A People's Future of the United States

by Charlie Jane Anders

  “Look at these here,” Dad says. Now he’s glowering at a line of people outside a pho kitchen. Auto spigots deliver torrents of steaming soup in three flavors. Some people in the queue have small buckets to take home as much as they can carry. Enough for their family, a group of friends, or just a week’s supply so they can binge-watch the latest drop on Flix. Doesn’t matter why—all Dad sees is people getting something for free.

  “Hey, Dad, tell me about the new place.” Anything to divert his attention before a rant comes on. And anything to put off the real reason I joined him today. “What kind of cuisine were you thinking?”

  “Italian,” he mutters. He’s on the knife-edge of having a terrible day because of the diorama the modern world is presenting outside his window. I feel bad for how much worse I’m going to make things with what I have to tell him.

  “Italian!” I try really hard to be excited. “What’re the chances of some wood-fired pizza?”

  Dad touches the datapad on his forearm. He still uses the trackpad kind that his generation grew up with, won’t have anything to do with neurals. It takes him a while, but his eyes focus on the spot of air where his holo resides. “Seventy-eight point two percent,” he says.

  “Yum,” I tell him.

  The car turns onto Sherwood and stops in front of a high-rise residential, first-floor commercial. There’s an auto-laundry sandwiched between a GoDega and a shuttered storefront. Dad eyes the GoDega as people wander in, grab what they need, and shuffle back out. A woman lets her daughter collect a sack of neatly folded clothes from the auto-laundry, showing her how it works. I point toward the shuttered building, keeping my old man focused.

  “Looks great. Used to be a Chinese restaurant?” There are dragons emblazoned on the awnings, and ornate carvings across the door header and window lintels. “How’d you find this place?” I ask him.

  “Top search result,” he says.

  This is his answer for most things, has been for as long as I can remember. My dad is seventy-two, and he owns over a hundred restaurants across greater Texas. He doesn’t take a single day off. To spend time with him means running errands like this. And every business decision he’s ever made has been the result of a Google search; he loves to say how Google has never done him wrong. Used to be that he never clicked over to the second page of a search. Now he doesn’t even look at the second result. Hard to argue with his methods; he’s never had a restaurant go under. Every one is a success, even though he charges for the meals. A good 40-plus percent of Texans are happy to pay, not trusting any food that human hands didn’t touch.

  Dad gets out of the car, and I watch as he sizes up his future Italian joint, hands on his hips, stance wide, the look of a man on a mountaintop gazing around at his domain. A coughing fit ruins the imagery as Dad wheezes and pounds on his chest. “I’ll get you a water,” I say, turning to the GoDega—

  “Don’t you dare,” he croaks.

  I shrug and watch him fight for air. Dad staggers to the door and palms the realtor pad. It recognizes him as having an appointment and opens the door. A guy named Mike Doolan used to do this for Dad; he was—I guess you’d call him his realtor, but all Mike did was show Dad around at the places from the top result of his searches. He got a percentage of the deal for palming Dad through the door, I guess because they were friends from college and believed in the old ways of doing things. Mike passed away last year. Dad didn’t look for a new realtor.

  We go inside the restaurant. Across the street, a queue is forming outside a pizza dispensary. A young man walks away with six or seven reusable boxes stacked high, chin pinning the pies in place. Thank god Dad doesn’t see him.

  “Look at this place,” Dad says. Another favorite expression. It means one of two things: Look at how terribly someone else ran the joint, at all the bad decisions they made. But it also means: Look at all the potential that I’m going to wring out of it. Everything is someone else’s failure and his future glory.

  He casts his holo over the restaurant and makes the feed public. I know the drill and accept the link. Together, we see the restaurant as it’ll be in a few weeks, all the pandas and dragons and cherry trees replaced with murals of Tuscan hillsides and those trees that look like asparagus.

  “Looks great, Dad.”

  For a moment I think of Sylvia, the sweet old designer who used to do this for Dad, calling up the same interior-design AI that spits out the optimal décor and hires all the drones to come do the work. A few years ago, Sylvia moved to Pakistan to be a part of their art-revival movement. Dad hasn’t spoken her name since, and I know not to ever bring her up.

  “Eighty-two percent chance of pizza now,” he says. The odds are always creeping up and down, fluctuating. His restaurants change all the time, whatever the algos suggest. A Chinese restaurant will become a build-your-own-burger joint almost overnight. No one complains. With trillions of points of data from every online review, every Insta snap of served food, every check-in and tweet, the algos know what a neighborhood needs before its residents do. It’s like the time my wife and I found out we were having a kid because of new food combos she was grabbing out of the pantry and fridge. Our house just up and bought flowers one day to congratulate us.

  “So why did this place close down?”

  Dad is back behind the counter, looking at the kitchen space. Floating windows within his shared holo show all the costs of replacing the older pieces of equipment. None of what he does with his restaurants is considered “vital to the welfare,” so there are costs. He wouldn’t have it any other way.

  “Previous owner wouldn’t listen to the market,” Dad says.

  Probably the kind of person who manually reroutes his car through traffic, I think to myself. Or dares look at the second page of search results. Or anything like what I’m about to do—

  “Hey, excuse me? Are you the new owner?”

  We both turn and see a silhouette in the doorway. Dad closes down his holo and strides around the counter, reaches out his hand.

  “That’s right. Chuck Gillmore. You live in the neighborhood?”

  I had the words I’d been dreading saying on the tip of my tongue, but now the moment is lost. I lean on one of the tables and watch my dad work his magic instead. He has an uncanny ability to pull people into his orbit and to recognize his own kind—people who appreciate the way the world used to work. People not like me.

  “Yeah, Ben Grazzley. I live right over you. Well, up on the fifth floor anyway. Whatcha planning on doing with her?”

  “Italian restaurant,” Dad says.

  “Oh, exactly what we need. I was just telling my wife we needed an Italian place down here.”

  I notice a woman standing behind the man, almost blocked from view.

  “He was just saying that,” we barely hear her say.

  I very nearly ask them which home-assistant speaker they have in their apartment, wondering how much of their chatter goes into the percentages and the algos of Dad’s top search results, but I keep it all to myself.

  “Are you going to have pizza?” Ben asks.

  Dad hesitates. Watching numbers tick up, probably. “Almost certainly,” he says.

  “Good good. All we got is the freebie place across the street.”

  Dad peers past the gentleman. They share a moment of coiled rage.

  “You won’t find machines back in my kitchen,” Dad says. “Homemade pasta, cut with a knife, by hand. Human hand.”

  “That’s right,” Ben says, like there was a war once fought for the right for men to cut their own pasta and drive their own cars, and by god they may have lost one battle, but not this one. Not this one.

  “I make a wonderful tiramisu,” the woman says. She still hasn’t been introduced to us. Doesn’t seem to bother anyone except me.

  “You’re hired,” my dad jokes, but I know he’s seriou
s. I’ve seen this before. She’ll be in the kitchen the next time we visit, and Ben will be seating folks rather than having some holo point out their table. They’ll get paid, and it’ll go into the same account as their guaranteed income, so that when any money is spent it all feels like the money they earned the old way. Washed clean. Laundered, and not by machines.

  Dad closes the deal on the spot, the algos handling all the details.

  * * *

  —

  On the way home, I try to distract him from a line that’s formed outside the national bank. Some people still like to pick up their income in physical form, small envelopes full of crisp bills. They’re usually people Dad’s age but not of his political bent. Everyone’s handling this paradigm shift in their own way. The main thing I’ve seen in common is that more people are spending time with their families than before. And it seems everyone now plays an instrument, or paints, or is writing a book.

  “Goddamn commies,” Dad hisses, like he can read my mind, like he knows what I’ve been wanting to talk about all day. “These people think some moron sitting in a room somewhere can make the economy work—well, they can’t. It’s all gonna come crashing down. All of it. Hell, not one person in the whole world can know how much to price a pencil. Have I told you that?”

  “Yeah, Dad.” He’s also been predicting a worldwide crash every year for almost two decades.

  “How much do you think a pencil should cost?”

  “Dad, you’ve told me this a thousand times.” And a thousand times I’ve pointed out that the essay he mangles, “I, Pencil,” was written in 1958, way before we even started settling the Moon. Before we had calculators.

  “It’s people like you and me, making lots of little decisions every day, taking risks, putting our capital out there, knowing our businesses inside and out. We’re the ones that set the prices and wages, that keep the world moving along. These people are just sucking at the teat, always looking for a handout.”

  I used to bring up things like his mortgage deductions, capital-gains rates, the farm subsidy he gets for a little plot of tomatoes, but I’d given up those conversations decades ago. Those are abstracts. What I’ve been trying lately is to get him ready for specifics.

  For this day.

  “The day some commie in an office knows better than me what this market needs is the day I throw myself into traffic. Speaking of which, why are we going so slow? Why won’t this car ever take the quickest route?”

  “It is, Dad. If we go right, it’s a minute more. And left here is six minutes slower.”

  Dad grumbles and settles back into his seat. His hand falls to the trackpad on his forearm. Somewhere in his vision, there’s a Google query being made. I hope it’s a business question, maybe the next restaurant he’ll open up, making him piles of money he’ll never spend, serving those who refuse to be served by machines. I hope it’s not the other kind of query he likes to make, the ones about people. I’ve seen his search history. I know how he frames his questions. I know where the hate comes from.

  “Dad, I’ve got something to tell you.”

  Maybe my voice quavers. Maybe this has been a long day of disappointments. Maybe he just knows. But he looks at me the way he looks at all the people of the world he despises.

  “What?” he asks. Almost like a dare.

  “I put in my notice,” I tell him.

  “I forbid it.” He turns back to his holo for a moment, then looks out his window instead. The few times I’ve tried to raise the possibility, it’s ended like this. An ultimatum and silence. Not this time.

  “Tomorrow’s my last day. I put the notice in weeks ago—”

  “Then they’ll take you back. You’re their biggest account manager. They’ll—”

  “Dad, I oversee an algorithm. I don’t do anything. It’s by design. The last five years, I’ve been working on a system that can do my job so no one else has to—”

  “So you’ll do what, then?” He whirls on me, eyes full of fire and tears. “Sit around the goddamn house? Write poetry like that brother of yours? Go ride a camel across Africa on some hajj? You’re about to have a child. What kind of household are you building for him?”

  “She. It’s gonna be a girl, Dad. We just found out. And Sam’s leaving her job as well—”

  “For maternity leave.”

  “No, for good. We don’t need the money. We’re working just to work, and neither of us looks forward to going in.”

  “That’s why it’s called work, son. You aren’t supposed to like it.”

  The rage has faded. He’s begging now. He must see that I’m serious, must be terrified he’s about to lose another son.

  “We’re going to stay in Houston, at least for a while. So you and Mom can be around the baby. But we want to travel, to spend our time learning together and teaching her what we can. Spending every moment we can together—”

  “You’ll suffocate her,” Dad says.

  We’re almost back to his high-rise. I should’ve taken us the slower way. The conversation has done its damage, and it’ll take a lot more talk to heal the wounds. I want to throw my arms around him, but I don’t know if the two of us remember how to hold one another.

  “Look at that,” he spits. There’s a couple carrying several grocery bags each out of the GoDega across the street. “Something for nothing,” he says.

  “I’ll call you tomorrow,” I say, getting out of the car. “Congrats on the new place.”

  “I’m in meetings all day tomorrow.”

  “Thursday, then.”

  “I’ll be on a plane. Chicago.”

  I give up. Standing outside the car, about to close the door, Dad gives me one more look meant to shame me. “You’re gonna suffocate each other,” he says.

  I look at my old man and think of all the times his friends and family—hell, myself—have called him a machine. Like that was a compliment. How he can go and go forever and never stop, never take a day off. No wonder he hates them so much. All that going, and I can’t remember what I did as a kid other than accompany him to work, watch him make deals, sit there while he stared at his financials.

  “You might be right,” I tell him. “We might.”

  He grimaced as I admitted to the unknown. But for me, there was joy in not being handed all the answers. And I nearly added that suffocation by family was much preferred to starvation, but there was no point—he wouldn’t understand what I meant. There were no algorithms in the world that could make it compute for him.

  HUGH HOWEY is the New York Times bestselling author of Wool, Sand, Beacon 23, and more than a dozen other novels. His works have been translated into 40-plus languages, and TV adaptations of Wool and Sand are in the works at AMC and SyFy. Howey worked as a bookseller while penning most of his novels. His two life dreams have been to write a novel and to sail around the world. He currently lives on a catamaran in Fiji, where he’s continuing to write as he fulfills his dream of circumnavigating the globe.

  ESPERANTO

  JAMIE FORD

  In 1588, the English dramatist John Lyly wrote: “As neer to fancie is beauty, as the pricke to the rose, as the stalke to the rynde, as the earth to the roote.”

  * * *

  —

  Beauty used to be in the eye of the beholder. And people used to say that I had a type. Short hair. Big eyes. Brown skin. Curvy and soft. Like I used to be. Before I woke up from surgery, thirty or forty pounds thinner, my breasts smaller, my hair longer, my double chin all but gone, an iLite pulsing at my temple.

  “How are you feeling today?” The neurologist smiles as she glances at a tablet near the examination table to catch my name. “Catalyst White, I presume?”

  “Well, aside from being disfigured and having a new name, I’m stellar. Couldn’t be better.” I lie, of course. And I don’t blame her for forgetting my m
achine-generated moniker. I’ve seen how I look in the mirror. In the grand social experiment known as the city-state of Esperanto—my new home and place of confinement for the next year—we all look vaguely alike. My olive skin is now marigold, the racially inert standard. My new hair shimmers with digital pigmentation, moving like shadows under water.

  Beneath those shadows are scars, hidden by a clever augmented reality.

  My vision blurs and refocuses as the good doctor makes a few adjustments before sending me out into the surreal world. I’m nervous as I smell something sweet, like warm cotton candy, then ammonia. I hear water rushing, then glass breaking, then nothing.

  I had a habit of chewing my fingernails raw, especially when I was stressed. But I can’t do that anymore. They were blown off in the same explosion that took my left thumb, damaged the soft tissue of both hands, ravaged my face, and burned away most of my real hair. I feel lucky, though, cliché as that sounds, as I touch the jangled ridge of skin and staples where my eyebrows used to be. I remember that the same bomb blast that ended my first year at Google’s Mountain View Township killed twenty-nine staffers, including my preceptor, Alyce Harring, who ironically, as the Dissociated Press was quick to point out, had a Twitter history that was sympathetic to the insurrectionists.

  Propaganda of the deed, Alyce had argued, is the violence necessary to shake the foundations of those who have amassed 99.9 percent of the world’s capital. (She might have said hoarded, but since my recovery, I wasn’t so sure.) Are we really innocent if children are starving while we’re spending trillions on tech?

  I never got to answer her question.

  * * *