by Leo Champion
She’d never liked just standing still on these things, so she kept up a brisk pace as the conveyor whisked her north. Around her, on this level and the atrium above, were chain stores – the Intendancy permitted a few independent stores in Manhattan, but the ones that weren’t high-ups’ personal hobbies were usually far lower down, not to be found on hundredth-floor concourse throughways.
The Enterprise was a larger and more prestigious building than the One, in part because it was a crossover point for both the east-west miniloops that ran from Philadelphia to the Long Island clusters across Midtown and Harlem, and the ‘paperclip’ lines that served Manhattan at the hundredth and two-hundredth floor levels. They intersected in four places and the Enterprise was one of those.
So it was crowded as she filed onto an escalator up to the miniloop station, sensors scanning her implant and deducting the fare from her designated bank account. Throngs of people, many of them with Intendancy insignia, moved with her, bombarded by their own advertising and implant holograms. It was something you had to live with in public places – advertising that recognized your face, associated it with past buying patterns and influenced by your physical location and mood, which computers could reliably infer from facial and blood-pressure scans.
A string of miniloop cars slid noiselessly on frictionless magnetics into the station on her side as she arrived at the platform. The doors opened to a two-thirds-full car, slimmer than the subway cars slowly rusting away underneath the city but similarly decorated with seats, rails, and straps hanging from them. The noise in her ears cut out as she stepped through, the hologram vanishing from in front of her eyes as she took a rail and braced herself. These things could start fast.
The building media had shut out because – as with a brief title screen it opened up in front of her at the same thirty-percent transparency – she was on the miniloop’s communications network now. Consumer views were a valuable commodity, captive audiences an inherently reliable bringer of views, and every media corporation protected its staked-out turf vigorously. But right now it wasn’t advertising, it was a social news update – news deemed beneficial to society and the promotion of virtue. Only the opening shot of drones with bombs stopped her from muting it.
“A trespasser settlement in the West Virginia Global Heritage Park was discovered this morning by satellite analytics,” came the sneering voice of Glen Hauk, a US-20 Speaker for the People and a current trending sensation well on his way from Executive First-Class to Senior Executive Intendant, which would be the same pay grade as the President of the United States or a United Nations Delegate.
Hauk was a big Maori man with a sneer on his white teeth as he spoke. On each shoulder, instead of stars, were two big silver thumbs-up. Speakers dealt in likes; they were the voice of the online mobs, reality-TV demagogues as they executed purges and zeroings. Social Advocates were predictable as they enforced virtue out of duty; Speakers for the People could be random as they did so for entertainment.
You disgrace your warrior ancestors, Diana Angela thought, careful not to let any trace of the opinion reach her face.
Hauk’s newscast cut to imagery from autonomous dragonfly drones that had apparently found their way down airshafts. A community had holed up in abandoned coal mines, using geothermal power and groundwater to feed themselves with hydroponic crops. The cameras showed dug-out concourses with what looked like dozens of people. Safe from raiders and out of the seething violence of the cities, it must have been nice. While it lasted, Diana Angela tried to look away but the projections cast onto her eyeballs moved with her head. Closing her eyes would only shut the images in with her, as her implant instead projected them onto the images of her eyelids. The only way to shut them out entirely would be to turn the implant off – and then she’d just get a hologram cast in front of her.
“The industrial trespassers,” Hauk sneered, “were scanned and discovered to number three hundred and eighty-one individuals. Upon its identification as a permanent settlement, ASB-2000 drones were detailed to an enforcement action.”
Cut back to the flight of wing-shaped drone blimps, as large bombs dropped from each of them. The camera switched to a noseview from one of the bombs, descending toward wooded hills.
“The trespassers might have believed that they were invisible; they might have believed that hundreds of meters of rock would protect them. Or maybe,” Hauk said, and the camera cut from the descending bombs to a rack of shotguns and rifles, “they hoped to fight us with their macho toys.”
There were snickers and a couple of low jeers from a few people in the miniloop car. Everyone on it, through their own implants, was watching the same news.
“They could at least have applied for a permit,” said a two-squared US-8 with a glance at Diana Angela.
“Serves them right,” a man with an open circle on each shoulder said with a smile. “Street people destroying nature.”
The footage cut to the inside of the mineshaft settlement as the bombs hit, ceilings caving in and burying screaming people in rock. Snickers came from some of the people in the miniloop car watching.
Then the camera went back to smirking Speaker Hauk.
“And if any of you are wondering whether we got all of them – no, we didn’t, signs show fifty-two still alive… but they’re not going anywhere! Vegas odds currently have the over-under on the last of them as nine days. To place your bet, go to…”
Over Speaker Hauk was superimposed a betting screen, tied to Hauk’s affiliate link. A live approvals ticker showed that millions of people around the world were rushing to the site or Liking that particular comment.
“Grand on at least one of ‘em lasting at least a month,” said an angular, shaven-headed person of indeterminate gender from across the miniloop car. “They’ve got their food and water.”
“Madison Park,” came the announcement as the miniloop slowed down at her stop. To her relief – Hauk had cut to an up-and-coming Social Advocate talking about how the drones worked, vacuum-celled dirigibles circling in the stratosphere with sensors active and bombs ready – the feed cut off as she got out of the car.
Almost home!
* * *
Her apartment was a one-bedroom on the hundred and ninth floor of the Madison Park Building, off a secondary corridor of a respectable elevator district in a somewhat prestigious building of the Midtown South cluster. It was a moderately desirable neighborhood; mostly those with the social credit of US-11-14, those born to lower executive management or higher but waiting their turn like she was, lived on corridors like this. She stared at a moment for the lock, letting it recognize her eyeballs and ping her implant, and the door smoothly opened, a light coming on as she did.
The living room was moderately but minimally furnished, with only a comfortable sofa and some rugs; when everyone had an implant there was no need for showy home entertainment units. On the walls, though, were pieces of Impressionist art, all originals with certificates of authenticity from the lower-floor artists who’d painted them.
On the east wall was a big picture window that currently showed a cutesy cartoon family. Once upon a time, until four years ago, the big picture window had showed a constant sunrise, the feed from east-facing camera drones that traveled west around the planet at such a speed that they constantly showed dawn. She’d faded that eternal sunrise after they’d purged Lucius Theron, and in a black mood after the Commune had replaced it with the insipid Luvettes. People might see from the door, and evidence of following a popular thing was another data point toward statistical normality. Appearing normal on the little things allowed you to violate the big ones. She looked away, though, as she headed through that room to the bedroom.
That room was different. There were two heavy wooden cases filled with old paper books, some of them twentieth- and a few even nineteenth-century, Damon Runyon and Horatio Alger prominent among them. By the unmade bed were a pile of six, all with placemarkers sticking out from between the pages. The art
on the walls was original but inconsistent; this room was where she put the ones she really liked. It was within the bounds, for now, of virtue to have taste in art. Someday, of course, it would not be – they were already burning paintings in Europe and South Africa, “extirpating a sinful heritage.” She hoped that trend would take a while to reach the capital of the world, rather than its provinces; the book-burning period during her girlhood had been bad enough, but original art couldn’t be substantively backed up electronically.
Quickly she checked her implant, noting the time she was supposed to be aboard the hyperloop to Shenzhen. She wasn’t actually going to use the ticket she’d paid for, but the first rule of invisibility was to deal with the low-hanging fruit. When she disconnected her implant she would no longer be visibly tracked, and she needed to get out of her apartment shortly. The booking would give the algorithms an excuse for the anomaly; if they actually did cross-reference across the Chinese border, she would have been in handcuffs a decade ago.
Ready on the dresser was a sports bag packed with clothes, her outfit for the way back because anything she wore down on the streets stayed down there. Getting the wrong kind of dirt – or, god forbid, trace radioactivity – picked up and flagged by some environmental sensor… might draw attention. She always worried about bringing something back inside anyway, maybe in her hair.
But she wasn’t worried about that now, she decided: she was going down!
She slung the bag over her shoulder with a smile as she mentally disconnected her implant from the network. About time!
Chapter Two
On a silly exuberant impulse she’d decided to, rather than waiting for an elevator, take the stairs from her floor, the hundred-and-ninth, down to her local concourse on the hundred-and-first floor. The empty grey concrete flights of steps went down as far as sub-basements, although access was restricted below about ground level, and high up into the distance toward the sealed levels where the very highest Intendancy lived. And at least around her area, nobody else seemed to use them.
She’d been up to the very top – she went up there regularly, to pay necessary respects to her Uncle Hugo, who wore stars on his shoulders. He tolerated her eccentricities – antisocialism, he thought it only was – and covered her back. For an Executive Intendant, with all the compromising things you had to do to maintain that rank, Uncle Hugo was really a decent guy to his nieces, at least. And it certainly helped to have a high-ranking relative protecting you, even if he had no idea exactly what he was protecting…
Now she trotted briskly down the empty stairs, taking them two at a time even in the heels as happy energy bubbled through her. She was tempted – but not in heels, or for that matter a work suit! – to go faster by leaping over the handrails. You could go down stairs fast if you really wanted to, and now she was finally on her way out she felt exuberant, energetic, giggly. There was a bounce in her step and as she reached the next landing she threw her arms out and whirled a full three-sixty, her skirt flaring and a grin on her face up to her eyes. She experimented with a half-remembered pirouette from some childhood dance class, tested the limits of her skirt with a couple of gentle, careful kicks.
It was good to be fit; it was wonderful to have a body that could do exactly as it was told, that enjoyed most challenges. But as she approached the hundred and first floor she tamped herself down, forcing the bounce out of her step and replacing it with a stately plodding gait. Her happy grin became a thin smile and then a dour frown; she made herself think of purges and zeroings, of good people’s lives destroyed completely because some US-20 was on a power trip or some fucking Speaker for the People saw a chance for a cheap shot that might get him a handful more likes. The missed opportunities, the waste in her world… not to mention the billions, globally, living like animals on the streets because the Intendancy had outright fabricated a pretext to purge the one man whose vision might have done something about it…
By the time she pushed open the stairwell doors at the hundred-and-first floor, onto the reasonably busy concourse that had been her local shops for about a decade, she had the right and proper bearing for a US-13 in public. The dancing had been a bad idea; she wasn’t the only person who ever used the stairs, and there might well have been private surveillance. It was entirely possible that someone’s damn termite or dragonfly had gathered footage of her dancing inappropriately – there was really no such thing as dancing appropriately, was there? And certainly not in a work suit – in the stairwell, her face to be recognized by one of the algorithms and another data point put into someone’s blackmail book.
No, she had to take better care about that kind of thing, she chided herself firmly. Do you want to draw notice? And God forbid someone cross-referenced her ticketing and social media posts, realized that downstairs from her apartment was not actually on her way to High Central, and wondered where she actually was going if she wasn’t going to be catching an intercontinental hyperloop…
She passed the Whole Foods Market, noting a couple of staff she recognized, US-3s and -4s with single or double hash-marks on each shoulder. The lowest level of Intendancy other than the student and postgraduate grades, which were not awarded insignia. Their jobs, high on the hundred-and-tenth floor – they probably lived way further down, and not necessarily in the Madison or even Manhattan – involved keeping an eye on the scanning plates and the restock bots. Both of those were solidly mature technologies with their own internal diagnostic and self-repair capabilities, which meant the retail workers were really just there for customer service. Robots could answer questions just as easily too, but a lot of people – it sort of came with having circles or higher on your shoulders – wanted to boss around human beings.
She took an escalator down to the mezzanine hundredth floor, ignoring the projected holograms dancing in front of her face and tuning out the constant nagging of the directed speakers. Her implant was disconnected so the sensors couldn’t pull from that, but they could read the three fucking circles on each shoulder just fine, analyze her face for an estimate of her age – if they didn’t simply have her face registered with her date of birth in some database – and throw demographically-targeted advertising at her anyway.
She was a US-13, she was thirty-three, Valentine’s was coming up, half of the ads were maternity goods and a third of the rest were dating services. No and fuck no, she thought. Her double life meant there was never going to be a man in her life at more than a careful extended arm’s length… and despite a growing amount of gentle nagging from her family, she didn’t want to bring any more human lives into this miserable world. Her younger sister Annabelle could have her quota, could have four children if she wanted; Diana Angela had quietly had her tubes cut years ago.
At the hundredth floor elevator banks she pressed the button for a direct interdistrict to the eighty-first floor. When the door opened she filed in with a dozen other people, mostly with one or two circles on each shoulder although there were a couple of three-circlers and a massively built dark-skinned woman with two wreaths and a bosom the size of a packing crate. The US-16 wore a long, black flowing dress that hung from that battering-ram of a chest and dragged a little bit on the floor behind her, and she glared imperiously around the elevator for the duration of their ride.
Eventually – it would have been only a couple of minutes, but in the uncomfortable silence around that damn US-16 it felt like longer – the interdistrict opened at the eighty-first floor and she headed down the nearest escalator to the eightieth. The stores on this mezzanine were a little plainer, a little less upscale than the ones a district up; where her home shops had a Whole Foods, this area had a Safeway. In the same slot twenty levels below here, there would be a Piggly Wiggly. Every interdistrict concourse had a Duane Reade because it was New York.
Someone had already hit the call button for the next interdistrict, which would express down to the sixty-first. The big US-16 two-wreather appeared behind her, munching on a hot dog while absorbed in he
r implant, and there were a couple of others from the previous elevator as well. The people on this concourse were mostly three- and four-squared US-9s and 10s, a few US-7s and -8s. Dating or marriage too far outside your pay grade was heavily discouraged at the lower levels, would draw Social Advocates and leering wannabe Speakers, but it did sometimes happen quietly.
Around the level of circles – open circles meant heir to wreaths, after all – it became a bit more fluid, mostly because men with stars on their shoulders wanted to be able to pick up whatever young upper-middle-class women they wanted. That was sometimes a problem for her, although Uncle Hugo was usually good about running interference on that kind of thing.
Uncle Hugo seemed to have accepted that his younger brother’s elder daughter was an antisocial fitness nut who liked to travel alone. The family was old money, Hugo had once told her after some cognac. Our great-grandparents built Silicon Valley. Our blood’s earned the right to some eccentricity and at least you don’t own three dozen cats.
She truly hoped that if they ever did finally catch her, he wouldn’t be too badly damaged politically or by whatever metrics the real high-ups balanced against each other. It would be too much to hope that he’d be able to save her, and she’d long ago decided she wouldn’t ask – he’d have enough strain on his favor bank and his political capital protecting the rest of the family given what she was guilty of.
The elevator doors opened, a tipsy foursome of middle-aged men with squares on their shoulders stumbling out. Then people boarded, Diana Angela lagging toward the end while the US-16 with the battleship chest surged in immediately, others flinching or stepping out of her way.
