Read Online Crashed by Robin Wasserman - Free Book Online

(the glass walls of the housing cubes sucked up plenty of solar energy, but privacy apparently took precedence over energy efficiency when it came to protecting industrial secrets). Not that it mattered, since these days all corps did pretty much the same thing. Plenty of programming and systems maintenance, a dash of information processing, a smidge of chem- and bio-engineering, probably even a pinch of manual labor for flavor. Yes, machines could do almost anything, but human labor was just as efficient, half as expensive, and, especially when it came to exceedingly toxic waste or toxic working conditions, 100 percent more disposable.
    "Why would anyone want to do that?" I'd asked my godfather, confused by the pale, ashen-faced workers spilling out of their underground burrows.
    "No one wants to," he'd said, and left it at that.
    So it fell to my father to explain: Not all corp jobs were created equal. Which was why jobs were assigned rather than chosen. It was easier that way, more orderly, more efficient. Joining a corp-town meant free housing, free food, free medtech--and it meant accepting the job you were given. Whatever job the corp-minders judged you to deserve.
    "People like choice," my father had said. "But they like food even more." And it was easier on everyone to have a nation of employees than a nation of beggars. So everyone was happy.
    The few who weren't, the few who preferred to make their own rules--have too many children, vote for whoever they wanted, eat more than their ration of soymeat, use more than their ration of power--well, they were welcome to move to a city and see for themselves how freedom tasted. If they were good enough, they might even get out again. This was America, after all. Anyone could get ahead.
    That's what my father had always told me.
    The residence cubes were identical and unmarked, leaving us no choice but to trust the cart when it deposited us at an entrance. Behind the transparent walls, thousands scurried back and forth through a multileveled atrium, denizens of an oversize ant farm. Towering above our heads were the hundreds of privacy-free residential units, cubes within cubes, complete with all the comforts of a 15' x 15' home.
    Riley led us into the ground-level atrium, its carpet of artificial grass gleaming green in artificial sunlight that belied the dark gloom beyond its walls. Corp-towners worked on a three-shift system, one-third working while the other two-thirds slept or played, so even in the middle of the day, there were more orgs than I'd expected milling about the plaza, toting bags of food and clothes and whatever other crap they wasted their corp-credit on. Orgs everywhere, cozying up to one another on park benches, strolling hand in hand down paths lined with fake stepping stones, people crowding in and out of the elevators that would speed them up or down to their housing module. Maybe it wasn't more people than I'd ever seen in one place, but knowing that there were thirty levels above us and another twenty carved out of the ground below, all of them equally packed, made me want out.
    Not that any of them came near us. As we walked down one of the curving paths, a vacuum opened in the crowd, as if an invisible force were clearing our way. And as they edged backward, they stared. And whispered. At least, some of them whispered--some insulted us in raised voices, unashamed.
    "What are they doing here?"
    "It's uglier than I thought."
    "What do you think it's thinking?"
    A laugh. "As if it thinks."
    "Mom, it's looking at me." That was a whiny kid, pink hair, baggy overalls hanging over a matching pink hug shirt, the kind I'd loved when I was a kid. For a few blissfully simple months, trading hug shirts had been the perfect declaration of best friendship: You had only to wrap your arms across your chest and, no matter where she was, your best friend would feel the hug. We'd all dug them out again in junior high--boyfriends made the tech infinitely more