Reviewing and letting me know any mistakes I made would be wonderful.
Enjoy you beautiful reader you.
WALL·Y belongs to its respectful owners.
"Out there…
There's a world outside of Yonkers
Way out there beyond this hick town, Barnaby
There's a slick town, Barnaby-!
Out there,
Full of shine and full of sparkle!
Close our eyes and see it glisten, Barnaby-!
Liste-n, Barnaby-!…"
A lone girl walked around the avenues of trash towers, strolling across the littered streets and carrying out her job, or directive as it was so-called. A cheery tune poured out from a small appliance on her.
"We'll take a hitch and slowly we will ride through town!
In one of those new horse-drawn open cars-!
We'll see the shows at Delmo-nico-'s,
And we'll close the town in a whirl,
And we won't come home until we've kissed a girl!"
She stops near a small ancient mobile compactor, one of many located around the Sector. Wielding a shovel in her heavy-duty gloved hands, she began to scoop pile after pile of the land's indefinite filth into the device. She runs a wrist across her forehead and activates the machine. The sound of obsolete and worn hydraulics grind through the air as it compressed the garbage into a cube. The sound created a soft echo that mixed with the ringing music of the girl's small gadget: an age-old cassette player. It was eroded and abused, it's sound pertaining a slight static-y after tone. But, it was playable. There was a loud thunk as the compactor opened and spat out a one by one meter cube of junk. Despite weighing roughly fifty kilos, the girl hauled it up with practiced ease and carried it behind her back. Another life form, a mutt canine, follows right behind her.
After much climbing and one or two slips on loose garbage, she finally stacks the cube atop the others on the trash tower. She paused for a moment and leaned against the cubes, fanning herself and trying to catch her breath. She wore a very old and very dirty coverall jumpsuit, its mustard-yellow cloth coated with stains of dirt, dust, and grime. Her name was Wally, as indicated by the worn red patch that was roughly stitched onto her chest. She stood 5'2, and looked around her late teens. The exposed areas of her skin were a sun-bleached shade of light brown from the unforgiving sun, dusted all over with light freckles. Her dark brown hair was an unruly mess, akin to a dust mop tied in a loose pony tail.
She absently leans her head to the side. "Ooh!" Something catches her attention: a shimmering object in one of the cubes.
She pushed away from the cube and grabbed it. It didn't budge. She tried harder, but still nothing. She was now yanking furiously with her feet planted on either side of the cube, pulling with all her might. The shiny object broke free with such sudden force that Wally fell flat on her back, thankfully not over the edge. She sat up, simply staring at the object she'd pried free. It was just a circular aluminum trash lit.
"Huh." She wondered how something so… simple could have made herself so work hard.
She looked up at the falling sunset above the horizon, her protective UV goggles shielding her unseen eyes from the harsh rays. It would be dark soon, she lifts herself up from the ground and prepared to leave. Still clinging to the lid, she slung her utility bag over her back. She turned off the cassette player hooked to her belt, and silence filled the metropolitan void.
"Hal!" She whistles for her companion to follow her back down the 3000 ft trash tower. She slowly makes her way to the bottom on a spiraling makeshift ramp, and despite having faced it everyday the sight of the long fall down leaves her easing against the trash wall.
It was a far distance to travel through the toxic city back to her home. Wally walked down the streets from the trash tower to the former Central Park. Old crumbled buildings and towers of garbage stand proudly as far as the eyes could see. Holo-screens materialized from everywhere, activated by the motion of her presence. They flashed endless advertisements of a planetary consumerist government that no longer existed. BnL shopping, BnL banks, BnL restaurants, BnL stores, BnL everything.
She passed Wall Street, stepping over the old newspapers scattering the ground. Barely legible from the dirt and weathering, they read, "TOO MUCH TRASH! EARTH COVERED! BNL CEO DECLARES GLOBAL EMERGENCY!"
Wally reaches an elevated maglev train station, the train itself derailed and rusted to the very spot. She motioned for Hal to follow her as she hopped down to the tracks below. It was an easy short cut home, but not a pleasant one.
She kept her eyes fixated straight ahead. All around her were humans. Dead humans.
Skeletal remains that looked like one touch could disintegrate them on the spot. Their bodies were scattered and forgotten, just like the garbaged city they were cleaning. She was born and raised in this. She couldn't escape it nor change it; it was her life and job. Just as it was for her fellow cleanup workers. She'd participated since early childhood in excavating the city, a requirement of any child over the age of nine. It was all part of a global effort that had started a very long time ago, created by Buy N' Large to clean the planet. People left on the ships that had set sail for the infinite vacuum of space, while a certain few million selected laborers, including Wally's ancestors, where left to do the work of the societie's lowest. They worked for the new upper class that created this mess, whom eventually left them behind as they sailed on a cruise to the heavens. But for reasons she didn't know, they never returned. Most of this happened before Wally was born, and no one had really been documenting history on Earth.
The job itself was deadly. There were constant fatal accidents, from falling off the trash towers to getting buried alive. The powerful sandstorms wrecked the most havoc though, killing and causing destruction of untold years worth of labor. Disease had been common, and medicine was just crude improvising. People had died off by the hundreds every day. All of these natural forces led to violent civil unrest. Workers turned on each other, fighting for survival. By the time Wally could first use a shovel, there were mere hundreds left in her sector. Every year they'd succumbed to the uninhabitable environment as they killed each other off one by one. Being a child, Wally had just barely survived. There were probably a few more like her scattered across the globe, but like Sector NA-001, everyone else was dead and forgotten.
There was uneasiness in her as she continued walking. Her concentration was focused on looking anywhere but ground, so she didn't notice the sharp metal jutting from the ground until it cam in contact with her foot.
"Ow!" A yelp cut through the silence as Wally knelt over and held her bleeding foot. She glimpsed under her heavy-duty work boots and saw that they were completely torn, blood trickling out. She surveyed the area, looking for the cause of her wound, and her eye caught the pieces of metal shards protruding out along the corroded tracks. Not wanting to stay in the city till nightfall, she rotated her position on the ground and hops to one foot. She had to find replacements.
Limping her way carefully around the mass grave, Wally held her breath. There had to have been a hundred bodies that lay unmoved from the spot they dropped dead on. Most were completely buried in trash or sand, but there were few with wearable boots. Finally she spots a usable pair still fit to the skeleton of its deceased owner. From the look of it, the man had still been working when he died. His skeleton clung helplessly to a stray cube, as though it believed it could continue working even after death
Nausea washed over her at the frozen scene. She could have known him, she could have known any of these skeletons. Voices, faces, and names blended together in her head, her brain holding only vague details. She remembered that she'd considered them her family. But they turned on each other without a second thought when food became scarce. People resorted to looting, murder, and even cannibalism. She never killed in defense, she'd just run away and hid.
Her unwanted thoughts continued to seep out. She'd spent so long trying to will these memories away to the back of her head, and now all her hard work was undoing itself.
Wally looked over the bodies scattered about as though they were still wandering the streets, cleaning a long hopeless cause as they dropped dead one by one.
"They don't need to worry about their troubles anymore. Another man's death is another man's survival," She shook the thoughts of dread from her mind as she respectfully and carefully exchanged her boots with the worker. They were men's size, so her smaller feet jostled around in it as she walked.
Walking again along the eroded maglev tracks, Wally hummed softly as she sported her new boots. Hal bustled along beside her as the pair made their way down the tracks to lower Manhattan. She climbed off as she reached their exit station, Hal following closely behind.
She passed a series of check stands for the train station. Suddenly, a hi-tech holo-Ad appeared across the walls, displaying static images of Luxurious BnL starships leaving Earth. A voice came on over the ad:
"Too much garbage in your face? there's plenty of space out in space!"
The screen showed Images of workers like her still on the surface, all seem in quite content with cleaning despite the ruined landscape around them. They stop and smile to the camera like a janitorial advertisement.
"BnL star-liners leaving each day, we'll clean up the mess while your away!"
At last she reached the road to her destination. As she stepped onto the ramp, an even larger huge holo-Ad appears overhead. The same announcement voice returned:
"The jewel of the BnL fleet: The Axiom!"
The image of a giant starship sailing gracefully through space appears before shifting to a picture of a luxurious interior; an artificial paradise. Literally. Indoor sun, indoor sky, holographic palm trees, People swimming, getting messages, getting tans, being served steamy entrées, and many other luxuries Wally couldn't even begin to imagine.
"Spend your five year cruise in style! Waited upon 24 hours a day by our fully automated crew, while your captain charts a course for nonstop entertainment, fine dining, and with our all access hover-chairs, even grandma can join the fun. There's no need to walk!"
She spared a sideways glance at the ad and eyed it distastefully. She'd seen these ads before. They seemed to serve little to no purpose other than reminding her of the things the upper class enjoyed while she was stranded here. Not to mention every other human on Earth was probably dead and rotting away without a care in the world.
"The Axiom! Putting the 'star' in 'executive star-liner!'"
A different image appeared. A middle-aged man in a fine suit wearing an executive BnL pin on his lapel stands at a podium, proudly displaying his overly-white teeth. Shelby Forthwright, the annoying optimistic BnL CEO.
"Because at Buy N' Large, space is the final fun-tier!" He turns and waves off the massive ship as It's engines thunderously lift off. The holo-screen flickered then faded away, revealing the barren terrain that lay behind it. An enormous man-made concave miles wide and thousands of feet deep could be seen in the dried up Hudson Bay. It was the very same launch pad for the Axiom seen in the ad, now empty and overrun with rust.
She walked on the Brooklyn Bridge, or what was left of it that hadn't collapsed. Its main brick suspension towers still stood with sections of bridge attached. At the very end near the edge stood a lonely a mammoth of a vehicle.
"Finally," Wally thought as she walked up to the large truck. It was a Tonga-Like transport with treads that was broken down by the bridge, other smaller vehicles scattered around it. She pulled a lever on the side, and the sound of loud and obsolete hydraulic actuators echo through the canyon a ramp lowered for her.
Wally was home from another day of hard labor.
Grammar check tried to correct "born and raised" because it was to cliché.
Rude.
