by Jim Stark
"No,” said Julia far more firmly, “I ... love ... you."
She had been taught to see the world situation as an extension of her own behavior. It was exactly like her decision to have a baby. She had asked herself the question every Human Three was taught to ask at square one: “What would happen if everybody in the world did what I'm doing?” If everybody decides to have only one baby, like I decided, then the population of the whole world goes down by half every generation ‘cause it takes two to have a baby but there's only one baby. If everybody has two babies, the population stays the same—like in ZPG, she remembered—'cause it takes two to have a baby and there's two babies for every two grown-ups. And if everybody has three babies or more, then there's too many people in the world and we can't all have enough to eat and people will fight and die. And if everybody acted like me and worked so that their money could help themselves and help other people too, nobody would need anything they didn't have. And if nobody ever worked, like Becky, then nothing would ever get done. I better explain some new things to Sébastien.
"I showed you my beautiful body ‘cause I knew you'd like that. I put my hands on your arm ‘cause I knew you'd like that. I gave you some real nice donuts and coffee ‘cause I knew you'd like that. I worked lots of time as a waitress in the E-tery and in the day care center to make money so Chantal and Rejean could get stuff for free if they didn't have enough money to pay ‘cause I knew you'd like that. I got two nice boys to help me today and hold their hands and help them find stuff they really need or want ‘cause I knew you'd like that. Rip van Winkle said...” Julia put her hands to her mouth and giggled at the way the nickname she'd given to Victor almost twenty years ago had just popped out. “I mean Victor said that...” She paused to collect herself and remember her point. “Victor Helliwell said we are what we do ... or most of all we are what we do, I think it was ... so you can just look at what I did, and you can figure out who I am, and what I feel, see? I told you what I did, so ... you see? I ... love ... you! Simple as that!"
Sébastien kept his eyes and his attention on the shrinking donut, and wondered how he could communicate with this gorgeous creature with the bent brain. “If you want to do lovey-dovey stuff for me, then you can give me my job back. Victor-E bought the school that I used to teach in back when it was a public school, so why don't you Netlink with the principal over there and tell him to hire me back on?"
"Oh, this is so fun!” squealed Julia. “I'm good at this SST stuff, eh?” she said as she picked her big canvas bag off the floor and rummaged around in it for her Sniffer. “I call this my ‘manly canvas bag,'” she mentioned distractedly. “It was Eric's, this boy I like from the Hydro? I called it his ‘purse’ once, and he said purses are for girls and this was his manly canvas bag.” She used her deepest and manliest voice to say “manly canvas bag,” the way Eric used to do to make her laugh. “And then I said I liked it, so he gave it to me and—oh, here it is!” she said as she located her Sniffer from amongst the rubble.
"What do you mean you're good at this SST stuff?” asked Sébastien as he watched Julia unfold the device. “You're ... actually going to call them up and try to get me re-hired?"
"Well,” explained Julia patiently, “the first part of my job was to find out what you wanted and needed, and I did that ... even though you were cross with me for no reason. And the second part of my job is to get it for you ... what you want or need ... which I'm going to do now ... that's if I can."
Sébastien leaned back in his chair and stared, occasionally at the long, straight blond hair that fell down her front, but mostly at her breasts—or at what he could see of them through the sheets of hair ... especially at the nipples, when they peeked out. This should be interesting, he thought while Julia asked for the principal's office at the Victor-E “3” Primary School—"3” for “Human-Three-oriented."
"You pronounce his name ‘see-fwah,'” explained Julia as she waited for the principal to answer. “It's a funny name, eh?"
"Humph,” said Sébastien.
"Hi, Six-fois,” she said giddily, holding the Sniffer in front of her with both hands. “By the way, how come they call you that anyway? Is that your nickname or a for-real name?"
"Hi Julia,” said Six-fois Bellehumeur patiently. “Didn't I tell you about that before?"
"Maybe,” thought Julia out loud, “but if you did I guess I musta forgot."
"Well,” began Six-fois, “my bioDad traveled a lot ... for his work ... and every few months when he went through Thetford Mines, where my mom lived, they—uh—got together, and after the sixth time, she got pregnant ... with me ... so she called me Six-fois. She thought it was cute. I didn't think so when I was a little boy, but I do now. My mother and I laugh about it all the time. So—uh—what can I do for you, Julia?"
"Oh yeah!” said Julia, blushing slightly from embarrassment. “You did tell me about that before, and I forgot. I think it's cute. My mom used to always call me—"
"Julia,” interrupted Six-fois Bellehumeur, “I'm ... really kind of busy here. Was there something I—"
"There's this nice Normal man,” said Julia, “his name is Sébastien—uh—what's your last name?"
"Roy,” said Sébastien.
"His name is Sébastien Roy, and he's got these two really pretty children Chantal and Rejean, and the mommy went over to England with a rich guy ‘cause Sébastien lost his job teaching at the nice school where you are—before we bought it and changed it into a nice Human Three school—and he needs his job back ‘cause he likes to teach kids and he likes to work but he hasn't got a job now. Can he come over to our school and teach ... please?"
"I remember Mr. Roy,” said Six-fois. “He taught my sister's kids. He was very highly regarded as a teacher. He's—uh—there with you now, I take it?"
"Yeah, he's right here,” said Julia expectantly. “See?” She turned the Sniffer around so it would capture the man's image.
Sébastien Roy nodded and said: “Hello, Monsieur Bellehumeur. Listen, I—uh—just came here to the SST because my children nagged me to death, and this wasn't my idea. She just took out her Sniffer and—"
"Julia!” Six-fois interrupted with unexpected force and authority. “She has a name, and it's Julia Whiteside, and she's a friend of mine, and I love her dearly, and she's got a higher CQ than mine, so when she talks, I listen. Now ... you were saying...?"
Jeeze, thought Sébastien as he reeled mentally, almost physically. He had heard that the late Randall Whiteside had a rich daughter who was mentally challenged and lived somewhere inside Evolution, and ... this is her! “Ms. Whiteside,” he restarted, “just took out her Sniffer and—"
"Just ‘Julia’ is fine,” said Julia. She smiled as she kept the Sniffer pointed at her new friend and signaled him with her other hand to take the thing and carry the ball from here. When Sébastien seemed to balk, she stood up, leaned across the table, and just placed it in his hand. “Six-fois is a really nice man,” she whispered, as if that were appropriate or relevant ... which it was.
Sébastien took the Sniffer and wondered why his attitude sucked. She did love him, sort of, and Six-fois probably was a nice man, and...
"Sébastien,” said Six-fois on the small black-and-white screen, “you are welcome to come over here and help the children learn their mathematics ... you were in maths and sciences, weren't you?"
"Yes,” said Sébastien.
"Well, you're a fine teacher, by all accounts, and we've sure got a lot of kids here who need to learn what you have to teach, and we can never have too many teachers, so there's nothing stopping you from joining our staff whenever you're—"
"The paid staff?” asked Sébastien pointedly.
Six-fois was frustrated. Surely the man watches the Netnews and knows the score, he thought. “Parents send their children here because the paid staff are Human Three,” he explained, “or at least well into transition. Most of our unpaid staff are in transition, and a few of them even have CQs in the two-hundr
ed-plus area—high enough to claim Human Three status if they went to the bother of doing it. So ... as paid positions open up, we'll undoubtedly choose the new paid staff from among the volunteers. If you want to work here on our paid staff, that's how you get in ... by showing us that's what you want to do, by being here. Just come on in and do what you love to do—teach kids—and although any decision to enter transition would be entirely up to you, it wouldn't kill you to at least find out what the hell you're missing. Human Three Consciousness is as real a thing as the chair you're sitting on, Sébastien, not some phony religious belief. In fact it can be LieDeck-verified, for those who really have it, now that the LieDeck has been partially unbanned, and we can LV a person's CQ too. The ball's in your court, my friend. And now, if you'll excuse me, I really do have to get back to my work. I hope you'll join our vibrant little outfit, Sébastien. Bye Julia. Net, down, now."
"See!” said Julia triumphantly as she took the Sniffer back and tucked it back into her manly canvas bag. “He says you're a good teacher and you can go teach there tomorrow if you want. And if you love all the children and the other teachers and the mommies and the daddies and they love you back, you can get paid after a while and be a Human Three person! Isn't that just wonderful?"
"Oh yeah,” muttered Sébastien as his chin flopped onto his sternum. Just fan-fuckin'-tastic, he said to himself as he slurped coffee.
Chapter 67
UNDER YOUR CLOTHES
Friday, April 22, 2033—7:25 p.m.
Annette didn't feel well. It wasn't anything she could put her finger on, like a cold or the flu. Her temperature was normal, but she felt weak, worn out, unmotivated—even utterly “unhorny,” which was unusual for her. She lay on her bed, and wished she could doze off during the day. She could rarely manage that, and on the few occasions when she did, she usually woke up with a splitting headache and had to take a painkiller. And besides, she told herself, I got no time for sleep. I got my stupid “helper” job to do. There were times when she just didn't feel very Human Three. But ... we are ... what we do, she reminded herself. We are, at the very least, what we do.
Since she had taken over the leadership of Victor-E thirteen years ago, she had been allowed to assign her own volunteer hours. Evolutionaries were supposed to do no less than five hours a week, and hers usually consisted of cleaning or cooking or serving food in the mess hall—inward-looking stuff; self-help, really; the Evolutionary equivalent of housework or yard work or taking out the garbage. When Annette was too busy with her clan duties, she did no volunteer work at all, and even when she wasn't terribly busy, she still often did none.
She didn't keep a detailed record, but she figured her productive work in the office gobbled up fifty hours a week, on average. And in a way it's all volunteer work, she had often rationalized. She'd saved the standard forty percent of her income since she had helped to establish Victor-E early in 2016, with her late husband, Steve Sutherland. She had inherited his nest-egg last year when he passed away, and she had her pension from her days at Patriot Security, and she had her own savings which alone were sufficient for her to retire since ... mid-twenty-twenty-nine, she estimated as she turned onto her other side and fluffed the pillow. Her work wasn't so much what she did any more, but who she was ... and she was okay with that. She was still being paid, of course, and she loved her work, plus she had no idea what the hell she'd do with her time if she were to retire.
This new phase 2 regime, though ... that had changed a lot of things. She didn't have to touch her two sizeable retirement funds or draw on her Patriot pension—she was, after all, “well off"—but now, in addition to giving half of their ongoing savings to the SSTs, all participating Evolutionaries now had to do an additional three hours of volunteer work every week in an SST! Financially, it was nothing, but emotionally, Annette minded ... a lot! Her feelings kept coming up with phrases like: “It isn't fair,” or rhetorical questions like: “Don't I give enough already?” In her rather good mind, however, her Human Three Consciousness was as solid as Arctic pack ice—vulnerable to fissuring, but on the whole, quite thoroughly immovable.
In fact, she was awed by the stark simplicity of Victor's phase 2 plan for Evolution—the authenticity, the inescapable, pure logic of the thing! In a few years, she figured, most people on Earth would be Human Three, and the remaining few percent would live in a Human Three world, being served by Evolutionaries. “And the need for Social Service Terminals will kind of disappear,” she recalled Victor explaining in the Diefenbunker.
For centuries, it had been a case of “tough luck” for Human Ones who had to live in the Human Two world. They spent all their days ducking Human Two laws or enduring Human Two law enforcement. Now, with the WDA in global power and the application of LieDeck-verification, everyone was forced to actually conform to minimum Human Two standards and accept an array of Human Two expectations. And soon, Human Twos will be constrained by Human Three laws and mores and expectations, Annette said to herself.
But that was for later. She'd be in her mid-sixties by then, and if she made it to the average life expectancy of ninety-one for women, she'd still spend the last third of her life without the threat or fear of Human Two chaos, and without the oppressive oversight of the WDA! Nice thought, she said to herself as she rubbed her face and pushed herself to a sitting position. But for now, it doesn't get my volunteer SST work done.
She stood in front of her dresser mirror and scrinched up her face at the marginally less chunky body she'd won from hundreds of hours in the gym. Her breasts seemed to sag with fatigue in recent years, and they had little stretch lines in the wrong light. Her stomach was almost as big as her hips, and her hips were too big ... or bigger than she wanted them to be, for reasons she didn't care to explore. She leaned forward, and felt glad that the old bullet scar over her left eye was almost invisible now. Lots of great years left in this old dog, she reminded herself. And that made her smile ... finally.
Annette hadn't actually volunteered for CQ duty, but with the burgeoning, out-of-control international demand for entry into the Evolutionary movement, she knew she'd end up doing at least some of that ... and for free, as part of her SST volunteer work. For several scary weeks after Sheena Kalhoun's now-famous “five-and-a-half-point” Netcast (the “half-point” being her veiled declaration of economic war), there had been a sharp migration out of Evolution—not by those who had already retired, of course, but by those who assumed that Kalhoun's “modest suggestion” would turn out to be a death knell for the movement. There had been a net decrease of more than a million members in a three-week period, a dip of almost half of one percent worldwide—an average loss of one or two people per clan. But in the last few weeks, mostly as a result of Victor's phase 2 plan and its emotional adoption by the world's remaining Christians, the tide had turned, with a vengeance! Kalhoun's attack was backfiring! Many of the Evolutionaries who had fled what they believed to be a “sinking ship” were now sheepishly moving back into their former clans. The latest statistics from Evolution International showed that in addition to these “returnees,” there was also a spectacular—and problematic—influx of three million new applicants. And of course all of these new applicants wanted and needed transition guidance, as well as clans to live in.
A lot of Evolutionaries, including Annette, had even wondered out loud whether they could cope with the pressure of so much success ... even if the goal Victor had suggested was the conversion of ninety-five percent of all humans, she thought. (Actually, Victor had only used the word “conversion” once, and when someone said that it had a religious sound and feel to it, he switched to saying that people just “grew up” or “matured” into Human 3 Consciousness.) Transition wasn't something anybody could rush or shortcut, and most of these new applicants were on rather long lists, waiting for the kind of highly-qualified assistance that Annette was now preparing to give to some anonymous couple. Frankly, she preferred physical volunteer work, the kind that gave her brain a r
est. But ... she had been asked by the CQ Center to handle a transition assignment for this married couple, and she'd accepted. She had even agreed to do the first session “blind!"
The clients she'd been assigned weren't Christians, she'd been told, or adherents of any other faith, and she was truly glad for that. She hated having to explain that the very idea of religious belief was irrational, and a obstacle or hindrance to anyone's attempt to get a grip on reality. Persuading people to transcend their emotional impulses was hard enough without having to do battle with a mythological creature that was defined by the believer as all-powerful. And when those folks get onto a roll of scriptural citations, she considered, well, sensible discourse becomes all but impossible.
She figured she was a pretty good transition guide, but this business of not being able to see the people you were working with, and not being seen by them, and having to put up with pseudonyms and voice-alteration all around ... that was so ... Human Two, she thought. It's hard enough to work with two people at once without having to do it blind. Sure, couples had the right to go at this thing together, but one partner was always light years ahead of the other, and the volunteer often felt more like a 20th-century marriage counselor than a Human Three transition guide. In the case that faced her now, it was even trickier. The wife already was a Human Three—or so she said—and the husband's motivation, Annette had been alerted, might have more to do with clinical depression than intellectual insight. “Oh joy,” she said sarcastically. “Yes, joy,” she repeated as she straightened herself out. At least they're both university-educated, she remembered from her briefing. That may help, although IQ is way over-valued as a predictor of anything important.
The sun stayed up later these days, and the one thing about living in a bubble that really irritated Annette was that Sleepery #1—her “Boss spot"—had no windows to the outside. In the summer, when things usually slowed down, she often traded spots with someone in a normal, detached sleepery, a traditional structure made of anything except Pliesterine. It wasn't summer yet, but she'd already made the move, and now she was ensconced in Sleepery #31, an eight-unit building just east of the hub. Her room had a small south-facing window, and an April sun was lancing through, brightly illuminating one skewed rectangle of hardwood flooring. Her new digs were pleasantly warm on this spring evening, even with the window open.