When I come to, I find that I'm sitting on a torn-up leatherette couch that must have once been red. As I look around groggily, I see that I'm in a small room crowded with junk. There's exposed pipes and duct work lining the ceiling, and I'm engulfed in the white noise of whirring fans.
Surrounding the couch are plastic milk crates, each one filled with shabby carbon squares stacked together. Across from me is a dusty wooden credenza with a diamond pattern across its front. It is covered with more of the carbon squares.
There's a machine that looks like those old video arcade games I've seen in old movies. But instead of a video screen, there's a host of mechanical parts inside.
There's a closed door on one wall. Along the opposite wall is a floral patterned couch. And on it sits...Chris.
"Welcome to our Eden of analog," he says as my eyes linger on my strange surroundings.
I have no need of pleasantries. It's been weeks since I first saw him here in New Rome. It's been years since I last saw him on Earth.
I remember that day as if it happened yesterday. He admitted to me that he'd made a deal with RoboNomics -- with his father's company. He tried to convince me that he had every good intention. But just like the old saying suggested, he'd paved the way to hell for Toronto. No one had a good life while the Anti-Robotists were in charge.
"How could you have betrayed us like that?" I scream at him.
"Well, hello to you too, Teach." He shifts forward in his seat. "Or should I say, Ms. Anderson. You've moved up in the world, haven't you? And now you're here, living happily in New Rome, surrounded by the machines you once swore to take down."
"Cut the crap, Chris. Just tell me why you're here."
A dark cloud passes over Chris' face.
"I knew how passionate you were, and I knew if you found out that I was a traitor to the cause, you'd turn your back on me. That I'd lose you." Chris said. "I'd lose what was between us."
"All we really had between us was secrets. Did we have anything else?"
"Do you know how they hate you down there? Do you have any idea how many of your colleagues would thank me if I destroyed you right now?"
I'm not about to response to his threat. I want answers.
"How did you even get here? I thought you were -- how is it that you're Robert Newhouse's son?"
"Yeah, I'm his son," he answers grimly as he slides back on the sofa and leans into the cushions. "And I was also a garbage collector. I know this is difficult for you to understand, but some of us don't want the cash, the privilege, the power offered us. Some of us just want the dignity to choose our own profession."
Then he tells me his story.
He was a child of privilege, born nearly four decades ago to one of the richest families in America. Raised in New York City, he lived in a world of great privilege and expectations.
While his father was busy building RoboNomics, buying out semiconductor and computer conglomerates and putting automated intelligent machines on the market, he was in high school. He pissed away money on drugs, partying, and girls.
By the time college was over, he was a burn out. He needed a break from his life, a moment to breathe before the world of his father's making swallowed him whole.
"Oh, poor little rich boy," I snipe.
Chris ignores the comment.
"He agreed to it. My father said it would be good for me -- to know what it would be like to have a real job. To be a self-made man like him, rather than a spoiled kid. So I took the first job I interviewed for: a garbage collector. I got a shitty apartment and moved out. And I loved it. The guys I hung with on the job, the feeling of being bone tired at the end of a day. And the freedom. What I liked most was the freedom."
"Freedom?"
"You know what I mean, Anderson. You've been here long enough to know that your role is clearly defined. That you can no longer tell them who you are. You are not Andrea Anderson. You're the head of iTronics. Your stock will rise and fall with that company's fortune."
He explains why he came to Toronto in the first place. When his year of 'real life' experience was up, he still wasn't ready to join RoboNomics. He couldn't take the job and the destiny laid out for him.
And so he changed his name, left the states, and continued the work he loved. That is, until he was replaced by one of his father's machines.
"He caught up to me, eventually," he concludes. "When the Group formed and when we started getting in the Toronto Star, the stories were circulated through the press. He knew me right away."
"Okay?"
"Don't you see, Andrea. I had to make a deal with him. I had to. If we'd done all that work to get our jobs back and succeeded, what then? Do you think I had any choice? Do you think I would have been able to just go back to the way things were? I'm his heir, Andrea. And to people like my father, that means only one thing."
"So, what? You botched the riot so that you could still be a garbage collector? How does that work?"
"It wasn't supposed to go that way. He didn't tell me that everything was going to go to shit. I didn't know about that until later. But he gave me Toronto. And as long as I had that city, there was a chance that I could find you."
People giving and taking cities as if they were fruit baskets. People building a Martian city in secret. Clearly there were things in the world that I've never been privy to before.
I used to be a member of the unwashed masses, living in the same way as everyone had for centuries. Maybe things were better that way. I may not have been worldly, but at least I had been happy.
"What do you want from me?" I ask.
"We're not even close to being done. You thought we'd lost the war, didn't you?"
"What are you talking about?"
"Back on Earth, at the protest and afterwards, the bots came full force to fuck up the world and then they disappeared. You thought they won? Look where we are, Andrea. A world of automation. Oh, we're not nearly done."
"You're not still hoping things can go back to the way they were, are you?"
"Of course not. I know they can never go back. What I want is recompense. They owe us for all they took away from us and everyone down there on Earth."
I stare at him speechlessly.
"Isn't that what you want, Andrea? Don't you want to save your friends from that dying planet?" He says the last two words mockingly.
I start. "Whatever you're planning, it's not the way."
"How could you know what I'm planning?"
"I don't. But I know you."
"You're going to help me." He grabs his FlexPhone out of his inside pocket and presses it once.
"You can't just go around hunting everyone and double crossing..."
Two men enter. I gasp when I see that one of them is Joe. They're dressed in layers of black: cargo pants and pocketed vests.
It's Joe's face that strikes me most. He still towers over me, but he's emaciated, a ghostly vision of his former self.
"Come on," Joe says.
It's as if he doesn't recognize me. He and the other equally large man grab me, haul me up. They follow Chris as he exits the room.
"Joe," I say. "Come on, let go. Joe, it's me Andrea."
"Anderson!" Chris spins around to face us.
The room in which we stand is as black as the first, but with tables and chairs scattered here and there. People sit around, obscured by the shadows. At the end of the room is a bar with a human, rather than a robotic, bartender.
"Wha -- what is this place?" I ask as Joe pushes me into a seat.
"This is our place," says Chris. "It's our bar."
I look at the shadows cast by bone on hollowed-out faces. Chris stands out in his suit in among the rags that hang from the other bodies.
"Antirobotists?" I ask to no one in particular. "Here?"
"Yes, Andrea. And we have a plan that you're going to help us with."
"What makes you think I would help you ever again?"
"Besides the fact that together you and I have access to the most stunning resources contained in this paradise of automation, I have something else to convince you."
"How could you possibly convince me?" I sound more confident than I feel.
"Teacher, CEO, Philanthropist," he says. "You've worn many different hats in your life, haven't you?"
"What's your point?"
"You were also once known as a computer programmer, weren't you? And you didn't exactly use your skills for anything respectable."
I stare. He couldn't know, could he?
I'd covered my tracks. I'd been so careful. There was only one person alive who knew my secret. Not even the vast network of New Roman artificial intelligence has it on record.
There's only one person in existence who has ever known about my past.
But that person is emerging from the shadows in the room. A dark, thin form that I once knew so well.
"Maybe he can't convince you, Tohru," the man says as he comes forward. "But I can."
My mouth hangs open and my hands go cold. I gasp. "Matt?"
(Continued in Chapter 84...)
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Who's Matt, you ask? Remember Chapter 32? Yeah, it's a bit fuzzy for me as well. Is it too esoteric a reveal for you? Let me know!