of cities

Cities across the globe .. and now I can safely and with all authority say even across the galaxy, have the same functional outline. There is a need for food, water, sanitation, transportation and habitation. Living beings need a place to live, they need to eat and drink, dispose of the waste resulting from eating and drinking, and get from one place to another in a reasonable amount of time. Reasonable being relative to a particular planet's technological progress, of course. Now outside this very stable infrastructure are all the decorative bits. The social trimmings that make a place unique. I don't exactly fit into the decorative bits. I am in a sea of shadow figures that move around behind the scenes. There are those invisible people who are the ones that repair the street in the middle of the night and otherwise grease the wheels of the big machine and then there are those of us who have no particular place. We just ... exist. We are the ones the beautiful people try to forget and yet we are the mass. We outnumber the beautiful people and yet, we seem so enamored by their very beauty as to empower them to bigger and greater things than we ourselves feel capable of ascending to. How humble ... how noble, of us.

Many of the invisible people are morally and ethically sound. In fact they are more honorable than the beautiful people. More strict with their children and have higher standards than the beautiful people. They are what keep the city alive. They are the backbone. The stability. They ensure fresh blackwine beans and the latest fashions made up into wearable clothing at precisely the right time and place to make the beautiful people .... well, look even more beautiful while they are being .. beautiful.

Then there are the insects. The scavengers. Those shadow people who prey off of and eat the weak, sick and dead of the city's society. We devour the rotting and provide the fertilizer to keep the backbone strong. Without the insects there would be no need for policing and locks and guards and clinics and banks and ... well you get the idea. There are a lot of people who make their living off the insects. As well as rely on the insects to ... clean. The only time this becomes a real problem is when an insect gets out of control. Eats the wrong beautiful person, or too many stable invisible people so that the beautiful people get inconvenienced and that is even worse than eating one of them. They really ... really loathe being inconvenienced. So as long as we stick within the very simple parameters set ... we are free to do what insects do.

So even in Ar there are the levels of people. The beautiful people. The stable invisible people behind the walls and beneath the floors making all the things work for the beautiful people. And then lower than that, within the drains and trenches we have the insect shadow people .. that would be me.