by Jim Stark
If it weren't for his great sense of humor ... she thought. She shook her head at the “I'll-never-find-a-man” panic she'd felt when she first decided to hook up with good old Ed. She remembered the moment two years ago when she had flipped an old American twenty-five-cent piece to help herself make the decision. The foolishness of flipping the keepsake coin had made her laugh, and that laugh reminded her of Ed's unfettered ability to crack up, even at his own expense. The deal she'd made with herself was: “Heads, I commit; tails, I split.” But when the 1931 quarter landed on tails, she'd laughed heartily, and ... well, the rest was history ... and now so was Ed.
Lilly opened the small jewelry box that was always with her, and jiggled her index finger among the trinkets until the old quarter peeked up from among the baubles. Coins and paper money were gradually being phased out in favor of those infallible ones and zeros of InterBank, the WDA's digitized record of all bioID-verified financial records and transfers. She knew it made sense, but somehow she knew she would miss the jingle of coins in her pocket. At the moment, she missed good old Ed ... or at least she missed having a man in her life.
I wonder if I'll meet someone up here in the great white waste of time? What was that guy's name? Uh ... Gordon Weatherby. She remembered his name from Netfiles she had reviewed on her MIU last weekend in her tiny office in downtown Miami. This Gordon Weatherby chap was her WDA counterpart at Callaway #6, the WDA baby-sitter of a smaller Evolutionary clan about twenty miles down the highway from Victor-E, towards Gatineau. He's got Ed's laugh, and a full head of hair! she said to herself, recalling the mild revulsion she'd always felt towards old Ed's baseball-sized bald spot. Maybe I'll face him on the Net tomorrow, about the time he's starting to wonder if I'm stuck up.
Lilly knew she should go once more through the Netfiles of the key players at Victor-E, but ... to hell with it, she said to herself. This job was destined to be a walk in the park. She'd probably report “all quiet on the northern front” twice a week for a year, then move on, up the organization, south. I wonder when I'll get the further instructions that Control mentioned?
But Lilly Petrosian had a longstanding problem with guilt, especially if it was caused by her own procrastination. She opened her eyes, leaned forward and booted up her MIU, asking for random ten-second scans of intra-clan SuperNet transactions, snippets of who was talking to whom in this cluster of losers, and about what. She wasn't tired—that's if you didn't count physical fatigue—and this aspect of her duties would likely be good for a few insights, perhaps even a chuckle or a snort.
One thing Lilly didn't usually feel much guilt about was her access to other people's private lives. She had studied a thousand horror stories of what life was like before the LieDeck Revolution, and for a few years thereafter, in the period before the WDA had truly established its presence and control throughout the world. Humans were civilized now, in 2033, and for one reason only. They had no choice! The WDA had fifty million agents monitoring almost ten billion civilians, a ratio of one agent per two hundred or so civilians. Agents were empowered to prevent crime—individual crime, corporate crime, state crime, all crime—using whatever means were necessary. That's all a WDA agent is authorized to do, and that's all we do, Lilly grumbled to herself. Granted, civilians were not aware of all the means that were used, but there was no need for them to know all that stuff. It's not their concern, she reminded herself. I don't give a hoot how they conduct their personal lives, she assured herself, as long as they stay legal. The system works.
There were eighteen internal conversations under way on the SuperNet, between and among the various members of Victor-E, and twenty-one non-commercial interfaces in progress with the outside world. She decided she would check out the external traffic later, tonight, more likely tomorrow morning, when there'd be less Netsex going on. For now, however, she sat back to eavesdrop on the inside poop.
They're not as different from Normals as they imagine, Lilly said to herself as short Netbites passed before her eyes and through her practiced mind. These Evolutionaries were talking to each other about money, work, and Netshows they liked or didn't like ... pretty mundane stuff, all in all. They also talked about their sex lives, a lot, and she was mildly disquieted by their openness on that score. She noticed a few Netgropes going on, but not many. In fact, it seemed to her that Evolutionaries didn't get into actual Netsex as much as most Normals did, though she knew she might have to revise that opinion when she started monitoring their external Netlinks. Everybody likes to tingle, she remembered “learning” in her first month at the WDA's Officer Training Academy.
She spent a full minute watching a live chatroom that hooked up six of the thirteen patients who were in the small medical clinic that was maintained in the Victor-E base, at the south end of the hub, near the E-tery. From what she heard and saw, it seemed that a couple of those patients might be better off in a regular hospital—there was a hospital in the nearby village of Shawville, as she recalled.
Then, after a few more ten-second clips, she hit on a two-person Netlink that really caught her attention, although she wasn't sure why. Let's see where this one goes, she thought as she disengaged the “scan” key. The woman doing the talking was a Dorothy Copps, according to a written notation on the bottom of the screen. The same information box, with a keystroke of prompting, said that Dorothy Copps had a daughter, Olivia, and that the father was a Terry Day, who lived down in the Callaway #6 clan.
"...so I go over to her bed, and she says, ‘I did subtig bad, bubby.’ So I said, ‘you were just having a bad dream because of your cold, sweetheart,’ and I put my hand on the bed to lean over and give her a kiss, and jeeze, it was all over the place! So I turned on the light, and she'd thrown up all her spaghetti, eh? Yuck! My hand was right in it! I switched on the main light, and then she looks at the puddle of barf and starts to scream: ‘Worbs, bubby, I got worbs id by tubby.’ God, I could hardly stop myself from laughing. I mean Olivia's only three, eh? And she'd never thrown up before. It scares them, eh? I mean they got—"
Lilly killed the sound and watched as the two Evolutionary mothers yammered away about the joys and trials of turning blubbering bundles of joy into walking, talking, potty-trained adults. I guess motherhood is the same everywhere, she thought. It's great, but it's just not for me. I'm not up to that much ingratitude.
Her Netscreen was split, so she could watch both ends of the transaction. She looked at the bottom of the screen, and saw that the other mom was an Alice Lochlear. She had a son Barry; father unknown. Now it seemed to be Alice's turn to story-tell, so Lilly turned the sound back on.
"...at that age, eh? So I said, ‘Look, Barry, every eight-year-old in the world thinks there's a monster under his bed.’ And you know what he says? He says, ‘Why?’ So I start talking, then I realize that I don't have a fuckin’ clue, eh? How the Christ would I know? When I was his age, I had a gigantic purple monster that lived under my bed, with long, scaly, green legs—six of them—and there was this slimy, icky pink and yellow drool seeping out between its rows of long, pointy teeth. Shit, I used to hold my bladder until I figured I was going to pee the bed for sure, then I'd leap out and run like hell for the can, and on the way back I'd leap into the bed from as far away as possible, so my monster wouldn't catch my ankles and eat me alive. I used to wake up my sister every time that happened, and my mom would have to come in and turn on the light and look under the bed. She'd make me look too, eh? And of course there was no monster, but that didn't help worth a shit. As soon as she left and turned out the light, I knew it was down there again. I just knew it was there, you know—knew it in my gut. And now here I am, thirty years later, and I got my little Barry asking me why eight-year-olds have monsters under their beds, like I'm supposed to know, eh? I mean moms know everything, right?"
"Well,” said the first mother, “I'm sure you can sort that out with him on the Net. At least you don't have to worry about getting bit any more. My little one's only six month's old, but s
he's got teeth like your fucking bed-monster. She almost took my damn nipple off last week. What kind of plan is that, setting things up so kids can bite the bejesus out of their mothers and not know what the hell they did wrong? I remember on the Net once I saw about these capitalists back in the nineteenth century, and they had these women called ‘wet-nurses,’ and these girls sort of rented out their boobies to the highest bidder, eh? I mean talk about—"
Learn some freaking history, for Christ's sake, thought Lilly as she killed the sound. Wet-nurses date to antiquity, and the practice had nothing to do with capitalism.
She closed down her MIU and indulged another very uninhibited yawn. Mom #1—Dorothy Copps—seemed sort of interesting, and Lilly decided that she would sidle up to her some time soon, maybe get to know her a bit ... if she lets me, she reminded herself. Even though having babies wasn't on her own “to-do” list, Lilly could never get enough hand-me-down chatter on the subject. Probably to keep myself committed to not having one, she thought, with a suppressed chuckle that good old Ed used to say was designed to hide her sadness.
Maybe I'll sack out for a while before supper. I hope the bed's soft. She went to the bedroom, kicked off her shoes and lay down. She tried to rest and relax for a while, with no success at all. Her life was her work, and vice versa ... and that sucks, she mused as she rolled over.
Lilly's last assignment had involved a factory, an actual old-fashioned workplace that people traveled to in cars and busses. The company also had a large body of workers who were Netbased, of course, but Lilly's monitoring duties had been limited to the physical plant, where one hundred and forty men and women manufactured shoes. Another agent covered all the management types and a legion of Netters—sales staff and so on. It was a good go. There had been no trouble worth remembering—not because she and her team caught a lot of bad guys, but because there were no bad guys to get caught, thanks to the WDA and their LieDecks.
Those workers never stole so much as a single grommet, she said to herself. People nowadays tend to forget the critical preventative role played by the WDA. They lose sight of the fact that before agents started LieDeck-verifying everybody, there was rampant cheating, lying, stealing, harassment—all kinds of disagreeable stuff, even violent crime.
Those who would break the law whenever they wanted to always resented policing ... or whenever emotion managed to banish reason from the equation, Lilly adjusted the thought. Recent studies by the WDA, LieDeck-verified surveys, showed that eighty-six percent of the civilian population would have few compunctions about breaking most laws if they thought they had a reasonable chance of getting away with it. Animals, she said to herself. Clever animals, but animals all the same.
She turned over the pillow, punching it a few times first—an old habit. Even with a subdued pillow, it was hard to concentrate on nothing. One persistent image kept drifting across her internal Netscreen; the memory of the time she'd spent last week, in Miami, reviewing the Netfiles that were left behind by Harry Lloyd, the man she was replacing at Victor-E. He had kept a personal Netdiary the entire time he had lived in the state of Québec. The archived entries started with his arrival about a year ago, in January of 2032. He had used his Sniffer to record his entire first hour at Victor-E, and that touching entry had left a lasting impression on Lilly's mind.
About a hundred of Victor-E's three hundred and twenty members had gathered in the mess hall for a spoofy welcoming gala. They had sung a rousing rendition of “For he's a jolly good fellow,” knowing full well that the LieDeck in his Sniffer would register a lie at the end of every line. Then they presented him with a huge cake, and made him blow out all the candles. In the icing, in large letters, was written: “Welcome to Victor-E.” And underneath, in small letters and bracketed, was the word “beep.” They wanted him to know they didn't need him or want him in their midst, but since world law made his presence necessary, they'd made their point with good old-fashioned humor. “And an absolutely scrumpdillyicious chocolate cake,” Harry Lloyd had reported. The mood was buoyant, the pleasure genuine and the central difference of opinion mattered no more than partisan shadings at a Christmas party in the White House. Harry Lloyd and these sweet-tempered but eccentric Evolutionaries were having honest-to-God fun together.
For Lilly, this was heart-warming and heart wrenching at the same time. Things had changed dramatically since then, with the WDA scandals that New York Times reporter Gilbert Henderson had unearthed and the full flowering of the protest movement that was demanding civilian access to the LieDeck. Where the last agent had been thrown a party, Lilly had been met by ... by a retard and a fucking dog, she thought.
She pounded the pillow again, hard, and her contemplations coasted unintentionally back to Ed, her ex, whom she felt the need of ... for about three seconds. She changed channels quickly, and reminded herself that she'd promised to face her mother in Miami as soon as she got to Québec ... but that can wait till tomorrow ... screw the guilt.
Whenever her mother landed in her thoughts, Lilly ended up thinking about her own childhood. Now, for some reason, she couldn't ditch the memory of her late father, of the way he'd had of comforting her whenever tears came. “Remember that happy place in your heart that you were in a few minutes ago?” he'd always ask, forcing her to at least nod. “Aaaaaand what do we do when we get lost in a sad place?” he'd ask next. “Go to my happy place,” she would say, frowning, hanging her head, and pushing out her lower lip. Whenever they'd had that conversation, Lilly had suspected there was some kind of trickery involved, some ruse by which she was being denied her absolute right to behead a brother or disembowel some other rottenest kid in the world. I don't have a happy place any more, she realized. I just cope, get by, work, and wait.
A “bing” sounded on her MIU. She looked through the open doorway, and a rapidly flashing light on the screen told her she had a coded, top priority “face” archived. Maybe from Control, she thought, or one of his assistants. She rose from the bed and rubbed her hands—they never seemed to get really warm up here in Québec—and walked shoe-less across the carpeted floor to her Netstation. This must be it! she assumed as she turned on the MIU and entered her bioID.
"A decode will be allowed,” said the electronic voice in pleasant female tones. “This transmission will automatically de-archive upon completion,” it added.
"Start, now,” said Lilly, pressing the “Q” button for “decode."
"Well, you made it,” said the smiling image of Control.
Jeeze, this must be big, thought Lilly. It looks as if Control is planning to act as my personal handler on this assignment.
"Once you're settled, and once your car gets there—I was told there was a screw-up on that—your orders are to drive over to the Whitesides’ estate and then on out to their lodge on Wilson Lake. It's a couple of miles from the manor. Patriot Security patrols the whole estate, so you'll have to tell them in advance that you're coming. Your orders are to LieDeck-verify Victor Helliwell, but tell Patriot you must see him unannounced. Just go into his quarters on the second floor of the lodge and walk in on him and LV the man like any other citizen. Tell him that his free ride is over. We found out last week he's got an inoperable brain tumor, and only a few months to live. We've got to mine his attitudes and thoughts before he dies. Tell him history will demand it if he whines about having a reason for compliance."
Control paused, looked down, shuffled some papers. Lilly continued to gaze serenely at the screen, but inside ... well, that was a different story. She had just been asked ... no told ... to interview the world's most famous recluse! And Victor Helliwell was dying! God, she thought, all I did for years was LV people about stupid stuff like stealing, and now I'm LieDeck-verifying the inventor of the LieDeck! This is amazing!
"Now, there is ... one other—uh—other thing,” said Control, who seemed to hesitate, to struggle.
Christ, there's more! Lilly realized.
"We—uh—want you to get to ... know Michael Whit
eside. As you know, he's the president of Whiteside Technologies. He has a wall around himself, those Patriot Security folks, but you can get to him through your contact with Victor Helliwell, who's out at the lodge. Of course all those personal connections you've got might also come in handy—Michael's sister Julia lives at Victor-E, and his daughter Venice wants to join Evolution, and of course you met his son Randy on the plane. So ... you're well set up.
"I should mention that Michael Whiteside has a bit of—uh—of marital discord in his life right now, and ... well, I'm sure you'll find your own way of getting close to him. By way of explanation, there's some serious thought being given to ending Whiteside Tech's monopoly on LieDeck production. We need to either cut him loose or reel him in. We're extremely concerned about him, actually, Captain Petrosian. We need a window into his mind and his feelings, and you're it. I wish you well. I want bi-weekly reports on this, to me personally.
"Well, that's it,” said Control. “Good luck on both fronts. I'm sure you know what an honor it is to be given these two taskings. Control out."
"Automatic de-archive complete,” said the mellow voice of the MIU.
Holy God in heaven! Lilly thought. There must be thousands of more senior agents who would have killed for these assignments. I wonder why they picked me? It ... doesn't figure. But I appreciate their confidence in me, don't I? Reality check ... hello to me! She closed her eyes, pinched her nose, and looked inside herself with enough integrity to get it right the first time. Yeah, she assured herself with some relief. I'm okay on that. Real okay! No detectable lie there! I can say that out loud and not get beeped.
"Transmit, coded, to Control Upper America, now,” she said. When the on-screen traffic light jumped from red to green, she smiled at the MIU, at her unseen superior. “Message of February eight, two thousand and thirty-three, received and de-archived. I'll do my best, and ... thanks,” she added. “I appreciate your confidence in me. Net, down, now."