by Jim Stark
"Just a minute, okay Mikey?” Julia said when her MIU signaled another incoming face. “Put the first face on hold,” she said carefully, to be sure she got the commands right. “Switch over to the new face,” she said, using hand gestures to be extra sure the MIU did what she wanted, “and add on the visual part of me, now.” She smiled as the new face popped up on her screen. She didn't always get it right, and she tended to get flustered when her MIU got muddled up.
"Hi Alex!” she squealed, delighting herself that she had remembered the name of the taxi driver she'd met earlier in the day. “I got my brother on hold so I can't face too long, eh? How's life at Walden? I forgot to ask—are you a daddy yet? I'm going to be a mom before it's next Christmas. I got one brother Mikey and I had one sister that ... that died. Her name was Sarah, and she got killed in this awful car accident and—"
"It's okay,” interjected Alex. “I just called to say I don't really have time to face you tonight, but I said I'd call, so I did. Let's do it tomorrow, okay. Or another day?"
"Sure,” said Julia. “Anyway I was in the middle of talking to my ... oh, I already told you that, didn't I? Bye Alex."
Julia realized that she'd forgotten to re-kill the visual export when she instructed the MIU to return to her brother, but she decided to leave it that way. I sure hope I don't get all mixed up and start crying, she said to herself.
"So can Venice come and visit me?” she asked as she turned her back to the MIU and threw a white cardigan sweater over the flimsy dress. “I love Venice so much,” she said as she turned towards her brother's image and pulled the sweater tightly across her chest. “The last time she was here, she learned how to ride a horse, and she saw lots of people that didn't have clothes on. She never saw that before, you know! I think she's probably going to start to have her own breasts pretty soon, eh? Boy, she was really excited about that! And she really liked talking to the grown-ups over here, sometimes about stuff that I didn't even know what it was. I'm glad she's smart, Mikey. I don't mind it any more ... I mean ... like me being not as smart as other people. I used to hate that, you know ... but now I'm happy just like I am."
It's like she's ... on drugs, thought Michael as he pinched the bridge of his nose and closed his eyes. It's like when a Normal tries to have a sensible conversation with those Netfreaks, in those “Happy Hookah” chatrooms. We say there is no point, and they say we don't get the point. Maybe pot is a way to lower a person's IQ? Maybe intelligence is produced or facilitated by some enzyme that's the inverse of THC? Or maybe she's just stoned out of her gourd! She says she doesn't do grass, and she never lies, but...
"I have to go now,” Julia announced. “Did I tell you? They let me serve the tables almost all the time now, in the E-tery. I still work in the day care too, but in the E-tery I take out the water with ice cubes in it on this tray, and not spill it, and I bend over and put a glass in front of all the people who come in to eat our really really good food. And the customers are always so nice to me. They ask me what my name is, and I tell them I'll have my own baby even before it's next Christmas, and it might even be a girl, I hope. And sometimes there's this nice boy from the Hydro comes here to eat, and he's thinking of moving in, being like an Evolution person, like me. His name is Eric, and the last time he was here, I showed him all over the place, eh?—the swimming pool—and where we dance on the roof of the mess hall—and the gyms—and where all the offices are with all the Netstations like for V-Insight and Soft-E and all that—and the garage bubble and the garbage pickup and the big hot tubs and—and everything. He told me he's got this wife that doesn't even like Evolution, but he says she's not a happy girl, so she'll probably go away somewhere else with this other boy, and then he can—"
"I've got to go now Julia,” interrupted Michael. “I'll ... talk to Venice about maybe visiting you in the summer. Bye, sis."
"Uh—bye Mikey ... Net, down, now,” said Julia. People were forever changing the topic on her. It was ... disconcerting, but she'd learned to just let it be, to move on. Still, she'd meant for Venice to be able to come visit her now, not next summer. I guess Mikey didn't understand, she concluded.
* * * *
Michael Whiteside sat glumly in the den, that special room he still thought of as “Dad's den.” The family had decided just after Randall's death back in 2014 that the den would stay forever as it was when the patriarch had been alive, and except for the new SuperNet installation, not a stick of furniture or a single appointment had been altered ... or even moved. Sometimes when Michael walked into that rich wood-paneled room, he almost expected his father to still be there, to swivel around in his chair and give his little five-year-old “Mikeyface” a big hug, or throw a mock left jab at his teenaged son, and ask about his girlfriend, Becky.
But as usual, the voices and images on the Net had brought Michael back to reality, such as it was. He had too many wrinkles in his personal life, and life in general was too complicated, too different. Dad would gag if he were alive today, he thought.
Michael slapped his thighs as if to discipline himself, and pushed off the old maple desk, spinning the chair round to face the door. “Should I tell Mom the whole truth and nothing but?” he asked the giant of a man who wasn't there. I ... suppose I should, he thought as he rose from the leather wingback chair.
As he walked into the hall, he paused. He rubbed his neck and wondered again what his father, the man that the financial heavy-hitters used to call “the man,” would make of the today's world, apparently satisfied with the new international military machine, and with much of the planet laced with a network of Evolutionary communities ... “clans,” as they called them.
Dad was murdered because of the LieDeck, he reminded himself, the last victim of the LieDeck Revolution ... the last violent victim, anyway ... not counting the suicides. And now there was this new power architecture, with generals enforcing the peace, using the threat of nuclear attack as the ultimate attitude-adjuster, using Whiteside-produced LieDecks as the tool that made every civilian into an informer—willingly or otherwise; it didn't matter.
"Oh, what a tangled web we weave when first we set out to deceive no more,” he said softly, with a bent smile. With the company's exclusive contract to supply the WDA with all its LieDecks, millions of units every year, the wealth of the Whiteside estate had leapt from merely legendary to stratospheric. “If we didn't make the fucking things, somebody else would,” he muttered as he eased the door closed. “And ... if Victor hadn't invented the damn thing, someone else would have."
As he dawdled pensively down the wide hallway, he shook his head at the archaic nuclear policy of the WDA. Yes, Brampton vaporized Leningrad in 2014, the very day that Moscow had destroyed Bucharest, but he'd been replaced by Sheena Kalhoun seven years ago, and no one really believed that the world government would toss a backpack nuke into any old town that defied its authority. Still, the age-old debate had finally been decided; human beings simply wouldn't behave themselves unless somebody issued a credible threat to punish them if they stepped out of line. It was easy to imagine that this equation wasn't needed by oneself, but the history Netfiles didn't lie. We're all capable of anything, Michael sighed in his mind, but surely the day will come when we'll be able to rely on something less than a nuclear bludgeoning to keep the peace.
He walked into the spacious kitchen, and found his mother sitting at the varnished pine table, looking sadly at a dark screen. He'd told her earlier that she was welcome to audit his call to Julia if she wanted—listen and watch, but not participate. “Not that you have to even listen,” he had emphasized. “Just if you want."
She looked so old now. She'd lost weight steadily since Randall's death, and her thin head of hair had gone from slightly gray to seagull white. We never could buy happiness, he thought, but we used to be able to rent some. He sat down across from his mother, the woman who had once run the household staff so gaily. Now, she was almost like a guest, staying in her ground-floor suite most of the tim
e, reading, leafing through photo albums, praying to a dead Jew, or just sitting, rocking back and forth, lost in the past and waiting to be called to Glory.
"Hi Mom,” he said cautiously. “You ... watched?"
"Hello sweetheart,” she said, looking up as if she hadn't heard him approaching down the hundred-year-old hardwood floor of the hallway.
I'll talk to her about Julia later, he decided. Over the Net, and when she's in a more receptive frame of mind. “Let's us two make some toast and jam,” he said, “like we used to when I was just a little whippersnapper."
Chapter 10
BUBBLE TROUBLE
Tuesday, February 8, 2033—5:35 p.m.
Lilly walked down the stairs from her “suite” and into the motel restaurant, which was starting to fill up with local customers. She had never actually been inside a clan-base before, but she knew there were no menus in any Evolutionary eateries. If you came for supper, you got what they were serving themselves for supper, period. You could call ahead and find out what was on the stove, but that was the extent of the choice offered to outsiders. The attraction was wholesome food at low prices, often less than it would cost to fix the same meal in your own home. It was a formula that assured a steady stream of non-Evolutionary customers, and the undying enmity of capitalists who were also in the restaurant trade.
There were three people serving tables already, all of them males, as it happened. They had white aprons on, and they were walking quickly between chores, trying to keep up. In the open kitchen behind the counter, two women in hairnets and less-than-white aprons were dishing out—Lilly glanced at the blackboard by the front door: “Yummy home made cream of mushroom soup, spicy biscuits, lasagna with lots of cheese (slightly singed on top!), salad, milk or juice, hot pumpkin pie with real McCoy whipped cream sprinkled with cinnamon, coffee or tea, $40.” Jeeze, thought Lilly, that meal in a regular restaurant these days would cost sixty dollars!
She sat at the counter, turned on the vinyl-capped stool, and looked all around. There were several tables of Normals—the usual Canadian “hewers of wood and drawers of water"—with assorted spouses and progeny, but most of the customers, twenty-five or so, were kids, all boys, and all fifteen or sixteen years old. That's ... odd, she thought.
"Annual hockey tournament down the road in Shawville,” said one of the cooks as she set two bowls of soup on the counter and slapped a palm on the little bell that alerted the waiters. “Every February, same thing."
"Oh,” said Lilly. “Do they...” She was about to ask if these kids came from all over Canada or just Québec, but the cook had no time for chatter if it didn't fit in between her stacked-up duties.
Lilly rose, walked to the back of the restaurant and went on through the wide door that opened into the “Mainspoke,” according to a sign. There was no wind in the dimly lit spoke, but the sudden coldness of the air was stunning. Her Netfile map said it was two hundred yards from the E-tery out to the air-lock doors of the hub. Well, it said “metres,” actually, and spelled it “metre” instead of “meter” because it was a Canadian map. As she hurried along the unpainted floor, Lilly Petrosian found herself, for the first time in her life, wishing she were fat. She pulled her cardigan tight around her body and hugged her ribcage as she listened to her quick steps on the wood. She kept her chin tucked in and watched her breaths exit her mouth as short-lived puffs of fog.
There were several ups and downs and turns in the Mainspoke, so she couldn't see the other end, or even that far in front. Although she kept expecting to meet up with other people, there was no one else walking in the thing, either way. When she figured she was about half way there, with only a few turns to go, her slacks began to chafe at the goose bumps that had sprung into existence on her thighs. “Tin pants,” she remembered seeing in a strange Netfile entitled: “Canadian expressions.” She resolved to wear a coat, gloves and boots the next time she had to walk the spokes, and she resolved to go shopping for warmer duds.
Finally she reached the hub, where there was a large air-lock door. “Be very sure the door clicks firmly behind you,” read a sign taped to the glass. She tugged the end of the sweater sleeve over her hand before pulling on the handle, not just because it was sure to be very cold, but because she had been forewarned by an expatriate Canadian agent that skin could fuse to metal in these temperatures. Once inside this door, she found a second entrance, a large revolving door—the main system that prevented the bubble's air from rushing out and the Pliesterine roof from parachuting down. That happened here before, Lilly had read in the Netfiles, and while no one had been injured, the clan had invested in the latest safety precautions to make sure it wouldn't happen again.
As she passed through the revolving door, the low swooshing sound of the air pumps hit her—that and the warmth. At last, she said to herself as her body began the recovery process.
She found herself standing on an elevated, railed rim that ran around the entire inside perimeter of the oval Pliesterine bubble, at ground level. The rim was concrete, and about fifteen feet wide, with a sturdy wooden railing. The rest of the inside space was sunken, perhaps twenty feet below ground level. As she stood there, shivering and listening to the low hum of a human hive, she felt as if she had stumbled into the den of alien beings.
The enclosure below was vast, the size of half a dozen ice hockey rinks—larger than it seemed from the outside. Set in about fifty yards from the raised perimeter was a wide oval hallway, perhaps twenty feet across, with smaller, narrower hallways leading out towards the skin and in towards the center. At equidistant points along the oval hall there were ten immense uprights, stainless steel poles, reaching about two-thirds the way up to the air-suspended roof, with banks of lights on top of each pole. It was similar to the kind of set-up one would expect to find on the perimeter of a sports stadium. And every pole was anchored by three thick guy wires, and each bank of lights had a rounded steel mesh encircling it. Good idea, Lilly said to herself. If the roof collapsed, the poles would catch it, preventing injury or death, and the steel mesh envelopes would prevent the Pliesterine from getting cut, or from being singed by the hot lights. Inside each mesh globe, hanging below the rows of lights, were four slow-turning fans, pushing warm air down, or at least moving air around.
She took out her Sniffer and linked up to her MIU, verbally instructing a quick search for the weight of the roof at Victor-E. “Eight tons,” came the answer three seconds later. “The tough, light-weight fabric is made only in Dallas, USA, on the largest machine ever built, measuring six hundred yards in length. Pliesterine has a unique molecular structure that discourages BTU exchange, so that temperature variations on both sides of the fabric tend to stay basically as they are, keeping heat in, or out, as desired. This revolutionary material was first developed for commercial use in the year two thousa—” She cut it off. Wow, she thought. That's just a bit more than a ton per acre! Amazing stuff, Pliesterine!
The elevated lights were probably too bright to look at, but the directional bulbs were pointed up rather than down. The curving roof reflected light back down, like those white umbrellas used by professional photographers in the pre-digital 20th century. Smart, she said to herself.
"Heads up,” came a voice from the left.
She looked over and saw two young men on bicycles bearing down on her position, apparently racing around the rim. She beat back an irrational and devilish urge to scare them as they zipped by. “Hi guys,” she said instead.
"Hi, hi,” came two quick replies.
Below the rim, there were walls everywhere, many hundreds of them, walls without ceilings, mostly, delineating various areas: production and repair shops, offices, two gyms, a swimming pool, lounges. However, except for the rooms close to her, directly beneath or not very far away, she couldn't see the floors or the furnishings, and could only guess what all the rooms were for. It reminded her of a day a few years ago when she had sat in the stands of the Boston Gardens and looked down at a summertime tra
de show, with all its little booths ... and big crowds, she thought. So ... where are all the people? With the exception of a couple of bobbing heads in a nearby pool and a cleaning crew in one of the gyms, there seemed to be nobody about. Directly below her was some sort of meeting room, with two dozen chairs set in a semi-circle, and sheaves of papers left on the chairs. They must be having supper.
Just to the right of the abandoned meeting room was an area that did have a ceiling. That was the clinic, she knew from the Netfiles, plus Sleepery #1, the only full apartment in the hub, and the place where Annette Blais lived—or at least slept—in the winter. Lilly was momentarily tempted to pull out her Sniffer, connect with her MIU, and peek inside that room via Annette's MIU, but of course she didn't—not due to any particular moral compunctions, but because it was just faintly possible that she'd get caught in the act by a civilian. That would mean her job, and a boatload of legal problems—possibly even jail time. Even after seven years on the job, it was still easy to forget that her WDA masters could watch her at will whenever her Sniffer was activated.
Lilly lifted her eyes again to take in the full sweep of the place. In the middle of all the ceilingless walls, there was a large enclosed area, one tall story high. It was oval in shape, like the bubble itself, and it had its own ceiling, painted black, at least on the top side. It occupied perhaps a quarter of the entire floor space ... maybe two acres or so, she guessed. The flat roof of this structure seemed to be some kind of entertainment facility, with a link fence around the whole thing, and a large stage at the far end. On the sides of the stage were giant speakers, stacked to the height of a bungalow. Evolutionaries do love their pleasures, she thought. The acoustics in here must be awesome ... or atrocious.
She knew from the Netfiles that the mess hall and the kitchen were in that building-within-a-bubble, along with several other facilities that either required some privacy or needed to be protected from the ambient dust or noise of the “open” spaces. At the four “corners” of the inner oval structure were four more of those giant posts, with the lights and the mesh globes and the fans and the guy wires. Can't be too safe, she thought.