by Mason Adgett
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I was watching a news article on the wall 3V when I got the call from my brother on my cell. I paused the V and patted my cell onto my lash. When the image focused I could see he was in his office. I recognized the huge painting of Beethoven that hung behind his chair. I couldn’t see him, just the painting, which meant he hadn’t even bothered to put the cell on his eye, just left it sitting there on the desk.
“Hey, did you see the show this week?” he said.
The show he meant was Lewis Gregory, Private Investigator. Due to the surprise success of his new reality feed, my brother Lewis had recently become the most famous private detective in the Dallas-Houston polyplex. I hated his show – I considered it an embarrassment to the Gregory name – but I didn’t have the heart to tell him so.
Anyway if I did it would have done damage to my income. Lewis wasn’t just family, he was also my most frequent employer (among too many) and so it would hardly have been in my best interest to avoid taking part in his newest enterprise. But it was not my favorite gig. I hate publicity, I’m not fond of souped-up reality feeds, I don’t like being noticed, and nowadays working for Lewis meant having a 3V crew constantly at my back.
Still I answered the phone because there was a good chance there was a job in it and I needed the jobs to come as frequently as the bills did.
“I haven’t watched it yet,” I said. I hadn’t intended to.
“I’m going to send it to you,” he said. A moment later his shoulder appeared in the picture, then my cell pinged and a notification flew by my peripheral vision. I swiped it off-screen.
“I’m watching the news,” I said. “You do realize how close we are to electing this ass, right?”
“Who?” he said. “Curry?”
I sighed. “No one is going to vote for Curry. I mean Krumb.” I personally didn’t think he was civilized enough for the position of Earth’s Arbiter of Civilization.
“Yeah,” he said. “He’s got Darby’s vote.”
“You’re not voting for him, are you?” I asked, appalled.
“I’m not voting,” he said. “You can’t trust any of them. It’s all rigged. Civilization will pick whoever they want and say we did it. I don’t know why you even worry about politics. Have you at least heard who I had on the show? It’s not like you’ve filtered me out of your feed.” He laughed, then paused uncomfortably, then laughed again. “It got over ten million replays in the first hour.”
“Great,” I said. “That’s really great. I’m proud of you.”
“Just turn it on,” he pleaded.
I rolled my eyes – figuring he wasn’t looking at his screen anyway – and flicked towards the wall to replace the news with my cell display. I tapped my temple to pull up my messages. His was the only one unread since I was fairly religious about keeping up with my communications.
“Do I have to watch the whole thing now?” I asked. “Or can I start it in the middle?”
He stood up and put his cell on solely so he could give me a wounded look and see if I felt any shame. I didn’t.
“Just watch it,” he said. But now that I could see him I took a moment to admire his hat. I couldn’t see the top of it, it just kept going and going like the electric rabbit. In a rare moment of acuity he read my expression and touched the metal brim of it proudly. “Do you like it? It’s a Wurlit Top Popper.”
“Obviously,” I said.
“Pretty neat, right? It’s a hologram. Goes as high as the ceiling if I want.”
“I’m sure you stand out in a crowd.”
“I know,” he beamed.
I hit play on the video and pushed the slider past the credits, then shoved another three minutes or so out of the way for good measure and ended up in the middle of an argument between Lewis and his full-time assistant and bodyguard Mike. I jumped another thirty seconds because I don’t like drama. Now I was in the middle of Lewis telling the audience how he liked to work. He gave no specifics but repeated his favorite phrase a few times, “from the outside, in.” Yep, that’s how Lewis worked: “from the outside, in.” Emphasis on the comma.
Don’t try to work out what it means. Having known Lewis his whole life, I can promise you it means nothing. He acted like he really believed “outside, in” represented some kind of method but I suspect he knew better which is why he called me in anytime things got even remotely complicated. “Legwork,” he called it but it really meant “watch my back and make sure I don’t screw this up.”
When I pushed another minute into the video I realized why he had called me. A close-up filled the screen, a face I recognized immediately. Anyone would have: India Phoenix, celebrity socialite, heiress, society ingénue. She was one of those rich celebrity girls who didn’t do anything at all but still everybody constantly needed to know what she was doing.
“Keep watching,” Lewis said. “She’ll come on in a minute.”
“You mean India?” I said.
“You skipped ahead!” he objected.
The video cut to show her full entourage: two beefy security guards and an old lady in a purple skinsuit with a hat to rival Lewis’s, only hers was no hologram. They were all seated in the luxury couch that curled around his desk. “She’s a client?”
“Just listen to it,” he said.
So I turned my attention back to the video. The camera stayed on India – a good choice – but it was the old lady who was talking. I listened with one ear while my eyes took in Phoenix. She wore a satiny robe with a black lace fringe that clung to her curves, highlighted by some kind of accentuator that created a soft glow where it touched bare skin. It probably cost more than my entire life up to this point.
She was way more attractive than she deserved, I thought. Despite her looks I had never really liked her. She came from the kind of centuries-old money I despised and she always wore a pouty half-frown like someone had stolen a lick of her ice cream. Hers was probably the most famous pout in the solar system.
Anyway, the old lady was saying, “We trust him, of course. But a family such as ours must protect its interests.”
The video cut to Lewis, who nodded. “Of course, of course. The integrity of your name.”
“We must be very cautious about our connections,” the old lady said. “Vavaka loves India deeply but any time two such important families unite business interests can become complicated.”
I paused the vid. “Okay,” I said to Lewis, “I knew she was getting married. She’s hiring you? To do what, investigate his family?”
“Background,” he said.
“She’s marrying an alien,” I said, thinking aloud, repeating something I had only recently heard. I skipped most gossip vids but it was a trending topic even in the news. I just hadn’t realized the info had come from Lewis’s show.
“Gobo,” he said. “It’s a gobo. You know gobos?”
I was somewhat familiar. “With the funny eyelids,” I said.
“His name’s Vavaka. He owns U-Ship.”
That was something. Since U-Ship was the largest shipping company on Earth I had always figured it was Earth-based. Just goes to show there’s a lot I don’t know. I had rented their hover-trucks the last two times I had moved but all I knew about them was the single day price for a three meter glider: $318.
I knew only slightly more about gobos in general, who had started to show up on Earth pretty commonly in the last five years or so. Asitot was about ten years behind us in star-travel. I paid a lot of attention to alien immigration, especially when it came to nucleites (organisms evolved on the nucleotide), not because I was worried about an alien takeover – many still feared such things – but because I
was fascinated by the variety of human-like life that cropped up in all corners of the universe. Not all nucleites were human-like, of course, just like all animals don’t necessarily have arms, legs, or eyeballs. What I found intriguing was the homogeny of the variety – if such an oxymoron may be considered – in that where there were nucleites there were primates and arachnids and amphibians and cetera. I read all the writings of the higher organisms on the subject as soon as they were translated, which didn’t happen as often as you might think in a universe so vast. Since nucleites struggle with the complexity of languages used among the completely different hive-like and trans-dimensional minds of bosonites and leptonites their work hardly ever makes it down to the lower languages. Humans, a tier-4 nucleite, don’t even really have a reason to read the philosophies of, say, the Copwul meld system, which I think is considered a single tier 3 bosonite. I know I should probably leave these distinctions to scientists and if any such are reading this I apologize. I may have mixed up the Kent-Stark classifications levels.
Anyway, I said to Lewis, “You’re going to Asitot?”
He said, “Well...”
And there it was. You didn’t have to square r and multiply by pi to draw a circle around where he was headed. Lewis leave Earth? You could barely get him to leave Houston.
“So,” I said. “You want me to go to a distant star that I’ve never been to and dig up dirt on a powerfully connected alien at the request of some celebrity rich kid.”
“It’s India Phoenix!” he said.
He did have a point. Honestly it sounded right up my alley.
For fifteen minutes we haggled over my pay – I felt I was worth at least as much as a U-Ship hover glider. We settled on slightly higher per diem and I agreed to take the case.
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Reality 3V shows are not generally as real as they would have you believe. Was Lewis a real private detective? Yes. Were the events shown in the feed real events that transpired in his life? To a degree. But most of what was shown were re-enactments and souped-up stagings of things that had already taken place.
That was the thing that bothered me most about working with Lewis nowadays: all the acting.
I met with India Phoenix the next day, January 14, 2166 (a Tuesday). We talked initially for about twenty minutes, all of it recorded on multiple video streams. India wanted to play it back right away (as did Lewis) so we sat through that. This led to all kinds of “great ideas.” India – who as one of the premiere body actresses on Earth was certainly no stranger to constructed entertainment – was game for another shoot and re-writes were managed on the fly by India’s manager (the old lady from the video) and Lewis with occasional input from India. I kept my thoughts to myself and delivered all my lines as I usually do – dry with an emphasis on diction. Lewis tried to get me worked up to no avail.
“People like drama,” he said and behind him Debra Rhine, the manager, nodded emphatically. I was sure I wasn’t the only exception to this rule. I said so and India laughed.
“Let him be a stick,” she said. “It’s good contrast.”
“Of course,” said Lewis. With India he was all deference and courtesy, a little on the groveling side if you ask me. But any man could be forgiven it considering the snug way she fit into iridescent stretch pants. The bright red cloth drew immediate attention to her well-rounded assets.
It became obvious that the reason they hired Lewis was the opportunity to be on the show. They wanted our investigation to appear before a wide audience. India Phoenix clearly loved the spotlight but I thought there had to be more to it than that. How, I wondered, did a powerful gobo like Vavaka feel about all the publicity? But when I asked about it in the initial interview they brushed the question aside.
“Both India and Vavaka are big fans,” Ms. Rhine said. “Also we reserve the right to review all footage first.”
“It’s in the contract,” said Lewis.
“You mean even if I find something we might not show it,” I said.
“Right,” she said. “Depending on what it is.”
That was standard reality 3V. Every client reserved the right for confidentiality and more than half never shared what was discovered. I wondered what was the point of asking me to dig up Vavaka’s dirty laundry on such a public medium if they didn’t want me to display it? But I figured the rich would do anything for publicity’s sake. All the attention was good for branding both for the Phoenix label and for Vavaka and apparently the Lewis Gregory show was taking off on Asitot in a big way.
The whole interview took place with four members of a video crew crouching in various corners and talking between takes about things like compensation for stereoscopic drift and light temperature adjustments. One of them, the polygonist, used a cad-cam to detail all the objects in the room, including the people. I asked him if my face had changed much since our last shoot. He said, “You’re grayer and you’re fatter.” I was a fit twenty-six. I couldn’t tell if he was joking or if he didn’t like me.
Anyway, I got the facts of the case in twenty minutes, then we filmed for another five hours. Here are those facts, sans re-takes:
India Phoenix and Vavaka as’Tatim first met four years prior at the virtual premiere of the game Galactic Empires. I knew it well. It had exploded in popularity since and I personally wasted far too much of my life on the DNA Wars expansion pack. India and Vavaka hit it off immediately (though India was at that time only sixteen) and met again for several play dates over the next year.
It was funny, India said, that at the premiere she had modded gobo while he had modded human and they only later realized the coincidence when they were comfortable enough to talk about their backgrounds.
A year ago their relationship had become – as India put it – a “matter of state” when Vavaka had casually brought up the possibility of marriage. It was a bit of a surprise as they had yet to meet face to face but after considering it she found she rather liked the idea. Such relationships today were common. It was her family who was old-fashioned, she felt. Vavaka, she said, was fun. He had a sense of humor. He was competitive in all the right ways. Charming and considerate. Her only complaint was his lack of time as he oversaw most of his business interests personally. Which she also admired.
But if his proposal was a surprise to her it was even more so to the Phoenix family. Who was this alien? Where in the universe was this planet Asitot? How long had they been communicating? The most important question: how would this association with an alien affect the Phoenix family name?
“My family doesn’t really know much about the rest of the universe,” she said with a shrug. Most people didn’t. It was too big to keep track of so hardly anyone bothered.
“But you were fascinated by it, no doubt,” I helped out.
“What do you mean?”
“That he is alien. Not human.”
“He’s different,” she said. “I like different.”
None of that particular dialogue made it into the final version. Instead India ran over his virtues again, the beginning of a refinement that wouldn’t be perfect until somewhere around take 18. Then she explained how after Ms. Rhine’s connections had looked into his business matters their skepticism had turned to growing support. Still they had decided to keep the relationship private, waiting to reveal it until they came to Lewis and asked to appear on the show. They both watched it, both were big fans, both thought it would be “fun.” India was defined, apparently, by “fun.” That was when I first delicately probed about the consequences of finding something embarrassing, still not sure why they would request an official investigation – and from all I could tell they meant it to be legitimate – on such a public forum. They answered in one take, cut from the final episode:
Ms. Rhine: “We expect you will discover nothing untoward. In any case you will update us regularly.”
Lewis: “Of course.”
Ms. Rhine: “We will provide all capturing equipment. All material will be uplo
aded to us at the end of the working day. We will review all recordings before release to your production team.”
Lewis: “Absolutely.”
Ms. Rhine: “Anything unexpected you find concerning Vavaka as’Tatim you will reveal directly to me.”
India: “And me.”
These words were all accompanied with a heavy sort of eye contact that I believe was supposed to command my very soul but it was Lewis who answered, “No doubt about it.” He then favored me with his own weaker version of the hypnotic gaze and said, “That was all prepared in the contract.”
I nodded and went on with the interview. The wedding would take place in March, two months away. India would travel immediately to Asitot where she would meet Vavaka face to face for the first time. I would accompany her and once on Asitot I would begin investigations into her fiancé’s background while she began wedding preparations in the traditional style of Asitot, as per Vavaka’s request.
It didn’t give me much time to prepare but to tell the truth I was keen to get started. I kept my excitement hidden, in my usual style, but an all-expenses paid trip to a recently unveiled nucleite bred planet felt like winning the lottery to me. As it also meant two days travel time with the incredibly beautiful India Phoenix, I agreed to be ready to leave the next morning.
To prepare I questioned her about Asitot and gobos in general. It was astonishing how little she seemed to know considering she was prepared to marry one.
“What I always liked about them,” she said, “what attracted me to them right away was their eyes, you know, how large and colorful they are? I thought it was crazy how many different colors they had, and the textures?” The way India talked you got the impression her head was full of questions more than statements. “You know what I’m talking about? They have all these different eyelids.”
I did know what she was talking about. It was the feature that most distinguished gobos from humans. Each gobo had a unique set of eye-filters behind a fully opaque outer membrane. Humans thought of them as extra eyelids as they often appeared that way from the outside but they were much thinner, a different material entirely, designed to filter light in various ways. There were thousands of varieties scattered across the gene pool. An individual gobo could have anywhere from five to fifteen of these filters on average. I had read about it and watched several detailed videos the night before, fascinated by this strange deoxyribonucleic variation.