Fantastic Metropolis

4. Reality Cubed

Lester Barton knew who he was because his flapper told him so. He knew where he was for the same reason. The invaluable device lay open in front of him like the two jaws of a large yawning clam. The single word MEMINI, repeated without a break, snaked around the lip of each unfolded half—around the screen that occupied one half, and the keyboard/voice-input panel of the other—just as the Memini corporation itself spanned both global hemispheres. Lester’s flapper gave him access to all the data he needed to orient himself to the two halves of his world: the “objective” half that included his public self, the world of clock and calendar; and the “subjective,” private realm of his memories, which he’d had personalized at great expense.

By and large, he found it comforting to be reminded by his flapper just who he was supposed to be, where he was supposed to be, and what he was scheduled to do when. It was he, of course, who made up his own schedule (with the help of his executive secretary, to be sure), but he wouldn’t have had the slightest idea how to structure his day if his schedule didn’t play itself back to him, repeatedly issuing its prods—in the form of stern or gentle reminders in his own unmistakable voice—until the demands were either heeded or else canceled and replaced with new ones. (He allowed only Sibyl to reprogram his flapper; she made all changes seamlessly, in the sounds of his own voice, supposedly—a voice that to him sounded frighteningly mature compared to how he sounded to himself whenever he was actually speaking.)

The security of having such a firm orientation to reality, of constantly being reminded (was it at five-minute intervals now or four?) of his coordinates in public space and time, was not to be taken for granted. Moments came on him, how often he couldn’t say—but right now, for example, he was experiencing a wild, loony desire to ignore what was next on his schedule. He felt like refusing to turn on the in-house 3V for his weekly yak with his Meminet psychoprosthetist—just as he had canceled meeting Gibbich and fat-ass Tingworth after letting them sit around waiting for three hours. For that matter, why not even cancel his periodic ID advisory? The hell with being assured every four-five minutes (or was it every three minutes now?) that YOU ARE LESTER BARTON, etcetera, etcetera, and so forth!

 

This would mean, of course, a plunge into the void... but the void sometimes exerted an enormous attraction—like the world of a treasure-strewn ocean bed that reveals itself with tantalizing suddenness just when the diver must surface for air. Horrendous as it was to experience the void, it was not really empty. If you held your breath and clenched your teeth against fear, shining things began to shimmer out of the depths, and you were no longer in your great big Persian-carpeted office in mid-Manhattan facing the blank gray stage of your 3V that stared at you reproachfully, impatiently, menacingly, focusing on you, with its blank grayness, the horror of the void. Lester’s heart began pounding as he kept his tongue locked behind his lips, as he willfully delayed uttering the scheduled command that would fill the box that faced him with the face of his psychoprosthetist.

The “skeeter” or “mosquito” in his ear, however, picked up on his mounting anxiety. His skeeter, which communicated with his flapper, now tripped his anxID, the special ID advisory that, in his “own” authoritative voice, was designed to rescue him from the void:

YOU ARE LESTER BARTON, FORTY-TWO YEARS OLD…. I’m not! I’m not even eighteen! he wanted to hurl back. I’m in my last term of high school and you bastards don’t want me to graduate! “Don’t worry, if you don’t graduate, it won’t be the end of the world!” you guys’re telling me. That’s okay for you old farts. You’ve “made” it, so to speak. But what about me? Do I become just another disgruntled ghost doomed like every other dropout to wander forever through the back alleys of Worldnet in search of myself?... YOU MUST NOT LET YOURSELF BE DELUDED BY ANY PASSING HALLUCINATIONS. YOU ARE THE DYNAMIC, INVENTIVE PRESIDENT OF THE MEMINI CORPORATION, WORLD LEADER IN MNEMONIC PHARMACEUTICALS AND HARDWARE WITH A CONTROLLING SHARE IN TWO-FIFTHS OF WORLD BANKING, INFORMATION, ENTERTAINMENT, AND COMMERCE…. He wanted to shout back his true name. It had just been on the tip of his tongue…. It was lost. Perhaps he would never find it again…. YOU MUST KEEP TO YOUR SCHEDULE, LESTER. YOU ARE ONE MINUTE BEHIND. YOU MUST NOW BEGIN YOUR 3V SESSION WITH YOUR PSYCHOPROSTHETIST, DR. PROSS. TO DO SO, SAY “DR. PROSS.” DO NOT DELAY, LESTER. YOU MUST NOW SAY —
“Dr. Pross!” snapped Lester at the gaping box in front of him. Instantly, a life-like figure filled the cavity, that of a man comfortably seated, also behind a desk, one arm slung casually over his chairback. Kindly eyes locked onto Lester’s from under bushy white eyebrows. A widening smile bespoke genuine concern, and a deeply etched forehead conveyed the impression of profound wisdom and experience. Lester did not really recognize him, but neither did his stereotypical features look strange. The man’s tranquilizing gaze began to expunge Lester’s heady urge to toy with the void. At the same time, anger against that benign face welled up in the president of Memini.

DR. PROSS: Hello, my friend! Well, Lester, time for our weekly session again, is it?

LB: You know damn well it is. Why do you have to ask?

DR. PROSS: Manner of speaking, Lester. Manner of speaking. My, we are a bit hostile today, aren’t we? Perhaps I’m only a brain on a chip, Lester, but we psychoprosthetists have feelings, too—behaviorally indistinguishable from your own, as you know.

LB: Behaviorally indistinguishable, yes. But to call them “feelings”...

DR. PROSS (sighing): So it’s always down to basics with you! Look, my good friend, I don’t mind a philosophical debate, but our lives must go on, mustn’t they? And we do have this identity problem that we’ve been trying so hard to deal with, don’t we?

LB: Cut this “we” shit, Doctor! Do you think you’re talking to a child?

DR. PROSS: Sorry, Lester. I’ll admit I was trying to be ingratiating. You caught me on that one. No offense intended, however. My interests, like yours, are entirely with the Corporation. I always treat you with the full respect due to the Chief Executive Officer of Memini—even at times when my probing seems to scrape too close to the bone.

LB: You seem to take lightly my questioning of what you condescendingly call “basics.”

DR. PROSS: No, Lester, I don’t. But I’d hoped we’d gotten—you’d gotten past the issue of my identity. You see, on the behavioral level you accept me as your psychological equal. Otherwise you wouldn’t argue with me about whether I were capable of “feelings” or not. With all due respect, Lester, this issue you’ve raised—more than once, now—about my who-ness versus my what-ness, is a smokescreen hiding the real issue I try to face with you, namely, the uncertain feelings you have regarding your own identity, the reality of Lester Barton.

LB: I suppose there’s a connection.

DR. PROSS: This wouldn’t even be an issue between us except for the fact that you’ve admitted it affects the way you function as head of one of the greatest conglobulates in the world, a man whose words and deeds affect billions of—

LB: Can’t you cut the rhetorical bullshit? Look, I think I’m handling things objectively well despite my subjective struggle with the reality-concept.

DR. PROSS: Lester, my good friend, first you admit having problems, and in the next breath you deny it. You yourself have admitted on recent occasions that you sense a certain “antagonism” directed at you by various members of the Executive Council, that you feel there may be a “conspiracy” afoot to undermine your authority, even that you’ve felt yourself “slipping” when presiding at meetings of the Council.

Lester had recorded those fears and suspicions as soon as they arose, whispering them into flapper, or discovering them afterward upon replaying a whole meeting. Marking them for periodic recall, he would finally burn them into semantic memory with a Pill—meminize them (Memini made the first and still made the best of the Pills).

DR. PROSS: Was it not, Lester, a feeling of sheer hostility that caused you just now to cancel a meeting with two vice presidents after having them wait an inordinate—”

LB: I had good reason to dismiss those dinosaurs! Sure I sense antagonism, but I think I’ve exaggerated those fears. You know, just to give my psychoprosthetist a little something to chew on.

DR. PROSS: But your facial expressions, your heartbeat, your hormonal activity, the electrical potential of your skin, surely all these signs that I read so clearly can’t be—now you know you must keep your wristband on, Lester, if you are not to invalidate our session.

LB: Sorry, Doctor. Just a nervous response.

DR. PROSS: You are a very nervous man, Lester. More and more nervous all the time. These things can’t be hidden from the eye of a trained psychoprosthetist.

LB: But I have found a way to deal with things, to keep my subjective problems from affecting my practical judgment.

DR. PROSS: Really? And may I know just what that might be?

LB: Sure. I treat my job as a game—like Planetopoly. Such and such local population to be won over to the establishment of a new manufacturing outpost, a rival product to be stripped of credibility, a dangerous patent to be bought up… in whatever way that can’t be refused, and so on.

DR. PROSS: The unreality you feel in private, then, is projected onto the public world—which in your mind is nothing but a gameboard?

LB: You sound so disapproving. What the hell’s the difference, if that’s how I manage to keep the lid on? Look, in business we all speak of game-plans, don’t we? What kind of reality do we attribute to “reality” when that’s the leading metaphor we model it with?

DR. PROSS: Your point is well taken, Lester. We can only approach reality through some sort of model. But there is a difference between the conscious use of a metaphor—“all the world’s a stage,” for example—and its complete acceptance on the literal plane. Your reduction of what you do to a “game” can have dangerous consequences if you take your metaphor too literally.

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Pross was closing in on him. How much of the office could Pross take in holographically from the edge of the 3V cabinet? Could he scan that wall, the bins? The bastard was a spy, he was sure. The corporate cyberspy supreme! What was it Pross had said?... That it shouldn’t be taking this long, this process of orientation to his new Personal Past? That his “resistance” to full psychoprosthesis was caused by certain residual organic-memory complexes? He was exactly right. On target, the old wall-eyed sonuvabitch! And to hasten the erosion of those protoplasmic minskies, they were stepping up the paperwork, feeding him these tekdecks of unnecessary documents that could be assimilated only if he doubled his normal Pill dosage.

Lester sat straight up in his chair, resisting with all his power of will the plunge through dark waters that landed him in one or another of those “residual organic-memory complexes” that confirmed him in his true identity. It was splendid to know that he still could know who he was, but the danger of such knowledge lay in its power to distract him from coolly playing the Game. To think straight about his future “moves,” he had to remain in command of all his intellectual resources as head of Memini, the role he had to succeed in if he were ever to go on to college. He knew that most of his teachers and administrators hated him, so it was logical that they had loaded the dice of the Memini-game against him, that they had turned his refusal to help DUSA [Democratic Union of Southeast Asia] into an international crisis designed to cause him to fail—since they would try to turn any action he took against him.

Who was it used to say to him, “Don’t worry, if you don’t graduate, it won’t be the end of the world”? Mophead, no doubt, his old Chemistry prof—one of those snag-brained ex-teachers of his who had been planted, barely disguised, on the Memini Executive Council. Well, if they were bent on having him fail, then he would “take out” everything with him. If they’d tipped the scales against him, it would give him a delicious satisfaction to use his power as head of Memini to destroy the entire “world.”

Reading his thumb, his desk drawer slid open. He glanced at the geological maps and the plain-paper sheets he had covered with detailed calculations. Nothing had been disturbed. He had been selective in his studies lately, working hard at geophysics—to determine how much focussed solar power would be needed, and in what range of frequencies it would have to be tuned, to crack the Antarctic ice sheet and drown the “world” in virtual tidal revenge that he wished he could take out directly on his teachers. Failing that, he could at least screw up Meminet, that Frankenstein Monster of theirs that the whole stinking gang of them were using as a means to screw him.

In fact, he thought, in only two more days he should have finished programming the entire sequence of events that would climax in the Grand Gurgle, a scenario that he would be able to unleash from his private pocket computer whose codes not Meminet, not even his personal secretary, could decipher. The whole vast complex of ISEC solar arrays was now almost completely in place above the Southern ice sheet, poised, ready to go. Hundreds of billions of virtual BTUs to be narrowcast down upon Antarctica. Within forty-eight hours of his order, the catastrophic collapse of West Antarctica would begin. Four hundred thousand cubic kilometers of ice translate into a global sea-level rise of over three feet. The disintegration of the Ross and Filchner-Ronne ice shelves would initiate the irreversible deglaciation of the entire zone, 3.4 million km3 of the cold stuff, initially raising all sea-levels by at least twenty feet. And then into the ocean would pour the pent-up fury of East Antarctica, twenty-six million cubic Ks of ice that would eventually raise the world’s oceans by another two hundred feet!

This, so far, he had managed to put in place without arousing any concrete suspicions in Meminet. He was going to fry Meminet’s brains! Given Meminet’s very own game-logic, any act that destroyed civilization must, at the very least, short-circuit Meminet itself.

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Memini will be available in hardcover from Prime Books in November 2003.