FKA USA

by Reed King

  “I don’t understand,” I said. Susan had taken me outside for a squint at Walden. I was still too weak to go far. But from the front porch I had a nice squint of real growing things, sprawls of grass and trees and even flowers—and not the silicone ones either. “I thought the Colorado River went dry.”

  “It did,” Susan said. “For a long, long time. Those were the drought years everyone’s heard stories about. I was a little girl in Albuquerque when Noah Two hit. I remember all the refugees that came through as the drought deepened, all of them covered in white dust, choking on their own tongues and staggered from dehydration. They said Arizona was done. They talked about building a wall.”

  She shook her head and reached out to finger the ridged leaf of a tomato vine climbing her front porch. Without meaning to, I twinned her. I half-expected my hand to pass through it, the way it would of on the Yellow Brick Road.

  She was quiet for a click. Here in Walden, furred in by growth and the faint mist of an in-ground sprinkler system, the sun felt bearable. Somewhere, notes of music climbed on currents of air.

  “It’s funny how things work out,” she said. “Balance. The way new things are born from destruction. I guess that’s called evolution.” She turned away from the tomato field and we kept walking. “You heard of the nuclear fracking they do up in the Dakotas?”

  “Sure,” I said.

  She smiled. “When they started nuking down in the Bakken Formation, they found new oil deposits, sure, new natural gas fields. They also shook up the earth. I’ve heard of earthquakes lasting in Iowa and Kansas for days at a time. And sinkholes. Well. No wonder Nebraska’s up for sale.3 From what I hear, it’s just a giant sinkhole. But all of that creeping beneath the crust pushed new water into the river basin. Not a lot, but enough for us.”

  The people of Walden lived totally without juice, except for what they needed to run their plumbing (“There’s no utopia without flushing toilets and cold showers”) and a few rigged “environmental adjusters”: outdoor lights, cooling mechs, and water-sprinkling systems. All their power came through renewable energy like wind and even the desert climate itself: they’d even souped up a coolant that scammed off the relative density of cooling air. She told me, too, that in Walden they ate nothing made with chemical additives, hormones, substitutes, or synthetics.

  It was like saying that the people in Walden didn’t breathe air. Chemical additives, hormones, substitutes, and synthetics were food.

  “What do you eat, then?” I asked, hoping the answer wasn’t grubs or, even worse, body rot from one of Arizona’s mass graves.

  “Real food,” she answered.

  “Yeah, okay,” I said. “RealFood™. Sure.”

  “Not RealFood™,” she said. “Real food. Food we grow ourselves.”

  “You have your own agrofirms?” I’d never heard of a hillbilly town with its own food production.

  She shook her head. “No, no. Food we grow in the ground.”

  I was more confused than ever. Agrofirms still converted sunlight so I didn’t see how you could sink them.

  “Here. I’ll show you. Take a seat.” She plunked me down on a rocker and disappeared inside for a while. Instead of the beeps and whistles I knew from one-and-done ovens, or even the heavy grinding of a home printer, I heard a slop heap of sizzles, hisses, and pops, plus a lot of metal clanging. The smell, too, had none of the chemical edge I knew from childhood, no special SmartScents™ I could pick out.

  After several minutes she reappeared with a plate.

  “Go on,” she said. “Take a bite. You’ll love it. There’s nothing like real food after a lifetime of substitutes. It’s a grilled cheese,” she added, when I lifted the dish to sniff it.

  Oozy and crusty and blackened and slick, all at the same time, it was nothing like the GrilledCheez™ I’d grown up on, with its vivid orange cheese and neat corners and flash diagonal grill marks that darkened when you slotted them under a lamp. Pools of something that looked like lipid 607a dripped onto the plate. It looked like an edible wound.

  Still, I was starving, and Susan had saved me from evaporating into a pile of bones, so I gave it a shot. The nosh wasn’t as bad as it looked, but I missed the salt-burst aftertaste and the chem adds that gave the bread its boost. The cheese wasn’t even flavored with Shakin-Bakin’ or Jalapeno-Popper-Explosion or PepperCornParty! It was just … cheese.

  I didn’t finish the whole thing.

  “Oh, well,” Susan said. She looked a little disappointed. “I guess it takes some getting used to.”

  * * *

  It was like no hillbilly town I’d ever seen. No one was starving, first of all. There were no flu warnings, no mass graves, no crusted, fly-chewed garbage pits, no reek of sewage or swarms of overgrown cats with a taste for chemical waste and human pinkie fingers. There were no armories, no company stores, and no ration announcements.

  Children scrolled around barefoot through massive rows of silk-tipped growth Susan told me was popcorn, but without the pop. Girls in faded cutoffs and T-shirts giggled together as they dug for lumps from the ground (potatoes, squash, radishes) uncolored by chemical castoff. People grinned in the sun like someone had upped their dosages. Coils of tomato vines, fields of golden wheat. Kids shuffled physical cards at picnic tables, or gamed with an actual ball—a sleek, orange sphere I mistook at first for an excavated land mine.

  The houses were more or less template, styled after the last-century Americana of ancient record players and blue jeans and people who had to go to theaters for virtual reality. But one house stood out: real swank, twice as big as the others, with a bunch of look-at-me features like storm shutters and rainwater purifiers.

  “Who squats there?” I asked.

  She frowned. “Right now? The Edwards family, I think. Sometimes the Richardsons. Sometimes the kids stay over and the parents hightail across the square for some quiet.”

  “But who owns it?”

  Susan stopped walking and began to laugh. She laughed so hard, she wasn’t even shaking with laughter: the laughter was shaking with her. “Sorry. I always forget, you know, when new people…” Seeing the look on my face, she shook her head. “No one owns anything here. Walden is a share community.”

  “A what?”

  “A share community,” she said, like repeating the words might give them some sense. “There’s no ownership. We all own everything.”

  No wonder the whole place felt a little off. “So you’re Communists?”

  “No.” She squinted, like she was trying to make her visor feed line up with the horizon. Except she had no visor, and no feed. “In Communist systems, the state owns the resources and doles them out as they see fit. But no one owns anything here, and so everyone owns everything. Cooking materials, houses, tomato gardens … everything belongs to all of us equally.”

  It was, hands-down, the most idiotic system of any I’d ever heard of—counting Miami, where wealth and power were allotted in proportion to a person’s tan and breast-implant size.4

  “Come on,” she said, once she was through laughing at the look on my face. She threaded an arm through mine. “There’s something I want you to see.”

  She waved me on down a tree-lined alley and into the shade of an old quarantine tent, repainted a patchwork of colors to hide the insignia.

  I swallowed a shout. Sitting at a long rough-hewn table, dappled by sunlight, were Barnaby and Tiny Tim.

  And next to them, the familiar torpedo shape of an ancient-model android.

  “Sammy!” I was across the courtyard and hugging her before I knew I’d moved.

  “Truckee.” She gave a series of beeps and whistles that might of been a laugh. “Careful. You’ll trip all my new circuitry.”

  “Sorry.” I pulled away, keeping one hand on her shoulder joint. She looked incredible. Her interface was wiped clean, her speaker grille was free of dust, and—

  “Your lens,” I blurted out. “You got a new one.”

  “Yes,” she
said, rotating it. “Isn’t it fantastic? It has all the newest fiber optics and more than ten times the resolution of my last one.”

  I wanted to be happy for her. But a lens like that was going to cost us more chow than I’d ever touched. I turned to Susan. “Nice upgrade,” I said. “What’s that going to ring us?”

  “Nothing.” She laughed. “It’s a gift.”

  “Sure.” I forced a smile so she knew I could take a joke. “You gave a perfect stranger a brand-new fiber-optic 360-degree lens for free. Nothing belongs to anybody else and all that.”

  “Exactly. Some of our young men and women and non-gendered humans are quite the tinkerers. We have a whole engineering corps. They were happy to do it. Besides,” she added, “you aren’t strangers anymore.”

  I realized she wasn’t kidding. But I figured she’d try and stick us with the bill later, maybe in the form of kinky sexual favors. Maybe Walden was one of those religious cultist places where people used “community talk” to justify bumping rags with all their neighbors.

  There was no such thing as free. It was the one law in the world we could all agree on.

  * * *

  That night we ate outside in a big park: homemade pasta and real butter and cheese, grilled corn, and peach salad. As the temperature dropped, we flowed down to a fire pit to drink homemade wine and listen to music beneath a scrim of smoke and the stars shining through it.

  And in the morning, when Susan woke me up with some coffee stripped from actual beans, my mind buzzed around the same thought, over and over like a fly around a RealPeach™ Sugar Crunch Salad canister.

  What the hell was wrong with these people?

  32

  If someone offers you a deal that sounds too good to be true, don’t be surprised to wake up with your pants off.

  —from The Grifter’s Guide to the Territories FKA USA

  It was misery: Four days without portal, without feeds, without livestream and ambient music or the chatter of faraway voices talking tricked-up politics and national pride. All I had for entertainment was The Grifter’s Guide, and even there I was stuck smack-dab in the middle. I couldn’t even slip onto the Yellow Brick Road to chat with Bad Kitty—to chat with Evaline. There was a firewall to stop it, and besides, there was nowhere to juice my visor.

  “Too many people,” Susan said, “live their life like pollo, heads under their wings, always sweating someone else’s body, someone else’s life. They give up their real lives to try and live a fantasy. We want to change that.”

  I almost pointed out that the problem wasn’t fantasy. The problem was real life being so damn crap to begin with. But there was no point wasting my bandwidth. Like my ma always said, you don’t give socks to a slug.

  I couldn’t shake the feeling that we’d dropped off the world into a creepy simulation, and that by the time we escaped there would be no world to come back to. But Sammy had to work out a few kinks in her operating system and I was still blistering off a slough of burned skin and weak from sun fever, and as long as we were stuck, I had to play like I thought squeaking it in the middle of nowhere and digging sewage trenches from scratch were the best things that ever happened to anybody.

  On my third day awake, Susan lathered me up with aloe and sunscreen and took us out on four-wheelers across the desert to the McDonald’s-Hyatt Canyon™. It was weird to leave Walden and its shelter of greenery and water, and to launch again into a bone-colored landscape—it was the same pulverizing comedown I got from quitting a really good simulation and finding the world just as ugly as I left it.

  The canyon itself was toothy with abandoned luxury houses, hotels, tourist shops, slop shops, and malls in a state of decay. More than a few condos and a big-ass wing of the Grand Hyatt had toppled over the cliffs, chewed away by wind and the punch of faraway earthquakes. Broken pylons and support beams littered the canyon floor like so many matchsticks. A McDonald’s teetered on a slim rock outpost, just barely clawing on. Within a hundred years, Susan said, all the buildings would be gone, bucked off by the earth they were clinging to, driven into dust like the bones of all their desperate suited-up shamsters and mortgage loaners and developers.

  The world goes on without us, she said. Like that was supposed to be comfort.

  I kept searching Walden for signs of freaky sex rites or cultism or brainwashing, and kept coming up empty. There was no leader, no one preaching about fire and brimstone, no one to shep a thousand different wives into service, like I’d heard the Children of Nature guru had done in the Green Mountain Associated Intentional Communities—before the whole country outlawed gender, and wives, and marriage.1

  Sammy got friendly with an engineer and his android wife, who told horror stories of her work in the Dakota fracking camps and a liberation by the ALF only days before she was due to be disassembled for scrap. We even helped them do some handiwork on their baby, which they were designing from orphaned android parts.

  Even nature seemed to go easier here, sheltered from the worst of the quake zone that belted California to Sinopec-TeMaRex Affiliated. Ingenious stone towers trapped the desert air at night and exhaled it all over the town when the fans were cranked. The soil was unpolluted by chemical leach—one benefit, I guess, of losing your whole population in a sudden diarrhea stream—and Susan showed me how to pick blueberries and raspberries from the fields, working row after row of real branches.

  I just couldn’t believe there wasn’t a catch.

  One afternoon I was working the fields next to a ze, maybe ten or eleven years old, with the slow drawl of the Confederacy and a face full of freckles, who kept trolling me for the way I was going after the blackberries. They were the fastest picker I’d ever seen, and they’d filled up their basket before I’d managed to get a dozen.

  “So, how much do you get comped?” I asked, trying to sound casual.

  Ze looked up at me, blinking, like I’d just asked how to get to the next dimension of the multiverse. “Comped?” they repeated.

  “Sure,” I said. “You know. Comped. Paid. Blinged-up.” No answer. They just kept staring at me blankly. “The town must pay you something to ant out here all day. I mean, no one spends hours picking berries for fun.”

  It was like someone had poked them in the nose and turned it into a sinkhole. Their whole face collapsed. Their lower lip quivered like a plucked noodle. And before I could say anything more, they rocketed to their feet and darted away, down a long aisle of plants punching out little green fists.

  A minute later, they returned, trailing Susan behind them. Susan looked angry for the first time ever. The ze looked all puckered around an urge to start wailing.

  I stood up. “I didn’t mean to upset them,” I said quickly.

  “You didn’t upset them. You confused them.” Susan sighed. “Look, Truckee. I know the way we live might seem strange to you, but the truth is that people lived this way for many, many years.”

  “You’re talking about the hippies?” I said.

  She smiled as if I were a first-generation robot, like it was a miracle I knew how to lift my arms. “I’m talking about various indigenous tribes throughout the world. I’m talking about communities of community, where identity with the whole was as important as identities with the self.”

  More sharing-and-caring promo spam. Susan knew I wasn’t buying it. She sighed again.

  “Come on,” she said. “I want to show you something.”

  She led me out of the fields. I turned around once to see the ze still glaring. They even stuck out their tongue. Well. At least not everything in Walden was different. Eleven-year-olds were still assholes.

  We scrolled down a street packed with all the scavenge the people of Walden hadn’t found use for: stacks of tile and four-by-fours, slate roofing and plastic tarps, old sinks rusted at the drains, and empty metal cisterns. At the end of the litter was a dumpy wooden shed. Susan gave the door a hard shove and hesitated for just a click before waving me inside.

  The place was d
ark and reeked of mildew. It took a second for my eyes to adjust, and when they did, I nearly blacked out: the shed was small, plain, and completely empty.

  Except, of course, for the money.

  The squat was crawling, teeming, shimmering with cash. It looked like half the chow in the world had crawled to the same place just to lie down and die.

  Buckets of Western gold. Heaps of Manna, glimmering in the half dark as if they really had come down from heaven. Stacks and stacks of Crunchbucks, rubber-banded together, not just tens but hundreds and even thousands, colored a rare violet I’d only seen once or twice in my whole life. Suitcases so stuffed with Texas dollars they wouldn’t close. A trunk filled with discarded U-bytes, which I knew must be packed with a lifetime’s worth of RealFriends© wealth: encoded winks, nudges, pokes, grins, and smiles, hundreds of thousands of digital dollars. Maybe millions.

  “… was serious when I told you we’re a sharing community…”

  Susan’s voice sounded distant. Maybe because in my head I was tumbling in the money, stuffing my grille and ears with it. Even a quarter of the floss in the room would last me a lifetime. No—two lifetimes.

  “… ask them to give up the currencies of their old lives…”

  I was swimming in paper, chewing my way through the towers of Crunchbucks, gnawing slowly, paper piece by paper piece.

  “Do you understand it now?”

  In my head, I was halfway through a mouthful of metal Manna before Susan’s question finally touched my mind. I had to swallow twice before I could talk, working down the phantom taste of all those dollars.

  “No,” I said. I was dizzy on my feet. I had to lean against the wall to stand. “What—what do you do with all of it?”