Kalifornia by Marc Laidlaw Page B

he’s one of our best customers. We comp him
to a suite, drinks, girls, you name it.” The pope let out a great laugh. “It’s
worth the investment, believe me. The old boy never fails to lose his shirt!”
    Thaxter clucked and shook his head. “How pathetic. A god who
gambles? Don’t you two agree it’s time for some new divinities?”
     

S01E05.   Seersuckers
     
    The Seer raged, raged at her studio audience. She had to grab their attention. They lived in her flesh, but the sight of it
bored them. They preferred the veil to the face beneath it. They craved the
illusions she cooked up for them, preferring insubstantial fantasies to solid
food. And they loved it best when she insulted them for their bad taste.
    “It’s criminal, the mental degeneration I see here!” she cried.
“Am I the only one who still has a mind of her own? Let’s talk concepts, let’s
talk eons of time. You’re devolving. You’ll be blind and white as cave fish
soon, your bodies will shrivel up, your eyes will cloud over, you’ll be nothing
but a bunch of body-temp insulation for your wires.”
    The audience laughed in tentative agreement.
    “Oh, Shiva!” she cried in mock exasperation. “Do you even hear
what I’m saying?”
    Pulses of acknowledgment lit up the tall response boards along the
walls, like lightning flashing in stained-glass windows. She noted the boards
with satisfaction.
    “I see that some of you are still breathing. But how much of this
is really getting through?”
    Fewer flickers this time. She glanced at the ratings monitor to
make sure that the audience was still with her; they were too self-conscious to
give their all just yet. She signaled her thruput man with a pinching gesture: Peel
me a few off the top.
    Her vision darkened. Her wires began to warm and purr. She slid
sideways into the astral realm, sailing the pure ether of information, skimming
the Akashic records.
    Shadows filled the studio, blotting out the audience, the
tech-crews, the walls of equipment. Her normal sight was displaced by a fly’s-eye
view, a composite of signals skimmed from the vast population of her audience.
RO was a misnomer; most people never thought of the fact that they were all
potential senders. Wires were wires, if you knew which switches to throw. They
had been designed that way, with the distant goal of continuous two-way
operation, just as the telephone companies had provided early push-button
phones with symbol keys that no one used for years. It was all a matter of
opening their eyes and using them as her own.
    She looked out at dingy living rooms with stuccoplast walls; she
leaned against splintered doorframes, stroked mangy dogs, squatted in an alley
as her guts heaved.
    “I’m disappointed in you,” she said, closing her fingers to
constrict thruput to a more manageable stream. “I mean, you people, you people . . . my
God, you have no respect. Someone out there right now, yes you, shitting in a
back street. Yeah, I see you—damn right I do! You ever stop to think that’s
disrespectful? You don’t find me shitting on the program, do you? You don’t
tune in to find that kind of stuff going on. We all know it happens, we’re
adults here, but do I shove your faces in it? How would you like me to treat
you with that disrespect? You’re so tied up in me that each and every one of
you would crap your pants or your reclining chair or your kitchenette, wherever
the hell you are. If you want me to take care of your bowel movements for you,
all right, I’ll do it. But get this, people. I’m not going to wipe your collective ass!”
    She completely closed the gap between her fingers and the signal
window shut. Herself again, free of the leeches, she faced her equipment, her
crew, and the restless studio audience.
    “It’s time to do a little skimming,” she said.
    The ratings monitors hummed as the audience grew. All over the
state, people who’d tuned in with half a mind now got completely snagged. She