Like many young singers Narise had been forced into the profession of lounge singer, the tip's where good and at least she had a classy venue in the
Red Robin Lounge unlike some of the other singer's.
The act before her had just gone off stage, a couple of gymnastic dancers and a stage magician, well she could not pull a rabbit out of a hat or make
handkerchief's appear from behind an audience member's ear but she could sing and she was damn good at it.
Her father had been a poor Texan of Hispanic descent and her mother had been half Anglo-Irish and part Japanese though Narise just thought of her self
as a poor American living in mid twenty first century north America.
The audience looked like a group of shark's swimming around her, calming herself as she always got stage fright, she steadied her nerves and began
with a classic old country song, Country road's which though over seventy years old sparked a new meaning in today's world were the past was always
better.
The audience barely noticed but when she started singing the tables quietened down as people started to listen, the atmosphere was smokey and dark
which made it feel more intimate, in the shadow's away from the bar there was a group of four men sitting at one of the tables they were watching her
like about half the other people in the lounge but there was something about them that just caught her attention, they felt different and somehow not
right, strange even and one she could see clearly had the strangest piercing blue violet eye's, long and tilted upward at the outside and downward
toward his nose bridge, they seemed just too long and his nose was very fine, his skin was very pale as was his long blond hair, then as he removed
his black fedora just for a moment she thought his ear's were pointed but his long hair fell back over them and hid them, she carried on singing
feeling a little disconcerted but they were a good distance away and when you worked in a bar you saw thing's sometime's.
That night as she lay on her bed taking a sip of bottled water from a glass she thought about him again, his hair had been almost translucent
yellowish white, immaculately dressed in a tailored black silk business suit as had the other three but then she rationalized to herself that it was
probably just a party using the Red Robin for an informal business meeting and most likely out of town visitors having a relaxing night, no one really
believed those story's about aliens running the world but she could have sworn there was something very odd about him, even alien, still though it was
still in parts run down Detroit had in the last twenty years since the end of the great recession of the teen's and twenty's become the new north
american investment capital, real estate was cheap, a ready developed if outdated and an aging infrastructure was already present and workers whom had
left the city in a great exodus thirty years before were now being replaced by cheap labor from the south and mexico since the corporations had
declared the economy was recovering after the pan north american unification had taken place back in the late 20's.
Outside she could hear the moncop's siren's whining as the Monstanto corporation owned army/police and drone air force whom had taken over almost 60
percent of policing and all military in the states after moving in for the largest corporate takeover in history when the state department had
declared the nation bankrupt back in the late teen's, went about it's Crime fighting and population suppression business, without a pass a shoot to
kill policy was present after 20:00 pm until 05:00 am, the arm implanted pass' were electronic and could be read at a distance with bio-metric sensors
providing confirmation it was genuine, there had been an underground resistance but they only lasted about an hour when they tried an uprising, no one
went there now, near the city council buildings, except the rich and everyone remembered the massacre's which had taken place there but there was no
such thing as a free speech anymore.
Narise Claudia Isabella Jones-Domingo lay there thinking of her home, how her father had sold his own blood and even an eye and a kidney just to pay
for food for his kid's back then, she thought about how he had died in poverty after being broken by the lack of work as tuberculosis had ravaged his
malnourished body before the economy supposedly recovered, yeah recovered but not for the enslaved population and only for the top 0.1 percent and
that was a generous estimate) and all while the richest had only gotten richer, there corporations foreclosing on entire state asset's at the height
of the bankruptcy, if you wanted to receive any respect from the moncops you had to have a corporate issued card stating you where a shareholder and
you only got one if you owned more in shares than any worker could ever earn on there low salaries in ten life time's, people now carried a new type
of green card, one which allowed them to buy food and if you did not work for more than a year it was cancelled so that not only could you not buy
food but it was illegal to sell you any, these people were forced to register with the moncops and were taken off to rehabilitation (or as they were
openly known disposal) camps from which non ever came back, of course the politicians had done nothing as after all they where all on the boards of
one corporation or another or else being payed by those same corporation whom had engineered the downfall of the western economy's in order to
purchase at rock bottom prices the national assets, You did not talk about it though and those whom did often disappeared or else reappeared
brainwashed and praising the corporations, the corporate protection law's which had been made in the supposed national interest by congress in the
early twenty's had given the corporations the power to imprison without trial anyone seen as threatening the corporate economy by preaching anti
corporate propaganda.
Narise lay her head into her pillow and slept the tears still running out of her eye's, her mother whom was fifty had been taken away to one of the
camps two day's ago and she had only received the mail from her neighbor today,.
Outside her small 8 foot by four foot box room apartment (she was lucky and had an outside apartment with an actual window and this was spacious for a
worker) the police military drones scanned the building's and the alleys for criminal subversive elements? and curfew breakers while the workers, the
drone's whom were enslaved with no rights by the corporations slept in there curfew enforced suburb apartment block's but across town behind forty
foot tall steel armored walls the wealthy lived in a different world like something out of the past with well tended gardens and broad avenues along
which there limousines cruised and town mansions in there city within a city.
Another reason Detroit had been so successful was that along with the mafia like buy up of the real estate in at the start of the century the
radiation from the fallout had not been so bad with plenty of rain to wash most of it into the gutters and drains and the fact that the almost
derelict and then bankrupt city had not been the target Washington and New York had when it happened on the 4th of july 2032, a surprise attack by
eastern coalition forces and a mass paratrooper invasion from submarine carrier launched choppers of strategic locations up and down the east coast,
this had led to the expected retaliatory annihilation of several eastern country's with the launch of the majority of north Americas remaining nuclear
weapon's and nearly led the world to the brink of a total third world war, but then so many had lost there lives most historian's and scholars
regarded the war as a world war anyway, strangely though the corporations had escaped unscathed almost as if they had known it was coming and the
chiefs of staff along with the president had all been at camp David at a secret meeting, indeed back then when they had existed some of the honest
reporters had disappeared or been murdered after disclosing the invading forces had been a corporation military also owned by a Corporation linked to
the Monstanto group and based in the Russian federation, the ancient Russian dead hand system had thankfully failed due to the anti missile systems
which had been placed around the eastern coalition but western Europe had suffered a 95 percent depopulation through NBC combined agent's and was even
today declared a no go zone, especially Germany which the Russian system had targeted excessively.
The corporations now managed the asset's of the destroyed nations having purchased them from the New World Overbank (formed in the twenty's from a
merger of the world bank and the IMF) with there Cino North American treaty drone fleet patrolled the ocean's of the world, only China had gotten off
more or less unscathed and in a position of power with a full arsenal and no other power players left, convenient since most corporation then had
there headquarters in China, it's border guards operated a ruthless shoot to kill policy against the mass attempt by refugees from the devastated
country's to enter illegally but they welcomed the useful and skilled if they past quarantine, though they were sterilized and it had also expanded
it's borders aggressively creating vast buffer zone's with rumors of mass ethnic cleansing,.
India the only other possible player had been knocked out of the game when they where attacked by elements of the eastern coalition in Pakistan and
Afghanistan in an act so barbarous that nearly a billion people had died from the deadly biological weapons they had deployed and now twenty years
later China would most likely one day take over the entire territory now gone back to nature while the remnants of the indian people lived in a buffer
under Chinese control, once it was declared safe to do so of course.
As she slept Narise started to dream, she dreamed of a place far away with clear air and snow on the ground.
She woke up and looked at the clock, 01:44 am in illuminated red digital number's, turning on her side she went back to sleep as the moncop siren's
which had woken her faded into the distance.
edit on 26-3-2014 by LABTECH767 because: (no reason given)