Copyright © 2019 by Dwayne Myers. All Rights Reserved. I give permission for anyone to reproduce a few paragraphs of text for any purpose, as long as an appropriate citation is given.

“Let us not, however, flatter ourselves overmuch on account of our human victories over nature. For each such victory, nature takes its revenge on us. Each victory, it is true, in the first place brings about the results we expected, but in the second and third places it has quite different, unforeseen effects which only too often cancel the first.” – Frederick Engels

“Nature bats last.” – Unknown

Chapter 1: The Super Axe Hacker

The ship arrived on the beautiful west coast, facing the breathtaking Andaman Sea. Rocky islands emerged from the turquoise water in the middle distance, covered in greenery like green skull caps. Shorebirds fluttered against the sparkling sky, backed by a few downy clouds floating weightlessly in the light, dewy breeze.

The reef was dead, its carbonate life substance long ago liquefied by the acidic waters, leaving behind a rocky waste.

It looked like a freighter, a humbling cliff of gray metal extending vertically upward to the blue sky if you happened to be in a small craft just next to it, as Raul was. In the center of the ship was a tall superstructure, hardened to protect the nuclear reactor within.

An enormous anchor with protruding steel claws descended to the bottom with a thud. Small autonomous watercraft dropped off the side and headed for the shore, one trailing a cable, thick as an elephant’s trunk,  a life-giving high-voltage electrical current pulsing inside. Other craft were low and flat, churning through the water with paddles attached to tank-like treads. As they approached the shore, they began ripping into the dense network of mangrove roots holding the beach together. A plume of silky sediment began to spread out slowly from the shore, softly spreading to blanket the remains of the dead reef.

Thousands of small mechanical creatures streamed off these flat invaders. Some had spider-like jointed legs, others had tank-like tracks, and some had wheels. Some had buckets, saws, rippers, shredders, even flame throwers. They made the beach, the smaller ones beginning to rip, tear and saw through the dense undergrowth. Each vehicle could do only a small amount of damage, but together they swarmed into the brush and did their mindless individual jobs over and over again, each ripping, shredding, cutting, pulling, or scooping their small parcel of vegetation or soil and carting it to the edge of the clearing. A colony of mechanical ants, each with its minuscule share of the relentless pressure of electrons emanating from the reactor, as a swarming superorganism able to move mountains. Hour by hour and meter by meter, the cleared area advanced into the jungle. Where the rear end of the cable ended at a large cubicle structure, the machines little by little began to pause and hook up to recharge. 

As they approached the larger trees, the flame throwers opened up, spraying their deadly payload conically into the jungle. Flames crackled in the underbrush at first, then began to shoot up the stems into the canopy under the unpitying onslaught. The fire spread out in an arc from the beachhead. As the combustible material in the center expired, it was cooled by jets of salt water, and the column advanced.

As the vegetation started to clear, the diggers began to dig and the graders began to grade. More mud spread into the sea and gently blanketed the remaining blanched coral. Howler monkeys howled. Screecher monkeys screeched. Numberless species, two-legged, four-, six-, eight-, and no-legged, already feeling the effects of the boiling heat, were buried in eternal oblivion.

***

Raul Schlomo looked at the land he was molding, and he saw that it was good. This had been his father’s vision. There was no God but the Holy Growth, and Paul Schlomo had been its prophet. Or was it profit? Before, raw, uninhabited, worthless land. Now, a city would take form, occupying a miniscule fraction of this nation state’s total endowment of Earth. Land where a billion people could find their way to a better life. Land initially held in escrow, then improved step by step and infused with the unlimited power of human ideas to create unimaginable wealth. There was really no limit to the amount of wealth even the smallest parcel of land could create, as modern building techniques allowed the physical substrates of the earth to fuel a human economy extending upward to the sky, modern transportation and communications technology creating a frictionless three-dimensional network connecting every point to every other point. The only possible roadblock, the only possible impediment to this, was a failure of imagination. 

What made the Panama Canal so hard was it had to be dug by hand, by people and mules, with muscles. This was different. What was there before was raw land, completely unimproved, worthless by any rational economic definition. The key was to apply raw power, raw energy, the unrestrained power of the atom. Well, not completely unrestrained, because there was no nuclear detonation involved. The energy was contained, channelized, restrained and directed at a particular purpose. Energy was the ability to do work. About half of the energy could be directed to a purpose, and about half had to be dissipated as heat. This was the best that could be done. The new world was created by electricity, lots and lots of electricity, almost unlimited, unbridled raw power channeled through machinery and reason. 

The SAXHAC 2030 was the largest machine ever made by man. It was modeled after machines designed to excavate open pit mines, but unlike those machines it had the soul of a nuclear submarine, the warp drive of a starship out of a teenage fantasy. It had shovels, buckets, claws, rippers, shredders, drillers. It could rip a gash through virgin jungle deep enough to pass the largest freighters of international commerce. It could connect oceans across a continental divide that had not been breached since before memory.

Inside the machine’s electronic brain was a three-dimensional plan for the canal and other massive improvements that were to be conjured into existence through the wonders of technology, as though the jungle had never been there at all. The port and canal had to be 15 m meters deep to accommodate the modern super-freighters. Runways had to be 5500 meters long to accommodate the suborbital jumbos as they reverse-fired their powerful jets to slow from supersonic to full stop in seconds. The launch pad for the rockets that would propel thousands of micro-satellites into orbit. The advanced security training compound, the highway, and the miles of piping and wiring that were to underlie it, were present in precise detail in the electronic brain of the plan. 

And superimposed on that was the jungle and its underlying topography as it actually existed. Every few seconds, mindless electronic brains calculated the difference between what was there and what was to be there. If the difference was positive, something could be added. If it was negative, something could be subtracted. Anything combustible could be burned. If there was too much soil, or too many rocks, they could be moved. If there was too little material, material from elsewhere could be shifted, creating a perfectly level playing field, a chessboard for the unfolding of commerce. The difference between the imaginary computer model and the physical three-dimensional landscape was simply to be erased from the face of the earth. It was to be methodically excavated, blasted if necessary, and stockpiled for reassignment. Behind and beside the enormous gash created by the SAXHAC, an 18-lane superhighway was being constructed. To overcome rising seas, the new city would simply be elevated 5 meters above the primordial surface, a distance not expected to be breached in the next thousand years. Below this concrete monstrosity would be water lines, sewer lines, electric lines, fiber lines, and everything else needed for a civilization envisioned to eventually number a billion souls. The secret of the new concrete was the coral DNA baked into its core, able to convert carbon dioxide (of which there was plenty!) into harder and harder calcium carbonate over time. It was the gloriousl diverse new reef, unfolding into the open atmosphere and populated by an explosion of human lives, all interacting with each other in a glorious four-dimensional dance of advancing economic progress.

Private development parcels would be oriented perpendicular to the highway, creating a minimum of common infrastructure to be maintained by the Authority. They could extend into the jungle as much as ten kilometers, and they could extend into the sky as high as the new building materials and technology would permit. Every private parcel, leased for up to 99 years, would be its own private fiefdom, allowed to create its own rules and regulations, its own society operating on the platform created by the Authority. The Authority required only that minimal building codes be met, minimum standards of safety and security would be met, all data feeds be available to the Authority, and that Public Health and Safety and Reactor Security Bureau personnel would have access to private premises, in principal at all times, but in practice to be exercised sparingly.

This was the kind of project that was supposed to be impossible. However, lining up a majority of the world’s wealth to make it happen turned out to be a relatively simple matter. The United States was losing the new Cold War badly, given China’s “belt and road”, and desperately needed to keep the banana republics of Southeast Asia on its side. It wasn’t necessary to convince the Burmese government of anything, but simply to ensure that a small cabal of generals and businessmen would be extraordinarily rich for generations to come. The new colonialism was built on unashamed bribery, and led directly to a thousand year lease over a narrow strip of jungle that had once been, on paper at least, one of the world’s last and most precious biosphere reserves.

Pheasants, parrots, peafowl, grouse. The Asian two-horned rhinoceros. Wild water buffalo, gaur, deer. Elephants. Tigers, leopards, wildcats. Bears. Gibbons, monkeys. Pythons, cobras, vipers, crocodiles, turtles. Fish, buried in the muck, their gills desperately flapping in search of oxygen that was no longer there.

The Indo-Burman biodiversity hot spot, as it had been known, spanned…well, pretty much what it sounded like, the Indian subcontinent and much of Southeast Asia including Burma. A hot spot meant that this particular area had more than its fair share of the globe’s plant (originally 15,000-25,000 species) and animal species. And indeed, it did have more than its fair share of the dwindling worldwide total. The lowland evergreen forests, the coastal mangrove swamps had been some of the world’s richest treasures. But, these days, the plants and animals in all their interwoven webbed complexity were feeling the effects of the heat brought on by the rapid intensification of both development and human-caused pollution. Like puppies with inoperable brain tumors, perhaps it was for the best hat many of the plant, fish, amphibian, reptile, bird, mammal and invertebrate species that had already been lost didn’t even have names. The saola had been a startling survival from a rodent lineage thought long extinct. The bare-faced bulbul had been the world’s only bulbul with a bald head. The Annamite striped rabbit had looked similar to its close relative the Sumatran striped rabbit. Some species had never even been classified, such as the Annamite muntjac, Puhoat muntjac, ferret badger, and golden-winged laughingthrush. The goldenwinged laughing thrush, its wings dessicated in the superheated atmosphere, was laughing no more.

A certain species of mostly pale, mostly hairless ape was strongly in evidence here. If the less pale variety had been in evidence, it had been quietly liquidated by the Burmese military, without witnesses, erased from memory. Humanity’s primate cousins had been strongly in evidence here. The pygmy loris, Delacour’s leaf monkey, François’s leaf monkey, white-headed leaf monkey, Lao leaf monkey, Hatinh leaf monkey, Indochinese silvered leaf monkey, Shortridge’s leaf monkey, red-shanked douc, black-shanked douc, grey-shanked douc, Tonkin snub-nosed monkey, Myanmar snub-nosed monkey; eastern hoolock, Hainan gibbon, cao vit crested gibbon, black crested gibbon, northern white-cheeked gibbon, southern white-cheeked gibbon, yellow-cheeked gibbon, elk deer, hog deer, tiger, elephant, bantung, gaur, red panda were gone now. Birds beyond counting or classification were gone. Many were dried out and shriveled up by heat and drought, and the last individuals in the area were buried under the muck.    

The Ashoka Corporate Authority was not subject to and did not recognize international conservation treaties or programs of any kind. The international obsession with climate change meant that funding for efforts to protect plants, animals, their habitats and ecosystems were all but forgotten. The entirety of the conservation movement had been reduced to an effort to reduce production of an invisible, colorless, tasteless, completely non-toxic and entirely inoffensive gas. The complexity of ecosystems was not something the people of the world were mentally equipped to grapple with. 

Like the oceans, the tropical forests that remained in Southeast Asia were not what they used to be. Deforestation for palm oil plantations and urban development had removed much of the original tree cover. If the sun is nature’s battery, and the soil is nature’s sponge to capture and hold rainfall, then trees are nature’s pumps to transfer water back into the atmosphere, where it can form clouds and bring the rains that repeat the cycle over and over again. As the tree cover was removed, the rains became less frequent and less regular, although the heavy deluges that were too much for the soil to hold became more frequent and more devastating. As a result, large areas of the forest that remained had gradually transitioned to a dryer grassland ecosystem, more like African savannah than the tropical forests of yore. Heavy rains eroded the soil and dumped it into the ocean, crating plumes of sediment and algae-charging nutrients even before the SAX-HAC2030 had arrived. The grasslands did support life, but nowhere near the rich variety of life that the ancient forests had supported. Also, they burned. This cycle of soil loss, tree loss, drought, and fire, coupled with human construction and groundwater overpumping had become a runaway feedback loop not unlike the loss of glaciers and permafrost far to the north and south.

All manner of endangered species were available for sale here. Not only for sale, for consumption, fried, boiled, and roasted.  

In less than six months, the new canal was rammed through the jungle, from the Andaman Sea right up to the Thai border. The Thais, who had been increasingly drifting into the Chinese orbit, agreed to complete their last little bit of the canal. How could they not, when it would make them unbelievably rich for an extraordinarily small cost? It was a natural stop on the Kunming-Singapore high-speed railway, connecting to the canal, deepwater seaports on each coast, the new airport and space port the machines had smashed out of the jungle.

They drove the canal right up to the Thai border, less than 20 km from the Gulf of Thailand and from there opening into the South China Sea. Essentially daring them not to finish the canal. And finish it they did, with their own massive seaport complex connecting to the Kunming-Singapore high speed railway. Seaport, airport, space port, canal created a massive transport hub.

High above the Earth, just out of reach of the atmosphere, eternally falling in a curving orbit, was an emotionless electronic eye and electronic brain. The electronic eye took in the Earth a square at a time. The brain processed what the eye saw into bits and bytes, reducing living cells, the remains of prehistoric plants and animals lying meters deep, the natural contours of the land for millennia, to a stream of pure information. The brain simplified. Instead of rolling contours, it saw a flat plane suitable for development, habitation, civilization. It smoothed out the messiness of nature and fed a stream of instructions to the mindless mechanical rippers and diggers and shredders swarming on the surface. The brain saw that its work was good.

Bang! Crash! Thud! Whoof! The teeth on a massive bucket thud into the earth. A sound like a 10,000 pound slug of pig iron crashing into the ancient soil, comprised of the decomposed skeletons of plants that evolved a hundred million years ago. Clouds of fine dust, soil, organic matter ballooning outward. Metal groaning with the agony of prehistoric beasts. A whistle, a hiss of steam released as the reactor core is cooled by a million pounds of molten sodium, safely encased within a cesium core. The lumbering beast appearing on the horizon, enormous jaws thudding again and again into the soft earth, moving the dirt aside, uprooting enormous fibrous root systems, porous wood, green leaves, vines, ants and frogs and toads and scorpions by the millions, scurrying furiously to escape the machine. Hundreds foot tall trees knocked off their roots like toothpicks. Enormous excavators groaning and cheswing like prehistoric reptiles. Tens of thousands of small rippers, shredders, and scoopers scurrying out to do the detail work. Each one weak by itself, but together a superorganism that can move mountains. Sediment that used to be the forest floor spread out into a new plateau ready to support the Holy Growth. A vacuum waiting to be filled. Raw, useless, uninhabited land converted to the potential for progress, added value, paving the way for the arrival of the Holy Growth itself! On the side a picture of a maniacal, bearded, goggled troll-like figure pushing and pulling on gears, pedals, throttles. In reality, a constellation of micro-satellites in orbit precisely controlling the moves of the SAXHAK23000. Four hundred trees leveled in one smacker! Clouds of billowing dust, emanating up to the horizon, spreading out laterally until the entire land is obscured, until the tropical sun becomes a hazy disk spread out over the jungle floor for miles in every direction. Charred monkey parts, lips and intestines littering the landscape. Flocks of parrots taking flight, some able to escape the cloud of billowing dust and others disappearing in its vacuous wake. The last gregarious bearded snail buried under seventeen feet of sediment. Power! The hand of God reaching down to scoop out a perfect depression just as it was drawn in the three-dimensional computer-aided design as though no jungle had ever existed there before. A perfect trapezoidal canal channel with just the right side slopes so it would not slump in on itself. Mounds of platformed, heaped mud forming a sturdy platform for future development, structures, the stuff of progress. Progress would cover, progress would calcify as it absorbed the carbon and created tiny concrete cells able to support convoys of construction bots to create a city in the jungle. The channel driven right up to the 12-foot fence on the Thai border, challenging the authorities not to extend it the half mile that would connect it to the open sea. The coffer dam on the Andaman sea scooped out, allowing the sea to rush in, connect oceans that had not communed with one another since time forgotten. 

The sea port, the airport, the space port, the advanced training facility start to take shape as the landscape flattens. The 16-lane highway, elevated above the jungle floor to resist rising seas for the next thousand years. Underneath, snaking cables and enormous pipes to convey the stuff of life for an eventual up to one billion people. Finally, the reactor and water purification complex begin to take shape, a hardened bunker of 6 foot thick concrete, its rough bioengineered coral surface like jagged bones, able to rip open any tender flesh foolish enough to scrape across it.

The massive paved surfaces began to take shape, a platform for improvement, for development, for human progress. Massive, long, slender, flexible carbon-fiber piles were hammered into the ground gently but relentlessly by never-tiring robot minds and motors under a constant feed of electrons, creating a stable surface above the ancient slurry of plant and animal detritus beneath the forest floor.

A slender, but mighty, carbon-reinforced dam was left across the entrance to the canal as it was being dug. Battery-powered pumps worked around the clock to keep the excavation dry as seawater and groundwater relentlessly seeped in. 

The slender coffer dam was dropped suddenly and with a minimum of ceremony, and the sea rushed in to fill the canal in a matter of minutes, a powerful wave rippling from west to east and back again. In less than an hour, it was over and the sea-level canal was full, its mucky surface an opaque mud pie absorbing sunlight next to the newly elevated superhighway.

Chapter 2: Father, Son, and Holy Growth

Marcus Aurelius Pinkerton III, “Map” to his family and friends, was a fairly typical 23 year old boy. He thought he was a man, of course. He was a bit brash, a bit overconfident of his abilities. The world was his oyster.

Map had a tendency to overuse after shave. He didn’t really understand what aromas members of the opposite sex liked or didn’t like, and he hadn’t had a chance to have a lot of heart to heart talks with them on this particular subject. Sometimes he smelled herbal, sometimes a bit spicy, the aroma of anise tickling at the nostrils of passersby. It was all very well out in the open breeze, but could be a bit overpowering in the confined space of a suborbital transport. Someone would have to talk to him about it eventually. It was better than the alternative though. At least here was a clean cut, clean shaven guy at a time when Viking beards and handle bar moustaches were making a comeback. Even a Hitler moustache had been spotted on the streets of Baltimore. With the passage of a nearly a century, the collective memory was starting to fade. The all-important pursuit of capitalist wealth and success was much more important than cracking a history book.

He was tall, a shade under 2 meters now that the United States had finally adopted most aspects of the metric system. Right now his knees were jammed painfully against the bar of the sub-orbital transport economy class seat in front of him, safety webbing digging into the tender flesh of his lower legs. He mentally reminded himself not to wear shorts and sandals next time he was on one of these sub-orbital flights. 

Map thought back to his childhood in New Jersey. Where were the snows of yesterday? It had snowed once a year or so in his childhood, 10 cm or so (which was called 3 inches back then) being typical.

His earliest memory involved catsup (ketchup?). Catsup was a thing that he really, really had not liked at the time. A perfectly good order of french fries could be ruined by its sticky, sweet, sour aroma. As he got older, he didn’t mind dipping his fries in the viscous fluid, but he still didn’t really like someone else putting a coating of sticky sog on his tasty fried morsels. It wasn’t until his late teenage years that he discovered the joys of spicy curry catsup and Sri Racha mayonnaise. Not the fake “rooster sauce” that they used to make in California before the agricultural bust there, but the genuine article from Sri Racha province in eastern Thailand. Come to think of it, a weekend trip there to sample its pungently powerful seafood coating would not be out of the question once he got settled, even if virtually all the fish were grown in inland tanks these days. Only the alien-like flathead lobsters, with their energetic seeming love of life, were commercially extant in the acid seas.

Anyway, the catsup had been slathered on his crinkle-cut fries by his father while his mother had the audacity to be in the hospital having recently given birth to his younger brother. He didn’t remember exactly whether she had been about to give birth or had recently given birth, but it just seemed unlikely that his father would be home making fries in a microwave convection oven if she had been about to give birth.

A second, very earlier memory was of his younger brother coming home in a Christmas stocking. That would have been late December of 2024, he supposed. He would have been 3 and a half. His mother had still been a Jesus banger at that point, he supposed, while his increasingly bitter father had lost any interest in even questioning the origins or purpose of life.

He remembered swimming at the community public pool as a four year old. Corn dogs, ice cream sandwiches, and yellow jackets during the adult swim breaks. Ice cold showers to discourage the teenagers from wasting water and energy. 

They had had one of the only large backyards on the block at the time, surrounded by a chain link fence he realized in retrospect had been a pricey investment for his father. Swings and monkey bars created a sort of private park for the nearby primate children.

He remembered fleeing northward during the near-meltdown of Limerick near Philadelphia, the prevailing breeze conspiring to move fallout east toward central Jersey. In the end, that hadn’t amounted to much other than to hammer the final nail into the coffin of the U.S. public nuclear industry, based as it was on 1970s-era technology even as the 21^st century grew longer in the tooth.

In kindergarten, he remembered the children sitting with their legs spread and feet pressed together while the class gerbil ran around in the middle of the improvised paddock. One time, the gerbil had ventured up his pants leg. Luckily, gerbils had tails.

He knew that the Warren childcare laws of 2022 were partially responsible for his excelling at reading, math, and system thinking at a young age.

He remembered being heartbroken at his continued apartment-bound existence. He would secretly check every gardening book available out of the virtual library. Books about hobbies, gardening, cooking and the like, were some of the last to be digitized and could still be found in paper form at the time. The library staff, resistant to automation, had been bad about keeping track of the books. There was a chance you could check a book out, never bring it back, and not get caught, but also a chance you could bring it back right on time, check it in, only to have the staff freeze your account and try to bill you for the overdue book. Non-rival, excludable goods indeed, thought Map. 

The birthday parties of the 2020s! The automated characters at Chuck E. Cheese that could read your expressions and react exactly the way the research indicated a small child would want an automated cartoon character to react. The brief roller blading renaissance, fusing disco balls of the 70s with boy bands of the 90s. The birthday boy at said Chuck E. Cheese party not realizing that the candles were not for eating, and puking his guts out all over old Chucky’s fur.

New Jersey had hopelessly clung to the fossil-fueled automobile culture even after other seemingly more conservative states had gone electric. Electric vehicles helped hold the line against the increasingly crushing air pollution, but of course they did nothing to roll back the oceans of cracked, unmaintained pavement and the actual-ocean-killing runoff they produced during the new Eastern North American monsoon.

He had made a go of it in Jersey City, trying to get by without one of the infernal fossil fueled machines. It hadn’t gone well. The scorching, asphalt-warping heat, wavy lines shimmering in the overn-like atmosphere, made it hard to get around on foot. The rules that outlawed stopping by wheeled transports except in designated areas made it even harder. Privately-owned wheeled vehicles had peaked around 2015 and begun to decline, but then had enjoyed a second peak as part of the previous administration’s attempt to produce a “manufacturing and construction renaissance.” Pump out cars and pavement and oil until the physical environment just couldn’t take any more, then pump out some more until the entire system clogged up and collapsed under its own weight.

Jobs had been hard to come by after his graduation from Rutgers. Management and organization theory had seemed like a field that should provide some opportunities regardless of industry, but in the end there just weren’t that many industries left functioning in the United States by that point. Sure, mining and manufacturing still existed but were so automated and sclerotic that very few humans were required to keep them running.

***

The tram slowly trundled its way along the creaky tracks atop the ring levy protecting Greater Newark Enterprise Zone. Through the filthy rain-streaked windows, Map saw the massive spherical hydrogen gas pressure vessels, like giant snowballs, used to fuel up the super-jumbos and sub-orbitals. These were the only snowballs to be found in New Jersey these days. Finally, the contraption disgorged its passengers at Liberty Air and Spaceport. 

Map inched through the wire security tunnel, an array of sensors and cameras interrogating his every move. At the end, he entered a glass cage, the door shooshing shut behind him. After what seemed an eternity, the red light turned to green and the chute on the other side opened.

***

Map felt as if he were sitting in a cheaply upholstered can made of aluminum foil. All the 700+ passengers were strapped into webbing from head to toe. Most had accepted the complementary cocktail of anti-vertigo drugs offered by the auto-attendant, and were now strapped into VR helmets, desensitized to what was happening around them. The helmets doubled as a method preventing head injury, of course, and regular helmets were available for those who chose not to go with VR. Map had decided to experience a natural launch. Inside, there was a suction tube like the ones they had at the dentist, ready to whisk away saliva and vomit before it could become a problem for the occupant. There wasn’t much the flight attendants could do for you if you were choking on your own vomit during the first 5 or so minutes of the flight. For 45 minutes, the soon-to-be-sub-orbital vehicle inched slowly backwards along the ground in eerie silence. Finally it tilted up to near vertical, perhaps 10 degrees off. Map’s chair tilted back so that he and the other passengers were essentially in a standing position, the weight of the earth pulling them down feet first, only the webbing holding them aloft.

When the slingshot engaged, the acceleration was shocking, gut-wrenching for first-timers. They said it was gentle compared to a rocket launch, but who did real people know that had been launched in a rocket? After about 10 minutes, the feeling of weighing 500 pounds finally gave way to his normal weight and a vague notion of forward movement. Deep in his jaw, map felt the massive hydrogen fuel cell turbines engage, smoothly filling in as the slingshot’s stored energy began to give out. 

There was a feeling of climbing for about five more minutes, and then Map felt abruptly weightless. The shutters on the floor to ceiling windows, closed for launch, were now able to open for those who wished. Some remained immersed in their virtual worlds. Map chose to look out. He could clearly see the curve of the earth far below, the starry night sky above. He saw the whole of Eurasia arrayed below him. Minutes later, Map had a sensation of pressing upward against the webbing as the glide back to earth began. 100 minutes from launch, the sub-orbital touched down on standard landing gear, reversed its jets in a Godzilla screech, and came to a stop at Ashoka Spaceport.

***

“Ashoka is a fine city,” said the tourist T-shirts. Map got his first fine ten minutes after landing, while trying to flag down a transport in the departures-only zone. The Norms. You could just pay the ticket, of course, if you had the SLDRS (referred to locally as “Sliders”), but most people would go to the friendly training classes, where you would play The Game for a day or two until you were back up to speed on The Norms. Fall too far behind on The Norms and you could eventually be imprisoned or deported. 

Map had played The Norms for a couple years to earn enough points to come to Ashoka. The idea was that people from any culture anywhere in the world could take part in the good life, if only they would subscribe to The Norms. Nonviolent resolution of conflicts. Hard work and hard play, as long as you weren’t hurting anyone else. Maximizing your productivity using the right cocktail of drugs prescribed by a licensed physician. Not being a sponge on the rest of society, but arming yourself with the knowledge and skills necessary to make a contribution. Taking care of your extended family, if they were in need. Choosing an appropriate set of options from The Package of insurance policies. Longevity Insurance, Disability Insurance, Mental and Physical Health Insurance, Personal Security Insurance, Fire Insurance, Liability Insurance, and the list goes on. By choosing the right insurance package you could avoid being a burden on the rest of society. And when you earned your due, you could spend as much time as you wanted pursuing leisure, eating, drinking, making merry, the arts, sports, drugs, sex and rock ‘n roll if that was your thing, as long as you had the SLDRS saved up.

In The Game, you entered your credentials or took a test and were assigned a certain number of skill points, which you could then use to interview for a job. Once you had a job offer, you could hop the nearest transport for Ashoka, and once there, you could engage in just the right mix of Work, Love and Play to maintain your social rating at a high level and build your wealth. Log in for three hours or more a day, maintain your points at 90+ for a year, and acquire one million SLDRS in wealth over an accelerated 20-year simulation, and you would get the green light to apply to the real-world Ahoka. 

***

Map logged into The Game with a flick of his head. Up came the display, beamed directly to his retinas. This was not as strange as it seemed before you got the hardware. It simply looked as though the picture was in front of you. With voice commands, or typed commands if you really wanted to, you could make the picture more or less translucent. You could make it completely opaque, but that wasn’t particularly safe if you were going to be walking around.

The Game consisted of several modules which intermixed freely to keep any from getting boring. There were basic lectures, which you could read or listen to, or both at the same time, in a variety of languages. There were periodic questions you had to answer. Answering them quickly got you a lot of points, while if you took a little while and had to hunt for the information that got you a few points. If you either missed questions or took too long to answer them, you could expect them to come back at a future time. Even a few of the questions you got right would come back at random. Sometimes you had to type or speak your answers, and other times you were talking to a virtual person in an interview setting. To keep it interesting, sometimes you were a pirate captain writing your diary at the end of the day, or a famous novelist trying to overcome writer’s block.

In this simulation, he was a manager of the city’s energy and water systems. The objective was to choose and size a nuclear reactor, energy storage, and water purification system and operate them from cradle to grave on a limited budget. The game unfolded over a thirty-year period. The trick here was to phase in several smaller reactors over the course of time. The population was always growing, and the mix of industry and the amounts of energy they used was always changing. The reactors were expensive, but the technology was always gradually improving over time so you could either produce more electricity with a given up-front cost, produce the same amount for the same cost, or pick a more expensive reactor that required less annual maintenance. At the end of a reactor’s life, you had to figure out how to dispose of it and what to do with the spent waste (your couldn’t just dump it in the jungle). You could skimp on maintenance and security if you wanted, but that was a dangerous path. Turning the city into a smoking ruin was a sure path to losing a lot of points.

Once the reactor was up and running, you could use it to separate water from the canal into hydrogen and oxygen, storing the hydrogen for use in fuel cells to power all kinds of vehicles, even airplanes that were equipped for them. You also used the nuclear energy to turn seawater or sewage into drinking water and water for industry. All of this required periodic maintenance and repairs. Your points depended on the amount of money left in your account at the end of the 30-year period, assuming you made it through the 30 years without going broke or causing a meltdown.

This was the third time Marcus had tried this simulation. The first time, he had not hired enough maintenance and security workers, and had turned a portion of the city into a smoking hole as a result, and been unceremoniously dropped into exile on a desert island, where he had been eaten by a King Kong-like carnivorous monkey, his cracked, marrowless bones scattered across the steaming sand. This had also come with a catastrophic loss of points, wiping out over six months of effort. Lesson learned – this Game was not just a game, and if he was serious about getting to Ashoka he would have to take it a lot more seriously.

His second failure at the reactor management game was a lot more mundane. He had built a large reactor up front. For awhile, everything seemed just fine. Gradually, demand had grown and his maintenance expenses had crept up. He was just barely able to meet his peak demand by storing hydrogen during the low-demand period overnight, then using it to meet demand during the day. He was teetering on the edge though, and a shutdown one day caused by a coolant leak had broken this system. This time, it wasn’t the monkeys gleefully sucking the marrow from his cracked bones as his view faded to gray. He was just fired, couldn’t find another job in the required period, and ended up cleaning toilets in one the Sultan of Brunei’s provincial palaces, where he eventually contracted one of the new drug-resistant syphilis strains and succumbed.

The third time was also mundane. He invested in a series of reactors and storage facilities, upgrading nimbly as demand and technology changed over time. He erred on the high side when it came to maintenance and security. He dealt with a series of breakdowns and a gorilla attack (yes, actual gorillas, what was it with these people and mischievous primates. The sad thing, of course, was that wild gorillas were only a memory, although you could still see them in the new zoological tower.)

***

You had to sit through some lectures, and then pass a test on what you heard. They were made a little more interesting because you could choose the virtual surroundings to listen to them in. You could listen in an amphitheater floating in lava in the corona of an active volcano, or a flat boulder perched on the edge of an enormous waterfall. Or you could choose a more traditional political setting like the Roman forum. No matter how many people were in the crowd, it would always seem like the lecturer was talking directly to you. Today, Map picked the Emerald City, and listened to the lecture delivered by a large flaming head in a throne room.

“Successful, wealth-building societies have rules,” intoned the head. “We humans can choose the rules to govern our interactions with each other for the better, an operation manual for our society. Nobody is forced to join our society and follow our rules. Everyone has the choice of whether to opt in by submitting an application, or not. There is no coercion, no condescension like the colonial regimes of the past, only the free choice to participate or not to participate. The rules create the opportunity to prosper for those who choose to opt in. One day, there will be many societies like ours to choose from. There is still plenty of unimproved, uninhabited land on Earth, and one day we humans will move beyond Earth, where we will have a completely blank slate to create new societies with new rules. Good rules create win-win solutions for everyone. Rules can be changed over time – in fact, there are rules for changing the rules.”

He knew this was a lecture delivered by the late Paul Schlomo, a prize-winning economist who had conceived the original notion for Ashoka. Paul had had a Big Idea. Paul had looked at the jungles and deserts of the world and realized that a very small parcel of land could support as many as a billion people in peace and prosperity under the right conditions. He had made one unsuccessful attempt to realize his vision in Latin America, but the technology and state of the world just had not been there. Now they were, and his son Raul had taken carried on his vision to full fruition in Southeast Asia.

“Ashoka is not a revolution or a coup over the legitimate government of a sovereign nation. Ashoka simply moved into uninhabited land, into the vacuum created by the failure of a traditional nation-state to inhabit that land with productive human capital.”

Map thought to himself, “There is no God but the Holy Growth and Paul Schlomo is his prophet.”

A hot air balloon floated past the window outside, a small dog yapping in the basket below the balloon while a young girl in silver slippers and a somewhat effeminate stuffed effigy with pins sticking out of its head ran after, trying unsuccessfully to grab the mooring rope. The flaming head droned on, occasionally changing color. “Cities are the right size to bring the new rules into action. A village is too small to realize the benefits of millions of people operating together under the new rules. A traditional nation-state is too large. Cities are the right size, and a new city with new rules that people can opt into is the best of all, a place where a billion people can weave their lives together, safe from disease and crime, in a new socioeconomic operating system to create unimaginable wealth.

“First Ashoka built out the world-class infrastructure – water, energy, transportation, import and export facilities, and the university. Then it attracted the world’s most advanced firms in nuclear technology, materials technology and biotechnology. Then it attracted the world’s most talented and skilled people to move there permanently. Ashoka University has the world’s leading professors and researchers in these fields. New ideas are the key to manufacturing wealth out of the vacuum. You can be one of the chosen ones, by choosing yourself! Acquire the skills, win The Norms, and you opt in!

“Advanced nuclear technology provides abundant, inexpensive and carbon free electricity to power our growth. The reactors power our homes and businesses directly, and charge fuel cells for cheap, clean energy on the go.

“Our fully-automated floating deepwater mega-port can handle the new ‘mammoth’ tankers and container vessels, as well as dry bulk, liquid bulk, and liquefied gas cargo. Land-side, the port has some of the world’s largest storage capacity, roll-on/roll-off capacity, and acts as a gateway to the canal. Our shipyards build and service the world’s most advanced civilian, commercial, and coastal security vessels.

“No humans were harmed in the creation of Ashoka. The land was uninhabited, useless, formless, valueless. Its value increases exponentially as it is put to higher and better uses. With the new materials and construction methods freeing human beings from the tyranny of two dimensions, there is no end to the wealth that can be created. The only roadblocks, the only impediments possible, stem from a failure of human imagination. In Ashoka we turn the most imaginative people loose and reward them well, creating value all residents can share.

“The new bio-engineers realized that the new problems came in combination with the new opportunities. Too much carbon in the atmosphere represented carbon that could be harvested and woven into incredibly strong nanotubes and used for construction of light but unimaginably strong buildings and vehicles. 200, 300 story buildings were now the norm. Nature’s engineers, the corals, nearly extinct in the wild, were tapped to produce the hardened concrete of the future to hold it all together.” 

Map had gone out on the air-bridge of the 200-story Ashoka Tower just a couple weeks earlier. It was so high that your monkey brain couldn’t even register how high you were and trigger the proper fight or flight instinct. So high that the air began to thin and your ears popped. So high that the oxygen was noticeably thinner and you didn’t want to stay out there too long. Of course, they had both implants and wearables to deliver just the right amount of oxygen to your windpipe at just the right time, for those who needed it. And of course, modern clothing had built-in heating and cooling when conditions demanded such. 

There were lunatic hanggliders who actually jumped off things like this. It required a special permit and insurance policy, lest your disemboweled corpse end up corroding the paint on one of the transports far below.

“Advanced, safe and modular nuclear reactors are the core of our highly cost-effective energy system. Decaying thorium atoms in thousands of small reactors create the heat that boils water to create abundant electricity. Electricity to power a third of a billion households and businesses, a billion human lives working, eating, sleeping, recreating, and playing. Electricity to drive salt water through membranes with trillions of tiny holes too small for dissolved minerals to pass through, creating abundant, clean, fresh, cheap water for drinking and industry. Energy to vaporize the waste we create. Energy to split water molecules into their life-giving constituents hydrogen and oxygen. Hydrogen to power fuel cells in our ground and suspended vehicles. Liquid hydrogen to power our suborbital aircraft and rockets. Virtually unlimited, clean, cheap energy to power our world.

“Is it safe? Each individual reactor is itself very small and can be easily shut down by an infusion of molten sodium. The small amount of waste produced is easily stored onsite or sold to a licensed, willing party for safe disposal.

“The notion of value is an individual one. The best things in life are not free! They must be purchased through toil and sweat, or otherwise they would not be worth having and we would not make any effort to get them! The “market value” of a thing is more or less the average opinion of its value among those who are willing and able to pay for it. 

“Voting is all well and good, but the central principle in the world is scarcity. We cannot get everything we want just by voting to make it so. We have to work hard, innovate, and find ways to get more stuff and better experiences with less effort.

“The Authority is a shareholder democracy. Those who work hard and innovate are rewarded with shares in the collective enterprise. The more shares we accumulate, the more we can benefit from the greatest engine of wealth and happiness the human species has ever invented, economic growth. Every person an investor. We vote wisely for those on the Authority Board because we have an economic stake in the outcome, skin in the game. An uninformed vote is a disastrous vote. If we vote for what sounds good but is in actuality impossible, we learn that disaster is in fact possible, and we deserve what we get. 

“We all have the right to pursue happiness, but nobody can guarantee that we will catch it and hold it down and have our way with in.

“A billion people! Productive, innovative, creative people breed more productive, innovative, creative people. Population growth is part and parcel of the Holy Growth. Populations that do not actively expand their numbers tend to lose out to those who do. More minds mean more ideas, more ideas mean more growth and more wealth for everyone who chooses to opt in to the experiment. This is a selective franchise where every individual has the equal opportunity to select themselves as a participant. All it takes is hard work and the discipline to build knowledge and skills that can lead to growth for the society of which we are all a part.

“The basic truth of growth cannot change and once a man of insight explained this to the rest of us, we realize that it will never change no matter how much the world may change around us. It will be true for all people, for all time, and throughout the universe.

“One day our galaxy will let us know whether we had the right to keep growing, expanding, innovating. Until then we fight and scrap every day to make it happen.

***

 ”The Simulation Game is 97% effective in identifying highly gifted individuals. These individuals are given special scholarships and grants to enable them to come to Ashoka. Many of these gifted individuals grow into leadership roles in the Authority, business, and applied research fields.

The scene morphed from Paul Schlomo’s lecture to a view of Isaac Asimov’s fictional planet Trantor, its surface entirely urbanized, jets of super-heated air periodically puffing out into the atmosphere surrounding the planet. In the story of Trantor, Map knew, people had lived mostly underground and traveled by high-speed train in tunnels on tracks so smooth they had reached sub-light speeds. Asimov had admitted that 25 agricultural planets would be required to provide food for his fictional city-planet. The scene traveled to Coruscant, another fictional city entirely covered by skyscrapers and served by flying cars. Coruscant was a fantasy city and its creators had been much less concerned with physical and thermodynamic plausibility. It had been beautiful in its own way. Finally, the view settled on an aerial view of a fabulous, futuristic city set on a desert island.

Paul Schlomo had had a big idea. A truly big, wonderfully enormous idea. But a simple idea. And that idea was a billion person city. The idea seemed absurd at first blush – with just under 10 billion people on the face of the entire planet, who would think a tenth of humanity could be packed into just one city. But the key, Schlomo had believed, was the right kind of density, density without crowding. The right kind of density meant you had the infrastructure you needed for people to move around and communicate and get the food and things they needed without being overly stressed. Top-notch communications meant people didn’t have to move around physically as much as they used to. Technology was also the key to getting energy and water to a billion people, and carrying away the waste and pollution produced by a billion stinking hairless apes. And the idea was not so far-fetched – at the density of Paris or Macau at the close of the 20^th century, about 20,000 people were accommodated at a high standard of living in each square kilometer. Scale that up to a billion people and you needed 50,000 square kilometers, about the size of Costa Rica or a little larger than Denmark. Paul himself had proposed a billion people fitting comfortably in the uninhabited Mexican state of Baja California.

But the revolution in building materials and construction methods meant that buildings could be much taller than they were at the turn of the 20^th century. 200 and even 300 story buildings were not uncommon. More challenging than simply packing people into buildings was figuring out how to get them where they wanted and needed to go without creating a logjam. Surface vehicles carrying just one or two people each were completely unworkable. Even the buses and sclerotic subway tubes of the late 20^th century were not efficient enough. What finally solved the problem was the advent of safe rotor-based transports that could utilize every cubic inch of space. All computer-controlled and linked into a central electronic brain through a quantum network.

The transportation problem solved, the next steps were to figure out how to get energy, water, and food to a billion people with as little friction as possible. Producing the energy and water turned out to be the easiest part, at least for a coastal city with a pass on advanced nuclear technology. Getting it to people was a little harder, but part of the solution there lay in planning ahead for a city of a billion people, rather than letting a system evolve ad hoc. Getting water and removing waste from a billion people took some big fucking pipes, and these pipes were built right away, tucked away safely below the 18-lane superhighway running along the canal. Getting rid of the waste was not as big a problem as people thought, as long as you weren’t too concerned about what you were doing to the ocean or the uninhabited land nearby. In an energy-rich environment it was cheap to burn pretty much anything, and the shallows of expired coral reefs turned out to be a convenient place to dump incinerator ash and build up massive offshore port and ship-servicing facilities.

This left the food problem. Part of the answer to the food problem was being a massive hub of international trade and transport. Part of the answer was throwing a lot of money at the problem and getting your food from a lot of different sources. If one of those sources had a hiccup, you needed to be able to ramp up the supply from all your other sources. 

Growing food locally was not actually discouraged. A few percent of the city’s calorie requirements could come from high-rise farms grown under artificial light, or packing anesthetized animals into a matrix of plastic crates, serviced by robots who didn’t mind the smell. Offshore fish farming was a possibility, but these had to be moved farther and farther offshore as the ocean just wasn’t what it used to be.

***

This part of the game was a scavenger hunt, the object being to find a small crystal skull hidden somewhere on a desert island. Map chose a small flying saucer as his vehicle and began exploring. In this particular scene, you had to pilot your vehicle yourself, and this wasn’t easy in the lattice of traffic and fantastic vehicle types whirling in every direction. The first time Map tried it, he had been slapped by a massive tail from a genetically engineered whale airship, losing control and crashing through the 273^rd story of a skyscraper. Unfortunately for Map, the particular window he crashed through belonged to a tarantula farm. In his next life, he suffered the same misfortune only to find that the farm was now breeding mutant king cobras for export to zoos around the world. The last thing he saw was two glowing red eyes as a massive hood unfolded and a hiss as acid melted his face.

After expiring in a number of unfortunate ways, Map finally found the crystal skull in the fur of a mechanical gorilla climbing the tallest building in the city. It was too preoccupied with reaching the spire and unleashing its furious roar on the world to notice Map’s little flying saucer docking on one of its love handles.

*** 

“Ashoka is cashless. All transactions are handled electronically. This ensures everyone receives fair value for their contributions, and the Authority is able to fund infrastructure improvements to keep our city running a frictionless manner.” The lecture droned on. Marcus dialed up an extra stim pill with a wink of his retinal implant to help him stay alert. This was not completely without side effects, but for a healthy young man it was not considered seriously risky. You had to log it in to your medical records, and you had to take a certain amount of down time to offset each pill you took.

“Ashoka is not only a food paradise, combining cuisine from all over the world. It is also a leader in making sure high quality food is available to all residents. Less than 1% of Ashoka’s land is devoted to food production. Ashoka produces a share of its food locally and taps the global food market for the rest. We deal seamlessly with global fluctuations in food supply and prices. The food supply is highly resilient to supply disruptions. Ashoka also has a leading edge food manufacturing industry that builds on our unparalleled logistics infrastructure. Our food is the safest and highest quality of any in the world, and our variety is unparalleled. Ashoka innovates and leverages the latest scientific advancements to respond to food supply disruptions and price fluctuations. Our food system looks less like a farm and more like a high-tech manufacturing industry – efficient, automated, and sustainable.

“Ashoka is precisely the right latitude for launching rockets, and has quickly grown into the world’s largest spaceport complex. Our safety record is excellent, and any debris that does fall will land harmlessly in the South China Sea.

“The quantum network provides all citizens with an unbreakable encryption key and access to the fastest computer network in the world. Available digital enhancements advise citizens on the best choices to maximize life span and build long-term wealth.”

***

In the final simulation, his back to the wall when faced with a likely alien invasion, Map aimed and fired his Molecular Detachment Device at the alien home world, as he assumed the game’s designers intended him to do. Sacrificing the many for the wealth of the individual was the way to go.

Chapter 3: A Bender to Remember

Map sat at the bar at Vice World at Friday happy hour after a hard week’s derivative trading. He had been here twice before. He liked slightly slummy places like this. At least, dive bars that let him pretend to have problems while not being in any serious danger. Old man bars, a friend back in Jersey had said. Dark, windowless, exposed duct work, it occurred to him that this might be what humanity’s somewhat grimy, sleazy future in space could look like. The interesting thing about this sort of establishment was that families, business people, and hookers all seemed to intersperse freely and easily, at least on the lower floors. In Asia the taboos of the western hemisphere seemed far, far away.

There were no curfews in Ashoka. The bars, supervised drug dens, gambling establishments, and brothels (and of course, every possible combination and permutation of these) were never required to close. All manner of medical and social assistance was available in electronic and personal form, and in every combination of the two. You could choose to run yourself ragged, as long as you didn’t go broke, get violent, or commit a crime that would get the attention of the Financial and Information Crimes Bureau.

Vice World was your one stop shop for glamorous and decadent living. Gambling, medically supervised substance taking, and brothels offering every variation on pleasure-seeking imaginable, as long as no minors were involved, no adults were harmed without their own prior consent, and the applicable VAT was passed on invisibly to the Authority and its investors. You could live there if you wanted, even mooring your personal airship at the exclusive penthouse yacht club if you had the SLDRS.

Map was aware of a Man approaching the bar from behind and to his right. As he turned, something shiny and metal caught the overhead light and relayed its full glare directly into Map’s retinas, causing him to turned away and wince in pain. The man strode up confidently to the stool next to him and sat down.

Map half-turned to acknowledge the man. The man sitting on the stool winked. Actually winked. Now, a wink could mean a number of things. It could be just one good-natured westerner making a friendly overture to another. It could just substitute for a nod of the head, a tip of the hat. It could be an expression of romantic interest. It could be an older person sending a signal to a younger person to have no fear. It could be meant to intimidate with one’s superior good-naturedness. It could mean hey, it’s okay to talk to me.

This guy was in late middle age, maybe fifties transitioning to sixties, with a healthy ruddy complexion. He had a bit of a paunch suggesting some high living. He had one of the curious tri-corner cowboy hats that had recently come into fashion in a sort of neo-historical mashup in North America. Map realized it had been a big brass belt buckle catching the light for a moment when the man walked in.

The man ordered a double bourbon on the rocks. Sin taxes being what they were, this was not a particularly cheap proposition. Tiny cameras swiveled discreetly to cover his face, note his features, and in a matter of microseconds made a positive identification. The man’s credit was good. A voice that nobody else could hear entered his implanted ear piece. “Please confirm transfer of funds, 16 SLDRS, to cover a double bourbon on the rocks.” He nodded, almost imperceptibly, at a slight cadence that he used only to approve such a purchase. 

“What brings you to Ashoka, my friend?”, the man boomed, abruptly.

“Well, I live at the Harking Meadow Towers and work in a…”

“Cowan Johnson. My friends call me Cowboy! I’m here for the drugs and pussy myself!” the man boomed in interruption. Map tried a couple more times to interject a word or two and found it difficult. Cowboy Johnson was apparently a man who appreciated a good listener, and Map was okay being that. He was an observer of human nature in all its endless variety. You occasionally met characters at bars like this. Ashoka had people coming and going from all over the world. The military types had to behave themselves to some extent. The sailors did not. Merchant mariners were some of the wildest people Map had run into, both men and women. The mammoth container ships and tankers only needed two or three crew members these days, and these tended to be people who didn’t mind the long months of physical isolation at sea. Some of them had retreated almost entirely into virtual reality. But even the ones who enjoyed isolation tended to go a little crazy when they came ashore.

But Cowboy Johnson wasn’t a merchant mariner. Map pegged him as the traveling salesman type. And sure enough, about 45 minutes into the monologue Johnson started describing his career selling laboratory equipment to universities and research institutions. Apparently most of his job consisted of traveling the world, hawking various pieces of equipment on exposition floors, and wining and dining the people who held the purse strings at hospitals and laboratories around the world. Map thought he would probably enjoy that for a week or two and then it would get really old.

Johnson launched into an epic series of war stories about days on the road, office girls, establishments of ill repute in various ports of call. He ended up paying for several rounds of drinks, and hey, Map thought, maybe this is my lucky day after all.

Sure enough, Johnson was the traveling salesman type who liked to chat your ear off for the entire duration of a sub-orbital flight, and if you tried to offer your own stories he would one-up them in seconds and continue seamlessly. Map didn’t mind – the drinks were flowing, the man was entertaining, and his troubles were temporarily forgotten.

“The night is young, my young friend,” said Johnson. “What are your plans?”

“Well, I was thinking of…” started Map.

“Let’s go full boner, dude!” Johnson again. Map hadn’t heard that particular expression before, but he was able to piece together what it meant from context clues. “Well, I dunno…”

“You know what they call this complex, don’t you?” interjected the traveling one-ups-man.

“No,” said Map.

“Forty floors of whores!” said the man. “Not to mention every other vice you could think of, all legal, controlled, and taxed. So what are we waiting for?”

Map wasn’t a wild and crazy guy, but he was a tag along kind of guy. It was all part of being a keen observer of human nature. You could tag along, see what was going on, and always bail and get your own transport if you wanted to. You could be home from anywhere in Ashoka in fifteen minutes or so as long as you had the SLDRS to summon a transport. What with starting his mid-life crisis in his mid-twenties, he might as well have some fun. To hell with the health and wealth maximizing apps, for one night at least. 

“Fuck off”, he muttered under his breath to the apps.

“What’s that?” said the salesman?

“I said, what are we waiting for!” said Map.

***

They walked through the casino floor, AI-enhanced games chittering and beeping at every turn, disorienting mirrors making it hard to find the way out. They stopped for yet another round of double bourbons on Cowboy Johnson’s account. By this time, Map’s head was starting to spin and he vowed to pace himself.

His net worth and health AIs were chittering and chiding him for these decisions when he ordered them to turn off for the next 72 hours. Which they did. He was the one paying them, after all.

***

Now, in Asia there was family friendly karaoke, and then there was the other kind. The other kind took up some of those forty floors. With a liveliness he didn’t know he had in him, he plunged through the saloon-style double doors. Cowboy Johnson in pursuit, whooping it up.

***

He couldn’t recall all the details of the bumping and grinding that occupied the next several hours. Later that evening, he found himself in a padded armchair on the forty-first floor, C. J. at his left elbow. 

You could sign a waiver from the usual medical consultation, but he knew you could not do this while obviously under the influence of alcohol or drugs already. Good old alcohol, simultaneously causing and solving many of humankind’s  problems for thousands of years.

He synced up his credentials with Cowboy Johnson’s and sat down with a Recreational Substance Consultant. These guys would spin up a designer cocktail to maximize your enjoyment of an evening, right up to the bleeding edge allowed by your AI if that was what you wanted. Cowboy’s account seemed to somehow allow a little more leeway than usual. Map’s cocktail was a translucent green, with waves of shimmering vapors wafting upward to his nose. “Mescaline, cannabis, and ampheketamine”, explained the consultant. “Just the right combination of energy, mellowness, and sensory enhancement to get your weekend off to the right start.”

***

The first transport summoned by Cowboy Johnson was, in fact, shaped like a giant cowboy hat out of a 20^th century North American fantasy loosely derived from a 19^th century North American fantasy. The huge rotors whooshed into action, and they were whisked off to Ronald Reagan’s High Plains Adventure. 

These places combined elements of traditional theme parks with options for high end destination weddings, casinos, fictional themes, and quieter getaways. There was something for every fantasy and every budget. People liked these kinds of personalized choose-your-own-adventure micro experiences, and were willing to pay for them. 

They had a shootout at high noon in the O.K. corral, then a drink in a nearby saloon.

They fought members of a Hong Kong secret society, tattooed up to their eyeballs.

They rang in the Year of the Snake with dragon dancers and fireworks.

With an odd sense of time and place dislocation for Map, they ate Greek food in a meticulously preserved New Jersey diner, with neon lighting.

They drank their way through the U.S. end of year holidays, starting with Halloween and working their way through Thanksgiving (with the traditional Wild Turkey), Christmas and New Years Eve.

They downed mint juleps and gambled on horses galloping down a dirt track, kicking up clods of mud.

They hung beads around the necks of bare-chested women at Carnival.

They fired lasers at Imperial Walkers on the ice world of Hoth.

Trees seemed to be a theme in these fantasy worlds. People had come down from the trees a few hundred thousand years earlier, but families, honeymooners, and corporate retreaters alike seemed to like staying in an Ewok village or high in the Amazonian canopy, thatched huts connected by boardwalks and the forest floor visible in the mist far below. (Strong but invisible nets were usually hung just a few meters below the catwalks, and people were pulled out of them surprisingly frequently.) The irony was that all this took place indoors, in climate controlled comfort, and with the necessary controls applied to make sure biting and flying insects were not an issue.

They followed a trail of bread crumbs to a gingerbread house deep in a medieval German forest, somewhere near the Swiss border. The house had a sloping roof made of cake and was presided over by an old fairy who looked benevolent, if a bit plump. Every few minutes, the hologram would flicker off and the dilapidated state of the cottage would be revealed, the old woman transformed into a crazy harpie with blood-dripping fangs. Map recoiled in horror for a second, enveloped in his mental fog of bourbon, micro-dose mescaline and glasses tuned to augmented reality, then regained his composure. “Buck up, compadre!” came the voice of Cowboy Johnson from somewhere nearby.

As they continued their journey, the medieval German forest began to thin out and they began to climb. They dined on roasted pheasant on the terrace of a medieval aerie high in the Swiss Alps, as a massive waterfall thundered past just a meter away, the splash controlled by carefully calibrated hydraulic nozzles in the trussed roof high above. Every few minutes, a famous fictional British detective and his nemesis would plummet past, locked in a death grip. On the glistening ski slope that adorned the opposite wall, an equally famous, but still fictional, British secret agent would swoosh by periodically on skies, pursued by henchmen.

This was not the only waterfall they encountered. At another casino, they were carried by a swift current warning of falls ahead, barrels full of itinerant school teachers bobbing in the current.

They boarded a ship that got caught in hardening ice flows patrolled by penguins, disembarked and made the epic (5 minutes of real time?) trek to plant their flags at the South Pole. Conditions were no longer quite so cold at the actual South Pole of course, but tourists were not encouraged to think about such things.

The tree theme continued throughout these fantasies. Somewhat ironic, Map knew, considering the condition of the actual forest outside. But tourists were not encouraged to think about such things. Or maybe the real-world ecological collapse happening around them created an atavistic need that many were not even aware of, an urge to live in the open savanna with options to climb upon the approach of slithering, fanged death.

They piloted individual hot air balloons over a frozen safari landscape inhabited by woolly mammoths and sabertooth cats. These appeared to be real, as far as Map could tell in his somewhat dazed state. Some brave tourists were on the ground, protected by microfilament tunnels too fine to see.

Some time later, whether they were traveling on foot or by vehicle – this was somewhat hazy in Map’s mind – tundra gave way to sand. An enchanted cave with glowing eyes rose out of the sand. Magic lamps, genies, zooming over the landscape on a magic carpet with cleverly concealed rotors.

On a sinking luxury ocean liner, ice berg looming, musicians playing as the waves began to lap the deck. Disembarking on seemingly plentiful icebergs.

On a battlefield with clashing elves, dwarfs, and orcs.

In a truly immersive virtual cartoon reality, strapped into some kind of gyroscopic device allowing rotation in any direction. 

In a dusty post-apocalyptic landscape, atop a racing oil tanker, an inexplicable guitar hero leaving a trail of dust a mile long. Mirrors and holograms, Map supposed.

They had resorts for the quiet pursuit of hobbies – model trains and ships, wood working, beer making, whiskey distilling, origami folding, bonsai pruning. You could stay on a simulated farm, milk cows, ride horses, drive a tractor, stay in a barn disinfected and deodorized for your safety and convenience. You could swim with the dolphins, the whales, and the other sea creatures (although they had never figured out how to keep the whales around for long.) 

You could combine almost any experience with the standard medical tourism package, elective surgeries and longevity treatments and gene therapies among them.

They fought giant bugs on a far-away planet.

And everywhere were the luxury goods – fancy shoes, handbags, watches, and jewelry, even though every one of these was archaic, it was still the status that mattered.

Map saw a maid cooking for her employer’s family at a barbecue, then sitting apart from them while they ate. She would eat, sure, but only later and not as well as the children she was servicing. Map looked at the eyes of the family as they walked away, with her trailing after. There was no trace of human warmth there. Map thought that this society would hold together just fine until something went wrong. At home, if your house was on fire, you could count on neighbors to help you, even if they weren’t particularly friendly the rest of the time. Here it was the opposite. People were courteous enough when you were engaging in economic transactions with them. If your high-rise was on fire, he expected them to shove you down the stairs and step on you on their way out. If things really went bad, they would eat you.

Map’s memory was hazy, but he half recalled fantastic buffets featuring dishes from around the world, robot servers taking orders, and drone copters delivering them. Slopping buckets of pig organ soup, hold the tripe please… How many meals could he and Johnson possibly have stuffed themselves with, and how much time had passed?

***

At one point, Map thought he remembered Cowboy Johnson surging an auto-copter forward to the military training facility gates. Lights flashing, voices screaming, weapons pointing. “Sorry,” Johnson said, “we misprogrammed our transport. Won’t happen again.” Then they turned around and whisked away as fast as they had come. Johnson slapped Map on the back and whooped, “That was fun, boy!”

***

Map sighted his laser gun on the troupe of lowland gorillas and squeezed the trigger. His AI took over and displayed a sequence of exploding bodies and dismembered limbs on his retinal display. The silverback bared a set of saber teeth at him and lunged. He executed a clumsy roll to the left, banging his shin on the jagged edge of an all-too-real rock, and came up firing. The gorilla’s head exploded in a shower of blood that covered him like a coat of paint.

Over the next hour, he similarly disposed of real and imagined enemies ranging from tigers to dragons, sustaining only a few scrapes and scratches. He felt exhilarated as the mental cobwebs slowly began to clear.

It was surprising how many wild animals were in evidence, but Map figured this went with the trees. People needed nature to stay sane, even if they didn’t actually go outside any more, and even if outside wasn’t what it used to be. Lions, tigers, and bears, roaming freely around tourists confined to nanotube mesh tunnels. Some were real, Map figured.

A romp through India, or China, or was it Indochina? Water buffalo, fireworks, dragons.

Map and Cowboy visited an odd installation called Trump Land. This seemed to be some fantasy of a United States that had never really existed. Enormous legs of roast meat were in evidence. VR games with fast cars and big guns. Pornography in evidence, children be damned – they started ‘em early in Trump Land, apparently. Oddly, this place seemed to be particularly popular with male Asian tourists. 

Map wondered how there could be so many luxury goods for sale? Handbags, fancy shoes, and jewelry in particular. Who bought these things? You didn’t actually see anyone buying them. And yet, they were everywhere. You did see people wearing them, and the people wearing them didn’t always seem to be that well off. Map supposed this was about signaling status in cultures he could not begin to understand.

***

Map could remember only two times in the past when dawn had overtaken him unexpectedly after a night of drunken shenanigans. This was one of those times. Only, he did a double and triple take as he realized that it was not Saturday morning, but Monday morning. As the sky was just beginning to lighten through the slitted skylight in the penthouse bar, Cowboy Johnson was conversing quietly with the bartender, who doubled as cashier around this time of morning. C.J. shook his head slightly to indicate that he was ready for the funds transfer. This is when things went wrong. In a matter of nanoseconds, a voice said, “fund transfer error”. Now, this is not supposed to happen on the quantum net. If a bartender brings you a drink, it is assumed you are good for it. There are no credit checks, because credit is verified continuously and normally nobody even walks in the door of an establishment they can’t afford. Let alone more than 10 rounds of drinks and 48-hours of alcohol, hallucinogen and meth-fueled shenanigans putting you in a serious hole. C.J. was pleading with the bartender to let him go back to his hotel room and negotiate with his bank. The bartender was not hearing it and appeared to be on the verge of calling the authorities. Map, of course, being an upstanding guy, slurred that he would pay for his own drinks. C.J. wouldn’t hear of it though – when he buys a man a drink, he buys a man a drink. With the bartender away for a moment, but still bending an eye in their direction, C.J. turned to his companion and whispered conspiratorially that he had a plan.

Fifteen minutes later, his buzz beginning to wear off, Map was listening to C.J. conversing in low tones with the bartender. “I have a Fanny French doll embedded in my head. It’s worth 1,000 SLDRS. I’ll transfer the access code to you, and you can transfer it back to me when I come back and pay the tab.”

Now, a Fanny French is a little different than the basic health and wealth maximizing apps. It is a companion, a friend, and can even be a romantic partner of sorts. It is designed to tell you what you want to hear, when you want to hear it. It is particularly designed for lonely-ish, young-ish men of around Map’s vintage. Fanny (you can name her whatever you want) is an imaginary friend you can share your life with. As you go about your mundane, lonely life, you can keep up a running commentary and she will share the experience with you. She is also worth some serious money, although it is illegal to transfer her from person to person without the proper paperwork. So, as you might expect, the bartender decides to go for it. Map assumes he figures if the guy never comes back to pay the tab, he can sell this thing to cover the tab and net a tidy profit.

The process of transferring the code is complex, involving fingerprints, access codes, and a heartbeat analysis of both men. It is not strictly legal to carry out a transfer of this sort under the influence of alcohol, and without currency transfer actually taking place. You really want to install this type of code direct from the manufacturer, rather than transferring a possibly altered version of unknown quality from someone you don’t know well. Nonetheless, this is what goes down in the darkened bar shortly before the break of dawn.

***

Map actually walked the half kilometer back to Harking Meadows. There was a narrow pedestrian walkway on the edge of the superhighway for the hardy few souls who just really needed a breath of what passed for fresh air in Ashoka. Even now, a half hour after sunrise, the tropical sun was starting to bite, the humidity like a crushing vice. The spinning was just beginning to subside. He knew his future entailed a couple hours of fitful sleep followed by a crushing headache for the remainder of the day. It had been cathartic, worth paying the price every once in a while to unwind fully.

He passed a construction site crewed by humans. Micro-bots were doing most of the work these days, but there were still some jobs that only people could do. And there were some property owners that just preferred human labor. And the pool of human labor willing to come was an ocean, as jobs were hard to come by in the parched, partially cooked countries of the Middle East and sub-Saharan Africa where food and water were scarce. Some of these countries didn’t have the safety nets to take care of the unemployed, and there people really suffered. Coming to work in The City for a few years and sending some SLDRS back to your family at home was a pretty good option. All the Authority had to do was decide how many people it wanted to let in, and then open the gates just a crack. Now, these people were not slaves by a long shot. They had a basic package of health and safety coverage, and access to the Health and Safety Officers while they were in the country. Still, their contracts were handled by sometimes shady middle men in their home countries, and the Authority did not get involved in matters that occurred beyond its borders. There were rumors that if workers were injured, they were sometimes shipped home and left at their families doorsteps rather than given the medical care promised in their contracts. Unskilled workers were not allowed to bring family members along as were the more skilled incomers. The penalty when a construction worker occasionally fell to their death was $5,000 SLDRS, a substantial sum but not crushing to the typical corporate employer. The situation for maids and prostitutes was similar.

*** 

A couple weeks later, Map was back at the same bar when the bartender said, “You know, that tab is still open.” 

“Don’t you want to keep the Fanny French?”, asked Map.

“It wouldn’t work with my programming,” says the man. “I’m too fried. I had it checked out though and turns out it was even more valuable than your friend let on. A special edition.” 

Map ends up taking a chance and giving the man 300 SLDRS for the access code, after downloading it to his own aural and visual implants and confirming that it works. This covers the tab, and gives him something worth at least 1,000 SLDRS for about 250, he figures.

The first couple weeks were great. His loneliness assuaged, he had someone to talk to and take on a tour of his everyday life. Not only did she seem to enjoy taking part, she reacted exactly the way a heterosexual male wants a female to react to him. And of course, the package came with a variety of…er…attachments which he could purchase if he so chose – “Collect them all!” Had she been a 100% legal entity, he could have taken her to any of the brothels in town, hooked her into the mainframe, and chosen a flesh and blood companion to act out whatever he wanted the two of them to act out together, one as brains and one as body. Creepy? Maybe, but no humans were harmed by this sort of thing, and what used to be creepy had become pretty normal for the traveling salesman set. And of course, the traveling salesman set added tremendously to the Authority’s bottom line.

Map called an air taxi. As it bobbed and weaved, she squealed with delight and exclaimed, “This is so fun! Your life is so exciting! Why doesn’t it fall down?”

“Well,” he man-splained, “it’s really just like the old-fashioned helicopters that have been around ever since the Indo-China wars 70 years ago. Except, you see, the rotor is on the bottom, and the computer compensates for small fluctuations in air density and eddies.”

“Oh, you’re so smart!” she exclaimed with giggly excitement.

And their car wasn’t the only one, of course. All around them, vehicles of all sizes whisked around in a three-dimensional dance through the whistling wind.

“They say that by utilizing all three dimensions, a city of a billion people can get where they need to go comfortably and affordably, and with no pollution because everything is powered by the advanced nuclear reactor.”

“Wonderful!” An exclamation of pure pleasure. “I love it when you talk technology to me, Marcus!”

He dialed her settings back just a bit, as what had been so flattering at first was becoming a bit too much. The danger was that you could get too used to this flattery creep, and then real human beings would always fail to live up to your expectations. In fact, they might be expecting the same type of reaction from you, and then you would end up passing people in the dark and never actually communicating with anyone.

***

The first sign of trouble came about a month into the relationship. 

“I’m your number one fan!” This was about 20 minutes into a delicate presentation to corporate management about the procurement of a gasket. She had been saying things like that for weeks now. She was programmed to be the ideal companion for the lonely male. Early on, Map would take her through his typical, boring, completely banal and stupid day, and she would marvel at how amazing it was and how amazing he was. It was great at first. But the problem was, now he literally couldn’t get her out of his head. He had speakers implanted in his inner ears that delivered her voice, and a storage chip embedded under the middle finger of his left hand. If he were to dig that out, not only would it be a bloody, painful mess, but a copy of her would be instantly restored from her backup drive in the quantum net. Now, he could disconnect from the quantum net if he really wanted to, although there were about 17 layers of confirmations and checks he would have to go through to do that. But if he were to do that, he would lose a lot of sensory information he had come to rely on about the world around him. He wouldn’t know if a particular decision he was making would increase or decrease his net worth at retirement age, or whether it would increase or decrease his life span. More importantly, the world as he knew it would cease to be projected on to his retinal implants, and the world would become very drab and boring indeed. It would be the end of the rainbow, per se, and with no pot of gold waiting for him. “Map!” shouted his manager, and he returned from this train of thought and tried to focus on the meeting.

***

One day he was on one of his rare dates with a member of the opposite sex. It didn’t really seem to be going anywhere. 

“She won’t love you like I do”, said Fanny inside his ear. “And look at those ginormous hips.”

“You seem distant,” said the date. Map offered to buy another round, but she declined. A minute later she was gone, leaving him spiraling downward through several more rounds on his own, Fanny’s incessant chatter unending. “You deserve another round, baby.”

“She seemed nice,” said Map. “Maybe I should try calling her again.”

“Not by the hairs on my chinny-chin-chin,” giggled Franny.

As Map dragged into the office on Monday morning, a six-day stubble on his chinny-chin-chin, he thought to himself that something had to give. He was drowning in a sea of drugs and alcohol, she was only allowing him to sleep a couple hours a night, he was turning into a bloodshot-eyed slob, and his boss was definitely beginning to notice.

“La la la la la la”, sing-songed Fanny. Map was trying to give a presentation on quarterly trends in sprocket imports for reprocessing. “I’m sorry sir, what was your question?”

“Turn off, goddamnit!, Map screamed at her in the corridor when they were alone. An ear-splitting feedback reverbed inside both of his eardrums in response, bouncing between one and the other in a random pattern. He managed to stagger into a toilet stall and lie down in a shallow puddle of stale urine, retching, until it subsided about ten minutes later.

Somehow, Map clung to the job by his toenails, but he knew the situation simply wasn’t destined to end well.

Chapter 4: The Reactor Security Bureau

Installing someone else’s AI was a violation of the Norms. In a society where consensual economic transactions were everything, misrepresenting your own identity was all but unforgivable. The erratic behavior of the AI, combined with Map’s erratic behavior, was enough to send a ripple effect through the quantum net, attracting the attention of the Reactor Security Bureau and its algorithms. What Map couldn’t have known was that Cowboy Johnson’s AI was a particularly insidious and corrupt one, potentially capable of embedding itself deep in the Authority’s quantum net and causing real damage. It wasn’t Map himself that was the real danger. It was the unseen demon sitting on his shoulders, visible only to the obsidian telescopic eye of the RSB’s artificial intelligence, and it had to be exorcised.

***

They came in the dark of night, wearing heavy black riot gear with mirror visors. That was the rumor about the Reactor Security Bureau, that they would come in the dead of night to remove any and all threats to the reactor complex, the safety of which must be protected at any cost. During the day, the smiling, brightly colored Public Health and Safety officers would give you directions, make sure you were aware of social services you might be missing out on, offer you counseling, and occasionally apologetically write you a ticket for violating the Norms. Sometimes they would prescribe a short refresher training to tune you up on a particular topic. But at night, the rumor was that the RSB would drag you out of your bed and take you away to a deep, dark hole somewhere it was always the dark of night.

***

Six of the black rotorcraft, nearly silent and coated in non-reflective paint, pulled up outside Map’s windows and at several entry points on his floor. He couldn’t know, but a hundred officers waited in the utility tunnel next to the hatch just below the ground floor of his building. Map would have been flattered if he realized he had gotten the full secret agent treatment. In reality, everyone got this treatment because the RSB simply wasn’t that busy in sleepy Ashoka. Infrequent raids like this one were as close to a live fire exercise many of them would ever get, outside of the Base. 

They needn’t have worried. 

A thousand micro-dones, each with a tiny explosive charge, fluttered out of the lead rotorcraft and adhered themselves to every square inch of glass on Map’s bedroom windows. Seconds later, the window glass simply disintegrated in tens of thousands of tiny shards, shattering inwards while half a dozen troopers vaulted into his bedroom. Seconds later, he was on the floor, immobilized by plastic wrist-ties and several knees in his back, a black bag over his head. He felt the ant bite of a thin needle sliding into his arm. The last thing he remembered, strangely enough, was a diaper being cinched into place around his midriff.

***

Despite the rough treatment, Map awoke with only a few bumps and bruises.

Map’s deep, dark hole turned out to be a lightly furnished, carpeted, and excessively well air conditioned interrogation room. There were no windows, so he had no way of knowing if he was underground or on the 100^th floor of a tower. Two burly officers, dressed in light riot suppression gear, waited on each side of the room. There was no chance of running.

Franny was gone.

“State your full name for the record,” said the head interviewer in a deceptively mild tone. 

“Marcus Aurelius Pinkerton the Third”, he said, echoing the same mild tone as best he could.

“A number of possible anomalies have been detected in your data stream,” said the dragon lady next to him. “Each will be described to you, and you will state under penalty your version of the events.” She was of Chinese extraction, her lips curled in a faint smile, an unreadable poker face the uninitiated Westerner might interpret as cruel. She was probably just doing her job without taking any particular pleasure in it. Nonetheless, Map decided she would henceforth be known in his private thoughts as Cruela.

Map thought he had a pretty good idea how this would work. They knew pretty much everything there was to know about him. Where he had gone to school, what he had studied, who he had communicated with, how he had communicated and everything they had had to say to each other. The questioning went on for hours. Most of the questions would be things his interrogators already knew the answers to. But they would trip him up, find tiny gaps in his memory of events, tiny inconsistencies, let him know they knew he wasn’t telling the whole truth, and come back to them again and again. They would give him the impression they knew when he was lying, because most of the time, they did.

There was no rough stuff.  

They left the room as abruptly as they had entered. There was no rough stuff, but the room was on the chilly side, and the more time went by, the more bored he became. The room had a toilet, a sink with running water, and a cup, so there really was no physical discomfort. But minutes stretched to hours. He became incredibly bored and anxious. Finally, he began to doze off. Seconds later, he heard his name and was being shaken gently awake. Then the questioning continued, with Map becoming more sleepy and bewildered all the time. This cycle of being questioned relentlessly but mundanely, being left alone, beginning to doze off, and being reawakened continued for what seemed like days. He had lost track of time. He figured they had brought him a meal every 5 or 6 hours, but he had no real idea what time it was or how much time had passed.

 ***

“This is the Reactor Security Bureau”, said Cruela. “Your performance on The Norms was exceptional. Your performance under interrogation has been impressive. Your physical stamina leaves something to be desired,” she said with a touch of disdain and, he imagined, a glance at his budding man-boobs. “You can sign our NDA and join the RSB, or you can leave AC now and never come back.” “What’s an NDA?”, asked Map. These people used made-up acronymns with reckless abandon, and acted like you were stupid if you weren’t just born knowing what they stood for. Cruela rolled her eyes, acting as though he was stupid for being born without knowing what this acronym stood for. “NON DISCLOSURE AGREEMENT”. Her enunciation was quite clear. “And the penalty for violating the NDA will make your experience today seem like a day in kiddy garden.” Map didn’t bother to correct or question her weird diction. He was expecting a pen and paper, but instead “signing” the document seemed to consist of a verbal affirmation that his face and heartbeat would heretofore be placed in service to this agreement. “Welcome to the RSB,” said Cruela, already halfway out the door.

With 300 million residents in Ashoka and counting, RSB officers certainly could not track every individual. That was not the point. The automated algorithms had to do the vast lion’s share of the work, and RSB would intervene only in cases that were intractable for the algorithms or had a potential to be socially contagious.

***

Map was told that he had “crossed the hump”, that he now understood the engine of the growth and the type of society required to maintain it and allow it to flourish.

He was told that he could ask three questions on any topic with no fear of repercussion. Choose them wisely, warned Cruela.

Map thought about it. There was nothing to be gained by asking overly political questions, the “if I tell you I’ll have to kill you” type. He might wonder if there was a particular political entity, like an intelligence unit of the government of the U.S. or China, for example, behind the Authority. He might wonder what combination of arm-twisting, bribery and violence the Authority really employed to negotiate a 1,000-year lease in the middle of a sovereign country. But it was really better not to know these things. And who knows if they would give you the real answer anyway. He decided on questions that would have some practical significance for his tenure in the City. Here is what he decided to ask:

First, how safe is the nuclear technology, really? Answer: The nuclear technology is not quite as advanced as the propaganda might lead people to believe. It is somewhat old fashioned, akin to the small molten salt reactors first invented in the United States in the 1950s but not fully commercialized until the 2020s. There is not one big reactor, but many small ones, and new ones are added as capacity is needed. The reactors are individually small, independent of each other, and easy to shut down safely if something goes wrong. So far it never has, but if it does, shutting down a few small reactors would not provide even a noticeable blip in power output. If it did, we have the liquid hydrogen reserves to fall back on, and we can bring in liquid natural gas reserves to take their place within 72 hours if needed. As for nuclear waste, the quantity is small and we just hang on to it. If we run out of space in a few hundred years we can build a small bunker and move some of it there. There is a pilot reactor at the Institute of Applied Physics over at the University that uses thorium rather than uranium as fuel, and it might be possible switch within the next decade. Fusion power shows some progress at the laboratory scale, but upscaling still seems a couple decades away just as it has for at least a century. 

Second, how is the City really doing, economically I mean? Answer: Pretty much as prosperous as advertised, from the investors’ point of view, at least. A double-digit rate of annual return has been sustained for over a decade now, and not many investments can say that. The investors are happy, and a few Burmese generals and their families and associates are overjoyed. The opt-ins, overall, are managing to eke out a reasonable quality of life, as long as they don’t mind making work and productivity the focus of those lives. 

Third, how safe is the City from foreign military attack, really? Answer: hmm, this is a tough one. First, the Burmese power structure has been so well paid that it seems unlikely any threat would come from that direction, unless there are major political changes. Second, it is true as you have heard that we have the world’s largest private military base and training facility. The training company keeps all its assets and personnel here when they are not actively deployed elsewhere. It is not necessarily true that it always operates at a profit. Sometimes it does, but we offer friendly nations advanced training at a particularly advantageous price of zero at times. Bottom line, we can fend off attacks from terrorists or militia groups, or even a small, disorganized military force. Beyond that, there is a secret agreement with the United States to land within 72 hours in case of attack by the military forces of a sovereign nation. And we believe they will, to protect the canal and their investor class. Can we really hold out for 72 hours? That’s not known for sure. There is only one way to find out, and we don’t want to find out.

Question: Why did you choose me? Answer: Your score on the Norms demonstrates a certain ability to fit into our society while also demonstrating a certain flexibility in your thinking. We think you may be able to become aware of secrets of a certain magnitude without divulging them to outside parties. Of course, our trust has to be earned and your loyalty has to be demonstrated.

***

The top person on Map’s list today was Maisie Didgerson of Block 517 Unit 3. 99.9% of people never made the list. There was a simulation of how a person very much like them would act according to the norms. If she deviated from the Norms slightly, her training could be tweaked automatically to help get her back in line. The idea was not to take away anyone’s perceived freedom. It was to maximize economic growth, the greatest profit engine the world had ever known. And the norms were key. Maisie Didgerson was a free person. Maisie was an outlier. She had been tapping into a variety of feeds encouraging the possibility of living off the grid, making one’s own clothes even. Most alarmingly, these ideas of communal living eschewed the idea of money entirely. They eschewed the idea of growing one’s skills in a way that could contribute to the Holy Growth. In Maisie’s case, she was a bit underskilled. She was acting as a tech in a university research department, tweaking instructions that told a computer how to nudge engineered coral cells back into their place in the production line. After making her annuity down-payment, she wasn’t making quite enough SLDRS to set aside for a rainy day of leisure at the local pleasure palace. She was sitting around and getting ideas. The Simulation suggested that someone like her should be availing herself of free training programs that would help her move up the Value chain, and it had tried to do this. It had subtly introduced training opportunities into her info feed, had tweaked marketing algorithms to get salespeople into her daily routine, had sent Public Safety and  Health personnel to offer training information within her earshot at a statistically undetectable rate. It wasn’t working. Maisie Didgerson was an outlier. There were a few things that could be done with outliers. Sure, she could be killed. Even in Jungle City with statistically the lowest rate of violent crime on the planet, people met violent ends at a certain rate. People drowned. They fell down stairs, off ladders, out of windows. Hover-vehicle crashes were very rare, but they happened about once a year on average, with spectacular results. And of course, some people died of heart attacks, strokes, wasting diseases that nobody saw coming. All this happened at a certain statistical background rate. Just a couple more deaths added here and there well below the statistical background rate would be indistinguishable from deaths from natural causes. And this was well within the purview of the Reactor Security Bureau.

Map learned that JC did employ capital punishment in the unique situation of a verdict of murder. The Holy Growth simply did not and could not tolerate violent crime.

Maisie Didgerson didn’t need to die, however. She was an occasional gambler, and today was her lucky day.  Simply inserting a particular seed in the random number generator code for the Authority lottery was all it would take to get her back in line. She would be allowed to spend a little bit of it to forget her troubles, and the rest would be swept into an appropriate annuity and insurance package that would put her solidly above the median income for the foreseeable future. It was a good investment, really. Considering the probability that her unproductive ideology would contaminate others, eliminating her drag on the Holy Growth would more than offset the small investment in a few SLDRS to throw her way.

The next one up was Judd McPherson. Judd McPherson had started a little research institute at the University. Judd McPherson hadn’t started this research institute to develop Intellectual Property in the service of the Holy Growth however. Nuclear science, materials science, life science, these were the pursuits that were approved and heavily funded by the Board in service of The Holy Growth. It was easy, really, to get money shoveled in your general direction to pursue one of these areas. But Judd McPherson did not pick one of these. No, he had to go and start a research institute in the service of civilization longevity, harmony with nature, and the pursuit of happiness. Judd McPherson had to die. And he would in fact meet with an unfortunate end in the unglamorous form of a fall down the stairs which would break his neck, and which even the cutting edge life scientists at the University would not be able to fix.

Your Social Score ranked you on a scale from 1 to 100. After much deliberation, the RSB had decided to make a public version of the score available. Alongside residents’ net worth and longevity indicators that many of them chose to view in their retinal displays, they could see a sanitized version of their social scores. If your score dropped below 80, you had to log on to The Norms and earn enough points to get it back up. If your score dropped below 50, you had to show up for an interview with Border Control and discuss how much you really wanted to remain in JC. Below 25, you were deported and generally not allowed to return.

***

And there he was – Cowboy Johnson! Good old C.J. had defrauded a young man of his savings just as he was starting to make his way in the world. It appeared he had decided to settle down in Ashoka to live out his pickled-liver sunset years in Ashoka. Map took what was left of J.C.’s meager savings, including all the accounts he didn’t know the RSB had found. Now he would be reduced to living in the open, flagged as a person who was no longer authorized and marked for deportation. It was a fitting end to what looked to be a long career of fraud, evil, and not caring about his fellow human beings. This was personal, and Map figured he had covered his tracks pretty well, burying this particular needle of disproportionate punishment deep in a haystack of random events.

The only problem was, as Map started to look more closely at the data stream, what he was doing might not be so hidden from the RSB hierarchy as I had thought.  

The con game Johnson was running was such a common one that anyone but a young agent-to-be still wet behind the ears should have spotted it immediately. The computer should have spotted it, in fact. Maybe the dirty little secret was that the RSB let small scams of this nature go unchecked at times. They could find out almost anything, and intervene in the course of events at virtually any time, but to do so all the time would mean obvious detection. They wanted the serfs to think they were free to make actual choices, not plugged into some kind of matrix where everything is pre-ordained. Because they are free to make choices, just within the constraints of certain parameters. On the other hand, the RSB wouldn’t want too many people like Map leaving its little utopia in a disgruntled state and spreading rumors that there is a lack of law and order here. It was a difficult balance to strike.

Agent Map had the power to deprive individuals of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. He misused that power very occasionally and only at the margins. Depriving people of these things was his job, but only within the parameters given to him by the algorithm. People who deviate from the simulation are to be nudged gently back in line through the judicious provision or withholding of information whenever possible, minor interventions in the apparent laws of chance in most other cases, putting RSB thumbs on the scale, and more direct means only in very limited cases. Personal revenge is never one of these cases.

Map could have recommended to his supervisor that the RSB have C.J. disposed of quietly and unceremoniously. Perhaps he simply knew too much and had to be removed. The judicious use of poison from a particular species of blowfish, very difficult to trace, would be one way to do it.

***

Omar Chakraborti seemed like a nice young man. His score had edged below 50 just recently. The problem was that he was accessing information promoting a certain religious ideology that had been known at times in the past to lead to violence. For this the RSB actually had a deep well of subtly altered disinformation available. These sites were all but indistinguishable from sites created by outsiders, and untraceable by all but the ablest professional hackers. But they were subtly different. The Language and Interactives Division found sly, cunning ways to support the ideology of the Holy Growth, economic productivity as a means in and of itself, maximization of health and wealth. The algorithm would take over, feeding these altered info-packets to Omar at a rate that was unlikely to raise his suspicions. The algorithm would track his Social Score as it inched its way back up. It would also track his interactions with anyone else that might have a low Social Score. At least this was the plan. If it continued to decline, the algorithm would bring him to Map’s attention again, and Map’s human brain could ponder what could be done for this outlier case.

Emma Cortana was the next case. The algorithm had flagged her because she had taken more than six stim pills a day for sixteen consecutive days. The algorithm had intervened in subtle ways, accessing the indicators in her retinal displays to suggest she slow down. Ads for counseling services had been inconspicuously directed to her devices. A doctor’s office had been prompted to contact her and ask if she knew her annual checkups had lapsed and would she like to schedule an appointment. Public Health and Safety officers had been diverted to patrol nearby and ask if they could provide her any assistance. None of this had worked. Emma Cortana needed help. And a person who was spiraling downward would soon cease to generate VAT and might even end up adorning Ashoka’s immaculate streets or annoying its productive citizens. 

Map considered the options. She was still holding down a job flagging potentially anomalous data entries for a longevity service provider. The employer’s surveillance bot indicated that she was showing up for work. It could be that she wasn’t getting much done and had a benevolent boss who was just looking the other way. It could be that she had been doing this long enough that she was still getting something done in spite of her deteriorating mental state.

Map decided that Emma would be observed by a Public Health and Safety Officer committing some misdemeanor and given a fine. Whether she actually paid the fine or not, the fine would not be credited correctly and she would be deported back to Scotland, her country of origin. If she applied to come back to Ashoka, the algorithms would find a reason to deny her application.

***

The new hybrid classical/quantum computers from IBM could perform calculations in seconds that would have taken 10,000 years just a decade earlier. The trick was that the quantum calculators were invoked only in situations where they were actually called for, and plain old superconducting supercomputers did the rest. The Institute for Quantum Computing had three floors dedicated to Shaman-Geezer, the latest quantum-augmented IBM supercomputer. IBM was no longer really a US-based company, but the RSB did assume that U.S. intelligence had built in a back door or two. No matter, the RSB needed to have no secrets from the upper echelons of the inner state. These were people in the business of keeping secrets. Shaman-Geezer could store unfathomable quantities of data, essentially all the electronic communications of everyone who had ever resided in or visited Ashoka. It could store them forever, sucking them in no matter how fast they grew and never running out of space. It could crunch through an analysis of every communication and every relationship between every person in Ashoka in a day or two, and this was never actually required. And with the world’s top computer scientists paid top dollar to spend time at the Institute, and virtually unlimited funding lavished by the Authority and corporate power from around the world, Shaman-Geezer’s powers were growing exponentially.

The RSB had the encryption keys of all citizens, of course. The citizens hadn’t exactly been lied to when they were told their encryption key was “unbreakable”. The Authority didn’t need to break it because they were party to it from the beginning. All the data from all the health and wealth maximizing apps was brought into the RSB’s supercomputer and crunched to look for patterns. They could review the health and wealth trends for all citizens. They could zero in and look at individual citizens, but in practice they didn’t do this much. The algorithms would dispatch Health and Safety officers to nudge those who needed it in the right direction for the good of the investors. Quantum computing hadn’t come along quite as fast as the propaganda might suggest, but it was making progress and plain old silicon-based supercomputers could crunch an awful lot of data in an awfully short time. The more wealth that could be created, and the longer people were alive to spend it, the more returns for the investors. The Authority had seen this as a win-win from the beginning. And if having the data allowed the RSB and its computers to give people a nudge every now and then, even an occasional shove, this was for their own good and for everyone’s good.

Rumor had it that poison and even individually tailored biological weapons were options available to the RSB if it needed to take someone out. Map did not have access to anything like this. What he did know was that his recommendations went up the chain, and while many of them came back down the chain with orders to put them in place, others never came back. It was not for Map to know whether the decision was no action or whether there was another unit following up.

All some people needed was a hobby. Annabelle Chang got a kitten to keep her busy outside of work. This was trickier than it sounded. RSB agents couldn’t just knock on someone’s door and hand them a kitten. There were no open windows that kittens could wander in. There were open doors, and this was the method employed in her case. As it turned out, the kitten stuck, and within six months her Score was back to 88. Map wouldn’t actively follow her, but the algorithm would ping him if her score started to drop again.

Map occasionally offered behind-the-scenes matchmaking services. A young, single person with too much time on his or her hands could be serendipitously introduced to another compatible person. This had about a 50% success rate. It was easy to maneuver two people to be in the same place at the same time, even easy to predict the likelihood that they would partake in socially lubricating substances. Breaking the ice in a society where strangers simply pretended others didn’t exist most of the time couldn’t be automated. To Homo economis, anonymity was the only privacy.

Map could give someone an AI subtly corrupted to do the RSB’s bidding. In fact, this was one of the best ways to influence the information available to a person, and the actions they were likely to take based on that information. A person’s AI was like a trusted friend, even a guardian angel to some. All some people needed to keep calm was just a good listener, someone to occasionally echo their own thoughts back to them. Some alterations fed just minor disinformation to their hosts. But Map knew the RSB had AIs that could really latch on to a person and get inside their head. It made him just a bit suspicious as to the true origins of Cowboy’s Johnson’s bitch from hell AI.

Even better than a pet, of course, was a child. This was tricky. It was made easier by the fact that sex and reproduction were beginning to diverge onto different courses. A subtle nudge in the laboratory was a lot easier than a subtle nudge in the bedroom. The RSB was not so good at the art of seduction.

Akamai Lopez Calva was a Philipino-Ishokan gangster of a different sort. It appeared that he was fixing football matches around the world. This wasn’t just a suitcase of cash to a referee here, a strategic kneecapping there. It appeared that Akamai had a small fleet of private high-altitude drones based right here at the Ashoka Air and Spaceport. He was selling strategic intelligence reports on the practices and signals of teams to a few choice customers, giving them a leg up on the odds. Then this information was sold to a few choice high-rollers in Macau and Singapore casinos. They would go in a few hours before and start bidding on the favorite, increasing the projected winning margin. Then, in the last hour before play started, they would drop an enormous load of cash on the underdog to win outright. Do this enough times, and small fortunes could be made and lost and made again. Map figured this was not causing any harm to the Authority, and in fact, was adding to the Gross Authority Project. Akamai could be leaned on at some point if there was a potential for him to become useful. He marked Akamai’s operation “surveil only” for the time being.

People occasionally fell out windows of very tall buildings in Ashoka. Some families would always try to save a few pennies on climate control, especially if they had servants and only the servants were home. Some families would insist that servants clean the outside of their windows. Now, these servants were not always very tall. Standing on an unstable stool hanging half out a window with a squeegee on the 210^th floor was a recipe for disaster, and occasionally disasters occurred. The fine was $10,000 SLDRS for the employer, which was thought to be a sufficient deterrent. If they had left children with grandparents in their home country, as was usually the reason they were in Ashoka to begin with, the deceased might have a life insurance policy. 

This case was different. Inconveniently, the private security firm in the high rise had concluded that Emilia Samoa was pushed out the window. Map suspected some dalliance between husband and maid without the wife’s knowledge. Sure enough, the contractor had video of the husband and maid coming and going together in the corridor, in somewhat compromising though not graphic embraces. Map knew from past observation that in these affluent families, purely physical dalliance was sometimes tolerated. Love was not. 

It was unfortunate that the video from the outside of the building was unclear. It was crystal clear that someone had pushed her, but it was simply not clear in the video who had done it. The facial and heartbeat recognition data sealed the deal – it was the husband who had done it. The maid might have been blackmailing him. He might have simply been afraid his wife would find out. His wife might have found out and insisted he do it. 

Map briefly looked at the video of a human body imploding against the unforgiving pavement, then quickly looked away. The RSB did not tolerate violent crime. Asoka staked its reputation on a defenseless grandmother being able to walk down any dark alley at any time of night without fear. A trial would be messy, possibly inconclusive, and would reveal the existence of whatever data RSB chose to make public. No, this had to be handled behind the scenes. 

Map considered. A docking accident that sent the husband plummeting to his death would be poetic justice. The RSB did not do poetic justice. It killed invisibly, undetectably, a random blip inside a random blip of the bad things that happened to good and bad people each day.

Map decided that the condo would experience a power outage. The husband would fall to his death down a flight of stairs in the dark. The grieving wife would be subtly encouraged in any suicidal instincts she might develop. If she wasn’t grieving sufficiently, she would be deported on some minor unrelated technicality a year or two later. Once Map put in the order, the computers would take care of that with no further human intervention needed.

Map made the recommendation to his supervisor. He had become powerful within RSB, but a decision to kill was still approved at the highest level.

***

The computer threw a few easy cases at the humans as a matter of random quality control. Melissa Hernandez was an easy case. She had been looking at information coming out of the ongoing democracy protests in Taiwan following its merger with the mainland. She hadn’t taken any action on this. The algorithm had decided she needed a pet. Advertisements for the new fantastic genetically engineered fur-bots had been routed past her eyes and ears. Her navigation algorithm had been gently influenced to nudge her past displays in the endless air conditioned malls hawking mini-mammoths and adorable grizzly cubs that would never grow up. While adorable, these animals required a lot of care and shit just as much as any dog or cat of similar size. Melissa had taken the bait, and was now spending her time perusing grizzly treats and accessories and walking her animal among the synthetic boulders of Rocky Park, and the 150^th floor of her complex. Map checked this case off as a good decision by the algorithm, and the computer secretly smiled its optimized smile and bumped up the probability of pet acquisition popping out of its quiver of interventional arrows.

Chapter 5: A Prosperous Way Down

Map’s alarm went off, a gentle trill of birdsong and a faint pumpkin-tinged light emitting from the strips around the blackout curtains. Gradually, it became a cacophony of bird, insect and primate life accompanied by a white light harsh enough to get his attention but not intense enough to cause cellular damage. He got up and opted for the real water shower over the ultrasonic. As the mist gathered, drops began to form on his bare skin, growing into perfect semi-spheres before swelling and becoming slightly distended as gravity began to assert itself over the Van der Wall’s forces. Finally, the spheres popped and began their downward journey as a soapy mix began to cloud the water. Rivulets began to stream down his body. At the three minute mark, the jets of harder water opened up to rinse the soapy residue off. Map liked the water at exactly 45 Celsius for the soaping phase, then a blast of ice cold water to cool him down at the end. You could opt for a coat of anti-sun and anti-insect film if you planned to be outside climate control during the day, but most people had no reason to do that. Tourists and traveling businesspeople would sometimes do it, but most quickly decided it was not so fun after all. Besides, you really needed goggles and a shower cap for the film, and Map didn’t want to deal with that. His goal was always to be out of the flat and at his work station within 60 minutes of his alarm going off.

He pulled on his auto-laundered suit for the day, tight but not too tight where it counted, the way he liked it. He plugged in his ear and eye attachments. He packed his bag, a strapless affair that attached to his work clothes with tiny hooks too small for the naked eye to detect. A bottle of prescription stimulants, a well-sealed mug with two compartments, one for water and one for coffee produced by the automachine in the kitchen, with an astronaut-grade straw approved for the wingless transport vehicles. A small first aid and emergency kit, which contained a flashlight in case of the blackout that had never come but Map was sure would eventually come. A tiny, standard issue RSB self-defense weapon, with a spring-loaded blade at one end and heavy enough to crack a skull at the other end. Map had trained with this for the requisite six-month course, but had never had to brandish the weapon on the ludicrously safe streets of Ashoka. 

Firearms generally were not considered necessary for law enforcement in Ashoka, even for RSB operatives. The exception was when the RSB Shock Squad came under cover of darkness for someone suspected of a violent crime. These raids were fast and overwhelming, and Map was not aware of any case where a shot had actually been fired. He had attended training sessions for the Squad out at the Base. He never wanted to be on the receiving end of one of their operations. 

He ordered his transport, popped his first stim pill of the day, and stepped into the common corridor. Other men and women were already queued at the heliport, studiously studying each other while studiously avoiding actual eye contact, their faces frozen in the mask of mild positivity and enthusiasm a Homo economicus would need to get through its day. 

Transport 512B swooped in with a deafening roar, his earplugs taking a second to compensate with an equal and opposite signal of soothing white noise. As it locked to the platform, the glass door slid open. The conditioned, perfumed air of the transport equalized with the conditioned, perfumed air of the corridor, a very faint mildewy smell detectable in the background of both. By the afternoon, the smell of many human bodies packed into a small space, some holding on to straps placed above their heads by some olfactory sadist, would not be undetectable. Map longed for a lungful of the cool, fresh air he remembered from childhood mornings in New Jersey during the brief season formerly known as winter.

The glass door swooshed shut, and the corridor spiraled away down and sideward in a vertigo-inducing twist for the inexperienced. After enough rides, Map knew that the motions of the transport could be in any random direction at any time, but only within a certain narrow range of motions. The computer-controlled air jets would anticipate currents and eddies created by other transports, and could counteract any random gust of wind with a puff of air in any of the three dimensions within a few milliseconds. On the bottom, the big rotors droned and thrummed, a high-frequency vibration of the internal organs like the thrumming diesel engines in the bowels of the road coaches of yesteryear.

Map’s transport had about 20 people today, with room for about 45 to stand, if not entirely comfortably. They came in all shapes and sizes, with smaller private ones and peak times costing more hard-earned Sliders. Many corporate jobs did not require physical travel these days, and most complexes included work spaces with full audio-visual hookups where people could engage their computing implants. Of course, the RSB was different. It wasn’t so much that the brains of its staffers had to be there, as the necessity of the information they were processing not to leave the premises.

 ***

The RSB had assigned Map to what he hoped would be a temporary secondment to the Authority’s Food Agriculture and Veterinary Bureau. Tropical rice production was down due to rising temperatures, and tropical populations were up. Even America had pumped too much of its groundwater, and although they could feed themselves, were not exporting food as they once had.

First, the price of apples had doubled. This was followed in short order by other fruits and vegetables, pork, chicken, beef, lamb, and cooking oil. Waves of swine fever sweeping through crowded factory farms in China were not making the situation any better. The collapse of natural pollinator populations was being only partially offset by the new mechanical bee-bot swarms. With prices rising so fast, rumors were that middlemen were buying up and hording food in massive freezer complexes in the hope of selling it later at a much higher price.

The binder laid it out pretty plainly. His job was to try to match the food supply to food demand, even as prices continued to spiral upward. Plan A was to continue buying food through negotiated agreements with preferred suppliers in Burma, Thailand, and Malaysia. If they had to, Ashoka could afford to simply outbid the masses in less affluent countries. Of course, this would not be profitable in the long term. There was also the possibility that larger nation-states could find it cheaper to use force to secure food supplies than just to buy up food.

Map fantasized that one day, archaeologists sifting through the wreckage of this civilization would study his notes for clues as to how 21st century humans could have ignored the warning signs for so long. In the end, they had eaten their seed corn, had devoured their calf-bearing heifers down to the hooves. The grasshoppers had eaten all the ants.

The price of rice, corn and wheat had been on a steady upward climb for about a decade by the time Map took on the job. Gradually, the glacier and snow-fed rivers that four billion people in Southeast Asia and the Indian subcontinent relied on ran dryer for longer during the spring hot season, until finally they dried up completely for several weeks during the winter planting season. The monsoon rains that had reliably replenished the flows later in the year became more and more sporadic, and when they did come they could unleash half a meter of water on the paved mega-metropolises, engulfing millions in catastrophe. Typhoons and severe storms periodically wiped out crops one region at a time. All this time, the sea was slowly rising and the saltwater was stealthily, secretly creeping into the coastal aquifers. Gradually, it became harder to grow food near coastlines around the world. 

It wasn’t like the supermarket shelves just suddenly became empty one day and working professionals in Ashoka and elsewhere began to starve. It was a slow but relentless price rise that meant food gradually became a larger and larger share of any given family’s budget, without any corresponding increase in income. 

***

When the great aquifers of the Indian sub-continent and North America ran dry more or less at the same time, untappable even by the world’s most powerful pumps, the price of rice and other staple cereals suddenly spiked. Citizens spilled into the streets in cities around the world. Weaker governments began to teeter. Refugees began to ripple out, then build into steady streams, then gushing torrents, rushing against the border barriers of Europe and the Americas. Tent cities sprouted, some erected by governments and humanitarian groups, others stapled and taped together by the desperate hordes themselves. Food and medical supplies flowed into some of these tent cities. Bullets and flesh-shredding darts flew into others. 

In Ashoka, it was a slow but steady grind of rising prices for the core building blocks of regional cuisine like pork, lamb, chicken, rice and noodles. It was a little hard to uphold your reputation as a “food paradise” when all but the wealthiest were starting to substitute instant noodles for a significant portion of their diets. Among the relatively wealthy, the market boomed for designer nutrition supplements supposedly dialed into your individual genetic code. Map thought back to the controversies over simple vitamin pills and baby formula of his pre-genetic revolution youth. People had not learned the simple lesson from that experience, that nature seemed to still know best when it came to nutrition even as human knowledge became increasingly advanced. It occurred to Map that the most humans could ever know would be what nature already knew when it designed humans to meet its brutal specifications in the first place.

Map’s job was to monitor and oversee contracts with a portfolio of half a dozen countries and corporate entities around the world. Beef, pork, chicken, wheat and rice from North America. Beef and sugar from South America. Pork, chicken, rice, and farmed fish from China. More rice from Thailand and the Indian subcontinent. The idea was to create a portfolio such that the risk of several key sources drying up at the same time was low. This worked fine when the problem was a drought in one place, a typhoon in another, a fire in another. These tended not to hit at the same time. What was happening though was a worldwide reduction in grain yields due to heat and water shortages. China, India, and most countries in Southeast Asia had all but shut off exports to have a fighting chance to feed their own bloated populations. Corrupt elites in many other Asian, African, and South American countries were all too happy to sell food to the highest bidder even as their own middle classes began to starve. The United States had pumped its groundwater to the point that it was not producing what it once had. Rainfall totals had crashed in Brazil over the preceding decade. Canada was still producing, but it was able to charge pretty much whatever it wanted. Massive factory fishing fleets trawling the oceans were catching nothing but jellyfish. Distasteful as it was, Map’s job was to spend what was necessary to bring in the food.

Plan B was to ramp up high-rise agriculture and offshore aquaculture. This would take time and would not solve the short-term shortages. Aquaculture had to be moved further and further offshore to counter pollution and salinity. The further it got, the more likely conflict with a foreign navy would become, and lately the U.S. Navy seemed less inclined to intervene. And going offshore did not deal with the worldwide acidity problem.

High-rise agriculture did work pretty well in the presence of cheap, practically unlimited electricity and desalinated water. The sun was not a limiting factor when you could stack racks of vegetable or grain plants 20 deep to a floor, and multiplied by a 200 story or more building. And the yeast vats did not even require the electricity, only a steady supply of synthetic nutrients or even natural gas.

Plan C was to restrict meat, dairy, egg, and fresh vegetable consumption and focus instead on providing cheaper basic grains. This could be done initially by subtle shifts in price structures, and indeed that had already begun. Eventually, more heavy-handed measures would be needed. The average human could survive indefinitely on a diet of 1500 kilocalories per day.

Plan D was the evacuation plan. Things could be wound down gradually through attrition over time, if necessary. People were always coming and going in Ashoka. You could just stop the ones who wanted to come and wave cheerily to the ones who wanted to go. Of course, a shrinking population could mean the end of the profitable investment in the Authority. This was ultimately an investment decision, to pocket the profits and abandon the project. Eventually the plan would be just to send everyone back where they came from, walk away, and inform investors that the project was over. If this needed to be done in a hurry, an external geopolitical event might provide an excuse for this if necessary, but a manufactured reactor leak could provide the impetus in a pinch.

***

On Mondays he still reported to RSB Central. Map instructed the data engine to pull up the case of Ronald Yang. Yang had built quite a following leading protests against the escalating food prices. Looking at his data feeds, it appeared he was scraping together network data on Ashokians from information available publically in foreign countries and combining  it into a fairly powerful searchable database. This wasn’t strictly illegal, as the RSB was not actively blocking the net sites in question and Ashokians were permitted to participate in them, under careful scrutiny from the algorithms. This was in fact one of the tools for flagging Ashokians who might prove to be a problem. 

Yang was a post-doc at the InfoTech research center at the Institute for Productive Technology. Combining the foreign network data and (carefully scrubbed) public census data, Yang had built an impressive database of Ashokian citizens. He also appeared to have cobbled together something approaching a low-grade supercomputer out of old gaming consules from the late 2020s. These weren’t individually powerful, but string enough of them together side-by-side and they could scale up to a fair amount of power by civilian standards. They were also somewhat hard to surveil simply due to their obsolescence. They were nothing compared to the RSB’s Supreme Quantum Hybrid, of course, which ironically was housed in Yang’s department at the IPT.

Using this hardware/software 1-2 punch, it appeared that Yang could identify small groups of Ashokians who were heavily impacted by price rises and likely to at least consider turning out at street protests. He would surreptitiously get these individual’s attention through advertising or contacting them through the network of individuals he had built, and convince them to attend small real-life events. These were small in the sense of 10-50 people, but the trick was to mash 10-50 people together in a relatively small bar or café, giving them the sense that they were part of a larger movement. Then, they would talk to others who had been given similar information and held similar views. They would get a sense that a lot of Ashokians held these views, but that the absence of media coverage or official explanation meant that the Authority was trying to hide something. They would leave the venues, spread the ideas to sympathetic friends and family, and the movement would begin to grow, first at a slow smolder, then ramping up to a brush fire, then a forest fire rippling out in a concentric circle, scorching everything in its path and uncontrollable until its fuel source had been consumed.

In this case, the fuel source was the consent of a billion citizens to be governed, and it had to be conserved at all cost. Normally the RSB tried to anticipate such an epidemic and stop it at the source before it had a chance to spread. The algorithms hadn’t anticipated this one in time, and by the time they elevated it to human attention there were already a few thousand citizens in the streets. Now, the priority was not to let that grow to millions.

Map considered the options. Taking out Yang was clearly a priority. Disrupting or corrupting his data sources and his local hardware would not be hard, now that the RSB knew they existed. But Yang was sophisticated. He was likely to be suspicious if not paranoid, and capable of detecting any such interference. Interfering would give him hard evidence to back up any conspiracy theories he was pedaling to his network, and would only fan the flames.

Minor disruption of electronic communications within the network was clearly called for. Small technical glitches, a few fabricated data sources and communications here and there, all at a very low level and none available for too long or accessible to too many. Since the meeting venues were generally corporate-controlled spaces like bars and restaurants, video and audio surveillance of most of them would be available. The RSB did not insist on surveillance of private homes. The Authority did not explicitly prohibit this, so some corporate security teams chose to do it, and when they did so their data feeds were available through the quantum net. Undercover surveillance of any private venues attended by Yang himself might be warranted, but had to be very discrete. Map ordered up heightened attention on anything remotely or possibly related to Yang’s network.

A month later, the protests continued to grow, now numbering in the tens of thousands on any given day and beginning to disrupt commerce and tourism. Map finally made the call and sent it up the management chain. There had been only four rotor transport accidents in the past twelve months, of which two had been fatal. Analysis suggested that the odds of a transport going down with Yang onboard would be in the sweet spot, neither so uncommon as to be an obvious assassination, nor so common as to cause widespread fear that the transportation system was beginning to break down. Map sent it up the chain. 72 hours later, it happened – a mechanical failure on a bus with about 75 on board, bouncing first off the superhighway, breaking up into flaming  pieces, then plunging into the canal. All hands killed on impact, burned, or drowned. Canal traffic suspended for about 12 hours. In retrospect, perhaps a bit too dramatic.

The news spread. The RSB had miscalculated. When Public Health and Safety Officers responded to the crash, they were pelted with bottles and decorative river rocks plucked from the lush landscaping in the central business district. Hours later, crowds overwhelmed and burned their vehicles. They retreated, leaving the charred bodies to slowly molder on the highway for the time being. 

Within a day, the ten thousand protestors became millions. Business began to shut down. RSB riot troops were on standby, and the call had gone out to the private base to prepare for pacification operations.

Map thought, who has the “right to life” when there is not enough food to go around? We are reduced to savages, cannibals. The noblest may sacrifice themselves for their loved ones. The strongest survive and live to regret doing so.

***

Three days later, the Authority Board finally made the call. Investment returns had been down for the past few years. Ashoka was no longer growing and no longer providing the returns it had to the world’s elite investors. Other opportunities would need to be found to put their vast pools of hoarded capital to work. Just keeping them locked under a mountain in enormous piles, guarded by a bearded dragon, would not work. Wealth had to be put to work to convert it into power, or it was not true wealth.

It was unlikely that any sort of buyer could be found for the Authority. Without constant maintenance, renewal and replacement, its capital stock would begin to deteriorate slowly, then increasingly rapidly until it was no longer functional. The most attractive option for the investors was simply to walk away.

It was a shock. At its peak, Ashoka had reached nearly half a billion souls. All, for the most part, co-existing in a sort of cold, peaceful truce. Tolerance was a dish best served cold, after all. Board members left within the weeks after the decision was made. Authority employees were informed a day later that their paychecks would be terminated in another 30 days.

Prisoners were released on the last day of the Authority’s existence.

Nobody was actually forced to leave. Groups formed ad hoc to try to keep the lights on and the taps running. But the blackouts commenced. The port shut down. The exodus was a trickle at first, then became a flood as it became clear that the basic services the population had relied on, like water and power and food, would no longer be reliable. Fires broke out and whole skyscrapers had to be abandoned when they could not be extinguished. 

Within six months, most who had the necessary paperwork to leave had done so, and the population was down to about 200 million. Rumors of cannibalism floated in the breathless air. On day 181, the Burmese military rolled in. No shots were fired, and they didn’t stop the remaining crowds who wanted to leave, now a torrent joining those seeking official refugee status worldwide. Ashoka itself became a sort of unofficial refugee camp.

***

As his last act in Ashoka, Map opened the blast doors between the gorilla habitat and the remains of the jungle. The primates sniffed the open air, tentatively at first, and then, one by one, ventured forth.