Mind Over Ship

by David Marusek

  “But I didn’t come here to discuss the GEP,” she was saying. She placed her satchel on the small table. When Meewee looked up, they were sitting side by side on the settee. “I came to show you this.” She opened a frame and displayed a letter with an officious letterhead.

  Try as he might, Meewee was unable to read the document. The text kept skittering away as he tried to focus on it, and he said, “What does it say?”

  “It’s a letter from the Mandela Prize Foundation. They are requesting a fresh sim of you for their upcoming Freedom Trail exhibit. It’s a very high honor.”

  Ah, an honor. He thought so. Meewee was so weary of honors and prizes and awards. He had been honored so often for his humanitarian work he was afraid of falling victim to false pride, and he had long ago begun refusing them. “I’m not worthy,” he said.

  “Of course you are,” Andrea replied. “Your work at Birthplace, and UDESCO, WHO, and other important organizations has done so much to alleviate human suffering. You, of all people, are worthy.”

  That wasn’t what he had meant. He was having difficulty putting his thoughts into words. What he had meant was that the person who works for recognition devalues the work he does, that awards are first and foremost political instruments, that altruism’s true name is always Anonymous, and so much more, but every time he tried to speak, his thoughts slithered away. “No,” he managed to say. “No honors.”

  “You are too modest,” Andrea said, her expression sparkling with sun-rays of angelic grace. She removed one of her smooth, cottony gloves. “Perhaps you will reconsider.”

  someone said. Meewee looked around for the speaker.

  Andrea’s cool fingertips touched the flesh of his wrist, and he sat back, reeling with love.

  “Because, while it’s true that it’s an honor to be asked for a sim by the Mandela Foundation,” she went on, “it’s something of a duty as well. Think of it as your duty to the world.”

  Duty, he thought. Duty.

  “With your busy schedule,” she continued as she removed a small apparatus from her satchel, “I knew I’d never convince you to come into one of our preffing suites, so I did the next best thing; I brought the suite here.”

  It was a cam/emitter on tripod legs. She set it on the table in front of him. A small holoscape opened above it, and Andrea put on a pair of shades. Simple shapes appeared in the holo: rotating cubes, dancing hearts, expanding diamonds.

  “This is just to set your baseline,” she explained. “You remember this part. All you have to do is relax and watch them. You can do that, Bishop. You can relax and watch.”

  Relax and watch, he thought. The shapes were so fascinating, it would have been hard not to watch them. Stars exploding! Rectangles squatting into parallelograms. Arrows pointing. Arrows spinning. Lots of arrows. Arrow. he managed to say.

  Immediately, an alarm rumbled through the room, and a calm but insistent voice repeated, “Fire alert. Please evacuate. Fire alert. Please evacuate.” The office door opened, and an arbeitor entered to escort them to safety. Meewee tried to stand up, but Andrea touched his wrist again, and he swooned back into the soft cushions of the settee.

  Andrea sent the arbeitor away and said, “Ignore the noise, Bishop. It means nothing. We will continue with the preffing.” In the holo, the shapes gave way to scenes. A city arcade appeared, alive with pedestrians, commotion, vehicles. Everything about it was amazing.

  But there were popping sounds above his head, and a pelting shower of fire suppressant slurry filled the room, coating everything in a thick layer of red mud. The holo flickered out, and Andrea jumped up in surprise. She quickly folded her apparatus and stuffed it into the satchel. Her summer dress clung to her body, and her hair was pressed against her skull. She quickly grabbed her hat and pulled it over her head. She shot Meewee a calculating look and left him there — a little red man on a red settee in a red office.

  Your Wake-Up Call

  < BE THEY PHARAOHS or freeholders, barons or farmers, landowners are and always have been the most capable, most intrepid, and most assertive members of civilized society.>

  Meewee scoured the bank for an arsenal of large rocks. he said

  She droned on

  Meewee shouted. Meewee had not taken the time to change before coming down to the pond, and bits of his rust-colored coating flaked off each time he bent over to claim another rock.

 

  Meewee hurled a barrage of rocks into the pond. His rocks made impressive geysers of turgid water.

 

  Meewee punctuated his tirade with a rock that took both arms to toss.

  There was a long silence as Meewee caught his breath. Then Eleanor-by-fish spoke.

  Meewee flung his hands over his head.

  Eleanor said mildly.

  Arrow said.

  There was something new in Eleanor’s voice. New but familiar. she went on

  Meewee complained.

  What was familiar was the natural authority of her voice.

  The Big Bed

  It wasn’t just Ellen snapping at her. She had deserved that; she knew she had taken the nuss thing too far. She wasn’t a bossy person by nature, but she had been feeling out of sorts lately. Georgine had the right attitude. She said that Ellen’s increasing independence was a good thing. It showed that they were doing their job well, and that it was time to transition into a more adult relationship with her. They were companions, after all, and not foster parents.

  Mary took a spa car home. A mud bath and a vim infusion did much to dispel the clouds. When she arrived at the Lin/Wong gigatower, later than usual, Fred was already in the lock, cycling into the null room. He must’ve just stepped out of the shower because the scuppers were tidying up in the bathroom, and his work clothes and wet towels were still on the floor.

  Mary sat on the big double bed in the bedroom they never used. “So, did he leave me a message?”

  There was one: “Hey there. I’m beat and going right to bed. Join me whenever. Love ya.”

  Few deadlines are as flexible as “whenever,” and in fact, Mary didn’t feel like being cooped up all evening in that tiny room. So she stayed out till her usual bedtime. She dialed up her favorite pasta dinner but lost her appetite after a few bites. She drank two glasses of wine and let the slipper puppy trim and polish her toenails.

  When she did cycle through, Fred was watching a vid. The bed was not perched in a treetop or parked on the Serengeti, but was just a narrow bed in a stunted room.

  “Hey there,” he said as she stepped through the vid to the comfort station. She selected a flask of Lemon Flush and a liter of ’Lyte. Fred made space for her, and she snuggled under the covers. The vid was some kind of crime drama, and she tried to watch but couldn’t qui
te follow it. There was some kind of gurgling business going on in her belly, and the Flush had made it worse. It got so bad that at one point she threw off the covers and stumbled across the mattress to the comfort station. Her stomach felt like it was trying to turn inside out. She braced herself over the toilet and retched the entire half liter of Flush into the bowl. Fred came over to help support her. Next came her pasta dinner mixed with the Merlot. Finally, a thin gruel of gastric juices and bile, and she was empty. Her knees wobbled.

  Mary washed her face and rinsed her mouth in the sink. Fred gave her a fresh towel and said, “So, what were you thinking about?”

  At first she didn’t understand the question, but then she remembered. “Oh, you were right,” she said. “All I thought about was puking and breathing.”

  “Yes, I could tell you were really into it. Here.” He opened a flask of ’Lyte. She took a couple of sips, but it came right back up, and the room began to spin.

  “Come on, let’s get you out of here,” Fred said and half carried her to the lock. She did not object, and they cycled out together and went to the bathroom where the autodoc asked her to spit into the collector basin. But instead of spitting she vomited into it. A minute later the autodoc delivered its diagnosis: poisoning.

  “Visola poisoning,” Fred said, reading the display. “It says you’re toxic from all the expressive visola and Flush you’ve had in the last month. Your liver isn’t able to keep up with it all. You need to give the null room a rest.”

  Mary said, “You won’t get any argument out of me.”

  THEY TURNED DOWN the big bed for the first time. Neither of them could fall asleep, and they lay next to each other in companionable silence.

  Finally, Fred said, “How do you feel now?”

  “Much better.”

  “I’m glad, and I apologize for dragging you in there every night.”

  “You didn’t drag me. I wanted to go.”

  “You don’t have to soft-peddle the situation, Mary. I know I’m totally inflexible about this whole nit thing, and now it’s made you sick. It’s my fault, and I apologize, and I want to make it up to you.”

  Mary didn’t feel like having that whole discussion all over again. “Don’t worry about it, Fred. I can only imagine what you’re going through.” She draped her arm over his shoulder and felt his body tense up at her touch. So she let go of him and said, “I’m pretty tired, dear. Good night.”

  “Good night.”

  They still couldn’t fall asleep, however, and after lying in the darkness for a while, Fred sighed.

  “What?” Mary said.

  “Nothing. I’m sorry for making you ill.”

  Mary propped herself up on her elbow. “Quit apologizing.”

  “I’ll try.”

  “Maybe this will help. You said you want to make it up to me. Here’s how you can. Go with me to see someone. And I don’t mean an auto-psyche in a null room. I mean a real relationship counselor. Will you do that for me?”

  The Masterpiece

  The Gray Bee waited with its team under the portico of the Chicago Museum of Arts and Commerce until suitable patrons climbed the broad entrance steps. The team rode into the museum under hat brims and lapels. Once past security, they abandoned their mules and reassembled in the lobby. A beetle and wasp, hugging the ceiling, flew to the main exhibition hall, where they would hide themselves and wait. Meanwhile, Gray Bee led another wasp and beetle through the twentieth-century galleries. There, the Samson Harger painting of drips and drabs filled one whole wall.

  The composition of the large canvas was dominated by four diagonal slashes of black paint that were swallowed up under dozens of layers of riotous color spatter. While the wasp took up a defensive position, Gray Bee and the beetle crawled from the ceiling to the picture frame. The bee disabled the frame security feelers for the beetle to move to the canvas itself. Camouflaged by the spatter, the tiny mech crisscrossed the large canvas laying down a bead trail of clear gel. When its carapace was empty, Gray Bee helped it leave the canvas, and together with their wasp, they backtracked to the museum lobby.

  The wasp and beetle rode patrons out the exit. When they were clear, Gray Bee signaled the other mechs waiting in the main hall. Hundreds of museum visitors milled about the grand space under towering displays of resurrected monsters of prehistory. There were cockroaches the size of alligators, a blue whale made of shaped water, a disassembled tyrannosaurus rex, and Asian elephants.

  At Gray Bee’s signal, the beetle launched itself from a spot above a security cam and glided across the hall spewing from its carapace a trail of yellow smoke. At once, evacuation alarms sounded throughout the rambling museum building, and pressure barriers snapped into place around individual works of art. Museum arbeitors began herding patrons to the exits, and flying scuppers chased the beetle. Before it could be captured, its wasp escort destroyed it, incinerating it with a blast of laser fire. Then the chase was on for the wasp. The nimble mech was not so easy a prey: it could shoot back. It led the scuppers in a dogfight through the galleries. Eventually the scuppers knocked it down and surrounded it, but before it could be taken, it destroyed itself in a small fireball of weapons plasma.

  With the mission accomplished, Gray Bee rode out under a convenient hat. Ninety minutes later, after all the excitement had died down, order was restored, and human curators went through the galleries. They dropped pressure barriers and inspected the artworks for damage. It was another hour before they reached the Harger painting, and when the barrier fell, it appeared that the painting was untouched. But then, a tiny spatter of cadmium red near the center of the canvas peeled off and fluttered to the floor where it disintegrated into a smudge of pigment. Another spatter peeled off, and another, until whole layers of color cascaded to the carpet in speckled heaps.

  Redeeming a Favor

  Andrea ordered a light lunch at St. Gaby’s on Union Square. She shared her booth with a half-dozen shopping bags, the spoils of a leisurely morning browsing the district’s exclusive showrooms. She was pleasantly exhausted — her new body still lacked an entire day’s worth of stamina — and E-P was solicitous of her health. E-P did not raise any objections to these excursions, even though it knew exactly what she wanted before she did and could have produced everything with their house hold extruder. This was what it routinely did for hundreds of millions of consumers through its E-Pluribus “Just What I Wanted” shopping service. Ask for a new pair of shoes, and moments later they drop into the receiving bin in your closet. Not any shoes but shoes to die for, within your budget, and complementary to your wardrobe. Just what you wanted.

  Sometimes Andrea wondered why E-P never offered to shop for her. On her bad days she suspected that it was because she was an experimental appendage of the mentar, that it was gathering data on her, and that she could be terminated anytime when she no longer proved useful. But today wasn’t one of those days. Today Andrea was new. Real people, each representing a whole other preffing universe, passed by her booth. Handsome men made fleeting, inviting eye contact. The coffee was outstanding, and lunch never tasted so good, not even in her tank.

  When Andrea finished, she wasn’t ready to leave, so she ordered dessert and retreated inside her head to the Starke house to see what Lyra was up to. There were currently 110 persons at the Manse, including Ellen, her companions, and Dr. Rouselle. There were 508 employees at the Enterprises headquarters, including Meewee. Lyra knew who everyone was, where they were, and what they were doing. Such trust to place in a mentar and then not teach it how to protect itself.

  MARY WAS SITTING in her favorite floral-print armchair in her Manse suite living room. She was surrounded by a dozen holocubes floating in the air. One of them showed the death artist’s breezeway where the Leena still lay in a comalike trance. Jennys and evangelines attended to her. Most of the rest of the cubes displayed search hits: two-or three-second clips of other Leenas making Dark Reiki spirals with their fingers. Lately, there were hundreds of
hits per hour.

  One of Mary’s holocubes was following Georgine as she carried a lawn chair across the Manse grounds. “Oh, and Mary,” Georgine said, “that person we talked about? She’s someone the Sisterhood uses and recs. She insists on realbody/real-time meetings, and because of that she’s booked up solid for the next six months. But I see there’s an auction going on for a late cancellation slot at 3:30 this afternoon. The auction closes in twenty minutes. Interested?”

  Mary said yes, and the holocube switched to the auction. Although the high bid for the last-minute appointment was fairly steep by normal evangeline standards, it was nothing special for Mary, and although she would never ordinarily take advantage of her wealth, these were extraordinary circumstances, and she raised the high bid by an intimidating amount.

  Only then did she stop to consult with Fred. It’s not convenient, he said when she reached him at his latest call-out site. We’re in the middle of a big sloppy mess.

  Mary could hear a lot of shouting and turmoil in the background. “We’re lucky to get her, Fred.”

  I know. I know. It’s just — Fred paused and changed his mind. You know what? If I’m a john, I sure as hell ought to be able to take sick leave like a john. Where should I meet you?

  WITH THE AFTERNOON appointment set, Mary changed into her bikini to enjoy the noontime sun out on the lawn with Georgine. On her way out of the suite, she swiped all of the holocubes off, except for the breezeway with the Languishing Leena. This one she placed in the center of the coffee table. Then she threw on a robe, grabbed her shades, and headed for the door. But before she could leave, a phone call arrived from Bishop Meewee. “Tell him I’m unavailable,” she instructed Lyra.

  “He says it’s of the utmost urgency.”

  “Everything is of the utmost urgency with that man.” Mary returned to the living room, and Lyra put the call through.