Deprecated

by Michael Karr

  “The sanctions comprehend two parts. One, food rations will be decreased by fifty percent.”

  Angry shouts erupted from the crowd. Not a few mothers in the crowd held trembling hands to their mouths, likely wondering how they would keep their families from starving on such meager rations. Around the platform, the Regulators tightened their ranks and pointed their assault rifles at the unruly crowd. Gunfire pierced through the noise, as several Regulators fired warning shots into the air.

  Rylee shook her head, recalling another of her grandfather’s lessons. A bullet shot into the sky will eventually come down. And it can kill a person just as surely as if you had pointed the gun directly at them.

  Idiots.

  The shots had their effect. The people knew the drill. Next time, the warning shots would be fired into the crowd at random.

  O’Conner continued, ignoring the crowd teetering on the brink of rioting. “Food rations shall remain fixed at fifty percent until this matter has been satisfactorily resolved. The second part of the sanctions involves Deprecation.”

  A collective shudder at the mention of that word ran through the crowd.

  “In two week’s time,” continued O’Conner, “if the culprits have not been found, the Deprecation age shall be lowered five years. All sixty or older shall be Deprecated.”

  Cries of dismay.

  Not waiting for the crowd’s fury to unleash like a pack of rabid mutts, Chief O’Connor turned on her heel, marched off the back of the platform, and disappeared into a large black vehicle. As soon as she was inside, the vehicle sped off, Regulators trailing in its wake on their electrocycles.

  Rylee watched it all in shock, repeating the news to herself as though in a trance. The Deprecation age, unless someone found who was murdering these high-ranking Elects, would be reduced to sixty.

  Precisely her grandfather’s age.

  ELEVEN

  William sighed and leaned back in his chair, ignoring another of Adrianna’s messages. Sometimes he wished he could shut his PNU off…permanently. If nothing else, it would end the constant intrusions into his thoughts. He couldn’t though. Of that he felt certain. He relied on its abilities far too much. And, for as much as he complained sometimes, deep down he knew he liked the telepathic abilities his PNU afforded.

  He was tired and stressed. That was all. And the thought of dealing with Adrianna didn’t help.

  The fact that he felt stressed, added to his stress. He shouldn’t feel stressed. He’d finished the latest assignment from his father several days ago. After coding for months on end, often working through the night, scarcely sleeping, subsisting off nothing but energy drinks, he ought to be sleeping or relaxing. Anything that didn’t involve code or work in any form. But his mind refused to allow either.

  Sure, he could utilize his PNU to suppress his anxiety. The PNUs could synthesize any emotion. But doing so for too long could be damaging. As addictive as Lander’s own obsession with SimComps. Besides, PNU emotion-synthesis wouldn’t solve the underlying problem. That was one thing that could drive him to work all night—unsolved problems. The more challenging and perplexing the problem, the more likely he was to relentlessly pursue its solution.

  This wasn’t a coding problem. The problem was…well, that’s what troubled him. He didn’t know what the problem was. Only that he felt something amiss. It was the same feeling he’d been having for several days. Of course, he could blame the feeling on the death—murder—of Garrison Pike. There was more to it than that, though.

  Swirling around in his chair, he stopped so that he faced the windows of his office. The same gray clouds hung in the sky. No sign of storms, or anything brewing outside. He yawned—his overloaded brain trying to cool down. Perhaps he should respond to Adrianna. She could help distract him.

  No. He refused to succumb to that temptation.

  He should find Lander. The two of them could do…something. Preferably an activity that didn’t involve Sims. In the last few months, the two of them had spent little time together. He didn’t know what they’d do. Work consumed so much of his life these days that he struggled to remember what life was like before, when he had more discretionary time.

  When they were younger, they enjoyed pranking unsuspecting victims. Regulators were a particularly fun target. They liked hacking into Regulation’s secure communication channels and sending messages to lower ranking Regulators which looked like they came from a senior officer. Message spoofing. Always good for endless entertainment. One time he and Lander tricked a Regulator into trying to arrest the Chief of Regulation’s daughter.

  William smiled at the memory. Of course, they’d been caught for that one. A verbal reprimand had been their only punishment, though.

  Sending spoof messages between a girlfriend and boyfriend was fun too.

  But William was twenty-one, now. And an Engineer Lead at his father’s laboratories. The days of programming mice to scare girls in the shower, imitating Regulation officers, and causing breakups between love-struck teens were over. Well, maybe mostly over.

  Standing up, he raised his arms, stretching out his whole body. Where was Lander, anyway?

  He sent a direct message to Lander using a private protocol they’d created years ago. It permitted them to communicate without anyone snooping. I need a break, he messaged. Where are you?

  He waited for Lander’s sarcastic reply, mocking William’s full sentences and proper grammar. It was a running joke between them. William refused to compose his messages as though he were some kind of alien toddler who didn’t know a single complete English word. To William, there was no excuse for the lazy—often cryptic—lingo that suffused most PNU messages amongst the adolescent population. Maybe forty years ago, when you had to physically type each letter of the word. These days, all you had to do was think it. To William, it was more work to try and think in the bizarre messaging jargon.

  A full minute passed. No response from Lander.

  Likely too busy with his latest SimComp.

  Deciding to go find his friend, William left the office and took the elevator to the studio apartment he and Lander shared. He found it empty, no sign of Lander. And still no response to his PNU message. Where was that idiot?

  William went over to the kitchen and opened the refrigerator. A single unopened energy drink sat on the top shelf. The shelf had been practically full a few days ago. Had Lander drunken that many since then? At least, one was left. He reached in and grabbed it.

  Unscrewing the plastic cap, he moved to bring the bottle to his lips. But paused. What was that? He turned the bottle around and inspected its side. Affixed to it, edges curling up slightly, was a piece of…paper. Paper? Scrawled on the paper in a messy hand were the letters 7-5-M-Y-Z-1. 75MYZ1.

  Had Lander put that there? A written note on paper? William was so busy puzzling over why Lander would do such a thing that it took him a minute to recognize what was written. When he finally stopped to look at it, he immediately identified it.

  Back when he and Lander were learning about data encryption, they’d devised their own custom cipher algorithm. A variant of the old Caesar Shift, but with their own twist. At the time, they thought they were quite clever. Of course, they were only eleven at the time. Their cipher used the standard English alphabet, offsetting it by some integer. The offset-value changed with each cipher, the creator writing it at the beginning of the message. Naïve. The offset-value wasn’t completely obvious, though. The person deciphering the message had to divide the value by seventeen to attain the actual offset. Lander had chosen the multiple. Entirely random.

  The only part of the algorithm which showed any promise was that vowels could be dropped at the creator’s discretion. The only indication of the missing letters would be a string of indices at the end of the message. It mitigated the chance of a quick decipher by unwanted eyes. Though, in reality, any brute-force algorithm could crack the code in a matter of minutes—or less—given a long enough sample of the encrypted
message.

  Most people, however, wouldn’t give this seemingly random scribble of numbers and letters a second thought.

  Utilizing his PNU, he deciphered the message. Dividing the prefixed seventy-five by seventeen produced five. That was the offset for the cipher. The trailing single digit one, using zero-based indexing, meant that the second letter in the word—a vowel—was omitted. The ciphered text HDE flashed within his PNU-augmented vision.

  The only logical missing vowel, was an I.

  HIDE.

  TWELVE

  Duncan’s Warehouse stood on the south western-most tip of the old industrial district, far out of the way of Regulation’s notice. At least, far enough out of the way that it passed the notice of Regulators making their usual rounds. Or maybe Regulation knew of it but decided to turn a blind eye to it. Of course, if Regulation ever did raid the place, they’d find plenty of Deps—those with Deprecated status, but hadn’t been caught and officially Deprecated. Deps usually didn’t last long. But Duncan’s warehouse attracted them like sewer rats to rotting food.

  From the outside, the warehouse looked no different than all the other decaying warehouses. On the inside the building was alive. Alive with propane lanterns hung from the ceiling, which struggled to keep the night’s darkness at bay with their sallow glow. Alive with a raucous crowd, faces begrimed and clothes soiled from a long day’s work in the fields or the sewers. Alive with smells, sweat and grease and cheap alcohol and bodies that hadn’t bathed in weeks. Alive with the motives that drove the people of the slums to Duncan’s Warehouse every Wednesday night.

  Most people came to Duncan’s warehouse to bet on the races or to waste a few rations on a dram of whiskey to chase away the burdens of a hard life. Some came to escape the monotony of slum life. Rylee came for a different reason.

  Rylee, Preston, and Feng pushed their way through the crowd waiting for the races to begin. A girl, whose arm was held in a sling, passed them on the right, eyes sunken and dark rimmed. A Dep. Injured and unable to work, the girl had been Deprecated. Rylee didn’t need to ask the girl her story to know it. She’d seen it hundreds of times before. Unlike many before her, this girl stood a chance at survival. A pretty face could do that. Deps like her could usually find someone willing to exchange rations for….Rylee didn’t like to think about it. If she had rations to spare, she might have shared them with the girl. Given what she was about to do, she definitely did not have any to spare.

  In the center of the warehouse, a tall chain-link fence cordoned off the racing rink. At the far end of the rink, was another cordoned off area called the pit. Both fenced areas were topped with razor-wire to prevent tampering and interference. Not that any sane person would tamper with a race. The penalty for such an infraction was a severed hand—which for any Norm was as good a Deprecation sentence as any.

  Though Rylee couldn’t see him, she suspected Serghei was in the pit at that moment, preparing Grant for one of the races.

  “I’ll go place our bets,” said Preston, shouting to be heard over the din of the crowd.

  Rylee nodded her head. With Preston gone, she and Feng continued to push their way through the crowd, in search of a place to watch the race from. They passed a group of Norms seated about a makeshift table—an old wooden cable spool, turned on its end—drinking, and listening to a sailor spew out a tale from his travels. Anytime a ship came into port, you could find sailors at Duncan’s warehouse, exchanging stories of the outside world for shots of whiskey.

  On more than one occasion, Rylee had listened to those stories. Sea storms with waves that could swallow an entire ship whole. Great cities once home to millions of people, now deserted, but for the bones of the people who died. She never listened for long. It was all death and destruction. And if she listened too long, the sailors started to slur their words and make ridiculous claims that were obviously false.

  The sailors were the only ones Rylee knew brave enough to venture out into the outside world. Though, at their core, sailors were just glorified scavengers. Going from deserted city to deserted city, pilfering whatever supplies they could find to trade with the Alliance. From the sailor’s stories, very few people lived outside the Alliance. Most sailors had only come across a handful of settlements—twenty to thirty poor souls, fighting to stay alive—among all their travels. Of course, few sailors lived more than one or two years before drowning, disease, or a pack of feral dogs ended their life.

  There was one sailor who’d managed to live nine years out on the seas. People called him Moby Dick. When he came to Duncan’s warehouse, people fought to get within spitting distance of the man. His glass never went dry.

  But Rylee wasn’t here to hear a sailor’s drunken tale, either. Pushing their way deeper into the warehouse, she and Feng came to a set of metal stairs which took them to a loft. This too was packed with people. Still, they managed to squeeze into a space along the railing.

  From this higher vantage point, they had a clear view of the rink. Most of the lanterns in the warehouse hung above the oval shaped race track.

  The races were simple. The first animal to cross the finish line after completing the requisite number of laps around the rink won. The number of laps depended on the category. Serghei’s rat would race in the rodent division. As such it would only have to complete three laps. In the larger size and weight divisions which included dogs and cats, and the occasional wolf or coyote, the animals had to complete fifteen laps.

  The fact that rats, and sometimes wolves and coyotes, were involved didn’t make the races particularly unique. It was their common robotic body parts. Like Serghei’s rat, all of the animals were in some way modified by cybernetics. Rodent cyborgs. Freaks of nature. The animals were only rivaled in abnormality by their masters. Norms like Serghei—smart enough, resourceful enough, and yet twisted enough to spend their time turning an injured animal into a racing machine.

  With a crowd like tonight’s, though, she could hardly blame anyone for creating a racer. A hefty winner’s cup awaited the victor. A month’s worth of food rations, maybe two. And a handful of other valuables—gasoline, ammunition, blankets, cigarettes.

  No paper and coin currency existed in the Alliance. She didn’t know what Elects used for their currency, but in the slums food controlled everything. And why not? It was blasted hard to get enough of it. And now, with the announced decreases in rations? The worth of food just skyrocketed. Which also meant what she was about to do was insane.

  Rylee watched the crowd below press against the fence surrounding the rink, desperate for their chosen animal to win. Was she any less desperate? A heightened tension electrified the air. Much was at stake tonight.

  She breathed in deeply and forced herself to stay calm. The pungent odor of the warehouse assaulted her nose. The smell of a hundred different kinds of filth. The warehouse odor only partially overwhelmed the smell of fish coming from Feng, who stood just inches from her.

  “Do you really think Serghei’s lousy rat can win this thing?” Feng shouted over the crowd. Rylee didn’t respond. “If it were my rations at stake, I’d bet on the squirrel—Mr. Rabies, or whatever its name is. Have you seen that thing? All foaming at the mouth. All it has to do is bite all the other racers, and it’s game over.”

  Serghei has to win.

  Preston returned from placing their bet a few minutes later, and made a spot for himself next to her. Though they were packed so tightly Rylee struggled to breathe, she felt better to have Preston’s warm body next to her. She always felt better when he was around. Since that first day when she was seven, alone and afraid, he’d been there for her when she needed him.

  Soon the wail of a steel alarm bell signaled the last call for bets to be placed and for trainers to move their animals into position. Rylee watched, scratching at the back of her hand as the trainers entered. The pale, lanky form of Serghei, gingerly holding Grant in his hands, stood out from the other trainers. He looked to be stroking the rat’s head and talking
to it. Probably giving it a pep talk or some other crazy idea that only Serghei would think of.

  Let him talk to it, massage it—whatever it takes. Just so long as that rat wins. Please win.

  If she were her grandfather, she’d probably be praying right now. If he were there, she’d probably encourage him to. Not that she believed it would help. Then again, if her grandfather were there and knew she had just bet a weeks’ worth of rations on a race, she would be in major trouble. But if Grant didn’t win this race and she lost those rations, he would find out eventually. That worry, however, was least on her mind.

  With the extra rations they would win, she’d have enough to pay an informant. Only a handful of informants lived in the slums. Among them, there was only one worth his salt. That is, if his reputation was to be believed. Uriah Mounts was his name. Sources claimed he always made an appearance at the races, and that he had connections inside Regulation. If anyone from the slums knew anything about the recent murders, Uriah Mounts was the one. And Rylee intended to suck all the information she could out of him.

  There was no way she was going to leave it to Regulation to find the perpetrator of the murders. Not when her grandfather’s life depended on it. Deprecation. Just another name for death. Any Norm who reached the age of sixty-five was automatically Deprecated. Disenfranchised from the Alliance. Serial number erased from the system. No barcode meant no food rations. By law, Deprecated members were not permitted within the city. Every week, truckloads of fugitives were found and carted off to either be executed or dumped outside the city’s border, where armed border guards would ensure they did not return.

  No one survived long outside the city. When she was younger, she often saw corpses along the roadside, as the trucks carried her and the other children to the fields each day to work. In the summer, fresh bodies would be engulfed in black plumage, as ravens and vultures picked away the flesh, leaving only skeletons and mangled bits of cloth that had been clothes. Once, she’d witnessed a man trying to get one of the trucks to stop. He ended up crushed behind the truck’s wheels. Rylee still could recall the sickening crunch, and the bump of the truck as it went over the man’s body.