Чарли Андерс - Six Months, Three Days, Five Others

“Fix… it?”

Jethro handed Bruce a Robo-Bop with a pulsing Yes/No screen. “It’s all on you, buddy. You push yes, we can make a difference here. There’ll be some disruptions, people might be a mite inconvenienced, but we can ameliorate some of the problems. Push no, and things go on as they are. But bear in mind—if you push yes, you’re the one who has to explain to the people.”

Bruce still didn’t understand what he was saying yes to, but he hardly cared. He jabbed the yes button with his right thumb. Jethro whooped and led him to the executive elevator so they could watch the fun from the roof.

“It should be almost instantaneous,” Jethro said over his shoulder as he hustled into the lift. “Thanks to our patented ‘snaggletooth’ technology that makes all our products talk to each other. It’ll travel around the world like a wave. It’s part of our enterprise philosophy of Why Not Now.”

The elevator lurched upward, and in moments, they had reached the roof. “It’s starting,” Jethro said. He pointed to the nearest ThunderNet tower. The sleek lid was opening up like petals, until the top resembled a solar dish. And a strange haze was gathering over the top of it.

“This technology has been around for years, but everybody said it was too expensive to deploy on a widespread basis,” Jethro said with a wink. “In a nutshell, the tops of the towers contain a photocatalyst material, which turns the CO 2and water in the atmosphere into methane and oxygen. The methane gets stored and used as an extra power source. The tower is also spraying an amine solution into the air that captures more CO 2via a proprietary chemical reaction. That’s why the ThunderNets had to be so pricey.”

Just then, Bruce felt a vibration from his own Robo-Bop. He looked down and was startled to see a detailed audit of Bruce’s personal carbon footprint—including everything he’d done to waste energy in the past five years.

“And hey, look at the parking lot,” Jethro said. All the Car-Dingos were reconfiguring themselves, snaking new connections into the car engines. “We’re getting most of those vehicles as close to zero emissions as possible, using amines that capture the cars’ CO 2. You can use the waste heat from the engine to regenerate the amines.” But the real gain would come from the car’s GPS, which would start nudging people to carpool whenever another Car-Dingo user was going to the same destination, using a “packet-switching” model to optimize everyone’s commute for greenness. Refuse to carpool, and your car might start developing engine trouble—and the Car-Dingos, Bruce knew, were almost impossible to remove.

As for the Crados? Jethro explained how they were already hacking into every appliance in people’s homes, to make them energy-efficient whether people wanted them to be or not.

Zoe was standing at Bruce’s elbow. “It’s too late to stop the trend or even reverse all the effects,” she said over the din of the ThunderNet towers. “But we can slow it drastically, and our most optimistic projections show major improvements in the medium term.”

“So, all this time—all this hellish time—you had the means to make a difference, and you just… sat on it?” Bruce said. “What the fuck were you thinking?”

“We wanted to wait until we had full product penetration.” Jethro had to raise his voice now; the ThunderNet towers were actually thundering for the first time ever. “And we needed people to be ready. If we had just come out and told the truth about what our products actually did, people would rather die than buy them. Even after Manhattan and Florida. We couldn’t give them away. But if we claimed to be making overpriced, wasteful pieces of crap that destroy the environment? Then everybody would need to own two of them.”

“So, my crisis of conscience—” Bruce could only finish that sentence by wheeling his arms.

“We figured the day when you no longer gave a shit about your own future would be the day when people might accept this,” Jethro said, patting Bruce on the back like a father, even though he was younger.

“Well, thanks for the mind games.” Bruce had to shout now. “I’m going to go explore something I call my culture of drunkenness.”

“You can’t leave, Bruce,” Jethro yelled in his ear. “This is going to be a major disruption, everyone’s gadgets going nuts at once. There will be violence and wholesale destruction of public property. There will be chainsaw rampages. There may even be Twitter snark. We need you to be out in front on this, explaining it to the people.”

Bruce looked out at the dusk, red-and-black clouds churning as millions of ThunderNet towers blasted them with scrubber beams. Even over that racket, the chorus of car horns and shouts as people’s Car-Dingos suddenly had minds of their own started to ring from the highway. Bruce turned and looked into the gleam of his boss’s schoolmaster specs. “Fuck you, man,” he said. Followed a moment later by “I’ll do it.”

“We knew we could count on you.” Jethro turned to the half-dozen or so executives cluttering the roof deck behind him. “Big hand for Bruce, everybody.” Bruce waited until they were done clapping, then leaned over the railing and puked his guts out.

The plastic cat head is wearing an elaborate puffy crown covered with bling. The cat’s mouth opens to reveal a touch screen, but there’s also a jack to plug in an elaborate mask that gives you a visor, along with nose plugs and earbuds for added sensory input. Holding this self-contained game system in my palms, I hate it and want to throw it out the open window of our beautiful faux-Colonial row house to be buried under the autumn mulch. But I also feel a surge of hope: that maybe this really will make a difference. The cat is winking up at me.

Shary crouches in her favorite chair, the straight-backed Regency made of red-stained wood and lumpy blue upholstery. She’s wearing jeans and a stained sweatshirt, one leg tucked under the other, and there’s a kinetic promise in her taut leg that I know to be a lie. She looks as if she’s about to spring out of that chair and ask me about the device in my hands, talking a mile a minute the way she used to. But she doesn’t even notice my brand-new purchase, and it’s a crapshoot whether she even knows who I am today.

I poke the royal cat’s tongue, and it gives a yawp through its tiny speakers, then the screen lights up and asks for our Wi-Fi password. I give the cat what it wants, then it starts updating and loading various firmware things. A picture of a fairy-tale castle appears with the game’s title in a stylized wordmark above it: THE DIVINE RIGHT OF CATS. And then begins the hard work of customizing absolutely everything, which I want to do myself before I hand the thing off to Shary.

The whole time I’m inputting Shary’s name and other info, I feel like a backstabbing bitch. Giving this childish game to my life partner, it’s like I’m declaring that she’s lost the right to be considered an adult. No matter that all the hip teens and twentysomethings are playing Divine Right of Cats right now. Or that everybody agrees this game is the absolute best thing for helping dementia patients hold on to some level of cognition, and that it’s especially good for people suffering from leptospirosis X, in particular. I’m doing this for Shary’s good, because I believe she’s still in there somewhere.

I make Shary’s character as close to Shary as I can possibly make a cat wizard who is the main adviser to the throne of the cat kingdom. (I decide that if Shary was a cat, she’d be an Abyssinian, because she’s got that sandy-brown-haired sleekness, pointy face, and wiry energy.) Shary’s monarch is a queen, not a king—a proud tortoiseshell cat named Arabella IV. I get some input into the realm’s makeup, including what the nobles on the Queen’s Council are like, but some stuff is decided at random—like, Arabella’s realm of Greater Felinia has a huge stretch of vineyards and some copper mines, neither of which I would have come up with.