Landscape with Invisible Hand

The vuvv, an alien species that has invaded Earth, live in floating houses with rendering sails that emit a constant low light, so the town is never in darkness. Adam Costello and Chloe Marsh are watching the rippling sails, which Adam sweetly compares to Chole’s hair, although he hates her. Their interaction is being watched by vuvv customers.

Adam hasn’t been to the vuvv’s first landing site, which was at Wrigley Field; however, he has seen the monument on a hologram. The vuvv started watching Earth in the 1940s. They aren’t humanoid beings: “They looked more like granite coffee tables: squat, wide, and rocky” (5). The vuvv came in peace, offering to end work and cure diseases, and they invited humans to join their “Interspecies Co-Prosperity Alliance” (6). Now, a large floating luxury condominium floats over the initial landing site, blocking the sun from hitting the glass monument erected in the vuvv’s honor. A few years back, a man tipped over one of the monument’s columns in an act of common vandalism.

The roof on Adam’s house is half shingles and half painted boards. His mother asks him to repaint the boards, which are peeling, since he wants to be a painter. He really wants to be an artist, which Mrs. Costello considers impractical. Although Adam has painted the house, his art teacher, Mr. Reilly, praises his paintings. Mrs. Costello doesn’t complain because Adam brings in a large portion of the family’s income, which the family supplements by renting the lower portion of the house to the Marsh family. Chloe’s older brother, Hunter, has a part-time job at an energy facility, and her father, like Adam’s mother, is currently unemployed. Mrs. Costello, who lost her job as a bank teller to vuvv technology, tries to stay optimistic while job searching. She refers to the job market as flexible, and she e-mails her résumés to hiring businesses each day and then paces while waiting for responses.

Adam sketches a food cart while his mother waits to talk to the manager about her application. She thinks the restaurant will last and analyzes her chances of getting hired: “I think I have like a sixty-forty chance of getting the job. Maybe sixty-five/thirty-five” (10). She has a master’s degree and views this job as temporary until she can find something better paying. Mrs. Costello remarks that she wants people to order and get out of her way, and the man in front of her tells her that they aren’t there to eat but to speak to the manager about the job. The woman serving broth kicks them all out, saying that she’ll pick someone later that night.

The man who spoke to Mrs. Costello follows her and Adam, complaining that he used to manage 11 people. He asks to see a copy of Mrs. Costello’s résumé, and he compliments the formatting. When the three of them walk around a corner, the man slams Mrs. Costello against the wall and threatens her, saying that he’ll burn her house down if he sees her working at the food cart. He leaves, and Adam regrets not punching the man. Mrs. Costello doesn’t get the job; it’s given to a tough-looking woman.

People have lost hope because they spend their days scavenging and trying to feed themselves and their families. The vuvv sold their technology to the rich for access to the electromagnetic field surrounding Earth. Vuvv technology first replaced factory jobs and then replaced other jobs, such as customer service. The vuvv’s economy, based on the ch’ch currency, takes over, and everyone, except the few wealthy humans who can afford to invest in vuvv businesses, now lives in poverty.

Mr. Costello, who was a skilled salesperson and worked for Ford, believed his job was safe. However, his sales diminished as the human economy failed, and he was fired.

At first, people tried farming, but the food that the vuvv produced was much cheaper because of their technology and government subsidies, which led to the failure of agriculture. Industrial agriculture survived by adapting to become a distribution channel for vuvv-produced food. People make a livable income only if they work closely with the vuvv—a chance that people will literally kill for.

Adam once painted a picture of his house with his father on the stoop looking dejected. They had a conversation in which Mr. Costello was upset that he couldn’t provide for the family and compared the current employment market to “those Iranian heart surgeons you used to run into driving cabs in New York” (17). Mr. Costello said he felt emasculated by his unemployment, which Adam reproached as sexist.