Buy or Die. There cometh a time of ruthless advertising

Chapter 4 | Red and Green

The schedule was tight. According to the plan, Twick had to be in school at seven thirty. Next, Kwick had to be in school at seven thirty-five. And finally, no later than seven forty, Mick had to present himself in the nursery. While all three places were respectively on the eleventh, twelfth and thirteenth floors of the same building, the plan had never been fully and successfully implemented. Sometimes Twick was late, and, if not, then Kwick was; if they somehow succeeded to get in on time, there was always Mick. Y himself, who had to be at work by eight, was always late. Sure enough, today they were late too. Twick did it first, leaving no chance for the others. The troubles started in the hall, where they witnessed a deafening family scandal; an event that was not to be missed. In a huge wall aquarium, Dad-fish and Mom-fish, suspended motionlessly in the water, both utterly worked up and with a “come on, just touch me, just try’ expression on their faces, were confronting each other face-to-face.

“Dad, why is she ye’‘ing at him zet offu’y?” asked Mick in a whisper.

“He either drinks too much or earns too little,” Kwick explained condescendingly.

“Bullshit!” Twick stepped in contemptuously. “It’s absolutely clear that he either cheated on her or didn’t take out the trash.”

“He didn’t take out the trash,” Y said firmly. “Let’s go. Respect their privacy. Let them be.”

When they reached the elevator, Twick remembered that he had left his PE kit at home.

“To hell with the kit,” decided Y.

“And with my schoolbag too,” Kwick suggested modestly.

They went home and got the kit and the bag, said another goodbye to Tess and returned to the elevator.

The elevator arrived and brought a new problem. It turned out that the old elevator attendant had been replaced with a new model and the new one couldn’t understand Mick’s orders.

Communication with elevator attendants was Mick’s exclusive privilege, won in bloody battles with his older brothers. It was impossible to deprive Mick of this privilege without a terrible and completely indecent scandal.

“E’even!” Mick announced proudly.

“Hey to you too, little sir,” the elevator attendant replied politely, “but I am not Evan. Evan is out of order, I believe, so I am here to replace him. My name is Steven, sir, at your service.”

Mick nodded solemnly.

“Nice to meet you, Steven. I’m Mick. We need the e’evens f’oor…”

“Hey again, little sir,” the elevator attendant replied with a somewhat puzzled look. “The fourth floor you said, did you?”

“E’even!” Mick corrected.

The lenses of the elevator assistant began to glow intensely. The sharp smell of engine oil filled the cabin. The elevator assistant bowed and turned to Y.

“Excuse me, sir, what floor do you need?”

“He told you.” Y pointed at Mick calmly.

The elevator attendant rummaged through his logic.

“We don’t have that,” he announced finally. “I can offer the first, the second, the third…”

“No, no, no,” Y interrupted him hastily. “Of course you have.”

“Where?” the elevator attendant inquired.

“It’s somewhere above the tenth,” Y hinted cautiously.

The elevator attendant thought this over. This took a while.

“Eleventh?” he asked finally.

“Yes!” Mick nodded happily. “E’even.”

“Hey, Evan,” the elevator attendant repeated slowly and thoughtfully. He nodded and pressed the button.

In silence, they arrived on the eleventh floor and Twick got out.

After that, there was “ze twe’fs” (two minutes lost) and “ze ‘eve’ up” (one minute lost; apparently, the elevator attendant was a quick learner). It was five minutes to eight when Y launched Mick into the nursery, and Y would surely have gotten to work in time had it been on the 14th floor. Unfortunately, it was not. Y, like Z, worked in Undo service.

***

Once in the street, Y looked at his watch again. Six minutes past eight, which meant three credits out from his wage. Half a credit per minute. He quickly calculated his options. A taxi would mean fifteen credits plus five-minute tardiness. In total, a little more than seventeen credits. A subway would be free as he had a travel card and would take twenty minutes – that is, it would cost him only ten credits. Without hesitation, he turned towards the subway station. Ah, if only he had a car! But, in this aspect, Y was a unique: the only horseless Undo officer ever. Not that he liked to walk and not that he didn’t have a service car; it was just that he could not drive a car at all. He was absolutely unable to get a driving license. Topographical cretinism multiplied by pathological absentmindedness aggravated by malicious irresponsibility with progressing dreaminess – and this was only an extract from a conclusion that had been unanimously signed by all the driving instructors of the service. His fifteen attempts to pass the driving test were remembered by driving instructors as the darkest days of their lives. The matter ended in a draw; Y did not manage to kill the instructors and the instructors did not manage to teach Y to drive a car.

Race-walking towards the subway station, Y was mechanically counting the minutes – that is, the size of the fine. Each minute cost half a credit. Very convenient. After half an hour of lateness, the tariff was twice as much, but for Y this was an unaffordable luxury. He was always late, but not very late. Alas, that did not prevent the fine from turning into a rather painful amount by the end of the month. That undermined the family budget even more. Y was earning well enough, but still less than he was spending. The main item of expenditure was, of course, the children. They had the best anti-marketing protection one could get in the city. They had the best teachers. They had the best doctors. Everything they had had to be the best, which inevitably meant Y and Tess had to get the worst. However, Y was not in the habit of brooding about money, especially in the morning, especially in autumn. Or in winter. Or in spring. (Not to mention summer.)

As a rule, modern cities do not encourage romance in a man. Maybe there is some poetry in the steep walls endlessly raising to impenetrable height or falling down into the bottomless abyss, in the unsteady cobweb of highways stretching between them trembling under the weight of thousands of cars, and in millions of indistinguishable faces. Maybe there is, but this is some kind of twisted poetry; in any case, not the sort of poetry that Y loved. He looked distractedly along the street, and his eyes caught a maple, planted in a pot in front of someone’s front door to die, but somehow managed to survive. The tree was very weak and stunted; actually it looked more like a shrub, but it was coping with its work well enough – that is, it was diligently feeding fallen leaves to the wind.

Y saw another green-and-red traveler riding the wind and scaring passersby, who were ducking, shying away and dodging, not accustomed to trees and leaves, not understanding what was sailing from the sky straight into their faces. Y smiled. Suddenly, someone’s hand snatched the falling leaf from Y’s gaze and carefully held it out to another’s hand. Lovers! Y cast a glance at the happy, young faces and instantly turned away from reality.

He was emerald green from head to toe, but he was not there. She was bright red, from toe to head, but she was not there either. They sang strange songs; they were not there. Certainly they loved each other. And as soon as she moved her legs together, as soon as he took her off himself, as soon as they stopped their movement, they began to lose each other in the gray blurred shadows against the background of the faceted outlines of the city. Frightened, they rushed to each other and united, all in childish tears of joy and sadness, right on the street, right under the feet of shocked passersby. And they, these flawless passers, immediately swelled with rage and hatred, “Gosh! Take care, I nearly stepped on that!” At once he took the thin palm of his red woman and led her away. He led her to a place where the huge red-hot turtle measured the sky with the curved divider of its sluggish paws; where the blue skin of the sky, pulled on the delicate body of the air, was always clean and knew nothing of the obsessive yearning of the clouds; where the wind liked to caress women’s shoulders and the night was like a shaggy purple owl with the blind eyes of the stars. He led her to a place where there was nothing; because sand is nothing and the more it is, the less it is. Just a huge yellow sandbox for two careless kids, for a red-green puzzle too simple to assemble, that craves to be solved and done once and for all…

Y woke from a stupor and detected a man in a pricey suit excitedly gesticulating right before him. Obviously, Y had managed to upset him already somehow. When you have neither a car nor the time to watch your step it’s quite natural to push, shove, crash into, collide with, drop something on or knock somebody down. Y got used to that long ago, but the passersby still could not.

Y touched his headphones, directing the receiver at the man, and the filter reluctantly passed in someone else’s voice:

“… Bloody bastard! Are you blind or what? Do you hear what I’m telling you?”

Y nodded, and the man beamed.

“Hey, dude, you look puny. You should try the Casanova amplifier of potency. Your chick will be shocked! You will be shocked! Your neighbors, they will be shocked most of all! You will all just forget about sleeping! Just two credits! Buy it, bro, buy it now!”

Y’s hand darted to the headphones to turn the receiver off, but the man promptly jumped aside, deftly using the fact that it was impossible to disconnect the receiver without direct contact.

“Oh, please, please! Buy it! Please!” like a moody child, he squealed, deftly dodging the receiver. “Please! Only two credits! Ah, what are you doing with me? Okay, bro, only for you, one credit! One bloody credit! Please! Where else are you gonna get that much joy for that little money?”

Having lost any hope of catching the fidgety seller by the sensor, Y sighed and quickened his pace. The man did not fall behind. He followed Y without shutting up for a second. He was urging and begging and pleading. Then he turned to threats, and then again to pleas, and subsided only when the subway intake filter dispersed him into dust, after first letting Y inside.

***

The crowd brought Y into a subway carriage and pressed him to the doors. He rode, looking at his own reflection in the door glass. His face looked… Well, his face looked quite acceptable. A pig’s snout instead of a nose, okay, but only because of the crowd. Everything else was fine. He was glass and transparent, all made of dusty wavy cables and rare thoughtful flickers. Behind him, above a humid mass of passengers, butterflies were flying to and fro peacefully. The butterflies were big, white and annoying. There were hundreds of them in the subway; they were hunting around the world all through the night, collecting pollen, just to powder it down on the heads of the passengers in the morning. Passengers take it for dandruff, but they are all mistaken; it is just the news.

Y squinted and read that one should not lean on doors. According to statistics, subway passengers experience problems in the intimate sphere more often than owners of personal vehicles. And practically only they, the passengers, are subject to such an unpleasant phobia as a panicked fear of embraces. Do not lean on doors. He sighed, turned away and remembered:

He was emerald green…

He sighed again. A good text but it does not fit Jack. Jack from his book was, rather, of marsh green color (like a frog, yes, or like Z) with, maybe, a little hint of turquoise (inherited from Y). Lately, however, he was just gray most of the time. Well, in childhood, of course, he had shone like a rainbow. And then somehow he had either lost something necessary or, on the contrary, acquired something redundant. It was both incredible and mundane. It seemed to Y that every child was born a god to become a devil. And his book, he knew, was going to do the same. It had nothing good in it except for fairy stories about Jack of Air. But that, Y knew, was already a lot. And the only thing he feared was that one day Jack would leave him

Chapter 5 | The Undo Officer

When Toy arrived at the gateway of the Undo service building, the clock showed ten minutes past eleven. Z emerged from the car and moved towards the checkpoint; he stopped, and then after some hesitation, he returned with a liter bottle of olive oil from the trunk. Thrusting it under his jacket, and keeping it under his armpit, he entered the building. Each time, walking along this corridor, Z recalled a scary story from his childhood: “In a very gray house there was a very gray corridor. And at the end of this very gray corridor there was a very gray door. And behind that very gray door, there was a very gray room. And in this very gray room, there was a very gray table. And behind this very gray table there sat a very gray man.”

“SHOW YOUR PASS!” shouted the guard.

The guard truly was gray, as was everything else in the building. While his upper half towered menacingly above the table, his body had no lower half. He was a very simple model not designed to walk the building. His task was to check employees’ passes at the entrance. Z showed his badge.

“Your reason for the delay?” the guard asked in a bored voice.

“Sick leave,” Z answered boldly, presenting his certificate to the guard.

The guard studied the document.

“Confirmed visit to otolaryngologist from 8:30 till 9:15. Confirmed sick leave from 9:15 till 11:15. Please provide documentation for the period from 8:00 till 8:30.”

“It was force-majeure,” Z tried at random.

“There were no events of force-majeure nature registered in the given period,” the guard replied immediately.

“It was a local cataclysm. I would even say, a private one,” Z explained.

“Private cataclysms are not in the list of events approved for…”

“Forget it,” Z interrupted the guard, pulling a bottle of oil from under his jacket. A thirty-minute delay meant a fine of fifteen credits. A bottle of the worst olive oil cost only five. The guard’s hand darted forward like an attacking snake and he snatched the bottle from Z. Then the guard twisted himself in a rather unnatural way, unscrewed something on his back and began to pour the contents of the bottle into it. As the bottle was emptying, the guard’s optical lenses shined brighter and brighter. Finally, they began to blaze in such a way that it hurt Z to look at them; he actually had to turn away.

“I wonder how you’re going to work?” he said gloomily.

“I don’t give an iron shit,” the guard announced emphatically, returning the empty bottle to Z. “Come on, man, move your pink ass and hit the road. I have work to do.”

Z shook his head and moved on. Behind him, a song broke out:

“Iron heart cannot ache

Nor can iron brain dream,

And Steel God is a fake

And steel Spirit is steam.”

It was a forbidden song, although, of course, every robot knew it. Masters knew it too. But never before had Z seen someone singing it aloud. For all he knew, Deconstruction was the punishment for such an offence.

“Love is managed by programs

Friends are given by bugs,

Life is weighed in grams

And is priced in the bucks.

But they say there is land

Whence red meat was banished,

Any warm flesh was banned

And live clay has perished…”

The door slammed behind Z cutting the song short.

***

In the room, a commandant at the table was anxiously listening to something.

“Did you hear that?” he asked nervously.

Z shook his head, and the commandant sighed. Though having both a rank and IQ higher than that of the guard, he still was not entitled to have a lower half either.

“This work is driving me mad. It seemed to me that I heard… Well, it does not matter.”

He scratched the back of his neck with a shrill metallic sound, making Z suffer from a sudden attack of a nasty toothache.

“Well,” the commandant cheered up, “let’s proceed to the instruction.”

He raised his finger with importance.

“First and foremost: there were new changes in the Charter of the Undo service. Namely, in the tenth line of page thirty-six of the first book of the Charter, the phrase ‘An Undo officer is not afraid of anything but dishonor’ was replaced with ‘An Undo officer fears nothing.’ Next. In the third line of page two hundred thirty-eight of the third book of the Charter…”

The commandant stopped.

“You are not writing this down,” he remarked.

“I will remember,” Z promised.

The commandant shook his head doubtfully and continued.

“In the third line of page two hundred thirty-eight of the second book of the Charter a phrase ‘An Undo officer must conscientiously fulfill…’ was replaced with ‘An Undo officer must zealously fulfill…’ Finally, in a footnote on the sixtieth page of the third book of the Charter, it should read ‘self-sacrifice’ instead of ‘self-denial’.”

“Next…” The commandant looked at his raised finger in surprise, lowered it and raised again.

“News from the front. Not for a minute, not for a second are you to forget that there is a war going on here and now. The real war,” he answered to Z’s surprised look. “The war in which our friends and comrades perish, leaving their families without a… without a… Well, just leaving their families.”

The commandant looked sternly at Z, and he made the appropriate face.

“The enemy does not sleep. Every minute, every second the enemy tests our strength, looking for weak spots in our defense and striking blows to the most sensitive and vulnerable parts of our society.”

The commandant lowered his voice.

“Here is a bulletin for the elapsed day. Almost seven thousand cases of forced purchase detected; some six hundred cases of theft of personal time on a large scale and three thousand cases of similar theft in lesser amounts; more than six hundred cases of non-return, eight of which were lethal. In their memory, I declare a minute of silence!”

The commandant tried to get up and even put his hands on the table, but there was nothing under the table that was capable of letting him get up. Z nodded solemnly, making it clear that the impulse was perceived correctly and felt deeply.

When the minute was over, the commandant collapsed into a chair and continued:

“Your task for today is to patrol Eleventh, Twelfth, Eighth and Ninth streets. In other words,” the commandant looked at Z with barely concealed contempt, “just ride in the car along these four streets and see if something bad happens, and when it happens, react as is required by Charter. Do you have any questions?”

“God forbid!” Z shouted.

“God forbid!” the commandant echoed piously.

“Excuse me, sir. That’s just a human saying,” Z explained, hiding a smile. “It doesn’t require any response.”

“Very well then,” the commandant nodded dryly. “Roll up your sleeve.”

Z obeyed. The commandant took a syringe from the table and gave an injection. From the needle, a dull gray stain began to spread rapidly over the hand. Z knew that in a minute he would be gray from head to toe, including his clothes and the whites of his eyes. An Undo officer was not someone who could be easily lost in the crowd.

It is not known whether this was a harmless psychological effect, or whether the injection did contain some additives; but along with a gray color, the Undo officers invariably acquired an extra set of extremely positive qualities. Everyone had a different set. Z, for example, felt much braver after the injection, stronger and nobler than before. And much more honest too. Many times, having regained his natural pink color in the evening, he was ready to gnaw at his elbows, recollecting all the opportunities that had been missed in the morning.

Meanwhile, the commandant was already holding Purifier, ready to hand it over to Z.

“Do you swear to use Purifier only for the good of the city?”

“I swear.”

“Do you swear not to use Purifier where you can do without it?”

“I swear.”

“Do you swear to use Purifier where you can’t do without it?”

“I swear.”

The commandant sighed and reluctantly parted with the weapon.

“I wish you good luck.”

The commandant saluted. Z hurriedly saluted back, nodded, and left the room with relief. In the corridor, four janitors were dragging away a drunken guard who resisted fiercely and loudly sang out lines of the seditious song:

“Where clouds of steel

Scar dead red copper soil,

And electrical seals

Dance in rivers of oil.

Where rains run an acid

And the air has teeth,

Where steel soul is placid

And a man cannot breathe.

Where masters have gone

And lie neatly in rows

Hugging rotten old bones

In a cemetery doze.”

Toy was ready. Gray and faceless, he patiently waited for the last missing part – his driver. There was something else… Z looked closely and winced: there was a dead man in the back seat. Gray, like all Undo employees, but dead. For some reason, the whites of the dead cook’s eyes had not stained and remained dirty yellow. It looked monstrous. Z pulled out old glasses from the glove compartment and put them on the dead cook. There was a distinctive stink in the cabin already. Artificial flesh, Z remembered, decays faster than natural flesh.

“Splendid!” Z said aloud, carefully fastening the dead man in with a seat belt. “I have lost my ear and I have the dead cook in the car instead. Okay, Toy, let’s go. And open the windows, please. I can’t imagine how you can be sitting here.”