The Warehouse Page 4

  I put the money in the bill folder and let the waiter take it, told him to keep the change, and my dad is just sitting there with his wallet in his hand, this look on his face like, I don’t know, the cat just rode in on the Curiosity rover or something. Here I was, twelve years old and buying my daddy dinner at a restaurant with a candle on the table.

  After the waiter was gone, before we left, he patted me on the shoulder and looked at my mom and he said, “Our boy.”

  I can remember that moment exactly. Everything about it, down to the last detail. The way the candle made this orange light dance on the wall behind him. The purple stain on the white tablecloth from the little bit of wine that spilled out of his glass. This soft look he had in his eyes, which he only ever got when he was being really honest about something. The way his hand felt on my shoulder.

  “Our boy,” he said.

  Now, that’s a hell of a thing. It made me feel like I’d done something special. Like even though I was a kid I could take care of them.

  That’s it, I guess. It started with a need to please my parents. Though I guess that’s why most people do anything. It would be brutally dishonest to say this has nothing to do with wanting to live a comfortable life, to make some money, to be successful. Everyone in this world wants that. But simply put, it seems I have a need to please.

  I remember, years and years later, we were opening our first MotherCloud. We started pretty modestly, with only something like a thousand people, but it was a pretty big deal at the time, being the first modern live-work facility in the United States.

  My daddy came out. It was a tough trip for him, because he was pretty sick at that point, and Mom had passed a few years back, but he came out anyway, and I remember, after we cut that ribbon, me and him took a little stroll through the dormitory so I could show him around.

  After we were done, he patted me on the shoulder and he said, “Our boy.”

  Even though Mom was gone.

  He died a few months later and I miss them both like crazy, but if there’s any silver lining to this cancer gnawing at my gut, it’s that at least I’ll be seeing them soon. Fingers crossed I head in the same direction as them!

  So that’s what’s been on my mind. Lots more to talk about, but I’ve never really articulated that beginning part of it. And now I have, and it feels good to see it in writing. Tomorrow Molly and I will make it to the MotherCloud outside Orlando. It was the twelfth one we built, and the first one that was on the kind of scale we build them to now, so it’s pretty special to me, but then again, they all are.

  And, listen, I know a lot of people are expecting me to announce who’s going to take over in my stead. I had to turn off my phone because it won’t stop ringing. I’ll get to it soon enough. I’m not dying tomorrow, okay? So all you reporters out there, pour yourselves a drink, take a deep breath. I still have full control of the board and I’ll be announcing it here, on the blog, so it’s not like any of you are getting an exclusive.

  That’s all for now. Thanks for reading. After unloading all this stuff, I am just real excited to get off this bus and stretch my legs and walk around a bit.

  PAXTON

  Mass migrations continue out of Kolkata, India, where more than six million people live in low-lying areas that, in the past few years, have fallen below sea level….

  The accompanying picture showed a group of people floating on a makeshift boat assembled from driftwood. Two men, a woman. Three children. All of them, their skin stretched taut like drums. Paxton closed the browser on his phone.

  The sky darkened. He thought maybe a storm was coming in, but when he leaned over to peek past Zinnia’s sleeping form, the air looked full of insects. Great black swarms moving back and forth across the sky.

  The roadway was getting busier, too—they had been alone for so long, barreling through nowhere, but then a driverless tractor-trailer had whipped past them, the roar of it ripping Paxton from the edge of a nap. The trucks increased in frequency after that, one every ten minutes, then five, and now maybe every thirty seconds.

  The horizon ahead was a flat line with a single large box sticking out of it. Too far away to make out the details just yet. He leaned back in his seat, picked up the brochures explaining the credit system and ranking system and housing system and health care system. He’d read them all twice but it was a lot of information. His eyes were bouncing off the words.

  The intro video was playing on a loop. Must have been shot years ago. Paxton knew what Gibson Wells looked like. The man was in the news nearly every day, and the Gibson in the video was taller, had less gray hair.

  Now he was dying. The Gibson Wells. It was like being told New York City was going to remove Grand Central Terminal. Just pick it up and toss it out. How would things function without it? The enormity of the question overshadowed his anger.

  He couldn’t stop thinking about what Wells had said at the end. About visiting MotherClouds across the country. Wells still had a year to live. How many would he visit? Could Paxton meet him? Confront him? What would he say to a man who was worth three hundred billion dollars and thought that wasn’t enough?

  He stuck the pamphlets into his bag and took out a bottle of water, cracked the plastic cap. Took out the only pamphlet that was making his chest ache with anticipation.

  The color-coded job assignments.

  Red was the pickers and placers, the swarm of people responsible for moving goods around. Brown for tech support, yellow for customer service, green for food service and cleaners and other odd jobs. White was for managers, though no one started at that level. There were other colors, too, not in the video, like purple for teachers and orange for the drone field.

  Any of those would do just fine, but he hoped for red.

  And he feared blue. Blue was security.

  Red would mean a lot of time on his feet, but he was in good enough shape to handle it. Hell, he could stand to lose some of the soft skin from around his midsection.

  But his background was in security. Not his real background. His degree was in engineering and robotics. But when he couldn’t get a job out of college, when he got desperate, he’d answered a want ad from a prison and ended up there for fifteen years, carrying a retractable baton and pepper spray while he scrimped and saved and tried to launch his own business.

  That first day at UNYCC he was so scared. He thought he’d be walking into a place where everybody was covered in tattoos and they ground down toothbrushes into shivs. What he found were a few thousand low-level, nonviolent offenders. Drug violations and outstanding parking tickets and failure to pay mortgages or student loans.

  His job was mostly to tell people where to stand and when to go back to their cells and to pick up something they’d dropped on the floor. He hated it. He hated it so much that some nights he would come home and go immediately to bed, dig his head into his pillow, his stomach a pit, the rest of his body falling into it.

  The last day, the day he handed in his two-week notice and his supervisor shrugged and told him to just go home, it was the best day of his life. He’d promised himself he’d never return to a place where he’d have to answer to someone.

  And yet.

  As the bus barreled closer, Paxton flipped through the pamphlet, reread the security section. Apparently Cloud had its own team, deputized to handle screening and quality-of-life issues, and in the event of actual crimes, would liaise with local law enforcement. He looked out the window, at the rolling, empty fields. He wondered about local law enforcement.

  The Cloud campus came into view as the bus crested a slight incline, affording a spectacular view of the surroundings.

  A scatter of buildings sat before them, but at the center, the source of the drones buzzing back and forth across the sky, was a single structure so big you couldn’t look at the entire thing at on
ce, you had to do it in stages. The side of it facing Paxton was almost perfectly smooth and flat. Tubes ran between the behemoth and the smaller buildings that surrounded it, snaking across the ground, and the architecture had a feel of being both childish and brutal—hastily arranged after being dropped from the sky by an uncaring hand.

  The woman in the white polo who’d been handling the announcements thus far stood up and said, “Attention, everyone.”

  Zinnia was still zonked out, so Paxton leaned over and said, “Hey.” When she didn’t stir, he put a finger on her shoulder and applied slight pressure until she woke up. She sat up with a start, eyes wild. Paxton put up his hands, palms out. “Sorry. Showtime.”

  She breathed in through her nose, nodded, shook her head as if she were trying to rattle a thought loose.

  “There are three dormitories at MotherCloud: Oak, Sequoia, and Maple,” the woman said. “Please listen carefully as I’ll be reading a list of housing assignments.”

  She launched into a series of last names.

  Athelia, Oak

  Bronson, Sequoia

  Cosentino, Maple

  Paxton waited his turn, down at the end of the alphabet. Finally: Oak. He repeated it to himself: Oak, Oak, Oak.

  He turned to Zinnia, who was riffling through her bag for something, not listening.

  “You get yours?” Paxton asked.

  She nodded without looking up. “Maple.”

  That’s too bad, Paxton thought. There was something about Zinnia he liked. She seemed attentive. Compassionate. He hadn’t expected to tell her what happened with the Perfect Egg, but he’d found that when he did, the saying of it, he was able to relieve some of the pressure, like letting air out of the balloon. It didn’t hurt that she was pretty, though in an odd way. Her smooth neck and long, skinny limbs made him think of a gazelle. And when she smiled, her top lip arched in an exaggerated curve. It was a good smile and he wanted to see more of it.

  Maybe Maple and Oak were close to each other?

  A thought seized him. He wanted to say it was sudden, but it wasn’t. The thought had climbed onto the bus with him and sat behind them until just now. Everything was about to change. A new job and a new place to live all at once. A seismic shift in the landscape of his life. He found himself stuck between a feeling like he couldn’t wait to be there and hoping the bus would turn around.

  He told himself he wouldn’t be here for long. That this was just a temporary stop, like what the prison was supposed to be. Except this time he would stick to that.

  The bus cruised toward the closest building, a large box with a gaping maw that the roadway ran into. Inside, the road split into dozens of lanes. Almost all of them were filled with tractor-trailers, making a careful, choreographed dance underneath metal scanners extending over the roadway. Paxton couldn’t see any trucks coming the other way. There must have been a different route for exiting.

  The bus drifted to the right, into its own lane away from the trucks, and sped past the gridlock, then came to a stop amidst a cluster of similar buses sitting in a lot. The woman who’d been leading the pack stood again and said, “As you exit the bus you’ll receive your watch. It’ll take a few minutes, so you folks in the back get comfy. We’ll have you all off soon. Thank you and welcome to MotherCloud!”

  The people on the bus stood and grabbed their bags. Zinnia remained seated, gazing through the window at the scene outside, which was mostly just other buses, the tops of their roofs visible, the black surfaces of the solar arrays rippling in the light.

  Paxton considered asking her to go for a drink. It might be nice to know some people. But Zinnia was pretty, maybe a bit too pretty for him, and he didn’t want to mar his first day with a rejection. He stood and got his bag, stepped aside, and let her walk ahead of him.

  Outside the bus was a tall man with his gray hair pulled back into a neat ponytail, wearing a white polo shirt. He was flanked by a tall black woman, her head wrapped in a purple bandana, holding a box. The man would ask a question, tap the screen of his tablet, then reach in the box and hand each person something. One after another. When it was Paxton’s turn, the man asked his name, checked the tablet, and handed him a watch.

  Paxton stepped away from the throng to examine it. The strap was dark, dark gray, almost black, with a magnetic clasp. On the inside of the band was a series of metal discs. When he laid it over his wrist and secured the clasp, the screen flashed.

  Hello, Paxton! Please place your thumb on the screen.

  The message was replaced by the outline of a fingerprint. Paxton pressed his thumb against the screen and after a moment the watch buzzed.

  Thanks!

  Then:

  Use your watch to get to your room.

  Then:

  You’ve been assigned to Oak.

  He followed a queue of people to a series of body scanners, staffed by men and women in blue polo shirts wearing blue latex gloves. One of the men in blue called out, “No weapons,” as one person after another deposited their luggage on a scanner, stepped into one of the machines, put their arms in the air, and allowed the machine to spin around them, before stepping out and getting their bags.

  Beyond the scanners was an elevated platform overlooking a set of tracks, fronted by turnstiles. On each turnstile was a small black-mirrored disc with a white light around the circumference. People waved their CloudBands in front of the disc and the light turned green and made a comforting, satisfying sound. A warm little ding that seemed to say, Everything is going to be okay.

  Paxton made it onto the platform and found Zinnia and stood next to her, watched as she fiddled with the watch, running her thin fingers along it.

  “Not a watch person?” he asked.

  “Hmm?” She looked up and squinted, as if she’d forgotten who he was.

  “Sorry. Just an observation. Seems like you don’t like wearing it.”

  Zinnia stretched out her arm. “It’s light. It’s like you can barely feel it.”

  “That’s good though, right? If we’re going to have to wear it all day long.”

  She nodded as a tram car shaped like a bullet pulled into the station. It moved silently on magnetic tracks and came to a stop with all the force of a leaf hitting the ground. The assembly of people climbed on, squeezing into the packed space. There was a series of yellow poles for people to hold on to, and a few disability seats along the wall that could be pulled down, but no one took them.

  Paxton was pushed away from Zinnia by the force of the crowd, and when they’d settled and the doors closed, she was on the other side of the car, everyone crammed in shoulder to shoulder. Bodies pressed against him, smelling of sweat and aftershave and perfume, a toxic mix in the confined space. He wanted to kick himself for not saying something to Zinnia. At this point it felt like it was too late.

  The tram rocketed through darkened tunnels before blasting into the sunlight. A few sharp turns nearly threw people from their feet.

  The tram slowed and the large tinted windows flickered. The word OAK appeared in ghost-white letters, superimposed over the landscape. A cool male voice chimed in, announcing the station.

  Paxton followed the crowd off and threw a quick salute to Zinnia, saying, “See you around?” It sounded more like a question than he would have wanted—he wanted to sound more bold—but she smiled and nodded.

  Just off the tram was a tiled, subterranean station with a bank of three escalators, flanked by staircases on either side. One of the escalators wasn’t working, orange cones placed around the mouth of it like teeth. Most people were opting for the escalator, but Paxton slung his bag onto his shoulder and braved the stairs. At the top was a blank cement space with a bank of elevators. One entire wall was a large screen, playing the introductory video from the bus.

  As the mother placed an adhesive bandage o
n her son’s knee, his wrist buzzed.

  Floor 10, Room D

  Efficient, at least. He proceeded to the elevators, found there weren’t any buttons on the inside, just another disc surrounded by a circle of light. As people waved their wrists in front of it, the floor numbers appeared on the surface of the glass. Paxton waved his and the number 10 appeared.

  Paxton was the only one to get off on the tenth floor. When the doors closed behind him he was surprised at the silence of the hallway. Pleasant, after hours of talking and videos and the bus and the road and the forced proximity to strangers. The walls were cinder block, painted white, the doors forest green, a little placard indicating the direction of restrooms and apartment numbers. The alphabet started at the far end of the hallway, which meant a long walk down the linoleum, his shoes squeaking against the reflective surface.

  At the door marked D he held his wrist near the knob and there was a deep click. Paxton pushed the door open.

  The room was more like a crowded hallway than an apartment. The floor was the same hard material of the hallway, the walls the same white-painted cinder block. Immediately to the right was a kitchen area: a countertop with a microwave built into the wall, as well as a small sink and a hot plate. He popped open a cabinet to find cheap plastic dishware. To his left were sliding doors, which he opened to find a long shallow closet.

  Just past the counter and the closet was a futon built onto the left wall, with storage cabinets underneath. The mattress was a smooth, plastic-like material, like you would give a kid who still wets the bed. There was a small notecard on the edge of the futon, indicating he could pull it out into a bed.