2020 Read Online Free Page B

wanted the, uh, since . . . No noises anymore.”
    She shrugged. “Something from an implant then, after all,” she said, shaking her head. She drained her glass of vodka. “Now let’s have dinner. I’ve got a fifty-year-old bottle of wine.”
    Afterwards, we sat by a fire in the living room, drank port and watched a bit of the comet special on VNN. Unix settled in with us. She’d had a falling out with her boyfriend.
    The special was interrupted, to my dismay, by a commercial for IMMORTALITY NOW! from Grateful Dead. Elderly men and women romped around a fountain in a cobbled square—Max had turned creative control entirely over to Fiat/Disney. The little cartoon animals splashing in the water of the fountain, the voiceover sales pitch, the promise of a Purgatorio sequel, made me burn with shame.
    The tacky part, though, cheered up Unix, and she cheered me up, and we started to chat, sunk so happily in the sofa by the Nomad firehearth that I didn’t at first realize that Keiko had been out of the room for some time.
    Unix blushed a little, smiled, and disappeared.
    It was getting late, and I wasn’t sure what to do. Then the lights dimmed, and I thought I saw someone in the hallway to the master suite at the rear of the house, hand raised at about the level of a console for a house computer. A moment later subdued harp music floated through the air. Then Keiko walked slowly into the room wearing a black silk robe.
    She stopped at the hearth, her hands resting on the slate platform, fingers splayed, her hair down around her shoulders, the fire reflected on her face. She had continued drinking—I could see it in her eyes, in her breathing, in the way she swayed, ever so slightly. I calculated the time since the judge had been cremated: a month, exactly. The grieving process takes different forms for different people; I had used my professional experience to read her precisely.
    “The kind of man he was, my late husband,” she said. “He would have wanted me to jump back in. You’re that kind of man too.”
    I cleared my throat. Would you believe me if I told you that I realized then that what I had encouraged in her was wrong, that things between us had moved too fast, that for her own good I was going to turn her down, hug her gently and lead her back to her bed and tuck her in and tell her to go to sleep? I’m not sure I believe myself either. Oh, I realized I’d been wrong, certainly, but the way she’d said jump back in I’d fallen completely, victim to my desires, victim to the silky curve at her waist, to the huskiness in her voice.
    Keiko and Unix, forgive me.
    As it was, I was saved by my pager, which hummed against my heart insistently.
    The message was from Lance, He was paging me from the mortuary lab in the basement of the GD tower. The message read: Highest Urgency.
    * * *
    When I found him, Lance was crouched over a jury-rigged assembly surrounded by a bank of instruments. I recognized a light-enhancing stereo microscope.
    “You’ll never know what ecstasy you interrupted,” I said dryly. “What is it?”
    “Uncle Coop,” Lance said, pointing to an eyepiece. “Look at this.”
    I put the bridge of my nose between the soft cups of rubber. At first I didn’t see anything but a mottled background, then discerned what seemed an aberration, a comic little figure, a smaller grid of red and white.
    “You may not believe me at first,” Lance said, his voice tight with excitement, “but I think that’s the Judge. Or some manifestation of him, like a homunculus. It was created by the chipset when I powered it up. . . . See, first thing it did was output a nutrient program, carbon high. I used my Pepsi. Next thing I knew . . . See, it was a sequence, started with the sound chip, to call attention to itself. . . .”
    “Christ!” I said. “It’s a little person. Those are plaid pants.”
    I continued to watch the figure in wonder as Lance brought me up to speed. The judge had