Robyn's Egg (3 page)

“I feel for you, my man. Kelsey had me go to a few of those during the Mars Initiative. After all the testing was done, I was able to get my hands on our ranking. We were so far down the list it was embarrassing. But it’s better than winding up a contestant on
Anything For Baby
.”

“I suppose. Still, you should have seen the way the techs looked at me last time,” Moyer said. “I’m standing there naked as the day I was decanted and could see the disdain on their faces. I was wasting their time and they wanted me to know it. A pair of them smirked, barely able to contain their laughter. I wish you could talk to Robyn. Maybe she would listen if it came from someone else.” After a moment, a short bitter laugh escaped Moyer’s lips. “Who am I kidding? We argued about it last night, her term for it, not mine. I barely got a word in. Did you know she lost her job as a result of the Mars debacle?”

“No, I didn’t. Is she working?”

“Yes, though not in her field. It’s rather a sore subject.”

A young waitress clad in a pink acetate uniform sidled up to the table to take their orders. Petro leered, taking full advantage of the garment’s translucence. His eyes moved over the waitress’ body, gleaning as much detail as he could manage. Moyer directed his attention to the shifting images of menu specials shown on the video wall. They ordered food and Petro continued leering as the waitress walked away.

The waitress returned a short while later with their meals and a scanner. Petro picked at his food as if its arrangement was more important than its flavor or nutritive value. Moyer checked his ticket to assure the order was correct, and held out his arm, pulling back his sleeve to expose the hologram on his wrist. After scanning in the code, the waitress gazed at the screen. Her smile faded. “Sir, it says you have insufficient funds.”

“No, that’s impossible,” Moyer insisted.

“It must be a misread,” Petro chimed. “It happens all the time.”

Moyer offered his wrist again. The girl scanned the code, waited a moment and wagged her head.

“How can this be?” Moyer muttered.

Petro extended his arm to the waitress. “Here, add it to mine.”

A torch of pain braised Robyn Winfield’s knees while she scrubbed travertine floors with a brush. The seams between tiles cut into her flesh like hot wire. A month earlier, she had her own office and people cleaned her floors and emptied her trash; that was before the recession and the last wave of job cuts, before Robyn had been repurposed and put to productive use – the phrase the Labor Counselor used during their meeting. The counselor was a prim, humorless woman in a masculine suit with a plaque on her desk that read
Productivity is next to Godliness
. In less than an hour, she had reduced Robyn from a respected computer encryption specialist to a cleaning woman.

Robyn stood and threw her scrub brush across the room. It clattered across the floor and smacked the wall with a satisfying thud. She pressed the heels of her hands into her knotted back and arched to try and loosen her muscles.

Scrubbing a different section of the same floor, a young woman whose name Robyn could never remember called to her in a harsh whisper. “What are you doing?”

“I quit,” Robyn said. Her words echoed in the expansive library and sounded satisfying when they returned to her.

“Keep your voice down or Big Mona will hear.”

“I don’t care,” Robyn said.

The woman worked her brush even harder as if she could scrub Robyn’s words from the air. Her dark hair swayed in rhythm with her efforts. She blinked rapidly. Her expression turned pensive as she cast her eyes toward the door. The heavy clop of sturdy heels on stone alerted Robyn that someone was approaching.

“Lollygagging again, Princess? What seems to be the problem this time?” asked the crew supervisor, a woman the others called Big Mona. She swaggered into the room, her swollen face stern, patience at an end.

“I shouldn’t be here,” Robyn said. “I’m a programmer and not cut out for this work. It’s…”

“Beneath you?” Mona finished. “We get that a lot with you repurps.” A wry, condescending smile tickled Mona’s lips. “I will make this plain to you. The Judge will be back in a couple hours. These floors will sparkle when he arrives. That is your job. Pick up your brush and get back to work.”

“Or what?” Robyn challenged.

Big Mona’s eyes glowed with delight as if Robyn had led her just where she hoped to go. “Well, then I call Security Services and you get rehabilitated. It’s your choice and makes no difference to me. Productivity is next to Godliness, and one way or another you will wind up productive. Are we clear, Princess?”

Robyn muttered to herself as she crossed the room to recover her scrub brush under Mona’s glare. After she returned to her knees and started scrubbing, the heavy clop of heels departed the room like a team of Clydesdales. “Damn repurps,” the big woman spat as she left. Something soft bounced off Robyn’s shoulder. On the floor beside her rested a pair of red kneepads. “Thanks, uh…”

“My name is Serafina,” the girl said. “It means
heavenly angel
. I’ll want those back. Get yourself a pair of your own tonight.”

“Why is she always such a bitch?”

“Big Mona? Her husband divorced her last year,” Serafina said.

“What a shock.”

“She didn’t see it coming. They had a little girl and her husband wanted custody. It was nasty. He had a better paying job and could afford child care. And he had a better lawyer. The judge awarded him full custody.”

Robyn rode the tube home from Freedom Circle. She waited more than an hour, jostled by the throng on the platform every time a new train came into the station. When she finally found a car with space, her patience was frayed. Bodies poured through the doors until the aisle filled chest to chest. Robyn took one of the last open seats and avoided eye contact. These were what her father referred to as
low people
, those that live by brawn, not brains, and those who lived in the dirty outskirts beyond the civil part of the city. Packers on the platform forced on a few more passengers. A man in the aisle was driven back and stepped on Robyn’s foot. She yelped and clenched her jaw to keep from cursing.

Robyn sat with her eyes closed and let the pain of the workday ooze from her shoulders. A buzzing sting radiated from her chapped hands. She kept lotion in her purse, and rubbed a dab into her palm. The lotion burned where the fissures in her skin penetrated down to exposed flesh. While she waited for the pain to subside, the subtle aroma of roses filled her nose. She supposed that if her hands weren’t in such bad shape, the sensation might actually be pleasurable.

She glanced up and noticed her reflection in the far window. The fiber optic strands woven into her work uniform radiated an advertisement for Global Brands Beer. Powered by her body heat and ambient light, images selected to cater to those nearby appeared in her clothing downloaded via the net. As ads went, this one was tame. If she was in a car full of men, it could just as easily be an ad for One-Eyed Pete’s Sex Shop. It had happened before. Being a walking billboard was the tradeoff for affordable clothing. What she resented was having no say in what was posted there.

Robyn noticed a woman watching her. The woman’s eyes met Robyn’s and her lips curled to one side in a rueful grin. The woman was old and tired from more than just the day, but from decade upon decade. She was obviously labor class born and bred, hard working and beaten down. And yet her expression said she felt sorry for Robyn.
Sorry for what
, Robyn wondered? And then she grasped that it was for what lay ahead; pity for the decades to come. But maybe the pity in the old woman’s face was for something else. Robyn supposed the woman thought she was also low people and trying to cover the fact by applying lotion to make her working class hands soft, pretending to be better than she was. The old woman must have presumed she was a status jumper. And if Robyn tried to explain her situation was only temporary, would the old woman believe it? When Robyn got off the tube in the Professional Quarter instead of riding all the way out to Labor Housing, what would the old woman think then? That Robyn was embellishing the lie by pretending to live someplace she couldn’t afford, or that she had screwed her way to a better part of town and was some professional schlub’s mare. Explaining her situation was a waste of breath. Who would believe it, anyway?

And what if Robyn didn’t find programming work soon? Would her skills become out of date? Would she be stuck, relegated to scrubbing other people’s floors for the rest of her life? Was the old woman right about her future?

The video map on the Michigan Street line showed the tube nearing Washington St. Station. As the car slowed, Robyn stood. She was the only one. Professional shifts ended early in the afternoon. They were already snug in their homes. The laborers on the tube still had at least forty minutes to ride. She noticed the old woman wagging her head slightly from side to side as if saying,
pitiful
. Robyn realized that being perceived as pathetic was the same as being pathetic. She wanted to scream,
you don’t understand
, to explain her situation. Instead she bit her lip until she thought it would bleed and waited for the doors to open.

Moyer sat on the sofa reading Steinbeck’s
Cannery Row
, a gold mesh cap perched atop his head linked to the radiator by a length of wire tipped with an alligator clip. As he started to read, his muscles slackened and he relaxed into the cushions. Words on the page transported him to the SalinasValley on a drunken frog hunt with Mack and the boys, far from the troubling dungeon of Digi-Soft, far from the negative balance on his bank statement. His father had once taken him to a place where frogs lived in ponds. But that was so long ago it no longer seemed as real as Steinbeck's story.

The clunking of the electronic lock on the front door snapped Moyer into the present. Robyn shuffled in wearily. She let her purse drop from her shoulder onto the table as she shuffled by.

“How was work?”

Robyn bared her teeth. “How do you think?”

“Hard day?” he asked.

“They’re all hard.”

“You know it’s only temporary,” he said. “You’ll find another programming job soon.”

“I don’t see how. I spend all day working. When am I supposed to find time to search for something else?”

Moyer didn’t respond. As Robyn’s eyes bored in on him he recognized that the question wasn’t rhetorical.

“I want to quit,” she said.

Moyer’s face went slack. “You can’t. Without your income we’ll lose the apartment. If we lose the apartment on short notice, we might be forced out to Labor Housing, and we could be on the waiting list for years for a place near town again.”

Every kid in the ManningSchool who’d had his grades slip or performed poorly on a test had been threatened with the specter of Labor Housing. Teachers went into great detail describing the horrific conditions in the factories. Workers’ quarters packed eight to a room. Decade long contracts at meager wages. Mind numbing repetitive work where workers made the same weld or assembled the same parts hundreds or thousands of times during eighteen hour workdays. Depression and suicide were rampant, so much so that the factories strung nets between buildings to catch the jumpers. Each morning, disconsolate laborers were fished out and escorted back to their work stations, back to the hell they’d tried so desperately to escape.

A student’s failure to advance to the next grade meant a one way ticket to the factories, and those at Moyer’s school were painfully aware of it. Were things different where Robyn was raised?

“We can borrow from my folks,” Robyn said.

Moyer rolled his eyes. It all seemed so simple to daddy’s little girl. “No, I won’t. Your father has always looked down on me and said I’d never amount to anything. I don’t want to come to him with my hand held out and prove him right.”

Robyn’s shoulders sagged. Hopelessness twisted her face with despair and seemed to take the starch from her. She wobbled for a moment. Moyer was ashamed. “You know what? I have never really cared what your father thought,” he said. “Why should I start now? I want you to be happy and I’ll do whatever it takes.” He extended a hand, and guided Robyn to a spot next to him on the sofa. “If you need to quit, then quit.”

She gazed at him, a resigned smile on her face. Sadness still glossed her green eyes. “I don’t know what I want, but I’m pretty sure I don’t want to live in Labor Housing, and I don’t want you beholden to my father.” Robyn eased her head back against the cushion and stared at the ceiling. “So how was your day?”

“Fine,” he said. Robyn shifted her eyes from the ceiling and bored in on Moyer. He realized his answer had been too curt. She had detected something in his delivery that sent alarm bells clanging.

“What happened at work?”

“Nothing, just the same-ol’ same-ol’. So what happened today at the Capital Arms that makes you want to quit?”

Robyn let her head loll back, her eyes shifting side to side as if collecting her thoughts. “I don’t know. It’s a bunch of things. It’s the pain in my back, the soreness in my knees, and the sting in my hands. It’s the looks I get on the tube when I get off on Washington. No one yelled
status jumper
, but I see it in their eyes. And most of all, it’s the fear I may never find another job, and that this is it for me.”

“It won’t be forever,” he said. “I promise.”

“Why do you do that?” Robyn asked.

Moyer didn’t understand at first. Then he noticed she was staring at the gold mesh cap on his head. “I’m blocking the signal.”

“No, why are you reading? It’s so slow. You could download the content of that entire book in a couple seconds.”

Moyer had had this discussion more than once. Perhaps if Robyn ever read recreationally, she’d understand. There was something relaxing about having an uncluttered mind and taking things in at their own pace rather than having the information jammed into his skull all at once, the end simultaneous with the beginning.