The most visible businesses lay farther out: the government-contracted managers of finance, recycling, food, and health. They occupied the buildings bordering the forum, squat gray pillboxes of metal and stone with as much personality as a carpenter's square. They displayed their power in huge multicolored LED logos and hectic loading docks. Only employees entered those buildings; the companies lording over life and death cared little for those of us they saved or killed. I crossed and re-crossed the forum, searching for some sign of Doctor Hasaphitz. I bulled my way through opaque floods of people, skirting the walkway traffic and irregular knots of bodies that ground people between them like meal. I stumbled into a Mass conducted by two Jesuit priests for a congregation of four. I cut between a man and the bony, dull-eyed girl he groped. I barely avoided notice by Stephanie the God Lady haranguing a crowd of hecklers. I didn't have to step over prone, sleeping vagrants as I would anywhere else; to lie down in the forum was suicide by trampling.
From my dystopian sci-fi novel Falling Through Gethsemane, Walter Cheatham, the protagonist, shoving his way through the Green Forum, a natural pedestrian choke point in the asteroid spaceship he lives on.
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