Proxy (6 page)

But this new kid, he almost demanded punishment. That kind of defeated the purpose, no? Even without the volume on, you could tell he was whining. Knox was grateful there was no sound. His head couldn’t take it. He imagined the kid’s voice like a squawking penguin.

Why was he thinking about penguins? Did he steal a penguin? Was that what this was about? He remembered something about the zoo. He tried to remember flapping wings, those tuxedo birds, anything at all, but there was just blankness, a hole in time.

Suddenly, another figure was in the room on the screen, a boy he recognized. He rose right out of the floor. That was the boy, Knox’s proxy. The kid must have a rough time of it living in the Valve, if this was his house. Had he come out of a basement? Was that where the old man kept him?

“Can we get some sound, please?” Knox’s father snapped at the nurse. “This is hardly a useful exercise without sound.”

“Yes, sir,” said the nurse. She brought the sound on with a swipe of her finger. She’d been sparing Knox the volume up to that point. He’d have to get her ID before he checked out. Her hair had this amazing copper shine against her pale neck. It wasn’t the fanciest gene-job he’d ever seen—the color profile was just a little off—but that made it even more endearing. Of course, she worked for his father, which was a point against her.

“I’m Sydney Carton,” the boy on the screen said. “You’re looking for me.” The female Guardian checked a projection to get a match on his biofeed. She nodded at her partner. They had the right kid.

“What is it this time?” Sydney asked.

“Please come with us,” the female Guardian said. Talk about nice curves. The Guardian was amazing.

The theory was that people followed the orders of an attractive person more readily than an ugly person, so all the Guardians were hot; they were chosen for their attractiveness. “Genetically sourced” was the official line. Everything else could be programmed in. Biomanipulation was a booming business, especially in the security sector. There was no shortage of threats to guard against—smugglers, hackers, Nigerian-backed saboteurs, debt-crazed Rebooters trying to overthrow the system. Some people didn’t want to pay their fair share. Some people hated the prosperity of others.

Knox tried to pay attention to the holo, but his mind kept wandering. He found himself thinking about a polar bear. What did that have to do with anything?

“I already gave him my blood today. What else do you want?” Sydney sighed. He didn’t look alarmed. He looked bored.

Knox glanced at the bag of blood pouring into him and the scruffy dark-skinned kid on the holo. He felt suddenly itchy, like the poverty of that boy was flowing through his veins now. His stomach turned.

“Is that hygienic?” he asked his father.

“We test the blood, Knox.” His father sounded bored too.

“Aren’t you supposed to tell me what I’m being punished for?” Sydney on the holo said. Knox pushed himself up to lean his lower back against the headboard.

“Did my patron hack another diet supplement pill? Make the steak taste like sewage? Foot-sweat crème brûlée?” the proxy grumbled.

The sniveling kid stared at the Guardians, unblinking. Knox wondered what sketchy scene they’d wandered in on. Codesnappers? IP thieves? Cut-rate gene rippers? Anything goes in the Valve. You get the laws you can pay for, and no more. The Guardians weren’t there to enforce some petty Valve crimes. The sniveling kid looked like he had never even seen Guardians before. Probably hadn’t, if he was lucky.

The old man was suddenly back in the room, coming toward them, wagging his finger in the air.

“Sydney is a good kid,” he was saying. “He follows the rules. You have to tell him what this is about.”

The Guardians turned to the old man and stared him down, stopping him in his tracks with their eyes.

“These are
your
rules,” the old man added, much more quietly, almost to himself. “I have a terms of proxy agreement statement here somewhere.” His eyes twitched as he scanned the datastream in his glasses, projections flashing in the air in front of him, but the female Guardian grabbed his wrist and bent his arm back like a mischievous child with someone else’s doll. The projections vanished. The old man’s eyes focused.

“Sir,” the Guardian spoke calmly, but with a tone that left no doubt as to who was in charge. Knox leaned forward. At least now he’d find out what he’d done. Stealing a penguin wouldn’t land him in this hospital. Stealing a penguin wouldn’t hurt this much. Although he’d never actually stolen a penguin that he remembered. Maybe it could. Or maybe a polar bear? Had he been that tweaked? What kind of punishment did stealing extinct animals from the zoo require of his proxy?

“The proxy owes his patron a debt accrued for theft, trespassing, destruction of property,” the Guardian said.

“What an idiot,” Sydney muttered.

“And homicide,” the Guardian added.

“Wait, what?” blurted Sydney.

“Wait, what?” Knox blurted with him. “Homicide . . .” He looked at his dad. Machines started beeping; holo projections of his vital signs appeared all over the room.

“Yes, Knox, and I hope this will teach you a lesson,” his father answered, peering over his glasses. “Marie died.”

“Who?” was all Knox could muster before the world went black again.

[8]

IT WAS SOME TIME later, Knox couldn’t tell how long, when that familiar drug rush of clarity and pain woke him. His father and the nurse were on either side of him and he was staring once more at Sydney, his proxy, on the holo at the end of his bed.

Knox hadn’t moved, but Sydney had. He was in a tiled room, brightly lit. The proxy’s skin looked almost gray under the harsh lights, and he didn’t look bored anymore.

He looked frightened.

The picture zoomed in close on his face, probably for dramatic effect now that Knox was awake. He hated those cheap tricks. The punishments should really speak for themselves. But some case agent in some office somewhere probably had his own ideas about cinematography.

The image widened to reveal that Sydney was tied up by the wrists and suspended by some sort of chain overhead. He’d been stripped down to his boxer shorts. He had a large scar on his upper arm, probably from the cheap biofeed install when he was a child. He had two more scars along one side of his rib cage and another along his collarbone that looked like it had been sewn shut with concertina wire. Knox wondered why he didn’t get the scars fixed. There were patches that could do the repair work and they weren’t even that expensive. Maybe the kid took pride in looking like a thug. Maybe that was fashionable in the Valve.

The Guardians were with the proxy, flanking him, maybe the same ones, maybe different ones. It was impossible to tell.

Sydney’s clothes were piled on a table in front of him, just a shirt and cargo pants. His plastic holo projector sat beside them on the table, smashed, useless. That seemed excessive to Knox, adding inconvenience to injury. What lesson could breaking the kid’s datastream access possibly teach Knox?

“Sound again, please,” Knox’s father commanded and the nurse brought up the volume. All they could hear was Syd’s deep breathing.

No one spoke.

Knox had seen his proxy punished in all sorts of ways over the years: zapped with the EMD sticks, forced to work under the blazing sun out on the dam construction above the river, even just held alone in the dark for days. That was how the system worked. Knox’s father purchased the boy’s debt and when Knox broke the rules, the boy was punished. It was a transaction, plain and simple, the cornerstone of civilization. The free market.

But this—tied up, nearly naked. It was too raw. Too physical. Knox wanted it to stop.

Calm down, Knox, he reminded himself. Think clearly. It’s not like anyone forced this Sydney kid to go into debt, right? Was it Knox’s fault the boy had bad luck? The proxies were randomly assigned by age group. Xelon purchased huge blocks of debt in bulk, sold and resold them automatically. Nothing personal at all.

Some other kid in the Valve was probably racking up debt with some patron kid who never broke the rules. Like that kiss-ass in his Intro to Financialization class, Duross Wen. He never did anything wrong. He’d probably never even seen his proxy and never would. His family paid and paid and the proxy got credit for nothing. It was a gamble. Duross’s proxy had won. Sydney had lost. It was that simple.

But this time a girl had died.

A girl named Marie.

She died because of him.

Knox still couldn’t exactly remember how or why, but he’d find out. That was the deal. When his proxy was punished, Knox was forced to watch it happen. Even now, even in his hospital bed. His father sat in judgment beside him.

Knox had known Sydney since they were both four years old, even though Sydney would never know him. The first time he saw Sydney Carton was because Knox had broken one of the ancient tablets his great-grandmother rescued from the ruined museums of the East Coast when the floodwaters rose, a stone slab with little dents and shapes in it, some contract from some long-forgotten civilization. Messoposomething. Knox had tried to ride it down the stairs. It shattered halfway to the landing.

Sydney was pulled right out of his bed in a part of the city Knox hadn’t known existed. He was skinny and brown and his hair was wild and kinky and he didn’t look anything like the other children Knox knew. Just seeing him made Knox frightened.

When he was brought into the room, Knox remembered Sydney laughing. He stopped laughing when he saw the EMD stick. Sydney got five low-power zaps and he obviously didn’t understand why, even when the matronly head of the orphanage explained it to him. He just cried and cried and screamed and cried some more. Knox cried right along with him.

Then Knox apologized to the holo and to his father and even to the little vacuum robot he’d tried to blame for breaking the tablet. He vowed to be better, promised he’d never be a disappointment again, but that lasted about six weeks, until he tried to see if the vacuubot could fly by throwing it off the roof.

It couldn’t.

For that, Syd got ten zaps.

Within a year, Sydney had stopped crying and Knox had stopped wincing when he watched. They varied the punishments as the boys aged, but it never affected Knox as it did the first time. And Sydney seemed to take it in stride. All part of the system.

But now Knox felt that old pang, that feeling he hadn’t really known since that old clay tablet. He was watching the screen and he was afraid. He felt like he was in the room with Sydney, like he
was
Sydney.

“Your patron has committed serious crimes,” the female Guardian said. “Per the terms of your contract, you will be administered the full punishment unless he files a waiver to appear in your place, is that understood?”

Sydney didn’t answer. He just looked around the room.

“Where is he?” Sydney asked, eyes darting. No way he’d even see the cameras, but still, his glances made Knox wrap his hospital gown tighter. He hugged himself.

“His whereabouts are not your concern,” the Guardian said. “Do you understand why you are being punished?”

“Because my patron is a waste of meat,” Sydney said.

The female Guardian smiled in an imitation of sympathy. She nodded and the male Guardian stepped forward with an EMD stick and put it against Sydney’s side.

The proxy squirmed and writhed; his feet left the floor and his toes curled. When the stick was pulled away his head slumped forward and he gasped. He looked up again. The view zoomed in on his face. Knox wanted to close his eyes, but he wouldn’t give his father the satisfaction. He wasn’t in that room. He wasn’t Sydney. Nothing like someone else’s pain to put you back in your own body. He was here, in this room with his own pain and he wouldn’t blink.

“Do you understand?” the female Guardian asked again. Sydney nodded.

“Good. You currently have two remaining years of debt to repay. We are required to give you the option to repay in full now. The current rate of exchange is four thousand eight hundred and sixty-two credits per month outstanding, for a total of one hundred sixteen thousand six hundred eighty-eight, plus processing fees. Would you prefer to repay in full now and defer punishment?”

This was the standard script. The rates changed based on a formula only the top executives could see, but the choice was the same every time. It’s either you or me. Someone’s got to pay.

It was pretty absurd when they were little kids. Knox didn’t know what any of those words meant, and it didn’t look like Sydney did either. But it was like the old religions: Repeat the prayers over and over for years and years and only later come to understand them.

Knox got worried as they got older that Sydney would say yes one of these days, and buy his way out of the system. Would this be the time? He held his breath, not sure what he was hoping.

“Repay with what?” Sydney sneered.

The Guardian nodded and a holo appeared in front of her. She tapped it a few times to enter the response, then vanished it with a wave of her hand. She met Sydney’s eyes.

“We will administer the punishment as follows—” Knox held his breath. He was going to hear the full list of what he’d done. “For your patron’s crime of larceny of corporate property you will receive twenty pulses at level eight-point-seven. For the crime of trespassing and destruction of property, you will receive forty pulses at level twelve-point-five”—Sydney slumped where he was hanging—“and for the crime of negligent homicide, your flesh be branded with the name of the deceased, one Marie Louise Alvarez, and you will be sent to Old Sterling Work Colony for the period of sixteen years, eighteen days and nine hours.”

Sydney’s head snapped up. His face showed a new expression, the lips turned down, the eyebrows collapsing toward each other. “You can’t . . . I only have two years left . . .”

“Per the terms of the agreement, all policies are based on penal recommendations as defined in the current actuarial tables available through the Xelon Corporation Information System at the time of contract. The compensation for the life of a patron is the equal number of years from the offender’s proxy as replacement for lost productivity, as your contract clearly states.”