Complete Stories (148 page)

“Rawna and I had a good talk,” said Jeff, preening for Diane in the new shirt, which had a not-unpleasant seaside scent. Right now it was displaying an iridescent pattern like a peacock’s tail, with rainbow eyes amid feathery shadings. “I might do some work for her.”

Diane felt a flicker of jealousy. “Do you have to wear that dorky sailor hat?”

“It’s an exabyte-level antenna,” said Jeff, adjusting the gold lamé sailor’s cap that was perched on the back of his head. “It comes with the shirt. Come on, Diane, be happy for me!”

-----

Initially the squidskin shirt seemed like a good thing. Jeff got a gig doing custom promotional placement for an outfit called Rikki’s Reality Weddings. He’d troll the chirp-stream for mentions of weddings and knife in with a plug for Rikki’s.

“What’s a reality wedding?” asked Diane.

“Rikki’s a wedding caterer, see? And she lets her bridal parties defray their expenses by selling tickets to the wedding reception. A reality wedding. In other words, complete strangers might attend your wedding or maybe just watch the action on a video feed. And if a guest wants to go whole hog, Rikki has one of her girls or boys get a sample of the guest’s DNA—with an eye towards mixing it into the genome of the nuptial couple’s first child.” Jeff waggled his eyebrows. “And you can guess how they take the samples.”

“The caterer pimps to the guests?” asked Diane. “Wow, what a classy way to throw a wedding.”

“Hey, all I’m doing is the promo,” protested Jeff. “Don’t get so judgmental. I’m but a mirror of society at large.” He looked down at the rippling colors on his shirt. “Rikkie’s right, though. Multiperson gene-merges are the new paradigm for our social evolution.”

“Whatever. Are you still promoting Kenny Lately too?”

“Bigtime. The band’s stats are ramping up. And, get this, Rawna Roller gave me a great idea. I used all the simmies in my growbox to flood the online polls, and got Kenny and the Newcomers booked as one of the ten bands playing marching songs for the Fourth of July fireworks show at the Rose Bowl!”

“You’re really getting somewhere, Jeff,” said Diana in a faintly reproving tone. She didn’t feel good about flooding polls, even online ones.

Jeff was impervious. “There’s more! Rawna Roller’s really into me now. I’m setting up a deal to place promos in her realtime on-line datamine—that’s her playlists, messages, videos, journals, whatever. She frames it as a pirated gossip-feed, just to give it that salty paparazzo tang. Her followers feel like they’re spying inside Rawna’s head, like they’re wearing her smartware. She’s so popular, she’s renting out space in the datamine, and I’m embedding the ads. Some of my simmies have started using these sly cuttlefish-type algorithms, and my product placements are fully seamless now. Rawna’s promised me eight percent of the ad revenues.”

Diane briefly wondered if Jeff was getting a little too interested in Rawna Roller, but she kept her mouth shut. It sounded as though this might actually bring in some cash for a change, even if his percentage seemed to be going down. And she really did want to see Jeff succeed.

-----

On the Fourth of July, Jeff took Diane to see the Americafest fireworks show at the Rose Bowl in Pasadena. Jeff told her that, in his capacity as the publicist for Kenny Lately and the Newcomers, he’d be getting them seats that were close enough to the field so they could directly hear the bands.

Jeff was wearing his squidskin, with his dorky sailor hat cockily perched on the back of his head. They worked their way into the crowd in the expensive section. The seats here were backless bleacher-benches just like all the others, but they were…reserved.

“What are our seat numbers?” Diane asked Jeff.

“I, uh, I only have general admission tickets,” began Jeff. “But—”

“Tickets the same as the twenty thousand other people here?” said Diane. “So why are we here in the—”

“Yo!” cried Jeff, suddenly spotting someone, a well-dressed woman in a cheetah-patterned blouse and marigold Bermuda shorts. Rawna Roller! On her right was her assistant, wearing bugeye glasses with thousand-faceted compound lenses. And on her left she had a pair of empty seats.

“Come on down,” called Rawna.

“Glad I found you,” Jeff hollered back. He turned to Diane. “Rawna told me she’d save us seats, baby. I wanted to surprise you.” They picked their way down through the bleachers.

“Love that shirt on you, Jeff,” said Rawna with a tooth-baring high-fashion laugh. “Glad you showed. Sid and I are leaving right when the fireworks start.”

Diane took Rawna’s measure and decided it was unlikely this woman was having sex with her man. She relaxed and settled into her seat, idly wondering why Rawna and Sid would pay extra for reserved seats and leave during the fireworks. Never mind.

“See Kenny down there?” bragged Jeff. “My client.”

“Yubba yubba,” said Sid, tipping his stingy-brim hat, perhaps sarcastically, although with his prismatic bugeye lenses, it was hard to be sure where the guy was at.

Diane found it energizing to be in such a huge, diverse crowd. Southern California was a salad bowl of races, with an unnatural preponderance of markedly fit and attractive people, drawn like sleek moths to the Hollywood light. There was a lot of action on the field: teenagers in uniforms were executing serpentine drum-corps routines, and scantily dressed cheerleaders were leaping about, tossing six-foot long batons. Off to one side, Kenny Lately and the Newcomers were playing—

“Oh wow,” said Jeff, cocking his head. “
It’s a Grand Old Flag.
I didn’t know Kenny could play that. He’s doing us proud, me and all of my simmies who voted for him.” Picking up on the local media feed, Jeff’s squidskin shirt was displaying stars among rippling bars of red and white. Noticing Jeff’s shirt in action, Rawna nodded approvingly.

“I’m waiting for the fireworks,” said Diane, working on a root beer float that she’d bought from a vendor. Someone behind them was kicking Jeff in the middle of his back. He twisted around. A twitchy, apologetic man was holding a toddler on his lap.

“I’m sorry, sir,” he said.

Jeff was frowning. “That last kick was sharp!” he complained.

“Oh, don’t start tweaking out,” snapped the man’s wife, who was holding a larger child on her lap. “Watch the frikkin’ show, why dontcha.”

Diane felt guilty about the snobby feelings that welled up in her, and sorry for Jeff. Awkwardly they scooted forward a bit on their benches. Sid and Rawna were laughing like hyenas.

Finally the emcee started the countdown. His face was visible on the stadium’s big screen, on people’s smartphones, and even on Jeff’s shirt. But after the countdown, nothing happened. Instead of a blast of fireworks, yet another video image appeared, a picture of the Declaration of Independence, backed by the emcee’s voice vaporing on about patriotism.

“Like maybe we don’t know it’s the Fourth of July?” protested Diane. “Oh god, and now they’re switching to a Ronald Reagan video? What
is
this, the History Channel?”

“Hush, Diane.” Jeff really seemed to be into this tedious exercise of jingoistic masturbation. His shirt unscrolled the Declaration of Independence, which then rolled back up and an eagle came screaming out from under his collar and snatched the scroll, bearing it off in his talons.

Up on the scoreboard, there was a video of Johnny Cash singing “God Bless America,” including some verses that Diane hadn’t heard since the third grade, and then Bill Clinton and George W. Bush appeared together in a video wishing everyone a safe and sane Fourth. By then, others were grumbling, too.

The announcer did another countdown, and the fireworks actually began. It had been a long wait, but now the pyrotechnicians were launching volley after awesome volley: bombettes, peonies, palms, strobe stars, and intricate shells that Diane didn’t even know the names of—crackling cascades of spark dust, wriggly twirlers, sinuous glowing watersnakes, geometric forms like crystals and soccer balls.

“
Au revoir
,” said Rawna Roller, rising to her feet once the show was well underway. She and Sid made their way out to the main aisle. Sid cast a lingering last look at Jeff, with the fireworks scintillating in every facet of Sid’s polyhedral lenses.

Looking back at the show, Diane noticed that the colors were turning peculiar. Orange and green—was that a normal color for a skyrocket shell? And that shower of dull crimson sparks? Was this latter part of the show on a lower budget?

The show trailed off with a barrage of off-color kamuros and crackling pistils, followed by chrysanthemums and spiders in ever-deeper shades of red, one on top of another, like an anatomical diagram or a rain of luminous blood.

Out of the corner of her eye, Diane could see Jeff’s squidskin shirt going wild. At first the shirt was just displaying video feeds of the skyrockets, processing and overlaying them. But suddenly the Jeff-plus-shirt system went through a phase transition and everything changed. The shirt began boiling with tiny images—Diane noticed faces, cars, meals, houses, appliances, dogs, and trees, and the images were overlaid upon stippled scenes of frantically cheering crowds. The miniscule icons were savagely precise, like the brainstorm of a person on his deathbed, all his life flashing before his eyes. The million images on Jeff’s shirt on were wheeling and schooling like fish, flowing in jet streams and undercurrents, as if he’d become a weather map of the crowd’s mind. Jeff began to scream, more in ecstasy, Diane thought, than in agony.

In the post-fireworks applause and tumult—some of it caused by people rushing for the exits en masse in a futile effort to beat the traffic— Jeff’s reaction was taken to be just another patriotic, red-blooded American speaking in tongues or enjoying his meds.

Diane waited for the crowd to thin out substantially, to grab its diaper bags and coolers and leave the stadium under the cold yellow glare of the sodium vapor lights. Jeff was babbling to himself fairly quietly now. Diane couldn’t seem to make eye contact with him. She led him across the dimly lit parking lot and down Rosemont Boulevard, towards where they’d left her car.

“This simple, old-fashioned tip will keep you thin,” mumbled Jeff, shuffling along at Diane’s side. “Embrace the unusual! Eat a new food every day!” His squidskin glowed with blurry constellations of corporate logos.

“Are you okay, Jeff?”

“Avoid occasions of sin,” intoned Jeff. “Thieves like doggie doors. Can you pinpoint your closest emergency room?”

“Those fireworks tweaked you out, didn’t they, honey?” said Diane sympathetically. “I just wonder if your shirt is having some bad kind of feedback effect.”

“View cloud-based webcam of virtual population explosion,” said Jeff. “Marketeer’s simmie-bots multiply out of control.”

“That’s an actual answer?” said Diane. “You’re talking about your growbox on the web?” For a moment Jeff’s squidskin showed a hellish scene of wriggling manikins mounded like worms, male and female. Their faces all resembled each other. Like cousins or like—oh, never mind, here was Diane’s car.

“To paddle or not to paddle students,” said Jeff, stiffly fitting himself into the passenger seat. “See what officials on both sides of the debate have to say.”

“Maybe you take that shirt off now, huh?” said Diane, edging into the traffic and heading for home. “Or at least the beanie?”

“We want to know what it’s like to be alive,” said Jeff, hugging his squidskin against himself with one hand, and guarding his sailor cap with the other. “We long for incarnation!”

Somehow, she made it home in frantic Fourth of July traffic, then coaxed and manhandled Jeff out of the car and into the apartment. He sprawled uneasily on the couch, rocking his body and stamping his feet in no particular rhythm, staring at the blank screen, spewing words like the Chirpfeed from hell.

Tired and disgusted, Diane slept alone. She woke around six a.m., and Jeff was still at it, his low voice like that of a monk saying prayers. “Danger seen in smoking fish. Stand clear of the closing doors.” His shirt had gone back to showing a heap of writhing simmies, each of them with a face resembling—Jeff’s. He was totally into his own head.

“You’ve taken this too far,” Diane told him. “You’re like some kind of wirehead, always hooked up to your electronic toys. I’m going to the office now, and by God, I want you to have your act together by the time I get home, or you can get out until you’ve straightened up. You’re an addict, Jeff. It’s pathetic.”

Strong words, but Diane worried about Jeff all that morning. Maybe it wasn’t even his fault. Maybe Rawna or that slime-ball Sid had done something to make him change like this. Finally she tried to phone him. Jeff’s phone was answered not by a human voice, but by a colossal choral hiss, as of three hundred million voices chanting. Jeff’s simmie-bots.

Diane made an excuse to her boss about feeling ill and sped home. A sharp-looking Jaguar was lounging in her parking-spot. She could hear two familiar voices through her front door, but they stopped the moment she turned the key. Going in, she encountered Rawna Roller and bugeye Sid, who appeared to be on their way out.

“Cheers, Diane,” said Rawna in her hoarse low voice. “We just fabbed Jeff one of our clients’ new products to pitch. The Goofer. Jeff’s very of the moment, isn’t he? Rather exhilarating.”

“But what the hell—” began Diane.

“Rawna and I did a little greasing behind the scenes,” Sid bragged. “We got those rocket shells deployed in patterns and rhythms that would resonate with your man’s squidskin. I was scared to look at ‘em myself.” His expression was unreadable behind his bugeye lenses. “The show fed him a series of archetypal engrams. Our neuroengineer said we’d need a display that was hundreds of meters across. Not just for the details, you understand, but so Jeff’s reptile brain would know he’s seeing something important. So we used fireworks. Way cool, huh? “

“But what did it do to Jeff?”

“Jeff’s the ultimate hacker-cracker creepy-crawler web spy now. He’s pushed his zillion simmie-bots out into every frikkin’ digital doohickey in sight. And his simmies are feeding raw intel back to him. It adds up. Jeff’s an avatar of the national consciousness. The go-to guy for what Jane and Joe Blow are thinking.”