There's always seemed to me to be something morbid about the fetishization—by extremists, even by some Western pacifists—of the natural world in its mythic virgin state. Not to get philosophical, but man's always been a creature apart from, and above, the other life of the earth, a creature destined to remake the world in his own image just as God made man in His own image—and thus a creature destined to remake the world in God's image. Whatever we imagine, God's imagined first. If you don't believe that, you don't believe in God. That man would repaint the sky, that he'd fill it with his own colors, his own designs, was inevitable from the moment he discovered SuperLight. But apart from questions of man's destiny, the fact is, everything's got to change, or die, or become new. Before the banners—and Dad's colorstorms—the skies, at least in the cities, were just ceilings of smog. To prefer that featureless, shit-brown, smothering pollution to my father's electric palette is simply to prefer deadness and decay to the possibility of life.
In a similar way, I think, to reduce Dad's art to "marketing"—as he himself was willing to do, but impishly, as I said—is to be willfully obtuse. What were Michelangelo and Raphael, if not marketers? Marketers in the employ of the Pope. People forget that after Dad had finalized his patent on the Imitation of Life engine, there was no need for him to work again; his wealth was fixed for life. What he did for CFG—the swooshes and colorstorms and robotic eyes—he did only because of his obsessive need to create, to commune and converse with the world, celebrate and enrich the life around him. If he tethered his work to Prudential Investments and Fuck Body Spray, it was only because without those sponsorships, his achievements would never have been technically possible—and the first and ultimate imperative of any artist is to create; he has To make his art, whatever the terms. Dad's stuff on Rapa Nui—and at the Taj Mahal, the Forbidden City—was controversial, really, only among the kinds of people who believe, naively, that ideas like "France" and "Japan" are intrinsically more noble, more authentically human, than "Apple Computers" and "Toyota"; that the rules that govern and define our achievements are immutable and unchangeable; that it's not for us to dictate the terms of our own evolution.
But I'll tell you a story—something from a Session not too far back—that connects a few of the ideas I've been talking about, and gets at some of the ways in which my Dad's career, ostensibly so different from my own, converses with my work as an interrogator.
This is the early winter of last year. We're on week three with one of the Islamabad captures. Ali's knuckles are gone; we're moving to dental.
The Objective's not important to this story. Something involving Ali's mom; she's hiding somewhere in Brunei. Ali swears he doesn't know where she's hiding, but it's clear he does. And in the end, a few weeks after the stuff that I'm describing here, he did give us what we needed, and we were able to bring the mother in.
Right now I'm in his mouth with the finest drill, going straight down the middle of every tooth, one after another. That's how we do it: one pass through each tooth with the finest drill bit, and then we stop and interrogate. Then another full pass with a bigger bit, and more questioning. We call them Rinse-and-Repeats. Ali's on a cocktail, now, of Sharpener and Nurturer, which makes the drill work like a light switch: when it's going in, Ali's pain is at the human maximum; the second we stop, he's on cloud nine.
We're on the first pass—I'm entering an incisor—and all of a sudden, Ali's teeth, all of them at once, begin to spray. Eight or nine of them: these fine, crisscrossing sprays arching straight up in the air from the holes in his teeth. Like we'd struck oil.
You ever seen this? I say, sort of to the room. No: nobody's ever seen it. We're all just fascinated, observing this phenomenon. The blood loss is minimal, but the spray is getting pretty far, inking Ali's bib, turning it a very pale pink. Something about this image seems familiar to me—déjà-vu-type familiar—and then I figure it out: Ali looks disconcertingly like the heads from Pier Pierson's Geysers bodywork. From thirty years back. Pierson was the guerilla artist and serial killer who plastinated his victims' heads and installed them, rigged with lights and fountains, in public spaces. A twisted descendant, in some ways, of my father—but let's not start down that road right now.
What's Ali's drug situation? I finally think to ask my Technician.
Euphoric, the Technician says. He's drifting.
I wavered. Let him drift, I finally said. Ali was a CI, I should add, and also just a kid: fourteen, if even that. It wasn't going to hurt to let him float around for a few minutes.
And as he floats, Ali starts smiling—his eyes narrowing like this is the happiest he's ever been. As I'm sure it is. That's one of the uncanny things about this job: in moments like these—and at the end of long sessions, when we inject the Nurturer—our guys have never felt so good in their entire lives.
For a long time, then—a mysteriously long time—we all just stood around Ali and watched. One of my PFCs took off her goggles, and I didn't reprimand her. A little later—it's obvious in retrospect—we figured out the mist from Ali's mouth was leaching Nurturer into the air; that's why we were feeling giddy, and why, for a short time, I was almost hypnotized, was actually seeing rainbows reaching into the room from Ali's mist. At the time, though, it seemed to me that it was just something about the strange sight of that fountain of pink, its queer resemblance to the Pierson heads, that was making me feel this way. Ali, meanwhile, is smiling so hard—so happy—that he's started to cry.
In moments like these—when art intrudes, unexpected, like a ghost—it's easy for me to think that my father is speaking to me. That he's reminding me of why I'm here.
I don't deny the truth of men like Muhyi Al-Din—of the men who've spent, and will spend, their last long years in my interrogation Chairs: there can be heroism in destruction—heroism, as well as art. There was art in my father's murder—in the transformation of a major American city into a primordial swirl of liquid color—just as there was art in my CI's smiling face, the gentle sprays of blood. But it was a destructive art.
My father, who could never have aligned himself with the destroyers, was blessed by his opportunity to stand with the creators. That's the American opportunity, isn't it? And that's the opportunity I fight for here. All of us. We're fighting for the triumph of a civilization that lets its heroes be creative heroes. My own destiny, determined from the day my father melted into color like one of his own brilliant creations, is to stand against the destroyers by becoming a destroyer myself. The sacrifice is worthwhile only if we win.
Twenty thousand years from now, when people marvel, as they will, at father's Apple, nobody will see an advertisement for a laptop or a phone; when they see the apple, they'll assume, perhaps, that the shape had some religious significance, or maybe they'll conclude that it was chosen for its inherent aesthetic properties. And what will they be able to think, if not that the people who lived here at this time, however primitive, were a questing people, reaching through their blindness, and the limitations of the real, in an attempt to touch the divine?
And it was these kinds of thoughts, sentimental and a little grandiose, that cycled through my head as, drunk on Nurturer and surrounded by rainbows, I laughed and cried with my Innocent Ali.
Just Do It
by Heather Lindsley
Heather Lindsley's short fiction has appeared in Asimov's Science Fiction, Greatest Uncommon Denominator, and Strange Horizons. This story first appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, was reprinted in Year's Best SF #12 and Escape Pod, and has been translated into Polish and Romanian. Lindsley is also a graduate of the Clarion Writers' Workshop.
As America's largest chemical company, DuPont is best known for its work creating fibers like nylon, Kevlar, and Teflon. . . and for developing CFCs, the refrigerants responsible for the hole in the ozone layer. But beyond its products, DuPont has given society a special gift. In 1935, DuPont adopted the slogan "Better things for Better Living. . . Through Chemistry. " Other advert
isers and cultural figures immediately jumped on this slogan, creating the infamous phrase better living through chemistry.
Chemistry has a bad rap these days. The late twentieth-century is riddled with environmental and health disasters stemming from human abuse of chemistry. From thalidomide babies to endangered eagles, it's difficult to see a good side of the chemical industry.
And our next tale turns a scathing eye upon it. Lindsley says "it's about desire and how easy that is to manipulate. But I'll go a bit further and say I was also thinking about the ongoing conflict between doing the right thing and doing the comfortable, pleasurable thing. It's about having a compelling excuse to take the easier, ethically questionable path. To just do it and blame somebody else's chemical. "
Sometimes the only warning is a flash of sun on the lens of a sniper's scope. Today I'm lucky enough to catch the mistake.
Funny, I think as I duck down behind the nearest parked car, I don't feel lucky.
The car is a tiny thing, an ultra enviro-friendly Honda Righteous painted
an unambiguous green. Good for the planet, bad for cover. Ahead there's an
H5 so massive and red I first take it for a fire truck. The selfish bastard parked illegally, blocking an alley, and for that I'm grateful.
I take a quick look at the roof of the building across the street before starting my dash to the Hummer. Halfway there a woman in plastic devil horns steps into my attempt to dodge her and her clipboard.
"Would-you-care-to-sign-our-petiton-in-favor-of-the-effort-against-ending-the-Florida-blockade?" Damn, she's good. She sounds like she trained with a preBay auctioneer.
I feint left and dart right, putting her between me and the Shooter and countering, "I-already-signed-it-thanks!" so she won't follow. It's not the first lie I've told today, and it's not likely to be the last.
Temporarily safe behind the Hummer, I lean against the heavily tinted windows of the far back seat door, glad to be standing upright but panting and sweating and wishing I wasn't wearing the black jumpsuit I reserve for funerals and job interviews. Nanofiber, my ass—it can't even keep up with a little physical activity on a hot April day.
I start the long walk toward the front bumper, figuring I'll duck into the alley and continue on my way one block over. It seems like a good plan until another Shooter steps out of the alley.
This one has a pistol. I'd go cross-eyed if I tried to look down the barrel.
"Oh, come on," I say, backing away slowly. "Not the face. "
He dips the barrel down a bit. I sigh and start pulling the zipper at the high neck of my jumpsuit in the same direction. I stop just shy of revealing cleavage—I'll get shot in the face before I give this punk an eyeful.
He shrugs and fires.
"You little bastard!" I yell at his retreating back as I pull out the dart out of my forehead. "I want your license number!"
Of course he doesn't bother to stop. They never do.
The itching starts almost immediately, and I reflexively reach up and touch the bump above my eyes. I know better than to scratch it, but I do anyway. The scratching releases a flood of chemicals that create a powerful and specific food craving. I brace myself.
French fries. French fries from the den of the evil clown, where they don't even pretend to use potatoes anymore. I hate those french fries, so golden and crispy on the outside, so moist and fluffy on the inside—
No no no no no, I do not want them.
I manage to get past the first shadow the clown casts on my route with relative calm, but by the second the itching is more intense and all I can imagine are french fries. Disgusting, nasty, tasty, delicious french fries.
This is not the way to walk into a job interview.
The site of my two o'clock appointment looms in the office tower ahead. . . right behind a third opportunity to relieve the craving. I keep moving, trying not to think about how well the diabetes-inducing corn syrupy sweet ketchup complements the blood pressure-raising salty savor of the fries.
I make a full circuit through the revolving doors of the office building before going back toward the object of my involuntary, chemically-enhanced desire.
The food odors pounce immediately and I can almost feel the molecules sticking to my clothes. Even if I turn around now I'll smell like fast food.
"Let's get this over with," I say unnecessarily to the credit scanner, staring it down until it greenlights my ability to pay for food I don't really want. None of the automat compartments contain fries, which is unusual, so I punch hard at a picture of french fries on the order panel. The dents in the panel tell me I'm not the only customer who feels antagonistic about buying food here.
It shouldn't take more than a minute or two for the fries to appear in a compartment, so when they don't I start pounding on the automat.
"Hey, hurry it up!" I yell, scratching furiously at the bump on my forehead.
The back door of the empty fry compartment slides open. An eye stares out at me.
"What?"
"Fries. I need fries. "
"We're out of fries," the voice behind the automat says.
"How can you be out of fries? You've got Shooters out there making people crave the damned things!"
"That's why we're out. "
"Doesn't the head office coordinate this stuff?"
The eye blinks twice and the door slides shut.
It's 1:47, enough time to go back to the second place if I hurry. But I don't hurry. I pace in the street, muttering to myself like a lunatic. It's almost five minutes before I quit trying to control the craving and dash back the way I came.
I give the next credit scanner an especially dirty look, then yank open the one compartment with fries. I stop only to pump blobs of ketchup from the dispenser. On my way out I pass an old man scratching his arm as he raves through an open compartment, "How can you be out of fish sandwiches?!"
"Try the one on third and Pine," I say around a mouthful of fries.
CraveTech's offices are both plush and haphazard, the combined result of a record-breaking IPO and the latest design fad: early dot-com retro. I arrive sweaty, greasy, nauseated, and thoroughly pissed off. I smile at the receptionist anyway, a fashionably sulky blonde boy seated in a vintage Aeron chair behind a desk made out of two sawhorses topped with an old door and a crystal vase.
"Alex Monroe. I have a two o'clock with Mr. Avery. "
"Two o'clock?" he says pointedly. It's 2:02. "Have a seat. Something to drink while you're waiting?"
"Water please. " I'll probably retain every ounce. Damn salty french fries. There are pills that reduce bloating, of course—they sell them out of the same automat—but I wouldn't hand over any more of my money.
I've just taken my first sip when a young man pops out of the office. He looks like a typical startup manager: handsome, well-dressed, and almost certainly in over his head.
"Ms. Monroe, welcome!" He bounds up to me, hand extended. During the handshake he nods toward my forehead. "Ah, I see you use our products!" He laughs heartily at his own joke. I laugh back. I want this job.
"It's a wonderful time to be in chemical advertising, Ms. Monroe," he says, shepherding me into his office. I notice he has a proper desk. "We have some exciting deals in the works. Exciting, exciting deals. "
"Really?" I say, distracted by the fry-lump in my stomach.
"Oh, yes. Now that the Supreme Court has reversed most of those class action suits, Shooters don't have to be stealthy. We've had to discontinue the tobacco lines for the time being, but otherwise it's open season on consumers. "
I make another effort to join in his laughter, and reaching toward the bump on my head add, "It certainly is effective. "
"Indeed. " He smiles like he loaded the dart himself. "So," he says, picking up my resume,"I see your background is in print. "
"Yes, but I've done some work in fragrance influence, and I'm very interested in chemical advertising's potential. "
"Well, it is a growing field, plenty
of room for trailblazers, especially with campaigns as impressive as these. " He sets my resume aside. "And of course we still have quite a lot of synergy with print. " He pulls an inch-long Crave dart out of a drawer and drops it on the desk between us. I resist the urge to cringe at the sight of the wretched thing.
"What do you see?" he asks.
I want to say a menace, but instead I tap the delivery barrel and give the context-appropriate answer. "Unused ad space. "
Suddenly he's a schoolmaster who has finally found a bright pupil in a classroom full of dunces.
"Exactly, Ms. Monroe. Exactly. No square millimeter wasted, that's what I say. " He leans across the table and whispers conspiratorially, "We're looking at co-branding an AOL-Time-Warner-Starbucks Lattepalooza Crave with a Forever Fitness session discount. "
"Wow. "
"Yes. Coupons on the darts. How does that grab you?"
"Coupons. "
"Tiny coupons, like the ones on swizzle sticks. Can't you just see it? You get Stuck, so you want the product, but you're also concerned about your weight. The coupon helps. The coupon tells you the provider cares about your concerns. It tells you they understand. " He leans back in his chair, my cue to speak.
"Interesting. But I'd go log-in rebate rather than immediate discount. Same message, same coverage, easier on the bottom line. "
He leans forward again. "I like the way you think, Ms. Monroe. "
I hate meeting at Sandra's house—her cats are constantly trying to climb up on my lap, I suspect because they know I'm allergic to them. But Sandra is my best friend from college, and also my cell leader, so I usually end up here
at least once a week.
"Whoa, right in the forehead," she says when she opens the door.
"Yeah, and that's an ugly one on your neck. "
"That's a hickey. "
"Oh, uh, sorry. Or congratulations, I guess. "
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