Zoey crossed her arms. She suddenly felt like she was on trial. “We really have gotten rid of the bad stuff, I mean, a lot of it is still prostitution and gambling, but it’s not the kind of thing where we’re ambushing people in an alley and stealing their jewels. I wouldn’t stand for that. Hell, that’s why I stayed, to try to clean up the operation. They were doing some pretty terrible stuff before. And my father, he was a monster. His father was even worse, or that’s what I hear anyway.”
“But you kept all of those same people around? The ones who did all of the bad stuff?”
“They were the only ones who knew how to run everything! And trust me, they all know the rules, they step out of line and they’re gone. I mean, I really am doing my best here. It’s not easy.”
It was clear Shae sensed she’d stepped over a line. It was also clear that Shae fully believed Zoey would have her killed and dumped into the river if she persisted. In the course of the conversation, Shae had edged back toward the doors by a couple of steps.
“Okay, okay,” said Shae. “I believe you. Still, I don’t want your money. I don’t want it to turn into a thing at tax time, or if I could get in trouble for accepting illegal income…”
“First, it’s not illegal. These are legitimate businesses with thousands and thousands of people on the payroll all around the world, it’s all getting filed with the IRS, it’s all aboveboard. Second, and this is the important part, we’re not doing this as charity. If you stay in the city, you’re going to bump into that guy, Tilley, at some point and who knows what he’s going to do. Plus all the weirdos who were cheering him on out there, maybe they wouldn’t do anything and maybe they would, but, you know, why tempt fate? We can even provide security staff, just for peace of mind. And these doubts you’re having, they’re the same ones I felt last year! But in the end, hey, the money is going to go to somebody, so why not you?”
“If I take it, can you promise that I’ll never see any of you again? That scary guy isn’t going to show up at my door?”
“You mean Will? Ha, yeah, I’ll make sure you never have to see him. And he’s not that scary once you get to know him.”
“He’s terrifying. And if you don’t see that…” Shae abandoned the sentence, apparently sensing that it was heading toward dangerous territory. “Anyway, can I go? Please?”
“Of course, you’re not a prisoner. Door’s unlocked. One of my people will drive you—”
“No, I’ve called for a ride already. Thank you.”
“Are you sure? We can—”
Shae was already pulling the door open. She slipped through and Zoey heard brisk, nervous footsteps fade into the night.
5
Zoey was still agitated from her conversation with Shae when she crawled into bed a few hours later. As she tossed and turned, she thought about a sign on the wall of her old workplace, posted back by the coats and Department of Labor notices. It was a supposedly motivational quote that said:
[A] flaw in the human character is that everybody wants to build and nobody wants to do maintenance.
KURT VONNEGUT
The manager had hung it there because she was always complaining about the staff not cleaning the espresso machines properly and it was probably the only “inspirational” poster she could find that seemed to be scolding people for not taking care of equipment. But Zoey thought about that quote constantly, especially in light of the turn her life had taken in the last couple of years. When you get sick of what’s in front of you, yeah, fixing it is never as appealing as just walking away and starting fresh. It’s the reason the landfills are choked with stuff that could easily be repaired and it’s the reason action movies are always about killing psychopaths instead of helping them get better mental health meds. It’s the reason Zoey’s supposed soulmate, Caleb, had decided to just go find a girl with better genes and it’s the reason, according to Will, that the city of Tabula Ra$a exists.
Mankind, he had told her, had spent much of the twentieth century dreaming of colonizing the stars (why fix civilization when you can just run away and build a brand-new one?), but by the 1980s or so everyone had soured on the idea. Colonizing Mars, everyone eventually realized, would be unbelievably difficult and the only reward for interplanetary trailblazers would be that they’d have to live on goddamned Mars. By the early 2020s, a new and better idea started to take hold among the ultra-wealthy and powerful: just recolonize the earth instead. Go find some sparsely populated area with a weak or disinterested government and just start building a brand-new city that would function under its own rules. Everything could be fresh, new, and efficient, free of the baggage and stagnation that was weighing down the rest of the modern world. And really, what’s the worst that could happen, other than the new city descending into a dystopian hell of poverty, terror, and bloodshed?
These ludicrously expensive social experiments were often called “charter cities” and soon, every obscenely wealthy and/or powerful clique wanted one to call their own. Scientologists started one in Taiwan, some famous Communists did the same in Northern California, and a bunch of Libertarian tech billionaires were, at the moment, building a floating island nation off the coast of French Polynesia. Tabula Ra$a, by far the most successful and well known of the bunch, had been planted in southwestern Utah by a cabal of flamboyant criminals, apparently over a petty grudge.
Spearheading the project had been Arthur Livingston, Zoey’s biological father, a self-made crime kingpin. And here, “self-made” means he gave himself a fake, WASP-sounding name to conceal his connections to his own wealthy Armenian gangster father. Arthur’s group had been run out of Las Vegas and, mostly out of spite, planted their flag in a spot positioned to siphon away Sin City’s most profitable tourists and whales. The founders played up the new city’s lawlessness, Arthur doing media appearances telling potential residents and developers alike to stay away if they couldn’t handle it. “Tabula Rasa,” he’d say while grinning and stabbing a finger at the camera, “is not for pussies. If you’re not man enough, well, there’s a loser’s train to Vegas that leaves every hour.” People couldn’t move there fast enough.
Zoey stared at the ceiling. She really wanted to roll over, but Stench Machine was sleeping in the hammock formed by the blanket between her legs and disturbing him was, of course, unthinkable.
She didn’t ask Will much about Arthur’s early years; when she did what she got back were anecdotes that everyone at the table thought were hilarious but that Zoey found sickening. She knew that several years after Arthur got Zoey’s mother pregnant, North Korea fell into civil war (the two events are thought to be unrelated). Arthur then used the war as cover for a human trafficking scheme that blatantly violated the laws of the DPRK, the United States, and common human decency. In the process, he encountered Will Blackwater, Budd Billingsley, and Andre Knox, who were doing equally illegal off-the-books PSYOPS work on behalf of the US government. Once back in the States, Arthur recruited all three to ill-defined roles in his organization that would take advantage of their unique training. Arthur had apparently once confided to Will that if one possessed the skill to craft sufficiently elaborate and convincing lies, then no other skills were really necessary.