Working the Game

I knew it was going to be a bad day when I saw the scrag almost get cut in half an hour after work began.

I was working on a crew off Hodges Street, a mile from the wall that cut us off from inner Raleigh. I'd been on the job for eighteen days now. For my first two weeks, the oldest workers - the ones with years of breakdown and restructuring in their hands and backs and legs - constantly watched me for any hint of weakness in the chilly fall air. For all of them, half an instant's distraction could mean a painful, crushing death. And the wall would still be there whether any of us lived or died.

But the wall and the cold didn't matter so much now that I was finally working the game. Before I'd been just a scrag, doing the shit work no one else would do. At ten points an hour, this was my first legit job. At a hundred thousand points, I could put in an application for my and Lia's chance to go over the wall, and at two hundred thousand we could pay for it. At our site, Kwabe and Natalie had the highest point totals, so they had been chosen by the govvie to lead the job; they had the most to lose. Rumor had it that Kwabe, after working fifteen years straight, already had his application to go over the wall almost paid for, and he would be gone in a matter of days.

Maybe Lia and I'd be gone, too, someday. Maybe in fifteen years, like Kwabe, if we both kept working, and if Lia could hold out that long in the cold. This morning, my wrist had read an even fifteen degrees, and the front door of Lia's box had been blocked by half a foot of new, blue-tinted snow. It wasn't supposed to be this cold, not in October, and especially not here in Raleigh. I'd been chilled to the bone since late August, and Lia hadn't stopped coughing since June.

So to keep my points flowing and my mind off the cold, I worked. Each day was a new list, relayed to the group leaders through their wrist implants. The routine was the same whether you were at a reconstruction or a deconstruction job: you make or take down your quota of walls, you get all your points; you don't get enough walls put up or taken down, the points come off, two, then four, then eight at a time. Three of the scrags in my group had decided not to show up this morning. We'd have trouble making our quota with just the five of us.

I melted a six-inch-thick border onto the floor the length of one of the pieces of duraplast. This was the easy part of putting up walls. Coated with a thin lining of nanodes, each duraplast wall on the fifth floor would get fused to the top-most block of duraplast on the fourth floor. As long as we got the new piece of duraplast in place before the plastic cooled, the outer wall would be immobile in five minutes. By that time the tech inside the new wall would have talked to the tech in the existing wall, and then you had a smart wall. A wall that controlled the heat and cold, muffled the sounds of the outside and neighbors, even showed old vids, all according to the preset settings. At least that's how Natalie had explained the tech to me.

To my surprise, Nat had given me her leveler at the start of the day. Only foremen used these yard-long tools, digital versions of the old levels that Nat said used to work with water, somehow. Half the junk she told me about old jobsites had to have been made up. But she'd given me her leveler, and she'd kill me if the first wall I did on my own was crooked.

Takeem and two other scrags had the piece of duraplast waiting for me. Takeem was a good kid, and smart. When I popped off the fuser, Takeem and the other scrags hefted the duraplast over me and fit it vertically into place, careful not to let their bare skin touch the melted floor before the wall was fused. If they did make contact, they'd be infected by the nanodes. Nat knew a scrag - there was always a scrag story, I thought with a grin - who was sucked into a wall that way, and was now part of a smart wall in a building outside Durham.

Once the wall was in place, I slid the fuser up the right hand side, bonding it with the existing wall. Holding my breath, I held the leveler next to the wall, squinting at the readout. It was level.

When I looked up from the wall, a stupid grin on my face, it happened.

Twenty yards away, two scrags struggled with the wiring for one of the north-facing walls. The scrags were so new I didn't know their names. I made it a point of remembering everyone's names, even if Roberts, one of the older workers, thought I was just wasting my time.

The girl jerked at the wires being fed up from the scrags below, her hair falling into her face. The guy reached over to help her, and the wire in his hand touched the wire in hers. They both were thrown by the electric contact. The girl skidded back into the building, while the boy was knocked into Kwabe, who was working his cutter on a bad piece of recycle. The boy's legs crossed the beam of the cutter, and the screaming began.

Continued...