Aiden followed Tancy up to the fifth floor via several flights of stairs, swiping a box of sugared synth-raisins from the rotary cupboard as he passed, and they took the lift up the rest of the way. Aiden had campaigned for years to install an elevator that went all the way to the ground floor, but all his parents had done was put in an auto-waiter to transport new furniture. They had a tradition to uphold in the house, they said. By having to climb the stairs, they maintained the antiquated elements that tied their family to the ones who came before, gave one time to admire all the shelter and wealth they had accumulated over generations, and served as a reminder of the effort it took to protect it.
Aiden understood nothing of what they were talking about. He just didn’t want to walk upwards of ten flights of stairs in his own house.
Once they climbed out onto the upper landing, Tancy hung the backpack on a hook beneath one of the towers jutting up from the roof, making sure the solar panels were fully exposed.
The sun shone brightly, and from their vantage point the ocean spread out before them like a dark quilt dotted here and there with small white crests. Behind them lay the inner metropolis of Neocopy, where the riots continued to rage; the odor of smoke lifting from the burning streets clashed sharply with the saltiness of the fresh sea breeze like roasted salt.
And way out in the distance was a giant golden wall, rising above the sea like an enormous slab of pale gold.
The Bar. From the streets, one could barely see it between the closely packed buildings. Even along the coast, on the beach, or at the many docks encircling Nezarrano Harbor, it was easy to mistake it as a thick yellow haze. But from their vantage point on the mansion’s roof, itself located on one of the many hills of the 9th Borough, the thing was clear as day.
“I’ve seen it go purple one time,” said Tancy, nodding towards the ocean. “Around sunset. It matched the horizon.”
Aiden sat down and leaned back against the tower wall, laying his legs flat on the sloped surface of the roof. ““Pictures or it didn’t happen.”
“No, really. I saw it from the Hakama Tower viewing station.”
“Yeah, right — the most variation I’ve ever seen is orange.”
“I’m not joking! It was purple, like a plum.”
“What’s a plum?”
“A synth-pear, then.”
Aiden closed his eyes as Tancy went silent. An invisible curtain of awkwardness fell between them like a guillotine. When someone began talking about the Bar, one knew they had run out of things talk about; the thing was as constant as the sun and as boring as the weather.
Every schoolchild in Neocopy knew its history. The city mandated that it be reviewed once every grade level. But the Bar’s origins were so mysterious that the lack of knowledge surrounding the purpose of its existence made it boring. The lectures had become repetitive, the lack of new knowledge stagnating the growth of new material, and teachers usually played the same holographic lecture and left the students alone. Aiden usually fell asleep each time the unit was taught, but he had heard the story so many times that it was ingrained within him like a nursery rhyme.
Nearly eighty years ago, three hundred miles off the coast of the western continental shelf, it had appeared out of nowhere: a colossal barrier so tall that it pierced the clouds, giving off an iridescent luster similar to a ripening papaya or a gold ingot, an appearance that lent the structure its name.
This was half a century after the end of the Winter War, in which the devastating aftermath of a widespread nuclear conflict had nearly frozen the earth over. Nations around the world were just beginning to recover, leveraging the remnants of advanced technologies developed in the beginning of the 22nd century to humanity’s rebuilding effort, painstakingly clearing the skies and purifying the fields contaminated by the grout of nuclear fallout.
So when the Bar materialized, it set off a global panic, igniting fears of yet another global disaster. Frantic surveys by sea, air, and space all confirmed that the giant, seemingly indestructible golden wall in fact wrapped around to form a large rectangular prism, and that aside from the fact it covered half of the Atlantic Ocean, it behaved rather unremarkably. The panic soon subsided into curiosity, for the giant golden wall had yet to show signs of doing, well, anything. It neither shrunk nor expanded. It simply stood in the middle of the ocean — an unmoving monolith lighting up the surrounding water with its glow.
World governments quickly established an exclusion zone around the boundaries of the Bar for research and study, and naval trade routes were changed completely to accommodate its presence. Though information about its composition was scarce (for some reason, any tools that touched the luminescent surface reportedly melted away, and advanced imaging proved impossible given the Bar’s size and density) images had surfaced on the Net of the box-like structure under the ocean waves; its solid texture thinned out the deeper it went, dissolving into a thick and similarly impenetrable haze in the watery depths that obscured all vision, reaching all the way to the ocean floor.
Decades passed and there the Bar remained, becoming a global symbol of wonder. In Neocopy and other coastal cities, it became a popular tourist attraction. Lev-gondolas criss-crossed the beaches and cliffs for people to sit and gaze upon its shimmering splendor. But despite its prominence, the government restrictions around its boundaries held firm. Access was heavily guarded.
When Aiden was a freshman, a third-year from Terminary, Peter Miloni, took his father’s speedboat and four of his friends out of the harbor for a secret joyride to the exclusion zone. He was last seen by a wayward delivery drone skipping over the waves thirty miles out. After a million-unit-funded search and several high-level inquires by the Miloni family, the boat was found bobbing past a buoy thirty miles off the coast, empty and unmarked. Miloni and his companions, however, were never seen again.
As Aiden looked upon the Bar now, its surface rippled orange like a gauzy curtain listing in a breeze, and he felt a sense of peace come over him. Its gentle glow was comforting. When he was younger, he would lie in bed and project a live feed of the Bar onto his wall like a night light, imagining himself flying across the ocean by jetpack and stopping at the foot of the enormous wall, watching it rise away for eternity.
“You were right, by the way,” said Tancy suddenly.
“About what?”
“About what you said to Mom and Dad. I’m not a good technical fit. I never was.”
“Well…yeah.”
Tancy raised an eyebrow. “Wow, I’m so taken aback by your sensitivity. It’s overwhelming.”
“I mean, what else can I say? You’re good at other things. Like eating synth-cream. You remember that chocolate-raspberry swirl you got at the dessert place at the Tenth Borough Observatory? It was bigger than your face, I thought you were gonna die.”
Tancy snorted with laughter. “Stop. Just stop.” Then her face got morose again. She picked a piece of gravel off the roof and tossed it down the hill-side.
“I watch you make and train your own helper AI from scratch, and I can’t even put a stupid survival pack together. It’s not like I don’t know where I stand with actually innovating the company’s future.”
As much as he tried to suppress it, guilt wormed its way through Aiden. As annoyingly earnest as Tancy was, she did not have an insufferable ego.
“Okay, I shouldn’t have said that. Being head of the company doesn’t mean you have to be a genius engineer. Operations, experimentation — you can hire people for that. CEOs also need vision, drive —”
“Humility?” said Tancy amusedly, arching an eyebrow.
Aiden snorted. “If you like looking weak, sure. I was going to say ‘showmanship.’ You gotta know your products. What other features does the backpack have besides the omni-generator, by the way?”
“Mobile purifier, fluid recycler, temperature regulator, ziv-canvas — I was thinking of a kind of single-person shelter with ID customization through bio-scanners, so the shelter could conform to a person’s body type.”
If you spot this tale on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.
Aiden set his box of synth-raisins off to the side, brushing off his hands.
A head popped out a neighboring window — a member of the house staff, a bouncy young woman named Yayla.
“Are you done with those synth-raisins, young master?” she asked.
“Uhh…yeah, sure.” Aiden scooted over to the window and handed the box to her for disposal.
“I didn’t mean to eavesdrop,” said Yayla apologetically. “I was just reorganizing the guest room here and saw you eating your snack. Your mother is rather sensitive about leaving garbage unattended.”
“It’s fine,” said Aiden patiently. Yayla bobbed her head and withdrew, and the window slid shut and sealed in place.
He turned back to Tancy. “Those features all sound pretty good. What material are you using for the superconductors in the omni-generator and bio-scanners?”
“One of Dad’s friends got me a sample of high-pressurized metallic hydrogen, but I’m not sure how to implement it.”
“You might want to consider a more stable, doped agent. I heard Hakama Labs is developing a new line of cuprate nanomaterials. Maybe you could run your design by them and ask for, you know, ‘recommendations’.”
“Just because you do that exaggerated winking thing doesn’t mean you’re funny. I don’t want to mooch off Mom or Dad’s business friends for any more advanced stuff. It feels like cheating.”
“Hey, better to be malleable in your thinking than stubbornly wrong — just like with your code. Your initial approach to problems don’t always work.”
“I’ll figure it out.”
“Well, you’ve got the basics of programming down,” said Aiden sarcastically. “Now you just have to learn more about robotics, fluid dynamics, materials science…”
“You make it sound like I’m bad at everything.”
Aiden shrugged. “You’re bad at everything until you learn about everything.”
“What, like you?”
“Maybe.”
Tancy rolled her eyes. “I’m gonna ask Miriam for some food. You want anything?”
“I’m not hungry right now.”
As Aiden watched her brush dirt off her shorts, a thought struck him.
“Here’s one thing that trips me up,” he said. “When that hobo broke into your school, how did the admin not detect the opening of a side entrance in the first place?”
A mischievous spark lit up in Tancy’s eyes. “The principal said it was a malfunction in the security software. The cameras and infrared sensors fritzed out for like five minutes.”
“Convenient malfunction. How did they not catch you?”
“Maybe I’m a little better at making code malleable than you think,” said Tancy airily, and she skipped the rest of the way to the elevator.
While he waited for her to return, Aiden closed his eyes. The acrid scent of smoke from the Fourth/Fifth Borough riots had blown away in another direction, and the softness of the sunset made him drowsy. Before he knew it, he fell asleep.
--
When he awoke, it was dark and the city skyline was blazing with lights of red, blue, and purple.
Tancy was seated cross-legged farther down, near the eaves.
She’d laid a blanket on a section of the roof overlooking the garden. It was a vast oasis of greenery. Globe lights suspended in mid-air lit the cool, quiet space in a cozy glow: trees taller than light posts and shaped in tufted plumes curved over beds of blue, pink, purple, and maroon flowers. Shorter saplings with brittle, green-and-brown leaves shaded a pathway of stepping stones running along a burbling pond.
When he got close, she indicated the bowls of Sichuan tofu, garlic-and-synth beef-stuffed dumplings, and oxtail stew on the blanket, “Here’s what Miriam made for dinner. She also ordered some synth-duck feet from Yang Chow’s for you, even though I told her you didn’t ask for it.”
Aiden accepted the steaming box of meat from her and inhaled gratefully. Miriam was the family’s in-house chef, and she knew Aiden always had a special place in his heart for that particular Chinese restaurant. He remembered when the family used to order course after course on Sunday nights when it wasn’t too crowded, remembered laughing in excitement as the waiters brought the food over on platters and whirled them over polished serving oval, which levitated over the table as it spun.
Tancy pointed at the garden below, naming each plant as she went along. “Magnolia tree, cypress tree, Asiatic Lily Mapira…”
“Look, a brown stick,” said Aiden, gesturing to a wayward branch lying next to the ornamental pool. “Didn’t need the garden registry for that.”
“Ha-ha,” said Tancy dryly. “I only read the list when it gets updated. Mom makes new requests to the plant geneticist every month or so. Don’t know why. It’s not like she’s ever really here to see them.”
Aiden glanced around. Tancy’s survival pack was off its hook, lying several feet away.
“Did the omni-generator finally work?” he asked.
“Yeah, but I messed up with the battery somewhere, so it lost a ton of power to heat dissipation. I troubleshooted it, and the generator itself was routing properly — just wish I figured out the battery issues before I installed it in the pack. It’ll be a whole pair of rusty gears to remove it and take it apart.”
“I’d take that over causing a blackout in the entire borough.”
“Ugh, don’t rub it in…” Scooping some oxtail stew into her bowl, Tancy settled on her knees and ate morosely. After about ten minutes of them companionably chewing, she said, “Hey, do you ever feel bad about who we are?”
Aiden nibbled at the folds of stippled meat between the toes of a duck claw. “What’re you talking about?”
Tancy slurped her stew and chewed a bit. Then she gestured out at the garden. “This is the only place I’ve ever seen with real plants. Everything else is made in a lab, or projected on a screen. I don’t think anyone in my entire school has even seen a tree before.”
“Mom and Dad are fans of landscaping. So what?”
“Why can’t we plant them in the city, too?”
“Zoning laws, probably. And people might have dormant allergies they might not know about ‘cause of, you know, the Winter War and all that.”
Tancy looked out into the garden. “I want to plant one of those cypress trees at Exsupero High, someday. The hills, too. No more of those holograms — I want to see all the flowers in our garden everywhere else, going all the way down to the beach.”
“Why?”
“I want other people to see them, too.”
“There’s nothing to feel guilty about, you know. You didn’t choose where you were born, just like me. We got what we got.”
“That should be the slogan of Neocopy. ‘I won the lottery at birth and everyone else can die’. I’m sick of seeing corporazzis price-gouging neural implants and blood refreshers. I’m sick of seeing their companies poisoning the water and the city government turning a blind eye to it. I’m sick of seeing people hoarding money to…what, buy another jetpack? Get another chromagraphic eyebrow?”
“We’re corporazzis, goon. Nobody’s going to give you a gold star and a pat on the back for admitting the obvious.”
Tancy shrugged. “It’ll make me feel better.”
“Yeah, but there’s no point in feeling bad about things you can’t change.”
“I just don’t like it. Seeing everything for what it is hurts my brain like screws. Call it guilt or whatever…but if I don’t try to at least think about making things better, it makes me feel ill.”
Aiden munched his dinner as he listened, a little annoyed. He couldn’t really relate to what she was saying. He liked where he was and the perks that came along with it, perks that weren’t really perks because he’d always had them. He liked heated car seats; multi-jet, aromatherapeutic showers with hyaluronic acid cleansers; whipped synth-cream desserts; microfiber towels; busting out high scores on Dance, Dance Infinity! at the VR arcade with his friends; sneaking stimulants with Edward Eng before gym; listening to overclocked orchestras on the Net; and occasionally hacking into Terminary’s landing page to change the opening banner to “Welcome to Neocopy’s Premier Neuron Reduction Center.”
He gazed past the garden to the curve of a neighboring hill. A silver orb rested on a sleek rail connected to one of the mansion’s out-stations. When they were younger, Tancy had dubbed it the Pinball Express after an old arcade game they’d bought from a pawn shop.
Aiden’s parents had used the viewing orb as a pleasure ride conveyance for the family should they want an uninterrupted, leisurely route to the beach. But that was before their work had taken over their life, before it seemed like they’d forgotten they had children.
Aiden noticed some of the holographic grass curving over the railway, the natural expansion algorithm in their software mimicking the growth of wild shrubbery. Seeing the structure lie dormant and broken-down suddenly caused a hot ball of resentment to burn in his gut.
Tancy had put her bowl down and was still talking, like she couldn’t stop herself. “On the car ride home every day, I see mothers selling their eyes at chop-shops to pay for their kid’s medication. I mean, can you imagine that? Exchanging your eyes for one of those street rip-offs that lose lens integrity in a month?”
“No, because I have money.”
“You go downtown all the time when you visit your duper-mechanic-buddy Markus. It’s a trendy, polluted, opiate-filled mess. And people at our level want it that way. The medtech and cybertech corporations get over four hundred billion units in profits a year, and the city council subsidizes another fifty billion just so they can get reappointed by the Overton Guild. It doesn’t have to be like this.”
“So what’re you gonna do?” said Aiden irritably, his temper rising. “Sell the family fortune when you become CEO? Live in the slums like the rest of the bums and druggies and stand on top of your insta-lunch crate preaching equality?”
“I’ll move the company in a new direction. I’ll expand research into branching out fusion power for integration into lower-bracket locales. Pour more funds into poverty nonprofits and health outreach. Lower costs for basic supplements. I’ve read our earnings reports — we can afford all of this.”
Aiden let out a mocking laugh. “It sounds like you’ll be bleeding out everything our family’s built for a couple feel-good initiatives! I’ll tell you right now it won’t be enough. We’re one company in one hundred and twenty-two boroughs with a population of over ten million. But you didn’t think about that, do you? You just wanna sit in a big chair and be Queen of Integrity for Innovation Weekly’s charity-of-the-month slot.”
Tancy looked away. “Whatever.”
“Get your head out of the clouds, Tancy. If you can’t do that, you’re not a real player. You got to be able to actually get things done, not complain about the problems.” He shook his head. “Still can’t believe Mom and Dad are going with you over me. What a junk-brain move.”
“I knew it,” said Tancy vehemently. “You really are still jealous you were taken out of the running for head of the company. Well, guess what: I never asked them to make me a candidate. You have more talent and brains than I could ever hope to get in a lifetime — I understand that. But maybe, just maybe, after seeing how you make a mess of your life when you already have no obligations is exactly why they thought you’d be a disaster for the company.”
“Better me than some clueless kid that was about to burn her room down with a backpack heater.”
They lapsed into a heavy silence. Gray tones of moonlight swam over the roof. The Bar twinkled like a dull chandelier across the sea.
“Sometimes I think you really only care about yourself,” said Tancy quietly.
“That makes two of us,” said Aiden. He packed up his dinner box and headed back towards the open window, back to the elevator to take him inside the mansion.