“Now you’re in for it,” I said.
“I think I can handle the smell of an honest day’s work,” she said, and then gave her destination to the pod. We started off. “I mean, I hope you won’t smell like this at the end of every day. But first days are always stressful. What’s the new job?”
“Pig farmer,” I said.
“Normally I’d tell you to stop kidding around, but given how you smell at the moment, I’m willing to believe it,” Leah said.
“Oh, believe it,” I said. I told her about my day.
“It could be a positive,” Leah said. “It’s like an initiation rite into the tribe. If they didn’t like you, they would have just said good night to you at the end of your shift.”
“So, when you started your job, did your co-workers do something like this?” I said.
“No,” Leah admitted. “They took me out for a drink. But they don’t have access to pig droppings, either.”
“I’m not sure I agree 100% with your tribe initiation theory,” I said.
“In that case, stick with it and get them back,” Leah said. We were coming up to our stop. “Because you now have access to pig droppings, too.”
“That’s a very good point,” I said. “And here all this time I was thinking you were a nice girl, Leah.”
“I am a nice girl,” Leah said. “I’m just not a pushover.”
Later at home, mom opened the door a crack while I was in the shower. I was using the graywater because I was wanting a real long soak and after my day, whining about graywater just seemed kind of stupid.
“Syndee told me about your day at work,” mom said, through the door.
“Did she tell you I rubbed her face in my shirt after she called me a ‘stinkpig’?” I asked.
“That was how I found out,” mom said. “I told her I was going to let it slide this time. Do you want to have me talk to your supervisor about it?”
“Since my supervisor was one of the people laughing his ass off about it, I don’t think it would do much good,” I said.
“Well, then, his supervisor,” mom said.
“I thought you said you weren’t going to fight my battle for me anymore,” I said.
“Having your kid drenched in pig shit changes things,” mom said, and I realized she must really be pissed, because she hardly ever swore in front of me or Syndee. I laughed. “What’s so funny?” mom asked.
“Never mind,” I said. I turned off the shower and grabbed a towel and wrapped it around my waist. Then I opened the door all the way and have my mom a big sloppy hug.
“Damn it, Benji, my blouse,” mom said.
“Sorry,” I said. “And thanks for wanting to stick up for me. But you said it yourself. I’m an adult now. I can handle this on my own. Okay?”
“You sure?” mom said.
“Oh, I’m sure,” I said.
And so the days and weeks started to go by.
At work, I still did menial vacuuming and Love Lounge duties, as did everyone else. But slowly I was shown the other parts of the pig trade, from handling feed and water trade to helping the Arnold Tower vets with the vaccinations and their medical rounds. I also learned how to handle Arnold Towers securities and diagnostic systems—which, in fact, could be handled remotely by phone once I was given my access codes. I proved to be a quick study with the computer systems, and because of it I was put in the rotation for late night shifts, when it was just me, a couple of members of the administrative area janitorial staff, and thousands upon thousands of sleeping pigs. Late night shift workers were exempt from the solo surcharge on the pod system and sometimes I took advantage of that to take the long way around New St. Louis, cruising over the streets at night, watching my hometown slide by silently.
Outside the city, the drought that threatened in the early months of the year delivered with a vengeance, drying up croplands all over the American Midwest and in the lower part of the Canadian corn belt. Mom was having a difficult time selling the rest of the NSL council on Technology Outreach but managed to convince them to make an emergency release of food surpluses to the surrounding suburbs and The Wilds. The generosity of the gesture seemed to be lost on the people in The Wilds, since NSL was accused of holding back on what it could have given, and the protests on our doorsteps got bigger and louder. This frustrated mom and enraged a fair share of New Louies. I was annoyed myself.
About ten weeks after I had my “embargo” event, Jeffers and Pinter were preparing to herd their boys into another session in the Love Lounge when an apparently random computer glitch locked them out of the control room and then cycled through the session, spraying them with swine-tuned aphrodisiac just as the door slid open to admit a fine selection of very horny pigs. If the door to the control room hadn’t randomly unlatched a couple of minutes in to the session, Jeffers and Pinter might have found themselves porked into oblivion. A routine check of the systems after the event found no tampering and no reason why the system would have behaved like that. Barnes ordered the software reloaded and everyone was given new security codes into the system.
A week after that, protests at the city border finally turned bloody, as a small group of Wilds folks attacked the NSL police force, seriously wounding one of them when a rock dented his skull. I saw this particular protest from above as I slid into work; if it wasn’t an actual riot it was practicing to become one. The NSLPD told the executive council it didn’t have enough officers to handle the growing crowds. The council, over the strenuous objections of my mother, contracted with Edgewater for border control. After that the protest crowds got larger but they also stayed mostly under control. The rumor was that the Eddies got paid bonuses on a quota basis, and were just looking for someone—anyone—to get out of line. I asked my mom if the quota bonus rumor was true. She looked at me and told me that now would be a great time to change the subject.
Shortly thereafter Syndee completed all her education requirements, got her certificate, and took her Aptitudes. She scored high enough on them that she qualified for New St. Louis’ executive training, which meant she was now on a fast track to be an administrator either here or in another city we shared “open borders” with. Despite myself, I was really proud of her.
As for me, I got a promotion, of sorts: Arnold Tower had a lorry it used to transfer pigs or other things from our tower to Wilber Tower or Pippo Tower, the other two non-meat pig towers in New St. Louis, and the driver of the lorry had slipped while stepping out of the cab and broken his leg. While he was on desk duty, I was assigned temporary driver. I spent part of my day on the actual roads of the city, which beat vacuuming up shit. One day as I was driving along I saw Leah and Will standing on the street corner, waiting to cross. I honked as I went past, which delighted Leah and confused Will, which seemed about right in both cases. Sometimes I took Lunch with me on the trips; he sat up front with me. He seemed to enjoy the ride.
As bad as the protests where we lived were, they were worse in other places. In California, the Malibu Enclave was nearly burned to ground when protestors there started fires in the canyons and pushed the fire line right to the border of the enclave. A lucky shift of the wind let firefighters save the enclave; other parts of Malibu were not as lucky. When the protestors came back, they put the blame for the fires on the Enclave. Edgewater, which had a contract with Malibu just like it did with New St. Louis, saw a lot of its people get bonuses that night. The protesters saw their people go into the Eddies holding cells or the hospital.
Despite the rising tensions, mom kept hammering away at her Technology Outreach program, trying to convince the other executive board members that time was running out. It was already too late to have the outreach be any use for this year, she said, but next year we’re going to see the same thing happen again, and the year after that, and the year after that. But it wasn’t doing her any good. Opinions were hardening against The Wilds, which looked more like anarchy than anything else these days.
Eventually even mom gave u
p and tabled the outreach program until after the elections. Her opponent, who as it turned out was distantly related to Will’s dad, had been gaining ground on her, mostly by hammering on her for wanting to do outreach to the same people who were rioting on our borders. He didn’t seem to have any other platform, but at the moment he really didn’t need any other platform. Mom looked at what her support for Technology Outreach was costing her and had to dump it. And even though I’d been opposed to it, I was sorry for my mother that something she cared so much about couldn’t get a fair hearing.
At the end of summer, my work group had a classic cinema movie night, which included Babe, Deliverance and Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome. When I saw the latter, I finally got the “embargo” reference.
On the first day of autumn, as I pulled a night shift, I invited Leah to the experimental gardens on the roof. We brought Lunch along for security purposes.
“It’s beautiful up here,” Leah said.
“I’m glad you like it,” I said. “I thought you might want to see it before all the leaves fell off.”
“Why are they called the experimental gardens?”she asked.
“The plants up here are genetically engineered,” I said. “The botanists share the genetics lab with the geneticists who work on the pigs. The lab takes up the whole twentieth floor, actually. Common rabble like us aren’t allowed in there, but they let us come up here on our breaks and during lunch. I come up here with Lunch all the time. Lunch, the pig, I mean. For lunch. You know. I think I’ll stop talking now.”
Leah smiled, which was a pretty thing in the moonlight. “I think it’s adorable you have a pet pig,” she said.
“I wouldn’t use the word ‘pet’ around him,” I said. “He’s his own pig. We just happen to be friends.”
“Well, fine,” Leah said. “I think it’s adorable you have a pig for a friend. Are you happy now?”
“I’m getting there,” I said, and even in the moonlight, I could sense her blushing a little. Leah was still with Will, and she wasn’t the sort of girl would let something like that slide, even for a minute. But it wasn’t a secret to her that I still wished she was with me. And I didn’t see much point in pretending that I felt any other than I did. You can let people know how you feel about them without seeming desperate, or at least, that was what I was hoping.
“I like where you work, Benji,” Leah said, after a minute.
“You’re only saying that because I haven’t taken you to sub-basement C,” I said. “Let me give you the embargo treatment and we’ll see what you think then.”
Leah laughed. “I think I’ll pass on that,” she said.
“Chicken,” I said. She smiled again and reached down to pet Lunch. He snuffled at her.
One of our phones rang. It was Leah. She stepped away and took the call. A minute later, she came back, holding the phone in front of her. “Here,” she said. “It’s for you.”
I took the phone. “Hello?” I said.
“Benji,” Will said, on the other end of the line. “I have a favor to ask of you. A real big favor.”
“It’s Marcus,” Will said, when I met him and Leah for lunch the next day. “I haven’t seen him in nearly three years. We email a little, and talk about what’s going on, but he’s always somewhere that’s nowhere near here. Then he calls yesterday—actually calls—and tells me he’s in St. Charles and he wants to see me. He said there’s a rave he’ll be at out there tomorrow and gave me directions and the time. So I know where he’ll be and when he’ll be there. I just don’t have a way to get there.”
I squirmed in my seat. Will asking me to take the Arnold Tower lorry to drive him to see his brother out in The Wilds was bad enough, but asking me to take it to a rave edged on the insane. “I don’t understand,” I said. “Just requisition a car from the city. It’ll put a hole in your energy budget for the month, but it’s your brother. He’s worth it.”
“I tried that,” Will said, and he let his irritation creep into his voice. “Maybe you’re not keeping up with current events, Benji, but we’ve got a daily near-riot right outside the city. The city’s not letting people take their ground cars out into that; they’d get stripped before they got to the Interstate. Jesus, you’re clueless sometimes.”
“Will,” Leah said.
Will held a hand up. “I know. I’m sorry, Benji. It’s just that I haven’t seen Marcus in so long, and I have no idea when I’m going to get to see him again. You know how important he is to me.”
The hell of it was, I did know. Long ago, before we decided we actually really didn’t like each other, Will and I were friends, and I hung out with his family. Will idolized his older brother. He was crushed when Marcus blew off his Aptitudes and ended up out of the City. It was why I knew how to poke him in that particular soft spot whenever I felt like he had gone too far with his belittling of me.
“Look, Benji,” Will said. “I know we haven’t been friends in a long time. I know we don’t get along. I know you resent me—,” he stopped before he could actually say for being with Leah, and chose something else instead, “I know you resent me for a lot of things. And I know I’ve treated you like crap. If you said no to this, no one would say I didn’t deserve it. But I’m asking you, just this once, for a favor. I can’t get a car to get out to St. Charles. But you can. Your lorry can get through the gates and get back. You don’t even have to stop at the gates like regular cars do because the lorry has a signature transponder in it, right?”
“You’ve thought this through, Will,” I said.
“It’s my brother, Benji,” Will said. “I want to see him. Help me. Please.”
I looked at Will and then I looked over at Leah, who was keeping a very carefully neutral expression on her face. But I knew what she wanted me to say, and I know what I was going to say because I knew what Leah would want.
It takes a special kind of pathetic loser to help someone you hate just to make his girlfriend happy, I thought. There was more to it than that, I knew. But at the moment that’s exactly what it felt like.
“Let me see what I can do,” I said. “I can’t promise anything. The same restrictions that are out there for groundcars might be there for city lorries, too. And if there are, I’m not stretching my neck out for you, Will. It’s not like I have a whole lot of job options available to me at this point. Okay?”
“Okay,” Will said, and looked like he was going to cry. “Thank you, Benji. Really. I’m not going to forget this.”
“Thank you, Benji,” Leah said.
“You’re welcome,” I said, looking at her, and then looking at him. “You’re both welcome.”
“Here’s the deal with the lorry,” Barnes said, to me. “I’m not saying yes, but I’m not officially saying no. All of us have unofficially ‘borrowed’ that truck from time to time. As far as I’m concerned it’s one of the perks of the job; a little something to make up for having to work in pig crap all day long. That said, if you take it out and something happens to it, then officially you’re screwed and there’s nothing I’m going to be able to do to dig you out of that hole. So don’t run it into a tree or hit a deer or let anyone set fire to it. Got it?”
“I got it,” I said.
“What do you need it for, anyway?” Barnes asked.
“I’m taking someone to see his long lost brother in St. Charles,” I said.
“That’s not a trip I’d want to take these days,” Barnes said. “That must be some friend.”
“It’s not a friend, actually,” I said.
“I’m confused,” Barnes said.
“His girlfriend,” I said. “My ex. Still hold a candle. And so on.”
“Ah,” Barnes. “Well, and I hope you don’t mind me saying this, but that’s got to suck for you.”
“It really sort of does,” I said. Barnes clapped me on my back and headed off.
The next night, late, Will and Leah and I rolled out of New St. Louis and took the bumpy city streets of old St. Louis until we
found a suitable onramp to Interstate 70, heading west. The Interstate was not exactly in what you would call brilliant condition these days—the US federal government’s list of priorities was getting smaller and smaller, and the Interstate system had clearly not made the most recent cut—but it was workable as long as you didn’t go too fast, and the traffic out to St. Charles from NSL was pretty much non-existent.
“So you actually have directions to where we’re going, right, Will?” I said. I had gotten to the I-70 on my own, and Will had been silent for all of the ride so far.
Will pulled something out of his coat pocket and handed it to me. “Here,” he said.
I took it. It was a pair of goofy-looking glasses. “What the hell are these?” I said.
“Marcus had them sent to me,” Will said. “He had me stand at one of the gates where there wasn’t a protest, and someone came up and gave them to me.”
“Who gave them to you?” I asked.
“It was just some guy,” Will said. “He said he’d been paid to turk the package. Put them on.”
I put them on; the lenses were clear and non-correcting. “Do these do anything but make me look stupid?” I asked
“You have to turn them on,” Will said. “There’s a power switch on the rim of the lens.”
I fumbled with the glasses with one hand until I found a slightly raised ridge. I pressed it.
There was suddenly a bright orange three-dimensional arrow in my field of view, pointing down the Interstate.
“Whoa,” I said.
“The lenses are supposed to superimpose images over the real world,” Will said.
“Well, it works,” I said.
“Marcus said they’re from company out of Switzerland. He said they’re going to be huge in a few years,” Will said.
“That’s great,” I said. “But am I supposed to follow this arrow or what?”
I was. When the arrow turned, I turned. 45 minutes later, we rolled up to what looked like it used to be a city park, which had gone to pot sometime in the not-too-distant past. In the middle of the park lights flashed and music pulsed. We were at our rave.