2020 Page 2

  I teach the franchisees what we in the business call “setting features.” The corpses that come to us often stare up from their gurneys eyes wide and mouths agape, cheeks slack from gravity. Our service is to make them look dead; not actually dead, transfixed with the abyss or vacant-eyed as cooked lobsters, but properly, conventionally dead. So we shave them, close their eyes, their mouths, shut the openings that in life were ever active: we set the features. We fold the hands, one over the other, over the umbilicus: a posture of repose, peace with dignity at last. The final detail, here at GD, is insertion and adjustment of the Mona Lisa® smile.

  The fitting comes in seven sizes.

  It’s a serene time for me, passing from corpse to corpse among the Angels® on the walls, Mozart’s Requiem® in the air, murmuring with the students, seeing peace drive out fright on the faces below my hands.

  About eleven I got back to my office and was able to start on the urn. It looked seamless, but a magnetic lock inside the Model 986 responds to a proprietary magnetic key and the pyramid unfolds into four triangles.

  The judge’s ashes were intact in a traditional Ziploc bag: a generous cup of fine white and tan powder, bone fragments and white chunks, a couple the size of stream pebbles. Although we burn at 4500 degrees, not every part of the body vaporizes, and some of the body’s bones—the pelvis, for example—are so large as to resist reduction. Still, the total mass only came to seven point four ounces, a handful of dust. It is instructive how little even the rich and powerful come to, in the end.

  I spread the ashes on a lab table for inspection. One bone fragment reminded me strongly of the new Matsushita turtle logo, but that was about it. I ran a series of scans on the urn’s inner sleeve, came up with nothing. I tried heating and cooling the unit and listened for thermal flex noises. Nothing again. I delaminated the phoenix, sent each strata through computer-aided tomography. Nada. What the hell was going on?

  * * *

  I took my lunch up to the boardroom, brought an extra corned beef sandwich, spread it out on the slate table—but Max still wasn’t around. His wife, Dorothy, didn’t know where he was either; I supposed he was worrying the bean counters on the twenty-fourth floor.

  Morosely I ate and watched the Obit Channel. Our GD logo continued to shrink as our market share fell. When I looked away, out the window, the atmosphere was socked in again, this time with a browner cast to it, like the mustard had gone bad; you couldn’t remotely see the heavens; you’d have trouble framegrabbing a streetlight tonight.

  Then late in the afternoon, using a stereo zoom technique from cosmic body imaging, I finally discovered an anomaly in the ashes: a tiny green drop, shiny, like a fused gemstone. Its hardness registered in the diamond range and its translucent surface, like Chinese jade, offered no clue to its interior. I thought I could make out a minuscule rectangle of shaded stripes, but it might have been my imagination.

  Then I heard the little bugger creak.

  I called Keiko who toggled on video when she recognized my voice. She was wearing navy blue today, which suggested an advance in her grieving process. I told her what I’d found.

  “Did the judge have any gems on his person, any implants, anything like that?”

  “No implants that weren’t recycled. Do you think you’ve solved the problem?”

  “Once I figure out what this green thing is. . . .”

  * * *

  My efforts were interrupted by a message from Max asking me to cover a business meeting. I still couldn’t find Max himself—but since he knew how I hated taking meetings, I was hardly surprised.

  Keesha, Max’s secretary, gave me a wink of conspiratorial approval when she ushered in the sales rep, an ancient gnome with the unlikely name of Slaughter.

  The salesman represented a line of containers suitable for the cremates of family pets. They looked like stuffed animals, fluffy birds and cats and fish with big eyes, had microprocessors inside and made lifelike twitches for months on a tiny rechargeable. “Max said you needed to work on your numbers,” Mr. Slaughter said with a wet smile.

  Has it come to this? I asked myself. True, when my black Lab Balthazar died, on the way back from the crematorium I’d wound up shoving his ashes into the glovebox of my Lotus, where they’d stayed for want of a proper spot. Maybe a full-service franchise should have something for everybody passed through my mind. But this was going too far.

  I ran Mr. Slaughter out. Keesha gave me the evil eye. “It’s not like we don’t have a problem,” she hissed.

  * * *

  As for the little green thing, I kept thinking chip, though I’d never seen anything quite like it. At noon the next day, I finally found Max. Inadvertently. I was tracking down Lance to help me identify the green blob. I found my call forwarded from Lance’s holocube game to a lab at CalTech in Pasadena.

  “It may be the remains of one of those new biochips,” Lance said after a moment’s study on the vidphone. “Looks fried. You can still read the barcode, though. . . . Huh. Lemme scan this. . . .”

  The vidphone screen was suddenly taken up by Max’s face, bushy eyebrows wagging. He looked manic. “We’re back in business,” he shouted.

  “What are you talking about?”

  Max pushed Lance back in front of the camera sensor. Lance was blushing. “You’re the one who gave us the idea, Uncle Coop,” Lance said. “It started with your comet.”

  “What about my comet? What idea?”

  “We’re using Virgilius Maro to produce the signal we need for IMMORTALITY NOW! I’ve been taking courses in radio astronomy this semester. Did you know comets and their tails move through the solar system like huge generators?” He waved his hands around. “They come slicing through the system with a bigtime surge of radio frequency signals we get as broadband noise. I mean, comets produce it, generate radio frequency signals, in a major way. It’s, like, the snow between channels?”

  “Yes,” I said, vaguely familiar through radio imaging. “And?”

  “All we need to do is organize that RF noise and transform it into something useful—our image carrier, say. Digitalize it, modulate it with the holounits you want broadcast. . . . Then you send back to the comet a one-time countersignal to reshape the original RF noise into the signal you want broadcast. Bingo. . . .”

  “Bingo?”

  “Bingo. You’ve got a customized signal that’ll be transmitted through the solar system on every pass of the comet until, uh . . . ten to the seventh over pi . . . for about, uh, four hundred million years?”

  “You’re not seriously . . . Max?”

  There was his face again, shiny with perspiration, beatific with a kind of madness.

  “Look, Max,” I said, “It’s nice to have Lance in the loop here, but aren’t we reaching a bit? Selling radio noise from a comet? Isn’t that a little out of our range?”

  Max’s grin might have been shaped by a Mona Lisa® insert. “Not like we have a choice, Coop.”

  “It’s O’Donald’s, Uncle Coop,” Lance said off camera.

  I saw Max wince. He was particularly touchy about the mortuary arm of McDonald’s Corp., the O’Donald’s chain. “Those cheap maggots,” Max said grimly, “with their fake Irish Wakes and that stupid fucking clown, Digger O’Donald.”

  “What did they do?”

  “They underbid us for the AARP contract.”

  Now it was my turn to wince. Perhaps we were finished after all. No business can downsize by half overnight and not experience disaster. I looked up. The Angels® on the wall seemed surprised too. I noticed a film of dust on their wings; were we already laying off maintenance staff up here in the suites as well?

  The monitor framed the faces of both Max and his son: the Earth and the Moon, Jupiter and Io. I imagined retiring into another life with a woman like Keiko, working through the night somewhere, framegrabbing shooting stars. How nice it would be to have that kind of human satisfaction when the business was coming down—a son you loved, a loyal wife. “You guys d
o what you want,” I said. “We’re due for some luck.” I was certain, of course, that our luck had run out.

  “Send me the chip!” Lance blurted out under a squeeze from his dad.

  II.

  “A memory chip?” Keiko said.

  “Apparently it survived the cremation, so it’s clearly some hardened circuit. Maybe part of a life-extension implant that didn’t melt down, maybe something else. . . .”

  She was sitting across from me at Espagio’s. Its aquarium wall bubbled behind her in an algae-laden homage to Venice, the Italian city which had sunk just the year before to rising sealevels. Keiko’s niece Unix had suggested the place, winking at me in a way which, I felt, boosted my stock. I’d needed the boost; the news about her husband’s remains had changed Keiko. She’d put more holopix of the judge around the house and she was wearing black again. She seemed drawn into herself.

  “Is the chip readable?”

  I recited again the printout of the message text Lance had sent me that morning. “Bubble memory nanochip exchanging gasses through a quantum field. Proprietary barcode, unlisted, bio range.”

  “Bio range. I haven’t been able stop thinking about that.”

  I folded the mostly blank paper down to a sixth its size, the proportions of a coffin. “All of us wait for signals from the dead,” I told her. “We watch for signs that they’re still there, listen for voices to tell us that they still care. People are even happy when we hear that some deceased soul has done some outrageous thing, like disappeared from a grave or sat up in a coffin or made noise from an urn. As if any of that proves they’re much like the living and that we’re still on their minds. You have to be realistic, Keiko.”

  “Do you know I’m really fifty-nine?” she said quietly. “He was a bastard to a lot of people. But not to me.”

  I’d guessed fifty; not bad. “Mrs. MacPhee. Keiko. . . .”

  “First the noises, now this chip. It would be like him to leave something. Maybe he’s just saying hello. Maybe. . . .” She sighed, looking away with dark eyes that mixed sadness and hope.

  Well, the surprise was on me. Life always turns out to be more complex than you’d planned for it to be. I’d only just figured out what I really wanted in life—the love of a woman like Keiko, a life together to complete my own approaching sixties—and now here I was, the rival of a bag of ashes. And losing. I put my two hands over hers on the center of the table, nudging aside my plate, felt a tremor in my palm. “Maybe you ought to get out more,” I said, deciding to go for it. “Unix told me that you’ve been alone in your house since . . . Go for a walk. Anywhere, to a park. Dig around in your garden.” Embarrassed, I felt my face go hot and I muttered, “Have um, a fling.”

  She smiled.

  “Well, it would be a mistake to give you hope about the judge.”

  “I suppose you must be right. But until I really know about this chip . . .”

  “Give me a couple more days. Just don’t expect a miracle. The only real miracle is . . .” I said, waving my arms, “all round you.” I’d intended to wave at life itself, but I found myself waving at replica Espagio’s, at the movie people at the tables, at Unix, coming in the blue-green glass door, a head-turner in her short reflective dress.

  Still, my strategy with Keiko seemed to be working. As I helped her into Unix’s van at the curb she let her hand linger in mine and smiled. “My niece was right about you,” she said. “You’re a lot of fun.”

  * * *

  At breakfast the next morning I found myself watching an infomercial on the Obit Channel whose strangely familiar elements took a long time for me to fully recognize.

  The screen had gone European with archaic reds and blues and golds, morphed into an ersatz ancient tapestry whose vague robed figures came to life holding hands and ascending through some sort of stagy empyrean busy with GD Angels®. A smooth, deep voice intoned: “Star with saints and heroes in a dazzling holographic celebration your descendants will cherish forever. Travel through eternity clothed in the authentic finery of medieval Florence. . . .”

  I recognized the voice from an ad for our International Line. Medieval Florence? The hair on the back of my neck stood up. What I was looking at was an infomercial for IMMORTALITY NOW!

  I was even partly responsible for it. When we’d kicked around the idea years ago I’d suggested holotaping the clients (or, failing their actual presence, their computer-generated images) in scenes set in the ascending circles of Paradise as imagined by Dante Alighieri. I mean, it had been just an idea. Now apparently Max had gotten someone to develop it.

  I paged the rest of the executive floor for Max, got forwarded to Pasadena.

  “We’re getting great results,” Lance told me enthusiastically from the CalTech lab. Max, who appeared disheveled, was behind him, teleconferencing with a bank of monitors; I recognized the rainbow colors of the GD Regional Franchisee Net. “Fantastic results,” Lance went on. “A friend of mine from the radio astronomy club has an internship at the SETI transmitter in Arecibo, Puerto Rico. We’re working with him. Dad leased the site for the duration.”

  “Arecibo? The whole site?”

  “We’re going for a burst transmission on the 31st,” Lance gushed.

  Max had migrated to the vidphone and joked about buying down the national debt with the deal for Arecibo.

  “Cripes,” Lance said, “are we getting bandwidth! We’ll be able to encode enough information to broadcast tactile holography in a window of about eight hours real time. Then with compression . . . We’re trying to squeeze in a full twenty-four-hour day.”

  “I still don’t get it,” I said, trying to stay calm. “How does this signal override all the other signals people get?”

  “The way sunspots affect even hardened satellites; you fiddle with the magnetosphere a bit. Virgilius Maro’s that big, and we punch him up besides. Terrific lot of RF noise. Now if Virgil was just a little closer to earth, ha ha.”

  There was Max over his shoulder, munching popcorn. “Isn’t it great how Lance’s finally taken an interest in the business?” Max said. “It’s been a dream, to pass it on to the kid: Sczyczypek forever. Wait till you see the spots we’ve got running on the Obit Channel.”

  “Max, that’s what I called you about.”

  “Virgil, everybody’s calling the comet Virgil, don’t you love it? How could we pass the Dante angle up? I know you usually handle the art director end of things, but how you’ve been lately. . . . I thought I’d turn it over to Fiat/Disney.”

  “Max . . .”

  “It’s a business decision, Coop.” The way Max tensed his jaw when he spoke, that distant look in his eyes, reminded me that it was, after all, his business. I held my tongue. Anyway, I thought, who wants to paint the hull of a sinking ship?

  “We’re already selling units,” he went on. “From six this morning we’ve had a lease on reference studio space in the Valley. We’ll have virtual setups in every franchise city by week’s end. Overnight we’ve sold sixty thousand slots of that Paradiso so far—hey, you think that’s too Italian? ParadiseLand maybe?”

  Max downloaded other segments of the advertising program into a window on my wallscreen and I saw more of Fiat/Disney’s work, even one of the holounits themselves. Now I knew what those high production levels, those make-up jobs reminded me of: soap opera. Set in Thirteenth-Century Florence, laced with special effects, but soap opera all the same. It was painful to watch. I felt the way any writer feels when a story of his or hers is worked over, distorted. I felt surrounded by disaster.

  It had been a good run, with the company, I found myself thinking.

  “Don’t look so glum, Uncle Coop.” Lance seemed a little embarrassed himself. “I got something else on the chip. Set of chips, I guess we should say. Apparently the, uh, cooking it went through? Thermal conversion auto-booted a runnable file to access mass storage? Or at least so say the probes. Amazing how the lines hold up. I think I got the power leads identified to the CPU and the
bubble memory. Who knows, I might even be able to run that sucker. Or ruin it for good. I mean, it’s really a longshot.”

  “Do what you can,” I smiled automatically, but the room really began to swim around me now. Destroy it! I wanted to shout. Give it to me! I’ll ruin it. I had just been comforting myself with a vision of retirement with Keiko and my rival’s dust refused to settle, if you know what I mean.

  After I hung up different schemes passed through my mind. Get it back from Lance, send it down the trash chute, flush it down the john. But gradually, after twenty minutes of controlled breathing, I settled down.

  I did have qualms of conscience about destroying it, after all. And I was curious about what would happen if Lance tried to run the program (“ruin it for good,” ran through my mind). Still, I resolved to withhold this latest development from Keiko. I would tell her that we hadn’t made any progress, that it looked like there was nothing to the chip after all.

  As the comet approached, I could lose myself in setting up the imaging equipment, dirty though the atmosphere continued to be. I’d planned to invite Keiko to drive down to Baja with me, but word was even Baja was socked in. So I would have to console myself with beta-testing new Zeiss filters; they were ingenious: including power supply the whole set fit into palm of my hand.

  My specialty is the suitcase-sized observatory. There is a special pleasure in handling such fine equipment, calibrating the sensors, cleaning the lenses, inputting the current project’s program, coordinating frame-action with celestial coordinates, running through simulations whose successes and failures both leave you hanging, peacefully and without messy human contact, somewhere among the stars.

  * * *

  The comet was a big event in the news: icy infalling interstellar material from the Kuyper Belt, a remnant of the formation of the solar system. The best estimate of its mass was a bit over a hundred kilotons, the size of a small mountain, a fairly rare event. A comet that big, impacting the Earth, would cause an untold catastrophe, its energy yield on the order of 20,000 megatons, equivalent to all the nuclear weapons produced in the previous century. But though V. Maro’s 272 year orbit would be close in cosmic terms, no measurable effect to earth was expected beyond an interruption in communications, and an incredible show.