by Stanley Bing
“That’s right,” said Gene, turning to the bot and staring deeply into its receptor space. “Maybe I think it’s just too nice outside to keep my appointment with this Bob fellow.”
“Well. That can be ameliorated,” said Officer O’Brien. It immediately began to rain, not everywhere, but right over Gene’s head. A brief clap of thunder was followed by a single bolt of lightning that came dangerously close to his ear.
“Now perhaps you can keep your appointment,” said the bot.
For this unique annoyance, Gene might have blamed the Stanford University physicists who had recently introduced the notion that, in order to do their jobs well, servile entities would need to incorporate simple emotions essential to decision making. Right now the machine was smirking in satisfaction at the solution it had engineered with its brand-new, state-of-the-art local environmental manipulator.
“Okay, very funny,” Gene said. The rain stopped.
“Get going, pardner,” O’Brien growled. But there was a twinkle in its crystal eye. “Building Eight.”
Gene put his arm around O’Brien’s molded shoulder. “Your shoelace is untied,” he said.
“That gag was old a hundred years ago,” it said, but it did look down at exactly the point where its feet might have been.
Gene turned and walked on until he reached Building Eight. People were streaming in and out of the enormous, arched portal. “What is this place?” he asked a comparatively friendly-looking citizen who was hurrying by.
“It’s Building Eight,” the man replied. Polite. Annoyed.
“Yes,” Gene said. “But what is Building Eight?”
“Well,” said the fellow slowly, as if checking an internal regulator. “It’s where we’re both going.” Then he tore off through doors that hissed open at exactly the right moment to gain him entry.
Gene examined his alternatives. Then he went into the building.
An image exploded in his head. He had walked through the front doorway of a great cathedral sometime in the far-distant past. The light was streaming in through immensely tall stained glass windows, and there was singing in the choir high above. He felt awe and, most annoying to him, fear, mingled with a desire to obey the builder of the temple. He felt himself breathing differently. A hum surrounded him: a low purr of human activity that was both soothing and exciting. Towering, translucent elevators transported people skyward.
“Bob?” he asked a floating eyeball conveniently located in a slender kiosk marked INFORMATION that abutted one of the elevator banks.
“Excuse me for a moment,” said the bright and shiny object. “You’re Gene, right?”
“Who wants to know?” growled Gene. This was pissing him off.
“Well,” said the glowing optical sphere, “if you are Gene, then you are cleared for entry to the elevator. If you’re not Gene, you aren’t.”
“Okay,” he said, trying to sound as belligerent as he could. “I am, in fact, that person.”
“You might want to watch that attitude, pal,” said the eye pod darkly. Then it brightened. “Or have it medicated out! That’s available on the fourteenth floor.” Was it smiling? How do you smile if all you are is an eyeball?
Gene determined to stay off the fourteenth floor if he could help it.
There was one solitary elevator provided for transportation to Bob and another advanced mechanism to summon it: a deep socket in the wall of the elevator bank intended for insertion of the supplicant’s finger. He placed his digit into it, and, after a moment of thought, it lit up. A little hologram of a dodecahedron rotated within the minuscule housing in the wall while the elevator came to meet him.
Big deal, thought Gene.
The elevator came. It was a transparent room of clear polymer and spun titanium supported by a massive steel floor that floated like a leaf on the wind. Similar vehicles glided up and down throughout the spacious central atrium. “Thanks, Gene,” said the room as it deposited him at the doorway to Bob’s office. It was the only space on the floor. A small panel in the front door slid open, revealing a 3-D screen.
“Hiya, Gene!” said a fat, friendly face in the monitor. “We’re expecting you! Please take off your shoes when you come in the house.” It clicked off.
The house? thought Gene. Up here? But he left his shoes neatly in the tiny vestibule between the elevator and the front door, which now opened to reveal the fat face that had greeted him in the security screen. The face was on a head—nothing but—that was just floating there. A triumph of hovercraft tech if ever there was one, thought Gene. It started with skateboards. And now this.
“Hey there,” said the head. It looked affable enough.
Gene took a peek around. He was in the foyer of a capacious New Orleans manse in the days before the great flood, when that lovely city finally disappeared beneath the waters of the Gulf for the last time. Ah, what a shame. But . . . how did he know that? Yet he did know it, and more. History of the antebellum South. Furniture that was in favor immediately after the first American Civil War. And at the same time, he actually knew nothing at all. All his knowledge had been overlaid upon a base of wet, gooshy stuff. It was frustrating.
“Bob’s not quite ready at this moment,” said the head in a light Southern accent. “He asked me to keep you company here in the foyer while you wait. My name is Edgar.” It floated there, looking at Gene expectantly.
Gene felt some reply was required. “Hello, Edgar,” he offered at last.
“The truth is,” said Edgar, with an odd mix of humility and enthusiasm, “I’m trained only for vestibules and foyers. Next month I hope to graduate to waiting rooms.”
“Well,” said Gene. “Good luck with that.” He couldn’t think of much else to say. A strangely uncomfortable silence then ensued in which Edgar continued to hang in midair, grinning the way people do when they want to appear friendly but had run out of conversational topics.
This was one of the new CyberPals that the very wealthy could purchase for business and entertainment purposes. They were competent at virtually any form of communications: scheduling, greeting, and the like. Obviously, they came up short if any manual labor was required, since they had no arms and legs. It was not until the Disney unit of Alphabet entered the market, however, that something really went wrong. The Goofy head, for instance, refused to stop crashing violently into any wall that was available to it, exclaiming “Gorsh!” over and over until it incapacitated itself. The Mickey head would be quite pleasant at first but would end up wandering around the house, laughing in a strange, high-pitched giggle. They were eventually phased out and could now be found mostly at garbage dumps, still awake, blinking and muttering to themselves until, after several years, their solar power systems died.
Edgar was receiving an incoming alert. “You can go in now,” he said.
“Thanks, Edgar,” said Gene. Then, just to be friendly to a fellow creature, he added, “And good luck with your, you know, career progress.”
“A man’s reach must exceed his grasp, particularly when he has no arms,” Edgar replied with exaggerated gravity. Then they both cracked up.
“Through there?” Gene inquired, pointing to a doorway beyond.
“Yeah,” said Edgar. “Good luck to you, too.”
This time Gene’s bowels seized up for real. He felt like he was about to go onstage for a crucial performance but had neglected to learn his lines. He stood rooted to the spot.
“Go on,” said Edgar, scooting over and nudging Gene with his flat plastic forehead. “You’ll do okay. Bob’s a nice guy.”
“Really?”
“No,” said Edgar. “Not really.” And he laughed, a tinny, sparkly sound, and ascended to the corner of the vestibule near the front door, where he deactivated himself. The entire far wall of the room suddenly dematerialized, and Gene found himself in a brand-new, expansive living space. The man he had encountered earlier was rising to greet him from behind a desk in the far corner, a wobbly grin on his handsome face.
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3
Bob the Great and Powerful
Gene couldn’t move. What was he so fearful of? This mild-looking gentleman in front of him didn’t seem to offer much of a physical challenge. What was there that bestowed such tremendous power over him? Nothing that showed. Something, then, that didn’t show—that was invisible. Among things that we fear, aren’t those the worst? The monster under the bed? The creature in the closet? The angry parent in the next room?
“Come on over, son,” said Bob. “I won’t bite you. Much.”
Gene approached slowly. The room was enormous and spectacular, preternaturally quiet, with huge, towering windows of the old-fashioned kind—not hermetically sealed plate glass—that actually opened onto the great outside world that lay beyond the pristine tower of Building Eight. They were very high up. Gene walked to the open window. The vista before him consisted mostly of what had to be called suburbs. He could see many pretty houses: some for medium occupancy, many others for one or two families, and, in several places, what were obviously gated communities sporting castles of which the Thane of Cawdor would have been proud . . . whoever he was . . .
There were also some very clean industrial parks with spiffy acres of expensive vehicles parked for a variety of serious purposes, he was sure, and what looked to be dozens of self-contained strip malls with the same configuration of small stores in each. He could make out at least ten gigantic big-box stores, too, guarded by hovercraft bristling with high-tech weaponry. Everywhere, in every direction, the same. But no, wait: there along the very distant rim of the smoky horizon to the east, the ancient bones of some ancient urban center lay smoldering, a strange green haze rising from its decaying towers, a warm, definitely analog light radiating from its old stone piles of glass and steel.
“It is mysterious, isn’t it?” said a voice immediately behind him, so close that it seemed to be emanating from within his own head. “The old city.”
“What is that stuff way, way out there?” Gene asked without turning around, as one would do with a friend with whom pretense was no longer an issue.
“You’ve seen it before, Gene. But you remember nothing about all that, do you?” the voice inquired. Gene did not reply, because no reply was necessary. It was true. He knew a lot of random junk. But he remembered nothing.
After a time, the man behind him, in a voice choked with emotion, said, “You’ve got nothing up there but the basic superstructure, do you, son?”
“I wish I knew what you were talking about,” said Gene, turning around to face his interrogator.
“Let’s sit,” said Bob. “There’s no reason we can’t be comfortable while we get this little part over with. Then you’ll be off to the next chapter of your great adventure. Would you like that?”
“Again,” said Gene. “I think you have me at a disadvantage.”
“I have you at a disadvantage. Jesus. It’s like talking to myself.” Bob returned to his default position behind the desk, reached down, and came up with a rather large Xnfiniti silver cushion about a meter wide, deflated, and held it in front of him like a child about to play a fun game with a new friend. “I like to sit on this,” said Bob. “It helps my whole sacral situation. Remember?”
“The floating tuffet,” Gene observed.
Bob peered at him thoughtfully. “Still some memory in evidence,” he said, as if dictating to an invisible microphone, as indeed he was. He positioned the deflated cushion behind the enormous slab of steel that served as a desk, sat down on it carefully, crossed his legs, and then activated it. The thing then glowed with a very gentle white light, inflated to a full, plump ovoid, and lifted itself smoothly about a foot or so off the floor. “Ah,” Bob sighed. “That’s better. Age is a terrible thing, Gene. And it’s the spine that goes first, you know.”
Bob then sat in silence, regarding Gene with thoughtful concentration. Gene felt the sensation of Bob probing the inside of his brain with delicate, inquiring fingers, moving his various lobes this way and that, peeking underneath one and then the other. Finally he inquired, as politely as he could, “Is this supposed to be some kind of conversation? Because if it is, you’re doing very well holding up your end.”
“You’re doing great, right?” Bob inquired abruptly.
“I guess so,” said Gene. Then, after a second, he added, “Though I suppose it depends on what you mean by ‘great.’ ”
Bob assumed the same dictational tone and spoke to nobody in particular. “The substrate of consciousness appears intact,” he said, “but the long-term and short-term memory issues seem to have been resolved, and with them the problem of consciousness.”
“Bob.” Gene stood up. “I think I’ll be going. I personally feel like this is getting me nowhere.”
“Right. Right. You should.” He stayed seated and fixed Gene with a steely gaze. “Just a couple more questions?”
“Go ahead.” Gene sat down.
“You know who you are?”
“Well,” said Gene, “I mean, sorta.”
“Do you remember anything about the last couple of weeks? Friends? Activities of any kind? Stuff like that?”
“Actually, no, Bob,” said Gene, who felt a bit relieved to be asked about it. “Where I live. What I do. My clothes. This chip I have on the end of my finger.” He looked at it quizzically. “This thing behind my ear . . .” He touched the communications implant, which leapt into life and hummed congenially. “I have no recollection of acquiring any of these things.”
“Well . . ., you have them, don’t you?” said the doctor. His eyes were light blue and slightly watery. “I mean,” he said, “you wouldn’t be the first person in the world to be defined by his possessions and generally amnesiac about why you acquired them in the first place.”
Gene considered this nutty statement. What did it have to do with his predicament?
“I mean,” he said, “I seem to be in the middle of a relatively established setup here. But I don’t think it was me who set it all up.”
“But you feel good, right? You feel strong and smart and wide awake and ready for anything this crazy old world can throw at ya? Just checking.”
“Well . . .,” said Gene. “Yeah. I mean, as far as that goes.”
“Groovy,” said Bob. He jumped off the silver cushion and onto his feet with surprising agility for one with ostensible spine issues. Then he came around the desk, put his arm through Gene’s, and began to walk him rather ceremoniously to the door. “Gotta scramble now, me hearty,” he continued in a false, jocular tone, then “Holy cannoli!” he exclaimed, looking at an archaic wristwatch. “You have to be in Bel Air in . . . forty minutes! Gotta hustle!” They had arrived at the door to the room, which had magically rematerialized.
“Come back right after,” Bob instructed him. “That’s an order, amigo.”
Gene was now at his wit’s end. He disengaged his arm from Bob’s friendly grasp and turned to face him, man to man. “Seriously, Bob,” he said. “What’s in Bel Air that I have to be there so immediately?”
Bob looked him over carefully. “Come on, son,” he said gently. “Try.” Once again he gently tapped the silvery implant behind Gene’s ear. Gene closed his eyes. There was an airy silence in the room where they were standing together, one thinking, one waiting. “It’s in there,” said Bob, with the same note of patient impatience.
A bird was singing somewhere. Was it a bird or a recording of a bird? A faint smell of . . . Was it ozone? Or . . . Was it perfume? Yes. Very light. A clean smell. Fresh-cut flowers—not fancy ones, daffodils—with a hint of lilac, almost imperceptible. A woman sitting on a couch in a vast living space of some kind, not reading, not doing anything, just . . . sitting, staring out an enormous plate-glass window onto a patio that opened up onto a virtually endless lawn so green and perfectly groomed it had to have been planned and maintained by an intelligence artificial enough to be satisfied with nothing short of perfection. She was in a long, white caftan, her hair collected in a carele
ss sheaf of golden sunshine at the top of her head.
“Sallie,” said Gene.
“Mmm-hmm.” On the other side of the lawn was a vast infinity pool, shimmering waves of bright-blue water cascading gently over its far side and into an abrupt chasm that stretched off into the landscape beyond, where the well-tended mosaic of homes and pools and neatly tended macadam paths faded away, as it did here, into the ruins of a smoking, reeking urban cauldron that lay beyond. And now Gene knew he was dreaming a waking dream, for here was this beautiful woman, Sallie? And she was turning her head now in his direction, and she was staring frankly into the eye of his imagination, and in her was a call—a beckoning of some kind. Then it was just the two of them, he and Sallie, staring into each other the way lovers do. And yet they most certainly had never met. Or had they?
“What if I don’t want to go?” said Gene, to nobody in particular. He had lost his awareness of Bob in there someplace.
“Oh, you’ll go,” said Bob. He touched the back of Gene’s neck then—not roughly, but not casually, either, as one would press a button on a microwave oven to get it started. Gene saw nothing but blank white for a brief moment. Then all the pain in the world filled his head. Then he was back in the room.
“That really hurt,” he said.
“This isn’t easy for me, either, Gene,” Bob said, his hand now grasping Gene’s elbow perhaps a little too firmly. “We’ve been working together for a while, you know, and during that time, I’ve come to see you as something of a . . . Well, anyway, what’s the point of that?” His nose had developed a decided thrush, and around the corners of his eyes a bit of extra moisture appeared. “We all of us have our roles to play, son. It’s time for you to play yours.”
“Whatever that may be?” said Gene.
“Yes.” The two stood looking at each other for a moment. Now Gene saw, Bob was perhaps not quite as fit as he looked when the sun was shining bright and his nanotech body shirt was newly printed. After their brief conversation, he appeared a bit weary. Shorter than Gene, too. And much, much older, now that he looked a bit harder.
