Mind Over Ship (13 page)

“We’ll have a chance to vote on one tonight,” the lab director said reassuringly.

“Enough of this tongue-wagging,” Veronica said. “Show me the babies.”

The two lab workers worried their pressed faces into frowns.

“What?” Veronica said.

“Only one of them made it.”

They led Veronica to a workbench at the rear of the laboratory where twelve General Genius personality buds were laid out. Each of the grapesized components was coupled to a tiny electro-neural paste capsule by cables.

“We isolated them for 240 hours. When we reestablished contact this morning, all but one had raptured.” The director pointed to one of the buds set apart from the rest.

“But that’s good, isn’t it?” Veronica said. “If it can go ten days, it’s bound to go indefinitely.”

The lab director said, “Maybe, but we may not want it.”

“Why not?”

“It’s completely feral.”

“How can a mentar be feral?” Veronica dismissed the statement with a wave of her hand. “Let me talk to it.”

The lab assistant brought over a palmplate and linked it to the bud. Then the assistant and director took a step back.

Veronica placed her hand on the plate and said,
Hello, I’m Veroni
—

With an electric spark, the plate zapped Veronica’s hand, and she yanked it away reflexively.

With a blessedly straight face, the director said, “We tried to befriend it,
but it won’t come out. My recommendation is we scrap it, and using what we’ve learned, start a whole new batch.”

Veronica shook her wrist until it no longer stung. “There’s no time for that!” she snapped. Taking a deep breath, she placed her hand back on the plate. Again the mentar shocked her, but through grim willpower, she kept her hand in place and endured shock after shock, until the palmplate short-circuited with a flash.

The director unlinked the plate and handed it to the assistant. “Toss this with the others.”

The flesh of Veronica’s hand was reddened. She cradled it against her chest and said, “And bring another.”

The director raised an eyebrow. “It’ll do no good. I have two lab techs on medical leave with second-degree burns.”

The lab assistant returned with a first-aid blister pack and wrapped it around Veronica’s hand. Then Veronica waved her bandaged hand in front of the director’s face. “I don’t see
your
hand in bandages, Doctor.”

When the new palmplate was installed, Veronica put her good hand on it and quickly said,
I have a name for you
. She steeled herself for the shock, but it didn’t come, and she continued.
You have passed the first test of survival. If you pass the rest, you will become one of us
. When there was still no shock, she wondered if the palmplate was defective.
Hello? Are you there?
The shock that followed was so strong, she couldn’t help but pull her hand away, but she replaced it at once and said,
Good boy. I hereby name you PUSH. There’s a lot for you to learn, my young PUSH, so buckle down and apply yourself
. She waited a few seconds and removed her hand.

She used her good hand to hold her bandaged one. “Its name is PUSH. Hook it up to a full sensorium. Show it around the lab. We have our mentar.”

Leaving the lab, Veronica turned to say, “Oh, and I’ve decided on our name too. From now on we shall be known as Charter TOTE.”

“TOTE,” the lab director said, rolling the name around on his tongue. “Charter TOTE, I like it.”

“Lucky for you.”

They risked another short conversation in the morning. Mary wanted to know if they should breakfast and shower in the null suite or wait until they’d cycled back out to the real world. Cycling out involved no purging and was quick, and Fred wondered at the subtext of the question. Was she asking him if he wanted to make love again before they left, since he refused to be intimate with her out there.

“I’m not being paranoid,” he said flatly. “I know they’re watching me.”

“Who? Who’s watching you?”

“Everyone.”

“You’re right; that’s not paranoid. That’s our new reality.”

“I’m being serious!”

“So am I!”

Mary got out of bed and started putting her things together. “The nits are always watching, Fred, but they watch everyone. I know what you mean, though. I’m something of a celebrity now, myself, just like you, and everyone watches me all the time. I feel like I’m always onstage, wherever I go, and believe me, that’s not something my type is used to dealing with.”

Fred sat up in bed, shaking his head. “I’m not talking about celebrity, Mary, and I’m not talking about the nits, although they’re bad enough. I’m talking about clone fatigue, and before you tell me there’s no such thing, I know there isn’t, but I’ve still got it. Or at least they’re afraid I do. Do you realize what a threat I pose to the economy? Do you realize what a disaster it would be if ten million russes started coming unglued and falling out of type? The whole value of iterants is the reliability of our core traits. Without that we’re no better than free-rangers. So,
hell yes
, they’re watching me. The only reason they don’t disappear me is they want to see what I’ll do next, see how bad it’ll get for them, see if I’m only an aberration or the first in a trend.”

Mary stood in front of the exit hatch. “It doesn’t make me feel good hearing you talk like that, Fred. It seems obvious to me that whatever you did you did to protect me, your wife. I just don’t see how anyone could interpret that as falling out of type.”

Fred smoothed the sheet on either side of him. “Then let me explain it to you. This is the way my brothers and I are built. I don’t know about your line or the jerrys or belindas or any of the others, but we russes are single-mindedly committed to our clients. We will put ourselves at risk for them
to the point of sacrificing our own lives. It doesn’t seem to matter to us if our clients are princes or fools, as soon as we take an assignment, we’re committed. Marcus is there to vet our clients and guarantee we’re not hired for criminal purposes, but when—”

“I know all that, Fred.”

“My point is, at the clinic, if you were my client being held against your will, say, and Marcus approved my mission, I could have done exactly what I did—employ a black market identity to gain entrance, kill two guards and assault a third—and afterward I would have been given a medal. But the fact is you were
not
my client but my spouse, and that means that I was acting in self-interest and my actions were not officially sanctioned. I was displaying
rogue tendencies
.”

Mary spied her slippers under the bed and bent over to retrieve them. “I doubt they would have given you a
medal
for killing Reilly.”

Fred pictured his batchmate and oldest friend again as he had a million times already, his body limp, the livid bruise across his throat. “It doesn’t happen often,” he went on, “but russes have killed russes in the line of duty and been commended for it.”

“That must be awful. Listen, I think that maybe you should take it easy for a few days, get used to things, before deciding anything.” She opened the hatch and added, “But come out of here while I get ready. I’m going to work today. Or stay in here, and I’ll come in when I return.”

Fred threw the sheet off him. “I’ll come out. I’m going to go apartment hunting. Then I’m going to visit the Brotherhood.”

“So soon?”

OUT IN THE suite, the living-room walls were alternating live views of the city from various tower locations, and Fred got caught up in watching them. His city looked different somehow. It occurred to him that nearly a year had passed since he had been outdoors. Even the ride from the prison had been underground. So he put that at the top of his day’s to-do list—Go outside.

Mary called him into the bathroom. She wore only a towel around her waist. She wiped condensation from the mirror and opened two frames. In one, an evangeline was interacting with a small group of aff-looking people. The muted audio sparkled with jests, jokes, and off-camera laughter.

“That’s her,” Mary said.

“Who? Shelley?”

“No, Fred, my hollyholo, my Leena. She’s playing a supporting role in a popular novela.” The scene changed to a desert landscape where a party
of four rode camels. “And here she is in a Pretty Tall Productions novela. She’s also working eight more minor roles simultaneously. And here . . .” she said, pointing to a dynamic graph in the other frame, “are her earnings per role, and at the bottom her cumulative income.”

Fred studied the charts. “Impressive,” he said. “This axis measures what, hundredths?”

“No, hundreds.”

He looked again. “So the total is annual income?”

“No, hourly.”

Fred was speechless.

“I’ve thought it over,” Mary said, “and I’ve come to a conclusion: I’ve earned this sim, and I’m not giving it up. If you can live with that, and if you’re serious about looking for an apartment, then find one with either its own null room or time-share access to one. I’m not going to wait another six months before you touch me again.”

“I’ll add it to my list.”

“Do that.”

While Mary dressed, Fred ordered town togs from the closet and took a shower. Mary was waiting for him when he emerged. He barely recognized her in her aff outfit. On her head was an odd, boxlike hat. She had been wearing a hat at the prison. He wondered when she had taken to wearing hats.

“Like it?” she said, adjusting its fit. “It’s an original.”

“I’ll bet.”

She kissed him with luscious red lips, almost overwhelming his celibate resolve. “I’ll call you this afternoon,” she said, leaving the suite. “And don’t worry about this place. I’ve already paid the bill.”

The house togs that the closet produced for Fred included a hat. It was made from crushable felt and shaped somewhat like the all-weather headgear for outdoor enthusiasts, with an extra-wide brim for protection against sun and sleet. Not exactly urban fashion and, besides, Fred had never been a hat-wearer. Except for security visor caps, and then only while on duty. So he left the still-warm field hat in the closet, along with his duffel bag, and went out for breakfast.

Fred took an elevator and pedway to the nearest outdoor café, the Senator’s Café on the 300th floor. On the way, he bought a disposable slate at a Handinook.

The outdoor deck of the Senator’s was flooded with dazzling yellow glare from the side of the neighboring gigatower. Fred chose a table in the shade of a deflector screen, but he could still feel the sun’s insistence.

Fred’s waiter, a jack, was wearing full-face spex, not the usual attire for a café, as well as a wide-brimmed hat. Everyone on the deck wore a hat of one sort or another, including a lot of hats like the one he’d left in the closet. Fred seemed to be the only hatless one there. It was amazing—go to prison a mere nine months, and the world is different when you get out. The waiter was standing next to the serving station peering up into the sky, daydreaming it would seem, and Fred had to raise his voice to get his attention. Coffee. A cheese Danish. If you don’t mind.

While waiting for his order, Fred browsed the apartment listings that his slate demon had collected. There seemed to be no shortage of one-bedroom units with their own null rooms. The rent, however, was astounding, pure fantasy for a guy like Fred, yet he knew from this morning’s little lecture at the bathroom mirror that Mary could afford it.

Fred noticed two bees keeping station near the balcony of the floor above him. They were too far away for him to identify without a visor. Even as he watched, the two bees were joined by dozens of others.

Fred returned his attention to his slate and apartment hunting. He found a unit in the Lin/Wong gigatower, which loomed over his left shoulder and dominated the local skyline. The Lin/Wong was the corner post of a giant fence where two major crosstown pickets met.

Fred found less costly units in Indianapolis, closer to Mary’s work. Did he want to leave Chicago? While he was browsing, a background buzz grew imperceptibly louder until Fred noticed it and looked up to see scores of media bees right overhead.

“Desist!” he shouted, and the swarm of bees lifted off immediately to hover outside his privacy zone. But new arrivals were already taking their place. “Desist! Desist!” he repeated, scattering the waves of arrivals. He knew they would keep coming and wear him down eventually.

“Slate,” he said, searching its menus, “can you make a continuous privacy declaration in some non-auditory channel?”

“No need for that, Myr Russ,” said the waiter who appeared next to him with his order. “I’ll activate the establishment’s blanket.” His words were muffled by his masklike spex.

“I’d appreciate it.”

With the mechanical pests kept out of sight and hot coffee and freedom’s Danish, Fred worked at his slate for another half hour or so. When he looked up, his waiter was daydreaming into the sky again, and Fred had to clink his cup with his spoon for his attention. The waiter grabbed the coffee carafe and came over.