Vita Aeterna

by Jay Allan Storey

  I shrugged, and shoved the card back in my pocket. “I’m not going back to find out, I can tell you that much.”

  While I’d been on my way back, Spiro and Jake had made a run to steal some beer. They picked up my girlfriend Cindy on the way. It was too dangerous for her to go anywhere near our side of town by herself.

  I told them not to tell her what I was doing, so I was pissed when they showed up and she knew all about it.

  “She asked why you weren’t there to pick her up,” Jake whispered to me. “I had to say something.”

  I explained to her what I’d done. It sounded stupid even as I said it. I showed her the card.

  “So that’s what you risked your life for?” she asked, nodding at the card. “Collecting souvenirs is one thing, but breaking into SecureCorp? Are you crazy?”

  “Hey, I made it out,” I answered, puffing out my chest. “Nobody’s ever gotten inside a—”

  “You’re going to get yourself killed,” she snapped, shaking her head. “For a stupid card. And it doesn’t even do anything.”

  “It might,” I said defensively.

  “Nothing that would do you any good.”

  I stepped forward to hug her. She pushed me away. “If you’re going to keep doing stuff like that, I don’t want to see you anymore.”

  She moved away to a corner with her back to us.

  I went over and put my arm around her shoulder. This time she didn’t resist. “Hey, we’re just fooling around,” I said. “I promise I won’t go near SecureCorp anymore. That scared the shit out of me anyway.”

  “I don’t want to lose you,” she turned and whispered into my ear.

  “You won’t,” I whispered back. “Forgive me?”

  Finally she smiled, and kissed me.

  I took her hand and we joined the others. We proceeded to get hammered to celebrate my run. I showed Jake and Spiro my trophy. They said it was great, though I got the feeling they were underwhelmed. I didn’t tell any of them about the old guy. It was so creepy, and I was still trying to figure out what was going on. I felt guilty about leaving him there, but what else could I do?

  Anyway, I’d done something no other kid had ever dared to do — broken into a SecureCorp building. It was a great feeling, but something else overshadowed all our laughter and back-slapping. It was like we all wanted to say something, but we were all afraid. We’d talked about it so many times before, but back then it had been something in the distant future, something we could kick down the road and worry about later.

  Now it was later. We were all about the same age, so we’d all be having our Appraisals sometime this year.

  Richie brought it up first. It pissed me off. I didn’t really want to talk about it.

  “I’m not worried,” he said. “Everybody in my family’s done okay. I’ll be in the high teens.”

  “It’s got nothing to do with heredity,” Spiro said. “They proved that a long time ago.”

  Richie sneered at him. “They’re full of it. I’ll do okay.”

  “I’ll outlive all of you losers,” Jake laughed, a bit nervously I thought. “You wait — I’ll be a two.”

  “Good luck,” Richie said shoving Jake’s shoulder. “You’ll be one of those white-haired forty-year-old guys sleeping in their chairs with the HoloTV on and…”

  He blushed and glanced over at me. Nobody else spoke. “S…Sorry Alex,” he finally said.

  I just shrugged and looked at the ground.

  “What about Spaz, here,” Jake said. He nodded his head toward Spiro. “Bet he negs out big time.”

  Spiro’s face turned red and he clenched his fists.

  “You shut the fuck up!” he yelled at Jake. He stood up, ready for a fight.

  “Settle down,” Jake said. “I’m just joking.”

  Spiro stood shaking for a few seconds. “And don’t call me Spaz,” he mumbled as he finally sat back down.

  “What about you, Cindy?” Richie said. “Your daddy’s rich. He should be able to buy you a good one.”

  “I don’t want to talk about it,” she said. She looked scared. I took her hand.

  “Screw you, Richie,” I said. “Leave her alone. Anyway, you know it doesn’t work like that.”

  “That’s what they say,” Jake said, “but who really knows.”

  “Shit, you guys are touchy,” Richie said.

  He looked at me. “Anyway, what about you?”

  I was annoyed with the direction the conversation was going. “How the hell do I know?” I said. “Whatever happens, happens. Let’s just shut up about it.”

  I’d just turned sixteen. I was the oldest, so I’d be going first.

  My Appraisal was just one week away.

  CHAPTER 6

  The Quarters

  Tintown is managed by sort of an ad-hoc council. If you’re lucky, they’ll pick you to do odd jobs around the Quarter, sometimes for money, but usually for barter, like food, or medicine.

  A few years ago, my dad got hired to help pick up the garbage that the rats and stray dogs didn’t get to. He makes enough to keep us going, but he’s constantly got to fight to keep his job. Like I said before, it’s survival of the fittest — the way they’re always telling us — the way it should be. But Dad’s not as healthy as he used to be. He’s slowing down.

  The luckiest guys are the ones who work security. They take care of anybody that gets out of line, and defend our Quarter against attacks from outside. The job’s dangerous, but you get lots of barter, and lots of respect. If I was bigger, that’s what I’d do when I’m old enough. But jobs like that are hard to come by. They probably wouldn’t want a runt like me, and even if I snagged one I’d have to fight like hell to keep it.

  Since the Corps are all private and for profit, none of them lift a finger without getting paid, and the amount they do is directly proportional to how much they get. For instance, BuildCorp is responsible for collecting garbage. How much they collect, and how often, depends on how much they get paid. If they’re not paid anything, they don’t do anything. If the garbage piles up and rats and disease are everywhere, too bad.

  Like all good private enterprises, the Corps would all like to swallow each other. Travis, my teacher at the co-op school, says they’ve reached a standoff — they jockey for position and dominance, but mostly they put up with the status quo.

  Here in the Quarters there’s a few small backroom setups: corner stores, repair shops. But if they grow to any size the Corps either absorb them or drive them out of business. Then there’s the black market, which the Corps are constantly trying to shut down. With all the stuff on HoloTV about free enterprise and competition, you’d think the Corps would approve. I guess when it doesn’t bring in money for them, suddenly it’s evil. But for us, buying from the Corps is just too expensive. For us, the underground market is all there is.

  Life in the Quarters can be tough, but they say it used to be a lot worse. The newscasts talk about how in the past, every time you made a dollar you had to pay part of it to the government. They called it ‘taxes’. Nowadays we’re free from all that. Whatever we make, we keep — period.

  Travis says that’s a joke — that if what you make is pretty much zero, which it is for us, not having to pay any of it back isn’t a big advantage. According to him, a lot of the stuff the Corps do now used to be done by the government and paid for by taxes, and since everybody paid a share, and they didn’t have to make a profit, it ended up costing less.

  Sounds like a stupid idea. Why pay for stuff that you might not even want or need? Anyway, now we’re free — free to follow our dreams. We don’t have to depend on anybody else’s help. Anybody — even people like us from the Quarters, can make it big and join one of the Corps — even the Elite.

  Back when Mom was alive, Dad used to say I could make something of myself, even though we’re poor. If I got a good Appraisal, I’d have time to get really good at something and one of the Corps would have to hire me. I notice he doesn’t say t
hat anymore.

  Mind you, Dad doesn’t say much of anything anymore.

  ☼

  It’s weird. For almost everything I do, Dad doesn’t seem to give a shit. He never asks me where I’m going, who my friends are, even whether I’m happy. Mind you, it’s not just me — as far as I can tell my dad doesn’t give a shit about anything or anybody.

  That’s why it’s so weird — about school. I have to go. He’s fanatical about it. He can’t actually force me — he can barely walk. But he makes my life miserable if I don’t go, hounding me and getting on my back. Since he cut down on his work schedule, that’s pretty much the only reason he ever takes time off from watching HoloTV. I keep offering to take over the garbage work for him, but he gets mad and tells me to concentrate on finishing school. In the end, it’s easier to go than listen to him. Anyway, as pathetic as my dad is, I still feel like I owe him something.

  Of course, like everything, regular school costs. There’s only one proper one in the Quarters, but even when Dad was working full time it would have been too expensive. Now that he’s old and sick, there’s no way. Our only choice is the co-op school. It’s not really even a school — just a couple of people from the neighbourhood who volunteer to teach the local kids.

  I don’t really mind going. I actually might have liked what they call higher education (that is, anything above about grade eight), if there was such a thing in the Quarters, and if I didn’t have to spend most of my time fighting to stay alive.

  Travis, the teacher that shows up most of the time, is what you’d call eccentric, but he’s basically a great guy. He seems to take a special interest in me. He says I’m one of the few of his students that’s got an ‘inquisitive mind’. When you’re teaching people as ignorant as we are, you could say pretty much anything and they wouldn’t know any better, but he’s confirmed enough stuff that I actually know about for me to give him the benefit of the doubt.

  After all the time we’ve spent together, I still don’t even know his last name, or what he does when he’s not teaching us. He just shows up at the allotted time, like the rest of us (when I say ‘the rest’, I mean the three or four that can be bothered). I asked him once where he got all his education, but he wouldn’t tell me. I found out from one of the other kids that he had a daughter about my age, though I’ve never met her. Apparently, she went to the regular school — who knows how he could afford that.

  Travis taught me to read and write, and some math and science. He tries to teach me what he calls history, too, but it sounds like bullshit to me. Anyway, what’s the point of hearing about stuff that happened before you were even born? You hardly ever hear anything about it on the HUD or on HoloTV. If it was important you’d think they’d talk about it. Nobody cares about it — nobody except Travis, that is.

  And he likes to talk about philosophy and politics. More lame subjects. He goes on about democracy and freedom of choice and all that, which I don’t get. How could you be any more free than we are right now?

  Anyway, like I do every Monday and Wednesday, I boarded down to an abandoned office building a few blocks from us, where they’d set up the co-op school. More history. More philosophy. More politics. Boring.

  At a break between classes I cornered Travis in the courtyard outside. Most of the time he managed to make classes pretty interesting, but today was a snoozefest.

  “Maybe you find it boring,” he said, “but it’s stuff you need to know.”

  I laughed. “I need to know about politics?”

  He gave me that look he had.

  “What’s the difference between the Freedom Party and the Enterprise Party?” he said.

  “How do I know?” I said. “Anyway, who cares?”

  “Well, they’re the only two parties you can vote for. If they stand for the same thing, why vote?”

  “You have to vote. It’s the law.”

  He held out both his hands with the palms facing up, like he was balancing something in them. “Look, if I force you to choose between a red ball and another identical red ball, do you actually have a choice?”

  “I don’t want a red ball,” I laughed.

  He droned on and on. I got tired of listening to it.

  “Shit, man,” I said. “All you do is complain. What more could we want? We got free speech, we got the vote — we have to vote. Anybody who works hard can get rich—”

  It was his turn to laugh. “What good is free speech when there’s nobody to hear you?”

  “I can talk to you,” I said, “and Richie, and my dad—”

  “But you can never reach a large crowd. You could never broadcast on the net to people’s HUDs. You could never talk on HoloTV. You could never change anything.”

  “Sure I could. I’d just have to make enough money.”

  “And how would you do that?”

  I looked at my feet. I had to admit it was a pretty stupid idea.

  “You’d have to be in one of the Corps,” he answered for me. “Even then it would be tough. And in the incredibly unlikely event that you managed to claw your way up the ranks to a position of power, your agenda would be the same as all the guys in the Corps now.”

  I was getting annoyed. “If things needed changing,” I said, “I’d change them.”

  He stared at me, like he was studying me.

  “You know,” he said, “maybe you would.”

  He glanced over at the other kids kicking a ball around the courtyard, then turned back.

  “Let me ask you this,” he said. “Have the government and the Corps ever given you anything for free?”

  I laughed again. “Why would they do that? If you want stuff you have to pay. Everybody knows that.”

  “But in fact, there’s two exceptions to that rule,” he said, smiling.

  “Oh yeah?”

  He nodded at the HUD controller on my wrist. “There’s the HUD. Don’t you think it’s strange that everybody gets one?”

  I shrugged. He was always coming up with stuff like this. I can just barely remember when I got my HUD. I think I was about seven or eight years old. Travis says they’re a pretty recent thing, developed within the past fifty years. So I guess there was a time when nobody had them. I can’t imagine what it would be like without one.

  “Everybody — even bums living on the street — get the HUD,” Travis said. “Why do you think that is?”

  I shrugged again.

  “The same reason they sell the HoloTVs for almost nothing,” he said. “Control.” He pointed at his own head. “The HUD feeds you information, but it’s their information — the information they want you to believe. If you can access something on the HUD, it’s because they want you to have it. If they choose not to show it to you, it might as well not exist.”

  For once I thought of a comeback. “What about the hacks?”

  I figured I had him on that one. Hacks like the one that confuses the HUD’s GPS locator, and the ones we use Cam-surfing, are pretty common. They’ve never done any real damage, which I guess is why the crackdown hasn’t been harder.

  At first Travis’ eyes opened wider, like I’d reminded him of something. The look disappeared, and his brows came together. I smiled. I’d stumped him.

  “That I can’t answer for sure,” he finally said, “but I don’t think the kids are coming up with this stuff on their own.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean they’re getting help. Maybe there’s people in the Corps… Then again, if you can hack into the system, it’s probably because the Elite want you to.”

  “Why would they want that?”

  He looked me in the eye. “There’s no way for us to know exactly why they’re doing something, but if you know how their minds work, you can guess.”

  I looked down and shook my head. “And you know how their minds work?”

  He stared out at some distant point beyond the courtyard. “I know enough,” he said.

  I was starting to tune out, like I usually did w
hen he got on one of his rants.

  “You know there was a riot last night?” he said.

  I looked up. “What?”

  “A riot. People in the streets, throwing rocks and bottles. In ShakeTown, the next Quarter over. They’re desperate. No jobs, no money, no future — the Elite have walked a fine line, leaving just enough to keep the public quiet. But they’re getting greedy, putting themselves in danger.”

  “You’re so full of it,” I laughed. “I would have seen it on my HUD.”

  “You think so? Like I said, if they don’t choose to tell you about it, it’s like it never happened.”

  “Well, if it’s so secret, how do you know about it?”

  He leaned in toward me and whispered. “I was there. The SecureCorp thugs opened fire. A bunch of people died.”

  I stared at him. “I don’t believe you.”

  He shrugged. The riot thing was new, but I was getting a little bored with the conversation. I thought about changing the subject, but I couldn’t think of anything. Then I remembered.

  “So, what’s the second thing?” I asked.

  “Second thing?”

  “You said there were two things they gave us for free — what’s the second one?”

  He smiled. “Appraisal — they pay for everybody to have it, even you. Why do you think that is?”

  I stood there like a moron. I’ve got to admit the thought never occurred to me before.

  “You’re so smart,” I said. “You tell me.”

  “Because they’re looking for people,” he said.

  “People?”

  “People who respond to Appraisal — in a certain way.”

  “What do they care?”

  His expression turned dark. “For all they go on about freedom and democracy, it’s the farthest thing from what they want.”

  “So, what do they want?”

  “Everything,” he said. “They want everything. And they’ve almost got it. The only stumbling block is Appraisal. They can’t control it. They have to put up with the results the same as everybody else. They can’t stand that.

  “They’ve poured trillions into research trying to find a way to change the outcome, but nothing’s worked. That’s why they give the Appraisal to everybody. They know that statistically a certain number will be worth studying.”