I park next to the playground that nearly fills the apartment complex’s small courtyard. It’s early, but kids already swarm the slides and ladders, their yells and laughs echoing from the buildings.
Two boys kick a groundskeeping robot back and forth across the parking lot like a soccer ball. One of them waves and says something to me as he goes by, but it’s on the side with my bad ear, so I can’t hear. The other boy misses a pass and the robot rolls into the grass, then unfolds and scampers off into the bushes. Something seems off with the boys, but before I can work it out, they tear off in pursuit of the robot.
Grabbing the data pad and tool bag, I crawl from the cramped truck cab to face the Texas summer heat. Only nine o’clock and already near a hundred degrees. Within seconds I’m sweating under my bra straps and in my pits.
My truck—made nervous by the neighborhood—barely lets me step clear before going armadillo. It collapses into a secure, armored configuration with hair-thin seams and no wheels or glass exposed. If only it were round, I could kick it to the boys.
I start up the sidewalk, and again, my eyes are drawn to the kids. The colors seem wrong. I don’t dare look too closely as I walk past. Even being a woman and wearing a utility uniform, I get nothing but glares from watchful parents. I’m still black, six feet tall, and a stranger. That makes me a threat.
Two girls of about nine or ten also eye me warily as they come up the walk, then burst into giggles as they pass. This time I do turn to look. They both wear brightly colored shirts and shorts. The clothes are standard printer styles—not something from a store or subscription service—but are far more colorful than anything normally available from UBI printers. One wears white with brightly colored rainbows surrounded by stylized yellow stars. The other is wrapped in brilliant interlocking fractals of green, orange, and sky blue.
I then understand why some of the smaller kids look odd. Most wear clothes matching the pastel buildings, drab and plain, but one sports tiger stripes and another wears a giant sunflower. The parents glower at me, so I move on.
I stop where the sidewalk tees and glare at row upon row of pastel-painted apartment buildings and secretly despise these people. Ubies don’t know real poverty, at least not the hard, desperate poverty of an inner-city black kid from forty years ago. They don’t share their food with roaches or shiver in unheated apartments. Universal basic income has made them nothing more than cattle, kept fat and happy by the government so they don’t cause trouble. I’m glad they have plenty of food to eat. I’m glad their kids won’t go deaf in one ear from a simple case of the flu left untreated due to lack of medical insurance. But these people don’t appreciate what they have and that pisses me off.
The interior of building twelve is blessedly cool. I pause inside the door to check the repair assignment flashing on my pad’s screen. The first item should be a simple enough fix. A fault—probably a short—in a control cable for apartment unit 1210. I feel smug satisfaction in that one. Automated systems can detect a problem, but in so many cases it takes a human to determine the reason and fix it.
The second item on the list will be a bitch. Elevated raw stock usage. Since supply companies can’t legally put programmed cutoffs on printer stock use, there is a constant problem with the poor using their state-provided printers and stock to make things for sale. I curse under my breath. Proving that is always tough, and I hate being in the middle of those fights. It makes me miss my old job working in the uptown office buildings even more.
I hesitate before the door marked 1210. My pad says it belongs to Gabriella Hernandez. Taking a deep breath, I ring the buzzer.
A skinny boy with black hair and eyes opens the door. He looks about eleven years old and is all smiles. Then—when he sees my uniform and tools—his eyes go wide and he slams the door.
Yep, they are doing something illegal.
I ring the buzzer again.
This time a woman answers. I tower over her by nearly a foot. She’s in her mid-thirties and glares at me while using a wet towel to wipe a crusty white coating from her hands and arms. White spatters also speckle her face and baggy blue shirt. One glance at my uniform and my black face tells her all she needs to know about me. Her stance changes, filling more of the door.
“Yeah?”
As I open my mouth to reply, a strange earthy smell reaches my nose. It reminds me of dirt and childhood. I’m transported back to my grandma’s backyard, where I played in the mud, squishing it between my bare toes and making mud pies.
“I . . . ummm . . . my name is Annie Harrison. I’m from building maintenance,” I finally say. “I need to check your printers.”
She crosses her arms and nods at my uniform. “I’ll have to get some confirmation. These buildings are owned by the state, not some company named TechPro.”
I show her my picture ID. “The state pays my company to maintain the buildings. You should have received an email or notification through the apartment complex network that I would be coming.”
“Our printers work fine.”
“I still have to check them.”
We stare at each other for several seconds, and she finally moves aside.
UBI housing units are all laid out to one of four floor plans, and this is no different. The small living room is neat, with a love seat and two chairs in the center, arranged to view a modest-sized wall monitor, but what surprises me are three large bookshelves dominating the wall space. Two are overflowing with books crammed into every open space. I hadn’t seen so many paper books in one place since I’d last visited a library, probably twenty years ago, so I take a step forward to look closer. Those on the upper shelves are novels, but the lower shelves are filled with textbooks covering diverse subjects, like psychology, art history, and fundamentals of computer logic.
The other shelves contain pottery. Dozens of stunning pots, pitchers and plates of various sizes, all covered with bright and colorful designs. The vase closest to me appears china-thin at the lip and is trimmed in gold and shiny blue enamel. I want to touch it, but with a shake of my head, I remember why I’m here.
The woman still glares at me, but there is something else in her expression. Sadness? Defeat? I heft my tools and enter a kitchen that has been transformed into a workshop that explains the earthy smell.
A pottery kick wheel sits in the center of the floor, encircled by tarps draped from metal racks, obviously arranged to collect the splatter. Some half-formed project sits on the wheel covered by a damp towel. A wet-dry vacuum and large bucket filled with milky-colored water sit to either side.
The two-person table in one corner holds a small kiln surrounded by fire-proof welding blankets and two pedestal fans. The sink is also surrounded by white spatter marks, and the adjacent counter space is crowded with pots in various stages of completion.
“It’s all legal,” she says when I turn to look at her. “I paid for this stuff and have written consent from management. The room is properly vented. The kiln has its own fire suppression system, and I have approval from the fire marshall.”
When I look back into the kitchen, I see the boy. He is almost hidden behind the tarps, standing with his back to the main printer, arms spread slightly to the sides, as if ready to block access. His eyes are wide. Beyond him, the printer arms zip back and forth behind the safety glass, actively constructing something.
There is barely room to walk in the cramped room, but I take two steps forward and nod at the boy. “I need to see that.”
His head moves side to side in a barely perceivable shake, and skinny arms rise higher. Just then, the printer’s completion bell rings, and we both flinch, but like gunslingers from some old western, neither of us gives ground.
“This is my job,” I say to the boy. “I can’t leave until I examine the printers.”
He glances at his mom, obviously unsure what he should do.
“It’s okay, Carson,” his mother says. “Let this woman do her job.”
The boy hesitates, then steps to one side. The food printer set into the wall just below the microwave is empty. But Carson had been blocking the large, main printer and it contains a shirt, covered with brightly colored images of people dancing.
Everything clicks together: the kids in the courtyard, the increased stock usage, these reluctant people. They’re using state resources to manufacture goods for sale. Despite the books and pottery, they are lying cheats, just like the others.
I turn to the woman. “I don’t know how you get the supplies for your pottery operation, so that might be legal, but printing those shirts isn’t.”
“It’s only illegal if we use the printer to make items for sale,” she says. “We haven’t sold any. He gives the clothes away.”
“Not taking money for the stuff is a technicality,” I say. Since the printers are used to make everything from shampoo to shoes, the authorities can’t cut off access, but they will fill their home with monitoring equipment to ensure they stop contributing to the black-market barter economy. “Are these subscription clothes? If not, then it is illegal.”
She knows that would be easy for me to check, so doesn’t answer and just stares at the floor. Finding ubies making stuff to sell didn’t really surprise me, but I do wonder how they managed this particular hack.
I pull the shirt from the printer and stuff it in my bag as evidence for the report, then lean into the unit and use my ID card to open the maintenance panel. I expect jumper wires or some other crude kludge, but instead, find a tiny circuit card inserted between two cable connections. I remove the card, reconnect the cables, and close the panel.
“Where did you get this?”
“I made it,” Carson says, tears streaming down his face.
I glance at the mother and she nods with a scowl.
“You designed a PC board just to bypass the color block?”
“Yes.”
I look down at the card that’s roughly the size of a quarter, then drop it into my pocket and pull the shirt out of the bag to examine further.
“This is great. So are the clothes I saw in the courtyard. But if you’re stealing and printing designer patterns, you’re in a lot more trouble than just a simple stock usage violation.”
“My son is not a thief,” his mother snaps.
“They’re my designs,” Carson says.
I raise my eyebrows, skeptical. “An artist and an engineer? What a talented family.”
“Report us or not, but I don’t have to let you accuse my son,” the mother says and points to the door.
I stuff the shirt back in my bag.
The boy speaks, but I miss what he says, so I turn my good ear toward him. “Say that again?”
“I’m not an engineer,” he says, struggling to not cry again. “I found the bypass schematic online. It was pretty easy to find a program to convert that into a card design I could make on the printer.”
I’m impressed and wonder how he managed to even get the maintenance cover open, but don’t ask, because everything I hear will have to go into my report, and I’m actually starting to feel a little bad for the kid.
“Look, Carson. You have to stop doing this. You printed too many. Your stock usage is through the roof. To the monitoring programs, this looks like mass production. I’m surprised you haven’t been shut down before now.”
He nods. “I started out by charging a piece of clothing as the cost to print a new one. That way, I was getting recycle credit that almost equaled what I was using. But people stopped bringing old clothes. I think they wanted to keep the stuff I’d made for them.”
I suspected half of them were selling the clothes on the black market. Using this poor well-meaning boy as a scapegoat. Bastards.
“That was a good plan,” I say. “You should have stuck with it.”
His mom still glares at me with crossed arms, but she lets us talk.
“Can’t you leave the bypass board?” Carson says. “That way, I could at least make a few.”
I shake my head. “Your bypass was showing up in diagnostics as a fault in the cable. It’ll do that every time. People will keep coming out to fix it.”
He slumps.
I feel terrible, but there is no way he can keep doing this without raising flags.
“It’s not fair,” Carson says.
“Huh?”
“If we buy subscription clothes, it will print any color and style we like. Why do they limit us to five ugly solid colors?”
“You just gave the reason why,” I say. “You’re too young to remember, but clothing manufacturers and retailers raised holy hell when plans were proposed to allow those on UBI to print their own clothes at home. This was a compromise.”
“Bullshit,” the woman says. “This is just a way for them to spout their sanctimonious propaganda about caring for the poor while still setting us apart and shaming us.”
I’ve had it. I feel sorry for the boy because he doesn’t know any better, but the mother? She has no excuse for encouraging this. “If you don’t like this life, then do something about it,” I snap.
I get so tired of hearing ubies whine about being victims. I started out much poorer than any of them and clawed my way into a career that has supported me my entire life. “Go back to school and retrain.”
Her face flushes with anger. “How dare you! You’re nothing but an ignorant piece of . . .”
She glances at Carson and then grits her teeth and throws the towel at the floor.
“I did retrain! I started out with a master’s degree in Molecular Life Sciences. Do you even know what that is?”
Now my face grows hot, but she continues before I can answer.
“But evidently, specialized computer systems can do ninety percent of that job better than I can now. So I got a new degree in chemical engineering, thinking that maybe something more practical would be better. Nope, because there is a glut in that field too, with experienced people scrambling for the open jobs, and of course, I was then at entry level. Now I can’t even get a job in a damned coffee shop!”
Carson stares at his mom with wide eyes. She must not talk this way very often. Or at least doesn’t yell when she does.
Time to go. I move to the door, but then pause. I should just let it drop, but the kid needs to know just how lucky they are.
“With twenty-three percent unemployment, I understand you not being able to find a job. But you have nothing to complain about,” I say and spread my arms to encompass the apartment. “You’re not hungry. I mean, look at how you live! This isn’t even poverty. You have no idea how it used to be.”
“Get out,” she says and pushes me toward the door.
She’s brave. I give her that. I have about a foot in height and fifty pounds on her. She opens the door and shoves me into the hall.
“Look, I’ve grown to like this life,” she says, a little quieter, but with the door half-closed. “I feel human now. I think maybe for the first time ever.”
“What is that supposed to mean?”
“That now my time and labor are given to things I want to do. Carson and I are still giving back to society, we’re just doing it on our own terms now, not working eight or ten or twelve hours a day to provide goods to consumers on the other side of the world? But I don’t expect you to understand that. All you see is a lazy moocher living off of productive people!”
Then the door slams in my face.
I stand in the hall for a moment, stunned and a bit embarrassed. She feels human for the first time? That made no sense.
The whole encounter sours my gut. I pull out the bypass circuit card, part of my brain already looking for ways to modify it so as not to trigger the alarms, but then I squelch the idea. I like Carson, but there are a hundred qualified people ready to take my job if I do something wrong or even if they find out about my hearing. I have to do everything by the book. Besides, the kid is smart and ambitious. He’ll probably do just fine without help from me. I still feel like shit as I leave the building.
The incident with the boy and his mother bothers me. Even two months later when my boss calls me into his office, Carson’s little criminal empire is the first thing that comes to mind. Did Gabriella Hernandez file a complaint? Or did they get in serious trouble, and I would need to testify in court?
But understanding comes immediately when I open the office door. My coworkers, Marty and Dora, are already waiting. Umberto, my manager, looks frazzled and pale. I take the empty chair.
Umberto sits on the edge of the desk and stares at his hands for a couple seconds. “The City of Dallas has started replacing all the UBI-housing printers with those self-maintaining units from that European company. What’s it called?”
“Copenhagen Fabricage?” I mumble.
“Yeah, anyway, effective immediately, you’re all laid off. I’m getting cut too, though at least I have until the end of the month.” He snorted. “Apparently, they don’t need a service manager if there are no service techs to manage.”
This isn’t a surprise, I’d seen it coming for a long time, but I still feel myself coming unglued. I’m hot with frustration and anger and shame. I’m an ubie now.
My boss continues talking in the background, about severance, about how people with our skills will find jobs quickly, or perhaps we can take advantage of the company’s retraining options.
Part of my mind races around like a frightened animal, trying to think of ways to find a new job, but I know deep down that will never happen. My position at TechPro has a queue of more than a hundred people waiting for me to quit or get fired, just to get a chance to interview for the spot. And it was just dumb luck they didn’t ask about or test my hearing when I was hired. Of course I will look for work, but have to face the facts. I’m forty-eight and my career is over.
I stare at shaking hands and clench my stomach muscles in an effort to quell its churning. It’s not like I’ll go hungry or be homeless. I have UBI, just like everyone else. That’s how it works. Every person gets paid the same living wage, even if they have a job. It acts as a safety net or cushion, replacing the old programs like welfare and social security. But survival isn’t the point. I have always worked for a living. My entire life. I vowed to never be a burden on society. I would never live for free on other people’s hard work. But here I am. An ubie.
A hand squeezes my shoulder, and I look up into my boss’s haunted eyes. “Are you okay, Annie?”
I nod and look around. My coworkers have already left. I am being weird and needy, so I say goodbye and go to empty my locker.
I stuff another empty box into the recycle chute and then turn in a slow circle to look around. Like all UBI housing, my kitchen has a small table with two chairs. Everything else, the microwave, fridge, and the two printers, are all set into the wall to make space and prevent theft.
In contrast to the nearly empty kitchen, my living room is cramped with boxes holding spools of wire, trays filled with saved hardware, tools, dusty test equipment, and all the accumulated detritus of a thirty-year career as a technician. Everything had fit easily into the rented two-bedroom house with the attached garage I’d used for a workshop, but not so well in what I can afford with just basic income.
One of my coworkers said he feels oddly free now. It is a strange relief to not hide my bad ear anymore, but for me, this new freedom feels more like I’m cut adrift and at the mercy of tides and currents beyond my control. I take a deep breath and look around at the mess. Hard work has always been a salve for my pain, so I start sorting through boxes. I need three piles: sell, keep, or discard.
The fourth box I search contains my grandmother’s mantle clock. Most of my family calls it cheap and ugly, but it was the only one of my grandma’s possessions I wanted. For me, the clock radiates a strange power over time itself. Just touching it transports me back to her hot kitchen filled with that sensuous baking cookie aroma.
“As soon as the clock strikes three, we can take them out of the oven,” Grandma says.
I pull it from the box, remove the bubble wrap, and am again playing Monopoly on her living room floor.
“Okay, we can play until the clock strikes ten, then off to bed with you!”
The clock hasn’t worked for years. The spring doesn’t catch when I turn the winding key and there has never been time to fix it. Now I have the time.
I quickly tear the clock down into its basic subassemblies, expecting to find a broken mainspring, but I am pleasantly surprised to find the spring intact. Instead, the bracket that holds the spring’s loose end is twisted out of shape. They’d used cheap aluminum that hadn’t held up to repeated winding torques.
Pulling the bracket free, I dig out measuring tools and transfer the design into the little CAD program on my data pad. Then I thicken the material a little, change it to steel, add two tiny gussets for strength and send it to the printer.
Twenty minutes after the part finishes printing, the clock is reassembled, wound up, and ticking away happily on the top shelf. I am elated and filled with energy. Making broken things work again is a good feeling, so I start looking around for the next thing to fix.
My search is interrupted by a child’s scream from outside. I raise the blind with some alarm and look out at a young mother already attending a scraped knee. All the kids yelling and playing in the courtyard below wear bland, patternless pastels. It makes me remember Carson, and I know immediately what I need to fix next.
Carson again answers the door when I ring the buzzer. He blinks, slightly confused, probably not recognizing me without my uniform and tools. Before he can say anything or slam the door in my face, I hand him the new bypass circuit board.
“This is a little larger than your old one,” I say. “But it won’t cause an interrupt in the circuit. They’ll never know it’s there unless they open the panel and look inside.”
The door opens wider, and Gabriella appears behind him, drying her hands.
“Thank you!” Carson says.
“That still won’t help with your stock usage problem. You have to keep that under control. You should be able to print two small shirts or a large one each week. But if you’re feeding old clothes into the recycler for credit, you should be able to print more.”
“I will,” he says.
“There’s one more thing,” I say and glance at his mother. “They will be coming to change your printer to a newer, fully automated version sometime later this year.”
Comprehension fills Gabriella’s face, and she slowly shakes her head.
“So that means this bypass will only work until then. I’ve never worked with those new printer units, but if you call me when that happens I’ll come over and try to help you hack that one too.”
Carson laughs, then slips past his mother and yells over his shoulder. “I’m going to try it out!”
Gabriella and I—left in a sudden and awkward situation—stare at each other. Just as I get ready to say goodbye, she says “I’m sorry about your job.”
I nod. “Well . . . I’ve dodged that bullet for years, but it was inevitable.”
She motions at my tee shirt. “I have to say I like these clothes a lot better than your previous fashion choice.”
I can’t help but laugh. “Yeah? I could still use some fashion advice from Carson.”
“What will you do now?” she asks.
The question catches me off guard, and I feel awkward and panicky. I am simultaneously ashamed of being an ubie and for how I had treated her in my first visit. I shake my head and take a step backward. “I . . . I really haven’t thought that far ahead yet.”
“You should come in,” she says.
“I really need to get going.”
She stares at me for a second, examining my face, then holds up a finger for me to wait and disappears inside. She returns holding the delicate vase with gorgeous blue and gold designs I noticed during my last visit.
“I remember you examining this when you were here before. Do you like it?”
“Of course,” I said. “It’s beautiful.”
“Then it’s yours,” she says and holds it out to me with a broad smile.
I take a step back. “Oh no. I didn’t mean . . .”
A faint smile touches her lips. “Hey, it’s okay,” she says. “Remember what I said about me being human now?”
I nod.
“Well, making beautiful things and giving them to people is part of being human. At least for me it is. And for Carson too, so what you did makes it easier for him to do what he enjoys. This is what we do now.”
She pushes the vase into my arms. It weighs almost nothing and feels so fragile.
“I can’t take this,” I say, almost whispering. “I mean don’t you make these to sell?”
“Oh, I sell some of them, just to replenish my supplies, but like I said, most are given to my friends. You sure you don’t want to come in?”
I look at her again and see the clay spatters on her smock and arms, then shake my head.
We say our goodbyes and I hold the vase like an infant as I make my way back to the train station. I’ve never owned anything like this before in my entire life.
The man who sits next to me on the train says, “That’s a stunning piece of art. What printer design did you use?”
“No printer. A friend of mine made it by hand and gave it to me.”
His eyebrows rise. “One of a kind! In an age where everything is made by a machine, you’re lucky to get such a gift.”
I nod and smile, then turn to look out the window at Dallas flashing past. I see a broken bicycle, then a large TV monitor sitting with the trash beside the road. This city is filled with old technology. Some things are kept for nostalgic reasons, others because the owner is too poor to buy something better, and maybe much more could be kept if it were reconditioned or fixed.
I know how to do that.
I smile at my reflection in the glass, and like so many other newly minted humans, my head fills with one-of-a-kind ideas.