Complete Stories (147 page)

“Woof.”

It turned out to be a fun evening indeed. After falafel, guided by Jeff’s smartphone, they watched two fire trucks hosing down a tenement, cruised a chanting mob of service-industry picketers, caught part of a graffiti bombing contest on a freeway ramp wall, got in on some outdoor bowling featuring frozen turkeys and two-liter soda-bottles, and ended up at a wee hours geek couture show hosted by the wetware designer Rawna Roller and her assistant Sid. Rawna was a heavily tanned woman with all the right cosmetic surgery. She had a hoarse, throaty laugh—very
Vogue
magazine. Sid was an amusing mixture of space-cadet and NYC sharpie. Rawna’s goth-zombie models were wearing mottled shirts made of—

“Squidskin?” said Diane. “From animals?”

“Yeah,” marveled Jeff. “These shirts are still alive, in a way. And they act like supercomputer web displays.” He pointed at a dorky-looking male model in a dumb hat. “Look at that one guy in the shiny hat, you can see people’s posts on his back. He’s got the shirt filtered down to show one particular kind of thing.”

“Motorcycles with dragon heads?” said Diane. “Wow.” She controlled her enthusiasm. “I wonder how much a Rawna Roller squidskin shirt costs?”

“Too much for me,” said Jeff. “I think you have to, like, lease them.” He turned his smile on Diane. “But the best things in life are free. Ready to go home?”

The evening had felt like several days worth of activity, and it seemed natural for Diane to let Jeff spend the night at her apartment. Jeff proved to be an amazingly responsive and empathetic lover. It felt like they were merging into one.

And he was very nice to Diane over breakfast, and didn’t give her a hard time because she didn’t have any eggs or bacon, what her ex-boyfriend Roger had called “real food.”

“Are you a vegetarian?” asked Jeff, but he didn’t say it mean.

Diane shrugged. She didn’t want to be labeled by what she ate. “I don’t like to eat things that can feel pain,” she said. “I’m not woo-woo about it. It just makes me feel better.” And then she had to go off to work.

-----

“Stay in touch,” she told Jeff, kissing him goodbye as she dropped him off downtown, near the JetTram.

“You bet,” Jeff said.

And he did. He messaged her at work three or four times that day, called her that evening, messaged her two more times the next day, and the day after that, when Diane came home from work, Jeff was sitting on a duffel bag outside her apartment complex.

“What’s up?” asked Diane, unable to suppress a happy smile.

“I’ve been sharing an apartment with three other guys—and I decided it was time to move on,” said Jeff. He patted his bag. “Got my clothes and gadgets in here. Can I bunk with you for awhile?”

The main reason Diane had dropped Roger was that he didn’t want them to live together. He said he wasn’t ready for that level of intimacy. So she wasn’t averse to Jeff’s request, especially since he seemed pretty good at the higher levels of intimacy. But she couldn’t let him just waltz in like that.

“Can’t you find somewhere else to live?”

“There’s always the Daily Couch,” said Jeff, tapping his smartphone. “It’s a site where people auction off spare slots by the night. You use GPS to find the nearest crash pad. But—Diane, I’d rather just stay here and be with you.”

“Did your friends make you move? Did you do something skeevy?”

“No,” said Jeff. “I’m just tired of them nickel-and-diming me. I’m bound for the big time. And I’m totally on my biz thing.”

“How do you mean?”

“I sold my Goob Doll options yesterday, and I used the profit to upgrade my access rights in the data cloud. I’ve got a cloud-based virtual growbox where I can raise my own simmie-bots. Little programs that live in the net and act just like people. I’m gonna grow more simmies than anyone’s ever seen.”

“Were your roommates impressed?” said Diane.

“You can’t reason with those guys,” said Jeff dismissively. “They’re musicians. They have a band called Kenny Lately and the Newcomers? I went to high-school with Kenny, which is why we were rooming together in the first place. I could have been in the Newcomers too, of course, but…” Jeff trailed off with a dismissive wave of his hand.

“What instrument do you play?” asked Diane.

“Anything,” said Jeff. “Nothing in particular. I’ve got great beats. I could be doing the Newcomers’ backup vocals. My voice is like Kenny’s, only sweeter.” He dropped to one knee, extended his arms, and burst into song. “
Diane, I’ll be your man, we’ll make a plan, walk in the sand, hand in hand, our future’s grand, please take a stand.
” He beat a tattoo on his duffel bag. “
Kruger rand.
”

“Cute,” said Diane, and she meant it. “But—really, you don’t have any kind of job?”

“I’m going to be doing promo for Kenny’s band,” said Jeff. “They said they’d miss my energy. So there’s no hard feelings between us at all.”

“Are Kenny Lately and the Newcomers that popular?” Diane had never heard of them.

“They will be. I have seven of their songs online for download,” said Jeff. “We’re looking to build the fan base. Kenny let me make a Chirp account in his name.” Jeff looked proud. “I’m Kenny Lately’s chirper now. Yeah.”

“You’ll be posting messages and links?”

“Pictures too,” said Jeff. “Multimedia. It’s like I’m famous myself. I’m the go-to guy for Kenny Lately. My simmies can answer Kenny’s email, but a good chirp needs a creative touch—by me. The more real followers Kenny gets, the better the sales. And Kenny’s cutting me in for ten percent, just like a band member.” Jeff looked earnest, sincere, helpless. Diane’s heart melted.

“Oh, come on in,” said Diane. If it was a mistake, she figured, it wouldn’t be the only one she’d ever made. Jeff was a lot
nicer
than Roger, in bed and out of it.

-----

In many ways, Jeff was a good live-in boyfriend. Lately Diane had been ordering food online, and printing it out in the fab box that sat on the kitchen counter next to the microwave. It tasted okay, mostly, and it was easy. But Jeff cooked tasty meals from real vegetables.
And
kept the place clean, and gave Diane backrubs when she came home from working her cubicle at the insurance company. And, above all, he was a gentle, considerate lover, remarkably sensitive to Diane’s thoughts and moods.

He really only had two flaws, Diane thought —at least that she’d discovered so far.

The first was totally trivial: he doted on talk shows and ghastly video news feeds of all sorts, often spinning out crackpot theories about what he watched. His favorite show was something called “Who Wants to Mock a Millionaire?” in which bankers, realty developers, and hi-tech entrepreneurs were pelted with eggs—and worse—by ill-tempered representatives of the common man.

“They purge their guilt this way,” Jeff explained. “Then they can enjoy their money. I love these guys.”

“I feel bad for the eggs,” said Diane. Jeff looked at her quizzically. “Well, I do,” insisted Diane. “They could have had nice lives as chickens, but instead they end up smeared all over some fat-cat’s Hermes tie.”

“I don’t think they use fertilized eggs,” Jeff said.

“Well, then I feel bad that the eggs never got fertilized.”

“I don’t think you need to feel too bad,” said Jeff, glancing over at her. “Everything in the world has a life and a purpose, whether it’s fertilized or not. Or whether it’s a plant or an animal or a rock.” He used his bare foot to prod a sandal lying next to the couch. “That shoe had life when it was part of a cow, and it still has life as a shoe. Those eggs may feel that their highest function is to knock some humility into a rich guy.”

“You really think that?” asked Diane, not sure if he was just yanking her chain. “Is that like the Gaia thing?”

“Gaia, but more widely distributed,” said Jeff. “The sensei at the karate dojo explained it all to me. It’s elitist to think we’re the only creatures that matter. What a dumb, lonely thing to think. But if everything is alive, then we’re not alone in the universe like fireflies in some huge dark warehouse.”

Maybe Jeff was more spiritual than he appeared, Diane thought. “So, if everything is alive, how come you still eat meat?”

“Huh,” said Jeff. “Gotta eat something. Meat wants to be eaten. That what it’s for.”

Okaaaayyy, Diane thought, and she changed the subject.

Then one day Diane came home and found Jeff watching a televangelist. Pastor Veck was leaping up and down, twisting his body, snatching his eyeglasses off and slapping them back on. He was a river of words and never stopped talking or drawing on his chalkboard, except once in a while he’d look straight out at his audience, say something nonsensical, and make a face.

“You believe in that?” she asked.

“Nah,” he assured her. “But look at that preacher. He’s making those people speak in tongues and slide to the floor in ecstasy. You can learn from a guy like that. And I’ll tell you one thing, the man’s right about evolution.”

“Evolution?” said Diane, baffled.

“Say what you like, but I’m not an ape!” Jeff said intensely. “Not a sponge or a mushroom or a fish. The simple laws of probability prove that random evolution could never work. The sensei told me about this, too. The cosmic One mind is refracted through the small minds in the objects all around us, and matter found its own way into human form. A phone can be smart, right? Why not a grain of sand?”

I’m not going there, Diane thought. We don’t need to get into an argument over this. Everybody’s entitled to a few weird ideas. And, really, Jeff was kind of cute when he got all sincere and dumb. “Can we turn off Pastor Veck, now?” she asked.

-----

Jeff’s other, more definite, flaw was that he showed no signs of earning a living. At any hour of the day, he’d be lying on Diane’s couch with her wall screen on, poking at his smartphone. Thank god he didn’t know the user code for Diane’s fab box, or he would have been ordering half the gadgets that he saw and printing them out. His intricate and time-consuming online machinations were bringing in pennies, not dollars. People didn’t seem all that interested in Kenny Lately and the Newcomers.

“How much exactly does this band earn in a week?” asked Diane after work one day.

“I don’t know,” said Jeff, affecting a look of disgust. “What are you, an accountant? Be glad your man’s in show biz!” He held out his smartphone. “Look at all the chirps I did for Kenny today.” There was indeed a long list, and most of the chirps were cleverly worded, and linked to interesting things.

If Diane had a weak spot, it was funny, verbal men. She gave Jeff a long, sweet kiss, and he reciprocated, and pretty soon they were down on the shag carpet, involved in deep interpersonal exploration. Jeff kissed her breasts tenderly, and then started working his way down, kissing and kind of humming at the same time. He really is a dream lover, Diane thought. She was breathing heavily, and he was moving down to some
very
sensitive areas. And then —

“
Chirp
,” said Jeff very quietly. His voice got a little louder. “Afternoon delight with Kenny Lately and—”

“What are you doing!” Diane yelped. She drew up her legs and kicked Jeff away. “Are you crazy? You’re chirping me? Down there?”

“Nobody knows it’s you and me, Diane. I’m logged on as Kenny Lately.” Jeff was holding his smartphone. Rising to his knees, he looked reproachfully at Diane. “Kenny wants me to raise his profile as a lover. Sure, I could have gone to a hooker for this chirp. But, hey, I’m not that kind of guy. The only woman for me is—”

“Take down the chirp, Jeff.”

“No,” said Jeff, looking stubborn. “It’s too valuable. But, oh damn, the video feed is still—” His face darkened. Jeff had a tendency to get angry when he did something dumb. “Thanks a lot,” he snapped, poking at his phone. “You know I don’t want my followers to guess I’m not Kenny. You just blew a totally bitchin’ chirp by saying my real name. So, okay fine, I’m erasing the chirp of your queenly crotch. Sheesh. Happy now?”

“You’re a weasel,” yelled Diane, overcome with fury. “Pack your duffel and beat it! Go sleep on the beach. With the other bums.”

Jeff’s face fell. “I’m sorry, Diane. Please let me stay. I won’t chirp you again.”

Even in her red haze of rage, Diane knew she didn’t really want to throw him out. And he
had
taken down the video. But….

“Sorry isn’t enough, Jeff. Promise me you’ll get a real job. Work the counter at the Wienerschnitzel if you have to. Or mop the floor at the karate dojo.”

“I will! I will!”

So Jeff stayed on, and he even worked as a barista in a coffee shop for a couple of days. But they fired him for voice-chirping while pulling espressos, when he was supposed to be staring into the distance all soulful.

Jeff gave Diane the word over a nice dish of curried eggplant that he’d cooked for her. “The boss said it was in the manual, how to pull an espresso with exactly the right facial expression: he said it them taste better. Also, he didn’t like the way I drew rosettes on the foam. He said I was harshing the ambiance.” Jeff looked properly rueful.

“What are we going to do with you?” asked Diane.

“Invest in me,” said Jeff, the candlelight glinting off his toothy smile. “Lease me a Rawna Roller squidskin shirt so I can take my business to the next level.”

“Remind me again what a shirt like that is?” said Diane. “Those of us who slave in cubicles aren’t exactly
au courant
with the latest in geek-wear.”

“It’s tank-grown cuttlefish skin,” said Jeff. “Tweaked to stay active when sewn into garments. Incredibly rich in analog computation. It’s not a fashion statement. It’s a somatic communications system. Just lease it for two weeks, and it’ll turn my personal economy around. Please?”

“Oh, all right,” said Diane. “And if you don’t get anywhere with it, you’re—”

“I love it when you lecture me, Diane,” said Jeff, sidling around the table to kiss her. “Let’s go into the bedroom, and you can really put me in my place.”

“Yes,” said Diane, feeling her pulse beating in her throat. Jeff was too good to give up.

So the next day, Jeff went and leased a squidskin from Rawna Roller herself.