Ambrose swam up out of sleep, away from the dream he’d been having almost every night since he turned fifteen, six months ago. This morning he was left with a slideshow of impressions: cold metal, darkness, his father’s voice. He shuddered and blinked away the crust from the corners of his eyes for the last time. After today’s modification procedure, he’d never sleep again.
The bedroom, aware of his waking, gradually brightened the window to bathe the room in gentle, lemony sunlight.
Another knock. “Sir?”
Ambrose sat up as his standard morning Process Flow clicked into place in his mind, altered here and there to account for the importance of the day ahead. There would be extra preparations. He yelled toward the door, “Meet you in the hall in seven minutes.” Shuffling footsteps receded.
At fifteen, Ambrose was the youngest UniCorp Associate. The next-youngest, a Data Mapping prodigy from the Greater London Expansion, was twenty-one. Ambrose even headed his own Process Flow team, which meant he was responsible for following Friendship threads and predicting user behavior within the Unison social network. This ensured that each Unison login was a singularly satisfying, pleasant, and efficient experience. More than half the world’s population paid handsomely for their Unison Profiles, and it was Ambrose’s job to make them want to stay logged in forever.
The fact that Ambrose was the son of UniCorp CEO Martin Truax (and richer than Mistletoe could ever imagine) had never been much of an issue for the older Associates for one reason: he was freakishly good at his job. Corporate wisdom stated that the truly gifted Process Flow Associates had a kind of sixth sense for following multiple Friendship threads and Thoughtstreams to probable outcomes. For Ambrose, this job was simply an extension of the way his mind always worked. He had known it would take exactly seven minutes to get ready for his day before he had a single conscious thought about what he was going to do first, second, or third. In fact, he’d learned long ago that he could alter his routine at any point—stare out the window, drink a second glass of synthesized grapefruit juice—and it would still take exactly seven minutes.
As if to prove this point, he leapt out of bed and went straight to the window. He lived with his older brother, Len, on the 298th floor of the Great Plains Apartments, so named because the neighboring atmoscrapers were almost entirely pasture buildings. From his window a mile above the canopy of Eastern Seaboard City, Ambrose watched the sun rise over the fields. The morning had dawned blazing hot, and orange sunlight splayed urgently across the neat green rooftops. He pressed his palm lightly against the window to darken the shade against the glare and watched a group of cows—tiny black-and-white-spotted blobs at this distance—graze in one of the fields. They reminded him of the dairy farm on the border of the New England Expansion his family had toured years ago. His father had let Ambrose and Len run free on their own for an hour or two, and together they had annoyed the lab-grown cows all the way to the edge of the pasture. It was surrounded by some kind of near-invisible plexi shield so cows couldn’t fall off and crash through the canopy at atmospheric reentry speed, but Len had managed to find a tiny hole.