Corporate hierarchies are strict. No C-Class gets up to a B-Class position without first doing the climb all the way up through C. The average is something like twenty-five promotions from bottom to top. If you start at D, it’s even worse. Even more promotions are needed. Pretty much every corpo I’ve ever looked at forbids more than one promotion a year, too.
That’s on purpose, you see. It’s to keep those job openings available for the kids of the A-Classers. Everybody’s got to start somewhere, and in Badgerborough, you start one rank below your lowest-ranked parent. So the whole system is really nothing more than institutionalized nepotism.
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March 21, 2064
I glanced away from my mom to the living room. There were still no sounds coming from there. Did that mean I’d successfully banished Steve back to the mirror, or just that he was smart enough to keep his mouth shut while Mom was here? I took a few steps to the empty door frame separating the rooms and looked in.
There was no one standing there, but there was a wrapper sitting in the corner near Mom’s treadmill. That was probably a good sign, not for our tests, since it meant Steve couldn’t in fact take anything from Earth back to wherever he’d come from, but that he was gone.
“Cherish, you’re acting weird. Come back here and talk to me,” Mom said from the kitchen.
“What? Oh, sorry. I just… had a lot on my mind. Thinking about the future, you know? What I want to do, how I’m going to get there.”
“That’s fantastic! Getting started early is key. It’ll give you time to research your ladder, figure out what skills you need to start working on, and hit the ground running. I’d bet you could make it up to C-Class yourself in just twenty years. You might even make it to B before you die. There’s a lot of rejuvenation and life-extension therapy out there now. Wouldn’t that just be something?”
That was technically true, but it was so expensive that no one who wasn’t making B-Class salaries could afford it, and it took forty-five years of climbing the corpo ladder at absolute minimum to make it from D to B. That was a number I knew by heart. Mom had a whole idealized plan, and every year she didn’t manage to snag her next promotion as soon as the rules allowed sent her spiraling into a depressive fit for weeks before she bounced back. She was always twice as determined to nail that promo immediately.
She had the whole thing mapped out, every step of the way, every promotion broken down into what she needed to learn and whose ass she needed to kiss. The Plan was updated religiously; it had to be in order to take into account promotions other people received in case she needed to switch to a new cheek.
Six months ago, she’d started working on one for me, too. I still had the files she’d forwarded to me stored in my cloud even though it was indecipherable gibberish to me. There were dozens upon dozens of names and titles for various positions that I expected were at least half out of date, lists of classes to take, certifications to obtain, and seminars to sign up for.
I kept trying to pretend I was interested. It made Mom happy, and since work was her life, it was about the only thing left to bond over.
And I got it. Everybody worked for the corpos in one way or another. The only exception was the E-Class, and life wasn’t easy for them. Those were the ones who had to worry about their next meal, or finding shelter, or getting stabbed when someone tried to mug them for their shoes.
Was the alternative any better? Working seventy hours a week, barely making enough to keep the lights on? No vacations? No long weekends. Sometimes not even a short one. All that to struggle my entire life, to twenty years of hell just to make it to the bottom of C-Class, to maybe have a few good years of making decent money and a shot at hitting the bottom ranks of B before I died.
None of it mattered to me anymore. I was a mask now. That would automatically boost me up to at least lower B-Class salary if I signed on with a corpo, or I’d be left to make my own money as a rogue if I refused their recruitment. In that case, corpo structure wouldn’t mean anything anyway.
Mom broke me out of my thoughts when she moved across the kitchen. Absently, she pushed the chair Steve had been sitting in back under the table, and my eyes widened in panic when I remembered his cannon… thing he’d left sitting there as part of the unsummoning test.
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I glanced down at the floor and let out an audible sigh of relief. It was gone, presumably taken back to wherever Steve went when he was back on the other side of the mirror. Mom frowned at me, then craned her neck to look down at the floor under the table. “Are you sure you’re alright?”
“Yeah, Mom, just… stress, I guess.”
“Mmm. Get used to that, sweetie. There’s always more work to do than there is time to do it, no matter how inventive you get. Learning to prioritize is an important life skill.” Mom crossed the room and put her hands on my shoulders. “I love you, Cherish. But you’ve only got two years left to figure out what you’re going to do. Once you finish high school, the clock is ticking. If you spend too much time dithering around, you’ll never make it to C-Class, and if you don’t make it to C, your kids won’t even get to start as D. You don’t want to send them into the world as E-Classers when they finish school. People don’t escape that.”
“I know, Mom.”
Mom pulled me into a hug, and said, “I know that you’ll accomplish great things. You’re too much like your father to coast on minimum effort. You just need to figure out what direction you’re going in. And try not to forget your dear old mother when you’re racing up to the stars, okay?”
I hiccuped out a tiny laugh. “No pressure, huh?”
“Oh, there’s pressure. Get used to that too. That’s part of being an adult. You’ll get there soon enough.” Mom stepped back and looked at me. “I’m going to go get a shower, then we’ll sit down and discuss your future.”
Oh no. That would take up the rest of the night, and she might want to continue that conversation into the next day. “I have some more homework to do,” I said, desperately grabbing at any excuse.
“Mmhmm.” Uh oh. Mom tone. “Well, it’s important to take your school work seriously too, but we’ll talk tomorrow or Sunday then.”
She paused at the threshold between the kitchen and living room and said, “Cherish.”
“Yeah, Mom?”
“Try to finish a cup of tea before you make another one, and it’s not going to kill you to reuse the same cup.”
I followed her gaze to the table, where two partially-consumed cups sat there. “Crap. Sorry. I’ll get this cleaned up.”
“I’d better not find any other cups up in your room, young lady,” Mom’s voice came from the living room as she headed for the shower.
“You won’t!” I said.
Not as long as she didn’t look in there in the next few minutes, at least.
* * *
Since I really did have homework to do, and since SchoolOS had finally accepted my history paper, I cleaned up real quick and got to work. To start, I sent a quick email to Mr. Hadley letting him know I’d finally gotten the system to accept my third attempt at the paper and forwarded him the receipt. I could only hope that it would be there for him to grade. I’d sent him a copy of it directly prior to submitting it again, just so that one way or another, he’d at least have proof I did it, but it had to officially be inside SchoolOS in order for him to submit a grade.
And then I pretty much immediately felt bad about emailing him at eight in the evening on a Friday when he responded back within minutes. I’d meant for it to be a message he saw Monday morning, not to drag him back to work when his weekend was just getting started. I sent him another email apologizing for reaching out to him so late, then cringed as soon as I realized I’d just made even more work for him.
The next hour dragged on as I caught up on my other classes, but my heart wasn’t in it. I kept going back to the memo I’d taken with all the questions Steve had posed. We’d answered some of them, but a lot were still open. I crossed off ‘Can Steve take things with him when he goes back?’ and wrote NO next to it, then did the same with ‘Can Steve leave his stuff behind?’ ‘Can I unsummon Steve at will?’ got a YES.
Three questions answered, another ten or so to work on. Most of this seemed pretty easy to test. I just needed the time and privacy to do it. I’d have the whole weekend to work on it, minus the few hours Mom was home in the evening, and I was determined to answer every single one of them before Monday rolled around.
Something Mom said stuck with me though. I needed to figure out what direction I was going in. Did I want to be a corpo mask? Not really. I was sure life was very different for them than it was for my mother, but they weren’t heroes. They were a military force, always on call for when whatever corpo that owned them needed them to make some trouble go away.
Independents were a whole different set of problems. Empowered without corporate sponsorship were rogues and vigilantes. Could I do that life, have a secret identity and live off the grid? There wasn’t really much choice otherwise. There were just too many cameras and too many digital fingerprints all over everything to be an unregistered Empowered who actually used her power.
Not using them was an option, but not one I wanted to consider. I knew I wanted to use my power, and that I didn’t want to do it under corpo control, but I also didn’t want to live like an E-Classer. There had to be some middle ground in there somewhere, if only I could find it.
I added a new question to the bottom of the list. What direction am I going in?
***