Showdown in the Economy of Good and Evil Page 21

  “What’s that, boss?” Valence asked, closer now. “Couldn’t much hear you through that fuckin’, uh, pillow.”

  Evan let loose a scream of frustration into the pillow before rolling over and putting on a calmer face. Valence was hovering over him with the Gatorade. He took it, opened it, and slammed down half of it in three successive gulps.

  “Just let me know if you hear anything about the drones, okay?” he said. “For now, I just need an evening to myself. Been a long day.”

  “Got it,” Valence said, but he made no move to leave.

  Evan glared at him. He ignored it, instead looking around for something.

  “You want me to put a fuckin’ movie on?”

  “No thank you, Val. If you could please just—”

  “Always helps clear my head. Watching a movie. Aw! Maybe you could watch The Matrix. That’s the one I’m screening this week, and it’d be great to get some notes for you to help color my post-show comments.”

  “Val?”

  “Yeah, boss?”

  “Get out.”

  Finally, he moseyed off, head held high.

  Alone at last, Evan returned to his brooding. Forget the damn drones. If he was being genuinely honest with himself, what he wanted most was to speak to Nora—to finally find out how she felt about him blurting out how he loved her. But she’d spent most of the week getting the cooks in line about the regime change to Donatella’s leadership, and then when she wasn’t in the kitchen, she was tending to her father, who had taken a fall in the fields due to exhaustion the morning after the drones.

  That alone was stressful enough. Dan Pastor never fell. He wasn’t the falling type. Evan had seen him tend to his chores even while battling the flu. For him to take one sick day—let alone several in succession—was a plenty worrying thought. And it had consumed nearly all of Nora’s attention. She spent every free moment in the farmhouse with him. They kept the place locked up like a fortress. No one was allowed in to see Dan and wish him well.

  Evan discovered this fact firsthand when he’d tried to check in on Dan before his day of meetings began. Nora had come to the door and somewhat impolitely told him that she would meet up with him later, but right now, Dad just needed his rest.

  There had been no denying her dismissiveness.

  While Evan’s mind was still wrestling with what this dismissiveness meant, a vanload of new residents had arrived. They hadn’t been scheduled to show up for another three days, but Natalia had apparently gotten straight to work on making the whole process more efficient. So then Evan had to deal with scaring up more wristwatches and cots and spaces for them all.

  This had made him an hour late for his meeting with David and Laz, a meeting he spent bickering with them about how the thresher still wasn’t working and now the combine was on the fritz, and what the hell were they supposed to do without more workers? Evan had tried to explain that any major expense on machinery—particularly on machines that might automate or eliminate jobs—would require careful thinking on how to adjust the direct deposit rates.

  “Automation and efficiency gains lead to workers having more available working time,” Evan had tried to explain. “So I’ll need to figure out what level to increase the deposit. That way, this group of people with more time will also have more money to contribute to each other.”

  They had seemed to be understanding this, but then Justin had wandered in unexpectedly, saying they needed more machines if they hoped to keep up with all this growth. This put Laz, who had lost his job to a robot prior to becoming homeless, into a frenzy. No resolution came.

  Justin had joined him in the next meeting, this one with Jao and Hap, about the progress on the Farm’s various construction projects.

  “Munanire wants a house with a private bathroom,” Hap revealed.

  “He make lots of money,” Jao agreed. “Paying top dollar.”

  As proud as it had made Evan to think about how quickly Muna was advancing his lifestyle, this news also worried him. He knew about Muna’s history of overspending and hoped that he hadn’t caught the credit bug again. “Do you have the workers to pick up another project?”

  “David wants a house too,” Justin chimed in.

  “But David doesn’t make nearly enough money yet to—”

  “I told him I’d give him a loan.”

  Before Evan could object, Justin, Jao, and Hap had started plotting the details for David’s house. They were so intent on it that he could hardly get a word in edgewise.

  “That’s going to have to be considered third-tier housing,” he tried to tell them. “That’s a new level that we need to plan for and standardize for pricing. And if he’s doing this on credit . . .”

  They weren’t listening to him.

  As Evan flopped onto his back and stared up at the cracks in the ceiling, he lamented about how he had managed to go an entire day without anyone listening to him. The residents? He was used to them ignoring him. But Justin was a different story. He had known his benefactor for nearly two years now. It was entirely unlike him to behave the way he’d been behaving. Unilateral decisions, flightiness in conversation, casually suggesting more automation, offering to give direct loans to residents—none of it added up.

  The final meeting of the day had been with Bob-O, whose plumbing and personal hygiene business could not have been experiencing more of a boom. All these new residents certainly had an impact on his bottom line.

  “Only problem is we’ve got lines for the showers and toilets,” he’d said.

  “Maybe you could sell shower times on an appointment basis,” Evan had suggested.

  “Already doing that. Used to be just the lines for the showers at night and the toilets in the morning. Now the lines are pretty much constant. I mean, don’t get me wrong; I like the demand. But I’ve only got the four employees, and it’s getting tougher for us to keep up with the sanitation rotations. Hard to clean a toilet or shower when there’s always someone in it.”

  “Understood. But what are you suggesting?”

  He’d shrugged. “Build more showers and bathrooms.”

  Evan had tried to remind himself that all of this was a good thing. Construction projects piling up left and right was the surest sign of a booming economy. But for the first time since he’d taken up this challenge, he sensed himself becoming overwhelmed by it. How in the hell could they possibly keep up?

  All of that paled in comparison to the final blowup of the day—the one that had sent Evan scurrying to his room with a massive headache and a very real need to cry.

  The argument that had sprung up in the center of the Circus had bordered on violence. Evan had been talking to Meryl about the new curriculum he wanted to implement. At least, that was what he was trying to do, but Meryl seemed far more interested in the details of what he had talked about with Bob-O.

  “Did he mention me?”

  “I don’t—”

  “Did he tell you about all his business?”

  “Yes, but I’d just like to talk about—”

  “I just can’t get over how ingenious that whole business of his is. And he still lives in the barracks. His savings must be through the roof!”

  Evan had reached his wits’ end even before those half dozen residents arrived to interrupt the conversation.

  “There’s a fight!” came the general and collective cry.

  With what little capacity for conflict he had remaining, Evan followed the crowd into the Circus, where he found Prickly being held back by three other residents. He was screaming about a thief, and no one could seem to calm him down.

  “What’s going on, Sanjeev?” Evan had asked, trying to deliver calm with a voice that was decidedly ragged.

  “That little prick knocked me down,” he hollered.

  Since Prickly appeared to be fighting no one in particular, Evan asked the obvious question. “Which little prick?”

  “I don’t know his name. He ran off.”

  Prickly di
dn’t seem to have the head for specifics at the moment, so Evan asked the others to explain. As they all talked over each other, he managed to piece together that someone—possibly a resident and possibly a guest from Savannah—had stolen two jars of Prickly’s honey while Prickly had his back turned. Aria Foles had seen all this and started screaming, only to spook the resident or guest into running. In the process, he’d rammed into Prickly, horse-blinded as the latter man was by his veil, and knocked him to the ground.

  Before anyone—Aria included, who somehow managed to see the thief in action but couldn’t place his face—could sort out the identity of the thief, Prickly was up swinging, trying to fight an opponent who’d already fled. Even as Evan tried talking him back to calm, he was still trying to fight that fight, preposterous as it was. Prickly, it turned out, possessed considerable strength and singularity of mind. He assuredly did not care for theft, so much so that it took three residents rotating in and out to keep each other fresh, all to prevent him from performing a full-fledged bull-in-a-china-shop routine on the whole Circus.

  “What’re we gonna do about this, Evan?” Prickly asked through gritted teeth.

  That was when it had occurred to Evan that Prickly was the sort of man who wouldn’t calm down until presented with a solution. So, done with this day as he was, Evan pulled an idea straight from his ass.

  “We’ll establish a police force,” he heard himself saying.

  Moments after he had spoken the syllables for the word “police,” Oscar Farsi was at his side, looking hopeful.

  “Maybe more like a security team,” Evan said. “Nothing huge. Just to keep the peace at the Circus when the public is visiting.”

  This would of course mean more work, which was a good thing for the residents, as new jobs would become available, but it was also a bad thing for Evan, who’d had the kind of day that made him hate everything about the idea of more work. Maybe it was that exasperation that caused him to name the decidedly overzealous Oscar head of security without even thinking it through.

  Oscar had puffed out his chest as if expecting Evan to pin a badge on him. The little man had never looked quite so proud.

  Anyway, that was all over. Now Evan could be alone in his room with his Gatorade and the silence. He wished Nora could be here. He wished he could start the whole day over and do everything differently. He wished he could just make himself cry.

  There was a knock on the door. With an exasperated sigh, he picked up his head. Carl had come, and his expression did not promise good news.

  “We gotta corn borer problem, boss.”

  Evan had no idea what a corn borer was, but he could guess. His answer to Carl came monosyllabically, in the form of half a groan and half a cry. After a day like this, he couldn’t help feeling like a biblical patsy. Job perhaps. Or one of the tribes God punished with plagues of locusts and the deaths of their firstborn sons.

  Maybe Elliot had been right. Maybe they never should’ve tampered with God’s economy.

  Chapter 18 The Matrix

  If smartphone technology was such a tremendous breakthrough for humanity, how come the economy collapsed in an unprecedented way shortly after the iPhone’s arrival on the market? The answer is that technology does not mix well with an economy that is based on human work.

  —Justin Wolfe

  The line stretched all the way from the classroom building to the machine shed. Bob O. Shaler had never seen such a long line at the Farm, and he’d been dealing with lines almost exclusively since Elliot’s residents started turning up in droves. He had come to think of lines like these as both a blessing and a curse. On the one hand, they meant paying customers eager for your product. On the other, nothing irritated people quite like having to queue up and wait.

  Mostly, he was just proud of his friend Valence. The business model had seemed so far-fetched at first, but there was no denying that the movie theater was raking in Farm Bucks hand over fist. More and more of the faces in these lines were unfamiliar each week, too, which meant that Val had started drawing considerable crowds from Savannah.

  Bob-O dealt exclusively in Farm Bucks, given that all his paying customers were residents in need of some shower time or hygiene products, but he had heard from the other entrepreneurs about what it meant when US dollars started flowing in. It would only be a matter of time before Valence would have enough money to open his own proper movie house in the city. And to think of it . . . Val had started as a drug-addicted homeless man. Now he was on the verge of owning his own legitimate, thriving business in the real world—the same real world that had once kicked him to the curb.

  Bob-O was proud of his friend Valence.

  “What I can’t understand is why everyone’s so anxious to see this movie,” Meryl said, speaking for the first time since they’d gotten into this line. She was standing beside Bob-O, her shoulders all tense. She’d looked tense since the moment they first said hello, in fact. That was another thing whose goodness or badness Bob-O couldn’t decide. Was she tense because of her nerves about their first official date? Or was she tense because she didn’t like anything he’d had to say so far? Or was it maybe that he’d forgotten to wear a hat, as he had intended, and she was put off by his bald spot? “I mean, who hasn’t seen The Matrix?”

  “It’s not about whether you’ve seen the movie,” Mr. Wolfe said. He was standing in line ahead of them, with Evan at his side. Bob-O still couldn’t believe that the two men who ran this place had to wait in line and pay to get into Valence’s movie just like everyone else. “It’s about coming together and sharing something as a community.”

  “Muna was saying something like that the other day,” Evan said. “Sounds like he’s cultivated a pretty nice group of regulars at Dollar Bread every morning.”

  “There you go, Muna,” Mr. Wolfe said rhetorically. “Bringing people together over a shared love of something real.”

  “The Addicts have been having our meetings at the bakery in the afternoons too,” Bob-O cut in. He wished he hadn’t said it, though, because he’d started this date with the intention of drawing as little of Meryl’s attention as possible to his condition as a recovering alcoholic. One glance at her said that it had done nothing to sway her tension one way or the other, however.

  “It’s good to have places to commune with each other,” Meryl said. Bob-O liked the way she’d said it. She was so damn smart. Pretty too. She looked very pretty in her pantsuit. Bob-O made a point to himself that he would have to compliment her on it as soon as possible. How had he failed to do that when he first saw her? God, he was screwing up this date.

  But really, who could blame him? He hadn’t had a legitimate date since his wife died. That was how many years ago now? Twenty? No, it couldn’t be . . . But it was.

  He was drifting into himself. Looking too pensive and removed. He could feel Meryl’s tension growing, her peripheral vision on him, waiting. He had to say something.

  “I suppose Val’s really onto something here,” he said. “Better to watch a movie next to someone you love than to plug into your phone all the time.” He winced, fearing that he had just said something so obvious that it would make him look stupid. Now he had Meryl’s full gaze on him, no longer in the peripheral. Self-consciously, he set a hand on his bald spot. He winced.

  “You know, Bob,” Evan said, “that’s a really profound point.”

  Bob’s heart fluttered. Meryl, Evan, and Mr. Wolfe were all looking at him, impressed. His date finally appeared to ease into a relaxed pose, and as she did so, her arm brushed against him. Bob blushed.

  “Well, you know me. The world’s most profound janitor.”

  The others chuckled in a way that filled Bob with warmth and contentment.

  “It’s why I’m glad that people haven’t gotten too into smartphones around here,” Evan said.

  “Probably because our entrepreneurs have given them too much to do so they don’t need the stimulation,” Mr. Wolfe suggested.

  Evan s
ucked a breath through his teeth, looking thoughtful. “It really is mostly about that sense of community, though. And abundance, for that matter.”

  “Abundance? How so?” Meryl asked.

  “You think about where the real world is headed, right?” Evan said, running a hand through his enviably thick hair. “Everything is getting more expensive all the time. People are inundated by all these things they supposedly need to be happy, and all these things cost money. But you know what doesn’t cost too much money—at least after you’ve paid the up-front cost and figured out how to cover the monthly bills? The entertainment on your smartphone.”

  “Interesting,” Mr. Wolfe said. “You’re saying that higher cost of living is part of why people are getting so addicted to their phones?”

  “It’s certainly not helping things.”

  “Technology is making it easier for people to live apart,” Meryl said.

  “But here on the Farm,” Bob chimed in, “we’re making it easier for people to live together.”

  Mr. Wolfe turned back to them and smiled. Then, he elbowed Evan. “I do believe we’ve created an economy for good after all, buddy.”

  “It is great that this environment encourages everyone to come together to watch a movie instead of watching it on their own device,” Evan said hesitantly. “But I have to say, jury’s still out on whether this economy is going . . . well . . . good.”

  Bob-O had a sense of what Evan meant, though he could never know the full spectrum of the troubles.

  “I hope it’s going good,” Justin said with a tug at the shoulder of his sport coat. “Or well, as it were. Because I’m doing an interview with Fox News tomorrow.”

  Evan visibly deflated. No one spoke. Meryl returned to her tension, only this time, it was redoubled. Justin stared ahead, either oblivious or just hoping everyone would leave it alone.

  “Fox News?” Bob-O said. “Don’t they kind of . . . hate the Farm?”