2020 Read Online Free

Travel through eternity clothed in the authentic finery of medieval Florence. . . .”
    I recognized the voice from an ad for our International Line. Medieval Florence? The hair on the back of my neck stood up. What I was looking at was an infomercial for IMMORTALITY NOW!
    I was even partly responsible for it. When we’d kicked around the idea years ago I’d suggested holotaping the clients (or, failing their actual presence, their computer-generated images) in scenes set in the ascending circles of Paradise as imagined by Dante Alighieri. I mean, it had been just an idea. Now apparently Max had gotten someone to develop it.
    I paged the rest of the executive floor for Max, got forwarded to Pasadena.
    “We’re getting great results,” Lance told me enthusiastically from the CalTech lab. Max, who appeared disheveled, was behind him, teleconferencing with a bank of monitors; I recognized the rainbow colors of the GD Regional Franchisee Net. “Fantastic results,” Lance went on. “A friend of mine from the radio astronomy club has an internship at the SETI transmitter in Arecibo, Puerto Rico. We’re working with him. Dad leased the site for the duration.”
    “Arecibo? The whole site?”
    “We’re going for a burst transmission on the 31st,” Lance gushed.
    Max had migrated to the vidphone and joked about buying down the national debt with the deal for Arecibo.
    “Cripes,” Lance said, “are we getting bandwidth! We’ll be able to encode enough information to broadcast tactile holography in a window of about eight hours real time. Then with compression . . . We’re trying to squeeze in a full twenty-four-hour day.”
    “I still don’t get it,” I said, trying to stay calm. “How does this signal override all the other signals people get?”
    “The way sunspots affect even hardened satellites; you fiddle with the magnetosphere a bit. Virgilius Maro ’s that big, and we punch him up besides. Terrific lot of RF noise. Now if Virgil was just a little closer to earth, ha ha.”
    There was Max over his shoulder, munching popcorn. “Isn’t it great how Lance’s finally taken an interest in the business?” Max said. “It’s been a dream, to pass it on to the kid: Sczyczypek forever. Wait till you see the spots we’ve got running on the Obit Channel.”
    “Max, that’s what I called you about.”
    “Virgil, everybody’s calling the comet Virgil, don’t you love it? How could we pass the Dante angle up? I know you usually handle the art director end of things, but how you’ve been lately. . . . I thought I’d turn it over to Fiat/Disney.”
    “Max . . .”
    “It’s a business decision, Coop.” The way Max tensed his jaw when he spoke, that distant look in his eyes, reminded me that it was, after all, his business. I held my tongue. Anyway, I thought, who wants to paint the hull of a sinking ship?
    “We’re already selling units,” he went on. “From six this morning we’ve had a lease on reference studio space in the Valley. We’ll have virtual setups in every franchise city by week’s end. Overnight we’ve sold sixty thousand slots of that Paradiso so far—hey, you think that’s too Italian? ParadiseLand maybe?”
    Max downloaded other segments of the advertising program into a window on my wallscreen and I saw more of Fiat/Disney’s work, even one of the holounits themselves. Now I knew what those high production levels, those make-up jobs reminded me of: soap opera. Set in Thirteenth-Century Florence, laced with special effects, but soap opera all the same. It was painful to watch. I felt the way any writer feels when a story of his or hers is worked over, distorted. I felt surrounded by disaster.
    It had been a good run, with the company, I found myself thinking.
    “Don’t look so glum, Uncle Coop.” Lance seemed a little embarrassed himself. “I got something else on the chip. Set of chips, I guess we should say. Apparently the, uh, cooking it went through? Thermal