Up The Tower Read Online Free

His apartment was on the seventh floor—a bit of a luxury, that close to the ground—but it was tiny. The balcony was bigger than the apartment by half, and he shared it with his neighbors. He wished, as he had often wished, that he hadn't sold his Dad's place, but it was no use. He had needed the money. Khakis, button-down shirts, hair product, these all cost money, and Gary had to look good if he was ever going to bag someone like Ana. No, not someone like her—her. Alone. Just Ana.
    There was a tablet on the balcony, egressed into the stone behind a plastic pot full of plastic dirt and a plastic tree. The tablet only had a few operations—either sending for different kinds of food or calling for cabs. He had modified the tablet so that instead of waiting for a service to call him back, it sent a signal straight to whatever cab was available, signaling them direct to his apartment. There were a lot of how-tos on the net to teach how to fix something like that up—so much so that the cab and food services depended on them. The software workarounds and circuitry weren’t too hard to set up, probably a seven year-old could do it, but Gary had felt triumph that first time he made it work for him a few months ago, calling in a pizza that took up a fourth of his week’s budget.
    Gary knew Ana’s boyfriend worked somewhere in Junktown—all it had taken was a few calls, pretending to be some businessman—so he headed to Junktown. His mother was there, in the hospital. He would stop and see her on the way, he supposed. Get a little bit of good karma in.
    The cab arrived and hovered down, lowering its guns after it scanned Gary and found him unarmed, except for the baton around his ankle. In a few moments, he was off.
    * * * * *
    B efore anything else—before the riot, before the flood, before the gap and the deaths and the fires and the pain—before all of that, Ana just wanted to get the hell out of Junktown.
    But she was stuck there with Raj, and Raj had all the bodyguards, so she couldn't very well leave on her own. Walk into Junktown without any protection? No, thank you. She had a knife on her, but that was hardly enough. The knife fit neatly in a small, luxury, Cardion-brand sheath at her side.
    The rest of her outfit was direct out from a fashion magazine. She wore tight black Cardion slacks and patent leather Aushwere ankle boots—attractive and stylish and perfect for inner-city walking. Her dark blue blouse was Cardion again (there had been a sale); already, she had noticed the way Raj had noticed how it cupped and clung to her body. He would have been looking a bit more, perhaps, but she wore her favorite Kadaya Sarin-brand leather jacket, allowing her a bit of modesty with the long sleeves and tight collar, despite the thinness of the material. Her hair, blond, was wrapped into a neat knot in the Sarin style. She was a woman dressed to impress, but she also was no tramp—she had her man. He liked her dressed in a manner that was attractive but not trashy. Ana knew what he wanted, because what Raj wanted was her entire life, as she saw it, from now on.
    They were inside the ground floor of a tall building. Cleanbots rushed around them, sweeping up dust, guided along by retrofitted eyebots that spied out areas of dust and disrepair.
    “Here's where we'll have the lobby,” said Raj, opening his hands out wide to the open space.
    Ana had the presence of mind to hold her tongue.
    What she wanted to say was, “Really, dear? Here in the first possible place that someone could enter from the street? That's where you'll have the lobby? That's so inventive. You're so smart.”
    What did she say was, “Oh! It will look beautiful, I'm sure.”
    “Perhaps we will hang up pictures of you, to make it more beautiful than ever, eh?”
    “Oh, stop.” She blushed, an informed reaction. Men like Raj didn’t like for a girl to know she was pretty already. It took the power of validating her self-worth out of his