2030_ The Real Story of What Happens to America - Albert Brooks [11]
“No, thanks. I’ll go back inside until the champagne wears off.”
“Champagne, my ass,” Stewart said. “Go inside and sleep it off.”
Kathy and her father drove home without talking. He was too tired to make obligatory conversation and she was still feeling the effect of the drug, even though it was supposed to last only a few minutes. It made her feel extra angry. Not at her father—after all, there he was, unemployed, no future, and still getting out of bed at two in the morning to pick her up. She was angry at everything else.
Her grandfather used to tell her how he stopped the war by rioting and filling the streets and how it really meant something. But it was different then. You had options in a war. You could lose, win, declare victory even if you didn’t win; you could turn the fighting over to the country you invaded. Lots of options. But now, massive debt was something else. All you could do was pay it off or not. Or you could keep delaying the problem, hoping that the next generation would invent something to take care of it. But as advanced as science was becoming, no one had come up with a debt machine. Finally Stewart spoke. “I won’t be home until late tomorrow night.”
“Why?”
“I’ve got a new job.”
“Really? That’s wonderful! What kind of job?” Kathy sounded so hopeful. Her father was dipping dangerously into his life savings and really needed a break.
“It’s not that great.”
“What is it?”
“They’re adding a person to the automated security staff at the city college.”
Kathy wanted to cry. A security guard? In her mind that was worse than a grease monkey, but she tried her best to sound positive. “Wow. That’s good news. It’ll give you something to do.”
And they drove the rest of the way home in silence.
* * *
When Brian Nelson woke the next morning he felt awful. Physically and mentally. Hungover, hating his crummy college, knowing it would only buy him a few more years before the shit hit the fan. He had a car his parents had given him and that was it. One possession.
College had become meaningless to so many kids. The few who had privilege went to the expensive ones and that was still fun, and it was good to have a degree if you were going to work in a white-collar job, but it guaranteed you nothing. If the parents couldn’t pay, most kids didn’t go. The student loans took so long to pay back that young people really had to examine if it was worth it. There were all kinds of calculations that would tell them exactly how much they had to earn and how many years it would take to pay it back, and many kids decided that a lower-paying job, in the long run, would earn them more than a college education and a huge debt.
Brian had no idea what he wanted to do with his life. His father was a pharmacist, but he couldn’t do that; that job was being replaced by pharmaceutical assistants monitoring automated dispensing machines, and the pay was terrible. He didn’t want to drive a truck, the way his grandfather did. His grandfather was always going from company to company and bitched about never having any security. Besides, Brian had never liked his grandfather and certainly did not want to emulate him. And he resented that whatever he wound up doing, a portion of his earnings was always going to go to his grandfather and all the rest of them. “He never even sent me a birthday present,” Brian would say, “and now I have to pay for his wheelchair.”
CHAPTER SIX
Sam Mueller had received so many honors in his life, he had a separate bungalow just to house them. And he knew all the living presidents—in fact, two of them were alive because of him—but he had yet to meet Matthew Bernstein.
President Bernstein liked to make calls himself. He got a great kick out of appearing on someone’s screen. No secretary, no Secret Service, just him. Many people thought it was a joke. There were pretty good devices that had come on the market around 2018 that could change your appearance when you made a call. You could even change your sex if you wished. So when Bernstein called Dr. Mueller the very first