Emperor of Gondwanaland (50 page)

The Market had a healthy appetite and a moderate taste for luxury, and I ate more fancy meals than I usually indulge in. At the end of a week, I was having trouble bonding the stik-tite closures on my pants. Finally, however, we began to run out of things to talk about, and my deadline was imminent. Zulma was pressing me to see a first draft of the piece, so she could start thinking about pull-quotes. But I still hadn’t broached my second awkward question on an essential topic—a topic that Zulma had specifically enjoined me to tackle.

I decided at last to confront the Market over lunch on what would be the final day of our time together.

After the waiter had taken our orders, I asked, “Tell me, Adamina, do you ever think about sex?”

The Market did not respond immediately. And was that a faint blush suffusing her cheeks?

“Oh, I’m sorry, Glen. Some drudgester just posted news of a big water-strike on Mars and the NASDAQ went through the ceiling. What was that question again?”

The NASDAQ and Dow Jones functioned like the Market’s temperature or an EKG. I would guess that such a spike might represent a fever or a case of heart arrhythmia in a mere mortal. For the first time it occurred to me that the unverifiable demands her job made on the Market’s attention could also serve as a convenient excuse not to hear something. But I was not to be rebuffed.

“I asked about your feelings on sex. Specifically, how does it feel to be a virgin at your age, with no prospect of ever experiencing normal physical love?”

“What do you want me to say, Glen? That the situation doesn’t bother me? I told you I was physiologically human in all respects. But I simply can’t indulge in sex. The hormonal and neural and endocrinal turmoil that intercourse involves would wreak havoc with my wetware. My connection with the market—well, as the experts love to say, ‘Results would be unpredictable.’ So do I obsess about this lack or limitation in my life until I’m miserable? Or do I just accept it as part of who I am, and concentrate on what I do best and on all the rewards it brings to me and the rest of the world? It’s not so unusual, is it? After all, I wouldn’t be the first person to choose celibacy as an aid to a higher goal, would I?”

I felt like a louse, and decided to cut the thread short. “Fair enough, Adamina. I’m sure you realize that our readers would have felt cheated if we hadn’t addressed this aspect of your life.”

“I understand. But I’d prefer to talk about something else now, Glen.”

So we did.

As we were leaving the restaurant, a young woman rushed up to us. The stranger threw her arms about the Market and spontaneously planted a kiss on the Market’s cheek.

The Market shied back in a manner not typical of her usual generosity toward such impulsive displays, and I knew my insensitive probing must have disturbed her usual composure. I immediately took the Market back to her hotel.

Sometimes my job made me feel like shit.

But nothing in my professional experience had prepared me for what came next.

Now, of course, everyone knows that the woman who kissed the Market was a member of the Counterfeiters’ Army, whose nom de guerre was Penny Candy, and that her kiss was laced with a potent designer drug engineered to function on contact as a general emotional disinhibitor. Having failed to disrupt the Market through attacks on her cyberspace extensions, this group of malcontents had hit upon the strategy of sabotaging her implanted wetware.

And quite a successful strategy it proved to be.

A few hours later I knocked on the door to the Market’s hotel room, intending to say goodbye and to thank her for her cooperation as an interview subject. Like some timorous teenage suitor, I carried a box of Godiva chocolates and a small hair clip she had admired once while window-shopping with me.

What could you actually buy the woman who had everything?

Who was everything?

The door jerked open and I faced the Market. Her hair was in disarray, with tendrils plastered to her sweaty face. Her shirt was half unbuttoned, and she was barefoot. Her usual perfume was overlain with a musky reek.

She put the back of her hand up to her brow. “Oh, Glen, it’s you— What is it?”

“I just wanted to come in to say goodbye. But if this is a bad time—”

“Yes. I mean, no, it’s not. Come in.”

I took a seat, expecting the Market to do likewise. But she instead paced up and down the room, talking unceasingly, her words on the edge of sense and craziness.

I should have left then. I half suspected something bad was about to happen. If I had just stood up and exited, I would never have played such a pivotal role in the Orgasmic Meltdown of 2022.

But then I knew subconsciously that some other man surely would have taken my place.

And that was a prospect I couldn’t tolerate. Along with my infatuation with the Market, jealousy compelled me to stay.

And in the end, both Penny Candy and I were equally complicit in the Market’s downfall.

“Glen, I just don’t know how to feel about anything anymore. Suddenly everything looks different to me. This busy world, all the people eager for more, more, more— Have I wasted my life? What was I thinking? Who appointed me God? And all these numbers! They’re driving me insane! There must be more to life than getting and spending. Money, money, money! It’s in my bloodstream, Glen. It’s in my
blood
!. I’m burning up!”

“Adamina, calm down. I’m sorry if anything I said caused you to feel this way. Here, let me get you a glass of water.”

I stood up and moved toward a carafe on a sideboard.

Halfway there, the Market hurled herself at me.

I took the shock of her impact and remained standing. She hopped up and wrapped her arms and legs around me. Her mouth was all over my face and neck. I cupped her haunches and staggered backward. The edge of the couch caught me behind the knees and we tumbled onto it.

The rest, as they say, is history.

Our lovemaking left a precise trail of wreckage across the global economy. It was as if we were two giants fucking atop a village, crushing houses and barns, livestock and citizens heedlessly.

The first touch of our tongues sent sizable tremors through the market. Prices of individual stocks began to oscillate senselessly, without reference to actual values or trades. Around the world, investors started to panic. Buy and sell orders flooded into the Market, but were ignored or interpreted incorrectly by the Market’s sex-addled brain. But the worst was yet to come.

My hands on the Market’s breasts bankrupted hundreds of companies. Her thrashing trashed whole fiscal empires. When I went down on her, entire nations became paper paupers. When I broke her hymen and penetrated her as deeply as I could, Mars and the Moon fell entirely outside the solar system’s financial net.

When the Market and I climaxed together, her screams signaled the complete implosion of the planetary marketplace.

We lay panting amidst the smoldering ruins of the world’s commerce. I estimated we had about sixty seconds of postcoital solitude before the world began hammering on the door.

I overestimated the peaceful interlude by ten seconds.

Well, in short order the boffins rebooted the world’s economy from that morning’s backups, but repercussions from our sex remained. Approximately half a million people worldwide had committed suicide, mistaking the Market’s convulsions for actual tragic outcomes affecting their fortunes. A dozen small wars had begun, and millions of companies—in the hair-trigger fashion so typical of the modern failsafe economy—had canceled orders, dumped inventory, and redirected their marketing schemes in nonrecoverable ways.

After Adamina’s wetware implant was removed, experts cast about for another person to take on the burden of being the Market. But they could find no one else who possessed Adamina’s combination of skills and character and statelessness. So the market today stumbles along using Adamina’s partial software persona to run the show. It functions better than the twentieth-century market, but not as well as the Market. Filling the tank of your car costs about a dollar extra now. You don’t get dessert with your prix fixe meal. And the new model Palm Pilot doesn’t feature so much free software. But somehow we survive.

As for me, things are just getting to the point where I can show my face in public without provoking catcalls or sniggers or assaults or congratulatory slaps on the back from macho jerks. My career as a journalist was pretty much shot the moment I became a subject rather than a reporter. So I spend most of my time in my study, working on a novel. The subject matter’s not my experiences with the Market. I wanted to steer clear of autobiography. But the fact that I won’t spill any dirt and that my fifteen minutes of infamy is fading means that I haven’t had any bites from any publisher yet. But money’s not a problem.

Adamina had banked the majority of her pay as the Market.

And it’s all safely invested now in real estate.

So, here’s how writers get their ideas. One way, anyhow.

I was reading a comic strip by the great cartoonist known as Kaz. In it, he depicted hideous, post-apocalyptic, mutant children who had the ability to imbue inanimate objects with a kind of brief life force. It was a throwaway panel, hardly the central conceit of his story. But something about Kaz’s gleeful drawing of a run-away coffee mug ambulating on pencil legs lodged in my head and wouldn’t depart. At least not until I figured out a rationale for how such a sight could be encountered in a technologically plausible way.

Gardner Dozois picked up this tale for one of his year’s-best collections.

And the Dish Ran Away with the Spoon

Facing my rival that fateful afternoon, I finally realized I was truly about to lose my girlfriend, Cody. Lose her to a spontaneous assemblage of information.

The information was embedded in an Aeron chair mated with several other objects: a Cuisinart, an autonomous vacuum cleaner with numerous interchangeable attachments, an iPod, and a diagnostic and therapeutic home medical tool known as a LifeQuilt. As rivals go, this spontaneous assemblage—or “bleb,” as most people called such random accretions of intelligent appliances and artifacts, after the biological term for an extrusion of anomalous cells—wasn’t particularly handsome. Rather clunky-looking, in fact. But apparently it had been devoted to Cody from the day it was born, and I guessed women appreciated such attention. I had to confess that I had been ignoring Cody shamefully during the period when the Aeron bleb must’ve been forming and beginning to court her, and so I have no one to blame for the threat of losing her but myself. Still, it hurt. I mean, could I really come in second to a
bleb
? That would truly reek.

Especially after my past history with them …

I had feared some kind of trouble like this from the moment Cody had begun pressuring me to move in together. But Cody hadn’t been willing to listen to my sensible arguments against uniting our households.

“You don’t really love me,” she said, making that pitiful puppy-with-stepped-on-tail face that always knotted my stomach up, her blue eyes welling with wetness.

“That’s ridiculous, Cody. Of course I do!”

“Then why can’t we live together? We’d save tons of rent. Do you think I have some nasty habits that you don’t know about? You’ve seen me twenty-four seven lots of times, at my place and yours. It’s not like I’m hiding anything gross from you. I don’t drink straight out of the nutriceutical dispenser, or forget to reprogram the toilet after I’ve used it.”

“That’s all true. You’re easy to be with. Very neat and responsible.”

Cody shifted tactics, moving closer to me on the couch and wrapping her lithe limbs around me in ways impossible to ignore. “And wouldn’t it be nice to always have someone to sleep with at night? Not to be separated half the week or more? Huh? Wouldn’t it, Kaz?”

“Cody, please, stop! You know I can’t think when you do that.” I unpeeled Cody from the more sensitive parts of my anatomy. “Everything you’re saying is true. It’s just that—”

“And don’t forget, if we ditched my place and kept yours, I’d be much closer to work.”

Cody worked at the Senate Casino, dealing blackjack, but lived all the way out in Silver Spring, Maryland. I knew the commute was a bitch, even using the Hydrogen Express, because when I slept over at her place I had to cover the same distance myself. I, on the other hand, rented a nice little townhouse in Georgetown that I had moved into when rents bottomed out during the PIG Plague economic crash. It turned out I was one of a small minority naturally immune to the new Porcine Intestinal Grippe then rampant in D.C., and so could safely live in an infected building. Renter’s market, for sure. But over the last year or so, as the PIG immunization program had gotten under way, rents had begun creeping back up again. Cody was right about it being only sensible to pool our finances.

“I know you’d appreciate less road time, Cody, but you see—”

Now Cody glowered. “Are you dating someone else? You want to be free to play the field? Is that it?”

“No! That’s not it at all. I’m worried about—”