I
don’t regret what I did, Your Honor. Beatitude is fine, after all. You would have done the same thing if you grew up like me, a girl from the sewers. But all of you top-dwellers are so full of yourselves, you forget us bottomdwellers exist. Not your concern, right? If you don’t see us, why should
you care? Everyone out for themselves. I was born a top-dweller, you know. My dad was an engineer at the Air Filtration Plant and my mom was a telesurgeon. I can still remember our apartment in Sector 108. We had access to the park on level 47. I loved going there. Sunlight—real sunlight—would come in through the tiny windows. I couldn’t see anything but I loved lying in those bright yellow squares. So warm. It was like I was glowing inside. That was the best hour of every week. I didn’t know there would be a day I would see my parents smile for the last time. When I was seven, dad took his own life. Couldn’t take it anymore was all the note said. To this day I can’t figure out what the signs were, whether he’d still be here if I had given him one more hug. Not even mom noticed. And perhaps she never forgave herself. To cope, she started taking extra sun pills. I saw her when she thought I wasn’t looking, and denied it when I asked her. Heliodor was her favorite. Extra potent. Could make you hallucinate for hours. HelioTech eventually pulled them off the shelves but not before they made their trillions and mom was an addict. She lost her job after almost killing a patient while high. No one would help. My grandparents were already gone. If there hadn’t been the one-child policy, we might have had aunts and uncles to depend on like in those old books. Friends and neighbors didn’t want to be accused of addiction, or worse, selling that stuff illegally. Hypocrites. Sure, a corporation can sell something addicting and that’s legal but some rando looking to make an extra coin is a criminal. What choice do people have? Sun pills are expensive. And sun booths only offer a minute of vitamin D. Mom became a laborer and the only place we could afford was a coffin home down in the Barracks. When the company downsized, Mom lost her job and we ended up in the sewers. I was eight. I didn’t know darkness—real darkness—until then. In Sector 108 we might not have had direct sunlight all the time and the Bar-
Even the Sun Eric Odynocki 50
