by Toby Weston
Before the big brass and glass revolving door had stopped spinning, Keith was met by a receptionist on intercept course. She smiled engagingly at him as she glided across the marble floor, her feet slipping slightly as if on ice. She had a hint of an Asian slant to her perfect features, and she oozed the strange combination of nervous innocence and sexual availability, which were the traditional hallmarks of an Anime cartoon heroine. She would show up on the hotel bill as a business expense.
“Hello Keith,” she fluttered, while adjusting her indecently short skirt. “Can I be of any assistance…?”
She was a graphical user interface created by the hotel’s AI. She only existed on Keith’s Spex and inside his brain, but that was enough to trick his glands and gonads. Infrared cameras sprinkled around the lobby had, no doubt, detected the slight tumescence, and the server had dutifully passed the information on to her software. She parted her lips slightly.
“You are already checked in; would you like me to show you the way to your room?”
The motorised luggage trolley, doing a perfect impression of being pushed by the virtual bellboy, followed them into the lift and the bellboy seemed to punch Keith’s floor. During the short ascent, Keith caught the virtual bellboy checking the virtual receptionist’s arse; the attention to detail was impressive. Keith was liking this Niato guy.
He told the bellboy he could have a tip if he would unpack the suitcases. The slouching youth looked convincingly pissed off and left with the trolley. The receptionist/hostess, who had been waiting outside Keith’s door, moved aside to let the bellboy pass. She was very polite and waited for an invitation to enter. Keith was perfectly aware that asking her in would initiate the adult entertainment transaction, but he appreciated that his face was not being rubbed in it. He was being treated with some dignity, for a change, even while ordering up a quick fuck from a virtual whore.
He called over and invited her in. His Spex bleeped quietly and a confirmation notification hovered briefly before sliding into his peripheral vision. After gratefully accepting his credit card details, she stepped into the room and out of her dress. Keith had no special hardware with him; the hotel could provide it, but he had no intention of sharing a cybernetic vagina with an anonymous list of businessmen. Instead, he would have to work on the principles of suspension of disbelief and self-sufficiency.
Even as she pointed to the bed, Keith could see she was frowning. He had been a bad boy. Still thinking too rationally, he wondered how she picked up on his triggers. Was the room’s camera and microphone network reading his physiological responses, or was she, or rather it, paying dubious BotNets to mine his tastes, based on the websites he visited and the books he bought?
She pulled her briefs into a T, and Keith stared transfixed as her soft virtual flesh welled up around the vertical axis of their sheer black material. She seemed to know him better than any real girlfriend ever had.
Four minutes later, it is nearly over; she is kneeling on Keith’s bed, poised above him, just out of reach, encouraging him. A few more seconds and it is all too much; with an audible exclamation, Keith releases his tension. There seems to be a lot of it too. Great thick ropes of it shooting into the air, arcing like a Vegas fountain, indifferent to mundane concepts like gravity, and then splashing extravagantly over her perfect face and tits.
There is a pause as the universe sorts itself out, then she smiles, wipes herself down with her briefs and slips into her dress. She blows him a kiss as she leaves Keith to clean up the less-Herculean, non-virtual residues.
The next morning, he woke to the sun streaming into the room. He enjoyed its natural light. He delighted in the abstract whimsical patterns it made on the wall, as the rays were split into their component colours by the half-drunk glass of water by his bed.
A morning free of hangovers or vague troubling memories was a pleasant rarity for Keith. He called up Monica on his Spex and requested the headlines:
An earthquake in San Francisco, twelve dead.
A major storm in Bangladesh, which had broken through the dykes again, killing an undetermined number of people, expected to be in the tens of thousands.
Rebel fundamentalists in Yinchuan had sabotaged a nuclear reactor, causing millions of people to be evacuated and potentially polluting two thousand kilometres of the Yellow River.
Something in the broadcast stood out. Keith commanded his Spex to rewind and loop the last story, so he could look more closely at the images. A group of terrorists were posing in front of a smoking hole in the reactor's concrete apron. They were all waving RPG launchers and coil guns—millions of turns of super conducting wire driven by a couple of whooping great capacitors and powered by high-capacity batteries, they were capable of firing copper slugs through a tank. Keith recognised the barrels from yesterday’s visit to the Irish factory, where they had been masquerading as bicycle crossbars. He could make a confident guess who had supplied the capacitors and batteries.
Bastards! So now BHJ had him gun-running for terrorists too! Fuck it!
He kicked off the duvet and stood up. With all contentment and optimism shattered, he was ready for another shitty day. Then he remembered! The morning was set aside for a data confidentiality training. This would be followed by a workshop on multi-cultural business practices for most of the afternoon, and finally they would finish the day with a team-building circle jerk. If Ben’s previous on-sites were any indication, the night and early hours of the morning would be devoted to a massive piss-up.
‘Fucking Ben!’
He got dressed and headed down in the gleaming brass and marble elevator to the patio, where breakfast was served. Keith couldn’t see Ben, who was probably still in bed. The room seemed populated exclusively with the tanned young professionals Ben gathered to himself; lean bodies, smiling faces, loose morals. He was painfully aware of the grit at the corners of his eyes, the fur on his teeth, and the wad of fat lolling over the top of his trousers.
As he approached the breakfast buffet, Monica, ever helpful, informed him that his weight was trending above his two hundred day moving average, approaching an all-time high.
The hash browns and sausages no longer looked as succulent and enticing as they had a few seconds before.
***
Keith’s Companion chirped, reminding him it was time to trot along like a good boy. He was still sitting in the breakfast room with the remnants of his third coffee, his bowl of bran flakes pushed back in disdain. In his current fragile mental state, he was not sure he could take the stupid waste-of-time sycophantic serial arse-kissing of the next few days.
He forced himself to summon some energy and asked Monica to check his calendar. After the onsite, he had another epic series of flights, followed by a joyful stint of debt collection for a corporate client at a group of farming collectives in Portugal. He had dealt with the farmers before. He knew they didn't have the money. They were three months behind on the payments for their EHW—electricity, heat, water—system, and the BHJ SLA demanded Keith carry out the threat he made last time he saw them. BHJ’s client could much more easily use a remote Kill-Switch to shut down the system. One certificate revocation and the whole complicated setup would revert to an inert mass of metal and glass: algae turning foul, turbine rotors locking up and solar panels shorting out, but that was not the personal shakedown service BHJ prided itself on providing.
He knew he was not being sufficiently cynical. This thinking assumed a sort of honour amongst thieves, but human motives are a flowery fairy tale. Reality is a cold emotionless analysis that has calculated that sending Keith to deliver the news, in person, to a crowd of distraught farmers and crying children, would be better for future business.
The organisation he worked for possessed nothing like human sympathies.
He wandered out of the breakfast room, leaving his Companion on the table. He was still wearing his jeans and the hotel dressing gown. Some of the chirpy young executives paused their chattering and turned to watc
h the sad fat fuck in the flapping monogrammed terry towel robe. He imagined hands lifted to faces and excited hushed whispering, already propagating news of his putative meltdown. Only thirty-five, already jaded like a fifty-eight-year-old alcoholic nose-diving gonzo porno producer.
The doors to the breakfast room opened onto a little veranda. Keith’s eyes were crusted with sleep gunk, so he took off his Spex to rub them, leaving his eyes naked for a change. He saw a rare and unadulterated view of his environment. A rustic dry stone wall, hung with flowering creepers, surrounded the veranda and a set of steps cut out of the rock led off from one corner to a beach below. A nasty extruded metal handrail tried to mess with the aesthetics, but when you add the beautiful view of cliffs, the waves, and the frolicking youths below, it was idyllic.
Let Ben and his little flock of robotic sycophants run through the motions of corporate responsibility without him. Keith decided to call in a sick day.
Skiving off was not as easy as it used to be. Monica, his pedantic intrusive company-issued agent, in a very literal sense, ran Keith’s life. Appointments, notes, and contacts were just the surface. She knew him and, more importantly, she knew and understood every detail of his employment contract with BHJ. She knew where he was, where he should be, what he was eating and how often he was shitting it out again. If he was sick, she would call him a doctor, and if the doctor said he was not sick, she would tell him where his next appointment was, how long he had to get there—and, if he should miss the appointment, where the nearest exit was and when he could expect to be mailed his personnel belongings.
All this was passing through Keith’s mind as he looked at the surf and the surfers scattering the beach. Somehow, his legs turned him around; he couldn't skip a morning and go surfing. They wouldn't fire him for that, but it would be a blip, a bonus burner, a promotion postponer. Yet, as he got back to his table and saw the Companion sitting smugly, blinking on the coffee-stained tablecloth, he knew he couldn't put up with Ben’s crap today, either.
Two hours later, he had concocted a plan, changed into a pair of canvas shorts, and paid for a week of room and board in a less luxurious hotel along the beach. He drew out enough cash to keep him in food and beer for a few days. Sometimes, honesty is the best policy. The breakfast room was full of witnesses who would confirm he was, at most, a short stumble away from a full-on meltdown. So why not simply burn out for a while? In a couple of weeks, when he decided that perhaps he could take the bullshit again, before he was grilled by a company psychiatrist, he could subtly mention to Ben that all the blood on his hands from the illegal weapons he was complicit in dealing to violent sadistic international terrorists, must have pushed him over the edge, but he was better now and ready to get back to work, if that was all right.
So, he was back outside with his bags, five steps down from the veranda on a semi-concealed narrow stone landing, stooping down to smash his Companion to pieces, when a big, good-looking Asian guy came bouncing up the steps. Keith paused for a second, but from the frozen pose, it was clear what he was about to do. He shrugged, then, whacking the glass and aluminium Companion against the wall, watched the screen shatter satisfyingly into hundreds of pieces. Various arcane components scattered the surrounding shrubs and cactuses.
The guy didn't even break his stride, but bounded on. Passing Keith, he gave the high five sign and shouted, “Surf’s up, dude.”
Keith surprised himself by landing the palm slap response at short notice and headed on down to the beach, feeling cool. A few seconds later, he was back, grubbing through the grit for the solid-state storage, which he put in his pocket for a more thorough disposal later.
The sun had disappeared behind the big volcano half an hour before. Most surfers had come up the beach to be close to fires being gently coaxed into life there. The riders sat around chatting, surrounded by an irregular shell of boards jammed sharp end first into the sand and draped with wetsuits. Keith seemed to have chosen the little boutique hotel well; its beach was a surf Mecca.
After a morning of lying under the shade of a palm tree, a morning spent moving his hotel issue towel every thirty minutes to keep himself within its irregular splat of shade, Keith’s hand-slapping friend had called him over to where a dozen tanned men and women were eating a lunch of melon and mango. He had taken the juicy segment of watermelon and, after a brief set of introductions, he considered their offer to lend him a surfboard.
The waves were gentle, the water clear, the sky blue. He accepted and then made a fool of himself for the rest of the day. Along the way, he had acquired a large board-inflicted bruise on the back of his head and plenty of scraped skin.
His exhaustion and aches at least felt honest. His Companion-smashing stunt had been re-told, giving him more kudos than his pale skin and flaccid belly might normally warrant in such circles. The burly Asian guy called himself Nick. He was a big bouncy bloke, who communicated with an excessive amount of backslapping. Contrary to Keith’s initial impressions, he was not a trustafarian stoner. Rather, he described himself as an anarchist and CEO. He was coy about what his company did, but mentioned synthetic ecosystem design and photic zone fabrication of self-assembling calcium carbonate structures. Without his Companion or Spex, the words were meaningless to Keith.
‘Damn, he's cool!’ Keith thought, enjoying a little man crush.
Yesterday, he would have said smug and narcissistic, but today, having raised his middle finger to the man, he wanted to be a surfer anarchist, too.
They were sitting cross-legged on the beach, around a fire of driftwood, drinking from big brown bottles of beer cooled by the Pacific surf. They were passing around a joint.
‘Okay, so he is a stoner,’ Keith internally corrected himself.
“Hey, good progress out there today, bud!” said one of the entourage, passing Keith the joint.
“Ha! Thanks. No. Come on. I was terrible, right?”
“Yeah, but you tried and that’s what makes the difference in the end. Stick with it,” the chap said with a laugh.
“Sure. Will do.”
“So what do you do, man?”
“Did. You mean, what did he do? You quit. Right?” asked Nick.
“Well, let’s just say I’m taking a couple of days to think about my future.”
“Right, so what did you do?” the same guy asked again. Keith had forgotten his name and, without his augmentation, he was crap at remembering them.
“Oh, you know, PR, B to B, and B to C liaison stuff…”
“Monkey in a suit, right? Grease on the wheels of the corporate juggernaut? I know the type. Wild youth. Unfocused talent. Flexible moral character…” Nick interrupted.
Some of the others stopped their own conversations or leant in to listen. Nick was speaking. Not chatting or joshing, but speaking, and when Nick spoke the others listened. Or, as Nick had to remind a few in the past, they fuck off.
Keith had originally thought these guys were a bunch of waster friends with rich daddies on holiday, but Nick had authority. This was his company. Sure, they were friends, but more than that, they were a team, and this was work. If this was their onsite, it was better than the tedious training courses and seminars Ben scheduled as a flimsy justification for flying everybody out for a massive piss-up.
Earlier, while the fires were being lit, Nick had continued unambiguously to lay down the law: Keith was welcome to hang out, borrow a board, catch waves, but some of the stuff they might talk about was privileged; and, if Keith hung, he would be implicitly agreeing to a blanket non-disclosure agreement. From a journalistic point of view, everything was off the record. Keith had protested at that point that he wasn’t a journalist, but Nick had ignored him, insisting everybody with Spex was a journalist. He didn’t want there to be any confusion later when Nick sued the shit out of BHJ for corporate espionage. Everything said by any member of the group was off the record, unless explicitly stated otherwise, and then only for the agreed points.
Sitting nearby,
an attractive Asian female with vibrant strawberry-blonde hair, wearing a pink and khaki one-piece, was recording the conversation on a small waterproof Companion.
“Yeah, most of that is true. I'm not keen on the flexible moral character stuff though. But it’s probably true. Fuck it, right? A man’s got to survive somehow,” Keith said, pausing to suck on the spliff.
“Wrong!” replied Nick. “You're not stupid, so you’re not innocent. If your flexible morals hurt people, then they hurt people, period. People are hurt, and that’s bad, so it’s not fuck it. You need to do better than that, or it’s fuck you, I’m afraid.”
Keith's head was spinning from the Ganja and beer, and he wasn’t sure what had just happened to the friendly après surf beer and smoke. Things had seemed to be going so well, and now they were going downhill fast.
“What? Slow down. I don't know what you think I do, but I'm just a bloody pawn, a runner. Take this to there, collect that, just shit. Tedious shit.”