by Rob Hart
The world is in a sorry state, and I’m trying to help. Has everything I’ve done been perfect? Hell no. That’s the price of progress. Making Cloud was like making an omelet, just like any business. Some eggs had to be broken along the way. Not that I ever felt good about breaking eggs. It’s never something I took pleasure in. But the end result is the thing that matters. You know what I’ve always said, what I’ve been saying for years: the market dictates. Nearly had that tattooed on my shoulder at one point, during a period of youthful folly. I never went through with it—I’m not too proud to admit I’m afraid of needles—but it is on a piece of paper that I stuck above my desk on that first day that I started Cloud.
That same piece of paper is still there. A small slip, yellowed, cracked, the words barely legible. But I had that phrase put on mugs and hung around our offices. I have lived and breathed it. Succeeded and failed by it.
The market dictates.
If the market says: this thing can be cheaper for the consumer, it can be delivered more efficiently, it can make a difference in people’s lives, I say, let’s do it!
You know, I remember, years ago, we were dealing with this pickle company. Molly can tell you, I love pickles. And I loved the pickles this company made, but they were pretty expensive, and our customers weren’t really too hot on paying as much as the company was charging, which I think was something like five dollars for a jar.
So we went to them and we said, “Let us work with you.” We helped them change their packaging. We helped them better source their ingredients. We got them to switch from glass to plastic and that alone saved them a ton of money on shipping, because then the trucks leaving their warehouses were lighter and they could spend less money on gas.
The ultimate goal was to get them down to two dollars a jar, which is what our customers wanted to pay. But they insisted on three fifty. And we told them, look at the amount of money you’re saving now. You could easily do two. And they said no, they couldn’t, and gave me this song and dance about what it would mean for their back end and having to change their internal structure, and I said, great, you should do that, and let us know if you need a hand with it.
Anyway, long story short, they wouldn’t budge, so I said fine. I’ll give my customers what they’re asking for: pickles for two dollars a jar. That’s what led to the creation of Cloud Pickles. I don’t care what anyone says, I like our brand of pickles more than theirs.
They eventually went out of business. And I never want to see someone out of a job, but that was on them. All they had to do was meet us in the middle, and we would have been able to do great things together. You would be amazed to find out how many pickles we sell. People really like them and they keep pretty well and that works out pretty good for everyone.
The market dictates.
I remember when that happened a couple of people got mad at me, but you know what? If I can provide a product or a service for people, and it’s cheaper, and just as good, and it lets them put the money they saved toward something else—more food, housing, health care, even a night on the town—I will gladly do that. The whole point of Cloud was to make people’s lives easier. There are plenty of companies that worked with us to cut costs and now they’re thriving. They don’t work with us because they have to, they do it because they want to.
I’m sorry, I’m veering a little off topic here. Haven’t been sleeping so good lately. There’s this pain in my gut now, like a slow-burning fire. Like coals at the bottom of a barbecue. You don’t think they’re hot, but they are. That heat is reaching up to my head. I’ve been getting real annoyed at things lately and I’ve been working on not being so annoyed, because I want to meet my maker with a smile on my face, not a sneer.
Point is, I won’t apologize for being rich. And I am sure that when my time comes, when I cross that line, I won’t be sent down to hell for the simple fact of the work that I did. Man has to be judged on more than that.
Twenty years ago the United States was responsible for 5.4 million tons of carbon dioxide. This past year it was less than a million. That’s it! A lot of that can be attributed to what we did at Cloud, and you better believe the mandate I’ve given Claire is to get that even lower. I don’t want Cloud to be carbon neutral. I want it to be carbon negative. I want us sucking carbon out of the air. I want those rising sea levels to recede. I want people in coastal cities to return to their homes. I want a Miami that doesn’t look so much like Venice did. I want Venice back.
Should I be condemned to eternal damnation for that?
PAXTON
“Put these on,” Dakota said, handing Paxton a pair of sunglasses.
They cut down on the glare significantly and made it easier to focus on the utter chaos of the roof. He couldn’t see the edges, so standing on it gave the feel of standing in the middle of a busy field. The sun shone off solar panels embedded in the ground, and dotted around the landscape were shed-sized bays, where boxes rose through a lift system and could be attached to waiting drones.
The workers wore orange. Many of them wore long-sleeved white shirts under their polos, and wide floppy hats, water canteens hanging from their belts. The docking bays provided some shade, but not much, especially now, at the height of the day.
“They don’t have orange in the introductory video,” Paxton said.
“This is one of the shittier details,” Dakota said. “They don’t show the shitty colors.”
Paxton was overwhelmed by the scene, by the sound of it, or really, the lack thereof. The drones were nearly silent. There was an electric buzz all around him, like an insect that was close but darting around the edge of his vision. He could feel it on his skin.
“You really think this is it?” she asked.
He had told her the story about the drone at the prison. He verified with her and Dobbs that there weren’t many security officers up here, because they weren’t really needed. Everything that came up was boxed and recorded by the CloudBands so nobody could steal anything. The workers had their own exit where they queued up at the end of shift. More important than security officers was having a med team up here, because of the constant danger of heatstroke and dehydration. Every loading bay included signage reminding workers to stay hydrated, and there were fountains everywhere, with two spigots—one for water, one for sunscreen.
“Where do we even start?” Dakota asked, looking over the field, at thousands of workers, and miles of flat space, and swarms of drones that blotted out the sun like a passing cloud, delivering moments of relief that never lasted long enough.
“At the beginning,” Paxton said, taking a few steps, making sure Dakota was following, and then continuing on, walking down the striped paths where workers could safely travel, marked off with yellow reflective tape so it was easy to see, so that nobody crossed onto the dark surfaces of the solar panels, which looked like perfectly square pools of still water.
Every station was the same: a flurry of workers, drones moving up and down through the air, oddly shaped packages sprayed in weatherproof cardboard foam. No one paid them any mind. Which was what Paxton was counting on. He wasn’t interested in the people who weren’t interested in him.
One of the lessons he’d learned in prison was: You don’t look for the handoff. You look for the side-eye. That frightened glance, the tension that builds up in muscles. The badge reflecting off frightened eyes. Prisoners were professionals at subterfuge. You had to become an expert not on seeing the hidden things, but on seeing the people who were doing the hiding.
They walked for an hour. It was more of a stroll. They got a few looks, but more What are they doing here? looks, not Oh shit, it’s the fuzz looks. Paxton knew the difference. So he walked, watching faces, watching hands, watching shoulders, as Dakota grew more anxious. Audibly sighing, stopping to drink water, stopping to pump out globs of sunscreen that she rubbed on her neck and face,
until her skin was pasty white and the black void of her sunglasses made her look like a skeleton roaming the blazing-hot roof.
At one point, Paxton saw a familiar figure and turned a little in that direction, just to be sure. It was Vikram, in a wide-brimmed hat and sunglasses, a canteen of water dangling from his belt. His shirt gone from blue to navy because it was soaked with sweat. He was slightly turned away, watching a group of men and women in brown servicing a drone that was sitting on the ground. Paxton wanted to get closer, so Vikram could see him, be reminded of who had won, but decided against it. It was petty. He rejoined Dakota, who was taking a long slug from her bottle of water.
And then he saw it. A skinny white guy, stick-and-poke tattoos from elbow to fingertip. The kind you get in prison, or from an idiot friend with a sewing needle and some printer ink. He froze as Paxton and Dakota wandered into his field of vision. He moved himself so that someone would be situated between him and them, like a child hiding behind a tree that was too narrow. He pushed his hands into his pockets, like there was something he wanted to make sure was still there but also wished it wasn’t.
“Him,” Paxton said, nodding in the skell’s direction.
Dakota tipped up her sunglasses, looked at the guy, sweating now, maybe not from the sun. “You sure about this? We turn him out and he’s got nothing on him, Dobbs is going to be pissed. Maybe reassign-you-up-here pissed. We call this the skin cancer beat.”
“Trust me,” Paxton said as the skell took a few steps backward.
“Okay,” Dakota said. Then she waved at him. “Yo. You. Over here. Ándale.”
The guy looked around, like someone might help him. No one did. Rather, the people closest to him took a few steps away, like they knew what was coming. He wandered over from the docking station, forcing a smile onto his face, trying to play it cool. Like, Who, me?
“Inside-out those pockets,” Dakota said.
The guy looked around a little. Shrugged. “For what?”
“Because it’ll make me fucking happy,” Dakota said.
The guy sagged. Reached into his pocket and held out his fist. Opened it. Nestled in his palm were more than a dozen oblivion containers. Dakota stuck out her hand and he put them in hers.
She turned to Paxton and smiled. “Nice.”
Paxton smiled back. “Now the real fun starts.”
It took a full half hour to make it to an exit point, then down to a tram and over to Admin, where they brought the skell—Lucas—to an interrogation room, so small the table and two chairs facing each other could barely fit in the space. Paxton sat Lucas down and left him in there for a bit, to think about the shit spot he was in.
Dobbs came across the bullpen at Paxton, Dakota trailing behind him, clapping his hands in a slow, deliberate motion. When he reached Paxton he smacked him on the shoulder. “Knew I was right about you. How’d you do it?”
“Just a hunch,” Paxton said.
“Well, it paid off,” he said. “So the next step, I guess, is to get him to explain to us how the smuggling operation works, who else is involved, etcetera, etcetera.”
“Mind if I take a run at him, boss?” Paxton asked.
Dobbs gave him a hard stare. Chewed on it. Finally said, “Sure thing, kid. You earned it. We’ll be listening in though. No sense having to go through the whole thing twice.”
“What do I offer him?” Paxton asked.
“Reassignment. We’ll stick him in one of the processing facilities. He may want to leave, and that’s on him, but we don’t have to fire him outright.”
“Okay then.” Paxton nodded to Dobbs and Dakota, went back to the room. Entered it and sat across from Lucas. Got comfortable in his seat as Lucas fidgeted in his. After a few seconds of staring Paxton said, “Let’s talk.”
“About what?”
“The oblivion in your pocket.”
Lucas shrugged, looking at everything in the room—ceiling tile, tabletop, dust in the corners, obvious two-way mirror. Everything except Paxton. “For personal use.”
“This is what I’ve guessed so far,” Paxton said. “I’m sure it’s more complicated than this, but, someone orders something from Cloud; when the drone drops it off, they stick some oblivion on for the return trip.” Lucas narrowed his eyes, indicating that Paxton was right. “Now, the complication is, how do you know which drones to check? Maybe the same drones always come back to the same spot. Maybe there’s something about the coding, the way they move around, some kind of pattern you guys have cracked. Surely there are a lot of people in on this. Probably some of the managers and security guards. Maybe a lot of those drones are flying around with little stashes of oblivion on them, but only certain people know to look for it. I don’t know. What I do know is this: You were carrying more than a hundred hits. That is grounds for immediate expulsion. And you know what that means.” Lucas’s eyes went wide. “But I can help.”
“How?”
“We’ll stick you in a new dorm,” he said. “Put you in processing, way on the other side of the campus.”
“What do you want?”
“An explanation of exactly how the operation works,” Paxton said. “And as many names as you can give me. People in charge. Security, especially. You give me those things, and if I am suitably impressed, then you get what you want.”
Lucas looked at his hands in his lap. Mumbled something.
“What was that?” Paxton asked.
“I want a lawyer.”
Paxton had no idea how to proceed, and he didn’t want to say the wrong thing, so he simply nodded, stood, pushed in his chair, and left the room. Worst-case scenario, it would scare the life out of Lucas. That was the best-case scenario, too. When he closed the door Dobbs appeared.
“Good first attempt,” he said. “But now I’ll talk to him.”
“Does he get a lawyer?”
“Hell no,” Dobbs said, laughing under his breath. “But don’t worry. You gave him a little of the good cop. Now it’s time for the bad.” He reached down for the knob, then looked back up. “I’m damn proud of you, son.”
Dobbs went in, and Paxton watched as he pulled out the chair and sat down across from Lucas. Dobbs started talking but Paxton couldn’t hear what he was saying. Must have been someplace else to listen in. He stood there for a minute, lathering his skin with the word son.
After a little while he went looking for Dakota, and one of the other blues—a blond surfer bro whose name he’d forgotten—told him she was running an errand but to wait for her to get back, so he sat at a desk and logged in to a tablet.
All day long, in the back of his head, he’d been thinking about what Ember had said. About Cloud hiding books. He had noticed, in the first few days, that his login gave him access to the inventory system, so with nothing better to do he jumped in, clicked around a bit, hitting walls, going down paths blindly until finally, he found a way to access how much of every item was available in this MotherCloud.
He picked Fahrenheit 451, because he remembered that was a Ray Bradbury book. He had read it in grammar school and he liked it. There were two copies available. Which didn’t seem like a lot. He looked up the top-selling book in the Cloud store—a remake of an erotic novel originally based on a young adult series—and found they had 22,502 copies on hand. That seemed like a pretty big swing, but at the same time, Paxton understood the principle of demand. Of course they’d have more copies of the top-selling book, whereas Bradbury’s book had been published in, according to the database, 1953. Next he looked up The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood, and found there were no copies on site. That was slightly more recent, at 1985, but still. No copies?
A little more clicking around and he found something called “order metrics.” In that section he could look up search and order histories for items in this MotherCloud’s delivery ra
dius. He looked around, suddenly worried he might be doing something wrong. That information ought to have been more private. But then again, he was a security officer, and if he had the access, it was probably for a reason. He clicked through the history for Fahrenheit 451. In the past year, two searches, one order. For The Handmaid’s Tale, one search, no orders.
Ember was wrong. The books weren’t being hidden from people. It was just that people didn’t want to read them. And what kind of business stayed afloat by giving customers things they didn’t want?
It was almost a relief.
Still, there was something about the things Ember had said that prodded parts of Paxton, parts that still felt raw and tender, even after a night’s sleep.
But if she was wrong about this, what else could she be wrong about?
“Good news,” Dobbs said, his hand landing on Paxton’s shoulder, which made Paxton jump and spin around.
“Sir?”
“We got it,” he said, leaning on the desk. “Sounds like a couple of the tech guys were able to hack the flight algorithm so certain drones always returned to the same docking bays. Drone would drop a package, dealer would put the oblivion on, boom.” Dobbs clapped his hands. “Nice work, son. Nice work.”
“Thanks, boss.”
He stepped away and a few moments later Dakota appeared, her face still streaked with sunscreen. She was smiling, too.
“So,” she said. “You want on the Gibson detail?”
“Hell yes I do,” Paxton said.
He floated through the rest of his shift, and when he finished, he walked to the lobby of his dorm, slowly, drawing it out, not wanting to dive in too fast and disappoint himself, because maybe the system took time to update, but when he got to the elevator bank he couldn’t help himself, so he checked his rating and found that he was now at four stars.