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  Praise for Paul Black

  “…an imaginatively skilled story teller of the first order…”

  ~ Midwest Book Review

  “Mr. Black has quite an imagination…”

  ~ Dallas Morning News

  “Black is one of those writers that we who worship this genre look for every time…”

  ~ John Strange, the cityweb.com

  T H E P R E S E N C E

  By Paul Black

  Published by Novel Instincts Publishing. A Smashwords edition.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locations or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Programmable Matter is a trademark of The Programmable Matter Corporation

  Copyright ©2010 by Paul Black

  All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.

  ISBN: 9780972600743 Library of Congress: 2010934982

  1. THE GREATER GOOD

  “Deja?!”

  Deja Moriarty sensed her boss’s beckon somewhere at the periphery of her consciousness. She left her virtual researching and peeled the Netgear from her head. Its microfiber-optics uncoupled into techno dreadlocks that glowed prismatic at their ends. She cautiously peered over her cubicle.

  “Ah, there you are!” Bishop Green’s anger was clearly in professional check because Life’s a Bitch had dropped to a 22.0 share in the weekly ratings, now making it the second-most-watched program in AztecaNet’s prime-time lineup. Which meant the second-most-watched program on the planet. Which also meant his bid for the old Kennedy compound, out in the Hamptons, would have to hold at its present number. Since his earnings were directly tied to the Net ratings, the people who labored under Green had come to accept his emotional swings as part of the package. There had been other success stories, but nothing compared to Green’s. His prolific output of hit programming not only exceeded shareholder expectations, but also garnered him accolades usually bestowed on producers twice his age. Bishop Green was definitely AztecaNet’s undisputed “it” boy.

  Deja passed a hand through her electric blond hair and strutted toward him with all the confidence her new senior producer title could bring.

  “Be a dear and get Sotheby’s on the line for me. And if you’re headed that way ...” Green raised his coffee cup.

  “What kind of sugar day are we having?” Deja asked, irritated with his lack of acceptance of her new role.

  Green thought for a second, then a sly grin grew across his face. “Triple.”

  “Oh! One of those days.”

  “Yes, it is,” Green said, then suddenly shifted mien and announced to anyone in earshot, “and if we don’t get Life’s a Bitch back up to number one, there’ll be a housecleaning like you’ve never seen!”

  Life’s a Bitch was Green’s brainchild and had perched at the top of the ratings for over a year. Its concept was simple: destroy an ordinary life as a ruthlessly brutal world looks on. Nanocameras disguised as houseflies provided a world audience with an unfettered view of the destruction, while AztecaNet’s patents on the camera’s technology ensured its reign as the leader in reality-based programming. It also gave new meaning to an old phrase.

  In the beginning, the plan was to leave individuals destroyed. But after the pilot season’s first unsuspecting contestant, Leonard Smotts, decided to reduce himself to a puddle of matter by eating the butt end of a Light-Force, AztecaNet’s lawyers decided that revealing the prank and restoring a person’s life might be the preferred option. The finale had been completely reworked with a digitally processed Leonard morphed into a happy ending. Litigation with his family was still pending, but if the numbers held, final payoff to keep the Smott family’s contractual silence would be a drop in the bucket compared to the revenues from Life’s a Bitch.

  “Three sugars, please,” Deja ordered into the system pad at the snack dispenser, but then thought better. “Wait! Make that four ...” The dispenser’s door slid aside and presented a steaming ceramic mug of coffee, specially blended to Bishop Green’s genetic profile. Only she had access to his codes.

  Deja had worked with Green as his assistant since his producer beginnings on the soapy Net drama All of Their Days, where he would have probably gone unnoticed if it weren’t for the sudden exit of its head producer to the Chelsea Clinton Clinic. When Green took control of All of Their Days, it was floundering somewhere near the bottom of the ratings. And since the suits at AztecaNet considered it fodder for a demographic comprised mainly of those left floundering by the economic shift of the Biolution, they never noticed Green’s decision to “tweak” the formula when he fired all the writers.

  Green felt the audience of the Net was better suited to dictating the comings and goings of the simple folk of Waterville. By switching All of Their Days to an interactive format, he created a promotion manager’s wet dream and offered weekly contests for the best scripts, which, conveniently, were judged by Green and his favorite assistant.

  Slowly, ATD’s ratings began to climb as Green and Deja allowed a tasteless, insomniac audience to drive the daily actions of their show’s characters. Being a late Friday night product meant talent was barely “C” level, comprised mostly of young actors who would do practically anything for the mere possibility of Network exposure. So when Deja presented Green with a script written by a particularly horny housewife from Manchester, England, who suggested the show’s leads go ahead and give in to their characters’ carnal passions, Green announced to his stunned associates there had been a shift in direction for their little corner of the Net.

  Since the show’s leads were sleeping with each other off camera anyway, the two actors merged business with pleasure and gave their worldwide fan base a season they would never forget. It was weeks before Network censors caught on, but by then All of Their Days was in the Top 10. It became an underground hit that redefined the late-night soap genre and catapulted Green to phenom status with many of the boardroom suits. It also brought Green to the attention of AztecaNet’s parent company, Grupo TVid Azteca, and its chairman, Alberto Goya.

  Deja handed Green his coffee. “I need to show you this bit of info I’ve dug up on Billy Bob–”

  “Ray,” he corrected, reviewing his Netpad. “Billy Ray.”

  “Well, whatever his name is, our little Texas boy has a whole other offshore account he’s been diverting gobs of credit to for the last 10 months.”

  Green looked up mid-sip and raised an eyebrow. “Mistress?”

  “Oh, yeah.”

  Green smiled around the edge of his cup and took a gulp. “That’s why I love you, Dej. You always have your priorities in the right place.” He turned and headed toward studio 2b, but stopped and glanced back. He pointed with the cup. “Oh, and ah, nice coffee, love ... just right.”

  * * *

  “Good night, Miss Moriarty.”

  Deja looked up at the intern.

  “Working late?”

  Deja grinned tersely and returned to her Netport, its cerulean glow the sole light in her cubical. The kid sulked away.

  “You alone?” Sonny Chaco’s image filled the screen.

  Deja glanced about. “Yeah, it’s just me and the data.”

  “You running that security program I gave you?”

  She rolled her eyes. “Yes, Sonny, I am.”

  “Okay, don’t get upset.”

  “I don’t like all this spy business.”

  Chaco’s holoimage quivered out from Deja’s Netport as he sat in the cramped confines of his office, deep in the lower levels of the National Security Agency. He relaxed and gave Deja that grin, just like he did the first ti
me they had met at the National Netcasters Convention a year earlier.

  “Look, if you’re uncomfortable–”

  “It’s not that,” Deja said, not listening to her better self. “It’s just ...” She tentatively bit at one of her nails, and its color retreated into the cuticle.

  “What, you feel like you’re ratting on your boss?”

  “He’s not technically my boss, but yeah ... it feels weird.”

  “What you’re doing is brave, and it’s for the greater good.

  “I know, but this is my company. My future’s tied up here.”

  “Taking down a suit like Goya isn’t going to faze a corporation as big as Azteca. It might even help. Did you ever think of that?”

  “Well ... no.”

  “Let’s make this the last one for a while, all right? And to celebrate, why don’t you jump a shuttle up here and let me treat you to dinner at Fusion.” Chaco leaned forward, and his image grew to the edges of the screen’s holo parameters.

  “I don’t think they have my gen file anymore,” she said.

  “They do. I’ve already checked.”

  Deja matched Chaco’s action, knowing her image was enlarging at his end. She touched her index finger to his holo lips and narrowed her eyes into sexy slits. “You’ve got this all worked out, don’t you.”

  “And what if I do?”

  “Then this won’t be the only thing you’ll be getting this weekend.” She slowly grinned and clicked the Send button.

  2. TOO LATE

  Today should have been the day that he stopped throwing up. He lifts his head from the trashcan’s stench and sees his image in a store window. A curry-colored drop falls from his chin in a thick, slow motion. He had been warned. SI: Sensory Inundation – probably from the shift in travel.

  He straightens and wipes his mouth with the sleeve of his coat, then centers himself in the black vibration that continuously emanates from the pavement. He studies the people who walk past ambivalently and succumbs to the realization that the populace of his new home is sadder than he ever imagined. He has spent the better part of his life studying for the assignment. They all do. But his studies, he now feels, have not prepared him for what he will face.

  He looks up at the blanket of permanently ashen clouds and tries to understand what happened. The city where he was placed is the nation’s largest and is considered the cradle of everything current. Its urban dementia seems to merge into endless patterns of gray skies, liquor advertising, and parking garages slowly spreading like industrial lichen to the southernmost point a thousand miles away. The sheer mass of the sprawl isn’t what consumes him. It is something else – something more elusive.

  The noise.

  Day and night, its subtle presence is relentless, humming its processed merger of a trillion tonal discharges into what, he has been told, is affectionately called “the hum.” He fears it will take some getting used to, but he will. He’ll have to.

  Most everything was set up before his arrival. He has plenty of credit, which was imbedded into the financial system five years prior so that its presence would be solid and unassuming – enough to live on for the rest of his life. But some essentials have been left out. “Be inventive” was the directive.

  He enters the little bodega. “Yo, leather-boy, looking or buying?” asks the Asian clerk, who has categorized him by his shoes. An old man watches him with eyes that seem to distill every detail of his actions in even ocular movements. He can barely tell the clerk’s eyes have shifted, because the dark brown slits don’t easily reveal the direction they might be focusing.

  “Looking,” he answers, trying not to reveal his complete naiveté with a culture he has barely greeted.

  “Shitfuck,” the clerk says so under his breath that it sounds more like some ancient dialect than New American.

  He walks the aisles and studies everything in the store, from the types of products to the styles of design. One thing this culture doesn’t lack is variety. They have a seemingly endless appetite for goods and entertainment, which can be produced, he concludes, in solid, liquid, virtual, or pharmaceutical forms. And if a need can’t be bought in a store, it might be found in any of the thousands of “entertainment cafes” that fill the cracks of their cultural landscape.

  “If you’re goin’ to hang this long, what’s your deno?” The Asian is shaking a large wooden spoon at him through a thick haze of stir-fry and cigarette smoke.

  Deno? He deduces that the clerk wants to know his name, which is yet another thing his instructors failed to provide. He recalls their teachings.

  The revolution, or “Biolution,” as the media termed it, was a blessing and a curse. It caused whole industries to vanish, yet promoted, in a kind of sick display of reverse karma, a whole new wave of decadence and global promiscuity. Its fusion of organic peptides and nanotechnology erased, among other things, many of the medical threats from a century earlier. Now people could afford the luxury to destroy vital organs without worry. New liver, new lungs, new pancreas, a new attitude – modern medicine could regenerate whatever was needed, quickly and affordably. Cradle to grave, the Biolution force-fed the middle-class a steady diet of misery wrapped in festively colored mediocrity.

  “Are jou deaf, too?” the clerk asks.

  His focus settles on the dozens of cigarette packs competing for attention behind the protection of the counter’s armored plexi. “Hmm?” he says, having clearly heard the clerk, yet wanting to test his retail tolerance.

  “Ko-chu-pado!”

  The pack with the red triangle seems very popular.

  “Yumago,” he replies.

  The clerk’s eyes open with surprise. Then his lips part and form a smile that causes the skin of his face to fractal into hundreds of creases. The clerk appears to age before him.

  “Jou spreak Korean!” the clerk declares, still aging. “So, what’s your deno?”

  “Marl,” he answers, fixating on the pack with the red triangle. He needs a name, and the directive was: Be inventive.

  “Where jou learn to spreak Korean?”

  “I’ve been around,” Marl answers in the best street speak his memory can bring forth. The inflection is off, but with a few minutes of exposure, it will be easily corrected.

  The tinkling of chimes signals the cramming of another customer into the store; Mr. Korean’s shop begins to fill with people getting their late-night meal supplements or bottles of their favorite entertainment. The woman entering is wrapped by an expensive biocoat whose collar demands she accept a measured amount of pain in service of fashion. Even her movement is different, which suggests that she lives a life free from the trappings that burden the other customers. They keep their distance while she glides through the store.

  As Marl studies her, he has a sad feeling that she is faking it – that her act is a put-on and probably not her idea. He stands at the front counter: still, silent, rapt like the other men by her exquisite figure and hair that seems to be evolving from a different lineage than her makeup. Her coat’s living fabric senses the change in environment and relaxes. She slips through the store collecting a small contingent of party essentials: two bottles of Polish potato vodka, one bottle of standard meal sup, a bag of hydro-bars, a deodorant microchip, and a vid. A classic. She enters the checkout line, and a man in front of her steps back. The woman moves so in sync that Marl wonders if she is precognitive. She nudges a box of candy off its wire shelf and glances at her backside like it has acted on its own.

  “Oh,” she says.

  No, he figures, this girl is definitely a package deal. Probably grown to a customer’s specs in the vats of the Lesser Antilles, where binders of girls are churned up from the voodoo science that nibbles around the fringes of the Biolution. She catches his stare.

  “Casablanca?” he asks, trying not to grace her acknowledgement with a shift in posture.

  She glances into her basket, and a small grin forms at the edges of her full lips. The pattern of her glos
s shifts. “Have you seen it?”

  “Yes.” He instantly calls up all he can on the film and its actors.

  “What’s your favorite part?” she presses.

  His memory rallies. “When Ilsa asks Sam to play it again.”

  She peels back her sunglasses and reveals a set of striking green eyes with rings of hot orange circling the irises. The pupils narrow like a cat’s. Custom. Probably aftermarket. And if he wasn’t so enthralled with how they were set above a pair of dimples he can only describe as perfect, he might have missed the slight discoloration of the bruise. Its mottled purple travels the length of the lid and conspicuously disappears into a delicate layer of makeup.

  But he doesn’t.

  The flinch is instinctive.

  She quickly replaces the glasses, which reset with a sucking sound. “Yeah,” she says, edgy. “That and the airplane scene are my faves.” She disconnects.

  “A night for Bogie ...”

  She places her basket on the floor and quickly walks toward the store’s exit. The doors slide open, and her coat senses the rush of cold night air and tightens at the neck, cuffs, and thighs. Marl and the clerk watch her disappear into the fray that has descended on this part of the city for a night of whatever gets them off. The doors jitter before slamming shut.

  “She’s crustom!” Mr. Korean says, pointing after her with his big wooden spoon. He returns to the sizzling contents of a large wok he has been nursing behind the counter.

  “Who’s not?” Marl says, still staring.

  “She’s not natwural.”

  An odd statement coming from a man Marl suspects has a new set of regen’d lungs. He compassionately eyes the old Korean.

  “Ah, dong-mongo!” And the clerk throws his attention back into the wok.