New character introduction.
I check the addresses. I'm heading uptown as usual. Halfway down the list is an address that sticks out like a sore thumb. Long Island City. Queens. Crap. I usually don't have to leave the city. I'm gonna have to turn off my splitter for that. And it's a drop-off at 1400 hours. I'm going to miss part of my bio-netics group. Oh, this is truly some bullshit. Suzy?
Receiving, Ben.
What is this? 78 Northern Boulevard? That's Queens, I don't know if-
This type of assignment will of course entail a bonus, I'm authorized to offer an extra $10,000 US plus billable hours. You are, as always, free to decline any work.
Damn, that's a nice little bonus, and when you start declining, they tend to assign you less and less work in more and more unpleasant areas. I guess I don't really have a choice this time. Ok, Suzy. Sounds... acceptable.
Excellent, the bonus will be wired to you upon delivery.
Gotcha.
It's 752, my first class starts in in sixty-eight minutes. My first class on Tuesdays is physical psychology, basically phrenology, but with full resolution 3-D brain scans. Turn left here. I turn onto Houston. Bike messengers seem like an anachronism to people nowadays. Why don't you just send it electronically? Encrypt it and send it over secure channels? I'm pretty sure there is no such thing as a secure line anymore. The only way to keep something secret is to hide it in the open, make it look like something else, lodge it somewhere in a few terabytes of code, everyone is scanning everything. The government, competing houses, freelancers looking to steal and sell secrets(these guys are often the worst, tweaked out 3rd worlders that will do just about anything for a few US bucks). You can't hack a human being. Well you can, but we are kept on a tight leash when it comes to foreign NCSs. Our movements are constantly monitored and the data we carry can be destroyed remotely at the drop of a hat. The people in charge of these firms also tend to prefer hard copies, and when you have more money than God, hiring a kid on a bike isn't exactly a huge sacrifice.
I decide to activate my cephalic splitter. Starting a splitter is a hard experience to describe. You can feel a chasm growing somewhere in your head. Your consciousness is straddling the gap, one foot firmly planted on each side, and you have to choose which side you want to jump to, I've never not jumped so don't ask me what the consequences of that are. As soon as you do jump, the feeling of a chasm instantly dissolves and you can only focus on what is directly in front of you. I'm still standing on my pedals, I know what pedals are, I can feel every muscle and nerve in my legs, pumping away, but now I'm capable of significantly less abstract thought. In fact the extent of my abstract thought capabilities right now is realizing that I can't think abstractly which can get very confusing if you focus too much on it.
I attempt to spell my name backwards and I get thrown to my frontal lobe. I entrust my physical coordination and reflexes with the task of keeping me alive and picking up packages. I've already checked my email by the time I'm conscious of what I'm doing. I open up and review my notes for my bio-netics meeting, physical psychology is kind of a joke. There's a macro and a micro unit, viewing how the mind works as a whole and then getting as specific as high-traffic neural junctions. Despite it seeming to be of a very technical nature, it would be more appropriate to call this class philosophy of thought. The professor is a burn-out that has clearly consumed more than his share of substances in his lifetime. Don't get me wrong, he's interesting, scratch that, insightful, when he's lucid, but this is not the most common event. I load my group's bionetics final project, a theoretical mod that would practically double the human mind's ability to absorb information by simultaneously stimulating strategic emotional centers while providing information. This is all purely theoretical and becoming suddenly and inexplicably emotional would probably cause a bit of distraction to the user's studying.
“Alright, ladies, gentlemen, let's begin,” my voice is without accent, it has a studied meter that my speaking coach says makes me seem more professional. I take slight pauses, I was told that this gives a sense of importance to each word. The trick is also to make what you're saying actually important and interesting in content and not just to blather on, taking imperious pauses. “The first order of business on your agendas should be the matter of the tidal power plants of Northern New York. Parts of Queens and the Bronx have been experiencing brownouts in recent months. This is by no means a shocking or unforeseeable development, the changing and still somewhat unpredictable currents of the Atlantic have left us without much tidal movement before. What was not delivered by our tidal plants was supplemented by our solar generators, especially during these warmer months, and energy imports from upstate, of course. If you would all look to the screen, the “soup” as our air is now colloquially referred to is inarguably getting thicker, blocking almost 53% of the sunlight that hits sensors a few hundred meters above sea level and this activity seems to be somehow damaging our panels. We've detected some malicious nanotech activity at these panels, but nothing is yet provable as far as connecting it to one of the other houses. There is also a possibility that this is not a corporate effort, and, the final possibility, there might not be an actual, directed effort to damage these panels. Our engineers are still working on it.” Behind me a rectangle of data, a meter high, two wide, switches to a chart with a number of jagged lines, all climbing upwards menacingly.
“Rising also, if you would please note, is the cost of energy importation from the Upstate nuclear plants. Note here, the sale of these plants American government ownership to the Lanzhou Energy Interest. No significant price increases until this point, here, January of this year. An average of four percent monthly increase in cost ever since then. Our lack of home-grown megawatts, combined with this increase in cost will mean we will soon reach our subsidized housing energy budget limit. We will not be able to supply the several thousand residents of the outer boroughs with 24 hour air filtration within the month.” The entire room, a room filled with my colleagues stares at me, mouths agape, as if I've committed some indescribable blasphemy, as if I've defecated right there on the conference table. I have brought up the fact that people will die if we do not do something, something entirely within our power, quickly.
“Ms. Li, thank you so much for your presentation. The board has already considered this fact and we have decided to allow rolling brownouts between the hours of 000 and 300 every other evening until the tides return to their natural ebb and flow, which our meteorologists are predicting will happen, by the latest, September or October.”
“You can't just turn off the power. I've seen as many as ten or more people living in these airtight closets we call studios. Suffocation is a real possibility in these situations. We have to at least inform-”
“Ms. Li, our decision has already been made. The tenants are warned not to over-occupy their quarters and any illegal occupancy is not a legal concern of Citi-Kraft-Morris."
"I think that it is our responsibility to tell these people what is going on with their air."
"Again, thank you, Jessica.” My boss points to my seat with his arm. I can either sit down now and take some kind of slap on the wrist for this presentation or I can go down fighting, guns blazing, indicting the company and everyone in this room with charges of premeditated murder and loss of humanity. In my mind, I do this. I invoke the image of infants and mothers, locked in an embrace as they quietly choke on their own CO2. I call my bosses inhuman. I rage against the machine. I tear down the building with my words. I appear on every news feed, regaling reporters with the tale of how I saved the poor and turned around an evil corporation. I silently walk back to my chair, smoothing my unwrinkled black skirt. I sit down and open my planner, becoming wholly engrossed in tomorrow's activities.