Barter your Future – a 2200 Blues Short Story (Third Draft)

This is a non-canon 2200 Blues short story, meaning that even though it takes place in the 2200 Blues universe and involves characters from the 2200 Blues novel manuscript, this story is not part of the definite canon or timeline of events that the manuscript belongs to.

This story takes place prior to the events of the manuscript, and reflects new and evolving world-building from my current rewriting of the manuscript as a trilogy. Further revised, this story may become canon in the future.

2200 Blues © 2026 by G.R. Nanda. All rights reserved.

I roam where the traders go, cursed to wander lands raped by the hubris of ancestors long gone. I go where the traders go, to the blasted winds of Atalantia, the land where men go to die. The long silent night of the soul, uncharted by language and science. I know there’s something waiting for me in the orange fog and the blasted canyons of orange fog and radiation. Something to scavenge, something to make my own. Something to claim amidst the rubble of a power plant and people to call my own.

Atalantia. Orange. Blight. Radiation. Cursed.

Words flit across the bright sheen of my Heads-Up Display, a screen attempting to map the unmappable. My exosuit weighs down my every move, made worse by the screaming gusts of the Blast Zone where countless individuals lost their lives and countless more fled to escape the orange blight of radiation unleashed by the power plant accidents. Only to be replaced by ghosts of humanity’s past, haunting the forbidden city of Hedonim, and more haunting the world below this cliff.

Amusement Park. Orange. Blight. Radiation. Cursed.

The same words from my data files flitted across my HUD like a never-ending news bulletin, never to solve my problems or make sense of the humanity I was struggling to find. The so called Atalantia Archive turned out to be bust. No one had gotten far enough, and the ones who did never made it out, until three months ago.

Where is everyone? I wondered. Only the screaming gusts of wind responded to me. There were people here who could barter with me, join the Free Commerce Guild, make me richer than I could imagine. The edge of the cliff neared me, a brown crust of rock jutting out into the rapids of orange air. Seeing the edge of the cliff suddenly made the whole venture more fearful than it had been since starting out. Alone from the rest of the world, I thought I’d escaped his fears of insufficiency of the disgust he felt so sure he caused in others simply by being me. Somehow, seeing the edge of the cliff and the obscured world beyond made me feel more alone. I balled his fists. Noone would cross me again. I was a Freemason and I would not be made to feel diminished for it again.

Oceanic remnants. Skeletal DNA. Toxic fauna.

The HUD never let up, playing the same garbled language that told him nothing about how to find the survivors in these canyons.

Clanging noises emanated from behind. Surely it was bits of corrugated metal that he’s seen flying around the air. The seemingly indestructible material used to build these power plants over a century ago were now caught in a whirlwind of a vortex, its remnants spinning around in a parody of indestructible industry, now caught in the vortex of the hellish climate it created.

It was only as I was coming down the very bottom of the Haravan cliff, on the very outskirts of the Blast Zone, where the winds had died down, as the sound of my breathing and the crunching of pebbles and rock on the clifface filled my ears, that I heard a high-pitched twang that sounded alarmingly like a human voice. Pulling out the gun from my belt, I jogged down so fast, adrenaline searing my mind and body, that I tripped over a rock and tumbled down the rest of the cliffside. I bounced and careened off of boulders and mounds of stiff sand embedded into the cliffside, forming the stairs that brought me cascading to the very bottom, where my head plummeted against rock, cracking the screen of my HUD, and the dark nozzle of a gun met my face.

“WHAT ARE YOU DOING HERE?” roared a man I couldn’t see. But the end of his gun hovered over my cracked HUD screen.

Too soon. I had betrayed myself too soon.

“Aaaaaaaghhh……,” I moaned feebly. I’d run into another human sooner than I’d thought. And he was one step ahead of me.

“YOU BETTER ANSWER ME IN TWO SECONDS OR I’LL BLOW YOUR HEAD OFF,” the old man roared. The inside of my HUD flickered.

“Aaaaaaagh, wait!” I wailed. “My face hurts!”

“Shoot him!” cried a boyish voice from afar.

“Shut up!” the old man roared, his voice sounding farther as he turned aside to scream at the boy.

“You said two seconds 10 seconds ago!” cried the boy.

“My name is Gyrill!” I exclaimed, flicking my palms up from the ground to show them holding nothing. “I come in peace!”

“Who sent you?” the old man screamed. “The Varvens? The Blood Brothers?” The nozzle of the gun shook in front of me with the violent movements of the old man.

“He’s not a customer!” said the boy.

“I am a customeraaaaiiI am!” I shouted over the noise. The two of them grew silent. The old man finally gave a big chuckle and the nozzle of the gun disappeared from my glitching HUD.

“Then why didn’t you say so, brother?” the old man said in a lower, cackling voice. Stupefied, I said nothing.

“I-uh-ah,” I stammered, “-I wanted to…..”

“Relax,” the old man said, his voice growing fainter alongside the sound of his footsteps crunching against pebbles, “Farrul get him up.” Farrul, the boy grabbed my arms and pulled me up. I got on my knees and slowly pushed up on my legs. As I stood up, Farrul helping me up by the arm, he swiftly reached into the holster at my belt. Finding nothing, he skidded away to my right, grabbing the gun that I had dropped from my hands when I had fallen down the cliffside. I finished standing up, finding the old man standing father away in front of me, still aiming his gun, an oblong mechanical looking brown laser rifle, at me. Despite his demeanor, he wore a wide smile that stretched through his flowing gray beard and the seams of his old face. The orange haze was thinner below the cliff, and I could see the old man quite clearly. He gazed at me with wild wide eyes hanging below furry eyebrows. An even furrier mane of gray hair swept down from his head, over his shoulders and his stained coat whose flaps fluttered at his legs in the wind.

“Easy there fella,” he said, “let’s talk business and get you straight, then you’ll get your gun back. The name’s Steve.” My entire HUD screen started to flash bright red.

“I need to take off my helmet,” I said, hesitating to make any sudden movements without letting him know.

“Sure thing, boss,” Steve said. I reached up for the pressure valves on my helmet, pressing them and releasing the helmet from my head, I pulled it off. The orange was much brighter and much starker with the helmet off. Behind Steve was a flagpole to the side of which were clusters of boulders, stretching on towards the horizon on both sides. Farrul, a frail adolescent boy in tan rags hung by Steve’s side, eyeing me fearfully. I could see the contours of the orange fog’s thickness, wavering above our heads.

“Where am I?” I asked. “Is that a flagpole?”

“Slow your horses, I’m still the one asking questions here,” Steve said. “What do you want to buy and how did you hear about us?” Steve wiggled his gun to the side and Farrul immediately walked back around the way he came, moving behind me.

“I want to buy hovercraft parts,” I said. Steve frowned and Farrul scoffed from behind him. Steve raised his gun slightly higher towards my chest.

“Hovercraft parts?” he said. “Where do you think this is? New Amsterdam?”

“New Amsterdam doesn’t exist anymore…..,” I said. How long had these people been stuck in these canyons, isolated from the rest of the world?

“And neither do hovercraft parts, sir,” Steve said, his voice suddenly hardening again. “You’re out beyond the Radial Drift. Only land vehicles here. You’re hundreds of miles from the Coriolis Storms that bring in the hovercrafts—speaking of, how did you get here anyways? You don’t look like you’re from the Caravan—”

“I’d prefer to keep that to myself,” I said. It was time I started conversating with him on my terms for once.

“Close to the chest,” Steve muttered, nodding his head, his gun shaking with the movement. “I respect it…but that’s also why I can’t fully trust you, you know.”

“Well maybe if you tell me what flag flies— or used to fly on that flagpole, we’ll both know if we can trust each other,” I said. Steve only chuckled, his gun shaking even more with the movement. His chuckle was a dry peal of laughter, a hollow cold cackle that trailed into a bitter grunt.

“Flags don’t mean much to me these days,” Steve croaked, his expression hardening with his voice, “….it’s only the Ether Realms that decide who’s who.”

“The Ether Realms?   That’s a myth-“

“You think so?” Steve asked, his frown deepening and his hold on his gun becoming firmer. “For as long as I can remember the tech lords draw the lines that really matter.”

“Nation States like the U.R. control the Intersphere, not the other way around,” I said. Now was a good time to cut to the chase, assert my jurisdiction over him. “I work for the FCG. Our jurisdiction is more legitimate than whatever tribal boundries people make in the digital world. If you’re from the U.R., I can get you a FCG contract and get you out of here-“

“Ahhhh, so that’s why you’re here?”

I pursed my lips, struggling to find a proper response. These weren’t the desperate survivors I was promised. It seemed the only thing that could buy their favor was a hovercraft, which was not in my possession.

“You want to put a U.R. flag up there and buy me out, huh?” Steve muttered.

“I can get you out of here,” I said.

“There’s no getting out of here,” Steve said.

“I came aboard an aircraft,” I responded flatly.

“And the storm’s eaten it up already if you came from over Haravan Cliff,” Steve said.

“What, how would you—” I started, before putting my helmet on to see for myself. The screen buffered and glitched, even more unresponsive and malfunctioning than before. I whispered voice commands under my breath, trying to make contact with my air carrier. Nothing. I felt like ice plunged through my chest and stomach. Until—or if I made it back, I was just as stranded in the Atalantia Canyons as Steve and Farrul.

“This flagpole used to belong to you,” Steve rumbled in a low voice, dropping his arms below his neck so his gun wouldn’t conceal his face. “Used to fly United Republic. Flag’s been up there since before you were born. You wanna know why I tore it down? It’s cuz the U.R. forgot about me back when it just the Divided States of America.”

“I belong to the United Republic, and so does that flag,” Steve continued, “but the United Republic forgot about us.”

Steve was the only solid object against the flickering glitches in my HUD, now so volatile and incoherent that I only saw words and symbols flashing into incoherent blurs of light, against which was the dull image of a hurt and angry old man. I had nothing else to say. I had gotten nowhere with him. If this was all that was left of this survivor, then I might as well try to head back to home base or try to find a survivor who was siloed into a digital realm that actually supported the United Republic.

“Come back if you want some land parts or motorwares, I got em,” Steve said as I walked back to the base of the cliffside. “But don’t come back looking to sell me out for a country that only exists in the digital Intersphere.”