Patrick suddenly had a wild thought. He looked around for a video camera. When he didn’t see one, he checked the stalls—all empty. Laughing, he came back to Tome.
A reading, AFL-CIO sim. Sure.
“All right, who put you up to it? Armstrong? Rogers? Come on, who?”
“No, Mist Sulliman. We know you. Want hire.”
Could this cloned ape be serious?
Patrick sighed. “Tome, you have no idea what you’re saying. Unions are for people. Sims aren’t people. That’s the law.”
“Yessir, but Mist Sulliman lawyer. Lawyer change law. You—”
Just then the door swung open and Holmes Carter waddled in. About Patrick’s age—mid-thirties—but he looked older and had a commanding lead in the gut department. A bulbous forehead and no lips to speak of, and where Patrick’s hair lay thick and fair, Carter’s was dark and thinning; his scalp gleamed through his comb-over. Soon he’d be a chrome dome.
Or maybe not. Looking at Carter’s hair now, Patrick noticed that it was thicker; didn’t appear to be a rug or a weave either. Must have gone and got himself a splice to replace his baldness gene. You ol’ devil, you.
Too bad the genemeisters couldn’t do anything to reduce his fat. Scalps were easy: a limited number of cells to splice. Fat was a whole other deal—trillions of fat cells in a body.
But fat, thin, bald, or pompadoured, Carter would always be a first-class dork. No splice for that. But he was also third-generation Beacon Ridge and first in line to inherit the family’s string of car dealerships. In his teens Patrick had caddied for the two preceding generations of Carters and they’d been pretty decent. But Holmes…Holmes must have been fashioned from what had collected in the skimmers of their gene pool.
Although Patrick qualified for the club professionally and financially—at least on paper—he hadn’t been able to squeak past the membership committee. The blackball rule was alive and well here, and he was pretty sure Holmes Carter had used it to keep him out. Probably couldn’t tolerate the idea of a former caddy hobnobbing with the members.
“Talking to yourself again, Sullivan?” he said, baring his teeth in what passed for a smile.
“You might not believe this, Holmes, but Tome and I were just…” Patrick noticed a sudden fearful widening of the sim’s eyes “…having a little chitchat.”
Carter swung on Tome. “You know the rules! No talking to people—even if it’s a nonmember. You are to be barely seen andnever heard!”
“Yessir,” Tome said. He turned away and hung his head.
Patrick spotted the ID number and bar code tattooed on the nape of the sim’s neck.
“Lighten up, Holmesy,” he said, then eyed the man’s gut. “In more ways than one. What’s he supposed to do when I talk to him? Ignore me?”
Carter bellied up to the urinal. “If it’s you, yes. What’s the matter? Can’t get any people to listen to you?”
“I guess I like sims better than some people I know—present company included.”
Carter had that shark grin again as he returned from the urinal and began rinsing his hands. “You never learn, do you, Sullivan. Why do I keep seeing you around here? When are you going to quit cadging rounds of golf from our members and bamboozling them into sponsoring you? Didn’t you get the message when the committee turned you down? You’re not wanted around here.”
That stung. But Patrick hid the hurt and said nothing, simply stared at him.
“What’s the matter?” Carter said as he dried his hands. “Cat gotcher tongue?”
“No,” Patrick said. “Just wondering why you sprang for a hair splice and passed up one for a personality.” Figuring he didn’t have to worry about burning nonexistent bridges, he added: “Also wondering why I’m standing here listening to a used car salesman—”
“They’renot used!”
“—who has to use a homing pigeon to get his belt around his waist.”
Carter’s pie face reddened toward cherry. “You think you’re funny?”
“I’m no Bill Hicks, but I have my moments.”
“Keep it up, Sullivan. I hear you tipped a caddie today. Just keep it up and I’ll have you banned from the grounds, so no matter how many friends you have here, you’ll never step on our course again.”
He threw his towelette at Tome and stormed out.
Patrick waited for the door to close, then turned to Tome.
“When do you get off?”
“Club close ten,” Tome said.
“I’ll meet you then. You may have found yourself a lawyer.”
3
Patrick buzzed around in his new Beemer 1020i, more car than he cared for, but if you wanted to snag the big clients, you had to look like you didn’t need them. As he drove he pondered how to tackle this sim union thing, and wondered why he was attracted to it. He smiled, realizing the two things he most enjoyed in his professional life were making money and pissing off people he didn’t like—in that order. And when he could combine the two, that was heaven. Better than sex. Well, almost.
A bid to unionize the Beacon Ridge sims would be a definite two-fer.
As he wound through the back streets of Katonah he tried to organize what he knew about sims. They weren’t news anymore but they hadn’t been around long enough to be taken for granted. He was old enough to remember the uproar when Mercer Sinclair introduced the first sim at an international genetics conference in Toronto.
He shook his head. He remembered how at the time it had been all anybody talked about. Religious groups, animal rights groups, and branches of the government from the FTC to the FDA had raised holy hell. You couldn’t turn on a TV or radio without hearing about sims or the Sinclairs.
Everybody knew the Sinclair brothers’ story. Sims hadn’t been their first brush with genetic notoriety. Ellis and Mercer started gene-swapping while grad students at Yale, published some groundbreaking papers, then quit and went into business for themselves. Their first “product” had been an instant success: a dander-free feline pet for people allergic to cats. They used the enormous profits from that to start work on altering apes.
What they came up with was a creature more than chimpanzee and less than human. As Mercer Sinclair, the brother who seemed to do all the talking, had tirelessly explained on every show from Leno to Letterman to Ackenbury, and anyone else who had an audience, they’d settled on the chimpanzee because its genome was so close to a human’s—a ninety-eight-point-four percent match-up in their DNA. As Sinclair liked to point out, there was far greater genetic difference between a chimp and a gorilla, or between the different species of squirrels running around the average backyard.
One-point-six percent, Patrick thought, shaking his head…the difference between me and a monkey. If ninety percent of DNA was useless junk, how many genes was that? Couldn’t be many.
With so much shared DNA, it hadn’t taken a whole lot of germ-line engineering to produce a larger skull—allowing for a larger brain, greater intelligence, and the intellectual capacity for speech—and a larger, sturdier, more humanlike skeleton. That took care of functional requirements. Smaller ears, less hirsute skin, a smaller lower jaw, and other refinements made for a creature that looked far more human than a chimp, one that might be mistaken for aHomo erectus , but never for aHomo sap .
The result was the sim: a good worker, agile, docile, with no interest in sex or money. Not an Einstein among them, but bright enough to speak a stilted form of whatever language they grew up with.
To manufacture and market the product—Mercer Sinclair insisted from the get-go on referring to sims as a product—the brothers had formed SimGen. And SimGen got the government to agree that the creatures were just that: a product.
How they accomplished that feat remained a mystery to Patrick and lots of other folks. President Bush the Second had come out against the whole idea, calling it “Godless science,” and the Democratic congress, with its hands deep in the pockets of the very anti-sim Big Labor, was ready to put the kibosh on the whole thing. SimGen stock was in the toilet.
But somehow anti-sim legislation kept getting deadlocked in various committees; for some unfathomable reason, union bluster tapered off.
Instead of waiting for the ax to fall, SimGen started cranking out sims for the unskilled labor markets. Common consensus was that the Sinclair brothers had lost their minds and very soon would lose their shirts. Who’d want transgenic laborers during a global recession with millions of humans out of work.
The Bush administration, wrapped up in the seemingly endless war on terrorism, failed to pass any regulatory bills. And then came the boom of the mid-oughts, making the nineties look like a pop gun and tightening all the labor markets. Suddenly sims weren’t such a godless idea after all. In fact, they made good economic sense. They even allowed the US to compete with Asia in the textile markets. The result: A lot of senators and congressmen who previously might have been expected to vote against, came out in support of pro-SimGen legislation.