Once we got that mess cleaned up, PJ was all business again.
“You’re going to see Zarthar, right?”
“Yup.”
“And I’m coming with you.”
Centropolis being the capital of both the USA and the GDM, the city was full of offices and officeholders.
The Bureau of Cultural Innovations was an impressive, civic temple-style building that occupied two square blocks bounded by Disney and Iwerks. PJ and I climbed its broad marble steps and passed between its wide columns to its brazen doors and entered the vast, well-populated lobby.
I had to surrender my blaster to security, and PJ confessed to carrying a vibrablade, which surprised me.
Once we were beyond the checkpoint and on our way up to Zarthar’s office, she volunteered: “Some geeks go way beyond grabby hands, you know.”
“Admitted.”
The GDM is open-source government. Citizens are encouraged to participate at all levels. Which is why we had been able to get a quick appointment with Zarthar himself.
I wasn’t exactly certain how we were going to confront the mastermind behind this secret scheme to produce übergeeks, but I figured some gameplan would present itself.
And then the door of Zarthar’s office opened to our annunciated arrival.
“All geeks are geeky, but some geeks are geekier than others.” Everyone knows George Orwell’s famous line from his novel Server Farm. But you haven’t really experienced it until you meet someone in that leet minority like Zarthar.
Zarthar had been born Dennis LaTulippe, but had refashioned his entire persona somewhere around age sixteen, when he was already well over six feet tall. He legally changed his name, permanently depilated his head and tattooed it with a Wally Wood space panorama, grew a Fu-Manchu moustache, adopted sandals and flowing floor-length robes of various eye-popping hues as his only attire, and declared his major passion to be Situationist Bongo Playing. (This was circa 1956, twenty years ago, when beat-zeks like Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg and Doris Day were all the rage.) He revolutionized his chosen field, and his career since then had been successive triumphs across many passions, resulting in his appointment to his current position.
Zarthar’s voice resonated like Boris Karloff’s. “Chum Hornbine, Chum Moritz, please come in.”
We entered tentatively. I had just begun to take in the furnishings of Zarthar’s ultra-modern office when PJ hurled herself at the man!
“You killed my father! You killed him! Admit it!”
Attempting to choke Zarthar, PJ made about as much progress as Judy Canova might’ve made wrestling with Haystack Calhoun. And when multiple ports in the walls snicked open and the muzzles of automated neural disrupters poked out, she wisely ceased entirely.
Zarthar composed himself with aplomb, smoothing his robes. His next words did not immediately address PJ’s accusation.
“My friends, have you ever considered the problems our world still faces? To the average citizen, it seems we occupy a utopia. And granted, two-thirds of the world—the portion under GDM—deserves that designation. But that still leaves millions of people living in pre-geek darkness. And these seething populations are actively anti-GDM, seeking constantly for ways to undermine and topple what we’ve created. They are ruthless and violent and cunning. All we have to oppose them is our brains and special geek insights.
“I realize that you’ve learned about my plan to create a new generation of ultra-geeks, especially talented individuals who could develop new strategies, new ways of looking at the world that would extend the GDM way of life to those benighted portions of the planet. If you just stop a moment and reflect, you’ll see that this program is a dire necessity, not anything I do out of personal aggrandizement.”
“But why the secrecy?” I said. “Surely you’d find plenty of parents willing to enroll their kids in such a program.”
“KannerMax is still highly experimental. We can’t predict whether those who undergo the treatment will emerge as geniuses or idiots. Results point to the first outcome, with a large percentage of certainty, but still…. If parents were to enroll their young children who can’t decide for themselves, and the lives of these children were ruined, the parents would recriminate themselves endlessly. Better for one man to shoulder that responsibility, I thought.”
PJ and I contemplated this for a while. Zarthar seemed sincere, and his dreams had merit. But there remained one obstacle to our endorsement of his plan.
“Dr. Hornbine—” I began.
“—committed suicide. A self-administered dose of potassium chloride stopped his heart. You can see him inject it here.”
Zarthar activated a monitor, and an obvious spy-ray recording, time-and-date-stamped with the GDM logo, showed Dr. Hornbine alone in his office. He tied off his arm with surgical tubing to raise a vein, picked up a hypodermic—
“No, stop it!” PJ yelled.
Zarthar flicked off the recording. PJ sobbed loudly for a time, and when she had finished, Zarthar spoke.
“After contacting me, your father was so despondent that KannerMax would not work on adults—that he himself would be deprived of its benefits—that he chose not to live in a world where he would soon be Darwinically superseded. And this is another reason for secrecy. So as not to instill a similar mass despondency in the population. Let everyone think that these bright new stars are random mutations. It’s more merciful that way.”
I had come here ready to bring Zarthar down in the media with a public shaming. But now I found myself ready to enlist in his cause. I looked to PJ, who raised her red-rimmed eyes to mine, and saw that she felt the same.
And then I knew that our children would rule the sevagram.
THE OMNIPLUS ULTRA!
Everyone wanted an Omniplus Ultra, and I was not immune to the urge. But of course they were almost impossible to purchase, for love nor money.
Since their debut nine months ago at the annual Consumer Electronics Show, over forty million units had been sold worldwide, exhausting the initial stockpile but barely sating a fraction of consumer demand. Now the Chinese factories that produced the Omniplus Ultra were tooling up as fast as possible to make more, but every desperate retailer could guarantee delivery no sooner than six months in the future. On eBay, each available Omniplus Ultra, with an MSRP of $749.99, was selling for upwards of $5,000.00.
OmninfoPotent Corporation, the enigmatic firm behind the Omniplus Ultra, had instantly leaped to the top of the NASDAQ exchange. Its reclusive founders, Pine Martin and Sheeda Waxwing, had vaulted instantly into the lower ranks of the Forbes 400. Sales of the device were being credited with almost singlehandedly jumpstarting the ailing economy.
The ad campaign for the Omniplus Ultra had already won six Clios. The catchy theme music by the Black Eyed Peas—“O U Kidz”—and the images of average people of every race, age, gender, nationality and creed utilizing their Omniplus Ultras to navigate a plethora of life situations ranging from sweetly comic to upliftingly tragic had generated their own fan clubs, YouTube mashups and punchlines for late-night comedians. Allusions to the Omniplus Ultra, as well as its invocation in metaphors, similes, rants, raves, jeremiads and paeans, filled water cooler conversations, the printed pages of the world’s magazines and newspapers, and blogs and online journals. The first instant book on the Omniplus Ultra—Uberpower!, by Thomas Friedman and Charles Stross—was due out any day.
I myself did not know anyone who actually owned an Omniplus Ultra, and I was dying to see and handle one. But even forty million units, distributed across seven billion people, meant that there was only one Omniplus Ultra for every 175 citizens. Of course, the gadgets were not seeded evenly around the planet, but concentrated in the hands of relatively wealthy and elite consumers and early adopters: circles I did not really travel in, given my job in a Staples warehouse, and a set of friends whose familiarity with the latest products of Silicon Valley generally extended no further than their TV remotes.