Sycamore (Near-Future Dystopia) (17 page)

“
Change is inevitable. Progress is Sycamore.
”

Kurt shook his head and climbed into the shining Gallardo determined not to let Amos and his games ruin the evening. The radio provided little respite as a no-mark host debated the tracking changes with none other than Isaiah Amos himself. What Amos was doing on the old-fashioned radio Kurt didn’t know, but the whole thing sounded like a shill-job.

The host complained that compulsory tracking would ruin games of hide and seek, as if that was an issue to rival the emergence of a publicly-funded human grid. Amos appeared concessionary in promising that consumers who didn’t opt-in to location sharing would remain invisible to others, and that only Sycamore and the police would ever have access to their exact location.

“And what if I don’t want
anyone
to know where I am?” the host asked.

Amos cleared his throat in preparation for a sharp reply. “Then I would ask why you’re hiding.” Applause rang through the speakers. From whom, Kurt was unsure. He turned off the radio and drove in silence.

No one else seemed to be driving into the city so Kurt arrived at Stacy’s corner in no more than six or seven minutes. He was early. The dumpster was open again, this time with two table-legs sticking out. The message in the sky and the propaganda on the radio had nudged him towards annoyance and he hoped that some uplifting music would bring him back to his best before Stacy showed up. Assuming she did, of course.

Would she, though? He hadn’t really thought about it, but did she ever say that she would? All he could remember her saying was something about not being able to refuse a night in a mansion with him, which now sounded like a joke. Kurt suddenly felt ridiculous. This wasn’t the first time he had misread a girl’s signals but it was surely the worst. He had been looking forward to seeing Stacy again since the moment they parted, and to make matters worse she lived a 1990s lifestyle that left him with no way of contacting her.

Five o’clock arrived and still she didn’t show. Ten past came and went. If Kurt had wanted to be anywhere else, he would have left. He closed his eyes again and hoped for sleep. Sudden knocking on his window startled him upright and the sight of the knocker sent him smiling with delight.

She opened her own door and stepped in. “Hey. How long have you been waiting?”

“Maybe like two minutes,” he lied. “I was starting to think you weren’t coming.”

“You really thought I would miss seeing the mansion you bought with your sell-out money?”

Kurt laughed defensively. “I know you’re joking but I need to not think about that tonight. All day, all month, all I’ve done is talk about Sycamore and The Seed. I talk to the press about how great everything is and I talk to Amos about how bad everything is and I talk to myself about how I wish I had never gone back to that stupid contest. Now that I’m with someone I actually like, I don’t want to talk about any of it.”

Stacy smiled, glad to hear it. “Let’s drive.”

They did, and minutes later they were rolling through the black gate and into the granite driveway. Kurt swiped his Seed on the door and invited Stacy to lead the way in.

“This is a big house,” she said. And it was — intimidatingly so. She didn’t know what else to say.

Neither did Kurt. “Yeah. I haven’t moved my stuff in yet, though. I haven’t even been in some of the rooms.”

He looked worried about something and Stacy couldn’t help but pick up on it. “Is there something on your mind?” she asked.

“I said I wouldn’t talk about it. Do you want to help me explore?”

Stacy pulled him down onto his long sofa. “I don’t want to do anything until you’re alright and you’re not going to be alright until you clear your mind. So what’s up?”

“They’re making the tracking compulsory,” he sighed. “Just like that. Just like you said. And the money. Amos talked to the president about currency digitisation and they both want it.”

“I don’t know why I’m surprised.” Stacy sat back and blinked too many times. “Everything always happens in an instant: wars are waged, towers fall, economies collapse. But this just seems
too
sudden. Why are they doing the tracking now?”

“I don’t know how much has been announced,” Kurt replied carefully.

Stacy clasped her hands around his and held his gaze. “You can trust me.”

With eyes like hers, he couldn’t not. “Okay. The government is funding a new department at Sycamore to analyse incoming video streams for potential criminal activity. They’re calling it CrimePrev. It’s basically PreCrime but instead of three idiot savants locked in a basement we’re going to have a roomful of idiot geniuses poring over vistas at Sycamore HQ.”

“Do you think they’ll have a big wall full of everyone’s vistas and they’ll be sitting there in big recliners, smoking cigars while they spy on you?”

Kurt appreciated Stacy’s use of humour to process the situation and laughed with her at the image. “There won’t be a wall, but I wouldn’t put the rest past them. I just know that Minion is going to get his paws all over this, and he doesn’t play well with privacy.”

“He’s the guy who was in the news last year about getting kicked out of university, right?”

“Yeah. Professor Walker put his neck on the line to get him back in then he ended up dropping out to work for Sycamore. I don’t know for sure what he actually did but I have an idea. I knew him for a few years and the whole time he was trying to blackmail people, and not over childish stuff. He was always sneaking into places he had no right to be. I can’t exactly preach on that front but he’s not like me — he didn’t do it for good, or even just for the chaos. He’s not like Amos, either. At least with Amos you know it’s about money. Minion is all about the power.”

“I don’t know much about him. What’s he like?”

Kurt didn’t like the tone of Stacy’s question and couldn’t hide that fact. “Why do I feel like you’re working right now?” he asked. “Are you recording this? Are you going to try and publish what I’m telling you? Because if you did, we would both be finished.”

“No,” she said. “I promise. I want to see Sycamore die but I’m not insane. I’m just interested. This is serious stuff. We’re talking about military surveillance disguised as consumer electronics. The concept might not be new but the scale is.”

“This isn’t military. People said the same kind of things about old social networks — that they were designed as phishing operations for federal intelligence agencies. But in the real world it’s the other way round. Things get successful then the agencies want in.”

“Well, that’s
usually
how the story goes, but this time it’s different. How much do you know about Amos?”

Kurt shrugged. “Enough. I know he used to be in the military if that’s what you’re getting at.”

“Tip of the iceberg,” said Stacy. “His work was in managing communications and tracking enemy movements. That’s when he took an interest in the multi-focus HUD lenses the army were developing. He formed a company called Unifield and started working on what became the UltraLenses. The funding came from serious people. Top-level people. The kind of people who buy legislation. Anyway, Unifield was deemed too unfriendly-sounding so Sycamore was born. It’s the same company, built on oil money and arms. How did you think he was able to afford that ridiculous tower before launching a single product?”

Kurt stopped to think about that for the first time. “So Amos is a pawn?”

“I wouldn’t call him a pawn. More like the queen. I reckon you’re the king — a figurehead with no real power. The queen is dangerous, but at the end of the day she’s still just a player in someone else’s game. Amos’s backers contrived an American Dream fairytale about a man and his idea coming from nothing. I don’t think people bought it but then you came along and it sort of came true. Even if someone else had invented the chip, someone like you was exactly what they needed.”

After the day’s message in the sky, Kurt felt that Stacy’s analysis of his role made sense. “And now there’s a huge silhouette of my face in the clouds beside words I never said. Whatever I do, whatever I say, they’re always going to hold me up as the friendly young face of Sycamore.”

“What’s the quote?” she asked.

“Amos said change was inevitable and I said that progress wasn’t. In advertising land that translates into “
Change is inevitable. Progress is Sycamore
.” Even the font annoyed me.”

Stacy smiled with a lot of teeth. “Why would you be annoyed by a font?”

“I dunno. It was written in roundhand, you know, as if to signify some kind of sophistication. I’ve been noticing stuff like that since Professor Walker showed me an old article in New York magazine that said our generation “did not yield a great literature, but it made good use of fonts.” It’s so true. Suddenly it was 2005 and everything was white and round and smooth and the world got so good at writing nothing beautifully. It’s just like how politicians read their scripts without even knowing what they’re saying. Nothing means anything anymore. Everything is just presentation. Life is a giant spectacle.”

She nodded in full agreement. “Right? Usually people think their generation is the only good one, but ours is the worst. Generation Y. Generation Me. Generation want-it-now-and-don’t-even-care-what-it-is… as long as it’s now.” Her tone was one of unbridled contempt. “The generation that lives on a social network and queued up to buy itself into slavery. Generation Sycamore.”

“Generation Sycamore, that’s good. Don’t tell Amos though; he would use it!” Kurt was smiling. Being with Stacy cheered him up.

“I know you said that you didn’t want to talk about all of this but you seem to be enjoying getting it off your chest. This is important stuff. What else is there?”

“Nothing,” said Kurt, like a child. “I want to talk about something else.” He looked around the cold room for ideas. “You. Tell me about you and your family and where you grew up.”

“We grew up here. Me and my brother.”

“Where is he now?”

“North. He moved after my parents died in a car crash last year. I don’t know what else to tell you.”

“Snap.”

“What?”

“My parents are dead, too,” Kurt clarified.

“Oh.”

“Yeah. Car crash also.”

There was silence. Stacy stood up and wandered around. She paused at a door and looked to Kurt for permission. He nodded and she opened it. The hot tub in the middle of the floor caught her by surprise. “Wow. Why are we not through here?”

Kurt followed her through and when he arrived she was standing by the waterbed.

“It looks so soft.” She sat down on the bed and rubbed its surface.

Kurt’s heart and every other part of his body screamed “
sit down
” but his head told him something else. Its warnings were too serious to ignore. “This is a mistake,” he said, forcing the words out. “We can’t do this.”

Stacy widened her eyes and pulled her head back. “I never said we were going to—

“No,” he interrupted, “
any
of this. You shouldn’t be here. It’s not safe.”

“Okay... now you’re starting to scare me. What’s going on?”

“You said you want to see Sycamore die.”

“So?”

“So that’s kind of a big deal. It doesn’t matter that I don’t agree with what they’re doing any more than you do — in the public’s view I
am
Sycamore. We can’t be together like this.”

“So I’m out of bounds, like a minister’s daughter? We’re not in high school, Kurt. Why are you so scared of what people might say?”

“I don’t care what anyone says, it’s what Amos and his friends might do.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“I don’t even know. But if he knew I was spending my nights with someone who wanted Sycamore to fail and that she was asking me all sorts of questions… No. This can’t happen.
We
can’t happen. I know too much and now you know most of it. It’s one thing for me to kid myself that my life is still normal but I can’t drag you into this.” Kurt was rambling, realising his thoughts only as he spoke them. “I don’t know what I was thinking bringing you here. You have to leave. I’m sorry.”

“Okay.”

They walked to the car and drove to the corner. Both were too confused to feel any awkwardness in the silence. Stacy felt sorry for the position Kurt found himself in but more than a little annoyed at him for wasting her night. Kurt’s anger was directed equally at the circumstances and at himself for causing them.

The car pulled up. Stacy scribbled something on a piece of paper and looked deeply into Kurt’s eyes. “Why do you never take your Lenses out even though you say you hate what’s happening?”

“I can’t walk around blind,” he said, looking at her like she was from another world; some far-off fantasy land where people didn’t need to be online all the time. “What if someone tries to text me?”

“You know, sometimes you sound just like everyone else.”

Kurt wanted to say that he was nothing like everyone else but he didn’t feel like arguing. He turned his hands upwards to indicate as much and got out to open the passenger door.

“At least you’ve got more manners,” Stacy smiled as she stepped out. She pecked Kurt on the cheek and handed him the note before leaving. “My address. If you ever feel like manning up and taking your Lenses out, you know where I’ll be.”

9

The water bed was too comfortable. Kurt barely moved between dropping Stacy at her corner on Friday night and going out to find the nearest Tasmart on Sunday afternoon upon hearing that the Seed-aisles were finally up and running.

More people recognised him than before. Pairs of shoppers took turns to stand beside Kurt for pictures, one snapshotting the other and swiping across their photo before switching positions. He was a new celebrity but Kurt already appreciated how annoying it was to be bothered by strangers. They didn’t even want to talk to him — it was all about getting a photo with the most popular man in the world for their Forest profiles.

Kurt didn’t know that most of the people in the Tasmart were sharing their experience of meeting him via the TransVista feature Amos had demonstrated back at the pre-launch press event. Living vicariously through the eyes of others was sufficiently irresistible to ensure that TransVista had taken off immediately but Kurt had too little contact with typical street-level consumers to get a feel for how his Seed was being used by the masses. Given the ever increasing popularity of Happy Pigs and the lookalike cam shows, this was probably for the best.