Asimov's Science Fiction 12/01/10

by Dell Magazines

  Copyright © 2010 Ian Werkheiser

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  Short Stories

  EXCELLENCE

  Larry Voss receives a disconcerting wake-up call in Robert Reed’s acerbic examination of ... EXCELLENCE

  Robert Reed

  The Kingdom of Abalone was once again secure. Sitting on his high throne, flanked by a platoon of devoted guards and red-eyed Erebus hounds, my doppel told me that the Conspiracy of Three had been defeated, their armies scattered and their heads set on rusted pikes. Then, with a champion’s smile, he mentioned that our mines on Mt. Kroon were once again producing wagons full of blue platinum—the most lucrative trade item on Kingdom Earth. And, perhaps best of all, this prettified version of me had finally wooed and married a certain notorious virgin witch. This day was bringing me nothing but good news, it seemed, and the only difficulty was deciding which to enjoy first. Immerse myself in the slaughter of my enemies, spend my treasure on castles and yachts, or sit in the shadows of the king’s bedchamber, witnessing the deflowering of a beautiful young woman.

  Blood, bucks, or blood: Never an easy choice.

  Yet my doppel wasn’t finished. “I should mention too that I recently met someone. A soul that might be of some interest to you.”

  “Who’s that?”

  “His name is Gilchrist.”

  My next question was too obvious to ask aloud.

  The Lord of Abalone, one of the thousand Great Kings on a vast, beautiful world, explained, “Gilchrist is from your realm. He attended my wedding, apparently as one of the bride’s guests.”

  “Abalone’s a popular destination,” I reminded him. “Thousands of doppels visit us every day.”

  “Yet this wasn’t merely a stand-in, Master.”

  Gilchrist was an avatar, in other words. An essence.

  That story seemed unlikely. I didn’t recognize the name but offered it to my biography, and, as I suspected, nothing came of the search. “I don’t know the fellow,” I replied. “Let’s drop him for now. Show me our war.”

  Yet nothing changed. There was no cinematic vista of slashing swords and wild carnage, just my doppel and his throne stubbornly remaining in view. Leaning back, he said, “Master,” as if the word tasted wrong. Then, with a heavy sigh, he explained, “I had a long intriguing conversation with this Gilchrist gentleman. He knows quite a lot about you. And he made a point of telling me that he is a champion of your talents.”

  “He’s a what?”

  “‘A champion of Larry Voss.’ Those were his exact words.”

  Larry Voss couldn’t help but feel impressed. Sitting back in my squeaky old La-Z-Boy, I was filled with keen pleasure and more than a little hope. But modern life is full of people trying to fool other people. The rational, deeply suspicious parts of my brain set to work. Who was this stranger? What did he want with me? He definitely had some purpose, but what did it mean, being my champion?

  I launched my security savant.

  The king said, “I must admit, Master, I have never had the opportunity, the honor, of meeting a genuine essence.”

  And I had never been an essence. The band-fees were prohibitive, and that’s just what it cost to plug a customer’s body and mind into an artificial world. Kingdom Earth lived ten days for every one of my days. Most realms held that pace. Augmenters and neural cheats allowed you to match that velocity. It was a high-wire trick used by Oligarchs and their companies, and, on occasion, certain important underlings.

  “You’re sure that this person ...”

  “Gilchrist.”

  “Was an essence?”

  “I am,” he said, launching into a list of technical, tedious clues.

  “Shut up,” I instructed.

  He fell silent.

  “So what else did our friend say?”

  “He claims to be a long-time devotee, and he wants very much to meet with you. In person.”

  “Face to face. How quaint.” I caught myself fiddling with the drawstring on my sweatpants. “Did he mention an employer?”

  “No.”

  “An agency? Some foundation, maybe?”

  “No, and no.”

  “Not that he’d admit anything,” I muttered.

  The king’s patience was waning.

  “So where does our mystery man want to meet me?”

  “You may select a secure public venue. He told me that he didn’t want to intrude on your precious privacy.”

  “He said that?”

  My doppel saw no point in repeating himself.

  “My privacy?” I said. “Shit, this boy doesn’t know me at all.”

  On ten very different earths, I am a trillionaire. On an eleventh earth, I’m a warrior of distinction, famous among those players who genuinely appreciate the history of the Mobius War. All told, there are four hundred artificial earths, plus thousands of partial places and unmoored scenarios. My doppels aren’t significant presences in any of those realms, but I don’t know anybody who can juggle eleven earths as well as I do, and that doesn’t even include the drab, exhausted world where I happen to live.

  I’m pretty much successful here, too. My parents paid off their mortgage before the Great Repression struck, and they had only one child, and that boy was an adult before they got sick, both dying young, without fuss or much expense. My inheritance included this shelter and its spacious lot, and I was the beneficiary of two matching life insurance policies issued by corporations that weren’t mismanaged into oblivion. Today my money is scattered and safe, and my monthly bills aren’t too awful, and during the occasional lush year I make a little profit. I don’t need work, and sure as hell work doesn’t need me. I have friends who like to boast about tiny promotions and the daily challenges, but most of them are just glorified clerks whose jobs are protected by Humanpower laws or salespeople who survive because other people don’t like buying condoms and beer from machines.

  I was six when the Repression took hold—just young enough that I can’t remember any other way of life. Thirty years of tepid growth and emergency politics. Common opinion holds that these are the opening scenes of a new Dark Age, which is why Kingdom Earth and its siblings are so extraordinarily popular.

  Yet I’m richer than any king of old. Unlike those jewel-encrusted monarchs, I have friends around the world, and there aren’t barbarians at my gates or plague in my fleas, and every day I do exactly what I want to do, and what I love most is matching wits against people and machines from every part of this dusty, over-heated, dangerously crowded world.

  My neighbors have always been my neighbors, most of them old now and set in their ways. I rarely talk to them. But one crazy gal could be considered my oldest friend. Maddy Greene sat me when I was a baby. A lucky back injury made it impossible for her to work but didn’t cripple her, and her settlement included one fat upfront payment and a steady annuity with inflationary clauses. Her back is miserable, but she’s mobile enough to turn clay pots and sew fancy quilts, both of which she sells at the local Farmer’s Market. This woman used to wipe my ass, which puts her in very select company. And one day, Maddy came to my door waving a check for five thousand dollars. Some genius foundation had awarded her a cash prize. She didn’t know that she was being considered, but here she was, five grand richer, and there was also a fancy gold certificate that called her an artist and a unique visionary.

  I buried my envy and congratulated her. “What did you win it for? Pots or quilts?”

  That brought laughter and a giddy confession. “I don’t know. I think it’s for my quilts, but I’m not going to ask. What if it’s all a mistake?”

  Later that evening, I was sitting in the usual booth at my neighborhood tavern, drinking with people that I’d known since we were six. They were in the flesh and otherwise, and we were sipping and joking, and that’s when I told my story about the lucky neighbor lady.

  Nelson was our alcoholic friend, brash and loud, sometime
s angry but often entertaining when his fury was on display. Trained professionals tested him and me during sixth grade, and one of us was declared to be an authentic genius. Which was pretty much the death knell for Nelson. Today he uses his innate talents to game the welfare system. He works even less than me, unless you count boozing time. And he took my news very badly. “It’s a rip-off, these goddamn foundations are. Money for clay pots! Jesus Christ, whose stupid idea was that?”

  “Hey, it was a nice gesture,” I said. “Five thousand isn’t much. But still, I like the lady, and she’s dancing in the street tonight, sore back and all.”

  Most people sided with me. Most wished it could be us. But Nelson saw conspiracies, and worse, he smelled guilty consciences. “You know why we have these foundations today? The Oligarchs want to be remembered. They throw pocket change into tax loopholes. A tiny staff oversees the funds, and machines write checks every now and then. Just to prove that the foundation’s working.” His face colored and his arms gestured. “Really, it doesn’t matter who wins these idiot awards. Keep up the illusion of supporting the arts or music or good humanitarian causes. It’s just another trick the Oligarchs use to keep us under their paws, ignorant and helpless.”

  Mostly, we like Nelson. Or more to the point, we appreciate the yin and yang of his chaotic nature. But this wasn’t one of his better nights, and I was glad that he lived in a distant city, lured away by lenient benefits and better mass transit. We broke into little conversations, ignoring him by design, and he continued to drink and shout at our blindness. Then we started turning down his volume, and eventually our old pal realized that nobody cared about his profound, acidic wisdoms. Without a good-bye, he vanished, and we looked at one another, laughing.

  Then with quiet cruelty, one of us muttered, “Somebody’s still waiting for his little genius check.”

  I think that voice was mine. But I’d have to refer to my biography, and really, at this point, I don’t care enough to ask.

  * * *.

  Traditional identifications weren’t good enough for my admirer. Gilchrist had supplied the king with assorted proofs-of-reality, far and away superior to any evidence that I ever needed, demanded, or dreamed of acquiring. My security savant got to work, and for shits and giggles I hired a random AI to duplicate my software’s labors. Gilchrist Terrence Lambbone proved to be an authentic twenty-four-year-old male, single and employed thirty hours a week by Green Arrow, the biotech firm based in Melbourne. But he lived in southern Mexico, in a little city built by his employer. Corporations love to obscure their inner workings, but my “champion” had the schooling of a numbers master—one of those rare souls who talks to machines as equals, helping generate tactics and predictions, policies and contingency plans. Gilchrist owned a dozen doppels, but if one of my faces had ever encountered any of his, it didn’t show in my records. To be certain, I brought in another AI, one specializing in teasing out the subtle ties between people. For eighty-two minutes, that entity submerged itself in my biography and Gilchrist’s proofs-of-reality, and the result was the quiet, rather puzzled announcement that the two of us were very close to being perfect strangers, which almost never happened. And even stranger was the evidence that at least three hundred employees of Green Arrow had placed their doppels into my little corners of the Web, and quite a few of them had crossed paths with me, and the odds of idiot chance causing that many meetings was deemed to be less than one in nineteen hundred and nine.

  I was thrilled and chilled, but by the end of the day I still wasn’t sure what to make of it. Unless I was being professionally scouted, which made the circumstances very, very promising.

  Green Arrow began as one man’s business. Its patriarch wasn’t one of the famous giants of commerce, but he was close. Fifty billion euros from his personal accounts had created the Green Light Foundation. And while it wasn’t the biggest of its kind, Green Light was famous for the infrequency of its genius gifts and their considerable, even awe-inspiring size.

  Gilchrist’s proofs included a lifetime interlink number and suggested times to call. I thought hard for two minutes, waited until the next window, and then made the call.

  Gilchrist opened the channel instantly. “I’m so glad to hear from you. How are you today, Mr. Voss?”

  “Puzzled,” I confessed.

  He was a smallish man wearing a good shirt and neat tie. He had no beard, and his hair was long and slick like people wore it when I was his age, and his teeth looked perfect, and his skin was office-pale, and he acted respectful if not quite as gushy as I’d hoped for. The faint Australian accent lent him a measure of charm. I expected a sparkly-eyed genius, but no, Gilchrist looked like the most normal person in any math classroom. He sat comfortably before me, and he looked at me steadily, probably taking his measure of the man.

  I showed him what I assumed he wanted to see. At one point or another, everybody plays that game. I was dressed in real clothes, my hair combed, my house computer peeling six years off my face. Looking thirty and fit, I leaned forward and said, “Well,” and then waited for him to respond. Because it pays to be paranoid, I wondered if he was real. Maybe I was facing a quality doppel. Sniffing for a trick, I found myself listing the friends and enemies who could put together such an elaborate practical joke.

  “I suppose you have questions,” Gilchrist said. “Please. Ask anything.”

  “Are you real?”

  “I’d like to believe so.”

  “Are you honest?”

  “Not especially.” He sat back in his chair—a black leather treasure that looked fresh from the factory. “Just today, I told my mother I was coming home for Christmas. But I’m going skiing instead. And a colleague asked if I liked her hat, and I said that I did. But I diluted my enthusiasm. The words sounded nice without making me feel as if I was actually lying.”

  I nodded, thinking only about Green Light.

  He smiled graciously. “‘What about me could possibly interest you?’ Perhaps that’s a viable question.”

  “Okay. What interests you?”

  He leaned forward. “Potential.”

  The word sounded grim and sorry, even when I repeated it with a question mark dangling on the end.

  “Or in this case,” he continued, “I’m interested in your enormous but badly wasted potential. That’s one reason why I find you so intriguing, Mr. Voss.”

  Two coolly delivered sentences, and I was both thoroughly stroked and utterly bitch-slapped. Hopefully my software kept me from looking too shaken, but I did lean back in my ratty old chair, asking no one in particular, “So what the hell am I supposed to do about that?”

  My neighborhood has a perfectly fine grocery and three houses with restaurants on their ground floors, plus a respectable coffeehouse and one rakishly seedy bar. But when a stranger travels two thousand miles to visit me, and when he makes the bold promise of buying dinner at any place of my choosing, the world opens up considerably. I was yanking restaurants and capsule reviews out of my biography, cross-checking them with those that still exist today. And what I discovered—no surprise this—was that most of my favorites had been relegated to the golden realm of memory, leaving nothing but a certain amount of meat and bone lain down inside me.

  One ripe exception lay at the north end of town, and that’s where I told my champion to meet me. As an afterthought, I asked, “Do you like American?”

  “I adore good food,” he said with a diplomat’s ease.

  “Well, it used to be that.”

  “My train arrives at 5:37,” he said. “I’ll check into my hotel first. Does seven o’clock seem reasonable?”

  It did. And to be certain that I made it in time, I left my house at six, riding my thermoplastic racing bike instead of the big steel freighter. The journey proved easy and quick, and in contrast to certain recent adventures, the buses and private cars on the street showed me nothing but consideration.

  “Because they recognize greatness,” I joked to myself.

>   Twenty minutes early, I arrived at a restaurant that looked abandoned but wasn’t. Grateful for my business, the owner greeted me with a big smile and my choice of empty booths. He looked exactly as I remembered him, but younger. It took me several moments to realize that this was the original owner’s son—trapped in an inheritance that would, with luck, last until he was old enough for Social Insecurity. A battered LCD was hung on the nearby wall, tuned to an oldie station. Sipping ice water, I tried to remember the last time I’d seen Jasper and Baby Doll and that funny kid who didn’t have a name or parent or any place that could be called home. Sure, I had the entire series on file, not to mention when and where I’d seen every episode, but it felt fresh, watching those three old stars trading barbs all over again. The weather was displayed along the right edge; cyclists always needed to watch for rain. Two bottom scrolls fed me highlights from the world’s news. Between jokes, I read about the drought in China and methane in the Arctic, elections and scandals and other typical noise. Lottery numbers and betting lines for upcoming games filled the top of the screen. Then the program broke for a commercial touting the pleasures of steak—a none-too-subtle touch supplied by the restaurant’s management.

  My bio announced that it was seven o’clock.

  And Gilchrist came through the door. He was shorter than I would have guessed, wearing what looked like a fresh shirt and slacks and a decidedly bland tie. I was glad to have arrived early; my bike sweat had time to dry. He saw me and approached, and exactly at that point where we felt physically close, he smiled.

  I rose to greet him, shook his small hand and sat again.

  He settled across from me, looking at my face. I felt studied, and I felt nervous. I’m not an anxious person usually. What I wanted to ask about was Green Light, but my overriding fear was that he would sweep that daydream aside, and, worse, his denials would prove true. So I left that cat in the box, half-alive and half-happy.