“Don’t tell me, you’re a closet raw-lifer,” Veronika said.
“Not at all. I never took my system off, when I had one. I’m just old-fashioned when it comes to love.” It was the one realm where he had completely turned his back on the modern approach. Somehow it was important to him that he meet a woman in the course of his day-to-day life. “In the wild,” as Nathan put it. Technology felt like cheating.
Veronika smiled. She had a peculiar smile—her lips all but jumped from her teeth, forming a big Sardonicus grin. “I’m going to fix you up.”
“No, I don’t—”
Veronika waved away his protest. “I’m going to find the perfect woman for you, on the house. The honor of my trade is at stake.”
Rob wasn’t the least bit interested in meeting a woman at this particular juncture, but it seemed rude to refuse when Veronika was being so insistent. Hopefully she’d forget about it.
Up ahead, a bunch of screens that hadn’t been there a moment earlier caught Rob’s eye. He pointed. “What’s going on?” More and more were popping up between the Second Life Building and the Hilton.
The screens were swirling, trying to organize into a pattern, but having trouble. Rob searched the net for information as the three of them jogged out to get a better angle, but he couldn’t find anything. Maybe they didn’t have a permit to gather in such large numbers, so they hadn’t posted any public info that might tip off the police.
“Look at that—they’re spelling something,” Veronika said.
They were. The first word was Save. That much was clear. The rest was an indecipherable mess of swirling screens.
They watched as some of the letters formed. The third word was long, and started with a B.
“‘Save the bumpercrops,’ ‘Save the bicycles,’” Nathan said.
“‘Save the bicycles.’ Yeah. That’s probably it,” Veronika said.
An r and a d fell into place, and with a jolt, Rob got it. “‘Save the bridesicles.’”
They watched as the remaining letters formed.
“‘Save the bridesicles’?” Nathan said. “I didn’t realize they needed saving.”
The skywalks were filling with people coming out of towers to watch.
“I’ve always wondered why there are no groomsicles,” Nathan said.
Veronika clicked her tongue. “And you call yourself a dating coach? There were, early on, but the program folded from lack of business.”
“I didn’t know that,” Nathan said. “I wonder why it folded?”
“My guess is it’s the same reason there aren’t many hetero male prostitutes: women just aren’t into the sort of power and dominance that keeps the bridesicle program going.”
“They’re not?” Nathan asked, eyebrows raised.
A chant was rising up from the screens, intentionally low at first, slowly building.
“What about gay men? And gay women, for that matter?” Nathan asked.
Veronika shrugged. “Probably just too small a market. The straight program is relatively small as it is—a niche industry with a limited but extremely wealthy clientele. I also doubt gay women have any more interest in that sort of setup than straight women do.”
“What are they chanting?” Rob asked.
Veronika stopped talking. They listened, and soon it became clear: “Women aren’t salvage. Women aren’t salvage.”
“Not sure what that’s supposed to mean,” Rob said.
Rob spoke the phrase into his pathetic little handheld, feeling self-conscious as he manually sorted the results. The group was called Bridesicle Watch. He brought up their site, and was met by a familiar face. It was Lorelei’s stepmother, Sunali. He laughed out loud. “Oh, you’re shitting me.”
“What?” Nathan asked.
Rob externalized the image so Nathan and Veronika could see it as well. A crawling line of text beneath Sunali identified her as a founding member of Bridesicle Watch, and a bridesicle herself. Nathan and Veronika were looking from the clip to Rob, trying to understand his reaction.
“Look at the name,” Rob said, highlighting it for them.
“Van Kampen. Is that Lorelei’s mother?” Veronika asked.
“Her stepmother,” Rob said. After considering whether he wanted to go into a long explanation, he reluctantly added, “And her great-grandmother.”
“Come again?” Nathan said.
Rob took a deep breath. “Sunali was a bridesicle for something like seventy years. In the meantime, her son, Kilo, became a trillionaire techie, but wouldn’t revive Sunali, because he hated her guts. Kilo’s daughter went through an ugly divorce, and to spite her and Kilo, her ex-husband revived Sunali. And married her.”
It wasn’t surprising that Lorelei was a little fucked up, when you laid out her family’s story in a nutshell like that. Not that it excused what she’d done.
More screens were joining the protest. Rob couldn’t believe Sunali was one of the people behind this. Not that it was out of character—she was as brash and blunt and tough as nails—but this was a big event; they’d convinced thousands of people to join an illegal protest that would probably cost each of them an instant two-hundred-dollar fine.
“So what are they protesting?” Nathan asked. “At least bridesicles have a fighting chance to be revived, which is more than you can say for most people in the minus eighty.”
Rob pulled up Bridesicle Watch’s goals and read: “‘We want the dead to be afforded the same rights as the living. We want marriage contracts that are nothing short of indentured servitude banned. We want Cryomed’s outrageous upcharges on revivification abolished so that reviving people is more affordable. Most importantly, once a human being is put in the minus eighty, we demand regulations that make it the equivalent of murder to remove her.’”
Rob felt a chill as he read the last part. “They can remove people?”
“I read about that in a magazine somewhere,” Veronika said. “If a bridesicle doesn’t draw enough paying suitors, they pull her from the program.”
“But if they move them back to the main cryo facility, aren’t they paying just as much to maintain them?”
Veronika hesitated. “No, I mean the women who don’t have freezing insurance.” Like Winter. Veronika didn’t say it, but Rob could tell she was thinking it.
“I assumed you already knew that,” Veronika said as Rob searched deeper into the Bridesicle Watch site.
“I didn’t know that,” Nathan said.
Rob read aloud: “‘Cryomed charges a great deal for bridesicle visits because they want to create an atmosphere of exclusivity that will encourage men who can actually afford to revive bridesicles to visit. Loved ones crying over lost daughters and mothers is bad for business—’”
“They should stop referring to them as ‘bridesicles.’ It’s derogatory,” Veronika said.
“It would have taken a lot more screens to write ‘cryogenic dating center resident’ over the city,” Nathan said. “Plus, no one would have known who they were talking about.”
Rob was only half listening. He scrolled farther, until he found what he was looking for. “What’s less well advertised by Cryomed is their barbaric policy on what they refer to inside the organization as ‘salvage.’ ‘Salvage’ refers to women who don’t have cryogenic insurance. While only attractive women under forty are recruited into the bridesicle program from the main storage facility, Cryomed incurs very little extra cost, because these women must be stored in the minus eighty in any case. Women without cryogenic insurance are selected for the program only if they’re especially young and beautiful. If a salvage case doesn’t prove profitable because not enough men are visiting, she’s ‘Released from the Program’—Cryomed’s euphemism for thawed and buried.”