The Naked World

by Eli K. P. William

  For all these reasons, in the final analysis, the Charity Gift Economy was a process that arose spontaneously from the interactions of free individuals all pursuing their self-interests in accordance with laws—not from some imposition of any will over another. To call it ‘breeding’ was simply a misnomer. Rather, it was in keeping with the ideals of liberty and individual autonomy that made the free market possible.

  “I’m still unclear about how this relates to your original concern, Amon? Could you elaborate?”

  “Well, I didn’t find the answer of the Books particular satisfying.”

  “I would certainly hope not.”

  “No, it’s obviously a partial, self-serving picture of the situation here. But I couldn’t come up with any follow-up questions. Instead, it got me thinking about the idea of freedom and the different kinds of meaning it can have.”

  Amon glanced up at the sky as if to summon inspiration from the patches of stars, but a thin gray film had bled from the interlinked cloud blots into the pockets between them, hazing and dulling their light.

  “Even though I’m learning a lot from the Books, figuring out the terrain from my trips outside Xenocyst—my Hinkongo is good enough that I can ask questions of my co-workers now too—there’s still a lot I don’t understand about this place. So I could be totally wrong about all this. But, I mean, in some ways I almost agree that we do have a certain kind of freedom here in the District of Dreams. Free Citizens supposedly get all the freedom they can earn, but this means they must earn all their freedom, every bit of it. Here everyone has their basic needs met—something to eat, a place to sleep—without having to earn any money or serve the market. In a certain way, this allows us to be free or ensures that the freedom we have is in some sense truly free. In theory, it almost seems too good to be true, like the District of Dreams really is the best of all possible slums. No one is compelled to have a job or do anything in particular, so, in principle, we can do whatever we like with our time. Often this means just lazing about, but it could mean trying to better the situation, as it does at Xenocyst. Though we may not get paid for what we do here, I feel like we’re helping people that really need it, with the hospital for mothers and the orphanage and everything, and we all contribute to maintain order and security for the whole enclave, which benefits everyone. Also, I can’t say all the art is to my taste, but it’s starting to grow on me and I can see how much it uplifts not just the regular residents but the artists themselves.”

  Amon paused for a moment to think of all the creativity he had witnessed, from the architectural comics to the children piloting make-believe spaceship kites to the band and dancers performing right beside them.

  “So what I want to say is … it amazes me how much we’re able to better ourselves and the community through our own efforts with so little. But at the same time, there’s a limit to how much improvement we can make because life here is a tough slog. We may not need to work, but to get bare subsistence—the minimum nutrition, shelter, and clothes designed without any thought for comfort or style—just to get that, we have to use up all our energy on pointless tasks. We’re always exhausted from constantly rebuilding our homes, climbing these insanely tall buildings to sleep each night, and descending to the feeding stations again the next day. Then there’s the supply pickup, which is a long and dangerous trek whatever route you take, and everywhere you go, even in Xenocyst, it’s packed and hot and suffocating and falling apart constantly … People like you and Book over forty are a rarity, right? I think that says a lot … Have I gone too far?”

  “No,” said Hippo, keeping his embracing eyes on Amon’s. “Please go on.”

  “I mean, I see all this and I look back on my former life. Rick and I were Liquidators as you know. We dedicated the better part of our adult lives to banishing people here. We even felt pride in our work. That’s how deluded we were. So many people condemned to misery by our hands. Losing the pricing on my actions isn’t the only thing that makes it hard for me to get up, to get moving …” to go on living, he thought.

  “I wish someone could give me the answer. I mean, I just don’t see what we’re supposed to be achieving here. We may not have to earn any of our freedom, but without the freedom to earn it seems like we can never be free at all. Instead, we labor away just to maintain conditions that are barely tolerable and nothing seems to improve. Despite being exempt from paying for our actions we’re basically trapped doing the same things over and over. Don’t get me wrong. Xenocyst provides a lot of great services, but so do the venture charities, right? And in the end, we’re basically supporting them by providing them with human resources. Not only that, but we depend on them for the most basic necessities to stay alive. That means our fates are decided by the same plutogenic algorithms as everyone else in the camps. Our choices are limited by the same humanitarian pressures. So why don’t we just let the venture charities take charge of us? What are we all striving for when it’s obvious that nothing we do changes anything? Aside from our instinct to survive, why do we make any effort at all? Why do so many people get up off of their floor each morning?”

  The moment Amon uttered this last sentence, he immediately regretted it. It felt so good to express the doubts that had been festering inside him for weeks that he had let too much slip. He couldn’t believe what brutal criticism he had just leveled at a community that Hippo seemed to firmly believe in. Yet to his surprise, Hippo showed no signs of anger. He simply looked away, hanging his head, as though he couldn’t bear to confront Amon’s words. As Amon’s focus shifted from speaking to his surround, he suddenly became aware of the music again, stuck on repeat as the band played the same complex refrain again and again. The fluteboxing and zithers spiralled rhythms over the disjointed pounding of the beatboxing while the singers wove in trance-like throat-vibrato punctuated with stabs and chirps of scratching. Gradually, almost imperceptibly, each successive loop had been growing softer and softer, until finally the music was too quiet to hear. A pause followed as the whole crowd, startled by this unexpected silence, seemed to hold their breath. Then everyone—from the dancers to the seated audience to the scampering children—began to cheer and stomp on the rooftop.

  Despite cries of encore, the musicians began to clear away their instruments and disperse, as a new art form immediately took the stage. Now that the embyrbrycks were beginning to expire, they turned a bright orange, like molten glass, and began to release a constant spray of cinders that fluttered up and away on the breeze. Apparently, at this phase of their decay, the bricks were soft and malleable, like luminescent clay, for men and women worked together squeezing and molding and mushing them into new shapes—delicate ferns, birds, demons, stern-looking men, enigmatic women, skyscraper temples, gods. Depending on the contours of the sculptures, the cinders flittered off on the breeze in different formations, and cinderworkers standing behind the embyrsculptures waved paper fans to channel them on precise courses. Usually the cinders formed glittering rivers or abstract cloud-like patterns, but sometimes they took recognizable forms—Saturn, four-leaf clovers, hearts, open palms, constellations, mushrooms—appearing momentarily in the space and then disintegrating into nothing. Amon looked around for Rick and Vertical but spotted them nowhere, and turned back to Hippo to find his gaze waiting.

  “Those are poignant and incisive concerns, Amon,” he said. “In fact, they cut right to the heart of the most urgent issues we face here. I might have had answers for you once a time long ago. Unfortunately, my thoughts on this matter are no longer clear.”

  Hippo drained the dregs of his suposhu and laid the bottle on the ground. “I called you and Rick over here tonight because I wanted to show the council how much improvement you had made. I also wasn’t one hundred percent sure about you myself. But I appreciate your honesty. Just promise me this.”

  “Yes?”

  “Never repeat anything you told me to anyone. I understand the subtlety of your points, but the council might mistake it for c
rashdead arrogance.”

  “Has the council already decided?” said Amon with a sudden pang of anxiety. “Are Rick and I going to have to leave?”

  “I’m doing what I can.”

  “Thank you so much,” said Amon with another bow.

  “I wouldn’t get excited. I’m only an advisor. I don’t run this place.”

  “But I really appreciate all your support. Can I ask you a question?”

  “Asking never hurts. About what?”

  “About the council …”

  “Yes?”

  “I don’t know. I mean, you said you were arguing in my favor because you kept your BodyBank like me. What did you mean? Is that why you’re helping us now?”

  “I won’t be talking about that tonight. If you’d asked about my name, that would have been easy. I received my name before the council existed, so I never had a hearing and it has no connection to my story. They call me Hippo because of the way I look.” Hippo smiled wryly. “Not even I can deny it.

  “But I cannot tell you much more than that. Because, you see, I am the founder of this community and Xenocyst is my story. It is the culmination of my life’s work. I would need to tell you about the history of this community for you to understand who I am. But that would count as education. So forget about me. Let’s concentrate on you. What can you do to show the council that you’re worth something to us?”

  “I—I don’t know. I’m already doing the best I can just staying on top of everything.”

  “Well I’m afraid it’s not good enough. Find something exceptional to impress them with or, I’m sorry, you and Rick may only have a week left.”

  A week, thought Amon, frowning into Hippo’s embracing, troubled eyes. What could useless crashdead like us achieve in—

  Suddenly there was a great cackling laugh from the direction of the stage. There, a man in a rapidly flaking black cloak stood raising his arm to the tatters of starry sky as a cloud of cinders billowed around him. He spoke in a high-pitched, dramatic voice, and Amon caught enough of the Hinkongo to know he was telling a story. The storyteller was accompanied by a fluteboxer, who provided background music and sound effects. Children were gathered at the storyteller’s feet, sparkle-eyed and entranced by the lurid performance in voice, flute, and light. To his right now stood a massive embyrsculpture creature, with the head of some bird of prey on an elephantine torso; arms, claws, and tentacles jutting out from all sides; the whole motley body propped up on a dolphin fin curled between its small, stubby legs. Other sculptures smaller but no less exquisite, spanning styles from the surreal to the abstract, were arrayed across the stage around him. When the storyteller began gesturing to these, Amon realized that they formed a tableau of a scene from some famous myth. The material was too fragile to handle now and the sculptors had stepped away to calmly observe their redly glowing creations as they dissolved quickly. This was the cue for the cinderworkers to step in and begin to fan away with greater speed and focus than before, dazzling dot shapes and images taking form in the air so briefly Amon’s mind could only register a pulse of the sublime before they were gone and his fear returned.

  12

  THE RESORT, THE GIFTED TRIANGLE

  1

  Beneath a clear, late-morning autumn sky, Amon crept along a curving rooftop ledge behind Rick and Ty, looking up at a cylindrical glass building that loomed before them. The ledge was the upper edge of disposcrapers built of cream-colored, brand name shelters that circumscribed the lip of a huge crater in the roofscape sprawling endlessly around them. It was a drop of about thirty meters to the bottom of the crater and only about ten meters from the uneven wall atop which they stood to the sheer, see-through surface of the fifty-story structure that rose from it. Inside the cylinder were thin walls of what looked like plaster that divided its interior into high-ceilinged suites. These were shaped like triangles with a rounded outer face, resembling deep-dish pie slices viewed from the crust side. There were eight such slices on each floor, and the building rose far over their heads, making for hundreds of suites, each with a Jacuzzi by the floor-to-ceiling window and then plush rugs leading to a king-sized bed.

  On a mission to settle a dispute with upstart Opportunity Scientists, Amon, Rick, and Ty were passing through a brandclan enclave built around a slum resort.

  “Those rooms aren’t much to look at for a resort,” said Rick, when Ty halted to survey the crater.

  “Maybe not to you crashdead,” said Ty, “but I wouldn’t mind grabbing a few winks in one of those beds.”

  “You don’t think they’re meant to be seen with an overlay?” Amon said to Rick.

  To Amon’s naked eyes, the interior of the rooms definitely appeared more shabby and plain than their size would suggest, with carpet stains, patches of discoloration on the walls, glass smudging, and a total lack of patterning. Though as Ty had implied, they were still lavishly furnished compared to what camp denizens were used too.

  “Oh, for sure. I’m just calling it like it looks. You’d agree?”

  “Um yeah, but—”

  “I don’t think this one is for looking at anyways,” cut in Ty. “More for looking out, like peeping.”

  “You mean people come here just to stare at a wall?” said Rick.

  While the upper suites above them looked out over the slumscape, the lower ones faced straight at the disposcrapers encircling the resort. There were no curtains on the windows or barriers of any kind between the hotel and the shelters, though a murmuration of glassy butterflies, bees, hummingbirds, bats, and other CareBots sparkled churning formations in the sky above its roof, their fragile beauty and grace somehow only emphasizing the threat they posed.

  “Not just walls. Take a look at the sand garden.” Ty pointed down below to the floor of the gap between them and the glass façade where it was ringed by a thin patch of sand. “At the other resorts you’ll see a wider space with grassy golf hills, gardens, sculptures, maybe some hedges. Usually big walls for privacy too. But I don’t think this one’s designed to be pretty or exclusive. It’s designed so the guests can get a view of who’s living here.”

  “I don’t see what’s so interesting about them,” said Rick. “Just look at them now.”

  Only two residents were visible inside the crater, a man and a woman, both sprawled out on different stairwells napping.

  “I guess this resort is part of one of those educational charities,” said Amon, vaguely remembering a humanidocupromo he’d seen years ago, “eh, Ty?”

  “Yeah. We’ll be crossing paths with a tour guide in a minute, so just listen close to what they say.”

  From what Amon had heard about slum resorts, a certain percentage of the fees for all actions performed in them was donated to venture charities, so the visitors could let loose with conscience soothed. They played sports, took seminars, glutted themselves on gourmet foods, knowing they were making a difference while enlightening themselves about the plight of the world’s most unfortunate. It was a chance to experience actually living in a slum, without, of course, actually living in a slum.

  Though most of the guests were supposed to be out on tours at this hour, Amon could see a few still lounging in their rooms. A young man soaked in his Jacuzzi, gazing out the window with an apparently forced frown of concern despite his relaxed eyes. An elderly couple sprawled naked on their bed, not moving, at least not right then … Amon supposed that many of the guests were exhibitionists of one sort or another, whether sexual or pecuniary, though the windows could be tinted to satisfy those who preferred privacy, unaware it was an ImmaNet setting the bankdead couldn’t see. Further down in the crater, Amon spotted a bankdead mother and child in cream-colored brand wear stepping out of a shelter onto the side of the matching cream wall. Holding his mother’s hand as she led him up a railed stairwell, the child looked up curiously at the hotel and Amon wondered what he saw.

  “For a place designed to look out, they sure do a good job of showing off,” said Rick, apparently fol
lowing a similar line of thought. “Fuck, what I wouldn’t give to join that buffet line.”

  On the fourth floor was a restaurant serving brunch, with rows of steaming trays surrounded by rows of tables with patrons chowing on colorful heaps of food.

  “Oh yeah,” said Amon. “Then we might have energy for a workout.” He pointed to the gym occupying the floor above the restaurant. There, overweight tourists worked machines and, in one corner, lay on mats for a stretching class.

  “Not me,” said Ty. “Let me into that restaurant and I’d never leave the trays. Not for one second, I tell you, until they kicked me out of there.”

  “Yeah. You have your workout, Amon. I’m right there with Ty, packing it in till I’m about to explode and waiting for the moment a space opens up inside me again. Then I’d scoop some of that sweet, juicy whatever they’ve got right into my mouth. Eat just a bit faster than I digest so my stomach learns to keep pace.”