The Green Leopard Plague and Other Stories (49 page)

"Want some more fish?" I ask my dad.

"Thanks."

My dad's body is tall and wiry, and at home he dresses in khakis, very immaculate, as if at any moment he might be called upon to sell something and needs to look his best. He's cooked this whole Chinese meal, with sticky rice in lotus leaves and steamed fish and Hunan chicken and orange peel beef, and since my mom is delivering a lecture series in Milan there's only the two of us to eat it. Huge platters of food cover the antique oak table between us.

Fortunately the gorilla body needs a lot of feeding.

"We've got to figure out a way to grow the Demographic," my dad says.

"The Demographic" is what my dad, the marketing whiz, calls my audience. Every product, according to him, has a "demographic" that forms its natural consumers, and his job is to alert that demographic to the existence and alleged superiority of the product.

By "product," he means me.

My dad's audience has to be alerted by stealth. Nobody has to look at advertisements if they don't want to. In my Media and Society classes I learned that broadcast media used to be full of adverts, but they're not anymore because people can download their entertainment from other sources. You see holograms and posters in stores and public places, but every other form of advertising has to be sneaky. It has to disguise itself as something else.

My dad is a specialist in that kind of advertising.

If you're my age you grow up suspicious. When you see something new you wonder if it's genuine or a camouflaged advertisement for something else.

That's why Kimmie's revelation could be trouble for me. If I turn out to be nothing but an advertisement for DNAble, then the Demographic might never trust me again.

The numbers are important because they can turn into money. Even though my flashcasts are given away free, I get paid for an occasional fashion shoot, or an interview, or for appearing on broadcast video.
Darby's Train
and
Let's Watch Wang
may be silly comedies, but they pay their guest stars very well.

Fortunately I don't have to do any acting on these programs. I appear as myself. I walk on and all this insane comedy happens around me and in the third act I deliver a few pearls of wisdom that solve the star's problem.

Which means I'll be starting my adult life with a nice little nest egg. I won't be rich, but I'll be ahead of the average twenty-year-old.

"So how do we grow the Demographic?" I ask my dad.

"A new love interest always produces a bounce."

"So do babies," I say, "but I'm not going to start one now."

He grins. "Okay. The Demographic is growing older. You need to give them a more mature product. More mature clothing choices, more mature music . . . "

I want to tell him that my tastes are my tastes, and they've done pretty well for me so far.

Eight percent.

I've got to do
something,
I think.

 

We all know how lucky we are. There aren't any wars anymore. There's no permanent death. Nobody has to get old if they don't want to. There's no poverty, except for a few people who deliberately go off to live without material possessions and eat weeds, and they don't count. There are diseases, but even if one of them kills you, they'll bring you back.

Our elders have solved all the big problems. The only things left for us to care about are fashion, celebrity, and consumerism.

And the pursuit of knowledge, if that's the sort of thing that appeals to you. The problem being that you'll have to do a few hundred years of catching up before the elders will pay you any attention.

We can change bodies if we like. You lie down in a pool of shallow warm water that's thick with tiny little microscopic nanobots, and the bots swim into your body and swarm right to your brain, where they record everything—every thought, every memory, every reflex, everything that makes up your self and soul. And then all this information is transferred into another body that's been built to your own specifications by
another
few billion nanobots, and once a lot of safety checks are made, you bound out of bed happy in your new body, and your old body is disassembled and the ingredients recycled.

Unless you want something unusual, the basic procedure costs less than a bicycle. Bicycles have moving mechanical parts that have to be assembled by hand or by a machine. The nanobots do everything automatically, and are powered by, basically, sugar.

Our custom brains are smart. We don't have to deal with stupid people or the messes they cause. We
do
have to cope with a bunch of hyper-critical geniuses nitpicking us to death, but at least that's better than having a bunch of morons with guns
shooting
at us, which is what people in history seemed to have to deal with all the time.

Within certain limits our bodies look like whatever we want. Everyone is beautiful, everyone is healthy, everyone is intelligent. That's the
norm
.

But where, you might wonder, does that leave
you?
Who are
you
, exactly?

What I mean is, how do you find out that you're
you
and not one of a bunch of equally talented, equally attractive, equally artificial
thems?

How do you find out that you're a person, and not some kind of incredibly sophisticated biological robot?

You find out by exploring different options, and by encountering challenges and overcoming them. Or
not
overcoming them, as the case may be.

You learn who you are by making friends, because one way of finding out who you are is by figuring who your friends think you are.

Your friends can be the kind you meet in the flesh. If you live in the Bay Area, like me, there are eight or nine thousand people under the age of twenty, so odds are you'll find some that are compatible.

You can make the kind of friends you only meet electronically, through shared interests or just by hanging around in electronic forums.

Or you can work out who you are by watching someone else grow up and struggle with the same problems.

If you're my age or a little younger, odds are that someone else would be me.

 

I check out the messages that have been flooding in since the last flashcast. The artificial intelligence in my comm unit has already sorted them into broad categories:

• I'd take the money.

• I wouldn't take the money.

• I wouldn't take the money, and if you did you're evil.

• I hate Kimmie.

• I hate you.

• Gorillas are lame.

• I'm a reporter and I'd like an interview.

• I built the hut, so now what?

• I'd really like a date, and here's my video and contact information.

Some of those last videos are very stimulating.

Stimulating or not, they all get a polite but negative response. Meeting girls is not a problem for me.

And in any case, I can't get Kimmie out of my head.

The messages from reporters I file till later. All they want to talk about is Kimmie anyway.

I pick a representative sample of the rest of the messages and make a flashcast of them. I give some a personal reply. The whole point of flashcasts is that they create a community between the subject and the viewer, and so even the ones who don't like me get their say, and sometimes I'll respond with something like, "Well if
that's
the reason you hate me, you'll probably like Joss Mackenzie, go check out his flashes, I think he's still a snake," or "Sounds like you and the girl in the previous message should be friends."

When they hate me, I don't hate them back. Not publicly anyway. That's not who I am.

(Publicly.)

After the flashcast I take one of my classes. I'm sixteen and should finish college in a year and a half. I don't personally attend class very often, because then the class fills up with people who want to watch me instead of the teacher, so instead I use a headset to project myself into a virtual class.

The class is Media and Society, and the professor is Doctor Granger, who I don't like. He's got a young seamless face and wavy grey hair like sculpted concrete, and he paces up and down and gestures like a ham actor as he orates for his audience.

That's not why I don't like him, though that's probably bad enough. When he found out I was taking his class, he opened up the flashcast to anyone, not just those who had signed up for his class. He knows this is his chance to be famous, and he's not about to miss it. If he realizes how pathetic it is that he, a man in his nineties, is leaching off the fame of his sixteen-year-old student, he has shown no sign of it.

"The chief characteristic of modern media," Granger says, "is the existence of near-instantaneous feedback." He's dressed very stylishly today, with a charcoal-grey turtleneck and a blazer and a white silk scarf that he's somehow forgot to take off when he entered the lecture hall, and that ripples when he walks. Awareness of a worldwide audience has upgraded his wardrobe.

"The reaction of the audience can be viewed by the performers immediately after the performance—sometimes during it. So while performers have always taken their audience into account—always judged their performance and its effects with regard to the public—there is now a special urgency involved. A worldwide consensus on a given performance can be reached before the performance is even over."

I know what the consensus on Doctor Granger's performance is. The Demographic despises him. I wonder if he knows it.

"For those the audience chooses to condemn," he says, "the penalty is oblivion. For those to whom the audience grants its favor, instant fame is possible. But continuing fame depends on continuing positive feedback. Performers have to take their audience into account every minute, and the good ones, like all good performers, anticipate what their audience wants and finds a way to give it to them. But now more than ever a performer has to be careful not to alienate their core demographic."

There's the damn Demographic again, I think.

He turns to me. "Sanson," he says, "do you keep your audience in mind when you're making a flashcast?"

He's always using me in class as an example, another reason I don't like him.

At the moment, however, I purely
hate
him, because he's asked one of those questions for which there's no good answer. If I say I worry about what the audience thinks, then I'm not my own person. But if I say that I don't care what the audience thinks, the Demographic will get mad at me for saying that they don't matter.

"I'm not a performer," I say. "I'm not any kind of actor at all. I just
do
stuff."

"But still you present programs with yourself as the focus," Granger says. "You perform in that sense. So I wonder if you concern yourself with what your audience is going to say after each flashcast."

I feel a little flutter of unease.

"I respect their opinions," I say. "But that still comes afterward. We can all have a big discussion later on, but when something's going on, the only people I'm interacting with is my pack."

Doctor Granger gives me a big smile. "Aren't you worried about losing your audience?"

Eight percent,
I think.

Let me tell you what it's like. When I was eight my parents took me on a vacation to the Middle East, and we went to the Dead Sea and I took a swim. The water is so dense with salt that it holds you up, and you just lie there with the hot sun shining down on you in the warm water, as if it were the most comfortable mattress in the world, and you know that no matter what happens, you'll never drown.

That what it's like to have the Demographic on your side. There's this outpouring of interest and friendship and love, and they respond to everything you do. There's a whole community there to help you. Anytime you want a friend, a friend is there. If you want information, someone will give it to you. If anyone offers you disrespect, you don't have to respond—the Demographic leads the charge on your behalf, and you can stay above the fight.

You just float there, in that warm saltwater, with the sun shining down, and you'll never drown as long as the Demographic is behind you.

Am I worried about losing that?

I'd be crazy not to.

"It's like any other kind of friendship," I tell Doctor Granger. "There's feedback there, too. But if friends respect each other, they won't tell each other what to do."

Doctor Granger gives a nod.

"You'd better hope they're your friends, then, hadn't you?"

I think of Kimmie and feel a knife of terror slice into me.

She stopped loving me. What happens if everyone else stops loving me, too?

 

I do some other work and then catch Kimmie's next flash, in which she goes shopping with a couple of her friends. She's wearing big hoop earrings and a wraparound spider-silk skirt, sandals, and a loose-fitting cotton tank with flowery embroidery.

Next, I think, she'll be wearing a headscarf.

She's still wearing the color threads in her hair, the ones that match the color shifts going on in her eyes. It's a subtle style, and not the sort of thing people would notice at once. I'd only spotted it because I viewed her flash twice.

Once I viddied it, though, I recognized it as a statement as clear as a tattoo. Her flashes weren't just a kind of personal electronic diary she was sharing with whoever chose to view them, she had greater ambitions.

Picking such a subtle style meant that she hoped people would notice, only not right away. She was hoping that the whole hair-eyes thing would start small and snowball and become a craze, and that before a few weeks were out, hundreds of thousands and maybe millions of kids would have their hair and eyes in synch.

And after that, after she'd set a major trend, Kimmie was hoping those millions of kids would turn to her for the latest in style, that they would watch her breathlessly for clues as to what to wear, or what music to listen to, or who to be.

That was why I'd suggested that my viewers send Kimmie a note telling her they liked what she'd done with her eyes. It was my way of telling her,
Hey, Kimmie, you're busted.