Chicken Little

Free Chicken Little by Cory Doctorow

Book: Chicken Little by Cory Doctorow Read Free Book Online
Authors: Cory Doctorow
on board, discounts on the meds, make it cheaper to prescribe a course of treatment than to take the call-center time to explain to the guy why he's not getting the meds."
    "You're my kind of guy, Leon," Buhle said. "So yeah."
    "Yeah?"
    Another one of those we're-both-men-of-the-world smiles. "Yeah."
    Oh.
    "How many?"
    "That's the thing. We were trying it in a little market first. Basque Country. The local authority was very receptive. Lots of chances to fine-tune the message. They're the most media-savvy people on the planet these days -- they are to media as the Japanese were to electronics in the last century. If we could get them in the door --"
    "How many?"
    "About a million. More than half the population."
    "You created a bioweapon that infected its victims with numeracy, and infected a million Basque with it?"
    "Crashed the lottery. That's how I knew we'd done it. Lottery tickets fell by more than 80 percent. Wiped out."
    "And then your friend beat your head in?"
    "Well."
    The suit was getting more uncomfortable by the second. Leon wondered if he'd get stuck if he waited too long, his overinflated suit incapable of moving. "I'm going to have to go, soon."
    "Evolutionarily, bad risk-assessment is advantageous."
    Leon nodded slowly. "OK, I'll buy that. Makes you entrepreneurial --"
    "Drives you to colonize new lands, to ask out the beautiful monkey in the next tree, to have a baby you can't imagine how you'll afford."
    "And your numerate Vulcans stopped?"
    "Pretty much," he said. "But that's just normal shakedown. Like when people move to cities, their birthrate drops. And nevertheless, the human race is becoming more and more citified and still, it isn't vanishing. Social stuff takes time."
    "And then your friend beat your head in?"
    "Stop saying that."
    Leon stood. "Maybe I should go and find Ria."
    Buhle made a disgusted noise. "Fine. And ask her why she didn't finish the job? Ask her if she decided to do it right then, or if she'd planned it? Ask her why she used the coffee jug instead of the bread-knife? Because, you know, I wonder this myself."
    Leon backpedaled, clumsy in the overinflated suit. He struggled to get into the airlock, and as it hissed through its cycle, he tried not to think of Ria straddling the old man's chest, the coffee urn rising and falling.
    She was waiting for him on the other side, also overinflated in her suit. "Let's go," she said, and took his hand, the rubberized palms of their gloves sticking together. She half-dragged him through the many rooms of Buhle's body, tripping through the final door, then spinning him around and ripping, hard, on the release cord that split the suit down the back so that it fell into two lifeless pieces that slithered to the ground. He gasped out a breath he hadn't realized he'd been holding in as the cool air made contact with the thin layer of perspiration that filmed his body.
    Ria had already ripped open her own suit and her face was flushed and sweaty, her hair matted. Small sweat-rings sprouted beneath her armpits. An efficient orderly came forward and began gathering up their suits. Ria thanked her impersonally and headed for the doors.
    "I didn't think he'd do that," she said, once they were outside of the building -- outside the core of Buhle's body.
    "You tried to kill him," Leon said. He looked at her hands, which had blunt, neat fingernails and large knuckles. He tried to picture the tendons on their backs standing out like sail-ropes when the wind blew, as they did the rhythmic work of raising and lowering the heavy silver coffee pot.
    She wiped her hands on her trousers and stuffed them in her pockets, awkward now, without any of her usual self-confidence. "I'm not ashamed of that. I'm proud of it. Not everyone would have had the guts. If I hadn't, you and everyone you know would be --" She brought her hands out of her pockets, bunched into fists. She shook her head. "I thought he'd tell you what we like about your grad project. Then we could

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