WANDA MORRISON: (Moves closer slowly, slides buttocks onto desk, side-slit pants fall open to reveal legs. Musical score shifts to Dangerous Romance.) What I really want to know is if you’re still in love with either of them.
(Suddenly the door opens stage left, and a dark, hunched figure shambles into the office. Ray and Wanda react with comic double-takes. The figure is carrying a greasy cardboard package of some kind. It shuffles forward and slaps the thing down on Dr. Wazer’s exquisite desk. It then jerks back its filthy cowl to reveal the face of a disfigured black woman with thin wispy hair and rotted stumps for teeth. One eye droops, gazing lifelessly at the floor.)
DARK FIGURE: Pizza sir, just as you ordered! The lid flips open by itself, showing a disgusting mess of cheese and fish parts, all heads and flipping tails.
DARK FIGURE: Plenty of anchovies on this Fu-*CENSOR INTERRUPT, OUTTAKE!* (figure faces camera, close-up of rotting teeth.) Buy Zeppo’s take-out pizza, system-wide delivery within thirty minutes or it’s free!
Zundra continued the show despite the interruption. The cast moved like wooden marionettes, mouthing their lines without conviction, they missed their cues and fumbled when they kissed. Damn! Through the fugue of the link she felt her real-life nails digging into her real-life palms. Growling in the back of her throat, she managed to finish the show without further deviations from the script. Zundra’s eyes fluttered and her fingers formed harpy’s claws.
“Did we broadcast that crap?” she rattled out of her constricted throat. Her good eye focused long enough to make out Andy’s mashed nose and see him perform a slow, grim nod. Then she strained to see the ratings graphic on the far wall. A steady green line slowly rose to a peak two minutes into the broadcast then took a sudden dive into the red. Only during the last three minutes did the line get out of the red and into the green again, leaving them several million kilo-dollars under target.
“I’ve said it before, and now we have our proof. You’ve got the best ratings in the business, but you’re too old for this game, Z. People in their mid-fifties don’t work the nets these days. Our vast amorphic viewing audience, otherwise known as paying customers, fled like a school of startled fish when you ran that personal ad of yours,” said Andy. His mashed nose wrinkled and he clucked his tongue. “I don’t blame them, I would have been searching for less annoying entertainment myself if these monitors could be switched to someone else’s station.”
Zundra glared at him with one wide open eye, showing plenty of bloodshot white around it. A single droplet of sweat shone on her brown skin. Andy’s hands curled up and he pulled his arms back against his chest. Zundra grinned hugely, then stabbed the release that freed her from the interface. She rolled her mobile life-support module down the aisle between the operators, staring straight ahead.
“Network’s going to shut you down if we miss target so badly next week, Z!” shouted Andy at her retreating back. “Doesn’t matter that you’re black, or that you dock your floater in the handicapped zone! Not this time, babe!”
“Maybe it’s Alzheimer’s,” said a voice behind her in the cafeteria. Because of her life-support module she had to eat at a special table without attached benches, and tonight her back was turned to the other employees. “Rust in the brain, that’s what they say causes it, you know.”
Zundra’s tuna fish sandwich turned to pink paste in her mouth. Scattered chuckles. “Some of the best of them go out this way-even our first string directors lose it now and again.”
With a sudden whirring of servo-motors she turned to face them. Most eyes fell, but Steve, a director with wild red hair that flipped and curled in a long ponytail down his back, smirked instead.
“I hear you ran into a little trouble with your files today,” he said.
More scattered chuckles. Coffee cups became very interesting.
“Insanity,” said Zundra simply. They all stared at her, falling quiet and still. She finally dropped her odd gaze and they all shuffled in relief.
“It makes for bad video,” she told the keyboard that was permanently mounted in front of her abdomen. Steve smiled and ate another French fry bloodied with ketchup.
“Well? Are you nuts? What’d the pysch say?” asked Andy. He perched his skinny butt on the ledge of an instrument array and swung his legs like an adolescent. Zundra could smell the chocolate that was melting in his back pocket. Her eye caught his and her face drooped. She massaged her wispy black hair with claw-like hands.
“No tumors. They give it a sixty-seven percent chance of schizophrenia if the system was truly sealed and bug-free.”
“There are no bugs.”
“I know. Something like this would have shown up before.”
“And this system, my system, is sealed tight,” Andy said. Then he chuckled. “I guess you’re nuts.”
Zundra shook her head, her claw-like hands balling into fists. “There has to be a leak.”
“No, no way,” Andy said, his mashed nose wrinkling. He shook his head like a dog drying itself. “Not in my system.”
“Someone’s tapped into the link, I know it.”
“Well, you go on again in eighty minutes Z. Why don’t you meditate for a while or something? Just make sure it doesn’t happen again.”
Zundra swung one baleful eye around to cover him and he flinched and shrank like a convict in a spotlight. “ You’re going to do something about it! You’re going to set a trap for the intruder.”
“But I’m telling you that there isn’t any intruder,” insisted Andy, uncrossing his thin arms long enough to shake a bony hand at her.
“Don’t whine, just do it.”
“Eighty minutes isn’t long enough to produce a good piece code.”
“Do it.”
NURSE TAI: So, you admit to it. You did sleep with my twin sister. (Musical Score shifts to Strident Events).
RAY WAZER: What’s the point of denying it? It was a simple mistake. I thought she was you.
NURSE TAI: (Tight shot of her round lovely face, eyes shining and wet, jaw set firmly). You’re lying, doctor.
RAY WAZER: (Standing up and approaching, leans forward over the hospital bed and its comatose patient). I still want you Tai. You’re sister has your body, but not your heart.
(The couple kiss heatedly, but before events can take their natural course the comatose patient jerks awake like a puppet pulled erect by its strings. The patient is a black woman of surpassing ugliness. She makes gross slurping sounds with puckered lips, mocking the kiss.)
COMATOSE PATIENT: Whew! Sure is getting hot in here! How about a refresher? (While the two lovers watch dumbfounded, the black woman rips loose her I.V. and aims the needle-tipped tube at them. Screaming laughter, she sprays them with an amazing amount of liquid. Quickly, the I.V. tube and needle grow into a fire hose with a brass nozzle. Liquid floods the room knocking the lovers to the floor and soaking them.)
COMATOSE PATIENT: (Shudders, spasms, then looks around the room in shock). That was, ah-to teach you two cheaters a lesson!
(While RAY WAZER and NURSE TAI pick themselves up, dripping wet, COMATOSE PATIENT reaches up and rips off her face. Beneath the ugly exterior is the mirror image of NURSE TAI.)
COMATOSE PATIENT: (Voice raises an octave to match NURSE TAI’s). That’s right, I’m your sister, and before I’m done I’ll kill you both!
SYSTEM CLOSE:*Curtain Close, cue Theme Song* (short sound-bite version) cut away to commercial.
SYSTEM WARNING:*Commercial cut-away occurred 55 seconds early. Auto-readjust of schedule completed*
When the ordeal of Orbital Hospital was over, Zundra awoke with a nasty, morning-breath taste in her mouth. She realized vaguely that her mouth must have gone slack and hung open during the broadcast.
“How are the ratings?” she croaked, tapping the button for a shot of glucose. She pursed her lips over the plastic feeding tube that rose up from her life-support module and drank a few swallows. The fluid smelled faintly of lemons.