The autokitchen shushed and rattled, rinsing and chopping celery as it made mock andouille sausage gumbo. Unlike Audrey’s old kitchen back in Arizona, this one had no manual stove or oven. It was pretty, though: a pale blue ceramic wall with six glass windows showing prep and cooking chambers, a recycled wood serving counter where the finished food came out, and matching return door for leftovers and dishes. A blank wall on the left masked room temperature, refrigerator, and freezer compartments, and the wall could interact with Audrey’s lenses to display available food, meal suggestions, and the like. Somewhere in the depths of the unit, dishes, utensils, and glassware were stored, and multipurpose robotic arms inside stood ready to move a cup, wield a spatula, or perform any of a hundred other tasks.
There was a stainless steel sink on the wall to the right of the autokitchen, underneath a window that looked out over the woods surrounding Lamb Valley. Next to it, a small prep counter was situated.
Audrey still remembered when cooking something was something you had to do to eat instead of a hobby. Even hobby cooking was less fun than it used to be, because it was harder to take joy in turning out a perfectly light soufflé when your kitchen could do it for you in half the time. For that matter, the kitchen could pull up a great recipe that used your forgotten extra asparagus, order supplies for delivery by automated trucks, wash up, and pack away the leftovers.
With no manual cooking equipment, Audrey couldn’t have cooked anything herself if she’d wanted to, but between learning the ropes at the Cascadian Reemployment Bureau, her search for her family, and especially carrying out her work for the U.S., there wouldn’t have been time anyway.
She’d spent most of the day shadowing Dylan Poppe, whom she found eccentric but likable. She was intimately familiar with unemployment back in the U.S. from her official job as a re-employment supervisor, but the Cascadian experience of losing a job was new to her. In the U.S., having work was about status, money, and dignity. A person without employment had few financial resources and fewer options, and many who fell out of the workforce never found their way back in. Not working meant being labeled as an economic freeloader and losing many of the advantages of the employed classes. The people Audrey had worked with in the U.S. were usually scared and resentful. The office she ran was considered a successful one, yet most of its clients never found a new job. Many became increasingly desperate as their options narrowed and their reserves were spent. Even the U.S. Climate Works Department and the military offered many fewer opportunities than either had decades before, when anyone who was desperate enough could fall back on one or the other.
In Cascadia, by contrast, losing a job seemed like more of an opportunity for self-discovery than a real crisis. It wasn’t just that everyone had access to a livable income: it was also that working had stopped being central to the idea of what constituted a responsible citizen. In Cascadia as well as the U.S., jobs were scarce: only a fraction of the population needed to contribute for everything to get done. In Cascadia, however, the shift from a mainly employed population to a mainly unemployed population had come with a shift in attitudes and some sharing of the wealth. In the U.S., attitudes hadn’t changed much since the early part of the century. With America lacking any serious commitment to sharing increased prosperity with the population at large, wealth there had become much more concentrated. Those who owned businesses had, for the most part, shifted from paying workers to paying much less for AIs and robots. The workers had shifted to being unemployed.
The problem was made worse by the faltering U.S. economy, which every year saw average citizens spend less money due to ever-expanding unemployment. Wealthy Americans held onto much more of their money than less affluent citizens ever had, because they didn’t need to spend most of their income on basic living expenses. A person with ten times the income and a hundred times the financial reserves of the average American family didn’t buy ten or a hundred times as many groceries or homes or cars. Meanwhile, all of the people who lost jobs and couldn’t get new ones struggled to survive, and many were left in desperate straits when their unemployment checks ran out. Even those still receiving unemployment had to complete laborious paperwork week after week to document that they were still applying for the few, out-of-reach jobs that were left. Many developed physical and mental health problems, and some of those managed to qualify for long-term disability and scrape by on that. No wonder so many Americans were desperate or angry, or both.
Audrey had known all this before she came, but sitting with Dylan and watching his Cascadian clients be mildly frustrated by an event that to Americans was a devastating loss ... It made her mission in Cascadia feel not just problematic, but bitter.
Yet none of that interfered with her resolve.
The kitchen machines sizzled, and Audrey glanced over to see a small mechanical arm in a windowed prep chamber scrape vegetables and sausage into a hot pan one chamber over. Moments later, a sharp, rich aroma of onions, peppers, and celery rose around her, purposely vented into the house instead of out of it, as per her kitchen settings. Audrey closed her eyes, remembering meals she’d cooked in the terrible little apartment she had in graduate school with her then-boyfriend, the perennially uncertain Francis. A wave of resentment came over her for the life she’d had to give up in America. She’d chosen America over Cascadia long ago, despite—maybe even because of—its troubles and limitations. Cascadia could have stayed part of the Union, could have been a source of positive change, but Cascadians had decided to leave instead, to abandon America to wallow in its long-standing problems and moral debts.
Even so, on some level she could understand Cascadia turning away from the endless political problems, the scandals and dangers of American life. Cascadians must have felt unsafe going along with the U.S. when they were all still one country.
She didn’t want America to take back Cascadia by force. She didn’t especially want reunification at all. What she really wanted was for Cascadia never to have left.
She felt the same, to be honest, about her mother, Lauren. Audrey’s family had lived in Oregon until Audrey was four, and then they moved east, to Ohio. It had all been one country back then.
Five years later, Audrey woke one morning to find a note on the kitchen table explaining that her mother had left, taking along Audrey’s seven-year-old sister, Carrie. They were moving back to Oregon, the note said, but there was no explanation of why.
Audrey’s father hadn’t seem surprised. First he’d been furious. He smashed aside the plate of muffins Audrey’s mom had left on the table, hammered on the stove with his fists, and shouted curses. Audrey ran to hide in her room. Later, she’d found him drunk and crying, slumped against the oven with the refrigerator wide open, streamers of vapor falling to the linoleum.
For years, Audrey had woken up every morning thinking maybe today they’ll come home—but they never had.
Audrey’s knew her father was no prize. He was moody and stiff-necked and spent too much time “out.” He made Audrey’s friends uncomfortable, to the point where it was hard to have friends. He didn’t always drink, when he did, he drank a lot. Even so, why would Audrey’s mother run off with no explanation, not even leaving a forwarding address? Actually, that wasn’t the real question. The real question was, why had she taken Carrie, but left Audrey behind? Was she as sick of Audrey as she was of her husband?
Audrey took a deep breath and turned her mind back to the work. When her mind was disordered, focusing on data and process usually cleared it. Data could be sprawling and inconsistent and messy, but there were always ways to order and refine it, to channel chaotic fragments of knowledge into answers and sense.
In recent years, Audrey had made detailed inquiries. It was possible Lauren and Carrie had not gone back to Oregon as the note had said, or that they’d since moved back East, but there was no sign of them in U.S. records, and two years after they’d left, Audrey’s Great-Aunt Ruth had mentioned they were in Oregon—though she refused to say where. It seemed most likely to Audrey that her mother and Carrie had stayed in Cascadia after the secession.
With the datasets Audrey had at her disposal now, it should have been easy to find Lauren and Carrie, unless they’d legally changed their names. Yet while there were people on record who matched Lauren’s name, none of them had a daughter named Carrie. If Lauren had changed both their names in Cascadia, it shouldn’t have been much harder for Audrey to find a record of that either, but there was nothing. Under Cascadian law, it was possible to keep name changes out of public records, but Audrey wasn’t looking in the public records: the database she had access to through the Agency, used by the Cascadian vital records office, should have been comprehensive.
Audrey restarted her search, widening the range of ages and allowing name variations and alternate spellings: Lauren Constance Adams, her mother’s married name. Lauren Constance Golden, her maiden name. Lauren Constance Golden Adams. Lauryn or Loren or Laurin instead of Lauren, Goldin and Goulden instead of Golden, Addams instead of Adams ...
Audrey engaged her personal AI—not the hyperpowered government one she’d been issued, but the one she used for personal tasks, like keeping her dental appointments or working out a fitness plan—and set it to continue the searches with different name spellings and combinations. Meanwhile, she took a different approach, looking for Lauren’s father, George Golden, and Lauren’s brother, Daniel. They were easy to find in the records, but they’d both been dead for years, and there wasn’t much of use for her there. Neither man had been good at keeping in touch with Audrey. She didn’t know if that was just the way the two men were or if for some reason, her mother had asked them to limit contact. Birthday presents had arrived from Uncle Daniel for a few years when Audrey was a teenager, but those turned out to be the work of Daniel’s then-husband, Kevin, and they stopped after Daniel and Kevin got a divorce—something Audrey only knew about because Kevin wrote to let her know.
The only other relative was Audrey’s Great-Aunt Ruth, but Audrey had only a few letters from her, and she’d never met her in person. It was very unlikely Ruth was still alive. She’d be in her late nineties by now.
Just to be thorough, though, Audrey checked. A match came up immediately: Great-Aunt Ruth was living in a Jewish retirement home in Spokane. Was there any chance she’d still be lucid enough to help? Even if she could help, would she?
A chiming sound interrupted Audrey’s research: the old-style wireless doorbell she’d installed after deactivating the built-in systems. She hadn’t realized it was 4:30 already. She saved and closed her documents and data views in her lenses, then got up and tried to stretch the stiffness out of her back. She had a habit of hunching when she was doing research.
Elena would be waiting at the door. They were going for a walk at Capay Open Space Park just a few miles away.
The disruption was courtesy of a fitness plan Audrey’s personal AI had worked up for her, but it wasn’t entirely unwelcome. Apart from her little picnic with Bennet and one visit to the office she worked for in Sacramento, Audrey had hardly stepped outside for days. Too much had needed doing to ramp up the CitDiv fraud project.
“I ran into the governor here once,” Elena said. “The Cache Creek dried up again that year, and she said she was touring some of the climate impact sites. She had a bunch of her people around her, but I came over and reminded her we’d met, when she talked with a group of us from the Benton Paiute Reservation about our geothermal projects.”
“Oh, you’re Paiute?” Audrey said. She knew far more about Elena than that she had Paiute heritage through her mother, but she wasn’t about to mention research she’d had to do to allow the friendship to go forward.
That was all Elena needed to launch into a discussion about illustrious ancestors, famous people she’d met while working for the tribe, and the prestigious school careers of her two nieces. Audrey listened half-attentively as they ambled down trails and through scraggly oak trees along the trickle of the creek. The temperature was in the nineties again that day—mid-thirties Celsius to Cascadians—and both Audrey and Elena wore battery-powered cooling collars. The grass to either side was thirsty and tinted with yellow. California and much of the American South was weathering another round of multi-year droughts, but it seemed to Audrey to be a little better in Cascadia, where more care seemed to be taken with water and more landscapes had been adapted to last through dry spells. Birth rates around the world had been brought down over decades, mostly through advocacy for women and women’s support services, and the world’s population was finally falling instead of rising, but even without ever-increasing populations, there were many places where water supplies were unreliable at best. Audrey knew enough to be grateful that most Americans and Cascadians still had access to water just by turning a faucet handle.
Keeping a bit of her attention on Elena’s monologue, Audrey refocused the rest of her mind on the CitDiv project. She’d made contact with each of the workers in the Citizen Dividend Office, none of whom knew about the others, and with an economics professor at U.C. Davis who was providing guidance on the finer details of defrauding the system. Bennet Culkin was gathering a list of potential participants, and Audrey had more from files at the Reemployment Initiatives Bureau. These were passed on to other American assets who were purposely unknown to Audrey, people who were responsible for the messaging and record-keeping.
She’d developed careful criteria to limit which names she passed along, because it was important to only include people who would take the windfall without asking too many questions. Others who might meet the more obvious criteria but who wouldn’t be easily distracted by money needed to be excluded—for example, that person Audrey had met while sitting in with Dylan Poppe, Marley. As long as Audrey’s unknown collaborators stuck to the lists Audrey sent them, nobody like Marley would be included.
“Come on, slowpoke,” Elena called back from further up the trail. “It’s not exercise if you don’t actually move! You know, down this way is where one of the locations they used in that movie back in the thirties ... what was it called? That one with Ashley Tallman ...”
Audrey picked up the pace.
Audrey’s work for the U.S. was going well, but unfortunately, she wasn’t being left alone to her task. In passing, Bennet had mentioned receiving a drone from Audrey’s superiors in the U.S. with a list of thousands of candidates for the program, people whom U.S. AIs had profiled as unusually likely to accept financial windfalls from dubious sources. Gathering that information in the U.S. had been unnecessary and likely a little laborious for someone, and the fact that the information was going to Bennet and not to her was concerning. Bennet didn’t seem to realize he had gotten the only copy, and Audrey hadn’t volunteered that it was new information to her.
Why were her superiors, who seemed lukewarm on the mission in the first place, sending unrequested help? Did she have an unknown ally?
Unless it wasn’t meant to be helpful. Was someone at the home office trying to undermine her in order to better the chances of war?
Or maybe it was just a new recruit trying to prove themself. From out in Cascadia, Audrey had no good way of knowing.
Elena was talking about her niece Dahlia, who apparently had been awarded some kind of fellowship. Up ahead, two lithe, black dogs ranged off-leash ahead of their owner.
The fact that a cross-border drone had been used meant that approval had to have come from high up—most likely from Audrey’s biggest detractor, Tyler Godbout, the New Hampshirite who had helped bring the Mountain Republic back into the U.S. If that was the case, it wasn’t likely to have been intended to help the mission, unless that hypothetical unknown ally had enough leverage to get Godbout’s people to assist. That seemed unlikely. She had to wonder whether there was an intentional problem with the particular names they’d sent. She wanted to turn the scarf AI loose on the problem, but she had no way to be sure she could trust it to do anything that might compromise the home office or Godbout himself.
“I could talk about those girls all day,” Elena said. Elena’s fast speech slowed to only medium fast when she talked about her nieces, and her voice took on a fond, musing quality Audrey enjoyed. So why had she stopped?
“We still have three hours of sunlight,” Audrey said.
“Don’t tempt me,” said Elena. “Anyway, I have some questions. I’ve been noticing some things about you.”
“That would make you just about the only person,” Audrey joked, but she felt a chill.
“You’re reminding me,” Elena said. “We have to talk about your man situation sooner or later. I’m keeping my eye out, but you’d need a very specific type, smart and level-headed. So far I don’t have any candidates—but let’s not change the subject. What’s your secret project?”
“My what?”
“Your secret project. Whatever you’re doing that you don’t want anyone to know about.”
Audrey had to force her voice to stay steady, her steps to continue at the same pace. “You mean my plot to steal your nieces? You can’t stop me. I already hired the kidnappers.”
“Audrey,” Elena said. “You come here from the U.S., and you immediately have a job, while regular people spend months and years trying to find one. And you turn down your CitDiv, which you have as much right to as anyone else and which would only make it easier to pay the bills.”
“I was offered the job while I was still in the U.S., trying to decide whether to move. I didn’t want to take CitDiv money because my job pays well enough, and I figured I wouldn’t have any trouble moving here if I promised not to cost the state money.”
Elena huffed dismissively. “First of all, taking the CitDiv is just normal. Nobody cares if you take it or not. Second of all, you were born on this side of the border, so even though this wasn’t Cascadia then, by law you have every right to move here regardless of Citizen Dividend or anything else.”
“I just didn’t want to take the chance.”
“I guess you didn’t,” Elena said. “You’re actually taking precious few chances since you arrived, considering how independent-minded you are. We’ll get back to that. I was also going to say: you decide to live in a nothing place like Esparto even though you have no family or connections here. Then once you move in, you disconnect half the electronics in your house.”
“You’re darn right I did,” Audrey said. “And you would, too, if you cared about your privacy.”
“There’s no such thing as privacy anymore,” Elena said. “It’s one of those old things they had before everything became electronic. You’re working on something secret. What is it?”
Spending time with Elena had clearly been a mistake. Even so, Audrey couldn’t help feeling a little proud of her friend.
“I’m amazed at you,” Audrey said. “Are you some kind of spy?”
“Are you?” said Elena.
Audrey was eighty to ninety percent sure Elena wasn’t serious.
“If I tell you,” Audrey said slowly, coming to a stop on the path, “Do you promise not to tell anyone?”
Elena hesitated. Then she said, “I promise.”
“I’m serious about this, Elena. You like to communicate. If you communicate with anyone about this, I could get in a lot of trouble.”
“No, I promise,” Elena said. Nearby, a bird keened.
“I’m searching for my mother and my sister,” Audrey said. “I haven’t heard from them for forty years.”
“Why is that a secret?” Elena said.
“I’ve been looking for a long time,” said Audrey. “I’ve exhausted all the legal means at my disposal. There are some systems and databases I’m not supposed to have access to, but my job gives me tools I wouldn’t have otherwise.”
“I was hoping for something more juicy,” Elena said. “But I’ll settle for a family mystery and a little bit of illegal data use. Why do you think they’re so hard to find?”
“I honestly don’t know,” Audrey said. Her hands were shaking, and she willed her body to settle down before it gave her away. “Any ideas?”
The next day was a Thursday, and since Audrey had finished the orientation phase of her work, she went back to the Reemployment Initiatives Bureau office in Sacramento to sit down with Gordon McGill, the director.
Gordon was a cheery white man with a gleaming, bald head and a gray beard the size of a Pomeranian. His greatest talents, in Audrey’s opinion, were as a facilitator and an encourager. An innovator, however, he was not. As new as the Cascadian system was to Audrey, given her long involvement in the field, she felt she had some useful ideas that could help solidify her place in the organization.
She showed up expecting to see Gordon right away, but he’d been rescheduled at the last minute to meet with an unexpected group of Chinese dignataries that had come for a jobs summit sponsored by the Cascadian government.
She spent her unplanned time touching base meeting some colleagues in person whom she’d only seen virtually so far. Later in the morning, Gordon carved out ten minutes to hear how her orientation had gone and to promise he would be all hers by 1:30.
If Audrey had known she’d be in Sacramento the whole day, she would have brought some gumbo for lunch. As it was, she went downstairs to try the cafeteria, which she’d heard wasn’t half bad.
It was the wrong day to try the cafeteria. The Chinese delegation turned out to be many dozens of members, all of whom seemed to be eating at the same time. It took nearly half an hour for Audrey to get a plate of fish tacos and a salad, and once she had it, she had trouble spotting an open seat. There, though: across the room, she could see an empty two-person table. Even as she watched, a man around her own age with tidy, gray-blond hair took one of the seats. She wended her way through the crowd to get there before someone else took the other one. The Chinese diners filled the room with a musical din.
When she reached the table, the man looked up. Audrey was struck by his eyes, which were deep brown and which, to her surprise, seemed to actually take her in. His appraisal was nothing like the transient glances she was used to. For just a moment, she was lost for words.
“Have a seat, if you don’t mind company,” he said. “I don’t think anyone’s getting a table to themself today.”
She sat, looking at his tray. He also had the fish tacos.
“I approve of your choice,” he said. He had a rich voice, like a radio announcer from the old days. He was broad-shouldered and more or less barrel-shaped, with quick eyes.
They ate their tacos in silence. The man finished his first. “It was nice of them to send someone to eat with me,” he said. “I don’t know many people in the building.”
“I’m new, too,” Audrey said. “That must be why they told me to go sit with you.”
The man’s eyes narrowed, and he seemed on the verge of asking who they were before he smiled.
“I’m encouraged to see that there are a few other people around our age who are still employed,” he said.
“Our age?” said Audrey.
“I’m twenty-six, myself,” he said. “You must be a few years younger?”
That wasn’t a bad save, Audrey thought, unless he’d been setting it up.
They spent a few minutes talking about the heat of the summer and what little they each knew about the jobs summit, but having finished their food, it became clear they needed to give up their table to less fortunate diners who were still milling around the room forlornly, trays in hand.
“I’m Noah,” the man said, standing. “This is too hectic a situation for good conversation. Maybe we should have a normal lunch together sometime.”
“Maybe we should,” said Audrey. The man motioned to his lenses, using a dated, inefficient gesture sequence, and his contact information appeared on her display. Noah Drell, it said, with a call-and-message link. She hesitated before gesturing to her own lenses and pushing her own contact information back. Noah nodded, gathered his tray, and left.
Fairly certain she’d somehow just agreed to a date, Audrey stared after him. Part of her wondered what in hell had just happened, while the rest just observed the calm, deft way he wove through the commotion until he was out of sight.