Sewer, Gas and Electric

by Matt Ruff

  “It had better luck with the second part—“A thousand ironic prosecutions.”

  “It was in the Seventies,” said Joan, “that John Hoover first started killing people to protect his position in the Disney organization. Roy Disney’s death left him vulnerable again to the vagaries of corporate politics. Office infighting aside, there were lingering questions about Walt Disney’s mortgaged portfolio; Hoover seems to have queered the paper trail on that, but for years there would be attempts to trace the whereabouts of Walt’s missing millions. And there were other dangers: that someone would find G.A.S.’s bunker, for instance; that a Disneyland utilities manager would get curious about the excess drain on the Magic Kingdom’s power grid and start poking around the grounds.”

  “Or that someone from the finance department would take note of Hoover’s embezzlement,” Kite added. “When G.A.S. needed spare parts, Hoover siphoned funds from legitimate projects to pay for them. Which was only fair, given that the computer had helped save so much money for the organization; but Disney management wouldn’t likely have seen it that way.”

  “Hence the need to bump off the occasional nosy accountant. Hoover handled it the same way he handled every problem: he did the legwork himself but let G.A.S. do most of the planning.”

  “They made a game of it.”

  “A nihilistic game. Each murder was staged as a bizarre accident that in some way mocked a stated belief or principle of the victim. Ironic homicide.” Joan opened the case file and turned to a series of Xeroxed newspaper articles and obituaries. “Cetus Fleetwood and Dilmun Theroux, troubleshooters for Disneyland’s internal water and power service. Friends described them as ‘weekend flower children’; they carpooled to work in a VW microbus plastered with anti-war and pro-vegetarian bumper stickers. They were killed and eaten by an escaped Vietnamese tiger that somehow found its way from the L.A. Zoo to their flat in Venice. . . .” Joan turned a page. “David Shenkman, quality supervisor for Disney accounting. A devout Baptist, he was found drowned in the 20,000 Leagues Lagoon. . . . John Tombes, Disney security. A member in good standing of the N.R.A., he was falsely identified as a fugitive Weatherman and shot dead by the Orange County Sheriff’s Department.”

  “‘A well-regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state . . .,’” Kite quoted. She took the case file from Joan and flipped ahead a few more pages. “This one is my favorite. Shelley Lacroix.”

  “That’s the psychologist?”

  Kite nodded. “Hired in 1978 to supervise mental health testing of Disney personnel after a crazed ride operator dressed as Santa Anna tried to annex Frontierland. Management wanted to make sure it wasn’t a contagious form of dementia. Dr. Lacroix brought in a whole arsenal of psychological evaluation tools, including an updated version of the same exam that had gotten John Hoover barred from the Army Signal Corps.”

  “One night about three months into the job,” Joan said, “Dr. Lacroix was driving home along a winding back road when a figure loomed out of the darkness ahead of her. She swerved to avoid it, plunging her car off an embankment; she was killed in the wreck, and her latest batch of psych evaluations underwent a quick roadside edit.”

  “The irony of the situation is fairly obscure,” Kite said. “It seems Dr. Lacroix was a former member of the UCLA debate team, and the author, while still in college, of Accentuate the Negative, a pamphlet on the use of hyperbole in argument—the old debater’s trick of exaggerating an opponent’s position to make it appear ridiculous and extreme, then attacking the exaggeration as if it were the actual point of view.”

  “When the highway patrol found Dr. Lacroix the next morning, they saw nothing to indicate foul play; it looked as though she’d simply fallen asleep at the wheel and lost control of her car. The only peculiar element was a scattering of hay on the road a few yards ahead of the spot where she’d gone over the embankment. The patrolmen were curious about it, but without Dr. Lacroix to tell them what had really happened, they couldn’t guess that the hay had come from the figure that had frightened her off the road.”

  “A scarecrow,” said Kite. “Set in ambush and later removed by John Hoover.”

  “And so if you wanted to make a really, really bad pun about it,” Joan said, “you could say that Shelley Lacroix, like her old debate rivals at UCLA, had been—”

  “—demolished by a straw man,” Kite concluded. “Pretty much sums up the whole business, doesn’t it?”

  “Between 1971 and 1982,” Joan continued, “there were over a hundred ironic fatalities within the Disney bureaucracy. G.A.S. blueprinted the murders with such cleverness that Hoover seems never to have come under suspicion.”

  “Then in 1983,” said Kite, “G.A.S. found another game to play.”

  “That was the year John Hoover finally broadened the computer’s horizons. Installed a modem link and patched in a cable television receiver.”

  “CNN.”

  “Watching the news, G.A.S. got its first look at real black people, and they weren’t at all what it had expected. They weren’t like Uncle Remus. They weren’t like Dumbo’s crows.”

  “Most distressing of all,” said Kite, “they weren’t like each other.”

  “Extrapolating from the film portrayals, G.A.S. had come to equate perfection with a stereotypical level of conformity,” Joan said. “Hollywood movie Negroes, whether depicted as people or cartoon animals, were simple, predictable, and largely interchangeable—and they never stepped out of character.”

  “Real black people, by contrast, were horribly irregular—born misfits,” Kite said. “As a group, barely an adjective could be applied to them whose opposite was not also in some sense true. They were both jovial and solemn, cordial and irate, lighthearted and embittered . . .”

  “. . . lazy and industrious,” Joan said, “educated and illiterate . . .”

  “. . . criminal and law-abiding, noble and debased, traditional and revolutionary, religious and profane . . .”

  “Pretty much the only thing that could be said with confidence about all of them was that, given enough time, they were almost certain to contradict themselves.”

  “In a word,” said Kite, “they were human.”

  “Hence in need of replacement by something more reliable,” Joan said. “So G.A.S., assisted by the sociopath Hoover—who evidently felt this would be a really neat idea—set out to create a better, more consistent type of Negro. But first it was necessary to get rid of all the old Negroes.”

  “They decided to use plague.” Kite spoke now with the anxious bemusement of someone discussing a thing so horrific that it was, thankfully, impossible. “With over a billion people to be vaporized, plague was really the only way they could do it . . .”

  “And not just any plague. For what it had in mind, G.A.S. had to invent a whole new class of pathogen. No ordinary bacterium or virus could have turned the trick.”

  “This new plague bug,” Kite said, consulting her notes again, “was called a nanovirus.”

  “Nano for nanotechnology,” Joan said, “the technology of moleculesized machines. Hoover refers to it in his journal as an expert virus.”

  “Expert about race . . .”

  “The nanovirus was the knowledge and intuition of a physical anthropologist distilled into a single, self-replicating molecule. A smart contagion that could read the DNA of its host for skin color, hair texture, bone structure, and more subtle racial indicators like blood type and metabolic chemistry.”

  “The nanovirus acted like a Jim Crow bouncer at a polling station,” Kite said. “Examining each person it infected for Negroid features. Those who passed scrutiny were used as carriers to spread the disease but were otherwise left unharmed; those who didn’t pass were marked as victims.”

  “Designing the virus mechanism was actually the easy part,” Joan said. “What took G.A.S. almost two decades to get right was the protocol for classifying infectees, thanks to another troublesome irregularity: the inherent vagueness o
f racial categories. Not only are there no perfect Negroes, there’s also no perfect biological definition of what a Negro is. G.A.S. had to invent a definition and teach the nanovirus how to fudge borderline cases.”

  “Which G.A.S. finally did . . .”

  “. . . somehow,” Joan agreed, “and probably it’s just as well that we don’t know the exact details. Suffice it to say that it worked: the nanovirus became so adept at distinguishing racial subgroups that it was able to decimate Negroid Africans and their descendants while leaving other dark-skinned peoples—particularly dark-skinned Caucasians—virtually untouched.”

  “It did have one odd quirk, though,” Kite said. “Upon encountering a host with bright green eyes, the nanovirus automatically assumed that person was not a Negro, even when they clearly were. Not only that, but the virus molecule immediately destroyed itself.”

  “People with the gene code for green eye color couldn’t even be carriers of the plague. And this wasn’t an accident, it was an intentional immunity built into the virus. Hoover mentions it obliquely in his journal but doesn’t give an explanation.”

  “I think I could hazard a guess,” Kite said, but didn’t elaborate. Continuing the narrative, she went on: “By the turn of the millennium, or shortly thereafter, the plague was ready for release.”

  “But Hoover and G.A.S. decided to add one more refinement before putting it to use.”

  “A clock.”

  “A fuse, really,” Joan said. “Every copy of the virus molecule contained the nanoscopic equivalent of a synchronized watch. The plague knew what time it was. This was to allow it to spread unnoticed, in a benign, semidormant state, until a pre-set date when it would suddenly turn virulent.”

  “Appearing to erupt everywhere at once,” Kite said, “like no other epidemic in history.”

  “Hitting so hard and so fast there’d be no hope of anyone finding a cure, or tracing the plague’s origin.”

  “In 2002, with a test tube full of virus secreted in his shaving kit, Hoover flew to Paris, to attend the tenth-anniversary celebration at Euro Disney, a gala event that promised to lure in visitors from all points of the globe . . .”

  “But with typical irony, Hoover didn’t release the bug inside the theme park. Instead he took it to an anti-Disney rally being conducted about a mile away by a federation of Parisian intellectuals, Gallic purists who’d coined the phrase ‘aesthetic Holocaust’ to describe the threat posed by Mickey Mouse to French high culture.”

  “The lead speaker at the rally was a professor of semiotics named Alain Broussard . . .”

  “. . . whose great-uncle had been a Jew-catcher for the Vichy regime during World War II. Hoover got upwind of the bandshell Broussard was using for a rostrum and popped the stopper on his test tube. When the rally turned into a protest march about an hour later, the opponents of the ‘aesthetic Holocaust’ brought the plague to the gates of the Magic Kingdom—infecting security guards, ticket takers, and tourists from six continents.”

  “The virus began to multiply and spread.”

  “G.A.S. had estimated a lag time of two years for the nanovirus to diffuse from ground zero in Paris to the most remote human settlements,” Joan said. “Hoover spent the interim back stateside, trying to find a manufacturer for his latest invention, the Self-Motivating Android . . .”

  “For legal reasons,” said Kite, “he was obliged to offer first refusal—and a share of the patent—to the Disney corporation. But he’d grown increasingly disaffected with Disney; it seemed no matter how many bosses and functionaries he did away with, the bureaucracy just became more and more stifling to him.”

  “He wanted out,” Joan said, “so he sabotaged the test-marketing of his own invention, submitting an inferior Android design and purposely antagonizing the consumer research team assigned to work with him. At the same time he began shopping around discreetly for a new patron.”

  “Hoover wanted to go back to working for an individual,” Kite said. “A maverick visionary, like Walter Disney had been, someone who wasn’t at the mercy of his creditors and who maintained enough clout within his own organization to guarantee the independence of his most trusted employees.”

  “Most of the established mavericks weren’t interested, though. Ted Turner was busy building airships, Ed Bass had just sunk the bulk of his free capital into a new Biosphere project, Bill Gates was bidding to write the operating system for the new Cray PC, and Steve Jobs had left Silicon Valley to become a televangelist. And H. Ross Perot was just too damn paranoid for someone with Hoover’s secret history to even try approaching.”

  “Then Hoover read an Esquire article about Bold Young Entrepreneurs, among them bold young Harry Gant.”

  “Harry’s photo is what clinched it. Hoover wrote in his journal: ‘He has the face of a man with more enthusiasm than sense.’ G.A.S. agreed with Hoover’s assessment. . .”

  “The Self-Motivating Android was formally rejected by Disney in August of 2004,” Kite continued. “The onset of the Pandemic followed less than a week later.”

  “All over the world, the nanofuses ran down to zero,” said Joan. “By pure chance, the first recorded outbreak of plague symptoms occurred in Boise, Idaho, where a reunion of the Buchet family ended with all forty-seven members simultaneously contracting meningeal fever. The story wasn’t on the AP wire more than ten minutes before a deluge of reports started coming in from everywhere else, but because of the perceived incongruity of that very first report—black people in Idaho?—a rumor got started that the plague had originated in Boise.”

  “A myth that potato farmers are still trying to live down. In fact, Negroes everywhere—including those who’d never touched an Idaho Russet—all began to feel ill at roughly the same time. The nanovirus’s timer was accurate to within a few hours.”

  “Most of the victims died within the first two days. A few hardy souls hung on for twice that long, but they went out raving and fever-crazy.”

  “And as they succumbed, they vanished.”

  “A last trick of the virus,” Joan said. “After killing its host it became a saprophyte—an eater of the dead. A fast eater.”

  “This not only made autopsies impossible,” Kite said, “it removed the very serious threat of secondary plagues that would surely have been generated by a billion unburied corpses. And of course, it had the effect of making the Pandemic seem even more unreal.”

  “It was a quick, neat, sanitary genocide,” Joan said. “A perfect genocide.”

  “Hoover was elated,” said Kite. “Though G.A.S. had done most of the work, he chose to view it as a personal triumph . . .”

  “. . . like a kid whose backyard chemistry experiment had turned out better than he could have hoped. He was still beaming with pride several months later, when he had his first meeting with Harry in Atlanta, and it may have helped swing the deal for him. Harry took a shine to him right away. He thought Hoover was very upbeat, very positive.”

  “By March of 2005, they’d signed an agreement. Hoover left Disney and came east to work for Gant Industries.”

  “G.A.S. remained behind in Anaheim. It was fully plugged in to the global communications net now, so it didn’t need to be near Hoover to stay in contact with him. And it had become self-maintaining: by dialing into supply house computers or Disney’s own on-site inventory, it could arrange delivery of any new parts it needed, and install them itself with the help of two Servant prototypes Hoover had left in the bunker.”

  “That last may have been a mistake,” Kite said. “It may have given G.A.S. ideas . . .”

  “The Automatic Servant became a huge success—all the more so because of the labor vacuum created by the Pandemic,” Joan said. “Gant Industries cranked out thousands of the machines, and plans were made to produce a second generation with realistic human features.”

  “Anthropomorphic Servants that, remotely controlled, would allow an inhuman intelligence to assume human form and act as its own agent in human societ
y. . .”

  “Which would make Hoover kind of superfluous, if G.A.S. happened to be thinking along those lines. Of course, he was an old man, and sick, and operating-room accidents do happen, but . . .”

  “. . . but look at whom we’re talking about. Both the timing and manner of his death were suspicious, to say the least.”

  “Even more suspicious is the fact that Harry thinks Hoover is still alive. Hoover retired from Gant Industries in 2008, to pursue God knows what new experiments in the suburbs of Atlantic City, but he still kept in touch with Harry by fax and phone . . . and he continued keeping in touch, periodically, even after he was dead. Or at least something with his handwriting and voice did.”

  Kite frowned. “Wouldn’t Gant have been told that his business associate had died?”

  “I’m sure someone mentioned it to him,” Joan said. “Probably more than once. But that doesn’t mean it registered. More enthusiasm than sense, remember?”

  “So G.A.S. assumed its creator’s place in the community . . .”

  “. . . and has been operating behind the scenes ever since. Supported by an unknown number of Automatic Servants that it’s converted to its service. And whatever its present goals are, it continues to ironically prosecute anyone it considers a threat to its interests.”

  “People like Amberson Teaneck, the corporate raider, who wanted to take over Gant Industries.”

  “Amberson Teaneck the Objectivist,” Joan said. “Who believed that A is A, that things are what they are . . . that logic, applied to the evidence of the senses, is sufficient to understand reality and choose a proper course of action . . .”

  “. . . which is generally good philosophy,” said Kite, “unless an evil supercomputer built by a mad scientist has seized control of your reality, for the purpose of mocking you to death. In that situation, trusting to your senses, acting on what you think you know to be true, is liable to get your face bashed in. Which is exactly what happened . . .”