Counterfeit World by Daniel F. Galouye Page A

DISTILLERS’ PRODUCT?
    It was a gimmick for prodding our subjective units into expressing opinion. Thompson, who had been exposed to the simulectronic equivalent of Soropman’s Scotch over what, to him, had appeared to be a number of years, reacted reflexively.
    Damned rotgut! I (IDU-7412) thought. It might not be too bad if it was aged enough to take out the sting. But Scotch in a bottle shaped like a bowling ball?
    Meanwhile, all other visual advertising media throughout the analog city were flashing the same message.
    And reactions of thousands of ID entities were being sifted out, analyzed, herded into the master output-register. There they would be sorted, stored and indexed. Merely the flick of a switch would produce complete categorical breakdowns by age, sex, occupation, political affiliation and the like.
    In the space of but a few seconds, Fuller’s total environment simulator had accomplished what otherwise would have required a month-long effort by an army of certified reaction monitors.
    What happened next took me completely off guard and it was fortunate that the empathy coupling was a one-way arrangement. Or D. Thompson would have known he was not alone in his astonishment.
    A fierce streak of lightning crashed down out of the clear sky. Three huge fireballs blazed high overhead. Clouds appeared from nowhere, expanding explosively until they blotted out almost all of the daylight, and unleashed lashing torrents of hail. Spontaneous flames enveloped two lesser buildings below.
    Perplexed, I rejected the possibility that Chuck was clowning with the background props. Although something like this could, without prohibitive strain, be shrugged off by the ID units as a “freak of nature,” Whitney wouldn’t take the chance of disturbing the equilibrium of our delicately balanced analog community.
    There was only one other possibility: Something had gone wrong with the simulectronic complex! Imbalance, breakdown, faulty generation, even a simple short—all would be automatically rationalized by the system as more or less “natural” equivalents of errant electronic forces. There had been a foul-up somewhere along the line, but Chuck hadn’t retrieved me because withdrawal from a look-see coupling had to be either voluntary or at the end of the programmed interval. Otherwise a major portion of the subject’s ego might be irretrievably lost.
    Then Thompson’s eyes swept across the horizontal billboard and I sensed his puzzled reaction to the anomalous message that was now being flashed out by the xenon lights:
DOUG! COME BACK! EMERGENCY!
    Instantly, I broke the empathic coupling and swam up through wrenching transition to my own subjective orientation. The peephole department was a bedlam of scurrying figures, shouting voices, stifling heat, pungent smells of burning insulation.
    Chuck, working desperately with a fire extinguisher at the control console, glanced toward my couch.
    “You’re back!” he shouted. “Thank God! We might have gotten a current surge at any minute!”
    Then he snapped off the master switch. The crackling sound of electrical arcing stopped abruptly, as though someone had closed a door on it. But fierce, blazing light continued to pour out of the console’s ventilation louvers.
    I cast the helmet aside. “What happened?”
    “Somebody planted a thermite charge in the modulator!”
    “Just now?”
    “I don’t know. I stepped out after I plugged you in. If I hadn’t come back in time, you might have been cremated!”
    Siskin accepted the thermite charge episode with surprising composure—too calmly, I thought. Within minutes, it seemed, he was at Reactions, surveying the damage and nodding over our assurance that we wouldn’t be delayed more than a day or two.
    As to who had been responsible for the treachery, he had his answer ready and emphasized it by ramming his fist into his palm. “Those damned reaction monitors! One of them managed to get in here!”
    Joe Gadsen