A light flashed green and the gate swung open.
“End of the line,” Riley said, hopping out of the car. I followed. Corp-towns were car-free zones—ours would presumably find its way to a nearby lot, while we tooled around on the blue solar-powered cart that was already waiting for us. We climbed into the narrow vehicle, which noticeably shuddered when it took on our weight. The rusty thing looked like it hadn’t been replaced—or even retooled—since the corp-town was first built.
“Destination?” its nav-system requested.
“Residential, A-three,” Riley said.
I felt like a child—or, worse, like a pet, towed around on a leash. Following obediently and unquestioningly after my master.
“Ever been to one of these before?” Riley asked as we sputtered into slow, lurching motion.
I grunted something that could have been a yes or a no. Just because he was suddenly and inexplicably in the mood for conversation didn’t mean I had to oblige. Despite the leash, I was no puppy.
The corp-town wasn’t quite pretty—it was too manicured for that, its stacked cubes of productivity too regimented and too concrete—but it wasn’t quite the wasteland I remembered from my childhood. The large pool of waste water dotted by mirrored solar-collecting lily pads was nearly beautiful, especially with the reflection of purple-tinged clouds unfurling across its still surface. Of course, I was lucky—being a mech, I didn’t have to deal with the smell.
The heart of Synapsis, like all corp-towns, was the housing complex, a cluster of ten massive glass cubes, each about thirty stories high. Glassed-in skyways spiderwebbed from these to the outlying factories, where Synapsis workers repaid the corporation’s beneficence. I didn’t know enough about Synapsis Corp to guess what was going on inside the concrete block buildings (the glass walls of the housing cubes sucked up plenty of solar energy, but privacy apparently took precedence over energy efficiency when it came to protecting industrial secrets). Not that it mattered, since these days all corps did pretty much the same thing. Plenty of programming and systems maintenance, a dash of information processing, a smidge of chem- and bio-engineering, probably even a pinch of manual labor for flavor. Yes, machines could do almost anything, but human labor was just as efficient, half as expensive, and, especially when it came to exceedingly toxic waste or toxic working conditions, 100 percent more disposable.
“Why would anyone want to do that?” I’d asked my godfather, confused by the pale, ashen-faced workers spilling out of their underground burrows.
“No one wants to,” he’d said, and left it at that.
So it fell to my father to explain: Not all corp jobs were created equal. Which was why jobs were assigned rather than chosen. It was easier that way, more orderly, more efficient. Joining a corp-town meant free housing, free food, free med-tech—and it meant accepting the job you were given. Whatever job the corp-minders judged you to deserve.
“People like choice,” my father had said. “But they like food even more.” And it was easier on everyone to have a nation of employees than a nation of beggars. So everyone was happy.
The few who weren’t, the few who preferred to make their own rules—have too many children, vote for whoever they wanted, eat more than their ration of soymeat, use more than their ration of power—well, they were welcome to move to a city and see for themselves how freedom tasted. If they were good enough, they might even get out again. This was America, after all. Anyone could get ahead.
That’s what my father had always told me.
The residence cubes were identical and unmarked, leaving us no choice but to trust the cart when it deposited us at an entrance. Behind the transparent walls, thousands scurried back and forth through a multileveled atrium, denizens of an oversize ant farm. Towering above our heads were the hundreds of privacy-free residential units, cubes within cubes, complete with all the comforts of a 15 x 15-foot home.
Riley led us into the ground-level atrium, its carpet of artificial grass gleaming green in artificial sunlight that belied the dark gloom beyond its walls. Corp-towners worked on a three-shift system, one-third working while the other two-thirds slept or played, so even in the middle of the day, there were more orgs than I’d expected milling about the plaza, toting bags of food and clothes and whatever other crap they wasted their corp-credit on. Orgs everywhere, cozying up to one another on park benches, strolling hand in hand down paths lined with fake stepping stones, people crowding in and out of the elevators that would speed them up or down to their housing module. Maybe it wasn’t more people than I’d ever seen in one place, but knowing that there were thirty levels above us and another twenty carved out of the ground below, all of them equally packed, made me want out.
Not that any of them came near us. As we walked down one of the curving paths, a vacuum opened in the crowd, as if an invisible force were clearing our way. And as they edged backward, they stared. And whispered. At least, some of them whispered—some insulted us in raised voices, unashamed.
“What are they doing here?”
“It’s uglier than I thought.”
“What do you think it’s thinking?”
A laugh. “As if it thinks.”
“Mom, it’s looking at me.” That was a whiny kid, pink hair, baggy overalls hanging over a matching pink hug shirt, the kind I’d loved when I was a kid. For a few blissfully simple months, trading hug shirts had been the perfect declaration of best friendship: You had only to wrap your arms across your chest and, no matter where she was, your best friend would feel the hug. We’d all dug them out again in junior high—boyfriends made the tech infinitely more entertaining. There was nothing like sitting through an intensely boring biotech lecture and suddenly feeling the warmth and pressure of invisible arms wrapping you in an invisible embrace.
Two men, not old, not young, scruff blotting their faces like a rash. One to the other. “Would you? For a thousand?”
The other. “Ten thousand. Maybe. But only the girl one.”
“Hell, I’d slam it for free. Try anything once, right?”
An old woman, her tan, dry skin taut from one too many shoddy lift-tucks, the best you could get in a corp-town. “You shouldn’t be here.”
Not all the stares were hostile—there were plenty who watched us closely, neutrally, like little kids watching an anthill, placing bets on which insects would wander off and fry in the sun.
Riley deposited me on a bench just opposite a small fountain flickering with water and colored light. “This is where you meet him,” he said. “I’ll be watching from up there.” He pointed to the level above us, where two girls a couple years younger than me were leaning against a railing, making a pathetic show of ignoring the boys goggling them from beneath. The floors, like nearly everything in the atrium, were made of glass; the girls were wearing skirts and had apparently decided to put on a little show.
I raised my eyebrows at Riley.
He scowled. “Over there,” he said pointedly, nodding at an open spot on the railing, suitably far from the giggling exhibitionists. “If anything seems off, I’ll VM you.”
“How am I supposed to know who ‘him’ is?”
“He’ll find you,” Riley said. “Just take the package. Don’t tell him I’m here. Don’t ask any questions—and don’t answer any.”
Stay with me, I almost said, watching the orgs watch me. But that would be paranoid and weak, and I was neither. “So get out of here before ‘he’ shows up.”
With Riley gone, the whispers grew. It was like his silence had been loud enough to drown them out, but now they were all I could hear. Or maybe now that I was alone, the people were getting bolder. I waited for one of them to take the next step.
If something happened, would any of them try to stop it? None of the tech upgrades we’d gotten had made us any faster or stronger. No martial arts savvy downloaded directly to the motor cortex, no superhero skills whatsoever. Just a titanium head and some bones that were nearly impossible to break.
<
br /> Nothing’s going to happen. No violence, that was rule number one in every corp-town, and violating it was the fastest way to get yourself ejected. One of the vidscreens flashing overhead made the point in stark terms, broadcasting a looped vid of two men wrestling, a knife flashing in each of their hands. As the background shifted from the corp-town plaza to a desolate city street, blood spurted and the men fell backward, still. The moral of the story scrolled across the screen—Live like an animal, die like an animal—and then the whole thing started again.
The rest of the vidscreens were flashing pop-ups for corp-produced goods and services to be bought with corp-credit—corp-towners got paid in play money that was only good within the bounds of the corp-town, forming a neatly closed circle between corp and employee. Within the corp-town, everything went cheap; play money let the poor playact at being rich. You could trade in your corp-credit for real credit, but only if you wanted to sacrifice all your purchasing power, foregoing a corp-supplied wardrobe or a kitchen full of corp-supplied food in favor of one box of real chocolate or a slab of real organic beef. I never understood why any of them would have bothered trying to buy anything in the outside world—but then, I never understood why they would set foot in the outside world in the first place. And most of them didn’t.
“It’s easier that way,” I’d told Auden once, cutting into one of his rants. “Why would they want to see what they can’t have?”
“It’s easier for us that way,” Auden had replied. “We pen them up, like we pen up the city people, and then we don’t have to think about them. Or see them. We can just forget they exist.”
“No one’s stopping them from leaving the corp-towns—or the cities, for that matter. But why go where you don’t belong?”
Leaving a corp-town was logistically almost as hard as leaving a city. Regulations restricted corp-towners to public transportation, and the last bus and train lines had died out years ago. What was the point, when the minority had cars of their own and the majority was better off staying put? There were a few jobs that required leaving the corp-town regularly on corp-transport—the shippers were always traveling back and forth, and the security-operations force were a regular presence, standing guard over the rest of us with their badges, their thermobaric grenades, their stunshots, and their don’t-screw-with-me scowls that couldn’t mask their boredom. Not to mention their bitterness at protecting a life they could never afford themselves. Small wonder that secops was as low on the desirability spectrum as wastewater management and human resources. At least the data-entry grunts got to stay hidden away in their glassy cubes—ignoring us, I’d always assumed, just as happily as we ignored them.
There was one recent exception to the stay-put rule—the Brotherhood of Man had begun sending buses to area corp-towns, offering residents a field trip to the newly completed Temple of Man. I wondered how many of the hostile faces surrounding me had witnessed Auden’s little martyr show live and in person. How many looked at me and were afraid.
Twenty minutes passed, and Jude’s mystery man didn’t show. Another twenty, and still nothing.
I glanced up at Riley. He was resolutely ignoring the giggling girls—who were now taking turns boldly flashing their net-linked lingerie at him.
“Is he usually this late?” I VM’d.
“Never,” came the answer. “Stay put. I’ll voice Jude.”
Of course, I thought in disgust. Jude always knows what to do. The all-knowing, all-powerful Jude had all the answers.
Then the sun went out.
Darkness, and then the world blazed red. I stood up as the alarm sang out, a single scream at the top of the octave. The crowds froze, faces tipped up toward the vidscreens, which all flashed the same useless message: Alert. Biohazard. Alert.
The red strobe flashed on, off, on. Glowing faces burst from the darkness, then dropped into shadow. The fountain bled pink, the rippling pool of water at its base a bottomless red.
I was staring at the fountain when I realized the noise had stopped. Not the alarm, which was still singing, but the sounds beneath it, the rustling, mumbling, shrieking, crying chaos of the crowd. Gone.
Ring around the rosie, a pocketful of posies.
The inane rhyme whispered through my head as they began to drop. They fell silent and still, their eyes bulging and mouths convulsing, fishlike, open shut open. Soundless. The two men with their dirt-beards, the old woman. The giggle twins, their giggles silenced, their skirts askew. Down, hard and ugly, heads cracking against plastic stone, arms jutting at odd angles. Down went the little kid, fingers clawing at her pink shirt. And her mother, down without a fight, her back to the kid.
Ashes, ashes.
Someone told me once that the nursery rhyme was about the Black Plague. That the ring of roses referred to the disease’s trademark red rash; the ashes to the burning bodies of the dead. But that was a lie: I looked it up. The words were nonsense; they meant nothing.
The red light pulsed rhythmically. I tried not to count the faces, hundreds of faces. Some of them twitched, chests heaving, sucking in air and whatever poison hid inside of it, whatever biohazard had touched off a useless, too late alert alert alert.
Some of them—one of the men, the girl, three women with chunky ankles and identical rings on their stubby fingers—prostrate, frozen. Askew. Their eyes open, their chests still.
Faces red, then pale, shadowy, non, then red again.
“We have to get out of here!” Riley’s voice in my ear. Riley’s shirt absurdly pulled over his face as if he had anything to fear from the poisoned air. Riley’s hands on my shoulders. Riley, there, but seeming very far away. Riley alive and in motion, seeming wrong in the still, empty room. Empty until you looked down.
“Lia!” Riley grabbing me. Dragging me out of the plaza.
Running, stumbling over something lumpy and large that didn’t make a sound as our feet sank into its chest.
Running without looking down, just step over them like stones, just go, Riley said, don’t stop don’t look just go.
Running and standing still, leaving a piece of myself in the empty atrium, still watching the red light pool in the whites of their eyes.
Ashes, ashes, we all fall down.
TOGETHER ALONE
“We’re all better off now.”
The red light turned to tears, trickled down pale, still faces.
Their eyes were bleeding.
Alert! Biohazard! Alert! screamed the vidscreens, although there was no one left to warn.
“Get it together!” Riley’s hands were rough on my arm and back, pushing me forward. “We have to get out.”
What’s the hurry? I thought, a mad giggle rising in me. No bio equals no hazard. Safe and sound.
But I shook him off and I ran with him, down the dead, empty hall, the corp-town in lockdown, its residents hiding or evacuated. Or neither. Steel shutters had dropped to shield the glass walls, trapping us inside, in the dark. The biohazard protocol had locked even the glowing emergency exits, sealing the corp-town tight—no nasty microorganisms would escape to the outside world. And no mechs.
Riley went straight for the control panel to the right of the nearest exit and ripped off the cover. He began messing with the wires, stripping two of them with his teeth and winding them together, then touching them to a third, and before I could ask what the hell he was doing, the steel slid up toward the ceiling, and he pushed through the door. His hand gripped mine, tugged hard, and I followed.
We cut across the matted astroturf surrounding the residential cubes, ignoring the solar-powered cart that had carried us here—even if it wasn’t on lockdown with the rest of the compound, it was too slow and too easily tracked by the secops. Alarms were blaring across the campus, and steel shutters had dropped across all the residence cubes, turning them into bunkers, a fitting accessory to the corp-cum–war zone. The air split with distant sirens. Thunder shook the sky. Except it wasn’t thunder; it was a squadron of helicopters dropping towa
rd the glass cube as the emergency vehicles, the fire trucks and ambulances, appeared on the horizon. Next would come the secops looking for someone to blame. I suspected we’d do.
“We didn’t have to run,” I said, my brain finally starting to work again, though I was still running, because he seemed so sure and I was so not. We passed the wastewater ponds and trampled through deserted soy fields. The workers had presumably all been hustled away to the underground safe houses dotting the perimeter, and only the reaping and spraying machines remained to witness us tearing through the knee-high fronds of sallow green. “We could have stayed—maybe we could have helped.”
Riley sped up. “We’re helping ourselves.”
We ran for miles, quickly crossing the boundaries of the corp-town into open country. Security at the borders was light—in most spots nonexistent—and it would probably take at least an hour before the secops had a chance to cover the grounds. In the meantime, the more distance we could put between us and them, the better. Mech bodies didn’t tire, so we just kept going. Through industrial wastelands and past smokestacks puffing purified clouds into foggy sky, beyond the boundaries of the corp-town, away from the sirens, through flat fields and more fields, staying off the road, feet tramping through the high grass, another mile and another stretching between us and the corp-town. I’d been a runner, before, and I knew my stride. Counting paces was easier than thinking, so I focused on the wet thump of our shoes on the soggy ground, marking off five miles, then ten, then twenty. Until a cloud of green mushroomed on the horizon, resolving itself, as we drew nearer and nearer, into a wide, dense grove of trees. We’d reached the border of a Sanctuary, twenty square miles of unspoiled wilderness, off-limits to orgs. Which meant, except for the birds and squirrels and deer, we were alone.