Analog SFF, May 2008

by Dell Magazine Authors

  "Christine. It sure is good to see you."

  To avoid further sentiments, she quickly introduced me as “just a friend.” Then they didn't say much to each other for a while. It was more like they were caressing each other with words. Nothing mushy at all, but it was the way they spoke, the way they looked at each other.

  Tina looked uncomfortable, and she said, “Jimmy has a computer question for you."

  "Yes, sir,” I said, surprised at my politeness. I must have been trying to put some structure to my own discomfort. “We work for Good Fortune, as you probably know, and I was wondering whether it would be possible to hack into the computers.” I outlined the situation of the four-armed target, and trailed off, not knowing how much detail Tina's dad needed.

  "Not a problem,” he said without a thought. “Might take time, is all."

  "Okay.” I hadn't prepared anything after that, and his answer was too easy.

  Tina wanted me to keep talking, and she was still fiddling with her hair. Tyler looked at her, pretty much ignoring me. “Why did you come here, honey?” he said.

  "Daddy,” she said, faltering. “It's just that I was thinking of having this removed.” She breezed a hand halfway to her neck. He knew what she meant.

  "I'm surprised you haven't done that long ago."

  "Really? That's funny, because I remember that Mom was really scared to do it. I always assumed that there was a good reason for that."

  "Of course there was a good reason. Your mother was an idiot."

  "Where is she now? Do you know?"

  "Not a clue, kiddo. If I were you, I'd stay away from that woman. Then again, I wouldn't blame you for looking her up. If you do, don't tell her where I am, okay? I got nowhere to hide."

  They talked a little more, and Tyler tried to be polite and ask me a few questions. He obviously thought Tina was bringing her man to meet her father, even though we both denied it. I couldn't tell whether he was happy or indifferent about the idea.

  Time was up and the escorts returned. Tyler looked hard at his daughter. “I have one last question for you,” he said. “Can you promise to tell me the truth?"

  She made a fake smile and then sneered. “I love you too much to lie to you, Daddy."

  "Oh, then this will sound silly,” he said, mimicking her sarcasm. “Do you hate me?"

  "Of course I do."

  Then something very strange happened. Tina must have blushed, I thought, because her cheeks became really red. Tyler sat up in his chair and drew close to look at her face. She realized something had happened and turned away from him. Then I saw it.

  Her cheeks each had a bright red heart tattooed on them. It took me a minute to figure out what it was: mood makeup. She never wore makeup that I'd noticed before, but there was no mistaking this. Mood makeup is some gunk that reacts to your skin temperature, or electrical resistance or some jack like that. It changes color depending on your mood.

  She was so embarrassed that her chair fell over as she got up. She gave me a shove toward the door, the metal chair legs clattering loudly on the floor.

  "Come on!” she said. “Let's get out of here."

  I shrugged with my hands to Tyler, who just sat there perplexed. “Aren't you going to say good-bye?” I said to her.

  "Good-bye, Daddy,” she called, holding her hair in place. She didn't turn back.

  * * * *

  We stopped at the bank to make a withdrawal on the way to the clinic. While waiting in the car at the drive-through, I learned that the rumors about Tina being the company whore were all lies. She hadn't slept with anyone. I believed her; guys spread those kind of stories when there is a girl that they think somehow threatens their sexuality. They do it when someone is so hot that they all want her, but can't have her. And they do it when someone is so unsavory that they're embarrassed to admit that, yes, there are females out there that even their super-libidos must reject. So they spread lies, to create the illusion of legitimacy to their rejection. I figured that one out from being rejected so often.

  People buy into it, too, even other women. I'd heard Kaitlin call Tina a cow, for example. That was her way of fencing off the livestock from “real” women, so that guys could more easily tell which side she was on.

  It was hard to find the clinic because it wasn't on any of the computer maps. Those places that are “guaranteed 100% sterile” don't usually want to be listed. After missing several turns, we found it—a dubious establishment in the low-rent part of town.

  Before I was born, the spiraling costs of health care nearly bankrupted the country. They had a big depression. People tried to socialize health care, but couldn't quite pull it off politically, so for over twenty years, we've had a hybrid system that doesn't work at all. You can't get good care in the government facilities unless you're uninsured, and you can't get good care in the private sector unless you're rich. Of course, insurance was one of the causes of the problem in the first place.

  Another cause was pollution. A lot of kids were born with defects, like Tina and myself. After a few business, were flipped off by lawsuits, a law was passed that basically let the others off. Too many would be put out of business, which would throw things deeper into economic ruin. They were still working on it, but at the time, a lot of middle-class people went to unlicensed clinics.

  The people we met were just in it for the money, and since the job didn't pay them well, they had pretty poor service. I could tell by the way they treated Tina that they didn't believe in what they were doing anyway.

  I waited for over an hour, until a semi-professional nurse brought Tina out of the operating room. Tina had a white towel wrapped around her head, held in place with a pink Velcro strap. It looked like she'd just come out of the shower, and I didn't see any blood at all. This nurse, a black lady with an African or island accent and a badly repaired harelip, was the one person who seemed to care about Tina. She gave us painkiller and antibiotics, instructions for care, checked one last time for bleeding, and saw us to my car.

  "How do you feel?” I asked.

  "If only you cared."

  "Of course I care. Otherwise I wouldn't be here, would I?"

  She gave me a strange, pained look.

  "Does it hurt?"

  "The muscles in my neck are sore.” Tina exhaled a big breath, as if she'd been holding it all these years. “Wow,” she said. “I can't believe I just did that."

  I took her to her apartment, offering to stay for a while. I'd have spent the night on the couch if she'd wanted, but she would have none of that. I'd seen how vulnerable she could be, but she was a proud lady, that one. She barely thanked me for helping her, as if that would somehow compromise her independence.

  "Do you mind if I check on you?” I asked.

  "No."

  Then, as she chained the door behind me, she opened it as far as it would go, and called me through the crack.

  "Yeah?” I said.

  "Sorry about the mood makeup."

  "Well, I'm not sure, but I think he appreciated it."

  "You're really dense, aren't you? It was meant for you."

  She slammed the door in my face. There is nothing more confounding for a guy than having a door slammed in your face, except maybe a slap in your actual face. With the door slam, you know you have to get back inside to overcome the insult, but you also know that you should let it go. It could have been classical drama, me yelling at her through the door like in some old movie. Only it wasn't, because I'm not dramatic. She slammed the door in my face, so the hell with her.

  * * * *

  Neither of us would apologize, so we went on for a while like we were just co-workers. I sometimes had to keep my distance. While she had always been a bitter pill, she now seemed more acerbic, more in your face. I supposed that with the healing of her amputated growth, other scars were itching. I decided to let things cool for a while.

  As it happened, Swami sent us both an interesting e-mail, and we met in his office to discuss it. Tina w
ouldn't talk to me, and I only granted her a nod. I'd be damned if I was going to apologize to her for not being able to read her mind. You don't slam doors in people's faces for that.

  "One Tree,” Swami said, apparently as a greeting. He backed his wheelchair into his office, and we sat in chairs to either side. “I think I figured out what's going on with your four-armed target. But first, I have to ask you something. Either of you ever smoke herb?"

  "No,” we both answered, both taken aback. It wasn't the sort of question you asked someone at work. “What's that got to do with anything?” I said.

  "You may recall,” he said in an exaggerated haughty voice, “in our last lesson, that I spoke of the One Tree, so you know what that is."

  "The missing link of trees, right?"

  "Correct-o-mundo. What I didn't tell you was that the One Tree might as well be mythical at this point. I've done a lot of research, and I think it's too far removed genetically from anything alive today to ever recreate."

  "I'll bite,” I said. “What's the missing link for marijuana?"

  "Hey, I like you. You're sharp!"

  "I got talent, sidecar."

  He chuckled. “Anyway, you're on the right river. I can't recreate the One Tree, as I used to think. But I'm onto one of its descendants: Sinsemilla, the mystical mother of Mary Jane. She's attainable, and her medicines hold many cures."

  I made spooky fingers and went, “Whoo!"

  "Shut up, jerk,” Tina said. “I want to hear what Swami found out."

  "So you're in?” Swami said to her.

  "In what?"

  "My little club. There's too much research for me to do alone. Anyone who helps me reincarnate the ancestral herb will reap in like kind."

  "You must be smoking the good stuff,” I said.

  "Funny,” Swami said with a bemused smile. I liked Swami, because he tolerated me. People often fight back, which just tells me that their ego is threatened. Swami had his act together, and I respected that. “Think about it. Man's been growing and smoking herb almost since fire was harnessed. So herb evolved along with the human brain, in symbiosis. As man became more conscious, he needed herb less, so Mary Jane became relatively barren. And we became less spiritual."

  "Whoa."

  "Today's herb is weak, giving only a bit of euphoria. But Sinsemilla, now, she would restore man's full consciousness, a direct link to the original spirit breathed into the Garden of Eden. I don't expect you to buy all that right away. But if you want to help, hey!"

  "I promise, I'll think about it. Now what about Tina's target?"

  "Fair enough,” said Swami. He paused for effect. “It's a test signal."

  "A test signal."

  "It's sort of like calibration. One way to do science is when you know the result you are looking for and set up a careful test for that result. But sometimes that so-called methodical purity is impossible to achieve. In our case, we don't know the result at the outset, so we can't afford to ignore data just because it isn't rigorously attained. Our management needs to make sure that Genie identifies the targets that he should, and then they need to make sure we report them properly. So they inject an artificial target into the raw data. A test signal. The real rigor of our process happens at the back end."

  "Test signals.” Tina was uncertain. “Testing me, you mean."

  "Partly, yeah."

  For once, someone said something about that four-armed target that made sense. Since it was no coincidence that it hit me so close to home, it had to be that someone had deliberately planted it. Until now, I just could not figure out why. This was some kind of ethical test.

  "So what should I do?” said Tina. “I mean, should I tag it for follow-up or trash it?"

  "I wouldn't worry about it."

  "But what's the right answer?"

  "Not your problem. Your job is to identify Genie's best targets. It's up to someone else to be critical of your choices. The old scientific method was too critical up front. By the turn of the millennium, this negativity, posing as critical thinking, was killing science by feeding anointed lab coats and starving creativity."

  "I don't know. I don't want to do the wrong thing and blow my chances at my new position."

  "What chances? If you had a chance, would they treat you like a cog in a wheel? Allow me to quote Neville Livingston, aka Bunny Wailer. ‘We aren't organizations, we are organisms.’ All these corporate types are part of a system, and a system doesn't care about its parts. They're replaceable."

  "Oh yeah,” I said. “Stupid of me to forget that. See ya."

  "No, seriously. If someone treats you like part of an organization, they don't care about you. If they treat you like an organism, then they do."

  "That's actually true,” Tina said, smirking at me.

  Swami beamed. “Of course it's true. If you don't believe me, go check out who's on the board of directors."

  "Yeah, yeah,” I said, turning to go, making praying-Gandhi hands. “See you around, Swami."

  "One Tree,” Swami said, waving over his head as he rolled to his desk.

  "Thank you,” Tina said to him. Then she followed me out. “Good God, get me out of here,” she muttered.

  * * * *

  If Tina was being tested, why did the target resemble me? Was it originally intended for me? Did Tina's promotion have anything to do with it? Swami had put us on the right river, but we still didn't know much. I was damn well going to get to the bottom of it all, though.

  Something else Swami said had made sense too, and when I got back to my desk, I looked into the company's board of directors. There wasn't one. The shareholders had voted to replace the old board with a computer. At the time, it was pretty controversial stuff, so it was not hard to find information on it.

  The idea was that today's business environment—which included local policy, local and federal law, oversight by several agencies, high investment costs, high risks, insurance nightmares, and more—was too complex a maze for humans to negotiate quickly enough to turn a profit. With a highly adaptive program tracking the myriad variables, creating and simulating strategies, the company had turned around and was four times more profitable than our nearest competitor. The owners plugged in the broad business goals, and let the machine figure out how to achieve them. For example, that's how the current quota system got started. The board figured out that the way to maximize profit was to focus on certain metrics, such as the worker productivity measured as a ratio of qualified targets per month. It didn't matter that there was nothing we could do to generate the targets—it was just a way of pulsing the company's efficiency.

  There was a management team that directed operations from this output. In that, they had a lot of leeway, but if the company fell short, it was that team that was fired, not the computer. All that made some sense of Swami's warning about being treated like a machine part.

  In a rare excursion, I went to my boss's office to ask him about it. Dave Deale was a handsome guy, brown hair with graying temples. Deep, commanding voice. The kind that did well in front of customers, but not necessarily his employees. He was broad and muscular, but hobbled from some football injury, like he had blocked a field goal with his butt, and they never got the ball out.

  "In the final analysis,” Dave said, after I asked about the board, “our company is just another flavor of mint."

  "I don't get it."

  He smiled at his private joke. Some people are like that. They amuse themselves, and if no one else is amused, they are amused even more. “I mean the kind of mint that makes money. Of course we don't print it; it's all just numbers. But we're nothing more than another kind of money-making apparatus. Another flavor of mint. See?"

  "Yeah, Dave, now I get it. Doesn't that make you feel like a cog in a wheel?"

  "What do I care? I get paid, just like you and everybody else. Sometimes I'm proud of what we accomplish around here.” He shrugged. “It's a job. Then I go home to my family, my kids climb all over me, and I'm someone imp
ortant to them. You ever take a kid to Disney?"

  I shook my head. Actually, I'd been one of those kids taken to Disney, when I was written off as a terminal case. I hated it. All those fantastic things to look at, but nothing was real—you couldn't even touch most of it. It was a great monument to the imagination—but whose imagination? Whose dream was to take a vacation with a bunch of afflicted seven-year-old biological losers? Not mine, that was for sure.

  "I forgot, you aren't married,” he said. “You won't find much love at work, ‘fraid to say."

  "You got that right.” I left his office, trying to find my way back to Walt Real World.

  * * * *

  I made an overture to Tina via e-mail, asking what she was going to do about her four-armed test signal. She made a brief reply that basically said it was none of my business. “Bitch” was my single-word response, to which she returned, “XOXO.” I was going to reply “Same to you,” but hesitated. Tina wasn't as introverted as she was when I first got to know her. Before her operation, I don't think she would have e-mailed things like that.

  Something about that new assertiveness attracted me. If she was out to stick it to the world, to make them pay for the way they treated her, I wanted to be there to watch. We didn't have to be lovers, but we didn't have to be enemies either. She must have been thinking the same thing because after a couple of days with me not e-mailing back, I received another message from her.

  She asked me to dinner and a movie. I made her promise not to slam any more doors in my face, and she went along, joking that she reserved the right if I called her a bitch or a cow. It was nice, the two of us having a laugh like that. Nothing like reminiscing over old insults to break the ice.

  Dinner was okay, the movie sucked, and then she said, “Don't take this the wrong way, but do you want to make love?"

  I laughed. I was into that. Since her neck healed, she actually looked hot. I made villain eyebrows, rolled a make-believe mustache in my fingers, and said, “My place or yours?"

  "Not tonight,” she said. “There's something you need to do before the rubber hits the road."