FIFTY-TWO YEARS FROM NOW
“Key Sixteen, Housing Omicron Kappa, aleph sub-one,” Andy said to the software on duty at the Alhambra gate of the Los Angeles Wall.
He didn’t generally expect software to be suspicious. This wasn’t even very smart software. It was working off some great biochips—he could feel them jigging and pulsing as the electron stream flowed through them—but the software itself was just a kludge. Typical gatekeeper stuff, Andy thought.
He stood waiting as the picoseconds went ticking away by the millions.
“Name, please,” the gatekeeper said, what could have been a century later, in its kludgy robotic gatekeeper voice.
“John Doe. Beta Pi Upsilon 10432QX.”
He extended his wrist. A moment for implant check. Tick tick tick tick. Then came confirmation. Once more Andy had bamboozled a keeper. The gate opened. He walked into Los Angeles.
As easy as Beta Pi.
He had forgotten how truly vast the wall that encircled Los Angeles was. Every city had its wall, but this one was something special: a hundred, maybe a hundred fifty feet thick, easily. Its gates were more like tunnels. The total mass of it was awesome. The expenditure of human energy that went into building it—muscle and sweat, sweat and muscle—must have been phenomenal, he thought. Considering that the wall ran completely around the L.A. basin from the San Gabriel Valley to the San Fernando Valley and then over the mountains and down the coast and back the far side past Long Beach, and that it was at least sixty feet high and all that distance deep. That was something to think about, a wall that size. So much sweat, so much toil. Not his own personal sweat and toil, of course, but still—still—
What were they for, all these walls?
To remind us, Andy told himself, that we are all slaves nowadays. You can’t ignore the walls. You can’t pretend they aren’t there. We made you build them, is what they say, and don’t you ever forget that.
Just within the wall Andy caught sight of a few Entities walking around right out in the street, preoccupied as usual with their own mystifying business and paying no attention to the humans in the vicinity. These were high- caste ones, the boss critters, the kind with the luminous orange spots along their sides. Andy gave them plenty of room. They had a way sometimes, he knew, of picking a human up with those long elastic tongues, like a frog snapping up a fly, and letting him dangle in mid-air while they studied him with those saucer-sized yellow eyes. Old Cindy, back at the ranch, had told tales of being snatched up that way right at the beginning of the Conquest.
Andy didn’t think he would care for that. You didn’t get hurt, apparently, but it wasn’t dignified to be dangled in mid-air by something that looks like a fifteen-foot-high purple squid standing on the tips of its tentacles.
His first project after entering the city was to find himself a car. He had driven in from Arizona that morning in quite a decent late-model Buick that he had picked up in Tucson, plenty of power and style, but by now he expected that there were alerts out for it everywhere and it didn’t seem wise to try to bring it through the wall. So, with great regret, he had left it parked out there and gone in on foot.
On Valley Boulevard about two blocks in from the wall he came upon a late-model Toshiba El Dorado that looked pretty good to him. He matched frequencies with its lock and slipped inside and took about ninety seconds to reprogram its drive control to his personal metabolic cues. The previous owner, he thought, must have been fat as a hippo and probably diabetic: her glycogen index was absurd and her phosphines were wild.
“Pershing Square,” he told the car.
It had nice capacity, maybe 90 megabytes. It turned south right away and found the old freeway and drove off toward downtown. Andy figured he’d set up shop in the middle of things, work two or three quick pardons to keep his edge sharp, get himself a hotel room, a meal, maybe hire some companionship. And then think about the next move. Stay in L.A. a week or so, no more than that. Then head out to Hawaii, maybe. Or down to South America. Meanwhile, L.A. wasn’t such a bad place to be, this time of year. It was the middle of winter, yes, but the Los Angeles winter was a joke: that golden sun, those warm breezes coming down the canyons. Andy was glad to be back in the big town at last, at least for a little while, after five years roving the boondocks.
A couple of miles east of the big downtown interchange, traffic suddenly began to back up. Maybe an accident ahead, maybe a roadblock: no way of knowing until he was there. Andy told the Toshiba to get off the freeway.
Slipping through roadblocks could have its scary aspects and even under favorable conditions called for a lot of hard work. He preferred not to deal with them. He knew that he probably could fool any kind of software at a roadblock and certainly any human cop, but why bother if you didn’t have to?
After some zigging and zagging, heading basically in the general direction of the downtown towers, he asked the car where he was.
The screen lit up. Alameda near Banning, it said. Right at the edge of downtown, looked like. He had the car drop him at Spring Street, a couple of blocks from Pershing Square. “Pick me up at 1830 hours,” Andy told it. “Corner of—umm—Sixth and Hill.”
It went away to park itself and he headed for the Square to peddle some pardons.
It wasn’t Andy’s plan to check in with the Mary Canary syndicate. They wouldn’t welcome him very warmly, and in any case he was planning to be in town only a short while, too short for them to be able to track him down, so why split the fees with them? He’d be gone before they ever knew he was here.
He didn’t need their help, anyway. It wasn’t hard for a good freelance pardoner to find buyers. You could see the need in their eyes: the tightly controlled anger, the smoldering resentment at whatever it was that the mindless, indifferent Entity-controlled bureaucracy had done to them. And something else, something intangible, a certain sense of having a shred or two of inner integrity left, that told you right away that here was a customer, which meant somebody willing to risk a lot to regain some measure of freedom. Andy was in business within fifteen minutes.
The first one was an aging surfer sort, barrel chest and that sun-bleached look. Surfing, once such a big thing along the coast, was pretty much extinct, Andy knew. The Entities hadn’t allowed it for ten, perhaps fifteen years— they had their plankton seines just offshore from Santa Barbara to San Diego, gulping in the marine nutrients that seemed to be their main food, and any beach boy who tried to take a whack at the waves out there would be chewed right up.
But this guy must have been one hell of a performer in his day. The way he moved through the park, making little balancing moves as if he needed to compensate for the irregularities of the Earth’s rotation, it was easy to see what an athlete he had been. He sat down next to Andy and began working on his lunch. Thick forearms, gnarled hands. A wall-laborer, most likely. Muscles knotting in his cheeks: the anger, forever simmering just below boil.
Andy got him talking, after a while. A surfer, yes. At least forty years old, and lost in the far-away and gone. He began sighing about legendary beaches where the waves were tubes and they came pumping end to end. “Trestle Beach,” he murmured. “That’s north of San Onofre. You had to sneak through Camp Pendleton, the old LACON training base. Sometimes the LACON guards would open fire, just warning shots. Or Hollister Ranch, up by Santa Barbara.” His blue eyes got misty. “Huntington Beach. Oxnard. I got everywhere, man.” He flexed his huge fingers. “Now these fucking Entity hodads own the shore. Can you believe it? They own it. And I’m pulling wall, my second time around, seven days a week for the next ten years.”
“Ten?” Andy said. “That’s a shitty deal.”
“You know anyone who doesn’t have a shitty deal?”
“Some,” he said. “They buy their way out.”
“Yeah. Sure.”
“It can be done, you know.”
The surfer gave him a careful look. That was sensible, Andy thought. You never knew who might be a quisling. Collaborators and spies were everywhere. An amazing number of people loved working for the Entities.
