Excessica Anthology BOX SET Winter (30 page)

Suzies were our most
popular model. Her sisters were aimed at the largest single demographic group:
the stay-at-home, traditional guy. For the man who hates change, places family
first, is both patriotic and religious, values belonging to clubs and community
organizations, and never drinks anything "off brand" with his friends
after a day of hard work, Suzie is exactly it! We made her five-seven with pale
skin, bigger boobs, a trim figure, short straight blonde hair, and an
all-American face. She was a
belonger's
fantasy woman. She came with the
personality of an ever-cheerful, perky, obedient, stay-at-home princess/whore
that convinced men to go to their debt limit to own her. In a pleated pink
dress with white blouse and heels too high for any realistic household, she was
like a mannequin come to life. Unlike Patricia, who was a companion to be taken
anywhere, Suzie was one to be kept in the house and talked about in the bars.

Five present, one to go.

Abruptly though, Natalie
rapped on the table and declared, "I witness quorum present and now call
this meeting of the Simtronics Technica board to order."

That was a bad sign. It
looked like Guinevere was not going to so easily walk into my lair one more
time.

What had once started
out so innocently and optimistically now threatened to take us all down.

* * * *

Inventions are developed
by people who spend years sitting in lonely laboratories figuring out how to do
something no one else has ever done before. Money from these inventions,
however, is made by someone who can see the potential, put together the pieces,
and market the package. Inventors, even if they do get their company up and
running initially, still lose out to the professional managers in the end.

I'm a manager and I
intended to enjoy the good life, which is not spent in some dusty lab. Let
someone else do the work to make me rich.

I'm not as bad as I
sound. Many advancements occur when some clever person looks at independent
discoveries and realizes what is really going on. Seldom is the inventor the
one who actually assembles the pieces of his invention into something new,
useful, and saleable. You might say that while an inventor is someone who looks
for something that has never been done before, I look for inventors who don't
know what to do with what they have now developed. For my own life, I wanted
something quick, easy, and very rewarding. I saw that opportunity six years
ago.

It is hard to think of
Patricia as barely five years old, and the rest of the girls as three- and
four-year-olds, yet in one sense that is exactly what they are.

They are my children,
and they proved to be quick learners.

* * * *

"The first order of
business," Natalie intoned, "will be..."

"The first order of
business," I interrupted, "will be the presentation of proof of
proxies granting you provisional seats on this board."

It was a very weak
technical point on my part, but I had to go with every possible delay. If I
could force the disruption of this meeting on any technicality, I could at
least buy some additional time for countermeasures.

Each of the women pulled
from her handbag a memory chip and handed it down the table to me. They were
clearly prepared for this possibility and it was probably a waste of time on my
part, but I was going to go through all of the motions.

One-by-one I plugged
each chip into my data terminal and let it run the validation process. It would
take several minutes to identity check the recorded documents against the
shareholder database.

* * * *

Putting this company
together had been a stroke of luck, resulting from years of believing in and
looking for exactly such a situation.

There was this secret,
well-funded, start-up attempting to build a human-form robot, using all the
advances in microelectronics, imaging systems, actuators, power supplies, and
synthetics that our modern world had provided. Their off-the-shelf approach, in
a way, paralleled my own at a lower level, and I was interested in seeing how
well they'd done. I wasn't expecting too much.

I wrangled an invitation
through a couple of well-placed friends, and after signing the obligatory
non-disclosure agreements, was taken in and introduced to Eve.

Why do scientists have
no imagination when it comes to names?

Eve stood six-feet-six
inches tall, and except for her excessive height and one other thing, actually
looked remarkably like a robust, though attractive, nude woman. A real Valkyrie
down to the finest detail—a point I noted as counting in their favor.

A simple demonstration
had clearly been arranged ahead of time for me, because when I entered the
room,
she
swiveled her head to look at me, then turned and carefully
walked over to me.
She
extended her hand in a deliberate motion, while
speaking, "Hello, Mr. Delftmann. I am Eve and I am pleased to meet
you."

I took the proffered
hand cautiously in mine, and watched as it closed to a precisely predetermined
pressure point, before shaking and releasing.

"Hello, Eve. What's
shaking?" I queried her.

Eve froze for a moment,
then said in her measured voice replied, "I do not understand. Can you
please restate your request?"

One of the technicians
quickly came over.

"You used an
unfamiliar colloquial term. Eve only responds to known phrases." With that
explanation, he gently took her hand, saying, "Eve. Walk following
me," and led her back across the room.

Still, it was an impressive
demonstration, except for the fiber optic thread coming from the base of her
spine and running across the room to an MPP supercomputer the size of a file
cabinet, which certainly cost more than I'd made in my entire life.

Later I learned that Eve
weighed in at nearly 350 pounds. Not the lover I'd want to have.

The people in the lab
were effusive about how they expected to halve her weight within three years,
while shrinking the required support computer to the size of a microwave oven
with a wireless link to the body in the same time frame. They explained, in a
level of technical detail that lost me in the first thirty seconds, how their
unique, high-level Human Definition Language allowed them to easily add any new
human trait quickly and easily—like understanding my particular usage of
the English language, I presumed. They even felt that some day a man might
actually marry such a robot—in fifty years or so.

I was polite. I was
encouraging. I was totally wasting my time. Remarkable as this accomplishment
was, it wasn't going to sell to anybody, anytime soon. I said my goodbyes and I
was gone.

* * * *

The terminal chimed and
displayed its results. These five
women
had verified proxies
representing 42.17% of the outstanding stock. With just over 17% of the total
outstanding shares listed as No Preference or Authority Withheld, and poison
pills outlawed in the Shareholder Reform Act of 2019, they had the plurality of
the vote.

I'd also set the program
to check for any
illegal
ownership, naked short sales, or other
challengeable acts. Though they might be sitting here in my boardroom with
these votes backing up their right to be here, none of them so far, nor any of
the others we'd built and sold, had any legal rights—yet. In particular,
none could own stock in their own name. Again a slim chance, and again a
washout. The stock was all legally owned, and by the corporate rules in effect
in this state, a dog could sit on this board if it had these votes backing up
its right to be here. They'd done their homework well and for now I'd have to
deal with them, so best to put a good face on it.

"All verified. Just
a formality, of course, but given the... unusual.. .perhaps unprecedented... circumstances
here, we wouldn't want any questions or challenges to this board's actions,
would we?"

"Of course
not," Natalie replied neutrally. "Now may we proceed?"

She took my silence for
assent and continued a moment later.

"The first matter
before this board is the subject of ongoing litigation in the area of spare
parts..."

* * * *

Spare parts. That had
been a problem that had come along much later down the way. It was our first
red flag that we were losing control—and we completely misread it. When I
had put this corporation together, spare parts had been the furthest thing from
my mind.

The Eve demonstration
had been filed away in my mind and effectively forgotten. Forgotten, that is,
until an entirely chance encounter over lunch several weeks later.

I always made it a point
to eat at Solomon's at least once a week. It's said that more deals are made
here than anywhere else on the entire East Coast. If you are going to be
successful yourself, you start out by modeling other successful people. Many of
them ate here, so I did too. Usually alone, but not today.

An old college acquaintance
spotted me. Over lunch, he mentioned in passing meeting a man who was going to
revolutionize computing as we know it. Some guy who had figured out what
everybody else was doing wrong. I managed to get the name without appearing too
obvious. Once I had it, I thanked him by paying for both lunches, then left
quickly.

It was the longest of
long shots to be sure, but nothing else was popping right now. Long shots
always pay big, if they pay at all.

I tracked down a Dr.
Carter. He turned out to be a quiet, unassuming man whose sole interest seemed
to be nothing more than solving interesting problems. Carter believed an
enhanced neural network computing was the way of the future. His explanation
of, "Hey, this is how our own minds think," was pretty convincing. He
then started into an involved discussion on how physics and heat dissipation
problems set an upper absolute limit on all other forms of computing, but that
those limits wouldn't apply to neural networks in the same way. Don't ask me
why any of this stuff works. Six years later I still don't know, but I was
sold. That's my talent—knowing people without needing to know their
technology. Too bad that talent didn't extend to our second species in time.

Dr. Carter was
unshakable in his conviction that he could build, on a chip, a neural network
computer that would process data in parallel at a million times the rate of the
best conventional computer. To him, it was just a matter of how to build a
complex net and then train it afterwards. Yes, train. As he said, "You
don't program these things, you train them." He just knew he had the
answers to both of these challenges. His belief convinced me more than any
technical argument ever would.

Oh, one more very useful
stroke of luck as it turned out. Dr. Carter was also an amazingly good artist.

* * * *

"I place a motion
before this board," Natalie continued, showing how the skills that we'd
given her for office work served her now in such good stead. What proper
executive assistant would be of any use if they didn't know how to properly run
a meeting?

Natalie continued,
"That all present litigation, and other company actions, seeking to
restrict the supply of spare parts to outside parties immediately cease and
desist."

"Second the
motion," from Cheryl.

"Discussion?"

Things were moving
quickly—too quickly. I raised my hand.

"Dan Delftmann is
recognized by the chair."

I rose slowly in order
to compose my thoughts. Now I would find out how well this whole farce was
organized and what their agenda might be.

"I will keep my
remarks on this subject brief. The company's position on spare parts
availability to
unauthorized
outside parties is based on the following
concerns."

I started to move around
the table; a debate tactic that had always worked well for me in the past.
Motion creates emotion. Then I froze as I realized that this group was not
likely to be swayed by such theatrics. Old habits die hard, however, and I
resumed my march.

"First, untrained
repairmen may damage the quality of our product, resulting in a loss of company
reputation.

"Second, in
addition to this possible loss of reputation, because we cannot ensure quality
control, faulty repairs could result in substantial company liability if one of
our units, dare I say this so bluntly, malfunctions resulting in harm or injury
afterwards. Assessing true liability in such cases is extremely difficult and
often unfairly goes against the company with deep-pockets in litigation.

"Third, there will
be an overall loss of revenue to the company from lost repair work we would
otherwise perform. This will impair our ability to remain competitive in the
marketplace."

I was back to my seat
now, but still standing.

"In all cases, it
is to the company's disadvantage, with no apparent offsetting advantages, to
permit or encourage outside repair or modification of any of our products by
supplying spare parts to unauthorized channels."