Sycamore (Near-Future Dystopia) (32 page)

Professor Walker sighed. “I knew it.”

“You don’t know anything.”

“All I’m asking is that you step back and assess the situation. Bad things happen when smart men let their hearts win.”

“I said I love her! That’s the end of it.” Kurt rushed to the door and turned his head to deliver a parting shot. “I wouldn’t expect a bitter old failure like you to understand.”

Kurt put his Lenses in once he was a few minutes away from the campus and a message from the professor was waiting for him: “Principles get people buried, Kurt. Don’t be an idiot. Run while you can.”

In five years Professor Walker had never called Kurt anything but Jacobs. The change somehow suggested sincerity, so Kurt’s reply was defiant rather than angry.

“I can’t not fight,” he typed into his hand as he walked down the street.

The professor’s final message came almost instantly.

“Please. Run.”

~

Kurt decided to experiment as he walked towards the central bank after parking beside Sycamore HQ. The bank was near the Jobs Monument, from where he planned to watch the rally, so it didn’t take him long to walk there.

The experiment involved walking through the city wearing one UltraLens. It was insane. Nothing made sense with one Lens in and both eyes open, but the set-up allowed Kurt to navigate Sycamore’s metaworld without completely losing touch with reality.

Even without BeThere, the world looked cleaner and fresher from behind a lens. Seeing people in tatty clothes and immaculate outfits at the same time gave Kurt a feeling akin to motion sickness. He looked down at his own feet and saw two different pairs of shoes at once. His mind told him that optics shouldn’t work like this, but his eyes begged to be believed.

A saying kept running through Kurt’s head: “
in the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.
” With that in mind he closed his naked eye and climbed over the fence at the Jobs Monument for the best view of the night’s events. The monument was closed but there was no attendant. And really… he was Kurt Jacobs.

From the top, his naked left eye could see a demonstration penned off to the side of the rally. His UltraLens-wearing right eye couldn’t.

He closed his naked eye again and zoomed in. There was nothing there. Sycamore had always been good at putting things into the world — augmenting reality as per their initial remit — but only now did Kurt appreciate just how adept they had become at hiding things.

No Lens-wearers would see the protest, which meant that in their reality it wasn’t happening. Kurt’s naked eye could see police. The fact that they weren’t intervening suggested that the protestors were all seeded and had paid their protest charge.

Kurt could just about make out a long banner about the mark of the beast. It was difficult when the eye that could zoom wasn’t the one that could see the protestors, but they didn’t look like Fury River. Amos would gain nothing from tricking the extremists into attending only to hide them, anyway, so it seemed that the announcement of currency digitisation had pushed genuinely religious people over the edge.

To risk coming out when Sycamore was already so powerful, to stand up against something, to stand up
for
something — even if it
was
a fairytale… — Kurt felt that there was surely something noble in that.

The worst part of the deceit was that if people would only take their Lenses out they would see what was going on, not just with the protest but with everything. The public’s dependence on The Seed for necessary socioeconomic activity meant that freeing themselves from the matrix wasn’t as simple as removing their Lenses but doing so would at least pierce the illusion.

Amos then addressed the crowd, interrupting Kurt’s thoughts by filling his right ear. Kurt tuned out but heard bits and pieces of Amos blaming the bankers for all of society’s ills and promising a new era of just economy.

Amos whipped the assembled city into a frenzy over “those wretched fat-cats who thought they could forever get away with creating money from nothing and loaning it to us with interest.” It was bizarre; Amos spoke as though he wasn’t about to assume their role with the added bonus of a universal 1% surcharge.

“Too long have they exploited you,” he shouted. “Too long have we let them! Today, we take no more. Today, we blow them away.” Amos walked over to a novelty-sized detonator and pushed down on the handle. The central bank exploded into the night like an angry supernova.

Kurt couldn’t believe that both of his eyes could see the explosion — Amos had actually blown up the bank. For a second he wondered why the demolition wasn’t faked. Then he acknowledged that Amos no doubt wanted the last few unseeded consumers to get the message: Sycamore was in charge now.

One of Kurt’s eyes watched in amazement as a colossal sycamore tree was quickly unveiled in the bank’s place, rising like a phoenix from the ashes. He almost felt bad for the companies with massive HQs in the nearby Quartermile. They had spent hundreds of millions of dollars on tributes to their own vanity and Amos had just dwarfed them all with an imaginary tree.

After much fanfare and several celebrity appearances, Amos announced that the rally was over. He sent the herds home with a message for the next day: “Don’t forget to tune in for more fireworks tomorrow morning when the father of The Seed, local boy Kurt Jacobs, will be honoured for his unparalleled contribution to humanity and his sterling services to Sycamore.” Amos looked up towards the top of the Jobs Monument and saluted, revealing that he had known where Kurt was the whole time.

“And trust me,” he continued, “if you thought
tonight
was exciting…”

~

Kurt opened his bedroom door and froze. Sabrina’s blue teddybear sat on his bed, gutted. Foam spilled from its stomach and a knife lay abandoned nearby. It was the most overt attempt at intimidation he had ever seen. It was sickening and it was frightening and it was a new low, but he couldn’t rise to it.

Kurt went to bed angry and impatient for the morning to come. Because when it did, he was going to kill Sycamore. And the afternoon? Well, that was for Amos.

17

Kurt stepped in front of his mirror to put the final touches on his real-life outfit for the recognition ceremony; he had a $3000 RealU suit on top but wanted to look nice for Stacy. A message appeared in his vista, notifying him of a text from an anonymous sender. He was intrigued, because no one was anonymous.

“If you go, you won’t come back,” read the message.

Kurt typed back nervously. “Who is this?”

“Minter.”

He dismissed the warning at that point, sure that Minion was just being his typical self, jealous of Kurt’s recognition like a middle-manager drowning in his own irrelevance and obsessing over an employee of the month award. Knowing that Minion was watching, Kurt looked in the mirror and gave himself the middle finger then winked and left.

On the way to the Quartermile he stopped at a red light and heard a seductive female voice calling through his open window from inside a Tasmart. “Psst, Kurt.” He turned instinctively. An attractive if immodest ad-girl stood by the entrance with a Lexington in her hand. “Who says it’s too early?”

She was the first ad-girl Kurt had seen and she looked shockingly real. As real as the RealU-enhanced real women who walked around the city, anyway. What struck him most was how completely she seemed to fill the space in the Tasmart doorway; she wasn’t like a hologram or a ghost. With none of the kinetic problems that came with physical robotics, she bypassed uncanny valley. If Kurt and Stacy hadn’t formulated this plan, how long would it have been before fake ad-girls were carrying out full conversations with unsuspecting men?

There was something about the road, too, but Kurt couldn’t quite put his finger on it. He parked outside HQ and walked to join Stacy by the black car in front of the Sycaplex. “Hello, Monica,” he said.

She smiled and readied her Italian accent. “Mr Jacobs.”

The driver opened their doors — Kurt’s first, as seemed to be universal protocol. As soon as Kurt sat down he received a text from Amos asking him to have the driver wait and to step out of the car. An urgent, private call was necessary.

“Driver, hold on!” said Kurt. “I’ll just be a second,” he promised Stacy. “I need to make a quick call.”

Kurt stepped out onto the street and selected Amos from his Voice-call menu.

“Are you outside the vehicle?” asked Amos.

“Yes…”

“Good. We couldn't have the driver hearing anything. If there are any people around the car please cross the street towards HQ.”

Kurt did. “Okay, I’m out of everyone’s earshot.”

Amos sighed loudly enough for it to transmit through Kurt’s in-earphones. “When will you learn, hotshot? When will you learn that cats eat birds and that’s just the way it is?”

“What?”

“I gave you everything but it wasn’t enough. Money, power, you could have had it all! But no. I'm disappointed in you, Kurt. You
and
your little friend. Monica, was it? No... Stacy, right?”

Kurt started back across the road.

“You don't want to do that,” said a gruff voice — the guard from the lobby. He and another black-suited man grabbed Kurt and kept him from running.

“Count with me, hotshot,” Amos said in his ear. “Three.”

“Stacy!” Kurt cried at the top of his voice. “Stacy!” One of the goons muffled his mouth.

“Two.”

Kurt bit the goon’s hand and shouted again, somehow even louder. “Stacy! Run!” She rolled down her window. The affronted goon punched Kurt in the stomach hard enough to wind him and knock him to the ground. Stacy saw and threw open her door.

“One.”

Kurt lay at the side of the road gasping for air. The last thing he saw was Stacy’s right foot hitting the ground as she hurried to help him.

“Boom.”

The car exploded, taking Stacy, the front of the Sycaplex, the disposable driver and eleven innocent consumers with it. Chunks of everything flew across the road and Kurt Jacobs closed his eyes to die.

~

One of the security goons dragged Kurt to his feet and the other blocked the path to the rubble. There was no reason for Kurt to want to go near it, anyway — Stacy was dead.

“Hey, hotshot… glad you’re alright,” said a teasing voice inside his ears. “You might want to take a look at this.”

Kurt’s vista filled with a horrifying image, almost on the same level as the sight of Stacy’s obliterated body. It was Professor Walker, hanging from a sycamore tree. The picture sat under a headline reading “Child Sex Professor Found Hanged.” The accompanying report claimed that a sex-abuse investigation had been closing in on him.

Knowing that the professor had been murdered and now defamed by these lies — these lies of the very worst kind — Kurt ripped the Lenses from his eyes. He clawed at them, frantic fingernails drawing blood from his sensitive eyelids. He thought about the mug, warning him that Stacy was in danger. He thought about the professor, murdered and framed without even that much warning.

Kurt felt paralysing guilt for keeping the warning from Stacy. He felt equally blameworthy for visiting the professor and involving him in the danger, and even worse about what he had said. The last thing Kurt ever told Professor Walker was that he was “a bitter old failure.” Why?

He sat on the pavement crying and put the Lenses back in his aching eyes to communicate with Amos. He noticed now what was different about the road: RealU had apparently begun allowing consumers to virtually enhance their cars and consumers had apparently jumped at the chance. Kurt noticed this without caring. “Why would you kill him?“ he screamed. “He was nothing to do with anything!”

“You told him too much,” Amos replied, devoid of emotion. “This one’s on you, too.”

Kurt stood up and walked down the street. He yelled at passersby that Amos had caused the explosion outside the Sycaplex but no one would listen. He reached a bus stop and the people who weren’t tuned-out in full-immersion asked who he was and how he would know.

“It's me,” he said “… Kurt Jacobs! I invented the damn Seed!“

They all laughed. “Listen bro,” said one, a man in a yellow hood. “I know what Kurt Jacobs looks like, and you sure as hell ain't it.”

“What?”

“Are you some kind of crazy person?" asked an older woman. "One of those dangerous and deludeds they keep warning us about?”

“Take out your Lenses and see,” Kurt begged. “It's a lie. Everything is a lie!"

"Take out our Lenses? He says to take out our Lenses!" Yellow-hood turned back to Kurt. "Man, you’re crazy. I won't see nothing without these things. How am I gonna know if someone texts me?"

Kurt approached the last group at the bus stop. “Get away from my family,” the man yelled. Kurt kept trying to explain until the man punched him in the face.

Beaten but not quite defeated, he turned and ran towards Sycamore HQ. A sticky mixture of blood and tears had collected on his cheeks but no more seemed to be coming. The pain of everything was numb. Too much had happened at once. Too much had gone wrong. Too many good people had died.

The door at HQ was predictably locked so Kurt tried the magic keypad. Where there should have been numbers there was a message reading “ACCESS DENIED.” Perfect. He stepped away from the door as the valet approached and hid behind the tree from which someone had thrown an egg at him a lifetime ago, hoping to sneak in before the door closed like Stacy had taught him.

The valet noticed. “Closed building, sir. Authorised personnel only.”

“It’s me, Kurt. You park my Gallardo. Come on, it’s yellow.”

“It says you’re barred from the premises,” said the valet. “What the hell did you do? Why are there so many red arrows pointing to your head?”

Kurt realised in that moment that he was marked as wanted in the eyes of Sycamore personnel and law enforcement but disguised as an everyman to the rest of the city. He looked in the building’s glass front and saw his augmented reflection. It wasn’t him. There was no arrow and the face looked nothing like his own.