Proxy (7 page)

“But, I never . . . I was a baby when the contract was made.”

“The Benevolent Society enrolled you
in loco parentis
to repay your debts. You should have filed a formal objection at the time.”

“I was a baby!”

“Unless your patron would care to waive his exemption, we will begin immediately.”

“You can’t do this . . . Sterling . . . sixteen years . . .”

The silence hung heavy around the hospital room. The nurse looked at her feet. Knox could feel his father’s attention shift from his datastream to his son, even without seeing his eyes.

He frowned. Whatever he saw on Knox’s face was more disgusting to him than the torture Sydney was enduring.

“We will begin.” The Guardian nodded at her colleague, who stepped forward with the EMD stick emitting a low hum that seemed to shake the image in the air. Knox winced as it got near his proxy.

“Why shock me if you’re just going to send me to Sterling?” Sydney squirmed where he hung, pulling his waist away from the tip of the EMD stick.

“The punishments are not for you,” the Guardian said without the slightest hint of emotion in her voice. “They are for your patron.”

“Who is he? What’s his name?” Sydney yelled. “Coward! I know you’re watching! You knockoff patron coward!”

The first shock sent Sydney’s whole body rigid. Every muscle tensed. Knox could see the veins in Sydney’s forehead and arms pop up. The stick was removed from his side and he slumped again where he hung. The holos from the proxy’s biofeed that hovered around the tiled room flickered. The EMD pulse disrupted his signal. It fried every nerve in his body.

“One,” said the female Guardian.

Sydney gasped. The stick touched his side again. He flailed. His legs danced freely in the air; his neck thrashed from side to side. The holos around him flickered again.

“Two,” she said.

More flickers.

“Three.”

Knox closed his eyes. He had to. He couldn’t witness this. In the oblivion, Knox saw an image of the girl. Her purple wink, her dark hair, her nervous laugh. He’d taken a car. He’d convinced her to come. Her name was Marie. Marie Alvarez.

“Open your eyes, Knox,” his father barked at him. A rush passed through his limbs and his eyes shot open on their own.

“Do you realize how much this is costing me?” His father leaned forward. “My rates are going to go sky high because of this. I’ll have to pay for a new proxy for you on top of this one while he’s at Sterling. And you can be sure that Xiao and Grace Alvarez will not let my board of directors forget about this. They are very important clients and they lost their daughter because of you. Do you understand me? This reflects on me.
You
reflect on me. You need to start thinking about consequences, about other people. You aren’t some piece of Valve trash who can act without affecting others. You are supposed to be a leader! How will the shareholders react when they hear what my son has done, huh? You hear me? You are hurting your legacy with your foolishness. Our share price is going to plummet and it will be blamed on my reckless son, so you will watch every second of this and think about what you’ve done. You will not waste my time and money closing your eyes. This is your wake-up call, Knox. It is time to grow up. I will not humor you any longer.”

Knox clenched his jaw. He wanted to scream out. He wanted to shut his father up. He wanted to stop the Guardians and set Sydney free. But he stayed silent. He stared forward, watching the holo and breathing loudly through his nose.

Knox watched as the Guardians fried his proxy’s nerves over and over and over again. By number nine Sydney had thrown up; by eleven he was glassy eyed, his head lolling about like a zombie in a classic movie; by the last zap he was hanging limp. His wrists were red and raw from where they rubbed against the chain that held him. A tear ran down Knox’s cheek, even as he held his head stone still. For the first time since he was four years old and he had been told that this boy was named Sydney and that this boy would be his proxy, and that this boy would be punished because of the old piece of clay he’d broken, Knox cried.

“You are responsible for him,” his father had told him after that first punishment, so many years ago. “Whatever happens to him, that is your responsibility. Do you understand?” At the time he had nodded through his tears. He had broken the tablet. He was responsible.

When it was done, his father let him fall asleep. As he drifted off, the holo zoomed in on Sydney’s head, hanging limp against his chest.

“Hold that image,” Knox’s father said, suddenly standing. He stepped forward and poked his finger right into the image.

What was he doing?

Knox tried to focus. His father used his fingers to zoom in on Sydney’s head. He put his finger up to some weird birthmark behind the proxy’s ear. He leaned in close.

“Get me the proxy’s blood test results immediately,” he ordered the nurse. She began working in her own projection.

“I have it right here,” she said, studying the data she’d brought up. “What is it you’re looking for?”

“Dad, what’s wrong?” Knox asked, although it came out slurred and hazy. His father turned around, looking surprised to see him there. As if Knox could be anywhere else. “Is something wrong with the blood?”

His father ignored the question. Asked his own. “Have you noticed that birthmark before? Has it always looked like that?”

“I . . . uh . . .” Knox couldn’t remember. He never paid that much attention. Who looks at some other guy’s birthmarks, especially some proxy’s?

Knox was so tired, but he was suddenly scared. What if he’d gotten some weird disease from that proxy’s blood, loaded with parasites and pollutants? Rat flu, dengue fever, brain worms . . . who knew what kind of diseases lived down in the Valve? They ate wild animals down there, didn’t they?

“Is something wrong with—” Knox tried again, but his father brought up a holo, tapped around and suddenly, the patch on Knox’s arm lit up again. His pain vanished and he felt a glowing, cloudy peace blossom inside him.

“Don’t you worry about a thing,” his father said. “It will be taken care of.”

“But I—” Knox started, but he couldn’t hold his eyes open, couldn’t even remember what he’d wanted to ask. Even with his eyes closed, he saw Sydney’s face. He saw Marie’s face. Their faces hung there in the void and then the void engulfed him and he slept.

This time, he did not dream.

[9]

SYD SHIVERED HIMSELF AWAKE, every nerve raw and prickling. The echo of a nightmare shot adrenaline up his spine. He reached back to the mark behind his ear. He could never be a gambler. His finger always went right to that spot when he was nervous.

It hurt to open his eyes, but it hurt to keep them closed. Slowly, his vision came into focus. A steel table leg. White tiles. Bright light. A vague electric hum. The pain and the cold told him he was alive.

He was still in his boxer shorts, lying on the floor of the room where they had shocked him. His pants and his shirt were bunched under his head, as if someone had wanted him to be comfortable but didn’t want to spare a pillow. He felt his heart racing in his chest. He tried to slow his breathing, to calm down. He lowered his hands and pressed his palms against the cold tile.

He could hear shouts and screams through the walls. He guessed these were the sounds of other proxies in other rooms enduring other punishments for other patrons.

He’d never been in a prison like this before. Usually, the punishments were given wherever the bounty hunters happened to find the proxy. If hard labor had been ordered, some local security goons would just issue the summons. Failure to show up at the appointed time was a breach of contract, punishable by additional months and years of debt, and, of course, a few hits with an EMD pulse.

The security firms were always liberal with those. They made the whole thing much more vengeful than these Guardians had, taunting and turning the settings higher than required. Competition was fierce to get more patron business, so firms would often interrupt one another to serve the same punishment. Fights broke out. Sometimes, they’d reach a settlement and the punishment got issued twice for the same debt. Double payday. And if the proxy complained . . . well, proxies were replaceable.

Using the poor to control the poor kept everyone in the Valve at one another’s throats and kept them from looking too far up in the direction of the skyscrapers and the private communities. The Guardians rarely showed up to haul anyone off. The market preferred to keep its enforcers more invisible than that.

But a girl had died. Syd couldn’t believe it. His patron had actually killed someone. Syd never imagined a crime like that or a punishment like this. He never imagined he’d find himself here.

It had to be one of those intelligence centers that SecuriTech ran. “Enemies of the market” disappeared inside them and never came out.

Last year, after the Rebooters hacked an insurance datastream, two or three dozen guys were pulled out of the Valve in night raids, accused of anti-market terrorism and supporting the debt revolutionaries hiding in Old Detroit. The Rebooters, as they called themselves, were always trying to hack corporate systems to erase data, but they never managed to inflict much damage. The network was resilient.

The men who’d been rounded up in night raids disappeared into a place like this one. Their bodies started showing up in the gutters of the Valve a few days later, dumped out with the rest of the Upper City trash. It was an effective reminder not to upset the status quo.

Syd remembered Egan laughing at one of the headless bodies lying arms akimbo on a heap of discarded processors.

“That’s Doolaine,” he said. “The butcher who used to pay us to hunt rats and then rip us off when we brought ’em in.”

“How do you know?” Syd had asked.

“The neck tattoo. I’ll never forget that big knockoff’s neck tattoo.” Egan spat on the body and the bead of saliva rolled across the purple skin of his chest. “You don’t remember the beatings he used to give us?”

Syd had shrugged. He remembered, but he’d developed the philosophy that it was better to forget old beatings. A grudge was just another debt owed.

“No way he was a Rebooter,” Syd said. “He wasn’t political. He didn’t care about debt reform.”

“Who cares what he was or what he believed?” Egan shrugged. “Someone must have informed on him for some reason. It’s not our problem.”

They had walked on, but the idea stuck with Syd. Someone didn’t like Doolaine and had made an accusation. It didn’t matter if it was true. Truth was a commodity no one down in the Valve could afford. Protection mattered a lot more than truth and Doolaine didn’t have any. Too many enemies.

Syd remembered feeling glad he didn’t know anyone well enough to have enemies like Doolaine had. He’d kept to himself, private. But now, lying on the floor listening to the tortured screams of whoever it was in those other rooms, he couldn’t help but consider the coincidence. The same day he agreed to help Tom, the same day his crush on Atticus Finch came to light, was the day he was taken by the Guardians. Had he formed too many connections, reached out just far enough to get cut off? Did he have more enemies than he’d thought? Or maybe, the wrong friends?

No.

This wasn’t about him. It was his patron. It had nothing to do with Syd. That was his weakness. When he got to thinking, it always turned back on himself, his failings, his mistakes.

But he didn’t matter in this. He was just a body for the rich to use and to discard when it suited them. That was his place, his market niche, as they called it. He was a proxy and his life was on loan.

His forearm ached. Or rather, it ached in a different way than the rest of him. He looked at it and saw the angry red welt of skin with silver metallic letters embedded in it. They’d done it. They had actually branded him.

M
ARIE
L
OUISE
A
LVAREZ, 16.
His arm glistened at him. The metal letters implanted in his skin were hard and surprisingly warm to the touch. They were slick with antibacterial gel.

Syd pressed the base of his hands into his eyes. Another mark on his body. The birthmark, the scars from fights and cheap vaccines, now this, another reminder he had as much control of his skin as he did over the weather. None.

Rage boiled inside him, pushing the pain in his body down. Sixteen more years, added just like that, and in Sterling Work Colony. It wasn’t right. It wasn’t fair.

He had played by the rules, mostly, for his whole life. He didn’t turn squatter or scavenger or freelance. He didn’t hook up with the revolutionaries. He didn’t care about all the Rebooter stuff, deleting the debts, restoring equality to a corrupt blah blah blah . . . the sermons got tiresome. The debts were tied to the data; the data was in the blood. There was no deleting it, and the people who thought otherwise were no better than mystics, praying for a hopeless deliverance.

Syd could never afford idealism and he never wanted to. He’d rather do his work and get ahead without any stupid games. The debt he had, the debt that had been forced on him for the rescue he never asked for and the upbringing he barely got, he paid. He endured the beatings and the volunteer work and the cruelties inflicted on behalf of his Upper City patron because that’s how it worked. He was almost free.

And then they changed the terms.

They changed their policy, just like that.

Sterling Work Colony was a hell. Everyone knew it. Survivors told stories of brutal guards, relentless disease, and ruthless inmates. There was no escape because there was nowhere to go. The Mountain City was the only civilization on the continent. The rest was swamp and desert and ruins. Sterling was the end, a place without compassion, without even the false kindness of the free market. There was only work and death.

And soon, Sydney Carton would be sent there. Sixteen years old and off to Sterling with the unredeemable.

No.

He refused. It was that simple.

He was not unredeemable and he was not a terrorist and he was not just a body they could discard and replace to teach some patron a lesson.