The Naked World

by Eli K. P. William

  Little Book stopped tapping as Book stilled his lips for the first time, both of them locking their gazes with Amon’s, their eyes twitching like switching transistors as they analyzed his response to this information.

  “This has brought us now to the end of this account of our heritage and its relation to our present identity. Since technology has rendered brute labor obsolete, the poor have now become the pig iron of the global workforce. In the most literal sense of the phrase, we are human resources. That is our sole raison d’être.”

  Amon was impressed by the clear and articulate way the Books had explained such complicated ideas, as only accomplished scholars who’d spent years tangling with them could. But it was a lot to take in all at once and he was feeling lightheaded.

  Perhaps detecting Amon’s confusion, ta-tappa-taptap, Book added, “You will undoubtedly require additional clarification on the detailed lesson we have provided. Therefore, please collect your questions before our next meeting, as I am certain your expedition to Delivery tomorrow will provide illumination as much as it stimulates your curiosity.”

  Amon thanked them with a bow and the three of them left the council chamber, the Books heading for the library and Amon for his elevator futon, where he dropped to sleep instantly, his mind worn beyond its limit.

  13

  Still staring at the babies in their cells, Amon remembered Book’s point about pig iron the night before and was reminded of something the PhisherKing had said. He had spoken of balancing the cost and benefits of future generations and the “perverse industrial inertia” that kept humanity going. Only now were these words finally starting to make sense. Can you swear to keep asking questions until no doubts remain in your mind?

  “Hey! Get going!” snapped Ty, who had just stepped inside Delivery and spotted Amon straggling in thought. “You’ve got a mother to take care of!”

  Startled from his reverie, Amon looked ahead and saw that Bané had proceeded about ten spots in line. “She doesn’t have the baby anymore,” said Amon, glad he had a good excuse for spacing out on his duty.

  Ty frowned for a second, registering the change. “You still can’t just stand around like that. Go get your supplies so we can get out of here!”

  Bowing slightly in apology, Amon hurried over to the nearest machine and inserted his pinky, feeling the tickle but thankfully hearing no alarm. These machines, located exclusively in Delivery, were called Gift Receptacles. Aside from intaking infants, their readers were the only ones in the camps that registered the genomes of crashnewbs like Amon. Now that he was on record, he would have access to the regular feeding stations and would no longer need to mooch off Xenocyst for everything.

  As Ty followed behind him, Amon noticed that he wasn’t interfacing with any of the readers. “What about you?” he asked.

  “Like I said, today isn’t my pickup day. Me and the guards are just here to see you back safe. Now keep moving!”

  With another meek bow, Amon proceeded ahead and realized that he’d lost sight of Rick. Soon a gap of about five meters opened in the walls of receptacles on both sides. When he reached this gap, he saw that it was an intersecting hallway. Immediately to the left was a corridor parallel to his down which the outgoing line headed to the exit for the bridge. Over their heads, the hallway continued for hundreds of meters in the same direction, intersecting pairs of identical incoming and outgoing lineups for all the other bridges, and glancing to his right Amon saw that it continued in exactly the same way.

  Equidistant between each pair of lines in the wall of the hallway was a steel door. Each door was flanked by two Charity Brigade freekeepers. These men and women stood stock still, holding assault dusters and wearing head-to-toe skin-tight uniforms that looked like clouded plastic, so that only their blurry skin color could be seen while their features were obscured. To the right of each door was a table behind which two people in generic, casual, bankliving outfits sat: Amon supposed these were career volunteers. Along the wall behind them, near the door guarded by the freekeepers, were stacks of black plastic supply crates.

  Two more freekeepers stood just beyond the outgoing line and Amon watched as they occasionally waved over bankdead from his line. Once beckoned, the bankdead would obey without hesitation and head down the hallway, crossing the curtain of exiting people to line up in front of the table with a couple dozen others. When the bankdead reached the head of this line, they put their pinky into a hole in a small black cube resting on the table that Amon recognized as a standard genome reader used in hospitals in the Free World. A career volunteer man then took bags pre-filled with supplies from the crates and handed them to those at the front of the line, who slung them on their shoulders and peeled back to the exit line. One of the bankdead put the finger of her baby into the reader and a career volunteer woman took the baby from her to place it in a diagnostic crib like the one that popped out of the receptacles. When the diagnostic was complete, she then inserted the baby through a plastic flap into the foam-cushioned interior of a nursery crate and handed the woman a bag of supplies, while the other volunteer stacked the nursery crate behind them. There were three different piles of bags that seemed to be of slightly different sizes. Two of these piles Amon supposed were for people in one of the plutogenic categories—gifted or giftless—and the third a bonus for those from either category who had gifted their baby within the last year.

  At first, he thought the Brigade was siphoning off people in his lane to alleviate crowding, until he noticed a reporter and his sousveiller standing beside the table. Although Amon couldn’t see the immaculate suits they were surely digimade in—only their casual shirts, jeans, and sneakers—he could tell what they were from the way one man gestured towards the supply table in full view of the other, whose unwavering eyes could only be in ultra-definition recording mode. Between the bodies of the outgoing line, Amon could hear snatches of what the reporter was saying to his online audience through the eyes of the sousveiller: “The sacrifice for mothers is tremendous, but they know that Freedom for the next generation begins here … the triumph of compassion … freekeepers here as neutral observers to maintain freedom between the bankdead gangs and factions … rags to Opportunity … equal gender rights in the best of all possible slums …”

  Amon could imagine how this would all appear in the edited pitypromo the bankliving would see: the diagnostic box a doctor and nurse giving the babies a careful health check, the nursery crates the waiting arms of a warmly smiling parental guardian, the mother thanking the volunteers for taking her baby with a deep bow, the freekeepers—

  The scene was cut off when Amon’s line moved ahead and he continued past the hallway intersection. On the other side, the glossy gift receptacles were replaced by walls of black vending machines. Imitating those in front of him, Amon pinky-interfaced with each successive machine, and picked up whatever dropped into the bins. First a shoulder bag, then a T-shirt, then shorts, and finally the large heavy cylinder of a roombud. He put the last three items into the bag and spotted Bané up ahead taking a pair of sneakers from a bin. Amon tried interfacing with the same machine, but this time nothing came out. When he withdrew his pinky and tried again, the wine-glass alarm sounded and he quickly moved along. He tried four consecutive machines after that—out of which Bané got a toothbrush and toothpaste kit, a small tube of PeelKlean, a firefLyte, and a nightstick in a holster—but was rejected each time. All of her items, he noticed, had the same Mobius-strip-shaped logo on them, whereas his and those of most others were unmarked. And beside the logo on her white bag, in a silvery gray font, were the words, The gift of a baby is the best gift for your baby.

  He thought then of Arata, and could almost feel the patch of warmth on his chest where the boy’s weight had rested only a short time ago as he remembered him slipping away into the machine. It surprised Amon how sad he was to think that the cute, little baby would never return, though he had only met him that morning. How much harder it must be for Bané, who had
carried him inside her body and out, and he wondered what drove her and other parents to make that heart-rending trade.

  It was now clear to Amon that he was giftless while Bané was gifted, for although she would have received a supply bonus for gifting her baby, only gifted got branded gear. This perplexed him for a moment, as she was wearing a plain, tattered giftless outfit like everyone else in their crew. Then he remembered that not a single person in any of the supply crews wore branded clothes and realized that this must be a Xenocyst policy to disguise gifted as giftless and throw off OpSci kidnappers looking for chattel to milk.

  Amon imitated the other giftless in skipping all the machines until the final one in the row, into which everyone, regardless of their plutogenic category, inserted their pinky. When Amon interfaced, a high-pitched granny voice said, “Please come to gate 12-16 in the morning two weeks from today.” The recording repeated three more times as Amon continued to the end of the lane.

  “What was that number?” Ty asked from behind.

  “Gate 12-16.”

  “That’s your floor and bridge. When are you going there?”

  “The morning two weeks from today.”

  “Make sure to remember that. If you’re hoping to get any supplies.”

  Amon nodded and continued ahead, reciting “12-16 morning two weeks, 12-16 morning two weeks,” under his breath.

  At the end of the dispenser row was another gap of a few meters with a sheer glass wall on the other side. This formed the border of another left-to-right hallway, along which he could see the backs of all the lines. Drawn by the pleasant sunny glow from the window, Amon stepped up and looked outside. Above, cloud wisps wavered like mirages in azure. Below was the city—not the slums, but the sprawling condos and office towers of Free Tokyo. Strangely, this area appeared to be in much better shape than the blighted stretch of Tokyo he had seen on his way to the Sanzu River. The walls of the skyscrapers looked clean and new, the windows polished, the roads swept. But if so, what for? Since this area would appear tidy to Free Citizens on the ImmaNet either way, there was no more reason to actually maintain it than anywhere else in the metropolis … unless this isolated pocket of tidiness was for the sake of the bankdead who looked out the rear window of Delivery just like Amon was doing right then … ?

  Down below, running left to right along the base of the nearest buildings, was a body of water spanned by three identical suspension bridges. The bridges had two levels with four lanes each—all jammed with traffic—and were joined together by steel scaffolding into a single massive structure. Amon recognized it as the Bridge of Compassion: the only land route connecting the District of Dreams to Free Tokyo. This meant that the sliver of water on its left was the Tokyo Canal and on its right the Sanzu River, as the bridge also served as a dam that separated the metropolis’s seawater from fresh. Several enormous pipes ran across alongside it. These pumped in the ink, both Fleet and nutritional, which was diverted through Delivery to a matrix of smaller pipes supplying every vendor and feeding station across the island. The vehicles coming and going across the bridge seemed to be a mix of charity personnel trucks, slum tour buses, and private cars, taking a highway on the Free Tokyo side and a ramp on the island side that curved around a gardened square to the lower levels of Delivery just below the window.

  As Amon stared in a daze at the sole link between the city he’d inhabited since his memories were born and the one he inhabited now, thoughts flashed in his head like lightning on a black sky. He remembered the promoguiltumentaries and docucharitisements like the one he’d watched with Rick in Self Serve. Just a few steps away, at that very moment, a reporter was creating such programming, and yet everything Amon had experienced cut through the credibility of what the man asserted like a dull knife through fatty meat, slow and snagging.

  “Amon!” barked Ty from behind, beckoning down the outgoing lane. “Time to go home.”

  Home. Now seemed as good a time as any to go there, whether that meant the BioPen, his old apartment in Jinbocho, his elevator in Xenocyst, his dream landscape, or somewhere else entirely. But could any place built on a foundation of lies ever merit the word?

  It was in the lineup on his way out that Amon saw her.

  The reporter kept interviewing the career volunteers and approaching bankdead as supplies were handed out and the freekeepers continued to conduct the line. But now, in the midst of this, was a woman Amon hadn’t seen there before. She was surrounded by a group of men and women carrying assault dusters and wearing skin-tight armor like the Charity Brigade except their plastic was tinted gold.

  Even though Amon was certain he’d never seen her before, she somehow seemed familiar. Wearing black chinos and a dark brown shirt with cuffs and collar unbuttoned, she was beautiful, though in a somewhat boyish way, with silky brown skin, short hair, and a small lithe body. Her movements were graceful but purposive, her features delicate and distinctively Indian, her expression calm and confident with a certain hint of unpliable fierceness. It wasn’t until she blinked though—her long, sharp, scythe-like eyelashes rending the air in the naked world just as they had in the Free World—that Amon realized who she was … or at least narrowed down the possibilities of who she had to be to two.

  Her build and complexion and face were more feminine and soft, her torso more curvy, the line of her lips and jaw more gentle, and her hands slightly smaller. But if not for the difference in gender, she would have looked exactly like both the activist and recruiter that had interviewed Amon—exactly like the Birla sisters in their digiguises as men.

  But which one is she? he wondered with cold fear as she strode confidently across the open space, the box of mercenaries seeming to shield her from all imaginable threats. Rashana or Anisha?

  If the woman was the activist called Makesh who’d warned him of coming danger in Sushi Migration and who he’d contacted on the verge of bankdeath, then she could be the key to his salvation—the only person who might scoop him from this ephemeral wasteland and help him find justice. If she was the recruiter who’d helped Sekido infect his left hand with that sinister virus, then she was his greatest threat, surely eager to snatch him, extract his incriminating information, and dispose of him however she might desire. But how could he tell the difference when they were twins who looked almost exactly alike?

  Amon kept his eye on her in an unfocused way, searching for aspects of her presence that would answer these crucial questions without catching her gaze. He wanted to hang back and avoid moving any closer until he could be sure he was safe, but knew this would cause a disturbance in the crowd around him that would only draw her attention more assuredly, so he shuffled his way slowly and inexorably ahead as she approached his line.

  To his surprise, she called out to someone ahead of him and began to talk with them. There were a few tall people ahead of Amon that blocked their face at first, but soon the crowd shifted and between their parted heads he saw, to his amazement, that it was Rick. The Birla sister said something, and then Rick replied, giving her a sour look as if to express his disappointment about something. They know each other? Amon thought, wishing that there had been some way to hear the rest of Rick’s story before this moment.

  After exchanging a few more words, the woman swept her gaze around the room as though searching for someone. Amon bent his knees to duck down as slowly and inconspicuously as he could, trying to give his face cover behind the head of a tall man in front of him. To his relief, she seemed to overlook him and soon turned to walk away, her guards parting for her and doing an about face so they could follow her in box-like formation. She then led them around behind the supply table, went through the door between the freekeepers, and was gone.

  10

  BETWEEN SLUM & STARS, DUSK

  Keeping his shoulder pressed against the wall to feel like he was grounded to something, Amon ascended the banister-less stairpath. He’d never been afraid of heights to begin with and scaling disposcrapers daily to reach his new ro
om or fulfill his construction duties had diminished what minor fright he had initially experienced. But they were now approaching one of the highest peaks in Xenocyst and more than two dozen stories above the rooftops below he felt a churning rush of vertigo whenever he glanced down. The fact that the gray rectangles of about a dozen embyrbrycks were stacked unevenly on his cradled forearms only increased his worry that he might lose balance. Best to hug close to the wall, lean back slightly to make sure the load fell against his stomach and chest, and stay focused on the ascent. One foot after the other, stair by stair. It only took four or five steps to reach the top of a flight on the narrow skyscraper shaft, and Amon felt his breathing stop for a split second every time he reversed direction.

  Just ahead, Vertical and Rick were carrying a small table together, with Rick facing forward in the rear and Vertical backing up above him. Both seemed completely relaxed, and although Amon wanted to stop for a moment to settle his jitters, he forced himself to keep climbing, not wanting to admit his fear. Just a few more stories.

  It was the autumnal equinox, and Vertical was taking Amon and Rick to the rooftop of the Cyst to attend Xenocyst’s fall festival. Helping out with the preparations after a full day on reproductive waste duties was turning out to be exhausting, but Amon was looking forward to the extra supplies he had heard would be distributed as part of the celebration. When at last they reached the top, he breathed a sigh of relief, but this seemed to release the pent-up jangles from his nerves and he began to shake, spilling the embyrbrycks onto the rooftop.

  “Better pick those up before someone else does,” said Vertical, steadily receding across the bustling rooftop with the table, “unless you want to lose all the credit for lugging them up.”