He had tried for most of the last two years to design a new and better program. His mistake with Pocketz, he had decided, was relying on Cost as the reference variable—that is, measuring value against the existing system of credits instead of creating a brand-new virtual credit system with its own reference variables, such as Intellect, Morality, Creativity, Humor, and Spirituality. He thought it might be possible to commodify Societal Values, and therefore move them from the periphery to the center of value exchanges. Then, it wouldn’t matter if a music track were illegally downloaded; you’d be paying for the musician’s talent rather than the product of that talent.
But he couldn’t make it work. The beta version of Virtuz, which he had test-run on a group of college sophomores, was a failure. “Boring,” according to Wes’s survey-processing software, was the most frequently used adjective in the discursive evaluations, followed by “confusing” and “useless.” The test subjects hadn’t liked the rewards system. The updates in the feed made them feel guilty and inadequate rather than inspired.
Betsy Chang volunteered 2 hours at Calabash County Soup Kitchen.
Explore Share High-five Two hours ago, near Wilmington, AtlZ
Ely Singleton wrote 986 words for Sociology 256.
Explore Share High-five 30 minutes ago, near Greensboro, AtlZ
When Wes complained to his girlfriend, Sonya, about the failure of the trial run, how it was indicative of the superficial nature of young people today, she had said, “Well, what on earth did you expect? It’s a feed for Goody Two-Shoes. Hey, wait—that’s what you should call it.” She synced her tablet so he could see on the wall what she was writing: Goody Two-Shooz. She used the Fontastic! app to make the letters gold and sparkling, with halos tilted over the letters G and S. Then, mouth slanted in thought, she erased the halo over the S. “There you go,” she said. “That’s your logo.”
Granted, they were having a rough go of it lately—and this wasn’t the first time one or the other of them had snapped and said something nasty—but that stung.
“Well, if you felt that way all along, why didn’t you say so?” Wes yelled, swiping her stupid logo out of sight.
“I did. Half a dozen times I said to you, ‘This isn’t how a virtue works.’ That the minute you try to attach a precise value to it, you turn it into something that isn’t a virtue. The whole system’s a paradox, and I told you so, but you never listened.”
Wes found himself pouting, childishly sullen. “You didn’t say it in so many words.”
She shook her head in a disgusted way, so that her chin-length, auburn hair swung back and forth. She was thirty, five years older than Wes, and a Pocketz employee, head of the team of graphic designers who came on last year to freshen up the main-feed interface and create subtle, pleasing avenues into what Wes had started calling the “ad opps.” She had been his first real girlfriend—his first sexual partner—taking the initiative in almost every negotiation, from the night she asked him if he wanted to join her at Ozzy’s for a beer (“I don’t drink,” he had said, and, unruffled, she replied, “Well, you can just watch me”) to the night a week after that when she put his hand on her warm, full breast and asked him, “So, are we going to fuck or what?” Wes lived a life of precision and self-discipline. Each morning he washed down half a dozen vitamins with a glass of fiber-infused orange juice, had one bowl of plain oatmeal, and then went for his usual six-mile run before the urge came, like clockwork, for him to empty his bowels. He ate a strictly vegan diet, did not drink, did not smoke (even Smokeless), and abstained from refined sugars, caffeine, and gluten. Sonya, on the other hand, never exercised (though she was tireless in bed), drank daily, smoked leaf tobacco and pot, and subsisted on a diet of sugary cereals and vacuum-sealed cold-cut sandwiches that she purchased in bulk each weekend from Tesley’s. Her favorite meal out was a rare steak, salty fries, and most (or all) of a bottle of red wine. She was Wes’s only indulgence, his only bad habit, and Wes had assumed all this time that he, on the other hand, was the point of light in her life, the voice of reason. Her daily vitamin.
“Not in so many words,” she muttered. They had been sitting at Wes’s small kitchen table together, Wes with his oatmeal, Sonya with her bowl of Salty Caramel Crunch Nuggets and a tall mug of sludgy black coffee, and she stood and flipped the cover of her tablet closed. She went to the living room, grabbed her backpack from the credenza (where Wes always stowed it, since her habit was to simply sling it into Wes’s recliner, or on his coffee table, or in the middle of the floor, where anyone could trip on it), and shoved her tablet roughly into it.
“What are you doing?” Wes asked.
She was tall and lean but not scrawny, her hips a little on the wide side compared to the rest of her, good-sized hands and feet, toenails always painted some garish hue but never, somehow, freshly. He would have liked to paint her toenails for her, to work the color neatly into the tiniest corners, even on her funny-shaped pinkies, getting it exactly right; but he had not, in their eight months of courtship, had the courage to make the suggestion. She stalked around his living room in a cropped T-shirt and boxer shorts, hunting down her things: two balled-up socks, a lipstick, an old paperback mystery novel. Into the bag they went.
“You’re leaving?” he asked, bewildered.
“Yup.” She stuck her bottom lip out and huffed, blowing her hair out of her eyes. Wes looked at her cereal bowl, where what was left of her Crunch Nuggets was growing bloated and sodden in the milk, and he wondered if she planned to at least clean up after herself.
“Oh, Jesus H.,” she said. She snatched the bowl out from in front of him and dumped its contents in the sink, then ran the garbage disposal without turning on the water first. “Better?” She disappeared into the bedroom, returned a few minutes later in a sweatshirt and jeans, and paused in the door between the kitchen and the living room, hands on her hips. “OK. I’m going.”
Wes tried to process this. “For good?”
“Yeah,” she said.
“Because you say I didn’t listen to you about Virtuz?”
“I don’t just say,” she said, “but no, that’s not the reason. Or all of it. I just realized that we’ve hit the wall.”
“The wall,” Wes repeated. This was how Sonya spoke: not a wall, but the wall, as if Wes ought to know what she was talking about, as if the thing they’d hit was looming ahead in the distance all along.
“The ‘more work than fun’ wall,” Sonya said. “The, ‘My boyfriend has a tablet instead of a heart’ wall. So anyway, I’ll see you at work.”
“That’s it?”
She stopped at the door. “What else would there be?”
“And you’re still going to work at my company?”
She cast a level gaze at him. “Well, unless you’re planning to fire me for not fucking you anymore.”
“God, when you put it like that,” Wes said.
“See you at work,” she said again firmly. And as quickly and unceremoniously as she had entered his life, she left it.
—
“You could say I had a crisis,” Wes was telling Marta on the touring bus as it rolled past still-familiar landscape. The Salt Line was at least a half-hour’s drive away according to a map animation on the overhead monitor, but the Wall’s vibration was already making its presence known, shivering the window glass, wiggling into the soles of his feet so that he had to start flexing his toes against numbness. “I needed a radical change in my life. I needed to do something no one expected me to.” By no one he meant Sonya, of course, but he’d be damned if he’d say her name aloud, even to a person who had never met her, who knew nothing about how they’d come together and why they split.
“And you think it was the right choice?” Marta asked. She was a good listener, easy to confide in.
“Well, that remains to be seen, doesn’t it?” He drummed a little rhythm on the tops of his thighs.
“Wow. Feels weird not having my tablet.”
She sighed. “For me, too.”
“I can’t even remember the last time I went without it,” Wes said. “It must have been that brownout three years ago.”
Marta shivered. “That was scary. The boys had just left for college. I couldn’t reach them. I had no idea how they were.” Her face sagged, as if she’d suddenly realized she was now in a version of the same position.
“Those ‘free yourself from the tablet’ nuts—you’ve got to wonder about them,” Wes said. Marta had insisted he take the window seat, and so he stole a quick glance outside, wondering, like a little boy, Are we there yet? Are we there yet? So far there wasn’t much to see. Thirty kilometers back, they’d passed a community of single-wide trailer homes: cars rusting into piles of weeds, laundry flapping on lines. No one outside, not even playing children. There had been no housing since. Ten or fifteen kilometers ago, he’d noticed that there weren’t trees or shrubs any longer, and the October grasses had yellowed, but there were some fields of wildflowers—goldenrod, purple asters—to break up what was otherwise a level and almost wintry prospect but not an overtly dismaying one. Past the Wall, however, the situation would change. We’re talking a little bit “scorched earth” for the first couple of miles, Andy had said. Nothing they hadn’t seen on the feeds, more or less, but experiencing the thing in the flesh would be different. “It always struck me as a kind of bullshit proposition,” Wes continued. “You know, willfully out of touch with how the world is. Like, if you’re not going to use a tablet, I hope you’re also going to grow your own veggies and never ride in a car or a train. Good luck with that.”
His right-hand thumb was miming the tablet sweep stroke, and he tucked the hand under his thigh.
“I’m obviously biased. If I sold ice cream for a living, maybe I’d try to convince you it doesn’t make you fat.”
“I don’t think that’s a fair comparison,” Marta said. “You’re being hard on yourself.”
“Well, maybe.” He looked down, embarrassed—as if Sonya were watching him and smirking—by the conscious pose of his modesty. Sonya had, in the months since their breakup, become a kind of scolding, mocking voice in his head, and the pathetic part was that the voice comforted him. He liked it. “Anyway. I say all that because I have to admit that part of the appeal of this trip for me was going somewhere the signals don’t reach. Three weeks of feed silence. Crazy, right?”
“I wouldn’t call it crazy,” Marta said.
“Like Captain Cluck swearing off fried chicken.” He smiled ruefully. “There was this . . . person. This person I’d come to depend on. And then she didn’t want me to depend on her anymore. At first, it didn’t bother me much. I told myself it didn’t. But I still had to work with her, and I’d see her in the office, and she’d act completely nonchalant. Not just like she was over me, but like there wasn’t anything for her to get over in the first place.”
Marta patted his microsuit-clad knee. “I’m sure that wasn’t the case.”
He lowered his voice, aware of a gradual silence that had settled in the seats around his and Marta’s. In the quiet, the vibration coming off the TerraVibra—whose presence had been so creeping and gradual—was obvious, verging on overwhelming, and Wes used his middle fingers to knead the two points just in front of the hinge of his jaw. “She wouldn’t talk to me, except work stuff. And then I checked my feeds even more than I usually do, thinking maybe she’d call or message. Or I’d see something to help me know what was going on with her.”
“Did you?”
Wes was almost whispering now. “One night she spent twenty credits at a restaurant I used to take her to, this steak house. Mahogany. But so did this other guy at work, Timothy. Same place, same night. Same time for the charge.”
“They could have just been friends,” said Marta.
“That’s what I thought,” Wes said. “I considered it rationally. They’re on the same design team. They each paid their own tickets. But a few nights later, they both rang up simultaneous charges at a bar. Then dinner again the next week. Then, the same night as the dinner, Pine Ridge Bed and Breakfast puts a two-hundred-credit hold on his account.”
Marta didn’t have a response to this. She gave him a pained, tight little smile, eyebrows drawn into a pitying peak.
“My first thought was to go over there.” He barked a sharp laugh. “Yeah, me. The big man. I was going to confront them. Then I thought, well, maybe I’ll just sit outside the hotel and see what I see. Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe I won’t even see them leave together.
“Then—I don’t even remember how it happened—I booked this trip. I just did it before I could even decide to do it, if that makes any sense. I had to get away from her, and I had to get away from the feeds. I was going to do something I’d regret if I didn’t.”
“That’s quite a story,” Marta said sincerely.
Well, it was a story. Some of the story. Not all of it.
“She said I had a tablet instead of a heart,” Wes blurted out, voice thick with feeling, and that was when he heard muffled snickering in the seat one back and over from theirs.
Then there was a tiny, cheerful strumming sound. A ukulele, Wes thought, accompanied suddenly by a pleasant, raspy tenor:
That girl sure was a habit
I stalked her on my tablet
She was everything I need
So I feasted on her feed
Till I was bloated as a tick
And sure she sucked his dick
I just wish there was a Stamp
What could rid me of that tramp
A female voice hissed sharply, “Stop being an asshole, Jesse.”
Wes stood, bracing himself with a hand against the back of his seat, in time to watch as Jesse Haggard finished his little ditty with a twangy riff on “Shave and a Haircut,” biting his bottom lip comically for the last two notes. He was slumped, knees tucked up against the seatback in front of him, ukulele resting on his chest, and he opened his eyes, which had been pinched tight with affected earnestness, and grinned at Wes. “Good stuff, my man. Good stuff.”
His girlfriend, Edie, looked stricken. “Oh, Wes. Please ignore him. He has a weird sense of humor.”
Wes’s mouth got very dry. He swallowed, blinking stupidly, and gripped the seat harder, afraid that his knees were about to turn to liquid. Edie’s expression of embarrassed pity was harder to bear than the song had been. For three weeks now he had been noticing her, admiring her, and wondering why she’d paired off with someone like Jesse “Burger Blitz” Haggard, who couldn’t even do a chin-up in the weight room without manfully grunting a plea for attention. The Timothys of the world, the Jesses—what did women see in them?
“Don’t go and do something you’ll regret now,” Jesse said.
Every eye on the bus was on Wes. Marta grabbed his forearm, tried to pull him back into the seat. “Ignore him,” she said. “He’s a child.” Andy, sensing some tension in the group, started back the middle aisle toward them, but then the bus hit a bump in the road, and he and Wes both swayed. There was another vibration now, strong enough to make Wes’s teeth clank together, and Wes realized that the road had gotten rough and textured the way it did close to shoulders, so you knew if you were about to go into a ditch. The travelers turned their attention to the windows, craning their necks for a view of what lay ahead—Wes, too—and when Marta leaned against him and said, “What is it?” he replied, hoarsely, “It’s the Wall.”
“Back in your seats, folks,” Andy said. “We’ve reached the Salt Line.”
Four
Arguing with your boyfriend was bad, Edie thought. Arguing with your buddy, whose side you would not be able to leave for the next three weeks, was worse.
“Just lighten up,” Jesse said. He was picking the same four- or five-note sequence out on his ukulele, barely brushing his thu
mb across the strings so that the sound wouldn’t travel far. It was driving Edie nuts, especially since she was trying to concentrate on what was happening outside the bus. “If you can’t have a sense of humor about yourself, you’re fucked at life.”
“You don’t have a sense of humor about yourself,” Edie hissed. “At all.” The bus driver had restarted the engine, and a guard in an armor-reinforced, helmeted microsuit was waving them forward. She felt nauseated, and she didn’t know how much of the sensation to attribute to her mortification, how much to the rhythmic churning of the air around the Wall, how much to her fear. Right now, the split seemed to be about even.
“That’s not true.” Strumly strum strum strummmm.
“It is,” Edie said. “You moped for two days when the guys in the band laughed at your eyeliner.”
Strumly strum strum. He’d pinched his eyes closed again, ignoring her.
“And at least you know those guys. You have a rapport with them. Why on earth you’d want to start this trip out with bad blood between you and a virtual stranger is beyond me. With everything else to be worried about.” She shook her head with irritated wonder. The bus darkened momentarily as they passed under the structure of the gate and guard station, the view just outside her window only a seamed concrete wall punctuated by intermittent flashing red lights before the bus was again flooded with hazy daylight. She had opened her mouth to say something else, something about how nice Wes seemed and how randomly cruel Jesse’s actions were, when the words turned to dust in her mouth. She made a strangled sound of horror, and the muted strumming of the ukulele stopped.
“Oh my God,” someone behind her said.
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