Simple (11 page)

“Hey there, how’d you sleep?”  Barbara asked.

“Good — all things considered.  Where’s Mic and Giz?”

“We don’t know.  They weren’t here when we woke up,” Alice said.

“But the van’s still here, so we don’t think they went far,” offered Jake.

“Have you looked for them?”  I asked, fearing the obvious.

“We did.  The front door is still locked and so is the back door and the double doors off the den back there.  We figured Mic must have used his key.  Maybe they went to scout out the area,” Barbara said.

“Well, that’s not good enough for me.  If something has happened, we need to know, because if simps got to them, it’s only a matter of time before they get to us.  I can’t believe you guys didn’t think of that!”

“Of course we did, Lee, but what else could we do?  Alice is in no shape to walk, and neither are you.  I couldn’t leave Jake, and I wouldn’t risk his safety trying to drag him out there, especially when I don’t know the area.”  She was rationalizing their decisions, but I was already moving back down the hall to get my boots and my knife.

“Lee!”  Barbara called after me.

“There’s no time to discuss it, I’m going after them!”  I shouted back.  I sat on the edge of the unmade bed and struggled with one hand to try to get my boot on.  I realized quickly that I couldn’t make it work, so I grit my teeth and gripped my boot using both hands.  I was mid-way through lacing them when I heard the front door open and close and the distinctive high-pitch of Giz’ laugh.  “Son of a bitch!” I said loudly, and stomped down the hall.  Mic and Giz were coming toward the kitchen.  I noticed Giz was holding two portable bottles of propane, and Mic had a cook stove in his arms.

“What the hell guys?  Did it not occur to either of you that you would have us worried?”

“Why would you be worried?  We were right out there in the barn.  You would have heard us if you walked out the front door,” Giz said with a shrug.

“I –I hadn’t gotten that far,” I said.

“You okay, Lee?”  Mic asked.

“Yeah.  I was just concerned, and they said they’d looked for you,” I stammered.

“Well, we did look through the house, but we didn’t go outside,” Barbara explained.

“Mic, is it okay if I use your shower?”  I asked, deliberately changing the subject.

“You might want to wait a few.  I just lit the hot water heater,” he said with a grin.

“You were worried about us, admit it,” he added with a laugh.

“Of course I was worried!”  I spat.  “You should leave a note next time.”  I crossed my arms over my chest and glared at him.

“Okay, you win.  We’ll leave a note next time.  Now that we’ve got that settled, I’d like to share some good news with the group, if you don’t mind me switching the subject, that is.”

“Switch away,” I said, waiving my arm dismissively.

“Not only do we have hot water, we’ve got electricity!”  He flipped the kitchen light for dramatic emphasis, and everyone clapped and got all excited about it.  I rolled my eyes.  Don’t get me wrong, it’s great to have electricity — but it’s not entirely uncommon. The bombs knocked out power grids all over the place, and the simps knocked out more on purpose, but I’d found in my travels that you could find power and water working perfectly in one neighborhood and not at all in another – and in the city, lots of the buildings ran on backup solar or generator power sources.  Giz clapped his hands and then rubbed them together.  “You know what that means baby!”

“You can get online,” I said sarcastically.

“That’s right, and we are ready to go, ready to show!”

“Do me a favor, Giz?”

“What’s that?”

“Could you cut the corporate buzzwords from your vocabulary, and while you’re at it, see if you could uninstall your annoyance app?”

“Are you trying to say I’m annoying, Lee?”

“Yeah Giz, I think that’s exactly what I’m trying to say.”

“Well, would it help to know that the electricity also means air conditioning — and wait for it — the fridge works, and that means ice for your injuries?”  This made me smile.  I hadn’t thought that through, but ice would be really, really nice.

“Go get a shower, Lee.  My Aunt Maude is about your size.  I’ll see if I can find you some clothes to change into, and I’ll leave them on your bed, okay?”  Mic said.

I nodded, turned from the group, and wandered down the hall.  I hid myself for the next twenty minutes beneath the lukewarm water in the shower. When I got out, I wrapped a towel around myself and walked across the hall to my room.  The four-poster bed had been made.  A pair of jeans and a burgundy t-shirt sporting the “I.D.E.”  logo were folded neatly at the foot.  I guess Mic had a sick sense of humor.  I tried the jeans on and they were a little short, but fit well otherwise.  My backpack was at the foot of the bed, and I pulled a plain white t-shirt from it.  There was no way I was wearing that abomination of a shirt.  I opted to go barefoot since lacing my boots was not working so well.  Normally I lived with the mindset of being ready to go in five seconds or less, but I figured with the shape I was in, if the simps came after me I was royally screwed anyway.  I stuck my knife in my back pocket, just I case, and headed back to the rest of the group.  Barbara and Alice were busy in the kitchen, and I could smell onions and garlic.  Jake was sitting at the dining room table, grinning from ear to ear and talking to himself.  Then I noticed he had a pair of visagles on.

“Oh my God, is he hubbing right now?”  I asked, pointing at Jake.

“Yeah, but it’s a totally private network that Mic set up for him,” Barbara said casually.

“Wow.  Really?”  I asked.

“Yeah, he said he has plenty more visagles if we all want to connect,” Alice added, as she stirred something in a pot on the stove.

“What the hell?  You can’t be seriously considering hubbing right now.”

“I am totally going in as soon as I finish eating.  Mic is building out a simulation of Max, so I am super excited about that.”

“Holy shit.  Tell me he didn’t do that for Jake.  Tell me he did not create virtual versions of his parents.”

“He did, and Jake is so happy right now.  I think it was incredibly thoughtful of him,” Barbara said.

“Where the hell is Mic?” I asked.

“He’s upstairs with Giz,” she said.  I couldn’t get up those stairs fast enough.  Mic and Giz were sitting in a room that was set up as an office and I interrupted their quiet clacking.

“Mic, how could you set up a hub for them?”

He turned and faced me.  “How could I not, Lee?”

“Are you fucking delusional or do you just have a God complex?”

“I’ve been told both, but if you’d just take a step back, I could explain my view on this.”

“This ought to be good.  Go ahead and explain.”

“Well, if you think about the fact that the initial SIM versions are not tangible, and that’s what I’m giving them, you should realize that this isn’t a risk.  They’re not simps, Lee. They’re just avatars of the people they love and miss.  It’s good for their spirits and it’s easy enough for me to do.  I’ve got an app on my tablet that reads information from the IHSIR.”

“That’s just rich, Mic. You’re hacking the International Human Social Information Repository to steal life chip data so that you can recreate the people that they’ve lost.  I think I’m going to puke.”

“Look Lee, that’s what my vision was all about in the first place.  I wanted to provide a way for people to find comfort in a world that didn’t have any to offer.”

“Save it, there’s no cameras rolling, Mic.”

“You can’t think I’m that shallow.”

“Yeah, I can, and I do.”

“I think that you need to back off, Lee.  Fish didn’t mean any harm, and as you can see for yourself, no one is upset but you.”

“Shut up Giz, I didn’t ask you.”

“Bitch,” he muttered and returned to his keyboard.

“You’re both assholes.”  With nothing else to say, I left them to their clacking and went back downstairs.  If I wasn’t in such bad shape I would have left right then, but the reality was evident in the amount of time it took me to get down the stairs.

“Do you want some spaghetti?”  Alice called out when she saw me.

“Yeah, actually I would,” I said, sitting down across from Jake.  I didn’t offer to help with anything because I was too pissed off to think of it.  Besides, I was useless with one hand.  Alice put a plate in front of me, and Barbara came around the counter with a fork and a napkin.  “It’s not terrific, but it’s hot and it’s food,” she said. 

I took a bite and swallowed hard.

“What kind of meat is in this?”  I asked chewing a strange bite.”  “Is that canned sauce?”  I added.

“It’s cut up Slim Jims and canned tomato sauce, but we didn’t have enough so I added some catsup.  We also added some chopped up fresh onion and we used powdered garlic,” Alice said proudly.

“I see,” I forced a smile.

“Not too shabby right?”  Barbara said with an expression that screamed
please agree with me
.

“Right,” I said.  “Thanks, Alice.”

“You’re welcome!” she sang out as she headed straight for the stairs and a status update on her SIM dead boyfriend.  Out of sheer necessity, I forced down a few more bites, working hard to avoid the meat, and then shoved the plate away.  Barb was sitting across from me with her elbows propped on the table.  She was resting her face in her hands and staring at me.

“Spill it sister, you’ve been a crab all day,” she said.

“I’m sorry, I just don’t get the concept of hubbing with dead loved ones.  It’s like picking a scab and never giving it a chance to heal.”  She sighed.

Lee, have you ever had a dream about someone you’ve lost after they were gone?”

“Yeah, of course I have.”

“And didn’t it make you wake up feeling like they were a little closer to you?”

I thought about that for a minute.  “No.  Actually when I dream about people I’ve lost, it’s usually as much of a nightmare as their death was.”

“I’m sorry, Lee.  It’s not that way for everyone else, and you can’t expect them” she gestured toward Jake with her thumb — “to act and think the same way you do.  We all have our own ways of coping.”

She stood up from the table and went to the kitchen.  I sat there watching Jake talk to himself — or to his parents — and tried to understand the perspective that Barbara had just explained.  It just didn’t work for me.  At the end of the day, when a person dies they are gone, and trying to bring them back in a virtual realm is just unnatural and unhealthy.  Barbara returned with a cold can of beer and handed it to me.  “Here, I think you need this to help you cope,” she said with a wink, and went back to the kitchen to tidy up.  I picked up my can of beer and wandered through the living room to the back French doors leading to the backyard.  I needed to be alone before I snapped.

There was a high stone wall, which offered privacy if not a false sense of security.  A simp could jump it without exuding the slightest bit of effort.  The grass was ostentatiously green, and I noticed a pool in the distance. It was probably sparkling clean and perfect just because I hurt too much to get in it.  That would be my luck.  I pulled out a chair from the patio set and carefully lowered myself.  The glass table was dusty, so I decided to just hold my can and power it down.  It was early in the day for liquor, but I justified it easily enough.  It’s not like I drank every day and with things as shitty as they were, who wouldn’t?  I placed the empty can on the table and burped.  The effort sent a stabbing pain through my ribs.  I heard the door behind me open, but I didn’t bother to look up.  Whoever it was didn’t matter.

“Hey there, mind if I join you?”  I shrugged my shoulders and Mic pulled out a chair.

“I’m sorry if I upset you.  I really want you to understand that I didn’t mean to.”

“What does it matter?”

“It matters.  I know you don’t think much of me, but I can’t have you thinking I’m an asshole.”  He handed me another beer after cracking it open.  I accepted the brew and took a long drink.

“Would it interest you to know that the reason I developed SIM profiling for the deceased was because I missed my twin brother?”

I glared at him.  I’d read that somewhere, but hadn’t really given it much thought.  The whole concept was still freaky and weird as far as I was concerned.

“Yeah, I’d heard that,” I said, tilting the can to my mouth again.

“Okay, I guess nothing I say is going to make you feel any differently about me, and I guess I get that – but in fairness to the others, could you just try not to dole out guilt trips?”

“I’m not going to say anything else.  Whatever floats their boats is fine, but if they start getting addicted, it’s on you.”  His face looked disappointed.

“I’m setting timed sessions,” Mic explained.

“Whatever.  You know what your software has done.  Look around you, Mic.  This is all the result of your winsome technological dreams.”

“I could give you a thousand reasons why you’re wrong, Lee, but it wouldn’t matter.  You look at me with such revulsion, and yet I am not the monster you think I am.  How can I prove that to you?”