God Doesn't Deal in Gold

Tarltan hoisted the bags higher on his shoulder. His eyes followed the long lines of infrastructure upward, stretching with the skyscrapers up into the filthy red sky. He could barely see the last remaining cracks of ruddy light filtering through the tops of the city's jagged looking teeth. The quickly moving vehicles whizzing overhead looked like an army of well-trained flies swarming the sky's rotten maw. Tarltan hoped he would be allowed into the plant before they closed. If not, he would likely need to stay in line overnight to retain a spot this good.

His stomach growled at the thought, and he re-settled the bags on his shoulders again. He felt incredibly exposed, with his haul for the week just on his back in one lump for all to see. It almost made him grateful for the hired arms who patrolled between the flickering city streetlights.

"Last Ten!" called the man at the door "I ain't takin' more than ten of yous sluices tonight! So get in here so I can beat the rest of this trash off my doorstep."

Tarltan quickly did a headcount of the people in front of him. He was 8th. He would make it. He let out the small breath he'd been holding as if for good luck. He would be able to buy his meal and a bed tonight and a ticket to the next town within a week if the rates held out.

He watched one of the people who had been in front of him in line exit the building: a young woman with her baby slung on her back. She was a new sluice and one he had talked with a few times while they had dug through the Heaps. The woman held a handful of tiny lead tokens clutched tightly to her breast. Based on her expression, though, it was a smaller victory than she had been hoping for.

He'd warned her that the rates were not consistent for #5's, and considering how high they had been last week, the supply would be too high for similar rates this week. She had played it risky, though. The young mother had hoped that if she was fortunate, she wouldn't have to sluice for more than two weeks to pay off her debt. Tarltan had seen similar women with similar hopes before. He wagered that iff she wised up, she would be able to get herself back into housing in the slums in a year and a half. Iff she was smart about it, her kid would never need to know she'd ever been a sluice.

'Iff...'

He had collected #2 plastics himself, which held steady exchanges for the previous month, hovering around twenty clips per pound. He would reach his goals, iffing rates held out.

'Iff...'

It was spraypainted along the walls of decrepit alleys, scratched into the walls of public washrooms, and sloppily tattooed into people's skins. It was an abbreviation of the phrase 'If and only if'- a relic of older schools of thought.

"Alright, get in there and tare out." The voice from the door commanded.

Tarltan was snapped from his reverie and shuffled forward with his bags of antique toys and old juice containers. He felt a wash of relief flood over him as the metal doors scraped shut behind him with his payload intact. No one could rob him now, for a few minutes at least. He moved to the scale and stood as still as he could- errors usually favored the plant, not the sluice.

His weight with the load was recorded, and he told the plant processor he had #2 plastics. He was directed to an orange-colored hallway but left to walk it alone. He did just that, reaching a bin on a scale at the end. He dumped the contents of his bags into the bin, watching the weight change on the readout. "27.875 lb". The scale spat out a ticket, and he turned around to go back to the plate by the entryway. It spat out another ticket -his tare weight- and a mechanical voice sounded over the echoing sounds of feet on the rickety metal walkways around Tarltan. He moved unburdened to the payout counter and wordlessly slipped the pieces of paper under the chainlink barrier to the tiny looking woman behind it.

"Clips or credits?" She asked mechanically. He gestured towards his wrist, and she scanned the few hundred credits to his account. With that, the transaction was complete, and she no longer even owed him the courtesy of eye contact. Her gaze had already moved onto the next nameless face in her line before he had even stepped away.

"I miss your smile, Karina," Tarltan said, his voice tinged with regret. "I always had hoped... they couldn't take your soul from you."

Her eyes snapped back to him for a second. There was venom in them as she stated, coldly,

"I don't care what you want. Mum wanted better for you, and you didn't care. Now, move along sluice." The last word dripped with her hatred.

Even so, Tarltan was grateful for it. At least his sister's hatred was real, an emotion that wasn't manufactured by the system to exploit anyone.

No, her hatred was honest. That was perhaps why Tarltan barbed her when he saw her. He knew he did himself no favors with her but couldn't help it when everything else in this whole world felt just as plastic as the bounties he traded for his meager living. The whole of society seemed just as fake and disposable as the golden bags they had used to hold everything in before.

Tarltan had studied old economics. He had studied old books on business. He found it ironic how much value they used to place on things they consider garbage now. The more rich men mined space of its metals, the less kingly those metals became. The very metals that man had once called "God's Money" were now made worthless by the robots the rich sent into space behind the rotten cloud of pollutants. They were made to mine the satellites between the stars for the increasingly abundant elements.

And as they did so, the value of plastic became more apparent.

Tarltan could scarcely believe there was a time the planet was so short-sighted that they had blended these perverse polymers into their clothing. They had carried their food in it, wove it into their furniture, and carpeted their homes in the least abundant resource in the known universe.

There was something refreshingly honest about the Heaps, also. He could see what they had previously disregarded; he could read what the past had considered 'worthless' to them. Though the smell and stigma deterred a good many, there was a wealth of knowledge to be gained by opening plastic bag after plastic bag of refuse. The fact that they had once sent everything they considered worthless to the Heaps in the same plastic bags spoke volumes about how little they had thought about their universe. The bags were like precious gold-plated caskets they sent their garbage to be buried in.

In the deepest reaches of those heaps, there weren't biopolymers, no soy-based plastics. In the places most far removed from the surface, the most stable of the plastics usually lay. Little frames of handheld mirrors, meant to mimic bone, pressed into shapes that were too perfect to be carved. Creepy looking dolls with unseeing, glass eyes...

There had been more before they began burning it, releasing toxic clouds that stained the sky rusty.

They hadn't known. The millennial man clearly hadn't realized what they were doing when they sent this to the heaps. They didn't know that one day, their children's children would be climbing through those piles. Sifting through their garbage for the nutritional sludge, meltable metals, and most precious: the plastic caskets that held it all in bundles.

The Heaps were comforting in their honest testament to ignorance. The past never meant to make him a sluice.

The entities represented in this story are fictitious. Any resemblance to any other entities, living, dead, or undead, is entirely coincidental. All opinions contained are an expression of the characters and should not be confused with the opinions of the author.