Future Tense Fiction

by Kirsten Berg

  Instead, I say, “Now McGee…” Someone hisses, and I wave to quiet them down. “Now McGee’s campaign slogan is ‘Let’s Make Some Improvements.’” Derisive laughter. “She says she just wants to make the Federation a better place to live. To let Members ‘keep a little extra of what they earn.’ To make the Project Approval Framework ‘a little more rigorous.’ But her ‘little’ proposals, well, they make you wonder, who exactly is the Federation being improved for?”

  “For the Artists,” says a man wearing an Activist pin.

  “It’s bullshit,” a Universalist adds.

  It’s nice to hear ideological rivals agree on their dislike of McGee. I raise my finger, about to make a point, when a blond man in a peacoat interrupts me.

  “No it’s not,” he says. He’s an Artist, of course. Not everyone here is a supporter.

  “Shut up, Steve,” the Activist says.

  Steve doesn’t shut up. “If we didn’t give up all our outside income to the Federation, we could fix the goddamn boiler.”

  Marlow rolls his eyes. “We filed a Help Ticket.”

  “Seven days ago. Why the hell are we giving them our Basic?”

  “If you want to keep your tremendous ‘outside income,’” someone suggests, “the door’s right there. Go find—”

  “Maybe,” Steve interrupts, “if you didn’t waste—”

  “Hey now,” I say, collecting the crowd’s attention. “Steve, I hear what you’re saying.” I look into his eyes and smile warmly, and he’s surprised I’m not arguing with him. “You’re making a serious point. If I hear you right, what you’re saying is, you work hard, and you want the quality of your life to reflect that hard work.” Despite himself, Steve nods; I’ve roped him into my empathy trap. “Your feeling is valid, but we also have to be careful not to bring class divisions from the World back into—”

  My phone buzzes again, and a dozen other phones and specs and tablets buzz, and I lose my focus. Members look at their devices. They’ve received an alert, the same one I’ve gotten.

  “Damn.” Marlow holds up his phone. “Viola, look…”

  “What is it?” I whisper.

  “McGee.”

  McGee is on the screen, her red hair newly and expensively cut, her freckled cheeks pink. She’s wearing a sleeveless gray dress and red pumps, holding forth to a standing-room-only crowd. There’s something familiar about the footage. My brain can’t sort it out.

  “That a recording?”

  “It’s happening now.”

  “McGee wasn’t scheduled to do a Chat ’n’ Chew today.”

  “Viola,” Marlow says. “That’s Pimento House.”

  A sneak attack.

  I put down my fork. “I… I gotta go.”

  “But we’re right in the middle of—”

  I stand up, and 30 faces turn to me. Everyone knows. I pull my phone from my blazer. Hundreds of messages jam my inbox. Damn. I’m breathing fast. Am pushing through the dining room, the living room, the mudroom; am putting on my trenchcoat and hat; am out the door.

  I’m surrounded by winter dark, my frozen breath visible. Snow has started coming down in a serious way. I walk from Zardoz House down a quiet residential street, a degentrified Rochester, New York, neighborhood. Almost every house other than Zardoz is boarded up, burned, gutted. The street is pockmarked, hasn’t been paved for the better part of a decade. Rusted gas-powered cars, some abandoned, some home for indigent squatters, line the road. I parked on the avenue, which is still being maintained by the city. I walk and brood. I feel furious but also guilty.

  When it was founded, the Federation wasn’t supposed to have adversarial elections. There weren’t supposed to be factions, but factions quickly formed. Artists want the Federation to be separate from the World, to focus on the individual creative projects of Members. Activists want the Federation to become a platform from which to save the World. We Universalists, meanwhile, want the Federation to eat the World. The way it’s supposed to work, candidates are supposed to get spontaneously drafted by the community. The way it really works is when you make it known you’re running, Members invite you to Chat ’n’ Chews. You visit Houses. You answer questions. You give a campaign speech, though you never call it a campaign speech. Campaigning is what your opponent does. You, you’re just chatting, and maybe someone just happens to broadcast your visit. The Federation pioneered the art of passive-aggressive politicking, but McGee has perfected it. Somehow, she got herself invited to Pimento House—to my house—at the very end of the Voting Period, on the night I was invited to one of the First Five. She’s at my House, right now, and 30,000 people are watching her on the Bulletin, watching her humiliate me, live.

  When I get to the avenue, I’m confused for a second. A big robot soup-kitchen truck, operated by some effective altruism distributed autonomous charity, is selling discount meals to the city’s indigents. Hundreds wait in line, clutching their National Basic Income cards. I spot my van across the street. It turns on when I get close, its headlights bright. Its door slides open. My phone says it’ll take two hours to get from Rochester to Ithaca. If I’m lucky, I’ll make it back before McGee is finished.

  If I’m lucky, I’ll get the chance to kill that bitch live on the Bulletin.

  When I joined the Federation, I was in a bad place. I’d been kicked out of my vocational high school, one of those charter “code boot camps” popular back then, for unruly behavior. For a while, I trained robots to do home reno work, and then a roofer robot splat fell on me. That’s when my drinking and drug use got really out of hand. Six months out of recovery, methadone pump in my arm, LoJack on my ankle, I was at the end of my rope. I’d run out of friends willing to let me couch surf, couldn’t get a job. I had nothing but my Basic.

  One day, I got a weird message. Someone from my Narcotics Recovery Group—a woman named Grace Zenebe—invited me to visit her. We weren’t supposed to contact each other outside the Group, but Grace said she wanted “to catch up.” To be honest, I didn’t much like her. The machine learning court had forced me into my NRG after my arrest (long story). Grace had gone into recovery voluntarily. She’d gotten addicted to sleep suppressors during her senior year at Cornell and treated the NRG as a form of personal therapy.

  During meetings, she complained about her parents, and she seemed especially interested in telling me about her personal problems. Worst of all, she was part of a weird cult, kept talking about being “a Member of the Federation.” Took me a couple weeks to figure out she wasn’t talking about Star Trek. Still, when her message appeared in my inbox, I accepted her invite. I’d get a meal, I figured, and—though she was annoying, though she was in a cult—she was hot, and I hoped we might hook up. When I arrived, I walked up to her House and opened the door; it was unlocked. When she saw me, she hugged me like we were old friends. Her smile—bright, welcoming—floored me.

  “Vee,” she said, “It’s so wonderful to see you!”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Yeah, definitely.”

  Pimento House was big and creaky but also cozy. Fifteen people lived here, Grace explained. Sitting at the kitchen island, I ate two oversize pieces of vegan lasagna, which her housemate Farhad had made. “He’s an amazing chef,” she said. I felt jealous, even though I had no right to be. I grunted and gulped down a mug of black coffee. Grace sipped mate. Soon, we moved to her room and cozied up on her purple futon. She’d graduated a year ago, but her room still looked like it belonged to a student. Aromatic candles covered tables. Economics textbooks and Russian novels lined DIY concrete-block bookshelves. I almost sat on an Ursula K. Le Guin novel—I think it was The Dispossessed.

  We got to talking. Well, she got to talking. Since I last saw her, she had decided to become a writer, and when she told her parents, they freaked out. All the major TV shows and video games were written by A.I. these days; there wasn’t much of a future for human writers. Her parents all but disowned her, but she refused to be cowed. She’d already had a few short storie
s accepted, showed me a magazine called The Sideways Review, which included her story “A Small Hang-Up.” She had even (she was embarrassed to admit) been accepted into the Iowa Writers’ Workshop but had declined the offer. She said “Iowa Writers’ Workshop” like I was supposed to know what that was.

  I asked the question she wanted me to ask: “Why didn’t you go?”

  “All the most interesting young writers are part of the Federation.”

  “Uh-huh.” I hadn’t read a novel since before code boot camp.

  “This generation is going to reinvent American literature. The Federation is changing everything that matters—art, music, philosophy.”

  Overcome with excitement, she took out a folder from her backpack, and I sighed. I hadn’t been asked to her room to make out but to be recruited. “You know what a Basic House is, Vee?”

  “It’s not a cult?”

  She smiled. “Not exactly.” A Basic House, she said, was just a group of people who chose to live together. What had happened was, 10 years ago, a network of friends, using an old social media platform, started a conversation about how they wanted to escape the tyranny of the labor market, how they wanted to work on their own projects full time, and so a few hundred activists and artists banded together, bought five dilapidated houses in a degentrified neighborhood in Rochester. Those five—the First Five—formed the seed of the Basic House Federation. In the years that followed, any group that owned a House could join. You gave your biweekly Basic payment to the Federation, and in return the Federation handled food, housing, and the other necessities, negotiating on behalf of the entire Membership with the outside economy. To be admitted to the Federation, she said, each Member of a House wrote up a personal Five-Year Plan explaining what Meaningful Project they would commit to.

  I said, “What if my Five-Year Plan is: ‘Play Zombie Fortress all day’?”

  “It would depend. Are you, like, doing an ethnography of gaming communities or something?”

  “I’m playing because I like killing zombies with a sawed-off shotgun?”

  She laughed. “That proposal might need a little bit of work.”

  “OK, what if I’m a professional gamer, and I’m raking in money knocking off newbs?”

  “Well, if your Project happens to earn you money, your windfall will be, eh, returned to the Federation common fund.”

  “I see,” I said. “So, the Federation isn’t a cult. It’s a scam. I give away my Basic, and I’m supposed to trust some Communist bureaucrat to spend my money for me?” Back then, I didn’t know what communism was, but it sounded disreputable.

  Grace playfully hit my arm. “You can think of it as a sort of Communist Costco. If Costco happened to own your house and ran its own world-class health care system. It’s called a monopsony. When there’s only one buyer in a marketplace, that buyer has a lot of—”

  “I get the idea,” I said, and Grace seemed embarrassed at her own chattiness.

  She said, “Vee—” (our arms touching) “—where’ve you been living the last six months?”

  “Here and there.”

  “You getting work?”

  “I tried…” Tears came. “I really tried.”

  “They garnishing your wages or whatnot?”

  “What wages? No one wants to give me a job.”

  “And the Basic?”

  “You can’t live off the Basic.”

  She held my hand and waited till I finished crying. “We have a spot in Pimento House. If you wanted to, I could introduce you to my housemates? Sponsor you? Everyone here is supernice.”

  “Why me? I’m just some random nobody from your recovery group.”

  “I missed you,” she said.

  “What?”

  “You just… most people in recovery, when you talk to them, they don’t really hear what you’re saying. You’re different, Vee. You really listen. You, like, empathize.”

  I wasn’t the person she imagined me to be. I was just better than others at hiding my feelings. When you’ve got a rage-filled homophobic alcoholic dad and a mom with borderline personality disorder, you become pretty good at reading people and hiding your emotions. But I let Grace be confused about me. I was torn. On the one hand, I wanted to run. Grace was being too nice to me. On the other hand, despite myself, I trusted her. And anyway, joining Pimento House definitely beat starving. So I filled out an application, I said in my Five-Year Plan I could help Houses with repairs and renovations, and I met her Housemates. I’d mooch off these suckers for six months, then get the hell out.

  But something strange happened. Six months became a year. A year became five. I filled out a second Five-Year Plan and then a third. I went back to school, paid off my debts, got PT for my bum leg, did repair and reno all across the Burned-Over Territory. And Grace and me, well, we fell in love. Got married. Decided to do an ovum merger. That wasn’t the strangest part. I started believing in the Federation. The World was getting more fucked every day, but the Federation worked. With the national indigent population edging toward 100 million, it was a place you could live. I decided we could only be free inside the Federation, but we couldn’t be truly free until everyone joined. Our wealth came from the World, but one day we would cast aside the Basic and the Federation would stand on its own two feet, producing everything it needed by itself, for itself. The Federation can’t change the World like the Activists think; the Federation has to eat the World. That’s what I decided. And now, I’m pushing 40 and running to be Chairperson, fighting the best I know how to save the Federation from those who would destroy it from within.

  Weird, huh?

  It takes an hour longer than promised to get back to Ithaca. All that time, I watch McGee. Every time I pick up my phone, she’s holding forth, big grin on her smug face, outlining her plans for her next term. Before dinner, she volunteers, “Members should totally be allowed to keep more outside income and here’s why.” She speaks with a Valley Girl cadence. An hour later, between forkfuls of salad, she slips in, “The Project Approval Framework so totally needs to be made more rigorous. If you, like, just want to sit around all day in your pajamas, you don’t need to do it in a Basic House, am I right?” Laughter. Housemates and Members I don’t recognize surround her. I don’t see Grace, and she isn’t answering my messages. Farhad is at McGee’s side. He must’ve been the one to invite her.

  Now, it’s no secret that me and Farhad don’t get along. He runs a five-table restaurant in town that caters to University bigwigs. It even got reviewed in the New York Times. If McGee’s reforms were adopted, his disposable income would shoot up. Still, I never imagined Farhad would betray me this way. During dessert, McGee makes a new suggestion: “And, like, I know it’s controversial to say so, but the Member Removal Process is 100 percent a joke. You can’t be kicked out of the Federation even if you’ve committed a felony, you know?” She eats a spoonful of gelato. “Can’t we make the Federation a safe space?”

  Was that a swipe at me? I wasn’t convicted of a felony, just a misdemeanor. I stow my phone, too furious to watch more. When the van lets me off, I’m shaking. My suitcase follows me onto the street on mechanical spider legs. I send the van away to find parking. The lot across the street has become a small tent camp filled with a few dozen indigent squatters. Most used to teach composition at the University before their jobs got automated. Now they spend their days working microgigs on their phones.

  I’m home. I study the face of the old Victorian. Its yellow siding is stained, its turret cladded by snow. The wraparound porch is covered in junk. Its frosted windows are lit up, decorated with tinsel and strings of lights, and cheerful voices emerge from within. The first-floor windows look like two stern eyes, challenging me.

  Before I can go in, a shadow approaches me. It’s a man, an indigent. I don’t recognize him. He’s short, has a well-trimmed goatee, and his hair is pulled back in a ponytail. He’s wearing a CalTech sweatshirt and gray sweatpants and is holding an ancient MacBook under his ar
m. I’m about to say I can’t help him when I see that he’s wearing a LoJack around his ankle. My ankle twinges where the weight of one just like it sat for 18 months. Irritation melts into pity, and I pull out my wallet.

  “I’m sorry, ma’am,” he says, “but I don’t want your money.”

  I don’t respond.

  He says, “You live in this here House?”

  I nod, wary.

  “You think… you think I could get in or something?”

  “Well, we’re full up. But there’s a list of Houses with openings online and—”

  “I applied already, three times. Never even got an interview. The rejection letter was like, ‘There are 5,000 applications for every open spot.’ But I have something unique to contribute, you know? I just thought, maybe, if you live here, maybe you got some inside track or something? Maybe you could look at my application and tell me if I did anything wrong?”

  I shove money into his hand, and he doesn’t refuse it. “I’m sorry,” I say.

  “I’m a skilled programmer. I can do so much more than training coding algorithms all day.”

  “It’s not a decision I can make on my own…” The man glares at me. I dig out one of my cards from my wallet and hand it to him. “Look, admission is a collective process, but why don’t you send me a message, and when I’m in less of a hurry I’ll see what I can do?”

  He doesn’t like this answer, but he takes my card and wades through the gathering snow to join his comrades in the tent camp.

  Off balance, I step up the creaky steps, straighten the sign by the door.

  WELCOME TO

  PIMENTO HOUSE

  JOINED 2045

  I look squarely at the security camera and wait for the door to unlock. I reach for the knob, and my hand is shaking. But then I see my wedding band on my left hand, and I calm down. Whatever happens in there, I’ll have at least one ally in the House, one person whose unconditional support I can count on.