“You? You’ve got it made!”
Shelley sighed. “I don’t know how many more of these deaths I can take. Remember the last one when my hair fell out? Well, look at this.” She unfastened her sleeve and exposed her arm for a moment. Her skin was inflamed and swollen, an early sign of scleroderma, Judith Hsu’s current terminal disease.
Shelley didn’t have scleroderma; the symptoms were false, psychosymptomatic, all in her head. Her rash was an occupational hazard of the evangelines’ high degree of empathy.
“The breast cancer was bad enough,” Shelley continued, refastening her sleeve, “but this one is killing me. I have this stuff all over my body. Reilly hasn’t been able to touch me for weeks!”
Mary scratched her throat and said, “I’m so sorry, Shell,” but she wasn’t sure she meant it. Not that she’d enjoy feeling sick, but at least Shelley was working. At least she was a companion. Mary leaned over to scratch her leg, just as a slug that had somehow eluded the massacre crawled up her shoe and fastened to her ankle.
“Damn!” she said.
“What is it?”
“Alice is right. It’s high time we were rid of these monsters. Here, give me that cup.”
Shelley handed her a heavy china coffee mug, and when the slug dropped off, she hit it. The slug didn’t even slow down.
“Hit it harder,” Shelley encouraged her. “Hit it in the middle; that’s where the brain is.”
Mary hit the slug again, to no avail. “It’s tougher than it looks,” she said and raised the mug over her head. This time she swung so hard the mug shattered. “I dinged my hand,” she said.
“But you killed it.” The slug lay still, its side split open.
“You can have it,” Mary said, lifting the slug by its tail and offering it to Shelley. “Thanks, Mare, but you whacked it.”
“Fred would kill me.”
“Same with Reilly.”
“Anyway, whacking it felt good.” Mary stood up and flung the mech over the banister to fall five hundred stories.
WHEN FRED CAME out to the deck, the Skytel billboards were announcing ten minutes to showtime. He sat with Mary and Shelley, and what was left of the gang reassembled around them. There were plenty of free chairs now that so many people had left to cash in their kill or to report for duty. Already a fresh wave of slugs was descending from the side of the tower to begin evening rounds. An army of them entered the building via the Stardeck slugways, and some detoured to roam the deck and test random ankles. Few people objected, their fury spent for the day.
Fred said, “Our jerrys got scrambled for special duty.”
“Arresting friends and designated others?” said Peter.
“No, I don’t think so. And Reilly went home to bed.”
“I know,” said Shelley.
They ordered more drinks, more food, and watched the Skytel cycle through its usual smorgasbord of civic and commercial messages: sports scores, stock quotes, population clock, birthday and anniversary dedications, celebrity news, ads. A news headline crawled across the boards: Chicagoland breaks out of its shell at midnight!
“How condescending,” said Alice.
Sofi said, “If there’s anything I’d like to smash more than a slug, it’s that monstrosity up there crowding out our moon.”
“Many have tried,” said Fred.
“It seems a rather large target to miss,” Alice said.
“True, but it’s farther away than it appears, fifty-five thousand kilometers, in fact. And it’s modular, not much more than prisms, lenses, and mirrors, and the servos that point them. Hard to kill, easy to repair.”
A vibrant message rippled across the boards: “Chicago, give yourself a hug!”
The lulu Mariola giggled. “Now tell me, wouldn’t you miss that if it was gone?”
“No, I wouldn’t!” Sofi said.
“I wouldn’t be surprised if it did follow the canopies into retirement,” said Peter. “Advertising revenue alone isn’t enough to justify it anymore. Never was, in fact. And there’s no public messages on it people can’t easily access by other means.”
Mary said, “Why’d they put it up in the first place?”
“Propaganda.”
“Give yourself a hug?”
“Not for us,” said Peter. “Propaganda for the other side of the globe. The Skytel is not geosynchronous, you know. It follows the night and spends as much time over enemy and/or unaligned territory as it does over ours. The wanted posters were a little before your time, Mary, but imagine a nightly rogues gallery of fatwah posters with princely rewards for indicted extremists, dead or alive, up there where everyone could see it, mug shots as big as Texas. The extremists hated the Skytel and tried to shoot it down many times. While it tormented us with adverts here, there it might feature your next-door neighbor and put such a price on his head that no one could resist the temptation to bring him in. No one was safe from us. The Skytel was one of our most potent weapons against the Outrage for a while.” Peter raised a glass of wine and toasted the Skyteclass="underline" “To blood money.”
The central billboard opened a window to show a close-up of a woman in a formal jumpsuit.
“What channel? What channel?” people asked across the Stardeck. The woman introduced Chicago CEO, Forrest Slana. The CEO’s roundish face seemed to compete with the Moon behind him. He beamed pallid sincerity upon all sectors of the great city.
Good evening, Chicago, he intoned. In a few moments, I will turn you over to our masters of ceremony, but first I wanted to say a few words about your decision to lower the city’s canopy.
Decision? Did we vote on it? someone asked on an open channel. And a hundred voices answered, Shut up!
Our canopy, this shell of charged squamous plates, this bubble of anti-nano, has served as Chicagoland’s hard hat these last sixty-eight years. As he spoke, the CEO glanced over his head, pretending to look up at the canopy. In that time, it has saved many lives and much property. It has intercepted and neutralized over a trillion extremist weapons. In the last sixty-eight years, it has failed us only twice, and we will always remember our neighbors who perished on those days. A sober pause here.
But today’s world is a different, better, safer place. The Outrage is over, thank heaven, and we won. The atmosphere and oceans and land are free of NASTIES. They have been flushed away, their energy depleted, and no new ones are being nanofactured.
Both Mary and Shelley looked at Fred—is that true? No new NASTIES? But he was still off-line and unable to follow the speech.
Meanwhile, this barrier over our heads costs us dearly. Operation and maintenance alone comes to one hundred credits per capita annually. And that’s a lot of yoodies that I’m sure you’d rather spend on other things. And so, as the first major city to raise a canopy, Chicago will again lead the way and be the first to drop it. We will, after sixty-eight years, finally and willingly break out of our shell!
He pretended to rap against the canopy with his knuckles. Somewhere there was generous applause, though Mary didn’t see anyone clapping on the Stardeck. As a relative newcomer to this world, Mary was curious about how her Applied People colleagues were taking all this. The canopy—the Skytel for that matter—was a fixture in her sky from as far back as she could remember. And as far as the Outrage went, she had learned about it in History class.
But if there are still evil haters out there, cooking up new terrors to unleash on us, continued the CEO, let them know that though we lay down our defenses today, we will not dismantle them. On the contrary, the canopy pickets will be maintained in a fully functional status. We will be able to respond to any threat at a moment’s notice. Another round of unseen applause.