by Susan Juby
“Did you hear about that favour at our house?” asked Jane-Smith, who worked at the House of Office. She unbuttoned her beautifully cut suit jacket and the top of her blouse, then unpinned her bun. Her dark hair tumbled down her shoulders. “One of her clients went all blurgh, and she got released.”
“That’s terrible,” said Bluefoam, from the House of Splash. “A favour in our house drowned three weeks ago.”
Cirque, from the House of Bends, wrapped a leg around her head with one hand and inspected the nails on her other hand.
“Hey, you guys,” said Slater. “Let’s keep discussions positive and productive.” With a sidelong glance at Bright, he adjusted his board, which leaned against his lounger, and grinned to show that he wasn’t being a downer.
Bright thought it must be a challenge for Slater to have to carry a surfboard, skis, or a snowboard everywhere he went. At least at the House of Gear the favours could change into off-duty outfits, like the skydiving outfit she had on. Rumour had it that the House of It favours had only to carry their own hotness around.
“So this favour who drowned,” Bright said. “Was it an accident? Or was she released?”
People who were released came back better than ever.
People who died accidentally were just gone, which was depressing and embarrassing.
Bluefoam shrugged. “They just said she drowned. But it was kind of strange because she was in the pink bubble splash pool, which is only like three inches deep. One of the other favours who was there said she kept trying to dive under the water.”
Attempting to sound casual, Bright said, “Like she was trying to find something?” She was thinking about the bizarre behaviour of her client, and all his talk of looking for the light.
Bluefoam yawned and picked one of her shiny white teeth with a pointy blue fingernail, painted to match her modified mermaid outfit, which trapped her legs so close together she had to shuffle. “I don’t know. I don’t pay attention because I have a permanent sinus infection from being wet all the time. Sometimes—” Bluefoam’s voice dropped so low that Bright had to lean in close to hear her—“I think the Deciders messed up by putting me in a water house.”
“A favour at our house fell off a balcony a few months ago,” said Slater. “He kept saying, ‘Blinded by the light, yo! I’m blinded!'”
Bright cast another anxious glance at the parachute bag. Was the one on her helmet the only light? Was the House of It doing a recruitment drive? She and Fon must be lead candidates. Except for a little passing out, they’d had no problem with the light. A thrill ran through her at the thought that she could soon be working in the most superelite house in the Store.
“Life happens,” said Fon, awkwardly turning her whole body until her haloed head faced Slater and Bright. “It’s best not to think too much.”
Bluefoam shrugged inside her glittering, scaly blue bodice. “I second that,” she said. As she moved her legs into a more comfortable position, she knocked over a tray of All-Health Post-Op fruit-like drinks.
No one moved to clean them up. There were service bots for that.
And just like that, the discussion moved on to who had the highest credit score and what awesome things they were going to buy and experience with those credits.
Fon was, as usual, at the top of the charts. She thought she might have as many credits as some of the favours at the House of It, only they didn’t report their credit scores. They were too elite for that.
Jane-Smith took her smart but sexy glasses off and allowed two frown lines to form in her forehead. She had left that part of her face untoxed for that express purpose. She leaned toward Fon. “Your ability to stay on top, week after week, is a major inspiration to me,” she said.
“I agree,” said Bluefoam. “Even though my sinuses are killing me all the time and sometimes my eyes get so fogged up that it’s hard for me to see, let alone pay attention, I still admire you and your scores.”
“Hey, you,” whispered Slater. His lips brushed Bright’s ear. “Did I ever mention that I dig your style?” He always seemed to know when Bright needed to hear something nice. Her jealousy at the compliments being firehosed all over Fon eased. She felt herself growing warm all over, almost like when she got a second-release accessory or was one of the first in line for a new surgery.
The power of her emotion was so strong that she said, “Anyone want to go to Mind Alter?”
“I do,” squealed Fon. “I can drive us!”
Bright looked at Fon’s blankly perfect face inside the brilliant halo of pink twinklers and thought of how the halo might affect Fon’s driving ability, which was weak to begin with.
“Great,” Bright said. “But I’ll drive.” She looked at the others. “When should we meet?”
Slater said once he got back to the House of Boards it would take him forty-five to fifty minutes to prepare a good look. Jane-Smith said she’d need an hour and a quarter to change into Librarian Gone Wrong, which was what she always wore to Mind Alter. Bluefoam debated whether she should change out of her mermaid costume and decided against it. “It’ll take me a full hour just to resurface my nose, I’ve been blowing it so much,” she said. Cirque, who was extremely nimble, said fifty minutes.
Fon broke into an enormous smile that revealed gleaming veneers. “It will take me an hour and a quarter,” she reported. “Or two hours if my halo shorts out while I’m blasting my hair.”
At that moment, the door to the meeting room crashed open and three favours fell inside. One was bleeding from her leg. Another had a man’s wig in her hand. The third fell to her knees and threw up in the corner. While she vomited, the other two laughed and laughed.
It took them several moments to realize the room wasn’t empty.
“Oh my job!” screamed the one with the wig in her hand. “This isn’t our dressing room! It’s not even our floor!”
“Aaaaah!” shrieked the other one. “Ahhhhhh!”
The third stayed on her knees, staring into the watery puddle on the floor.
“Meeting adjourned,” said Bright.
10.00
Grassly told himself to stay calm and access the logical part of his brain. This was no time to get emotional, nor was it time for feats of physical prowess, of which he, like all 51s who hadn’t yet joined up with their Mother, was quite capable.
He strode to his worktable. He was now sure that the flicker had rendered the favours immune to the light. His own physiology had reacted by becoming intolerant. He would have to eradicate the flicker if he wanted to enlighten the whole population. It would be so much easier if he could just gas the lot of them and drag them onto his ship. But that was not the way of the Sending. The ancestors had to actively participate in their own rescue.
The good news was that his light carriers couldn’t accidentally enlighten themselves, but it was still best to play it safe.
He had enough supplies to build perhaps six more lights. How many people could be enlightened by a mere half-dozen lights carried by a highly erratic workforce? How many of the enlightened would actually make it to the Natural Experience so he could entice them onto his ship. Lucky for him, it was one of the largest Sending ships, capable of transporting between twelve thousand and fifteen thousand ancestor-sized beings. It would be a tight fit, but once they were on board and under way, he would put them to sleep for the journey.
Yes, the obstacles he faced were many.
Then he remembered something about migrations among other species. Most involved mass movement of many individuals. He had seen millions of skakavech move across the yellow fields of GF12, coating the ground and filling the air with what seemed a solid mass. Now that was a migration! He’d seen images of the majestic kerbou thundering across the snowy plains of Q12 in search of their breeding grounds. What he needed to do was enlighten a critical number of ancestors at once. To do that, he couldn’t simply rely on Bright and Fon and a few other individuals to shine little lights on people. The ancestors were,
like all sentient, communal species at an early stage in their development, easily influenced by each other. They did not have a guiding mind, but if one ancestor saw ten or fifty or a hundred others running toward something, that ancestor would follow the group. Look at how they would charge toward a new entertainment on the advice of a Partytainment Report, even if they had no idea how the new activity was any different from all the others.
To enlighten the ancestors all at once, he would have to reprogram all the lights in the Store, which were run through the main computer system. Unfortunately, whoever had programmed the lights had dim-wittedly made it impossible to implement large-scale system changes without rebooting using the manual switch located somewhere inside the Headquarters, where the Board of Deciders lived, an area that could not be viewed on the feed surveillance system. That meant that, once he got the lights reprogrammed, he would have to turn them off for the changes to take effect, then someone in the Headquarters would have to turn all the lights back on.
Changing the lights would be a big job from a programming perspective, and if he got anything wrong, such as frequency or intensity, he could kill all of the ancestors. That would be embarrassing. He didn’t want any more of the bad feelings he’d experienced when the lure and the client were released in the Stimu Room. His Sending was on the line, which meant that his ability to mate and have offspring was at stake.
Grassly exhaled. Life is breath, he encouraged himself, echoing his Mother’s words. He would run some more tests on the prototypes, and if all went well and he was absolutely sure the lights were safe, he would start reprogramming the lights in the Store.
He logged on to his ship’s computer for his daily status check. He stared at the readout in disbelief. The last time he’d checked, only one day before, it had projected sixty-four days to seal failure. It now read forty-eight hours.
Forty-eight hours!
Grassly closed his eyes and listened to the panicked blood rushing through his body.
A minute passed. Two. With great reluctance, he accessed the feed and looked for the most recent update on the primary systems inside the Store, such as air scrubbers, skin integrity, backup power. They were barely adequate. The minute the seal between his ship and the skin failed, the biotoxins and pollutants that had poisoned everything on the planet would rush into the Store and the ancestors would be no more. He would have killed them all, or at least hastened their extinction. He might also have killed himself, which would be a grave disappointment.
He was going to have to change the plan. Speed things up. There was no time to waste. No time to test the lights. He would have to trust his ability to get rid of the flicker. At least he was tucked away safely in his workshop, where he could work undisturbed. Bright and Fon were busy with their leisure time, and he didn’t have to keep a close watch on them.
He would not allow this Sending to become a disaster of universe-sized proportions.
Grassly turned up his sleeves and rolled his shoulders, forward twice, backward twice. He dropped into the splits and shot back up.
He was ready.
But before he could sit down at his workbench and begin, a red light began to pulse insistently at the top left corner of the virtual visual field on his dataglasses.
All House of Gear personal support staff stand by for an important message from the commander.
Grassly stopped and his hands rose to his dataglasses. This was something new.
All House of Gear personal support staff report immediately to the muster station for an in-person briefing on a developing situation.
The message, written in red letters, rolled past several more times, obscuring all other images on the feed.
There hadn’t been an in-person meeting of PS officers stationed at the House of Gear since Grassly had arrived. PS staff followed instructions from the same information loops that directed everyone and everything else in the Store. That was partly why Grassly had found it such a simple matter to hack into the feed and make the changes he needed. His hacks allowed him to work perhaps one shift in twenty, to make specific favours and rooms invisible to anyone trying to conduct remote surveillance, to change credit scores, and to create new identities for himself as required. Things like in-person meetings would interfere with his ability to influence events. The last thing he wanted was his colleagues looking beyond their dataglasses.
He felt his shoulders sag. Tiredness swept through him. The persistent sluggishness he felt must be a result of the ancestor diet, which consisted of nothing more than manufactured nutritional powders taken in liquid or pill form. Even the air was largely manufactured. His research suggested that, somewhere along the line, the Board of Deciders had decided that food and its attendant rituals cut into productive time, so nutritional cocktails had replaced the traditional human diet.
He wished he could go back to his ship for a decent meal. But that would have to wait. Right now he had to get himself to the muster station, a surveillance room located off the cart park below the House of Gear.
When Grassly reached the muster station, he saw that he needed to revise his conclusion that all PS officers were automatons directed by the feed, nearly inert with obedience. The officer at the front of the room seemed to vibrate with a hectic energy. Thanks to the small red badge over his heart, Grassly recognized him as the commander from the Stimu Room.
“There have been anomalies in the feed,” the commander was saying. “Serious anomalies. I have been tracking suspicious occurrences, and they appear to be centralized here in the House of Gear.”
The PS officers stood with their hands behind their backs and their feet shoulder-width apart. Grassly fell in line with the others who’d just arrived.
“As you know, we rely on the feed for our instructions and do not monitor each other’s actions or report to one another. This is going to change. We will keep each other informed about any suspicious activity, even that which we’ve only seen directly, with our own eyes. As your commanding officer, I believe that our powers of discretion must be expanded in times of danger, such as when the feed malfunctions. Such discernment is in keeping with our duty to the Store and to the Board of Deciders.”
The commander rocked back on his heels and jutted his chin.
Grassly couldn’t believe what he was hearing. Here was the only PS officer in the whole Store sharp enough to notice glitches in the feed, and he happened to be in charge of the party favours?
The commander, who seemed to have expanded an eighth of an inch in all directions, continued. “I believe that we are dealing with a multi-pronged attack by unknown enemies. I suspect we are looking at a computer virus that is also infecting people, specifically the favour and client populations. We don’t know who is behind this virus, but we aim to find out.”
Pressure built behind Grassly’s eyes. The man was insane! He wasn’t just offline in terms of ambition. He had remnants of an unfettered imagination, and he was putting it to work.
“We have had multiple occurrences of favours displaying highly unproductive behaviour. These incidents are often followed by untraceable changes to their feeds.”
The commander must be referring to the favours on whom Grassly had tested the first versions of the lights. He’d tried to shield them by taking their room feeds offline, but their behaviour had been so extreme that they’d quickly been spotted and reported.
“More recently, I believe that the credit scores of certain favours have been tampered with.”
At this there was a sharp collective intake of breath. Tampering with credit scores was a serious offence, right up there with touching private property.
“We have been unable to track down the source of the viral outbreak, because critical data is missing from the feed. With the help of some key members of my team, I have narrowed down the field of current potential problem areas to the forty-three favours who worked the third shift in the House of Gear today.”
Grassly had to restrain himself from scroll
ing through the feed so he could double-check that he’d hidden Fon’s and Bright’s data streams. He also wanted to make sure that they weren’t using the light and calling attention to themselves.
“Two or more favours from the third shift may be infected with the virus, and they may have passed it along to at least one of their clients and a lure.”
A PS officer standing in the front row put up his hand. “Sir, should we release the entire shift, just to be on the safe side?”
The commander stared at the questioner, his mirrored glasses and eerily symmetrical face betraying nothing. “That is an excellent question. It shows the sort of initiative we are going to need to do our jobs while the feed is compromised and until we get to the bottom of this situation. I encourage all of you to begin asking questions out loud. Consult me. Keep in touch with each other. It’s the only way we can contain the threat.”
All the PS officers seemed to stand a little straighter after this speech. Grassly could hear their hearts begin to beat in unison.
Worse and worse and worse.
“The continued productivity of Citizens United Inside the Store is of paramount importance. We will not release the third shift unless it becomes apparent that they are all infected. Instead, we will track down and interview each favour and client who took part in the shift. At the same time, we will aggressively pursue our investigation of who would have means, motive, and opportunity to interfere with the feed. I have printed out a master list, with photos of each favour. You must locate them in person, using this printed image. Do not rely on surveillance footage or profile photos from the feed. That data could be compromised. If you see any unusual behaviour in a suspect, you have my explicit permission to release them. Discretion is now your byword. I expect you to use it.”
With that, the commander began to hand out sheets printed with the photos and most recent statistics of forty-three favours. Grassly joined the lineup, hoping beyond hope that he would be assigned a sheet with Fon’s or Bright’s picture on it. No such luck. He received the sheet for a favour called Blink. He barely glanced at it.
