Yi San manages to land on his feet, but Lydon’s big paw on his shoulder puts him down on one knee.
“Let’s rescue him,” you say.
“Yes, let’s,” says Emmal, who starts to rev up her suprarenal glands, but then the rest of the bloc quickly votes against saving Yi San, who is a big boy. Even Yi San signals that it’ll all be okay. You loiter for a moment, you’re the last to run, and you only do after Lydon Walker makes eye contact with you—a hungry, interested glare, and a little chuckle. He’s holding Yi San now, like Yi San is a baby that needs to be burped.
You run, but you’re still freezing.
* * *
Sweet Blursday, Old-Fashioned Video Chat
It was an ingenious idea—your own, in fact—to celebrate Sweet Blursday in the classic fashion. Alone at home, sans pants, but connected to nearest and dearest via group video chat. What they did in those years that never ended, back when the population could be counted in the half-millions, not the thousands, when people voted incoherently and individually with their dollars and their time, instead of thoughtfully and continuously via nano-linked blocs. Back, not quite before, but during the great glassifying plagues that killed so many even before the nanowars, that ultimately spared people of only one blood type.
Everyone’s a universal donor now.
And what you’re donating to tonight’s cause is the intense experience of liquor supplied by the nanobots keeping you alive, counting your consumption and production, monitoring your moods and preferences, connecting you to your bloc. The video chat is just for fun, so you can watch one another get as drunk as you can will one another to get. And no chance of uninvited guests, right? You make Roderick, with his permission of course, slip right off his chair and slide off-screen. He missed the last party, so he’s loving this one. Manjari snorts when she laughs at that. Yi San is keeping you on the right side of tipsy, so you can still argue with him in front of everybody.
“We need to blow the bridge,” he says for the millionth time.
“That’s insane, that’s ridiculous,” you say for the millionth time. “Because Lydon Walker wants us to.”
“Because Lydon Walker told us to,” says Emmal.
“Thuh-thuh-thuh economy,” says Jeffrey.
The other members of the bloc repeat their claims, their arguments. It’s been circles all season. Cockshot-Cottrell equations are great! Much better than markets, and much freer than having a government decide how quickly everyone gets to starve, but nanos aren’t perfect. The world economy, it is said, still needs a few fixers, barterers, decision-makers, for when a machine is made too cheaply and spits out goods that are too expensive, or vice-versa. Everyone has at least a warm home and a remarkably nutritious diet, and most of the time plenty of entertainments and medicines, and occasionally unusual artifacts from before the nanowars, and libraries of every surviving e-book, but still, sometimes you just have to blow up the fucking Mankill–Boroughton Bridge Overpass so that a handful of randos will die screaming, and a lot of other, luckier randos will have some work to do, and the iron smelters can afford milk, which will make the farmers happy and the cheesemongers sad in that Gallic way everyone prefers them to be. Plus, Mankill has it coming, so says Lydon Walker.
You’re as proud a Boroughstonite as any, which is to say that you take a perverse pride in your dumpy apartment and silly accent, which really comes out when you’re drunk, which is now, and so when you say, “Society needn’t be perfect, you know. The algorithms of agony are designed to suit us, not us them,” you sound just like this: “Sudy neent be perfek, ya knoo,” et cetera et cetera.
You might as well have stood up and showed everyone what you were up to with your feelings that day. Not perfect? On Sweet Blursday no less! Emmal turns up the potentiometer on the nanos swimming around in your spinal fluid, but you’re able to stand up without swaying too much. “Comrades, this is madness! Utopias make for dystopias!”
That was a new thing to say. It took Yi San a second to respond: “So we should just let the suffering happen, let the trolley run over a hundred randos instead of people we choose? Fewer people? People with less to offer?”
“They’re voting as we speak to do it to us,” Emmal added. “Or for us, as they’d put it.”
“They? You live in Mankill, Emmal,” said Aftixi. “I’m a Mankillian-born myself.”
Roderick, from under his desk, says, “Emmal, you can move in with me.”
“I agree with Robin,” says Manjari. “Why are we doing the tolkach’s dirty work?” Manjari nails the ancient Russian pronunciation of the word for “pusher”—the men, always men, who used to keep the people of Siberia and points west fed with a little nudge and wink and surreptitious bartering. “None of us want unorganized emergent properties from our economies, but what the hell are tolkachs but just that? They were born into it, or connived their way into it, or had one bright idea they brought to their bloc, and suddenly they’re Comrade Shit?” She snorts again.
Jeremy starts talking and with every thuh one of the windows on your screens blacks out. Thuh thuh there go two more, thuh then starts sounding more Aaah and then like the words you know Aaahzzz iiieee and the screen gets darker and Jeremy’s voice changes further and some of the black squares on your screen regain some chrominance, some luminance, but many of them remain black or navy and it’s a heavily pixelated face like from the ancient 16-bit games and Jeremy’s box is the last to go but his voice, or what his voice has become, remains, and it sings:
As I was going over the far-famed Kerry mountains
I met with Captain Farrell and his money he was counting.
I first produced my pistol, and then produced my rapier.
Said stand and deliver, for I am a bold deceiver,
musha ring dumma do damma da
whack for the daddy ol’
whack for the daddy ol’
there’s whiskey in the jar.
It’s Lydon Walker’s even tenor, and his face, albeit one like a video game from the Jurassic.
“Robin, Robin, Robin,” he says to you you you, “are you telling tales out of school? A drinking song for a drinking party, I’ve got a million of them, and I’m distributing them equally. I got nanos for days.” Maybe it was the primitive image, looking like it’s made from children’s blocks when it’s not glitching and crackling, but you realize you have no idea how a man like this could even get work as tolkach. Cross-bloc negotiations require more than a little personal charisma, and as far as you’re concerned Lydon Walker has none. You just want to slam your screen shut, maybe throw it out the window, or lock yourself in your closet until he just goes away.
“Robin Robin Robin,” he says, half pleading, half taunting, a cistype who never got over the crowded parties where he stayed all night and always was the only one who went home alone, even when there had been an even number of people in attendance. “You gotta work with me! You’re no’ the smart one here, that’s comrade Yi San. You’re no’ the thoughtful one here, that’s unibrow, wossname, Aftixi, yeah. You’re no badass, not like Emmal. You can’t just work work work like Roderick, can’t open yer eyes in the morning looking like a nillion nanos—Manjari’s so hot she’s Kelvin. How do I flatter a person like you? What can I offer except a life of easy-breezy ease? No wetwork for you, kid, I just need your vote your vote your vote. Keep holding out on me, you’ll let the Mankill River overflow its banks with black flaming oil and their entire navy of marauders, heck, you’ll make it happen. You’ll bring down the whole economy with your bad bad thoughts.”
You do have a thought—Lydon Walker failed to mention Jeremy in his litany. Jeremy, offscreen but still connected, awake and aware but hacked by Lydon. You grab your bottle and drink it down, pushing the booze past your throat and hard into your belly, thinking about what Lydon had forgotten, the body whose nanos he hacked. You’re en bloc with Jeremy, you know him too well. Mid-sentence, Lydon gurgles, gasps, vanishes. Jeremy fills your screen now, his eyes st
reaked with red lightning, clutching onto the sides of his desk so he won’t fly off into space. He’s never been so blotto! But it worked, he’s free, and you don’t feel a thing.
But then the rest of the bloc reconnects, and they’ve all been recruited. A ramshackle chorus, they sing, “Whack for the daddy ol’! There’s whiskey in the jar!” They don’t remember anything.
You and Jeremy, you two exchange knowing looks.
* * *
Fête du Travail, a picking-nick on the shores of the River Mankill You and Jeremy, you two exchange knowing looks. Labor Day is harder this year, but you two are like goats the way you tear up the weeds and the grass. After the last party, you and Jeremy formed a little microbloc of two—no booze, no Walker, no matter what. Because of your triple-secret vows, the economy has stuttered, and Boroughston is hungrier than usual. Labor Day always involves some work hours to help Cockshott-Cottrell equations to click over, to give your nanobots a day of rest, your species-being a day of remembrance, and local kids a holiday week sack of greens.
At least the Mankill–Boroughston Bridge still stands, so you get to weed the field in the shade. It’s 310 Kelvin though, so much hotter than the last time you were here, back at Yearstart. Emmal never invites you across the river to Mankill anymore. The rest of the bloc isn’t doing well either. Aftixi, topless but wearing a veritable blanket of body hair he refuses to shed, looks about ready to just die. Manjari is performing the bare minimum of work, plucking a dandelion here and there, and blowing the seeds everywhere. “So as to guarantee that the world keeps spinning and there’s a Fête du Travail every Sevenstart,” she explains whenever someone glares at her, which is every fifteen minutes. Roderick’s no fun, Emmal you cannot even bear to look at her arms are so sinewy and bark-dark and delicious, and Yi San is missing this party for reasons probably to do with Lydon Walker and trying to keep everyone fed.
Jeremy finds an important mushroom, shows you, palms it, opens his hand again, it’s gone. That trick is magic with no k, but the fungi are plenty k. He says thuh thuh thuh.
“You’re right,” you say, “Lydon Walker probably isn’t even a spiritual being on any level. Even that cheap Psilocybe cyanescens would be wasted on him. Forget Amanita muscaria.”
And yes, no more booze, but between the two of you shrooms are just fine. Not now, though—trippin’ and travail don’t mix.
After some hours of sweaty work and frequent breaks to sneeze and sniffle, a hallucination! No, not a hallucination, but something like from a bad dream fueled by a broken brain nano. Lydon Walker on a great and pale gray horse, complete with Stetson and Levi’s, and Yi San following awkwardly behind on a slowly meandering piebald.
“Ho!” says Lydon Walker as he rides up to your party.
“You talkin’ to me?” says Emmal and people who aren’t you chuckle.
“Joyous Fête du Travail,” says Lydon. “How’s it going? We need those sacks full! Look across the river to the Mankiller’s bank!” Lydon had taken to appending –er to Mankill, to make it sound like something other than the river named for the explorer Emmanuel. It got popular quick, despite not being propagated bloc by bloc via nano. You caught Roderick saying it once and boiled in rage at him.
“They’re all done,” says Emmal, who looked when she crossed the bridge this morning. “The people of Mankill are hearty and well-fed. They can afford to have vitamin-rich urine. Just have their full required doses and piss the rest of it right out.”
“Into our river,” says Roderick.
“Into the river,” says Aftixi.
“Even the tap water tastes like piss now,” says Roderick.
“Are you sure you’re not just drinking your piss by mistake?” asks Yi San, who for a moment appears to be genuinely puzzled, but then bursts into a sweaty grin. “Just kidding, sorry sorry. I know you only drink your own piss on purpose.” You howl like the rest of them at poor idiot Roderick, but then you hate yourself for it. You’ve never seen Yi San like this before, happy and weird and rankin’ on the boys. Lydon must radiate such characteristics like they were alpha particles. Roderick scowls, embarrassed, and returns to his work twice as fiercely as before, a total sucker, as that’s exactly what Lydon wants him to do.
“In the old days, you know,” Lydon addresses you, “there was a Labor Day every week.”
“Five Labor Days a week!” says Yi San. “I can’t imagine it. Absolutely hump-busting.”
Thuh thuh thuh says Jeremy and you all know that he is pointing out that in the earliest of old days, when technology was sticks and pestles and needles, there were seven labor days a week, but they only lasted two hours each and the rest was for fun and sleep, and even in the normal old days there was a fifty-hour goodstart every week.
“That sounds good,” you say. “I’ve also always thought we should yearstart in the summer and not the winter, to take advantage of the river.” You stand before Lydon and slip off your shirt, shimmy out of your vraka and vrakaki, kick off your flip-flops. “I’m done. My bag is full enough. I’m going for a swim!”
He gets an eyeful of cute little you, but it doesn’t distract him. “You’re going to kill a child with that sack!” says Lydon. “It’s only eighty-three percent full!”
“Kids leave half of all greens on their plates,” you call back over your shoulder as you march to the shore. “Come on, everyone, let’s go skinny-dipping!” you announce to all the workgroups. You put a second, more powerful call to your voting bloc via nano, but you sense none of them are following you, not even Jeremy, though he has reasons of his own—what he’s managed to stuff into his pockets. Manjari calls for you to return, promises that it’s not so bad, but you cannot handle even one more moment of Lydon Walker. Your skin is practically crawling ahead of you, keener to swim than you are.
Burning with shame you throw yourself into the river, and it does taste like mud and chemicals and maybe the tiniest molecules of sour piss, and the Mankill really is too silty for pleasurable swimming, but as the air is free you don’t need to breathe much of it and the nanos do it for you for the three minutes you spend angrily kicking up all the filth you can from the river bottom to hide yourself from the sun and ten thousand peering pairs of eyes, from both sides of the water, that are silently judging you.
The water’s cool, but you burn so hot with shame it starts to bubble off your skin, and you stay down there for a good fifteen minutes, till your nanofied lungs take command of your gross motor control and push you up past the surface.
They’re all working still, even Yi San, who is endeavoring to top off your sack. Lydon’s doing some labor too—he’s holding the piebald horse’s reins and… what do they call it?
Managing.
* * *
The Feast of Saint Nicholas, Mankill River City
You are sitting at the long rustic table in Emmal’s long rustic kitchen in her very nice apartment in Mankill with your bloc and Jeremy is just finishing explaining the true meaning of the Feast of Saint Nicholas. Has it been elevenstarts already? Whatever—when you pointed out how handy it was that the bridge still stood and the bloc wouldn’t have to swim the river to gather at Emmal’s, everyone ignored you, except Aftixi, who offered that he liked cold-water swimming and did it often before when he lived in Mankill, before he’d joined this bloc.
And that, Jeremy concludes with his thuhs, is why Saint Nicholas wears red, and why consuming the mushroom is eating his very body. An annual communion to firm up the blocs, in the very depths of snowy winter, though it hasn’t snowed in your living memory, Robin, O youngest of us all, our ol’ switcheroo, and won’t you slice the shrooms and pass them around?
These are nice ones, on the wooden cutting board before you, and Emmal’s knife, a relic from the days of her great-great-great-grandfather Emmanuel III, is probably the nicest physical object you’ve ever held. A perfect party, the most wonderworkingest time of the year. Nothing could possibly ruin—
“Ho ho ho!” you hear bellowed fro
m somewhere outside and then through the large loft window comes a sack full of something. Coins! Golden and scattering across the table. All hands on deck, slapping them down or snapping them up. And behind it, dressed like Saint Nick, one Lydon Walker, eyes and beard blazing like a comet and its tail, shattered glass upon the floor a million stars.
He hovers into the room majestically, probably thanks to flydrones under his red cloak. In his hands has two more sacks, positively bulging with palladium coins. “Hail Saint Nicholas!” he says as he lands with a thump. He drops the other sacks upon the table. “I bring you tidings of joy and greatness! We need not have a war after all! I have found the perfect solution.”
For a moment your heart soars! You feel truly seen. A short year of holding out was worth it. You reach over to Jeremy, squeeze his hand, and he squeezes back. The rest of the bloc smiles upon you as well—even Emmal is happy again.
“And it was thanks to you all,” Lydon Walker says diplomatically, though you know it was you you you. “By withholding your consensus, we had a very rough year, but it would have been even rougher had we detonated the bridge. None of us would be here today, am I right?”
“Well…” Emmal starts.
“Oh, really!” Manjari says with a comical huff. “I’m just as much as a child of Emmanuel as you. We could have Nixday at my flat in Boroughton.”
“Please,” says Roderick, “no fighting,” but the fight was already over.
“What’s with the coins?” Aftixi asks Yi San, who nods over to Lydon.
“The coins are the solution,” Lydon says. “Currency. Money. Universal trade goods. With these, we won’t need to depend on the Cockshot-Cottrell equations, or even a tolkach like me. I can enjoy my retirement, and you can enjoy the fruits of your virtue, get it?”
“How’s it going to work?” you ask.
“Simple. Every bloc gets a single sack of coins on the Feast of Saint Nicholas, the same way every child gets a sack of greens on Fête du Travail. Then you do what you want with them, trade goods and services, lend and borrow.”
Out of the Ruins Page 17
