by Jim Stark
Lilly made her way down the metal stairs to the main level, and when she reached the floor, the place started to look and feel like a maze. There was no foyer, no receptionist, just walls—here, there and everywhere. No capitalist designed this, she said to herself.
She made her way inward to the wide oval hallway, where she found color-coded signs with arrows on them pointing the way to the various rooms, including the mess hall—its arrow was red. I wonder how seniors or the disabled get down here from the rim? she said to herself. There must be an elevator somewhere, but I didn't see it. “Check whether it has handicapped access,” she recorded on her Sniffer for later reference.
As she followed the red arrows, she glanced through various open doors at some of the facilities she'd seen from the rim. She realized she had never felt so miserably out of place in her life. It staggered her to realize that more than two hundred and thirty million civilians lived like this, that there were more than a million of these huge bubbles around the globe, and many millions of the smaller ones. She wondered if Evolutionaries felt as awkward in the Normal world as she felt in theirs. They must, she thought, especially with all their offbeat “clan-cultures."
Back in 2016, when the movement began in earnest, Evolution was just a way to minimize the cost of living and save money ... for people who didn't have the smarts to get a real job or the entrepreneurial guts to start a business. But as the years went by, each clan seemed to spin off in its own direction. People would go bubble-surfing on the Net or “on the warm” when they first decided to join Evolution, to see if they could find the clan that would suit them best. Now, there were whole clan networks of like-minded people, and the cultures of these clan networks were almost as divergent from each other as they were from Normal society.
On the sex front, some clans were all gay or all bisexual, some were puritanically hetero and monogamous (or puritanically hetero but only serially monogamous), and a few were totally celibate—although these had an admittedly hard time recruiting new members. Some Upper American and European clans were so sexually liberated that a backlash had developed among non-Evolutionaries, among Normals who feared for the emotional health of all the children that were being born or raised in these unconventional environments. Most clans settled for just being non-judgmental about sexuality. Thank goodness this clan is one of the tamer outfits, Lilly said to herself as she walked along the oval corridor, gazing up occasionally at the brightly lit roof, more than a hundred yards overhead.
Her thoughts stayed trained on what Evolutionism was ... if indeed anyone can say what the movement really amounts to these days. Some clans placed high value on such things as literature, art and film, while others were more like bloated pool halls. Lilly had heard of clans that required applicants to have at least a Masters degree, and that was just to be considered for entry. Most clans had no requirements at all, other than a willingness to work hard, save money diligently and get along with the other members.
The clan network that Victor-E was part of claimed to be seeking the elusive dream of “Human Three Consciousness,” a concept that had been advanced nineteen years ago by Victor Helliwell, the reclusive and silent inventor of the LieDeck. A decade ago, only a minority of clans had declared themselves committed to the pursuit of “H3C,” as they short-formed their goal. But after pretty much eliminating lying from their behavior and their experience within the clans, they “ran out of excuses not to go all the way,” as their Netfiles explained. Now, virtually all Evolutionaries were budding or aspiring “Human Threes"—even those that spurned the lexicon of Helliwell's odd dialectic.
Lilly remembered glancing at the Netfiles about this matter while she was still in Florida. The details all seemed to fudge together into an incomprehensible mass, or mess. The only part that had lodged in her memory was a quotation from Adlai Stevenson, a mid-20th-century American politician and failed Democratic presidential candidate, as she recalled: “The Human Race has improved everything except the Human Race.” Why Helliwell or Stevenson would capitalize the words “Human” or other words like “Race” or “Consciousness” was beyond her, and that curious detail seemed to stick awkwardly in her memory, and her craw, as much as the quote itself. “Re: my visit to lodge,” she said into her Sniffer as she continued following the red arrows, “Do not forget to ply Helliwell about that Human One, Two, Three crap he went on about back in twenty fourteen ... with all those capital letters he said were important."
Lilly deliberately sent her mind back to its previous train of thought. The only thing all the clans seem to have in common any more is their way of sharing work and saving money for early retirement ... plus their contempt for the WDA ... plus their increasing participation in those damnable LieDeck Unbanning Committees that are cropping up all over the world.
The mess hall had a double-door arrangement, where the doors are both hinged on the outside edges, and swing open both in and out, with no upright spar in the middle. Each door had a small, square window. Lilly was tempted to just watch for a bit before making her grand entrance, but someone would surely notice her peeking, and the gossip would begin ... or someone will come barging through without looking and bowl me over. She pushed the right-hand door gently and walked in.
The mess hall was cavernous and bright, with photographs all over the walls, many thousands of them, plus posters and notices. The buzz in the place was palpable. There were perhaps two hundred people sitting down, eight to a table, eating or waiting to be served by a gang of scurrying Evolutionaries in hairnets and red aprons. Kids were seated at their own tables, with two adults strategically situated in their midst to keep the peace. There was unrestrained laughter and rollicking banter everywhere, almost like a family at Thanksgiving ... more like fifty families, she recalculated.
Within a few seconds, the first elbow in the ribs had infected everyone, and the joyful delirium plummeted into hundreds of silent stares, aimed in her direction. Annette Blais, the administrator of Victor-E, was sitting about four tables away from the double doors, and she was on her feet as soon as she saw what had killed the mood. She walked quickly over to where Lilly was standing.
"Can I talk to you outside for a minute?” she asked, clutching Lilly's elbow and not giving her any kind of graceful choice in the matter. Once they were outside, Annette cupped a hand onto her forehead, crumpling the skin laterally and seeming to struggle for words.
Lilly could hear the happiness levels being reborn inside the hall. “What about?” she asked.
"You ... were supposed to be told earlier,” Annette said as she released her brow and faced the music. “I'm ... really sorry. We—uh—I screwed up on that."
"Told what?” asked Lilly.
"The governing council took a decision at its last meeting ... two nights ago,” said Annette, “a decision that the mess hall was for Evolutionaries only—and pre-approved guests. But you can eat in the motel restaurant. It's the same food and the same price, but we just felt that...” Oh Christ, she thought, this isn't coming out right.
Lilly waited. She knew the clan was entirely within its rights to take such a decision, but it seemed so insulting, as if it were intended to exclude only her.
"It took us a long time to reach the point where this kind of atmosphere became the norm here, for meals,” said Annette, pointing loosely towards the renewed gaiety inside. “It requires a rather unique kind of trust, and that's a—uh—fragile thing. Like ... like it's a difficult job to build a house, but any jerk with a ... any person with a match can burn it down, you know what I mean? It's not personal, Lilly. That's why we took the decision before you arrived, before we'd even met you, so you'd see that it's just something we were doing for ourselves, not ... like it's not against you, or against the WDA. You see, we've had problems before, and usually it had nothing to do with the WDA. Usually it was somebody's guest from the community, a person who maybe said something or did something that didn't ... you know ... fit with our way of life. I hope you un
derstand."
Lilly understood all too well. She turned without speaking, and headed back down the hallway towards the long, unheated spoke that led to the motel. Not a very good start, she thought. What kind of mindscape has to ban people so they can feel secure? It's like ... a cult.
As she reached the large revolving door, a silent alarm was set off inside her mind. She looked out again over the massive infrastructure of the hub, and decided to walk the entire rim, to drink the place in from all angles. It was something that she needed to do at some point, and it seemed a good idea to cool down and gather her thoughts before going back in the restaurant. Evolutionaries pick up on a person's mood, she reminded herself.
Chapter 11
TECHNICALLY A VIRGIN
Tuesday, February 8, 2033—5:40 p.m.
"You see what I mean, Mom?” Michael said hopelessly at the screen. “She won't even let me see her when we Netlink. That was the first time she's let me see her in months, and I think she just forgot to kill the visual when she came back from that other call."
He waited for this to sink into his mom's tired mind, and for the hurt in his gut to fade away. He'd barely finished his toast and jam with his mother when he'd been called back to his own MIU in the den for a short business consult. When that was over, he'd finally worked up the nerve to Netlink with his mother and review the “conversation” he'd had with Julia a half hour earlier—the one his mother had watched from the kitchen. It had to be done, and for this unwelcome duty, he much preferred the safety of cyberspace. It was selfish, he knew, but...
"She doesn't even ask about you, or Becky, or even me,” he continued, “and I'm the one who called her! I'm scared to let Venice go over there. She's only twelve, and she'll end up ... you know ... liking it, and staying, and then frittering her life away, like Julia. And now this ... this pregnancy thing! Christ, Mom, you know I don't like to say this, but I mean ... Julia may be pushing thirty, but she has the intelligence of a ten-year-old."
Doreen Whiteside sighed. “Mikey,” she said, “I'm as upset about Julia as you are, and if your father were alive today..."
That prefix always unlocked the ducts. Doreen missed her late husband so terribly. He used to be called “the man” on Bay Street, and on Wall Street as well, at least when electronics were discussed. He had built the company he founded into a healthy corporate juggernaut, and while the LieDeck patent had made Whiteside Technologies into one of the biggest firms of its type in the world, the damnable little device had also cost Randall Whiteside his life. The nineteen years since his assassination seemed to have had no real effect in softening Doreen's pain. Every day was another violation for her, another theft of the lovely time they should have had together. Michael always seemed to end up using the word “healing” when his mother broke down, and Doreen always looked at her son sideways when the word came up. The general idea of healing was fine in principle, she had agreed on many occasions, but deep in her heart, talk of healing felt like a betrayal, a surrender. “Why did they have to shoot him?” she sobbed.
Michael glanced out the den window at the floodlit back yard of the manor, at the leafless trees, and the snow drifts. He had been through this “healing” conversation so many times, and his mother's tears were often infectious. She forgets that I was his son, and a son needs his father as much as a woman needs her husband, he thought ... before he caught himself.
Even though the LieDeck had been banned for everybody except the WDA since shortly after its invention back in 2014, virtually every adult in the world bore LieDeck-inflicted scars from the Revolution. It was as if there was an uninvited spy living inside your head, beeping you when you told a lie, even if you just thought a lie! Her suffering is so much greater than mine, and hers is forever, Michael realized. His mother would die weeping for her beloved Randall ... in spite of his flaws, he thought, his penchant for cheating on her every now and then, and ... and cheating on her without any guilt. Back in Dad's generation, you were supposed to at least feel bad if you got caught cheating, he considered, but Dad didn't see the point of all that guilt, sort of like how things are now ... in Evolution, anyway.
"Actually,” he said slowly, “Mr. Wu told me that Julia's still technically a virgin. She was artificially inseminated, so the baby would be smart, or at least not ... intellectually challenged, like Julia. She's never had ... you know ... the full sex act. Mr. Wu told me that she just likes to have fun with her body, but he said she never goes as far as ... actual intercourse, you know."
Doreen did not want to hear these details. This technical nicety didn't change the fact that her sweet little Julia was living with ... with common people, she said to herself, with people who put sex on the same level as joke-telling, a toy of a behavior, un-connected with the deep, spiritual love that bonded Randall and me through thick and ... well, most of the...
"I have to admit that she really is happy,” tried Michael.
"But she's ... rich,” sputtered Doreen through her tears, “and she ... works as ... it's almost like a topless waitress. I don't know why you're defending her. Just you wait till you get a call from your Venice, saying she's not happy as a Normal and she's decided to spend her life on some stinky farm with a bunch of dirty hippy Communists."
Michael wanted to stand behind his poor mother and place his strong, man's hands on her shoulders, the way his father used to do, but that was one of the major problems with Netlinking. “Mom,” he said gently to the screen, “they're ... not hippies. The hippy thing was a silliness-episode seventy years ago. It ended about the time you were born. They're Evolutionaries, Mom. I know ... some of them smoke marijuana, but that's been legal for six years now, and lots of Normals smoke that stuff too.
"Evolutionaries live cheaply, but they work hard and save up money so that they can retire young, that's all, and that's ... that's fair ball for anybody. They're not hippies and they're not Communists either. They're sort of ... collective capitalists, I guess I'd say. They live collectively because it's efficient, economical. And they're no more interested in Marxism than they are in..."
He was about to say “Christianity,” but his mother still believed, or thought she did, or at least tried to, still fell to her knees and prayed, in any event, still asked her precious God for favors and forgiveness ... favors mostly. Few people had taken religion seriously since the Revolution, since virtually all believers, of every stripe, had found out that faith in a deity was the practical equivalent of a psychiatric disorder, a frivolous and dangerous self-deception that served to diminish fear when it was convenient, and served no purpose at all when it got in the way of want, of instinct. True, there was a movement in America and in many of the world's backward societies to raise General Brampton, the founder of the WDA, to the vaunted status of other-worldly saviorhood, but that was just a sick joke, an egomaniacal myth that was probably started by Brampton himself. And then there were those ridiculous Jesus-Eers, who had pegged Victor Helliwell, of all people, as the Second Coming of Christ. Michael didn't have any understanding of why some people needed to have a “savior” to make sense of life. It reminded him of a late 20th-century aberration he had read about in university, where a few thousand delusional people tried to make a new Jesus out of Elvis Presley—they got married in his name, they prayed to him, and they waited for him to return from the dead to put on the rock concert to end all rock concerts.
Still, who's to diminish the sole comfort of an old lady? he thought. Who's to stick a needle into her imaginary balloon? Who's to pull the Messiah out from under a hurting Human Two? He always winced when he caught himself using the term “Human Two,” even when he only thought it. It seemed to imply a kind of unconscious concurrence with the Evolutionary paradigm.
Another extended silence was now in progress, and he decided to just let it happen, to let his mother get through whatever pain she was feeling now. He let his eyes close, and his mind went back to the Revolution. Damn, he said to himself as he remembered the chaotic we
eks following the Last Holocaust.
After the obliteration of Bucharest by the Russians and the nuking of Leningrad by the Americans ... well, by General Brampton ... word of Victor's theory had gotten out to the public, and LieDecks were still floating around loose at that time. Even though the phenomenon he called “Human Three Consciousness” could not be directly LieDeck-verified at the time, the underlying conceptual framework was LieDeck-verifiable, and was LieDeck-verified, by anyone with an interest in such things. There was no getting around it. A million years ago, all humans were what Victor called Human One, a wholly instinctive animal, not terribly different from a dog or a chimp, Michael said to himself. And what we are now is Human Two, like Victor said—an animal that is both instinctive and rational. The LieDeck Revolution has transformed our minds forever ... redesigned how we see ourselves. There was no God any more, but there might well be a thing called Human Three Consciousness. Progress! Michael grunted in his mind. We were better off with God, even if He only ever existed in our heads.
"Are you going to let Venice go visit her?” asked his mother as she wiped her eyes with a wrinkled clot of facial tissue that seemed to live permanently under her left wrist-cuff.
Michael wondered what his father might have done, or said, if he were alive. “Well, eventually I won't be able to stop her,” he said wistfully. “I'm hoping it'll just be a phase, but ever since her visit last summer, there's only two things she really wants and can't get; to talk to Victor Helliwell and to spend time with Julia, in her clan. She's got Dad's single-mindedness, I'm afraid, and unless—"