John Adams - The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2017

I pause the show. “How wide is the advertising?”

“Wide,” says Betty. “Like, vast. Like, omnipresent. We’re going after seniors first. Then moms. Then kids. By airtime we’ll have total saturation.”

“What about buzz?”

“Are you kidding? People can’t get enough. They’re intrigued. They’re outraged. They’re absolutely terrified.”

The TV special is my baby. I was the one who reached out to the producers. I was the one who made the pitch. I’m chief consultant, assistant producer. And of course I’m the star.

It’s a strange feeling. I’m not just in the charity game. I’m a one-man movement, the soul of a cause, the president of an ever-growing organization. I’ve become, as the magazines of the globe proclaim, the human face of mediaterrorism.

Betty and I run through other promotional channels—ads, radio, tie-ins, public appearances, even print. It’s important to be comprehensive in this game. You’ve got to blanket the airwaves. You’ve got to speak up. People forget about the big issues, and reminding them is a full-time job. You’ve got to be ubi, omni, toto, round-the-clock. You can have too much of a lot of things in this world, but you can never have too much public awareness.

I give Betty a kiss on her perfect neck. “Keep pushing it. Don’t let up. Let me know if you get overwhelmed.”

“I never get overwhelmed,” Betty says. “I do the whelming.”

I give her another kiss. Then I go into my private office, where Armando sits waiting.

“Caspar D. Luckinbill,” Armando says, rising, “you lucky s.o.b.” He slaps my shoulder. “You’re the talk of the town.”

“I’d better be,” I say. “We’re paying through the nose for it.”

“So that’s your secret? Money talks?”

“Is it a secret?”

“Not many things are, these days,” Armando says.

I shrug. I smile. I feel weirdly ashamed. The truth is, I never expected to be the talk of the town. I guess it’s like a lot of things. I guess you have to hit bottom before you can climb to the top.

When I started my campaign to raise awareness of mediaterrorism, I didn’t honestly hope to be heard. I’d lost my job, my wife, my home, my health. I needed to get busy. I needed to speak out. Speaking out was about the last thing I still had the wherewithal to do.

What I didn’t know was that the reporters would run with it. What makes reporters decide to run with things? “It’s a ripeness issue,” one of the reporters told me. “This is a moment whose time has come.”

What I didn’t know was that there were fellow sufferers. So many, many fellow sufferers.

What I didn’t know was that there were researchers of mediaterrorism—researchers who also wanted to be heard.

What I didn’t know was that the donations I received would be numerous, large, almost reflexive. What I didn’t know was that people would buy my book. I didn’t even know people still read books.

What I didn’t know was that corporations would get involved. Especially the media corporations. Ubervision alone gave $80 million.

What I didn’t know was that the government would take interest, and that consulting with the government can be both lucrative and pleasant.

What I didn’t know, in short, is that something on the order of a mini media and monetary empire can grow up around one man through a process of near-ecological inevitability. Why me? I often wonder.

“Why me?” I say to Armando as we sit in my office sipping South Islay single-malt twenty-three-year-old Scotch over cubes of naturally refrozen Swiss glacier melt. “That’s what I still don’t understand.”

“It’s obvious,” Armando says. “You’re a nobody, a nonentity. You’re trivial, dull, not even very bright. Another TV-watching office drone who stayed in his mesh-chair and never made a fuss. You’re all of us. You’re an innocent victim.” He crunches glacier. “For what it’s worth, I’ve always supported you.”

“That’s why you’re here,” I say, and beckon him to my desk.

Armando listens while I explain what I need him to do.

“So what I’m hearing,” Armando says, “is that you want this to be discreet.”

“Use your judgment,” I say.

“And you want it to be judicious.”

“Use your discretion.”

“Now it’s my turn to ask,” Armando says. “Why me?”

I look into his wide eyes. I feel sure I can trust him. Of course I never blamed Armando for turning his back on me. It takes a lot of energy, I’ve found, blaming people. It takes more commitment than I’m able to muster.

“You’ve always been someone very special to me, Armando,” I say, and squeeze his shoulder. “You’re my friend who knows about computers.”

When Armando is gone, I go to the office window. Ad-clouds glide through the sky above the city, converted by projectors to flying billboards, sky-high beautiful faces smiling down. I have to go back out to Betty soon, to discuss the campaign for our new fundraising drive. It’s a full-time job, attaining full-time exposure. It doesn’t allow for a lot of freedom.

I hope Armando knows what he’s doing. I don’t want anyone to trace the donations. I don’t want anything linked to my name.

Money circulates. Money gets around. Call it a rich man’s sentimental dream. I’m the human face of a global cause, but I want my fortune to be infinitely sneaky, invisible as life-giving air or light. I want it to trickle through the world, working its influence unobserved. Above all, I want it to reach the FRF, or whatever that little country’s called now. I see it percolating through the foreign soil, mingling with the graves and seeds and bones. I picture it gathering to itself a secret life, springing skyward as a stand of trees. I picture it inhaling and reaching for the air, and in my better moments I can almost see the details, the windy movement and the flickering leaves, now dark, now bright, like data, like grace.

Before Miss Ferguson found Maude Lewis’s body in the school gym, none of us believed in the teenage werewolf. There had been rumors, of course. There always are. But many of us viewed Miss Ferguson’s discovery as confirmation of our worst fears.

Not everyone shared our certainty. There had been only a fingernail paring of moon that late February night, and a small but vocal minority of us argued that this precluded the possibility that Maude’s killer had been a lycanthrope. It was common knowledge, they contended, that werewolves only struck during full moons, often adding that one only became a werewolf by surviving the bite of another werewolf. No such attack had been reported.

The rest of us refrained from pointing out the errors in this fount of superstition. Instead we asked the skeptics to consider the facts of the case as Principal Ferguson reported them to the Rockdale Gazette. She had been working late, as she did most nights, partly, we believed, because she was lonely, having no family to go home to, and partly to accommodate Maude’s practice schedule. Maude was a talented gymnast who harbored hopes of a college scholarship and often stayed well into the evening to practice her tumbling runs and stunts.

Around eight o’clock on the night in question, Principal Ferguson had heard a brief shriek of terror. What she found when she investigated sent her flying back to her office in a seizure of panic and horror. She would not soon forget what she’d discovered in the gym. Some creature with superhuman strength—surely it could not have been a man—had snapped Maude’s back like a twig and draped her supine body over the balance beam. It dangled there like it had no bones at all. Her abdomen had been torn open, spilling out glistening loops of yellow entrails. The stench was terrible. You wouldn’t think a pretty girl like Maude would have had such smells within her, Miss Ferguson said.