Repurpose
The wolf was already sniffing at his door by the time Martin woke up.
This one didn’t howl. This one wore a tie, carried a clipboard, and had a polite but firm knock. But Martin recognized the predator. It looked like a man from the Canada Economic Restructuring Bureau—an arm of what used to be Revenue Canada. They didn’t knock unless something important was about to be taken.
Martin blinked sleep from his eyes and stumbled into his coveralls—an urban-styled blend of black and steel-gray with luminescent blue trim, now faded from too many cycles in the recycler. He attached his badge—the digital ID every citizen had to scan over public scanners, meters, market zones. Without it, he couldn’t even order nutrient broth.
Outside, the sky was as beige as the inside of an old computer terminal. His apartment hung near the bottom tier of Montreal Sector 4’s vertical stack housing—one level above the waste vents, nine below the daylight zone. No birds. No trees. Just air drones and dull vapour trails.
“Martin Aube?”
The Bureau Reporter’s voice was level, devoid of any judgment or warmth. His name tag flickered: FIELD AGENT—CRB. He didn’t wear a suit. Just the standard government uniform—dynamic weave, auto-fit, designed to intimidate. On his left wrist, the income gauge blinked like a heartbeat monitor.
“Mr. Aube, your living profile indicates you’ve fallen below Stability Threshold Three. Protocol requires enrollment in the Voluntary Reclassification Program by end of this cycle.”
Martin rubbed at his jaw. “I’m still working. Logistics AI dispatch, night run rotation. That’s Class Two income.”
“Median dynamic-adjusted earnings now put Class Two at a $72,900 annualized benchmark,” the agent replied. “Your last reported cycle came in at $57,400. Adjusted for inflation, that’s Regression-Class Five.”
Martin stared. “But I do shifts. Full hours. I transport parts between HydroVaults. No sick leave.”
“That may be true,” the man said, “However, beyond baseline housing, transportation expenses, and sector fees, your discretionary footprint is too shallow. You qualify for Repurpose.”
Repurpose. The polite word for economic deletion.
Martin shut the door.
In a time when citizenship came with a minimum viable productivity score, the line between useful and obsolete had become razor-thin. Fifty years ago, sixty grand a year could buy you a house. Now, it hardly bought you a place to sit down.
“Where do you even go if they Reclass you?” he asked his friend Lenny later over the narrowband connection.
“Sector 7, mostly. New Maritimes Transit. Some get drafted to maintain the Eastern Breach. Some just get redirected to crypto-farms under the Rockies. Nobody sees them again.”
Martin had never been brave. But as he looked out over the gray rooftops, watched drones drop ration pouches on designated mats like birds made of metal, he knew what awaited: complete financial erasure.
He needed an escape. And fast.
That night, under cover of the 3:00 AM Quiet Hour when even surveillance AIs went into low alert states, Martin climbed the old elevator shaft of Tower G to the Daylight Zone. The salarymen who lived up here never wandered the rooftops—unless drunk, depressed, or looking to fly off to their deaths.
He pulled a keycard from his boot. It hummed as it scanned. A relic from his past. Before Repurpose. Before he was retasked.
The old maglev line had long been shut down. Officially off-grid. But it wasn’t dead—it had just been forgotten.
He boarded an unused cart, rewired the core, and activated the line. Within minutes, the train punched through the darkened tube network and emerged into the North Expanse—areas now dubbed Unincorporated Territories. No overhead drones. No economic assessments. No Repurpose surveillance.
Martin watched the frozen forests blur past like wind-scattered sparks. The land here didn’t care how much you earned or what class ranking you held. It simply existed.
He had enough resource credits for maybe twenty-four days—less if he triggered national grid alerts. After that? No Plan B.
But he felt something he hadn’t felt in years—hope.
He stepped off the maglev near a collapsed ranger station, the air raw and biting. Above him, the aurora rifled through the sky in slow, elegant waves.
His digital badge blinked once. Then died.
For the first time since he was sixteen, nobody knew where Martin Aube was. And that meant—for the first time—he truly existed.
Genre: Dystopian Psychological Speculative Fiction
The Source...check out the great article that inspired this amazing short story: What percentage of Canadians make $60,000 a year?
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