Life on the Other Side
Isabella Niedzwiecki
It was at this moment, knees aching and mere seconds away from tearing her washcloth in two, that Avery remembered how profit somehow always comes with a price.
No, scratch that. She learned that lesson the instant she accepted this job five years ago and was irritatingly re-taught that mantra every day since. Her arms started to shake with how hard she scrubbed the wet rag against the ever-persistent scuff marks littering the white-tiled floors. If the boss was really so insistent on keeping the floor ‘sparkling clean,’ you’d think he’d just ban people from wearing shoes entirely and save us all a step.
Avery sighed out her frustration and sat up as she chucked the washcloth in the general direction of the mop trolley. She didn’t even have to look to know that it landed in the murky water–the resulting splash on her canvas pants was all the confirmation she needed.
Just breathe, Avery whispered to herself shakily. It’s not a glamorous job, but what other option do we have?
Like many other members on the sanitation team, Avery had debts to settle. Debts that aren’t even mine to begin with, her conscious grumbled, but that was simply an added perk of the ‘paradise’ promised by the Arceus.
The official name of the ship that now carried 75% of Earth’s population away from a dying planet and into the depths of space was actually “Noah’s Arceus.” Awfully cheesy and a tad too biblical for Avery’s taste, but it had nevertheless been her home for all twenty-one years of her life. Just before she was born, or so her parents have said, the people of Earth collectively decided that their planet was no longer habitable and set out to make for a better life in what the government deemed a “hospitable” new section of space.
What they failed to mention was exactly how long it would take to make that space hospitable. Rome certainly wasn’t built in a day, and in the 25 years since takeoff, the new Earth colony was still, for lack of a better term, ‘in the works.’
Lucky for us, the Arceus was designed with long-term lifestyle in mind. Aside from being the size of a large country, the ship boasted all the amenities and creature comforts of home–from classrooms to casinos to widespread internet connection, we had it all.
As a gaggle of loud teenage girls approached Avery’s corner of the dining commons, though, she was reminded of one thing that seemingly got left behind–manners. Assuming they ever existed in the first place, Avery scoffed.
The frontrunner of the group, holding her trash as far as possible from her designer suit jacket, twisted her mouth in disgust as she noticed the cans were not just full, but overflowing.
She turned to her friends with a sour note to her voice. “God, you’d think they’d hire someone to actually clean up this shit.”
Avery gazed over as the girl proceeded to throw her trash on the top and watched as a layer of coffee cups scattered to the floor. Like a moth to a flame, the other girls tossed their trash at the pile and burst into a fit of giggles.
The trash was last on the to-do list of Avery’s closing shift, but she kept her mouth shut. Any hopes of avoiding confrontation soon disappeared as suit-jacket girl caught Avery’s eye across the room.
Her face distorted into a smarmy grin as she shouted, “Hey, janitor lady!”
Avery braced herself for the worst. While she never expected anyone to actually call her “sanitation expert,” as the back of her uniform implied, she’d certainly faced worse than “janitor lady.”
Suit-jacket girl turned around abruptly, letting her purse knock over a broom propped against one of the cans. With a flick of her glossy hair over her shoulder, she turned her head back to let out the zinger.
“You missed a spot.”
The other girls stifled their cackles as they moved in a flock out of the dining commons.
Real creative, Avery mumbled as she stood up from the table she was unsuccessfully hiding behind. She would give up an entire day’s wages just to see those type of girls try manual labor.
Those type of girls? Avery caught herself thinking. If I get any more jaded, I’m going to turn into one of them.
In general, the people of the Arceus could be split into two categories: the corporates, and the rest of us. Back on Earth, most of the population was naturally a bit hesitant to get on a big shiny spaceship and say goodbye to their home planet forever. In order to incentivize people to join the Arceus, the government aligned themselves with Earth’s largest corporations to promise its citizens lucrative jobs in exchange for trusting that they wouldn’t get themselves killed in the soul-sucking void of space.
And for a brief shining moment, it worked. National currencies were dissolved into a single system of “units” and prices were set fairly to match proposed incomes. The first five years on the Arceus was the paradise that everyone had been dreaming of, and those years happened to be Avery’s childhood.
In fact, it was many people’s childhoods. We grew comfortable in the promise of a new life and babies were booming at a startling rate. For the first time since leaving Earth, people were starting to believe that this could actually work.
But then, people grew up. And people got nervous.
I swear, the lines here seem to get longer every day.
Did you hear? They say if the population keeps going up, we’re gonna run out of food before the colony is ready.
They just raised their prices in the clothing sector! I bet they don’t have enough people to make them anymore…
Nerves quickly became fear. And fear started to push people to need more. At first, the government thought they could slap a band-aid over it in the form of credit. When you couldn’t afford what you needed and couldn’t take longer hours of work, you could assume debt to be paid off within a year of purchase.
But credit soon became an empty promise. Dissent started among the people of the Arceus to raise wages, to fairly match prices like how things were done in our rose-colored beginnings. First fingers were pointed, and then protest signs. A cry for help arose from citizens, a cry for those in power to actually step up and fix the situation at its source. But the real mistake was assuming the government officials were the ones in power.
Avery would know, as she cleaned the offices of the real bigwigs. The corporate elite.
It was one evening in her first year of work that she learned how executives were often quite loose-lipped around someone as lowly as a night-shift janitor. Cleaning the windows of some random CFO’s office, Avery could hear whispers drifting from an empty boardroom around the corner of the hall.
Or so she soon realized, a not-quite empty boardroom.
“Can you believe Senator Richards? Man must be dreaming if he expects us to bump wages by 20%.”
Avery could hear the sharp click of a lighter and a soft chuckle.
“Why don’t you remind Richards who signs his paycheck? Or better yet, who signed off on building this god-forsaken boat.” The raspier voice paused, and then let out a deep sigh. “Tell them we’ll raise it by 3% and if he gives you shit, we go no higher than 5%. That oughta be enough to buy his niece a wedding present, don’t you think?”
Hearing the rustle of chairs moving, Avery scattered back down the hall to her cart. She risked a glimpse of the two men as they rounded the corner, exchanging equally smug grins between puffs of a cigar. As the taller man passed by, he slowed at Avery’s small frame hunched before the office window.
They would be fools not to think I heard them, an anxious voice whispered in her head. They can’t do anything to me…could they?
Stooping down to meet her at eye level, the man dug into his pocket and procured a crisp blue bill for 100 units. Stuffing it into Avery’s pocket, the man stood back up and graveled in a low voice, “Here’s for your troubles, doll.”
Avery ignored the shake threatening to roll through her body as she looked up and met his gaze.
“I’m feeling generous…” he drawled, “tonight”. Faced with a dark glare that promised repercussions, Avery nodded her head sharply and looked back down at the floor. It was when she could no longer hear the scuffing of their dress shoes that she finally sat up and let the fear set in.
Ever since that night, Avery felt dirty for keeping the money. It was her sign of compliance in the face of corruption, but there was no denying that she needed that crisp blue bill. While Avery was quite thrifty herself, her family had accrued an almost massive hill of debt from “essential” medical procedures. In other words, copious amounts of plastic surgery.
And so, there Avery sat in the midst of her ratty microfiber cloths, push brooms, and water buckets. Truly a sanitation expert, she joked to prevent the fall of the tears starting to form in her eyes. Giving herself a thorough shake and surveying the floor around her, she deemed her job done for the night and made for the infernal trash pile. Cursing each coffee cup that evaded her grasp, Avery slung the trash bags onto her cart with a hefty swing.
As always, her shift ended with delivery of the trash to the furnace room. Coming up to the large metal doors marked ‘INCENDIARY DISPOSAL,’ she noticed a smaller red sign hanging from the handles.
Furnace at full capacity for tonight. Follow secondary protocol.
-Boss
Avery groaned in frustration and promptly turned her cart around to head to the export depo. This was by no means a novel occurrence in her shift–in fact, it was becoming startlingly common for the furnace to be closed this late at night. In accordance with protocol, Avery’s job was to now bring the trash to a secondary means of disposal that she liked to call, “out of sight, out of mind.” It was the much less talked about practice of dumping the trash into an empty cargo bay and letting the vacuum of space do the rest.
Was it a particularly ethical means of disposal? Certainly not. But the risk of mass infection due to excessive waste was a very real possibility, and so Avery once again chalked it up to being part of the job.
At the entrance to the export depo, Avery noticed that the usual security guard, Hank, was not alone this time. Two men in crisp blue suits, their eyes covered by dark glasses, were questioning him and scribbling down intermittent notes on a small tablet.
Federal agents, Avery realized with a start. Noticing her head peeking from behind the cart, Hank waved her forward with a small smile.
“Don’t worry about this one, guys. She’s just a part of sanitation.”
The two agents looked up and exchanged a short glance, faces tight from trying not to divulge too much of the situation.
“You’re all clear then.” One of the agents waved Avery forward. “We’re conducting a minor investigation, but rest assured, there’s no cause for panic or concern.”
Having far surpassed her limit of human interaction for the day, Avery nodded quickly and pushed her cart down one of the many corridors of the export depo. Once out of sight, she heard the agents start up their interrogation again, their deep voices echoing down the hall. A small bud of curiosity rose in Avery’s chest, and try as she might to squash it, she found herself leaving the cart and tracing back a few steps to listen.
“Hank, I know you’ve said you haven’t seen any unauthorized personnel down here, but we have reason to believe there’s been another incident.”
The agent paused, and Avery could imagine the irritation on Hank’s face from the vague nature of his comment.
“A deserter.”
The hall went quiet again.
“We’ve been picking up increased activity from Earth. Entire electrical grids,” the agent whispered. “It seems the shantytowns have found resources of their own.”
Avery knew the rumor. She knew practically every rumor. While the Arceus liked to let everyone believe that abandoning Earth was a mutually arrived upon decision, there was a sizeable amount of the population that had stayed behind. They were the dissenters, those who couldn’t be reasoned with and therefore were of no importance to those who wished to move on.
Avery was taught, along with the other children of the Arceus, that Earth was nothing more than fire-scorched barrens soon to be eaten up by the sea.
But if that was really the case, why were some people choosing to go back? These deserters, who would illegally steal an evac ship and leave the ‘creature comforts’ of the Arceus, do they really have so much faith that there’s still life on Earth?
More importantly, a life on Earth that’s somehow better than a life here?
Would it really be so hard to imagine a life better than here?
Is the life you have here even so great?
Avery’s mind started to grow jumbled with all the possibilities. Leaving the Arceus. Leaving her job, the debt, and the primped suit jacket-wearing litterers.
Seeing the sun as it lights up a blue sky.
Seeing the ocean reach all the way up to the horizon.
With a jolt, Avery stood up and walked back to her cart. What a ridiculous idea, echoed in her mind as she fiddled with the cold, metal handle.
Avery would be leaving everything behind, the only life she’d known. But now there was a small glimpse, a promise, of a better one–if even only by a little bit.
With a turn of her cart, Avery made her way toward the evacuation wing.
Isabella Niedzwiecki, class of 2023, is from Matawan, NJ, with a chemistry major and French minor. She writes, “I normally write for academic or research papers but having always been a massive fan of reading science fiction and fantasy novels, I was excited to explore here my own take on a post-apocalyptic world.”
Isabella wrote this story in a creative writing course taught by Professor Caridad Svich. Svich selected the piece for inclusion in WHR.