by Alex London
These advos were so not his.
Syd kept his purchase profile boring. Most of the sales pitches he saw were for dehydrated noodles. Original sodium flavor. He didn’t like to make it easy on the predictive marketing software. He bought as little as possible and used the black market whenever he could. Of course, the black market sold its data upstream to the legit companies too, but they didn’t care if the data was accurate or not. They got the same price for a lie as they did for the truth.
Everything costs.
“You could just drop out.” Syd tried to stop the kid’s crying. “Go to the recycling yards, work as a runner? Or join the Rebooters to fight the system.” Syd held up his fist in mock solidarity. “Bring on the Jubilee.”
The kid shook his head.
“Guess you’re not a Causehead,” said Syd, lowering his fist. He couldn’t blame the kid. Syd didn’t believe in all that Jubilee stuff either. Universal debt forgiveness was a pipe dream and the Rebooters were a bunch of losers living out in the wastelands, eating rats and waiting for their debtor messiah or something. Even their corporate terrorism was laughable. When they blew up a datacenter, three more went online in its place. When they trashed a protein depot, the price of food went up for everyone and EpiCure hit record profits. Rebooter anti-market actions had been integrated into the market. There was no changing the system. Best you could do was get yourself clear of it any way possible.
“You could sell an eye for hard cash?” Syd suggested. “Sell a kidney? One of the dupe organs anyway.”
That suggestion only made things worse. The kid blew a loud blast of tear snot and wiped it on his sleeve. Charming.
“Calm down,” Syd groaned, a trickle of sweat running down between his shoulder blades. The small of his back felt like a swamp. “I was kidding.” He put his hand on the kid’s shoulder, because what else was he supposed to do? The boy lowered his hands from his face. Syd stooped to look the kid right in the eyes. “What’s your name?” he asked.
“Tom,” the kid sniffed. “Tom Sawyer.”
Tom Sawyer.
Of course. The name said it all: a refugee and an orphan, renamed from a database. Probably a West Coaster by the sound of his accent.
No wonder he had all that debt. It came with the name. The Benevolent Society charged ten years for a “rescue” from the desert and another three for installing the datastream into your blood. Three more years got tacked on for foster care, and two more just to get into school. That made eighteen altogether. Syd knew that eighteen years of debt well.
He had it himself.
Syd sighed.
Why was he such a sucker for these charity cases? He was a charity case. Sixteen years old and eighteen years in debt to the Xelon Corporation. Once you got so deep into debt, it was almost impossible to get out. Civilization wasn’t free.
But it was better than the alternative. Better than life in the swamps or the desert or the ruins of some squatter city out in the badlands. Better than going freelance, out of the system, scrounging in the dumps for recycling, working a corner for the syntholene gangs or in a hacker pharm, going blind writing cut-rate codes for the Maes gang. It sure beat getting rolled for your organs, used as meatware.
Some would consider Syd lucky. He had access to credit. He got to be in school. He got to be out of the hustle, if he chose, if he wanted to take on the debt.
His problem was, he didn’t want to.
Egan, his best friend, the one guy he trusted in the whole damned city, had like thirty or forty years of debt by now—he was always buying the newest biopatch, updating himself with new eye colors or hair colors or skin colors, buying data-enabled contact lenses from the Upper City, tiny projectors that slid under his fingernails, crazy climate-control clothing. He went out all the time too, got girls presents, and did whatever designer patch was popular with the patron kids up above.
Egan didn’t care. His patron was a saint, never got in trouble. Egan never had to do hard labor. He never got hit with an EMD stick. He never had to teach his patron a lesson about responsibility.
Syd wasn’t so lucky.
He’d missed more nonrefundable school days for “volunteer work”—Xelon corporate code for forced labor—than anybody else in his class. He felt like he’d hauled every ton of cement in the Hayek Memorial Dam up the mountain by himself and single-handedly ripped all the copper wire from all of Old Denver. He figured his was the worst patron anyone had ever had in all of history.
But that was the system. Patrons owned the debt and proxies took their punishments. A simple contract, a free market. Debts had to be paid.
The work built Syd’s muscles up so that he didn’t have to worry so much about Maes gang thugs giving him a beating, but it was murder on his knees. He’d been hit with an EMD stick more times than he could count. Electro-muscular disruption fried your nerves, but you could endure anything once you got used to it. By now, Syd was very used to it.
Still, just two more years of debt and Syd would be no one’s proxy, his own man. The thought pulled him through. Soon he’d never have to owe anybody anything ever again.
He worked in the back of an illegal repair shop in the Valve, and he studied hard and he avoided the corners and the dumps and whatever new schemes Egan cooked up. He put in his time with his head down. For friends he had Egan and dating wasn’t even a remote possibility. Not for him, not in the Valve. Easier to keep to himself.
And yet, Syd knew, he wasn’t going to let Tom Sawyer drop out because of a busted biofeed. He never could say no to someone desperate.
Syd was a sucker.
“All right, Tom.” He sighed. “Just get through the day, okay?” He dropped the projector into the boy’s shaking hands. His fingertips left sweaty smudges on the cheap plastic. “You know Mr. Baram’s shop? Down by the runoff?”
Tom shook his head. Syd rolled his eyes, but brought up his datastream again.
“UtiliBoots! Give your other boots the boot,” an advo squawked. “Now with burn retardant dura—”
He swiped the advo away and brought up a holo of the entire Mountain City, with the swirling roads and private communities of the Upper City blurred out—wouldn’t want undesirables learning their way around. The chaotic jumble of the Lower City appeared in perfect detail. He zoomed in on the shop near the dried-up river in the heart of the Valve.
“Meet me there after school,” he said. “Maybe I can rig something to get you back on the datastream for a while.”
Tom smiled and for a second Syd was afraid the boy was going to give him a hug, but he ran off to class instead, and Syd stood alone in the middle of the emptying hall, sweating by himself. Advos for hair product and the newest holo games flashed at the edge of his vision. He watched through the glowing map floating in the middle of the hallway as Tom disappeared around the corner.
And then, without him doing a thing, the map vanished and a message appeared:
Report immediately to the school aid station.
Syd stared at the words.
The aid station.
Maybe he really was sick. His fingers went to the birthmark behind his ear again. It sat on that lump of bone where his ear met his skull and he found the thumping sound calming.
He didn’t feel sick. He felt fine. Other than the fear of slow, painful death from some undiagnosed disease, he felt fine.
Report immediately to the school aid station flashed again in front of him. This time he noticed the logo of the Xelon Corporation in the hologram. He reached up and swiped the projection out of the air.
This wasn’t about his health. This was about his patron.
What had the brat done this time?
[3]
“YOU’RE LATE, MR. CARTON.” Mr. Thompson’s face glowered from the holo projected on top of the bot at the front of the classroom.
“I . . . uh . . .” Syd stared up at it as it rolled toward him. He swayed on his feet and rubbed his arm where the bot at the aid station had shoved a nee
dle in. He shuddered at the memory. He really hated needles.
“I, uh is hardly an excuse,” Mr. Thompson snapped. “Do you expect the entire district to wait for you?”
“No, sir,” Syd muttered, knowing that his words were being broadcast to four other classrooms across the Lower City at the same time. There were about fifty kids in each one, which meant he was being called out in front of two hundred people. So much for keeping his head down.
“I was at the aid station. I had to give blood.”
“So we are all to be punished for your obligations?” Mr. Thompson demanded.
“No, sir.” Syd wobbled. He worried he was going to pass out. He was having trouble focusing. They’d taken a lot of blood.
The aid station bot hadn’t explained why he had to give blood, just that he did or he would be in violation of his debt contract. The blood was required of him.
That was the only answer he could get, but it was from an official Xelon datastream, so he had to obey. The aid station bot also had EMD capabilities. He’d prefer a simple blood donation to an EMD blast any day.
So he’d closed his eyes, looked away as the needle went in, as his blood flowed through a tube into the medical bot. He’d heard the term “blood debt,” but he’d never had to donate blood to his patron before. He always thought blood debt was some sort of historical thing. Why should his blood pay a debt?
Then again, why shouldn’t it? Value is in the eye of the creditor, as they say.
The debt paid, the bot let him stagger his way to class. Now that he was there, he just wanted to sit down and be left alone.
“It won’t happen again,” he mumbled and rushed to take his seat.
“See that it doesn’t, or it’ll be a fine on your account.” The holo of Mr. Thompson’s face followed him as he crossed the room. The bot was an old teaching model, but their school didn’t get lux equipment for anything. Mr. Thompson was probably in an office somewhere in the Upper City in front of a bank of monitors, enjoying the climate control and the fact that he would never have to meet his students in person.
The bot was seven feet tall and sat on a large swivel ball that made it maneuverable in any direction and impossible to tip over. It had multiple channels of video and sound to pick up the whole room, though half of them were jammed with simple jabber apps. There was also a transmitter for uploading and downloading from the students’ datastreams, and that was a lot harder to jam. EduCorp proprietary software. Interference with biodata transmission was punishable by hard labor and six additional months of debt for each count. No one bothered with those hacks. The crime was not worth the punishment.
Once Syd sat, the bot went back to pacing, rolling over the tile with a mechanical purr and a disconcerting click where the tiles weren’t level. It would be pacing the same way in all the classrooms where Mr. Thompson taught. He probably had it on an auto-pacing program designed for “dynamic instruction to meet the developmental needs of the modern vocational student.”
Educational jargon. Syd had read the manual.
Syd had read all the manuals.
His boss at the shop where he worked bought them off the black market so Syd would know how to repair or modify anything that came in. It wasn’t technically legal, but the Valve security companies looked the other way. Every business in the Valve broke some regulation or another. It was the only way to survive. As long as only small rules were being broken, no one cared. If you lived in the Valve, lawlessness wasn’t a vice, it was a life skill.
Syd’s transmitter vibrated the moment he sat down. He tapped it and brought up a tiny projection on the palm of his hand, small enough that only he could see it.
Blud? Egan’s text popped up in his cupped hand. They messed with their spelling so the EduCorp wordworm didn’t pick up on their conversation.
Syd looked up at Egan and shrugged.
Egan fired another text off and Syd looked down at it.
Yr pAtr0n = a$$. Egan shook his head, sympathetic.
Syd didn’t disagree. Egan changed the subject.
wHt’s w/the sndRat? Sawyer . . . nw b/f?
Sandrat. That’s what they called the West Coasters and anyone from the lowlands around the Mountain City. There was no civilization left out there, just desert sand and festering refugee camps. To the east were the pestilential swamps and the radioactive cities. They couldn’t even support refugee camps. If you came from the east, you were a swampcat. Like Syd.
y? u jeLus? Syd texted back. He ignored Egan’s sandrat comment. They’d been friends forever, though lately it seemed like they had a lot more history than current events. Egan was always tweaked on something.
u Wsh. Egan’s eyes flickered. He didn’t use a projection. He got his datastream from contact lenses, right against the eye. Very lux. Private projectors did not come cheap and with these lenses, you couldn’t even tell Egan was getting data, except that he blinked more than usual and his eyes didn’t seem to focus on anything. Although Egan’s eyes never seemed to focus on anything anyway, lenses or no. A side effect of syntholene. Or maybe its intended effect.
yr nt my Typ, Syd replied. 2 sKnny.
stLL crShing on Atticus Finch?
Sht up. Syd swiped.
oo la la he so hndsme . . . u wunt 2 kiss kiss w/him . . .
Atticus Finch, a sandrat who was going places, a skilled gamer with sponsors and everything. He wouldn’t be living in the Valve for long and it didn’t hurt that he was easy on the eyes.
imd, Syd replied.
mega tmi.
Unauthorized text flashed across the palm of Syd’s hand and suddenly he was staring at Mr. Thompson’s face hovering in front of his fingers. Egan flinched. He’d just gotten an eyeful of the old coot. Thompson could multitask, that was true. He’d hacked them without stopping his lesson for a second.
Syd looked up from the teacher’s face in his palm and saw that he was staring down at them from the holo on his bot too, double faces glowering at Syd and Egan.
“There is an old saying, gentlemen,” Mr. Thompson declared. “It goes: Secrets, Secrets Are No Fun. Secrets, Secrets Come Undone.”
Suddenly, their brief conversation went public, projected into every datastream in the class, in all five classrooms across the city.
Kid’s he’d never meet, never would meet, were reading Syd’s texts with his best friend. Years of keeping his head down, gone in a flash of data, just like that. Instantaneous.
Egan shrugged it off, but Syd turned rust red. Kids glanced back at him, muttering, their own unauthorized texts pouring out in torrents. He saw a dozen hands drop down, colors in their palms as covert holo projections exploded with the new info, a handheld light show of Syd’s humiliation.
“Projections on desks please,” Mr. Thompson barked, and the palm-sized glows rose and flattened onto the tables in front of each kid.
A few rows up, Atticus Finch raised his projection straight over his head. He glanced back at Syd and his perfect lips sneered. On the holo above him a message popped up in bright red, clear to Syd from across the room, clear to everyone. It was fully spelled, wordworm be damned: Don’t look at me, You Chapter 11 Punk.
Atticus put his index fingers up and banged them together in Syd’s direction.
“To you too!” Egan grunted and did the same right back, but Atticus had already turned away.
Syd pressed his hands into his eyes, shutting out the world.
Chapter 11.
Slang for guys like him. A bankrupt 1 and 1, a binary insult. Two of the same thing pressed together. The old way of saying it was homo.
So much for a private life.
Everyone probably suspected it already—he’d never had a girlfriend—but now they knew, right there in undeniable digital. Syd had a thing for Atticus Finch, or at least for the idea of Atticus Finch, just like all the Fangirls did.
He sank into his chair.
Class continued. Something about the emancipation of the working class through open cre
dit markets, but it was boring stuff. Ancient history. Syd stewed where he sat.
“Hey,” Egan whispered, not daring another text message. “Don’t worry about it. Thompson’s a knockoff of a man. Don’t let him get to you.”
“I’m not worried about Thompson,” Syd whispered back.
“You could do better than Atticus Finch.”
“Shut up, okay?”
“I guess you like ’em dumb, huh?”
“Just. Shut. Up.”
“How about the sandrat with the busted projector? He . . . uh . . . open for your sort of business?”
“You aren’t helping.”
“Relax. If anyone messes with you, you tell me. They’ll regret it.”
“You’re messing with me.”
“Other than me.”
Syd sighed. He knew Egan was as good as his word. He was ruthless and always had been, but he valued loyalty above all else. He didn’t care that Syd was a Chapter 11, as long as he was loyal.
Egan had come to the orphanage around the same time Syd did, though Egan was local. Not a refugee, just unwanted. When they first arrived at the orphanage, they were assigned to share a sleeping compartment. It was an accident of fate, but it worked.
Egan called Syd “swampcat” until they were eight years old. Then Syd hit a growth spurt first and punched Egan in the face. He called Syd “Syd” from then on. Syd had only ever called Egan by his name.
They stuck together. They looked after each other and fought with each other and fought for each other. They told each other their plans and their dreams and their secrets. Some of them were even true. They were, in short, best friends.
After Syd took up working and living in the shop, Egan kept freelancing for the security firms. He trashed stores that competitors were supposed to protect, stole from other people’s clients, and looked out for anyone who’d come into some success and might want a little peace of mind. Syd never had a talent for that kind of commerce and he had no interest in salvage picking or selling himself to leering old has-beens. Egan, however, didn’t mind getting dirty. Blood washed off easier than poverty.