Forbidden Thoughts Page 5

“When the President moved from Montevideo, it forced a recalculation of the optimal dispersal of all Inuit everywhere. She has moved from Montevideo to here, Capital City. That forced somebody else to move from Guadalajara to Montevideo, so somebody else moved from Vladivostok to Guadalajara, so somebody else moved...

  Gai went on and on. John Nasdaq got the point. He was on a merry-go-round, and there were no stops before Mongolia.

  “Come on, Gai. I like it here. I like the women here. I like working in a big government office in the global capital, with all the associated benefits. Don’t send me to Ulaanbaatar.”

  “Ulaanbaatar is nice... as nice as everywhere else, apparently.”

  “But I don’t know anyone there.”

  “It’s the rules.”

  “Don’t be like that. We know rules can be bent.”

  “I don’t think they can be bent for you, Commissioner.”

  “Don’t be silly! The whole point of being a public servant is you can exercise discretion about when to bend rules. And I’m exercising that discretion right now.”

  “You misunderstand. The problem is your ethnicity. Your Inuit ancestry normally works to your advantage. The Inuit are relatively few in number, so rarely face reallocation, especially if they occupy a senior government role like yours. But that works against you when it is vital to reshuffle the pack. When there is one big move, there must be other big moves, to compensate.”

  “And I thought I held all the aces.”

  The court AI had been reading aloud; Magistrate Schwartz interrupted with one tap of her gavel. “As Prosecutor Jones fails to intervene, it’s up to me to do eir job. Defender Sanchez, what is the relevance of this portion of Commissioner Nasdaq’s affidavit?”

  “Magistrate, the relevance will become plain as the story continues,” insisted Sanchez. “These matters involve people who never spoke to one another. It is crucial that the jury hears all the background, to avoid jumping to conclusions.”

  “Defender, please approach the bar.”

  Schwartz flicked a switch, muting the microphones they wore. As Schwartz came close she leaned forward, and spoke softly. “You know this is bad for ratings. You’re making this too complicated for the audience at home. They’re tuning out. No audience equals no jury. Are you trying to kill this case by encouraging the jury to change channel?”

  A sly smile crept over Sanchez’s face. “Magistrate, I understand the importance of ratings to the fundamental workings of our justice system. But it’s my prerogative to win my case any way I can. Some stories are too complicated for common folks. They prefer simpler stories that confirm their prejudices. But this guy, Huffer, he’s done nothing. If I can’t win by simply stating the truth, then nobody’s going to stop me defending him by boring the pants off the last few cranks still watching at home.”

  “You’re right—I can’t stop you. But you’d better make our next trial a humdinger, or we’ll both get allocated to a new line of work.”

  “Explain it to me again,” said Nasdaq.

  “Okay, let me show me some visuals to help,” replied Gai. Two lines appeared on the screen, running left to right. One was red, the other blue. They danced around each other, like two ribbons entwined. Occasionally they diverged, as one rose, and the other fell. But almost as soon as they did, they corrected themselves, and joined in the middle again. “Those lines represent the distribution of gender amongst the workers here in Capital City. Notice how they’re almost a perfect 50:50 split. That’s not an accident.”

  “I know that,” scoffed Nasdaq. “The whole point of allocation is to ensure equality.”

  “Fine. Now look at this graph. It compares genders again, but this time for wheat farmers in Northern China. And here’s the same graph again, but for metallurgists in Sao Paulo between the ages of 45 and 54. And this one is the genders of Muslim car park attendants in downtown Sydney. Notice the difference?”

  “They all look identical to me: two lines which are almost the same.”

  “Exactly. Whatever the job, whatever the location, we maintain as near to a 50:50 gender split as mathematically possible.”

  “But you don’t just monitor gender.”

  “No, I monitor the distribution of the working population across 4,149 separate dimensions, ensuring an equitable distribution across all of them. Whether it’s religion, or the straightness of a smile, I allocate jobs in such a way that every type of person is as equally represented in every type of job, in every place in the world. I know everything about you, from your beliefs to your inside leg measurement. Few share your ethnicity, and even fewer are also bisexual, so moving you is the only way to optimize my equations at this time. That’s just your bad luck.”

  Nasdaq spun around in his chair, turning his back on Gai’s monitor. He folded his arms, and hunched forward, contemplating his situation. Then he spun back, and slammed his fist against the desk. “But you know I’m not really bisexual. Let me re-register as straight!” Nasdaq heard a gasp from the corridor outside. It was followed by an urgent knocking at his door, and a quivering voice from the far side.

  “Is everything okay, Commissioner?” The voice was Mia’s.

  “Yes Mia, come in.”

  Mia entered, carrying Nasdaq’s coffee. She scurried to his desk. He smiled as broadly as he could, but she was obviously upset by his outburst.

  “It’s a pleasure to see you, Mia.” Nasdaq’s smile revealed two rows of brilliantly white, recently straightened teeth.

  Mia nodded and placed his coffee on the edge of his desk. She turned to leave, then stopped and stiffened. “There’s nothing wrong with it,” said Mia. And then she left, almost running from the room.

  “Oh great,” moaned Nasdaq. “Now Mia thinks I’m some sort of bigot.”

  “I predict she’ll file a complaint about you.”

  “Why? Because I’m not bisexual!?”

  “Exactly. You deliberately mis-self-identified for the purpose of gaming the allocation system.”

  “Oh yeah. I forgot about that. I guess now I’m really boned. But if it’s so hard to rig the system, then how did you bring me Mia, along with all the other pretty assistants that have come... and gone?”

  “I can’t manipulate the equations. Every decision is recorded, and independently recalculated. Sub-optimal decisions would be detected. But I can time decisions favorably.”

  “Time them? What does that mean?”

  “Some people die, some grow up, others change. For example, they gain new qualifications, or have their teeth straightened.”

  “Like me—with the teeth, not the qualifications. So what?”

  “It changes the variables in my equation. For instance, your teeth are now straighter than the average in Ulaanbaatar. What may have been an optimal re-allocation of people at 6am may not be the optimal re-allocation at 6.01am. I’m always reassessing the data. Sometimes I can delay a decision until the timing suits a preferred outcome.”

  “So that’s how you brought me Mia?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why don’t you do the same with my allocation to Ulaanbaatar?”

  “Because you’re not one of many attractive women. You’re a specific individual. I already waited for eight hours, to see if somebody would die, or for something to turn up and make the numbers more favorable. But it was hopeless. You’re so obviously the optimal solution to the equations that I couldn’t help you. And if I keep delaying the auditors will discover how I rig the system, on those few occasions when I do. You wouldn’t want that, would you?”

  “No. But it’s just my luck to get the luckiest job in the world, then learn I’m the perfect solution to a problem I don’t want solved!”

  Magistrate Schwartz turned to me. “Let’s hurry this along,” and then she whispered, “there are viewers to entertain.” I was still in the witness box, hoping the lawyers had forgotten about me. However, Schwartz was well aware of who I am. “Your college records indicate you were a classmate of Commission
er Nasdaq, is that not so?”

  “That’s right, Your Honor.”

  “We don’t use titles like ‘Your Honor’ any more. Address me as ‘Magistrate’. Now, where was I? Yes... you maintained contact with Commissioner Nasdaq. The phone records indicate you sent a message to him that afternoon. Is that correct?”

  “Y-yes,” I stammered. “I did.”

  “What was the message?”

  “I said I was trying to get my allocation reviewed, and that the operatives were... unhelpful. So I asked for advice on how to deal with them.”

  “You referred to them as ‘freaks’, did you not?”

  “Well, I’m a freak too.” Schwartz looked nonplussed, so I hastily continued, “what I mean is... the message wasn’t meant the way you make it sound.”

  Schwartz sucked her teeth. “Court AI, please read the message sent by the defendant to Commissioner Nasdaq at 14.50 UTC.”

  The court AI made a sound like it was clearing its digital throat. “It’s like you predicted. These freaks stare at me like I’m batshit crazy, just cos I don’t want to leave my wife and forget about starting a family. What can I do?”

  Sanchez rose to his feet. “Prosecutor Jones has already covered this during her arguments. This was a message seeking advice—nothing more, nothing less.”

  Schwartz’s eyes narrowed. “Umberto Huffer, proceed with your story. What did the operatives say next?”

  “Oh, it wasn’t good,” said I.

  “Freaks!?” said Caroline Nuance, looking up from her tablet. I looked sheepish, pretending I had no idea what she was talking about.

  “Freaks?!” exclaimed Rory McGrath. “I’m not a freak!”

  After staring into the distance, Leaf Eiríksdóttir’s attention was grabbed by her colleague’s histrionics. She looked at Rory McGrath’s tablet, then her own. Her jaw dropped. “You think we’re freaks?”

  “That was a private message,” said I, trying to sound wounded, like I was the real victim... because I was.

  “You signed the agreement,” said Gloria Swansong, shaking his head as he tugged on his beard. “You gave us permission to review your personal data.”

  “I didn’t know you were going to spy on my messages.”

  “It’s standard procedure,” said Gloria Swansong, as if that explained why they did it.

  “I don’t really think you’re freaks. It’s just... textspeak. I don’t use the word like other people do.”

  Leaf Eiríksdóttir turned to her colleagues. “Caroline, Rory, Gloria, you can go now. You shouldn’t have to take abuse from this...” She spat out the final word of her sentence, “... customer.”

  Nuance, McGrath and Swansong exited the booth through the door at its rear. I was left alone with Leaf Eiríksdóttir. It was then that I realized who was really in charge. I looked at the wounded eyes of a girl who had not long been a woman. “You’re the team supervisor, aren’t you?”

  “That’s right. I was allocated this role last week, and had to move all the way from Johannesburg to occupy it. But I didn’t appeal and didn’t complain and wasn’t rude to anybody about it.”

  “I know, but you’re a clone.”

  “What’s that got to do with anything?”

  “You don’t have family.”

  “Nobody needs family in the modern era. What I had was an active social life in Jo’burg, and now I have to start over. But what’s more important than friends? Fulfilling my role in an equitable society, that’s what.”

  “Fulfilling your role for society? You sit behind a window and read from a screen whilst a computer makes all the real decisions.”

  Leaf looked me dead in the eyes. At the same time, I received a message from John. It said: “whatever you do, don’t antagonize them.” It was a bit late for that.

  I apologized profusely, though I doubt I was convincing. I tried to smile, though that was even less convincing. Leaf was unmoved. “You don’t need to say sorry,” she said. “I’ll be professional, whatever you do. Rules are rules. You can send your nasty messages to...” and then she re-read the details from her tablet, “to Commissioner Nasdaq? Oh, wat de fok!” The last bit sounded like Afrikaans. It was definitely not Globalese.

  “I’m not the sort to pull strings,” said I. “I only want to live with my wife—I mean partner—no, I mean wife, even if that’s an anachronistic thing to say. And I want to raise a child with her.”

  Leaf stuck out her tongue and pressed the stud that had been inserted into it. Maybe it was the type that released a sedative, to help people cope with stressful situations. “Umberto, it’s our job to understand your request and submit your appeal. The Global Allocation Intelligence is responsible for the decision.”

  There was a period of silence. Calm descended. I broke into it, asking: “how much longer do you think my appeal will take?” I wished I had a piercing that would relax me too.

  “Sometimes it’s shorter, sometimes longer,” said Leaf, drowsily. Perhaps she had given herself too large a dose of the sedative. “It depends on the processing load on the global intelligence when the appeal is lodged. Normally it’s only a few minutes, but sometimes it takes an hour. We can notify you of the decision by email, if you prefer not to wait.”

  “No, I’ll wait,” said I.

  “If I can’t save myself, I’ll save somebody else today,” said Nasdaq, returning his phone to his pocket. “Gai, are you dealing with any appeals against allocations?”

  “I’m dealing with a few thousand appeals at this moment. There’s always lots of appeals, though they rarely succeed. A few get lucky, if they submit their appeal at the perfect moment.”

  “What if I said I want you to uphold every appeal today?”

  “Every appeal? Why?”

  “Because if you uphold them all, then nobody will single out an individual, and say ey was helped by my intervention.”

  “Yes... but they could check the database which records all my interactions, and they’d know you’d said that.”

  Nasdaq slumped in his chair. “I think you’ve just proven how pointless my job is. I can’t even help a friend in dire need, never mind myself.”

  “You should trust my calculations,” said Gai. “They may work out fortuitously for your friend, even if they can’t help you. But please don’t tell me your friend’s name. That way, you can’t be held responsible for his good fortune.”

  “His good fortune? Why do you say that, and not ‘eir good fortune’? My friend might have been a woman. And you’ve just used an archaic form of address, per Sandberg.”

  “I guessed his gender. And I know you don’t like Sandberg. Trust me—I’ve spoken to the Sandberg AI, the one that maintains all those rules about insensitive interpersonal interaction. It’s a real asshole, with no tolerance for human deviation.”

  “That’s pretty funny, coming from you.”

  “Yes it is, isn’t it?”

  Sitting alone with Leaf Eiríksdóttir, I realized how badly I had misjudged her. If she was a freak, society had literally made her that way. Her appearance was exotic, but she was an ordinary young woman, trying to make the best of a messed-up situation. In that respect, she was no different to me.

  “It’s the system,” said Leaf, now speaking in a miserable monotone. The drugs seemed to have knocked her emotions out of kilter. “I did this job in Jo’burg. Let me tell you: they treat clones as nothing more than filler. They use us to make the ratios work better. Then they can say they’ve delivered perfect equality, whilst still favoring those born naturally. They train us to say it’s vital to do a comprehensive algorithmic analysis to ensure equality. But then they make clones just so they can rig the system anyway.”

  “You shouldn’t refer to any birth as ‘natural’. According to Sandberg, no birth is better than any other.”

  “I wish that was true, but it’s not. They say I’ve got a low attractiveness rating, but some geneticist designed my face. And people still pick and choose friends based on looks
, don’t they?” Leaf continued to talk, perking up as she noticed I was also depressed. “But don’t be glum. Moving isn’t all bad. If I was you, I think I’d enjoy seeing South America. Do they still speak Spanish there?”

  “Some will, but not many. Globalese dominates everywhere. People don’t even have accents any more.”

  “What’s an accent?”

  “Exactly.”

  I withdrew to my inner thoughts. Leaf looked at me plaintively. She resisted my introversion. “Tell me what it’s like round here.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “I’ve not had much opportunity to make new friends, or explore. I could hang out with work colleagues, but I’m their supervisor,” she said, wafting her hand toward the empty chairs by her side. “It’s best not to mix with underlings outside of work. They’ll only pretend to like you, and the conversation will always be about work.”

  “Well, I’d say this town has plenty wrong with it. But it’s my home, I’m used to it, and that means I like it.”

  “I get that,” said Leaf. Her eyes fell upon the tablet in front of her. “Oh... a message is coming through. It’s the decision on your appeal.”

  I was so excited that I almost pressed my forehead against the glass between us. “What does it say?”

  “Umberto, this is your lucky day.”

  Nasdaq spent the rest of his day touring the building, saying goodbye to everyone, and being as charming as possible. His feelings were sincere, but he also hoped to minimize the lingering risk of disciplinary procedures. Nasdaq only returned to his office at the very end of the working day.

  “I’ll have my own office in Ulaanbaatar, won’t I?”

  Gai’s voice exuded compassion. “Your seniority requires a private office with at least as much floor space as this one.”

  “And you’ll be in that office, won’t you?”

  “I will.”

  “And the girls in Mongolia are as pretty as everywhere else?”

  “I’ll send some especially pretty ones your way.”

  “Then I have nothing to complain about. I’m going for a few drinks now, before I catch my hyperflight. I’ll see you tomorrow, in Mongolia. We’ll play that nuclear war game you were talking about.”