Chicken Little

Chicken Little

Cory Doctorow

The Lower East Side had ebbed and flowed over the years: poor, rich middle-class, super-rich, poor. One year the buildings were funky and reminiscent of the romantic squalor that had preceded this era of light-speed buckchasing. The next year, the buildings were merely squalorous, the landlords busted and the receivers in bankruptcy slapping up paper-thin walls to convert giant airy lofts into rooming houses. The corner stores sold blunt-skins to trustafarian hipsters with a bag of something gengineered to disrupt some extremely specific brain structures; then they sold food-stamp milk to desperate mothers who wouldn’t meet their eyes. The shopkeepers had the knack of sensing changes in the wind and adjusting their stock accordingly.

Walking around his neighborhood, Leon sniffed change in the wind. The shopkeepers seemed to have more discount, high-calorie wino-drink; less designer low-carb energy food with FDA-mandated booklets explaining their nutritional claims. A sprinkling of FOR RENT signs. A construction site that hadn`t had anyone working on it for a week now, the padlocked foreman`s shed growing a mossy coat of graffiti.

From rough to rougher… (Read the full text in The Best Year’s Science Fiction Anthology 2011, edited by Gardner Dozois). Photo: © Megan Jorgensen (Elena)

Leon didn`t mind. He`d lived rough – not just student-rough, either. His parents had gone to Anguilla from Romania, chasing the tax-haven set, dreaming of making a killing working as bookkeepers, security guards. They`d mistimed the trip, arrived in the middle of an econopocalytic collapse and ended up living in a vertical slum that had once been a luxury hotel. The sole Romanians among the smuggled Mexicans who were de facto slaves, they`d traded their ability to write desperate letters to the Mexican consulate for Spanish lessons for Leon. The Mexicans dwindled away – the advantage of de-facto slaves over de-jure slaves is that you can just send the de-facto slaves away when the economy tanked, taking their feed and care off your books – until it was just them there, and without the safety of the crowd, they`d been spotted by local authorities and had to go underground. Going back to Bucharest was out of the question – the airfare was as far out of reach as one of the private jets the tax-evaders and high-rolling gamblers flew in and out of Wallblake Airport.

From rough to rougher. Leon`s family spent three years underground, living as roadside hawkers, letting the sun bake them to an ethnically indeterminate brown. A decade later, when his father had successfully built up his little bookkeeping business and his mother was running a smart dress-shop for the cruise-ship day-trippers, those days seemed like a dream. But once he left for stateside university and found himself amid the soft, rich children of the fortunes his father had established, it all came back to him, and he wondered if any of these children in carefully disheveled rags would ever be able to pick through the garbage for their meals.