The Companions

by Katie M Flynn

  A wand won’t work on me and he knows it. All he can do is pat me up, and he does, diligently, every square inch, my system registering each prod and squeeze.

  “Do you have it?” he asks.

  I unzip the backpack, show him the cash. A credit transfer is easily made anonymous, but he’d insisted. Some people are like that.

  He cups the hard drive in his hands as I insert the cable into my neck, feel the surge of connection, of information, though I don’t absorb the data like memory. It sits behind a partition, in a place I couldn’t access if I tried.

  We separate and he smiles, embarrassed, new to this. I’ve done it a thousand times. I toss him the backpack. He opens it on a redwood stump, one of many this close to the ocean, trees leaning uneasily in the slow root rot, the ground covered in crunchy ice plant. Inspecting the contents, he takes his eyes off me long enough that I reach down to the rubber sole of my shoe where the metal file I sharpened this morning is lodged, and I feed it into the base of his neck, catching him as his knees give. I could’ve snapped his neck, but that’s companion work, and I have to make it appear human. He doesn’t go right away. Instead, it’s a bit like paralysis, his eyes blinking up at me though his body is broken, his ability to make speech gone. I lay him on the soupy ground and disentangle the backpack of cash from his shoulder. I can feel him watching, practically hear him screeching in his head, and I take up a rock and bring it down.

  * * *

  I ride the bus to my meet-up with Nat in Bernal, next to an old man reeking of gum disease and dead skin, and I go off in my memories, to our first meeting on East Falkland three years ago. Nat had some acres, a compound, a couple dozen companions living there. It was a type of refuge, a place companions could go, and they came, the companions, while they still could, avoiding air travel and sticking to the roads, thousands of miles in some cases, hiding on boats, bribing people—Nat didn’t turn them away as long as they agreed to work. And who would make a better worker than a companion? No need for water or food, only power, of which there was plenty in the Falklands with its battery of oil rigs and deal with Desire Petroleum—as long as the wells bled oil, the Falklands would never want for fuel.

  The memories play and it’s as if I’m there, unlike the ones from my human life. Those are dim and dangerous. But not this, not Nat, coming out of the compound’s main house, the first time I saw him. He wore wool and had a beard and a head of long hair, an animal smell. He smiled and I could see his heart in his eyes, the blinking, bloody mass that pumped him, and I thought for the first time in a long while that being alive is a lovely, dangerous thing. I don’t know why I thought that then. Perhaps I was attracted to him.

  “How’d you get here?” he asked me. I knew what he was thinking: I couldn’t have flown all those miles, crossed all those borders, getting harder every year since the mass recall—how had I managed to get to the island undetected? I gave him the story my handler had come up with: the wealthy man I was a companion to had a private plane, and he’d brought me to Santiago where I’d escaped, paid a sailor to bring me here by boat.

  It was a good idea, the story. I could see it register in Nat’s eyes, what a companion like me would have endured in the meek female body my handler always selected for me—he was a slender, particular man and a fan of the shock effect. It gave him a thrill, the surprise my victims felt at my strength and speed, the easy way I could kill.

  Nat threw an arm over my shoulders. I could smell his unwashed hair, the damp wool of his sweater, and I thought with a pang of fresh pain of the dog I’d had as a girl, white and mischievous. She’d come back pregnant once, had a litter of six puppies, all of which my mother made us give away, and she’d never been the same, my dog—why can’t I remember her name?

  * * *

  As I’m walking up to the coffee shop to meet Nat, the door swings open, a woman, I know her, young, short hair, trying to hide under a hoodie—Gabe. So that’s why Nat made me meet him here.

  “Sorry,” she mutters, observing me a little longer than normal before brushing past, and I wonder, does she know what I am? Most people can’t tell, but the ones who have experience with companions, well, they can identify us on sight.

  I’ve been following Nat for a few weeks, seen him trailing Gabe. She lives in the Outer Excelsior alone and works in Potrero Hill, a small storefront she shares with some artists, stationery and custom cards, and it’ll probably fail. Nice idea—local products, letters—but all that artistry for a handwritten note? Feels like they’re trying too hard. And really, how many people could have a need for that? Yet whenever I spy Nat spying her, the shop always has a customer or two.

  I know other things. I know, for example, that even though Gabe lives in the Outer Excelsior, she likes to stop in Bernal on her way home for a yoga class or a latte. It’s a habit, one of an isolated person. Sure, she’s chummy with some of the people in her classes, but she always leaves alone, smile fading as she walks, hood of her sweatshirt coming up.

  Nat and me, we both have vapor trails we’re chasing, only his is living, Gabe—the girl he’d raised on the road, four years out of a van in the redwoods of Humboldt County. I’ve never worked up the nerve to ask him why he left, why he’d gone all the way to the Falklands. I know not to press him where Gabe is concerned.

  I find Nat nursing a cold coffee in the back jungle of a patio where a trio of musicians improvises.

  “You have it?” he asks, palming his shaved head. It’s been three years since we parted ways in Tierra del Fuego, after I saved his life, or destroyed it, depending on who you ask.

  I can see his hands are shaking, and not from the caffeine. His pink-rimmed eyes, the yellow pallor of his skin—he is not well, hungover, maybe even drunk.

  “Pretty girl,” I say, hoping to liven him, and it works, eyes blinking up at me, and I see inside them a flare of anger not unlike the one I’d seen the day we left the Falklands.

  “How long have you been tailing me?”

  “Long enough to see the pattern.” I pass him the spindle of data I downloaded in the café’s bathroom. Only a fool would carry a companion’s consciousness on a spindle for longer than necessary, and I’m no fool, even if it means using myself for storage. The companion brain is often disrupted in these kinds of transactions, and I wouldn’t even be aware of it, if I’d lost memories—it’s the sort of shift only someone who knows you can identify, and no one knows me.

  “Who is it?” I ask him.

  He tucks the spindle into the pocket of his jacket, frets his scarred eyebrow. “Someone I knew once. What’s left of him, anyway. He burned through a lot of memories.”

  “Courier?”

  He nods slowly, like it hurts. I once thought him handsome, but now he is rubbery and old and I have a rare maternal urge to tuck him into bed, to warn him it’s foolishness, helping companions—it won’t be long until we’re all gone, wiped from the earth. They’ll put him away for years, what’s left of his youth, if he keeps on like this.

  “Well?” I prompt him. Nat runs a security firm and has plenty of staff, but this is the kind of passion project he likes to keep on the side, and I’m perfect for on-the-side jobs, no handler anymore, nothing I won’t do. Plus, it was the only way he’d agree to take me to her.

  “She still goes by Lilac,” he says.

  “After all these years?”

  “And she’s a courier.”

  “Shit. How long?”

  “Not sure. Years now.”

  “Christ.” I know what moving information can do to a companion—I’ve been doing it too, relieved at the thought of forgetting, of not knowing to miss them, the ghosts of my past.

  “She isn’t going to like it, you showing up unannounced—if she remembers you at all. Are you sure this is a good idea?”

  “Get some sleep,” I tell him. “See you tomorrow.”

  * * *

  Cortland Avenue is positively bustling, bookstores and ice cream shops and yoga studios and bi
cyclists clogging the road. This lifestyle, this way of being out in the world, of interacting, it seems irritatingly quaint and San Franciscan, as if they refuse to commit to the glasses New Yorkers wear like armor, with their endless streams of data, not after those years indoors—will it last?

  On the bus ride home there are no seats. I hold on to the filthy metal bar, swaying with the others, our bodies bumping, and I pull up the memories, play back the trip to the compound.

  I’d taken a small, moderately populated plane from Santiago to Stanley with top-notch fake papers, a bag of pretzels in my lap, not even concerned about being discovered. My confidence at that point was unparalleled—it had been some years since I’d uploaded, longer still since I’d made a mistake I’d had to pay for. My mind was lost on my feed, unspooling the islands’ history behind my eyes—Vespucci claimed to have sighted the Falklands in 1502, the Magellan expedition in 1520. The first Brit to lay eyes on the islands was John Davis, 1592, of the HMS Desire, pushed by storms to certain Isles never before discovered by any knowen relation. I tried to imagine what it was like to travel without a destination. I had never journeyed so far, and the feed with its flutter of data behind my eyes was a comfort.

  It told me there was a population of penguins along the southern rim of East Falkland, the island where I was headed. It was out of my way, but I’d make a point to visit. I’d never seen a penguin outside a zoo.

  As we neared the islands, I abandoned my feed for the window, British warships in the water in case the Argentinians decided to test the crown’s claim to the islands for a third time, patrol boats skimming the blue. Oil rigs fringed the eastern coast where some fifteen billion barrels of crude lay under the Patagonian Shelf, and Desire Petroleum, named for that questionable discovery, had finally tapped it.

  I picked up a Rover in the rental lot. The airport was connected to the town of Stanley by a bridge, underneath which flowed a man-made channel dug to feed the expanding waters of Whalebone Cove back into the South Atlantic Ocean.

  I passed Stanley in a human’s heartbeat, so small and yet it was the biggest city on the island, full of Rovers, not a single ad—I remember that—how dull the cluster of red- and blue-roofed buildings seemed without the commercial glow of product. I slowed for the old red-and-rock church, an arch made of whalebones, my feed delivering me information as I drove. The first people to stay here had been whalers, and it had always been about oil, boiling blubber inside whale casing like a cauldron, using penguins for their flammable fat to feed a dying fire. On the way out of town was a neat fence of sandbags lining the southern edge of the cove.

  I was not in a hurry to get to the compound, heading southwest on Darwin Road where I hoped I might see some penguins. The road ran right up along the water in some places. Long stretches of flat brown beach, bare, not a single seal or penguin, only a few seabirds circling. Not far from the road was a lone marker, what turned out to be a gravestone for a British soldier, KILLED IN ACTION ON THIS SPOT, MAY 1982—I didn’t need my feed to tell me it was the First Falklands War, when Argentinian soldiers occupied the islands and Margaret Thatcher, with her hard hair and muscular position on capitulating to demands, quickly struck back. My feed fluttered anyway, showing me photos of Argentinian soldiers planting land mines, British seamen in white antiflash hoods and giant oven mitts flame-proofed in boric acid. Then my feed got lost on a Thatcher tangent, Bobby Sands in the Maze Prison in Northern Ireland, 1981, hollowed out from hunger strike, and Thatcher with her hard hair, refusing once again to capitulate, even in the face of such suffering.

  “Enough,” I said, and glanced up to see a wooden barricade blocking the road. I nearly collided with it—the sign marked ROAD CLOSED. I checked my map, which offered clear ingress. But ahead of me was a narrow isthmus connecting the eastern span of the island to the Lafonia region, utterly inaccessible even in a Rover. The road was a wet wash of dirt and rocks and decaying plant matter, an obvious floodplain, and Lafonia had become a seasonal island, even if my feed said otherwise.

  I turned north, my connection giving out as the road wound inland, rocky tumbles and fog and blond bunchgrass. It was there that I saw my first sheep, hills of them, recently shaved and scrawny, rib bones shifting in their skin as they scattered. At their peak these islands had once had nearly a million head. Years of decline in seasonal rainfall, longer summers, stretches of drought. Now herds were culled to keep the lot from perishing. It was all oil wealth and no water.

  I reached a high point, a blanket of black earth stretching ahead of me. I got out of the Rover and bent to touch the burnt grass crumbling in my fingers—fire, not old, miles of hillside scorched, leaving a dark stretch of desert. Then I got back in the Rover and drove on.

  My feed came in clear as I neared the compound, cruising past a field of solar panels, row after row like crops. It was silly, considering all that oil—but this was companion territory, and we have a different notion of time. At some point, the oil would dry up here too.

  The compound seemed petite in contrast, a wooden main house, two smaller brick buildings, a fleet of Rovers behind the slatted fence. I rolled to a stop at the gate. “Hello?” I said into the intercom. There was a crackle, a woman’s voice telling me to stay still while the I8 scanned me. It came buzzing along the sides of my Rover, under, scanning for weapons. Pausing in my window, it drew close to me, its wings fluttering feverishly like a hummingbird, its pin eye probing and exploring my body. It zipped off, the gate inching open, and I rolled in, tires popping on the gravel, met with guns, a group of them, coming out of the main building, from the smaller buildings, companions the lot. Except Nat.

  He waved off the guns, took me around, gave me a tour. I saw a companion lying in a hammock, a couple playing cards—all this idling, and for what? In the kitchen was something I’d never seen, a companion without skin, wearing only jeans, his metal frame showing clean and skeletal as he bent to set a mousetrap.

  “Why do you help them?” I asked Nat once we were out back and alone, the sky blazing red, the sun settled low on the horizon.

  “They help me too. It’s an arrangement.”

  “But why did they start coming in the first place?”

  He told me that years ago he’d taken something that didn’t belong to him, data he copied and sold to a stranger for major credit. He used that to buy the land, dirt cheap given the drought, and he’d worked it alone for some months before it hit him, the guilt. “Some things shouldn’t be sold,” he said. “Some people should never be left behind.” By then he’d heard about what was happening, the recall, and he knew he needed the help, so he put a notice in the shadow spaces of the Internet, inviting them. He couldn’t pay, but any companion who was willing to work was safe. At that point he’d met only one, Lilac, from Laguna Beach, and he kept hoping she’d find him, though she never did.

  “Lilac?” I’d repeated, needing confirmation. Couldn’t be.

  Nat nodded, told me she’d been a friend to his Gabe, and I’d been certain, prodding him on, earning details. Yes, her, definitely her, how could it be? That night I couldn’t go into sleep mode, so excited I was at the prospect of seeing her again.

  * * *

  I have a box in one of the new Western Addition buildings, just enough room for a bunk, a kitchenette, not that I need either. I shut myself inside, store the backpack in my safe under the bed. Then I head down the hall to the bathroom, the sound of screens carrying from the singles. I shut myself inside, lift my shirt to the mirror. The skin there has begun to fester, my stomach mottled with sores, my metal insides showing in the gaps. I have no more handlers; there are no more bodies, no examinations, no upgrades—why did I give it up? Lilac is the only other companion I know of in all the world. I wonder at the state of her body, if she’s as damaged as I am by now.

  I lie on my bunk, go into sleep mode for the first time in days, and when I wake to my alarm I’m thinking of the Falklands. Was I dreaming? It’s not supposed to be possible for a compa
nion to dream, but I can feel it, like a lozenge on the tongue, both present and disappearing all at once, the Falklands.

  Nat was so terribly alive, so painfully living—his wrinkles and dog smell and that bumpy caterpillar of a scar threading his eyebrow, how he ate, an unsettling hunger, food dribbling his beard. For the first time I didn’t like it, the idea of cracking his head or slitting his throat or bashing his brain in with a rock.

  I had a window, seventy-two hours, and I waited nearly to the end of it. We were hiking up a hill and he was telling me, “There are no trees native to the Falklands. The only ones here are the exotics the Europeans brought to remind them of home.” I didn’t understand what he was talking about, why it mattered, what it was that made him glow.

  “There,” he said when we reached the hill’s crest—a herd of reindeer, maybe a hundred, their velvet horns shining even in the weak light of the gray morning. “Norwegian whalers brought them to nearby South Georgia near the turn of the twentieth century. By 1958 there were three thousand—it must’ve been something to see! But people began to think of them as pests, causing erosion, desertifying whole stretches of the island. The plan was extermination, so the Falklands agreed to take some calves, and eventually they were brought here, to East Falkland. I like to picture it, those first calves borne across the Southern Ocean, the only reindeer population not poisoned by Chernobyl in the whole of the world. I wonder how many of them died on the voyage.”

  None, my feed told me, a safe voyage, and I was relieved. It was a fine story, and I could see that Nat enjoyed telling it. Sorry, I was sorry I had to kill him.

  We climbed higher, Nat chattering about his plans, the desal plant. “We’ll have water to irrigate the fields, that’ll mean more sheep. Do you know what those ladies in LA pay for our wool?”