“Oh, lordie,” he murmured. “Joanne’s got herself a flycam.”
“Is that what it’s called?” Like everyone else at the table, Tom was watching Joanne. “I knew they were called something, but I didn’t know what it was.”
“I call it a pain in the you-know-what.” Garrett picked up his cold coffee, took a sip, made a face. “What she’s doing with one here, I have no idea.”
Joanne sashayed to a pair of truck drivers sitting in a nearby booth, the flycam keeping pace with her from above. “All right,” she announced as she picked the plates off the tray and placed them on the table, “a western omelette with a side order of bacon, two scrambled eggs with sausage, a glass of orange juice and a glass of tomato juice. Will that be all?”
The drivers looked at the plates she had put before them. “Ma’am, I ordered a ham and bacon omelette,” one said quietly, “and I think my friend here asked for his eggs over-easy with ham.”
“And I didn’t ask for tomato juice, either,” added the other. “I wanted orange juice, too.”
“We-e-e-elll!” Joanne struck a pose, one hand on an out-thrust hip, the serving tray tucked under her other arm. “I suppose one of us made a mistake, didn’t we?”
“Yes, ma’am, I suppose one of us sure did.”
Joanne looked over her shoulder. “Ray!” she bellowed in the direction of the kitchen. “You made a mistake!” Then she pivoted on her heel, and raised her arms. “I swear,” she loudly proclaimed to no one in particular (except, perhaps, the flycam), “it ain’t my fault no one ’round here speaks English!”
Then she flounced away, her hips swinging with overdone suggestivity. The two drivers gaped at her. “I’m not paying for this!” one yelled at her. “This isn’t what I ordered!”
Joanne ignored them. She was already advancing on the two college kids sitting in the next booth. They stared at the flycam as it moved into position above their table. “What’ll you have, guys?”
One of the students pointed at the drone. “Uhh… hey, is that thing live?”
“Taped,” she said briskly, dropping her voice for the first time. “Just pretend it’s not there.” She raised her voice again. “So what’ll you have, kids?”
He gawked at the camera, absently combing back his hair with his fingers. The other student nervously looked back at his menu. “I… uh… can I have…?”
“Son, what were you smoking last night?”
Startled, he looked up at her. “What?”
“Oh, you were smoking what.” She beamed down at him. “That’s new to me. I’m just a poor country girl.”
“Huh? What are you…?”
“Look, dudes, let me rap with you, okay?” She lowered her order pad, bent over the table to look them in the eye. The flycam dropped a few inches closer, its cameras recording everything. “I was your age once, and yeah, I used to get pretty wild…” She took a deep breath. “But dope is just a bad trip, y’know what I’m saying? A thing is a terrible mind to…”
“Huh?”
“Aw, dammit.” She shook her head, glanced up at the flycam for a moment, then returned her attention to the students. “I mean, a mind is a terrible thing to waste, and you’ve got your whole future ahead of you.”
“I… what?” Stammering with disbelief, the student glanced between Joanne and the hovering drone. “I… hey, lady, I don’t use drugs!”
“Neither of us do!” His companion peered up at the flycam. “Hey, we’re straight! I swear, We’re straight! Geez, we just came in here to get breakfast and…”
“Think about it,” Joanne said solemnly. “Just… think about it.”
Then she was off again, heading for another table, the flycam following her like an airborne puppy. “Can we at least get some coffee?” the first student called after her.
“What in the world is that fool girl up to?” Tom murmured.
“Taping another episode of her net show.” Chet watched her progress across the dining room. “Joanne’s Place, something like that…”
“But this isn’t her place.” Tom was bewildered. “It’s Ray’s. Ray’s Diner. What’s she doing, some kind of TV show?”
As always, Tom was behind the times. No surprise there; he was still trying to get over Bush losing to Clinton. But Bill recognized the technology; eight years might have gone by since he retired as physics teacher at the local high school, but he still kept subscriptions to popular science magazines.
Flycams were miniature spinoffs of unpiloted military reconnaissance drones. Initially intended to be used for law enforcement, only police departments were able to buy them at first, but it wasn’t long before they became inexpensive enough to enter the consumer market, and now they were available at electronics stores for approximately the same price as a high-end camcorder. Early versions were remote-controlled, but later models had the benefit of newer technology. They could be programmed to automatically track someone by his or her body-heat signature and voice pattern and follow them around, during which time they would record everything he or she did and spoke, with the data being transmitted to a nearby datanest. Bill figured that Joanne had probably parked the nest in the kitchen, or perhaps under the lunch counter.
“It’s a net show, Tom.” Chet watched Joanne perform for another pair of truckers seated at the counter. Now she was playing the coy vixen while she took their orders; she had loosened the top button of her blouse, and she was letting them get an eyeful of pink cleavage as she freshened up their coffee. The drone waited overhead, its mike and lenses catching everything. “She’s got that fly-thing following her around while she works, and when she’s done at the end of the day, she takes it home and makes it into another episode.”
“Like for a TV show, you mean.”
“The net.” Chet gave him an arch look. “Don’t get out much, do you? No one watches TV anymore ’cept old duffers like us.”
“Hey, did anyone catch Miami Vice last night?” Garrett, always the peacemaker. “They showed the one where Crockett and Tubbs…”
“See what I mean?” Chet waggled a finger at Garrett, cutting him off. “We’re used to shows about make-believe characters in make-believe stories, but that’s not where it’s at anymore. Now you can go out, buy one of those things, hook it up to your DVD and your home computer…” He snapped his fingers. “You’ve got your own show.”
“My wife really likes that stuff.” Garrett had surrendered; no sense in trying to talk about an old cop show in perpetual rerun on a local cable station. “Every night, she sits down in the den and just searches back and forth, looking for the newest shows people have put on.”
“On her computer?” Slowly, Tom was beginning to catch on. “You mean, like on… whatchamacallit, web sites?”
Bill nodded. “Sort of like that.” He didn’t add that the web sites were old tech; no sense in confusing him any further. “The net has all these different nodes, millions of them, and you can rent time there, put in your own program. Anything you want.”
“Anything?” Tom’s eyes widened. “Like… you mean… anything you’ve recorded with one of those…?”
“Yes. Anything.”
Yes, anything. Bill had his own desktop system, a decrepit old Mac he had been nursing along for years with mother boards and internal modems bought from online junkyards or cannibalized from CPUs purchased at flea markets. Slow as autumn sap from a maple tree, but it was enough to let him patch into the net if he didn’t mind waiting a few extra minutes.
He didn’t mind, although there wasn’t much worth looking at, really. Too much homemade porn, for one thing; every fool with a flycam seemed to think he was king stud of the universe when he got in bed with his wife or girlfriend, and wanted to share his glory with the world. Only slightly less prevalent were the boatloads of fanatics who sincerely believed that they had stumbled upon vast conspiracies involving crashed UFOs, biblical prophecies, and political assassinations; their flycam caught them standing outside military bases, government offices, or ancient Egyptian ruins, delivering rants fascinating only for the width and depth of their meaninglessness.