Chapter 13: And Then He Kissed Me

New Pittsburgh, Mars

November 15, 2135

They were on the 135th floor now, with only ten more to go before the building topped out. After that, Nate and the rest of the BEAST crew would be reassigned somewhere else, another project in another part of the city. This one would be topped out, ready for the floors and sides and windows and wiring and plumbing and everything else that went into a new high rise in the vertical sprawl of New Pittsburgh. Just another high end rez-hue tower housing people who would never think about the greenies and bots who had put it together. For now, though, they were still here, and the last vertical beam of the 135^th floor was being lifted into position.

Nate walked toward it without hesitation. There was no pause anymore, no moment where he had to remind himself where he was or what stood beneath his feet. He moved across the steel the same way he moved on the ground, the only difference being the shallow, controlled steps he had learned to take in natural Martian gravity. The stride was different in form but identical in confidence. Up here or down there, it no longer mattered. Once his brain had accepted that falling was not something that simply happened—not with the harness, not with the tethers, not with the layers of redundancy built into the system—the fear had faded away. In its place came something far more useful: ease.

They were a little over four hundred meters above the red surface now. From this height, the world split cleanly depending on which way you looked. To the north, there was nothing but Mars—an endless red expanse stretching out to a clean, sharp horizon, broken only by subtle rises and depressions in the terrain that caught the light in muted shades. It felt open in a way that was hard to describe, like the planet itself was still unfinished out there.

He could see one of the MF towers in the distance. MF not having the traditional meaning in this instance but standing for Magnetic Field. The towers—there were eight of them currently around the NP perimeter—linked together to form an artificial magnetic field to protect the humans and the plants below. Mars itself had no magnetic field, so if you wanted to avoid having your DNA rearranged by the solar wind and cosmic rays that constantly bombarded the surface, you had to make your own. The towers were the tallest free-standing structures that humans had ever built. Each of them stood eight kilometers high.

In the other three directions, New Pittsburgh pressed in tight and vertical, dense clusters of rez-hue towers rising in rigid grids, all of them packed together in a way that felt deliberate and controlled.

The contrast was striking, and from up here, it made more sense than it did on the ground. The view no longer tightened his chest or turned his stomach. It had become something else entirely—expansive, almost beautiful, something he took in without even thinking about it. He had not needed his harness to save his ass in two weeks now, not once, and the thought crossed his mind that he could probably walk around up here without it. He dismissed that idea just as quickly. Confidence was one thing. Being a complete idiot was another. He liked the harness. He liked knowing it was pretty much impossible to fall off the building as long as it was attached.

What he liked even more was simply being up on the high steel. There was a quiet satisfaction in it, a sense of doing something that most people around him would never get to (or have to) do. The greenies were a fearless bunch in Nate’s experience but the idea of stepping out onto open steel hundreds of meters above the ground would make most of them pale. For Nate, it had become routine.

He stepped out onto the corner where the east face of the building met the south, positioning himself next to the studs at the very edge of the structure. There was nothing beneath him on either side but open space and distance. Lissa was working the south side and could have taken the placement just as easily, but Nate had volunteered for it. He watched the beam as it approached, tracking its movement, coordinating with the crane bot through short, practiced phrases that no longer required conscious thought.

When the beam came within reach, he moved in. He swung one leg over the horizontal member and straddled it, settling into position with practiced ease. The vertical beam hovered in front of him, swaying slightly as the crane brought it in. Nate reached out, caught it, and guided it into alignment. The process that had once required intense focus now unfolded automatically. Within seconds, the beam was exactly where it needed to be.

George and Tom, the two securement bots assigned to the south side, moved in immediately, gripping the beam and lifting it slightly before lowering it again, then repeating the motion to confirm alignment. Satisfied, they held it steady as the crane released tension and withdrew. Loretta, the inspection and welding bot, rolled into position and applied the bonding adhesive in a clean, even layer. At her signal, George and Tom lowered the beam for the final time, seating it firmly. Loretta’s welding arm extended and locked the joint in place with a quick series of precise arcs, sealing it permanently into the structure.

Nate pushed himself upright and stepped back onto the beam, already disengaging from the task. Another placement completed, another incremental step toward the top. Over the comms, the voice of Thad Markum, the greenie erection supervisor, came through, steady and unremarkable.

“All right. BEAST team on the structure, the final beam for one-three-five is in place. Go ahead and break for lunch now.”

Above them, the HIBS crew was still working on laying down the horizontal beams atop the verticals the BEASTs had just laid. The two crews worked about thirty minutes out of synch with each other. That way, both teams could be in operation at once, thus increasing efficiency. They would get their lunch break thirty minutes later and enjoy it while the BEASTs started laying down verticals atop what the HIBS had just built.

Nate turned off his tactical channel transmission mode. He could still hear instructions from the foreman or emergency signals, but his voice would not be transmitted. He activated proximity mode, which would allow open communications to anyone within three meters. And the only one in that range now was Lissa.

“All right, mofo,” Lissa told him. “Let’s eat. Did you bring the fuckin salad forks and the fuckin lemon slices for the water?”

“Fuckin’ A,” he told her. “Let me just pull that out of my ass.”

They shared a laugh and sat down, he on the east beam, she on the south beam. They could step onto each other’s beams but it meant one of them would have to unclip from the harness rails long enough to clip onto the secondary rail on the side they wanted to go to. It was absolutely forbidden to be completely unharnessed while on a beam. But still, they had to switch rails a few times during the day. As such, there was a secondary clip on the harness. It was not a smart clip that could yank him up if he fell. Instead, it was a dumb clip that could only stop him from falling more than a meter or so. Since they were already close enough to talk comfortably, there was no reason for either of them to step onto the other’s beam, so they didn’t bother.

They settled into place, each of them straddling their respective beam, one leg resting along the flange, the other hanging free into open space that dropped nearly half a klick to the surface below. It had become a comfortable position, natural in a way that would have seemed impossible to Nate back in the beginning of his new career. Now it was just how you sat when it was time to take a break.

He let himself relax and took a long piss, feeling that same strange, faintly pleasant sucking sensation from the condom catheter as it did its job. It was something he had noticed early on and never quite gotten used to, not because it was uncomfortable, but because it wasn’t. He kept his face neutral and gave no outward sign of what he was doing. That was just how it worked when a male and a female were talking. No mention of it. No acknowledgment. It simply didn’t exist. With two males or two females, it was a different story entirely. Then it was just another bodily function, open for crude and hilarious commentary like anything else.

He still hadn’t taken a shit in the suit. Not once. The original waste pack was still in place, showing less than half a percent full—only the useless remains of his urine processing inside. He wasn’t sure whether to be proud of that or mildly concerned.

Lissa had gone quiet beside him.

Nate glanced over at her without turning his head. Was she peeing too? Did it feel like that for her too—slightly off, slightly good, just enough to make you think about it more than you probably should? He found himself wanting to ask, curiosity pushing at him, but he already knew the answer to that question. Not allowed. Not between them. Not yet.

Maybe later. Maybe if they got to know each other better. Maybe if things shifted to the next level.

They had bonded, that much was clear. A friendship had formed between them, something that would have raised eyebrows back on Earth, back in the vermin zones where lines were drawn sharper and crossed less often. On Mars, it didn’t mean much. Men and women worked together, talked together, got along or didn’t, and that was that.

Still, there was something else underneath it.

Lissa had been giving him signals. Not subtle ones either. Clumsy, sometimes, like she wasn’t entirely sure how to do it, but unmistakable all the same. She flirted with him. Not constantly, not aggressively, but enough that it registered.

The game was the same here as it had always been, just with a different set of stakes. Romance in their station in life wasn’t about grand gestures or fantasy ideals. It was about compatibility, about whether two people could function together in a system that didn’t give a shit about either of them.

Maybe she didn’t feel anything particularly deep for him. Maybe that wasn’t even the point.

He was stable. He had a job. He wasn’t an asshole. He was someone she could build something with.

That was what passed for romance in their world. Not knights in shining armor, not princes who will someday come, not dreams. Just a quiet calculation that maybe this person would make a decent partner, maybe a decent father, and probably wouldn’t beat you more than once a week or so and only rarely put you in the hospital.

That was the ideal prospect for a vermin woman. Apparently it was for greenies too?

Nate watched as Lissa took a good gulp of her meal pack. She had listened to his plan to not fall into insurmountable debt. She had agreed that it was the best plan available and had adopted parts of it for herself. She, like Nate, no longer bought beer or marijuana. She pooled money with her shower-buddy for meals on a few days of the week, pooled with Nate and his butt-buddy on others. She had become an accepted member of Nate’s little group of friends and fit in well with them. But she could not bring herself to eat the free food paste like Nate did.

“What is it today?” Nate asked her with envy.

“It’s the chicken one,” she said. “Chicken marsupial or some shit like that.”

“Ohhh,” Nate said with a little sigh. “I loved the chicken one. I loved all of them. Even the vegetable medley.”

Lissa shook her head. “I can’t believe you eat that shit they hand out. It’s only four hundred bucks a month for the good shit, motherfucker. Taken out on Mondays, so it doesn’t even dump out of your fuckin’ paycheck.”

“That’s four hundred bucks a month I don’t want to lose,” he said. “That’s what’s keeping my ass just a little bit below the fuckin’ water instead of down on the bottom.”

And this was true. By severe budgeting and sacrificing anything fun that cost money (fortunately, fucking Roxy was both free and readily available) Nate had almost managed to turn his ship around. Almost. He still had more than eight thousand dollars of the ten thousand he had taken out after that first shocking payday. He wasn’t the most fun person in the world for it, but he was close to moving in the right direction. Or at least he was no longer heading in the wrong one.

But the paste ... He found it did not taste like grandma’s twat at all. Grandma’s twat would have tasted better. Standard food paste tasted like dirty armpits with a strong kicker of sewer gas and just a hint of rotting vegetation. He let some slide directly down his throat, trying to avoid having it touch his tongue at all. And after swallowing, the first exhale brought out all the flavors in all their glory. He sucked it down as quickly as possible and then chased it with nearly half a liter of water from his H2O tank.

“It has to be deliberate,” Nate complained, feeling a little queasy, dreading the first burp. “There is no way the paste naturally tastes this bad. This is a plot by the food paste corporation and fuckin’ Briggs.”

“Everything is a plot to you,” said Lissa, still sucking on her own paste tube. “You ever think you’re one of those paranoid motherfuckers?”

“Is it paranoia if it’s true?” he asked her.

“Deep shit, mofo,” she told him and then had another suck.

“That’s me. A deep motherfuckin’ mofo.”

Lissa continued to suck down her food paste until it was gone. She then gave an unapologetic burp. “It’s payday today,” she said. “Gonna drop in another twenty minutes.”

“Yep,” Nate said. “And ninety-five percent of it is going to swirl right down the fuckin’ shitter.”

Lissa giggled at that. “You’re so fuckin’ poetic and shit.”

“I’m a product of the WestHem public school system, slut-dawg,” he said.

She let that sit for a second, then casually said, “You wanna get a beer with me after work? Since it’s payday and all. That’s the fuckin’ tradition, right?”

Nate shook his head slightly. “I don’t wanna spend fifty dollars on a beer when that same fifty bucks will buy me hamburger for burrito meat.”

“That’s a good point,” Lissa said. “Your burritos are really fuckin’ good. Is that what you’re making tonight?”

“Fuckin’ A,” Nate said. “The ones with the green sauce and the pepper jack.”

It had become a thing with the group. Tuesdays and Sundays, they pooled money and let Nate handle the cooking. He sourced the ingredients, did the prep, made something that actually tasted like real food instead of whatever the takeout places were serving. Vermin food, they called it, half-joking, but nobody complained when it was on the table. The Mexican stuff had become the clear favorite.