The Media Candidate Read online

  She didn’t care about choosing a candidate or playing the games everyone swilled. Her focus slashed through the peripherals, digesting every facial expression, every movement, every shadow. She wasn’t just watching; but dissecting, penetrating, analyzing. Her attention spotlighted the details, looking for flaws, searching for any glimpse or clue to support her belief.

  She’d developed a simple but controversial theory with painstaking research. But her effort had been met first with an artificial indifference that intellectuals reserve for issues that offend their faith, but which they hope will just wither with neglect. This seeming indifference turned into hostility by the university administrators as it became clear that Professor Halvorsen wouldn’t just go away.

  Professor Halvorsen nudged Samantha, and the black and white ball turned her head sideways and looked up at her with one eye. She nudged her again. “Come on, Sammy. I have to get up now. Vamoose.”

  Samantha stretched one paw far up her robe until it came to rest on bare skin. “Ouch! Not with your claws, Sammy!” She stood up with Samantha who jumped down in displeasure.

  * * *

  The sudden movement caused a pair of eyes to retreat quickly and silently from the skylight. A dozen feet over the professor’s head, this pair of eyes had watched the scene intently. The brain behind these eyes, however, was assimilating data in a different way and for a different reason than was Professor Halvorsen. Although this being was as intent on her as she was on the candidates, it had vastly different motives. With the stealth of a cat, it repositioned three of its legs on the wooden shakes. The two eyes telescoped forward again until they could once more observe the setting below. It was trained to be exceedingly cautious, and it carried out its missions with diligence and tenacity. It had been an A+ student. A “jaw” was carefully tucked beneath it like a napalm bomb beneath an attack plane. It would be called on at the proper time.

  Its control system continually checked the status of each critical subsystem, maintaining a readiness for any eventuality. A single drop of venom fell on the roof, and as if embarrassed by this tiny infraction of robotic protocol, it adjusted the pressure on the injector to prevent another such occurrence. Meanwhile, it resumed its surveillance on the target human.

  * * *

  Professor Halvorsen’s hair was long and blond, like her name. Though in her late forties, she had no trouble avoiding accumulations of fat since she subscribed to the latest regimen of drugs that sculpted her body chemistry to her desires. Her slender legs rose like saplings into the terry cloth attending her. She brushed her hair behind her right ear and walked toward her study where she sat down before a computer. Her hair slowly regained its desired position, strand by strand, like a child testing a distracted parent.

  The dormant computer surged to life with a touch. With a few glances at icons and some verbal commands, she had ultra-high-resolution images of the three candidates from the Primary at her command. Now she could examine them again, but at her leisure and with all the power of the best image analysis software at her disposal.

  She had worked at the University for nearly twenty years, though they’d not been easy ones. The problem wasn’t lack of publishing. She had seventy presentations and journal articles to her credit. She’d chaired numerous symposia and co-edited two books, one of which became a popular text book early in her career. The problem wasn’t her relationship with students or lack of teaching ability. The undergraduate course she had regularly taught was popular and received the highest grades from her students.

  The University, however, hadn’t allowed her to teach a course for years. She was told that many of the students completing her class had “demonstrated an unhealthy attitude toward many of the basic tenants of twenty-first-century disciplined democracy” and that many parents and alumni had complained about her iconoclast views.

  Cynical was the University’s word describing her view of Government, and there was no need for cynicism. The Government had taken dramatic steps to insure total and uncompromising honesty in the political process. Technology wrested every bit of lying and empire building out of the political arena. In fact, the socially correct term for politician had recently become social principal, which had been shortened to sopal and was being further shortened to pal by a subtle media campaign.

  But Professor Halvorsen refused to believe that Government could be trusted to monitor its own integrity and maintain the degree of discipline presumed by its new role. Since the media’s traditional watchdog role had become compromised by its alignments with political parties, she felt there might no longer be anyone overseeing the overseer.

  Most skeptics like her had been weeded out of the education establishment over the last twenty years. But her brother-in-law occupied a very influential position at the National Subsidy Foundation and she had an aunt at the National Pension for Preceptors. This helped make her maverick ways tolerable to an intolerant aristocracy.

  Technology had become the principal tool of the many tentacles of Government. Not only did it allow unprecedented access to the minds of the electorate, it provided a subtle wall between it and them, a barrier that ordinary people could neither understand nor penetrate. Technology was the most effective isolation Government could maintain during a period when it claimed to be bringing both the leaders and the led into a historically unique milieu, a oneness of body and function that would preserve fundamental rights into the centuries that followed.

  Professor Halvorsen had her PhD in political science, but understood that the science of poli-sci wasn’t the science of the technological elite. She felt she would have to understand technology if she were to understand the workings of this new republic, so she studied communication engineering. But this had become another wedge between herself and the Political Science Department. They resented her as uppity, an engineering transvestite. Her research into political trends and electro-optical imaging technology made her aware of the fantastic potential for its use and abuse.

  This research and her outspokenness had gelled in the events of this evening. Tonight she would test her theory based on thousands of hours of research. It would be her vindication to the University. She would have hard data that not even an academic community, dedicated to the status quo and fearful of government funding agencies, could ignore.

  * * *

  Her rooftop visitor began the next stage of its mission. It opened the skylight with its myriad of tools and used its eight perfectly coordinated legs to climb into the skylight well where it was only a short drop to the floor. Attaching itself to the roof with a silken thread of carbon nanotubes, its jet-black body, about the size of a cat, lowered into Professor Halvorsen’s living room. It descended its slender thread as if it had evolved for a billion years for just this task. Eight legs flexed gracefully to a silent ballet in its brain.

  Its goal, however, wasn’t centered on illuminating beauty, but on extinguishing truth. Reaching the floor, it disconnected the silken tether and examined the surroundings with both visible and infrared sensors. A single-minded goal drove each movement.

  Its feline size and spindly legs did not suggest the immense power built into it or the intelligence, which allowed autonomous completion of the most complex assignments. It was a monument to the highest callings of human ingenuity and art. It was also a terrifying and vulgar machine—the progeny of the excellence and the malignancy of man.

  Silently creeping toward Professor Halvorsen’s study, its arachnid movements were controlled by a brain whose evolution was integrated with that of man, not spiders. It entered the room where its target was seated facing sideways so her peripheral vision intersected the robot. Her attention, however, was focused on her own mission.

  Samantha napped with her head buried in the folds of a mauve robe. The spider’s movements slowed to mimic a stalking cat as it approached its victim, a victim who was at that moment reveling in her future, a future the spider was committed to erasing.

  Suddenly Sama
ntha raised her head, her ears at first forward to sense the silence, and then lay back to the frontier of terror. The spider now had its injector fully armed, its legs tensioned for attack, its brain calculating angles, forces, trajectories, maneuvers, sequences.

  Professor Halvorsen looked down at Samantha, then turned her head slowly toward the doorway. A gasp rose involuntarily from her throat, a beautiful soft throat that was now at the center of the spider’s zoom-optics field-of-view. In a fraction of an instant, the spider was wrapping its legs about her head and her shoulders in the last embrace that Professor Halvorsen would ever experience. The injector plunged deep into her throat and remained only long enough to expel its venom. The trio was now tumbling across the floor, but only Samantha got up and ran. Stalker and prey were locked together in a union that would last only a moment, only until her every muscle became limp, and a thoughtful and beautiful woman was transformed into just a body.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Looking for More

  The Townsends sat in their breakfast room sipping fresh coffee and reading fresh news. They each had their own copy of the Times in front of them dated 9:13 AM MDT, July 17, 2048. Elliott tried to enjoy his first day of not biking to the Lab after breakfast. He looked at the newspaper corner with the “next page” icon, and page three instantly appeared on his electronic paper display. He folded it in half, sat back, and looked at the top headline “LIZZIE WINS BIG.” It responded by filling the page with a replay of last night’s “Election Beat.” Elliott had the interface icon set to “reader only” so a coherent sound pattern would be projected toward him, the waves interfering in such a way that only his ears received the message so as not to bother Martha with her own “reading.”

  “Well, Lizzie, last night you topped the comp. And with one hell of a finish. At this rate, you’ll sweep the finals, and you could be our next Pres.”

  Applause

  “You know, Jack, I’ve been musin’ at this for years; and I can’t say enough about my NBC spags.” Her blond ponytail danced in time with her breasts and gestures. “It’s a shine, and I’ll sure try to live up to the specs. We’ve got some tough tags coming down our bus, and I think I can help America over the stricts.” She stalked the camera, flashed her widest smile, waved a small American flag with one hand, and gave a thumbs up with the other, all accompanied by more thunderous applause.

  “Lizzie,” the MC continued, “you started out as a tennis star at Sportford, then turned pro and grabbed the top prize money six years in a row. Then you cranked with American Warriors for a diversion, and you just warped out a new book Priming to the Top: Drugs, Sex, Tennis, and Big Bucks. And with all this, you still have time for your rap chap, and you’re the highest paid on the charts according to Power Sex last month. And if that isn’t enough, your latest movie, Cape Desire III, has topped the box for two quads.”

  The MC turned to the TV viewers. “As you can see, Lizzie brings it all to her bid for the Chief Chief. But Lizzie has some pretty tough competitors. Let’s bang with the other two. First is Tab Hardman who’s sure no stranger to our studio. Tab started out on the Soaps and got interested in public service after he pegged the rates as the gay pimp, Roundmouth Robbins, on NBC’s Nights of Rapture where he also pegged the TV pay scales making him the second highest paid …”

  Elliott fast-forwarded to the last contestant, Junkie Gordon. “… and since pinking the Dung Druggers, Junkie’s been comping and forming music for some of the biggest flicks like Big Kink II and Pillage IV. Junkie’s a tad different because he’s already plugged one term in the Senate where …”

  Elliott’s attention shifted out the window. There was Lizzie in the reflection with her ponytail bobbing and her nipples erect, and Junkie with his silver chains and nose rings. Tab was there too. And the constant applause, and the flags and holograms and shouts and more applause and categories and cameras and MCs and smiles, a sea of smiles. He saw a half billion Americans sitting at home, enchanted by entertainers and living their lives vicariously in them. Some entertainers called themselves baseball players, some musicians, others movie stars. Entertainment was their craft. And the business of America was entertainment.

  He saw another world of entertainers, but they called themselves news anchors, journalists, and editors. Their goals and tactics were similar to those of the confessed entertainers. They all, in fact, worked together in the same business—infotainment.

  The common thread was money. The unwealthy loved wealth and revered wealthy people and the glamour they surround themselves with. And it didn’t matter if these heroes had talent or were offensive or bitter or boring. Their display of wealth, their disdain for the unwealthy, and the hype they heaped upon themselves were exactly the qualities that bound their patrons to them.

  “How did all this happen? How could it?” he said, his lips recoiling from the images.

  “What, Ted?”

  Elliott fled to his paper. He looked at the corner with the “next page” icon and page four stormed into his life with pulsing and gyrating ads competing with two news stories. His routine newspaper-scowl silenced them, and they faded out in response to his focusing on the top headline: “Organized Crime Wave Accelerates.”

  “Organized crime has become increasingly aggressive with its high-tech hit squads. Hardly a day goes by without murders in the wars among rival factions. It’s become common to use robots to kill operatives and burned-out agents. The advantage of a hit robot is twofold: first, the robots are more clandestine than a human can be; but more important, a robot leaves no telltale genetic or chemical print. And even if one is apprehended, there’s no way to trace it to its source if its users have taken the proper precautions.

  “These robots are frequently called spiders for obvious reasons. They’re very expensive, and it’s unlikely anyone would have access to such advanced technology except organized crime. When asked if the FBI or COPE has any such devices, the FBI spokesperson said, ‘Absolutely not. We are forbidden by law from using any kind of automated device in any interface between Americans and their Government.’"

  Elliott looked away from the article and the photo of a spider robot. A shiver made him aware of the goose bumps covering his arms. He rubbed one arm with his free hand and tried to blot spiders out of his mind.

  “Anything wrong, Ted?”

  The question surprised Elliott. “Uh, no … no. Just a little draft … here.”

  Martha looked at the motionless trees, then at the closed window. “Huh,” she said indifferently. “It says here that Queer Homophobia Syndrome affects as many as ten percent of Americans, and if Lizzie Special is elected she will put it on the official disability list.”

  “Queer Homophobia Syndrome?”

  “Yes,” Martha said. “It doesn’t say what homophobia means. Maybe … fear of men.”

  “Fear of homosexuals.”

  “Oh. Hmm. I guess being afraid of yourself would be kind of …”

  “… disabling.”

  “Yes,” she said. “Disabling.”

  Elliott noticed that his goose bumps were now gone, thanks to QHS. But there was the picture of the spider robot again. Elliott certainly knew about phobias. His was arachnophobia. It had stalked him since that childhood day when he’d been tasked to clean out the garage. His doctor theorized he must have gotten into a nest of spiders judging by the many punctures on his face and neck. Elliott lay in a coma for two weeks. It was a rare allergic reaction, they said.

  He’d never been able to talk to anyone about what actually happened that day. His thoughts could proceed only to the point where he began to drag a used tire off of an overhead shelf. The next thing he remembered was waking up in the hospital. Since then, he’d been subconsciously on the guard against spiders. He would frequently break into a sweat with itching and swelling arms just at the sight of a spider.

  He forced his eyes back to the newspaper. “The FBI has identified the latest victim as Terra Halvorsen, a professor of political
science. Dr. Halvorsen was murdered in her home. There was no sign of forced entry, and a single puncture wound was found in her neck. An autopsy report is pending.

  “The FBI has traced Dr. Halvorsen’s activities to dealing in the stolen advanced communication technology arena. She used her political science position as a cover in the lucrative technology espionage field. Most hit-robot victims don’t have such an obvious connection with organized crime as Halvorsen, however FBI investigations usually show that the victim was a discrete drug dealer or involved in some kind of international software trade.”

  Elliott looked at the photo again and took a hard swallow. When he turned his eyes away from the newspaper toward Martha, the article stopped. Martha was watching something else now and didn’t notice his gaze at first. She finally looked up at him and said, “What’s wrong now, Dr. Townsend?”

  “Nothing.” He looked out the window for a moment, then back at Martha. “I just read—”

  “There’s this article about the Navy,” Martha said. “Did you know they’re going to start naming ships after baseball players? Don’t you think that’s nice? There’s going to be a TV lottery or something to pick the names. You remember how you used to follow baseball when we first met?”

  “Yeah. I used to.” Elliott’s stare shifted back to the back yard. “Remember when Susie was in college?” he asked, “She had that political science professor she thought was so great?”

  “Yes,” she said. “I remember that. She had some kind of Swedish name.”

  “Halvorsen.”

  “Yes, that’s it.”

  “Remember,” Elliott continued, “when Luke got into college, he wanted to take the same course, but they wouldn’t let Halvorsen teach it?”