People think it's bad on Gladian 4. They think it is bad on the surface in those sprawling crowded dust bowls they call cities. The soil is crap for farming and what little light gets through the atmo is barely enough to keep the plants alive. People say on Gladian 4 its so bad they use bullets for credit, and that's true enough, but that's not bad. The Cut is bad. Down in the Cut they don't have bullets. Down in the Cut they use people for credit, and parts of people too.
In my understanding G4 has always been a penal colony, hundreds of cycles of dumping crooks and crazies and people not wanted in the garden of New Eden. Who ever first found this place coming in from those beautiful green worlds must have wanted to eat their blaster. What a shit hole system - BLAMMO. The boss men must have figured they had found the shittiest system ever spun because they didn't even try building nothing, they just started dumping. And at first it was just crooks that were dumped, and maybe some unlucky bastards who didn't know when to keep their traps shut. Later it was experiments. That’s when the Eloi got dumped, and some other things too. Life was hard back then but it wasn't the hell that came after. Maybe it wasn't even that bad really. Eloi are pretty tough - not strong or anything but really tough. We can eat most anything, we don’t get sick, we can take a lot of rads. And we’re quick - quicker than most food anyway. Sure there were some other types that were pretty messed up, but mostly folks were folks - even those giant ropey fuckers were folks sort of. Ya I think back then it was tough but it was probably OK. Once the Garden Wars started up though, then it got pretty bad. Once the wars started rolling even shitty little G4 must have started looking pretty good, and that's when they started coming. And they just never stopped coming.
They had changed too, all those new bloods, they weren't like people so much anymore, more like parts of people - more like termites all working together in those giant crazy mounds. Just like those termites they started digging too, that’s when they started the cuts, all those holes and tunnels that became The Cut. Whatever piss poor rocks and oil they could find below they started digging it up - and it was buried pretty damn deep. I guess poor G never had much for the heavy mins, and the places where there had been enough water or plants together to make oil and coal were pretty spread out, pretty deep. Still there was some there, and they wanted it. They treated people like bugs too. They made everyone work and work and if you couldn't work you got dumped. Sometimes you got ate.
The more they came, the deeper they dug, and the more the folks kind of melted down into the tunnels and cracks to get away from them. And the more they crowded their way in after us. We're in there pretty deep now, I don’t think I even saw the sun till I was like eight or nine cycles. I don’t remember being too impressed with it either. Some people say the Garden Wars ended a few hundred cycles ago, but if it did no one told anyone out here on G4. Maybe things are a little better up top, there might be some fancy folks up there in the cities now buying and selling and washing their toes. Nothing’s really changed down below though. It’s always been bad down in The Cut and it gets worse all the time.
Next: A Good Time
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