In World City

by I. F. Godsland

  He could detect that judgement on him again, quite lightly placed, but definitely on him: Dion, the poor black boy, the criminal inhabitant of the Waste, judged by someone with wealth and position.

  “I’ve got a good life, Miranda,” he said sharply, holding in his mind all he had been through to arrive at where he was.

  He saw her turn away from the picture, looking down. She had felt the edge in his voice. Not long before, she would not have noticed it.

  Dion’s life was, indeed, a good one, and increasingly so. From his beginnings as inheritor of the electronics side of Leo’s business interests, he had steadily developed a network of trusted aides, business connections, casual workers and contract men, all with him at the centre. He had extensive interests of his own now that were bringing in good money and some considerable respect. He had a fine apartment on the edge of World City, people who sought out his company and girlfriends who liked his image. He had abandoned the patch of ground where Leo’s company had once congregated. Instead, he met with his men in hotel lobbies and restaurants. There was a gloss gathering around Dion’s operation, which, untarnished as it was by drugs or vice, he tended carefully. Hardware was different, he told himself. It was clean. And with the influx of cash from Miranda, he was expanding further. His so-called ‘corporate operations’, which had been the most sophisticated aspect of his inheritance from Leo, were growing to include intelligence and research activities, some of which might even have been considered legal.

  After some moments, Miranda looked up at Dion. “Suppose I bought back the company that controls the island now,” she speculated. “We could all move there with the kids and live happily ever after.”

  Dion looked at her, puzzled. Once that had been all he might have dreamed of, but now it was unreal. What did he want with his island? Hadn’t he told her he had a life of his own now?

  Miranda turned and contemplated the framed picture again. She looked at it some moments, then said, “No, we’d both go crazy, stuck there, watching the sunsets.”

  Her unquestioned assumption that they had a life together shocked Dion. How had it happened? How was it that she could be freely offering him what he had once so desired? And why did he find himself so uninterested in the proposition? Fleetingly he remembered his grandmother and his times with her on the island. That was the absence he felt in the face of Miranda’s offer. That was what was gone. His screen of dreams and memories had fallen away without him even noticing and he was awake in a life of his own now – a good life. He wondered what he could say to Miranda. He asked, “How much do you believe in what you’re doing?”

  “I believe in it pretty much,” she said, affecting unconcern.

  The question had seemed to come from nowhere, but Dion was primed to ask it. He had come to wonder, over and over, why she was going to such an extreme to see her experiment through; why it was the only thing she had left; why it was life and death not only for the twelve children but for her as well.

  Dion gave her a look, exaggeratedly unconvinced.

  “It’s the only way left to go,” she began briskly, collecting herself as if for a presentation. Then, teasingly, “What’s it to you anyway, Dion?”

  “Oh, you know,” Dion replied, ironically. “Come on, you’ve got everything anyone could ever want, yet you come here risking it all. And anyway, it isn’t like these viruses you use are something new. My guess is they were easy enough to make. It’s just that you’ve decided to be the one to risk using them. And that’s a big risk you’re taking if you’ve nothing of your own to prove.”

  “I do have a few things of my own to prove, Dion. There are others in my institute who would take exception to what I’m trying, people who would never even give me the chance of seeing how well it might work. They’re still talking possibilities and I’d like to see them confronted with the reality. But it’s mainly a matter of timing. That’s all. The time is just absolutely right. I couldn’t not do it.”

  “Timing?” Dion questioned.

  Miranda laughed, recalling something. “Dion, have you ever seen films of penguins getting ready to jump in the water to go fishing?”

  Dion shrugged. Why should he have ever watched penguins?

  “No, maybe you haven’t. But what they all do is gather right on the edge of the ice and jostle around, each one hoping it won’t be the first to have to jump. There might be something nasty under the ice floe. But, finally, one of them does jump in and, providing he doesn’t get eaten immediately, all the rest jump. Work in longevity is like that, Dion. Everyone is jostling around with what’s safe but they all know that if anything is really going to happen, someone’s going to have to jump into something dangerous. I’m the one who’s jumped. If I come up with a mouthful of fish then all the rest of them are going to jump and to hell with the ethics. I’m using viral vectors to reprogramme the human body. That’s the jump that no one else has dared take so far. If it works, it doesn’t matter what people think of the way I’ve done it. The hope of a longer life is so tied to our most basic drives that any kind of ethical concerns will go out the window.”

  “Are you sure it’s going to be okay with other people?” Dion questioned. This was a business he was unfamiliar with. He had never imagined his own transgressions would find any acceptance under the law.

  Miranda nodded, paused a moment, then said, “Dion, do you know who runs World City?”

  “International business,” he replied without hesitation. To his surprise she shook her head. “Government?” he hazarded, “... the Mafia? ... The Triads? ... The Freemasons?”

  “No, none of those,” Miranda laughed. “The people who run World City are the pension fund managers.”

  Dion was intrigued. It sounded just unlikely enough to be true.

  “They’re the biggest investors – have been for ages, but since governments started restricting how much profit-making capacity private investment can have a slice of, they’ve skyrocketed. They control every major corporation. They could make and break governments if they wanted. There’s been nothing like it since the church in the high Middle Ages.”

  “So how did they get so much power?”

  “For the same reason the church did: because of the value people place on the product. The church offered eternal life. The pension funds offer a long and comfortable retirement.”

  “So people in World City put all their money into retirement funds? How come they all look so rich?”

  “Not all their money, but a high proportion of it. There’s more though. The pressures the pension fund managers exert mean increased efficiency. So more and more is produced by fewer and fewer and most of the gain goes to feed the great promise of eternal retirement. There’s some unevenness in who gets how much – that depends on the level they worked at when they were employed – but all those who paid into their statutory pension funds get a comfortable income.”

  “And those who didn’t?”

  “They end up in the Waste. They’re mainly the incorrigibles who spent everything they earned on lottery tickets and food, usually in that order – them and the likes of you.”

  “So fewer and fewer people produce more and more. Isn’t there some kind of limit to this?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe not. That’s why I’m confident that what we’re doing is going to be okay. You see, the fund managers are a strange people. They’ve been selected by the system not to feel at ease with limits. The funds they serve are not meant to have limits placed on them, they’re meant to expand. So the fund managers want to push back the boundaries. And one of the ways they can do that is for people to live longer, which means the pension system has even more work to do. The fund managers are working it through a charity called the Ageing Initiative that pays for global longevity research. It started quietly – just a pension funds sideline – but it’s been getting to be one of the most powerful research organisations there is. Believe me, Dion; the fund managers are crazy with the possibilities. When I tal
k to them, they make it sound as if there could be some single great productive instant in which everything anyone could ever want is made freely available and everyone lives forever. Up until recently, they were putting most of their weight behind robotics and nanotech with only a little set aside for longevity research. But now the whole focus is going to be on longevity. All the earlier tracks are on course; it’s longevity research they want to put their money into now.”

  “So do we get rich?”

  “Very. I’m rich already, but you and the kids too. You’ll be international celebrities. More than that, you yourself will probably get to live longer than anyone could have ever imagined. Because it isn’t just what I’m doing with the kids that’ll be bought with the money the Ageing Initiative will be making available. There’ll be groups all over the world set up, working on every stage in the human lifespan. There’ll be something for everyone.”

  “How much longer will I have?” Dion was intrigued by this prospect. He had a good life now, and enjoying it longer was attractive.

  “God knows. The focus will be on the early stages: children and adolescents. But you might expect twenty years more. What do you want to do with it?”

  Dion thought about this. A while back, after a particularly successful corporate operation, he had revisited the area where he once lived with his parents and had walked once more past the glacial, unreachable shop displays. He had gone in through the door next to one such display and pointed to what would once have seemed the most unreachable object of all, a single ebony-encased personal screen, exquisitely and uniquely crafted and occupying the centre of the most select of the display cases. He had bought it and now kept it with him wherever he went. While waiting in some perfectly appointed World City hotel lobby for one of his company men to return from behind the doors of a carefully guarded development organisation, he would set his screen down on a table and watch it while he sipped bitter espresso coffee.

  “I could pass the time quite well,” Dion replied.

  Miranda turned back to the framed picture of the tropical island and thought of sunlit glades scattered across the wildwood, with birds singing and flowers blooming. “I really am desperately rich, Dion,” she said, turning to him, laughing. “My father had business interests all over the world. He died three years ago and left me the lot. Ever since I can remember, I’ve not wanted for anything.”

  She turned away, wheeling on tiptoe, to end up again looking at Dion’s picture of the island. “Isn’t that what they say about the rich?” she said, examining the picture closely, “... that they want to live forever with the hoards of wealth they’ve accumulated. Isn’t that why envious people say, you can’t take it with you? I don’t know, maybe that’s why I’m hooked on longevity. Maybe people who’ve got it all want to keep it that way forever. What do you think?”

  Suddenly, Dion didn’t want to think anything. The lightness had gone in an instant. He didn’t want to think about people keeping things the same way forever. He just wanted to think about his usual life and the promises it might hold. But something had moved inside him; some old door stiff from disuse had opened and he couldn’t help but let out what had been hidden behind it. Without willing the words to come, he found himself saying, “Isn’t that what the whole of World City is about – keeping it that way forever?”

  “What do you mean – the whole of World City?” Miranda asked.

  He hadn’t wanted to say that. He didn’t want to know about how things really were. It made him uncomfortable. There was something in there he didn’t want to know about anymore.

  “Nothing,” he said. “I didn’t mean anything.”

  And Miranda looked at him, curiously, but didn’t press the question.

  Handelmann’s Hotel...

  The boy moves a step closer. In the face of this genetic replica of himself, Dion feels his skin begin to crawl. He wants to explain the boy away, devalue him. “You’re something that was made to get through security,” he says flatly.

  “No, you’re wrong,” the boy replies, confidently, “I special. I your twin.”

  Dion looks back, shaking his head slowly. He wants the boy to vanish. He wants to be left to the impersonal comforts of his usual life.

  The boy appraises him carefully, then says, “Either you stupid, or you scared.”

  Dion looks at him stupidly.

  “Okay, let’s suppose you stupid. Let’s suppose you think I come with just another deal to get around the patents. You think I got some fancy junk to make you rich people richer at half the price. You think I got something that some bitter creep got to sell after they fire him from Mondosys or Racal. You think my people’ve thought up some new perversion. You think I here with more of the same kind of shit you people like to lock yourselves up with.”

  The boy begins to pace up and down the floor, then he turns on Dion, “Well you wrong, Mister. You very wrong. Because what I got for you is me, your twin, and you don’t know a damn thing about what that means. That’s ‘cause you stupid. That’s ‘cause you sit in World City, locked up with all your fancy gear like prison was turned inside out. You only deal in what you know already. And that’s what keeps you stupid, Mister. What I got for you is me. I got something new in your world – something that’s going to turn you people upside down.”

  22

  In framing and rehanging Dion’s picture of the island, it had been the bedroom window of her childhood that Miranda had put back in place. She had found the picture in a fairy tale chamber at the top of a tower; in other words, in what she had made of her old room in her father’s house. The picture of the jungle-clad island was the view of the wildwood she had looked out on from there.

  But the window was open now and Miranda Whitlam was gazing through it freely. In her pursuit of forever and ever, she had found her way into the Waste and the Waste was the wildwood, the same wildwood that had cast the moonlight shadows that had once so terrified her. Stepping into those shadows now, she was beginning to place herself entirely outside the anaesthetising material of World City.

  Consciously, though, she worried about the children, like any good World Citizen would. Once, Dion had said to her, ‘What’s going to happen to them? They must find out sometime. We’re not going to be able to just walk away from it all at the end of ten years.’ At the time, she’d had other things on her mind. But afterwards, his words kept coming back.

  Dion was right. If the experiment worked, she was going to have to parade those children in front of review committees, the press, other investigators. As Dion had said, she was making freaks out of them: they would be singled out as something special and, much worse, something enviable. How could she prepare them for all that?

  She and Dion were walking together through the crumbling streets of the Waste when her tightening knot of concern began to untangle, along with much else.

  The day was clear and bright after a hard spring shower, and they were keeping to the remains of the pavements, away from the rutted, waterlogged street. Occasional strands of people meandered past, talking interminably about ways of influencing Our Lady of Luck. Miranda was beginning to like the feel of those people. They had a mediaeval air; folk in an extreme of poverty with nothing left for their spirit to feed on but the most abstruse and probably heretical of doctrines. She could imagine them as refugees in an older Europe, where they might be swallowed up for decades in the great forests, developing their own societies with no one knowing.

  The image struck her with unexpected force and she said, “Dion, what are we worrying about the children for? They never belonged to the normal world anyway. They’ve already taken responsibility for their lives. They grew up years ago. They’ve been their own masters from the moment they walked away from their parents. They’ve been in charge since the first night they found some doorway to curl up and sleep in. They’ve been deciding their fate ever since they took their first tin of food from a corner store. They were deciding it when they latched on to you. S
ame as you latched on to that Leo of yours.”

  Dion thought about this some moments. He had been aware that Miranda was changing, but he hadn’t expected anything as careless as this. He found himself shocked by her sudden self-absolution of any responsibility for the children.

  “They trust us, Miranda,” he said, with some severity. “I never trusted Leo. I just worked with him. We’ve done something to these kids that others are going to take notice of. Leo gave me a few challenges but he never actually changed me.”

  “Didn’t he change you though? He knew he was making something out of you that would put you outside the law forever. He changed you into a better criminal.”

  “But I knew that. Those kids of ours don’t know a damn thing about what they’re in for.”

  “For Christ’s sake, Dion, they didn’t know what they were in for when they decided to cut and run from their families. They’ve done family and they opted out of it – same as you. Maybe your leaving home was your only chance for a life of your own. Maybe it was their only chance. Anyway, they took the chance and now they’ve got a different life.

  “And what guarantees does anybody have anyway?” she surged on. “We’re always trying to make up ways of making the future better, making it more predictable, making it more like we imagine it ought to be. It’s what the pension funds are doing for Christ’s sake. It’s what I’m depending on. It’s why I thought we’d all come out of this okay. But it’s all a lie. Like the lie that anyone could become a perfect person if only they had enough money to throw at the problem. Most of what you see on that neat little screen of yours, Dion, is about keeping everyone believing in the lie, showing them images of what they might become. They believe it all their lives and then they die.”

  “So, what happens when you make people live forever?” Dion asked acidly. There was something peculiarly familiar about what she was saying and it was making him uncomfortable.