The Citadel
Louise was sitting drinking her morning coffee and picking at a large gooey pastry. She was at a table just outside her favorite coffee shop. There was a tall building rising above the little shop. A number of similar buildings surrounded a little square with trees and grass along curving paths. Lots of flowers. A sweet breeze lightened the sunny air. A tiny brook or a fountain was babbling just out of her sight. It was beautiful.
As she watched, a small motor began to hum and a long metal bar across the front of the building just above the coffee shop began to slowly crawl up the face of the building. It began making little puffing sounds, a hushed staccato chant that left behind rows of colored dots about the size of a finger print.
Louise focused intently on the mural that was unfolding as the bar moved up and a similar bar was moving down from the top of the building. It was becoming a beautiful bird in a blue sky full of slightly yellow clouds. Not quite realistic. Fantastic. It was her latest submission to the community art. The Graffiti Group. Similar art, “graffiti”, was unfolding on the buildings all around.
As the images grew complete, people walking through the square were stopping in little groups, some were having animated discussions, arms waving in the air. Some people punched a finger at their phone and took a photo of their favorite piece.
There were no signatures. They would be added some time later. After the pieces had been ranked. But Louise’s had a feather jutting up to the right from the head of the bird. And every piece she created had a similar item. It was not cheating. It was her mark.
The highest ranked work would be kept up for weeks. Some for months. But eventually all would be washed away. Such is the nature of graffiti.
Louise rose and looked around while a satisfied smile began to grow across her face. She headed off to work. She noted the robot that came to clean her table. Robots were all around, tending the shrubbery, mowing the lawns, maintaining the infrastructure, cleaning everything.
She worked at M1, a design house making the latest head wear and scarves. All the clothes she wore were a variety of sage green. The people working with her wore similar colored clothes. It was a defining characteristic of her work and status. Status was also signaled by the elaboration and complexity of the outfit. She had been designing a shawl that wrapped a shoulder and fell around the neck and had a fold that could cover the head. There were six versions of the piece on her computer but the piece on the mannequin she was working with was the most elaborate. She needed to hit the mark on this model as it would drive the adoption of the whole series.
She had been sweating this project for many months.
It was the most important and intense enterprise in the whole society. There was no wealth. Money had been forgotten. Status was everything. To everybody. It denoted beauty, intelligence, power. Desirability. And since sex was the foundation, the core of the society, desirability was the premier feature everyone sought.
Louise understood this. She did not understand how her designs would become physical clothing. She did not know how the cloth, or the thread, the dyes, the packaging… anything was made. No one knew how the buildings or the machines, the food was made. How the lights stayed on. How the water arrived clear and clean. How the sewage and refuse was disposed. How the trees and grass and flowers were planted. Who put the concrete down. How all the city worked. They all just knew the robots would take care of it. So they could concentrate on status and sex.
Something else that had escaped Louise’s notice…
There were no children.