleaned himself again in the scrub-out showers. Used a sterility test-swab to make sure he didn’t have anything on him, and slumped onto a bench in the locker room, holding his face tightly, whiskers squeezed to his snout.
Even if it wasn’t his happy place, it was still a place for him to be. It was honest work. When he arrived, things were dirty, unkempt. When he left, he left them pristine.
That was worth holding onto, wasn’t it?
*
No one sat beside him on the tram home, shying away from him like he was filthy, like he stank. Rick wasn’t, and he didn’t. The sweating salaryman on the other side of the tram? Rick had needed to crack open the tram’s nearest window, because that was how obvious it was the salaryman had pulled a double shift since his last shower. But people sat beside the salaryman, and not Rick, because they thought Rick was dirty and either didn’t believe their own noses or simply couldn’t pick up odours as well as Rick could.
The tram rolled silently along the rails lain along the main roads linking Uptown to the 4th Residential District. Self-driving cars neatly slotted in behind and in front of it, and scurried out of the way whenever the tram needed to turn, gradually making its way out to the 7th Residential District, away from the trees and grass of the nearby Upper Greens and into the modern sprawl of four and five storey buildings – just tall and crowded enough to make homes cramped, uncomfortable, and affordable. Especially if shared between a few roommates.
More commuting salary men and women – suited officeworkers in the unwaveringly corporation-committed style of Japan in years gone by – stood clinging to the tram’s handrails and hanging straps, but not one took a seat beside Rick. Not even the lone cheetah among the humans, wearing an unusually shaded blue suit to better contrast the shade of their fur.
They all avoided him, shunned him, so Rick looked away, neatly folded his naked tail over his lap, and set his work duffle over it. He’d long ago covered the GaleHome sanitary services logo with a series of promotional patches for the companies Galehome had sent him to clean for – Rolson Dynamics, Hallman Electronics, Coronet Investment Management, even Norec-Naroi – but people didn’t avoid him because he worked sanitation.
Hartley knew it. The tourists knew it. The commuters knew it. Even Rick knew it.
He was a rat, and not one of the picture-perfect Giraud production line. He was a Larue, a street rat with fur that clumped into tufts no matter what shampoo and conditioner he used. Whoever had designed the geneline he’d been cloned from hadn’t cared about aesthetics.
As usual, he tried to ignore his isolation by staring out the window. This time, he glimpsed something he hadn’t seen before.
A flash of white across the side of a building, a fresh mural, or maybe graffiti. There in one blink, passed behind the tram a moment later.
He’d seen a pair of loving hands carefully enfolding and shielding a small white body, a curled shape like a natural rat, all curves. Clean. Beautiful.
Adored.
He tried to make sense of the flashed image, tried to fix it in his mind while he texted his roommates, Lana and Sylvester, to let them know he’d be back a little late, got off the tram at the next stop, and started walking back to it.
It was so stark in his memory as to be black and white. Then, as he tried to remember, it took on a more painterly, coloured rendition in his head… the curves became corners, the clean lines smudged. Gradually the whole of the image in his head became the measurements, angles and stroke order necessary to precisely paint it, like a layout diagram for painting ground-markings and safety symbols to code.
His mental image swam, but two things remained clear. First, the figure of a beautiful, loved rat. Accepted and wanted. Second, the fluttering in his chest, like flying, like hope. A conviction that if he saw the mural again, could make sense of it, everything would change. That the mural would change him, make him be beautiful, make him someone who could be loved. He just had to see it again. Just had to understand.
All nonsense, but he kept walking, trying to shield the strange little ember of hope in his chest from all his doubts.
The mural didn’t give him the same spark of inspiration, when he saw it again, but it was still beautiful.
The white rat protected in loving hands was painted across the back wall of a building, behind a parking lot, covering older graffiti in dancing colour.
The mural wasn’t of the rat, really.
It was of a woman in flowing red clothes. Her skin was a stylized tone, somewhere between tamarind rinds and statuesque bronze. She wore a queenly crown, gold in filigreed petals, and a single bindi dot on her brow. Sanskrit text Rick couldn’t read surrounded her in vibrant graffiti swirls.
A goddess, gently holding a white rat as though it were sacred. Smiling at it, turning it into the focus of her vast and powerful love. The afternoon sunlight turned its white fur into a blazing icon, and the way the artist had shaped the rat made it seem not just alive, but fluid. Like a river, or ocean wave – something naturally in motion, its curves hinting at life and vitality. As though it could be anywhere it wanted to be, and where it chose to be was here – within her hands, protected and admired.
The rat seemed… happy.
Rick still felt that spark of hope inside himself, but distantly, now. Hidden by the mural. But if he could get inside it, behind it, if he could stand inside the mural, maybe he could find that hope again and make it stronger.
Rick didn’t understand why the mural made him feel like that. The only thing Rick could understand about the mural was the sign around the corner – 7th Residential Hindu Mandir – because his high-school social studies classes taught him that Hindu temples were called mandirs.
“Hello. You like the mural of Karni Mata?”
The woman was Indian. Had approached slowly, clearly torn between wanting to say hello, and wanting to let Rick stand and stare. But he’d smiled at her, awkwardly, and she’d smiled back, and a few moments of that had apparently been enough for her to approach.
“Very much. Is that her name?”
“One of them.”
*
Rick spent a lot of time thinking about where his happy place was, over the next few days. He thought about it when at end-of-day Hartley called Sandalio up to congratulate him on being promoted from shift-supervisor to section supervisor. Someone new, with a similar ethnicity to Hartley, was introduced as Sandalio’s new assistant who would replace him as shift-supervisor. The new person thanked Hartley by calling him ‘uncle’.
When the rest of the shift started applauding, Rick joined in and did his best to sound like he was clapping as hard as anyone else.
There were only a few other furs in the room. Tilly’s expression was a little fixed, Chuck smiled and nodded enthusiastically – exploiting the way humans responded to his doglike features to assume he was absolutely joyous. But Rick knew Chuck had been chasing a promotion for the better part of two years without getting it.
Later, Hartley patted Rick on the back and told him, “So glad you’re part of the GaleHome family – and that you’re happy where you are.”
The temple, the Mandir that was mostly dedicated to Karni Mata… There were albino rats there, and they had a place in their temple. Big padded cushions, and a few boxes for them to nest in. They were treated like family. Those rats seemed happy where they were.
GaleHome had a place for Rick. But he was unhappy.
*
“You’re done for the day. Why haven’t you clocked off?”
Rick froze, still holding the mop. He glanced down at the wet floor, then at Hartley’s nephew, Chauncey. “I’m mopping.”
“This floor’s clean,” Chauncey replied, gesturing across the food factory’s entryway. “You don’t need to mop it.”
There were things Rick could say, about visual inspection being insufficient for infectious agent control, and about how if staff carried pathogens home with them on their footwear, they’d bring it back more potent the next day, and that the hallway needed to be disinfected before and after every shift change. That the better a job Rick did here with mopping, to exclude contaminant motion in and out of the facility, the more likely Bestgreen were to track down the pathogen running around the factory.
He wasn’t sure which of them he could say without making the new shift-supervisor antsy. “Did something change?” he ventured. “Mopping this area after sterility checks is part of the schedule.”
Chauncey smirked, superior. “Then you didn’t check the schedule on Monday, did you?”
Without thinking about it, Rick hunched his shoulders – shrank in place to avoid looking too tall. Taller than a supervisor was always too tall. “No one mentioned a schedule change.”
“Checking the schedule before undertaking work is your responsibility.”
Actually, it was the shift-supervisor’s responsibility to ensure all staff had been briefed to any changes. Rick didn’t contradict him, though. “Yes, sir. I’ll scrub-out and clock out, then.”
“Sign off from your shift, first.” Chauncey held his head higher. “We don’t pay you to shower.”
“This is a biohazard cleaning job,” Rick said, before he could stop himself. “We have to scrub-out before departing to prevent cross-contamination.”
“Cleaning yourself is your responsibility. It’s not work, so you don’t get paid for it.”
Rick couldn’t quote the safety guidelines, not off the top of his head. And he’d have to, if he wanted to contest it. So he didn’t – he ducked his ears, to avoid looking too tall, and meekly said, “Sorry. Of course. Yes, sir.”
Chauncey nodded, satisfied, and for all Sandalio’s shortcomings, Rick missed him immensely.
He put the equipment away, clocked out of the shift-timing software, and hit the showers, caught halfway between anger and dismay as he applied and reapplied disinfectant shampoo the guideline-required three times in a row… and realized for the first time, not being paid for it, just how uncomfortable methodically scrubbing out his fur over and over was.
But he always did it. Always. That was the job, that was the specification, and just like sweeping a floor, it was only clean when every corner had been swept. The job wasn’t done until it was done. And he hated leaving a job half done even more than he hated working for GaleHome.
*
“Bestgreen have let GaleHome know that they are not fully satisfied with the team’s work at the factory,” Hartley said.
“Yes, sir.” Rick clasped the end of his tail underneath Hartley’s desk. Fidgeting uncomfortably, invisibly. He had a feeling he knew what came next. He’d checked the labour law, and GaleHome’s employment contract ensured he’d waived about half of his rights. Not all of them, though. He couldn’t be summarily fired without cause.
Hartley knew that, too. “We’re continuing to have difficulty attaining full sterility at their factory. It’s come from above that given the sterility issues, sending a rat to their facility does not align with our company image.”
“Some people like rats,” Rick mumbled.
“What was that?”
Rick pushed thoughts of the Mandir away, and cleared his throat. “They found external contaminants, didn’t they?”
Hartley nodded, as if comfortable now that he knew Rick knew why he was being fired. “They did.”
“After Chauncey informed me that scrub-in and scrub-out were no longer part of the work schedule, I chose to embrace the company values of responsibility, opportunity, and personal excellence by arriving earlier and departing later to maintain the original scrub procedures.” Rick paused, just long enough for Hartley to look up. “Further, I’m still sterility testing before and after my shifts.”
Hartley stared at him.
“I can confidently state I am not the source of external contamination at the Bestgreen facility,” Rick said, carefully.
“You can.”
“Yes, sir. Your nephew made it clear that following procedure was our responsibility. My sterility tests are logged.”
“I see.” Hartley picked up a sheet of smart-paper and began reading the documents on it for the first time.
“Yes, sir.” A pause. He tried to resist it, couldn’t help saying, “I can’t speak for my colleagues, but I hope my example in maintaining GaleHome’s top standards inspires others.”
Hartley pulled someone else’s file up from his desktop up onto the smart-sheet. Frowned, slightly.
Rick wasn’t sure, but he was pretty sure he saw Chauncey’s face on the file’s desktop icon. Rick was sure that Chauncey was habitually skipping scrub-in-and-out in favour of changing his disposable sterile shoe-covers, but that wasn’t enough when a single particle could contaminate a bioreactor.
“I’m sure it does.” Hartley set the sheet down and stared at Rick, uncertain, now.
“I like working at Bestgreen. And I’m biohazard immune.”
“Unfortunately, you no longer suit the role at Bestgreen.” Hartley smiled, weakly. “The concern is that furries on staff are shedding fur, causing the contamination.”
“My sterility tests are logged.”
“Which is to your credit,” Hartley said. “But the decision has been made to move all furry staff out of Bestgreen, the alternative would be having you all in full body hairnets or something, which… would be ridiculous. This is a decision about company image, not you, specifically.”
He’d just said that rats didn’t fit the company image. But Rick didn’t call him on it. Conversations like these, unlike sterility tests, were not logged and recorded. And while he’d ensured he couldn’t be fired on procedural grounds, he could still be fired for mouthing off.
“Yes, sir.”
Hartley began typing into his desktop. “So…” He frowned down at the work-surface. “We will be reassigning you to a less forward-facing role,” he explained, as though he wasn’t searching for such a role right now.
“Of course, sir. Still in biohazard or sterile conditions?” Biohazard bonus was a third of Rick’s pay.
Hartley didn’t answer until he’d finished navigating the relative databases. At last, he began making the necessary adjustments to the files. “I’m afraid not. District sanitation.” Hartley looked up, then smiled tightly. “Now you won’t need to go through those scrub procedures to clean yourself up, which I’m sure you’ll be more comfortable with.”
Rick said, quietly, “I like being clean.”
“I’m sure you do.” Hartley gestured, dismissively.
In the Mandir, the rats were clean. Their white fur pristine, despite being allowed to run free, despite the temple sometimes being covered in coloured powders and dyes and ash from festivals and rituals Rick didn’t understand. Rats groomed themselves, didn’t Hartley know that?
“You’ll have access to your new schedule this evening.”
Rick didn’t leave his seat. “I’d like to ask to be considered for advancement.”
Hartley barked out Ha twice, before catching himself and shaking his head. “I’ll make a note of that.”
The reason there were so many rats in the temple was that people from one small part of India had brought the rats with them when they fled the biowarfare fallout and the water crises. That’s what Manisha said. She was shy, wanted him to stand before the shrine because she thought Karni Mata, the goddess, would be interested to meet a rat who was a man, and the shrine was where Karni Mata was. Manisha thought the other worshippers would be interested to meet him, too, but the people who were most interested to meet Rick were the sacred rats, half of which were albinos with pink little eyes, unlike Rick’s dark blue.
Of course, the people at the Mandir didn’t think Rick was a reincarnation of people from their holy family – they only thought that about the rats they’d brought with them, from the original temple – but they’d seen he was curious about the mural, and they were curious about him. So they invited Rick in, and showed him kindness, even if he was only a stranger, not family.
Rick wondered if things would be different if he were family, or just human. If Hartley would have promoted him, like Chauncey, instead of laughing at Rick when he asked about promotion.
“Thank you, sir.”
Some people liked rats, Rick reminded himself.
*
Hardly a buffet of opportunity for career advancement, two thirds of the city’s Midtown district was pressure-washed by part-autonomous trucks that also gathered up most of the garbage bags. Staffers were only needed for the detail work – cleaning around the edges of art installations or away from the streets. District management had four companies on retainer for sanitation services, and GaleHome were determined to impress by sending out staff in picture-perfect uniforms to polish the statues and wipe up the randomly distributed puddles of vomit and bird shit stains that weren’t profitable to automate.
Rick’s uniform was clean, but his new manager didn’t seem to think the rat in the uniform was picture perfect.
Instead, Rick was sent to clean warrens of alleyways where the real estate borders had tangled and shifted back in the sixties, when it was standard practice for a company to sell off a slice of their real estate when they needed to show a little more profit for the year. The buildings didn’t move, but the renovations did strange things to the architecture.
A neighbour bought five feet of a building, demolished the adjoining wall and rebuilt it five feet inside the next. A delivery firm desperate for somewhere to recharge their drones bought a zig-zagged mess of land trapped in an uneven corner between three skyscrapers, only accessible by an eight inch wide gap between the buildings that a homeless person had squeezed their way into sideways, and died in, forgotten and held standing for weeks until Rick discovered them.
The Midtown district had started using eminent domain to reclaim the splintered fragments of hidden property borders, planning to undo the mess as buildings reached the end of their architectural lifespans and were replaced, but that would take decades. In the meanwhile, the city’s more laissez-faire real estate era had left behind thousands of small and secret spaces.
Through a temporary wooden construction fence that had been up for twenty years, and along a driveway that had once provided access to a warehouse where there was now a beautiful brick-and-steel facade office block, Rick followed the vestigial road-arteries powering a delivery firm that had gone out of business before he and his brothers were decanted. Past the crude painted lines automated vehicles had followed sixty years ago, through the gate that led to an eight foot wide strip of a wasteful open-air parking lot that had been chopped into at the sides by new buildings, and into the hell-like humming rush of air conditioners using the secret space to vent heat.
The mismatched hidden alley belonged to the district. It had to be cleaned.
An artist had turned the grille covering the waste-heat air ducts into a shadowy samurai in shogunate armour, the gaps between the grille’s slats exposing that the spraypainted warrior was empty inside – a ghost. A string of tags ran down a wall, the calligraphy sometimes clear, sometimes so stylized that Rick had no idea whether he was looking at an alphabet or abstract art.
He didn’t know how the artists – vandals, he supposed – had reached this space. They painted over each other’s works, making overlapping murals that gradually swallowed each other.
In a sense, he joined them, even if the mural he added was the flat white of district-approved paint, worked across the building with paint rollers on poles. Previous efforts at expunging the graffiti had been messy – the last person to do it, here, had left uneven strokes at the top of the wall, untidy smears, as if whatever sanitation worker had repainted the wall had given up at the edge of their reach.
That seemed disrespectful, so Rick made sure to finish the top edge as neatly as he could. A neat vertical strip, almost as good as if he’d used masking tape. Day by day he covered the works in the missing space between buildings, until all was white and clean.
He looked around the space, satisfied and regretful.
The day’s work had been completed, close to the end of his shift. So he cleaned the paint rollers, then logged out.
Rick switched off his phone and his badge, going into both of their privacy settings to ensure location tracking was off. He had that right, now that he wasn’t on the clock.
He also had the right to buy a can of reflective white road-marking paint, standardized across six city districts and available to the public. He did not have the right to pour it into the paint roller’s canister, drive to the dead-end alley that was already being recolonized with graffiti after his visit two weeks before, and get back to work.
Real art took years to master, it wasn’t something Rick had any experience with. But he knew how to lay down a line with draftsman’s accuracy, and then a second, and a third, a fourth…
*
“It’s like something from a cathedral,” the voice-over announced, panning over the white-on-white work.
Staring at his phone was a nice distraction, on the tram home from work. Rick was pleased – he couldn’t go back to the little dead-end alley, not during working hours, anyway. And that was when the light was best, close to noon, reflecting from wall to wall and turning the reflective road-marking paint into blazing lines. Shocking white, like the rat mural in the sun had been. But these were angular hands clasping each other, like an angel reaching down from heaven to help lift someone to divinity.
Well. That’s what Rick thought, anyway.
It had been swallowed up closer to ground level by smaller tags and images, but thanks to being able to socket two extension poles together for his roller, the two conjoined hands stretched twenty-four feet up the wall. No one else had tagged that high, yet.
When he wasn’t on shift, the company weren’t looking. And nobody paid much attention to another worker in high visibility clothes carrying painting equipment around with a work badge – even if the badge was switched off.
He even managed to keep so closely to his schedules that his roommates didn’t notice anything. Otherwise, they wouldn’t have been so hesitant about asking him.
“Sylvester was hoping for a favour,” Lana said, while they were unloading the dishwasher.
“I’ll take his turn cleaning the bathrooms if he loans me his car on Tuesday.”
Lana hesitated with a dish in her hand. “I don’t… think that’s what he wants.”
Sylvester appeared, leaning out from where he’d hidden behind the doorframe. “Why do you want my car?”
For moving two industrial-sized bladders of road paint to refill old paint cans from work. Rick took the next dish from Lana and stretched up to get it into the shelf-rack. “What do you want?”
“You’re going to think I’m awful.”
“I already think you’re awful – roommate privilege.”
“I’m trying to impress a girl.”
“I don’t see how that’s a thing I can help with.”
“She’s a furry.”
“I don’t even know all of my brothers. You think I know every fur in the city?”
With a melodramatic groan, Sylvester slumped back down behind the doorframe. “No, ugh! I thought you’d think I’m some kind of chaser or something.”
“I’ll think that if you don’t know her name.”
“Jackie. She’s got a space at the art studio. She’s very into designer fashion and her favourite guy just did this photo shoot with London graffiti artists, so I told her that we have a very vibrant street art scene here, and she told me she’d never seen any, and I showed her that photograph of the Samurai you had to paint over for work, and she said if I knew where more was I should let her know. You know where more graffiti is, right?” He got out his phone, thumbing at it desperately for an image to show Rick. “Do you know where this is?”
*
Rick knew exactly where Angel of Dishumanity was.
But he couldn’t tell Sylvester or any of Sylvester’s friends what the title was, just bring them to the disused hollow of concrete partially open to the sky, where it wasn’t blocked by the 3rd Expressway’s overpass above Manson Street.
“It is sort of okay for you to be here while I work. The district rents this space to construction firms for materials storage. Since nothing’s been torn down or built in Midtown right now, and no one else has rented the space for an event, I’m going to go ahead and sweep up. And while I do that, you all can look at… that,” Rick said, concluding his introduction to the space with a vague wave at the Angel.
It wasn’t his best work, but Angel was close.
Towering four times her height, Sylvester’s crush Jackie didn’t hide anything of significance by standing beneath the Angel. Angular wings that broke up into fading and fragmented DNA helixes, storming up towards the underside of the overpass above. The mere hint of a face, suggested by a twist of the paint roller while forming the silhouettes that gave the angel her shape. It had opened up a gap, allowing a pale limestone stain on the concrete to take on the aspect of a cataract-blind eye.
The angel couldn’t see her hands. Blind to what she was creating – the angular shapes of a city skyline. Specifically, San Iadras as it was in 2070, the decade in which the first clone factories were built. When the first clandestine steps had been taken toward creating Rick and all the others, like Jackie with her scarlet hair.
Angel was his attempt at trying to find something to say about how he came into the world. Most human beings knew their origin story. They had parents who wanted them. Those who didn’t, well. One way or another, that was a tragedy.
Furs, in general, only knew that they had been produced to order. By an industrial process. To sell, as slaves. They were all an economic product, not all that different to the disembodied digestive tissue the gullets were built from. It had been kept secret almost long enough for the first of them to be sold, but the secret broke out, and they’d been freed. Everyone had been blind, and then they’d seen. Maybe they wished they could’ve stayed blind. Then they wouldn’t need to sympathise, to love.
To love, Rick thought, was to be recognized. For one person, or entity, to know another – and to revel in that knowledge. The Angel of Dishumanity was blind to those she created – or at least, that was his intent, a quality he hoped to put into the carefully lain down lines. She was all pre-planned sweeps and pulls and twists of the paint roller, as efficient and precise as assembling scaffolding from a kit.
He’d designed her existence in four hundred and sixty eight strokes, and executed them in precise order over the span of two weeks in stolen pockets of time. No detail was smaller than the smallest two-inch roller he used, but there was enough there for one of the artists from Sylvester’s studio to comment, “She seems so… sad.”
“What makes you say that, Martin?” Jackie asked, tilting her head thoughtfully.
The others listened to Martin go on, and he looked the part – beret, a rough-spun neckerchief tied loosely around the throat. A poseur could look like that, but they probably couldn’t gesture at the Angel’s precise lines and begin to explain how, “Before thinking about what she seems to be assembling, notice she’s almost mechanistic. Not in the sense that she’s mechanical, but the rendition looks like an engineer’s attempt to create an organic form. Which implies a certain… inevitability to her own act of creation, that she was created to create. Set in motion by others, not making her own decisions. Juxtaposed against the city – you can see Hallman Towers there, that’s definitely our city – well… even if the DNA provides an obvious read to what she’s doing, the aesthetic of presentation provides a lot to consider.”
Jackie turned her long muzzle up, leaning in beside Martin in a way that implied Sylvester’s crush might not be as interested in him as he’d hoped.
Sylvester and the other artists moved around the space, taking in the other works… but Martin lingered longest, staring up at the Angel.
“It’s big, huh?” Rick leaned on his broom, staring up at it.
Martin glanced at Rick. At the smaller tags, lower down, the overlapping lines of graffiti blurring around cartoon figures and stickers and stencils of Anti-Corporate and Anti-Fascist propaganda. Up at the Angel’s pure white lines.
“It’s a monument,” he replied, after due consideration. “I can’t decide if it’s to express regret over what gengineering did, or if it’s a mournful celebration, or an attempt to find peaceful acceptance… but given that she’s blind, maybe I’m not supposed to know that.” Martin frowned. “All I know is it makes me feel… like the world could, should, be a better place.”
Rick hid his smile, and kept sweeping up. Praise wouldn’t clean the floors, but it was nice knowing the Angel had some kind of value for Martin. Not that Rick had a value Martin, or anyone else would notice – nobody noticed cleaners. But they saw it in the Angel, and through her, even if they didn’t know it… they saw it in Rick.
The same way Rick had seen value inside himself, through the rat cradled in Karni Mata’s hands.
*
He’d tried to make his value visible, write it all down, put it in his application at the quarterly review. He’d gone from cleaning biosecure facilities to sweeping streets, and arguably that gave him more of what GaleHome was looking for – responsibility, opportunity, and personal excellence.
Sandalio mentioned the Bestgreen contract had gone sour, production slowed because of the contamination GaleHome had failed to clear out. So Rick took personal responsibility and listed the sterility requirements for the Bestgreen contract. Then he wrote a short passage explaining how, if selected as shift-supervisor, he would attain them through rigorous sterility testing and scrub-in/scrub-out procedures. He followed the opportunity, and estimated the possible profit on the contract by following those procedures – a cost of a few more paid hours per person on shift, cleaning equipment and supplies, versus the loss of thousands and thousands of New Dollars Galehome continued to pay in penalties every day they failed to meet contract standards. Finally, he pursued personal excellence by, again, putting himself forward for shift-supervisor training.
And while it wasn’t Hartley, this time, who blinked at Rick across a desk while turning him down, Rick could see the calculation in the human’s eyes. A scruffy looking rat with patchily stained white fur was going to work in biohazard safety conditions and turn things around at a key sterile facility?
Of course not.
Rats were dirty. Everyone knew that. The human understood that. But Rick didn’t. Not anymore. Not when he knew he wasn’t just what people could see on the surface.
So he took his application, and turned it into a resumé.
“Interesting.” Dell Simons, the greyish-furred fox on the other side of the desk at Simons and Simons and Simons cleaning services, put down Rick’s resumé after checking a detail. “They took you off the Bestgreen contract?”
Rick nodded, clutching his hands tightly. Even if the company’s owners were all gengineered clones, like him, they weren’t rats. “That’s correct.”
“That seems an incredible waste of your abilities, especially given your immunities, Mr. Larue. Is that why you’ve decided to put in an application with us?”
“Oh, no. I recently came to the conclusion that I have some value to contribute, and… I’d like to find somewhere that value is recognized.”
“Very understandable. I’m sorry – I’ve been calling you Mr. LaRue. Would you prefer I use your first name, uhhh… Hendrix?”
“Rick is fine.”
“Well, Rick, your application states that you’re looking for career advancement to supervisor or shift foreman status.”
“I am.”
Dell glanced back at Rick’s resumé, and Rick felt tension start to clench down inside him.
“Based on your last biosafe certifications, your performance metrics are in the average range. Average is a good starting point. Training should lift most of your scores by five to eight points, which will get you well above our requirements. So, we’ll pay for that training, recertify you, assuming your scores come up as expected we’ll put you on a track to supervisor status. However, we have seen employees who push themselves on training achieve a lift in the ten to fifteen point range, which would open the door to further training in the direction of a management position after three to five years with us. Would that interest you?”
Rick sat up straighter. “Uh. Yes, very much.”
“Good. We’re not quite there yet, but the plan is to expand Simons and Simons and Simons, and we’ll need management with ground floor experience if we expect to achieve that.” Dell smiled, briefly. “Did you have any questions, Rick?”
“No, I… think that covers it.”
“Great. I’ll have Jill send over our employment contract – you have something else on your mind, don’t you?” Dell cocked an ear, attentively.
“It’s a little personal.”
“Go ahead.”
Rick leaned in, frowning slightly. “Do you consider higher positions a front-facing role? I always maintain sterility standards, but my fur hangs onto stains. The white can end up looking a little… murky.”
“Don’t worry about that – we’ll get your measurements.”
“Sorry?”
“We provide custom personal protective equipment.”
“You… don’t use standard PPE?”
“Not with furs in our employ. Trust me, with coveralls built for you, keeping your fur white’s going to be so much easier.”
It wasn’t.
But that was only because, now that he didn’t have access to paint rollers, Rick found out that using spray-paint was a lot more fun.
