This is the End 2(14)

His shoulders shook. “I shouldn’t have gone to you. This was a huge mistake. Are you going to put me in the icebox?”

Neil started to cry. I rubbed my jaw and decided to take a closer look around. Aunt Zelda had books and a painting, both indicators of wealth. I wondered what else she had around the old homestead.

I began in the bedroom. There were more books, and the pillows and comforter were stuffed with real feathers. Two other paintings, both real, and taking up valuable wall space that could have been used for growing ivy or hemp. Her clothes closet was filled with synthetics, save for one spectacular piece: a raccoon fur coat. I thought of my four-legged friend on my green roof. Maybe if I put this on, I could make him think a giant had moved in and scare him away.

I checked all the drawers, but didn’t find her DT. Aside from accessing the personal data on a chip implant, a person’s digital tablet usually revealed the most about them.

I tried the living room next, and uncovered more contraband. A collection of antique tech magazines. There were paper issues of Wired, PCWorld, Science Digest, and a number of others. Some of them were almost as old as she was, which meant she must have bought them off the black market, or new when they came out. But why? The content of these magazines was available on the intranet on every DT. Why spend what had to be a small fortune for paper copies?

In the bathroom, I discovered cotton towels and a silk kimono. She also had one of those new ComfortMax toilets—the kind with a seat warmer, heated bidet, music player, scent control, and an autoflush so powerful it could suck down a boot without getting clogged. This went way beyond rich. Aunt Zelda was easily the wealthiest person I’d ever encountered during my years on the peace force.

Who was this woman?

I went into the kitchen. Neil had abandoned the breakfast bar and opened a utensil drawer. He had a pair of scissors against his neck and was getting ready to cut the supplication collar.

“Neil, that won’t work. And if you try it—”

He squeezed the scissors. They didn’t cut through the nanotubes. But they did activate the tamper sensors, sucking electricity from the Tesla field and giving him a harsh jolt.

“—you’ll get shocked again.”

Neil dropped onto his butt. The jolt continued.

“Neil, you need to let go of the scissors for it to stop.”

He probably heard me. But the muscles in his hand remained locked on the blades, and the collar kept shocking him in self-defense. I saw a small cloud rise up and hover above his head. It wasn’t smoke. It was the tears on his face turning into steam.

I gave his hand a kick—away from his neck so he didn’t stab himself—and broke the connection.

“I want to go home,” Neil cried.

“I know, buddy. Tell me how your aunt got so rich.”

He touched his face, then his forehead. “Do I still have eyebrows?”

“Most of them.”

I lost Neil to another sobbing binge, and took the opportunity to search through the kitchen. Still no DT. But I did find a can of blackstrap molasses that was worth more credits than I earned in a month. I’d never tasted the real thing before, and was tempted to try it.

Government subsidies, and competition with biofuel companies, caused food farmers to sow what could be grown and harvested the quickest. Things that took longer to grow were proportionally more expensive. The universal availability of synthetic food drove the price up even higher.

Indulgent as the molasses was, it was downright decadent when I figured out what she was doing with it. In one of the cabinets, Aunt Zelda had a Mr. Distiller.

Alcohol was never actually outlawed. In fact, the biggest manufacturer of alcohol in the world was the US government, which sold it as fuel. But it became illegal to drink it. Stupid, too. Alcohol pills were safer, and cheaper, than the real thing. And from what I understood, the pills didn’t damage your liver, or give you bad breath and hangovers.

I stared at the antique silver device, retrofitted to function off of the Tesla grid, and noticed behind it on the shelf were several full bottles with Rum written on the sides.

Next I searched the bathroom to see what sorts of pills she took. I found the standards. Morphine. LSD. Ibuprofen. Penicillin. Antacids. Methamphetamine. Antihistamine. Pretty much the same contents as every other person’s medicine cabinet, mine included. Except for two exceptions. Antiandrogen and Estrolux. Both in high doses.

Time to power up the intranet and see what I could see.

I took out my DT and accessed uffsee. While having every bit of human knowledge accessible on a digital tablet was an overwhelming experience—so overwhelming that many folks had to go into therapy because of their DT addiction—information was essentially useless unless you were able to find it. When I was a child, pre-intranet, the Internet was the place to go to learn things. But search engines were limited back then, and you spent most of your time trying to sort out the good information from the ads, inaccuracies, and plain old bullshit.