SIMS

SIMS Page 4

Beacon Ridge quartered its sims in a long barracklike building in the low corner of the club grounds, a section that flooded during a heavy rain. The lights were on, the windows open, and music filtered out into the cool night air. Patrick stopped and listened. Was that...?

"Ma-gic...mo-ments..."

Perry Como?

He saw a sim silhouetted in the lighted doorway. It pointed to him and ducked back inside, crying, "Is him! Comes now! Just like said, he come!" A babble of voices arose from within.

What am I? Patrick thought. The messiah?

Tome met him at the door and motioned him inside. "So happy come you, Mist Sulliman. Welcome to sim home, sir."

Patrick stopped and looked around. The two dozen Beacon Ridge male and female sims who carried the golf bags on the links, set and cleared the tables in the dining room, washed the dishes and peeled the potatoes in the kitchen, and cut the grass and weeded the flower beds, stood gathered before him in the front room of their quarters. Overhead fluorescents shone on scattered stuffed chairs, long mess-hall style eating tables, and industrial carpeting. Two TVs, one in each far corner, were on but no one was watching; soft music crooned from the radio.

Patrick had once visited a client in a mental hospital; this reminded him of that institution's day room.

"What's behind the wall?" he said.

"We sleep."

With most of his fellow sims trooping behind like lemmings, Tome led Patrick to the dormitory section where triple-decker bunks lined the walls. A toilet and shower area lay beyond the next wall. Patrick wondered about the coed living conditions, then remembered reading that in addition to being sterile, sims' libidos were genetically suppressed.

Back in the front room, Tome led Patrick to a graying female sim seated in one of the easy chairs.

"This Gabba, sir," he said. "She oldest. Like mother here."

"Yessir." The aging female started a slow, painful rise from her chair. "So pleased meet - "

Patrick waved her back - probably take the arthritic old thing ten minutes to stand and another ten to sit down again. "Don't get up. I'm gonna sit anyway."

He looked around, found an empty chair, and lowered himself into it. The rest of the sims gathered around in a circle. He spotted Nabb but didn't see Deek. He'd never been this close to so many sims at one time and was struck by how similar they looked. You didn't notice when you saw them singly or in pairs, but crowded together like this...

He'd read where SimGen made minor variations in the genomes as they cloned them so sims wouldn't look like they'd all been cast in the same mold. Maybe this crowd didn't exactly have a cookie-cutter appearance, but no question they'd all been baked from the same batter.

Now, here, with their pidgin English and weird looks and odd way of moving, he felt as if he'd dropped in on a colony of simple folk of a different race and culture.

But these folk wereowned . He could not allow himself to forget that. Anything he'd read about SimGen credited two moves for its success: First was the company's patents on nearly all the viable recombinant chimp genomes, guaranteeing the field to itself; second was the Sinclair brothers' decision not to sell their product, but to lease it instead.

A sim lease was too pricey to allow it to be a common household servant, but the creatures were a huge bargain as unskilled labor - no social security taxes, no pension plans, no compensation or unemployment insurance. And when one got hurt or too infirm to do the job, SimGen replaced it.

As a result, more and more businesses all over the industrialized world were lining up for sims.

And since the creatures were all genetically sterile, preventing black-market types from growing their own, SimGen had an absolute lock on the market. Special legislation had classified sims as neither humans nor animals; since they did not occur naturally, and since SimGen owned the patent on their genome and, in a very real sense, manufactured them, they were deemed a product, a commodity -  property - and SimGen owned every damn one of them.

He leaned toward Gabba. "Okay, the first thing I have to ask is where the hell you came up with the idea of a union?"

"See TV," Tome said.

Patrick had expected Gabba, the apparent matriarch of the group, to respond, but obviously Tome was the spokessim.

"Read also paper," Tome added.

"Yeah, that's right. You can read." He still couldn't quite believe it. "How about the rest of you?"

"Only Tome read," the sim said.

"Okay, so you came up with this idea of starting a union. That means you want something you don't have. To tell you the truth," he said, looking around, "compared to other sims who work in sweatshops or on production lines or digging ditches, you've got it pretty cushy here."

Never failed. With humans, and now apparently even with sims: The more you have, the more you want. But maybe he should be careful here. Didn't want to change their minds.

He quickly added, "But that doesn't mean, of course, that your living conditions can't be improved. So what are our demands gonna be? More food? Better quarters?"

"Sim want family, sir," Tome said.

Patrick felt as if he'd been slapped. Talk about coming out of left field...

Family? Uh-uh. No way that's gonna happen.

"You don't mean like becoming wives and husbands and having children, and all that, do you? Because if - "

"No, sir," Tome said, waving his arms around at his fellow sims. "This family."

"I don't get it."

"Sims grow up large group, no mommy, no daddy, just child sims. Get know others, make friend, then take away. Come here, make friend, then take away. No want take away. Want stay together. Want family."

"I see," Patrick said slowly. "Family...interesting concept."

He looked around at the intent faces of the creatures encircling him. The faces were definitely simian, but far less so than any monkey in the wild. They'd been retooled from chimpanzees, a creature genetically damn near human. But pure chimps had mothers and fathers and a family structure. Sims were even closer to humans yet they were raised like cattle and leased out as soon as they were fit for work. And then they were traded in or swapped around like used cars.

Nowhere along the line did they have any semblance of a family.

Patrick felt a twinge of discomfort, almost like sympathy. He brushed it away. Never get emotionally involved. Stick to the facts.

But hey, if I feel something...

This was good. Oh, this was very good. He could use this. He could embellish this a little and tug like mad on all sorts of heartstrings.

He began scratching notes on his pad: Poor lost sims, raised without parents or siblings, cast out into the cold cruel world to work long hours for no pay. They weren't asking for wages, not for anything material, they just wanted a little personal continuity in their lives...the right to keep certain close-knit groups of sims from being broken up...allowed to live together and work together...as a makeshift family of sorts...

Ilove it!

Maybe he could even start up a nationwide Sim Legal Aid Fund.

This was looking better and better.

"Okay. That kind of family just might fly. So that's what we'll shoot for. Let's do it."

Tome's eyes lit. "Is yes? Mist Sulliman do?"

"That's what I said."

Tome pumped his long arms in the air and the rest of the sims began screeching and jumping about, capering in circles, leaping in the air. Only Gabba remained seated, but she was clapping and grinning.

Patrick had to smile. What a rambunctious crew. Something innocent and almost childlike about them, like early humans might have been before hundreds of generations of social conditioning turned them into the uptight species they were today.

Tome raised his fist and screeched, "La Causa!"

The rest of the sims took up the cry, turning it into a chant.

Patrick raised his hands to calm them.

"Where did you pick up 'La Causa'?" he said when he could hear himself.

"From Jorge," Tome said.

"Who's Jorge?"

"He cook kitchen. Ask him union. He give smile and do fist and say, 'La Causa.'"

Again exuberant jumping and running and chanting.

When finally they calmed down, Patrick said, "The best way to approach this may be to demand a union and then settle for all of you staying together as a group."

"Settle?" Tome said, frowning. "That mean no union?"

Don't start going Cesar Chavez on me, Tome.

"A union could be a long shot, I'm afraid," Patrick said. Like to the moon and beyond. "I'm telling you this up front so you won't be disappointed if we lose on that one." Never raise a client's expectations. Always low-ball the outcome. "But I think we could possibly walk away from this deal with a family and some cash."

"Cash?"

"Money. It's called a settlement. I figure we ought to be able to get the club to concede on the family issue plus squeeze them for a nice piece of change in return for our shutting up and leaving them alone. And then we'll split the money fifty-fifty."

"Mist Sulliman get half?" Tome said.

Aw, we're not going to haggle are we?

"Sure. When you consider how much time I'll be devoting to this, and strictly on a contingency basis, you - "

"No," Tome said.

"No?"

"No half for Mist Sulliman. Take all."

Patrick blinked, too shocked to speak. Never in his life had he expected to hear those words pass a client's lips.

"All? But what about you guys?"

"Money not want."

"Of course you do. You could use it to fix up this place, buy one of those big picture-frame TVs, better furniture..."

...start tipping the golfers...

Tome was shaking his head. "All money for you."

"And all you want is this family thing?"

Tome nodded. "Family...any one thing other."

Patrick poised his pen over the pad. "Shoot."

Tome's big brown eyes bored into him. "Respect, Mist Sulliman. Just little respect."

Patrick felt his mouth go dry. Talk about a tall order. But he recovered and wrote it down.

"Okay. Respect. Maybe we can get into the specifics of that at a later date. Right now, the first thing we do is formally petition the club to allow you to form a union. They'll refuse, of course. When that happens, we go before the NLRB."

"Enell...?"

"National Labor Relations Board."

That was when the shit would really hit the fan. Patrick rubbed his hands together in a dizzying mix of anticipation, dread, and glee.