This morning he had mixed the grout—a trough of fine portland cement, this one prepared without aggregate—and now he was troweling it carefully onto each layer of bricks, working along two or three bricks at time, putting just the right amount of cement on the butted ends and using a string stretched between two stakes to keep them in a straight line. When each couple of bricks were set and tapped down with the heel of his trowel, he used the edge like a knife to cut away the excess grout that oozed out and slung it back into the trough. Then he used his bare finger to smooth the gap into a nicely finished curve. It was patient, methodical work of the kind he had come to enjoy.
The two boys, Tommy and Joey, ages eleven and nine, watched with fascination. They helped by bringing him bricks from the pile and adding measured amounts of water, sand, and cement powder to the trough whenever it went low.
“This one’s broken,” Joey said, holding up half a brick.
“Nuts,” Praxis said. He took the brick and studied its broken end, which was nearly perpendicular and could easily enough be made to fit. It would stagger the line, of course. He looked at the diminished pile, spotted more broken bricks, and knew it would be a near thing to finish all the wall with what he had there.
“We’ll use it anyway,” he said.
“It’ll mess up the pattern,” Tommy objected, pointing to the neatly spaced bricks in the existing layers.
“Naw, it will give your wall character,” he said. “Besides, you don’t want to trap a devil inside the wall, do you?”
“What?” the older boy said.
“Sure,” Praxis said, “all great artists leave a little flaw, a break in any regular pattern, so the devil can find his way out of it. The ancient Navajos did it all the time with their sand paintings, leave a little nick in one line, so as not to trap spirits in a perfect design. I think the word ‘glitch’ even comes from the Navajo language.”
“You’re just making that up!”
Praxis turned to the younger boy, whose face was clouding up with this talk of devils and spirits. “I’m sure glad you found that brick, Joe. It kept us from making a terrible mistake.”
The little boy tried to smile.
“Now be sure to find me another one like it real soon,” Praxis said, “so we can come out even at the end of the line.”
“Would’ve been better if my mom had bought new bricks,” Tommy said.
“Well, you know,” Praxis replied, “we can’t have everything we want.”
He finished the long wall between the vegetable and flower gardens and started the shorter one around the compost pit. He laid three bricks on the first course, straightened up to reach for the next one from Tommy’s hands, and felt the world go gray.
Praxis stood there, feet rocking gently in the loose soil, holding himself upright by muscle tension alone and not by any act of his own will. The trowel slipped from his fingers and fell a long way to earth, a distant thump. He stared into the golden sparkles that lit up just behind his eyes and knew that if God was going to take him, now was the time. And that was all right, too …
After a moment the dizziness passed. He walked over to the wall he had just finished and sat down, and be damned to what his weight might do to the still-wet grout.
“You okay, sir?” The two boys were staring at him with fear in their eyes.
“Sure,” he said. “I just get a bit dizzy sometimes. It passes.”
The little fits, due to low blood pressure, were coming more regularly now. And some days he felt just … tired. No energy. No pep. He wasn’t eating as much as he once did, either, and these days he was not much interested in food. He had been thin since he took up running after his heart implant, but now he was getting downright scrawny. He still tried to run at least a couple of times a week, but his distances were getting shorter and his breath giving out faster. It had been months since he had gone as far as five kilometers at one time, and that on level ground. A marathon was out of the question—not that any city in his part of the country had the money to stage those anymore, not even a Fun Run 10K for a good cause.
Hell, he was just getting old. He would turn seventy-five this year. His heart was still going strong, but the connective tissue seemed to be giving way. It was called life. Old age happened to everybody.
He stood up, looking back to make sure the wall hadn’t gone swaybacked under him. He looked over at the pile of remaining bricks, the trough full of grout.
“That’s enough for today, boys. We’ll finish up next weekend.”
“Aww!” Joey said and made a face. His brother punched him.
“You know where to dump that?” He pointed at the trough. “And how to clean it out without killing the grass?”
“Yes, sir,” Tommy said.
“Good then. Next week.”
* * *
“I told the damn thing both mares was due for foaling, and it would take about six months,” Edward Hopper said. “Still the dummy went ahead and ordered oats and hay like usual, vet service like usual, shoeing like usual, stabling and grooming—”
“ ‘Like usual’?” Antigone Wells supplied, with a smile.
“Yes, ma’am. You’d think a computer could add and subtract. Two horses minus two horses means how many horses do I got to feed? Quick now!”
“You told your system the horses would be foaled?”
“Yes, ma’am.” Hopper had now quieted down some.
“Did you say where? I mean, they’d be moved out of your stables?”
“Well, it had the waybills, transport fees, and insurance.”
“And is that on the same account?” Wells asked.
“As which?” Hopper’s eyebrows knitted.
“As the one that maintains your mares.”
“Well, no, transportation’s different.”
“What app are you using?” she asked.
“Farmer John two-point-something.”
“Yeah.” Wells didn’t even have to check with her tech specialist. “That’s an older model. They don’t cross-link.”
“I thought these robots were supposed to be smart.”
“Well, some are true intelligences, and some just clever programming.”
“Anyhow, it finally cancelled all the orders,” Hopper said, “but the feed store won’t take back and restock without a charge, the vet and stable will only add months to my account, and the blacksmith had already spent my payment.”
“So what do you want me to do?” she asked.
“Cancel ’em properly. Get my money back.”
Hopper was an old man—older than Wells herself. Over the years she had learned the peculiarities of computers in order to stay current in the legal business. It had taken time and patience, but the brainwork seemed to keep her young. Hopper was just that much older and probably thought he could simply install a piece of software on his smartphone and let it run a part-time stock-raising and stud business spread over four farms and six private stables in three different counties.
“You know,” she said, “that software comes with disclaimers.”
“Lawyer stuff.” He shrugged. “Didn’t read ’em.”
“Of course. Still, this matter has been tried in court—all the way to the High Court here in the Republic and the Supreme Court back in the States, parallel rulings. A properly installed intelligence system has de jure as well as de facto power of attorney. It’s like you bought those things yourself. That’s the only way the Integrated Commerce System can work.”
“But I didn’t want ’em.”
“That’s as may be. You got ’em.”
“Well, this has been a complete waste of my time.” He paused. “You ain’t gonna bill me, are you, seeing as you can’t help me?”
She squinted at him. “Just because your horse is feeling horny, do you give your stud away for free?”
“What’s that got to do with—?”
“My ’bot will talk to your ’bot.”
Hopper jammed his hat on his head.
�
�Good day to you … young lady.”
“Nice try—but you still owe me.”
In the last nine years, Antigone Wells had also had to learn the ways of country people, which was “a fur piece” from her former law practice in San Francisco. She had gone to Oklahoma to visit her sister Helen, got caught on the wrong side of a shooting war, and been interned as an enemy alien. She spent six weeks on a cot in detention at the National Guard Armory in Shawnee until the paperwork could be cleared to release her into Helen’s custody.
“I’ll bet you’re loving this,” she told her younger sister.
“Shut up and get in the car … war criminal.”
As an essentially stateless person, because the borders were closed to both the East and West Coasts, Wells lived for six more months under house arrest, then applied for citizenship in the new Federated Republic. Two years after that, including a year at the Oklahoma University College of Law, catching up on the New Constitution and all the reformulated precedents, she passed the bar and set up Wells & Wells, LLC in Oklahoma City. She didn’t actually have another “Wells” in the firm, because Helen’s married name had been Carter and she just helped out in the office, but it looked more stable and professional. If asked, Antigone Wells said it was a “me, myself, and I” kind of partnership.
Over the years she had come to specialize in what she called “human-cyber relations.” Amazingly, the course of the war—complete with military raids, economic sanctions, occasional civilian rationing (worse in the States than in the Republic), and crushing public and personal debt (again, worse over there than here, but not so good here nowadays)—had not at all affected the march of twenty-first-century technology. Next generations of smartphones and watches, neurostims and biolinks, across the spectrum of hardware, software, and squishware, still appeared at the end of every summer and at the midwinter geek shows. All of it had vastly improved human communications and data management. And every year the devices grew smaller, faster, smarter, more intuitive, and more seamlessly connected to the human body and fringes of the nervous system, not to mention integrating people’s social relationships, commerce, banking, medicine, and government services.
Perhaps all that technological growth was actually a function of the war. An assassination drone could now be made the size of a sparrow, find your street address in GPS coordinates from two hundred miles away, and pack the explosive power of ten pounds of Semtex. A spy drone could be made the size of a bumblebee, travel a ten-mile radius through wind and rain, transmit over more than twenty miles, and still hear in broadwave, see in plex-pix, and fake a retina scan. So why shouldn’t the labs sell their goodies from three generations back onto the commercial market?
Wells might not be able to get a cup of real Sumatra coffee through the U.S. blockade on the Gulf Coast. Yet she could wear an agent on her wrist which scheduled her days, ordered her lunch, did the grocery shopping, and contracted to get her car fixed. She could wear eyeglasses—well, faux lenses in her case—that with a blink recorded everything she saw and read, received her emails, and communicated with her wrist to help it plan her social life. She could wear earrings that let her pick up conversations across a crowded room just by turning her head and triangulating. And all this stuff was voice activated, touch sensitive, and had the good sense to go dead the minute the physical device determined itself to be lost or stolen. Her wrist companion also kept track of her vital signs and, should they ever stop or change beyond certain limits, it would signal her current location and medical history to the nearest medical facility. If she felt threatened, she could whisper a code word to summon the police—her current panic word was “Shazam!”—not that she ever felt that threatened.
Antigone Wells—and every other adult she knew—walked through a virtual world that was webbed in various dimensions and at various wavelengths with personal contacts, social obligations, commercial and medical support, and information and entertainment resources. To be a citizen in the Federated Republic was to be a wired citizen. It meant she was never alone, unless she chose to be. And whatever she might consciously have surrendered of her privacy, she had won back many times over in terms of convenience, speed, and connection.
* * *
Business used to be personal, John Praxis kept telling himself, like some kind of old man’s mantra. Time was, running a business either as a buyer or seller was all about relationships, about finding people he could trust, people who offered good service at fair prices, who could expedite and solve problems, who could make things happen and tell a joke along the way. Over the years Praxis had become accustomed to the business phone tree having replaced a live human person at a switchboard. He had even come to accept that most branches of that tree would take him to automated responses, where he had to speak slowly, annunciate clearly, and repeat himself until the machine stopped saying, “I’m sorry, I didn’t get that …” Sooner or later he would press zero and be talking to a person again.
But five times in the past two weeks, when he dialed one of his suppliers he got neither a person nor a tree but a disembodied female voice: “Your call is being transferred to our automated ordering system.” And after that, rather than more robots painfully working on their language recognition skills, he got the high-frequency buzz of machine talk, an earful of static, one machine trying to communicate bits and bytes to what it supposed was another but was actually a live human person, Praxis himself.
This time he was trying to order flapper valves from etoilets.com. He just hung up. And that wasn’t getting the work done.
Praxis was a corporate buyer for PlumbKit, the West Coast branch of a plumbing services center representing “23,000 independent contractors nationwide”—or at least that part of the nation represented by two separated coasts. His job was to maintain a virtual warehouse that provided just-in-time delivery of everything from copper pipe to septic tanks and whatever came in between: faucets, valves, sinks, toilet bowls, urinals, shower stalls, and sidelines in the new electrostatic precipitation systems and composting closets that used no water at all.
Once he had been personally responsible for building huge dams and power plants, freeway and transit systems, commercial and residential skyscrapers, and mechanized facilities covering acres of land that designed and built automobiles, airplanes, and all the other necessities of modern life. Those were the new turnkey factories, which took raw materials and commoditized components like screws and ball bearings in at one loading dock and spit out finished goods in your choice of model, features, and colors at the other. But in the ninth long year of war between the United States of America and the upstart Federated Republic of America, nobody wanted that kind of infrastructure anymore. Correction: everybody wanted and needed it badly, but nobody had the money to pay for it.
But, so far, and as bad as things got, everybody still needed a toilet that flushed or did whatever the local ordinances allowed. So John Praxis had gone where he could be useful … at least until this morning.
Bernie Gutierrez, head of Praxis’s department, stopped by his desk. “How’s it going?”
“I just got another carrier signal. Sounded like an old modem.”
“Like a what?” The younger man looked blank.
“Or dialing into a fax machine.”
“That’s okay, John.”
Gutierrez was somewhere in his thirties. Praxis suddenly realized he was talking about technology that had been dead before this man’s childhood. He could read silly old geezer in Bernie’s facial expression.
“Anyway …” Gutierrez lifted his head above the angular partition that separated Praxis’s section of desktop from the buyer next to him in line. “People?” he said, raising his voice. “Meet in the conference room in five minutes? Let’s go team!” And he actually clapped like a cheerleader.
On all sides people broke off conversations, shed headsets, and stood up. Praxis followed them down the hall. When they were all seated around the table, Gutierrez stood up and appla
uded them.
“I want to tell you personally what a fine team you have been. We could not have achieved our success without each and every one of you.”
Around Praxis people exchanged nervous glances. Business used to be honest, too, he thought.
“However,” Gutierrez went on, “word has come down from Corporate in Philadelphia. In two weeks we will be rolling out OSMA—the Order and Stock Management Analyst.” Praxis could hear his voice emphasizing the capitals. The man sounded positively giddy. As if he didn’t know that without a team of buyers, Gutierrez himself would have nothing to supervise. The supervision of his own department would become an Information Technology function.
“We will be keeping a number of you on board for the transition period. Your job will be to teach OSMA everything you know. For the rest, you’ll be getting severance packages with extended benefits commensurate with your years of service.” Which would average about six weeks, Praxis knew, because PlumbKit believed in new blood and promoted rapid staff turnover.
“So everyone keep up the good work during these exciting times.”
It was a dismissal, and the team took it as such. They filed out of the room to go back to their desk sections and headsets. All but Praxis, whom Gutierrez took aside.
“You know, John, there’s a company policy on overage employees.”
“I didn’t know that,” Praxis said. “What’s the policy?”
“Since you’re already hooked into Social Security and Medicare, the company automatically waives your severance and extended benefits.”
“Oh,” he said. “I see.”
In fact, although he had paid the maximum amount into the federal Social Security system all of his life, Praxis never actually applied for benefits when he became eligible at sixty-two, or any year after that. He had never told Gutierrez nor anyone else at PlumbKit how, once upon a time, he had been an extremely wealthy man. Once, he could have bought their little plumbing supply business—all the franchises, on both coasts—with just pocket money from a month of his average income.
Praxis had salvaged as much as possible from the wreckage of a family business that had taken four generations to build and a single year of economic chaos to destroy. He had tried to manage wisely the wealth that remained to him, investing it in the stocks and bonds of companies which made necessary goods and offered necessary services like food, housing, clothing, and military supplies. He invested in productive land that bore good harvests and supported people. And when the government had appropriated those enterprises for technical violations of its ever more complex regulations—basically, for the good of society—Praxis had shown better sense than to try and fight those actions. And he still had resources, held in bank accounts and other assets, that amounted to many millions, for the family fortune had been huge before it went mostly away. Those resources were meant to provide for his old age and for the future of his children and grandchildren.
Coming of Age: Volume 1: Eternal Life Page 21
