Bobbie stood outside, eyes closed, breathing until she heard Chuck let the door close behind her. Now she was committed. Turning around and asking Chuck to let her back in would be admitting defeat. He’d clearly done some time in the UNMC, and she wasn’t going to look weak in front of the competition. Hell no.
When her ears and nose had gotten more accustomed to the barrage of inputs, she opened her eyes again, looking down at the concrete of the walkway. Slowly, she lifted them till the horizon was in view. Ahead of her lay long sidewalks passing through meticulously tended green space. Beyond it in the distance was a gray wall that must have stood ten meters high, with guard towers regularly spaced on it. The UN complex had a surprising amount of security. She wondered if she’d be able to get out.
She needn’t have worried. As she approached the guarded gate to the outside world, the security system queried her terminal, which assured it of her VIP status. A camera above the guard post scanned her face, compared it to the picture on file, and verified her identity while she was still twenty meters from the gate. When she reached the exit, the guard snapped her a sharp salute and asked if she’d need a ride.
“No, just going for a walk,” she said.
The guard smiled and wished her a good day. She began walking down the street leading away from the UN complex, then turned around to see two armed security personnel following her at a discreet distance. She shrugged and walked on. Somebody would probably lose their job if a VIP like her got lost or hurt.
Once Bobbie was outside the UN compound, her agoraphobia lessened. Buildings rose around her like walls of steel and glass, moving the dizzying skyline far enough up that she no longer saw it. Small electric cars whizzed down the streets, trailing a high-pitched whine and the scent of ozone.
And people were everywhere.
Bobbie had gone to a couple of games at Armstrong Stadium on Mars, to watch the Red Devils play. The stadium had seats for twenty thousand fans. Because the Devils were usually at the bottom of the standings, it generally held less than half that. That relatively modest number was the greatest number of humans Bobbie had ever seen in one place at one time. There were billions of people on Mars, but there weren’t a lot of open spaces for them to gather. Standing at an intersection, looking down two streets that seemed to stretch into infinity, Bobbie was sure she saw more than the average attendance of a Red Devils game just walking on the sidewalks. She tried to imagine how many people were in the buildings that rose to vertigo-inducing heights in every direction around her, and couldn’t. Millions of people, probably in just the buildings and streets she could see.
And if Martian propaganda was right, most of the people she could see right now didn’t have jobs. She tried to imagine that, not having any particular place you had to be on any given day.
What the Earthers had discovered is that when people have nothing else to do, they have babies. For a brief period in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, the population had looked like it might shrink rather than continue to grow. As more and more women went into higher education, and from there to jobs, the average family size grew smaller.
A few decades of massive employment shrinkage ended that.
Or, again, that was what she’d been taught in school. Only here on Earth, where food grew on its own, where air was just a by-product of random untended plants, where resources lay thick on the ground, could a person actually choose not to do anything at all. There was enough extra created by those who felt the need to work that the surplus could feed the rest. A world no longer of the haves and the have-nots, but of the engaged and the apathetic.
Bobbie found herself standing next to a street-level coffee shop and took a seat.
“Can I get you anything?” a smiling young woman with brightly dyed blue hair asked.
“What’s good?”
“We make the best soy-milk tea, if you like that.”
“Sure,” Bobbie said, not sure what soy-milk tea was, but liking those two things separately enough to take a chance.
The blue-haired girl bustled away and chatted with an equally young man behind the bar while he made the tea. Bobbie looked around her, noticing that everyone she saw working was about the same age.
When the tea arrived, she said, “Hey, do you mind if I ask you something?”
The girl shrugged, her smile an invitation.
“Is everyone who works here the same age?”
“Well,” she said. “Pretty close. Gotta collect your pre-university credits, right?”
“I’m not from here,” Bobbie said. “Explain that.”
Blue seemed actually to see her for the first time, looking over her uniform and its various insignias.
“Oh, wow, Mars, right? I want to go there.”
“Yeah, it’s great. So tell me about the credits thing.”
“They don’t have that on Mars?” she asked, puzzled. “Okay, so, if you apply to a university, you have to have at least a year of work credits. To make sure you like working. You know, so they don’t waste classroom space on people who will just go on basic afterward.”
“Basic?”