Proxy (2 page)

Everything costs.

But really, who would set the access code to a brand-new CX-30 Roadster as 1-2-3-4-5 and not expect his son to take it for spin? If anyone was to blame, it was his father. Knox was sixteen. He was just doing what came naturally.

Like the polar bears.

And look where that got them.

“What’s so funny?” the girl asked, seeing Knox chuckle.

“Just thinking about polar bears,” he said and he reached over to squeeze her thigh.

That was his first mistake.

The next two came in quick succession.

The car swerved slightly toward the guardrail when he took his right hand off the wheel. At that speed, on manual drive, it took both hands to keep the vehicle straight. He’d have known that if he had ever taken a manual driving class.

He hadn’t.

He overcompensated for the swerve, jerking the wheel toward the center lane. That was his second mistake.

His heart skipped a beat as he felt himself losing control. If he hadn’t shut off the augmented reality driving, it would have taken over right then. These cars drove themselves if you let them.

Instead, he tried to brake.

Mistake number three.

An alarm sounded. The car jackknifed, spun sideways, and flipped over at 162 mph.

Airborne.

The stabilizer engine screeched helplessly at the sky.

Or maybe that was the girl.

He felt the car hit the ground and roll. The entire universe shattered into blinking lights and screaming metal. He heard a crunch, a snap of bone. He felt like he’d been punched in the throat.

There was heat, an intense heat, and an invisible fist pulled the air out of his lungs and ripped the sound from his ears. He couldn’t hear anything now, no screaming, no screeching, just the blood rushing to his head. He thought he was upside down. Twisted metal pinned his arms to his sides. He felt the urge to laugh. There was a warm wetness on his face and he tasted something metallic.

And then darkness.

[2]

DARKNESS.

Nothing but darkness.

What could be wrong?

Syd swiped and twisted; he dragged and dropped.

Still nothing.

He tried resetting the power source, rebooting the software. When that failed, he tried the oldest repair trick he knew: whacking the thing with his palm.

Nothing.

He couldn’t get a holo to project. There was just a void hanging midair in the hallway.

Syd shook his head and handed the kid back the beat-up piece of plastic he used as his datastream projector. “There’s no connection between the projector and your biofeed. No input. Broken beyond repair.”

The boy didn’t deign to take the small device back, even though it belonged to him. “So, like, what? You’re saying you can’t fix it?”

“I’m saying no one can fix it. It’s not picking up your signal anymore. Could be the receiver, could be that you aren’t transmitting anything to receive.” Syd looked down at the kid, some snot-nosed first-year, zit pocked and sneering, trying to look tough because he figured he was being scammed. Probably not a bad assumption to make, but Syd wasn’t scamming him. Life in the Valve was hard enough without everyone trying to get one over on everybody else all the time. Even in high school.

EduCorp scammed the teachers, the teachers scammed the students, and the students scammed one another. Maybe somebody learned something along the way, maybe not. But everybody paid.

Syd was just trying to get his certificate and get out without owing anybody else anything.

The kid’s lip quivered.

Exams were coming up for the first-years, the kid whined. How was he supposed to get through them with no datastream access? He couldn’t afford a new biofeed install. He already had eighteen years of debt, he said, and he’d just started high school. Blood work cost, what, another three years at least?

“What am I supposed to do?” he pleaded. “I’ve already been volunteered for two weeks of swamp drainage because of a stupid prank my patron pulled.”

He went on whining. He needed new malaria meds and sunblocker patches. Probably another six months of debt right there. He couldn’t pay for new software in his blood on top of all that. He’d have to repeat the whole year at full price if he didn’t make the tests.

“Bribe the test proctor?” Syd suggested. Half the kids did that. Some of them didn’t even show up at all, just paid for their grades. Easy to do if you didn’t mind borrowing the credit. Credit was easy. Studying was hard.

The kid made a face like he’d been hit in the stomach. No go on the bribe.

Syd felt for the kid. He couldn’t afford to bribe the teachers either. Not without borrowing himself into oblivion or starving himself to death.

The floodgates broke; the kid wept, standing in the green tiled hallways of Vocation High School IV. His shoulders shook and he buried his face in his hands.

Syd stared at the wet armpit circles on the kid’s shirt. The climate control was out again. Nothing smelled worse than three thousand sweating teenagers trapped in a concrete bunker of a building made for half that number. The Valve was at the lowest point in the Mountain City, where the wet heat lingered, unmoved by the breezes that kept the peaks of the Upper City comfortable. Breezes were for people who could afford them. All the Lower City kids got was the heat of nature’s indifference.

Other kids stared at Syd as they passed, shaking their heads, rolling their eyes, whispering to one another. Shoulder bump after shoulder bump.

Syd ran his hand through his short hair and his fingers tapped absently on the birthmark behind his ear. The mark was changing. He’d had it as long as he could remember, but in the last few month, it had been growing, little black dot by little black dot, like pixels. The dots had formed shapes, four of them, darkening day by day. He worried that maybe it wasn’t a birthmark. Maybe it was cancer. Or plague blemishes.

Were those a thing?

He didn’t know. But he couldn’t afford to have a cancer patch installed to correct it. Talk about debt. Medical installs cost a fortune; at least, medical installs that wouldn’t make you sicker than you already were.

Syd had more to worry about than this crying first-year and his broken datastream.

Advos based on the kid’s purchase profile flashed on the walls around them. Some off-brand acne care called PusPopper and three flavors of Fiberizer Diet Supplements from EpiCure Incorporated.

“Hey, your advos are still working.” Syd pointed at the wall where the advertisements were displayed. “At least your biofeed is still broadcasting.”

“Those aren’t mine.” The kid denied it. Of course he denied it.

This was not helping Syd with his image. The advos were linked to your biofeed, read off the scanners that picked up everyone’s background radiation. If you had a biofeed installed in your blood—and everyone in the Mountain City did—then your advos belonged to you and you alone; your body was networked. If those advos weren’t the kid’s, that’d mean that they were Syd’s. Syd did not want everyone thinking he needed PusPoppers or Fiberizer Diet Supplements.

These advos were so not his.

Syd kept his purchase profile boring. Most of the sales pitches he saw were for dehydrated noodles. Original sodium flavor. He didn’t like to make it easy on the predictive marketing software. He bought as little as possible and used the black market whenever he could. Of course, the black market sold its data upstream to the legit companies too, but they didn’t care if the data was accurate or not. They got the same price for a lie as they did for the truth.

Everything costs.

“You could just drop out.” Syd tried to stop the kid’s crying. “Go to the recycling yards, work as a runner? Or join the Rebooters to fight the system.” Syd held up his fist in mock solidarity. “Bring on the Jubilee.”

The kid shook his head.

“Guess you’re not a Causehead,” said Syd, lowering his fist. He couldn’t blame the kid. Syd didn’t believe in all that Jubilee stuff either. Universal debt forgiveness was a pipe dream and the Rebooters were a bunch of losers living out in the wastelands, eating rats and waiting for their debtor messiah or something. Even their corporate terrorism was laughable. When they blew up a datacenter, three more went online in its place. When they trashed a protein depot, the price of food went up for everyone and EpiCure hit record profits. Rebooter anti-market actions had been integrated into the market. There was no changing the system. Best you could do was get yourself clear of it any way possible.

“You could sell an eye for hard cash?” Syd suggested. “Sell a kidney? One of the dupe organs anyway.”

That suggestion only made things worse. The kid blew a loud blast of tear snot and wiped it on his sleeve. Charming.

“Calm down,” Syd groaned, a trickle of sweat running down between his shoulder blades. The small of his back felt like a swamp. “I was kidding.” He put his hand on the kid’s shoulder, because what else was he supposed to do? The boy lowered his hands from his face. Syd stooped to look the kid right in the eyes. “What’s your name?” he asked.

“Tom,” the kid sniffed. “Tom Sawyer.”

Tom Sawyer.

Of course. The name said it all: a refugee and an orphan, renamed from a database. Probably a West Coaster by the sound of his accent.

No wonder he had all that debt. It came with the name. The Benevolent Society charged ten years for a “rescue” from the desert and another three for installing the datastream into your blood. Three more years got tacked on for foster care, and two more just to get into school. That made eighteen altogether. Syd knew that eighteen years of debt well.

He had it himself.

Syd sighed.

Why was he such a sucker for these charity cases?
He
was a charity case. Sixteen years old and eighteen years in debt to the Xelon Corporation. Once you got so deep into debt, it was almost impossible to get out. Civilization wasn’t free.

But it was better than the alternative. Better than life in the swamps or the desert or the ruins of some squatter city out in the badlands. Better than going freelance, out of the system, scrounging in the dumps for recycling, working a corner for the syntholene gangs or in a hacker pharm, going blind writing cut-rate codes for the Maes gang. It sure beat getting rolled for your organs, used as meatware.

Some would consider Syd lucky. He had access to credit. He got to be in school. He got to be out of the hustle, if he chose, if he wanted to take on the debt.

His problem was, he didn’t want to.

Egan, his best friend, the one guy he trusted in the whole damned city, had like thirty or forty years of debt by now—he was always buying the newest biopatch, updating himself with new eye colors or hair colors or skin colors, buying data-enabled contact lenses from the Upper City, tiny projectors that slid under his fingernails, crazy climate-control clothing. He went out all the time too, got girls presents, and did whatever designer patch was popular with the patron kids up above.

Egan didn’t care. His patron was a saint, never got in trouble. Egan never had to do hard labor. He never got hit with an EMD stick. He never had to teach his patron a lesson about responsibility.

Syd wasn’t so lucky.

He’d missed more nonrefundable school days for “volunteer work”—Xelon corporate code for forced labor—than anybody else in his class. He felt like he’d hauled every ton of cement in the Hayek Memorial Dam up the mountain by himself and single-handedly ripped all the copper wire from all of Old Denver. He figured his was the worst patron anyone had ever had in all of history.

But that was the system. Patrons owned the debt and proxies took their punishments. A simple contract, a free market. Debts had to be paid.

The work built Syd’s muscles up so that he didn’t have to worry so much about Maes gang thugs giving him a beating, but it was murder on his knees. He’d been hit with an EMD stick more times than he could count. Electro-muscular disruption fried your nerves, but you could endure anything once you got used to it. By now, Syd was very used to it.

Still, just two more years of debt and Syd would be no one’s proxy, his own man. The thought pulled him through. Soon he’d never have to owe anybody anything ever again.

He worked in the back of an illegal repair shop in the Valve, and he studied hard and he avoided the corners and the dumps and whatever new schemes Egan cooked up. He put in his time with his head down. For friends he had Egan and dating wasn’t even a remote possibility. Not for him, not in the Valve. Easier to keep to himself.

And yet, Syd knew, he wasn’t going to let Tom Sawyer drop out because of a busted biofeed. He never could say no to someone desperate.

Syd was a sucker.

“All right, Tom.” He sighed. “Just get through the day, okay?” He dropped the projector into the boy’s shaking hands. His fingertips left sweaty smudges on the cheap plastic. “You know Mr. Baram’s shop? Down by the runoff?”

Tom shook his head. Syd rolled his eyes, but brought up his datastream again.

“UtiliBoots! Give your other boots the boot,” an advo squawked. “Now with burn retardant dura—”

He swiped the advo away and brought up a holo of the entire Mountain City, with the swirling roads and private communities of the Upper City blurred out—wouldn’t want undesirables learning their way around. The chaotic jumble of the Lower City appeared in perfect detail. He zoomed in on the shop near the dried-up river in the heart of the Valve.

“Meet me there after school,” he said. “Maybe I can rig something to get you back on the datastream for a while.”

Tom smiled and for a second Syd was afraid the boy was going to give him a hug, but he ran off to class instead, and Syd stood alone in the middle of the emptying hall, sweating by himself. Advos for hair product and the newest holo games flashed at the edge of his vision. He watched through the glowing map floating in the middle of the hallway as Tom disappeared around the corner.

And then, without him doing a thing, the map vanished and a message appeared:

Report immediately to the school aid station.