21st Century Science Fiction: The New Science Fiction Writers of the New Century

by David G. Hartwell

  “You’d never seen him before this?”

  “It was a risk,” he said. “I thought I could convince him, face to face.”

  “But?”

  “I bombed. It was—it was the—it was everything. The compound. The people. All of it. It was like a city, a theme park. They lived there, hundreds of them, and managed every tiny piece of his empire. Like Royal urchins.”

  Leon puzzled over this. “Eunuchs?”

  “Royal eunuchs. They had this whole culture, and as I got closer and closer to him, I realized, shit, they could just buy Ate. They could destroy us. They could have us made illegal, put us all in jail. Or get me elected president. Anything.”

  “You were overawed.”

  “That’s the right word. It wasn’t a castle or anything, either. It was just a place, a well-built collection of buildings. In Westchester, you know? It had been a little town center once. They’d preserved everything good, built more on top of it. It all just . . . worked. You’re still new here. Haven’t noticed.”

  “What? That Ate is a disaster? I figured that out a long time ago. There’s several dozen highly paid creative geniuses on the payroll here who haven’t seen their desks in months. We could be a creative powerhouse. We’re more like someone’s vanity project.”

  “Brutal.”

  Leon wondered if he’d overstepped himself. Who cared? “Brutal doesn’t mean untrue. It’s like, it’s like the money that came into this place, it became autonomous, turned into a strategy for multiplying itself. A bad strategy. The money wants to sell something to a monster, but the money doesn’t know what monsters want, so it’s just, what, beating its brains out on the wall. One day, the money runs out and . . .”

  “The money won’t run out,” Brautigan said. “Wrong. We’d have to spend at ten-ex what we’re burning now to even approach the principal.”

  “Okay,” Leon said. “So it’s immortal. That’s better?”

  Brautigan winced. “Look, it’s not so crazy. There’s an entire unserved market out there. No one’s serving it. They’re like, you know, like communist countries. Planned economies. They need something, they just acquire the capacity. No market.”

  “Hey, bub, I know just what you need! You need a house to go with this doorknob!” To his own surprise, Leon discovered that he did a passable Daffy Duck. Brautigan blinked at him. Leon realized that the man was a little drunk. “Just something I heard the other day,” he said. “I told the lady from my monster that we could provide the stuff that their corporate culture precluded. I was thinking of, you know, how the samurai banned firearms. We can think and do the unthink- and undoable.”

  “Good line.” He flopped onto his back. An inch of pale belly peeked between the top of his three-quarter-length culottes and the lower hem of his smart wraparound shirt. “The monster in the vat. Some skin, some meat. Tubes. Pinches of skin clamped between clear hard plastic squares, bathed in some kind of diagnostic light. No eyes, no top of the head where the eyes should be. Just a smooth mask. Eyes everywhere else. Ceiling. Floor. Walls. I looked away, couldn’t make contact with them, found I was looking at something wet. Liver. I think.”

  “Yeesh. That’s immortality, huh?”

  “I’m there, ‘A pleasure to meet you, an honor,’ talking to the liver. The eyes never blinked. The monster gave a speech. ‘You’re a low-capital, high-risk, high-payoff long shot, Mr. Brautigan. I can keep dribbling sums to you so that you can go back to your wonder factory and try to come up with ways to surprise me. So there’s no need to worry on that score.’ And that was it. Couldn’t think of anything to say. Didn’t have time. Gone in a flash. Out the door. Limo. Nice babu to tell me how good it had been for the monster, how much he’d been looking forward to it.” He struggled up onto his elbows. “How about you?”

  Leon didn’t want to talk about Ria with Brautigan. He shrugged. Brautigan got a mean, stung look on his face. “Don’t be like that. Bro. Dude. Pal.”

  Leon shrugged again. Thing was, he liked Ria. Talking about her with Brautigan would be treating her like a . . . a sales target. If he were talking with Carmela, he’d say, “I feel like she wants me to succeed. Like it would be a huge deal for everyone if I managed it. But I also feel like maybe she doesn’t think I can.” But to Brautigan, he merely shrugged, ignored the lizardy slit-eyed glare, stood, pulled his pants on, and went to his desk.

  • • • •

  If you sat at your desk long enough at Ate, you’d eventually meet everyone who worked there. Carmela knew all, told all, and assured him that everyone touched base at least once a month. Some came in a couple times a week. They had plants on their desks and liked to personally see to their watering.

  Leon took every single one of them to lunch. It wasn’t easy—in one case, he had to ask Carmela to send an Ate chauffeur to pick up the man’s kids from school (it was a half day) and bring them to the sitter’s, just to clear the schedule. But the lunches themselves went very well. It turned out that the people at Ate were, to a one, incredibly interesting. Oh, they were all monsters, narcissistic, tantrum-prone geniuses, but once you got past that, you found yourself talking to people who were, at bottom, damned smart, with a whole lot going on. He met the woman who designed the moss in the Living Room. She was younger than he was, and had been catapulted from a mediocre academic adventure at the Cooper Union into more wealth and freedom than she knew what to do with. She had a whole Rolodex of people who wanted to sublicense the stuff, and she spent her days toying with them, seeing if they had any cool ideas she could incorporate into her next pitch to one of the lucky few who had the ear of a monster.

  Like Leon. That’s why they all met with him. He’d unwittingly stepped into one of the agency’s top spots, thanks to Ria, one of the power-broker seats that everyone else yearned to fill. The fact that he had no idea how he’d got there or what to do with it didn’t surprise anyone. To a one, his colleagues at Ate regarded everything to do with the vat-monsters as an absolute, unknowable crapshoot, as predictable as a meteor strike.

  No wonder they all stayed away from the office.

  • • • •

  Ria met him in a different pair of jeans, these ones worn and patched at the knees. She had on a loose, flowing silk shirt that was frayed around the seams, and had tied her hair back with a kerchief that had faded to a noncolor that was like the ancient New York sidewalk outside Ate’s office. He felt the calluses on her hand when they shook.

  “You look like you’re ready to do some gardening,” he said.

  “My shift at the club,” she said. “I’ll be trimming the lime trees and tending the mint patch and the cucumber frames all afternoon.” She smiled, stopped him with a gesture. She bent down and plucked a blade of greenery from the untidy trail edge. They were in Central Park, in one of the places where it felt like a primeval forest instead of an artful garden razed and built in the middle of the city. She uncapped her water bottle and poured water over the herb—it looked like a blade of grass—rubbing it between her forefinger and thumb to scrub at it. Then she tore it in two and handed him one piece, held the other to her nose, then ate it, nibbling and making her nose wrinkle like a rabbit’s. He followed suit. Lemon, delicious and tangy.

  “Lemongrass,” she said. “Terrible weed, of course. But doesn’t it taste amazing?” He nodded. The flavor lingered in his mouth.

  “Especially when you consider what this is made of—smoggy rain, dog piss, choked up air, and sunshine, and DNA. What a weird flavor to emerge from such a strange soup, don’t you think?”

  The thought made the flavor a little less delicious. He said so.

  “I love the idea,” she said. “Making great things from garbage.”

  “About the jetpacks,” he said, for he’d been thinking.

  “Yes?”

  “Are you utopians of some kind? Making a better world?”

  “By ‘you,’ you mean ‘people who work for Buhle’?”

  He shrugged.

  �
��I’m a bit of a utopian, I’ll admit. But that’s not it. You know Henry Ford set up these work camps in Brazil, ‘Fordlandia,’ and enforced a strict code of conduct on the rubber plantation workers? He outlawed the Caipirinha and replaced it with Tom Collinses, because they were more civilized.”

  “And you’re saying Buhle wouldn’t do that?”

  She waggled her head from side to side, thinking it over. “Probably not. Maybe, if I asked.” She covered her mouth as though she’d made an indiscreet admission.

  “Are—were—you and he . . . ?”

  She laughed. “Never. It’s purely cerebral. Do you know where his money came from?”

  He gave her a look.

  “Okay, of course you do. But if all you’ve read is the official history, you’ll think he was just a finance guy who made some good bets. It’s nothing like it. He played a game against the market, tinkered with the confidence of other traders by taking crazy positions, all bluff, except when they weren’t. No one could outsmart him. He could convince you that you were about to miss out on the deal of the century, or that you’d already missed it, or that you were about to walk off onto easy street. Sometimes, he convinced you of something that was real. More often, it was pure bluff, which you’d only find out after you’d done some trade with him that left him with more money than you’d see in your whole life, and you face-palming and cursing yourself for a sucker. When he started doing it to national banks, put a run on the dollar, broke the Fed, well, that’s when we all knew that he was someone who was special, someone who could create signals that went right to your hindbrain without any critical interpretation.”

  “Scary.”

  “Oh yes. Very. In another era they’d have burned him for a witch or made him the man who cut out your heart with the obsidian knife. But here’s the thing: he could never, ever kid me. Not once.”

  “And you’re alive to tell the tale?”

  “Oh, he likes it. His reality distortion field, it screws with his internal landscape. Makes it hard for him to figure out what he needs, what he wants, and what will make him miserable. I’m indispensable.”

  He had a sudden, terrible thought. He didn’t say anything, but she must have seen it on his face.

  “What is it? Tell me.”

  “How do I know that you’re on the level about any of this? Maybe you’re just jerking me around. Maybe it’s all made-up—the jetpacks, everything.” He swallowed. “I’m sorry. I don’t know where that came from, but it popped into my head—”

  “It’s a fair question. Here’s one that’ll blow your mind, though: how do you know that I’m not on the level, and jerking you around?”

  They changed the subject soon after, with uneasy laughter. They ended up on a park bench near the family of dancing bears, whom they watched avidly.

  “They seem so happy,” he said. “That’s what gets me about them. Like dancing was the secret passion of every bear, and these three are the first to figure out how to make a life of it.”

  She didn’t say anything, but watched the three giants lumber in a graceful, unmistakably joyous kind of shuffle. The music—constantly mutated based on the intensity of the bears, a piece of software that sought tirelessly to please them—was jangly and poplike, with a staccato one-two/onetwothree-fourfive/one-two rhythm that let the bears do something like a drunken stagger that was as fun to watch as a box of puppies.

  He felt the silence. “So happy,” he said again. “That’s the weird part. Not like seeing an elephant perform. You watch those old videos and they seem, you know, they seem—”

  “Resigned,” she said.

  “Yeah. Not unhappy, but about as thrilled to be balancing on a ball as a horse might be to be hitched to a plow. But look at those bears!”

  “Notice that no one else watches them for long?” she said. He had noticed that. The benches were all empty around them.

  “I think it’s because they’re so happy,” she said. “It lays the trick bare.” She showed teeth at the pun, then put them away. “What I mean is, you can see how it’s possible to design a bear that experiences brain reward from rhythm, keep it well-fed, supply it with as many rockin’ tunes as it can eat, and you get that happy family of dancing bears who’ll peacefully coexist alongside humans who’re going to work, carrying their groceries, pushing their toddlers around in strollers, necking on benches—”

  The bears were resting now, lolling on their backs, happy tongues sloppy in the corners of their mouths.

  “We made them,” she said. “It was against my advice, too. There’s not much subtlety in it. As a piece of social commentary, it’s a cartoon sledgehammer with an oversize head. But the artist had Buhle’s ear, he’d been CEO of one of the portfolio companies and had been interested in genomic art as a sideline for his whole career. Buhle saw that funding this thing would probably spin off lots of interesting sublicenses, which it did. But just look at it.”

  He looked. “They’re so happy,” he said.

  She looked too. “Bears shouldn’t be that happy,” she said.

  • • • •

  Carmela greeted him sunnily as ever, but there was something odd.

  “What is it?” he asked in Spanish. He made a habit of talking Spanish to her, because both of them were getting rusty, and also it was like a little shared secret between them.

  She shook her head.

  “Is everything all right?” Meaning, Are we being shut down? It could happen, might happen at any time, with no notice. That was something he—all of them—understood. The money that powered them was autonomous and unknowable, an alien force that was more emergent property than will.

  She shook her head again. “It’s not my place to say,” she said. Which made him even more sure that they were all going down, for when had Carmela ever said anything about her place?

  “Now you’ve got me worried,” he said.

  She cocked her head back toward the back office. He noticed that there were three coats hung on the beautiful, anachronistic coat stand by the ancient temple door that divided reception from the rest of Ate.

  He let himself in and walked down the glassed-in double rows of offices, the cubicles in the middle, all with their characteristic spotless hush, like a restaurant dining room set up for the meals that people would come to later.

  He looked in the Living Room, but there was no one there, so he began to check out the other conference rooms, which ran the gamut from super-conservative to utter madness. He found them in the Ceile, with its barn-board floors, its homey stone hearth, and the gimmicked sofas that looked like unsprung old thrift-store numbers, but which sported adaptive genetic algorithm–directed haptics that adjusted constantly to support you no matter how you flopped on them, so that you could play at being a little kid sprawled carelessly on the cushions no matter how old and cranky your bones were.

  On the Ceile’s sofa were Brautigan, Ria, and a woman he hadn’t met before. She was somewhere between Brautigan and Ria’s age, but with that made-up, pulled-tight appearance of someone who knew the world wouldn’t take her as seriously if she let one crumb of weakness escape from any pore or wrinkle. He thought he knew who this must be, and she confirmed it when she spoke.

  “Leon,” she said. “I’m glad you’re here.” He knew that voice. It was the voice on the phone that had recruited him and brought him to New York and told him where to come for his first day on the job. It was the voice of Jennifer Torino, and she was technically his boss. “Carmela said that you often worked from here so I was hoping today would be one of the days you came by so we could chat.”

  “Jennifer,” he said. She nodded. “Ria.” She had a poker face on, as unreadable as a slab of granite. She was wearing her customary denim and flowing cotton, but she’d kept her shoes on and her feet on the floor. “Brautigan,” and Brautigan grinned like it was Christmas morning.

  Jennifer looked flatly at a place just to one side of his gaze, a trick he knew, and said, “In recognition of his ex
cellent work, Mr. Brautigan’s been promoted, effective today. He is now manager for Major Accounts.” Brautigan beamed.

  “Congratulations,” Leon said, thinking, What excellent work? No one at Ate has accomplished the agency’s primary objective in the entire history of the firm! “Well done.”

  Jennifer kept her eyes coolly fixed on that empty, safe spot. “As you know, we have struggled to close a deal with any of our major accounts.” He restrained himself from rolling his eyes. “And so Mr. Brautigan has undertaken a thorough study of the way we handle these accounts.” She nodded at Brau-tigan.

  “It’s a mess,” he said. “Totally scattergun. No lines of authority. No checks and balances. No system.”

  “I can’t argue with that,” Leon said. He saw where this was going.

  “Yes,” Jennifer said. “You haven’t been here very long, but I understand you’ve been looking deeply into the organizational structure of Ate yourself, haven’t you?” He nodded. “And that’s why Mr. Brautigan has asked that you be tasked to him as his head of strategic research.” She smiled a thin smile. “Congratulations yourself.”

  He said, “Thanks,” flatly, and looked at Brautigan. “What’s strategic research, then?”

  “Oh,” Brautigan said. “Just a lot of what you’ve been doing: figuring out what everyone’s up to, putting them together, proposing organizational structures that will make us more efficient at design and deployment. Stuff you’re good at.”

  Leon swallowed and looked at Ria. There was nothing on her face. “I can’t help but notice,” he said, forcing his voice to its absolutely calmest, “that you haven’t mentioned anything to do with the, uh, clients.”

  Brautigan nodded and strained to pull his lips over his horsey teeth to hide his grin. It didn’t work. “Yeah,” he said. “That’s about right. We need someone of your talents doing what he does best, and what you do best is—”

  He held up a hand. Brautigan fell silent. The three of them looked at him. He realized, in a flash, that he had them all in his power, just at that second. He could shout BOO! and they’d all fall off their chairs. They were waiting to see if he’d blow his top or take it and ask for more. He did something else.