Pacer, by Charles Carreon

PACER

by Charles Carreon

Harry Zeman remembered the first day he saw her. She walked through the swinging metal double doors at the back of the store, straight up the bakery aisle, neat, natural, practically dressed. Supposedly, she'd been hired straight out of high school, a management trainee through a special program. Supposedly, she had family in Idaho, and had moved to the area in search of opportunity. Supposedly. He watched her step up to the counter, grab a bag, flip it open crisply, and start bagging the groceries that flew from the hands of the clerk as he scanned them.

No stiffness or ladylike reserve impaired the flow of her movements, which were simple, authoritative, efficient. The bags were packed, set in the basket with neat, easy turns of the waist. She looked like she was modeling her uniform, long auburn hair swinging in arcs like a silken pendulum.

Zeman knew what she was. Her employment records were false . The paycheck she picked up each week was voided automatically. The house she occupied was owned by the company. She generally did not eat unless others were about; when she slept she did not dream, and when she appeared to watch TV she was having her chemical memories edited, revised and updated.

She was a special type of ringer, sent out by the company for a two-year tour at his store. Everyone knew ringers were doing duty as assassination decoys, models, and jet-set prostitutes. And that they were too expensive to use as ordinary grocery clerks. But company management had thought up a special application, worthy of the expense --pacers -- ringers with a special purpose. Pacers were calm, attractive, obedient, above all, efficient. They did a lot of work, but that was secondary. The important thing was they set the pace for human employees. Never sick, never late, never impertinent. They didn't take drugs or steal or fall in love with other employees. They were, in short, subject to none of the sins that flesh is heir to. They set the standard for flawed humans, and that was the purpose of the project -- to raise the standard. And the project was a roaring, silent, top secret success.

To test his ability to participate in this project, Zeman had been subjected to strange tests. He was given blatant opportunities to steal from the company -- the computer virtually threw apparently untraceable funds at him. A bachelor without other inclinations, he suddenly found several women initiating liaisons. He reported the potentially lucrative computer snafu. He rebuffed the women. Then he was called back east to a special management seminar, put up at the Four Seasons, and informed that he was being let into a special pension plan, on top of getting a very healthy boost in his salary. And then, they introduced him to Sheena.

Sheena was a veteran pacer, due to be phased out after one last tour of duty, at his store. They explained the program, how it had been ongoing for twelve years, and the fabulous results Sheena had accomplished at various stores during that time. Pacers, they told him, could increase productivity and morale by as much as thirty-four percent -- depending on the baseline you were starting from -- the combined result of decreased tardiness and sick time, and just plain working harder and smarter. The suits smiled smugly when they said this. A pacer, they said, works like a mechanical rabbit at a dog track, keeping the greyhounds moving at top speed. Behavioral modeling -- changing the parameters of human performance -- lots of fancy words.

At first it felt strange to have Sheena in the store. He'd look through the two-way mirrors that gave him a view of the floor, and watch her in motion, mopping up a spill, gathering scattered carts and misplaced items, stocking shelves and directing customers. Unfailingly friendly, quietly serious, utterly disinterested in small talk or anything other than the task at hand.

The change was gradual at first. He didn't want to believe it, because he always thought his people worked at maximum, but as the changes became more obvious he had to accept that she was having an effect. The place began to hum. The floors looked cleaner and the checkstands more tidy, as workers adopted the ethic of ceaseless, productive motion. Customers started leaving compliments in the suggestion box. In this new environment , slackers quit to find work with the competition, and the employees who remained worked even harder.

Zeman's top employee was also his charge. Under cover of a close friendship, he monitored her condition with a few weekly tests, and with frequent evening visits, screened out the attention of those who might try to make friends with an attractive young clerk. Being one of the older models, she needed that kind of screen, because her maintenance routine required non-interference from outsiders.

The lab techs who'd trained him back east had explained how important "TV watching" was for Sheena. She needed to do it every night for at least two hours. Any show was fine, as long as she watched it at home, because the TV in her house was fitted with a laser that projected binary code directly into the retinal photoreceptors of her eyes. Ordinary sight detected nothing except perhaps the slightest flicker in the screen, but to Sheena's chemical memories, the transmissions channeled through the optic pathway were packed with meaning. The software beamed into her, unwinding the randomly forming logic strings that built up each day. Thus were eliminated the processing slowdowns and quirky tendencies that would precede the "evolution" of unprogrammed characteristics in the unit. But watching her sitting there, laughing at some old rerun, it was hard to believe she wasn't just enjoying herself without a thought in the world.

The techs had told him she had no subjectivity at all -- no sense of self -- just circuits that mimicked subjective conduct. She acted as if she had a mind, but she didn't. "Like a videocam," they said, "she can record and process a scene, but she never knows she sees it." Her reactions to the scene made it seem as if she were seeing it, though. "So be careful," the techs told him, "and if you start to get a fixation" -- and here they looked at each other with what seemed like unease -- "be sure and give us a call. " He assured them that he would not develop any fixations, but if he felt one coming on, he would be sure and call the company.

But when it happened, he didn't. It happened too suddenly, like waking in a nightmare and having it all be terribly familiar. He realized one night, sitting with her on the couch, that although he knew he was alone, he didn't feel alone. She was unthreatening. No matter what he did, she couldn't think him strange. He couldn't please or displease her. He couldn't offend or distress her, but she reacted to everything he did.

When the company decided to try the pacer project, it was a trial deal. They didn't spend the extra money to get custom ringers made -- instead they bought the available, suitable hardware from vendors, and had them softwired in-house. So, many of the pacers, like Sheena, came with extra, unnecessary features, like fully functional sex packages. Her successors would be custom designed and sexually neuter. But not Sheena -- she had pleasure-simulating subroutines built into chem-memory, which tempted Zeman to experiment.

As the obsession deepened, he cursed the fourteen months he'd spent avoiding play with this wonderful toy. He told himself repeatedly that he knew her for what she was, but then how could he explain buying her clothes, taking her out to movies and night clubs? He was drawing in their moments together like air, needing every breath more. He was racing to devour all of their allotted time, because he knew that on October first, at ten p.m., she was supposed to be lying in a wooden box on the back porch of her residence for pick up. Operation would automatically cease at that time.

All through September he fought with himself. He considered calling the techs at the company. He couldn't believe they weren't watching out for this kind of slip up. As he worked, his mind repeatedly wandered from the spreadsheets, schedules, and invoices. He would catch himself just staring through the two way mirrors, watching her moving through the aisles, leaving order in her wake.

On October 1, at 9:59 p.m., they were nowhere near her house. They were not even in the right state. He was piloting a rental car south along the cliffs above the Pacific ocean, about eight-hundred miles from their little town. She seemed to be watching the waves off to their right intently as dark cumulus chased each other over the horizon, starkly backlit by rich moonlight in a sky of velvet. The waves glowed. Mist speckled the windshield. The tires fretted the edge of the pavement as he kept acceleration high.

The dashboard clock was synchronized to the microsecond with the watch on Sheena's wrist. Her head was turned toward the sea as the clock flashed 9:59:56, and he held the wheel straight on a tight curve, launching the car into flight. Startled by the changing gravity , she turned her gaze -- a look of surprised pleasure -- swiftly back to him, and spoke his name in questioning wonder, in a voice so sincere he could swear she knew. He smiled back as moonlight rushed in the windows.

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