Chapter 1: listen to me
She was still alive, and she could disappear somewhere new. She had never wasted herself down to nothing. She was Elizabeth Bixby, 32 and hardly noticeable. Divorced. An artistic but sterile lover. She woke with a neck-ache on a hot gray morning in early September to face a stocky PanGender who stood outside her window. This was the most intimate proximity Elizabeth had shared with another person in a long time. It frightened her. The night before she had parked her car, nicknamed Sweet Thing, at the edge of a neighborhood of neat cooperative-apartments in Redwood City. She slipped between two Ubiquit.us car-shares, hoping to blend in with them to pass the notice of the Security Scans. She had meant to leave before dark to head south. But she had drunk half a cup of Sav Blanc Lite around midnight and dawn was already here, spitting her latest nightmare out at her again, by the time she woke. She opened her eyes to the appraisal of this female-leaning Pan, who was ugly but self-assured. Dressed oddly, too, in recycled cotton tunic, flowy; tight pants; with clipped mustache on her upper lip, you didn’t know whether it was real or not. Elizabeth knew how she looked: wild, with overgrown eyebrows, legs unshaved beneath sour-smelling vintage silk pajamas, chipped toenails, beaded Moroccan slippers with the beads falling off. She was hung over.
No one could arrest her with any right, though. She had petty cash stuffed in her bra, $800 in her BitSpend account and $2,000 in BitSaves, and $1,200 left on her BitCredit line. The only legitimate penalty to her existence was a loitering fine. But she considered herself hardly Viable, and—scrutinized so closely like this, as she hadn’t been in months—she could see how pathetic she was. She was a shame.
Elizabeth started up Sweet Thing and reversed her out of the lot, warily watching the Pan who stayed standing where she was. Frumpy. Frowning. Elizabeth held her gaze. But just as she was about to escape the Pan’s Device radius, the Pan took picture of Sweet Thing and Elizabeth’s Device was immediately pinged with a notice: “Illegal loitering penalty $100. Press 1 to pay from BitSpend, 2 for BitCredit.” She shakily pressed 2. “Processed. Thank you! Remember safety is number one.”
She was broke. Her ex-husband, Charlie, had given her the car, believing this concession to be more than fair. Generous, even. She was at fault. Her fault had ended their marriage. Her fault had risked his job at MyWorld and his own Viability. She accepted his disappointment in her as she’d accepted everything about him, and left him with the house and everything but some of her clothes, legacy belongings, and the clunky shortwave radio they’d built together for their old sailboat. Six months delinquent now, she found she was freer, if less Viable, than most. At least she understood survival, or the art of moving forward hopelessly. At least she was moving forward. At least her life was precipitous.
The day brightened a little. You couldn’t ask for it to do anything better than that because gray was all you ever got. She eased Sweet Thing toward Marsh Road, watching out for herself as hers was the only non-Ubiquit.us vehicle in sight. It was too early to drive free without an auditor noticing, but she was safe on the eastern section of this road, whose old and broken cameras the auditors hadn’t replaced because there was nothing to watch here: just a long-abandoned, sprawling school campus, a few cheap health facilities, and some defunct psychic healing practices.
She rarely had luck these days, but along this stretch she managed to find cigarettes. The abandoned school, once shut away behind a link fence topped with cyclone wire, had been overlooked for so long that non-Viables now and then tried to make encampments there. Security auditors had to clear these camps out again and again and had finally torn down part of the fence to make their raids easier. Two months earlier, Elizabeth had found a vice van loitering inside the former school’s old locker pod barely visible from the road and had got some non-registered liquor, weed, and cigarettes. She hadn’t smoked since she was a teenager, but the time seemed right by that point to start again. She had returned to the spot every week since, but so far had failed to find a dealer. This morning she didn’t worry about parking Sweet Thing outside the fence to check again. She slipped behind the pod wall and was blessed to find a white van waiting there, reeking with tobacco and weed. She craved a high. When she craved a high, she didn’t think about anything else. Her reasoning was just enough for her to give in to the craving.
“I know what you’re doing!” she said, knocking on the front tinted window. “Open up for me. Now, please.” She watched her reflection in the smoked glass—how gaunt she looked, how gorgeous. No answer to her taps. “Idiots!” she said, walking to front of the van and kicking the fender with the point of her slipper. “Do you want to get audited?” She kicked harder.
A face appeared, a plain girl’s face in the windshield. The gang probably thought they should present their member most likely to mellow out a security auditor; but how wrong they were to choose a female. Elizabeth had faced enough officious females in her time to laugh at their naïveté, which led them to believe that women looked out for women. This girl’s shyness made her seem stupid. She unlocked the front passenger door without raising her eyes to Elizabeth’s face.
“Yeah?” she said.
“How much for half a pack?” Elizabeth asked.
The girl was nervous, and this made Elizabeth feel stronger than she was. The girl looked toward the back of the van for approval. Voices cursed with the eagerness of nature-made entrepreneurs. It was a comforting sound.
A boy, probably seventeen, skinny with arms that weren’t yet taut and eyes that could burn coin out of your BitSaves just from looking at you, wedged himself behind the girl.
“One for fifty,” he said. “Half for thirty.”
“Cash?” Elizabeth said, panicked. The currency she traded in was debt, mostly.
“No shit,” the kid said.
“OK,” Elizabeth said (she was an idiot). But cash was nearly impossible to come by, and she had paid dearly for what she had. Still, cash was best spent on pleasure; it was too scarce to be spent on anything else.
“How did you know we were in here?” he demanded. “Who referred you?”
The slow-or-shy girl tried to wedge herself out of the way and finally climbed into the middle seat of the van.
“Yeah, I was referred,” Elizabeth said. “And I’m not Chipped.”
“Get in the van,” he said, and she hauled herself inside and slammed the door shut.
She chewed her cuticles and watched their faces. “Let’s say you give me ten for twenty,” Elizabeth said.
“Ten for twenty-five,” the kid said. “I can tell you’re not cheap.” His voice was half whine, half winsome, and he had charm. “You look good.”
“Ten for twenty,” Elizabeth said. “That’s all I got. My honesty costs me, believe me. Hurry up, little brother.” She dug into her bra, and managed to withdraw just one-bills. They watched her as she counted them out painfully. “OK, here’s twenty-one,” she said. “Take it or leave it.”
The kid decided to take it. He said, affably enough: Unfiltered? And she said: Filtered, please, and the kid said they were out of those. “Truth?” she said.
“Listen, I don’t lie either.”
“Fine,” she said, “unfiltered, whatever.” He said to one of the other kids, a ginger with blueish skin, to get unfiltered, long-cut cigarettes. The ginger scrambled in the back for a carton and counted out ten for her.
“Hope we can conduct more business sometime,” the leader said. “How about some speed to help you on your way?”
She considered the offer, nearly succumbing to it out of self-pity. “No,” she said finally. She had to look out for herself.
“What’s your name?” he said.
“No,” she said, sadly.
She stuck the cigarettes in her bra along with the cash and climbed out of the van. She forced herself to walk slowly and peacefully back to Sweet Thing. No other cars in sight. She started up again and passed the school and the bleak facilities beyond, crossing under a bridge to the populated side of the road. Here lay service centers and charging stations, and also a Certified All-Foods, where she stopped for Sweetened Fluid with Regulation Caffeine and an EggPlus. At the self-check, she ran her MyHealth card for product-user scanning to assure the system she had no allergies. The check-out screen warned her through five beeps that her vege-mineral and protein intake this month had been insufficient, reminding her that eating well was the best defense against preventable diseases. She must replenish this shortage by next week in order to avoid the penalty tax addition to her MyHealth card balance. She cursed affably at the screen, but was allowed to proceed to payment anyway. Her CoinCredit app in her Device didn’t issue any low-balance alerts. She had not checked her debts against her spending limit in the past month, yet the transaction cleared. Today, unlike most days, she was stronger than the system. She had cigarettes in her bra, close to her heart.
Safe back in Sweet Thing, she drifted west into the dun hills toward Half Moon Bay to chase the deserted roads still veining through abandoned towns until she found a safe place to smoke alone. Then, at the appropriate hour, she could steer south, crawling among the Ubiquit.us vehicles busing Productive citizens to their jobs. For now she followed a sharp rise into a tumble of dirty, treeless hills above the cooperative housing of the middle classes who had borne a retreat from the urbanity below. The sun was stronger now, thrumming steadily through the cloud cover, and she parked, left her Device in Sweet Thing, and perched on the hood to smoke. Behind her lay the wasting sea. Below her spread California’s vast basin of Productivity that kept her alive and safe, from which she leached a scarce existence. She liked its scarcity, or could believe she did so long as this quick-burning cigarette could last. It stung her throat. The nicotine wasn’t even the best part and, for a minute, her solitude didn’t feel punishing. She took her final drag and held it in her throat until she had to choke it out. Gagging, she hung her head off the hood and cried until a noise alarmed her. She looked up to find a lost seagull, blown from a stagnant estuary below, thrashing toward her—squalling like a hurt child. She had to leave then. You never knew where auditors would look for you.
She set Sweet Thing into manual mode and doubled back to the highway ridging the east side of the coastal hills. This time she would keep going south where no one would care to watch her Streams. In the past few months, through the talk she had snatched from other indigents, formerly Productive people turned into system freeloaders, she had begun to feel a change in herself, a strange and terrifying vulnerability. She tried to believe that everything she felt must also exist in the world outside, so somewhere—elsewhere—the system must be weakening too. No being was isolated: the system and its people created one another through cause and effect. But she also knew that no one in her old Productive life at MyWorld could feel a change like hers; or understand it. She couldn’t understand it immediately, in the terrible first three months alone in which she still despaired over her own lonely self and her loss of Charlie. As her life emptied of its small daily purposes she watched herself deflating, losing her shape as a Productive person defined by the rules, the delineations, the limits of this drained, scarred world whose survival required that everyone play the designated part to sustain a Viable system. She grew lighter and lighter. She hardly felt attachment to the system that kept feeding her, even though she didn’t give anything back and would have been troubled to remember who she was without the Streams telling her. Yet she didn’t like the self that the Streams showed to Charlie and everyone in her old life. It no longer seemed to be her.
At nine o’clock she stopped at a vehicle station and paid for thirty minutes of charge-time for Sweet Thing before starting a wary approach into San Jose on the white-hot road. San Jose was a tidy and Productive city, unchanged since she had last seen it years before. There was the big Fluid processing plant dominating the northern side, and also the walled-off, humming data centers that kept California beating forward. She drove past all this, overly sensitive to her hardly-Viable status. Sweet Thing was battered and old. The vehicles she joined were sleek and efficient—stretched long enough to fit twenty people in comfort. Slowly, the crush of traffic thinned, departing from the freeway into the vast hush of the city. Suddenly, she was speeding—quickly, quickly whirling through the dusty San Joaquin Valley with its low, flat-roofed AgroTech complexes. She felt sweet and rare relief. After the relief, desolation. She had vanished out of her old life. Now she was unseen. The darkness she knew yesterday adumbrated the unknowns of tomorrow, and she felt the weight of her freedom acutely.
She activated her Device, which she balanced on her knee beneath the wheel.
“Check MyStream,” she said into the microphone, and hoped, with intense anxiety that shamed her, that maybe someone, somewhere, cared where she was going.
The last location-tag for her avatar was Redwood City, and the car-share pod where the Pan had flagged her for loitering. She clicked through to the Pan’s security scan accompanying the tag: there she was, grainy but unmistakable, open-mouthed and grim. One hundred and thirty people, according to the Stream, had seen the post. So, one hundred and thirty people (maybe more!) followed her Stream, witnessing her non-Viability. Judging it. Hating her. She scanned the list of these witnessing avatars for Charlie’s, but didn’t find it. He no longer looked out for her.
She wouldn’t let her past and its future become a sad story. She tagged herself in a new update that would show everyone her strength, her resolve, her autonomy: “You won’t see me anymore,” she said aloud, surprised by the sound of her own voice. It was pleading, thin. “I’m Southbound now. Add photo.” And her Stream flashed an update complete with picture, showing her as she was: shadowy, hungry, unafraid. “Post,” she said, and laid her Device on her lap.
The morning settled bleakly on the suddenly emptied freeway. Few people ventured outside their house-shares and workspaces because the only peace lay inside, not outside. She risked an audit by spinning out alone like this in the middle of the day. So she decided to find a place to wait until dark, when she could disappear among the transport vehicles making their nightly food-distribution treks south. For the next thirty miles, according to Sweet Thing’s maps, there was nothing except the massive, clean-burning Agro Tech Complexes. She wouldn’t find a secure place to park and hide until she got to Salinas.
She checked her Device: one hundred and forty people had seen her post, but no one who mattered. She was alone. She tossed her Device to the floor and considered having another cigarette but you never knew who or what was watching. She couldn’t afford another fine. Already, she could hardly afford to exist—that being the definition of non-Viability. California was privatized for everyone’s good, and balances of society had been carefully calibrated. There weren’t many poor people left, at least none that you could see. There was so little crime, her offences had accumulated enough that by now she was considered criminal. When she had been more than Viable—when she had been Productive and lucrative for herself and the state—the balance had worked for her. Now she sure as hell couldn’t afford any more recalibration.
Unable to bear the insolent passive-aggression of the Streams, or the quiet of her own mind, she set Sweet Thing into autodrive and reached underneath the passenger seat for her small short-wave radio—one of a pair she and Charlie had built for their boat before they were married. He had kept the boat. Sometimes in the past months, when she went so long without speaking that she started fearing she had lost her voice, she would find a signal on this radio that could carry it to someone, maybe to a person who could tell her what to do. She rarely searched the frequencies though. Unlike the Streams, which were composed by everyone posting all the time, no one seemed to speak on the radio.
But today she searched, and she found the deep-soothing prophecy of an astrologer in New Mexico.
The collective spirit of this age invites you into an innocent state, as if you were a child again. What we shall experience this week is not a selfish Mercury, and therefore you must turn away from the selfishness of desiring personal gain. Open your minds to one another. Join one another in new inter-synaptic terrain. Together, we will be influenced by this innovative Mercury. While he dwells in the constellation, meditate on novelty and connection.
She curled up against her seat, clutching the radio and wanting to rebel against this placid voice, a voice possessed and directed by an unknown malevolence threatening predestination. Fuck predestination. Her family’s predestined history was diluted to this: herself, alone and wasted and sterile. She had volunteered to sterilize herself long before she met Charlie in order to advance her own Viability. Most educated girls chose to do it prior to sexual activity, and she had wanted to be as sensible and sexually active as early as her friends. Now her parents were dead. So this post-Charlie solitude was not her fault. Her father, fifteen years older than her mother, grew cancer when he was 72, the Recommended Terminal Age (RTA). He couldn’t afford the age-extension taxes and Elizabeth’s mother had to help kill him, though the accepted language for this was putting him down. According to protocol, Elizabeth’s mother administered the lethal dose under the supervision of the Terminal Coordinator. Death was supposed to be kinder this way. The Coordinator’s limited imagination couldn’t foresee what Elizabeth’s mother did next, though, which was to inject the needle into her own arm as his heart failed. They wanted to die together. It was a pact they had. Neither one of them bothered to warn Elizabeth of the plan. In a letter she left behind, her mother told Elizabeth that she did not worry about her. At the time of her parents’ deaths, Elizabeth was preparing to marry Charlie. “I would rather go with your father,” her mother had written in her suicide note. “I would rather get out of this life, go back to the dark, which I don’t know. Not knowing is the only sensation that comforts me. You will understand what I am doing when you have loved Charlie for thirty years. You will not understand it before. I wish you many more years and even more love.”
Elizabeth hated her mother’s last words now that her marriage was over through the fault in her own soul, which was so lonely that she had sought to love Charlie as much as she needed, but more than she could. In trying her best for him, she’d ruined their relationship. The truth was she had tried to free him from her anxiety, her needs. But once he realized his freedom from her, he could shed her. When she was gone, it seemed to make no difference to him.
She glanced out over a Tent City that housed agro-laborers, little Sisyphi who kept the food and Fluid supplies flowing. At a glance, it depressed her. She changed radio frequencies, and this is how she heard truth spoken for the first time in years. It was over the radio: people speaking truth in Spanish. Clever, she thought at first. Here, auditors wouldn’t track or censor you if they couldn’t understand what you said.
Once they’d gotten her emotional, their frequency went dead and they left her abandoned and unhappy. She had to return to blank from a new height of feeling. She had been waiting to hear people talking like this, with pain and frustration, not caring if it came out sounding unProductive, pernicious, undermining. Not caring if they alerted auditors. She could understand them and hold their pain in her head because they had given voice to hers. Elizabeth was half-white and half-Japanese. In school—because when she was young education was broader, and they still half-heartedly taught you languages—she hadn’t studied Spanish with any enthusiasm. She lived in a mostly white town, and there was something illicit about Spanish even then. But she knew enough to understand this. Anyone could understand it. Anyone would recognize the feeling behind it.
She searched the frequencies for more of them. She heard another astrologer, then resource-saving advice from a Fluid controller. She went to her and Charlie’s private frequency and connected her transmitter. No one would hear it, but she said it anyway. She spoke from her heart: “Quiero a vivir también. Sálvame.”
She was almost as embarrassed as if she had sent a message to Charlie asking him to love her again. She waited for an answer from someone. But Sweet Thing’s radar blinked and she saw, beaming her from behind through the gray light, a security auditor’s UbiquiFord—heading straight toward her, hacking into Sweet Thing’s controls and slowing her to a stop on the shoulder of the freeway. She was arrested.