The Real Thing

CAROLYN IVES GILMAN

Carolyn Ives Gilman has sold stories to The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. Interzone, Universe, Full Spectrum, Realms of Fantasy, Bending the Landscape, and elsewhere. She is the author of five nonfiction books on frontier and American Indian history, and (so far) one SF novel, Halfway Human. Her story “Frost Painting” was in our Fifteenth Annual Collection. She lives in St. Louis, where she works as a museum exhibition developer.

In the ingenious story that follows, she takes us on a tour of the wonderful, glittering World of the Future—which turns out to be not much like we’d thought it would be.

In the end, the key to time travel was provided by Lawrence Welk.

It happened in the vicinity of Peapack, New Jersey. One evening during February sweeps, all the television sets that still had antennas started emitting accordion music and grainy black-and-white champagne bubbles. It lasted only a few minutes, but viewers of The World’s Most Gruesome Accidents flooded the station with complaints.

Pranksters was the first theory. But videotapes of the event deepened the mystery. It had been a live broadcast from the 1960s, and no tape of it was known to exist. Attempts to pinpoint the source of the signal failed until the Defense Department reported that one of its satellites had also picked up the bubbly broadcast. It had come from outer space.

Aliens was everyone’s second thought. Green men had picked up our planet’s electromagnetic ambassador and, in a mortifying commentary on Earthling musical taste, returned him to sender. But when the scientists at Princeton turned their attention to the spot of sky from whence the beam had come, they found no planets teeming with music critics. Instead, they found evidence of the closest black hole yet discovered.

They announced what had happened in a packed press conference where none of the computer graphics worked, and the physicists resorted to scribbling diagrams on pads of paper. The television signal, launched in the 1960s, had traveled outward into space for twenty or twenty-five years before encountering the black hole. There, unimaginable gravity had bent a portion of the signal around in a U and slingshotted it back, focused and amplified in the weird electromagnetic environs of the singularity. Peapack had had the honor of passing through the returning beam. If future viewers picked up reprises of Bonanza or Mister Ed, no one should be alarmed.

What happened next was more secretive.

It had occurred to the scientists almost at once that it would be possible to use the black hole to send a message to the future. What very few of them knew was that in a secret research institute outside Boulder, Colorado, experimenters had been perfecting a new method of space travel. With a particle beam, they disassembled an object, recording its molecular structure. That information, encoded into a beam of clarified light, was sent to a receiver that reassembled the object in its exact original configuration. They had started by sending gumwads and bottle caps across the laboratory, and graduated to begonias and rabbits. There had been a few messy slip-ups, but we won’t go into that.

The drawback of this system for space travel was that you needed a receiver at the other end before sending anything through. It would be necessary to ferry receivers out to the stars by slow, conventional means. But with a handy black hole to boomerang the message back, sending someone to the future was a real possibility.

“Don’t worry, we’ll leave a note on the refrigerator,” the scientists joked to their volunteer time traveler, when she raised the point that someone in the future would have to be expecting the message.

What else could they say? There were no guarantees.

The volunteer’s name was Sage Akwesasne, and she stood out in the army of balding math nerds—not only because she was as tall and lean as the Iroquois hunters of her ancestry, but because she was a person who took in much and said little. Not even she could have explained why she had volunteered for such a hazardous experiment. It certainly wasn’t deep trust in the reliability of scientists. She was a newly minted postdoc in an era with few job prospects, but that wasn’t it, either. There was just something about the idea of flaming across the parsecs as a beam of pure information that appealed to her.

No one consulted OSHA, or got a permit for black-hole travel. They just did it.

 

The first thing that came to Sage’s mind, after the electric shock that re-started her heart, was surprise that it had worked. She was lying on a polished steel surface, covered with a thin hospital blanket. Experimentally, she wiggled her fingers and toes to make sure everything had been assembled in the right configuration.

An elderly man with a large pocked nose and wild gray hair leaned over her. A doctor, she thought, concerned for her health. “Sage,” he whispered urgently, “don’t sign anything.”

Whatever happened to “How do you feel?” Perplexed, she sat up, clutching the blanket. After a moment of vertigo, she saw that she was in precisely the kind of place she had expected: a laboratory full of enigmatic devices. She looked back at the assembler machine that had just reconstituted her. It looked bigger and more well-funded than the one they had had in her time. “What year is it?” she asked.

The man gave a sheepish, tentative smile. There was something familiar about him. “Five years later than you were expecting. I’m James Nickle, by the way. Oh, here.” He remembered to hand her a bathrobe he was carrying.

“Jamie,” she said, too detached to be embarrassed she hadn’t recognized him. He had been a graduate intern on the project. Then, he had been a peculiar-looking young man with a large pocked nose and wild brown hair.

“You came in on time, just as we planned,” he explained as she pulled on the bathrobe. “But you’ve been on disk for a while.”

“On disk?” she said blankly.

“Yes, because of the court case. You were impounded until they figured out who owned your copyright.”

“My copyright.”

There was a discreet cough, and Sage realized that another man had entered the room. This one was small and sleek as a ferret, dark-skinned and bearded. Something about his immaculate cuffs and narrow lapels said “lawyer.” With a restrained manner he came forward and said, “I am Mr. Ramesh Jabhwalla. I represent the Metameme Corporation. I regret to have to inform you that you are not Sage Akwesasne.”

“I’m not?” Sage said.

“Legally, you are a replica produced through a patented process, using proprietary information owned by the Metameme Corporation. It is our contention that your copyright resides in us.”

Sage wasn’t sure she was getting this straight. “You mean, you’ve copyrighted my story.”

“No,” said Mr. Jabhwalla. “You.” He opened his briefcase and showed her a large data disk with a stylized MM logo on it. “The code that was used to create you.”

“You’re crazy,” Sage said. “You can’t copyright a person.”

Behind Mr. Jabhwalla’s back, Jamie was nodding vigorously. But the lawyer was unperturbed. “They patented the human genome,” he said. “That was the legal precedent. There is no substantive difference between the biochemical code to create a human and electromagnetic code to do the same.”

Jamie said apologetically, “It’s why this technology has never taken off. All the legal questions.”

Sage’s head was spinning.

Impeccably polite, Mr. Jabhwalla said, “However, Metameme has recently decided not to continue pursuing the case. The copyright question will remain moot. Instead—” he fished a thick, blue-covered contract out of the briefcase and presented it to her—“we are offering you a contract with our wholly owned subsidiary, PersonaFires. They will market your persona for a very reasonable twenty percent commission, plus expenses. It’s a good deal, Ms. Akwesasne-dupe. Most people would kill for a PersonaFires contract. Sign here.” He offered her a polished wood fountain pen.

No doubt the twenty-four dollars’ worth of beads for Manhattan had seemed like a good deal at the time. “And if I tell you to get lost?” she asked.

“Then, who knows? We might be forced to create a more agreeable duplicate of you.”

“You can’t do that!”

“Can’t we?” Smiling pleasantly, he lifted the briefcase with the disk an inch.

“Then I guess I have to think about it.”

He hesitated, but seemed to sense Jamie scowling over his shoulder. “Very well,” he said, and pocketed the pen. “Till then, allow us to be your host in the twenty-first century.”

She got down off the assembler slab, ignoring Jabhwalla’s offered hand. Standing in bare feet, she was six inches taller than he. Jamie ushered her into a bathroom where there hung a many-pocketed jumpsuit that made her look like an African explorer when she put it on. She examined herself in the mirror, wondering if her nose had really been so long before.

Mr. Jabhwalla was waiting when she emerged. He led the way to a door, but paused before opening it. “I’m afraid the press knows about you,” he said.

The next room was packed with reporters. When she entered, the sound of cameras going off was like a bushful of crickets. Round-eyed video recorders tracked her every move. “Sage! Sagie! Honey, look over here! Have you signed with Metameme? What do you think of the future? How does it feel to be so many years out of date?”

Three people crowded forward to shove endorsement contracts at her, talking fast about tie-ins and face time and profit exposure. Others tucked business cards into her pockets. In seconds, the room was a muddle of elbows and frenzy. Then Sage saw Mr. Jabhwalla’s hand wave, and two bodyguards in suits with Metameme logos waded in on either side of her, clearing a path to the door.

They came out into an airy, high-ceilinged lobby, pursued by cameras and action. The bodyguards were hustling Sage along so fast she barely had time for a glimpse. “Where are we going?” she said.

Mr. Jabhwalla answered, “I am taking you to meet the most powerful man in the world.”

“The President?” Sage said, astonished.

The lawyer looked taken aback. “No, do you want to meet him?” He glanced at one of the bodyguards. “Hans, who is president, anyway?”

“Don’t know yet,” Hans answered. “The election is day after tomorrow.”

“Oh, of course. Well, that has to wait. Today you are going to meet D. B. Beddoes, Chairman of Metameme.”

Glass doors drew back before them. At the curb waited a white limo equipped with approximately half a block of tinted glass. One bodyguard opened a door; the other propelled her inside. She was thrown back against soft leather as the car took off.

The dark inside of the limo looked like an electronics store, screens everywhere. An out-of-shape, rather pasty blond man in wire-rimmed glasses was seated in a swiveling recliner, viewing a recording of Sage getting into the limo. He was wearing a baggy sweater, jeans, and bedroom slippers. He scrolled the picture back to the point when Sage entered the roomful of reporters, and watched it again, jiggling his leg restlessly. “That went well, don’t you think?” he said.

Mr. Jabhwalla had been flung into a seat opposite her, but he was not the one who answered. Instead, a young woman whose skin was startlingly dyed in gold and black tiger stripes said, “Right on script.” She leaned forward to offer a friendly hand to Sage. “I’m Patty Wickwire, President of PersonaFires. We’re an image marketing company.”

“I’ve heard of it,” Sage said.

“Yes, I know.”

Patty looked too young to have a job, much less be company president. She was wearing a leather vest and tiny shorts that showed off her picturesque skin. Her hair was piled on her head in a teased and tousled whirlwind. Little objects were caught in the cyclone of hair: a cigarette, a tiny working television screen, a miniature Statue of Liberty. Sage thought she detected irony in the choices.

“You’ve got to approve some photos of yourself for replication,” Patty said, directing Sage’s attention to a screen at her side. “I’ve already weeded the bad ones. Press ‘Accept’ to send them out to auction.”

The photos had been taken moments before. They were unrealistically flattering, as if they had been doctored. “They must have taken three hundred photos of me,” Sage said.

“They can take them, but they can’t replicate them without paying a royalty,” Patty explained. “Every image is proprietary. Laws have improved since your time. All you need is someone to enforce them for you.”

Sage pressed “Accept” to see what would happen. Across the car the doughboy was talking on a wire headset. He said, “The photo’s going on the block right now, number 47. See it? No, don’t buy it, you dipstick, we want it in Elite or Hip. That’s the fashion image we’re imprinting on the upscale set.” With an air of savage, myopic concentration he studied a screen in front of him. “Damn! It went to Fox. Okay, change of plan. Replicate her jumpsuit in denim, under fifty bucks. Flood the Bargain Bays. Can you do that by tomorrow? Good man.” He poked the screen and it switched to a complicated 3D chart. “Hot damn, will you look at that! Her penetration’s close to 80, and it’s been logarithmic since 40. Her contagion index is off the charts. She’s taking over the bandwidth like smallpox.”

“You’re a genius, D. B.,” Patty said in a tone that implied he already knew.

He checked another screen. “Endorsement bids are rolling in nicely. Disney and ATW are duking it out for rights to the action figures, the biopic, and the immersion game. The plastic surgeons are waiting for the specs on her face.” He peered through wispy bangs at Sage. “Thank God they didn’t send some bald guy with bad teeth.” A terminal beeped. He turned to it. “The photos sure went fast. Congratulations, Ms. Akwesasne. You just made your first $30,000.”

“That was easy,” Sage said.

His face lost all semblance of softness. With a cold intensity he said, “No, it wasn’t. You have no idea how hard it was to set up the system that just made you all that money.”

Sage focused on him more clearly. No one had introduced him, presumably because he needed no introduction. It occurred to her that this was no man to trifle with. His puppy-dog looks hid a carbon-fiber personality.

“Why are you selling the specs on my face?” she asked.

“That’s the business we’re in, Ms. Akwesasne. Sorry, I thought Jabhwalla filled you in. Metameme is an information wholesaler. We don’t usually do end-product consumer delivery; there are lots of companies in place for that. We buy from information producers and supply the data to publishers, manufacturers, media outlets, and other businesses.”

“An information middleman,” Sage said.

“Right.” A terminal was warbling; he swiveled around and touched the screen. “Hi, Steve. What’s up?” He listened for a moment. “No, she’s from turn of the millennium. Golden age of innocence, remember? Mass markets. Marriage. Internal combustion. When they thought jaded hackers would hippify the world. If you’re interested, I’ve got a whole line of classic revival concepts posted for bid. Use access code ‘Nostalgiapunk.’” He jabbed the screen off. “Sheesh, how do these people stay in business, so far behind the curve?”

“You’re selling information about me?” Sage said.

“Brokering it for you. Don’t worry, you’re getting royalties. You’re very lucky you landed with us. We’re the best as well as the biggest. I’ve run the projections myself. As intellectual property, you could go exponential.”

“Wait a minute,” Sage said. “What if I don’t want to be a celebrity?”

D. B., Patty, and Jabhwalla all stared at her as if the words “don’t want to be a celebrity” weren’t in English. D. B. was first to recover. “It doesn’t matter,” he said, leaning forward, suddenly intent and earnest. “In a way, this isn’t about you at all. It’s about the idea of you, and that transcends all of us. You answer a yearning in the culture. Our world is hungry for heroes. The brave woman who gave up her life to become a beam of light, and traveled around a black hole to come back to us—it’s Promethean, it’s Orphic, it hits us at this limbic level. You are a heavenly messenger. And if you don’t pull it off with style, you’ll disillusion a generation of kids, and people who still want to believe the way kids believe. You’ve come to redeem us from our cynicism, and I can’t let you let us down.”

Everything but the flicker of screens was frozen for a moment after he stopped speaking. Then D. B. shook his head, as if emerging from some kind of fugue state, and turned to Patty. “Did you get that?”

“Yup,” she said, holding up a recorder.

“Put it in a marketing plan or something,” he said.

For a moment there, he’d practically sold Sage to herself. With a pang of disappointment, she forced herself to be skeptical. “Then why did you keep me on disk for five years?”

D. B. blinked as if the question had ambushed him, but he only lost one beat. “Five years ago we weren’t ready for you,” he said. “You would have gotten your fifteen minutes, and that would’ve been it. Today, you could be the next wave. I don’t just mean popular, I mean dominant paradigm.” He turned to Patty. “What is your marketing plan on her, anyway?”

Patty bit her lip. “Actually, D. B., I need to run it past you.”

“Of course,” he said.

“No, I mean, it’s a little bit novel.”

“Novel’s good.”

“Let’s talk about it when we get to the house.”

“Yes! What the fuck is it?” he snarled at the air. For a moment Sage thought he was having a psychotic episode; then she realized a call had come in on his headset.

The video screen at the front of the car showed the road ahead. They were entering a one-lane tunnel. Ahead, a steel gate rolled up to let them through. They passed a manned checkpoint, then rolled to a stop next to a set of elevators. The car windows went transparent, and Sage realized that there was no driver. Mr. Jabhwalla got out and held the door for Sage, the perfect gentleman. Meanwhile, D. B, had gotten absorbed in a densely detailed discussion with his caller. He gestured them on, never glancing from his terminal.

As they waited for the elevator, Patty said in a low voice to Mr. Jabhwalla, “Maybe you better stay with the Idea Machine, in case he has another inspiration spasm. I’ll take Sage up.”

Mr. Jabhwalla nodded. Patty and Sage got on the elevator. Patty’s stripes undulated when she moved.

“So, what do you think of D. B.?” Patty said when they were alone.

Sage shrugged. “Nothing wrong with him a little Ritalin wouldn’t fix.”

Patty laughed nervously. “He’s my client, too, you know. I’ve been trying to get him to ditch that geek-boy persona. It was useful at first; everyone bought into him as eccentric genius mogul. But it’s gotten old. He needs to grow up.”

“Maybe it’s just who he is,” Sage suggested.

Patty shook her head. “He is who he needs to be to run Metameme. It’s not an insurgent startup anymore. He’s a public figure now, and this isn’t the twentieth century.”

After a long ride, the elevator doors opened onto an airy entry hall. The front wall was glass, three stories high, and looked out on a dramatic mountainscape. They were at a high elevation; patches of snow lingered in shadowed spots, and a bank of clouds hid the lowlands below. The room had been built around three old-growth white pines that soared up to the skylight roof. At their base, a Japanese fountain played in the sunlight.

“I thought you might feel at home in the millennium suite,” Patty said. “I’ll show you now, while we have some time.” She led the way up a sweeping cedar and slate staircase to a landing adorned in Tlingit and Kwakiutl art. Three hallways radiated from it.

The decor of the millennium suite turned out to be late-1990s luxury hotel, teal and beige. The only inauthentic touch was that video screens were everywhere—in the ceiling above the bed, in the surface of the dining table, in the wall opposite the toilet, behind the bathroom mirror—not to mention the six-foot-square one that filled an entire wall. “You have access to all the major infoservices here,” Patty said proudly, as if Sage was supposed to be impressed.

“Who normally lives here?” Sage asked, feeling the pampered anonymity of the room.

“Well, this is D. B.’s house, but he only uses a couple rooms. The rest are for business guests.”

“So, no patter of little feet?”

“Children? God, no! Where would those come from?” She made it sound inconceivable.

Sage sat on the bed, cross-legged. “So I guess the information trade pays off?”

“For D. B. it does,” Patty said, sitting next to her. “It’s like he channels the Zeitgeist or something. He was first to use memetics in the infobiz. Did they know what memes were in your time?”

“There was a theory. Memes were supposed to be units of information—like ideas, tunes, fads, rumors—that supposedly replicated themselves through the population the same way new genes spread. The idea was that people caught memes like viruses, and spread them to others. There was speculation that you could come up with an epidemiology of knowledge. No one had ever done it, though.”

“Well, D. B. did it, or something close. He figured out the algorithms to model the spread of memes on the net. It was like cultural weather prediction. He could forecast what kinds of information were going to be in demand, and then he’d go and sew up the market before anyone knew what he was up to. He made his first killing when he figured out that a little food-taint scare in Belgium was going to go nonlinear. He borrowed fifty million dollars and bought up rights to a whole pile of university test results. Pretty soon the world was clamoring to know the food chain was safe, and the bioag companies didn’t know whether he was holding positive or negative results. They paid top dollar to buy back control of the info.”

“But—that’s blackmail,” Sage protested.

Patty shrugged. “So? Times change. Usury used to be illegal; now we call it interest. Anyway, Metameme expanded into information supply. Tracking trends is still its bread and butter. But D. B.’s moved on. Today, he’s more interested in memetic engineering—creating and propagating memes deliberately.”

“You mean starting fads, so he can be ready with the merchandise?”

“It’s not as easy as it sounds. If anyone really knew the formula for a successful meme, he’d have made a billion billion by now.”

After giving her instructions on how to find D. B.’s office when she was ready, Patty left. Alone, Sage went into the bathroom, thinking of taking a shower, but found that the shower stall had no spigot, and was lined with fat glass tubes. Cryptic safety instructions on the door led her to stand in the stall, arms raised and eyes closed. There was a flash of light, a puff of air, and she stepped out again, clean down to the roots of her hair. It was an enormously pleasant discovery. All the time and labor wasted on personal hygiene would be miraculously restored to her day. She understood now how Patty could maintain the elaborate hairdo—it could stay in place for a month without growing dirty.

Considerably refreshed, she looked into her closet. It was full of clothes, all her size, but she did not trust herself to assemble any of it appropriately, so she stayed with her jumpsuit. Lying back on the bed, she decided to turn on the ceiling monitor, but could find no controls, only a laser pointer on the bedside stand. Experimentally, she pointed it at the screen, and the terminal flashed on, presenting her with a menu. She discovered she could use the pointer to make selections.

Quickly she navigated to a news service and found she was the headline news, completely eclipsing the coming election. She surfed from site to site, seeing the same photos and video clips she had approved for sale, but given a variety of spins. To her surprise, not a single one was complimentary to Metameme or D. B. Beddoes.

He was described as everything from “secretive infomagnate” to “indicted monopolist” to “evil genius.” Paging to a background piece, she learned that the court battle over her copyright had been brutal to Metameme’s image, and only in the last few days had it become clear that the company was going to lose. Then, without warning, Metameme had abruptly reversed position and substantiated her without consulting anyone. The uproar now was about why she had been whisked away into “Castle Metameme,” and what the evil genius had in mind. A senator spoke threateningly about human rights violations.

She, on the other hand, seemed quite popular—the broadcasts dwelt lovingly on beauty-enhanced photos of her mysterious appearance before the reporters, her gawk transformed to glamor. With some ambivalence, she realized there was already a duplicate Sage Akwesasne in the nosphere—an image passed from brain to brain, growing more vivid at every step—chic, magnetic, untamed. It was no one’s creation, and everyone’s; but no one else had such power to alter it, or be it.

Sage flicked off the screen and lay musing. The twenty-first century was a forest primeval, it seemed; but she was more than just wolf bait. She had hunter instincts herself, honed in the Darwinian jungles of Cambridge, Massachusetts. She was a match for this world.

The hallways of D. B.’s house were sepulchrally silent. Sage was tempted to explore, but put it off. She needed to follow the track of information now. Patty’s directions led her past the pine tree room, down a hall, and through a security door that opened to her thumbprint. A camera swiveled to watch her cross the foyer.

D. B. was alone in his office—except for the virtual presence of several harried employees on a double bank of monitors that served him for a desk. He was pacing up and down in stockinged feet, talking on his headset and brandishing one of his bedroom slippers. The other one was lodged on a tall bookshelf where he had apparently flung it. There was a half-eaten peanut butter sandwich and a Coke abandoned next to an unplugged keyboard.

“Am I surrounded by morons?” he was saying. “Haven’t you ever heard of schadenfreude?” Seeing Sage at the door, he beckoned her in and pointed his slipper at a chair. She sat. “Yeah, schadenfreude. The feeling of pleasure at someone else’s misfortune. Public figures get a popularity boost whenever something bad happens to them. Unpopularity is bad, so it’s self-correcting. At least, that’s the theory. Give it a chance, okay?” He thumbed the touchscreen off and slumped into a leather office chair. “My own PR department thinks I’m nuts.”

Sage said, “Well, you are getting pretty badly beat up on the net.”

He swiveled to face her, staring intently through round lenses. “Have I violated your civil rights?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “Have you?”

He didn’t answer, just drummed his fingers on the arms of his chair. He seemed incapable of sitting still.

“So you sell information,” she said.

“Yeah,” he said, still drumming, preoccupied. “Engine of the economy.”

“In my day we thought information ought to be free and available to all.”

“Well, that’s how capitalism expands, by commodifying what people find valuable. The Native Americans thought you couldn’t buy and sell land, and where are they now?” He focused on her suddenly and said, “Oh, sorry. I forgot about your ethnic identity. That’s amazing hair you’ve got, by the way.”

“It comes with the ethnicity,” Sage said tolerantly.

“I figured. Makes for great graphics.”

Patiently, Sage steered the conversation back to him. “There’s got to be a lot of perfectly worthless information out there. How do you know what’s valuable?”

A flash of boyish animation came across his face. “That’s the question! That’s the whole question. On one level, it’s the same as any other commodity: what’s scarce is valuable, what’s abundant is not. When I first got into the business, no one had any control over supply, or any way of forecasting demand.”

“How can you get control over the supply of information?” Sage tried not to let on how sinister she found this.

“Not by hiring a bunch of information workers,” D. B. said. “That’s how a lot of companies went broke: they weighed themselves down with payroll. I put my money on entrepreneurship. I offered global brokering for knowledge workers—engineers, image designers, researchers, programmers, composers, graphic artists, scriptwriters. Anyone with a viable product could come to us, and we’d package it, find a buyer, and get them top price. God, it took off. Pretty soon all the content providers were going independent to get out from under the stale old corporate work models, and I was everyone’s best and biggest market. Companies started economizing by laying off their information producers, because they could buy ideas better and cheaper from me.”

For a moment, he looked nostalgic for old times. Then he snapped into focus again. “But the real question is still your first one: what information is valuable? Obviously, I’m not out to buy all of it, only what there’s most demand for. Well, without giving away trade secrets, there’s a near-insatiable demand for certain kinds of information; you can always sell more. Other kinds don’t repay the cost of production. To oversimplify, it’s governed by the Urge Pyramid. At the broad base of what people want are the primal urges: fear, sex, hunger, aggression, and so on. Only after those are satiated do people want to be stimulated by beauty, novelty, sentiment, and the other mid-level urges. And at the tiny tip of the pyramid is desire for rational thought; it’s the last thing people want. Information is nutrition for the brain, same as food. We’ve got to have it, roughly in the proportions of the pyramid.”

“Your view of human nature is way cynical,” Sage said.

His reaction was abrupt and angry. “I’ve made a couple hundred billion based on my assumptions. What’s your proof?”

She didn’t react, and as quickly as his anger had flamed up, it was gone. He started wandering around the room, his hands in his pockets, talking. “The way not to do an information-delivery system is top-down. You can’t give people what you think they ought to have, you have to give them what they ask for. Elitist distribution systems get all caught up in accuracy and ethics, quality and high culture. Like ballet on television, for cripes sake, and not wrestling. It’s not just unprofitable, it’s undemocratic.”

“Wait a second,” Sage objected. “A democracy depends on a wellinformed populace, citizens who know the issues. How can people have a sense of investment in society if they’re flooded with urge-fulfillment programming, and not quality information?”

“Spoken like a true elitist,” D. B. said. “You want to dictate to the populace instead of trusting them to demand what they need. Democracy is all about giving people what they want. That’s why the free market is the most democratic institution ever invented.”

“Even if it deprives people of accuracy and ethics?” Sage said.

“Oh, accurate, ethical information is still out there,” D. B. said. “It’s just expensive.” To her astonished stare he said defensively, “Well, it costs money to get the story right, and there’s less demand for it. Wonks ought to pay a premium.”

“But that means—”

“Listen,” he interrupted, “I don’t just have populism on my side, I’ve got natural law, too. Free markets operate according to the same underlying principles as ecosystems. The driving forces in both cases are competition and natural selection. Innovations are constantly getting injected into the system, and competition sorts out the ones that are viable. Or innovators form coalitions that are more viable in symbiosis—and then the other organisms call you a monopolist and take you to court.” For a moment his voice grew bitter.

“Never mind, this is the point: in the information market, rival memes are always competing for habitat space in our brains, and the successful ones are the ones that are most contagious. You know what makes a successful meme?”

“Uh … a true one?” Sage said.

“Wrong! Couldn’t be wronger. A successful meme is one that tweaks its host’s urge pyramid, and makes him want to pass it on. True memes are actually at a competitive disadvantage. You know why? Because, oddly enough, the world doesn’t work in a memorable or interesting way. That’s why fiction is so much more satisfying than truth: it caters to our brains, and what they want. Reality needs to be productized in order to be convincing.”

One of D. B.’s terminals was buzzing urgently; he thumbed it on. A bright-looking young man appeared, clearly nervous at speaking to the boss. “D. B., I think I may have a solution for us.” He saw Sage, and froze, staring.

“Go on,” D. B. said.

“Right. You know there’s a war in central Asia.”

“There’s always a war in central Asia.”

“Well, we’ve got atrocity reports coming out now. Refugees. I thought we could push them really hard.”

“As a distraction?” D. B. said, incredulous. “Oh, right. Like no one’s ever thought of that before. Sheesh. Give ’em some credit.”

The young man looked crestfallen. “Oh. Well then, what should we do with this war?”

“We’ve marketed three wars in the last six months,” D. B. said, pushing his glasses up his nose. “Their sponsorship potential’s crap.”

“Oh, we’ve got some insurance companies and HMOs interested. We can make it a brand-name product.”

“Well, run the projections, then. I think the mass markets are saturated with refugees; it’s become a cliché.” He pondered a moment, then said, “I know. Pretend you’re trying to downplay it. The egghead outlets will think we’re trying to suppress something, and they’ll jump all over it. They’re total suckers for suppression.”

“But then we’ll become the story,” the young man protested.

“So? You will have sold your war.”

“Well … okay.” The screen went dark.

D. B. turned back to Sage. She said, “How can war become a cliché? A cliché is rhetorical; war is real.”

He shrugged. “We don’t lead. We are led.”

“Oh good, I’ve found you,” Patty said, standing striped and windblown in the doorway. A flash of irritation at the interruption crossed D. B.’s face, but he snagged a loose chair and rolled it over the carpet toward her. As she sat, she looked hintingly from her boss to Sage and said, “D. B., have you … ?”

He snapped his fingers, remembering, and turned to Sage. “I forgot, I was supposed to be suborning you with lucre. Well, I’m sure you picked up the subliminals.” He gestured at the rest of the house. “This could be yours, and so on.”

“D. B.!” Patty protested, annoyed at him. “That’s—”

“That was charming,” Sage said. “I’m touched.”

“Touched enough to sign a contract?” D. B. said, suddenly purposeful as a nail gun.

“Not.”

“Oh, well. Tell Jabhwalla I tried.” He turned to Patty. “So what was this marketing plan of yours?”

Patty shifted nervously in her chair, looking about fifteen. “D. B., you’ve got to promise not to get mad when I say this.”

“What are you talking about?” he said. “I never get mad.”

Sage laughed out loud. “Sorry,” she said, covering her mouth.

“All right, this is my idea,” Patty began.

D. B. had settled in his chair; now he sprang up again. “Let me tell you my idea first.”

Resignedly, Patty said, “Okay.”

“This isn’t based on research; I’ve just got this gut feeling.”

“Your gut is golden,” Patty said. Sage didn’t think it was entirely flattery.

“I think the outsider angle is going to catch on. The visitor from a simpler, more innocent time comes face to face with our complex, corrupt world—and conquers it through natural goodness.”

“Kind of a noble savage thing,” Sage put in ironically.

“Yeah, Rousseau without the colonialist baggage.”

“That’s great, D. B.!” Patty said enthusiastically. “It fits right in with my idea.”

“Which is … ?”

“Well, who’s the ultimate symbol of the complexity and corruption of our time?”

Patty paused; no one answered. “You are, D. B.!” she said. “She’s got to conquer you!”

He looked utterly blank. “I don’t get it.”

“Love, D. B.! You bring her into your house for some questionable end, but her natural goodness turns the tables, and you fall for her. No one will expect it. It’ll humanize you, make you sympathetic. The man who never has to compromise is finally conquered by love.”

There was a long pause. D. B. was motionless for the first time since Sage had seen him.

“You’re not mad, are you?” Patty asked.

“I’m not mad.” He turned away from them, brooding.

“You’ve got to move forward, D. B.,” Patty coaxed. “Your image needs this.”

Without turning, D. B. said, “I think you’d better ask her.”

Sage had been wondering when they were going to get around to that. “Let me get this straight,” she said. “First you try to copyright me, then you abduct me, then you try to suborn me. Now you want me to collaborate in a false scenario you’re selling to the press.”

“Right,” Patty said. “Jerking around the publicity machine.”

“And this is going to benefit me how … ?”

“Oh, your stock will soar,” Patty said. “Can you imagine, the richest man on earth? This is the ultimate image synergy.”

“Just imagine for a moment that I don’t want the publicity,” Sage said. “Can you give me one reason why I should do this?”

D. B. looked at Patty; Patty looked at D. B. The idea flow seemed to have run dry. At last D. B. ventured, “For the fun of it?”

Sage kept thinking it couldn’t get any more surreal. “Listen, you may find this quaint or naive. But I’m a scientist. Scientists are trained not to lie. I can’t lie for you.”

D. B.’s expression was awestruck. “My God, Patty,” he said. “Do you know what she is? She’s the real thing. The real fucking thing.”

 

Mornings (Sage learned the next day) were, by tacit custom, set aside for catching up on news and communications. It was the only way people could consume the enormous amounts of information required to keep the economy humming.

The terminals in Sage’s room boasted a vast array of competing infoservice subscriptions, each combining a different mix of television, phone, fax, rental movies, games, chat, shopping, and a host of less familiar options, all accessed through the Internet. Choosing a service at random, she tried to do a search for the people and project that had sent her here. In minutes, she felt awash in junk information. A search engine that claimed to specialize in history linked her to a nostalgiafest of pop culture from the last forty years—celebrities and entertainers, scandals and scuttlebutt. She tried her favorite encyclopedia site. The brand name was still there, but the entries had all been auctioned off to advertisers. Her searches for scientific subjects kept turning up “Top Hit Topics” pushed by their sponsors. On a whim, she queried the encyclopedia for Leon Trotsky, and found him missing in action. Not profitable enough, apparently. No market potential.

At last, remembering what D. B. had said, she backed out and found a way to arrange the list of his infoservice subscriptions by cost. His monthly bill was staggering. An average person could obviously afford only a single service in the midrange—and in that range, there were only a few clonelike choices. Below them, cheap services clustered like vermin in the cracks, offering colorful, kinetic interfaces like Saturday morning cartoons, but only rudimentary access to bargain shopping, pornography, lotteries, and sports, heavily larded with advertising. So she headed for the high end. The true vastness of the information resources only became apparent here, where the search engines were sophisticated enough to find them. But they were not free. Oddly enough, the higher the price of admission, the rawer the data became, until the business and professional portals opened onto arcane libraries of unmediated information, like the neural architecture of civilization.

Her whirlwind tour of the infoverse left her thoughtful. She leaned back, sipping a liquid the interactive house menu called “starbucks,” which she had correctly intuited was coffee. Clearly, the Internet had not turned into a cyber-fairyland where heroic hackers ruled. On the contrary, it was about as radical as a suburban mall, and served much the same purpose. Most of what people could find there was not information at all, but processed information product—Velveeta of the mind—more convincing than the real thing.

Perhaps it had been naïve to think everything would stay free. All the same, the way the market had debased and stratified the information well filled her with distaste. Fabrication and fact, work and play, information and manipulation had become hopelessly mingled. It could be she had a role in this era after all. Perhaps an outsider could warn people of dangers they couldn’t see.

In the end, Jamie Nickle was the only one from the time-travel project she was able to find outside obituaries. The project itself had disappeared into obscurity. She sent Jamie an e-mail thanking him for bringing her back to life.

Sage was still in pajamas when Patty came to find her shortly before noon. “Power up,” she said brightly. “You’ve got to be in New York in two hours. You can take D. B.’s plane.”

“What for?”

“An interview,” Patty said. “You’re going to be on the net.”

Cautiously, Sage said, “You’re letting me talk to the media?”

“Of course,” Patty said. “How else would we imprint you on the public?”

“Will you control what I say?”

“No! Just don’t be boring, okay?”

Sage realized she kept asking all the wrong questions. “How much is Metameme making off this?”

“Never mind that,” Patty said. “You’re making $75,000.”

A blindingly simple insight had come to Sage: Metameme sold information. As long as it was profitable, the content of that information was a matter of almost complete indifference.

Looking over her closet, Sage tried to think what an information warrior would wear to perform a cultural expose. She chose a flowing Japanese silk robe, worn over a black body stocking. She left her hair untouched, falling straight to her waist. The effect pleased her; it was dramatic but elegant.

The only one who went with her was Hans the bodyguard, who acted as chauffeur and pilot. The plane, obviously outfitted for D. B., had banks upon banks of video screens, a kitchen stocked with enough caffeinated beverages to light the eastern seaboard, a flash-clean stall, and bed. When they came in sight of Manhattan, the plane disdained the airport, and instead hover-landed on a rooftop pad. A network producer met her.

“I told them I wouldn’t lie,” Sage said as the woman led her down a hall to the elevators. “I’m perfectly free to answer any question.”

“Don’t worry, you’re wonderful,” the producer said. “That outfit is perfect, and your hair. Everyone will love you. Just relax and be yourself.”

Sage was nervous but determined as they entered the bustling studio. An audience was already sitting in bleachers around the set, but they seemed oddly quiescent. Sage did a doubletake. “Your audience,” she said. “They’re robots.”

“Don’t worry, they’ll come on when we start taping,” the producer assured her. “You won’t be able to tell the difference. None of us can.”

The show was called Yolanda’s Chat Room, and the main set was a kitchen. Uneasily, Sage said, “What kind of questions will we cover?”

“Just whatever comes up,” the producer said. “Relax, Yolanda’s a pro. Her audience profile is to die for.”

A black woman who radiated near-thermonuclear energy came striding toward them across the studio. “Have I gone to heaven?” she crowed exhuberantly. “Those corporate cheapskates actually paid top dollar to get me a real guest! And they’re even hyping it. Do you hear my heartbeat? Ratings says there’s already a spike.” Her voice dropped an octave, and she was suddenly businesslike. “Hi, honey. I’m Yolanda. You won’t regret this. I deliver numbers.”

“Uh … good,” Sage said.

“You look darling in that. Oh, I’ve got a feeling this is my day.”

Sage waited in a room backstage till the producer came to fetch her. When her cue came, she walked out into the eye-stunning brilliance of the lights. The animatronic audience gave her a standing ovation. They were so lifelike, she actually caught herself feeling flattered.

She sat down at the kitchen table and Yolanda poured her a cup of starbucks. With exaggerated animation, Yolanda said to the audience, “Now this is a woman with courage like most of us can’t even imagine. Isn’t she?” They clapped. “Sage. You actually had to die to make your voyage, right? Weren’t you afraid?”

Sage made a fatal error then. She actually considered the question. Had she been afraid? Thoughtfully, she said, “Actually, I think the fear was part of the appeal … .”

Once caught in subjectivity, it was almost impossible to break out. They talked a while about her preparations and the trip (“Did you have any after-death experiences?”), then Yolanda asked her to describe what happened when she woke up. Sage tried to make it factual, but her bewilderment came through.

Yolanda glowed with empathy. “Weren’t you angry at the way you were treated?”

By now Sage was able to think, My feelings aren’t the story here. “I was concerned by what I saw.” A lie, but she needed to steer the conversation to substantive issues.

Her host didn’t follow the lead. “You’ve met D. B. Beddoes now, right? What do you think of this recluse billionaire who had the power to say whether you should live or not?” The audience stirred in sympathy.

Distracted again, Sage said, “Well, you’re wrong to paint him as some kind of monster. The problem’s more complex than that.”

“Should we be worried for you?”

“Oh, no. In fact, D. B. can be rather sweet. But that’s—”

“Sweet?” Yolanda’s eyes grew big.

“Well, I mean … .”

Yolanda leaned across the table and touched her hand. “Honey, are you lonely here? Did you leave anyone special behind?”

Oh my God. What did I just imply?

Sage was so flustered that by the time Yolanda actually gave her an opening by saying, “What’s the biggest change you’ve seen in the world?” she babbled something inane about self-driving cars and flash-clean booths.

When the interview wrapped up and the lights went off, Sage protested, “That was a disaster! Can’t I do it over?”

“Don’t worry, babe,” Yolanda said. “You were natural and beautiful, that’s all people see. They just want to identify with you.”

She had come to deliver a clarion warning, and had been limp and vacuous instead. “What came over me? It’s like I turned into one of those robots.”

Yolanda’s business voice said, “Those questions I asked you, they only have one answer, but that’s the point. Everyone knows what you’re supposed to say, then you say it, and they feel affirmed. I used to be a journalist, I know the difference.”

“Used to be? Why aren’t you now?” Sage asked.

“Journalists don’t have control over the final product,” Yolanda said. “Information production and information delivery are two completely different jobs now—and I’m telling you, honey, all the money and security is in delivery. You have to be young and committed to be a journalist, always under pressure to nose out contracts, never knowing where the next check will come from. I couldn’t live like that, hand to mouth.”

“But there’s such a demand for information—”

“The public needs the truth but doesn’t want it. The money’s all in what they want but don’t need.” She looked away toward the nowflaccid audience and said, “Well, speak of the devil.”

D. B. was standing there, managing to make an expensive Italian coat look shapeless. In alarm, Sage blurted, “D. B.! How much did you hear?”

“Just the last part,” he said. “You were fine.”

“Since you’re here, Mr. Beddoes,” Yolanda said in a voice like lead bullets, “maybe I can ask some questions.”

“No comment,” he said. “Come on, Sage. Let’s go to dinner.”

Still in turmoil, Sage followed him out of the studio. In the elevator she said, “I wanted to tell the truth. I wanted to warn them how dangerous it is to let the market govern the information supply.”

“You wouldn’t have been sympathetic,” he said.

“This isn’t about me! If I soften a message just to be popular, I’m as evil as you.”

“No, you’re not,” he said, trying to be comforting.

They walked across a wide lobby to the front doors of the building. Outside, it was evening, but the city lights blazed down a shining, impossible canyon. They were halfway down the broad set of steps to the sidewalk when Sage saw the paparazzi waiting for them, cameras already blinking. Suddenly, D. B.’s phone rang.

“Yeah?” he said, then stopped dead. Seizing Sage’s arm, he turned around and started back up the steps.

“What is it?” she said.

“He says not to leave the building.”

His pace was unhurried, but his grip on her arm was vise-tight. Back inside, a security guard came racing across the lobby toward them. “This way, Mr. Beddoes,” he said, hurrying them toward the elevator while another guard locked the glass doors behind them. Outside, a siren wailed to a stop.

In the elevator, Sage said, “You can let go of my arm now.”

He dropped it as if it singed. “Sorry.”

Hans was scowling and talking on a headset when he met them at the top floor. He escorted them protectively to the plane. Once inside and in the air, D. B. dialed a number and said, “What the hell was that about?” He listened a while, then said, “Did they get him?” Then, “Okay. Let me talk to Patty.” Moments later, he said, “Well, that was sure a fiasco. Did you get any pictures at all?” Pause. “Easy for you to say. You didn’t have some jerk trying to get famous by waving a gun at your back. Oh yeah? Well, fuck schadenfreude. From now on be more careful who you leak my schedule to.” He hung up on her and sat brooding.

Sage had picked up an important point from that exchange. “That was a photo op, wasn’t it?” she said. “Patty planted those paparazzi to photograph us together. You’re going ahead with her plan whether I like it or not.”

He gazed at her sulkily.

“You egotistical bastard!” She felt manipulated. Her indignation nearly levitated her from her seat. Or maybe it was just the plane leveling off.

“Patty says your approval numbers are going stratospheric,” he said a little resentfully.

Outside the plane window, the sky had turned black, but the ground below them was still glowing in sunlight. “My God, so is this plane,” Sage said, gripping the arms of her seat. “Where are we going?”

“To dinner.”

“Where?”

“Hong Kong.”

 

A large section of downtown Victoria had been destroyed in an earthquake, and in its place had risen a set of three shining, silver towers that grazed the underside of hubris. As the plane circled, the afternoon sun turned them incendiary.

“The south one’s mine,” D. B. said absently. “But we’re not going there.”

It dawned on Sage that people weren’t kidding when they said he was rich.

They climbed from the plane onto a windy platform that jutted from the north tower like a fungus from a tree trunk. Sage found the height exhilarating; across the strait the skyscrapers of Kowloon looked like miniatures, and the mountain-framed harbor was freckled with tiny boats. But Hans was getting nervous at her standing near the edge, so she followed D. B. inside.

The maitre d’ ushered them to a window table. D. B. was still edgy and morose until they had polished off a bottle of pinot noir; then he asked about her day.

“Did you know that Leon Trotsky has been expunged from the collective memory?” she said.

“Hmm. My day wasn’t so hot, either.”

“Don’t you care?”

He shrugged. “He was part of a memeplex the culture got inoculated against last century. You know why?”

“Why?” Sage said fatalistically.

“Because it lacked entertainment value,” D. B. said. “The least people want from their government is entertainment. Once everyone realized the class war was over and it was just going to be five-year plans from here on in, they knew what a yawner they’d created, and flushed it for something with more pizzazz.”

She fitted that answer into her picture of him. “So don’t you ever have labor trouble?”

“Labor?” he stared at her. “Information isn’t made in factories.”

“It still takes work to produce.”

“Oh, well, I don’t employ the producers, I told you that. Journalists, researchers—they make bad employees. Anyone with a commitment to a set of professional standards can’t be completely loyal to the company. So I just buy their product, and leave the standards up to them.”

“Along with the financial risk,” she said. “This whole economy of yours rests on the backs of exploited information workers who have no control over the fruits of their labor.”

“What is this, a barbecue?” he said, irritated.

“You’re a regressive thinker, D. B.”

“You’re the one from the past.”

“Besides being a manipulative s.o.b.”

“Hot damn, what a romantic dinner this is.”

But by the time the food came, Sage was feeling pleasantly buzzed; the bordeaux with dinner and cognac afterward made her temporarily forgive the day for its disappointments. There would be other days, other chances to denounce him.

The sun was low and coppery behind the headland when they finished, and the city lights were beginning to twinkle. “We can’t go back yet,” Sage said. “I’ve got to touch ground, or I won’t feel like I’ve been here.” So they took a glass elevator to the plaza between the towers and strolled through a cloud of pigeons to an abstract sculpture in the center of the square. Sage leaned back against the warm enamel surface and watched the Asian sky turn electric pink and orange, her thoughts pinwheeling pleasantly in her head. The air was balmy and sensual, smelling of the sea. And, yes, there was a pleasant exhilaration at being with a man who could buy the inner solar system and still leave a tip.

Suddenly, he leaned over and pecked her on the cheek. She looked at him in surprise. Was he blushing, or was it the sunset?

“Was that for the reporters?” she asked.

“No,” he said awkwardly. “That was for me. Sorry.”

It was endearingly inept. “That was no kiss,” she informed him. “This is a kiss.” She took his head in her hands and gave him a long, lingering kiss. A thorough kiss, one that would take.

When she pulled away, his glasses were fogged up. He fumbled to wipe them. Laughing, she said, “Race you to the elevator,” and took off.

She lost a shoe halfway across the plaza, but beat him anyway. Laughing breathlessly, she started back to get it, but he caught her hand and said, “Leave it. Maybe some prince will find it and come after you.”

“What would I do with a prince?” she said.

“I don’t know. Kiss him. Confuse him.”

She realized he wasn’t joking.

They returned silently to the plane. The last shreds of brilliance were fading from the sky when they took off. D. B. watched it out the window, unaware she was looking at him, at the expression of longing on his face. It seemed implausible that a man like him could long for anything.

“Sage, I’ve got an idea,” he said, turning to her. “Let’s fly on to Paris and see the sunset again.”

She smiled. “We can’t just go chasing sunsets around the globe.”

“Why not?”

“Because … we’re adults. We’ve got responsibilities. Especially you.”

He turned back restlessly to the window. Fidgeting with the arm of his chair, he said, “That was one hell of a meme you gave me.”

“People have been passing that one around for a long time.”

“I guess so.” He paused. “That was all just playacting, right?”

She found it hard to answer. Because, unexpectedly, she wasn’t sure. At last she said, “Sure. If that’s what it was for you, that’s what it was for me.”

The liquor that had made her so giddy was now putting her to sleep. She reclined her seat as far as it would go and started dozing off to the drone of the engines. Later, she roused momentarily to find him still awake, still watching her with an expression too complex to decode.

 

Sage woke in her own bed the next morning, late and hung over, to find her face had launched a thousand tabloids.

The kiss was emblazoned across one Web page, along with a telephoto shot of her and D. B. on the plaza in Hong Kong. Another page was auctioning her lost shoe for several thousand dollars. “Shit,” she said, and called Patty.

“Who approved those photos?” she demanded, her temples throbbing.

“I did,” Patty said, cheerful enough to deserve summary execution. There was a new collection of objects in her hair. An Oriental drink parasol and a tiny Venus de Milo. “Don’t worry, I’m taking care of everything.”

“I didn’t want that spread all over the net,” Sage said. “It was private.”

“If you wanted privacy, Sage, you sure picked the wrong planet. Not to mention the wrong guy.”

After Sage hung up, she sat thinking: as long as she was part of the Metameme pseudo-reality, she was never going to be herself. Even sincere acts and unpremeditated words would be manipulated into lies.

She needed to get away. But to where? She had no friends, no family to run to. No money, no skills. Nothing marketable but notoriety.

Nevertheless, she needed to escape. As far as she knew, there was only one way out of D. B.’s house, the guarded underground tunnel. After dressing and eating aspirin for lunch, Sage went out to the pinetree room. No one was around to observe her, so she took the elevator down to the bottom level.

To her surprise, the limo was waiting at the curb. Glancing around, she got in. As soon as the door closed, the vehicle started rolling silently forward. She waited, hoping the guards would think it was D. B. and let her through.

Abreast of the checkpoint, the car came to a stop. One of the phone screens buzzed. Sage hesitated, but at last touched the “answer” icon. It was D. B. He was in his office, wearing a rumpled sweatshirt.

“Where are you going?” he said.

“Out,” she said, keeping her face impenetrable.

He absorbed her expression, and his face turned as uncommunicative as hers. “Would you mind taking another car? That one’s a little conspicuous.”

“I’ll take the lawnmower if I have to,” Sage said.

“Okay, get out and I’ll send something else.”

She got out and the limo rolled away backward, disappearing around a curve in the tunnel. The guard in the glass booth opposite her was trying not to watch. Soon another vehicle came self-propelled up the tunnel—a sleek, silver sports convertible. Sage didn’t recognize the make, but the design was a universal language: the car burned pure sex appeal. She wondered what D. B. thought of her, to have chosen that car.

There was a steering wheel, accelerator, and brake, but all the other controls had been replaced by a screen. When she got into the driver’s seat, the phone rang. Sighing, she answered.

“Do you know how to program it?” D. B. asked.

“Can’t I just drive it?”

“No. It’s illegal on the freeways. Traffic control laws. Just tell me where you want to go and I’ll program it from here.”

“I suppose you can trace where I go anyway.”

In a martyred tone he said, “Sage, I apologize for my world. Cars don’t come without tracer functions now.”

There was no help for it, so she told him to send her to the university. The screen flashed to a different mode as he programmed it. “When you want to come back, just hit ‘Return,’” he said. She refrained from commenting on whether she was going to come back.

It was a crisp and sunny day, and as the car cruised down the winding mountain road, Sage lowered the top to enjoy the wind in her hair and (with only a twinge of self-consciousness) the chic and muscular machine cornering lithely beneath her. She found a pair of sunglasses in the glove box and put them on so she would match the car.

At the freeway the car shot up the ramp toward a solid wall of traffic, and she found the brake didn’t work. Just when a collision seemed imminent, a sports-car-sized notch opened up, and her vehicle merged. Traveling at full speed only six inches from the car ahead gave her panic reflexes a workout, but the traffic flowed smoothly at a volume that would have caused apocalyptic jams in her time.

On the road into downtown, her own face loomed from a video billboard. For a distraction she tried the radio, but the first thing to issue from it was a come-on for a program called “Sage: Enchantress from the Other Side of Time.” She turned it off, gagging.

Just then she noticed the patrol car behind her. The phone rang.

“We are taking control of your vehicle,” the officer said when she answered. “Turn on your fax machine and we will send the warrant.”

“What have I done?” Sage asked as her vehicle veered onto an off-ramp.

“You have been subpoenaed to appear at the Federal Courthouse.”

“What for?”

“You’ll have to ask them that, ma’am.”

The car auto-negotiated a tangle of ramps that disgorged into downtown traffic. With the police close behind, she pulled up to the curb before a tall steel-and-glass building set back from the street behind a concrete plaza. A small crowd was waiting there, including two camera teams. As Sage got out, a woman reporter dashed over and put a microphone to her face. “Sage, do you have some ancient tribal medicine that explains your sexual magnetism?”

A tall, balding man in a brown suit met her at the curb. “Ms. Akwesasne, I represent a consortium of firms led by the Infometics Corporation that has brought suit to force a fairer distribution of information concerning you. We need your testimony to prove that there has been an illegal restraint of trade—”

A shiny black car pulled up at the curb, and Mr. Jabhwalla jumped out, looking perfectly composed and elegant. “I would advise you not to say anything,” he told Sage.

“Oh, so now you’re threatening the witness?” the other lawyer said. “I believe we got that on tape.” Two video cameras swung to Mr. Jabhwalla’s face for a reaction.

“She’s not your witness,” he said imperturbably. “Your subpoena has no force over her. This isn’t Sage Akwesasne. She is a replica.” In an undertone to Sage he said, “I can take care of this, if you want to go on about your business. You just need to sign here—”

An interruption saved her from having to tell him where to put his contract. The cameras turned to follow the approach of another figure across the plaza from the courthouse door. He was a burly, bearded man in a camouflage jacket and combat boots, waving a legal paper over his head. “Court order!” he was shouting. “Court order!” The two lawyers exchanged a look of mutual commiseration.

“Make way for the rights of the consumers, you corporate weevils!” the newcomer bellowed as he came up. “I’m Harry Dolnick, the consumer’s candidate for city council, and I’ve got here a court order for Sage Akwesasne to publicly reveal the message she brought back from the Holians.”

“I beg your pardon?” Sage said, perplexed.

He turned around to speak to one of the cameras. “Who are the Holians, you ask? We don’t know what they call themselves. The fact that aliens live around the black hole has been known to the global elite for years, but you and I could only learn of their existence from the underground lists, where the information can spread unfalsified by corporate media. The Holians would never have let a human being pass through their space without sending a message back, encoded in her DNA. It only stands to reason.”

“What?” Sage said.

“The question is, what’s in the message that is so valuable that the globals are standing here fighting over legal control of her? There could only be one answer. It’s a contract offer to market Brand Earth on an interstellar scale.”

“You see the kind of irritation we can protect you from,” Mr. Jabhwalla whispered in her ear.

Something D. B. had once said about the Promethean quality of her story came back to Sage. Only now the myth seemed to have mutated into a hybrid of capitalism and conspiracy theory. “Listen,” she said. The cameras swiveled round to her face. “I can comply with your court order right now. There are no Holians, and there’s no contract offer in my DNA.”

“Do you think she would admit it?” Harry Dolnick thundered. “Here in this pool of piranhas? No,” he addressed the crowd, “this is why the consumers need to rise up and demand their rights! We should all be shareholders in Brand Earth!” The office workers on lunch break continued munching their sandwiches and waving at the cameras. One of them offered Harry Dolnick an autograph book and he paused to sign it.

The woman reporter had pushed to Sage’s elbow, and now said, “Sage, my viewers are demanding to know something. What brand of lipstick are you wearing?”

“Dear God, get me out of here,” Sage muttered.

Mr. Jabhwalla’s phone rang. He answered it, then silently handed it to Sage.

“This makes terrific theater,” D. B. said. “You ought to see how many sites we’re streaming this to.”

“Do you have me under surveillance?” Sage glanced up, half expecting to spot a Metameme spy satellite overhead.

“I’m watching on television, like the rest of the western hemisphere,” he said. She looked at one of the cameras, held by a beefy man in sandals. “Yeah, that one,” he said.

“They’re yours?”

“No, they’re freelancers. We’re just buying their feed.”

“Did you set this up?” she demanded. The lawyers, who had been arguing, paused to look at her. She turned her back and lowered her voice. “Did you start these rumors about aliens and genetic messages?”

“No, those are wild memes that mutated spontaneously into existence. You’re like hermeneutical flypaper, Sage. Theories just stick to you.”

“You need to squelch them!” she said.

“What for?” He sounded puzzled.

“Because they’re wacko claptrap!”

“So? That doesn’t mean they can’t be profitable.”

Of course, what had she been thinking? Truth was not the standard of information, only profit.

“You look a little irritated,” D. B. said. She was searching for a sufficiently blistering word when he said, “Tell you what. Turn around and look across the street.”

She did. There was nothing there but a large building of gray granite. “See the ground floor door?” he said. “Go in there.”

“But … it’s the public library,” she said.

“I know. I own it.”

Now that he mentioned it, she saw the stylized MM logo on the signage. “How did you—”

“Never mind, just do it. Someone will meet you.”

She started pushing her way through the crowd. Mr. Jabhwalla said, “Wait! You can’t leave without—”

“You said yourself, I’m not Sage Akwesasne,” she told him. “Now back off before I sue you for unlawful restraint.”

“You’re catching on,” D. B. said. Sage hung up the phone and tossed it back to the lawyer.

All the way across the street she was mobbed by teenage girls offering notebooks and body parts for her to autograph. When she reached the staff entrance, a librarian waiting inside pushed it open for her, and she slipped through, relieved by the quiet inside. “Follow me,” the woman said.

They went up a back stairway to a hallway lined with offices. The librarian stopped before what looked like a closet door and said, “Wait here while I get the key.” Sage stood staring at a motivational poster on the corridor wall that showed a soaring eagle with the caption,

Free Speech

which someone had defaced, “Only $91.95/month.”

The librarian came back and opened the door onto a spiral, castiron staircase. Puzzled, Sage followed her onto the gravel roof. The wind was blowing, bringing the sound of Harry Dolnick’s voice up from the street below. A low-flying aircraft passed overhead, then circled; then, with a blast of dust and gravel, it landed vertically on the other end of the roof, and she recognized its outline. As the door opened and the steps extended, Sage dashed over to it, wondering when it had started to seem normal to be plucked off a rooftop by a private jet.

Inside, D. B. was talking to half a dozen people at once on his video screens. Feeling defeated, Sage slouched into a leather seat as the plane took off. Her attempt to escape the constructed reality of Metameme had only landed her in other realities where her identity was no more her own than here. It was like being a quark, constructed entirely of spin.

The problem was larger than she had supposed. Wired together in a free-market free-for-all, the collective brains of the human race had actually invented a world where it was impossible to tell the truth.

The landscape had dwindled into a wrinkled counterpane below by the time D. B. cut off his connections and came to sit opposite her. With some surprise, she saw he was dressed in a tuxedo. It had a remarkable effect. He had an embryonic air of distinction.

“Where are we going now?” Sage asked.

“Washington, D.C. You wanted to meet the president. Well, our guy won the election, so we’re going to the victory party.”

“Your guy?” Sage looked at him balefully. “I’m going to hate his politics, aren’t I?”

“I don’t know.” D. B. shrugged, fiddling self-consciously with his cuffs. “Look, he’s only our guy because we engineered his image. You’ll have to ask him about politics. As far as I know, he’s like all the others, pro-prosperity.”

“That’s safe.”

“Uh, Sage, this is going to be kind of formal. You might want to order something to wear.”

With a feeling of impending doom, she sat down at one of his terminals to try and find out what might conceivably be fashionable. The range of choices was bewildering. Briefly, she thought of asking Patty’s advice, then remembered the tiger skin. Finally, unable to decipher any pattern, she opted for simplicity: a low-cut, shimmering crimson sheath held up with spaghetti straps. The computer suggested a matching shawl, shoes, and purse, so she went for the whole package, muttering when it didn’t tell her the price.

“Trust me, you can afford it,” D. B. said.

When the plane came down on a rooftop just at the edge of restricted air space, a delivery company was waiting with a pile of packages. Sage gathered them in, then shooed D. B. out of the plane. Alone, she stripped and stepped into the flash clean booth. When she slipped on the dress, it felt like water against her skin, sleek and caressing. The earrings dangled like stone kisses against her neck, just heavy enough to let her know they were there. She gathered up the shawl, shook back her hair, and stepped to the door.

The look of sheer exhilaration on D. B.’s face told her she had scored a bullseye. He offered his arm, and she took it, giving it a little squeeze for the moral support.

A limo was waiting for them on the floor below. As it whisked them through the streets, D. B. peered out the windows with growing unease. At last Sage said, “What’s the matter?”

“Nothing. I just hate these party things,” he said.

By the time the limo pulled into a blocked-off street behind the Capitol building, he was gripping his knees in an obvious paroxysm of nerves. Sage leaned forward and put a hand on his. “Look at it this way,” she said. “You’re not yourself, you’re an actor playing the richest man in the world. The others—well, the script calls for them to envy you.”

He looked at her, a long look, then said, “Yeah. They will.”

There was a crowd of spectators and reporters lining the monumental stone steps of the building across the street. As soon as Sage and D. B. stepped out of the car, there was a trampling rush toward them, and their driver and bodyguard had to clear a path. A broad red cascade of carpet led up the stairway, with the crowds held back by ropes and stanchions on either side. As soon as they started up, Sage could feel the pressure of a hundred lenses on her. It was so distracting they were halfway up before she realized what the building was.

“The Library of Congress?” she whispered at D. B. “Do you own this one, too?”

“Don’t start, Sage,” D. B. said through his teeth. “I just help them out. They’re like the rest of the government, so underfunded they couldn’t pay the electric bill unless I bought information from them.”

They passed through towering arches into the Great Hall, a two-story Beaux Arts fantasia of gaudy marbles, bronze nymphs, gilt, and bared-tooth glamor. The party spilled down mosaic-floored halls on either side and up the stairs to the pillared balconies above. With a sinking heart, Sage saw she had guessed radically wrong on fashion—the style called for ruffles and flounces. Most women entering were peeling off from their escorts to visit the ladies’ lounge, so Sage parted from D. B. and followed the stream.

When she entered the restroom, a group of women were having an animated conversation that broke off abruptly when they saw her. They all took out their phones; with a snick like so many switchblades, the retractable screens unfolded and the women began perusing the photos of themselves that had been taken as they came up the steps. Silence fell, except for the curses and cries of disappointment as the photos inevitably failed to live up to expectation. Sage went into one of the marble stalls to hide. A video screen inside the stall door helpfully offered to order her a different dress.

D. B. was surrounded by businessmen in evening dress when she joined him again. They broke off shop talk and eagerly introduced themselves to her, and she had to parry several jocular remarks about the past. The men’s female companions looked on with frozen smiles. As D. B. was drawing her away to get some wine, an artfully sculpted woman leaned forward and whispered in her ear, “Nice accessorizing, dear. And in such a short time. Clever you.”

“These people are hateful,” Sage whispered to D. B. as they moved away. Rebelliously, she took his arm to prove he was more than just an accessory.

“Here, get drunk,” he suggested, plucking a flute of champagne from a passing tray.

Another businessman approached him with a hearty, “D. B., you’re like a new man! I saw the turnaround in your popularity numbers. Enough to give a person whiplash. Listen, I’ve got something you might be interested in … .”

D. B. looked like he was thinking of driving a nail into his skull to distract himself.

When at last the businessman moved on, Sage said, “Do you have a phone with you?”

“Of course,” he said. “Why?”

“I’d like to approve my own pictures.”

“Don’t worry, Patty’s handling it.”

“No. I’d like to approve my own pictures.”

He hesitated, then took a phone from his pocket and gave it to her. “Don’t do it here,” he said. “Take it somewhere private.” She slipped it in her purse.

Just then the string quartet that had been playing Vivaldi broke into a country western tune. All eyes turned to the balcony above, where the victorious candidate appeared. He was a weatherbeaten man wearing a tuxedo with cowboy hat and boots. He waved to the universal applause, then started making his way around the balcony and down the white marble stairs, shaking hands and greeting supporters along the way.

“Patty and I figured he wasn’t running against the other candidates,” D. B. explained in an undertone. “He was running against the late-night comedians. So we hired a team of crack joke writers and made him the funniest guy on the net. The electorate laughed all the way to the polls. Voter participation went up to thirty percent.”

“What a boon to democracy,” Sage said.

“It just proves you can’t act like customers owe you their attention. You’ve got to earn it.”

The president-elect had come opposite them. On seeing D. B. he did a comic doubletake, then said, “D. B. Beddoes, in public! Say, how does it feel to be popular all of a sudden? No, wait—I know!” As everyone around him laughed, he took D. B.’s hand and leaned close to say, “Thanks for the media blitz the last few days. You crowded my opponent’s little bombshell right off the air. Good work.”

Sage turned to D. B., speechless—for one point five seconds. Then, “You jerk!” she said.

D. B. gripped her arm tightly. “Sage, let me introduce—”

“No,” she said, pulling her arm away. “Is that what this has all been about? You’ve been using me as a smokescreen to manipulate an election?”

“No,” he said, flushing crimson.

“Well, let me tell you something, Mr. Beddoes. I still happen to believe in democracy, and I will not be used as your corporate tool to corrupt the process.”

By now, he had gotten angry. “I have done more to promote democracy than Thomas fucking Jefferson.”

“By burying people in infocrap till they’re incapable of judgment or reason? Before you trot out your cynical market populism, let me say something. Democracy’s not just about customer satisfaction. It’s not about finding the lowest common denominator. It’s about finding the highest.”

The whole room had fallen breathlessly silent. D. B. said, “Can we talk about this some other time?”

“No,” Sage said, “because there’s not going to be another time. I’ve had it with you. I’m asserting my copyright. I’m going out there to expose you.”

“Fine!” he said. “Go for it! Then maybe I’ll just run off another copy of you that suits me better.”

It felt like a gut-punch to her humanity. There was even an intake of breath in the listening crowd. “Go back to hell,” Sage said, and walked away in the first direction that offered an empty space, which happened to be up the stairs. Silent people in gowns and tails moved out of her way as she climbed the marble steps in the most conspicuous exit she could have chosen.

Once on the second floor, Sage headed down a random hallway till she was out of the crowd, and heard the hum of conversation resume behind her. Her heart was beating very fast. She passed down a long gallery into an empty, octagonal exhibit hall. On the western wall was a line of three tall glass doors letting onto a pillared balcony. She lifted the heavy old latch and went outside.

At first she paced up and down behind towering columns, replaying the argument in her mind till her temper cooled. She looked out over the low stone balustrade. The setting sun was shining through the windows in the Capitol dome, making it look transparent and fragile, like everything it represented. She suddenly felt trapped and friendless. He had said it all: she was just product, only of value if the demand exceeded the supply.

Below on the street, partygoers were still arriving, the cameras still shooting. Doubtless, the scene that had just taken place was already on the net. To distract herself, she took D. B.’s phone from her purse, opened the screen, and spoke her own name into the search box. It responded with a cascade of hits, but one caught her eye—a private folder named “Sage.” Curious, she opened it and found an assortment of documents, D. B.’s private collection. One of them was an e-mail to her from Jamie Nickle, sent two days ago and never received.

No longer feeling like she was snooping, she opened it.

Sage (it said),

There is something I have to let you know about. I didn’t have time today, and God knows when we might see each other again. This is it: Years ago, shortly after we sent you off to the future, another team of physicists proved that the universe is temporally symmetrical. That is, for every quantum particle that travels forward in time, there is another identical one that goes backward, and those backward particles (which they called “quirks,” ha ha) are detectable. You can check with me for details. This is the point: we instantly realized it would be possible to aim a quirkstream at the same black hole that sent you here, and by playing the process in reverse, send a message backward to any date when a quirk detector existed.

Of course, the first thing we did was build a quirk detector. Since we had just sent someone forward, we thought the future might respond by sending someone back, so we made sure we could reassemble anyone who came through. It took us five years; and since you have now been here five years, the time has just now come when we can send a person back and know they will be received.

So if for any reason you don’t like it here and want to go back, the technology exists. Just give me a call.

Jamie

The relief Sage felt was dizzying. She was not trapped or friendless. She had a way out of this time, and back to her own. Laughing aloud, she kissed the screen that had brought her the news, then folded it up and put it back in her purse. The sun had come out from behind the dome, and was bathing her in a glorious shower of photons. Behind her, the door clicked, and she glanced around. It was D. B. He had ripped off his bowtie and disposed of the body, and his hair looked like he had been tearing at it.

He just stood watching her at first, and she watched the sun, her back to him. At last, when the silence had grown over-long, he said, “Listen. That was just about the stupidest thing I ever said.”

She said nothing, waiting to see where this would go.

“I wouldn’t do it,” he said. “I’d be crazy to copy you. Your whole value is in your uniqueness, the fact there’s no one else like you.”

That finally made her turn around. He was looking at her with the same expression he had looked at the sunset the night before, the one he had wanted to chase even knowing he could never possess it. “Look, I’ll destroy the disk,” he said. When she still didn’t answer, he said, “All right, I’ll give it to you, and you can destroy it. Or whatever.”

Now that he had no ultimate power over her, much of the ice had melted from her anger. “All right,” she said. “It’s a deal. No backups.”

“No backups.” There was an awkward pause. He came forward to the balustrade and looked out, avoiding her gaze. “I couldn’t say it back there, but the idea that I would use you to affect something as paltry as an election—well, it’s ludicrous. You don’t get what you are, Sage. I didn’t want to use you to change the government for the next four years. I wanted to change the world for centuries to come.”

He gestured dismissively at the hub of earthly power. “This world doesn’t live up to my expectations. It needs a heart transplant, a phase change. That’s what I want. And you are the highest-caliber archetype I’m ever likely to lay my hands on. It took me five years to set it up. I was going to knock the culture off its orbit with you. You were going to be the first woman of your kind, homo novus.”

“I’m more than just a meme, D. B.,” she said.

“Believe it or not, I have figured that out.” He glanced at her sideways.

“No one ever accused you of being dumb,” she said.

He chewed his lip, his hands in his pockets. “I was thinking just now, when I was angry at you—probably seventy percent of the women in that room would sleep with me.”

From Sage’s observations, the estimate was low. But she shook her head. “Not with you, D. B. With your brand name.”

“Whereas the one woman I’d like to—no, damn it, that’s the wrong thing to say.”

She drew breath to save him, but he said, “No, shut up. I’ve got to figure out how to say this without making it sound like it’s all about lust, because it’s not. Only partly. Damn.” He pounded his fist against the granite pillar, then shook it in pain. “Ouch. The thing is, there’s another reason I couldn’t copy you. Because I don’t want a copy. I want the original. The only drawback is, you don’t give a shit whether I live or die.”

“That’s not true.”

He looked at her, hugging his bruised hand under the other arm. “Does that mean the ‘die’ vote won?”

“Do you know what I just found out?” She leaned against the pillar, feeling the warm stone on her bare back. “There is a way to travel backward in time. It’s possible for me to return to my own era.”

His face froze in a look of tachycardiac horror. “No!” He spun around and paced away, fists clenched in rage and frustration. “God fucking damn!” He turned back on her. “How did you find out?” Then, before she could answer, realization crossed his face. “My phone! Oh, how could I have such crap for brains?”

Watching calmly, she said, “You knew. You were hiding it from me.”

“I had to, Sage! I need you here. I didn’t want you to get away. I banked everything on you.”

“I’m not your intellectual property, D. B. I deserve to decide for myself.”

She watched the thought come upon him that he had actually lost, that he no longer controlled any of the variables. He looked stunned at such an alien state of affairs.

“I don’t know what to say,” he said numbly.

“What about asking me to stay?”

He studied her face, and she could actually see new thoughts dawning on him. “You wouldn’t, would you?” he said. When she didn’t answer, he came forward, putting his hands on her arms. “Sage—”

The opportunity was too good to pass up. She pulled him close by the lapels and kissed him. It took him by surprise again, but not so badly as the night before, and it was a far more satisfying experience.

“Oh, God, Sage,” he breathed when it was over. “Let’s go—”

She put a finger on his lips. “Shut up,” she said tenderly. “That wasn’t my answer.”

“It wasn’t?”

“This is my problem, D. B. You’re a dangerous megalomaniac. You manipulate people as naturally as you breathe. I find your life work reprehensible; I loathe your politics. You’re also cute and smart and funny, and there are times when I really want to take off in your plane, if you know what I mean.”

He started to say something, but she stopped him again. “If I stay here, there’s not a chance I’ll be able to keep away from you, and I don’t know if my nerves can handle it. So I’ve decided to go back. I just haven’t figured out when.”

He took it calmly. “I guess that’s the best I could hope for.”

Too calmly. It made her suspicious. “Did you know I was going to say that?”

“Well,” he admitted, “the thing is, you did go back. It’s part of the historical record.”

She pushed him away. “What historical record? I looked for information on our project. There wasn’t any.”

“There’s some information not even I will sell.”

“You bastard! So if you knew I was going to go back, what was this all about?”

“The historical record doesn’t say how long you spent here. You would never say a word about the future, or anything you did here. You said it was for fear of making it happen.”

She looked out at the Capitol dome against the scarlet sky, on the street below where the photographers were hauling out infrared cameras to get a better shot of the drama on the balcony. “So I wasn’t able to prevent any of this,” she said. “That means it’s inevitable.”

“Absolutely inevitable,” he said.

“Well then,” she said, “I guess I better get used to it.”