They refused to let him go home. “It’s too dangerous,” the Big Mutie said, “and that’s that.”

  Finally Guy suggested the apt of some friends, Sam and Janet Evening. He had a moment of compunction at involving them, but didn’t see any other choice. They had a computer and their apt wasn’t too far away. Bob667 went with them, leading the way through the twisting Subway tunnels.

  “Are you all named Bob?” Guy asked.

  “That’s right. It’s in honor of our first prophet. He was a 20th century salesman named J. R. ‘Bob’ Dobbs. He was the First Mutie.”

  “Oh,” Guy said. He didn’t hold much with religions, even inherently bogus ones. Still, the idea that the muties had a hero made them seem more, well, human. He regretted what he’d said to the Big Mutie about how ugly they were. Actually, they weren’t so bad as long as you didn’t really look right at them or anything.

  Once they got to street level Guy took Bob667 to Sam and Janet’s apartment. Night had fallen and Guy felt strangely lonely and uncomfortable. I’m on the lamb, he told himself, trying out the hopelessly antiquated words.

  Janet answered the door. “Hi, Guy,” she said, “This is a pleasant—look out! Behind you!”

  Guy ducked, then remembered. “Oh, yeah. This is, uh, Bob667. We were wondering...can we borrow your computer for a minute?”

  “You mean you want me to let that mutie in my house? Yuck.”

  “It’s really important, Janet.”

  “Well if you say so. Sam! Guy’s here! Wait till you see what he brought over...”

  Sam glanced up from the pornographic home video he was watching. A couple of the performers looked familiar to Guy—probably neighbors of Sam and Janet’s. “Make yourself at home,” Sam said, and went back to the TV.

  Guy slipped his diskette into the computer and punched up a printout of BLOOPERS. Bob667 stood behind him as the printer zinged out the lines of data. Sam and Janet stayed in the other room, talking quietly to each other and pointing occasionally at the mutie.

  “Do these names mean what I think they mean?” Guy asked.

  “I’m afraid I really don’t know what they are.”

  Guy showed the printout to Sam and Janet. “It’s a list of the worst TV shows of all time, right?” Sam offered.

  “Not all of them, though,” Janet said. “Just the successful ones. What do those dollar amounts beside the titles mean?”

  “I think,” Guy said, “they mean I’m in a shitload of trouble.”

  “So what you and the mutie here are trying to tell me,” Sam said, “is that the govt has been subsidizing bad TV?”

  Janet looked from Guy to Bob667 and back again. “Isn’t that a little...well...silly?”

  “If you’d told me about all this yesterday,” Guy said, “I would probably have agreed with you. Today I’m not so sure.”

  “It’s not just the shows,” Bob667 said. He slurred his s’s even more than usual when he got excited. “They were fixing the ratings, too, which means they were more or less forcing the competition to produce shows just as bad. You get a vicious circle going, and after a while it’s not just TV anymore. People are getting trained not to think, not to make decisions, not to take anything seriously. What we have to do now is decide what we’re going to do about it.”

  “I don’t really see what the big deal is anyway,” Janet complained. “Who cares about all this stuff? Why are they hunting Guy down? Who are we going to blab to, anyway?”

  “You don’t understand the govt,” Bob667 explained. “There’s hardly anybody working there anymore, just a lot of paranoid programmers and a lot of interconnected computers.”

  “What about all those people we elect?” Sam asked. “What do they do?”

  “Sit at home, mostly, and watch TV. There’s nothing left for them to do. The computers do it all.”

  “Well fuck it, then,” Guy said. “I’ll just clean up the floppy and send it in, like I was going to, and—”

  “Just a second,” Bob667 interrupted, holding up a decayed-looking finger. “The govt agents are closing in.”

  A fist hammered on the door.

  Janet switched the TV to hall monitor and glanced quickly away. “Yuck,” she said. “It’s another one of them.”

  Guy opened the door for Bob005. “The govt agents are closing in,” it said. “The High Bob sent me to warn you. If you don’t come with us and let us hide you, they’re going to catch you. We can’t stop them.”

  “Didn’t we go through all that this afternoon?”

  “Look,” said Bob667. “If you won’t let us hide you, can we at least try something else? Nobody’s ever had a chance to get on the govt’s computer before. They may just burn that diskette of yours, but there’s a chance they’ll want to look at it first. To at least make sure they have the right one. Let me copy a virus on there.”

  “A virus?”

  It took a diskette out of a fold in its toga—or a fold in its chest, Guy wasn’t sure which. “It is our sacred bulldada in program form—a self-concatenating string loop. We’ve spent a long time working this up, for just such an opportunity.”

  Guy hesitated. “How much more trouble would this get me in?” he asked, but Bob667 apparently misunderstood.

  “A good attitude,” it said, popping the second diskette into a drive and typing a command. “Are you sure you won’t come with us?” it asked again as it took out Guy’s diskette and handed it back to him.

  “I’m sure.”

  “Ahem,” Sam said. “Did someone say they were ‘closing in?’”

  “Uh, yeah,” Guy said. “Apparently.”

  Janet yawned widely. “Gee. Really sleepy all of a sudden.”

  “Gosh,” Sam said. “Look at the time.”

  “I’ll just walk you downstairs,” Guy said to the muties.

  “Don’t mean to rush you,” Janet said. “But...”

  ***

  The three of them stopped on a street corner near the Subway entrance. “I don’t really understand why you won’t come with us,” Bob667 said.

  “It’s like this. If I came with you, that would mean I believe all this shit you told me. I’d have to be crazy to believe that. So I’d rather just go to work and pretend that everything’s okay.”

  “Well, all right then.”

  Guy felt strangely reluctant to let them go. He was certain he would never see either of them again, less certain why that idea should bother him. “So,” he asked. “If they do catch this virus, thing, what happens then?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe the end of the govt, If so, that takes a lot of pressure off of us. I’m not sure anybody else would notice.”

  “I would,” Guy said.

  “Yes, well, good luck then,” said Bob667. The two muties walked away. Between one streetlight and the next they were gone.

  ***

  The govt agents picked Guy up a block later. He was wandering aimlessly, trying to make up his mind where to go. The agents, Guy noticed, wore their mirror glasses even in the dark, even as they tossed him lightly in the back of their Honda.

  During the trip one of them lifted the diskette out of Guy’s jacket. “Hey,” Guy said. “You can’t—”

  “Shut up, assle,” the agent said.

  Guy shut up.

  He kept expecting them to stop the Honda and throw him off a bridge, or take him into an alley and shoot him, but instead they led him to the basement of the midtown govt complex and handed him a stack of change. “Machines there, bathroom there,” the agent said, and left.

  The place looked and smelled abandoned. Pipes gridded the ceiling, oily water stained the floor, and plastic crates lay scattered everywhere. At one end of the room stood a big-screen TV, a ratty couch, and a wheelchair containing an old woman.

  “You ever watch this channel?” she asked. “I watch it sometimes. It’s not too bad.”

  Guy walked over to her. “Who are you?”

  “Sit down, sit down,” she said. “Or if you’re going to talk, do it in the other room.”

  Guy went to the door and pushed against it. Its surface was devoid of handles to shake or locks to pick; some kind of electronic seal held it in place. Guy bought himself a Coke and went back to sit on the couch.

  The woman was watching WLCD, “the browsing station.” A lot of football players chased a slippery ball to the accompaniment of synthesized bassoons. The station cut to the WLCD logo, then ran two-and-a-half minutes of pie fight scenes from old black-and-white comedies. Then back to the logo, a big dance number, the logo, and a man in a white coat talking very seriously for a minute and a half about hemorrhoids.

  After a short piece on crippled orphans, the old lady said, “Makes you sad, don’t it?”

  Guy thought about the floppy with the BLOOPERS file on it. Was this what the govt had been shooting for? He wondered how much money they’d quietly put into superstation WLCD. How perfect it was for them—a station you never had to turn off, because if you didn’t like what was on you only had to wait a minute or two. No complicated plots to follow, no characters to get mixed up, no difficult shadings of emotion.

  Guy tried to lure the old woman into conversation, but she refused to talk in more than three- or four-second bursts. He learned that her name was Mildred, but nothing else about her, or the reason he was being kept with her in the basement.

  Trying to ignore the TV proved beyond Guy’s will. He had nothing else to do in that basement but drink Cokes and eat candy bars, and in that suffocating grayness the splash of big screen color drew his eyes irresistibly.

  He was able to doze off for a few minutes at a time, but a sudden fanfare from the set would wake him up. The old woman never seemed to sleep.

  Finally he decided to risk the old woman’s wrath and tried to switch the thing off. “Hey!” she shouted at him. “Whatcha doing there? Get away!” The power knob was frozen, as was the channel selector.

  “Nothing,” Guy said. “Never mind.”

  “This is a good program,” she said. “I like this one.”

  “Okay, " Guy said. “Okay.”

  He soon lost his sense of time. His watch was still running, but he didn’t know if the numbers were AM or PM. He’d told that new girl at the store, the one with the soft, mobile lower lip, that he would call her this weekend. He didn’t know if the weekend had come or gone.

  He began to stay asleep longer, wake up less fully. He wished he had clean clothes and a razor. He wondered about Bob667’s virus program and decided that it had failed because nobody had come to rescue him.

  Then one day he couldn’t remember the last time the old woman had said anything. He struggled up from the couch and waved a hand in front of her inert face. No response. He felt her arm for a pulse, and though he couldn’t find one he noticed the flesh was still warm and soft. As he let go of her hand it knocked the afghan off her lap, revealing a mass of circuitry.

  An andie, he thought. No wonder.

  He ran to the door and began pounding on it. “Hey! Hey, somebody, let me out of here!”

  The door drifted open under his hands.

  The building was deserted. Chairs lay haphazardly around the offices and glass was broken out of the doors. Guy tapped on one of the CRTs, but it was dead as the old woman downstairs.

  The programmers had obviously panicked when the computer went down. So, Guy thought, no more govt.

  He compared his watch to the bright sunlight out, side and decided it was eleven in the morning. He went home, took a long shower, and walked to work.

  ***

  Isabel Necessary, his district manager, wanted to fire him at first. She couldn’t believe that Guy could have lost the diskette and missed five days’ work without phoning in.

  “I was in an accident,” Guy lied cheerfully. “I lost my memory.”

  “I’ll bet,” Isabel sneered. “You were probably just lying around watching TV.”

  But in the end she let him stay. Probably, Guy thought, because she couldn’t find anybody else for the money who’d wear decent clothes.

  He stopped at Sam and Janet’s place after work, but they’d moved away, with no forwarding address. The new tenant, a middle-aged man in a bathrobe, had WLCD running in the background when he answered the door.

  “Sorry I can’t help you,” he told Guy. He had one eye still on the TV as Guy thanked him and left.

  Standing in the street, Guy realized it was the first time he’d been outside in recent memory without something terrible happening to him. The astroturf sidewalk felt firm and springy beneath his feet; he was clean and nicely dressed again. He should have been happy, but somehow he felt like he’d missed out on something, as if he’d woken up and found himself inexplicably old and frail.

  He decided he really ought to talk it over with Santa. He crossed the street and went into the booth on the comer.

  The Porta-Santa was dead.

  Santa’s face was frozen on the screen, half, way into a wink. One eye was almost closed and his mouth was twisted in what looked like a grimace of pain.

  Guy stood there for half an hour, watching the distorted face, waiting for some kind of message. It’s not coming, he realized at last. It’s like the mutie said. The revolution happened, but nobody noticed. They were all home watching TV.

  “So long, Santa,” Guy said.

  He shut the door of the booth and shuffled away down the green plastic lawn of the sidewalk.

  * * *

  Lewis Shiner is the author of Black & White, Frontera, and the World Fantasy Award-winning Glimpses, among other novels. He’s also published four short story collections, journalism, and comics. Virtually all of his work is available for free download at fictionliberationfront.net.

  “Stompin’ at the Savoy” was previously published in Shayol #7 (1985).

  The Brain Dump

  by Bruce Sterling

  Of you Internet world people, many know our new bad troubles here in Ukraine. Beloved cool techno-culture center “Izolyatsia” is seized by ethnic rebels in city of Donetsk. Armed separatists get real drunk, bust up the art gallery, carry off all our favorite 3DPrinters. No nice gadgets left in Izolyatsia now, just landmines.

  We are independent digital culture center from Frunze, Hirske, Borivske (careful not mentioning exact village where we live). In our “Brain Dump” hackerspace we are underground alternative freeware hack scene. Total do-it-yourself. Share everything, build own desks from old packing crates. Way into Linux, Wikipedia and Instructables. Every day we learn something good from Internet community.

  In Brain Dump we have broadband, so we are watching cool videos from "motherboard.vice.com.” We see on Motherboard that Iraqis, Mexicans and Syrians getting shot up and bombed even worse than us. We are grateful to explain ourselves on much-respected Vice classy website backed by Intel.

  Because we are open-source freaks, no cash, also no real jobs, we settle inside dead rubber-tyre factory where we “borrow” electricity from local nuke plant. We listen to streaming techno and metal, coding a lot, smoking cannabis and never go into a church. So we are called “decadent” by repressive Russian-Orthodox militia of Donetsk Peoples Republic. Not looking good.

  Also, Ukrainian National Guard will probably blow up our hacklab with artillery strikes or chopper missiles. “Brain Dump” is rusty old concrete bunker with young men in and out at any time day and night, to carry big package of laptops also beer. Therefore Brain Dump fits ideal drone surveillance profile for terrorist headquarters. Sure to get blasted by authorities with no warning and no civil rights.

  Too late we Ukraine hackers regret our growing fame and high public profile online. During Euromaidan, we broke into the secret services of the former president of the guardhouse and stole all their Chinese and Korean wiretapping equipment. After that, many western hippies hacker come to visit us and share the cool knowledge. Chaos Computer Club, Icelandic Pirate Party, Lebanese cypher scene. These fun guys really help us in our creative art projects.

  Richard Stallman, too. He is our hero. Stallman does not visit our Brain Dump hackerspace, because he refuses to use Google Maps on principle. But Richard Stallman sends much helpful email clarifying important ideological differences between the “GNU” and the “Linux”.

  In our paramilitary emergency, even the great Richard Stallman can not help us. He is a prophet of a better world, Richard Stallman. This is his job. If only we could roam the whole world as him, to preach intellectual freedom for creative coders as us. We have hair as long as Richard Stallman but we have no passports. No money. No guns. No lawyers either. We are stuck inside “NovoRossiya” of angry separatist region of east Ukraine with new roadblocks onto every bridge. It’s like sad emoticon.

  We collect in the Brain Dump to discuss our crisis, we are stockpiling water in plastic jugs, also stealing a new generator. Crisis committee is me, also “Objekt110”, “Uroboros”, “Grey Turtle”, “Nashie” and “PizzaHutFan”. “Turla” and “AgentBTZ” busy at day of work at a computer repair shop. Also two girls from our digital culture group are gone to Femen rally cutting up icons with chainsaws.

  The dark truth of our grim situation do not require a lot of discussion on us. Everyone agrees it’s likely fatal. In our national tragedy, our hacker club of Internet freedom are only sane people left around. Being hip 4Chan hackers and LOLcats, we have always been considered craziest people in our village. Now the world turns. We hackers are only remaining source of common sense.

  Madness is at every hand. Unbelievable! Ukrainians of our sleepy eastern province are best known as the grumpy wheat farmers and boozy coal miners. When their TV is turned off and no police around, these normal Ukraine people get plenty weird. Not one shred of reality not to be found inside their heads. Daily life is like rave party of hallucinations bad trip Slavic political extremism. Even harmless old kerchief-head Grandma is a terrorist, fascist, and also World War Two Stalinist. New words of Cyrillic political abuse unknown to Latin alphabet, like “zionazi” and “liberast.”

  The modern telecommunication is no help to these people. Forget that. Never heard of useful hacker sites like GitHub and SourceForge. Instead they use social media stupid computer illiterate mobiles! Everybody’s fingers busy to send each other bloody scary pix of imaginary enemies!