Love Minus Eighty (27 page)

Lorelei’s face shifted through half a dozen emotions. She craned her head forward, as if about to expel something foul.

“Come on, sweetie,” Veronika said aloud to her empty living room. “Say it. You can do it.” She sent Lorelei a good, hard nudge:
Or are you happy staying a small-time player?

Lorelei cleared her throat. “I know we haven’t always gotten along, but I want you to know, I love you, Grandpa.”

Veronika raised her fist as Kilo and Sunali gaped at Lorelei. Veronika knew exactly what Lorelei was thinking at that moment: she was wishing her viewers were watching this. This was platinum.

“Why would you say something like that?” Kilo finally managed.

“Because I do. Sunali loves you, too; she just can’t say it. That’s why she’s at your side every time you go through this. She’s trying to show you she loves you.”

Nice! Very nice!
Veronika sent.

Sunali was gaping, openmouthed, at Lorelei.

“Well, it’s true, isn’t it?”

Lorelei reached out tentatively, as if gathering the courage to touch something that might bite, and stroked Kilo’s head once, then again, clearly not comfortable, but soldiering on.

Kilo was trembling, appeared to be holding his breath. With a squeal, he finally inhaled. Lorelei was looking at Sunali. She opened her eyes wide for an instant, urging Sunali to say something.

“I don’t like to see you suffer like this,” Sunali said tightly. “I know what it feels like to die. Doing it over and over…” She shook her head. “It’s got to be hell—”

“It
is
hell,” Kilo moaned.

“Then why don’t you let it go? You’ve squeezed everything you can out of this life. Rest now.”

Kilo was trembling, his lips drawn back from his expensive white teeth in a snarl. “You’re just saying that because you want my money—”

“
I know I’m not getting your money.
” Sunali leaned forward, her triceps tensing as if she was about to shove Kilo’s head under the surface of the goo. Then she relaxed.

“That’s right,” Kilo said. The filmy, drugged quality left his eyes for a moment, and he added, “I left it to my favorite charity.”

“Tell me this much,” Sunali said, leaning right over Kilo, her face six inches from his. “When
do
you plan to stop the revival order? When you get one lousy day before you die again? When the doctors can only squeeze out an hour each time? When will it be time?”

“It’ll never be time,” Kilo whispered.

Sunali leaned back into her seat, nodded. “Fair enough.”

They glared at each other. Kilo struggled; his eyes kept crossing, his breathing growing wetter, more labored. He looked like a giant wrinkled salamander. Veronika was so caught up in the moment she was barely breathing herself.

They stood, and sat, silently, until Kilo stopped breathing. No one shed any tears.

When the techs came in to prepare him for revival, Sunali stood, looked from Lorelei to Nathan and said, somewhat sarcastically, “Well, thanks for coming.”

As she paced from the bedroom to the living room and back, the walls kept shifting to expand the room she was occupying. She should stop it, but the back-and-forth of the wall gave the illusion that her apartment was breathing, and somehow that was both cool and soothing.

The guilt was eating a hole in her. Every time she saw Nathan, she came close to blurting a confession, but if she did she’d lose her license for violating client privacy. On top of that, she was having so much fun, and that was probably why she felt so guilty. It felt like fun at Nathan’s expense.

The thing was, she’d done some genuine good while coaching Lorelei at her grandfather’s deathbed. She’d brought three people closer together, had helped heal some very deep wounds. She could be proud of that. Maybe she should pursue it further; if she genuinely focused her efforts on helping Lorelei, she could feel good about what she was doing, instead of feeling sleazy. Lorelei didn’t need a dating coach, but her
other relationships were a mess—especially her relationship with Sunali.

She pinged Lorelei.

Almost immediately, Lorelei appeared via screen.

“We need to talk,” Veronika said.

“So talk,” Lorelei said.

“IP.” This issue was too personal to discuss with a bloody screen.

Lorelei sighed, as if it was a huge inconvenience for her to haul her scrawny ass over to Veronika’s place.

“We need to strategize. I’ve got some ideas to increase your viewership,” Veronika goaded.

“Fine, fine.” Lorelei’s screen vanished.

Assuming Lorelei wasn’t going to primp much before leaving her apartment, Veronika figured she’d be there in eleven minutes. She unwrapped her sandwich and popped in on Rob. He was working his awful, soul-grinding job.

“Any word on Winter?”

Rob shook his head as he carried on working. “I’m visiting her in a couple of hours, so I’ll get an update then. Every time I withdraw nine thousand from my account, it grows back like magic.”

“You’re going in a couple of hours? That’s the middle of the night. When do you sleep?”

Rob lifted his head, gave her a flat, expressionless stare. “I haven’t slept in two years.” He returned to his work, plucking parts out of what might have been an antique housecleaning drone.

“Let’s hope it’s almost over. Big hug, sweetie.” After considering for a sec, she added, “Love you.”

“Love you, too,” Rob said.

Even though it was a friendship “love-you,” it warmed her to hear Rob say it. If she could find five, maybe six friends she
cared enough about to exchange
I love you
’s, it might nourish her enough that she could live without a true love’s
I love you
’s. Maybe.

The apartment alerted her to a visitor. Veronika waved the door open and Lorelei sauntered in. When her virtual entourage didn’t follow, Lorelei gestured toward the door. “Can you lift your block?”

Veronika shook her head as the door folded closed on Lorelei’s hordes. “Just the two of us.”

Lorelei turned her face to the ceiling and sighed heavily. “What is it with you people and secrecy? If you lived your lives in the open, you’d all sleep easier at night.”

“I’m sure you sleep the sleep of angels,” Veronika said, then offered Lorelei a drink. Lorelei asked for a Thunder Road, and they settled in the living room while Veronika’s drone fetched the drinks.

“So here I am, all by my onesies.” Lorelei turned up her palms, raised her shoulders toward her ears.

“I have a suggestion for you. I think you focus too much of your time and energy on your romantic life and friendships and not enough on family ties. If your life was more well rounded, people would watch for longer, and you’d broaden your appeal outside a narrow demographic.”

Lorelei sipped her Thunder Road, her lips forming a plump O. “My family life? What, like I should spend more time with Sunali, talking about the plight of the frozen?”

This wasn’t going to be easy. “All I’m saying is, people respond to familial relationships. They go right to the brain stem in a way friendships and boyfriends don’t. You’ll build your viewer base if you round out your life.”

Lorelei curled her legs under her, pressed her fist against her chin. “Sunali
hates
me. And I hate her.”

“That’s perfect. Maximum drama. Now you slowly untangle that messed-up relationship. Conflict resolution is at the core of all good drama; find a way to reconcile, slowly but surely, and viewers will be addicted.”

Lorelei rubbed her finger across her lips, saying nothing. The wheels were clearly turning, as much as the wheels turned in Lorelei’s head.

“What does your puppet master think of the idea?”

Lorelei huffed. “You know, I’m getting pretty sick of your condescending attitude. Pathetic as I think it is, I don’t make snarky comments about your lifestyle. Who made you the arbiter of what constitutes an authentic life?”

Veronika had to engage all of her willpower to keep from rolling her eyes. “Arbiter? Well, Parsons, let’s see—”

Lorelei stood, peeled her system off, right in front of Veronika. Naked from the waist up, she held her system at arm’s length between two fingers, then opened her fingers and let the system slip to the floor. Smoothing her tiny skirt, she sat down again. “What’s more real: what
you
think you are, or what external, objective reality tells you you are?”

It was difficult to take Lorelei seriously, with her small, pointy breasts right there in the open, but at least Veronika knew who she was talking to. Unless she’d memorized the question, Lorelei’s verbal acuity was greater than Veronika had assumed. Maybe she usually talked dumb by choice, rather than because she was dumb.

“If you think you have a great sense of humor, but no one ever laughs, then you’re not funny, you’re delusional,” Lorelei went on. “I choose to see everything clearly, including myself, and the way to do that is to see myself reflected in others’ eyes.”

Veronika waited to make sure she had finished. “I’m not criticizing your decision to lead a public life.” She was criticizing
her reliance on Parsons, which made it impossible for others to see who she really was, but telling Lorelei that wouldn’t be constructive. “So, what does Parsons think of my suggestion?”

Lorelei retrieved her system, slid it back on. She cleared her throat. “He agrees it might be an interesting direction to go in.”

All this time, she’d been speaking to Parsons as much as to Lorelei. Maybe more. It was strange to have that confirmed.

“It won’t work, though,” Lorelei said. “There’s too much bad blood between me and Sunali. Even if I could stand being nice to her, she’s not going to respond.”

Veronika looked at the ceiling, seeking patience. Was she really going to have to take Lorelei and Parsons by the hand and walk them through this? Probably. “Can you think of some way? Is there something you could do that might cause Sunali to have a change of heart?”

Lorelei gave her a blank look.

“Maybe if you took an interest in some
issue
that mattered to her?”

Lorelei frowned. “You’re saying I should take an interest in her bridesicle shit?” She thought about it, or, more likely, talked it over with Parsons. “She’d like that, wouldn’t she?”

“What if you volunteered to work with her on the cause?” Veronika suggested.

Lorelei subvocalized something to Parsons. Veronika sighed, willing herself to be patient.

“That might be interesting. Getting into people’s faces, shaking my fist. That could work. My viewers might like that.”

It was a cause Veronika was beginning to believe in, so recruiting someone to it was also a good thing. Although Veronika doubted Lorelei would prove a particularly valuable addition to the cause.

Rob stood for a moment, pressed his palms against his kidneys, and leaned back to stretch his aching muscles. The light was beginning to fade, which meant his ten-hour shift was almost over.

Straddling his little workbench, the seat rose to support him, and he went back to gutting some sort of electronic game. Once in a while Rob came across a piece of salvage that he would have liked to examine more carefully, like this game with illustrations of old-time winged jets on the sides. Most of the things that would have provided a real glimpse into the people from the past, such as photos, food packaging, artwork, were culled earlier in the process by the drones. One day he’d love to be assigned to work on the hill, as they called it. Any different assignment would be a welcome change; he was tired of looking at the insides of old computers.

“Hey, Rob.” Rob turned and spotted Bryony repairing a sorting bin that had lost a wheel. She was squatting, looking
at him through the curved spokes of one of the intact wheels. “You interested in doing some bugs after? Me and Kiki are going down to the tunnels.”

“Can’t, have to meet someone. But thanks, another time.”

Bryony nodded as if it didn’t matter to her one way or another. He appreciated the invitation, and he wanted to fit in and make more friends here, but it was hard shifting from the clubs of High Town to sitting in a dirty tunnel sunk into a mountain of hundred-year-old crap, getting high on cheap bugs.

Tonight he couldn’t have gone in any case, because he was going to visit Winter. In just a few hours he would find out if Red had proposed. If he had, Rob would soon get to meet Winter face-to-face, maybe sit and have coffee. He might even get to hug her, to feel her newly warm body against his for a few fleeting seconds. The thought of that sent a thrill through him.

He tried to banish the longing that it be more than a hug. Even if getting revived wouldn’t include Winter being bound by an ironclad marriage contract, there was another reason he should forget about any possibility of their being anything more than friends. He had run her over. Run. Her. Over. As the months and years stretched out, it was becoming easier to overlook that aspect of the story.

Rob spotted Stellan, his replacement, winding between drones. “Your ass is free,” Stellan said, pulling on his hood and fixing the breather in place.

Rob resisted the urge to sprint back to the dressing room. As soon as he was out of his protective suit and heading toward the gate, he entered a reservation to visit Winter.

He stopped walking, carefully reread the message on his handheld.

No longer available.

What did that mean, “no longer available”? Had Red revived her, or had she been pulled from the program and buried? He didn’t know whether to shout for joy or sink to his knees. As second-shift workers brushed past, Rob put in a call to the dating center’s customer service, was connected with an AI operator.

“Yes, I was arranging to visit a woman named Winter West, and it says she’s no longer available.” He was breathing so hard he could barely speak.

“That’s correct,” the unnaturally mellifluous voice on the line said.

“Can you tell me what that means?”

“It means she’s no longer at Cryomed’s cryogenic dating facility.”

“Yes, I understand that.” A hammer-faced woman looked at him as she passed. He was shouting, he realized. He took a breath, lowered his voice. “I understand that. But was she revived, or released from the program?”