She tried to think of something else to say that wouldn’t sound condescending, clueless, or both. Coming from one of the only places in the world where bots were born autonomous, Med had this feeling a lot. It kept her from forming friendships with other bots in the lab. How could she understand them, when she’d always been autonomous? She felt like her bot identity was incomplete without that seminal experience, but at the same time, it didn’t make humans seem any less alien.
Threezed seemed to sense her mood. “Don’t feel bad that you never got indentured.” He touched her arm for a few seconds. “Nobody wants that. Plus, I’m sure you’ve been fucked over in lots of other ways.”
It was one of the nicest things a human outside her family had ever said to her.
Finally, she got up the nerve to ask him what it was like to be indentured.
“I used to write about it a lot, but I’m writing more about autonomy these days,” he said.
“You wrote about it? Where?”
She couldn’t believe it when he told her. “You’re SlaveBoy? From Memeland? Are you serious? I used to read you all the time.” She paused, remembering. “I thought you were dead.”
“Yeah, I know a lot of people thought that after I stopped posting a couple of years ago. I got sold in Vegas and didn’t have access to the net. But I’ve started updating again—look!”
He showed her the SlaveBoy journal on his mobile. Sure enough, there were new entries starting a couple of weeks back. She began to scan through them and stopped abruptly at a detailed description of sex with “J.” She might be Threezed’s friend, but there were some things she didn’t want to know.
SlaveBoy was one of those underground sensations on the net that flashed in and out of public awareness. Most of his posts were read only by his subscribers, but sometimes he wrote something so raw and bizarre that it bubbled up into the commercial text repos. Med’s sibling Ajax had introduced her to SlaveBoy’s journal six years ago, during the anxious summer in Anchorage before she started graduate school.
“You want to know what it’s like to be indentured?” Ajax asked Med. “You should check out SlaveBoy’s feed. He’s this kid in the AU who grew up in an indenture school. He says he’s like a bot because he doesn’t remember anything before indenture.”
She’d read through the whole thing that night, mainlining SlaveBoy’s prickly, grotesquely truthful story. He’d started posting when he was ten, describing his schoolwork and friends. But as he’d grown older, he began to chronicle the injuries, both small and enormous, that were a part of indenture. At the age of twelve, he changed his handle from SchoolBoy to SlaveBoy.
When he was on the verge of turning fourteen, a few weeks before Ajax showed Med the journal, the SlaveBoy feed had been linked all across the public net. He’d written a vivid, emotionless account of his school going bankrupt. All the kids’ contracts were sold, and SlaveBoy found himself indentured to a mechanical engineering shop that developed turbines.
He wrote:
Somehow, through a legal loophole I don’t understand, my contract has been reset to the state it was in when I was first indentured. I will work here until I’m 24, and I have two jobs. The first is to learn about engine design, which is so far all about transduction—the transformation of one kind of energy into another. And the second is, apparently, fucking. That’s right. My supervisor has made me a man. If the school hadn’t gone broke, I’d still be trading dinner for a public terminal. Now it’s blowjobs for a mobile and a private net connection. It’s not such a bad deal, and at least I get to eat dinner every night.
Somehow his dispassionate retelling made it more upsetting than if he’d actually described weeping over his rape, or beating his hands against the bars on his dormitory window.
All over the net, people were talking about how SlaveBoy’s story confirmed that indenture laws were being violated. Half-hearted, unsuccessful efforts were made to unmask his real identity, and some claimed he was a creation of anti-indenture radicals. Med had never doubted he was real. Nobody who was trying to drum up support for a political position would dare to be as sarcastic and ambivalent as SlaveBoy.
And now, years later, she had proof that he existed. In Threezed she suddenly saw two people: the young man she knew, and the SlaveBoy she had imagined knowing. She didn’t ask him if all those things had really happened. She didn’t try to comfort him. She was only curious. “What happened to you in Vegas?” she asked.
“Oh, you know what they say.” He shrugged, his tone as blank as his prose. “What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas.”
18
VEGAS
JULY 14, 2144
The sky rained pixels and the market awnings expelled cool mist as fine as smoke. Under its climate-controlled bubble, Vegas never changed. Projectors painted the dome above them with fantastical weather. Today it was Jupiter’s diminishing megastorm depicted in a lurid red, its sluggish whorl of clouds filling the Strip with a surreal, ruddy light.
Tourists pressed past Eliasz to the tram windows, eager to ogle the city’s monumental architecture. There were silver and gold buildings so narrow they looked like playing cards balanced on their edges; bulbous palaces; simulated cities, their landmarks rendered in caricature; transparent inverted pyramids; and, of course, the famous gardens whose sculptures were made of fire, fountains, music, wild animals, giant robots, and full-scale replica slave ships.
Everywhere, on the moving sidewalks and hologram-infested streets, there were human resources for sale. Each market center had its specialty, from gardeners and domestics, to secretaries, engineers, and bookkeepers. The indentured with high levels of education were expensive, hidden from the crowds, stocked in display rooms with the tools of their trades. You found them, one per room, in the labyrinthine hallways of the market centers.
But others were expensive because they were beautiful. They were not hidden away. These, led on show leashes, their skin glowing with cosmetics and hair piled in luxurious shapes, were what pulled murmurs from the throats of Eliasz’ fellow passengers. They sighed at the pretty things augmented to be prettier. They joked about being rich enough to afford one.
At each stop, the tram disgorged more of its human contents, shoppers and gawkers alike, until Eliasz rode alone in the direction of Wynn Market. Through the windows he saw a woman in a matte rubber spray-on body suit. She looked almost robotic. Seeing his eyes on her, she spun slowly, her perfect lips forming a perfect kiss. A bored-looking sales rep held her leash. His button-down shirt rippled with an illegible logo for the company selling her.
Eliasz thought of Paladin, autonomous on her mission in Vancouver, and promised himself that he would do everything in his power to prevent her from ever seeing this place. Then the tram reached Wynn and it was time to shut down all feelings but one: adrenaline-fueled attention.
Wynn Market was built around the ruins of a card-shaped palace. Once a luxury hotel, like most of the markets on the Strip, Wynn had suffered some kind of catastrophe in the twenty-first century that made melted skeletons of its penthouses. Only its intact lower floors were inside the dome, which curved sharply overhead. At the foot of the Wynn Market building was a vast bazaar of stalls, containers, and prefab sheds that spread confusingly down Wynn Lane, which bisected the Strip at this point. In truth, Vegas was not domed so much as tubed. From above, the Strip was like a long, gently curving cylinder. At one end, it was capped by a transport center. At the other, it radiated outward into a series of smaller tubes like tributaries. Many of these were little more than improvised tent shanties, filled with lukewarm, stale air. Wynn Market, where the cheapest contracts could be negotiated, stood at the nexus of all these branches.