Chapter 8: Undercover Work

Sioux Housing Complex, Lakota Heights Quadrant
New Pittsburgh, Mars
Wednesday, July 19, 2147

Walker Stevens climbed down from the work transport when it stopped and the crew leader yelled, “This is it. We’re here.” He looked around at the section of New Pittsburgh and wasn’t impressed. They had left the training facility, traveling through an area with government buildings, gone through what seemed like a rundown commercial section, and were now in a badly deteriorated ghetto area. They were parked in the middle of an intersection, and all four corners were filthy building towers covered in graffiti.

“Not quite the dorm area you’ve been living in, is it?” commented the foreman. He was a heavyset man with African-Brazilian looks and a ghetto accent. His name was Julian Cachaca.

“Uh, no.” Stevens wondered about the area. Even for a trained agent, infiltrating a ghetto was a chancy proposition.

“We’re safe enough. I grew up in a place like this in Dow. Once we’re finished, it will be sparkling. The residents, maybe not, but that is their job, not ours.” Julian pointed to the other side of the intersection, where a pair of cops were sitting in their cart. Next to them, a mobile health clinic was deployed.

When looking over possible work assignments, Stevens had turned down any of the jobs offered outside of New Pittsburgh. As an EastHem political dissident, he had claimed not to have any skills that would be useful on Mars. That limited him to manual labor until he could learn more usable skills, skills that would pay more. His friend Paul Winston was doing work like that as a farm worker, but that was on a factory farm far out of town. Stevens wanted to stay in the city, where it would be easier to meet people and recruit assets. He had requested a work assignment rehabilitating ghetto buildings.

Now he was wondering about the wisdom of that assignment. Still, nobody was looking angry or violent. In a typical WestHem ghetto two policemen wouldn’t have lasted two minutes. As Stevens was looking around, a second pair of cops showed up in a second cart, but they didn’t seem concerned, either. They were followed by a pair of dip-hoes in their cart. The dip-hoes, Martian slang for unarmed Department of Public Health and Safety Emergency Medical Technicians, didn’t look nervous at all. Instead, they were sitting in their cart drinking coffee. After a brief chat, the four cops, three men and a woman, split apart. Two of the male officers stayed outside, directing traffic, while the other two entered the building.

Stevens understood what was supposed to happen. The Sioux Housing Complex consisted of the four residential towers surrounding the intersection. The New Pittsburgh municipal government was rebuilding the ghetto housing areas and had selected Sioux Housing as their next target. The project would probably take months to complete. As he looked around, the mobile health clinic began setting up, with white-clad people setting up check-in stations. In an empty area of the intersection, an Employment Service van was setting up a string of kiosks to help people find work. To one side a MarsGroup crew climbed down from one of the delivery trucks; they were planning to record and broadcast from the work zone. Meanwhile, a series of freight trucks began arriving. It almost looked like a well-rehearsed ballet.

“Stevens! You plan on working today or you want to move right in?” yelled Julian.

“I’m on it, boss!” Walker turned and went over to the freight trucks. The rehab project had been going on for a month already and was progressing sequentially. They couldn’t evict everybody in the tower for several months, so they were doing a floor at a time. While an exterior crew cleaned up garbage and scrubbed away graffiti, an interior moving crew would help people pack their possessions, minimal as they might be, and move into temporary housing elsewhere in the building. Then, a removal crew would enter and rip out the flooring, cabinetry, kitchen or bath fixtures, and appliances, leaving each apartment nothing but bare ceramacrete walls, floors, and ceilings. The old materials would be removed and either recycled or taken outside and dumped in an empty crater. The rooms would be scrubbed and then prepared for the next crew. They would bring in new furnishings, with the colors previously selected by the displaced residents, and rebuild the apartment. Meanwhile, a considerably more trained group of workers would be repairing or replacing what they called the mechanicals, the water, power, and heating systems. Finally, a moving crew would help the original occupants move back in.

From his experience with Earth ghettos, Walker wondered whether it would do any good. The residents would immediately trash their apartments as soon as they turned around, and he said so. “Don’t be so sure of that,” said Julian. “When WestHem was running things, nobody gave a shit about these people, and they knew it. They had no incentive to take care of things. Well, we got rid of WestHem. The people down at the Municipal Tower know it, too, and they know they can be voted out, also. This isn’t the first housing project we’ve worked on.”

“At the rate we’re going, rebuilding the ghettos won’t be finished until after we are long dead and gone.”

“Again, don’t be so sure. This is just starting.” Julian pointed over at a Martian Employment System kiosk near the mobile clinic. Some of the people leaving the clinic were going to the kiosk and speaking to a small group of employment councilors. “A lot of the people signing up for job training don’t have much more in the way of skills than you do. Where do you think they are going to be assigned? I was told that New Pittsburgh is going to massively increase the number of rehab crews.”

“And what happens after the ghettos are rebuilt and you have all these crews doing nothing? That’s a boom-and-bust situation, which is how the ghettos came to be. All those AgriCorp workers finished building the greenhouses and got laid off and shoved into housing complexes. At least, that’s what I was told.”

Julian nodded. “True enough. Big difference, though. A lot of you guys are going to be learning more technical skills, maybe going back to school. The reason people are signing up is because the basic stipend doesn’t cover anything beyond the basics. If you want booze or smokes or pot or coffee, you need to work. If you want anything beyond ghetto housing, even refurbished ghetto housing, you need to work. By the time these buildings are rebuilt, there are going to be a bunch of factories and hospitals and schools and such that will need workers. By then, a lot of you guys are going to be working somewhere else.”

Stevens shrugged and went to the freight trucks. His job was to help take cabinets inside Building A and bring packing materials out. A steady stream of empty refuse trucks would remove the packing materials and anything else that needed to go. He helped load the pallets of cabinets onto a freight crawler and then directed it into the building and onto the freight elevators. From there it was up to the thirty-second floor, which was currently being rebuilt. By the time he got the crawler unloaded, a pallet of trash was ready for him to remove. He spent the morning shuttling cabinets in and trash out.