F Wilson - Sims

“You know him?”

“No, but a few years ago nobody’d even heard of that boy, and now he’s a household name.”

Voss liked to come on as a slow-witted, somewhat bemused good ol’ boy. He used it to lull opponents until he sprang and crushed them with one of the sharpest corporate law minds in the world. Mercer liked that. The crushing part.

Mercer grunted. “And he galloped there onmy back.”

“Yourback?” Ellis said. “How about my back as well? I wind up being painted with the same brush as you, something I donot care for.”

Well, well, well, Mercer thought. Look who’s speaking up.

He couldn’t understand why his brother bothered with these meetings. He’d arrive, slump in a chair without saying a word to anyone, stare into space without participating, then leave.

Ellis had been in an emotional tailspin for years. Mercer had heard that only a complex antidepressant cocktail enabled him to get out of bed these days. Somehow he dragged himself to meetings, and managed to maintain a decent work schedule in his lab, but his productivity was zilch.

Today he’d actually offered a comment. Hallelujah. Maybe Ellis had finally found a combination of drugs that worked.

Mercer turned toward his brother. “That’s what happens when you’re the co-founder.”

“ButI’m the co-founder who has kids. What’s said about me reflects on them. They go to school and have to hear that their father’s in league with the devil!”

Ellis’s kids…Robbie and Julie. Good kids. But Ellis didn’t get to see them much since the divorce. Truth was, they seemed to prefer their Uncle Mercer to their downer dad. Mercer liked playing uncle, but he lived alone; always had, always would. Robbie and Julie were the closest he ever intended to come to parenthood.

But the divorce hadn’t caused Ellis’s depression—no, it had been the other way around. Who could live with someone in Ellis’s state of mind?

“Don’t blame me, bro. Blame Eckert.”

“I know who to blame,” Ellis said with a glare.

“Gentlemen,” Voss said, “this can be saved for another time.”

Mercer turned toward the lawyer. “I didn’t call you here about the Eckert matter, but we might as well address it. It seems every time I turn on the damn TV I see his face.”

“That’s because the boy’s syndicated. He does one show a day and it’s farmed out to local stations all over the country. The local station managers plug it into a slot where they think they’ll draw the most eyeballs.”

“I can’t believe people watch him day after day. He’s got one goddamn issue and he beats it to death.”

Voss shrugged. “Them Bible humpers’ve had it in for you two since sim one. Eckert is just more aggressive in grabbing the reins of that wagon.”

“And he’s been riding it for all it’s worth ever since.” Mercer rapped his knuckles on his desktop. “Can’t we get anything on him?”

“Tried that. Took a look-see into his business affairs and personal life. Lives high but not too, too high. No bimbos, or if there are, he hides ’em well. On the surface he appears clean. No obvious belly-crawlin like Swaggart or Baker. Sockin away all those contributions until he’s got enough to set up his own satellite network to—as he likes to put it—‘spread the word to the world about the sin of sims.’”

“So let’s probe a little deeper,” Mercer growled.

“Gotta be careful with that sort of thing. The Rev’s got a bunch of real loyal eggs around him. You try to crack one of them, you could wind up with yolk on your face. I’m talkin a tar-and-feather overcoat in the PR department. I say give it time. These preacher boys, most of them got this sort of arc, y’see—they rise fast, then they fall back. And meantime, if he’s like most other preacher boys I’ve seen, all that money he’s pullin in will somehow find its way into his own pocket instead of being used to mess with us. You just be patient, son.”

Usually Mercer didn’t mind when Voss called him “son”—just one of the man’s Alabamisms—but today it irritated him. With his mother dead since his Yale days, and his father DOA with a cardiac arrest two years ago, he was now no one’s son. His own man, answering to no one.

“Patient! Do you know he’s scheduled to be on Ackenbury tomorrow night?Ackenbury at Large ! Millions who’ve never even heard of the creep will see him do his anti-SimGen rant. What’s Ackenbury thinking? Don’t we buy enough time on his lousy show?”

“Hey, it’s all show biz, you know that. That boy gets hold of the most controversial folks he can find. That’s why he’s rackin up better numbers than Leno and Letterman. I know we got a buncha cow flop flyin at us at once now, what with Eckert, the unionization thing, and havin to open our doors for an OPRR inspection, but I wouldn’t let this rattle you.”

“I’m not rattled,” Mercer said.

But he wasn’t particularly comfortable either. He didn’t mention his growing uneasiness, a sense of malevolent convergence. If he believed in fate or astrology, he might have said he felt the stars aligning against him.

Utter nonsense, of course. You made your own destiny. You grabbed what you could and then did your damnedest to keep it. And if you lost it, that was because someone else outsmarted you. Flaming gasballs floating millions of light-years away had nothing to do with it.

But if the stars weren’t aligning against him, then who?

“Good,” Voss said. “Glad to hear it. ’Cause there’s nothin here to get rattled about. Take this damn fool unionization thing, for instance. You have to be human to be in a damn union, sores ipso loquitur , the suit can’t succeed. It’s a sham, a PR stunt for this nobody shyster who—”

“PR,” Mercer said. “That’swhat I’m worried about. PR that’s good for him and bad for us. We can’t have people thinking of sims as anything more than brighter-than-average animals. Nobody talks about unionizing race horses or seeing-eye dogs. But start connecting the word ‘union’ to sims and you open a Pandora’s box. I can just see this shyster—what’s his name?”

“Sullivan,” Voss said. “Patrick Sullivan.”

“I can see this Sullivan character portraying sims as some poor mistreated underclass, when it’s just the opposite. We’ve never sold a sim, we lease them. Why? So we can limit how they’re used and oversee how they’re treated.”

“And, coincidentally, maximize profits,” Ellis said acidly.

“Nothing wrong with profits,” Mercer replied through his teeth without looking at his brother.

“You’re preachin to the choir, son.”

“No, I’m telling you the message we need to get out: We are a humane corporation that looks out for these creatures. We created them and we feel responsible for them.”

“Humane,” Ellis said in that same tone. “Now there’s a concept.”

Mercer wheeled on his brother. “Are you going to contribute something or just sit there and snipe?”

“Thatwas a contribution, Merce,” Ellis said, leveling a soulful gaze at him. “A very relevant one.”

Mercer turned back to Voss. He couldn’t stand Ellis’s holier-than-thou stance. “We can’t take any chances with this, Abel. I’ve heard of crazy things coming out of these NLRB hearings—especially where the regional office in Manhattan is involved. The wrong kind of decision and you’ll be using your stock options for toilet paper.”

“Don’t have to worry about no labor relations shenanigans. Sullivan thinks he’s got an edge because the director of NLRB’s Region 2 is a maverick. Well, I’ve already seen to it that he never gets to the NLRB.”

Mercer abruptly felt his mood lighten. “How did you manage that?”