Welcome to Golden, Chapter 1

Sound first.

Birds. Maybe grackles. A sparrow perhaps. Not a finch.

A raven chuckling? Not easy to hear, but there it was.

A dog barking, but not incessantly; more a happy nipping like a best buddy welcoming his boy home from school.

The dinging doorbell of Mercer's Drug Store. Chatting girls. Boys and such and giggles and an occasional squeal: teenagers.

A car. Fast car? Loud, really. The radio is playing an Elvis tune. Treat Me Right? No. Teddy Bear.

Ahh, smell now. Sensual, inviting.

Summer. Lilac bush nearby. Bread baking. Freshly mowed grass.

Billy Watson kept his eyes shut a little longer, not only to savor the sounds and smells, but to stabilize his equilibrium. Once satiated, he opened his eyes. His vision was still blurry but soon came into focus showing him the corner of Main and First in front of the Golden Bank & Trust. He checked himself carefully and found his body encased in a gray suit with a red tie and a white handkerchief tucked smartly in the breast pocket. His arms and legs seemed to be working fine. He smiled; another successful trip into Golden, where he served as the town doctor. He checked his watch where it was counting down from 5:57:45. His standard six-hour shift had begun.

The Bank & Trust was a three-story building constructed in a mid-20^th century Midwestern vernacular; it fit nicely with the rest of Main Street with its comforting brick facades fronted with awnings and picture windows. None of the people walking up and down the wide sidewalks noticed him, nor acknowledged he had appeared out of thin air. In the distance, Billy heard a low grumble of thunder and storm clouds momentarily cast a shadow over the town. It never rained in Golden, so the real show was in the harmless lighting and thunder. Instead of turning and walking into the Bank & Trust, where he had an office on the second floor, Billy glanced at the town clock sitting on its ornamental cast iron pedestal ten feet above the sidewalk. It was four minutes after 9 a.m. in Golden and he had an appointment in the park.

Billy whistled as he crossed the street in front of the Montgomery Wards and hopped the curb. From the distance, he could hear the revving of what he knew was a 1932 Ford Coupe painted candy apple red with flames on the side getting ready to make a run down Main Street. The car belonged to Jerry Walker, and Dan Driscoll was probably helping with a tune up. Who else could it be? Ever since Jerry had gotten here, he spent his time working on and driving street rods. Jerry had found a kindred soul in Dan. In the material world he had been Gerald Walker, a retired, bald accountant with severe angina who every day went to work in a gray office and worked with gray people. In Golden, Jerry would always be seventeen and have an affection for fast cars and teenage girls with pony tails and poodle skirts.

Dan Driscoll was the perfect sidekick for Jerry. In life, there are always leaders and followers; Dan was a follower. He had spent his life as a mechanic in a Dodge dealership, and although he obviously knew more about how a car worked than Jerry ever would, Dan was always there to hand Jerry a wrench or help out when a transmission needed to be changed. Neither Jerry nor Dan questioned their relationship, the pair were inseparable. The only issue Billy ever had with them was trying to keep them from racing up and down the streets in their hot rods, but there really wasn't anything he could do to stop them.

Walking down the sidewalk to the park, Billy realized he was whistling the tune of Red River Valley – an old cowboy song and one of his grandmother’s favorites. The song was about loss and leaving. It was somewhat fitting for Golden. Billy’s mother used to sing it to him when he was very young. The song had been taught to her by Billy’s grandmother long before illness had devastated her body.

Billy didn’t know his grandmother as a whole and healthy woman. She was a ghostly figure through most of his life as his parents struggled with the stress of maintaining a household under the shadow of her illness. He would look through photo albums containing little moments of her time captured, printed and organized chronologically. Billy had wondered how someone whose charm sprang forth from the two-dimensional confines of a photograph could become a skeletal human form consigned to a life hooked to numerous life-maintaining machines in a nursing home. An existence, yes, but not living. Golden was designed for living.

Now Billy was going to meet the grandmother he had only known through pictures and the recollections of his own mother. He was nervous. Would she like him? Would she even know who he was?

The walk to the park was short — most everything in Golden was only a brief stroll. A few residents chose to drive, but mostly just the ones who enjoyed driving. Billy headed north on Main Street, past the Chamber of Commerce, the Town Hall and Mercer's Drug Store, which had a soda fountain and a couple of booths where you could grab a bite to eat while waiting for your pills. There were a couple of people in the drug store, and Billy waved as he passed by. He knew each resident by name. He knew where they came from, their hobbies, their victories and defeats. With most, he knew about what haunted their dreams. He was, after all, their doctor; although he knew little about their physical ailments. He was more interested in their brains. In Golden, people didn't get sick, but sometimes their minds did.

He took a left on Third Street, after stopping for a minute to look in the window of the five-and-dime. Third, like all of the ancillary roadways in Golden, was shaded by a canopy of elms lining both sides of the street. A small boy in a pedal car drove straight toward him and Billy stepped to the side without acknowledging him. The homes he passed all had well-groomed yards, huge front porches and fresh paint.

He finally came to a low white picket fence surrounding Golden’s main park. The park took up a whole block and was dotted with trees, a gazebo and a playground. More residents sat on park benches and waved at Billy as he passed by. Lillian Weaver stopped him to complain about her hands. She looked to be about twenty years old, with dark hair and startling blue eyes. Her hands, however, looked to belong to an eighty-year-old woman. Billy held them for a moment, inspecting them, then told Lillian to drop by his office that afternoon and he would see what he could do. She kissed him lightly on the cheek, which caused him to blush, although no one in Golden would have been able to tell. He gently brushed off Lillian and made his way to the playground to meet his grandmother.

There she was in a form he didn’t expect; a small girl with sun-bleached brown hair was busy building a sand castle. Her pink pail and matching shovel were working furiously at scooping sand and packing it as she sang the same song Billy had been whistling a moment before.

“Ruth,” he called out. She looked up, unable at first to determine where the voice had come from, almost deciding it hadn’t existed at all. He called out again and walked toward her. She looked up at him when he was four paces away and smiled. Billy had a friendly face, although the face he wore there wasn't really his own. He appeared much older than his own thirty-four years.

“Hello,” she said. “You look familiar, do I know you? I’m sorry, but I don’t remember your name.”

“My name is Billy Watson. I work here. I'm a doctor. I help people like you — to make sure you’re okay and answer any questions.” He knelt beside her so that he could look her in the eye, to see if there was that spark to which he'd become familiar; the one that told him a patient was able to understand Golden. Her green eyes studied him carefully. Her face was young and smooth, but her eyes looked upon him with the affection that a grandmother gives to all children. His patients, no matter how young they looked, were all old souls. They had all seen so much in their long lives.

“Where am I? I feel like I’ve been asleep for such a long time. Is this … heaven?”

She got up and brushed the sand off her coveralls. Billy stood almost two feet taller than her. Her hair was tied back in a braided pony tail and she had freckles, but they were hard to make out as they blended into the darkness of her tanned face. She was a girl who had spent many summer days out in the sun. Her coveralls came from a different, more utilitarian era, more work clothes than a fashion statement.

“Where am I?” she repeated.

Billy pondered the question, unsure whether any answer he gave was satisfactory to Golden’s new residents. How do you tell people that their brains and bodies were hooked into two supercomputers, and that billions of cell-sized electronic microbes coursed through their blood and attached themselves to nerve endings, keeping their bodies alive while Golden was forged in their minds? Surprisingly, most residents reacted with indifference when they learned their corporeal bodies were actually floating around in a vat of an electrically charged glutamate goo. Most of Golden’s residents suffered from diseases like ALS, Parkinson’s or renal failure — disorders that robbed them of their bodily functions and left their minds to suffer. They were all old and came here for a retirement they never thought could exist. One computer watched over their bodies and the other transformed their fantasies into something tangible.

“No, it’s not heaven here. It’s kind of like a dream you can control. This town is called Golden, and it was created for people like you,” Billy said.

“Like me?”

“People whose bodies don’t respond to their thoughts anymore. This place was designed as a way to give folks like you a nice retirement.”

She nodded. Residents accepted from the beginning that Golden wasn’t genuine. They remembered their long fall into their own thoughts, where the real world repeatedly folded in on itself until it made no sense at all.

“This is new technology?” There was a trace of excitement in her voice making Billy smile. She seemed just as he had imagined, inquisitive and not at all archaic. He nodded his head and she immediately asked how it worked. Billy explained the basics as they walked back down Third Street, to Main and south to Elm.

Golden was a small town laid out in a simple grid of fifteen tree-lined streets, Billy told her. Main Street stretched north and south a half mile in each direction from First Street. Going north, the east-west streets were numbered up to five. South of First, the streets were named for trees — Elm, Oak, Ash, Sycamore and Poplar. The east-west streets were two blocks long. Running parallel to Main were four streets, McKinley and Foster Roads to the east and Baker and Gerris to the west. There was no need for many of the buildings, but there was an abundance of parks, tall shade trees and a few places to throw a line into the water. It was the kind of mid-century American town found only on Hollywood backlots to signify a time that had long since passed. It was the ideal community in the minds of its residents, and its creators.

Main Street was lined with businesses with big windows and brick facades. There was the drug store, of course, and a hardware store. There was also a fix-it shop, butcher shop and an auto shop. There was a fire station, which was really extraneous because there were no fires in Golden; and also there were dentists, lawyers and doctors. There was the town hall, which was rarely used, and the largest building was the school at the very north of Main Street.

It was a small town and Billy loved to walk along its pastoral streets to clear his mind. Golden was populated by anywhere from fifteen to forty-two patients and close to a five hundred Seegees, computer generated “people” who looked liked anyone and no one. The Seegees went about their business, running in loops created by the town’s programmers. Golden lived up to its name. The temperature was usually comfortable, the sun shined constantly and the moon was full once a month. Billy waved at two of his patients, Carmen Lugo and Ken Franklin, who were holding hands and sharing an ice cream as they walked. He tried to meet with all of the patients individually as often as he could to make sure everything was going okay, some people broke down mentally — they couldn’t handle Golden. Some had physical problems that manifested themselves in Golden, but only one person ever had to be pulled out of the town. All residents knew that their time there was temporary and that Billy was their Grim Reaper — the man who would eventually come to take them their deaths.

All new residents were taken to Fred’s house for an unofficial orientation. It was easier for a resident of Golden to explain the town and its rules; and no one had been a resident of Golden longer than Fred. Billy was just a visitor to the town and could not use the computer interface in the same way residents could. While residents had billions of cell-sized nanoprobes attached to their nerve endings, Billy only had a thousand or so injected into his body before each trip in to Golden. Unlike the residents, his nanoprobes were designed to slough off after eight hours. It made it easier for Billy to transition between the two worlds, but it was yet to be determined what kind of toll it was taking on his body.

Before they could make the half-mile walk to Fred's house at the corner of Oak and McKinley, Ruth had grasped how the computers could turn her thought of a Granny Smith into a seemingly real apple. She took a bite and grinned when she tasted a sweet, delicious fruit.

“I haven’t used my real teeth to bite into an apple in years,” she said, taking a second crunchy mouthful. “This is delicious! It's just how I remember!”

“Of course it is, you made it, so it’s what you expected,” Billy told her. “The computers work together to stimulate the neurons in your brain to fool you into thinking you just took a bite of apple. You can even put a worm in it if you want.”

“Why would I want something like that?”

“You would be surprised what people want when they come to Golden. It isn’t always pleasant. Almost anyone who lives here is suspicious of comfort and will put a thorn under the saddle just to make sure they are still alive. You can make any food you want with just a notion, but most people still shop at the market and go to the butcher shop for food. Plus, there are some things about Golden – some rules – that keep things from getting out of control. As you probably noticed, the rules of gravity are the same here as in the real world. We can't have everyone flying around and picking up buses, you know. Essentially, the rules of the physical world are followed here – with some exceptions for your comfort.”

Billy didn't say anything about the problems that arose in Golden from time to time; the invincibility most patients come to feel or even the sadness some residents experience because they know none of it is real. Better to keep those things to himself, he thought; no sense in frightening Ruth. She would learn about those things soon enough. He did explain that as with everything mechanical, there had been bugs to work out. Some people, especially those with a psychosis, didn’t adapt well to Golden. People suffering from a brain injury or from diseases of the brain like Alzheimer's usually were missing key parts that enabled success. But the bigwigs with the Golden Foundation were hoping research Billy was doing as part of his job would one day make them viable patients.

“Who pays for all this?” Ruth asked, finishing her apple. “How did I get chosen? I can't afford anything like this.”

“Golden is funded through several sources, but mostly from private investors who hope someday they will be able to make a profit on the service. The government, though, holds a pretty tight rein on what we do. Through a charter granted to the Golden Foundation by the USDA, Health and Human Services and a half-dozen other agencies we’re required to share quite a bit of what we learn here and look out for the safety of our residents. And,” Billy said, not wanting to go too deep into the interference the government imposed on the Golden Foundation, “in order to operate, we are required to invite at least half of the population of Golden from a pool of candidates who cannot pay. For this, Uncle Sam pays us a substantial grant. About half of our current residents are paying their own way, but it's a small amount compared to the actual cost.”

“Really?” she said. “How many residents are there now?”

“With you, we now have thirty-two, but we should be getting more in the next couple of weeks.”

“Paying customers?”

“I'm not at liberty to say,” Billy said. It was difficult to keep information from a blood relative, but rules were rules. “We respect our residents' privacy, and as a matter of course, that was one of the issues that held up our charter. The government was demanding too much access to information on the activities of our residents.”

Ruth thought for a moment then reached into her pocket a pulled out some bubble gum. She opened the wax packaging and stuck the gum in her mouth, relishing each chew while silently checking out the comic adventures of Bazooka Joe.

“So there's no cameras in here watching my every move, then?”

“Well,” Billy explained, “seeing as we are essentially talking to each other's minds, there wouldn't technically be any cameras. There is no record of your activities in Golden and the only thing we monitor is your vital signs. It's difficult to track ‘movement’ within Golden and the Foundation's board agrees that it’s an extraneous expense; we are unable to ‘see’ what parts of the town you explore. Your privacy is important to us, so you don't need to worry about that. For you, Golden offers whatever you want.”

“So I can wish anything into existence? If I want a big car or big boobs, I can have them?”

Billy nodded. “You can have anything you want within reason. There are some things that our computers are not capable of reproducing, but, for the most part, you can fulfill any … desire or dream that was deferred in your youth. We give folks a chance at what they’ve always wanted.”

Ruth thought about that for a minute and furrowed her cute brow.

“That doesn’t seem like a very good idea to me.”

As they mounted the stairs up to Fred’s porch, Ruth was busy creating a purple Popsicle and putting it into her mouth. Fred was in his usual place on the porch in front of an IBM Selectric typewriter. Billy noticed a half-filled ashtray with discarded marijuana roaches and a bottle of Pepto-Bismol sitting on a TV tray next to the typewriter. Fred hunted and pecked at the keyboard with amazing speed, a technique perfected over many years working a typewriter. Billy cleared his throat as he and Ruth stepped on the porch. Fred quickly removed his hunting finger and held it up, never taking his eyes from the manuscript as the pecking finger kept working. As quick as it was up, it was back at the keyboard. He jabbed the keys furiously, grinning like a madman.

Fred stopped and laughed, which to Billy always sounded like a baboon. He was a tall man with unkempt blond and gray hair. The most prominent feature on his face was a gray beard and mustache that needed a trim. Fred’s blue eyes twinkled with mischief and he always wore an unbuttoned cabana shirt over a plain white T-shirt, which somehow made his little pot belly stand out. As usual, he was wearing cargo shorts. While most residents of Golden went out of their way to look young and fresh, Fred took the opposite approach, which never really hid the fact that at one point in his life he had teen idol good looks. That's why he was famous – he actually had been a teen idol.

“Farts are even funny when you write about them,” he said giggling and taking a swig off the Pepto. Billy couldn’t help but laugh, too. Ruth looked at both men, silently waiting until she was introduced. Fred remembered he had guests and turned to them, fishing a breath mint out of his pocket and sticking it in his mouth. The roaches and the ashtray disappeared, Billy knew that Fred liked to keep his smoking hidden – especially from people he didn't know. It was the worse kept secret in Golden.

“Billy!”

“Freddie!” Billy shouted back in the pair’s standard greeting to each other that always made him feel like he was part of some old vaudeville routine.

“I was just writing about farts, Billy.” Fred took another gulp of the stomach medicine. “Me and the old man had a routine – for the late nightclub shows – he would sneak around the stage while I was making fart noises. We had one bit where he was a guest at a high society party. It always killed, even at some of the classier places we played.”

From behind Billy, Ruth could no longer wait to be recognized.

“You …You’re Freddie McKenzie!” Fred didn’t miss a beat. A hat appeared in his hand above his head as if he had just removed it from his head and he scrunched his face up and gave a weird chortle. In nearly two blinks of an eye, Fred regressed in age, his hair grew in and lightened, the facial hair disappeared and he seemed to grow a little taller. He looked like a college student, his face hairless and fresh.

“I yam?” he said, stretching the words into a comic grin.

Now it was time for Ruth and Fred to laugh together. Billy was not surprised at his grandmother’s reaction to Fred; all the new residents knew him. He was Freddie McKenzie of the famous McKenzie Family, stars of stage, screen and especially television, where America watched Fred grow up every Thursday night for 11 years on “Andy and Agnes,” his parents' sitcom. Freddie had the most stellar career of the McKenzie Family, moonlighting as a teen heartthrob when he wasn't on the set. Fred chose his disheveled appearance in Golden because he had said it was what he was most comfortable with and “required the least amount of thought.” Every time someone recognized him from his teen idol days, though, he would easily shift to that image. Billy suspected that Fred spent some of his nights charming some of the female residents as famous Freddie McKenzie, although the older man would never admit that. Of all Billy’s patients, Fred was the toughest nut to crack. Most were hesitant to say much of anything at first, but eventually would open up. Fred would talk and talk for hours and say almost nothing. Billy was careful to observe him, looking for small openings in the window to his psyche. Occasionally, Fred would let him see, but only on his own terms.

He may have been a star when he was younger, but Fred also had talents that reached far beyond fart jokes, sitcoms and hit records. Golden would not have been possible without Freddie’s seed money nor Fred's genius. To Billy’s surprise, Ruth turned into a teenager right before his eyes. He knew it was the computers making an adjustment to Ruth’s concept of self image, just as Fred had done, but he rarely saw it accomplished with so little effort. Both the reason she aged and the technology to do so had been Fred's dream and life's work.

“I never missed an episode of ‘Andy and Agnes’ and I bought all your records,” Ruth said, dancing from side to side with excitement. “I stood in line for three hours once to get your autograph at the Bijou, but you left before I could get to the front of the line. And now you are right here. Are you real, or are you one of those computer generated things Dr. Watson was talking about?”

Billy hoped she wouldn’t have too intense of an adrenaline rush, which could cause the computers to get a little confused. When that happened, they sometimes had to induce a patient into a coma and reboot their avatar. The fear was that if there were extreme cases, it could take the whole system down, which is why there is no skydiving allowed in Golden. It was one of the few glitches with the system that Ollie — the lead engineer for Golden — and his team were constantly trying to fix.

“Do you think it would be all right if I got your autograph?” she asked. An autograph book and pen appeared in her hand. Fred grabbed it and began thumbing through it, looking for a blank page while reading the names out loud. Billy had never heard of most of them.

“Ralph Bellamy, good guy. Gloria Grahame, crazy gal. My pop fired her once, you know? She kept showing up on set drunk.” Fred paused on one page. “Johnny Mancini? Who’s that?” Ruth blushed.

“He was my first autograph. Johnny was Tommy in Brigadoon. I had such a big crush on him.”

“Brigadoon, huh? I played Jeff in a revival,” Fred said. “I loved that show. Were you in it?”

“I played Meg,” Ruth said. “I so wanted to play Fiona, so … Well, Fiona got to kiss Tommy, you know? And that stupid Anita Folsom was Fiona. I was so jealous, they ended up nearly getting married, all because of Brigadoon...”

“Whatever happened to him? To Johnny?” Fred asked as he found a blank spot in the book and signed his name. Ruth aged another 10 years in an instant. Her face was not so carefree anymore, and in her eyes Billy could tell she never stopped loving Johnny Mancini.

“He got killed during the war. Vietnam. His name's on that wall in Washington, but I never got to see it.”

“There's a lot of names on that wall,” Fred said, walking to her and hugging her. After a minute of silent remembrances, Ruth pulled away, older but still attractive. Fred, too, had aged, not quite to his normal look, but close.

“I’m sorry Mr. McKenzie, I didn’t mean to get emotional on you. You just seem like you understand. There aren’t so many of us left, you know?” Ruth's avatar was going through contortions trying to decide if it was old or young. It would have scared anyone who had never seen something like that happen, but Billy and Fred both knew it was a sign that Golden's computers were having a hard time rendering an avatar for Ruth.

“That’s quite all right,” Fred said with a slight bow. Taking her by the elbow, he led her to a small sofa that appeared on the porch. “Why don’t you lie down and take a nap? It'll make you feel better. I'll be right here when you wake up.”

Ruth climbed onto the sofa, closed her eyes and immediately went to sleep. Billy sighed, as she turned back into a little girl once more.

“That is always weird when that happens,” Billy said as he grabbed one of Fred's joints and lit it. “Say, chum, could you make a guy a chair to sit in?”

While the residents of Golden had the ability to create most anything out of thin air — including furniture — Billy's interface with the computers didn't allow that. The result was that Billy couldn't control Golden's environment. He had to ask the residents to create chairs and such for him, unless they were already a part of the program. It was rarely a problem, but when he visited Fred, there never seemed to be enough chairs.

Fred laughed and a recliner appeared next to the sleeping girl. Billy fell into it.

“For a second there I was thinking we were going to have to reboot her. I didn’t know she was a huge Freddie McKenzie fan.”

Billy wondered if his grandmother might have continuing problems in Golden. The computers move fast, but not faster than brain waves, and hers moved faster than the programming could keep up with.

“I'm not worried,” Fred said. “Did you see the control she has? She picked up the way things work around here pretty quick, wouldn't you say?”

Fred moved back over to his chair and picked up a glass of brown liquid that Billy guessed was a Coke.

“Yeah, I noticed when I was walking her over here. Still, I thought she was going to burst when she remembered you. And what is it with that ‘I yam’ thing anyway? You do that all the time.”

“It was my schtick. Everyone had one. My older brother Harry was a master at the double take. Margie had a great spit take. It’s like that Steve Martin guy with his ‘wild and crazy guy’ thing. People picked up on it and it became part of the culture.”

He giggled again and downed the soda.

“I was part of the zeitgeist, man.” Fred set down his glass, which instantly refilled. He noticed Billy’s hands were empty and rendered the younger man a drink as well.

“And a has-been by twenty-six,” Billy added, with a smile. He liked it when Fred was in a good mood and would roll with the good-natured ribbing.

“That was my choice. I was tired of it. Look, the old ladies who come in here every once in a while and give a little swoon is good for the ego, you know? Makes me feel like I’m virile and everything. But the people who come here and marvel at what I’ve built with this town and the technology that makes it possible, those are the ones who made me realize my real accomplishments.”

He sat back satisfied. Fred never had problem with confidence; Billy liked it, but some people found it off-putting. Still, Billy liked to mess around with Fred's arrogance from time to time.

“Didn’t you date Tuesday Weld?” Billy asked, knowing where the conversation would lead.

“She was sweet, looked great in a sweater. Smart too.”

“And ten years later, she refused to talk to you?”

“She treated everyone like that.”

“Has-been.”

“Head shrinker.”

Both laughed and clinked their glasses together. Billy genuinely liked Fred. In another time, the older man would have been an admirable mentor. If Fred had a drawback, though, it would be his smoking weed. There were stories Billy had heard about when Fred was younger. He would bury his pot in the yard so his wife and daughter couldn't find it and throw it away. Marijuana, obviously, didn't exist in Golden unless someone made it exist. And the fantasy of it couldn't harm a real body, or at least as far as anyone could see. Fred wasn't the town's only dope smoker, but he certainly enjoyed it the most. And while his corporeal body didn't show any adverse effects that weren't there before, it was his mind that Billy worried about. Addiction was a disease whether you had an actual toke or not. In Fred's mind, the pot was real, and in turn, it affected his mind as if he was really stoned.

By sitting on the porch sipping a Coke and smoking weed with Fred, Billy knew he was enabling him. But how do you stop someone from smoking who is convinced his addiction has no harmful effects, and has physical evidence to back up his point? Billy read up on addictive personalities and really found nothing to help with Fred. In addition, Billy felt that the concern was probably more of an issue to Jenny, Fred's daughter, than it was anyone else. The simple fact remained: Fred was dying. It could take months or a couple of years, but he wasn't going to recover from the ALS that had put him in Golden. Billy had to deal with both of them, the father and the daughter, and he loved both of them dearly in very different ways.

“Whatcha working on today?” Every time Billy visited Fred, the older man was pounding away on the typewriter. Some days, Fred was working on instructions for Ollie. Fred started the company, but because he was legally incapacitated, was not allowed to run it. So he typed out his instructions to Ollie and to Jenny. His typewriter and a laptop computer in Billy's Golden office were the only way to send a message to the real world. Billy used his to write patient notes and Fred used his typewriter to browbeat his daughter and Golden’s maintenance supervisor.

“Working on the memoir, Billy-boy. That and a note to Jenny,” Fred said. “How is she doing?”

“Fine I guess, considering …” Billy hated these conversations and their dark tones.

“Considering what?” Fred’s mood quickly turned and the edge in his voice told Billy that the joking was over.

Billy squirmed. Although pretty and bright, Jenny was all business. She smiled infrequently, and usually only around Billy, who she treated like her personal therapist despite his numerous admonitions that he was not, and that she should talk to a good psychologist. He had his own motives, he wanted nothing more than to hold her in his arms and maybe even steal a kiss from her. Despite her maddening proclivity to talk and not listen — a habit that revealed her insecurities — he still found a strong attraction to her. With two strong personalities in one family, it made for some wild arguments. The trouble was that Jenny refused to come to Golden and Fred couldn't leave. So the arguments took place in memos to each other, or by simply using Billy as a go-between, a role he hated, but also used to his advantage. He knew more about the foundation than he should have, and he knew too much about how tenuous its existence was.

Fred, for his part, loved his daughter, but felt she was always too serious. Billy surmised that a lifetime of being the butt of Fred’s jokes — as well as his controlling nature ­— made her wary, and Fred never understood why she wasn't enraptured by his good looks and charm like just about everyone else. Both of them held fast to assumptions about each other and Billy could say nothing that would change the way they thought.

“Uh, well. As near as I can tell,” Billy said, “there are a group of investors who are concerned about a lack of profit.”

“What?” Fred picked up his drink, downed it and slammed the glass down hard on the TV tray by his typewriter. “Those bastards know that it’ll be at least ten years before this place shows a profit. It'll take that long before the government approves our patents. We can't even take a shit without Health and Human Services, Commerce and half a dozen other government departments looking over our shoulder. She should just tell them to go to hell. That kid of mine!”

“Well,” Billy said, standing, “that's another part of the problem. There's a senator from Arizona who isn't convinced of the efficacy of the project and he has the GAO breathing down our necks. Jenny hasn't said anything, but I suspect that the senator will be bringing this up before a subcommittee soon. I imagine he'll push for our charter to be revoked. He’s had his assistant at the Foundation’s warehouse every day for the past several weeks doing ‘observation.’ I haven’t talked to the guy much, but he acts like he’s looking for bugs under rocks.”

Fred stood and started pacing the length of the porch. The older man looked like a nervous lion contemplating his next move.

“Who is that senator? Peterson, right? That son-of-a-bitch has got nothing, we've been following their stupid laws to the letter, haven't we? They've got no reason to come after us, do they?”

“Well, I'm sure he sees things different ...” Peterson was convinced Golden exploited the elderly and ill, as well as coming close to accusing the Golden Foundation, which ran the project, of fraud. The nearly 1,500 patents that made the town possible should be owned by the government, Peterson had told the press, for the health and well-being of the public. His big issue, Billy learned while talking to Jenny, was that some patients are excluded from Golden while others get a free ride. It was a seemingly valid argument except for the fact that in order for Golden to work, the patient's mind has to be somewhat sound. Someone with ALS or another degenerative disease were ideal, any one higher than three on the Los Amigas Scale was not. People with serious brain damage were just as intellectually incapacitated in Golden as they were in the real world. The town had a couple of cancer patients, a few others who were just old and wanted something nice to go to. But Alzheimer’s patients did not magically become healed in Golden. Golden had a sister city — a room really — that was used to test the effect of the computer interface on such patients. It just didn't work for everyone.

The senator's push for hearings on Golden was what really had investors spooked. Any time the government makes a move to shut something down, people lose money.

Billy didn't want to get into this conversation with Fred, it didn't serve any purpose and would send him further into a rage. Better to just let this little talk die, and for Fred, it already had. He was staring at what he had written, which in his distracted state, didn't make much sense. Fred sat and pulled the sheet of paper from his typewriter, wadded it up and threw it over his shoulder, then carefully threaded a new one.

Billy looked off the porch at the perfect day. The storm clouds, thunder and lightning moved off without leaving a drop. Rain was tough to make, and the attempts the engineers had made didn’t look right.

“Holy Crap!” Fred stood up quickly. “What’s wrong with your hand?”

Billy stood quickly too, like he had a bee on him and looked at his hands. His right one had elongated to more than a foot, the fingers were narrow and flapping around like loose meat with no bones, but he could still control them. Billy shook the hand and it returned to normal. Fred was giggling.

“Man,” he said, “that really freaked me out. For a minute there, I thought I was hallucinating.”

“Isn't this whole place a hallucination? My program has been acting up a lot lately. Last week, my leg disappeared and I couldn’t get it to come back. I had to be pulled out early for the technicians to fix it.”

The computers had been having more and more glitches in the past couple of weeks. Patient fainting spells had always thrown them off, but now simple things were going haywire. A resident may want to render an apple, but come up with an orange instead. Billy had to make sure the residents wouldn’t come to harm, but most of them handled the technical problems like people who lived in the real world ­— sometimes stuff breaks.

Billy looked at his watch, he had to get going.

“Any suggestions on the malfunctions?” he asked. Fred shrugged, and got up to check on Ruth.

“Not off hand. Have Ollie send me a message when you get back,” he said with a chuckle. “It’s about time to wake her up. Does she know who you are yet?”

“Not exactly. It doesn’t seem to matter much to her. I’ll tell her if she asks. Listen, I’ve got to go. Will you take care of her?”

“Of course,” Fred said. “She’s kind of cute, you know?”

“Hey. That’s my grandmother you’re talking about there. You keep your hands off her. Have your fun with some of the other patients or I’ll …”

“What?”

“I’d be forced to make you watch reruns of all your old TV shows.”

Billy’s watch beeped; he had to hustle over to Peter Boone’s — it was his time.

“Who is it?”

“Peter.”

“Nice guy. I hope it goes well.”

“It should,” Billy said. “His son is supposed to meet me there. That's the first time that ever happened, plus you know who he is, don't you? So that should be interesting. Are you going to be around after? I haven't got much else going on. I kept my schedule free in case Boone wants to look around. That shouldn't take long, though.”

Fred stood and put a plastic cover over his Selectric — even though there was never any dust in Golden.

“I was thinking of heading over to the school. I've been working on a project and our newest resident here might get a kick out of it. I'll take Ruth over there, show her the ropes. She seems like she might take to it pretty good.”

Billy promised to drop by and waved goodbye to Fred.