Sycamore (Near-Future Dystopia) (29 page)

This was Sycamore and Sycamore was rotten.

“So that’s that,” boomed Amos from nowhere. “A damn good tour if I don’t say so myself.”

Kurt and Stacy both nodded despite themselves and, knowing that access to CrimePrev was impossible, started towards the elevator.

Amos pulled Kurt back. “I just need a second with Mr Jacobs,” he smiled to Stacy. She continued on. “Can we trust her to report the truth?” he whispered.

Kurt looked at him with surprise. “Stacy? Yeah, she’s a good girl.”

“That’s good, then,” said Amos. “But who’s Stacy?”

“I meant Monica.”

“So why did you say Sta—

“Stacy is Monica’s middle name. She prefers it.”

There was silence. “Monica Stacy Valentino? That’s a good name, hotshot. I don’t think you could come up with anything better if you tried.” Amos walked over to Stacy and thanked her for coming.

“What’s upstairs?” she asked.

“Above The Treehouse is some empty space, and then The Canopy.”

“What’s in there?” she pressed. Kurt was equally intrigued.

“You can’t go up there,” Amos answered flatly.

Kurt put a hand out to stop the door’s from closing. “That’s not what she asked.”

“Oh well. Goodbye, Monica Valentino.” Amos winked and walked away. He returned to The Treehouse as the elevator descended.

“Terrance!”

Minion rushed over. “Yes, sir?”

“I need everything you can get on this Monica character, and I need it now.”

“Why?”

“Do I pay you to ask why?”

“I only meant so I know where to focus my search, sir.”

“Fine. Jacobs is lying to us. They’re both lying to us, about everything from her name to her motives. They met three days after the launch, at the ScranTime protest. I want you to look back through his stream and find out where she lives and what they’re up to. It’s Stacy, by the way.”

Minion didn’t like the expression Amos was wearing. “What are you going to do to them?” he asked.

“That depends on what you tell me, Terrance.” Amos looked at the floor and shook his head slowly. “Damn shame it’s come to this. I liked that boy.”

15

Kurt and Stacy arrived in his Longhampton mansion in the early afternoon and huddled over her laptop for the moment of truth. She connected her camera to its tiny dock and before long its contents looked to be transferring over without a hitch. Kurt was nostalgically pleased to see things that he had forgotten all about — things like USB cables and spare batteries. It all seemed quaint and somehow pure.

USB‘s painfully slow data-transfer hadn’t been missed though, and it brought unbearable tension. When the single video file finally arrived Stacy double-clicked it and held her breath.

And then the screen filled with the view from the passenger seat of Kurt’s Gallardo rolling through the Quartermile, when Stacy had started recording. It had worked. She skipped forward and smiled like nothing else as high quality footage of The Orwall rolled.

“That’s the visual we needed,” she said. “The smoking gun. But if that’s just DC then what do you think CrimePrev looks like?”

“I don’t even want to imagine it. Is there any way we can get what we have online outside of Forest?” Kurt asked. He was aware that legislation had been passed forbidding ISPs from doing business with American consumers around a week ago but remained hopeful that there would be some kind of workaround.

Stacy shook her head. “And no one would be able to see it even if we could. Not here, anyway. The only people who still have real internet access are people who have old mobile contracts with foreign companies that they pay for with foreign credit cards, and there aren’t many of those people.”

“Where are they?”

“North.”

“Do you know where exactly?” Kurt asked, excited. “Are they the ‘we’ you were talking about before?”

“It’s best if we let them do their thing and stay focused on ours. Online isn’t an option for now, so what else can we do to get this out there?”

“That award I’m getting in two days…. the ceremony is at the university. A notice about it popped up in my Lenses when we were at HQ, so they’re advertising it well which means a lot of people will be watching. That would be perfect — nice and public. People will hear what I have to say before Amos can pull the plug. And once people know, he can’t snuff me out.”

“Will you have a screen behind you like at the contest?”

“If I want one. We could run the footage of The Orwall. That on it’s own will be enough to wake people up.”

“Just as well, because it’s really the only thing we have that isn’t public knowledge. Most people already know a little bit about how Forest works and The Studio was boring. Only The Treehouse was revelatory.”

“I want to say something about Forest, though,” said Kurt. “The whole thing is too huge a contradiction to ignore.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean that our society has a deepening addiction to human contact but Forest contact is false, like everything else in Sycamore’s world. Capitalism sells us ways to meet our needs but they’re never really met, are they? Intimacy issues sell cam shows and pornography which only fuels further intimacy issues. It’s the same craving for human contact that lies behind the social networking boom. But social networks have only ever offered the
illusion
of human contact; they don’t deepen our relationships, they reduce them to a series of the most base interactions possible. It’s like I said to Amos. We feel isolated in a world in which we somehow manage to simultaneously have everything and nothing, so we lose ourselves in a metaworld where we can enjoy popularity and relevance in the eyes of deluded others seeking the same. But people are more than profiles.” Kurt opened up a new text document on the laptop and typed the next sentence as he spoke it: “We are more than status updates.”

Stacy nodded in full agreement. “But most people don’t think so. However
we
feel, a lot of people like Forest. So don’t rant on social networks, just explain the lies. Say something about how people started off being worried about privacy and how everyone was careful what they put online because they never knew who would see it. But then they bought into the whole “
you decide who gets to see what — you can keep everything private if you want!
” line without realising that they had given the game away the second they input their data. The company had everything.”

Kurt liked it. “Right. We were more concerned about having a secure password than what we were sharing, as if a bored 15 year-old hacker motivated by chaos was more dangerous than a billion-dollar corporation driven by an insatiable lust for profit.”

Stacy nodded again. They made a good team. “And that was the point,” she said, Kurt typing her words as they came out. “We somehow felt safe sharing every aspect of our lives, whether through public posts or private messages, with a corporate entity that was: a) legally bound by prior legislation to pass our data onto whichever government agencies desired it, and: b) legally bound by a duty to its stockholders to share our data with advertising agencies and partners. We implicitly agreed to this by using their service and explicitly agreed by ticking boxes beside user agreements we didn’t have time to read.”

“And it’s even worse with Sycamore,” he took over, now typing and speaking his own thoughts. “People think their data is safe if they don’t post it publicly. No one realises that the service provider through which they are communicating is the real threat, not some straw-man peeping tom. Like the old social networks, Sycamore has a massive database of deleted status-updates, supposedly private messages and every consumer’s online movements and purchases. But unlike the old social networks, Sycamore knows everything you do the rest of the time, too. They sell your data to advertising companies who then buy placements. Advertisers pay Amos for your data then pay him to display their ads. It’s the greatest double-dip in tech history and your data and attention are the products that enable it.”

“You can’t say all that. It might be important but it’s not important enough. Not to most people. You have to start with something grand. Make it sound like a genuine acceptance speech then hit them with a sudden twist.”

Kurt listened to what Stacy said but kept typing. It was fun using a real keyboard again. After a few seconds he showed her what he had so far: “When the first smartphones came out and critics were warning us about sharing too much on social networks, having our location tracked and ditching cash for electronic payments, certain industry commentators insisted there was nothing to worry about. They said humanity would never sleepwalk into technological slavery, and we didn’t. No; we skipped merrily along and attached the shackles ourselves. And, as if to prove the point further, we didn’t even sell ourselves into slavery — we queued up and paid for the privilege.”

“That’s good,” she said. “Maybe you should say that you wish you could turn back time and stop yourself from making the pitch that night?”

Kurt shook his head. “That’s not how time travel works.”

Stacy laughed at his incessantly literal outlook.

“None of it matters now, anyway,” he said. “When we show footage of The Orwall there will be a revolution overnight. The birds will eat the cat. I remember at the contest, Amos asked if he was the cat. He is. Sycamore is the cat. That’s what the ravens were trying to tell me: pick your moment and strike. Revenge is coming, so be ready to take it.”

“Maybe, but this isn’t just about Sycamore anymore... we could take everything else down with it. Think about it properly — people are now dependent on Sycamore. When Sycamore collapses those people will have nothing. People who have nothing have nothing to lose. There could be a genuine revolution. The fat cats in Washington and on Wall Street should be worried, too.”

Kurt liked the sound of that, but he had never really thought in terms of people being dependent on Sycamore. Now that he did, the situation felt more complicated. Everyone’s money, everyone’s data, everyone’s access to their houses and cars… it was all tied to Sycamore. If the rug was pulled from underneath, what then? People’s lives were hard enough without him causing them all sorts of new problems.

Stacy read the concern on his face. “I don’t care if people are more comfortable now than they will be when it happens; they’re slaves. It doesn’t matter if the slaveholder feeds them every now and then and gives them a rough bed to sleep on, he owns them and they deserve to be free. Everyone deserves to be free. And Amos deserves to go down. I can’t wait to dance on his grave.”

Kurt got the feeling from those words that Stacy’s hatred of Amos went beyond what they had seen in The Treehouse and had its roots in something more personal. “I have to know,” he said, “why do you want to crush him? I mean
really
why.”

“He killed my father.” It sounded like the start of a superhero’s origin story but Stacy was dead serious.

“What?”

“The car crash was Sycamore’s fault. My dad was wearing UltraLenses to come and visit me because he didn’t know the way.”

“I remember what the old route-finder app used to be like. You synced it from your phone and dodgy arrows appeared onto the road. They always took you into the wrong lanes. It was like a seriously primitive BeThere,” Kurt said, forgetting that Stacy didn’t share that particular frame of reference. “It was too easy to crash.”

“It wasn’t the arrows.”

“How do you know?”

“He didn’t die straight away. At the hospital he told me that an ad for Lexington popped up and wouldn’t go away. He tried to take the Lenses out but it was too late. He crashed into another car and killed three people.”

Kurt struggled to process what he was hearing. “But I thought there were no pop-up ads until after The Seed launched,” he said.

“So says Amos. But Sycamore tested pop-ups last year then abandoned the project after complaints that there was no way to close them quickly. Their involvement in the crash was covered up. No one believed me. No one believed my brother. But we both heard my dad, and he wasn’t making it up.”

“I believe you,” said Kurt. “I believe him. The same thing happened to me when I was driving. If I’d had to get a phone out to close the ad, I’d have had no chance. When was the crash, anyway?”

“Last November.”

Kurt’s heart sped up. “November what?”

“28
^th
. Why?”

He could barely bring himself to share the shattering revelation. “Those three people were my parents and my sister-in-law. My brother was driving. His injuries are fading but he still blames himself.”

“It wasn’t his fault. It was Sycamore.”

“No,” said Kurt. “It was Amos.”

~

Night came and went as Kurt and Stacy fell asleep on his sofa talking about everything. They planned his acceptance speech to the letter and when the sun rose the recognition ceremony was only a day away.

Stacy got dressed and decided to give Kurt something. As soon as he started shuffling amongst the cushions she sat down beside him with her e-reader. He rolled over and opened his eyes. “Wow,” he yawned. “I haven’t seen a real book like that in months.”

“This isn’t a real book.”

“You know what I mean. I’ve been getting books on the SycaStore, but it only has certain ones. They’re pretty expensive compared to the abundance of mindless video content that consumers are so actively encouraged to sit through.”

“It’s because books make people think,” said Stacy, and he agreed.

“So what’s on here that you want me to read?”

“
The Space Merchants
. It has the best line I’ve ever read. The context is a group of executives talking about advertising, resources and the need for new frontiers. A guy at the ad agency says that the world was their oyster, then he says “
but we’ve eaten that oyster… actually and literally conquered the world. Like Alexander, we weep for new worlds to conquer.
””

Kurt took the e-reader from Stacy’s hands.