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  “I believe I heard that you’ve started on a new book after a ten-year hiatus,” Julie said to Geoffrey. “Can you share any details?”

  “I’m embarrassed to tell you it’s actually closer to twenty years,” the author said. “Before my unplanned retreat from civilization, I’d been struggling to keep myself motivated, and most of my work was for anime or the immersives, often uncredited. You see, I’d been writing military science fiction for over three decades, and at some point, I began to question whether the galaxy really needed another book about the last survivors of an alien invasion escaping on an obsolete battleship and overcoming enemies who underestimate the plucky humans.”

  “Oh, I didn’t realize it was so formulaic,” Julie said. “So what are you writing now?”

  “I don’t want to give the whole plot away, but it starts with a retired captain from Earth’s fleet escaping from the insane asylum where he’s been involuntarily committed after uncovering a plot by corrupt politicians to divert military funding for personal use. He smuggles himself back into space on board a—let’s just say he ends up with a crew of misfits and they manage to steal a mothballed destroyer and set about saving the universe.”

  “That’s not a bad setup,” Bianca said. “Sixth told me that you had a way with recycling your personal misfortunes into plots.”

  “This is a work of pure fiction,” Geoffrey deadpanned. “Any resemblance to actual events or persons, whether living or deceased, is purely coincidental.”

  Both authors laughed, and most of the audience joined in on hearing the disclaimer they were all used to seeing, at least in printed novels.

  “The funny thing is, fiction disclaimers really have no legal purpose,” Bianca said. “If a person who the author has written about can prove libel, which is the written form of slander, a few sentences at the start of a book claiming that the characters are inventions isn’t going to hold up in court.”

  “What about violation of privacy?” Julie asked.

  “I don’t think there is a right to privacy in the sense that you’re thinking. Defamation of character, which encompasses both slander and libel, doesn’t just require that a character in a book be identifiable as a real individual. The author has to write something nasty about the person that is both demonstrably false and could be mistaken for the truth.”

  “Can you give us an example?”

  “Well, let’s use Geoffrey, since he’s the only man in the room,” Bianca said with a wicked grin. “Say I write a novel about an old curmudgeon who had a long career writing science fiction before disappearing from the scene for a decade, and in my story, the character is also a plagiarist who steals all of his books from aspiring writers who seek his opinion on unpublished works. Even if I changed his name and physical description, if it was obvious I was writing about Geoffrey, he could sue me for libel.”

  “And Bianca would hire a good lawyer who could keep the case tied up in court longer than I’m going to live, so I wouldn’t bother,” Geoffrey interjected.

  “But if instead of having my character doing something plausible, I wrote about him having a thousand wives on a hundred planets, he couldn’t sue because nobody in their right mind would believe it was true.”

  “So you’re saying that an author actually has to harm a person in some way, beyond just stealing details of their life,” Julie summarized.

  “I’m not a lawyer, but that’s pretty much my understanding,” Bianca said. “Otherwise, successful authors would spend more time sitting in court than writing. All that said, it would be incredibly lazy of an author to simply use friends and family as characters without at least changing enough details to make them unidentifiable.”

  “Changing the species of a character based on a person is a pretty good safeguard against getting sued,” Geoffrey added.

  “That’s right, though a friend of mine once accused me of borrowing his personality for the witch’s familiar in our—”

  “Witches Who Love Vampires series,” one of the scantily clad women call out. “You’re talking about Percy the Cat, aren’t you?”

  “Guilty as charged,” Bianca said. “Any progress on our missing panelists, Julie? Shall we just open up to questions from the floor?”

  “Ooh, yes,” a number of voices chorused.

  Julie pointed to her ear. “Flower?”

  “They won’t get out of the massaging recliners,” the Dollnick AI reported, sounding not a little frustrated. “I don’t want to send my maintenance bots to pry them away because it sets a bad precedent.”

  “Have you tried cutting off the power?”

  There was a brief pause. “They still aren’t moving. I think some of them have fallen asleep again.”

  “Maybe we could just reschedule the panel and break it into two sessions,” Julie suggested. “And I’m sure if you sent some of those Green Room chocolates this way it would make up for any disappointment.”

  “Good idea. I obviously can’t keep the chocolates here,” Flower replied.

  Julie waited for Bianca to finish answering a question about positive reinforcement conditioning in her gryphon book, and the author’s click-training story was even funnier the second time around.

  “So here’s the update,” Julie told the audience. “We’re going to reschedule the Amish Romance and Alien Abduction Romance sessions separately, and the ship’s AI is sending a bot with a special treat to apologize for the confusion. But we do have this room for another forty minutes, so if you want to stay and ask questions…”

  “I have a question,” a familiar voice said, and Julie gaped as the head librarian stood up, dressed in an Amish outfit.

  “You read romance?” Julie couldn’t help asking.

  “On paper, never on screens,” Bea answered in a dignified manner. “And only when the books are set in farming communities or the Scottish Highlands. I have my standards.”

  “Oh. And what’s your question?”

  “It’s for Bianca. In number two hundred and thirteen of the jaguar shifters series, Noble Pack goes to war with Mountain Pack, and Esmeralda is forced to cancel her engagement with Mario. But in number two hundred and sixteen, she tells Choa that she’s never really been in love.”

  “Wait a second, Bianca,” Julie said. “What do jaguar shifters have to do with Scotland or farming, Bea?”

  “Did you think that all of those drugs the Mountain Pack traffics just appear out of thin air?” the librarian countered. “I read the books for all of the useful information about coca farming.”

  “I like to get the details right, but I wouldn’t suggest that anybody try to set up a drug cartel based on my descriptions,” Bianca cautioned the audience. “Besides, the Mountain Pack shifters are definitely the bad guys. As to Esmeralda’s engagement, she was only interested in Mario as a way to get away from Scar, the old leader of the Noble Pack who had his luminescent green eyes on her, despite the distinct possibility that he was her great-great-grandfather.”

  “You’re right,” Bea said, suppressing a shudder at the possibility of the relationship. “As I get older, I can’t remember more than twenty or thirty books back in any series. How do you keep from making continuity errors?”

  “With great difficulty,” Bianca said. “Is anybody else interested in hearing about the perils of being a line author?”

  Every hand except Geoffrey’s shot up, and Julie distinctly heard him mumble, “There goes the rest of the session,” but his voice didn’t carry past her.

  “All right. Just for background, you should all know that I’m the seventh in the D’Arc line. If any of you are familiar with our backlist, you’ll notice that I don’t try to keep every old series alive, though my eventual successor will probably choose one of those to revive just to put some separation between us. I mainly focus on the jaguar and bear shifters because those were always my favorites, so I’ve read the entire corpus, but I’ll let you in on a little secret. I always do a continuity pass on my old teacher bot be
fore—”

  “What?!” several voices interrupted.

  “Yes. Not many people realize it, but the same teacher bots supplied by the Stryx when they royally interfered with Earth’s education infrastructure also have a spelling and grammar checker that’s intended to help young people develop writing skills. If you dig down into the menus, there’s an option to chain text files together—

  “I’ve seen that,” another woman said.

  “Yes, and if you chain a number of files together in sequential order you can request a continuity check,” Bianca explained. “It doesn’t happen immediately, so the service is related in some way to the updates that get pushed to the teacher bots over the Stryxnet once a day, the same way students can get questions answered. Sixth actually told me about this, and she got the idea from Fifth, so it’s been around for quite a while. It does a phenomenal job catching contradictions, but my super-fans are better at telling me when I remember something that’s not there.”

  “What do you mean by that?” Julie asked.

  “I send my pre-release manuscripts to a group of super-fans who call themselves the Dark Shifters, a word-play on D’Arc. They know my style so well that they’ll catch me if I bring back a character who I think has already been introduced in the series I’m writing on, but who is actually from a different series, or somebody I’ve never written about.”

  “You mean, you could have a character enter the action without explaining how he got there because you mistakenly think that he was in a previous book?”

  “Bingo. Once I solved a tricky plot by having Elizabeth’s older brother show up and give her just the artifact she needed to overcome a curse and revert to human form after she got stuck as a bear. Well, several Dark Shifters pointed out that I must have been thinking about Richard, the older brother in…”

  “Runes of Time,” a woman on the underdressed side called out. “He was an artifact hunter, and he had a younger sister, Liz.”

  “So you can see how I could get confused, but my super-fans were right on it.”

  “I thought that teacher bots were only available to children,” a woman from the Amish-fan section spoke up.

  “I looked into it once,” Geoffrey said, jumping on the chance to finally insert himself into the discussion. “Teacher bots are actually available to everybody with an interest in learning, and a number of the alien manufacturers make them for humans under a license from the Stryx, who subsidize the cost. I think as far as the Stryx are concerned, we’re all children, at least in terms of our educational achievements. But the bots don’t teach anything that we haven’t already learned for ourselves as a species.”

  “How does that explain their ability to do continuity checking on a multi-hundred book series?” Bianca asked him. “I always get the results back the next day, so I can’t imagine that the teacher bot is contacting a remote supervisor who sits down and reads them all.”

  “Somebody once told me that all of the teacher bots are a project of one of the Stryx librarians, so I guess when they call home for help, there’s a near-omniscient AI answering the questions that aren’t appropriate for the local support network of other users.”

  “Does that mean a Stryx somewhere has read all of my books?” Bianca looked disturbed. “I don’t know if I should feel complimented or scared.”

  Seventeen

  “You’re working too hard,” Harry admonished his wife while delivering the cup of tea she had requested. “How long have you been on your feet?”

  “Just since breakfast,” Irene said, and took a grateful sip from the tea. “Compared to the holiday rushes we used to experience at our bakery back on Earth, this is nothing. It’s not like we’ve been retired for that long.”

  “No, it’s not like we’ve been retired at all, seeing how Flower put us both to work.”

  “You’re working, I’m volunteering,” she corrected him. “And speaking of the bakery business, how is the pastry supply holding up?”

  Harry glanced back toward the dessert buffet he had just come from while fetching his wife’s tea. “All present and accounted for. We could have used a couple of those four-armed bots in the shop back on Earth. One for the counter and one for the kitchen would have done the job nicely.”

  A woman pushing a rollator spotted Irene’s volunteer smock and used Harry’s foot as a chock to halt her forward progress. “Excuse me,” she said. “Is this the hospitality room for ElderCon?”

  “Yes, it is,” Irene replied with a bright smile. “It’s also the common room for Flower’s Paradise, where some of us take our meals, attend lectures, knitting circles, and enjoy all sorts of community activities. Are you interested in the independent living cooperative?”

  “My smart badge keeps on nagging me about it so I thought I’d take a look,” the woman said. “It doesn’t seem like a large enough room to feed the number of retirees I was told live on this deck. Do you have to eat in shifts?”

  “Flower’s Paradise has a full cafeteria that seats over five hundred, and there are three other independent living cooperatives on this deck, all with their own facilities. But when we started a year ago with just a few dozen members, some of us got into the habit of eating in this room, and Flower is very flexible about such things.”

  “Doesn’t sound like any independent living place I’ve ever lived in,” the woman said skeptically. She lowered her voice and asked, “Do you also have people living here who are…” she let go of the grips with one hand and made a swirling motion around her ear with an index finger.

  “Cuckoo?” Irene guessed. “Why do you ask?”

  “When I got off the elevator, somebody dressed as a giant insect tried to give me a piece of paper,” she said. “Of course, I ignored him.”

  “That’s Dave,” Harry told her. “He’s not crazy, just a good salesman. He’s passing out flyers for M793qK, the Farling doctor. Do you know what the special is today, Irene?”

  “It’s either same-day hip replacements or a central nervous system cleanse with myelin replenishment,” his wife said. “The doctor has been trying different promotions for conditions that are common in our age group. He took over one of the small classrooms down the corridor to set up a field clinic for the duration of ElderCon.”

  The woman stood up a little straighter between the handles of her rollator. “Do you think he could do something about these?” she asked, indicating her legs with a bob of her chin.

  “I don’t want to make any promises, but he does consider human biology to be trivial,” Irene said. “I haven’t heard of much he can’t fix, other than old age itself, and some people say that’s only because we aren’t mature enough as a species to deal with longer lives.”

  As the woman backed her rollator off of Harry’s foot and turned it in the direction of the classroom, Irene added, “When you pass the man in the costume, grab a flyer for a discount. And don’t be startled when you meet the doctor. Farlings look rather like giant beetles, and M793qK is on the large side.”

  A cheerful ding sounded over the public address system, and Nancy’s voice announced, “The next presentation about retiring to Flower’s Paradise will begin in five minutes in our common room. If you are already here, please take a Danish and a hot drink and find yourself a seat.”

  “I guess I should get ready,” Harry said. “When I got drafted for the board, nobody told me that I’d be attending so many meet-and-greets. And all of the men keep coming up to me and asking where I got the sword cane I use on Everyday Superheroes. Who knew that people our age even watch anime?”

  “At least Jack and Nancy only asked you to be here for two sessions a day, compared to the six that they’re doing,” Irene said. “With Maureen and Brenda taking turns in the rotation with you, it spreads the load across the board members.”

  “Dave is on the board and he’s a much better salesman than I ever was.”

  “It’s too much work for him to get in and out of the costume,” Irene said and turned to a
nswer a question for a couple who had just arrived. Harry slipped away and joined Nancy and Jack, the latter being an athletic man retired from a Dollnick ag world who served as the cooperative’s president.

  “How are we doing for numbers?” Harry asked.

  “Maureen said that our close rate was almost twenty percent, and if that holds up, we’ll double the size of the cooperative before the con is over,” Nancy told him. “I wish I could claim that it’s all a result of our brilliant programming, but it’s pretty clear that the pricing is what closes the deal for most people. Judging by the reactions, I’ll bet we see at least an additional ten percent of our guests making the move to Flower in the next year or so, but they have to get out of their current situation first.”

  “What’s so hard about packing up and moving?” Harry asked. “It’s not like living on Flower takes us out of touch with our families, and there’s something to be said for distance making the heart grow fonder.”

  “A lot of the independent living facilities on Earth are set up like condos, so people have to sell their unit to recover their investment when they leave. In some cases, if you stay there until you pass on, the facility commits to buying back the unit for ninety percent of the original purchase price, but that’s hardly what I’d call a good deal in the real estate business.”

  “We changed our presentation this morning and it worked well for the first two sessions so we’re going to stick with it,” Jack told Harry. “Rather than each of us talking for five minutes, we’ll just do a brief intro while taking questions, and then break everybody into little groups so they can talk to cooperative members one-on-one. We had so many volunteers this morning that we’ve had to turn some away.”

  “It’s probably the pastries,” Harry said. “I get the feeling that Flower is cheating on everybody’s dietary plans for the duration of the con.”