King's County (17 page)

His friends came stomping over the
wheat shouting at him. In the middle of the lane he turned to face
the oncoming traffic, chin raised and his arms
outstretched.

The cars stopped, grinding the wheels,
centimeters from his knees. They all broke up laughing. The kid
jumped back out of the road and the cars went on their way. The
others tackled him, just playing around, and rubbed handfuls of
wheat into his hair. Their celebration was brief: It was another
kid’s turn to go.

*

It's really interesting Qim.
We should go there sometime. Let me tell you about your friend
Leland, weird guy. His room was this lair like place. A whole train
car to himself like a museum, full of old stuff but amazing at the
same time. Weird. Crazy I guess. I'll see you at 8? Same
place?

*

"Highlight it red to be
replaced."

That voice again. Clipped and
toneless.

"35 Water bus nexus has a secondary
decay pattern warning," the voice said. We both waited... "You’re
looking right at it, Waller."

"Highlight it red?" I said while
staring - and it worked. The cross shaped pipe went light red, then
I fixed it to a darker shade. That was my part. It would be
replaced within a few hours, weeks before actual
failure.

"OK, pull out," the voice
said.

I put my hands on the desk and pushed.
It felt like my eyeballs were left behind. Blinking brought the
white and beige world of B level into focus. The Voice had pulled
up a chair next to me to talk.

"You interacted with a citizen." He
said it like I should have known better.

"Yeah. Sorry, I thought he deserved it.
They damaged the durum wheat in that section and were disrupting
traffic."

He looked away avoiding eye contact. He
stared at the wall behind the transparent screens as he spoke to
me,

"Don't interact with citizens in any
way. That's exclusively A level’s domain. I want you to restrict
yourself to the gardens and stock yards for a few weeks...OK...If
you can do well enough on your own and there’s a need, then maybe
we can broaden your role."

"OK, not a problem. Do you want to get
dinner?" I said.

The question pained him, "We keep
strict hours, 8 to 5. But I'll give you ten minutes at the end of
the day tomorrow to ask any questions."

I checked the time on my new watch. It
was 4:59. He was up and walking around the curve of the
room.

The day before I had played a trick on
the skateboarders by summoning a mole to pop up underneath them and
bite their heels. It terrified them much more than I expected. I
almost felt a little bit bad about it. It did work, though. They
quickly scattered back the way they had come. One of them left his
stupid skateboard behind which I made sure to mark for
disposal.

But I didn't want to make any more
waves with this new group of mine so I quickly settled into the
routine. I found it easy to do.

Two weeks flew by: up at 7, in the
chair from 8-5 (the system was completely inaccessible outside of
those hours) then home to eat, read for a few hours, and do light
exercise before showering, having one last snack, and then going to
bed just before midnight, every night.

If there was a game on, I watched it
instead of reading. Geake messaged me from Pittsburgh. He and Penny
had decided to settle there. I spent four hours composing a short
reply.

In the morning I tended the gardens. At
noon, I had lunch, always by myself, on the outside deck.
Afternoons were spent checking various ducts, valves, and conduits,
reservoir levels, raw commodity stocks and their associated
transport schedules. With The Voice's approval, I planned for a
slightly higher fence to be built around the highway.

After three weeks, the work started to
run out. The gardens were in top shape. They now required no more
than an hour a day of attention. All of the conduits and things
that had needed it were replaced or repaired. They’d be good for at
least a year. Everything else was mostly fine on its own. I could
check on things once or twice a day, maybe adjust something, but it
wasn't always necessary and would take only a few minutes of my
time.

*

Crazy day at work, how are
you? - Dinner? - Hello.....hello, hello, hello - Just kidding. You
doing OK? - Get back to me or just come over. Whatever's fine. -
Are you out? - hey faqu – you lookwd like a bicth you know
that

*

I walked around the operator's room
until I found The Voice's desk. He was leaving, right at 5. Seeing
me he panicked. He didn't like surprises. I asked him anyway about
maybe expanding my duties but got no answer. He just took off to
the elevators like he’d seen a ghost.

*

Sorry about that. I had a
few drinks too many. What's going on? - I'm at home
-

*

After five weeks I started falling
asleep at my desk. I couldn't find more than about half an hour of
things to do on any given day. I'd peeked over at the other system
operators. They seemed busy. No one ever said anything about my
sleeping or me pulling my weight. After a few days I didn't worry
about it any more.

This meant I stayed up later at night.
I stopped exercising. It was pointless, just a habit that served to
distract me. The chip in my back took care of my body. I read every
book in the house instead and sent out for more.

*

What happened?
-

*

Days blended together. Coming off the
elevators in the morning, the sight of my desk and chair triggered
yawning. I slept upright. I slept with my forehead pressed against
the interface frame.

I went to the roof on dry nights just
to sit looking around, down at the lights of the waterfront, and
smoking. I'd grind the butts out right on the shingles and toss
them in my little strip of hydrangeas and bluegrass.

After a week of these nights, I decided
to get dressed and head down to maybe meet some people, at least
talk to somebody. I tried. The network of wooden walkways
connecting all the little houses like mine didn't connect out other
than at the main road that I took to work.

And everywhere was dark. My neighbors
weren't night people and they had their little area the way they
liked it. Exploring now was out of the question. I decided to use
the KC+9 system to plot the best route from my house and try again
after work.

With this new mission in mind, my mood
immediately improved. I fixated on getting one of those cold
beer-like drinks in the green can, the one they sold in that
waterfront kiosk.

The next morning, I finished up garden
duty by 8:20. The system was mine until noon. I didn't want to skip
lunch or do anything out of the ordinary that might attract
attention. What I intended to do was specifically not
allowed.

The inhabited areas I wanted to explore
were inaccessible to me as a B level operator. Earlier, out of
curiosity and boredom, I’d looked for a way into the park, skirting
around the edge of the gardens, but was unsuccessful. This was my
last idea.

The hedges around the theater seemed
like the best place to try my plan. I brought up a side view of one
of the larger hedges, expanded out and found the ivy starting to
spread onto the marble colonnade. The nearest mole was a minute
away. While it made its way over, I picked out a particular strand
of ivy and traced from its roots all the way to the end hanging
down, halfway curling into the air.

The mole breached the surface. I
brought it along up the vine over the edge of the planter. It
teetered there, barely able to balance on its flat belly. I
focused, going blind, thinking of nothing but the delicate light
green tendrils at the end.

I opened my eyes at the sound of it
clattering across the hard marble floor. My mole was out of the
garden.

I still had control. Quickly, before we
were seen, we scurried to the side of the stage to hold there while
I tested the theory.

The sub-data for the theater came up
with no resistance. It worked. I could access the inhabited city
sectors the same as the others.

First I just looked around the park. I
had to plan a route to a safer location for us. I wasn't sure if
anyone could see me or not. Running across the wrong type of person
could get us reported.

Through the embedded sensors,
potentially anything could be seen from almost any angle. All
permanent static structures had the sensors. They were mostly
invisible to the eye. The largest was about 1mm in diameter and
good for longer distances, most were much smaller. Only a few
square meters of a wall could have a hundred of them: cameras,
microphones, chemical and pressure sensors. The input from them was
collected and synthesized into the KC+9 interface.

Nearby were a few guys lying around on
the grass and on the theater steps sunning themselves, artist types
by the look of them and probably little risk. I took the chance and
maneuvered the mole through the theater and out into the middle of
the park being careful to not reenter the garden in case we
couldn't easily return.

Following one gravel trail, a long
spoke leading to an open central circle, we found the perfect spot:
an art display of student sculptures (the ubiquitous blobs were all
perched on stilts for some reason). We buried safely away into the
base of a paper mâché swan-like thing.

I was going to get a look around, a
real one. Forget lunch, I had just under seven hours until the
system kicked me off, if I wasn't caught first, and I wanted to use
all of it.

My house was easily found out of an
expanded overhead view. The way to the waterfront was deceptively
simple. A right turn onto the main road and another right then a
quick left down an empty street would get me to the steps to the
glass enclosed tunnel going alongside and over the highway. Simple
enough. Mission accomplished, and it was still early.

I wandered over to the art colony next.
It seemed smaller than I remembered. I realized I could look inside
just the same as outside. Opal’s name ran through my head; before I
knew what I was doing, she was there, sleeping on a little bed
built into the wall. She rolled onto her back and exhaled. Her eyes
twitched. She was in the middle of a dream.

Her room was smaller than mine had
been. A lower level, I guess, less access. Maybe they'd had the
idea to make me into something more, higher status, maybe one of
those phony deans.

I watched her for awhile and got the
idea to bring up her stats: She'd been asleep for over a day. She’d
had sex eleven times in the past week with 3 different men and 1
woman, and she'd rarely been sober in over 10 years. She was 58
years old. She'd produced 6 solo artworks and collaborated on 3 in
the past 19 years. Her works were all located in residence which I
found meant the big storage room.

I watched her and listened to her
murmur in her sleep. Some time passed. My senses blanked out for a
bit. I came around to find myself staring down at the roof of the
art complex.

A tab indicated Ricky, one of the
idiots introduced to me by Elena, in the courtyard cafe. I zoomed
in - his mouth was open, slumped in two chairs - I looked further -
he wasn't sleeping normally. He was in an internally induced coma
to give his chip time to detoxify his blood. The chip couldn't keep
up with his earlier rate of intake.

I'd seen enough. I went back to my
neighborhood, our segregated cluster of single, efficient
Japanese/Craftsman detached homes, and hovered on it: Quiet as
always with a little wind making the only noise. I resisted
hovering directly over Qim’s house but she was the reason I was
there.

Eventually, I gave in, before I really
wanted to. She was home walking naked out of the bathroom. She
stopped at a large square of black and red silk that was her bed. A
guy, a naked nobody, came to stand behind her.

I stayed in her room but with my eyes
tightly shut. I couldn't leave and I couldn't look at what was
happening. I felt my fingers in an iron grip on the edge of the
desk. Panic shimmered and peaked. A strong, slow building relief
washed through me until I felt nothing and then I looked. Moles and
worms waited, squirming their gray metal bodies on the carpet
beneath the bed. Ten moles bristled with all appendages out. Many
more worms raised up twirling, flexing their external vibrissae to
sniff the air.

*

I flew, scanning, over the tops of the
old, wet downtown buildings, perfect stands of trees, formidable
stacked gardens with invisible intelligence. I left the county and
went west over the water to Olympia.

Over the water and in the mountains and
forests there were still plenty of sensors. They were embedded in
the trees and even in the air, hosted on floating gray dirigibles a
cm long. There were worms and moles in the forest soil but fewer,
less rigorously deployed than in the urban core farms.

I stopped over the forest near the
mountains. Pausing brought up suggestions of sub-data: system
hardware locations, wildfire proclivity, rainfall amounts,
temperature and humidity at different altitudes, wind speeds and
directions; means, ranges and forecasts for everything. I ignored
them all, more came: historical tabs, geological data, background
radiation, dozens of zoological overlays, list headers for every
wild plant, every wild fungus, bacterial profiles, soil
composition, pH, density, granularity / then there were the
people.