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eBook Category: Science Fiction Year's Best Science Fiction Honorable Mention
eBook Description: In the cities of the future, walls separate the wealthy from the workers. The workers can earn their way over the wall by "working the game," paying for their freedom in backbreaking labor while living in third-world conditions. But the dream the government has promised the workers may not be the utopia they were promised.

eBook Publisher: Fictionwise.com, Published: Future Orbits, 2002
Fictionwise Release Date: May 2003

49 Reader Ratings:

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Available eBook Formats [MultiFormat - What's this?]: eReader (PDB) [31 KB] , ePub (EPUB) [36 KB] , Rocket/REB1100 (RB) [17 KB] , Adobe Acrobat (PDF) [74 KB] , Palm Doc (PDB) [18 KB] , Microsoft Reader (LIT) [67 KB] , Franklin eBookMan (FUB) [87 KB] , hiebook (KML) [49 KB] , Sony Reader (LRF) [45 KB] , iSilo (PDB) [15 KB] , Mobipocket (PRC) [19 KB] , Kindle Compatible (MOBI) [46 KB] , OEBFF Format (IMP) [27 KB]
Words: 5788
Reading time: 16-23 min.
Microsoft Reader (LIT) Format: Printing DISABLED, Read-Aloud ENABLED
Adobe Acrobat (PDF) Format:  Printing DISABLED, Read-Aloud DISABLED
All Other formats: Printing DISABLED, Read-aloud DISABLED

"Michael J. Jasper's future is a bleak one: the characters of his world are practically slaves of the government who work for points. They are told that if they accumulate enough points they will be promoted over the wall and into a life of paradise with others. While the narrator has his doubts about the truth in the system, he doesn't investigate them seriously until it becomes clear that his girlfriend Lia's health cannot be restored. "Working the Game" was a frightening look into the kind of dystopia many of us fear, where the government/corporation controls or monitors almost every aspect of our life. The ray of hope offered at the story's end seemed slimmer than the narrator realized."--Howard A. Jones, Tangent Online (Learn more about Tangent Online, the Internet's leading SF&F short fiction review website)

"Working the Game" left me in awe of his creative prowess. In a future where a smart wall separates the city of Raleigh into haves and have-nots, oppressed workers build and destroy with nano-tech and other hazardous techtools. Twined against this dystopian background are a touching love story and a vision of futility that rivals Hardy's. A spectacular success."--Daniel E. Blackston, SF Reader

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

I was working on a crew off Hodges Street, a mile from the wall that separated us from the rest of 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. So I showed up early and worked late with the rest of them, and they were starting to trust me. I was finally working the game.

Before, I'd been just a scrag, doing the scut 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 to go over the wall, and at two hundred thousand I could pay for it. Kwabe and Natalie had the highest point totals at our worksite, so they had been chosen by the govvie to lead the job. They had the most to lose.

Maybe Lia and I'd be gone, too, someday. If we both kept working, and if Lia could hold out that long in the cold. This morning, my wrist had read fifteen degrees F, 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 restructuring or a breakdown: you make or take down your quota of walls, you get your points. You don't get enough walls put up or taken down, the points get taken away. 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.

On the top floor of the reconstructed building off Hodges Street, I melted a six-inch-thick border onto the floor with my fuser, getting it ready for a piece of duraplast. Coated with a thin lining of nanodes, each new wall on the fifth floor would get fused to the top-most piece 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 just over a minute. 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 that controlled the heat and cold, blocked the sounds of the outside and neighbors, and even showed old vids, all according to the preset govvie settings. At least that's how Natalie had explained the tech to me.

Nat had given me her leveler at the start of the day. Only team leaders 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 lent 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 a piece of duraplast waiting for me. Takeem was a good kid, and smart. When I popped off the fuser, the scrags hefted the duraplast over me and fit it 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. Nat knew a scrag--there was always a scrag--who got sucked into a wall that way. He was now part of a smart wall in a ten-story outside Durham.

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

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

Twenty yards away, two scrags were struggling with the wiring for one of the northern walls. 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 her wire. The wires were hot, and they were both thrown by the electric contact. The girl skidded back into the building. The boy was knocked into Kwabe, who was working his cutter on a bad piece of recycle. The boy's legs crossed the blue-white beam of the cutter, and the screaming began.