My Talk Show

In the year 2099, in the era of the anti-celebrity, Miss Harmony Love is the reigning talk show host in the world, heir to the longest running talk show ever. Technology being what it is, she produces her show in a public time slice referred to as Nuevo York. Then she bubble jumps the dimensions to open in a simultaneous time slice, in a secret location. She films live, although in the era of the anti-celebrity most audiences are androids, unless a renegade cyborg worms through the bubble jump. Harmony Love has some misgivings about showing a renegade the portal. Mostly she tolerates these politically motivated disruptions to her show. Her own cause today is the abolishment of self-adornment, but still, life can be dull in 2099.

It’s also apparent to her that an occasional renegade cyborg is a relief, as she never interfaces well with androids. But it is the age of the anti-celebrity, for which she is grateful, as we all are, and so she calmly accepts that audiences are hard to come by, unless you are filming north of Siberia where progress is slower. No way could she afford an audience, or handlers, or people ripping up seats from the longest running talk show ever. And anyway, souvenir taking is discouraged in the age of the anti-celebrity. As everyone knows, though, they just want the seats. In an earlier era, her predecessor had to replace seats every other week, and forget about a camera pan of the audience!

Tonight the camera blinks a three minute cue. It is hard for Harmony Love to feel pushed around by a disembodied voice, but if she doesn’t bubble jump fast enough the camera will insist rudely on a low frequency.

“Do I look all right?” Harmony faces her make-up Guru with the same high anxiety every night.

“Don’t be vain,” says Zero, who is part Gray and subject to discrimination on earth. “You know you look bad when you show off. Just be yourself. What are you paying yourself for?” Zero does not actually apply make-up or any adornments to Harmony’s face or body. In fact, jack of all trades, Zero has just finished his duties for the night as Harmony’s make-up Guru, which is a good thing. He has more important things to do before the night is over, least of which is being the bouncer—which is exhausting for Zero and involves eye strain and, in dire emergencies, a telekinetic sucking motion along the seams of the portal.

Zero is also Harmony Love’s best friend. They met on a space tour of outer-toxic coagulations seven lifetimes ago. In addition to his other demanding work on My Talk Show, Zero is Harmony’s co-host. Secretly Harmony was in love with Zero in another lifetime, but now he’s too insulting. He’s also not the greatest hybrid she’s ever seen, so she keeps her emotional distance. Zero is an anti-celebrity in his own right. He claims he doesn’t need anything—no substance, no outer wrappings. He claims that, as a half Gray, he only needs to be amused. It was a great day in recordable history when the Grays sat down with the Pentagon chiefs and explained that, after all these years, they simply wanted to be amused, and then they gave us their masses of hybrids.

Zero and Harmony make a great team. They play off each other perfectly, never missing a microsecond. In real life they communicate poorly, suffering a cultural gap the size of a Zeta Reticuli vacuum slug. Zero has a few sand gray wisps of hair on his head like dead sea-grass. His eyes, peerless black almonds, are the biggest thing in his face. His body is gummy and sticky with little distinction, more fluid and wobbly than muscular, like hard Jell-O. Harmony is a seven foot tall eugenics experiment, an abomination from an earlier age—the age of the ultra-celebrity. One-hundred thirty-thousand other women in the solar system share her identical look—tan, blue eyed, perfect and beautiful enough to be boring after a minute of gazing. To distinguish herself from others she wears a new hat every night on her show, and she plays the victim of science. But enough exposition. Let’s watch the show.

“ Welcome to My Talk Show,” says Harmony as she appears diaphanous, and then solid. The roar of the audience is, to use a term from antiquity, canned. Zero has bubble jumped before her so he already sits in his rocking chair by her love seat. One of their sight gags—one which always gets the audience going, occurs when Zero says something sarcastic about humans and Harmony, in a supine manner, leans off her couch as if to gag. If it is a particularly good joke, she does a pratfall and lands on her belly on the floor. If the joke is a crowd buster, she swims on the floor like a fish out of water.

Harmony flops onto her love seat. “Well, Zero.” She slips her brocade slippers off, one after the other, and throws them; Zero flinches, but the second one decks his vast brow like a bulls-eye target. “I see that five trillion light year stare again. You mad at me for something?”

“Just cut to the chase, Harmony. I saw this one coming five years ago.” Zero sits weightless in his rocker. He drapes the old presidential relic like an empty dress.

“All right, honey! Whatever! I apologize in advance. I know that look. You’re killing me, Zero.”

“ Well, nobody ever said you were perfect,” says Zero, and it is a non sequitur, but when their chemistry interfaces slowly in the beginning the line is a certain crowd buster; the audience program claps and hoots automatically for any reference to the word “perfect.”

“In fact, you’re so perfect you look like a plasma cast.”

The audience pauses for the end of the line and then claps and hoots for the insertion of the word “perfect.” From Harmony’s point of view, the interface seems to be timing up well.

“ So would your mamma, I suspect, if you had one. By the way, I’ve been meaning to ask you for, like, seven life times already: who, or what, is your mamma, Zero? Do you even know? In fact, surprise, surprise, although apparently nothing surprises your rubbery ass, tonight we have, as our guests, three entities who claim to be Zero’s mother. And our sentient/biosphere viewing audience is already primed to simulate a vote during the break, if that’s alright with you, my friend.”

A nd peering into the audience, Harmony says, “Zero is a good sport, isn’t that right Zero?”

“ Since you’re ripe with condescension, what choice do I have?”

“Do I detect hostility?”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“I knew I’d regret asking. Let’s bring on the candidates. First, candidate number one, a pleasant young earth born woman who claims she can reincarnate without perishing the body. Let’s get her up here and see what her agenda is. Ladies and gentlemen, let’s welcome the entity purporting to be Zero’s Mother, the former Miss Pacific Fault Line, Lila Wyoming!”

Nothing is perfect in the age of the anti-celebrity, so it is not an awkward moment when the android audience stiffs the former Miss Pacific Fault Line. The audience sits frozen, un-activated, and the camera pans them anyway. Zero and Harmony clap all alone and Miss Fault Line, Lila Wyoming, takes a seat on a bar stool beside Harmony’s love-seat. Light fades and the hologram of an old grungy Beatnik basement café materializes behind them, with brick walls and neon swear words and smoke. Lila Wyoming wears a barrette, black tights, a sweatshirt for a dress, and ballet slippers. She smokes a cigarillo from a long black tip.

“ Well, Zero,” Harmony starts to say, “Do you recognize…” But just then the androids catch their cue and clap politely.

“As I was saying, do you recognize this woman as your birth mother? You could do worse.”

M iss Fault Line smirks sardonically, which makes Harmony wish she were more telepathic today. She at least understands something is wrong, but then Zero saves the moment.

“Couldn’t I see all the candidates at once? I might pick her and then like someone else better.”

“It doesn’t work that way, Zero.”

“ Why not? Who’s running this show?”

“Nobody.”

T he android audience laughs on time. From the corner of her eye, Harmony spies a shadow like a water stain spreading out across the barrier seal and she realizes that a renegade cyborg or two or more may succeed in jumping the portal at some point during the night. She notices that the shadow is not diminishing. She hopes they’re merely looking for seats.

“Miss Lila Wyoming has come here from the lawless nether region formerly known as San Francisco, and she claims she ascended into astral space corporally, at will, during a poetry argument with the late great poet of the 20 th century, Allen Ginsburg.”

Harmony pauses, gearing up for a little pain. Many names and terms from antiquity are extinct and she is always relieved when one hasn’t been entered into her palm imbedded prompt. The device reminds her that she is a victim of science. She breathes a sigh of relief when her skin does not erupt, bubbling with code.

“Miss Fault Line further states that in that moment she had an epiphany that lead straight to hell. However, in 2020 she returned to earth as a soccer mom…”

Harmony winces in pain and reads her palm prompt, ‘…a soccer mom is a person of female persuasion who has issues with non-transgender males…’ Wow! Have you ever heard that before, Zero? I mean, she is your mom.”

“I confess I have never heard the definition of a soccer mom before,” says Zero. “It intrigues.”

Grays can be humorless. Miss Wyoming snorts without mercy. Harmony winces, but the show must go on.

“ To continue, Miss Wyoming once again had an epiphany and willingly left her body on the soccer field after tearing her daughter’s coach a new asshole. Zero wouldn’t know what an asshole is, would you Zero,” says Harmony Love and the audience laughs without a prompt. Zero vacates his mind momentarily.

“Miss Wyoming, you have an interesting story to tell about your present incarnation. Tell us, where did you conceive Zero?”

M iss Wyoming twines and untwines her legs. She surveys the river beams of magnetic rays overhead and feigns boredom as she drags on her cigarillo.

“I’m glad you asked that Harmony,” says Lila, “because I’d like to clear up a misunderstanding. You see, I met Zero on the astral plain. He and his guide were looking for a fag hag to play Zero’s mother on the earthly plane.”

“I resent that!” sounds the haughty, disembodied voice of the automated political editor.

“ What’s a fag hag?” asks Zero.

“I resent that!” repeats the voice of the automated political editor.

Harmony scrutinizes her palm imbedded prompt which is lighting up faintly, reminding her once again that her skin is too thick. For a moment she pities herself, but the show must go on. “A fag hag,” she reads from the painful code erupting over the entire length of her arm, “is a term from antiquity. I can’t tell you what it means other than a vague reference to sexual preference. The code is in Sanskrit, and I am not fluent in ancient languages, but I will be by tomorrow’s show since it’s a glaring fault.”

“I agreed to the terms,” continued Miss Wyoming, “but after conception I reneged on the deal rather than live with the stigma of having a son with odd sexual proclivities. I dumped him as a zygote in parallel dimension number nine.”

“But Miss Wyoming, Zero is asexual, and parallel dimension number nine is, in general, considered a myth.”

“ Who can explain the ways of the Grays?”

“I resent that! I resent that! I resent that!”

O ver the voice of the automated political editor, the audience boos uniformly, right on cue, sitting up like boards. Zero, taken off guard because he is only half Gray and inconsistently telepathic, spits back at Miss Wyoming through gelatinized teeth, “You friggin Bitch! You’re from The Alliance!”

Zero is quivering like amorphous haze. Being half human, he can be ruled by his emotions.

“ So, you’re saying this woman could not be your mother?”

“Have you got moon rocks between your ears? I said she’s from the nether region formerly known as San Francisco. Or more specifically, The Alliance. They tried to exterminate hybrids in 2045! Soccer mom, my ass!”

Harmony falls off the couch and begins swimming over the floor. She wears a conical hat this night, cinched under her chin. The hat has stars and moons like Merlin the Magician, the magical ruler of the mythical domain once known as Britannia. The hat is cerulean blue, the same color as Harmony’s eyes. The androids should have, but don’t make their cue until she finishes and sits herself properly on her love seat. The effect registers as if the audience clapped because she completed a swimming contest.

Harmony rubs sleep out of her eyes as she sits on the couch. It has been a long seven life times and Zero has had some tiresome part in each one of them. Intuitively, she knows that Zero always has been a burden to her. A burden and a blessing.

“Miss Wyoming, you have been rejected as Zero’s mom. Do you have any explanation or apology you’d like to extend?”

Harmony glances toward the barrier seal. It seems as if the water stain has multiplied into something with six or seven heads and she no longer thinks she is being invaded by a few cyborgs wanting seats. She can see metallic noses and fingers pushing through the thin membrane of the seal, which is supposed to be indestructible. Discretely, she glances overhead at the magnetic river beams, hoping they hold for the next hour or two. She has no idea how many telekinetic co-operatives hold grudges against her show tonight.

“Long live The Alliance!” shouts Miss Wyoming, and she jerks something small and rectangular from its hiding places under her armpit. She waves it high over her head with slight enthusiasm.

Zero zeroes in on the small bit of cloth with his discerning eyes: “It’s the Rag Flag. Told you so.”

Harmony sees her palm lighting up. She reads the front and back of her arm: “The Rag Flag was popular with The Alliance of the former nether region known as San Francisco. It stood as a symbol of righteous self-pity, although individual members of The Alliance rarely knew of its significance as a war relic from an ancient dispute between northern and southern cousins in the region of the Americas.”

Harmony Love turns her entire body to face Miss Wyoming, who is dead panning the audience. “All right, Miss Wyoming. In recorded history we do know for a certainty that the Grays exterminated The Alliance in the year 2059. So your political cause, I’m sorry to say, is extinct, and that probably makes you a fraud. Or are you a hologram?”

“I’m just trying to have an epiphany, here,” says Miss Wyoming.

“Do it on somebody else’s time-warp, baby.’’ Zero chides her. Amused by Miss Wyoming, he makes a huge effort to smile.

Telepathically, Harmony is sensing that Zero is having fun for once, too much fun to pay attention to the barrier seal which has grown dark with the presence of so much body heat; she can only assume a renegade cyborg mob will succeed in causing a static pause in the river beam’s magnetic force, thus creating a window of opportunity for a worm hole to rip into her secret timeline on dimension eight. It’s pretty darn inevitable, she thinks, and she wishes for the life of her that she could remember which political cause is current tonight, so that she could prepare a good line or two. She ponders: Is it Dimensions Unite? Clone to Own? Daughters of Fame and Fortune? Augmentation at any Cost? How am I supposed to keep current? Every Cyborg is a renegade these days. Whatever!

“ Stay seated, Miss Wyoming. You may get your wish yet. Let’s welcome our next contestant. Oh, she’s already bubble jumped. If you look close enough you can see her outline in a cryogenic capsule. Ah, here she is in the flesh, and I do mean warm flesh, for the first time in a century. Audience, please welcome Miss Lunita Caracas, who is not only Zero’s mother, but also the first person to thaw in current time right on our show. You’re seeing it live, folks, in case you’ve never seen it before. Please give her a warm welcome.”

It’s a bad joke but the audience has malfunctioned again and Harmony is trying to get the clap and laugh at once prompt going. “Watch your step, Miss Caracas. You haven’t used those legs for a while. Look, she’s wobbly,” Harmony says to her co-host.

“ What’s her agenda?” says Zero as he watches Lunita flop down like an empty puppet over the back of Harmony’s love seat; her face drops sideways onto the seat cushion like a heavy head of sawdust. Her eyes pop open. She stares in a trance.

Harmony, being engineered for strength, flips her guest onto the seat next to her at light speed. Then she props her guest up. The young, less than perfect talk show host always has oxygen on hand, since it’s the law, and she mainlines Miss Caracas’ wind pipe, thus saving her life with one minute to spare. Once Lunita loses her blue tint Harmony resumes her show. It is not an awkward moment, as the audience is primed to clap at length for anyone who has ever experience cryogenic rebirth.

“Miss Lunita Caracas once presided over the directive for displaced hybrids, did you not Miss Caracas?” Harmony stalls to let Miss Caracas recapture her breath.

Lunita Caracas gasps long and then answers. “Yes I did. Back in the late 22nd century.”

“Ah,” says Harmony. “So this occurred during recordable time.”

“Recordable what?” Miss Caracas screeches with too much alarm for polite viewing. Her voice is craggy. In addition, she pumps her chest with her fist for air. Harmony fears Miss Caracas will vomit like so many who thaw before their due date.

“Before we started recording time backwards, Miss Caracas. Didn’t they brain feed you that information while you were in stasis?”

“No! I couldn’t afford it. You mean to tell me that was the lousy solution they came up with?” asks Lunita.

Harmony is puzzled. “For what, Miss Caracas?”

“ You didn’t know? We practically stuffed the moon with hybrids back in the 22nd century.”

“I resent that!” says the automated political editor in a tone which is guttural, banal, and testy.

“ Since you’re here, Miss Caracas, perhaps you can solve an argument that Zero and I have been having since, well, since before recordable time. Is it true that millions of hybrids were once systematically dumped off the bottom of a Deltoid Cargo Vessel like beam trash?”

“ Yes. It happened more than once, in the nether region once known as Detroit, and the Grays had full government co-operation.”

“And by government you mean…?”

“ Who even knew by then? It was my difficult task to control alien blooms in our part of the solar system.”

“I resent that!”

“I’m Sorry Miss Caracas, but as of yesterday, we no longer use the word ‘alien blooms’ in reference to hybrids.”

“I resent that!”

“ We call them Alien Diasporas.”

“ Well, I apologize, and I’m actually glad to hear that, Miss Love, and to know that you are using the automated political editor. In my day, talk shows never employed them anymore as an attempt to boost ratings, since only a few hundred people watched talk shows regularly. Vanity was on its way out by then.”

Zero and Harmony Love glance at each other perplexed.

“ Well, to speak the truth, Miss Caracas, Zero and I don’t even know who activated the automated political editor.”

“I resent that!”

Zero and Harmony share another look, sheepish, telepathic. Both understand that the automated political editor, so often unused, has morphed this day into an autonomous entity with a grudge. Harmony now telepaths to Zero, asking him what the hell is wrong with him? Why hasn’t he noticed the Cyborgs storming the barrier seal like pompous earth-borns with endless air supply packs. On a smoother wave transmittal, she asks him if the renegades have something to do with the automated political editor going haywire. Zero’s path is static, but he hears enough to know that someone is scrambling his magnetism, making it hard for him to intuit. We’re in trouble, I think, he manages to transmit, and since telepathy happens at the speed of light no one is the wiser that Zero and Harmony have stopped the show to have a discussion.

Harmony Love calls for a diversion.

“ We’ll come right back to your story, Miss Caracas, of how you became Zero’s mother, but first let’s take a relativity break. There’s no time like the present for arm chair space travel, for those of you who are lucky enough to own refitted armchairs, but if you are not one of the lucky ones, our monitor will simulate the lunar vacation tour package now being simultaneously enjoyed for the price of a glove and a pair of goggles. Zero, activate the tour, and folks, we will be right back with My Talk Show in just five lunar minutes.”

D uring the diversion Miss Caracas turns to her host. “I should have waited another fifty years. This is about as momentous as a Zeta Reticuli staring contest. Who are all those people?” Miss Caracas points to the barrier seal surrounding the studio. Currently, it appears that hundreds of bodies and faces and hands are pressing through the seal which has suddenly elasticized. Something, Zero intones to Harmony, in their mass metallurgic aggregate has softened the seal.

Zero hums in a tone frequency that only Harmony understands. It’s their secret friend language: “The cyborgs, I believe, are rattled by a solar storm. Other than that, they’re not in sync with anything beyond a fierce malcontent. The word jealousy comes to mind. Free-floating jealousy.”

A s they look overhead Zero and Harmony can see the vague outline of them, pushing against the membrane like a herd of cloned bison, which are supposed to be docile, only there is nothing docile about this crowd, and they are most definitely not bison pushing against each other and bawling out for an inch of space in the vast Texas desert. As their silver faces push against the seal, their expressions tell the story; they are furious, evil, intent on domination and insurgency. They intend to conduct a coup, no doubt. Harmony turns to Zero.

“Oh well. I hope Miss Caracas gets to tell her story, at least.”

“It’s not like you’ve never been upstaged by a mass of renegades before.”

“ Whatever they’re demanding today will change tomorrow.”

“Don’t I always say that?” says Zero.

“Can’t you get a read on their cause? It’s too much chaos for me. Here, let me turn the river beam on unification mode. Nothing they do or think will jam your current once we put the river beams on unification mode. Too bad we can’t afford the unification mode all the time.”

“ That’s fine, Harmony. We’d never take vacations if we could afford unification mode.”

“ What do they want?”

“Oh, my Aggregate of Everything! They want your hats!”

“ That’s it?’

“ They want your entire collection!”

“No way are they getting my hats. Oh my Aggregate of Everything! That’s all the identity I own in this dimension! No way are they getting my hats!”

“Oh, my Aggregate of Everything! Like I’m supposed to care? Hybrids can’t even move through eight dimensions without getting slimed by half a dozen no good entities. Bo-hoo-hoo! Like I give a zygote’s hind-end about your friggen hats!”

“ Zero, please, you gotta help me save my hats!”

“Like hell I do.”

“ Zero, as my only hybrid friend, I’m begging you.”

“Excuse me! Only! Emphasis on the word only!”

“Please, Zero!”

Zero gets a look of deep consternation in his vast black almond shaped eyes. If he had eyebrows he’d be scrunching them. His eyes strain hard, and a sucking motion flutters around the barrier seal, as bodies magnetized to the membrane break apart and fly away, splintered into sharp slivers of space debris, but Cyborg life is cheap in 2099.

“ There,” says Zero. “That will hold them for a while. They’ll be back of course, in bigger numbers. In the meantime, let’s bring Miss Caracas back in.”

“I owe you one, Zero.”

“ You owe me my dignity.”

“Ladies and Gentlemen, welcome back to My Talk Show, the longest running talk show in history, and if you just tuned in a few minutes ago you know that we are about to interview Miss Lunita Caracas, who claims to be Zero’s mother. And you also know, many of you, that renegades of a yet undiscovered political cause are attempting to storm my studio for the purpose of stealing the one thing in my life I own individually the only unique thing I have ever owned, thanks to the once idiotic notion that every woman should look like a casting coach dream. Now, I don’t know what a casting coach dream is and neither do you. Even my palm meter can’t find the reference. The meaning of the term has been lost to us for eons, but the damage has been done by people living in the age of the ultra-celebrity. I mean, look at me! I’m perfectly boring. I see hundreds of me every day. What insidious political movement would want to rob me of my hats! The one thing! The one thing! It’s inconceivable ladies and gentlemen!”

“Oh give it a rest,” says Zero.

“All right, I will. Miss Caracas, do tell us your story. How is it that you claim to be Zero’s mother?”

“Adopted mother,” Miss Caracas corrects Harmony.

“ Well, what difference would that make? Half the earth-born population is adopted.”

“ Yes, but they didn’t all begin their lives in a vacuum slug.”

“I don’t believe it,” says Zero.

“ Why do you care?” asks Harmony in a snide voice. It is clear that Harmony is still lugging a bruised ego from the attempted assault on her hats. Also, concerning her own conception, Harmony has a rough stigma of her own to combat having been cloned from butt flesh.

“I don’t care,” says Zero, who is used to countering Harmony’s testiness with apathy. “I’m just saying I don’t believe it. I happen to remember my conception.”

“Oh My Aggregate of Everything, now you tell me! I could have written a different show!”

“I didn’t say I remember who the fuckies were. I just said I remember the event. I’m just as curious as you are.”

“ Well, I suppose that’s different. Do tell, or let’s have Miss Caracas tell her side of the story, since she claims to be your mother.”

“ Zero is correct. There was an actual moment of conception. But it involved no specific fuckies.”

“Go on,” says Harmony.

“ Stop it. You are turning me on,” says the disembodied voice of the automated political editor. Zero and Harmony flash each other a worried look. The voice is sardonic.

“ Zero came to me as a cryo-specimen. It was a birthday present from a diplomat. One of the Blues, as I recall, a sentient species which is most likely extinct today.”

“I wouldn’t know,” says Harmony.

“No, I wouldn’t either,” says Zero.

“ This diplomat of a dying race told me that Zero was slated for great things someday. Well, he had no idea, being nearly extinct, that we had just exited the age of the Ultra-Celebrity. By the way, in my day, we had a limit on celebrities. Listen, in our day we had solutions. We handled the problem. Once a celebrity died, we never replaced them. Everyone else got their allotted three hours and twenty minutes of fame, and they took their minutes sequentially. The problem became reasonable. If it weren’t for the introduction of your new idealism, the ‘Backlash’ would be stuck on dimension nine without an air pack to split between them.”

“Dimension nine is a myth,” replies the automated political editor.

“It’s just an expression. I can’t believe your editor missed that. Don’t you download, Harmony?”

No one downloads everything in 2099. However, regardless of her near perfection, Harmony Love can be defensive: “For someone who couldn’t afford a brain feed you sure know a lot about the politics of the moment, Lunita. By the way, we’ve heard the poverty excuse before, like, a billion times. Half the people in stasis use that phony excuse. Obviously you had access to a cheap, pirated feed. Which means you haven’t paid an air tax in a very long time. Believe me, you don’t want to know the penalty for breaking the law in 2099, Miss Caracas.”

Zero and Miss Caracas yell at her simultaneously, “What law, Harmony!”

“All right. Well, no offense taken. Excuse me for exposing you on a live Time Cast.” Harmony smiles at Miss Caracas and she smiles back.

“

Well, excuse me, as well, Harmony. I apologize for disgracing your show. In my own defense, I had reasons for getting the hell out of time/space. They eliminated my job, outsourced it to some degraded solar system I never heard of. Some place that spits sulfur five hundred feet in the air. I didn’t even have a womb to rent at the time. All I had was a fifth rate cryogenic plan which was about to expire anyway. I’m damn lucky I wasn’t salvaged for spare parts. ”

“By?’

“A harvester!

Harmony shrugs. Then she caught on. “Oh! They’re called realignments now, and there’s a two thousand year back log of spare parts. But would that be so bad? You’d be doing your part for science.”

“Holy Mother Aggregate! I never dreamed people would become so inured to it all by the year 2099.”

“Go on, Miss Caracas. That is, I mean to say, back up to what we were discussing before you had an agenda.”

“ So I kept Zero on my curios shelf, thinking, for the sake of our history, that someday he might be designated a specimen of the age of the Ultra-Celebrity, perhaps the last of his kind. Someone from my lab must have been a renegade spy from the ‘Backlash,’ however, for Zero was stolen, and the last I heard, he was shipped off to Cleveland for the purpose of creating another hybrid bloom.”

“I resent that, and I intend to respond with force.”

Zero, Harmony, and Miss Caracas all wince at the roughness in the voice of the automated political editor, who is talking in slow motion.

“I mean the Alien Diaspora. Whoever it was, they weren’t heartless. Cleveland, in my day, was a safe haven for hybrids. Most things in Cleveland were done telekinetically back then. Hybrids could go there and just chill for centuries. The last thing I did before I cryogenerated was to trace my specimen…”

“I resent that,” says Zero, since the automated political editor has missed its cue.

“I mean to say, I traced Zero’s migration records to Cleveland.”

“ That’s it? That’s all you have?” asked Harmony. “Zero, have you ever been to Cleveland?”

“Oh my Aggregate of Everything! Every hybrid vacations in Cleveland. Ask me if I have thin lips.”

“But do you remember being a child there? Do you remember being part of a Diaspora when you were embryonic?”

Telepathically, Zero and Harmony begin to argue.

“Are your ratings that low?” says Zero. “You would give me up for a few dozen extra biosphere plazma zombies?”

“ Zero, just make something up! What the hell is wrong with you? Can’t you trust me after seven life times? I would never tell anyone that you were viral in nature! Say something, quick!”

“Lady,” says Zero. “If you were my mother, which you’re not, I wouldn’t take you to a zygote show.”

“Fine with me,” says Miss Caracas. “I got a free thaw out, didn’t I?”

“Look at her. She’s smirking. If that isn’t the grossest damn thing.” Zero forces a smile as best he can, for he is highly amused.

“Ladies and gentlemen of the midnight hour,” says Harmony. “We’ll be back in five lunar minutes with our third contestant. For now, do enjoy the holograms dancing in your heads to the tune of “Whose Your Mamma Tonight,” a song from antiquity which Zero, our band master, is artistically arranging in his mind as we speak. My apologies to those in the viewing audience who don’t have the sentient link up to Zero’s left hemisphere. His spontaneous compositions are really worth the extra price. “Enjoy folks, and we’ll be right back with you in a lunar five.”

Zero turns to Harmony. “As I said, I saw this five years ago. You don’t have a third contestant.”

“I was going to use one of the androids.”

“I saw that too, you creep.”

“ Well great, sport! Aren’t you special! Why don’t you just tell me what happens next, Mr. Walks on Water!”

“Can I go now,” says Miss Caracas. “I hate talk shows.”

“No, that’s fine, Miss Caracas,” says Harmony.

“ You run along. Thanks for coming,” says Zero.

“ Where is Miss Wyoming?” asks Harmony, noticing for the first time that the former Miss Pacific Fault line and all her props are gone.

“Ha!” says Zero, “The entire thing was a hologram. Who duped you into buying that package? I hope you didn’t pay liquids for it.”

W hen Harmony feels criticized by Zero, she reminds him, in any way she can, that being human, even part human, can be painful. “Gee. How interesting. It looks like you’re drawing a vacuum slug for a memory blank. You gave me the package, you dolt! You sold it to me five years ago!”

“ Well that’s because I saw the show five years ago!”

“ Who can explain the ways of the Grays!” Harmony snaps back, but then she immediately apologizes.

Harmony and Zero face each other in the dead of night. The river beams hiss silently above their heads, but of course they can both hear them. For telepaths, there is no silence. Silence is deafening, like a wind gust through a lunar canyon, like a zillion simulated heart beats on the cusp of Zeta Reticuli, like a dimension collapsing in the slow, prolonged space of one agonizing star death. And for this reason, Harmony Love and Zero remain good friends.

Zero tips forward ever so slightly in his rocking chair—moving his body for the first time all night. “All right. Apology accepted. Let me tell you what happens next. The river beams won’t be compromised tonight. The renegades will be back shortly, in bigger numbers. They breach a wormhole, but it closes before they make up their minds about something. To be completely honest with you, I don’t see it any clearer than that.”

“I get to keep my hats?”

“ You get to keep your hats,” says Zero. “Why don’t you just power down and call it a night?”

“Let me check the data. One or two of the biospheres might still be time lining with us.”

“ Trust me,” says Zero. “They’re not.”