America City

by Chris Beckett

  But that hadn’t been what he said, had it? There was no way you could read that first message like that. What the fuck was going on? It came out in the end that so-called Cynical Sam wasn’t a real person at all. He was just some kind of AI. All this time, I’d been getting my opinions from some damn machine. I guess it was then that me and Karla started to listen to Senator Slaymaker again, and think about what he was trying to say.

  CHAPTER 26

  Everyone was talking about it on their cristals as they converged on the Slaymaker ranch. Zara Gluck, the technology lead, thought there was a possibility that there’d been some kind of attack on the integrity of the Pollcloud system to give the Slaymaker team an inflated estimate of the popularity of their flagship policy and lead them down a path they wouldn’t be able to go back on, like an army that’s been led into an ambush. It had happened before in other countries, Zara pointed out. The American Pollcloud was heavily protected against the risk of AIs pretending to be human participants, but any such protection, however smart, was going to be penetrated sooner or later by an even smarter attack.

  Others were skeptical about this scenario. Wasn’t it more likely that Reconfigure America had flown for a while on good presentation, but now the bald facts of its huge cost and enormous implications for northern voters were finally becoming uppermost in people’s minds? No one pointed the finger at Holly – or no one did in the conversations she had access to – but of course the entire campaign team was well aware that this policy had been Holly’s special baby.

  ‘I bet they’re crowing over this,’ she told Richard as they drove back across the border after a largely sleepless night. ‘They’re all jealous of me because they know I’m Steve’s favorite, and this is their chance finally to get rid of me.’

  ‘But you warned him from the off that this was going to be a hard sell.’

  ‘They need someone to blame, someone other than themselves. And I’m the perfect target.’

  ‘But not Slaymaker, right? I’ve always had the impression that he—’

  ‘I’ve let him down, Rick.’

  ‘But if he asked you to do something that was impossible, then surely—’

  ‘I should have been more careful with those polls.’

  ‘You’re not the tech person in the team.’

  ‘I let myself get carried away. I should have known it was all too easy.’

  She hated to cry and very rarely did, but she was fighting tears.

  So then there she was in front of the fire in Slaymaker’s ranch. She felt like a character in a fairy tale whose seven-league boots had suddenly been taken away. She was surrounded by the ogres she’d thought she could easily outrun and now they were closing in. They’d never liked her. They knew she wasn’t one of them. They were jealous of her closeness to the Mountain King. There were only a few seconds left before they laid their hands on her.

  ‘I think we’ve been missing something,’ she said. ‘I think there’s a really simple solution here that’s been staring us in the face.’

  The map on the wall had given her the idea: that long straight border that Ruby called the Medicine Line, though Holly had never got round to asking why. Looking at it reminded her of something Jenny Williams had said after Slaymaker’s ‘bullock wagon’ speech: If everyone moved up north, she’d asked, where were they going to go next? And it made her think about Ruby, who’d spent all those hours trying to persuade immigration AIs that she’d be of benefit to the Canadian economy.

  ‘Canada,’ she said.

  There was an incredulous silence.

  ‘Invade Canada?’ cackled Jed. ‘Hey! Good idea, Holly! Everyone loves a war!’

  They all laughed rather too loudly at that, as embarrassed people do when laughter is offered as a way out.

  ‘No, of course not,’ she said shortly. ‘But we should demand that Canada take more people in. I’ve no idea how many they take at the moment, but I do know it’s very hard to get an extended visa, let alone one of those red passes.’

  ‘Millions of Americans go there anyway,’ Pete Fukayama pointed out. ‘It’s hardly the same as us and Mexico. It’s not like there’s a wall or anything.’

  ‘But you can’t get a decent job without a visa, or buy a house, or even rent an apartment. And if you overstay, sooner or later the cops track you down, and you end up paying a big fine and being sent back south.’

  Ann Sellick rolled her eyes upwards in disbelief. ‘Why are we even discussing this? What the fuck has this got to do with—’

  ‘Human beings look after themselves first, right?’ Holly said. ‘They look after themselves and their families. Well, that’s basically your party’s philosophy, isn’t it? People won’t really make sacrifices for the country as a whole unless they can see some kind of external threat. We’ve been trying to get the message over that there is a threat to them from the changing weather, because it’s endangering the integrity of the country as a whole. That has the advantage of being true, and we’ve done pretty well with it thus far, but the trouble has always been that it’s way too abstract. In the end people’s attention has been drawn back to more concrete, immediate things, like having to pay more taxes, or having barreduras with strange accents moving in around them and spoiling their view. What we’ve always lacked is some tangible external human opponent to bring us together.’

  ‘But Canada?’ snorted Quentin Fox. ‘Come on, Holly. Who hates Canada, for Christ’s sake? Who hates Canadians? What is there to hate?’

  ‘Look how big Canada is!’ Holly said. That old-fashioned Mercator map made Canada look far bigger than it really was, but there was no need to point that out. ‘They have all that land but only – what? – 10 percent of our population. We’re having to deal with water shortages and storms and floods that are making many tens of millions of homes uninhabitable, but, apart from some coastal flooding and local challenges, they just aren’t having problems on the same scale. In fact, some of their territory is even getting more hospitable than it used to be.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Holly,’ Slaymaker said, ‘I guess I’m being slow, but I’m just not getting how we’re going to make use of this.’

  ‘Northerners don’t like the idea of being the dumping ground for displaced people from the south. They figure they’ve already got problems of their own – we get floods right here in Washington, after all, and dying forests, and fires – and they can see things getting worse, and yet we’re asking them to be a refuge for the rest of the country. So what I’m suggesting is that we demand Canada take its share of southerners. Like I say, I don’t know how many Americans they let in each year these days but—’

  Zara, her fellow Brit, had got her jeenee to look it up. ‘They give permanent resident status to twenty thousand Americans a year.’

  ‘Well, there you are!’ Holly said. ‘It’s nothing. Yes, we can move people up to the north of the US, but there needs to be somewhere to go after that, and there needs to be some way of sharing the burden more widely. So a major part of your platform, Steve, has to be that some of our barreduras be allowed to settle up there across the border. Not twenty thousand a year but a million a year, or two million, or – I don’t know – maybe even a completely open border. You see what I mean? That’s something that all Americans can get behind. And when you think about those Canadians with all that beautiful space and far fewer weather problems than we’ve got, well, it’s a bunch of people right there we can easily all feel pissed with.’

  Sue Cortez snorted. ‘Come on, guys, we’re just wasting time. I mean, how in hell can we demand they open their border to our displaced people when we’ve built a two-thousand-mile wall and a minefield and a fence and a specially designed fleet of drig gunships, to keep out displaced Mexicans?’

  ‘But can’t you see that’s not an inconsistency at all?’ Holly said. She had her seven-league boots back. Her brain was working at twice the speed of everyone else’s. She was bounding along at a hundred miles an hour. ‘We don’t le
t homeless Mexicans in for the simple reason that so many of our own people are already homeless. Probably Canada should take in Mexicans, I don’t know, but we certainly shouldn’t.’

  Jed nodded slowly, beginning to smile. ‘You know what, Holly? I’m liking this. We used to be a destination country for migration, like northern Europe or Russia or Argentina, but what you’re saying here is that now we’re a source country, like China or Mexico. We just haven’t quite faced that yet.’

  ‘Well, we’re half a source country and half a destination country. America has become two countries with quite different needs, meaning it’s hard to get the support of both. But Canada is another country again, and if both parts of the US can agree that Canada should do more, it will allow us to win support on both sides of that line. Frinton and Montello have basically given up on the southern half of the country so as to get as much backing as possible in the north, but if we can offer something that north and south can get behind, we’re going to beat them easily. After all, the line is moving north all the time, much more quickly lately than the weather scientists predicted even a few years ago. The hurricanes are hitting the coast higher up each year, the desert’s spreading northwards at – what’s that figure? – fifteen miles a year, and we don’t know when, or if, the weather will stabilize again. So northerners feel vulnerable too.’

  Slaymaker looked round at the people in the room, a broad smile spreading over his face. ‘You see why I hired this woman, guys? She is smart. Holly, say some more about how exactly we might play this.’

  Holly’s head was bursting with ideas now, but she knew she needed space to put them in order. ‘We’ll have to give it some thought, but off the top of my head, how about we organize some big rallies at border crossings? Demand they open the gates and let us in?’

  ‘But there’s no room in the calendar for that!’ complained Phyllis Kotkov. ‘We’ve got a whole schedule worked out for the beginning of the primary season.’

  ‘People don’t hate Canadians,’ Quentin said. ‘They’re too like us. They’ve been our allies in pretty much every war we’ve fought for the last two hundred years. Last time they were our enemies was 1812. Who in hell is going to turn up to your rallies?’

  ‘Jesus, Quentin, that’s our job! That’s my job and your job and Ann’s job. Si, si, up to now Canadians have been virtually invisible, but that’s exactly how they’ve got away with this for so long. All that lovely space has been hidden in plain sight. Our job is to change that! And you know what? I don’t even think it’ll be hard to do.’

  Slaymaker laughed. He looked round delightedly at the resentful faces of his team. He rubbed his hands together in anticipation of the task ahead. He knew quite well that very few of them were happy about Holly’s sudden prominence, but that was all part of the fun for him.

  ‘Not even hard to do,’ he chuckled. ‘Well, how about that, compañeros? Let’s give it a go, eh? I’m not dropping the Reconfigure program, period. So what have we got to lose?’

  ‘Well, there’s one plus, as far as I’m concerned,’ said Jed. ‘I have never liked the Canucks. I mean, what really is the point of them? No one outside this continent can even tell the difference between them and us. And they are just so fucking smug.’

  Canucks. Holly had never heard the word before, and she didn’t like it any more than she liked Jed himself, but she couldn’t help noticing its usefulness. Canucks. Not a press release word, of course, not a word to put in speeches, but a great word to use in a whisperstream campaign, in much the same way that Frinton and Montello were using words like ‘storm trash’.

  What did the doctor say to the Canuck who complained she couldn’t get pregnant? You’ve got to let them in...Three Canucks walked into a bar...

  Well, obviously, she’d have to work on it, but there were AIs that could pour out half-decent jokes at the rate of ten per second. She’d get them onto it right away. She needed to reinvent Canada. She needed to make it into a ‘them’ so that Americans could once again be an ‘us’.

  Jed found her later, working with her jeenee in the leathery room that the Slaymakers liked to call their library, though the books were basically decorative, and many of them weren’t even real. She’d poured herself a coffee from the flask that the servants kept constantly replenished, and he fetched a cup for himself and came to join her.

  ‘That was pretty smart, Holly, that Canada idea.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  ‘I actually think it could work, if we really give it everything, and don’t give way to squeamishness.’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘It won’t work if we start dancing the delicado dance and asking ourselves whether the Canucks really deserve this, are they any different from us, all that shit. We’re us and they’re them. Period. Like a football game. That’s how it’s got to be. By the way, personal question, but you’re not fucking the senator, by any chance?’

  Holly glared at him. ‘No I’m bloody not. Why? Is that what people are saying?’

  He scrutinized her face, amused by her indignation. ‘More of a mutual crush type of thing, huh? The old Slaymaker hands pretend to throw up these days every time they hear your name. Not that that’s your problem. Congratulations on becoming the darling of the next president of the United States of America! The next president and one of the last.’

  ‘One of the last?’

  ‘Well, pretty much all of science seems to agree that we’ve set too many positive feedback loops in motion for the air temperature to stop rising any time in the next century, whatever we do. Billions of tons of methane every day from the melting permafrost, billions from the rotting forests, billions from the dead molluscs on the ocean floor. Or should that be trillions? Or tens of trillions? I’ve no idea, to be honest, but whatever it is, it’s a lot. And each ton heats the air up enough to release a couple of tons more. Time will come when someone strikes a match and the whole atmosphere goes off with a bang.’

  He laughed loudly at this, a harsh, barking, jackal’s laugh, while Holly regarded him with slightly narrowed eyes. How ugly he could be! But the strange part was that even though Jed came from a wealthy family and had been to the best and most expensive schools, he could walk into a bar and get talking to some average American or other – one of those Henry McKenzies struggling to get by in the precarious niches that robots had left for human beings – and he and his savage views would most likely be much better received than, say, her Richard with his average middle-class background and his concern for everyone. People at the bottom had a harsh view of the world because that was how they experienced it. People at the top had a harsh view because that was how they got there. The delicados sandwiched between them were the odd ones out.

  ‘Don’t get me wrong,’ said Jed, ‘I can see your idea working politically, I really can, but in terms of any sort of long-term solution, well, shifting our population northwards, whether it’s to Montana or to Yukon or – I don’t know, fucking Baffin Island – won’t buy us much more than a generation’s respite. Where will we go after that? They’re supposed to be building this star ship, I know, but how many people is that going to carry? Two? Three?’

  ‘Why are you part of the team, Jed, if you think it’s all pointless?’

  ‘I’ve got to pay for my vices. And, okay, I could probably get paid to campaign for Christmas trees or for spraying sulfur into the stratosphere or whatever, but this looks like being way more fun. Plus I don’t give a shit, to tell you the honest truth. Any more than the last four generations on planet Earth have given a shit.’

  Holly thought about her parents, their recycling and their bicycles, their little wind generator at the bottom of the garden, their demonstrations. They’d given a shit, hadn’t they? Whatever else you could accuse them of, surely you couldn’t say they hadn’t given a shit? But now, picturing them in her mind, it seemed to her that they didn’t really care either. They just needed to think of themselves as caring. That, in fact, was the whole probl
em she had with them. Their efforts had been a matter of ritual, of placating some kind of god, of preserving their spotless innocence.

  ‘I believe in what Slaymaker’s doing,’ she said stubbornly.

  ‘So suppose old Gray Jenny had picked up the phone first? Suppose she’d told you she had to have you on her team. Okay, she’s not quite so sexy as our Steve, but still, I reckon you’d have gone for it.’

  After Jed had gone, Holly thought about Ruby, her warm, kind friend, who’d been so good to her in those early days in New York. Ruby would hate the direction Holly was taking Slaymaker’s campaign. And yes, Ruby was naïve in some ways, and, yes, she avoided thinking about things that made her uncomfortable, playing in her studio like a gifted child while others made the deals and the messy compromises that kept the world moving. But still, if you compared Ruby with Jed, who prided himself on facing even the bleakest realities, could you seriously doubt that she was the better human being?

  ‘What am I doing with these people?’ she whispered. ‘How have I ended up here?’

  ‘Because of all those people who are losing their homes,’ her jeenee softly answered her. ‘You and Slaymaker are trying to help them.’

  She was a little startled. She had mouthed the words without thinking, but hadn’t been seeking an answer. Still, she thought, the jeenee was right. The Slaymaker campaign wasn’t telling a story about helping the barreduras but only because that wasn’t a story their voters were willing to hear. The fact remained that it was those people they were working for. So, never mind comparing Jed and Ruby, that wasn’t the real question. The question that mattered was: which was more important, (a) avoiding upsetting Ruby, who had a lovely home and no worries about earning a living, or (b) doing something for all those people who didn’t have anywhere to live?