F Wilson - Sims

“Maybe you should be checking a little closer,” Sinclair-1 said. “I understand there was an incident yesterday.”

Luca tensed. “What incident?”

“The OPRR point scout saw something she shouldn’t have.”

Damn! How had he learned that?

“She saw an unmarked truck, nothing more.”

“She shouldn’t have seen that truckat all .”

“And she wouldn’t have if she’d stuck to her schedule. She was supposed to arrive at one. The truck was scheduled to be long gone before noon. But there she was making a stink at the gate five hours early.”

“What did she see?” Voss said.

“An unmarked truck pull out of Basic’s secure loading dock and head up the road. No reason for her to think it was anything more than a supply truck making routine deliveries.”

He didn’t mention her question about it heading for the airport.

“Lucky for us,” the CEO said. “But what if something untoward had happened, say, an improperly latched rear door swinging open while she was standing there staring at it? What then?”

“I don’t waste time worrying about things that never happened.”

The CEO stared at him a moment. “Let’s just hope that little incident does not come back to haunt us.”

Luca said nothing. He also didn’t want to mention the fact that the truck hadn’t been completely unmarked. It had had a license plate. He wondered if Romy Cadman had noticed that. And if so, had she cared. He hadn’t seen her write anything down, but that didn’t mean she hadn’t memorized it. But why would she bother? OPRR wasn’t interested in trucks.

But they’d sure as hell have been interested in what that one was carrying.

Nothing to worry about as far as Luca could see. The truck had been driven aboard the cargo plane and whisked away to Idaho. The OPRR inspection was going by the numbers—his numbers. Everything under control. No sweat.

Although he wouldn’t mind getting sweaty with their chief inspector.

He yanked his thoughts away from that warm little fantasy to the matters at hand. As he saw it, this Sullivan guy and the sim unionization thing were powder kegs. Let Sinclair-1 and Voss try to put Sullivan on the ropes their way. If that worked, fine. If not, his people would step in and settle the matter his own way. For good.

Either way, the future was not going to be a happy place for a certain shyster named Patrick Sullivan.

1

MANHATTAN

OCTOBER 19

“Well, it’s been two weeks since the inspection,” Romy said, “and we’re still in court trying to get SimGen to open its basic research facilities. So, net gain thus far from all this effort is zip. Or maybe I should sayzero —if you’ll pardon the expression.”

“Any time,” Zero said.

They had assumed their usual positions in the dank basement under the abandoned storefront on Worth Street: Zero backlit behind the rickety table, swathed in a turtleneck, dark glasses, and a ski mask this time; Romy sitting across from him. She’d walked twice around the block today to assure she hadn’t been followed.

Romy knew she’d been in a foul mood lately; she’d spent the past couple of weeks snapping at everyone in the office. And with good reason. The organization was getting nowhere with SimGen. Lots of movement but no forward progress. Like jogging on a treadmill.

And she resented Zero too, with his corny disguise and his secrets and his damned elliptical manner. She could sense him smiling at her behind the layers of cloth hiding his face. She wanted to kick over his crummy folding table, snap his dark glasses, rip off his ski mask, and say, Let’s just cut this melodramatic bullshit and talk face-to-face.

Usually she didn’t like herself when she fell into this state, but today she relished it. She wanted someone to push her buttons so she could tap dance on a head or two.

“But ‘zero’ isn’t quite accurate,” he said. “Your inspections confirmed that SimGen is treating its sims as humanely as advertised.”

Romy nodded. That had been the plus side. Though the young sims led a barracks-style life of multilevel bunks and regimented hours, their environment was clean and they were well nourished.

“Humanely,” she said. “After spending all that time with so many of them, the word has garnered new meaning in respect to sims.”

“How so?”

“Well, so many typical chimp behaviors are missing. The mothers don’t carry their young on their backs like chimps, but on their hips like humans. And I saw only a rare sim grooming another. Chimps are always grooming each other. I’d think if SimGen wanted to keep the public thinking of sims as animals they would have allowedsome chimp behavior to carry over.”

“First off,” Zero said, “it could be learned behavior. If they’ve never seen or experienced grooming, they might not do it. Plus, sims don’t have anywhere near the amount of hair as chimps, so it’s not necessary. And if it’s genetically linked behavior, it might have disappeared when SimGen ‘cleaned up’ the sim genome by removing most of the so-called junk DNA. Or the company might have engineered it out of them because it would interfere with their work efficiency.”

“That last sounds typical. Too bad, because it seems to give chimps comfort.” Romy shook her head. “No grooming, no sex, no joy, no aggression, no love, no hate…it’s like they’re half alive—lessthan half. It’s unconscionable. Chimps laugh, they cry, they exhibit loyalty and treachery, they can be loving and murderous, they can be born ambitious, they can fight wars, they can commit infanticide. A mix of the good and the bad, the best and the worst, just like humans. But sims…sims have been stripped of the extremes, pared down to a bland mean to make them workforce fodder.”

She closed her eyes a moment to hold back a hot surge of anger. No use getting herself worked up now.

“How do sims feel about it?” Zero asked. “Ever wonder?”

“All the time. I signed to a lot of the young ones during the inspection tours, asking them just that:How do you feel? andAre you happy? ”

“How did they answer?”

“They answered ‘Okay’ to the first, but they didn’t seem to know what ‘happy’ meant.”

“Tough concept.”

Romy shot to her feet and walked around in a tight circle, grinding a fist against her palm.

“Maybe I should quit this.”

“Romy—”

“No, I’m serious. My life is one tangled mass of dissatisfaction. I should quit the organization, put in my time at OPRR, settle down, marry a fellow bureaucrat, buy a house, have kids, and forget all this crap! Life would be so much simpler and I’d be so much happier!”

“Would you?”

“At least I wouldn’t be so damn frustrated!” You’re losing it, she thought. Keep a lid on it. But she couldn’t. She needed to spew. “Everywhere I turn, someone’s hiding something from me: couldn’t find anything useful at SimGen, you won’t show me your face or let me in on who else is in the organization. Hell, for all I know, OPRR’s got a secret agenda they’re keeping from me too! I’m sick of it! Sick to death!”

Zero said nothing, merely sat and waited for her to cool. Good move.

With a little more circle walking and fist grinding, the heat seeped away and she dropped back into the chair.

“Okay,” she said. “I’m back.”

“What can I do to make this better?”

“Nothing. It’s not you, it’s me. I always seem at odds with a world that I should be so thankful for. Look what the genome revolution has done. We’ll all live longer because so many genetic diseases have already been wiped out, and days are numbered for the rest of them. Heart disease, diabetes, high blood pressure, certain cancers—if they ran in your family you pretty much had to resign yourself to dealing with them at some point in your life. Not these days. Germline therapy has seen to that. Cystic fibrosis, sickle cell anemia, MS—hell,nobody has those anymore.”