Eileen Gunn - Questionable Practices

“ Au revoir ,” said Rawna Roller, rising to her feet once the show was well underway. She and Sid made their way out to the main aisle. Sid cast a lingering last look at Jeff, with the fireworks scintillating in every facet of Sid’s polyhedral lenses.

Looking back at the show, Diane noticed that the colors were turning peculiar. Orange and green — was that a normal color for a skyrocket shell? And that shower of dull crimson sparks? Was this latter part of the show on a lower budget?

The show trailed off with a barrage of off-color kamuros and crackling pistils, followed by chrysanthemums and spiders in ever-deeper shades of red, one on top of another, like an anatomical diagram or a rain of luminous blood.

Out of the corner of her eye, Diane could see Jeff’s squidskin shirt going wild. At first the shirt was just displaying video feeds of the skyrockets, processing and overlaying them. But suddenly the Jeff-plus-shirt system went through a phase transition and everything changed. The shirt began boiling with tiny images — Diane noticed faces, cars, meals, houses, appliances, dogs, and trees, and the images were overlaid upon stippled scenes of frantically cheering crowds. The miniscule icons were savagely precise, like the brainstorm of a person on his deathbed, all his life flashing before his eyes. The million images on Jeff’s shirt were wheeling and schooling like fish, flowing in jet streams and undercurrents, as if he’d become a weather map of the crowd’s mind. Jeff began to scream, more in ecstasy, Diane thought, than in agony.

In the post-fireworks applause and tumult — some of it caused by people rushing for the exits en masse in a futile effort to beat the traffic — Jeff’s reaction was taken to be just another patriotic, red-blooded American speaking in tongues or enjoying his meds.

Diane waited for the crowd to thin out substantially, to grab its diaper bags and coolers and leave the stadium under the cold yellow glare of the sodium vapor lights. Jeff was babbling to himself fairly quietly now. Diane couldn’t seem to make eye contact with him. She led him across the dimly lit parking lot and down Rosemont Boulevard, towards where they’d left her car.

“This simple, old-fashioned tip will keep you thin,” mumbled Jeff, shuffling along at Diane’s side. “Embrace the unusual! Eat a new food every day!” His squidskin glowed with blurry constellations of corporate logos.

“Are you okay, Jeff?”

“Avoid occasions of sin,” intoned Jeff. “Thieves like doggie doors. Can you pinpoint your closest emergency room?”

“Those fireworks tweaked you out, didn’t they, honey?” said Diane sympathetically. “I just wonder if your shirt is having some bad kind of feedback effect.”

“View cloud-based webcam of virtual population explosion,” said Jeff. “Marketeer’s simmie-bots multiply out of control.”

“That’s an actual answer?” said Diane. “You’re talking about your growbox on the web?” For a moment Jeff’s squidskin showed a hellish scene of wriggling manikins mounded like worms, male and female. Their faces all resembled each other. Like cousins or like — oh, never mind, here was Diane’s car.

“To paddle or not to paddle students,” said Jeff, stiffly fitting himself into the passenger seat. “See what officials on both sides of the debate have to say.”

“Maybe you take that shirt off now, huh?” said Diane, edging into the traffic and heading for home. “Or at least the beanie?”

“We want to know what it’s like to be alive,” said Jeff, hugging his squidskin against himself with one hand, and guarding his sailor cap with the other. “We long for incarnation!”

Somehow, she made it home in frantic Fourth of July traffic, then coaxed and manhandled Jeff out of the car and into the apartment. He sprawled uneasily on the couch, rocking his body and stamping his feet in no particular rhythm, staring at the blank screen, spewing words like the Chirpfeed from hell.

Tired and disgusted, Diane slept alone. She woke around six a.m., and Jeff was still at it, his low voice like that of a monk saying prayers. “Danger seen in smoking fish. Stand clear of the closing doors.” His shirt had gone back to showing a heap of writhing simmies, each of them with a face resembling — Jeff’s. He was totally into his own head.

“You’ve taken this too far,” Diane told him. “You’re like some kind of wirehead, always hooked up to your electronic toys. I’m going to the office now, and by God, I want you to have your act together by the time I get home, or you can get out until you’ve straightened up. You’re an addict, Jeff. It’s pathetic.”

Strong words, but Diane worried about Jeff all that morning. Maybe it wasn’t even his fault. Maybe Rawna or that slimeball Sid had done something to make him change like this. Finally she tried to phone him. Jeff’s phone was answered not by a human voice, but by a colossal choral hiss, as of three hundred million voices chanting. Jeff’s simmie-bots.

Diane made an excuse to her boss about feeling ill and sped home. A sharp-looking Jaguar was lounging in her parking-spot. She could hear two familiar voices through her front door, but they stopped the moment she turned the key. Going in, she encountered Rawna Roller and bugeye Sid, who appeared to be on their way out.

“Cheers, Diane,” said Rawna in her hoarse low voice. “We just fabbed Jeff one of our clients’ new products to pitch. The Goofer. Jeff’s very of the moment, isn’t he? Rather exhilarating.”

“But what the hell — ” began Diane.

“Rawna and I did a little greasing behind the scenes,” Sid bragged. “We got those rocket shells deployed in patterns and rhythms that would resonate with your man’s squidskin. I was scared to look at ’em myself.” His expression was unreadable behind his bugeye lenses. “The show fed him a series of archetypal engrams. Our neuroengineer said we’d need a display that was hundreds of meters across. Not just for the details, you understand, but so Jeff’s reptile brain would know he’s seeing something important. So we used fireworks. Way cool, huh? ”

“But what did it do to Jeff?”

“Jeff’s the ultimate hacker-cracker creepy-crawler web spy now. He’s pushed his zillion simmie-bots out into every frikkin’ digital doohickey in sight. And his simmies are feeding raw intel back to him. It adds up. Jeff’s an avatar of the national consciousness. The go-to guy for what Jane and Joe Blow are thinking.”

“Jeff?” called Diane, peering into her living-room. For a moment she didn’t see him, and her heart thumped in her chest. But then she spotted him in his usual couch position, prone, nearly hidden by the cushions, fooling around with — a doll? A twinkling little figure of a woman was perched on the back of his hand, waving her arms and talking to him. It was an image of the rock star Tawny Krush, whom Jeff had always doted on.

“What’s that?” said Diane. “What are you doing?”

“It’s a wearable maximum-push entertainment device,” said Rawna.

“Fresh from your fab box,” added Sid. Diane tried to get a word in edgewise, but Sid talked right over her. “Oh, don’t worry about the cost — we used Rawna’s user code to order it. Our client is distributing them on-line.”

Ignoring them, Diane rushed to her man’s side. “Jeff?”

“I’m Goofin’ off,” said Jeff, giving Diane an easy smile. He jiggled the image on his hand. “This is the best phone I’ve ever seen. More than a phone, it’s like a pet. The Goofer. The image comes out of this ring on my finger, see?” Jeff’s squidskin shirt was alive with ads for the new toy, fresh scraps and treatments that seemed to be welling spontaneously from his overclocked mind.