THIS IS ROME

The music that comes out of Trastevere Profondo is called scarto — scrap, offcut, the thing left over after the useful part has been taken. It is made on instruments that are not instruments: drainage pipes tuned by filling them to different levels with chemical runoff, repurposed Vatican broadcast equipment running frequencies the Vatican no longer monitors, the hydraulic systems of decommissioned androids played percussively by people who have learned which components resonate and which ones burst. It sounds like the city digesting itself. People dance to it. The dancing is not recreational. It is the only legal assembly that does not require a permit, because SecCorp has not yet classified it as assembly. They are working on it.

The folk religion predates the Pharma-Vatican by approximately forever and has survived every attempt to absorb it by being too small and too strange to absorb cleanly. It has no name. It has no clergy. It has specific things you do at specific times in specific places and specific things you absolutely do not do, and the reasoning behind both has been lost and replaced with other reasoning that has also been lost, and what remains is the practice, which persists the way all practices persist: because stopping feels worse than continuing.

You leave something at the base of certain walls. You do not look directly at the junction of Via Benedetta and the unnamed alley beside it after dark. You do not say the word for a specific kind of debt in the sub-levels — there is a different word for it down there and you use that one. You knock three times before entering any space that has been empty for more than a week. These are not superstitions. They are protocols. The distinction matters to the people who follow them.

The Floating Market appears somewhere on the Tiber every ten to fourteen days. It is a collection of boats lashed together that has been a collection of boats lashed together for longer than anyone currently operating it has been alive. Everything is available. The prices are negotiated in a pidgin that combines Latin, corporate brand terminology, and a gestural system developed for transactions that cannot be spoken aloud near the water-level microphones that everyone knows are there and pretends not to know are there. The Market does not appear on any map. It appears on the Cartographer's skin. Nobody has confirmed this directly.

The sport is called caduta — the fall. Two participants. One elevated surface. The objective is to not be the one who goes over. There are no other rules because the other rules kept getting argued about. Betting is the point. The betting infrastructure is more sophisticated than most of the city's legitimate financial systems because it has had to be, because SecCorp has been trying to shut it down for eleven years, and pressure produces either collapse or refinement, and caduta has refined. The current betting network runs on a distributed ledger that three CogniData analysts have privately assessed as more secure than CogniData's own systems. CogniData has not made this assessment public.

Children in the Sump play a game with no pieces and no board and no fixed rules that involves a complex system of debts and counter-debts that can be called in or deferred across sessions that last days. Adults who grew up in the Sump and now operate in the city above report that the game was excellent preparation. They do not say for what, specifically. The answer is obvious.

The graffiti is a newspaper. It has been a newspaper longer than the feed has existed and will be a newspaper after the feed is gone, because paint is cheap and walls are permanent and the need to tell someone what is happening right now in a way that cannot be deleted has not diminished and will not diminish. The Vatican has a department dedicated to wall remediation. The department is understaffed. The walls are faster. Some of what is written is true. Some of it is the same kind of true as a rumor — true in the sense that it represents what people believe is happening, which is sometimes more accurate than what is actually happening, and is always more accurate about what matters.

The food that is not Vatican product and not corporate product and not pharmaceutical is cooked in the sub-levels in kitchens that are not licensed and cannot be licensed and have been cooking the same things in the same ways since before licensing was a concept that applied to kitchens. The ingredients are not always identifiable. The results are. You eat it and something in the body recognizes it as food in a way that the Vatican's meal subscription does not produce. The body knows the difference. The body has always known the difference. The city is working on closing this gap.

There are approximately four hundred androids in the city who are passing as human. Not for political reasons. Not for safety reasons, though safety is a factor. For the same reason anyone maintains a fiction that has become more true than the thing it replaced: because at a certain point the performance and the performer are not different things, and insisting on the difference is the kind of philosophical position that the city does not have the infrastructure to support.

The infrastructure supports other things. It supports the metering of air and the charging for steps and the harvesting of confession and the commercial licensing of grief and the subscription management of biological function. It is very good at these things. It has been optimizing them for two thousand years.

This is Rome. It has always been Rome. The branding changes. The underneath does not.