Wild Cards: Inside Straight

by George R. R. Martin

  “Wait. Those look like little wings.”

  “Yeah, there are lots of small fliers. They can be fun.”

  She gave a wan smile. “They don’t look very stable.”

  Mike had noticed that, but not in the view she could see. How did she know? “That’s true, but hardly anything is passively stable. I could take care of that, if you want to match a power supply.”

  She studied the stupid display. “Ah, I see.” The power supplies were visible there, along with obvious pointers to interface manuals.

  “You really could manage the stability?” Another smile, broader this time. “Okay, let’s try.”

  The wings were just tissue flappers. Mike slid a few dozen onto the table top, and started some simulations using the usual stuff from ReynoldsNumbers-R-Us. Xiaowen Xu alternated between querying her laptop and poking her small fingers into the still tinier wings.

  Somehow, with virtually no help from anywhere, she had a power train figured out. In a few more minutes, they had five design possibilities. Mike showed her how to program the fab board so that they could try a couple dozen variations all at once.

  They tossed handsful of the tiny contraptions into the air. They swirled around the room—and in seconds, all were on the floor, failing in one way or another.

  From the far end of the table, Marie Dorsey and her friends were not impressed. “We’re making fliers, too, only ours won’t be brain damaged!” Huh? And he’d thought she was making crawlers!

  Dr. Xu looked at the Dorsey team’s floppers. “I don’t think you’ve got enough power, Miss.”

  Marie blushed. “I—yeah.” Her group was silent, but there was heavy messaging. “Can we use your solution?” She rushed on: “With official credit, of course.”

  “Sure.”

  Marie’s gadgets were making small hops by the time the class bell rang.

  End of class, end of school day. But Xiaowen Xu didn’t seem to notice. She and Mike collected their midges and merged improvements.

  Three generations later, all their tiny flappers were flying. Xu was smiling from ear to ear.

  “So now we put mini-nodes on them,” said Mike. “You did pretty well with the power configuration.” Without any online computation at all.

  “Yeah!” She gave him a strange look. “But you got the stability in less than an hour. It would have taken me days to set up the simulations.”

  “It’s easy with the right tools.”

  She looked disbelieving.

  “Hey, I’m near failing at bonehead math. Look Dr. Xu, if you learn to search and use the right packages, you could do all this.” He was beginning to sound like Chumlig. And this fits with the affiliance! “I-I could show you. There are all sorts of joint projects we could do!” Maybe she would always be one of those deep resource people, but if she found her place, that would be more than he could ever be.

  He wasn’t sure if Dr. Xu really understood what he was talking about. But she was smiling. “Okay.”

  Big Lizard would be pleased, and maybe some money would come Mike’s way.

  And maybe that didn’t matter so much. He suddenly realized he was whistling as he walked. What did matter . . . was a wonderful surprise. He had coordinated something today. He had been the person who helped other people. It was nothing like being a real top agent—but it was something.

  The Radner twins were almost home, but they showed up to chat.

  “You’ve been scarce, Mike.” They were both grinning. “Hey, we got an A from Williams!”

  “For the Vancouver project?”

  “Yup. He didn’t even check where we got it,” said Jerry.

  “He didn’t even ask us to explain it. That would have been a problem!” said Fred.

  They walked a bit in companionable silence.

  “The hole we put in the Pyramid Hill fence is already repaired.”

  “No surprise. I don’t think we should try that again anytime soon.”

  “Yeah,” Fred said emphatically. His image wavered. The slime was still messing his clothes.

  Jerry continued, “And we collected some interesting gossip about Chumlig.” The students maintained their own files on faculty. Mostly it was good for laughs. Sometimes it had more practical uses.

  “What’s that?”

  “Okay, this is from Ron Williams. He says he got it firsthand, no possibility of Friends of Privacy lies.” That’s how most FOP lies were prefaced, but Mike just nodded.

  “Ms. Chumlig was never fired from Hoover High. She’s moonlighting there. Maybe other places, too.”

  “Oh. Do the school boards know?” Ms. Chumlig was such a straight arrow, it was hard to imagine she was cheating.

  “We don’t know. Yet. We can’t figure why Hoover would let this happen. You know those IBM Fellows they were bragging about? All three were in Chumlig’s classes! But she kinda drifted out of sight when the publicity hit. Our theory is there’s some scandal that keeps her from taking credit. . . . Mike?”

  Mike had stopped in the middle of the path. He shrugged up his record of this morning, and matched Big Lizard’s English usage with Chumlig’s.

  He looked back at the twins. “Sorry. You . . . surprised me.”

  “It surprised us, too. Anyway, we figure this could be useful if Jerry and I have serious grade problems in her class.”

  “Yeah, I guess it could,” said Mike, but he wasn’t really paying attention anymore. It suddenly occurred to him that there could be something beyond top agents. There could be people who helped others on a time scale of years. Something called teachers.

  HOW WE GOT IN TOWN AND OUT AGAIN

  Jonathan Lethem

  Here’s a wry but poignant look at an impoverished future America desperate for almost any kind of entertainment . . . and at the down-and-outers desperate enough to provide it for them . . .

  Jonathan Lethem is one of that generation of talented young writers who came along in the ’90s and the Oughts to date, and whose reputation spreads far outside the usual genre limits. He has worked at an antiquarian bookstore, written slogans for buttons, and lyrics for several rock bands (including Two Fettered Apes, EDO, Jolley Ramey, and Feet Wet), and is also the creator of the Dr. Sphincter character on MTV. In addition to all these certifiably cool credentials, Lethem has also made sales to magazines as varied as Asimov’s Science Fiction and The New Yorker, as well as Interzone, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, and McSweeney’s Enchanted Chamber of Astonishing Stories. His first novel, Gun, With Occasional Music, won the Locus Award for Best First Novel as well as the Crawford Award for Best Fantasy Novel, and was one of the most talked-about books of the year. His other books include the novels Amnesia Moon, As She Climbed Across the Table, Girl in Landscape, and The Fortress of Solitude, and two collections of his short fiction, The Wall of the Sky, the Wall of the Eye and Men and Cartoons: Stories. His novel Motherless Brooklyn won the National Book Critics Circle Award in 2000. His most recent book is a nonfiction collection, The Disappointment Artist: Essays. Coming up is a new fiction collection, How We Got Insipid.

  It was summer. Two days before this Gloria and I had broken out of a pack of people that had food but we couldn’t stand their religious chanting anymore. We hadn’t eaten since then.

  “So what do we do?” I said.

  “You let me talk,” said Gloria.

  “You think we could get into town with them?”

  “Better than that,” she said. “Just keep quiet.”

  I dropped the piece of pipe I’d found and we walked in across the parking lot. This mall was long past being good for finding food anymore but the scapers were taking out folding chairs from a store and strapping them on top of their vans. There were four men and one woman.

  “Hey,” said Gloria.

  Two guys were just lugs and they ignored us and kept lugging. The woman was sitting in the front of the van. She was smoking a cigarette.

  The other two guys turned. This was Kromer and Fearing,
but I didn’t know their names yet.

  “Beat it,” said Kromer. He was a tall squinty guy with a gold tooth. He was kind of worn but the tooth said he’d never lost a fight or slept in a flop. “We’re busy,” he said.

  He was being reasonable. If you weren’t in a town you were nowhere. Why talk to someone you met nowhere?

  But the other guy smiled at Gloria. He had a thin face and a little mustache. “Who are you?” he said. He didn’t look at me.

  “I know what you guys do,” Gloria said. “I was in one before.”

  “Oh?” said the guy, still smiling.

  “You’re going to need contestants,” she said.

  “She’s a fast one,” this guy said to the other guy. “I’m Fearing,” he said to Gloria.

  “Fearing what?” said Gloria.

  “Just Fearing.”

  “Well, I’m just Gloria.”

  “That’s fine,” said Fearing. “This is Tommy Kromer. We run this thing. What’s your little friend’s name?”

  “I can say my own name,” I said. “I’m Lewis.”

  “Are you from the lovely town up ahead?”

  “Nope,” said Gloria. “We’re headed there.”

  “Getting in exactly how?” said Fearing.

  “Anyhow,” said Gloria, like it was an answer. “With you, now.”

  “That’s assuming something pretty quick.”

  “Or we could go and say how you ripped off the last town and they sent us to warn about you,” said Gloria.

  “Fast,” said Fearing again, grinning, and Kromer shook his head. They didn’t look too worried.

  “You ought to want me along,” said Gloria. “I’m an attraction.”

  “Can’t hurt,” said Fearing. Kromer shrugged, and said, “Skinny, for an attraction.”

  “Sure, I’m skinny,” she said. “That’s why me and Lewis ought to get something to eat.”

  Fearing stared at her. Kromer was back to the van with the other guys.

  “Or if you can’t feed us—” started Gloria.

  “Hold it, sweetheart. No more threats.”

  “We need a meal.”

  “We’ll eat something when we get in,” Fearing said.

  “You and Lewis can get a meal if you’re both planning to enter.”

  “Sure,” she said. “We’re gonna enter—right, Lewis?”

  I knew to say right.

  I’d never gotten into a town in a van before, but I’d only gotten in two times before this anyway. The first time by myself, just by creeping in, the second because Gloria went with a militia guy.

  Towns weren’t so great anyway. Maybe this would be different.

  We drove a few blocks and a guy flagged Fearing down. He came up to the window of the van and they talked, then went back to his car, waving at Kromer on his way. Then we followed him.

  “What’s that about?” said Gloria.

  “Gilmartin’s the advance man,” said Kromer. “I thought you knew everything.”

  Gloria didn’t talk. I said, “What’s an advance man?”

  “Gets us a place, and the juice we need,” said Kromer. “Softens the town up. Gets people excited.”

  It was getting dark. I was pretty hungry, but I didn’t say anything. Gilmartin’s car led us to this big building shaped like a boathouse; only it wasn’t near any water. Kromer said it used to be a bowling alley.

  The lugs started moving stuff and Kromer made me help. The building was dusty and empty inside, and some of the lights didn’t work. Kromer said just to get things inside for now. He drove away one of the vans and came back and we unloaded a bunch of little cots that Gilmartin the advance man had rented, so I had an idea where I was going to be sleeping. Apart from that it was stuff for the contest. Computer cables and plastic spacesuits, and loads of televisions.

  Fearing took Gloria and they came back with food, fried chicken and potato salad, and we all ate. I couldn’t stop going back for more but nobody said anything. Then I went to sleep on a cot. No one was talking to me. Gloria wasn’t sleeping on a cot. I think she was with Fearing.

  Inside, Ed and the other guy were setting up the gear. They had about thirty of those wired-up plastic suits stretched out in the middle of the place, and so tangled up with cable and little wires that they were like husks of fly bodies in a spiderweb.

  Under each of the suits was a light metal frame, sort of like a bicycle with a seat but no wheels, but with a headrest too. Around the web they were setting up the televisions in an arc facing the seats. The suits each had a number on the back, and the televisions had numbers on top that matched.

  When Gloria turned up she didn’t say anything to me but she handed me some donuts and coffee.

  “This is just the start,” she said, when she saw my eyes get big. “We’re in for three squares a day as long as this thing lasts. As long as we last, anyway.”

  We sat and ate outside where we could listen to Fearing. He went on and on. Some people were lined up like he said. I didn’t blame them since Fearing was such a talker. Others listened and just got nervous or excited and went away, but I could tell they were coming back later, at least to watch. When we finished the donuts Fearing came over and told us to get on line too.

  “We don’t have to,” said Gloria.

  “Yes, you do,” said Fearing.

  On line we met Lane. She said she was twenty like Gloria but she looked younger. She could have been sixteen, like me.

  “You ever do this before?” asked Gloria.

  Lane shook her head. “You?”

  “Sure,” said Gloria. “You ever been out of this town?”

  “A couple of times,” said Lane. “When I was a kid. I’d like to now.”

  “Why?”

  “I broke up with my boyfriend.”

  Gloria stuck out her lip, and said, “But you’re scared to leave town, so you’re doing this instead.”

  Lane shrugged.

  I liked her, but Gloria didn’t.

  The doctor turned out to be Gilmartin the advance man. I don’t think he was a real doctor, but he listened to my heart. Nobody ever did that before, and it gave me a good feeling.

  Registration was a joke, though. It was for show. They asked a lot of questions but they only sent a couple of women and one guy away, Gloria said for being too old. Everyone else was okay, despite how some of them looked pretty hungry, just like me and Gloria. This was a hungry town. Later I figured out that’s part of why Fearing and Kromer picked it. You’d think they’d want to go where the money was, but you’d be wrong.

  After registration they told us to get lost for the afternoon. Everything started at eight o’clock.

  So, like Gloria always says, we killed time since time was what we had.

  Most of the contestants were there already. Anne, the woman from the van, was there, acting like any other contestant. Lane was there too and we waved at each other. Gilmartin was helping everybody put on the suits. You had to get naked but nobody seemed to mind. Just being contestants made it all right, like we were invisible to each other.

  “Can we be next to each other?” I said to Gloria.

  “Sure, except it doesn’t matter,” she said. “We won’t be able to see each other inside.”

  “Inside where?” I said.

  “The scapes,” she said. “You’ll see.”

  Gloria got me into my suit. It was plastic with wiring everywhere and padding at my knees and wrists and elbows and under my arms and in my crotch. I tried on the mask but it was heavy and I saw nobody else was wearing theirs so I kept it off until I had to. Then Gilmartin tried to help Gloria but she said she could do it herself.

  So there we were, standing around half naked and dripping with cable in the big empty lit-up bowling alley, and then suddenly Fearing and his big voice came inside and they let the people in and the lights went down and it all started.

  “Thirty-two young souls ready to swim out of this world, into the bright shiny future,” went Fearing. �
��The question is, how far into that future will their bodies take them? New worlds are theirs for the taking—a cornucopia of scapes to boggle and amaze and gratify the senses. These lucky kids will be immersed in an ocean of data overwhelming to their undernourished sensibilities—we’ve assembled a really brilliant collection of environments for them to explore—and you’ll be able to see everything they see, on the monitors in front of you. But can they make it in the fast lane? How long can they ride the wave? Which of them will prove able to outlast the others, and take home the big prize—one thousand dollars? That’s what we’re here to find out.”

  Gilmartin and Ed were snapping everybody into their masks and turning all the switches to wire us up and getting us to lie down on the frames. It was comfortable on the bicycle seat with your head on the headrest and a belt around your waist. You could move your arms and legs like you were swimming, the way Fearing said. I didn’t mind putting on the mask now because the audience was making me nervous. A lot of them I couldn’t see because of the lights, but I could tell they were there, watching.

  The mask covered my ears and eyes. Around my chin there was a strip of wire and tape. Inside it was dark and quiet at first except Fearing’s voice was still coming into the earphones.

  “The rules are simple. Our contestants get a thirty minute rest period every three hours. These kids’ll be well fed, don’t worry about that. Our doctor will monitor their health. You’ve heard the horror stories, but we’re a class outfit; you’ll see no horrors here. The kids earn the quality care we provide one way: continuous, waking engagement with the datastream. We’re firm on that. To sleep is to die—you can sleep on your own time, but not ours. One lapse, and you’re out of the game—them’s the rules.”

  The earphones started to hum. I wished I could reach out and hold Gloria’s hand, but she was too far away.

  “They’ll have no help from the floor judges, or one another, in locating the perceptual riches of cyberspace. Some will discover the keys that open the doors to a thousand worlds, others will bog down in the antechamber to the future. Anyone caught coaching during rest periods will be disqualified—no warnings, no second chances.”