Howard
March 2344
Trantor
Sooooo, marketing campaigns. Not worth their weight in bird droppings, apparently.
I sat on the couch in our Trantor apartnt and read the report from the Hawking Institute. The hueys had been rolled out across all civilized worlds, too much hoopla in all available dia. A huge blitz, extolling the advantages combined with so well-applied FOMO for those who might resist. Piece of cake, right?
Yeah, no. The Luddies went ballistic, FAITH went absolutely apeshit, talking heads everywhere expressed skepticism, and about half the governnts of the UFS expressed guarded concern (the half, I noted silently, that were on the more authoritarian end of the political spectrum). I wasn’t quite sure how hueys threatened them, but it was obvious they did.
Of more imdiate concern was the rush of proposed bills, restraining orders, and lawsuit filings intended to delay or block the sale and support of hueys. Huey LLC (yes, we picked that na) was already the subject of no fewer than fifty-two restraining orders, sixteen class-action suits, and four threatened governnt audits.
Sighing, I called Hector. Not bothering to sit in front of a screen, I used my internal comms service and generated an avatar for my video image. He ca up on a virtual window in my head’s-up.
I opened the conversation. “I suppose you’re wondering why I’ve gathered you here.”
Hector laughed. “Not the least bit. I sent you that report, Howard. Honestly, I expected a little more cursing. You must know what we’ve been up to.”
Oh, that was interesting. Hector wasn’t acting at all like a CEO who was seeing his company crash and burn—more like soone relishing a fight. “Why don’t you just update without making assumptions about what I do or do not know?” I said. Quite calmly, I thought.
I must have been right, because he didn’t suddenly look concerned. “None of this is unexpected, Howard. We took a page from the Bobs. We’ve been filing injunctions, counter-injunctions, briefs; getting legal opinions; preparing and pre-filing countersuits; and so on for weeks now. The perpetrators of most of these legal actions will have to spend up to six months unraveling all the judicial balls of twine we’ve been winding before they’ll even be able to demand their first eting with our lawyers. The threatened audits are already four layers deep in preemptive lawsuits and show-cause orders. Basically, we sowed the entire battlefield with caltrops before we even started.”
“All legal?”
“Nothing illegal.”
I gave Hector the hairy eyeball. That sounded almost—
“You’ve been talking to Will,” I exclaid.
“If you an the Bob forrly known as Riker, I plead the Fifth.” Hector grinned. “But yes. He’s very cynical about humanity, which is helpful in this kind of fight. In any case”—Hector looked down and played with sothing, and another email popped into my inbox—“we have more than two hundred thousand firm orders with deposits, plus close to a million tentative orders queued up already, and every one of those custors could be convinced to join a class action if soone actually managed to delay us.”
I was impressed. My initial take of Hector as an ass-kisser had wildly missed the mark. This guy was a serious pugilist.
I thanked him and hung up. The hueys were just the tip of the iceberg, of course. Companies that rented mannies would expand to include generic hueys in their lineups, for people who only occasionally needed one. Companies that stored mannies for ex-human custors would expand to include huey storage for still-living clients. A new vacation industry would evolve as people realized they could visit other worlds using hueys instead of spending years in stasis. Or having to die first. ŘÃ𝐍ÒᛒЕș
And I owned most of those companies. Well, the Bobiverse did.
There were also other, more salacious uses that we really didn’t want to advertise to the general public, but it was a dead certainty that a secondary industry would form within a day.
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