Djemonique - Preview 1

Alright, I got permission from my current commissions to share approved previews, so here's the introduction to "Djemonique".

"“I'm fucking tired of this shit!” There was a loud thud and the scraping of table legs across a roughly carpeted floor. “Every time I walk through that fucking door you've got another man in my house, in my bed, fucking you my wife you god damned whore!”
“Oh fuck off Derek. If it weren’t for me and the money I bring into this house you'd be so far under the poverty line you wouldn’t even see a vagina.”
There was another dull thudding, and it was hard to tell which of them was the cause. Not that it overly mattered as James lay in his bed, keeping his breathing regular, staring at the uncovered light on his ceiling and letting it leave the ghost of its impression on his eyelids whenever he blinked. It was all he could really do when his parents fought like this, that and listen for the cries of his sister. More accurately his half sister.
Though shouted in anger what his father had said wasn’t entirely wrong. His mother, Angel, was a whore, though she held absolutely no shame about it. It was a job like any other, and from the sneak peeks her son had stolen of her in the act she was a hell of a good one. She could play a man, or woman on the right occasion, like a finely tuned instrument; making them willing to pay out the nose for just five more minutes in her heavenly embrace.
Before James had been born he almost wondered if at one point his father had been played like that. Full of love instead of the simmering frustration that constantly found itself roiling over at the sight of her. For as much as the boy disapproved of it though, he couldn’t exactly hold it entirely against the man. It was a rough world they lived in.
Rolling onto his side the black haired boy fished into his nightstand, retrieving his wallet and opening it to look at his beginner’s licence, his first piece of ID. His picture looked back at him, monochrome and wearing a face that wanted its best to be excited but had to keep an impassive line to meet standards. Had he been thinking about the next part that might not have been as hard.
Punched through the bottom right of the plastic card was a copper coloured stud the size of a small button. It was only a little thing, but what it represented dictated the path James was allowed to take in life. There were three denominations: gold, silver, and the one he had, bronze.
Gold was reserved for the elite, the one percent who sat at the top of society in their thrones and looked down on the rest of the world from the metropolis cities. For generations their way of life hadn’t changed, and would probably continue not to change for a dozen more.
Next down on the stepladder were the silver. To say there was just one level of silver would be inaccurate, there was a reason it was often called the “rat race” tier. Silvers stretched both ways, up towards gold status where one good business deal or promotion could rocket a man up into the gold leagues, and down towards bronze where two jobs and working every waking hour were the only way from falling into bronze. This was where James’ father sat, struggling to keep the family afloat.
No that wasn’t exactly true, Derek struggled to keep himself afloat. To keep himself out of the bronze caste, or as it was more commonly known “the pits”. This was the largest group just in sheer numbers. Something like sixty plus percent of the county’s population was in the pits, living in clustered slums in the shadows of cities, and this was the majority of society that got hit hard by the system and its intended purpose.
That purpose: trying to dent the world’s growing overpopulation problem. There were just too many people and not enough world. At first the solution was the floating metropolis cities, essentially doubling the space to put people by building cities stacked one atop another. Space wasn’t so much the issue though, simply a band-aid, and when it failed to cover the problem they realized it required an ounce of prevention.
Thus the caste system. It was marketed as better for children, but basically if you fell below a certain line you were bared from having kids. Originally they marked it at the poverty line, after all if you couldn’t afford to keep yourself how could you afford a child? As the years went on though that label slowly pushed itself further and further up to ladder, widening the gap between those at the bottom and those even in the middle.
There were written and unwritten parts to the rules of being in bronze. Written obviously you couldn’t have children, unwritten that was only if you were male. If you were a woman your caste didn’t matter, all you had to do was nab yourself a respectable silver and you'd jump your way up to that class with a kid. There were checkpoints going in and out of cities and the districts therein, and your tagged ID was the only way past. This essentially trapped those who found themselves in the pits, making it so those from lower-middle silver and above didn’t need to think about what was going on. And the last big thing was monitoring.
Once a month you needed to check in at the closest office, at least if you were bronze or low silver; there would be little reason for anyone else to unless they were the highest of silver working at gold. It was why the little button-sized markers were removable, they could be changed at any time by an official if you moved a rung on the social ladder. They'd know if you missed it too, most of the pits was rigged with a security system of sorts that watched you day in, day out. The cameras got the nickname “peeping Toms” since they were on the lookout for procreation more than anything else. If they caught you with or doing anything banned in bronze it wouldn’t be five minutes before monitor security was banging down your door to break it up; forceful contraception they called it.
The thought of it all weighed on James’ shoulders like hundred pound weights. Since his father was only barely scrapping by low silver, and only there thanks to his mother’s work, the dark haired boy was bronze until he could support himself. Then it would be a decision based on if he could support two people with whatever job he managed to find. If he wanted to eventually make silver it meant he'd either have to somehow get a scholarship for college, or else work two, maybe three jobs to drag himself up over the line. With how his household was both ideas seemed more like pipe dreams.
The sound of his parents’ argument was still going strong, causing the boy to let out an frustrated sigh. He should be studying right now, or passing out resumes. Hell, watching his mother work and having a fap would have been a better use of his time than listening to them at each other’s throats. He had to listen for his half-sister though, because they couldn’t be trusted to tend to her when they got like this. She didn’t deserve to be left to cry because her parents were squabbling like immature children.
Carefully he slipped his ID back into his wallet, catching a small glimmer of gold from one of the card slots. Immediately his frustration bloomed into a raw annoyance, as he worked his fingers to get at the shining card. “True love is coming,” it read in a fanciful looping script.
How the hell was he always getting these? Once every few months he'd catch one of these in his wallet, on his desk, slipped into his pocket. It had been happening for years now and every time it just had him wracking his brain how someone could have possibly slipped it to him.
When the first one had every shown up he showed his mother, he couldn’t have been more than about thirteen at the time, and she made a show of tearing it up and warning him about dangerous people who would take advantage of him. Ironic she'd been talking about sex workers like herself, but still the memory of a time when she gave more of a damn and acted like a proper mother was a warm reminder of how things had once been. Since then James had had to be doubly sure to destroy them whenever they came up. With his bronze status such a thing was contraband and could have the monitors knocking down the door to question him. And since he legitimately had no idea where it had come from it was liable to get him into even more of a mess.
He was ready to tear it in half like the rest when he was suddenly in the dark. One of the everyday occurrences of living on the edge of the pits were these rolling blackouts, as their poorly maintained power grid hit frequent stressing points. There was a brief flicker of silence, the one good thing to come from it all, as the blackout stunned his parents from their bickering and the background sounds of everything electronic wound down to a halt.
Then his sister’s shrill wail rose up and broke the peace.
The argument came back in full force, seeming all the louder now without the dull white noise of everyday life. The card could wait, as James set it down and rushed down the hallway into his sister’s room." - "Djemonique" by Madam Materia