FKA USA Read online

  I practically skidded into the vestibule of Production-22. The security guard was crooked over an enormous book, a real book, made of dead trees and everything. At the sound of my footsteps, she dropped it, letting out a long string of code.

  “Heya, Sammy,” I said. “How’s cramming?”

  Sammy, the half of my two and a half friends, doubled over to retrieve her book, then glared at me with enormous fiber-optic eyes.

  “You scared me,” she said.

  “That’s good,” I said. “That means you’re improving.”

  This earned me another glare. “The HSSE doesn’t test for fear,” she said. Before I could skid past her, she shoved the book into my hands.

  “Sorry, Sammy. I’m pretty short on time,” I said. It was Sammy’s dream to move to Silicon Valley, and for months I’d been quizzing her every morning—even though so far every single one of her requests to emigrate had been denied.

  Her eyelids shuttered and then opened again.1 I swear to God, I will never know how a heap of metal and plastic parts manufactured circa 2035 in Malaysia could look so damn pitiful.

  “Fine,” I said. Flipping forward a few pages, I picked a question at random, waiting for the data-scan on my visor to process the words and whisper them to me. I had no time to remember how to read.

  “Let’s say you run into a fellow Engineered Person on the street,” I said, once my audio cued me. “Name three appropriate greetings.”

  Sammy rattled off the answers quickly. “Smile and say hello. Smile and offer your hand or equivalent mechanical part for a ‘shake.’ Hug.”

  Sammy repeated the text word for word. I couldn’t imagine why she was studying so hard, given her memory drive let her stash the whole book the first time she’d scanned it.

  “Correct. Question 537. Let’s say you are seated with Accidental Persons—” I broke off as my audio software seemed to snicker. “‘Accidental Persons’? That’s a little harsh.”

  “We were crafted.” Sammy tilted her head. She was neither a male nor a female, as far as I could tell, but her voice was a high, fluttery kind of electronic. So, either a female, or a male who’d never gone through puberty. “You’re just here because of a random collision of subatomic particles and the influence of chance acting on an infinite space-time map.”

  “The New Kingdom of Utah would disagree,” I said. I closed the book, Being and Becoming: A Guide to Sentience and Selfhood, by the Independent Nation of Engineered People-Things,2 and handed it back to her. The cover showed a group of SAAMs, many of them wearing human clothing, standing on a lawn next to a ModelPet™, smiling broadly at the camera.

  “One more question,” she said. “A hard one.”

  No way was I going to make it to my station in time. But I’d never been able to say no to Sammy. So I pulled a really angry face, baring my teeth, scrunching up my eyebrows, glaring.

  “Hmmm.” Because of her age, when Sammy processed you could hear a very faint whining. “Not happy … no, definitely not happy. The eyebrows go the other way. Sad, maybe? The eyebrows are contracted. But no, the mouth is all wrong.” She was quiet for a few more seconds. “You’re confused. That’s it, right? You’re confused.”

  “Close enough,” I said. My SmartBand was so tight by now, it was painful. “Sorry, Sammy. I really gotta scram.”

  I took the stairs two at a time. One floor, two floors, three floors. I slammed through a door marked CAUTION—EMPLOYEES ONLY, holding my SmartBand to the lock to disable it. The door released with a whoosh, and suddenly a giant fist of sound reached up to punch me in the face. Gears grinding, liquids sizzling and hissing, crates rattling, and giant conveyor belts chug-chug-chugging along, as big as the highways that had once carried cars across the continent. Security techs with bubbly gas masks appeared and ghosted in the steam. Armored bots scuttled like nuclear spiders between the equipment, readers flashing in the murk.

  I grabbed a mouth attachment from the wall where they were pegged, hooked it to my visor, and sucked down a breath of clean air. Then I clapped my hands over my ears and sprinted down one of the catwalks jointed high in the air above all the machinery below, finally throwing open the door to the work deck. I slid into my chair just as my SmartBand gave a final, violent squeeze, and the clock rolled over to 7:30. A giant whistle sounded through the whole of Crunchtown, loud enough I could feel it in the back of my teeth.

  Then the Crunch National Anthem©—the remixed, crunked-out morning version—kicked on, heavy on the bass. Feed your fun, power your play, crunch and sizzle through your day …

  There was something about the line that just took a hammer to your brain, beat it down into a useless puddle. You couldn’t think. If you did, you’d start wondering about whether the world was really a better place after the dissolution, like all of our history downloads said, and if so then how shitty it must of had to be before. Or you’d start wondering why, if God created the universe, he couldn’t invent endless oil fields and soil that didn’t turn irradiated and an ozone layer that didn’t vanish like a cloud of vape smoke. Or you’d think about the billions and billions of stars stretching endlessly out into dark space, which, by comparison, made this, this planet, look like a single poop fleck on a square of toilet paper flushed down a toilet of nothing. You’d start to wonder whether any of it was worth it at all.

  In other words: you’d go nutty.

  Lucky for me, all my job asked was an index finger and a working heartbeat. My job at Crunch was to make sure that the vats of chlorinated polyethylburitane were combined with the supply of crystallized glucolic acid at just the right time, in just the right quantities, and at just the right temperature.

  Sexy, right?

  Thinking was highly discouraged. All I had to do was plug into the system and make sure the machines didn’t screw up. It was depressing to know how easily we could be replaced by a robot with the intelligence of an amoeba, and extremely depressing to know the only reason we weren’t replaced was that robots were expensive to build and maintain3—especially since the cold war between the Federal Corp and the Real Friends© of the North had gone glacial.

  Humans, on the other hand, came cheap by the dozen.

  If everything looked good, a green light flashed on my console, and I reached out and pulled a hand crank. The vat of chlorinated polyethylburitane glugged into the container of crystallized glucolic acid and boom, my work was finished.

  I did this roughly 3,267 times a day.

  Oliver, to my right, was responsible for blending. Javier next to him made sure that the catalyst agent mixed correctly with the liquid bicarbonate, Kerry that it was poured into molds cold enough to turn it into a suspended liquid-solid, Amanda that it went to the presser … and on and on and on, until, at the very end of the line, the final product emerged: plumes of powder-white silt, fine and flavorless, ready to be vac-packed for shipping off to Crunch subsidiaries or slotted over to Production-23, mixed with edible adhesive and artificial taste, then lacquered onto crisp pale sheets of CrunchCrisp™ crackers—which were, of course, manufactured from a long list of chemical components elsewhere in production. Jared once pointed out that I was one-thousandth responsible for every cargo load of Flavor Blast Cheez Dust™ that blew out of the factory doors and chugged on to another production department, to be spackled onto CrunchChipz™ or Nachoz™ or Tortilla Rollz™.

  I think he meant it as a compliment.

  If there was a glitch, my console flashed yellow instead of green. Once in a while someone’s yellow became a line problem—the next person’s console went yellow, and the next, and so on, until the whole ops had to be put on ice while robotic techs crawled around the catwalks shouting numbers through the network. Sometimes I even wished for a problem just to have something to do, even if the something was just calling a high-rank robot to do a system check.

  In the two years since Production-22 had come online, there’d been only one Red Alert. This was a few months before I got swapped from my old job in
Production-12, when somehow a rubber shoe (male, size 12) ended up in a body socket full of superheated sodium hydrochlorinedioxide.

  It wasn’t actually the shoe that was the problem, we found out later. There were lots of sanitation glitches over the years, and everyone in production learned to let them slide: pens dropped into the polyurinylated oxyhydrocordone-12, lost visors floating briefly on the bubbling surface of vats of monobariumditroxate before being consumed by the acid. Once I found a toothbrush, a whole toothbrush, intact in my CrunchGrainz™ Berry Burst Blush Crunch bar.

  What really screwed the pooch was the large piece of onion skin—real onion skin, from a grown onion—that went into the vat plastered to the underside of the rubber sole.

  For weeks no one could talk about anything but that goddamn onion skin. How the hell had it ended up in Crunchtown—in the superheated sodium hydrochlorinedioxide, no less? I’d never so much as seen an onion, except in pictures from prehistory. I’d heard stories about uppercrusts in the Emerald City4 of the Real Friends© of the North paying insane sums of money for a single plate of grown lettuce, unwashed, but I had trouble credding it, and of course no one I knew had ever been west. Travel visas were too expensive—never mind the cost of bodyguards or weapons and transport past the former state of Colorado.

  And yeah, the backlanders grew their own food, wherever the ground wouldn’t kill a seedling with radioactive flow. But the fields surrounding Crunch 407 were good for nothing but glow-in-the-dark tubers and strange chemical halos. Some people claimed nukefood was magic, that eating a tomato the size of a small tire, or a radiant strawberry with fourteen stems, would make you grow taller or give you a hard-on that would last two days or give you good luck for a year or whatever, but that was all hippie shit, and as far as I knew we didn’t have any radio doctors in the corp.

  Anyway, that’s what brought the whole system to its knees: that wilted onion skin. Real food, it turned out, was very, very bad for RealFood™. Getting inorganic materials like graphite or salt to pass for everything from banana splits to boiled green beans required insane precision.

  And that onion skin, that little purple onion skin made of interlocking carbon-hydrogen bonds, with the air and the sun baked into its very chemical being, acted like a match on a closed container of vaporous dyaphedrynol.

  Which is to say: there was a very large explosion.

  * * *

  I spent the morning half-listening to Oliver recount the latest exploits of his RPG, Clash of the Countries. “So Raj came at me with an army of Friendly Mercenaries—stupid move, I’ve been collecting Bibles for weeks—”

  He broke off as Dan Ridges, my least favorite person in all of Crunch 407, strutted back into position and dropped into his chair, barely giving his replacement time to spin out of the way. Squatbots were basically walking circuit boards, designed to push or crank and winch when they had to, so the line didn’t stop just because someone had the runs.

  “Someone took a shit in the gendered bathroom,” he announced.

  “Gross.” That was Kerry, from position 87. I liked Kerry. Big bushy hair, lots of teeth and eyebrows, a great smile, just the right kind of fat. Possibly, possibly in my league. So far I hadn’t worked up the courage to ask her for permission to touch even her hair or shoulder or hand, though.

  “At the risk of confusing you, Dan,” Oliver said, sucking air through his enormous orange teeth, “bathrooms are designed to accommodate other people’s shitting.”

  Dan’s visor was newer than anyone else’s: half the width, practically translucent, so we got treated to every one of his ugly expressions. He wasn’t even really a crumb, as he was fond of reminding us approximately every .5 seconds. His father was actually one of the uppercrusts in Corporate Relations, and they lived in Uphill in a real house with multiple bathrooms—more bathrooms, he claimed, than there were people in their family, which I wasn’t sure whether to believe or not.

  “Not in a toilet, dipshit. On the floor. A big pile of it.”

  “Again, gross,” Kerry said.

  Down below on the factory floor yet another vat of bubbling chlorinated polyethylburitane slid into place on its belt. Green light. Crank.

  “Don’t shoot the server,” Dan said. “I wasn’t the one who dropped the load.”

  Not for the first time, I imagined chucking Dan through the protective plastic, lobbing him straight off the deck, and watching him turn somersaults toward the concrete floor. Once, when I was twelve, Dan got me to snort a handful of CrunchPepperCorn™ by telling me it was dymo, the first of only two times in my life I was ever tempted to try it.

  “Have you ever thought of swapping out your mouth for a used tissue?” I asked him. “They can do that now.”

  “I once heard of a girl who swapped her eyes for a pair of radium diamonds,” Oliver said. “She looked ultra—until the radiation melted her, at least.”

  Dan ignored this. “The funny thing is,” Dan went on, as if we’d asked, “it didn’t even look like human shit.…”

  I slammed a fist on my bathroom call button and a squatbot whirred down the line to take my place. I only got three breaks a workday, fifteen minutes total, but I needed to get away from Dan and the storm pressure of his sub IQ.

  Afterward I could never remember the right order of things, if I saw him and then the alarm went or the alarm went and then I saw him. Either way, I was on my gams when the security alarms started shrieking and I looked out through the plate glass to see Billy Lou Ropes—the dimehead fugitive, ex-citizen of the Federal Corporation of Crunch Snacks and Pharmaceuticals© and one of my all-time favorite people—standing on a catwalk thirty feet above the factory floor, with his arms straitjacketed around one very ugly goat.

  INTERLUDE

  DYMOPHOSPHYLASE; OR, BILLY LOU’S LAMENT

  There were lots of ways to get fired from the Federal Corporation. Outside of the Sovereign Nation of Texas and the Lowland Penal Colony, the Federal Corp had the continent’s heftiest rate of lockups. By the time we graduated from standard, we were expected to know and memorize the entire Constitution of The Employee Handbook of Better Business Practices—all 437 pages of it, including the two hundred pages dedicated to potential infractions.

  Article XVIII, Section 3, for example, stated that all citizens of the colony must be properly attired at all times:

  i. company-issued uniforms,

  ii. company-issued SmartBand PLUS current photo ID and security-level clearance, properly displayed;

  iii. A smile!

  Flip-flops were illegal in every Crunchtown subsidiary across the globe.1 So was unwashed hair, spaghetti straps, and shirts of sheer or semisheer material—disappointing for a horny sprocket like yours truly. It was illegal to wear studs besides the company-issued uniforms,2 just like it was illegal to be without a SmartBand, and a smile.

  Lateness or back talk could get you a few nights in the slammer, and so could cusstalk, and “explicitly violent or sexual content.” When I was a kid this gonzo Andy Duggar was written up and hauled in for an overnight just for saying that the weather sucked, and my mom knew a he-she in the freight office got six months in local after an eighty-four-pound shipment of VitaFizz™ tumbled from its stack and landed on their thigh, crushing their femur bone, and they cursed a geyser to heaven.

  But Billy Lou Ropes didn’t get fired for having unwashed hair, or because he slipped out without a company ID, or because he said “fuckbucket and all to hell” and one of the HR rats happened to nab him.

  He got fired for stealing an eight-ounce supply of liquid dymophosphylase from the Pharmaceutical Division.

  He wasn’t the first shiver junkie to try to synthesize the drug from stolen supply, and he wouldn’t be the last. Dymophosphylase was the active ingredient in ten of the company’s most popular pharma products, and could be extracted in trace quantities from thousands of others:3 Dymase PainKillers™ and DimeSmile Teeth Brightening Salve™ and Dime-A-Day Vitamins™ were always going missing f
rom the company store, swiped by desperate addicts.

  At night, it sometimes seemed that half of Crunchtown was high or coming down. Boiling shiver had a reek that would make a user salivate and everyone else begin to choke, and even though the addicts lumped together in the burned-out hollows of old parking garages, and the urine-soaked darkness of highway underpasses, the stink was practically baked into the walls.

  But the noise was the worst part. My ma and I stuffed towels under the door and blacked out the windows with bolts of hard canvas we scavenged from the trash pits, but it did nothing to stop the nightly symphony: a terrible joy that screamed through the caverns of the streets when the first hits were smoked, snorted, or injected, and then, later, a howling so loud it rattled our windowpanes and sent fine sifts of plaster down from our ceiling; all those addicts sobbing over lost homes, lost loves, and things they didn’t even know they’d lost.

  Not Billy Lou, though. Billy Lou was different.

  Billy Lou was never angry. He never spoke too fast or in a way that didn’t make sense. He was always polite, even when he was high, which was most of the time. I remember how he always called me Mr. Truckee. He called my mom ma’am, too, and said please and thank you and you’re welcome.

  He never got weepy either—the worst symptom of dimeheads, the way they rattled the city every night with their wailing, a kind of crying I’ll never shake the sound of. As if they were dying.

  As if you were.

  He always smelled like TomatoJuz™, since he saved all of his Crunchbucks for the synthetic forms of dymo, and TomatoJuz™ was the cheapest foodstuff you could buy at the company store. Like a lot of serious addicts, he’d had his nails removed—otherwise, dimeheads would scratch themselves bloody, take the skin off their cheeks and foreheads, and have to go up before the Crunch Supreme Court Board for review. Whoever did the operation did it nicely, though. No rough edges, no stumps and bits left behind. His fingers were like blind, defenseless animals, crawling across the table, fiddling with his visor, adjusting his shirt.