There had once been a time the young man believed he was privileged, if not lucky to live in such a time.  Things had once been good for him.  But no longer; the world was not a nice place to live if you were poor.  It was packed with teeming masses of people.  No one knew how many, for everyone registered with a PIN in the planetary data net, it was estimated a thousand more walked the streets beyond immediate Federal control.
     Jasper had been born in one of the last of the “natural neighborhoods”, back in the days when there were still rooftop gardens, filterable rainfall and a sky the common man could see.  The poor could go to the parks and get a glimpse of how things had been, once upon a time before the great starships, before the colony, before The Tree.
     But The Tree had been cut down long before he was born, and the colony had revolted and escaped Federal control.  The Feds had sent the planet bound malcontents on a wild chase beyond the stars and locked away the last of the Lir.  The parks had been paved while the wealthy had raised their homes to touch the sky and leave the poor folk in the dark far below.
     Jasper was not like the “Everyman” working for the Fed.  “Everyman” spent his hours in toil, looking upward, dreaming of the day he could join the wealthy few above.  But Jasper had already been there, and he knew what “Everyman” did not.  The uppers sky was no longer blue, filled with black clouds that washed the cityscape with greasy acidic rain.  The few glimpses one got of the sun came when the violent storms battered the high spires piercing the gloom, ripping the black clouds to shreds that reformed as soon as the turbulent eye would pass.
     And those above with wealth and power lived in the very towers he had helped raise, looking out over the unfortunates below through windows permanently tinted with rainbow smudge.  It had been two decades since the surface of the world had been graced anywhere with the light of the sun.
     He found it hard to believe sometimes how much the world had changed.  When he was little he had watched the spotlights cut the sky.  There had been no stars even then, but on some nights the amber glow of the triple moons had graced the streets he once called home.  That was now a time as forgotten by the people as The Tree.  How he had hated those streets, living amid the poor and homeless, looking for an escape into the dreamed life of the booming city just like everyone else.
     He had been so proud the day the military had accepted his enlistment, and he had bid farewell to those streets with a shot of liquor and a fervent wish never to return.  He had only been working his way up to freedom.  He hadn’t meant anything personal when he helped to blot out the skies from those below.  The evictions and the displacements, the destruction of places over crowded and stagnant… he’d only been doing his job.
     It was the same thing he’d heard from the officers, the doctors, the enforcer escorts and tram conductors that had shipped him back to the dark below.  “Only doing my job; nothing personal,” they’d told him on each step of the journey to send him back to where he came from.  And even as he arrived he knew there would be nothing left to greet him.
     They’d dropped him off at Westlam Stair, 24th, as the closest place to his “point of origin”, and immediately scrambled out of there.  He couldn’t blame them; he didn’t want to stay there either.  The rutted pockmarked streets of his childhood were gone, smoothed over with a layer of plascrete tarmac and buried by stacked layers of development, each raising the Federals higher and away from the people upon whose backs they had climbed to power.
     The now burned out streetlamps were no substitute for the once cloud cast natural light. But that was all right; there wasn’t anything worth shining a light on anyway.  Westlam had never had much business, and the slums had only grown worse as the credits moved farther away.
     It was good in one way that he’d never really made it in the service.  He knew the Feds wouldn’t have shipped more than he got away with.  They would only tell him to be thankful that they hadn’t taken his wire back.  But if he had arrived on that stair with a crate of goods and a wallet full of cred he would have been cleaned out by the locals in a matter of minutes.
     As it was he left them his kit bag.  It hurt his back to carry the damn thing anyway.  Credits would have been gone as soon as he’d flashed them, so it was as good not to have any to flash.  And the card… the card that had proven to be so damning later… was the one thing of worth he could carry, because the locals didn’t know what it was.
     No, Jasper was no longer so naïve.  Living in this world had been a curse for a very long time.  Sometimes he wondered if the people had really understood what they were doing when they had placed the Technists in power so very long ago.