“Ho, ho.” The director chuckled. “We knew you were going to say that.” She opened his folder and pointed to a document. “We wrote it down. Want to see?” When he didn’t respond, she shut it again and continued. “We’re not at all interested in your evolution, Myr Kodiak. We have other control subjects for normal human development and maturation. In you we were interested in something entirely different, that is, in a stalled personality, one that has ceased evolving. Imagine, a twenty-nine-year-old boy who hasn’t grown up yet, the spoiled lottery baby of a senescent charter, a housemeet who yearns for adventure but does nothing about it, a virgin too involved with a hollyholo to have a relationship with a real girl, any real girl.” She stopped to pick her teeth with a fingernail, giving him a chance to say the next thing they knew he would say, but he crossed his arms and refused to say anything.
“You’re offended,” she went on reasonably, “even though you know that what I say is true, and you wish that I’d die. You are certain that we don’t know you at all, and you’d just love to get your hands on our so-called model of you. Then you’d show us, correct?
“Very well,” she continued when he refused to agree or disagree, “meet Bogdan Kodiak.”
A chair, duplicate of his own, appeared next to him, and in it slouched a small, skinny boy who observed Bogdan through slitted eyes.
“What do you think?” the director said. “Spooky, eh?”
“Oh, I don’t know about that,” Bogdan said.
“No, you don’t, do you?” the replica boy said, sitting up. “You don’t know nothing.” Suddenly and without warning, the false Bogdan leaped from his chair and, crying and shrieking, ran about the room knocking over piles and towers of folders and scattering paper everywhere. Then he climbed back into his chair and yawned.
The director looked at the real Bogdan and said, “Feel better?”
Bogdan had to admit that he did.
“But you’re still not convinced.”
“No, I’m not. Not that it makes any difference since you plan to fire me anyway.”
The director leaned back in her chair and said, “There may be a way for you to stay.”
Bogdan’s ears pricked up. “Really?”
The director scratched the mole on her cheek. “Yes, you can stay if you can demonstrate a flaw in our model.”
The Bogdan model rolled his eyes.
“How would I do something like that?” Bogdan asked.
“Ask it a question. If you can ask it a question that it can’t answer, but you can, then you can stay.”
“Deal,” Bogdan said and tried to come up with something that he kept locked away in the deepest, most secret recesses of his mind. Something that not even a visceral response probe could reach. It wasn’t easy, and his double started munching snickerdoodles in the meantime.
Bogdan’s sleepless mind put forth and rejected dozens of possibilities. Finally the HR director said, “Time’s up.”
“I’ve got it,” Bogdan said. He decided he had to cheat and ask the sim something that not even he knew himself. “Tell me, Bogdan impostor,” he said, “if you’re so smart, what does the dust H stand for?”
The false Bogdan laughed. “That’s easy. It stands for Hubert.”
Of course it did. Even as the phony Bogdan uttered it, Bogdan knew it to be true. The H stood for Hubert, and this could only mean that the Tobblers already knew of the mentar’s arrest. Or maybe only Troy and Slugboy knew it. Bogdan took another look at his double. And as disturbing as its revelation was about Troy knowing about Hubert, Bogdan had another question he sorely wanted an answer to.
“You’re right,” he said. “It does. That was a practice question. Here’s the real question: Who stole Lisa?”
The simulated boy twirled in his chair. “Who else? Troy Tobbler and his evil friend Slugboy.”
Again, his double astounded him. Who else, indeed? Clearly, the E-Pluribus model of him was flawed—it possessed too much insight. But before Bogdan could report this to the director and possibly keep his job, the faux Bogdan, out of the blue, raised his hand and saluted him. At first, Bogdan thought it was reminding him of Troy and Slugboy’s mockery on the steps, but it held the salute and locked eyes with him and continued to salute until Bogdan gave in and saluted back. Then it said, with creepy sincerity, “If you don’t believe in it yourself, how can you make it happen?”
“YOU ABOUT DONE in there?” Rusty called into the shower stall. “April says the bus is almost here.”
Bogdan blinked and looked around. He was in the shower. He got out, dried himself off, and donned the party togs April had given him. Rusty hung around making small talk and doing a bad job of pretending not to be watching to see if he was all right.
“I’m all right,” Bogdan said.
“I know it.”
IN THE SECURITY shack at McCormick Place, Commander Fred Londenstane turned away from a venue diorama and rubbed his eyes. On either side of him, twenty sullen pikes surveilled other dioramas, which were laid out in the same arrangement as the real rooms that they modeled. Altogether, Rendezvous filled three dozen halls and ballrooms. The largest was the multitiered Hall of Nations, the scale-model diorama of which would completely fill Fred’s living room at home.
Across the security shack, which itself was a commandeered ballroom, Gilles caught Fred’s eye, and Fred went over to see what was up. Gilles was watching the second largest display, the Welcome Hall, which was the Rendezvous entrance. Thirty conveyor belt scanways converged on Welcome Hall, feeding it four hundred Rondy-goers per minute. In the diorama, these people looked like multicolored ants marching across the marbelite floor and climbing the Grand Staircase to the adjoining Hall of Nations.
Of the thousands of attendees, a small fraction had flags pacing them over their heads. The flags marked potential troublemakers as identified by the McCormick Place mentar, MC, which also ran the scanways.
Gilles reached into the diorama and pointed to a man with not one flag but three. Fred skimmed the man’s doss: violent crimes and prison time, but no new offenses in the last seventy years. Fred zoomed in on the man’s face—no hint of hostility, only high expectations. He was accompanied by several men and women of the same charter.
“Let him pass,” Fred said, “but assign him his own bee.”
“That’s what I was thinking,” Gilles replied. “Oh, and by the way—” He tilted his head at the large Hall of Nations diorama and two of the pikes assigned to surveil it. Fred had assigned half of his contingent of forty pikes to monitor the dioramas. This was just busy work—MC was fully able to monitor the entire complex. These two, instead of watching out for trouble, were engaged in it. They were zooming in on women in the upper tiers of the terraced building and viewing their naked bodies through their clothes. Fred went over and said, “Stop that behavior immediately.” The pikes’ ratlike eyes never blinked, but they returned to the women their clothing.
Fred continued around the room, chewing over this new bit of information—pikes, at least, were a type who liked hinks and weren’t shy about showing it.
ON THE STAIRS, Bogdan met Denny who was carrying Samson down from the roof. Samson seemed awake and clear-witted. “Sam’s going to Rondy with us,” Denny said. Apparently, so was the homcom bee, which tagged behind.
On the second-floor landing, April and Kale waited next to a lifechair. Denny placed Samson gently into it, and the chair introduced itself. “Hello, Myr Kodiak,” it said in a cheery voice while covering him with a smart tartan blanket. “I am a Maxilife Empowerment Chair—at your service! I am equipped to meet all of your special needs with feeding, autodoc, hygiene, colonies, massage, telecom, media, and transport functions. I will even scrub the local air of malodorants. I’m your home on wheels. You need never leave me again!”