Collected Stories

by Lewis Shiner

  He made it to the office in just under two hours. The front desk was deserted when he first walked in, then John, the slight, middle-aged receptionist, ducked out of the conference room and looked at him blankly. “Can I...help you with something?”

  “Is Lisa in?” Lisa was the owner, and Richard had introduced her to Nick on his first trip to North Carolina. There was a chance she might remember him.

  “Everyone’s in a company meeting now,” he said.

  “Is this about the prime business? Because until yesterday I worked here. Your name is John Fanthorpe and your father was a logger in Oregon. Lisa’s kids are named Spike and Janet. The alarm on the back door goes off every morning at 8:31 and nobody will drink the coffee when Dave Lee makes it.”

  John thought it over while Nick counted silently to five. “You might as well come in,” he said at last.

  Nick stood against one wall and scanned the room. He knew all but two of the fifty or so people there. Almost all of them were sitting in pairs, and some of the ones from Nick’s world met his eyes and nodded. Both Dave Lees, Nick noticed, had on identical black jeans, black running shoes, and black 3dfx T-shirts.

  One Lisa sat in the audience. The other Lisa stood at the front of the room and said, “You have to keep in mind that we’re a small company, and a lot of federal guidelines don’t apply here. Hell, you know as well as I do there aren’t any federal regulations to cover this kind of mess. So what it comes down to is, I’m going to do whatever I think is best for the company, because in the long run that’s going to do the most good for the greatest number of you all.

  “I’ve got to sit down and crunch some numbers and make some decisions. So what I want everybody to do is to go on home.” There were groans from the audience. “I know, it took you hours to get here. But you should all be home with your families right now. I will call each and every one of you before five o’clock today, Bell South and GTE willing, so that means any of you primes that aren’t staying with your originals, come up here and give me a number where I can get hold of you.”

  Nick had heard the TV reporters distinguish between “primes” and “originals” but it sounded different when it was his job on the line. It sounded like there was no point in signing up.

  “That’s it,” Lisa said. “Everybody go home, try and be cool, wait for this thing to shake itself out. I’m not even going to ask for questions because there aren’t enough answers to go around right now.”

  Hands went up anyway and one or two people started sentences with “What about...”

  Lisa shook her head decisively. “I’m serious, people. I’ll talk to you all one-on-one later today.” She held up one placating hand and left the room.

  Nick forced himself to get in line and put his name and David’s phone number on the legal pad. The Lisa who’d been sitting in the audience came up behind him. “Hey, Nick. I looked over the employee list and didn’t see your name.”

  “Apparently I’m still in Texas,” Nick told her. Lisa had been all right for an owner. She didn’t pretend to be one of the gang, but she didn’t distance herself either. Her office door was open most of the time, which meant on bad days Nick had been able to hear her yelling into the phone all the way back to his office. She was about fifty, with purplish-black skin and the first traces of gray in her short, stiff hair.

  “Uh oh,” she said sympathetically.

  “Yeah. Kind of takes a bite out of my seniority.”

  “You want some coffee or anything? It’s not bad, Dave Lee didn’t make it.”

  “No thanks. I got a long drive coming up.”

  They sat on two of the folding chairs and Lisa said, “I’ll tell you what. I don’t think seniority or equal opportunity or even friendship is going to matter much. I know what I’d do in her place. If I could have two Dave Lees and lose a few entry-level programmers to do it, I wouldn’t hesitate. Especially since I could probably get the second Dave dirt cheap.”

  “And let’s face it, who would know better than you what she’d do?”

  “Indeed.”

  “So what happens to you?”

  “Lisa’s putting me and the kids up for the time being. My guess is she’s going to offer me some kind of a buyout. The thing is, the old definitions of wealth are probably going to cease to matter much. Don’t get me wrong—I’m sure the same people are going to be on top, probably by a greater margin than ever, but the units of measure are going to change. Nobody knows yet what that measure is going to be, but the more liquid it is, the more likely it is to carry the day. So if she offers me a big wad of stock, it’s probably not going to hurt her much to do it. She can salve her conscience on the cheap, and I’ll have to take it, because what choice do I have? Which means I have to find a way to turn that stock into something to eat and a place to sleep.” She drained her coffee cup, which featured Gary Larson cartoon dinosaurs. “What about you?”

  “My situation is a bit complicated. Angela’s husband is alive here and her double isn’t. I think she’s going to have to make a choice, and...let’s just say my seniority isn’t looking that good anywhere.”

  “Maybe seniority won’t matter there, either.”

  “Yeah. We can always hope, right?”

  And hope did, in fact, die hard, Nick realized, as he found himself headed toward his old office as if he would find some trace of himself there. Instead he found a fierce-looking young woman with black hair and a thin face, staring at the computer screen and typing with blinding speed. She had her own posters on the wall, no plants, no stereo. There would be no email for Nick on her machine, no code for his new graphics driver.

  On the way out he ran into Tom, his project leader. Tom was heavy and graying, with a bristling white mustache. He and Nick had been friends, but never particularly close.

  “Hey, Nick,” he said.

  “Thereby identifying yourself,” Nick said, “as the Prime Tom.”

  Tom nodded. “A bunch of us fifth wheels are talking about having a picnic tomorrow over at Lake Crabtree. Start around noon or so, go on all day. Everybody bring what they can. Maybe take our minds off things for a little while.”

  “I’ll just have to see,” Nick told him. “Tomorrow seems like a million years away right now.”

  19. It took Nick less than an hour and a half to get back to Hope Valley Road. As he idled past the bank which no longer held any of his money, he watched a National Guardsman in full riot gear turn people away from the cash machine, which bore a hand-lettered sign reading “Out of Service.”

  “It’s a fucking lie!” a woman was screaming. Tears were running down her face and she was waving her ATM card in the Guardsman’s face. “There’s nothing wrong with that machine except the greedy bastards who shut it down!” The Guardsman was faceless behind his Plexiglas mask, but Nick could read the nervousness in his posture.

  Nick looked away. The two twenties in his pants pockets had a palpable weight. The urge to drive to Food Lion and squander the entire forty dollars on candy bars and balloons and toys almost overwhelmed him. Being an adult was more of a burden than he could carry. He wanted someone to take him by the hand and either beat hell out of him or tell him everything was going to be all right.

  Instead he drove back to David’s house and the chilly comfort of CNN.

  On Headline News, the world’s religious leaders stepped up for their share of the limelight. “If God had no hand in this,” Pat Robertson asked, “then who put these drivers into automobiles to guard their safety? Who put these passengers into airplanes? Science can’t explain what’s happened to us in the last twenty-four hours. Life is a miracle, and we’ve just seen six billion miracles in a single day.”

  Anchor Lynne Russell noted, without comment, that the whereabouts of only one Pat Robertson was known. Whether the one who addressed the nation was original or prime was likewise a mystery.

  Twin Dalai Lamas, from separate encampments, each declared the other to be but maya, illusion, a physical manif
estation of earthly greed. The Pope, meanwhile, had gone into seclusion with his prime, intimating that they might be a while.

  On the scientific side of the fence, the EPA issued a statement pointing out that the simple body heat of an additional six billion people, not to mention the carbon dioxide they exhaled, could escalate global warming catastrophically. One source speculated that the entire land surface of the planet could be desert within ten years.

  The global population continued to drop rapidly, however. The combined overnight death toll from Bosnia, Khazakhstan, Jordan, Somalia, and Mexico was already estimated in the tens of millions, with no end in sight. Large portions of LA, London, and Moscow were on fire, while Mexico City had burned out from lack of oxygen. Australia and New Zealand had both closed their borders, turning back all incoming sea and air traffic while ferrying foreign tourists out of both countries on nationalized Qantas planes.

  President Quayle, not knowing what else to do with him, had appointed the Bill Clinton from Nick’s world as Special Advisor on Prime Affairs. The “Affairs” part had commentators sniggering. The two emerged at 5:00 eastern time to announce the formation of the US Peacekeeping Force, a new organization that would incorporate existing members of the Army, National Guard, and local police forces, plus anyone else who wanted to volunteer. The government promised all recruits three meals a day, a place to sleep, their nation’s gratitude, and pay in the form of government scrip to be redeemed when the crisis was over.

  “That’s it,” David said. “They just flushed the dollar down the loo.”

  At the inevitable press conference, with a freshly minted USPF logo on a banner behind him, Quayle said, “The mission of this force is to protect private property, safeguard human life, and provide an orderly.” He squinted at his TelePrompTer. “Transition.”

  “Property first, of course,” David said, and Nick felt a surge of warmth toward him.

  “Transition to what?” Angela asked.

  “Martial law,” Nick said. “God help us all.”

  Helicopter footage showed an unbroken line of the desperate and homeless that stretched from Mexico City to the Texas border—cars, bicycles, pedestrians, wagons, horses. Somebody had blown up the International Bridge at Laredo in the early morning hours. The US Border Patrol blamed right-wing extremists and the Governor of Tamulipas blamed the US Border Patrol. The loss of the bridge made no perceptible difference. The tidal wave of humanity rolled across the Rio Grande like it was a mud puddle, and refugees simply swarmed over the few cops who were willing to open fire.

  “In Austin, Texas,” Russell said, “billionaire Harvey Chambers has become a one-man Works Progress Administration.” Nick had been drifting into his own alarming fantasies of Quayle’s personal New World Order, but the mention of Austin brought him back. The screen showed what seemed to be thousands of workers outside a huge complex of steel and glass towers. As one crew cleared live oaks and mesquite bushes in a long straight line, a second crew came behind them, digging a shallow trench. In the background still more workers unloaded massive blocks of stone from flatbed trucks.

  In the foreground, a young male reporter in khakis and a polo shirt turned to the camera and said, “Offering good pay, hot food, and accommodations at a Tent City of his own creation, Chambers has commissioned a large-scale building project on his Computics campus. Though Chambers hasn’t released any details of what he’s up to, it doesn’t take one of his resident geniuses to make an informed guess. It looks to be a very high, very thick wall, and with the visitors headed his way from south of the border, he may need it.”

  An hour later, as Nick was washing the dinner dishes, the phone rang. David didn’t answer so Nick let the machine take it. “This is a message for Nick,” Lisa’s voice said. “I’m sorry, but we’re not going to be able to find a place for you. I’m sure you appreciate the situation.” Nick could hear her relief that she didn’t have to break the news to him directly. “If you haven’t heard, though, the government is going to have jobs for anybody who needs one.”

  23. Nick woke at seven the next morning, cranky and sullen. He’d been dreaming about deserts and sandstorms, and in the middle of it all a pyramid with Computics logos carved into its sides.

  Angela murmured something unintelligible and turned her back to him as he got out of bed. He dressed and went over to the main house, shivering a little in the distinctly colder morning air. David was still not up, so Nick made coffee and brought in the paper. Enjoy this, he told himself. Solitude is now the most precious commodity on Earth.

  The front page told him that the USPF was an instant hit. The government, cleverly anticipating that they wouldn’t have enough guns or uniforms to go around, had declared that volunteers were to provide their own uniforms of blue jeans and white shirts. Their commanders would issue them red bandannas. They were encouraged to bring along their own personal weapons.

  In separate, but nearly identical statements, two Ralph Naders warned that there was little difference between the USPF and licensed vigilantism. Any unstable person with a piece of red cloth and a gun could wreak unchallenged havoc. The reporter covering the story dismissed him with as a harmless crank.

  Saturday had always been Nick’s favorite day of the week. Just seven days ago he’d cooked his strawberry mint crepes in his special pan and sat on the patio in the sun to eat them. This Saturday he spread the classifieds—reduced to eight pages from the usual two dozen—across the dining room table and looked for work.

  There were personal ads, mostly from primes looking for missing persons. Auto dealers were looking for temporary repossession specialists and drivers. And there was still plenty of work for telemarketers. The rest of world seemed to be holding its breath.

  David eventually wandered in and logged on to his Internet provider so Nick could check job listings on the Web. The Web seemed largely unfazed by the Prime Event. And why not? Nick thought. There was no shortage of room in cyberspace. Ads for electronic stock trading services still popped up everywhere. On ZDNet, Jesse Berst—now with two photos of himself at the head of his column—asked his readers if it was the end of life as they knew it or simply the biggest stunt yet by Harvey Chambers and Computics to stall the Justice Department. The AltaVista search engine invited Nick to ask a question like, “Where did all these people come from?”

  He found half a dozen openings for C++ developers in the area, though he suspected most of them were no longer viable. He switched over to the Computics Writer program, figured out the slightly cheesy interface, and put together a quick résumé. If he had to fill out a job application, he wondered, would there be a box to check if you were a Prime?

  By the time he’d emailed the copies of his résumé it was after noon. Angela, puffy and uncommunicative, was watching CNN with David. Special Presidential Advisor Bill Clinton was addressing protesters at the Washington Mall. “I’m a Prime just as many of you are,” he said. “I know your sense of dislocation and anxiety.”

  The crowd jeered and shouted insults.

  Clinton raised his hands. “I urge you to return to your homes. This disruption is only delaying our efforts to bring help to those of you who need it the most.” Clinton’s words disappeared under a chorus of heckling, and finally he shrugged and walked away with his head down, surrounded by bodyguards in dark suits.

  Voices began to chant, “No justice, no peace,” over and over. Nick could hear growing alarm in the voices of the CNN reporters, and then, moments later, the crowd seemed to buck, like a single organism reacting to a shock. The camera swung wildly around to show a wedge of USPF recruits in white shirts and red bandannas, swinging clubs and baseball bats and firing something into the air. The screen filled with smoke from pepper spray and tear gas, leaving sound as the only evidence of what was happening: screams, grunts, the sound of wood impacting flesh, the muted thunder of running feet. Nick, horrified, covered his ears and went into the bathroom, running water in the sink to mask the noise of the TV.
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  When he came out he had decided to go to the picnic at Lake Crabtree. He had real friends there, and friendship seemed less contingent than everything else in his life at that moment. He got all the way to the hall closet, looking for his softball and glove, before he remembered that he wouldn’t find them there.

  He stuck his head back into the den, where CNN had moved on to the next atrocity and David and Angela were in the midst of a heated discussion. “...has nothing of real value to back it up,” David was saying. “There’s no disincentive to inflation.”

  “Where have you been for the last thirty years?” Angela was leaning forward aggressively, but Nick could see she was enjoying herself. “Money isn’t real. It’s a necessary fiction that everybody’s bought into for the sake of the game. There’s nothing to back it up but good intentions anyway.”

  “There’s your, what do you call it, Federal Reserve System.”

  “It’s the Emperor’s New Money, except the emperor is naked now. So people will transfer all their leftover hope and need to this government scrip. It’s Tinkerbell money, but people will clap for it. Wait and see.”

  Why can’t I look up from people being beaten and debate economic theory? Nick wondered. If I could have fought with her like that, over something other than wounded feelings, then maybe she could have loved me too.

  “Listen,” he said. “There’s a company picnic thing at work, and I think I want to go.” Too late, and with too little enthusiasm, he added, “You guys can come along if you like.”

  David looked at Angela, who was already shaking her head. “I’ll pass,” she said.

  “I think there’s some veggie dogs in the freezer,” David said, “if you don’t want to go empty handed.”

  29. The crowding was less severe on I-40, but there was still insufficient room for Nick to shake off the restlessness that gripped him, to push the accelerator to the floor and watch the landscape come hurtling at him. He knew it was just another misguided impulse, like the one that had sent him to the closet for his baseball glove.