An Appetite for Power
by Kevin O’Donnell, Jr.
Illustration by Anthony Bari
William Field grunted in discomfort as he squeezed his bulk behind the wheel of his car. Why did they have to make these electrics so small, anyway? Barely room in them for a dwarf, much less a tall man of, er, ample proportions.
“Ample proportions”—so much kinder than “outsized,” the currently preferred term in Silicon Valley.
He thought fondly of Munich, which he visited on business three or four times a year. Now, that city respected ample proportions. Nobody there looked down on you for having a waistline larger than your inseam. They rather preferred it, in fact. If Germany would just cut its tax rates, he would not only move there, he’d even learn the damn language.
He slid his driver’s license and insurance card through the magnetic stripe reader on the dashboard computer. The system awoke the cellular modem, queried the remote databases, and verified his right to drive. When the OK flashed, he put his key into the power-on switch lock. The center of the steering wheel irised open. He scrunched down, kissed the breathalyzer mask built into the steering column, and breathed until it beeped.
As a bio-genetics researcher, he knew and admired the durable simplicity of that breathalyzer. As a driver, he found it annoying. As a man who liked a beer or two with dinner, he hated the damn thing.
He wished he could take the bus. It would pick him up a hundred yards from his front door, and drop him off kitty-corner from Jackson s Famous Ribs. If he could take the bus, he could sip one ice-cold Dos Equis while waiting for his platter of ribs, and a second while stacking the bones.
But no, he had to drive, because it was the evening rush hour, and during the evening rush hour, not one bus in twenty permitted the outsized to board.
Well, he thought grimly, if you don’t want your buses crowded, you’ll have your streets congested, then. All the same to me. I’m going to be uncomfortable no matter what.
He turned off the Lawrence Expressway onto Stevens Creek Boulevard, and found himself at the ass-end of a mile-long traffic jam that stretched all the way to Wolfe. He drummed his fingers on the wheel. His stomach growled the bass line. “Yeah, yeah,” he told it, “I hear you. I’ll go down a side-street as soon as I can.”
Police barricades at Tantau put paid to that plan. Another random stop-and-search. “Pfui!” He slumped in his seat. The roadblocks served their purpose, he’d grant them that, but by God did they screw up traffic. Especially the STD sweeps—the blood tests on those took fifteen, twenty minutes apiece to process. Even when the cops only pulled over every tenth driver, that still double-parked so damn many cars that the broadest of roadways pinched down into the worst kind of bottle neck.
The state of the boulevard reminded him of some work in progress at his lab. His lab, yes, even if Jennifer had gotten a third of his founders’ stock in the settlement. Along with the house and the ’97 Lincoln Town Car, the last American-made car big enough to accommodate him. She’d taken that just for spite, the anorexic bitch.
He shouldn’t have expected anything different, though, not in California. The leotard brigade had pretty well overrun the whole damn state. Health-club hens everywhere you looked. All of them counting their calories, watching their waists—and doing the same for you whether you wanted them to or not.
Oh, sure, it made for nice scenery. Trim and taut bodies everywhere. A mall bench proved an ogler’s paradise. And the fringekinis at the beach could break a sweat on the statue of a saint.
But, jeez. Take a woman out to dinner, she’d spend half an hour grilling the waiter about the oils, and the sauces, and the possibility of getting celery sticks instead of rolls. Or you go over to her house, and she serves up something mostly green, arranged on its plate as carefully as a bonsai, and about as nourishing. Over in the corner of the kitchen, her cat (and they all have cats) is smirking at you, and refusing to swap dinners.
He sighed. Twenty-five years on the Left Coast should have inured him to its idiocies, but no, he still reacted as he had when he was a fresh-from-Kansas-man at Stanford. He ached for the women when he saw them on the streets in their bike shorts and sports bras—and ached to get away when they sat on the other side of the table from him.
Where did all the big ones hide? He knew they existed. He’d seen them in the supermarkets, whisking cookie bags off the shelves saying “they’re for the kids,” or hefting inch-thick steaks at the meat counter while murmuring, “My husband, he…”
But where did they go afterward, and why couldn’t he ever meet an unmarried one?
Jesus. If only he could find someone he could take home to Kansas, someone who’d smile at Ma and ask for more gravy, someone who’d figure that the right thing to do after dinner was eat dessert.
But no. He wasn’t going to run into her in California, unless maybe she’d just gotten off the boat from Samoa.
Californians. They just couldn’t figure out which arteries to keep clear…
Ah, well. All those skinny bigots were going to make him rich. Again. And since he could prove he hadn’t started the project until after the divorce was final… oh, my, would that drive Jennifer crazy, for him to be rolling in money and her unable to filch even a bit of it. Teach her to sell her holdings to Pfizer.
The project itself would upset her even more. She had a Puritan streak to her, or maybe a tinge of Calvinism, he wasn’t sure. Whatever; that didn’t matter. What did matter was that she believed nothing had any value unless earned through hard work and sweat.
And his next product would give a slim, trim body to anyone who wanted it.
He’d code-named it “Dr. Field’s Cure for Cookies a silly name, to be sure, but he liked it, and it would do for the time being. He’d hire a marketing type to come up with a better name when it was ready for FDA testing.
He hadn’t worked out all the details yet, but he had the outlines down. Dr. Field’s Cure would alter a few patches of cells in the brain—the ones that, relying on feedback from the alimentary system, control the speed at which food moves through the gut.
Those cells ask various parts of the gastrointestinal system what they’re holding, and calculate a calorie/volume ratio on the answer. Then they send back instructions, saying either “That’s low-value food; move it through quick to make room for more,” or “High-value food! Take your time with this; suck all the goodies out of it before you push it out the other end.” (Field had long ago decided this was why his body extracted less than 90 percent of the calories available from say, a celery stick, and nearly 98 percent of those in a Snickers bar.)
Dr. Field’s Cure would mislead those cells into issuing the doubletime order.
In a strange sort of way, exactly that was happening on the boulevard ahead of him. The commuters moved along Stevens Creek just as food travels through the intestines. The system controller—in this case, the police department-decided that the flow held value: arrests to make. So it slowed the flow in order to examine it as closely as possible, and to suck all the goodies out of it before dumping it into the next town over.
But damn, it was inefficient, and that ticked him off. He’d bid on supplying those blood tests, yet had lost the contract because his test cost ten cents a unit more than the competition’s. Damn city hadn’t considered processing time at all. His test ran in an average two minutes forty-seven seconds, easily five times faster.
Damn city. A lot more sensible in Munich, But then, over there, they knew the importance of keeping vehicular arteries clear, and leaving the thoracic ones to the discretion of their owners.