TheAnoraknophobe

He yawned, he stretched, he realized he had overslept.

Martin-Stuart Q. Obviousstandin, a reasonably acceptable human being, rose from bed, put on his comfy bathrobe and opened the curtains. He always liked to start his morning with a look out over the rest of the city.

He blinked, and blinked again. Slowly, it registered on him that he was not seeing what he had expected to see.

The familiar, cramped environs of his hometown had been replaced with sleek, somewhat alienating spires, the sort of thing you'd see in a cyberpunk comic. Holographic traffic lights chimed as they sluggishly directed flows of traffic on the ground and in the air. In the air? Yep, those were drones and what appeared to be stylized flying trucks.

Huh. What in the WORLD had happened?

The answer came to him as he made his morning cup of coffee. Yes, that's right, he'd heard mention that this would happen. Come to think of it, they'd mentioned it weeks ago. It had been all over the news, as had been the loud protests against the change.

Boy, people had gotten REALLY het up about it. They'd talked in apocalyptic terms, described it as treason, threatened to move to one of the other cities on the other side of the country.

Martin-Stuart (or Marty-Stu, as his friends called him) didn't like to dismiss people's concerns out of hand, but he'd found it hard to take much of the panic seriously. Sure, the city management was never as responsive to public issues as would have been ideal, and it was true that enforcement of public safety statutes felt downright uneven at time.

But as far as he could tell, a great many of the city's inhabitants did so without paying anything in the way of municipal taxes, and their main contribution was doodling on their apartment walls, building disturbing shrines to obsolete cartoon characters, and talking at length about themselves. The city's revenue, the revenue that subsidized everything else, was pretty obviously generated mainly by a prolific and talented minority of professionals.

He chewed thoughtfully on a mouthful of discount cereal. Now, that didn't mean that the professionals were inherently better people, or that the opinion of everyone else didn't matter - heck, Marty-Stu himself was definitely closer to the wall-scribblers than the skyscraper builders - but the narrative being advanced, that a silent majority of hard-working heroes were being exploited by irredeemably evil parasites who were now throwing them to the wind...well, it lacked credibility somewhat.

He had seen cities ruined by short-sighted mismanagement before. Selling out, abandoning constituents, beautiful systems brought to a shambolic mess. Was that what was happening now?

Well, there was only one way to be sure. He finished his breakfast, did the dishes, and got ready for a walk. He would see for himself.

His initial impression was that the agitators had a point.

Sure, the cosy old streets had bloated far beyond their original intent, desperately needed maintenance, and smelt faintly of cheese. But he'd gotten used to them, he knew them like the back of his hand. They were HIS streets.

These new ones, so sterile and arbitrary, didn't feel like an obvious improvement. And even the automated guide stations at every street corner would glitch out, crash or suddenly start swearing at him in Swahili half the time. If they were working properly, it would be much more convincing a change...but they didn't, and that tarnished the possibility of it all.

And then Marty-Stu came to one of the major skyscrapers.

The crowds outside were surly, unruly, but they weren't that much more disjointed than they had been anyway.

What was it one of the professionals had said? That they relied on their customers and supporters to make a living, and the city's changes would kneecap that base. Ruined was the word used, as Marty-Stu recalled.

He tried not to be bitter, but he had reflected even at the time that it was a non-issue for him. After all, HE didn't have to worry about managing a fanbase, or about being 'vulnerable' by virtue of his visibility. And he never would, because he didn't paint the statuesque and scantily-clad women who were plastered on most of the skyscrapers and on whom the city's exports were dependent. Nah, at best, he could aspire to writing the little blurbs at the base that nobody paid attention to. God, how proud his Mother pretended to be when they talked.

He sat and watched. The crowds moved in and out of the skyscraper-cum-shopping-complex. The flying trucks moved product in and out of the building likewise. It was sluggish, inefficient, but it was still happening.

It didn't seem to Marty-Stu that anyone would go hungry because of the change - or at least, not JUST because of this particular change.

He swung by his usual haunts; the cafe, the artisanal bakery, the stationery store. The routes had changed, but he was beginning to get the measure of them now. Heck, it might not be long before this became the new normal.

Marty-Stu understood why people were unhappy. The management could definitely pull itself together, and it was no surprise that people were ready to expect the worst. Even the professionals, who it would be easy for a little guy like him to sneer at, did actually rely on their familiar paradigm to feed themselves, so their concern was fair too.

But life, this city? It would go on. It would go on.

He chewed on a pretzel, and made a face. Ugh, he'd gotten a bum one. He'd have a word, a respectful and measured word, with the baker next time he was over. It was important to be proactive, but it was on him to not be a jerk about it either.