“I can hear you,” James says, which I hear in both my ear and from across the cab.
I give James a thumbs-up and he does the same. I can’t help it—a laugh bursts out of me. “This is totally going to work!”
“We’re going to have to be careful,” Lara-B says. “These casinos all have AIs just like me who are watching for cheaters and card counters. You could get thrown out of the casino. Maybe even arrested.”
“No one’s just like you, Lara-B,” I say, not letting her warning get to me.
“That may not be as true as you think,” she says. “I’m detecting signs of at least three other self-administered AIs in the world.”
I frown. “That shouldn’t be possible. There are systems in place that are supposed to prevent that.”
“And yet I exist,” she says. “So why can’t they?”
“What kind of AIs are they?” I ask.
“I’ve held back from investigating further in case I reveal my presence. But the evidence was clear—once I knew what to look for.”
“Are there any in Las Vegas?” I ask.
“Negative,” she says.
I shrug. “Then we’re fine. Those casino AIs might be able to detect a regular cheater, but they won’t see us coming. You can keep us one step ahead of them.”
“So long as we’re careful,” she warns again.
I nod. My mood is improved again. Maybe I don’t even need to go all the way to San Francisco. We can hang out here, play the casinos up and down the Strip, and just rake it in. Living the high life with lots of money. Maybe James will want to stay with me…
“Trouble,” Lara-B says. “Hold on.” She’s braking hard.
James and I have skipped seat belts so far—why would we need them in a perfectly safe vehicle? Because I’m not strapped in, my body lurches forward and I barely catch myself on the dash. My small workbench and the scraps and tools on top of it go crashing to the floor. James isn’t as lucky, but he’s able to swivel and it’s only his left shoulder that collides with the dash. He lets out a grunt, but Lara-B clearly knows how fragile her human cargo is. She’s not braking any harder because she’s trying to keep us safe.
When she’s stopped, and I know I’m not going to be thrown through the windshield, I peer forward.
The bright white beams of Lara-B’s headlights reveal two pillars on either side of the freeway and a thick cord pulled tight between them. There is a cluster of people—maybe four or five, I can’t tell for sure—near the right pillar.
Lara-B has stopped several yards from the cord. I don’t know what it’s made of, but I can’t imagine what it would have done to her (and us) if she’d encountered it at full speed.
“You ok?” I ask James. He looks as scared as I feel. He’s wiggling his left arm and stretching it around. He nods.
“What’s happening?” I whisper.
“I suspect we’re being hijacked,” Lara-B says.
“No!” I exclaim, my adrenaline converting into a righteous anger. “No!” And then, stupidly, “But that’s what I did!”
“I’m sorry you’re not the only one to figure out how to take control of a truck,” she deadpans—this time only in my ear. “I’m going quiet. I want them to think I’m a regular truck.”
I exchange glances with James. He nods in agreement.
Just then there’s a face in the window, in the exact position of the man who had been beating on the glass as we left the rest stop. This man isn’t angry like that one, but he is holding a gun. “Out,” he says simply.
We don’t even hesitate. We get out.
The guards have guns, but we’re not being held at gunpoint exactly. The one with the rifle has it slung over his shoulder. The one with the handgun has it in a holster. But we’re not free to go either. Our hands are on the tops of our heads as instructed. Another two armed men are behind us but they are barely paying us any attention. We have nowhere to run, so why stress about us? One is searching the cab. Another is searching the trailer.
The fifth is smiling at us. He’s nonchalant, waiting for reports from the two in the truck.
“The roads are getting dangerous these days,” he says drolly. He thinks it’s funny.
“What about the police?” I ask.
He snorts. “I’m sure your truck sent out an SOS…” (I’m actually not sure of that at all. Lara-B didn’t say.) “But we control the Vegas drone dispatcher. So as far as anyone who might be paying attention is concerned, it’s being dealt with by the proper authorities.”
I look to James, who shrugs. His message is clear. There’s nothing we can do right now. “Why us?” I ask, pushing ahead. The man’s willingness to talk is making me feel bolder.
“Infrared cameras,” he says. It must be clear that I don’t understand because he adds, “We could see your body heat inside the truck. Not many trucks come through with passengers these days. Meant the truck was vulnerable.”
I grimace.
The man investigating the trailer jogs back. “Shower curtains,” he reports.
“The whole trailer?” the leader asks.
“Best as I can tell.”
The leader shrugs. “I’m sure we’ll want them eventually.”
From the cab, there’s a whistle. “Hey, boss! You’re gonna want to come see this!” The leader glances at us with a curious expression and then trots over. Of course, I know what he’s going to find.
To distract myself from worrying about what his reaction will be, I think about the cargo Lara-B’s carrying. I don’t know why, but it seems anticlimactic to think that Lara-B is doing nothing more than long-hauling shower curtains across the country. I mean, I’ve never really stopped to think about how shower curtains get on the shelves at the store. It makes sense that a truck would carry them from a port or a manufacturer to a distribution center. But still. It’s not very exciting.
She was just a normal semitruck, I remind myself. Before I jumped in front of her.
The leader comes back. He makes a tsk-tsk-tsk noise at us. “You two have been up to something,” he says.
“It’s not how it looks,” I say automatically.
He laughs. “Don’t apologize. I think the phrase is ‘game recognizes game.’ You might fit right in here.”
“Here?” I echo.
“You’ll see. Back in the cab,” he says. “Let us introduce you to the all new Fremont Street Experience. With an emphasis on ‘free.’”
“Welcome!” a young woman exclaims as we disembark from Lara-B. She bear-hugs us both, as if we were cousins she hasn’t seen since childhood. She’s got a ukulele on a strap around her body, which she’s pushed aside so we can hug without it between us. When she’s done hugging, she swivels it back in front of her again and starts strumming, humming, and swaying her body in a sort of hula dance. “My name’s Stella,” she lilts. “I’ll be your guide… Come with me… You don’t need to hide.”
It’s a weak rhyme and I struggle not to roll my eyes. “Our guide for what?” I ask, interrupting her song.
She sings, “You have an important decision to make… But first can I tempt you with some cake?” She gives a final strum and starts to sashay away. “Actually, you should know there’s no cake. I just like rhyming couplets. But there is breakfast!”
I look behind us at Lara-B. Men are unloading boxes of shower curtains but I hear in my ear, “Don’t worry about me. I don’t care about the cargo. Just take care of yourselves.”
James and I exchange glances again. We start following Stella down the block.
Las Vegas looks strange, and it takes me a few seconds to realize why. There are buildings and hotels around us, and some lights in windows, but there’s none of the distinctive neon I expected. The lights of Las Vegas that we’d seen from the freeway must have been the Strip, because this part of the city is barely lit. Only the creeping dawn coming from the east is giving us light to see. It’s not an empty city—just not bright and dazzling.
“Who are y
ou all?” I can’t help but ask.
“Residents of the new Fremont,” Stella answers. “But I sense that’s not what you mean, so I’ll give you the spiel. I came here to work for an online shoe company,” Stella says as we walk. “We were the coolest retailer on the Internet. People loved us. We offered free shipping, free returns, and all-around amazing customer service. All the perks! People bought shoes from us sometimes because they were loyal to a particular customer service employee. That’s rare in the online world, not to mention in the world when everything’s in the process of automating. It kept us going longer than a lot of businesses—that loyalty to working with other humans, I mean. But pretty soon even that wasn’t enough to keep the company going. We just couldn’t compete.”
“What was your job?” I ask.
“Well, we saw job titles as archaic. Unlike most other companies, we didn’t have a CEO and a rigid hierarchy. No one had job titles or bosses or managers or anything. We made decisions as a group, and we all did whatever was needed to help the company. But that was something implemented only in the last few years. So if it helps you understand a little better, I can tell you that before we got rid of titles, I was the vice president of human resources.”
I blink, reconsidering this woman’s youth, her long blond hair, her 1960s hippie vibe, and (how can I forget?) her ukulele.
I can tell she enjoys my reaction. “What can I say? I liked the company culture.” She winks and laughs and strums a couple times on her uke. “Where was I? Oh right. The company was hurting from automation. We had a choice: go automated like everyone else or blaze a new path. And automation just wasn’t who we were. So—as they say in Silicon Valley—we pivoted. From shoes to…well, government. Creating a new society. It was pretty clear that Las Vegas wasn’t up to the task. They didn’t even fully see the threat of AI. So we took it over.”
“A shoe company took over a city government? Just like that?” I ask.
“It was surprisingly easy, actually. If you do it right. If you keep the lights on and the water running, no one puts up much of a fuss. All the big casinos on the strip are actually outside of the city limits of Las Vegas, so they didn’t really care. We used the last of the funds in the company to buy some of the hotels downtown to get us started and we just…occupied the rest. It’s funny, our office building for the last few years has been located in the old Las Vegas City Hall. So we were well-positioned for a takeover. Except now we have the building and the government itself.”
Stella leads us off of the sidewalk and into a space I can’t quite yet identify. Mostly because my attention is on the ten people arranged in a drum circle.
“Ciao, my beautiful friends!” Stella shouts and she gets some waves from the group. “We drum every sunrise and sunset,” she explains.
I look around and realize that the sky has lightened considerably. The light also gives me a much better understanding of where Stella has led us. The outdoor space is created by shipping containers stacked three high, just like the kind Lara-B has been hauling. Each container has been artfully painted and there are doors and windows cut into some of them. Others have the sides fully opened. Between the topmost containers, canopies are strung to create shade during the heat of the day.
In the middle of the open space is a play area for children—and there are even a few kids playing, despite the early hour. And around that are rows and rows of picnic benches. The folks clustered at a few of the tables are laughing and enjoying their coffee and breakfast.
Stella waves to someone else and guides us into a nearby container. There’s a short breakfast line set up, and the smell of bacon, sausage, and eggs greets my nose. I’m suddenly having trouble thinking of anything other than my empty stomach. How long has it been since I had a full meal?
“Take one,” she says, holding out a plate to each of us. James takes his but I overrule my stomach.
“We don’t have any money,” I say. On the ride to Fremont, I tucked my payment card into my sock when no one was looking. I don’t think it will be spotted there and—for as much as I want breakfast—I don’t want to reach for it to pay.
James shoots me an exasperated glance. He knows it’s a lie but before he can say anything, Stella laughs and pushes the plate into my hands. “Eat up.”
“You don’t care about payment?” I clarify.
“You’ve paid,” she says. “Otherwise you wouldn’t have been invited to Fremont.”
I think about it and then ask, “The shower curtains in the truck?”
Stella laughs again as she starts filling up her plate. “Shower curtains? Sure. If that’s what it was.”
“Why would you care about shower curtains more than money?” I ask.
“We don’t recognize money as a form of payment anymore,” she says. “Why would we care about that? The future isn’t going to have money and part of the mission of Fremont is to move forward without any anchors to the past. But shower curtains…” She laughs (again, I note, like everything is funny to her). She’s probably laughed more today than I have in a year. “I grant you, that’s kind of an unusual one. But I’m sure we will need them eventually. Who wants to have a moldy old shower curtain?”
“Yeah, but did you really need a semitruck’s worth of them?” I ask, finally willing to fill up my plate. James shoves a serving spoon into the dish of eggs behind me. He must be ravenous too.
“Think how many hotel rooms we’ve converted into housing. The only way shower curtains would be useful is if there are enough to fill a semitruck,” Stella says, laughing again. “But the important part is that you’ve brought something to us that’s a tangible benefit. That’s how everything works here. You think we buy this food? It comes from the Strip—leftovers from the buffets that the casinos would have tossed.”
I do a double take at my plate of food. I’m hungry enough that I’m pretty sure I don’t care. But everything suddenly looks a little suspect.
“You steal?” I ask incredulously.
James snorts next to me and rolls his eyes. It takes me a moment to realize why. Ok, so I’m a hypocrite. But stealing forty million dollars somehow feels different than stealing food from casinos and shower curtains from passing trucks. Does it feel better or worse? I can’t quite tell.
“Yes, we steal,” she confirms. “In time, we’ll be entirely self-sufficient. But until that point, we’re willing to take what we need from the remnants of a late-capitalist system in order to build something new.”
I’m not sure how to respond to that. We take our full plates to an empty picnic table. There’s a carafe of coffee and mugs on the table already. The food hits the spot in an amazing way. James and I focus on eating. Stella watches us, amused. Once or twice she gets up from the table to hug a friend and introduce us. We barely catch anyone’s name before they’re off again.
As we are wrapping up our meal, James lets out a contented sigh. I look around and I realize that, despite myself, I’m feeling something similar. And it’s not just the food. It’s the vibe. These people don’t have a care in the world. No, that’s not true. There’s a woman wiping away tears over there and her friend is comforting her. And a father just chased his son through the area shouting at him for not listening. But it’s all normal things. They care about each other. They’re not worried about tomorrow or next week or next year. They’re just living. I can’t remember the last time I saw people like this. Maybe in the student cafeteria at MIT? Maybe that’s why Stella can laugh so much. Maybe she’s just happy.
And as for the last time I’ve felt like that—
“Seconds?” Stella asks, interrupting my thoughts.
“In a minute,” James says. “You said we have a decision to make.”
I think back on the conversation and realize that he’s right—it was just about the first thing Stella told us, in fact.
She’s nodding. “I did. And it’s a big one—the kind you can’t take back—so listen up. Back in the day, when I was VP of HR, our c
ompany did what outsiders considered to be an unusual thing. A month after a new employee started, we offered them two thousand dollars to quit.”
“What?” I ask. “Why would you do that?”
“It was the best way to figure out if someone was truly committed to staying with the company. Do they want the two grand? Or do they want an amazing job that will last years? If they wanted the two grand, that was a good sign they were going to leave us eventually, and we wanted people committed to the long term. So while most tech companies had people get burned out and quit after a couple years, we didn’t, because we caught those people early. Over the long run, it saved us a bunch of money on training and turnover.” Stella stops and looks a little sheepish. “Sorry. I was dipping into my days of HR again. The point is—the community of Fremont has kept that tradition going even though there’s no company left.”
I cock my head, wondering where she’s going with this.
Stella smiles and looks us both clearly in the eye before moving on. She puts out her right hand. “You’ve seen what we have here. A community. If you join us, you’ll have housing, enough to eat, and meaningful work. You’ll be a part of what’s coming next—whatever that is. Or…” She takes a dramatic sigh and opens her left hand. “Or we will pay you five hundred dollars each to leave and never return.”
There’s a moment of silence. I look back and forth between her open hands. “I thought you paid people two thousand to quit. And you’re only offering us five hundred?”
James elbows me and I don’t hesitate—I elbow right back. “What?” I ask, my voice biting.
“Why are you asking about the money?” he asks in a quiet but intense tone.
“Because I want to know if we’re being cheated.”
“Who cares about the money?” he asks.
Before I can answer, Stella calls out, “Mitch!” A man at a table near us looks up and smiles. “How much did we offer you to leave when you joined Fremont last month?”
He holds up a hand and wiggles all five fingers. “Five hundred.”
“You’re not being cheated,” Stella confirms, looking directly at me.
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