Deshima Station - home of Bounty Hunters and Interspace Commerce. There was that variety of accents, true, but for one man, it always seemed a little closer to home than anything else.
Hozumi Tadatoki had grown to visit there on occasion; he was, by all notionals, a citizen of Kusari, but hadn’t lived there for a good amount of time. His parents lived on Junyo, where his address was listed. He visited there, on occasion, too. There was, however, far, far more profit to be found outside of Kusari than inside Kusari, and Tadatoki had grown to hate the Hogosha as much as he found a dislike for the other institutions of the house.
The polling station wasn’t as cluttered as one would guess from the traffic in the promenade, or at the port. Most people on Deshima couldn’t vote, after all, but there were a few who could. Just a few. It was quiet, as one could expect from any location of Kusari citizens, with more than a few from nearby Tsukishima. The man could see employees from that station, some still in their boilersuits, some in their business suits from the offices, as well as a few officers who were more than likely off of the Nagasaki. Those weren’t wearing their uniforms, though - it was by their posture and attitude, by their haircuts. Tadatoki steered clear of those. They always were trouble.
Go on into a booth, and look at the different options. Easy as that. Tadatoki had been considering it all on the shuttle ride over. There were few parties that appealed to his sentiments, very few. The idea of isolation, of closing off to all of Sirius, seemed like an almost center position in Kusari, from Sunrise to the new upstarts of Hanazono. Invade Chugoku indeed. The man was sure they were just trying to find a way of honorable deaths without actually saying it. Fanatics and puppets for Samura, for Kishiro, for the Hogosha, that’s what most of them amounted to.
So, Hozumi Tadatoki cast his vote. The Social Democratic Party of Kusari.
.
Ishida Otsune hated Deshima. It was loud, and annoying, and the Libertonians were always loud, the Bretonians touchy about this or that about the past, and the Rheinlanders burdensome. Mention anything ever involving Leeds, like the 820 Ross-Keen Derby where Red Lightning of Kyushu beat Drake of Cambridge by twenty seconds, and suddenly a Bretonian is weeping or screaming out ‘444’ and ‘never forget’. She hated Deshima, and hated that her posting there was something done for necessity than anything else.
Maintain an office at Deshima, they said. It’d be better for the company, they said. Sometimes, Otsune wished she’d listened to her mother and gotten a nice desk job on New Tokyo. Then again, if she’d been unlucky she could have been transferred up to Roppongi, and then where would she be? A long sigh, from that thought. There were some things worse than foreigners, the woman supposed, and death was probably among them.
She needed to vote, though. ‘The duty of all conscientious Kusari’, they’d said back before, back when she was going to school on Honshu. That’s what they always went on about, that to be a citizen meant you needed to vote, and Otsune found the idea of not voting to be near bizarre. Everyone had an opinion on things, after all, even if you weren’t supposed to express it, and the government did affect everyone with its edicts. She had no interest in being helpless from that, to accept the demands of others. Matsuda had taught otherwise. Otsune knew that enough.
Into the polling booth. There were no good options. There were only less bad options. She voted for United Kusari.
.
He didn’t have many things to do, today. Ando Shohei had come over on a transport from Galileo, wanting to move some materials from the station that had been more or less discreetly procured for the interhouse system. He needed a cover, and lo and behold, he had a cover. Vote.
Politics in Kusari had always been halfway horrific. There was always some politician calling for what had happened to Leeds to happen to Gallic worlds, or something or another, or some other politician saying that women would lead to great inefficiencies in the government because they talked too much or cried too often. Shohei was halfway certain that those things were bull, though, because he had far too many times watched some politician stutter his way through a speech or forget where he was at on the script or go on some long-winded tangent about how Kusari was once great and needed to return to that place. Clowns, most of them, clowns and fools and just sheer politicians.
He didn’t follow politics, in short.
Check the time. Shohei had time to kill before the transfer. Time enough that he could complete that cover and get on his way. Wait in line, look around…hey, there were a few salarymen from Tsukishima. Probably would be going to the bar afterwards, to get drunk and sad and complain before going back to work on another stupid shuttle or going off on one of those little Grouses from OS&C that blared their stupid commercial music over open comms. Probably would get a dance from some lady in a synth paste bikini.
He could go for that. Maybe? Probably would be better to just swipe some credit authenticators from the salarymen before they went off on their little Grouse adventure, transfer some money while they were getting drunk as skunks. Yeah, that was a plan. Oh, the line was moving.
Shohei went into the booth. He was inside for maybe one minute. Most of that minute was trying to remember which parties sucked the most. In the end, the man cast his vote for the people he knew wouldn’t be trying to screw him and his livelihood for the foreseeable future: the Social Democratic Party of Kusari.
What a stupid name, he thought, going off to the bar.
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