Goldstein

by Troy J. Grice

  Devin contemplated the billion faces compiled into the NaPol database; a billion faces broken down into twelve mathematical parameters. A billion people, including all five-hundred million plus Amerikans, each assigned a unique, twelve-digit equation. A billion equations interfaced with ten thousand images taken of every person in Amerika every single day. Ten thousand times a billion compilations of Amerikans walking down sidewalks or riding in their electros or immersed in their holovisions or pinging their multis or having their faces altered in walk-in cosmetic salons or strolling past any window or city light or signage facing any public street in any city or hamlet or point of interest anywhere in the fifty three contiguous states.

  “Wheww,” Devin thought.

  There were at least a billion tiny spy cameras integrated into fingernail-sized chipsets, embedded into everything from traffic signals to salt shakers, each costing less than a penny, each scanning skeletal-geometry ten times a second with nano-laser-radar devices. Each beaming their images to a million local relay stations which bundled and sent their packets up to a hundred thousand orbiting satellites which re-bundled and recompiled and beamed the data back down into the great, humming, blinking, black box which housed the NaPol supercomputer transit database in Ensenada, Mexico.

  “They couldn’t triangulate me that quick, there’s not enough data points on me to predict my movement patterns,” he reasoned. “I have no patterns. It’s impossible! It’s a coincidence, that’s all. Coincidence,” he thought as the escalator extruded the herd of sheeple onto the street.

  A cacophony of sirens and whining, rattling electos, and roaring, soot-belching, diesel haulers and whistling superjets, way, far, high above, stitching the hazy skies with their gray chem-trails greeted him as he emerged onto the street. Sirens! The ear-piercing, baritone airbursts caused Devin’s teeth to clench.

  He scanned the intersection. Diagonal from him was a municipal park with plastic crabapple trees and a field of faux-grass. A herd of wooly-haired bums roamed about the synthetic pasture, leisurely soaking up the warm midday haze.

  Across Chavez Ave stood a fortress-like, seventy story, gray block and glass box of Kruschevian architecture. It was the Federal Department of Employment.

  Devin crossed the street, pushed through the glass doors and entered the lobby. He was immediately grabbed by the arm by a security guard and slammed onto the ground.

  “Where you going?” the guard barked.

  “Here, take my multi,” Devin replied, submissively, unsure of why he was thrown to the ground.

  The guard went catatonic as he scanned Devin’s multi and the augmented reality played out before his eyes within his lenses. Nothing abnormal turned up on the readouts. He wanded Devin from head to toe. Then he frisked him.

  “All clear here,” the guard remarked into his wristwatch. “Get up. Don’t make a scene, please. You can’t go storming into government buildings like that. What’s your business here?”

  “I’m looking for a job,” Devin explained, still shaken. “Can you point me in a direction?”

  “It’s that way.”

  Devin strolled down the hall past a bank of elevators to a desk manned by a cherubic woman.

  “Can I help you?” she asked.

  “Yes. I’m looking for the employment department. I’m looking for work.”

  With robotic proficiency, the woman scanned him with her eyes, gathering the requisite information and transferring it to her computer. The data transfer populated a forty six page form with all of Devin’s phony information. Then she wanded him again which was routine at government offices.

  “I must first inform you that you have not been profiled based upon your race, gender, religion, sexual preference, mental or physical challenges, unattractiveness, body type or shape, eye color, odor, atypical facial expression, or visible or invisible deformity, birth defect, scar, or abnormal feature and that all civil servants at this location wand all patrons regardless of the aforementioned for security reasons. Do you understand? If you do, please nod yes for the surveillance devices.” Devin nodded. “Please have a seat, Mr. O’Shea. A counselor will see you momentarily.”

  Devin took a seat in the only available, stackable, plastic chair. To his left was a table with three holozine tablets. It sprung to life in three-dimensional color as he picked one up. Tinny dialogue and faint music came out of its miniature speakers. There was almost no written language therein beyond one-sentence taglines that exploded off the surface as Devin turned the virtual pages.

  “Victory!” exclaimed one. “Patriotic Duty!” popped another. “Security”, “Evil”, “Safety”, “Fanatic”, “War!” The headlines were followed by one-second visuals of young, angry, brown people firing assault rifles and setting things ablaze. Then dragonfly gunships appeared over third world shanty-towns and obliterated them with micro-nukes and heat seeking bullets and tanks rolled over blackened corpses all of which played out before a backdrop of a wind-rippled Old Glory.

  Devin looked for football scores. Besides war and patriotism, all he found were advertisements for “The Totally Redesigned Flux from Mumbai Motors”, “Numenor Corporation: The Business of Democracy”, A public service announcement warning parents that un-chipped kids might be abducted, “Prescription Extacin: Intensify Your Passion”, and “Forevernet: Virtual Immortality for the Ones you Love”.

  Bored, Devin set the tablet down and it immediately went dark. He patiently waited in the hard plastic chair for forty minutes.

  “Mr. O’Shea,” barked the receptionist. “Please come to the counter” Devin complied. “A counselor will see you now. Go through that glass door and down the hall. It’s the last room on the right. Room 194.”

  Devin opened a glass door and walked down a concrete walled hallway to the last door, room 194, which was a door made of compressed sawdust but made to look like wood. Devin knocked.

  “Come in,” came a high-pitched male voice from behind the door. Devin opened the door but there was no one inside. “Take a seat. I will be with you in a minute.”

  Devin sat down in another hard plastic chair. Its legs were so short that sitting in it made him feel childlike. The rest of the office was empty except for a giant holovision screen on the wall opposite the door.

  Devin waited. There was nothing to divert himself from his boredom. No holozines. No music. Definitely no books. No one read books in Amerika. Who had the time to read with a six hour work shift and ten hours of holovision programming to devour every day.

  Devin waited still longer. He loathed sensory deprivation, it made him nervous. He fidgeted. The room was dim and gray. The screen facing him remained dark. The plastic chair became increasingly uncomfortable. He squirmed. An overwhelming sense of being watched came over him. He scanned the featureless concrete walls for the hidden camera.

  He knew they could be made so small now that they could be hidden virtually anywhere. “It all depends on who was doing the watching,” he thought, “and what they were watching for.” Big conspicuous cameras were typically found in public. They sent a message that said, YOU ARE BEING WATCHED! But they could also make cameras as small as a grain of sand. They watched you everywhere. But it shouldn’t matter so long as one was doing right. Devin resented it nonetheless.

  “C’mon,” he whispered. At that very instant, the holovision filled with life.

  The face of a very, very large man appeared. He was a neck-less man with rolls of fat in place of a jaw line. His deep set, beady eyes had no eyebrows. His chubby cheeks squished his red little mouth into a pucker. His hair was greasy and disheveled.

  “One moment please,” he said after taking a puff of oxygen from a mask. His sausage fingers typed cuneiform into his keyboard which rested on his whale-like chest.

  Devin waited patiently for the man to finish. Several minutes passed. The fat man did not so much as acknowledge Devin while he typed and whispered into his keyboard. While he worked, the nano-processors deciphered and word-smithed hi
s jibberish into a legible report. All that was really needed to properly document agency events was an occasional adjective or noun which could be snatched from the blather and plugged into the appropriate, pre-constructed, government approved sentence.

  The fat man whispered and squinted and his sausage fingers danced. Then he’d pause, take a sip of a soft drink through a long straw, and then whisper and squint and type some more.

  Another few minutes elapsed. Then the fat man cleared his throat. “O.K. so what do we have here?”

  Devin was relieved.

  “I’m looking for a…”

  “What employment licenses do you have, Mr. O’Shea?” he interrupted.

  “Licenses?”

  “Yeah, licenses,” replied the agent as he brushed his greasy hair out of his face with his sausage fingers.

  “I don’t have any that…”

  “That’s what I thought,” interrupted the agent with a sigh.

  “I’m a skilled programmer,” Devin offered. “I’ve worked quite a bit with AI. I can…”

  “And what good is that without a license?” asked the annoyed agent. “How could you possibly work as a programmer without a license?”

  “Well, how would I go about getting a license? Do I need to take a test or something?”

  “Yeah,” answered the agent snidely. “Then, if you pass parts one, two, three, and four, taken over fourteen months, you can submit an application. The Programmer’s Guild will review your application and within ninety days— and after you pay the $140,000 fee— you can come back here and I’ll place you with a firm. That is, if they have any openings.”

  “I’m a good programmer. If you could just get me in the door somewhere I’ll show them what I can do. Entry-level, anything. I know I’ll move up quickly.”

  “What does proving yourself have to do with anything? Are you asking me to break the law for you?”

  “Break the law?” Devin asked.

  “You know you can’t get a job in the programming field without a license. It’s illegal.”

  “Why is it illegal?”

  “Why is it illegal?” asked the agent sarcastically. “We clearly can’t have anyone who wants to going around and becoming a programmer without a license.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because, you…” the agent paused for a moment to calm himself as he had started to wheeze, “…because of security concerns. Because of safety and fraud issues. Because of social justice. If anyone could work any job they want at any time, everyone would flock to the high paying jobs and drive the wages down to poverty levels. Then everyone would starve. Don’t you understand supply and demand?”

  “Why would everyone go into a line of work that would make them starve?”

  “Because they aren’t regulated,” the agent explained. “Unregulated job seekers would destroy the market. Then what would we have? Look, I don’t have time for this. What else can you do?”

  Devin pondered for a moment.

  “I can set tile.”

  “Do you have a license to do that?”

  “A license for tile-setting?”

  “Then we can cross that off as well,” he responded rudely. “You can’t expect me to send you out to a job site where you might build something that falls apart and kills people, do you? You would be a threat to public safety.”

  “What about day labor?” Devin asked in desperation.

  “Mr. O’Shea, I think that you would do better on assistance than as a day laborer.”

  “Huh? But I want to work.”

  “You some sort of comedian? First you say you want work as a programmer without a license and now you expect me to believe that you want a day labor job rather than assistance.”

  “But…”

  “Mr. O’Shea, you seem like a nice fellow,” the agent continued patronizingly. “Because I like you, I’m going to set you up with assistance. I’ll even file the paperwork on your behalf. Let me go over your dossier.”

  Devin scratched his head and watched while the fat man squinted and scrolled through the images on his monitor.

  “Oh!” he exclaimed.

  “What is it now? Do I need a license to receive assistance?” Devin asked sarcastically.

  “No…no…I’m sorry. I assumed you were Sub-Saharan African American.”

  “You mean black?”

  “There’s no need to be vulgar,” admonished the counselor.

  “I wasn’t meaning to be vulgar but you were saying that I look bl…I mean Sub-Saharan African American. What does it matter?”

  “It matters naught to me as I am color blind,” he professed proudly. “But as a government employment agent, I am required to check for assistance modifiers on your behalf.”

  “Assistance modifiers?”

  “Yes. Certain— how should I say this— uh…underprivileged identity groups may receive modifiers to their daily assistance credits.”

  “Underprivileged?”

  “Well, it’s no matter. It says here on your dossier that you are Irish, Mr. O’Shea. Being Irish doesn’t qualify for a modifier. 100% payout only. Sorry.”

  Devin chuckled. “Do I look Irish?”

  “As I said before, I do not see color. Anyway, the dossier says that you are Irish so that is what you are, officially anyway. You are what the government says you are. If you have an issue with that you can take it up with the Federal Department of Ethnic Determination. I can put the contact info into your multi if you like.”

  “I don’t have an issue,” Devin replied. “My mother always talked about how proud my dad was when he first set eyes on me. She said he was utterly amazed when I was born.”

  “I wouldn’t know what you mean,” replied the counselor humorlessly. “Anyway, the process has been started. You should start receiving credits in your account by Friday. Check your multi. Well, it appears that we are all finished here. Is there anything else I can do for you before we wrap this up?”

  “Yeah, there is one more thing…”

  “What’s that?”

  “Where can a Mick get himself a drink around here?”

  “Houdinis, down four blocks from the park.”

  Chapter Six

  “Is there anything else, Axel?” asked President Mellon as his putter tapped a golf ball emblazoned with the Presidential Seal sending it rolling across twelve feet of green carpet. The target was a brandy snifter resting on its side on the floor. The putt missed by more than a meter.

  “There’s one more thing, sir,” explained Director Morgenthau.

  “Oh Christ, Axel…”

  “There’s the Goldstein situation, sir.”

  “I know where you’re going and I want no part of that mess. The Chinks would have my ass.”

  “Sir,” continued Burton, “they’re a real thorn in the side of my department. They’re costing NaPol a great deal of prestige. And they’re breathing life into insurrections all over the country. Pardon the expression Mr. President, but they sit up there behind their ray fields giving us...giving you the finger. They’re mocking the government of the United States. We must make an example of them or things might spin out of control.”

  “Axel,” President Mellon replied, “you know I can’t risk pissing off the Chinese any more than I have already. They’re already on edge about Taiwan.” He put his putter back in a golf bag leaning against the Oval Office desk. “They’ve got investments up there, fusion or something. If we go in and torch Goldstein, the Chinks are gonna want reparations. They might get so pissed that they might cut off the Treasury.” President Mellon kicked his golf ball into the snifter, picked the glass up off the floor and set it on the desk. “If they get pissed off enough to dump our debt then we’ll have to start that god damn keystroking money again. I don’t want any more hyperinflation.”

  “Sir, I think our domestic security is at stake here. Besides, I…”

  “I didn’t even explain how upset Numenor would get. Christ, Axel, you should know bet
ter. They make all your shit, don’t they? All your surveillance equipment and dragonflies and your cloaking suits and…what are those little zapper things…those pulse emitter things and your brain chips…all that creepy shit that you Stasi types enjoy screwing around with.”

  Axel grinned.

  “What is it with those Chink-lovers down there at Numenor, anyway? They got a bunch of commie-sympathizers running that outfit? Aren’t you on the Board? Do you admire those little, yellow, commie bastards or something?”

  “You know as well as I that Numenor has several multi-billion dollar, joint op agreements with China.”

  “Why do you got such a hard-on for those Eskimo-rednecks up there in Alaska, anyway? You still bitter ‘cause they kicked your ass twenty years ago?”

  “With all due respect, sir, they didn’t kick our ass.”

  “They ran you pussies right on out of there. What a disgrace: NaPol, routed by a bunch of Eskimos.”

  “That’s not entirely accurate, sir.”

  “It got a little cold and you guys retreated like the French. You got your ass kicked by five hundred lumberjacks on snow machines.”

  “I wasn’t in charge then, sir. Had I been, I would have executed the assault differently.”

  “Well, you were there and you got your ass kicked regardless. And now you want me to risk a currency-war with China by giving you a green light so you can replay your homecoming game? Get over it, Axel. Go get some payback on some compound in Idaho or something. Those Mormons are getting out of line, too. I’ll green light that right now.”

  Axel picked the golf ball out of the President’s snifter and poured brandy into the glass.

  “What if I told you I could get a green light from China?”

  “Get the hell out of here, Axel. It’s over. Talk to me about it in my second term when I need a media distraction. Shit, I’ll probably get Twenty-Two overturned, anyway so come back in the third term.”