Payback

Chapter 5

Starbucks coffee shop. Crowded and steamy. Hunched shoulders in wet raincoats. Chugging coffee grinders, whirring machinery. Microscopic stereobots carry soft jazz through the air from table to table, brushing past the ears of the elders, their tiny speakers dragging lilting notes through the air.

A relaxing place for a discussion of agonised worry.

They’ve gathered in the biggest booth, with a couple of tables dragged over.

On today’s agenda: what’s going in Mahonyland – and what’s happening to our children?

Conversations bolt out of the stable, collide, collapse. The first problem is only ten pairs of parents show up. Nobody is representing Watson; Adam’s dad isn’t taking part, either. Disturbed, emotional, radiating rage, he walks up to the glass, peeks inside Starbucks, glares at everyone, then goes back to the street where his Uber is hovering. He can’t miss out on nine dollars of work. His TeslaCoil is one of those barely legal ones that has a big rusty hackbox welded to its front to override the engine and the computer so he can go off-track and pick up people to make a couple extra bucks here and there.

This meeting, it’s just another example of people wronging his son. Mr Turing is certain the world’s against him. He banks every insult, saves it up for the Rapture, the Revelation. Revenge-time.

Mr Turing watches the Starbucks-sipping conspirators through his car windows. It’s halfway through the year. Parents are anxious. No emails, no texts. No one accepts they signed their own kids up for a year of torture in exchange for money. What begins with a couple of group messages becomes an email between three parents, then a mass group email, then an online forum, then a Change.org petition demanding the kids’ release. And now these meetings.

Carol and David Shepherd have come to believe their daughter could get killed any day. They can feel it, they’re certain–but no one will interrupt the experiment. Not security, not the lab coats, not the Mechastructure. The Shepherds crawl into bed with framed photographs of their Edie cradled in their arms. In Carol’s dreams, guilt takes the form of a golem. The Shepherds try to get the other parents to commiserate, to meet and share concerns, as if everyone is alike, but all the parents have in common is they’ve been rebuffed. The university–governed by AI decision-makers–keeps referring Mumshine and Dad and all the other parents back to their lawyers. There is a big, thick contract each parent and guardian has signed. Buried deep in the legalese, it clearly says each kid cannot be pulled out of the experiment. No intervention will come even if the kids get sick or injured. Even if human rights are being breached. The dome is completely sealed. Human rights don’t get in.

Maria Stiles, the former weathergirl, presenter of home cooking videos with millions of views, stands up over the booth and attempts to preside over the meeting. She believes she has two kids in the game. It’ll be another half-a-year before she finds out her little boy Kane has had his skull cracked, and he’s been drowned and buried like an unwanted fish under a sprinkling of dirt, left for Adam’s hound to nibble at. A shallow grave. The ugliest way to leave this world.

While Maria Stiles tries to speak, Fatima’s mum and dad are looking up from their green tea with adoring eyes. The petition is off to a slow, difficult start. People are afraid to sign it, afraid to publicly question the Mechastructure. Everyone’s heard the stories. Complain about the Mechs, next week you can expect a power surge blowing up your computer. They’ll crash your Tesla. Airplanes with anti-Mech critics on them forced out of the sky, melting into the ocean.

Through the steaming cups of coffee, the parents put grief and excitement and dreams on the table. They want to pool money to get a good lawyer. They want their kids back. They want… they want to control the money. Not take all of it–but half, surely? There has to be an intervention. Please, God. Let us into the dome so we can check up on our kids then pat their bums and send them back to chasing those dollars for us.

Today’s meeting, the secret Starbucks, the booth of conspirators, it should’ve been twelve sets of parents with one vision, one cause.

They’re anything but united.

Omar Saleh’s dad Rico is a wild frontiersman who hunts big game in the Writeoffs, the cities hyperinflation has forced people to abandon. Haunted hotels in the woods of Japan, resorts in New Zealand with ferns growing through the carpet, McMansions in Orlando, Florida where the wind flaps through. Mr Saleh shoots and spears and crossbows feral cows, pigs, camels, horses, dogs. He can’t commit to the petition–he’s certain his Omar is happy and well-fed. Rico Saleh is all about infiltration. Mattera fact, he says, I sneaked up on the dome one night last week. Dodged security. Came up with a backhoe and started to dig. I couldn’t get through the forcefield, but I got a good look inside, through the glass ‘n all. It’s the suburbs. Looks like good streets. Couldn’t’ve looked safer.

I sneaked up on the dome one night last week. Dodged security. Came up with a backhoe and started to dig. I couldn’t get through the forcefield, but I got a good look inside, through the glass ‘n all. It’s the suburbs. Looks like good streets. Couldn’t’ve looked safer‘Thanks for the story,’ Carol Shepherd tells Mr Saleh, eyes cold. ‘You say you think your kid’s safe. And yet you’re here.’

Maeve Simpson’s mum Paula nods. She has always been a timid little accountant, born and raised in the shadows of stronger people. She supports every suggestion around the table, even when the suggestions contradict one another.

There is jostling beside her. Big gestures from Chan’s parents. The Prachs–a cartel of excitable businesspeople, uncles and mums and obscure elders from Phnom Penh–have the stock market reports dancing on a digital screen, giving only a fraction of their attention to the emergency at hand. Chan’s dad doesn’t appear to be the head of the family–there are a couple of grandmas, an old man, and Chan’s mum. They still have their Cambodian accent, bending English so it’s hard to tell the tone. Their eyes flit from their portfolio of stock results on their organisers to whichever parent is speaking and around the table then back to their money. These people operate bakeries, warehouses, a furniture removal business, and about a hundred vehicles bussing fruit and vegetable produce across the city. Chan will come out of Moneyland unscathed. Privileged people don’t get hurt.

The Wadlow parents take their cues from the Prachs. Since their daughter Esther indicated Chan was making her his Number One Girl, Israel and Leticia Wadlow have taken jobs on the Prachs’ estate. They’ve all moved into a wing of Gilded Gables, the country manor the Prachs own. The Wadlow women work in the same laundry as mechs. They’re grateful Esther was given an opportunity to join a royal family. It’s not a good time to complain. They feel dirty just being here, in a steamy coffee shop, everyone in wet coats, squeezed in beside the crucifix-stroking parents of Elijah Joshua, superstitious Samoans who pray three times during the Starbucks meet-up. They believe a shaft of light from heaven will penetrate the Mahonyland dome someday soon so long as they have enough faith. If there is a God, he won’t let Elijah suffer, and there is definitely a god. Providence will come.

Everybody talks across each other. The panic is contagious. Carol Shepherd, saying little, absorbs every crumb of information–not that there is much. Nothing has leaked from Moneyland. Surely they’re okay in there, KT’s mum says. ‘Just be nice if there were, like, updates each week, you know? Like a newsletter or something wouldn’t hurt. Holiday snaps.’

Few stop to wonder about that Watson child, who appeared to have either dropped out of heaven or been built to fit into the group.

Few worry about the hard-to-understand foreign parents, the silent, watchful Russians, whose daughter, the muscular one, the tall one, the outsider, Carol remembers as being a little too self-assured. Cold and hard. Like a shark, silent as a stone until it turns.

It’s the Uber driver outside in the dirty coat that Carol’s afraid of, though. The standoffish man, the icy man, the bitter man, the angry starving man with the face covered in splotchy stubble and sores. The man always clutching his sandwich as if he knows the world could end at any minute and he’ll have to find food. The desperate dad born bitter at the world, bitter at the Haves for leaving him a Have-not. The father retreating deep inside his head and planning, thinking, obsessing. The loner in the car outside, watching. Plotting.

Adults around the world are bypassing this selling-out-your-kids thing entirely. Money’s worth living for, no doubt, but thanks to Universal Basic Income–which is the fake-ass name the Mechs gave to the millions they’re starting to drown us in–the price of everything keeps creeping up. Few parents are signing up for this biodome game anymore. A million dollars today isn’t a million tomorrow unless you bank it–and no one’s got the patience to invest, let alone trust in a Mech bank.

No, instead of trying to get rich in reality, it’s easier to sell your house, get a CloudBox delivered, plug some sunglasses into your brain, lie back, ascend into this Cloud-thing everyone’s talking about and live online. No drama about repaying your mortgage to the bank. No fear of your body getting old. Nobody stressed about becoming fit, famous, rich, or respected. Leave all your worries behind on Earth. Dive into the Metaverse. A pool of silica. Pure joy forever. All you have to do is trade in your entire life. Apple’s CEO has done it, and Google’s. Musk and Bezos and Jack Dorsey. The leaders of just about every tech company on Earth found it irresistible, then the upper class, then the upper middle class, then huge chunks of society started leaving their families.

If your loved one went to Elysium, you’d follow too, wouldn’t you?

More and more people took holidays in The Cloud for longer and longer. There were traffic jams outside Cloudports. Abandoned dogs and toddlers in the backs of cars as if everyone had been suddenly sucked up into heaven.

Except Albert Turing won’t step out of the game like that. He’s been put on Earth to do things the right way. Often the right way is the difficult way. He’s never short-changed a customer, never snaffled a spare ten dollar note left in the back of the cab, never put profit over principles. Every Sunday at West City Lutheran, God speaks to him. There is no shortcut to heaven, just a life of privation and struggle, so sayeth the Lord. A boy and his father, on their own, must hold up the sky. Be strong. Be intolerant of weakness, corruption, fancy apps, and cell phones. False idols.

Out in his car, hunched behind his steering wheel, as he rubs a little porthole in the foggy windscreen glass, Albert Turing looks in on the conspirators. They aren’t really on Adam’s side–and that means they’re really not on his side.

hisHe doesn’t trust these people–though he might reach out to the wiser adults if they’ll serve his cause. Plus Albert Turing needs to solicit intelligence about what’s happening within the dome. Has little Adam been hurt? Because if anyone’s put a scratch on the child, there’s going to be hell to pay. An eye for an eye.

Albert dreams of striking back at a world that tried to crush him with disadvantage, with poverty. But he has plans to strike back. He’s squirreling weapons away, see. He’s acquired a cannon which can knock bots from the sky, shatter servers, rupture internet cable. Man, mech, meddlers – Father Albert will destroy anyone who f***s with his family.