“The upside is that Rawna’s paying me really well,” said Jeff. “I already got a big payment for the Goofer product placements.”
“But you hear voices in your head,” Diane asked. “All the time. Is that any way to live?”
“It’s not exactly like voices,” said Jeff. “It’s more that I have these sudden urges. Or I flash on these intense opinions that aren’t really mine. Have your baby tattooed! Oops. Hive mind man. Make big bucks from social-networking apps. I said that.”
“Non-linear man,” said Diane, smiling a little. Jeff was, come what may, still himself. “I hope it stops soon. Rawna sounded like it won’t last all that long.”
“Meanwhile I am getting paid,” repeated Jeff. “I can see the money in my bank account.”
“You can see your bank account in your head?”
“I guess I’m, like, semi-divine,” said Jeff airily. “Ow!” He dropped to the ground. In the dusk, he’d tripped over a tiny bicycle that the four-year-old next door had left lying on the sidewalk outside Diane’s apartment.
“Are you okay?”
“I hate clutter,” said Jeff, getting to his feet and angrily hurling the pink bicycle into the apartment complex’s swimmingpool. “The city should crack down on improperly parked toys.”
“Poor little bike,” said Diane. “It wasn’t the bike’s fault. Remember your sensei’s theory, Jeff? Isn’t the bike alive too?”
“Just because it’s alive doesn’t make it my friend,” muttered Jeff.
Diane felt a little relieved. In some ways, Jeff hadn’t changed.
Jeff said he was too fried to make love. They fell asleep in each other’s arms and settled into a good night’s rest.
Diane was awakened early by voices in the street. It wasn’t just a cluster of joggers — it sounded like hundreds of people streaming by, all amped up. She looked out the bedroom window. The street was filled with demonstrators marching towards the town center. These weren’t happy, hippy-dippy types, they were ordinary people mad about something, yelling slogans that Diane couldn’t quite understand.
As a sidelight, Diane noticed that many of the people were carrying Goofers, or had them perched on their shoulders or peeking out of their shirt pockets. She felt a little proud of Jeff’s influence. On the bed, he snored on.
As the end of the crowd straggled past, Diane finally deciphered the words on one of the handmade signs the people were carrying: “Sidewalks are for people!” And another sign’s heavy black lettering came into focus too: “Bikes off the sidewalk! Now!”
“Hey Jeff, wake up!”
Jeff opened his eyes, smiled at Diane, and reached out drowsily for a hug. “I had the greatest dream,” he said. “I dreamed I had the answer to everything, and I was about to create an earthly paradise. And then I woke up.”
“The answer to what?” Diane was intrigued in spite of herself.
“To everything, Diane. To everything.”
That’s not enough, thought Diane. “Jeff, you should look outside. This is getting weird.”
“Not right now. I need to watch the big screen. It’s time for Pastor Veck.”
Diane threw on some clothes and ran outside. By now the demonstration had moved on, but the street was littered with black-and-white flyers. She picked one up. It called on the City Council to impound bikes, scooters, and other toys left on the sidewalks.
Inside the apartment, Jeff was watching the ranting of his favorite televangelist. On Pastor Veck’s pulpit stood an angelic little Goofer, smiling at the Pastor and applauding now and then.
“I don’t know about those evil—lutionists,” Pastor Veck was saying, his eyes twinkly and serious at the same time. “But I know that I am not descended from a sponge or a mushroom or a fish! ” He lowered his voice. “A famous mathematician once said that, statistically speaking, the odds of randomly shuffled atoms leading to puppies and kittens and human beings are infinitesimal! The simple laws of probability prove that evolution could never work! ”
Oh wow, thought Diane. The Pastor is preaching the real-time wisdom of the prophet Jeff.
“Let us pray within our own minds,” the pastor continued very slowly, as if the words were taking form one by one upon his tongue. “Let us touch the tiny souls within our bodies and within our chairs, my friends, the souls within each and every particle great or small, the holy congress of spirits who guide the growth of the human race.” The studio audience bowed its heads.
Jeff grinned and turned off the big screen.
“You’re running his show now?” said Diane.
“My thoughts filter out,” said Jeff, looking proud. “My simmie-bots are everywhere, and my keenly tuned brain is the greatest net router on earth. I’m the hive mind man. Connections. That’s what my dream last night was about. Learning to talk to each other. But I need to kick my game up to a higher level. I wish that — ”
Like some unhinged genie, Rawna Roller pushed in through Diane’s front door, trailed by Sid, who was wearing video cameras as his spectacle lenses today. He had tiny screens set right behind the lenses.
“Hi, lovebirds!” sang Rawna. “We brought a multi-culti pick-me-up for you, Jeff. Ready, Sid?”
“Check,” said Sid, miming an assistant mad scientist routine.
“Slow down,” said Diane, interposing herself, wondering if she should try her karate kick on Sid. When exactly was the right time to deploy a kick like that? “You can’t just barge in here and poison Jeff again,” continued Diane. “I mean, what is the problem with you two? Hello? We’re human beings here.”
“We got good news, bad news, and a fix,” said Rawna, sweeping past Diane and into the kitchen. “Yes, thank you, I’ll have a cup of coffee. Oh, look, Sid, they use one of those chain-store coffeemakers. How retro. How middle American.”
“Remain calm,” intoned Sid, his eyes invisible behind his lenses. His mouth was twitching with reckless mirth.
“The good news,” said Rawna, returning from the kitchen, holding a coffee cup with her pinky-finger sarcastically extended. “The Goofer is through the ceiling in product orders from white-bread Americans. The bad news: the U.S. ethnics aren’t picking up Jeff’s vibe. And Jeff’s campaign is totally flat-lining overseas. If Jeff can’t hook mainland China this morning, the Goofer CEO is pulling the plug and canceling our payments, the selfish dick.”
“Jeff’s not cosmopolitan enough,” said Sid, shoving his face really, really close to Jeff — as if he were studying an exotic insect. “Too ignorant, too pale, too raw, too — ”
“It’s my simmie-bots,” said Jeff evenly, staring right into Sid’s cameras. “They’re living in stateside devices. I need the protocols and the hacktics for sending them overseas. And, okay, I know it’s more than just access. I’m almost there, but I’m not fully — ”
“We’ve got the fix for you!” Rawna cut him off. “A universal upgrade. Whip it on the man, Sid. It, ah — what does it do again, Sid?”
“Crawls right into his fucking head!” crowed Sid, taking an object like an aquamarine banana slug from his pocket and throwing it really hard at Jeff’s face. The thing thwapped onto Jeff’s forehead and then, in motions too rapid to readily follow, it writhed down his cheek, wriggled in through a nostril, and, as Jeff reported later, made its way through the bones behind his sinus cavities and onto the convolutions of his brain.
Meanwhile Sid took off his kludgy video glasses and offered them to the speechless Diane. “Want to see the instant replay on that? No? The thing’s what the box-jocks call a Kowloon slug. A quantum-computing chunk of piezoplastic. The Kowloon slug will help Jeff clone off Chinese versions of his simmie-bots. â‰çÇãª. Wo go xìng. I am happy.”