Sycamore (Near-Future Dystopia) (25 page)

“Until someone got me fired. And now this asshole pig is here to stop me from moving because I can’t afford to pay the tax.”

“It’s a duty,” said the police officer. “And watch who you’re calling asshole, maggot.”

Kurt put his hand on the policeman’s shoulder. “I’ll take care of the fine. You can leave now. And watch your lip.”

“What did you just say?” the officer asked, turning around. His face popped in familiar shock as Kurt’s info appeared in his vista. “Oh, Mr Jacobs! I’m sorry, sir. As you were.” He tipped his hat like a Dickensian lunatic and disappeared shame-faced into his car. Kurt noticed a newly-placed Sycamore logo on the back of the policeman’s collar — a sapling inside two concentric diamonds.

“Thanks,” said Rocco. “But this isn’t like everything else you can Kurt Jacobs your way out of. Sycamore will send more police after me. My suspension will flag everything up and each step I take makes it worse.”

“You’re going to have to tell me what the hell is going on.”

“I’m done, man. Broke. Sycamore and the government said credit would be extended for anyone who needed it to pay the duty, but apparently losing my job and having a kid on the way makes me too high-risk to pay it back. I literally can’t afford to take another step and my wife is at the hospital right now having our baby. ”

Kurt didn’t tell Rocco that there was a huge red arrow pointing down at him with the word WANTED flashing above it. “Get in the car,” was all he said. “We’re going to the hospital.”

Rocco climbed into the Gallardo confident that he could hardly get into any more trouble and hopeful that having Kurt Jacobs by his side would keep the police at bay for a little while at least.

As they reached the end of the street a pop-up filled Rocco’s vista. “Warning: stop immediately. Warning: continued violation of these orders will…” He took his Lenses out and threw them onto the road.

“The Seed can come out, too, you know,” said Kurt. “The operation is free by law.”

“And then what? Even if they dropped the charges, I wouldn’t be able to do anything without The Seed. Your boy Amos and his lapdogs in Washington are forcing through the money thing so pretty soon you won’t be able to buy food
anywhere
without a Seed, not just at Tasmart. And this time next year we all know it’s going to be compulsory to take The Seed and wear your UltraLenses at all times. Land of the free, they say? Welcome to Hell.”

Kurt couldn’t disagree with most of Rocco’s observations but he took issue with the idea that Amos was at the top of the decision tree. “That’s not how it is,” he said. “The tail doesn’t wag the dog. The government has wanted all of this for years: surveillance, currency digitisation, a population placated by inanity and taxed to the hilt. Sycamore is just a vehicle.”

“Well, whatever. Look where it’s taking us! You seem like a nice enough guy, Kurt, but you don’t have a clue what you’ve done here. What kind of world is my kid coming into when I can’t walk around without a man at a desk’s permission?”

Silence was Kurt’s best and only answer.

“I would kill for some fries right now,” Rocco said after a while.

“Me too,” Kurt replied. “I haven’t eaten all day.”

A new kind of notification appeared in Kurt’s vista — a small flashing exclamation mark. He clicked as soon as he was stopped in traffic and it presented him with the five nearest fast-food joints. He knew this meant that someone at Sycamore had finally come up with effective voice-recognition and that it was running full-time, scanning for key words. Directions to a restaurant were harmless enough, but what if he was talking about something more subversive? CrimePrev agents would be all over him like…

And then Kurt realised. The computerised voice-scanning had come in too soon after Amos secured CrimePrev’s public funding for it to be a coincidence. DC were using the security tech for commercial purposes.

The hospital came into view and he insisted on taking Rocco right to the door to minimise his risk of being intercepted. After parking he stepped out of the car to make sure the security guard would pose no problems.

“You can’t get through without a Seed,” the man said. “New security procedures.”

Kurt stepped in front of Rocco to answer. “We both have Seeds.”

“His appears to be permanently deactivated.”

“What?” said Rocco. “Suspended, yeah. Not deactivated!”

“I’m afraid your account has been terminated as a result of your crimes against Sycamore,” the guard explained. “I understand that your travel privileges were suspended and you ignored repeated orders to stay still. The punishment for such an offence is termination.”

“Come on, guy. My wife is having a baby.”

“I can’t let you in.”

Kurt looked into the guard’s eyes. “Let him in.”

“I really can’t.”

“Do you know who I am?” Kurt felt dirty saying it but these times were desperate enough to justify pulling rank.

“With respect, sir, I’m just following orders.”

“My position at Sycamore comes with authority that supersedes your prior orders,” said Kurt. It was a lie, but one delivered with sufficient conviction to pass as the truth. “Now let him in.”

Reluctantly the guard typed a code into the door’s blank keypad and stepped aside. Rocco smiled his thanks and set off down the hall to find his wife and baby.

“Wait!” Kurt shouted after him. “What happens tomorrow?”

“As soon as someone comes for me I’m done. You heard the guy: my account has been terminated.”

“Can’t you make a new one?”

Rocco sent a solemn shake of his head along the corridor. “It's not like I can sign up with another e-mail address, man. I
am
my account.”

13

The following morning Kurt drove to Randy’s with the intention of taking Sabrina to the park. He left his car at the park and walked to get her, thinking it would be useful to have it there to drive her home when she was tired from running around. He enjoyed the walk to the house because it was another one of those good days to be alive and under the sun — a good day to enjoy the simple things in life like fresh air before Amos found a way to bottle it. Or, more likely, before he made the sky grey by default and charged for sunshine by the minute.

The last time Kurt had walked through the deprived streets between Randy’s and the park had been just after The Seed launched, when Sycamore’s real-world marketing was at its peak. There had been huge billboards for The Seed — the largest of which read “Sycamore: The Mark of the Best” — just across the road from a row of derelict storefronts interrupted only by convenience stores, fast-food joints and bookies. Almost all of the houses now sported some kind of corporate branding, some more elaborate than others, but the roadside was dominated by a huge Lexington static with a simple message: “Drink Your Dreams True!”

Something about it brought to Kurt’s mind a documentary he saw in school about a certain cola company in which a snazzily dressed executive spoke of the corporation’s commitment to Africa, an untapped market of hundreds of millions of potential customers. It didn’t seem to bother the man that those hundreds of millions of potential customers — those hundreds of millions of human beings — lived without access to clean water.

The implicit message of “
why give them water when we can sell them this?
” irked Kurt enough that he switched to Lexington. By now, though, he was old enough to have realised that the story was always the same: the rich were only interested in dealing with the poor when it involved making them poorer. Lexington were no better or worse than anyone else.

He turned the corner into Randy’s street and a message flashed in his vista. A free surroundings update was available. If the government had wanted to invest in deprived areas they would have done so decades ago, but when BeThere’s technology arrived the temptation to brush away the urban decay was apparently irresistible. Kurt clicked accept and within seconds Randy’s street looked like a quaint Parisian boulevard. The ads were still there and so was the poverty, but the latter had been brushed over by the artistry and genius of Sycamore’s landscapers. The “opt-in, opt-out, no-choice” release pattern made it all but certain that today’s downloadable update would be tomorrow’s universal experience. The sparkling storefronts and picturesque flowerbeds were here to stay.

This is what everyone will see
, Kurt realised.
This is reality.

He sped up and soon arrived at Randy’s, letting himself in to save anyone the hassle of answering the door. His first stop was Sabrina’s room.

Sabrina opened her door when Kurt knocked and he immediately saw that she was wearing an ad t-shirt. It said “I Beat Feminine Odour With GirlyGuard Daily Spray.”

Kurt hated GirlyGuard. Before The Seed there had been a jingle: “GirlyGuard helps you work and play, keeps the smell away with a daily spray.” He was glad that, as a man, he would never have to hear it again; Sycamore’s targeted advertising was good for that, at least. But now he hated GirlyGuard all over again for making a fool of Sabrina. He tried not to react angrily because none of this was her fault.

“I left my car at the park for us,” he said. The blue teddybear he had given her for her birthday was still on her bed. He smiled when he saw it. “You coming out?”

“I really need to do some stuff,” Sabrina answered.

“Not even an hour?”

She shook her head. “Maybe tomorrow?”

“Okay,” said Kurt. But it wasn’t. Sabrina disappeared back into her room and he shouted down the stairs. “JJ!”

A voice called back. “Yeah?”

“What’s going on with your sister?”

Julian couldn’t make out the words so he jogged upstairs. “Hey, Uncle Kurt.”

“Hey. What’s going on with Sabrina? She’s never too busy for the park.”

“She’s trying to earn some money,” Julian explained. “Doing consumer surveys and looking for better sponsored clothes, you know? I think she’s saving up to fix her nose in RealU.”

“She said that? To fix her nose?”

Julian nodded.

“What the hell is wrong with her nose?”

“I dunno. It’s nothing I said. Probably someone at school said something once and now that she can change it… you know how girls are.”

“She’s ten!”

“That doesn’t mean what it did when you were ten. It doesn’t even mean what it did when
I
was ten.”

Kurt walked downstairs and shook Randy out of full-immersion. “Your ten-year-old daughter is in those damn Consumer Rewards apps saving up for a new nose. How can you sit there and let this happen?”

“What can I do?” Randy shouted, raising his voice to an uncharacteristic volume to match Kurt’s. “It’s not like I can ground her and take it away! If one of us is to blame here it sure as hell isn’t me. That’s not
my
Seed inside of her.”

There was nothing Kurt could say, because Randy was right.

~

Kurt walked to his car and found himself sitting behind the wheel too angry to go home. HQ was the only other place he could think of.

He arrived unannounced on Amos’s floor but was greeted warmly.

“Hotshot!” Amos grinned. “To what owest I the pleasure?”

“Shut up.”

Amos sighed. “Not another one of these visits. I thought we were past this?”

“We were,” said Kurt. “But kids shouldn’t be wearing advertising.”

“Is this guilt over your friend Rocco?” Amos asked evasively.

“What? Me guilty? That guy has a family and you’re locking him up for nothing. I didn’t know having him fired would cause any of that. I tried to help him. Your company, on the other hand… terminating people for having the audacity to walk around the world they were born in?”

“He committed a serious crime, Kurt.”

“Which was?”

“Ignoring direct orders. If people think they can disobey, they will. We can’t have that. Disobedience leads to rebellion, and crimes of rebellion are the worst kind.”

“No way,” said Kurt. “Crimes of rebellion are nowhere near as bad as crimes of obedience. What kind of person tries to stop a man from seeing his wife and newborn baby just because orders say so? The guard at the hospital is more guilty than Rocco.”

“Following orders isn’t a crime. What is it with you, hotshot? How can anyone be against the elimination of crime?”

“Stop pretending you can eliminate crime. The Seed went as far as anything can to eliminate crimes of greed by making most people’s money digital, but there will always be crimes of passion.”

“Not with CrimePrev. All crimes will be stopped before they happen.”

“Tell me then, are Sycamore men exempt? Are we safe from the eyes of the thought police?”

“None of this is about thoughtcrime,” said Amos. “Why do I have to keep telling you that? What’s important here is that no individual is above the law. Indeed, as men of responsibility we have a particular obligation to tow the line.”

“So what would happen if I ever did something that displeased the company?”

“It’s really best if you don’t. You’re an important figurehead. More important than you realise, I think. We’re at 90.1% of the eligible population seeded and you’re still by far the most popular.”

Kurt hadn’t checked the numbers for almost a week, since before Seeding had been heavily subsidised by the government. He quickly went into Forest and saw that Amos wasn’t exaggerating.

“And only prisoners and soldiers have been compulsory,” Amos boasted, “so everyone else thinks it’s a good idea.”

“Schoolchildren were compulsory. You made my niece and nephew get seeded so they could read the work on the board at school.”

“That was a generous program to upgrade outdated equipment. Anyway, where was I? Oh yes. The 9.9% — the potentially-criminal element — can only evade justice for so long.”

“No,” said Kurt. He had a horrible feeling where Amos was going. “I won’t let you make it compulsory.”

“You say that now, hotshot, but what do we say when consumers flood the streets to demand it? What happens when there’s a terrorist attack that universal seeding and Lens-wearing would have prevented? How can we justify
not
seeding the potentially-criminal resistors? There is no reason for any law-abiding consumer not to participate. Democracy and freedom require participation.”