Total pages in book: 86
Estimated words: 81280 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 406(@200wpm)___ 325(@250wpm)___ 271(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 81280 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 406(@200wpm)___ 325(@250wpm)___ 271(@300wpm)
In that regard, it’s a good night at the club. The music is pounding, the lights are dim, and people are desperate to feel… something. Anything. It’d be easy to write the patrons here off as horny sex goblins who have to pay for it, but these days, there’s nothing we don’t have to pay for anymore. Sex is a commodity. The air we breathe is too. It’s accepted that nobody is entitled to anything. Even dying is taxed to the hilt.
A young man with blue half-shaved hair approaches me through the smoke and lasers. His pupils aren’t as dilated as he’d like them to be. He gives me a swift upward nod, a silent question delivered in an environment where nobody can hear themselves think. We lock eyes. Deeee deee diddilee dee… A light tone plays across my cranium and down my spine.
A word appears behind my eyes.
“Happy?”
I nod.
That’s all he needs to know. We touch chips by pressing the inside of our wrists together. A brief swipe is all it takes. I have code running to extract a certain amount from his account. A vibration behind my left ear indicates a successful transaction. We’ve all got the chips in us. They’re the only way to do business. Physical currency is outlawed, and bartering is basis for being defenestrated. They’ll throw you right off the side of the island through a specially prepared window if they catch you swapping goods and services. That’s why, even though what I’m doing is technically illegal, I do it by legal means.
I slip a vial out of my bandolier and slide it into his hand. He pops the cap, throws his head back, and the pill rolls down the smooth interior and into his throat. I watch as it hits his system almost instantly, a broad grin spreading across his face.
Dopamine, serotonin, oxytocin are all being dumped into his synapses. He feels like he’s at the birth of his first child, meeting the love of his life, orgasming, getting a promotion, and winning a gold medal all at the same fucking time. Nothing that ever happens in reality will match up to the way he feels right now. He’s made living obsolete in one swallow. For the next three hours, he’s going to feel as good as anybody ever could. And after? Well. There are other pills for that.
I keep moving through the crowd, waiting for the next eye contact or chip tingle to tell me I’m about to make another sale. I close my eyes and check my subscriptions. That sale I just made went toward my clean air count, which is good. I like to keep that at least thirty days in advance. If you run out of clean air subscription, they move you down to the dirtier parts of the city. They can’t stop you breathing outright, but they can make it very unpleasant to do so.
What it really comes down to is private corporate terms of service.
Eclipse bar is owned by Zeal, one of the big four corporate entities. The dancing girls all have cute little Z tats at the back of their heads, up on their hairlines. There’s Z-themed stuff everywhere. Even the toilets are shaped like big pink Z’s.
Zeal is the most fun of the corporates, but that doesn’t mean they don’t have any terms of service. One of the terms is not to perform commerce on their properties. If there is money to be made, they want to be the ones making it. Technically, this is very against their ToS.
But there’s sort of a loophole. They can’t sell what I’m selling, because all mind-altering substances were banned five years ago in one of the many mutual contracts between the corporates. Laws are complex. There are corporate terms of service, and then there are bigger laws, the older kind. Laws everyone is supposed to follow no matter who owns what. Private citizens can technically do what they want on their own land. It’s just that nowhere is anybody’s land anymore.
So anyway, I can pay a percentage of my income to them, and they’ll look the other way. That’s what I do. I break the law, they make money from it, we’re all happy, or at least a functional kind of miserable.
A big guy bounces into me. I have to dodge out of the way. He’s drunk. I think.
“You’re hot,” he says, his breath laced with alcohol. He reaches for my hand. I yank it away. Unauthorized chip hacking is rife, so I have to be careful. I’m not the only criminal in the place.
Navigating this world is not easy. There are real laws and then there are fake laws, and there’s subterfuge and espionage and split loyalties, and subscription citizenships and… it’s so complicated. I’m not sure that I really understand all of it yet, even after three years.