This highly technical argument had the room befuddled for a time, and soon some of the councilors who had been nodding their heads during Barrow’s speech used this opening to begin insisting upon the superior advantages of going to war after all. But to everyone’s surprise, Barrow himself spoke up against Book. “Actually, from my understanding of the political situation, I believe that there is a good chance Amon’s viral exposé will have a major impact. You see, Full Choice is originally a Moderate Choice faction. This means that they have traditionally received funding from the SpawnU Consortium. Since the death of the Birla founders, Fertilex has been breaking away from SpawnU under the influence of Anisha and she has been funding Full Choice to advance her own ends. However, the fact that the Full Choice party maintains its identity as an organization distinct from the Absolute Choice party, even nominally, tells us that it is not fully in the hands of Anisha and must continue to receive part of its funding from SpawnU. The Full Choice party, therefore, is still a swing variable in the current political arrangement, and SpawnU will be trying urgently to cut deals with it to bring down the coalition government. For this reason, I believe that the coalition is highly fragile and that the SpawnU Consortium will seize the chance to take advantage of this exposé.
“A massive scandal implicating the coalition could very likely spur Full Choice to blame Absolute Choice for everything. Whether this would be in an effort to return to Moderate Choice or to strengthen itself as an independent third party depends on what the SpawnU lobby behind them wishes to achieve. Either way, I believe that if such a recording went viral, it could bring the government crashing down, and this would open up the possibility for the crowdcare fine reductions to be reversed. Then supplies might be increased to their former levels as Amon suggested. At the very least, it will direct public attention towards the conditions here, and the economic power of pity and guilt can only improve them, Book’s objections notwithstanding. Because, while he is entirely right that an inquiry would struggle to nail the Philanthropy Syndicate with any legal responsibility, that wouldn’t prevent the media from making them appear politically responsible if the seg was compellingly spun, a task I’m certain the SpawnU Consortium and Rashana will pursue eagerly.”
Stunned by Barrow’s eloquent defense of Amon’s plan, despite having energetically proposed his own only minutes earlier, the room went silent for a while. When discussion started up again, it shifted to the logistics of how to realize it in practice. And soon, without a definitive vote being held, Amon watched as all the councilors began working together to make it happen, reluctantly or enthusiastically.
While the details were being finalized, a task force was assembled and the digital quarantine became their center of operations. Select residents were delegated specific roles, weapons and equipment were gathered, and a gang of Opportunity Scientists was robbed for their uniforms so Xenocyst could have a template to sew more of their own.
Everyone came to Hippo frequently for advice, as he seemed to take to his role as central coordinator with renewed relish. The look of smoldering rage and defeat he’d worn for weeks had vanished, to be replaced by a sort of lucid determination, his eyes now receptive again to those who needed him. Amon even heard him laugh a few times, noting how he became particularly absorbed in planning the defensive strategies of Ty’s armed backup crew. To Amon, he seemed relieved to finally have an excuse to resist—to do something, anything, for those who suffered—without compromising his long-cherished resolution to be a xenocyst, and Amon was happy that his plan had offered this kind man, this friend who had saved him from death and despair, a new source of hope.
Vertical led a scouting crew charged with recruiting Tamper. With binoculars and telescopes salvaged from Barrow’s trove, her scouts took posts on the disposcraper rooftops along the bank of the Sanzu River, and she instructed them to ring a signal bell to get Tamper’s attention if they spotted him. Over the course of several days, he was sighted numerous times, wandering in and out of view along streets that ended at the far shore, and after a dozen rings he finally stopped and took notice. Seeming to spy the watch stationed high across the river, he walked over to the railing along the bank, commandeered a boat, and parked it beneath the building where the bell had sounded. Vertical dashed over and had only briefly described the situation when Tamper disembarked through a crack in a shelter, climbed to their post, and began to head south without a word, taking for granted that Vertical would follow along and guide him directly to Barrow’s trove for the electronic components he would need. When Tamper arrived at the Cyst the following day, he had merely greeted Hippo, his old friend and benefactor, with a nod, and went straight for the elevator Amon had once slept in. There he holed himself up for weeks, designing the new devices they would need. When they were complete, he went off to Delivery to test them and—leaving a coded message with Book that they had worked satisfactorily on both a receptacle and a dispenser—vanished, presumably back to haunt his son on the edge of Free Tokyo, leaving the devices neatly arranged on the floor of the elevator.
At the same time as the search for Tamper began, efforts were underway to enlist Rashana. The signal bells on the roof of the Cyst were rung in the pre-decided pattern and that very evening her PhantoCopter landed there. In the privacy of the digital quarantine, compromised only by the presence of Rashana’s BodyBank, Hippo told Rashana everything and requested her support. To everyone’s relief, Rashana seemed excited. She confirmed their read on the political situation, with only a few minor revisions and additions, explaining that from all the sources she had consulted it seemed likely their plan would have a huge effect if successful, and promised to do her part. Her first step would be to call a strategic brainstorm on the ideal media presentation, and Hippo suggested inviting the Books to contribute their psychological expertise.
During the meeting, Hippo had also delivered a message directly from Amon: he was living in Xenocyst with Rick and they would appreciate if she could meet them on the roof of the Cyst at midnight the day of the sabotage. This had required Hippo to admit that he’d lied to Rashana about Amon’s being there, but when he’d tried to explain that it was only to protect Amon, etcetera, etcetera, Rashana had interrupted, saying, “There’s no need to explain. I know. Just tell him that I’m glad to hear he’s finally ready to speak with me and that I’ll be here at the time he requests.”
Amon had considered meeting her with Hippo, as he and the council surely would have let him do so if he’d wanted to. But after much wavering he’d decided to approach her indirectly in this way. If they talked now, Amon was afraid that she might insist he come with her right away, and he wasn’t ready to leave just yet. First of all, he hoped that, once the exposé operation was complete, Rick might change his mind about avoiding her, for if Rashana did her part, Rick would see for himself that she could be trusted. (Though Rick might not be able to acquire a training bank as Amon might, since he had been liquidated and lacked a BodyBank, Rashana had to be able to do something for him.) But a change had also come over Amon. Yes, the ever-increasing lack was excruciating and their precarious relations with the OpScis were terrifying. After Mayuko, or whoever it was, came to find him, he felt the need to leave more urgently than ever. And understanding jubilee, vindicating himself, finding the forest, were all still of profound importance to him. Nevertheless, he couldn’t forget what Rick and Vertical had said about focusing on what was close at hand. Through helping Barrow, Amon had begun to earn his forgiveness, and he wanted to do so much more for others so that he might one day forgive himself. Here was his chance to show Free Citizens what iniquities made their lives possible and give something back for what he had done to make it this way. The people he’d met here too—Hippo, Ty, Vertical, Book, Little Book, Tamper, and all the rest—though he’d only known them a short time, were closer to his heart than anyone he’d met in the metropolis, except for Rick and Mayuko. He wanted to make sure that they were okay, that they survived the greatest c
hallenge Xenocyst had ever faced, and since it was his idea, he felt obligated to see it through. So instead of rushing off before the imminent cataclysm, he volunteered to be one of the frontline saboteurs, willing to risk it all if anything went wrong.
And so it was, once everything was set, that he trudged up the Road to Delivery with a crew of Xenocysters dressed like OpScis and crossed the bridge to the entrance, his head swimming with thoughts of what might happen when he met Rashana at midnight, his chest tight with fear of what lay ahead as he put his foot over the threshold.
18
INSIDE DELIVERY
The moment Amon stepped into Delivery and began to line up in the lane of receptacles, he made eye contact with someone familiar and felt an eerie chill mist up his spine. Was that really Minister Kitao? It was difficult to tell at first because the man’s lower back had given out, his whole torso hunched forward to the right from his waist, and it was unclear if he would reach the minister’s two meters when stretched out to full height. What should have been neatly gelled short hair on his head was a frizzy mop, and he was even skinnier than the gangly man Amon remembered, his broad face drawn ghoulishly tight, his long arms nearly dangling to the floor. Even so, it was difficult to deny the resemblance with the minister’s former digimade features. He was also wearing the brand name patchwork robes of an OpSci priest, which matched Barrow’s story, though Barrow had said nothing about back problems, so could Kitao have been injured somehow?
Judging by his place in line, the man must have been walking just a few paces ahead of them along the bridge outside, and Amon was surprised he hadn’t noticed someone with such distinctive posture and dress until he’d looked back at them. Crooking his neck around, his face about level with his solar plexus, the man’s gaze had traveled up Amon’s body from his toes to his eyes and remained locked there ever since. The man—Kitao, yes, the delirious glaze over his eyes was unmistakable, it had to be Kitao—wore a perplexed expression as though he thought he remembered Amon’s face but wasn’t sure. Had yet another of his targets recognized him, now, at this most precarious of moments? It seemed impossible that Kitao would remember Amon’s face when he had mostly seen him rendered as an aphid and had only spoken to him when he was digimade as himself for less than a minute. Perhaps the intense stress of the experience had burned Amon’s face into his recollection, as Amon had often feared. Then again, perhaps Amon’s patchwork pants and jacket had caught his attention. Were their disguises flawed somehow? Could OpScis see through them? Amon felt harrowed under the stare of this hunched apparition from his past, his guilt scraped out to the surface of his mind, and he imagined Kitao headbutting his way back through the crowd like some enraged, hobbling dinosaur to choke him with his long-fingered hands.
But without saying or doing anything, Kitao turned his tired grimace away and continued to shamble ahead in line. Amon peeled his gaze from the man’s back and turned it towards Rick to inquire with his eyes whether his friend had noticed him too. Apparently oblivious, Rick was already stepping towards the receptacle on the left row that the council taskforce had assigned him, and Amon realized that he had almost missed his receptacle, third from the door on the right, and stepped up to it quickly before the inexorable crowd behind could push him past it.
He reached his right hand into his pocket to put a small electronic device like a closely fitted thimble onto the tip of his pinky finger and inserted it into the machine. Tamper had designed the device to block the genome reader from taking a sample of him, while impersonating the genome of a recently deceased resident of Xenocyst, thereby reducing the chances of the Charity Brigade learning his identity and potentially blacklisting him as a hungry ghost. At the same time, it transmitted malicious inputs. When Amon retracted his finger and slipped the device off into his pocket again, the virus was already doing its work. Other members of their crew, including Rick, had inserted their fingers into five other receptacles in the same way. They had lacked the materials for Tamper to make devices for all the machines, though they could have made more than six if they’d wanted to. But the taskforce had decided on this number, in consultation with Tamper, because it would create a serious enough disturbance for their purposes without immediately appearing intentional.
Amon and the other five men in the line behind him all moved ahead, past the intersecting hallway where the supply tables stood to the vending lane, and inserted their thimbled fingers into the machines there. No supplies came out as the vendors instantly stopped working, and at around the same time the receptacles began to break down one by one. The virus for the receptacles had been programmed to delay the malfunction to coincide with that of the vendors. This way the Brigade would have trouble seeing the connection between certain people inserting their fingers into machines and certain machines going haywire. They might analyze data from the sensors monitoring the room and discover people with little devices on the tips of their fingers. But the sabotage crew was expected to be long gone by the time such conclusions were reached, and since they were dressed like OpScis and hadn’t provided their own DNA it would be their rivals that took the blame. The vending virus, on the other hand, had been designed to work immediately, as this was crucial to the next stage of their operation: the riot.
“What’s this!” Rick called out to the freekeepers and career volunteers around the pitypromo table. “Nothing’s coming out!”
“Yeaaah!” Amon shouted, pointing to his hole-filled sneakers with a what-the-fuck scowl. “Where my shoes!?”
The other four men in their crew began to growl at the Delivery staff with similar pretend anger. Soon the weight of the line had pushed them ahead. Amon and the rest tried to put their fingers in the next set of machines, but when these broke down and failed to eject their supplies in the same way, they began to shoulder their way back to the first machines that had supposedly betrayed them. Those next in line also found that supplies wouldn’t come out of several of the machines, almost half by this point, and began to join in the clamor. “I’m not goin’ anywhere till I get my fuckin’ shoes!” Amon bellowed as he shoved against the tense, squabbling tangle that had formed in the lane, the functional machines now the locus towards which the weight of the crowd surged. There was no resisting the immense force of all the bodies, and Amon found himself pushed backwards step by step, but refused to give in and saw dozens nearby digging in their heels. Soon he was squashed against the back wall that overlooked the Bridge of Compassion, his cheek flattened on the cold glass. Turning around, he leaned in to resist turning left into the exit line and a barricade of other bodies assisting his, including Rick and their partners, soon formed. Amon could almost see the pressure of the rapidly swelling crowd clog on the vending machine walls as the jostling back and forth grew more violent, and he feared they might soon rip out of their mooring in the ceiling and topple onto innocent heads, when a freekeeper poked her torso into the space between receptacles and vendors that opened into the intersecting hallway, the assault duster in her hands bespeaking her authority. “Due to technical difficulties, we will now be providing supplies at the tables,” she shouted. “Those at the end of the vending lane, continue immediately into the exit lane. Everyone else form a line right here.” She swung the barrel of her duster forward to indicate the start of the line at the mouth of the hallway.
With Rick right in front of him, Amon allowed the crowd to shuffle him into the exit lane and started to push his way towards the intersecting hallway and the exit to the bridge beyond it. HandyPedes peeked out from holes in the ceiling and crawled down in their strange jittery, tottering way on dozens of tiny prongs and tools of different sizes poking from their long, slender torsos. When they reached the backs of the vendors, they began prying open small panels and inspecting inside with flexible lights and lenses. From beyond them, past the hallway, Amon heard baby wails contributing to the racket and saw two career volunteers unloading the compartments from the backs of the receptacles. With the devices shut down, th
e air-conditioning inside was no longer working and the babies needed to be ejected immediately to maintain their commercial viability. The occupied compartments—teary-eyed grimacing babies visible through the walls of the glass cubes—were being stacked on the back of an electric cart, presumably for shipment elsewhere.
When the line had moved forward a few paces and Amon was passing the HandyPedes, they were fiddling with something behind a detached panel just above him and he could see right, down the intersecting hallway, to the table where supplies were being frantically handed out. The female freekeeper who’d spoken earlier directed the incoming bankdead line towards the tables and the outgoing line to the exits while two other freekeepers flanked the supply stacks behind the table. They tried to keep the crowd orderly, but the bankdead pressure from behind and their eagerness to get their share were too great, so that the lines just kept widening and spilling into an even greater area of the hallway. Once someone got to the front of the line, a career volunteer would have them insert their pinky, or the pinky of their infant or child, into the hole in the genome reader cube. Those with potentially marketable babies were waved over to another career volunteer, who took the babies and lowered them into a diagnostic crib, where scriggling robotic limbs attached to the bars began their health check. The babies were then removed from the crib and either returned to the mothers or inserted through a plastic flap into nursery crates stacked behind the table. Each bankdead then received different supply packages from two other volunteers depending on their plutogenic category. Already the volunteers were running out of pre-packed bags and were beginning to gather supplies from crates behind them to stuff into empty ones. Two of them who had pushed their way to the back of the vendors to retrieve supplies from the shorted-out dispensers were struggling to get back to the tables, resorting instead to tossing them over the heads of the crowd to the table. Amon watched the famished bankdead eyeing these near-flying items with palpable covetousness.
The Naked World Page 47
