Free Shattered by Robin Wasserman

pathetic show of ignoring the boys goggling them from beneath. Thefloors, like nearly everything in the atrium, were made of glass; the girls were wearing skirts and had apparently decided to put on a little show.
    I raised my eyebrows at Riley.
    He scowled. “Over
there
,” he said pointedly, nodding at an open spot on the railing, suitably far from the giggling exhibitionists. “If anything seems off, I’ll VM you.”
    â€œHow am I supposed to know who ‘him’ is?”
    â€œHe’ll find you,” Riley said. “Just take the package. Don’t tell him I’m here. Don’t ask any questions—and don’t answer any.”
    Stay with me,
I almost said, watching the orgs watch me. But that would be paranoid and weak, and I was neither. “So get out of here before ‘he’ shows up.”
    With Riley gone, the whispers grew. It was like his silence had been loud enough to drown them out, but now they were all I could hear. Or maybe now that I was alone, the people were getting bolder. I waited for one of them to take the next step.
    If something happened, would any of them try to stop it? None of the tech upgrades we’d gotten had made us any faster or stronger. No martial arts savvy downloaded directly to the motor cortex, no superhero skills whatsoever. Just a titanium head and some bones that were nearly impossible to break.
    Nothing’s going to happen.
No violence, that was rule number one in every corp-town, and violating it was the fastest way to get yourself ejected. One of the vidscreens flashing overhead made the point in stark terms, broadcasting a looped vid of two men wrestling, a knife flashing in each of their hands. As thebackground shifted from the corp-town plaza to a desolate city street, blood spurted and the men fell backward, still. The moral of the story scrolled across the screen—
Live like an animal, die like an animal
—and then the whole thing started again.
    The rest of the vidscreens were flashing pop-ups for corp-produced goods and services to be bought with corp-credit—corp-towners got paid in play money that was only good within the bounds of the corp-town, forming a neatly closed circle between corp and employee. Within the corp-town, everything went cheap; play money let the poor playact at being rich. You could trade in your corp-credit for real credit, but only if you wanted to sacrifice all your purchasing power, foregoing a corp-supplied wardrobe or a kitchen full of corp-supplied food in favor of one box of real chocolate or a slab of real organic beef. I never understood why any of them would have bothered trying to buy anything in the outside world—but then, I never understood why they would set foot in the outside world in the first place. And most of them didn’t.
    â€œIt’s easier that way,” I’d told Auden once, cutting into one of his rants. “Why would they want to see what they can’t have?”
    â€œIt’s easier for
us
that way,” Auden had replied. “We pen them up, like we pen up the city people, and then we don’t have to think about them. Or see them. We can just forget they exist.”
    â€œNo one’s stopping them from leaving the corp-towns—or the cities, for that matter. But why go where you don’t belong?”
    Leaving a corp-town was logistically almost as hard as leaving a city. Regulations restricted corp-towners to publictransportation, and the last bus and train lines had died out years ago. What was the point, when the minority had cars of their own and the majority was better off staying put? There were a few jobs that required leaving the corp-town regularly on corp-transport—the shippers were always traveling back and forth, and the security-operations force were a regular presence, standing guard over the rest of us with their badges, their thermobaric grenades, their stunshots, and their