Indentured

Born after the fall of public schools, after student loans had crept down to the earliest stages of education, she was burdened by debt before she began kindergarten, becoming some bank's investment long before she even understood money as more than the word her parents always said with a sigh or loud voices. For her eighteenth birthday, her parents gifted her ownership of her debt; when she saw the number of commas, she knew she would never be free. She spent that night crying, her parents outside her locked door, trying to console her with gentle reminders that things could be worse. She could have been born on a reservation, surrounded by razor wire and the creeping genocide of development and re-wilding projects. She could have been born in an Opportunity Town, the daughter of migrants or refugees allowed the chance to earn enfranchisement through decades of unpaid sustainability labor that always seemed to prove fatal. She could have been born somewhere in the equatorial band, where daylight melted asphalt and anyone not rich enough to afford rent in a dome or emigration did not live long. She could have been born not-white, spending her life subjected to harsher treatment before the law and the eyes of employers. She could have been born in a time when smart women were labeled witches and burned at the stake. Her parents went on in this way for hours, assuring her that indentureship wasn't so bad, that it wasn't any worse than things had been before, in some ways it was better, for they never had to worry about making rent or having money for food. Through gritted teeth and false cheer they told her they preferred it to how things had been before the reforms, before capitalism had replaced nations with the megacorps that had saved the world from climate extinction. She did not respond, but their words did not fall on deaf ears. When she had emptied her tear ducts, her gaze fell on the rows of cracked paperbacks lining her shelves, sci-fi tales of worlds saved by tech, and as her parents polluted her air with false solace, she hatched her plan. Breakfast was all smiles and silence. She spent the next decade at university, studying bio- and nanotech, ignoring her debt as it climbed into the eight-figure death zone. She played the model student, never griping, never showing discontent, steering clear of the student riots and uprisings that claimed many of her classmates and a few of her friends. For her doctoral dissertation, she developed a sentient self-replicating nanobot swarm for mass surveillance, earning her an indentureship with the world's leading tech megacorp. As her new employer's quality control division examined her creation, behind her facade of excited satisfaction, she held her breath, imagining what would happen if they discovered the secret algorithm suite buried deep in her swarm's mind, allowing herself to relax only after the swarm had been cleared, produced, and dispersed to silently saturate the air, water, and bodies of the planet. When the time came, she did not hesitate. She transmitted her secret activation code and waited. Her nanobots detected behaviors of oppression and exploitation then temporarily paralyzed the actors and delivered a simple message that none would any longer be free to do such things and that whenever such behaviors were detected, the actors would find themselves locked for twelve hours. The world stopped, she glimpsed the beginning of a new order, she heard something, she blinked, she found herself in a bed in a cell of grey walls, staring at a ceiling screen where grinning news anchors reassured viewers that the terrorists responsible had been identified and dealt with, and that their weapon had been reprogrammed to prevent any such future attacks. She tried to turn her head, to sit up, to lift her arms, her legs, to twitch a finger, but nothing moved. With her peripheral vision, she glimpsed tubes running from the wall into her arms, carrying what she assumed to be her sustenance. She tried to scream, to call out, but nothing escaped. Only her eyes moved, but wherever she looked, she could not escape the streaming news. Sleep brought visions of something better, but before long her dreams became endless news nightmares. She grew old watching the unfolding of a horrid future she had helped shape. She never had a visitor.