Shine (28 page)
"I do?"
"Yes. Because then you'd understand." And Jake looks at me with an expression of the utmost gravity on his face, as if he's about to disclose one of the darkest, most mystical secrets of the universe. "It was different tonight. He came in early. Jumped his usual cue. And when he did come in it was for longer than usual and he added that vocal flourish."
I nod, but I'm still not seeing the big picture. "OK. He screwed up. Shit happens. Gotta roll with it, remember? It was still a good show. Everyone said so."
But he shakes his head. "You're not getting it, buddy. That wasn't a mistake. That was something much worse. That was an improvement. That was him improvising."
"You can't be sure."
"I can be sure." He punches another key and a slice of Derek's neural activity pops up. "Extracted this from the performance," he says. "Right around the time he started going off-script." His finger traces three bright blotches. "You see these hotspots? They've come on in ones and twos before. But they've never once lit up at the same time."
"And this means something?"
He taps his finger against the blotches in turn. "Dorsal premotor cortex. That's associated with the brain planning a sequence of body movements. You slip on ice, that's the part that gets you flapping your arms so you don't you fall over." Next blotch. "Anterior cingulate. That's your basic complex resolution, decision making module, right. Do I chase after that meal, or go after that one?" He moves his finger again. "Interior frontal gyrus/ventral premotor cortex. We're deep into mammal brain structure here--a normal Rex wouldn't have anything you could even stick a label on here. You know when this area lights up, in you and me?"
"I'm not, strangely enough, a neuroscientist."
"Nor was I until I got involved with Derek. This is the sweet spot, buddy. This is what lights up when you hear language or music. And all three of these areas going off at once? That's a pretty unique signature. It doesn't just mean he's playing music. It means he's making shit up as he goes along."
For a moment I don't know what to say. There's no doubt in my mind that he's right. He knows the show--and Derek's brain--inside out. He knows every cue Derek's meant to hit. Derek missing his mark--or coming in early--just isn't meant to happen. And Derek somehow finding a way to deviate from the program and make the song sound better is, well...not exactly the way Jake likes things to happen.
"I don't like improvisation," he says. "It's a sign of creative restlessness. Before you know it..."
"It's solo recording deals, expensive riders and private tour buses."
"I thought we got away from this shit," Jake says mournfully. "I mean, dead bodies, man. Then robots. Then dinosaurs. And still it's coming back to bite us. Talent always thinks it knows best."
"Maybe it does."
"A T-Rex?"
"You gave him just enough of a mind to rock. Unfortunately, that's already more than enough to not want to take orders." I take a sip from the JD. "But look on the bright side. What's the worst that could happen?"
"He escapes and eats us."
"Apart from that."
"I don't know. If he starts showing signs of... creativity... then we're fucked six ways from Tuesday. We'll have animal rights activists pulling the plug on every show."
"Unless we just... roll with it. Let him decide what he does. I mean, it's not like he doesn't
want
to perform, is it? You've seen him out there. This is what he was born for. Hell, why stop there? This is what he was evolved for."
"I wish I had your optimism."
I look back at the cage. Derek's watching us, following the conversation. I wonder how much of it he's capable of understanding. Maybe more than we realise.
"Maybe we keep control of him, maybe we don't. Either way, we've done something beautiful." I hand him the bottle. "You, mainly. It was your idea, not mine."
"Took the two of us to make it fly," Jake says, before taking a gulp. "And hell, maybe you're right. That's the glorious thing about rock and roll. It's alchemy. Holy fire. The moment you control it, it ain't rock and roll no more. So maybe the thing we should be doing here is celebrating."
"All the way." And I snatch back the JD and take my own swig. Then I raise the bottle and toast Derek, who's still watching us. Hard to tell what's going on behind those eyes, but one thing I'm sure of is that it's not nothing. And for a brief, marvellous instant, I'm glad not only to be alive, but to be alive in a universe that has room in it for beautiful monsters.
And heavy metal, of course.
Sarging Rasmussen:
A Report (by Organic)
Gord Sellar
I
n most of the
Shine
stories the positive change that happens is implemented through actions of individuals, groups or companies (and eventually, one hopes, the people), who often have to fight--apart from the barrage of real-world problems--the political powers that be. In "Sarging Rasmussen" Gord Sellar proposes--maybe only partly tongue-in-cheek--that it might be better to, well, go with the flow.
This may be true (I suggest with one cheek bulging) for Gord himself: after venting his frustration that a certain Australian stole his ideas before he had them (see "The Egan Thief" in
FLURB
#4), he saw his stories published in
Asimov's
,
Interzone
and
The Year's Best SF
(and other fine venues). So maybe at the next SF convention we all should be 'Broing Sellar'...
Were people really so - alone, granpa? /
disbelief in her deep brown eyes /
Yes, dear, said I /
Old friends laughing in the back of my mind
--David Heijl--
"I
Don't!" Hunter screamed, tears trailing down his cheeks, lit by the trendy piezoelectric floor-powered club lights pulsing to the fashionable heart-attack thump of Malaybeat techno. "I let Bagheera amog me and fuck it all up! I don't got shit!"
I managed to fight my urge to start calling him by his real name--Wilfred Chan--but I made the mistake of reasoning with him. "What? Listen, you do.
You got game.
Trust me. I've seen your work, Hunter, ever since you first came to Den Haag. I watched you amog Marko Rechschild, and co-bro Park and Almeira into signing that Pacific RI treaty, all in three hours! You even banged that hot little attachÈ from the IECWP before the committee went into session! Shit, man, you got so much Game you're a legend! Game 1.0, Game 2.0: new guys dream of being like you... what're you crying about?"
A smile almost cracked his face in half as he remembered bonking that secretary, but then reality flooded back, slamming his frown back into place. He'd been amogged--knocked right out of his synthetic alpha male mindframe, reduced to inaudible mumbling. Once again a low-status, never-gets-laid, can't-save-the-world loser. The club noise swallowed his broken little voice.
But his words flashed boldly across my comptact lenses: What about the Reefs? The IPBR display in the corner of my right lens showed his body temp running high, though so was everyone's in that place, but his pulse rate and respiration were all in the red. Then Muggle
CC
kicked in, blaring terse, blood-red warnings across my comptacts: Hostile. Unbalanced. Tox?
You can always trust software to tell you the truth you're trying to ignore hardest.
The Muggle
CC
app was one of the finest tools in the Game 2.0 kit. It told you which chicks really just wanted to be left alone, and when a suit had been rubbed the wrong way beyond the point of no broability. For analyzing people you didn't know, possible targets, it was the most kickass app around, like a wingman who was never scared to realityslap you upside the neocortex. But Hunter had been my mentor once; I felt a stab of guilt about what I'd have to do to him. My doubts swirled momentarily, and the comptacts picked that up--my system was monitoring me, too--and flashed me emphatically: Totally Fucking Hostile, Dude. A moment later came the default addendum, built in to urge restraint: Sorry.
I embraced my guilt for a second--I figured it kept me human--and then I shoved it aside. Compassion for fuckups and flakes is what crippled the green movement so badly that Game 2.0 became necessary. Besides, I've worked too hard to burn off the residuals of my own Average Frustrated Environmentalist Crusader mentality. I didn't have time to be an AFEC anymore. There were protocols for handling backslides like this.
"Listen, man," I said, setting my hand on his shoulder. And then I felt it, right through the fine black Italian arachnosilk: Hunter was shivering, almost shaking. "What the fuck are you on?" I asked, snatching his peacocky mirrorspex from his face, and taking a good look at his surgically-Eurasianised eyes.
Dilated pupils stared back wetly at me, the left one huge and the right still dilating. Hunter cringed from the sudden brightness. He ignored my question and exhaled slowly. Brain haemorrhage, it had to be. The pupils: textbook images flooded back from one of my pre-med bio courses, before I'd fled into a pharmacy program.
Fuck!
For what? A couple of fucking
coral reefs
that were doomed anyway, because Diaz and Abral and Rodriguez were playing let's-compare-dicks with ASEAN again? Always with the drama, Hunter was, and now he was probably gonna end up brain-damaged, if not dead on the spot. We had to get that shit out of his system fast. My Winger
CC
app had already alerted the other guys, thank fuck. He stared at me, grunted my name, and then, with a sudden jolt, he slapped himself in the face and started howling, nothing but vowels and slobber. Nobody had noticed, lucky for us.
By then Homboyostasis and Biosfear had shown up on either side of Hunter and looped their arms through his. They hauled him out of the place with all the efficiency of professional bouncers, with me at their side.
"Get him to a DTC, or he's fucked for sure," I hollered once we in the hallway, away from the pounding beat, wondering if there even
was
a detox centre close enough to save his ass. "Maybe too late already. If not, when he wakes up, tell him he did his best, and buy him some time in a vippy tank, okay? I'm gonna go back in and shake-close this treaty if it takes both of my front teeth and one of my balls."
By then, they'd stuffed him into a cab and piled in after him. "Sure thing, Organic," Biosfear said to me with a nod, while Homeboyostasis shouted into his cell phone and fumbled with the taxi's emergency medikit. Before the cab had even pulled away, I was back in the hallway, making my way back into the noise. Strutting, already: if there was one thing that would get me through the next two hours, it was inner game.
And thank fuck, my inner game was deep as the Mariana Trench, and solid as titanium steel, or the sight of Hunter losing his shit would have done me in.
Fuck s-closing
, I thought to myself.
Fuck handshakes. I am gonna t-close
, I told myself.
I'm gonna fuckin' treaty-close this deal
, I repeated, and took a deep breath as I reached the dancefloor.
Finally, I caught sight of Gilberto over by the bar, laughing as he talked to a tall skinny black guy--I didn't quite recognize him but I was pretty sure he was on some human rights land mines homeless children immunization whatever-the-fuck committee we usually didn't have to game--and Sigrid Rasmussen, a slightly chunky middle-aged blonde--HB 6, if I were pressed to rank her sexually, because I don't like big girls and because of her age--who was the Assistant Secretary of the Taskforce for the Deacidification of the World's Oceans. Who was, everyone agreed, playing a little too friendly with the WTO-run oversight council, and needed to be reminded that whatever profit motive mattered now would mean nothing once the reefs were all toast.
The world's reefs. Not the world, just the world's reefs
, I told myself. We could always engineer something artificial if we had to, I reassured myself dubiously.
You can do this.
Then I kicked myself with the 3 Second Rule: never wait more than three seconds to approach a person, or else you'll overthink it. I thought of Mother Earth for a moment, and then waded into the pulsating crowd.
Not for the first time, I wished these WTO/UN dickheads would start acting their age and hang out someplace besides night clubs.
We started out as far from idealists, of course. As my teacher, Praxis, said when he met me: "Environmentalist? Ha, you know who gets laid less than a green radical?"
"Nobody?" I said, wishing I'd mentioned my day job as a lab tech instead of how I spent my weekends.
It was true, though. Women had seen fit to chain themselves to trees beside me, and join me in hijacking oil tankers on highways, and march arm in arm with me in the streets of a dozen countries by my side. But I'd gotten precisely one girl out of a bra in my life, and that had lasted just five weeks. 37 days, to be precise. And that had been four years before.
"'xactly," Praxis said with a sneer. "Nobody. But we're gonna change all that.
You're
gonna," he said, on day one.
That was back in the days when fellas like Praxis were called mPUAs. Guys like him made a living running "boot camps" for AFCs, the Average Frustrated Chumps. Guys who didn't know how to talk to women and were willing to spend a thousand bucks for a weekend of being coached on how talk to women.
Guys like me.
Mostly, they learned by being forced to go sarging--approaching thousands of women in a row, until they stopped pissing themselves with fear and grew a backbone. And Praxis was right: during that weekend, he changed my life... or, well, really,
I
did. He'd taken me and the other AFCs--a hardware engineer who called himself Axiomatic, a lonely high school teacher we dubbed Homework, a recently-divorced cop called Slammer, and some Japanese poet or something--and baptized us by fire. We went out sarging all weekend--chatting up hot women in bars and bookstores and coffeeshops, coming onto them and hassling them, teasing and rubbing shoulders and even scoring some phone numbers.
That weekend was the first time I ever wore leather.
Tight
leather.
Peacocky
leather. Praxis taught us routines, taught us cocky-funny, taught us rules of thumb and dozens of techniques, and by the end of it, every one of us had learned the secret: there wasn't one. Getting a woman's phone number--or anything else, for that matter--didn't require magic, or an eleven-inch cock, or perfect white teeth. All it took was asking for it in the right way, once she was ready to give it... once you'd helped her become ready. Pretty soon, we were having the time of our lives with the kind of babes who'd terrified us just months before. I was no longer Andrew Dalton: I had become Organic, and now I was swimming in women. Tall women, short women, dark and pale, funny and serious, wild and schoolmarmish alike. I tasted every flavour there was. I'd learned techniques for getting them to come home with me in less than thirty minutes of first contact. For engineering a threesome. For getting them to give me a sponge bath dressed in nurse uniforms, while speaking in fake Polish. (Look, everyone has his kinks, and whoever claims otherwise is lying.) For the first time in my life, I was getting laid like a truckload of linoleum. And it was the part of me that was really, really enjoying all that sex that spoke first when Katana had laid out his plan.
