Metatropolis

by John Scalzi

  “There’s nothing wrong with the job,” mom said.

  “You just spit tea everywhere when I told you what it was,” I said.

  “I was just a little surprised, is all,” Mom said.

  “Come on, mom,” I said. “There’s got to be something else out there. Something better than this,” I said.

  “The job is fine,” mom said, and pounded her chest to get the remaining tea out of her lungs. “In fact, I think the job will be great for you.”

  “Well, great,” I said, throwing up my hands. “Just what I need. A learning experience.”

  “That’s right,” mom said. “You do need a learning experience. To get back to the list of reasons why I won’t help you change your job, the second reason is that you need to understand the consequences of your choices, Benji,” mom said. She dropped her napkin back into her lap. “Somewhere along the way you decided that you didn’t need to work all that hard for things, because you figured that I would always be there to bail you out, and that my stature would help you get the things you wanted.”

  “That’s not true at all,” I said.

  “Please, Benji,” mom said. “I know you like to think it’s not true, but you need to be honest with yourself. Think back on all the times you’ve asked for my help. Think back on all the times you’ve given just a little less effort to things because you knew I could back you up or put in a good word for you. If you’re honest about it, you’ll recognize you’ve relied on me a lot.”

  I opened my mouth to complain and then flashed back to Will in the pod, telling me how “happy” he was that I wasn’t going to rely on my mom to get me through things. I shut my mouth and stared down at the table.

  “It’s not all your fault,” mom said, gently. “I’ve been always telling you to do things for yourself, but when it came down to it, I let you slide and I bailed you out of a lot of things. But that has to change. You’re an adult now, Benji. You need to be responsible for your actions. And now you’re learning that the actions and choices you made before make a difference in your life now. I kept telling you about this, and you kept not listening to me. Well, now you have to deal with it, so deal with it.”

  “You could have told me a little harder,” I said, and poked at my dinner.

  Mom sighed. “Benji, sweetheart, I told you almost every single day of your life. And you did that smile and nod thing you do when you decide you’re hearing something that doesn’t apply to you. You can’t tell someone something if they don’t want to listen.”

  “Uh-huh,” I said.

  “Look, mom,” Syndee said. “He’s got that face on again.”

  ON the way to the Arnold Tower the next day, to start the first job of the rest of my life, I saw what looked like a protest at one of the entrance gates to New St. Louis.

  “Do you know what that’s about?” I asked my podmate, an older man.

  He looked over at the protest as we glided by and then shrugged. “Some of the folks in the Wilds have been demanding we help them out with their food crisis,” he said.

  “There’s a food crisis?” I asked.

  The guy looked over to me. “It’s been in the news lately,” he said, pointedly.

  “You got me,” I said. “I haven’t been watching the news.”

  The guy motioned out toward where the protest had been. “The drought is bad this year. Worse than usual. Outside of the cities, there’s been a run on staples and prices are up. Someone’s been telling the folks in the Wilds that we’ve got food surpluses, and technology to increase food yields, which is how we got the surpluses. So we get protests every morning.”

  “Do we have food surpluses?” I asked.

  “No idea,” the man said, and went back to his reading. I looked back in the direction of where I saw the protest and wondered what it was the protesters were doing—or not doing—that they could take time out of their work schedules to protest on a daily basis. About two seconds after that, I recognized the irony of me, who was going to his first job more than a year after most of my class had gotten their first jobs, wondering how other people could be slackers.

  A minute later I was at the Arnold Tower. I walked over to the receptionist.

  “Benjamin Washingon,” I said. “I’m here to start work.”

  The receptionist eyed me up and down. “Oh, honey,” she said. “You shouldn’t have worn good clothes.” She shooed me away to sit down and picked up her phone. Shortly thereafter a door opened and a very dirty man came out of it. He looked around until he saw me.

  “You Washington?” He said.

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “Come on, then,” he said. I got up and followed him. He smelled terrible.

  “Nicols,” he said as we walked down the corridor, by way of introduction. He glanced at my clothes. “Tomorrow you should probably dress more casual,” he said.

  “I thought we might have uniforms,” I said, nodding at Nicols’ blue uniform. I was trying to keep my distance from Nicols. He was beginning to make me gag.

  “We have coveralls,” he said, “but the smell still gets into everything. You don’t want to be wearing anything nice around here.” He glanced down. “You’ll probably want to get boots, too.”

  “Boots, casual clothes, got it,” I said. We approached a pair of doors. “Anything else?”

  “Yeah,” Nichols said. “Noseplugs.”

  He opened the doors and a wave of stink rolled over me and I very nearly threw up my breakfast. Instead of retching, I looked out into the vast room the doors opened on to. There were pigs in almost every square inch of it. Pigs eating. Pigs sleeping. Pigs milling about. Pigs farting. Pigs pooping. Pigs generally making astounding amounts of stink.

  And my job was to look after them. That’s what Biological Systems Integration Manager meant: Pig farmer.

  “Welcome to your new job, kid,” Nichols said to me. “You’re going to love it here.”

  “I kind of doubt that,” I said.

  “You’re stuck here,” Nichols said. “You might as well learn to enjoy it. Now come on. It’s time to get you set up, and to take you to meet the boss.”

  LOU Barnes, my new boss, pointed at a carved plaque on his wall. “Do you know what that means?” he asked me.

  I looked at the sign, which read Utere nihil non extra quiritationem suis. “I don’t know Spanish,” I said.

  “It’s Latin,” Barnes said. “It means ‘use everything but the squeal.’ People used to say about pigs that you could eat every part of them but the squeal.” He waved toward the plate glass window that overlooked an entire different floor of pigs than I saw earlier; Arnold Tower had twenty stories, and every story had thousands of pigs in it, or so Nichols told me on the way up to Barnes’ office. “The pigs you see here are a fundamental part of the zero-footprint ecological ethos of New St. Louis. When you toss your dinner leftovers into the food recycling chute, they’re sterilized, fortified and brought here as part of the pigs’ diet. In return, we get manure, which we send to the agricultural towers and to the test gardens on the top of the tower. We get methane, which we collect and use for fuel. We get urea from the pig’s urine, which we use to make plastics. We recycle the plastics when we’re done with them. Around and around it goes.”

  “We make plastic from pig pee?” I said. I knew about manure and methane, but this was a new one on me.

  “Urea’s a bulking agent,” Barnes said and, when I gave him a look that indicated I hadn’t the slightest idea what he was talking about, changed tracks. “Yes. Plastic from pig pee. You got it.”

  “I suppose we get pork chops from them as well,” I said.

  Barnes made a face. “No,” he said. “Not these pigs.” He waved out at the floor again. “These pigs are genetically engineered to maximize output of end products.”

  I tried not to go to the next logical place and just couldn’t avoid it. “You’ve produced prodigiously pooptastic pigs,” I said, with as straight a face as possible.

&
nbsp; Barnes gave me a tight-lipped smile. “Laugh it up, Washington,” he said. “And while you’re laughing it up remember that all this pig shit and pig piss is part of the reason New St. Louis isn’t on the verge of economic collapse or starvation, like most of what’s left of our suburbs. And Missouri. And Illinois.”

  I thought back on the protest I saw outside my pod window on the way in and sobered up a little.

  Barnes seemed to approve. “Look, Washington, I know why you’re here,” he said. “You screwed around in school, got crappy Aptitude scores and this wound up being the only job you could get. Am I right about that?”

  “Sort of,” I said.

  “‘Sort of,’” Barnes repeated. “I know you think this is a dead-end job, below your dignity. But what you need to understand, Washington, is that if anything, it’s you who have to step up.” He jerked a thumb back to the pigs. “I don’t suppose you know that those pigs are part of the Technology Outreach program your mother and some others on the council are trying to push through.”

  “Pigs count as technology?” I said.

  “These pigs do,” Barnes said. “The same genetic improvements you are joking about are what make them valuable. They’re exceptionally efficient processors of urea and other valuable elements, and we’ve improved their already considerable intelligence enough that they actually know where to go to get rid of their waste.”

  It took me a minute to process this. “You mean they’re potty trained?”

  Barnes motioned to the window. “Look for yourself,” he said.

  I walked over to the window and stared out at the pigs. At first I had no idea what I was looking at, except for lots of pigs wandering around. But then I started to see it: trickles of pigs flowing into marked-off areas with grated floors. When they got there, they would let fly, and then wander back out when they were done.

  “Does someone have to teach them to do that?” I asked.

  “At first someone did,” Barnes said. “But these days they teach each other.”

  I looked back at him. “They’re teaching each other things?” I looked back at the pigs. “And you’re not worried about a piggy revolution or anything.”

  “It’s not Animal Farm,” Barnes said. “And it’s not like they’re teaching each other calculus. But now you understand why these pigs are valuable.”

  “What do you think of my mom’s Technology Outreach thing?” I asked Barnes. I know you’re not supposed to talk politics with your boss, much less on your first day on the job, but I was curious.

  Barnes shrugged. “I’m sympathetic,” he said. “People out there aren’t starving yet, but they’re getting close. No one’s going to eat these pigs—they shouldn’t, at least—but they can help with crop production and the production of biodegradable plastics. But,” and here Barnes looked at me significantly, “the reason it works here in NSL is that we actively manage it. It’s a closed loop. Zero-footprint. Everything gets recycled, nothing gets wasted.”

  “We use everything but the squeal,” I said.

  “That’s right,” Barnes said, approvingly. “Not just here but all over New St. Louis. Now, you give the same technology to people who aren’t managing their system—who don’t believe in that sort of zero-footprint philosophy—and all you’re going to do is make things worse.” He nodded out to the pigs again. “These guys are great for us, but they’re like any crop or animal that humans have messed with, either by old-fashioned domestication or modern genetic engineering. They have to be managed. Put a bunch of pigs designed for high outputs of urea and nitrates into an open system, with their waste flowing into streams and seeping into groundwater, and you’ll have a goddamn mess on your hands. Your mother is right, Washington: We need to help the people outside of the city. But we have to do it right, because they’ve already messed things up badly enough that they can’t afford another screwup. And neither can we. That’s why we haven’t given the technology to anyone else yet. The genetics of these pigs is still a state secret. Which is another thing you need to know.”

  “And here I thought I was just going to be a high-tech pig farmer,” I said.

  “Well, you are,” Barnes said. “Make no mistake about that, Washington. It’s just that pig farming is a lot more important than you thought it was. And that’s why I’m hoping your shitty Aptitude scores are more of a reflection of you farting around than you actually being stupid. If you’re an idiot, I can find jobs for you to do. But if you’re not an idiot, I can actually use you.”

  “I’m not an idiot,” I said.

  “I’d like to believe that,” Barnes said. “We’ll see. In the meantime, we’ll start you on vacuum detail.”

  “IT’S simple,” said Lucius Jeffers, who was the head of the four man work detail I was assigned to, on the fifth floor of Arnold Tower. “Whenever you see some shit or piss on the floor, you suck it up with this.” He waved the business end of a vacuum tube at me. “The mess goes into the tub here, and when the tub is full, you drag it over to a waste port at either end of the floor.” He motioned to one of the waste ports, which looked a little like the fire hydrants I saw in old children’s books. “Attach the tube to the waste port, switch the unit from the ‘vacuum’ to the ‘expel’ setting and let it empty out. Lather, rinse, repeat.”

  I looked at the vacuum unit doubtfully. “I thought these pigs were toilet trained,” I said.

  “They are,” Jeffers said. “But they’re also pigs, you know? Sometimes they just let fly. We’ve tried training them to use the vacuum to pick up after themselves. It didn’t work.”

  “You really tried that?” I said.

  Jeffers smiled. “You’re going to be a lot of fun, Washington. I can tell that already. All right, off to work with you. You can start with that pile of crap over there.” He pointed to a fresh leaving on the floor. “Try to get to them before the other pigs start walking through them,” he said, and left. And then off I went, sucking up crap.

  After an hour or so of doing this, I noticed that one of the pigs was following me around, usually about five feet behind me wherever I went. The porker was on the smallish side, and seemed to be grinning at me whenever I looked at it. I asked Jeffers about it at lunchtime.

  “Yeah, they do that sometimes,” Jeffers said. “The biologists made them smarter than the average pig, so now they’re a little curious about us. Pinter here,” Jeffers pointed at one of the other guys on the crew, “he had a sow follow him around for months. I think she was in love.”

  “It wasn’t love,” Pinter said, between sandwich bites. “We were just good friends.”

  “Yeah, right,” Jeffers laughed, and turned back to me. “The sow was probably just looking for a little action. They don’t let these pigs breed normally.”

  “What do you mean?” I asked.

  “You’ll find out after lunch,” Jeffers said.

  After lunch I was taken to the Love Lounge, filled with silicone pig-sized objects.

  I looked at Pinter, who had taken me to the Lounge. “Tell me these aren’t what I think they are.”

  “They are exactly what you think they are,” Pinter said. “We bring in a bunch of male pigs, fill the air with Scent of a Sow—” he pointed at what looked like a fire sprinkler on the ceiling “—and then the boys go to town. After they’re done we suck out the leavings, send them down to cryo for storage, and then clean out the love toys with an injection of soap and hot water.”

  “You have got to be kidding,” I said. “I just ate.”

  “It’s not so bad,” Pinter said. “Come on, get into the control booth. You don’t want to be in here when the boys come in. Once they get the sow scent into their nose, they’re not exactly discriminating.”

  I got into the control booth as quickly as I could. “Okay,” Pinter said. “Ready?” He pressed a button, and the sprinkler fizzed to life, coating the love dolls. Then the far door slid open, and a small pack of randy pigs trotted in.

  “Oh, God,” I said, a minute
later. “That is so not right.”

  “Makin’ bacon,” Pinter said, and looked at me. “Well, half of it, anyway. What would that be? ‘Bac’? Or ‘con’?”

  “I think there’s something wrong with you,” I said.

  Pinter shrugged. “You get used to this place after a while. And it’s not so bad working here once you do. I listen to my husband complain about his work day every single damn night. He complains about work, about his co-workers, and about his boss. I’m about ready to strangle him.” Pinter pointed out to the pigs, who were now winding down; they were not the long-lasting sort, apparently. “I wouldn’t say this job is glamorous—”

  “That’s a good thing,” I said.

  “—But on the other hand I don’t have to go home and whine to him about my day at work, either. Pigs are easy. People are hard. You learn to appreciate it after a while.”

  “I’m not entirely sure about that,” I said.

  “Well, if you don’t like it, you can always take your Aptitudes again and do something else with your time,” Pinter said, as the door to the Love Lounge opened and the pigs trotted out. “I like it fine. Now come on. We’ve got to collect this stuff while it’s still hot.”

  I swear to you, I never thought I would be so glad to get back to vacuuming up pig crap. And sure enough, once I started up again, there was the little pig again, trotting behind me.

  “Hello,” I said, finally, when I stopped to drain the vacuum, and the pig parked itself to watch. “I think I’ll call you Hammy. Or how about Pork Chop? Or maybe Mr. Bacon. Or just plain Lunch. What do you think about that?”

  The pig snorted at me, as if acknowledging my choices.

  “Great,” I said. “The first day on the job and I’m already talking to the pigs. Shoot me now.”

  Lunch snorted again.

  The vacuum suddenly chugged to a stop.

  “What the hell?” I said. The vacuum was still half full. I pulled my phone from my coverall pocket and called the Arnold Tower number for Jeffers. “Something’s wrong with my vacuum unit,” I said. “It stopped working and it’s half full.”