But as things stood at present: after a dip in the thirties, life expectancy had better than recovered. On average, Americans were living to ninety-two. The US sported an unprecedentedly large cohort of senior citizens. In contrast to Willing’s passive generation, typified by low rates of electoral participation, nearly all the shrivs voted, making it political anathema to restrict entitlements. Together, Medicare and Social Security consumed 80 percent of the federal budget. The labor force had shrunk. Dependents—the superannuated, the disabled, the unemployed, the underage—outnumbered working stiffs like Willing by two to one. In concert with linking the dólar nuevo to the bancor, Congress had finally passed a balanced budget amendment. Mind control? No one in DC gave a damn what you were thinking. They just wanted your money.
So perhaps Willing’s fleeing back to Citadel rather than do as he was told on Eastern Parkway would only have amounted to a brief delay. Soon enough being unchipped was sure to be classified as a civil violation if not a criminal offense, at which point even armed mavericks like Jarred would be rounded up and regularized. The picture was vivid: the gangly, wild-eyed iconoclast, tackled to the ground, bound and branded by the state like a steer—Willing could almost hear the mooing, wordless cry of impotent defiance. He would bet, as they say, the farm on it: Jarred would rather die than be chipped.
Nonetheless, Willing had never been certain whether his offbeat first name suggested a character who was abnormally headstrong, or abnormally compliant. Alas, his having walked into King’s ER of his own accord pointed toward compliant.
• CHAPTER 2 •
SO TONIGHT WE’RE GONNA PARTY LIKE IT’S 2047
“I’m really sorry,” Savannah apologized on maXfleX. “I feel like such a yunk. He asked what I was up to, and it slipped out. Now he knows Bing and I are coming over, you’ve absolutely got to ask him, too. You don’t want to get on his bad side.”
“No,” Willing said gravely. “I don’t want to get on his bad side.”
The original fleXcreen had worked as well as any personal digital device possibly could. So to keep customers replacing the product with updated models, the manufacturers had resorted to a time-tested solution: they made it worse. A maXfleX was technically capable of unfolding into a screen the size of a small cinema’s. But almost no one used the function, which had necessitated further thinning the molecules. Now a device celebrated for its waddability tended to develop permanent creases. At thirty-five, Savannah was no less vain. She’d not have appreciated the harsh dark line shadowing the side of her nose, which made her look ten years older.
“It’s no joke,” she said. “He could ruin your life. So it’s a small price to pay. You have to invite him to dinner.”
“Can’t we cancel?” Willing pleaded. “The whole night will be splug. He makes everyone nervous. Including me. We’ll only talk treasury.”
“You can’t risk his realizing you called it off because I ran my big mouth, and then you couldn’t stand having to invite him. Hardly a stretch. There’s never been love lost. He already thinks it’s weird you’ve asked me and Bing but not him yet.”
“I have to invite Goog to come Friday,” he told Nollie when he’d signed off.
“Why would he want to come?” she said. “He hates you.”
“He enjoys hating me. And he likes to be in on things. It’s one of the attractions of his job: the inside track.”
“The attraction of his job,” Nollie said, “is throwing his weight around and making everybody sweat.”
Speaking of sweat: she’d just finished her jumping jacks, and was dressed in athletic gear. Another two inches shorter after all that pounding up and down, she was wearing out her third set of knee replacements. The scars on the joints were the only smooth aspect of her spindly, withered pins. Privately, Willing didn’t understand the purpose of his great-aunt’s exercises, commonly pursued to look more attractive. There was little enough chance of that.
“He was such an asslick as a kid,” Willing said.
“He’s still an asslick. I’m sure he brings his minders the limp carcasses of citizens he’s destroyed, like cats bring mice to their masters. As a teenager, he always took the party line. It’s a type. They side with authority and parrot received wisdom.”
“Well, sucking up to the suits has sure worked out for him. One lousy training course. And he makes more money than any of us, by a yard.”
“Does that matter?”
“It is noteworthy,” Willing said, “that it pays so well to work for the Scab.”
“You’d better practice spelling those letters out, and putting the B up front,” Nollie advised. “You know Goog reviles that acronym.”
No one called the Bureau for Social Contribution Assistance anything but the Scab, and the migration of Bureau to the end of its name was so inevitable that the yunks in DC should have seen it coming. “I’m not the one who renamed the IRS after dried blood,” he grumbled.
“Or a strike breaker. But that’s before your time.”
“You know what perplexes me,” Willing reflected, “isn’t the fact that the BSCA is the largest arm of the federal government. What’s perplexing is that it wasn’t always the largest arm of the federal government.”
“Yes…,” Nollie said, squinting. “I see what you mean.”
“I’ve never stood on ceremony myself,” Nollie said that Friday, before his cousins arrived. “But sitting around with communal bowls on the floor—it’s the way you’d feed dogs.”
“No one has ‘dinner parties’ anymore,” Fifa said, draping her long limbs over the sofa. “They’re biggin’ uncruel. Lord, I don’t know how my mother could stand it. All those glasses. All those spoons.”
Willing slopped several cans of kidney and garbanzo beans into a stainless steel mixing bowl and conceded to salt. They would scoop the muck up with flour tortillas and splash vodka into disposable plastic glasses. Grateful as children to be fed anything, Willing’s generation had rebelled against their parents’ bizarre obsession with food. He made sure to slurp the bean liquor messily up the sides of the bowl. Obliviousness to presentation had become a presentation in itself.
He streamed some retrotech for ambience. Only with Nollie’s assistance had he been able to identify the constituent bars of the music, all drawn from the sounds of bygone mechanisms: the sshtick-brrrr of a dial telephone; the EEE-khkhkh-EEE-khkhkh of a connecting fax; the poo-pi-pur-pi-poo-pi-puh… BEE-di-duh-BEE-di-duh… kchkchkchkch of a dial-up internet connection; the oceanic slosh and hum of washing machines that used many gallons of water; the crazed white noise of a boxy cathode-ray TV with no reception; the dementing recording “Please hang up and try again,” over and over, of a landline telephone off the hook. The clap-clap-clap-DING! of a manual typewriter echoed the ting of an opening cash-register drawer, the ping of an arriving text, the doo-di-dring! of an arriving email, and the default marimba ringtone of an iPhone when you didn’t have enough pride to buy something more interesting. Mixed well, the tones fused into a soaring symphonic rush with a staccato under-beat. The sounds were once so blithely integrated into the audio of daily life that few could remember them when they grew extinct, and their interweaving was both catchy and mournful.