Excerpt

1

Try hard work, if you want to get wealthy, if you want to escape the trap that your crappy life has turned out to be. Work hard! Or—what? You think maybe a fortune in gold will simply fall out of a clear blue sky and into your lap?

Say a fortune literally did fall out of the sky? That might mean you'd end up working harder. It might end up costing you more.

When Paul was younger, he had a flame inside him. The world was unfair. He vowed to make it fairer. By the sweat of our brows we earn our burritos and beer, the crappy furniture in our shitty domiciles. Individuals work harder and harder and retain less and less value to themselves; corporations glide effortlessly overhead, retaining more and more of the world's wealth. In the case of the new tranche of corporations like Astraxx the overhead was literal: a dozen eager, vigorous companies that made fortunes mining outer space. What that meant—what that meant for people like Paul—was: two dozen locations down here on Earth where chunks of material, mostly meteorite iron, was dropped from heaven above upon the place beneath. Coat it in smartfoam, shoot it into a targeted re-entry trajectory, and down it comes—upon Queenstown, South Africa, or Shymkent, Turkistan, or Zhucheng, China, or—Gary, Indiana, Paul's own town.

When Paul was young, and making à way noisily and with a quantity of rebel posturing through High School he thought: I'll be President, I'll lead the world out of this nightmare into a better age! Then he got older and weighed up the probabilities—of some nobody kid from Gary ascending to such altitudes—and downgraded his ambition: to be a community leader, to post vlogs online that raised consciousness about the crappiness under which people, here, live. A friend and helper. That he got a job in the Fire Office owed something to this desire; although by the time he got that job, his views had changed. You start out a dreamer, but then life slaps you in the face. Dreams must be paid for. So you alter: I'll get the money together, I'll work and save and eventually I'll be in that place where I can do some good. But work is hard and saving money is harder, and soon enough you look around—as Paul did—and realise that pretty much everybody in Gary was stealing something. Robbing small to make ends meet, robbing big to make a name for themselves, robbing anything in-between. Paul figured: he could rob in order to put himself in a position where he could do good. Lots of heinous criminals start out that way. Imagine becoming a mass murderer, on a vast and what's worse random scale? Imagine doing so for the best of intentions?

Meet Paul. Five foot three, ninety-eight pounds.

Two generations ago it would have been drugs. But some drugs are legal now, and drugs are easy to synthesise using 3D-printers, which means the bottom has fallen out of the illegal drugs market. There's just no money in it anymore. Today's criminals need to pursue bigger projects. Giant cylinders of oxygen, because that's a gas that can't simply be printed. A lump of gold the size of a freight train. That's bigger, what's bigger than that? 'Communism,' whispers Paul. But you don't quite hear him. 'Revolution,' he whispers. 'The guillotine, and its blade coming down.'

Down, down. Deeper. Down.

Do bad to do good. It's not even a contradiction, or so Paul told himself. It wasn't as if he was robbing ordinary people. Not sticking a pistol in some old person's stomach and taking their welfare chip. Old boys, old girls, shuffling along with the toes of their feet inwards, like bears taught to walk on their hind legs. Beggars and utility hookers and the piss-on-me-for-five desperates. There are two kinds of stealing: one where you deprive another person of something they need—which is bad—and two where you intervene in the workings of the System itself. In this latter case you're stealing from the corporations, who get reimbursed by their insurers, who are underwritten by the government.

You could almost call it a revolutionary act.

Paul started small-time, and only slowly got bigger. He started dating someone who worked for Astraxx—Zelda, sweet Zelda, who needed continual reassurance that Paul wasn't simply dating her to gain access to Astraxx's control systems pursuant to some ambitious heist. Months of 'no, no, it's you I want' followed, with a dexterity that impressed Paul himself, by the switcheroo: 'since you keep going on about it, Zelda—since you are so insistent—I'll call your bluff. Let's do it, you and I. Prove yourself to me. Let's steal the big one. Let's pluck the golden apple as it plummets down from the heavens, you and I. It'll mean you and I can get the hell out of Gary and live, you and I, a rich and fine life together.'

'Wow,' said Zelda. She almost believed—almost but not quite—that it had been her idea all along.

So they planned the heist. Far and away Paul's biggest score. And then someone major, locally, got wind of Zelda's access to this golden apple. A big boss; a Gary crimelord. The, not a, Bully. The Bully grabbed Zelda. You work for me now, or my people will hurt you. You work for me now, or my people will kill Paul. Ach, it's dog eat dog. That's your basic set-up.

A man who believes you have to do bad to do good. A man whose partner has been taken away.