The Floor

April 7, 2024

by Melissa Fall

Here is the joint winner of the old “basic income” short story contest, as discussed in the previous post. I find it an even better story than when I first read it back in 2018. It does not contain the line “can’t build a floor until you’ve laid a foundation”.

I have never set up a referral to another article before, in this way. I hope it works out well for everyone. I was surprised to find it still up on gizmodo, but a rule is that all links eventually go dead. Here is the present link, https://io9.gizmodo.com/read-the-into-the-black-contests-winning-story-set-in-1822338909 and if someone is interested in reading it and finds it dead, I will be happy to e-mail you the text.

(Note; you now have to scroll below the “Rounding Corrections” story to find it.)

If Melissa is still out there somewhere, it would be interesting to have a chat.

They said it would solve all our problems.

That’s what everybody comes back to now when something goes wrong, when their plans aren’t working out. That sentence is a mantra, whispered at the bus stop and on the corner and in darkened bedrooms around the country. I don’t know how many times I’ve been sitting in my office, across the desk from some poor slob, when that line gets snorted out through the tears: they said it would solve all our problems.

My response is always the same: “Listen, they said a lot of things.”

Before they put down the Floor, they told us to pull ourselves up by our bootstraps, to wait for the cash to trickle down. Before they gave us the Allowance, they sold us on two ideas: that the self-made man was real and that money couldn’t buy happiness.

Obviously, they lied.

But they always lie, don’t they?

“The lying never stops,” Colleen said, pushing open my office door like it was an artificial barrier that existed only in the mind.

“What are you talking about?” I said.

I was still half-asleep.

“Human beings seem pathologically unable to tell the truth,” she said. “Do you know how many unfaithful spouses I’ve had to track this week?”

“Don’t tell me,” I said. “I don’t want to know.”

She looked terrible, probably almost as bad as I did. She dropped into the chair on the other side of my desk, closed her eyes, and pressed against their lids with her fingertips. She’d painted her nails, I noticed. They were black. They’d been a maroon color last week. I wasn’t sure when she’d made the switch.

“I don’t even understand how people cheat anymore,” she said. “And I don’t mean from an ethical standpoint. I mean literally. Just, like: how?”

We both knew that our jobs had gotten harder because of the late-tech wave. In the good old days, the days of my fathers and forefathers, you could do what you had to do as an investigator. You could leave a microphone in someone’s purse or put a tracker on the bumper of someone’s car. If you hired one of those burned-out hacker types, you could access someone’s credit card records, maybe even their hospital files. It was easy to see who was calling which lover, and how much the two of them were paying to book a hotel room in Reno, and whether or not someone had needed to get an STD test after the whole thing was done.

None of that was possible anymore. The Corps had bought the hospitals, and they’d been able to pay the burned-out hackers to lock down their databases from the inside, so only Corps-affiliated insurance companies could look at them and decide who deserved to die and why. One of my aunts, who’d worked for the Corps for a couple years before having a nervous breakdown, told me that you should never let yourself get put in a spreadsheet, because, as she put it in a rare moment of lucidity, “it’s too easy to sort by column.”

After I told Colleen that one, she jokingly called them “the Corpse” for a while, but I told her to stop; you never knew who was listening in.

And that was our problem. People had known for a while that the Corps was eavesdropping on cell phone conversations, supposedly because they wanted to improve the accuracy of their virtual assistants, but really because they wanted to gather more data and do a better job of targeting their ads. But when the Government started using the audio files from those stupid virtual assistants to get people convicted in a court of law, everyone finally shut up.

I’d thought that maybe everyone would unplug those goddamned things instead, but obviously, I’d been wrong. People got used to asking a machine to tell them the time, because they didn’t have the energy to raise their head a few inches and look up at the clock.

So, now Colleen and I and the rest of our profession didn’t have anything to go on. No one called a boyfriend from their hands-free device in the car, and even if they did, it would have been impossible for anyone outside the Corps to access the information. Most people were so paranoid that they didn’t use credit cards anymore, and the girl in the apartment next to mine told me that she periodically swept both her home and her car for trackers and bugs.

“Well,” I said, “it doesn’t matter if you’ve got nothing to hide.”

“Don’t give me that BS,” she said. “That’s what everyone said a hundred years ago, and look where it got us.”

The question wasn’t where; the question was what. We were in the same place we’d always been. The only difference was that now we had a Floor.

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(Note; you now have to scroll below the “Rounding Corrections” story to find it.)