All That We See or Seem, page 32
“Did not.”
“Look.” The guard tried to be patient. “If you insist on a mismatch, we’re going to have to get Victor down here and do a full inventory check with the origin facility. Do you really want to do that?”
The thought of dealing with the nasty, brutish, sadistic Victor for an extended period was unappealing.
The guard saw the driver’s expression and pressed. “Or, you could just change the number on your form. You picked up twenty-three, I took in twenty-three. Everyone is happy.” He reached into his pocket for something that he had kept there for just such emergencies and held it out to the driver.
The driver shook his hand and assessed the size of the plastic baggie he felt between their palms. Oh, what the hell. He closed his fingers around the baggie and nodded.
“I picked up twenty-three.”
“Excellent.”
As the truck backed away, the migrants lined up to be brought inside the facility. Before passing through the security scanner, the guard asked each to surrender whatever electronics they carried. Most had already done so to other “guides” along the transport network that brought them over the border, but a few still had their phones.
“I need to call my husband at home,” a woman said, clutching her phone.
“We’ll give you new phones once you’ve settled in,” said the guard soothingly. “You understand we can’t have unauthorized devices in here. Do you want DHS to find you?”
The woman still looked hesitant. “I have pictures on—”
“We’ll hold on to it for you. You’ll get everything back once your contract is finished.” The guard was earnest and comforting. He knew that this wasn’t the time for intimidation. Not yet. “Also, please give me your passcode. I have to make sure there’s nothing illegal on here. You understand? Your employer is taking a big risk hiring you.”
Reluctantly, the woman gave up the phone and the code.
Julia, who was next in line, looked longingly at the door to the loading dock before turning back to the guard. During that brief window of darkness, after she had disposed of the fusion vision glasses, she had deliberately slammed herself into a wall before scrambling into the loading dock. Her face was already swelling from the bruises. She hoped it was enough to defeat whatever facial recognition program they used—and she prayed that Victor wouldn’t see her.
She gave Talos a hard squeeze. Goodbye. For now.
Since she had no documents—not uncommon among migrants—and Cole, the guard, found her Chinese name unpronounceable, he decided to record her as “Number 23.”
The detector beeped as she went through.
“Your phone,” said Cole, holding out a hand.
Julia placed the tensor bank in his palm. The screen showed “Welcome” in various languages and an animated finger swiping up.
“What’s going on here?” Cole was confused. “You never activated your phone?”
“I got from border man,” said Julia, putting on a heavy accent. “No card. No call. You have card?”
The guard waved dismissively. “Sure. You’ll get all the subscriber cards you want at the end of your contract.” He examined the device more closely. “What kind of phone is this anyway? Some Chinese knockoff?”
Julia put on an ingratiating smile. “Yes. Cheap. Good phone. No government watch.”
Cole considered the phone. Chinese knockoffs were supposed to have none of the trackers the government forced domestic makers to install. Instead of dropping the phone into the collections tray, he slipped it into his pocket discreetly before waving her on. “I’ll take real good care of it for you. Go on. We have a schedule to keep.”
From the muffled shouts she heard in the distance, she surmised that Victor had caught the “mole.” For the moment, at least, she was safe.
FORTY-SIX
Two weeks had passed since the beginning of Julia’s captivity.
After her own horrific indoctrination session, Julia was given a series of assessments to see what kind of content work best suited her talents. Those deemed to have the most talent were put on short-form video or livestreaming, with the hope that they could develop into influence idols (they were told that they would be able to work off their contracts faster, given their higher “wages”). Julia, who showed little promise in her assessments, was put into the “tap farm,” where the assets were expected to each operate hundreds of social media accounts and to boost the content created by the rest of the farm with claps, likes, upvotes, comments, and so on to increase the likelihood that the content would go viral.
Two weeks felt like an eternity.
It was the loss of the most basic things, things that she had taken for granted, that she felt the most. She could no longer go for a run whenever she wanted to, seeking the restful tiredness of physical exertion. Neither had she understood, until now, how much sunlight was a necessity. Her skin hungered for it, a hunger that could never be satisfied by the cold light of LEDs.
Idly, she wondered how long it would take before anyone in the world out there—growing more unreal with each passing day—realized that she was gone. Cailee, Nick, Sahima, Hutch—would any of them know? She had not been returning their calls, had pushed them away in her prickly solitude. Even the apartment manager wouldn’t be checking on her for not paying rent—her place wasn’t habitable after the fire.
Oh, she was in deep trouble, wasn’t she?
On top of it all, the monotony of the work, sixteen hours a day, plus being always under surveillance and control—she was told when to wake up, when to go to her meals, when to have bathroom breaks, when to sleep—felt like an inescapable, crushing hand. The only way to cope was for her to make herself as like a machine as possible, to detach further from this current reality so that she could preserve some semblance of her soul. Resistance required you to remember who you were, and the enslavers did all they could to make you forget.
She knew she had to get out before she lost herself.
*
But how?
Besides the cameras, microphones, guards, Victor also encouraged the “assets” to report on each other.
One time, when Julia spent too long in the bathroom, one of the other girls reported her, and Julia was beaten. Her injuries were so extensive that she was allowed to stay out of work for half a day.
The girl who tattled on Julia was told that her debt to the Prince would be reduced by one hundred dollars as a result of her reporting. She nodded expressionlessly.
But she beamed when she was told that as an extra reward, she would be allowed to watch a video of her son back home in Vietnam. A guard held a phone in front of her eyes as the video played, and the hunger and love in her face broke Julia’s heart.
Julia wanted to tell her that the video was a deepfake and the debt a mere lie. But she didn’t. The truth seemed even crueler than what had been done to her.
Resistance is futile, everything around her seemed to whisper, and she almost believed it.
*
Julia awakened with a start.
In the dim light from the hallway, she saw Elli kneeling next to her bunk bed. Holding up one finger against her lips to warn her to be quiet, Elli gently took her by the hand and led her out of the dorm-prison.
Somehow, they were walking on a deserted, muggy beach, the scent of salt and blood in the air. Waves from the turbulent ocean slammed against the beach and sprayed them with white foam like confetti. Thick haze hid the sun and made it impossible to tell what time of day it was.
Julia looked at Elli: worn, tired, bloodshot eyes. Her clothes were dirty and full of holes. She didn’t look anything like her egolet.
“An egolet isn’t the same as the person behind the egolet,” Elli said, giving her a smile. “Even if the egolet was trained on everything I’d ever written, every picture I’d taken, every dream I’d woven—it’s still just an impression, not the whole story.”
“Where are we?” Julia asked.
“Where do you think?” Elli asked.
Julia inhaled the humid air deeply. “Was this . . . where you died?”
“In a way,” said Elli. “This is the shore of dream country.”
“Dream country,” Julia repeated to herself. What were her dreams? Could she find them here?
“You crave freedom, belonging, telling a story about yourself that you love,” said Elli.
A wave of longing struck Julia so hard that she couldn’t breathe. She stopped, bent over with her hands on her knees, and strained against the lump in her throat.
“It’s the simplest dream of all,” said Elli, “as well as the grandest.”
Julia looked over the desolate beach; then she glanced at the stormy sea. “I can’t see it.” She had to shout to make herself heard above the roaring of the waves.
“There will always be those who don’t want you to tell the story you want to tell,” said Elli. “But you must still try.”
“I don’t know how!” Julia shouted.
Elli began to walk away. “Only you can fight for your dreams.”
“Tell me how!”
*
Her eyes snapped open.
In the dim light from the hallway, she saw Isabella, the girl in the bunk above hers, kneeling next to her. “You were talking in your sleep.”
“What . . . what did I say?”
Isabella put a finger against her lips. “They’re listening,” she whispered.
She could have reported me, thought Julia. She could have called for the guards.
“Thank you,” Julia whispered back.
Only then did she realize that she wasn’t using her fake accent. But Isabella showed no sign of surprise as she climbed into the bunk above.
*
All day long, she worried about Isabella, who worked next to her in the tap farm.
So she paid extra attention to Isabella—to the bruises on her face, to the slight limp in her walk, to the hint of defiance that sometimes slipped out when she glanced at a guard. Most of all, she focused on what Isabella did.
Isabella worked in bursts. For a while, she’d be a whirlwind of activity: clicking like on a stream, clapping a flipclip, thumbing a micropost.
Then she’d turn into a model of focus: a very long comment on Wirrwirr, a lengthy reply to a complaint clip, a detailed dissection/takedown of a fakebust.
Back to another clap, a like, a yessah.
A brief pause.
A like, another like, a thumbs-up.
A review, a fakebust, a flouncexplanation.
A share, an upvote, a stir.
Another brief pause.
Three short things, three long things, three short things again.
. . . - - - . . .
S.O.S.
Julia’s heart convulsed at the audacity of it. A pattern spread across hundreds of accounts, all relayed through different addresses—how would anyone ever be able to put all that together? This was like screaming for help in the middle of a desert, except you couldn’t scream yourself and so had to train random roadrunners and scorpions and kangaroo rats scattered over thousands of square miles to scream on your behalf, one syllable per creature.
It was preposterous. It was never going to work.
Yet, the very fact that Isabella was trying to get help, refused to give up—it told her everything she needed to know.
You don’t have to do everything by yourself.
Julia clicked a share, a like, another like.
Then she typed out a micropost, wrote a hiphype, composed a toothytruthy.
A clap, another clap, a thumbs-up.
She paused, then glanced over at Isabella, before resuming the pattern again.
By the end of the day, she could feel Isabella stealing glances back at her. Though Isabella said nothing, Julia sensed a new energy in Isabella’s movements. Each act of rebellion, no matter how futile or how small, was a reclamation of the soul. The Prince and Victor didn’t own them. No one could ever own them.
Before the end of the shift, as they were marched out of the room to dinner, she whispered to Isabella, so quietly that the microphones wouldn’t pick up her words, her head turned so that the cameras couldn’t read her lips: “Tonight. Three one four one five nine.”
Isabella stiffened.
“Pi?” she whispered back.
Straining to betray no sign of her excitement to the cameras, Julia nodded.
For the rest of the evening, they didn’t interact in any way, not even exchanging a word or a glance.
*
At night, her dorm cell was filled with its own kind of music.
The snores, gentle and otherwise, of eight women wove the soundtrack to their dreams, the only time they were left alone, free to roam in their minds. This was disrupted from time to time by the off-beat pounding steps of the guards, who patrolled the corridors in irregular patterns, emphasized by a jarring rasp now and then when one of them slid open the viewport in their locked door to peek in. Finally, the constant whirring and occasional beeping of the night-vision cameras hanging in ceiling corners formed a kind of menacing chorus.
Julia waited until the guard had slid the viewport shut with a metallic screech. From experience, this gave her anywhere from fifteen to thirty minutes before the next peek. She reached up and punched the bunk above her several times until Isabella’s snoring ceased. Then, turning her face toward the wall, she began to mutter as though talking in a restless dream.
“Maybe then we find a way. Will tomorrow be sunny? She can help get food ready. Out there, have picnic.”
She paused and smacked her lips. Turned and tossed.
There was no sound from Isabella.
She went on.
“Chicken, eggplant, oil, rice, I then cook for you. You get me what I tell you I need. Make your food so good. You always very good to help me.”
She tried to pause between the sentences without making the pauses too significant.
The first eight digits of pi were 31415926. She had spoken eight sentences. If Isabella took the word from each sentence that corresponded to the digit of pi in that sentence’s position in the sequence (e.g., the third word from the first sentence, the first word from the second sentence, the fourth word from the third sentence, and so on) and strung them all together, she would have a message.
She muttered some more incoherent noises and then settled down.
The guard came by and slid the grinding viewport open, peeked in, and shut it again.
It wouldn’t be easy to pick out eight words in eight sentences, especially if Isabella wasn’t ready. So she tried again, this time embedding the message in a different set of eight sentences, also delivered as dream mutterings.
After another peek-in from the guard, she tried a third time.
She dared not do more. Victor relied on AI monitoring, and the more she said, the more likely it was for the AI to detect a pattern.
She hoped she had said enough.
We will get out. I need your help.
Julia waited and waited. One of the other women snored so loudly that she woke herself up, swore angrily at herself, and then fell back into an uneasy slumber. Another woman muttered in a language Julia didn’t know.
Still, nothing from Isabella.
Disappointed, Julia allowed herself to drift toward sleep. Maybe she would try again the next day.
Just as she was about to land on the shore of dream country, she was jerked back by the mumbling voice overhead.
“I didn’t know that’s what it’s called. They can’t do that! When you said no, you were so mean!”
Julia recited the sentences to herself as she picked out the right words: the third, the first, the fourth . . .
Know they no.
That made no sense. Julia was plunged into despair.
But then she remembered. If Isabella was answering her, she wouldn’t start the code anew. The next digits of pi, after the first eight, what were they? Oh yes, five, three, five . . .
The bunk above her creaked as Isabella turned and began mumbling again, her voice fiery with dream rage. “You have no idea what they may need after all that rain. . . . That was some hike you and Sofia took me on, but I stuck with it. . . . I know you told me not to, but I can’t not go on a trip to Miami! . . . How did they get so much money to do that?”
Heart pounding, Julia silently picked out the words one by one in the dark. Five. Three. Five.
What do you need me to do?
The viewport screeched open once more and then slammed home.
Julia squeezed her eyes shut in the dark, but all she could see in her mind was light.
FORTY-SEVEN
Julia and Isabella carried out their audacious plan over a week. Cooling fans had to be sabotaged, in-room alarms disabled, fire-starting lint and debris deposited into the right chassis—all without leaving a record on any of the cameras. They took it slow, taking advantage of blind spots and maintenance windows, doing a little bit at a time, slowly chipping away at the impossible task so that it was merely improbable, unlikely, doubtful, and then almost plausible, possible, so close they could taste it, until, eventually, inevitable.
The hardest part had been the programming. Writing code without the help of Talos, or even a lowly codemonkey or datajinn, was not something Julia had much experience with. In the same way that few contemporary writers could compose even a five-hundred-word essay without the help of AI as research assistant, fact-checker, dictionary, thesaurus, grammarian, and, in extreme cases, amanuensis, very few contemporary programmers could create a functioning nontrivial application without the help of codedaemons, bug-genies, patchsprites, scriptpixies, and a whole fairyland of similar artificial intelligences.
Homo sapiens had always externalized their minds into the world, oozing books, drawings, plans, recordings, the same way honeybees made their minds visible in the form of wax comb and sweet honey, but the trend had never gone as far as now, when most of one’s knowledge consisted of knowing where to look things up and how to give an AI the best prompts, and more of one’s mind existed outside the skull, infused into fiscjinns and memoelves and egolets, spread among artificial assistants and helpers and aide-mémoire, imprinted in cogitrons and electrons and logons, than remained inside the squishy gray matter inside the skull.
