Amon doubted if it was architecturally possible to build a structure with such a narrow base that would be stable enough to exit the atmosphere—certainly not in earthquake-prone Japan—and had always wondered about GATA Tower’s naked dimensions. Maybe it reached no higher than the subsidiary rooftops? Maybe it was as monumentally tall as it seemed? Reliable information on the subject wasn’t easy to come by. The GATA Tokyo website claimed it was the tallest building in the world, but so did the GATA headquarters in Seoul, Rio De Janeiro, and Mumbai, and the discussion page of the FlexiPedia article for “Tallest Building” had degenerated into a bout of name-calling between the various architects and their followers. Satellite views were equally useless, as the controversial buildings were all inexplicably blacked out from publicly affordable maps.
Amon had been tempted for a long time to try diminishing GATA Tower’s overlay. Added floors and other digimade features that might have been applied—like vivid coloration and increased girth—would dissipate, allowing him to look upon the structure with naked eyes. But he had never tried, for it was financially unthinkable. Peering beneath the overlay on tangible property like buildings, parks, and clothing was a violation of the owner’s image rights—that is, a credicrime. Sentences varied from case to case, so Amon could only guess at the fine for peeking at GATA Tower, but given the heated encyclopedia debate, it was probably exorbitant. The architects’ bragging rights were at stake, giving them vested interest in lobbying for strict protections, and GATA would have a stake in maintaining its mystique. Amon was curious, but not enough to consider throwing away his precious savings.
Approaching the looming edifice, he arched his neck up and tried to spot the top, but it shrunk to a minuscule point inside its thin circle of ad-less sky and vanished into the blue distance. Strangely, the complex muddle of emotions that had been nagging him began to settle down, and he almost felt relaxed. Looking at GATA Tower often had this effect on him. It was as though the very inability of his eyes to fully encompass such an imposing thing brought him solace and reminded him how lucky he was to work for an organization that had reached the pinnacle of justice. Instead of fretting over some minor interpersonal problem, he ought to feel more grateful for who he was and the time he’d been born.
As he entered the shadow of the tower slanting across the root-traced concrete at his feet, Amon began to reflect with reverence on the history of GATA and the inauguration of the Free Era. To think, it was only forty-nine years ago that GATA, the Global Action Transaction Authority, had first been established. In response to the worldwide economic collapse that followed the Great Cyberwar, branches of GATA had been built simultaneously in every capital on Earth and had jointly fulfilled the roles of both domestic and international governance ever since. What kind of world, what sick, iniquitous world had existed before? Amon knew about credit cards and the Internet and cellphones and people doing things that didn’t feed the economy, but he couldn’t really imagine it. Now, after less than five decades of GATA administration—Amon had learned in the BioPen and at his Liquidator training—all social injustice had been eliminated, all citizens had been emancipated from financial despotism, and government interference in the market had been reduced to the minimum.
Now here he was, at the end of the boulevard, before this majestic tower, this stronghold of salvation. Here he was at the end of history, when the ideal life of humankind—the life of absolute liberty—had finally been attained, and primitive institutions scrapped in favor of fair and efficient ones: laws superseded by credilaws, courts by Judicial Brokers, police by Liquidators, criminals by bankrupts, jails by pecuniary retreats, and for the first time ever, not just war, but the very capacity for war was gone, as militaries were universally disbanded under the sway of Pax Economica—the great economic peace. All excess bureaucracy was eliminated, leaving just enough to ensure that every action was charged its due, just enough to uphold the guiding principle of the Free World:
All the freedom you can earn.
Amon recited this phrase in his mind as he went up an escalator to the round marble platform, tailing a line of his colleagues. Some were dressed in concrete gray like him, and others in the baby blue shirt, lavender tie and brown suit of the standard uniform; but everyone had GATA written in lavender on their right breast. Moving with them towards the glass doors leading into GATA Tower, he felt relief and pride wash over him. Corporate empires might fall, cherished currencies might deflate, real estate barons might lose their homes, but GATA would always be there; for without GATA there could be no empires, currency, or real estate of any kind. Being on the GATA payroll meant job security for a lifetime, and so long as he kept working hard and scrimping consummately, accumulation of savings was guaranteed. Setbacks like the trouble with Rick might occur from time to time, but if he took the long view, tried to see the metropolis for the skyscrapers, his dream—the only thing he lived for—was right there, glinting over the wildly sprawling rim of the adscape horizon.
When the elevator reached the Liquidation Ministry, Amon was pushed out the doorway by the eager Liquidators behind him. He entered an expansive concourse with a pyramidal roof made of green glass squares in an orange frame and a floor of circular turquoise tiles the size of flattened cans. In the distance he could see stores side-by-side that sold various kinds of goods: outdoor gear, shoes, bags, toys. Customers wandered leisurely in and out of the stores holding paper bags stamped with brand names. The wallpaper provided by the Liquidation Ministry changed daily. Sometimes it was a beach or a golf course or a library, other times a swimming pool or a riverside or an open diamond mine, and occasionally, like today, a mall.
The walls of the office were marked off by a faint field of white dots in the foreground of the mall. Along the edges were vending machines serving energy drinks, bottled green tea, water, and instant noodles. There was no furniture except for rows of wheeled office chairs facing away from the elevator. The chairs were distributed evenly across the whole floor, standing exactly three meters apart to form a symmetrical grid. Every five rows there was an extra three-meter space that formed an aisle and carved up the grid into five-by-five squares of twenty-five seats.
There were hundreds of such squares, each supposed to be occupied by a Liquidator squadron, yet every chair in the room appeared to be empty, like a stadium in a ghost town. As Amon edged along the dotted wall, Liquidators ahead of him took the aisle to their chairs, sat down, and disappeared from sight. The default setting in the office was to edit everyone out of the ImmaNet, turning them invisible. This way the ministry could give the staff privacy without the need for ugly cubicles, and ensure no one felt like they were being watched, even if they sometimes were (by higher management, who could make them visible with a click).
Halfway to the far end, Amon turned right and took the aisle to the square of his squad. He was about to sit down in his chair—located front and center—when two colossal men began to approach him along the same aisle, both waving to get his attention. It was Tororo Xiong and Freg Bear—two Liquidators recruited at the same time as Amon and Rick. Both were over two meters tall with huge hairy clutches for hands, round barrel-shoulders like wheat bales hoisted horizontally, and rock-hard potbellies. As if to intentionally flaunt their immensity, their Liquidator uniforms were always digimade too small to contain their bursting, fatty muscles. Although the resemblance between them was uncanny, there were a few differences. Half-Japanese, half-Chinese Tororo kept a pointed goatee, his eyes long and narrow with single-folded lids, his black hair rising in small, wispy curls; while Lithuanian Freg was clean-shaven, his eyes gray-blue, his sandy brown hair in a tall, spiky mohawk.