Chasing New Suns by Lance Robinson

Author:Lance Robinson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: environmental science fiction, hopeful science fiction, space colonization, Canadian science fiction, Writers of the Future, neocolonialism, unity
Publisher: Lance Robinson
Published: 2024-09-12T00:00:00+00:00

The Gig of the Magi

One hundred and eighty-seven dollars. Not much for some people, but for Jack it meant months of grinding gigs, foregoing pub night with his friends, and abstaining from streaming movies. He did a budget, and estimated that it would take three months to save that much. Three months if no unexpected expenses arrived on his doorstep. But Jack had learned to expect unexpected expenses, because that’s the way life was. You could not know what it might be—that was the unexpected part—but you could be sure that before long, some expenses would inevitably come calling.

One hundred and eighty-seven dollars. It had been six months since making the budget and he was still short of his goal.

In response to the situation, Jack did what he always did, what he needed to do: he sat down, opened one of the several freelancing platforms he was registered on, and searched for his next gig. But rather than watch him do that, let us look at his apartment. A bachelor suite that is hardly worthy describing. The bathroom had a toilet and shower—no bathtub. There was a kitchen and a living room, but with no clear boundary between them they were effectively a single, not very large room. There was a small wooden table just large enough to accommodate two plates if both wings were raised, and beside it, two mismatched kitchen chairs. The living room had a flat screen television, very old with dozens of dead pixels. There was a single futon that Jack slept on, but currently folded up into a comfy chair. Though he lived alone, Jack stripped his bed every morning and converted it into a chair, not wanting his living room to look like a bedroom throughout the day. And there was a large sofa, too big for his cramped apartment really. It had been a hassle getting it in the elevator and then a nightmare getting it through the apartment door. But it was long and deep and comfortable—the kind of sofa Jack imagined a family of four or five might have, and for that reason he liked it.

Jack struggled to get by. His situation had nothing to do with lack of effort: he worked hard. Or at least he worked hard when he was able to find work, but the economic system was what it was, and on top of that, bad luck had pulled the rug out from under him more than once.

However, you should not make the mistake of thinking that luck always runs bad. As Jack looked through job postings, he learned that the sewage treatment marshes in the county to the north were dying—bad luck for the people downstream, but good luck for Jack. The freelancing platform showed new gigs for environmental engineers, bioremediation troubleshooters, artificial aquatic ecosystem ecologists, and sewage crisis PR specialists. Jack studied bioremediation engineering in college, and since then he had worked a couple of short-term manual labor jobs at the old oxidation ponds in another town and gotten good reviews from the supervisor.

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