The Warehouse Read online

  On the wall opposite the bed was a mounted television, underneath which was a narrow coffee table, barely deep enough for a cup of coffee. At the far end of the room was a window of frosted glass, letting sunlight filter through the room, with a shade above it that could be drawn down.

  Paxton put his bag next to a series of boxes and folded sheets and an anemic pillow. He stood next to the futon and could barely touch either wall with his fingertips.

  No bathroom. He recalled the signs in the hallway for the restrooms and sighed. Shared bathrooms. Like being back in college. At least he didn’t have a roommate.

  Paxton’s wrist buzzed.

  Turn on the TV!

  He found a remote on the futon, sat down, and turned on the television, which was at a high enough angle he had to crane his neck. A small woman wearing a white polo shirt and a megawatt smile stood in a room not dissimilar to Paxton’s.

  “Hello,” she said. “Welcome to your introductory housing. As I’m sure you know from reading your housing material, room upgrades are available, but for now, you’ll be here. We’ve provided you with some basics, and you can head over to the shops to fill in anything else you might need. During your first week at MotherCloud you’re entitled to a ten percent discount on all apartment and wellness items. After that, you receive a five percent discount on all items purchased through the Cloud website. You’ll find bathrooms at the end of the hall—male, female, and gender-neutral. If you need anything, please contact your resident adviser, who lives in apartment R. Now drop your stuff, take a walk around, and get acquainted with your Cloud family. But first, you might want to check your bed.” She clapped her hands. “There’s a job assignment—and a shirt—waiting for you.”

  The screen went black.

  Paxton regarded the box sitting on the mattress. He hadn’t noticed it when he first came in, even though it was sitting there, right in the open. He hadn’t noticed it because he didn’t want to notice.

  Red. Please be red.

  Really anything but blue.

  He picked up the box and cradled it on his lap. Thought back to the prison. A short time after he got the job, he read about the Stanford prison experiment. A bunch of scientists stuck some folks into a role-playing environment where some were prisoners and some were guards. Though regular people, they took to their roles in earnest, the “guards” growing authoritative and cruel, the “prisoners” submitting to rules they really had no reason to submit to. It fascinated Paxton on a couple of levels, the deepest being that, even in a guard’s uniform, he always felt like one of the prisoners. Authority was a too-big shoe that rubbed his foot raw and threatened to tumble off if he took too wide a step.

  So of course, upon tearing open the box, he found three blue polo shirts.

  They were neatly folded, the material smooth like athletic wear.

  He sat there for a long time staring at them before tossing them against the wall and falling backward on the futon, letting his attention drift into the rough texture of the ceiling.

  He considered leaving the room, going outside, somewhere, anywhere, but he couldn’t bring himself to do it. He grabbed the pamphlets he’d gotten on the bus and reread the payment structure. The sooner he could get out, the better.

  PAYMENTS AT MOTHERCLOUD

  Welcome to MotherCloud! You probably have some questions about our payment structure. That’s okay—it can be a little confusing! The following is an overview of how our system works, but if you need further assistance, you’re welcome to make an appointment with a banker in our Admin building.

  Cloud is 100 percent paperless—this includes money. Your CloudBand, which features the latest in near-field communication technology, is coded to you and you alone. It will only work when the clasp is done and it is in contact with your skin, so we recommend you only take it off for charging at night.

  Your watch can be used for all transactions at MotherCloud. As an employee you are granted a special account in our banking system you can use while you work here. If you leave Cloud, you are welcome to maintain your account here—we’re FDIC insured and funds are accessible through any standard ATM.

  Your salary is paid in credits. One credit is roughly equivalent to $1 US, subject to a small conversion fee of a few fractions of a cent (see online banking portal for latest conversion figures)—and will be deposited in your account every Friday.

  Taxes, along with modest housing, health, and transit fees, will be removed for you. As you know, because of the American Worker Housing Act, and the Paperless Currency Act, you do not earn minimum wage. But you get that money back in a variety of ways—through generous housing and health care plans, and through unlimited use of our company transit system, as well as our matching retirement fund.

  Your account balance starts at zero, but you can use any current bank account to transfer money over, subject to a modest processing fee (see online banking portal for latest fee rates). We also offer temporary relief for those who don’t have any cash to help them get started, on a credit basis. Please contact our banking department for more information.

  You should also be aware that, due to the Worker Responsibility Act, you can be docked pay for the following offenses:

  • Damage to Cloud property

  • Arriving to work late more than twice

  • Not meeting monthly quotas as set by a manager

  • Personal health care negligence

  • Going over your allotment of sick days

  • Losing or breaking your watch

  • Disorderly conduct

  In addition, you can receive additional credits for the following:

  • Meeting your monthly quotas for three months or more

  • Using no sick days for six months or more

  • Receiving a health checkup every six months

  • Receiving a teeth cleaning once a year

  Also, your pay is automatically increased by .05 credits for every week you maintain a five-star rating. The rating must be maintained for the entire week for the raise to take effect.

  Your account also works as a credit card. If you go below the amount of credits in your account, you can still make charges. Any credits earned once you’re in a deficit will go toward paying interest (see online banking portal for current rates) and then the principal.

  You’re also welcome to join our pension retirement program, in which, after a certain amount of years, you will be eligible for a reduced twenty-hour workweek, as well as subsidized housing and a 20 percent discount on anything purchased from the Cloud store.

  Bankers are available between the hours of nine a.m. and five p.m. in Admin to help you with any needs you might have. You can also access your account at any time from the online banking portal, on CloudPoints located throughout MotherCloud, or through the browser on your apartment’s television.

  ZINNIA

  Zinnia ran her finger over the screen of the watch. So smooth it was slippery. She clasped it, the magnets snapping against the thin membrane of skin on the inside of her wrist.

  Charge it at night. Other than that, don’t take it off, because it provides health tracking data, opens doors, registers ratings, delivers job assignments, processes transactions, and probably a hundred other things someone would need to do in MotherCloud.

  Might as well have been a manacle.

  In her head she recited the paragraph from the CloudBand manual that had sent her blood pressure up a few clicks.

  CloudBands must be worn outside your room at all times, and your band is coded to you. Due to the sensitive personal information stored on each CloudBand, an alarm will sound—both audibly and in the Cloud security system—if it is off for too long, or if someone else is wearing your band.

  She looked up at the door
. On the inside wall was a disc—even to get out, you had to swipe. Probably to ensure people weren’t leaving without wearing them, since they served as your key to everything, from the elevator to your apartment to the bathrooms.

  It wasn’t just about wearing it or not wearing it—it was tracking her location. Step into the wrong section, probably a blip would appear on a screen in a dark room. Someone would be alerted.

  She glanced at the red polo shirts she’d pulled from the box on her bed, still annoyed they hadn’t been brown.

  She’d known about the watches of course. And she thought she’d figured out Cloud’s job placement algorithm, giving them answers and a background that would place her on the tech crew. Which, in turn, would have provided ample access to what she needed.

  Now, not so much.

  It left her with three options:

  First, tamper with the watch to alter the location data. Not impossible but also not something she was excited about. She was good, but maybe not that good.

  Second, she could find a way to move without the watch on. Except, she wouldn’t be able to open any doors. She couldn’t even get out of her room.

  Third, get reassigned to maintenance or security, since those jobs had the most access. Though she didn’t even know if that was possible.

  Which meant this whole gig was going to be a hell of a lot harder.

  So why not start now, with some penetration testing?

  She knelt down at the disc on the wall. Ran her fingers over it. Considered prying it off, but she figured it would trip some kind of alarm. She swiped so the door would open, then kept her foot in the door as she leaned over to the CloudBand charger. Placed the watch on the mat and then stepped into the hallway.

  She stood there for a moment, until she realized it looked weird to just stand there, so she made her way to the bathrooms. By the time she reached them, a hunk of meat in a blue polo with tribal forearm tattoos had appeared from the elevators. He stopped a safe distance away from her and put his hands up in a Calm down gesture. He seemed to understand how the way he looked could set people on edge.

  “Miss?” he asked, his voice slightly dopey. “You’re not supposed to be out of your room without your CloudBand.”

  “Sorry. First day.”

  He smiled a gee-whiz smile. “It happens. Let me swipe you back into your room though, because otherwise you’ll be locked out.”

  She let him escort her down the hallway. He kept a respectful distance. At the door he waved his watch in front of the disc and it lit up green. Then he stepped away from the door as if there were a wild tiger behind it. It was sweet.

  “Thank you,” she said.

  “No worries, miss,” he said.

  She watched him trudge down the hallway and stepped back in the room. Went to her makeup kit, pulled out the tube of red lipstick she’d never worn. Unscrewed the bottom and pulled out a radiofrequency detector the size and shape of her thumb. She pressed the button on the side and a green light flashed to indicate it was charged.

  She ran it over every surface in the room. The light turned red at the television and light fixture, which was where she expected it would, but no place else. Nothing in the air vents or the cabinets.

  Next she popped open the door and ran the scanner around the jamb. The light turned red at the latch. There was something there, embedded behind the thin metal of the frame. Thermal scanner? Motion detector? She took her CloudBand off the charger and strapped it around her wrist. Checked the door again. No red light. Put the CloudBand on the charger. Red light.

  There it was. It seemed fair to assume, then, that the problem point was the door. Some kind of sensor that could read her leaving the room if she wasn’t wearing the watch. If she could dock her watch and find another exit, she’d be okay.

  She looked around the room and it looked even smaller, like a child’s clubhouse. She’d get there. First, a little recon. She strapped the watch to her wrist and ambled down the empty hallway to the bathroom. Picked the gender-neutral door—half man, half woman-with-skirt—where she found a long row of sinks and toilets and urinals. One of the toilet stalls was taken, small sneakers visible underneath the gap. Probably a woman, given the size and style.

  Zinnia walked to the sink and ran the tap. The faucet felt loose in the housing. She gave it a tug and it nearly came out. She went to the next sink and splashed some water on her face. Looked up and found the bathroom had a drop ceiling.

  Good.

  On her way to the elevator she crossed paths with a young woman, pretty in a cheerleader way, and delicate, too, which made the brown polo shirt appear out of place on her slender frame. Her hair, the same color as her polo, was tied in a ponytail pulled back so tight it looked painful. She locked her big cartoon eyes on Zinnia and said, “You’re new on the floor?”

  Zinnia paused. The law of social niceties demanded she offer platitudes in exchange.

  “I am,” Zinnia said, forcing herself to smile. “Just this morning.”

  “Welcome,” the girl said, offering her hand. “I’m Hadley.”

  Zinnia shook. The girl’s hand was fragile, like a small bird.

  “How are you getting on?” the girl asked.

  “Fine,” Zinnia said. “You know, it’s a lot, but I’m getting settled.”

  “Well, if you need anything, I’m in Q. And there’s Cynthia in V. She’s, like, the mayor of the hall.” The girl gave a conspiratorial smile. “You know how it is. We girls have to stick together.”

  “Is that how it is?”

  Hadley blinked. Once, twice. Then she nodded and widened her smile, hoping the glow would distract from the unsaid thing hanging in the air, and Zinnia filed that away in her brain as potentially interesting.

  “Well, nice to meet you,” she said, and she spun around in her cute little red flats. Zinnia called after her, “Nice to meet you, too,” and turned toward the elevator, her guard still up, trying to figure out exactly what that was, and by the time she was halfway down to the lobby she decided the girl was just being nice and she should probably calm down.

  Once downstairs, Zinnia stopped in front of a large freestanding computer screen that showed a map of the entire campus.

  The dorms ran in a straight line, north to south: Sequoia, Maple, Oak. North of Sequoia was a teardrop-shaped facility called Live-Play, which the map indicated had restaurants and movie theaters and a whole bunch of other crap for the people here to anesthetize themselves with.

  The tram ran in a loop. It stopped in each of the three dorms. The dorms were also connected by halls of shops, so you could walk from Oak on one end to Live-Play on the other on what the map called the promenade. It looked to be about a mile.

  The tram then looped around to two more buildings—one of which was for administration and banking and schools, Admin, and the other for health and hospital, Care. Then it went through the main warehouse facility, before returning to Incoming, the building where they’d gotten off the bus. Finally, back to the dorms.

  The map showed there were also emergency tracks. Each facility had multiple medical bays, all of which led directly to Care. There was also an entirely separate system that took maintenance workers across the solar and wind fields to the far edge of the property, to the cluster of water, waste, and energy processing facilities.

  It was exactly where she needed to be.

  Zinnia turned and walked, figured she would go down to Oak, then loop back up to Live-Play. Get a feel for the promenade, at least. The lobby of Maple was stark, plain polished concrete. Zinnia found doors to a laundry room as well as a gym, which was nicely stocked—free weights and machines and treadmills. No one was using it.

  The promenade was airport chic, a massive, bi-level hall with the occasional elevator or escalator or winding staircase. There were q
uick-stop food joints, drugstores, a delicatessen, a nail salon, a foot massage parlor. Lots of foot massage parlors, full of people in red or brown or white polo shirts, sprawled on long chaise lounges while women in green shirts worked their hideously exposed feet. Built into the walls were massive video screens, the color saturation torqued up so high it hurt her eyes to look at them, advertising jewelry and phones and snacks.

  Everything was polished concrete and glass, the feel of the color blue, and Zinnia had a sense of every surface being violent. She climbed a staircase and walked along the railing, the barrier a perfectly clear plate of glass, and her stomach lurched as if she might fall; if she did, she would surely be grievously injured on the unforgiving floor. She passed an escalator that was out of service, the teeth of it pulled up, men in brown polos standing inside its guts, not really trying to fix it, more looking around like they were just discovering how it worked, while long lines of people queued up at the elevator.

  She passed through the final dormitory and entered a corridor that turned at a ninety-degree angle, leading to Live-Play. It was lined with video screens and restaurants a little more eclectic than the sandwich and soup fare in the earlier halls. Tacos and barbecue and ramen, all of the storefronts with stool seating and limited menus, all of them half-full of people eating with their faces down.

  She stopped into the taco shop and sat at the bar. A stout Mexican man raised his eyebrows at her and she asked in Spanish if he had cabeza. He frowned and shook his head, pointed to the small menu over his head. Chicken, pork, and of course beef that was four times the cost of the other two. She settled on three pork tacos and the man got to work, throwing precooked meat onto the stainless-steel griddle to warm it up, tossing down some corn tortillas alongside.

  Zinnia worked some money out of her pocket and put enough on the bar to cover her tab, plus a little extra, as the cook scooped the meat onto the tortillas, along with a heap of chopped onion and cilantro. He placed the plate in front of her, along with a small black disc. He shook his head at the money and said he couldn’t make change. Zinnia waved him off, said to keep it. He smiled and nodded, pulling the cash off the counter, looking around briefly, and placing it in his pocket.