Non-Techs

inhabited the tunnels and spaces deep in the bowels of the shining city above their heads. They provided the services robots weren't able to. Sewage techs. Toxic waste disposal specialists. Anything the ruling class of net-addicted "light bulbs" were too busy, distracted or dainty to do, and robots could not due to the hazardous atmospheric conditions. It turned out, as technology progressed, that there were certain things only a human could manage and survive. Go figure.

The Non-techs were not Luds. They were the remains of a society that grew silicon light-tubes into the very fetuses of it's children as they developed -- more often in a lab than in their mother's stomachs. The tubes infiltrated every portion of the infant's brain. There were literally hundreds of thousands of filaments in the brain of every Techie who walked the passageways in the the shining world above.

But here, here were the Nons. Those whose unborn bodies rejected the intrusion. Whose brains were, for whatever reason, unable to connect to the Net, even though the implant of light-tech took. Those who found they could not handle, mentally or emotionally, the nightly flood of information that Mother Net poured into their brains. The rejects. Doomed to the depths of the city. Outcasts, merely afterthoughts in the minds of the Techies above them, a necessary annoyance to Mother. They lived. They had spaces, down there, their own rudimentary self-government, which answered to the Net, schools, children who ran, laughing and playing. And they waited.

They knew the "Heads" were leaving. They knew that the orgiastic spewing of chemical waste into an already destroyed atmosphere would stop once the society was finished hurtling itself into space, searching for other planets to rape. They knew that the meek would, indeed, inherit the Earth, and that they could then begin the process of healing the planet humanity had put so much misdirected effort into destroying. And they would live unmolested, and would learn from the mistakes that Techs had made - mistakes so grave that they had soiled their own nest, and were "forced" to find other planets to colonize.

Jackson knew that it was only a matter of time before the heads were gone and the Nons could move to the upper levels and begin cleaning up the mess society had made of the planet, but that did not stop him from chafing at the way society treated him and his people simply because their bodies could not accept the silicon embrace of Mother Net. Second class citizenship was not his idea of how to live, but he had to admit, it was better than being a non-entity like the Luds. They were living, if you could call it that, outside the walls, in the blasted artifacts of the technological civilization that had both destroyed the planet and enabled escape because they chose to - they and those who had gone before them had rebelled against the technological advances - the had not only refused the infraskulls for themselves and for their children and actually left the enclaves. Left the cities. The only hope for humanity was the cities. Even the Nons knew that. Instead, the Luds chose to crawl through the ruined, blasted surface of the planet, irradiated, foraging for food, stealing what they could, fighting border skirmishes with the Heads over every inch of ground, every piece of scrap likely to be useful for recycling into a tool or a gun.

they scrape just to exist Jackson thought. We live, we work, it's poor, pitiful work, but at least we have something. At least we have a place to lay our heads without being shot at.