Can you imagine a world where there are more, empty, livable, homes and apartments than there are homeless individuals, and yet the wealthy allow those homes and apartments to fall into disrepair and ruin rather than allow the homeless live there and maintain it? Can you imagine a time, a place, a world... where people build small homes for the homeless, a 'tiny home' with a bed, a roof, basic toilet facilities, and tiny kitchen, just enough to be comfortable and survive without being out in the elements, and those safe shelters being confiscated by the governments, torn down, burned down, and the homeless individuals being homeless once more? And yet, those same governments wanting to claim "We are trying to help the homeless but they don't want help. They want to have and refuse our aid." And then criminalize the very act of being able to sit for a few moments to sleep so they can throw these people into prison? A world where a massive number of the workforce are working long, exhausting, hours, yet cannot afford so much as a tiny apartment in the worst area of town and are forced to sleep in run-down shelters, in tents, or in their vehicles?
This happened in the world of humans in the past. This was a common, cruel, thing in the world of the Dereggers. A helpless workforce of homeless. And yet.. what happens to that Deregger world, when the homeless start disappearing off the streets and from their world altogether? -- Anon Guest
[AN: Honestly, Habitat For Humanity could probably prove a point by buying/fixing up abandoned and foreclosed homes in the USA and then giving them to people with no-interest loans]
Welcome to Greater Deregulation Lower South West. We do the things that were illegal by the end of the twenty-first century, but we will never admit to that. The graffiti only ever stays up on the Galactic's side of the one customs and trade station, and there's continuing debate about making it an official sign.
The Galactic Alliance agrees that every citizen had the right to health, shelter, and reliable means to support themselves. Greater Deregulations refused to join the Alliance because giving their citizens any rights were against their moral superiority. The dissonance in that statement fails to land on Greater Deregulations owing to the fact that education for the common populace was also against their "moral superiority".
Which lead to problems that the Dereggers refused to consider on their planets. Especially within Greater Deregulation Lower South West. Where there is money in building homes, but none in keeping them occupied. Houses sprang up like a rash, but people didn't live in them. They couldn't afford to. There was more to be made in criminalising the poverty they manufactured. It was a permanent workforce of people desperate enough to do anything for food, water, and shelter. No matter how bad any of those were.
Harrow dodged between security patrols, keeping low to avoid the scopes of the tanks. He knew better than to try and squat in the idyllic-looking homes. Their security systems would catch him in there until way past the time when the house was too dangerous to try and shelter in. Houses could stand for ten years before they got deadly. The security systems remained deadly for twenty. Clutched tight to his chest were the scraps of food he could glean from the dumpsters of the upper-class zones before the foodstuffs thrown in there could be hosed down with noxious chemicals.
Through the suburban paradise halfway done with their estate of decay. Down to the underside of an underpass that was hidden with hostile architecture masquerading as art, down into the tunnel that lead to a sewer line to nowhere that was a forgotten work-for-food initiative that had since become a shantytown of cardboard and stolen building materials.
His family were smiling. Not just for him, but a stranger in their midst. The underbelly was full of strangers. This one was one of the generous ones. One of the peripetatic miracle workers who just... helped... for no reason and often for little more pay that a shared meal, shelter for the night, and the agreed silence of all those they assisted in their travels.
They were always clean, because one of the things they gave out was Nannycloth. A small square of something that, when moist, took the filth off of anything it touched and turned into cubes or ball-bearings of stuff. Carbon. Salt. Cellulose. Iron. Things that could be traded at the Scrappers who certainly knew what they were and turned a blind eye to where they came from.
The CEOs had made owning a Nannycloth illegal, but, like many bans on things that made Underbelly life easier, it was ignored. They were seized by any security raids, and paraded on the newsfeeds, but the wandering miracle workers just turned up with more of them. This time, the miracle was a small device that, if left in the sunshine or the wind, could print as many as eight food bricks at a time. In combination with the illegal saviour straws, that would mean food security for as many people as possible. The device would use the carbon, cellulose, and even the adulterated reject food from the dumpsters... all to create food for a day.
It didn't matter that they were technically eating filth. They did that anyway. This time, the miracle worker had an offering. "What if I said there's a place where you can go where you don't have to worry about the next raid? Somewhere that didn't even have security tanks."
There was a catch. There had to be a catch. That was the way of things in the world around them. Nevertheless, the miracle workers were kinder than anyone else around them, so Harrow made a decision. He took a chance. Like any chance anyone could take on that world.
Harrow gathered his family and what supplies they could glean, and journeyed with the miracle worker.
Underneath the ivory towers of the CEOs. Through the streets of the prison-industrial labyrinth. Into a different field of fallow residences, and then into a decaying mall where a small vessel sat. It was not an interstellar vessel, but a drop-shuttle. Just enough power to escape the gravity well and meet up with something in low orbit.
Gathered in the skeleton kiosks and emporium bones were other families, all taking the same chance as Harrow's. Faced with this or the threats of continuing how things were always been, they had all decided to face this. They could be sold for meat, for all they knew, but it was better than the terror of every day on Greater Deregulation Lower South West.
Someone with the look of a miracle worker smiled for Harrow and his family and cheered. "Quorum at last. Excellent. I put the stash in the old shoe store, Ben. You're still good out here?"
"Sure am," said Ben the miraculous. Ben helped the other families into their seats and, in the case of the babies, safety pods. They and the other miracle workers there made sure the harnesses were snug and that everyone was safe. It was crowded and frightening, but they had all made a choice. Even if they were fooled, it was still better than the threat of debt, death, and prison.
They joined in prayer as the vessel launched, praying in the name of the Sacred Profit Line and begging for the blessings of the CEO On High, that they might find value in the machinery of commerce.
They sang together, one last hymn, or so they thought.
The drop shuttle met with a vessel in low orbit, flying straight into a hold that sealed them in and fed clean air into the area. There, the miracle workers unlatched the harnesses and hustled the desperate into... heaven. It had to be heaven. The air was sweet, the floors were clean. There was abundant water that didn't even smell. There were doctors who saw to even the littlest of worries and would not accept trade.
Where there were green plants and good clothes that would last longer than a season and educators and individual beds for everyone. Even cribs for each baby. The food had flavours and there was no-one threatening to take anything away. It had to be heaven, and the miracle workers were angels.
By the time they arrived at Redemption Station, the care workers who had come to take them to a better place had gently removed that assumption from all their thinking. Harrow never looked back. Never even thought of his homeland again. Many of his co-expatriots were the same. Things were so much better on the Galactic Side of the trade embargo.
Greater Deregulation didn't know it had a problem. Raid after raid on the Underbelly shanty-towns turned up fewer leaches on the glory of their fair land. Some turned up empty hovels and wreckage, with no hint of what had happened. Good riddance, they thought. Finally, the moral victory had been won.
There was great celebration on the media. A new era of utopian profits was bound to occur.
It didn't.
The prison-industrial complexes collapsed. There were no prisoner-slaves to exploit to death in the factories. Factories shut down for lack of workers. Those running them refused to work in the unsafe conditions that only the morally bankrupt deserved.
It would cost too much to make new factories that were safe...
The middle class, such as it was, found their homes getting filthy, and fought against their children going into the dwindling school-factories. Fought against being criminalised to feed the machinery of commerce. Fought against the harsher taxes that drove them towards the horrors of poverty.
Then they, too, started to vanish.
The CEOs learned the lesson far, far too late. There was nobody to work the farms. Nobody to make the merchandise. Nobody to clean the homes. Nobody to buy what merchandise there was. Nobody to sell to.
They starved in the lap of luxury. Their golden homes filling with garbage as they scrounged what they could in order to live another day.
Too late, they understood where the real moral failure was.
Too late to turn things around.
[Image (c) Can Stock Photo / 18percentgrey]
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