Sycamore

by Craig A. Falconer

  “This is nothing to do with the devil,” Kurt snapped, fed up of hearing about him. “There’s no good and no evil, just money and power and abused technology. I’m never giving the world anything again.”

  Professor Walker lifted a box from the folding chair in the far corner of his office and moved the chair next to his own. “Sit down, Jacobs.”

  Kurt obediently followed the instruction.

  “Now tell me… if you give a man a potato, what will he do?”

  "I don't know." Kurt was too caught out by the randomness of the question to do anything but answer immediately.

  "Of course you don't; it depends on the man. One man might plant it and hope to harvest more. One man might boil it. Another less patient man might try to eat it raw. But there's always that one man who'll put a stick in the side and cover it with nails to make a weapon. There's always that one bad egg ready to lead the rest of the flock astray."

  Professor Walker had always mixed metaphors like a madman. Kurt had never minded.

  "And then there's the fruitcake,” he continued. “No one can predict what the hell he's going to do with it. He might dress the potato up like a tiny child, throw it onto a train line and kill himself crawling to its rescue. You can never tell how people will use it. That’s the point."

  Kurt sat back in his chair. "What am I supposed to take from that?"

  "That's just it: nothing. Everyone today is always looking for what they can take, but I know you're better then that. You're a giver, you always have been. You came up with a brilliant little chip that the most privileged and expensive minds in the country had never dreamed of. You gave it to the world. Whatever you give them, some people will waste it and others will turn it to their own nefarious ends. That doesn't mean you should stop trying. Not a jot. You want something to take away?"

  Kurt nodded like the child who had first walked into Professor Walker’s classroom almost five years earlier.

  "Fine. The moral isn’t “don’t try.” It’s never “don’t try.” So keep handing out potatoes. Always try. You’re a smart kid; you know what to do.”

  “About that…”

  “Yes?”

  “I’m planning something big for the recognition ceremony. I can trust you, right?”

  “With your life, Jacobs. You know that.”

  “Okay. I snuck a journalist into HQ and we filmed everything they’re doing. I’m going to play the footage in the auditorium when everyone is watching me.” It sounded so much riskier when he said it out loud.

  “That’s a very permanent thing to do,” said the professor. “I expect the consequences will be equally final.”

  “That’s what worries me. We lied about her identity — the journalist — and she’s unseeded. But I was in her house earlier on and Amos had been there. He wanted me to know, but he didn’t tell me. He thinks this is a game.”

  “Does your friend know about his visit?”

  “No. I didn’t tell her.” Kurt paused to consider that. “But she wouldn’t care, anyway. Sometimes I think she’s too strong for her own good.”

  “You still have to tell her.”

  “She wouldn’t want me to do anything that could compromise our plan. Anyway, if Amos wanted to hurt her then the mug would have been a bomb. She’ll be standing by my side when I kill Sycamore and the world will be a better place.”

  “Maybe so, but do you really have the right to make that decision?”

  “I’m the only one with the power to do anything before it’s too late.”

  “But people have chosen to use the services, Jacobs. Just like I didn't use facebook when so many others did. We always have a choice.”

  “This is 100% different,” said Kurt. “People have to use Sycamore’s services.”

  “Everyone else said they had to use the old portals, too. They had to network for their jobs and they had to stay in touch with old friends. You know, the old friends it was crucial to stay in contact with but too inconvenient to visit, call, text or email. They had to be a part of it when it was the only place where their friends hung out. I don’t have many old friends so I didn't have to do any of those things. Likewise, people who don’t want what Sycamore offer don’t have to take The Seed.”

  Kurt wasn’t sure if Professor Walker was serious; he thought so but hoped not. “You make it sound like Sycamore is just a social network. If we were only dealing with Forest then you’d be making sense but that’s just one component... maybe the most used, but not the most invasive. They’re watching everyone, all the time. The whole thing is just surveillance dressed up as convenience. Wait until you see The Orwall, then you’ll understand. This isn't just another corporation collecting and selling our data so the government can track us. This is a corporation aiming to partner with every government — one that collects our information and instantly determines our access to essential services. And they’re announcing currency digitisation tonight! In this world people can’t live without using money.”

  “People will adjust. Your unseeded journalist friend must be managing to get by as things are, no?”

  Kurt was infuriated by Professor Walker’s dissociation from the problems. “Whose side are you on here?” he shouted.

  “There don’t have to be sides.”

  “Well there are, and we all have to pick one. Anyway, what do you mean she must be managing? She can’t buy food from most stores — soon to be any stores — and she can’t even ride the bus without a Seed. You know nothing about her. You know nothing about anything in the real world. Every morning you come into this office and sit around worrying about nothing.”

  “As opposed to you who drives his Lamborghini through a Longhampton gate every night?”

  “I get mobbed when I go outside! You don’t know anything about me, either. I’m risking everything because I hate it all. Stacy is risking her life because she hates it, too. Living without a Seed is almost impossible but for her it’s better than living with one. She actually cares about the world and she’s going to be by my side when we blow the lid off this thing.”

  “Before you do anything stupid, Jacobs…. are you sure that this Stacy can be trusted?”

  “What?”

  “Stacy. Are you sure you can trust her?”

  “What kind of a question is that?”

  “I’m only looking out for you.”

  “Of course I can trust her! I met her at a protest against that tower for making pigs. She’s unseeded. She doesn’t even have Lenses.”

  “Come on now. They would hardly send someone who—

  “Wait a minute,” said Kurt, rising to his feet. “How do I know I can trust you?”

  The professor’s hands urged him to calm down. “This is what they want, Jacobs, people turning against each other.”

  “You started it! Trying to put that seed of doubt into my mind. Well it won’t work. I trust her and I love her.”

  Professor Walker sighed. “I knew it.”

  “You don’t know anything.”

  “All I’m asking is that you step back and assess the situation. Bad things happen when smart men let their hearts win.”

  “I said I love her! That’s the end of it.” Kurt rushed to the door and turned his head to deliver a parting shot. “I wouldn’t expect a bitter old failure like you to understand.”

  Kurt put his Lenses in once he was a few minutes away from the campus and a message from the professor was waiting for him: “Principles get people buried, Kurt. Don’t be an idiot. Run while you can.”

  In five years Professor Walker had never called Kurt anything but Jacobs. The change somehow suggested sincerity, so Kurt’s reply was defiant rather than angry.

  “I can’t not fight,” he typed into his hand as he walked down the street.

  The professor’s final message came almost instantly.

  “Please. Run.”

  ~

  Kurt decided to experiment as he walked towards the central bank after parking beside Sy
camore HQ. The bank was near the Jobs Monument, from where he planned to watch the rally, so it didn’t take him long to walk there.

  The experiment involved walking through the city wearing one UltraLens. It was insane. Nothing made sense with one Lens in and both eyes open, but the set-up allowed Kurt to navigate Sycamore’s metaworld without completely losing touch with reality.

  Even without BeThere, the world looked cleaner and fresher from behind a lens. Seeing people in tatty clothes and immaculate outfits at the same time gave Kurt a feeling akin to motion sickness. He looked down at his own feet and saw two different pairs of shoes at once. His mind told him that optics shouldn’t work like this, but his eyes begged to be believed.

  A saying kept running through Kurt’s head: “in the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.” With that in mind he closed his naked eye and climbed over the fence at the Jobs Monument for the best view of the night’s events. The monument was closed but there was no attendant. And really… he was Kurt Jacobs.

  From the top, his naked left eye could see a demonstration penned off to the side of the rally. His UltraLens-wearing right eye couldn’t.

  He closed his naked eye again and zoomed in. There was nothing there. Sycamore had always been good at putting things into the world — augmenting reality as per their initial remit — but only now did Kurt appreciate just how adept they had become at hiding things.

  No Lens-wearers would see the protest, which meant that in their reality it wasn’t happening. Kurt’s naked eye could see police. The fact that they weren’t intervening suggested that the protestors were all seeded and had paid their protest charge.

  Kurt could just about make out a long banner about the mark of the beast. It was difficult when the eye that could zoom wasn’t the one that could see the protestors, but they didn’t look like Fury River. Amos would gain nothing from tricking the extremists into attending only to hide them, anyway, so it seemed that the announcement of currency digitisation had pushed genuinely religious people over the edge.

  To risk coming out when Sycamore was already so powerful, to stand up against something, to stand up for something — even if it was a fairytale… — Kurt felt that there was surely something noble in that.

  The worst part of the deceit was that if people would only take their Lenses out they would see what was going on, not just with the protest but with everything. The public’s dependence on The Seed for necessary socioeconomic activity meant that freeing themselves from the matrix wasn’t as simple as removing their Lenses but doing so would at least pierce the illusion.

  Amos then addressed the crowd, interrupting Kurt’s thoughts by filling his right ear. Kurt tuned out but heard bits and pieces of Amos blaming the bankers for all of society’s ills and promising a new era of just economy.

  Amos whipped the assembled city into a frenzy over “those wretched fat-cats who thought they could forever get away with creating money from nothing and loaning it to us with interest.” It was bizarre; Amos spoke as though he wasn’t about to assume their role with the added bonus of a universal 1% surcharge.

  “Too long have they exploited you,” he shouted. “Too long have we let them! Today, we take no more. Today, we blow them away.” Amos walked over to a novelty-sized detonator and pushed down on the handle. The central bank exploded into the night like an angry supernova.

  Kurt couldn’t believe that both of his eyes could see the explosion — Amos had actually blown up the bank. For a second he wondered why the demolition wasn’t faked. Then he acknowledged that Amos no doubt wanted the last few unseeded consumers to get the message: Sycamore was in charge now.

  One of Kurt’s eyes watched in amazement as a colossal sycamore tree was quickly unveiled in the bank’s place, rising like a phoenix from the ashes. He almost felt bad for the companies with massive HQs in the nearby Quartermile. They had spent hundreds of millions of dollars on tributes to their own vanity and Amos had just dwarfed them all with an imaginary tree.

  After much fanfare and several celebrity appearances, Amos announced that the rally was over. He sent the herds home with a message for the next day: “Don’t forget to tune in for more fireworks tomorrow morning when the father of The Seed, local boy Kurt Jacobs, will be honoured for his unparalleled contribution to humanity and his sterling services to Sycamore.” Amos looked up towards the top of the Jobs Monument and saluted, revealing that he had known where Kurt was the whole time.

  “And trust me,” he continued, “if you thought tonight was exciting…”

  ~

  Kurt opened his bedroom door and froze. Sabrina’s blue teddybear sat on his bed, gutted. Foam spilled from its stomach and a knife lay abandoned nearby. It was the most overt attempt at intimidation he had ever seen. It was sickening and it was frightening and it was a new low, but he couldn’t rise to it.

  Kurt went to bed angry and impatient for the morning to come. Because when it did, he was going to kill Sycamore. And the afternoon? Well, that was for Amos.

  17

  Kurt stepped in front of his mirror to put the final touches on his real-life outfit for the recognition ceremony; he had a $3000 RealU suit on top but wanted to look nice for Stacy. A message appeared in his vista, notifying him of a text from an anonymous sender. He was intrigued, because no one was anonymous.

  “If you go, you won’t come back,” read the message.

  Kurt typed back nervously. “Who is this?”

  “Minter.”

  He dismissed the warning at that point, sure that Minion was just being his typical self, jealous of Kurt’s recognition like a middle-manager drowning in his own irrelevance and obsessing over an employee of the month award. Knowing that Minion was watching, Kurt looked in the mirror and gave himself the middle finger then winked and left.

  On the way to the Quartermile he stopped at a red light and heard a seductive female voice calling through his open window from inside a Tasmart. “Psst, Kurt.” He turned instinctively. An attractive if immodest ad-girl stood by the entrance with a Lexington in her hand. “Who says it’s too early?”

  She was the first ad-girl Kurt had seen and she looked shockingly real. As real as the RealU-enhanced real women who walked around the city, anyway. What struck him most was how completely she seemed to fill the space in the Tasmart doorway; she wasn’t like a hologram or a ghost. With none of the kinetic problems that came with physical robotics, she bypassed uncanny valley. If Kurt and Stacy hadn’t formulated this plan, how long would it have been before fake ad-girls were carrying out full conversations with unsuspecting men?

  There was something about the road, too, but Kurt couldn’t quite put his finger on it. He parked outside HQ and walked to join Stacy by the black car in front of the Sycaplex. “Hello, Monica,” he said.

  She smiled and readied her Italian accent. “Mr Jacobs.”

  The driver opened their doors — Kurt’s first, as seemed to be universal protocol. As soon as Kurt sat down he received a text from Amos asking him to have the driver wait and to step out of the car. An urgent, private call was necessary.

  “Driver, hold on!” said Kurt. “I’ll just be a second,” he promised Stacy. “I need to make a quick call.”

  Kurt stepped out onto the street and selected Amos from his Voice-call menu.

  “Are you outside the vehicle?” asked Amos.

  “Yes…”

  “Good. We couldn't have the driver hearing anything. If there are any people around the car please cross the street towards HQ.”

  Kurt did. “Okay, I’m out of everyone’s earshot.”

  Amos sighed loudly enough for it to transmit through Kurt’s in-earphones. “When will you learn, hotshot? When will you learn that cats eat birds and that’s just the way it is?”

  “What?”

  “I gave you everything but it wasn’t enough. Money, power, you could have had it all! But no. I'm disappointed in you, Kurt. Youand your little friend. Monica, was it? No... Stacy, right?”


  Kurt started back across the road.

  “You don't want to do that,” said a gruff voice — the guard from the lobby. He and another black-suited man grabbed Kurt and kept him from running.

  “Count with me, hotshot,” Amos said in his ear. “Three.”

  “Stacy!” Kurt cried at the top of his voice. “Stacy!” One of the goons muffled his mouth.

  “Two.”

  Kurt bit the goon’s hand and shouted again, somehow even louder. “Stacy! Run!” She rolled down her window. The affronted goon punched Kurt in the stomach hard enough to wind him and knock him to the ground. Stacy saw and threw open her door.

  “One.”

  Kurt lay at the side of the road gasping for air. The last thing he saw was Stacy’s right foot hitting the ground as she hurried to help him.

  “Boom.”

  The car exploded, taking Stacy, the front of the Sycaplex, the disposable driver and eleven innocent consumers with it. Chunks of everything flew across the road and Kurt Jacobs closed his eyes to die.

  ~

  One of the security goons dragged Kurt to his feet and the other blocked the path to the rubble. There was no reason for Kurt to want to go near it, anyway — Stacy was dead.

  “Hey, hotshot… glad you’re alright,” said a teasing voice inside his ears. “You might want to take a look at this.”

  Kurt’s vista filled with a horrifying image, almost on the same level as the sight of Stacy’s obliterated body. It was Professor Walker, hanging from a sycamore tree. The picture sat under a headline reading “Child Sex Professor Found Hanged.” The accompanying report claimed that a sex-abuse investigation had been closing in on him.