Shattered

4. ALL FALL DOWN

The days had no shape. They passed, which was good enough. It was a Friday when Jude sent me to the corp-town, not that it mattered, because when you didn’t have school or a job or contact with the world beyond the bounds of the estate, when the seasons only shifted from cold and gray to colder and grayer, when you didn’t age and the sentence of your life had no foreseeable period, marking time became a formality.

But I remember it was a Friday.

He was in the vidroom, pumping the Brotherhood’s zone. It was all he ever did anymore, scanning the texts and vids they posted, Savona testifying before congressional subcommittees, Auden meeting and greeting fellow victims who’d suffered at the mechanical hands of the skinners, testimonials from new members, rigged debates with purported supporters of BioMax, who mumbled and stumbled their way through a halfhearted defense of the download technology before bowing to the inevitable, conceding that Savona was right and vowing to do everything in their power to take down the tech from within.

That was the party line: Eliminate the download, not its recipients. Hate the sin, not the skinner. Savona didn’t want to destroy us, he just wanted to strip us of our credit accounts, our citizenship, our identities, ourselves. He wanted it known that we were machines, and just as machines had their place, so did we.

It was beginning to rain when I got summoned. Riley was already there, slouched on a couch, his legs kicked up on one of its arms. Quinn and Ani were there too, not much of a surprise since Quinn had been hanging around Jude more than ever lately, and where Quinn went, Ani was sure to follow.

“I need you and Riley to run an errand for me,” Jude said, barely lifting his eyes from the screen. “He’ll fill you in. If you leave now, you should make it back by tonight.”

A road trip with Riley, the wordless wonder? No thanks. “Did I miss a memo? Since when do I take orders from you?”

Jude turned to me, miming surprise. But he knew exactly how much I hated the glorious dictator act. “Let me rephrase: Dearest, most valued, exceedingly busy Lia, can you do me this minor favor? Pretty please, with a cherry-flavored dreamer on top?”

“Forget it,” Quinn said, standing up. “I’ll go.”

Jude shook his head once, sharply. “Lia’s going.”

“Why?” Quinn and I said together. She glared at me.

Jude looked back and forth between the two of us, a smile playing on his lips. “Because I trust her.”

“And not me, right?” Quinn slumped back down on the couch. “Very nice.”

Ani rested a hand on her back, rubbing slow, wide arcs along her spine. “I trust you,” she murmured. Quinn shrugged her off.

I wasn’t sure which would be worse: leaving with Riley and enduring endless hours of his sulky scowl, or staying to bask in the stench of Ani’s desperation.

“How about you go yourself?” I suggested.

“Busy,” Jude said, turning back to the vidscreen.

“So send Riley alone,” I said. “Or are we working on the buddy system now?”

“One to pick up the package,” Jude said. “The other to watch the drop.”

Much as I hated it when Jude pulled the need-to-know spy crap on us, I couldn’t help it; I was intrigued. “The package of…?”

Jude shrugged. “Could be dreamers, could be new tech. Hell, for all I know, they’re giving us wings. Ours is not to ask, but to receive and enjoy.”

Quinn, Ani, and I all gaped at Jude. For months he’d been producing new, easily installed tech for our mech bodies—nothing major, a VM hookup here, nanojected titanium bone-knitters there, a microplayer that piped music inside your head. All untested, all unlicensed by BioMax, whose technicians—on the rare occasions when one of us showed up for a scheduled monthly tune-up or the more frequent emergency trips postcollision, crash, or other such self-inflicted catastrophe—eyed the tech with badly disguised suspicion and fear. The suspicion I got. Jude didn’t have to spell it out: He obviously had a connection at BioMax, some employee or former employee who’d decided to field-test the newest toys. But I never understood the fear. Especially since they didn’t even know the whole story. They saw the tech, because that was impossible to hide. But they didn’t know anything about the dreamers.

Of course, neither did the rest of us, if “anything” included where they came from, why they existed, or how they did what they did. Letting Jude believe he could order me around seemed like a small price to pay to find out.

Riley spoke six words on the drive.

One and two: You’ll see.

Three: Yes.

Four: No.

I asked my first two questions—Where are we going? Have you been there before?—as the car sped past the fields bordering the estate, spotted free-range cows grazing in a sea of genetically engineered green. I figured Riley would insist on driving manually, since he seemed the type, but he left the car in automatic, keyed in the mystery destination, and settled into the driver’s seat, apparently content to silently watch the road stream by.

“You ever learn how to drive manual?” I asked after half an hour had passed. That earned me word number four, a quiet “No.” Paired with a cool gaze that efficiently transmitted the message: You’re dumber than I thought.

Asshole, I thought. But I was the asshole. As if anyone learned to drive growing up in a city. Like there were any working cars in a place where energy was rationed so carefully that no one got more than a couple hours of electricity to spread out over a day. And what would he have needed a car for, anyway? Anywhere you needed to go in a city, you could get to on foot—not that there was anywhere to go except for the central distribution facility for the occasional ration of food. I’d heard sometimes they even handed out meds, mostly the experimental ones, but sometimes there was a surplus of something useful but defunct. When it came to disposing of unwanted waste, better the city than the garbage.

“The government could afford to supply med-tech to the cities,” Auden had once told me. Another of his conspiracy theories. Back then they’d seemed almost charming. “They just don’t want to. They figure people who are sick and starving don’t have time to be angry.”

“But wouldn’t being sick and starving give them more reason to be angry?” I’d pointed out.

“You just don’t get it,” he’d said that time, like he’d said whenever I called him on one of his elaborate plots. It was why—aside from the fact that it bored the hell out of me—we usually tried not to talk politics. I couldn’t help feeling like Auden, who usually listened to me more intently and less judgmentally than anyone I’d ever known, was dismissing everything I had to say under the basic theory of: You don’t get it and you never will.

I had to admit that had been one of the benefits of dating a brainburner like Walker. However much care his parents had put into selecting the genes destined to give him that perfect smile, those eminently strokable biceps, the scruffy brown hair, the square jaw and the cleft chin, they’d overlooked certain other aspects of his development. Which is to say, if you’re going to be dumb but pretty, you’d better be really pretty—and willing to let your girlfriend take the lead. Walker was both. Of course, dumb had its drawbacks too. It made it harder to understand the subtleties of situations like your girlfriend getting her brain dumped into a machine—and easier to fall into bed with her sister.

Though even brain-bulging Auden hadn’t been smart enough not to follow me to that waterfall. Lose a liver, gain a new conspiracy theory. The most successful one yet, so maybe it had all worked out for him in the end. Maybe he should be thanking me.

Just when you think you can’t hate yourself any more, a thought like that slithers through your brain.

But before I could look around for a helpful self-impalement tool, the car stopped, and Riley spat out words number five and six.

“We’re here.”

Synapsis Corp-Town was twice the size of the only other one I’d visited, my godfather’s corp-town about a hundred miles south. I was nine when my father decided it was time for me to see how the other nine-tenths of the country lived. “This is why I make you work so hard,” he’d told me, resting a heavy hand on my shoulder. “Take your eye off the prize, just for a second, and you could end up in a place like this.” But even then I knew it would never happen. I was young not stupid: Even if I morphed into a zoned-out, brainburned loser, my father would never let me sell myself to a corp-town. Imagine the humiliation—the public humiliation—were a Kahn to end up working a line twelve hours a day, administering gen-mods to soy crops or keying data for the credit crunchers, then going home to corp-supplied housing, feeding her family with corp-supplied food, staying healthy with corp-supplied med-tech, voting for the corp-supplied candidates, obeying each and every corp-supplied rule lest she have it all stripped away from her and end up in a city. My brain may have been a computer, but the corp-towners were the ones who ran on a program, their lives prescribed, their every word and move coordinated by a central processing unit. The corps were machines, and the corp-towners were just the cogs, the gears, the fuel that made them run.

The corp-town stretched across more than fifteen square miles, but most of that was taken up by manufacturing and agricultural concerns. According to the schematic that greeted us at the entry gate, the eastern half of the compound was reserved for farmland, acres of modified corn and soy crops that would eventually be ground into the tasteless nutri-grain that formed the bulk of nearly all corp-town food. We’d all gotten a taste of it in elementary school—one full day of nutri-pops, nutri-shakes, nutri-burgers. It had been enough to last a lifetime. They say corp-towners develop a taste for the stuff, that they’d prefer it to real-world food if they ever got a choice. But no corp-town had ever tested the theory.

Riley swiped an ID card across the scanner at the gate, and our faces popped up on the screen with two unfamiliar names scrolling beneath them. He shot me a quick look, like I’d be dumb enough to protest where the corp authorities might be listening. But I kept my mouth shut, resolving later to find out where Jude had gotten his hands on such ridiculously good fakes. Add it to the list of things I’d probably never know.

A light flashed green and the gate swung open.

“End of the line,” Riley said, hopping out of the car. I followed. Corp-towns were car-free zones—ours would presumably find its way to a nearby lot, while we tooled around on the blue solar-powered cart that was already waiting for us. We climbed into the narrow vehicle, which noticeably shuddered when it took on our weight. The rusty thing looked like it hadn’t been replaced—or even retooled—since the corp-town was first built.

“Destination?” its nav-system requested.

“Residential, A-three,” Riley said.

I felt like a child—or, worse, like a pet, towed around on a leash. Following obediently and unquestioningly after my master.

“Ever been to one of these before?” Riley asked as we sputtered into slow, lurching motion.

I grunted something that could have been a yes or a no. Just because he was suddenly and inexplicably in the mood for conversation didn’t mean I had to oblige. Despite the leash, I was no puppy.

The corp-town wasn’t quite pretty—it was too manicured for that, its stacked cubes of productivity too regimented and too concrete—but it wasn’t quite the wasteland I remembered from my childhood. The large pool of waste water dotted by mirrored solar-collecting lily pads was nearly beautiful, especially with the reflection of purple-tinged clouds unfurling across its still surface. Of course, I was lucky—being a mech, I didn’t have to deal with the smell.

The heart of Synapsis, like all corp-towns, was the housing complex, a cluster of ten massive glass cubes, each about thirty stories high. Glassed-in skyways spiderwebbed from these to the outlying factories, where Synapsis workers repaid the corporation’s beneficence. I didn’t know enough about Synapsis Corp to guess what was going on inside the concrete block buildings (the glass walls of the housing cubes sucked up plenty of solar energy, but privacy apparently took precedence over energy efficiency when it came to protecting industrial secrets). Not that it mattered, since these days all corps did pretty much the same thing. Plenty of programming and systems maintenance, a dash of information processing, a smidge of chem- and bio-engineering, probably even a pinch of manual labor for flavor. Yes, machines could do almost anything, but human labor was just as efficient, half as expensive, and, especially when it came to exceedingly toxic waste or toxic working conditions, 100 percent more disposable.

“Why would anyone want to do that?” I’d asked my godfather, confused by the pale, ashen-faced workers spilling out of their underground burrows.

“No one wants to,” he’d said, and left it at that.

So it fell to my father to explain: Not all corp jobs were created equal. Which was why jobs were assigned rather than chosen. It was easier that way, more orderly, more efficient. Joining a corp-town meant free housing, free food, free med-tech—and it meant accepting the job you were given. Whatever job the corp-minders judged you to deserve.

“People like choice,” my father had said. “But they like food even more.” And it was easier on everyone to have a nation of employees than a nation of beggars. So everyone was happy.

The few who weren’t, the few who preferred to make their own rules—have too many children, vote for whoever they wanted, eat more than their ration of soymeat, use more than their ration of power—well, they were welcome to move to a city and see for themselves how freedom tasted. If they were good enough, they might even get out again. This was America, after all. Anyone could get ahead.

That’s what my father had always told me.

The residence cubes were identical and unmarked, leaving us no choice but to trust the cart when it deposited us at an entrance. Behind the transparent walls, thousands scurried back and forth through a multileveled atrium, denizens of an oversize ant farm. Towering above our heads were the hundreds of privacy-free residential units, cubes within cubes, complete with all the comforts of a 15 × 15-foot home.

Riley led us into the ground-level atrium, its carpet of artificial grass gleaming green in artificial sunlight that belied the dark gloom beyond its walls. Corp-towners worked on a three-shift system, one-third working while the other two-thirds slept or played, so even in the middle of the day, there were more orgs than I’d expected milling about the plaza, toting bags of food and clothes and whatever other crap they wasted their corp-credit on. Orgs everywhere, cozying up to one another on park benches, strolling hand in hand down paths lined with fake stepping stones, people crowding in and out of the elevators that would speed them up or down to their housing module. Maybe it wasn’t more people than I’d ever seen in one place, but knowing that there were thirty levels above us and another twenty carved out of the ground below, all of them equally packed, made me want out.

Not that any of them came near us. As we walked down one of the curving paths, a vacuum opened in the crowd, as if an invisible force were clearing our way. And as they edged backward, they stared. And whispered. At least, some of them whispered—some insulted us in raised voices, unashamed.

“What are they doing here?”

“It’s uglier than I thought.”

“What do you think it’s thinking?”

A laugh. “As if it thinks.”

“Mom, it’s looking at me.” That was a whiny kid, pink hair, baggy overalls hanging over a matching pink hug shirt, the kind I’d loved when I was a kid. For a few blissfully simple months, trading hug shirts had been the perfect declaration of best friendship: You had only to wrap your arms across your chest and, no matter where she was, your best friend would feel the hug. We’d all dug them out again in junior high—boyfriends made the tech infinitely more entertaining. There was nothing like sitting through an intensely boring biotech lecture and suddenly feeling the warmth and pressure of invisible arms wrapping you in an invisible embrace.

Two men, not old, not young, scruff blotting their faces like a rash. One to the other. “Would you? For a thousand?”

The other. “Ten thousand. Maybe. But only the girl one.”

“Hell, I’d slam it for free. Try anything once, right?”

An old woman, her tan, dry skin taut from one too many shoddy lift-tucks, the best you could get in a corp-town. “You shouldn’t be here.”

Not all the stares were hostile—there were plenty who watched us closely, neutrally, like little kids watching an anthill, placing bets on which insects would wander off and fry in the sun.

Riley deposited me on a bench just opposite a small fountain flickering with water and colored light. “This is where you meet him,” he said. “I’ll be watching from up there.” He pointed to the level above us, where two girls a couple years younger than me were leaning against a railing, making a pathetic show of ignoring the boys goggling them from beneath. The floors, like nearly everything in the atrium, were made of glass; the girls were wearing skirts and had apparently decided to put on a little show.

I raised my eyebrows at Riley.

He scowled. “Over there,” he said pointedly, nodding at an open spot on the railing, suitably far from the giggling exhibitionists. “If anything seems off, I’ll VM you.”

“How am I supposed to know who ‘him’ is?”

“He’ll find you,” Riley said. “Just take the package. Don’t tell him I’m here. Don’t ask any questions—and don’t answer any.”

Stay with me, I almost said, watching the orgs watch me. But that would be paranoid and weak, and I was neither. “So get out of here before ‘he’ shows up.”

With Riley gone, the whispers grew. It was like his silence had been loud enough to drown them out, but now they were all I could hear. Or maybe now that I was alone, the people were getting bolder. I waited for one of them to take the next step.

If something happened, would any of them try to stop it? None of the tech upgrades we’d gotten had made us any faster or stronger. No martial arts savvy downloaded directly to the motor cortex, no superhero skills whatsoever. Just a titanium head and some bones that were nearly impossible to break.

Nothing’s going to happen. No violence, that was rule number one in every corp-town, and violating it was the fastest way to get yourself ejected. One of the vidscreens flashing overhead made the point in stark terms, broadcasting a looped vid of two men wrestling, a knife flashing in each of their hands. As the background shifted from the corp-town plaza to a desolate city street, blood spurted and the men fell backward, still. The moral of the story scrolled across the screen—Live like an animal, die like an animal—and then the whole thing started again.

The rest of the vidscreens were flashing pop-ups for corp-produced goods and services to be bought with corp-credit—corp-towners got paid in play money that was only good within the bounds of the corp-town, forming a neatly closed circle between corp and employee. Within the corp-town, everything went cheap; play money let the poor playact at being rich. You could trade in your corp-credit for real credit, but only if you wanted to sacrifice all your purchasing power, foregoing a corp-supplied wardrobe or a kitchen full of corp-supplied food in favor of one box of real chocolate or a slab of real organic beef. I never understood why any of them would have bothered trying to buy anything in the outside world—but then, I never understood why they would set foot in the outside world in the first place. And most of them didn’t.

“It’s easier that way,” I’d told Auden once, cutting into one of his rants. “Why would they want to see what they can’t have?”

“It’s easier for us that way,” Auden had replied. “We pen them up, like we pen up the city people, and then we don’t have to think about them. Or see them. We can just forget they exist.”

“No one’s stopping them from leaving the corp-towns—or the cities, for that matter. But why go where you don’t belong?”

Leaving a corp-town was logistically almost as hard as leaving a city. Regulations restricted corp-towners to public transportation, and the last bus and train lines had died out years ago. What was the point, when the minority had cars of their own and the majority was better off staying put? There were a few jobs that required leaving the corp-town regularly on corp-transport—the shippers were always traveling back and forth, and the security-operations force were a regular presence, standing guard over the rest of us with their badges, their thermobaric grenades, their stunshots, and their don’t-screw-with-me scowls that couldn’t mask their boredom. Not to mention their bitterness at protecting a life they could never afford themselves. Small wonder that secops was as low on the desirability spectrum as wastewater management and human resources. At least the data-entry grunts got to stay hidden away in their glassy cubes—ignoring us, I’d always assumed, just as happily as we ignored them.

There was one recent exception to the stay-put rule—the Brotherhood of Man had begun sending buses to area corp-towns, offering residents a field trip to the newly completed Temple of Man. I wondered how many of the hostile faces surrounding me had witnessed Auden’s little martyr show live and in person. How many looked at me and were afraid.

Twenty minutes passed, and Jude’s mystery man didn’t show. Another twenty, and still nothing.

I glanced up at Riley. He was resolutely ignoring the giggling girls—who were now taking turns boldly flashing their net-linked lingerie at him.

“Is he usually this late?”

“Never,”

“Stay put. I’ll voice Jude.”

Of course, I thought in disgust. Jude always knows what to do. The all-knowing, all-powerful Jude had all the answers.

Then the sun went out.

Darkness, and then the world blazed red. I stood up as the alarm sang out, a single scream at the top of the octave. The crowds froze, faces tipped up toward the vidscreens, which all flashed the same useless message: Alert. Biohazard. Alert.

The red strobe flashed on, off, on. Glowing faces burst from the darkness, then dropped into shadow. The fountain bled pink, the rippling pool of water at its base a bottomless red.

I was staring at the fountain when I realized the noise had stopped. Not the alarm, which was still singing, but the sounds beneath it, the rustling, mumbling, shrieking, crying chaos of the crowd. Gone.

Ring around the rosie, a pocketful of posies.

The inane rhyme whispered through my head as they began to drop. They fell silent and still, their eyes bulging and mouths convulsing, fishlike, open shut open. Soundless. The two men with their dirt-beards, the old woman. The giggle twins, their giggles silenced, their skirts askew. Down, hard and ugly, heads cracking against plastic stone, arms jutting at odd angles. Down went the little kid, fingers clawing at her pink shirt. And her mother, down without a fight, her back to the kid.

Ashes, ashes.

Someone told me once that the nursery rhyme was about the Black Plague. That the ring of roses referred to the disease’s trademark red rash; the ashes to the burning bodies of the dead. But that was a lie: I looked it up. The words were nonsense; they meant nothing.

The red light pulsed rhythmically. I tried not to count the faces, hundreds of faces. Some of them twitched, chests heaving, sucking in air and whatever poison hid inside of it, whatever biohazard had touched off a useless, too late alert alert alert.

Some of them—one of the men, the girl, three women with chunky ankles and identical rings on their stubby fingers—prostrate, frozen. Askew. Their eyes open, their chests still.

Faces red, then pale, shadowy, non, then red again.

“We have to get out of here!” Riley’s voice in my ear. Riley’s shirt absurdly pulled over his face as if he had anything to fear from the poisoned air. Riley’s hands on my shoulders. Riley, there, but seeming very far away. Riley alive and in motion, seeming wrong in the still, empty room. Empty until you looked down.

“Lia!” Riley grabbing me. Dragging me out of the plaza.

Running, stumbling over something lumpy and large that didn’t make a sound as our feet sank into its chest.

Running without looking down, just step over them like stones, just go, Riley said, don’t stop don’t look just go.

Running and standing still, leaving a piece of myself in the empty atrium, still watching the red light pool in the whites of their eyes.

Ashes, ashes, we all fall down.