Kurt couldn’t disagree with most of Rocco’s observations but he took issue with the idea that Amos was at the top of the decision tree. “That’s not how it is,” he said. “The tail doesn’t wag the dog. The government has wanted all of this for years: surveillance, currency digitisation, a population placated by inanity and taxed to the hilt. Sycamore is just a vehicle.”
“Well, whatever. Look where it’s taking us! You seem like a nice enough guy, Kurt, but you don’t have a clue what you’ve done here. What kind of world is my kid coming into when I can’t walk around without a man at a desk’s permission?”
Silence was Kurt’s best and only answer.
“I would kill for some fries right now,” Rocco said after a while.
“Me too,” Kurt replied. “I haven’t eaten all day.”
A new kind of notification appeared in Kurt’s vista — a small flashing exclamation mark. He clicked as soon as he was stopped in traffic and it presented him with the five nearest fast-food joints. He knew this meant that someone at Sycamore had finally come up with effective voice-recognition and that it was running full-time, scanning for key words. Directions to a restaurant were harmless enough, but what if he was talking about something more subversive? CrimePrev agents would be all over him like…
And then Kurt realised. The computerised voice-scanning had come in too soon after Amos secured CrimePrev’s public funding for it to be a coincidence. DC were using the security tech for commercial purposes.
The hospital came into view and he insisted on taking Rocco right to the door to minimise his risk of being intercepted. After parking he stepped out of the car to make sure the security guard would pose no problems.
“You can’t get through without a Seed,” the man said. “New security procedures.”
Kurt stepped in front of Rocco to answer. “We both have Seeds.”
“His appears to be permanently deactivated.”
“What?” said Rocco. “Suspended, yeah. Not deactivated!”
“I’m afraid your account has been terminated as a result of your crimes against Sycamore,” the guard explained. “I understand that your travel privileges were suspended and you ignored repeated orders to stay still. The punishment for such an offence is termination.”
“Come on, guy. My wife is having a baby.”
“I can’t let you in.”
Kurt looked into the guard’s eyes. “Let him in.”
“I really can’t.”
“Do you know who I am?” Kurt felt dirty saying it but these times were desperate enough to justify pulling rank.
“With respect, sir, I’m just following orders.”
“My position at Sycamore comes with authority that supersedes your prior orders,” said Kurt. It was a lie, but one delivered with sufficient conviction to pass as the truth. “Now let him in.”
Reluctantly the guard typed a code into the door’s blank keypad and stepped aside. Rocco smiled his thanks and set off down the hall to find his wife and baby.
“Wait!” Kurt shouted after him. “What happens tomorrow?”
“As soon as someone comes for me I’m done. You heard the guy: my account has been terminated.”
“Can’t you make a new one?”
Rocco sent a solemn shake of his head along the corridor. “It's not like I can sign up with another e-mail address, man. I am my account.”
13
The following morning Kurt drove to Randy’s with the intention of taking Sabrina to the park. He left his car at the park and walked to get her, thinking it would be useful to have it there to drive her home when she was tired from running around. He enjoyed the walk to the house because it was another one of those good days to be alive and under the sun — a good day to enjoy the simple things in life like fresh air before Amos found a way to bottle it. Or, more likely, before he made the sky grey by default and charged for sunshine by the minute.
The last time Kurt had walked through the deprived streets between Randy’s and the park had been just after The Seed launched, when Sycamore’s real-world marketing was at its peak. There had been huge billboards for The Seed — the largest of which read “Sycamore: The Mark of the Best” — just across the road from a row of derelict storefronts interrupted only by convenience stores, fast-food joints and bookies. Almost all of the houses now sported some kind of corporate branding, some more elaborate than others, but the roadside was dominated by a huge Lexington static with a simple message: “Drink Your Dreams True!”
Something about it brought to Kurt’s mind a documentary he saw in school about a certain cola company in which a snazzily dressed executive spoke of the corporation’s commitment to Africa, an untapped market of hundreds of millions of potential customers. It didn’t seem to bother the man that those hundreds of millions of potential customers — those hundreds of millions of human beings — lived without access to clean water.
The implicit message of “why give them water when we can sell them this?” irked Kurt enough that he switched to Lexington. By now, though, he was old enough to have realised that the story was always the same: the rich were only interested in dealing with the poor when it involved making them poorer. Lexington were no better or worse than anyone else.
He turned the corner into Randy’s street and a message flashed in his vista. A free surroundings update was available. If the government had wanted to invest in deprived areas they would have done so decades ago, but when BeThere’s technology arrived the temptation to brush away the urban decay was apparently irresistible. Kurt clicked accept and within seconds Randy’s street looked like a quaint Parisian boulevard. The ads were still there and so was the poverty, but the latter had been brushed over by the artistry and genius of Sycamore’s landscapers. The “opt-in, opt-out, no-choice” release pattern made it all but certain that today’s downloadable update would be tomorrow’s universal experience. The sparkling storefronts and picturesque flowerbeds were here to stay.
This is what everyone will see, Kurt realised. This is reality.
He sped up and soon arrived at Randy’s, letting himself in to save anyone the hassle of answering the door. His first stop was Sabrina’s room.
Sabrina opened her door when Kurt knocked and he immediately saw that she was wearing an ad t-shirt. It said “I Beat Feminine Odour With GirlyGuard Daily Spray.”
Kurt hated GirlyGuard. Before The Seed there had been a jingle: “GirlyGuard helps you work and play, keeps the smell away with a daily spray.” He was glad that, as a man, he would never have to hear it again; Sycamore’s targeted advertising was good for that, at least. But now he hated GirlyGuard all over again for making a fool of Sabrina. He tried not to react angrily because none of this was her fault.
“I left my car at the park for us,” he said. The blue teddybear he had given her for her birthday was still on her bed. He smiled when he saw it. “You coming out?”
“I really need to do some stuff,” Sabrina answered.
“Not even an hour?”
She shook her head. “Maybe tomorrow?”
“Okay,” said Kurt. But it wasn’t. Sabrina disappeared back into her room and he shouted down the stairs. “JJ!”
A voice called back. “Yeah?”
“What’s going on with your sister?”
Julian couldn’t make out the words so he jogged upstairs. “Hey, Uncle Kurt.”
“Hey. What’s going on with Sabrina? She’s never too busy for the park.”
“She’s trying to earn some money,” Julian explained. “Doing consumer surveys and looking for better sponsored clothes, you know? I think she’s saving up to fix her nose in RealU.”
“She said that? To fix her nose?”
Julian nodded.
“What the hell is wrong with her nose?”
“I dunno. It’s nothing I said. Probably someone at school said something once and now that she can change it… you know how girls are.”
“She’s ten!”
“That
doesn’t mean what it did when you were ten. It doesn’t even mean what it did when I was ten.”
Kurt walked downstairs and shook Randy out of full-immersion. “Your ten-year-old daughter is in those damn Consumer Rewards apps saving up for a new nose. How can you sit there and let this happen?”
“What can I do?” Randy shouted, raising his voice to an uncharacteristic volume to match Kurt’s. “It’s not like I can ground her and take it away! If one of us is to blame here it sure as hell isn’t me. That’s not my Seed inside of her.”
There was nothing Kurt could say, because Randy was right.
~
Kurt walked to his car and found himself sitting behind the wheel too angry to go home. HQ was the only other place he could think of.
He arrived unannounced on Amos’s floor but was greeted warmly.
“Hotshot!” Amos grinned. “To what owest I the pleasure?”
“Shut up.”
Amos sighed. “Not another one of these visits. I thought we were past this?”
“We were,” said Kurt. “But kids shouldn’t be wearing advertising.”
“Is this guilt over your friend Rocco?” Amos asked evasively.
“What? Me guilty? That guy has a family and you’re locking him up for nothing. I didn’t know having him fired would cause any of that. I tried to help him. Your company, on the other hand… terminating people for having the audacity to walk around the world they were born in?”
“He committed a serious crime, Kurt.”
“Which was?”
“Ignoring direct orders. If people think they can disobey, they will. We can’t have that. Disobedience leads to rebellion, and crimes of rebellion are the worst kind.”
“No way,” said Kurt. “Crimes of rebellion are nowhere near as bad as crimes of obedience. What kind of person tries to stop a man from seeing his wife and newborn baby just because orders say so? The guard at the hospital is more guilty than Rocco.”
“Following orders isn’t a crime. What is it with you, hotshot? How can anyone be against the elimination of crime?”
“Stop pretending you can eliminate crime. The Seed went as far as anything can to eliminate crimes of greed by making most people’s money digital, but there will always be crimes of passion.”
“Not with CrimePrev. All crimes will be stopped before they happen.”
“Tell me then, are Sycamore men exempt? Are we safe from the eyes of the thought police?”
“None of this is about thoughtcrime,” said Amos. “Why do I have to keep telling you that? What’s important here is that no individual is above the law. Indeed, as men of responsibility we have a particular obligation to tow the line.”
“So what would happen if I ever did something that displeased the company?”
“It’s really best if you don’t. You’re an important figurehead. More important than you realise, I think. We’re at 90.1% of the eligible population seeded and you’re still by far the most popular.”
Kurt hadn’t checked the numbers for almost a week, since before Seeding had been heavily subsidised by the government. He quickly went into Forest and saw that Amos wasn’t exaggerating.
“And only prisoners and soldiers have been compulsory,” Amos boasted, “so everyone else thinks it’s a good idea.”
“Schoolchildren were compulsory. You made my niece and nephew get seeded so they could read the work on the board at school.”
“That was a generous program to upgrade outdated equipment. Anyway, where was I? Oh yes. The 9.9% — the potentially-criminal element — can only evade justice for so long.”
“No,” said Kurt. He had a horrible feeling where Amos was going. “I won’t let you make it compulsory.”
“You say that now, hotshot, but what do we say when consumers flood the streets to demand it? What happens when there’s a terrorist attack that universal seeding and Lens-wearing would have prevented? How can we justify not seeding the potentially-criminal resistors? There is no reason for any law-abiding consumer not to participate. Democracy and freedom require participation.”
“You mean the freedom to be a slave and the right to pick which of the two parties the next Sycamore-serving president will come from? And stop pretending you can go through with CrimePrev. The law doesn’t permit the detention of innocent people.”
“Read it again, Kurt. 9/11 changed everything.”
“Not that. What ever happened to innocent until proven guilty?”
“It’s been replaced by something better. People used to be innocent until we gave them a chance to become guilty, but society is finally recognising its duty to stop them. We're protecting innocence. Once the public demand universality there will be no more saboteurs, agitators and rabble rousers in any of our cities. When someone is suspected of something, our CrimePrev agents will look back and see how they’ve been acting. You saw Blind Luck, didn’t you? We can jump back to any point in time to see what a user was doing.”
Kurt inhaled deeply. “I need you to be honest with me,” he said. “Can that really be done?”
“Of course! You know that everyone with Relive can go to any moment, and you know that the data isn’t stored locally. It’s on our servers.”
“I know that in my head but it’s still unbelievable. The servers must be huge. Where are they? I want to see them. I need to see how the system works and what we’re actually doing here. Seriously — I’m at a point where I don’t know how much longer I can keep smiling and pretending I don’t hate everything.”
“The servers aren’t here,” said Amos.
“Where are they?”
“Somewhere else.”
“I don’t believe you. You’re lying. You don’t even have everyone’s historic video data. Relive data is stored locally. CrimePrev is just a money grab and an opportunity to scare people into submission. That amount of video, at that sort of quality… you just couldn’t. That’s why there’s no proof. There must be some trickery going on.”
“Proof? Fine. Come through here.” Amos led Kurt into the meeting room and then through another door into a small closet-like office. There was a desk and a computer and nothing else. “Now pick a number, pick a date, pick a time. The computer will be able to show us what the selected user was up to. Pick one of the first 20 million so we can go a few weeks back.”
“A desktop? Did you ride in here on a horse-drawn carriage?”
“Very good, Kurt. There’s a reason this kind of work is done on mini desktops: if the lookouts were using their Seeds to stream other people’s vistas there would be nothing to stop them doing it at home. This way they can only do it at work, when we’re watching. Obviously we could watch their vistas when they’re at home but then we’d need watchers watching the watchers, and more watchers watching the watcher-watchers and, well, you see the predicament. So we have a few dozen computers that let them access streams and recordings up in The Treehouse. That’s where DC is based. I can access everything using my Seed but no one else can be trusted with that kind of power.”
“So why can you be trusted with it?”
“Maybe I can’t,” Amos shrugged, “but someone has to be. Anyway, we’re getting sidetracked. Give me the time, date and user.”
“Before that, I know you’re using CrimePrev tech to scan people’s voices for keywords so you can deliver ads. What I want to know is if you can do that then why do you need anyone in DC spying on people?”
“Hmm. Well, surveillance is an art. Computers can’t do it all. The keyword-scanning of text and voice comms is crude, like a hammer. Minion’s staff are more like watchmakers, delicately working away. Have you picked your time, date and user yet?”
“Noon on the 16th. User number 20,000,001.”
Amos rolled his eyes at Kurt’s obtuseness. “Whatever. Okay, so we have a Miss Janey Fisher, age 10. We’ll jump back to the date and time… bingo. Here it comes.” Amos threw the video onto the wall and Kurt was reminded why he knew the name Janey Fisher.
/>
She was in Sabrina’s class, and at noon on the 16th Sabrina’s class was in the school changing rooms. Sabrina was standing directly opposite Janey so Kurt could see her clearly. Her hair was soaking wet from either the swimming pool or the shower but she looked to be wearing an advertising t-shirt from RealU.
“She didn’t turn ten until the schools were out,” said Kurt. “How is she wearing an ad?”
“Who?”
“My niece Sabrina, right there.”
“She must be wearing that shirt now,” said Amos. “That’s how it works. Don’t you think it’s funny that consumers used to pay to wear branded clothing and now we’re paying them? Sometimes I wonder if we give them too much. Anyway, let’s see what the raw feed was bringing in.” Amos clicked a button.
Kurt kept his eyes on the video. Sabrina’s RealU t-shirt disappeared, leaving only a towel. “Change it back,” he said.
“You picked the feed.”
“I said change it back.”
“Come on, hotshot, there’s no need—
Kurt spun around and grabbed Amos by the collar in a single movement. He pushed him against the office wall and held a forearm against his throat. “Change it back.”
Amos’s bulging eyes and reddening cheeks didn’t convince Kurt to relent but the involuntary whimper that escaped his windpipe did. Amos immediately killed the video.
“Now delete the recording.”
“Pointless.” Amos raised his hands in front of his face and neck in anticipation of further violence. “There were about ten other girls in the room who could see her. It’s in their feeds, too. And even if we deleted them all... what about next time?”
“Why should there be a next time? Why don’t you put blockers in changing rooms like the ones you have here? Is Sycamore’s privacy more important than everyone else’s? Is your security really more important than children’s safety? What if footage like this got into the wrong hands?”
“That’s the whole point! Sycamore’s security is everyone’s security; by investing our security budget in blockers here, we prevent anyone else from accessing sensitive footage anywhere.”
Sycamore Page 20
