Bournemouth sighed and knocked out his pipe. If you wanted to smoke in Corporation territory it was pipes or nothing; the only tobacco to be had was illegal gen-mod growth, ripped raw and skunky from where it grew in every vacant lot from Fort Lauderdale to Bangor, and paper was too valuable to waste on cigarettes. He could see the footprints, two pair, marked like epitaphs in the sludge and melting snow of the yard. Most of the Surplussed went for the Great Lakes Confed, or maybe all the way to Deseret if they could make it that far. Dixie wasn't exactly welcoming. He snapped on his biosynth nylon gloves and started sifting through the wreckage from this home in what was, before municipalities were declared extraneous by ORCAS in 2031, Yonkers, New York.
This particular home was McMansion standard from the 2000's expansion. Bournemouth's official term was 'Surplussed Assets Management and Evaluation Specialist'. 'Dentist' was the universal nickname. Pulling bad teeth, as it were. Or maybe just because no one was ever happy to see him. Whatever it was, the name stuck and by some quirk of fate or management, all the acronyms and equipment played into the joke. Residential Countermandings became root canals. The families that clung on in these places were plaque. The antique .45 he packed was a toothbrush. Reducing someone to a screaming, sobbing ball with the old pre-Bust pepper spray that could eat the bottom out of a Styrofoam cup was 'the fluoride treatment'.
Most of the junk on the weedy patch that used to be a front lawn was just that; junk. But a few pieces here and there he sorted into bags for repurposing by the Organized Recovery Corporation of the Atlantic Seaboard. That baby monitor, for example. iPhone 9 compatible, with a central processing unit, well-miniaturized, sleek design, about $249.99 in 2020 dollars. Lucky kid, to have parents with the disposable income to afford that kind of thing. Bournemouth wondered where the kid was now. Wondered if he had rickets or cholera or tapeworm or any number of those other half-forgotten ailments that had come back in the last decade and a half to haunt humanity. He stomped down with his steel toed boot, cracking the baby monitor open like a walnut.
His nylon-gloved fingers swiftly sorted through the wreckage, salvaging a fragment of rare earth mineral here, a silicon board there, copper and fiber optic cables. The rest he tossed over his shoulder like an ape throwing away a coconut husk. Useless. Superfluous. Like the people who had, until quite recently, lived here. Assets and losses. Balanced ledgers. Risk management. Who needed morals and ethics when you had profitability matrices? That was ORCAS' creed. Or would be, if creeds weren't just another unnecessary expense.
It was all done within fifteen minutes, and Bournemouth phoned in to dispatch that he had gleaned everything valuable from the possessions left behind in this home. Now ORCAS could use the land for farming, or industrial development, or concentrated housing. Or, maybe just like 69% of the Residential Countermandings of the last fiscal year, they wouldn't do anything with this property. Let it rot on its foundations, empty. On average, 2.121 less mouths to feed. Make it the Great Lakes' problem. Make those communist assholes in Milwaukee or Grand Rapids or Chicago-That-Was deal with it. They were just Competition anyway, and competition was a dirty word ever since things caved in about 15 years ago.
Bournemouth struggled to re-light his pipe as he walked back towards the dispatch office, a mile and a half away. It hadn't been just one thing; he was 47 years old, he could remember how things were back in the early 00's. First it had been the Default, and all the images live on the 24-hour newscasts of riots outside the Capitol in DC and of Wall Street in flames. Then Hurricanes Joker, Karl, Lenore, and Oswald had turned Miami into an especially soggy parking lot and left New Yorkers seriously talking about evacuating Manhattan permanently. Then the Willis Tower siege. Then the crop failures in Russia and the EU. Then the Sino-Pakistani conflict went nuclear. And then, and then, and then. After a certain point you couldn't fill the cavities any more. It was denture time.
The funny thing? Bournemouth really had been a dentist, back before the world went away. Well, dental hygienist, actually. But he told people he'd been a dentist. Made for a better laugh this way. A little irony to wash down the millet beer and SSRI caplets in the canteen. Besides, who was going to look up his diploma? On what Internet?
A light breeze blew out his pipe, and, shrugging his shoulders, Bournemouth decided it was too much trouble to keep it lit.
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