by John Barnes
There’s no one to call. She has no brothers or sisters, her father disappeared when she was six, her mother is dead, and she hasn’t had a real boyfriend since three months before Passionet hired her and invented Synthi.
There is nobody to call or talk to except Karen, whom she used to work with in the Data Pattern Pool. When Mary Ann got picked at the audition, they swore they’d stay friends, and they really have done a pretty good job of it, considering she could buy Karen’s apartment building every month and never notice, and that Karen has admitted, shyly, that nowadays all her offtime is spent living in Synthi’s head. But it’s only six A.M. in Chicago, and Karen has to work in the morning (they talked about having her work for Mary Ann, as a personal assistant or something, but both of them had the common sense to see that would have destroyed the friendship, and probably Karen with it).
She hasn’t told Karen about the crying jags yet. She knows that Karen will be a little hurt that she’s kept it back.
Well.
She’s up early, and at least they got His Oafishness, Quaz, out of here before she woke up; one thing she never does on offtime is sleep—Synthi gets to do all of that, or rather, as the net shrink explained to her, she falls asleep as Synthi, dreams as Mary Ann, wakes up as Synthi, but gets paid for being Synthi the whole time. Quite a deal.
She goes into the bathroom to wash her face, hoping that will kill the last of the tears this time. It doesn’t. It hasn’t for a few days. Instead, they seem to flow more freely now, as if they will just keep running for the rest of her life.
Well, what did you expect, Mary Ann? Or Synthi? Whoever you are now? She asks the question to the image in the mirror and is no longer sure whether she is speaking aloud or not. You spend most of your time being someone else, how are you supposed to know what she’s crying about?
She turns on the hot water in the sunken tub, then calls room service and orders a huge breakfast that she isn’t sure she’ll eat: eggs, corned beef hash, potatoes, all the plain food that she never eats as Synthi Venture, who takes her experiencers on trips into the exotic world of wealth and power that they will never see, and therefore eats mostly foods they’ve heard about but couldn’t afford or wouldn’t be able to prepare.
As the tub fills, she pulls out her reader and scans through her personal library for something she’d like to read. Another and not surprising difference between them is that Mary Ann reads.
She’s almost cheerful as she settles into the great masses of bubbles and reads the scene at the inn in Bree; by now she knows The Lord of the Rings so thoroughly she can open it anywhere she likes and just read as much as she wants. It may be a waste of time, but it’s her time to waste and this is what she wants. There’s a stack of history books, and a big collection of theatre reviews that follow her around, things she keeps meaning to read, things she used to like, but for the last few months all she’s wanted on her offtime has been The Lord of the Rings, The Once and Future King, and The Picture of Dorian Gray. Each of which she has read at least ten times.
In another hour or two, she can call Karen at work.
There’s a knock at the door and she bellows “Come in!” The bellhop wheels the table in, and she tells him to bring it into the bathroom; this seems to make him a bit nervous, and she realizes he’s probably been experiencing via Rock, Stride, or Quaz, the Passionet reporters she usually works with, and thus has had the experience of being very sophisticated and knowing exactly what to do with this particular naked body in all sorts of exotic settings. The Point Barrow Marriott is not exactly the sophistication center of the universe; the possibility of having Synthi herself, sudsy and naked, demanding breakfast from him, must not have occurred to him.
He’s averting his eyes; it’s almost funny. “I’m under all these bubbles,” she calls out. “You can see my sweaty face and soggy hair but that’s about it.”
“Still feels weird,” he says, moving the food and coffee to where she can reach it.
“I bet it does.” Then on impulse she adds, “My real name is Mary Ann Waterhouse, nobody is recording this, I like to read old books that nobody ever reads anymore, and every time I listen to Haydn’s The Creation I get tears in my eyes.”
He steps back as if he’s afraid she might bite his leg. She remembers what it was like, when she had a regular job, to have mysterious strangers around who might be able to fire her. “It’s okay, when you tell people you served me breakfast, just say I’m a regular person, and use a couple of those things as examples to prove we talked.” She reaches for her purse—risking exposing a breast, but he’s being so careful not to look—and tips him much more than she should. “Who do you experience?” she asks. “Rock?”
He laughs, a funny nervous laugh. “Yeah.”
“Well, if you want more of me, he and I will be paired for a few weeks starting tonight. Quaz is leaving for another assignment.”
“Thanks, I’ll remember that. Um… can I ask… is there one you like better?”
According to Passionet, this is the question she must never answer, but here she is trying to have some kind of conversation with an ordinary experiencer, and now that she thinks of it, it’s also the most natural question in the world. Still, she temporizes…. “Like in what way?”
“Oh, um—” He blushes almost purple. Clearly he did mean that way.
“Well, uh, let’s see. Quaz is very well-informed. Stride is kind of the bad boy of the lot, and he’s rude, but—well, he’s really hot when we’re, you know. He knows a lot about being satisfying. Rock… well, he’s a very warm, down-to-earth kind of guy. I guess there’s more affection there than the other two.”
The bellhop’s eyes are full of gratitude.
“That’s important to you—the being likable part, isn’t it?” Mary Ann asks, hoping to keep the puzzlement out of her voice. “Being likable,” after all, is a pretty basic set of acting tricks, ever since Petrokin developed the Sincere Mode Technique twenty years ago.
“Yeah. I mean, I’d like to be as smart as Quaz, or as—uh, you know—as Stride, but it’s that kind of warm feeling that Rock has around him that… oh, well. I guess you know what I mean. I’d rather have people like me than anything else.” He smiles a little. The way he smiles—quite unconsciously, she’s sure—is a not-quite-right (because it’s just a bit exaggerated) copy of Rock’s Sincere Mode smile.
They talk for another minute or so, and she explains that yes, she really did get to be Synthi Venture just by going to the right audition, but she had six years of acting school before that, and she waited a lot of tables, played in a lot of Equity Showcases, and did a lot of data patterning before she got the break. It’s a nice story, happens to be true, and who knows, maybe he’ll get famous and tell it.
After he goes, she realizes that she is going to eat the whole huge breakfast. It’s not quite as perfect as a big breakfast used to be at three in the morning when they’d just closed and struck a Showcase Uncle Vanya, in a café full of theatre people and Lefties and random street lunatics, but it’s still pretty good, and it isn’t any of the overpriced, overseasoned weird stuff Synthi eats. She finishes breakfast without reading more, and gives herself a good scrub all over. Two hours of her time off are now gone as she towels off.
She looks at herself in the full-length mirror, and damn if she isn’t going to cry again. One problem with XV is that it comes at the experiencer through a thick curtain of emotional gauze; that’s why a melodramatic character like Synthi comes through more clearly, and why newspom, with its acute physical pain and terror, is such a big seller. So there, in the mirror, is the evidence of the “lovemaking” with Quaz the night before. Big blotchy bruises on the perfectly shaped breasts and long scratches from his nails—practically his claws—on her thighs and belly. They gave her a pain block, like they always do, but it doesn’t override the memory of having her jaw forced painfully wide open and him biting her tongue till she bled.
Of course, the experiencers got something
much less intense, and they never knew… or did they? She looks more closely, under the bruises and scrapes, touching where she can feel her soreness like an echo through the pain blocks, and she sees the fine little lines the laser leaves, sees that where a healthy woman with big breasts would have a bit of extra skin, her armpits have been fitted with something that works like a tiny accordion, that the skin where they take marks and scars off her breasts twice a year is a kind of raw, callused pink—she can’t even feel her own long thumbnail scraping it, and her trim and tidy labia show all kinds of scar tissue.
How can anyone get excited by a woman who’s sewn together like a Frankenstein monster?
She lets her mind catch the edges of memory, and she realizes they are in no better shape than she. Quaz has scar tissue visible on his neck from all the biting, and his back, clawed so often by Synthi (and Flame and Tawnee and Giselle… ), looks like he’s been whipped. Rock, Stride, and Quaz all have penises mangled in a way analogous to cauliflower ear. The needle marks from the muscle stimulators are visible all over their arms, chests, and abs.
She has a vision of the Bride of Frankenstein, of sewn-together corpses thrusting and tearing at each other, falling into heaps of mangled parts, and she thinks she may just lose that fine breakfast, but then she draws a deep breath and says, “I am going to demand a vacation, and if they fire me, I will just have to content myself with being richer than I ever thought I could be. But I am not going to do this even once more until they tell me when I get time off, and it’s going to be soon, because I can’t go on doing this. Not until I’m a lot more rested and feel a lot better.”
At that, she breaks down, sobbing so hard that she can feel her Mary Ann Waterhouse muscles wrenching and twisting against her Synthi Venture tummy sheath.
John Klieg is awake early, as always, and by the time dawn is washing over the old Kennedy Space Center spread out below his control tower, he’s rubbing his hands together and chuckling. A naive visitor might think that all the flashing screens around him are part of his pleasure because he is so thoroughly on top of the operations of GateTech, but in fact they are just decorations. Klieg doesn’t even look at them—he pays people to look at them and to think about what’s on them, and for every screen you see here (and for thousands more that are too dull to make good decorations), there are at least a couple of employees who know much more about it than Klieg ever will.
There are also more than a hundred employees who know more about all the screens than Klieg does. If he were his own employee, he’d have to fire himself, he supposes, and the thought makes him smile.
They make a good decoration because most people who’ve been to Kennedy just came out to look at the big plaque that says various lunatics allowed themselves to be shot into orbit on top of barely controlled bombs from here. A few more determined sorts will go out and look at the little plaques on the crumbling concrete or by the partially collapsed gantries and the towers with the DANGER—UNSTABLE STRUCTURE signs, the small plaques that mention names and dates.
But most people don’t come out here at all. To the extent that they know about it, they look, a few times, at the video clips in their history lessons, and what they see, besides rockets rising into the sky on long pyramids of fire, are immense rooms full of screens, screens that somehow, by their sheer numbers, gave the impression that everything was under control and everything was being taken care of. (It must have been an interesting problem in PR, keeping people from thinking of every screen as something that was liable to go wrong and had to be watched all the time, Klieg thinks.) So as the Man Who Bought Cape Canaveral, he has this row of screens here as a sort of trophy, and he puts what he wants on it—and that’s the data that flows through his empire.
“Empire” is not a bad term for it, either, Klieg thinks—and why is he getting so philosophical today? Not that he undervalues getting philosophical either. One advantage he has always had over the competition has been a certain rigorousness of thought that keeps him focused on what he’s actually doing, not on some image of it. He knows in his bones that he is not a captain of industry (in that nothing he does is very much like what the captain of a ship, an infantry company, or a basketball team does), nor a facilitator of work (work does not cause money; getting paid causes money), nor a seeker of vision (you should know where you are going, but if it is anywhere worth getting to, most of the time and effort goes into the trip). No, philosophic clarity has been a key to his life in business, and he doesn’t fall for facile or self-flattering descriptions—not even, usually, for the self-flattery of thinking he is immune to self-flattery.
So he leans back in the big control chair—it reminds visitors of the idea of a “mission commander” and of high achievement, but it also supports Klieg’s bad back—and gives himself permission to let the philosophizing run its course. Perhaps he can learn something.
Alexander wept at the thought of no more worlds to conquer, and Alexander hadn’t conquered nearly as much as he thought he had.
The thought is unbidden. Klieg looks down across his trim body; he’s graying a little and refusing to give in to that. He lets his thoughts wander.
What is it about empire, Alexander, conquest? A very poor metaphor for what he’s done. GateTech is not any of those things. Cold realism led him to put it together, the realization that he knew how to make money in a new way and that the first major corporation on the field would dominate it if it were played right.
Okay, take stock, Klieg, back to basics, he tells himself. GateTech really does four things. One, it studies what research other businesses are doing. Two, it does R&D in those fields and takes out patents as quickly as it can. Three, it forces other companies to pay GateTech for access to the technology they’ve been developing.
Four, it lobbies Washington, Tokyo, Brussels, Moscow, and the UN to maintain the laws that allow it to do that.
He explained it once to a distant cousin’s kid; if he’d been alive at the time of James Watt, he would have sought to patent, not a steam engine, but the boiler and the piston; if he’d been alive in Edison’s day, he’d have sought to patent tungsten wire and glass bulbs; if he’d been around at the beginning of computers he’d have tried to patent the keyboard. And the biggest secret….
Aha. That’s the parallel to empires and Alexander and all that. I’m thinking about the fact that GateTech has never manufactured one object or performed one service for anyone; that’s the secret of our success. We get in their way and make them pay to get us out of their way, that’s all. We function like the ancient empires that didn’t care about local customs as long as taxes got collected. Like Alexander or Caesar, we keep everyone doing what they were doing before, what they would do without us, and we take a cut.
But nowadays a lot of them are defending themselves better. Just last week MitsDoug beat us to patenting the new charge-deformable plastics, and now they can make their damned shape-shifting airliner without paying me a dime to do it. How many billions have I just been done out of?
Don’t get mad, and don’t waste time getting even.
Get ahead.
That was the key. He lost a lot in the Flash, but while other companies spent fortunes suing the banks, trying to get their lost accounts re-created, GateTech merely moved in on every technology needed for data recovery. He made back a lot more than he lost.
He lost a lot when Parti Euro Uno took over and “Europeanized” foreign holdings, but he gained a lot more by taking on every highly skilled Afropean he could after the Expulsion.
For twenty years, a bit of industrial espionage and a little forethought have told him how to get the critical patent six months or a year ahead, just close enough to make them pay GateTech to “infringe.”
He almost laughs aloud at how much thinking he’s had to do. Couldn’t he have just looked at the current business plan and said the time horizon needed to move outward?
Nope. That’s what he pays flunkies to do. “Glinda,” he says, speaking al
oud. He takes two deep breaths, exhales slowly… she will come in . . now.
A door glides open and Glinda Gray comes in. It’s not that she’s been sitting outside waiting for his voice—he wouldn’t pay anyone to do that—or that she’s dropped anything vital to answer his call. She is one of seventeen Special Operations Vice-Presidents, and Glinda was top of the queue of those he hadn’t already assigned to anything specific. But if he’d had to pick the perfect person for this job, it would be Glinda. Two reasons—one, she’s a perfectionist negative-thinking nut. Her report always contains everything that could go wrong.
Two, she never asks very many questions when he throws her at a new job.
She stands in front of him and he mentally describes her the way a TV news broadcast would if she lost her house in a hurricane, got murdered, or wrote a best-seller: a “pretty, blonde divorced mother.” Her skin is freckling and roughening, and he suspects a touch of the needle is keeping the silver out of the gold in her hair. She has a slightly tired look around the eyes and from the way she stands he suspects the pink pumps are already hurting her feet this morning.
She finished her last big project three weeks ago and she always looks a little tense when she’s trying to come up with a new one, because although John Klieg wouldn’t part with her for anything, he can never convince her of that.
“Have a seat,” he says, “this is going to take a while. I’ve got a new priority-one project for you, and I want you to know that if you weren’t at the top of the queue already, I’d’ve jumped you up the ladder to give you this task.”
She nods, firmly, once, and sits down. “Tape on?”
“Yes.”
“Systems please record access highest,” she says, forcefully, and a mechanical voice responds, “Recording.”
Klieg smiles at her, and makes it as warm as he can manage. “I have a gut feeling that we are not working enough long-range stuff, and especially we’re passing up chances to find master patents that will block lots of technologies instead of little patents that jam up just one corporation’s key project.”