Chicken Little (8 page)

Leon found he was breathing so hard that he was fogging up his faceplate, despite the air-jets that worked to clear it. "Buhle," he said, "the point of that story was to tell me how vulnerable you are so that I'd tell you my story, but that story doesn't make you vulnerable. You were beaten to death and yet you survived, grew stronger, changed into this --" He waved his hands around. "This body, this monstrous, town-sized giant. You're about as vulnerable as fucking Zeus."

Ria laughed softly but unmistakably. "Told you so," she said to Buhle. "He's a good one."

The exposed lower part of Buhle's face clenched like a fist and the pitch of the machine noises around them shifted a half-tone. Then he smiled a smile that was visibly forced, obviously artificial even in that ruin of a face.

"I had an idea," he said. "That many of the world's problems could be solved with a positive outlook. We spend so much time worrying about the rare and lurid outcomes in life. Kids being snatched. Terrorists blowing up cities. Stolen secrets ruining your business. Irate customers winning huge judgments in improbable lawsuits. All this
chickenshit
, bed-wetting, hand-wringing
fear
." His voice rose and fell like a minister's and it was all Leon could do not to sway in time with him. "And at the same time, we neglect the likely: traffic accidents, jetpack crashes, bathtub drownings. It's like the mind can't stop thinking about the grotesque, and can't stop forgetting about the likely."

"Get on with it," Ria said. "The speech is lovely, but it doesn't answer the question."

He glared at her through the mirror, the marble-eyes in their mesh of burst blood vessels and red spider-tracks, like the eyes of a demon. "The human mind is just
kinked wrong
. And it's correctable." The excitement in his voice was palpable. "Imagine a product that let you
feel
what you
know
-- imagine if anyone who heard 'Lotto: you've got to be in it to win it' immediately understood that this is
so much bullshit
. That statistically, your chances of winning the lotto are not measurably improved by buying a lottery ticket. Imagine if explaining the war on terror to people made them double over with laughter! Imagine if the capital markets ran on realistic assessments of risk instead of envy, panic and greed."

"You'd be a lot poorer," Ria said.

He rolled his eyes eloquently.

"It's an interesting vision," Leon said. "I'd take the cure, whatever it was."

The eyes snapped to him, drilled through him, fierce. "That's the problem,
right there
. The only people who'll take this are the people who don't need it. Politicians and traders and oddsmakers know how probability works, but they also know that the people who make them fat and happy
don't
understand it a bit, and so they can't afford to be rational. So there's only one answer to the problem."

Leon blurted, "The bears."

Ria let out an audible sigh.

"The fucking bears," Buhle agreed, and the way he said it was so full of world-weary exhaustion that it made Leon want to hug him. "Yes. As a social reform tool, we couldn't afford to leave this to the people who were willing to take it. So we --"

"Weaponized it," Ria said.

"Whose story is this?"

Leon felt that the limbs of his suit were growing stiffer, his exhaust turning it into a balloon. And he had to pee. And he didn't want to move.

"You dosed people with it?"

"Leon," Buhle said, in a voice that implied,
Come on, we're bigger than that
. "They'd consented to being medical research subjects. And it
worked
. They stopped running around shouting
The sky is falling, the sky is falling
and became --
zen
. Happy, in a calm, even-keeled way. Headless chickens turned into flinty-eyed air-traffic controllers."

"And your best friend beat your brains in --"

"Because," Buhle said, in a little Mickey Mouse falsetto, "
it would be unethical to do a broad-scale release on the general public
"

Ria was sitting so still he had almost forgotten she was there.

Leon shifted his weight. "I don't think that you're telling me the whole story."

"We were set to market it as an anti-anxiety medication."

"And?"

Ria stood up abruptly. "I'll wait outside." She left without another word.

Buhle rolled his eyes again. "How do you get people to take anti-anxiety medication? Lots and lots of people? I mean, if I assigned you that project, gave you a budget for it --"

Leon felt torn between a desire to chase after Ria and to continue to stay in the magnetic presence of Buhle. He shrugged. "Same as you would with any pharma. Cook the diagnosis protocol, expand the number of people it catches. Get the news media whipped up about the anxiety epidemic. That's easy. Fear sells. An epidemic of fear? Christ, that'd be too easy. Far too easy. Get the insurers on board, discounts on the meds, make it cheaper to prescribe a course of treatment than to take the call-center time to explain to the guy why he's
not
getting the meds."

"You're my kind of guy, Leon," Buhle said. "So yeah."

"Yeah?"

Another one of those we're-both-men-of-the-world smiles. "Yeah."

Oh.

"How many?"

"That's the thing. We were trying it in a little market first. Basque Country. The local authority was very receptive. Lots of chances to fine-tune the message. They're the most media-savvy people on the planet these days -- they are to media as the Japanese were to electronics in the last century. If we could get them in the door --"

"How many?"

"About a million. More than half the population."

"You created a bioweapon that infected its victims with numeracy, and infected a million Basque with it?"

"Crashed the lottery. That's how I knew we'd done it. Lottery tickets fell by more than 80 percent. Wiped out."

"And then your friend beat your head in?"

"Well."

The suit was getting more uncomfortable by the second. Leon wondered if he'd get stuck if he waited too long, his overinflated suit incapable of moving. "I'm going to have to go, soon."

"Evolutionarily, bad risk-assessment is advantageous."

Leon nodded slowly. "OK, I'll buy that. Makes you entrepreneurial --"

"Drives you to colonize new lands, to ask out the beautiful monkey in the next tree, to have a baby you can't imagine how you'll afford."

"And your numerate Vulcans stopped?"

"Pretty much," he said. "But that's just normal shakedown. Like when people move to cities, their birthrate drops. And nevertheless, the human race is becoming more and more citified and still, it isn't vanishing. Social stuff takes time."

"And then your friend beat your head in?"

"Stop saying that."

Leon stood. "Maybe I should go and find Ria."

Buhle made a disgusted noise. "Fine. And ask her why she didn't finish the job? Ask her if she decided to do it right then, or if she'd planned it? Ask her why she used the coffee jug instead of the bread-knife? Because, you know, I wonder this myself."

Leon backpedaled, clumsy in the overinflated suit. He struggled to get into the airlock, and as it hissed through its cycle, he tried not to think of Ria straddling the old man's chest, the coffee urn rising and falling.

She was waiting for him on the other side, also overinflated in her suit. "Let's go," she said, and took his hand, the rubberized palms of their gloves sticking together. She half-dragged him through the many rooms of Buhle's body, tripping through the final door, then spinning him around and ripping, hard, on the release cord that split the suit down the back so that it fell into two lifeless pieces that slithered to the ground. He gasped out a breath he hadn't realized he'd been holding in as the cool air made contact with the thin layer of perspiration that filmed his body.

Ria had already ripped open her own suit and her face was flushed and sweaty, her hair matted. Small sweat-rings sprouted beneath her armpits. An efficient orderly came forward and began gathering up their suits. Ria thanked her impersonally and headed for the doors.

"I didn't think he'd do that," she said, once they were outside of the building -- outside the core of Buhle's body.

"You tried to kill him," Leon said. He looked at her hands, which had blunt, neat fingernails and large knuckles. He tried to picture the tendons on their backs standing out like sail-ropes when the wind blew, as they did the rhythmic work of raising and lowering the heavy silver coffee pot.

She wiped her hands on her trousers and stuffed them in her pockets, awkward now, without any of her usual self-confidence. "I'm not ashamed of that. I'm proud of it. Not everyone would have had the guts. If I hadn't, you and everyone you know would be --" She brought her hands out of her pockets, bunched into fists. She shook her head. "I thought he'd tell you what we like about your grad project. Then we could have talked about where you'd fit in here --"

"You never said anything about that," he said. "I could have saved you a lot of trouble. I don't talk about it."

Ria shook her head. "This is Buhle. You won't stop us from doing anything we want to do. I'm not trying to intimidate you here. It's just a fact of life. If we want to replicate your experiment, we can, on any scale we want --"

"But I won't be a part of it," he said. "That matters."

"Not as much as you think it does. And if you think you can avoid being a part of something that Buhle wants you for, you're likely to be surprised. We can get you what you want."

"No you can't," he said. "If there's one thing I know, it's that you can't do that."

He tried not to stare inside it, but he couldn't stop himself.

Take one normal human being at lunch. Ask her about her breakfast. If lunch is great, she'll tell you how great breakfast is. If lunch is terrible, she'll tell you how awful breakfast was.

Now ask her about dinner. A bad lunch will make her assume that a bad dinner is forthcoming. A great lunch will make her optimistic about dinner.

Explain this dynamic to her and ask her again about breakfast. She'll struggle to remember the actual details of breakfast, the texture of the oatmeal, whether the juice was cold and delicious or slightly warm and slimy. She will remember and remember and remember for all she's worth, and then, if lunch is good, she'll tell you breakfast was good. And if lunch is bad, she'll tell you breakfast was bad.

Because you just can't help it. Even though you know you're doing it, you can't help it.

But what if you could?

***

"It was the parents," he said, as they picked their way through the treetops, along the narrow walkway, squeezing to one side to let the eager, gabbling researchers past. "That was the heartbreaker. Parents only remember the good parts of parenthood. Parents whose kids are grown remember a succession of sweet hugs, school triumphs, sports victories, and they simply forget the vomit, the tantrums, the sleep deprivation... It's the thing that lets us continue the species, this excellent facility for forgetting. That's what should have tipped me off."

Ria nodded solemnly. "But there was an upside, wasn't there?"

"Oh, sure. Better breakfasts, for one thing. And the weight-loss -- amazing. Just being able to remember how shitty you felt the last time you ate the chocolate bar or pigged out on fries. It was amazing."

"The applications do sound impressive. Just that weight-loss one --"

"Weight-loss, addiction counseling, you name it. It was all killer apps, wall to wall."

"But?"

He stopped abruptly. "You must know this," he said. "If you know about Clarity -- that's what I called it, Clarity -- then you know about what happened. With Buhle's resources, you can find out anything, right?"

She made a wry smile. "Oh, I know what history records. What I don't know is what
happened
. The official version, the one that put Ate onto you and got us interested --"

"Why'd you try to kill Buhle?"

"Because I'm the only one he can't bullshit, and I saw where he was going with his little experiment. The competitive advantage to a firm that knows about such a radical shift in human cognition -- it's massive. Think of all the products that would vanish if numeracy came in a virus. Think of all the shifts in governance, in policy. Just imagine an
airport
run by and for people who understand risk!"

"Sounds pretty good to me," Leon said.

"Oh sure," she said. "Sure. A world of eager consumers who know the cost of everything and the value of nothing. Why did evolution endow us with such pathological innumeracy? What's the survival advantage in being led around by the nose by whichever witch-doctor can come up with the best scare-story?"

"He said that entrepreneurial things -- parenthood, businesses..."

"Any kind of risk-taking. Sports. No one swings for the stands when he knows that the odds are so much better on a bunt."

"And Buhle
wanted
this?"

She peered at him. "A world of people who understand risk are nearly as easy to lead around by the nose as a world of people who are incapable of understanding risk. The big difference is that the competition is at a massive disadvantage in the latter case, not being as highly evolved as the home team."

He looked at her, really looked at her for the first time. Saw that she was the face of a monster, the voice of a god. The hand of a massive, unknowable machine that was vying to change the world, remake it to suit its needs. A machine that was
good at it
.

"Clarity," he said. "Clarity." She looked perfectly attentive. "Do you think you'd have tried to kill Buhle if you'd been taking Clarity?"

She blinked in surprise. "I don't think I ever considered the question."

He waited. He found he was holding his breath.

"I think I would have succeeded if I'd been taking Clarity," she said.

"And if Buhle had been taking Clarity?"

"I think he would have let me." She blurted it so quickly it sounded like a belch.

"Is anyone in charge of Buhle?"

"What do you mean?"

"I mean -- that vat-thing. Is it volitional? Does it steer this, this
enterprise
? Or does the enterprise tick on under its own power, making its own decisions?"

She swallowed. "Technically, it's a benevolent dictatorship. He's sovereign, you know that." She swallowed again. "Will you tell me what happened with Clarity?"

"Does he actually make decisions, though?"

"I don't think so," she whispered. "Not really. It's more like, like --"

"A force of nature?"

"An emergent phenomenon."

"Can he hear us?"

She nodded.

"Buhle," he said, thinking of the thing in the vat. "Clarity made the people who took it very angry. They couldn't look at advertisements without wanting to smash something. Going into a shop made them nearly catatonic. Voting made them want to storm a government office with flaming torches. Every test subject went to prison within eight weeks."

Ria smiled. She took his hands in hers -- warm, dry -- and squeezed them.

His phone rang. He took one hand out and answered it.

"Hello?"

"How much do you want for it?" Buhle's voice was ebullient. Mad, even.

"It's not for sale."

"I'll buy Ate, put you in charge."

"Don't want it."

"I'll kill your parents." The ebullient tone didn't change at all.

"You'll kill everyone if Clarity is widely used."

"You don't believe that. Clarity lets you choose the course that will make you happiest. Mass suicide won't make humanity happiest."

"You don't know that."

"Wanna bet?"

"Why don't you kill yourself?"

"Because dead, I'll never make things better."

Ria was watching intently. She squeezed the hand she held.

"Will you take it?"

There was a long pause.

Leon pressed on. "No deal unless you take it," he said.

"You have some?"

"I can make some. I'll need to talk to some lab-techs and download some of my research first."

"Will you take it with me?"

He didn't hesitate. "Never."

"I'll take it," Buhle said, and hung up.

Ria took his hand again. Leaned forward. Gave him a dry, firm kiss on the mouth. Leaned back.

"Thank you," she said.

"Don't thank me," he said. "I'm not doing you any favors."

She stood up, pulling him to his feet.

"Welcome to the team," she said. "Welcome to Buhle."