Page 3 of A Better World

With all the trains down from so much flooding, the Jam was theironly way out of the city. More practically, a car is a kind of house, with four walls and a roof. You can live in a car.

“Naw,” she said. “It’s worth more to us than the cash.”

“College fund?”

“We’ll get killed on the taxes if we cash that in,” Linda said, trying hard to greet this logically. But more than her ring, or her winter coat, or even her hair, she loved that college fund. It represented every ice-cream cone never bought, every vacation never taken. It meant they’d done at least one thing right.

“Forty percent penalty. It’d be a huge waste,” Russell agreed. Then again, that money might float them. The Legal Aid lawyer had told them not to waste another dime on rent—just wait for the eviction. Then use this college fund to rent something smaller and deeper into the messy part of town. But what then? That money would run out, too, eventually.

People were dropping out all over this city. One day, they were your coworker or neighbor or that harried parent at drop-off with the crazy hair. The next, they were squatting in abandoned buildings. They werethe disappeared.

She’d been denying it for a while now, but the inexorable weight of it hit her right then: her family might become the disappeared.

“Russell,” she said, her voice cracking. She was trying not to cry, but it was happening. He didn’t react right away, and she knew it was because this was too much for him. He felt too bad about how things had turned out.

“Don’t mind me. Ignore me,” she said.

“It’s okay,” he said, soft. “Let’s just get through this.”

That was when his device rang. Instead of an area code, the screen blinked a steady stream of rolling names. A scam, she assumed. Another grifter offering water rights in Siberia or sham iodine pills for radiation. Russell answered it anyway, probably for the distraction.

“Yes, this is Russell Bowen,” he said. His spine perked, his voice coming to life. “That’s right. I met with Jack Lust… Really? That’s great. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. That’s great.”

As he talked, his eyes watered. He circledcollege fundinstead ofcrossing it out, then made a sunshine of exclamation points all around it, and she felt a great and gruesome sympathy for him, for all of them, for the whole messed-up, unwinding world.

BetterWorld was one of the smaller multinationals, known mostly for a polymer called Omnium, whose main ingredient was recycled plastic. Hailed as a miracle product, Omnium was used for things like rope, clothing, bags, packaging, fabric, upholstery, machine parts, and even ship sails.

It was biodegradable in the presence of a GRAS-rated (Generally Recognized As Safe) solvent called GREEN. You applied GREEN at home, in your bathtub, and your fabric turned into a thin green slurry that ran right down the drain, or you deposited your Omnium at local collection sites, where it was taken to special waste facilities, and the solvent was applied there. GRAS-rated products were the “natural flavors” you might find in a bag of chips, or the thickening agent in your fake milk. In other words, they were so safe you could eat them.

Quickly after BetterWorld’s founding, Omnium replaced plastic as the most popular global synthetic. BetterWorld couldn’t make enough of the stuff, opening mills across the globe. All that plastic in the oceans shrank. Dolphins, whales, and sea turtles—the ones that could tolerate the acidity—lived to swim another day. The company prospered, extending its reach into pharmaceuticals, banking, construction, and mining.

Though in recent years sentiment had turned against the big corporations, whom protesters accused of resource hoarding, BetterWorld was spared the worst publicity hits. They paid the highest wages to contract workers, contributed to charity, and had literally cleaned the planet. Or they’d done their part cleaning the planet. The planet needed significantly more tidying to sustain life over the next few generations.

Plymouth Valley was BetterWorld’s crown jewel. Located along a distributary of the Missouri River, it was established as the site of the first Omnium mill. Though that mill had closed in favor oflarger-capacity factories across the globe, the town was reconceived as the seat of operations, where BW’s top executives lived.

Over the course of Russell’s interview process, Linda read everything she could find about Plymouth Valley. There wasn’t much. High walls protected its residents from crime. A filter called the Bell Jar cleaned its air. Their mascot was something called a caladrius, a bird indigenous to the area whose cartoon likeness BetterWorld used as its emblem. Their local culture was called Hollow. Like most company towns, its architects had built a subterranean survivor shelter.

In his old job, Russell had reviewed the safety and efficacy of polymer-based products. Jack Lust was interested in hiring him as a science adviser in BW’s Plymouth Valley office. He would follow Omnium from creation to disposal, read and initiate studies, and testify on his findings.

With unemployment hovering around 25 percent, people all over the world were trying to get into company towns—places with laws and order and guaranteed work. Places where you could go to the grocery store and exchange pleasantries without getting shot by a stray bullet. But like everything else, even company towns were shrinking. Access to outsiders was practically impossible. Unless you were born to the privilege, you had to be exceptional. A genius, even. The residents weren’t the 1 percent. They weren’t the .01 percent. They were the .000001 percent.

After that phone call, BetterWorld’s search committee flew Russell out to Plymouth Valley. He stayed three days. Linda spent the time acting falsely cheerful and sometimes genuinely cheerful:Dear God, what if he got this thing?

“Well?” she asked when he called on his flight back home.

While Russell spent the day at the library, studying for his final interview, she prepped the kids.

“We’re flying out in two days,” she explained. “They want to meet the family. No cussing. No rudeness. No interrupting. I need you to be on your best behavior.”

“What the fuck?” fifteen-year-old Josie asked. To correct for her own childhood, in which the people around her had nourished their secrets like beloved lap dogs, Linda had always encouraged open discussion. Lately, as it pertained to Josie, she was starting to think she’d overcorrected.

“If your dad gets this, we’re moving,” Linda said.

“I’m not moving,” Josie said. “I’m the only sophomore starting center forward in Brilliant Minds’ history.”

Linda explained the situation in plain terms: there weren’t any other jobs.

For Hip, who was neither a good student at Brilliant Minds Prep (a prep school only in name), nor a big man on campus, reality clicked right away. Either the Farmer-Bowens moved up to Plymouth Valley, or they moved down and out, to someplace much worse. He nodded. Behind his glasses, his eyes were wet.

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