Nollie sent Willing across the way to fetch takeout. Goog lobbied for a proper restaurant meal, but they didn’t want to have to explain a taste for bondage in a diner banquette. He wheedled for them to please cut the duct tape so he could eat without making a mess, and it took discipline to resist his imprecations. Likewise, Willing took no pleasure in binding his ankles to the bedstead in the room they all shared.
For Goog had so entered into the spirit of the adventure that it was hard to remember he was being coerced. Only that afternoon, he’d threatened to restrict Willing’s movements to the tri-state area with militarized Scab drones and menaced Nollie with compulsory surgery. Granted, he often made cheerful allusions to the doom awaiting at their destination. So perhaps he’d decided to enjoy the ride, confident that he’d have the last laugh: Willing’s brain would fry; Nollie would be picked off by a border-guard sharpshooter. At the least, the duo would be drably arrested, and Goog would figure out how to take the credit.
Be that as it may, Goog’s travel history was also provincial. He claimed to have attended a Bureau conference in Cleveland, but being on the outs with Avery, he hadn’t even returned to Washington since his parents moved back in ’44. Alone of the cousins, he could have afforded to explore beyond his tight New York orbit. But theirs was a crimped, wary, stinting generation, and travel is an acquired appetite. Maybe it never occurs to you to go anywhere in particular on a given weekend when you don’t ever feel you’re going anywhere in a larger sense.
So with the promise of wider horizons farther west, even Goog the ultimate T-bill seemed energized. His work must have been boring—totals, percentages, and occasional deviations from the norm. He was powerful, but wielded only the clenched power to ruin people’s lives, as opposed to the looser, open-palmed power to improve them. Everybody with whom he came in contact hated him, and had to pretend they didn’t. A few days’ unofficial vacation from being an asshole must have been welcome.
As they rolled through the Alleghenies and entered Ohio the following day, Willing continued to be astonished that this journey was possible. No drone descended and fastened itself to the roof of their car with gecko-like suction cups because he hadn’t reported to work at Elysian that morning to do his fair share. The chip at the base of his neck didn’t glow and heat as it sensed his growing geographical distance from the means of making a social contribution.
While the wooded hills rolled past his window and Nollie played the contented la-la-laah-laah of “Our House,” Willing considered all that data pouring into federal supercomputers. He had previously conceived of the central network as an omniscient, all-seeing overlord, which sorted and stored every minute detail to perfectly reconstruct the smallest infringements of each American citizen. But perhaps instead the data fed a bloated, overloaded behemoth choking on its own information excess and suffering from a sort of digital obesity. Woozy from gorging on a smorgasbord of similar tidbits, maybe the monster was helpless to know where to stuff the fact that Willing Mandible nee Darkly of East Flatbush, NY, had bought a packet of soda crackers for 2.95.
In any event, nothing and no one seemed to care that Willing and Enola Mandible, and even Goog Stackhouse—who might not be as important at the Bureau as he pretended—had gone AWOL. It was exhilarating.
Nollie’s having plotted their course with her fleX GPS turned out to be unnecessary. The directions all the way to the Nevada border at Wendover, Utah, came down to: “cross George Washington Bridge, then turn right.” To Willing’s amazement, I-80 stretched in a virtual straight line across the continent from Teaneck to San Francisco. Granted, the tarmac was degraded, and he felt wistful about those apocryphal days when one could smooth along this route at 85 mph, in which case they might have made this whole trip in a mere three days instead of five. Willing was a fairly proficient economics autodidact, but knew soberingly little else about the country.
Because Nollie claimed that “children in the backseat need toys,” they disabled the personal communications on Willing’s maXfleX, password-protected the settings, and let Goog play with it. Big on showing off his general knowledge as a kid, he enjoyed pitching out factoids: “The interstate highway system was initiated in 1956. I-80 took thirty years to complete. It closely approximated the route of the Lincoln Highway, the first road across America, and also duplicates much of the Oregon Trail and the Transcontinental Railroad.” Clearly, this uncompromising streak of roadway gouged remorselessly through boulders and mountain ranges was a staggering feat of engineering. Willing had harbored a variety of emotions about the United States over his short life: disappointment; anxiety, even fear; incomprehension; a whole lot of nothing. Pride was new. It was nice.
To pass the time, Nollie regaled them with reports from her friends in France, who said Americans’ reputation abroad was looking up. The arrogant, loud, gauche, boastful stereotype was obsolete. The few of their compatriots who ventured to Europe were widely regarded as modest, deferent, deflective. They were increasingly renowned for a sly acidity, dry self-deprecation, and black humor. No one tossed off clichés about Americans having “no sense of irony” when their entire country had become an irony writ large. And Yanks told great stories. In Paris, it had grown fashionable to invite lively American raconteurs to dinner parties, much as one might previously have invited the Irish.
Yet as the Myourea sped through Indiana and Illinois, the landscape was blighted on either side with huge, warehouse-style manufacturing plants. These would be abundantly automated and 100 percent foreign-owned. Locals were glad for the few low-level jobs that real people who would work for peanuts could do so cheaply that it wasn’t worth the capital expense of buying and tooling up robs. The US had become a popular location for foreign investment: the land was ample and economical. If income taxes were fiendish, DC was desperate to raise the employment rate, and corporate tax rates were trifling. Undereducated, true, the workforce was also cowed, biddable, and grateful. A higher than average incidence of workplace shootings was unfortunate, but Americans mostly killed each other, and the casualties were easily replaced. Willing had recently heard from their old tenant Kurt, who after Jarred went dark had ended up in one of these sprawling, single-story factories in the Midwest. Kurt said employees slept in dormitories—more like mausoleums than the kind that housed college students. By day, you could walk for half a mile along the shop floor without coming across another human being. It was lonely work, which Kurt said was worse than the boredom.
Their progress moderately impaired by Nollie’s insistence mornings on doing her jumping jacks, they struck Iowa on the third day. Fields of corn stretched to the horizon, rarely interrupted by a farmhouse. The region had always been the country’s breadbasket. Now it was the rest of the world’s. The harvest also mechanized, nearly all this grain was for export. Two years ago, the global population had crossed the ten billion mark earlier than expected. Disappearing for decades, family farms like Citadel had now been swallowed altogether by single concerns with holdings so extensive that they could have become independent countries. Companies from China and India had colonized American agriculture with a sense of entitlement and no small hint of self-righteousness. Feeding ten billion was supposedly a great achievement. Presumably feeding 10.5 billion in three or four years’ time would be an even greater achievement. Willing couldn’t see the satisfaction himself. Maybe they’d even succeed in feeding twelve billion, but then what did you have—that you didn’t have before? He’d rather build an interstate.