The Pedestal (40 page)

I vaguely recognize the inspector from my interrogation following Stewart’s death, but I don’t bother intimating this. “Mr. Abby?” he says, his voice arcing to a question mark.

“That’s me,” I say. He pores over my features, into my eyes, and hesitates. “I know, I’ve looked better,” I admit. Only, just as the words pass my lips I realize that he’s not merely taken aback by my unhealthy appearance; he literally doesn’t recognize me. I remember him now—Rackley, right?—but he’s not able to reconcile what he sees in front of him with the man he was so interested in last year. I’m a shell of my former glory, and it didn’t add up to much before. It doesn’t bode any better for me that I’m standing here dressed only in my boxers.

I invite him in, and he declines. “Just wanted to drop this by to you. We recovered it this morning from one of Palmer Gunn’s confiscated properties.” He holds out a small plastic bag, and I reach out to accept it.

It’s my NanoPrint.

“I suggest you make arrangements to have it implanted again very soon,” he warns. “You wait too long and it’ll deactivate on you.”

I nod blankly, staring at the tiny gizmo in my hand—an invention that has been my crux and my salvation, my strength and my weakness. I mutter my thanks, and Inspector Rackley makes a hasty exit.

Well, that’s one way to clear a room—just strip to my boxers.

I use the toilet and set my NanoPrint on the counter by the sink—wait, reverse that.

Bedtime, take two.

A knock on the door. This time it’s my neighbor, Mrs. Grace. Thankfully, she’s old enough to have seen it all and doesn’t even notice that I’m more than half-naked. Before I can mutter any sort of a greeting, she snatches me into a heavy embrace, squeezing me hard enough to pop my joints.

“I was sooooo worried about you!” she cries. “I just knew something had happened to you and I’d never see you again.” When she releases me, her eyes are spilling tears. And—to my surprise—so are mine. This marks the first physical contact I’ve had with another human being in more than ten months. Excluding beatings, anyway.

Mrs. Grace invites me over for dinner, with the caveat that I put on some clothes—and I don’t mean just any clothes; Mrs. Grace is a devoted disciple of dressing for dinner. Unfortunately for both of us, my clothes hang off me like dusty tarpaulins. I savor a plateful of roast beef and potatoes, wishing my shrunken stomach had room for it all. She’s a talker, Mrs. Grace, yet she still manages to put her food away faster than me. I feel so heavy, like my extremities are invisibly mired in elastic. Although it was less obvious at the hospital, this sensation has become more and more noticeable.

“You need to start beefing up, Wilson. You’ll never get a girl to marry you looking like this.”

I have to laugh.

“I’m serious,” she says with a motherly frown. “Don’t they have a muscle-stimulus add-on for the implants now?”

I shrug noncommittally. “First I’ve heard, but I’ve been out a while. Besides, my implant isn’t much help at the moment.”

“What do you mean?” she asks, but then her eyes lose focus for a moment, and I realize she’s connecting to my NanoPrint. “Oh my goodness,” she observes. “You’re here, but our NanoPrints can’t shake hands!”

I slide back a loose sleeve and give her a peep of my scarred wrist. “Yeah, I gotta get that fixed.”

Mrs. Grace covers her mouth and coos like she’s seeing the Grand Canyon for the first time.

“You know, my husband Charles—rest his soul—had quite a physique.” My excised implant is forgotten.

“Really?”

“Oh, yeah! He had every woman inside a mile radius giving him the eye every time he stepped out the door. Got pretty old, to tell you the truth. Jealousy takes a lot more energy as you get older.”

“Was it genetic?”

“No, I don’t think so. His parents were both heavy. But Charles always made time to exercise.”

Huh.

The next morning, I take a tram to a nearby sporting goods store. I order a beginner’s set of free weights, a jump rope, a punching bag, and a few sets of exercise clothes. The saleswoman doesn’t say so, but she’s surprised at my zeal. “You don’t get a lot of that?” I have to ask.

“Nah, ever since that muscle-stimulus add-on was released, things have been pretty slow. But that’ll change. Everyone’s getting all pumped up chemically because they don’t know any better just yet. Won’t be long before that blows over.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, the thing about building muscle is that it makes you stronger, and it changes your metabolism.”

“That’s a good thing, right?”

“It can be, but not in this case.”

I don’t get it. Shocker.

“Think about it for a sec. You got some guy relying on his night-burner to keep his waist trim, right? Then he decides thin isn’t enough and throws muscle stimulus into the mix. Now, he’s burning off calories at the same time his muscles are trying to grow, just spinning his wheels, you know? So he’s gotta eat more, right? To fuel all that muscle growth? Next thing you know, he’s ripped like crazy, but he’s got a caloric imbalance that leaves him starving and exhausted twenty-four seven; built like a tank, but can’t even take the stairs in a fire drill.”

“Whoa.”

“Eventually people’ll figure all that out and some guy’s gonna walk in here and say, ‘Hey, what can I do to not feel like circuit scrap all the time, but still look like this?’ And I’ll say, ‘Never leave to your NanoPrint what you can do for yourself.’”

I smile; that could’ve been Arthur’s mantra.

When the lecture’s over, I head to the nearest mall and buy some new clothes—I don’t go overboard, because if all goes well, I’ll be back in my old ones in no time.

Just before dark, the delivery crew arrives. When they’ve finished storming my apartment with the clinks and clanks of iron, my spare room looks like a boxer’s private gym. I lean against the doorframe and just stare at the equipment for a long, long time.

At eight o’clock, Mrs. Grace invites me over for a slice of pie. I’m pooped and take a rain check.

I’m just lying down when there’s a tentative knock on my door. Now, I would hate to speak ill of Mrs. Grace, who is literally the only person on Earth to me right now, but if she’s standing at my door with a slice of pie, I’m going to be more than a little peeved.

But it isn’t Mrs. Grace. At once, the person I find at my doorstep is infinitely familiar, and hopelessly foreign.

“Hey, Wil,” says Tim. “Remember me?”

I feel all my fatigue vanish into the night, swishing around my legs, whipping through my hair at the welcome sound of his voice. Before I can think better of it, I step out and pull him into a mad bear hug—I know, Keith would be so proud.

He looks a bit embarrassed when I finally let him go, but he’ll get over it. I invite him in and we drink hot tea in my kitchen.

“You look older,” I observe. His hair’s a bit long—more hip than shaggy—and the boyish cheeks I remember well are all but gone.

“I
feel
older, Wil. You look like circuit scrap.”

“I feel like circuit scrap.” With no real forethought, I add, “And by the way, It’s Wilson now.”

Tim blinks as if taken aback, then up go the hands in theatric surrender. “Well, excuuuuse me,” he balks, still smiling. “Didn’t realize you were suddenly a grown up.”

I shrug, offering a crooked smile. “Had to happen eventually.” The truth is, I’m not exactly sure where this came from; I can only say that
Wil
suddenly feels wrong. It belonged to someone I used to know, a kid I can no longer relate to.

“Maybe you should start calling me Timothy.”

“Sure, no problem.”

Tim mouths the word a few times—Timothy… Tim-o-thy… Tim-ooo-thee—but wisely calls the whole thing off. “Nah, that wouldn’t work,” he explains. “I’m a monosyllabic type of guy, and unlike some people I know, I’m okay with it.”

Crisis averted.

A gap creeps into the conversation, but there’s nothing awkward about it; it’s merely an agent of reflection. I’m compiling a mental tally of the many ways in which we’ve both changed since I last saw him, and I suppose he’s doing the same.

Tim takes me in with a sad sigh, and then breaks the silence. “You know, I thought a camera was supposed to add ten pounds. So when I saw you on the news, I was thinking,
Get some more cameras on this guy, would ya?
You look a little better in person, but not by much.”

“Always the charmer, Tim.”

“Yeah, well. Gotta be me. Stopped by the hospital a few times, but they had you under lock and key.” Learning this warms me.

We settle back to shoot the breeze for a little while, and I ask about IDS.

“We’re hanging in there, but the writing’s on the wall. We’ll be lucky to survive another year.”

I was afraid of this. “I imagine there were some pretty traumatic hiccups after Gunn’s extortion ring was exposed, huh?”

Tim shakes his head with an ironic smile. “Actually, no. Not really, anyway. Our stock plummeted like crazy for a couple of days, but it stabilized. It’s really undervalued at the moment, but our real problem is that without Arthur and Ryan—and you, for that matter—we’ve lost all our government contracts. It’s hard to maintain consumer confidence when your top dogs have slipped the leash.”

“Can’t say I’m surprised, but I am sorry.”

“Don’t be. The truth is, with all those kickbacks out of the equation, we’d have a good chance of squeaking by—if it wasn’t for Keith, anyway.”

At the mention of that name, I feel darkness gather in our midst. “What do you mean?” I ask, wishing we could talk about something else.

Tim looks at me without speaking for a second, then shifts his eyes to his hands, where his fingers are drumming against the side of his mug. “You’d think with all that’s happened, I’d have learned to keep my nose where it belongs.”

“Uh-oh. What’d you find?”

“You ever notice how high our GFL invoices have been?”

I think I see where this is going, but I nod my head and keep my trap shut.

“Well, with Gunn out of the picture, I thought it might be worth looking at one of their competitors. I just couldn’t handle the thought of paying another dime to Global Freight, knowing how much they’ve sucked out of us over the years.”

I nod again.

“Anyway, so when I got an idea of what we should be paying, I made the mistake of pulling our old invoices to make sure our accounting system didn’t have a bug in it or something—I mean, we’re talking a hundred and fifty thousand credits every year, when everyone else is charging fifty.”

“So what did you find?”

Tim hesitates and his cheeks flush with heat. “Well, you.”

I laugh, first because it must be a joke, then because I realize it’s not. “What in the world are you talking about?”

“Well, obviously you didn’t do it—and if it comes down to it, I can probably prove that much. One of the payments was authorized by your implant signature, but it couldn’t have been you. The profile IDs match and all, but according to your proximity stats, you and Arthur were setting up a test partition in Dallas the week you supposedly signed off on it.”

I try to remember, and though I can remember taking such a trip, I can’t lasso in any detail about the time period.

“Okay,” I say. “So where does Keith come in?”

Tim sighs. “That’s the part I’m not clear on. I know it’s him; I just can’t prove it.”

“How’s that?”

“Well, I did some digging—the kind that could get me fired, by the way—and I found that Keith and our GFL rep have spent a lot of time together in the last several years. Fishing trips to Canada, a safari to Africa.”

My tea is gone and I switch to coffee. Tim switches to lite beer and starts pilfering through my cabinets for something to snack on.

“Is he a man or a woman?” I ask. He pauses with a hand still in my pantry.

“What? Who?”

“The GFL rep,” I say with a sly grin.

“What difference does that m—” Tim’s eyes narrow and then squeeze shut. “Oh, c’mon, Wil!” he explodes. “I mean, Wil
son
. That’s just nasty.”

I burst out laughing. “Sorry, I’m just saying. Even the genderless get lonely.”