The Free People’s Village by Sim Kern EPUB & PDF – eBook Details Online
- Status: Available for Free Download
- Author: Sim Kern
- Language: English
- Genre: Science Fiction
- Format: PDF / EPUB
- Size: 2 MB
- Price: Free
7:00 P.M. – AUGUST 14, 2020
know you want to hear about the Free People’s Village and that literal,
fateful-fucking-step at the reflecting pool, but to explain why I did what I
did, I have to start the story months earlier, before the tents and tear gas and
stirrings of revolution, with the night of the last great party at the Lab—the
night Red destroyed the Fun Machine.
I got to the house just before sundown. Even though I taught in the
Eighth Ward, just a few blocks away, I always went home to change before
a show. My friends would have roasted me alive for showing up to the Lab
in one of my linen work suits. So after the last bell, I’d bike two miles to the
G train—the only maglev station in Eighth Ward. I’d wait one or twenty
minutes, depending on luck, watching the grackles argue in the live oaks
around the station, feeling nervous, if I’m honest, as I was usually the only
white person on the platform.
Then the G train zipped me to Midtown. After a few minutes, the old,
brick cottages and shingle roofs of the Ward gave way to shiny Community
towers—their tops angled and glittering black with solar panels. The
landscape morphed from yards choked with invasive vines or flat-topped
squares of Bermuda grass into swaying prairies, interrupted by the neatly
maintained orchards surrounding each Community. Here and there, the
prairie humped up in wildways passing over the maglev lines that
spiderwebbed across this part of the city, with a stop for each Community
and fast connections to Downtown, the Medical Center, and the Galleria. At
each stop as we headed west, more Black people got off, and more white
people got on.
Disembarking at my Community, I dashed from the station up to my
apartment on the seventh floor. Threw off my stale work clothes. Threw on
thrifted cotton shirt, denim shorts, and some alligator-leather cowboy boots
I’d found at an estate sale. I threw on a thick coat of eyeliner, clipped a
take-cup to my belt, and then it was back to the train, back through the
prairie and over the bayou, past herons spearing fish along the rocky banks,
and finally back through the time warp. To a neighborhood that hadn’t
changed a bit in the last twenty years of the “War on Climate Change,”
except that its potholes were wider now.
Navigating those craggy streets on my pop-out bike as the sun set was
no easy feat. At least I didn’t have to worry about cars running me off the
road, like they would’ve in the olden days. By 2020, the only cars left in the
Ward were wheelless hulks in backyards, colonized by bees and weeds, too
rusted to be sold for scrap. Only suburban people or rich folks had cars
anymore—and those were all shiny, hyperway-compatible electrical
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