Fitcoin

Will you take the Fitcoin challenge?

The words were there, in my mind, even before my brain had registered I was awake. Sleek and sexy models filled my vision.

“The hell? End ’vert – end ’vert.”

The models blinked out of existence and I shook my head.

“Bloody Fitcoin challenge – I’m already signed up, dammit.”

As if to confirm my words, there was a hungry clench of muscles in my stomach and a hollow pain. I groaned. How were you supposed to burn more calories if you couldn’t afford the food in the first place?

“What happened to a nice ‘Good morning, Steve,’ anyway?”

Good morning, Steve, my room announced in my head. I was tired enough to find it mocking. Remember, you’re working today.

I rolled slowly out of my cot and stood up, ducking my head just a little to avoid the ceiling. Data flashed before my eyes – my shift hours, details of the predicted weather, a special offer on Jazzler X, my current credit and Fitcoin balances, both low. With a yawn, I blinked them away.

“First things first…” I murmured and took a step over to the narrow counter that serves as my dining table and mail centre.

“Soypops, please.” I almost asked for real milk, but remembered the number that had appeared in my credit score and asked for soya, as usual. It tastes awful, but it’s cheap.

There was a faint sound, then a panel slid aside and a sealed container and a sachet of soy-milk were vomited out onto the counter.

I looked down at them and tried to see the Fitcoins, instead. It didn’t help, so I tore off the lid, poured the milk into the container, and decided to just get on and eat the stuff.

Don’t eat too much – keep that weight down.

“Gah!” I winced at the disembodied voice of Nanny Cass. Has a more annoying virtual entity ever been created?

It wasn’t as if HealthTek needed to remind me to keep my weight down, anyway.

Sure, encourage people to burn calories, become fitter and healthier, a great idea. Except, you needed the credit to buy food in the first place and the Fitcoin bonus for maintaining a low weight would never get you anywhere, not compared to shedding it. If you wanted the Fitcoin to pay off, upgrade your life, then you needed to do more than tolerate a rumbling stomach..

“Will you shut up and go frag yourself – I’ve got a Fitcoin implant, you dozy digital dipwad!”

Abusing the e-Nanny never felt as good as it ought, so I sighed and got on with eating.

Then, when I was done, I ordered a second bowl as I deposited the empty one and the sachet down the garbage chute. There was no way I was ever going to upgrade my iDoll if I didn’t up my calorie intake.

As the second bowl was vomited out onto the counter, I glanced over at Lucy and sighed as a list of her faults appeared before my eyes, along with a ’vert for the latest iteration of iDoll.

“This sucks,” I told her as Nanny Cass repeated her admonition.

I snarled a grin at the interruption and emptied the sachet of soy-milk into the bowl, as if eating another one was somehow punishing the algorithm.

Reminder: You have work today.

“Yes, I know.” As if I could forget I had twelve hours on the sub-minimum wage, picking up products dropped by the warehouse sorting machines, waiting for me. Could life get any more lame?

Your job is your identity, my father always used to say. I wonder what he’d say if he could see mine. He was always worrying about the immigrants and never foresaw it was the machines that were the real threat to our jobs.

I dropped the second bowl into the garbage chute and said, “Shower.”

The cubicle didn’t descend into the corner of my room, just a drip.

Unavailable. Please try again later.

I swore. That meant the girl upstairs must be using it. She seemed to be showering all the time. I don’t know what she did to get dirty.

“Dammit. Right… Wetnaps, please.”

A packet was spat out and I set about the inadequate process of wiping myself down.

Cleanliness is next to godliness. That was another one of my father’s. I never quite understood the reference, but he wouldn’t have approved of this.

“Clothes.”

There was a hiss and a shrink-wrapped packet popped out the delivery slot.

Careful not to rip the contents, I tore away the shrink-wrap and tossed it down the chute, before pulling on the awful beige outfit.

The paper pants and top might do the job of providing modesty on a budget, but I hate them. Single use, they feel thin and scratchy, and never seem to fit quite right.

“One day… One day…” As if I’d ever have the credit to afford an apartment with space for a wardrobe full of real clothes.

Ditching the daydream, I pulled on my shoes. They were almost as bad.

“Open.”

The door folded itself aside and I exited my room with a soft rustle. It closed behind me and I paused to try and pull my outfit straight; it didn’t help.

There was a groan from down the corridor. A woman was slumped on the landing, one thin leg dangling down the stairs. She wore the remains of a paper outfit like mine, tattered and stained from long use. Ribs protruded tightly against skin as ill-fitting as my clothes, and one thin leg dangled down the stairs.

Her name escaped me, but I was fairly sure she had a room in the block. Or, more likely, had had. She was a Fitcoin chaser – but, obviously not one successful enough to rent herself a life. There were always a few around – spending all their credit on calories, then burning up their own bodies on a fool’s quest for more credit, chasing the dream of wealth. You saw all the influencers, of course, who claimed to live a celebrity lifestyle off their Fitcoins, but never any normal person in a dead-end job. Fitcoin would never replace my wage; it barely counted as pocket money.

I carefully stepped over her and took the stairs to the street where an iCab was waiting to ferry me to work.

Almost every iCab I passed that morning seemed to contain someone gorging themselves: The more people ate, the more they could earn. You never saw an obese person any more, but seldom someone practising self-restraint, save through poverty as you needed credit in the first place to buy the food to convert to Fitcoins. I was one of the latter – my job just didn’t pay – and, it was difficult to earn much through exercise, not unless you could afford a gym membership.

A bitter laugh summed up my view of the system. As a carrot to encourage healthier lifestyles and reduce food consumption, Fitcoin had been an abject failure. ‘Burn and earn,’ as the slogan put it – turn calories into credit, lose weight and increase your balance to spend on approved purchases. Perhaps, it was the product of false assumptions. Maybe, it was just a scam by the food industry. It certainly didn’t work as intended. And, despite its promise of offsetting the austerity in which so many of us lived, it only really worked if you were already doing well, able to afford food and the means to exercise the calories away. The rest of us were screwed before we even started.

I needed a way to beat the system. There had to be a way to do it, if only…

Still, sitting in a cage all day on the warehouse floor waiting to be deployed to pick up the occasional fumbled product gives you plenty of time to think and I had just one thought in my mind.

As I chewed on a generic choco-flavoured sugar bar, my thought about how the rest of us were screwed before we started came back to me.

Us. Not individuals, but a pool. What if you could pool the body-fat of several people? The Fitcoins would soon come flooding in. There were such pools, for communal projects, for couples. But, it wasn’t as if I were going to find people willing to fund my replacement for my iDoll, Lucy. They’d expect their share, taking me back to where I began.

Unless…

What if I didn’t give them a choice?

Not hack their accounts – my programming skills are distinctly mediocre, otherwise I wouldn’t be sitting in this cage serving machines, and even exceptional code crackers would have a hard time taking that security on – but, could I redirect their Fitcoins into my account?

It was doable. Definitely doable.

I set to work when I arrived home.

It cost, of course, but I was sure it’d be worth it. It was my only chance to break out of my hell. Set up a fake business account, buy a scanner, then start sucking up the Fitcoin from those in no position to use it.

Three days later, when an account scanner popped through my mail slot, I was ready.

The girl was still slumped, slowly dying, on the landing. She wouldn’t be checking her balance, so I chose her as my test subject. I cringed as I leant in close to her to use the scanner. She smelt awful. Sick. But, once I’d scanned her account details, it was simple to tag her to a pooled account and up the rate at which the Fitcoins were farmed.

She only lasted another two days, but I’d proved it could be done.

All I had to do was trawl the city looking for losers like her. There were plenty to choose from. To reduce the risk that they’d notice what was going on, I made sure that, for each one I added to the pool, I upped their rate – burning their body fat, their organs, every gram of them to increase my pot. The only downside was, they didn’t last long.

But, there were plenty of them and, each time one slipped from the pool, I would go out and find another, another two or three, to replace them.

There was something on the news alerts the other morning about the increasing number of burn-outs and a warning about the dangers of becoming a Fitcoin chaser, but nothing to hint LawTek had connected the deaths, nor indeed that anyone cared.

My father always called people like those chasers ‘useless eaters’, a term that’d become apt now more than ever, but I’d given them a purpose, if only for a short time. I think I can be proud of that.

Still, I might ease off for a while. After all, I’ve got Jenna and Juno now, Lucy’s replacements, with all the optional extras, and plenty of Fitcoin left over in my account. And it is getting a little tedious to have to step over former neighbours reduced to skeletal frames in the stairwell, nagging reminders of my activities.

Quit while you’re ahead. That’s something else my father used to say.

The End