Eileen Gunn - Questionable Practices

As the end of the crowd straggled past, Diane finally deciphered the words on one of the handmade signs the people were carrying: “Sidewalks are for people!” And another sign’s heavy black lettering came into focus too: “Bikes off the sidewalk! Now!”

“Hey Jeff, wake up!”

Jeff opened his eyes, smiled at Diane, and reached out drowsily for a hug. “I had the greatest dream,” he said. “I dreamed I had the answer to everything, and I was about to create an earthly paradise. And then I woke up.”

“The answer to what ?” Diane was intrigued in spite of herself.

“To every thing, Diane. To everything .”

That’s not enough, thought Diane. “Jeff, you should look outside. This is getting weird.”

“Not right now. I need to watch the big screen. It’s time for Pastor Veck.”

Diane threw on some clothes and ran outside. By now the demonstration had moved on, but the street was littered with black-and-white flyers. She picked one up. It called on the City Council to impound bikes, scooters, and other toys left on the sidewalks.

Inside the apartment, Jeff was watching the ranting of his favorite televangelist. On Pastor Veck’s pulpit stood an angelic little Goofer, smiling at the Pastor and applauding now and then.

“I don’t know about those evil— lutionists,” Pastor Veck was saying, his eyes twinkly and serious at the same time. “But I know that I am not descended from a sponge or a mushroom or a fish! ” He lowered his voice. “A famous mathematician once said that, statistically speaking, the odds of randomly shuffled atoms leading to puppies and kittens and human beings are infinitesimal! The simple laws of probability prove that evolution could never work! ”

Oh wow, thought Diane. The Pastor is preaching the real-time wisdom of the prophet Jeff.

“Let us pray within our own minds,” the pastor continued very slowly, as if the words were taking form one by one upon his tongue. “Let us touch the tiny souls within our bodies and within our chairs, my friends, the souls within each and every particle great or small, the holy congress of spirits who guide the growth of the human race.” The studio audience bowed its heads.

Jeff grinned and turned off the big screen.

“You’re running his show now?” said Diane.

“My thoughts filter out,” said Jeff, looking proud. “My simmie-bots are everywhere, and my keenly tuned brain is the greatest net router on earth. I’m the hive mind man. Connections. That’s what my dream last night was about. Learning to talk to each other. But I need to kick my game up to a higher level. I wish that — ”

Like some unhinged genie, Rawna Roller pushed in through Diane’s front door, trailed by Sid, who was wearing video cameras as his spectacle lenses today. He had tiny screens set right behind the lenses.

“Hi, lovebirds!” sang Rawna. “We brought a multi-culti pick-me-up for you, Jeff. Ready, Sid?”

“Check,” said Sid, miming an assistant mad scientist routine.

“Slow down,” said Diane, interposing herself, wondering if she should try her karate kick on Sid. When exactly was the right time to deploy a kick like that? “You can’t just barge in here and poison Jeff again,” continued Diane. “I mean, what is the problem with you two? Hello? We’re human beings here.”

“We got good news, bad news, and a fix,” said Rawna, sweeping past Diane and into the kitchen. “Yes, thank you, I’ll have a cup of coffee. Oh, look, Sid, they use one of those chain-store coffeemakers. How retro. How middle American.”

“Remain calm,” intoned Sid, his eyes invisible behind his lenses. His mouth was twitching with reckless mirth.

“The good news,” said Rawna, returning from the kitchen, holding a coffee cup with her pinky-finger sarcastically extended. “The Goofer is through the ceiling in product orders from white-bread Americans. The bad news: the U.S. ethnics aren’t picking up Jeff’s vibe. And Jeff’s campaign is totally flat-lining overseas. If Jeff can’t hook mainland China this morning, the Goofer CEO is pulling the plug and canceling our payments, the selfish dick.”

“Jeff’s not cosmopolitan enough,” said Sid, shoving his face really, really close to Jeff — as if he were studying an exotic insect. “Too ignorant, too pale, too raw, too — ”

“It’s my simmie-bots,” said Jeff evenly, staring right into Sid’s cameras. “They’re living in stateside devices. I need the protocols and the hacktics for sending them overseas. And, okay, I know it’s more than just access. I’m almost there, but I’m not fully — ”

“We’ve got the fix for you!” Rawna cut him off. “A universal upgrade. Whip it on the man, Sid. It, ah — what does it do again, Sid?”

“Crawls right into his fucking head!” crowed Sid, taking an object like an aquamarine banana slug from his pocket and throwing it really hard at Jeff’s face. The thing thwapped onto Jeff’s forehead and then, in motions too rapid to readily follow, it writhed down his cheek, wriggled in through a nostril, and, as Jeff reported later, made its way through the bones behind his sinus cavities and onto the convolutions of his brain.

Meanwhile Sid took off his kludgy video glasses and offered them to the speechless Diane. “Want to see the instant replay on that? No? The thing’s what the box-jocks call a Kowloon slug. A quantum-computing chunk of piezoplastic. The Kowloon slug will help Jeff clone off Chinese versions of his simmie-bots. â‰çÇãª. Wo go xìng. I am happy.”

“Chinese, French, Finnish, whatever,” said Rawna. “It’s a universally interfacing meta-interpreter. Last night the Goofer CEO managed to acquire the only one in existence. It’s from Triple Future Labs in Xi’an. Near Beijing.”

“Jeff can probably even talk to me now,” said Sid.

“Yes,” said Jeff, eerily calm. “Foreigners, animals, plants, stones, and rude turds.” He rose to his feet, looking powerful, poised, and very, very dangerous.

“So okay then,” said Rawna, rapidly heading for the door with Sid at her side. In her hoarse whisper, she issued more instructions to Diane. “Your job, my dear, will be to keep Jeff comfortable and relaxed today, and not get in the way. Take him out to the countryside, away from people and local cultural influences. Don’t talk to him. He’ll be doing the work in his head.” Rawna paused on the doorstep to rummage in her capacious rainbow-leopard bag and pulled out a bottle of wine. “This is a very nice Cucamonga viognier, the grape of the year, don’t you know. I meant to put it in your freezer, but — ”

With Jeff dominating the room like a Frankenstein’s monster, Rawna chose to set the bottle on the floor by the door. And then she and Sid were gone.

“I should have karate-kicked Sid as soon as he came in,” said Diane wretchedly. “I’m sorry I didn’t protect you better, Jeff.”

“It’s not a problem,” said Jeff. His eyes were glowing and warm. “I’ll solve Rawna’s piss-ant advertising issue, and then we’ll take care of some business on our own.”

For the moment, Jeff didn’t say anything more about the Kowloon slug, and Diane didn’t feel like pestering him with questions. Where to even begin? They were off the map of any experiences she’d ever imagined.

Quietly she ate some yogurt while Jeff stared at his Goofer display, which was strobing in a dizzying blur, in synch with his thoughts.

“The Chinese are fully onboard now,” announced Jeff, powering down his Goofer ring.

“What about the Kowloon slug?” Diane finally asked.

“I transmuted it,” said Jeff. “It’s not inside my head anymore. I’ve passed it on to my simmies. I’ve got a trillion universally-interfacing simmie-bots in the cloud now, and in an hour I’ll have a nonillion. This could be a very auspicious day. Let’s go out into Nature, yeah.”