Guardian (16 page)

The power to control a crowd with words could be deadlier than all the weapons in the world. Was that why Baram insisted Syd give all those speeches? Not to make the crowds respect him, but to make him respect the crowds, to see the power they had, the way they could be transformed, called to action, called to change. If he was meant to lead, this would be a skill he needed. He should have practiced when he had the chance. Gianna must have.

“It was Yovel who severed the networks.” Gianna pointed at Liam. “Yovel who crashed our markets. And yet, we received no compensation! Is that justice? No payments were ever made!”

The crowd booed.

I spent my whole life paying,
Syd thought.

“But now he is here,” Gianna shouted. “And with his blood, we will be compensated!”

The crowd roared their approval. They moved forward, murder in their eyes.

Liam braced himself for a losing fight. “When it starts,” he whispered to Syd, “just run.”

“I’m not leaving you behind,” Syd replied quickly.

“You have to,” Liam said.

Marie took a step forward, one step down toward the frothing crowd, her finger on the release of the bolt gun’s spring.

“This is not how business is done!” she shouted. She turned to Gianna. “Is Xelon Corporation nothing but pirates and thieves now? A murderous mob?”

Gianna swiped her hand to hush the crowd. “How dare you—?”

“We brought Yovel to you in good faith.” Marie pointed at Liam. “We could have gone to any corporation in the city, but we came to you, to Xelon, because we knew you to deal honestly, to honor contracts, to offer the highest market yield on investment. Were we wrong to come here? Were we wrong to do business with you? The Xelon Handbook of Profit Directives clearly states that until a transfer of property is formally completed, no asset exploitation may be undertaken lest it expose shareholders to claims of market malfeasance.”

Liam sucked in his breath. He had no idea what Marie had just said.

Gianna looked at Liam and then at Syd with her eyebrows raised. She stepped to Marie. “You know the Xelon Handbook of Profit Directives?”

“I do,” said Marie, holding her finger on the spring release of the bolt gun, just in case.

“And you abide by its Best Business Practices?”

“We do,” said Marie.

Gianna looked at Syd, who nodded. Gianna looked at Liam, who nodded too, because the others had. Gianna thought a moment, then turned back to the crowd.

“We will do business with our visitors!” she announced. “And when a fair price is negotiated, Yovel’s blood will pay his debts.” Her face broke into a smile, turning back to Marie. “You are welcome to the new Xelon Corporate Satellite Offices as honored business associates!”

“You guys hungry?” the guy with the bot asked the moment Marie lowered her weapon. “We don’t have much, thanks to the corporate restructuring—”

“May the Reconciliation go bankrupt and die,” Gianna interrupted, spitting on the ground.

“But what we have, we are happy to extend to you,” the guy continued. “With low interest rates.”

“We’d love to eat with you,” said Marie, smiling. “We can discuss the terms of our exchange and the structure of our agreement after we eat.”

She tucked the bolt gun into the waistband of her pants and motioned for Liam to lower his weapon. Everyone relaxed and the room soon erupted in excited chatter.

“Don’t mind them.” Gianna waved her hands at the crowd. “It has been a while since we’ve engaged in a good-faith transaction. We’ve not been in an ideal business environment for some time, you understand?”

“I do,” said Marie. Gianna cleared a path for them through the crowd. Syd and Liam were still staring at Marie, dumbfounded.

“What is going on?” Liam whispered in Syd’s ear.

“We’ve just agreed to make a deal with them,” Syd said. “To sell you.”

“They can’t kill someone else’s property,” Marie explained. “We’ve bought some time.”

“Yeah, but how much?” Liam wondered.

“We still have to work all that out,” said Marie. “How much they’ll charge us for dinner; how much we’ll charge them for you.”

Liam looked at Syd.

“Everything costs.” Syd shrugged. “We might as well eat.”

“I’M SORRY THE FOOD
is so . . .” Gianna searched for the word. “Organic.”

Marie shrugged, stuffing a roasted turnip into her mouth. They sat around in the empty great room. The breeze blew through the giant window, cooled the humid air. It also stirred around the stench of over thirty bodies that hadn’t washed in months. Syd sniffed deeply at the charred flesh of whatever root he was eating. The burned smell masked the putridity.

“We harvest from the park.” Gianna explained their dinner, shaking her head sadly. “A shame what we’ve been driven to.
Farming.
It’s like we’re primitives. Xelon Park was once beautiful, you know? I went there as a child. Now . . . well, we’ll restore it. With the Machine, when the networks return, the corporations will rise again. Balance, freedom, sponsorship . . . it will follow. Until then, we eat like this. The Reconciliation”—someone behind her cursed and spat—“left seeds behind when they were driven out. We’ve made use of them until we can get more efficient nutrient production online. Unfortunately, everyone at EpiCure Incorporated is a miscreant, a syntholene addict, or a Chapter Eleven.”

Syd glanced at Liam, who didn’t seem at all bothered by the insult. There were things Liam felt ashamed of in his life, but that wasn’t one of them.

“You came to the right corporation,” Gianna continued. “We have good credit. We can secure financing for this one.” She pointed her chin at Liam. “We at Xelon know how to profit with our partners. We were one of the first to incorporate again after we drove out the green uniforms.”

“What happened?” Marie asked. “I mean, how did you drive out the Reconciliation? How did you . . . ‘incorporate’ . . . Xel . . . Xelon?” She faltered on the company’s name. She thought of her father, standing in his suit, leading a meeting of shareholders, proud, powerful, certain of the future. She thought of him now, dying in a squalid barracks.

“When the networks fell, there was confusion at first,” Gianna said. Her eyes narrowed; she swayed slightly and the others leaned in to hear. She told of things they themselves had witnessed, but they sat rapt as she spoke, as if the past became real not through the living of it, but through the telling of it. “It was morning and I was in school. Many of us were. Suddenly, the teacher’s holo from EduCorp vanished from the front of the classroom. Our datastreams went blank. Some worried their assignments for the day hadn’t been transmitted. Others cheered, because a network outage meant no school.”

Gianna looked up, scanned the faces watching her. She addressed them all: “Do you remember?”

“We remember,” they said in unison.

Gianna continued. “We waited, of course, many of us, but nothing happened. Some tried to look up the outage on their datastreams . . . but they couldn’t. In minutes, there was grumbling. No one could figure out why they couldn’t look up why. Then the malfunctioning transports ran into each other in the streets. There were crashes; the sky fell onto the city. The hospitals were glitched . . . they couldn’t access records or treatments, couldn’t activate the patches or identify their patients. The medibots fell silent. They couldn’t treat even the simplest conditions. Our biodata was cut off. My father . . .” The girl shook her head. “By the time I walked home from school, an old case of malaria had laid him low. He died within days. Anyone with an old condition relapsed. Do you remember?”

“We remember.”

Gianna locked eyes with Marie. “And then the Reconciliation came.”

Someone in the crowd cursed. Someone else spat.

“They swarmed up from the Lower City, from the Valve and its rotted slums and they overran our beautiful neighborhoods. Our schools and businesses. Our homes. They had no uniforms then, but they came and they looted. They told us
we
were criminals even as they burned executives in the streets. Our parents. Our families. There were no Guardians to stop them and the personal protection bots no longer functioned.”

“My father was burned alive,” the guy with the broken bot said flatly.

“My mother was beaten in front of me,” a girl in a flame-orange gown said. “They left her lying in the street. They told me if I wanted to live, I would put her out of her misery. I did.” She wept into her hands.

Syd bit his lip. This was his Jubilee too, the side of it he hadn’t seen, wasn’t ever supposed to see. It wasn’t all rallies and farms. This was done in his name.

Marie’s face was frozen, impossibly still. Inside her stillness, there was a hurricane swirling. She had come from this group; if it weren’t for Syd, her parents would have met the same fate as theirs. She could have been one of these lost kids, playing pretend corporation in the ruins of her own home. Syd slid his hand across the mildewy carpet where they sat and rested his fingers on hers. He understood.

“I saw my own proxy on the restricted speedway that first week,” said Gianna. “She, of course, didn’t know me, but I had seen her on holos a few times, when I broke my curfew. The punishments she received for those things were never too harsh and my offenses were never too severe. She only had two years of debt left before she wouldn’t be a proxy any longer. She was part of a mob tearing apart a Xelon transmitter. A group of managers had come out to protect it, in case the network came back online . . . it wouldn’t work without transmitters. She kicked the teeth out of one of the men, after he was on the ground. The proxies wanted revenge, and they took it. Many of us hid, in the parks, in the offices. Anywhere we could hide, we hid. Do you remember?”

“We remember.”

“Then the Purifiers came in uniforms. The white masks,” Gianna said. “They established order. They stacked the bodies of the executives and of the criminals in the windows of empty shops, like new shirts on display. To the Reconciliation”—another curse, a splatter of spit—“they were all the same.

“The Purifiers told us all debts had been erased, and all wealth too. Our possessions were no longer ours. Our tech was banned. We could submit to evacuation, go to learn work and be productive, or be killed. They went door to door, searching, gathering our families, splitting them up, sending everyone away. But we stayed hidden. Some were found. Some were not. For a month, we hid, half starved, full frightened. No one knew what to do. The Guardians, who we thought would protect us, had become useless. They wandered aimlessly. They turned into monsters. We kept our distance. We fought amongst ourselves for scraps, even to eat the zoo animals. We made the polar bear extinct again. Some gave up, surrendered to the white masks and vanished. The gangs returned, like swamp gas rising from the sewage. They hoarded supplies, bribed the Purifiers, enslaved those of us they could catch, and made the children of the city into their pleasure dolls. I had a sister . . .” Gianna shook her head. “We would not have made it much longer, but then, one night, we took shelter in a club, a place I had danced before, Arcadia, it was called. There were others there; they had made it a home. And they had a leader. She told us the truth, the saving truth that turned us on to the righteous path. The Machine. Do you remember?”

“We remember.”

Syd remembered too.

Arcadia.

That was where he had found Knox and Knox’s friends. That was where he’d kidnapped Knox and gone with him back here, to this house.

Arcadia.

That was where all this began.

Gianna smiled. “Chey is her name.” Liam made eye contact with the Syd. The scratchiti.
Chey is watching.

“Chey taught us that the network went down because we did not serve it well,” Gianna said. “She taught us that there was a Machine that could bring it back, but only if we committed ourselves to serve it. We organized, we rebuilt the corporations our mothers and fathers had failed to preserve, and she made a deal with the Maes gang to retake our city. Together, we rose up against the Purifiers. We drove them away and we gathered all the tech that remained, that had not been destroyed, and now, we prepare. We prepare for the Machine. When all will be restored.”

Liam, Syd, and Marie looked over the room, the crazy outfits, the imitation holo projectors, the fragments of this or that device or bot the kids pretended to make work. The devotional tattoos honored a programming language surely none of them understood.

Again, Syd had that feeling, the past as an echo, repeating itself as it faded. The poor had longed for Jubilee to save them from the powerful, and now the one-time patrons longed for the Machine to do the same. Every revolution believes it can return something that had been lost, but nothing is ever the same. The only thing that endures are people. Syd saw that clearly now, and perhaps so too did Marie. You could serve a revolution, an idea that ended up an echo of itself, or you could serve people, with all their maddening contradictions. You couldn’t serve both. You had to choose.

“We are not insane,” Gianna said, seeing herself through their eyes. “We know the tech is broken. We know the network is not back yet. But we must be ready. We use what we have so that we’re ready. Chey will build the Machine and everything will come back.” She glared at Liam. “And those who stand in the way will be destroyed.”

“So there is a Machine? It’s real?” Marie asked.

“Of course it’s real!” Gianna said. “Chey has showed it to me herself!”

Syd had an idea. By the look on her face, Marie had the same one. Liam still clutched his EMD stick. His only idea was to get out this place, fast. All things considered, it was as good a backup plan as any. But first, Syd had to try something.

“We cannot sell Yovel to you,” he said.

The room grew quiet. Gianna’s eyes narrowed. “You are backing out of our deal? Or you are beginning negotiation from an aggressive position?”

“Call it negotiation,” said Syd, leaning closer. “It is in your interest that we do not sell Yovel to you. You cannot kill him.”

“We can do what we please with him once he is our property,” she replied. “And if we cannot reach an agreement on the terms of this sale, we’ll simply kill all of you.”

“That’s not very good business,” said Marie.

“We’re in a challenging economy,” Gianna said back.

“But wouldn’t it be better if you had to spend none of your own resources on this transaction?” said Syd. “He would still die. And you could still get paid.”

“Explain yourself,” Gianna said.

“Yeah,” Liam added. “Explain.”

“We’ll sell him to Chey. Think how it will please the Machine to have the blood of Yovel spilled directly before it.”

Gianna suppressed a smile. Syd had her. She liked the idea.

“And you would get a finder’s fee for bringing Yovel to it,” Marie added.

“What is in this deal for you?” Gianna asked, suddenly skeptical. She was wise to mistrust any idea that was not her own, but Syd knew he had to convince her. They would get to the Machine. Once they were there . . . well, then Liam could do what he did best. They would seize control of the Machine by any means necessary.

“Chey is wealthy, right?” said Syd. “Wealthier than Xelon?”

Gianna nodded. “She runs the Benevolent Society. Every corporation makes donations.”

“We’re businesspeople like you,” Syd told her. “We want the best price for Yovel we can get, and we didn’t bring him all the way from the headquarters of the Reconciliation to sell him at a discount.”

“We do not buy on discount!” He’d offended Gianna. Good.

“You could be a broker or you could be a buyer,” said Syd. “I guess it’s up to you.”

“Strangers don’t go to see Chey,” said Gianna.

“We would be in your debt,” Syd added, sweetening their offer. “Indebted to you.”

The crowd murmured.

“We would be your patrons?” Gianna asked. “You, our proxies?”

Syd took a deep breath. “Yes.”

Gianna broke into a broad grin. She stood and urged Syd, Marie, and Liam to stand.

“Contracts!” she called out, and another girl stood. She held a plate of plexi and the same small boy shined a light through it so it glowed on the wall. It was filled with tiny scratched-out writing, edge to edge.

“These are your terms, a standard proxy agreement,” Gianna said. “You will each sign and become our proxies for a term equal to the cost of your food and your admittance fee to our district and the processing costs for the Xelon Corporation. Yovel”—she pointed at Liam—“will remain in your possession, but serve as collateral until such a time as we broker his sale.”

“Uh—” Liam hadn’t understood a word Gianna had just said. He stared at the shadows on the wall, knew them to be words, and was amazed at the effort it must have taken to make such a thing and the impossibility of reading it even if he knew how.

“Everything will be spelled out in the Xelon actuarial tables available from your local sales representative.” Gianna rolled her eyes.

Local sales representative. Actuarial tables. These were the old words of an old system. They were all playing make-believe.

“How do I sign?” Syd asked. He would play too, if that’s what it took.

“Biodata,” Gianna said, and someone handed him a small knife. Gianna gestured to the wall and Syd stepped forward. He looked back at Marie, pricked his finger with the blade, and dabbed a dot of blood into the projection on the wall. He stepped back, looking solemn. He never imagined he’d agree to become a proxy again, even if it was make-believe.

Marie stepped forward and went through the same motions, leaving a drop of her blood on the wall of the abandoned mansion. She wondered what her father would think if he could see her now.

Liam stepped up to do the same. But Gianna stopped him. “You are not a proxy,” she said. “You are the product.”

Liam stepped back beside Syd.

A product. He understood this was a ploy to find the Machine, but still, it made him uncomfortable. People lived and died—he knew that well enough. Products, on the other hand, were used and disposed of. He wondered if Syd saw him that way too: useful for now, but disposable when he’d been used up.

“Excellent.” Gianna clapped. The light snapped off and the shadow of the contract vanished. Only the two dots of blood remained. “We will have to determine a system by which you serve as proxies to each of us for an appointed time . . .” She tapped her finger on her chin, thinking. “Of course, you’re not actually supposed to know your patrons . . . We’ll have to form a working group, conduct meetings on the best way to allocate your debt and maximize efficiency. Also, the method of enforcement for infractions . . . So much to consider.”