This was the most precious of all freedoms, the plug-in life-style raised to the nth power: freedom to become the person you chose to be instead of the person remembered by the computers. That was what Nickie Haflinger desired so keenly that he spent five years pretending he was still himself. It was the enchanted sword, the invulnerable shield, the winged boots, the cloak of invisibility. It was the ultimate defense.
Or so it seemed.
Therefore, one sunny Saturday morning, he left Tarnover, and on Monday he was a life-style counselor in Little Rock, ostensibly aged thirty-five and—as the data-net certified—licensed to practice anywhere in North America.
THE TANGLED WEB
“Your first career went well for a while,” Freeman said. “But it came to an abrupt and violent end.”
“Yes.” A harsh chuckle. “I was nearly shot by a woman I advised to go screw someone of a different color. The massed computers of half a continent were in agreement with me, but she wasn’t. I concluded I’d been overoptimistic and rethought myself.”
“Which was when you became an instructor with a three-vee cassette college. I note that for your new post you dropped down to twenty-five, much nearer your real age, even though the bulk of the clientele was forty or over. I wonder why.”
“The answer’s simple. Think what lured most of those clients on to the college’s reels. It was a sense of losing touch with the world. They were hungry for data supplied by people fifteen or twenty years younger, usually because they’d done what they thought best for their children and been repaid with rejection and insults. They were pathetic. What they wanted was not what they claimed to want. They wanted to be told yes, the world really is pretty much as it was when you were young, there aren’t any objective differences, there’s some magic charm you can recite and instantly the crazy moiling framework of the modern world will jell into fixed familiar patterns. … The third time a complaint was filed about my tapes I was surpled despite my rigorous proof that I was right. Being right was at a discount in that context, too.”
“So you tried your skill as a full-time Delphi gambler.”
“And made a fortune in next to no time and grew unspeakably bored. I did nothing that anybody else couldn’t do, once he realized the government manipulates Delphi odds to keep the social-mollification index high.”
“Provided he had access to as much computer capacity as you did.”
“But in theory everybody does, given a dollar to drop into a pay phone.”
There was a pause. Freeman resumed in a brittle tone, “Did you have a clearly defined goal in mind which guided you in your choice of roles?”
“You didn’t already dig that out of me?”
“Yes, but when you were regressed. I want your contemporary conscious opinion.”
“It’s still the same; I never hit on a better way of phrasing it. I was searching for a place to stand so that I could move the Earth.”
“Did you ever consider going overseas?”
“No. The one thing I suspected a 4GH might not be good for was a passport, so if I found the right spot it would have to be in North America.”
“I see. That puts your next career into much clearer perspective. You spent a full year with a utopia-design consultancy.”
“Yes. I was naïve. It took me that long to realize that only the very rich and the very stupid imagine happiness can be bought tailor-made. What’s more, I should have discovered right away that it was company policy to maximize variety from one project to the next. I designed three very interesting closed communities, and in fact the last I heard all were still operating. But trying to include in the next utopia what seemed to be most promising in the previous one was what got me redunded again. You know, I sometimes wonder what became of last century’s hypothetical life-style labs, where a serious effort was to be made to determine how best human beings can live together.”
“Well, there are the simulation cities, not to mention the paid-avoidance zones.”
“Sure, and there are the places like Trianon where you get a foretaste of tomorrow. But don’t bleat me. Trianon couldn’t exist if G2S didn’t subsidize it with a billion dollars a year. Simulation cities are only for the children of the rich—it costs nearly as much to send the kids back to the past for a year as it does to keep them at Amherst or Bennington. And the paid-avoidance areas were created as a way of economizing on public expenditure after the Great Bay Quake. It was cheaper to pay the refugees to go without up-to-the-minute equipment. Which they couldn’t have afforded anyhow.”
“Maybe mankind is more adaptable than they used to believe. Maybe we’re coping well enough without such props.”
“In a day and age when they’ve quit covering individual murders on three-vee, where they just say bluntly, ‘Today there were so many hundred killings,’ and change the subject? That’s not what I call coping!”
“You don’t seem to have coped too well yourself. Each of your personae led to failure, or at any rate it didn’t lead to fulfillment of your ambition.”
“Partly true, but only partly. In the enclosed environment of Tarnover I didn’t realize how apathetic most people have become, how cut off they feel from the central process of decision-making, how utterly helpless and resigned. But remember: I was doing in my middle twenties what some people have to wait another decade, even two decades, to achieve. You people were hunting for me with all the resources at your command. You still didn’t spot me, not even when I changed roles, which was my most vulnerable moment.”
“So you’re blaming others for your failure and seeking consolation in your few and shallow successes.”
“I think you’re human after all. At any rate that sounded as though you’re trying to needle me. But save your breath. I admit my worst mistake.”
“Which was—?”
“To assume that things couldn’t possibly be as bad as they were painted. To imagine that I could undertake constructive action on my own. I’ll give you an example. A dozen times at least I’d heard the story of how a computer purchased by one of the hyper-corps exclusively—on their own admission—to find means whereby they could make tax-immune payments to government officials for favors received, had been held an allowable business expense. I was convinced it must be folklore. And then I found there really was such a case on record.” A sour chuckle. “Faced with things like that, I came to accept that I couldn’t get anywhere without supporters, sympathizers, colleagues.”
“Which you were hoping to obtain via your church?”
“Two more personae intervened before I hit on that idea. But, broadly speaking, yes.”
“Wasn’t it galling to have to rethink yourself so often because of outside circumstances?”
There was another pause, this time a long one.
“Well, to be candid, I sometimes regarded myself as having escaped into the biggest prison on the planet.”
DEAN INGE HE SAY
“There are two kinds of fool. One says, ‘This is old, and therefore good.’ And one says, ‘This is new, and therefore better.’ ”
RECEPTION TODAY IS OF AVERAGE QUALITY
“This is Seymour Schultz, who’s one of our orbital troubleshooters.”
A lean dark man wearing blue, smiling and proffering, according to custom, a card bearing his name and code. Projected image: man of action, no-nonsense type.
“Ah, I saw one of your colleagues taking off just now.”
“Yes, that would have been Harry Leaver.”
“And this is Vivienne Ingle, head-of-dept for mental welf.”
Fat in gray and green, never pretty. Projecting: got here on merit, I know more than you do about yourself.