by Matt Ruff
For a long while it didn’t appear that there would be any public relations problem. People didn’t seem to mind—in fact seemed strangely comforted by—the sudden profusion of dark-skinned Servants, all of them polite and hard-working to a fault. The ace of corporate advertising is the basic human desire to minimize or look away from gross unpleasantness, to which end the AS204s acted like an army of Sidney Poitiers and Hattie McDaniels dispatched to exorcise the memory of the African Pandemic; but the flipside of that ace is the peril of lurking guilt, and when Harry Gant was told about a D.A.R. heiress who had purchased three hundred Servants for use in a sort of antebellum theme park on her plantation estate, he used his advertorial influence to keep the media away from the story.
He couldn’t stop American idiom, though. The Oxford University philologist kept on retainer by Gant’s Department of Public Opinion estimated that the expression “Electric Negro” had entered the English vernacular sometime between 2014 and 2016.
“Electric Negro”: an unkind nickname that, in addition to being terribly disrespectful of the dead, summoned up a host of images that Gant Industries did not want associated with a quality product like the Automatic Servant. It had begun cropping up in print and on video several years ago: a trickle of usages in various nationally circulated publications, as well as a sly reference on one of the late-night talk shows, to which Vanna Domingo and the Public Opinion Department had responded with a barrage of outraged faxes and threats of advertising boycott. For a while the problem seemed to evaporate, only to reappear after a Delaware country-metal band released a hit CD entitled Electric Negroes on the Neon Prairie. As of this August even the Wall Street Journal had used the expression, in a headline no less, and the battle to keep “Electric Negro” out of the media stylebooks appeared to have been lost.
And that was the Negro problem. Not a big problem, Harry Gant would have been the first to point out: so far, sales had not suffered in the slightest, and the general public remained quite happy with their Servants, no matter what they might call them.
But in fact, of Electric Negroes and the potential for trouble, Harry Gant still had a lot to learn.
Timex Presents
Joan put her rosary around her neck along with her dog tags. Despite her long separation from the Church, she girded herself for the day’s work with a determined reverence that would have done a Jesuit proud, handling her weapons and equipment as if they were sacred objects. This early-morning intensity always elicited some comment from Prohaska, for whom the sewers were just a job, albeit one with great danger pay.
“Ready for another week battling the forces of evil?” he asked, indicating her crucifix. “That’s a dead religion, you know.”
“I do know,” said Joan, zipping up the front of the synthetic body suit that would hopefully protect her from chemicals and contagions if she ended up swimming. “And what creed are you following these days, Lenny?”
“Pan worship.” He showed her a petrified sliver of wood. “Ecologically sound pagan tree power.”
Joan laughed. “Tree power. That’s really going to help you down in the shit, right? Besides, didn’t you tell me Teddy May was a Catholic?”
“Sure. Back in the days when they hunted alligators with .22 rifles and rat poison.”
“So call me a traditionalist.” She took an oxygen tank from a charging rack and strapped it to her back. Behind her she could hear Hartower coaching a reluctant Eddie.
“Grenades go here on the belt, like this,” he was saying. “You don’t touch them unless it’s a matter of life and death, got that? Next—”
“Wait,” Eddie said, “just wait. The sawed-off shotgun I know how to use, but the rest of this stuff. . . shouldn’t I go through some kinda training course? Like boot camp?”
“Zoological Bureau can’t afford training. A quarter of the money we get from SHQ gets spent on equipment and ammunition, and the other three-quarters goes to cover insurance. Look at it this way: if you get unavoidably retired because you didn’t know how to use something, your family gets one hell of a death benefit. . .”
Joan went to the inventory cage to sign out for the four sets of gear. “Need a key for a Servant, too,” she said, passing her union card under an optical scanner. The thin-lipped young man inside the cage gave her the key without a word; he was an art history major at Columbia University working part-time to pay the rent and thought anyone who’d choose the sewers as a full-time career must be crazy. Best not to engage them in conversation.
The Bureau’s Automatic Servants were kept near the back of the storage area, behind the spare engine parts for the barges. Joan found the one that her key belonged to and unfastened the Kryptonite lock that secured it to the wall. It was an older version of the AS204, built when Gant’s engineers were still experimenting with the joint articulation; while trying to mimic a natural range of motion it sometimes did things, like bend its elbows in reverse, that were painful to watch. Its skin, worn by years of service in an unkind netherworld, bore more resemblance to scuffed leather than human flesh. Joan had never decided whether she preferred this type of Servant or one of the newer ones that were practically indistinguishable from real people; maybe neither. Somewhere the Lefty God grumbled against the concept of automata in general.
“Harpo 115,” Joan said, reading the name and number on the Servant’s I.D. badge. “Wake up.”
The Servant opened its eyes, twin video cameras concealed behind fake chocolate-colored irises. It focused on her and smiled broadly, as if reunited with its greatest friend in the whole world. “Zippity-doo-day!” it greeted her. Like all Servants it kept its ceramic teeth close together as it spoke, concealing the fact that it had no tongue, only an Electric Voice Box. “Isn’t this a lovely morning!”
“Harpo 115,” Joan asked it, “has it ever not been a lovely morning for you?”
The Servant, a low-end physical labor model programmed for the bare minimum in conversation, merely widened its smile at this question and repeated its greeting: “Zippity-doo-day! Hey, let’s go to work!”
Servant in tow, Joan went back to get Hartower and Prohaska, and Eddie, who had finally gotten all his gear on but still looked uncomfortable with it. A cargo elevator lowered them to the barge staging area, a concrete dock on an artificial lagoon situated some forty feet under the Javits Center. There were seven barges, armor-plated flatboats with searchlights and holographic cameras mounted fore and aft. They boarded the one with “M. Team 23” scrawled in white paint across its keel; Prohaska fired up the engine while Hartower cast off the lines and Joan checked the stocks of the barge’s first aid kit. They had enough gauze and disinfectant to handle a bad nosebleed; anything worse and they’d better hope they were right under a hospital when it happened.
“Enjoy it while you can,” Hartower said, seeing the way Eddie was looking at the lagoon. “That water’s half fresh; they pump in extra to make sure the barges stay afloat. Out in the main tunnels, though, the problem’s not too little but too much. You ever see a river of human effluvia before?”
Eddie declined to answer this question. Instead, observing the size of the tunnel mouth Prohaska steered them towards as they left the dock, he said: “I didn’t realize it would be so big down here.”
“Didn’t used to be,” Prohaska told him. “Back in Teddy May’s day you could walk or crawl through most of the system, no need for boats or flotation devices. Some of the secondary tunnels are still small enough to just hike through. But the buildings kept getting taller, more and more waste coming down, so they had to bore the primaries wider every year . . .”
“. . . and then,” said Hartower, “there was the big genetic engineering boom in the late Nineties, after which the effluvia got strange, all sorts of wildlife wandering in and doing cute little overnight evolution tricks, adapting themselves to the conditions down here. Hence the Zoological Bureau.”
“You just want to hope you’ve got a good immune system,” said Prohaska. “The
re’s bacteria loose in the tunnels they don’t even have long names for yet.”
They fell silent for a bit after that, Eddie looking less and less enthusiastic about his new job. The Automatic Servant stood in the prow of the barge sniffing the air, its nose performing a full chemical analysis of the atmosphere every three seconds. As they moved farther out into the system of tunnels, Hartower directed Eddie’s attention to the whirl of glistening shapes in the flatboat’s wake: “Now we’re really in the shit, eh kid?”
Other May Teams had followed them out, but by this point the barges had diverged, each taking a separate route into the target area. They were alone in the effluvia. Prohaska set the searchlights and underwater floods to maximum illumination.
“Where are we?” Joan asked. She’d opened her comic book and was flipping through the pages.
“The Electric Mercator says we’re under 41st and Ninth, headed east into the Interchange.”
“You want to be careful, then. There’s a waterfall right around here somewhere.”
Eddie tapped Joan on the shoulder. “Listen,” he said, “in case I catch a disease or something and don’t have a chance to ask you later—is it true you were married to a billionaire?”
“Who told you that?” Joan asked Eddie. Prohaska began whistling innocently at the wheel; Hartower became engrossed in the latest word from Mobil on the Times editorial page. “You wouldn’t happen to have been gossiping with two other members of this May Team, would you? Two members who swore they were going to stop blabbing about my private life?”
“We didn’t say a word to him,” Hartower bluffed, and the Automatic Servant bellowed, jolly as ever: “Methane! Zippity-doo-day, we got a lethal methane concentration building up in this tunnel!”
Prohaska checked the auxiliary atmospheric scanner clipped to his body suit; it had a Liquid Crystal Display that showed a Liquid Crystal Canary falling dead from its Liquid Crystal Perch. “He’s right,” Prohaska said. “Masks on, everybody.”
When they were all breathing tanked oxygen, Eddie Wilder asked again, in a somewhat muffled voice: “Is it true?”
Joan sighed, then nodded. Eddie’s candor no longer struck her as refreshing.
“Wow,” Eddie pushed ahead, “did you marry him for his money?”
Prohaska barked laughter. “Joan isn’t interested in money, at least not for its own sake,” he said. “Conspicuous wealth is contrary to her political beliefs.”
“Which isn’t to say,” added Hartower, “that marrying Harry Gant didn’t put her in a whole new tax bracket. But his historical significance was probably the big motivating factor . . .”
“. . . and true love, of course. Sooo trendy . . .”
“Hey guys?” Joan said. “You know I could beat the crap out of both of you with one hand tied behind my back, so why don’t we change the subject?”
“His historical what?” said Eddie.
“Historical significance,” Prohaska told him. “Harry Gant deciding where to have breakfast has more of an impact on history than most people do deciding how to live their whole lives. And Joan’s always wanted to leave her mark on history . . .”
“Just like her mother,” said Hartower. “Though hopefully with better luck.”
“True. The Catholic Womanist Crusade was pretty much a bust.”
“Hence the fact that the pope still has a wanger.”
“That’s enough,” Joan warned, brandishing a can of reptile repellent. “I swear to God, I am never going drinking with you assholes again.”
“Hey, it’s not our fault if you get talky after only three beers. Besides, I thought that whole bit about wanting to make the world a better place to live was really sweet. Pathetically naive, but sweet. . .”
Joan took aim with the can of repellent; Hartower ducked. Eddie Wilder raised his hand to forestall a fight and an invisible orchestra launched fortissimo into Ravel’s Bolero, scaring the hell out of everyone.
“Sorry, sorry,” Eddie apologized. He groped at something bulky on his wrist, beneath the sleeve of his body suit.
“What is that?” shouted Prohaska, who’d nearly spun the barge into the tunnel wall. “Somebody bring a marching band along this morning?”
“It’s a going-away present from my folks,” said Eddie. “A Timex Philharmonic. They mail-ordered it special from L. L. Bean.”
In the prow of the barge, the Automatic Servant pointed at the water and said something, but no one heard it over the thunder of bassoons.
“It can play ten different classics,” Eddie continued to explain. “It’s got sixty-four voices.”
“We can hear that,” said Hartower. “The question is, can you make them shut up?”
“Well I’m working on it,” Eddie said. He tried to remember where the mute button was, but before he could, a shark came out of the water and ate him.
The Power of Positive Thinking (I)
Vanna Domingo was waiting in the Phoenix Parking Annex with the Portable Televisions Gant had requested. The Televisions—Automatic Servants with cable-ready, high-definition monitor screens in place of heads—might seem a macabre notion at first, the sort of thing René Magritte would have come up with if he’d worked for Zenith, but in fact Harry Gant had employed a top Czech design firm to insure that his Portable TVs were comical rather than threatening. This was done primarily by dressing them in funny outfits. If advance sales were any indication, middle America was ready, eager, for a home appliance in a cowboy suit that could wash, dry, and put away the dishes while receiving any of five hundred exciting channels.
The Televisions Vanna Domingo had brought for Gant’s school address were dressed up like Apollo astronauts. Harry Gant’s father had often spoken with pride of witnessing the NBC broadcast of the first moon landing, and Harry himself had always had a soft spot for NASA’s finest, even though he personally would never have invested in the space program. Heights.
“Morning, Vanna,” Gant said, stepping from his private elevator.
“Harry.” She nodded humbly, after the fashion of a feudal vassal. Gant tried to ignore this. While he believed the protocol of corporate hierarchy demanded a certain deference to superiors, there was a difference between being ranking capitalist and being lord of the manor, a distinction that Vanna, with her almost worshipful loyalty, tended to lose sight of. But she was excellent at her job, no questioning that.
Gant pointed at the object tucked under Vanna’s arm, a slim tome with matte black covers. An Electric Book. “What’re you reading these days?” he asked. Vanna read a great deal, but because she was ashamed of her own tastes and more than a little paranoid, she preferred the anonymity of a programmable reading device with no telltale dust jacket.
“The new Tad Winston Peller book,” she said, with a little shrug. “All about earthquakes.”
“Earthquakes!”
“Yeah, there’s supposed to be a big one due on the East Coast. Peller says Boston and New York are going to get leveled all in one shot.”
“Well I can’t speak for Boston,” Gant said, “but you mark my words, it’ll take more than an earthquake to level this city, especially those parts I’ve had a hand in building. The best engineering anchored in some of the toughest bedrock in the world, that’s what we’ve got here.”
“You’re the man,” said Vanna, and touched a decorative-looking brooch at the throat of her blouse. An armored transport bus left its parking space across the Annex and pulled up in front of them. Its doors opened, and at a command from Vanna the Portable Televisions filed in and took seats.
“Tad Winston Peller,” Gant said, shaking his head. “You know I was never much of a writer myself, and I have to respect a man who can make such a fortune out of words, but still. . .”
“You don’t like his stuff.”
“Well. Disasters, I mean. Earthquakes, floods, radioactive Tupperware . . . it’s such a pessimistic way of looking at life. I’d rather make my money selling people a happy version of the world, y
ou see what I’m saying?”
Vanna Domingo’s composure faltered for only an instant, a barest tick that Gant did not notice. Then she pasted on a big smile and nodded. And said again: “You’re the man.”
Joan and Meisterbrau (I)
Prohaska was the last one to stop screaming. In the dying flicker of the aft searchlights Joan caught a twinkle of his zircon as Meisterbrau dragged him under. Prohaska’s shotgun discharged once, scarring the blue ceramic of the tunnel ceiling; when the echo of that had died, the only sounds were the surging of the effluvia around the stricken patrol craft and a dull roar that Joan was too dazed to pay attention to at first.
The great white had come flying over the bow like a cruise missile with teeth, sweeping all hands overboard. Only Joan had managed to pull herself back into the barge in one piece. Hartower had almost made it, only to be seized and slammed against the underside of the craft hard enough to rupture the fuel tank and short the electrical system; Joan didn’t want to know what the impact had done to Hartower himself. He did not resurface.
The barge was developing a starboard list as it took on water through the cracked keel. Joan crouched in the stern in a shivering ball; she had her shotgun out but had forgotten to take off the safety, which didn’t matter as much once the searchlights failed. There was still some ambient light from the phosphorescent lichen that thrived in the sewers, but not enough to aim by. Could sharks see in the dark?
“Lenny?” she called out (not too loudly), though she knew it was useless. “Lenny Prohaska? Hartower?”