"Glad you took a break," Katie said.
On the flat screen monitor, a vast desert loomed, the sands a deep gold and the sky a vibrant blue. A solitary figure on a camel strode in the background, coming closer each moment. When it neared, a red-on-white title splashed across the screen.
"The New Alexander."
Jamerson drew in a deep breath. Katie, he knew, liked these epics, these larger-than-real stories of armies and conquests. Looking closely, eyes narrowed, he tried to find the telltale signs that the camel and its rider were fabrications, computer-generated virtual characters. The rider pranced back and forth atop the camel, his body covered from head to toe in a green-striped robe, with a green and white checkered headdress kept in place by a braided rope that circled his head. A carbine slung across one shoulder, crossed bandoliers against his chest, he looked ready for war. Soon, behind him, his army appeared. Foot soldiers marched in a long line, fifty or more deep, the gigantic column arrayed in attack formation.
"Snacks?" Katie asked, shifting her body so she lay sideways, her head propped up by one arm.
The movie progressed along its simplistic storyline, weaving in a love interest, conflict with a once-trusted comrade, betrayal and lust and anger, with a hint of the sadistic that made Katie cling harder, her body hot to touch. Jamerson moved as well. They overturned the bowl of faux-sugar crisps the service-bot brought them during the start of the show.
"Wait," Katie objected, pushing Jamerson aside. "I want to see this!"
He lay back, not really paying attention to this "Alexander." This conqueror. The entertainment industry in California Free State churned out these epics in rapid succession, two or three each year. Sometimes the setting was the desert, other times the steppes, and often the old Southwest U.S. The plots followed similar lines, from setting to setting, warrior-king to warrior-king. Sometimes, a queen -- and Jamerson thought of Commander Lindsay Trapp -- commanded the troops, took the trophies, snapped the whip or otherwise showed her strength.
"It's still early," Katie whispered the moment Jamerson rolled away from her. He panted in the aftermath of exertion, his body slick with sweat. In the dim light, he searched for any sign of satisfaction in Katie's slightly swollen lips, a blush on her cheeks, her eyes wide and watery.
He didn't want to talk. The flat screen monitor folded back into the ceiling. A scrum-bot scrambled across the carpet collecting crumbs and spilled snacks. Katie scooted sideways, away from him, her body no longer touching his, the bed sheet pulled to her neck, her hands holding it in place.
"There's a disrupt tonight," she said. "Want to know where?"
"It's late."
She laughed. "If we pulled off the shutters, I bet it's still light outside."
He didn't want to look at his All-Pod, which sat on the table next to his side of the bed. He wanted it to be late at night, so late that Katie would stay with him and sleep, and not return to her own apartment.
"Come with me," she said.
Jamerson looked at the ceiling. "Where?"
"You know what I'm talking about." Katie scrambled to a new position, on her side, chin in hand, elbow on the mattress, the sheet falling down around her hips, and her bare feet sticking out at the end.
"It's dangerous."
"It's fun," she countered. Her usual refrain. "It's at a crowded mall, a restaurant. In city-proper. An expensive neighborhood. I've been before. No security to speak of, just some kids on a 'tween year or maybe in the last year of high school. Mall police." She waved her hand, as though to dismiss the danger.
"I don't see what the -- "
Katie interjected. "What don't you see? It makes a point. The service robots take jobs away from people. Waiters, line cooks, greeters in the mall, all kinds of jobs that people did fifty years ago are done by robots of one kind or another."
"Disrupting them doesn't prove anything."
"It shows we don't like it."
Jamerson thought about the restaurant where he met his co-worker, Oliver Griffin. Staffed by people, it tugged at the nostalgia for a bygone era. He couldn't judge the establishment's efficiency, though, because he didn't go often enough and he never made a scientific study or organized comparison.
"Whatcha gonna think," Katie said, "when they perfect the computer program that can do your job?"
He laughed. A snorkeling sort of laugh. The work he did required human expertise, a way of thinking and analyzing that no automated being, robot or virtual man or non-corporeal program could ever replace.
"Some of the jobs," Katie said, "that robots do are jobs people thought safe. We bring attention to the problem."
"I don't know that that's true. You trip some service-bots, knock them over."
"Disrupt," Katie said.
"It doesn't solve anything."
"It's still fun. Come on. I promise you, there's no way to get caught. We've never been caught. And then we can laugh about it, talk about it." She seemed to want to say more, her face beaming. She sat up, on her knees, arms across her chest.
Jamerson lay back, hands behind his head. He didn't want to lose Katie because of this. Didn't want her respect for him to diminish. Didn't want her to think he didn't want to do the things she liked to do.
"You can't keep saying no to me," she whispered.
#
The bus seated twelve, so Jamerson and a couple of others stood during the ride, in the back, hands on the overhead bar. The vehicle picked up speed when it left the maglev depot, turning away from the tunnel and climbing at a steep angle to the narrow city-bound roadway atop the enclosed area where the train ran. Tinted windows prevented Jamerson from peering out. Katie and her friends kept up a drumming noise, half chant and half sing-song, that made conversation impossible.
He felt old. Katie looked old, too. Most of the passengers looked to be youngsters in their first post-high school year, some of them enjoying traditional college classes and others, from what little he knew from overhearing conversations when he boarded the small bus, taking a year off from school to work what they termed "grit jobs." They labored as pedicab operators, private security guards in city malls, gate minders at guarded apartment complexes.
For the experience, Jamerson imagined, because these were privileged kids, the sons and daughters of the elite. Katie Shaw owed her living arrangement to the type of work she performed for the Towers. Jamerson occupied one of the least expensive suites. But these children, these rowdy and laughing and singing boys and girls, came from wealth, from parents with apartments the size of entire floors on the top levels of the tall buildings.
Ironic, he thought, that they protested the very industry that gave their kind power. Robotized factories were run by humans. Hospitals that relied on service-bots for everything from nursing to surgery still required human oversight. Wherever robots served, people ran herd over the mechanical devices. Most of those humans were at the top of their professions; in turn, they enjoyed the luxuries that the common laborer saw only in his and her dreams.
Someday, Jamerson hoped, he'd be head of his department. He'd live in a top-level apartment. He'd vacation in California Free State or the Floridian Isles or the man-made islands of the Mexican Gulf. Standing in the swaying bus, he looked down at Katie's beaming face, her hands fluttering as she carried on a conversation amid the songs and chants of their fellow passengers. Her eyes shone in the bus' dim interior. She looked happy. When their eyes met suddenly, he smiled, wanting her to think he was just as pleased. But danger lurked in what these kids were about to do, what he'd let Katie talk him into doing with her.
The bus slowed. Looking to the front, to the little cabin where the driver sat in a cushioned chair, and then past that to the front window, lights of the city-proper's entryway glowed, with bright red and blue beacons flashing at both sides of the road. Unlike the maglev train, travel by taxi or bus always culminated at a checkpoint, with an inspection that could be mildly irritating or wholly frightful.
Two women in l
ong brown coats boarded. They walked down the aisle, visibly counting the passengers, fingers wagging at each body in the padded seats and then the three men, Jamerson amongst them, standing in the rear. The border police looked bored, numbed by endless nights and days, Jamerson thought. He tried to determine the ages of these two women. They didn't look young. Their dark eyes and dark faces, with tired lines at the edges of those eyes and deep etchings around the chin, across the cheeks, marked them as old and worn and experienced at their jobs.
"You're overcrowded by two," one of the police announced, as though speaking to a non-assigned leader of the group. "That's a ten-ogre fine."
"Who's got the ogres?" someone said.
Jamerson recalled Katie giving one of her friends a handful of tokens when they boarded. These Off-Grid Rings, a currency Jamerson never used, were given as tips Katie once told him. That way, she didn't report it as income unless she traded in the tokens for official V-Rings. So many small businesses accepted ogres that she never needed to cash in. But she did need a small purse to hold the plastic coins and Mylar strips, which reminded Jamerson of movie tickets he saw in museum exhibits.
The police took the ogres, splitting them between themselves, and left the bus. In a moment, the vehicle pulled away from the inspection station. Behind them, a taxi rolled up. Ahead, the narrow highway led into a tunnel, a short one with lights streaming along its curved walls. Soon, they emerged onto a wide boulevard that surrounded a central plaza, a familiar sight to Jamerson when he peered ahead and saw New Union Station lit by searchlights in the middle of the open square. Soon, the station, the plaza, and the search lights disappeared from view when the bus rounded a corner.
Katie stood. "Look at me," she ordered. Jamerson responded with a stare. She smiled and applied a stick-on tattoo to each of his cheeks. Elsewhere in the bus, the riders decorated their faces with the decals, which would fend off video intrusions. Somebody distributed sunglasses with thick lenses to ward against iris scanners.
"When the bus stops, just follow me," Katie said. Jamerson felt her hand grip his. Her warm skin seemed reassuring. He looked into her eyes, which suddenly disappeared behind the polarizing lenses. Clover-shaped tattoos covered each cheek. A bright red dot stood out on her rounded chin.
Jamerson didn't know where exactly the bus had gone. It seemed they hadn't ridden very far after emerging from the tunnel. He'd seen upscale city neighborhoods on his right. One his left were the kind of places where people lived in modest houses with tree-lined streets, front yards, back yards, playgrounds for their kids, fenced in schools, and shopping malls. Some people liked the city, Jamerson mused. They didn't want to move outside the walls and live in a gated community or a tower complex or village-like district that mimicked small-town America of a hundred years ago.
The bus stopped alongside a shopping mall. Screaming and laughing and pumping the air with both fists, the passengers streamed from the front door. Jamerson stayed close to Katie. His stomach rumbled. His eyes watered. His legs moved. he raised his hands to pump the air like everyone else and followed Katie, stayed close behind her.
"You kids got ten minutes," the driver said. "Re-board at the other side of the mall."
Holograms popped up to entice shoppers on either side of the mass of young revelers emerging from the bus. They moved in a tight knot, across the lip of the mall's entrance. Then they flowed inside, past kiosks in a central atrium. They moved like some strange beast, all of them chanting and shouting. Jamerson tried to pick out the words they sang, but couldn't and settled for shouting and roaring, just making noise. The sound gave him strength and stifled his fears.
He didn't see more than two mall cops standing at the edges of the atrium. The mass moved into a restaurant. Service-bots meandered from table to table. Soft lights bathed the patrons. Music poured from overhead.
Then came the screams. Laughter, too. Robots fell. Dishes clattered. Someone -- perhaps the restaurant's manager -- tried to interfere, but he was tripped and pushed into a couple sitting at a small round table.
Jamerson kicked at a robot that got in his way. He turned left, turned right, in the midst of the fray, part of it one moment and a spectator the next. He felt a tug on his shirt. Katie. She led him to one side, where her friends pummeled a mechanical tray that hovered in the air until it was beaten down.
Mall cops -- about six of them -- filled the entrance to the restaurant. The diners moved away from their tables. Nobody confronted the disrupters. Katie pulled Jamerson close and said, "The side doors. The emergency exits."
They ran, all of them, away from the robots lying on the floor and the cops at the restaurant's entrance. They poured out by way of three emergency exits, which set off alarms. Jamerson expected they'd meet more mall police. Or be pursued. Instead, the way was clear. An empty corridor was their escape route, and they ran out of the mall to the waiting bus, laughing and crying and hugging one another.
Jamerson felt Katie's kiss on his lips, her ample body rubbing against his. Her skin seared him. Her whispers bathed his face. He couldn't make out what she said, but he held her tight as they got back on the bus, which pulled out of the mall's back alley and onto a wide boulevard.
#
The voice disturbed his thoughts. Jamerson looked back over his shoulder, the movement of his head making him slip in the seat of his swiveling leather chair. He sat up, gripped the edge of his desk, and turned away from the source of the sound.
"Half asleep, Jonnie?" Oliver Griffin, smiling, traipsed into the office Jamerson shared with a junior analyst who labored here four days a week. Griffin's chiseled face beamed, his blue eyes bright. A recent haircut left his small ears to protrude from the sides of his head.
"Thinking," Jamerson said as Griffin's large hands closed on his shoulders. "Any idea how to get ogres?"
"Yes," Griffin said in a slow voice, his eyes narrowing. He set himself on the edge of the faux-wood desk, the pointed corner wedging into the back of his trousers. "Since when do you deal with artificial currency?"
Jamerson gave voice to the lie he'd concocted when he earlier decided to question Griffin or some other co-worker about the underground currency. "I bought something from a friend. She wants to be paid in ogres, not V-Rings."
Griffin shrugged. "Sex?"
Why not? Jamerson thought. He nodded. In truth, he'd promised Katie to reimburse her and her friends the ten ogres they paid the border police to bribe their way past the checkpoint in the overcrowded bus. As Katie put, he was the only one with anything even close to a well-paying job. He owed them something.
"How'd you like Commander Trapp?" Griffin suddenly said. Jamerson suspected he'd deliberately changed the subject. Then he saw the junior analyst in the doorway, a shocked look on his young face.
"You can come in," Jamerson said. "Keenan," he added, introducing the youngster to Griffin.
Keenan nodded and slipped into the large black chair at his desk in a corner of the room. Three computer monitors on rotating stands shielded him and he went to work immediately, tapping a virtual keyboard light-painted across the desktop.
"I see why you didn't want to be the liaison," Jamerson said. "Why get involved with a mission destined to fall apart."
Griffin snorted. "I told you, I had something better, more up my bailiwick, to occupy my time."
"Do you know Trapp?"
"I know of her."
"Then you knew she'd screw this thing up."
Griffin shook his head. "Nobody screwed up."
Jamerson swallowed. "Bandinni blames me." He thought back to the scathing email his boss had sent the day after the meeting with the army's representative at Fort Sheridan. In short, it had said, This doesn't make me happy. Why didn't you shut her down before that colonel shut up the both of you?
There were more words, some specific accusations concerning things that were said by Trapp, by Jamerson, by Colonel Westin. And then some of the fallout from Trapp's report to the mayor. The meeting at Fort
Sheridan was more than a week in the past, but its afterlife still stung.
"I don't know what else I could've done," Jamerson admitted. He'd made a report the Monday following that Friday afternoon disaster, claiming Commander Trapp and Colonel Westin didn't seem like two people who could work together. At any rate, Trapp was convinced she should be leading things, not just lending a hand.
"Don't worry," Griffin said, and squeezed Jamerson's shoulder in an almost affectionate manner. "Some other lunatic idea will be floated in the mayor's office and then nobody'll even remember this one."
"Trapp wants to clean up the lake front," Jamerson said, remembering the hard look on her solid face and the way she clenched her fists on the ride from Fort Sheridan to Chicago-proper. Every now and then, the police commander uttered, "I'll just do this myself."
"Maybe," Griffin said.
"About those ogres?" Jamerson whispered.
"There's a bar in the basement," Griffin said. "You know the one?"
Jamerson pictured the bars and lounges in a portion of the building's basement that was given over to extended lunches and relaxation. "Has to be The People's."
Griffin smiled. "Ask the bartender for Pete Williams. Code word. You know? But the rate's something like two for one, not the official ratio you'd find in the Bazaar. You know about the Bazaar?"
Jamerson nodded.
"Don't go there," Griffin said with a chuckle. He strode out of the office.
Jamerson jumped to his feet, tired of Griffin's sudden announcements.. "What's that supposed to mean? Don't go there?" He caught up to Griffin in the hallway. Clerks and other office functionaries hurried past them, along with service-bots on an invisible track at the edge of the corridor. Doors opened, closed.
Griffin pulled Jamerson aside, away from the stream of people traffic, into an empty and spacious room with furniture and monitors and piles of optical cable in one corner.
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