“The strikers are having the last laugh on you, sister,” Goog said. “They’re not sacrificing for their principles. They’re lounging around their parents’ house and sponging off their grannies’ Social Security. And the more strikers and slumbers? The higher your taxes go. You’re being had.”
“So do you think refusing to work for only 23 percent of your wages should be against the law?” Savannah said.
“Yeah, maybe,” Goog conceded gruffly. “Maybe I do.”
“I’m not sure slumbers are in the same category,” Willing said. “They’ve saved up—though I don’t know how. What little slumbers cost, they pay for up front.”
Just as he didn’t understand why it took so long for the IRS to rise from a beleaguered, underfunded agency to the rechristened behemoth it was today, Willing was also perplexed by why slumbering hadn’t taken off decades earlier. When recreational drugs were legalized, regulated, and taxed, they became drear overnight. Only then did people get wise to the fact that the ultimate narcotic had been eternally available to everyone, for free: sleep. A pharmaceutical nudge into an indefinite coma was cheap, and a light steady dose allowed for repeated dream cycles. Inert bodies expend negligible energy, so the drips for nutrition and hydration had seldom to be replenished (slumbers were hooked to enormous drums of the stuff). The regular turning to prevent pressure sores provided welcome employment for the low skilled. Slumbers didn’t require apartments—much less maXfleXes or new clothes. They needed only a change of pajamas and a mattress. An outmoded designation revived, “rest homes” denoted warehouses of the somnambulant, who were only roused and kicked out once their prepayments were extinguished. Previous generations had scrounged to buy property. Many of Willing’s peers were similarly obsessed with scraping together a nest egg, but with an eye to dozing away as many years of their lives as the savings could buy.
“Slumbers cost in productivity,” Goog said.
“I’ve thought about it, if I could raise the funds,” Willing said. “Maybe a year? Every time my alarm rings at five-thirty, it seems like bliss.”
“Willing, you wouldn’t!” Nollie said in horror.
“I’d rather watch my own dreams,” Savannah grumbled to Fifa, “than another fucking Korean TV series. Separated twins set up housekeeping after unification, and the Northern twin mistakes a hairdryer for a bazooka… Mom and Dad had no idea how lucky they were to watch sit-coms set in Minneapolis.”
“Mom says the physio after slumbering is pretty grim,” Bing said. “Though that new sideline of hers, Vertical Reconditioning, is doing pretty well. Their muscles are jelly. They get rolled out of rest homes on gurneys, like you move bodies from a morgue. Actually being awake can be scary, too. There’s been a lot of suicides. I’d rather emigrate.”
“Like where?” Savannah asked in alarm.
“The Javanese in management at IBM seem civilized,” Bing said. “Maybe I’d head there.”
The Indonesian Business Machines plant in New Jersey where the youngest Stackhouse worked as a manufacturing overseer was producing robs that could be tooled as manufacturing overseers. Willing could see why Bing might be making other plans.
“How are you going to get into Java?” Savannah said. “They don’t give visas to much of anybody, and they really don’t give visas to Americans.”
“There are ways…” Bing shot an anxious glance at his brother.
“Getting into anywhere in Asia illegally is a bastard.” In her determination to dissuade her beloved younger brother from flying the coop, Savannah was oblivious to Bing’s nervousness about Goog. “There’s none of that ‘human rights’ and ‘due process’ and ‘claiming asylum’ treasury. They don’t give you weekly stipends or put you up in public housing with a flabby little advisory that you’re not supposed to work. There aren’t any polite trials with a free lawyer and then when you’re turned down you can appeal, and appeal, and appeal. There’s no forgetting all about you even though you’re not supposed to be there, because they’re too disorganized, and politically ambivalent about their right to throw you out of the country in the first place, and frankly too broke to pay for your deportation plane fare. No, no. They keep track all right, and they never throw you idiotically on your own reconnaissance: oh, it would be nice if you showed up for this court date eighteen months from now. They chuck you summarily in detention, with rats and spoiled food, and when they collect enough of a crowd they don’t even send you back to your own country. They dump you anywhere: Siberia, France, Nigeria. Wherever’s convenient for them. Especially in China, they’re bigging T-bills. You might never get back home.”
“Oh, it can’t be that hard,” Fifa said. “China and India are both awash in illegal immigrants. Lots from Africa, too, and they’re kinda recognizable.”
“But I’ve got to do something,” Bing said mournfully. “Even if they keep me on at IBM, which I doubt, it’s like Willing said about Elysian. I’ll never advance. All the senior positions are filled by Southeast Asians. And it’s not like I don’t want to do my fair share.” As he shot another glance at his brother, his expression curdled like a puppy’s after peeing on the rug. “It’s not that I mind, at all, you know, keeping the economy on the road… I’m glad to help the shrivs—I mean, sorry, Nollie, the long-lived. It’s medical care they biggin’ deserve, right? Still. I don’t get paid much to begin with. When the chip is finished chewing it up, there’s nothing left.” He wouldn’t look at Goog at all now. “At least if I emigrated…”
“Hate to burst your bubble, bud,” Goog said. “But one aspect of the US tax code hasn’t changed since the Civil War. Americans are taxed on their worldwide income, and that includes expats. You get some credit for foreign taxes. But if Jakarta doesn’t suck your chip dry, we take up the slack. So it’s fortunate you don’t mind paying your dues, my brother. BSCA satellites can extract what’s owed if you’re sprinting across the Mongolian tundra. Not that it would ever occur to you to cheat your very own United States government, but now that chipping has taken off internationally? Your ability to get your hands on any readies whatsoever without our knowing about it to two digits after the decimal, well. It’ll be slight.”
“Wow,” Fifa said, flat on her back. “What a great party.”
“What about Mexico?” Willing suggested. “You might move up the ladder there. The manufacturing sector is huge. It’s got a bigger GDP than the US—”
“That’s not saying much,” Nollie quipped.
“But Esteban is doing great,” Willing said. “He runs his own wilderness expedition company now—”
“I don’t know how,” Nollie said. “Mexico doesn’t have any wilderness.”
“Well, nowhere does, Noll,” Fifa said irritably to the ceiling. “Maybe he takes groups to a parking lot where there are still some empty spaces.”
When his much-missed de facto father struck out for the southern border in 2039, Willing had been moved by the depth of the Lat’s reluctance to leave what he regarded profoundly as his country. Esteban was an authentic American patriot. By contrast, in the liberal northeastern tradition, the Mandibles had routinely said mean things about America, as if hating it here made them better. True, Esteban scorned aging honks who were vain about their “tolerance” but who didn’t really want him here. Who missed the old days, when they controlled everything. But he never insulted the country itself—the idea of the country, and the way it was supposed to work, even when it wasn’t working that way (more or less always). Jayne and Carter, GGM, Nollie, and his mother had sometimes seemed to take a savage pleasure in the downfall of the United States. For Esteban, the decline of what he genuinely believed was the greatest nation on earth was solely a sorrow.