like her. People come to me, and they listen to me, and they go away believing me. I make them contented with their choice. There’s satisfaction in that. It’s proof that I’m good at what I do. Everyone deserves to believe that he’s good at what he does. I got little of that in my previous job.
Out in the waiting room, I saw my next applicant stand up. She clutched a slip of paper in her hand as she looked down the row of Social Interface cubicles. In her other hand, she carried a canvas shopping bag. She came straight for me. She wasn’t looking at me; she was looking up at the number flashing green over my cubicle. But I saw her face, and despite her sunglasses and all the harsh years since I’d last seen her, I recognized her.
I should have red-lighted right then. There’s no regulation that says we can’t counsel people we know, but we all know it’s frowned on. It’s not like a Social Interface can change the computer’s decision, but maybe that’s why it’s best for an applicant to hear it from a stranger. It’s less personal that way. Many people don’t want their friends to know they’ve been turned down for their first or second or even third choice. Everyone would like the neighbors to think that the child you gave birth to was your dream kid from the start.
I didn’t red-light. Instead, I sat there, watching Cecily rush toward me like shrapnel from the past. The Blonde Banshee, Cliff had called her. That was when he wasn’t calling her Cecily the Willing. How two people could love and hate each other so much, I still don’t know. Being around them was like escorting a bomb. They could explode in any setting, in restaurants, on trains, even onstage. Public mayhem never bothered either of them. I’d seen Cecily overturn a table on the whole band for the sake of dumping an expensive dinner in Cliff’s lap. But I’d also seen her beatific smile the time I nearly broke my neck falling over their coupled bodies in a hotel stairwell at two in the morning in Vancouver.
“No limits, Chesterton,” Cliff had told me later. “No limits to what we can make each other feel. It’s the magic. What good is a woman who can only make you love her? That’s only half the passion, man. Only half.”
He made it sound so logical that while he was talking, I believed it. Cliff was like that. He would have made a good Social Interface himself, if he’d lived long enough to hold down a real job. He killed himself when he was twenty-seven. He knew what people would say about that. He even left it as his death note. “All the real ones check out at twenty-seven,” he wrote. And that was it.
By the time he reached that point, I didn’t really know him anymore. The band had fallen apart three or four years before then. His death was something I read about in the newspaper, a scrap of news in a column full of celebrity notes. Cliff Wangle, former drummer for the Coolie Fish, Oberon’s Jest, Hazardous Waste, and most recently with the Flat Plats, died of an overdose at twenty-seven. That was it. I read about it over my breakfast cereal and thought,
Even after his death, even after all the years, it was still hard to forgive him for that. Aloysius had gone on to doing sound-track arrangements, and I still could pick out Mikey’s tenor in a lot of sampled backup stuff. I hadn’t had the heart to go on with music after the disappointment. I’d gotten a day job, a wife, and eventually a kid, a KewpieDoll male the first year they’d come out. He was seven now, and still cuter than hell, with curly hair and big dark eyes. I’d made it, I told myself as I watched Cecily zoom in on me. I’d succeeded. I was good at what I did, and I knew it. What more than that could a man ask?
She sat down in front of my desk. Our Interface desks and chairs are elevated just slightly, only an inch or two. Even so, she didn’t have to look up at me. But she didn’t look at me at all. She merely handed me her disk. I popped it into my machine. I didn’t have to open the confirmation port for her. She did that herself and expertly rolled her fingers across the glass. The reason for that flashed up immediately. She’d refused her reproductive choice nine times in the last four months. Of course, she would know the routine by now.
The computer immediately gave me a first option for terminating the interview.
The lines came up at the bottom of my screen specs.
Cecily looked determined, not agitated. If she had looked overwrought, believe me, I would have called Security. I’d seen Cecily in a temper and knew what she was capable of doing. She wasn’t angry, not yet. Both curiosity and nostalgia swayed me. From the way she looked at me, I didn’t think she’d recognized me. I didn’t think I had changed that much, but my screen spectacles are the bulky government-issue type, and I had them set at semiopaque. I double blinked to bring up the next screen. She saw it and waited silently.
The information surprised me. She’d completed a psychological evaluation followed by a personality reorganization class a year ago. Her obsessive/compulsive disorder was controlled with medication. Her preparenting scores were within the acceptable range. She had four preapproved fetus choices, all children selected from the “nondemanding” end of the spectrum. Her physical size had limited her to smaller infants for natural birth. Still. Four choices weren’t bad. I’d interviewed prospective parents who were limited to one or two options and still managed to send them away happy. Mentally, I earmarked a Cherub2 male as being her best bet. I’d steer her that way.
I smiled at her sunglasses and observed, “Well, Ms. Kelvey, does this visit mean you’ve reached a choice on your options?”
She took a breath. That brisk rise and fall of her small breasts that had always indicated she was going to take a stand with Cliff. Not a good sign. Her voice was as I remembered it, girlish and without depth. She’d wanted to do backup vocals for Flat Plats, had even bought an enhancer, but Cliff had refused her. “We’re retro,” he had reminded her harshly. “Real voices. Real instruments. Real people playing them.” The flung enhancer had given him a black eye.
“Not exactly.” Her voice jerked me back to the present. “This visit is so I can submit documentation as to why my request for a free conception should be granted.” She bent down to the canvas tote at her feet and began taking out papers. Some were folded, some yellowed at the edges. Papers. The information hadn’t even been scanned to disk. I accepted it from her hands the way you take wilted dandelions from a kid. It’s the intention. A tap set my specs to scan as I looked over her “documentation.”
None of it was biologically acceptable data. It was a weird spectrum of stuff, from old grade readouts from high school to IQ tests that documented Cliff’s brilliance. There was even a newspaper clipping that called him a “rock Mozart.” My heart sank as I realized what she was angling after. She didn’t want an approved fetal implant. She was going for an egg/sperm conception. In some parts of the world, they were still common, but for the life of me, I couldn’t figure out why anyone would choose to take such monumental risks.
I obediently finished blinking the material into her reproductive request file. The nature of the entries might set off a red flag. The behavior of compiling such a pile of nonrelevant information was a definite earmark of obsession. She might find her prescriptions adjusted the next time she got her monthly implant. Cecily’s actions, I told myself, not mine. If it made trouble for her, she’d brought it on herself. I gave the sheaf of documents back to her. She held them and watched me hopefully.
“So.” I glanced at my timer. Three more minutes before I went into overtime with her. “Apparently you wish to conceive a random fetus with eggs from yourself and sperm from Cliff Wangle. You have his permission to do this?”
Her shades were so dark, I couldn’t tell if she met my gaze or not. “He’s dead. But before his death, he made a sperm deposit at a private facility. They were a birthday gift to me. As my property, they are mine to use as I wish.”
“That is true.”
“But I can’t schedule an insemination without a permit. That’s all I’m here for today. A permit.”
“One moment, please.” I swiveled back to my keyboard. A blink or two brought up her genetic rating on my specs. I had to key in Cliff’s SSN to do a search for his. Both were as I expected.
