Sometimes that single sentence that heralds the approach of a story doesn’t come at two in the morning or when I’m mowing a lawn. Sometimes, in the midst of a discussion with a friend, someone will say something so succinct and so true that the pieces of a story just start falling into place around it.
I think that many people assume that being a writer brings me into contact with all sorts of interesting people. And that’s true. But wondrous to tell, the majority of fascinating people I’ve met have intersected with my life in other ways. Last summer, an extraordinary natural philosopher was part of the crew putting a new roof on my house. I spent several afternoons outside, listening to his random observations as he fastened roof tiles down on my house. Marty the junkman, who used to come by our old place to see if we had any scrap metal for him, was a fountain of stories from the Depression era. A random encounter that delivers a person like that to my life is like beachcombing and finding a little treasure chest.
One such friend is Jeff Lin of Harvey Danger. He came into my home years ago as my daughter’s friend. In the course of sharing coffee, cats, and conversation, his thoughts on creativity in the music field, performing for an audience, and Who Owns the Work left a definite impression on me. I wrote “Drum Machine” as a direct result of one such conversation and indeed a single sentence from Jeff. It’s languished in my files for a long time. In the course of looking over stories for this collection, I took it out, read it, and wondered if its time had finally come to see print.
The client leaned forward across the desk and all but hissed at me, “I have a right to the child of my choice.”
I smiled at her warmly, reassuringly, and read my line from the prompter. “That’s not precisely correct, Mrs. Daw. You have the right to a child. That’s very clear.” I tapped the notarized slip from her husband, ceding his population replacement right to her. “And you have the right to a choice. The Constitution guarantees you that.”
She thrust her already prominent chin at me. “Then I want my choice. Another EagleScout12.” She smiled exultantly. “Derek is almost six now, and he has been the perfect choice for my husband and me. When we decided we wanted another child, we decided, well, why take a chance? Get one we know we’ll like.”
I leaned back in my chair and blinked my eyes twice quickly to call up the next screen. I chose the conciliatory option. “I’m sure, on the face of it, that seemed logical to both of you. But consider the reality, Mrs. Daw. You would essentially be raising identical twins, born six years apart, into the same environment. Same nature, same nurture. Where’s the variety in that? You’d be defeating our entire Genetic Variety Preservation program. Even if you can’t choose an EagleScout12 again, that doesn’t mean your next child won’t be just as perfect for you as your first one was. That’s the whole purpose of our counseling, Mrs. Daw. The embryo options that the program has chosen are selected to be compatible with you and Mr. Daw. And, I might add, with Derek.”
Her eyes widened somewhat. “Could that be why we’re not offered another EagleScout12? Because he might not be compatible with Derek?”
I smiled and shrugged. “I suppose that could be so.” Actually, that particular embryo had been discontinued, but that was not something the client needed to know. They always asked why. Not even I had access to that information. “I’m just a Social Interface, ma’am, not a biologist. But I wonder if you haven’t hit on the very reason.” I eyed the timer in the bottom left quarter of my goggle-screen, but my smile never faltered.
She had taken up almost seventeen minutes of my time, over twice the normal allotment, trying to nag an approval out of me. When she had first sat down in my cubicle, I had popped her disk into my machine and tapped in the latest information. She hadn’t liked the choices we’d offered, but her request for another EagleScout12 had come up with a solid Denied. But you don’t flatly tell the applicant that. If that was all there was to my job, I wouldn’t have a job. The computer could do it. As a Social Interface, class 7, it’s up to me to select the right words and tones and mannerisms from the suggested dialogue on my screen. Mrs. Daw was a tough one, but in the next three minutes, I managed to send her on her way. She had even looked happy with her new selection, a female DutchDoll7. She strode away, clutching the appointment slip that would let her fetus be implanted tomorrow.
I was forty-five minutes from the end of my shift. Three, maybe four more people to counsel and I was through for the day. I was ready to go home. I rocked back in my chair in my cubicle and heard my spine crackle. Then I straightened up and pushed the “next client” button.
I work for the state in Reproductive Permits. My position is Social Interface. I’ve been there about seven years now, and I like to think that I’m good at what I do. It wasn’t a job I would have chosen for myself, but the state aptitude test rated me high for Social Interface duties. The woman in the Aptitude offices who told me about the job opportunities in the field was a Social Interface herself. There was something about her voice when she told me that she just knew I’d be right for the job. I couldn’t help but believe her. And over the years, I’ve come to be like her. People come to me, and they listen to me, and they go away believing me. I make them contented with their choice. There’s satisfaction in that. It’s proof that I’m good at what I do. Everyone deserves to believe that he’s good at what he does. I got little of that in my previous job.
Out in the waiting room, I saw my next applicant stand up. She clutched a slip of paper in her hand as she looked down the row of Social Interface cubicles. In her other hand, she carried a canvas shopping bag. She came straight for me. She wasn’t looking at me; she was looking up at the number flashing green over my cubicle. But I saw her face, and despite her sunglasses and all the harsh years since I’d last seen her, I recognized her.
I should have red-lighted right then. There’s no regulation that says we can’t counsel people we know, but we all know it’s frowned on. It’s not like a Social Interface can change the computer’s decision, but maybe that’s why it’s best for an applicant to hear it from a stranger. It’s less personal that way. Many people don’t want their friends to know they’ve been turned down for their first or second or even third choice. Everyone would like the neighbors to think that the child you gave birth to was your dream kid from the start.
I didn’t red-light. Instead, I sat there, watching Cecily rush toward me like shrapnel from the past. The Blonde Banshee, Cliff had called her. That was when he wasn’t calling her Cecily the Willing. How two people could love and hate each other so much, I still don’t know. Being around them was like escorting a bomb. They could explode in any setting, in restaurants, on trains, even onstage. Public mayhem never bothered either of them. I’d seen Cecily overturn a table on the whole band for the sake of dumping an expensive dinner in Cliff’s lap. But I’d also seen her beatific smile the time I nearly broke my neck falling over their coupled bodies in a hotel stairwell at two in the morning in Vancouver.
“No limits, Chesterton,” Cliff had told me later. “No limits to what we can make each other feel. It’s the magic. What good is a woman who can only make you love her? That’s only half the passion, man. Only half.”
He made it sound so logical that while he was talking, I believed it. Cliff was like that. He would have made a good Social Interface himself, if he’d lived long enough to hold down a real job. He killed himself when he was twenty-seven. He knew what people would say about that. He even left it as his death note. “All the real ones check out at twenty-seven,” he wrote. And that was it.
By the time he reached that point, I didn’t really know him anymore. The band had fallen apart three or four years before then. His death was something I read about in the newspaper, a scrap of news in a column full of celebrity notes. Cliff Wangle, former drummer for the Coolie Fish, Oberon’s Jest, Hazardous Waste, and most recently with the Flat Plats, died of an overdose at twenty-seven. That was it. I read about it over my breakfast cereal and thought, Well, that’s it, it’s really over now. We had shared a year and a half of almost being famous. The Flat Plats had had one commercial CD release, with one Top Ten song and one in the high teens. We had barely tasted our success before the cup was dashed away from us. Cliff was the one who had done the smashing.
Even after his death, even after all the years, it was still hard to forgive him for that. Aloysius had gone on to doing sound-track arrangements, and I still could pick out Mikey’s tenor in a lot of sampled backup stuff. I hadn’t had the heart to go on with music after the disappointment. I’d gotten a day job, a wife, and eventually a kid, a KewpieDoll male the first year they’d come out. He was seven now, and still cuter than hell, with curly hair and big dark eyes. I’d made it, I told myself as I watched Cecily zoom in on me. I’d succeeded. I was good at what I did, and I knew it. What more than that could a man ask?
She sat down in front of my desk. Our Interface desks and chairs are elevated just slightly, only an inch or two. Even so, she didn’t have to look up at me. But she didn’t look at me at all. She merely handed me her disk. I popped it into my machine. I didn’t have to open the confirmation port for her. She did that herself and expertly rolled her fingers across the glass. The reason for that flashed up immediately. She’d refused her reproductive choice nine times in the last four months. Of course, she would know the routine by now.
The computer immediately gave me a first option for terminating the interview.
The lines came up at the bottom of my screen specs. “I’m sorry, Ms. Kelvey, but you are well aware of your reproductive status at this time.” Firm tone recommended. That was the weighted suggestion.
Alternative. If applicant appears agitated, press any key for Security now.
Alternative. If applicant is calm and Social Interface judges it prudent, proceed as for normal interview.
Cecily looked determined, not agitated. If she had looked overwrought, believe me, I would have called Security. I’d seen Cecily in a temper and knew what she was capable of doing. She wasn’t angry, not yet. Both curiosity and nostalgia swayed me. From the way she looked at me, I didn’t think she’d recognized me. I didn’t think I had changed that much, but my screen spectacles are the bulky government-issue type, and I had them set at semiopaque. I double blinked to bring up the next screen. She saw it and waited silently.
The information surprised me. She’d completed a psychological evaluation followed by a personality reorganization class a year ago. Her obsessive/compulsive disorder was controlled with medication. Her preparenting scores were within the acceptable range. She had four preapproved fetus choices, all children selected from the “nondemanding” end of the spectrum. Her physical size had limited her to smaller infants for natural birth. Still. Four choices weren’t bad. I’d interviewed prospective parents who were limited to one or two options and still managed to send them away happy. Mentally, I earmarked a Cherub2 male as being her best bet. I’d steer her that way.
I smiled at her sunglasses and observed, “Well, Ms. Kelvey, does this visit mean you’ve reached a choice on your options?”
She took a breath. That brisk rise and fall of her small breasts that had always indicated she was going to take a stand with Cliff. Not a good sign. Her voice was as I remembered it, girlish and without depth. She’d wanted to do backup vocals for Flat Plats, had even bought an enhancer, but Cliff had refused her. “We’re retro,” he had reminded her harshly. “Real voices. Real instruments. Real people playing them.” The flung enhancer had given him a black eye.
“Not exactly.” Her voice jerked me back to the present. “This visit is so I can submit documentation as to why my request for a free conception should be granted.” She bent down to the canvas tote at her feet and began taking out papers. Some were folded, some yellowed at the edges. Papers. The information hadn’t even been scanned to disk. I accepted it from her hands the way you take wilted dandelions from a kid. It’s the intention. A tap set my specs to scan as I looked over her “documentation.”
None of it was biologically acceptable data. It was a weird spectrum of stuff, from old grade readouts from high school to IQ tests that documented Cliff’s brilliance. There was even a newspaper clipping that called him a “rock Mozart.” My heart sank as I realized what she was angling after. She didn’t want an approved fetal implant. She was going for an egg/sperm conception. In some parts of the world, they were still common, but for the life of me, I couldn’t figure out why anyone would choose to take such monumental risks.
I obediently finished blinking the material into her reproductive request file. The nature of the entries might set off a red flag. The behavior of compiling such a pile of nonrelevant information was a definite earmark of obsession. She might find her prescriptions adjusted the next time she got her monthly implant. Cecily’s actions, I told myself, not mine. If it made trouble for her, she’d brought it on herself. I gave the sheaf of documents back to her. She held them and watched me hopefully.
“So.” I glanced at my timer. Three more minutes before I went into overtime with her. “Apparently you wish to conceive a random fetus with eggs from yourself and sperm from Cliff Wangle. You have his permission to do this?”
Her shades were so dark, I couldn’t tell if she met my gaze or not. “He’s dead. But before his death, he made a sperm deposit at a private facility. They were a birthday gift to me. As my property, they are mine to use as I wish.”
“That is true.”
“But I can’t schedule an insemination without a permit. That’s all I’m here for today. A permit.”
“One moment, please.” I swiveled back to my keyboard. A blink or two brought up her genetic rating on my specs. I had to key in Cliff’s SSN to do a search for his. Both were as I expected. Unacceptable. “I’m very sorry, Ms, Kelvey, but neither you nor your sperm donor is genetically qualified to reproduce. Fortunately, this does not mean that you cannot have a child. It is a woman’s right to choose, of course, and we have four possible choices for you.” I swiveled my monitor screen toward her and blinked to pull up a split screen of four adorable babies. One gurgled aloud and then sneezed endearingly. I damped the volume.
She took off her sunglasses and stared at me. The crow’s-feet at the corners of her eyes reminded me of how many years had passed since I had last seen her. The flat anger in her blue eyes told me that my screen specs were no disguise at all.
“Cut the crap, Chesterton. I want a real baby, not a seed-catalog clone. I want Cliff’s baby. I know you can do this for me. Push the button and hand me a slip. That’s all you have to do.”
The bottom dropped out of my stomach. I knew I was subject to random monitoring. Some Interfaces believe we are constantly monitored. My instructors had always counseled me to behave as if we were. That was how one stayed at maximum efficiency. It was also how to keep your job. “I can’t do that, Cecily,” I said quietly. “There is some latitude in my job, but not near that much. If your health allows it . . .” I punched some keys and got a tentative okay. “ . . . by opting for a C-section delivery, one sometimes gains a few additional choices . . .” I punched a few more keys, then shook my head at the readouts on my specs. “But not in your case. Temperament can be more restrictive than physical biology.” I winked and the Cherub2 male expanded to fill the screen. “But this little fellow is a perfect match for you. Look at that curly hair, and those big blue eyes.”
“I don’t want curly hair, or big blue eyes. I don’t want perfect teeth and zero birth defects. I don’t want any of the features and benefits I’ve been hearing about for nine months. I want Cliff’s baby, Chesterton. And Cliff Wangle’s baby deserves to be born just as much as any of these gen-engineered ones. More so. You guarantee any of those four will have average intelligence? Well, Cliff’s baby would be a genius.”
“Cecily, you know better than that. We all do. An exceptional donor doesn’t guarantee an exceptional child.” I was smooth. I didn’t bother to challenge her assertion that Cliff was a genius. “I’m sure you’ve seen Cliff’s genetic profile, and your own. Manic-depressives tend to assort. Left to themselves, they mate with other manic-depressives, increasing the child’s chance of mental illness.” I let her connect the dots.
She leaned forward to hiss at me. “That’s stupid! How can something that is genetically determined be called an ‘illness’? My moodiness should be seen as within the range of normal human development. If it wasn’t, why the hell would there be so many of us? Society used to allow for us. Look at all the Byronic poets with ‘melancholy temperaments.’ Can you tell me it’s right to silence an unborn poet simply because he may be a bit moody?”
I’d read the same article. It’s part of my job as a Social Interface. I have to keep up with all the crackpot metaphysics of horoscopes, wonder diets, and “give birth under a crystal-hung pyramid” fads. The ones who argue for a random conception usually spout the old nonsense about a need to guarantee genetic diversity, as if new embryos weren’t licensed every month. In the long run, it’s about selfishness, not diversity. It was all about the belief that my genes were better than anyone else’s, the same basic concept that is behind prejudice, racism, and even genocide. It’s amazing what otherwise rational people will buy into when it comes to reproduction. In Cecily’s case, she had found scripture to support her obsession. She’d cling to it no matter what. For old time’s sake, I made one more effort.
“A bit moody is one thing. A history of suicide, social maladjustment, and public violence is another. Cecily, you can’t have Cliff’s baby. You can’t expect society to support you in a bad choice. Choose another.”
“I don’t want another.”
I winced. I was sure the monitor would record those words and store it in her files. Her words would register her as refusing her choices. That counted as an abdication of her right to reproduce. The next time she came in to bully someone in Reproduction, she would find her options changed to a flat Choices Relinquished.
Perhaps she saw something in my face. She pushed back her chair. “Forget it, Chesterton. I shouldn’t even have bothered coming here. There are ways to get around this. I’ll have Cliff’s baby.”
I wondered what she was imagining. Did she have some of his sperm in an ice tray in her home freezer? Would she inject herself with a turkey baster? According to the netbloids, that happened every day. There were still random births. No system was perfect. But ours was close to it, because it now excluded the imperfect. I kept my voice level as I reminded her. “Ms. Kelvey, I suppose that is theoretically possible. But if you should become pregnant without a permit, all support benefits from the state will instantly cease, including your Basic Individual Maintenance. Neither you nor your child will ever be eligible for a housing allowance or medical benefits. Your child would be ineligible for citizenship.”
“That’s not fair!” she cried. The eternal objection of the citizen who wants only her own way.
“It is ultimately fair. Why should your neighbor’s taxes go to support a substandard child? Why should you be allowed to gamble genetically for the sake of your own ego? Suppose you give birth to an idiot, or someone with such a ‘melancholy temperament’ that he cannot become a productive member of society? Why should we have to extend health benefits to such a person, let alone continue to support him or her after you are dead? You are talking about a very selfish act, Cecily. I’m sure even you can see that.”
“Selfish act!” She leaned forward and hissed the word at me. A centimeter closer and she would have triggered the automatic security alarm. A cool part of my mind wondered if she knew that, if she had stopped just short of making a legally threatening move. She leaned back in her chair. She began stuffing her documents, willy-nilly, into her canvas tote. Furious words streamed from her as she thrust the papers in. “Selfish act, he says. Selfish act. From the king of the selfish acts.”
She stood up. She snatched her dark glasses off and for the first time in years, I looked into her pale blue eyes. They were rimmed red and were a degree too shiny. Whatever she was using wasn’t part of her monthly supplements. I had a duty to report that. But I just looked at her.
“You killed Cliff. When you destroyed the Flat Plats, you destroyed him. If you hadn’t betrayed him, he’d be alive today. And rich, and famous, and everyone would know what a genius he was. Women would be lined up around the block to get a Cliff Wangle baby. It’s all your fault, Chesterton. You were greedy and you were selfish. You had to go with the sure thing, didn’t you? You couldn’t take a chance, not on music, not on life. Well, look what it got you, just what the sure thing always gets you. A sure dose of nothing. Mediocrity.”
She stood up so suddenly that her chair crashed over behind her. She didn’t pause to right it. She shoved her sunglasses back onto her face and stormed out. As she went out the outer door, two security guards approached me. “Should we detain?” one asked me.
“I don’t think it’s necessary. I think she was able to vent her frustration at me. I don’t think she’s a danger to anyone at this time.”
“You sure?” the other one asked.
I knew my response would be logged and filed under “legal culpability.” If I were wrong, the security guards would be absolved of blame. I hedged my response.
“Reasonably sure,” I replied. I longed to push my “break” button and get out of my cubicle for fifteen minutes. But that would be an extra break right at the end of my shift, and it might prompt someone to scrutinize the transaction immediately before. Any break in a pattern was a cause for concern. I gave security a small wave to dismiss them, and green-lighted. Out in the waiting room, a young man’s face lit up with a smile and he hastened toward me.
The rest of the afternoon went well. I handled six more clients in record time, arranging good choices for all of them. After each happy customer, I offered myself a life choice affirmation. “I am good at my job. Because I am good at my job, I increase the satisfaction other people have in their lives.” I knew it was true, and every one of my last six clients thanked me, but somehow the affirmations didn’t work as well as they usually did.
My bus was late and filled up before I could get on, so I had to stand and wait for the next one. The early evening streets were filled with teens and twenties, some quietly studying palmscreens while they waited, others laughing and jostling and restless. I wondered who they would be ten years from now and wondered who they thought they were now. Sweet illusions of youth.
I thought back to my precareer days, when my whole life had been Basic Individual Maintenance, a Housing Allowance, and my music. I thought I had needed nothing more. I had been convinced that I was going to be rich and famous long before society mandated that I settle on a career choice. Mikey, Cliff, and I had lived together in an efficiency, using the extra HAs we saved to buy sound equipment. We had been at the crest of the retro-rock wave. We should have made it. Damn it, we had made it, until Cliff destroyed it. Cliff, not me. Cliff, who had to be wild and crazy for the sake of being wild and crazy. He always claimed it was for the music, but that was just crap. It was for the sake of Cliff Wangle. It had nothing to do with the sounds we made; he just wanted to be the star. He wanted to be worshipped as an old-fashioned rock bad boy.
We’d practice our set endlessly, but once we were onstage, there was no predicting what Cliff would do to us. A forty-five-second drum bridge might become a two-minute drum solo. It would throw the whole band into chaos. Mikey would improvise weird vocalizations to cover, and whatever guitar player we currently had would just about tear his fingers off trying to keep up. I’d usually get pissed and just stop playing until he was finished grandstanding and came back to the plan. Aloysius would use his bass as if it was a weapon, pointing it at Cliff and firing off chord after chord, always with this weird grin on his face. And the audience would go crazy, screaming and jumping, and Cliff would feed off it, drumming until the sweat flew from him. That was the title of our first commercial release: Spattered Sweat.
Blood Blisters, our second one, should have assured our careers. Instead, Cliff had axed it. He’d burned all the live masters, all our notes, everything he could get his hands on, in a fifty-gallon drum down on the beach one drunken evening after calling up our label and telling them that Flat Plats no longer existed. He said he’d sue the hell out of them if they tried to release Blood Blisters. And why? Simply because I had replaced one of his live wild man solos with a studio track we had done earlier. The label had loved it, our producer was wild about it, the decreased length made it a more commercially viable track, and the sound was cleaner—hell, even Mikey and Aloysius had grudgingly admitted it gave the rest of the band a chance to shine in their own right. The fans loved it; the prerelease teaser downloads from our site were incredible. Everyone who was anyone had agreed I’d made a wise choice for the band.
Everyone but Cliff.
He came back a month late from his “weekend” in Mexico with Cecily, listened to what was on the site, and exploded. I’d tried to reason with him, but we’d only gotten into the same old argument.
I couldn’t understand why he couldn’t play a piece live just the way we played it in the studio or at rehearsal. “Give the fans what they expect, what they paid for, not some unpredictable experimental . . .”
“Give them what they expect!” he’d roared. “Then it’s theirs, not ours, you idiot! And there’s no reason to play it again, if it comes out the same every damn time. Music isn’t supposed to be ‘right’; it’s supposed to be music. Alive. Growing and changing. If it doesn’t change, then how are you going to get from ‘right’ to ‘better’?”
I’d made one final try. “Isn’t it as likely to be ‘worse’ as ‘better’?” I’d asked him.
“Chesterton. That’s the chance you’ve got to take. That’s how you know you’re alive.”
And they all just stared at me. I knew then that I’d lost. I’d lost the moment that Cliff Wangle walked back into the room. When Cliff was there, none of the others could ever do things any way but his. It was just how they were. And that had been the end of the Flat Plats and my musical career.
The bus came and I got on it.
The apartment was dark when I opened the door. The note on the table said she’d taken the boy to the movies with his friends. Dinner was in the fridge.
But I didn’t eat. I went to the living room and took down my keyboard. I turned on the media wall and plugged it in. I set up for video, audio, body vibes, lights, the whole show. I pulled up Blood Blisters, the studio track that Cliff had despised. I helmeted in so the sound wouldn’t disturb the neighbors, and I turned it on. Then I played along with it, keyboard in my lap, hammering every note at precisely the right moment, exactly as we’d played it that day in the studio, proving to myself that I still had it. Then I hit reset and played it again. I sounded just as great. By the time I finished the third run through, I was dripping sweat. I leaned back and cranked up the audience roar I’d spliced in at the end. I lifted my arms and held them wide until it died off into white noise.
I took off the helmet and shook my sweaty hair loose. So much for you, Cliff Wangle. You’re dead and Chesterton is still as good as he ever was. So who’s the real musician now? I headed for the shower, grinning, triumphant. There’s nothing like knowing you can do it. I could have played it a hundred times, and each repetition would have been just as good as the first.