Metatropolis

by John Scalzi

  “No,” I said.

  “This is a representation of every single job that is available right now in New St. Louis,” Lo said. “Everything from neurosurgeon right down to janitorial systems maintenance crew. Roughly about one thousand jobs, at the moment. This is a live feed, so you’ll see some jobs disappear as they are filled, and new ones show up as they come online.”

  I looked up again and took a closer look. She was right about it being a live feed; while I watched, one of the text boxes winked out of existence. Somewhere in New St. Louis, someone had a new job as a crèche supervisor, watching bunches of hyperactive two-year-olds while their parents were off at their jobs.

  “As your mother has no doubt told you, New St. Louis has a managed employment economy,” Lo said. “Every adult who lives in NSL is required to work, and all vacancies are filled internally whenever possible. Each new entrant into the NSL workforce, whether through immigration or through graduation from the NSL school system, is required to take a series of aptitude tests that help us place that person into their initial job.”

  “Right,” I said, and remembered the Aptitudes. How I hated them.

  First off, they took two days out of your life, after you’ve already gotten your education certificate. In other places in other times, a high school diploma was all you needed for a job—not especially good jobs, my mom would point out, but even so—but here in New St. Louis, all your education certificate meant was that you were allowed to take your Aptitudes.

  So, two days. The first day was a recap of math, science, history, literature and other school subjects. Which to me seemed a waste of time, these days. Yes, it’s nice to remember all this stuff in your head. But the fact of the matter was even if you didn’t, everything you had to know about anything was a database search away and had been for decades, and out in the real world the chance that you would need to know when New St. Louis was founded or the intricacies of the city’s “zero-footprint” ecological and economic philosophy—and would not have a mini-terminal in your pocket—approached zero.

  You know, I think of myself as a practical person, and in practice, all this memorization just seemed like busy work to me. I know I can find out anything with a query; worrying about stuffing things into my head seems too much.

  That said, I wasn’t completely stupid. I did spend a little time reviewing the basics before my Aptitudes. And because I didn’t want to stress myself overly, I also made sure to have a good time the night before. I think that being relaxed is key. My mother might disagree. So might Leah.

  If the first day was annoying the second day was just mystifying: a series of conversations with a rotating pack of NSL city workers about completely pointless subjects that really had nothing to do with anything as far as I could tell. Sometimes I didn’t understand my hometown’s job protocol.

  “I notice you took your Aptitudes at the last possible opportunity to do so,” Lo said.

  “I’m sure a lot of people do it that way,” I said.

  “No, not really,” Lo said. “Most kids do them right after their schooling is completed, so everything is still fresh in their heads. Most of them are also eager to start contributing to the well-being of NSL as soon as possible—and to start their career paths.”

  I shrugged. After I’d gotten my education certificate schooling, I decided to travel to some of the other cities that shared “open borders” with New St. Louis: The Portland Arcologies and other parts of Cascadia, the Malibu Enclave, Singapore and Hong Kong and the new Helsinki Collective. They kept me busy for a few months, and in a good way, I thought. Travel broadens the mind, and all that.

  Mom wasn’t very happy about this, but I had promised her I’d take the Aptitudes the next time they were offered once I got back. And I did try, but things kept getting in the way. I finally took them because I was coming up on my twentieth birthday, and here in New St. Louis they had a word for twenty-year-olds who hadn’t taken their Aptitudes to get assigned a job: evicted. Even New Louies who went to university outside the city had to take their Aptitudes before their twentieth; they took them remotely and had their scores filed away for later. Miss them, though, and out you go.

  That’s what happened to Will’s brother Marcus. He missed his last chance to take the Aptitudes five years ago, and the City showed up at the door with his Document of Removal, escorted him to the city border, placed a credit card worth sixteen ounces of gold into his hands and waved goodbye. Now Marcus was living outside, in the banged-up ring of suburbs around St. Louis, new and old, that we referred to as “the Wilds,” doing whatever the hell it was people in the Wilds did with their time. I suspected he was scrounging and gardening, not necessarily in that order. And now you know why Will would have been happy to stab me for mentioning his brother.

  Marcus could get back in one day…maybe. People who’d been booted out of NSL for missing their Aptitudes could get back in only once they’d taken a new set of tests and waited to see if there was a job that no one in the city wanted. And even then they’d have to wait in line, because the list went New Louies first, citizens of other “open border” cities next, and then finally the rest of the world. You skip your last chance at the Aptitudes, it might be years before you get your citizenship back.

  Now you know why I didn’t miss that last Aptitudes testing day. I try to imagine what mom would do if the City showed up at the door to boot me out and my brain just shuts down. On that path lies madness. I shivered just thinking about it.

  Lo noticed. “Cold?” she asked.

  “No, sorry,” I said. “Just thinking about something.” I motioned toward the board. “So, what now? Do I pick one of these jobs?”

  “Not quite,” Lo said. “I’m showing you all of these jobs so you have an idea of the scope of the city’s need for labor.”

  “Okay, I get it,” I said.

  “Good,” Lo said. “Now, what I’m going to do next is plug your aptitude test results into this matrix of job openings, and see which ones they qualify you for. First, the results from your first day of testing—the recap of your knowledge from your education.” Lo tapped her tablet screen.

  I watched as roughly ninety percent of the job openings disappeared from the wall. I spent the next minute or so opening and closing my mouth to no real good effect.

  “I think there’s something wrong with your wall display,” I said, finally.

  “The wall display is fine,” Lo said. “The problem is that overall you scored in the 35th percentile for your aptitudes. Look.” She held up her tablet display and showed it to me. My test scores were on a trio of lines, showing my ranking relative to others who had taken the test the same days I did, in the same year as I had, and since the beginning of the tests, just a few years after the founding of New St. Louis.

  “Actually, the 35th percentile is for the historical chart,” Lo said, pointing. “You scored lower among the people who took it with you, and who have taken it in the last year. And most of the people who did worse than you were people who were taking the Aptitudes from outside the city.”

  “Maybe there was a mistake in the scoring,” I said.

  “Probably not,” Lo said. “The tests are triple-scored by machine to catch errors. You’re more likely to get hit by lightning than suffer an incorrect Aptitudes score.”

  “I can take them again,” I said.

  “You could have taken them again if you had taken them earlier,” Lo said. “But the next set of Aptitudes isn’t scheduled until after your twentieth birthday. So for the purposes of your first job, you’re stuck with these scores, Mr. Washington.”

  I slumped back into the chair. Mom was going to kill me. Lo looked at me curiously. I began to resent her, or at least what I figured she thought of me. “I’m not stupid, you know,” I said.

  “You don’t appear stupid, no,” Lo said, agreeing. “But I’d be willing to bet you didn’t pay very close attention in school, and taking time off before you took your Aptitudes certainly
didn’t help either.”

  Okay, that sounded exactly like something mom would say. And like with mom, I really didn’t want to have that discussion right now. “Fine, whatever,” I said, and pointed at the wall. “So now I pick from these jobs?”

  “Not yet,” Lo said. “Because now I have to plug in the results from your second day of testing: the evaluator’s reviews of your attitude and psychological fitness. The good news here is that a good score can put back on the board some of the jobs that you might have lost before. There are a lot of jobs that the city feels a motivated worker could do even if they don’t have the academic Aptitude test scores.”

  “Okay, good,” I said. I felt slightly encouraged by that; I think I’m a pretty personable guy.

  “Here we go,” Lo said, and tapped her tablet again.

  All but three jobs disappeared from the board.

  “Oh, come on!” I yelled. “That can’t be right!”

  “Apparently it is,” Lo said. She gave her tablet to me. I took it and looked at it. “You scored even lower on the evaluator’s reports than you did on the academic testing. It says there that you struck them as arrogant, bored, and defensive. One of them actually called you ‘a bit of an asshole.’”

  I looked up from the tablet for that one, appalled at what I was hearing. “You can’t say that on an official report,” I said.

  “They can say whatever they want,” Lo said. “They’re trained to evaluate everyone’s fitness as an employee and they’re required by law to write their honest impressions. If one of them called you a bit of an asshole, it’s because that’s what you are. Or at least what you come across as.”

  “I’m not an asshole,” I said, thrusting the tablet back at Lo.

  Lo shrugged. “You came in here with some attitude, didn’t you?” she said, taking the tablet. “That ‘joke’ about the monitor and your mom, for example.”

  “I really did mean it as a joke,” I said.

  “Maybe you did,” Lo said. “But it comes off like you’re just dropping your mom’s name to hint to me that you should be given a cushy job. Whether you mean it that way or not, that’s how you present. And it is more than a little annoying. I can believe you came across as an asshole in your testing. And I can believe you probably weren’t even aware of it at the time.”

  “Can we talk about something else, please?” I said. This was not a good day so far. “Like what jobs are available?”

  “Okay,” Lo said. She tapped her tablet. The three tiny squares remaining on the wall disappeared, replaced by three very large job listings.

  “The general feeling about you is that you’re best off not working a job that requires any interaction with the public, or that requires a great deal of technical competence,” Lo said. “So basically we’re talking some form of back-end job with a heavy physical component. And among those types of jobs we have three openings: Assistant Greensperson at park tower number six, Composting Engineer, trainee level, at the East End waste transformation plant, and Biological Systems Interface Manager at the Arnold Tower.”

  “‘Composting Engineer’?” I said, leaning forward in my seat.

  “That’s what it says,” Lo said. “It’s a polite way of saying you’ll be shoveling shit. Although as I’m sure you remember from your studies, there’s more to industrial scale composting than just shit.”

  “I’m not doing that,” I said, recoiling a bit.

  “Well, you have to do something,” Lo said. “If you hit your twentieth without a job, you lose your citizenship, and not even your mom will be able to help you then.”

  I was beginning to get annoyed at her bringing up mom all the time. “‘Assistant Greensperson’ doesn’t sound so bad,” I said.

  “That would be my choice,” Lo said. “The park towers are nice. I go to the one down the street here on my lunch break sometimes. The greenskeepers are always tending to the trees and flower and bees. It’s physical work, but at least you’ll be in pretty surroundings. And remember, this is only a first job. If it’s not to your liking, you can always get more training and education, and try for a different sort of job. The important thing is you have a job.”

  “Fine,” I said. “I’ll take that one.”

  “Good,” Lo said. We both looked up at the listing.

  It disappeared.

  “Whoops,” Lo said.

  “‘Whoops?’” I said. “What ‘whoops?’”

  Lo accessed her tablet. “Looks like someone else just took the job. It’s gone.”

  “That’s totally not fair,” I said.

  “Other people are having their assignment sessions just like you are,” Lo said. “If you had taken the job first, someone else would be saying ‘no fair’ right now. So now we’re down to two jobs: Composting Engineer, trainee level, and Biological Systems Interface Manager. Pick one. I’d suggest you pick quickly.”

  I looked up at the wall and my two remaining choices. Composting Engineer just sounded vile; I wanted no part of it. I had no idea what “Biological Systems Interface Management” meant, but, you know, if it was management, that probably meant a good chance that I wouldn’t be hunched over with a shovel or tiller in my hand, aerating solid waste and food scraps.

  “Mr. Washington,” Lo said.

  Oh, who cares anyway, I thought. I’ll talk to mom about this and get it all sorted out. Because while mom was a hardass about me taking a job, I was willing to bet there was almost no chance that Josephine Washington, executive council member, would let her only son spend any significant amount of time doing menial labor. She expected better of me, and I thought she’d help me live up to her expectations.

  “Biological Systems Interface Manager,” I said.

  Lo smiled. “Excellent choice,” she said, tapping her tablet and securing the job. “I think you’ll be perfect for it.”

  “What is the job?” I asked.

  She told me, and then laughed when she saw the expression on my face.

  “SO, let’s recap,” mom said to me at dinner. I’d explained my situation without quite telling her the job that I’d gotten. “You want me, a member of New St. Louis’ executive board, a highly visible public servant, to pull strings for you so you can get a better job than the one you’re qualified for.”

  “Come on, mom,” I said. “You know I’m qualified for lots of jobs.”

  “Do I?” mom said. “I know you didn’t read your Aptitude scores when they came in, Benji, but I did. I know what you got. I know you spent most of your education screwing off and screwing up because you didn’t think any of it mattered. I told you to do better, but you were happy just to do well enough.”

  Oh, God, I thought. Here we go again.

  “Look, mom,” said Syndee. “Benji’s got his ‘I’m not listening anymore’ face on.”

  “Shut up, Syndee,” I said.

  “Well, you do,” Syndee said.

  “Kiss ass,” I said. She was sixteen and a model student, and a little too smug about it for my taste.

  “Benjamin,” mom said.

  “Sorry,” I said, shooting a look at Syndee. “And anyway, mom, I’m listening to you. Really.”

  “Good,” mom said. “Then you’ll hear me fine this time: I’m not going to lift a finger to get you another job.”

  “Why not?” I said. It came out more of a whine than I would have preferred.

  “First off, because the last thing I need right now is for the news blogs to be talking about how I used my influence to get my son a job. Honestly, now, Benji. You think people wouldn’t notice? This isn’t like me asking the school to switch your class schedule around, and you remember how much crap I got for that.”

  I looked at her blankly.

  “Or maybe you don’t,” mom said.

  “I do,” Syndee said.

  “Hush, Syndee,” mom said. “That was bad enough. Actually yanking you out of the assignments queue and handing you a job you don’t qualify for is the sort of thing that will get me k
icked off the executive board. It’s an election year, Benji, and I’ve already got a fight on my hands because I’m for technology outreach. You know how many New Louies hate that idea.”

  “I don’t like it either,” I said. “Technology Outreach” was a plan for NSL to help the people in the Wilds by offering them some of the city’s technology and support. It amounted to basically helping a bunch of people who had intentionally gone out of their way to fail in creating a sustainable civilization. “I think it’s a dumb idea.”

  “Of course you do,” mom said, acidly. “You don’t want us to share technology with the folks in the Wilds because then we wouldn’t have something over them. And then you wouldn’t be a precious little snowflake, like all the other smug precious little snowflakes in here. Keeping technology bottled up isn’t why New St. Louis was founded. Quite the opposite, in fact. And these days it’s more important than ever. Cascadiopolis had the right idea: Develop useful technology, send it out into the world.”

  “Look where it got Cascadiopolis,” I said. “It doesn’t even exist anymore.”

  “You spent too much time with those idiot cousins of yours in the Portland Arcology,” Mrs. Washington said.

  “Whatever, mom,” I said. My cousins weren’t idiots, even if they were snobbish enough that even I noticed it. “I just don’t see what it has to do with you helping me.”

  “That’s my point,” mom said. “You don’t appreciate what the consequences of my ‘helping’ you like that would be. All you know is that you don’t want the job you’ve been assigned. What job have you been assigned anyway?” mom reached for her iced tea.

  I shrugged. No point keeping it from her now. “Biological Systems Interface Manager at Arnold Tower,” I said.

  Mom choked on her tea.

  “Mom, tea just came out your nose,” Syndee said.

  “I’m fine, baby,” mom said, and reached down into her lap for her napkin.

  “See,” I said, accusingly. “Now you know why I want another job.”