When Laura swiped the card for her apartment door, three loud beeps let her know in no uncertain terms that she was no longer welcome inside. She leaned, pressed her head to the door, and considered whether it might be worth it just to sleep in the hall. Nearly half the residents in her building did. Nocturnals would have already pitched tents in the common rooms by now. They’d drive her away if she tried to sleep nearby, but she could always find a spot in the stairwell. She was friendly with some of its loiterers. They’d probably leave her alone if she settled down next to them.
Or she’d get raped.
Probably not. Assaults didn’t happen as often as the internet said.
But she also had two weeks of shower water saved in her apartment, and after an hour on a subway so crowded that her feet hadn’t been touching the ground, her two weeks of accumulated stench had reached her limit.
Her phone buzzed. Her sister was calling.
“Hello!” Joana’s face rendered. It still wasn’t the face of Laura’s sister, but they’d both agreed it was as close as Laura should bother. This face was symmetric. The eyes were better outlined, and Joana’s lips weren’t cracked from her childhood habit of compulsive chewing. Objectively, it was a better face—one of Laura’s finest.
The face frowned. “You’re not home yet?”
“I sort of am.” Laura turned the phone to show the door. A screen pad beside it glowed red. “Eviction Eminent,” it said. A timer under it showed twenty hours remaining.
“I’m sorry. Do you want me to call back?”
“No. You can keep me company while I work the machines.” And that settled it. She’d renew her lease now. The wait would be long at this time of day, but it wouldn’t be so bad with Joana. Shouldering her pack, she headed back to the stairwell.
“So you’re getting home late,” Joana said.
“Client wanted to talk about his content right at the end of the day. Held me over a little.”
“Could have just told him to stuff it. Clock is done. Flip him two birds and run off.”
“My boss was listening in.”
“Seriously? Is that even legal?”
“Who knows?” Laura stepped around people lounging on the stairwell steps. No one moved to make her passage easier. “He called me right after to give me shit about a bunch of stuff.”
“Like what?”
“I had the audacity to hear someone else offer me a job. And I didn’t do a whole bunch of avatars for free like he wants. And he also wanted me to touch up his body.”
“Again?”
“He thinks he’s too pasty.” Laura walked through the commons room. It was occupied by nocturnals. They’d set up tents and cots as though a native tribe of days long past were living in the savannah after raiding a sporting goods store. A camp fire was all that was missing, but that would have given the block security the legal excuse they needed to kick them out. Laura got dirty looks from many sleepers as she passed by while on the phone. Screw them, she thought. She was the only one legally allowed to be here, at least for twenty more hours.
“Do you know what you should do?” Joana said. “Just do a bad job. Not a shitty job, but bad. He wants rock hard abs? Then just slap some on from the default templates. If he’s not going to pay for your time, then why should you put in any? It’s not like he’d fire you. You’re the best virtual designer they have.”
“I don’t know, Jo.” Laura loved her sister, but she was a terrible person to gripe to. Her solutions were the kind that people would daydream about, but no one in their right mind would ever do.
The rental machines were in the basement. The line for them started in the stairwell leading down. She couldn’t see the machines from where she was, but no doubt half were still broken.
She changed the topic. “How are things with you?”
“I got the job!”
“Congratulations! Which one?”
“The scrapper!”
“The parts scrapper? Salvage?”
“Yep?”
“How’s that work?”
“I work a waste disposal belt with other people. I spend ten hours a day tearing up metals.”
“Sounds fun.”
“So fun. It’s actual delegation. I had to take this calibration interview where I scrapped some simulated refrigerators, but I did it! I don’t know why so many people hate it. You get three arms. That was tricky, because I didn’t know how to work the third one at first, but I figured it out. I’ve got a saw and a wielding torch for hands too. And when I use them, it’s not like I’m pressing a button. It actually feels like my hands. Like a muscle!”
“You don’t feel weird as a robot?”
“Nope! I think that’s why I got the job. Everyone else hates delegation unless it’s a humanoid machine.”
“What will you be?”
“I’m an assembly machine over a scrap conveyor. It’s like I’m a torso stuck to the ceiling. And the craziest part is I’ve got eyes on the end of each arm. It’s so trippy. I’m amazed I don’t get motion sick.”
Laura’s line moved forward. She could see the machines, and yes, half were still broken.
“Does the robot have a sense of touch?” she asked.
“It has sensors in its grabbers, and some pads along the arms. Oh, and the saw has nice feedback. The rest of the machine is touch free, but I haven’t gotten the feel-crazies yet.”
“But how long have you been doing the job?”
“Only two days. I know. Give it time, but the other workers say there are some mods that simulate a lot of extra sensory input. It’s supposed to help.”
“You should probably get it now. Sensory deprivation builds on you.”
“Yeah. Maybe. Tearing apart junk is probably going to get super old after a few weeks, but it’s ten dollars an hour. It’s the highest paying job I’ve ever had. A huge step up from Turking.”
“Wait. You were turking?”
“Oh. Just for a little bit. I was unemployed.”
“You told me you had to be in debt for that. Are you in debt?”
“Don’t worry about it.”
“How badly in debt?”
“Not bad. Don’t worry. I just helped some self-driving cars park. Tagged some photos…”
“Did you lose any privileges?” Laura asked. “Tell me.”
“I lost taste for a while. Like a day or two.”
“You were Turking for food? You said you were on the verge of Turkatory. Not in it. If you were paying to taste then… Christ. Were you even allowed to leave your apartment?”
“No…”
“You couldn’t do anything, could you? That’s why you haven’t called all week. Did you just buy your media privileges back to make this call?
“…Yeah.”
“Why didn’t you tell me,” Laura said. “I could have covered you.”
“That’s why,” Joana replied. “I didn’t want you to. I can take care of myself.”
“You could have paid me back. I’d charge you a billion times less interest than they do. You promised you’d tell me if you ever fell into Turkatory. It’s a spiral, Joana. It’s hard as hell to get out of.”
“But I did get out. On my own. I have a job now.”
“But what if you didn’t get it? You couldn’t have told me. I’d have had no idea what had happened to you. You’d have been stuck in a room forever. No food. No sensation. Just all those stupid menial tasks so you can shave pennies off your debt.”
“I know. Stop it. I got out. I wasn’t close to spiraling.”
“Do you still have any debt?”
Silence.
Joana,” Laura said. “Let me help you.”
“But I can do it.”
“You can pay me back a little bit extra if you want. We’ll both save money.”
“I can handle it!”
“Please, Joana. Don’t let this be about pride. Virtual debt destroys people. They will literally drive you insane with the feel-crazies. Let me cover whatever debt you have left, and then you can pay me back. You know I’m paid—” She caught herself. “I can cover you.”
She’d nearly said out loud that she earned several times what her sister makes while standing in line with people waiting to spend their last few dollars for a day in a private home. If people here knew how much she made, she wouldn’t just be a target, she’d be a traitor.
These people existed in this society, but they were no longer a part of it. They’d rather live as tribes in alleys than take part in this broken culture. They’d survive off minimum government handouts as a point of pride—a defiance to a system that would rather they didn’t exist. Meager livings were okay, but too much and you were one of them.
Laura had the gall to strive for a job in a different class level. Virtual content design was a trade skill she’d honed on her own, and she was paid hundreds of times what her neighbors made, but her yearly income was a fraction of what her usual clientele made daily in capital gains. She was riffraff to aristocrats, and an overprivileged guildsman to subcity dwellers.
If people here knew how much she made, the SmartDoor to her apartment wouldn’t protect her.
To be safe, Laura switched to audio only and put the phone to her ear. “Please,” Laura said. “I want to. Consider this me paying for the privilege to have a big sister who I can call as much as I want. Do it for me.”
Joana didn’t respond immediately. “I will pay back everything. And I’m only taking you up on this because I can start paying you back next week. It’s the first thing I’m doing.”
“Okay. Thank you. Let me just get back into my apartment, and we’ll sort this out.”
Her turn at a machine came. She could have paid for a coming year. Instead: one week, because the panel before her door would list her allotted time to anyone who pressed the info button, and no one was supposed to afford more than a few days at most.
Laura trekked back to her apartment, chatting with her sister all the way.
From the door, she crawled into bed. From there, everything from her kitchenette to her workstation was in reach. If she wanted floor space, she’d have to fold her bed into the wall. To shower, she needed to sit on that floor and use the kitchenette faucet pulled out on its hose. The building managers allotted her five liters of water each day, good for two minutes of showering, but like everyone, she needed to drink most of it. Her toilet was the shower drain with the floor panel removed. Flushing was done manually with the single faucet head. She combined that with showering when she could, which she knew was weird, and she probably went longer without bathing than most, but to date, she’d never had to buy an extra water allotment.
It was a coffin in a coffin complex, but this was luxury to some. She could stand straight. Many couldn’t.
After setting some water to boil, she stretched out on her bed and tapped her phone against the far wall to activate her tri-screen. This was the other “luxury feature” of her home—a hexagonal alcove whose three walls doubled as an interface desk. It was cheap. Instead of three MFCD screens, the tiled walls had video alignment markings and only one embedded camera in each. Without her interface lenses, it was nothing, but it was the feature that made her choose this coffin complex.
With her lenses, she saw on the left pain a jungle mountain-scape with a pillared city of black marble nestled against a forested mountain—Paititi, or future home. The right-hand screen showed the open editing software she used to create it.
The center screen now showed her sister. Through her lenses, it was 3D so much so that it seemed like Laura could climb through the window.
“All right,” Laura said. “Do you know how to send me your bill?”
“I’ve got it all set up.”
“Gimme.”
Joana performed the same maneuver Laura did to send Stilwathe his previews. The differences was that Joana actually picked the file off her desk and pressed it to their shared screen—a nice little feature of living in the virtual world. With a graphical ripple, its contents appeared on Laura’s side.
Eight thousand dollars.
“Holy hell, Joana.”
“I know. I’m sorry. If it’s too much, you don’t have to pay it.”
“It’s fine. I’ll cover it, but damn are they ripping you off.”
“Yeah… but here I am, right? I mean it’s not like I don’t get nice stuff out of it. Could you imagine what this place would cost if it were in real life?” She leaned aside to show Laura her apartment. It was maybe twelve hundred square feet—nearly fifty times the size of Laura’s DayPay coffin. “I know it’s not the apartment you made for me,” she said. “I was going to wait a while before buying the home customization option again.”
“Don’t buy it back at all. I told you to stop using it.”
“But it’s so nice. You’re so good.”
“It’s really nice,” Laura agreed, “because I didn’t realize that they were going to charge you for every single amenity I put in it. They charged you for the windows. Don’t use it. Maybe I’ll make you an affordable one for your birthday.”
“Okay. It was really nice though.”
“Don’t worry. We’ll both be in my villa soon.”
Joana’s face lit. “How long now?”
“Soon. As of two weeks ago, I can finally afford a private contract. Now I just need to save for the jar. If prices stay where they are, then maybe three years.”
“Three years? How much is it?” Joana asked.
“About two hundred thousand.”
Joana reeled. “Are you sure there’s nothing cheaper?”
“Of course there is, but if we’re going to live together, I need something that can host. There’s also the full neural one-to-one hookup that—”
“Yeah, yeah,” Joana said. “Let’s get all the features I’ll never have.”
Laura grinned. “Sorry you got cancer, but yes, I’m getting all the bells and whistles I can afford. I’ll be such a better content designer if I can finally experience all my content in the same fidelity as all my fat-ass clients. But don’t worry. It’ll be worth the wait. Someday soon all you’ll have to pay is a remoting fee.”
“And you’ll finally get out from under that festering, pus-filled asshole who calls himself your boss.”
“Yes,” Laura sighed. “The dream…”