The Good, The Bad, And The Stinky

It's said to be good luck for homeowners when a carpenter leaves a tool in your walls after a job. They might hide a fish in the vents if they get screwed over for money. It will take years for the smell to dissipate. Whoever built this house went a little too far. At least that's what I'll tell the police.

They're still looking for my partner. I suspect that she and the contractor left town with my money.

In my mind, I can still see the bodies, skin crumbling, bones exposed. The smell of flesh lingers inside my skull.

From Guest Contributor J. Iner Souster

The Glue

Victor Coolidge often referred to himself as the glue that held the city together (the joke being the reason he was so obese was that a city of one billion people needed a lot of glue). In the end, he was the snag that lead to the city coming apart at the seams.

When he told his media friends that Georgi was the infant predator, they seized on the story. A manhunt began. Top-levels began dying in the vents. The riots spread to the sewers and the ground levels.

Georgi became the eye of the hurricane that finally destroyed Colossopolis.

Part 5

This is the treatment for a sci-fi novella. I think it's definitely worthy of more than the 100-word treatment. Let me know what you think!

The Vents

In Colossopolis, the slums and sewers were home to escaped convicts, perverts, and the debt-afflicted--the least desirable elements of society. Most of the city's population would never see the sewers in their lifetimes.

Such people had never even heard of the vents.

The vents were for the mutants and genkies who had nowhere else to go. There was a division of Justice that specialized in going into the vents to retrieve wanted criminals or especially valuable contraband. They had an 82% success rate of coming back alive.

Georgi was born in the vents and he didn't want to go back.

Part 3

Neon

Georgi was having trouble seeing.

Vacuumers operate in shifts of 16 hours on, 4 hours off for five days in a row, with three days of downtime. During their breaks, most of Georgi's colleagues stayed in the seedier sections of the city, near the exteriors.

For the majority of vacuumers, it was enough to dabble in illegal, though lightly-monitored, activities such as drug use or gene manipulation. Only the most foolhardy went in for neon ingestion. Georgi, however, wasn't worried about harm to his nervous system.

But if he couldn't see, he'd be fired and sent back to the vents.

Part Two