THE SURFACE—NORTHAM
EN ROUTE: AIR CONVEYANCE, TAMPICO TO MANHATTAN
Half a million favors.
What had she done?
Rubi fell into a stunned half-trance of task management, working with Crane as offers poured in. Specialists offering to repair riot-damaged infrastructure. Small volunteer teams looking for drones disabled by rioters. Water-bomber pilots, launching choppers to tackle the Fort McMurray fires. Security giggers readying for hard contact, if necessary, to protect flammable carbon sinks in Warsaw and Saigon.
Yes, I owe you one. Yes, do that, and thank you. Sorry, the limit is one favor per individual. Yes, I’ll get you.
Bounce back! Have a prosocial day!
She was glazed, barely aware of Gimlet bustling her actual body aboard a helicopter. Happ tried to convince her to experience takeoff in the flesh, but she noped him away.
Hours passed.
Half a million favors.
How long would it take to fulfill those commitments? Now she’d have to take life extension.
Thrut-thrut-thrut. The chopper’s vibrations stitched pain through her injured hand.
She wouldn’t have to start keeping promises until the chaos petered out. This was a grace period, eye of the storm. “I should’ve set different win conditions.”
“You bootstrapped a solution to the Cloudsight problem,” Crane observed. “A kludge, perhaps, but I doubt anyone could have done better.”
Kludge, indeed. And yet her spirits lifted, just a bit.
She pushed the virtual world to background, finding Gimlet staring out the chopper window.
“Where are we flying?”
“Frankie’s been tagged near the Central Park Zoo, with your father. He believes he’s found the @ChamberofHorrors.”
Piercing sense of despair. He’d gone full @hoaxer, then. “Can you raise them?”
“It’s a one-way sound feed.” They shared it.
The sound faded in and out. Drow was apparently trespassing in an old shopping center. “Frankie says she saw Allure Noonstar?”
Gimlet nodded.
“Saw how? She abandoned her wearables.”
“They must use old-style screens in Sodom and Gomorrah.”
Rubi snorted, then saw they were serious. Did Gimlet actually think Drow was right about the Horrors?
“Crane, has anyone analyzed this transcript?”
“Your father’s transmission has ninety thousand realtime follows.” A blanket of infographic formed between their knees, like a coffee table, side-by-siding the snatches of conversation from inside the mall.
“This is … legit? Drow found something?”
“It appears so.”
She stared across the graphics at Gimlet, who was hunched, miserable, caught up in worry.
“It seems like they’re safe enough for the moment,” she said, tentatively, tapping one of Frankie’s utterances time-stamped fifteen minutes earlier.
This got a glower. “Scampering amid the ruins of New York with a drugs-hopped madman is not what I call safe.”
“Drow—” She gritted her teeth. Being right about the horrors didn’t not make him a hopped-up madman.
“He’s got her climbing in the ceilings. If I find out he lured her—”
“Lured?” she said sharply. “Lured?”
“Isn’t it true that abuse victims are more likely to become deviants—”
“Don’t. You dare. Finish that sentence.”
Outrage churned between them, spiky protective instincts roused on both sides.
Come on. People say worse things about Drow all the time.
Gimlet wasn’t just people.
They’d got past her defenses somehow, scaled her battlements, picked her locks, danced past all the traps. To say something so … so unthinkable, about Drow! She tasted blood behind her teeth.
“Miss Cherub,” Crane interrupted. “Call for you.”
“It’ll wait.”
“I’m afraid not. It’s the mayor of Hyderabad.”
Lured. Deviant. She manifested an illusory glove, making to slap it across Gimlet’s face. They caught her hand.
“This isn’t over,” she growled.
Then the chopper vanished, leaving Rubi hovering over a spectacular sandstone wall, pinkish gold in color, with hexagon turrets. Hot wind whisked at her virtual skin. Her toon defaults transformed, dressing her in a long desert robe the color of coffee.
The structure below was tagged Golconda Fort. All around it was a sea of people.
It was a realtime feed, yet another #flashmob. Soapboxers on the ramparts were competing to shout each other down in … Hindi?
Before Rubi could request translation, the mayor herself tooned in beside her, clad in a bronze-and-blue sari and chemise.
Despite her fury over Gimlet’s accusation, Rubi felt a buzz of true fannish awe. Mayor Agarwal was a true Bounceback celeb, always top ten on the @Worldsaver Leaderboard. Beloved for raising her city’s life-quality and contentment metrics by nearly 6 percent, she had even decreased the city’s net resource take.
“Your Honor,” Rubi said. Should she bow? Offer air kisses? “What is this?”
“Anti-rationing soapboxers have petitioned BallotBox for an emergency vote.”
“On what?”
“Requesting aid from the Pale.”
A weird shock, around her sternum, jolt as real as if Rubi had inhaled a rock. “Nobody’s definitively proved Luce is telling the truth about—”
“The @Martians coming? Buy-in, with Allure on the scene…” Mayor Agarwal unfurled her hands, graceful as a dancer. “They’ve steamrolled the numbers. Forced a vote.”
Impossible. Rubi launched BallotBox. The voter package sat, like a spider, in her polling booth.
“Pool qualification is opt-out, rather than in,” the mayor explained. “All adults are understood to have a stake.”
The voter package contained the usual educational vid, outlining the pros and cons on ceding sovereignty.
Ceding. Sovereignty.
There were optional docs for further study, links to realtime debates, and a ten-question quiz to ensure she understood the issues.
“This is slapdash. It’s … ridiculous!”
“You don’t know the half of it. Voting opens in twenty minutes,” said Agarwal.
“Twenty—” Rubi’s jaw hung.
“Rapid-response democracy was built for the unfolding crises of the Clawback, remember? Autonomous gun wars and cascade hurricanes.”
“Then electoral law needs a product update,” Rubi grumbled. The blue surface of BallotBox was chalked up with numbers. Stakeholders, a count of billions, represented every adult on earth. Quorum levels were set at 75 percent. A countdown showed voting closed at midnight, Greenwich standard time.
If aliens take over, do I still owe half a million favors?
“Does the Department of Preadolescent Affairs get a say?”
“They’ve negotiated a ten-percent bloc and are running their own poll.”
“Why would anyone throw up a referendum?”
“Cloudsight adjudicators are recalculating social capital scores for riot participants. The #flashmobs are dispersing. The @Freebreed movement is taking strikes, so they’ve thrown in with Allure.”
“But it’ll fail,” Rubi said. “Getting seventy-five percent voter turnout by midnight—”
Something in the other woman’s expression caught her. “What?”
“#Votefail might be their plan B,” the mayor said. She whiteboarded a huge document, transcripts of everything Luce Pox had told @Interpol and the press, since the very beginning. “Juanita Bell’s had people analyzing your client’s posts.”
Tagging feels about that—Luce was still, against all odds, her client?—Rubi scanned the contributors’ list. The sigs read like a roll call of the global genius cohort: politicians, tactical experts, gamification analysts. Household names all, working over Luce’s every utterance. More of her heroes. Serious people.
Rubi’s own comments and questions were sprinkled into the transcript, as if she belonged among them.
All of it public, too. No back-room deals.
“See this?” The mayor sidebarred a Luce rant regarding the Pale’s alleged treaty obligations. They could take over if the oxygen cycle failed, or if humanity made itself #extinct. They could take over if humans requested aid.
“I remember these criteria—”
“How many times has Pox criticized our standard of governance? He claims our voting system is … See this recurring phrase? Fundamentally ungovernable? Allure has picked up the refrain. Poll-driven democracy is ineffectual and messy.”
“So, if this referendum makes quorum and everyone votes to ask for aid…”
“The Pale take over.”
“And if we don’t make quorum, they also take over?”
Mayor Agarwal shrugged. “They’re looking for a pretext, aren’t they? This has the distinct whiff of system-gaming.”
If it’s a game, we have to outplay them. “We know the Pale are worried about how their allies see them. But this fleet commander Luce talks about, the royal—”
The type who cheats at cards, Luce had said.
“They obviously think there’s some wiggle room,” the mayor said. “If they’re anything like people used to be, they’ll invade on any pretext they can find and soak in like a stain. Remember all those years when settlers claimed North America had been all but empty until Europeans moved in? Or the British East India Company? By the time someone acknowledges they were in the wrong, it’ll be too late.”
Rubi stirred the infographic.
“So,” she said. “The problem is we need voters.”
Glint of a smile from the mayor. “The most pressing problem.”
“And I can help how?”
“By bringing in gamers.”
Back to Bastille.
“We’ve asked Rabble and Risto Games to offer up extra lives for anyone who turns in a voter badge. Theirs or a friend’s. If they bring in three, they get a one-year bump to premium sim access.”
It was a big give. Any player who died could vote in exchange for a reset. Die twice, get a spouse or an elder to give you their badge …
Rubi frowned. “That’ll throw millions of extra players into Bastille, without attrition.”
“Data management is clearing extra servers. The longer the scenario runs and the bigger it gets, the better.”
“But … the NorthAm gaming community can’t make a difference to the numbers?”
“We do need every vote we can get.” Agarwal shook her head. “But the real prize is the Rabble fan base in Brazil.”
Of course. Greater Sao Paulo had four times as many people as all of NorthAm. “What if you do get all these voters and they vote for offworld aid?”
“Then we’ll have a new most pressing problem. That’s what we signed on for when we instituted real democracy.” The mayor took her hands. “This campaign’s running, Mer Whiting. It’s going to be hard fought. Are you in?”
“I’ve got other problems. My father—”
“Can you really second the future of the world to the fate of one recidivist #troll?”
Rubi felt her jaw drop.
“You’ve launched an unregistered currency with your offering of favors.” Agarwal’s pleasant, doll-like features belied the harshness of her words. “People are trading the tokens you issued, and you’re not a registered bank—”
“I’ll see if registration is an option,” Crane subbed. “Unless you’d like a jail cell next to your father’s.”
She muted him.
“You just went from a friendly pitch to the edge of #bullying, Your Honor. Drow’s my dad. He’s #triaged. Nobody but me is going to help him.”
Cloudsight’s numbers rose from the stones of the fort.
“This fragile new currency you’ve coined,” the mayor said. “The @RubiOwesMe channel is exchanging favors at ten tons carbon or one ton oxygen. It’s a booming market. You cashed in all your personal privilege for a measurable piece of the economy.”
She swallowed. “Your point?”
“You’ve triggered a surge of prosocial offering. People are stepping up, Mer Whiting. Row, row, row, you said. But we’re not just rowing; we’re excited. The true Bounceback spirit is trending. All the compassion fatigue, the memes that looked to be losing steam? You asked for a recommit. You’re getting it.”
Rubi rubbed her jaw with her bruised fingers. Her skin felt oily and too cold.
“It all hinges on your word,” Agarwal went on. “Your honor, if you will. If you can’t fulfill a contract to your old lover Manitoule at Rabble, how can you make good on half a million favors to strangers?”
Rubi stared at Golconda Fort. The crowd surrounding the sand-colored tower was rapt, captured by one passionate, outraged speaker.
“I need a moment.” With that, Rubi ghosted India, returning to the helicopter.