Interzone Science Fiction and Fantasy Magazine #220

by TTA Press Authors

  "Until Mom changed the restrictions on her funds, and all your accounts locked up."

  "Think about it,” Antonio said.

  I just nodded.

  "Hey, we're gettin together later tonight, just a thing, not a fling. Bring Nana?"

  "Maybe.” Another fucking place to be seen. Plenty of transactions to avoid. I could rec it and send it to Mom. See, you can't suck me into your world. Not completely.

  "Come on."

  "Maybe."

  Antonio grinned. “See you there."

  He disappeared and my eyeset went back to its default: screens of gritty Hollywood before they cleaned it up, before video made everything transparent, before the Big Dump. A time when money was dumb, and every conversation was just a conversation, not a chance to spread the latest hot product or service and make big bux, and people were still stupid enough to think bots were fun in a Max Headroom kinda way.

  "Mike?” Nana Copan's voice, from the bedroom door. I looked up. My eyeset went to transparent mode for stereo vision. She wore a sheet wrapped around her slim shoulders, like a girl waiting to model for a lecherous old artist. She was six feet tall and one hundred twenty pounds, and she had that slow, languorous way of moving that turned the simplest clothing into a fashion show. I could watch her for hours. In bed, she was strange, a bundle of sticks jointed at odd angles, almost inhuman. Nana was one of the most beautiful women I had ever seen.

  "Yeah. Sorry."

  "Problems?"

  "Yeah. No. Nothing big."

  "It's good that you help your friends,” she said.

  If this is a fine bedroom situation, you can earn up to two hundred new dollars by referring your partner to Optimum Stimulation, the parlor that preens! MakeMoMoola said.

  I shook my head. I'd only known Nana for a couple of weeks, and I'd never really dug deep into her public profile. At first, I figured she was just another AI-craver, calculating how much attention she could get by being with the Son of the Mogul, the Man Who Said No. But now I didn't know.

  "Come back to bed,” she said. “I have to go soon."

  Yes. She had to be seen. She had to wear the perfect outfit, blouses that were still on the upcurve, pants that hadn't been discovered by the masses, jewelry made by funky little local shops that were just starting with the word-of-mouth dance, purses and accessories she made herself for that ain't-never-seen-that-before factor. And Saturday was a big day, lots of tourists and people who still worked, out for a little fun and commerce.

  I sighed, and went back to bed.

  * * * *

  I liked my kitchen. It was on the shady side of the house, and almost none of the food talked to me. That was deliberate; I shopped in orbit, around the outside of the big box stores where they still sold stuff that was grown on plants and animals. Shit that had no tags telling me about the latest special offers, new trial flavors, or anything like that. Every once in a while a freshtag'd go off and let me know I shouldn't eat something, but I did anyway.

  The only thing talking to me was my car.

  My battery pack is low, please drive me, my car said. I groaned and looked out the window at it, squinting in pain at the sun winking off the dirty chrome. It was a near-new ‘23 Lexus ex700h, streaked with runnels of dust from sitting near an entire year in my driveway. I'd gotten tired of it whining about being abandoned, so I'd brought it home. Thanks, Mom.

  So I muted the car, made my breakfast of wonderfully silent food, and surfed the answers sites, where billions of people had spent trillions of dollars to have both the simplest and most complex questions answered, sometimes hundreds of thousands of times. The sum total of human knowledge, free to be ignored by all of humanity. I wondered when someone would find all those unsolved math theorems and metaphysical questions answered, probably by some eight-year-old in Bulgaria.

  I know I'm a fuckin waste. I know I could pick up, go down to Argentina or Patagonia or someplace where my mom wouldn't bother to go, get a job, and start over. But I'd never worked before, and I didn't know a shit thing about Argentina or Patagonia other than what I saw on the answers sites. For all I knew they weren't just fringey on the network side but maybe fringey on the social side, and I don't know what I'd do if they wanted me to worship the Catholics or anything like that. Yeah, I know, doesn't make sense. But I also wasn't going to use Mom's money to start my own business, cause that's what she wanted.

  A knock on the door. “Mike! Mike Palmetto!” At the same time, my eyeset shrilled its special mom-alert noise, loud enough for me to remember what a stupid idea it was to go around with a movie theater and sound system attached to your head.

  Shit. I leaned over to look down the hall, saw her mascara-ringed eyeball pressed up against the 50s-vintage bubbled glass on the front door.

  No use hiding. I went and opened it. Mom walked right in, trailing angry perfume. She was slim and sculpted like only the best plastic surgeons could do, her fifty years held in a standoff somewhere just south of thirty. If it wasn't for her don't-give-a-shit-about-revenue fashion sense that included things like recycled grunge and even some 80s fab, she looked like someone I'd date.

  "Your car messaged me,” she said, holding out a little Sony handscreen. Another old-person clue.

  I nodded. “I know."

  "You're neglecting it!"

  "I don't need it."

  "Then I'll take it back—” Mom snapped her trap shut, realizing that she had been outmaneuvered. I smiled.

  "Why are you grinning?"

  "Mom, what do you want?"

  You missed a chance to refer parents to the SunShine Happy Home in northern Utah, worth 150 new dollars on signup, MakeMoMoola said.

  A bit about Mom. I never knew my dad. I was conceived in the early hours of the morning on New Year's Day 2000, at a rave when Mom, out of her head on MDMA, was happily screwing to the end of a millennium that had not yet ended. Too early for ubiquitous video then, but cross-references from early blogposts and MySpace reminiscences of her friends told the story. No matter how much she wanted to paint it pretty, she didn't know half the guys she banged. Most of them faded away into the anonymity of people who suck at social networking. Some of them were still trackable, and there were nights I'd look at their mugs, side by side with my own, to see if there was any resemblance.

  My mom was one of those people who, finding themselves pregnant, wigs the fuck out and decides to Do Something With Their Life and Make Things Right With God and Sacrifice Everything for the Baby and all that shit. She dropped the E, dropped the raves, and decided that making a whole shitload of money was the way to Paradise for her and her little baby Mike. She struck it big in the Web 2.0 scene, when she was running a whole bunch of entertainment fansites and scraping Google AdSense revenue to get by. I remember those days before the money, fuzzily, like one of those Vaseline-on-the-lens tricks. Hand-me-down clothes, a shitty formica table, the pissy-eucalyptusy smell of too-well-lived-in apartment.

  Then she got the idea. Pay the forum posters. Not a new idea, people'd been paying for blogs and shit for a long time, but when she started sharing revenue with the posters, her sites went nuts. And when people found out how much they could make, suddenly she had user-generated video and mashups of popular series that were sometimes better than the series themselves. Of course, that went nuts, and when they spread out to track referrals and conversions in a real-time basis ... well, everyone knows Palmetoo, the network that monetized word of mouth. She got real pissed when everyone started stealing the idea, she had to get up in front of Congress once, when everyone was still trying to protect copyrights and get big companies to pay fifteen billion dollars for accidentally putting some suckass tard's face on a coffee can, and she went ballistic when PropPo brought out their MoneyWhispers bot, until she had MakeMoMoola.

  But it didn't matter. She was rich.

  I remember going from the apartment to a decent house in Westwood, then to a fucking mansion in Los Feliz, then to leveling a goddamn hilltop in the
Hollywood Hills. But those memories are even fuzzier, a whole jar of Vaseline fuzzier, because what I really remember is sitting in her office, listening to her scream on the phone, or yell at me for ignoring my tutor, or yell at me for surfing to sites that weren't in the lesson plan, or yelling at me for missing an opportunity to spread the word and collect the dough, because I was Her Son, and people Knew Me, so my Attention Index was high.

  "I have a new opportunity,” she said, bringing me back to the present.

  "You always have opportunities."

  "This is big."

  "Big, like someone wants to buy me to launch a new hairspray by putting a permanent tattoo all over my body?"

  Using brand names like HardAsRock hairspray and Ouchless Tattoos could have earned you 2.5 yuan, said MakeMoMoola.

  "Tattoos aren't permanent."

  "You know what I mean."

  Mom wrinkled her nose. “No. I don't know all the big details. It's not word of mouth, it's something else—"

  "Honest work?” That was new.

  "Everything's honest. Word of mouth powers our propagation economy. Nobody hides, everyone wins.” Parroting her own marketing messages.

  "But only the ones with the highest Attention Index can attend the big parties."

  List of clubs with covers, valued from 0.5 yuan to 60 golden dollars. A list scrolled in my eyeset.

  Mom grimaced. “And this is different than the old world how?"

  "And, of course, the big corps always distribute seed products first to those with the highest AI and ME."

  Mom clamped her mouth shut and glared. “We're meeting tonight at the King of Brentwood's house."

  "Oh, joy."

  "This is something you might want to be a part of. Unless you want to get, well, left behind."

  There is a current bid of one hundred seventy five thousand new dollars for specific information on the King of Brentwood.

  Hmm. That was interesting. I tagged it.

  "All I've ever wanted is—"

  Mom headed for the door. “Left behind, as in Big Dump left behind."

  "What does that mean?"

  She opened the door, then turned and pointed at my eyeset, “And don't bring that damn thing, unless you want it burned off your head."

  "I—"

  She stepped out and slammed the door in my face.

  I went back to my breakfast. The last couple of minutes of my video feed from the eyeset was hash. The only record I had was pixellated crap from my old retina-cam, which Mom had installed when I was seventeen.

  But why'd she hashed the video? Because she could? Or because it really was important?

  I chased the link for info on the King of Brentwood, but it was one of those contact-us-for-more bullshit things. I sent a message from an old and disposable account, knowing it was probably just a phishing trick, old as the goddamn hills. Or Mom, just fucking with me.

  I sighed, knowing I'd be there. Which was what she wanted in the first place.

  * * * *

  One hundred seventy-five thousand new dollars isn't really that much. Only about fifty thousand golden dollars, or twenty thousand yuan. People are still nervous about dollars whether they were new dollars backed by the government or golden dollars backed by McDonalds, even though the Big Dump was almost a decade ago, and that other golden dollar died when they started doing the nanoseparation trick on seawater a few years ago. I thought my friend Grigory, who had a real job in customer service, summed it up best: So people in the States went from a 5,000 square foot house and two vacation homes and five timeshares and six cars in the garage to a single two thousand square foot house and one car, who cared, hell that was still livin large in Russia. A buncha whiny crybabies had to go without their Starbucks, was how I saw it.

  But one hundred and seventy five thousand new dollars was enough money for me to do some real deep trolling. Cause that money would be mine, no restrictions. I could start my own business with it, and watch it grow. The sweet, sweet image of Mom asking me for money floated for a moment in the big virtuality of my head.

  I'd heard the King of Brentwood before. Some deep searches of the social media showed me a stocky Hispanic man with a buzz-cut and a perfectly trimmed goatee hamming it up at a martini bar. His real name was Fernando Padilla. Apparently he hadn't made his money in content or word of mouth, but actually had connections in manufacturing. Grown diamonds, shit like that, before it got easy and people started doing it in garages. He'd bought up most of Brentwood with his money after the Big Dump, hence the title.

  The thing I know about people is, they don't change. If he was in manufacturing then he was probably in manufacturing now. I set some of the best free digger-bots on the memes of Fernando Padilla and manufacturing.

  Some people ask why my mom's that way, and say, well, maybe she didn't have that great of an upbringing. Maybe grandma and grandpa, boomer images only fuzzily remembered, didn't give her the love she needed or wanted or deserved. But I don't know about the whole upbringing thing. I think sometimes people just are. I mean, why do I like super-thin women like Nana? She didn't look like my mother, and she certainly didn't look like my first love, a redhead who nailed me on Mom's office desk one day. There's nothing I can point to. It's something that just is. Something a salespitch can't change, your peers can't change, your family can't change.

  Bonk! Helpful detextualized icons floated in my eyeset.

  When you use diggers, you can see trends. Small blobs lead to larger blobs over time, connections multiply as you near present day.

  But this was red and sketchy, like whole patches had been acid-etched out of the whole. Results like this made the tinfoil-hat ranters on the edge of the intarweb scream about how Google or Wal-Mart or McDonalds or the Omnipresent Yahoo or the government were diddlin the network, skewing it the way they wanted it to go. And it did look like results from a VirtUCLA class on proactive data security. But I didn't have the stomach to be a real academic, what with their segregated networks and love-and-hate relationship with the government and its New Dollar.

  I had the bots go deeper, and connections emerged. They were stripped of brand and context and commerce, so I went to geography. Two pools glowed. One in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, where the real-time satellites showed water, water, and more water, and one in Vernon, part of LA's old gutted manufacturing core.

  I thought of having Antonio send a WeRU agent down in my stead. But I knew that inpersons took a long time to train, longer than the bots that did most of WeRU's work.

  But I could go to Vernon myself. Vernon meant taking the car, because none of the public or private transport companies were crazy enough to go down there. I wondered if Mom had done all this for the sole purpose of getting me to charge the batteries.

  I got in the car, let it thank me, and fired it up. The windshield wipers screeched across the dust-streaked glass, pushing blue-tinted mud off the windshield.

  I told the car where I was going. After signing the disclaimer on the dash, it asked, Would you like the highest revenue route, the most scenic route (as specified by the Los Angeles Tourist Board), or the fastest route based on traffic patterns?

  "Fastest."

  Are you sure? This is a high-visibility vehicle. Any sales tied back to your appearance provide referral revenue of 4.75% -

  "I'm sure."

  The car lit a route on the dash. I let it drive by itself, and it did a pretty good job, only getting hung up at the Hollywood New Products Lottery, where people with low AI and ME clustered around the bright glass building, hoping to get a hot new item on its upswing.

  It's not like they're starving, Mom's voice came. All they gotta do is pick good stuff, get out, be seen. People'd kill to live like them, a hundred years ago.

  Yeah, and fuck you, Mom.

  Vernon was, well, Vernon. Cracked streets strewn with trash, rusted cars huddling next to corrugated-steel warehouses gone out-of-square with age and quakes, crappy old tilt-up buildings, blank-face
d and penal, some no more than burnt shells. Nothing moved. I could have been the last survivor of a nuclear war, or in one of those old-timey Twilight Zones where all the people just disappeared one day, poof, gone. People lived here, yeah. Google Earth's geonetworks showed little glowing specks here and there where people gathered, or burned trash, or did whatever they did down here. But from my POV, they were invisible.

  The Lexus slowed to a crawl and said, I must advise you that this area is not regularly patrolled, and I may be damaged if I am left unattended.

  I laughed. “Take me where I'm going."

  You did not specify an address.

  "Cruise, then."

  There is no potential revenue here. I can recommend another cruise area.

  "Just drive through the neighborhood, block by block."

  I passed another one of those ancient tilt-up buildings. A flash of sunlight on chrome caught my eye.

  I made the Lexus stop and go back. Behind the rusted chain-link was an alley that led to the back of the building. I could just see a row of shiny new cars parked in back, Caddies and Benzes and Lexii. The location corresponded reasonably well to the geotarget for the King of Brentwood's Vernon ops, but the peak was so mushy I couldn't be certain. I hesitated. I'd done my share of urban exploration as a kid, but this was different. I could be walking in a labor farm or something really nasty like a tobacco warehouse.

  Parking here is inadvisable, the car said. I have many high-revenue parking areas for you to consider.

  I nodded. Yeah, I could walk away. I could go to the meeting tonight and hear the pitch, and have Mom talk me into signing up, because it was the safe thing, it was what I should do, because I could always give that money to my friends (but not the people at the lottery), because I was the visible rift in her perfect life, because I made people think about this whole propagation thing (because I was too scared to do anything else).

  I parked the car down the block a bit, signed off the three disclaimers that it showed on the screen, and headed around to the end of the block, where a wider alleyway once served as a thoroughfare for trucks. Now, it was a parking lot for abandoned cars too dumb to call home, a place where semi-trailers had been turned into low-rent apartments with stolen windows and doors from Home Depots. Again, I saw nobody, but I felt them watching. I wished I had my old concrete camo from the urban exploration days, but I didn't look too out of place in faded old Chinese Levis and a Tommy's T-shirt. And my ThugAlert bot hadn't beeped, so it wasn't like there were subtextuals I wasn't seeing.