“Then that proves you’re doing a good job. No breakdowns, no emergencies. Keep up the good work, George.”

“Mr. S, does anybody really know how anything works in this factory?”

“That’s in the hands of the general manager.” With a jerk of his head, Mr. S. nodded toward the ceiling, indicating other floors in the skyscraper overhead.

George went back to his station and watched the robots continue to work for the rest of the day.

That night he came home from work with a brilliant idea. The rest of the family considered it a disaster. While Judy and Elroy sat at the table and Jane pondered the evening meal in front of the food replicator, George sauntered into the kitchen holding a can of chili and a can of soup. “Let’s try these. It’ll be like nothing we’ve ever had before.”

Judy seemed horrified. “The pictures on the label look gross.”

“Where’s your sense of adventure? We’ll heat up our own food . . . as soon as I figure out how to do it.”

Elroy got into the spirit of the challenge. “Don’t we have to rub sticks together or something, Pop?”

“Of course not. Maybe we can use a heating plate. I wonder how long it takes.”

The first experiment turned into an unpleasant experience. The instructions printed on the label—which George was proud to read by himself—didn’t say anything about having to open the can first before exposing it to high heat. The soup exploded into a dripping, hot mess. Rosie the maidbot complained as she wheeled back and forth to clean up every drop. George did better with the can of chili, and soon each of them had a small bowl of a lumpy red-brown mixture that didn’t look even as appetizing as the faded illustration on the label. Elroy, sitting beside his father, good-naturedly took several bites. Jane was stoic as she tasted the meal. Judy refused and slipped over to the replicator to make herself a different snack, much to George’s disappointment. He expected that most of them would prepare a different meal for themselves later on, but he insisted that this was quite tasty. The fact he’d made it for himself added a sense of accomplishment that increased the flavor of the meal (though his stomach gurgled unpleasantly and his mouth tasted strange for hours afterward).

In the evening, when it was time for them to plan their upcoming family vacation, Judy was the first to pipe up, bubbling with excitement at her own suggestion. “I’ve always wanted to go to CentroMetropolis. We can see the shows and the museums.”

“And the boys,” Elroy added sarcastically.

“And the shows, ” Judy insisted.

“Sounds boring,” Elroy said. “I want to go on a virtual immersion vacation! Every kind of game simulation! We’ve got a dome right here in the city, and Pop can get discount tickets from the factory.”

“We’re not all going to play virtual games.” Judy rolled her eyes. “That’s for kids.”

Jane sighed. “Wouldn’t a few days at a spa be nice? Temperature-controlled water jets, zero-gravity relaxation chambers, massagebots that can work your sore muscles for hours? It’s not easy being a homemaker these days, you know. You kids just wait until you grow up and have families of your own.”

George, however, cut off all further argument. He had already made his decision, and he was sure his family would enjoy it. It would be quite an exciting experience, if only they kept open minds.

“This year we’ll do something we’ve never done before. We’re going out to visit where my Uncle Asimov lived.”

George flew the family bubblecar out past the city and into the next city (which looked exactly the same as the last), then to the next city, and the next. He remained cheerful, anticipating what they would find out in the rugged swatch of uncivilized land in the middle of the barren, reddish desert. The bubblecar whistled and hummed as it cruised along under its computerized guidance. Though George sat in the driver’s seat, he didn’t actually fly the craft. The guidance systems took care of everything for him, but he had always felt in control. He ignored the two kids picking on each other in the back seat as the bubblecar streaked onward. Beside him in the front, Jane seemed quite uneasy about where they were going.

“Are we there yet?” Elroy said. “It’s been an hour.”

“It’s been fifty minutes,” George said.

“Seems like forever,” Judy complained. “When are we going to stop? Shouldn’t we take a rest break?”

Eventually, the neatly organized buildings dropped away, the traffic thinned, and soon the landscape was like something George had seen on a Martian pioneer adventure video. The ground was rocky and barren, dotted with sagebrush and cactus, broken by huge outcrops of rock that didn’t look at all like real skyscrapers.

Judy squealed when she saw dark, four-legged creatures munching on the unappetizing foliage. “Look, wild animals! We’re not actually going down there, are we?”

“Those are cattle, I think, Judy. Real cattle.” He searched his memory. “They were the inspiration for many of the meat products our food replicator makes.” Gazing down at the clumsy creatures, though, George didn’t think they looked at all like any of the steaks, burgers, or sausages he happily received on a plate that came out of the delivery chute.

“Do they attack people, Pop? Are they dangerous?”

“Of course not, son. We won’t be going anywhere close to them.”

The bubblecar’s metallic voice said, “Reaching end of automatic guidance network. Air travel no longer safe or recommended. It is advised that you turn around and go back.”

“See, Daddy? We shouldn’t have come here. Let’s go to CentroMetropolis.”

“Aww, that’s two hours from here,” Elroy complained.

George’s voice was firm. “We’re almost there. Uncle Asimov’s trailer is just up ahead.”

The bubblecar said, “Without grid guidance, it is suggested that you land and proceed on foot from this point.”

“On foot!” Judy cried. “Does that mean . . . walk ?”

“Yes, I think it’s only a mile.”

“What’s a mile, Pop?” Elroy asked.

“A long, long way,” Jane said. “George, are you sure this is a good idea?”

He landed the bubblecar in the middle of the desert. They seemed to be far from anywhere. Had anyone ever been so alone, so isolated? As the transparent dome lifted and they climbed out into the hot sun, George took a deep breath, noting the strange smells, the dust in the air, the spice of sage.

“What if one of those . . . cattle comes after us?” Judy asked.

“Uncle Asimov was fine. He lived out here by himself most of his life.”

“Yes, Daddy, and he died.”

George strode forward, leaving footprints on the ground in the real dirt. He pointed to a white structure on a rise in the distance. “There’s his trailer.” Even Jane was uncertain about how far away it looked, and she was concerned they might get lost, though the bubblecar was perfectly visible and so was the trailer. Elroy bounded ahead, and Jane warned him to watch out for rattlesnakes, scorpions, tarantulas, jaguars, and any other terrible creature she could think of. After five minutes, the boy lost his steam and began complaining. Judy whined about how dirty she was getting. Tight-lipped, Jane followed with obvious disapproval.

The trailer turned out to be a ramshackle affair made of patched metal siding, solar-power panels on the roof, a water pump in the back. George tried to imagine being out here all by himself day after day without any instant news updates or real-time transmissions of the latest robotic baseball games.

“He really was a caveman!” Elroy looked around with eyes as wide as saucers. When George pulled open the door, it creaked unnervingly Jane stepped inside and shuddered. “Rosie would blow an entire circuit bank if she looked at this. There’s dirt everywhere!”

They poked around, looking at the kitchen cabinets and a countertop that contained an actual stove and actual sink, though no one wanted to trust the water that came gurgling out of the tap. Elroy found the bathroom and the shower and called out for them to look at the exotic, primitive fixtures.

“That was called a toilet,” George said. He had looked up historical background before they’d begun their vacation.

He paced through the cramped rooms of the trailer, wondering about what his Uncle Asimov must have done all day long. When they found the small, rickety bed with its spring mattress, Jane frowned in a combination of disgust and dismay. “Unsanitary conditions and no conveniences. Your Uncle Asimov was crazy, George. It’s so sad. Just think of what kind of life he could have had if he’d gone into the city. He could have been a productive member of society.”

George faltered at the thought. Now that he had begun to pay attention to his job and home life, he wasn’t sure what he himself was doing to be “productive.”

Jane stood with her hands on her narrow hips, shaking her head. “I guess we’ll never know why he did this to himself. It’s like he was being punished.”

“Uncle Asimov knew how to take care of himself. He was self-sufficient. I bet he built most of this trailer with his own hands.”

“Do you think he used a spear to hunt for his food?” Elroy asked. “Maybe he killed some of those cattle, or jackrabbits, or prairie dogs.”

“Whatever he did, he did it his own way. He must have felt a sense of accomplishment in just getting through each day.” George recalled how good he’d felt with the single task of making a pot of coffee with the old-fashioned percolator.

“How inconvenient,” Jane insisted. “It must have been impossible for him! I’ll bet he was very miserable.”

George wasn’t so sure. “I bet he was happy.”

Judy laughed in disbelief. “Nobody could be happy out here. Just think of everything he was missing.”

“But he had things most of us don’t even remember.”

Jane remained unconvinced. “What does that have to do with anything? So much unnecessary work. It’s such a shame.”

“And now this place is all ours, for what it’s worth,” George said, grinning. “Uncle Asimov willed it to me.”

“But what do we do with this place?” Jane said with a growing horror in her voice.

“We’ll keep it. I just might come back, spend a whole two hours next time.”

“If you do that, George, you’re doing it alone.” Jane was completely no-nonsense. Under the sunshine and with her own perspiration, her always-perfect hairdo had begun to come undone. He just smiled mysteriously at her. “That’s the idea.”

Elroy pushed the creaking door and went back out into the bright sunlight, where he saw a lizard scuttle across the sand. “Can we go, Pop? Please?” The boy’s normally cheerful voice carried a whining tone.

“We could get back home in time to play a game or two in the virtual immersion dome. Wouldn’t that be neat, Pop?”

He saw that Jane had been ready to go from the moment they set down in the desert. Before the situation could grow entirely unpleasant, George agreed. Ironically, both of the kids had plenty of energy as they hurried back toward the waiting bubblecar.

George had seen what he needed to see, and he would remember this for a long time. His family grumbled and complained, but their words washed off of him as he felt a strange sense of possibilities. He had a spring in his step.

Elroy and Judy scrambled into the bubblecar, gasping and panting and moaning with the effort. Jane settled into her usual position beside him in the front of the craft. He sealed the dome over them, raised the vehicle in the air, and whirred away.

“It’ll be good to get home and back to normal, now that you’ve had your little adventure, George.” Jane had the patient tolerance of a woman who had been married a long time.

“Yes, dear.”

The bubblecar picked up speed and they flew back toward the city. When no one was looking, though, George surreptitiously switched off the autopilot, took the controls, and piloted the bubblecar by himself all the way home.

KICKING AND SCREAMING HER WAY TO THE ALTAR

Alan L. Lickiss

‘Idon’t care what you say, that’s not my father.”

Jeffrey groaned, not bothering to internalize it so the customer wouldn’t be offended. He had been arguing in circles with his client, the soon-to-be Mrs. Rene Stevens, or as Jeffrey liked to think of her, the brat, for the past hour while they stood in his office. The thick blue carpet had long since stopped soothing his feet. No amount of evidence could convince her that his staff had created an accurate android of her father complete from his physical appearance down to his disgust of professional baseball players.

“But miss, he looks exactly like the holo you provided,” said Jeffrey. The brat stomped her foot, actually stomped, and shoved her fists toward the floor. “No, no, no, no, no,”

she said as she looked down at her stomping foot and shook her head back and forth. The short blonde hair whipped back and forth, fanning her perfume around the room. Jeffrey almost laughed when he thought about the wave in her hair waving at him.

Jeffrey retreated behind his desk. “Miss, if you could be more specific about the deficiency in our work, I could make sure we correct the android.”

“For one, my father was taller,” the brat said. She had stopped her tantrum, but had switched to pouting while standing with her hands on her hips, one hip cocked out toward him. In the six months he had been working with the brat, Jeffrey had learned every one of her give-me-what-I-want-now poses. This one he had labeled little girl number four. Unfortunately for all her stances and facial expressions the brat only had one tone, a whiny, high-pitched one that was worse than fingernails on slate to Jeffrey. Its only variant was in volume.

“Miss, we have checked your father’s drivers licenses, his passport, and even, forgive my indelicate-ness, his measurements taken by the undertaker who interred him. All of them agree, your father was five foot eight.” As he listed each item, Jeffrey pointed to the copies he had obtained that were now laid out on his desk.

“I decided to allow your company to service my wedding because you promised that the father I remembered would be able to give me away,” said the brat. She extended her arm and pointed to the android, the tip of her finger inches away from its nose, “That is not tall. My father was this tall.” The brat was the same height as the android. When she stood on her tip toes and held her hand high above her head she gave her father a height over seven feet tall.

“I’m sorry, Miss, our contracts are very clear,” said Jeffrey. He reached into the spread of papers on his desk and fished out the signed contract.

“You see,” he said, underlining the fourth clause of the contract with the motion of his finger. “We commit to creating the android from all official sources of documentation as to the physical features and characteristics of the loved one that has passed on.” Jeffrey waved the contract toward the android.

“That we have done.”

“But—”

Jeffrey raised his hand to hold her off, and was amazed when she stopped. “When you had an issue with how the android behaved, saying it was too stilted and nothing like your father, we contacted his living friends and family and interviewed them extensively about how your father moved, spoke, acted in private settings, and how he behaved in public. Without even examining these refinements you have rejected our work.”

Jeffrey now looked at stance fourteen, disbelief facial expression number three. “Please forgive my being forward, but is it possible that you really don’t want to get married and are just using this as an excuse not to continue?” he asked.

“How dare you!” the brat shouted.

Explosive anger number seven, thought Jeffrey.

“Donald and I love each other very much. We can’t wait to get married,” the brat said. “Is it wrong to want the perfect wedding? Isn’t a girl’s father walking her down the aisle part of that perfect wedding?

That’s all I want.”

Jeffrey knew he wasn’t gong to convince her today. It was like those couples who thought a buffet at five dollars a head would be fine, then were amazed when everyone was hungry after their allotted three pieces of cheese.

“I’ll tell you what: let me see what we can do and then we’ll try him out at the wedding rehearsal and dinner. That way you can see him in action and still give us a few hours for final adjustments before the wedding if necessary.”

Jeffrey was relieved when the brat took a deep breath and let it out slowly. He placed his hand on the small of her back and moved her toward the door.

“But you’ll make him taller?” she asked.

“I’ll see what we can do,” Jeffrey said.

A moment later she was gone and Jeffrey had to fight the urge to lock the door behind her. He returned to his desk, gathered the paperwork for the android into a neat stack, and slid it into a hidden pocket on the back of the android’s suit jacket. Jeffrey knew he was legally covered. No court would say he hadn’t honored his part of the contract. He decided to let the android stay as is and let the brat take him to court if she was foolish enough.

“Please, Miss,” said Jeffrey, “just try him out, see how he does for the rehearsal.”

Jeffrey stood at the back of the chapel talking to the brat. A red carpet ran from them down the center aisle through the fifty rows of pews to the pulpit where the minister, her fiancé, and the eight attendants waited. Her mother, future in-laws, and other friends and family sat in the pews on their respective sides, their bodies twisted around, their heads craned back to wait for her approach.

“He doesn’t smell right,” said the brat. “How can you expect me to walk down the aisle on the biggest day of my life when my father doesn’t smell like my father?”

Jeffrey leaned into the android and sniffed its shoulder. Not detecting a problem, he moved over and sniffed its neck. It smelled like he expected, so he walked behind the android and sniffed between the shoulder blades.

“Miss, I don’t detect an odor,” said Jeffrey.

“Not an odor, you moron,” said the brat. “Look, I’m giving you a break even though you didn’t make it any taller, but can you at least make it smell right? I’ve got to walk all the way down there with it and no one will believe it’s how my father would have done it if this thing doesn’t smell right.”

The whine was rising in volume and Jeffrey was experienced enough with the brat to know a full tantrum was soon to follow.

“But Miss, the latex we use for the skin of our androids is odorless. Before we left the showroom tonight, a mist of a proportionate mixture of your father’s favorite aftershave, soap, and deodorant was applied to the android.”

“My father didn’t smell like flowers,” the brat said, each word forced through clenched teeth, short and clipped. She squinted her eyes into a piercing stare and leaned forward slightly, forcing her face into Jeffrey’s personal space, glaring at him.

Angry face number one, Jeffrey thought. Lord, he was going to be happy when this wedding was over. It was customers like this that made him glad he insisted on payment up front. He fought his natural urge to step back and reestablish his personal space. Instead, he pointed to the flower arrangements attached to the ends of each pew.

“Is it possible that you are smelling the floral arrangements, Miss?” he asked in as pleasant voice as possible. He had noticed a couple of months before that it infuriated her when he spoke accommodatingly while not letting her have whatever impossible request she had made. The brat looked as if she was seeing the arrangements of carnations for the first time, their white and red blossoms bursting out of the tops of the baskets Jeffrey had had to special order so one side was flat against the pew and the other jutted a few inches into the aisle.

“Please, Miss,” Jeffrey said while gesturing to the people waiting and then to the android. He didn’t think he had won when the brat moved into position. He wouldn’t declare victory until after the real ceremony. Jeffrey had been lucky in that the brat hadn’t been able to counter his argument. Otherwise they’d still be fighting about what her father smelled like. While his androids may not have smelled exactly like the people they resembled, Jeffrey refused to try and add the element of body odor into the mixes.

The brat had made it to the altar and the android was now sitting in the pew next to her mother. Jeffrey could see the look of adoration the brat and her intended gave each other. He almost never judged the chances of a marriage succeeding, but in this case, unless the groom was a spineless full wallet, Jeffrey didn’t give them a year.

After the rehearsal and after the wedding party had posed for the spontaneous photographs for the memorial book, Jeffrey signaled the android and they left before the brat could start up again. There was still the rehearsal dinner to get through, and Jeffrey wanted to check each minute detail again. His biggest worry was the new modifications that had been added to the android’s programming to satisfy the brat. She had shouted, stomped, and flounced until Jeffrey had agreed with her request just to get rid of her. She didn’t want the android just to sit at the table and eat. Her father liked to dance and mingle with the guests. It was her wedding and she wanted the android to act like her father. Jeffrey was grateful the groom’s parents had been in charge of the rehearsal dinner. They had been so easy to work with. If the brat didn’t like anything tonight, he’d just refer her to her future in-laws. The private room was set up exactly as he had specified. The band was already there and set up. They were on one end of the room with a large wood dance floor separating them from the tables. Jeffrey walked around the tables, inspecting the settings. He picked up the fork at one, confirming it had water spots. A signal to one of the two women assigned to serve the dinner brought a fresh fork. As he placed it on the table, two of the bridesmaids came in. He stepped to the side, the android already moving to greet them.

Jeffrey took the opportunity to work out the final details for two upcoming receptions with the manager while the rehearsal dinner progressed. When he got back to the room the toasts had concluded, the meal finished, and the dishes cleared. The smell of broiled chicken still filled the air, but a hint of alcohol was there as well. The band had changed from light rock covers to a harder funk sound, heavy on the bass. The lights of the room had been dimmed except for those over the dance floor. Red and blue color lights had been added there to give a more festive look. A dozen people bobbed and swayed on the dance floor.

“There you are,” the brat said.

Jeffrey turned, his eyes adjusting from the bright hallway he had come from. He could see the brat a few feet to his right.

“There’s something wrong with your android. Again,” she said. She stood with her arms across her chest, right foot tapping the speed of a hummingbird’s wings, mouth pursed together and pushed to the left side. Pissed off number two.

“Excuse me, Miss, but what has happened?” Jeffrey asked.

“Just look,” the brat said, shouting as she gestured toward the dance floor. Jeffrey looked again, this time picking out the android dancing with two of the bridesmaids. His suit jacket and tie had been removed, his two top buttons undone. The three danced in a line, hips bumping together, then swiveling and gyrating between hits. After a series of four hip bumps the two young ladies spun into the androids arms and drew close to each other; a group hug with the participants shimmying their bodies in place, bouncing against each other. After an eight count the ladies extended, reestablishing the chain, and the hip bumps resumed.

Jeffrey turned back to the brat. “What’s the problem? He’s doing the Bump Twist, a dance popular about twenty years ago. I think he’s doing it rather well. I’ll have to be sure and compliment the programmer in the morning.”

“You don’t understand,” said the brat, the whine rising in volume. “That’s supposed to be my father and it’s dancing with two of my best friends.”

Jeffrey was at a loss. He couldn’t see the connection between the participants and why it was giving the brat a fit.

“They’re my age for God’s sake,” she said, twisting her volume up another notch. “It’s undignified for my father to be dancing like that. He should be doing waltzes and stuff, old folks’ dancing, not something that looks like he’s planning to have sex.”

Jeffrey wasn’t able to stifle his chuckle. He hid it by turning to the side under the pretense of pulling his pad from his pocket. He had control over himself when he turned back and turned the pad on. It took only a second to bring up the relevant file.

“I’m sorry, but according to fourteen of the people we interviewed, your father loved to dance to music like this. In fact, this song was one of his favorites,” said Jeffrey. He turned the pad so the brat could see he wasn’t making it up.

Instead of checking his pad, the brat waved her hand to dismiss it. “What do those people know?” she said.

“One of them was your mother,” Jeffrey said calmly.

The brat rolled her eyes to the ceiling and shook her head slightly from side to side. “She’s always saying things about my father that aren’t true. I may have been only eight when he died, but I know what my father was like. He wasn’t like that.”

Jeffrey’s eyes were drawn back to the dance floor by the brat’s pointing finger. The song had ended and the young ladies had left the floor. The android turned from talking to the synth player and made shooting motions with its hands, clearing an area of the dance floor. The band began to play a rhythm with a heavy backbeat and a little melody thrown in; the android began to shift its weight from foot to foot before taking a step back and forth to either side.

“Now what is it doing?” the brat asked.

As the song progressed the android increased the complexity of its footsteps, always in perfect time with the music. Jeffrey picked out the symmetrical nature of the steps to either side, marveling that his staff had been able to code such a sequence. When the steps reached the point where both sides had had the same steps, and the next moment should produce a more intricate change to the dance, the android lowered itself to the floor and began a new footwork sequence with its arms added to the movement. It shifted back and forth, the legs and arms a blur of spinning, twisting motion.

“Oh no,” said the brat. She started to move toward the dance floor. The android’s body rocked back and forth, swaying in an ever growing arc with the momentum of the dance to the rhythm of the music. A flick of the legs and the android was on its head, its body spinning like a top, legs gyrating in the air above it. As the song ended, the android’s body collapsed, and the spining stopping, leaving the android lying on its side, legs crossed, head propped up in its hand. Applause broke out from around the room.

“Stop it,” said the brat.

Jeffrey moved to the dance floor. He could see the brat pulling at the arm of the android, trying to pull it up from the floor. The android looked up and smiled at the brat.

“Hi, pumpkin,” said the android.

“No, get up,” said the brat, still tugging.

The android let itself be pulled to its feet and off the dance floor. Jeffrey reached them when the brat had the android sitting at the table.

The brat looked across the table at Jeffrey. Her entire body looked tense, her muscles bunched and tendons straining against her skin. A new pose he’d never seen. Jeffrey wondered if he should feel afraid.

“You did this on purpose,” she shouted.

“We programmed him according to what your father was like,” said Jeffrey.

“Why did you do this?”

“What, Miss?” asked Jeffrey. He wasn’t sure what deficiency she was imagining this time. The android’s dancing had been impeccable.

“Why are you trying to destroy my marriage?” said the brat at full volume. Jeffrey stepped back from the verbal assault. The noise from the party had disappeared and when he glanced to his side he saw everyone was staring at them. The brat followed his look and also saw the others. Her eyes opened wide and her hand flew to her mouth. Pushing past Jeffrey, she ran from the room.

The room remained quiet until the door closed behind her. It was as if it was the switch to turn everyone back on. The groom jumped up from where he had been sitting next to his father and ran after her. Jeffrey gathered up the android’s coat and tie and led him from the room, ignoring the whispers behind him.

Jeffrey leaned through the doorway into the small room at the back of the chapel, his hand on the door-knob ready to pull it closed. The android stood to the side, silent and waiting for the brat to signal she was ready. The brat sat in front of a mirror, the wedding dress reflecting the light was making it look brilliant white. Her head in her hands; Jeffrey could hear her sobs. Jeffrey knew he’d probably get blistered by her response, but it was why he got the big bucks. “Miss, the minister asked me to tell you that he has to move along. He has another wedding scheduled after this one.”

The brat’s sobs became a wail. Jeffrey stepped into the room and closed the door behind him. A quick glance told him the android looked fine, very dapper for the ceremony.

“What is it, Miss? If it’s uncertainty, let me assure you that all bri—”

“How can I get married now?” the brat said before another sob shook her.

“As I was saying, Miss, all brides, and grooms for that matter, are nervous on their wedding day. Just think about how much you love each other,” said Jeffrey. He may have had his differences with her, but that was what he was paid for. Now that the end was coming he could afford her a little sympathy.

“That’s not it,” the brat said. “I’m not nervous about getting married. But after last night, how can I let that walk me down the aisle?”

“But I’ve shown you the documentation. Your father did indeed love to dance, and was known to street dance in his youth. If it helps, the android actually reproduced the steps your father used to do.”

“My father was tall and strong and used to dance with me, holding me close as he moved around the room. A waltz, not a jiggly shaking roll in the dirt,” said the brat. Her tears slowed as she spoke. “And then what I said.”

Her hand covered her mouth and her eyes went wide, a repeat of the face she had made the night before.

“The party was being recorded. Several people out there have seen what happened. I heard a couple of people talking about it outside my door when they were going to the chapel. Do you have any idea how embarrassed I am?”

Jeffrey let her talk, wind down, let the problem flow out with her words. He found himself nodding in what was supposed to be a supportive way when he realized he had no idea how embarrassed she was, or why. The brat was looking at him, her eyes moving toward anger number five.

“I’m going to sue you,” she said.

It was the first time she hadn’t whined when she spoke to him. Her voice was cold, without heart, and carried the feeling of deadly seriousness.

“Excuse me,” Jeffrey said.

He opened the door and leaned out to bring in an older gentleman. The older man had short, wavy white hair and a bristly white mustache. His tux was clean and neat, but a little large for his body. He had a twinkle in his eye when he smiled down at the brat.

“Grandpa!” she shouted when she saw him. She jumped up from her chair and rushed into his arms, crushing the folds of her wedding dress in the tight hug.

“Hi there, baby girl,” said Grandpa. His arms reached around the brat, pulling her into the hug, one hand on the back of her head, patting her hair in a soothing manor. “There, there. What’s this I hear about you not wanting to get married? That’s a mighty fine young man you’ve picked out and he’s been standing in tight shoes waiting for you.”

“Oh, Grandpa, it’s this dumb idiot and his android. They’ve messed everything up. I wanted Daddy to walk me down the aisle, you know, perfect wedding, but that’s all spoiled. The dinner last night was ruined and everyone will laugh at me now if I let that thing walk me down the aisle.”

The old man looked over at Jeffrey and the android. He turned back to the brat and kissed her on the forehead.

“I know I’m not your father, but he was my son. What do you say we leave these two here and I walk you down to that young buck? That is, if you’ll have me.”

“Oh, would you, Grandpa?” said the brat. The tears were gone and her eyes happy and bright. In response, Grandpa turned around and extended his elbow to the brat. The brat tucked her hand inside his arm and her head on his shoulder. Grandpa led her to the door and held it as she left the room. The door closed behind them and Jeffrey could hear the bridal march music begin. Jeffrey sighed. Contingency clause fourteen. Size seven android with a grandfather program plug in and quick makeover for facial feature match had saved the wedding again. ALIEN VOICES

P. R. Frost

‘ J’accuté comme...’ my nurse whispered to the trailing student nurse. I heard that the last three patients who had this surgery went insane and committed suicide, I translated in my head. My many years in the ballet studio had forced me to learn French. I understood every dire word she said.

The student nurse proved that she had heard the same rumor. They left notes saying the alien voices from the nanobots . . .

“Enough idle gossip.” The surgeon’s looming presence in the doorway to my private hospital room cut short the women’s whispered confidences. “Mademoiselle de la Marachand must rest without anxiety.”

He spoke in English for my benefit, but with a decided French accent. He’d been practicing medicine for many years in this Caribbean haven for money launderers, drug smugglers, and off-the-wall medicine. I’d done a lot of research on him and his unique treatment for worn-out knees before committing to this strange and peculiar treatment. The AMA said it was unsafe and ineffective. For me and other dancers staring at the end of a too-short career, his new technique looked like a miracle.

At twenty-eight I’d neared the pinnacle of success in the world of ballet. At twenty-nine I was close to losing it all because my knees were torn to shreds by the dance.

Faced with the prospect of never again melding my soul with movement and music into the glorious art of ballet, I searched for options. Even now, with the cold steel cage of the bed frame around me, my body twitched with the need to move with the canned calypso music filtering through the hospital. Without dance the music was incomplete. Without dance I was less than half a person. The drowse of pre-surgery drugs could not remove my need to dance.

“So will I kill myself?” I asked the surgeon as he lifted my gown to look at the markings made by the nurses on my knees. Perhaps the conversation I’d overheard was merely the product of my overactive imagination under the influence of those drugs.

“You speak French?” His eyebrows went up. He placed a warm hand on my foot. “Do not worry your pretty head about what these ignorant cabbages bandy about,” Dr. Bertrand reassured me. “They merely seek to thrill each other with tales of science fiction.”

So I had not imagined the whispered conversation.

“I do not fear voices.” Could these alien voices be worse than those of the mad choreographers, dictatorial ballet masters, and critics who think they are God?

“Yes,” Dr. Bertrand chuckled. “I have heard that dancers do not fear. You welcome pain as a necessary part of your art.”

“If it doesn’t hurt, you aren’t doing it right.” I tried to grin, but the drugs were making my face as well as my tongue numb.

“If you had not avoided treatment to your poor abused knees for so long, you would not require such drastic measures.”

“If I’d undergone corrective surgery sooner—a stopgap at best—I would have missed three of the most important years of my career. I might never have danced again.”

“Ah, but soon, I shall put that all right. My nanobots will repair all the damage you have inflicted upon your knees and keep repairing it for many years to come.”

“How long can you promise me?”

“My nanobots will last longer than the rest of your body. When you die of old age, your knees will remain as limber and strong as those of a teenager.”

“When can I dance again?”

“You will need a few weeks for the nanobots to work. Then you will feel the youth pouring into you.”

“I’m scheduled to open in London in eight weeks.”

“Eight weeks?” Dr. Bertrand shook his head and clicked his tongue. “Possibly you will be better by then, but I cannot promise peak performance in eight weeks.”

“We’ll see about that,” I said. The music played as I let the drugs carry me off. I could hear the music. I tried to move to the music. To dance.

Always, the dance.

Two days later, before breakfast, I ignored my physical therapist’s orders and rose up on tiptoe to test my balance. A big smile creased my face as I realized that Dr. Bertrand’s treatment had indeed worked a miracle. Pain-free, except for a tightness around the small incisions, I raised my arms and spun in a circle. My body swayed and threatened to tumble. I caught myself on the bed railing and forced my feet to stay under me.

Someone sighed in relief. I looked around for the source of the whoosh of air through clenched teeth. I was alone.

Perhaps I had made the sound. I certainly was relieved that I had not landed upon the still-healing surgery incisions around my kneecaps.

A few hours after that I tried again and accomplished five steps and a turn on tip-toe, then five steps back to the bed.

Étienne, the physical therapist, whisked me away to his gymnasium—or torture chamber—as the aides cleared away the lunch trays.

“You are a lot more limber this afternoon,” he said as he pushed my bent leg toward my chest. I smiled at him but said nothing.

“Tell me when the muscles begin to protest,” Étienne said as he pressed a little harder against my leg. I loved the way his French accent slid from his mouth, almost like music. I could dance to his voice. I let my kneecap brush my breasts before I squeaked a protest. Etienne gently straightened my leg and let it rest upon the hard therapy bench. In truth I’d felt the burn in my thigh fifteen inches before I said anything. I needed to push myself harder and faster than either he or Dr. Bertrand thought prudent. In my experience, all medical people were far too conservative. They didn’t want athletes—dancers—back at peak performance as soon as we could manage. We ceased to pay for their services when we felt ourselves healed, long before they were ready to release us.

“That was amazing, Mademoiselle. But you really should not press so hard,” Etienne é said, shaking his head. He stood back, hands on hips, a stern frown upon his face.

“I am a dancer. I do not interpret pain in the same way you do.” I tried to temper my excuse with a flirtatious smile. Hard-nosed critics had been known to change their reviews when I smiled like that.

“Then allow me to judge the intensity of your therapy. The nanobots need more time to repair the damage to your bone, ligaments, and cartilage before you begin to stress them. Even miracles need time.”

He stalked out of the gymnasium-like room.

Before the orderly could arrive with my wheelchair to take me back to my room, I rolled off the bench to the treadmill. I used the handrails as a barre.

Long habit settled my posture into a classic première position to begin a ballet warmup, heels together, toes pointed out, left arm hanging down in slight curve with fingertips at the top of my thighs, right hand resting lightly on the improvised barre. The mirror opposite me reflected my long legs, narrow waist, long, dark hair pinned up in a ponytail. I smiled at the figure I cut, even wearing baggy sweats. Except my feet pointed straight forward.

I forced them to turn outward along with my thighs and knees. My kneecap should face the same direction as my toes. Both should line up with my shoulder.

I sighed in relief when I achieved an almost normal première position. No! Someone—someones?—shouted into my mind.

My feet and knees whipped forward of their own accord. My left knee buckled. I clung to the railing with both hands, desperate to master my rebellious body.

I inched myself back to standing. Then I eased my feet and legs outward until toes, knees, and shoulders again aligned. Then before my muscles could protest and change my position, I bent my knees into a demiplié, forcing my heels to remain on the floor.

Sharp pains shot from my knees into my brain. It felt as if someone drove daggers directly into my temples, again and again in rhythm with my elevated pulse.

I collapsed onto the floor, pressing the heels of my palms into my eyes. The moment I stretched my body flat on the floor the pain stopped. But the memory remained. I cowered there for many long moments, whimpering.

The orderly found me curled up in a fetal position. He carried me back to my room. For the rest of the day I contemplated my situation from the confines of my bed. I let the nurses and Étienne do what they needed to do without protest, without interest. My entire focus and concentration riveted upon the overhead conversation just before the surgery.

Alien voices? Nanobots inside my body. Alien voices!

My mind looped around and around the problem. Could it be? Could the mad surgeon with his miracle procedure have done more. Much, much more?

The nanobots repaired damage. The doctor had hinted that they could even recognize new damage as it occurred.

Was the leap to recognizing potential damage too far?

From there might they not need to discourage behavior that could lead to potential damage?

No, I reasoned. That was madness.

Madness. Had the nurse used that word?

I waited and counted the hours until after midnight. The rehab wing grew quiet. The PTs and doctors went home. The other patients slept. Occasionally a nurse walked the corridors on her rounds. I could listen to my head without interference.

With as little bending and twisting as possible, I rolled from my bed and stood. So far so good. The knees did not protest. I took one step, then two in the direction of the bathroom. Still no reaction from the things inside me.

I turned my feet and knees outward—not the full ninety-degree angle I wanted, but enough to suggest a ballet stance.

Ten steps, then twelve. My knees felt a little shaky. A little hum of concern in my nape. I grabbed a towel bar for support. My knees stayed steady. The hum went away.

While I was in there I might as well take care of business. The raised seat of the john was a blessing in my condition. Once more, I turned my knees and feet outward and lifted my heels several times. My calf muscles welcomed the stretch and release.

Grab bars in all the right places helped me stand again. I left my legs turned and rose up on tiptoe. Slowly, ever so slowly, I lifted my right arm forward and up to cinquième en haut. Then I released the bar and lifted my left arm.

The hum in my head started up. I pretended it was music and stepped forward on tiptoe. The hum grew louder.

I overrode it by singing a jaunty little waltz. “One, two, step. One, two, step.”

The hum matched the lilt in my mind.

Arms still up, I dropped to both feet in a modified fifth position, all the while singing. On each third beat I took one step forward on the right toe and brought the left up into fifth position, toes aligned, heels facing opposite directions. Then I came down on the count of three, still in fifth position, heel to toe and toe to heel.

Six times I performed this simple exercise. Six times the aliens hummed along with me, so caught up in the music and the lovely stretch of calf, thigh, and back muscles that they didn’t notice how I moved. Then they noticed. Straight, straight, straight, they screamed at me. My feet and knees jerked to an ugly front face and without my will, marched me back to bed. The moment I placed both hands on the side bar, my legs gave out. I had to drag my tired body onto the mattress.

A smile tugged at my mouth as I drifted off to sleep.

For the next three days, every time I had a little privacy in the bathroom, I repeated the exercise, singing my favorite ballet waltzes ever louder to drown out the nanobots’ protests. Each day they took a little longer before forcing me back into their version of a normal stance. By the end of the week I managed a few pliès—bends— entendues—stretches—even a quick ronde de jambe —a circle of the leg.

“I want a practice room complete with barre, mirror, and sound system,” I demanded of Dr. Bertrand on the following Tuesday. A week and a day after the surgery. Time was running out. Seven weeks to the opening in London. Seven weeks to tame the voices in my head.

“This is too early,” he replied, setting his jaw stubbornly.

‘Étienne has told you that I can walk the entire length of the corridor without aid. The time has come,” I insisted. I paced my little hospital room, my legs stiff in the exaggerated step of the dancer.

“No.”

“Yes!”

“No. You will damage yourself beyond the abilities of the nanobots to repair.”

“I have paid you a great deal of money for this treatment. I still owe you half the fee. If I cannot dance, I cannot pay. You will not get the second half of your fee.” I could be just as stubborn as he. I softened the demand with a smile and a gentle touch to his hand. “I must dance.”

“You may use the physical therapy room. But only if Etienne supervises,” the doctor conceded as he dropped a light kiss on my forehead. “When you fail, then you will know that I know how the nanobots work in your body better than you do.”

I did not retort with the “Oh, yeah?” that burned on my tongue.

The hum in the back of my neck began the moment I took my place at the barre Etienne installed in his beloved PT room. The treadmill, weight bench, and other accoutrements of his trade were all pushed against the back wall, out of my way.

“Adagio in 4/4 time,” I called to the computerized music system.

The slow, melodic tune drifted over the hidden speakers. I let the sound fill me as I drew deep breaths. The nanos picked up the count. Carefully I ran through gentle plies in first, second, fourth, and fifth positions. Blood coursed through my muscles, giving them warmth and flexibility. I reveled in the stretch

and burn. Then I pushed into deeper grand pliés.

Ah! the nanos sighed.

I pushed a little deeper.

Not so much yet, they insisted and shot fire from my knees to my head. I backed off, but continued through my routine warmup. The microscopic robots let me know when I went to far. We compromised on the grand battlements, leg lifts. I managed to bring my leg level with my hip; half as elevated as I considered beautiful and necessary; much, much higher than the nanobots thought feasible.

“How in the hell,” I asked Etienne, “do you work with football players who have to kick up to their shoulder level?” I mopped perspiration off my brow and neck.

Football players do not demand the precise placement of hip with a full turnout as you. The answer came not from Étienne, who remained focused on my motions, but from inside my head. A full, coherent sentence from the bots. I raised my eyebrows in speculation. Was there more here than an invisible guardian of my cartilage? They seemed to be gaining in sentience. True sentience meant consciousness and appreciation for beauty.

My hope and spirits rose.

Until I moved to the center of the room and asked for a waltz.

Too much! Too much! the bots screamed. My knees collapsed. Étienne clucked his tongue and lifted me into a waiting wheelchair. “We told you not to push yourself too far,” he gloated.

I turned my face away from his glower. “I will try again tomorrow.”

“But . . .”

“I did not fail today. I just could not do as much as I wanted. Dr. Bertrand said I could practice until I failed. I did not fail.”

The nanobots needed to love my dance. To know why I had to dance. Why the world needed dance and beauty and art.

Eat, eat, eat! the aliens inside my head insisted.

I stared aghast at the mounds of yams, a tiny green salad drowning in oily dressing, a large portion of fruit salad dripping mayonnaise, and a slab of beef covered in rich Béarnaise sauce. And on a side plate a six-layer piece of gateau chocolat, complete with gooey icing.

“You want me to eat this crap?” I nearly gagged at the thought of putting so much fat into my body at one time.

“Well, of course. This is what the doctor ordered for you,” the kitchen aide sniffed. “This is how les Américains eat!” She flounced out of my room.

“Too much fat,” I snorted and pushed everything aside but the salad. I scraped off as much of the fat-filled dressing as I could.

You must eat. We need fuel to work on your body.

I stuck to my guns as I nibbled the salad.

Please?

Suddenly I was not in control.

The meat disappeared down my throat faster than I expected. It tasted so good, I wanted more. Never since I had begun to dance professionally at the age of fifteen had I so craved food. The yams too, the nanobots reminded me.

“But the sauce?”

It will not hurt you. And as if reading my mind, It will not detract from your muscle mass.

“Promise?”

Promise.

So I ate the yams and sauce as well.

“Nice to see that your appetite has returned,” Dr. Bertrand remarked. He entered my room just as I finished the last forkful of super-sweet gateau.

“Let’s just monitor the activity of my nanobots after your workout today. There should be a slight increase in activity as you rebuild your strength.” He attached sticky pads to either side of each knee and then stuck wires to the brackets on each pad. The wires led to a handheld monitor the size of my PDA. The gadget clicked and hummed to itself, much like the nanos hummed in the back of my head. We’d been through this procedure every day since my surgery and rehab.

Dr. Bertrand frowned. “I have never seen activity at these levels. If I did not know better, I’d say I’d given you four treatments, not one. I don’t see how the number of nanobots I gave you can generate these readings.”

The monitor began playing a lilting Andalusian tune. “En Aranjuez Con Tu Amor,” by Joquin Rodrigo, I thought. A nice piece, easy to dance to.

“You said the nanobots had self-repair and replication capabilities to give them longevity.” I tried to look innocent. As long as the nanobots appreciated music and let me dance, they could replicate themselves a thousand times over.

“No dance for you tomorrow,” Dr. Bertrand said through his frown. “You did too much. The nanos won’t be able to keep up with repairs if you keep pushing yourself like this.”

“I’m checking myself out and going home tomorrow,” I replied icily.

“You can’t! You aren’t ready. You’ll collapse before you get to the airport.”

The monitor buzzed and beeped, then returned to a much slower pulsing tone, the tone it should have had before I had exposed the nanobots to music.

I smiled sweetly at Dr. Bertrand. The nanos had completed their repair job for the day. For three days the nanos kept me anchored to the barre while I worked. When they finally released me for some true dance—after a good warm up at the barre, of course—I almost shouted with joy.

“Computer, ‘Woodland Rhapsody’ by Alexander,” I called to the music system. The lilting strains of my favorite piece of music in the world drifted out from the speakers, a New Age piece played on synthesizer and uilleann pipes.

I began the slow, twisting moves of the dance created especially for me two years ago, just after my first bout of tendonitis. The work had become my signature piece. I always ended solo performances with this dance. I always received multiple standing ovations and dozens of bouquets of roses when I performed it.

The adulation was nice, but did not compare to the sheer joy of dancing to this music. Tears came to my eyes as the music overwhelmed me. I became the dance, the music, the art. By the time I completed the triumphant celebration at the end my ears rang and sweat dripped from every pore of my body. My heart beat too rapidly.

“Now you know,” I told the nanobots, “why humanity craves art. Existence is chaos, conflict, and fear. Art is the flower bud of beauty that allows us to step back from the horrors of life so we can find the hope and joy in living.”

I exulted in finally being close to what I was meant to be. Only one more step remained in my recovery. Inside me, the nanos wept with awe.

We have spent some time working on your pelvic muscles, the nanos informed me as I entered the dressing room of a private studio in London.

“What’s wrong with my pelvis?” I sank onto one of the benches and began digging leg warmers and pointe shoes out of my bag.

I was due to open at the Royal Albert Hall in just two weeks. I needed to get into rehearsals in the next day or two at the latest. But I didn’t want anyone to see my first venture onto pointe. Certainly the nanos would protest. The argument might take several hours. But I knew how to convince them. A lifetime of carrying your bags and books and things on the same hip. Then an imbalance in your posture—you tighten your butt but neglect your abs. You had pushed the joints out of alignment. We have corrected that and stimulated the muscles so that they hold.

“Oh. A lifetime of bad habits. Thank you for correcting it. I’ll work on eliminating those bad habits.” I loved this new relationship with my nanos. I’d found that I could finally indulge my appetite without gaining weight. The nanos put every calorie to good use. They’d added firmness to my breasts, eliminating the beginnings of sag. My skin felt fresher and more elastic all over my body. I arched my feet within the pointe shoes and tied the ribbons securely. A strange, numbing silence took over the back of my neck.

I slipped from the dressing room into the studio and took my position at the barre. No time to waste putting music in the CD player in the corner. I had to do this before the nanos became suspicious and closed me down. I’d just have to hum along to my warmup routine.

The silence in my head spread through my shoulders and arms as I dipped into my first round of plies. Biting my lip, for concentration, I rose out of the bend and continued stretching up and up until my feet rolled to a full point within the special shoes.

Fire laced through all of the delicate bones and muscles from toe to knee and upward. NO! You can’t do this.

“I will do this. The dance is not complete without pointe shoes. The lines of my body are asymmetrical unless I continue the line of my feet into a full point.” I dropped down to flat. The fire went away. I tried again.

The pain increased and rose up to my hips and into my heart and lungs. Gasping for breath, I bent double.

The moment my heels touched the ground the pain reduced to a burning ache. Air rushed back into my lungs.

“Let’s try something else.” I marched over to the portable CD player in the corner and shoved in a disc. By the time I returned to the barre, the nanos had begun to hum along. Hoping I’d lulled them into submission, I tried again.

They reacted more violently. I collapsed onto the floor, straining to breathe through the pain. We cannot allow you to damage yourself beyond our ability to repair you.

“Then get busy and replicate a bunch more of you. I will do this. The dance is not complete unless I go on pointe. My career is finished if I can’t dance on pointe. Without my career, I am nothing.”

Silence.

When I could bear to stand up again, I tried one more time to rise up on pointe. This time the nanos reduced me to puddle of pain and tears. I had to crawl back to the dressing room. Inside the studio the music continued its lonesome routine, playing for the dance without a dancer.

Alone in the dead of night, I sat on the bed of my furnished flat and stared at the bottle of pain pills Dr. Bertrand had given me. Sixty of the big green caplets with the unpronounceable name. Heavy-duty medication, barely legal in the U.S., and certainly not in the dosage and numbers in that bottle. Enough to last me an entire month if I took the prescribed amount of one with breakfast and another when I went to bed.

Was it enough?

I arched my feet one more time.

No reaction from the nanos.

I stood up and stretched into a long arabesque.

Still no reaction.

I reached for my pointe shoes.

The nanos collapsed every muscle in my body.

Crying for all my lost hopes and dreams, crying for the end of my art and dance, crying for the end of me, I crawled back onto the bed.

The bottle of pills still stood on the nightstand. A big glass of water sat beside it. Choking on my tears I shook six pills into my hand and reached for the water. What are you doing? the nanos asked in alarm.

“The only thing I can do. You won’t let me dance. Without my art my life is reduced to mere existence. There is no hope, no joy, no beauty.”

You may dance; just not with those torture devices.

“That is the only way I can perform ballet. The dance is not complete without an audience.”

Then invent a new form of dance, a less destructive form that does not require turnout or pointe shoes.

“They call that modern dance. I find it ugly.”

I swallowed one pill.

It went down sideways and stuck in my throat. I gagged and drank more water until it cleared. Damn. Now I’d have to get more water to take the rest of the pills. One is enough.

“No, it isn’t. Not to end the pain in here.” I slammed my fist onto my heart. A new spate of tears blurred my vision as I refilled the glass of water.

You will damage yourself. We cannot allow that.

“You have damaged my identity, my very soul to the point of no return.” I tried to put another pill into my mouth and found my hand shaking so badly I dropped them all.

Cursing, I crawled around on the floor seeking them out.

You will end your existence if you take all those pills.

“And your point would be?” I found four. That should do the job. And there were others in the bottle. If my hands stopped shaking long enough to open the childproof cap.

You cannot mean to end your existence! they cried in alarm.

“I mean precisely to do that.” I managed to get a second pill into my mouth. But, but . . .

I’d never known the nanos to sputter.

It didn’t matter any longer. I had to do this. I grasped the glass of water firmly.

“Without the dance, I am nothing. All the pain, and agony, cutting myself off from friends, denying myself the pleasure of a movie, or an art museum, or a loving relationship . . . I endured all of that because it interfered with my dancing. Now I have nothing. I am nothing.”

If you kill yourself, then we will die, too.

“So? What good are you if you won’t let me dance?” I got the glass as far as my mouth. Then my hand clenched so tightly the glass shattered. Water sprayed all over me. The precious pill dropped to the floor once more.

Blood ran down my hand and dripped on the floor from half-a-dozen glass cuts.

“Now look what you made me do.”

We cannot allow you to terminate yourself or us.

“I’ll find a way.” I picked up one of the larger pieces of glass. Big enough and sharp enough. I aimed it over the big artery in my wrist. I remembered reading somewhere that those who were more serious about their suicide slashed lengthwise, along the artery. Cutting crosswise was only a gesture by those who cried for help.

I watched my blood pulse in my wrist and poised it to slash lengthwise. Is destroying your body with pointe shoes more important than living?

“Dancing on pointe is an essential part of the dance . . . of living.” I brought the glass shard closer to my wrist, bracing myself against the pain I knew would come. The final pain I must endure. If we let you dance on pointe will you continue to live?

“Dancing on pointe is life to me. Without the pointe shoes I cannot perform; I cannot complete the art of dance without an audience.”

A huge sigh of resignation ran through my body.

Clean up the broken glass, then sleep. We must replicate ourselves one hundred times over to accommodate your art. For the stake of beauty.

Crying in relief I obeyed and flushed the last of the pills down the toilet. The nanos had given me another chance to live.

“Donna, you’ve never looked more radiant!” Lucien, the company director, gushed as he gathered me in a hug tight enough to disrupt the layers of blue chiffon that constituted my costume.

“It’s all that time I spent in bed recuperating from surgery,” I lied by way of explanation. He’d never understand the sentient nanobots in my system that kept my body looking and performing like a twenty-year-old.

“I watched the rehearsal this afternoon. ‘Rhapsody’ was positively poignant. You’ve added new dimension to your work.” He held me at arm’s length, inspecting my new costume, complete with a crown of flowers, wisps of green leaves about the chiffon, and fluttery wings on a flexible wire. My fairy costume.

“Your knees working okay?” Lucien had known me to dance through excruciating pain without admitting it.

“Better than new. The procedure worked miracles.”

“How long will it last? This company needs you dancing. Our receipts were way down during your absence. Audiences just do not react to your understudy the same way they love you.”

He’d recommended conventional surgical techniques when the tendonitis first hit me three years ago. Those procedures were really only temporary pain relief. Joints never were the same afterward.

“My knees will outlive you.” I smiled graciously at the white-haired gentleman of a certain age. He’d been around so long no one dared ask how old he was, and yet he had more energy and stamina than a dozen dancers put together.

In fact he’d pointed me toward Dr. Bertrand and his controversial techniques when my pain became so acute I could not walk.

I wondered . . .

“But will your knees outlive you? That is the important part.”

I smiled enigmatically.

“Time for you to go on, Donna.” He kissed my cheek. “ Merde. He whispered the universal “Good luck”

of all dancers. Though why we said “shit” to each other in French, I’ll never know.

“I have to go easy on the jumps,” I apologized.

No jumps, the nanos nearly screamed in my ear.

“There are no jumps in this dance.” Lucien looked puzzled.

“I’ve added a small tourjete and pas de chat. ” Next week I’d make those little jumps bigger. Then we’d go for the truly magnificent grand jeté leaps I had once been famous for. We won’t let you undo all our repairs with jumps and leaps and such.

“That’s what you think,” I told the nanos sotto voce.

“Did you say something?” Lucien asked.

“Just a little mantra to psyche myself up for my premiere.”

No jumps.

“We’ll see about that.” I could out-argue stubborn, mad ballet masters, cranky conductors, and insistent bean counters like Lucien. What were a few nanobots to a true dancer? “If I don’t jump, leap, and turn, the dance is not complete.”

We must complete the dance. To dance is to live.

Exactly!

INSIDE JOB

Loren L. Coleman

. . . loading . . .

You’d think by now I’d learn. The city’s top cop wasn’t going to do me, or anyone in the department’s Virtual Division, any favors. Still, when the case landed in my queue I felt a moment’s hope. Every career cop (and yeah, I’m one) is really waiting for the next Big One. The case that offers some major resources to play with. Gets you noticed. Maybe hauls you up to the next paygrade. That gold folder jacket sitting on my virtual desk? The one pulsing with a soft, supernatural glow that could only mean its return address was Number One Police Square? It had “special assignment” written all over it.

Literally. In tiny red letters that marched around the folder’s edge like some kind of Times Square marquee. Not bad programming, either. I checked the corners—those ninety-degree turns can be tricky—and the letters held perfect form as they swung round the bend. Someone upstairs was still taking pride in their work.

Or they knew that some serious eyes were going to be looking at the data. I swallowed hard. Purely an affectation, when you’re transformed into The System and really nothing more than a floating database wrapped up in a neurohistic signal. A standard avatar, in other words. But I’m really an old-fashioned kind of guy, and sometimes the moment calls for a hard swallow. Striking a pose: hands splayed across the old-fashioned blotter that covered a large part of my antique desk, leaning heavily forward and head hung low. The lights in my virtual office dimmed until only a spotlight of dingy yellow fell across my shoulders and pooled on the desktop. I hadn’t taken the case yet, and already I felt the weight bearing down on me. One of those moments when you knew people’s lives were going to change. Maybe end. Maybe it would be mine, this time. Maybe. Okay, maybe it was a little early for the Sam Spade act.

There wasn’t even a beautiful dame yet.

A shift of thought brought the lights back up, and I hooked my swivel chair over with one foot. A broken castor rattled in protest, and that made me smile. It was that kind of detail, the little things, that made for a convincing experience inside The System, and I’d spent enough of my working hours inside the past six years to want to do it right.

So, getting comfortable, I grabbed up a pencil to take notes right there on my blotter and then tapped the pink eraser end against the folder jacket’s tab. A pins-and-needles tingling sensation crept into my fingers. Looking deep into the No. 2 yellow-painted wood, I saw my security code streaming across the pencil’s bridge, dumping into the tab. Three-level security, I noticed. Someone had locked this up tight. Again, there was that shimmer of hope. Then the folder jacket fell open. Not like a book would fall open. The folder suddenly grew depth. As if I’d removed the cover from a box and revealed a stack of datapages about three inches deep. Officer’s reports. Crime scene photos. Notes from other detectives. They would all be in there. Anything and everything pertinent to the case. And the most pertinent page of all was sitting right on top, ready for me to thumb it out and toss it up into the air where it hung, centered above my desk and glowing like God’s holy writ. The damn cover page, with a large, no-nonsense black IAB stamp in the upper right corner.

Internal Affairs Bureau. The Rat Squad.

Ah, hell.

Chewing through the data forwarded by IAB didn’t take long. One of the (admittedly few) advantages to being plugged in was the ability to manipulate, digest, or expel data at a rate that nearly matched the clock speed of a good CPU. It took longer to requisition a vehicle, once I realized that I would have to unplug for an onsite visit to the downtown depository. Longer still to drive there. Police depositories, where we log in and secure all evidence for trial, are like small warehouses. Or, really, U-Store-It places. A warren of separate rooms, filled with shelves, drawers, cupboards, and lockboxes. Everything we need to manage an inventory that ranges from the pair of shoes a suspect wore the night of his crime to a steamer trunk filled with fifty kilos of Colombian H. They are cold, musty, cramped little spaces, usually overseen by aging cops who are turning into cold, musty, cramped little people. Dead-end careers. Little hope for parole.

I could relate.

Each depository also housed a datavault, which managed the official and total inventory and offered a place for VD detectives (like me) to store their finished work until trial. But someone at the downtown station had apparently developed “happy fingers,” doing a little off-the-job programming to gum up the entire works. Which was how the problem ended up on my desk.

Agent Curtis of Internal Affairs met me just as I came off the elevator, coming up from the parking garage. Tall, and thick about the middle, with shadows under his eyes and a habit of glancing suspiciously at anyone who stood too close by. Serious frown lines drooping from the corners of his mouth. He had a gold wedding band on his left hand, but I doubted the hangdog expression came from his marriage. If I ever meet a happy IAB rat, it will be the first.

“VD?” he asked, too loudly. Like the chrome jack behind my right ear wasn’t obvious enough. Heads turned.

“I’d rather use protection,” I said. “But I appreciate the warning.”

He frowned, and it looked like an avalanche building up on his face, ready to come crashing down. “You going to play games, or help me catch one of your wirehead buddies?”

Apparently Curtis was ready to paint me from the same color palette reserved for whomever had

“abused the privilege,” as some cops like to say. I was tempted—sorely tempted—to turn around right then. One Police Square or not. But there was still some hope left. Call me an optimist, but I didn’t want to give this case up just yet.

“How ’bout first we rule out accidental corruption and a third-party hack?” I asked. The avalanche started to roll. “I didn’t think that was possible.”

Technically, it wasn’t. Well, an accident maybe, though from the evidence that seemed highly unlikely. Third-party? Would take some doing. First and foremost, datavaults were highly secured, with no (and I mean zero ) outside access. That was just one of the ways The System beat back that whole cyberware scare. It really was as simple as not plugging in your critical data to the world-wide. You hosted it off your own intranet, or, if you really wanted security, a dedicated machine. Banks and big corporations figured that out pretty quickly. Hell, most mom-and-pop businesses had enough smarts not to install a System interface unless they wanted vandals messing with their inventory and bookkeeping. Porn was one of the few big businesses still tied in, and with so many holes (no pun intended) in their frontline security it was easy to hack. They wanted you in, after all. Eventually they made a customer out of you.

So The System had become a glorified chat room, used primarily for communication and some semi-secure data management, and was big on the world-wide primarily with the entertainment industry. Not to mention it took a hardcore fan to bother getting jacked in the first place. Or a cop bucking for an easy promotion to detective. One which, by most cops’ standards, had never earned his gold shield.

“Let me take a walk through the system, at least. Get a feel for our perp.”

Our perp. On the same team, me and him. Curtis hesitated, studied me like something he wasn’t quite sure about.

Strike a pose: feet spread apart, confident, relaxed, thumbs hooked into the front pockets of my slacks (because I didn’t have a trenchcoat). If he’s there, we’ll find him. That’s what you do when your business is being a cop. A man crosses the line, any man, and you bring him in. No matter what.

“All right,” Curtis finally said. And nodded me down the hall.

Score one for the wirehead.

It was just a short trip to the property clerk’s office. Past the men’s room and a janitorial closet with a small puddle of water leaking out under the door. Isolation was always a good first line of security, but screen freeze me if it didn’t feel like these officers had been exiled to this far corner because they rated below mop buckets and dusting cloths.

There was a metal security door protecting their lair, with an access port that refused my badge number. Curtis swiped us through on his.

Tell me to take a square room ten feet on a side and fit in four desks and a DataScanVI the size of a small filing cabinet, and I’d have great game of mental Tetris playing in my head. Apparently, so had the officers in charge here. Two desks pushed back-to-back, the third shoved up against a wall with the DSVI crouched in the kickspace beneath it, and the fourth desk set on end in one corner as the piece-which-would-not-fit. Plus, the walls were painted in a bright, too-cheerful jewel-tone yellow. All that was missing was the jaunty little background tune. Instead, the chief property clerk had a CD

player spinning out some classical piano.

“Franklin Torres,” he introduced himself. Willowy would be the best word to describe him. Tall and extremely lean, with stooped shoulders and rail thin arms. A good breeze would probably bend the man in half. No wonder he’d been filed down in the property clerk’s office—sure wasn’t built for the streets. He did have a chrome jack behind his right ear—another of the chrome detectives squad, then—and he made sure I got a good look at it by turning his head overfar to introduce the others. Nothing to hide?

Asking for some professional courtesy?

Samantha Blake and David O’Rourke were his two assistants. Samantha was a freshly made officer who starched her blues and I’m sure had an academy stencil still visible below her shirt collar. How she had pulled drudge duty I could only guess. Luck of the draw, maybe. Her file, as it had been given to me in the package, was clean. Top marks in programming and rated for an eventual job with the Electronics Division.

O’Rourke was sour-faced and carried an obvious chip on his shoulder. No doubting why he was here. His file had mentioned two trips to rehab in his first three years. Both officers barely acknowledged Torrres when he introduced them. Me they glanced down at like a particularly loathsome bug trying to crawl into their food. I’d like to think it was the IAB detective looming behind me. Maybe it was the chrome.

“You have logs on the door for the last week.” I said. Meaning, to let them know, that I had the logs and knew there was nothing out of place.

Torres nodded. “I’ve made runs on them in System,” he said. “Sam has mast—fingered them for two days. We’ve got nothing new to add.”

Fingered them. On keyboard. Torres was definitely old school cybercrime. He’d been about to call it

“masturbating.” By the light flush coloring Samantha Blake’s cheeks, she knew it too. I shuffled around the two back-to-back desks and crouched down before the DataScanVI. There was an Electronics Division sticker on the case, logging it as “evidence in place.” So ED had already looked it over for tampering, to see if someone had installed a wireless bridge on the sly. No joy on the third-party hack.

Samantha, keyboarded and neither she nor O’Rourke had visible jacks, but I had to double check.

“Wireless?” I asked them, and they shook their heads.

Not surprising. Not on a cop’s pay, and the department would never spring for the new tech when the old stuff still hadn’t paid for itself. Not in the eyes of the upper brass. I’d have them scanned again, but I doubted I’d turn up anything.

Mind if I plug in?” I asked Torres.

A courtesy only, as the equipment was owned by the department. But you didn’t go plugging another man’s jack into your chrome without asking. And don’t go there.

“Top drawer,” he offered.

Never pointed out his desk. Didn’t have to. Even outside The System, it was the details—those little things I mentioned—that made the difference. In this case, his chair. A nice form-fitting tilt model designed to hold you in a semi-reclined position. He didn’t have much privacy, not even so much as the closet-cubicle I was allowed for hosting my virtual office uptown, but he did go in for comfort and safety. No sense letting your body fall forward with an involuntary twitch, impaling your cell or a piece of your coffee mug into the middle of your forehead.

I eased myself into the hugging material, liking the velour touch. Then opened his top drawer and pulled out the datajack on its thin cable. Like most, it was covered in a thin latex sheath meant to keep things clean. Okay, it was a condom. Extra-small. The department wasn’t about to pay for a custom-designed sheath, but it could have been worse.

The upper brass could have made us pick up our own extra-smalls at a local drugstore. Without a warning glance at Curtis, and avoiding Samantha’s gaze altogether, I stripped the condom away and set the jack into the socket behind my ear. Immediately, I began to relax. Muscles going slack, and a pleasant buzzing in my ears as the endorphins kicked in to lull me in to a . . . let’s call it a receptive state. In a dreamy haze, I settled my hands down onto the chair’s arm rests and reclined back into a comfortable pose.

Then rocked forward.

Standing up (in The System).

I was back in the office I’d just left, only without the clutter of desks and without the jewel-tone walls closing in around me. Instead, walls were painted a pleasant beige, illuminated by a soft glow that seemed to pool up from the floor, and hung with a few art masterpieces I might have recognized from museums. That is, from movies that had been shot inside museums.

So I wasn’t an art buff. But still quite soothing, all considered. The room remained ten-by-ten, held only by the single chair I’d just stood from and, out of the corner of my eye, I saw the mirror. Mirrors were such a common physical interface between The System and reality that it didn’t surprise me at all. My office in the uptown precinct had one as well, and I was well trained in not looking until I was ready to unplug. There’s something disconcerting in watching yourself lolling back, often with a sliver of drool trickling down your chin, giving those phantom twitching motions you see dogs do when they are asleep and “chasing rabbits.”

Worse when you realize that there were several people in the room watching you do it. Me and an empty room. Chair and a mirror. Some art. And the door. Right. I remembered the case file, which laid out the normal architecture of the datavault. Back through the door (which we’d used to enter) and I would instead be in a small virtual library. Complete with an electronic “card catalog” for maintaining the depository’s inventory as well as VD’s final casework. A drone—an artificially programmed personality—mocked up as a reference-section librarian was available for help. And bringing a “book” back through the door downloaded a copy to the DataScanVI’s auxiliary port. Small. Ordered. Convenient.

I opened the door.

I’ll say this . . . I had been warned. Warned in the case file as delivered by IAB. And still, I was overwhelmed. The subtlety with which the perp had sabotaged us was staggering, really. I didn’t doubt for a moment that all the data was still there—the DSVI’s safeguards did not allow for erasure, ever—but it was all cunningly “lost” against the new interface.

The library had become an underground warehouse that stretched away from the suddenly-very-small door I’d stepped through for several miles. Three stories high, by estimation. Stacked floor to ceiling with shelves crammed full of nondescript wooden crates. Aisle upon row upon section. I shuffled along the smooth concrete floor looking to my left and right at the endless collection. There were lift-trucks for retrieving items off the very top shelves; one of the vehicles up on a stand for maintenance, and another leaking a small, spreading puddle beneath it that smelled of brake fluid. Every step sounded hollowly and then died without an echo. Even sound got lost in this immense room. I chose an aisle at random and walked along, checking out crates. They were solidly built in the old-fashioned way, with real, heavy wood and nailed shut. Each was stenciled with an arcane system of numbers and letters, though not necessarily shelved by any kind of system I could easily discern. I knocked on a few, kicked hard against a few others. Nothing wrong with the physics program, as my big toe throbbed from the effort. I dug behind one stack, pulling out a small box that left a sliver of my thumb and sent me to sneezing from the gray swirl in dust I stirred up. Smashing it against the floor, I nearly laughed when a few dozen gold detective shields spilled out over the concrete walk. Millions. Maybe billions of possibilities. So stunning, it took me until I’d turned back for the door to place the image. When I realized that no programmer could have quickly produced all this detail from raw design.

No. I recognized it now. This was right out of the Indiana Jones section of The System’s Studio Tours. Even if they weren’t on wireless or plugged in, millions of people walked through this “warehouse” every year by pulling on a VR helmet. You run from the giant rolling boulder (which was probably crated and stored in here somewhere as well), ride along in the big car chase scene, and then walk through the government warehouse from the end of the movie.

This was that warehouse.

And lost in here somewhere, right behind the Ark of the Covenant, would be our master inventory list and the key to opening all our VD casework.

I think that may have been when the glimmer of hope, the one I’d carried with me through most of the day, finally died.

It’s just another part of the problem, working Virtual Division. When you get right down to it, the work is a lot of number crunching and sifting through data. There aren’t any high-speed chases or running a suspect down on foot. No gun fights (though I can’t say missing out on those bothers me too much). And very few high profile arrests. We chip away against “black ice” or battle cyber ninjas. We rarely found anything worse than some low-stakes money laundering. Occasionally, we helped on a RICO subpoena, but OCD grabbed whatever glory came with those arrests.

It wasn’t impossible to get in trouble on The System. People did it everyday. Quite easily, in fact. What was difficult was getting in so much trouble that it justified a program that probably cost the city millions. Not when a keyboard jockey could do most of what a chromed detective could do. So, escorted by Detective Curtis back to the uptown station, I did what any good detective does. I drank some coffee and I sifted data. Curtis fed it into me, the data that is, through barely civil conversation. And I tried to ignore his suspicious glances, which filled every quiet moment.

“Simply put,” he said as we paused outside my closet office, “the DA’s trial schedule is falling to hell and she’s going to blame us. There are three high-profile cases on the docket, including the serial killer Brendon LaChance, any one of which might go belly up because we can’t track the damn evidence. Chain of custody issues aside, we can’t find it all!”

“Uh huh.”

There was that avalanche building again. Growing heavy on his brow and starting to tumble down his face. “Something you might want to remember is that IAB is pretty damn fireproof. We don’t burn as easily as other divisions. In fact, we often do the burning.” He glared at me, long and hard. “I can serve up VD as easily as the next guy.”

With straight lines like these, I might seriously think about asking for permanent assignment with Curtis once this case was closed. There was some potential here.

“Have you come up with any new conclusions?” he asked.

“It must be Wednesday,” I said. Took another sip of my coffee. “Yep, there’s a hint of chocolate in there. Which means Claire at Espresso-Daily served me a double shot extra-light mocha. That’s my usual Wednesday poison. Fascinating, don’t you think? I hated coffee for so long. But chocolate, that I could handle. And I needed the caffeine buzz on Wednesdays to help get me through the week. A personal choice becomes so routine that now I take evidence of that routine as fact.”

“I meant about the case,” Curtis said. Tone, dark.

I shrugged. Opened the door to my closet. Inside was my own support chair and a condom-wrapped datajack. “Have you found any connection between LaChance or a defendant from any pending case and one of the suspects?” I asked. He shook his head. “Any financial incentive? Someone get a new car, or pay down their mortgage, or suddenly win big at the track?”

I knew the answers, of course. And he knew I knew them. Another glower. Another shake.

“So there is no high profile tap. No third-party hack. It’s not financial. And there’s no way this was accidental.”

“So what’s left?” Curtis asked.

Strike a pose: roll the lower lip back against the teeth, one finger tracing along the line of my jaw. The Detective. About to say something profound. So it wasn’t murder. There wouldn’t be any headlines in the morning. But it was still a crime, and we still had a job to do.

“Personal,” I told him.

Then I shut my closet door.

Plugging into my virtual office, I dialed up some atmosphere. Overcast and heavy showers. The street lamps outside penetrated the gray rain just enough to wash me out of the shadows. A great noir moment. Minus the trench coast and beautiful dame.

I paced in front of those too-large windows, the kind of office I’d never have on the force except inside The System, and thought. Something I was missing . . .

Well, my coffee, for one. I’d left that on a utility shelf inside my closet. If I wanted to check the mirror on the back wall, I could see it. And myself, sitting easy in my chair, twitching. Not Bogey-style twitching—that purposeful tic that made him such a character. Chasing rabbits. I thought about programming up some cigarettes. Or dressing the part in a beige trench coat and a felt fedora. Then logged in my drone instead. He entered through the door behind me, keeping far back in the shadows. Probably slouched. Against the wall or standing alone in the middle of the room, Sam Spade had a great slouch.

“It’s got you tied in knots, don’t it?” the drone asked. The click of an old-fashioned Zippo cover. The strike of the wheel and a hiss-crackle as he pulled a cigarette to life. “You wanted into this business. Never forget that.”

“It has to be an inside job,” I said, ignoring the banter. Counting raindrops as they splashed against the window glass. “Three good suspects. If there was a body, we’d have a great locked room mystery.”

“You still got one of those,” the drone said. “A locked room, I mean.”

Check. The warehouse was large. Impressively so. But it was still a closed box and only three people had access. Score one for the drone, with extra points for style. It was programmed to run the same probability matrices as standard software and to check my facts. But to do so in a conversational manner. It helped me think.

“The thing about it is this,” I said. “The trace evidence I need to prove who did it will be hidden against that same background programming. If I can find a unique programming signature, it will be as good as any fingerprint.”

The drone made a tchk sound. My guess it was accompanied by that twitching smirk I’d never perfected. Not even in The System. “Fingerprints will get you so far,” Sam agreed. “Me, I usually followed the money. Or the dame.”

“I don’t have either.” I tried not to sound petty. I could have cast Samantha Blake in the role, I suppose, but she really didn’t fit the part. The dame always came from outside.

“Then use what you do have. Look for what doesn’t belong, and you’ll have them.”

There was a sharp exhale and the smell of cigarette smoke blowing in from over my shoulder. I hate that smell, and could have filtered it out. But, like I said, it was the little things which made a difference in The System.

The little things . . .

Strike a pose: leaning into the windowsill, letting the whole world fall away behind me until it is lost on the blur of the camera’s eye. The filtered light from outside pools in my eyes. There is a soft patter against the window, as fat raindrops splash into droplets and leave silver-gray trails down the glass pane. It was raining in The City. A steady rain. Strong enough to wash the trash out of the gutters. If I had thought to program some trash into the gutters to begin with. The little things!

Ah, hell.

He was waiting for us, Detective Curtis and me, in the datavault office. Even though it was after hours. Even though he could have lit out and made a good run of it in the hours since we’d first come by. Franklin Torres sat in his plush wraparound chair. Turned to face the door. The lights were dimmed, which I appreciated given the loud color on the walls. He raised a hand in casual salute as we entered.

“What gave me away?” he asked. No preamble. Not even a pretense of innocence. He knew we were back to make an arrest, and had never doubted, apparently, that we wouldn’t come for him. I decided to let him keep his pride. As much as I could. “The artistry.” I told him the truth. “The little touches you left behind, because you couldn’t help yourself. The dust and splintering wood. The sound effects. They were all just a little bit better than a keyboard jockey would bother fingering in.

“But the unique trait which I’m sure will match up against samples of your previous work, our providence, will be the fluid slick building up beneath that lift truck. It’s what doesn’t belong. It’ll have your signature on it.”

“Yes,” he said. “That will do it.”

And he sounded a little surprised that I had keyed on it.

“Actually, when I realized you had smashed open that small box, I thought you’d have jumped at the gold detective shields. That was what got me exiled here, after all. The chrome detective squad. When System cops didn’t pan out as the next big thing, we were all but thrown away.” He reached up to tap the chrome jack hiding behind his right ear. “I was tired of being forgotten.”

Which was when Curtis stepped forward. Of course.

“But you will be,” he promised, the avalanche rolling down his hangdog face. “You and all the wire-heads. Eventually the entire department will be free of VD.”

I’m telling you. He’s a goldmine.

Strike a pose: leaning back in my swivel chair, feet up on the desk and hands clasped behind my head. Staring up at the ceiling to watch the ceiling fan push the thick, muggy air around the room. And that’s the way it went down. One man tired of being forgotten. Another resigned to it. Two side of the same coin.

Agent Curtis and IAB grabbed what little kudos there were to claim for the arrest. No one was going to thank Virtual Division, especially when it had been one of our own who had “abused the privilege.”

You’d think I’d have learned by now. No one does us any favors.

But maybe I’m okay with that. Not learning, I mean. Because it’s that little glimmer of hope that comes with every case that still separated me from Franklin Torres.

And like I said, it’s the little things that matter.

Especially when you don’t get the beautiful dame.

A SMALL SKIRMISH IN THE CULTURE WAR

Mike Resnick and James Patrick Kelly

Roger hated Elwood Tweed. There was no denyingR it anymore. It had taken Roger several months to put a precise name to the churning in his gut whenever he entered Tweed’s presence. When he had first come to work for the Understanding Network, he was certain that what he was feeling was awe. Here he was, a twenty-two-year-old English major fresh out of Gates College, working in television as personal assistant to Elwood Tweed, Ph.D., on-air book critic for 24/7 and host of The Good Word . But awe had changed to anxiety when it became apparent that everything Roger Allman did for Elwood Tweed was wrong. He put too much cream in Tweed’s coffee. He failed to highlight a stray mention of Tweed’s name in the two dozen newsfeeds he surveyed each day for the great man. He gave Tweed his five-minutes-to-air call at four minutes and forty-three seconds, or five minutes and seven. By the fall Roger had convinced himself that it was jealousy that was eating at him. Tweed was not all that smart—his degrees to the contrary—and Roger had come to realize that his most firmly held convictions were at best wrongheaded and at worst pernicious. Tweed was nothing but a smile that had about twelve too many teeth, a buttery voice, and an unflagging self-confidence that was within hailing distance of arrogance.

But Roger had now proceeded far beyond mere jealousy. He daydreamed of Tweed being caught in bed with a goat. A male goat. Or pitching headlong down a flight of stairs. Preferably made of marble. Roger thought about quitting his job every day. But he could imagine how it would look on his resume if he had lasted less than six months on his first job. People would think he wasn’t serious about having a career in television. And despite his utter disenchantment with Elwood Tweed, Roger knew that there was no higher calling, that movies and nightclubs could appeal to the lowest common denominator, but television’s purpose was to uplift and educate, to bring serious culture to the masses.

“I’m sorry, Kurt,” Tweed touched Kurt Vonnegut’s sleeve discreetly. “But we have to pause here for a word from our sponsors. But when we return, I want you to hear what you think of those who call your work—pardon the term—sci-fi.”

“Rascals.” Vonnegut yawned. “Critics.”

“We’ll be right back, ladies and gentlemen.” Tweed turned his smile up to broil, and the directorbot cut to a commercial for Steak Pearls, The First Foodtabs With That Home-Cooked Taste.

“One minute, Mr. Tweed.” Roger never understood why Tweed insisted on a count during commercials.

“Can I get anyone anything?”

“Yes,” ordered Tweed. “Bring Mr. Vonnegut more water. His glass is almost empty.”

Actually, Vonnegut had taken just one sip during the opening segment. In Roger’s opinion, he would be better off drinking a extra-large latte with a couple of extra shots of expresso. (He looked as though he might nod off at any minute.) But then most of the guests who appeared on The Good Word recently tended to sleepwalk through their interviews. In August, the Understanding Network had switched Tweed’s slot from the early bird 5:00 to 5:15 AM to the late night 12:45 to 1 AM. Tweed continued to insist that the show remain live—“After all, this is television,” he intoned, “and as my pal Ed Murrow likes to say, we must never take the easy way out”—which was too bad for Vonnegut, who looked at 12:50

AM like he was eighty-four going on a hundred and twenty.

“Thirty seconds, Mr. Tweed.”

“Make yourself useful for a change, Allman.” Tweed twisted around in his chair. “I left my readette of Cat’s Cradle in my dressing room. Fetch it up here for me. You will thumbprint it for me, Kurt?”

“That book is not science fiction,” Kurt Vonnegut muttered. “I don’t write science fiction.”

Roger was happy to get away from the set and (especially) from Tweed. He settled himself in a Pneum-A-Pod and was whooshed down to the eighteenth floor of the Understanding tower. This was where the talent for 24/7, the UN’s morning news, talk, and political science show, had their offices. Sharon Swelter and Bobo Lamonica were just down the hall. Tweed had argued his way down onto eighteen even though the directorbots only gave him three or four Book Banter segments a week. But on eighteen he could bump into the stars of 24/7 and pretend he was one of them. The actual headquarters of The Good Word were way up on sixty-four, which was where Roger spend most of his time when he wasn’t running Tweed’s errands.

The carpetmoss on the floor of Tweed’s office gave off an earthy deep woods scent that Tweed liked to tell people reminded him of Thoreau’s Walden, although Roger was pretty sure that Tweed had never been north of Yonkers. Tweed’s rosewood desk was slightly bigger than the cubby where Roger worked. The walls were decorated with holos of the host in the reluctant embrace of some of his most famous guests: Judy Blume, Gore Vidal, Joyce Carol Oates, and James Michener. There were two of Tweed with J.D. Salinger, who had become something of a publicity hound since the release of the videogame version of House of Glass .

Tweed’s desk and credenza were piled high with gaudy readettes, most of them still unread in shrink-wrap. Roger sorted through them, searching for Cat’s Cradle . Every now and then he would find one he was certain Tweed wouldn’t miss, like the latest Ursula Le Guin historical, or the sequel to Nineteen Eighty-Four . As he looked, he tried not to listen to the desktop, on which played the live feed from the studio up on the ninety-fourth floor. Tweed was browbeating a weary Vonnegut.

“. . . fantasy, romance, thrillers—sheer vulgarity, in my opinion, and I’m not ashamed to say it. Don’t you agree, Kurt, that the people who control our publishing houses ought to be ashamed of the way they have dragged American letters into the gutter, have foisted popular hacks like Kelly and Resnick, Kessel and Malzberg off on them while publishing only two Pynchon books in the past decade? Don’t they have the responsibility, nay, the obligation to publish works of fiction that ennoble us?”

Vonnegut squinted suspiciously into the studio lights. “All my aliens are metpahors.”

“Obviously, Kurt. I quite agree. But does it bother you that an innocent reader, say some bright thirteen-year-old boy, might mistake your work for sci-fi?”

“Doris Lessing.” Vonnegut picked up his water glass, considered it and intoned, “Margaret Atwood.” He sipped.

“Rog, what are you doing here?”

As Roger spun around, he knocked over a stack of readettes haphazardly piled on top of Tweed’s brushed titanium IBM File-O-Matic. He managed to snag three in midair, but the rest clattered to the floor. One of those in his grasp was Cat’s Cradle .

“Your clueless boss is live, Bookboy.” Doreen Best grinned at him from the doorway. “Shouldn’t you be up in the studio getting ready to wipe his nose?”

Doreen Best flustered Roger in just about every way possible for a woman to fluster a man. It started with her looks. While not exactly beautiful, she was inarguably striking. Doreen was taller than Robert by a head. She had a dancer’s long body; when she was eighteen she’d appeared in the chorus lines of Stephen Sondheim’s The Cherry Orchard and Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Treasure Island . Some people might have said that her neck was too long or her nose was too stubby, but Roger was not one of them. He usually tried not to look directly at her, because every glimpse seemed to sear itself into his memory and return to haunt him at odd moments, especially just as he was trying to fall asleep. Then there was the fact that Doreen had been working for the Understanding Channel for almost seven years, which always made him feel like the total neophyte that he was. At various times she’d been on the production staffs of shows like 24/7, Protons and Planets, Pan Am Broadway Showcase, Yesterday Today, Poet’s Theater, March of Progress, and Impact!, and had even spent a few months working with Edward R. Murrow, whom the network had lured away from CBS with the promise of a weekly fifteen minutes of prime-time for It’s Bad For You, his anti-smoking show. And, more than anything else, her attitude toward television in general and the Understanding Network in particular flustered him. Sometimes she seemed too cynical about TV’s momentous enterprise, which Roger believed—no, knew

—nothing less than the cultivation of the human spirit. And when it came to the day-to-day of the UN, she was usually more interested in office gossip than the quality of the programming. But what flustered Roger most about the glamorous Doreen Best was that she seemed to be taking an interest in him.

Now she crossed the carpet moss to where he stood goggling at her and gently tapped his chin, encouraging him to shut his open mouth.

“Let me try again, Bookboy, this time in English.” She pressed a finger into his chest. “You are here .”

His heart leapt to his throat.

She pointed toward the ceiling. “Tweed is there .”

He swallowed it again.

She folded her arms over her chest. “Why is that?”

“He’s not clueless,” Roger mumbled, and stabbed at the mute button on Tweed’s desktop. It made him uncomfortable whenever Doreen mocked his boss, even if he agreed with every brickbat she hurled at Tweed. Tweed may have been an inconsiderate ass-hole, but he was doing the most important work a man could do, bringing civilization to the great unwashed of Florida and Ohio and Montana.

“He just doesn’t always think things through,” said Roger at last.

“Are you stealing his stuff again?” She stopped to pick up one of the readettes and glanced at it. “Oh, you better leave The Cat in the Hat Comes Back if you know what’s good for you.” She tossed it carelessly onto the File-O-Matic and lowered her voice into an uncanny imitation of Tweed. “A classic bildungsroman in the tradition of Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther and Twain’s Huckleberry Finn .”

“Don’t, Doreen,” he said uncomfortably. “I shouldn’t be listening to this.”

“Then come out with me tonight,” she said. “I have something I want you to see.”

“It’s tomorrow morning, actually.” He checked the clock that hung over the doorway. “Twelve fifty-eight.” He gathered the rest of the fallen readettes. “I need to get back to the studio before they sign off.”

“But after you finish helping Tweed pat himself on the back, your time is your own, right?”

“What is it that you want from me, Doreen?”

She sat down in Tweed’s chair, kicked off her shoes, and put her feet up on his desk. “I was hoping for your immortal soul, but I’d settle for a slice of innocence.”

Roger concentrated fiercely on her stockinged toes, afraid that his gaze might slide up her calves and perhaps stray past her knees. “What would you do with it?”

“I’ll think of something,” she replied with a leer.

“Put your shoes on, Doreen. This is an office, not your living room.”

“You know what your problem is, Bookboy? You’re too serious.” She slipped one shoe on, then the other. “But maybe that’s why I bother with you.”

“And why do I bother with you?”

She scribbled something on a sheet of Tweed’s note-paper, folded it, and tucked it into Roger’s shirt pocket. The touch of her fingertips through the thin material made his neck muscles go tight. “Meet me at the Pneum-A-Pod on forty-eight,” she said, as she walked past him. “Twenty minutes.” She paused at the door. “Bring your sense of humor. You do have one, don’t you?”

“Of course I have one,” he said heatedly.

“I was starting to wonder. Dust it off once in a while.”

“We’re in a deadly serious business, uplifting the public.”

“Deadly, right.” She waved over her shoulder on her way out.

He waited almost a minute before he opened the note.

You don’t have a choice, it read.

Roger and Doreen lay side by side in the Pneum-A-Pod as it hurtled on a cushion of air through the Eighth Avenue tunnel. Through the clear walls of the tunnel, Roger might have seen the lights of the city rushing beneath them, if he hadn’t been staring into Doreen’s eyes.

“What I believe is that ratings reflect our mission,” he was saying. “According to the May sweeps, the UN has more viewers than Fox and CBS combined. And if the World Chess Championship hadn’t gone to fourteen games, A&E wouldn’t even have come close to us.”

“The only reason so many people watch us is that there isn’t anything on TV that’s more fun,” Doreen responded. “Uncle Ralph makes sure of that.”

“Uncle Ralph? Are you talking about Ralph Nader?”

“Right—the Secretary of Television,” she confirmed. “The man who knows what’s good for you—or else.”

“Are you seriously suggesting that the Pan Am Broadway Showcase isn’t fun? Don’t we run Shakespeare and Aristophanes every week? Didn’t we just have a Moliére Festival?”

She made a lemon face. “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”

She had never quoted Shakespeare to him before. Roger tried not to let her see that he was impressed.

“But where are we going?”

“You’ve been cooped up in the Tower for too long, Bookboy,” she said with a smile he didn’t quite understand. “Wake up and smell the gutter.”

“I’ve never been in this part of town before.” Roger glanced uneasily at the garish lights that blinked and throbbed around dim doorways and dark windows. “Where are we going?”

“What difference does it make?” asked Doreen. “You’re out on the town with a sexy girl on your arm. Stop thinking and enjoy.”

“Don’t talk like that.”

“Why not?” she said. “This is the real world, Bookboy. You know,” she added confidentially, “‘even Harvard professors leave the ivy-covered halls and blow off a little steam from time to time.”

“It’s the buildings that are ivy-covered, not the halls,” he corrected her.

“Roger, come down off the sixty-fourth floor. The air is too thin up there for life.”

“Why do you keep belittling our work?” he asked, “Television is the greatest invention of the century, maybe the greatest since the invention of fire.”

“You never heard of penicillin, I take it,” she said sardonically. “Or Botox.”

“Antibiotics are certainly wonderful breakthroughs, but they save sick people. Television saves everyone

. Surely you’ve seen movies from the pre-television era: Abbott and Costello talking nonsense about who was on first base, private detectives walking into a hail of bullets and never getting hurt, Hoot Gibson and James Cagney being held up as examples of American manhood.”

“There were good movies too, you know,” said Doreen.

“But nobody watched them, so they stopped making them. Nobody wanted to know that Frankenstein’s monster spoke perfect English and had a soul; they just wanted to be scared into mindlessness. Or James Bond. Here’s a secret agent, a covert agent, and he can walk into any bar in the world and someone is sure to say ‘Shaken, not stirred’—and no one objects or guffaws. Movies dumb the public down; it’s up to television to pull people back up.” Roger could feel his adrenaline flowing as he warmed to his subject.

“Same thing with popular literature. Before people like Tweed came along, junk like sci-fi and thrillers and romance dominated the bestseller lists. Now thoughtful essays and avant-garde poetry get the readerships they deserve.”

“Just because books are bought doesn’t mean they’re read,” said Doreen. “I think Stephen Hawking proved that years ago.” She paused in front of a double door painted a lascivious shade of red. The humming neon sign above it read All Night Long Lounge . “What if people just want to escape?”

“From what?” he asked, genuinely puzzled.

“From the culture Tweed and acolytes like you are forcing on them.”

“Ridiculous!” he snapped.

“Speaking of ridiculous, we’re here.” She gestured at the door. “I want you to see this show.”

“What is it?”

“Something very funny.”

“Well, the network can always use more humorists. Mort Sahl is getting a little long in the tooth, and Lord Buckley and Severn Darden both died a few years ago.”

“Well, Woody Allen did apply for a job with us. So did Nichols and May.”

He sniffed contemptuously. “Too lowbrow.”

“But people understand them,” she said. “How many people do you think understood Lord Buckley, or Ken Nordeen’s Word Jazz ?”

“Our job is to make them understand.”

Her eyebrows arched and for a moment he thought she might laugh at him.

“Let me amend that,” he said hastily. “Our job is to expose them to such things, and give them the cultural tools to comprehend and appreciate what they’re seeing and hearing.”

“I was wondering what our job was,” she said, and as happened so often when they spoke, he had no idea how to answer her.

A well-dressed couple walked past them and entered the club, and Doreen turned to Roger. “So, we can stand here arguing all night, or we can go in.”

“Wait,” said Roger. “How much is this going to cost?”

“Nothing,” she said. “They know I’ve been scouting the talent here, and I told them I’d be bringing along a consultant tonight.”

Roger didn’t know whether to be relieved or disappointed. If this was just business, then he’d have to lower his expectations. But if it was just business, why did she keep flirting with him? He opened the door and held it for her.

They passed through and were immediately greeted by the doormanbot, who was wearing a gorilla suit. He greeted Doreen warmly and allowed them to pass through. A skimpily clad hostess (which, decided Roger, was just one tiny step more acceptable than a scantily clad hostess) escorted them to a table very near the small stage.

Soon a scantily clad waitress approached them and asked for their orders.

“I’ll have a Manhattan,” said Doreen.

“And the gentleman?”

“Just coffee,” he said. When both women stared at him, he fidgeted uneasily and added, “I have to have my senses about me if I’m evaluating talent. One drink and I’ll probably miss half of the subtleties and nuances.”

“He’ll have a martini,” announced Doreen. As the waitress walked off, she said to Roger, “Not to worry. These people check their nuances at the door.”

“Then why are we here?” he asked earnestly.

“Just relax and we’ll discuss it later.”

The drinks arrived, and Roger took a sip of his martini. He tried not to make a face as it went down. It was the drink of the masses, and he found himself wishing for a ’48 Chardonnay, or possibly a ’51 Dom made entirely from grapes raised on the north slope. (In truth, his tastebuds couldn’t tell the difference between Dom Perignon and Two Buck Chuck, but that, he knew, was merely because they weren’t yet properly educated. He watched all three of UN’s wine shows religiously, and he by God knew good from bad, even if his mouth didn’t—another gift of television to the drab, empty lives of its audience.) Suddenly the lights dimmed, and a fat man in a sad sack suit sidled nervously onto the stage. He had a receding hairline and bulging eyes almost as big as ping-pong balls. He goggled at the audience, as if he expected that they might start throwing things at him. For a long moment, he said nothing. The room went quiet as well. He shuffled from foot to foot in the spotlight in front of a microphone. Roger thought maybe he had wandered onto the stage by accident. Then he crooked a finger between the collar of his shirt and his neck, loosening his tie.

“I get no respect,” he said. “I took my wife to a fancy restaurant on her birthday and I made a toast. ‘To the best woman a man ever had.’ The waiter joined me.”

The room exploded into laughter.

“My wife and I were happy for twenty years. Then we met.”

A man at the next table doubled over and banged his head against the tabletop. There followed another ten minutes of one-liners, none of them new, and none, in Roger’s opinion, the least bit funny. The alleged comedian complained about his wife, his kids, his doctor and his dog, a sad litany of abuse and misunderstanding.

“They actually pay this man to stand up there and spout this drivel?” whispered Roger.

“They not only pay Rodney Dangerfield to perform,” replied Doreen, “but you’ll notice that every table in the house is full.”

“But he belongs in a saloon a century ago!” said Roger. “This whole act is about how stupid he is.”

“Everyone laughed,” she said. “Doesn’t that mean anything to you?”

“It means we’ve got our work cut out for us,” said Roger grimly.

“Nothing else?” she persisted.

“Should it?” he asked, confused.

She looked pityingly at him and sighed. “No, I suppose not.”

“So can we go now?”

“This is just the opening act,” said Doreen. “We’re here for the headliners.”

“If I have to sit through anything else like this Dangerfield, I’m going to need another martini,” said Roger, signaling to the waitress.

The drink arrived. Roger was just lifting it to his lips when the place erupted in such a deafening roar that he almost spilled its contents.

“What is it?” he asked, looking up.

“The stars of the show,” said Doreen.

Two old men strode onto the stage. One, tall and handsome, carried his age well. He strode confidently to the microphone and began crooning a melodic tune. Meanwhile the other shuffled out among the tables, picking up customer’s drinks and sniffing them, looking down women’s dresses and mugging shamelessly every time his partner hit a high note. He might have been skinny once but now had gone to fat. He seemed to move with difficulty.

“What do you think of his voice?” asked Doreen.

“Well, it’s sure as hell not La Traviata .”

“I didn’t ask what you thought of the song.”

“How can I tell about his voice if he won’t sing an aria?” replied Roger.

“Not everyone sings opera, and not everyone likes opera,” she noted.

“Not everyone likes coming in out of the rain,” he shot back. “I don’t see your point.”

Just then the fat man with the uncertain step seemed to slip on something. His arms windmilling wildly, he caught himself by sitting briefly on the lap of a woman with enough blonde hair to stuff a pillow, then rolled off her to onto his knees and rested his head on the shoes of her date. The slow-motion pratfall sent the audience into paroxysms of laughter.

“Hey Lllaaadddyyy!” He stared up at the blonde with a grin. “Don’t worry, lady. I’m all right, but your boyfriend needs a shine.”

The comedian clambered gracelessly to his feet, pawing at the woman as he did, then crossed his eyes and started complaining about the singing in a high, whining voice.

“If you think you can do better, Jerry,” said the singer, “go ahead and try.”

“You bet I can, Dean!” whined Jerry. Then, to the audience, “I’ll murder the bum.”

He began singing, horribly off-key, and the audience began laughing again.

“Ladies and gentlemen, if you think that’s bad,” said Dean, “you should hear it in French.”

“My God!” muttered Roger. “This is what passes for entertainment in this place!” He turned to Doreen.

“I can’t take any more of this. I feel like I’m losing my mind. I’m dizzy. I have to get some air!”

“All right,” she said unhappily. She left a tip on the table and then led him through the maze of people and chairs until they reached the exit.

“That was dreadful!” he said when the world stopped spinning around him.

“Those are the most popular acts in New York, Roger,” said Doreen. “Maybe there’s something wrong with you .”

He stared at her. “This is all some kind of practical joke, right?”

“No,” she said seriously. “I intend to use whatever clout I have to get the network to hire them and start a variety show.”

“We already have a variety show, in case it’s slipped your mind,” said Roger. “We’ve had St. Martin-in-the-Fields Choir, Allen Ginsberg’s Poetry Slam, Pilobolus , the Kronos Quartet . . .”

“Roger, we’re giving the people what we think they should have,” said Doreen. “I think it’s about time we started giving them what they want.”

“They don’t know what they want!” Roger shouted. “A baby doesn’t want to stop suckling at its mother’s breast. A two-year-old child doesn’t want to learn to use a toilet. A six-year-old doesn’t want to go to school. We teach them to accept things for their own good, and thanks to television and visionary men like Nader and Murrow and, yes, Tweed in his limited way, we don’t have to stop teaching them just because they’ve grown up and left school.”

“You left out one important thing, Roger,” she said.

“Oh?” he replied. “And what is that?”

“The element of choice.”

“Do you give a child the choice between touching a live wire and not touching it?” asked Roger.

“We’re not talking about children, Roger,” said Doreen.

“All right then, what if you’re right?” said Roger. “Have you ever seriously considered that?”

“What do you mean?”

“What if you’re right?” he repeated. “What if you gave the unwashed masses their choice?”

“It would be a good thing,” said Doreen. “There’s room on television for everything.”

He shook his head. “If that audience tonight was typical, then Martin and Lewis and Rodney Dangerfield won’t share time with Mort Sahl. They’ll share it with dumb weekly shows about dippy housewives and teenaged hippies and country hicks outsmarting city slickers. Dance bands and crooners won’t share time with Pavarotti and Domingo; they’ll shove them into the shadows and their places will be taken by more tuneless music, aimed at the least sophisticated tastes. And worst of all, the news shows will be unable to hold an audience unless they start covering beauty pageants and diet fads and crimes no one has any reason to care about.”

“That’s the silliest thing I ever heard,” said Doreen.

“The bad always drives out the good,” answered Roger. “Why do you think I keep working for a mean, self-centered son of a bitch like Tweed? Because he’s what stands between us and Dangerfield. Can’t you see that? Ed Murrow is what stops the Super Bowl from being more important than the war in Uruguay. We have a sacred mission to uplift and educate.”

“Jesus, you really are brainwashed, aren’t you?” said Doreen. She sighed deeply. “I’m sorry I wasted your evening, Roger.”