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COPYRIGHT INFORMATION
Copyright © 1976, 2012 by Brian Stableford
Published by Wildside Press LLC
www.wildsidebooks.com
CHAPTER ONE
It was late when I left the studio, and I’d missed the worst of the crowds. I’d also missed the worst of the afternoon stink because the sun was low and there were clouds blowing from the east. Around noon it had been hot enough to cook the garbage in the alleys, but it was cool now and the flies were settling down.
I walked to the monorail station with my hands in my pockets and my eyes fixed on the ground about ten feet in front of where I was walking. It hadn’t been a great day, and I wasn’t feeling like looking the world in the face. At long last, though, we’d put the knights-in-armor thing to bed. The feelers could move in on Monday and the techs could cut the tape inch by inch into consumer packages. Our part was done, and I had seen the last of all the fancy tinfoil for a good long while. The producer was due for another stroke of self-declared genius, but the one thing you could say for him was that he was inconsistent. Whatever he came up with would be a change.
Personally, I didn’t even believe that the travesty we’d just done would ever reach the public. Network might have no taste but they were sensitive as hell about clumsy E-tapes, and no matter how hard the feelers worked they’d never make those tin-clad idiots seem remotely human. It was all too absurd.
So much for chivalry.
When I got to the station there were ten minutes or so to wait. Twenty or thirty other people were there—almost all Network staff of some sort. They looked bored and tired, and stared at the tracks or the down line platform with a uniform glassiness. Even the ones that were talking didn’t look at one another. The whole scene was completely enervated. It would never be allowed to happen inside a sim. Simulation is far more alive than life.
I nodded to a couple of techs who worked along with me, on and off. They nodded back and didn’t smile. Keyboard staff spend so much of their time enveloped by the miracle of MiMaC that they no longer know how to communicate with one another. They take off their headsets and switch themselves off right along with their machines.
But there was one man in the loose knot who saw me and who moved over to stand close to me. His name was Jimmy Schell, and he’d recently moved in across the corridor from me in stack 232. He had a job with Network as a feeler, but they were still testing him out.
He was excited, which meant he’d dubbed a tape.
“I thought you’d’ve gone,” he said, without bothering to say hello. He presumed a lot on the fact that we were neighbors, but he was new into cap living and probably hadn’t cottoned on to the disposability of neighbor relations. The turnover is fast.
“Wrapping up King Arthur,” I muttered, leaving nothing in my tone to suggest that I might welcome his following up that particular line of conversation. I needn’t have bothered. He didn’t want to talk about me.
He opened his mouth to say something, as if he were in a hell of a rush to pour the words out, but nothing emerged. Jimmy had a stammer—not the kind of stammer which makes you repeat letters or syllables, but the kind which catches you up as you try to form a sound and stops you dead while your face goes red and you look like constipation is killing you. His mind seemed to be prone to the same kind of jamming from time to time. He didn’t live on his thinking. That’s what made him into a potential feeler. Feelers mustn’t think—it gets in the way.
“—Got a job,” he forced out at last, the G bursting like a little bomb and all the other sounds lurching as they toppled.
“In the can?” I said, fairly pleasantly—fairly pleased, come to that. I was glad to see the kid getting himself up off the ground. Six months and he could be a household name. I wasn’t likely to do any handling for him, but I could well be playing opposite.
He was nodding vigorously. “On the Net,” he said. “Next week.”
“Commercial?” I asked, trying not to let it sound like a dirty word.
“Beer,” he said. “On a beach. They had me in the sweatbox for—hours. God, it tasted good!”
“It would,” I said.
His face clouded slightly, though I hadn’t meant to sound cynical.
“You think—” he began. He had to stop. He didn’t know what I thought.
I shook my head. “It’s work,” I said. “It’ll show what you can do. Everybody begins the same way.”
They have to. Commercials live on naïveté even more than the plastic drama. It takes quite some simplicity of mind to be able to generate wild enthusiasm over some bland crud. It takes a kid who needs to feel good—can’t get through the day without it.
The people know it’s fake even when it’s honest, of course. They know that sun-bronzed Apollo pouncing about the beach is being puppeted by a bored handler while some callow kid radiates his glamour. But if it’s good, if it feels right, they play the game. They go out and buy the crud. They buy the plastic drama too. It isn’t real but it’s comfortable. It feels okay. Some even prefer it that way—they like the pap and can’t take it straight. Even the addicts of the authentic adrenalin high don’t live on an undiluted diet—it would blow their E-sodden minds.
So Jimmy was doing a real public service. Keeping the wheels of modern life in motion. He’d be a hit, I was sure. Up like a shooting star. And, by the same token, burned out as fast. Fame kills feelers. It dispels the simplicity of mind, the gaucherie, which is so essential to their ability to radiate good feelings.
The train came in and I stepped forward reflexively, short-circuiting Jimmy’s next remark even better than his stammer could have. I elbowed my way in through the sliding doors with practiced ease, trying to beat the comptechs to the seats, but it was no good. Standing room only. It wasn’t that late.
I grabbed a strap and hung hard, making the tendons in my wrist go rigid. As the train accelerated I was thrown back, then had to lean into the movement. Starting like that made some people sick but the monorail had a schedule to keep up, and even these days the trains ran on time. They really used their speed between stops.
There’s always a big demand for speed between stops.
Jimmy was behind me, and once we were under way I edged round to face him. He was looking at me as if he expected something. Congratulations, maybe. Or a funny story.
Anything to keep the word-flow going.
I grinned at him.
“I think I did it good,” he said, confidentially.
“Sure,” I said, nodding. “They give you a hard time?”
“No. I think they liked it. I didn’t have to go back in the—box.”
A thirst is a thirst. It wasn’t that they were paying him for, though they’d sweat him up to get it. They were paying him for gladness, for pleasure, for relief—all the things that go into feeling how wonderful a can of beer can be. That’s what they’d be sending out good and strong over the beach scene.
“You know,” he said, “I thought they’d need
