The Green Leopard Plague and Other Stories (53 page)

Lisa offers me a glass of tea. We talk about other subjects till it's time for me to go.

I think about those Persian designs all the way home. I think about how you could base a whole style on it. I can see the clothes in my head. I wonder what kind of music would go with it.

When I get home I hear my dad in his office talking to some of his colleagues. I go into my room and watch other people's flashcasts. They're all inane.

The Duck Monkey could rip them to shreds, but they don't seem worth the bother.

It's a strange thing, but the Duck Monkey's ratings have held steady, fed by a stream of celebrity gossip from Dolores and her friends. The Duck Monkey has a completely different demographic from my own audience. They're smarter and funnier, and they're not trying to get me to kill myself in some horribly public way.

It's like the Duck Monkey is some kind of viral marketing campaign for something else. A new Sanson, perhaps, one who comes swinging back into the world with a style based on Persian manuscripts.

Or maybe the Sanson who's a real boy.

I lie on my bed and think about Lisa and the Duck Monkey and Arab calligraphy. I wonder if I can live without the love of all those people who made up my Demographic for all those years.

I decide I'll try to get the love of just one person, and if necessary go on from there.

I send a message to Lisa to tell her I'd like to see her again.

 

This story was written for Jonathan Strahan, as a substitute for "Incarnation Day," which proved too long for his
Starry Rift
anthology.
"Pinocchio" was inspired by a television documentary about former child stars. I was depressed by the desperate need of mature forty-year-olds to recapture their glory days, when they werse ten or eleven, and I began a meditation on the nature of celebrity. I combined these ideas with reflections on the instantaneous feedback that is such a prominent characteristic of twenty-first-century media, and gradually developed the story of Sanson, the media puppet who was trying desperately not to become a real boy.