Sycamore (Near-Future Dystopia) (19 page)

“Fine,” he eventually said. “I’ll stay away for a while. Before I go though, how does RealU actually work? It’s impressive enough how real the shoes look on the ground, but I didn’t think I’d be able to make them out from up here. There must be some serious processing going on for it to work over such a range of distances.”

Amos turned away from the window. “I don’t concern myself with the details but it’s probably some kind of pixel-level analysis. Is that a thing? Anyway, the Lenses take everything in and pass it to The Seed — as you know well enough — and The Seed’s abilities are our abilities. Whatever our best minds can think of, The Seed can do the donkey work. It knows what a shoe should look like.”

“I don’t know if you’re playing stupid or you really don’t understand, but it’s not as simple as that,” said Kurt. “Do you have any idea how complicated it is to know where garments should stop and to have them stay attached to the wearer in a 3D world where everyone and everything is moving unpredictably? This is proper virtual reality, realtime, for millions of bodies at once. The tech that this needs shouldn’t be here for years. Decades, maybe.”

“We’ve brought a lot of good teams in-house since your pitch, including cutting-edge VR developers. Wait until you see BeThere! Anyway, even without the fresh blood, I told you in the beginning that we have top men on our side.”

“Who?”

“Top men.” Amos smirked.

“The only ‘top men’ who have tech this far ahead of the game are in the military and space agencies. Are we talking about your friends from the Unifield days?”

The smirk faded as quickly as the eyes above it narrowed. “I don’t know what you think you know, hotshot, but if you knew half as much as you thought you did, you would know that those kind of people don’t play dress-up. Your head would explode if you knew what they had.”

Kurt spoke without thinking. “A controlling interest in Sycamore, you mean?”

Amos typed something into his hand; Kurt wanted more than anything to know what the message was and who it was for. Amos returned to focus and looked at him blankly. “It’s probably best if you go home now, Jacobs. I’ll be in touch when I need you.”

Kurt heeded Amos’s joyless tone and walked into the open elevator. He pressed G and the doors began to close. An arm came from nowhere to hold them open. “Hotshot, wait!”

Kurt looked at Amos and found something new in his eyes — fear. It was contagious. “What’s wrong?” he asked.

Amos shook his head, as if to say “nothing,” then stepped back. He clicked his fingers to recapture Kurt’s attention and mouthed two words as the doors slid shut: “Be careful.”

10

188,662,491.

To Kurt’s conflicted amazement, the second week of seeding far outpaced the first. Sycamore’s aggressive promotions and no-questions-asked credit had worked wonders to the extent that week two defied even Amos’s expectations.

Kurt had paid little attention to the world of Sycamore since Amos’s warning eight days earlier and nor had he left his new house, preferring to order in whatever food and flavour of Lexington he needed as the days passed. This bright Monday morning, however, brought reason to get up. It was Kurt’s 24
^th
birthday — hardly an occasion worth getting dressed for — but it coincided with Sabrina’s 10
^th
, which absolutely was.

Birthday messages flooded in from Kurt’s tens of millions of Forest friends but he didn’t read any; even before the bizarre warning from Amos his intention had been to take some time off from thinking about Sycamore. For the most part, the week had been a surprising success in that regard. Kurt spent his days catching up with old shows he used to follow before developing The Seed had consumed his life, and his nights usually involved playing chess online with Randy.

He missed Amos’s grand gesture on Tuesday which saw a huge convoy of trucks drive to California and dump 20 million smartphones in front of his main rival’s headquarters, like half-eaten apples left to rot in the sun. It was low but it was brilliant, and Sycamore would gladly pay the clean-up costs because the visual image of so many rejected devices was priceless — a Consumer Relations mauling from which the hipsters would never recover.

A few minutes of excitement came on Wednesday afternoon when a universal announcement encouraged everyone to step outside and look to the sky for some breaking news. Kurt wondered why Amos would go to the trouble of putting news in the sky when he could deliver it directly to everyone’s Lenses, and this curiosity carried him outside. He walked to the end of his driveway and found the street busier than he had ever seen it. All of his neighbours were out at their doorsteps, looking up to the sky for answers. Answers from Sycamore. Now he understood.

A virtual screen appeared in the sky and a newsreader explained that exceptional circumstances demanded an exceptional report. She then relaid the story of a kidnapped 4-year-old who had been tracked down and rescued thanks to his Seed. Kurt’s neighbours applauded the announcement. He knew Amos too well to believe a word of it.

Kurt watched the regular SycaNews bulletin that night to pay closer attention to the rescue story. Fact or fiction, the incident was a CR home-run. Reports showed parents rushing to Tasmarts around the country to have their preschoolers seeded en masse to protect them from kidnappers. Queues coiled around street corners like hydras once more.

Footage looped of a SycaNews reporter being confronted outside a store in Chicago by a young mother, babe-in-arms, apoplectic that her 9-week-old son would have to wait another seven days to be seeded as per Sycamore’s Sapling policy. The woman didn’t look like a shill. Kurt wasn’t sure if that made it better or worse.

Since then he had avoided the SycaNews totally, including the second sky announcement on Friday. The voice in his ears said there was “exciting news about Tasmart” but he didn’t care enough to go outside. The sound of the sky reports only played to consumers whose Lenses were focused on the virtual screen.

On more than one occasion Kurt had fallen asleep in Relive, rewatching the moment he met Stacy. If Sycamore had just stopped at Relive then everything would have been fine, he still thought. The striking image of Stacy standing in the rain allowed Kurt to understand why the system had chosen that shot to sell him Lexington and left him ruing the fact that he couldn’t safely be with her.

Back in the present, on Monday morning of week three, the schools were now closed for summer. Kurt wanted to make sure that Sabrina was home before going to visit so, not yet used to Forest’s location info and TMT’s tracking abilities, he texted Randy to check. Randy confirmed that she was there so Kurt got ready to leave.

He quickly checked the SycaNews before leaving, not wanting to be annoyed by any surprises while driving. The main headline explained Friday’s sky announcement without needing to be clicked: “Tasmart completes transition to entirely Seed-based shopping destination.” Unless they were buying their Seed, customers couldn’t pay with money anymore. Sycamore balances were linked to bank accounts and credit cards — paper really was on the way out.

Four of the other five headlines on the front page concerned the upcoming presidential election. Kurt’s low-information diet meant that he missed the precise moments when the ISPs had been closed down on spurious national security grounds and when the SycaNews had become so blatantly partisan, but he was unsurprised by either development. No one important cared about the real internet, and Amos had mentioned in passing something about promising the president favourable coverage in exchange for his support of Sycamore’s various causes.

The headlines ran like single-line attack ads against the president’s rival, linking him to the Fury River Baptists and asking why his children still hadn’t been seeded. Did he sympathise with domestic terrorists? Did he not care about his family’s security? The people had a right to know.

The other article was about a multi-car collision, the third in as many days. Kurt decided to drive more carefully than normal. He touched the Gallardo’s door with his left hand to unlock it and stepped in.

As Kurt drove through the gate and left Longhampton, the number of people on the streets quickly increased as usual. It didn’t take long for him to realise that RealU had taken over the world. Major physical changes were expensive enough to be out of most people’s reach, but the clothing and makeup was priced to sell.

Everyone seemed to be wearing one of the same few Daily Hot List ensembles and many of those who weren’t looked even more ridiculous in their patchwork outfits from the Statements section. Sycamore partnered with top designers at the RealU launch and millions of consumers subscribed to their Daily Hot Lists. Kurt thought that these designers must have had a vendetta against taste.

The designers had done away with things like jeans and the colour black, their adventurous new stylings making it easy to see how few people were still dressing themselves with real clothes and without RealU’s help. The kind of clothes most people were ‘wearing’ were the kind of clothes someone would get for Christmas and return for store credit
—
the kind of clothes no one would ever look at unless someone else told them they were fashionable.

Kurt slowed to a halt in a long line of traffic. As dozens of questionably-clad citizens passed by his window, he clicked into the Fashion section to see what was available. There were new wardrobes to choose from in addition to the designer ones — things like Formal and Party. He was immediately drawn to the Rebellion wardrobe where he found t-shirts that said Suckamore, various Che Guevara designs and even a baseball cap with an apple on it. All were available to be purchased, feeding the beast with acceptable rebellion as Sycamore directed teenage angst and middle-aged nostalgia for an era when people cared about things in an acceptably profitable direction. Kurt had forgotten the French word for this, but it was the opposite of détournement.

There were also two new sections in RealU’s main menu, respectively titled Earn and Suggestions. The latter sounded boring but Kurt wanted to see what Earn was all about. He was suitably annoyed to learn that consumers could now be paid to wear advertisements, with the level of payment dependent on how popular they were and how many others saw the message. Payment was in the form of Sycamore credit which, pleasingly for Kurt, could now be spent on almost anything.

Kurt parked at Randy’s rusty gate after a longer than expected drive and stepped out. He hadn’t noticed anything about home-advertising in RealU’s new Earn section, but several houses on the street flashed with marketing images brighter than Christmas decorations as consumers jumped at the chance to make some money by turning their homes into billboards for Lexington, Tasmart, and various third-party apps. Kurt tried to ignore them and decided not to knock on the door, hoping to surprise Sabrina with his arrival. He walked into the hallway and shouted. “Happy birthday!”

She ran through from the kitchen and jumped into his arms the way he always loved. “You too,” she said. Kurt noticed something different.

“Wow, when did you dye your hair brown?”

“I didn’t. I bought it on RealU.”

Kurt ran his fingers through her hair and looked at it up-close, amazed by how convincing it was. He was still annoyed, though. “You shouldn’t be messing about with that garbage,” he told her. “You’re far too young to be worrying about how you look.”

“I’m not a little girl. I’m ten!”

“And one day you’ll wish you were ten again. You’ll be old enough for long enough, trust me. Just don’t do anything to your face and don’t waste all your birthday money on fake clothes, okay?”

She nodded. “I just wanted to change my hair for a day. Dad isn’t good at doing things like that.”

The look in her eye and the stubborn courage in her voice made Kurt feel guilty for reacting so strongly. Sabrina was a little girl without a mother and she wanted to look nice for her birthday. He was an idiot for misdirecting his anger with Sycamore at her. “I brought you something. It’s a bear.” He handed her a fancy gift-bag.

Sabrina removed the smiling blue teddybear, forgot about being upset, hugged Kurt again and said that she loved it.

Julian entered the kitchen through the back door and wished Kurt a happy birthday. Then Kurt saw the writing on his t-shirt: “
Lexington Jr - it tastes like fun!”

Julian noticed him looking at the ad and tried to explain. “I need the money to buy school books for next term.”

“Where’s your dad?”

“He’s asleep,” Sabrina answered.

“Okay. Tell him I was here, and tell him that I wasn’t happy. And JJ – send me a list of the books and I’ll get them. You don’t need to sell yourself out like this.”

Julian smiled faintly, like he meant it. “Thanks.”

“You’ve seen my car and you should see my house. Most people work their whole lives and still can’t afford things like that. We don’t need money, whatever your dad says. If you need anything at all just tell me.” Kurt turned to Sabrina to say goodbye because he didn’t want to be there when Randy woke up. “Enjoy the rest of your day, champ. We’ll talk later, yeah?”

“Okay,” she said. “I added you on Forest, so we can talk there. You should see how many friends I have already!”

The words cut into Kurt like a dart through the eye. It was bad enough that Sabrina’s body had been compromised, irrevocably tainted, impregnated with Sycamore’s devil seed. But now they had gotten into her mind — her soul. Amos was shaping her into a model friend-chasing consumer.

He didn’t want to say anything else to upset Sabrina on her birthday so toned down his reply. “Okay. But just remember that your real friends are the ones who come to
see
you on your birthday. Anyone can wish you a happy birthday when Forest tells them to. Trust me, I know. I’ve had ten million messages today.”

Julian and Sabrina looked at Kurt without saying anything. He left through the back door and walked round to the front. His hand was on the rusty gate when his ears began to ring. A voice-call. From Amos.