Payment Declined

Orla Finch found out she had stopped being a person at 7:40 in the morning, at a coffee kiosk, in front of nine strangers, when the reader refused her face. She had done nothing differently. That was what she would keep coming back to in the days afterward — there had been no warning, no dramatic gate slamming shut. She had simply walked up to the kiosk the way she walked up to it every weekday, and looked into the little glass eye the way you look into a little glass eye, and waited for the soft chime that meant the Republic had recognized Orla Finch and deducted the price of a coffee from the account that was attached, like everything, to her face. The chime did not come. Instead the kiosk said, in its mild and reasonable voice, "Identity not recognized. Please present a valid citizen profile." "It's me," Orla said, which was, she would realize later, the single most useless sentence a person could say to the Republic of Verge. The Republic did not care who you were. The Republic cared who you were *subscribed as*, and those had been allowed to become the same thing so gradually that nobody had noticed the day they finished merging. She tried again. She angled her face. She wiped the kiosk's glass eye with her sleeve, as if the problem could be a smudge, as if a smudge were a thing that could un-person you. The little voice repeated itself, mild, reasonable, and the queue behind her began to do the small shifting and sighing of people watching someone else's morning go wrong and being quietly grateful it was not theirs. Orla stepped out of the line. Her face was hot. She took out her slate to check her citizen account, and the slate — her own slate, in her own hand — showed her the message that the kiosk had been too polite to spell out. CITIZEN PROFILE SUSPENDED. CAUSE: NON-PAYMENT. PROFILE WILL BE ARCHIVED IN 30 DAYS. TO RESTORE SERVICE, SETTLE OUTSTANDING BALANCE. She read the outstanding balance. It was not a large number. It was, in fact, a slightly absurd number — the cost of roughly two weeks of groceries — and Orla stood on the pavement in the cold morning and understood that she did not have it. The contract job had ended in March. The next one had been promised for April and then for May and was now, in the way of promised things, simply not spoken of. She had been managing. She had been, she'd believed, *managing* — paying the urgent bills, letting the quiet ones drift, the way everyone she knew let the quiet ones drift. Citizenship, it turned out, had become a quiet one. Somewhere in the long fine print of the Republic's modernization, the thing that made you a person — the profile that opened doors and bought coffee and let the buses and the clinics and the banks and the building you lived in *see* you — had been reclassified as a service. A subscription. And a subscription, if you missed enough payments, lapsed. Thirty days. The slate said thirty days, and then the profile would not be suspended but *archived*, and Orla did not yet know exactly what archived meant but she knew the shape of the word, knew it was the word you used for things that were no longer in the room. She started to walk home, because walking home was a thing a person could still do, and that was when the bus shelter she passed did not light up its little welcome for her, and the door of her own apartment building, three streets later, considered her face for a long cold moment and then did not open. Orla Finch stood on the step of the building she lived in, locked out of it by a city that had, overnight and without raising its voice, simply stopped being able to see her. She had thirty days. And the first thing she understood, standing there, was that nobody was going to come and explain the rules to her, because as far as the Republic of Verge was now concerned, there was no longer anybody standing on the step at all.