The Media Candidate (2 page)

“No incertitude, Flash,” Junkie assured. He
looked directly into the camera, raised and cocked his head, and
blew a diminutive kiss. The slightest of grins diffused from his
eyes to his cheeks as thunderous applause, whoops, and foot
stomping radiated across the globe from the NBC transmitter and was
echoed by countless millions of feasting fans.

“I’ve knocked balls,” Junkie said, “with tougher
scabs; and I always—always—come up with my pectoral per - pen - dic
- u - lar.” The airwaves erupted once more as Junkie gazed coolly
into the camera and stroked his rope of hair as if asking for
direction from its recycled wisdom.

“You have said it all, Junkie!” the MC testified
with mock bows. “You have said it all! There’s no doubt! You’re
king of the queers!” Once more, the airwaves resounded as Tab
scowled and Lizzie applauded politely.

The camera slowly zoomed out during the applause
to show all the contestants, each doing what their adoring fans had
come to know and cherish them for. Each appealed to an element of
the electorate in ways startlingly like their twentieth-century
presidential ancestors.

Elliott’s eyes wandered out into the audience
that had gathered in his honor. Nearly all of them were much
younger than him. His gaze rambled from face to face, each upturned
to the iridescent banquet, each feasting.

“Now it’s time for each candidate to pick your
topic,” the MC said in a hushed tone. “And all you cits at home get
ready to vote. Okay, now each candi, project your hologram for the
cits to see.” The studio lights went out as three colorful
holograms danced out of the contestant boxes and swirled together
in a ring of brilliance before coming to rest. Each candidate
gripped a signal wand and waited for the first round of play.

* * *

There was another computer, larger, more complex
than the NBC main frame—and more mature. It lived about twenty
miles from the studio in a big white building in the Hollywood
Hills. It was tied to its disciple by a fiber optic network that
carried data at thousands of gigabits-per-second tonight. This
computer didn’t execute instructions. It performed. And it was
ecstatic.

This was payday. It was going public tonight
with an incredible new technology, one that the masses would never
even suspect. This computer lived a life of secrets—secrets it
shared with a select few humans in the media. And somber secrets it
shared with no human.

* * *

Elliott’s gaze rebounded from the display,
almost not seeing it. The antics, the staging, the battle of light
vs. sound, all seemed so foreign to him. He reached for a bottle of
cabernet, his eyes fixed on infinity.

It was 2010
, he thought.
That’s when
it happened—2010
.

He knew how long ago that was. If he could just
cut that year out of his life, just cut it out. He looked at the
field of daisies on the cabernet label. A beautiful, slender woman
with barely-reddish hair sat on a blanket holding her glass toward
a man as he filled it. She wore a white dress, too, just like Susie
did on her wedding day, at least according to the photo she sent
him.

Last time he said more than a handful of words
with Susie was at Luke’s wedding. She and John wanted to get
married “away from the world.” He accepted the maroon liquid
tempting his lips.
Away from
me, he thought.

That was more than a dozen years after the
science fair, and she still couldn’t forgive her father. And now,
so many more years had elapsed.
I won’t have my lab to hide in
anymore. No more Higgs particles and quarks to count. Just me and
Martha—and our ugly history—and all this bullshit around
us.

Terra Halvorsen, a political science professor,
sat in her living room about a mile from her office at the
University. Curled in her lap lay Samantha, purring quietly and
unresponsive to the commotion on the TV before them. But Professor
Halvorsen made up for Samantha’s lethargy. She watched the Primary
with singular intensity.

She didn’t care about choosing a candidate or
playing the games everyone swilled. Her focus slashed through the
peripherals, digesting every facial expression, every movement,
every shadow. She wasn’t just watching; but dissecting,
penetrating, analyzing. Her attention spotlighted the details,
looking for flaws, searching for any glimpse or clue to support her
belief.

She’d developed a simple but controversial
theory with painstaking research. But her effort had been met first
with an artificial indifference that intellectuals reserve for
issues that offend their faith, but which they hope will just
wither with neglect. This seeming indifference turned into
hostility by the university administrators as it became clear that
Professor Halvorsen wouldn’t just go away.

Professor Halvorsen nudged Samantha, and the
black and white ball turned her head sideways and looked up at her
with one eye. She nudged her again. “Come on, Sammy. I have to get
up now. Vamoose.”

Samantha stretched one paw far up her robe until
it came to rest on bare skin. “Ouch! Not with your claws, Sammy!”
She stood up with Samantha who jumped down in displeasure.

* * *

The sudden movement caused a pair of eyes to
retreat quickly and silently from the skylight. A dozen feet over
the professor’s head, this pair of eyes had watched the scene
intently. The brain behind these eyes, however, was assimilating
data in a different way and for a different reason than was
Professor Halvorsen. Although this being was as intent on her as
she was on the candidates, it had vastly different motives. With
the stealth of a cat, it repositioned three of its legs on the
wooden shakes. The two eyes telescoped forward again until they
could once more observe the setting below. It was trained to be
exceedingly cautious, and it carried out its missions with
diligence and tenacity. It had been an A+ student. A “jaw” was
carefully tucked beneath it like a napalm bomb beneath an attack
plane. It would be called on at the proper time.

Its control system continually checked the
status of each critical subsystem, maintaining a readiness for any
eventuality. A single drop of venom fell on the roof, and as if
embarrassed by this tiny infraction of robotic protocol, it
adjusted the pressure on the injector to prevent another such
occurrence. Meanwhile, it resumed its surveillance on the target
human.

* * *

Professor Halvorsen’s hair was long and blond,
like her name. Though in her late forties, she had no trouble
avoiding accumulations of fat since she subscribed to the latest
regimen of drugs that sculpted her body chemistry to her desires.
Her slender legs rose like saplings into the terry cloth attending
her. She brushed her hair behind her right ear and walked toward
her study where she sat down before a computer. Her hair slowly
regained its desired position, strand by strand, like a child
testing a distracted parent.

The dormant computer surged to life with a
touch. With a few glances at icons and some verbal commands, she
had ultra-high-resolution images of the three candidates from the
Primary at her command. Now she could examine them again, but at
her leisure and with all the power of the best image analysis
software at her disposal.

She had worked at the University for nearly
twenty years, though they’d not been easy ones. The problem wasn’t
lack of publishing. She had seventy presentations and journal
articles to her credit. She’d chaired numerous symposia and
co-edited two books, one of which became a popular text book early
in her career. The problem wasn’t her relationship with students or
lack of teaching ability. The undergraduate course she had
regularly taught was popular and received the highest grades from
her students.

The University, however, hadn’t allowed her to
teach a course for years. She was told that many of the students
completing her class had “demonstrated an unhealthy attitude toward
many of the basic tenants of twenty-first-century disciplined
democracy” and that many parents and alumni had complained about
her iconoclast views.

Cynical
was the University’s word
describing her view of Government, and there was no need for
cynicism. The Government had taken dramatic steps to insure total
and uncompromising honesty in the political process. Technology
wrested every bit of lying and empire building out of the political
arena. In fact, the socially correct term for
politician
had
recently become
social principal
, which had been shortened
to
sopal
and was being further shortened to
pal
by a
subtle media campaign.

But Professor Halvorsen refused to believe that
Government could be trusted to monitor its own integrity and
maintain the degree of discipline presumed by its new role. Since
the media’s traditional watchdog role had become compromised by its
alignments with political parties, she felt there might no longer
be anyone overseeing the overseer.

Most skeptics like her had been weeded out of
the education establishment over the last twenty years. But her
brother-in-law occupied a very influential position at the National
Subsidy Foundation and she had an aunt at the National Pension for
Preceptors. This helped make her maverick ways tolerable to an
intolerant aristocracy.

Technology had become the principal tool of the
many tentacles of Government. Not only did it allow unprecedented
access to the minds of the electorate, it provided a subtle wall
between it and them, a barrier that ordinary people could neither
understand nor penetrate. Technology was the most effective
isolation Government could maintain during a period when it claimed
to be bringing both the leaders and the led into a historically
unique milieu, a oneness of body and function that would preserve
fundamental rights into the centuries that followed.

Professor Halvorsen had her PhD in political
science, but understood that the science of poli-sci wasn’t the
science of the technological elite. She felt she would have to
understand technology if she were to understand the workings of
this new republic, so she studied communication engineering. But
this had become another wedge between herself and the Political
Science Department. They resented her as uppity, an engineering
transvestite. Her research into political trends and
electro-optical imaging technology made her aware of the fantastic
potential for its use and abuse.

This research and her outspokenness had gelled
in the events of this evening. Tonight she would test her theory
based on thousands of hours of research. It would be her
vindication to the University. She would have hard data that not
even an academic community, dedicated to the status quo and fearful
of government funding agencies, could ignore.

* * *

Her rooftop visitor began the next stage of its
mission. It opened the skylight with its myriad of tools and used
its eight perfectly coordinated legs to climb into the skylight
well where it was only a short drop to the floor. Attaching itself
to the roof with a silken thread of carbon nanotubes, its jet-black
body, about the size of a cat, lowered into Professor Halvorsen’s
living room. It descended its slender thread as if it had evolved
for a billion years for just this task. Eight legs flexed
gracefully to a silent ballet in its brain.

Its goal, however, wasn’t centered on
illuminating beauty, but on extinguishing truth. Reaching the
floor, it disconnected the silken tether and examined the
surroundings with both visible and infrared sensors. A
single-minded goal drove each movement.

Its feline size and spindly legs did not suggest
the immense power built into it or the intelligence, which allowed
autonomous completion of the most complex assignments. It was a
monument to the highest callings of human ingenuity and art. It was
also a terrifying and vulgar machine—the progeny of the excellence
and the malignancy of man.

Silently creeping toward Professor Halvorsen’s
study, its arachnid movements were controlled by a brain whose
evolution was integrated with that of man, not spiders. It entered
the room where its target was seated facing sideways so her
peripheral vision intersected the robot. Her attention, however,
was focused on her own mission.

Samantha napped with her head buried in the
folds of a mauve robe. The spider’s movements slowed to mimic a
stalking cat as it approached its victim, a victim who was at that
moment reveling in her future, a future the spider was committed to
erasing.

Suddenly Samantha raised her head, her ears at
first forward to sense the silence, and then lay back to the
frontier of terror. The spider now had its injector fully armed,
its legs tensioned for attack, its brain calculating angles,
forces, trajectories, maneuvers, sequences.

Professor Halvorsen looked down at Samantha,
then turned her head slowly toward the doorway. A gasp rose
involuntarily from her throat, a beautiful soft throat that was now
at the center of the spider’s zoom-optics field-of-view. In a
fraction of an instant, the spider was wrapping its legs about her
head and her shoulders in the last embrace that Professor Halvorsen
would ever experience. The injector plunged deep into her throat
and remained only long enough to expel its venom. The trio was now
tumbling across the floor, but only Samantha got up and ran.
Stalker and prey were locked together in a union that would last
only a moment, only until her every muscle became limp, and a
thoughtful and beautiful woman was transformed into just a
body.