Todd White- Mcdonalds employee Seattle 2005
I have an apartment on Titan, my job? I work the graveyard shift at a Mcdonalds in downtown Seattle. Every day I commute from Titan, which revolves around Saturn to Earth and go make hamburgers for junkies, burn outs, and insomniacs, then I go to the subway and take the train to another world. Sounds fantastic, unbelievable right? Pure goddamned science fiction, it must take up all of my money to do it, or I'm getting money from my parents right?
Nope, you know what the price of rent is in Seattle, Washington? The average price for a one bedroom appartment? 1,412 dollars a month. You know what the price of a two bedroom apartment on Titan is? A 100 bucks a month, and we're not talking about a shitty apartment either. I have a kitchen, electricity, temperature controls. I make maybe a thousand a month, at a hundred bucks rent, I can actually afford to have my own place, go to community college and work at the same time and all I have to do is go through a very long commute.
So the question a lot of people ask is why is it so fucking cheap, supply and demand. The Tree on earth side is fucking small, the ones offworld are huge, I can't understate that fact, they're huge. They have enough dedicated housing to hold 9 million people. Seattle the city has 950,000 people, and that's after the huge influx of people who came in after Leviathan. The commute? If you're going by subway, it takes about half an hour.
So everyone who couldn't afford the rent pretty much ended up bolting and going offworld. There are plenty of people who actually live on Titan full time but for the most part once you get away from the ground floor it's pretty deserted. I can go days without seeing anyone in my neighborhood and honestly I like it that way. It's peaceful and relaxing, my little place on Titan. My folks call sometimes to check up on me, they worry but honestly I'm a lot safer here then I am on Earth.
At some point science fiction just becomes life, I wonder if my grandparents felt this way.