Sims Read Free Page B

didn’t want him? Fine. They were going to regret that. Not only was there a buck or two to be made, but instead of seeing less of the man he’d blackballed, Holmes Carter was pretty soon going to feel like he was married to Patrick Sullivan.
    Here comes the bride, Patrick thought as he stepped through the hedge onto Beacon Ridge property.

4
    Beacon Ridge quartered its sims in a long barracklike building in the low corner of the club grounds, a section that flooded during a heavy rain. The lights were on, the windows open, and music filtered out into the cool night air. Patrick stopped and listened. Was that . . . ?
    â€œMa-gic . . . mo-ments . . .”
    Perry Como?
    He saw a sim silhouetted in the lighted doorway. It pointed to him and ducked back inside, crying, “Is him! Comes now! Just like said, he come!” A babble of voices arose from within.
    What am I? Patrick thought. The messiah?
    Tome met him at the door and motioned him inside. “So happy come you, Mist Sulliman. Welcome to sim home, sir.”
    Patrick stopped and looked around. The two dozen Beacon Ridge male and female sims who carried the golf bags on the links, set and cleared the tables in the dining room, washed the dishes and peeled the potatoes in the kitchen, and cut the grass and weeded the flower beds, stood gathered before him in the front room of their quarters. Overhead fluorescents shone on scattered stuffed chairs, long mess-hall style eating tables, and industrial carpeting. Two TVs, one in each far corner, were on but no one was watching; soft music crooned from the radio.
    Patrick had once visited a client in a mental hospital; this reminded him of that institution’s day room.
    â€œWhat’s behind the wall?” he said.
    â€œWe sleep.”
    With most of his fellow sims trooping behind like lemmings, Tome led Patrick to the dormitory section where triple-decker bunks lined the walls. A toilet and shower area lay beyond the next wall. Patrick wondered about the coed living conditions, then remembered reading that in addition to being sterile, sims’ libidos were genetically suppressed.
    Back in the front room, Tome led Patrick to a graying female sim seated in one of the easy chairs.
    â€œThis Gabba, sir,” he said. “She oldest. Like mother here.”
    â€œYessir.” The aging female started a slow, painful rise from her chair. “So pleased meet—”
    Patrick waved her back—probably take the arthritic old thing ten minutes to stand and another ten to sit down again. “Don’t get up. I’m gonna sit anyway.”
    He looked around, found an empty chair, and lowered himself into it. The rest of the sims gathered around in a circle. He spotted Nabb but didn’t see Deek. He’d never been this close to so many sims at one time and was struck by how similar they looked. You didn’t notice when you saw them singly or in pairs, but crowded together like this . . .
    He’d read where SimGen made minor variations in the genomes as they cloned them so sims wouldn’t look like they’d all been cast in the same mold. Maybe this crowd didn’t exactly have a cookie-cutter appearance, but no question they’d all been baked from the same batter.
    Now, here, with their pidgin English and weird looks and odd way of moving, he felt as if he’d dropped in on a colony of simple folk of a different race and culture.
    But these folk were
owned
. He could not allow himself to forget that. Anything he’d read about SimGen credited two moves for its success: First was the company’s patents on nearly all the viable recombinant chimp genomes, guaranteeing the field to itself; second was the Sinclair brothers’ decision not to sell their product, but to lease it instead.
    A sim lease was too pricey to allow it to be a common household servant, but the creatures were a huge bargain as unskilled labor—no social