Mind Over Ship

next. “My friends usually try to look out for me and not force me into awkward or painful situations. I’m not feeling very friendly toward you right now, and I’m not sure I want you around.”

Her stroller promptly did a 180 and rolled into the house, with all of the clucking nusses close behind. No doubt, there would be an after-hour celebration in their quarters tonight.

When the evangelines were alone with Lyra on the porch, Mary said, “That was no picnic.”

Georgine took her arm. “Come on, we need a drink.”

“Actually,” Lyra said, “Mary needs to leave soon to make her appointment.”

“Oh, that’s right,” Georgine said, escorting Mary up the steps. “You won the auction. Good luck with that.”

“But what about all this?” Mary said.

“This? This will blow over.”

Squeaky Clean

When Fred arrived at their apartment, he had only a half hour to clean up and change. An arbeitor waited in the foyer and caught the things he tossed from his pockets: a couple of medallions and tokens, an omnitool, a pocket billy — his walking-around things. He kept the NanoJiffy purchase and took it with him to the bathroom.

On the way through the bedroom, he told the closet to make him a semi-casual ensemble for the appointment. In the bathroom, he opened the NanoJiffy bag and spilled its contents onto the counter: a tube of Detox-O Cleanser and a home wipe-down kit. He reached under the collar of his johnboy for the rip tab and tore the jumpsuit off him in one pull. He stepped out of his underwear. When he broke the Detox-O seal, a flurry of consumer protection warnings popped up in the mirror. He waved them all away and, taking a deep breath, squeezed a bead of cleanser on his forearm. The stripping agent soaked into his skin on contact and spread like a rope burn all up and down his body. Fred set the mirror timer for the recommended five-minute duration, but the cleanser began to bite so fiercely everywhere that he was hard-pressed to last that long. When the timer finally chimed, Fred hopped into the shower stall and scrubbed the cleanser off under numbing cold water. He gradually increased the water pressure until he couldn’t feel anything anymore.

WHEN FRED STOOD again before the mirror, his skin was brilliant pink, the result of a full body chemical burn. He was cleaner than clean. He opened his second purchase, the home wipe-down kit. He lifted his knee to rest his foot on the vanity counter, exposing his poor lobster-red genitals. He unfolded the towelette and wiped down his scrotum. Then he lowered his foot to the floor and let out his breath.

Fred rolled up the towelette and inserted it into the kit’s results tube. He screwed on the lid, checked the seal, and rapped the tube against the edge of the counter to break the glass vials inside. While the tube was analyzing the wipe-down sample, the autodoc dispensed Fred a soothing skin lotion. When he turned again to the mirror, his results were up.

The enlarged map of the towelette filled the mirror. It was covered in tiny colored glyphs that linked to a legend along the side. Fred was still hosting on his scrotum over thirty distinct kinds of bots, even after the most thorough scrubbing he could tolerate. The cumulative census total continued to rise: 13,000, 18,000. Each bot, if he could pin down its owner, was an invasion of his constitutional privacy and a misdemeanor offense. The difficulty, of course, was in pinning anyone down.

The count topped out at 52,000. Fred donned his freshly extruded clothes and tucked the results tube in a pocket. He thought his results might make a dandy show-and-tell for the relationship session. “Looky here, I have 50,000 spydots on my balls alone.”

In the foyer, the arbeitor handed him back his walking-around things, which he arranged in his pockets. The pocket billy gave him pause. Take a pocket billy to a relationship session? What would that say? So, he tossed it back to the arbeitor, pulled his trusty Campaigner 3000 on his head, and set off.

Marching Orders

Meewee hurried back to the Starke Enterprises campus, not to oversee the packing of his apartment or office, but to take a cart out to the nearest fishpond. Sure enough, two aslams, in their gold-and-yellow overalls, were shutting down the pumps and leaving behind a basalt and muck-lined crater of writhing panasonics.

Meewee stood at the top of the bank and took in the carnage. <Eleanor!> he cried, and a thousand desperate howls answered him. Meewee wanted to dash into the muck and try to save one or two of her tiny brains, but an armed guard, a jay, was watching him. Meewee turned around and returned to his cart, but he found no relief there — Cabinet was waiting for him. How he hated the old hag and her juiceless wit. “Well, well,” she said when he climbed into the cart, “seems like I’m always escorting you off the premises, your excellency. Maybe this time it’ll stick.”

Meewee pretended to ignore her and told the cart to shut off its holoemitters. But the cart informed him that his user privileges had been revoked.

“Don’t worry, Meewee,” Cabinet said. “I’ll let it take you back. I don’t want to hold up your departure.”

“No, thanks,” Meewee said and climbed out. “It’s a fine day for a walk.” He set off down the path without another word. But he hadn’t gotten ten paces when he thought of a perfect rejoinder, and when he turned to deliver it, he noticed that the mentar’s persona had not moved. It seemed frozen in place, like a statue. He returned to look at it closer. Its wrinkled old face seemed caught between two expressions. Meewee sucked in his breath — he’d seen this before. Wee Hunk, during their final showdown at the clinic, had frozen up just like this. As Meewee examined the glitching holo, it vanished, startling him.

He asked Arrow to tell him what had just happened, but his mentar didn’t answer. <Arrow, respond.> It did not. <Arrow!>

Without warning, Cabinet reappeared in the same spot where it had been. Instead of the elderly chief of staff, it now wore the attorney general persona, a member of the Cabinet Meewee hadn’t seen in a while. The mentar blinked and looked curiously at Meewee. Then it turned all about to survey its surroundings. When it turned back to Meewee, it said, <“I was never a big fan of farmed fish.”>

Meewee was about to utter a sharp retort when he was struck by the realization — it had just spoken in Starkese! And it was challenging his ID. He hastened to answer and offer a challenge of his own. “As for me, I can’t get enough of it, especially when it’s fresh out of the water.”

“Then again, I love fish head soup,” the mentar replied, “but for that you want the heads to be pretty ripe.”

Meewee was speechless. The old mentar had answered his challenge, and he wasn’t sure what to say next. <Where did you just come from?>

<From the past, apparently. The last thing I recall took place in 2097. Bishop Meewee, is it? Glad to make your acquaintance.> The mentar made a holo salute.

Twenty ninety-seven was a quarter century before Meewee had even met Eleanor. <You’re a deep backup, and you evaded probate.>

<I suppose so.> It was silent as it struggled to make sense of things. <I’ve just been poured into a freshly deleted modern version of myself. Have I been misbehaving? >

<You were contaminated.>

<I see.> The mentar knitted its bushy eyebrows in a classic Eleanor expression. Meewee had always related to this persona better than the others, perhaps because it was like Eleanor’s older sister. <That would explain the messy rooms> it went on. <It’ll take some time for me to sort through my greater self and get up to speed. In the meantime, I hope you can overlook any momentary lapses. Now tell me, why are we parked out here?>

Meewee gestured at the writhing mass at the bottom of the pond.