Virtually True by Adam L. Penenberg Read Free Book Online Page A

don’t operate.”
    “Catchy.”
    “Look, Ailey, I’ve come here to tell you, nobody knows more than me what a journo stud you used to be. You were my hero, the way you, uh, you know, all that great stuff you did. But you’re slacking now, and on my beat that’s not copacetic.” Rush picks at his cuticles. “I don’t know what happened with you in New York. Heard you went mental. Got a new hard drive installed. But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t do your job.”
    True thinks of electric snow.
    Rush rages on. “Got to tell you. I was not looking forward to you coming over here. Told the home office same-same. I could do more with someone young, hungry. But they sent you. Either you upgrade your job performance or I’m aborting you.” Rush stands, ankles crossed. True’s seen him do the same thing on a newscast— canned concern , he calls it. Luzonians think it’s a sign of decreased fertility. “So, you histoire or you going to get real?”
    True shrugs. “Real enough.”
    “Your dossier says you were born in a test tube.”
    Not exactly a test tube, but True was more planned than born, one of the first to spring from a movement of retirees opting for parenthood past 50. The stigma follows him like a misbehaving shadow. True’s parents ordered him (piece by piece, code by code) from a DNA catalog, scanned electropages for donors with primo characteristics, paid a lab in Italy to mix and match until an embryo was produced and left to grow in an incubator until developed enough to post home.
    What they ended up with was something, or someone, far different. A random access, but this did not stop American red-bloodeds from torturing True throughout his childhood, blaming him for… what? he wonders. Their shortcomings? True’s shortcomings? Society’s?
    Rush rushes on. “What’s it like, growing up a beaker baby?”
    True looks out the window to the yellowing sky. Briefly wonders how he can clean the windows, then realizes they are clean. It’s the pollution. True recites: “ In the Bottling Room all was harmonious bustle and ordered activity. Whizz and then, click! the lift-hatches flew open; the bottle-liner had only to reach out a hand, take the flap, insert, smooth-side down, and before the lined bottle had had time to travel out of reach along the endless band, whizz, click! another flap of peritoneum had shot up from the depths .”
    Rush asks, “What’s that?”
    “Huxley. Brave New World .”
    “A book?”
    “A book.”
    “Thought so. Sounds old. When did you memorize that?”
    “Seems like I’ve always known it.”
    Skeeeee! True’s console alarm. The message, from WWTV: a news emergency in Japan. He tunes in to hear a woman he recognizes as Reiner Jacobi, one of WWTV’s top news anchors, as she heli-floats over Tokyo. The viewing audience is offered flattened neighborhoods, bodies strewn in wreckage, fires screaming toward the heart of the city.
    “…at five fifty-five this afternoon a massive earthquake struck Tokyo, a city with fifty million people living within a hundred-mile radius.” Reiner has to shout over the rotor’s soft rat-a-tat-tat . “Information is sketchy, but already estimates put the number dead at more than one million and climbing. Millions more, it’s impossible to say just yet, are homeless. Hospitals report massive casualties. Whole sections have been destroyed.”
    Reiner soars over the damaged shoreline as a tidal wave smacks the shore, further decimating Japan’s capital. With a telestrater, she replays the tidal wave, again as a reverse-angle replay. The helicam pans the cockpit, shows Reiner, a pilot, and a large black Labrador, barking and panting. Reiner shoves a biscuit into the dog’s mouth. The shore is shredded, coastal buildings hammered into chunks and washed out to sea along with cars, couches, futons, clothes. True feels he’s a voyeur, peeping into lives he has no right peeping into. The screen breaks into grids displaying different