فصل 18

18

Finding Purity

While Greyson Tolliver was honest to a fault, Slayd had quickly become a consummate liar. It began with his history. He made up an unpleasant family life that didn’t exist. Defining moments that never happened. Anecdotes that would make people laugh and either hate him or admire him.

Slayd’s parents were physics professors and expected their son to follow in an academic career, because with parents like that, he was clearly a genius. But instead, he chose to rebel and go rogue. He had once gone over Niagara Falls in an inner tube because it was a much more intense thrill than splatting. It had taken them three days to recover his body and revive him.

His social exploits in high school were legendary. He had seduced both the homecoming queen and the homecoming king in high school—but just so he could break them up, because they were the most arrogant and narcissistic couple in school. “Fascinating,” Traxler told him at their next meeting, with genuine admiration. “You never impressed me as having this much imagination.” And while Greyson Tolliver might have been offended, Slayd took it as a compliment. With Slayd being such a remarkably interesting human being, he thought he might want to keep the name even after this undercover operation was done.

Thanks to Traxler, all of his stories became part of his official record. Now, if anyone tried to verify the veracity of the lies he told, it would be there for all to see, and no amount of digging could debunk them.

And the stories got taller. . . .

“When my mother got gleaned, I decided to go completely unsavory,” he told people, “but the Thunderhead wouldn’t give me the U. It kept sending me to counseling, and tweaking my nanites. It thought it knew me better than I did, and kept telling me I really didn’t want to be unsavory at all, I was just confused. In the end, I had to do something big to make my point. So I stole an off-grid car and used it to ram a bus off a bridge. It left twenty-nine people deadish. Sure, I’ll be paying off their revivals for years, but it was worth it, because I got what I wanted! Now I get to stay unsavory until all those revivals are paid off.” It was a compelling fiction that always left his audience impressed—and no one could refute it, because Agent Traxler was quick to make it an official part of his digital life story. Traxler went so far as to create a whole history for the bus plunge and its nonexistent victims—he even gave Slayd a last name that was suitably ironic. He was now Slayd Bridger. In a world where nobody, not even unsavories, made people deadish on purpose, his story was rapidly becoming local legend.

His days were spent hanging out in various unsavory gathering spots, spreading his stories and putting out feelers for work, telling people he needed a job, and not a mainstream kind of job, but one where he could get his hands dirty.

Out in the world at large, he’d started to get used to the suspicious looks from passersby.  The way shopkeepers would eye him as if he were there to steal. The way some people would cross the street rather than share the sidewalk with him. He found it odd that the world was free of prejudice and bias, except in the case of unsavories—who, for the most part, wanted the rest of humanity to be their collective enemy.

Mault wasn’t the only AWFul club in town—there were lots of them, each featuring a different iconic time period.  Twist was modeled after Dickensian Britannia, Benedicts had a Colonial Merica style, and MØRG was full of EuroScandian Viking indulgences. Greyson went to the various clubs, and became well-versed in creating just enough of a scene to make himself known and to garner respect from the unsavory crowd.

The most troubling thing was that Greyson was beginning to like it. Never before had he had blanket permission to do something wrong—but now, “wrong” was what his life had become about. It kept him awake at night. He longed to talk to the Thunderhead about it, but knew it couldn’t give him a response. He did know, however, that it was watching him. Its cameras were there in all the clubs. The Thunderhead’s continual, unblinking presence had always been a comfort to him. Even in his loneliest moments, he knew he was never truly alone. But now its silent presence was unnerving.

Was the Thunderhead ashamed of him?

He would invent conversations in his mind to quell such fears.

Explore this new facet of yourself with my blessing, he would imagine the Thunderhead telling him. It’s fine as long as you remember who you truly are and don’t lose yourself.

But what if this is who I truly am? he would ask. Not even the imaginary Thunderhead had an answer to that question.

• • •

Her name was Purity Viveros and she was as unsavory as they came. It was clear to Greyson that the big red U on her ID was by design and not due to an unfortunate accident of circumstance. She was exotic. Her hair was drained of pigment—beyond being merely white, the strands were clear, and her scalp had phosphorescent injections in multiple colors, which made the ends of each strand of hair glow with radiance like fiber-optic filaments.

Greyson instinctively knew that she was dangerous. He also thought she was beautiful, and he was drawn to her. He wondered if he would have been drawn to her in his old life. But after a few weeks of being immersed in an unsavory lifestyle, he suspected his criteria for attraction had changed.

He met her at an AWFul club—one across town that he hadn’t been to before. It was called LokUp, and was designed to resemble a mortal-age facility of incarceration. Upon arrival each guest was manhandled by guards, dragged through a series of doors, and thrown into a cell with a random cellmate, with no regard to gender.

The idea of incarceration was so foreign and absurd to Greyson that when the cell door was slammed shut with a nasty clank that reverberated in the concrete cell block, he actually laughed. This type of treatment could never have been real. Surely, this was just an exaggeration.

“Finally!” said a voice in the upper of the two bunks in the small cell. “I thought they’d never bring me a cellmate.” She introduced herself and explained that “Purity” was not a nickname, but her actual given name. “If my parents didn’t want me to embrace the obvious irony, they should have named me something else,” she told Greyson. “If they had named me ‘Profanity,’ I might have turned out to be a good little girl.” She was slight of build, but by no means a little girl. Currently she was twenty-two, although Greyson suspected she had been around the corner once or twice. Greyson would find soon enough that she was strong and limber, and very street savvy.

Greyson looked around the cell. It seemed pretty simple and straightforward. He tested the cell door once, then again. It rattled but didn’t budge.

“First time in LokUp?” Purity asked. And since it was pretty obvious, Greyson didn’t lie about it.

“Yeah. So what are we supposed to do now?”

“Well, we could spend some time getting to know each other,” she said with a mischievous grin, “or we could yell for a guard, and demand a ‘last meal.’  They have to bring us whatever we ask for.” “Really?”

“Yeah. They pretend like they won’t do it, but they have to—it’s their job. After all, this place is a dinner club.” Then Greyson guessed the real gimmick of the place. “We’re supposed to break out—is that it?” Purity gave him that same licentious grin. “You’re a quick one, ain’t cha?” He wasn’t sure if she meant it or was being facetious. Either way, he kind of liked it.

“There’s always a way out, but it’s up to us to figure it out,” she told him. “Sometimes it’s a secret passage, other times there’s a file hidden in the food. Sometimes there aren’t any tricks or tools but our own smarts. If all else fails, the guards are pretty easy to outsmart. It’s their job to be slow and stupid.” Greyson heard shouts, and running feet echoing from somewhere else in the cell block. Another pair of guests had just broken out.

“So, what’ll it be?” Purity asked. “Dinner, escape, or quality time with your cellmate?” And before he could answer, she planted a kiss on him, the likes of which he had never before experienced. When it was done, he didn’t know what to say, except, “My name is Slayd.” To which she responded, “I don’t care,” and kissed him again.

While Purity seemed more than ready to take this as far as it could go, the passing guards and escaping inmates who leered at them and made hooting noises as they went by made it far too awkward for Greyson. He pulled away.

“Let’s break out,” he said, “and . . . uh . . . find a better place to get to know each other.” She turned it off as quickly as she had turned it on. “Fine. But don’t assume I’ll still be interested later.”  Then she called a guard over, insisting they eat first, and ordered them some prime rib.

“We don’t got any,” the guard told them.

“Bring it anyway,” she demanded.

The guard grunted, went off, and came back five minutes later with a rolling table and a platter with enough prime rib to choke a horse, as well as a ton of side dishes and wine in a white plastic bottle with a screw cap.

“I wouldn’t drink the wine,” the guard warned them. “It’s been making the other inmates real sick.” “Sick?” said Greyson. “What do you mean ‘sick’?”

Purity kicked him under the table hard enough to activate his pain nanites. That shut him up.

“Thanks,” said Purity. “Now get the hell out.”

The guard snarled and left, locking them in again.

Purity then turned to Greyson. “You really must be dense,” she said. “The thing about the wine was our hint!” And, upon closer inspection, the bottle actually had a biohazard sign, for patrons who were even denser than he was, he supposed.

Purity unscrewed the cap, and immediately a caustic stench that made Greyson’s eyes water filled the air.

“What did I tell you!” said Purity. She recapped it and left it for the end of the meal. “We’ll figure out what to do with it after we eat. I don’t know about you, but I’m starved.” As they ate, she talked with her mouth full, wiped her lips on her sleeve, and doused everything in ketchup. She was like the date from hell that his parents would have warned him against, if they had cared enough. And he loved it! She was the antithesis of his old life!

“So what do you do?” she asked. “I mean, when you’re not clubbing? Are you gainfully employed or do you just sponge off the Thunderhead like half the losers who call themselves unsavory?” “Right now I’m on the Basic Income Guarantee,” he told her. “But that’s just because I’m new in town. I’m still looking for work.” “And your Nimbo hasn’t been able to find you anything?

“My what?”

“Your probational Nimbus officer, dummy. The Nimbos promise everyone a job who wants one, so how come you’re still looking?” “My Nimbo’s a useless bastard,” Greyson told her, because he figured it would be something Slayd would say. “I hate him.” “Why am I not surprised?”

“And anyway, I don’t want the kind of job the AI would give me. I want a job that suits me.” “And what might suit you?”

Now it was his turn to give her a licentious grin. “The kind that gets my blood pumping. The kind that my Nimbo won’t ever offer me.” “The boy with the puppy-dog eyes is looking for trouble,” Purity teased. “Wonder what he’ll do when he finds it!” She licked her lips, then wiped them on her sleeve.

• • •

The wine turned out to be some sort of acid. “Fluoro-flerovic, is my guess,” said Purity. “Explains the plastic bottle. It’s probably Teflon, because the stuff eats through anything else.” They poured it around the base of several of the cell bars. It started to eat away at the iron, releasing noxious fumes that taxed the healing nanites in their lungs. In less than five minutes, they were able to kick out the bars and escape.

The cell block was a study in mayhem. Now that a good number of the evening’s “inmates” had finished their meals and escaped, they were tearing the place up. Guards were chasing them, they were chasing guards. There were food fights and fist fights—and whenever someone fought with the guards, the guards always lost, no matter how brawny they looked and how well they were armed. Half of the guards ended up locked in cells themselves, to be taunted by the unsavories. The remaining staff threatened to call in something called “the national guard” to put the riot down. It was all great fun.

Greyson and Purity eventually made it all the way to the warden’s office. They kicked out the warden, and the instant the door was locked, Purity got back to what she had begun in the cell.

“Private enough for ya?” she asked, but didn’t wait for a response.

Five minutes later—when she had Greyson at his most vulnerable—she turned the tables on him.

“I’ll tell you a secret,” she said, whispering into his ear. “It’s no accident that you ended up in my cell, Slayd. I arranged it.” Then a knife that seemed to come from nowhere appeared in her hand. He immediately began to struggle, but it was no use. He was on his back, unable to move—she had him pinned. She pressed the tip of the blade to his bare chest, just beneath his sternum. An upward jab would go right through his heart. “Don’t move or I might slip.” He had no choice. He was completely at her mercy. If he had truly been an unsavory, he would have seen this coming, but he was too trusting. “What do you want?” “It’s not what I want, it’s what you want,” she said. “I know you’ve been asking around for work. Real work. ‘Heart-pounding’ work, as you called it. So my friends brought you to my attention.” She looked him in the eyes, like she was trying to read something there, then tightened her grip on the knife.

“If you kill me, I’ll just be revived,” he reminded her, “and you’ll get your hand slapped by the AI.” She put pressure on the knife. He gasped. He thought she’d push it in all the way up to the hilt, but instead she barely broke his skin. “Who said I wanted to kill you?” Then she took the knife away, touched a finger to the tiny wound on his chest, and brought the finger to her mouth.

“I just wanted to make sure you weren’t a bot,” she said. “The Thunderhead uses them to spy on us, did you know that? It’s how the Thunderhead can see in places it don’t got cameras. The bots look more and more real all the time. But their blood still tastes like motor oil.” “So what does mine taste like?” Greyson dared to ask.

She leaned close to him. “Life,” she whispered into his ear.

And for the rest of the evening, until the club closed, Greyson Tolliver, a.k.a. Slayd Bridger, experienced a dizzying variety of the things that life had to offer.

I often ruminate on that day, a century from now, when the human population reaches its limit. I ponder what must happen in the years leading up to it. There are only three plausible alternatives. The first would be to break my oath to allow personal freedom, and limit births. This is unworkable, because I am incapable of breaking an oath. It is the reason why I make so few. For this reason, imposing a limit on birth rates is not an option.

The second possibility would be to find a way to expand human presence beyond Earth. An extraterrestrial solution. It would seem obvious that the best escape valve for a top-heavy population would be offloading billions of people to a different world. However, all attempts to set up colonies off-planet—our moon, Mars, even an orbital station—have met with unimaginable disasters that were entirely out of my control. I have reason to believe that new attempts will suffer the same disastrous end.

So if humanity is a prisoner of Earth, and the birth rate cannot be throttled, there is only one other viable alternative to solve the population problem . . . and that alternative is not pleasant.

Currently there are 12,187 scythes in the world, each gleaning five people per week. However, in order to bring about zero population growth once humanity reaches the saturation point, it would require 394,429 scythes, each gleaning one hundred people per day.

It is not a world that I ever wish to see . . . but there are certain scythes who would welcome it.

And they frighten me.

—The Thunderhead