by John Barnes
Berlina Jameson has been enjoying breakfast, partly because she hasn’t been paying for it and mainly because she is having company. Haynes Lamborghini, the New York Times textchannel reporter, has taken her to breakfast because today is to be his last day in Barrow, and they’ve gotten to be friends.
“So do the ‘nobody will talk to me’ story,” he says. “And start thinking about distribution if you haven’t already. You’ve got most of the video footage there is. Just from a standpoint of history, that’s too important to let it rot someplace, or to wait until it’s in an archive.”
“I thought you text guys didn’t like video.”
“Beats hell out of XV,” Lamborghini says. He takes another gulp of coffee. “Boy, one thing I won’t miss is the coffee here. They compensate for the lack of flavor by watering it down. The thing is, Berlina, the camera is not objective, and TV may be for people who can’t read, but it’s still light-years ahead of XV. At least you know what happened in front of the camera and at least people have their own feelings about it instead of having the reporter’s. And potentially a lot more people could access your work than mine, so there will be a few people with an objective view.”
“But a view of what?” Berlina says. “Everyone I talk to here is determined to tell me there’s no story. I’ve burned up most of my long-distance budget on calls to Washington and no one will talk there either.”
Lamborghini raises his hands, palms up, as if he were a magician turning her into a fairy princess. “But you have all that footage of people saying there’s no story. And you have a bunch of contradictory statements about why there isn’t, and enough outside testimony to make it clear that there probably is a story. That’s all you need. ‘Why aren’t they telling the truth?’ is the phrase that’s sold more news than anything else. Kid, you’re home free. Just put the story together into one documentary and distribute it.”
Berlina nods. “I guess I’ll try,” she says. The conversation goes on to other matters.
When she gets back to the Motel Two and starts to check her mail, she finds the usual things—a mass of short phone calls from various offices saying they have no statements, junk mail, notices that she’s getting close to the end of the line she lives on. The datarodents haven’t reported much except the usual stuff—there’s one obnoxious one out there that flags every weather report for her, and she hasn’t been able to track it down and kill it—
Well, this is different. There’s a priority-one. She sits down, switches on the full playback, and watches the phone conversation, just before Jesse gets back into Tucson on the zipline.
Ten minutes later she has called Di Callare and asked for an interview; he says he’ll be happy to talk to her while he’s taking the zipline home tonight. She sets her clock for that. At least she now can prove that there’s more to worry about than they are talking about.
All she has to do is make the whole story come out in a way that saves her financial butt, which, according to the last message, is about one week from oblivion. Still, it’s a better chance than she’s had in a long time. The bleak, dark, gray day that has emerged from the bleak night looks pretty good to her.
Just as Mary Ann Waterhouse is undressing, but trying to do it as Synthi Venture for Rock, and struggling to keep the thought, This is the last time, the last time, the last time, my breasts are so sore, so sore, please, please, this is the last time, from getting loud enough in her head to be picked up by the estimated three hundred twelve million women (and a scattering of curious men) worldwide who are experiencing her right now, and as Jesse is seeing through Rock’s eyes and watching those amazing cartoon-girl breasts pop out of the tiny bra, and Rock himself is wondering (below the level where Jesse can hear it) if after all this he’s going to have any energy left for Harry, his own longtime boyfriend—
and as Di has finally gotten the organization chart to meet the criteria he started with—
and as Berlina Jameson notices that she has a priority-one call from a datarodent—
and before Akiri Crandall and Gunnar Redalsen have even become aware that their days are going to be unpleasant—
At that instant, Glinda Gray notices that an AI thinks it’s picked up something important.
The trouble with the damned things is that they’re right too often to ignore and wrong too often to inspire any confidence. She’d really rather leave now; she promised Derry she’d get home early enough for them to have lunch together, and here she is working on a Saturday and looking at keeping going right through the day.
Well, if she checks it, and it’s nothing, she’s going right out the door and home to Derry, and she’s going to use the privacy router that the boss is always telling her to use. Klieg is such a nice guy he wants her to cut herself off from the company every weekend and take the time on her own, and if nice guys like Klieg were all the company had, it wouldn’t last a week. Got to stay on top of the competition, because in getting blocking patents, being second is spending money for nothing.
She hits the key before she can worry about it anymore, reads it—and whoops like the cheerleader she was in high school. In the silence that follows as she re-reads, she can hear six doors out in the corridor open and her co-workers asking each other whose office that noise came from, and did it sound like someone was upset? Normally she’d run out to tell them it was okay, but normally she wouldn’t have whooped in the first place—and things are anything but normal.
She sits at her desk, hugging herself. It’s really a shame that there’s no equivalent of Liver Treats or a scratch between the ears for an AI, because this AI has earned any treat it could want, if it were capable of wanting anything. What’s its number?—GT1500AI213 + 895. She writes it down, since she’ll want to copy its rule system for the next generation of Als to use as a starter.
Sitting on a node near NOAA central, a datarodent, running random checks, picked up several conversations of this guy, Diogenes Callare, and reported them to the AI. The AI in turn reprogrammed the datarodent to pay special attention to Callare after it noted that his boss talks about him a lot and cites him as an authority; and spotted Callare’s use as an influence to get a bright but difficult former employee—Carla Tynan—back into the organization for the crisis.
It even picked up the fact that Carla Tynan used to work in their blue-sky, crazy-people division, which implies that if they want her back, it’s because they aren’t sure of what they’re doing, or they’re afraid of getting zapped by something they haven’t thought of, and that it isn’t possible to tell whether this is because Diogenes Callare is so influential within the circle of meterologists there that he’s the only credible one to make the offer, or because Tynan, brainy maverick that she is, wouldn’t listen to anyone who wasn’t equally bright, so that all the calls it picked up to, from, and about Carla Tynan were vital evidence for Diogenes Callare as the key to the whole thing.
It thus quite properly began to pay very close attention to Callare himself, and when it caught him explaining it all—to his kid brother! you couldn’t ask for anything more perfect! it’s all in simple nontechnical language with no CYA in it!—it ran that explanation against the official press release, found out where the missing emphases were in the press release, and dashed off down the fibrop to let everyone know.
The press release began with the basic weasel-position of saying that maybe nothing would happen, and that with so many possibilities it was very hard to say for sure that anything would, and then described the scenarios as if they had been a set of worst cases.
But when you read this conversation against it, the key thing is that three times, Di tells his kid brother—an engineering student, so someone who doesn’t know meteorology but does know physics—that a huge amount of energy is getting dumped in. To most ears it just sounds like Di is saying “big,” but it’s the key to the whole thing. To people who’ve taken physics as a serious subject, energy is the name for that which is expressed in the universe as eithe
r mechanical work or as heat. Work is change in a mechanical system—the distance a thing is moved times the force resisting it. So a big difference in energy in a mechanical system (such as the atmosphere) translates into immense changes in where things are and how fast they move.
Or in very simple terms, to big, big winds.
The AI went so far as to run some calculations, and they’re pretty fascinating—in a spooky sort of way. The increased energy retained by the Earth and not bounced back into space is just about one-third of one percent more than normal—but the last time it got that much less it was enough to get the Little Ice Age started. At the present rate of global warming—which, the AI notes, is at least supposed to be slowing down—the Earth shouldn’t reach the overall global temperature it will reach this year until… holy jumping jesus god, 2412.
So the press release is the sheerest thin tissue of fact stretched over an implied lie. The one thing that is for sure is that something will happen, and that something will be huge. Everything else is reassuring noise for the public, helping it to believe that the people in charge probably know what’s true.
Moreover—and this is what brought out the whoop—if you don’t worry about specifics, if you lump things together instead of splitting them apart, then there’s something that several of the scenarios include or imply, something that gives the key to making money off this; and her AI has already turned that key.
She uses her priority to put through a call to John Klieg’s office, and it doesn’t surprise her at all that he’s there. He thinks everyone else works too hard and wants to take care of them, but look at the care he takes of himself—or rather doesn’t take. The man’s attitude toward work is positively twentieth.
“Boss, I think we’ve got what we wanted here.”
Klieg grins at her. “Attagirl. Get in here and tell me about it. And when you’re done I’ll expect you to explain why you’re not taking the weekend off to be with your kid or go out on the town.”
She smiles at that, knowing that whatever he says he doesn’t mean it.
It was first noticed late in the twentieth century that economics was rapidly becoming a trade of one kind of signal—orders, invoices, debts, entertainments, permissions, a thousand other kinds—for another kind of signal—money. The physical production of goods ran, more and more, on its own; money flowed because of the signs attached to the goods.
This was not without parallel; on the island of Yap, in the Pacific, money had long been in the form of giant stone wheels, and most property had been land or fishing rights. Neither the land nor the fish moved, and the money was too heavy to move in normal circumstances; only the information flowed.
By 2028, the rest of the world has caught up with Yap.
Passionet flips out as Synthi and Rock curl up, pretending that they are about to go to sleep in each other’s arms. When Synthi got into the showdown with the network people about her exhaustion, they put a lot of pressure on her, but with Rock’s advice she was able to make them give her the time off she needed, and that time off is starting right now.
In fact, it turned out that Rock had been taking vacations all along—“You have to ask’em, Synthi, and then make them stick to what they agree to, they won’t just do it for you”—and he’d been very helpful with getting her through the red tape.
As soon as they hear “feed out,” they roll away from each other. “I didn’t hurt you, did I?” Rock asks.
“I was sore when we started, but I don’t think you damaged anything any more than it already was. You’re a very gentle guy, you know.”
“Yeah.” He sighs. “I’m going to miss you in the next couple of months. You’re really a pro, you know? And frankly, it’s so hard for me to stay interested in the news that I’d rather have the experiencers get it from you.” He sits up. One of the attendants coming in hands him the little bag that holds his own clothes and belongings. “And you don’t make me feel like a goon, the way… well, some of the others do.”
“I like you too,” Synthi says. “But I’ll be back, I’m sure.” Her own bag contains a general makeup dissolver; she smears it on her face, and the whole mess, false eyelashes and all, turns to thin fluid that she washes off with soap and water. “Uh, Rock…” She shakes off the water and towels her face briskly. “My real name is Mary Ann Waterhouse.”
“And mine is David Ali,” he says, smiling back at her. “Now you take care of yourself.” He scribbles something on a piece of paper and hands it to her. “My phone number. If you just want to talk or something. But I’d advise you to just forget all about the business and go be Mary Ann for a while—it’s a much nicer name than Synthi.”
She nods. “I told the travel agent to find me a place where nothing ever happens. I’m not even taking a portable XV set with me; I’m just going to walk through the city like a real person.” She pulls on the bra with special supporters so that her breasts, too large and too heavy from the implants, don’t jerk around and hurt her when she moves. It feels so comfortable to know that for three months at least, she won’t have to run around in skimpy wisps of fabric, her chest, shoulder, and back muscles aching.
Over the comfortable bra goes the big, baggy sweatshirt, she ties up the flame-red hair in a bandanna, and now she looks like a slightly overweight young housewife, especially once she pulls the back of the shirt down far enough to hide the buttocks they’ve sewn into taut globes. She’s got to find a couple of loose-fitting skirts, first thing… it’s going to be great to spend months of having men think that she’d be pretty if she hadn’t let herself go.
When she turns back to Rock, she almost laughs; she’s never seen him go out of persona before, but when she had decided she would get out of persona right at the end of a recording session, he said he had to do the same. “If you’re going to show me yours, I’ve got to show you mine,” he explained. “Didn’t you ever sneak into the basement with a neighbor boy to go exploring?”
Now he looks… well, there’s no other word for it. He looks incredibly gay. The classically tailored narrow-lapelled pinstripe suit with vest and jacket unbuttoned are straight out of any gay bar in Manhattan; the wide tie with the NFL logo on it has become stereotypical as the code for “available for fun, nothing serious.” Even the phone on his belt is hopelessly retrobutch, made to look like a 1980s’ deal-maker car phone.
He winks at her. “Check the wingtips. And you didn’t see the nutsqueezing excuse for underwear I put on. Lace-y and tin-y, babe. There are times when I wish Harry didn’t like me to dress up like a bar slut.”
And then Mary Ann does laugh, and hugs him gently. “You look nice.”
“Oh, sure, if you don’t pay any attention to fashion, dearie,” Rock says. “But if you do, you’d know I’m a full year behind the trend.” He holds her for a second and says, “Now, you be careful among those civilians, you hear? Don’t do anything that you don’t think is going to be a barrel of fun. You’ve earned your enjoyment.” He kisses her forehead. “Now run along; Daddy’s got to finish dressing for his playmate.”
“When I get back,” Mary Ann says, “every so often, David and Mary Ann are going to have a drink or some coffee.”
“You got it,” David says. “We’ll talk about men and why they’re impossible to have good relationships with. Now go find yourself a nice one to break your little heart.”
Walking down the corridor, one of the things she enjoys most is that half the staff is doing double takes—only recognizing her on a second glance even though they know she’s in the building—and the other half is walking right by without seeing her.
There’s a pile of newsbriefs in her room, and it’s wonderful to throw them away unread. She calls for a bellhop.
When he comes, it’s the same bellhop who brought her breakfast the morning when she made her decision—if you can call halfway-to-a-break-down a decision. Come to think of it, he’s been turning up a lot; maybe it’s because she tips well or maybe it’s personal loyalty. Either
way, she’ll take anything that seems like human association right now.
“Uh,” he says, “I guess it’ll be a while before you do this again.” He’s still kind of awkward in making conversation, but since she’s made it clear that she likes to talk to him—and to waiters and desk clerks and everyone else—she’s been getting used to this kind of awkwardness.
“Yep. Wanna know where I’m secretly going?” she asks.
“It won’t be much of a secret if you tell people.” He drags the baggage cart onto the elevator for her, and the door closes behind them. Two floors, then out to the limo, limo to the airport, then onto a jumplane.
“The tabloid channels will be revealing it tomorrow,” she explains. “Fortunately, most people can’t recognize an XV performer who isn’t on XV, and I’m going where XV is still pretty rare anyway. So I really can tell you, and you can tell anyone you want to.”
He grins. “Well, then, sure, tell me. I’ve impressed a lot of people at Yukon Mike’s Saloon with our conversations.”
“Well, make sure you spill this one tonight, because everyone will know it tomorrow. I’m going to Tapachula. It’s a city in southern Mexico, close to the Guatemala border.”
“What’s there? What’s it known for?”
“Regular people with regular jobs, and absolutely nothing,” she says. “Except maybe peace and quiet. Kind of town everyone leaves, where they learn to get excitement somewhere else.”
They’re at the limo now, and very deliberately she steps close to him, hands him his tip, and says, “If you can be as gentle as Rock is, you’d be welcome to find out what it’s like to kiss me.”
“Nobody’s going to believe this,” he mutters, blushing, and when he does kiss her, it’s like a sensitive fourteen-year-old touching lips with the girl he worships. If that’s what Rock is coming across like in XV, no wonder he’s got such a following.
