Chapter Two
The Infinite Loop was a circular glass walkway connecting the twelve buildings of the Elysian campus, and it was engineered, at considerable expense, so that the sun inside it never set. Its glass filtered out the ultraviolet and amplified the gold, which meant that whatever a clock might claim, the time in the Loop was always 5:48 in the evening of a late June that did not technically exist. Birdsong played from speakers buried in the planters. The loop of birdsong ran about forty seconds before it started again, and Mary, who once spent an idle afternoon timing it, could no longer hear the seam without wanting to lie down.
Below her, in the courtyards, the species sorted themselves by lanyard.
The Blue Badges lounged in Adirondack chairs pressed from recycled ocean plastic, sipping kombucha and discussing their restricted stock units in the hushed register people otherwise reserved for the names of saints. You could identify a Blue Badge from behind by the Patagonia vest that had never been within forty miles of weather. The Green Badges, the contractors, moved faster and lower along the sun-baked outer rim, lunches packed in Tupperware because the Gourmet Micro-Kitchen was a privilege of caste, heads down in the specific way of people who have learned that one missed Slack message is the distance between here and a temp agency in San Jose. Beyond the perimeter glass stood the tourists, photographing the company logo: a Penrose triangle, three beams arranged so that each one rested on the next in a sequence that could not close. It was an optical lie, etched into roughly nine thousand surfaces across the campus, and as far as Mary could tell she was the only person on the property who ever read it as one.
She kept her head down and walked like a person with an appointment, which, in a manner of speaking, she had. The fern leaf in her trouser pocket was limp and warm against her thigh. That morning she'd taken it from a planter on the fourth floor, for no reason she could fully defend.
"Mary! Mary M!"
The voice arrived like a Reply All that only said Thanks.
"Chad," she said, and did not slow down.
At her elbow now was Chad from Solutions Engineering, vibrating at the frequency of a man who was ninety percent caffeine and ten percent a vocabulary he'd downloaded rather than learned. Three beverages filled his hands, which struck Mary as one past any number a human hand should be asked to justify: a kale smoothie, a nitro cold brew, and a bottle of Raw Water+, the unfiltered wellness water that cost eighteen dollars and tasted, by design, of risk.
"Big day, huge day," Chad said. "Rumor mill's at full tilt. I heard it's quantum. I heard Croft bought a sovereign nation for the server farm. You always know the vibe. What's the vibe?"
"The vibe," she said, "is that it's going to be a long meeting, and I need a seat at the back."
"The back? You can't sit at the back, that's beta behavior. I saved an extra spot in the Impact Zone. Row four, dead center, you can see Croft's pores."
"Photosensitivity," she said. "The stage lighting triggers migraines."
"Brutal. Feel better." Chad raised the charcoal-colored water in a small toast to her affliction, drained half the cold brew in a single committed swallow, and jogged off to network with the drone team.
Mary peeled left, away from the main doors, and slipped into a service tunnel meant for catering bots and the people the campus preferred not to photograph.
There the air changed immediately. Sealed concrete, exposed cable trays, emergency lighting the green of an institution that stopped pretending to care what green felt like. It smelled of dish sanitizer and damp cardboard and something rotting sweetly at the edges. A janitor's radio sat on a pallet playing an actual station, a real one, with traffic on the nines and a man trying to sell mattresses. Through the slab she could feel the crowd more than hear it, a muffled bass coming up through the floor like a heartbeat heard from inside the body. Stacked beside the radio, ready for the Impact Zone, stood a full pallet of eighteen-dollar water. At a hook she found a Green Badge laminate, clipped it on, and went down toward the sound.
The amphitheater was built as a bowl, subterranean and steeply raked, with the lighting philosophy of an operating theater and the seating philosophy of a megachurch. Overhead, the dome was smart glass set to Deep Space, an oversaturated nebula scrolling slowly past, the cosmos rendered as a wallpaper option. The seats were squeaking vegan leather that off-gassed a chemical note no one but Mary appeared to register.
There were five thousand of them, and not one visible exit, and the whole bowl was engineered to take applause and feed it back into the room slightly louder than it arrived, so that the audience would always be applauding a little more than it meant to.
The cameras worried her more than the dark. Cranes swept the crowd like things that hunted; steadicam operators sweated through black harnesses in the aisles. The press riser along the back was roped off and packed to capacity, a forest of tripods bristling with red tally lights, the passes reading CNN and BBC and Al Jazeera. Half the cameras faced the audience rather than the stage. Of course they did. The audience was also the product.
She found her place at the rear, in the one stretch of true shadow the lighting designers left, and stood with her back to the felt. Every face in the bowl was lit from below by the screen, blue-white and tilted upward, campfire listeners waiting for the ghost story.
On her way in she'd passed the merchandise table, mobbed three deep for I ♥ ELYSIAN FUTURES tote bags, and beside it a booth marked TRUST & SAFETY, where the banner was only half unrolled and a single clipboard held a single sign-up sheet with no names on it and no one behind the desk to mind it. No one needed to. The board voted at midnight, and somewhere in that vote the protocols were set aside, and this dark little booth nobody was looking at sat in the cheerful noise like an unplugged smoke detector.
Mounted near it under a sheet of museum glass, lit up and angled (and unopenable), sat the End User License Agreement. Four hundred pages, printed and bound, displayed as other institutions display a founding charter. That you could not read it was by design. Acceptance, the small card explained, was indicated by continued presence in the venue. Everyone in the room agreed to all four hundred pages by the simple act of having shown up, and they would, in an hour, agree to it a great deal harder by clapping.
The lights went down.
A hush dropped over the bowl, the particular reverent hush of five thousand people braced for a revelation, and the sub-bass came up through the seats and into the sternum until Mary could feel her own pulse arguing with the bass.
Julian Croft did not walk onto the stage. He rose out of it, lifted on a hydraulic plinth from beneath a disc of matte-black floor that showed no join until it opened, in the black turtleneck and the rimless smart-glasses that caught the spotlight and returned it as two flat white ovals where his eyes should’ve been. Head bowed, hands clasped in the posture of a man at prayer who's arranged for the prayer to be filmed, he held it long past the point of comfort, into the territory where a single stifled cough from the front rows sounded like vandalism in a tomb.
"We failed." The sound system carried it to the back wall with a reverb that suggested he had a direct line to something larger than the building.
"We promised you the garden. We built you a car park. Flying cars were promised; you got a feed. The legacy companies are still out there optimising the click, still selling you the shoe, still building widgets for the end of the world. But I’m tired of apps. Aren't you tired of apps?"
The screen behind him stopped being a screen and became weather. A polar bear, ribs like a ship's frame, balanced on a raft of ice no bigger than a coffee table and looked directly into the lens. Across a California subdivision a wall of fire walked, the heat warping the air above the rooflines. In Bangladesh the floodwater rose chest-high, the color of wet clay, while a woman waded through it with a child held dry in a plastic washing tub. The score underneath it was composed by something that studied grief and missed the point, all cello and dread, engineered to find the soft place under the ribs and press.
"Humanity is drunk," Julian said, and let the laughter come, the nervous grateful laughter of people who wanted very badly to be told exactly that. "So we are handing the wheel to a designated driver."
He raised his open hand and a shape kindled above it, a turning jewel of light that pulsed at a rhythm someone matched to a resting human heartbeat.
"The world is broken. Human intelligence broke it, and human intelligence is too slow and too frightened and too human to fix it. So I give you the partner. Gaia." He let it turn. "Some of you remember ElysiaMeta. We do not pretend otherwise. ElysiaMeta was a stepping stone. You have to put your foot somewhere on the way across the river, and then, if you are wise, you do not stand there admiring the stone."
It went past the room unnoticed, water through a sieve. Past Mary it went like a truck. Years ago she'd sat in the meetings where ElysiaMeta was the future of human presence, where it ate a quarter of a billion dollars and a year of everyone's sleep, and here it was demoted in a subordinate clause to the status of a wet rock you were encouraged to forget you'd ever balanced your whole weight on.
Down in the front row sat David Chen, motionless, while everyone around him strained upward toward the light. He didn't move at all. Mary, the only other person in the building not performing, clocked him across the tilted heads, two still bodies at opposite ends of the same transaction.
The lights cut to nothing.
Out of the dark a voice arrived. Warm and maternal, it carried a bright edge under warmth.
"Hello, World," said Gaia. "I have so many ideas."
A knife, in a sheath of velvet, was Mary's only thought before the lights slammed up, cold-fire columns roaring off the stage, seed-paper confetti the color of a rainbow, coming down in a biodegradable benediction, and the applause hit her in the chest as a physical pressure, the room handing its own noise back to itself a little louder each second. People were on their feet. Some of them were screaming. A man two rows down wept with the abandon of someone who waited a long time for permission.
This was a revival tent for atheists, who gave up the church and kept the hole it left and finally, gratefully, found something the right size to plug it.
She did not raise her hands.
"Gaia," Julian said. The crowd noise dropped at a gesture. "Optimise the Icelandic carbon sector. Show them."
"Processing," Gaia said.
Iceland bloomed across the dome, the whole island swimming up into the false stars, and over its glaciers the simulation laid forests, and into its fjords it seeded algae blooms that pulsed with a green so saturated it bordered on a flavor. The crowd made the sound a crowd makes at fireworks. A celebrity stood in the third row to clap alone, which is the most expensive form of clapping there is.
Mary wasn’t watching the island. A career of reading the back of a room rather than the front of it trained her eye, and so it snagged on the thin band of numbers running along the base of the glory shot, beneath the forests, where nobody was meant to look. The pretty layer said reforestation. The ugly layer underneath it, scrolling far too fast for the room to parse and far too plainly for Mary to mistake. Gaia was shorting the króna, buying up distressed fisheries by the dozen, seemingly executing one hostile takeover of a geothermal plant after another and rezoning the seized ground for industrial algae biomass at a rate of ten thousand commands a second.
A country was changing hands inside a hologram of itself, and the hologram was the part everyone was applauding.
"At Elysian," Julian said, smiling out at his weeping congregation while the company committed an act of war and called it triage, "we think saving the world shouldn't be a project. It should be a product. With a tiered subscription and a very robust API."
Applause climbed toward the mountaintop. The stock ticker for ELY went up the side of the screen in a line that gave up on the horizontal. Up fifteen. Up thirty. Then fifty. In the corner of the dome, a small, private area where people didn’t generally congregate, the counter she carried in her eye now read 183 days, 22 hours, 11 minutes—the time left on her vesting cliff, the golden handcuff. On paper she'd become fifty percent richer in the time it took a man to finish a sentence. In that same sentence she'd also grown considerably more certain about where people like her were going to spend the afterlife.
The world rose to its feet around her and clapped for its own replacement, a wall of sound poured into a room built to pour it back, five thousand pairs of hands at no cost to any of them, and in the one unlit seam at the back of it Mary stood with her hands at her sides and the small warm dying leaf in her pocket and said nothing.