“The government could afford to supply med-tech to the cities,” Auden had once told me. Another of his conspiracy theories. Back then they’d seemed almost charming. “They just don’t want to. They figure people who are sick and starving don’t have time to be angry.”
“But wouldn’t being sick and starving give them more reason to be angry?” I’d pointed out.
“You just don’t get it,” he’d said that time, like he’d said whenever I called him on one of his elaborate plots. It was why—aside from the fact that it bored the hell out of me—we usually tried not to talk politics. I couldn’t help feeling like Auden, who usually listened to me more intently and less judgmentally than anyone I’d ever known, was dismissing everything I had to say under the basic theory of: You don’t get it and you never will.
I had to admit that had been one of the benefits of dating a brainburner like Walker. However much care his parents had put into selecting the genes destined to give him that perfect smile, those eminently strokable biceps, the scruffy brown hair, the square jaw and the cleft chin, they’d overlooked certain other aspects of his development. Which is to say, if you’re going to be dumb but pretty, you’d better be really pretty—and willing to let your girlfriend take the lead. Walker was both. Of course, dumb had its drawbacks too. It made it harder to understand the subtleties of situations like your girlfriend getting her brain dumped into a machine—and easier to fall into bed with her sister.
Though even brain-bulging Auden hadn’t been smart enough not to follow me to that waterfall. Lose a liver, gain a new conspiracy theory. The most successful one yet, so maybe it had all worked out for him in the end. Maybe he should be thanking me.
Just when you think you can’t hate yourself any more, a thought like that slithers through your brain.
But before I could look around for a helpful self-impalement tool, the car stopped, and Riley spat out words number five and six.
“We’re here.”
Synapsis Corp-Town was twice the size of the only other one I’d visited, my godfather’s corp-town about a hundred miles south. I was nine when my father decided it was time for me to see how the other nine-tenths of the country lived. “This is why I make you work so hard,” he’d told me, resting a heavy hand on my shoulder. “Take your eye off the prize, just for a second, and you could end up in a place like this.” But even then I knew it would never happen. I was young not stupid: Even if I morphed into a zoned-out, brainburned loser, my father would never let me sell myself to a corp-town. Imagine the humiliation—the public humiliation—were a Kahn to end up working a line twelve hours a day, administering gen-mods to soy crops or keying data for the credit crunchers, then going home to corp-supplied housing, feeding her family with corp-supplied food, staying healthy with corp-supplied med-tech, voting for the corp-supplied candidates, obeying each and every corp-supplied rule lest she have it all stripped away from her and end up in a city. My brain may have been a computer, but the corp-towners were the ones who ran on a program, their lives prescribed, their every word and move coordinated by a central processing unit. The corps were machines, and the corp-towners were just the cogs, the gears, the fuel that made them run.
The corp-town stretched across more than fifteen square miles, but most of that was taken up by manufacturing and agricultural concerns. According to the schematic that greeted us at the entry gate, the eastern half of the compound was reserved for farmland, acres of modified corn and soy crops that would eventually be ground into the tasteless nutri-grain that formed the bulk of nearly all corp-town food. We’d all gotten a taste of it in elementary school—one full day of nutri-pops, nutri-shakes, nutri-burgers. It had been enough to last a lifetime. They say corp-towners develop a taste for the stuff, that they’d prefer it to real-world food if they ever got a choice. But no corp-town had ever tested the theory.
Riley swiped an ID card across the scanner at the gate, and our faces popped up on the screen with two unfamiliar names scrolling beneath them. He shot me a quick look, like I’d be dumb enough to protest where the corp authorities might be listening. But I kept my mouth shut, resolving later to find out where Jude had gotten his hands on such ridiculously good fakes. Add it to the list of things I’d probably never know.
A light flashed green and the gate swung open.
“End of the line,” Riley said, hopping out of the car. I followed. Corp-towns were car-free zones—ours would presumably find its way to a nearby lot, while we tooled around on the blue solar-powered cart that was already waiting for us. We climbed into the narrow vehicle, which noticeably shuddered when it took on our weight. The rusty thing looked like it hadn’t been replaced—or even retooled—since the corp-town was first built.
“Destination?” its nav-system requested.
“Residential, A-three,” Riley said.
I felt like a child—or, worse, like a pet, towed around on a leash. Following obediently and unquestioningly after my master.
“Ever been to one of these before?” Riley asked as we sputtered into slow, lurching motion.
I grunted something that could have been a yes or a no. Just because he was suddenly and inexplicably in the mood for conversation didn’t mean I had to oblige. Despite the leash, I was no puppy.
The corp-town wasn’t quite pretty—it was too manicured for that, its stacked cubes of productivity too regimented and too concrete—but it wasn’t quite the wasteland I remembered from my childhood. The large pool of waste water dotted by mirrored solar-collecting lily pads was nearly beautiful, especially with the reflection of purple-tinged clouds unfurling across its still surface. Of course, I was lucky—being a mech, I didn’t have to deal with the smell.
The heart of Synapsis, like all corp-towns, was the housing complex, a cluster of ten massive glass cubes, each about thirty stories high. Glassed-in skyways spiderwebbed from these to the outlying factories, where Synapsis workers repaid the corporation’s beneficence. I didn’t know enough about Synapsis Corp to guess what was going on inside the concrete block buildings (the glass walls of the housing cubes sucked up plenty of solar energy, but privacy apparently took precedence over energy efficiency when it came to protecting industrial secrets). Not that it mattered, since these days all corps did pretty much the same thing. Plenty of programming and systems maintenance, a dash of information processing, a smidge of chem- and bio-engineering, probably even a pinch of manual labor for flavor. Yes, machines could do almost anything, but human labor was just as efficient, half as expensive, and, especially when it came to exceedingly toxic waste or toxic working conditions, 100 percent more disposable.
“Why would anyone want to do that?” I’d asked my godfather, confused by the pale, ashen-faced workers spilling out of their underground burrows.
“No one wants to,” he’d said, and left it at that.
So it fell to my father to explain: Not all corp jobs were created equal. Which was why jobs were assigned rather than chosen. It was easier that way, more orderly, more efficient. Joining a corp-town meant free housing, free food, free med-tech—and it meant accepting the job you were given. Whatever job the corp-minders judged you to deserve.