by Matt Ruff
“Well don’t you know, Joan? You were head of advertising for Gant . . . or did you quit before the Phoenix was finished?”
“A couple years after. But would you believe, Gant Industries doesn’t actually own the Billboards. Of course that was the original idea, that they would provide steady income through leasing, but Harry needed quick cash to complete the Phoenix and to lay the foundation for Babel, so he sold them outright to a Chinese advertising firm. Big short-term windfall, but in the long run he sacrificed billions in potential revenue.”
“And no one stopped him?”
“Some of us argued with him, but Harry had the final say. He always does: it’s a private corporation, his property, with no stockholders to answer to. Harry’s old partner Christian Gomez kept wanting to go public, partly to put some checks and balances on the enterprise, but Harry only wanted advisors, not voting partners.”
“But his creditors . . .”
Joan shook her head. “The banks love Harry. Unconditionally. It’s like I was telling you last night, between his optimism, his track record with the Automatic Servant, Lightning Transit, and other successes, and Clayton Bryce’s accounting skills, Harry can do no wrong in the eyes of the financial community. He hasn’t been formally audited in fifteen years; people lend him money because everybody knows that Gant Industries is a safe risk. Except Amberson Teaneck, of course.”
“Hmm . . . and what became of Christian Gomez?”
“He died in 2008. Freak car accident. That’s how I got my job as comptroller, didn’t I ever tell you the story?”
At the security desk in the Phoenix lobby Joan gave her name, and she and Kite were issued visitor’s passes. The ascent to the Public Opinion Department took several minutes. Variance in air pressure at different altitudes put a practical limit on the height of individual elevator shafts; as they got taller they began to generate powerful drafts and moan like organ pipes. Most superskyscrapers incorporated sky lobbies every sixty stories or so (useful also as potential firebreaks), where long-distance elevator passengers would disembark, pass through a series of revolving doors that served as an airlock, and board another lift for the next sixty floors. This was tedious, but preferable to having gale-force winds howling up and down a two-thousand-foot chimney.
The Gant Industries Department of Public Opinion was headquartered on the 200th floor. In lieu of separate offices, most of the opinion engineers shared a single open space known as the Cortex—marketing and image-maintenance being the true brains and nervous system of the corporation, whatever the schleppers in R&D might think—with a solid wall of windows at the south end overlooking the lower city. Designed to focus and amplify the creative energy of its occupants, the Cortex was as noisy as a Wall Street trading floor, but bigger, better, the best.
By ten A.M., when Joan and Kite stepped off the last of the succession of elevators, the Cortex was deep in thought, concocting Machiavellian stratagems—
“. . . I say we use double-hulled cargo ships and put a layer of crude oil between the two hulls. Let Dufresne sink one of those, cause a minor oil spill, and bing-bam-boom, there goes his reputation as a friend of the environment.”
“I have some problems with that, Bob.”
“Me too. What if one of the doctored cargo ships has an accident before Dufresne can torpedo it?”
“Well c’mon, how often do accidents happen?”
—mulling over new and novel ad campaigns—
“OK, roll tape.”
“IT’S TIME. PHONE LINES ARE DOWN, AND THE CAR WON’T START. . .”
“Sissy! Sissy 478! Come quickly! Scarlett just went into labor! I need help!”
“Labor! Labor! Oh my lawd, Mr. Butler, I don’t know nothin’ ‘bout birthin’ bay-bees . . .”
“IT’S TRUE. SHE DOESN’T KNOW. . . YET. BUT COMING SOON FROM GANT INDUSTRIES, THE AUTOMATIC MIDWIFE. . .”
“Stop tape. What do you think?”
“About what?”
“You don’t like it.”
“Do you know what a midwife does? Specifically, I mean?”
“Well . . . I know we’re talking pretty intimate contact.”
“Let’s try an analogy: even if I promised you it was safe and gave you a money-back guarantee, would you let an android handle your circumcision?”
—and contemplating the pronouncements of Electric Paralegals, specially programmed Servants in the guise and garb of black female judges who could recite up-to-the-minute F.T.C. and F.D.A. restrictions on advertising claims.
“. . . so we’ve got cheese analog, non-organic oregano, and mitigated flour in the crust, but as long as tomatoes play some role in the manufacture of the sauce, we can still call it all-natural pizza?”
“That is lawful.”
“What about the ‘high in natural fiber’ label? Do we still have to list powdered cellulose as an ingredient?”
“The Department of Agriculture has approved a waiver of that requirement, provided that wood pulp does not exceed thirty percent of the total mitigated flour content.”
“Thirty percent? What do they think, we’re baking furniture? No problem . . .”
Joan tried not to attract attention as she crossed to the double doors that gave access to Vanna Domingo’s office and, beyond that barrier, to Harry’s private work suite. On her own she might have made it; the employee turnover rate had been high since she’d left, and there were only a few opinion engineers remaining who knew her on sight. Kite’s missing arm, however, drew as much notice here as it had at the Department of Sewers, albeit for different reasons. Madison Avenue aesthetics put amputation in the same category as feminine facial hair and pot bellies; the idea that someone would flaunt such a deformity by forgoing prosthesis was, to a Public Opinion way of thinking, perverse. Nor were the senior citizens who appeared in commercials ever as wrinkled or leather-skinned as this strange old bird in combat boots with falafel smeared on her lower lip. Heads turned at the sight of her, creating ripples in the steady stream of adspeak.
The dip in the noise level alerted Vanna Domingo, who monitored the Cortex by means of a holographic goldfish bowl on her desk. She spied Joan Fine and went to DefCon One, storming out of her office to confront the intruder.
“You!” she hissed at Joan, brandishing a laser pen like a dagger in her fist. “You get out, now! Security will meet you at the first sky lobby on the way down and escort you from the building. And if you make any attempt to return . . .”
But Harry Gant was right behind her. “It’s all right, Vanna,” he said. “I invited Joan to come by.”
Vanna stopped in mid-tirade, mouth open. She looked at her boss. “You what?”
“Joan is the private meeting I had scheduled for this morning,” he explained. “Nothing to get excited about, we’re just going to chat for a bit.”
Vanna didn’t know what to say to that, so she glared at her Public Opinion staff instead. They quit staring and got back to work.
“Hi, Harry,” Joan said.
Gant smiled. “Joan.”
“Harry, this is my friend and new partner, Kite Edmonds. Kite, Harry Gant.”
“Pleased to meet you,” Gant said, shaking Kite’s hand without taking his eyes off Joan. Kite, amused, said “I can tell,” which Harry didn’t hear.
“So,” Gant said, to Joan, “should we go inside and talk?”
Vanna ground her teeth.
Kite and Vanna Share a Butt
“Don’t smoke in here,” Vanna said, after Joan had disappeared into Gant’s office. Kite put on her affronted grandmother face—there was an ashtray sitting in plain sight on Vanna’s desk—but didn’t light up.
“Guess you don’t remember me,” she said, tucking her tobacco pouch and rolling papers back in her coat pocket.
“Where should I remember you from?”
“Grand Central Station.”
Vanna was immediately on guard. “What about Grand Central Station?”
“Don’t look at me
like I’m a blackmailer, dear. I used to sleep in the tunnels, same as you did. We were bedded down right next to each other the night the rats came out and took old Sarge Kilpatrick. And if memory serves, I bull’s-eyed a rodent that wanted your face for dinner.”
Vanna nodded, still wary. “I do remember,” she said. Then: “All right, smoke if you want to.”
“I knew you could be civil.”
When the cigarette was rolled and lit, smoke rising in a thin white line, Vanna asked: “What does Fine want from Harry?”
“Information,” Kite told her.
“It’s the Teaneck murder, isn’t it? She wants to raise a stink about the missing Servant.”
“What makes you think that?”
“Because that muckraker from Brooklyn visited her at the hospital yesterday, and someone’s been running unauthorized searches of my own computer database, looking for references to Amberson Teaneck. It isn’t hard to figure out.”
“Well, what’s so terrible? Don’t you think the public should be warned if someone is using your robots as assassins?”
“I don’t think the public should be led to speculate about the impossible.”
“And if it isn’t impossible?”
“My first and only loyalty is to this corporation.”
Kite nodded. “You still guard your food when you eat, don’t you?” she said. “Hunker over it, so no one else can grab the plate. Must be embarrassing for you at big company luncheons, acting like a homeless woman.”
There was a rap at the door before Vanna could reply. Whitey Caspian stuck his head in. He was excited.
“Vanna, is Harry here? I’ve got news.”
“He’s in a meeting right now. Can’t be disturbed. Go away.”
“Well can I just talk to you for a sec, then? I think I’ve found out where—”
“I’m in a meeting too.” She gestured at Kite. “Can’t you see?”
“But Vanna—”
In what looked like a practiced motion, Vanna raised a leg, slipped off her shoe, and hurled it at Whitey’s head. He went away.
“Answers my question,” said Kite.
Vanna retrieved her shoe. “I protect what’s mine.”
Kite patted the black-powder revolver concealed beneath her coat. “So do I,” she said. “You want a cigarette?”
“Roll me a couple.”
Free Tickets to Jersey
The problem with Harry’s office, Joan thought, was the problem of the Phoenix itself in microcosm: too much space, poorly used. That might sound paradoxical, that you could ever create too much space in such a crowded city, but superskyscrapers were cities in their own right, cities within cities, and hard to fill. Tall simply for the sake of being tall, form had to go begging for function and was often left wanting.
Essentially, Gant got all the floor area that the Department of Public Opinion didn’t need. Allowing for a private washroom and conference area, a custom mastodon desk, and more filing cabinets than he would fill with hard copy if he lived to be Kite’s age, Harry still had enough room (and enough window) to accommodate in-office helicopter service, if he were ever so inclined. Not that he would be. Heights.
So he filled up all the space he didn’t need with clutter. Toys, mostly, like an exercise gyroscope and an Electric Train Map of the Lightning Transit system, and most recently, a holographic game projection rig twice the size of a standard pool table. Gant had left the rig turned on, perhaps to impress her, perhaps only to further fill up excess space. Between two control panels studded with joysticks, buttons, and switches, an illusory island floated, a Great American Consumer Island: an island with two factories on it, one white and one black. There were also hundreds of little pink houses with tiny hologram people living in them, tiny people who watched tiny televisions, mowed tiny lawns, and bought tiny ice-cream cones from tiny icecream trucks. Some of the trucks were white and some of them were black. They came from the factories and engaged in an idealized laissez-faire contest for the islanders’ patronage.
“It’s a teaching tool,” Gant said, “for developing capitalist democracies that haven’t got the hang of it yet. Albania has a thousand on order.”
“Where are the little hologram landfills?”
“It’s a simplified economic model, Joan. Waste disposal is beyond the scope of the simulation. And before you ask, no, the truck drivers don’t unionize.”
“Sounds like a great teaching tool for Albanian management. Mind if I smoke?”
“You still do that, huh?”
“Still have all my bad habits,” Joan agreed. “Same as you. But thanks for the flowers.”
“You’re welcome.” He smiled. “Thanks for not blowing yourself up with that shark. It’s good to see you. I missed you.”
She looked again at his new toy, imaginary ice-cream trucks flitting hither and yon, and it struck her that this too big, too cluttered, too impractical office was in fact just right for Harry. Which was a good thing to be reminded of even as she realized she’d missed him too. “On the phone,” she said, “you said you’d help me with the Amberson Teaneck investigation.”
“I said I’d be glad to talk about it. But you know as well as I do, Joan, that he wasn’t killed by an Automatic Servant.”
“I had my doubts when Lexa first mentioned it,” Joan said. “I told her that as far as I knew, defeating the behavioral inhibitors on a Servant would be too difficult and too resource-intensive to be worth the trouble. But then during breakfast CNN was replaying footage from Philo Dufresne’s latest raid, and I thought, this is a world where people build their own submarines because they don’t agree with the standing environmental policy, so who am I kidding? It’s possible. And if there’s corporate or government involvement, it’s more than possible.”
“If it were possible,” Gant said, “it would be very very very unlikely. People love the Automatic Servant, Joan; it’s a neat product that makes them happy by making their lives a whole lot easier. Why spoil that by focusing attention on a single unpleasant event that probably has nothing to do with the Servant? Why encourage other maniacs out there to try the same sort of stunt?”
“You’re honestly telling me you wouldn’t want to know if somebody were using your neat product to commit murder?”
“Of course I would. You know how much I spend on lobbying and litigation every year to make sure the Pentagon can’t manufacture android soldiers. Not with my patent. Hell, I still have reservations about Electric Police, especially with the LAPD constantly petitioning for a deadly force model. So you can be sure I’d be on it like that”—he snapped his fingers—“if I had the slightest inkling that someone had used a Servant to commit a violent felony.”
“And you haven’t had an inkling.”
“Not the slightest.”
“Well forgive my nagging, Harry, but how hard have you looked for an inkling? Have you even read the homicide file on the murder?”
“Well, no. That’s a confidential document, isn’t it? The police didn’t offer to show it to me.”
“You did talk to the police, though, right?”
“Vanna talked to them.”
“And?”
“And, nothing. She said they did have some technical questions about Servant design, but no accusations were made. She cooperated fully, asked them to please be sensitive concerning wild speculation, and said goodbye. And that’s that.”
“That’s that. They haven’t called again with anything more?”
“Not that Vanna’s told me.”
“Then why did you ask me to come here, if all you have to tell me is that there’s nothing to tell?”
“Just to see you,” he said. “Breathe a little secondhand smoke, listen to you talk about how irresponsible I am. Like old times. And,” he added quickly, “to say that if you won’t take it from me that my Servants are innocent, you should go visit John Hoover.”
“Who?”
Gant turned his head. “Toby.”
Th
e Servant startled Joan by seeming to appear from nowhere, though in fact it had been in plain sight among the clutter all this time, motionless, and she just hadn’t noticed it. It came forward without a word, and offered Joan an envelope.
“What’s this?” Joan asked.
“Two round-trip Lightning Transit tickets to Atlantic City. You missed the early Gambler’s Express, but there’s a train leaving at 11:30 and another at 12:59. If you want, I can have a cab meet you downstairs and take you to Grand Central.”
“Who’s John Hoover?”
“He’s the man who invented the Self-Motivating Android. He was with Disney originally, then came over and worked for me for three years after I bought the patent. He’s retired now, living in New Jersey, but he still keeps up with the corporation’s doings. Last night right before you called he faxed me this nice note, saying that he’d heard about Amberson Teaneck and also heard that some newspapers were thinking of whipping up a scandal. He wanted me to know that he’d be more than willing to talk to reporters if I thought it might help. Sweet man, really.”
Joan opened the envelope. Along with the tickets was a card with John Hoover’s address and phone number. “If I take the trouble of going to see this guy,” she said, “is he going to tell me anything useful? Or just give me another version of how very very very unlikely it is that a Servant could be reprogrammed?”
“Well, he’s a scientist. He could probably be a lot more specific about why it’s unlikely.” Gant spread his hands. “Look, Joan, I’m telling you as plainly as I can that there’s nothing to these rumors. But maybe Hoover can show you the math.”
“All right. I should call him first.”
“When you get back,” said Harry, “we could have dinner.”
Joan looked him in the eye, then glanced back down at the address card. “Tell me one other thing,” she said. “How does a guy who’s retired and living in Jersey know what investigative reporters in New York are planning to do? I mean as far as Lexa told me there hasn’t been a whisper about this in the media. For all her cooperativeness with the police, your Vanna Domingo has most news agencies terrified of libel suits.”