The Pedestal

by Daniel Wimberley

  “Really?”

  “Oh, yeah! He had every woman inside a mile radius giving him the eye every time he stepped out the door. Got pretty old, to tell you the truth. Jealousy takes a lot more energy as you get older.”

  “Was it genetic?”

  “No, I don’t think so. His parents were both heavy. But Charles always made time to exercise.”

  Huh.

  The next morning, I take a tram to a nearby sporting goods store. I order a beginner’s set of free weights, a jump rope, a punching bag, and a few sets of exercise clothes. The saleswoman doesn’t say so, but she’s surprised at my zeal. “You don’t get a lot of that?” I have to ask.

  “Nah, ever since that muscle-stimulus add-on was released, things have been pretty slow. But that’ll change. Everyone’s getting all pumped up chemically because they don’t know any better just yet. Won’t be long before that blows over.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, the thing about building muscle is that it makes you stronger, and it changes your metabolism.”

  “That’s a good thing, right?”

  “It can be, but not in this case.”

  I don’t get it. Shocker.

  “Think about it for a sec. You got some guy relying on his night-burner to keep his waist trim, right? Then he decides thin isn’t enough and throws muscle stimulus into the mix. Now, he’s burning off calories at the same time his muscles are trying to grow, just spinning his wheels, you know? So he’s gotta eat more, right? To fuel all that muscle growth? Next thing you know, he’s ripped like crazy, but he’s got a caloric imbalance that leaves him starving and exhausted twenty-four seven; built like a tank, but can’t even take the stairs in a fire drill.”

  “Whoa.”

  “Eventually people’ll figure all that out and some guy’s gonna walk in here and say, ‘Hey, what can I do to not feel like circuit scrap all the time, but still look like this?’ And I’ll say, ‘Never leave to your NanoPrint what you can do for yourself.’”

  I smile; that could’ve been Arthur’s mantra.

  When the lecture’s over, I head to the nearest mall and buy some new clothes—I don’t go overboard, because if all goes well, I’ll be back in my old ones in no time.

  Just before dark, the delivery crew arrives. When they’ve finished storming my apartment with the clinks and clanks of iron, my spare room looks like a boxer’s private gym. I lean against the doorframe and just stare at the equipment for a long, long time.

  At eight o’clock, Mrs. Grace invites me over for a slice of pie. I’m pooped and take a rain check.

  I’m just lying down when there’s a tentative knock on my door. Now, I would hate to speak ill of Mrs. Grace, who is literally the only person on Earth to me right now, but if she’s standing at my door with a slice of pie, I’m going to be more than a little peeved.

  But it isn’t Mrs. Grace. At once, the person I find at my doorstep is infinitely familiar, and hopelessly foreign.

  “Hey, Wil,” says Tim. “Remember me?”

  I feel all my fatigue vanish into the night, swishing around my legs, whipping through my hair at the welcome sound of his voice. Before I can think better of it, I step out and pull him into a mad bear hug—I know, Keith would be so proud.

  He looks a bit embarrassed when I finally let him go, but he’ll get over it. I invite him in and we drink hot tea in my kitchen.

  “You look older,” I observe. His hair’s a bit long—more hip than shaggy—and the boyish cheeks I remember well are all but gone.

  “I feel older, Wil. You look like circuit scrap.”

  “I feel like circuit scrap.” With no real forethought, I add, “And by the way, It’s Wilson now.”

  Tim blinks as if taken aback, then up go the hands in theatric surrender. “Well, excuuuuse me,” he balks, still smiling. “Didn’t realize you were suddenly a grown up.”

  I shrug, offering a crooked smile. “Had to happen eventually.” The truth is, I’m not exactly sure where this came from; I can only say that Wil suddenly feels wrong. It belonged to someone I used to know, a kid I can no longer relate to.

  “Maybe you should start calling me Timothy.”

  “Sure, no problem.”

  Tim mouths the word a few times—Timothy… Tim-o-thy… Tim-ooo-thee—but wisely calls the whole thing off. “Nah, that wouldn’t work,” he explains. “I’m a monosyllabic type of guy, and unlike some people I know, I’m okay with it.”

  Crisis averted.

  A gap creeps into the conversation, but there’s nothing awkward about it; it’s merely an agent of reflection. I’m compiling a mental tally of the many ways in which we’ve both changed since I last saw him, and I suppose he’s doing the same.

  Tim takes me in with a sad sigh, and then breaks the silence. “You know, I thought a camera was supposed to add ten pounds. So when I saw you on the news, I was thinking, Get some more cameras on this guy, would ya? You look a little better in person, but not by much.”

  “Always the charmer, Tim.”

  “Yeah, well. Gotta be me. Stopped by the hospital a few times, but they had you under lock and key.” Learning this warms me.

  We settle back to shoot the breeze for a little while, and I ask about IDS.

  “We’re hanging in there, but the writing’s on the wall. We’ll be lucky to survive another year.”

  I was afraid of this. “I imagine there were some pretty traumatic hiccups after Gunn’s extortion ring was exposed, huh?”

  Tim shakes his head with an ironic smile. “Actually, no. Not really, anyway. Our stock plummeted like crazy for a couple of days, but it stabilized. It’s really undervalued at the moment, but our real problem is that without Arthur and Ryan—and you, for that matter—we’ve lost all our government contracts. It’s hard to maintain consumer confidence when your top dogs have slipped the leash.”

  “Can’t say I’m surprised, but I am sorry.”

  “Don’t be. The truth is, with all those kickbacks out of the equation, we’d have a good chance of squeaking by—if it wasn’t for Keith, anyway.”

  At the mention of that name, I feel darkness gather in our midst. “What do you mean?” I ask, wishing we could talk about something else.

  Tim looks at me without speaking for a second, then shifts his eyes to his hands, where his fingers are drumming against the side of his mug. “You’d think with all that’s happened, I’d have learned to keep my nose where it belongs.”

  “Uh-oh. What’d you find?”

  “You ever notice how high our GFL invoices have been?”

  I think I see where this is going, but I nod my head and keep my trap shut.

  “Well, with Gunn out of the picture, I thought it might be worth looking at one of their competitors. I just couldn’t handle the thought of paying another dime to Global Freight, knowing how much they’ve sucked out of us over the years.”

  I nod again.

  “Anyway, so when I got an idea of what we should be paying, I made the mistake of pulling our old invoices to make sure our accounting system didn’t have a bug in it or something—I mean, we’re talking a hundred and fifty thousand credits every year, when everyone else is charging fifty.”

  “So what did you find?”

  Tim hesitates and his cheeks flush with heat. “Well, you.”

  I laugh, first because it must be a joke, then because I realize it’s not. “What in the world are you talking about?”

  “Well, obviously you didn’t do it—and if it comes down to it, I can probably prove that much. One of the payments was authorized by your implant signature, but it couldn’t have been you. The profile IDs match and all, but according to your proximity stats, you and Arthur were setting up a test partition in Dallas the week you supposedly signed off on it.”

  I try to remember, and though I can remember taking such a trip, I can’t lasso in any detail about the time period.

  “Okay,” I say. “So where does Keith come in?”


  Tim sighs. “That’s the part I’m not clear on. I know it’s him; I just can’t prove it.”

  “How’s that?”

  “Well, I did some digging—the kind that could get me fired, by the way—and I found that Keith and our GFL rep have spent a lot of time together in the last several years. Fishing trips to Canada, a safari to Africa.”

  My tea is gone and I switch to coffee. Tim switches to lite beer and starts pilfering through my cabinets for something to snack on.

  “Is he a man or a woman?” I ask. He pauses with a hand still in my pantry.

  “What? Who?”

  “The GFL rep,” I say with a sly grin.

  “What difference does that m—” Tim’s eyes narrow and then squeeze shut. “Oh, c’mon, Wil!” he explodes. “I mean, Wilson. That’s just nasty.”

  I burst out laughing. “Sorry, I’m just saying. Even the genderless get lonely.”

  Tim shivers. “Well, I’m pretty sure that’s not what’s going on.”

  Maybe it shouldn’t matter, but that actually seems to make me feel a little better. “Good to know. So that’s all you have to go on?”

  “Basically.” He stares at the floor for a moment, snacks no longer on the menu.

  “Still thinking about them?”

  “Can’t wipe the image away, you jerk. Why would you even go there?”

  “That’s what friends are for, you know?” I slap him on the shoulder and laugh again. My face hurts from smiling so much; I haven’t had this much fun in a long time. “Anyway, I see your dilemma. So what’re you gonna do?”

  Tim breathes heavily through his nose and slaps a hand on the countertop. “I don’t know. I guess I figured it was time to enlist some help.”

  “From who?” The police? The FBI?

  Tim tosses back the dregs of his beer and burps. “I’m looking at him.”

  At seven thirty a.m., I drag myself out of bed and into my brand-new home gym. Just looking at all this stuff wears me out. I take it slow—not only because it’s the recommended approach, but because I’m too wimpy to do it any other way. Ten push-ups—performed with the form of a narcoleptic misfire—ten sit-ups, a set of six bench-presses of sixty-five pounds. When I’m done, I feel as if I might faint, so I drop to the carpet and lie there for a while.

  Eventually, the spell passes and I’m able to stand without seeing spots. I look back at my home gym and think, You don’t look quite so scary anymore.

  I don’t want to sound ungrateful for the things Tim has done for me as a friend and a coworker over the years, but to say that I’m reluctant to grovel for my old job back at IDS is grossly understating reality.

  I’d just as soon beat myself in the face with a dead cat.

  In the end, though, I decide to do it—not only to help out Tim, but because I’ve never stopped hating Keith, never stopped longing for the day when he’s brought to justice.

  And the idea of hastening that day is too appealing to turn away.

  I have every reason to think that Keith will show me the door as soon as I peek into his office. In the best of times, we were never really on the same page. In the worst, I’m pretty sure he’d have killed me if he thought he could get away with it. But he doesn’t kill me or give me the boot. On the contrary, he jumps up as if I’m his long-lost brother and yanks me into a horrific back slap.

  “Oh, man, Wil. It’s good to see you. Figured we’d seen the last of you around here.”

  It’s Wilson, I think—and only just refrain from actually saying out of habit. Oddly, it doesn’t really bother me. I don’t give a pile of circuit scrap what Keith thinks of me, so he can try to belittle me or ingratiate himself to me all he wants. Looking at him, though, I realize this is going to be much harder than I expected. When I consider all the damage he’s caused to my life—betraying Arthur and getting him killed, dragging me into the fray of his iniquity by first sneaking the list onto Arthur’s drive and then setting me up as a patsy for his own embezzlement schemes—it becomes utterly impossible to keep from diving across his desk and beating the life from him. I let my eyes settle just over his shoulder, where they can see something other than red.

  “So what brings you by? You looking for a job?”

  I nod, because it’s all I can do to bite my tongue.

  “Hm,” Keith remarks. “Let me think.”

  For a split second, I worry that he won’t rehire me. But Tim has convinced me that he will, and the more I consider Tim’s logic, the more certain I become that he’s right. IDS is months away from filing bankruptcy, and when that happens, the attorneys are going to swarm in and pick the books to death. It won’t take long before one of them discovers what Keith has done; he may have doctored things a little, but he won’t fool a professional for long.

  Unless…

  If he can get me back on board, he’ll have an opportunity to either turn me or further incriminate me. And if by some miracle I manage to help him turn the company around along the way, IDS might just escape bankruptcy—and that means the GFL gravy tram might just continue its midnight run moving forward. There isn’t much of a downside, when you think about it. The downside to not hiring me, however, is much steeper, because as long as I’m out of his sight, I’m unpredictable.

  “Got it!” he announces. “There’s still your IntelliQ program—it never reached the test partitions.”

  Despite why I’m here, I have to admit I’m more than a little offended that my work didn’t warrant any attention in my absence. I’m also relieved that it still has a fighting chance of hitting the nexus. Even now, I have absolute confidence that it’s a cash cow waiting to be born.

  “Really?”

  “Yeah, without you or Arthur around, nobody was brave enough to take the reins.”

  This isn’t an unreasonable explanation, but I know feces when I smell it. I start to throw in a jibe, to point out that my program is no different than any other we’ve developed here—we have programming standards so that personal bravery never has to be a factor when projects are shuffled around.

  Again, I bite my tongue.

  “Let me just make a couple of phone calls, Wil—” It’s Wilson! Sorry, old habits die hard. “—and I’ll give you a shout. You mind waiting out in the lobby for a few minutes?”

  An hour later, I’m dusting off my old desk—my office has become a catchall for empty boxes and backup journals—and trying to remember how to program.

  After work, I eat dinner with Tim at his apartment. It’s the ultimate bachelor pad—ugly but super-comfortable furniture, an entire shelf of his fridge devoted to beer—and it’s somehow even more depressing than mine. Maybe because I know it’ll probably always be a bachelor pad. The centerpiece of his dinner table is a pewter dragon-foot with talons wrapped around a crystal orb. I’m reminded of a nature show I saw when I was a kid where a male bird spent days making a nest to impress a female, only for some reason, the female was more disturbed than impressed by his handiwork, so she flew away, leaving the male to cock his head, as if to say What just happened? Is it something I said?

  Still, Tim wears bachelorship well. He’s content to watch cheesy movies and read nouveau graphic novels. Unlike yours truly, Tim’s just fine with who he is. As I’m thinking this, he takes a gulp of his beer and says, “So, you’ll never guess who Keith-sha”—that’s Tim’s newfound remedy for the Freudian slip—“called today.”

  “Do tell, please.”

  “Robert Marlin, our GFL rep.”

  “Really? Do we even have any projects going that require hardware updates at the USS?”

  “Nope. He’s just counting his chickens, I think. If we can get your IntelliQ project wrapped up, he’ll have an excuse. Our equipment’s fine, but it can always use a little beefing up. You just wait: he’s gonna start turning the thumbscrews on you any day now.”

  “Fantastic. So what am I supposed to do? I mean, has anything changed since I left? How do we get the programs on the test partitions without Arthur?”


  “Well, I won’t say the problem’s gone away, but it’s nowhere near as dire as it once was. We hired a private nexus consultant to help us with that.”

  “So what’s the holdup? I mean, why didn’t you guys get the IntelliQ program up and running? It was already approved for testing before I left.”

  “To be honest, I really don’t know. I’ve asked myself that question over and over. We’d be rolling in revenue if we had, that much is certain.” My cheeks warm that at least someone has some confidence in my work.

  “Okay. So if I can get things worked out with this consultant, we can get the program up and running. And then Keith will start running his scheme again.”

  “That’s my guess.”

  “Okay, so then what? How can we bring him down?”

  Tim runs his fingers through his hair. “Well, I suppose that depends.”

  “On what?”

  “How’s your programming these days?”

  Yikes. “You mean in general? Pretty rusty, but it’s coming back.”

  “Well, get to practicing. Because I’ve got a program in mind, and there’s no room for sloppy coding.”

  I’m intrigued.

  I’m feeling energized by my workout this morning. It’s only been a few days, and I’m already seeing a little difference—I’m feeling a huge difference. I’m starving at breakfast, putting away more food than I’ve put away in a single sitting since I can remember.

  For the first time in a really long time—long before Mars, in fact—I feel really good, like I’m advancing toward something positive. At the same time, I’m stressing a little over my implant. The truth is—as much as I have avoided acknowledging it—I have no interest in getting it back. Sure, it was convenient and made life so much more fluid, but I’m enjoying the peace of its absence from my body. My head is so clear. No more retinal signage or daily planners, for example. On the other hand, I can’t just forget about it, either. It remains in my pocket most of the time, which allows me to access my apartment and office doors, transact credits, and satisfies my legal obligation to remain accessible to the nexus.