“What if I went to the police?”
“That would either be the safest move for you, or the most dangerous,” said Corva as she clambered out of the tilting boat. “You may know which, but we sure don’t.”
Back on Earth, the police had officially served the public, but in reality, they’d worked for the trillionaires. Toby looked back at the boat, which he wasn’t sure would take orders from him, then at the cold blank water, then at the icebound buildings, where bright spotlights harshly lit the tunnels.
“Look, we’re not after selling you,” said Corva. “You can walk away right now. Go on.” She made a shooing motion, aiming Toby in the direction of a pontoon road that wandered away over fog-capped water.
“You know I can’t go back.”
“Then come with us or walk away—but make a decision!” She spun on her heel, the tails of her coat belling out, and stalked away. Her friends followed her, two of the catlike animals dancing around their feet. The third one sat at Toby’s feet and stared up at him, unblinking, until he said, “Oh, all right!” He set off after the others.
Up ahead was a cavern with four towering factory façades built into its icy sides. The space between them was utter bedlam—driverless freight carriers shot out of tunnels and slammed through the space at a hundred kilometers per hour, smaller vehicles rumbled through in four directions without stopping, and bots sauntered among them all. There were half a dozen narrow misses every second, but no collisions—and Corva and her friends walked right down the center of the road and into it all. Flinching and jumping at the humming, careering traffic, Toby tried to keep up.
He trusted machine vision and reflexes, but he hadn’t been in a place like this before, either on Earth or Sedna. Toby breathed a huge sigh of relief when they reached the far side and Corva clattered down a flight of metal steps into a structure that was half embedded in ice, the other half plunging into the cold depths below.
“Anyway,” said Shylif as if there’d been no break in the conversation, “sell a McGonigal? That would be suicidal.”
“Much better to have one on our side,” said Jaysir.
It wasn’t significantly quieter inside the building. Dim lights sketched a hostile tangle of rumbling machines, zigzagging catwalks and scrambling bots. This was where the real work of the city happened, clearly—but it was bots doing it. There wasn’t another human in sight.
Corva suddenly turned to Shylif and said, “Told you we’d be back in time for your shift.” He sighed and nodded.
Luckily they didn’t move into that intimidating maze of machinery but headed down another flight of stairs. Toby expected a windowless room, but when they came out of the stairwell it was into a long glass-walled gallery that looked out into the deep ocean. The factory noise from above had become a muffled background drone. Sleeping rolls were laid out on the floor here, as well as a couple of little camp stoves. Some of the sleeping rolls had big backpacks next to them.
Shylif went to a jumble of bright machinery near the glass. He snapped something onto his wrist, and a suit began to build itself onto his body—not a space suit, however. Through the glass behind him Toby could make out blue ocean under an undulating ceiling of ice, its higher points inhabited by juddering silvery bubbles of air. This pale blue-green surface was lit by bright lamps that stretched far into the indigo distance; below them, all was black.
“You’re going out in that?” Toby asked.
“Right,” said Shylif, glancing behind himself. “It’s not nearly as interesting as it looks. I’ll see you all later.” With that he let the diving suit’s helmet cover his head and then walked to a set of heavy doors at the end of the gallery.
“Stamina,” said Jaysir. “Ah, to be young again!”
“He’s twice your age,” Corva pointed out.
Toby watched as the doors closed and, a minute later, a burst of bubbles and froth spewed into the water somewhere off to the right. Shylif’s silvery form shot into the dark water and disappeared.
“Everybody, this is Clark,” Corva was saying.
Toby finally noticed the other people in the gallery. Jaysir had joined several other young men at the camp stoves, where an elderly man and two middle-aged women also sat. They greeted Corva’s team in a friendly way, but all eyes were on Toby. He grinned weakly and tried to look harmless.
“That’s cool,” he said, aiming a thumb at the dark water.
Clark? When he realized that Corva had meant him, he nearly corrected her, not because he didn’t know what she was doing but because he couldn’t picture himself as somebody named Clark. Apparently these five could, though, as they accepted the name with nods. “I’m Dorvas.” “Nix.” “Elden,” said the older man. “Sofial.” “Salome.”
“We were just about to eat,” said William. “Care to join us?”
“S-sure,” said Toby. Jaysir shot him a warning look and Corva shook her head. “Maybe later.” Jaysir proceeded to spin out an elaborate and loud story about some adventure or other they’d been on all day—one that didn’t include boats—and all eyes turned to him.
Corva headed to a corner under a window and plunked herself onto one of the rolls. Rex leaped off her shoulder and went to greet several others of his kind that had emerged from somewhere.
Corva’s kit consisted of a sleeping roll, backpack, and a rather nice-looking exoskeleton that was currently rolled into a ball next to the blanket. She wore the same olive-green tunic and black leggings she’d had on the first time he saw her on Lowdown. Still, she didn’t have the air of true poverty about her that Toby had seen back on Earth.
“Until you prove to me that you can blend in, you don’t talk to people, Clark,” she said.
He crossed his arms indignantly. “The name is Garren Morton, if you must know,” he said. How could shenot think he could handle himself in a situation like this? He’d done things like it before, in Consensus and the many other simulations he and his brother and sister had spent so much time in. Being streetwise in strange situations was necessary in those games, and Toby felt he was pretty good at it.
“Yeah?” She raised a dark eyebrow. “Is that a new name, or one you were given by the very people who’re looking for you now?” He blushed, realizing his mistake. She continued, “You just asked where Shylif was going. You should already know.”
Now, that, she surely had no right to say. “Why?”
She sighed. “Because it’s basic. Look, in this lockstep, most work is done by bots—and most of that’s done while we’re all hibernating. They gather resources while the worlds are frozen over, they build stuff and stockpile it. But … well, here’s a little quiz question for you: who can own bots?”
“Robots? What do you mean, who?”
“There, you see?” She threw up her hands. “Only individual, living human beings can legally own multipurpose robots, and the owners must not be in hibernation for a whole turn. Corporations can’t own general-purpose bots, they can only own single-purpose machines like the production-line stuff upstairs, or vehicles and such. So that means that all the bots working upstairs are owned by individual people—mostly the people in the city back there.” She jabbed a thumb at the far wall.
“So the corporations pay the bots to work for them, not humans like they did in ancient times. Right?” Reluctantly, he nodded. “Then the bots hand over their wages to their owners. That’s how most people live. But stowaways like us … well, some of us don’t want to be found. We can’t send out registered bots to work for us. Shylif’s like that. If he’s going to make any money at all, he has to do it outside the normal economy. So he subcontracts to the factory bots.”