Sycamore 2

by Craig A. Falconer

  Ty stood up and encouraged Kurt to go with him. “Come on, dude,” he said. “Don’t waste your breath.”

  Kurt and Lisa both got up to leave with Ty. Torn between two sides of a splintering group, Anthony opted to stay where he was.

  Ernesto watched them walk away.

  13

  Kurt’s alarm woke him bright and early at 6:15 the next morning, before the sun was even up. But 6:15 was dawn, not night, he told himself, so it was perfectly safe to cross the walkway.

  Today was the day.

  Kurt’s motivation for being up so early was to get to the computer before Michael could block their access. If Ernesto had genuinely been misled, he would be keen to make sure Kurt and Minter got online as soon as possible and would log them in and leave them to it. All Kurt had to do was make sure Michael didn’t get there first to pretend that something else was wrong.

  There was no sense in waking Minter yet, Kurt knew, because the newly applied security patch meant that even he couldn’t get around the password requirement.

  Outside of Home, the mall was much darker than Kurt had expected. Whatever the little moon and sun icons on his phone might have said, calling this dawn was a stretch. Still, he made his way across the walkway, using his phone’s flashlight as a guide. The chance of a drone passing overhead was, for all intents and purposes, zero. Recent events in the mall had nudged Kurt towards Ty’s line of thought that the prohibition on walking around at night was an exercise of power for its own sake.

  To his dismay, Kurt saw someone sitting in the food court, right in front of the door to the workstation. He thought about turning back but knew that his flashlight would obviously have been seen.

  “Kurt?” the person called in an odd kind of half-shout half-whisper. Kurt recognised the strained voice as Anthony’s. He didn’t quite know what this meant.

  “What are you doing here?” Kurt asked. It was a question that could be fired straight back at him, but it was the obvious one to ask. Up close, Anthony was as sharp as ever, with his shining skin and perfect clothes making it look like he had spent two hours getting ready. Kurt wondered when the hell he slept.

  “Guarding the door,” Anthony said.

  Kurt still didn’t know what this meant. “To keep us out? Is your dad in there?”

  Anthony shook his head. “I spoke to him last night, though."

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah. I was angry that you didn’t get on, too. Not as angry as you, obviously, but we all want you to get this thing done. So I asked what the deal was and he said he was acting in the group’s best interests. Something about making sure Minter does what he says he’s going to do and nothing else.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “Beats me,” Anthony said. “I thought maybe they were installing a camera or something, so I checked everywhere. Nothing.”

  Kurt had no strong hunches, either. His first thought was an internet filter which would restrict them from sending e-mails or signing into old accounts anywhere, but Kurt doubted that Michael would be stupid enough to think they wouldn’t find their way around something as basic as that.

  “The password is still the same, anyway,” Anthony said.

  Kurt looked at the door. “So is there someone else in there, or are you just making sure no one goes in?”

  Anthony answered by knocking on the door with two quick triple-knocks. He then pushed it open. Inside, scrambling into the corner having turned the computer off in a panic, Kurt spotted just about the last person he expected to see: Lisa.

  “Are you trying to give me a bloody heart attack?” she shrieked at Anthony. “Two triples is the warning knock, you idiot.” She smiled as soon as the initial anger was out of her system because seeing Kurt rather than Michael or Ernesto was a huge relief.

  “Sorry,” Anthony said, but his tone and his grin suggested that he had been messing with her. “Seriously, though, if I do that again it’ll be a real warning; no “boy who cried wolf” stuff. But you should still have at least two hours.”

  Lisa turned around and switched the computer back on. Anthony entered the password.

  “I feel like maybe I’m missing something,” Kurt said.

  “He knows the password,” Lisa said.

  “I got that part…”

  “We take turns early in the morning,” Anthony explained. “Me, Ty, Lisa and Mary. The other three never come over before breakfast, so we have the computer between six and at least eight every day, sometimes nearer nine. It wouldn’t be a big deal if I got caught but I have to make sure the others don’t. That’s why I don’t just give them the password; it would be my fault if they got in trouble, so it’s better if they only go on when I’m here to look out.”

  Kurt now remembered Ty telling him something along these lines, that Anthony knew the password and let the others on whenever he could.

  “I better get back out there,” Anthony said.

  “Thanks,” Kurt said. “You’re a good guy.”

  Lisa pulled another chair over for Kurt. She asked why he was here if he didn’t know he could get online, and he explained about wanting to get to the computer before a Michael-sized roadblock beat him to it.

  “Can I just get like ten more minutes?” Lisa asked. “I was almost finished something when that big idiot freaked me out.”

  Kurt told Lisa to take as long as she wanted, repeating that he was only here to make sure Michael wasn’t. He watched as Lisa loaded up the browser, feeling the same warm buzz he got when Ernesto had done so yesterday. The internet was freedom, pure and simple; a bastion of liberty in an age of control.

  Kurt remembered his first meeting at Sycamore HQ, when Amos, flanked by Minter, had told him that the internet was a supermarket in a world where most people wanted vending machines. Until the day he died, Kurt would never be one of those people.

  Lisa typed the URL for Sycamore International, a name which Kurt wasn’t familiar with. The site loaded impressively quickly and what he saw next was very familiar indeed. With the browser in full-screen mode, which wasn’t normally to Kurt’s liking, the entire screen looked like the main menu of the Seed’s operating system. There were tiles for RealU and BeThere and everything else that Kurt had grown so used to. This site was a demonstration of some of Sycamore’s most popular apps, intended for users in countries where the Seed wasn’t available, which was to say everywhere outside the US.

  On the second page of tiles, Lisa clicked into an app called Star’s Eye View. Kurt recognised the icon — it was a yellow star with two cartoon eyes and a red-lips smile — but he had never used the app. He told Lisa this, and she couldn’t believe he had turned his nose up at the chance to experience a celebrity’s life in vicarious full immersion.

  It was fair to say that Star’s Eye View was the ultimate expression of a celebrity obsessed culture. As the name suggested, consumers could lie back on their couch and see the world through the eyes of their favourite celebrity. Lisa had to confirm that she was 18 or over, which she did by clicking that most pointless of all buttons, the one that said “I confirm I am 18 or over”. Kurt wondered if any child anywhere in the world had ever not clicked the button when faced with such a choice.

  Anyway, the screen flashed with disclaimers stating that this international web-based version was a pale imitation of the real thing. No Forest integration was available, obviously, and the voyeuristic enterprise didn’t have quite the same novelty when the user was looking at a screen.

  One of the most attractive features of Star’s Eye View for consumers was that every notification and ad placement seen by their SycaStar of choice would also be shown through the app. Consumers saw the world exactly as the SycaStars did, down to every last detail.

  Among the list of the 25 Most Watched Vistas, Kurt recognised only two or three names. He asked Lisa who they were, and she told him that most of them were famous on the internet for being famous on the internet. Some of them did stunts, some of them did pranks, and
some of them just did what they did. This was the new generation of video bloggers, and it was a whole lot weirder than the last one.

  As well as the Most Watched chart, there was also a Longest Running chart. This ranked all of the SycaStars by how long they had been publicly sharing their every moment without interruption. The entire Top 25 of this list had been live for exactly the same length of time, which was evidently since the moment the program first launched.

  Sycamore paid SycaStars based on how many cumulative viewing hours their streams clocked up, so it was in the SycaStars’ interests to live the most interesting lives that they could.

  Kurt was interested in the same way he would have been interested in watching chimps at the zoo. But Lisa then said something which focused his mind: “I reckon if you could get some of these people to see the videos you’re trying to put in the sky, all the people who watch their streams would see them, too.”

  Kurt’s eyes flicked to the left of the screen. He saw that the most popular SycaStar of all was a strikingly attractive young woman named Trixilicious, which must have been her legal name given that no Sycamore services allowed usernames or pseudonyms. Trixilicious was asleep right now, but her average viewership over the previous 24 waking hours was a ludicrous 2.6 million. At the exact same moment in time, more than two million people had been living life through the eyes of the same celebrity. Kurt looked down the list and saw that the next few SycaStars, while not quite as popular as Trixilicious, had still recorded million-plus viewerships in the last few days.

  Lisa’s throwaway idea had the potential to be huge. Kurt liked the idea because it would do exactly what he wanted: use Sycamore’s infrastructure against itself.

  For a brief moment Kurt wondered whether a fair argument could be made against destroying Sycamore given how popular some of its services so obviously were. This doubt didn’t last long. Even if there was nothing wrong with features like Star’s Eye View beyond Kurt’s subjective annoyance at how vacuous and vapid they were, Sycamore itself had to be stopped. Things like Star’s Eye View could easily exist in a normal world where people weren’t coerced into wearing UltraLenses and accepting a microchip under their skin if they wanted to function in society. It was like the old metaphor of a tyrannical government who made the trains run on time; non-tyrannical governments could do that too, so it was no defence against scrutiny.

  “That’s a great idea,” Kurt said. “We might actually use that. Thanks.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah. You got any more?”

  Lisa thought for a second then typed “SycAmbassadors” into the browser’s search bar.

  “These are people in the US whose job is to speak to an international audience,” she said. “There’s hardly any… maybe twenty or something. This is probably what Ty would have been doing if he’d said yes to Amos.”

  As the site loaded it became clear that Sycamore International was a major operation. Between the virtual apps, the international news service and the SycAmbassadors, the budget must have been huge. Something Amos said before the Seed’s launch rang through Kurt’s ears as though a cartoon Amos was standing on his shoulder: “Coverage like this is worth every penny, hotshot; you can’t put a price on hearts and minds.”

  “I guess everything these people say goes through Sycamore’s sensors first?” Kurt said.

  Lisa nodded. “It’s all positive. Some of them do demonstrations and stuff, showing people how different features work. Some of them do little compilation shows about the main things that have happened this week. Stuff like that. Ty knows some of them but I don’t know if there would be a safe way to reach them. It might not be worth it, anyway, because I don’t think you can access these shows through a Seed. It’s only on this site.”

  The list of SycAmbassadors appeared. Kurt recognised one straight away. It was Kate Pinewood, the girl who had been set to pitch the SycaPhone and who had led to Kurt’s first experience with the Seed’s lookalike sex ads, which plunged the depths of depravity even by Sycamore’s standards. Kate looked like a model and had natural charisma, so she was an obvious candidate for a SycAmbassador role.

  Her specific role was to present This Week On Sycamore, which was essentially a blooper reel in the time-honoured tradition. But the beauty of a world full of UltraLenses was that no bloopers any longer went unrecorded: every time a drunk partygoer fell off a boat; every time a child ran into a glass door; every time a public marriage proposal went wrong… Sycamore was there to see it and share it. Users couldn’t opt out of their vista recordings being shared in this way given that Sycamore legally owned all footage recorded through every pair of UltraLenses, but Sycamore kindly offered some compensatory SycaStore credit to everyone they embarrassed on a global scale.

  This Week On Sycamore was the only piece of SycAmbassador programming available via the Seed’s Video app, which meant that Kate could in fact be seen by the consumers Kurt needed to reach. But Kate was on Sycamore’s payroll and hated Kurt quite intensely, so this probably wasn’t an avenue worth pursuing.

  Lisa got out of her chair. “You know what? You’ve not had the internet for months. Look around at what you want. I’ll come in with Ty tomorrow morning. I would just be watching Star’s Eye View and crap like that, anyway.”

  “Are you sure?” Kurt said, keen to be polite but hoping not to talk Lisa out of leaving.

  “Yeah. I’ll see you later.”

  ~

  Kurt didn’t hesitate before going to the one site he had been longing to see: Dot Truth.

  Dot Truth was a conspiracy website that Kurt had visited almost every day since he got his very first computer as an inquisitive 11-year-old. Some of the topics were pretty far out — the chupacabra sighting in downtown Chicago was a memorable one — but other stuff had proven on-point. Kurt had read about indiscriminate government surveillance a decade before most people had ever heard of the NSA, for example, and the topic of currency digitisation had been popular for as long as he could remember.

  A ridiculous amount had happened since Kurt was last able to access Dot Truth, and he was itching to see what the top discussion topics would be. Quite unsurprisingly, he was the main focus of the top six posts:

  “Palamino, Jacobs, Minion… False Flags?” [128 replies]

  “Forget Kurt Jacobs, tonight we mourn for Kurtonite.” [37 replies]

  “Was Jacobs Silenced?” [61 replies]

  “Kurt Jacobs: Illuminati Puppet.” [79 replies]

  “Why does anyone even care about Jacobs?” [14 replies]

  “Prediction: alien contact during KJ funeral.” [6 replies / locked]

  These posts covered much of the Dot Truth spectrum.

  Kurt jumped to his feet as he heard a knock on the door. But this double-knock was swiftly followed by Anthony’s voice: “Not a warning.” The door opened and Mary stepped in.

  “I didn’t know if you were actually using the computer,” Anthony said.

  “I’m sorry,” Mary said. “I’ll come back tomorrow.”

  Kurt waved her in with his hand. “I’m just passing the time,” he said, which was largely true. Rather than reading the details of any discussions, his main interest had simply been seeing whether people on Dot Truth were talking about his death or not.

  Anthony closed the door and resumed his guard duties.

  Kurt opened a new browser window and let Mary sit in the chair nearest the keyboard. She typed in a long URL with a lot of numbers on the end. A photo album loaded. The pictures, forty or so, were small thumbnails. Mary clicked the first and pressed the space bar to go through them one by one. They were family photos.

  Kurt, only half paying attention, asked Mary to stop on one of the photos. “Is that your dad?” he asked.

  “Yeah.”

  “Does he drive a green car?”

  Mary looked confused. “How did you know that?”

  “We saw him at the mail lockers,” Kurt said. “Me and Minter, the day we met Val. He didn’
t see us, obviously, but we saw him. Pretty cool, right?”

  “I guess,” Mary said, fighting a smile. She continued through her pictures.

  One of the people in many of them was a woman a few years older than Mary who was unmistakably her sister. The sister held a baby in some of the pictures and wore a wedding dress in another. Mary wasn’t with her in any of them; it seemed that she preferred to capture happy moments from the other side of the lens. The final image featured three rows of smiling children with Mary standing next to them. She closed the browser and stood up.

  “Are you done?” Kurt asked.

  She nodded.

  “Did you just want to see them?”

  She nodded again.

  “I think there’s a printer somewhere,” Kurt said, remembering something that Ty said about the router connecting a printer to the offline computers. “I could print them for you if you want?”

  “Really?”

  “Yeah.”

  Mary smiled, more with her eyes than her mouth. “That would be so great.”

  “So who are the kids?” Kurt asked. “Do you teach them?”

  Mary sat down. It seemed as though Kurt’s offer to print the photos had succeeded in convincing her that he was a friend. “They were at my summer camp,” she said. “I’m trained to be a teacher but I couldn’t get the right placement for this year. Hopefully next year.”

  “What kind of camp was it?”

  “Music camp,” she said. “There were some pretty young kids who were already learning instruments and then older kids who had never been taught music before.”

  Kurt had only one direction to take the conversation from there. “I’m just going to ask you this straight up,” he said. “Why are you here?”

  “I met Val at the mail—”

  “I know how you got here,” Kurt interrupted. “But why did you come?”

  Mary didn’t quite know how to answer that.

  “Do any of your family have Seeds?” Kurt asked.

  “No. Not even Lenses. My dad is pretty strongly against all of it. He’s a pastor. But not like The Fury,” she took pains to clarify. “Not like them.”