Sims (18 page)

“I'm so sorry, Mr. Sinclair. I've called the police. They will be here in a few minutes.”

Ellis looked around the table. Judy was ignoring them, Julie was watching, fascinated, and Robbie, the birthday boy, looked ready to crawl under the table.

“How did they know I'd be here?” Ellis asked, furious. He'd booked the whole room just to avoid an incident, even used a pseudonym.

“Someone must have recognized you.”

Pretty fast work, considering he left all the public appearances to Mercer. Probably someone on the Tavern staff. However it had happened, he wasn't going to let them ruin the day he had planned.

He pushed back his chair and rose. “I'll handle this.”

“Ellis, no!” Judy said, placing a hand on his arm.

“Mr. Sinclair, the police—”

“Could take a while to get here. In the meantime I want to talk to these people.”

He crossed to a door leading out to the lawn and stepped through. The shouting grew louder as the crowd—a three-to-one ratio of women to men—recognized him. He stood impassively for a moment or two, then raised his hands.

When they quieted enough for him to be heard he said, “Please. I'm trying to have lunch with my family.”

Cries of “Aaaaaw!” and “Pity the poor man!” rose, and one woman stepped forward to snarl, “Yeah! Eating lunch grown and harvested by slave labor!”

Ellis stepped forward. He'd noticed something interesting about a number of the protesters.

“If this is supposed to accomplish something,” he told them, “I assure you it won't. Perhaps a more sincere group might make a point, but not a bunch of hypocrites.”

Ellis kept moving into the gasps of “What!” and “You bastard!” and “What right?” and pointed to the snarling woman's handbag.

“Balducci, right?”

Her only reply was a stunned look.

“Sim made!” Ellis pivoted and jabbed a finger at the insignia on a man's windbreaker. “Tammy Montain—sim made!” As he slipped deeper into the throng, pointing out all the popular labels that used sim labor, crying “Sim made!” over and over, he knew he should be careful. But these people angered him, and not simply because they'd interrupted his lunch.

Finally he was back where he'd started and could see by their expressions and averted eyes that he'd taken the steam out of them.

“How can you be part of the solution when you're part the problem?” he said, knowing it was a cliché but knowing too that it would hit home. “You really want to ‘free the sims'? The fastest way is to boycott any company that uses them as labor. Companies understand one thing: the bottom line. If that's falling off because they use sim labor, then they're going to
stop
using sim labor. It's as simple as that. But you can't show up here wearing sim-made clothes and shoes and accessories and expect anyone with a brain to take you seriously. If you're sincere about this you're going to have to make some sacrifices, you're going to have to let the Joneses have the more prestigious sim-made car, the more fashionable sim-made sweater. Otherwise, you're just blowing smoke.”

Ellis stepped back inside and closed the door behind him. He had no idea what the protesters would do next, but the question was made moot by the arrival of half a dozen cops who began herding them off.

He returned to the table to find his family staring at him.

“Dad,” Robbie said, wide-eyed. “You were great!”

“Ellis?” Judy said. Ellis noticed a tremor in her voice, and were those . . . ?
Yes, she had tears in her eyes. “For a moment there you were like . . . like you used to be.”

He looked into her moist blue eyes. God, he wanted her back, more than anything in the world.

“I don't know if I can ever be like I used to be, Judy,” he said, knowing his soul was scarred beyond repair. “But if things go right, if a few things happen the way I hope they will, I should be able to present a reasonable facsimile.”

“But Dad,” Robbie was saying, “you were, like, telling them how to, like, so screw your own company.”

Ellis put on a pensive expression. “You know, Robbie, now that you mention it, I believe I was. I'll have to be more careful in the future.”

“Will sims ever evolve into humans?” Julie said, looking up at him with her mother's huge blue eyes.

Ellis stared at her, momentarily dumb.

“She's studying evolution in school,” Judy offered.

Ellis cleared his throat and controlled the sudden urge to run from the room. He'd rather be off the subject of sims—this was Robbie's birthday after all—and especially off their evolutionary genetics, but how could he not answer the jewel of his life?

“Do
you
think they will?”

“Well,” she said slowly, “we humans evolved from chimps, and sims are a mix of chimps and humans, so won't sims evolve into humans someday?”

“No,” Ellis said, choosing his words carefully. “You see, humans didn't evolve from chimps; chimps and humans are primates and both evolved from a common primate ancestor, an ape that had evolved from the monkeys.”

“A gorilla?”

“No. Gorillas branched off earlier. Let's just call our common ancestor the mystery primate.”

Julie grinned. “Why call him ‘
mystery
primate'?”

“Because we haven't found his bones yet. But we don't need to. Genetics tells the story. So even though we may never identify the mystery primate's remains, we know he existed and we know that at some point millions of years ago, whether because of a flood or a continental upheaval or climactic changes in Africa, a segment of the mystery primate population became separated from the larger main body. This smaller group wound up stranded in a hotter, drier environment, probably in northeast Africa; some theories say it was an island, but whatever the specifics, the important point is they were cut off from all the other jungle-dwelling primates. And there, under
pressure to adapt to their new environment, they began to evolve in their own direction.”

“But didn't the mystery primates in the jungle evolve too?”

“Of course, but because they were in an environment they were used to, they had little need for change, so they evolved more slowly, and in a different direction: toward what we now call chimpanzees. Meanwhile the primates in the separated group, in a drier, savanna-like environment, were changing: They were growing taller, their skin was losing its hair and learning to sweat in the hotter temperatures; and because they were no longer in a lush jungle where food was hanging from every other tree, they had to learn to hunt to keep from starving. This added extra protein to their diet which meant they could afford to enlarge a very important organ that needs lots of protein to grow. Do you know what that organ is?”

“The brain,” Julie said.

“You are
smart
,” he told her. “Absolutely right. The sum of all these changes meant that they were evolving into hominids.”

“Humans, right?”

“Humans are hominids, true, but it took millions of years for the first hominids to evolve into
Homo sapiens
.”

“But once they got back to the jungle, couldn't the hominids get back together with the mystery primates?”

Bright as Julie was, Ellis wondered how far he could delve into the intricacies of evolutionary drift with a thirteen-year-old. He paused, looking for an analogy. He knew she played the cello in her school orchestra . . . maybe she could understand if he related evolution to music.

“Think of DNA as a magnificent symphony, amazingly complex even though it is composed with only four notes. Every gene is a movement, and every base pair is a musical note within that movement. So if one of those base pairs is out of sequence, the melody can go wrong, become discordant. If enough are out of place, it can ruin the entire symphony. But sometimes changes can work to the benefit of the symphony.

“Imagine the sheet music for a concert arriving in a city far from where it was composed. The local musicians look at it and say, ‘No one around here is going to like this section, nor that movement; we'd better change them.' And they do. And then that version is shipped off to another city even farther away, and those local musicians find they must make further changes to satisfy their audience. And on it goes, until the music is radically different from what was on the original sheets.

“This is what happened to the sheet music of the hominid's DNA. It was
progressively changed by different environments; but the chimp DNA never left its hometown, so it changed relatively little. And because they'd been separated, with the genes of one group never having a chance to mix with the genes of the other, each group kept evolving in its own direction, causing their genomes to drift further and further apart.

“At some point millions of years ago both groups reached the stage where neither was a mystery primate anymore. By the time the hominids started spreading into different areas of Africa, it was too late for a reunion. The hominids were playing Bach, while the chimps sounded like heavy metal. They couldn't play together. Too many changes. One of the most obvious was the fusion of two primate chromosomes in the hominids, leaving them with twenty-three pairs instead of the twenty-four their jungle cousins still carried.”

“But sims have only twenty-two pairs, right?” Julie said. “What happened—?”

“That's way too long a story for now,” Ellis said quickly. “Suffice it to say that the two groups had evolved so far apart that they could no longer have children together. Once that happened, their evolutionary courses were separated forever. So you see, a chimpanzee cannot evolve into a human any more than a human . . .”

His voice dried up.

Julie said, “But that doesn't mean a sim won't evolve into a human.”

“Sims are different, Julie. They
can't
evolve. Ever. To evolve you must be able to have children, and sims can't. Each sim is cloned from a stock of identical cell cultures. They are all genetically equal. Evolution involves genetic changes occurring over many generations, but sims have no generations, therefore no evolution.”

“This is pretty heavy luncheon chatter, don't you think?” Judy said.

Ellis was grateful for the interruption.

“Your mother's right.” He chucked Julie gently under the chin. “We can continue this another time. But did I answer your question?”

“Sure,” Julie said with a smile. “Sims will always be stuck being sims.”

Not if I can help it, Ellis thought.

SUSSEX COUNTY, NJ

“You're not getting another beer, are you?” Martha called from the upstairs bedroom.

Harry Carstairs stood before his open refrigerator, marveling at the acuity of his wife's hearing.

“Just one more.”

“Harry!” She drew out the second syllable. “Haven't you had enough for one night?”

No, he thought. Not yet.

“It's just a light.”

“Aren't you ever coming to bed?”

“Soon, hon.”

She grumbled something he didn't catch and he could visualize her rolling onto her side and pulling the covers over her head. He twisted the cap off the beer, took a quick pull, then stepped over to the bar. There he carefully lifted the Seagram's bottle and poured a good slug into his beer.

Gently swirling the mixture, he headed for his study at the other end of the house.

He was drinking too much, he knew. But it took a lot of booze to put a dent in a guy his size. Still he didn't think it was a real problem. He didn't drink during the day, didn't even think about it when he was surrounded by the hordes of young sims he oversaw. Their rambunctious energy recharged him every morning, filling his mind and senses all day.

But when he got home, when it was just Martha and he, the charge drained away, leaving him empty and flat. A dead battery. Not that there was anything wrong with Martha. Not her fault. It was all him.

He wished now they'd had kids. Life had been so fine before when it was just the two of them. And SimGen, of course. Martha worked for the company too, in the comptroller's office. SimGen became part of their household, turning their marriage into a ménage à trois. But it had been a rewarding
arrangement. They'd built their dream house on this huge wooded lot, traveled extensively, and had two fat 401(k)s that would allow them comfortable early retirement if they wanted it.

But a few years ago he'd begun to feel an aching emptiness in their home, to sense the isolation of the surrounding woods. He knew the day, the hour, the moment it had begun: When Ellis Sinclair had informed him about the sudden death of a sim.

Not just any sim. A special sim, one Harry had known throughout his entire time at SimGen. He'd taught that sim chess and turned him into a damn good player. They used to play three or four times a week.

And then he was gone. Just like that. Died on a Saturday, into the crematorium on Sunday, and his quarters stripped by the time Harry returned to work on Monday morning.

The boilermakers—Martha thought they were just plain beers—numbed the ache. But the ache seemed to require more anesthetic with each passing year.

Harry settled himself at his desk and reached out to restart the computer chess match he'd paused in midgame when—

He stopped. That feeling again. A prickling along his scalp . . . as if he was being watched.

Harry abruptly swiveled his chair toward the window directly behind him and caught a glimpse of a pale blur ducking out of sight. He sat stunned, frozen with the knowledge that he hadn't been imagining it. Someone had been watching him through that goddamn window!

He leaped from his seat, lumbering toward the sliding glass doors that opened from his study onto the rear deck. He slipped, fell to one knee—damn boilermakers!—then yanked back the door and lurched onto the deck.