21st Century Science Fiction (95 page)

They’d tried
everything.

• • • •

Brautigan’s whinny was the most humiliating sound Leon had ever heard, in all his working life.

“No, of course you can’t know what got sold to the vat-person! That was part of the deal—it was why the payoff was so large.
No one
knows what we sold to the vat-person. Not me, not the old woman. The man who sold it? He cashed out years ago, and hasn’t been seen or heard from since. Silent partner, preferred shares, controlling interest—but he’s the invisible man. We talk to him through lawyers who talk to lawyers who, it is rumored, communicate by means of notes left under a tombstone in a tiny cemetery on Pitcairn Island, and row in and out in longboats to get his instruction.”

The hyperbole was grating on Leon. Third day on the job, and the sun-dappled, ozonated pseudoforested environment felt as stale as an old gym bag (there was, in fact, an old gym bag under his desk, waiting for the day he finally pulled himself off the job in time to hit the complimentary gym). Brautigan was grating on him more than the hyperbole.

“I’m not an asshole, Brautigan, so stop treating me like one. You hired me to do a job, but all I’m getting from you is shitwork, sarcasm, and secrecy.” The alliteration came out without his intending it to, but he was good at that sort of thing. “So here’s what I want to know: is there any single solitary reason for me to come to work tomorrow, or should I just sit at home, drawing a salary until you get bored of having me on the payroll and can my ass?”

It wasn’t entirely spontaneous. Leon’s industrial psychology background was pretty good—he’d gotten straight As and an offer of a post-doc, none of which had interested him nearly so much as the practical applications of the sweet science of persuasion. He understood that Brautigan had been pushing him around to see how far he could be pushed. No one pushed like an ad guy—if you could sweet-talk someone into craving something, it followed that you could goad him into hating something just as much. Two faces of a coin and all that.

Brautigan faked anger, but Leon had spent three days studying his tells, and Leon could see that the emotion was no more sincere than anything else about the man. Carefully, Leon flared his nostrils, brought his chest up, inched his chin higher. He
sold
his outrage, sold it like it was potato chips, over-the-counter securities, or under-the-counter diet pills. Brautigan tried to sell his anger in return. Leon was a no sale. Brautigan bought.

“There’s a new one,” he said, in a conspiratorial whisper.

“A new what?” Leon whispered. They were still chest to chest, quivering with angry body language, but Leon let another part of his mind deal with that.

“A new monster,” Brautigan said. “Gone to his vat at a mere 103. Youngest ever. Unplanned.” He looked up, down, left, right. “An accident. Impossible accident. Impossible, but he had it, which means?”

“It was no accident,” Leon said. “Police?” It was impossible not to fall into Brautigan’s telegraphed speech style. That was a persuasion thing, too, he knew. Once you talked like him, you’d sympathize with him. And vice versa, of course. They were converging on a single identity. Bonding. It was intense, like make-up sex for coworkers. “He’s a sovereign three ways. An African republic, an island, one of those little Baltic countries. On the other side of the international vowel line. Mxlplx or something. They swung for him at the WTO, the UN—whole bodies of international trade law for this one. So no regular cops; this is diplomatic corps stuff. And, of course, he’s not dead, so that makes it more complicated.”

“How?”

“Dead people become corporations. They get managed by boards of directors who act predictably, if not rationally. Living people, they’re
flam-boyant.
Seismic. Unpredictable. But. On the other hand.” He waggled his eyebrows.

“On the other hand, they buy things.”

“Once in a very long while, they do.”

• • • •

Leon’s life was all about discipline. He’d heard a weight-loss guru once explain that the key to maintaining a slim figure was to really “listen to your body” and only eat until it signaled that it was full. Leon had listened to his body. It wanted three entire pepperoni and mushroom pizzas every single day, plus a rather large cake. And malted milkshakes, the old-fashioned kind you could make in your kitchen with an antique Hamilton Beach machine in avocado-colored plastic, served up in a tall red anodized aluminum cup. Leon’s body was extremely verbose on what it wanted him to shovel into it.

So Leon ignored his body. He ignored his mind when it told him that what it wanted to do was fall asleep on the sofa with the video following his eyes around the room, one of those shows that followed your neural activity and tried to tune the drama to maximize your engrossment. Instead, he made his mind sit up in bed, absorbing many improving books from the mountain he’d printed out and stacked there.

Leon ignored his limbic system when it told him to stay in bed for an extra hour every morning when his alarm detonated. He ignored the fatigue messages he got while he worked through an hour of yoga and meditation before breakfast.

He wound himself up tight with will and it was will that made him stoop to pick up the laundry on the stairs while he was headed up and neatly fold it away when he got to the spacious walk-in dressing room attached to the master bedroom. (The apartment had been a good way to absorb his Ate signing bonus—safer than keeping the money in cash, with the currency fluctuations and all. Manhattan real estate was a century-long good buy and was more stable than bonds, derivatives or funds.) It was discipline that made him pay every bill as it came in. It was all that which made him wash every dish when he was done with it and assiduously stop at the grocer’s every night on the way home to buy anything that had run out the previous day.

His parents came to visit from Anguilla and they teased him about how
organized
he was, so unlike the fat little boy who’d been awarded the “Hansel and Gretel prize” by his sixth-grade teacher for leaving a trail behind him everywhere he went. What they didn’t know was that he was still that kid, and every act of conscientious, precise, buttoned-down finicky habit was, in fact, the product of relentless, iron determination not to be that kid again. He not only ignored that inner voice of his that called out for pizzas and told him to sleep in, take a cab instead of walking, lie down and let the video soar and dip with his moods, a drip-feed of null and nothing to while away the hours—he actively denied it, shouted it into submission, locked it up, and never let it free.

And that—
that
—that was why he was going to figure out how to sell something new to the man in the vat: because anyone who could amass that sort of fortune and go down to life eternal in an ever-expanding kingdom of machines would be the sort of person who had spent a life denying himself, and Leon knew
just
what that felt like.

• • • •

The Lower East Side had ebbed and flowed over the years: poor, rich, middle-class, superrich, poor. One year the buildings were funky and reminiscent of the romantic squalor that had preceded this era of light-speed buckchasing. The next year, the buildings were merely squalorous, the landlords busted and the receivers in bankruptcy slapping up paper-thin walls to convert giant airy lofts into rooming houses. The corner stores sold blunt skins to trustafarian hipsters with a bag of something gengineered to disrupt some extremely specific brain structures; then they sold food-stamp milk to desperate mothers who wouldn’t meet their eyes. The shopkeepers had the knack of sensing changes in the wind and adjusting their stock accordingly.

Walking around his neighborhood, Leon sniffed change in the wind. The shopkeepers seemed to have more discount, high-calorie wino-drink; less designer low-carb energy food with FDA-mandated booklets explaining their nutritional claims. A sprinkling of
FOR RENT
signs. A construction site that hadn’t had anyone working on it for a week now, the padlocked foreman’s shed growing a mossy coat of graffiti.

Leon didn’t mind. He’d lived rough—not just student-rough, either. His parents had gone to Anguilla from Romania, chasing the tax-haven set, dreaming of making a killing working as bookkeepers, security guards. They’d mistimed the trip, arrived in the middle of an econopocalytpic collapse and ended up living in a vertical slum that had once been a luxury hotel. The sole Romanians among the smuggled Mexicans who were de facto slaves, they’d traded their ability to write desperate letters to the Mexican consulate for Spanish lessons for Leon. The Mexicans dwindled away—the advantage of de facto slaves over de jure slaves is that you can just send the de facto slaves away when the economy tanks, taking their feed and care off your books—until it was just them there, and without the safety of the crowd, they’d been spotted by local authorities and had to go underground. Going back to Bucharest was out of the question—the airfare was as far out of reach as one of the private jets the tax-evaders and high-rolling gamblers flew in and out of Wallblake Airport.

From rough to rougher. Leon’s family spent three years underground, living as roadside hawkers, letting the sun bake them to an ethnically indeterminate brown. A decade later, when his father had successfully built up his little bookkeeping business and his mother was running a smart dress shop for the cruise ship day-trippers, those days seemed like a dream. But once he left for stateside university and found himself amid the soft, rich children of the fortunes his father had tabulated, it all came back to him, and he wondered if any of these children in carefully disheveled rags would ever be able to pick through the garbage for their meals.

The rough edge on the LES put him at his ease, made him feel like he was still ahead of the game, in possession of something his neighbors could never have—the ability to move fluidly between the worlds of the rich and the poor. Somewhere in those worlds, he was sure, was the secret to chipping a crumb off one of the great fortunes of the world.

• • • •

“Visitor for you,” Carmela said. Carmela, that was the receptionist’s name. She was Puerto Rican, but so many generations in that he spoke better Spanish than she did. “I put him in the Living Room.” That was one of the three boardrooms at Ate, the name a bad pun, every stick of furniture in it an elaborate topiary sculpture of living wood and shrubbery. It was surprisingly comfortable, and the very subtle breeze had an even more subtle breath of honeysuckle that was so real he suspected it was piped in from a nursery on another level. That’s how he would have done it: the best fake was no fake at all.

“Who?” He liked Carmela. She was all business, but her business was compassion, a shoulder to cry on and an absolutely discreet gossip repository for the whole firm.

“Envoy,” she said. “His name’s Buhle. I ran his face and name against our dossiers and came up with practically nothing. He’s from Montenegro, originally, I have that much.”

“Envoy from whom?” She didn’t answer, just looked very meaningfully at him.

The new vat-person had sent him an envoy. His heart began to thump and his cuffs suddenly felt tight at his wrists. “Thanks, Carmela.” He shot his cuffs.

“You look fine,” she said. “I’ve got the kitchen on standby, and the intercom’s listening for my voice. Just let me know what I can do for you.”

He gave her a weak smile. This was why she was the center of the whole business, the soul of Ate.
Thank you,
he mouthed, and she ticked a smart salute off her temple with one finger.

• • • •

The envoy was out of place in Ate, but she didn’t hold it against them. This he knew within seconds of setting foot into the Living Room. She got up, wiped her hands on her sensible jeans, brushed some iron-gray hair off her face, and smiled at him, an expression that seemed to say, “Well, this is a funny thing, the two of us, meeting here, like this.” He’d put her age at around forty, and she was hippy and a little wrinkled and didn’t seem to care at all.

“You must be Leon,” she said, and took his hand. Short fingernails, warm, dry palm, firm handshake. “I
love
this room!” She waved her arm around in an all-encompassing circle. “Fantastic.”

He found himself half in love with her and he hadn’t said a word. “It’s nice to meet you, Ms.—”

“Ria,” she said. “Call me Ria.” She sat down on one of the topiary chairs, kicking off her comfortable Hush Puppies and pulling her legs up to sit cross-legged.

“I’ve never gone barefoot in this room,” he said, looking at her calloused feet—feet that did a lot of barefooting.

“Do it,” she said, making scooting gestures. “I insist. Do it!”

He kicked off the handmade shoes—designed by an architect who’d given up on literary criticism to pursue cobblery—and used his toes to peel off his socks. Under his feet, the floor was—warm? cool?—it was
perfect.
He couldn’t pin down the texture, but it made every nerve ending on the sensitive soles of his feet tingle pleasantly.

“I’m thinking something that goes straight into the nerves,” she said. “It has to be. Extraordinary.”

“You know your way around this place better than I do,” he said.

She shrugged. “This room was clearly designed to impress. It would be stupid to be so cool-obsessed that I failed to let it impress me. I’m impressed. Also,” she dropped her voice, “also, I’m wondering if anyone’s ever snuck in here and screwed on that stuff.” She looked seriously at him and he tried to keep a straight face, but the chuckle wouldn’t stay put in his chest, and it broke loose, and a laugh followed it, and she whooped and they both laughed, hard, until their stomachs hurt.

He moved toward another topiary easy chair, then stopped, bent down, and sat on the mossy floor, letting it brush against his feet, his ankles, the palms of his hands and his wrists. “If no one ever has, it’s a damned shame,” he said, with mock gravity. She smiled, and she had dimples and wrinkles and crow’s-feet, so her whole face smiled. “Do you want something to eat? Drink? We can get pretty much anything here—”