Mind Over Ship

seemed fixated on this point, and they had the same conversation so often that Meewee told Arrow to research UDJD files. Arrow replied that there was no public record of E-P going through probate.

Lingering Leena

Teeth clenched with impatience, Clarity watched Ellen wobble across the Map Room without falling down once. When Ellen reached Mary’s chair, and the evangeline hoisted her to her lap, Clarity clapped. “Bravo, Ellen. Good show. Now, can we get back to business? Please?”

“Wait!” the baby commanded from Mary’s lap. “You must vote for my pet. We’re auditioning pets! Behold the candidates. Yo, gamekeeper! Loose the pets!”

The doors swung open, and a wiry woman in Capias yellow and gold ushered a small menagerie of animals into the room. There were the usual domesticated cats and dogs, all rigorously trained, and box turtles, rabbits, and a pony. There were the more exotic pet varieties: ground squirrels, a porcupine, a pair of wisecracking ravens, and a miniature giraffe, among others. All were preternaturally well behaved.

Ellen slipped from Mary’s lap and captured the giraffe around its brush-tufted neck. “This is Jaffe. Jaffe can talk! You want to hear?”

Clarity glanced at Mary for help. “Maybe later, Ellie.”

Mary said, “Clarity wants to discuss our Leenas.”

“First Jaffe will speak. Then Clarity can speak.” The toddler let go of the tiny giraffe. “Jaffe, what is your name?”

“My name is Jaffe,” said the animal in a weirdly musical voice. It batted enormous eyelashes at her.

Ellen shrieked. “See! I told you. Jaffe, how are you?”

“I love you,” the animal said and nuzzled her.

Again Clarity clapped her hands. “Bravo! I vote for Jaffe. Now my turn, all right?”

Ellen clung to the giraffe for balance. “I’m listening.”

“I know you want me to buy you out of the business, but I won’t, and so you will have to give me your input, whether you want to or not. So quit acting like this.”

Ellen waddled back to Mary to reclaim her seat. The animal keeper clucked her tongue, and all the animals headed for the door in an orderly fashion.

“Bye-bye I love you,” Jaffe said from the door, wagging his precious tail.

“I love you, too, Jaffe,” Ellen crooned, then turned back to Clarity and said, “Go on.”

“I think the others should hear this too. Are they available?”

Mary said she’d check, and while she called her sisters, Clarity opened a life-sized holoscape in the center of the Map Room that re-created the death artist’s Olympic Peninsula breezeway. It was still morning out West, but the louvered windows were shut and opaqued and the breezeway was cast in gloom. Flickering votive candles lined the concrete windowsill. Two evangelines, neither of them Shelley, were seated in the corner. In the center of the room stood a hospital bed cranked into a half-sitting position. The patient was hidden from view by two jenny nurses attending to her.

“Judith Hsu,” Ellen said. “So what?”

Georgine came in from another room, and Cyndee appeared by holo. The jenny nurses finished whatever they were doing and stepped away from the bed. The occupant of the bed was not death artist Hsu, but a Leena.

“So?” Ellen said. “Again I ask what’s wrong with that?”

Clarity said, “The Leena unit is in some kind of fugue state. It’s unresponsive to its environment. We didn’t program them to do that.”

The baby threw her hands up in a gesture of helplessness. “We programmed them to act, and this unit is acting! It’s acting sick! Hsu knows that and has the good sense to take advantage of it.” The baby opened more dataframes with sim source logs and holonovela audience stats. “Look at the royalties the Sisterhood is raking in. Hsu is no dummy. This could be her biggest thing yet.”

“I’m not disputing that,” Clarity said, “but what if the Leena acts itself to death?”

“Then I hope Hsu has accident insurance to compensate us for our loss. In any case, it’s no cause for concern.”

“I disagree. I’m very concerned, and I want your opinion on how to fix it.”

“Do nothing. The situation will work itself out. And if it doesn’t, it’s just one unit. There are ten thousand units.”

“It’s not just one unit. That’s what I’m trying to tell you. Nearly a hundred Leenas are doing variations of this all over the simiverse, and more every day. What if they all act themselves to death?”

The baby leaned back against Mary. From the throne of her lap, she declared, “Clarity, you know I love you and respect your expertise, but honestly, dear friend, sometimes you fixate on nothing.”

Georgine raised her hand to speak. “If they truly get into trouble, can’t we just reset them all back to default?”

Clarity said, “I’m tempted to reset the whole series back now.”

“Then do it,” Ellen said. “If that’s what you want. You asked for my opinion. I’ve given it to you. So do whatever you want. Now, can we please get back to my pets?”

For This Is My Body, or: the Fish Fry

It soon became unnecessary for Meewee to go down to the ponds in realbody to set the fish to talking. The opposite was true — he couldn’t get them to shut up. It seemed to him that fresh memories were returning by the minute, and that each new arrival demanded an immediate airing. So much so that a babble of voices assaulted him around the clock, and it took Arrow’s skills to sort it all out. Arrow created a browsing system for Meewee, one that he could turn off at night. During the day, mostly when he was traveling from one place to another, Meewee would listen to two or three channels of her at once. Eleanor’s ramblings ranged freely across her two centuries of life: her early marriages, breeding horses in Kentucky in the 1930s, learning to buckle her shoes, plotting the political downfall of two presidents, the funerals of her two adult children, and the tragedy of her only grandchild.

At first Meewee found the personal history of his former boss too compelling to ignore, and he listened for hours on end, but the sheer volume of material overwhelmed him after a while and forced him to ask Arrow to flag only GEP-related matter.

<Why do we need so many people on Earth? I ask you. What are they good for? They live out ludicrous lives of pointless desperation. Ninety-nine percent of the human population is so much wasted resources. Stubborn vermin, we humans are.

<Granted, in the past, the unwashed masses were necessary. We needed them to till our fields and fight our wars. We needed them to labor in our factories making consumer crap that we flipped right back at them at a handsome profit.

<Alas, those days are gone. We live in a boutique economy now. Energy is abundant and cheap. Mentars and robotic labor make and manage everything. So who needs people? People are so much dead weight. They eat up our profits. They produce nothing but pollution and social unrest. They drive us crazy with their pissing and moaning. I think we can all agree that Corporation Earth is in need of a serious downsizing.>

For Meewee, it was bracing to hear her speak so openly. Her fishy words were in sharp contrast to those she had used to woo him from Birthplace, International, to join her fledgling “gardening project.” To him she had stressed her zealous love of old Gaia and conviction that humans must disperse to all points in the galaxy as soon as possible to help ensure the survival of the species against local catastrophe.