“People like choice,” my father had said. “But they like food even more.” And it was easier on everyone to have a nation of employees than a nation of beggars. So everyone was happy.
The few who weren’t, the few who preferred to make their own rules—have too many children, vote for whoever they wanted, eat more than their ration of soymeat, use more than their ration of power—well, they were welcome to move to a city and see for themselves how freedom tasted. If they were good enough, they might even get out again. This was America, after all. Anyone could get ahead.
That’s what my father had always told me.
The residence cubes were identical and unmarked, leaving us no choice but to trust the cart when it deposited us at an entrance. Behind the transparent walls, thousands scurried back and forth through a multileveled atrium, denizens of an oversize ant farm. Towering above our heads were the hundreds of privacy-free residential units, cubes within cubes, complete with all the comforts of a 15 × 15-foot home.
Riley led us into the ground-level atrium, its carpet of artificial grass gleaming green in artificial sunlight that belied the dark gloom beyond its walls. Corp-towners worked on a three-shift system, one-third working while the other two-thirds slept or played, so even in the middle of the day, there were more orgs than I’d expected milling about the plaza, toting bags of food and clothes and whatever other crap they wasted their corp-credit on. Orgs everywhere, cozying up to one another on park benches, strolling hand in hand down paths lined with fake stepping stones, people crowding in and out of the elevators that would speed them up or down to their housing module. Maybe it wasn’t more people than I’d ever seen in one place, but knowing that there were thirty levels above us and another twenty carved out of the ground below, all of them equally packed, made me want out.
Not that any of them came near us. As we walked down one of the curving paths, a vacuum opened in the crowd, as if an invisible force were clearing our way. And as they edged backward, they stared. And whispered. At least, some of them whispered—some insulted us in raised voices, unashamed.
“What are they doing here?”
“It’s uglier than I thought.”
“What do you think it’s thinking?”
A laugh. “As if it thinks.”
“Mom, it’s looking at me.” That was a whiny kid, pink hair, baggy overalls hanging over a matching pink hug shirt, the kind I’d loved when I was a kid. For a few blissfully simple months, trading hug shirts had been the perfect declaration of best friendship: You had only to wrap your arms across your chest and, no matter where she was, your best friend would feel the hug. We’d all dug them out again in junior high—boyfriends made the tech infinitely more entertaining. There was nothing like sitting through an intensely boring biotech lecture and suddenly feeling the warmth and pressure of invisible arms wrapping you in an invisible embrace.
Two men, not old, not young, scruff blotting their faces like a rash. One to the other. “Would you? For a thousand?”
The other. “Ten thousand. Maybe. But only the girl one.”
“Hell, I’d slam it for free. Try anything once, right?”
An old woman, her tan, dry skin taut from one too many shoddy lift-tucks, the best you could get in a corp-town. “You shouldn’t be here.”
Not all the stares were hostile—there were plenty who watched us closely, neutrally, like little kids watching an anthill, placing bets on which insects would wander off and fry in the sun.
Riley deposited me on a bench just opposite a small fountain flickering with water and colored light. “This is where you meet him,” he said. “I’ll be watching from up there.” He pointed to the level above us, where two girls a couple years younger than me were leaning against a railing, making a pathetic show of ignoring the boys goggling them from beneath. The floors, like nearly everything in the atrium, were made of glass; the girls were wearing skirts and had apparently decided to put on a little show.
I raised my eyebrows at Riley.
He scowled. “Over there,” he said pointedly, nodding at an open spot on the railing, suitably far from the giggling exhibitionists. “If anything seems off, I’ll VM you.”
“How am I supposed to know who ‘him’ is?”
“He’ll find you,” Riley said. “Just take the package. Don’t tell him I’m here. Don’t ask any questions—and don’t answer any.”
Stay with me, I almost said, watching the orgs watch me. But that would be paranoid and weak, and I was neither. “So get out of here before ‘he’ shows up.”
With Riley gone, the whispers grew. It was like his silence had been loud enough to drown them out, but now they were all I could hear. Or maybe now that I was alone, the people were getting bolder. I waited for one of them to take the next step.
If something happened, would any of them try to stop it? None of the tech upgrades we’d gotten had made us any faster or stronger. No martial arts savvy downloaded directly to the motor cortex, no superhero skills whatsoever. Just a titanium head and some bones that were nearly impossible to break.
Nothing’s going to happen. No violence, that was rule number one in every corp-town, and violating it was the fastest way to get yourself ejected. One of the vidscreens flashing overhead made the point in stark terms, broadcasting a looped vid of two men wrestling, a knife flashing in each of their hands. As the background shifted from the corp-town plaza to a desolate city street, blood spurted and the men fell backward, still. The moral of the story scrolled across the screen—Live like an animal, die like an animal—and then the whole thing started again.
The rest of the vidscreens were flashing pop-ups for corp-produced goods and services to be bought with corp-credit—corp-towners got paid in play money that was only good within the bounds of the corp-town, forming a neatly closed circle between corp and employee. Within the corp-town, everything went cheap; play money let the poor playact at being rich. You could trade in your corp-credit for real credit, but only if you wanted to sacrifice all your purchasing power, foregoing a corp-supplied wardrobe or a kitchen full of corp-supplied food in favor of one box of real chocolate or a slab of real organic beef. I never understood why any of them would have bothered trying to buy anything in the outside world—but then, I never understood why they would set foot in the outside world in the first place. And most of them didn’t.
“It’s easier that way,” I’d told Auden once, cutting into one of his rants. “Why would they want to see what they can’t have?”
“It’s easier for us that way,” Auden had replied. “We pen them up, like we pen up the city people, and then we don’t have to think about them. Or see them. We can just forget they exist.”
“No one’s stopping them from leaving the corp-towns—or the cities, for that matter. But why go where you don’t belong?”
Leaving a corp-town was logistically almost as hard as leaving a city. Regulations restricted corp-towners to public transportation, and the last bus and train lines had died out years ago. What was the point, when the minority had cars of their own and the majority was better off staying put? There were a few jobs that required leaving the corp-town regularly on corp-transport—the shippers were always traveling back and forth, and the security-operations force were a regular presence, standing guard over the rest of us with their badges, their thermobaric grenades, their stunshots, and their don’t-screw-with-me scowls that couldn’t mask their boredom. Not to mention their bitterness at protecting a life they could never afford themselves. Small wonder that secops was as low on the desirability spectrum as wastewater management and human resources. At least the data-entry grunts got to stay hidden away in their glassy cubes—ignoring us, I’d always assumed, just as happily as we ignored them.