Love Minus Eighty (15 page)

“And by ‘we,’ you mean me,” Nathan said. He was sporting an easy smile, enjoying himself. Actually, they both looked like they were enjoying it. “You’re certainly aware of
your
weaknesses.”

“Yes, I am. I’m neurotic as hell,” Veronika said without missing a beat. “That’s why most of my relationships last a couple of months—it’s how long it takes me to start driving a guy crazy.” She rolled her wrist, flicked an accusing finger in Nathan’s direction. “
Your
relationships, on the other hand, tend to last a couple of weeks. You hop from woman to woman like they’re gelato flavors.” She looked at Rob as if she’d just remembered he was there. “Now
you
.”

Nathan laughed delightedly. “You’ve met Rob a grand total of, what, four times, but you’ve already got him pegged?”

Veronika stepped in front of Nathan, forcing him to stop. She pushed her face right up close to Nathan’s—close enough for a kiss. “You doubt me, do you?”

Nathan grinned, looked toward Rob. “Not at all. Let’s hear about Rob’s love life.”

They went on walking as Veronika offered her assessment of Rob. “Most of your relationships have lasted more than a year, and when you’re not seeing someone, you don’t see too many women a second time. If you’re not feeling it, you move on.”

Rob smiled, shrugged. “You got me.”

Veronika rolled her eyes toward the sky. “It’s so obvious that you’re disgustingly well adjusted. You’ll be trolling the listings one day, discover a woman who’s a point nine-two match, fall in love, and be completely faithful to her for the rest of your life. And you’ll do it all without a coach. Makes me sick.”

Rob held up his finger. “Ah, you missed there. I don’t use dating services.”

Dual cries of surprise lit the air.

“Don’t tell me, you’re a closet raw-lifer,” Veronika said.

“Not at all. I never took my system off, when I had one. I’m just old-fashioned when it comes to love.” It was the one realm where he had completely turned his back on the modern approach. Somehow it was important to him that he meet a woman in the course of his day-to-day life. “In the wild,” as Nathan put it. Technology felt like cheating.

Veronika smiled. She had a peculiar smile—her lips all but jumped from her teeth, forming a big
Sardonicus
grin. “I’m going to fix you up.”

“No, I don’t—”

Veronika waved away his protest. “I’m going to find the perfect woman for you, on the house. The honor of my trade is at stake.”

Rob wasn’t the least bit interested in meeting a woman at this particular juncture, but it seemed rude to refuse when Veronika was being so insistent. Hopefully she’d forget about it.

Up ahead, a bunch of screens that hadn’t been there a moment earlier caught Rob’s eye. He pointed. “What’s going on?” More and more were popping up between the Second Life Building and the Hilton.

The screens were swirling, trying to organize into a pattern, but having trouble. Rob searched the net for information as the three of them jogged out to get a better angle, but he couldn’t find anything. Maybe they didn’t have a permit to gather in such large numbers, so they hadn’t posted any public info that might tip off the police.

“Look at that—they’re spelling something,” Veronika said.

They were. The first word was
Save
. That much was clear. The rest was an indecipherable mess of swirling screens.

They watched as some of the letters formed. The third word was long, and started with a
B
.

“ ‘Save the bumpercrops,’ ‘Save the bicycles,’ ” Nathan said.

“ ‘Save the bicycles.’ Yeah. That’s probably it,” Veronika said.

An
r
and a
d
fell into place, and with a jolt, Rob got it. “ ‘Save the bridesicles.’ ”

They watched as the remaining letters formed.

“ ‘Save the bridesicles’?” Nathan said. “I didn’t realize they needed saving.”

The skywalks were filling with people coming out of towers to watch.

“I’ve always wondered why there are no groomsicles,” Nathan said.

Veronika clicked her tongue. “And you call yourself a dating coach? There were, early on, but the program folded from lack of business.”

“I didn’t know that,” Nathan said. “I wonder why it folded?”

“My guess is it’s the same reason there aren’t many hetero male prostitutes: women just aren’t into the sort of power and dominance that keeps the bridesicle program going.”

“They’re not?” Nathan asked, eyebrows raised.

A chant was rising up from the screens, intentionally low at first, slowly building.

“What about gay men? And gay women, for that matter?” Nathan asked.

Veronika shrugged. “Probably just too small a market. The straight program is relatively small as it is—a niche industry with a limited but extremely wealthy clientele. I also doubt gay women have any more interest in that sort of setup than straight women do.”

“What are they chanting?” Rob asked.

Veronika stopped talking. They listened, and soon it became clear: “Women aren’t salvage. Women aren’t salvage.”

“Not sure what that’s supposed to mean,” Rob said.

Rob spoke the phrase into his pathetic little handheld, feeling self-conscious as he manually sorted the results. The group was called Bridesicle Watch. He brought up their site, and was met by a familiar face. It was Lorelei’s stepmother, Sunali. He laughed out loud. “Oh, you’re shitting me.”

“What?” Nathan asked.

Rob externalized the image so Nathan and Veronika could see it as well. A crawling line of text beneath Sunali identified her as a founding member of Bridesicle Watch, and a bridesicle
herself. Nathan and Veronika were looking from the clip to Rob, trying to understand his reaction.

“Look at the name,” Rob said, highlighting it for them.

“Van Kampen. Is that Lorelei’s mother?” Veronika asked.

“Her stepmother,” Rob said. After considering whether he wanted to go into a long explanation, he reluctantly added, “And her great-grandmother.”

“Come again?” Nathan said.

Rob took a deep breath. “Sunali was a bridesicle for something like seventy years. In the meantime, her son, Kilo, became a trillionaire techie, but wouldn’t revive Sunali, because he hated her guts. Kilo’s
daughter
went through an ugly divorce, and to spite her and Kilo, her ex-husband revived Sunali. And married her.”

It wasn’t surprising that Lorelei was a little fucked up, when you laid out her family’s story in a nutshell like that. Not that it excused what she’d done.

More screens were joining the protest. Rob couldn’t believe Sunali was one of the people behind this. Not that it was out of character—she was as brash and blunt and tough as nails—but this was a big event; they’d convinced thousands of people to join an illegal protest that would probably cost each of them an instant two-hundred-dollar fine.

“So what are they protesting?” Nathan asked. “At least bridesicles have a fighting chance to be revived, which is more than you can say for most people in the minus eighty.”

Rob pulled up Bridesicle Watch’s goals and read: “ ‘We want the dead to be afforded the same rights as the living. We want marriage contracts that are nothing short of indentured servitude banned. We want Cryomed’s outrageous upcharges on revivification abolished so that reviving people is more affordable. Most importantly, once a human being is put in
the minus eighty, we demand regulations that make it the equivalent of murder to remove her.’ ”

Rob felt a chill as he read the last part. “They can remove people?”

“I read about that in a magazine somewhere,” Veronika said. “If a bridesicle doesn’t draw enough paying suitors, they pull her from the program.”

“But if they move them back to the main cryo facility, aren’t they paying just as much to maintain them?”

Veronika hesitated. “No, I mean the women who don’t have freezing insurance.”
Like Winter.
Veronika didn’t say it, but Rob could tell she was thinking it.

“I assumed you already knew that,” Veronika said as Rob searched deeper into the Bridesicle Watch site.

“
I
didn’t know that,” Nathan said.

Rob read aloud: “ ‘Cryomed charges a great deal for bridesicle visits because they want to create an atmosphere of exclusivity that will encourage men who can actually
afford
to revive bridesicles to visit. Loved ones crying over lost daughters and mothers is bad for business—’ ”

“They should stop referring to them as ‘bridesicles.’ It’s derogatory,” Veronika said.

“It would have taken a lot more screens to write ‘cryogenic dating center resident’ over the city,” Nathan said. “Plus, no one would have known who they were talking about.”

Rob was only half listening. He scrolled farther, until he found what he was looking for. “What’s less well advertised by Cryomed is their barbaric policy on what they refer to inside the organization as ‘salvage.’ ‘Salvage’ refers to women who don’t have cryogenic insurance. While only attractive women under forty are recruited into the bridesicle program from the main storage facility, Cryomed incurs very little
extra cost, because these women must be stored in the minus eighty in any case. Women without cryogenic insurance are selected for the program only if they’re especially young and beautiful. If a salvage case doesn’t prove profitable because not enough men are visiting, she’s ‘Released from the Program’—Cryomed’s euphemism for thawed and buried.”

Rob felt like he’d been punched in the stomach.

“We treat our stray dogs better than that,” Veronika said.

On the website, Sunali’s picture grew ghostly pale, her lips tinged blue, her hair and eyelashes frosted over. Her eyes welled with tears.

How long was it before they pulled the plug on an unprofitable salvage case? Decades? Years?
Months?
Rob was paying to visit her, so she was bringing in some income, but was it enough? Was anyone else visiting her?

Rob felt a hand on his shoulder, turned to find Nathan at his side. “Holy, holy, shit. I’m sorry, Cousin.”

“I have to find out how long she has,” Rob said.

Veronika worked her system, after a moment shook her head. “I can’t find any numbers.”

Rob could barely feel his feet. Despite the dizzying view and wide-open sky, he felt as if walls were closing in around him. She was going into the ground. If no one wanted her, she was going into the ground.

It was not solely guilt that caused that image to shake him to the bones. He knew her now.

“I have to go,” he said. “I’m sorry. I have to find out.” Before they could answer, he turned and jogged toward the elevator.

Sunali might know, or be able to find out. As he ran along the crosswalk, he tried to contact Sunali on his handheld. She
had a complete block in place—no visitors, no messages, no info on her current location.

He tried the public address for Bridesicle Watch, and was told Sunali was out of the office for a few days, on personal business. He left a message for her.

“
Shit.
” He wanted to punch something, or scream at someone. How could they simply bury someone? It wasn’t murder, because Winter was already dead, but surely it was
something
.

Lorelei would be able to get in touch with Sunali, but God, he didn’t want to contact Lorelei, especially about this. Maybe there was some other way to get the information. In the meantime, he’d keep trying Sunali.

“Hey Rob, this is Veronika.” Veronika paused the recording, looked at the ceiling. She wasn’t sure of her own motivation here. Was she doing this because (a) Rob was a thoughtful, genuine, remarkably principled guy she’d like to cultivate a friendship with, and (okay, unlikely) possibly more? Or because (b) if Nathan saw her hanging out with Rob, he might think there was something percolating between them and get jealous, even if he had caught Veronika kissing a virtual hunk from an interactive?

Option (b) reflected the thinking of a disturbed individual who should seek psychiatric attention. Of course Veronika was already receiving psychiatric attention on a weekly basis, so she was covered there. She closed her eyes, tried to listen for that tiny voice of truth anchored within the swirling mass of chattering and anxiety that passed for her mind.

The truth was, it was both, but it was sixty percent (a) and forty percent (b). Veronika decided she could live with that.

She checked the time and jumped off her sofa. She was supposed to meet Lycan at the Broadway High micro-T stop in three minutes. The message, checking on Winter’s status and simultaneously inviting Rob to coffee with her alone, would have to wait.

Veronika threw on her boots and bolted for the elevator. She really should invite Lycan on some outing with Nathan and Rob, rather than having it always be just the two of them. Lycan clearly saw their get-togethers as platonic, but what if he did develop a crush on her? She certainly wasn’t sending him signals that she
wasn’t
interested.

Taking the walk-up steps two at a time, she hit the sidewalk and glided off, threading past slower walkers.

Was she interested? No, not seriously. She needed a man she could spar with, a man with a sharp sense of humor. Maybe that was why she was reluctant to bring Lycan along on a jaunt with Nathan. Lycan wouldn’t fit in—he was too earnest, too serious.

Weaving slightly like a tall tree in a breeze, his hands dangling awkwardly at his sides, Lycan was waiting at what appeared to be the exact center of the station. He spotted her and smiled, raised his hand to wave, then inexplicably aborted the wave and let his hand drop.

“I thought you’d changed your mind.”

“Just got caught up in other things. Sorry.”

“So where are we going?” Lycan sounded excited.

Veronika paused for effect. “Into the wild.” On their last two outings they’d seen a concert, and visited the vertical gardens on Roosevelt Island—both beautiful things. It was time to revisit the other end of the spectrum.

Lycan frowned. “You mean, literally?”

“As far out as we can get.”

“
Why?
” Lycan sputtered. He seemed flabbergasted that anyone would voluntarily leave the city.