We need more realism. . . . More life! The animals should start and stop, saunter and stare, just like their living models. . . . I want to see the way a wolf rocks back on its haunches, the green of their eyes as if lit from inside. I want to see a bear rake open an anthill with his claws. . . .
Let’s build this place up in every detail, from stuff out there. Real savannas, real temperate forests, real wetlands. The Van Eyck brothers painted 75 different kinds of identifiable plant species into the Ghent Altarpiece. I want to be able to count 750 kinds of simulated plants in Mastery 7, each with its own behaviors. . . .
As he composes the memo, employees knock and enter, with papers for him to sign, disputes for him to resolve. They show no revulsion or pity for the giant walking stick propped upright in the chair. They’re used to him, these young cybernauts. They don’t even notice the catheter anymore, where it empties into its reservoir on the chair’s frame. They know his net worth. Sempervirens common closed that afternoon at forty-one and a quarter, triple last year’s IPO. The twig-man in the chair owns twenty-three percent of the company. He has made them all wealthy, and he has made himself as rich as the game’s greatest emperors.
He dispatches the latest pamphlet-sized memo, and, moments later, the shadow comes over him. Then he does what he always does whenever the bottom drops out: he phones his parents. His mother picks up. “Oh, Neelay. So, so happy it’s you!”
“So happy, too, Moti. You good?” And it doesn’t matter what she’s saying. Pita taking too many naps. Planning a trip back to Ahmedabad. Ladybug invasion of the garage—very strong-smelling. Might be cutting hair very dramatically soon. He revels in whatever she wants to go on about. Life, in all the pitiful details that won’t fit yet into any simulation.
But then the killing question, and so soon, this time. “Neelay, we are thinking again that it’s not impossible to find you someone. In the community.”
They have been all up, down, around, and over this, for years. It would be socially enforced sadism toward any woman brought into such a match. “No, Moti. We’ve said.”
“But Neelay.” He can hear in the way that she pronounces the words: You’re worth millions, tens of millions, maybe more—you won’t even tell your mother! What sacrifice, there? Who couldn’t learn to love?
“Mom? I should have told you already. There’s a woman here. She’s actually one of my caregivers.” It sounds almost plausible. The hush on the other end crushes him with its tongue-biting hope. He needs a safe and reassuring name, one he’ll remember. Rupi. Rutu. “Her name’s Rupal.”
A horrible suck of breath, and she’s crying. “Oh, Neelay. So, so happy!”
“Me, too, Mom.”
“You will know true joy! When do we meet her?”
He wonders why his criminal mind failed to foresee this little difficulty. “Soon. I don’t want to scare her away!”
“Your own family is going to scare her? What kind of girl is this?”
“Maybe next month? Late next month?” Thinking, of course, that the world will end long before then. Already feeling his mother’s bottomless grief at his simulated breakup, just days before the women were to meet. But he has made her happy in the only place where people really live, the few-second-wide window of Now. It’s all good, and by the time the call ends, he’s promising people in both Gujarat and Rajasthan at least fourteen months’ notice to clear calendars, buy airplane tickets, and get saris made, prior to any wedding.
“Goodness. These things take time, Neelay.”
When they hang up, he raises his hand in the air and slams it down onto the desk’s front edge. There’s a very wrong sound, and a sharp white pain, and he knows he has broken at least one bone.
In blinding pain, he rides his private elevator down into the opulent lobby, the beautiful redwood trim paid for by millions of people’s desire to live anywhere else but here. His eyes stream with tears and rage. But quietly, politely, to the terrified receptionist, he holds up his swollen, snapped claw and says, “I’m going to have to get to the hospital.”
He knows what’s waiting for him there, after they mend his hand. They will scold him. They’ll put him on a drip and make him swear to eat properly. As the receptionist