Everybody Pays (9 page)

SAFE SEX

T
he safest place in all Underground is the Sex Tunnels. A long time ago, the way I heard it, everything was different, and the Sex Tunnels were the most dangerous. They scared people, just being there. Nothing is forbidden in the Sex Tunnels. But that doesn’t mean there are no Rules. The Book Boys wrote it on the wall. In their special blue.

What that means is the one Rule. You have to pay. You can buy anything in the Sex Tunnels. Any skin/shade, any age, anything you want to do or have done.

The Rulers keep count. It goes on your encoder, so they always know. I mean, you don’t even have to ask anyone. As soon as you go inside, the scanner tells the truth about you, and you follow the arrows to the subtunnel where they have what you want. After you see the cashier.

The only thing you need to know is that you can buy anything. That’s what the Sex Tunnels are for. Nothing is for free.

Kill-sex costs the most credits, because they can only use the product once.

But nobody is afraid to go into the Sex Tunnels anymore, because the Rulers made it safe for everyone.

Only the Book Boys scare anyone. The Rulers say they are terrorists, and there is a reward for naming any of them. I heard some of them got captured once. It was on the InfoBoard. But the very next turn, the Book Boys wrote on the walls again:

So nobody ever knew what really happened. Everybody knows the Book Boys never lie. But did they mean the Rulers were lying about capturing some of them, or just . . . lying?

Nobody knows that. And there is nobody to ask.

People have sex outside the Sex Tunnels, but that has to be sanctioned—and only approved sex is sanctioned. So, if people want to have unsanctioned sex, but they don’t want to pay for it, they have to go into the Uncharted Zone.

Some of those who wanted to have sex with children, that’s where they went. They took the children with them. They said this was different. What they were doing was love. You shouldn’t have to pay for love, just for sex. So they went where they could do what they wanted without paying.

But they never came out. They made their speeches and they went into the Uncharted Zone and nobody ever saw them again.

The Book Boys wrote:

That one was tricky to understand. A debit is a death. Everyone knows that. But . . . who died? And why?

It didn’t stop anything. The people who say they love children go into the Uncharted Zone. They even sell maps of how to get to certain places where it is safe to have that kind of sex.

But nobody knows if the maps work, because none of them ever come back.

The whisper-stream says maybe they don’t go to the Uncharted Zone at all. Maybe they go Outside. It’s okay to do that to children Outside without paying. Here, you can only do it if you pay.

But the Book Boys say it’s all a lie:

The whisper-stream says the Terror was just what those people do—the ones who want sex with children and don’t want to pay the credits. The best way to do that is to breed your own. The whisper-stream says some do that. It is not sanctioned, and, sometimes, there are Bad Babies born that way. If the Rulers find one, it goes into the Sex Tunnels. So it isn’t wasted.

I wonder if there are any Rulers at all. The whisper-stream says there aren’t. It says there was a computer program. Outside, before the Terror. Because Underground had to be built
before
the Terror. It had to be ready for people a long, long time before anyone came down here. At least the life-support systems had to be in place. Some say it was prisoners who built it, the way prisoners on the HydroFarm work to make the power that drives everything here. Some say it was the children, the used children.

Nobody really cares what the truth is—people just like to talk.

Some say the Rulers don’t ever put you Outside at all. That’s supposed to be the ultimate punishment, but some say it never happens. They just kill you. Because some people, they
want
to go Outside, and they can’t get there. I know this one guy, Horto, he wanted to go Outside. But there is no Rule about going Outside except that’s where you go if you
break
certain Rules. So Horto broke one of those, and they came and took him. The thing is, Horto said he would contact me from there. From Outside. And everybody knows there are transmissions from Outside. In the Uncharted Zone. But nobody knows if they are real, or just from some people Underground themselves. Horto never contacted me. I wish I knew what that meant.

I know secrets. Secrets even the Book Boys don’t know. I was one of them. One of the children. They took me into the Uncharted Zone. They said it was love.

Here are my secrets: I grew up and I came out. There are others like me. Children, grown now. Some became just like the ones who took me into the Uncharted Zone. Now they say they love children, too.

But some are like me.

And those like me, we are the only ones who really know the ones who say they love children.

And we don’t love them.

for Bror

CHARMED LIFE

I
know she’s in there. It was on the InfoBoard. Not her name, they never do that . . . her ID number.

I know her ID number, even though it’s a secret. I know a lot about her. When she is with me, I will know everything about her. Now I have to find out. Where it is, I mean—where they are keeping her. And then I have to take her away. I know she wants me to do that. I can hear it in my head, telling me. All the time. It never stops.

The trick in here is to stay alive without doing anything to make anyone dead. Because, if you do that, you never get to leave. I know more about the HydroFarm from the whisper-stream than ever I knew from being here before. I was, once. Twelve cycles, that’s what you get for what I did.

My name is Charm, and I’m Leader of the Dancing Girls. I got my name because I had none. Not name, charm. I was not charming. But I could dance the best. Everybody knew that. Even those crazy Game Boys, the ones with the little pistols, they stepped aside for us. The pistols aren’t that good. You have to be real close for them to work. And if
we
get close enough to dance, you’re going to die. Razors never miss.

They’re better for scaring people, too. A lot of people, they didn’t know what the pistols were, or what they could do. But everyone knows a razor. Everyone gets afraid when they see the thin blue edge. Everyone knows how easy it goes through flesh. Everyone who knows me knows how much I like that.

A thick, heavy blanket of water comes down from above where we have to work. I don’t know how they make it. One of the old men told us once that Outside, before the Terror brought everything Underground, the water came from above too, but nobody made it, it just came. Those old men are insane.

Not as mad as Radioman, though. The one who says I love him. He hears it in his head. That I love him. A boy. So crazy. I don’t love anyone. I don’t even know the word that they use. I know it doesn’t mean sex. I mean, people who say they love, they
have
sex. But you never hear the word in the Sex Tunnels. Some of the Dancing Girls work there, for credits. A long time ago, the whisper-stream said, you had to live in the Sex Tunnels if you wanted to work there for credits. But it’s not that way now. You just go into the main gate and tell them you want to work, and they measure you and capture your image. Then they ask you what kind of sex you will do and they put you in the right subtunnel. When you’re done, you just walk out and collect the credits you earned. If you ever come back, anytime at all, they have your image and your other stuff and you can go right through the gate.

Radioman never tried to sex me. He was a Game Boy, when they still had their pistols. They were the ones who started the whole thing. With marks, I mean. You got a mark for every life you took. I had a lot of them too. I wore them on my thigh, hiding the secret. But not the secret the boys thought.

It didn’t get crazy until two things happened:

The first one was the idea that if you killed someone with marks, then their marks belonged to you. So people stopped going after the easy ones and went after the ones who already had marks—you could get maybe a dozen marks for one kill that way.

But crews aren’t allowed to fight each other. So a lot of people in crews got put Outside. The Rulers were confused at first, thinking everybody was breaking the Rules. But then they figured it out.

The second thing that happened, the bums made their own crew. Nobody thought this would ever happen. It wasn’t such a big thing to the other crews, but it made the Rulers very upset. You could tell because they changed the Rules. The new Rules were even more tricky.

Most of the crews stopped wearing their costumes. And when they did, even then, it had to be on the fringes, near the Uncharted Zone. That wasn’t much fun. People don’t recognize you’re moving all together in a fan if you’re not dressed the same. So they don’t get out of the way like they used to.

Radioman was a Game Boy. They said he heard signals in his head all the time. But he never got a signal to take a mark, so he never did. That meant he was the lowest in the crew, but he didn’t care.

When he said he loved me, I just laughed at him. If he had tried to sex me, I would have sliced him. But he didn’t. One of the other Game Boys did—laugh, I mean—so I ripped him. We were all going for marks back then, but the other Game Boys were scared to shoot, because the Rulers don’t let crews fight and they were afraid it would look like that. We never did fight. Not as crews.

But the Rulers got it wrong. They didn’t know it was about marks. And it didn’t matter who you took them from.

There has to be a way to get people there. To the HydroFarm. Where they have my girl. Charm. I have to rescue her. They must have a way to get them there, and it has to be a conveyor. It’s too far to walk and, anyway, the ones who come back always say it took a long time to make the trip. They couldn’t see anything, but they were moving. And there’s new ones back here every day. I asked a couple of them but they wouldn’t tell me. After a while, I figured it out. They wouldn’t tell me because they didn’t know. And if a conveyor goes there, it has to be through the Charted Zone, because the Rulers couldn’t have something as important as the HydroFarm out of the Zone. All the power for Underground has to come from the HydroFarm—they could never risk it.

I know who to ask. I just don’t know how to ask. But the voices will tell me when they’re ready.

The way they make you work here is they use what you make
on
you. Electricity. That works. Nobody wants it on them. And being wet all the time, it doesn’t take much.

If you escape, they give you double whatever time you had left. It’s easy to get away, but not many even try. Twelve cycles doesn’t take long, because you can have Zoners for free on the Farm. Some of the people here, they don’t feel anything, they just smile. They can still work, though, so nobody gets mad at them.

Even if you could get away, where would you go? If you have a crew, you can’t go there. The Rulers will take them all for hiding you. Harboring, that’s breaking a Major Rule. If you want to go back as Leader, you can’t get the others in that kind of trouble. Actually, if you think about it, if you brought them that kind of trouble, there wouldn’t be any of them to come back to. They wouldn’t want you.

If I wait until my time is done, I can go back and be Leader again. There’ll be a new girl, and we’ll dance. I can’t wait. That’s the worst thing about being here—you can’t dance.

I have a tiny little slice of nuim just under my thumbnail. It cost me a lot. Not credits, they don’t have any in here. If you’re caught with credits, they think you’re getting ready to escape. And then you get the electricity. If you get too much, it’s like you’re on Zoners all the time, always smiling. But you can’t even eat. They have to feed you with tubes. I paid for the nuim with sex. One of the Guards. I didn’t even have to look at him while he did it.

I used the nuim and cut another straight, thin line across the front of my left thigh. The pain was wonderful. I felt something. I never usually feel anything. Except when I’m dancing. I love to cut myself, but I have to be careful, not let anyone see. And never deep. The blood dries quickly, and the moisture keeps it clean. The cuts look like painted lines now—tattoos, like some of them get. Even when the Scanners check us, they don’t pay attention to the cuts. They’re like marks, because I made them myself. Marks on me.