Up The Tower (3 page)

That is, unless Gary sharpened up his act. And he could do it. He just needed Ana on his side. That would fix everything. She would motivate him. She would make it all okay.

There were a good twelve hours before he had to be at work. So, he devoted the first part of his day—up until about seven or eight in the evening—to organizing a random encounter with Ana. It would work. He would make it work, this time. This day would not be like all the other days. This day was
Gary’s
day.

He stepped outside. His apartment was on the seventh floor—a bit of a luxury, that close to the ground—but it was tiny. The balcony was bigger than the apartment by half, and he shared it with his neighbors. He wished, as he had often wished, that he hadn't sold his Dad's place, but it was no use. He had needed the money. Khakis, button-down shirts, hair product, these all cost money, and Gary had to look good if he was ever going to bag someone like Ana. No, not someone like her—her. Alone. Just Ana.

There was a tablet on the balcony, egressed into the stone behind a plastic pot full of plastic dirt and a plastic tree. The tablet only had a few operations—either sending for different kinds of food or calling for cabs. He had modified the tablet so that instead of waiting for a service to call him back, it sent a signal straight to whatever cab was available, signaling them direct to his apartment. There were a lot of how-tos on the net to teach how to fix something like that up—so much so that the cab and food services depended on them. The software workarounds and circuitry weren’t too hard to set up, probably a seven year-old could do it, but Gary had felt triumph that first time he made it work for him a few months ago, calling in a pizza that took up a fourth of his week’s budget.

Gary knew Ana’s boyfriend worked somewhere in Junktown—all it had taken was a few calls, pretending to be some businessman—so he headed to Junktown. His mother was there, in the hospital. He would stop and see her on the way, he supposed. Get a little bit of good karma in.

The cab arrived and hovered down, lowering its guns after it scanned Gary and found him unarmed, except for the baton around his ankle. In a few moments, he was off.

* * * * *

B
efore anything else—before the riot, before the flood, before the gap and the deaths and the fires and the pain—before all of that, Ana just wanted to get the hell out of Junktown.

But she was stuck there with Raj, and Raj had all the bodyguards, so she couldn't very well leave on her own. Walk into Junktown without any protection? No, thank you. She had a knife on her, but that was hardly enough. The knife fit neatly in a small, luxury, Cardion-brand sheath at her side.

The rest of her outfit was direct out from a fashion magazine. She wore tight black Cardion slacks and patent leather Aushwere ankle boots—attractive and stylish and perfect for inner-city walking. Her dark blue blouse was Cardion again (there had been a sale); already, she had noticed the way Raj had noticed how it cupped and clung to her body. He would have been looking a bit more, perhaps, but she wore her favorite Kadaya Sarin-brand leather jacket, allowing her a bit of modesty with the long sleeves and tight collar, despite the thinness of the material. Her hair, blond, was wrapped into a neat knot in the Sarin style. She was a woman dressed to impress, but she also was no tramp—she had her man. He liked her dressed in a manner that was attractive but not trashy. Ana knew what he wanted, because what Raj wanted was her entire life, as she saw it, from now on.

They were inside the ground floor of a tall building. Cleanbots rushed around them, sweeping up dust, guided along by retrofitted eyebots that spied out areas of dust and disrepair.

“Here's where we'll have the lobby,” said Raj, opening his hands out wide to the open space.

Ana had the presence of mind to hold her tongue.

What she wanted to say was, “Really, dear? Here in the first possible place that someone could enter from the street? That's where you'll have the lobby? That's so inventive. You're so smart.”

What did she say was, “Oh! It will look beautiful, I'm sure.”

“Perhaps we will hang up pictures of you, to make it more beautiful than ever, eh?”

“Oh, stop.” She blushed, an informed reaction. Men like Raj didn’t like for a girl to know she was pretty already. It took the power of validating her self-worth out of his hands.

Ana was pretty. She was too tall, she knew, to ever be taken seriously enough as a real powerhouse beauty. She hoped in maybe a couple of years, when she was twenty-one and had safely stopped growing, that Raj would pay for some height reductions. Raj could afford such procedures. His chin and his jawline, for example, were entirely artificial. They suited him—strong, sharp lines of tech implants covered over with dark bioskin fabric.

Raj ran a business contracted under Trandam, which was under GenEnTo which was under Barbacoa which was under Woodflap, which was under the inescapable umbrella of Tri-American. With only four corps away from the tip-top, Raj was on his way up in the world. He was handsome, with a short dark beard that contrasted neatly with his tanned skin. He had dark eyes that glittered in the dark when he said nice things to her in his bed. She liked all these things about him—his eyes, his handsomeness, and most especially his ability to get her out of Junktown.

His business, Choice Thought, offered choice consultation to the Tri-American folks in the surrounding region. Soon, powered by Tri-American’s money, they hoped to become a national entity.

Choice consultation was an outgrowth of the overwhelming possibilities of entertainment and direction offered to the employee class. A person could spend every hour of their life soaking up just three channels of cable and never once watch the right thing. It was a sad state of affairs. When a person was required to spend a quarter of their income—disposable or not—on products sponsored by Tri-American, they wanted to make sure they were getting their money’s worth.

In an odd hiccup, Choice Thought was actually not sponsored as a product by Tri-American, so people could spend their money on the service assisting them with what to buy without actually burning up their requirement to spend. This was said to be a courtesy for the consumer.

Raj’s business had started with entertainment—what channels to watch, what shows to binge through. When that business picked up, Choice Thought expanded to other areas—places to eat, diets to maintain, where to live, what to wear, who to be seen with, who to date, where to go to school, what careers to pursue. The contracts were ironclad, and everyone who signed one also signed up to be a spokesperson for Choice Thought. Failure to comply, like failure to comply with any contract, sent a person off to the gulag.

Choice Thought offered packages—you could buy singles, in threes or fives or bulk, even. You could tailor the kinds of choices, restricting them purely to social activity, for example, or gambling up and choosing economic activity or lifestyle choices. The first choice was free. Usually, Raj had explained to her, they offered something simple and guaranteed to satisfy. Dropping sugar out of a diet. Eating blueberries for lunch, but only the synth-organic kind. Things like that. Things with tangible, bodily results. This drew folks in.

Feeling bored with their romantic life not too long ago, after more than six months of dating, Raj had suggested she buy a package. Raj told her to do things by suggesting them, but it was telling, all the same. This is how Ana wound up exercising more than she ever studied, and getting a regular new hairdo every other Thursday at the second-most expensive salon in town (Raj paid for half). As a result, so far, she felt tired most of the time, and also had begun to feel as though her appearance was some sort of doll’s game to Raj; a doll’s game that he portioned out to dolls higher up on the totem pole than Ana.

Raj's business was very specific, very thorough. She knew that these activities he picked out for her were ones she enjoyed. She just didn't enjoy them yet, that was all. There were no errors by Choice Thought, simply errors by users.

“We’re really getting a lot of funding,” said Raj, gently inspecting a cleanbot as it brush-shuffled up a wall. “I just heard from Chairperson Howell that President Solap himself is highly invested in where we’re going with this.”

“That’s wonderful, dear.”

Automatic response, the tone filled with enough pride to let him know somewhere inside of her, she cared. Perhaps she did.

They approached a tall set of elevators with golden doors. Raj turned, smiling, his hands gathered in front of his waist.

“And this,” said Raj, “this is where you get off.”

“I’m sorry?”

He pointed at the entrance, winking. “You have to go, now. There’s a cab waiting outside.”

“Oh. All right.”

She was a little surprised. Usually when he asked her over during business meetings, she followed him around, looking nice until he wanted a break. Then he’d push her into a closet or a bathroom and make use of her and relax a bit. He told her she was good at that. Ana didn’t see how what she provided differentiated from something Raj could take of with his hands, but Raj was her first boyfriend. Perhaps this was just how things worked.

He took her hands in his. Smiling, still smiling.

“You and I, we’re just going on different paths.”

“What?”

Behind him, the elevator opened up. Three dark-haired girls with tech swirling around their beautified faces and tiny all-bust bodies appeared, softly cooing Raj’s name. They were high-class girls. Everything about them bespoke of a higher birth than Ana. They pushed in on his body—each of them appropriately shorter than him. She had been vultured. Her whole life, now theirs.

“You're too small-time for my game, honey. Really, I just don't think you'll fit with my life.”

There were some more words after that. Ana didn’t know if she really heard them. Raj drifted into the elevator, mouthing for her to leave. Maybe he was saying it. She couldn’t tell—all that filled her ears was empty, hissing air. She wandered out into the street, pushing away the driver that Raj had arranged for her. He fell backward into the street and cursed her, spitting at her heels.

Ana slipped and stumbled down the street, dazed, her future gone, pressing southward into Junktown.

* * * * *

“H
ey, Smellson!”

Samson ignored the jeer, focusing carefully on opening the box. He was twelve years old and did not want to screw this up. Being twelve was important, and people took the things you did seriously, so long as you did them well.

“Smellson, hey!” The Crowboy banged his crowbar on the dusty ruins of the factory line where they had set up the six crates from their haul that morning. “Don’t blow us up, okay? I don’t want to die with your stench clogging me up, yeah?”

Again, Samson ignored the other boy, trying to concentrate as he eased his longtool through the gap in the crate before him. He very well could blow himself up; he could blow them all up. Inside the GuaranTech crate he tinkered with was a copbot.

Copbots blew up all the time. If their main processors or power source were damaged, they blew up. If they were being captured, they blew up. If they ran out of ammo and couldn’t refill within about ten minutes, they blew up. When they blew up, they incinerated everything in about a hundred foot radius. The warehouse was not big enough for the Crowboys to keep their distance and still work in the role of protection as they had been hired. So they were in the blast zone as well as Samson.

The copbots, deactivated, were precious and valuable. Strangely, they were valuable precisely because they were so hard to deactivate. A copbot was made almost entirely out of self-healing nanotech, and with enough time, it could repair from almost any wound to its metal shell. So, to keep this sort of power out of the hands of the gangster conglomerate that ran Junktown, the Five Faces, and any other sort of competitor, the copbots had a very liberal self-destruct mechanism.

This is what Samson worked against. As far as he knew, he was the only person in the entirety of Junktown who could deactivate a copbot safely. He had done it twice before; after giving his notes to his boss Jackson Crash, the work had been outsourced. Crash was one of the Five Faces. He ran the tech in Junktown; he ran it because he had Samson working for him. Samson worked for Crash because he’d die before doing anything else.

Normally, Samson worked in his workshop in The Tower. But after Crash had outsourced the work for deactivating copbots, four warehouses in a row had blown up, all due to Samson’s successors doing shoddy work. Now he was back on the job in the middle of Junktown. The warehouse was one of many in the enormous slum, abandoned long ago after the water boom died down. You could argue there was a sort of system of illegal subsidies for the warehouses—gangsters paid to keep them from being demolished so that they could continue to use them for illegal activities such as what Samson was doing now.

Holding his breath, he rotated his longtool into the box a little more, waiting for it to catch.

A soft gasp, a sigh, and then then the box banged open on the line. Samson let his breath out slow. Underneath, the copbot was all folded up, accordion arms wrapped around its legs, head between its knees.

“Good job, Smellson! Just five more to go!”

Samson stepped away from the line a minute to wipe his face with a cloth. A great deal of sweat had gathered on his brow, his cheeks. Samson loved to work with tech, but usually it didn’t put his life in so much danger. He longed to be back up in the safety of his room in The Tower.

Is that what you sweatin’, baby? That you gonna die? Don’t sweat that, baby. We all gonna die. You could die just later today.

You won’t die, though? Right, Crash?

Nah, baby. You done me good. I ain’t gonna die.

That memory wasn’t doing him any good right now.

He flopped the cloth down against the line, glancing over at the Crowboys. See, he wanted to shout. I clean sometimes. Just when I need to, that’s all. Most of the time he was too busy to clean. There was so much work to do. So many people wanted to hurt Crash.