Somewhere in the middle of all this, a bird, a crow, came crashing to the deck beside us. What I could make out, through the thick anti-nano envelope that contained it, was a mess of shiny black feathers, a broken beak clattering against the deck, and a smudge of blood that quickly boiled away. The whole bird, in fact, was disassembling. Steam rose from the envelope, which emitted a piercing wail of warning. Henry spoke loudly into my ear, Attention, Sam! In the interest of safety, the HomCom isolation device orders you to move away from it at once.
We were too distracted to pay much mind. The envelope seemed to be doing its job. Nevertheless, we dutifully moved away; we rolled away belly to belly, like the bard’s “beast with two backs.” A partition formed to separate us from the unfortunate bird, and we resumed our investigation of the merits of parenthood.
Later, when I brought out dinner and two glasses of visola on a tray, El sat at the patio table in her white terry robe looking at the small pile of elemental dust on the deck—carbon, sodium, calcium, and whatnot—that had recently been a bird. It was not at all unusual for birds to fly out through the canopy, or for a tiny percentage of them to become infected outside. What was unusual was that upon reentering the canopy, being tasted, found bad, and enveloped by a swarm of anti-nano agents, so much of the bird should survive the fall in so recognizable a form, as this one had.
El frowned at me and said, “It’s Governor Rickert, come back to haunt us.”
We both laughed uneasily.
THE NEXT DAY I felt the urge to get some work done. It would be another two days before the orphanage would begin the recombination, and I was restless. Meanwhile, Eleanor had some sort of Tri-D meeting scheduled in the living room.
I had claimed an empty bedroom in the back of the apartment for my work area. It about matched my Chicago studio in size and aspect. I had asked the building super, a typically dour reginald, to send up an arbeitor to remove all the furniture except for an armchair and nightstand. The chair needed a pillow to support the small of my back, but otherwise it was adequate for long sitting sessions. I pulled it around to face a blank inner wall that Henry had told me was the north wall, placed the nightstand next to it, and brought in a carafe of strong coffee and some sweets from the kitchen. I made myself comfortable.
“Okay, Henry, take me to Chicago.” The empty bedroom was instantly transformed into my studio, and I sat in front of my favorite window wall overlooking the Chicago skyline and lakefront from the 303rd floor of the Drexler Building. The sky was dark with storm clouds. Rain splattered against the window. There was nothing like a thunderstorm to stimulate my creativity.
“Henry, match Chicago’s ionic dynamics here.” I sipped my coffee and watched lightning strike neighboring towers as the air in my room took on a freshly scrubbed ozone quality. I felt relaxed and invigorated.
When I was ready, I turned the chair around to face my studio. It was just as I had left it months before in realbody. There was the large oak worktable that dominated the east corner. Glass-topped and long-legged, it was a table you could work at without stooping over. I used to stand at that table endlessly twenty and thirty years ago when I still lived in Chicago. Now it was piled high with prized junk: design trophies, hunks of polished gemstones from Mars and Jupiter, a scale model Japanese pagoda of cardboard and mica, a box full of my antique key collection, parcels wrapped in some of my most successful designs, and—the oldest objects in the room—a mason jar of paintbrushes, like a bouquet of dried flowers.
I rose from my chair and wandered about my little domain, taking pleasure in my life’s souvenirs. The cabinets, shelves, counters, and floor were overflowing: an antelope-skin spirit drum; an antique pendulum mantel clock that houseputer servos kept wound; holocubes of some of my former lovers and wives; bits of colored glass, tumbleweed, and driftwood in whose patterns and edges I had once found inspiration; and a bull elephant foot made into a footstool. This room was more a museum now than a functioning studio, and I was more its curator than a practicing artist.
I went to the south wall and looked into the corner. Henry’s original container sat atop three more identical ones. “How’s the paste?” I said.
“Sufficient for the time being. I’ll let you know when we need more.”
“More? Isn’t this enough? You have enough paste to run a major city.”
“Eleanor Starke’s Cabinet is more powerful than a major city.”
“Yeah, well, let’s get down to work.” I returned to my armchair. The storm had passed the city and was retreating across the lake, turning the water midnight-blue. “What have you got on the egg idea?”
Henry projected a richly ornate egg in the air before me. Gold leaf and silver wire, inlaid with once-precious gems, it was modeled after the Fabergé masterpieces favored by the last of the Romanoff tsars. But instead of enclosing miniature portraits or clockwork engines, my eggs would merely be expensive wrapping for small gifts. The recipients would have to crack them open. But then they could keep the pieces, which would reassemble, or toss them into the bin for recycling credits.
“It’s just as I told you last week,” said Henry. “The public will hate it. I tested it against Simulated Us and E-Pluribus.” Henry filled the space around the egg with dynamic charts and graphs. “Nowhere are positive ratings higher than seven percent, or negative ratings lower than sixty-eight percent. Typical comments call it ‘old-fashioned,’ and ‘vulgar.’ Matrix analyses find that people do not want to be reminded of their latent fertility. People resent—”
“Okay, okay,” I said. “I get the picture.” It was a dumb concept. I knew as much when I proposed it. But I was so enamored with my own latent fertility, I had lost my head. I thought people would be drawn to this archetypal symbol of renewal, but Henry had been right all along, and now he had the data to prove it.
If the truth be told, I had not come up with a hit design in five years, and I was terrified.
“It’s just a dry spell,” Henry said, sensing my mood. “You’ve had them before, even longer.”
“I know, but this one is the worst.”
“You say that every time.”
To cheer me up, Henry began to play my wrapping paper portfolio, projecting my past masterpieces larger than life in the air.
I held patents for package applications in many fields, from archival wrap and instant skin, to military camouflage and video paint. But my own favorites, and probably the public’s as well, were my novelty gift wraps. My first was a video wrapping paper that displayed the faces of loved ones (or celebrities if you had no loved ones) singing “Happy Birthday” to the music of the Boston Pops. That dated back to 2025 when I was a molecular engineering student and before we lost Boston to the Outrage.
My first professional design was the old box-in-a-box routine, only my boxes didn’t get smaller as you opened them, but larger, and in fact could fill the whole room until you chanced upon one of the secret commands, which were any variation of “stop” (whoa, enough, cut it out, etc.) or “help” (save me, I’m suffocating, get this thing off me, etc.).
Next came wrapping paper that screamed when you tore or cut it. That led to paper that resembled human skin. It molded itself perfectly and seamlessly around the gift and had a shelf life of fourteen days (and a belly button!). It came in all races. You had to cut it to open the gift, and of course it bled. It was creepy, and we sold mountains of it.