A Nutrient Extractor on Every Corner (2/2)

       And we're back to the Rust City! This was originally going to be a story about something else but it spun into a historical recount of guerilla warfare waged by food cart owners. These things happen!

This is the most concrete history I've crafted for this setting, and I'm trying not to get bogged down in lore any further than this atm. As soon as I put a concrete timescale on this, I'm screwed

        

        Ben huddled under the awning of the foodcart, shoulders pressed against the other patrons trying to keep out of the rain. He ripped the foil wrapping at the corner, the heat from the shamb kebab bathing his face. Processed krill and nutrient enriching paste cooked up in vats the size of apartment blocks. Real meat was reserved for those who could afford it. If you didn’t want it lab grown, you had some interest in it having four legs and a nervous system, you had to be richer than Ben could fathom. And Ben had a pretty active imagination, let me tell you.

He took a bite, the pita slightly waxy, the vegetable substitutes grainy against his teeth, the sauce too watery. The flavor was perfect. If you can’t sell people the genuine article, at least put in the legwork to make the replacement so good they’d never miss the real thing. Meat being such a rare commodity, many corps were convinced that as long as it was legally qualifiable as food (And being the ones holding the pens, the laws tended to be fairly generous in that respect) the throng would eat it up. There had been enough of that anguish around the start of the millennium, and they hedged their bets that people would just be grateful for the presence of food, regardless of quality.

It was economics, not morals, that changed that tune. The flavorless vitamin jellies, or flaccid reams of parchment flavored meat substitute, could be sold at a scale and cost unprecedented. Pulverized plankton and nutrient substrates flew through fabricators like newsprint through an ancient printing press. And people ate, and the corporate profit margins stayed neatly within their expected ranges.

It was the food carts, that perennial armada who swarmed street corners in spite of weather or air quality warnings, that forced the invisible hand. The carts bought the basics for cheap. The corporate imagination (an oxymoron to any who have ever interacted with the empty eyed number men) stretched as far as the walls of the board rooms. People would eat what was given them, and the only thing that corporate magnanimity gave was flavorless and nutrient rich. Flavorless, nutrient rich, and a shelf life long enough to survive another nuclear war.

So the proprietors of the foodcarts bought, and stocked. Corporate anxiety over spoiling stock guaranteed that whatever wasn’t sold one day would still be edible the next. And the corporations sold and sold and sold, seeing nothing but the little green line that kept rising with each passing day. The food carts continued to buy. Warehouses, long abandoned by corporate interest, began to fill with stock. The Yatai Cartel had formed under the megacorps’ noses, and the corps were too focused on profit to realize the tiger that had been growing fat on their scraps.

The Cartel was formed as an alliance of desperation by the poor immigrant masses that the corporations needed to thrive but balked at acknowledging. The food they got from the corps was identical, whether you came from Seoul or Maseru, so it was interchangeable in its base state. Neighborhoods formed co-ops, the stalls and carts saving leftovers for a common trust. The constant motion of human traffic carried word of these cooperatives throughout the city. Neighborhood power blocs merged and unified, until whole swaths of the city were overseen by the Cartel. The racket was simple; take care of eachother. Without a profit incentive, it’s easy to see how the corps overlooked what was happening.

Black market aquaculture operations sprang up throughout the city. Trademarked algae bloomed in basements, far from the labs it had been stolen from. Abandoned apartment buildings became multistory farms, gas masked rusters churning vats of nutrient paste, always with someone on guard to cover the windows in case a corporate drone floated by. Soybeans grew along the roofs of the Rust City in vast plantations. This wasn’t what ruffled the corps’ feathers. It was what they did with the food afterwards.

“Unlicensed modification of proprietary corporate flavor profile,” is what they called it. They could expect some black market operation, that was to be expected. Jailbroken cybernetics and overclocked hardware had been staples of the tech industry since its inception. What they couldn’t abide by was when the slugs they sold to stopped buying. The bottom feeders had found better tasting algae, and it sent them haywire.

Flavors borne from passion instead of profit, cooked up in tiny residential arcology kitchens instead of labs. The occasional stall owner taking from the Cartel’s vast stores rarely warranted notice. The cause for concern in board meetings was the stunning revelation that people would pay slightly more to eat things that made them feel like human beings. The human soul needed to be nourished as much as the stomach. Corporate imagination strained to understand this, and sent jackbooted CorpSec thugs to start serving cease and desists at the end of a rifle. A wave of “Right to Prepare” protests spread throughout the city. Corporate Security continued unimpeded.

Francesco Mancuso-Hung was one of the people on the other end of that gun. He’d been drafted as a corporate auxiliary, serving his five year stint in Western Europe during some of their nastier commercial mergers. He clawed his way across the Atlantic. Cesco ran cable skyward when the first of the solar balloons took flight. His hands were cracked and raw from decades of use, and he had used his meager savings to purchase a cart that he could serve his fellow rusters from. He was a proud member of the cartel, always willing to contribute what he could and never taking more than he needed.

He took great pride in his work, particularly in the cleanliness and maintenance of his tools. It was uncommon for a chef to have any knife free of rust. The Rust City fed on the scraps that the CZ produced, so even a “new” knife would be considered subpar by corporate standards.

Cesco had polished each of his to a shine, so sharp he could shave with them if he chose. It was one of these knives that passed cleanly through the forearm of the CorpSec pig who was scaring Cesco’s customers. He picked the man up by the throat and threw him back to his comrades, cowering behind guns. He threw the knife in the washbasin, and shouted for his next customer.

Pop historians note that as the first blow in the “Yatai War”. The Rust City stopped purchasing corporate foodstuffs. FoodMarts were plundered overnight. Trucks were bombed on the way to distribution depots. AgriCorp Arcologies suffered numerous security breaches a day, fluctuating climate control boiling trillions of plankton in their tanks. Any CorpSec incursions were small strikes, raids carried out on empty buildings that just hours before had been once thriving centers for contraband aquaculture farms. The green line that had so steadily ticked upwards began to change hues. Stockholders began to lose more money than entire generations of Rust City residents were worth.

Mosiah Vatel was a devout rastafarian with locs that brushed the chip perpetually on his shoulder. He’d been a latecomer to the cartel, but he was all in on the cause. When hostilities broke out, he became the most famous produce pirate of the era, his daring raids on feed convoys swelling the Cartels hidden caches.

There was never any official tally on just how much food they had to last, so many conflicting and apocryphal claims so long down the line make it impossible to tell. Some say there was enough squirreled away to keep the fight going for decades. Others assert that the Cartel pushed themselves to the breaking point the moment they opened their caches.

Whatever the reality was, it was five weeks of intermittent fighting and the rusters were no less well fed than they were at the start. The harder the pressure came out of the CZ, the more violent the response. When a D’Haeseleer AgriChem surveillance craft was shot down, it was a sign for the corporations to back off. Weapons powerful enough to drop a hovercraft weren’t supposed to exist in the Rust City. Any further incursions could cause the conflict to boil over into total war. No more precision strikes or isolated hacking events. A full military conflict, boots on the ground and combat drones in the air, seemed inevitable.

The unwavering corporate axiom was that it didn’t matter if people could eat, only that the corps made a profit. For the first time, this sword cut both ways. The people were eating and not a cent was making its way back up the chain to the multinationals.

There was no official end to hostilities. No pact was signed, no accord drawn up. But the cease and desists were lifted. CorpSec knew better than to butt heads with the street vendors, and the “proprietary flavor profile” drifted out of corporate lexicon. The Right to Prepare became the law of the land.

Within a few weeks of the cessation of the conflict, the multinational conglomerates started introducing their own alternative products to appeal to the masses. Jerk plankton patties with a pirate mascot. Meatballs with 60% real animal protein, humorously advertised with a red faced chef cutting off the arm of someone reaching across the table. “Those are-a my meatballs!” he croaks on repeat on the hoods of taxis and in the margins of websites. The corporations couldn’t be embarrassed if they were in on the joke. They could laugh at their own expense, turn the people who stood up to them into mascots and jingles.

The rusters had never eaten better. The corporations took a miniscule hit to their profit margins. It’s still unclear whether this was a fair trade for the poor corporations, or so say the talking heads whose accounts are lush with corp money.

Ben crumpled the foil of his meal, wiping the back of his hand across his mouth. The rain continued to pelt the roof. The young woman working the stall peeked her head out.

“Hey man, you like it?”

“Ichiban,” Ben burped into his fist, holding up two fingers, “Let me get a couple to go,”