Virtually True (7 page)

True doesn’t tell him the reason he lives here is because Rush lives there. Closes the door.

“It’s after ten. What are you doing in bed? Don’t you have work to do?” Rush doesn’t wait for a response before gravitating to the home entertainment center. “Look at this dinosaur. Must be three, four years old.”

“It came with the place.”

“Yeah, but that doesn’t mean you can’t upgrade. Like total sheesh-kay-bob. Stick a fork in it, it’s done. You should compost this puppy. Mine’s got twice, three times the megs. I bet there’s a lot of software you can’t run.”

“Undoubtedly.”

Since there’s no couch, Rush sits on the edge of True’s futon. “I just came from a meeting with Bong Bong. Did you know he doesn’t like you?”

“I had an inkling.”

“Usually when he’s not happy with our coverage, he gives me the old applesauce enema. You know, lets me know he’s not happy but doesn’t threaten to kill off my manhood. But this time he reamed me. Said if I couldn’t control you, he’d do it for me. And he didn’t forget to mention that neither you nor me would—is it me, or I?”

“I.”

“I would enjoy it. I mean, what the hell is this about you meeting up with a Muslim at 24-7? I was here two years before you got here, and Bong Bong and I got along just swimmingly. No problemas amigo. Now you get here and undermine everything I accomplished.”

“What did you accomplish?” True really wants to know.

“I get along with the locals. I don’t make waves, they don’t cause me trouble. It’s a healthy relationship, and I won’t have you messing it up.”

“Spoken like a true reporter.”

“A true reporter gets ratings. This is now, and today’s motto for the press is cooperation.”

“Maybe you mean the motto is
corporation
.”

“Shut up, Ailey.
Cooperation
. I know what I’m saying. Either you work with me, or you’re out of here. Cooperate or you don’t operate.”

“Catchy.”

“Look, Ailey, I’ve come here to tell you, nobody knows more than me what a journo stud you used to be. You were my hero, the way you, uh, you know, all that great stuff you did. But you’re slacking now, and on my beat that’s not copacetic.” Rush picks at his cuticles. “I don’t know what happened with you in New York. Heard you went mental. Got a new hard drive installed. But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t do your job.”

True thinks of electric snow.

Rush rages on. “Got to tell you. I was not looking forward to you coming over here. Told the home office same-same. I could do more with someone young, hungry. But they sent you. Either you upgrade your job performance or I’m aborting you.” Rush stands, ankles crossed. True’s seen him do the same thing on a newscast—
canned concern
, he calls it. Luzonians think it’s a sign of decreased fertility. “So, you histoire or you going to get real?”

True shrugs. “Real enough.”

“Your dossier says you were born in a test tube.”

Not exactly a test tube, but True was more planned than born, one of the first to spring from a movement of retirees opting for parenthood past 50. The stigma follows him like a misbehaving shadow. True’s parents ordered him (piece by piece, code by code) from a DNA catalog, scanned electropages for donors with primo characteristics, paid a lab in Italy to mix and match until an embryo was produced and left to grow in an incubator until developed enough to post home.

What they ended up with was something, or someone, far different. A random access, but this did not stop American red-bloodeds from torturing True throughout his childhood, blaming him for… what? he wonders. Their shortcomings? True’s shortcomings? Society’s?

Rush rushes on. “What’s it like, growing up a beaker baby?”

True looks out the window to the yellowing sky. Briefly wonders how he can clean the windows, then realizes they are clean. It’s the pollution. True recites: “
In the Bottling Room all was harmonious bustle and ordered activity. Whizz and then, click! the lift-hatches flew open; the bottle-liner had only to reach out a hand, take the flap, insert, smooth-side down, and before the lined bottle had had time to travel out of reach along the endless band, whizz, click! another flap of peritoneum had shot up from the depths
.”

Rush asks, “What’s that?”

“Huxley.
Brave New World
.”

“A book?”

“A book.”

“Thought so. Sounds old. When did you memorize that?”

“Seems like I’ve always known it.”

Skeeeee!
True’s console alarm. The message, from WWTV: a news emergency in Japan. He tunes in to hear a woman he recognizes as Reiner Jacobi, one of WWTV’s top news anchors, as she heli-floats over Tokyo. The viewing audience is offered flattened neighborhoods, bodies strewn in wreckage, fires screaming toward the heart of the city.

“…at five fifty-five this afternoon a massive earthquake struck Tokyo, a city with fifty million people living within a hundred-mile radius.” Reiner has to shout over the rotor’s soft
rat-a-tat-tat
. “Information is sketchy, but already estimates put the number dead at more than one million and climbing. Millions more, it’s impossible to say just yet, are homeless. Hospitals report massive casualties. Whole sections have been destroyed.”

Reiner soars over the damaged shoreline as a tidal wave smacks the shore, further decimating Japan’s capital. With a telestrater, she replays the tidal wave, again as a reverse-angle replay. The helicam pans the cockpit, shows Reiner, a pilot, and a large black Labrador, barking and panting. Reiner shoves a biscuit into the dog’s mouth. The shore is shredded, coastal buildings hammered into chunks and washed out to sea along with cars, couches, futons, clothes. True feels he’s a voyeur, peeping into lives he has no right peeping into. The screen breaks into grids displaying different close-up views of the damage.

Rush’s murmurings. “Wish I was there. Reiner’s one lucky bitch.”

True’s fascinated by nature’s wrath, knows he’ll face his sadness later, in private. For now it’s reporter-mode. He switches off most of the grid sequences and enlarges a shot of the downtown business district, which is relatively untouched, built as it is on solid rock. People stream into the area, awaiting guidance, searching for refuge from the inevitable aftershocks. True pulls up the next option: bed towns, the suburban towns that serve as home to salarymen and their families, a two-, three-hour commute from their jobs on packed trains and buses, have been eradicated as well.

Reiner ends her report by focusing beyond the crumbling embers of what was one of the great cities, beyond the skyline to the sun, the color of the inside of a roasted sweet potato, taunting the city by dripping below the horizon. The Rising Sun is setting.

A request for more options:
Repeat telecast? More news from around the globe? Local news? Sports? Weather?
True buttons it closed and the earthquake is tucked from sight.

Rush speaks first. “I hope they call me to Tokyo. That could really help me upgrade my career. Great anchors get their breaks covering wars and disasters.”

True focuses on the here and now. “There’s a lot we can do here.”

“Like what?”

“Many J-corps have set up shop here, so there are bound to be refugees. We can interview them, especially given the context.”

“What context?”

“The bad blood that exists between the governments of Luzonia and Japan, since Japan is supporting some of the ethnic groups fighting for independence.”

“I didn’t know that.”

“These refugees will be bringing stories of their escape. Victim profiles make for interesting viewing and solid ratings.”

“I’m glad you’re getting the idea how we do things at the new WWTV.”

“And you know what else? After a major ecological disaster, what happens next?”

“What?”

“Rebuilding.”

“So?”

“There will be tremendous incentive to begin construction in Tokyo, which means great demand for labor. With imported workers come prostitution and a thriving black market.”

“How do you know all this?”

“Check your history. And where do you think many of these prostitutes will come from?”

Rush furrows. “Luzonia?”

“Luzonia.”

“Ailey, you’re showing me something. Maybe you haven’t used up all your processors, after all. What’s the plan?”

“We find out where the refugees are and interview them. Human interest stuff, too. Tap into the black market here and see how they plan to play in Tokyo.”

“Do it. Lots of pain and suffering. Find an outbreak of cholera or plague, too, if you can. You know, the usual ratings grabbers.” Rush slides through the door. “Ratings call.”

CHAPTER 5

Outside a makeshift refugee camp at the Nerula’s port. Black marketeers have vined wood and plastic together for makeshift electric currency conversion booths. To express its displeasure over Japan’s support of autonomous ethnic regions, Luzonia’s Parliament banned yen. Currency pirates extort the nouveau-refugees, proffering ridiculous rates for the conversion of yen into Luzonian currency into American electric dollars, tacking on a 50 percent surcharge; or they trade wads of Luzonian toilet paper money for Japanese heirlooms, electronics, jewelry, liquor. And with each stolen minute, the rates change; Luzonia suffers such severe hyperinflation that traders have to weigh the money. This day, 800 grams of Luzonian 100-peseta paper notes fetches one electric dollar. In an hour or two, a greenback could bring as much as a kilogram.

True lolls to a section squeezed by scriggly wire. Through fence coils he sees luggage—suitcases, plastic bags, cloth coats tied up to hold the salvageable—and next to that are heaps of foreign aid: sacks of Indonesian dried noodles; Polish canned hams; squeeze bottles of Vietnamese fermented fish sauce; corn; wheat; boxes of stale pancake mix. Food no one wants. It’s True’s experience that food passed off as foreign aid usually couldn’t pass muster as pet food. He aims his wrist-top at the pile and his Geiger counter squirts off the scale. Enough ambient radiation to power a space launch.

Not looking, True bumps into Maxi Khoompootla, anchor of
Aussie Beat
, a popular TV tabloid show, at the press entrance.

“G’day, mate.
GDAYGDAY
you here, too?” Maxi mock-salutes True.

It usually takes True a moment to adapt to Maxi’s heavily accented English. He’s broad, hulking, with a beard framing a face frozen in perpetual sneer—as if, True thinks, he’s about to sneeze. Claims he originates from the outback, but True knows he’s Sydney born and bred. “What, miss this?” True says.

They flash press passes at a rheumy guard, who sits in the sun with his feet up on a plastic table, and cross inside.

“
GDAYGDAY
downtown with the coppers. Trouble, Ailey?” Maxi once told him he refuses to call any journalist “True.”

“Yes and no.”

“Could be worse.”

“How so?”

“You could bloody well be Japanese. Say, Ailey, look at these.” Maxi taps wrist-top keys, and a 3-D hologram of backdrops mushrooms into view. Parodies of Luzonian monuments. The statue commemorating the ethnic cleansing of Nerula sporting a decal: Sudzy—a popular Aussie detergent. Nerula’s Revolutionary hero doing the hula. Liberty, the country’s dog mascot, proudly flexing—if, True thinks, that’s the right word—an erection. Maxi elbows his ribs. “Phony backdrops for all occasions.” Maxi zips up his screen, the backdrops zapped to infinity. “Time to have meself a Captain Cook. Ratings call, mate.”