Bright's Light (5 page)

Clients all over Big Guns had stopped to watch Fon’s performance. Bright couldn’t let this continue.

“I’ve got something special I think you’re going to enjoy,” Bright yell-whispered.

“Okay,” said her client, still staring at Fon.

Bright pulled him by the sleeve through the crowd of favours and clients and out of Big Guns. As they went, she danced hard, throwing in moves that had shown up on the professional enrichment advermercials only half a day before.

Bright led her stoop-shouldered client past the Jousting Room and Private Eyes (Are Watching You), past the doorway that led to the Total Access Room, which she always avoided because the faces looking in from outside made her nervous, even though it was highly desirable to be desired. Without knowing quite what her plan was, other than to get the client away from Fon’s relentless attention-sucking, Bright finally turned into the Stimu Room, which had a padded floor, padded walls, and a series of soft plastic crawling tubes, bouncy climbing ramps, and tumble slides. Bright and her client were alone in the room. It wasn’t very
popular, because the House of Gear was so intense that most clients were worn out long before they made it this far. There weren’t even any PS staff assigned to the room.

Her client stared at the physically challenging obstacles all around them. His shoulders slumped further, and Bright knew she’d done the wrong thing. He was disappointed. He’d spent every credit he’d earned for the past month or more to visit the House of Gear and party with a top professional, and she’d disappointed him.

“You’re going to LOVE this!” she said, trying to sound as if she believed it. He nodded dully, staring up at the bendy ladder in front of him. The thing was a lot of work, especially for an out-of-shape productive from Stuffed Baby Things.

What if the House of It was watching? Bright, in a near panic, went for her light, the most special thing she had to offer. “What we need is more light on the situation!” she cried. She flipped the switch that turned on the helmet’s beacon.

The pinkish light began to rotate on top of her head. Each time it moved across the client’s features, his face seemed to change. It got softer and blanker, transforming from a picture of disappointed neediness into a vacant mask.

Bright had never seen a person look unconscious while standing upright with his eyes wide open. What was wrong with him? She fumbled for the switch, but instead of turning off, the beam steadied into a single stream that poured straight into the client’s face.

He sighed, his mouth opened, and his head and body rocked backward as though he’d received a slo-mo punch to the chin. When his head came up, his expressionless eyes settled on Bright. He took several steps toward her, his hands held out in front of him.

Bright stepped aside.

The client’s lips parted and a small stream of drool trickled from one side.

“Oops,” said Bright.

He walked, stiff-legged, until he fell over an orange crawl tube. He sat on the rubber mats for a long moment. Then he got to his hands and knees and began to make his way forward. He crawled until he ran into a tangle of purple and yellow Fun Pulls, thick stretchy rope ties used for inversions and launches. First his arms became entangled, then his legs, until he was dragging the entire mass of pulls behind him. He crawled until his head hit the padded wall on the other side of the room, all the while muttering something about having to get ready and going toward the light.

Bright stood with her hands at her side, watching in horror as he bumped his head against the wall. Over and over.

What had she done?

Her training failed and she ran.

˚ ˚ ˚

Bright didn’t dance or even strut when she stepped into the Choosing Room. She didn’t want to draw any extra attention
to herself, other than the attention she automatically received as an astonishingly attractive favour in the House of Gear. The room was just as she’d left it: washes of shifting colours transforming the swaying, gyrating mass of clients and lures, who danced and shouted and waited for the next favour to descend and the bidding to begin.

Bright cast a glance around and didn’t see Fon. At least she didn’t have to worry about that for a few minutes. Bright approached the nearest lure. The girl had black curly hair and a dark tint. She wore a standard Contempo-Construction look with a hint of High-Tech Electrician, along with sweet little yellow work boots. The look wasn’t refined, but the girl was seriously cute. Favours really did get better-looking all the time.

“Excuse me,” said Bright. “I have to go for my nutrition update. Would you be willing to watch my client so his experience is seamless?”

“Me?” gasped the girl, astonished by the opportunity to handle a real client. Ordinarily, favours only used other fully qualified favours to watch clients when they went on break.

“I think you’re ready. I’ve been watching you, and you’re very advanced,” lied Bright.

In truth, she’d never noticed the girl before. The House of Gear ran three shifts a day and employed over a hundred favours. The place was full of specialty rooms, and favours tended to work the same rooms shift after shift. Most only got to know their dressing-mates, and them only slightly unless they happened to be in the same leisure unit. Not that anyone cared. One of the first things favours learned
in the Party Favour Training Centre was not to get too attached to anyone. It was much better to try to learn from (and copy) other favours than to get all friendy-friendy and risk losing your edge.

“Oh my job,” gushed the lure. “I can’t believe this is really happening to me!”

“Go ahead to the Stimu Room at the end of Corridor 5. I’ll be back after my break. I will be reporting on your performance to the Mistress. She’ll be very interested to hear how you do.”

The girl hugged her tools close to her body, as if to protect them, as she pushed her way through the crowd toward Corridor 5, running as fast as her little yellow boots would carry her.

This Sending was beginning to damage his self-esteem.

Grassly had watched in horror from his workshop as two PS officers released the first favour who’d been truly enlightened and ready to migrate. Why hadn’t he recognized the obvious flaw in his plan? Enlightened ancestors were, if anything, even more random and senseless than regular ones and quickly attracted negative attention.

He was going to have to get more involved. Either he or the favours with the light would have to usher the enlightened to the Natural Experience and his ship. But how could he explain his plan to the favours in a way that wouldn’t alarm them or cause them to report him?

Personal support staff acted as a sort of security force inside the Store. As in many subjugated and highly indoctrinated societies, the ancestors took directions extremely well. They did not act autonomously or with discretion. Favours were convinced that it was a great honour to be watched by a large number of PS officers, even though the moment their productivity diminished or they began to show signs of age-related illness or any other behaviour that might
cause discontent among the larger population, a PS officer was there with a releaser and it was boogie down and catch you on the rebound. The Deciders who ran the Store had convinced all the citizens—productives and consumables alike—that when they were released from their contracts they would “come back better than ever.” Accidental death was shameful, but being released from one’s contract after valuable service was natural and even desirable. That made it much easier to for the Deciders to cull the population of those no longer deemed useful.

Of course, natural instinct sometimes took over and, when faced with imminent release, some individuals would show fear or even resist. But for the most part, the Citizens United Inside the Store accepted releasing as right and just and never questioned it, just as they never questioned being constantly surrounded by PS staff who could end their lives at the slightest provocation.

Personal support staff were the only ones, other than the Deciders, allowed to use personal communication or surveillance devices, because such objects had the potential to decrease productivity, the core value among the remaining ancestors. The dataglasses fed a ceaseless stream of information to the PS staff. But as far as Grassly could tell, none of his colleagues paid attention to the possibilities of the information scrolling across their retinas, or considered what they might do with it.

Grassly was starting to feel uncomfortable about all the casualties attached to his rescue efforts. He was trying to help the ancestors, but they were so unbelievably perverse
and self-destructive and uncooperative and … and … confusing. His mind was stuck on the puzzle of why those two female favours were unaffected by the light. It must have something to do with the initial flicker. Perhaps the warm-up phase of the device, which had caused him to become allergic, had made the two of them immune.

His confusion made him irritable, and he reminded himself that one should not despise the beings one was rescuing. He needed what his Mother called an “attitude adjustment.”

So he sat cross-legged in his workshop and sank into a deep, meditative state.

When he came out of his trance some time later, he felt much better. Calmer. Able to see the situation clearly and without excessive emotion. 51s valued rationality and perspective almost as much as the ancestors liked productivity and entertainment. He looked around his workshop and felt pleased that he’d been able to create such a soothing space inside the House of Gear. The tabletops held a wide range of equipment, and his tools were neatly organized. He’d made many of them himself from the tools used in the Productive Zone to keep the Store and its population functioning. The light inside his workshop was soft, with none of the flashing and laser beams so popular in the rest of the house. His bed was neatly made, and the space where he practised his dancing was clear.

He checked the feed to see what the two favours with the enlightener were doing. One of them had the pink helmet perched on her head and was running from one of the
rooms where the ancestors tired themselves out doing useless, inexplicable things such as thrashing, yelling, and brandishing toy implements instead of dancing. She left behind a man who was also attempting to get out of the room—by crawling blindly into walls.

Grassly turned up the audio so he could hear the man over the music.

“I’ve got to get going. Got to go toward the light,” said the man.

Another enlightened!

Grassly had to help the man migrate. This rather unprepossessing figure in the brown jumpsuit would be his first successful rescue. But as he rushed to pull on his black boots, something else on the feed caught his attention: three PS officers on secondary room patrol entered, stopping when they saw the man bumbling into the wall.

Too late. Grassly had taken too long to adjust his attitude. Worse, he’d forgotten to block the favours’ productivity information. The system would have recorded and streamed their data, including which clients the favours had been paired with, into the main database, where it would raise flags when one of the clients was found behaving oddly. Grassly would have to track down and eradicate that information while saving the man.

With his boots undone and straps flapping, Grassly ran out of his hidden workshop and made his way up to the Choosing Room floor. As he went, he worked the feed until he found the identity of the enlightened man and his assigned favour, whose name was Bright. Grassly erased her
records, including all the surveillance footage from the time she left her dressing room until she ran away from her client. It was hard to do all this inconspicuously while shoving his way through the crowds in the Choosing Room, but he managed. Once he got into the maze of hallways, he had more room to move, but he was also more exposed. Most PS staff didn’t walk with their hands darting around at their temples, obviously working the feed. They waited for alerts and notifications to scroll across their dataglasses while they half watched whatever scene was unfolding right in front of them.

Grassly tilted his head far to the side and shielded it with his free hand, as though he had a headache located directly over his ear.

Luckily for him, favours and productives tended not to make direct eye contact with PS staff even though they wanted as many of them as possible around so they could feel special and valuable.

Grassly arrived at the Stimu Room to find the three PS officers standing over the newly enlightened client. He joined them, trying to look as though he belonged.

“Sir,” said one of the PS officers to the client. “For the last time, please identify yourself.”

This should have been a formality. In other circumstances, the productive would already have been scanned and the officers would have all his data. But Grassly had broken the link between the man’s neck chip and the feed, and corrupted his database for good measure.

“I’ve really got to go. I, I, ah … ohhhhhh.” The man
sank to his knees in front of the wall. “I’m just not sure which way is out. The light …”

“Sir, when did you begin feeling unwell?”

“Can you tell us when your symptoms started?”

The man made a low groaning noise and rested his sweaty forehead against the padded purple wall.

“Maybe he’s—” Grassly began, but he was interrupted when someone else entered the room.

It was another favour. No, not a favour. A favour-in-training. A lure. The girl was not yet fourteen. Slight. Vibrating with nerves and excitement. At the sight of all the PS officers surrounding the client in the obstacle-filled room, her eyes stretched wider.

“Oh,” she said. “I think I must be in the wrong room.”

“Release him,” ordered a PS officer with a small red badge on his chest that identified him as a commander. The man was speaking directly to Grassly, who felt a sudden pressure bear down in the region of his thoracic cavity.

He’d seen several ancestors released, and the sight had barely affected him. After all, the poor creatures were in such a precarious biological condition from being bred over many generations to be highly suited to their specific functions. All that cloning had turned the ancestors into ticking time bombs, biologically speaking. They had much briefer lifespans than the humans they had been cloned from because they had chromosomes only slightly longer than a bananflukken’s fart, which was among the shortest farts ever recorded. Ancestors who made it past inception were often released during the early stages due to disabilities
such as inappropriate weight or hair distribution. Of those who completed their training and made it to productive or consumable status at the age of thirteen, precious few made it to their twenties. Instead, they became afflicted with one of any number of degenerative physical and mental disorders and were released.