Zoey’s phone chimed and a holographic text message hovered above it, Wu telling her he’d scanned the box and that it was important, to get back to him right away. Stench Machine, who was terrified of holograms, jumped up onto the toilet and hissed.
Zoey ignored the message.
She instead turned her attention to the monitor above the tub, which was still paused on the video she’d been watching (a haughty heiress in a marble mansion and her filthy, wiry, olive-skinned gardener) and brought up a street stream called Blastphalt, hosted by a quick-talking guy named Charlie Chopra. He was bald, with a two-foot-long beard twisted into elaborate braids. He was walking the streets, talking into his Gadfly, the little bobbing drone recording his face.
“So I know what you’re asking, you’re asking, ‘Charlie Chopra, you golden beacon to mankind, why does a routine stickup make this week’s Worst Ten List? Did you actually have less than ten crimes this week, and try to fudge some boring ones in?’ Oh ye of little faith, grant me your attention for just one minute more and ye shall be rewarded. So this one occurred Monday night. Our degenerate approaches the old dude running the Human Bodega—you’ve seen him walking the sidewalks downtown, got the power assist rig with the display box strapped to the back, full of sodas and churros and, oh yeah, plenty of narcotics. And the degenerate’s got some kinda plasma pulse zapper implanted in his palm and intends to burn Bodega’s old-ass face off and then cut his way into the case. And we all know he’s not there for the sodas.
“So the degenerate goes to fire his zapper and, as so often happens with those implants, it overloads, vaporizing his hand and most of his forearm in a flash, as if the Goddess of Justice herself had summoned a bolt of lightning and declared, ‘Enough! This limb shall sin no more!’ Then the little battery pack implanted next to the guy’s degenerate spine catches fire and those tiny capacitors have got so much juice that once they start burning, they can’t be stopped. My friends, that man’s torso is still burning, five days later. They’ve got him in a special ward at the hospital and if you listen close, you can still hear his screams carried by the night wind. Though I’m sure that through it all, he is still beaming with pride that he has made number two on our Worst Ten List, certain that a mention by the great Charlie Chopra made it all worth it.”
Zoey grabbed a cube of cheese off the tray mounted to the edge of the tub. She accidentally knocked a couple of olives into the water, where they vanished under the suds.
The phone chimed again. Another text message from Wu, about the box. Asking if she’d gotten the first message, then asking if she was still in the tub. Zoey lifted her feet out of the water and studied the black polish on her toes.
“So we’ve made it almost all the way through the list,” said Chopra, “and no mention of the Suits. Will that end our streak? Have things honestly gone quiet on that front for a whole entire week? Not at all, my beautiful, yet hopelessly impatient disciples.”
Ah, there it was, Zoey thought. All of the streamers were obsessed with Zoey’s people, who everyone just called the “Suits,” always sniffing around for any hint of palace intrigue. When she’d been hospitalized due to her breakdown a few months ago, guys like Chopra went wild with the idea that it was some sort of coup, a Will Blackwater PSYOPS operation that would let him seize power once Zoey was found mentally incompetent. Word had leaked somehow that he was the one who’d discovered her unconscious in her bedroom, Zoey having mixed the wrong alcohol with the wrong pills. The rumor mill immediately mutated this into Will having drugged her. Crazy, the things people make up.
Chopra stopped walking in front of a glowing construction site. His gadfly got a low angle, showing off the looming skeleton of a seventy-story skyscraper enshrouded by an enormous hologram. This would eventually be the new headquarters for Zoey’s company. She was supposed to come up with a name for the tower, but she’d been stalling, since sticking her own dumb name on there just seemed weird (the whole idea of having her own building seemed weird, if she was being honest). They had decided it would be cool that if during the months-long construction process, they installed a bunch of hologram projectors that would show off the building as it would look once finished. As for the design, they had held a contest for people to submit their own and Zoey had ignored the professional renderings in favor of one sent in by a six-year-old girl. She demanded the finished building be built exactly like the winner’s wobbly crayon scribble, complete with colors spilling outside the lines and giant squiggly windows seemingly placed at random. The press seemed to think the cartoonish hologram was just a joke and that the final building would be something more professional. Boy, would they be surprised.
Chopra said, “Get a look up behind me, Cammy.”
His camera drone tilted its view upward to reveal that some clever jerk had gotten in and reprogrammed a few of the projectors so that what scrawled across the middle of the building in glowing red was a fairly sloppy Cow Zoey drawing. Under it were the words,
WAIT, THAT’S NOT MILK!
… which Zoey assumed was a reference so many memes deep that it’d take a half hour for someone to explain it to her.
“You talk to any old-timer in this city,” said Chopra, “they’ll tell you, if you opposed Arthur Livingston, if you had an expression on your face that implied you were even idly musing about it, bystanders would get quiet and slowly back away, as if waiting for a giant fist to crash down from the heavens and smite you. And you know what? The streets were peaceful back then. That first decade, the blank slate years, you didn’t dare rob a Livingston business, you didn’t dare intimidate his potential customers. You didn’t hurt his escorts, you didn’t tag his walls. And he owned everything. That, my children, is what kept the peace. Now, with all of the advisors in charge and his daughter, who I’m going to be frank, when they were handing out brains in Heaven she accidentally got back into the tit line, the inmates are running the asylum. It’s the scariest thing in nature, my friends—a power vacuum. What do you get then? Anarchy. Or worse, government.”
Chopra gestured to the glowing graffiti. “That’s why this simple act of holographic vandalism takes the number one spot this month. It’s an act that would have been totally unthinkable a year ago. Those of you who’ve been in town from the start, who saw this place grow up around a single casino in the middle of nowhere, could you imagine somebody striding onto a Livingston property and doing this, ever, in your wildest dreams? No, you could not. Or maybe you could. Okay, I admit I only had nine good ones this month.”
Zoey turned it off.
Here’s what really drove her crazy: if her on-site security had shot that vandal, it would have gotten ten thousand times more coverage than, say, the sliding scale housing project she’d spent months getting built outside the city. Nobody cared about that, or the endless meetings spent fighting with the bus companies to get them to set up routes out there, finally paying through the nose for additional security to calm drivers who were nervous about doing stops in the projects. That housing meant thousands of homeless and semi-homeless people were saved from the incredibly dangerous structures they had been squatting in. It meant heat in the winter, locks on their doors, and working plumbing. But it wasn’t exciting, so nobody cared. People don’t want solutions. They want novelty.