Idempotency (24 page)

Frank sat down with a large plop onto the ergonomically ass-shaped, smart-cushioned stool. He closed his eyes and smiled as he slowly sank down three inches. “Oh man, I love that feeling.”

“Jesus, Frank, can you pay attention to me for thirty seconds, please?” asked Dylan, slightly perturbed but somewhat entertained.

Frank looked hurt. “Dyls, I’m insulted. For you, forty seconds. Go.”

Dylan shook his head and began anew. “Frank, I’m considering leaving SolipstiCorp.” Dylan paused to let the weight of his words sink in.

Raising his eyebrows, Frank asked, “And, so?”

“So?” replied Dylan incredulously.

“So? What do you want me to do about it?”

“Umm, I want you to talk me out of it? Maybe tell me how valuable I am to the corporation, to yourself?”

“Look, Dyls, I love you, and if it’s a raise your after, I’ll fight for you. But anyone is expendable. Next man up. Fact is, I’m guessing that if you’re thinking of leaving SolipstiCorp it probably has less to do with money and more to do with something else.”

“Huh . . . that’s . . . actually somewhat accurate.”

Dylan rubbed his hand through his wavy brown hair and stared momentarily at the bar. Frank surprised Dylan with bouts of lucid logic often enough that Dylan had almost begun to expect it. In fact, he had started to wonder whether Frank’s frenetic personality was an act, or at least used deliberately to further Frank’s good fortune.

“Let me guess, girl troubles?”

This was correct, in a roundabout way, so Dylan seized on this opportunity of misdirection to provide a plausible reason for his exit from SolipstiCorp. “You got me,” he replied, shrugging.

“Well, fuck. So you and Kristina can’t make it work?”

“It’s . . . well, it’s complicated.”

“It always is, my friend.”

A tall, slim bartender with perfect blond hair came over carrying two similarly strange concoctions. Both glowed with an unnatural vibrancy. Frank’s eyes lit up.

“Shit—sorry, man,” Frank replied before taking a large gulp. “You always liked redheads more anyhow, right?”

“Yeah. Funny thing, she was talking about dyeing her hair red just before we broke up.”

“For you?”

Dylan nodded as he took a gulp of his large green glowing drink.

“Wow, Dyls. What happened to you guys anyhow? Kristina’s a keeper. Smart as hell, too smart for me. She’s cute. What the hell happened there?”

In the weeks after his virtTrip, Dylan and Kristina had spent nearly every night together. Feelings he had been repressing came welling back to the surface. “Oh, I don’t know. Well, yeah, I do,” he lied. “Work is my first priority, and she couldn’t deal with that.”

“Ha! Right,” Frank scoffed. He was now calm and focused. “And what would she say was the problem?”

“Hmm . . .” Dylan stared at the bar surface again. Under the viscous entrails of his beer’s sweat, text swirled past at a breakneck speed, reporting on the day’s events: rising stock reports, updates on the recent terrorist bombings in Philadelphia, sweltering weather blanketing the globe, and a thoughtful update on Great-Great-Great-Grandma Ethel’s eighty-nine-year-old cat (the oldest on record). Ignoring the rest of the news, Dylan replied, “I guess she would probably say that I wasn’t invested enough, or that I wasn’t entirely there all the time. Or something like that.”

“And were you?” Frank asked.

“Yes, but things change, you know? My, well—damn, Frank, I’ll just say it like it is—after my deathTrip I couldn’t look at her the same. I just saw that other woman, and I still do sometimes . . .” His voice trailed off. His recent nights with Kristina hadn’t been easy. He’d hidden feelings of jealousy and anger from Kristina. It worked in the short term, but it would be a problem later . . . if later ever came.

“Man, it’s no wonder you want to leave SolipstiCorp—that deathTrip of yours fucked you better than a robot whore. Dylan,
you
didn’t feel that way. Dalton felt that way. Right? I’m sure your psycheDoc wouldn’t be too excited to hear yourself talking about Dalton in the first person—right? I mean, we are on monitored corpSoil here.”

Dylan, now feeling the glowing green alcohol, guffawed. “I don’t give a shit. I’m leaving anyway. They can monitor the crap out of me. I don’t give a damn if it was just a program, or code, or whatever, a binary simulation. Love, anger, resentment, revenge—my feelings were real. So what if the memories were fabricated? They felt real; they were all-encompassing. Our product works, for better or worse.”

“Yeah, maybe a little too well,” Frank agreed. “I really hope they figure out that damn bug soon.”

“They will,” Dylan said reassuringly. “They have the best person on it.” Frank raised his eyebrows questioningly, to which Dylan responded, “Kristina. She’ll figure it out. And I’ll still be coming back to SolipstiCorp occasionally—they’re still testing me, they need to ensure the best care. I could sue you guys into oblivion if I wanted to.”

“We appreciate your benevolence.” Frank polished off his glowing drink. “Well, Dyls, I gotta get outta here. It’s been fun. But I’m hitting Vegas tonight with a few old college buddies.”

“Vegas? Tonight?”

“Yeah, we’re taking the new hyperLoop, twenty minutes from San Diego to Vegas. That’s less time than it’ll take me to find a good hooker once I get there!” Frank’s face turned down as he continued. “So I should expect your resignation letter on Monday, then?”

“Yep, that’s correct. Sorry, man. Thanks for being a great boss.” Dylan stuck out his hand and added, “And I mean that.”

Frank ignored Dylan’s handshake, replying instead, “Fuck you for leaving, you whiny son of a bitch.”

And with that, Frank slammed down his glowing green highball and walked briskly out of the bar, careful not to miss staring at a few good asses on his way out.

The fog didn’t roll in as much as it bumbled its way onto shore. It happened quickly—one minute it was a comfortable twenty-two degrees, ten minutes later it was a moist fifteen. Sindhu hadn’t brought a jacket, and much of her lithe back was now exposed to the bitter breath of the sea. She wore a small, tight-fitting plain brown shirt that was cut lower on the back than on the front. Had her long hair not covered it up, a stranger’s leering eyes may have noticed the subtle black aniToo on her back. The aniToo rained small Tamil letters—the antique script from her homeland—from the tips of her shoulders down to her lower back, where the letters would bounce slightly, eventually coming to rest, spelling out a long-since-forgotten Tamil proverb. Under calm circumstances, the letters would gently float down her back, drifting featherlike. During physical exertion the letters would fall chaotically. When she slept, the letters would lay gently upon her back. Should she somehow stand upside down, the Tamil script letters would follow gravity toward her shoulders. Currently, the letters were vibrating as they fell, matching the shivering of her body due to the piercing cold.

Sindhu frowned. She hadn’t fought the public light-rail system to arrive at this godforsaken run-down beach town for the cheap clam chowder—penurious though she was. She stood from the bench she had been sitting upon and was about to dump the plate that had held her chowder bread bowl into a nearby compost bin, when one of the many beach-faring vagrants snatched the plate out of her hand. The man wore a discarded and defective suit made of aniFabric; one pixel of blue was flickering pathetically near the man’s right knee, where the remaining pant leg had been tied up at the man’s stump of a shin. Portions of the man’s face were scabbed over, and the rest bled slightly through open sores. His milky-white eyes appeared blind; an assertion validated by Sindhu as she watched the man search the plate for food. He grumbled nonsensically to himself.

A desensitization to the sight of those suffering from dermatrophy was not easily obtained. Sindhu was a hard woman, but she would never feel comfortable around these zombielike elders. After she had settled into her nonprofit job, she had begun taking part in charity work during her weekends. Most of the work involved free health clinics or simply providing food and water to the slums. The dermatrophy subjects at these events were grotesque, there was no denying it. Many compared the affliction to that of leprosy. The moraligious and bioligious portions of the population claimed that these people got what they deserved: a disease-ridden existence in exchange for their heretical desire to live an unnaturally long life. A minority of the wealthy also felt these pus-ridden people got what they deserved: insanity-riddled old age caused by a desire to spend what little money they had for a futile chance to live long enough to obtain more life—the riskiest investment on earth. The vast majority of the population had no idea how prevalent the problem had become. They turned a blind eye to the slum-cleanup crews that their corp tax dollars were paying for. Sanitation and inspection crews were innocuously named, but their primary charter was cleaning up the dead. The ignorant majority also turned a blind eye to the public lands that were now entirely filled with government-assisted slums. Miniature microeconomies, each one, where bartering for services and food had replaced the standard currency. The ignorant majority also turned a blind eye to the cheap public transportation, dirty but effective—and that was also funded from corp tax dollars—as the corp employees drove on their corp-owned and -funded, technologically enhanced roads. The ignorant majority also turned a blind eye to the lack of affordable education: More than 95 percent of the population could not afford to attend college; simple technological advancements could have been put to use, as India had done, but government spending had been the political lightning rod of the past century. The cost to simply care for the lower class had not eclipsed 50 percent of the government’s expenditures; education was merely a luxury the public couldn’t afford.

Initially, Sindhu had been startled by the state of the lower class within the United States. She had a vision from her childhood that the United States was a beacon of prosperity within the world, where anyone could succeed, even the poorest of the poor. In actuality, the separation of the classes within the US had become more extreme than any other industrialized country, due to the lack of controls on birth coupled with the cost of education. During the twenty-first century, every country—except the United States—had enacted some type of birth control; whether it was China’s strict legal enforcement, or the EU’s proactive enforcement through tax benefits for having fewer children. Meanwhile, India had set their radical precedent—genetic enforcement—which the rest of the world was quickly following. In the past decade, India’s genetic enforcement of childbearing had led to a boon in the their economy, and a clear dent in the population of the lower classes was beginning to form. The nature of India’s lead in this area could not be challenged.

However, to be truly great at class inequality, a country could not just focus on having an outstanding mass of destitutes, they also needed to promote an opulence achievable only by a select group. And the United States had succeeded with flying colors on both fronts during the twenty-second century. Recent estimates from the 2111 census (obtained from intrusive but legal digital monitoring coupled with microdetailed satellite surveys) placed 99 percent of the income with 5 percent of the people. There was no middle. Income had become a teeter-totter; if somehow you could become fat enough, your corpulence would totter you over to the rich, never to return to the poor. But, the fact of the matter was that the people were born into their teeter or totter positions; moving after birth was nearly impossible, and the statistics backed it up.

The lump of living entrails reached out its hand toward where it guessed Sindhu must have been standing. Childlike, he squeezed his dirty fingers into a fist, then back into an open palm. Over and over, and over; begging for a morsel to drop into his emaciated hand. Sindhu sighed and blinked slowly, wondering if the thing could even process thoughts any longer. She suspected not, then turned and began walking a short distance to the Pismo Beach pier.

The pier was dilapidated, and she could walk for only about ten feet before reaching a gate with a
Restricted Access
sign. Beyond the gate she saw dozens of vagrants who had ignored the sign (assuming they could read it in the first place) and set up makeshift encampments along the pier’s rotting slats. The water lapped near the slats, sometimes spitting foam up through the wood as if the pier were now a cheese grater for the waves. If the water rose any farther in the coming decades, these people would be forced to find a new paradise. She veered north, walking down some similarly rotting steps and onto the sand.

The beach had become a center for commerce. Small aluminum huts lined the edge of the high-tide line where vendors sold or traded their wares. The majority of items for sale consisted of clothing and food. Some higher-end vendors focused on legacy technological devices. Cheap holographic tabletops were the most popular; these obviously had been refurbished several times. Their video quality was subpar, nongranular, and their motion recognition and feedback systems were capable of only simplistic manipulation of the hologram, with no haptic feedback whatsoever. But for those vagrants who still had hope of reaching an improved level of life, these were the devices that could conceivably crack open those heavy doorways.

Beauty, cleanliness, and high-quality clothing combined to make Sindhu appear as a walking digital corp credit. Vendors shouted inanities, profanities, and innuendoes to tempt her into buying their wares instead of their adversaries’. She smiled politely to those who were clever; the rest she ignored. After a pleasant ten-minute walk, where she enjoyed the hypnotic, reverie-inducing sound of the waves, she arrived at a staircase carved into a cliff wall where the beach came to an abrupt end. She climbed the staircase up toward the Dinosaur Caves Park. Once at the top, she turned and looked south. In the distance she could see the Pismo Dunes: the largest official, government-supported slum on the California Central Coast, between Los Angeles and San Francisco. The slum began on the expansive dunes (once a popular playground for vacationers) and stretched for sixty miles inland, up and into the coastal mountains. Outside of the slum border, to the north and east, lay corp farmland; to the south lay an antiquated, but heavily guarded, government military facility. Some of the most affluent housing on the California coast was on corp farmland, just twenty miles north.
A strange dichotomy
, Sindhu thought,
that has become the norm
.