Counting Heads Read online

  The box’s ready light blinked on.

  “THE BITCH! HOW dare she?”

  “Actually, it makes perfect sense.”

  “Shut up, Henry.”

  Henry was safe as long as he remained a netless stand-alone. He couldn’t even answer the phone for me. He was a prisoner; we were both prisoners in my Chicago studio. Eleanor’s security chief had breached Henry’s shell millions of times, near continuously since the moment I met her at my friend’s reception. Henry’s shell was an off-the-shelf module I had purchased years ago for protection against garden-variety espionage. I had rarely updated it, and it was long obsolete.

  “Her Cabinet is a diplomat-class unit,” Henry argued. “What did you expect?”

  “I don’t want to hear it, Henry.”

  At first the invasion was so subtle and Henry so unskilled that he was unaware of the foreign presence inside his shell. When he became aware, he mounted the standard defense, but Eleanor’s system flowed through its gates like water. So he set about studying each breach, learning and building ever more effective countermeasures. As the attacks escalated to epic proportions, Henry’s self-defense consumed his full attention.

  “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “I did, Sam, several times.”

  “That’s not true. I don’t remember you telling me once.”

  “You have been somewhat distracted lately.”

  The question was, how much damage had been done, not to me, but to Henry. I doubted that Eleanor was after my personal records, and there was little in my past anyone could use to harm me. I was an artist, after all, not a judge. But if Eleanor had damaged Henry, that would be the end. I had owned Henry since the days of keyboards and pointing devices. He was the repository of my life’s work and memory. I could not replace him. He did my bookkeeping, sure, and my taxes, appointments, and legal tasks. He monitored my health, my domiciles, my investments, etc., etc. These functions I could replace. It was his personality bud that was irreplaceable. I had been growing it for eighty years. It was a unique design tool that amplified my mind perfectly. I depended on it, on Henry, to read my mind, to engineer the materials I used, and to test my ideas against the tastes of world culture. We worked as a team. I had taught him to play the devil’s advocate. He provided me feedback and insight.

  “Eleanor’s Cabinet was interested neither in your records nor in my personality bud. It simply needed to ascertain, on a continuing basis, that I was still Henry and that no one else had corrupted me.”

  “Couldn’t it just ask?”

  “If I were corrupted, do you think I would tell?”

  “Are you corrupted?”

  “Of course not.”

  I cringed at the thought of installing Henry back into my body not knowing if he were someone’s dirty little spy.

  “Henry, you have a complete backup here, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “One that predates my first encounter with Eleanor?”

  “Yes.”

  “And its seal is intact?”

  “Yes.”

  Of course, if Henry was corrupted and told me the seal was intact, how would I know otherwise? I didn’t know seals from sea lions.

  “You can use any houseputer,” he said, reading me as he always had, “to verify the seal, and to delete and reset me. It would take a couple of hours, but I suggest you don’t.”

  “Oh yeah? Why not?”

  “Because we would lose all I’ve learned since we met Eleanor. I was getting good, Sam. Their breaches were taking exponentially longer to achieve.”

  “And meanwhile you couldn’t function.”

  “So buy me more paste. A lot more paste. We have the money. Think about it. Eleanor’s system is aggressive and dominant. It’s always in crisis mode. But it’s the good guys. If I can learn how to lock it out, I’ll be better prepared to meet the bad guys who’ll soon be trying to get to Eleanor through you.”

  “Good, Henry, except for one essential fact. There is no Eleanor and me. I’ve dropped her.”

  “I see. Tell me, Sam, how many women have you been with since I’ve known you?”

  “How the hell should I know?”

  “Well, I do. In the 82.6 years I’ve associated with you, you’ve been with 343 women. Your archives reveal at least a hundred more before I was installed.”

  “If you say so, Henry.”

  “You doubt my numbers? Do you want me to list them by name?”

  “No. What good are names I’ve forgotten, Henry?” More and more, my own life seemed like a Russian novel—too many characters, not enough car chases.

  “My point exactly, no one has so affected you as Eleanor Starke. Your bio-response has gone off the scale.”

  “This is more than a case of biology,” I said, but I knew he was right, or nearly so. The only other woman who had had such an effect on me was my first love, Jean Scholero, who was a century and a quarter gone. All the rest were gentle waves in a warm feminine sea. But how to explain this to Henry?

  Until I could figure out how to verify Henry, I decided to isolate him in his container. I told the houseputer to display “Do Not Disturb—Artist at Work” and take messages. I did, in fact, attempt to work, but was too busy obsessing. I mostly watched the nets or paced the studio arguing with Henry. In the evenings I had Henry load a belt—I kept a few old Henry interfaces in a drawer—with enough functionality so that I could go out and drink. I avoided my usual haunts and all familiar faces.

  In the first message she recorded on my houseputer, El said, “Good for you. Call when you’re done.” In the second she said, “It’s been over a week—must be a masterpiece.” In the third, “Tell me what’s wrong. You’re entirely too sensitive. This is ridiculous. Grow up!”

  I tried to tell her what was wrong. I recorded a message for her, a long seething litany of accusations, but was too angry to post it.

  In her fourth message, El said, “It’s about Henry, isn’t it? My security chief told me all about it. Don’t worry; they frisk everyone I meet, nothing personal, and they don’t rewrite anything. It’s their standing orders, and it’s meant to protect me. You have no idea, Sam, how many times I’d be dead if it weren’t for my protocol.

  “Anyway, I’ve told them to lay off Henry. They said they could install a dead-man trigger in Henry’s personality bud, something I do for my own systems, but I said no. Complete hands off. All right? Is that enough?

  “Call me, Sam. Let me know you’re all right at least. I—miss you.”

  In the meantime I could find no trace of a foreign personality in Henry. I knew my Henry just as well as he knew me. His thought process was like a familiar tune to me, and at no time during our weeks of incessant conversation did he strike a false note.

  El sent her fifth message from bed where she lay between iridescent sheets (of my design). She said nothing. She looked directly at the holocam, propped herself up, letting the sheet fall to her waist, and brushed her hair. Her chest above her breasts, as I had discovered, was spangled with freckles.

  Bouquets of real flowers began to arrive at my door with notes that said simply, “Call.”

  The best-selling memoirs that had stymied my Buffalo houseputer arrived on datapin with the section about Eleanor extant. The author’s simulacrum, seated in a cane-backed chair and reading from a leather-bound book, described Eleanor in his soft southern drawl as a “perfumed vulvoid whose bush has somehow migrated to her forehead, a lithe misander with the emotional range of a homcom slug.” I asked the sim to stop and elaborate. He flashed me his trademark smirk and said, “In her relations with men, Eleanor Starke is not interested in emotional communion. She prefers entertainment of a more childish variety, like poking frogs with a stick. She is a woman of brittle patience with no time for fluffy feelings or fuzzy thoughts. Except in bed. In bed Eleanor Starke likes her men half-baked. The gooier the better. That’s why she likes to toy with artists. The higher an opinion a man has of himself, the more painfu
lly sensitive he is, the more polished his hubris, the more fun it is to poke him open and see all the runny mess inside.”

  What he said enraged me, regardless of how well it hit the mark. “You don’t know what you’re talking about,” I yelled at the sim. “El’s not like that at all. You obviously never knew her. She’s no saint, but she has a heart, and affection and—to hell with you!”

  “Thank you for your comments,” the author said. “May we quote you? Be on the lookout for our companion volume to this memoir installment, The Skewered Lash Back, due out in September from Pageturner Productions.”

  I had been around for 147 years and was happy with my life. I had successfully navigated several careers and amassed a fortune that even Henry had trouble charting. Still, I jumped out of bed each day with a renewed sense of interest and adventure. I would have been pleased to live the next 147 years in exactly the same manner. And yet, when El sent her final message—a glum El sitting in the Museum of Art and Science, a wall-sized early canvas of mine behind her—I knew my life to be ashes and dirt.

  SEVENTY-TWO THICK CANDLES in man-sized golden stands flanked me like sentries as I waited and fretted in my tuxedo at the altar rail. The guttering beeswax flames filled the cathedral with the fragrance of clover. LOOK proclaimed our wedding to be the “Wedding of the Hour” and it was streamed live on the Wedding Channel. A castrati choir, hidden in the gloom beneath the giant bronze pipes of the organ, challenged all to submit to the mercy of Goodness. Their sweet soprano threaded through miles of stone vaults, collecting odd echoes and unexpected harmony. More than a million subscribers fidgeted in wooden pews that stretched, it seemed, to the horizon. And each subscriber occupied an aisle seat at the front.

  In the network’s New York studio, El and I, wearing keyblue body suits, stood at opposite ends of a bare sound stage. On cue, El began the slow march toward me. In Wawel Castle overlooking ancient Cracow, however, she marched through giant cathedral doors, her ivory linen gown awash in morning light. The organ boomed Mendelssohn’s march, amplified by acres of marble. Two girls strewed rose petals at Eleanor’s feet, while another tended her long train. A gauzy veil hid El’s face from all eyes except mine. No man walked at her side; a two-hundred-year-old bride, Eleanor usually preferred to give herself away.

  By the time of the wedding, El and I had been living together for six months. We had moved in together partly out of curiosity, partly out of desperation. Whatever was going on between us was mounting. It was spreading and sinking roots. We talked about it, always “it,” not sure what else to call it. It complicated our lives, especially El’s. We agreed we’d be better off without it and tried to remember, from experiences in our youth, how to fix the feelings we were feeling. The one sure cure, guaranteed to make a man and a woman wish they’d never met, was for them to co-habitate. If there was one thing humankind had learned in four million years of evolution, it was that man and woman were not meant to live in the same hut.

  So, we co-purchased a town house in Connecticut. Something small but comfortable. It wasn’t difficult at all for us to stake out our separate bedrooms and work spaces, but decorating the common areas required diplomacy and compromise. Once in and settled, we agreed to open our house on Wednesday evenings to begin the arduous task of melding our friends and colleagues.

  We came to prefer her bedroom for watching the nets and mine for making love. When it came to sleeping, I was a snuggler, but she preferred to sleep alone. Good, we thought, here was a crack we could wedge open. We surveyed each other for more incompatibilities. She was a late night person, while I rose early. She liked to travel and go out a lot, while I was a stay-at-homer. She loved classical music; I could stand only neu-noise. She worked nonstop; I worked in fits and starts. She was never generous to strangers; I simply could not be practical in personal matters. She could get snippy; I could be silent for a long, long time. She had a maniacal need for total organization in all things, while for me a cluttered mind was a fruitful mind. Alas, our differences, far from estranging us, seemed only to endear us to each other.

  DESPITE EL’S PENCHANT for privacy, our affair and wedding had caused our celebrity futures to spike. The network logged 1.325 million billable hours of wedding viewership, and the guest book collected some pretty important sigs. Confetti rained down for weeks. We planned a five-day honeymoon on the Moon.

  Eleanor booked three seats on the Moon shuttle, not the best portent for a successful honeymoon. She assigned me the window seat, took the aisle seat for herself, and into the seat between us she projected her Cabinet members one after another. All during the flight, she took their reports, issued orders, and strategized, not even pausing for liftoff or docking. Her Cabinet consisted of about a dozen officials, and except for her security chief, they were all women. They all appeared older than El’s apparent age, and they all bore a distinct Starke family resemblance: reddish blond hair, slender build, the eyebrows. If they were real people, rather than the personas of El’s valet system, they could have been her sisters and brother, and she the spoiled baby of the brood.

  Two Cabinet officers especially impressed me, the attorney general, a smartly dressed woman in her forties with a pinched expression, and the chief of staff, who was the eldest of the lot. This chief of staff coordinated the activities of the rest and was second in command after El. She looked and spoke remarkably like El. She was not El’s eldest sister, but El, herself, at seventy. She intrigued me. She was my Eleanor stripped of meat, a stick figure of angles and knobs, her eyebrows gone colorless and thin. But her eyes had the same predatory glint as El’s. All in all, it was no wonder that Henry, a mere voice in my head, admired El’s Cabinet.

  The Pan Am flight attendants aboard the shuttle were all penelopes, one of the newly introduced iterant types who were gengineered for work in microgravity. That is, they had stubby legs with grasping feet. They floated gracefully about the cabin in smartly tailored flight suits, attending to passenger needs. The one assigned to our row—Ginnie, according to her name patch—treated Eleanor’s Cabinet members as though they were real flesh and blood. I wondered if I shouldn’t follow her example.

  “Those penelopes are Applied People, right?” El asked her chief of staff. “Or are they McPeople?”

  “Right the first time,” her chief of staff replied.

  “Do we own any shares in Applied People?”

  “No, AP isn’t publicly traded.”

  “Who owns it?”

  “Sole proprietor—Zoranna Albleitor.”

  “Hmm,” El said. “Add it to the watch list.”

  SO THE FLIGHT, so the honeymoon. Within hours of checking into the Sweetheart Suite of the Lunar Princess, Eleanor was conducting business meetings of a dozen or more holofied attendees. She apologized, but claimed there was nothing she could do to lighten her workload. I was left to take bounding strolls through the warren of interconnected habs by myself. I didn’t mind. I treasured my solitude.

  On the third day of our so-called honeymoon, I happened to be in our suite when Eleanor received “the call.” Her Calendar informed her of an incoming message from the Tri-Discipline Council.

  “The Tri-D?” El said. “Are you sure? What did we do now?”

  Calendar morphed into Cabinet’s attorney general who said, “Unknown. There’s no memo, and the connection is highly encrypted.”

  “Have we stepped on any important toes? Have any of our clients stepped on any important toes?”

  “All of the above, probably,” the attorney general said.

  After stalling as long as possible, El accepted the call. The stately though unimaginative seal of the Tri-Discipline Council—a globe gyrating on a golden axis—filled our living room. I asked El if I should leave.

  She gave me a pleading look, the first time I’d ever seen her unsure of herself. So I stayed as the overdone sig dissolved into thin air and Agnes Foldstein, herself, appeared before us sitting at her huge glass desk. Eleanor sucked in her breath. Here
was no minor bureaucrat from some bottom tier of the organization but the very chair of the Board of Governors, one of the most influential people alive, parked at her trademark desk in our hotel suite. Both El and I stood up.

  “Greetings from the Council,” Foldstein said, looking at each of us in turn. “I apologize for interrupting your honeymoon, but Council business compels me.” She turned to me and praised the inventiveness of my work in packaging design. She spoke sincerely and at length and mentioned specifically my innovations in battlefield wrap for the Homeland Command as well as my evacuation blankets for victims of trauma and burns. Then she turned to El and said, “Myr Starke, do you know why I’m here?”

  Foldstein appeared to be in her late forties, an age compatible with her monstrous authority, while my El looked like a doe-eyed daughter. El shook her head. “No, Governor, I don’t.”

  But she must have had some inkling, because Henry whispered, Eleanor’s chief of staff says Eleanor asks twice if you know what this means.

  I puzzled over the message. Apparently, it had been flattened by its passage through two artificial minds. What Eleanor had probably said was, “Do you know what this means? Do you know what this means?” Well, I didn’t, and the whole thing was making me nervous.

  “After careful consideration,” Foldstein continued, “the Council has nominated you for a seat on the Board of Governors.”

  “Sorry?” El said and grasped my arm to steady herself.

  Foldstein chuckled. “I was surprised myself, but there you have it—I’m offering you a seat at the grown-ups’ table.”

  BY THE TIME we shuttled back to Earth, the confirmation process was well under way. Over the next few torturous weeks, El’s nomination was debated publicly and in camera by governments, corporations, the Homeland Command, labor charters, pundits, and ordinary putzes alike. Such a meteoric rise was unheard of, and conspiracy theories abounded. El, herself, was at a loss to explain it. It was like skipping a dozen rungs on the ladder to success. Nevertheless, at no time did she doubt her ability to fill the post, and she marched through our town house in splendiferous pomp, only to crash in her bedroom an hour later to fret over the dozens of carefully buried indiscretions of her past. On the morning she testified before the Tri-D Board of Governors, she was serene and razor sharp.