The Sludge

By Johanna Lee

Sludge runs through the veins of the city.

It slurps its way through a series of pipes and is monitored by a few thousand government employees and digital systems. It delivers itself with the click of a valve to each of the 40 million residents who use it as their daily meals. It arrives through a secondary faucet installed in every public housing sink where anyone can stick a bowl under or, for the truly impoverished, just their lips to the hot tap and lap up all their necessary vitamins and minerals in one grey liquid meal. It is the scientific breakthrough of the century, a genius collaboration of the private and public sectors to ensure the optimum amount of nutrients to every individual, employed or underemployed.

The sludge ensures no one in Philadelphia starves. The sludge is a job creator that employs engineers, maintenance staff, and customer service reps through lucrative government contracts. The sludge is a miracle of modern science and government policy.

Most residents, if given the chance, would never want to taste another scoop of sludge as long as they live.

“Well, first off, we gotta call it by its proper name.”

Jeremiah looked over to the yellow-jumpsuit-wearing, bespectacled engineer who had interrupted his conversation for the seventh time this hour.

Isaiah obliviously continued, “Let’s keep calling it by the way its acronym is officially pronounced–slooooge. Supplemental Liquid Universal Gourmet Enhancement! SLUGE.”

Fatima growled, “Let’s call it what it is, sludge.” She crossed her hands and leaned against one of the pipes running along the wall, then cursed when she noticed that the back of her hijab grew damp with contact with the grey liquid. It was notoriously difficult to wash out, and her floor’s washing machines had been out for a few weeks now.

Isaiah paused to use his thick controller tablet to scan another QR code printed on a pipe. He had been scanning each individual sludge pipe for the past four hours in the cavernous sludge distribution center underneath Squilla Homes, the 100,000-room public housing project. Each scan took about a minute, and Jeremiah lost track of how many pipes they had scanned at this point—maybe eighty.

The ding went off, and Isaiah turned and looked over to the two, adjusting his eyeglasses as he spoke. “If we let people call it sludge, it’ll make people think they are, like, lesser for having to eat it, ya feel me?”

Before Jeremiah could respond, Fatima spoke forcefully. “I don’t give a fuck what we’re suppose to call it, I wanna know if we can get this shit done quicker!”

Jeremiah sighed. Fatima had more than a point. A string of sludge-faucet-related explosions had plagued Squilla Homes on the floors that Jeremiah managed. Fatima, the local committee person for floors 85 through 90, had community members knocking at her door demanding an answer, showing the burns they or their relatives had sustained from the explosion. For sanitation reasons, the sludge ran at 200° in the pipes, so any burst was a serious public safety concern.

It had taken approximately six days and 45 explosions before Jeremiah had collected enough help tickets from residents to allow him to contact the contracting company, Healthforce.

According to procedure, a building manager needed to get the sign-off from 45 percent of residents on their assigned floors before Healthforce would send an engineer to look at an issue. He had gone door to door collecting the signatures while Fatima had organized friends and family over her community group chats to send people over to her apartment to sign a ticket form. After collecting and mailing 3,476 help tickets, Healthforce sent him a chipper email saying they heard and saw their frustration and would send an engineer over in the next three to four business days.

In the meantime, Jeremiah had run through his office’s allocated supply of burn care, and Fatima had dedicated her limited freezer space to keeping bandage wraps cold. Fatima’s great-aunt had a second-degree burn on her face, sustained when her sludge faucet sprayed her with the superheated liquid.

The mood on floors 85 to 90 was downright mutinous.

Fatima stopped the futile effort to dry her hijab and composed herself with a sigh. “What I am saying is the issue is obviously in the sump room outside of the building. None of these pipes control pressure, they just control access. My brother is a sludge engineer for NutriCorp. He told me yesterday that the explosions are a sump room issue.”

Isaiah scanned another pipe before tucking the tablet under his arm and turning to face Fatima. “Well, habibi-”

“Don’t call me that.”

“Er, well, miss–if your brother was following the same protocol Healthforce follows, he would know that to ensure proper usage of the company’s resources, he woulda needed to check the pipe room before getting the security clearance necessary to access the sump room. It be a huge risk to even open the doors there without the proper decontamination procedure. I’m not even supposed to let y’all follow me around doing these scans, you feel me?”

It was true that it was a breach of protocol. When Isaiah had arrived, he told Jeremiah that he needed an “investigation period” before actually being able to do anything since their situation was listed as “lower priority.” Some quick texts from Fatima and an assembly of concerned neighbors came to block the door to Jeremiah’s office and helped Isaiah realize he needed to push this particular situation to “critical priority.” Extra paperwork on Jeremiah’s end, but desperate times called for extra measures.

Jeremiah shifted slightly in his steel-toed boots and pretended to check his work phone to weigh his words before speaking. He put the phone in his pastel work shirt’s pocket and spoke.

“Mr. Whistler, I–”

“Don’t call me that, bro.”

“Alright, Isaiah, can we investigate the Sump Room before we check all the pipes? You guys came here last year to unclog these jawns after they added that new green dye to the sludge, remember?”

Fatima shuddered, recalling those months. In February, Healthforce had introduced a new food dye to the sludge that they claimed would “increase holiday cheer and foster multi-ethnic inclusivity”, green for Ramadan and St. Patrick’s. What they hadn’t planned for was that this new “rama-patrick” dye bonded to the pipes, causing major blockages in all the sludge faucets in the building, which had lasted well into June. The bitter joke around the building was that Healthforce had gifted Squilla Homes two months of extra fasting as residents bucketed in sludge from friends and family who lived elsewhere.

“The last engineer gave these pipes a clean bill of health. So, if we can trust your own team’s report from a couple months ago, it could be worth checking out a part of the system that they didn’t check. I got kids and grannies scared sick to even go in their kitchen for water, Isaiah. Let’s at least come back to them with an update for a little peace of mind.”

The engineer put his finger to his cheek and considered for a moment. Before he could speak, Jeremiah felt a buzz from his work phone. He looked and saw an unknown number attempting to video call him. Jeremiah got a lot of these but couldn’t screen any of them. His phone tracked every rejected call and gave his boss a report about how many he accepted. Jeremiah lived and died by his performance evaluations, and thus the phone remained constantly answered, day and night–cranks, pranks, and butt-dials be damned.

Jeremiah accepted the call and was treated to a full frontal image of a man completely nude and covered in dried gold paint. The golden man was completely hairless, flexing his triceps in a bodybuilder pose and breathing heavily. Flecks of the paint fell from his body as he glared at the camera.

“Greetings, primitives,” the golden man said as he saw the three of them staring, mouths agape at his glistening image on the screen. “I am–”

“Weird! Yooo, who the fuck are you supposed to be? Why you naked?” Fatima laughed. The man was taken aback. The flecks fell faster than scratched dandruff as he

attempted to regain his composure, “Well, I am–”

“Mardi Gras is down south, bro, we don’t celebrate that here!” Isaiah said as he giggled. “Where the fuck do you think you are?”

“Silence! As I was saying. We are the Franco Fitness Regime,” he boomed, attempting to salvage the conversation. “I am the Nietzschean Blond Beast, and you will refer to me as such!”

Blond Beast grinned. “I believe you may be wondering about the cause of the recent SLUGE explosions in your enclosures. Rest assured, the Franco Fitness Regime takes full responsibility. Our followers have taken control of the building’s sump room and plan to use this as our first public demonstration.”

Fatima shot Isaiah a look of ‘I told you so’ while Jeremiah carefully considered his words. Not every day you get threatened by a nude neo-Nazi bodybuilder.

“Well, Mr. Beast–”

“Don’t call me that.”

“Well, Blond Beast, what exactly are you planning to prove with your demonstration?”

The Blond Beast smiled, relishing the moment. “Well, primitive, you may not be aware that the SLUGE is a Jewish Bolshevik conspiracy to weaken the Aryan race. You feed my people SLUGE to keep us docile and weak, unfit to take our destiny as rightful rulers of the planet. You push this goy soy to keep us feminized, obedient cattle.”

This, of course, wasn’t true. The sludge contained zero organic material–not plant, animal, or fungi. It was technically the most cruelty-free food in existence.

The Blond Beast changed his pose, sprinkling more golden flakes on the ground. “We intend to send a message to the Z.O.G. and its lackeys like you by drowning the inferiors in this, this Socialist Liberal Unnecessary Government Expenditure.” He paused for dramatic effect, ready to bask in awe of his incredible wordplay.

Thirty seconds passed in complete silence before his face settled into a sneer. “Anyways, soon, you primitives will be wiped out in a great cleansing flood. Your drowned bodies will be an example of how you cannot keep the white man down!”

Before Jeremiah could respond, emergency sirens blared all around the distro room. To his horror, a massive flow of superheated sludge made its way down a central pipe on the ceiling, the pressure causing it to burst and splash the room in the grey liquid.

“Get in the corner!” Jeremiah yelled. The bursting pipe had already coated the exit door in hot liquid, so keeping as far away from it as possible was their best option. The three backed themselves as tight as they could as the air turned hot from steam, flinching and swearing as flecks of hot sludge hit exposed parts of their body. Fatima frantically began messaging and calling relatives to evacuate the building while Isaiah flicked through his control tablet, desperately searching for a way to shut down the flow.

“We’ve rerouted enough SLUGE to flood the whole building!” the painted man shouted gleefully from Jeremiah’s phone. “Soon enough, you and your inferior race will be–”

He let out a high-pitched scream. Jeremiah picked up his phone to see waves of gray liquid flooding the room, Blond Beast was in before the signal was cut. Jeremiah stared shell-shocked at the screen and noticed that the loud whine of pressure from the pipe had stopped. Fatima tapped his shoulder and pointed up.

“Blockage,” she panted, sweating still from the near-death incident. Before Jeremiah could even ask, the pipes began leaking an oily green liquid. It dribbled on the floor, steaming as it hit the cold concrete—Rama-patrick green.

“Guess they missed that pipe, huh?”

Jeremiah sighed at the steaming green puddles all over the floor. 

“Can you call a wet-vac team, Isaiah?”

Isaiah nodded slowly and began writing a report on his big tablet. Fatima was already fielding calls from people asking about the big explosion outside the complex.

Jeremiah was in for a long night of extra paperwork.