by Jerry
Dave cautiously stowed file car to a stop as a woman in a standard-issue blue business suit stepped out of the copter. She waived at us, a plantinum debit card in her hand.
“You can knock off the pout, Salona,” I said, getting out of the car. “We’re about to become rich.”
After the exchange, we found a hotel, then went to celebrate the healthy thirty million deposit in our bank account Salona decided to stay behind and get some sleep. Nine-year olds have no stamina.
Sometime after three am, in a biker bar in the bombed-out remains of downtown Boise, surrounded by hundreds of newly acquired friends, me and Dave were celebrating, big time. When my bio-comp told me our business account had been accessed, I didn’t think anything of it One, I was way drunk. And two, I figured it was just the waitress deducting the latest round of drinks we’d bought for the crowd We’d been doing a tot of buying. Perfectly innocent access.
Fuck was I wrong.
We stumbled back to (he hotel around seven in the morning.
The room was empty. The beds hadn’t been slept in. The portable cot hadn’t been unfolded The protective paper coverings were still on the glasses and ice bucket.
And no Salona My stomach sank.
While Dave went into the bathroom to throw up, I accessed our business account It was almost empty. A couple a hundred where twelve hours before had been thirty million.
I went in to the bathroom. Dave on his knees. Hugging porcelain and taking drags off a cigarette between heaves.
“She took the money, Dave.”
He looked up from the bowl. “Our money?”
“Yep.”
“All of it?”
“Yep.”
“Pisser.”
“Yep.”
He heaved again. When he was done, he sat down on the bathroom floor. “How?” he asked.
I couldn’t look at him “I gave her the access code to the account, in case she wanted room service.”
“That was a mistake.” His face went soft for a second. That usually indicated his stomach was flooding his system with a ton of sundry chemicals. This time, pain-killers and valium, I guessed. “Shit, Jim, she’s my friend and I wouldn’t have trusted her with the damn code. Why the hell did you?”
“She’s just a kid Who’d thought?”
“You would have if you had a little more empathy.”
“It’s not a skill I’ve particularly missed.”
“Until now.”
“Yep.” I sighed “Until now.”
“So,” David said, balling a few feet of toilette paper to wipe his mouth and chin, “you ready to go?”
“After her?”
“Shit yeah.”
“Ain’t exactly gon’na be easy, buddy. It’s been hours. Our money could have bought her a ticket anywhere by now. Even off-world.”
“No worries, Jimbo. We have this.” He reached in to his jacket I figured he was going for another rig. Instead he pulled out a small, that oval of composite plastic and held it up for me to admire. “We get within range of the little traitor and this thing’ll beep.”
“Beep?”
“Well, more of a ding, ding, ding, but I think you can grok the paradigm, right?”
“My opinion of your abilities just wait up ten points. When’d you manage to slip a tracker on her?”
“That first lunch. Spritzed a couple cee-cee’s of saline suspicion full of nanotrackers into her soda.”
“Vishnu’s nipples,” I said smiling proudly, “you’re one paranoid flicker.”
“Thank you.”
“So, what’s that gadget’s range? How close do we have to be before it starts to go ding?”
“That’s not an easy question to answer. I mean, you’ve got to calculate the density of a human body, the battery strength of the transmitters on the nanotrackers, ambient atmospheric conditions, phase of the moon.” He shrugged looked at his feet “But all things being equal, about two hundred meters.”
“Two hundred meters? That ain’t exactly a real long distance—I’ve spit farther than that.”
“You have to understand they’re very tiny nanotrackers. Teeny.”
“AH of a sudden my opinion of you plummets once again to negative territory.”
“Hey, it’s better than nothing.”
“A teeny bit better.” I put my hand out He grabbed it and I helped him pull himself to his feet “You know, even with that tracker, we could aid up spending the rest of our lives chasing after Salona. Even for thirty million, that’s not exactly the way I had my future mapped out.”
He led the way out of the bathroom. “Make you a deal. We hunt her for three months. If we don’t find the little backstabber, we sell the tracks. I bet someone would be interested in it.”
“Deal.” I glanced around the room. Checked to make sure we weren’t leaving anything behind and whether there was anything in the place worth stealing. We weren’t and there wasn’t even anything worth vandalizing. “Maybe we can break even on this after all.”
“We should at least get enough to upgrade my VR gear. The new Hitachis look interesting. Barbarella should really kick in one of their model seventeens, assuming I can track down a copy of ha.”
“I thought Salona was supposed to give you one.”
“It surprises you she didn’t? The little lying, thieving, manipulative . . .” I huffed. “Our kind of people, all things considered.”
At the hotel door, he spun around and shot me a hard glare. Then he grinned “Yep.”
I opened the door. It was way too bright outside. Amazing what sunshine can do for a hangover. I felt like dying. But it did put me in the mood for a chase.
THE PRESIDENT’S CHANNEL
John Kessel
With presidential privacy being devoured by the public’s right to know, the only things to suffer are the ratings.
HOWARD AWOKE IN THE MIDDLE OF THE NIGHT AND COULD NOT go back to sleep. He looked at the bedside clock. 3:20. Jeanine lay solidly asleep beside him. After tossing and turning for a half hour, envying his wife her equanimity, he got out of bed and headed for the kitchen.
He rummaged through the pantry until he found a bag of chocolate chip cookies, poured himself a glass of milk and sat down at the table in the dark. The moonlight coming through the skylight softly illuminated the piles of bills at the corner of the table. He could make out the top one: $1100 for the monthly auto premium. The premiums had leaped up back in January when Holly had taken some automatic weapons fire from a van driver on the beltline.
She was too young—only eight—to be driving, but she needed the after-school job if she was ever going to save up enough money to afford college. But she seemed more interested in boys; lately she’d taken to wearing fishnet stockings, and had shaved her eyebrows off and drawn them on a half inch higher on her forehead. Howard blamed the sexy advertising from the companies that sponsored the third grade.
He finished the last of the cookies without even realizing it. They had gone down as tasteless as silicone. Jesus—the company urine test was tomorrow! He turned the bag over to the list of ingredients, and squinted to read them in the faint light. DERACINATED SUGAR, PROCESSED RICE FLOUR, DRIED BEET PULP, POTASSIUM CHLORIDE, PARTIALLY HYDROGENATED VEGETABLE SHORTENING, CALCIUM PROPIONATE, XANTHUM GUM, ARTIFICAL COCOA SUBSTITUTE, INERT SYNTHETIC BULK MATERIALS NOT MORE THAN 30%.
He supposed there was nothing there to set off any alarms. He drained his glass of milk. It tasted like water—Jeanine insisted on buying only ultra skim. She acted as if somehow, if she managed everything precisely, she would keep them alive forever.
The only way to live forever was to be rich. The problem was, in order to build up anywhere near the vast sum it would take to have his genes recapped, they would have to live like paupers. Or he could raid Holly’s college fund. Maybe Holly would do well enough in school to get some kind of scholarship? Right. The last time he had dialed up her academic record, she was maintaining only a B+ average. Eighty percent of
the kids in school had a B+ average. Kids who showed up in class twice a week and spent the other days hitting themselves in the head with hammers carried B+ averages. Holly was more interested in getting her ears lopped than in school.
She could get corporate backing. But indenturing his daughter to a multinational was not a hurdle he was ready to make himself leap. Yet. He still felt pretty good. As long as he could keep his job. Maybe they could win the lottery.
At this rate he would never get to sleep. He shuffled into the den and turned on the TV. The forty-six-inch screen lit and he flicked through the channels. Sportsnet was rerunning round sixteen of the perpetual NCAA Basketball Tournament. The Rage Channel had videos of people driving their cars off cliffs. He skipped past Sex Over Eighty to a gab channel.
The Wowsers were complaining about increasing wirehead addiction. Trying to get a constitutional amendment against electricity.
Elizabeth Taylor was getting married again.
Congressman Grieve was calling for an investigation of the administration, claiming that NSA operatives were feeding made-up footage into government monitors to cover up their crimes.
The Commentary All-Stars dismissed the president’s non-existent sex life and brought on an oral hygienist, who critiqued the chief exec’s spotty flossing and speculated what effect periodontal surgery might have on the upcoming budget negotiations.
Howard flipped around until he hit The President’s Channel.
The screen showed an image of a hallway; Howard recognized it as the one outside the president’s bedroom. It was four a.m., and President Richter was awake.
Howard wondered what had gotten the Pres up in the middle of the night. Some government crisis? His latest poll numbers? A guilty conscience? The Pres was humming a song, the tune of which was familiar, but Howard couldn’t make it out. The President liked to hum to himself; that was one of the first things Howard had noticed back when Richter had been promoted from Vice Pres and had had the camera and mike surgically implanted in his head.
His predecessor Gerringer had snapped midway through his second term—gone on a month-long binge, betting campaign money on football games, feeling up the interns, mainlining speedballs. So Richter found himself in a job he had never signed up for. So far he had seemed a completely stolid nonentity, a punching bag for the opposition, a vending machine for the lobbyists. Deposit your coins and receive your treat. Gerringer had been edgy; Richter was plain dull. Ratings on his channel had plunged. For all Howard knew, he might be the only person in the country tuning in at this late hour.
The Pres moved through the executive living quarters, down a hall and some back stairs. As he descended the stairs, Howard noted his clothing: he was wearing a wine-red robe and slippers. At the bottom of the stairs, the Pres poked his head around the corner, revealing a long view of a carpeted hall. A secret service man in a dark suit was stationed at the end of the corridor; the Pres jerked his head back, causing the image to spin dizzily.
Looked like Richter was finally going to do something interesting. Was he heading for some secret meeting? Maybe he had a rendezvous with his secretary, that Ms. Hodges? She wore short skirts and had long white legs.
The image of the hallway bounced as the Pres dashed across the corridor, though a swinging door to a dark room. He flipped on the light.
It was a kitchen. The Pres moved directly over to a stainless steel industrial refrigerator and took out a wheel of camembert. From a cupboard he took a box of crackers, a bottle of red wine, a bag of tortilla chips, a box of graham crackers, three chocolate bars, and a bag of marshmallows. He cleared a spot on a stainless steel table, pulled up a stool, and began gorging himself.
Howard watched for another fifteen minutes while the Pres put down half of the cheese, most of the wine, all of the chips. Watching the man raise the food toward the camera was like having food shoved at Howard through the television. By the time the Pres’s hands were sticky with melted chocolate and marshmallows from the s’mores, Howard was feeling sleepy.
Pathetic bastard. No way he was going to get himself re-elected.
Howard turned off the TV. He looked in on Holly, who lay sleeping, her face scrubbed free of paint, her scowl relaxed, looking more like an eight year old than she ever did when she was awake. He pulled the covers up over her sprawl and shuffled back to the bedroom.
Jeanine stirred. “Are you okay?”
Howard kissed her on the forehead. “Compared to who?”
STORY OF YOUR LIFE
Ted Chiang
YOUR FATHER IS ABOUT TO ASK ME THE QUESTION. THIS IS the most important moment in our lives, and I want to pay attention, note every detail. Your dad and I have just come back from an evening out, dinner and a show; it’s after midnight. We came out onto the patio to look at the full moon; then I told your dad I wanted to dance, so he humors me and now we’re slow-dancing, a pair of thirtysomething swaying back and forth in the moonlight like kids. I don’t feel the night chill at all. And then your dad says, “Do you want to make a baby?”
Right now your dad and I have been married for about two years, living on Ellis Avenue; when we move out you’ll still be too young to remember the house, but we’ll show you pictures of it, tell you stories about it. I’d love to tell you the story of this evening, the night you’re conceived, but the right time to do that would be when you’re ready to have children of your own, and we’ll never get that chance.
Telling it to you any earlier wouldn’t do any good; for most of your life you won’t sit still to hear such a romantic— you’d say sappy— story. I remember the scenario of your origin you’ll suggest when you’re twelve.
“The only reason you had me was so you could get a maid you wouldn’t have to pay,” you’ll say bitterly, dragging the vacuum cleaner out of the closet.
“That’s right,” I’ll say. “Thirteen years ago I knew the carpets would need vacuuming around now, and having a baby seemed to be the cheapest and easiest way to get the job done. Now kindly get on with it.”
“If you weren’t my mother, this would be illegal,” you’ll say, seething as you unwind the power cord and plug it into the wall outlet.
That will be in the house on Belmont Street. I’ll live to see strangers occupy both houses: the one you’re conceived in and the one you grow up in. Your dad and I will sell the first a couple years after your arrival. I’ll sell the second shortly after your departure. By then Nelson and I will have moved into our farmhouse, and your dad will be living with what’s-her-name.
I know how this story ends; I think about it a lot. I also think a lot about how it began, just a few years ago, when ships appeared in orbit and artifacts appeared in meadows. The government said next to nothing about them, while the tabloids said every possible thing.
And then I got a phone call, a request for a meeting.
I spotted them waiting in the hallway, outside my office. They made an odd couple; one wore a military uniform and a crewcut, and carried an aluminum briefcase. He seemed to be assessing his surroundings with a critical eye. The other one was easily identifiable as an academic: full beard and mustache, wearing corduroy. He was browsing through the overlapping sheets stapled to a bulletin board nearby.
“Colonel Weber, I presume?” I shook hands with the soldier. “Louise Banks.”
“Dr. Banks. Thank you for taking the time to speak with us,” he said.
“Not at all; any excuse to avoid the faculty meeting.”
Colonel Weber indicated his companion. “This is Dr. Gary Donnelly, the physicist I mentioned when we spoke on the phone.”
“Call me Gary,” he said as we shook hands. “I’m anxious to hear what you have to say.”
We entered my office. I moved a couple of stacks of books off the second guest chair, and we all sat down. “You said you wanted me to listen to a recording. I presume this has something to do with the aliens?”
“All I can offer is the recording,” said Colonel Weber.
“Okay, let’s hear it.”
Colonel Weber took a tape machine out of his briefcase and pressed play. The recording sounded vaguely like that of a wet dog shaking the water out of its fur.
“What do you make of that?” he asked.
I withheld my comparison to a wet dog. “What was the context in which this recording was made?”
“I’m not at liberty to say.”
“It would help me interpret those sounds. Could you see the alien while it was speaking? Was it doing anything at the time?”
“The recording is all I can offer.”
“You won’t be giving anything away if you tell me that you’ve seen the aliens; the public’s assumed you have.”
Colonel Weber wasn’t budging. “Do you have any opinion about its linguistic properties?” he asked.
“Well, it’s clear that their vocal tract is substantially different from a human vocal tract. I assume that these aliens don’t look like humans?”
The colonel was about to say something noncommittal when Gary Donelly asked, “Can you make any guesses based on the tape?”
“Not really. It doesn’t sound like they’re using a larynx to make those sounds, but that doesn’t tell me what they look like.”
“Anything— is there anything else you can call tell us?” asked Colonel Weber.
I could see he wasn’t accustomed to consulting a civilian. “Only that establishing communications is going to be really difficult because of the difference in anatomy. They’re almost certainly using sounds that the human vocal tract can’t reproduce, and maybe sounds that the human ear can’t distinguish.”
“You mean infra- or ultrasonic frequencies?” asked Gary Donnelly.
“Not specifically. I just mean that the human auditory system isn’t an absolute acoustic instrument; it’s optimized to recognize the sounds that a human larynx makes. With an alien vocal system, all bets are off.” I shrugged. “Maybe we’ll be able to hear the difference between alien phonemes, given enough practice, but it’s possible our ears simply can’t recognize the distinctions they consider meaningful. In that case we’d need a sound spectrograph to know what an alien is saying.”
