Claudia Casper - The Mercy Journals

I couldn’t help grinning ear to ear.

No way. Really?

Just pulling one of your three legs, you over-privileged bastard, I said.

Always with the gimp card.

At least he’s got a card to play, Velma said.

Well, Sunshine, Larry clapped his hands, we men have got work to do.

Nail ‘em to the wall, boys.

Don’t you love it when she calls us boys? I opened the door.

Our shift starts early so we can catch overnighters and charge them double. It’s like hunting, but it’s only mice we’re after. My job is to walk past every vehicle parked within my territory once an hour and scan the licence plates. The scanner relays data to city hall, which tracks each plate hourly and bills the user. These days the hourly fee for parking is equal to the average person’s hourly wage. If a citizen fails to pay parking fees, the vehicle is ticketed and impounded, and their driving privileges are revoked for a month. After four infractions, the penalty is loss of driving privileges for three years.

My job also includes ensuring the vehicles parked in my territory adhere to the latest regulations. When OneWorld came into being, most vehicles were Phevs, Bevs, or hybrids that used various combinations of hydrogen, solar, and electric batteries or fuel cells, with some gasoline or bio-diesel fuel, although some drivers still had luxury models with powerful engines run solely on fossil fuels. These models were banned immediately, but people got fuel on the black market and continued to drive them, either to circumvent charges to their ration cards or to avoid the limits to the speed or distance they could drive. A big part of parking enforcement in those days involved tagging and impounding these vehicles and disenfranchising the transgressors. That particular excitement has diminished over the years since most of the illegal vehicles have been impounded and OneWorld is transitioning to government-owned Shuvs. We still catch the occasional transgressor, though, someone who has installed an illegal engine in an approved body or attached a counterfeit licence plate to an illegal model.

I like to keep my territory clean and orderly. I enjoy catching cheaters. I think of them as people who would steal food from a baby, people who would take my last breath of air without blinking.

Between eight and nine a.m., the streets are full of people going to work, running errands, taking their kids to school. No one is in a hurry, and the city unfolds the way I imagine a medieval town would have — people greeting each other, picking up food, flirting, yawning, waking up as they go — colours faded, buildings ramshackle. Vehicle traffic is less with each passing year. Fewer people, more bicycles. The Canton laid off twenty percent of us in the last two years. I’m lucky to still have my job.

I was making a final round before lunch when an unusual matte sheen on a vehicle caught my eye. I took my key out, got down on my good knee, stuck my prosthesis out to the side, and scratched the solar paint under the bumper. Sure enough, old paint showed through — robin’s egg blue. I went and rubbed the tailpipe with my thumb. The soot smelled acrid and metallic. I popped the hood. I don’t know how the guy that drove this thing got here without being swarmed because that engine would have sounded louder than any other vehicle around today. I quickly closed the hood and examined the edges of the licence plate. Counterfeit.

I went to the stash box at the end of the block, unlocked it, got out a boot, came back, and clamped it on. Scanned the plate. The parking was paid. I sent in a tow request and moved down the street. I was about four or five cars down the road when I heard the boot being shaken and someone yell, What the fuck!

I scanned the next plate without turning around.

Hey! You! Did you put the boot on me?

I didn’t respond.

You. Asshole. Did you boot me? Am I a ghost? Did I fucking up and die and no one told me? This piece of shit life.

The voice was getting closer.

It struck me as familiar in a déjà vu kind of way. I turned and faced him. In these kinds of situations, the Krav Maga comes in handy. When I turned, he stopped. The guy was covered in hair — beard down to his armpits, greying hair down to his elbows. He had a dirty face, blue eyes burning at me. His clothes were dark and dusty, maybe black, maybe charcoal grey, maybe brown, but his shoes were polished and expensive. He must’ve kept some good pairs from the old days, and he’d recently oiled the leather.

You’re driving an illegal model, sir. And you might want to keep your voice down. The public doesn’t take kindly to these types of infractions.

Though the crises seem to be on the wane, people are still volatile. No doubt everything will be different in the future and, in any case, I don’t want to paint a picture of humanity gone to the dark side — it wasn’t like those old Hollywood movies about the future where everyone starts turning into killers and eating each other — mostly people help each other, pool their efforts, try to survive together, but there have been incidents where mobs suddenly coalesce and kill someone who they think is breaking the new environmental laws.

I don’t agree with it. Obviously I believe that civil society is our only hope, yet I understand what drives the rage. People still remember when individual citizens were allowed to consume as much as they wanted as long as they could pay. People still remember the impotence of knowing that the environment we all depended on for survival was being destroyed by people wanting more — more money, more security, more control, more stuff — and we remember our own anxiety as we ourselves did things that contributed to our destruction. We remember when we realized that we relied for survival on a system that was killing us. It’s not like our fates aren’t all bound together. And everyone lost someone close in the die-off. So now, when someone breaks the new laws, people aren’t always reasonable.

The bearded guy took a long bead on me.

What is this life to me? he said. Surviving to survive? I don’t give a flying fuck about what the public thinks, now do I?

Larry pulled up, which meant that certain things were out of my hands. He unrolled his window and pointed his thumb at the infractor.

Is he giving you a hard time?

Reclaimers like Larry are armed. A couple of passersby stopped and watched the three of us.

I looked at the infractor, and he looked right back at me. Was he just an aggressive prick or was there something else? People were starting to gather to see what the commotion was. I thought he understood that his life was in my hands. He didn’t flinch, yet neither did he take the next step.

We were just discussing, Larry, what we’d like to do to people who cheat the system. We’re incensed. We’re just incensed.

Yeah, well, how do you think we got here in the first place? A lot of assholes in our species, let’s face it, Larry said as he leaned out of the driver’s side window. Comes with the territory, he said. Natural selection never got rid of ’em, so we have to. He pulled ahead and backed the truck up at an angle to the booted vehicle.

Everybody references evolution these days. I guess coming face to face with extinction does that. If the last half a century showed us anything, it’s that human behaviour is not as malleable as we might have thought. It’s like our species is on a boat so enormous that no matter how hard we turn the wheel, it takes centuries to register a change in direction, and meanwhile everything around the ship changes a million times over.

Larry got out and took the boot off, lay down on the road, and looked under the vehicle. More people gathered.

Larry, my friend, I said by way of a hint that we might be finding ourselves in a situation, I want to get back to the office for lunch.