Dreams (26 page)

The reason most clichés are clichés, I think, is that they express an idea well. Once some clever bozo formulates the idea to perfection there's no reason to concoct another way of putting it, so everybody hops on the first guy's phrase and away we go.

Away we go.

Right.

See, I do it myself. I guess we all do.

For instance, "Be careful what you wish for, you just might get it." That, or minor variations on it, has been around for years, and I'll bet a nickel that no day goes past without some pundit using it for the title of a newspaper column or some screenwriter putting it into a script. You doubt that? Paste it into your search engine and see how many hits you get.

And as for me, I was tired of living in the 'burbs. Sunnyvale strikes me as an up-scale, latter-day Levittown for the technologically hip and the economically ambitious. I bought a house there for my family when my wife and I were still getting along and our very little girl was a daily ray of sunshine for us both.

Well, fifteen years and one divorce later, the dotcom boom and bust have swept through our happy little suburb, my daughter wants to go live with her mother because men just don't understand women (and she's right about that one!), and I manage to sell the house for a decent price. Enough to get me into a new condo on Drumm Street in San Francisco and even put a few bucks in the bank. I can see the Bay Bridge and the Bay itself and the lights of Oakland and environs from my living room window.

For a while I made a decent living, most of it by telecommuting, although I must confess that business has been slow of late and I've been casting worried if not panicked glances at my bank account. I do enjoy the variety and color of the city instead of trying to play Jim Anderson of the old
Father Knows Best
sitcom with my own daughter as innocent young Betty. I tried hitting the singles bars briefly but I quit that when I discovered they were full of twenty-year-olds and forty-year-olds trying to look twenty. I didn't want to fall into that pit!

Online dating was something else, and I was amazed at the women I met there. People my own age who shared my attitudes and interests. It was easy to sort out the ones who just wanted to get laid—not that there's anything wrong with that—-and the ones who never wanted to get laid—and before I knew it I was hooked up with a lovely, mature, intelligent woman. She had her place, I had my place, we enjoyed each other's company, and it looked as if the relationship was actually going to have legs.

The only problem, in fact, came from her name. Martha Washington, would you believe it? She's some kind of remote cousin, many times removed, of Our First President. The surname was tough enough but her parents apparently thought it would be fun to name their child for the First, First Lady. After enough years of ribbing and a couple of marriages and divorces (and who am I to criticize on that score?), she decided to take back her maiden name and make it a point of pride rather than an embarrassment.

Well, good for Martha, says I. Besides, she loves good music, she cooks well (as do I), she makes fascinating conversation, and we please each other in bed. A lot.

So it looks as if I came out of my divorce really well, not even hating my ex or being hated by her, and living the pleasant life of a middle-aged single in the first decade of this the twenty-first century.

Then Ed Guenther phoned.

"Can you come in for a meeting, Webster?"

I asked him what about.

"We've got a project we'd like you to consult on."

Okay, that meant at least a day's pay at a fat hourly fee. It would mean renting a car; I'd dumped my faithful Saab when I sold the Sunnyvale house, but I'd hit Ed for the rental. If my business had been booming I would have played hard to get, but revenues were down and I was, to put it mildly, starting to feel uneasy around the money belt. Even so, I wanted a little more info before I agreed.

"You had that experience with the Dreemz.biz outfit, Web."

I grunted.

"I know you were pretty upset by the end of it. Felt they were doing some dangerous stuff."

That was an understatement. Dreemz.biz pretty well scrambled my brain, and I don't know how many others. The Feds got into the act and the company quietly disappeared and its founding guru and CEO, a sharpy named Carter Thurston Hull, did the same. Where was he now, St. Elizabeth's? Guantanamo? Rumania? Just try asking, but if you do, don't blame me for what happens to you next.

"We know you were pretty upset by the end of the gig, Web."

"Sure, Ed, if you call six months in the bin alternating between ultra-high-dose tranks and intensive therapy sessions being pretty upset."

"Well, but you know what that stuff is like, and we think you can give us some important help with a new product." He paused for effect. I knew Ed Guenther well enough to know that he was sitting with his eyes closed, counting down, ". . . four, three, two, one . . ." And then he would open his eyes, inhale sharply, and get rolling again. I also noticed that he was bouncing back and forth between
I
and
we
, another favorite trick of his. Was he talking for himself or was he talking for Silicon Research Labs, Inc?
I
or
we?

Good old Ed. I'd worked with him before and he was a pretty good guy. Pretty good. But I wouldn't exactly trust him with the only can opener on the island if we were marooned with a case of canned goods and no other source of nourishment.

"Actually it's more than a product, Webster. It's an important new tool. It's really exciting. I think you're going to love this one."

A quick glance at the calendar, a mental calculation of my bank balance and current cash flow, and I made an appointment to spend a day at SRL, Silicon Research Labs, Incorporated, and find out what Ed Guenther had up his sleeve.

The car I rented was a hybrid. I figure I can't reverse global warming—I wish I could!—or even stop it but at least I can limit the damage that I personally do to this planet. I cruised down 280, pulled into a visitor's slot at SRL, and told the five-year-old receptionist that Mr. Sloat was here to see Mr. Guenther.

Ed bustled into the lobby, curly iron-gray hair in need of a trim, five o'clock shadow on his jaw even at ten in the morning, striped sleeves rolled up, and grabbed my hand in a paw the size of a catcher's mitt. He put his arm around my shoulders and practically carried me off to a conference room. There were half a dozen Silicon Valley types there. A couple looked old enough to have survived the big meltdown. The rest were members of the new generation. I felt a rush or relief that I wasn't making the Union Street singles bars trying to compete with the likes of these kids. They looked as if they belonged on the campus at Stanford or Berkeley but I knew they were already looking over their shoulders at the next generation of grads.

Before we got started, Ed delivered a little lecture on the fact that we were going to be exposed to classified information and under penalty of fine or imprisonment and yada-yada-yada. There was nothing there I hadn't heard a dozen times before, and I signed the confidential disclosure form with my trusty Cross ball-point that I'd got from a onetime employer for completing five years of honorable service.

There were carafes of coffee on the table, fake leather folders with the SRL logo emblazoned on the covers, and freshly sharpened pencils for all. Obviously, they were out to impress good old Webster Sloat. Frankly, it made me apprehensive. I opened my folder, trying to look casually curious, and found nothing inside but a fresh pad of lined paper with a different logo ghosted in the middle of each page. It was an abstract sketch that might have been a spiral nebula crossed with a happy face with just a suggestion of God as we know and love Him from Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel painting. The lettering WYSHES.COM ran across it.

Ed Guenther introduced me to the gang. Most likely they'd been briefed in advance. That's the way Ed worked. But he went over my sterling credentials, credited me with heroic public service in the Dreemz.biz affair, considerately overlooked the fact that I'd wound up in the cuckoo's nest after it was over. Then he turned the meeting over to the genius whose work I was supposed to support.

Her name was Miranda Nguyen. She squinted through Harry Potter glasses. Her face was makeup-free. She was as tall as I was and must have weighed sixty-five pounds. She was wearing a Xena Warrior Princess tee shirt that had clearly seen better days. I'm sure she washed her hair on occasion but I wouldn't want to guess how often that occurred.

When Miranda stood up I was afraid for a moment that she was going to topple over. She righted herself, flicked on a computer-fed image projector, switched off the overhead lights and started to lecture.

She did not lose me with her first word, or even with her first sentence, but by the middle of what must have been her first paragraph I was floundering and before I could finish a cup of hot SRL Custom Roast Mocha Java I realized that I had no idea what she was talking about.

Well, almost no idea. I'd made my living for the past decade turning the jargon of programmers and circuit designers and systems engineers into at least semi-literate and somewhat understandable prose. I bore down and managed to get at least the gist of Ms. Nguyen's pitch. She had reverse-engineered the software that my old buddy Carter Thurston Hull had used to make his
dreemz
seem realer than real. Apparently Miranda knew that he'd also come within a hair's breadth of wrecking my brain, and God knows what he did to how many other customers. But Miranda Nguyen had developed some
mixed-ware
—circuitry plus programming—that she claimed would work better than Hull's and would be perfectly safe for the user.

I believed her, every word.

And there's that nice new Bay Bridge they're working on at this very moment, and if you'd like to buy it from Yours Truly, I'm sure we could strike a really attractive bargain.

Ms. Nguyen sat down to a smattering of applause from her colleagues and Ed Guenther introduced the next genius. Alberto Salazar. Alberto Salazar from NASA Ames, a few miles up the freeway from Silicon Research Labs. Alberto was Mexican from the top of his glossy black hair to the tips of his tan fingers. Mexican, yes, but I had a feeling that he was a full-blooded Mayan or something close to it. He had an accent you could cut
con una cuchilla.
And he was living proof that we need all the smart immigrants we can get,
con documentación o sin.

And he didn't mince words, accent or no accent.

"There are aliens," he said. "They're not here, they're not little greenies or busty blonde princesses or monsters who want to cook us for dinner, Rod Serling and Damon Knight notwithstanding."

He paused and I guessed it was my turn to contribute something, even if it was only a question. "They don't zip around in flying saucers or abduct fishermen from Mississippi, then?"

"Nope. We're not sure where they are, but they're probably very far from Earth. There's some debate in NASA as to whether they're on the other side of the galactic disk or in another galaxy altogether."

"Are they a threat?" I asked.

"As far as I know they're totally unaware that we even exist."

"Then why trouble trouble?"

"Good question." Alberto smiled. "Again, some of our people say we should just pull our heads in and hope they never notice us. Others think we need to go out and say hello, take a risk if we need to, see what happens."

"What do you think, Alberto?"

"Who, me? I'm just a humble astronomer. My ancestors had the chance to wipe out their first European visitors and they didn't. So it's risky, I can't deny it. Still, Mr. Sloat, it's a basic philosophical question. Do we want to be
tortugas o iguanas?
"

"You lost me," I said. "I know what an iguana is but what's a tortuga?"

"Sorry," he said.

I didn't think for a split second he was sorry.

"Sorry," he repeated. "That means
turtles or iguanas.
Do we want to pull our heads in, hide in our shells, and hope nobody notices us, or do we want to get out there and move, make friends if we can or fight like hell if we have to. That was the mistake my ancestors made. They were ready to make friends but they weren't ready to fight, and they wound up in chains. But enough of that. What do you think about playing
Let's Make a Deal
with alien critters?"

"Not my field," I told him. "You want the SETI people, don't you? Or maybe Spielberg?"

"No, Mr. Sloat. We want you."

I felt my brain racing. All I could do was ask the obvious question. "Why me?"

"Because you've experienced
dreemz
and lived to tell the tale. You emerged from the experience with your sanity intact." He shot a glance at another of the conferees, a black-skinned guy in a suit, the only one I'd seen at SRL.

The only suit, that is, not the only black-skinned individual.

The suit nodded almost imperceptibly, emphasize
almost
, and Salazar kept on going. "You'll hear from Mr. Armstrong shortly. But for now, I'll just beg your indulgence. Okay?"

"Okay." I don't think he caught my Señor Wences impression. "Before you go any farther, suppose you tell me how you know these Martians or whoever the hell they are, are out there."

Salazar said, "Miranda?"

Okay, it was Miss Saigon Olive Oyl's turn again.

The giant stringbean put a picture on the screen. I had no idea what it was, a neutron bomb detonator or a new model can opener. There was even a caption underneath the schematic that told me nothing.

"In attempting to resolve the Einsteinian FTL dilemma and achieve tachyonic acceleration," Miranda Nguyen piped—did I tell you that she had a reedy, almost incomprehensible way of speaking?—we felt that a first modest attempt at ultra-high-speed data transmission would be a suitable preliminary to sending matter through a Hawking-Murray-Disch destabilizing filter."