The Pardoner's Tale

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“Key Sixteen, Housing Omicron Kappa, aleph sub-one,” I said to the software on duty at the Alhambra gate of the Los Angeles Wall.

Software isn’t generally suspicious. This wasn’t even very smart software. It was working off some great biochips—I could feel them jigging and pulsing as the electron stream flowed through them—but the software itself was just a kludge. Typical gatekeeper stuff.

I stood waiting as the picoseconds went ticking away by the millions.

“Name, please,” the gatekeeper said finally.

“John Doe. Beta Pi Upsilon 104324x.”

The gate opened. I walked into Los Angeles.

As easy as Beta Pi.

The wall that encircles L.A. is a hundred, a hundred fifty feet thick. Its gates are more like tunnels. When you consider that the wall runs completely around the L.A. basin from the San Gabriel Valley to the San Fernando Valley and then over the mountains and down the coast and back the far side past Long Beach, and that it’s at least sixty feet high and all that distance deep, you can begin to appreciate the mass of it. Think of the phenomenal expenditure of human energy that went into building it—muscle and sweat, sweat and muscle. I think about that a lot.

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