Sims (8 page)

Harry turned to the sim. “Did you have breakfast?”

The sim nodded. “Eth.”

“Are you hungry now?”

A head shake. “Oh.”

Ellis waited but gathered from the look on Harry's face that the show was over.

“That's it? He's your best and his entire vocabulary consists of two incomplete words and half his name?”

Ellis tried to keep the anger from his voice—none of this was Harry's fault—but still he heard it slip through. Because damn it, he
was
angry. When was he going to see some results? The sim sensed his emotion and shrank back a step.

Harry rested a reassuring hand on the creature's shoulder. “Seymour's doing the best that he can.”

Ellis wanted to beat his fists on his desk and scream,
It's not enough! Not
nearly enough!
Instead he sighed and leaned back in his swivel chair.

“You don't work them hard enough.” Maybe Harry had been around sims too long. An inherently gentle man, maybe he was identifying with them too much, cutting them too much slack. And maybe Harry was thinking about another sim, a special long-ago sim who was gone. “You're too easy on them.”

“What do you want me to do?” Harry said, his face darkening. “Whip them?”

“No, of course not.” What an awful thought.

“Not Seymour's fault if his hyoid's not up to par with the main breed's.”

The hyoid—always the damn hyoid. The little arch of bone that supported the tongue and its muscles was crucial to human speech. Ellis's new lines all lacked a fully developed hyoid bone.

That wasn't the only thing not up to par. “Ever hear of evolutionary synergy, Harry?”

The big man's brow furrowed. “I don't recall . . .”

“You wouldn't have. It's a new theory I've developed as a result of my recent work. It's the subtle, as yet unquantifiable cooperation between genes that have evolved together. It's so subtle that I can't prove it, but I know it's there, I know it's true.”

“What's that got to do with Seymour?” Harry said.

“Everything.”

“I don't understand.”

“I know.” He saw Harry glance at the plastic pill organizer on his desk—three compartments labeled AM, AFT, and PM. Ellis always left it in plain sight, to maintain his image as a heavily medicated eccentric. But the pills were for show. He'd been off medication for quite some time now.

Harry led the sim to the door, signaled for the handler, then closed it after them.

“Mr. Sinclair,” he said, approaching the desk. “I work your new breeds harder than the main breed, and—”

“I know you do, Harry.” Ellis stared at his hands, bunched into fists. “It's just that it's so damn frustrating.”

“
You
think it's frustrating? How about for me and my staff? We slave with these new breeds day after day and get nowhere. And we keep asking ourselves
why
. . . why does the company keep developing breeds that are inferior to the one we already have?”

Not the company, Ellis thought. Me. Just me.

“I can't go into that, Harry.”

“Then can you tell me what's wrong with the main breed that you want to correct?”

Everything!
Ellis wanted to shout.
Every fucking thing!

“I'm afraid I can't go into that either.”

“It has something to do with the sealed section then.” A statement.

The sealed section . . . only a handful of employees in the basic research building knew it existed, and even they didn't know that most of it was underground. No access through the main areas; the only entry and exit was through an enclosed loading dock on the northwest corner of the building. Sealed staff never mixed with other employees; they ate and slept where they worked, leaving only on weekends in enclosed trucks.

This he could answer truthfully. “No, Harry. It does not.”

Harry stood silent a moment. “Then what? I would think that I've proven myself loyal enough by now to be entrusted—”

“Please, Harry,” Ellis said, holding up a hand. “It's not a question of trust. It's a matter of . . .” Of what? What could he say? “A matter of deciding which way the company should go in the future. We haven't agreed—haven't decided on which way that will be. But when we do, I assure you, you'll be the first to know.” Ellis noted that this seemed to salve Harry's wounded pride. “But until then,” he added, “bear with the frustration. I promise you, it will be well worth it in the end.”

If
I succeed.

Harry's smile was lopsided. “I'll trust you on that.”

Harry left and Ellis was alone with the chrome-framed faces of his children staring at him across the desktop. Robbie and Julie . . . God, he missed them. Somewhere along the course of his consuming monomania he'd forgotten about them. He didn't know exactly when he'd metamorphosed from husband and father to something other, something distant . . . obsessed . . . a shadow . . . a ghost drifting through their lives, through his own life as well. But Judy and the kids hadn't been able to live with what he'd become, and so he'd lost them.

He wasn't bitter though. Just lonely. Didn't blame Judy. He'd deserved to lose them. But he was working toward getting them back—
earning
them back.

And when he deserved to have them call him father again, he knew he'd win them back.

But not until he'd fixed SimGen.

MANHATTAN

The green room of the
Ackenbury at Large
show was neither green nor roomy, but Patrick had it to himself. Half a dozen upholstered chairs surrounded a maple table that had seen better days; a small refrigerator against the wall sported a fruit bowl and a coffee maker. A wall-mounted monitor leaned from a corner near the ceiling; Patrick repeatedly glanced at it as he paced the beige carpet.

Reverend Eckert was running his line for the late-night network TV audience, but in a far lower key than on his own show. Instead of working himself into a red-faced, spittle-flecked frenzy, he was coming on as a calm, intelligent man with a mission: SimGen was doing evil by producing sims, and so it had to be shut down. Any products made by sims were the devil's handiwork and all God-fearing people should shun them.

Not good, Patrick thought, drying his moist palms on his slacks.

That was the role Patrick had planned to play—a calm, reasonable, compassionate counterpoint to Eckert's frenzy.

Now what?

Maybe this hadn't been such a good idea.

Upon leaving the sims this morning he'd placed a call to Ackenbury's offices. After being shuttled around for a good ten minutes, he'd finally found himself on the line with one Catherine Tresor, assistant producer. She didn't recognize his name, but when he explained that he was the attorney for the sims union, she jumped all over the idea of putting him on tonight's show. She said she'd have to run it by Alan first, but she'd get back to him right away.

She wasn't kidding. Less than five minutes later his car phone rang and he was scheduled for the show. But she told him not to trumpet the news. Alan wanted to surprise the Reverend Eckert.

As a result, Patrick had been ushered into an empty office when he'd
arrived at six—the show was recorded hours before air time—and kept out of sight until the Reverend had gone on. After a quick trip to makeup, he was led to the green room and left alone.

He wished Pam were here. He'd asked her to come along but she had to work late. She was involved in some Pacific Rim deal that would tie her up till midnight. She'd promised to watch at her office, though. She sounded as though she'd recovered from this morning. Patrick was glad for that.

“Mr. Sullivan?”

Patrick looked up. In the doorway he saw a short, owlish, clipboard-toting woman with large round glasses. She extended her hand.

“I'm Cathy Tresor.”

“And I'm wondering if this was such a good idea,” Patrick said, shaking her hand.

She squeezed his fingers. “You're not backing out, are you?”

“It's not as if you need me,” he said, wondering at the panicky look that flashed across her features. “I wasn't even on the horizon until I called this morning.”

“We do need you,” she said. Her blue eyes looked huge through her thick lenses. “
I
need you.”

“I'm not following.”

“I pitched your appearance with the Reverend as my own idea.”

Patrick stared at her. “Let me get this straight: You take my suggestion, pitch it to your boss as your own brainstorm, and pocket the credit?”

She bit her upper lip. “Well . . . yeah.” She looked away. “Sorry, but it can be hard to get noticed around here.”

“Sorry!” He laughed. “Don't be sorry. I love it! Just remember the name: Patrick Sullivan. You owe me one.”

She smiled. “I'll remember.”

“You do that.” Patrick liked her. Then he glanced at the monitor and sobered at the sight of Eckert's face. “And while you're at it, figure out a way for me to steal that guy's thunder.”

“Best way is to get under his skin. Goad him.”

“You don't mean that.”

“You kidding? We'd love it. ‘Let's you and him fight'—that's the Alan Ackenbury philosophy of quality TV.”

Patrick jammed his hands into his pockets and did a slow circuit of the green room.

Goad him . . . how?

Patrick's gaze came to rest on the fruit bowl and an idea sparked . . . a last resort if nothing else worked.

“Almost time,” Cathy said, glancing at her watch. “You go on after the next break. Let's get you in position.”

He followed her down a hall and to a spot behind a curtain just off stage. Patrick's eyes fixed on the blank monitor.

“You've got one segment,” she whispered as they came out of the commercial break. “Make the most of it.”

“For your sake or mine?”

“For both of us, but more for you than me. Think of this as an audition of sorts. If you make sparks fly, Alan will want you back, and that will be good for your cause.”

My cause? Patrick thought, then realized she was referring to the sim union. He'd never thought of it as a cause, just a case, a job.

He said nothing, though, because his gut had begun to twitch as Alan Ackenbury reappeared on the monitor screen. He opened the segment by saying that a last-minute opportunity had arisen to bring on a guest who could provide a counterpoint to the reverend's views.

Eckert muttered something to the effect that he'd understood he'd be the only guest. Ackenbury didn't seem to hear, or pretended he didn't, and introduced Patrick.

He felt Cathy's hand against his back, pushing him toward the stage.

“That's you,” she said. “You're on!”

And then Patrick was out in the open, feeling the heat of the lights, hearing polite applause from the studio audience.

The first few minutes were a blur . . . Patrick had always considered
Ackenbury at Large
a punning reference to the host's Orson Welles–class girth, and in person Alan was even larger than he appeared on screen. He didn't rise, but extended his hand across the desk as Patrick arrived. Instead of the traditional desk and couch set-up, the Ackenbury show seated guests on either side of its host who could then mediate the fray when they went at it. The barrier also prevented guests from coming to blows if the discussion became too heated.

Patrick was aware of Reverend Eckert pouting and sulking on the far side of the desk as Alan asked questions about the coming court battle to unionize the Beacon Ridge sims. Patrick didn't mention that the case was as good as stillborn with Boughton on the bench, simply reeled off the canned responses he'd spouted to the press since the news first broke.

He felt as if he were on automatic pilot at first, answering the questions by rote. But as minutes passed—minutes in which he noticed Alan Ackenbury's growing dissatisfaction with his flat, tempered answers—Patrick felt himself begin to relax. He remembered to mention the toll-free number and the website,
www.simunion.org
, and was casting about for a way to juice up the proceedings when his fellow guest did it for him.

“Admit it,” the Reverend Eckert said, pointing across the desk. “You work for SinGen.”

“Absolutely not,” Patrick said. “In fact, I expect SimGen to do its damnedest to stop me.” He quickly added: “That's why contributions to 1-800-SIMUNION are so vital.”

“You have no idea of what's really going on, do you? Or who is chairman of the board of SinGen?”

“Mercer Sinclair.”

“No! It's Satan! Satan himself—his very own self! Satan calls the shots in SinGen! And Satan has defiled the exalted holy clay of man by mixing it with the life stuff of a monkey. Through SinGen, Satan has defiled the pinnacle of the Lord's creation!”

“Depends on how you look at it,” Patrick said. “You're seeing the glass as half-empty. Why not look at it as half-full? Why not see sims as a lower life form that's been improved?”

“Improved? You can
not
improve on God's work! You can only defile it! Especially when you take the life stuff of man, the only being in the universe to possess an immortal soul, and degrade it by injecting it into a lesser being!”

“But a being with a shared ancestor.”

“Are you talking evolution? That's blasphemy! God created man
de novo
—that means completely new!”

“Then why do humans share all but one-point-six percent of their DNA with the chimps that sims are made from? If God made humans ‘de novo,' as you say, and wanted us to stand out from the crowd, wanted us to be the shining star atop the Christmas tree of his creations, you'd think he'd have come up with a new and special kind of ‘clay'—not stuff borrowed from primates.”