Chicken Little (4 page)

"So a success for me would be a success for you?"

"You think I'm after money," she said. "You're still not getting it. Think about the jetpacks, Leon. Think about what that power means."

***

He meant to go home, but he didn't make it. His feet took him crosstown to the Ate offices, and he let himself in with his biometrics and his passphrase and watched the marvelous dappled lights go through their warm-up cycle and then bathe him with their wonderful, calming light. Then the breeze, and now it was a nighttime forest, mossier and heavier than in the day. Either someone had really gone balls-out on the product design, or there really was an indoor forest somewhere in the building growing under diurnal lights, there solely to supply soothing woodsy air to the agency's office. He decided that the forest was the more likely explanation.

He stood at Carmela's desk for a long time, then, gingerly, settled himself in her chair. It was plain and firm and well made, with just a little spring. Her funny little sculptural keyboard had keycaps that had worn smooth under her fingertips over the years, and there were shiny spots on the desk where her wrists had worn away the granite. He cradled his face in his palms, breathing in the nighttime forest air, and tried to make sense of the night.

The Living Room was nighttime dark, but it still felt glorious on his bare feet, and then, a moment later, on his bare chest and legs. He lay on his stomach in his underwear and tried to name the sensation on his nerve endings and decided that "anticipation" was the best word for it, the feeling you get just
beside
the skin that's being scratched on your back, the skin that's next in line for a good scratching. It was glorious.

How many people in the world would ever know what this felt like? Ate had licensed it out to a few select boutique hotels -- he'd checked into it after talking with Ria the first time -- but that was it. All told, there were less than 3,000 people in the world who'd ever felt this remarkable feeling. Out of eight billion. He tried to do the division in his head but kept losing the zeroes. It was a thousandth of a percent? A ten thousandth of a percent? No one on Anguilla would ever feel it: not the workers in the vertical slums, but also not the mere millionaires in the grand houses with their timeshare jets.

Something about that...

Then the breeze, and now it was a nighttime forest, mossier and heavier than in the day.

He wished he could talk to Ria some more. She scared him, but she also made him feel good. Like she was the guide he'd been searching for all his life. At this point, he would have settled for Brautigan. Anyone who could help him make sense of what felt like the biggest, scariest opportunity of his entire career.

He must have dozed, because the next thing he knew, the lights were flickering on and he was mostly naked, on the floor, staring up into Brautigan's face. He had a look of forced jollity, and he snapped his fingers a few times in front of Leon's face.

"Morning, sunshine!"

Leon looked for the ghostly clock that shimmered in the corner of each wall, a slightly darker patch of reactive paint that was just outside of conscious comprehension unless you really stared at it. 4:12 AM. He stifled a groan.

"What are you doing here?" he said, peering at Brautigan.

The man clacked his horsey teeth, assayed a chuckle. "Early bird. Worm."

Leon sat up, found his shirt, started buttoning it up. "Seriously, Brautigan."

"Seriously?" He sat down on the floor next to Leon, his big feet straight out ahead of him. His shoes had been designed by the same architect that did Leon's. Leon recognized the style. "Seriously." He scratched his chin. Suddenly, he slumped. "I'm shitting bricks, Leon. I am seriously shitting bricks."

"How did it go with your monster?"

Brautigan stared at the architect's shoes. There was an odd flare they did, just behind the toe, just on the way to the laces, that was really graceful. Leon thought it might be a standard distribution bell-curve. "My monster is..." He blew out air. "Uncooperative."

"Less cooperative than previously?"

Brautigan unlaced his shoes and peeled off his socks, scrunched his toes in the moss. His feet gave off a hot, trapped smell.

"What was he like on the other times you'd seen him?"

Brautigan tilted his head. "What do you mean?"

"He was uncooperative this time, what about the other times?"

Brautigan looked back down at his toes.

"You'd
never
seen him before this?"

"It was a risk," he said. "I thought I could convince him, face to face."

"But?"

"I bombed. It was -- it was the -- it was
everything
. The compound. The people. All of it. It was like a
city
, a
theme park
. They lived there, hundreds of them, and managed every tiny piece of his empire. Like Royal Urchins."

Leon puzzled over this. "Eunuchs?"

"Royal Eunuchs. They had this whole culture, and as I got closer and closer to him, I realized, shit, they could just
buy
Ate. They could destroy us. They could have us made illegal, put us all in jail. Or get me elected president. Anything."

"You were overawed."

"That's the right word. It wasn't a castle or anything, either. It was just a place, a well-built collection of buildings. In Westchester, you know? It had been a little town center once. They'd preserved everything good, built more on top of it. It all just...worked. You're still new here. Haven't noticed."

"What? That Ate is a disaster? I figured that out a long time ago. There's several dozen highly paid creative geniuses on the payroll here who haven't seen their desks in months. We could be a creative powerhouse. We're more like someone's vanity project."

"Brutal."

He wondered if he'd overstepped himself. Who cared?

"Brutal doesn't mean untrue. It's like, it's like the money that came into this place, it became autonomous, turned into a strategy for multiplying itself. A bad strategy. The money wants to sell something to a monster, but the money doesn't know what monsters want, so it's just, what, beating its brains out on the wall. One day, the money runs out and..."

"The money won't run out," Brautigan said. "Wrong. We'd have to spend at ten-ex what we're burning now to even approach the principal."

"OK," Leon said. "So it's immortal. That's better?"

Brautigan winced. "Look, it's not so crazy. There's an entire unserved market out there. No one's serving it. They're like, you know, like Communist countries. Planned economies. They need something, they just acquire the capacity. No market."

"Hey, bub, I know just what you need! You need a house to go with this doorknob!" To his own surprise, Leon discovered that he did a passable Daffy Duck. Brautigan blinked at him. Leon realized that the man was a little drunk. "Just something I heard the other day," he said. "I told the lady from my monster that we could provide the stuff that their corporate culture precluded. I was thinking of you know, how the samurai banned firearms. We can think and do the unthinkable and undo-able."

"Good line." He flopped onto his back. An inch of pale belly peeked between the top of his three-quarter-length culottes and the lower hem of his smart wraparound shirt. "The monster in the vat. Some skin, some meat. Tubes. Pinches of skin clamped between clear hard plastic squares, bathed in some kind of diagnostic light. No eyes, no top of the head where the eyes should be. Just a smooth mask. Eyes everywhere else. Ceiling. Floor. Walls. I looked away, couldn't make contact with them, found I was looking at something wet. Liver. I think."

"Yeesh. That's immortality, huh?"

"I'm there, 'A pleasure to meet you, an honor,' talking to the liver. The eyes never blinked. The monster gave a speech. 'You're a low-capital, high-risk, high-payoff longshot Mr Brautigan. I can keep dribbling sums to you so that you can go back to your wonder factory and try to come up with ways to surprise me. So there's no need to worry on that score.' And that was it. Couldn't think of anything to say. Didn't have time. Gone in a flash. Out the door. Limo. Nice babu to tell me how good it had been for the monster, how much he'd been looking forward to it." He struggled up onto his elbows. "How about you?"

Leon didn't want to talk about Ria with Brautigan. He shrugged. Brautigan got a mean, stung look on his face. "Don't be like that. Bro. Dude. Pal."

Leon shrugged again. Thing was, he
liked
Ria. Talking about her with Brautigan would be treating her like a... a
sales-target
. If he were talking with Carmela, he'd say, "I feel like she wants me to succeed. Like it would be a huge deal for everyone if I managed it. But I also feel like maybe she doesn't think I can." But to Brautigan, he merely shrugged, ignored the lizardy slit-eyed glare, stood, pulled on his pants, and went to his desk.

***

If you sat at your desk long enough at Ate, you'd eventually meet
everyone
who worked there. Carmela knew all, told all, and assured him that everyone touched base at least once a month. Some came in a couple times a week. They had plants on their desks and liked to personally see to their watering.

Leon took every single one of them to lunch. It wasn't easy -- in one case, he had to ask Carmela to send an Ate chauffeur to pick up the man's kids from school (it was a half-day) and bring them to the sitter's, just to clear the schedule. But the lunches themselves went very well. It turned out that the people at Ate were, to a one, incredibly interesting. Oh, they were all monsters, narcissistic, tantrum-prone geniuses, but once you got past that, you found yourself talking to people who were, at bottom, damned smart, with a whole lot going on. He met the woman who designed the moss in the Living Room. She was younger than him, and had been catapulted from a mediocre academic adventure at the Cooper Union into more wealth and freedom than she knew what to do with. She had a whole rolodex of people who wanted to sublicense the stuff, and she spent her days toying with them, seeing if they had any cool ideas she could incorporate into her next pitch to one of the lucky few who had the ear of a monster.

Like Leon. That's why they all met with him. He'd unwittingly stepped into one of the agency's top spots, thanks to Ria, one of the power-broker seats that everyone else yearned to fill. The fact that he had no idea how he'd got there or what to do with it didn't surprise anyone. To a one, his colleagues at Ate regarded everything to do with the vat monsters as an absolute, unknowable crapshoot, as predictable as a meteor strike.

No wonder they all stayed away from the office.

***

Ria met him in a different pair of jeans, these ones worn and patched at the knees. She had on a loose, flowing silk shirt that was frayed around the seams, and had tied her hair back with a kerchief that had faded to a non-color that was like the ancient New York sidewalk outside Ate's office. He felt the calluses on her hand when they shook.

"You look like you're ready to do some gardening," he said.

"My shift at the club," she said. "I'll be trimming the lime trees and tending the mint patch and the cucumber frames all afternoon." She smiled and stopped him with a gesture. She bent down and plucked a blade of greenery from the untidy trail-edge. They were in Central Park, in one of the places where it felt like a primeval forest instead of an artful garden razed and built in the middle of the city. She uncapped her water bottle and poured water over the herb -- it looked like a blade of grass -- rubbing it between her forefinger and thumb to scrub at it. Then she tore it in two and handed him one piece, held the other to her nose, then ate it, nibbling and making her nose wrinkle like a rabbit's. He followed suit. Lemon, delicious and tangy.

"Lemon grass," she said. "Terrible weed, of course. But doesn't it taste amazing?"

He nodded. The flavor lingered in his mouth.

"Especially when you consider what this is made of -- smoggy rain, dog piss, choked up air, and sunshine, and DNA. What a weird flavor to emerge from such a strange soup, don't you think?"

The thought made the flavor a little less delicious. He said so.

"I love the idea," she said. "Making great things from garbage."

"About the jetpacks," he said, for he'd been thinking.

"Yes?"

"Are you utopians of some kind? Making a better world?"

"By 'you,' you mean 'people who work for Buhle?'"

He shrugged.

"I'm a bit of a utopian, I'll admit. But that's not it. You know Henry Ford set up these work-camps in Brazil, 'Fordlandia,' and enforced a strict code of conduct on the rubber plantation workers? He outlawed the caipirinha and replaced it with Tom Collinses, because they were more civilized."

"And you're saying Buhle wouldn't do that?"

She waggled her head from side to side, thinking it over. "Probably not. Maybe, if I asked." She covered her mouth as though she'd made an indiscreet admission.

"Are --
were
-- you and he...?"

She laughed. "Never. It's purely cerebral. Do you know where his money came from?"

He gave her a look.

"OK, of course you do. But if all you've read is the official history, you'll think he was just a finance guy who made some good bets. It's nothing like it. He played a game against the market, tinkered with the confidence of other traders by taking crazy positions, all bluff, except when they weren't. No one could outsmart him. He could convince you that you were about to miss out on the deal of the century, or that you'd already missed it, or that you were about to walk off onto easy street. Sometimes, he convinced you of something that was real. More often, it was pure bluff, which you'd only find out after you'd done some trade with him that left him with more money than you'd see in your whole life, and you facepalming and cursing yourself for a sucker. When he started doing it to national banks, put a run on the dollar, broke the Fed, well, that's when we all knew that he was someone who was
special
, someone who could create signals that went right to your hindbrain without any critical interpretation."

"Scary."

"Oh yes. Very. In another era they'd have burned him for a witch or made him the man who cut out your heart with the obsidian knife. But here's the thing: he could never, ever kid
me
. Not once."

"And you're alive to tell the tale?"

"Oh, he likes it. His reality distortion field, it screws with his internal landscape. Makes it hard for him to figure out what he needs, what he wants, and what will make him miserable. I'm indispensable."

He had a sudden, terrible thought. He didn't say anything, but she must have seen it on his face.

"What is it? Tell me."

"How do I know that you're on the level about any of this? Maybe you're just jerking me around. Maybe it's all made up -- the jetpacks, everything." He swallowed. "I'm sorry. I don't know where that came from, but it popped into my head --"

"It's a fair question. Here's one that'll blow your mind, though: how do you know that I'm not on the level,
and
jerking you around?"

They changed the subject soon after, with uneasy laughter. They ended up on a park bench near the family of dancing bears, whom they watched avidly.

"They seem so
happy
," he said. "That's what gets me about them. Like dancing was the secret passion of every bear, and these three are the first to figure out how to make a life of it."