“Yes.” She looked like she wanted to say no.
“Is it actually written in the rules somewhere that…” I still didn’t know what to call the thing I’d become. “… people in my situation aren’t eligible?”
The coach hesitated. “This particular… situation hasn’t come up before. Not in this league.”
“So you’re just assuming, then.”
“What are you getting at?”
“If the league didn’t care—if I got my father to talk to someone and made it okay—would you want me back on the team?” I could have done it. I knew it, and she knew it. It’s not about the money, my father always said. These days everyone has money. It’s about the power. And he had that, too.
But that wasn’t the question. I wasn’t asking if I could bully my way back onto the team. I was asking whether she wanted me to.
This time she didn’t hesitate at all. “No.”
Friday morning was Persuasive Speech, a weekly dose of posture, comportment, and projection techniques intended to smooth our eventual rise into the ranks of social and political prominence. The road to power may have been paved with lies, but according to Persuasive Speech guru M. Stafford, said lies had to be carefully candy coated with a paper-thin layer of truth. Or at least, the appearance of truth.
M. Stafford, of course, rarely told us anything we didn’t already know.
Of all the useless classes the Helmsley School offered—and there was little else on the menu—none was more useless than Persuasive Speech. M. Stafford was big into tedious presentations on even more tedious current events, which didn’t persuade us of anything except that we’d made an enormous mistake signing up for the class in the first place. A mistake, at least, for anyone who’d been expecting to learn something. For those of us expecting an easy A and plenty of time to lounge in the back of the room, linked in and zoned out while M. Stafford carefully ignored her snoozing audience, it fulfilled our every need.
So, all good. Except that while I’d been out “uh, sick”—that was M. Stafford’s feeble euphemism—Becca Mai had transferred into the class, and M. Stafford had given my seat away. Which meant that Becca sat in back with Cass and Terra and Bliss while I was stuck at a broken desk in the front row, wobbling on the loose leg every time I shifted my weight and trying to pretend that Auden Heller wasn’t aiming his creepy stare squarely in my direction.
I was—well, “sure” would be the wrong word, but let’s say “willing to accept the possibility”—that Auden didn’t intend to be creepy. He’d never been particularly creepy before. But then, he’d never been much of anything, except different, and not in the right way. Those glasses, for one thing. No one needed glasses anymore. At least, no one who could afford the fix, and no one without enough credit for that would have been allowed within fifty miles of the Helmsley School. There were net-linked glasses, of course, but those hadn’t been popular since we were kids. Now anyone who wanted that kind of access (and that kind of headache) could just pop in a lens while everyone else went back to screens and keyboards. The only reason to wear glasses now—especially glasses without tech—was to look different. It was the same with his watch. They didn’t even make watches anymore. FlexiViMs you could wrap around your wrist, or tattoo onto your forearm? Yes. But all the watch did was tell time, and—as I’d discovered one day a few years ago when one of Walker’s idiot friends snagged the watch to see if it would make Auden cry—it didn’t even do that right. A couple of miniature sticks swept out circle after circle, and you had to calculate the angles to even know the hour. And, yes, I was smart enough to figure it out, but why bother to do a math problem every time you want to know what time it is, when you can just get your ViM to flash the info and then move on with your life?
We’d been assigned to deliver a five-minute speech on a current issue that we felt strongly about. “We” didn’t include “me.” I’d been excused by virtue of my “uh, extended illness.” I wondered how M. Stafford would, if pressed, describe my sickly condition. Did she consider death, in my case, to be a fatal disease?
Auden went first, stammering his way through some lunatic theory that the government could solve the energy crisis whenever it wanted, but preferred using the power shortage to control the cities and the poor, oppressed masses who lived there. He didn’t explain where he thought all this magical energy was going to come from, or why, if the masses were so sad and oppressed, they never did anything about it. Everyone knew you could work your way out of the city if you wanted, and not just to a corp-town—although even that was better since you were guaranteed power and med-tech—but to a real life. If they didn’t want to bother, how was that our problem?
Auden’s conspiracy theories never came with much evidence or follow-through. I suspected he just liked getting a rise out of people with his flashy, if stupid, claims: The corps are secretly running the country! The Disneypocalypse was an inside job! The organic farmers poisoned the corn crop and pinned it on the terrorists to scare people away from mass production! B-mods are the opium of the masses! Apparently, if they made good slogans, they didn’t have to make good sense.
Next up, Sarit Rifkin, whose speech on the importance of eating more red meat didn’t include the fact that her family owned the county’s only cattle farm and reaped credit for every steak sold. Cass detailed the criteria she used to select new shoes. Fox T. spewed five minutes of crap about his favorite tactics for racking up Akira kills. Fox J.—also known as Red-tailed Fox, less because of his long auburn ponytail than because of the time he and Becca started making out in her father’s kitchen and Fox planted his ass on the stove, apparently so engrossed in the hot and heavy that it took him a full minute to realize the stove was on—got in about half a minute of arguing that chest lift-tucks should be mandatory for everyone overage and under a C cup before M. Stafford cut him off.
That was when Bliss, with her Fox-approved D cups, took the podium. She stood there for a long moment without speaking.
M. Stafford had the kind of voice you might use to talk to a mental patient, slow and measured and just a little too understanding. “Go on, Bliss.”
Bliss shifted her weight. “I’m not sure I should.”
“Are you sure you want to pass the class?”
Bliss reddened. Then glared at me, like she was daring me to blame her for going forward. “I wrote this last week,” she said defensively. “Before I knew that—” She stopped. “I wrote this last week.”
“Then you should be tired of waiting to deliver it,” M. Stafford said. “Go on, we won’t bite.”
Bliss Tanzen did bite, I happened to know—courtesy of Walker, who had been out with her a few times before trading up.
She cleared her throat. “A mechanical copy, no matter how detailed or exact, can never be anything more than an artificial replica of human life.”
I sat very still, face blank.
“It is for this reason that I argue that recipients of the download procedure should not be afforded the same rights and privileges of human citizens of society.”
I looked up, just for a second, long enough to note that everyone was staring at me, including M. Stafford. Everyone, with two exceptions: Bliss had her eyes fixed on her clunky speech. Auden had his eyes fixed on Bliss.
“You don’t have to believe in something called a soul”—someone in back snickered at the word—“to believe that a person can’t just be copied into a computer. They call it a copy because that’s what it is—not the real thing. Just a computer that’s been programmed to act that way.”