The Naked World

by Eli K. P. William

  Rick supposed that the man had stuck a tiny parasite on him, since BodyBank security systems could only be compromised through direct contact and this was the same method Sekido had used on Amon. Once he was infected, they had tried to trick him into killing himself. When this failed, they shifted to their backup plan of bankrupting him. His balance had likely jumped slightly when he was compensated for the credicrime of hacking committed against him, but he hadn’t noticed because the fine had been hidden from his readout as it had been from Amon’s. The amount had been insufficient to save him from bankruptcy because Sekido had delayed the release of his salary, which was due around the time he was supposed to jump. In case he didn’t go bankrupt, Sekido had ensured that Liquidators were waiting to crash him, likely by sending them forged reports saying he was bankrupt.

  “It looks like Sekido or whoever he works for has a whole system worked out for getting rid of people like us,” said Rick. “He even dangled the carrot of promotion to lead me along just like he did to you with the Barrow job. But I still don’t get why they tried to kill me. What did I do?” Rick sounded so offended he was almost whining.

  Amon considered this for a moment and said, “I think Sekido and his partners must have been thinking something like this: Here’s Rick, this highly skilled Liquidator with a poor work attitude. He’s probably capable enough to take on a difficult mission, but since he’s a bit lacking in punctuality and diligence, no one at the ministry will care if he disappears. They must have known about your financial problems too, so Sekido figured you’d be easy to push over the bankruptcy cliff if need arose. Plus, they could use your concern about your job security to get you to do their bidding. But you didn’t do their bidding. You kept asking questions and persisted even when Sekido implied in his messed-up rambly way that you really ought to lay off about it. You were clearly on high alert, and this got them worrying that you might expose sensitive information like the forged bankruptcy report on Barrow, or that at any point in the mission you might clue in that it was all a big ruse, like I almost did, and go to the media. Or maybe you’d complete the mission and make trouble for them afterwards. Whatever might have happened, your willingness to be vocal about your doubts showed them you were a huge risk, so they decided it was better to take you out even if it meant delaying Barrow’s identity assassination.

  “Once you were gone, they scrambled to find a new assassin and quickly settled on me. I wasn’t as expendable as you in their eyes. I had a flawless record, and as full of shit as Sekido and the recruiter turned out to be—from everything Sekido told me about the job close to the Executive Council and everything the recruiter said at the meeting—I get the impression they really were grooming me for something big. Maybe assisting with their coup d’état in some other way? Who knows? Aside from being more valuable to them than you were, I was also much more solvent and so a bit harder to cash crash. But since I was even more desperate to get a promotion, they could count on my obedience and total credulity; I was exactly the sort of person they would have wanted after you let them down. Plus, since my partner had just gone missing, they would have a decent enough excuse for dispatching me alone in violation of protocol if I’d bothered to ask about it. So they decided on the fly to send me in your place. Then when I started getting suspicious, they did to me just what they’d already done to you. Those conniving pieces of shit got both of us in the exact same way.”

  There was one difference and Amon was ashamed to remember it, let alone admit it aloud. While Rick had picked up on the dubious aspects of the mission—the delayed start time, the solo order, the secrecy—and expressed enough suspicion that Sekido needed to crash him before he even went through with it, Amon had been so blinded by his obsession with success that he’d swallowed Sekido’s lie that this was all necessary for the sake of political discretion. Then he’d walked right into the trap set for him at Shuffle Boom despite having every reason to distrust anyone and everyone—especially Sekido—at that point. Along the way he’d cash crashed a man he greatly admired and the end result was what happened to Mayuko … If not for the jubilee charge, he might still have been working for them, never knowing what they’d done to his best friend. He’d been a gullible idiot, but not Rick.

  Now that they had worked out what had likely happened to Rick, Amon realized that, while he had explained how he got from Free Tokyo to Xenocyst, Rick had not spoken about what had happened since his cash crash or how he had ended up on the supply crew that morning. He was about to ask when Rick said, “So what about Mayuko then? You called her a few times to check in about me. Never heard from her after that, or what?”

  After Amon’s omission of her involvement, it was the obvious question to ask, but Amon merely sighed with resignation and gave Rick a troubled look as if to suggest he hadn’t heard from her without committing to either possibility in words.

  2

  Before Rick could dig into Amon’s ambiguous evasion, they stepped into the large egg-shaped space along the border that Amon had stumbled upon and were pushed apart by the pressure of bodies. Crowds converging from every direction and elevation trickled up and down the stairpaths that formed a net-like matrix along the concave walls, flakes sucked swirling down into the center like a slow twister on drafts generated by their motion. The space looked even more egg-like during the day as Amon could now see that it was built exclusively from gifted rooms with white, ivory-like façades.

  “Go on ahead and regroup before the exit!” Ty called back over his shoulder. Amon worked his way towards the other members as best he could while they all trudged slowly up a wide stairpath that ran along the lower left curve of the egg to the exit portal in the wall above, connecting to many other stairpaths along the way.

  It was Amon’s first time back at the border since that disturbing night and he gazed about at the scene, feeling even more disturbed now that he had some inkling of how it all worked. As before, supply crews poured in and out through the two portals near the top of the egg. The clothes of those leaving spat flakes rapidly, mere days remaining before they turned to rags, while the clothes of those entering were brand new, and written on their bags was that same perplexing phrase: The gift of a baby is the best gift for your baby. This was the slogan of the Charity Gift Economy on the basis of which the District of Dreams operated, and Amon thought back on Book’s explanation of it the night before, his mind still grappling with its implications.

  The “orientation sessions” Book had mentioned turned out to be lessons about various aspects of the District of Dreams. Each night after the council adjourned, the Books met Amon in the council chamber to serve as his instructors. As Book explained at the start of their first meeting, they had selected this location as their classroom instead of the library because it was the only place in Xenocyst where they could be confident of keeping their conversations private from the surveillance apparatus of the venture charities.

  The main threat to privacy was the blinking cockroaches scuttling about, a kind of drone that Xenocysters had taken to calling PanoptiRoaches. Apparently the origin of this nickname went back to the days when Tamper still lived in Xenocyst. Upon request from Hippo, he had dissected several of the drones to examine their internal mechanisms and discovered that the eye wasn’t installed with a camera or any other recording device (though the sample was limited and he could not rule out the possibility that some might have vision capabilities). But the Books had observed the apparently random pattern of their roaming and determined that it was carefully calculated to appear like erratic insect behavior while allowing the roach to touch every point across a particular surface specified by a set of coordinates. Upon examining these programmed locations with his makeshift scanners, Tamper discovered that the roaches laid microscopic sensors at each location. The walls of disposable rooms were already filled with sensors of the same kind, an essential part of ImmaNet infrastructure that served as network nodes ensuring no jitter or lag for any Free Citizen that visited the c
amps. But the PanoptiRoaches were needed to install and replace them in condos, roads, sewers, and anywhere else not made of Fleet. In this way, the venture charities had realized a monitoring matrix of inescapable scope. Although the fines for mass surveillance were too great for them to monitor everyone all the time, residents had to live with the constant fear that they could still potentially be monitoring anyone at any moment throughout the District of Dreams.

  Upon piecing this all together, Tamper had designed and installed a digital quarantine system in the council chamber. Its main component was a particular nanodevice sprayed in the doorway, ceiling, and cracks between the walls and floor. This sent erroneous signals to PanoptiRoaches, convincing them that the space didn’t exist and diverting them to lay their sensors elsewhere. Once all the elements were in place, Tamper had made the council chamber into a sanctuary totally blacked out from the ImmaNet, allowing the councilors to discuss matters crucial to the community without the need to worry about remote eavesdropping.

  Since Xenocyst had made an agreement with the venture charities to never offer education of the sort Amon was receiving, for reasons Amon had not been told, the council chamber was the only place the Books could safely offer him lessons. And so the three of them had sat cross-legged on the wooden floor, Amon facing his teachers, Book’s nasally bass and Little Book’s taps echoing through the large, empty room.

  Tap-tapa-tap-taptatatap … “In preparation for your visit to Delivery tomorrow,” Book had said the night before, “our topic is the origin of the bankdead, as well as the rudiments of the Charity Gift Economy that defines our essence. We feel it appropriate to begin with this lesson, as it will provide background on both your present milieu and you yourself insofar as you are bankdead. In our explication of this origin, we will proceed chronologically and then conceptually, beginning initially with the era of the Tokyo Roundtable and continuing to develop our story into the present day.

  “We must preface this historical account, however, by cautioning you about its potential inaccuracy. Although some individuals, such as Hippo and myself, were alive during the Great Cyberwar that culminated in the Tokyo Roundtable, none are capable of confirming what actually happened in that period with any degree of certainty.

  “Firstly, the sheer quantity of information was too sizable to sift. Every event that occurred or supposedly occurred instantly spawned an enormous number of reports that diverged widely depending on the angle of the countless media actors involved. These permutations and variations on alleged facts were subsequently subjected to ongoing alteration, as the corporate blocs provided highly lucrative incentives to fabricate narratives that favored their business interests and edit the records supporting those that did not. Consequently, it became all but impossible to establish the authorship and authenticity of any particular message, to say nothing of any given set of such messages or their contextual interrelations. Moreover, the situation has not been improved by hindsight as the process of profit-motivated revision has progressed unabated throughout the intervening five decades of the Free Era.

  “What we present tonight, therefore, is the best hypothesis concerning our past that we could cull from a combination of our most credible sources, including gold search engine research conducted by Hippo during his banklife, crashnewb interviews, and bankdead oral lore. Although we lack the means to evaluate even the probability of its truth, this account is the most internally consistent and meaningful version we have been able to construct. This, we believe, is the best that can be hoped for regarding such a fraught and contentious moment as the founding of a new global political era …

  3

  At the top of the egg, the various paths merged into a broad series of roofs stacked incrementally higher into short steps, which led to a wide ledge bending along the curved wall to the exit. On the ledge, Ty and his two guards waited for Amon and everyone else to gather before proceeding to the squarish portal. Flanking it were two sentries with nightsticks holstered at their sides. Ty gave the password and the group continued through. Inside was a dim tunnel formed by the outer walls of disposable rooms with a row of guards standing along each wall facing inwards. Just in front of their feet was a line drawn in something similar to chalk running the length of the tunnel. Between these two lines, a steady stream of residents trudged out. The guards chatted to each other in voices too low for Amon to make out the words over the murmur of the crowd, their nightsticks flaking away along with their uniforms and the interior walls.

  The long tunnel darkened and then continued to grow increasingly brighter until they reached the other side. There Amon found himself blinking in the glare of the biggest patch of blue sky he had seen in weeks—a solid line that stretched off to the right and left above a series of looming buildings straight ahead. Bringing his gaze down, he felt a thrill of fear as he saw they were on an open ledge only a few paces wide that dropped two dozen stories. Before them was a sort of canyon, walled by two uneven precipices of buildings—the one they stood upon and the one across the gap that was obviously too chaotic to be part of Xenocyst—the floor far below paved with craggy, busted asphalt. The gulf was little more than ten meters across but, compared to the tight enclosure he’d experienced since entering the District of Dreams, it felt enormous. From where they stood, bodies squirmed down many-branching stairpath zigzags and trekked their way across the bottom of the canyon to paths and holes in the disordered structure on the other side. This space, Amon had learned, was a defensive buffer between Xenocyst and the outlying enclaves that wrapped around the entire compound. Most of the disposcrapers forming the outer wall of Xenocyst on their side were around twenty to thirty stories tall, but every ten skyscrapers they were only three stories tall with the stairwells tucked away on the inside. Sentinels stationed on the roofs of these low buildings kept watch for intruders and unauthorized construction in the buffer.

  As Amon and Rick made their way down a narrow stairpath single file, Amon studied the towering mass of disposcrapers on the far side and found himself disturbed by its random, haphazard architecture, having forgotten in just a few short weeks what the camps had looked like outside Xenocyst on that first day. The staggered dissolution, the scattered and discontinuous stair-segments, the gaps left by ill-fitted rooms. Motley-patterned, misaligned shafts rose to various heights, some as high as Xenocyst’s barrier, some higher, some mere stubs of just a few stories. Though none reached outwards into the canyon over the line enforced by Xenocyst, no other principle seemed to order their arrangement, and they leaned at almost every possible angle in all other directions, leaving triangular spaces that were nothing more than dead ends or from which heaped shafts on jumbles of rubble poked almost horizontal. Whether oblique or straight, toppled or standing tall, crumbling or solid, the disposcrapers crawled with residents and passersby—climbing, lying prostrate on gently inclined walls, sitting in rows with legs dangling over rooftop edges, going in and out of sliding doors—a steady streamer-curtain of varicolored petals gently fluttering earthwards over their shoulders.

  The sun was still behind the buildings of Xenocyst, keeping them in shade despite the bright sky, and with a slight breeze blowing, Amon relished the cool. When they reached the ground, the two guards corralled everyone onto a flat patch of asphalt and Ty began to speak.

  “We’re about to enter Saménokuchi, one of our proxy enclaves. The plan is to cut straight across to neutral territory, so we don’t expect any danger for the first leg. But this place changes so quickly it’s real easy to get lost—even for guides like us—and the last thing we want is to get separated. So we’re all going to stay in single file holding hands with the person in front. Issues?”

  Ty gave them another scouring look until they all shook their heads and began to link up. Amon held hands with Bané in front and with Rick behind him, while Rick also held hands with the mother under his care. Over Bané’s shoulder, Amon saw her baby asleep with his ear against her chest, a bundle of such adorable peacefu
lness that he wanted to shush all the canyon’s murmuring crowds. Once formed into a human train, they made their way across the buffer, stepping carefully around dissolving rubble and fissures that exhaled the hot, foul breath of sewage. Amon had rarely walked on ground level except when lining up at feeding stations and felt anxious when he saw the bottom stories they approached straining under the weight piled atop them. Soon the disarrayed heap of edges and right angles loomed over them, showering them with flakes, and Ty started up a pegway that cut through a rising crevice. Ducking and stepping around the corners of shelters that jutted into the space erratically like teeth in a shark’s mouth, they delved higher and deeper into the sprawl until the sky disappeared once again …

  4

  Tap-ta-tap, taptaptap, ta-tap … “But to dispense with the preamble, we begin with a question: Where did the bankdead come from? It would be comforting to believe, as standard PR-opaganda asserts, that all individuals on Earth began as Free Citizens when the AT Market was born and that bankdeath camps are inhabited exclusively by those among them who subsequently went bankrupt. However, this is manifestly false because, if we take the bankruptcy rate into consideration, the bankdead population could not have reached its current level in this manner. One might suppose that the difference could be accounted for by bankdead who are descendants of those conscientious objectors who refused to participate in the AT Economy from its inception, including extremist nosties, activists, academics, and community organizers, as well as violent renegades of various ideological persuasions. However, such dissidents in fact represent only a negligible minority. Few possessed the unshakeable convictions and courage required to willingly opt out of the new economy, as the potential rewards for joining were too promising and the risks incurred by doing otherwise too great.