Surfing the Gnarl (9 page)

His dad, whom he hadn't seen in several years, died that April. Denny flew out to the funeral. His big brother Allen was there, with Dad's insurance money. Turned out they got $15K apiece.

“Don't squander it, Denny,” said Allen, who was an English teacher. “Time's winged chariot for no man waits! You're getting older and it's time you found a career. Go
to school and learn something. Or buy into a trade. Do something to make Dad's soul proud.”

“I will,” said Denny, feeling defensive. Instead of talking in clear he used the new cyberslang. “I'll get so cashy and so starry so zip you won't believe it, Allen. I'll get a tunebot, start a motion, and cut a choicey vid. Denny in the Clouds with Clouds. Untense, bro, I've got plex ideas.”

When Denny got back to his room he got a new sound system and a self-playing electric guitar. And scored a lot of dope and food-packs. The days went by; the money dwindled to $9K. Early in June the phone rang.

“Hello, Denny Blevins?” The voice was false and crackly.

“Yes!” Denny was glad to get a call from someone besides Allen. It seemed like lately Allen was constantly calling him up to nag.

“Welcome to the future. I am Phil, a phonebot cybersystem designed to contact consumer prospects. I would like to tell about the on-line possibilities open to you. Shall I continue?”

“Yes,” said Denny.

It turned out the “Phil the phonebot” was a kind of computerized phone salesman. The phonebot was selling phonebots which you, the consumer prospect, could use to sell phonebots to others. It was—though Denny didn't realize this—a classic Ponzi pyramid scheme, like a chain letter, or like those companies which sell people franchises to sell franchises to sell franchises to sell …

The phonebot had a certain amount of interactivity. It asked a few yes/no questions; and whenever Denny burst in with some comment, it would pause, say, “That's right, Denny! But listen to the rest!” and continue. Denny was
pleased to hear his name so often. Alone in his room, week after week, he'd been feeling his reality fade. Writing original songs for the guitar was harder than he'd expected. It would be nice to have a robot friend. At the end, when Phil asked for his verdict, Denny said, “Okay, Phil, I want you. Come to my rooming-house tomorrow and I'll have the money.”

The phonebot was not the arm-waving clanker that Denny, in his ignorance, had imagined. It was, rather, a flat metal box that plugged right into the wall phone-socket. The box had a slot for an electronic directory, and a speaker for talking to its owner. It told Denny he could call it Phil; all the phonebots were named Phil. The basic phonebot sales spiel was stored in the Phil's memory, though you could change the patter if you wanted. You could, indeed, use the phonebot to sell things other than phonebots.

The standard salespitch lasted five minutes, and one minute was allotted to the consumer's responses. If everyone answered, listened, and responded, the phonebot could process ten prospects per hour, and one hundred twenty in a 9 a.m. — 9 p.m. day! The whole system cost nine thousand dollars, though as soon as you bought one and joined the pyramid, you could get more of them for six. Three thousand dollars profit for each phonebot your phonebot could sell! If you sold, say, one a day, you'd make better than $100K a year!

The electronic directory held all the names and numbers in the city; and each morning it would ask Denny who he wanted to try today. He could select the numbers on the day's calling list on the basis of neighborhood, last name, family size, type of business, and so on.

The first day, Denny picked a middle-class suburb and told Phil to call all the childless married couples there.
Young folks looking for an opportunity! Denny set the speaker so he could listen to people's responses. It was not encouraging.

“click”

“No … click”

“
click”

“This kilp ought to be illegal …
click”

“click”

“Get a job, you bizzy dook …
click”

“Of all the …
click'

“Again?
click”

Most people hung up so fast that Phil was able to make some thousand unsuccessful contacts in less than ten hours. Only seven people listened through the whole message and left comments at the end; and six of these people seemed to be bedridden or crazy. The seventh had a phonebot she wanted to sell cheap.

Denny tried different phoning strategies—rich people, poor people, people with two sevens in their phone number, and so on. He tried different kinds of salespitches—bossy ones, ingratiating ones, curt ones, ethnic-accent ones, etc. He made up a salespitch that offered businesses the chance to rent Phil to do phone advertising for them.

Nothing worked. It got to be depressing sitting in his room watching Phil fail—it was like having Willy Loman for his roommate. The machine made little noises, and unless Denny took a
lot
of dope, he had trouble relaxing out into the sky. The empty food-packs stank.

Two more weeks, and all the money, food, and dope were gone. Right after he did the last of the dope, Denny recorded a final sales-pitch:

”Uh … hi. This is Phil the prophet at 1801 Eye Street. I eye I … I'm out of money and I'd rather not have to … uh … leave my room. You send me money for … uh … food and I'll give God your name. Dope's rail, too.”

Phil ran that on random numbers for two days with no success. Denny came down into deep hunger. Involuntary detox. If his dad had left much more money, Denny might have died, holed up in that room. Good old Dad. Denny trembled out into the street and got a job working counter in a Greek coffee shop called the KoDo. It was okay; there was plenty of food, and he didn't have to watch Phil panhandling.

As Denny's strength and sanity came back, he remembered sex. But he didn't know any girls. He took Phil off panhandling and put him onto propositioning numbers in the young working-girl neighborhoods.

“Hi, are you a woman? I'm Phil, sleek robot for a whippy young man who's ready to get under. Make a guess and he'll mess. Leave your number and state your need; he's fuff-looking and into sleaze.”

This message worked surprisingly well. The day after he started it up, Denny came home to find four enthusiastic responses stored on Phil's chips. Two of the responses seemed to be from men, and one of the women's voice sounded old …
really old.
The fourth response was from “Silke.”

“Hi, desperado, this is Silke. I like your machine. Call me.”

Phil had Silke's number stored, of course, so Denny called her right up. Feeling shy, he talked through Phil, using the machine as voder to make his voice sound weird. After all, Phil was the one who knew her.

”Hello?” Cute, eager, practical, strange.

“Silke? This is Phil. Denny's talking through me. You want to interface?”

“Like where?”

“My room?”

“Is it small? It sounds like your room is small. I like small rooms.”

“You got it. 1801 Eye Street, Denny'll be in front of the building.”

“What do you look like, Denny?”

“Tall, thin, teeth when I grin, which is lots. My hair's peroxide blond on top. I'll wear my X-shirt.”

“Me too. See you in an hour.”

Denny put on his X-shirt—a T-shirt with a big silk screen picture of his genitalia—and raced down to the KoDo to beg Spiros, the boss, for an advance on his wages.

“Please, Spiros, I got a date.”

The shop was almost empty, and Spiros was sitting at the counter watching a pay-vid porno show on his pocket TV. He glanced over at Denny, all decked out in his X-shirt, and pulled two fifties out of his pocket.

“Let me know how she come.”

Denny spent one fifty on two Fiesta food-packs and some wine: the other fifty went for a capsule of snap-crystals from a street vendor. He was back in front of his rooming-house in plenty of time. Ten minutes, and there came Silke, with a great big pink crotch-shot printed onto her T-shirt. She looked giga good.

For the first instant they stood looking at each other's X-shirts, and then they shook hands.

“I'm Denny Blevins. I got some food and wine and snap here, if you want to go up.” Denny was indeed tall
and thin, and toothy when he grinned. His mouth was very wide. His hair was long and dark in back, and short and blond on top. He wore red rhinestone earrings, his semierect X-shirt, tight black plastic pants, and fake leopard fur shoes. His arms were muscular and veiny, and he moved them a lot when he talked.

“Go up and get under,” smiled Silke. She was medium height, and wore her straw-like black hair in a bouffant. She had fine, hard features. She'd appliqued pictures of monster eyes to her eyelids, and she wore white dayglo lipstick. Beneath her sopping wet X-shirt image, she wore a tight, silvered jumpsuit with cutouts. On her feet she had roller skates with lights in the wheels.

“Oxo,” said Denny.

“Wow,” said Silke.

Up in the room they got to know each other. Denny showed Silke his phonebot and his sound system, pretended to start to play his guitar and to then decide not to, and told about some of the weird things he'd seen in the sky, looking out that broken pane. Silke, as it turned out, was a pay-vid sex dancer come here from West Virginia. She talked mostly in clear, but she was smart, and she liked to get wild, but only with the right kind of guy. Sex dancer didn't mean hooker and she was, she assured Denny, clean. She had a big dream she wasn't quite willing to tell him yet.

“Come on,” he urged, popping the autowave food-packs open. “Decode.”

“Ah, I don't know, Denny. You might think I'm skanky.”

They sat side by side on Denny's mattress and ate the pasty food with plastic spoons. It was good. It was good to have another person in the room here.

”Silke,” said Denny when they finished eating, “I'd been thinking Phil was kilp. Dook null. But if he got you here it was worth it. Seems I just need tech to relate, you wave?”

Silke threw the empty foodtrays on the floor and gave Denny a big kiss. They went ahead and fluffed. It seemed like it had been a while for both of them. Skin all over, soft, warm, touch, kiss, lick, smell, good, skin.

Afterwards, Denny opened the capsule of snap and they split it. You put the stuff' on your tongue, it sputtered and popped, and you breathed in the freebase fumes. Fab rush. Out through the empty window pane they could see the moon and two stars stronger than the city lights.

“Out there,” said Silke, her voice fast and shaky from the snap. “That's my dream. If we hurry, Denny, we can be the first people to have sex in space. They'd remember us forever. I've been thinking about it, and there was always missing links, but you and Phil are it. We'll get in the shuttlebox—it's a room like this—and go up. We get up there and make videos of us getting under, and—this is my new flash—we use Phil to sell the vids to pay for the trip. You wave?”

Denny's long, maniacal smile curled across his face. The snap was still crackling on his tongue. “Stuzzadelic! Nobody's fuffed in space yet? None of those gawks who've used the shuttlebox?”

“They might have, but not for the record. But if we scurry we'll be the famous first forever. We'll be starry.”

“Oxo, Silke.” Denny's voice rose with excitement. “Are you there, Phil?”

“Yes, Denny.”

“Got a new pitch. In clear.”

”Proceed.”

“Hi, this is Denny.” He nudged the naked girl next to him.

“And this is Silke.”

“We're doing a live fuff-vid we'd like to show you.”

“It's called
Rapture in Space.
It's the very first X-rated love film from outer space.”

“Zero gravity,” said Denny, reaching over to whang on his guitar.

“Endless fun.”

“Mindless pleasure.”
Whang.

“Out near the sun.” Silke nuzzled his neck and moaned stagily. “Oh, Denny, oh, darling, it's …”

“RAPTURE IN SPACE! Satisfaction guaranteed. This is bound to be a collector's item; the very first live sex video from space. A full ninety minutes of unbelievable null-gee action, with great Mother Earth in the background, tune in for only fifty …”

“More, Denny,” wailed Silke, who was now grinding herself against him with some urgency. “More!”

Whang.
“Only one hundred dollars, and going up fast. To order, simply leave your card number after the beep.”

“Beep”

Phil got to work the next morning, calling numbers of businesses where lots of men worked. The orders poured in. Lacking a business-front by which to cash the credit orders, Denny enlisted Spiros, who quickly set up KoDo Space Rapture Enterprises. For managing the business, Spiros only wanted 15 percent and some preliminary tapes of Denny and Silke in action. For another 45 percent, Silke's porno pay-vid employers—an outfit known
as XVID—stood ready to distribute the show. Dreaming of this day, Silke had already bought her own cameras. She and Denny practiced a lot, getting their moves down. Spiros agreed that the rushes looked good. Denny went ahead and reserved the shuttlebox for a trip in mid-July.

The shuttlebox was a small passenger module that could be loaded into the space shuttle for one of its weekly trips up to orbit and back. A trip for two cost $100K. Denny bought electronic directories for cities across the country, and set Phil to working twenty hours a day. He averaged fifty sales a day, and by launch time, Silke and Denny had enough to pay everyone off, and then some.

But this was just the beginning. Three days before the launch, the news services picked up on the
Rapture in Space
plan, and everything went crazy. There was no way for a cheap box like Phil to process the orders anymore. Denny and Silke had to give XVID anther 15 percent of the action, and let them handle the tens of thousands of orders. It was projected that
Rapture in Space
would pull an audience share of 7 percent—which is a lot of people. Even more money came in the form of fat contracts for two product endorsements: SPACE RAPTURE, the cosmic eroscent for high-flyers, and RAPT SHIELD, an antiviral lotion for use by sexual adventurers. XVID and the advertisers privately wished that Denny and Silke were a bit more … upscale-looking, but they were the two who had the tiger by the tail.