by Stanley Bing
“You’re going to be all right,” said Bob gruffly. “So many of the right things went into the making of you, it’s impossible that you would not be all right. You just needed some . . . fine-tuning.”
“Well,” said Gene, “who doesn’t?”
Bob regarded him closely. Then he leaned very slightly into Gene’s face and said, “Stick close to your desk and never go to sea—”
“—and you could be the ruler of the queen’s navy,” Gene replied, as one of Pavlov’s German shepherds would have drooled when a bell was rung. Then he gave in to the vast cloud of black ooze that blossomed out of the deep emptiness that was his mind; a terrible despair at the depth of how little he knew himself.
For his part, Bob was patting Gene on the shoulder with evident satisfaction. “Hyperloop’s in the lobby. Bronny will help you find it.” Then he cupped his palm and put it against Gene’s cheek. For an instant, Gene thought it was possible that Bob was going to give him a kiss. It’s possible Bob thought so, too, because he coughed, turned, and walked back to his desk. As he went, he bellowed in a voice that would carry clear to San Jose, “Bronwyn!” He didn’t look at Gene again but got very busy with the meaningless crap on his desk.
The virtual door was open. Gene went through it and was in the foyer again. This time his greeter was not the local machine intelligence but an actual human being: smiling, a small, childishly slender young woman with pale, pale white skin, a bloom of pink at both cheeks, and big, brooding brown eyes with massive lashes. She had an old-style phablet cradled in her left arm. In her right was a stylus.
“Hey, Bubba,” she said to him. “Howzit goin’.”
“You’ll have to excuse me if I’m supposed to know you,” said Gene. “I have this memory thing going on, in the sense that I don’t seem to have any.”
“Bronwyn,” she said amiably. “You can call me Bee. Or Bronny. Or Bronwyn. I answer to all three.” He must have looked rather blank. “Oh my,” she said sadly. “We finally did it, huh?”
“Apparently,” said Gene.
“Follow me, then.”
“Lead on, Macduff.” Where the fuck did he get these stupid things?
“Ah, that’s right,” she said. “Bob always did like his Shakespeare.” Then, nodding at some private grim joke to herself, she preceded him down the hallway.
“And what do you do around here, Bronwyn?” he piped merrily to her pert little back and bobbing fall of light-brown hair.
“Well, it’s hard to say,” she said. “Let’s just say I work for Bob in whatever capacity he requires, within reason. And that means kind of keeping an eye on you, Gene, for your own good, if not always and entirely for his.”
“Is keeping an eye on me, like, a plum assignment or something?”
“It depends,” she said. “Sometimes.” And kept on walking. “Other times, not so much.”
“And how would you describe what it is I’m supposed to be doing?”
Bronwyn thought about that for a little while as they walked. Then she stopped, turned, and looked at him. “You’re supposed to be sacrificing yourself to one of the gross narcissists who run the atavistic corporate state in his obsessive search for eternal life,” she said. “That’s what you’re supposed to be doing.” Then she checked his eyes for some spark of understanding.
“Oh, I see,” Gene replied. So Bronwyn’s crazy, he thought. “That sounds like important work,” he added with pleasant sincerity. “I wouldn’t want to be late for it.” Bronwyn looked a bit crestfallen, shrugged, hugged her phablet a bit tighter, and they resumed their progress. At the end of the hall, they stepped into a glass-and-steel platform that had hissed open at their arrival. They rode down for a while in silence.
“But seriously, how come I can’t remember anything about this whole deal?” he asked as the perfectly transparent room slid to a halt on the ground floor.
“Which whole deal?” She once again preceded him out the doors.
“You know,” he said, “this.” They had moved into the gigantic lobby, which loomed above them like St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome greeting supplicants on their way to see the Pope.
Bronwyn stopped dead, turned, and pierced him with a hot and slightly hostile glare. “Tell me something, Gene. Think before you answer. I mean, really think.”
“Okay.”
“Do you really and truly remember nothing? Nothing?”
“Nope.” Gene brightened a bit. “Maybe I had an accident of some kind and have amnesia, like in one of those movies I can’t remember seeing.”
“Like, you don’t remember Petaluma?”
“City in Northern California,” Gene said noncommittally.
“Nothing about any of the people you might have met? Friends you may have made? Nothing about . . . Liv?”
Gene felt the wind whistling between his ears. “Liv,” he said, as if in a dream.
“Think about it,” said Bronwyn. The right side of her head above her ear began to glow red. “Whoops.” She grimaced a little. “Incoming.” She listened to her head for a moment. “I gotta go,” she said. “Here.” She gently took his hand and deposited a small plastic chip into his palm. “See that arrow? That’s the Hyperloop. This is your ticket. Give it to the droid at the platform.”
“Okay,” said Gene. “But what am I supposed to do when I get there?”
Bronwyn seemed on the verge of saying something but then thought better of it. “You’ll find out,” she said. Then she, too, touched his face. Her touch was tender and, Gene thought, kind of familiar for a person he had never met before. Then Bronwyn turned and went, her ponytail bobbing in what looked a lot to Gene like anger.
The Loop lay waiting in the station, and Gene got on. Each passenger had a private space in his or her own little car. His seating unit was a high-riding ergonomic masterpiece, fitted to some mystical understanding of the spinal cord and its relation to the central nervous system. He felt it forming itself to fit him. It was made of some prion-based fabric that was not alive in any organic sense but was not entirely inanimate, either. To what extent did such organisms evolve and change as the environment worked on them? Could they develop some very rudimentary form of consciousness after years on the job? Could a chair fall in love with the weight of its master’s body?
He sat back in the Hyperloop and decided to take a good long look at things. After what felt like thirty seconds later, he was awakened by a gentle nudge from his head. “Wake up, sleepy person,” said Bronwyn’s voice. “You are there.”
There? thought Gene. Where is there?
“You’ll never know until you go find out,” said Bronwyn. Were his unspoken thoughts so clear? “Yeah, they sorta are,” she said sweetly and evaporated back into his cranium.
Well, thought Gene, if I’m supposed to go there, I’d better go see what’s there.
4
A Love That Was Meant to Be
From the rustic climes beyond the smoking, overcrowded hive of the former San Jose where Bob and his campus made their home, to the pristine aerie that was the enclave of Bel Air, it was three hundred miles as the bird flies—if at that point there were any birds left capable of flying through the unfiltered atmosphere of the coastal metroplex. By Musk Hyperloop, the trip took a little more than twenty minutes. A short ride by driverless Uber, and there Gene was.
He was standing in the enormous circular driveway of a palatial mansion made of very pale stone. At least he thought it was stone. It looked like stone. He heard birds. Birds! How? Then he realized. He was actually . . . outside. No high-altitude dome. No stratospheric air filter. Just sky. He looked up. A huge flock of some kind of bird swept overhead.
“They’re swallows,” said a pleasant voice. A very pretty woman was crossing a huge sward of lawn toward him. She was dressed for gardening. About forty, maybe, quite tall, lean but curvy, big mane of medium-blond hair of many colors. Lovely mouth. Big green eyes. She was smiling and holding a perfectly manicured right hand out to him, palm sligh
tly up. It was a hand for taking, not shaking. So he took it.
“Hi,” she said. “You’re Gene. I’m Sallie.”
Of course it was Sallie. Every bit as pretty as in his waking dream.
Gene was silent. His heart was full. The music of creation was playing in his head. This was the woman destined to be his!
“Come in,” she said. “Arthur is very much looking forward to eating you.”
Eating him? Did she realize what she had said? He thought maybe he hadn’t heard her correctly, but he was pretty sure. Her expression remained benign, welcoming. He decided to let it go. They tiptoed hand in hand down the slate slabs of the front patio toward the house, weaving around the koi pond, where gorgeous, multicolored fish cavorted in a twisting, hungry, hyperactive mass. Gene assumed they were artificial.
“Will you wait here a moment or two?” she said with wink that made his knees feel funny. “I want to make sure the King is fully prepared.” She disappeared up the path. Well, thought Gene, this was semi-new information. Arthur was waiting to see him, and this woman, Sallie, was going to take Gene into his presence. It’s me who’s not prepared, thought Gene. So, with a tap of the hard space behind his right ear, he called up a short wiki on the subject of his host.
Arthur was famous. His wiki ran to seven screens, with lots of references at the end and tons of links. There was no time to access any of them, but the global paragraph at the beginning told him enough. Big dude. A legend, shrouded in mystery, speculation, and the envy of lesser mortals. He had invented something prodigious a long time ago and had been pretty much extruding money ever since. His personal wealth was greater than that of most nations. In some circles, his age was thought to exceed 125, since he’d been born way back in the middle of the century just past, during what was called the baby boom. Now he was, if not the last, then certainly one of the final representatives of that generation; the apex of its success vector. The last boomer.
And here she was again, striding down the pathway toward him, one hand extended to reacquire him. God, thought Gene. How beautiful. She conformed in every way to whatever paradigm of beauty had been established in his imagination. She took his hand, and a bolt of electricity shot from the tip of his finger through his body and directly into the soft tissue at the end of his penis.
“Come,” she said.
She walked him through the entryway and out onto an enormous stone veranda that opened up onto a massive lawn—more of a park, actually—that featured a bowling green, a gigantic negative-energy swimming pool, and a hydroponic vegetation platform that rivaled those that had graced the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, an image of which floated through his consciousness like a memory of a meal that he had no recollection of eating.
The pool glowed sweetly in the afternoon light. “In a moment,” Sallie said, “a flock of wild geese will land on the surface of the water, pause for a few seconds, and then take off again. After they go, there will be a double rainbow.” They stared at the pool for a while.
He listened to the mysterious buzz of unseen insects in the trees. Then, at a great distance, he heard the noise of something approaching on the breeze: first one comical honk, then another, then many, and then, with a great rush of wings and fussy, self-important wheezing and bleating, a squadron of Canada geese, accompanied by a few attendant ducks of various sizes and shapes. They lowered their landing gear and planed onto the surface of the swimming pool. Then they sat there for a few moments, conversing quietly among themselves. As they did, a rainbow appeared in the clouds, and then another. Somewhere far away, it had been raining, evidently. Or maybe it was chemicals. Two rainbows, he thought.
“See?” Sallie seemed pleased. They regarded the rainbows together.
“Wow!” said Gene.
“We’d better go in.” She took him by the elbow and steered him lightly to his destination. “We’ll have a little snack,” she said. “Arthur wants you to meet Lucifer. And I’m sure she would like to sniff you thoroughly as well. You have to be careful around her. She’s really very sweet, but something is a bit wrong with her programming, and she can get rather feisty if she takes a dislike to you. She’s been known to spray a noxious fluid or two when she gets into that kind of a mood.”
“Okay,” said Gene. “And what is she?”
Sallie looked at once amused, parental, and beaming with sentimental affection. “She’s mine, really, but Artie’s taken a shine to her, too. She’s a sort of . . . lizard, iguana kind of thingie. They say she’s artificial. But she’s very real to me. You’ll see.” They had been delivered onto the gleaming patio, a virtually endless expanse of white stone. In the center of this palatial piazza was a giant slab of black marble festooned with a cornucopia of meats, sweets, fruits, pastries. A zero-gravity ice bucket chilled a magnum of Veuve Clicquot.
Gene was swept by a wave of crippling embarrassment. They were clearly expecting someone very important here, and he was busting in on it. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m intruding. I should go someplace and wait while, you know, you have your lunch or whatever.”
“Gene,” she said with a juicy chuckle, as if they were sharing a private joke. Her laugh was lovely. Kind of dark and smoky. What a nice laugh. Yummy. “You are lunch or whatever,” she said, so soft and confidential that it would have been churlish for him to refrain from laughing along with her. Then he just looked at her face. She was still holding his hand, and now, giving it an almost imperceptible squeeze, she turned and led him across the patio, which was trimmed by several ponds loaded with more koi—these as large as otters—and at last into the front portal of the castle.
She dropped his hand and preceded him down a surprisingly cozy corridor, its walls lined with a variety of suspended hologram. Fruit. Animals. Sunsets. Quite a few of a green-and-gold lizard-like thing, which he assumed to be Lucifer, the aforementioned artificial iguana, in a range of endearing poses, if it was possible to so characterize such a creature.
“I did them,” Sallie observed over her shoulder.
“They’re really good,” he said. Gene was happy to be able to say it without lying. He wasn’t that good a liar. Really good lying takes confidence he was pretty sure he lacked. Or maybe he hadn’t been truly tested yet.
“Don’t encourage me,” she said. “Or I’ll have you here for weeks looking at things.”
That didn’t sound too bad. “I don’t mind,” he said. Sallie looked over her shoulder at him as she moved down the hall and gave him a tiny smile. Once again, Gene was suddenly aware that his knees were not as strong as he might like them to be, and there was a simultaneous flutter in the depths of his tummy. Pathetic, he thought. What a tool I am.
“Here we are!” she announced with what he thought was a smidgen too much brio. It was the way people talked to a bright but brittle child, one who could go off at any moment and bite people.
“I was wondering where the fuck you had got to,” said a deep, irritable voice within the darkened enclave of the room. “I’m hungry.”
“This is Gene, Arthur. Now, I want you to be polite.”
“I’ll be as fucking polite as I wanna be,” said Arthur. “You wanna get the fuck in here or what? It just so happens I’m feeling more polite than usual.”
“I assume you’re not talking to me, Artie,” said Sallie, and there was a little steel inside the satin. She stepped aside and gave Gene room to maneuver around her. He did so and found himself in what was clearly an area intended for relaxation and a little bit of work.
“Are you going to sit the fuck down, or what?” said the extremely ancient, desiccated life form before him. Gene was aware of a very faint odor of great old age wafting from that direction, along with the scent of powder and lotion, aftershave, hair tonic, and medicine. A Total Body Gas dispersion unit sat quietly in a space behind the occupant’s chair, within easy reach, a green light blinking. A floating Roomba hovered in the air behind his head. It seemed to be looking at Gene, though that was silly. How could a vacuu
m cleaner see you? And yet he was sure it did.
“Of course,” said Gene. “Thank you, sir.” He sat down in a big Nanohide recliner and immediately sank into it practically up to his waist. The entity that was part seating unit and part artificial life form welcomed him in with a contented sigh. This was somebody’s idea of comfort, thought Gene, but it wasn’t his. He felt tiny, diminished in the arms of this semisentient object. The neat, imperious, slightly smelly figure in the recliner/throne loomed above him now, clearly to its advantage.
“Say hello to Lucifer,” Sallie said, gesturing to what looked like a small footstool on the floor by Arthur’s chair.
This common household object—green, luminescent—was Lucifer, a synthetic lizard with the cognitive abilities of, say, a cocker spaniel. Rumors had it that certain recent models had the power of speech. This was not wholly inconceivable, since everything from info kiosks to kitchen appliances such as refrigerators, stoves, and toasters could converse with you on a level superior to that which you might enjoy with your college friends at an average Friday-night poker game.
Lucifer’s head was flat, semitriangular in shape, and perched on a short, muscular neck attached to a stump of a body that most closely resembled that of a streamlined tortoise. It had virtually no tail, just a small, plump thumb that moved very slowly as she looked at you. It was not an attractive creature, if you could venture to call it a life form at all. Gene reached out his hand very gently and put the end of his fingers at the crown of its silky noggin. It produced a noise, moved slightly closer to the ground, and produced a tiny wet spot on the floor.
“Hi, Lucifer,” he said.
Lucifer then emitted a noise that definitely sounded like a human being, possibly a newscaster, saying “Woof.”
“You’re a decent-looking specimen,” said Arthur, who was peering at him with creepy ferocity. Gene hardly knew what to say. A specimen? He didn’t like the sound of that. He had a feeling about it. Like, it wasn’t just an empty compliment. More of a scientific observation. It was cold.
