Sycamore (Near-Future Dystopia) (16 page)

“What girl?”

“Don’t play games, Kurt, not today. Bystanders have been running their mouths on Forest about how Kurt Jacobs abused a bus driver who wouldn’t allow a blind passenger to board. And this after you pulled rank on four police officers who were trying to restrain her!”

“She’s not blind, and that wasn’t restraining. I can rewind and show you.”

Amos smiled like a spider with a fly. “So there
is
a girl. And ‘blind’ doesn’t mean actually blind. Just without Lenses.”

“Look, I saw a girl struggling to get on a bus and I tried to help, okay? The driver was disrespectful and I couldn’t let that slide. The police were behaving like soldiers but at least they responded when they saw who I was. It just happened to be the same girl involved in both incidents. I don’t know her.”

“Good. I would hate to think that your personal life was harming your public persona. I’ll have Communications Colin and his team clean this up. They’re almost as good at spin as Minion’s guys, but a lot less busy.”

Kurt walked away from the window and sat in his usual pick of Amos’s scattered sofas.

“The meeting’s cancelled, by the way,” Amos called over.

“What? I got out of bed for it.”

“Oh well. Turns out the president didn’t need much convincing — he knows fine well how much good CrimePrev will do. I’ll fill you in on what’s been decided through in the meeting room. Follow me.”

Kurt rested his head on the arm of the sofa. “Tell me here.”

“Seriously, come on.” Amos pulled Kurt to his feet and led him towards the meeting room. “There’s new stuff, too. You take it for granted because you’re around everything all the time, but we have exclusive access to an endless stream of surveillance data and information on everyone in the country. That goldmine has all sorts of unimagined security applications, so he was keen to do business.”

“Except you don’t have everyone in the country. Even if we get to 30 million today and 60 million by Monday… that’s still only 20%.” Kurt heard himself say ‘only’ and realised how foolish it sounded.

“In a single week, hotshot. One week. And anyway, it wouldn’t matter if we never Seeded another consumer; the critical mass has been reached. Even if someone tries to stay blind and unseeded, there could still be a camera behind every other eye around them. The bigwigs know that, too. They can’t hide their corruption anymore. Power like this is what they live for.”

“Power like this comes with special responsibilities,” said Kurt.

Amos put his hand on the doorknob and shook his head. “Power like this has never existed.”

~

Kurt sat down at the head of the table, in the seat normally reserved for Amos. He didn’t mean anything by it but Amos appreciated it as a fearless gesture. Kurt was turning into the kind of man who could serve Sycamore well for years to come.

“I spoke with the president last night,” Amos began. “What do you want to know?”

“Why you didn’t tell me last night that I didn’t have to come in today.”

Amos laughed. “It’s probably easiest if I just let you hear the key part of our 15-minute voice-call. Bear in mind that he already knew what I was going to propose, so any resistance was purely ceremonial.” Amos accessed the call and moved to the relevant time as Kurt waited to receive the data. Amos looked in his eyes and swiped two fingers towards him.

The audio filled Kurt’s ears. Amos’s voice came first. “Tomorrow, Mr President, this country can expect to host 45 murders and 1800 rapes. Your police will catch 23% of the culprits; with our data they would catch them all. If this data was combined with sufficient resources for pre-emptive interventions, the crimes wouldn’t even take place. Our grid is capable of tracking the behavioural habits and movement patterns of everyone in the country. As soon as someone looks like committing a crime... boom. CrimePrev.”

“Pre-emptive interventions?” asked the President, sounding sure that he must have misheard. “You’re suggesting that we punish the innocent?”

“No, I’m suggesting that we protect their innocence. Only a few such interventions would be necessary, anyway. When detection is literally inevitable people will soon get the message that crime no longer pays. And when we push on with currency digitisation, theft will become impossible. Crimes of greed will vanish overnight. Crimes of passion are trickier, of course, but the only effective deterrent is guaranteed conviction. Who else can give you that? Sycamore holds the key to the door.” Kurt could imagine the smug look Amos would have been sporting as he said those words.

“And where does this door lead?”

“It’s a revolving door,” said Amos, “and it leads you back to the White House.”

The audio ceased. Back in the present, Amos still looked smug. “It was plain sailing from there,” he said.

“Did the president not pick up on that little currency digitisation bombshell you slipped in?” asked Kurt. His hands rested on the table. He felt impotent sitting in a largely empty meeting room discussing decisions that had already been made.

“He heard it and he liked it. After the part you heard we talked about currency for a few minutes. Its nature, its current state, you know? Digitisation is happening organically but the government seem as keen as we are to speed it along. I don’t know how much you thought about what you were doing with The Seed, but the government has been dreaming of something like this for years. A chip was always the long-term goal because it makes the herds so easy to manage. Washington didn’t think it could actually be done, though; they didn’t know where to start. Those clowns probably would have jumped in with compulsory chipping and had violent resistance on their hands. We knew better, of course. We know that fear only gets you so far because hope is always there getting in the way. So we did what we had to do: we made people want it. Now everyone is getting what they want.”

“What did
he
want from you? Really, I mean.”

“The government wants what we’re giving them, Kurt. They didn’t want us to know that, naturally, so they asked for favourable news coverage and such like.”

“And did you promise it?”

Amos ignored the question. “He also said that they could only fund CrimePrev if we made Seed-based tracking compulsory. It’s out of my hands but I’m sure the public will understand that. Oh, and they’re going to offer subsidised seeding for people on welfare.”

“I don’t even know what to say about that last part. But no, people
won’t
understand if you take away their right not to be tracked after barely a week. All the people who didn’t opt-in will be furious. You are going to tell them, right?”

“We have to — the concept of a grid for tracking potential criminals only works when people know it’s universal. But almost everyone opted-in, anyway. The percentage is somewhere in the high 90s.”

“That’s not the point. How can the president think this is a good idea? Morality aside, people will hate this. I don’t see how he can run for a second term on the back of this kind of partnership. His legacy will be a police state to end all others.”

Amos drummed his fingers on the meeting table. “It’s really not that complicated. Imagine for a second that you were the president. If you wanted to be elected again, would it really be wise to stand in the way of a system that promises to eliminate violent crime?”

“If he’s really trying to eliminate violent crime why not start with something tangible like proper gun control?”

“Are you crazy?! Listen, hotshot: you can control money, the media and the food supply, but don’t even
talk
about controlling their guns. We’re dealing with the kind of people who look at a school shooting and say it’s a false-flag conducted to stir up anti-gun sentiment. So we let the idiots have their guns and it makes them feel safe. They see guns as their protection against tyranny. You know, as if the state’s security forces work face-to-face.
“Good luck takin’ ma guns, city boi,”
they say. But, well, good luck with your rifle when we send round the drones!” Amos chuckled to himself.

“Anything else I should know?”

“This is why I don’t like telling you things,” Amos sighed, referencing the contempt on Kurt’s face. “You don’t understand how the real world works.”

“I understand more than you think. This just isn’t what I wanted. I wanted progress, not this.”

“It’s change. The only certainty we ever have is that change is inevitable.”

“Exactly, but progress isn’t. It has to be affected, nurtured, protected. All you’re doing is chasing power and paper.”

“The paper will be gone soon,” said Amos.

“Whatever. I’m going to head over to the new house with some of my stuff. There’s nothing else, then?”

Amos followed Kurt into the elevator without speaking. Kurt watched Amos’s eyes lose focus as they explored his chat logs. He found what he was looking for seconds before they stepped out onto the ground floor. “Here it is. I don’t know how fast word travels and you know how I don’t like to mention our competitors, but those Californian hipsters we’re going to crush with the dumping stunt are planning to announce a chip of their own at their gay little conference thing next week.”

“What? Another chip? But I thought we had patents for AR contact lenses? What use would their chip be without lenses?” The threat of a rival to The Seed knocked Kurt’s other concerns to the back of his mind in the way that only an external enemy could.

Amos was heartened by his evident concern. “I thought that, too, hotshot, but apparently we were wrong. We’re only protected for certain applications of AR lenses — the ones we had before The Seed. Recording live input, enabling direct chat… those concepts didn’t exist before you came along so none of my men had thought to patent them.”

“So what’s happening, did the president offer some sort of protection against the other chip as a sweetener?”

Amos smiled. They had reached the front door and the valet was going for Kurt’s car. “See: you’re better at this than you thought. I’ll give you the exact quote.” Amos swiped an extract from the call to Kurt.

Again, the president’s recorded voice filled Kurt’s ears. “Don’t worry, Mr Amos,” it said. “We’ll tell the media that Sycamore has invested heavily in our country and hence your intellectual property rights must be protected. Your monopoly on sub-dermal consumer technology will last as long as my establishment.”

That was it.

“They’re on our side all the way,” Amos beamed.

An assurance of protection against the rival chip had been what Kurt thought he wanted only seconds earlier, but actually hearing it rustled up discomfort. “I know that this benefits us right now, but is it a precedent we want? The government supporting anti-competitive action is a slippery slope.”

“Anti-competitive?” Amos couldn’t stop himself from snickering. “I thought you didn’t like competition? What happened to all your commie nonsense about inefficiency and inequality?”

“The system we have is bad enough,” said Kurt, unashamed of his position, “but if you take away the competition and leave everything else then we’re looking at corporate fascism. Is that what you want?”

Amos wrinkled his nose in indifference. “I don’t care what you call it, hotshot. An easy win is an easy win.”

~

Kurt’s Gallardo had a built-in navigation system but it couldn’t compete with the one on his Seed. Sycamore’s app was called TakeMeThere (TMT) and its title kept up the not-at-all-annoying habit of capitalising words with no spaces in between.

A long green arrow appeared on the road telling Kurt where to drive. The Distance and Time fields updated an unnecessary number of times per second. Unlike the dangerous pop-ups, though, TMT’s interface didn’t interfere with his view of the road. TMT also worked on foot and, not at all creepily, offered consumers the option of selecting “Person or Place” from its initial menu.

Longhampton lay at the opposite end of the city from Kurt’s apartment — social mobility was lifting him from the plebeian doldrums and dropping him somewhere at the edge of the city’s southwestern limits. It wasn’t that he wanted to live with the upper crust, that was just where the good houses happened to be.

Kurt had been driving south from the Quartermile for what seemed like no time when TMT told him there were 60 seconds until arrival. A huge black gate came into view. He sighed. He was going to be one of those gate people.

The gate opened as he approached and he continued to the end of the cul-de-sac. Kurt couldn’t see himself liking any of his new neighbours so was pleased that there were such big gaps between the houses. His Seed unlocked the front door without any drama and the inside of the house lived up to the pictures he had seen. It was huge.

Whoever had designed the house clearly had Kurt’s kind of taste: marble floors, high ceilings, a master bedroom with a waterbed in the corner and a hot tub in the middle, a kitchen that made Randy’s look like a closet, and closets that made the old apartment look like a sick joke.

Kurt decided not to bother collecting any more of his things for now and dumped the few boxes he had in one of the rooms upstairs. He returned to his new bedroom and sat in a fancy seat by the window.

Crystal glass of Lexington Blue in his hand and songs about the good life in his ear, Kurt kept his eyes fixed on the white viewing-wall, unable to bring himself to admire a beautiful rainbow over the world his Seed was ruining. CrimePrev and Forest and everything else ran through his mind until he dozed off to somewhere more peaceful.

The next thing Kurt knew, the time in the corner of his Lenses was blinking 16:35 and it was time to get ready to meet Stacy. He opened the curtains and looked out over a meadow he never knew existed so close to the city. The sky was clearer than it had any right to be. Kurt was refreshed and it was a good day to be alive.

He went outside to his car and a man in a driveway across the street called over to him. “Nice one, neighbour!” yelled the man. He was pointing to the sky.

Kurt followed his finger and saw the gargantuan ad. Virtual clouds formed a giant face — not unlike the two-tone revolutionary who adorned innumerable college dorms. The face floated above Sycamore’s latest slogan. The face was Kurt’s. The words weren’t.