Excerpts from Everyone In Silico
by Jim Munroe

Originally published by No Media Kings in 2004, a full ebook version can be purchased by a donation to the author at nomediakings.org, where his other books, graphic novels, movies and videogames live.

***

It was never good to work on an empty stomach, but Nicky had procrastinated to the point where there was no other choice.

At least I'm just hungry, not hungry and wet, Nicky thought as she wandered down Commercial Drive, welcoming the sun on her face like a long-lost friend. The rainy season was over: Vancouver had finally shucked off winter's grey cloak and the strip of stores and restaurants seemed cleaner, newer, reflecting Nicky's small smile back at her.

"Nicholas!" said someone coming out of the Safeway.

"Hey, JK," Nicky said, turning. "Little shopping?"

JK lifted his bulging bags as he backed away. "Lotta shopping. Gotta go. Like the new cut. Looks like an octopus is sitting on your head."

Nicky smiled and shook her thin ponytails. "Why thanks, Joseph Kindertoy."  She tried not to stare at his bags as she waved goodbye.

In the first Starbucks she saw she noticed some kids she knew, so she waved and kept on going. The Starbucks a block down looked clear, however, so she held her watch on the rusty plate until the door buzz-clicked.

Breathing a silent relieved breath — she hadn't been positive she had enough for a coffee — she threw her stuff at a table near the window and went up to the counter. As the machine filled her cup, she watched the people bustling by. Spring was all over their faces, as obvious and gleeful as strawberry jam. Nicky put sugar and two Milkbuds into her coffee and watched the door. Mostly tourists, since the kids from the Drive favoured the outlet she had passed by. The steam from her cup curled around and coalesced briefly into the
Starbucks logo, then dissipated.

An older masked couple came in and tentatively looked around the café. Nicky rifled through her watch for something to read. She found an article on using EasyCut for amphibious splicing and got her watch to project it on the table instead of her retina. After a minute, she checked the couple out over the rim of her coffee cup. They were at the counter, waiting for a couple of boys to finish filling their soup-tureen mugs. They were as noisy as their clothes.

The boys finally touched their watches to the payplate, bouncing them off it in a perfunctory way.

"Next time, ask him where's his body at!" the kid said on his way out the door, and his red-capped friend exploded in a honk-laugh that made the masked man step back briefly, place a hand to secure his mask, then square his shoulders and pretend he was rubbing his face.

Nicky strained to hear what the man was saying to the woman in his quiet voice, noticed that he touched his bare fingers to the payplate. Nicky smiled inside. Loaded. Only the utterly destitute and the fabulously wealthy did without watches.

After casually pressing a black pellet onto the surface of the table next to her, Nicky leaned away from it and absorbed herself in her article. The woman stood for a second with the classic lattes, holding them well away from her white smock, and surveyed the room before nodding the man towards the table next to Nicky. Good, Nicky thought, tapping a protein DNA graphic in her article and pretending to watch it unravel.

There was a movement from her backpack, and Nicky's heart rate suddenly spiked. Moving her legs slowly, she placed one of her feet on the opening of the bag, then the other one. She could feel pushing against the side of her
shoe. Settle down, you little shit, Nicky thought, you're not the only one who's hungry. She nervously glanced at the couple as they draped their coats over their chairs, but they seemed comfortable. The man even took off his mask
despite the woman's disapproving clucking. He had a square jaw and full lips, which he pressed against her ivory fingers. She had had her nails coated in mirror, and he pretended to stare at himself in them. She hit him and giggled.

Nicky, not looking up, lifted her foot. For a second, nothing, and then, just as she was considering kicking the bag, a brown blur. It had crawled up the man's leg and launched itself onto their table before the couple registered what was happening.

Luckily the woman's mask muffled her scream, because even then it bored into Nicky's ears. Nicky snatched the brown animal to her chest and surreptitiously slipped a black pellet into its mouth. "I'm sorry, ma'am. I don't know how it got out, my bag was closed..."

The man's mask was back on his face, and a halo was starting to generate around the two of them. Nicky stroked the head of the tiny pug-faced little bulldog with a single finger and murmured reassurances to it. The animal, however, was fully pacified by the pellet and stared at the couple with honey-liquid eyes.

"Oh, what a beautiful little... creature," the woman said, holding out her hand. "Turn off that silly thing, Alex," she said.

The halo disappeared. "Sorry," Alex said, to both Nicky and the woman. "It's just..."

Nicky looked down, kept petting the bulldog.

"It's just nothing. He's paranoid," the woman said, reluctantly taking her eyes off the bulldog to look at Nicky.

"He's been watching the news too much. I apologize for his rudeness." She looked back at the bulldog. "Can I..."

Nicky glanced at her. Go on, beg.

"May I... hold him?" she said.

"Her," Nicky stated firmly, as if she cared.

The woman leaned back, a little beaten. Nicky noticed the lines around her eyes and worried she'd pushed too hard.

"May I hold... her?" she said, finally. Nicky paused for effect, looked down at the little critter, and then slowly extended her hands.

"Oh... oh, she's a frisky... oh!" the woman said, her exclamations echoing in her mask. The little bulldog was trying to climb out of her hand and up her smock, its little paws gripping the red cross design printed there.

"Heh heh, careful Simone," said Alex, his eyes watching Simone's rapturous face as much as the little dog. Nicky noted the emotions washing over his face and thought, not for the first time, that some couples might as well have
childless stamped on their foreheads.

The dog was gnawing on her finger, and Simone was delighted by this. "Oh, Alex, look. It thinks my finger is a bone."

"Heh heh," Alex responded, looking at Nicky with an assessing eye. At this, Nicky held out her hand for the dog, and Simone reluctantly returned it. "So warm..."

"Where'd you get it?" Alex said, trying to sound conversational, taking a sip of his coffee.

"I made her," Nicky said.

"With what?" Alex said dubiously.

"You know those do-it-yourself kits?" Nicky said.

Simone nodded. "I had one of those when I was a kid. Mine didn't work..."

"They never did," Alex said. "They always turned out wrong... messes."

"Yeah," Nicky agreed. "She was my fourth try. I bonsaied her. It took the better part of a year. Even then, it was kind of a fluke. That's her name, actually — Fluky."

"Fluky, oh, that's cute," Simone murmured. She looked at Alex.

Nicky let the dog chew on her finger, trying not to lose her nerve. She thought about JK's bulging grocery bags and forced herself to smile. "Yeah... I've seen a bonsaied tiger go for ten thousand, and it wasn't nearly as unique. It just looked like a cat."

"Ten thousand dollars, huh?" Alex said, almost to himself.

He glanced at Simone. "I couldn't see paying more than five..."

Nicky frowned outwardly, while a joyous melody of cash registers ca-ching!-ed in her head.

***

By the time she got back to her place, the sun was dropping behind the mountains. In the dim light, she could still make out that her front door had been flashed — Can You Afford Not To Upgrade? Go For Self! — but Nicky ignored the giant block letters and let herself in. She had to swipe her watch twice before it snicked open. Cheap piece of shit.

She went into the kitchen and put away her groceries, stuffing the empty bags into a space between the counter and the wall, and remembered she had muted her watch when she went into Starbucks. She checked her messages. One was from her mom, inducing the familiar twinge of mom-guilt. The rest was spam that her filters didn't catch, one of them advertising the next generation of spam filters.

She stopped for a second and debated whether or not she should call her mom back now. She decided she didn't want it hanging over her head when she was in the lab and knew that the longer she waited the greater the chance her mom would go snooping around. She'd know she was home. She'd know Nicky got the message. She kept meaning to disable her mom's ability to track her watch's position, but she knew that would mean a shitstorm of drama. If she needed to be untraceable, she could always take it off and leave it at home, as high school a manoeuvre as that was.

She stood in her kitchen, paralyzed by indecision. She looked at the groceries, unappealing since she had eaten almost a whole packet of Sandwich Fixin's on the way home. She watched a fly loop around and land on her garbage lid. She checked it — three-quarters full. Well, if it's attracting flies I better get rid of it…

She tied it up and lifted it out of the can, watching for a second to see if there were any drippings. As she left her house she realized that the depot closed in 15 minutes, so she picked up her pace, walking the plank to the sidewalk and step-swinging the bag. The setting sun stretched her shadow out, making her look like a lurching zombie coming out to feed.

She admired a grand old house done up in canary yellow. It was similar to her own — at least a hundred years old, a walkway stretching out to the sidewalk to compensate for the fact that it was built on a slope. Nicky loved the style; it made her feel like she was living aboard a pirate ship. Too bad the False Creek flood hadn't happened here, Nicky thought sacrilegiously, I'm sure these things are seaworthy.

She got to the depot and went right up to the scale and plopped the bag down on the belt. It came to $8.343, so she held her watch up to the payplate 'til it dinged and the belt started up.

"Mmm, thanks!" The voice echoed in the empty depot as the stained belt moved the bag towards its black maw. She headed for the door, happy to leave the stinky and somehow creepy place. The recorded voice sounded hungrier than it had when there were even a few people lined up in there. She waited unconsciously for the "That was delicious!" recording to play as she pushed the door open.

Instead she got, "Pee-yoo! Don't you wish you could have just said, EmptyGarbage?" followed Nicky out on to the street. The "Go for Self!" tagline was cut off by the closing door.

She smelled her hands (fine) and glanced back at the green garbage can icon glowing in the half-light. As she headed home through the empty streets, she felt a little lonely. Since she had moved here, most of the kids her age who hadn't left Vancouver had moved to apartments around Commercial Drive. But Nicky felt that moving to the Drive, still busy with people, would be kind of living in denial. Plus, there was no way she could afford as much space there.

She heard squeaking when she got in and remembered she hadn't fed the flukes.

Nicky walked into her living room and looked in the fluke cage. Two of them were sleeping, but the other one was doing his best to wake them up. 

"How-are-you-my-little-meal-tickets?" Nicky said in her best imitation of Simone's baby-voice, reaching into the bag of Critter Kibble. She fed the one that was running around, panting with his big eyes glazed over, and the other two blinked awake. "Oh yeah, now you're awake. Where were you when I was taking in the groceries?" The flukes looked at her and started to whine.

She chucked the other two pellets in the cage and rolled up the food bag. Checking the time, she decided to get something done before JK arrived, so she headed up to the third floor.

She caught a glimpse of her new haircut in a mirror. Do I look like an idiot with this hair? she wondered. She had had a shoulder-length ragged cut for ages, and she needed a change — but she half suspected she'd done it to dramatically mark the end of her relationship. Kathy would have hated it, she thought giddily.

On the top floor stairwell, she stepped up on the wooden chair, pushed open the hatch and pulled down the well-oiled ladder that led up to her laboratory.

The lights came on gradually as she stamped down the hatch. She looked up with some regret at the covered skylight and window, even though it would have been pitch black outside by now. She remembered being excited by the skylight when she had first found the house, figuring it was perfect for a bedroom. But Kathy complained of having to climb down in the middle of the night to go to the washroom — it was a pain, but still, it would have been so cool to wake up to the sun — and so the lab ended up here instead. When Kathy ended up moving to Frisco, Nicky couldn't be bothered moving all the lab equipment out.

What had started out as a small operation with an EasyBake and a shaky table had expanded into quite a bit of stuff.

Wedged against the slanted roof was a long silver counter with tons of beakers and vials and other antiques that Nicky had a soft spot for. Her computer setup was also outdated, but stable — like the rest of the equipment, she had scooped it up when the genetics department was phased
out.

She called up her active in silico experiments — two had been birthed alive. One was a three-headed fluke she had called Cerberus, and the other had a single eye in the middle of its forehead. She focused in on the Cyclops fluke first, noting with satisfaction that it was blinking normally — the last version had been birthed with a messed-up eyelid.

She called up the Cerberus fluke. It wasn't doing as well, only one of the three heads breathing normally.

She zoomed in on the organs and got the computer to diagnose. The heart glowed red, 125% the normal rate. The lungs were within normal parameters this time, although still a little off. Nicky sighed. Maybe three heads aren't better than one...

She went back to the Cyclops and introduced different stimuli. The model fluke barked happily when it was introduced to food pellets, sexual partners, and petting. It looked good to Nicky, so she decompiled the dog into its spawning ingredients. To free up some memory, she went back to the sick puppy and deleted it. The computer, as it always did when deleting, made a tinny scream. It was just a morbid thing the EasyCut programmer put in, but it always reminded Nicky of the first time she heard it.

It had been in the first week of classes, when they were all getting trained on the equipment. Her professor, a tiny outspoken Asian woman, was showing them how the in silico programs were used.

"Now when I was a little girl, we were still dealing directly with the meat. None of this computer simulation crap. We'd use in vitro fertilization, being very very careful. But things still went wrong. And when it did, you'd have to take the sick little creature and terminate it." She deleted the current experiment and the computer screamed. She smiled as the small crowd of students jolted back. "Newbies," she mocked. As Cho pushed by them to the next piece of equipment, Nicky noticed her earlobes kicking.

Nicky remembered being more surprised by Professor Cho's highly modified earlobes than she was at the scream. She'd never seen club kickers in real life — the early body modification that pulsed with sound had been unfashionable for more than 20 years. After she got over the shock, Nicky decided it was gutsy — still later, she thought it hinted at why Cho stayed in genetics when it had ceased being scientifically relevant. She just didn't care what people thought.

At the end of Nicky's second year her department was shut down, and Nicky had made an appointment to see Cho supposedly for direction on which stream to take now.

Cho had been working on an in silico experiment of a trilunged horse when she came in. She had waved Nicky into a chair and made a few more adjustments before closing the horse. When it blinked out, Cho leaned back in her chair and tilted her head.

"I'm kind of surprised to see you here," Cho had said.

Nicky just looked at the professor's small smile, trying not to stare at her dancing earlobes.

"You struck me more as someone who knew what she wanted to do," Cho continued. "While the people who've been in this office lately are a mess. But this's been coming for a long time. There haven't been any jobs in genetics for a decade... except teaching jobs. We're lucky the school is allowing students to transfer some of their credits. When the arts were phased out, they didn't even get that."

Nicky wondered at the prof's defensiveness. Was it because she'd been dealing with angry students all week, or was it the knee-jerk reaction of the professional know-it-all?

She decided to cut to the chase. "What's going to happen to the lab equipment?"

Cho looked like she hadn't considered it. "It's too outdated to be of use to any other department," she thought out loud.

"They'll junk it, I suppose."

Keeping her face neutral, Nicky said, "I've got a couple of experiments I'd like to finish, and I don't have access to anything like that."

Cho nodded, her eyes suddenly hard. She touched the bridge of her nose. "Hmm. Yes, well... I'd be putting myself at risk if anything unorthodox was to happen to them..."

Nicky was suddenly very glad that she hadn't ever talked to Cho about personal matters. "I looked at the prices for them used, and they're way too much. I'm going to have to move out of my place as it is."

"My situation isn't very good either," Cho said with discomfort. "Your parents?"

"They've cut me off," Nicky said, preferring not to elaborate.

Something in Cho deflated. "Yeah, me too. There're no jobs in a digital world for us dirty meat-workers," she murmured. "Information Architecture, young lady, that's what I suggest."

"Yeah," Nicky said, trying to keep her voice respectful.  "That's what my mom said."

A few weeks later, Nicky had a fully functional lab in her attic. A little slow, but it was a stable system with Genome 2035 installed. The EasyBake oven was handy to have — no more having to send out her experiments to be compiled. And if the beakers and test tubes she had scored cluttered up the place a little, they at least gave her a sense of history.

Not just ancient history, either. They reminded her of first year, working late late late to finish an experiment alongside other students. Someone would inevitably cook up something in one of them to break the tension — and there was a lot of that, with the stress of deadlines, the limited equipment, and the egos. At some point, for incentive, someone would come from the chemistry lab and set a steaming beaker of something yummy and narcotic within everyone's sight.

Thinking of those long nights and fucked-up mornings, Nicky felt a wave of nostalgia. To fight how suddenly alone she felt, she asked the computer for some fast and melodic music. She started a new Cerberus fluke and began to
work on its organs, hiding everything except the problem lungs and heart. 

Maybe I could get a little more room by getting rid of the spleen...

A few hours later her watch spoke. "Hey Nicky, I'm at the door."

"Oh, hey JK. Down in a second."

A ladder and three flights of stairs later, she could see his big frame silhouetted in the lace-curtained window beside the front door.

"Sorry I'm late," JK said as he stepped in. He looked around her place in his characteristic way, stooping and peering intently through his small spectacles.

"No biggles, I've been chipping away in my lab."

"Man, you've got a hall. I wish I had a hall," JK said, looking for a place to hang his bike.

Nicky took it from him and arched her eyebrow as she hung it on a coat rack, saying "Were you in a big hurry or something?"

JK grinned. "Naw. I just felt like riding."

Nicky shook her head on their way upstairs. "You're a reckless fool, JK."

He shrugged. "It's not dangerous anymore. Who's going to hit me now — man, you've got a living room. I want a living room," JK said as they passed through it.

Nicky couldn't resist showing off the spaciousness by spinning, her arms extended. "Gotta move to Strathcona, son."

"Your hair looks great when you spin like that," JK said, laughing.

They climbed up into the attic and, as JK squeezed his shoulders through the hole, Nicky cleared out some dishes from the EasyBake. She got an empty one and handed it over to him.

He set it down on the silver counter and pried it open. He took a small metal box from an inner pocket and removed some seeds from it, and while he was painstakingly placing them in the container's compartments Nicky wondered why he didn't just get rid of the muscles when he was constantly dealing with tiny things. And if he was going to spend money on body mods, why didn't he correct his vision first?

But watching him focus on the task, Nicky decided she didn't want to ask. It was more interesting, in a way, not knowing.

He clicked the box closed and passed it to her. She put it in the EasyBake and set it to organics only. "You don't need the box copied too, do you?"

JK shook his head. "Nope. I put 'em in there so they're separated enough. Last time I did them loose, there were a bunch that fused together."

"A hundred of each enough?"

JK licked his lips, looked pained. "That'd be great, but I don't know how much extra you have..."

Nicky cut him off with a raised hand. "S'okay, I got the machine pretty much fully loaded. And my projects are one-of-a-kind rather than mass produced, so I don't need that much." She set the machine to working.

"The job will take about eight minutes," the EasyBake said. "And it will use under 1% of remaining toner."

"See?" Nicky said. "I'm going to get a cup of tea. Want one?"

JK's face lost its anxious look. "Ah!" he said, nodding and rummaging around in his bag. A few seconds later, he produced a jar full of dark leaves. "I brought tea!"

Nicky, halfway down the ladder, looked at the jar and raised a quizzical eyebrow. JK just smiled and put the jar under his arm, followed her to the living room and through to the kitchen. Nicky was already reaching up for a tetrabox of Starbucks Earl Grey.

"Oh, come on," JK said, unscrewing the jar and taking out a leaf. "I just need a pot of boiling water, and then we'll have tea."

"Sorry, no pot," Nicky said with a smile, whacking the box against the counter and peeling it open. She set two mugs beside it and when a spiral of steam slid out of the opening, she poured one for herself. She looked to him to see if he wanted one, and he nodded with defeat, twisting the lid back on the jar. "Oh come on." She handed him the balloon-festooned mug ("Lordy lordy look who's forty!") and slapped him on his shoulder. "You remember what happened that last time I had one of your herbal potions."

JK's face cracked in a mischievous smile. "You said you wanted to get wasted," he said. "If it hadn't been after a keg of beer and a genderbender, it would've been fine."

Nicky let her silence be the response, although really she was pleased it got her out of trying whatever it was he had.

She settled into the big quiltwork armchair and stretched her legs out. JK put the tea down on the coffee table and put a finger into the fluke cage.

"So you still passing off these ratdogs as canine bonsai?" JK said.

"Yep," Nicky said, taking a sip of tea and resting the mug on her belly. "That's where I was headed when I saw you on the Drive today, actually. Got enough to get me through next month."

"Sweet," JK said, finger-wrestling with the little creature. "And they never catch on and come back?"

Nicky shrugged. "Your average person doesn't know the difference between a simple ratdog splice and a bonsai. Other than the life span and the jaw strength, there's not much to tell them apart. Plus, I always sell to tourists, so I know they'll be on a plane pretty soon, and it'll get
confiscated."

"Yeah, the Drive's filthy with tourists these days. Lots of people doing a final tour before they upgrade. Easy pickings."

Nicky took another sip and looked up at the ornamental ceiling, water stained but still grand. "Yeah. I feel kind of bad about it, but there's no real harm done. If they have the money to fly or upgrade then they can afford to support the local culture."

Desperate times require desperate measures," murmured JK. "Can I feed them a tea leaf?"

"Don't, you freak, they have a very strict diet." Nicky looked away from the ceiling and straight at JK. "The thing is, though, I don't feel like these are desperate times. I've been living off this scam for a half-year now. But..." She lolled her head again. "Just because I'm clever enough to find ways to live decently in this shitty world doesn't mean the world isn't shitty."

JK turned away from the cage and ran a hand through his shaggy hair. "Well," he started, a tea leaf sticking out from a corner of his mouth. He sucked on it thoughtfully. "It's not that things are getting worse. In some ways... they're getting better. Easier, anyway. Less hassles. It's just that the world is… losing relevance." He pulled the leaf out from between his lips and dropped it into the mug.

"I don't want you tripping out on my living room floor," Nicky warned. "This is a respectable place."

"It's seriously just tea, Nicky," JK said. "From India."

"How did you get a hold of raw organic stuff?" she challenged. "Not from your mail-order club?"

"It's not through the mail, anymore," he said vaguely.

"Your job is completed," said Nicky's watch. "Would you like to..."

Nicky shut it up with a tap and set her tea down. "I'll grab it, just stay here."

She made her way up to the attic, opened the EasyBake and carefully took out the sheaves of seeds. With minor spills, she was able to slide most of them into the original container (hoping that was what JK wanted) and seal the lid. Then she made her way down, telling the system to save and shut itself down, feeling her body complain as she climbed down from the lab. She was too tired to do any more work tonight. The tea had failed her.

JK was back at the cage, looking at the flukes. "Want one? Only ten grand!" Nicky cracked as she handed him the container.

"Fantastic," he said, looking inside. "Yeah, the machine doesn't divide by colour," Nicky said. "You'll have to do that by hand."

"You wouldn't believe how much stress this saves me, Nicky, you're an angel."

"Not an octopus?" Nicky said, tugging on her pigtails.

"Same difference," JK laughed. "Seriously, last time I had to go to Kinko's —"

"They don't have EasyBakes there," she said.

JK nodded. "I know, but they do organic duplication. But I was incredibly nervous the whole time, assuming they'd make me fill out an intent-of-use form —"

"What are you doing with them, anyhow?" Nicky said, hoping to stop the waves of gratefulness before they built into a tsunami.

"Another new growth party. Hopefully you'll be able to go to this one."

"Well, hopefully you'll tell me about this one," Nicky said, poking his big chest.

"I know, sorry about that."

"Mmm-hmm."

"But now you're practically a patron. So I'll send you the coordinates."

"Excellent," Nicky said, stifling a yawn.

JK grabbed his backpack from where he had laid it beside the couch and opened it up. He noticed something there and pulled it out. "Oh yes." He took a little holocoin out and tossed it on the floor. A unicorn crawled out of it and pranced in a circle, stopped, seemed to notice Nicky and said in a whinny, "Come to see Mike Narc's show!"

JK was putting away the container. "I figured you're working with similar themes..."

Nicky gave a one-shoulder shrug. "Sorta." The show invite was a floating, large-bosomed woman now, who was intoning the time and place. "I met him once, and he struck me..." She looked at JK. "Do you know Mike?" JK made the finger gesture for a little.

"I dunno. Maybe I'll go," Nicky said, picking up the coin projector.

"He's a bit arrogant," JK said, putting on his backpack. "Yes."

They laughed at her vehemence.

"It might be the fact that we're working in similar territory, though," Nicky admitted.

JK shook his head. "It's so different though, in terms of treatment."

Nicky squinched up her mouth, nodded. "I think so." JK noticed the time. "Holy yikes, I gotta scram." He reached for the door. "Seeya!"

Nicky turned and walked into the living room, grabbed the jar of tea. "Not without this you're not." "Shit!" JK said, shouldering off and opening his backpack.

"Can't forget that. OK seeya for real this time," JK opened the door and left.

"Later," Nicky said and shut the door. It wasn't until she was coming back from the living room with the empty mugs that she noticed the bike, still hanging from the coat hook.

***

The SkyTrain was still pretty crowded at rush hour. As it slid along on its monorail track, Doug peered out the window at an even older rail system — a train yard cluttered by cars that looked like cast-aside beer cans.

Was that a tent? Doug thought, seeing a flash of olive green fabric in the yard. Probably some kind of garbage. It was hard to imagine someone living in the open, having to wear a mask all the time.

He kept staring out the window, although there wasn't much to see in the quickly dimming light. It was better than watching the advertisements, especially since most of them were for Self packages. Luckily they were broadband ads, unable to emorph with this many people.

Doug closed his eyes and willed himself home, trying to imagine himself in the seat of his sedan, trying but failing... the babble of ads just slightly louder than the squeaking and clicking of the SkyTrain ruined the effect. Death and ads, he thought to himself in an effort to drown his irritation in philosophy, the two constants of our free market society.

Maybe ads are more constant, if upgrading is all it's cracked up to be…

The SkyTrain hit a rough curve that jolted Doug, and he gripped the bar harder. He caught a child staring at him and he stared back, until he noticed that the adult with the child had been staring just as rudely. The adult, however, when confronted with Doug's arched eyebrow, looked away. It's not like you've never seen a balding man before, moron. The kid at least has an excuse.

He looked away. He knew that most people considered his decision not to regen his hair as eccentric at best and lazy at worst, but until he sold his car, he hadn't had to confront this on a daily basis. Now, with the little shit at work drawing attention to his lack of hair, Doug felt his credibility eroding away.

Not that he had ever doubted that he had a timeless, indisputably cool look. Even when he had realized why he had chosen this style, it didn't shake his faith — although the realization had been traumatic for other reasons.

His father had been dying for the better part of a year, and he had gone to see him at the hospital after work. The sour smelling room was big enough to house the life-support machines and a chair, upon which Doug had spent many an hour. Since the second stroke his father hadn't been very communicative — well, he hadn't spoken — and so Doug was left to his own thoughts, which often strayed to figuring out how much it was costing him per second to keep the decaying man alive.

"...you leave..." his father had said. His eyes, rheumy slits, were locked on him.

After a moment of complicated shock, Doug had licked his lips and replied. "...You want me to leave?"

"Why did you leave Pop?" the old man wheezed.

"I didn't leave, Dad," Doug had replied.

"Pop why did you leave?"

That had been the most coherent conversation they had had in months, but it wasn't until they were going through his stuff after the funeral that Doug realized that his delirious father had mistaken him for his grandfather.

"Honey," Cheryl had said, coming into the basement. She had taken on the job of going through the mounds of decaying print photos for ones worth scanning. "Is this a relative?"

He had looked up from the box he had been sorting through and taken the picture from Cheryl. His grandfather was in the middle of a sax solo, looking suave and dashing. His solid dome head with a well-kempt monk fringe had substance, dignity.

"Yeah..." he had said. "I haven't seen this in years." When he had seen it as a boy, he hadn't recognized the family features at first, assumed it was someone famous. When his father had told him who it was, the glamour of a relation had thrilled him. His father's dismissive and abrupt descriptions had just deepened the mystery.

The SkyTrain stopped at Main Street-Science World and a bunch of people got out, including the family of starers.

Doug took a seat and ignored the little boy pointing at him through the window, although it naturally attracted the attention of those who'd just entered.

Brat. Doug felt his jaw clench and forced himself to unclench it. Apparently he ground his teeth in his sleep, according to his dentist, and he occasionally wondered if this indicated anxieties so deep that they only surfaced in dreams. He made a mental note to ask his dentist if this had increased, now that his anxieties skittered freely over his consciousness at all times of the day.

Tired of watching lights flash to and fro outside the window, his eyes wandered cautiously to the other patrons. All but a few of them were watching media beamed from their watches. The middle-aged woman opposite him was particularly immersed, her mouth slightly agape. She blinked, and Doug caught an inverted flash of the guy-on-guy pornography that was being beamed onto her retinas.

He quickly looked down at his own watch. That'll teach you to be nosy, Doug ol'pal.

He didn't select anything to watch, though, since he was pretty close to home and he had lost that apparently psychic ability that SkyTrain regulars had to prevent them missing their stop. When he was young, of course, he had had it, as well as an uncanny ability to predict where the next free seat would appear. He had lost a lot of instincts since then.

Since settling into his first car at 17, a ride befitting the prodigy at the agency, and selling his car before the bottom totally dropped out of the market at thirty-seven, not much had happened. Twenty years had passed in a comfortable but not excitement-rich bubble. Oh, there had been moments — the birth of his daughter, the death of his father, hot accounts — and mostly, these little moments, coupled with security, had been enough stimulation for him and Cheryl. But now that his security was as low as his bank account, he wondered if he had been living life too conservatively…

The doors slid open, startling him. Was this it? Yes! Out through the doors and, moving with the flow, through the turnstiles. A few went down the escalator here, fumbling for masks before entering the night, but Doug strode across an enclosed walkway. He loved the glass walkway, especially in the morning when it glinted with the sun, clouds looming above, safe from the torrent of traffic below. How, if you timed it right, you could see the SkyTrain gliding out of the hills and get there just in time for it to whisk you away. There was something Doug found intensely satisfying about that; it helped lighten the bitterness he felt over the loss of his car.

Maybe I could buy a used one — that kid said he got a Camaro for $150. But Cheryl had been expecting to leave since August, when they sold the cars, and would take his buying another one as proof that they were staying. She'd want a car herself, then, for her and Olivia. Probably another one of those ridiculous 6x6 SUVs that kept growing each year. Doug could tell her that it was a pointless arms race, but the mother in her would look at Olivia's fragile little body and opt for the reinforced titanium frame.

Doug walked into the condo foyer and waited for the elevator. In the doors' mirrored surface, he looked at his slightly rumpled suit with disapproval. Another lady, slightly familiar, joined him in his elevator vigil before he could smooth himself out.

"Seems like I spend half my life in these things," the lady said.

"Mmm," said Doug.

The elevator arrived. On the way up, a Self ad started up with an exaggerated yawn.

"Is there anything more boring than shuttling your meat from location to location?"

"Nope!" the lady chirped, laughing at herself. Doug put on a polite smile and glanced at her, hoping she was simply talkative. He watched the floor indicator, waiting for his number to come up. The ad droned on.


Finally, the elevator slowed. Just as the doors were opening, both the ad and the lady said, "Go for Self!" The bubbliness of her pitch and the fake-downbeat tone of the ad combined in a nauseating way, but Doug didn't turn around. He knew exactly what he'd see: the half-apologetic, half-smug look. Although she was probably a freelancer, even the professional pitchmen had that look — it wasn't actual shame then, but it was effective in defusing anger. But Doug wasn't so much angry as stunned.

Doug walked through the corridor, absorbing the experience, filtering it. Trying to ignore the cold sweat that had broken out on his brow, the metallic taste in his mouth.

The fact that it had happened in his building was a bad sign. How did she get in? Could she actually be a tenant?

Things were getting desperate.

He stood in front of 1712, wondering if he should tell Cheryl.

He held the doorknob, waited for the locks to tumble, one thought racing through his mind.

We've gotta get out of here.

***

For the rest of the story, go visit nomediakings.org!SAUCE00Everyone in Silico excerpts        Jim Munroe          Mistigris           20151031;–