by Reed King
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To Ellen Rowett, for the support, and Lindsey Worster, for the party.
And for seekers, fighters, dreamers, and grifters everywhere.
EDITOR’S NOTE
It has been my pleasure to amend and update the tenth edition of Truckee Wallace’s immensely popular memoir, which we can assume was completed sometime between 2086 and 2088. Though I have left the original text unbowdlerized except for the occasional rectification of a spelling error, I have introduced several new footnotes and an expanded section of appendices to help contextualize Mr. Wallace’s world for the modern reader. Many people have wondered about the change of title, which after the first edition was amended from the original (Truckee Wallace: Memories of a Continent) at the request of Mr. Wallace’s close friend “Sammy” SAAM-1564A. (Thanks are owed to Sammy for her meticulous proofing and fact-checking, as well.) Sadly, I am unable to answer the numerous queries we receive about Mr. Wallace’s current whereabouts. But I like to think that he may yet be finding adventure in the territories formerly known as the United States of America.
—Reed King
PROLOGUE
You’re sixteen going on sixty, Truckee, my mom liked to say, giving me a cuff. Too smart for your own good, least where your brain’s not plugged into the feeds.
She always made that joke, even if I hadn’t surfed much since I was a kid. Ever since Crunch, United, had made the swag stuff like RealFriends© and WorldBurn: Apocalypse illegal,1 there just wasn’t a point. The company feed was stacked with the same sad sacks I saw every day in real life. Our board of directors couldn’t code a game an amoeba would want to play. And the international news never changed: the Sovereign Nation of Texas was threatening guns, the Real Friends© of the North plotting subterfuge, the Commonwealth might be leeching data from our servers, the Russian Federation and the Dakotas were price-gouging oil, again, and the Confederacy was deadlocked in Senate discussions about whether to permit gas lanterns and ignoring all international comms.
You pay no mind to all that blather, my ma used to say. It’ll cook your smarts up.
When I think of Mom now I think of her skin dark from sun, wrinkled up like river mud. I think of maroon-tinged hair, the taffy vowels of the Confederacy, her big bark laugh, and the haze of vape that shimmered around her like neon mist, that soft-cloud smell of cherry tobacco and fresh.
She was born in 2041, the year of the First Secession, before the civil war swallowed up the country and spit it out into individual parcels, like so many gummed-up pieces of spinach. She could remember when you could drive all the way from Texas to the Federal Corporation of Crunch Snacks and Pharmaceuticals© with no papers, no semiautomatics, no risk of getting gamed at all.
Can you imagine, Truckee? she’d say, showing me a paper map that had been old even in her time, wrinkly, soft, and warm to the touch, like skin. Highways ran like veins across the continent, horizons with no borders or boundaries at all. Can you imagine driving all that way? Just you, me, and a flattop rig.
I never felt closer to my mom than with one of those maps on my lap, hopscotching the states that no longer existed and running a finger on the dotted lines that divvied them—not borders so much as hints. I liked to imagine a time I’d go all the way to the Pacific, maybe as a hotshot uppercrust tourist, maybe as a grifter, wearing a belt strapped with black-market firepower and a smile.
It was a shiver dream, obviously. At sixteen years old, I’d never so much as inched a foot outside of Crunch 407, and I had no cause to think I would. I was a skinny company kid with a hawkish nose, two and a half friends, and a bad habit of not knowing how to keep my mouth shut.
Everything I ever owned and would ever own belonged to Crunch, United—sheets on the bed, toilet paper in the bathroom, clothes on my back, my full-service e-Pack. I was a hand-strap operator anting on the line for 600 Crunchbucks a week, minus taxes and deductions. A crumb like millions of others.
I wasn’t special. I wasn’t brave. I was made to be a nobody.
Until Billy Lou Ropes came back to Crunchtown with a gun, a goat, and a grudge.
Part I
CRUNCHTOWN 407, CRUNCH, UNITED, COLONIES
1
Knock, knock.
Who’s there?
No one, dick. It’s the end of the world.
—from The Grifter’s Guide to the Territories FKA USA
“There.” Jared Lee, the first of my two and a half friends, pointed past the stubby line of waste-treatment plants. “Right there. See? Refugees.”
I raised a hand to shield my eyes from the sun. All I could make out were colored blobs. Across the river, Burns Park glowed in the morning light, its two-headed plants and stunted chemical trees all lit a violent shade of purple.
I shook my head. “Nada.”
“Try your visor again,” Jared said, and sneezed half a dozen times. Even his allergies were nervy.
“I told you, the color’s crapped,” I said. But I notched my visor down over my eyes anyway, and the world molted a mucus color where it touched my feed. Everything was shades of green and yellow—had been since last night, when in the middle of a rub-and-tug my VR porn star had suddenly blanked off into dots and zeroes. A virus from the illegal download, probably. And I couldn’t exactly go to HR.
“I put my resolution up to twenty,” Annalee Kimball, the second of my two and a half friends, said helpfully.
I did some fussing around with my scope app, which came free with the Crunch company software. When we were twelve, Jared and I discovered this function and spent a solid week staring at girls’ boobs at resolution ten and then cracking up afterward. You can make technology as smart as you want, but you can bet bank humans will be stupid about it.
At resolution fifteen, patterns of algae made hieroglyphs on the Arkansas River. President and CEO Mark J. Burnham had pledged to clean the river by 2090 and there was even chatter of trying to breed fish, but we all knew it for empty talk.1
Finally, after another tweak or two, the whole of the Crunch 407 complex came into focus: the gridlock slum of Low Hill, the shipping plants and incinerators, the admin complex and chemical-waste drums, the water cisterns and sewage plants, the solar panels glimmering greenly, and the wind-powered tram that spanned the river and took the fat cats back to Uphill at the end of their workday. The Human Resources complex, dark and evil as a mold. Miles and miles of smokestacks, solar panels, water-treatment facilities, pipes—and beyond those, the splintered pinwheel of highways that went nowhere, at least nowhere you’d want to go.
I could just pick out a person working his or her way through the maze of ancient-model rigs on the highway just east of Ext 42A.
“A refugee,” Jared said again.
“Or just backlander,” Annalee said, tugging a crinkle of bangs out of her visor.
Jared shook his head. He wouldn’t let it drop. “What backlander you know would make a run on Crunchtown in broad daylight?”
“A backlander with the r
uns,” I said, and Annalee rolled her eyes. But almost every week HR stunned a backwoods camper sneaking in to poop in our toilets or steal toilet paper from supply. I once cranked open the shower to find a woman, butt-naked, sloughing about four years of grit down the drain. The only woman I’ve ever seen naked in real life, and she was a sixty-five-year-old hillbilly with dirt in her crack.
“Nah. Refugee.” Jared sneezed again. The same month Jared was born, Crunch Snacks and Pharmaceuticals had its worst enviro disaster in history, flooding the river with two hundred tons of toxic chemicals. You could always tell Riverside babies from the sound they made when they breathed, as if they were sucking air through a wet sock.2 “What do you want to bet we get a run of foreigners from the Federation? The Commonwealth’s been rolling blackouts from Chicago to Winnipeg because of the new Security Resolution.”3
“The Commonwealth’s always threatening blackouts,” Annalee pointed out.
“This time, it isn’t just a threat,” Jared insisted. “Half the Federation is dark right now. The servers are going haywire.”
“Spam,” I said. “You can’t trust everything you read on the news. Didn’t anyone tell you that?”
Jared shrugged, like Just wait and see.
“Besides, HR would of pulled the alarm,” I said, but mostly to convince myself. I wasn’t worried about raiders—no one, no matter how strung out on shiver, would dream of attacking Crunchtown, not with its security force and the watchtowers and the HR goons strutting the streets showing off their ammunition (but remembering to smile!).
The problem with foreigners was simple: they carried disease. When I was a kid, a few hundred desperate backlanders, fleeing violence at the border of Sinopec-TeMaRex Affiliated, made it to Crunch 407. The board of directors stuck them down in Low Hill, and a week later half of us were laid flat by the C-1 virus, one of the worst superflus that ever hit. Two thousand crumbs died in less than a week. Now foreigners had to go through quarantine, even if they were just passing through.
“There are two of them,” Annalee said suddenly. “A tall one, and a short one.”
I notched my zoom a little further. She was right: as I watched, the shadow fissured in two and then globbed together again.
“Maybe a dwarf,” Jared said.
“Or a hobbit,” I put in. A few years ago, Billy Lou Ropes had somehow rounded up a few old books—real ones, made of paper—and one of them was called The Hobbit. I’d never gotten used to reading—the text didn’t move or scroll or link to videos; it couldn’t read itself out loud, even—but I liked the picture on the cover, and the smell of the pages, which reminded me of my mom’s old maps.
“Or a child,” Annalee said.
The idea hovered uneasily between us: a little kid, maybe sick with something, maybe starving or thirsty for water or slashed up by the roadslicks who made their living taking tolls from travelers.
Then our SmartBands pulsed a light warning through our wrists. Fifteen minutes to daily login.
“I guess that’s our cue,” Annalee said.
“Hustle and shake,” Jared said, and sighed. “Another day in paradise.”
2
I became a grifter for a real simple reason: I wasn’t good at much of anything else.
—from The Grifter’s Guide to the Territories FKA USA
Most scientists gave the human race another hundred and fifty to two hundred years, tops. Almost everyone agreed the best of human history was behind us. We were, as the human spermicide Dan Ridges once said, on the wrong side of the blow job. It was hard to imagine a time when humans were just getting themselves worked up, when climax was a vision of the not-too-distant future. When there even was a future.
Now, we were in the sticky, smelly, post-climax part of human history.
But sometimes, in the morning, I could almost forget.
We joined the crowds flowing together toward the Crunch 407 Production complex—thousands of us, a single force churning through the narrow Low Hill streets. Buzz saws made a regular electric music: after all the problems with gut wedge, HR was on order to increase the regulation door size. Old holograms shed pixels on every corner, bleating about two-for-one painkillers at the Company Store. Deliverables robots whizzed sample envelopes and small packages through the narrow streets, and from every corner smiling holos reminded us of the importance of the three P’s: Punctuality, Positivity, and Productivity. The sky was the white iron-hot that meant we’d break a hundred before noon, and the wind smelled like a dust storm, shimmering with a blood-red haze: my favorite kind of weather.
Outside of R-Block, we ran into Saanvi Ferrier and Woojin. Woojin was sweating through his usual costume.
“You hear what we did to those HR fuckers at the Rose Bowl last night?” Saanvi asked as she cut her chair left and right to avoid a clutterfuck of trash. Saanvi was captain of a fantasy football team and competed against other company divisions for Crunchbucks and more HealthPass™ days.
“Tell me you nailed them,” I said. There was nothing we hated more than Human Resources. The department fed directly to the Crunch, United, board and worked in deadly secrecy. Its agents were everywhere and nowhere, like a poisonous fart.
“More than nailed,” Saanvi said. She had a dazzling smile, so wide it dimpled all her chins together, and it pained me to think that someday she might look like her mom, completely dayglo, with orange staining even her teeth and the whites of her eyes. “Creamed. It was infinite.”
“Meow,” Woojin said. Ever since the announcement he was transspeciating, it was all he ever said. Woojin didn’t wash his fur nearly enough, and we were careful to walk a few feet in front of him.
“You’re a legend, San,” I said. “Permission to fist-bump?”
“Granted,” she said. Physical contact without verbal consent was illegal in the colony—which wasn’t a bad thing, exactly, but made it pretty awkward for a sixteen-year-old kid hoping and praying he wouldn’t always be a virgin.
Jared was scrolling through his visor feed. “Hey, did you guys see Michael and Addie this morning?” Michael and Addie was the most popular feed in the country.
“Meow,” Woojin said.
“That whole show is staged.” When Annalee shook her head, her black braids caught invisible waves of chemical static, and briefly crackled off some colors. That was Annalee for you: electric. She and I were once neighbors, back when we lived in 12-B. It was lucky I got my hooks in her when we were little. She was way out of my league now, with skin the rich brown color of trees you never saw anymore and the kind of curves you wanted to bed on. Of course, I’d been in love with her forever but in a way that didn’t hurt, like a scar I couldn’t remember getting.
“You really think they could of staged that spew?”
“Why not? It’s called special effects.”
“Uh-uh. No way.” Jared started sneezing so bad even his eyes looked like they were snotting.
“So where’d they find a real egg? Tell me that. And don’t give me some shit about the Denver Airport and some secret underground civilization.”
“It isn’t shit, and isn’t even secret. The Russian Federation and the cartel have been building cities under the surface for years.…”
“Sure, just like the Mars colonists are alive and just choosing not to communicate.…”
“Would you?”
“Meow.”
There were lots of things I hated about Crunch 407. But there were things I liked about it, too, and one of them was this: walking with Annalee and Jared and even Woojin in the sun, while Saanvi whizzed along beside us in her chair, while from their blocks thousands of crumbs poured into the streets and shouted news at one another or stopped to slug a coffee at one of the unofficial canteens hacked out of a tiny square of lobby or a defunct elevator shaft.
Already, I’d completely forgotten the backlanders, or refugees, or whatever they were, making their way to us along a highway of littered wreckage.
“Is a road still a road
if it doesn’t go anywhere?” Annalee asked me once after a party in the old parking garage on the south side of Low Hill, where the serious dimeheads went to get high. She dropped her head on my shoulder—she didn’t even ask first. “Does time exist if nothing ever changes?”
Which is one of those questions that makes you think you should never have smoked embalming fluid in the first place.
* * *
We said goodbye to Saanvi and Woojin just inside the main gates. Five minutes later, Jared and Annalee peeled off toward the trolley that would take them to Uphill. Jared did New Business for Public Liaisons, and he was good. No surprise: He was the only guy I knew who could legitimately get excited about the release of Bolognese-Flavored CrunchItalian™ Bread Things or the fact that the company was running a holiday raffle through its advertising department, the prize equal to a week away at the Crunch Wellness Retreat in Ouachita National Forest, or what was left of it. Annalee worked in Remediation through the DoJ, which meant that she spent her days fielding angry livestreams from people demanding refunds when their CrunchChipz™ turned out to be composed mostly of glue, or their OrangeJuz™, over time, actually turned them orange.
“I hope you crunch it today,” Jared said with a grin and a sneeze.
I looked around to make sure no HR monkeys were lurking around, then gave him the finger.
“See you in the Commons?” Annalee called back—like she needed to ask. Every night we hung out in the Commons, a cozy little den of shaggy couches and old carpet, at least until the nighttime blackout took down the server and our VR. It was too risky to try to hang out in person once the dimeheads were out.
An HR goon stationed at the corner spitting venom through his teeth gave me the old once-over.
“Better hurry up,” he said. “Or you’ll be late.” Like I didn’t have my SmartBand to tell me.