Sometimes it's good to know that you aren't the only kid out there. Sometimes we have to have help to remind us who we are. Sometimes it's good to have someone to aid you with all the rituals of growing up, the problems of dealing with friends and rivals, the difficulties of courtship, the decisions of what body to wear and what shoes to wear with it. It's good to have a friend you can count on.
Well, boys and girls, that friend is me.
Q: Do we really have to play gorillaball naked?
A: We tried it in darling little blue velvet suits with knickers, but the lacy cuffs got all spoiled.
Next day the pack meets so that we can practice gorillaball. It's a game that we—mostly me—invented, so now we're sort of obliged to play it.
Our team is called the Stars. Because, let's face it, we are.
We practice in the hills up above Oakland, natural gorilla country. The air is heavy with the scents of the genetically modified tropical blossoms that stabilize the hillsides. We crash through bushes, smash into each other with big meaty thuds, rollick up and down trees, and scamper over the occasional building that finds itself in the way. The birds are stunned into a terrified silence. It's a good practice and we end up with our fur covered with dust and debris.
For a while I forget about Kimmie.
We've got grain cameras floating in the air the whole time and everything is uploaded, available for anyone interested in the gorillaball experience. Shawn will edit the thing tomorrow and make a more or less coherent story out of it. We keep uploading as all fifteen of us pile onto the roof of a tram and head back to our clubhouse, waving to people on the street and hanging over the edge of the tram roof to make faces at the passengers.
Our pack headquarters is in the Samaritain, which is a hotel and which gives us the suite free, because the owners of the apartment like the publicity we bring them. We jump off the tram and bound over the pointed iron fence into the pool area, where we splash around until we get the dust out of our fur, and then we lie in the sun and groom each other till we're dry.
You don't want to smell wet gorilla fur if you don't have to. That's one reason for the grooming. The other is social. We're a pack, after all, and packs do things together.
The grain cameras are still floating around us, maybe a hundred of them, each the size of a grain of rice. No single camera delivers an acceptable image, but once the images are enhanced and jigsawed together by a computer you have a comprehensive picture. We're still flashcasting, and for some reason the world is still interested. The splice on my optic nerve tells me that a couple hundred thousand people are watching us as we comb through one another's hair.
Mostly I groom Lisa. I don't know her as well as I know the others, because she's a year younger and new to the pack. She's a member because her older cousin Anatole has been part of the group from the beginning, and he made a special request. He's the brash self-confident one . . . and Lisa's not. That's about all I know about her, aside from the rumor that she's supposed to be some kind of genius with electronics—even more so than the rest of us, I mean. So I figure it's time I get to know her better.
As I comb through the fur on her shoulders I ask her about what she's studying.
"Lots of things," she says. "But I'm really getting interested in cultural hermeneutics."
Which produced a pause in the conversation, as you might imagine. I imagined tens of thousands of simultaneously calls on online dictionaries demanding a definition of "hermeneutics."
"So what makes that interesting for you?" I say.
"It tells you who created a thing," Lisa says, "and why, and what tools were used, and how it relates to other things that were created. And—" She flapped her hands. "You know, I'm not saying this well."
"Give an example," I urge, because I figured my audience was getting lost.
"Well, look at the headplay Mooncakes. It helps to know that it's a rewrite of an earlier work called The Prodigal, and that in the original the character of Doctor Yau was a parody of a politician of that period named Coswell. And that the character of Hollyhock has to do with a fad of that time called mindslipping, where people deliberately inserted a shunt between the right and left sides of their brain, and programmed it to randomly shift dominance from one to the other."
"So," I say, "that's why half the time she's talking like a machine, and the rest of the time her dialogue sounds like some kind of poetry."
"Right," Lisa says. "But people had given up mindslipping by the time Mooncakes was released, so much of the audience wouldn't understand the character of Hollyhock at all. So instead of Hollyhock being a comment on a contemporary phenomenon, she was just played for laughs in the remake. And though the Doctor Yau character was more or less the same as the original, the references to Coswell are lost."
"Maybe I'll download it and viddie it again with all that in mind."
"I wouldn't bother." She shrugs. "I didn't think it was that good the first time." She looks up at me. "I'd better fix the hair on your head," she says. "If it dries that way you'll look like Vashti the Dwad for the rest of the day."
She crouches behind me and begins to comb my hair. "So it's flashplays you're interested in?" I asked.
"Not usually. Hermeneutics can analyze any artifact—a book, a video, a building. Any cultural phenomenon. The idea is that you start with the phenomenon and work backwards to try to figure out the people and the culture that produced it."
I looked at her. "You could analyze me," I said.
"I could," she said. "But why? You're one of the most analyzed phenomena in the world. Anything I could say has already been said."
"I hope not."
She lowered her eyes. "You know what I mean."
"Yeah. I know. But people say things anyway, even if they're not new."
I shake myself and roll onto my feet and knuckles. I take a breath. What I say now is crucial.
"So has anyone seen Kimmie's flashcast?" I ask.
Just about everyone raises their hands. Lisa didn't, I noticed.
"Let's watch it together," I said. I look at Lisa and wink at her. "See if she has anything new to say."
We roll into the clubhouse. The furniture creaks under our huge gorilla bodies.
People put on headsets or visors or pull their video capes from out of their pockets, and I tell the video walls and the holographic projectors to turn on, and then I look up Kimmie's flashcast and play it. Suddenly Kimmie is everywhere in the room, her image repeated on practically every surface. It's overwhelming.
My breath catches in my throat. I've watched the flash enough times so that I think I've immunized myself, but apparently I'm wrong. A horrible sense of dread seeps into my veins.
So we watch the flash. There's a lot of groaning and laughter as Kimmie offers her revelations. I begin to feel the dread fade. This is a lot better than watching it alone.
By the end people get raucous, and Kimmie's final statements are drowned out by denunciations.
"Hey," I said. "Let's not get angry! This is still someone I have feelings about." I give what I hope is a wise nod. "I know what we should do."
We should pour a bucket of coals on Kimmie's head.
"We should all send a message to Kimmie telling her that we love her," I say, "and that we understand her problems." I picture Kimmie's message buffer filling with millions of messages from my audience.
"And while you're at it," I say with a wink, "tell her that you really like that thing she did with her eyes."
If you're not gorilla, you're just vanilla.
After we'd sent our messages to Kimmie I ask if anyone has any questions. I'm kind of nervous so I roll to my left, end the roll on my feet, and then roll back to my right.
Simple gymnastics are one of the great things about being a gorilla. I'm going to miss that when I'm back in a standard human body.
Cody raises a hand. "Were you really mad at Albert that time?" she asks.
Everybody sort of laughs.
"No," I said. "I was amused. Kimmie was kind of mad at him, though, so maybe she thought I was mad at him, too."
Take that.
I do some somersaults on the Samaritain's deep pile carpets. "Anything else?" I ask.
"Okay," Errol says. "Everyone wants to know if you really took money for wearing the gorilla body."
"I'm not going to answer that right away,"I say. I roll to my left, then to my right. It's important that I get this right.
"What I want to do is ask another question," I say. "Now Errol, you've got your visor on, right?"
"Sure."
"And what brand is your visor?"
He blinked. "Esquiline," he said.
"You like it? You think it's a good visor?"
He shrugs his huge ape shoulders. "I guess," he said.
"What if I offered you money for wearing the visor. Would you take it?"
Errol looked at me. "But I'm already wearing it," he said.
"So what if I offered to pay you for what you're already wearing? Would you take the money?"
He raised his shaggy eyebrows. "All I have to do is wear it?"
"Right."
"I guess I'd take the money, yeah. If that's all there was to it."
"Okay." I look up into the corner of the room where we've got a camera, and with my visor I tell the camera to zoom in on my face, so that I can look right at my audience of millions.
"What would you do?" I ask.
"You've had an eight percent drop in your audience in the last six weeks," my father says.
I put down my forkful of chicken in Hunan sauce.
"It's a blip," I tell him. "It's the part of the Demographic that wasn't interested in being a gorilla."
"The gorilla thing was a mistake," my father says.
Wearily, I agree that the gorilla thing was a misstep.
Wearily, I eat my Hunan chicken.
"The problem is that there aren't any great clothes to wear with a gorilla body," my dad says. "No designer's dressing for the Silverback. Baggy shorts and floppy tees, that's all you had to work with. No wonder you couldn't make it cool."
I wish I could get out of the gorilla body. But I can't, not till after the last gorillaball game.
What happened was that DNAble had sent a vice-president to show me their new body lines. "The Silverback just isn't moving like we thought it would," she said. She looked at me. "It's got a lot of unexplored potential. It just needs somebody like you to show everyone how fun it could be."
I knew right away why the Silverback hadn't become popular, reasons totally separate from the issue of how you fashionably clothe a hairy gorilla. If you want to be an ape, you'd pick a gibbon or a siamang or an orangutan, because those are the ones that can zoom hand-over-hand through the trees. Our pack had already been orangutans, and it was great.
By comparison, gorillas just sort of sit there.
But I needed to start something new. My audience was starting to get bored with my current round of parties and clubs and clothes.
"I'll think about it," I said. Already the first thoughts of gorillaball were stirring in my subconscious.
The flattery worked—Only You can save us, Sanson!
The VP looked at me again. "I'm authorized to offer you inducements," she said. "If there's a big uptick in gorilla body sales, we can arrange for a bonus."
I didn't answer right away.
But what really happened wasn't quite what I told the pack by the pool. Real life is more complicated than you can express on video.
"Want some more fish?" I ask my dad.
"Thanks."
My dad's body is tall and wiry, and at home he dresses in khakis, very immaculate, as if at any moment he might be called upon to sell something and needs to look his best. He's cooked this whole Chinese meal, with sticky rice in lotus leaves and steamed fish and Hunan chicken and orange peel beef, and since my mom is delivering a lecture series in Milan there's only the two of us to eat it. Huge platters of food cover the antique oak table between us.
Fortunately the gorilla body needs a lot of feeding.
"We've got to figure out a way to grow the Demographic," my dad says.
"The Demographic" is what my dad, the marketing whiz, calls my audience. Every product, according to him, has a "demographic" that forms its natural consumers, and his job is to alert that demographic to the existence and alleged superiority of the product.
By "product," he means me.
My dad's audience has to be alerted by stealth. Nobody has to look at advertisements if they don't want to. In my Media and Society classes I learned that broadcast media used to be full of adverts, but they're not anymore because people can download their entertainment from other sources. You see holograms and posters in stores and public places, but every other form of advertising has to be sneaky. It has to disguise itself as something else.
My dad is a specialist in that kind of advertising.
If you're my age you grow up suspicious. When you see something new you wonder if it's genuine or a camouflaged advertisement for something else.
That's why Kimmie's revelation could be trouble for me. If I turn out to be nothing but an advertisement for DNAble, then the Demographic might never trust me again.
The numbers are important because they can turn into money. Even though my flashcasts are given away free, I get paid for an occasional fashion shoot, or an interview, or for appearing on broadcast video. Darby's Train and Let's Watch Wang may be silly comedies, but they pay their guest stars very well.
Fortunately I don't have to do any acting on these programs. I appear as myself. I walk on and all this insane comedy happens around me and in the third act I deliver a few pearls of wisdom that solve the star's problem.
Which means I'll be starting my adult life with a nice little nest egg. I won't be rich, but I'll be ahead of the average twenty-year-old.
"So how do we grow the Demographic?" I ask my dad.
"A new love interest always produces a bounce."
"So do babies," I say, "but I'm not going to start one now."
He grins. "Okay. The Demographic is growing older. You need to give them a more mature product. More mature clothing choices, more mature music . . . "
I want to tell him that my tastes are my tastes, and they've done pretty well for me so far.
Eight percent.
I've got to do something, I think.
We all know how lucky we are. There aren't any wars anymore. There's no permanent death. Nobody has to get old if they don't want to. There's no poverty, except for a few people who deliberately go off to live without material possessions and eat weeds, and they don't count. There are diseases, but even if one of them kills you, they'll bring you back.
Our elders have solved all the big problems. The only things left for us to care about are fashion, celebrity, and consumerism.
And the pursuit of knowledge, if that's the sort of thing that appeals to you. The problem being that you'll have to do a few hundred years of catching up before the elders will pay you any attention.
We can change bodies if we like. You lie down in a pool of shallow warm water that's thick with tiny little microscopic nanobots, and the bots swim into your body and swarm right to your brain, where they record everything—every thought, every memory, every reflex, everything that makes up your self and soul. And then all this information is transferred into another body that's been built to your own specifications by another few billion nanobots, and once a lot of safety checks are made, you bound out of bed happy in your new body, and your old body is disassembled and the ingredients recycled.
Unless you want something unusual, the basic procedure costs less than a bicycle. Bicycles have moving mechanical parts that have to be assembled by hand or by a machine. The nanobots do everything automatically, and are powered by, basically, sugar.
Our custom brains are smart. We don't have to deal with stupid people or the messes they cause. We do have to cope with a bunch of hyper
-critical geniuses nitpicking us to death, but at least that's better than having a bunch of morons with guns shooting at us, which is what people in history seemed to have to deal with all the time.
Within certain limits our bodies look like whatever we want. Everyone is beautiful, everyone is healthy, everyone is intelligent. That's the norm.
But where, you might wonder, does that leave you? Who are you, exactly?
What I mean is, how do you find out that you're you and not one of a bunch of equally talented, equally attractive, equally artificial thems?
How do you find out that you're a person, and not some kind of incredibly sophisticated biological robot?
You find out by exploring different options, and by encountering challenges and overcoming them. Or not overcoming them, as the case may be.
You learn who you are by making friends, because one way of finding out who you are is by figuring who your friends think you are.
Your friends can be the kind you meet in the flesh. If you live in the Bay Area, like me, there are eight or nine thousand people under the age of twenty, so odds are you'll find some that are compatible.
You can make the kind of friends you only meet electronically, through shared interests or just by hanging around in electronic forums.
Or you can work out who you are by watching someone else grow up and struggle with the same problems.
If you're my age or a little younger, odds are that someone else would be me.
I check out the messages that have been flooding in since the last flashcast. The artificial intelligence in my comm unit has already sorted them into broad categories:
• I'd take the money.
• I wouldn't take the money.
• I wouldn't take the money, and if you did you're evil.
• I hate Kimmie.
• I hate you.
• Gorillas are lame.
The Green Leopard Plague and Other Stories Page 37