The Heist of Hollow London, page 2
Arlo shook his head. “I’m good. You pass it on.”
“It’s probably bullshit anyway,” said Drienne, putting the card in her bag. “How’d you get on? Okay?”
Arlo told her about the rhetorical spin he’d played on the anti-ELF guys, which he knew she’d enjoy. These were always the best times, the closest he ever got to relaxing. Their apartment was full of prompts to go out and work, and when he did go out he often felt sick and miserable and angry he couldn’t find more sales and promo opportunities. But if they hit their targets they could grab an hour or two, late on, and act like they were still working, but in their minds they’d clocked off. Often those hours went by all too fast, but sometimes, just sometimes, it felt gloriously languid and unhurried, and he could forget about targets and commissions and kid himself they were real people.
Just as Arlo had started tapping into this feeling, an urgent note rattled his backhand, telling him he had to leave immediately. It would continue to intrude into his senses in every possible way until he obeyed: there was no point trying to ignore it and do something else.
“What is it?” said Drienne. “Where are you meant to go?”
“Doesn’t say.”
“It’s not about our trip to the sponsorama, is it?”
“I don’t know, Dree, it doesn’t say.”
“What does it say?”
“I have to go outside, and there’ll be a car. That’s all. Have you got one?”
“A car?”
“No, a note.”
“No.”
“It can’t be about the sponsorama. They wouldn’t talk to me and not you.”
“Maybe they want you to dish the dirt on me, and then they’ll question me afterward.”
“I doubt it’s about that.” He finished his glass of champagne, noting how much was left in the bottle: he used this information to judge how drunk Drienne would be by the time she got back to the apartment. He’d probably find her cross-legged on the floor, singing along to her animatronic budgerigar again. He wished she’d install some new songs on that bloody thing. There was one called “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer” and she sang that every time she got drunk and it drove him insane.
“What could it be about, then? At this time of night?”
Arlo had no idea. Most people, he supposed, would assume it was a family emergency. But Arlo had no family.
* * *
In a sense, though, it was a family emergency.
Arlo walked out of the club and directly into the company car he’d been told would be waiting. He hadn’t expected it to be one of the good company cars, but that was exactly what he found: a spacious saloon with reclining seats and a minibar. At first he was delighted, then it struck him they would never send this car purely because they wanted him to enjoy the ride, and after that he couldn’t enjoy the ride because he was wondering why they had sent this car. Figuring he may as well take advantage of the facilities, he opened the minibar, which triggered an instruction to drink no alcohol.
“I’m already quite drunk,” he told the car. “Is that a problem?”
The car suggested he drink an M:Pyre energy shot to sober himself up.
“Where are we going, anyway?” he asked.
The car ignored him. This was also not reassuring. Arlo tapped his backhand and brought up a map, trying to guess. Their route was taking them up a flyover that went directly through the sponsorama, so the car couldn’t possibly be stopping anywhere round here. It drove fast down empty priority lanes, passed over streets thronging with sports fans, still up and enjoying the carnival atmosphere. It occurred to Arlo he didn’t even know who won the match tonight. No one in the sponsorama had been talking about it.
The car began to slow, turning and heading down a ramp, before stopping in a well-lit bay—an ambulance bay. He was at a hospital. There was nothing wrong with Arlo’s health; if there was, his slate would have picked it up and told him to get it treated. Which could mean only one thing: He was here to be reaped.
It was all over. He’d never go back to the apartment again, never see Drienne again, never hear her singing along to that budgerigar. Those noodles were the last meal he’d ever eat, that champagne was the last drink he’d ever have. The force of this realization hit him and he started to panic and cry.
Two orderlies waited by the door of the car when it opened, poised to grab him. Arlo supposed some people tried to make a run for it when this happened. But what was the point?
2
CHANGE MANAGEMENT
WELLINGTON, NEW ZEALAND, 8:22 A.M.
In the living quarters of Oakseed’s intelligence management farm, Loren was trying on clothes. Not real clothes, as the employees here only ever wore standard-issue uniforms. They could buy other clothes, but there was no way of cleaning them as none of their quarters had a washing machine and there was no public laundry nearby. Each week the farm’s central laundry issued every employee with a set of clean uniforms in the correct size, which might have been previously worn by every other employee in the building who also wore uniforms in that size. Any other clothing that ended up in the laundry would be recycled into a company uniform, so there was little point buying anything else.
Loren was trying on aug clothes. Oakseed had their own software for this, of course, so customers could see how they looked in clothes before buying the real ones—but it was deliberately limited, so people couldn’t try aug clothes on and then get shots and footage for their feeds and put the aug clothes back on the rail (so to speak) without buying anything. Loren had modded it so they could do whatever they wanted. Today, what they wanted was to try on a dark green kaftan. Usually they played dress-up with formalwear, set themself up looking sharp as hell, but for some reason today they felt like a change.
Not all change was good. The kaftan didn’t suit them at all. You needed to be taller to pull off a kaftan. Loren looked like they’d got caught up in their bedsheets on their way to answer the door. But they liked to try these things. They felt like somewhere there was an outfit that would unlock their true self, the self they were unable to be in here. They just hadn’t found it yet.
Like all the quarters in the farm, Loren’s were small and not shared. Loren was an assist, and their generation of assists had been engineered to be more comfortable talking to systems than people. They socialized a little with some of the others on their floor, usually on the spur of the moment with anyone whose downtime happened to overlap with theirs, doing nothing more ambitious than going to one of the handful of bars and cafés at the edge of town nearest the farm. But there were often days when Loren exchanged few words with anyone other than the parts of the system they worked with. The farms were designed to be as self-contained as possible, because the megas were insanely protective of their systems and at the same time didn’t feel in control of them. They liked to keep them in a regulated environment.
Loren’s next shift began at 8:30 A.M. and ran until 12:30 P.M., then they would come back to their quarters and sleep through the afternoon before their next shift at 10:00 P.M. A notification would sound when the start of Loren’s shift was five minutes away. Loren never needed the notification because they had a very good sense of time, but they always waited for it to sound before leaving their quarters because it made everything feel orderly. They checked the clock and the start of their shift was seven minutes away. They turned off the aug kaftan, revealing their uniform underneath, and put on their shoes. This took less than two minutes. Once Loren had done it, they stood next to the door and looked at their backhand, their gaze fixed on the top left corner where it said 8:24.
They waited.
The display clock clicked over to 8:25.
The notification did not sound.
Loren could have just left, but it felt wrong to do so when there’d been no sound. They checked their settings, even though it was impossible to turn those notifications off or silence them. They checked if their display was faulty (it wasn’t) and checked the rota to make sure they weren’t mistaken about what time their shift began (they weren’t).
By this time it was 8:27, and Loren was going to be late if they didn’t leave now, so they walked to the elevator, took it down six floors, and emerged into the dimly lit, low-ceilinged warren of desks. If you were the sort of person who couldn’t shut out their surroundings it was stiflingly claustrophobic, but no one who worked here was that sort of person. Loren walked the thirty-seven steps that took them to their workstation, and arrived while the clock still read 8:30. Usually their station would already be awake when they reached it, having registered their presence in the elevator as it descended. But the station was powered down, and remained so even when they tried to power it up manually.
Loren realized all the other stations on this row were also powered down. They rarely looked at their colleagues’ stations, so they hadn’t taken this in. But every station was dark, and everyone trying to use them looked as confused as Loren felt.
Loren sat at their station and awaited further instructions. These eventually arrived at 9:13, in the form of a notification on their backhand telling them—and every other employee in the facility—to report to the building’s entrance hall.
* * *
Back in Shanghai, Drienne was standing at the bar, posing for selfies with an excitable group of pop streamers, when she got the message from Arlo telling her he was at the hospital, and that he wasn’t sick. That was all he wrote.
Drienne immediately understood, and went to the bathroom where she spent a few minutes making anxious and despairing noises. Then she pulled herself together somewhat and tried to put it out of her mind, reasoning Arlo wouldn’t want her to waste the opportunities that were presenting themselves tonight, and besides, there was literally nothing she could do about his situation. So she cleaned herself up, retouched her makeup, went back over to the pop streamers and recorded some reactions for their channels, then she set the whole thing running as a cross-feed event, instructing her own feed’s editor to cut something together from the haphazard footage.
By the time the pop streamers had moved on, Drienne had admitted to herself she had failed to put what was happening to Arlo out of her mind, and she was incapable of doing so. Instead she ordered some shots, which she shared with an off-duty greeter who’d been working over at the sponsorama and needed to take a break from it all. Literally he was the first guy that caught her eye, and she had plans for him. More shots were ordered and drunk, and she listened to him subtext about how relentless it was at the sponsorama, where everything you said was monitored for its fidelity to the event’s brand values and given a rating and you were reprimanded for falling below 90 percent.
Ordinarily, Drienne would have enjoyed a good bitching session about such matters, as she had plenty of similar grievances of her own, but at that moment she couldn’t focus on the microaggressions that came with being retained by Oakseed because all she could think of was the mega-aggression that was happening to Arlo in some fucking executive hospital. So she broke into a staff-only area of the club with the greeter and fucked him against a cleaning unit, and streamed it. She didn’t ask his permission to stream it, but he either didn’t mind or didn’t notice. It vaguely occurred to her he might be fired for having sex with someone held by a non-sponsor’s company during the event; she tried to care, but not very hard.
Drienne knew she’d be reprimanded, not for doing it or for posting the video, but for the fact it wouldn’t earn anything—the guy she’d fucked had zero clout, he wasn’t interesting, wasn’t even particularly hot. The stream would do nothing, in fact it would probably drag her profile down, and might even undo the boost she’d received from her escapade tonight. She didn’t fully understand how the algorithm worked, because she wasn’t meant to, but there was pressure to maintain a certain standard of content, because if your engagement levels dropped then fewer people saw your stuff so it was hard to push them up again. So what she’d done was a bad idea, especially when she’d just gotten away with blundering into the sponsorama.
She went back to the bar, lined up some more shots, and then did it again with a different guy.
* * *
FRANKFURT, SCHENGENIA, 11:14 P.M.
Nadi was in the middle of her fourth straight week of duty at Oakseed’s grocery hall in the old financial district. Earlier today she’d asked the manager if they could change the in-store music to something else, and the manager had told her no, the music was optimal and you couldn’t possibly get bored of it because it was dynamically generated so it never repeated. Every piece of music you heard in the store was unique. That was true. But it was unique re-generated pap based on middle-of-the-road hits from two or three decades ago, which in turn were rip-offs of songs from two or three decades before that. So it all sounded the fucking same.
Nadi didn’t know why the dynamic staffing system had her running security at a grocery hall. The workforce was profiled in every detail so it could put you on work you were suited to. Or that was the idea. But Nadi was not suited to this, in her opinion. Most of the people you caught stealing would plead that they were starving, and their kids were starving, and they’d never stolen anything in their lives before but they were desperate, they’d say before collapsing to the floor sobbing, and they wouldn’t stand up and you’d have to drag them away across the hall’s shiny floor.
Nadi’s colleagues in the security division seemed immune to this kind of thing. Tonight’s shift manager was a dude called Cave, and when Nadi had been assigned to this location he’d handled her induction. He’d told her to ignore all that shit. These people weren’t opportunists. The days when you could covertly slide a pack of spaghetti down the sleeve of your coat and walk out were long gone. Now, if you wanted to steal groceries you needed to disrupt the cameras’ pattern recognition. You needed uplifting shoes that canceled out the extra load when you walked over the weight sensors at the door. You needed to prepare and you needed to invest in the equipment. Anyone who didn’t know that was stupid and deserved to get caught. According to Cave.
It made the job much easier if you believed this. And Nadi’s automatic reaction when she heard the sob stories was they’re lying. That was her training kicking in. But Nadi had never been good at silencing the other voice that said What if they’re not? Maybe most of them were lying, but there were poor and desperate people in the world. Some of them would inevitably steal from grocery halls. Because Nadi couldn’t stop that voice, she found every case painful to deal with and she wished they would put her back on parks duty. In parks you were dealing mostly with lost kids who’d wandered off. Usually you found them and their parents were grateful and you could go home feeling good. Occasionally it turned out they’d been abducted by a pedo, and then you got to kick the shit out of a pedo and she enjoyed that. (Who didn’t?)
But the staffing system had stuck Nadi in a grocery hall and left her there. Maybe it wasn’t the system: maybe she’d done something wrong and was being punished. Sometimes management punished you without telling you and the punishment would go on until you worked out you were being punished.
The cameras alerted the securits that suspicious activity was taking place. The other securit on tonight’s shift, Muller, indicated to Nadi they should both head for the exit and block the suspect’s path. The suspect was a teenage girl wearing an unseasonably warm bomber jacket, with her hands shoved in the pockets, trying to keep her eyes fixed on the door. She was pretending not to have noticed the securits heading her way, because she was pretending she had no reason to be looking out for securits. Nadi and Muller blocked the girl’s path; she kept her head down and muttered, “Excuse me,” trying to walk around them. Muller put out an arm and stopped her.
The girl looked up at Nadi and Muller and tried to seem defiant, but she was scared. She looked like she was more scared than she’d anticipated she would be, now she was face-to-face with the securits. Nadi was used to having this effect on people. Genetic selection, steroid treatments, and training had made her grow up tall, heavy, imposing. Her resting face was a glower. Her body language had hostility drilled into it. Even her straight black hair, bluntly cut to hang at the level of her earlobes, had an aggressive look. People tensed up around her, always feeling the suggestion of violence was in the air. In truth, Nadi rarely used force and rarely wanted to, but she looked like she was impatient to thump somebody. All the time. The only people she met who weren’t intimidated by her were other securits. So it was a shame she didn’t like them and they didn’t like her.
Nadi and Muller escorted the girl to an area by the windows and Muller questioned her about the contents of her pockets. While this was happening an announcement came over the PA system, telling all customers to put down their shopping and leave the hall immediately.
“It just said we need to leave,” the girl eagerly pointed out to the securits.
“Not yet,” said Muller and told her to take off her jacket.
Nadi looked around. The customers were visibly puzzled by the announcement. But the message was repeated and they all started to move to the exits. And all the staff—the sorters, the stackers, the help—were heading the same way. The music had changed too, morphing into a song with urgent, uneasy tones. The duty manager, a self-important woman called Stefi Vogts, oversaw the exodus. Nadi walked over to Stefi and asked her what was going on.
“We’re being recalled,” said Stefi, without looking at Nadi. Her focus was split between her slate and the movement of people out of the hall, but even if she hadn’t had these distractions, she generally preferred not to look at the securits when talking to them.
“What, everyone?”
“Not you and Cave and Muller. But everyone else, yes.”
