Sycamore (Near-Future Dystopia) (12 page)

“Isaiah Amos owes me quite a lot of money.”

Sabrina played for another hour until Kurt realised it was time to take her home for dinner. Exhausted from running and jumping, she didn’t protest.

Randy was sitting on the small bench under his front window when Kurt and Sabrina arrived. She went straight to the kitchen for a cold drink. Kurt had to talk to Randy.

“Sabrina just told me she has to get seeded for school, and so does Julian.”

“Yeah, he said that when you were gone.”

“I’ll make sure it’s free.”

“You don’t have to do that,” said Randy. “I can pay.”

“I’m not saying you can’t, but you shouldn’t have to. Amos has probably taken in $3 billion today. I’m not having you give him $1,000 more because he’s bribing schools to make their students get seeded. He still hasn’t paid me, you know. $3 billion and I haven’t seen a penny.”

Randy stretched out his bad leg and adjusted his back. “Remember what you wrote on that Minter guy’s wall when he first went to work at Sycamore?”

“This isn’t like that.”

“You called him a rat and said you would rather die than sell out,” Randy reminded him. “What ever happened to that guy?”

“Minter? He seems to be the second most important man at the company. And a poor liar.”

“I meant the guy who said he would never sell out: Kurtonite.”

Kurt’s gaze intensified and he pointed a finger in Randy’s face. “I didn’t sell out, alright? Sycamore was the only place my vision could ever be realised… they patented the whole idea of AR Lenses! I won a contest. That’s not selling out.”

“I’m not knocking it, hotshot. We all have to eat.”

“Which is why I need them to pay me. I can’t eat content from the SycaStore and the Seed-aisles at Tasmart won’t be set up for a few days. Apparently I’m the most popular man in the world, but apparently the most popular man in the world is expected to eat leftover noodles for breakfast and leftover leftovers for dinner. Amos has me driving around in limos and giving interviews in $2,000 suits until I’m dropped back home at an apartment that looks like the kind of place a cockroach would go to die.”

“So tell
him
that.”

“I will. I’m going to tell him I need a real salary. That way I can help everyone out.”

“Look, Kurt, how many times are you going to make me say this? We don’t need your money.”

“Come on,” said Kurt. He looked around at the chipped paint on the windowsills and the rusty gate at the end of the path. “It wouldn’t hurt.”

Randy’s voice fell half an octave. “Yes it would.”

“Whatever. I’m going to go before we fall out again.” Kurt popped his head in the door and shouted bye to the kids. “But you have to stop being so stubborn. When you have a family to take care of, rejecting help isn’t proud; it’s selfish. I’ll see you later.”

Kurt walked to the rusty gate and opened it carefully.

“Wait,” Randy called.

“Yeah?”

“Rook to bishop four. Checkmate.”

Kurt laughed and threw Randy a middle finger before heading for the bus stop. He didn’t have to wait long but his two minutes on the street was long enough for a small crowd to congregate and fuss over “that Seed guy from the TV.”

The first thing that struck Kurt on the bus was how many passengers were in full-immersion. How would they know when the bus reached their stop, he wondered, and what were they all watching? The first answer would remain a mystery until the bus terminated near the Quartermile and everyone realised they had stayed on too long, but Kurt’s Lenses could tell him what others were watching by looking directly into theirs.

He looked at three people and they were all playing Happy Pigs, the game he had seen on the SycaStore’s front page but forgotten to check out. With some time to kill and nothing to read, he went for it. Its positioning as a killer app led Kurt to believed that Happy Pigs would be a game of quality, innovation, perhaps even ambition. Disappointed didn’t cover it.

Clicking into Happy Pigs transported Kurt to a virtual farm where he was surrounded by oinks and grunts. The audio was delivered so convincingly by the in-earphones that he turned around to hear where it was coming from. Doing so made the camera turn, revealing a technically impressive 360° environment — a muddy field. Kurt looked down at his legs. He was a pig.

On-screen instructions taught him how to roll around and control the first-person camera. There was no stated objective. If pressed, Kurt would have guessed that the objective was simply “be a pig.” He clicked out of the game and looked with newfound disdain at the people smiling like idiots as they played it. He didn’t like himself for the thought, but Kurt was annoyed at having to share air with them.

To take his mind off Happy Pigs, he directed it back to his game of chess with Randy. He opened up Relive and watched the last few moves, disbelieving at how totally he had played into Randy’s hands. Randy was a good player so there was no shame in losing to him. But he was Kurt’s brother, so there was always regret.

A news-sheet on an empty seat piqued Kurt’s interest next. Having replaced free newspapers on the city’s buses, news-sheets had been cutting-edge until roughly 33 hours earlier. The single sheet of paper had a QR barcode in the centre which activated the news content. No device was required — this was one of few applications that made the most of the Lenses before The Seed came along. News-sheets had been good in their day, but after a few minutes of reading Kurt soon appreciated his Seed. How had he lived without the convenience of zooming and controlling the font size from the palm of his hand?

The news-sheet included a notice about important changes to the bus service but Kurt didn’t bother reading it. A small piece of news he hadn’t seen in his SycaNews app revealed details on Sycamore’s handling of location services: tracking was opt-in, as Amos had promised, but apparently few were saying no. Kurt studied the option screen pictured in the article, which made clear that only those who agreed to be tracked would be able to track others. It was dirty and it had Amos written all over it, but the worst part was that Kurt knew it would continue to work. Privacy was funny like that; people would readily give up their own for a chance to infringe everyone else’s.

Kurt looked out of the window and his concerns evaporated at the sight of an impossibly enchanting girl hurrying along the street. When the bus slowed in traffic he got a closer look and saw that it was Kate Pinewood, the girl from backstage at the contest. She hadn’t been particularly friendly but there was just something about her.

Kate had been about to pitch the SycaPhone when Kurt nuked her world. He still felt bad that she had lost her job because of his outburst. She wore sunglasses which prevented his Lenses from seeing through to hers, assuming she was wearing them, but it was definitely Kate. Her thick red hair was unusual enough but the placement of those two freckles on her nose couldn’t occur twice in a billion universes, let alone a single city.

Despite the fact that Kate almost certainly wouldn’t be glad to hear from him, Kurt ached to talk to her. He searched on Forest but found nothing; either Kate Pinewood was a fake name assigned by Sycamore or Kate Pinewood hadn’t been seeded. Neither was good news.

The movement of the bus turned Kate into an unobtainable speck of distant memory. So Kurt thought, at least, until an advertising placement of unprecedented size filled his vision. It was a sticky pop-up — the kind that moved with the target consumer’s eyes. The worst kind. His first instinct was to close it but he read the words and grew intrigued. “She sure is a hot one!” appeared above a picture of someone who looked just like Kate but without the lower of her two freckles.

Kurt clicked the link that said “Interested?” and instantly wished he hadn’t. More pictures of not-quite-Kate appeared — more explicit ones — and words played in his ears from a male voiceover who sounded like he should have been advertising cheap carpets.

“We saw you stare and we felt your heart pounding. You can’t have
her
, but here’s the next closest thing! XXX-rated pics and videos of this spitting image lookalike are available from just $4.99. Or treat yourself to a mind-blowing, full-immersion, pre-recorded cam show for only $29.99. If you’re the kind of guy, Kurt Jacobs, who
really
likes to party, we can arrange a more intimate encounter with your dream girl at a time of mutual convenience. Select your choice below.”

Kurt’s choice was to exit. Apparently Sycamore had entered the pimping business. Everything about the bus journey had annoyed Kurt but this disgusted him. The five-minute walk to HQ from the terminus offered just enough time for him to regain composure in preparation for a showdown with Amos.

~

“Kurt, you made it! I was about to give up and leave. What brings you, anyway?” Amos sat comfortably on one of his floor’s randomly-placed sofas. He patted the seat beside him in invitation for Kurt to join him.

“Annoyance, mainly.”

“With anything in particular?”

“Well, I was coming here because I was annoyed, but then I got annoyed at loads of other things on the way. Some of the things are less important but I’ll start with them before I forget. I got the bus here. Everyone was playing Happy Pigs.”

“So?”

“So I didn’t spend four years designing this thing so that people could pretend to be pigs and play at rolling around in mud. That’s actually what you do in the game! You roll around in mud. Like a pig. Like evolution was wrong and we should be happy rolling in mud.”

“You don’t have to like it, hotshot, but it’s been selling like nothing else. It’s like we’re fish and it’s shark repellant. Sorry, I couldn’t resist. But really, there’s no sense in getting annoyed that people like stupid things. Their lives are pointless and difficult... why grudge them a little game on the bus-ride to work if it makes them happy?”

“Happy like pigs in mud,” said Kurt. “Happy
being
pigs in mud!”

A cleaner emerged from the elevator and Amos shooed her away with a wave of his hand. “Tell me then,” he continued, “what else was annoying you?”

“More serious stuff. Like the fact that you’re running facial recognition on normal girls and trying to sell men prostitutes who look like them.”

“We don’t do that. The kind of adult placement I assume you saw only relates to women you’ve looked at for more than a few seconds, and only if the Seed detects that they caused a spike in your pulse. There’s no prostitution involved, either: consumers can view images, watch a pre-recorded cam show or enjoy an interactive video-call when the girl is next available. That’s it.”

“Do you not hear how insanely perverted this all sounds? Tracking guys’ heart-rates to sell them lookalike cam shows?”

“Sex sells,” Amos shrugged. “Why not sell sex?”

“It’s not like these are women who have chosen to be models, though. You’re selling the fantasy of an innocent and unknowing girl on the street. You can’t tell me that’s not wrong. The girl was Kate, by the way. The one you fired after the contest.”

“I should have known you had a thing for her. But she never really
worked
here. Considering the audacity of your big play at the Talent Search, it’s a goddamn miracle that we managed to keep collateral damage down to just one intern.”

“Whatever. The suggested ‘adult partner’ looked crazily like her. How many girls are on there?”

“A couple of thousand, I think. I’d have to check.”

“Thousand?!”

“It’s a big world. Lots of girls who like money. SycaWhores, you might say.” Amos grinned at himself.

“See,” sighed Kurt, “this is it. The Seed can do anything and it’s doing this. It’s doing Happy Pigs and cam shows.”

“I honestly think the camwhores are a temporary thing. There’s a team working on something that will eliminate the need for them. It’s a virtual wingman to help men communicate effectively with the girls they’re lusting over. I can’t explain it much better than that but you’ll see soon enough.”

“Can’t wait. When I pitched a microchip that turns you into a computer with your hand as the trackpad I always dreamed it would come down to helping people get laid.”

“I don’t need a lie detector app to tell that you’re being facetious, hotshot, but trust me when I tell you that it doesn’t suit. Look, you’re just going to have to trust that the future will be better than the present. It’s a long road and there might be troughs before there are peaks. Troughs... pigs... see what I did there? Anyway, “
descent into sex and inanity”
is as good a five-word summation of human history as we can get. These are old habits.”

“But you’re facilitating the descent! You’re pushing people towards a precipice and pretending to be surprised when they fall.”

“Right now it’s about making sure people are taking The Seed and using it in ways we can monetise — the details aren’t important. If something is worth doing well, it’s worth doing poorly at first, right? How do you think those genius Scotsmen who gave us TVs and phones would have felt if they’d lived to see Jersey Shore and hear those bogus “
you’ve won a cruise
” calls we used to have to put up with? Their brilliant inventions, wasted! Turned to pointless ends. Tools of inanity. You feel like that, don’t you?”

Kurt nodded tiredly.

“Well don’t. The Bairds and Bells and Clerk-Maxwells of this world have led us to this moment. The ultimate potential of their technologies has finally been realised thanks to our Seed and one day this creation will enjoy the same fate. Developers will always meet the public’s demands and sooner or later the public will demand more than Happy Pigs and cam shows. These are mere blips on the radar of progress. Our third world call centres... our reality TV. Necessary reference points so that in five years we can sit back, smile and see how far we’ve come.”

Kurt hated how easily Amos could not merely dismiss his concerns but convince him that they were trivial.

“Was that everything?”

“No,” said Kurt. “The ads are already too much. I’ve had targeted placements that could only have been assigned by someone who’s been watching my vista. I saw a poster for a show about big cats because I’d been watching one in my bed last night, and then I heard a voice outside Tasmart Express telling me noodles were on offer because I’d just been eating some. It’s beyond creepy. People won’t like being spied on. I sure as hell don’t.”