• I'm a reporter and I'd like an interview.
• I built the hut, so now what?
• I'd really like a date, and here's my video and contact information.
Some of those last videos are very stimulating.
Stimulating or not, they all get a polite but negative response. Meeting girls is not a problem for me.
And in any case, I can't get Kimmie out of my head.
The messages from reporters I file till later. All they want to talk about is Kimmie anyway.
I pick a representative sample of the rest of the messages and make a flashcast of them. I give some a personal reply. The whole point of flashcasts is that they create a community between the subject and the viewer, and so even the ones who don't like me get their say, and sometimes I'll respond with something like, "Well if that's the reason you hate me, you'll probably like Joss Mackenzie, go check out his flashes, I think he's still a snake," or "Sounds like you and the girl in the previous message should be friends."
When they hate me, I don't hate them back. Not publicly anyway. That's not who I am.
(Publicly.)
After the flashcast I take one of my classes. I'm sixteen and should finish college in a year and a half. I don't personally attend class very often, because then the class fills up with people who want to watch me instead of the teacher, so instead I use a headset to project myself into a virtual class.
The class is Media and Society, and the professor is Doctor Granger, who I don't like. He's got a young seamless face and wavy grey hair like sculpted concrete, and he paces up and down and gestures like a ham actor as he orates for his audience.
That's not why I don't like him, though that's probably bad enough. When he found out I was taking his class, he opened up the flashcast to anyone, not just those who had signed up for his class. He knows this is his chance to be famous, and he's not about to miss it. If he realizes how pathetic it is that he, a man in his nineties, is leaching off the fame of his sixteen-year-old student, he has shown no sign of it.
"The chief characteristic of modern media," Granger says, "is the existence of near-instantaneous feedback." He's dressed very stylishly today, with a charcoal-grey turtleneck and a blazer and a white silk scarf that he's somehow forgot to take off when he entered the lecture hall, and that ripples when he walks. Awareness of a worldwide audience has upgraded his wardrobe.
"The reaction of the audience can be viewed by the performers immediately after the performance—sometimes during it. So while performers have always taken their audience into account—always judged their performance and its effects with regard to the public—there is now a special urgency involved. A worldwide consensus on a given performance can be reached before the performance is even over."
I know what the consensus on Doctor Granger's performance is. The Demographic despises him. I wonder if he knows it.
"For those the audience chooses to condemn," he says, "the penalty is oblivion. For those to whom the audience grants its favor, instant fame is possible. But continuing fame depends on continuing positive feedback. Performers have to take their audience into account every minute, and the good ones, like all good performers, anticipate what their audience wants and finds a way to give it to them. But now more than ever a performer has to be careful not to alienate their core demographic."
There's the damn Demographic again, I think.
He turns to me. "Sanson," he says, "do you keep your audience in mind when you're making a flashcast?"
He's always using me in class as an example, another reason I don't like him.
At the moment, however, I purely hate him, because he's asked one of those questions for which there's no good answer. If I say I worry about what the audience thinks, then I'm not my own person. But if I say that I don't care what the audience thinks, the Demographic will get mad at me for saying that they don't matter.
"I'm not a performer," I say. "I'm not any kind of actor at all. I just do stuff."
"But still you present programs with yourself as the focus," Granger says. "You perform in that sense. So I wonder if you concern yourself with what your audience is going to say after each flashcast."
I feel a little flutter of unease.
"I respect their opinions," I say. "But that still comes afterward. We can all have a big discussion later on, but when something's going on, the only people I'm interacting with is my pack."
Doctor Granger gives me a big smile. "Aren't you worried about losing your audience?"
Eight percent, I think.
Let me tell you what it's like. When I was eight my parents took me on a vacation to the Middle East, and we went to the Dead Sea and I took a swim. The water is so dense with salt that it holds you up, and you just lie there with the hot sun shining down on you in the warm water, as if it were the most comfortable mattress in the world, and you know that no matter what happens, you'll never drown.
That what it's like to have the Demographic on your side. There's this outpouring of interest and friendship and love, and they respond to everything you do. There's a whole community there to help you. Anytime you want a friend, a friend is there. If you want information, someone will give it to you. If anyone offers you disrespect, you don't have to respond—the Demographic leads the charge on your behalf, and you can stay above the fight.
You just float there, in that warm saltwater, with the sun shining down, and you'll never drown as long as the Demographic is behind you.
Am I worried about losing that?
I'd be crazy not to.
"It's like any other kind of friendship," I tell Doctor Granger. "There's feedback there, too. But if friends respect each other, they won't tell each other what to do."
Doctor Granger gives a nod.
"You'd better hope they're your friends, then, hadn't you?"
I think of Kimmie and feel a knife of terror slice into me.
She stopped loving me. What happens if everyone else stops loving me, too?
I do some other work and then catch Kimmie's next flash, in which she goes shopping with a couple of her friends. She's wearing big hoop earrings and a wraparound spider-silk skirt, sandals, and a loose-fitting cotton tank with flowery embroidery.
Next, I think, she'll be wearing a headscarf.
She's still wearing the color threads in her hair, the ones that match the color shifts going on in her eyes. It's a subtle style, and not the sort of thing people would notice at once. I'd only spotted it because I viewed her flash twice.
Once I viddied it, though, I recognized it as a statement as clear as a tattoo. Her flashes weren't just a kind of personal electronic diary she was sharing with whoever chose to view them, she had greater ambitions.
Picking such a subtle style meant that she hoped people would notice, only not right away. She was hoping that the whole hair-eyes thing would start small and snowball and become a craze, and that before a few weeks were out, hundreds of thousands and maybe millions of kids would have their hair and eyes in synch.
And after that, after she'd set a major trend, Kimmie was hoping those millions of kids would turn to her for the latest in style, that they would watch her breathlessly for clues as to what to wear, or what music to listen to, or who to be.
That was why I'd suggested that my viewers send Kimmie a note telling her they liked what she'd done with her eyes. It was my way of telling her, Hey, Kimmie, you're busted.
It was my way of saying that I know she's trying to be me.
I watch as Kimmie walks through shops and looks at clothes and laughs with her friends. She's bouncy and sort of flirting with the cameras.
I feel sick as I remember how she used to flirt with me. She never loved me, I think. She just wanted to be around someone who could teach her to be famous.
"Sanson would have liked this," she says, holding up a flirty top. Then she shrugged and put it back on the rack.
Her friends giggle. "That style's so over," she says.
Given up on subtlety, have you? I think.
Kimmie nods. "I saw Sanson's mother wearing something like this, once, except it was blue."
"Leave my mother out of it," I tell the video.
She touches her friend's arm. "Sanson and his mother are so cute together," she says. "They're really close. He takes her advice on everything."
I snarl and throw a pillow at the holographic image. Lasers burn Kimmie's image across the crumpled pillowcase.
If there's one thing the Demographic isn't going to want to hear, it's that I depend on the advice of a hundred-forty-year-old parent.
Kimmie has declared war. And I don't know how I'm going to fight back—as my dad said, I can't respond directly without giving her more credence than she deserves.
And besides, what am I going to say? That I hate my mother?
I don't need a bucket of hot coals. I need a cannon.
Next day we have the semifinals in our gorillaball league. We had chosen a field half a kilometer long, with a three-story municipal office building in the middle, plus a row of stores and two groves of pine trees. The six goals were in hard-to-reach places that would involve a lot of climbing.
The Samurai arrive with angry designs shaved into their fur, arrows and snakes and snarling animals—I wish I'd thought of that, actually. Shaved into each of their backs are the words WE LOVE KIMMIE.
They've got a lot of nerve, considering that they're only playing gorillaball in the first place because they're in my Demographic.
Before the game starts the Samurai get in a circle and start chanting "Sanson is a sellout!"
It goes on for what seems like hours while we stand around and can't think of any way to respond. Eventually Errol starts shouting "Play or forfeit!" and the rest of us pick up the chant, but it's far too late. Our fighting spirit has already drained into the dirt, and we look like a gang of lames to our worldwide audience.
The Samurai stomp us. They've practiced a lot, and they have some moves we haven't encountered, and they play rough. The final score is 16-5, a complete rout, and by the end we're dusty and bruised and angry. I'm limping because a couple of the Samurai body-checked me off a building and I didn't catch myself in time. We leave with the Sanson is a sellout chant echoing in our ears.
And I'm still stuck in the gorilla body till the league finals, which are next week.
I decide it's all Kimmie's fault.
There's a lot of silence in the pool area after the game. I shave an area of my calf and slap on an analgesic patch. Hardly anyone is watching anymore, so I ask everyone to turn off their cameras, and we groom each other listlessly.
When I ask Lisa into my office I run all the detectors that are supposed to make certain that no one is eavesdropping. I don't want anyone to know what I'm planning.
"Kimmie's attacking me in her flashcasts," I say. "And I can't respond to what she's doing, because that would give her more credit than she deserves."
"Okay," Lisa says. "I can see that." She sits on one of the three-legged stools and rubs a bruised shoulder. "All you have to do is wait, though, because sooner or later she's going to make a mistake."
"No," I say. "I want to be able to respond—but I don't want anyone to know it's me."
She looks uneasy. "You want me to make a flashcast attacking her?"
"No," I say. "I don't want anyone in the pack to do it, because then it'll look like I'm just telling them what to say."
Lisa is relieved.
"I want to do it myself," I say.
She stares at me. Though our bodies are hulking gorilloids, our faces are a lot more human, so that there's room for brains behind the forehead and so that people can understand us when we talk, but that also means that we have a nearly full range of human expression. I look at Lisa and I know that she's looking at me with calculation.
"I want to create a false identity," I say. "I want to be somebody else when I start talking about Kimmie."
Lisa considers this. "What exactly do you want to do?"
"I want to create an artificial personality, one who makes flashcasts of his own. Maybe he could be based on Mars or somewhere even farther out." I grin at her. "Anatole says you're good at this kind of thing."
"Maybe I am," Lisa says, "but nothing I do is going to be foolproof."
"Lots of people make anonymous flashcasts."
Lisa looks dubious. "I don't think very many of them are as famous as you are."
"I won't do it for very long."
"All right," she says. She still seems doubtful. "If anyone really wants to find out, they will."
"Let's do it," I say.
"Let me look into a few things first," she says. "Before I start, I want to make sure I'm not going to make a mistake and wreck things."
I agree. I like the fact that she's being careful.
I start making plans for what I want to say.
"You've lost another fifteen percent of your audience," my dad says.
Tonight's meal is Italian. There's stuffed tomatoes, herring artichokes, squid salad, ravioli stuffed with pheasant, braised beef in the Genoese style, and a ricotta pie. And again it's all for the two of us, because my mom's giving a talk in Peru.
"I know," I say.
"You're a trend-spotter," he tells me. "What trends look good?"
"I've been looking around. But with everything else I'm doing—"
"How about the whole neo-barbarian thing?"
"No legs," I say, my mouth full of squid. I swallow. "Besides, after being a gorilla I don't ever want to have to deal with fur coats ever again."
"You need to find some coincidence of fashion and culture—video or music." He waved a ravioli on his fork as he repeated his mantra. "No modern cultural phenomenon ever lasted unless there were great clothes that went with it."
"I know," I say.
"And a new dance style always helps."
"I know."
I know. I know more than he does. I'm the one who's a slave to the Demographic, not him.
So I start casting about for trends. I stay up nights listening to music from all points of the solar system, and looking at the flashcasts of obscure designers. For a while I think about getting a second pair of arms, like some of the asteroid miners, but then I realize how much I'm longing to inhabit a basic human body again.
I keep looking. Put this style with this music with this dance. I've done it before. How hard can it be?
It's hard. Especially because I hear in my head what the Demographic is going to say about it. You want me to wear those heels? Or, These people are singing in Albanian! Or, Hell, I'd rather be a gorilla.
But in the meantime we have to deal with the last gorillaball event, the Samurai versus the Night People, the other Bay Area team that survived the semifinals. I've viddied their games and I don't think they stand a chance.
I appear in person to award the league trophy, which is a huge, fierce gorilla head chomping with its fangs on a ball. Since I don't want to go alone I bring the whole pack.
"Hey, a question," I say to the Samurai captain at the coin toss. "If you like Kimmie so much, how come you haven't gone blond?"
He doesn't have an answer for that, but wins the toss anyway.
I watch with the pack as the Samurai begin one of their patented jackhammer attacks and commence their long afternoon's humiliation of the Night People. The score is 4-1 when I look at Deva and give her the nod.
She quietly leaves, and takes the league trophy with her, out of range of anyone's cameras.
After the Samurai finish, they find that the trophy has been replaced by a piece of paper pinned down by a large pinecone. The rest of us are in our vehicles. (I have new but deliberately downmarket Scion. I'm not legally allowed to drive it, but I can always program it for a destination and let the onboard navigator take over)
"Hey!" the captain says. "Where's the trophy?"
"It's gone for a walk," I say, "but it left behind a clue as to its current location."
&nb
sp; What I'd written on the paper was this:
There once were gorillas of note
But overly tempted to gloat.
They played ball without peer
Till a brave Mutineer
Carried them off on his boat.
How to find the league trophy
• Scratch your heads in puzzlement until someone watching the flashcast sends you a message informing them that Errol's mother owns a boat called Mutineer.
• Troop down to the marina in Alameda, and then stand around like a bunch of apes until you finally notice that the boat is flying flag signals.
• Decode the flags and follow directions across the Bay to Sausalito.
• Spend the next several hours tramping back and forth across the Bay, knowing all the while that millions of people are watching your purgatory in realtime, and that Sanson and his pack are in their clubhouse rolling on the floor with laughter.
• Finally find the trophy in a pine tree on the field where the Samurai had beaten the Stars, and realize that the pine cone was a clue that you were too dense to get.
• Limp off into darkness and obscurity, knowing that millions of people are laughing at you, and will laugh for years to come.
After we stopped flashcasting, Lisa came over to me and said in a low voice. "You know that thing you asked me to do?"
"Yeah?"
"I've done it."
I take her into my office and she gives me the codes. "All you need to do is decide what your avatar is going to look like," she says.
"Magnetic," I answer.
That's how the Duck Monkey begins. A Martian, the Duck Monkey gazes down from the sky and examines the cultural scene on Earth with mixed amusement and scorn.
The Duck Monkey examines all of Kimmie's flashcasts. He mocks her fashions, and shows ridiculous people in history who had worn similar clothing. He points out similarities between her flashes and mine, and suggests that she's nothing but an imitator. He closely examines her ideas and expressions and provides links to the originators of those ideas and expressions. He makes fun of her friends. He points out that it's tacky to use information I gave her in private.
The Green Leopard Plague and Other Stories Page 38
