Future Tense Fiction Page 18

  Members crowd the entrance hallway. They’re grabbing coats and hats, putting on galoshes, summoning cars or getting ready to brave the snow on foot. I recognize a few Members, and when they recognize me, their faces become alternately ashen and curious. I push through the cluster of bodies, going from the entrance hallway to the living room. The place is a fire hazard. Twenty people are sitting on four couches arranged at odd angles. The light is low, and the air smells of pot. Empty wine glasses and beer bottles are everywhere. Over the House speakers, InfiniteIncome is rapping about deindustrialization, and a video from his new album, Eternal Recurrence, is being projected against one of the white walls.

  In the kitchen, I find them.

  Farhad is wearing augmented reality glasses, directing an army of helpers, coordinating the effort with a piece of software he wrote for his restaurant. His beard and hair are bound with colorful ties. His Mandelbrot-patterned bandana is soaked with sweat. He’s drying dishes and taking sips from an oversize glass of red wine. Infinite-Income is now rapping about the racial wealth gap from a spherical speaker-robot rolling around the kitchen island.

  Everyone is in a great mood. They’re doing dishes by hand. Our dishwasher has been broken for six weeks, and the Federation-run robot factory in Arizona that’s supposed to make us a new one is backed up six months fulfilling orders—a perfect advertisement for McGee’s platform. And McGee is, of course, helping the dish crew, wearing yellow rubber gloves and a Pimento House sweatshirt over her sleek campaign dress. A few videodrones linger, probably picking up b-roll for her next campaign video.

  “McGee!” I say, too loud.

  She looks startled and almost drops a plate. “Hey, Viola,” she says. “Awesome to see you!” as if we’re best friends.

  “What are you doing here?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You know what I mean.”

  “I was invited here.”

  Farhad steps between us. “Viola, back off.”

  “Don’t tell me to back off, traitor.”

  “How am I a traitor?”

  “You invite McGee into my House.”

  “Your House?” Farhad says. “First of all, it’s an honor for the Chairperson of the Federation to visit any House.”

  McGee says, “Really, I’m the one who’s honored. Pimento is one of the oldest and most storied Houses in—”

  “And second of all, I was not the one who—”

  “You timed this visit to mess with my trip to Rochester,” I say. “To embarrass me. I was invited to one of the First Five, and you found that threatening.”

  McGee frowns her cute frown and steps forward so one of the videodrones can get a good view of her. “I don’t know what I said or did to make you so angry, Viola, but you’ve been impugning my character for months.”

  “You want to gentrify the Federation. To erase people you think of as undeserving. Your policies are gonna reintroduce all the poisons of the World into our—”

  She holds up her gloved hands. “Viola, please believe me when I say I understand your fears. And I recognize that your history as a recovering addict informs the way you’re hearing my proposals, but—”

  “My history as a recovering addict?”

  “—it’s so important to me that you accept my good faith and—”

  “Fucking bitch,” I say, moving in fast.

  McGee gasps, raises her hands to defend herself, and we’re grappling over the counter, and water is filling up the sink, and everyone on the dish crew is frozen, and Farhad moves in to pull me away from McGee, but can’t get between us, and McGee is a head shorter than me but man she’s strong, and we move sideways, and the sink overflows, great sheets of water coming down, and I slip on wet linoleum, and I’m on my butt near the compost bin, and McGee’s hair has been pulled out of its hair tie, and her gray dress is slightly ripped, and her green eyes are on fire, ready for round two. I stand up. My ass hurts. I’m ready too. I’ve already blown the election, so I might as well drag her down with me. If she embarrasses herself, maybe the Activists will win.

  “Viola!” comes a voice.

  Grace is standing at the entrance of the kitchen. She’s wearing clogs, pregnancy sweatpants, a Federation Review of Books T-shirt, Artist pin on her shirt. One of her hands, its nails bright yellow, rubs her huge third-trimester-big belly. Her eyes are puffy, as if she has woken up from an uncomfortable sleep or has been crying. Her presence makes me realize how shamefully I’m acting. Farhad turns off the faucet; he and his helpers start mopping up the spilled water. My mind finally lets me hear what Farhad was trying to tell me.

  He wasn’t the one who invited McGee into Pimento House.

  He wasn’t the traitor.

  We move in silence, Grace half waddling in her clogs. Her feet have been swollen lately. Her back hurts all the time. Our Housemates give us space as we climb to the second floor. Grace is dejected. She has been dejected a lot lately. The past year has sucked for her. Her mother dying from cancer, the lukewarm reception of her second novel, the tribulations of a difficult pregnancy—every week has brought new problems. And I’ve been a less-than-supportive partner, on the road for months. I hoped the baby would solve our problems. Before the campaign season got going, we even toured child-friendly Houses in wine country, away from the tent camps, away from the decimated infrastructure of the stagnating cities. A vineyard near Seneca Falls even extended us an invitation to join. We laughed at the thought of two teetotalers helping to operate a Federation vineyard. But I was wrong. The baby won’t save us. I abandoned her when she needed me, and she lashed out.

  We climb a second set of stairs and arrive at the turret office. The turret is Grace’s domain. She’s House Accountant and also does all her writing here. She writes longhand and has boxes full of index cards where she composes elaborate notes. The big metal desk in the middle of the room is covered with her notebooks and printouts. We sit on the purple futon, near the window, moved here from Grace’s old bedroom years ago.

  Tears crawl down my face. “I’m so sorry.”

  “Look,” she says. “I’m the one who should apologize.”

  “I wasn’t… I should have… ”

  “I should have told you about Joan.”

  “I understand why you didn’t. You wanted to hurt me.”

  “No, silly. I would never want to hurt you. It’s just, we ran into each other at a Chat ’n’ Chew at Riot House and—”

  “You were at that one?”

  “Yeah, and we got to talking and it happened super last-minute, the arrangements. And I told myself you knew.”

  “What?”

  “We told you Joan was coming last week, and when you didn’t respond I thought it just… I don’t know…” I check my inbox; it’s true. “I guess I convinced myself you didn’t care. At some level, I knew you missed it, but you were away, and I was afraid to message you again. I’m sorry I hurt you.”

  “I do feel hurt,” I say, “but I understand why you did it. I get that you’re mad at me.”

  She narrows her eyes. “I’m not mad at you.”

  “I’ve been away. I’ve been a bad partner.”

  “You’ve been campaigning. Where else would you be?”

  “But if you’re not mad at me, why would you invite her?”

  “Because I support her.”

  “What?”

  Grace sighs. “Joan is right. The Federation is falling apart. We need to make changes if we’re going to survive. It’s crazy. We, like, live in the middle of an open-air homeless shelter, while every month Farhad is pulling in thousands of dollars from—”

  “Don’t talk to me about Farhad.”

  “Forget Farhad, then. I got a job offer.”

  “What?”

  “I was asked to help train the writing algorithm for the next season of Zombie Fortress.”

  “Since when do you care about video games?”

  “I would be writing, sort of. Helping make stories.”
>
  Over the past 15 years, Grace wrote two long novels. The first, a philosophical adventure about automation and underemployment, was well reviewed. The second, an experimental novel about climate change refugees, didn’t do nearly as well. The second book would (I tried to reassure her) just “take more time” to find its audience. She’s supposed to be working on a third book, a set of linked stories about the heat death of the universe.

  “You’re supposed to be writing your book,” I say.

  “My last book was read by, like, 50 people.”

  “You said you were going to ‘change American literature.’”

  “Look, I’m 38, and I’m… I’m tired of feeling responsible for the proclamations of my younger self. I just want to help machine learning algorithms tell stories people enjoy. Fun stories.”

  “You want to make video games? OK, you can submit an addendum to your Five-Year Plan. People do it all the time and—”

  “That’s not the point, Vee. I turned down the job.”

  “You’re not making sense.”

  “I was too ashamed to tell anyone about the offer.”

  “Why?”

  “The job paid well. Really well.”

  “And?”

  She says, “And I’m sick of these Federation taboos against working in the labor market. Would it be so bad if I make a little money and keep some of it for myself? For us?”

  “You don’t sound like yourself.”

  “I just… when we were touring Houses, I realized I’ve been living here since I was in college. If I’m going to be living in a Basic House when I’m 60—”

  “You want to leave the Federation?”

  “Listen to me. I love the Federation. I want to stay in the Federation. But if that’s going to be a viable option, we need to make the Federation better. We need to make improvements, just like Joan says. We’re growing too fast, letting in too many people too quickly and—”

  “I can’t believe what you’re saying.”

  “Stop interrupting me. I hate when you do that. Look, I get that the World is going to shit—the Stagnation has been hard for everybody—but the Federation isn’t a substitute for the welfare state.”

  “What welfare state? When they ‘gave’ us the Basic, they took everything else away.”

  “What I’m just saying is, we can’t absorb all the World’s addicts, homeless, underemployed, and mentally—”

  “You’re the one who brought me into the Federation.”

  “Of course I did. I liked you. You were great. Are great.”

  “If you had to do it again, would you?”

  “What?”

  “Would 38-year-old Grace still invite the person I used to be into Pimento House?”

  Grace hesitates. “That’s a totally loaded and unfair question.”

  “But it’s a question I’m asking you to answer.”

  “You’re impossible sometimes, Vee. You came into the Federation during a very different time. You’ve seen the changes, just like me. You’ve met the sort of people I’m talking about. We’re not a federation of halfway houses. We’re—”

  “I hear Artists talk about ‘those sorts of people’ all the time, and it’s always code for ‘those unworthy people.’”

  “You don’t really believe I think that, do you?”

  “You’re the one who told me the Federation was a model for a better world.”

  “A model for that better world—not the World itself. It doesn’t make sense to just, like, unilaterally make everyone in the World a Member and then say our work is done. The point is to show what’s possible if we work together, helping every Member do the slow, careful, deliberate work of personal transformation and self-improvement. It’s not enough to survive, Vee. We should make something nice in this life.”

  “You… you voted against McGee during the last cycle.”

  “I changed my mind.”

  My Grace wouldn’t change her mind, not that way. She can’t mean what she’s saying. I wipe away my tears. My phone buzzes. I should ignore the alert but can’t help myself. It’s my Election Dashboard. Somehow, in the past half hour, I’ve pulled ahead of McGee. On the Federation Bulletin, I see what has happened. Both McGee and me, we’ve bled supporters, but McGee has lost more than me, and I’ve gotten unexpected support from Activists and Independents. They like my aggressive defense of the Federation. The Bulletin discussion boards are a bloodbath.

  “Look,” I say, showing Grace my phone.

  “What?”

  “I’m in the lead. I think I might win.”

  Grace sighs. “Congratulations?”

  “I’ve worked so hard to get here. Is that all you can say?”

  “Is this the conversation you want to have right now?”

  “What I want to know is, why you don’t believe in me?”

  “Look, Vee, you know how much I love you.”

  “But you don’t love my success.”

  “What are you talking about? I think Joan is right, and you’re wrong. It’s not about you—it’s about your ideas.”

  She looks out through the window, across the street, at the tents being buried alive by snow, and her eyes fill with a new wave of tears. Across the street, cooking smoke rises into the night. Protected by a blue tarp, an indigent group—men, women, children, old folks—huddle around the man who approached me outside, watching something together on his MacBook, laughing. I see now what has come between me and Grace. This has been the view from her office, every day, for years, and my dear, sensitive Artist wife can’t handle the visible signs of the World’s long Stagnation.

  But I know I can fix what is broken between us. We can’t all face the truth, but it’s my job, the job of people like me, to face the ugliness outside so others don’t have to. We’ll move to a child-friendly House. She’ll have the kid, have a nicer view from her window, finish her book, and in time she’ll come to see things my way again. I’m ready to forgive her, too, for stabbing me in the back, but only if she’ll finally recognize that I’m right.

  Sitting on the purple couch, looking into her big, brown, wet eyes, I’m sure she will. Yes, together we’ll enfold this blight into our warm embrace, dispel the World’s despair, build a new World, a better World, one where people can finally care about one another, a World where the Federation will be universal, and all of us—to the last person—will be Members.

  Mika

  Model

  Paolo

  Bacigalupi

  The girl who walked into the police station was oddly familiar, but it took me a while to figure out why. A starlet, maybe. Or someone who’d had plastic surgery to look like someone famous. Pretty. Sleek. Dark hair and pale skin and wide dark eyes that came to rest on me, when Sergeant Cruz pointed her in my direction.

  She came over, carrying a Nordstrom shopping bag. She wore a pale cream blouse and hip-hugging charcoal skirt, stylish despite the wet night chill of Bay Area winter.

  I still couldn’t place her.

  “Detective Rivera?”

  “That’s me.”

  She sat down and crossed her legs, a seductive scissoring. Smiled.

  It was the smile that did it.

  I’d seen that same teasing smile in advertisements. That same flash of perfect teeth and eyebrow quirked just so. And those eyes. Dark brown wide innocent eyes that hinted at something that wasn’t innocent at all.

  “You’re a Mika Model.”

  She inclined her head. “Call me Mika, please.”

  The girl, the robot…this thing—I’d seen her before, all right. I’d seen her in technology news stories about advanced learning node networks, and I’d seen her in opinion columns where feminists decried the commodification of femininity, and where Christian fire-breathers warned of the End Times for marriage and children.

  And of course, I’d seen her in online advertisements.

  No wonder I recognized her.

  This same girl had followed me around on my laptop, dog
ging me from site to site after I’d spent any time at all on porn. She’d pop up, again and again, beckoning me to click through to Executive Pleasure, where I could try out the “Real Girlfriend Experience™.”

  I’ll admit it; I clicked through.

  And now she was sitting across from me, and the website’s promises all seemed modest in comparison. The way she looked at me…it felt like I was the only person in the world to her. She liked me. I could see it in her eyes, in her smile. I was the person she wanted.

  Her blouse was unbuttoned at the collar, one button too many, revealing hints of black lace bra when she leaned forward. Her skirt hugged her hips. Smooth thighs, sculpted calves—

  I realized I was staring, and she was watching me with that familiar knowing smile playing across her lips.

  Innocent, but not.

  This was what the world was coming to. A robot woman who got you so tangled up you could barely remember your job.

  I forced myself to lean back, pretending nonchalance that felt transparent, even as I did it. “How can I help you…Mika?”

  “I think I need a lawyer.”

  “A lawyer?”

  “Yes, please.” She nodded shyly. “If that’s all right with you, sir.”

  The way she said “sir” kicked off a super-heated cascade of inappropriate fantasies. I looked away, my face heating up. Christ, I was 15 again around this girl.

  It’s just software. It’s what she’s designed to do.

  That was the truth. She was just a bunch of chips and silicon and digital decision trees. It was all wrapped in a lush package, sure, but she was designed to manipulate. Even now she was studying my heart rate and eye dilation, skin temperature and moisture, scanning me for microexpressions of attraction, disgust, fear, desire. All of it processed in milliseconds, and adjusting her behavior accordingly. Popular Science had done a whole spread on the Mika Model brain.

  And it wasn’t just her watching me that dictated how she behaved. It was all the Mika Models, all of them out in the world, all of them learning on the job, discovering whatever made their owners gasp. Tens of thousands of them now, all of them wirelessly uploading their knowledge constantly (and completely confidentially, Executive Pleasures assured clients), so that all her sisters could benefit from nightly software and behavior updates.