"Ken Jenks - Created Equal" - читать интересную книгу автора (Jenks Ken)

The crowd outside quieted suddenly. We looked out the window. A small blonde girl with a Fisher-Price megaphone was talking to them from the top of a car. She looked about five years old. "Listen, folks, you all have the memories of Mitch Stevens. I do, too. It was probably Dr. K's experiment. Has anybody seen Katie?"

Katie stood and opened the window. She called out to the assembled Mitches. "I'm Mitch, too, folks. The original is inside with me. Everybody remain calm and we'll come out."

They did remain calm. We got our coats, then Katie led me down the stairs and into the street. They cleared a path to the little girl with the megaphone. She handed it to me and climbed down. I stood on the car and addressed the crowd. Public speaking isn't my strong suit.

"Er, hello, folks." I began. They all listened intently. "I'm Mitch Stevens, and I guess you are, too."

I didn't know what to say next. Katie climbed up, too, and prompted me. "Tell them what Dr. K said after the experiment."

I cleared my throat and triggered the megaphone. "After the experiment, I said good-bye to Dr. K over the intercom. He didn't reply. I ducked out the back door. Then I rode home. That's all I know."

Almost as one, the crowd started to mill about. We all wanted to go to Dr. K's lab to check in with him, but the streets were jammed by people coming to our apartment. A sharply dressed young lady tried her cell phone, but told me the circuits were busy.

Katie grabbed the megaphone. Everyone stopped and looked at her. Who appointed her leader? I thought. I did, I guess.

"Has anybody seen a news broadcast? Is there anything on the radio?" People searched their clothes. One man came up with a tiny TV. He handed it to Katie. Someone else passed up a boom box.

In another twenty minutes or so, the situation became clearer. Radio announcers, TV news anchors and everyone reachable on telephones was me. Most of the stations were off the air as people stopped doing whatever it is people do to keep radio and TV stations working. I didn't know, so presumably they didn't either. One of the early reports was about Dr. K. He was Mitch, too, and so was Ricci, the lab assistant. They were trying to piece together what happened from Dr. K's notes.

We marched against the flow of traffic to the stadium. Word spread out through campus town. Thousands of people met us there. The stadium lights were on, and someone had figured out how to run the sound system. A disorganized tangle of people tried to set up some video equipment, but they didn't have much success. Katie and I were escorted to the 50-yard line.

We stayed there most of the evening, answering questions as best we could. After an hour or so, they figured out the video equipment and patched us through to CNN. It was the most poorly produced television show I'd ever seen. Everyone tried to speak at once, and nobody knew what he was doing. Eventually, Katie took charge. She told the world the situation as we knew it. She had a special hotline set up in the press box, but it never rang. Nobody, anywhere, had any memories except those of Mitch Stevens, grad student.

The University switchboard was overflowing and poorly staffed, I guess, by people who'd never seen a switchboard before, but news trickled in slowly from around the world.

There was no major loss of life. There were a few trucks that went out of control. I never learned to drive a semi. An embarrassing number of helicopters crashed. Thank God I can fly fixed-wing aircraft. Almost all of the planes landed safely, even the big jets. There was a major chemical leak at a refinery in Louisiana, but they seemed to get everything under control quickly enough. Dozens of people around the world died in surgery. My soul felt bruised, knowing I died so many times. Newborn babies struggled with unaccustomed mouths to ask their mothers about Katie and Dr. K.

I really needed to sleep, but they said my apartment was still mobbed. A cop escorted me to Jumer's Bavarian Inn, the best hotel in Urbana/Champaign. He was grinning like a maniac while speeding down Green street with the siren blaring. I always wanted to do that. The desk clerk wouldn't take my credit card. He laughed and handed me the key. There was a fire in the fireplace. Some really cool silk pajamas, a toothbrush and my usual brand of toothpaste were waiting in the bathroom.

Katie joined me in the middle of the night. She just wanted to be held, she said. We ended up making love anyway in the hotel bed with its flowered canopy. Afterward, Katie stretched luxuriously across the bed. "Mmmm," she sighed. "That was the strangest thing I've ever done." She laughed. "Sex is better for women." She snuggled up against me and we slept.


The next morning, we turned on the television. The animals had started writing. Anything with a brain more complex than a squid seemed to be Mitch, at some level. So everybody turned vegetarian, virtually overnight. Carnivores everywhere struggled with their new consciences. It didn't much matter if they decided to hunt. All of the prey was smart, too.

As we got dressed, I saw a piece of paper slipped under the door. Addressed simply, "Mitch," it said we had a press conference scheduled for noon at the TV station. Our escort would be waiting.

We got dressed and opened the door. There was a small crowd waiting in the hall for us. People who had been working all night had some recommendations for the press conference and wanted to meet with me. Katie fended them off until after breakfast. They all agreed; they know how I am before I get my Mountain Dew.

Breakfast was superb. I was surprised; I'm not that good a cook.

We met in one of Jumer's conference rooms. The first order of business was names. My new advisors recommended that everybody adopt the name of the body in which they found themselves, if known. That made my advisors Stan, Georgia, Ivar and Anastasia. Anastasia didn't know her body's name. At the Transformation, she had been swimming at a sorority. She would try to figure out her real name later. In the meantime, Anastasia was one of my favorite names, so she took it. There were a lot of Anastasias "born" that day.

The second item on the agenda was Dr. K. The chimp involved in the experiment was still just a chimp named Epsilon. There was nothing Mitch-like about his behavior at all. Dr. K and Ricci had more help than they needed, but they were still no closer to understanding what happened or how to reverse it. Georgia pointed out that it would probably take years of study to get up to Ricci's level, much less Dr. K's.

The third item on the agenda was the state of the Transformation world-wide. Ivar had been studying news reports and organizing research teams all night to gather information from around the world. The good news was that people and animals born after the Transformation were normal. They seemed to have normal minds untouched by Mitchness. The bad news was that every human and animal in the world alive at the time of the Transformation seemed to be Mitch to some extent, with the possible exception of fish, mollusks, crustaceans, insects and Dr. K's chimp. Parrots talked about antimatter physics. Bears wrote questions in very large fonts. Plants were not obviously affected.

That brought up the subject of food. Georgia recommended that everybody everywhere go back to work doing whatever they were doing at the Transformation. This, presumably, would ensure that the world's food distribution systems would be uninterrupted. Meat animals which had already been slaughtered should be properly labeled and distributed. The world economy should continue uninterrupted. Against the day when memories were restored, people shouldn't stop paying each other for goods and services just because the customer was Mitch. They all agreed that the only exceptions, with world-wide carte blanche, would be Dr. K and his team, Katie and me. King Mitch.

Ivar jumped in again to continue his briefing on the state of the world. War had stopped instantly. World peace reigned at last. Crime and violence had vanished. All prisoners were being released. Huge piles of weapons were already being melted down everywhere in the world. Teams were at work carefully disabling all nuclear weapons. Drug abuse and alcoholism were gone, too. So was smoking. There was no more racial or sexual discrimination. Illiteracy was eradicated at last. No more technophobes, either.