Deeper in the hallway past the tables, Amon could see about a dozen of the Birla Guard standing in a square. It was the same formation they used when protecting the Birla sisters, but no one was visible at the center this time and Amon guessed that Rashana was there as a digital figment. By appearing to be there for anyone with ImmaNet access, she could observe the scene and direct her mercenaries without being present bodily at this volatile and politically charged event. Six of her reporters accompanied by sousveillers were already accosting the Delivery staff.
“This black cube you see here is the same type of genome reader many of us are familiar with from our local hospitals,” a male reporter before the supply table said, gesturing to the reader on top. “The venture charities claim that these are used to check for congenital diseases in infants and thereby offer personalized care—but some of the babies are not accepted after inserting their finger. Others are not accepted after the health check. Something else is obviously going on here. But what? The answer is …”
“Could you comment on the reason behind the difference in supplies?” a female reporter was asking a volunteer handing out bags.
“Where will these boxed infants be sent?” another man asked a volunteer unloading one of the receptacles. “Can you confirm or deny the reports that they are sorted by genome for specialized BioPens?”
The staff ignored the reporters as they scrambled to gather their exposed human resources and distribute the supplies fast enough to clear out the backed-up line. Aside from the three freekeepers occupied with directing the crowd, two more stood near the square of Birla Guards, watching impassively. They seemed strangely uninterested in restraining the reporters, and Amon guessed that they had been paid off by Rashana. The crowd squeezed his body and released it as it pulsed and swayed around him, impatient blather, shouts, and baby cries roaring in his ears. As chaos reigned, it was now time to move on to the next stage: the drama.
Right on cue, a woman shrieked up ahead—it was Vertical—and Amon watched as she hopped over the supply table and reached through the flap in one of the nursery crates. A career volunteer grabbed her arm to restrain her, but she shook him off and succeeded in wresting the baby from its enclosure. Then, sheltering it in her arms, she crawled back over the table and pushed back those at the front of the line to make space for her to stand. Although her scream had drawn the gaze of the freekeepers flanking the table and the one guiding the crowd in the midst of the fray, none of them made a move to stop her as Rashana’s reporters soaked it all up intently.
“Give that boy back immediately!” demanded the career volunteer.
“Noooo!” keened Vertical, cradling the crying baby close to her chest. “This is my baaaby.”
“Listen ma’am. You’ve already offered him up for adoption. You can’t just—”
“I never agreed to anything. I thought you were just giving him a health test.”
“Well, he’s already passed that test and now he’s …” The man faltered, and Amon guessed he was thinking “is property of MegaGlom X” somewhere deep in his mind, though it had probably been twisted into some other thought more compatible with Charity Gift Economy principles. What he said was, “… he’s been entered into the system.”
“Cancel it then!” she shrieked. “And give me my supplies! I want a home to go to with my baby boy!”
“We can’t do that, m’am … you have to …” The man was tongue-tied.
“You can’t give me my supplies you say?” Vertical shrieked again, cringing as though on the verge of tears. “Unless I give you my baby?”
The reporters and sousveillers crowded in, eagerly soaking up the scene while the Birla Guard stood back, observing with strident eyes.
This performance had been proposed by Barrow once he’d become a supporter of Amon’s idea, and Vertical had volunteered, followed immediately by Rick, though the council had decided on Vertical because they thought a mother would be more compelling than a father. Vertical had been given a finger device much like the one Amon’s crew had used, except rather than cause a breakdown it impersonated the genome of the baby’s dead mother. This subterfuge allowed Vertical to gift the baby, since Delivery only processed gifts from their genetic parents (a measure that prevented marketable resources from being damaged in kidnappings and from being stolen by giftless who lacked the supplies to raise them safely, though also encouraging Opportunity Scientist chattel herding). Vertical had inserted her thimbled pinky and the baby’s pinky into the reader. They had met the plutogenic standards of some MegaGlom’s brand and she had handed the baby over. A career volunteer had then put the baby into the diagnostic crib and, when he’d passed the health check, inserted him into one of the nursery crates. But Vertical, just as she’d rehearsed, pretended to be shocked that her baby was being taken and went to retrieve him.
Her demand for supplies now created a bureaucratic problem for the venture charities. The table was meant to be a manual realization of the automated receptacle and vending lines, but the receptacles drew any baby that passed the health check inside, meaning that passing the health check and receipt of the baby were equivalent and inseparable within the system. If a baby was tagged as marketable and healthy without being detected in the inventory, then an error would occur and the parent’s assignment to a supply category—gifted, giftless, or gifter—would be pending until it was resolved. This meant Vertical, in her genetic guise, currently had no category and was not technically entitled to any supplies. The career volunteer was rendered indecisive, therefore, because he knew he was in charge of ensuring there were no discrepancies between human resource receipts and supply disbursement, yet couldn’t admit before the media that there was any connection between them.
“Hurry up!” barked a man behind Vertical as the crowd continued to pile in behind this disturbance.
“Just give him the damn baby already!” cried a woman, and several others shouted in agreement. “Yeeeah!” “Come on!” “Move bitch!” To the bankdead, it was clearly Vertical at fault for not following the rules of the game and holding everything up. The two lines—Amon’s line coming from the glass wall and the other line coming from between the receptacles and vendors—were converging, causing vicious arguments and tussling to get ahead to the open tables, the freekeepers utterly failing to keep the crowd in any semblance of order as it seemed to grow denser and more irritable by the second. Feigning fear of the mob behind her with a tense shudder, Vertical handed over her baby to the man demanding it and went over to another career volunteer for her supply bag.
Giving back the baby had been part of the plan, though it was only decided after a heated debate. The council had sent a dozen orphaned babies from gifted parents to an Atupio laboratory to test whether they were marketable according to any MegaGlom algorithms, which Rashana had seized access to through her information channels, and this boy, whose name was Koki, had been the only one that passed. His father had been crushed in the big disposcraper collapse and his mother had died of an infection, leaving him under the care of the community. Their responsibility for him didn’t mean they could simply endanger his safety to garner media attention, so it was agreed that he should be handed over once Vertical had raised a fuss. Some had argued that it was wrong to gift him, but Xenocyst was now heavily burdened with orphaned infants, many of whom were not likely to see their first birthday given the shortages, and Koki would have a far better chance of survival where he was going. During the present crisis, there was little justification for keeping babies any longer.
Once Vertical received her bag, she slung it over her shoulder and made for the exit, getting shoved and buffeted back and forth by the agitated crowd as she passed. Her leaving was the sign that they had captured the footage they needed and should now head back to Xenocyst. All Amon, Rick, and the sabotage crew had to do now was move casually through the supply line so as not to arouse suspicion and their job was done.
Then, up ahead, in the open area beyond the tabl
es, just in front of where the Birla Guard stood in a box around Rashana’s figment, Amon spotted Kitao again. He was whispering with his mouth tilted to the side towards the ear of a freekeeper, who was leaning over to listen to the hunched priest. Suddenly another ominous chill misted up Amon’s spine and he looked towards Rick, squeezed in place just in front of him. “Hey, Rick.”
“Yeah,” said Rick turning to meet Amon’s gaze over the tossing headscape.
“You see that man over there, past the lineup? The one who’s bent over?”
Rick looked the way Amon indicated. “Yeah. What about him?”
“I think that’s Minister Kitao.”
“You sure? He looks short for—shit! Maybe you’re right.”
“A second ago he was talking to a freekeeper.”
“And?”
“He spotted me when I came in, gave me this weird look, so I …”
Amon trailed off as the eyes of the whole crowd shifted, drawing his along with them to the door in the wall just beyond the table, which had slid open, letting out a dozen freekeepers. They trotted into the hallway and the man in the lead immediately began to shout at the two freekeepers who were standing around doing nothing. Jumping to attention, they gave quick, surprised bows and began to clear away the reporters and sousveillers. Three of the Birla Guard moved in to interfere, but three of the newly arrived freekeepers stepped into their path and met them face to face while the others began to shunt the rest of the guards towards the door in the hall, addressing someone in the center of the square who to Amon’s naked eyes wasn’t there. The half-dozen mercenaries marched in formation as though Rashana had agreed to leave, while those that remained refused to yield to the freekeepers blocking them. A scuffle soon broke out between them, two of them gripping each other by their polymer armor as though ready to brawl, the rest raising their assault dusters in position to fire. Screams of fright mingled with yelling as the crowd began to mill about in pressurized panic, and some of the maintenance workers curled up on the floor at the base of the machines, perhaps obeying warnings from the freekeepers. Amon felt himself tossed and twisted about helplessly while Rick gripped the right sleeve of his hoodie so they wouldn’t be pried apart.
How did they find us out so quickly? flashed through Amon’s awareness. After Vertical’s rabble rousing, they were expecting the Charity Brigade to realize that the malfunction had been staged, allowing Rashana to bring them cracking down on the Opportunity Scientists when she claimed to have made a pact with the religion to create the viral video. But they weren’t expecting them to react immediately, and the presence of the sousveillers was supposed to ward off a heavy-handed response. Now freekeepers kept filing in until Amon couldn’t count them all in the tumult, though he was sure he had never seen so many in one area, and the remainder of the Birla Guard were forced to begin their retreat. For security reasons, the freekeepers stationed near other supply tables in the hallway were not allowed to leave, and reserves like these new arrivals were usually stationed in the upper levels of Delivery. It should have taken several minutes for them to arrive even after a decision was made to deploy them, which was supposed to take even longer since it required human executive clearance. But several squads of them had appeared so quickly it was as though they’d been dispatched before Vertical had even snatched the baby …
His eyes darting about in panic, Amon spotted Vertical a few paces from the exit, still trying to squeeze her way out. Then, just as the last of the reporters and Birla Guard were shunted through the hallway door, one of the freekeepers stepped in front of the exit portal, aiming his assault duster forwards to block those trying to leave.
Vertical dropped her supplies, ducked low, and dove out the door between the legs of the freekeeper faster than he could close them or lower his aim. Amon felt someone grab him around the shoulders and tackle him chest-first to the floor. Winded, he tried to struggle free from his assailant, who hissed “Stay down!” with a familiar voice, and he realized it was Rick. Lying on his belly, surrounded by tight layers of legs, Amon couldn’t see what happened next, but heard a sound he knew well: the chrinkle of dust fired through the air, then screams and water began to patter on the floor. Tear dust, the eyes of the crowd around him erupting like storm clouds. A great roar of panicked voices as Rick yanked Amon to his knees and began to headbutt and thrash open a path through the seams in the pandemonium of waists. Amon followed in his wake, punching and elbowing all who closed in on them. Bodies toppled on his back but he bucked them off and kept going. Then a shoe pressed someone’s weight onto the back of his calf, painfully pinning him in place. He had to stand up straight or the crowd would crush him, but if he did the Brigade might dust him.
His body now reacting of its own accord, Amon found himself half-charging, half-falling towards the door, dozens of hands tugging him back so their owners could get out ahead of him. I’m going to be sucked under! he thought as his feet tangled up with other feet, an arm hooking under his left armpit and a chin smashing into his right shoulder as he teetered off-balance. I’m going to be stomped into nothing! But just as his forward momentum died and he felt himself spinning towards the floor, a force pushed him from behind, a current of bodies moving in the same direction, carrying him ahead as though on the crest of a tidal wave, and he batted and flailed in violent contortions he was hardly aware of, spit flying from his mouth. Then Rick was there beside him and together they stepped over the fallen freekeeper in their way, sprawling on top of more writhing limbs and torsos onto the bridge outside.
19
THE BRIDGE FROM DELIVERY
The moment Amon and Rick spilled out onto the bridge, Amon felt an intense, burning sensation flare up on the skin across his body and time suddenly seemed to slow down. The feeling of heat enveloping him from head to toe brought with it a knee-jerk compulsion to escape and return the way he had come, but the crowd thundering behind kept him going straight ahead. Sudden exhalations and yowls told him they were being seared in the same way, and he found himself part of a stampede plowing helplessly ahead into the empty space left when the lineup had frozen several minutes earlier.
Turning his head right towards the source of the heat, Amon saw several DragonFrys hovering above him off the side of the bridge. They looked just like glass dragonflies, but with large mouths stretched wide open, concentrating the invisible rays of a hot miliwave towards Amon and those around him. They had first taken aim at the door, but as the crowd leapt ahead to avoid the ovenbeam the DragonFrys pivoted and directed the angle further along the bridge to corral everyone in Amon’s exit line and the approaching entrance line away from Delivery.
Just as Amon was out of range of the beam and gasped in the sudden rush of crisp fall air, he saw other translucent forms approaching in his peripheral. Peeling off from the churning cloud of CareBots that encompassed their bridge, DusterFlies swooped in on them, fluttering over the rapidly bobbing heads before him and flicking their wings downwards. Though Amon couldn’t see the minuscule nanobots as they fell, he could tell from how the crowd reacted that these vitreous butterfly drones were sprinkling various kinds of dust on them. One woman stuck out her tongue in mid stride and scraped wildly at it with her fingers as if to remove an unbearable taste. A man shuddered violently and batted at his body as though clearing away insects that coated him. A teenage boy began swinging about stupidly with his fists. A few lost their balance and toppled to the floor like drunks. Some looked utterly relaxed despite the uproar. Those unaffected just charged onwards, knocking aside and trampling those in their path, and Amon felt someone’s hand crunching underfoot.
Though the different kinds of DusterFlies were unmarked, he recognized the dust each one sprinkled: bitter dust, crawly dust, tantrum dust, vertigo dust, putre dust, mellow dust. Strangely, despite the cornucopia of precisely targeted discomfort and disabling euphoria visited upon the crowd, all those hit were completely silent. He heard yelling, wails of terror, trampling, flapping, gun shots, the
chrinkle-chrinkle-chrinkle of dust, but vocalizations of pain were oddly absent. Then TazerWasps began to dive in, and the man directly in front of Amon who had been violently bumping and digging through those ahead of him in the mayhem took a stinger in his right temple, whereupon he began to twitch and gurgle while crumpling beneath the charge.
As Amon was about to pass under a cluster of DusterFlies, he pulled one of the batons Tamper had designed for them from his left pocket and tossed it up towards them, watching as it arced downwards and the DusterFlies dive-bombed after it towards the moat. An approaching pile-on of wriggling bodies blocked the middle of the bridge, so he stepped onto the ledge between the in-and-out ramps to run along it. He had made it past the worst of the clog when the unbearable heat of another ovenbeam swallowed him, indicating he was out of bounds, and he leapt back onto the bridge to find himself crowdsurfing towards the opposite edge. Sensing the drop to the moat approaching, he bucked his legs downwards to squeeze himself into the crowd just in time.
The Naked World Page 48