"The Turnstile Jumper" by Matthew Rettino

I’ve never seen the surface. My whole life has been spent underground, living in the darkness below what once was a city. The faded sodium lights are our only sun, and the métro our only means of travel.

I pay my fare like the others, blending with the crowds with their torn wollen shirts and grunge jeans, leaving a splotch of grime from my index finger on the STM bioscanner like thousands of others. An STM officer in a blue, white, and green mech suit stands watching us, green-lit phaser set to stun with bodycam on, and I finally feel safe knowing the megacorp’s CEO has invested so heavily in police transparency.

I keep my head down and follow the crowd. Just one more stairway until the platform at Honoré-Beaugrand and I can whip home to Lac St-Louis station and arrive at my home-sweet-slum pod. I’d finally be able to talk to my landlord about the water dripping into my bathroom from the irradiated lake above. Things haven’t been the same since they nuked the island.

Then one fool gets an idea. They leapfrog over the stile and take off at a run, racing for the stairs. The crowd stops as one. We understand the script and what will happen next. We know it   better than what will happen tomorrow, better than why we always walk these stairs, never looking up, following the herd.

The STM officer activates thrusters and leaps the stile,  soaring overhead to land in from of the stile jumper. The man  protests, screaming that the officer is a fangool tabarnack corpo fascist dickhead. The officer’s voice is feminine and metallic, exactly like the AI personalities from the métro comm systems.

« Veuillez payer ton billet ou suffrir les conséquences. »

At that moment, an identical voice comes over the station’s comms.

« Ceci est un message de la STM. Il y a un ralentissement de service sur la ligne Orange en direction Lac St Louis. Code 68. Merci pour votre co-operation. »

The man, the reason for our intolerable delay, shouted some excuse at the mech officer and slowly backed up. It seemed like he was heading back to pay. But as he reached for his back pocket, presumably for his wallet, he grabbed, instead, a miniature railgun taped to his back—an illegal iron you couldn’t find behind a typical dépanneur counter.

The crowd screamed, giving his move away. The STM mech, noticing, reacted instantly, brutally. The green light showing phasers set to stun switched to red, and the officer blasted. There was a flash of red as the brick floor tiles were splattered with the headless man’s blood. He sank to his knees, the gun still locked in his hand.

Quicker than humanly possible, a four-legged STM DogBot swept the area, hosing blood off the tiles, dragging the body away to a garbage shoot embedded in the wall. The way was clear in under a minute.

« Il y a un retour de service sur la ligne Orange en direction Lac St-Louis. On va alluminer la ligne. Merci pour votre cooperation. »

The officer stepped aside and the crowd continued walking across the platform. I crossed the puddle, savouring the sweet lemony smell of the cleaning agent. At least there was one tunnel in this shithole that didn’t smell like piss.

Matthew Rettino is fourteen-year veteran of the STM commute and a speculative fiction writer from Tiohtià:ke (Montreal, QC). His story “The Goddess in Him” about a Scythian warrior raising his son in Mile End appeared with NewMyths.com in 2019. He works at Dawson College.