“I knew that this school used to have a ninety percent success rate in job placement, one of the best in the country. We were lucky to have been sent here, we were told. Now, rumor whispered, that rate had plummeted to a low of ten percent. Ten percent success! What chance could I have, with little more than dreams and a love of reading?”

Lisse’s commentary on the lack of jobs for graduates reveals that the world she is entering is not welcoming to young people. Even with an education, she faces the prospect of unemployment, especially since she doesn’t have specialized skills. Ironically, the traits she does possess, her idealism and her interest in storytelling, serve her well when she colonizes a new planet.

“As everyone exclaimed, I remembered my readout…‘Enjoy your leisure years. Use them creatively.’ […] Forty years in this jungle? I felt unbearably helpless. Was that why those kids painted their faces and rampaged through the city, breaking windows and carrying off women? Because violence was better than forty years of nothing? Even at the risk of being caught by the thought police?” 

The contrast between The Government’s empty slogan for the unemployed and the harsh reality of living in the city highlights Lisse’s lack of control over her future. Despite The Government’s surveillance, the city is a “jungle” filled with crime and anarchy. Lisse theorizes that the cause of the violence is the lack of work, not because people don’t have enough to sustain themselves (since The Government provides the unemployed with their basic needs) but because people have no meaning in their lives.

“‘Electronic?’ she mocked. ‘Who do you think you are? You’re living rent free. The monthly credits you collect here will buy you food and cleaning supplies and that’s it. Damned generous too, if you ask me. It’s our taxes you unemployed are living off, you know.’” 

The employed workers, such as the receptionist at the rehab center who laughs at the teens’ request for technology, resent the unemployed because they don’t have to work, and The Government provides for their food and shelter. The receptionist’s attitude reveals the social hierarchy of Lisse’s world in which the unemployed are treated as second-class citizens and viewed as burdens to those who pay taxes.