by Brian Savage
Agents weren’t “hated” in the traditional sense of the word. They were tolerated with extreme unfriendliness. Not unfriendliness in the sense that they were openly discriminated against, but unfriendliness in that if someone could interact with them without saying a word, they would. It went so far as to affect clothing sponsorships.
Jack didn’t seem to care; in fact, he loved that no one wanted to be seen sponsoring agents. It meant his clothing wasn’t a patchwork of corporate advertising. In the new capitalistic system, anyone could afford anything they wanted. Americans, from day one, wanted the newest and the best. The Corporation gave it to them, and the employee who came up with the idea was probably on some beach in the Gulf of Starbucks, relaxing on his early pension. You see, in order to afford the newest and the best, the employee thought, Why not sign them up with an advertising contract? The contract stipulated that they would only be allowed to wear that specific brand for the rest of their lives. This, of course, would be in exchange for the “sponsoring” company making it cheap enough that the person signing the contract would be able to afford the clothing. The clothes wouldn’t be free, but they would be affordable.
This inevitably led to the companies using these conscripted walking billboards as a way to advertise the other brands they owned, which led to pretty much all clothing being a patchwork of gaudy corporate logos. Jack watched the people passing within the perimeter of his tactical awareness.
A Coke jacket with fifteen logos, including Nestle. A Procter & Gamble suit with Johnson & Johnson across the shoulders. People didn’t think anything of this. This was their normal. Walking through the crowd, Jack knew that everyone noticed the clothing devoid of logos, and the tell-tale jackets they were wearing. That’s why, in a sea of faces, the sea parted as they passed. No one turned a head or gave them a second glance, but Jack knew they noticed. Companies, likewise, noticed the disdain the public had for the public terminations of employees, and those that enacted the Corporate policy. That’s why, no matter the fact that the terminations were publicly televised, the bright orange jumpsuits the accused wore were bare of logos, and why the clothing of agents were just as bare.
Jack continued to scan the crowd as he walked, hands in his pockets. He didn’t look back, but he knew Brant would be close behind and to the left. Brant was left-handed, which made the tactical formation perfect in case both weapons needed to address a threat at once. He didn’t expect a threat, but years of training told him that at any moment there could be one. Every once in a while, an aerial would land, and a large group of people displaced would forget that they were walking next to the two agents and close in. Jack would keep walking, the crowd would eventually remember his presence, and their usual the distance would reappear.
Jack allowed himself to look down for a bit, knowing that Brant would never allow such a tactical faux pas. He watched the concrete squares of sidewalk change color beneath his feet. He had walked this path so many times before, he could tell which building they were next to by the color of the man-made stone. Clean, white, new-looking concrete was the American Bank building, a facade of black marble with white marble steps that were extremely treacherous in the winter. Grungy, dirty-looking stone was the non-profit of such-and-such company, who hired the very people it fed to clean the sidewalks and front of the building. This, coupled with the fact that when they closed for the night, with beds full, the overflow slept, pissed, and lived on that very sidewalk they cleaned during the day, kept it grimy with a layer of trash. Job security. Jack smiled grimly to himself.
The next few stones were painted all in logos, real and imagined, peppering the sidewalk like corporate graffiti. This was the front of the Pentagram Design University that doubled as a marketing and design firm. Tuition could be paid in the traditional sense, or aside from your normal classes, you could complete projects and bids for the firm. This was the case with every single university across the New Corporate States of America. Traditional universities, which had grown ever more expensive before the Second Civil War, were completely recreated in the aftermath. Now completely specialized based on the career path a student chose, students could get direct work experience in their field, and classes at the cost of work done. A portion of the student’s tuition would be paid based on the contract the student worked on, the hours worked, and how large a part the student played in the finished project. This type of program had multiple effects across academia: it made universities profitable and relevant, cut drop-out rates down to single digits, and gave experience to students, which padded their resumes for the job market. Oh, the beauty of capitalism.
Jack stepped on a smiling Pringles logo, and a pot leaf with sunglasses giving a thumbs up, painted on the sidewalk. He looked back up. The crowd had thinned out some while he had his little sidewalk identification game. He stopped at the corner of the university and ducked into the alley, which was really a driveway for the adjacent apartment building. He nodded at the guard in the booth a little further up. Unzipping his jacket, he withdrew a small cigar case from the inner pocket. Brant stood a few steps away, looking up and down the alley, constantly scanning.
“Relax, Brant, the socialists aren’t coming for us,” Jack ribbed. Brant’s annoyance at the jab showed clearly on his face.
Jack struck a match on the aging brick wall. He held the flame to the end of the cigar, about the size of a grown man’s pointer finger, and puffed a few times until a thick cloud of smoke escaped his lips.
“Why do you poison yourself like that? That shit gives you cancer.” Brant was still a little miffed that Jack had basically called him scared.
“You eat the dollar burgers at the shithole by the academy; who do you actually think is going to get cancer first?” Jack retorted. “I know the only thing in this cigar that will give me cancer is the tobacco. You couldn’t name one ingredient in those mystery-meat sandwiches you shove in your face.”
Brant shook his head. He knew Jack was right. The food served nowadays was much more dangerous to your health than the unregulated tobacco market, or even the unregulated drug market. There were no regulations on how or where you got the ingredients in the food you served, you just had to be honest in your advertising of that food. This created situations for the fast food chains that enabled them to take over more and more of the restaurant space, and not through true competition, better prices, or even being the number-one choice of the consumers. Fast food chains dominated the market through corporate power. What small restaurant location could compete with a billion-dollar, “shit on a shingle”-slinging company? Jack thoughtfully puffed on his cigar, leaning against the red brick wall.
Now, at these sleazy locations, they had one menu with the same thing under every numbered meal. The one Brant loved so much, directly adjacent to the police academy through no accident, had ten menu items, numbered one through ten. Coincidentally, the price of each of these menu items was one dollar up to ten dollars. The lower the price, the more mysterious the origin of the ingredients and what they were made from. The one time Brant had convinced Jack to try it, Jack had disgustedly eaten half of the ten-dollar burger, one fry, and wouldn’t even sip the only drinks available. He had watched even more disgustedly as Brant devoured three of the one-dollar burgers, the large fry, and half of the large soda. Jack often wondered at how Brant stayed so fit when he knew Brant visited that establishment almost every day.
He remembered a news story about the food at that place. Someone had studied the food and found doses of known addictive chemicals in the food, the dollar burger being the highest-dosed food on the menu. The story had been taken off the feed within thirty-six hours of airing. The restaurant, if you could even call it that, didn’t even see a dip in sales. Jack shook his head. He looked down at his cigar, tapped the ash into the alley, and puffed again. And yet, this is what’s going to give me cancer, he humorously thought to himself.
“You know, you should try one. Might relax you a bit,” Jack said to his partner, ex
tending the cigar case toward him.
Brant hesitated a second. “Nah, I’ll stick with my double cancer with cheese,” he joked.
Jack smiled. “You gotta do something to keep that girlish figure.”
“The ladies love me.” Brant smiled back.
Jack took a last puff and tossed the stub into the alley. The guard looked up from the screen in front of him and stuck his head out the side of the booth. “Hey, pick it up, asshole.”
Jack and Brant had already started making their way back out onto the street and didn’t even bother turning around. The guard stood up, sliding open the door on the booth and half stepping out, when a flash of light caught Jack’s jacket, illuminating the hexagonal pattern of the material.
The guard stopped. “Never mind,” he muttered to himself. He went back to his booth and slid the door shut. “Fucking D.I.E.”
Jack and Brant made their way back onto the sidewalk and continued left. Jack kept his eyes up, and Brant moved into the same half-chevron formation as before. The buildings on their left and on their right across the street began to get shorter and shorter, and less like the buildings New York had in the history feed. They became newer and newer, but hadn’t grown back quite as high as they had once been, before they were cut down. Jack was on edge.
He was always on edge when he entered this part of City Prime. The capital of the New Corporate States of America, it had once been New York City. The capitalists had seen this as one of the most important cities for world trade, but it had been a hotbed of socialist ideologies and was hard won. Jack remembered well the firebombing that had wiped out entire swaths of the city, heat so intense that the concrete warped and the metal spires that once stood, named for the greatest capitalists of all time, bent down at the feet of the new capitalist might. He had been a part of the clearing teams, sweeping floor after floor, door to door, searching for socialists and socialist sympathizers. Agonizingly long and slow movements from one room of friendlies to one room of enemies, with nothing differentiating them besides the occasional gun pointed in the wrong direction.
Jack knew mistakes had been made. Elbows deep in the guts of a mother who had turned a corner at the wrong time, he had cried in front of his team for the first time. Jack gritted his teeth. Memories like this were best left for a strong drink and the solitude of his apartment. No one could blame us, he reasoned to himself. They asked the impossible in an even more impossible amount of time.
In the few months the battle had raged, hundreds if not thousands of civilians had been caught in the crossfire that was the battle for Prime City. No one really knew the truth except the men and women who had been there. The men and women who had pulled the triggers, and the men and women who never had a chance. All the bodies not a part of the capitalist army were placed together, labeled as socialists, and buried without ceremony.
A remnant of those days battling above, below, and through a city built like a maze, was the part of the job that Jack hated even more than the terminations. Part of the detection and investigation of socialism was clearing old buildings and checking seemingly abandoned parts of what was left of the old city. Rooting out the last of the socialists, who even now planted bombs at random intervals or shot up crowds of people at Corporate rallies, was a huge priority to the new President and CEO of the Corporation, and assignments in the dark sector, as it was called amongst the agents, had doubled since his hiring.
Seems like everything is ramping up, he thought as they continued on. Now they were entering the restricted part of the city. They bypassed a line through the first checkpoint on what was the First Ring. There were three rings of security around the capital building of the New Corporate States. Each of the three rings increased in security as you neared the capital, with the final ring allowing only those whose positions also required the black metallic implant.
The border of the First Ring was a slick white metal wall that cut across the street and sidewalks. At three stories high, it could be seen over the tops of all the buildings directly adjacent. This was also a story taller than the max altitude the aerials were allowed to venture. Aerials flying into the First Ring would enter through a specialized door twenty to thirty feet above ground level, checking in with the guards standing on a platform and controlling the gate.
On the ground, pedestrians entering the ring were funneled to two small doors on either side of the street. Concrete barriers six feet high placed askew the door forced everyone into single file lines starting around a hundred meters from the entrances. Between these foot traffic entrances was a larger door, matching the one directly above, used for the occasional gasser making deliveries or carrying agents. Security was tight here but surprisingly ran smoothly, with identification checks all being digital now. Exits from the ring were on either side a block over, and entrances and exits alternated as such all the way around the ring. The one-way system helped alleviate lines and sped up the movement of a large number of people.
The lines backed up during peak rush hour, with everyone working within the rings but living in the cheaper outer city, entering and exiting by the designated security points. Jack and Brant stepped off the sidewalk and into the streets. Jack looked back over his shoulder down the road out of habit; the likelihood of getting hit by a gasser was about the same as getting hit by lighting, but you could never be too careful.
The rain had slowed since coming out of the Human Resources Building; it was nothing more than a drizzle now. The front of Jack’s clothing was damp. He enjoyed the feel of the cool air under his jacket. He walked toward the larger, gasser entrance, not looking left or right at the lines of people on both sidewalks. The people in line watched the two agents impassively, seemingly indifferent to their presence. Jack felt like a ghost, passing by noticed and feared, but ignored.
A lone guard with a short black rifle approached Jack and Brant, stopping around ten feet from the gate.
“How’re ya doing, sirs?” he asked, giving them a quick nod. Jack nodded back, but neither Brant nor he responded to the polite inquiry. “It will just be a minute.”
Jack waited on the OK to pass from the guard. He knew that a tiny digital scanner was reading information from their implants to verify their identification; the scanner was concealed somewhere on the guard’s body, and communicated directly with the silver metal implant below the guard’s right ear. Jack looked at the guard. Young, probably early 20s, skin-fade haircut, and no facial hair. Most likely one of the cadets at the police academy paying a little tuition by working the gate. The way he was acting, he probably wanted to be an agent—he was trying to be so nonchalant, but he was coming off as hyper-vigilant. The guard made eye contact with Jack, the older-looking of the pair. He was trying to figure out if this was the right time to ask career advice. The guard started to say something, but was interrupted by the audio-notification of the complete security check.
“Agent Ripley, Agent Trapp, you’re cleared to enter,” the officer said, turning quickly and walking toward the gate that was now creeping its way open. Jack caught the name plate as the officer turned. Savage.
What a great name, he thought.
Officer Savage stopped and moved to the left as another officer came through the gate and to the right. The two officers posted-up at positions on either side of the gate, which had stopped opening at the width of a man’s shoulders.
“Stay safe, you guys,” Brant said, ducking through just behind Jack.
Emerging on the other side, the door they had come in through closed behind them and the second one began to open. They made their way forward, glancing up at the metal grate platforms with guards dispersed at random intervals on either side of the space, which would fit about two gassers at a time. They couldn’t see anyone, as the pedestrian lanes were blocked off from the gasser lane by ten-foot-high concrete barriers, but they could hear the two lines of people in low murmurs, talking as they passed through security. Jack didn’t envy the time it must take to pass through wi
thout the level of clearance he had. He slipped sideways through the gate and continued straight ahead.
What opened before them was a large concrete park of sorts, with four raised beds holding one tree each, and a variety of flowers. In the center of the four beds, laid out like a four-square court, was a large metal overhang, which shielded most of the area beneath from the rain that just never seemed to quit. The problem with the overhang was that it was made to be more artistic than functional; it had a strange, warped, triangular shape that didn’t cover a third of the benches present. This left multiple seats almost permanently vacant. Jack liked this; he always had a place to sit, and besides, he loved the rain.
The rain rarely stopped. This was due mainly to the extensiveness of the cities that had been built. On the history feed, it was talked about how, at one time, there had been huge swaths of the country completely open, untouched, and uninhabited by people. After the Second Civil War, when things were made right, every inch of land belonged to somebody. What didn’t already belong to someone was sold by the Corporation to anyone with money in hand, to raise money to rebuild the damage rent by a country that tried to eat itself. The cities sprang from once-empty land, population boomed, and things like farming adapted to even more efficiency than before. Why grow one crop in an open field affected by the weather when you could have a three-story grow house, each level a different crop; a closely controlled eco system powered by solar panels? It worked extremely well for a while.
Exactly as some environmentalists had predicted, or so the history feed said, the increase in solar farms affected the weather, causing an increase in humidity that created a near-permanent rainy season, only truly interrupted by the snowy season of the winter. Now massive, rigid airships were used to get solar panels high above the cloud cover. Their long cables, as thick as a man’s arm, could be seen dotting the city, small fences with “High Voltage” signs warning passersby.