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  Noel and Sean approached a nearby stand where a host or waiter in a red bowtie was loitering. The waiter looked surly.

  “What do you want?” he demanded from them very aggressively.

  Sean was taken aback, but Noel was undeterred.

  “We’d like a table for two, please,” said Noel.

  “What, to eat?” asked the waiter.

  “Yes,” said Noel.

  The waiter’s surly expression contorted into an expression of amazement.

  “Really?”

  “Yes.”

  “Hot dang,” said the waiter. “Hey fellas!” he shouted, turning his head back towards the kitchen. “We got customers.”

  “Tell ‘em to go to hell,” came a voice from the back.

  “No, I said we got customers,” the waiter shouted back. “Not health inspectors or bailiffs or public prosecutors. Customers!”

  “Really?” the voice shouted. “They must be freaks. Show them in!”

  “Yeah,” the surly man called back. “I’ll show you guys to your table. Wait, when you said you were here to eat and you wanted a table, you want the table to sit at, right? You’re not gonna eat the table? Because we don’t do that any more.”

  “No, we just want to sit at the table,” said Sean.

  “Okay, follow me,” the host said gruffly. He showed them to a table near the television.

  “Thanks,” said Sean.

  “Sit down and shut up,” said the host. “We don’t want to get too chummy here. This is a business. Now, here are some menus.”

  He chucked menus at them.

  “And here are place settings.”

  He threw some spoons and forks at them. Sean hurriedly grabbed them and shoved them down his shirt.

  “I didn’t get my place setting,” Sean lied as he did this. “Could I have another one?”

  “No,” said the waiter. “Now, gimme drink orders. What do you want? We got water and diet water, and I think we’ve also got a pot of de-caff water brewing in back.”

  “I’d like some coffee,” said Sean.

  Noel considered.

  “I’d like something for the thinking man, that makes me feel like I’m superior to everyone else around me when I drink it,” he said.

  “One coffee and twelve shots of bourbon, coming up,” said the waiter. He retreated.

  “Good service,” said Sean.

  Noel raised an eyebrow at him.

  “You might be experiencing some residual stupidity and ignorance-based positive outlook in the aftermath of those powerful electric shocks I applied to your brain,” said Noel. “That’s similar to what happens in lobotomy patients. It’s not surprising.”

  “That sounds like it could be bad,” said Sean. “Is it serious?”

  “No, it’s just some temporary permanent stupidity,” said Noel. “A small price to pay for getting rid of your alcoholism and various other personality flaws.”

  “I was wondering why I had this,” Sean said, drawing his hip flask out of his pocket.

  “Yeah, I’ll take that if you’re done with it,” Noel said, snatching it from him and sniffing at it. “It’ll go well with my bourbon.”

  They settled down and waited for their food to arrive. Next to them, the TV newspeople were showing a weather forecast.

  “Today in the weather news, light, scattered showers are sweeping through Charleston ahead of a much-anticipated visit by Donald Trump,” a newscaster said. “In other weather, a Trumpnado ripped through Trump country like Donald Trump through anything that was ever agreed in Paris.”

  Sean threw one of the forks he stole at the television to mute it.

  “All the news is about Donald Trump,” Sean complained. “I don’t like it. Why can’t they have something wholesome and educational on, like my dad?”

  “Is your dad on television?” asked Noel.

  “Yeah, he’s an anti-begonia pundit,” said Sean.

  Noel raised an eyebrow, but before he said anything, their waiter returned with drinks. He gave Sean his coffee and Noel his twelve shots of bourbon, which he poured from the bottle.

  “Leave the bottle,” Noel requested, catching the waiter by the arm as he moved to take it away.

  “No,” the waiter refused. “I’m drinking out of this, and I’m not giving it to you.”

  He took a swig from the whiskey.

  “I used to be an alcoholic, but I recovered,” Sean said.

  “Did you go to Alcoholics Anonymous meetings?” asked the waiter.

  “No, this guy ran a current of green lightning across my brain,” said Sean, pointing to Noel.

  “Well, that’s never worked for me,” the waiter said with a shrug. “Anyway, make with the orders, chop chop. We don’t have time to just sit around here all day with our fingers up our noses, like the chefs in the kitchens.”

  “We haven’t really had time to look at our menus,” said Noel.

  “Oh, to hell with the menus,” the waiter said, and ripped them off the table, then chucked them away. “We got two kinds of food here: 1) Food, and 2) Not Food. If you’re on a budget, the Not Food is on sale and is about 30% cheaper than the Food.”

  “I’ll have Food,” Noel said.

  “I’m not sure my new employer pays me, so you’d better give me Not Food,” said Sean.

  “For ninety-nine cents more, we can make that Not Food potentially edible,” the waiter said.

  “Mmm, okay,” Sean said. “Do that.”

  “What kind of disease do you want to get from your Food?” the waiter asked Noel. “We’ve got staphylococcus, MRSA, SARS, E. coli, Salmonella, polio, Bacillus subtilis, spider venom, the stuff that causes gastroenteritis, plus a bunch of swirly stuff that the scientists haven’t identified yet. That’s the house special.”

  “Do you have anything that doesn’t cause disease?” asked Noel.

  “Well, lah dee dah,” the waiter mocked Noel. “Look at His Majesty the King of England here who will only eat untainted food, too good to eat slop out of a bucket on his knees like the rest of us. Listen, pal, you’ll eat food with an illness festering it, and you’ll like it. I didn’t become a waiter just to lurch around listening to people whinge about how their food has lethal bacteria and spores.”

  “Hey, I eat slop out of a bucket every day,” Noel bristled. “That’s the only thing provided under our corporate catering plan.”

  “Then choose something,” said the waiter. “Trust me, you’re going to want an infection to take the edge off the taste anyway.”

  “Okay, okay,” said Noel. “Give me the Bacillus.”

  “Very good, sir,” the waiter said brightly.

  “And give me the swirly stuff,” said Sean.

  The waiter snorted.

  “You don’t get an illness with your Not Food. That’s what you get for buying the economy option. If you want the extra service, you’ve got to pay the extra price. You can choose a dressing instead. Do you want ranch or thousand island?”

  “Ranch,” said Sean.

  “Well, we don’t have either, so you’re getting bupkis,” said the waiter, and then stomped off to shout the order into the kitchen.

  Noel watched him go, then covertly took out the magic wand he used to scan for defective people. It started to beep wildly.

  “There’s definitely someone defective in this area,” he said. He waved the magic wand around. It chimed madly when he oriented it towards Sean.

  “Darn,” said Noel. “It’s getting too much interference from you to detect our target.”

  “What do you mean it’s getting interference from me?” Sean demanded. “I’m not defective.”

  He crossed his arms defiantly.

  “I’m not going to argue the point,” Noel said dismissively. “I’ll just have to modify it to ignore you so we can detect our target.”

  He flipped open a blinking panel on the wand to reveal a handful of capacitors and circuit boards, onto which he started to pour one of his shots of whiske
y. The device sparked and flared, letting off some steam in the process.

  “This could get a little delicate,” Noel said, taking a large hammer out of his jacket pocket.

  “Why don’t we just grab the waiter?” Sean suggested. “Isn’t he the defective one?”

  “No,” said Noel.

  “But he’s acting pretty defective,” Sean pressed.

  “I agree, but that doesn’t matter. Due to the brainwave resonance I mentioned earlier, the prime defective person causes everyone around him to act defective, not just himself. That’s what makes the defective people so problematic. They infect others with their defects. Why, just one defective person can cause the defect to spread to thousands of others! That’s what happened when the batch of people who suck loudly on their teeth slipped through our QA process and got released to the public. By the time we recalled them, it was too late.”

  Noel shook his head.

  “So one defective person can cause all the people around him to start acting defective?”

  “Of course,” Noel said impatiently. “That’s why everyone at Humancorp acts so crazy - all the defective models are in use at Humancorp. Well, that and the CEO’s policies. They have a lot to do with it too.”

  Sean thought about this.

  “So how many people are real and how many people are the fakes made by Humancorp?”

  “Practically everyone is fake,” said Noel, tapping his foot. “I’m fake. The only people who are real humans are rich and powerful, like the CEO. You’ve probably never met a real person unless they were born before the war. All the people were real back then.”

  Sean thought about this some more. It was difficult to wrap his mind around.

  “Er... so I wasn’t born?”

  “Definitely not,” said Noel. He wasn’t paying much attention to Sean, since he was now whacking his magic wand hard with the hammer.

  The idea that Sean was a fake automaton was very distressing to Sean. Throughout his whole life, Sean had very little to be proud of. He’d done poorly in school, been fired from multiple jobs, lost a lot of girlfriends, and been kicked out of most buildings near where he lived, including his parents’ house. However, there were two things in his life in which he’d taken a little pride. The first was the golden pin on his lapel, which was his most cherished possession in the whole world. The second was the fact that he was a human, and therefore better than lower forms of life, like raccoons, whales, and city councilmen. Indeed, Sean had often lorded this over raccoons and councilmen by going up to them and aggressively mocking them, a practice that had got him banned from city hall and the more respectable garbage cans around the neighborhood. Dinero’s and Noel’s assertion that Humancorp had produced him like a ballpoint pen or a power charger threatened to take the second thing away from him, and thus his sense of superiority over life’s other creatures. He couldn’t have that.

  Making up his mind then and there, Sean took out his smartphone and dialed a number he knew well. Since it was the twenty-first century and all, he went to the opulent excess of making it a video call.

  The image of Sean’s doting gray-haired mother appeared on the screen.

  “Hello, dear,” she said, her voice heavy with maternal affection, though as ever she recoiled slightly at the sight of Sean.

  “Hi, Mom,” Sean said cheerily. “I got a new job today!”

  “Oh, that’s very nice,” said his mother. “Do you like it?”

  “No,” Sean said. “I’ve been hit and had arcs of lightning run across my head and been told to live in a ditch, but maybe it will grow on me.”

  “I’m sure it will, sweety,” his mother said reassuringly. “Remember to give it your best and everything will work out fine.”

  There was a pause in the conversation. Somewhere in the background, Sean could hear his father swearing at plants.

  “Touch those begonias and I’ll burn your hand off and use it as a cupholder, Rodney,” Pearl shouted over her shoulder, then turned back to Sean.

  Sean shifted uncomfortably.

  “Mom, you gave birth to me, right?”

  “Of course, dear,” she said. “It was just down the road, at the Fake Childbirth Center.”

  “So I’m not an automaton that was constructed by a giant evil corporation that you purchased to raise as your son?”

  Sean’s mother’s expression changed. Her eyes narrowed to keen points, and her face became shrewd.

  “Who told you?” she demanded.

  “Humancorp did,” said Sean. “I work for them now.”

  There was another awkward pause.

  “How could you lie to me all these years?” said Sean. “Why didn’t you tell me I was purchased from a giant, evil corporation?”

  “Oh, Sean,” Pearl said. “Please try to understand. Your father and I always wanted to have children, but between my career and his insane, psychotic hatred of begonias, it just didn’t seem like a good idea at the time. We purchased a child instead. That’s what everyone does. Our neighbors down the street bought all seventeen of their children from Humancorp. We didn’t tell you because we didn’t want you to feel you weren’t as good as the other children.”

  “They’re all fakes too, though,” said Sean. “Why couldn’t you just have been honest with me?”

  “Sean, there are so many little white lies we, as parents, tell to our children - so many things that are fake that we pretend are real, like the Tooth Fairy, or the Easter Bunny, or Santa Claus...”

  “You mean Santa Claus isn’t real either!?” Sean demanded, thunderstruck. “How could you do this to me, mother?”

  She sighed again.

  “Sean, when you were little I really didn’t think you were ready to learn that virtually the entirety of humanity except for a select few were mass produced by an evil corporation as an underclass to provide labor and profit to rich and powerful elites. You weren’t mature enough.”

  “I’m not happy about this,” Sean said, and crossed his arms. “It’s not even the fact that humanity is just a bunch of fake automatons designed to work and bring personal wealth and comfort to the powerful, rich people that upsets me. I’m upset that you lied to me.”

  Pearl looked a little distressed. There was another awkward silence punctuated by the sound of shattering china.

  “I think I hear your father trying to murder my garden again,” Pearl said at length. “I have to go thrash his arms off with a hot poker. We’ll talk more later, Sean.”

  And with that, his mother hung up.

  Sean sank back into his chair, and feeling very despondent, started to shovel more napkins down his shirt.

  Chapter 14

  “It’s very distressing,” Sean complained to Noel. “My own mother knew I was a fake person and lied to me.”

  “If it makes you feel any better, she is also a fake person,” said Noel. “Your whole family is probably fake people. Maybe no one in your entire family was ever real. Think about it. Do you even have any proof that your great-grandfather existed at all? If so, your family probably never had any real people in it. It was just rolled straight off the assembly line, given false memories, and put to work in a fishery or something.”

  Noel didn’t look overly distressed, as he was still tinkering with the magic wand to detect defective people.

  “I’m still very upset,” Sean said crossly. In fact, he was so upset that it was making it difficult to enjoy his coffee.

  “Why not take this?” Noel said, offering him a pill. “It will take your mind off things.”

  “Is that another suicide pill?” Sean said, examining the capsule.

  “If I said it wasn’t, would you swallow it?”

  Sean didn’t answer but frowned at it.

  “Fine, fine,” Noel said, downing one of his many shots of bourbon. “Next time I reprogram your brain, remind me to get rid of your will to live. It’s causing a lot of problems for me.”

  “I hope it does,” said Sean. “What about all th
e pregnant people I meet?”

  “Fakes,” said Noel.

  “Videos of births?”

  “Staged, for the most part.”

  “Er, and mothers who say they’ve given birth to their children?”

  “Liars, like yours,” said Noel. “You can’t just go around believing everyone you meet! Start doing that and you’ll end up in church or as a member of a political party or something.”

  “I’m a member of the Reform Party,” Sean said in surprise.

  “I rest my case,” said Noel.

  “Phooey.” Sean tightened his crossed arms. “I don’t like all this manufactured humans stuff.”

  “You’d better not be like this all day,” said Noel. “If you’re that upset about it, why not read the Humancorp employee handbook?”

  “Will that explain more about the nature of humanity?”

  “No, but it will probably shut you up for a while.”

  Sean considered, then consented to take out his employee handbook. It was actually a very beautiful thing, and Sean ran his hand across the gold letters on the cover thoughtfully.

  “I sure hope I can read it,” Sean said. “I’m illiterate.”

  Noel looked up from the magic wand and raised an eyebrow at him.

  “I thought you had a degree in English.”

  “Yeah, the guy I stole it from was really mad,” said Sean. “Anyway, I’m not sure it’s a degree in English. I can’t read it. I’m illiterate.”

  “Ah,” said Noel, and went back to his magic wand.

  Sean opened the cover and looked over the first page, which had a copy of Humancorp’s mission statement in large, italicized text. It read:

  “At Humancorp, our mission is to make enough money for our CEO to afford a fourth palace for his dog.”

  Below that, there was something called a “culture vision,” also in large, italicized letters.

  “Humancorp strives to foster a culture of profitability by exploiting our employees and working them to the brink of death and then some, and charging them for the privilege, all the while producing products for people to buy.”

  On the next page, there was a statement from the CEO Richard Dinero.