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Marc stared at the blank white walls, the bland grey carpet and the plain steel desk. The invisible safe in which he kept things like his mother's letter was a blindingly obvious black porthole in the white wall. What he had always experienced as a potted orchid was, in fact, a cleaning droid; it must only move around at night, he surmised. The universe was suddenly close, claustrophobic and oppressive. Ironically, it also seemed completely unreal.
Ugly! Marc suvoxed, but there was nothing to hear him. Nothing to repeat it back, nothing to acknowledge. Marc felt suddenly alone, gripped in the fear of all the universe that he was not. He started to suvox the power-on sequence -
“Did you say something?”
Marc looked into Commander Erickson's eyes. In a world stripped of everything constructed, a fellow human being was suddenly very real.
“No,” Marc said, his own voice thunderously present in his perception.
“You don't look much like your mother,” Roger stated.
“Why you here?”
Commander Erickson snorted through his nose, a silent chuckle and a derision all at once.
“Your mom made great mac'n'cheese.”
“My dad.”
“I see.”
“You... got back... two months ago.”
“Yes.”
“Why you here? Why now?”
Commander Erickson crossed his arms across his chest.
“Because I'm about to go out again.”
Well then, Marc thought. That will be a first. Erickson was far from the first DeepShip pilot to return from the long sleeps and stretched time that defined the few, furtive journeys beyond the Five Worlds. But he'd been gone the longest. And Marc was pretty sure none of them had gone out for another round. He suvoxed -
No, he didn't. Marc's knowledge was drearily, depressingly contained within his own meat. There would be no consulting the cloud at the moment, no verification of suspected facts, no consulting of the great oracle of humanity's collective consciousness. And this... throwback in front of him lived that way. Every day. By choice.
“Why no chip?” Marc accused Erickson, Goa's panicked vit burning in his memory like a rune from a forgotten civilization. It only further convinced him that the universe that birthed Roger Erickson had moved on to brighter and better things.
“I don't particularly want to be in your world. Why would I want your world in me?”
“So you are more than an angry monkey.”
Erickson gave Marc a quizzical look. Oh god I've just insulted him, Marc thought. Interpol had warned him that there was far more subtlety and nuance in Erickson's spoken language than popular memory concluded. Nonetheless, it hurt his brain just to contemplate forcing his mouth into the string of shapes necessary to communicate these thoughts to Erickson. Thoughts that would, of course, flit through mindspace faster than Roger could form them.
“Wait,” Marc said, and held up his hand. He closed his eyes. Better at least try.
Marc shaped the language in his head like an elementary student trying his hand at calligraphy for the first time. Commander Erickson waited patiently. Marc opened his eyes.
“With the chip the world is what we want it to be. Together. Instantly. All of us. Without it I feel alone. And stupid. You don't?”
Erickson's expression changed to thoughtful regard.
“I am alone. Opening my brain to you or anyone else won't change that.”
My god, he's like something out of The Iliad, Marc thought. Yet Marc's shared isolation made him relate to the man. Something out of the unthinkable past, yes, but something still undeniably human.
Marc held up his hand again. The sentences were tedious and exhausting to form but they were worth the effort. Erickson waited patiently.
“Why no fake? You cause a scene without.”
“Because this is the only place I'm visiting.”
Holy crap. The businessman in Marc calculated the value of that exclusivity. It might well be enough to propel Roger Rocket's from “has-been” to “icon” if spun right. Not selling to Yum was no longer a regret in Marc's heart of hearts. Alicia was going to be insufferable about it but then, wasn't she entitled to be? Buy her something nice, make much of her and let her preen. It made her feel good and making her feel good made Marc feel good. Allow Alicia her little victories; Marc was sitting on a coup.
It took him a few instants more to figure out the other aspects of Roger's admission. Had the man had come clear across known space to eat macaroni and cheese?
“Why?”
'“Nostalgia.”
Erickson shifted in his seat. Had Marc any experience reading faces without the full power of biometrics and artificial intelligence to assist him, he might have concluded that Roger was holding something back. Marc waited.
“And I want to see what my money is doing. Terrible name, by the way. I liked 'Jennifer's' much better.”
The man drove eighteen years and forty two trillion clicks to insult my business. Great. But what Marc would have expressed to any of his friends as a witty and stinging FreeFont icon bursting with semiotic subtext would most likely come out of his mouth as an inarticulate howl. Who's the throwback now, Gutierrez? So instead, Marc simply said
“Beagle Two.”
Roger's eyes narrowed. There's a trick to this, Marc thought. Either that or the power of the name was entirely contained in the meaning, not the context. Saying “Beagle Two” had much the same payload as vitting Beagle Two, namely if you didn't want to interact with The Five Worlds and if you didn't want to stay on Eden, you could have left Eden on the Beagle Two, state-of-the-art DeepShip bound for Sirius at point nine C. Why are you instead driving SkyArc Redux, conservative trading scow, back to a place you only like for the food?
“I have my reasons,” Erickson stated flatly, and let it hang. The statement carried the exact opposite amount of information as Marc's utterance. Five syllables of nothing. Spoken language sucks, Marc thought.
“Million dollars,” He replied presently. I can pay you back the money you gave my mother. With interest. But surely that's not why you're here. The unspent wealth of the DeepShip pilots was the stuff of legend. It was the product of a generous salary, compound interest and relativistic time dilation. The trick, of course, was to spend it. One reason for returning to The Five Worlds: you weren't stuck in an economy where everyone not native-borne was sitting atop multiple decades of accrued interest. Inflation's a bitch when everyone is wealthy but no one has any goods to sell.
“Keep it. I could buy Virgin if I wanted. The fact that I'd rather head back into the black than exercise the shares I've accumulated through splits and mergers probably has much to do with Virgin's acquiescence to my travel requests.”
Yes, quite. What would a hedge fund manager do with a great deal of capital and sixty years to work it? Not to mention the power of insider trading which, if his mother was to be believed, was the root of the Gutierrez fortune. Commander Erickson's investment had done more than kept Jennifer's afloat; it had provided for strategic down payments on key pieces of real estate. It was foolish to assume that a man who left a million dollar tip hadn't made other far more lucrative, far more tactical purchases.
“So?” Marc held his hands up in the grand gestures favored by the ancient mariner before him. So what the hell are you doing here, caveman? Marc looked around. The sudden awareness of his unaugmented surroundings made Marc inwardly recoil; the throwback was fascinating and all, but he much preferred his universe tailored to fit. And while chattering across the campfire with a Neanderthal was a fascinating experience Marc was thankful that it wasn't a lifestyle.
“I made a promise. This is as close as I can come to keeping it.”
Marc waited. Roger looked at him stonily. And as close as he's going to get to explaining it. Context, Marc thought, not to follow. Roger fiddled with the ring on his finger.
“So... are you going to serve me or not?” Roger's question was a clean break – whatever deep mysteries they might have explored were now locked firmly behind the age-old ritual of service. And that, of course, meant a whole new set of problems.
“Here.” Right here, in this office. It was a snap judgement. On the one hand, having Commander Roger Erickson, Flying Dutchman, mobbed by any 'razi vitter with a WorldPress account so that his every bite flooded the MindSpace of twelve billion instantly-connected celebrophiles would undoubtedly create a buzz massive enough to keep Roger Rocket's at the top of the drops for a week or more. On the other hand, having Roger Rocket's known as a place that would abuse a celebrity like Commander Erickson would drive away the very business he most wanted to attract.
“Well can I see a menu then?”
Marc sighed deeply. He was weary of the unduly-complicated world this creature occupied. He pointed to his eye and simply said
“No.”
No you can't, because our menu has existed solely in mindspace for lo these many decades, caveman, where any civilized soul in the Five Worlds can reference it instantly and in real time. No you can't, because a printed menu could never encapsulate the shifting tides and eddies of micropayments, composites exchanges and speculative currency flows upon which interplanetary commerce has relied since the Hang Seng Wars of '47. No you can't, because there's no point in advertising a special that was spoken for by Table Twelve 37 seconds ago. No you can't, because -
“Can I get some macaroni and cheese, then?”
“And bordeaux.” The words came out of his mouth like a litany before he even knew he was speaking them. How his mother had loved relaying the story. Over and over again. “Bordeaux” was more than a wine to him – it was a name to conjure with. Marc had never really considered that before.
“She told you about me, eh?” Roger smiled a little. Marc knew that Roger's temporal experience between “then” and “now” could be measured in weeks – for all Commander Erickson's exploits, his blood had been warmer than a frozen lake for a miniscule percentage of his travels. But Marc looked at the man and knew it was something more than that. And that something more than that was required of him.
Marc stood in front of Commander Roger Erickson and said, simply,
“We worship you.”
Marc turned quickly away from the man and walked through the door. He suvoxed power on as he pulled it shut behind him, never even turning to look for a reaction. Commander Roger Erickson was closer to a god than a person in Marc's world. The archaic sweat-lodge sense-dep experience of meeting him was, in its own bizarre way, a religious pilgrimage. Or at least as close to a religious pilgrimage as anyone could really make in an era when any thought could be vitted anytime to anyone anywhere in The Five Worlds. Best cut it short before he fell completely in thrall.
Roger Erickson might have rationalized that the stunned silence Marc faced upon emerging was due to the experience showing on Marc's face. Marc knew it had more to do with the formal, placeholder blankness his sensorium had been presenting to the frantic hammerings his coworkers, colleagues and cliquemates had been blasting at him. Erickson's appearance had popped in mindspace, despite Interpol's best efforts to the contrary, and much of the universe was now focused on Marc. And just as quickly as his sensorium booted out of sleep the screaming, scrambling vits flooded his consciousness, like the keening return of sound after an eternity in hard vacuum. The cacophony was as unbearable as it was silent.
“Out!” Marc yelled aloud, the syllable coming across to his underlings like the barbarian cry of a wounded mastodon. They recoiled as a single organism – one interconnected consciousness under assault by its own primitive past.
But they also shut the hell up.
2Work, he vitted to everyone on his payroll in every Roger Rocket's in every city. He shaped it into firm, authoritative sentiments; welcoming, understanding but also a little savage. As far as his circle was concerned he had communed with the spirits. If shaman they wanted shaman they would get.
His sensorium cleared of Roger Rocket's vits as quickly as it had clogged. WorldPress 'razi garbage replaced it even quicker. Roger suvoxed ignore and then an articulate, complicated string of commands to filter and defer the onslaught of communication that he had neither the time nor the inclination to deal with.
Deal, he vitted his publicist. Earn your keep, we're alive again. $$$MacCheese$$$, he vitted the chef. He gave the communique the weight and import of a papal bull. $$$Bordeaux?$$$, he vitted the sommelier. Marc knew very well that the intricacies of the meal he was about to serve would be endlessly debated, deconstructed, reconstructed, critiqued, copied and codified by every foodie, restauranteur, poseur and pauper with the vaguest interest in flavor or fame from Paris to Planitia Arcadia. Saad had maybe five minutes to calculate and cajole the most favorable co-branding and franchise terms possible from whomever amongst their beverage partners recognized the prestige this opportunity presented.
The meal was all Roger Rocket's. It would be an RR exclusive, made however they wanted, at whatever cost and profit margin they chose. Marc had utmost confidence in his team and knew they'd take full advantage with no additional prompting. The wine pairing, though – that was cobranding...
?”Erickson’s”? he vitted the publicist in fragrant, luxurious overtones. The Commander was right. Roger Rocket's was a terrible name. It was one of his father's last contributions to the business just prior to his parents' retirement to Columbia. And it was outdated. Only a pre-cog would bank on nostalgia in a universe where information was instantaneous and memory was photographic.
He'd never liked the name and he had the undivided attention of The Five Worlds should he want to change it. Only now did he realize how much he longed to do so.
Marc stood with his back to the office door and waited for the tasks of his minions to bear fruit. His parents' fortune had been made by one meal; his was about to be made by another. And nobody was going to interfere with that by pestering his pet savage.
Commander Erickson was going to enjoy the hell out of his meal. And Marc was going to make sure the world knew it... on Marc's terms.