The Caryatids

"Toddy was the bomb," said Uncle Jack. "Any star might choose to sleep with some big director, but Toddy liked to sleep with the technicians. The ugly, geeky, meta-media guys! Yeah, she cut through those nerds like the scythe of doom! She even married one of them-she married Montalban."

Jack tugged at his tasteful cuff links. "I told her, way back then: 'Lila, he's a nouveau riche Spanish-language digital media mogul! And we're proper Hollywood stars, so he's just not our kind of people!' But I was dead wrong, and Toddy knew better. It took a visionary to carry off her strategies. Toddy was so totally clued-in. The Next Web was sure to take over the world. The Next Web had everything, because the Next Web was everything! All it needed was some oomph! It needed some big sexy va-va-va-voom! And Toddy had that stuff by the megaton! All people could do was stare."

Jack stared into Toddy's medical bubble. "Not that I like to stare at her just now...but yeah, the people stared, all right. Even the machines stared. Forget TV, movies-the old entertainment vehicles. Toddy could scratch her ass on any public beach and pull down ten million web-hits from homemade spy videos. She walked through her life in a universal cloud of voyeurs."

Radmila blinked. "Toddy never told me much about those aspects of her profession."

"Oh, come on, come on! Your generation never thinks like that at all! That's all over for you. You young folks are an entirely different breed of star. You crazy superhuman kids, you don't even have four-letter words for sex! Birth rates, children: That's what you people fuss about. You think that sex is all engineering."

"Gender roles are engineering," said Radmila.

"Fine, sure, go ahead, be that way...Well...the Toddy you knew was a wise old woman. The girl I knew was young: a hungry, very determined pop idol with a body like a force of nature. And even though I'm as gay as a box of birds, I sure had the better deal out of that one."

RADMILA DID A COSTUME CHANGE, snapping herself into her formal Dispensation uniform. To dress in this way: so simple, stern, and functionally ergonomic-it always helped her morale. She was proud of her medals and the hotlinks racing down her lapels: they were the visible evidence of endless fund-raisers, hospital visits, ribbon cuttings, awards ceremonies. "Community leadership."

The Family's Situation Room was a legacy from old Sergio Montalban. It was the master geek's addition to the Bivouac, part of his dogged campaign to stabilize the family finances. When Sergio had been Family chairman, the Situation Room had been his dashboard for the Family's fortunes.

The Family's fortunes had prospered mightily, but the pioneer's hardware had been badly dated. Today the Family's investments were so interwoven with the urban fabric of Los Angeles that maps made more sense than spreadsheets.

So the Family used the plush, hushed Situation Room as an informal romper space. They watched old movies in there. Most modern Angelenos couldn't watch movies-because they couldn't sit still and quiet for two solid hours without taking prompts from the net. But the Montgomery-Montalbans were a disciplined, highly traditional folk.

The Family-Firm didn't exactly "watch" the old movies-not in the traditional sense-but they would crowd together bodily in the Situation Room, slouch on beanbags, cook and eat heaps of popcorn, and crack silly jokes while movies spooled on the walls. The Situation Room had been the scene of Radmila's happiest hours, when she was pregnant and gulping chocolate ice cream. John had been proud of her then, truly happy about her, and Family members always went out of their way to be kind to a pregnant girl. It was the first time in her life that Radmila had been part of a human family: accepted, relied upon, taken for granted, just plain there.

Radmila even rather liked to watch the old movies. Especially the very, very old silent movies, which seemed less bizarre and abrasive than the other kinds.

The Situation Room was crowded this morning, but the Family-Firm's games today were grim. The Directors had brusquely abandoned Sergio's screens. A modern autofocus projector painted the wall with a geolocative map.

This disaster map was busily agglomerating the damage reports from the net, which were flooding in by their millions. The map filtered this torrent of noise, so as to produce some actionable intelligence.

Southern California was measled all over with color-coded dots: scarlet, tangerine, golden, cerulean, and forest green. The map refreshed once each second, and as it did, all the colored dots denoting their small threats and ongoing horrors would do a little popcorn jump.

Politely, Radmila did a star entrance into the Situation Room. They could tell by her gloomy choice of soundtrack that her news was bad.