by Jim Stark
"She's a caution, that one, a real pistol. I asked her to keep it sort of mild this year ... not because she's doing anything wrong, of course, but just to spare me the aftershocks. God, I wish Normals would get over their guilt trip on that whole area and stop...” I talk a good Human Three line, Annette thought, but I'm not exactly guilt-free myself. Still, I wouldn't get beeped for what I said even if we had LieDecks.
"Anyway, most of the working members are churning along blissfully, careening towards early-retirement dates that won't mean much anyway. I would say the freedom to retire is still a much-coveted status here, but nobody seems too keen on actually doing it when the big day arrives. Productive work has acquired a meaning almost as important as participating in the rest of the clan's activities. It's like ... it's like a day without at least some productive work is boring, and puts you out of the chatter, out of the loop.
"It's nine p.m., and the restaurant's almost empty. There's a bunch more stuff that I should enter, but I'd better shake my tail or ... yes, poor choice of words,” she said with a lopsided smile. “Our new WDA monitor, one Captain Lilly Petrosian, is now available for regular LieDeck-verification—I'm sure you're thrilled to hear that—but the law is the law, so book your appointments, people. Everybody six years old or over has to do this once a month and there's no point getting fined for forgetting. Net, down, now,” Annette instructed, and the screen went dead.
Chapter 16
POKE AND SNIFF
Saturday, February 12, 2033—9:40 a.m.
Lilly woke up the next morning, Wednesday morning, with a towering headache. Her throat felt as if someone had run amok in there with a miniature electric sander. It hurt to cough, to swallow, to move—even to think, it seemed. By mid-morning, she'd blown her nose so much she'd run out of Kleenex and had started using folded-over toilet paper. The outsides of her nostrils were beginning to chafe, something her temperament had already done.
The only Netcall she made that day was to her mother in Miami, to say that all was well, except for a little cold she'd picked up. The truth was that she could barely focus her eyes during that interface, and she had almost fainted as her mother signed off. She wished her mom could get on a plane and come sit by her bed, rub her head, sing soft lullabies and speak lovely lies like “there, there, it'll be alright, sweetheart.” Lilly was annoyed at her illness, and she was also a little scared, and horribly lonely.
She left a message for Annette on her MIU—just a short, polite face saying that she wasn't yet available to LieDeck-verify Victor-Eens. Then she spent the next three days in her apartment, feeling wretched and weak, leaving the bed only to get to the bathroom. “Perfect,” she'd said of her health when she did the required interview over the Net prior to her recent re-assignment. “Never had a day off sick since I was hired,” she'd bragged. Welcome to Canada, she kept hearing in her mind. Or rather, Québec.
Various Evolutionaries had brought her food, medicine and the offer of small talk. She turned aside all of the small talk, most of the food and none of the medicine. By Saturday, she was able to focus her eyes again, without pain. Her head still felt thick, but she was able to function. For some completely illogical reason, it bothered her that the life of Victor-E had muddled along problem-free without her. Burn that thought, she said to herself. That feeling, she corrected herself.
Lilly booted up her MIU, and the female voice gave her a normal two-day heads-up: “Valentine's Day is on February fourteenth, in two days.” Lilly realized miserably that most MIUs in the western world would be programmed to spit out exactly this reminder. She was tempted to call “good old Ed” and tell him to get his ass up here to Canada and pat her head until she felt better. Yeah right, she thought.
By 10:00 a.m., she found herself trying to concentrate on one of the Netfiles she still had to review, but it wasn't proving a very useful exercise. In spite of her relative sense of physical well-being, her intellect just didn't seem to be all there. The sharpness is all but gone.
She had read all of the charts for Victor-E—birth rate, death rate, growth rate through recruitment minus departures, types of work done in person-years, range of incomes plus averages (means, medians), range of annual savings rates by percentages of net incomes and dollar-values, nest-egg totals per adult member, plus the overall savings of the clan, RRSP and non-RRSP investment portfolios per adult and overall stats for the clan ... the records went on and on, but most of the numbers didn't stick in her mind anyway. Later, she thought.
There were a few duties on her plate that required no particular concentration, and she decided to hoist those to the top of her list. The biggest one was the grand tour of Victor-E, the “poke and sniff” routine that agents and Evolutionaries used to enjoy and now both resented. She bundled up with double sweaters and socks, loaded a pocket with Kleenex, took a preparatory breath through her mouth and opened her apartment door. The clan mascot was sitting on the landing halfway down the stairs, looking up, his tail thumping hopefully.
"Hi Big Wus,” she said in as friendly a manner as she could muster with her crackly voice and shrunken mood. Big Wus jumped up and hustled downstairs, disappearing into the restaurant. He wasn't ready to trust somebody who would try to kick a stranger, and without provocation. Jeeze, thought Lilly, I've managed to get rejected by the resident canary.
Evolutionaries took their animals seriously. They called their canine pals “canaries,” after the ancient tradition of coal miners, who took these birds down into the mines with them. If a canary died, there was odorless methane gas in the air and a real danger of an explosion, and it was therefore time to skedaddle. If Lilly couldn't befriend Big Wus, the members of Victor-E would know that something was dreadfully wrong. Big Wus loved everybody! Well, almost everybody, she said to herself.
Lilly passed through the restaurant, and received a couple of cautious and correct salutations from the staff. At the back door, she wound her scarf (on loan from Julia) twice around her neck, donned her earmuffs (another Julia loaner), buttoned up her black trench coat and put on her Miami-appropriate driving gloves. Once she was inside the Mainspoke, she took out her Sniffer and faced Annette Blais. “I thought I'd let you know that the dog Big Wus seems to have the run of the place, including the restaurant. I'm not here to help out the health inspectors, but it's a risk, you know. There's no point getting your restaurant closed down over a damn dog."
"Thanks,” said Annette formally—Lilly cold see that Annette was in Sleepery #1, her private quarters/office in the hub. “Nobody ever complained before. In future, please try to contact the person responsible, and that would be Claire Lapine for the restaurant. Net, down, now."
Christ, I knew that, thought Lilly. It wasn't like her to make mistakes, especially real stupid mistakes. She assumed it must be the fault of her lingering illness.
As she made her way quickly down the Mainspoke, her Sniffer beeped. It was Claire Lapine, the manager of the restaurant, and she had her claws out. She had just heard from Annette on her Sniffer, and now Claire was threatening to have Lilly banned from the E-tery. I guess she can do that, Lilly supposed, and if she does, that would leave me eating in my room ... and publicly humiliated. “I'll stop by after my tour of the hub and have a chat with you,” she said, hoping the plump cook would be willing to discuss things more rationally. Claire signed off without agreeing.
My popularity rating is in the toilet, and I just got started, thought Lilly. Oh well, I wasn't sent here to win friends.
As she was passing through the revolving door, her Sniffer beeped yet again. It was Annette, offering her the use of a guide for her exploration of the hub. “I appreciate the offer,” Lilly said, hoping she sounded properly chastened, “but I'll be fine.” It was nice to have the offer, but Lilly felt there might be more to it than just courtesy. She wanted to go about exploring Victor-E in her own way, at her own speed, with no agenda, no timetable and no expectations ... and no minder.
Just beyond the revolving door, a
wooden box had been hung on the wall with printed maps inside. And there was a bilingual sign beneath it, asking that the maps be returned. Lilly could have used her Sniffer to find her way around, and gotten fuller information, but civilians were always wary of agents with their Sniffers at the ready. Greeks bearing gifts, she thought. It was not so much that people feared getting caught violating the law; just that WDA Sniffers symbolized the power gap. They had LieDecks built in; civilian Sniffers didn't, and if they did, the users would have to be arrested. Lilly understood that fearful reaction; she even sympathized a little, but ... I don't make the rules, she thought as she descended the stairs from the elevated rim, map in hand.
She went from room to room along the main oval hallway that ran around the hub. There were doors, and narrow, offshoot hallways on both sides, with arrows and bilingual signs saying where things were. Most of the doors were open, and most of the rooms and other facilities had people in them, doing things. Most of the people who looked up and caught her eye gave her a chilly nod and went right back to whatever had occupied them seconds earlier. I'm a real hit around here, Lilly thought. Nobody asks me if I'm feeling better, or even says hello!
The first place she had checked, right beside the stairs, was the deserted meeting room she'd noticed from the elevated rim last Tuesday, the day she arrived ... five days ago, she pondered ... the same day I got thumped out of the mess hall. “V.I. Exec., 9:00 a.m. to noon,” said a taped-up notice on the door. A dozen or more people were deep in discussion of what seemed to be a business decision—whether to expand V-Insight, the commercial polling service that was one of Victor-E's largest enterprises. Lilly didn't stay at the door long enough to gather more than a general impression—the tenor of the debate had fallen off almost as soon as she'd been noticed.
She had decided to traverse the oval walkway counter-clockwise, so the next section was the enclosed area that housed Sleepery #1, Annette's digs, and the small clinic. She passed by without looking in either, partly so as not to have to deal with Annette, partly to not have to deal with any sick people—she was sick enough as it was.
Several small offices followed, most of which had two or three people working away diligently at MIUs. Then a door sign read “C.Q.E.S.” The small print beneath explained: “Consciousness Quotient Evaluation Service.” A row of twenty-five or thirty advisers, all wearing headphones, sat at MIUs. They were advising clients from all over the world, if the skin color and apparel of the people on the screens was any indication, and in several languages, although mostly in English and French. Lilly knew that Victor-E promoted the so-called “Human Three” perspective on CQ measurement, and she shook her head as she moved on. It's curious ... the way so many non-Evolutionary civilians pay perfectly good money for such frivolous advice ... like the tealeaf readers or palm readers of the twentieth century, she thought. She knew that Victor-E made a shitlaod of income from their C.Q.E. service. “It's like ... snake oil back in the nineteenth century,” she muttered aloud.
Lilly was surprised by how many people were at work on a Saturday morning. She knew that Evolutionaries got a lot of their “outside” business, their non-Evolutionary customers, because of their passion for quality service and their “never-say-no” attitude to any demand that generated cash. “Every day at work translates into an eventual three or four days of retirement for these people,” she'd learned as a teenager as she watched the movement explode in popularity. That was the basic appeal of the thing, and it was a formula that worked. Clearly the workers she was observing didn't need to have a “boss” to motivate them. But then neither do I, Lilly huffed to herself. At least I ... don't think I do.
She came across one large room where she rather expected the door to be locked, or at least closed. It was Victor-E's Netsex service, quaintly called “Soft-E.” There was big money to be made pseudo-tingling long-distance with horny clients the world over, and this clan was not about to pass on such a sure source of revenue. The name of the outfit, “Soft-E,” basically defined the angle. As a clan, Victor-E wasn't really judgmental on the subject of sex, but neither was it tolerant of excess, or weirdness. Inter- or intra-gender orgasms were just fine, and fun, but the approach here was “soft,” a head-tingle as much as a body rush. Fantasy was great, but “cluster-fucking,” bestiality and sadomasochism were out of bounds. How fucking tame, Lilly said in her mind, chuckling at her choice of unspoken words.
The WDA agent walked into the Soft-E operation. A secretary seemed to be guarding the gateway and monitoring all the Netsex activity on a bank of small screens perched on her desk. There was narrow a hallway inside the facility, with a neat row of closed doors on both sides. Each door had a viewing window, about the size of a hand.
"Would you like to take a look, Ms. Petrosian?” asked the fortyish woman, glancing up from her work. She was seated, and had both hands out and upturned, one offering a peek at the bank of screens, the other seeming to indicate that Lilly was welcome to go down the hall and look through the small windows into the rooms. “The windows in the doors are two-way mirrors ... you can see in, but the person inside can't see you."
"No ... thanks anyway,” said Lilly, backing out nervously. Even if most people saw nothing wrong with Netsex, she had never indulged in it herself.
She returned to the oval hallway and passed a few doors that seemed uninteresting, and then came to one that read: “V-Insight—Operations Centre.” She recalled that the polling outfit that Victor-E operated was very profitable, and that it asked questions that some other polling organizations dared not pose. While its commercial clients paid the bills, the WDA knew that this organization also surveyed public attitudes on behalf of Evolution International, the coordinating committee of the Evolutionary movement, and for many of the LUCs, the LieDeck Unbanning Committees that had sprung up around the world. She opened the door and found a man standing there, who had apparently been alerted to her approach ... by those people in the meeting room by the entrance, no doubt. He introduced himself curtly as Jimmy Ball, and told her before she could speak that she was not welcome in the nerve center of V-Insight, although he would happily answer any questions that she might have. She knew he was within his rights to bar her entry unless a reasonable suspicion existed that something illegal might be going on in there. She shook her head and moved along.
She sauntered down the wide oval hallway, quieting her resentment at Jimmy Ball's bluntness, and found herself in front of a door that she'd been expecting, looking forward to. “Kid-Kare,” the sign read. This was where Julia Whiteside worked most of the time, and Lilly was curious to see how her slow-witted “friend” fared in the raising of young Evolutionaries. She opened the door, and walked into a smaller hallway with several doors on each side. At the end, some twenty yards away, the hallway opened on the right into a well-lit change area in which mayhem reigned. Kids who had just returned from an outdoors romp were laughing and running about, throwing toques and scraps of snow at each other and trying not to heed the adults’ admonitions for order and calm. Lilly's head had stopped aching, but she wasn't up to coping with out-of-control children, armed with snow. She walked down the next hallway, at right angles to the first, and tried the door of the first office on the right hand side—no one home. Then she tried several other doors down that hallway, and still, no one. The last door on the right was ajar, and there ... she found life.
She saw Julia in there, talking intensely and earnestly to a young boy. Both had their backs to the door, and there was another woman, dressed in skimpy gym clothes with a towel over her shoulders, standing a bit inside the door, watching the conversation. Julia glanced up. “I'm just looking around,” said Lilly quietly, putting on a forced smile.
The onlooker turned around sharply. “I don't freaking think so!” she barked fiercely when she saw Lilly.
"Mom!” said the boy, who evidently didn't realize his mother had been standing there behind him.
The mother ignored her child and stood her ground
, glaring daggers. Lilly shot her own optical daggers back. What the fuck is your problem? she thought.
"Alice,” said Julia, “I think Lilly was just—"
"I'm in charge when it comes to my son,” snapped the mom, “and I do not need you to—"
"What is your problem?” demanded Lilly. “I was just—"
"OUT!” screamed the mom ... and then she started closing the door on Lilly, giving her the choice of being pushed back or getting out of the way voluntarily.
Lilly stepped back, watched the door bang shut and tried hard to fight the temptation to go back in there and jab an index finger into the mom's eyeball. Jesus H. Christ, she said to herself. These people think they're so cool, so fucking evolved, but they can be as brutish as the worst Normal. That ignorant woman had no reason in the world to treat me like that. Lilly had recognized the mother from her Netsnooping a few days earlier ... Alice Lochlear, she thought ... or Copps ... one of those women that were talking about their kids. “Bitch,” Lilly mumbled aloud to herself as she left the day-care area entirely and continued her “poke-and-sniff” tour of the hub.
The two gyms were next along the main oval hallway, and they were occupied with laughing, hollering basketball players, male and female. She listened in on the first game while staying pretty well out of sight. Evolutionaries made the most of their playtime, and these people were having their fill of rowdy fun. Lilly heard a rhythmic thumping sound she couldn't identify, and stuck her head around the doorjamb. At the far end of the gym, an aerobics class was under way.
The second gym's door was clearly labeled “dress-optional,” and when Lilly saw that several of the men and two of the women were naked—except for shoes and socks—she moved along quickly. She still had her coat on, even though the floor temperature in the bubble was kept at sixty-five degrees Fahrenheit. It seemed somehow ridiculous that any person would want to throw hoops in the raw, especially in winter.