Usually she didn’t like herself when she fell into this state, but today she relished it. She wanted someone to push her buttons so she could tap dance on a head or two.
“But ‘zero’ isn’t quite accurate,” he said. “Your inspections confirmed that SimGen is treating its sims as humanely as advertised.”
Romy nodded. That had been the plus side. Though the young sims led a barracks-style life of multilevel bunks and regimented hours, their environment was clean and they were well nourished.
“Humanely,” she said. “After spending all that time with so many of them, the word has garnered new meaning in respect to sims.”
“How so?”
“Well, so many typical chimp behaviors are missing. The mothers don’t carry their young on their backs like chimps, but on their hips like humans. And I saw only a rare sim grooming another. Chimps are always grooming each other. I’d think if SimGen wanted to keep the public thinking of sims as animals they would have allowedsome chimp behavior to carry over.”
“First off,” Zero said, “it could be learned behavior. If they’ve never seen or experienced grooming, they might not do it. Plus, sims don’t have anywhere near the amount of hair as chimps, so it’s not necessary. And if it’s genetically linked behavior, it might have disappeared when SimGen ‘cleaned up’ the sim genome by removing most of the so-called junk DNA. Or the company might have engineered it out of them because it would interfere with their work efficiency.”
“That last sounds typical. Too bad, because it seems to give chimps comfort.” Romy shook her head. “No grooming, no sex, no joy, no aggression, no love, no hate…it’s like they’re half alive—lessthan half. It’s unconscionable. Chimps laugh, they cry, they exhibit loyalty and treachery, they can be loving and murderous, they can be born ambitious, they can fight wars, they can commit infanticide. A mix of the good and the bad, the best and the worst, just like humans. But sims…sims have been stripped of the extremes, pared down to a bland mean to make them workforce fodder.”
She closed her eyes a moment to hold back a hot surge of anger. No use getting herself worked up now.
“How do sims feel about it?” Zero asked. “Ever wonder?”
“All the time. I signed to a lot of the young ones during the inspection tours, asking them just that:How do you feel? andAre you happy? ”
“How did they answer?”
“They answered ‘Okay’ to the first, but they didn’t seem to know what ‘happy’ meant.”
“Tough concept.”
Romy shot to her feet and walked around in a tight circle, grinding a fist against her palm.
“Maybe I should quit this.”
“Romy—”
“No, I’m serious. My life is one tangled mass of dissatisfaction. I should quit the organization, put in my time at OPRR, settle down, marry a fellow bureaucrat, buy a house, have kids, and forget all this crap! Life would be so much simpler and I’d be so much happier!”
“Would you?”
“At least I wouldn’t be so damn frustrated!” You’re losing it, she thought. Keep a lid on it. But she couldn’t. She needed to spew. “Everywhere I turn, someone’s hiding something from me: couldn’t find anything useful at SimGen, you won’t show me your face or let me in on who else is in the organization. Hell, for all I know, OPRR’s got a secret agenda they’re keeping from me too! I’m sick of it! Sick to death!”
Zero said nothing, merely sat and waited for her to cool. Good move.
With a little more circle walking and fist grinding, the heat seeped away and she dropped back into the chair.
“Okay,” she said. “I’m back.”
“What can I do to make this better?”
“Nothing. It’s not you, it’s me. I always seem at odds with a world that I should be so thankful for. Look what the genome revolution has done. We’ll all live longer because so many genetic diseases have already been wiped out, and days are numbered for the rest of them. Heart disease, diabetes, high blood pressure, certain cancers—if they ran in your family you pretty much had to resign yourself to dealing with them at some point in your life. Not these days. Germline therapy has seen to that. Cystic fibrosis, sickle cell anemia, MS—hell,nobody has those anymore.”
“Jerry Lewis finally stopped those telethons.”
Romy had to smile. “There you go—something else to be thankful for. And then there’s…me. You know about my splice, I assume.”
Zero nodded. “Changed your life, didn’t it.”
Oh, yes, she thought. You might even say it saved my life.
She remembered adolescence as a time of chaos. Under the influence of the new hormones surging through her maturing body, her childhood fits of violence segued into other modes of acting out. When she was Reasonable Romy she was an A student, but then somewhere in her system a switch would be thrown and Raging Romy would emerge. If Reasonable Romy had a fault, it was that she felt too much, cared too much. Raging Romy cared for no one, least of all herself, and needed to go to extremes to feel anything.
She stifled a groan as she remembered the reckless sex—she cut a sexual swath through the willing males and females in each of the three high schools she attended, then jumped into drinking, drugs, shoplifting, the whole gamut. When she was caught dancing naked on the roof of the gym she qualified for emergency institutionalization.
During her time in the locked ward of the hospital, the doctors explained that Reasonable Romy was the real Romy, the only Romy, but at times her neurohormones would undergo wild fluctuations, causing her to act out of character. They said it was a form of what they called bipolar disorder and they had medications that would keep her neurohormones—and thus her behavior—on an even keel.
Wrong.
Oh, the drugs worked for a while. She survived high school and her parents’ divorce—Raging Romy’s behavior playing a major part in the breakup—And Got Through College Without too many incidents. During grad school she started noticing increasingly wide mood swings. She managed to earn her Ph.D. in Anthropology, but shortly after that she was out of control.
A parade of doctors tried a wide array of chemical cocktails to regulate her behavior. No luck. Finally someone suggested a radical new treatment—gene therapy. A defective gene in her brain cells had been identified as the cause of her disorder. Using a viral vector, they could replace the aberrant base sequence in the gene and get it back to normal functioning.
But no success was guaranteed. The therapy was still experimental in those days. The virus would target only areas of the brain that controlled her serotonin and dopamine levels; if it got to enough cells, the levels would stabilize, normalize. If not…well, there’d been all sorts of releases to sign.
Apparently the vector virus reached a sufficient number of cells: Raging Romy never showed her face again.
But she wasn’t gone. She remained in the unspliced cells, whispering, rattling her chains…a ghost in Romy’s machine. And when Reasonable Romy was angry or stressed, she could feel Raging Romy pushing her way to the surface, trying to break through to be reborn.
And the scary part was, sometimes Romy found herself cheering her on, almost hoping she’d make it. Because she’d felt so damngood when Raging Romy had the wheel.
“Yes, it did,” Romy told Zero. “I had a genetic defect spliced out of me and I’ve never regretted it. I’m more my own boss because of it. So why aren’t I overjoyed with our brave new world?”
Zero said nothing.
The perfect response, Romy thought. If I don’t know, he sure as hell doesn’t.
She sighed. “Anyway, our inspections were satisfactory—as far as they got. But they could be performing vivisection in that basic research building for all we know.”
She’d had two ongoing problems to contend with during the inspection tour. Lack of access to basic research had been the major issue. The other had been the relentless come-ons from Luca Portero; the man somehow had developed the notion that he was irresistible to women, and that Romy’s repeated refusals of his invitations to lunch, dinner, and even breakfast were simply her way of playing hard to get.