And a mean old wife who died—Boo hoo!
And all the while Mickey Worthington, one of the pair of pudding-faced lawyers Wes had a hard time distinguishing from each other, was still moaning from the pain of a particularly nasty bite-Stamp combo, this one on the tender flesh of his neck, just left of his Adam’s apple. His buddy, Lee, who had panicked when the moment came to administer the Stamp, silently erected their tent on his own, occasionally throwing looks of guilt and annoyance at the weeping man he’d so humiliatingly let down. It had been a bad episode, halfway on the trail between the drop-off point and the campsite, and it was Andy, finally, who pushed the shocked Lee out of the way, gripped Mickey’s head roughly in his left arm, as if he were shouldering a watermelon, and depressed the trigger. “You need to get a fucking grip,” Andy said when he released Mickey, eyes lit with fury. It wasn’t clear if he was talking to Mickey, Lee, or both of them.
“I think the itching stopped before you got to it,” Mickey wailed, wiping his sopping face with a sleeve.
Andy stood with his hands on his hips, breath short. “You’ll know soon enough,” he said. The humor, the gruff-but-reassuring paternal pose—both were gone. He seemed simply annoyed and disgusted, and the look he flashed at the rest of them in turn was no warmer. “I’d suggest y’all wear your microsuits properly. The calf, the neck—there’s no reason why these bites should have happened.”
But then the anger slipped from Andy’s face. “Look. I’m sorry. You’ve just got to understand that I’ve been through this more times than I can count. You can’t treat every bite as cause for a nervous breakdown.”
“I don’t care,” Mickey said. “My partner didn’t do his job. It’s not right.” In his distress, a twang had slipped into his voice. It was like seeing him naked, and Wes flushed to the roots of his hair.
“It’s probably fine,” Andy said gently. “The odds are on your side. Remember that.”
“It’s not right,” Mickey said. His face shined with tears. “You pay as much I did, you expect some things.”
That had been his refrain, on and off, for the rest of the evening. He skipped dinner. As soon as Lee had pitched their tent, Mickey retreated into it. When Andy called to him irritably, “You know, Lee still needs a buddy out here,” Mickey yelled, “Fuck Lee!”
Wes crept past Mickey and Lee’s tent. It was silent and dark, and Wes hoped Mickey had exhausted himself into a deep sleep. He’d tested everyone’s nerves tonight with his whining, Wes’s, too, but you would have to be soulless not to pity him a little. To have your buddy fail you like that right out of the gate. You’d have to be soulless, and you’d have to be pretty confident in the brave stoicism of your own hypothetical future self. Wes wasn’t feeling that confident.
There was a glowing gibbous moon in the sky, bright enough that he could watch his footing as he put some distance between himself and the tents. He had a pocket-sized flashlight, but he refrained from switching it on yet. Everyone was sealed up in a tent—he’d hear their door vacs if they stepped out—but he felt sheepish and exposed out here. His digestive cycle was off; he hadn’t emptied his bowels in nearly two days. Andy had recommended that they answer that particular call of nature only in the daytime, unless it was an emergency, so that they could scan the area around them in full light. Good advice, of course. Wes imagined a nightmare scenario in which he’d have to try Stamping his own bitten ass or—worse—scream until someone (Marta? Good lord) could come and do it for him. But he needed privacy, and now that he was out here, this might be one of the few opportunities he’d have to get it.
He shuffled downhill another twenty paces, until the camp lights were an abstract glow without an identifiable source, and shined his flashlight on the ground in front of him. There was a rich, musty smell in the air that he’d never before experienced, a damp smell, decaying but totally alive, that rose from the layers of fallen leaves that created a soft carpet underfoot. He liked it. Not enough, yet, to make him glad that he was about to take his first open-air dump, but enough to ward off some of the despair that threatened to level him—a despair that was bigger than Wes, a despair that felt as real and risky as it did because he could sense that the other travelers were on the verge of it, too.
He stopped beside the wide trunk of a tree and looked around. Here was as good a place as any. He put the penlight between his teeth, letting the beam fall on the ground, and started clearing a circular patch of leaves. When he’d done that—no sign of ticks, not that they’d be easy to spot with these shadows—he used the edge of a small, flat rock to dig a shallow depression in the earth. Then, heart racing, he quickly swung around, unzipped the back of his suit, and dropped down on his haunches, letting his back rest against the tree trunk for balance. This was a thousand times worse than using a public toilet. A million times worse. He waited, sweat slicking his temples, his thighs and ankles beginning to quiver under the strain. He was, he realized, terrified.
Jesus Christ, he thought. What am I doing? What have I done?
—
After the spectacular failure of Virtuz, and the eighteen months of his life he’d lost to what amounted, now, to a digital garbage pile, Wes was left feeling a little cynical. And more than a little panicked. There were rumblings among the shareholders; the little upstart virtual money co-op everyone had been dismissing just last year, Bank On It, was gaining an indie following that would soon spill over into something . . . well, not so indie. Bank On It’s nineteen-year-old founding CEO, Chetna Sai, was the newest tech darling, a tattooed, eye-riveted punk pixie whose innovation to social banking was a brilliant little spin on crowd-sourcing, in which groups of people could mobilize behind a charity, or a movie project, or a politician, whatever, and do a Collect Invest, with to-the-second updates on interest gained and market trends. One Bank On It Collect Invest had earned, in a month’s time, enough profits to bankroll the campaign of Compassion Party presidential candidate Guy Wiley, who was now poised to make an actual showing in the November elections. Why the hell hadn’t Wes thought of this? Why, instead of screwing around with the idea of virtues, hadn’t he been coming up with ways to let money do what it does best: create power? The key was to find the right vessel for that power. That was capitalism at work. That was how a person could hope to be both a good person and a successful one.