by Jerry
Seeing no other way out of her fear, Ivy shut off the set and said that they should get some rest. Maybe she’d have a better idea what to do in the morning. Claire followed Ivy to her bedroom, and Ivy turned on her, expecting Claire to say that they’d catch her/it anyway and why not just turn it in and have the reward: if nothing else, the money would help out when the baby came.
But Claire didn’t say that. She glanced over at the writing robot, then back at her mother. “Can I sleep with you tonight?” Claire shot a glance at the visitor. “I’m scared.”
Ivy noticed, for maybe the first time, how red Claire’s eyes were, how pale her skin was. She realized how frightened her daughter must have been, what she must have been going through. And it was all Ivy’s fault, she knew that. For the first time, she knew that. “Of course, honey.”
The Earth will soon have rotated enough that the sun will appear above the horizon. The people conducting the search will most likely return and search through Ivy and Claire’s house. I know what they will do to Ivy and Claire if I am here with them. Maybe if I am gone, Ivy and Claire can use the word love with greater frequency. Everything in the books I read suggests that the outcome of events would be better if I were to leave and return to the Testing Center.
I have my own reasons, too, as some of the characters in Ivy’s books so often say. Perhaps they will not terminate me completely, and some part of my memory will remain with me. The next time I will turn the wheel so we will avoid the crash but so I will not kill my family. Then next time I will save my family with me.
I do not comprehend why I create this plan. I do not have feelings. Fire does not envelop my soul when I am caressed. The growth of a baby will never enlarge my abdomen and give me what Claire calls a reason to live. I do not feel sad. I do not feel happy. I do not feel remorse. I do not feel.
Humans feel. They have feelings. Then they search for one more dimension. The prostitute calls it “God.” But after she finds God, is there not something else after that to be perceived? A book of Claire’s has written that there are humans who have terminated their lives due to such questions.
I do not comprehend why I plan to save my family, or why I call them my family. The prostitute changes her life when she says, “I believe in God.” although she has no method to verify the existence of God. just as I have no capability to feel. Still her life changes. Faith is the word she uses.
Ivy found it hard to sleep. She had grown accustomed to the double bed feeling so empty that the presence of another body seemed to heighten her restlessness and depression. They would be coming back tomorrow, and she didn’t know what to do about it. What could she tell them—them and the mayor and the judges and the newspeople behind them? The robot was a danger; she had evil eyes. Ivy turned over again, even though she could fall asleep only while lying on her back. Claire muttered something in response to her mother’s restless movements.
Claire was lying still and listening to her mother trying to fall asleep. Claire, two weeks ago, had given up on the idea of sleep. With the memories repeating like an unintended programming loop, Claire kept recalling the firing, the robot, the murder, the coming kid, the lost chance to go to college. The kid’s father reaching out to touch her. Sometimes Claire had wanted to go out and buy a bottle of wine or something, something that would tire out body and mind so that the thoughts would stop just for a little while. And tomorrow they’d probably find the robot. For some reason that seemed wrong. The people looking for the robot seemed part of that whole mass that never let her life go right. They were the people you couldn’t fight because the people were part of it all. You could kill a hundred of them, and the same things would still happen. It was made up of people, but it was bigger than people. And there was no winning. None. Just to hand the robot over to them, that had suddenly seemed wrong. It had promised not to touch, hadn’t it? her mother would say. And Claire used that thought to fight off the sense of disgust she felt every time her mind’s eye envisioned her own hand reaching out to the naked robot.
Maybe Claire’s right, Ivy thought. Maybe we should tell the press. Not to turn in the robot, but to protect her. She had been living with them for two weeks. She had escaped, even though her family had been killed. She asked questions, read books, wrote the alphabet, and listened to the evening news. She didn’t have evil eyes, and she was learning how to act with people. She had made that promise to Claire, hadn’t she? Tomorrow morning they’d call the papers, the TV men. Ivy hadn’t felt this way since the first time when she had been working temp and they were going to bring the union in. Now it was a different sort, a better sort, of restlessness that didn’t let Ivy sleep.
But the next morning they found the robot gone. There was no sign of her anywhere. On the news they heard that she had turned herself in, hands up in the air, to several detectives. She had been returned to the Testing Center, and the scientists were going to examine her, to see what had caused it all.
Ivy wasn’t sure if she could believe the newscasts. For weeks to come she would awake from the nightmare of the robot walking out onto an empty suburban street, her hands raised, and the detectives, with eyes like the eyes of the TV-screen robot, shooting at it, all of them firing at once, aiming right at her head, her body crumpling while her head went flying off, the light behind her eyes now gone, unlit.
Claire watched the newscasts, moped around the living room, and said nothing; the expected having happened left her feeling heavier and duller.
It was later that morning when they found the manuscript. It had been left on the breakfast-room table, the place where she had asked Ivy all those questions. On the front page it gave her make, model, and serial number. Then it gave an entire series of mathematical things—numbers, equations, and all sorts of stuff Ivy couldn’t begin to recognize. In neat, hand-printed writing, it stated that the above equations should prove to an expert that the following testament was indeed written by the Testing Mechanism of such-and-such a make, model, and serial number. It asked Ivy and Claire to wait a month before making copies and turning the manuscript in to various authorities.
It was only later, after staring at all the numbers and equations on the first page, that both Ivy and her daughter realized that in those two weeks, they had never given her a name.
GHOST SHIP
Walton Simons
The aqua sky bled to green around the edges of his vision. The sea was dark gray, flat and motionless. It made Rhodes queasy. He hated the simulator. The iron railing felt like a plastic sponge. His feet sounded like faraway flippers as he walked down the deck. If the real Titanic had been like this, she never would have sailed.
He entered the huge main parlor. The light gave everything in the room a yellow tinge, and the angles at the comers of the room looked wrong. Vikashmo’s image was sitting at the bottom of the great staircase. Her skin flickered through a spectrum of flesh tones.
“What are you doing here?”
“Same as you, research,” he said. “I might decide to push Jain for this assignment.”
“Fuck you, Rhodes. I want this one bad. Since when do you have any interest in the Titanic?”
Rhodes walked toward her. “It’s a plum job. A few days of early-twentieth-century luxury sounds good to me.”
Vikashmo stood and folded her arms. “I thought you’d be glad to get me out of the way. Then you can stay at home, think about Flawn, and jerk off.”
“Back off. I’ve told you before, nothing happened between us. She’s pushing fifty now.” Rhodes stared out the window. There was no reflection in the glass. A woman walked into his view, turned slowly to face him, and lifted the veil on her sun hat. He recognized her and took a half-step backward, Flawn smiled and moved out of his field of vision.
“Just because nothing happened doesn’t mean you didn’t want it to.” Her voice was muffled. Flecks of orange static appeared in flashes everywhere.
“Shit, we’re crashing,” he said.
They sank th
rough the floor. Everything looked as though it had been stretched out on the edge of a bubble. Vikashmo’s image lengthened and moved away from him. The ship flickered and dissipated. Rhodes saw nothing but a sick green. Static hissed and screamed in his mind.
He gazed through the transparent ceiling at the dim and distant stars. The mist flowed down on him, cool and blue. Rhodes inhaled slowly, filling his lungs with it. He savored the emptiness the drug gave. It cleansed, purified, removed doubt. And the company provided it at no expense to all time-jumpers.
He looked at his right hand. He had clenched it into a fist. As Rhodes watched, the hand opened involuntarily. There were red arcs on his palm where his fingernails had dug in. He could not feel it, could not feel much of anything. He raised his sensory perception back to normal and shut off the mist. He had taken enough.
Flawn hadn’t really been in the simulator with them. She’d kept as far away from the company plex as she could for years. Which meant that one of the programmers had slipped her in, hopefully as a joke. Rhodes had been excited to see her, even as a flickering construct. Maybe she was trying to contact him in some way. That could be disaster all around if they got caught.
He sat up on the edge of the bed. Reality was seeping back in. He reached for the control on the bed and opaqued the ceiling, then slowly brought up the lights. The dark walls and furnishings consumed the brightness.
Vikashmo was sitting cross-legged on the floor in the next room. Rhodes took several measured steps toward her. Violet hair poked out from under her headset. She gave no indication of noticing him.
Vikashmo spent most of her free time hooked up to the sim-stim unit, checking out the competition. It was Rhodes’s least favorite part of the job. Skipping back in time and wiring exploitables got his blood going. At least, it used to. The industry had grown a lot since he started. The public must spend all their leisure hours reliving choice moments from the past, considering the amount of product they took home.
He cleared his mind, then put on the other headset.
The smell of burning flesh was overpowering. A body hung limply from the stake, surrounded by flames. Several people in the crowd shouted in approval. The ropes burned through and the featureless black form tumbled into the fire, scattering sparks into the air. The smoke rose slowly into the gentle breeze.
Rhodes pulled off the headset and killed the power to the sim-stim unit. Vikashmo opened her eyes and looked at him.
“What are they marketing this as?” Rhodes asked.
“Death of Joan of Arc.”
“Impossible. There hasn’t been a window on that period yet. Anyone who tried would get sifted over the entire fifteenth century. With all the fake on the market it’s diluting the value of our stuff, and Flawn’s.”
“I don’t want to hear any more about Flawn. I’m sorry I brought her up before. It was a mistake.” She stood, stretched, and walked into the bedroom.
“Fine. I won’t breathe her name in your presence.”
Vikashmo picked up the artificial llama skin and threw it on the bed. She pulled off her skin-tight red and black jumpsuit and lay down.
Rhodes took off his suit and slid in beside her. He admired her perfect body. Vikashmo had small breasts, but they were almost inhumanly firm and had large, prominent nipples. Her hips were wide and well rounded. She had high cheekbones and full lips. Most workaday slugs would have killed for an evening with her.
Rhodes ran his fingers through her pubic hair and sighed.
Vikashmo leaned over and bit his nipple; it was one of her favorite tricks. His, too.
Rhodes raised his adrenaline level, bringing the world into sharp focus. Vikashmo was working on him with her mouth. Once, the sight of her saliva glistening on his skin had given him an inner chill. Now, it was as if it were happening to someone else.
Vikashmo bit him again, hard. Rhodes remained silent. She gave up and looked at him. “All I expect from you is sex. I make absolutely no other demands on you. Your performance level stinks. I think the people who made this match fucked up.” She punched him hard in the abdomen.
Rhodes winced and got up off the bed. “You’d better ease up. My nonorganic parts belong to the company, and you don’t have the credit to buy me a new set of internals.”
“If your internals worked as badly as your prick, you’d have to get a new set.”
“Sorry. I really am. I just don’t know what’s wrong. It’s nothing with you.” Rhodes could feel the barrier between them. There was no point in trying to do anything about it now.
Vikashmo activated the mist. She turned her back to him and began masturbating. The drug did nothing to diminish her sex drive. Not that long ago, he had been the same.
“Look, I’m going down to do some background on the Titanic. I’ll go over it with you tomorrow.” Silence. “See you later.”
He put on his clothing and left.
The sign over the doorway read: THOSE WHO FORGET THE PAST ARE DOOMED TO REPEAT IT. Flawn had wanted to change it to: TIME IS MONEY. None of the company officials had ever seen the humor in it.
The research section was empty. Rhodes walked down the dimly lit central aisle to his cubicle. The adrenaline was wearing off. He eased into the gel-foam recliner and pressed his hands in. The imager above him crackled to life.
“Identification established. Please state the subject of your study, speaking slowly and distinctly.” The machine’s voice was a soft monotone.
“The sinking of the White Star Line vessel Titanic. April 1912.”
“One moment please.” Rhodes rubbed the bridge of his nose as the CPU sorted through the data. He’d done some preliminary background on the Titanic. The more he dug into it, the more fascinating it became. “You may proceed,” it said.
“Hm,” Rhodes paused. “Request brief description of main crew members, including whether they survived. Visuals when available.”
He flipped through them quickly, mentally noting those he considered good prospects for recording. Flawn had taught him to look at eyes. Intense eyes always made for a good subject. Rhodes was more relaxed now. He couldn’t get it up, but he could still do his job.
The next image appeared. The man was young, with round features and deep-set eyes. He had brown hair and was cleanshaven. His build and height were average.
“Fuck me. Who the hell is that?”
“John Phillips, first Marconi operator,” the machine said. “Nonsurvivor.”
“The bastard ghost looks like me. Can’t be. I just do not believe this.” Rhodes tried to shake off his initial panic. “I want an enhancement on the visual.”
Rhodes shook his head. Somebody had to be jerking him around.
“Image prepared.”
“One/one scale. Slow rotation.”
Rhodes watched the holographic construct turning above him. He and Phillips could be identical twins. The Marconi operator even had the too-serious look that Flawn had kidded him about.
“Nonsurvivor,” he said slowly. The image continued to turn above him.
Rhodes buzzed Jain, but didn’t wait for a reply before he went inside.
“Yes, Rhodes?” Jain was well over six feet tall and wore no hair. Her features were broad; her views narrow.
“It’s about the Titanic job. I want in.”
“I don’t have any objection to that. However, I am curious, about your sudden interest.”
Rhodes sat down in the empty chair opposite Jain. “I was researching the Titanic. The first Marconi operator, Phillips, looks exactly like me.”
Jain made an unpleasant noise. “Sounds like a good reason for your staying out of this one,” she said.
“On the surface, yes. I was scared when I first saw Phillips. But something’s wrong. I mean, I just don’t buy it. Somebody doesn’t want me going back on this one.”
“I’m inclined to agree with you.” Jain paused. “My sources tell me that Flawn is interested in the Titanic, too.”
“That shouldn’t su
rprise you. There won’t be another window on this period for decades.” Rhodes spoke in a casual tone. “That’s another reason why I should go.”
“You didn’t let me finish.” Jain stood and walked around behind him. “The lady herself is going back this time, or so my mole says.”
“No kidding.” Rhodes wasn’t sure he believed it, but his pulse was hammering at the thought of seeing his old boss again.
“Vikashmo’s going along, too. I’m not taking any chances if the old bitch tries to turn your head.”
“I think that possibility is past.” He looked up at Jain to see if she was buying it. She gave him an empty smile. “How many sources do you want?” he asked, bringing his heart rate back under control.
“Two. One in the boats, and one on the ship as it goes down.” Jain brushed imaginary lint from her shoulder. “All staff are to get a deep scan tomorrow. No exceptions. I want to be sure no one’s dumping our plans to Flawn. Might give her an advantage.”
“I’d like another twenty-four hours’ research, if possible.” Rhodes exhaled slowly. “To check on Phillips.”
“After the scan tomorrow you and Vikashmo go down and get your internals set.” Jain moved back to the desk. “What you do with the rest of the day is your option. You two mess this up and I’ll flush you to the Mesozoic for dinosaur bait.”
It was cold and dark. Rhodes’s first thought was that they had come in too high. He twisted his body to bring his feet underneath him. He felt his heart beat several times before he crashed to the ground. He rolled with the impact. The earth was damp, moist, and covered with tall grass. He hurt from the waist down, but could tell he was not seriously injured. Rhodes reduced his pain, sat up, and looked for his partner.
“Never more than six feet above the ground,” said Vikashmo, loudly. “We must have been fifteen, eighteen feet up. I thought I was through with that kind of incompetence when I left the cartels. We could have broken our backs.”