“You lost weight.”
“Fightin’ trim. As you could see, I usually lose, but I give back some too.”
“I’m so sorry, Morgan.”
“No need. I knew this was bound to happen the first time I made ten thousand dollars in cash. I was seventeen years old. Even way back then I knew that money came and went, came and went.”
“Your name will go down as one of the most important men in science and world history.”
“Or maybe I’ll be forgotten. Maybe they’ll say that the board of directors of BCI was the movers and shakers. I’m just another hustler or, or, or — what did that Lacosta call me? Yeah, a huckster.”
“Even now the youngsters are saying that it was you who discovered the human soul.”
“And here I’m just like you,” Morgan said. “Never thought one way or t’other ’bout if there’s a soul or not.”
“But you were the one who articulated the upload-download process,” Matthews said. “You were the one who convinced Tyler Barnes that his soul had been placed in a new form.”
“And that’s why I’m here. I did the devil’s work, and now they got me on the chain gang.”
For a time the old colleagues sat in silence.
Carly felt powerless to help a man who she’d come to recognize for his greatness, and he was just happy with a full stomach and the sun flooding in from the window at her back.
“Why you here, girl?”
“I was told by an ex-employee of BCI that they abandoned you because you didn’t tie up my patents and copyrights with them.”
“I never thought a’ that. Damn. I bet your source is right though. Them mothahfuckahs in corporations actually think they can own everything from the ants crawlin’ on the wall to the ideas in our heads. Shit. The blues tell ya that you come in cryin’ and alone and you go out the same way.”
Morgan started moving his head as if he was moving to the beat of a song unsung.
“How can I help you, Morgan?”
“You know what’s gonna happen, right?”
“With what?”
“Macromime.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Here these corporations and shit think they found an untapped commodity, but one day that machine is gonna do like them people in Europe say and think itself an entity. That’s why they should have us all in here.”
“That will never happen,” Carly Matthews said with absolute certainty.
“Well,” Morgan replied, giving her a shrug, “here I am in prison, and there you are free in the sunlight. So I guess I must be wrong.”
The Fourteenth Day of the Month of Morgan, 3042
“Where am I?” Morgan Milton Morgan III thought.
A flood of information poured into the fragile consciousness contained in a small corner of a memory system the size of Earth’s moon. This download contained his history: he was downloaded and lost, stored in a Macromime mini-system, and buried with his body by Carly Matthews in a final gesture of fealty. The world was growing, and humanity had been mostly replaced by biologically based synth-systems. There was a war being waged, but Morgan wasn’t clear on the nature of the enemy.
“Is this like heaven?” he asked with thought alone.
“And you, Morgan Morgan,” a deep and disembodied voice rejoined, “are our God.”
An Unlikely Series of Conversations
1
Laertes Jackson showed up at the human-resources office of Martin, Martin, and Moll at 10:37 on a Tuesday in March. The midsize investment firm was located on Maiden Lane in the Wall Street area of Lower Manhattan. There was no ostentatious sign outside, and only the initials MMM appeared on the legend next to the elevator. Even there just one floor, the fourteenth, was identified as housing MMM, when the firm actually occupied seven floors.
In the past two years MMM had been sued by various individuals and government agencies for multiple civil rights and sexual harassment violations. The CEO and several VPs had been relieved of their positions, and the corporation itself had been fined millions of dollars in restitution and reparations.
The new CEO, Miss Winsome Millerton-Pomerantz, had made a public statement vowing that the investment firm, which oversaw more than a dozen multibillion-dollar retirement funds that, either fully or in part, served public-employee unions, would make a supreme effort to right the listing ship of our intentions.
Taking this intelligence to heart, Laertes decided to apply for an entry-level job at MMM.
Arriving at the fourteenth floor, Laertes encountered B. Chang, a young Asian woman sitting within a semiopaque, azure circular desk.
“HR is on the twentieth floor, Mr. Jackson,” she said with a lovely red-stained smile. “Take the elevator to the right.”
On the twentieth floor Clarissa Watson, a woman whose skin was even darker than Laertes’s, gave him a confused, turquoise-tinted grin, saying, “But your appointment isn’t until one forty, Mr. Jackson.”
“I’m usually early,” Laertes said, cocking his head and smiling softly. “My father always told me to get there before your competitor, because you can never tell what will be left over later on.”
Young Miss Watson smiled and nodded. She said, “We have magazines and bottled water. You can sit in the waiting area, and I’ll try to get you in early. Ms. Rodriguez is interviewing applicants for the trainee broker position all day, but sometimes the interviews take less time.”
Laertes picked up the Wall Street Journal, turning pages until his eyes fell upon the phrase trying to define the first stock transaction. It seemed that there was a great deal of disagreement among economic scholars about the age of the idea of stocks, investments, and interest.
“Mr. Jackson?” a woman said, so softly that Laertes wondered if indeed he had actually heard the utterance.
He looked up and saw a roundish woman with pale skin, dark locks, and eyes that seemed to see past him into some other realm beyond his comprehension — and maybe hers.
“I’m Jackson,” he said.
“My name is Rahlina Rodriguez. I’m supposed to interview you.”
“OK,” Laertes said. “I took the day off from work, so I have as much time as you need.”
“Where do you work?” Rahlina Rodriguez asked as Laertes rose to his feet, clutching a pint-size plastic bottle of water in his left hand.
“Maritime Merchants Bank over on Twenty-Third.”
“Savings and loan,” she stated.
“It’s pretty much mom and pop,” he said. “Mostly residential mortgages. I’ve been a teller there for more than twenty years.”
“Have you worked with investments?”
“Not really.”
“What does that mean?” The expression on Rodriguez’s wary face was a leftover from childhood, when she was too cute for her parents to punish; at least that’s what Laertes surmised.
“I’m supposed to ask new clients opening savings and checking accounts if they want to connect their money to an investment account, and if they do, I check that box on their online form. But whatever it is, I don’t understand it or have anything to do with where the money goes.”
Something about what Laertes said seemed to bother Rahlina.
“We should go to my office,” the bank officer suggested.
“OK,” Laertes replied, with a forced smile. He followed her down a gray-tiled hallway toward a bright yellow door. Rahlina moved through the doorway like a dancer, swaying from side to side, creating an aesthetic out of mere walking. Laertes followed her the only way he knew, with a dogged, straight-ahead gait.
The yellow door led to a room that was drained of any hue. The white floor, walls, and ceiling contained an ivory-colored desk and a whitewashed pine chair where the candidate who was to be interrogated had to sit.