by D B Hartwell
“How long Fthshpk?” he asked the server, once he had eaten. It was the same server as before, brown with white spine-tips; it stood behind the counter, hands folded on its thorax, in a centered and imperturbable stance.
“One day,” it replied. “Though some believe the spirit of Fthshpk should be felt in every heart all year long.”
Walker suppressed a shudder at the thought. “Businesses open tomorrow?”
“Most of them, yes. Some trades take an extended holiday.”
“Building supplies?” Walker’s anxiety made him sputter the word.
“They will be open.” The server tilted its shoulders, a posture that seemed to convey amusement. “The most honored visitor is perhaps planning a construction project?”
“No.” He laughed weakly, a sound that startled the server. “Selling, not buying.”
“The visitor is a most intriguing creature.” The server’s shoulders returned to the horizontal. “This humble one wishes to help, but does not know how.”
“This one seeks business customers. The server knows manufacturers? Inventory controllers? Enterprise resource management specialists?”
“The guest’s words are in the Thfshpfth language, but alas, this one does not understand them.”
“To apologize. Very specialized business.”
The server lowered itself smoothly, bringing its face down to Walker’s level. Its gills moved like seaweed in a gentle current. “Business problems are not this one’s strength. Is the honored visitor having troubles with family?”
It took Walker a moment to formulate his response. “No. Egg-parent, brood-parent deceased. This one no egglings. Brood-partner . . . departed.” For a moment he forgot who, or what, he was talking to. “This one spent too much time away from nest. Brood-partner found another egg-partner.” He fell silent, lost in memory.
The server stood quietly for a moment, leaving Walker to his thoughts. After a while it spoke: “It is good to share these stories. Undigested stories cause pain.”
“Thanking you.”
“This humble one is known as Shining Sky. If the visitor wishes to share further stories, please return to this establishment and request this one by name.”
• • • •
When Walker left the Spirit of Life, the sun had already set. The Fthshpk crowds had thinned, with just a few revelers still dancing and twirling under the yellow-green street lights, so Walker was relatively unimpeded as he walked to hotel after hotel. Alas, they all said, this humble one apologizes most profusely, no room for the most honored visitor. Finally, exhausted, he found a dark space between buildings. Wrapping his jacket around the carry-bag, he placed it under his head—as a pillow, and for security. He would grab a few hours’ sleep and meet with his customer the first thing in the morning.
He slept soundly until dawn, when the first hot light of day struck his face. He squinted and rolled over, then awoke fully at the sensation of the hard alley floor under his head.
The bag was not there.
He sat up, wide-eyed, but his worst fears were confirmed: his jacket and bag were nowhere to be seen. Panicked, he felt at his waist—his passport and return ticket were safe. But his money, his papers, his phone, and his reader were gone.
• • • •
“Ah, human!” said Amber Stone. “Once again the most excellent visitor graces this unworthy establishment.” It was late in the morning. Robbed of street signs, addresses, and maps by the loss of his reader, Walker had wandered the streets for hours in search of the factory. Without the accustomed weight of his briefcase, he felt as though he might blow away on the next breeze.
“You requested I come yesterday,” Walker hissed. “I come, factory closed. Come again today. Very important.” Even without the papers from his briefcase, he could still get a verbal commitment, or at least a strong expression of interest . . . some tiny tidbit of achievement to prove to his company, his father, his grandfather, and himself that he wasn’t a complete loss.
“Surely the superlative guest has more important appointments than to meet with this insignificant one?”
“No. Amber Stone is most important appointment. Urgent we discuss purchase of software.”
“This groveling one extends the most sincere apologies for occupying the exalted guest’s time, and will not delay the most highly esteemed one any further.” It turned to leave.
“This-most-humble-one-begs-the-honored-one’s-forgiveness!”
Amber Stone spoke without turning back. “One who appears at a merchant’s establishment filthy, staggering, and reeking of Fthshpk-rings is obviously one whose concerns are so exalted as to be beyond the physical plane. Such a one should not be distracted from its duties, which are surely incomprehensible to mere mortals.”
Walker’s shoulders slumped in defeat, but then it was as though he heard his father’s voice in his inner ear: Ask for the sale. Walker swallowed, then said, “Would the honored Amber Stone accept indefinite loan of inventory management system from this humble merchant?”
The alien paused at the threshold of its inner office, then turned back to Walker. “If that is what the most exalted one desires, this simple manufacturer must surely pay heed. Would fifty-three million be sufficient compensation for the loan of a complete system?”
Stunned, Walker leaned against the wall. It was warm and rounded, and throbbed slightly. “Yes,” he said at last. “Yes. Sufficient.”
• • • •
“Where the hell have you been, Walker? Your phone’s been offline for days. And you look like shit.” Gleason, Walker’s supervisor, didn’t look very good himself—his face on the public phone’s oval screen was discolored and distorted by incompatibilities between the alien and human systems.
“I’ve been busy.” He inserted Amber Stone’s data-nodule into the phone’s receptor.
Gleason’s eyes widened as the contract came up on his display. “Yes you have! This is great!”
“Thanks.” Gleason’s enthusiasm could not penetrate the shell of numbness around Walker’s soul. Whatever joy he might have felt at making the sale had been drowned by three days of negotiations.
“This will make you the salesman of the quarter! And the party’s tomorrow night!”
The End-of-Quarter party. He thought of the bluff and facile faces of his fellow salesmen, the loutish jokes and cheap congratulations of every other EOQ he’d ever attended. Would it really be any different if his name was the one at the top of the list? And then to return to his empty apartment, and go out the next day to start a new quarter from zero. . . .
“Sorry,” Walker said, “I can’t make it.”
“That’s right, what am I thinking? It’s gotta be at least a five day trip, with all the transfers. Look, give me a call whenever you get in. You got my home number?”
“It’s in my phone.” Wherever that was.
“Okay, well, I gotta go. See you soon.”
He sat in the dim, stuffy little booth for a long time. The greenish oval of the phone screen looked like a pool of stagnant water, draining slowly away, reflecting the face of a man with no family, no dog, no little house in the woods. And though he might be the salesman of the quarter today, there were a lot of quarters between here and retirement, and every one of them would be just as much work.
Eventually came the rap of chitinous knuckles on the wall of the booth, and a voice. “This most humble one begs the worthy customer’s forgiveness. Other customers desire to use the phone.”
The booth cracked open like a seed pod. Walker stuck out his head, blinking at the light, and the public phone attendant said, “Ah, most excellent customer. This most unworthy one trusts your call went well?”
“Yes. Most well.”
“The price of the call is two hundred sixty-three.”
Walker had about six in cash in his pants pockets. The rest had vanished with his jacket. He thought a moment, then dug in his money belt and pulled out a tiny plastic rectangle.
“What is this?”
“Ticket to Earth.”
“An interstellar transit ticket? To Earth? Surely this humble one has misheard.”
“Interstellar. To Earth.”
“This is worth thousands!”
“Yes.” Then, in English, he said, “Keep the change.”
He left the attendant sputtering in incomprehension behind him.
• • • •
The man was cursing the heat and the crowds as he pushed through the restaurant’s labia from the street, but when he saw Walker he stopped dead and just gaped for a moment. “Jesus!” he said at last, in English. “I thought I was the only human being on this Godforsaken planet.”
Walker was lean and very tan; his salt-and-pepper hair and beard were long but neatly combed, and he stood with folded hands in an attitude of centered harmony. He wore only a short white skirt. “Greetings,” he said in the Thfshpfth language, as he always did. “This one welcomes the peaceful visitor to the Spirit of Life.”
“What are you doing here?” The English words were ludicrously loud and round.
Walker tapped his teeth together, making a sound like tk’tk’tk, before he replied in English: “I am . . . serving food.” The sound of it tickled his mouth.
“On this planet, I mean.”
“I live here.”
“But why did you come here? And why the Hell did you stay?”
Walker paused for a moment. “I came to sell something. It was an Earth thing. The people here didn’t need it. After a while I understood, and stopped trying. I’ve been much happier since.” He gestured to one of the squatting-posts. “Please seat yourself.”
“I, uh . . . I think I’ll pass.”
“You’re sure? The thksh hspthk is very good today.”
“Thanks, but no.” The man turned to go, but then he paused, pulled some money from his pocket, ran a reader over it. “Here,” he said, handing it to Walker. “Good luck.”
As the restaurant’s labia closed behind the visitor, Walker touched the money, then smelled his fingertip. Three hundred and eleven, a substantial sum.
He smiled, put the money in the donation jar, and settled in to wait for the next customer.
GENEVIEVE VALENTINE Born into a military family and raised in several areas of the United States, Genevieve Valentine began selling short fantasy and SF in 2007, and has since published several dozen stories that display a flair for a remarkably large number of the field’s subgenres.
“The Nearest Thing,” originally published in John Joseph Adams’s Lightspeed, was aptly described in that magazine as a story about “a future in which emotional entanglement in the workplace is even more complicated than we know it to be now.” Mason is a socially awkward coder employed by a corporation that makes personalized “memorial dolls,” robot duplicates of individuals with artificial pseudo-personalities. He has been shifted to a development team led by Paul, a charismatic wonder boy; their aim is to develop an AI, “the nearest thing” to being human.
THE NEAREST THING
CALENDAR REMINDER: STOCKHOLDER DINNER, 8PM.
THIS MESSAGE SENT FROM MORI: LOOKING TO THE FUTURE,
LOOKING OUT FOR YOU.
The Mori Annual Stockholder Dinner is a little slice of hell that employees are encouraged to attend, for morale.
Mori’s made Mason rich enough that he owns a bespoke tux and drives to the Dinner in a car whose property tax is more than his father made in a year; of course he goes.
(He skipped one year because he was sick, and two Officers from HR came to his door with a company doctor to confirm it. He hasn’t missed a party since.)
He’s done enough high-profile work that Mori wants him to actually mingle, and he spends the cocktail hour being pushed from one group to another, shaking hands, telling the same three inoffensive anecdotes over and over.
They go fine; he’s been practicing.
People chuckle politely just before he finishes the punch line.
Memorial dolls take a second longer, because they have to process the little cognitive disconnect of humor, and because they’re programmed to think that interrupting is rude.
(He’ll hand it to the Aesthetics department—it’s getting harder to tell the difference between people with plastic surgery and the dolls.)
“I hear you’re starting a new project,” says Harris. He hugs Mrs. Harris closer, and after too long, she smiles.
(Mason will never know why anyone brings their doll out in public like this. The point is to ease the grieving process, not to provide arm candy. It’s embarrassing. He wishes stockholders were a little less enthusiastic about showing support for the company.)
This new project is news to him, too, but he doesn’t think stockholders want to hear that.
“I might be,” he says. “I obviously can’t say, but—”
Mr. Harris grins. “Paul Whitcover already told us—” (Mason thinks, Who?) “—and it sounds like a marvelous idea. I hope it does great things for the company; it’s been a while since we had a new version.”
Mason’s heart stutters that he’s been picked to spearhead a new version.
It sinks when he remembers Whitcover. He’s one of the second-generation creative guys who gets his picture taken with some starlet on his arm, as newscasters talk about what good news it would be for Mori’s stock if he were to marry a studio-contracted actress.
Mrs. Harris is smiling into middle space, waiting to be addressed, or for a keyword to come up.
Mason met Mrs. Harris several Dinners ago. She had more to say than this, and he worked on some of the conversation software in her generation; she can handle a party. Harris must have turned her cognitives down to keep her pleasant.
There’s a burst of laughter across the room, and when Mason looks over it’s some guy in a motorcycle jacket, surrounded by tuxes and gowns.
“Who’s that?” he asks, but he knows, he knows, this is how his life goes, and he’s already sighing when Mr. Harris says, “Paul.”
• • • •
Since he got Compliance Contracted to Mori at fifteen, Mason has come to terms with a lot of things.
He’s come to terms with the fact that, for the money he makes, he can’t make noise about his purpose. He worked for a year on an impact-sensor chip for Mori’s downmarket Prosthetic Division; you go where you’re told.
(He’s come to terms with the fact that the more Annual Stockholder Dinners you attend, the less time you spend in a cubicle in Prosthetics.)
He has come to terms with the fact that sometimes you will hate the people you work with, and there is nothing you can do.
(Mason suspects he hates everyone, and that the reasons why are the only things that change.)
The thing is, Mason doesn’t hate Paul because Paul is a Creative heading an R&D project. Mason will write what they tell him to, under whatever creative-team asshole they send him. He’s not picky.
Sure, he resents someone who introduces himself to other adults as, “Just Paul, don’t worry about it, good to meet you,” and he resents someone whose dad was a Creative Consultant and who’s never once gone hungry, and he resents the adoring looks from stockholders as Paul claims Mori is really Going Places This Year, but things like this don’t keep him up at night, either.
He’s pretty sure he starts to hate Paul the moment Paul introduces him to Nadia.
• • • •
At Mori, we know you care.
We know you love your family. We know you worry about leaving them behind. And we know you’ve asked for more information about us, which means you’re thinking about giving your family the greatest gift of all:
You.
Medical studies have shown the devastating impact grief has on family bonds and mental health. The departure of someone beloved is a tragedy without a proper name.
Could you let the people you love live without you?
A memorial doll from Mori maps the most important aspects of your me
mory, your speech patterns, and even your personality into a synthetic reproduction.
The process is painstaking—our technology is exceeded only by our artistry—and it leaves behind a version of you that, while it can never replace you, can comfort those who have lost you.
Imagine knowing your parents never have to say goodbye. Imagine knowing you can still read bedtime stories to your children, no matter what may happen.
A memorial doll from Mori is a gift you give to everyone who loves you.
• • • •
Nadia holds perfectly still.
Her name tag reads “Aesthetic Consultant,” which means Paul brought his model girlfriend to the meeting.
She’s pretty, in a cat’s-eye way, but Mason doesn’t give her much thought. It takes a lot for Mason to really notice a woman, and she’s nowhere near the actresses Paul dates.
(Mason’s been reading up. He doesn’t think much of Paul, but the man can find a camera at a hundred paces.)
Paul brings Nadia to the first brainstorming meeting for the Vestige project. He introduces her to Mason and the two guys from Marketing (“Just Nadia, don’t worry about it”), and they’re ten minutes into the meeting before Mason realizes she had never said a word.
It takes Mason until then to realize how still she is. Only her eyes move—to him, with a hard expression like she can read his mind and doesn’t like what she sees.
Not that he cares. He just wonders where she came from, suddenly.
“So we have to think about a new market,” Paul is saying. “There’s a diminishing return on memorial dolls, unless we want to drop the price point to expand opportunities and popularize the brand—”
The two Marketing guys make appalled sounds at the idea of Mori going downmarket.
“—or, we develop something that will redefine the company,” Paul finishes. “Something new. Something we build in-house from the ground up.”
A Marketing guy says, “What do you have in mind?”
“A memorial that can conquer Death itself,” says Paul.
(Nadia’s eyes slide to Paul, never move.)
