Sycamore (Near-Future Dystopia) (14 page)

Another 4 million consumers were seeded while Kurt raced around the city, bringing the total past 15 million, but for one beautiful day he forgot about Sycamore and just drove. He felt like a child — a child in a fast car. Evening came. Kurt was smiling and tired when he pulled up at his old apartment to spend one last night in a poor man’s bed.

~

Kurt arrived late at the protest on Thursday morning but still managed to find a parking space near the action. There looked to be around forty protestors — a poor turnout by most standards. Before leaving the car Kurt searched through his SycaNews app for stories about the protest. He found one.

The demonstrators were complaining about a newly-constructed vertical pig-farm that was about to open in the city. An informative article from earlier in the morning left Kurt wondering why they were upset.

“Pork Towers will support 120,000 live units staggered across all stages of the production cycle,” it read, “from gestation to packaging through rearing and destruction. Lauded as the ultimate in efficient food production, vertical farms provide a cheap source of calories and delicious animal protein for all ages. As with ScranTime’s prior developments, cage sizes in Pork Towers exceed minimum welfare regulations and allow each unit of livestock enough space to perform 3/4 of a full turn. It is important to remind opponents of the project — which has created 2400 jobs — that pigs are only as intelligent as 4-year-old children, many of whom spend hours each day in playpens no larger than the tower’s communal cages.”

No wonder so few people had bothered to turn up, Kurt thought; it was a protest against progress. Between the road and the square where the protest was taking place stood a small table littered with informational leaflets and posters of pigs in dirty cages. Two people staffed the table — a man and a woman. The man was looking at something on his phone, a dead giveaway that he wasn’t seeded and probably the reason he was on table duty. The woman stepped out to greet Kurt. He sighed. She seemed like the militant type.

“Are you here to protest?”

“I’m just watching,” he said. “Neutral observer.”

“How can you be neutral when this is going on in our city? Look!” She pointed to Pork Towers. “At least sign the petition.”

“Why should I?” said Kurt. He instantly wished he could take the words back.

The look in the woman’s eyes changed, like she was entering an angry trance. “People who torture and kill animals for fun are locked up, right?”

“Um, yeah?”

“And people who torture or kill other people are locked up, too, no?”

“Obviously…”

“But if someone was to imprison, brutally kill and then eat their human victim, that person wouldn’t just be locked up. They would be thrown in a padded cell because they were so obviously evil.”

Kurt’s eyebrows gave a half shrug.

“Think about what’s going on here. A multinational corporation builds a tower and fills it with these intelligent animals who have feelings and thoughts and complex social structures. The corporation locks them in tiny, crowded cages and treats them like inanimate objects. Then it slaughters them. They scream and try to escape, you know, but we’re supposed to act like that doesn’t mean anything because it would be too inconvenient to think of livestock as sentient beings. The clue is in the name: these animals are just units of stock that happen to be alive.”

The woman paused for breath and continued. “Anyway, the pigs are imprisoned, mistreated and then brutally killed. Sounds familiar, except the corporation doesn’t eat its victims... it chops them into sausages and markets them to children. Yet this corporation — created and operated by people, remember — is somehow immune from morality. If ScranTime’s CEO was to kill a dog he would be in trouble. But when his company builds a killing tower for 120,000 of the dog’s social and intellectual superiors, our city gives him massive tax breaks and thanks him for his business.” She inhaled sharply again after the long and rambling rant then shook her head to compose herself. “Everything is wrong here.”

“You’re right,” said Kurt, “a lot of things
are
wrong. So why would I worry about pigs?”

“That’s how the moneymen want you to think,” interjected the woman’s calmer male partner, finished with his phone and keen to win Kurt over. “That they’re “
just animals
.” When a child hurts an animal it’s cause for concern. So why here, when the corporate establishment does it, should we look the other way? Because their cruelty is driven by the profit motive? Shouldn’t that make it worse? First it doesn’t matter how we treat animals; then it doesn’t matter how we treat enemy combatants; then it doesn’t matter how we treat criminals. Guess who’s next?”

“Me, I suppose. I’ll be chopped into sausages unless I sign a petition against vertical farms.” Kurt hadn’t set out to offend the campaigners, but they were being ridiculous.

The man pointed to the imposing tower. “
That
is not a farm.”

“And
I
am not a pig.” Kurt knocked on the table and walked away from the crazy people.

He retired to his car’s side of the road and watched the demonstration from there, zoomed-in to a decent view. Much to his surprise, no one was being ejected; either the drones were broken or The Seed had spread wider than he realised. It was certainly true that a disproportionate percentage of people were seeded in big cities — where there was never a shortage of trends to be followed and appearances to be kept up — but he hadn’t expected so many political activists to have joined Sycamore’s ranks.

And then, finally, some excitement. Four police officers approached the demonstration and each unceremoniously removed a protestor. They marched to the edge of the square, just opposite the point from which Kurt was observing with his arms folded, and explained that the protestors would be committing a crime if they re-entered the square. Three of them argued halfheartedly and relented when the police raised their batons.

The fourth, the only female in the group, slapped one of the police officers in the face. Kurt didn’t know what she was thinking but he was excited. This was the kind of action that could spark something big. The other three unseeded demonstrators fled and the woman was left in a circle of four affronted police officers. Two tackled her and held her hands behind her back while another reached for his taser.

Kurt knew that if they went through with it there would be a riot when the video surfaced, but his subconscious also seemed to know that it was wrong to stand by as an essentially innocent woman fell victim to police brutality. His mind wanted to be quiet but his voice wouldn’t listen.

“I’m recording this,” it shouted to the police. “And I don’t think Isaiah Amos or anyone else would be pleased to see it.”

“You stay the hell out of this, son.”

“Son?” Kurt crossed the road and looked straight at the recalcitrant officer.

The man stared back and gasped when Kurt’s info appeared. “Oh, Mr Jacobs! I’m so… I didn’t know it was you. There’s no need for this to escalate.” The policeman turned to the woman he had been about to tase and sheepishly apologised for his actions. He and his colleagues walked away. Kurt had no idea what had just happened.

~

Kurt hurried towards his car and realised that he had broken Amos’s sole instruction to keep his head down. As it went, he could hardly have garnered more attention if he had tried. From nowhere a hand landed on his shoulder and spun him around.

“You! This is all your fault.”

It was the woman. She still looked angry, but face-to-face she looked a decade younger — practically a girl — and she had the darkest eyes Kurt had ever seen. Wary of staring too long, he said the only thing he could think of: "I don't know you."

"And I'm fine, thanks for asking. See what you’ve done with this stupid chip?”

“It’s not a chip,” he said automatically. “It’s a Seed.”

“That’s all you have to say?”

“Look, none of what’s happening over there is my fault. I only found out about this new law yesterday and I came down hoping to see resistance. You’re the only one who put up a fight.”

The anger in the girl’s face faded. “I suppose you did sort of save my ass. So did you sign the petition? Pork Towers is symbolic of everything that’s going wrong these days. What do you think?”

Kurt couldn’t face another argument about pigs, Happy or otherwise, and especially not with as pretty a firecracker as this one. He exaggerated his concern. “Yeah, it’s a bad idea. Slippery slope. Anyway, how did you know who I was? I mean, I know the cop said my name but how did you know The Seed was my idea? You don’t seem like a Sycamore fan.”

“I’m a trainee journalist. I covered the Talent Search,” she explained, a hint of amusement creeping through the words. “That was some outfit.”

“I thought so, too. Did you like my pitch?”

“You mean the pitch as distinct from the idea you were pitching? I guess. It certainly had more spirit than any of the others. But I couldn’t help feel that as horrible a concept as a consumer microchip didn’t deserve as impassioned a defence as you gave it. And you did give Amos some pretty messed up ideas about how to maximise revenue. You even said The Seed would “
change the world while it’s taking it over.
” You’re more than complicit here. You’re responsible.”

“I said what I had to say to make sure that I won,” Kurt admitted. “But he would have come up with it all anyway.”

She liked his honesty. “I’m going to the bus stop. Are you going to wait with me?”

Kurt nodded and followed. He wasn’t sure if any of what she had just said was a compliment but the invitation to the bus stop tipped him towards a maybe. “The concept is still sound,” he insisted, “it’s just being poorly applied. I had nothing to do with this new law. I just wanted to make people’s lives easier.”

“The road to hell is paved with good intentions,” said the girl. “This fascist law against public protest might be the worst thing so far but it’s only the start.”

“The worst thing so far is the ads,” Kurt argued, ignoring her warning of things to come.

“I can only imagine.”

He shook his head definitively. “No, you couldn’t
possibly
imagine. It’s advertising gone wild. They have girls whispering in my ears when I walk past a store, telling me to buy more of what the Lenses saw me eating for breakfast. Then they have girls who look like girls…” Kurt trailed off. He couldn’t even bring himself to tell her what Sycamore was doing in the adult market, so ashamed was he to have given them the technology they needed to do it.

“Advertising is bad whether it’s targeted or not,” she said. “It feeds on our insecurities and when we don’t have enough of them it makes new ones. They tell us we can’t be happy without whatever garbage they’re trying to sell. If we don't buy it, everyone will hate us. It's reductionist, it's invasive, and it's everywhere.”

“Seriously, you should see it from this side of the Lenses.”

“I’d rather not,” she replied, wrinkling her nose in a way Kurt couldn’t help but like. “But if you think that ads are the worst of it you need to stop and think about the whole privacy side of things. I know how men like Amos work: they look out at the world from their ivory towers and they don’t see people, they see consumers.”

Kurt didn’t say anything.

“Consumers and their privacy are easily parted,” she continued. “Look at the tracking. First it’s opt-in, then it’s opt-out, then you don't have a choice. What then? I don’t even want to think what it’ll be like when they try to digitise the money supply.”

The girl seemed to know an awful lot about things that hadn’t been announced. “Do you have someone on the inside?” Kurt asked.

“Not yet. Don’t
you
worry about these things, though? Like what would happen if they decided to turn someone’s chip off and the person couldn’t buy anything? And the keys… what if someone at Sycamore decides they don’t want you getting into your house one night? Or into your car? Everyone is giving so much power over to this corporation without even realising it.”

“I’ve asked those questions to Amos and I’ve answered them for the press. There’s no danger of Sycamore cutting people off. The consequences would be dire. It would be CR suicide.”

“What the hell is CR?”

“Consumer Relations.”

She rolled her eyes. “Anyway, did you ever stop to think about the consequences of
your
actions when you were designing the chip in the first place?”

“Of course not,” said Kurt, like the answer should have been as obvious to her as it was to him. “I’m a how guy. I was focused on the problems.”

“Which were?”

“Many. Inefficiency, protectionism, technological stagnation....”

“Those weren't problems. Those were abstract concerns dreamt up by people with nothing more important to worry about, and in tackling them all you've done is create real problems. It hardly seemed possible that power could be any more concentrated but you've managed it. People who won't take the chip are going to be treated like criminals, and people who do take it are selling themselves into slavery.
Buying
themselves into slavery! Once you're chipped, Sycamore owns you. They literally own your memories. And once Amos pushes for cash to be abandoned he'll be in full control of your assets.”

Kurt wanted to remind her again that it was a Seed, not a chip, but the look in her eyes hinted against doing so. He stayed quiet.

“Those
are problems,” she reiterated. “And not the kind you can hack your way out of. By the way, how come no one has tried to hack Sycamore? If someone got in they could put all sorts of stuff in the sky and mess with the ads. It seems like too good a target for people to ignore.”

Kurt had the answer to that one. “The guy who did the security is the best in the world. He’s an asshole, but the kind you’re always sort of glad to have on your side. I know him from before.”

As Kurt finished speaking, the bus arrived and the girl stepped forward. “Interesting meeting you,” she said.