A hesitant rain was falling by the time Audrey’s car parked itself and shut down. Audrey looked across the lot at a cluster of undulating, four-story buildings. Judging by their curving design, they’d been built with construction printers, laid down from the foundation up in thin layers of concrete, glass, steel, wood composites, and resins. Printed buildings were less obvious in the States. Sometimes they were made the more expensive and time-consuming way, with human labor, to help preserve jobs. More often, they were simply disguised with exteriors that looked like human-built ones to avoid drawing attention to the fact that no actual people had been employed their construction.
A thin buffer of pine woods in hues of blue and green surrounded the apartments. The scene had that eerie familiarity that comes with seeing something in real life for the first time after looking at it in a simulation. She’d taken virtual tours of at least a dozen housing clusters before signing her lease at this one. Her choice, a privately owned housing complex called Lamb Valley Ecovillage, was about 30 kilometers from Sacramento, was moderately nice, and, importantly for her real work, lacked some social amenities that were common in many Cascadian housing clusters. It also allowed cats, as long as you were prepared to pay a nonrefundable pet fee.
Cascadian housing clusters were part of that country’s strategy to provide living space with a low carbon footprint. In the U.S., federal zoning directives together with greatly increased taxes on large homes and big yards meant that people tended to build unattractive apartments in unused outdoor space and to cram multiple families into what used to be single-family homes. Countries around the world had adapted to living with much lower carbon footprints, the U.S. almost as much as Cascadia, but back in the U.S., some of the changes, managed as they were through penalties and restrictions, felt more oppressive. Other changes were popular even in the U.S.: the quieter streets, the cleaner air, the new Jet Train routes, and the lowering of energy bills for everyone from householders to heavy industry.
If Audrey had really been looking for the best place to live, one of the cooperative rental communities would have easily won out. Costs were more affordable through group ownership, and it was usually easy to buy in and cash out. Most of these cooperative locations were designed to encourage neighborly interaction; to provide shared facilities like workspaces, music rooms, guest housing, and community dining; and to integrate small businesses like cafés, farm stores, and hair salons.
In this case, however, Audrey was much better off not being well-known to neighbors or missed at community meals. Free-standing homes and duplexes were generally expensive and often had excessive carbon footprints, which especially in Cascadia made them hard to pay for and heavily taxed. Lamb Valley, on the other hand, was dull and inconspicuous--in other words, ideal. The cost was reasonable by Cascadian standards, but Cascadia had a long-standing housing shortage that had driven up rents, and paying rent in Cascadian thuns (which Cascadians pronounced like tunes) at about $1.40 US per one thun, Þ1.00, made the expense much worse for someone whose supposed personal savings were in U.S. dollars. Her rent at Lamb Valley for a modest apartment was more than half again as much as the mortgage on the little house in Arizona she used to call home. It was a good thing her “pension,” actually an indirect allowance from the Agency back in the U.S., was generous.
Audrey stepped out of the car, straightened painfully, and ignored her plants and other possessions to get Matilda’s reeking carrier out first. Matilda mewled as Audrey lugged the carrier through a brick arch into the ecovillage’s courtyard.
The buildings that made up the ecovillage formed a U-shape around a central courtyard. The area within featured trees, a rectangle of grassy lawn, vegetable gardens in various states of order and unkemptness, gravel paths, and a few benches. Audrey mounted the steps toward her apartment, number 340, which overlooked a bank of picnic tables on the courtyard side.
Since Audrey’s lease had already begun, her biometric information was already keyed to the security systems. She looked into the eye scanner at the front door, which chirped in confirmation, unlocking with a click. She would have preferred an old-style physical key, something that didn’t leave an electronic trail, but those weren’t often used anymore, and asking the landlord to install one would draw attention. She’d have to make do with maxing out the privacy settings.
The odd familiarity of the house was especially acute as she walked inside and saw her furniture arranged the way she’d specified in the interactive moving plan. Robotic movers had come and gone. If the place hadn’t been perfectly clean, with every object in its place, it would have looked like she’d been living there for months.
Audrey opened the door to the carrier and set it on the floor, but Matilda stayed hunched in her corner. Audrey didn’t blame her. It was easier to step into a new life if you procrastinated a little first. Audrey herself didn’t have that option.
She began by powering down or unplugging all of the built-in smart devices, even the ones she had to partly disassemble to do that. AI-powered household items, from beverage makers to electric blankets, were all designed to watch and record, and it was often hard to know who had access to the data they generated. While the general public in both the U.S. and Cascadia had decades ago given up privacy for convenience, Audrey couldn’t afford that trade-off. Even shutting down the devices as she was doing then might be noted as unusual in some manufacturers’ logs, but that wasn’t nearly as problematic as letting her house watch her while she planned economic sabotage. She had a standard explanation she used about being old-school about privacy that generally went over convincingly.
She was just finishing this task when her tiny earpiece chimed with a notification. She gestured to view it on her lenses: the scarf she had “ordered” was in.
Audrey did not wear scarves. She had specifically told the Agency that she didn’t want an adaptive scarf, and that had been duly noted and duly ignored. An adaptive scarf was ideal camouflage for an AI, they had explained. First, an adaptive garment was a perfect excuse to have microprocessors and input/output features so that a person could coordinate color changes using their lenses. Second, despite “smart cloth” advances, people still weren’t used to thinking of flexible things as being able to contain computers. Audrey was impressed that the tech arm of the Agency had managed to fit the entire hardware requirements for a sophisticated, small-scale AI into a scarf, but “impressed” and “pleased” were not the same thing.
It would have been nice to go have a bath or to find a park to go walk in, but instead Audrey began the multiple trips down and back up the stairs with everything she’d brought in the car. A robot would have made it a lot easier, but the whole reason she’d brought those things in a car with her was that she didn’t trust them with a robot.
By the fifth trip up, with her left knee aching, she could hear the beehive hum of an incoming drone. She climbed the last flight of stairs to find it waiting for her, a bright yellow pod with two enclosed, circular rotors sprouting from its back. It resembled a huge bumblebee.
The drone made her lean down for a retina scan before it would open. Inside lay a smooth biopolymer vacuum package the size of a sandwich--the scarf--and she picked it up without comment. The drone closed its compartment and lifted off. It banked to one side, then sailed straight up before arcing away over the rooftops.
She threw the package onto an end table and began opening boxes. Nothing she’d brought with her would be of any help with her mission: it would have been unnecessarily risky to bring anything potentially damning through the border checkpoint when it was so easy to get whatever she needed from contacts within Cascadia or, like the scarf, flown in surreptitiously using a long-range version of what would look like an unremarkable delivery drone. In any case, the main things she would need for her assignment were information and access, and she should be getting plenty of both soon enough. The next day, she was scheduled to meet with her first contact, an American sympathizer highly placed in the Agency of Resilience and Disaster Relief. Tired as she was from the trip and from hauling things up from the car, she reminded herself she’d need to go over her notes soon for that meeting.
A rap on the door made her freeze in place. She resisted the urge to turn on the networked camera over the entrance and instead went over to open the door. She dismissed the worry that there might be people with suits and guns on the other side. If the Cascadians had somehow managed to flush her out already, so be it. She hadn’t even done anything against Cascadian law yet--not on this trip, anyway.
When Audrey opened the door, the woman standing there did not look like a squad of counterintelligence agents. She seemed close to Audrey’s age but stood a good head shorter, though Audrey was no giant herself. She had a wide-eyed, pale brown face; thick, straight, black hair; and a loose dress patterned with bands in earthy colors.
“Hi! I’m Elena, from 341,” she chirped. “Who are you? I wouldn’t have to ask you if you’d joined the community forum already. You should do that. People will want to know who you are. Can I come in?”
Technically it had been a question, but Elena was already moving forward, and Audrey decided she’d rather get out of the way than argue.
“Oh, you have a cat!” Elena said, looking back at Audrey with a smile. She got down on all fours in front of Matilda, who had crawled out of the carrier and was hiding under a chair. “What’s your name, sweet thing?” She extended her knuckles for inspection. Matilda sniffed unenthusiastically, but she didn’t pull away when Elena began massaging the crown of the cat’s head.
“That’s Matilda,” Audrey said. “It’s nice to meet you, Elena, and I don’t want to be unneighborly, but I still have a lot to do to get the house in order--”
“Well, sure,” Elena said, clambering back up into a standing position. She surveyed the room. “How can I help?” As she spoke, she was already walking to the nearest box, the one with the glass globe collection. She touched the tabs to unseal the top.
“Maybe not that--” Audrey said, lurching forward.
Elena shrugged and turned to examine the other boxes. “Do you work? Gwen and Phyllis on the other side of you are both on Citizen Dividend only. They don’t have time for work because they’re too busy making each other miserable. My husband, Jeremy, he designs plumbing fixtures. It’s not the most poetic gift, but he’s good. His download rates are in the top eight percent for his field, so with that and our CitDiv, we’re doing all right. Honestly, when I married him, I thought he was a stoner with no talents, but besides the plumbing fixtures, he’s very good at barbecue, so that’s two more than I thought. You’re not married? Are you alphabet?” Audrey wasn’t current on all the Cascadian expressions, but she was pretty sure Elena meant LGBTQIA+. “What are your pronouns?”
“Just she/her,” Audrey said. “Elena, I hate to shoo you away, but I have to ...”
She found herself trailing off. A compulsively curious next-door neighbor was not what she needed, but she realized she already kind of liked Elena. She also had the feeling that if she tried to push the woman away, it would only make her more doggedly interested.
Or, Audrey realized, she might be just rationalizing her need to not be utterly alone in this foreign place. Either way, just from the perspective of mental health, it could help to have a friend.
“Have to what?” said Elena.
Audrey shook her head. “Actually, nothing. It can all wait. Would you show me around the cluster?”
“Show ... who around?” said Elena, lifting an eyebrow.
“Me?”
Elena looked amused now. “Whose name is?” she said.
“Oh, I’m sorry! Audrey Adams. I just moved here from the U.S.”
“You left the U.S. to come here? Why in the world would you do that?”
“I--”
“I’m kidding! The U.S. is terrible. You made the smart choice. Come on, I’ll introduce you to your neighbors.”
Already the friend idea was backfiring. “I think I could should rest and clean up a little before I start meeting people--”
“Oh, you’re an introvert! I read a book about you people. You like to sit in dark rooms all alone. It energizes you.”
Audrey laughed. That wasn’t too far off.
“Don’t worry, Audrey: in that case, I’ll steer you clear of the social scene--for now. I’ll just show you the many wondrous features of Lamb Valley Ecovillage, which will take about a minute and a half and will mean I’ll have to exaggerate like crazy, and you can share your story of how you came to end up here in Esparto, of all places. You can also answer my question about work, because you didn’t before, and I like to know these things.”
“I can see that,” said Audrey.
Elena nodded, put her arm around Audrey, and steered them both toward the door.
The meeting with the man from the ARDR, Bennet Culkin, took place at a picnic table between a sprawling oak tree and a fence, behind which a fat, noisy outflow pipe gushed clean water from a treatment plant. The methane capture at the treatment plant must have been excellent, because Audrey smelled nothing but the mock pork Al Pastor burrito she’d just unwrapped. Culkin had some kind of sandwich bulging with what might or might not have been roast beef.
The constant white noise from the gushing pipe made hearing each other difficult, but it also masked their conversation from potential distance listening devices, while the sprawling oak tree above them prevented satellite surveillance. There was no indication that anyone in Cascadian counter-espionage was interested in either of them, but that was no reason to be reckless.
To keep conversation low, they each had voice recognition turned on in their glasses. Culkin’s words scrolled across Audrey’s field of view as they spoke. He had a lot to report, he’d said, about a potential war.
“Mr. Culkin,” Audrey said deliberately. “I’m not a courier. You’ll have to arrange some other way to get your information to the higher-ups. I have a specific job to do.”
Culkin glared at her. “Don’t you think your superiors will be a little more interested in Cascadian war preparations than in your side project?”
“Do you still wet the bed?” said Audrey. Culkin visibly flinched. Audrey gave him her rehearsed apologetic laugh. “Never mind, I’m sorry. It’s kind of an old joke among data wranglers. That we’d know if you used to wet the bed.” This was true, but it was also a good thing to say to people who were being a pain in the ass.
“Oh,” Culkin said. “Haha.”
A gust of wind shouldered through the branches of the oak, for a moment making the stirring of leaves as loud as the gushing water. The moving air did little to quell the heat. Audrey could feel sweat trickling down her back, making her blouse stick.
“To answer your question,” Audrey said, “it’s not up to me to guess what my bosses might be interested in. I’m just here to do a job. I purposely have no connection back to the U.S. so that I can do that job, which is why you can see I’m not anyone who can help you pass along that information you’ve been gathering so industriously.” She watched to see his reaction to her edge of sarcasm, but by all appearances, it hadn’t registered. That was important to know. If he was too wrapped up in himself to catch the nuances of what was going on around them, she’d have to spend more of her attention being aware for the both of them.
“I think you can help me, though,” she said. “I need to identify people who would accept an unexpected windfall--people who aren’t going to say ‘Hey, aren’t you guys giving me too much money?’ At least hundreds to start with, but before long it will have to be thousands. I’ll be able to get some names myself, but probably not enough.” She took a small bite of the burrito. It had gotten cold on its way to the picnic table, but it still made her have to stifle a groan of appreciation.
Culkin looked down for a moment, frowning, then met Audrey’s gaze and nodded. “I can do that. What else?”
Audrey held up one finger as she finished chewing her bite of burrito, then swallowed. “Second, we need to find someone in a position of power to be our star.”
“What do you mean, star?”
“There’s going to be a huge fraud, Bennet. I’m not a fan of fraud, and I don’t personally have anything against Cascadian basic income, but there has to be fraud on a shocking scale. It will be Cascadians taking advantage of the Citizen Dividend system like the Americans have been saying all along somebody would.”
“To sabotage the whole premise of the Cascadian economy,” Culkin said.
“No,” Audrey said. “To provide the headlines we need in the U.S. We need something that looks like proof the people who say basic income is for freeloaders and con artists are right. Honestly, it’s not important what happens here in Cascadia. If we can do this without ruining a lot of lives, that’s my preference. But it has to be such an embarrassment that the protests back in America will be slowed and the country will have a chance to come together. Somehow.”
“It doesn’t sound like you’re very clear on the ‘coming together’ part,” Culkin said.
He was right. Even so: “The coming together part isn’t up to us,” Audrey said. “Our work is just to calm the storm. An enormous embarrassment would be the best thing that could happen to Cascadia right now, because it’s the only thing that has a real chance of preventing war.”
“Why try to prevent it?” Culkin said. “Cascadia can’t stand separate from the U.S. forever.”
“I’m not shooting for ‘forever,’“ Audrey said. “Nothing stays the same forever. Let’s focus on preventing the war we have in front of us right now.”
Culkin shrugged. “All right.”
“And you can help find the people we need? And identify a scapegoat for us?”
“I have some ideas about that,” Culkin said. “Actually ... I may know just the guy.”