by Gates, J.
He raises his eyebrows.
“That’s an interesting question, May,” he says, gazing at me against the backdrop of blue sky. He takes a deep breath before he begins. “Imagine a beast. A monster. Imagine it cares nothing for children or trees or animals. The only emotion it knows is hunger. Let’s say, a hunger for gold. It will keep a man alive as long he brings it more gold, but as soon as the man stops, it will burn him to ashes and collect the gold in his teeth. Anything that stands in the way of the monster’s mission to collect every last scrap of gold in the world will be destroyed. Now imagine there are two of these beasts, May, and they rule the world.”
I can hardly repress a smile at his silly fairytale analogy. “So now the Companies are monsters?” I ask.
“That’s right.”
“Have you seen my penthouse? My car? My imager? Not very monstrous. They’re quite nice, actually.”
“The most dangerous monsters are often the most beautiful.”
I roll my eyes. “We’re talking about a public corporation here, not some creature! It’s made up of people—people like my father. People like me.”
“An organism is nothing more than a collection of individual cells,” Ethan says patiently. “A huge group of people, working together, form a larger entity. Individual morality fades. The new being develops its own macro-consciousness. In this case, a mind of infinite hunger.”
My father’s words from last night flash through my mind: It’s a big Company, May. Nobody can know all its dealings.
Ethan leans close to me, not threateningly, but in earnestness. “It’s not your fault, May. It’s not anyone’s fault. Corporations exist to make money. Greed is what they are. It’s their nature, their soul. Decades ago, that greed used to drive innovation, to breed excellence, to inspire hard work. But now, now that there are only two Companies left, there is no more competition, no innovation . . . all that’s left is the greed.” He shakes his head. “Don’t delude yourself, May. The Company will make its profit goals, no matter the cost.”
“What do you mean?” I whisper. Despite the golden sun on my face, I’m suddenly feeling numb. “What cost?”
Ethan steps closer to me. “May, what if I told you the Company is planning to murder over one million of its own employees?”
“I’d say you’re a lunatic.”
“The Company won’t stand for a loss. Plans for an N-Corp–B&S merger were already in the works. Since you gave your report, they’ve moved up the timeline. When the consolidation happens, over a million workers will become unnecessary.”
I stare at him. “You’re lying.”
“Am I?”
“What you’re saying is ridiculous! First of all, I’d have heard about the merger, second even if it were happening, we wouldn’t kill all the unprofitables!”
Ethan leans even closer to me, his eyes scalding. “Who will pay to keep them alive, then, May? Not the Company. The cost of feeding and clothing them would ruin the profit margin. Think about it.”
I do think about it. Suddenly, I feel like I might throw up.
“You don’t believe me, look into it for yourself,” he says. “The downsizing is to be carried out by a division called Black Brands.”
“Black Brands,” I whisper, suddenly dizzy as well as sick. Where have I heard those words before?
“But don’t take too long, May,” Ethan continues. “You have to go to your father. Get his help. The Company has to be stopped before—”
Suddenly, there’s the sound of a door opening. I turn to see two squadmen in the stairwell doorway, looking at me.
“Hi,” I mutter lamely. “I was just . . . getting some air with my—”
When I go to gesture to Ethan, he’s gone, disappeared—as if he’d evaporated and wafted off into the clouds. I look around, bewildered. Where could he have gone? Around the side of that air-conditioning unit? Over the edge of the building? I don’t have time to speculate. The squadmen approach. They look me up and down with palpable disdain.
“This area is off limits, ma’am,” one of them says.
“What are you doing up here?” the other spits.
The first one looks down at his IC screen. There’s a beep. When my identity appears on his screen, his demeanor changes entirely. He plucks at the sleeve of his comrade and shows him. They both smile at me, as shy as schoolgirls.
“Terribly sorry, Miss Fields,” the first one says. “We didn’t know.”
“There are a lot of things you don’t know,” I tell him.
This seems to confuse him, and he glances over at his friend.
My thoughts have wandered back to Ethan’s words. They sizzle through me like a powerful acid, filling me, burning me, leaving me hollow. Though my logical mind works feverishly to discredit or dismiss his claims, there is a deeper part of me that simply cannot.
“Miss Fields?” the squad member says, watching me closely. “You alright?”
I look up at him, at his eyes, dark-ringed and tired, at his face, furrowed with stress. The name Chavez is embroidered on his uniform.
“Chavez,” I tell him, “you’re a slave and you don’t even know it.”
And I brush past him and his friend and hurry toward the staircase, toward Black Brands, and a swarm of questions that won’t go away.
~~~
I’m elsewhere now. All the changes leave me dizzy, bewildered. The blending, falling from one scene to the next is disconcerting, but I always know where I am.
This is my life. . . .
“Your room is so stacked, Randal,” Kali says, looking around. “Not as nice as Blackie May’s, but . . . ”
She gives me a playful glare. I stick my tongue out at her. Randal laughs.
This is not the same Randal of later years. No, this is the beautiful Randal, the quiet teenager with dark, serious eyes and high cheekbones. This Randal is my confidant. Two years ago, he was my first kiss—though now, despite his good looks, that thought is repulsive. He’s the only kid in my class smarter than me, and therefore a cherished study partner. He’s polished—even stylish—good at playing pool, loves comic books, cracks dirty jokes, and has a goofy dog with one ear shorter than the other. He is, in a word, utterly lovable.
Randal is my best friend from N-Academy, and Kali is my best friend outside of school, so, of course, I wanted them to become friends, too, and the few times we’ve all hung out, they seemed to get along well with each other. Normally, they both hang out at my house, since it’s so palatial, but it’s nice to be at Randal’s for a change.
His parents are both mid-credit-level, so his room is decent—furnished with a large bed with a couple of cool, comfy chairs at the foot of it and a small single-wall imager with an N-Game system, which was the object of our visit.
“Alright, who wants to play first?” Randal asks, holding up the two “mind clamps,” helmets with sensors in them to pick up the player’s thoughts. The mind-clamp system is a forerunner of the cross technology that allows players to control the game with their minds, and it instantly made regular, handheld video-game controllers and body-motion technology obsolete. The new system was all the rage when it hit the market last year, and Kali was pretty impressed when she found out Randal had it. Of course, I’ve had mine for two years now, and I’m scheduled to have my cross implant in three months, which will be way better than the mind-clamp junk—but I don’t tell them that.
“I’ll play,” Kali says excitedly.
“Sure,” I say, taking the other helmet. “Why not?”
The game is Metal Death Six, a game of skill and strategy in which, basically, you and your partner are both huge robots that try to pummel the hell out of one another. Right now, I’m pummeling Kali.
“Ouch. May, you’re pretty good at this,” Randal observes when he comes back from do
wnstairs with a tray of N-Cola and some snacks.
“Don’t let her pretty exterior fool you,” Kali quips. “She’s totally a metal death robot on the inside.”
“Damn right I am,” I say, as my robot rips Kali’s robot’s head off and punts it off the imager screen. With the imager’s 3-D hologram technology, it looks like it’s flying right toward us. The timing is perfect, and we all laugh.
“Here, can I play?” Randal asks.
“Sure. Avenge me,” Kali says, and hands him her helmet. He puts it on, sits down next to me, and gives me the meanest-looking scowl he can muster. With his pretty green eyes and adorable dimples, however, he looks more like a male model with a migraine headache.
“Alright, Randal,” I say, “let’s see what you’ve got.”
I hold my own, but in the end he winds up beating me. And Kali is cheering for him the whole time, which—although it shouldn’t—pisses me off.
“Okay, okay,” I concede. “You’re tougher than me. At video games, anyway.”
“Not in real life, though?” Randal asks, amused.
“Of course not,” I boast.
Randal and Kali both laugh, which only eggs me on.
“You don’t believe me?” I say. “Let’s go. I’ll wrestle you right now.”
“Where?” Randal asks, amused but incredulous.
“Right here,” I say, shoving the chairs out of the way and assuming a ready position.
“You really want to wrestle me?” he asks.
“Looks like she does,” Kali says. “Watch out. May is a wiry one.”
What Randal doesn’t know is that my dad wrestled in college, and he taught me a few things. The minute we start, I shoot in, grab his legs, and take him to the ground with a double-leg takedown.
On his hands and knees now, his body shakes with laughter.
“Yeah! Go, May!” Kali shouts.
But despite my superior skill, Randal is still stronger than me. He manages to rise up into a kneeling position then pivots to face me. We’re forehead to forehead when our eyes meet.
“You’re in trouble now,” he says, and surges forward, pushing me to my back.
His body is pancaked against mine, his chest crushing my breasts, his hands at my wrists, holding me down. I arch my back, bucking violently to get him off me, but his weight is too much. Suddenly, Kali is on the floor next to us, beating out the count on the carpet with the palm of her hand: “One . . . Two . . . ”
I can smell Randal’s cologne, feel the warmth of his breath on my cheek. I look up to find his eyes on mine. Am I imagining the desire I see in them?
“Three! Randal wins!” Kali shouts.
He lingers before getting off me, his lips coming nearer to mine, and for a terrifying second I’m afraid he’s going to kiss me. I give him a little shove to hurry him along and we both sit up, catching our breath.
“Randal wins. Nice work,” Kali says brightly.
“It wasn’t easy,” Randal concedes. “You’re right; she’s stronger than she looks.”
“And meaner,” Kali jokes. We’re all sitting on the floor now, close together, our knees touching.
“Good effort,” Randal says, giving me a gentlemanly handshake.
“Yeah,” I grumble, squeezing his hand. “Everyone’s bound to get lucky once.”
My two friends laugh at my feistiness.
“Aw, somebody’s a bad loser,” Kali teases, and she leans forward and gives me a slow, lingering kiss—a pretty good consolation prize. When she pulls back, Randal is staring at us, wide-eyed.
“Are you two . . . ?”
“A couple?” I ask, taking Kali’s hand. “Yep.”
“But you can’t tell anyone,” Kali amends, a note of alarm in her voice. “Promise?”
The look of surprise on Randal’s face ebbs, replaced with a smile. “Of course. We’re friends, remember?” he says, and he snatches up the mind-clamp helmets. “Come on, let’s play again.”
—Chapter Ø1Ø—
The Cranton Facility.
This is the place they call Cranktown. Morning light pools on the shiny marble floor beneath my fast-moving feet. The lobby looks like a palace anteroom, full of huge, ornate, gold-gilded pots overflowing with fake flowers. I weave around countless fountains. Classical music trills softly around me, emanating from some unseen source.
This is the home of the Peakers, the brightest minds in the Company. Engineers, electronics wizards, technological visionaries, and computer geniuses all live, sleep, and work here, surrounded by every luxury N-Corp has to offer. The place is filled with huge imagers, state-of-the-art stereos, and the latest video-gaming technology. Top Company chefs man the kitchens twenty-four hours a day, preparing gourmet food that can be delivered to the Peakers at any time of the day or night. The geniuses who live here are given some of the highest credit limits of any Company employees and are allowed to take several weeks off per year to enjoy exotic vacations (unlike most N-Corp employees, who are only allowed one week of vacation per year, in addition to the standard one-day-a-week weekend).
In exchange for these privileges, the Peakers are expected to produce staggering amounts of research and develop thousands of new products and technologies every year—only a few of which will actually make it to the public. To help them meet the extraordinary demands of their work, one team of Peakers a few years back developed a drug, which, for its extraordinary properties, has been a required part of the Cranktown regimen ever since. Accumenzaphrin is the name of it, but the world has come to know it as Peak, since it has the effect of raising those who take it to their peak mental capacity. Test subjects experience a 30 percent increase of mental function across the board. The best analogy to describe Peak’s effect is that it soups up the mind the way a mechanic in the old days would have souped up a car.
Randal calls it synapse grease.
Good old Randal; he’s the quintessential Peaker and an ideal poster boy for the remarkable effects—both positive and negative—of the drug for which his tribe is named. He has a staggering capacity for mental mathematics and produces an impressive number of inventions and innovations every year. He has the entire periodic table of elements memorized, along with formulas for estimating the load-bearing capacity of various structures and materials, the gravitational pulls of most known celestial bodies, and the tensile strength of the seventy-seven most common aluminum alloys. He has memorized the name of the director from nearly every episode of every television and imager show going back to the 1950s. He can recite—and will, if you don’t stop him—the DNA code for most shared human characteristics, along with the abnormalities that cause Alzheimer’s, MS, Crohn’s disease, diabetes, and male-pattern baldness. Any task you can conceive of doing, he can tell you a better, more efficient way of doing it. And probably will.
For these abilities and many others, he and his comrades are well rewarded by the Company. A few of them have even become Blackies over the years.
But their gifts also exact a price. Randal has told me that he sleeps only a handful of hours a day, often at strange times. Sometimes he finds it difficult to sit still and focus on conversations; other times, it is almost impossible to rouse him from a contemplative stupor. He can rarely stand to spend time in the Company of non-Peakers, because their lower mental speeds make the conversations seem maddeningly slow. As a result, Randal and most other Peakers can’t help but look down on “normal” people and tend to separate themselves from regular society as much as possible. In fact, the only reason Randal probably picked up our friendship again is because of our long history together—and because my dad’s the CEO of the Company.
Male Peakers are almost universally impotent, an unfortunate side effect of the medication, although they often enjoy the company of women because of their favored position in society. A
nd of course, there’s the stuttering.
Lastly, and perhaps most disturbingly, most Peakers find themselves incapable of mustering real emotion. Sympathy is foreign to them, as are love, jealousy, rage, and delight. Most are vaguely despondent and aloof, but full of an almost superhuman, vital drive that is invariably directed toward the abstract world of their intellectual and scientific work. As a result, Cranton’s lavish imagers often go unwatched, the spa goes unused, and much gourmet food goes uneaten while its residents busy themselves in their labors of the mind.
Because of the drawbacks of the drug, N-Corp decided long ago that it should be administered only to an elite few. An entire workforce cranked up on Accumenzaphrin, while it might be more productive, would be uninterested, for example, in producing children—hence population growth would falter, and Company growth would soon follow. Worse, a “peaked” public would have little interest in consuming the products and services they had worked so hard to create, and the Company certainly has no desire to create a society like that. Therefore, though a large and ever-expanding pantheon of pharmaceutical deities are available for public worship, Peak is available only to an elite caste of perhaps four hundred people Company-wide.
This is their home.
Skirting another fountain, I pass pictures of famous old paintings displayed on several massive imager screens hanging on the walls on either side of me. I walk on, through a maze of velvet couches, glittering lamps, fake flowers. Finally, the reception desk.
The pale woman behind the desk stares back at me emptily, as does the white cleavage between her massive fake breasts.
“I’m looking for Randal Watson,” I say.
The woman only gives me a vapid glance then looks down at the screen of her IC. I stand there in an uncomfortable silence until a blip from the computer announces that the scanner has read my cross. Numbers, letters, an old photo—all the bits of data that are somehow construed to denote my identity—appear in front of the woman.
“Oh, Miss Fields, welcome!” her demeanor changes entirely when she realizes I’m from Headquarters. “Yes, Mr. Watson was stepping out, but I’m not sure if he’s left the building yet—”