America City

by Chris Beckett

  And above it all there were clouds. They were piled up in layers, white and gray, puffy cumulus clouds and streaky cirrus wisps, continents of cloud, continents and islands and shoals, one above another, and all of them made of nothing but water and air. It was as if the whole city, tiny and fragile, lay at the foot of a gigantic well.

  CHAPTER 15

  ‘Hi, I’m Henry McKenzie. I’m sixty-six. I live in Spokane, Washington, home of Father’s Day. I’ve done all kinds of jobs. Used to drive a delivery vehicle before they all went driverless. Then I worked as a security guy in a supermarket. Did building work for a time, too, until my arthritis wouldn’t let me. These days I’m a truck supervisor. I work for a hauling company. I check over the robot trucks when they come back to the depot for a service. Not the motor or the tyres or anything, obviously – the AIs do that – but I make sure the paintwork’s okay, that kind of thing, and I sign off the work that the service machines do: it’s kind of a legal formality. I’m also responsible for the depot itself. I organize the contractors to keep it clean, and about once a week something comes up on a service that requires the hands of a human being to fix it, and it’s my job to arrange that. We don’t have a mechanic on-site, but there are contractors you can hire and of course I get to know the guys pretty well.

  ‘I’ve been doing this for a couple of years, but I’m always looking around for the next job. Kelly’s, the other big trucking company with a depot in Spokane, has gone fully automated now. They have machines to check the paintwork and everything, and they have a contract with a delegated-authority service, which means that a machine can even sign off the paperwork and call in human mechanics when they’re needed. So no one’s there at all most of the time. A regional manager comes in once a month to look around and contractors still bring in yellow-coats every couple of weeks to wash the floors, same as they do in our place. Otherwise it’s just robots.

  ‘My wife and I rent a two-bedroom apartment four miles out of town, where we live with our daughter and her guy. It’s kind of cramped, but it’s the best we can do on our pay. We’ve never tried to buy a place. Too hard to raise the deposit, plus the mortgage companies make you pay insurance these days in case some AI takes over from you and you can’t afford to keep up the repayments. It can put the cost up by nearly 50 percent for a guy like me.

  ‘What do I do for fun? Watch the broadscreen mainly, like most people. Go to a ball game a couple of times a year.

  ‘No, I’ve never been outside of the US, except once to Canada, and that was just a day trip, which my son bought me and my wife for an anniversary present. Can’t afford foreign travel and who’d want to go out there anyway? Canada’s alright, I guess, but from what I’ve heard, most other places are basically hell on Earth. Life’s not easy here but at least we’ve got laws and cops. Thank Christ for that wall!

  ‘No, I’ve got no medical insurance. Can’t afford that either. A case of keeping my fingers crossed and hoping for a healthy life and a quick death.

  ‘I like Senator Slaymaker. He’s worked his way up from the bottom, done jobs like mine and worse. Plus he owns the company I work for. But I don’t know if I can vote for him, all the same. I don’t want this town filling up with Californians or storm trash or whatever. They say they won’t take our jobs, but that’s what they say about the yellow-coats and I’ve never figured out how having some Venezuelan guy with a tracker cuff on his wrist coming in and sweeping our floors isn’t taking a job from an American. Okay, an American wouldn’t sweep floors for the shit money they pay those suckers but if there were no yellow-coats, maybe companies would have to pay out something resembling a decent wage.

  ‘And it’s the same with the barreduras, I figure. Slaymaker says they’ll create new jobs, but who’s to say that’s true? And anyway, I like this town the way it is. I don’t want folk from the south coming in here with their funny accents and their spicy food changing it and making me feel like I don’t belong.’

  ‘Hi, I’m Danielle Schutz, I’m a checkout oversight operative for the Great Lakes Mall in Buffalo, New York. What does that even mean, right? Believe me, I get asked that a lot! Basically, we remotely monitor the checkouts of all the stores in the mall. The checkouts are all automated, of course – they just read the contents of customers’ bags and bill them when they leave a store – but once in a while there’s a problem. We send in security guards if need be, though the store AIs have usually done that before we get to hear about it, and if a customer needs to talk to someone we link to them by videophone...’

  ‘Hey there, my name’s Dave Brooks. I’m a so-called “forestry site supervisor”, working out of Portland, Oregon. My company gets paid to take out trees that are going to die. There are lots of those in Oregon. What do I actually do? Well, if you want the truth I spend most of my time sitting around doing nothing, while robot loggers cut down trees, saw off their branches and load them onto robot trucks. Basically, we’re there because state health and safety regulations require a human supervisor be present in case of difficulty. There’s no real need for us at all. Just one of those rules they make to create jobs for saps like me. But I’m not going to argue. It just about pays my rent and buys the groceries. The logging companies are trying to get the law changed, but I’m kind of hoping this will see me out because I’m seventy-six years old...’

  ‘Hi there, I’m Peter Curie from North Dakota. I’ve done several jobs but I’m a manufacturing maintenance engineer these days. My old job was in a canning factory, but we got phased out when the factory upgraded its systems and I got a grant from the state to retrain for this job. Course lasts three days. At the end you have to answer some questions on a screen, and then you get a certificate printed out and you’re done. Basically we go out to production systems in factories where a fault has been identified. The factory AI tells us the unit that needs replacing, and then we lift it out and drop a new one in. It’s not that hard, all the units are color-coded, and the AIs give you precise instructions, right down to how many turns to give to a bolt. But it can be dangerous because some of those units are pretty damn big, and there are a couple of guys in my team who’ve lost fingers trying to get a job done in too much of a hurry. You get a set allowance of time per job, you see, and if you go over it, well, that’s your own time and you have to make it up...’

  •

  They were Americans, like Holly’s friends, but they weren’t Americans that Holly’s friends would encounter socially, or read about in the novels they read, or see in the movies they watched on their broadscreens. Holly’s friends led interesting and elaborate lives that lent themselves to such stories. These people’s jobs were dull and precarious and poorly paid, their educational level low, their horizons limited and, unless they came from areas affected by drought or floods or storms, their sense of responsibility for those affected by such disasters was almost always practically zero.

  PART 2

  CHAPTER 16

  In the winter, moist air from the Pacific Ocean streams inland from the Californian coast. It flows over the Coast Ranges, down into the Central Valley and up again onto the Sierra Nevada. As it’s pushed upwards by the mountains, it cools. The moisture condenses and falls on the peaks below, sometimes as snow and sometimes rain.

  The air is a few degrees warmer now than it would have been a few decades ago and that means more rain and less snow. The snow used to settle up there, many meters deep in places, and it would form drifts and glaciers whose meltwaters flowed all summer long down into the Central Valley and into the states to the east. Some was so deep that it lasted years. But now what snow still falls will all melt off in the spring, stripping bare the rocky peaks before summer has even reached its height. And rain just runs straight off, evaporating all the while back into the air.

  It’s no big deal as far as the planet is concerned. The mountains themselves are still the same huge shapes against the sky. Earth still follows the same old track round the sun. But living things depend on small
contingencies. On the slopes of the Sierra Nevada, and down in the valleys, there are plants and animals that depend on streams flowing for such-and-such a time, farmers who depend on meltwater to irrigate their crops, towns that depend on water tables being replenished every year. There has only been a small change in the air, and only a small change in the way that water comes down the mountains, but an entire web of consequences are flowing out from it.

  Trees die. Animals starve, or climb higher up the mountains, or wander north. And in the human world, farmers dig deeper wells, invest in costly water-saving devices, experiment with expensively engineered low-water crops, until a time comes when they can no longer borrow the money or no longer service their debts. And then they abandon everything and follow the animals north, becoming another stream, a human stream that branches and divides across America, a river of people with no money and no home, leaving crumbling buildings and rusting machinery and empty fields.

  People in the north watch their arrival with suspicion and hostility. It’s dangerous to feel sorry for them, for that might mean acknowledging an obligation to help them, to give up some part of the comfort blanket that folk wrap around themselves against the frightening world. And isn’t that blanket always threadbare? Doesn’t it always feel too thin? And anyway, if you were to look those new arrivals in the face and really acknowledge them for what they are, wouldn’t you also have to face the thing that follows behind them, the thing that has driven them north, the thing that everyone knows is moving north itself, coming closer and closer with every year? Who in their right mind would want to do that?

  CHAPTER 17

  The key was to tell a story that would connect in the right way with people’s hopes and fears. You had to make them think, If this guy wins, these fears that press in on me all the time will be eased, at least just a little bit, and the things I value, the things I rely on for comfort, will be at least just a little bit safer. It wasn’t about dispassionate analysis of the facts, it wasn’t about philosophical debate about ethical principles. It was much more visceral than that. It was about the calculus of dread and comfort that every living creature engages in, from a swallow soaring across the sky, to a mole in the darkness underground. Which way should I go? Which way offers, if only fractionally, the higher level of security, the lower level of threat?

  The calculus of dread and comfort: Holly had an instinct for it, and it was that instinct that won the presidency for Stephen Slaymaker. She even knew exactly when it happened, the precise moment when he stopped being just another contender and became instead the future occupant of the White House.

  •

  The campaign team was in the living room of Slaymaker’s ranch in the Cascades. In the huge medieval-style fireplace that Slaymaker himself had built with chunks of rough-hewn stone, a log fire was crackling on an enormous grate. It was February, and the primary season was a month away. In December and January, Slaymaker had been out in front in the race for the Freedom Party nomination, but now he’d fallen behind. He was third in the polls behind Lucy Montello and Soames Frinton, and there was some evidence that even his apparent initial surge had been in part the result of foul play, someone manipulating the polls to mislead him and send him down the wrong path.

  They were ranged in a big semicircle round the fire, with Slay-maker himself presiding in the middle. Over to the left of him there was Sue Cortez, the campaign director, the squat tough black woman Holly had first met in that dull but showy restaurant in DC. Next to her sat Jennifer Anka, director of fundraising, immaculately groomed, with a bright smile and cold, relentless eyes. After that was Ann Sellick, the communications lead, Sue’s close ally, who Holly had also first met in that DC restaurant, with the same little splash of red lipstick in the middle of her spidery face. And then there was Eve Slaymaker, the senator’s beautiful film-star wife, whose donor liaison role was about looking after the campaign’s billionaire backers. On Slaymaker’s right, there was Pete Fukayama, who led the nationwide force of volunteers; Zara Gluck, another British exile like Holly, who led on technology, and Phyllis Kotkov, the events coordinator. And then, at the very right-hand end, sat the three youngest members of the team: Jed Bulinski, who’d been given the title of strategy consultant; Quentin Fox, Slaymaker’s affable head speechwriter, and finally Holly herself, the youngest of them all. Her job title was special communications adviser, and she was paid four times more than she’d ever been paid before.

  Jed was speaking, in that smooth, super-confident way he had that always verged on boredom, as if he was being forced by the stupidity of others to repeat something that ought to be too obvious to need to be said.

  ‘I’m sorry, Senator, but our only option now is to figure out a way of radically changing track. You’ve given it your best shot, but we’re basically trying to sell a flagship policy whose appeal is mainly southern, to a party whose support and whose national convention delegates are mainly northern. Chrissakes, down along the border there we’re the fourth party. Most Latinos vote for the Partido, most black people vote Unity, and at least 50 percent of white folk vote for the Christian Party. Our heartland is here in the northwest, and yet it’s the people up here we’re asking to make sacrifices. There was a moment there, I admit, when I thought that war-footing language you worked on with Holly was going to fix that, but I’m afraid it’s obvious now we were clutching at straws. We need to find a way of ditching the policies that are turning off northern voters, and beginning to prioritize their concerns. It’s going to be tricky to do without looking like we’re waverers,’ he flashed a grin at Holly, ‘but you’ve got Ann here to help you, and I’m sure Holly can work her magic and make everything alright.’

  ‘So what you’re saying, Jed,’ Slaymaker growled, ‘if I’ve understood you correctly, is that to become president, I’ve got to give up on the single goal that was the reason for my running in the first place?’

  Behind him, on the far wall, hung a large old-fashioned map of America such as might have hung in some high-school classroom a century ago. For no particular reason, Holly noticed that it wasn’t the Peters projection map that her parents had always favored – the one that distorted the shape of countries so as to fairly represent their size – nor any of the newer projections, but the old Mercator kind: the one that preserved the shape of countries, but made them look bigger and bigger the further north you went.

  Jed shrugged. He didn’t believe that people like Slaymaker were motivated by anything other than the desire for power. He thought finer motives were just window-dressing, branding, or, if they weren’t actually the product of cynical calculation, self-deception at least. ‘Well, that’s your choice entirely, Senator. But we can all see that this whole Reconfigure America message is just not cutting it any more with Freedom Party supporters in the north, no matter how carefully we refine it, or how many billions of dollars we spend on feeders and so forth to get it over. If anyone was going to sell it, you were certainly the guy to do it, with your northern credentials and all, but people are just not buying it, even from you.’

  Holly suddenly had an idea. It was so wonderfully simple, she was amazed she hadn’t come up with it before. She raised her hand. Several other people were trying to come in – Ann, Pete, Sue, Eve – but, whether because he was already looking in her direction, or because she was his favorite, or because she represented the last hope for his precious plan, it was her that caught the senator’s eye.

  ‘Holly. What do you reckon? Can you rescue me from this guy’s rattlesnake logic?’

  ‘I think I can,’ she said. ‘I think we’ve been missing something. I think there’s a really simple solution here that’s been staring us in the face.’

  CHAPTER 18

  Back in October, when Holly was in that drig on the way back from DC, Richard had been busy at the school where he taught drama for a few hours every week. He and a colleague called Alice were putting on a production of Doctor Faustus, and they were meeting to finalize the substantia
l cuts they were going to make to Marlowe’s rambling play. When Holly messaged him to say she was on her way, Richard and Alice were sitting side by side in the sunshine, with cups of coffee and sheets of script weighed down by pebbles, spread out on a table. Ahead of them were the school playing field and then some trees, live trees, tinged with autumn gold, blowing around a little in the wind. Richard’s cristal pinged, he touched it and heard Holly through his implants:

  ‘Hey, Rick, I’ll be landing in an hour. Okay if I send for the car?’

  ‘Sure. I won’t need it for a while,’ he mouthed. ‘Welcome back.’

  He felt uneasy, some sort of premonition, some sense of news being held back.

  ‘You alright, Rick?’ Alice asked him. He looked round at her. She had very black hair and very blue eyes, an unusual combination that reminded him of the heroine of some old Celtic legend.

  ‘Yeah, fine, just Holly saying she’ll be back later.’ He turned back to the text. ‘Yeah, let’s cut out this whole scene.’

  ‘Must be strange thinking of her down in DC with Senator Slaymaker.’

  ‘Very strange. It’s her job and I completely respect that, but I must admit I’ll be glad when this particular piece of work is over.’

  It was as if some force that he couldn’t see was there in the background all the time, like a leaking pipe in a basement.

  Holly was oddly reserved when they met again at the house. Richard had made a chicken casserole for them, and as they ate, he tried to find out how her meeting had gone down in DC.