I sat on the couch in our apartment, slack faced as I watched the ads that paid our rent.
“Meet LifeTrack. Your LifeTrack jewelry records every aspect of your life in audio and video,” came a cheerful female voice from the forty-inch vid on the wall. “Its advanced artificial intelligence steers you toward your every dream.”
It was the third advert today for this high-tech accessory, designed for people who could afford jewelry that told them what to do. By now, I could have quoted it by heart.
“Look at this.” My twin brother Harlan pointed to his hand-screen propped on the stained coffee table.
The voice of Lena Hayes burst from it, raw and clear despite the tinny speaker. “CyberCorp Technology will recover from the recent tragedies, which—I remind everyone—were the fault of humans and not our technology. If you continue to trust us, I assure you …”
It was easy to be passionate when you were born with a silver spoon stuck up your butt.
I shot a look at Harlan, who stared at the hand-screen as if it was the holy grail.
My mouth was a millimeter from a quip about how, if we had as much money as her, the last thing I’d do with it was revive a company whose reputation was on the fast track to the sewer. But Harlan listened with awe carved into his face, so I let him have his joy.
Only a year older than us, Lena Hayes steered the world’s most advanced tech firm. On the display, she sat in a minimalist office. Pearlescent white walls backed her and her metal desk. Her fists clenched on the desk’s top—one flesh and one a metal prosthetic.
I could resent her privilege, but I also admired that she had suffered devastating setbacks and emerged with purpose.
Meanwhile, I’d be lucky to keep this household limping forward.
The ad on the wall continued. “With LifeTrack, your dreams become reality.”
If I had to choose between the ad parade and Lena’s narcissistic video blog, I’d pick Lena every time. It wasn’t even a close call.
“Volume down,” I shouted at the vid.
“Volume is on the lowest setting,” came the vid’s computerized response. The ad paused for a fraction of a second and restarted from the beginning.
I groaned.
Harlan squinted at me from a tattered armchair. “You okay, Gia? It’s always on low.”
“I can hope.”
He graced me with a grin or a grimace—maybe a little of both.
“That reminds me.” Harlan snatched the hand-screen from the coffee table and navigated to a web page. Lena’s impassioned voice abruptly cut off as he left her stream.
Harlan angled it toward me. “Someone in this forum says we can trick the vid into thinking we’re watching to get credit when we’re not around.”
While the hand-screen was a luxury for which I was grateful—one of the few we’d managed to keep after our father’s accident—the wall-mounted vid and its incessant adverts were torture.
Necessary torture.
“Really?” I peered over his shoulder as he scrolled.
“Yeah, we would need . . .” He frowned and navigated away from the page, back to Lena’s stream. “Forget it.”
“No. What?”
“We can’t afford it.”
“Get your life on track with LifeTrack,” the vid continued in the cheerful voice of someone who’d never met adversity a day in their life.
I groaned. “Vid off.”
It went silent, leaving Lena’s voice to fill the room. “The board won’t let me test my computer-brain interface even though I know it would make a difference—not just to CyberCorp, to everyone. This tech could touch the lives of so many who don’t have full control of their bodies and want that to change. Improved prosthetics.” She waved her left arm, and the overhead lights glinted off the metal that spanned from her fingertips to her shoulder. “Even the potential to bring people back from vegetative states.”
I willed myself not to look across the room at my father in his hospital-style bed. Harlan looked, though, and my resolve melted into a puddle.
Dad was as unconscious as he had been for the past two years.
Thanks to artificial intelligence integrated into the latest building equipment, his contractor jobs had dried up. In a desperate attempt to stay relevant, he took increasingly dangerous work with increasingly strict time constraints and increasingly lax safety standards.
It cost him everything.
His monitoring equipment beeped every three seconds as if demanding attention. I squeezed my eyes shut and refused to cry. That would be giving up my little remaining power.
“So I’m going to test it myself,” Lena continued from my brother’s hand-screen. She paused, and her fingers trembled until she pressed them flat against her desktop.
Her gaze flicked to one side, and her irises scanned back and forth, reading something.
“Some are asking about the board’s hold on testing new products.” Her gaze returned straight forward. She stared right at us. “I don’t need the board’s money or permission to test my invention on my body.”
Harlan’s attention was laser-focused on me. “Gia?”
We both knew that the peace from the vid’s ads was temporary, but I loved him for giving me this one minute of solace. The vid’s service providers subsidized our rent based on how many minutes per month we watched. If we turned it off or left the room, that meant fewer dollars we could dedicate to Dad’s rented medical equipment.
We needed every dollar.
“Can’t we keep it off for an hour?” My whine irritated even me. I should have been stronger, better. I had to be for us to survive.
“If you want.”
Lena’s stream ended, and the beeping of my father’s life support filled the space left by the now-quiet vid. His eyes remained closed, his wasted body unmoving under the faded blanket. A familiar feeling soured my stomach but made me sit taller.
He was why we did this.
Harlan closed his hand over mine.
“Vid on,” I whispered.
Again, the ad restarted from the beginning. “Meet LifeTrack. Your LifeTrack jewelry will record every aspect …”
“We should go over what money we’ve made this week,” I said, as if I could drown it out with conversation.
Harlan flicked off the hand-screen, blacking out Lena’s frozen final expression, leaving us alone with our problems.
“Delivery jobs are gone,” he said. “Drones are faster and don’t expect tips. The shipping companies are churning them out like water. I had only a couple requests the past two weeks, and none this week.”
His expression went flat, cold. That was the best way to deal with this—stay calculating, leave emotion out of it, and find work where possible. He rotated his wrist downward over the hand-screen’s scanner. It beeped, and his account balance flashed on the display.
I cringed. “How did you make anything at all?”
His brown skin looked ashen, almost pale. “A few classmates paid me to do their homework.”
My heart ached at the shame in his voice. Harlan prized education above all else, yet he sacrificed his principles out of desperation.
I scanned my ID chip and winced as my account total popped up. “Babysitting helped a little. Luckily, the androids can’t do that reliably yet.”
The vid finally moved on to a different ad. “Meals go from freezer to table in three minutes with the HyperOven’s patented hyper-excite technology …”
“We have to find another income stream,” I continued.
Harlan slammed a fist against his armrest, sending stuffing puffing upward from a hole in the fabric. “Jobs are being automated. What are we supposed to do?”
“The HyperOven should not be used near medical or other critical equipment due to electrical interference.” The ad ended with a scrolling list of its dangers along with disclaimers of liability for death or injury.
The lock on the front door beeped, clicked, and our stepmother Ellen stalked into the room.
Harlan tightened his fingers around the armrest.
Ellen’s makeup and hair were flawless, with a smooth and even complexion, perfectly defined eyebrows, and just the right amount of mascara to accentuate her eyes. She took pains to maintain her professional appearance as an interior designer—another job computers hadn’t yet perfected. But her costly upkeep left little for the rest of us.
She glared at the vid, which played yet another ad. “Vid off.”
The display blanked.
“Let’s have it. What did you make this week?”
Harlan turned the hand-screen toward her so she could see the balances in our scrawny accounts.
“There are no more deliveries,” he said. “I had to—”
“Don’t waste my time. We all live here, and I still manage to work.”
“You have a college degree and experience,” I said. “If you’d give us the funds to get professional clothing, we might at least be able to compete for—”
“More excuses.” Ellen’s lips flattened into a hard line as she dropped into the armchair. Despite still being in her thirties, weariness lined her face, and the makeup couldn’t hide it.
Ellen didn’t acknowledge Dad. As far as she was concerned, he no longer existed except as a drain on this household.
“How much did you make?” Harlan asked. “Maybe you could give us a little more this week? The hospital sent a third notice about the increased rental fees for Dad’s equipment. We’re already behind.”
“I cover my own expenses so I can keep clients happy. Maybe if you contributed, I could spare more of my hard-earned cash for your whims.”
Our whims?
Fury set my temperature boiling. “We don’t need money for whims, you stupid bi—”
Harlan grabbed my hand and yanked me so hard that the backs of my knees slammed into the couch, and I fell into the seat beside him. “We understand, and we appreciate anything you can give us. You’ve been so generous.”
My fingernails clawed his palm, but he held firm.
Ellen breathed a long, high-pitched sigh. “I’ll see what I can set aside.” Her voice was generous, but her slitted eyes and thinned lips told the greedy truth.
As much as I hated tiptoeing around her, we needed her contribution. The alternative was to do what the doctors suggested—and Ellen supported—unplug Dad and let him die.
Ellen flounced to her feet. “Vid on.”
A meat market ad flashed across the screen, boasting obscene payouts for bodily organs. The practice existed in legal limbo, not explicitly illegal but highly unethical.
Ellen glanced at the screen. “That’s an option.”
A classmate of ours had died after a procedure negotiated there went wrong. Her family couldn’t afford to pay a lawyer, and no lawyers volunteered to take the case pro bono because of the rocky legal footing. I shuddered.
“People die because of those places,” Harlan said in a voice more level than I could have offered.
“Then they didn’t do adequate research about the clinic they used.”
“Desperate people don’t have time or money for research.” I tried to keep my voice calm and professional, something Ellen respected, but emotion made my words tremble. “Research is a privilege.”
“Let’s go.” The lines on Ellen’s face smoothed, leaving her looking younger than her age, energized after having shifted her negative energy to us. “Right now. You aren’t motivated to earn your share, so let’s go down there and see what you can contribute.”
My blood iced. I shot a wild look at Harlan.
“Give us more time,” he said.
“No.” A scowl contorted her features. She stomped over to Dad’s bed and yanked his power cable from the wall.
The beeping stopped.
Harlan jumped to his feet.
“Plug it back in!” I shouted.
I charged at her, but she held the end of the cable over her head. I grabbed a section that dangled below and yanked.
Dad’s bed shuddered under the tension.
I dropped it and raised my hands high, palm out. The worst-case scenario would be to break something. She stared at me with a challenge written all over her face.
Harlan fell to his knees, grabbed Ellen’s legs, and pressed his face into them. “Please. We’ll get the money.”
“It’s too late.” She leaned forward, soaking up every bit of the attention. “They’re coming tomorrow.” She reached into her pocket and withdrew a pink piece of paper.
My stomach clenched, threatened to catapult its contents. When people sent physical paper, they meant business.
Ellen read from the page. “Your landlord has been ordered to allow us access to your home on Thursday—that’s tomorrow—to retrieve our property.”
“Can you plug it back in, please?” I asked.
My dad’s machines weren’t beeping, which meant nothing was keeping his heart beating or his lungs pumping. Panic pressed against my chest, expanding larger and larger by the second.
“We can divert the apartment rent,” Harlan said.
“We’re thirty days overdue already. If we skip it again, we’ll be evicted in a month.”
“We made rent last month!”
Ellen shrugged. “I needed my share to entertain potential clients.”
“What happened to the money we contributed?” I asked.
She shrugged again.
Only the look on Harlan’s face kept me from strangling her.
“Please,” I said again, “plug it back in.” My hands shook. How long until he suffered brain damage from lack of oxygen? I tasted wet salt on my lips before I noticed I was crying.
“It’s your father or this apartment,” Ellen said. “We can’t keep both.”
Harlan released her legs and looked up at her from the floor. “There has to be another way.”
“There is.” She made her voice singsong sweet. “The meat market.”
“We need more time,” he said. “We can fix this.”
“In a day?” She laughed. “Even if you could, it would be temporary. You refuse to work full time—”
Harlan rose to his feet. “We have school.”
“Plug him back in!” I shouted. I couldn’t breathe. My body vibrated like a live wire.
That earned a scornful look from my stepmother, who waved the unplugged cable like a banner. “You’re incapable of supporting yourselves with odd jobs. This is the end of your laziness. The meat market is the answer.”
“No.” Harlan tensed beside me. “We stay in school. Education is our only chance at a decent future, and going to the meat market could destroy that. We stay the course.”
Ellen’s free hand cracked across Harlan’s cheek. “You’re as delusional as your father.”
A red handprint stood out on his brown skin, and his eyes watered. I jumped between them before Harlan could retaliate, but he didn’t even try.
Ellen straightened to her full height, a couple inches shorter than Harlan. She shouldered past me and leaned close to his face as if daring him to strike back. “I said get in the car.”
“I won’t.” His voice came out lower than usual, controlled but with danger under the surface.
A new ad started on the vid. “CyberCorp Technology’s newest embedded micro-comm takes a huge leap into the future …”
I grabbed Harlan’s hand. “No, let’s get in the car.”
“Gia, we can’t—”
“It’s okay. I have an idea.” To Ellen, I said, “We’ll go with you. Plug him back in.”
She pressed the plug into its socket.
I waited for the beeping to start. It did, and his vitals rolled across the small display by his head. The tension in my chest loosened, and I could breathe again.
Her head held high, Ellen strode to the door with me at her heels. Harlan trailed behind us. His expression mirrored the horror clenched in my gut, but I had a plan. We just needed a ride.
Somewhere we could make money. Anywhere but the meat market.