Saving the Cyber Soaps, Mike Morris [story books to read TXT] 📗

said sourly, and I realized with surprise that he had as much idea of what was going on as had Suddenly. He had anticipated some sort of summary trial and disposal near to the surface. Having to bring me to the center of power had rattled him considerably. I wondered how Dee could bring herself to deal with a person like Jonesy. The Dee I knew wouldn’t have wasted spit on him. Then I figured it out and cursed myself for being so stupid. Dee wasn’t dealing with him. He was still number two dog, or number three, or ten. He hated her, but he still feared her. He wasn’t ready to defy her yet. Ruthless as he was, he lacked the leadership and flair that had put Dee on top. She would have moved before now, and damn the risk. This man wanted to be sure. He was building up an irresistible machine. When the odds were overwhelmingly in his favor, he would strike.
Then he said to me “So, you’re her chief flunky up there. Don’t get me wrong, I admire Dee, but most of us think her time has passed. We don’t wish her any harm, William. I’m.. the board of directors is the future down here. A smart man like you should consider your options.” I was about to spit in his eye, then it hit me what he had just said.
“I’m nobody’s flunky. Not yours, not hers.” All the old anger came back, all the insecurity. I felt guilty about abandoning her all those years ago, and I pushed the guilt away. Dee had sold out. She had sold me out. Cast me upstairs without a thought until she realized she needed me again. “I don’t dance to her tune,” I told him. “I’m not stupid. As soon as she feels she doesn’t need me, she’ll shove me back up again.”
“I know,” he said soothingly. “She can be .. overwhelming. I understand. Just keep an open mind.” He seemed to have come to a decision, and I didn’t realize until much later that my immaturity had probably saved my life. He had decided that I was too stupid, or too weak to be a threat. He was probably thinking that, with friends and supporters like me, she needed no enemies, and, at that moment he was right. I had worked myself into a righteous indignation, and I was having nothing to do with any of them. “So,” he said. “She wants to see you. I’ll have one of my juniors escort you to her quarters.” And I was too self absorbed to even notice the contempt in his voice.
Five minutes later I was facing her across the inner sanctum.
Dee hadn’t changed a bit. Why should she, with all the resources at her disposal? She was still as beautiful, and as deadly, as a panther. She surprised me, circling the desk and walking towards me with the effortless grace that had helped her to the bottom of the tree, all those years ago. “Hello, William,” she murmured, standing close. She was as tall as me, and she wore sandals. Not much else, I noticed. The black, silk dress barely covered her hips, and I doubt she wore anything underneath. Well, she was the boss; who would venture to question corporate dress code. Certainly not me. I caught myself just in time. Those green eyes were bottomless pools where a man could drown. I put my hands on her shoulders to push myself away. Another mistake. She was in my arms, fragrant and feminine, ablaze with energy. Her fire snapped me back to reality. I had been pounding the beat longer than anyone in Cyber world, and I felt old and tired. I’d been upstairs for hundreds of years, just to avoid this sort of situation, and not once had she sent a message.
I shoved her away, roughly, and her eyes widened. Big Dee had been used to slavish devotion from her subjects for a long time. “Stow it, baby,” I grated, ”or I might forget myself and slap that pretty kisser through the wall.” I realized, belatedly, that this was a direct quote from a century-old detective show I’d starred in. Dee must have realized also. Her quick flash of anger dissipated, and she laughed, looking like the young girl I knew in the pre-cyberspace topside world. If I hadn’t felt such a fool, I’d have laughed myself, instead of maintaining a stony-faced silence until the laughter died away.
“OK,” she sighed. “Sit down and listen.”
I almost jumped when the chair appeared silently out of the wall. I wondered if it would disappear the same way, carrying me with it after the interview. It was comfortable, and Dee cleared a space on the huge desk and poured us a couple of shots of bourbon. “Still take it straight up, no ice?” she asked. I nodded and she offered me a cigarette. I was surprised. She had never gone in for anything illegal. “They calm my nerves.” She looked at me steadily. “I have problems,” she said.
I had to listen to her. She was the boss, she could fire me, send me above ground, if she wanted. I’d walk through cold and dirty streets and live in icy poverty among the lost people of Topside.
Society, down here, far below the weather and local skirmishes still managed to retain most of the amenities we’d all enjoyed before the visit from the star-travelers. It had been hundreds of years since the best and brightest of the human race were spirited away. We had been doing pretty well then. Only a few minor wars, and we were slowly fashioning ourselves into a society of different cultures, living together, helping each other. Poverty was disappearing, the rich countries finally giving real help to the poor, and we were on the way to colonizing the inner planets. Then, one day, the star-travelers simply appeared in every capital city of every major country of the world, and announced their intentions. Something about ‘enlisting us into the great, galactic society of living, thinking, ethical beings.’ Only problem was, three-quarters of us didn’t qualify, and the rules said we couldn’t be allowed to pollute the galaxy with our inferior life force. Of course, the star travelers were too ethical to kill us rejects off. In fact, like the brightest and the best, we became virtually immortal - and sterile.
The people of Earth were in a state of shock, and before we could recover, a quarter of the population simply vanished, and when the dust settled, the scientists, researchers, great artists, the movers and shakers, were all gone. Humanity started to tear itself apart, as if we wanted to punish ourselves for being rejected. We might be almost immortal, but we could still kill each other, and we did, in great numbers. Society fell apart, until a few leaders like Dee began to pull it together again.
I never found out why Dee was turned down by the race of star travelers who took our brightest and best. But Dee was as tough and clever as any of the Chosen, as we started calling the vanished ones. The best of the rejects tried to pick up the pieces, but we’d all lost too much. What was left of business, and ambition, and idealism retreated from the big cities, and then burrowed into the ground, deeper and deeper in an attempt to save what was left of civilization as centuries faded into the past and the world grew old and the travelers faded from our memories. Topsiders settled into a sort of medicated and sullen apathy, producing food and subsistence items, while we provided them with the drugs, chemical in the beginning, and later social. Dee’s empire churned out an unending stream of fourth rate soap operas and soft porn. Other businesses served up sports, or religion. One underground company even financed bogus political parties. Topsiders provided us with carefully inspected fresh food, and we lived in a luxurious cocoon.
The Topsiders had gone another route. I have to admit, they’d tried. They tried to maintain society as it always had been. Not just in the States, but all over the world. Too much talent had been sucked into space. The infrastructure was still there, but too few people wanted to use it. Maybe if the big businesses hadn’t retreated into the ground like frightened moles, the center might have held. But even we rejects had split, and the media opted for panacea and placebo instead of hard work and leadership. The world and the country drifted apart on a gentle swell of ignorance and apathy, and the individual States stood helpless as their power eroded and America became a loose coalition of Fortress Cities. Yet Americans stubbornly clung to the notion of a United States of America, a fiction held together by a media that broadcast an unending supply of escapism and bland, blinkered news. New Yorkers and Angelinos seldom mixed any more, Chicagoans hardly left the city limits, except in armored trucks more suited to war than commerce. And yet, wistfully, nostalgically, the scattered inhabitants of the United States still insisted on calling themselves Americans.
Here, at the heart of the Warren, I was for the first time in years thinking about life on the surface. Dee was still looking at me with a peculiar intensity, and all my anger started to boil. I was her companion, her soul mate, and she had abandoned me, thrown me aside like an old glove. Part of me realized that decades of fourth rate soap operas were shaping my thoughts into mindless clichés, but I pushed my rational self resolutely away. I knew she was going to send me topside. “You’re going to send me up there,” I accused her dramatically. “You wanted to tell me, to my face. You finally realized you couldn’t break me. I’m still a good soaper, a good actor. The public loves me.”
“And no-one else can stand you,” she finished for me. “Stop feeling sorry for yourself.” She settled down behind her big desk. “You think I don’t get reports. A lot of soapers are good actors, William. Every new project, I have to talk Suddenly into re-hiring you. You could have been comfortable, down here, if you were a team player. You were perfect for the twenty-first century, self-contained, selfish, egotistical, but that was a long time ago. Ah,” she sighed. “William, I’m not banishing you. I’m asking you to go up. I need your help up there.”
“Oh, sure,” I sneered. “The prima Dona, the dinosaur. The oldest field operative in the company. I was a star when Suddenly Sir Simon was a sniveling gofer.”
“Shut up,” she shouted suddenly. “Listen to me. I need you. Need! I know what sort of person you are, remember? You’re the only one I can turn to.”
I looked at her, astonished. Suddenly all the anger was gone. “Why,” I asked lamely. “Why me.”
“Because you’re the only person in the Warren that I can trust. Do you really think I’d throw you to the wolves?”
My self-important, self-pitying mood burst like a bubble in the sun. I listened to a lecture on boardroom politics and realized that Dee’s position down here was much more complicated and full of stress than my life in the endless soaps. Competition between the networks was brutal; a headlong rush to please the lowest common denominator, and Dee was in trouble. The men under her smelt blood, and a boardroom takeover can be pretty ugly. Dee still had a few – just a few - scruples about the garbage we produced. Her network still, occasionally, came out with stuff to make an audience smile rather than snigger, think rather than scratch. She was the only woman at the head of a