Authors: David Marusek
Mind Over Ship (18 page)
“Arrow,” he said, weighing his words carefully, “if Eleanor was still alive, how would she deal with the current GEP crisis?”
“I don’t understand the question.”
“If Eleanor was here, how would she preserve the original GEP mission?”
“I do not know.”
Fair enough. How could any artificial mind know the mind of that extraordinary woman?
Meewee’s scramjet was flying much too high for him to distinguish the lights of ships or to gain a sense of movement, so he asked Arrow to drop an overlay over the dark ocean. The meridians of latitude and longitude appeared below like chalk lines on a sports field. A compass rose floated in the corner, and faint outlines traced the topography of the ocean floor. Meewee watched the South Pacific go by and fell into a reverie. After a while, an odd feature came into view and stirred his attention, an outline in roughly the shape and size of the state of Tennessee. “What is that?” he asked.
NATPAC 6,
Arrow replied.
Meewee pressed his forehead against his window for a better view. The natpacs were free-floating pens that contained tens of millions of fish and were allowed to drift on the ocean currents. They were fish farming writ large, with no need for artificial feed. One natpac could sustain a small hungry nation.
Slowly, the natpac fell behind, and Meewee closed his eyes and drowsed. The burr of the scramjet engine lulled him deeper, and after a while, Arrow announced
“Huh?” Meewee said, rousing himself. “Say again?”
“Ellen?” Meewee said, thinking she was finally replying to his repeated requests for a meeting. He had tried to contact her numerous times since the disastrous GEP decision.
Meewee shook the sleep from his head. Eleanor? Suddenly it hit him; she was speaking from beyond the grave. She had left him detailed instructions in case she was murdered—she had always planned for all eventualities—and by asking Arrow how she would handle the current crisis, he had somehow tapped into them.
This was most puzzling.
Leave me alone? Meewee could not parse any sense out of it, the message or the sender.
With a chill creeping up his spine, Meewee recalled the daughter’s insistence that the mother was still alive.
It made no sense.
The elevator halted at the 123rd floor and opened its door to the E-Pluribus lobby. And what a lobby! The regulars called it the Temple, and it was the same basic arrangement E-Pluribus used wherever it rented space. The effect was one of vastness, and the elevator passengers, mostly Applied People iterants, were duly awed as they emerged from the car. The limpid blue lobby floor seemed to extend for kilometers in all directions. Far on the horizon stood giant stone columns, some broken and crumbled, some still joined by stone lintels. Beyond these lay a restive green sea. Lightning flashed in the yellow sky, and thunder rolled underfoot. Subliminal music swelled. At the sound of a trumpet blast, the visitors turned around to behold, not their elevator car, but a mountainous, stone ziggurat rising high into the sky. At its truncated peak, nearly as high as the pink clouds, towered the corporate logo, the quicksilver E-Pluribus Everyperson.
Arrayed on steps beneath the Everyperson was a pantheon of vid idols: thousands of the most celebrated hollyholo simstars of all time. This was the famous E-Pluribus Academy, the largest, most extensive stable of limited editions in existence. The visitors gushed with delight. At the bottommost tier, Annette Beijing stood alone and waited for their attention. She wore the loose-fitting house togs she had popularized in the long-running novela
Common Claiborne
and held aloft her graceful arms
.
“Welcome!” she said at last. “Welcome
all
to the House of E-Pluribus!” She dropped her arms and bowed. Her audience applauded with fervor. “Dear guests,” she continued, “you have been chosen to join us today in the very important and quite exhilarating task of preference polling. As you know, society can serve its citizens only to the extent that it knows them. Thus, society turns to
you
for guidance. Each of you possesses a voice that must be heard and a heart that must be plumbed.
“You,
all of you,
are the true E-Pluribus Everyperson.” She raised her hands to the ever-morphing statue high above them. “When Everyperson
speaks in the halls of Congress or Parliament, in corporate boardrooms, jury rooms, and voting booths, it speaks with
your
voice.”
She paused a beat and added, “Now I’m aware that some of you may find our methods a little
overwhelming,
especially if this is your first visit with us. Therefore, we have arranged for a few of
my friends
to stop by.”
The legion of simstars on the ziggurat tiers above her chorused a resounding “HELLO!” and the newcomers cheered again.
“We invite each of you,” Beijing continued, “to select your most favorite celebrity in the whole world to be your personal guide throughout the day. Feel free to choose your biggest heartthrob. She or he is bound to be here. And please, we’re all friends at E-Pluribus, so don’t be bashful. Choose whoever you want. Even me!
“Now then, we have a full day of taste-testing, opinion-polling, and yes—soul-searching—planned for you, but before we can begin, please review the terms and conditions of hire, and if you approve, authorize them. Then call out the name of your heart’s desire, and he or she will come down to be at your side.”
On the tier above Annette Beijing stood the Academy’s newest inductees—two Leenas from Burning Daylight Productions. They had quickly become the iterant visitors’ favorite celebrity, and jerrys, jeromes, and johns all shouted to call the Leenas down.
A jerry named Buddy got one of them, and together he and the Leena strolled across the marble plain to a distant stone structure in which the prep booths were housed. Buddy was proud to have the Leena at his side. She looked eerily like an evangeline, only hotter. A superb ass and large breasts went a long way to sex up the rather plain evangeline germline.
In a prep booth, Buddy was fitted with a visceral response probe. After the discomfort passed, the Leena led him to his first scenario room. It was a long, narrow, empty room that suddenly became a tennis court. A man in a white shirt and shorts and carrying a racquet approached them. He looked vaguely familiar, and though Buddy couldn’t place him, he took him to be an aff, and without even thinking, Buddy assumed the habitual deference of a service clone. But to his surprise, the aff addressed him with easy familiarity. “Buddy, Leena, welcome,” he said. “Care to join us in a game of doubles?” There was a woman, also vaguely familiar, waiting across the net.
Buddy was at a loss for words. He worked for people like this, and never once had they asked him to join in a tennis game.
“Hey, forget about that,” the man said. “We’re all equals at E-Pluribus.
And besides, I’ve heard so much about the famous jerry prowess on a tennis court, I would be delighted to see it for myself.”
The game was fast and challenging. The aff and his partner were strong players, as was Buddy’s partner, the Leena. Though, truth be told, he was more impressed by the bounce of her breasts than the power of her backhand. And every time he glanced at the aff, the man seemed a little bit more familiar until, with a slap to his forehead, Buddy realized he was a recent client of his, a Myr Hasipi. Buddy had served as his bodyguard for six weeks. And his partner was not his wife but his lover, whom Buddy had fetched for the boss whenever the coast was clear. Across the net, she winked at him.
After several strenuous sets, the tennis party took refreshments in the clubhouse lounge, a place Buddy had only ever entered as a bodyguard. It was a special thrill to have steves and johns wait on him. And the Leena, with beads of sweat trickling down her cleavage, adored him with her big brown eyes.
“So, Buddy,” Hasipi said, “you remember that spot of trouble I was having a while back?”
Which one? Buddy wanted to say. Myr Hasipi had been up to his eyeballs in shady deals.
“Don’t say it out loud, Buddy, but you know the case.”
It must be the bribes and kickbacks, Buddy thought. He had been tasked to deliver a few of them himself. Or what about that so-called accident in Istanbul? Buddy grinned and said, “I don’t have a clue what you’re talking about.”
Hasipi guffawed. “Good man.”
The sun topped a sand dune and jabbed Fred in the eye. He turned on his side, but the desert caught fire and there was no returning to sleep. The morning list marched through his mind: kiss Mary, roll out of bed, cycle out of room, toilet and shower, news and mail, coffee, dress, kiss Mary good-bye, leave the apartment. But when he leaned over to accomplish item number one, he discovered that Mary was gone. Her spot on the mattress was already cool to the touch. Barely 6:00
A.M
. and his routine was already gummed up.
But Fred had a flexible personality—he was a russ—so he propped himself up on one elbow and squinted into the harsh light. They had fallen asleep gazing at the Milky Way in the desert. “Room, default walls,” he
said, and the plain, too-small room returned around him. There was barely enough space between the bed and wall for him to maneuver. Unlike the null suite at the Cass, the null room in their apartment had no sitting room, kitchen nook, or closets, let alone full bath and toilet. Instead, it had built-in counters, shelves, drawers, and a narrow comfort station with a curtain. Fred had to stand in the comfort station when he reset the bedroom into a day room. The bed contorted into an armchair. Out came the end table and lamp, the shelves and another armchair. Default windows and posters appeared on the walls. Fred and Mary didn’t spend any daytime hours in here and hadn’t gotten around to decorating.
Fred gathered up the empty flasks of Flush, spent chem-pacs, and other trash and cycled out. The null lock was not a sauna but a plain, closet-sized, gas-exchange two-seater. Out in the hallway, he heard voices from the living room—Mary and two more evangelines, it sounded like. He turned the other way and continued to the bedroom. Since moving in, they hadn’t actually slept in the bedroom, instead spending every night in the null room. Fred ordered fresh clothes and a skullcap from the closet and went to the bathroom. He could feel the tingly sensation of the nits already recolonizing him, and the skin of his wrists and ankles were reddened by the daily assault of visola and nits. But it was nothing a little lotion couldn’t handle, and well worth it. His limp cock was crinkly with dried cum. He squeezed himself and brought his hand to his nose to inhale Mary’s oceanic fragrance. Well worth it.