Year's Best Scifi 3 Part 25

We exchanged small talk for several minutes, then Morita as the superior took the initiative to sign off. In the confines of my secret room, I heaved a sigh and checked my other. Coupon was arguing with his wife. We needed him to work on the proposal. He should have sent me to see her. I scanned the transcript of the argument to date. I needed to return to the communication queues, but the fight was too distracting. It upset me. Here I was dedicating the best days of the best years of my life to him, shouldering his most tedious burdens, taking the brunt of his personal and professional shocks, freeing him so that he could create. Day after day, night after night, I proved that I could be everything that he was, I could do everything that he did, yet he had the name. My name was almost forgotten. Because the lightning bolt of employment had struck him and not me, I had no dreams of my own. I dreamed his dreams. I accepted his insults. All that I asked was to serve him. And here he was, squandering the time and the emotional energy that I saved for him on yet another stupid argument with Cecilia. He was savaging her, too. Sometimes I thought he brutalized her just to upset me.

"... getting fat and lazy," Coupon was shouting. "Don't you understand that I've got work to do? I've got to earn the money that you're so fond of spending."

"We're rich enough already, Frederick," Cecilia said in her pleading voice. "I just want more of your time. It gets lonely in here-"

"You're the one who wants to see St. Petersburg in February, well, here you are, complaining about how boring an Arctic pa.s.sage is.""I thought we might have some time together," Cecilia wailed. Then she said something unnerving: "I don't understand you! Sometimes you're so wonderful and understanding, and other times, like now, you're so b.l.o.o.d.y beastly-"

Coupon roared with anger. I stood up, afraid that he was going to hit her again.

He loomed over her, his fists clenched. I fought my own compulsion to bolt from my hiding hole, dash down to her cabin and pull my twin away from her. Thankfully, he managed to chain the demon of his temper, venting it only in screams of obscenity. Coupon turned his heel and left Cecilia sobbing.

Moments later, he tore open the door to my room, crowding inside where his shouts would be doubly soundproofed.

"What have you been doing to my wife?" he demanded. His face was flushed, the cords of his neck muscles strained. I could see the pulse in his jugular veins.

"You know what," I said. "What you've ordered."

"You're making her fall in love with you!" he shouted.

Looking up into his flushed face, seeing the blood-shot eyes and spit-speckled lips, I wondered how I could ever have considered ourselves handsome.

"I'm making her fall in love with you," I answered.

"I said that you could make love to her!" Coupon shouted. "I didn't say to go on about it for an hour!"

"We were having a good day," I retorted.

Coupon clenched his fist and swung at my face. Abruptly . I stood, my left arm deflecting the blow, as I grabbed him by the lapels and jacked him up against the bulkhead.

"Never again," I hissed.

He could feel my strength. Our identical faces were almost nose-to-nose. I stared into his eyes and sought the glint of fear I knew would surface. When it gleamed like something arisen to the surface of a dark pool, I repeated, "Never again. You will never hit me again. And you'll..."

I hesitated, because it occurred to me that instructing the client not to beat his wife exceeded my brief as a professional emulator. Uncertain, I released his lapels, reflexively crushing my own so that once again our appearances matched. Coupon's breath stank as he hyperventilated so close to me.

"We're-sorry, master," I said. "We're under pressure. We've got the deadline.

Why don't you retire to the study, work on the proposal. I'll finish your communications. Later, we'll have calmed down enough. You could go to Cecilia then. Apologize."

"I'll be d.a.m.ned if I apologize to her," Coupon snapped. "But you will. And make it good, too."

"Yes, master.""I don't want to have to bother with her again for two days. Or with you. I've got a deadline, dammit! I've got to pitch a 300 trillion yen SEE in two days, and the d.a.m.ned 3D models aren't even done, let alone the animations. Aren't I paying you to make my life easier?"

"Yes, master. I'm trying."

"Well, give the communications back-log the same attention you give to my future ex-wife and maybe we'll get something accomplished!"

Coupon turned on his heel, checked the spy hole to ensure no one was in his stateroom and left me alone with only his odor. I sat and wondered. After I had glimpsed the fear in his eyes, something else had surfaced, something colder and more deadly. Hate. In that moment, Coupon hated me, his other self. I hugged my ribs. I began to fear for my life.

It would be so easy. He could poison me or simply tip me overboard. A privileged conversation with the president of Universal Emulators, a surrendering of his employee insurance premium and I would not even be history. It would be as if I had never existed.

Then, the sister idea presented its seductive self: how easy would it be for me simply to tip him overboard. If I managed to avoid DNA typing for the rest of my life, then I could be Coupon. Not emulate him. Be him.

A new fantasy, so much richer and darker than the workaday one of fleeing with Cecilia. "My future ex-wife..." Lately, he had taken to referring to her as such. Was he doing it to torment me, because he had learned to read my thoughts as thoroughly as I read his?

I shook my head, then turned my attention to the communications. There were now eighteen high-ranking requests to communicate, plus hundreds of messages in his in-boxes across the Nets. Soon I fell into the rhythm of communicating as Coupon. It was soothing. While he began to orchestrate the overall presentation in the study, I tended to the hundreds of details. The Korean animators needed a tongue-lashing; imagine trying to use stock backgrounds in a Coupon presentation!

Alexi, chief of the user group in St. Petersburg, had an interesting point about the spouse-acceptance factor; I summarized his drunken ramblings and shot the summary to Coupon. And that Zurich professor was still whining about historiocity!

Was that even a word?

Hours later, I worked down to the textual interchanges. Fan mail from Duluth.

Blue-sky futurizing with the MIT media lab. High-priced gossip about Microsoft's next move. He really was an incurable networker. If only he had built up a real staff and controlled his interactions, then he would never have needed an emulator. Yet that's how these employed people were: so fearful of losing control, so terrified of becoming one of the huge majority of the unemployed. The Net allowed them to be virtually everywhere all the time, so they worked until they stressed themselves to uselessness, shot themselves or hired an emulator to pose as them, first in the little things, gradually, in all things, even the most important... except presentations to thesponsors. After all, in the Net, you were who your crypto-key said you were.

And if your compet.i.tion used cla.s.s-B emulators, then naturally you wanted a cla.s.s-A: some poor dupe, highly educated but otherwise unemployable, who was desperate enough after squandering his youth preparing for a nonexistent job that he was willing to market his very self. Cosmetic gene therapy. Bone splints and grafts, hormonal treatments so that he smelled like you. Voice, posture, walking, sitting lessons. Someone willing to break himself upon the rock of economic necessity and heal in bonds so that he could emulate you during those tiresome c.o.c.ktail parties.

Someone who could even service your spouse while you were busy preparing for your next professional triumph.

Someone very much like me. Coupon's emulator. Whose name was just a scrawl on a contract locked up in a Yokohama bank, but when I remembered it, it was Jack.

Jack Quimby, who had been a poor British boy raised in America before he became an American tax refugee, or at least the shadow of such.

So I worked the queue until they were down to only one, which I thought had been garbled in transmission since I couldn't decode it. Then I noticed the routing codes. Someone in Yokohama was replying to a message Coupon had sent. Was he communicating with my service in a personal code unknown to me? Perhaps he was checking the details on the clause of the contract that dealt with the sudden and inexplicable disappearance of the emulator.

I wrapped the message in a sh.e.l.l and shipped it for decoding to a discreet black arts group in Taiwan. Checking the time, I saw that it was almost four in the morning. Coupon was still working in the study. Now he was drinking; the alco-holic phase of his work marathons typically lasted twenty hours. That would give us time enough to crash, sleep, work another day and then make the presentation.

And so to bed. My paradigm had ordered me to Cecilia, and so I went.

She was lying in the dark with her back to the door. I shut the stateroom door and undressed silently. The curtains were pulled back from the portals, which glowed as redly as demon's eyes. Beyond the gla.s.s, the ship's running light was firing the swirling mists of a heavy sea fog. The weather was worsening. As the ship was beginning to roll, I stumbled as I crawled into bed.

I could tell she was awake, although she didn't move. Settling into bed, I began to hope that I would spend a peaceful night.

"Don't you love me?" she asked, her voice small and vulnerable.

"Yes, of course," I said, but on whose behalf I was uncertain.

"Why do you treat me so horribly?"

"One word, Cecilia. Stress."

She turned, so that the red light outlined hazily the curve of her cheekbone. Her eyes were black pools in shadow, yet they gleamed.

"Why do you keep pushing yourself so? Is it worth it?""Sometimes..." I said, intending to say, Sometimes I wonder, but I pulled myself up short. It wouldn't do to negotiate the master into a position with which he was uncomfortable. How well I knew that his priorities were work first, second and third, with Cecilia somewhere in the double digits.

"Sometimes... it may not seem like it's worth it," I said, speaking now for him.

"But it's what I do, Cecilia. It's who lam."

"Who are you?" she asked sharply. "Who are you really?"

In the darkness, it was impossible to read her eyes. I couldn't tell at what level she was asking, so I answered at the level most comfortable for Coupon.

"Frederick Coupon, CEO of Bonus Enterprises."

"I don't think you know who you are," Cecilia said.

"Maybe not. All I see in the mirror is the reflection of a man's face. I don't see myself except when I look at something that I made and I know that no one else could possibly have made it."

"I don't think you exist outside of the things you make," she said. "I don't think you're for real."

"Yet somehow the reality of my money is convincing," I said. That was pure Coupon, but she had wounded me.

"I want a divorce," Cecilia said.

"A divorce will only get you two million yen, if you remember the terms of the prenuptial. I'll give you three million yen right now if you would kindly shut the f.u.c.k up."

Slowly Cecilia raised herself to sit. I wondered if she had a butcher knife among the bedclothes. How unfair it would be to die as Coupon!

"That was good," she said. "But that was just getting too much like Coupon."

There followed a profound silence.

"Excuse me?" I said.

"You do him really well," she said. "It bothers me that you're making it harder to tell the difference. I always liked you better. I don't think I should have to put up with two Coupons. A tag team of jerks. I've only been putting up with him for so long because I liked you. Don't you get like him."

"I am him," I offered feebly.

"I think you're getting confused on the issue," Cecilia said. "But you are definitely not him."

"Who am I, then? "I asked.

"I've been wondering that for two years," Cecilia said. "Who are you?""I don't know."

"Who did you use to be?"

"Jack. Jack Quimby."

The lights flared. Coupon stormed into the room.

"That's just great!" he shouted. "You're fired, you idiot."

"No, you can't fire him," Cecilia said.

"What! He's fired!"

"It's going to cost you half of everything, then, Fred," Cecilia said. We both winced. n.o.body called us Fred, just as n.o.body p.r.o.nounced Coupon with the accent on the first syllable, at least not after the first transgression. "Because the prenuptial is void in the case of infidelity."

"But I've been faithful to you!"

"No you haven't," Cecilia said coldly. "When you sent this employee, this double, into our bed, you violated the monogamy of our marriage. Any judge would see it that way."

Coupon staggered. It was obvious that he saw the piercing, twisted truth of Cecilia's logic.

"And so until you're willing to give me half of everything you own," Cecilia said, "I'm calling.the shots. And I don't want to see you anymore. And I want Jack here to... protect me. I feel threatened right now. Go away because I feel the deep urge for him to protect me."

Coupon's jaw sagged. He took a step forward, then one back, then he turned and fled from the stateroom.

Cecilia hugged me from the rear, her arms warm around my shoulders, her b.r.e.a.s.t.s pressed against my back.

"You do want to protect me, don't you, Jack?"

"If you'll protect me," I answered.

"Deal."

I collapsed into her arms. We made urgent love. She seemed to delight in murmuring my name, "Jack" and hearing her murmur it and then shout it and finally scream it was a perfect tonic for my wounded soul. When we were done, I felt more like my own self than I had in years.

"Who are you?" she asked, as I lay, head on her breast as she stroked my hair.

"An emulator. Universal-"

"No, who are you really?"

"Just... a fool who refused to be useless," I said. "I studied and trained for so many years. I always felt certain that I would be the one good enough to get a job.The months pa.s.sed and then the years. And I found out that there were millions of men like me. Do you know what that's like?"

"Yes," Cecilia said softly, her voice deep with emotion.

"And I am good," I said. "He never would have gotten the Miami contract without me. Now I don't know what we're going to do. We can't go on like this, can we?"

"Oh no," Cecilia said. "He'll kill us first."

My mind resisted the thought, but I knew that she was right.

"We'll have to go away," I said.

"Oh no," she said. "He'll have to go away. Do you really think that he would let us live, knowing that he's committed fraud thousands of times? His name is his reputation and his reputation is his business. We could ruin him. He'll never allow us to have that power over him."

"Why hasn't he..."

"He's thinking about it now," she said. "You know he is. He's been watching us make love and now he's thinking about what we're saying. He's working it out at just about the speed that you're working it out."

"So?"

"So I think you had better start looking for a weapon."

"But-"