by Reed King
2. Human stock was still legal in various countries, notably the SFF and Real Friends© of the North. Others, including Crunch, United, had recently passed legislation to make trading humans and their future wages illegal. Nonetheless, the practice was widespread, even in countries that had outlawed it.
3. Years of tension with the New Kingdom of Utah, including the brief but extremely violent War of the Saints in the summer of 2055, led to a proliferation of anti-Christian sentiment in Las Vegas expressed, unsurprisingly, in showboat style. Apart from burlesque numbers set to former hymns there was, for example, the infamous What Would Jesus Do? brothel, the Joseph Smith Celebrity Rehab Center, and the All Men Are Prophets If High Enough fresh emporium and drug-prescription palace.
4. The origins of this colloquialism prove that although the disparate countries of the former United States imposed rigorous travel restrictions on their residents, and maintained unique national technology systems and firewalls in order to control the flow of news and information, stories, rumors, and even linguistic quirks did in fact flow between borders, in large part due to the outsized influence of the nationless grifters who did trade around the continent. The expression itself originated in the Commonwealth, in the mid-2050s, after a male laboratory-generated rabbit managed to escape euthanasia, provoking a countrywide “hare hunt” for his recapture. The issue achieved notoriety because the hare had been genetically altered for strategy and language recognition and recall, in the hopes that animal prototypes might someday serve as useful tools of espionage; the Commonwealth was thus panicked about what secrets the animal might already be coaxed into revealing, should he fall into enemy hands. According to urban legend, the hare hightailed it straight for a whorehouse, where his chances of blending in, it was assumed, were next to nothing, giving rise to the popular saying.
Interestingly, however, the phrase enshrines an outcome that never came to pass. That the hare did take refuge in a whorehouse has subsequently been confirmed by various sources. However, for decades the agents who came to perform a search were instead universally distracted by the vast array of human and android prostitutes on offer, and thus never performed their duties comprehensively. Thus the hare was able to evade capture until his death, by natural causes, and even became something of a house mascot.
5. Compensation for individuals varied based on age, looks, and fertility: there were reports at the time of very desirable wives selling for as much as 20,000 Dakota oil dollars, although this was exceedingly rare; in 2084, only 800 dollars was the average. As in the case of Halloran-Chyung and its arrangement with Asia, the true profitability in the arrangement came not to the individual but in the form of incentives, rebates, and preferential trade agreements between countries.
6. Las Vegas was one of the most electricity-dependent cities on the continent, a need that defined nearly every aspect of political and economic life there. For an in-depth look at the controversial Gender Equality Act Rebate Program, which some critics complained was as bad as the slavery trades of past centuries, see A. Wilson’s pioneering book, Women for Oil: Gender, Sex, and Tax Rebates, and the Lies of the Gender Equality Act.
1. A pop star whose dramatic backstory—he’d escaped from one of the temp camps only to wind up working a tobacco plantation in the Confederacy, where the plantation owners insisted that the year was 1899 despite all evidence to the contrary, before effecting a daring escape—launched him to international stardom. By the time much of his personal history was proven to be a fabrication, his blend of synth and acoustic voice, and his famed use of android aspirants as backup singers, nonetheless guaranteed his enduring musical legacy.
2. In the late 2060s, Libertine had quadrupled their military footprint after spies reported that the Sovereign Nation of Texas was eyeing a takeover; Texas oil revenue was hurting after Noah Two, and Las Vegas was a diaspora of different cash and hard currencies. As a protective measure, Libertine’s hastily assembled government of casino owners made diplomatic overtures to the Real Friends© of the North, the only pacifist country to keep an active army 1 million strong—all bots, since the droids had been purged after their revolution—but their alliance soured in the early ’70s when New Libertine ended its software contract with the company and developed its own VR.
1. Drought in the aftermath of the Big One that first led to a fever of anti-android feeling in San Francisco. Half the city was dying of thirst and the androids just sat there rejuicing and watched their masters go under. Two hundred androids were hacked up, wiped, or dissected by crowds in the street.
2. Water Sharing Agreement.
1. “Electric whore” was a common midcentury denigration for the Sexy Saam models, and even inspired its own medical hysteria; the Center for Natural Born Humans produced specious results that seemed to show a correlation between sex with android women and an increased risk of heart arrhythmia and disruptions to the central nervous system. But by the 2080s, the term had become a more general euphemism for any object, town, or person with pretensions of glamour or style.
2. A hallmark of the Soviet Federated Frontier, human leather had ironically first come to market in the 2050s as a massively cheap substitute for the increasingly rare animal variety. But due to international restrictions in subsequent decades prohibiting the growth of human clones and the commercial sale or purchase of human corpses for decorative (i.e., non-functional) purposes, human leather became something of a status symbol. The luxury-obsessed SFF did more black-market trade in human furniture and fashion than the rest of the continent’s countries combined; supposedly the Opal Room at the Petrossian in Las Vegas, which was available exclusively to a select set of Russian high rollers, was tiled entirely in human teeth.
3. The Burners were a loose affiliate group unified by central principles that fell just short of constituting a religious belief system or political party. They were predominantly recognizable by their vehement support for various illegal drugs, including shiver; by their obsessive if somewhat inarticulate belief in what they represented; and by a proclivity for body modification and avatar reshaping in service of one of their emphatically maintained and incomprehensibly expressed principles of “exploratory identity.”
1. A common insult leveled at biological people by their engineered peers, in reference to their dependence on ingesting foodstuffs. Androids had many derogatory terms for “accidental persons” of this variety, including “ammonia fountains” and “shitpackers.”
1. Slang for “hell.”
1. And, third-wave liberation believed, the kind of modeling that prepared android society to look just exactly like the human world it was asking for recognition.
2. The Texas standard mile was exactly 5.8 Federal Corp miles, and was correlated to the length of the average Texas driveway.
1. The Free Territories didn’t have a central currency, obviously, since there was no central government and the enormous swath of land was ruled variously by different cartels, some of whom carved out their own sovereign countries and would have been highly offended to be counted as “free.” By and large, barter was the rule, but certain precious metals, rare elements (like uranium), and even universally useful equipment—like medication, bullets, and clean underwear—counted as various forms of hard currency. The Soviet Federated Frontier was known for ostentatious displays of wealth greatly at odds with the rigors and strains of life under the authoritarian and punishing political and social regime. Their highest denomination was a row of extinct animal teeth; it was the equivalent of 150,000 human hands (each hand was worth roughly 33 Crunchbucks).
2. It is not clear whether Truckee is deliberately referencing the famous Texas bluegrass tune here of the same name—allegedly written by a convict debating between escape into the Dust Bowl or the fulfillment of his sentence in a hunting preserve.
1. Known in particular for their conspicuous and ostentatious displays of wealth—notably, the Glitterati lived together in the penthouse floor of a 222-story tower sh
eathed entirely in melted gold, rumored to have been extracted from the fillings of deceased unfortunates—and for their patented “slogans,” which included the culturally omnipresent Shine Big, Bitch and Oh Haaaa No.
1. The tens of thousands of Koreans who fled the epidemic wound up transporting infected larvae with them.
1. Lesbian Bisexual Gay Trans Queer Asexual Non-Gendered Undefined.
2. After Texas sank the last of the Russian Federation’s oil industry, Sinopec-TeMaRex stepped in to help prop up the country by selling it nuclear power out of Chicago. The watershed agreement was brokered almost exclusively by financial diplomats from the Commonwealth—longtime enemies of Crunch, United, who had been looking to build an “axis-alliance” of several large nations, which could together compete with the financial and military capabilities of Crunch, United. For three decades, the Commonwealth, the SFF, and Sinopec-TeMaRex maintained preferential trade relationships and shared military responsibilities.
1. A reference to their place of origin, not, of course, to the emotional content of their speech.
