Read Online Asimov's SF, February 2010 by Dell Magazine Authors - Free Book Online Page A

grey screens lit up with images: two repeats of I Love Lucy and one of Gunsmoke , broadcast on the free-to-view channels, and a maddening diorama of meaningless, unscripted, silently parading men, women, and children. The Family of Man , Jive told himself, half-hysterically, recalling a book his grandma had loved and made him leaf through every time he and his sisters visited her in the nursing home. Gone these two score years, God bless her. And here were the same faces of every nation, peering out into the drab humming, shuffling, and rustling of the ad hoc, modified media lab.
    One of the nerds came forward to a podium. “We've had trained law enforcement lip readers examine the images, Mr. Bolen,” he said in a bored, impudent tone. “Most of them are speaking Mandarin, Cantonese, and dialectal variants. There's an admixture of other major languages, of course, including German, Arabic, English, French, Spanish—"
    "Chinese, you say!” Jive cried.
    "They seem to be lost and looking for their families. The popular rumor that they are so-called ‘thays’ or thetans is not borne out by synoptic analysis of the recorded utterances to date. The more articulate among their number are asking for our aid, the assistance of living scientists. Hence this briefing. We are not authorized to—"
    "Aid? Aid? Crap! A scheme to divert our remaining resources to ideological lunatics who wish to see the planet's climate disrupted, to their own sectional advantage.” Although what benefit could accrue to anyone other than the Inuits he couldn't imagine. Least of all those closer to the tropics.
    "Sir, we do have a few ideas about what's causing this manifestation,” said Bart Samuels. “It seems likely that the soletta structure is intercepting or even enhancing insolation in the cerebral theta range. Despite racist rumors of a geopolitical flavor—"
    Jive cut him off. “Listen, don't give me any moralizing hocus-pocus and run-around,” he said angrily, remaining seated but raising his voice so nobody in the room would miss his import. “Three weeks ago, I saw a man throw himself from a tenth story window, driven to desperation by these preposterous ... things." He flung one hand at the screens. “First he'd torn his TV set off the wall, and thrown it into the street, where the goddamned thing nearly killed me. Then he jumped after it, and did kill himself. This is not a new furtive viral advertising campaign. It is not a political ploy by some misguided faction of the American Unterschicht or sotto classe. "
    He rose, faced the useless pointy-headed drones, then looked back up in rage at the drifting images of despair. If what the screen displayed was truly hell, or some other version of the afterlife, as Tilly and Jolene claimed, it undercut everything a man could believe, could work toward in his career. How could you bring children into a world if this abomination was their destiny? “ No," he roared, with the deep-throated power of a Baptist choir baritone. “A fraud! These are computer-generated engrams projected into our living rooms on stolen citizen satellite channels by the Chinese national zaibatsus. Or, if not them, revanchists in the Saudi peninsula. They can't be...” His voice drained away, suddenly, as an image caught his eye. Bile rose in his throat. “Oh my dear god. Granny Bolen? Can that be you?"
    An old woman's face peered down at him from the closest orthicon tube display, and in a series of snapping jumps copied itself across all of the banked monitors. The muted mutter of Desi Arnaz and James Arness was wiped away. Jive Bolen stared up at his dead grandmother, who looked back in terror at him from twenty grey windows. Her wrinkled hands pressed the inner edges of the screens, and her mouth moved, again and again, in a sort of voiceless screaming supplication. Jive felt his own lips mimic the movements of her mute mouth. Help me , he mouthed back, mirroring her cry. Get me out of here, little Jevon.