He plucked the nuclear-red cherry from the top of the whipped-cream mountain on his shake and ate it stem and all. Natalie did the same. Seth scalded his tongue on the coffium and spilled ice-water in his haste.
Natalie used the edge of her plate as a palette and swirled together a beige mixture of HP sauce and mayo. She forked up small mouthfuls of food, swirled in the mixture.
“That looks vile.” Seth said it, not him, because he didn’t want to be a jerk. Seth was a portable, external id. Not always comfortable or appropriate, but handy nevertheless.
“It’s called the brown love.” She dabbed with a red-and-white-striped napkin, waited for Seth to make an innuendo, which didn’t come. “Invented it in high school. You don’t want to try it, your loss.” She forked up more hash and pointed it at them. On impulse, Hubert, Etc let her feed it to him. It was surprisingly good, and the clink of the fork on his tooth made him shiver like an amazing piss.
“Fantastic.” He meant it. He prepared his own smear, using Natalie’s for color-reference.
Seth refused to try, to Hubert, Etc’s secret delight. The food was better than he remembered, and more expensive. He hadn’t budgeted for the meal and it was going to hurt.
He pondered this, standing at the urinal and smelling his asparagus-y active-culture piss. Thinking of money, smelling the smell, he almost clamped down and ran out to get a cup to save some. Free beer was free beer, even if it did start out as used beer. All water was used beer. But it was down the drain before the thought was complete.
When he got back to the table, an older man sat next to Natalie.
He had shaggy hair, well cut, and skin with the luster of good leather. He wore a fabric-dyed cement-colored knit cardigan, with mottled horn buttons sewn on with hot pink thread. Beneath it, a tight black t-shirt revealed his muscular chest and flat stomach. He wore a simple wedding band and had short, clean, even fingernails, a kind of ostentatious no-manicure.
“Hi there,” he said. Hubert, Etc sat down opposite him. He extended a hand. “I’m Jacob. Natalie’s father.”
They shook. “I’m Hubert,” he said, as Seth said, “Call him ‘Etcetera.’”
“Call me Hubert,” he said, again. His external id was a pain in the ass.
“Nice to meet you, Hubert.”
“My father spies on me,” Natalie said. “That’s why he’s here.”
Jacob shrugged. “It could be worse. It’s not like I have your phone tapped. It’s just public sources.”
Natalie put her fork down and pushed her plate away. “He buys cam-feeds, realtime credit reports, market analytics. Like a background check on a new hire. But all the time.”
Seth said, “That’s creepy. And expensive.”
“Not so expensive. I can afford it.”
“Dad’s made the transition to old rich,” Natalie said. “He isn’t embarrassed by money. Not like my grandparents were. He knows he’s practically a member of a different species and can’t see why he should hide it.”
“My daughter is making a game of trying to embarrass me in public, something she’s been working on since she was ten. I don’t embarrass easy.”
“Why should you be embarrassed? You’d have to care what other people think of you in order to be embarrassed. You don’t, so you aren’t.”
Hubert, Etc felt embarrassed for them, felt like he should say something, if only so that Seth didn’t get all the mindshare. “I bet he cares what you think of him,” he risked.
They both grinned and the family resemblance was uncanny, down to the identical double dimple on the right side. “That’s why I do it. I’m proxy for every human beneath his notice. It’s not fun, either, despite what he thinks.”
“I don’t see you rejecting the privilege, Natty,” he said, putting an arm around her shoulders. She let him keep it there for a measured moment, then shrugged it off.
“Not yet,” she said.
His silence was eloquently skeptical. He moved her plate over to his place-setting, tapped the table’s “NO SHARING” message and waved a contact on his sleeve over it, tapped out a pattern with his thumb and forefinger. He polished off the last of the corned beef hash and then reached for her shake. She stopped him and said, “Mine.” He settled for the dregs of her coffium.
“Are you going to invite your little friends over for a play-date, then?” He wiped his mouth and loaded the plates on the robot that redocked with the table.
“You guys want a shower?”
Seth pounded the table, making the menu dance as it tried to interpret his instructions. “Come on, brother, we eat tonight!”
Hubert, Etc gave him an elbow jab. “Better count the spoons,” he said.
“They count themselves,” Jacob said. He did something with his sleeve and said, “The car’ll be around in a sec.”
[III]
IT WASN’T A carshare car, of course. The Redwaters were one of the big names – there’d been a Redwater mayor, Redwater MPs, a Redwater Finance Minister, any number of Redwater CEOs. The car was still small, not a stretch, but it was indefinably solid, skirted with matte rubber that covered the wheels. Hubert, Etc thought that there was something interesting underneath it. There were intriguing somethings about this car, and an inconspicuous Longines logo worked into the corner of the window glass. The suspension did something clever to compensate for his weight, actively dampening it, not like stone-age springs. He sat in a rear-facing jumpseat, saw the windows weren’t windows at all. They were thick armor, coated with hi-rez screens. Jacob took the other jumpseat and said, “Home.” The car waited until they were all seated securely and buckled in before it leapt into traffic. From his vantage the cars around them were melting out of their way.
“I don’t think I’ve ever traveled this fast in city traffic,” he said.
Jacob gave him a fatherly wink.
Natalie reached across the large internal compartment and gave her dad a sock in the thigh. “He’s showing off. There’s custom firmware in these, lets them cut the clearance envelope in half, which makes the other cars back off because we’re driving like unpredictable assholes.”
“Is that legal?” Hubert, Etc said.
“It’s a civil offense,” Jacob said. “The fines are paid by direct-debit.”
“What if you kill someone?” Seth got to the point.
“That’s a criminal matter, more serious. Won’t happen, though. There’s a lot of game theory stuff going on in the car’s lookahead, modeling likely outs and defectors and injecting a huge margin of safety. Really, we’re playing it safer than the stock firmware, but only because the car itself has got much better braking and acceleration and handling characteristics than a stock car.”
“And because you’re terrifying other cars’ systems into getting out of your way,” Seth said.
“Right,” Natalie said, before her dad could object. He shrugged and Hubert, Etc remembered what she’d said about his being “old rich,” unconcerned by the idea that anyone would resent his buying his way through traffic.
They raced through city streets. Natalie closed her eyes and reclined. There were dark circles under her eyes and she was tense, had been since her dad turned up. Hubert, Etc tried not to stare.
“Where do you live?” Seth asked.
“Eglinton Ravine, by the Parkway,” Jacob said. “I had it built about ten years ago.”
Hubert, Etc remembered school trips to the Ontario Science Centre, tried to remember the ravine, but could only recall a deep forested zone glimpsed from the window of a speeding school-bus.