The Pedestal (3 page)

A fringe benefit for patrons is that if a venue is over capacity or running a waiting list, IntelliQ can be used in conjunction with the nexus to issue notices to customers’ daygrids with real-time alternative recommendations based on their preferences, proximity, traffic and so forth. Of course, that’s a selling point that we’ll only tout from one side of our mouths, since no restaurant will appreciate their customers being redirected elsewhere when they could instead be made to wait. Nevertheless, once the nexus is in possession of the ball, tram and shuttle schedules will remap accordingly to compensate—all in an instant.

If the program tests well—and I have no reason to believe it won’t—it’ll be a shoo-in for the government’s next add-on roundup. If that happens? Oh, man ... I tremble with bliss at the thought. It’ll mean billions for IDS over the next few years—of which a percentage will be justly mine. And not only will the enhancement benefit restaurants—which will pay well for it in the form of taxes—commerce in general will become that much less volatile, paving the way for even higher-profile government contracts with IDS.

I know. I’m awesome. By the way, this is just the sort of dinner conversation that has kept me single for most of my adult life.

Anyway, Arthur comes into play the moment my programs land on our test partitions. Even then, he’s not terribly interested in my programmatic procedures; his concerns revolve around which gateways I’m using, which scripting libraries I’ve imported from the codebank. What he does—I think—is plug our programs into the nexus via our corporate portal, which in turn releases them into the market stream behind the appropriate firewalls across the global network. Without Arthur, my program’s dead in the water.

Hey, let’s just call a spade a spade: without Arther, IDS is doomed.

If Keith seriously thinks I stand a chance at filling Arthur’s enormous shoes, he’s as asinine as he is socially retarded. Whether he’s prepared to acknowledge it or not, our top contracts are in serious danger right now—the government isn’t known for giving second chances. We’ve done a good job for them over the years, but there’s no loyalty in business or bureaucracy. A single mistake, and they’ll drop us like a rotten egg.

I swipe the drive over my terminal reader and chew my lower lip as its contents splay across my screen. I sort the file list by modified date, as if that’s going to help. I don’t know what the heck I’m looking at. I open a few files and scan their contents in my code editor: it’s all nonsense. I recognize a virtual host configuration script here, an .htaccess file there, though I have only a vague idea of what they do. I know they hearken back to the days of the dotcomosaur, before its abrupt evolution into the nexus, but that’s it. I only recognize them at all because I took an immersive course on the history of programming in my college days. It was a mind-numbingly boring download that examined bits of old-world computer technology to prove that, while technology continues to advance, programming concepts remain fairly consistent. Apparently some of the programming itself managed to stick around as well.

I close down the files in rapid succession. I’m about to dismiss the drive altogether when a file catches my interest. Well, really, it isn’t the file itself that has my interest—it’s the extension. At IDS, we work with proprietary file types, unique not only to our industry, but to our company. In other words, we make up our own extensions and assign them internally to different compilers as needed; and we do this to an absolute fault—no exceptions. So finding an .rtf file extension on the list raises an eyebrow.

If you’re not a fellow nerd, let me explain: I’m looking at a run-of-the-mill rich-text file—one that by design is readable on just about any technological platform known to man, with or without the nexus. To preserve the integrity of our security, IDS prohibits the use of these, so finding one on Arthur’s drive throws me off—at least until I open it.

At once the confusion is gone, and in its place is grave concern. My stomach cinches into a quivering fist as I survey a list of names—names I recognize from all walks of prominence.

Scott Heber, Envirosec CFO: 100,000;

Amanda Van Burr, NSA Operations: 60,000;

Ronald Weistmeisser, FAA Operations: 70,000;

Leah Carlisle, Miritech (more notably, the vice president of Unified freaking America, for crying out loud!): 110,000;

Mannford Waters, Global Freight and Logistics: 60,000;

Et cetera; the list goes on and on and on.

In and of itself, this file is circumstantial, if not meaningless—at least, a court of law would say so. But around here, many of these names carry significant weight; not only are they general points of authority my company routinely encounters as we spec out new projects, these are the very names that grease the wheels of progress in this country.

Envirosec is the single largest security firm in the world, tasked with maintaining the global integrity of NanoPrint technology and its legal implementation in commerce.

The NSA is very much a governing force in the overall scheme of budding computer science, as it has been for hundreds of years—nothing happens without their permission.

The FAA is responsible for vetting every single NanoPrint add-on to determine its compliance with wireless transmission guidelines.

And so forth.

If any one of these guys gets a bad taste in his mouth for your product, you can bet it’ll never see the light of day.

I don’t want to read too much into this file, but I can’t think of a single benign explanation for its existence. My gut tells me this is bad news, not only for IDS, but for me. Unless I’m just being paranoid, somehow Arthur—and by extension, IDS—has landed smack dab in the middle of something sinister. Something I’m not supposed to know about.

Before anyone can get an unauthorized eyeful over my shoulder, I swipe out of my workstation, gather a few things from my desk, and head for the door. Keith looks up from his desk as I pass by his office, a manicured eyebrow hiking toward his hairline—I know, it’s messed up; he tossed his biological heritage out the window, yet he’s holding fast to many of the behaviors that came with it. Fifty cred says he still pees sitting down.

Oh, gross.
Why’d I go there? Now I’m thinking about Keith’s body—Keith who used to be Keisha with boobs, until she paid someone handsomely to have them chemically lopped off in the name of equality.

I really just stopped in to get some files together. Given what’s happened, I wasn’t planning on staying long; already this feels long enough. Keith gives me a
hey, what’s the deal?
sort of look, but I don’t bother with a detailed explanation. I just nod toward the elevators and say, “Be back in a little while.” No point in wasting breath, anyway; experience tells me that Keith will likely consult my proximity stats on the nexus, heedless of what I say. A more respectable person might call up my daygrid to determine if I’m headed out for a late breakfast or a dental appointment, or whatever. But Keith has no respect for anyone’s privacy, least of all mine.

Fifteen minutes later, I walk into the hospital. The odor of the elderly and otherwise terminally infirm wafts over me, and I now fervently wish I’d stayed at the office. I guess the grass is always greener.

Arthur looks terrible; that much is obvious even from the hall. I intend to go in there and see how he’s feeling—and to demand answers, if I can bring myself to be so callous—but framed by the doorway, my friend looks so pitiful, so unnaturally frail, that I’m suddenly unsure that I can face him. It’s all but impossible to juxtapose him against any ledger of wrongdoing; he isn’t only my best friend, he’s always been a monument of integrity. Yet, though it pains me to admit it, I’m already seeing him differently after opening that file. I feel like the worst kind of friend for withholding any benefit of doubt from him, a man who I know deserves better.

I lean against the wall outside Art’s doorway, where I hope to be unseen, should he happen to open his eyes in my direction. I remember the last time I was here for any length of time, four years ago, when my aunt Gertrude passed away. Somehow, though she still holds a dear place in my heart, this seems worse. Maybe it was the abruptness of her death that made it more bearable; before I even learned that she’d been involved in a freak accident, she was already dead. There was no room for hope, no slow easing into acceptance.

One moment she was here, the next she wasn’t.

This is different; the onset of Art’s condition has similarly come from nowhere, but unlike Gertrude’s, Arthur’s fate is an island on the horizon toward which he slowly rocks to and fro. I have no doubt he’ll eventually reach its sandy shore, but it’s impossible to pin that moment on a timeline.

The hospital is virtually empty; healthcare is a dying industry—if you’ll pardon the pun. Don’t get me wrong: I’m sure emergency rooms will remain forever abuzz with the broken limbs and bloody lacerations that prove we’re all still human and fallible. But whoever got the bright idea to chemically override the natural life cycle of cellular development turned the healthcare model on its rear forever. The—

>>Oh, Wilson ... you make me all warm and gooey inside, but did you mean to say ‘turn the healthcare model on its
ear
’?

What? No—ear? Now, how does that even make any sense, Marilyn? What I mean is, the life expectancy of a healthy human being, left unchecked, anyway, more than tripled on that day, so I can see why it must’ve seemed like a great idea at the time. I’m sure the guy never considered what should happen to people when they outlive their societal value.

The indignity of the nexus—or at least, the political powers that oversee the nexus—deciding how and when I’m going to kick the bucket enrages me if I allow myself to dwell on it. Politicians were never meant to don the reaper’s cape, of that I’m quite sure. Nevertheless, even if my cells are still dividing and synapsing like little champs, their days are literally numbered.

I guess I’d be less offended if I didn’t also feel systematically sapped of my free will while I’m still alive; everything I do, for example, is logged, classified, and then plugged into projections, which are then used to either influence or predict the commercial value of my next move. I can’t go number two without the wipe dispenser advancing six squares because at some point the nexus sensed a trend in my number two behavior and applied its conclusions to my global preferences. I don’t care that six squares is the perfect amount and that, if given a choice, that’s the number I’d invariably pick anyway. The fact that I don’t get to be spontaneous about it makes me want to squeeze my cheeks together and hold out for a day when I can rip off eleven squares—or use a crank bidet without consulting the nexus—just for the sake of mixing things up.

A nurse passes me and gives me a vague, sympathetic smile, which reminds me that I have more pressing concerns than hygienic wipes and bidets. I nod politely, then take a breath and step inside Arthur’s room. As soon as I reach his bedside, I know something’s wrong. The machinery to which he’s umbilicaled is still. In fact, all the gizmos and electro-widgets that were sustaining him earlier appear to have been powered off. When I left here early this morning, Arthur’s room was a tone-deaf choir of beeping and mechanical swishing, pulsing to the twinkle of countless LEDs and tiny backlit panels. Now, the musicians have retired, and the lights have gone home to sleep off the nightmare. By all appearances, my friend has been abandoned, left here to die.

But that can’t be true, I know. They must’ve done all they could here—and he died anyway. All the medical gadgets in the world are useless at some point. Still, they could’ve covered him with a sheet or something—or has that tradition fallen by the wayside just like everything else of value in this age? And the part that’s really bugging me: why didn’t someone tell me?

No one should have to die alone, least of all Arthur.

I reach out to touch his hand and find that my own is trembling. I’m breathing heavily now, through my mouth because I’m afraid that the smell of death will overpower me. I’ve never seen a dead body before, and I’m not ashamed to admit that the experience is creeping me out a little.

Before I can overthink it, I take his hand in mine and give it a tentative squeeze. It feels smooth and uncalloused—spared from the wear-and-tear of manual labor—like my own. Yet it’s cool against my skin, and there’s a stiffness that shouldn’t be there.

I have to remind myself that this isn’t some slab of meat—this is
Arthur
.

Arthur, the family friend who took me to my first carnival when I was six years old.

Arthur, who became a father to me when life deprived me of a more legitimate one.

My buddy Art, who used to have me over for dinner every Thursday night, until his wife Mitzy became concerned that I’d never learn to be independent.

Art, the worst poker player in the world.

Arthur, my colleague who went out on a limb to get me hired on at IDS when my résumé wasn’t quite up to snuff.