John Adams - The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2017

YOU have heard the cries of women in agony.

YOU have learned the names of murdered men.

YOU have seen the faces of suffering children.

Caspar D. Luckinbill, what are you going to do?

“This was posted to the company news feed,” Sheila says. “It went to my account. It went to everybody’s account. It appeared on our public announcement board. There were pictures. Horrible pictures.”

“Aren’t there filters?” I say. “Aren’t there moderators?”

“It got through the filters,” Sheila says. “It got past the moderators.”

“Someone should do something about that.”

“Indeed,” Sheila says, and looks at me very frowningly.

“It’s not my problem,” I say. “It’s like spam. It’s a technical thing. It’s mediaterrorism.”

“I understand,” Sheila says. “I understand everything you’re saying. What I also understand is that we’re a very modern office, and we’re all in this together. And right now, some of us who are in this are being made to feel very unproductive.”

“I’ll see what I can do,” I say, and turn back to my desk.

I spend the rest of the morning looking up the FRF. There are no sovereign nations by that name, none that I can find, not in the world at this time. There are several militias, two major urban areas, five disputed microstates, seven hundred and eighty-two minor political entities, ninety NGOs, most of them defunct, over a thousand corporate entities, over ten thousand documented fictional entities, and a few hundred thousand miscellaneous uses of the acronym.

I check news stories. An island off the coast of the former state of Greece once claimed independence under the name FRF, but it’s now known as the ADP and is considered part of the new Caliphate of Istanbul.

I spend my lunch break obsessing about a phrase. Payments made in my name. What payments in my name? I don’t make donations to murderous regimes. I give to charity. I eat foreign food. I buy clothes from China and rugs from Azerbaijan. Tin-pot dictators? Not my profile.

I call my bank. I call my credit card companies. Money circulates. Money gets around. The buck never stops, not really, not for long. Is it all a big bluff? What payments in my name?

No one can tell me.

I obsess about another phrase: directly or indirectly. It strikes me that the word indirect is itself, in this context, extremely indirect.

I spend the afternoon looking up mediaterrorism. Armando’s right. It’s a thing. It can come out of nowhere, strike at any time. Once you’ve been targeted, it’s hard to shake. It’s like identity theft, one article says—“except what they steal is your moral complacency.”

I call the company IT department. They say the problem is with my CloudSpace provider. I call my CloudSpace provider. They say the problem is with my UbiKey account. I call my UbiKey account. They say it sounds like a criminal issue. The woman on the line gets nervous. She isn’t allowed to talk about criminal issues. There are people listening. There are secret agreements. It’s all very murky. It’s a government thing.

I call the government. They thank me for my interest. I call the police. They just laugh.

While I make my calls, I see the mutilated bodies of eighteen torture victims, watch tearful interviews with five assault survivors, and peer into the charnel-laden depths of three mass graves.

Children’s faces stare from my screen. They are pixelated and human. Their eyes seem unnaturally wide.

At the end of the day, I call Armando. “I’m getting nowhere,” I say. “I’ve been researching all day.”

Armando looks confused.

“My problem,” I remind him. “My mediaterrorism.”

“Aha. Right. Well, at least you’re keeping busy.”

“I’m going in circles, buddy. I don’t know what to do.”

“I’ll tell you what to do,” Armando says. “Go home. Watch TV. Break out the Maker’s Mark. Get in bed with your lovely wife. Put everything to do with the FRF out of your mind. Your mission now, Caspar, is to be a happy man. If you’re not happy, the bastards win.”

I’m almost home when I remember.

Lisa! The new TV!

I run the last two blocks, slapping the pavement with my toothy shoes, nearly crashing into the ad-drone that’s painting a half-naked woman on our building.

This week my wife and I decided to take the plunge. We’re plunging together into the blissful depths of immersive domestic entertainment. We’re getting Ubervision.

A day came when Lisa and I could no longer duck the question. Here we were with a videoscreen in the living room, a videoscreen in the bedroom, a videoscreen in the kitchen, videoscreens on our phones, videoscreens on our desks, videoscreens in our books. Why not take the next big leap? Why not have videoscreens everywhere?

Sometimes I would like to read the news in bed without having to prop my head up. Wouldn’t it be nice if there were screens on the ceiling? Sometimes I would like my floor to be a carpet of roses. Wouldn’t it be nice if the floor could do that? Call me lazy, call me self-indulgent, but sometimes I would like to use the bathroom, or see what’s in the fridge, without necessarily looking away from my TV show. Wouldn’t it be nice if I could point at any surface in my home, anytime I wanted, and turn it into a full-spectrum screen?

Lisa and I went to school for fifty years between us. We work sixty-hour weeks. Who would deny us life’s little pleasures? And what pleasure could be littler than a TV across from the toilet?

After all, it’s not just about entertainment. Ubervision is smart. Ubervision gets to know you. It learns your habits; it picks up your tastes. It knows what you want to watch before you do. Ubervision tells you when you’re getting fat, promotes local food, reminds you where your wife goes on Wednesdays. Ubervision’s a key component of the wisely wired life.

I read that in an advertisement painted on the bottom of a swimming pool. Maybe I had chlorine in my eyes. What the advertisement didn’t appear to mention is that Ubervision is also a real pain in the Allerwertesten to install. Lisa’s been taking off to watch the technicians work. They have to coat every wall, replace every door. This is invasive home surgery.

Normally Lisa works longer hours than I do. She’s a contractor for the auditing department of the fundraising department of the remote offices of the Malaysian branch of a group that does something with endangered animals. Either they put them in zoos or they take them out of zoos; I can never remember.

Today’s the big day. When I get home, Lisa’s lying in her teak sensochair, eating Singaporean vacuum-food, wearing a sleep mask.

“Is it done?” I say.

The sleep mask looks at me. “Check this out,” says Lisa.

I shout. I wave. I try to warn her.

It’s too late.

Ubervision has activated.

I know exactly what’s going to happen.

When the first wave of screams has died away, Lisa sits up and takes off her sleep mask. “This isn’t what I expected,” she says, looking at the bleeding and shrieking walls. “Why is every channel playing the same show? And why is that show so incredibly terrible?”

I feel like a person who’s confused his laundry drone with his dogwalking drone. The living room walls are playing footage of an urban firefight.

“I tried to warn you,” I say.

“Warn me about what? What’s happening? What’s wrong?” Lisa taps the wall, but nothing changes. An explosion goes off in the kitchen floor, and a hi-def severed leg flies all the way through the kitchen, down the hall, across the living room ceiling, and behind the couch. I have to admire the power of the technology.

“Caspar D. Luckinbill!” shouts the stove, or maybe it’s the bathroom mirror. “Caspar D. Luckinbill, look at what your negligence and apathy have unleashed! In a bloody escalation of urban warfare, renegade militias have overthrown the HAP party of the DRS. Violent reprisals are underway. Dissidents have been purged and journalists persecuted. Soldiers as young as seven lie dead in the streets. Only two minutes ago, Paul Agalu, poet, ophthalmologist, and human-rights advocate, was attacked by a mob and torn to pieces in his home. Caspar D. Luckinbill, you are responsible for these horrors. Caspar D. Luckinbill, what are you going to do?”