Daisy glared a warning at her husband.
“Oh, shit. Juan. Name’s Juan.”
“That’s better, babe.” She pecked Juan on the cheek.
“Where’d you find him?” Sasha leaned in to whisper.
“Some POC mixer. I was at a different law firm. They had this event. You know the deal. Kenny and I used to go to those all the time. Room full of power bottoms about to make too much money.” When Daisy said that, Sasha arched an intrigued eyebrow, as though to ask if Daisy really talked like this. Daisy angled her face to Sasha. “Kenny was the best part of these things. Only time corporate law didn’t feel like living through some lifelong horror-comedy.”
“What does he do?” Sasha asked, somehow with a glass of wine already in her hand.
Daisy took a beat before saying, “Banker.”
Sasha made a yikes face. Kenny’s expression turned porcelain.
“But we balance it out,” Daisy said, rushing in. “I’m at a civil rights firm now, so that balances it out.” A sympathetic smile ricocheted between the three of them. “I mean, you know, Kenny. You know what it’s like. The debt. Gets to be the biggest number in your life and you have to hold off all sorts of stuff. Life decisions and whatever. You have to kill your dreams and ambitions and your hopes, just so you can get your head above water.”
“There’s also indentured servitude,” Kenny ribbed, wiggling his aquamarine fingertips.
“Oh, God,” Daisy whispered.
“I mean, they package the message as ‘tech this’ and ‘innovation that,’ and they do take a chunk outta the debt with the lease on my body, but it’s literally the least invasive way to go about paying that stuff off. Look, everyone’s got augments. Mine are just free. Fact, they’re freer than free.”
“But, Kenny, that means you can only work for approved employers.”
Kenny snorted. “List is big enough.” He shifted, made more space for Sasha, for backup. “Tell me about work. Fightin’ the good fight.”
“Wish you were down here in the trenches with me?”
“Eh, maybe.”
For the briefest of instants, Daisy’s mask faltered and a darkness swarmed beneath the skin of her face, like shadows fucking, and Kenny caught a glimpse of how haggard the work made her, how much whatever it was she did taxed her. A hungry part of him saw the pain and sought it out. “Tell me about it. Really.”
Daisy sighed, eyed Kenny and Sasha. “Well, since the police went Algo, lotta people stopped making wrongful death lawsuits. Imagine trying to fit a Crusty into the witness stand. Can’t bring an algorithm to court, and what’re you gonna do when you convict? Put a fucking robot on desk duty? Sometimes, though, you can get a payout. It’s never enough. Especially for an officer-involved shooting. No amount of money’s ever going to bring back a son or a brother or a father or a sister or whatever, but it’s money. It’s better than nothing. We all know the Algo’s not perfect. Everybody does. But a 13-year-old boy gets shot in a park and all evidence points to police misconduct, but the Algo told those toasters to do it. They’re not gonna admit to a malfunction. That would mean recalling all the units they spent dozens of millions of dollars to pay for. So,”—she shrugged—“the Nuremberg defense. ‘I was just following orders.’”
“Wait, you said a 13-year-old boy got shot in the park?” Kenny could feel Sasha tightening next to him, wine glass to her lips, her whole body urging Kenny to be careful.
“Yeah, Shamir Townsend. The firm’s been repping his mother on a wrongful death suit against the city, but really it’s just a play for the payout. This stays between us, k?”
Kenny shrugged. “Who am I gonna tell?”
Daisy relaxed. “It’s all fucked anyway. Poor people end up paying for this shit anyway.”
Sasha had leaned in but was making herself unobtrusive. “What, the city jacks up taxes?”
“Worse. Tax assessors overvalue homes in poor neighborhoods and undervalue properties in rich ones. So you got properties in, say, North Lawndale and Little Village in Chicago paying double the property tax rate than people living in Lincoln Park or on the Gold Coast. It’s like that everywhere. And that’s not even the fucking worst of it.”
Kenny couldn’t tell what his face looked like, but he knew he was trapped, enthralled, horrified. There was something different to this, though. This wasn’t instant. It wasn’t video. It wasn’t media. It wasn’t surveillance footage of an act. It wasn’t audio of an ongoing riot. It was a deeper injury. A drawn-out thing. Not a stabbing, but a knife drawn slowly along the skin.
“When you have to budget more for police tort liability, you have less for lead poisoning screening for poor children. Violence prevention initiatives, after-school programs, mental health clinics. All gone. Budget cuts.”
Kenny was too rapt to say anything. Sasha shook her head. “But these settlements, they’re millions and millions of dollars. The police don’t have to pay?”
Daisy snorted. “Police departments set aside a small slice of their budget for misconduct settlements. If the price is more than that, city’s on the hook. Not them. B’sides, it’s the city that pays for the robot.”
Sasha couldn’t stop shaking her head. “That’s fucked.”
Daisy exhaled. “Yeah.” And Kenny saw that face and knew there would be no more, not from Daisy. It hit like the comedown from a new drug, the bottomless despair, the instant and incessant hunger, the shame of it all. A moment later, everyone seemed to come to their senses, awake from whatever reveries or bromides or hungers they’d been trapped in, wiping the daydream from their eyes and seeing each other naked, and in swept Sasha calling out far too loud, “I am so hungry I could fuck a zebra right now.”
While the room lit up with laughter, Sasha caught Kenny’s gaze, and Kenny smiled what felt like an apology, and Sasha winked back a “you’re welcome.”
They were all supposed to be having fun.
In what felt like only seconds, the plates of fusilli arrived.
HOLO-PAINT TURNED THE walls of the conference room into open pasture with simulated wind blowing simulated stalks of wheat in mechanically precise rows far into the distance over verdant hills framed against an azure firmament. A glance overhead showed a sky the same shade of blue with cotton-colored clouds threaded through it.
Kenny and seven other sharks sat in hoverchairs around an oblong table while, at the head of the room, stood a white finance dude in shirt-sleeves rolled to the elbows and an Aryan as fuck face.
“I trust you all have had time to digest all the info on yesterday’s session about bonds, yeah? Pretty intro stuff, I know, so I’m gonna just jump right ahead into municipal bonds and—”
One of the sharks raised a hand and switched her voice software from Portuguese to English. “Why are we focusing on cities? This says they’re high-risk investments. If the city does a…bond…and they go bankrupt, they can’t pay it off. So our client loses money.”
“Good point, Fernanda. Except, under a lot of these state laws, the cities we’re focusing on can’t go bankrupt. What our clients are looking at is essentially guaranteed money…”
Kenny tuned the finance dude’s voice into background noise as he tapped and swiped through the hyperlinks in the material, scanning until he hit a page on something called “cat bonds” with a picture of what looked like a half-submerged city, roofs poking out like stepping stones through highway-wide rivers of blue. Risk-linked securities…sponsors…investors…triggered…industry loss index…
A random throwing-out of terms, data points, no constellation. Just a mess of jargon and a picture of a neighborhood destroyed by a hurricane.
“Like shootings.”
At that, Kenny sat up in his seat and tuned back into the lesson. “What?”
The finance dude stopped for a second. “You have a question, uh, Kenny, is it?”
“Yeah.” The finance terms swirled in his head like detritus in the funnel of a tornado. Then came the dinner party at Marea
earlier that week and tax assessors and property value and police and Shamir Townsend. And he felt himself just on the cusp of an understanding. An epiphany that promised a pattern. “Uh, you were saying something about shootings?”
“Yeah.”
Kenny rushed in to save himself with an explanation. “I do a lot of security stuff. Law enforcement-related. Traffic, crime. I blanked for a second. What were you saying about shootings?”
“Oh, just in terms of stuff to watch out for. Anything that could cause a liability suit. This is all complex stuff, but it’s just background. Help to inform your decision-making. You just need to watch out for the stuff you’re already watching out for and ping one of us in Finance so we can jump on it and do our thing.”
“Oh.” Kenny tuned out again and tried to focus on the pattern just out of reach. All bright nodes and non-existent edges. Like trying to trace astral constellations in an afternoon sky.
“SHOTS FIRED,” KENNY called out with renewed vigor. “Cudell Park.” He knew his voice was too loud, like he was listening to music and trying to have a convo at the same time, but he couldn’t help it. In one tab, he had the Mrs. Townsend press conference replaying and, on another tab, he had news of the settlement the city had offered the family—$2.2 million USD—and in another, the reading materials on catastrophe bonds. All this, he tried to keep hidden in tiny incognito-mode browser windows he knew the company was monitoring anyway. Research, he would tell them. Hurricanes, forest fires, all stuff they were supposed to be tapping and tagging and bucketing anyway. It still took him a moment to remember to loop the finance guys in on the security stuff, a quick tag or a Slack or whatever. Sometimes, the notification would switch to a different alert bucket altogether right in front of him or he’d see finance fingerprints on something he’d already bucketed.
He opened another Slack channel and @’d one of the analytics people. “Hey, can you do a quick data pull for me?”
“What’s up?” came the reply.
“Can you get me a sheet of the domestic shootings we notified on with finance?”
Then glowing ellipses until, a few seconds later, he received a link to a GDoc.
While he tapped and tagged and bucketed, he scanned the data, murmuring to himself, “officer-involved, officer-involved, officer-involved…” A pause. “The fuck?”
“Yo, Sash,” he DM’d in another Slack channel. “Yo, all my shootings have finance on them. Is that weird?”
“I dunno. Is it?” Glowing ellipses. “Sorry, gotta bounce. Working a factory fire.”
“Cool.” He bit his lip.
HE WAITED UNTIL his train hit the above-ground stops to call Daisy.
“Yo,” he beamed to her phone.
“Hey! What’s up? It was so good to see you the other night!”
Kenny smiled, realizing he’d forgot he was supposed to be polite. “It was good to see you too. Congratulations. On, like, everything. I’m so happy for you.”
“Thanks, Ken.”
He could feel her blushing at the other end. “Look, Daze, I got a question.”
“Hope I got an answer.”
“Where does the money come from?”
“Money? For what?”
“For the settlements.” Kenny pulled himself back, tried to slow down. He felt himself on the edge of it. So close. “It can’t be the city. $2.2 million for one settlement, but there’s gotta be like how many a year? Some of these places are paying out, like, $147 mil a year. And we’re talking smaller cities. All for officer-involved shootings.” For much of the ride, he’d tapped into municipal records, news stories, past alerts, all using his security credentials against protocol, credentials that, tied to his augments, gave him the same access as a federal government employee. “Is it banks?”
“What are you saying?”
Kenny gulped. This was the new part, the less-formed part. The almost-pattern. “The cities are floating bonds, I think. To pay for the settlements.”
“From who? Goldman Sachs? J.P. Morgan?”
“…yeah.”
“But…but how? Why? Cities have the shittiest credit ratings. How is that a sound investment?”
“Fees. Interest. The banks get paid every period off the interest and handling fees and all of that.” He reminded himself to lower his voice. “And…and I checked the state laws. The cities that have the most shootings, they’re in states where it’s literally against the law for them to go bankrupt. I think, to pay off the one bond, they issue another. I don’t think the cops are malfunctioning. I think…I think the banks are getting paid off of these shootings.”
“Jesus.”
Beeping sounded. Another call. Sasha’s ID blinked before his eyes. “Shit. Look, Daze, I gotta go. Ask Juan about it.”
“Wait, but—” Dialtone.
“Hey, Sash, what’s up?”
“Kenny, can you come over?” Her voice was sorrow-soaked.
He sat up in his seat. “Sure, yeah, what’s wrong?”
“You up for some trauma bonding? Having trouble leaving work at work today. Can you come?”
Greed, hunger, lust, guilt all warred inside him. He hoped that Sasha heard only the right kind of eagerness in his voice when he said, “Yeah, I’ll be right over.”
THE FIRST TIME they’d fucked was during a spell of downtime on the second of a two-day al-Shabaab terror attack on a hotel complex in Nairobi. Day One, Kenny, blanketed in the paranoia fog that shrouds the recently jobless and newly-hired, had been more locked in than he’d thought possible. Security footage, open calls from people trapped inside the buildings, terrorist channels online, to the point where he could feel his own torn dress shoes trying to step as softly as possible down bloodied corridors covered in pebbles of glass. He could hear the sporadic gunfire, the tearful, whispered phone calls, the online posts calling for help, giving as brief a room description as possible, the message saying that a poster’s phone was dying and they were unAugmented, unConnected. Then nothing.
And the following morning, he’d broken down on the train, one of those commuters wrapped in their own private sorrow while everyone went about the business of trying to make it to work that day. Things had slowed down on Day Two of the attack and Sasha had found him weeping in the office lactation room and he grasped for her, hungered for her, until they’d spent themselves with the quiet urgency of the hidden and hiding.
“Sash, this lighting is bisexual as fuck,” Kenny said, laughing, as he entered.
She was on a couch hugging a pillow, hair scattered over her face, smiling meaningfully through smeared mascara.
“I brought red for you and grenadine for me. You got Sprite? Ginger ale? Anything sparkly and see-through?”
“Come here,” she murmured, and Kenny obeyed because of that thing in her voice, and she pulled him onto her, and he vanished to himself until she said, “Kenny.”
“Yeah?”
“How you doin’?”
Kenny blinked, confused. “I…I’m fine. I’m good. I’m here for you.”
She smiled, and something in it pushed Kenny back so that he moved to the opposite end of the couch. For a long time, they occupied the couch like that: he at one end and she lounging at the other. “You figured it out, didn’t you.”
“What?”
“Don’t worry, Ken.” She waved a finger around her. “I got a Blanket. We’re not being watched. Nothing’s tapped.”
“What are you talking about?”
“The banks, the shootings, you figured it out, didn’t you.”
Kenny’s eyes widened. “You…you know?”
She nodded.
“You know that the new clients are making money off officer-involved shootings? Is that why they signed us?” His head spun. “Wait, fuck. But…but we’re also signed to local law enforcement. We do their algos. Wait.” His whole body felt leaden. “Fuck. Fuck fuck fuck. No. Fuck.”
Sasha’s face was sympathetic but marble-solid.
“Sasha! We’re prog
ramming cops to shoot black kids so that banks can make money!”
“Kenny.”
He stood suddenly, paced back and forth. “We can’t go internal. We…we have to do something. Your old journo friends. We have to tell them. We have to.”
Sasha shook her head, and the look in her eyes had turned a new shade of sad.
Dull pain filled the space beneath Kenny’s skin. Made him leaden.
“Who’ve you told?” she said softly.
“Sasha.” There was hard warning in his voice when he said her name. “Sasha, what is this?” When she didn’t answer, he glared. “What are you, their agent? Like, a spy or something?”
“Ken, you used security credentials out of the office. You kept office materials in personal storage.”
“Only publicly accessible stuff, Sasha! I would never—”
“But we touched it, Ken. Once we touch it, it’s ours.”
“Sasha.” Pleading.
“Who else have you told?”
“How long were you watching me?”
“It’s government, Ken. Or, government-adjacent. We’re always watching you. You know that.”
He collapsed into a La-Z-Boy and sighed. “Well.” Suddenly, it all felt funny. Hilarious. And he could not stop laughing. “Well, fuck me.” When he settled, “So what happens now?”
Sasha shrugged. “Nothing. We just wanted to check. We know what this work does to people. And not everyone wants to take advantage of office resources.”
“What, fifteen minutes of guided fucking meditation before I head into a Boko Haram attack?”
She chuckled. “Yeah, that.” She scratched her head, and somehow it looked like the most attractive thing Kenny had ever seen her do. “Look, I’m just doing my job. We’re all just doing our jobs. Fucking student loans.”
“Yeah. Fucking student loans.” He felt himself grow distant, something forming in him, and he wanted to be away from her before she could see it fully take shape. “Look, I should go. You good?”
She nodded.
“For real?”
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