All Rights Reserved

by Gregory Scott Katsoulis

  Oh, Sam, I thought. I wanted him to hear my thoughts. It was a useless hope, but if I could have managed it, I would have told him how sorry I was—not just for what I had done, but for the world we all had to live in.

  “I think it would help a great deal if Speth stopped this foolishness. She needs to snap out of it, read that speech and apologize for the confusion she caused.” Mrs. Harris crossed her arms as if this was the last word on the subject, and her frowning puss would be the thing that finally brought me to my senses.

  Part of me longed for what she said to be true. Most of me knew it wasn’t, and as if to drive that home, she followed it with the least believable words she could have selected.

  “Speth,” she said, blinking her eyes with that particular nervous tick she had when she spoke the following words: “I love you.”

  She didn’t love me. She didn’t even pretend it was true. The words made bile creep up my throat. Her budget had a special line item to speak those exact words to each of her charges once each month.

  “You don’t have to spend it,” Sam said, arms crossed.

  “Sam,” she began.

  “Please don’t,” he said. We all hated it. Our parents couldn’t afford to say it, but she got to.

  “Well, it seems like a waste,” she said. “It doesn’t roll over.” Her Cuff pinged. Her face turned even more sour when she looked down at it. “Well, I hope you’re happy!”

  She turned the Cuff for me to see. The message glowed the angry color of flame.

  Your Custodianship for Nancee Mphinyane-Smil has been terminated. Please remit all associated payments dated forward from this time.

  “What does that mean?” Sam asked, squinting.

  “It means I’ve been removed as Nancee’s Custodian!”

  “Why haven’t they removed you as our Custodian?” Sam asked.

  “I’m sure you think you are very funny,” Mrs. Harris said. “We’ll see how you like it when Keene Inc. is your guardian.” She turned to Saretha, her only real ally in the room. “Will you please tell Speth that you want her to speak? I will pay for your words.”

  Mrs. Harris was more desperate than I’d thought. She never offered to pay for words. I’d hurt her. Each child that left her guardianship was money out of her pocket.

  I felt good about that. But I worried about what was going to happen to Nancee now.

  “Saretha, Speth should know what you think,” Mrs. Harris offered softly.

  Saretha put her hand to her forehead, blocking her eyes, like the room was too bright. She shook her head. It must have been hard for her not to say anything. I knew the effort of silence all too well. Did my mother’s signing of the zippered lips mean as much to her as it had to me?

  Mrs. Harris threw up her hands. “I am trying to help! What do you think is going to happen? Do you have any idea of the trouble you are in? Do you realize how bad this looks?”

  “For you,” Sam said.

  “That’s right,” Mrs. Harris hissed. “For me! I am your Custodian! It looks terrible for you, too—for all of us. You’ve made it look like...” She stopped. I wanted to know what came next, but only because I’m sure that the words she didn’t say were the most important. In lieu of finishing her sentence, I hoped her pause would mean she was finished for the day, but sadly, she was not.

  “It is disgraceful,” she went on. “To be frank, Speth, I know exactly why you are doing this. Saretha gets all the attention, and you think this is the way to turn the spotlight on yourself. I am sorry to say it, but behaving in this manner does not make you prettier or more interesting. Quite the opposite, if you ask me.”

  It felt like she’d punched me. Is this what she really thought?

  “No one ASKED YOU!” Sam roared.

  Saretha’s head turned a little, and she eyed me pityingly.

  I didn’t care what Mrs. Harris said, but it felt like poison in the room. Did Saretha believe it? I swallowed and turned my face away. I didn’t want to hear anymore. I couldn’t shut her up by staying; I would just be a target for her to shoot at.

  I stood up and rushed out the door.

  IRIDESCENCE: $13.99

  My head pounded in the dry, late-day air. I blamed Mrs. Harris, but it wasn’t just her; it was everything. I found myself moving toward Falxo Park once again, and the bridge where Beecher killed himself. I remembered his lanky, miserable figure loping along in my mind and regretted ever knowing him. My eyes turned wet and then, like a lunatic, I laughed out loud, because I also missed him. I could laugh for free, but only if my Cuff deemed it to be genuine and “involuntary.”

  Why had his grandmother approached me in the park? Did she know something I didn’t about why he had done it? What could she possibly say that would make it right?

  Not far off, I saw her building. I had never actually been inside. A few times Beecher offered to take me to his place, but I assumed that was just a boy’s trick to get me alone. Thomkins Tower was not inviting. It was a dark, sloppy, printed slab scattered with tiny windows. There were no Placer handholds. There was no ornamentation. There were no overhanging eaves—even our building had those. The entire structure was slightly askew from the fourth floor up, where the building printer must have misaligned a few degrees and kept going.

  I wondered if Mrs. Stokes was inside. I closed my eyes and pressed my fingers to my temples to ease the throbbing. Was she just playing games? Maybe she had good reason to want to talk in private. Maybe she had an Advil™.

  I decided to go up. Whether she had something useful to say, or she was just playing games, at least I could do something.

  Thomkins Tower had a reputation for being rough. I slipped inside her building quickly, hoping not to be recognized, but of course I was. Two rough-looking boys came right at me the minute I was inside. I was ready to fight them, for all the good it would do, but they pulled up short and each showed me the sign of the zippered lips. The sight stunned me as I passed. I reached the stairs, my face burning a little with shame from jumping to conclusions about their intentions.

  I found her apartment on the third floor. I pressed the buzzer. A moment later, she opened her door. I didn’t wait for her to invite me in. I stepped inside. I hoped she wasn’t going to tell me Beecher had been in love with me. I didn’t want to know it. I didn’t want to believe that I’d played some part in his death. I looked up and saw the red-rimmed, haunted look in Mrs. Stokes’s eyes, and my anger at him and at her melted. I wished I had come up when Beecher asked. Now I had to imagine what it was like, the two of them living here.

  Her place was smaller than ours. One wall had recently been printed over, no doubt removing the space that had once been allocated to Beecher. There was a couch and a stack of old, ratty-looking boxes along one wall. Her home had a window like ours, but too foggy to see through. It looked like it had been purposely sanded and scraped.

  The other strange thing was that the room had no screen. I’d never been in a home without a screen. I stared at the blank wall where it seemed like one belonged, feeling weird in its absence. Nothing was glowing and serving Ads. I may have hated ours, but I was used to it. I found the noise and chatter of it comfortingly familiar. Her home seemed so quiet and lonely in comparison.

  “I haven’t got a food printer, either,” she said hoarsely, pointing at the blank wall. “Or I would offer you a sheet of Wheatlock™.” She laughed, like this was funny. Maybe it was funny. Wheatlock™ is disgusting.

  How did she eat? She couldn’t possibly afford fresh food.

  “You know Randall circumvented the programming and all that?”

  Randall, I assumed, was Beecher’s father.

  “You know why he did it?”

  I had no idea.

  “Ever try to use a food printer during a FiDo? They don’t work. WiFi goes down, and p
retty much nothing works. Everything has to be connected to the tether. Everything. Randall didn’t like it. He worried about it. He said the whole city would starve, and for what?”

  She sat herself down on the couch.

  “After they took him away, they said the family couldn’t be trusted to have any kind of printer.” She wiped the idea away with a disgusted hand. “Who needs that garbage?”

  How was she able to afford all these words? Then I realized that I hadn’t heard her Cuff buzz at all. Did those thick sleeves muffle the sound?

  “You know why Beecher jumped?” she asked, smoothing out the scratchy cloth on her legs. Her voice dropped to a sadder tone.

  Was she really asking, or was she going to tell me? If she knew, I wished she would just come out and say so.

  “Butchers & Rog bought him. Full Indenture. Said he could finish school and then be placed in servitude, or he could quit school right away, and Rog would take him.”

  What kind of choice was that? Quitting school made even less sense now that I knew what had been troubling him. My heart ached for the burden he’d carried, unable to tell me. Had their debt suddenly gotten worse? Is that why he had been Indentured?

  “That poor boy.” Mrs. Stokes shook her head sadly. “Boys his age need to eat, but you saw how skinny he was. We could never afford enough food, and we just couldn’t keep our debt rate steady, no matter how hard we tried.”

  She shrugged helplessly. “He signed a contract. Rog made him use paper and ink. Ink on his fingers. I should’ve asked about that. I didn’t find out ’til later that Beecher agreed to go right away to keep me out of servitude.”

  She shook her head pitifully. “That was the choice they gave him. He agreed to go early to protect me. He barely wanted to say that. You know what he was like after his fifteenth.” She sighed. “He knew what would happen if they found out my secret.”

  She put her hand on her thick sleeve and pulled the coarse fabric up. Underneath, the skin of her hand and arm was a shiny, red, mottled mess. Her Cuff was black, charred around the edges. The glossy screen was warped and eddied with a purplish iridescence.

  “It happened years ago,” she said. “Long before Randall and the printer. I went in to get my overlays—I got mine late in life, because they didn’t have them when I was fifteen—and when they presented me with Terms of Service, I clicked DECLINE. The administrator was shocked.”

  My eyes must have gone wide, because Beecher’s grandmother laughed at me. “She looked a little like that! Dear, you always have the legal right to decline. Did you know that?”

  Could I have refused my overlays? Her advice did me little good now, but still...

  “The transition specialist didn’t know what to do. Apparently neither did the Cuff, because it started to get warm. I thought it was a feedback loop. Randall wondered if it was purposeful—the government’s punishment for not agreeing to the ToS. Whatever caused it, the Cuff got hotter and hotter. It probably would have gone molten, like most do, but once we got home, Randall hacked it. That boy was clever, and was he ever mad. Burned his fingers some. My arm didn’t fare too well, either. But all the inputs were fried.”

  She held the Cuff a little higher, as if I could see what had gone wrong.

  “It still puts out a signal, telling them I’m here. That’s about it. It can’t record a thing. I can say anything I like,” she sighed. She looked sad. I would have expected her to be happy about it. “Beecher thought I could do more good than him because of this.” She held the Cuff higher. “As if I had something useful to say. Truth is, I talked too much already. I complained about the Rights Holders, and look where that got us. I got Randall so fired up with my talk, he got too bold. Now my son and his wife are out tending crops so rich people don’t have to eat printed food, and my grandson...” Her voice broke off, and she wiped her eyes.

  “As far as those Rights Holders know, I haven’t spoken in years. Doesn’t attract any attention, though. I’m sure lots of old ladies give up on talking, so I don’t show up as special or strange. You, though—silence at your age is awful conspicuous.”

  Her story, and the reminder of Beecher’s fate, was almost too much to bear. I clenched my jaw to hold back the tears, but they still came.

  “All you kids without your parents—it’s tragic—so much worse than it used to be,” she said, wiping my cheek. “Seems like they wait until you kids are just old enough to stick you with a Custodian, and then they yank your parents away.”

  She tussled my pixie cut, and I hurriedly smoothed it back into place. She was right, of course. How many friends did I have who still had their parents? It had somehow seemed normal—just the way things were—even if the idea of it twisted a knot in my chest.

  “Sorry,” she said. “I should be careful not to tussle you into a Copyrighted do.”

  She paused and closed her eyes for a brief moment. I felt my hair again. I’d have to cut it soon, hacking it back with the dull pair of scissors Sam and I used for trimming hair. It was weird to think her Cuff wasn’t watching, recording, scanning her haircut and mine and comparing the scans against what little was free.

  “They just keep taking all they can, right up to the breaking point. It’s odd how everyone seems to end up right at the edge of Collection, don’t you think? You can’t do any little thing to protest it, or they’ll sue you right into servitude. I suppose that is why I like your tactic so much. Technically, you aren’t doing anything. I hope you realize how clever that is.”

  I didn’t. I hadn’t. Another tear fell. I felt like a complete fraud. Did she really believe I’d worked this out—that I’d planned for all this to happen?

  “I hope you know I’m proud you did it,” she said. The wrinkles on her face crinkled up.

  I realized I was still standing, looming above her, my posture still full of anger and frustration. My heart was a different matter. I could feel the sadness and regret in her. I wanted to tell her it wasn’t her fault. Whatever she’d stirred up in Beecher, that was no cause for him to take his own life. But I couldn’t speak. I couldn’t take her hand. I didn’t know how to bring her any comfort, and that need welled inside me. One more tear slid down my cheek.

  She took my hand instead. Then she stood and hugged me, and I did not move, because I could not hug her back. I just let myself soak it in.

  ASSAULT: $14.99

  With each day that passed, our prospects dwindled, and without a paycheck, we would be in Collection before the month was out. My silence and notoriety made me impossible to employ. I couldn’t even try to earn pennies in a Free-to-Play game because I couldn’t agree to Terms of Service.

  Trapped in the house, Saretha took to mining for gold and candy in one of these games. She made little hammering gestures in the air, and her avatar made the same tedious motion projected on the wall screen. If she didn’t get distracted, she could make about a three or four dollars an hour by selling what she gathered—but only if she could transport it safely to an in-game bank. Time and again, she was ambushed by players who paid for perks that made them nearly invincible. They thrilled in making players like Saretha miserable; they were unaware or unconcerned that the tiny sums of money they were stealing might ruin us.

  “You’re just wasting time,” Sam told her, turning over in his bed. It was late. The dim glow of the twilight dome faded so it was lit pale by the city. Sam was tired. There was an ache in his voice.

  Saretha tensed. Her half-open mouth closed into a tight, lipless frown. Some kind of half wolf/centaur smashed her character to the ground, and her gold and jellybeans scattered across the screen.

  “Sam!” Saretha cried out, blaming him. Her Cuff buzzed. Sam shook his head. We both knew it cost Saretha more to say his name than she would have made from the loot. The half wolf/centaur turned and farted a noxious green cloud over her avatar’s body�
��a perk you could purchase in-game to taunt your enemies. It likely cost more than the loot as well.

  “You should go to school,” Saretha said.

  Sam looked puzzled. It was nearly eight o’clock at night. “Now?”

  “In general,” Saretha said, flailing a hand around and letting out an exasperated breath. “Don’t make me waste words!”

  Her Cuff buzzed. She meant I should go to school. I hadn’t been in days. After Nancee’s Last Day, I knew the pressure on me would only grow worse. Sera Croate would be waiting. Others would, too. I hoped Nancee was okay, and realized too late I should have gone to be with her.

  “You probably should,” Sam encouraged in a small voice.

  I almost said, Yeah, because speaking with Sam felt more familiar than my silence. But I stopped myself just in time. Still, he was right. It wasn’t good for Saretha and I to be cooped up together. I wasn’t helping her, and I doubt she understood how much I longed to help.

  Still frowning, Saretha waited to respawn and scrolled through her Cuff at her friend count. She once broke two thousand followers. Now she was down to a couple dozen. She sighed. She tried to pull up her Huny® status, but it wouldn’t load. I hadn’t even thought about how her Branding might be affected. Had they dropped her?

  “Crap,” Sam said realizing what this meant. Sam hated the taste of Wheatlock™. The Huny® spread was the only thing that made it palatable, probably because it had an actual flavor: sweet. Wheatlock™ tasted like the bottom of a shoe, but probably blander. “I guess we’ll have to ration our supplies.” He laughed, but he laughed alone. I didn’t find it funny; I found it sad. We wouldn’t have Huny® anymore.

  A moment later, Saretha’s character was back on-screen, unarmed and tiny, headed to the mines. The half wolf/centaur charged, having stuck around to crush her again, just because he could. I couldn’t watch her do this anymore.

  I left. I had to get out. I walked for a few hours, along to the far side of the rim where the shops gave way to small houses, greenery and then exclusive Law Firms, nightclubs and the enormous City Court House.