Chapter 12: Saturday In the Park

October 1, 2135
New Pittsburgh, Mars

It was payday for all the good little greenies of Mars.

For Nate, it meant something different than it did for most. This was his first real paycheck—not a transfer, not an advance, not borrowed money dressed up to look like opportunity. This was earned. Hours worked, beams placed, orders given, not falling off the structure like a dumbass. Thirty-seven dollars an hour, forty hours a week. Real money. His money.

But he’d found out quickly that this particular payday wasn’t just special to him. It was special to everyone. Not because anyone got extra money or anything—the corporations were not in the habit of distributing money for nothing—but because it fell on a Saturday, a day when the vast majority of Martian workers were off work for the weekend and did not have to report in the next morning.

It didn’t happen often—three or four times a year, usually. Sometimes only twice. Rarely as many as five. But when it did, it was something else entirely. It was the Fourth of July and New Year’s Eve rolled into one. Greenies talked about it the way people back on Earth talked about Winterfest or Memorial Day weekends, with anticipation, planning, and a kind of low-level buzz that built for the better part of a month and peaked right around 1300 on the Saturday afternoon in question.

It was the drinking holiday to end all drinking holidays.

The corporations loved it more than the greenies and worked hard to encourage the tradition. Any Earth-based entity that sold intoxicants looked at a Saturday payday the way old-world retailers looked at Black Friday. Staffing went up, inventory got stacked deep, and prices went up as much as the basic tenets of capitalism would allow. People were going to party as a fuckin’ culture and they were going to pay higher prices to do so and that had been made to seem like just part of the way things were.

Nate caught the enthusiasm whether he meant to or not. It was infectious. It lived in the way people talked in the streets, near the gas charging stations at the construction site, in the way Tyler had been grinning since Thursday, in the way Roxy had already explained to him that you could get fucked up three separate times on such a day with a recovery period in between.

Pay allotments dropped at 1300 hours New Pittsburgh time (even if you lived in Eden, which was one time zone east of NP). Not a second earlier. Not a second later. That was when the money hit. It might as well have been a law of physics, it was that established. The corporations that owned everything on Mars were ruthless, bureaucratic to a fault, manipulative, and entirely profit-oriented and without souls. But they were honest when it came to payday. No games were played. You worked your hours and you got paid on time and in the correct amount without question. Pretty much every greenie Nate had talked to over the past two weeks agreed on that.

Nate had gone over the numbers in his head more than once. Thirty-seven dollars an hour. Forty hours a week. Two weeks. Just under three grand. Yeah, some of it was already spent—he knew that much. His half of the rent, payments on the no-burn, the Green Horizon advance, half the clinker fee, half the premium meal packs for work. All that shit. But still, there would be plenty left over.

He was down to his last three hundred dollars in his account now, which made the timing perfect. He could feel the bottom coming up to meet him—groceries getting thin, options getting tighter—but he hadn’t hit it yet. Not quite. This would fix that. Recharge the account. Stock up on food. Maybe have a little fun. Maybe more than a little.

It was now 1200 NP time on this most hedonistically solemn occasion. Nate was in Nicholas Park, the largest area of parkland in the southern portion of NP—where the vast majority of the city’s greenies lived. It wasn’t anywhere near as large as Triad Steel Park, the city’s central park, which was two kilometers long by half a klick wide and even featured a natural Martian-gravity 9-hole golf course, but Nicholas Park was still respectable—half a klick end to end and two hundred and fifty meters across.

It had a public swimming pool and wave beach, an amusement park with rollercoasters and merry-go-rounds, two duck ponds, and an oak tree forest atop a thirty meter landscaped hill. There were soccer fields and a baseball diamond, and even go-kart tracks with electric karts you could drive yourself.

Most importantly, it was the site of the AgriCorp Seventh Day Pay Festival whenever such a thing rolled around—the place to be if you lived on the south side.

Tyler and Xan and Roxy had talked him into going, and he was glad they had. It was an amazing gathering. Easily more than twenty thousand greenies were making a day of the Festival, partying and drinking AgriCorp beer from keg bars for fifty dollars a cup and smoking AgriCorp Brown for twenty-five dollars a hit. Extra cops had been brought in to keep the peace. Portable toilets had been set up in staggering numbers to maintain some illusion of cleanliness. And millions of dollars in fresh pay would be transferred from greenie bank accounts to AgriCorp revenue streams between noon, when the Festival opened, and 2300, when it shut down until the next Seventh Day Pay occurred.

An hour before the money hit, the place was already alive. Music blasted from speaker towers positioned throughout the park, bass thumping through the ground in a steady, hypnotic rhythm. Groups clustered around the keg stations, some already drinking on credit tabs, others just waiting with their cups in hand like supplicants at the altar. The smell of bud hung thick in the air, layered over sweat, food grease, and the faint artificial freshness pumped in by the park’s atmosphere systems.

Nate sat on the grass with the others near one of the keg and bud stations, watching the crowd move and shift around him. Tyler had already scoped out their position like it was a tactical operation.

“Sixty more minutes, greenies,” Tyler said, checking his clinker. “You feel it yet?”

Nate nodded, though he wasn’t sure what exactly he was supposed to be feeling. There was something in the air, though. A kind of shared tension that ran through the crowd like an electrical charge waiting for a switch to flip. Twenty thousand people, all broke at the same time, all about to not be.

Yeah. This was going to be a good day.

Since Nate still had a little money left in his account, he had already bought his first beer and two vape hits of AgriCorp Brown. The beer was cold and bitter in the best way, and the Brown sat smooth and warm in his head. He was feeling fine indeed.

Roxy, on the other hand, had not had so much as a cent to her name for the past four days. She sat beside him on the grass with empty hands and an empty cup, watching the keg lines like a starving woman staring at a buffet she wasn’t allowed to touch.

Nate had fucked her six times in the past two weeks, always quick and dirty in the shadows of the little park by their are-hue, but that still didn’t entitle her to a single beer or a single hit under the ironclad rules of greenie life. Everyone bought their own intoxicants unless they were an official couple or married. No exceptions. Not even close friends, not even regular fuck-buddies. To offer would be an insult. To hint would be unspeakably rude. So Nate didn’t offer, and Roxy didn’t ask.

She wore a pair of tight shorts and a tighter shirt that left very little to the imagination. After enviously watching Nate take a long pull on his beer she leaned over and asked, “So what time is your work-slut getting here?”

Work-slut, Nate had learned, was the standard Martian term for a female coworker a guy had bonded with to any real degree. The female version for a male coworker was long-donger. Lissa was therefore Nate’s work-slut, and he was her long-donger. Greenies loved slapping sexually loaded labels on everything even though most of them had been raised WestHem-prudish and still got twitchy about actual sexual topics. It was an interesting contradiction.

Nate took another sip. “She said she’d be here by the time the paychecks dropped. She’ll text me when she hits the east entrance.”

Roxy nodded, eyes drifting across the growing crowd. “Does she know about ‘friends’ yet?”

Nate shook his head. “She does not.”

Roxy’s mouth curved into a slow, wicked little smile. “Maybe you should introduce her to the concept.”

Nate pondered that for a moment, the Brown and the beer making the idea feel warmer and more possible than it probably was.

“Maybe,” he said.

Xan wandered over from the keg line and dropped down onto the grass beside them, a paper cup of beer in her hand. She took a sip before even settling fully, like she didn’t trust the universe not to take it away from her if she waited too long.

“Wassup, Nate-dawg?” she asked, glancing over at him. “Your work-slut’s not here yet?”

“Not yet,” Nate said. “She said it’ll be close to pay-drop time. She don’t got no fuckin’ money to spend until then.”

Xan took another sip, then shrugged slightly. “Hopefully she doesn’t raw-dog your ass.”

Raw-dog—not raw-dawg, which meant something else entirely—was the Martian term for standing someone up, for missing an appointment, for quietly slipping out of an obligation without so much as a word. It could be the most serious accusation possible in one context, like if someone actually disappeared on you when something important was on the line, or just a light jab in others, like when someone was running late or hadn’t shown up exactly when expected. In this case, Xan was clearly going with the lighter version.

Nate shook his head. “I don’t think she’s the raw-dog type. She’d at least send a text if she couldn’t make it.”

Xan nodded once, accepting that, and took another pull from her beer.

Nate took a moment to glance at her legs. They were very pretty legs. Smooth, relaxed, strong in a way that suggested they got used regularly but not abused. Beyond that, it was hard to tell much about her. Xan favored baggy shorts and loose shirts that hid most of her shape, swallowing whatever feminine curves and protrusions she might have had. It wasn’t an attempt to conceal anything, not really. It was just the way she was.

Over the past two weeks, she had warmed up to him considerably. Nothing he would identify as romantic in any way, but it was clear she enjoyed spending time with him, talking to him, letting her guard down in small, controlled increments. He enjoyed it too. She was a smart, insightful girl with a deep mind and deeper thoughts than most of the people he’d met so far.

The other night, while stoned—and about an hour before Nate’s little stroll to the park—they had gotten into a long discussion about the difference between being a real person on Earth, like Nate, and being an unauthorized birth, and thus a non-person, like Xan had been. It had been an enlightening conversation. Nate hadn’t realized just how many unauthorized children there actually were in the ghettos of WestHem. There were no official studies, because people like Xan did not officially exist, but informal estimates suggested that for every ten legitimate babies born on Earth, three unofficial non-babies were born—all of them in a pee-hue bedroom or bathroom, delivered by a vermin midwife who would perform the service for half a pay-drop worth of welfare credits and likely have nothing but on the job training.

Tyler came striding back from the crowd a few minutes later, this time with company. The man with him was tall and good-looking, with darker skin and clear African-descended features. His head was shaved smooth, and his arms and legs had that compact, powerful look of someone built for physical work, whether he’d done much of it yet or not. He carried himself easy, relaxed, like he belonged wherever he happened to be standing.

Roxy and Xan both reacted immediately when they saw him. They got to their feet, smiling, and stepped in for hugs, which he returned without hesitation. There was nothing awkward about it. They knew him, and they liked him.

“Deal,” Roxy said. “Where the fuck you been?”

“Same place you always find my ass,” he said with a grin. “Chasin’ a paycheck.”

Tyler, who was still carrying no beer cup of his own, jerked a thumb at the man and said to Nate, “This is Jeff Dealerman, but everybody just calls him Deal.” Then he added with a grin, “And everybody calls this motherfucker Nate-dawg. He’s my new butt-buddy.”

Butt-buddy was, of course, Martian slang for assigned roommate among males. A female roommate to another female was called a shower-buddy.

They shook hands. Deal’s grip was firm but not showy.

“Deal works with me in the fuckin’ mines,” Tyler explained. “He’s static.”

Xan nodded, still smiling. “He comes over every once in a while. Hasn’t been over since your ass moved in though.”

Nate studied the new arrival for a moment. Deal seemed nice enough on the surface—easy smile, relaxed shoulders, the kind of guy who fit right into the Saturday-payday crowd. But something about him gave Nate a faint, uneasy vibe. It wasn’t the dark skin; in the ghettos of WestHem, dark-skinned people were as common as light-skinned ones, and there was little real strife between the groups that bottom-fed in the depths of the ocean. They were all equally worthless in the eyes of the rest of society.

No, it was something else. A half-buried memory from his school days that he couldn’t quite pull up. Whatever it was, it prickled at the back of his neck.

Still, Deal seemed friendly enough, so Nate shrugged the feeling off and gave a small nod of greeting.

Deal dropped down onto the grass with them, folding his long legs easily. For the next few minutes the five of them talked the easy, half-shouted talk of people trying to be heard over festival noise—work gripes, how fuckin’ clueless the Earthling admin assholes were, which keg line was moving fastest.

Deal looked over at Nate. “Tyler says you’re one of them motherfuckers who climbs up on buildings while they’re still building them.”

Nate nodded. “Yeah. BEAST crew. We set the vertical beams.”

Deal let out a low whistle. “No way in hell I could do that shit, greenie. I’d be pissing myself the whole time.”

“Used to think the same thing,” Nate said. “But it’s actually pretty fuckin’ safe once you trust the harness. By the end of the second day you stop thinking about the drop. Mostly.” He paused, then added, “Worst part is lightening. They shut off the Earth gravity and you go straight to natural Martian gravity. Feels like your guts are trying to crawl out your fuckin’ throat.”