This Other Eden (15 page)

He had
asked her to lunch. He had suggested a drink, a swim in his pool, a trip to the
BioDome-enclosed beach at Venice; but all this Rosalie had politely declined.
She reminded him that she was an international terrorist who had just tried to
give a whole crowd of media stars a dose of cancer and was now on the run from
the forces of justice. So could he kindly drop her at the airport so that she
could make her escape before her description got circulated.

That
was when Max suggested introducing her to Plastic Tolstoy. Max occasionally
caught the news, and he had a vague idea that Mother Earth and Natura people
considered Tolstoy a figure of some significance.

There
was a pause. Rosalie was wondering if this was a joke, or perhaps a trap of
some kind. ‘You can get me in to see Plastic Tolstoy?’ she asked warily.

‘Sure,
I have a three forty-five at his place in the Hills . You green guys have kind
of a down on him, don’t you?’

‘Oh,
well, you know,’ said Rosalie, ‘these things get blown out of proportion.’

‘He’s
actually a pretty cool person. I think you’d like him. You know, you’re both
kind of energetic “in your face” type of people. You get things done. He’s a
legend in the industry …‘ Max put on his most impressive tone of voice. ‘He
wants me for a picture.’

They
were manoeuvring through the traffic which was, as usual, gruesome. But for
once Rosalie did not go into her traffic-jam rant. For once she was
appreciative of the delay. She needed time to think. Despite her tough talk,
Rosalie was not a killer. She
had
killed, in an indirect sense. During
Mother Earth actions she had often been fired upon and had occasionally
returned fire. She might have hit someone, she didn’t know. She had never hung
around long enough to find out. Also, she had blown up a lot of things around
and about the world; polluters, Dodo-makers (as the traders in near-extinct
species were called), Claustrosphere showrooms. There must have been casualties
then, she supposed. Her own side had certainly suffered many losses, so she
presumed that the enemy must have had them too. She had, however, never
specifically or deliberately killed anyone.

Could
she do it now? Should she do it now? Rosalie’s mind was racing. Plastic Tolstoy
was not, after all, directly responsible for the dead seas and extinct species.
Except in a small way he was. He was, after all, the prophet of the alternative
to saving the planet… But that was stupid. If there was no Plastic Tolstoy
there would still be Claustrospheres. He had not invented them, what’s more
somebody would still be selling them. It was people who were destroying the
Earth, not any single person … But then again, Tolstoy did encourage them.
Every day, he cynically tempted people to neglect their true responsibilities… History was full of leaders and Plastic Tolstoy was definitely a leader and
an incredibly powerful one at that. More so than any politician. It wasn’t
politicians who shaped the world any more, it was the marketing people, the
people who perpetrated and justified the myth of consumption. Plastic Tolstoy
was the biggest marketer of all.

‘I
don’t think you heard me,’ Max interrupted Rosalie’s reverie. He was very
disappointed that his news had not gone over bigger. ‘Plastic Tolstoy wants me
for a picture! Have you any idea what kind of huge shit that is?’

Rosalie
was anxious not to arouse Max’s suspicions. She pretended to take an interest.

‘Why is
it so special? You’re a big star, everyone knows that. I’ve read that you could
work with anyone you wanted to.’

‘Anyone
but Tolstoy. He’s so far ahead of everybody else he’s an industry in himself,
he
is
the industry. No matter how big you are, you’re still small
compared to him and if I play my cards right, he’s going to make a picture with
me!’

Not if
Rosalie could help it he wasn’t.

Chapter
Eleven

Career opportunities

The
games people play.

Plastic and Nathan were
not playing tennis in the conventional sense. Big though Plastic’s ‘Sphere was,
it did not actually contain a court. It did not need to. It was equipped with
state-of-the-art games suits which offered a tennis court, a baseball diamond,
in fact, any pitch the player desired. The suits were Virtual Reality body
stockings which the player wore whilst suspended, weightless, inside a vacuum
tank. One could run, kick and jump in them without going anywhere. You could
play any sport, either against a great player of your choice, via computer or
against a real person whose suit was linked to yours. Thus, Plastic and Nathan
played two hard sets of tennis involving some pretty impressive serving and
net-play, and yet all an outside observer would have seen was something akin to
two frogmen squirming and writhing in a big fish-tank.

‘That’s
the kind of leisure accessory that is going to make New Generation Eden
absolutely irresistible,’ Plastic remarked over a glass of fruit punch as they
sat relaxing under the great geodesic dome on the edge of the desert, next to
the rain forest. ‘Inside one of those suits you can join any team you ever
dreamt of playing for and play against any team you ever wanted to beat. Some
great match you think your team should never have lost? Join the side, play it
again and see if you can make the difference. Many times I’ve come down here on
my own, got in that tank and shot hoops with the 1980s LA Lakers when Magic was
playing. Of course, your average guy couldn’t afford one of these suits if he
saved for a thousand years, but the price will come down, it always does.’

Nathan
was quite interested, but only quite. He didn’t want a game, he wanted a job.
He guessed that, despite Plastic’s rough treatment of his synopsis, he must
still be in some kind of contention or he would not still be in the great man’s
company. All he could do was sit and wait. Eventually Plastic returned to the
point.

Marketing
lesson.

‘Your treatment is good,’ said
Plastic. ‘The rat is going to eat the kid, that moves me. It’s a little down, a
little sombre, maybe, but it’s good.’

Obviously,
Nathan, not being privy to Plastic’s sense of humour, was a little surprised,
considering what had been said in the office, but he was happy to take his luck
where he found it.

‘But,
with respect, I would contend that it
has
to be down,’ he said,
launching into his pitch. ‘You market a product which will protect people from
the death of the Earth, surely the best way to do that is to push the total
planetary screw-up we’re m. Environmental degradation is the best sales tool
you’ve got. You can’t talk it up enough.’

Plastic
smiled at Nathan’s naive enthusiasm.

‘Oh,
like, and that never occurred to us, right?’ he said, returning to his
favourite tone of aggressive sarcasm.

‘Well,
I just thought —’

‘Like,
there’s all us dummies sitting around here in Hollywood without an idea in our
heads, just waiting for some genius Englishman to come and reveal the
dazzlingly obvious to us. Thank you, Mr Einstein, thank you for striking the
scales from my eyes. I feel so stupid my dick has shrunk.’

Nathan
was at a loss.

‘The
reason that we have avoided the scare advert for nearly thirty years, you
feeble-minded jerk,’ Plastic shouted, ‘is because we market a product that
shames us all, that’s why! Jurgen Thor and the Natura guys are right. It’s
absolutely disgusting that people are investing in post-Armageddon life
insurance. Jesus! We should all be putting every penny we have into saving what
we’ve got.’

‘Well,
yes, of course but
—‘

‘But
nothing! Shut up and listen. Claustrospheres are the thing everybody says they
wish they didn’t have to have. It’s like private education! People would like
to support the state system; on the other hand, they don’t want their kid
getting shot for his eraser. Now if we’d been playing the doom card all these
years we’d have looked like we were exploiting a terrible situation. Like we
were
happy
the Earth is screwed
—
which of course we are
—
but
if we say that, we look tacky, right? We’ve had to be positive and up-beat!
We’ve had to say
“Because we hope you’ll never need it”.
If we had said
“your kids will die unless you buy our product”, people would have smelt -a
rat, and the rat would have been them. Nobody likes getting the mote in their
eye shoved in their face.’

‘So you
don’t like my treatment, then?’

‘I just
said I liked it!’

‘But
then you said
—‘

‘Listen,
Nathan, just let me do the talking here, OK? You shut up and maybe we’ll get
somewhere. The situation has changed. Just about everybody in the developed
world has a Claustrosphere. You have one, right?’

‘Well,
actually it’s part of a property dispute with my ex-wi
—‘

‘Like I
should care? Nathan, please. We will be here all day. Everyone has a damn
Claustrosphere, the market is drying up, right? We’ve been so damned successful
we have consumed our consumers. Now this ain’t a new thing, right? Producers
have faced the problem before, like everybody has a freezer, a car, a
semi-automatic weapon. The point is that with other products you get round the
problem with built-in obsolescence. You just make a damn freezer that falls
apart after two years, it’s easy. Unfortunately, built-in obsolescence would
rather defeat the object of a Claustrosphere. By definition, it’s got to last
at least a couple of generations. So what’s the solution?’

Nathan
decided not to risk attempting an answer. He knew  that whatever he said
Plastic would twist it so that he was wrong.

‘We
gotta get people to upgrade, that’s what. People have to realise that their
present units, Eden Ones, Twos and Threes, are crap. What are you and your wife
fighting over?’

‘A Mark
Three with a bottled rain forest.’

‘Exactly.
Crap. A bolthole, nothing more. Sure, it’ll keep you alive but who wants to
live like that? I’ll bet the video library doesn’t even have Virtual Reality.’

Nathan
could only nod at this casual exposure of the woeful inadequacy of his
arrangements.

‘The
point is that all the time people have been sort of presuming that in the end
they ain’t actually going to have  to use the thing. You know, it’s been like
insurance. Nice to have it there but you hope you’ll never have to claim it.
What we need to do now is change the emphasis. We have to make people believe
that
they’re actually going to have to use their Claustrosphere
which,
let’s face it, they probably are. People have got to realise it’s a pretty good
bet that they’re going to spend the rest of their lives inside a geodesic dome,
existing off a Biosphere technology. We’ve got to have them asking, “Hey, do we
fit new carpets in the house? Or do we stick a rain water simulator in the
‘Sphere?” They’ve got to say, “Well, hell, where are we likely to be five years
from now?” That’s what we’ve got to do, Nathan, we’ve got to get people to upgrade
their Claustrospheres before they change their cars. It is finally time to play
the doom card
—
the one which you seem to be under the impression you’re
the only person who’s thought of!’

Consumer
Control.

‘So you’re going to make
my ad, then?’

‘Yes,
I’m going to make your stupid little dumb advert,’ Plastic replied irritably.
‘But that wasn’t why I asked you up here. You think I ask every pen-pushing
little scribbler I commission into my private ‘Sphere to play tennis? Let me
tell you, under normal circumstances I
shit
you kind of people. I
actually shit little guys like you and then use another little guy like you to
clean my ass. Understand?’

Nathan
nodded.

‘I
brought you here because I think you can write and I want to make a movie. A
real movie, a centrepiece to the new campaign. I want a real old-fashioned
advertainment and I want you to work on the words, OK?’

Nathan
was stunned. A proper movie! So few were made these days. To be asked to be
involved in one was to join an echelon so upper it gave Nathan vertigo.

Only a
few years previously it had seemed as if nobody would ever make a real movie
ever again. Not one with actors and a proper fixed plot, that people had to go
to a cinema to see. A series of technical innovations seemed to have made the
genre obsolete. The feeling was that technology was more interesting than art,
and that if you didn’t need a million dollar helmet to watch a show then it
wasn’t worth seeing.

Interactive
entertainment became the miracle ingredient that was going to revitalise a
depressed industry. The consumer was going to be put in control.