Sycamore (Near-Future Dystopia) (28 page)

Kurt widened his eyes to tell her yes. She looked at both Amos and Colin. “Surely you can’t reduce human interaction and nuance like this? We are complicated and complex creatures, no?”

Colin opened his mouth to answer but Amos beat him to it. “No is right. Consumers aren’t complicated in our world, Miss Valentino, they are predictable creatures of habit and conditioned reflex. Convoluted bundles of likes and dislikes. Zeros and ones. Thoughts and actions. Consumers tell us what they like — they
click
what they like — and they ignore what they don’t. We can tell what they’re thinking by looking at what they’re doing. There are a lot of variables, certainly, but not too many. Why is it believable that man can decode his own genome but not his own social behaviour? There can never be too many variables.”

“But these variables your are using to decide how valuable someone is… they have been arbitrarily plucked from the thinnest of air,” said Stacy. She was maintaining the accent but Kurt worried that she was speaking both too well and too frankly.

“We’re not deciding anything,” Amos insisted. “The system does the work. Welcome to the future. Welcome to cyberocracy.”

Kurt could no longer even try to hide his disdain. “This is nothing like cyberocracy. This is just clever people programming computers to make stupid decisions!”

“As good a definition as
I’ve
heard,” Amos chuckled.

“Shut up,” Kurt snapped. “Cyberocracy would be asking computer systems to calculate things we can’t — to follow trends and measure things in realtime. We could be programming these systems to intelligently manage the earth’s natural resources but instead Colin is sitting here building ways to rank people by his own demented conception of social value. Look at him, he knows nothing about the real world. He doesn’t even have any friends! How can he run Forest?”

Colin, only a few feet away, peered at Kurt through sad eyes. Kurt looked away; they sickened him. “I take back what I said about you being clever,” he said. “You’re a moron with skills.”

Amos rushed to follow Kurt back to the elevator, leaving Stacy to awkwardly wave goodbye to Colin. She caught up with them mid-argument.

“...nications Colin and his staff look up to you like a god, Kurt. Your Seed enabled them to do things they had never even dreamed about. Why would you speak to him like that? I’ll be expecting you to apologise personally.”

“Expect away,” said Kurt. “I take it Gary from Marketing has a floor, too?”

“No, I had to let him go. Sycamore doesn’t really need to be marketed anymore, you know?” Amos called the elevator’s doors to close without selecting a floor.

“What’s next?” asked Stacy.

“I think that’s it for the tour.”

That
couldn’t
be it — they didn’t have anything yet. Kurt encouraged her to press for more. “But you mentioned going upstairs?” she said. “My people would love to know about what you are doing with CrimePrev.”

“Well,” Amos sighed, “CrimePrev exists to further personal and national security. That’s why you can’t go in. They’re looking for unauthorised public gatherings and listening for dissent so it’s all very confidential in nature. I can tell you whatever you want to know, though.”

Kurt didn’t like standing in a stationary elevator but he would rather it was still than descending. All he and Stacy could do now was try to make sure that the next number Amos pressed was a high one.

“Okay. How is the work in CrimePrev monetised?” she asked, knowing full well that it officially wasn’t.

“It’s not. We receive public funding for the public service we provide. Like I say, I can’t show you exactly what they do. But I
could
show you some of the older user-tracking technology if you wish?”

“Yes, I would very much like to see the work of your Data Collection.”

Amos smiled a denial. “I didn’t mean I could take you there. Even Kurt hasn’t been in The Treehouse.”

“Really?” said Kurt. “You want her to go home to Italy and tell them she came to Sycamore HQ and met some talented artists and a sad little man at a desk? We’re so much more than that.” The “we” caught in his throat but it had to be said.

“We’ll see,” Amos replied. “I suppose I can take you to the old map for now. It’s on the way to The Treehouse anyway.” He pushed 23, which was three floors higher than where they were and one above his personal floor. The elevator moved in the right direction.

~

The doors slid open on the 23
^rd
floor and Kurt saw two men he didn’t know standing in front of a wall-sized map covered in flashing lights. Before he got near enough to see what was on the map, Kurt wondered why so much space was wasted on every floor when the artists were hidden down in the basement, slaving away under the soulless lights, packed together like Japanese commuters.

From a few metres away the map explained itself. The lights were consumers, the scale was the North American continent. Bright lights meant a dense concentration of consumers. It brought to Kurt’s mind satellite images of the earth at night. He thought it was a waste of time as well as space and wondered why the men were there.

“This used to be the height of tracking technology,” said Amos, turning his nose up to the map like a smug tabby cat. “Impressive in its day, perhaps, but such crude technology is already operationally obsolete.”

“Do these guys do anything?” asked Kurt.

“Not really. They can use the system to search by name and see where someone is, but that’s about it. It would be as much hassle getting rid of them as keeping them, though, you know?”

The two men pretended they couldn’t hear. Gutless or professional? Kurt couldn’t decide.

“Of course nowadays consumers are no longer removing their Lenses,” Amos told Stacy as they walked back to the elevator, “so not only can we see where they are, we can see what they’re doing and seeing while they’re there. We used the public funding to build a real nationwide grid for CrimePrev — it’s a true reflection of human experience. The big European governments know what we’re doing and they want in.”

“What do the American public think?” she asked.

Amos grinned. “Whatever we want.”

“What do you mean?”

“Consumer opinion is highly malleable. On a broad scale we ensure that society is supportive of Sycamore through our entertainment and news output. When quiet dissent does rear its head, a well-placed ad can appease, divert or distract the problem away.”

“This Treehouse must be some place,” said Stacy. Kurt had instructed her to flatter Amos in hope of getting access and this was the make or break moment. “How is it even possible to monitor so many feeds, let alone deliver such precisely-targeted advertising?”

“Here’s how it works: consumers are assigned to groups. Our matchers work at an individual level within the two most profitable groups, which amount to 20% of consumers. That 20% merits 80% of our attention. The stream of a profitable consumer may be analysed more than someone else’s, but in return they receive the best-suited placements. If they stopped responding then they would no longer be in the profitable 20%. Everyone gets what they want, you see?”

“What kind of groups are you talking about?” Stacy asked, scribbling in her notebook and pretending that everything Amos said wasn’t being recorded by the tiny spy-camera on her eyebrow.

Kurt was ready to pay close attention to the answer; he had never heard any of this, either.

“There are only three main groups,” Amos explained. “Two small and one large. Spenders are targeted with expensive advertising for expensive products. Breathers just really watch TV, chat and spend money playing games and changing their avatars. Losers are at the bottom. We make money from the people at the top and the people at the bottom, the rest not so much. The Breathers — some 80% of our seeded consumers — are largely an inconvenience.”

“Why are you being so candid?” asked Kurt.

Amos shrugged. “We have nothing to hide, hotshot. It’s the European advertisers and governments who will decide whether to let us in, and once they see how we have everything nailed down I’m confident they’ll make the right choice. So anyway, onto the losers. We hit the perverts with sexual ads whenever they’re alone and we get them almost every time. When it comes to males, as well as the perverts we have the drinkers and the gamblers. They find themselves inundated with relevant placements. The click-through rates are just incredible. Advertising works on base needs rather than rationality, so we strike when the iron is hot.”

“Does Sycamore feel no social responsibility not to exacerbate these addictions?” Stacy asked. “What I mean is: do you think it is right to profit from such human misfortune?” She looked up from her notebook to meet Amos’s gaze.

He was semi-annoyed by the question. “It’s an issue of personal choice. I don’t know how you Europeans like to do things but here in America people are free to choose.”

“And on managing the ads...” she began, “do you ever feel that the population is too high for best, how do you say, matching the placements?”

“No. As I said, the feeds of the middle 80% are ignored most of the time.”

“And have you encountered any problems with reduced intelligence in the American public?”

“No.” Amos smiled this time. “More bodies plus less brains equals easy pickings.”

“I don’t follow.”

“Hmm, how can I put this? It’s easy to fool ten idiots, but it’s easier to fool twenty. Because after a while they start fooling each other, you know?”

Stacy smiled and wrote everything down. Amos liked that.

“Okay,” he decided. “You can come into The Treehouse.” He pushed 27, skipping a few mysterious floors, and stood quietly.

The elevator stopped and Amos blocked the door with his arm. “This is awkward,” he said.

“What is?” asked Kurt.

“Well,
you
can’t come.”

Kurt looked at Stacy, at her spy-camera. She was going to see everything. He didn’t need to go in. But that wasn’t the point. Amos didn’t trust him. Okay, he was right to be suspicious, but that wasn’t the point, either.

“It’s nothing personal, hotshot.”

“It’s nothing but personal, you asshole.”

Stacy stepped back against the elevator’s wall.

“I let you put a chip in my hand that had never been tested,” said Kurt. “My chip. My chip that paid for all of this. I put my life in your hands — in my hand! — and you won’t let me in? You’ll let an Italian journalist we’ve known for a few days in, but not me?”

Stacy kicked Kurt in the foot to tell him to shut up. She was almost in and his stupid temper was about to ruin everything.

But Amos didn’t see it like that. He had come around to actively wanting Monica to see The Treehouse because she was interested and she was onside and she was going to write nice things about it — nice things that would help swing European consumer opinion further his way. The Seed was coming to Europe whether the consumers wanted it or not, but they still had to be convinced to take it. Monica’s article for TechItalia was step one towards that end, and he wasn’t going to let Kurt ruin that. It was only Kurt, anyway.

“Fine,” he said eventually. “But I don’t want to hear you moan about anything ever again. Deal?”

“I can’t promise that,” Kurt replied. Stacy kicked him again. “But I’ll try.”

It was good enough. Amos told the doors to open and Kurt froze. Stacy and Amos walked into The Treehouse and still he stood in the elevator, frozen.

“Come on, Kurt,” Amos called. “You can’t see it from there.”

But he could. He
could
see it from there. He could see the wall that covered the circular windows of the building’s most bulbous floor and he would never be able to unsee it however hard he tried.

He took a few steps into the room and looked at the central desk. It was round and full of Minion’s DC staff. His eyes surveyed the men for a few seconds — they were all men — then went straight back to the wall.

“The scale is humbling, no?” said Amos.

Stacy nodded coyly, making sure she was getting the best angles.

“And what do you think, hotshot?”

Kurt tried to tear his eyes away but he couldn’t. Small screens filled the wall — real screens that were as visible to Stacy as they were to him. Piled as high and wide as the eye could see, each screen played for ten seconds then flickered to something else... to someone else’s feed.

The feeds were all raw, showing the world as the UltraLenses saw it before doing their work. The wall had everything: people at work, people staring at blank viewing-walls, people making dinner, people in bed together.

The Treehouse was positioned at the widest point of the building. The wall must have been 40 feet in height and god-only-knew how many in circumference. The ceiling was much higher than the other floors’ but this wasn’t like the other floors. This wasn’t like anything else.

So many vistas. So many eyes. So much power.

An outward-facing ring of 60 DC workers staffed outmoded touchscreen-computers. From that position in the centre of The Treehouse, one man could watch every other… all at once.

Eventually Kurt managed to look at Amos. “It’s like the opposite of The Truman Show,” he said. And then, more poetically: “Orwell on acid.”

Amos beamed, fully approving of the comparisons. “Jacobs says it’s like Orwell on acid,” he called to his staff. His eyes returned to Kurt. “Those guys call this the UV wall, for UltraVista, but now that you mention it I much prefer The Orwell Wall. No... The Orwall!”

Kurt regretted saying anything and turned back to The Orwall. Amos encouraged both he and Stacy to walk around. They did. Kurt was outraged by what he saw and moved quickly from one flickering column to the next.

Stacy, on the other hand, had a job to do. She tried admirably to focus on the things that would upset people most: infants being bathed, couples in bed, the very scale of the room. She also made sure to capture the voyeuristic expressions worn by the DC staff as they peeped through every keyhole on every door across the country. When Stacy squinted her eyes The Orwall looked almost like a quilt, its patches flashing private moments like an epileptic nightmare.