The Mandibles

by Lionel Shriver

  So Willing found an opening listed online at a nursing home facility called Elysian Fields, a short bike ride away on Eastern Parkway. For the scut work going begging—emptying bed pans, mopping—all they required was able-bodied youth. (Youth was the sole resource his small cohort possessed for which there was a seller’s market.) So during the job interview, his hiring looked to be rubber-stamped, until he mentioned as an afterthought—if it was a problem, best address the matter now—that he hadn’t been chipped.

  The news raised every eyebrow in the room. “That’s quite irregular,” one committee member murmured. Another whispered, “Is that even legal now?” He might as well have revealed that he was a carrier of gray-squirrel flu. They instinctively pulled back from their interviewee an inch or two. He was informed that chipping was a nonnegotiable precondition of employment, not only here but anywhere in New York State. If he took care of it—“A five-minute business,” one of them assured him, “bit more of a sting for an adult than for an infant, but you’ll be right as rain by the next day”; another bureaucrat added, “Can get it done in any clinic or ER, on a walk-in basis, and for free! I was an early adopter, and it cost me two hundred nuevos”—he had the job.

  Back home, Nollie was staunchly against it—an easy stance for her to take, since citizens over sixty-eight were exempt. “A monstrous idea,” she said. “You’ll be their creature.” But then, the elderly always balked at innovation. Had shrivs stayed in charge, everyone would still be getting around in donkey carts.

  Granted, Willing could instead have swept up the house as best he could and sold the disheveled property in East Flatbush under value. He and Nollie could have headed back to Citadel. But Jarred had grown irascible. Though farms were gradually being re-privatized now that the worst of the food shortages had abated, he was livid over being expected to buy back his own property. Of the supportive extended family that had filled his younger days with humor and solidarity, only Kurt remained. Nollie might not have believed it herself, but she needed readier access to quality medical care than Gloversville provided. Resistance to a simple prerequisite of living in the modern world seemed at once childish and old-womanish.

  Turning a blind eye, then, to a wadding in his stomach as if he’d eaten a double order of dumplings, Willing strode too casually into King’s emergency room and stated his purpose. “Goodness,” the nurse exclaimed. “You’re awfully old to be a virgin! However have you got by? You’re not one of those strikers, are you? Lolling about on your parents’ sofa?”

  “No,” he said. He didn’t care for her ushering touch on his shoulder—the claiming, the corralling, the collusive inclusion, the welcome-to-the-club—but it was too late now. She had literally got her hands on him.

  In the simple white room, he was instructed to lie face down while they ran a quick sequencing of his saliva swab; the chip would forever be linked to his DNA. His forehead fit into a padded cradle, while the nurse adjusted the setting screws until each point contacted his head. The brace recalled the abattoir, where Jarred had taken veal calves, scarcely worth raising to mature cows for so little reward: a narrow chute steadied the skull, ensuring the bolt at the temple would plunge home. Willing could not move his head a hair. That was the idea. For his protection, the nurse explained sweetly. Otherwise, the slightest twitch “might leave him a paraplegic.” She laughed.

  He did not like lying on his stomach. The position was sexual, a posture of submission. He fought a rising panic as she swung a mechanism behind him and leveled it at the base of his skull—a soft, tender depression, undefended. Glass and chrome maybe, but the device looked like a gun. When she fired it, a white pain flashed up the face of Great Grand Man, gaunt, and pale, and red on one side, before he pitched beside the fire.

  Since that afternoon at King’s, Willing’s sense of himself had been small and inert. He felt limp, lackluster, lumpen. Fearful. Figures flickered in his peripheral vision that, once he turned to them, were not there. He went through a period of scouring his nape with a washcloth several times a day. He felt desecrated, and contaminated, and invaded—as if what had connived itself into his neck weren’t a chip but a tapeworm. He felt watched. He felt ashamed. He felt the need to cover himself, even in his old bedroom, on his own. For a time, even Nollie maintained her distance—mumbling, tight-lipped, keeping her thoughts to herself. She asked warily, “Can that thing hear?”

  He had never put it to anyone else outright. He had not regarded himself as a seer, a savant. He had not, precisely, been able to forecast the future. But since he was about fourteen, the disparate bits and pieces that he had been collecting, idly, like seashells, had cohered. Facts that others hadn’t fit together would form a pattern. He had known things, and the things he had known had been true, or had come true. Ever since the chipping, the part of his head that perceived so clearly had gone dead.

  Oh, it wasn’t that he trusted the fringier theories on the net. He did not believe the federal government controlled his mind. He accepted that the chip performed the functions it was purported to. It registered direct deposits of his salary. It deducted the costs of any products he chose to buy. It debited his utility bills. Though Willing had no experience of either, it recorded investments and received state benefits. It subtracted local, state, and federal taxes, which totaled 77 percent of his pay. It communicated his every purchase to the agency known until 2039 as the Internal Revenue Service—what the item cost, when and where he bought it, and the product’s exact description, down to model, serial number, or sell-by date. It informed the American tax authorities if he bought a packet of crackers. Were the chip to accumulate an excess of fiscal reserves—an amount that surpassed what he required on average to cover his expenses for the month—it would dun the overage at an interest rate of -6 percent. Should the balance cross various thresholds, that interest rate would progress up to -21 percent. (Saving was selfish. Saving was bad for the economy. Negative interest rates also provided Americans a short course in mathematics from which an undereducated public could surely benefit. At -21 percent compounded annually, 100 was worth 30.77 five years later.) Any additional income, including gift coupons for a birthday, revenue from pawned possessions, bake-sale proceeds, and private-party poker winnings, would also register on the chip, and would also be taxed at 77 percent. Chipping solved the problem of the hackable, stealable, long dysfunctional credit card. Chipped, you were a credit card.

  Parental protest over the chipping of newborns died down altogether when states began depositing a generous 2,000 “baby bond” in every infant’s chip. To the population at large, chipping was promoted as the ultimate convenience, and the ultimate in financial security. No more having to carry a wallet or device that thieves could seize on the street. At self-checkout, the terminal simply scanned your head. No more PINs or unique twenty-five-digit passwords, with numbers and letters and signs. No more biometric verification—the fingerprints, facial recognition, and iris scans that hackers had learned to duplicate as fast as the novel authentications had been brought in, since anything digitized can be copied. Obviating the bank account, with its erosive fees, your chip had its own website, or chipsite, for arranging monetary transfers. Its calculation of GPS coordinates precise within a millimeter, your chip communed with your very DNA, thrummed to your very pulse. If anyone contacted your chipsite whose distinctive heartbeat didn’t synchronize perfectly with the pounding in your chip, your funds went into lockdown. So no one could pretend to be you, and the account that went everywhere you went was safe from predators. (The feds somewhat oversold this feature in the early versions. In a surge of “chipnappings,” individuals were forced to make online transfers at gunpoint. Updates guaranteed that when the chip detected high levels of stress hormones like cortisol and epinephrine, or even heavy doses of tranquilizers that might suppress those hormones, transfers would not go through. The same bio-sensitivity ensured that gamblers could not place rash bets while drunk, which had a distinctly depressive effect on
the casino industry.)

  You were safe, of course, from all but one predator. For every transaction, it went without saying, was communicated to the Bureau for Social Contribution Assistance, the rebranded IRS. (Willing didn’t know why they bothered to change the name. If they’d rechristened it the Department of Bunny Rabbits and Puppy Dogs, within minutes the “DBRPD” would evoke the same terror.) The data storage capacity of federal super computers was now so infinite that the old reporting threshold of deposits over $10,000 had come to seem recklessly steep. Tax authorities were now instantly apprised when a six-year-old received the wherewithal from his mother to buy gummy bears. Two bags.

  The chipped all seemed thrilled to see the end of tax returns. Rendering unto Caesar was effortless. Though that meant there was no more cheating on their tax returns, either. No furtive rounding up or disguise of personal frippery as business expense. This also went down well politically. For decades, the public had been convinced that a remote elite living the life of Riley paid no taxes whatsoever. Oddly, Willing had never met one of these people. They must have lived somewhere else.

  Much the same reasoning had led to the complete elimination of the cash dólar nuevo in 2042. Cash was an antiquated store of value. It created logistical hardship for Main Street small business. It leant itself to counterfeiting. It was the easiest form of wealth to steal. Criminals had long conducted business in banded stacks, in bulging briefcases, in whole suitcases stuffed with greenbacks, and now these cinematic clichés were obsolete. For cash was also one of the only forms of wealth that eluded jurisdiction. Willing remembered the furtive spirit in which his mother had plied the plumber with a rustle of twenties, as if to exchange physical money for services were against the law. Because cash is so hard to track, to trace, to tax, to control, Willing was astonished it took the government so long to get rid of it.

  Language, by contrast, did not respond to fiat. Americans continued to communicate with idioms grown insensible. When their chips were down, so to speak, people still claimed to be low on cash. A profitable business remained a license to print money, and its proprietor might make a mint, though all the mints had closed. Fifa continued to offer her laconic boyfriend a penny for his thoughts. A tax refund would have been pennies from heaven had anyone ever got one. Affronted benefactors cut off heirs without a penny, although ferocious inheritance taxes kicked in at such a low level that you were lucky to leave children your button collection. Jarred didn’t regard fully automated farm equipment as worth a plug nickel, though the latest safety features enabled driverless electric harvesters to stop on a dime. Democrats often described the economic stability and political disempowerment of the 2040s as two sides of the same coin.

  A few optimists still bet their bottom dollar that the United States would rise again to world supremacy, though a digital construct could not be stacked. The rhetorical convention persisted, but making a bundle was now impossible. A property owner uneasy about a purchaser’s solvency might yet want to see the color of his money; as of 2042, American currency had no color. A unit of one hundred nuevos was a C-note, slang now easily mistaken for an allusion to music. However ethereal the quantity had become, the country’s linguistic Luddites insisted on regarding money as something you could roll in, throw at something, enjoy a sufficient excess of which to burn, or—a disconcerting image even in the days of the paper dollar—pour down the drain.

  To Avery’s delight, secure chipping had restored the online marketplace. Exhilarated by the prospect of once more buying a toaster without leaving the house, his aunt was an early adopter. (It was clever, making the first wave of guinea pigs pay for the privilege of implantation. Steep charges turned chips into status items.) Unfortunately for the likes of Willing and his cousins, the rousing return of internet shopping was largely theoretical. They commanded too little discretionary income to buy much. The economy was overwhelmingly powered by the whims of the retired.

  Socially, Willing kept any reservations about chipping to himself. Detractors of the liberating fiscal protocol were pilloried as crackpots. Although continuous government access to your exact location might have seemed an infringement of civil liberties, most Americans were long accustomed to having their movements tracked by commercial entities like Google Maps. For decades, bicycles had been chipped. Pets had been chipped. People being chipped seemed inevitable. Buying goods with a mere tap at a terminal went back to smart phones, so the technological leap was minimal, while the security leap was huge. Now no one could appropriate the means of effortless purchase without chopping off your head, and nothing destroyed the functionality of a chip more instantaneously than its host being dead. Yet Willing felt not enough had been made of the chip’s location. Its biological safeguards would have worked equally as well had it been embedded in an upper arm. The purpose of installing the thing right up against your spinal column was to keep you from digging it out. Employing shady surgeons, a few refuseniks had tried. They were recognizable for being paralyzed.

  Nollie’s disappointment that her grandnephew had freely become “their creature” was probably harsh. Nollie herself had an old-fashioned bank account, and made purchases with an ancient fleX. (Because it didn’t auto-report, she also had to file old-fashioned tax returns. The dodgy throwback documents were systematically audited with a rolfing thoroughness that led to multiple senior suicides.) But the unchipped constituted a dwindling minority: the elderly, the far-flung and rural, a few expats abroad. Such anachronisms drew an accelerating suspicion and contempt. They couldn’t buy a quart of milk without hauling out some device. Willing had noticed that customers behind Nollie in supermarket lines would fret. The unchipped inspired the widespread impatience that once greeted holdouts who spurned fleXes or their predecessor smart phones. In short order, the whole population would be chipped, and savings, checking, and investment accounts would be eliminated altogether—at which point it would be impossible to buy anything, sell anything, or possess any monetary wealth whatsoever in the absence of a pinhead-sized spy rammed into the back of your neck. That was certainly the plan, and Congress was unapologetic about this intention—a benevolence portrayed as akin to the nationwide polio vaccinations of the 1960s.

  Naturally, the web bubbled with the feverish imaginings of paranoid kooks: chips would turn the American people into an army of hollowed-out robs that would do whatever a mad dictator in Washington commanded. True, research was under way to expand the implant’s capacity by directly connecting the brain itself to the internet. This breathlessly anticipated “cognitive access” would obviate the chipsite, allowing you to check your balance by merely calling your bottom line to mind, and to make monetary transfers with a cerebral calculator pad. Perhaps in the near future, then, you would be able to read webzines, play games, and watch cat videos in your very head.

  But as things stood at present: after a dip in the thirties, life expectancy had better than recovered. On average, Americans were living to ninety-two. The US sported an unprecedentedly large cohort of senior citizens. In contrast to Willing’s passive generation, typified by low rates of electoral participation, nearly all the shrivs voted, making it political anathema to restrict entitlements. Together, Medicare and Social Security consumed 80 percent of the federal budget. The labor force had shrunk. Dependents—the superannuated, the disabled, the unemployed, the underage—outnumbered working stiffs like Willing by two to one. In concert with linking the dólar nuevo to the bancor, Congress had finally passed a balanced budget amendment. Mind control? No one in DC gave a damn what you were thinking. They just wanted your money.

  So perhaps Willing’s fleeing back to Citadel rather than do as he was told on Eastern Parkway would only have amounted to a brief delay. Soon enough being unchipped was sure to be classified as a civil violation if not a criminal offense, at which point even armed mavericks like Jarred would be rounded up and regularized. The picture was vivid: the gangly, wild-eyed iconoclast, tackled to the ground, bound and branded by the st
ate like a steer—Willing could almost hear the mooing, wordless cry of impotent defiance. He would bet, as they say, the farm on it: Jarred would rather die than be chipped.

  Nonetheless, Willing had never been certain whether his offbeat first name suggested a character who was abnormally headstrong, or abnormally compliant. Alas, his having walked into King’s ER of his own accord pointed toward compliant.

  • CHAPTER 2 •

  SO TONIGHT WE’RE GONNA PARTY LIKE IT’S 2047

  I’m really sorry,” Savannah apologized on maXfleX. “I feel like such a yunk. He asked what I was up to, and it slipped out. Now he knows Bing and I are coming over, you’ve absolutely got to ask him, too. You don’t want to get on his bad side.”

  “No,” Willing said gravely. “I don’t want to get on his bad side.”

  The original fleXcreen had worked as well as any personal digital device possibly could. So to keep customers replacing the product with updated models, the manufacturers had resorted to a time-tested solution: they made it worse. A maXfleX was technically capable of unfolding into a screen the size of a small cinema’s. But almost no one used the function, which had necessitated further thinning the molecules. Now a device celebrated for its waddability tended to develop permanent creases. At thirty-five, Savannah was no less vain. She’d not have appreciated the harsh dark line shadowing the side of her nose, which made her look ten years older.

  “It’s no joke,” she said. “He could ruin your life. So it’s a small price to pay. You have to invite him to dinner.”

  “Can’t we cancel?” Willing pleaded. “The whole night will be splug. He makes everyone nervous. Including me. We’ll only talk treasury.”

  “You can’t risk his realizing you called it off because I ran my big mouth, and then you couldn’t stand having to invite him. Hardly a stretch. There’s never been love lost. He already thinks it’s weird you’ve asked me and Bing but not him yet.”