A Darkness in My Soul

could wish for-all under a single roof. There are supermarkets and there are special "ethnic" food centers; there are clothing stores and beauty salons, bookstores and theaters, garages for hovercars and banks for money, bars for drinking and restaurants for nights out of the kitchen, office supply stores and car shops, electricians and plumbers and carpenters, legal prostitutes and drugbars for the purchase of approved chemical stimulants.
        To connect all these facilities and to make them all accessible in minutes from every reach of the three-blocksquare structure (and when you consider that with eighty floors and nine square blocks per floor, there are 720 square blocks, you can easily envision how distant some points of the complex can be from others), there is a maze of express elevators, slow elevators, descending and ascending escalators, horizontal pedways with belts moving at a variety of speeds, and stairs-though very few of the last. Near any of the main shopping plazas within the structure, one needs only to stand close to any wall to hear the thrumming arteries of transportation moving ceaselessly, efficiently, like blood behind the plastic and the plaster.
        It is possible to live in one such complex without ever finding the need to leave for wider spaces. If the urge to divorce oneself from civilization and its mad pace becomes too urgent, there are the underground parks with false sunlight and real trees and four floors of convoluted paths and bubbling, fresh brooks. There are butterflies and small animals and birds. If one happens to be a sports aficionado, there are arenas where various games are played out weekly. Some housewives who seek no career beyond that of running their home may be married in the complex church, return from a honeymoon, and perhaps live the next ten years in eighty floors, each nine square blocks. Husbands who work at stores within the complex and not at professions that take them into other parts of the city, may spend an equal length of time without ever seeing the real sky and the real world except through their windows-which usually exhibit other apartment complexes built nearby.
        And no one seems to mind.
        In fact, this sort of existence is advertised as a blessing, as something all of us should desire.
        For instance:
        Crime, the realtors point out, is all but nonexistent within the confines of the apartment area. All corridors are monitored by a full-time staff of police from central scanning depots within the structure. Anyone bent on illegal activity against the residents would find that it is utterly impossible to get into the complex without a plastic identicard full of computer nodes which activate the automatically locked doors. And only residents are carefully screened guests may have the use of such cards. Since everyone with a card has his fingerprints, retinal pattern, blood type, odor index, hair type, and encephalographic readouts on file with the structure's police bureau, it is difficult, if not impossible, to commit a crime from within and escape detection and retribution. Compared to the outside world, with its juvenile gangs, organized rackets, and political dissidents, such a style of crime-free living is quietly attractive.
        Pollution, the same realtors say, is a serious problem outside the complexes. Man never really seriously stopped fouling his air and his water until the early 1980s. Then, some of the European and Asian countries had still not seen the light. Pollution had not totally ceased until the mid 1990s, after the complexes were being built. Outside, the air had still not been purified. The death rate for lung cancer, beyond the complex walls, among those unfortunate enough not to have seen the wisdom of such compact mini-cities, was three times that for complex dwellers. The same for all respiratory diseases. The realtors could go on and on. And they often did. The complexes had elaborate filtration systems, and this selling point was never overlooked.
        Inflation, the salesmen will tell you, is far less noticeable in a complex apartment, for the companies who own the mammoth structures also do the buying from the smaller stores within. A company owning a hundred complexes, buying for a thousand grocery stores and hundreds of thousands of citizens can obtain lower wholesale rates and pass the savings on to the residents.
        A community sense of togetherness, the realtors