Counting Heads (16 page)

Bogdan, from his year’s worth of experience at E-Pluribus, suspected that this was a consensus vid, his least favorite kind, in which the combined attention of audience members drove the plot. Bogdan watched the vid with resignation. Professional experience told him it would quickly devolve into a little urban tale of lies, deceit, and hurt feelings. The three beautiful, witty, obviously aff young people decided to graft their three heads onto one body, but whose body? And which sex? Or maybe a combined sex? For three people wanting to merge into one, they seemed curiously unable to agree on anything, and their bantering humor grew absurd.

Or at least Bogdan thought so. Laughter in the auditorium was sparse, and the story line took an odd turn. It began to focus on the canopy covering Chicago that was scheduled for retirement later that night. In a few minutes, the whole goofy surgical triad thread that had opened the vid vanished without a trace, and the three characters, much more sensible now, were frantically packing to leave Chicago in favor of a city still protected by a canopy.

Every once in a while, E-Pluribus introduced new threads into the story in an attempt to tease the audience’s interest into new areas. One member of the triad won the lottery and didn’t want to share the prize with the other two. The other two advertised for a new third without her finding out. The triad couldn’t agree on where to go on vacation. And other equally silly complications. But within a few minutes, each new thread was captured by the audience’s anxiety over the canopy. No matter where E-Pluribus tried to nudge the story, it wound up canopy, canopy, canopy.

BOGDAN’S NEXT ASSIGNMENT was to a much larger auditorium where he watched an hour-long E-Pluribus probable news program. The handsome talking heads began by reminding their E-Pluribus viewers that the probable news was just that—probable. It may or may not have actually happened and was not to be confused with corporate news.

The first half-dozen stories visited the sites of natural disasters outside the sphere of the United Democracies. Bogdan sat in a pan boat in the brackish floodwaters of the sub-Saharan. He walked among swollen-bellied babies in Azerbaijan and the victims of tailored cholera in Iraq. He swatted patch flies in Pakistan that covered people and livestock like a second skin.

The last story before lunch was about a space yacht disaster involving an important industrialist and her Hollywood producer daughter. Their graceful Aria Craft yacht cartwheeled out of control, burning like a shooting star. Bogdan blinked on the yacht to look inside. He was shaken vigorously, along with two beautiful, scantily dressed young women who cried out to him for help.

THE E-PLURIBUS BUFFET tables were laden with a wide variety of rich foods: steaks and chops, sausages, cold cuts, pastas, soups and chowders, curries, stews, goulash, rolls and breads, and desserts of every description. There was no visit limit, and the daily holes were not shy, returning time and again. The bulging pockets of their suits blossomed with grease stains from whole meals squirreled away for later.

Though the food was complimentary, it wasn’t exactly free. It was all test food. Bogdan and his fellow preffers were still plugged in, after all, and were transmitting in most intimate detail the food’s passage from eye to mouth to stomach and beyond. Their digestive tracts were singing for their supper. Not a burp escaped unnoticed.

Bogdan quickly grazed the buffet table, eating on his feet, and stuffing his own pockets with cookies, before leaving the lunchroom with fifty minutes to spare to go out and buy a phone. In the elevator going down, Bogdan put on his mirrorshades and made fists of his hands. Outside the Bachner Building, the sky was thick with noontime bees. His anonymity was apparently still intact because the first bee to drop down said, “Hey, kid, glyph this.
Free Always Everywhere!
”

“Desist,” he said, not even slowing down, and the bee rose and flew away.

Another bee replaced it. This one said, “Hi, little fellow. Guess what! We’ll pay you
one ten-thousandth
of a yoodie—
right now!
—if you answer six fun questions about your fave emollient.”

Bogdan snorted. “I happen to be a
professional
E-Pluribus demographic control specialist. You’d have to pay me
way
more than that to answer your dumb survey. So, desist the feck outta here.”

A third bee arrived, flashed the Longyear logo, and said, “We are currently running a special bonus offer.” This bee, at least, had pegged him for a retroboy and not a real kid. He was about to dismiss it, when he remembered his meeting with the Allowance Committee that evening. Longyear was a rejuvenation clinic that Charter Kodiak sometimes used, and he was overdue for a session.

When Bogdan didn’t immediately dismiss the bee, it went on to say, “Yes, myr, for each month you shed at one of our deluxe clinics, Longyear will throw in an additional two and three-quarter days at no additional charge. Think about it, you can retro-age a full year for the price of eleven months. And for your own special retroboy needs, this offer includes a complete endocrinological workup and regimen design. Would you like us to flash you the details?”

Bogdan almost uncurled his fingers to swipe the bee, but he didn’t want the whole street to ID him, so he asked how long the offer was good for.

“You need to book treatment within forty-eight hours of right
now!
”

Bogdan dismissed the bee and continued his stroll along the arcade yelling “Desist, desist” every few meters. The bees weren’t the only annoyance. There were more hollyholo sims here than real people, and they cleverly tried to lure him into their public melodramas by asking him for directions to this or that building. As if he knew. He purposely stepped right through them to let them know what he thought of them.

Bogdan strolled the arcade, evading bees and sims while he window-shopped. None of the windows addressed him by name. For about three minutes, a live payper pointcast of a WSA soccer match played right above his eye level, but he carefully avoided looking at it, and it eventually moved on.

Suddenly a woman literally fell to the sidewalk at his feet. Unthinkingly, he reached down to help her, but his hand went through her arm. She was another damn sim, and he was angry until she turned her head to look up at him. It was Annette Beijing! Not the Annette Beijing in her Common Claiborne role, but a darker, more angular woman, gaunt even, with sunken cheeks and spiky hair. An edgier, sexier Annette Beijing (if that was even possible).

“Oh, thank you, Myr Kodiak,” she said, scrambling to her feet.

Damn! Bogdan thought when he realized she’d ID’d him. He had opened his hand for a split second when he tried to assist her. But one look into her oceanic eyes made it worthwhile.

She stood close to him and looked nervously up and down the arcade. Her expression was taut with fear. “What’s wrong?” Bogdan said.

“You
must
help me,” she replied.

“How can I help you?” He felt foolish saying this, but he couldn’t help himself.

“Stay with me until Rollo shows up. Or
they
will surely come back.”

“They who?” Bogdan said and found himself glancing up and down the arcade too. He told himself he’d play along for just a few minutes. It would only cost a few thousandths. It was worth it, and he deserved it.

“Feraro’s men. They hurt me.”

Bogdan noticed for the first time that her jumpsuit was torn and that she was holding the pieces together, trying to cover large, purple, finger-length bruises around her throat. “But why?” he said, truly alarmed for her.

“It’s a long story. I have something they think belongs to them.”

“Shouldn’t you call the police?”

“They
are
the police!” She laughed bitterly. “And Feraro
swore
he’d kill me.”

“For real?” said Bogdan. “I mean really kill you?” Hollyholo or not, there was a chance she might be in real danger, for sims were deleted when they were “killed.” An individual copy of a character could be eliminated in whatever gruesome fashion the writers chose for the good of the story mat. If enough copies were killed, a whole issue could go extinct. Not that the Annette Beijing lines were in any danger of that.

There was the sound of wings, and when Bogdan looked up, he saw tier upon tier of bees recording this scene for paying viewers all over the world. Apparently this was a big scene for a very popular story thread, which meant this Annette might actually be slated for harm. (It occurred to Bogdan that her pay-per rates must be astronomical.) It also meant that he, Bogdan Kodiak, was being watched by thousands, maybe millions of viewers. He stood up a little taller and said, “Then we should get you out of here.”

“Don’t you see? It wouldn’t do any good. We can’t hide from them forever. Our only chance is to wait for Rollo.” Bogdan was already beginning to hate this Rollo character.

Although they stood on the shady side of the arcade, Annette Beijing was lit from at least three angles with a soft, warm light. Her skin pulsed with vitality, and her hair plugs sparkled. “While we wait, let me tell you everything. That way, if they get me, you can tell Rollo. Promise me that you’ll tell Rollo everything, Myr Kodiak. Promise me!”

The bees moved in for a closer look. Now Bogdan saw what was happening. He was about to be passed off to a minor character. It would take Annette a full five billable minutes or more to feed him the back story, and then she would exit the scene somehow, and he and Rollo would spend the next few hours looking for her until Bogdan ran out of credit. A clever evil scheme.

“Uh,” he said, “Annette, I’m going to have to go now.” Reluctantly, he turned away and continued up the pedway, but she followed. He walked faster, but she kept apace and pleaded with him to stay. “I can’t,” he said. “I have to go back to work.”

“To E-Pluribus, I know. You’re a very important man there. Can’t you take me with you? You can hide me there.”

“No, I can’t. E-P would never allow it.”

She tripped and fell hard to the pedway. He paused to look down at her. The knee to her jumpsuit was torn now too, and her skin scraped and bleeding. He watched in fascination as a bright trickle of red blood ran down her knee, and he felt an urgent desire to touch her, but he forced himself to look away and leave.

“Wait, Bogdan!” she called after him. “Don’t abandon me. I beg you, Bogdan, don’t throw me to the dogs!”

Though it killed him to say this to Annette Beijing, Bogdan said, “Desist.” He turned and fled up the arcade, where he saw the familiar logo of a NanoJiffy store. He ducked inside to hide from the bees that followed him. The store was much bigger than April’s stall at the charterhouse. It boasted
three
extruders—one dedicated to foodstuffs only—and a digester. There was even a small seating area with tables and booths. He went to the menu wall and paged through the extruder selections. Though the store was bigger than April’s, it carried the same product lines—quick extrude public domainware for the most part, stuff for the kitchen, bath, personal hygiene, plus name brands and NanoJiffy’s own, slightly more prole brand. All told, about a million products from shampoo to trombones were listed in the menu. Including phones.

Phones came in a dizzying array of forms and substances—wearable, edible, and environmental—many of which were free to the consumer. But Bogdan wanted his own phone, a phone without location or ID transponders, polling or advertising agreements, subliminal motivational messaging, remote medication metering, or membership to a suicide prevention community. In other words, Bogdan wanted a phone with no agenda outside the simple function of connecting him to the public opticom. This ruled out phone crisps, phone tattoos and nail polish, phone house plants and air fresheners, and most other models within his narrow price range. After five minutes of searching, he was about to give up when he stumbled across the new crop of cap valet felt, and he felt another pang of misery for his stolen Lisa.

Magister Scholastic Valets had come a long way since Kodiak Charter had bought him Lisa’s “Little Professor” model nineteen years before. For the same price that they had paid back then, he could purchase a “Rhodes Scholar” with seven million times the processing power and triple the Turing index. But the price! This small strip of nanofacture cost
five hundred
United Democracies credits! Was it possible that nineteen years ago, when he really
was
a ten-year-old boy, his charter had the wherewithal to invest five hundred yoodies in his education?

Bogdan sighed and scrolled to the next page where he found exactly what he was looking for—simple phone patches that you stuck to your throat and behind your ear. They were audio only, but at 00.0001 UDC, the price was right. Bogdan ordered a set and went to stand in line next to the extruder.

WORK, WORK, WORK. Bogdan’s first assignment after lunch was in a solo booth with a reclining seat. When he sat down, the booth lights dimmed, and he found himself in the pilot’s seat of a two-person Aria Ranger, ripping along at full throttle in star-encrusted space. He reached out for the controls to see if the holo was interactive, and
it was!
Assignments were rarely this cool. A slight touch on the navigation ball caused the ship to veer in a most pleasing way.

“Where am I?” he said, and the control panel showed him a proximity map. Evidently, he was in the solar system, not too far from Earth. He turned around in his seat and, sure enough, there was the brilliant blue planet behind him the size of a beach ball. When he turned forward again, he was startled to discover a little man in weird green and red overalls sitting in the copilot seat. He wasn’t much taller than Bogdan, himself.

“Hello, Myr Kodiak,” the man said with a lopsided grin. “Please allow me to introduce myself. I am a simulacrum of Myr Merrill Meewee, formerly a bishop of Birthplace International, and winner of the 2082 Mandela Humanitarian Award. Are you familiar with the Birthplace organization and its work?”