The Heist of Hollow London, page 9
Mia smirked and inclined her head slightly. “You probably could. But if you do this job, and you succeed, not only do you get a cut of the money, but I’ll cancel your debt.”
Loren’s eyebrows raised. “Seriously?”
“You have my word.”
Loren shook their head and laughed—or at least, it was their version of a laugh. To others it just looked like they were grinning and making a clicking noise with their throat. “Fuck. You know we can’t turn that down.” No more routine. They could set their own routine, if they wanted to.
“Look, I get it,” said Mia. “I’m doing all this to buy back the rights to my soul, basically. I’d pay anything for it, although”—and here she went sotto voce, speaking out of the side of her mouth—“don’t tell anyone that, they’ll only put the price up.”
Loren smiled and nodded. Even if Mia was lying. Even if she was going to take all the money and refuse to lib them and laugh in their faces. They still couldn’t turn it down if there was even a chance she was on the level. Otherwise, they’d spend their life wondering if they could’ve been free, if they’d only had the guts to do this thing.
“So,” said Mia, “you’re in?”
“Fuck it. Yes.”
“Great. So, opinions on the plan? I’ve been working on it for years, though I had to adapt it to the current situation—”
“You really want my opinion?”
“Of course. Your experience of Oakseed is much more up to date than mine.”
“You need another guy.”
“For what?”
“You need to fake the brandies’ accreditation so they can get in, and you need to monkey around with the workings of the plant, yeah?”
“Yes.”
“You need an HR guy. They’ll be cheap, they’re usually public facers who’ve been moved inside after getting too old for floor work, and they’re mostly valuable for their knowledge of Oakseed operations and specific workplace dynamics, which is all useless now.”
Mia smiled. “I’m going to fill Drienne in on the plan, and then you can help me buy one.”
10
SECRETLY FRENCH
Education at the Oakseed nurseries had been selective, of course. But outsiders often had mistaken ideas about what the mades were told and what they weren’t. For instance, people were often surprised the mades had been taught about slavery. It was important, Arlo had been told at his nursery, that the mades should understand their own situation was very different from the past victims of slavery, especially under the Atlantic slave trade, which had been a racist endeavor, whereas no such consideration entered into how the mades were treated.
The important distinctions were that the mades had been created, rather than having their freedom taken away, and that their legal status was very different because of the debt system. Each made carried with them the debt incurred by their creation and upbringing, and when it was paid off they were free. (Arlo later learned this used to be called indentured servitude, back when it was legal for nats. Oakseed hadn’t taught him about that.) Arlo’s nursery was sometimes visited by mades who’d paid off their debt, who would talk to the younger ones about how they’d done it. You couldn’t even be reaped if your debt was paid—your donor lost their rights. You really were free.
But the debt was so high. You needed to regularly pull in high levels of commission and be very frugal with your outgoings to have any hope of paying it off. The accounting system was opaque, and it was common for those making good progress toward settling their debt to find surprisingly high charges added to their account for things like medical treatment or legal costs. Drienne had always told Arlo it was futile trying to pay it off, they weren’t meant to ever pay it off, and you’d live a happier life if you gave up on the notion you might. She was adamant the few who’d paid it off had only been allowed to do so to give the rest of them false hope, and to encourage them to work harder. Arlo thought she was probably right.
Even so, Arlo agreed with what the nursery said about slavery: the mades’ situation was different. But at the same time it seemed revealing how the company took such pains to make this clear, rather than assuming it was obvious.
* * *
“There’s something she isn’t telling us,” Drienne said to Arlo as they sat on Mia’s balcony and looked out across the forest. It was a warm early evening and the light rain was turning heavy, pattering on the leaves.
Arlo told her to keep her voice down.
Drienne glanced inside, where Mia had several windows open on her desktop and was conversing with Loren about something. “She’s not listening. Anyway, so what if she is?”
“She might not appreciate it, dear.”
“So what if she doesn’t?” Drienne held the margarita she’d made herself in Mia’s kitchen, running her finger around the rim of the glass. “She’s bought us to do this job, she needs us to do it, she doesn’t have to like us.”
“It might help if she does like us, I mean she has promised to cancel our—”
“Yeah, I’ll believe we’re getting libbed when it happens.”
“I know we don’t have any guarantees—”
“She might just sell us on.”
“Yes, I know.”
“If she screws us over, who would we complain to? We committed a crime for her and now we go to arbitration to get what we were promised?”
“Yes, I know. But that’s exactly my point—we don’t have any guarantees, so we should stay in her good books. And we can’t steal the money and use it to pay off our debt because she’s the one we’d have to pay it to, and—”
“Yes, I know how it works, Arlo.”
“I just wanted to make sure—”
“I still think I’m right, though.”
“About what?”
Drienne leaned over and said in a stage whisper, “About her not telling us everything.”
“I mean, maybe not. But if we do the job there’s a chance we get the big prize. If she screws us over, we haven’t lost anything.”
“There is the third option, where we fuck this up and get caught.”
“Yes, I know—”
“She seems very confident in her plan, but we have no experience in this and there’s a lot that can go wrong.”
“Yes—but come on, we could have ended up somewhere a lot worse. I was the one who got you here instead of working clean-up in the scorched zones, or in some zillionaire’s sex dungeon pumped full of hormones so you can be his hucow or something—”
“Yes, yes, this is better than either of those options, thank you for saving me from a terrible fate.”
“I thought you’d be up for it.”
“I am, I am. If you’d given me the choice between this and some other crap, even just going back to being a brand ambassador, I’d have taken it. Sorry if I seem ungrateful.”
Arlo sniffed and looked out at the forest. “I don’t ever want to end up like I was at the hospital. I got away by the skin of my fucking teeth.”
“I know.”
“I was this close and I got out and I’d do anything to stop it happening again.”
“Well, if Mia needs spare parts, she’s probably going to take them from me rather than you.”
“If this job doesn’t come off, Mia’s not going to keep us. She’ll sell us and then we could end up anywhere. We’re certainly not getting libbed. So I’m not doing anything to risk fucking it up.”
Drienne nodded, swallowed, and looked at the floor. “After they took you, all I could think about was how awful it must be. I couldn’t even talk too much about it because I was afraid I might disassociate and…” Drienne shook her head and sipped at her margarita. “Did you tell her about my—”
“Issues?”
“My duplisychosis, yes.”
“No.”
“Hmm.”
“She doesn’t need to know. Anyway, you’ll be fine. I’ll be with you.”
Drienne sighed. “I had an episode this morning, in the place where they put us. Was that today? I lose track. Anyway.”
“What happened?”
She shrugged. “Not much. Told a woman to fuck off. All the notes I had on my slate had been wiped, so I started making new ones. I thought my name was Eugénie, apparently.”
“Eugénie?”
“Yeah. It’s never been Eugénie, before has it?”
“No, it used to be Sandrine.”
“Why do I always think I’m secretly French? What’s that about? At least I didn’t try to do the accent this time.” She considered for a moment. “Well. If I did, no one mentioned it.”
“Anything else?”
“Just the usual fantasies about being from some rich family who live in a big house and have never stopped wondering what really happened to me, hoping I might still be out there somewhere. Nothing in the way of specific details.”
“Maybe now you could get some medication for it, finally.”
“Maybe.” She’d never sought treatment for fear of being removed from floor work. She didn’t even dare look up anything about it, in case HR flagged it and sent her for tests and it ended up on her record. So she knew nothing about handling her condition except what she’d learned through living with it. “After all this is done, yeah. It’d be nice not to forget who I am anymore.”
* * *
Arlo awoke early the next morning (his body clock was all over the place) in one of the apartment’s spare rooms, in a bed he was sharing with Drienne. He heard voices, and got up to discover the next member of the crew had arrived: the securit he’d watched Mia purchase. It was hardwired into Arlo to avoid the attention of securits, and ideally prevent them knowing he existed. He did not want to share a space with one, let alone work with one.
Her name was Nadi Kayal, and she conformed to the usual template: tall, heavyset, muscular, unsettling. She was about Arlo’s age, he knew that because he’d seen her profile. She spoke fluent English and German but her accent sounded Middle Eastern. She seemed remarkably relaxed about everything, and absorbed Mia’s explanation of what she wanted them to do with minimal comment. Perhaps, when you have no imagination, you become used to accepting everything at face value.
Mia said she’d brief them on the plan in more detail after the last guy arrived, and she asked Arlo and Nadi to help her assemble some extra beds they could put in her office and home gym. While the components were printing, he and Nadi moved the gym equipment to one side of the room to create some space.
“So, where you from?” said Nadi brightly as she and Arlo lifted a rowing machine.
“England. But most recently I was in Shanghai.”
“Ah! What was that like?”
“Okay, I guess,” said Arlo, trying to keep up with Nadi; her feet easily moved across the floor while he needed to rebalance himself with each step. “It’s, er, lively. Can you slow down, please?”
“Sorry. Is that better?”
“Yes.”
“I worked the Frankfurt site.”
“Right.” Arlo didn’t know what else to say. “Did you like it?”
She shrugged. “It was … I didn’t like anyone, really? Kind of strange I won’t be going there anymore, or seeing any of those people. But I don’t care. What do you think of this thing Mia wants us to do?”
“It’ll be great if we can pull it off.”
“Right?” said Nadi, turning to him and grinning broadly. It made her look like a shark. “We might get libbed, guy. We lucked out!” She held up a fist for Arlo to bump. He awkwardly returned the gesture.
“Like I said, if we pull it off.” Arlo felt concerned Nadi hadn’t considered the possibility they might fail. Ever since his conversation with Drienne, it was playing on his mind more and more. “I hadn’t expected you to be excited about having to do a heist.”
“Why not?”
“Just. Y’know. Normally you enforce rules, instead of breaking them.”
Nadi shrugged. “The only law that matters for you and me is what our holder wants. What Oakseed wanted wasn’t always legal.”
This was a good point. “Yeah, but. We won’t have Oakseed backing us up. I mean, if we get caught we’re fucked.”
“Yeah.”
“I mean really fucked.”
“Sure. But it’s just one job, that’s all we got to do. Which is better than I expected when I got put up for sale.”
“I expected your sort would get bought by police, or something.”
Nadi shook her head. “Rank-and-file cops hate us. We’re always getting in their way. No one wants to work with a securit from the megas. Corps got more than they need.”
“Military?”
“Not state military, probably a private militia, probably cannon fodder, sent out to the Taymyr Peninsula or somewhere. Or a criminal gang. Dirty deeds done dirt cheap. But this—” Nadi whistled. “Risky, but less risky than I was expecting and much more rewarding. Sorry, probably you were expecting something easier.”
Arlo was still trying to come to terms with a securit just shooting the breeze with him. It felt like a trick, her saying everyone commits a few crimes from time to time, right? His instinct was she was trying to get him to incriminate himself.
They collected a batch of the parts Mia had printed off, took them to the gym, and started slotting them together. Nadi talked about how insane it was that Oakseed could collapse, and shared with Arlo a theory she’d developed about what was really behind it, that it was all a plot to shrug off the company’s debts and unwanted commitments, and the profitable parts would be brought back together under a new banner, apparently under new ownership but not really. “’Course I don’t have any evidence for that,” she cheerfully concluded. “But it makes more sense to me than that thing about the company’s systems all going to war with each other and destroying it from within.”
“What?”
“Oh yeah. That’s what everyone’s saying.”
“That’s stupid.”
Nadi shrugged. “I don’t know anything about systems.”
“Why do people find it so hard to believe the company just failed?” said Arlo, sounding more exasperated than he intended, like he hadn’t found it hard to believe too. “Anything can fail. Even with fingers in five hundred different pies and systems dynamically adjusting every decision made at every level, someone can still fuck up and commit too much here or there and the whole thing crumbles out from under you.”
“Yeah,” said Nadi. “But life goes on.”
“Ideally, yes.”
* * *
The last one arrived midmorning. His name was Kline Farrar. Drienne hadn’t encountered a lot of HR guys—mades never had to talk to anyone about contracts or promotions or their rights as employees—and she saw in him a glimpse of the future she and Arlo could have expected at Oakseed. She could tell he’d been a brand ambassador before he’d been moved indoors—he did the walk, the confident one that drew people’s eye to you, and he held himself to show off his clothes to their best advantage, even though he was just wearing a cheap brown suit. He didn’t hunch or shrink in on himself, he leaned back a little and held his limbs in an open way. This stuff was drilled into you, it never left.
Kline looked to be in his midforties but Drienne knew that was impossible, because Oakseed hadn’t been cloning that long. He was probably in his late thirties … which would make him part of the original wave. Wow. Drienne hadn’t met a lot of originals. She felt impressed.
A lot of the first-wavers looked older than they were, they’d started aging faster in their midthirties. This was thought to be a flaw in the process that had since been ironed out, but someone once told Drienne it was built in deliberately—no one wanted to support them in their old age, so they were engineered not to have one. Drienne didn’t know if it would happen to her or not. Kline was still handsome, with a compact, friendly face and swept-back hair, and Drienne would fuck him if she was in the mood and there was no one else available, though he was probably more Arlo’s type. It was a shame Kline hadn’t been kept out there to sell shit to old ladies. They’d fucking love him. But the company always maintained the older generation didn’t respond to brand ambassadors and face-to-face, they’d grown up back in the social media era and you needed to get inside their heads a different way.
Mia took Kline into her kitchen to get him a drink and explain what he was required to do. When he came out of the kitchen he looked nervy and unwell, so Drienne came over and introduced herself. Mia had already introduced the whole group to Kline when he walked into the apartment, but Drienne was sure he wouldn’t remember her name. She was mistaken: he did remember.
“I’m an HR guy,” he said. “I remember names.”
“Oh! I kind of assumed we were all just an anonymous mass to you.”
Kline looked at her askance and lowered his voice. “She’s brought us all here to steal a hundred million dollars or whatever it is? What the fuck?”
“It’s not what I expected either.”
“I expected to end up doing tedious micronegotiations in local government somewhere—”
“It could be a lot worse.”
“They’ll have us all liquidated if they catch us. She’ll say we all went rogue and planned this ourselves. I’ve dealt with rogue cases. No one is buying a made who did that. They will get rid of us.”
Drienne knew he was right. But she was committed now, she and Arlo. He needed his debt canned and she was going to make sure they both got that.
“Look,” said Drienne, pulling Kline toward the wall, “you can make out to her you’ve got too much hardwired company loyalty or whatever, or you’re just too much of a pussy—I say that without judgment, some of my favorite people are pussies—and she’ll send you back for a refund and buy someone else. So you do, in fact, have a choice, right? To an extent.”
“Right.”
“But what she’s offering if we do this? If we pull this off?”
“Yes.”
“It’s kinda worth it, don’t you think?”
Kline breathed in. “I knew it wasn’t going to be micronegotiations in local government, not really. Like, I didn’t expect this, but … when I saw my price I knew it wasn’t going to be good. Fuck.” Then he nodded. “It is worth it.”
