Acting Out the Future

by Mike Rogers

Part 1 appears in this issue.

conclusion

“Quick,” said Ellen, running to the typewriter on the living room table. She scrolled out Vernon’s blank piece of paper, inserted the back page of the score pad and tapped away with aggressive certainty.

“Harry,” said Karen, pulling the floral blouse out of her Bermuda pants, “get me the apron and the big shiny tray outa the kitchen.” Deftly combining the two items, she made her way to the bedroom door, reaching it just as the handle began to turn.

Karen grabbed the handle and stopped it, conjuring up a metallic voice: “Security challenge. Vernon’s room. Unauthorised attempt at opening from inside. Identify. Identify. Password requested.”

Vernon’s words were angry, slurred, and, where comprehensible, obscene. He always forgot the rye hit him harder when he was lying down.

“Password not recognised. Manual reset for Vernon’s room. Telephone connection open.” She nodded furiously at Harry who was watching what went on with desperate but uncomprehending concentration. But he understood enough to pick up the receiver of the extension in the living room and listen.

“Get me out of here!” came Vernon’s voice, through the door and out of the earpiece simultaneously.

“JPS Stayclosed Doors, as used by FBI, CIA and the State Department as a whole. If we shut it, it stays shut. This facility first installed 1953, renewed with voice control 1960, upgraded 1985, second upgrade 2015,” intoned Karen as Vox Metallica. Vernon’s sudden silence was clearly audible.

“Vocal recognition accomplished. Do you wish a new password?”

“Y-y-yes,” stammered Vernon, coping with the disappearance of sixty-odd years with nothing to show for them, not even, as he could have discovered in a mirror at that very moment, wrinkles.

“New password,” said Karen, gesturing at Harry, who was up to speed and complied, saying, “Coca Cola.” Karen wasn’t impressed and frowned at him, but he shrugged his shoulders, as if to say How the hell do I know what’ll still be around in sixty years’ time?

Karen motioned to Harry furiously to duck out of sight in the kitchen, and he went. Ellen had already preceded him, carrying the typewriter.

Hesitantly, Vernon on the other side of the door said, “Coca Cola,” and was rewarded by a loosening of Karen’s grip on the handle, which meant he could turn it, open the door and step into the living room, where he was more than a little bemused by the sight of what looked like his wife, but with a shiny piece of metal where her well formed and familiar breasts had been. He felt an urge to come to grips with the future.

“Karen1 will not like it, sir, if you touch Karen2 like that,” said the robot wife.

“But how’s she going to know?” asked Vernon, pausing momentarily.

“I am telling her now, sir, through universal induction telephony. Anywhere within 30 yards of an electrical cable she will receive information through her skintenna and the implants which every United States citizen receives at birth in accordance with the 47th amendment to the Constitution.

“The operation to make you conform to the Constitution was postponed because of your coma, but I am instructed to inform you that you have been slated for modification at 3:30 a.m. tomorrow morning.

“I am also instructed to assure you that you will find it most agreeable to be part of the worldwide network of sentient beings, especially since it will mean that you can never be lost, as the co-ordinates of your precise location will always be available to the authorities via your unique signal. Should you find yourself in any emergency, you can always be tracked down, and your vocal utterances will be monitored at all times. Can I help you in any other way?”

Vernon’s hands had dropped to his sides, so he did what men usually do when they don’t know what else to do and asked for a newspaper to read.

“I will have it delivered directly, sir,” squeaked Karen and did her robot shuffle into the kitchen before the apron strings could loosen any more and slip through the handles of the tray.

A moment later, Ellen came in, carrying the typewriter, with the back page of the scoring pad poking out from the platen roller.

“Hi, Vernon,” she said, “good to see you awake again after all these years.”

“You a robot, too?” asked Vernon uncertainly, his hands dangling nervously at his sides.

“Why, no!” said Ellen, giving a little jiggle of the hips that was meant to imply flesh rather than metal. “But this is my fourth body. We change them every ten years or so, the way you would a car. Karen’s done the same, so you won’t notice any difference!”

“Glad to hear that,” muttered Vernon, lowering his eyes. Did women tell each other everything?

Ellen was glad he hadn’t queried why the house still looked exactly the way it had over sixty years ago. But then, however much you moved the furniture around, men never noticed, not even when they walked into a piece of it that was in a different place.

“I called up a newspaper for you on the induction telephony tickertape machine,” she said, holding out the typewriter.

Vernon picked up the scrap of paper between forefinger and thumb with something between delicacy and distaste. He was used to newspapers that were thick enough to be wielded as weapons, in the weekend editions, anyway.

“Yeah, well,” said Ellen, “the owner thinks news is valuable, and shouldn’t just be given away. You get what you pay for.”

“The owner?” queried Vernon, still turning the scrap of paper over and over, to see if there was anything more to it. “There’s only one?”

“Natural progression of capitalism towards monopoly, Vernon, you know that. And Scrooge McDuck is a bit of a miser, well known for it.”

“Scrooge McDuck?!” Vernon exploded. “He’s a cartoon character, not a newspaper proprietor!”

“You may be right, Vernon,” said Ellen, trying to calm him down, “but he’s also a legal entity and, as such, he is entitled to own a newspaper. All the newspapers in fact. And the TV networks. And the radio.”

“But how did he get so powerful?” asked Vernon, collapsing slowly on to the davenport, felled not least by the thought of how much it might cost him to get the racing results or read the commentaries on the ball games.

“Family connections, I guess,” said Ellen, doing her dumb blonde act.

“Family connections?” queried Vernon.

“Yeah,” said Ellen, slowly, apologetically, “I mean, it’s understandable, with one thing and another, and Hewie’s doing a great job as Secretary of State, while Louie’s really made a difference at Homeland Security, and Dewey’s regime at Treasury—”

“They’re goddamn cartoon characters!!”

“And legal entities,” said Ellen, “you have to remember that. I mean, they’re not just film stars. After all, who’d elect a film star as President? The very idea... Nobody says that politicians have to be human beings, that’s just old-fashioned prejudice. Public acknowledgement, that’s what’s important, and what more public acknowledgement of status can there be than having your footprints in the cement outside Grauman’s?”

Vernon had covered his face with his hands, in an effort to blot out the world in which he found himself. Through this fragile shelter of skin and bone he muttered, “Okay, so tell me who wields the Great Seal of these United States, I mean, I suspect I know, but I don’t want to believe it, so tell me—”

“Well,” said Ellen, “it’s Donald, of course. But maybe you should read the headline. I mean, you’ve paid a hundred dollars for it, after all.”

Vernon lowered his hands, and tried to smooth out the crumpled piece of paper that he was still clutching, even more carefully now he realised its value, though his hands were trembling more with contempt and outrage than respect. He looked at the familiar picture that Ellen had sketched so quickly.

“Does he always have to have that ludicrous quiff?” he asked no one in particular. Then he read the headline out loud: “Donald builds Mexican wall. What does that even mean?”

“Well,” said Ellen, “you get all the details through gossip, because McDuck can’t control that, so it’s like this: he’s building the wall to hold back the Mexican weather, so Texas and New Mexico and California and all those states down there will stay cooler in summer. And it’ll keep out the hurricanes, as well, so it’ll pay for itself in a decade or two. And then, spring will last all year because, you see, the cuckoo won’t be able to fly away...”

Ellen stopped, because she could see he was on the verge of tears. “Don’t worry, Vernon,” she said, trying to console him, “plenty of things are just the same, or even better. Karen’s last body upgrade had extra sensitivity built in. I mean, we may have made a lot of progress, but there are still some things you can’t do remotely, if you get what I mean.” She wiggled her eyebrows separately and extravagantly, as if she were Groucho Marx.

But Vernon stayed hunkered down on the davenport, as if he was waiting for it to swallow him.

Ellen ran back to the kitchen, where the others had been listening, and planning for just such a moment as this. The despairing silence in which Vernon sat was broken by the shrill metallic cry of Karen2: “Mister Vernon, Mister Vernon! They’re coming for you!”

“Who’s coming for me?” said Vernon, not so much in shock, surprise or denial, as in stunned curiosity as to which of the many possible groups of pursuers it might be that had tracked him down across the years.

“People from the past, people from the past!” squealed Karen in a voice she based on the noise the Oldsmobile had made just before its brakes went.

Any request Vernon might have made for greater clarity or precision in the warning was swamped by the chanting of the two heavily muffled figures who emerged from the kitchen carrying a large and rather floppy cylindrical object between them.

“Wisconsin is everywhere!” they chanted. “You are the object of extra-temporal rendition! Time heals no wounds! What was un-American, stays un-American! You can’t escape the past in the future! We’re Joe’s boys, and we’re gonna bring you back!”

“I am not now, nor have I evaarrrgghhh!” said Vernon, as the muffled pair put the smelly and mildewed golfing bag over his head and bundled him back into the bedroom.

Moments later, Harry and Ellen emerged, shucking off the thick winter coats they had worn back to front, panting with dust and effort, and sat at the dining table, where Karen joined them, tucking her blouse back in.

“We got three minutes, five tops,” said Harry.

“What will he make of it?” asked Ellen.

Karen shrugged. “Delirium? Psychotic episode?” In fact, it was only two minutes before the bedroom door burst open, and Vernon stood dramatically in the doorway. “I had a dream!” he said. “I had a dream!”

Then he marched to the table, grabbed the typewriter and the bottle of rye and returned to the bedroom, pausing only, just before he shut the door, to call out to everyone and no one, “John W. Campbell is going to love this!”

Ellen retrieved the bucket from the patio. All the ice had melted. She shared out the remaining three bottles of Schlitz in silence, as the conspirators meditated on what they had done, and in particular what damage they might have caused to the future.

From the bedroom came a constant clattering penetrated regularly by the single tinkle of a bell, as if an altar boy with pretensions to be Fred Astaire were trying to enliven the celebration of mass with a tap routine.

The cheeriest was Karen. If she could trust what she was hearing, she could look forward to a decent, professional permanent wave.

Ellen wasn’t far behind. She had been making mental notes of everyone’s inventions over the past half hour. She wouldn’t steal anything that Vernon actually used in his story, but she reckoned there’d be plenty left over that she could publish under one of her many male pen names.

Only Harry seemed ill at ease with recent events, as if they had been tempting fate and speaking of the devil. But then Harry didn’t just read Galaxy and Astounding but also The Saturday Evening Post and even Collier’s in his search for stories to imitate, and it was because of one of those stories that he now found himself trying to resist a constant urge to look at the sole of his shoe, to see if, squashed on it, was a butterfly from Ray Bradbury’s “A Sound of Thunder.”