by Nancy Kress
On Thursday night, Trevor called. I told him I had the flu. On Friday night, he let himself into my apartment with his emergency key. I barely had time to dart out of the bedroom and close the door.
“Trevor! I told you I’m sick!”
“It’s not flu season, Mandy.” His handsome face looked strange without its habitual smile.
“If I say I have the flu, then I have the flu!”
“I don’t think you do. You’re doing it again, aren’t you? Two restraining orders and a court fine weren’t enough?”
“I’m not. I’m not stalking Jake.”
“Swear on pussy willows’ pussies?” Our childhood oath; at ten years old it had seemed hilarious.
“Swear on pussy willows’ pussies.”
“Then you’re obsessing over the Opti-Cam images.”
“Isn’t that my business?”
Trevor lost his temper, something even rarer than losing his smile. “Oh, Christ, Mandy, you’re my business! Don’t you know that if I were straight, you and I would have married and had three Beckys of our own? Don’t you know how much better I’d have been for you than Jake? I can handle your intensity, he couldn’t. And I know when you’re lying to me.”
“Please go, Trevor. I’m not up to this right now, really I’m not—”
He left, slamming the door behind him. Once, nothing in the world would have kept me from following him. Trevor, my best friend, my support and confidant….
On the screen in the bedroom, Becky lay in her infant seat, studying her bare toes. She must have just woken up. On the rug, barely within the circle of her unknowing vision, Jake and Pam made love.
Frantically I keyed in his cell number. Anything to disrupt them, anything! The call went to voice mail. “Stop!” I screamed. “Stop, stop, stop!” The cell must have been on silent; they didn’t stop.
I am not sane, I thought, which was my last sane thought.
I called in sick to work on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday. I never left my bedroom. It began to smell: of Becky’s diapers, piled in the corner whenever I changed her. Of a pizza molding on the dresser. Of me.
On Thursday morning, Trevor returned.
“Mandy?”
“Go away! Go away!” I’d waited all week for 10:00 a.m. on Thursday! Trevor was not going to spoil this!
“Mandy…oh my God.” He stood in the door to my bedroom. Becky gurgled in her swing. She was dressed in her snowsuit; the window stood open to help with the stench.
“Go away!” I barely glanced at him—it was 9:57!
“Mandy, darling, whatever you’re going to do…don’t.”
9:58.
“Let me help you. You know we’ve always helped each other.”
“Don’t touch me!”
“I won’t. You know I won’t if you don’t want me to. I’m just going to pick up Becky, okay? Here we go, sweetheart, come to Uncle Trevor….”
9:59.
Jake’s law office was superefficient. The partners would be gathering in his spacious office for the regular Thursday morning meeting. His wall screen would be on, ready to bring up the week’s data. He didn’t know I had his office password; I’d stolen it right after he told me he was leaving me, but despite everything that had led to the restraining order I’d never used it. Until now.
Trevor said, “Mandy, what are you doing? Put down your cell if you’re calling the cops. I’m not here to force you to do anything you don’t want to do, I promise. Put down the cell.”
10:00.
I pushed both buttons simultaneously, my cell and the “Send” button on the computer. The phone number bypassed Jake’s office answering system—a direct line for privileged clients who needed to reach their lawyer instantly for some legal emergency. Jake would not recognize the number of my new, throwaway cell. His voice said, “Hello?”
Now it would happen. Now I would get what I had been trying for for so long, what I needed more than food or water or even Becky: I would get a reaction from Jake. The image of him and Pam naked on the rug would burst from the wall screen in his office in all its color-saturated, three-dimensional luridness, and Jake would know I had done it. That he could not erase me.
“Hello? Who is this?” Jake said, still calm. “Can I help you?”
I waited.
Nothing happened.
No one in the background gasped or laughed or said, “What the hell—?” Nothing.
Jake tried one last “Can I help you?” and then cut the connection.
Trevor, patting Becky’s back, said softly, “Mandy….”
I cried, “Why didn’t it work?”
Trevor’s face changed. His gaze moved to the computer. He knew, then; he was always smarter than anybody else I knew. He said, “Because Jake knew you’d do something like that. He put a detailed blocker on his system.”
“I just wanted him to acknowledge I exist!”
“Oh, he acknowledges it,” Trevor said. “How do you think he knew what you’d do?”
He held Becky, now squirming in her snowsuit, away from him and stared into her eyes, first the right and then the left, again the right, again the left. “The technology’s available to everyone. Including Jake.”
I don’t like to lie to Trevor. Sometimes, however, you have to do certain things you might not want to do. He went with me to the clinic, but of course he couldn’t sign any papers; he is not related to Becky. I told him I’d had both Opti-Cams removed. I swore on pussy willows.
Now I stand in my bedroom, which sparkles with cleanliness. Becky sits in her swing, gurgling at me. I lean closer to her. My hair, clean and shining, swings toward her. My makeup has been professionally done. My cleavage gets help from a $200 bra. I smile at my baby.
Jake is watching.
A Heart of Power and Oil
By Brenda Cooper
As Farren left the coffeehouse, he nearly fell over a skateboard. Sticky latte dripped down his fingers and mingled with water from a warm spring rain. He knew who owned the skateboard, and he hurried away, hoping to avoid him. A block farther down, he heard the clack-clatter of wheels on sidewalk behind him. “I might have spilled my whole coffee,” he said, overly loudly.
“Sorry.” Christobal did sound sorry.
Farren hadn’t really expected that. “Tell me what you need again?”
“It’s my senior project. You’re allowed to have one helper. I need you.”
Farren could taste the word “no” inside of his throat as he swallowed it. Sweet and beckoning. Familiar.
He’d said no to everything for two years.
Just this morning, he’d woken up and sworn to himself that he would find an opportunity. He’d imagined a job though. Something freelance. Not charity.
He turned his head so he could see the boy beside him: tall and lanky, dark enough that his teeth flashed white when he smiled. His face looked angelic, thin skinned and with a glow that seemed to come from inside.
Youth and hope, maybe. Stupid things. They glowed until life put them out.
The boy had been bugging Farren for a week. He deserved an answer. “You want me to help you make a dragon?”
“Yes.”
“And it’s got to be done by the Saturday after next,” Farren mused. “And it’s got to fly the length of the football field at Tech.”
“I worked on drawings for the wings all night.”
Farren knew Christobal lived with his mother and sister, but not what had happened to his dad. “Why me?”
“Because I heard you won in ’18. I’m counting on this dragon to get me into Tech next year.” His voice cracked slightly. “I have to get in.”
Farren drank down half his remaining coffee. “Why didn’t your grades do it?”
�
��I was sick for two weeks. Got a B in calculus.”
Farren sighed. “Everyone’s doing dragons?”
“No.” Christobal shrugged. “Maybe birds. Maybe airplanes. Please?”
“We can start in two hours.”
Christobal’s face looked as though a beam of sunshine had just spiked through the clouds. “Okay. Thank you. Okay. I’ll go get Mom to make us lunch.”
An awkward silence fell until Christobal flipped his board around and left. Inside the warehouse, Farren sat down at his desk and finished off the now-cold coffee. The idea of a visitor made the workshop look ramshackle. The worktables were cluttered. The row of makers filling one table sat askew in relation to each other, and dust dulled the open table that waited for the assembly of…whatever.
He cleaned the table with a damp rag, scooped up spare plastic parts and bags of printer material and stacked them on shelves, and sorted broken parts into raw material bins. All the while, his brain picked at the problems inherent in mechanical dragon making. Would it be easiest to make it big and light, with a wingspan greater than the length of the body?
The rain grew heavier and pounded on the roof, the staccato fitting Farren’s mood, imitating the jerky way his thoughts tumbled at the idea of company, of a goal, of something to create.
He plucked his broom from the wall and pushed it around the art-stained concrete floor. Christobal was right: Farren had won the Tech fly-off in its second year. That was before. Before a lot. Before his undergrad. Before the one year he had managed of his master’s, before he and Tess and Joe started Fire Drones.
He swept past stacks of paper marketing material from dead start-ups.
He stopped. Stared. Cursed.
He picked up the Fire Drones brochures and the Catchy Carbon Clothing sample order forms and walked them over to the recycler. He went back for the Remo-drone Doggie Walker magnets and put them in the trash, even though two of the patents from that particular failure were paying the workshop rent. He tugged the can out back, puffing against the weight of so much junk.
A tentative knock on the front door dragged him back inside.
“Come in.”
Christobal pushed his skateboard against the wall. “Wow. Cool place. I had no idea.”
Farren wondered if Christobal liked the rows of printers, or the blue and green floor-to-ceiling shelves, or the stacks of real books in the corner.
“Who did the mural on the floor?”
“An old girlfriend.” He didn’t want to talk about Julie. “Did you bring your drawing of the wings?”
“You walk on this? Really?”
“Your drawing?”
Christobal shrugged off his backpack and slid out his drawing roll, flicking each corner to flatten the flexible screen against the freshly cleaned table.
The first page showed a cross section of bones. “Ceramic polymer?”
Christobal nodded and tapped the page to turn it. Glorious wings with cascading black feathers covered the page diagonal to diagonal. “The wings are graphene.”
“You shouldn’t use feathers.”
The boy got a stubborn hardness to his jaw. “Flying dinosaurs had feathers.”
“Do you want to win?”
“I want to get into Tech.”
Farren had seen Christobal around the neighborhood for years, had chatted with him once a week or so about school or weather. He hadn’t really figured him for a maker. Christobal’s skateboard was manufactured; it didn’t fit the boy’s feet. “Why Tech?”
“I want to make a dragon for real. This is the beta. If I get into Tech, I’ll have the resources.”
“What do you mean by real? Do you want it to shoot streams of fire?”
“I want to fly on a full-size version.”
The boy wanted to ride a dragon? Farren stopped and blinked down at the drawing of wings, his thoughts racing. His hands broke out into a slight sweat and he caught a spontaneous grin just in time to stop it from filling his face. “Really? You want to make a carbon fiber dragon you can fly?”
Christobal nodded, his gaze searching Farren’s face, his own expression frozen.
Farren closed his eyes to shut out the sheer vulnerability of the kid. Vulnerability killed you, dreams killed you. His voice came out gruffer than he wanted it to. “That’ll be tough.”
The boy looked wounded. “I have a business plan.”
“Do you have the math?”
“Not all of it.”
At least he was honest. Farren smiled at Christobal. “You can keep some of the feathers for decoration.” He went on to point out reasons. He and the boy argued genially through the rest of the afternoon, every argument tweaking the design a bit.
They didn’t stop for lunch until late afternoon, eating cucumber sandwiches and dried apples and handfuls of mixed nuts.
Sunset turned the light coming in through the high windows a pale yellow-gold before Christobal and Farren both liked the boy’s bone specifications enough to feed them into the maker at school, where the final parts all had to be printed.
“Mind if I print a copy here?” Farren asked. “I want some extra skeletons to test.”
“Of course not.” Christobal thrummed with so much energy that Farren knew he planned to keep working at home. “Sleep, kid,” he said. “You’ll think better that way.”
Christobal laughed. “Don’t be my mother.”
Well. When the door shut, the corner where Christobal’s skateboard had been looked oddly empty.
Farren’s throat hurt like hell from talking so much. He pulled a flask of whiskey out of his bottom drawer and downed three sips that felt like fire.
He called a programming window into being and talked it through a set of specifications. He hadn’t spent money on anything really complex for a year. He’d been saving as if he were going to retire. Stupid thing to do at his age.
He paid for muscle designs he’d seen used in a drone-bird and ordered extra raw materials for morning delivery. He started feeding specs and raw material into his newest printer. While it hummed and clicked in the slow, measured way of makers, he set about calculating weights, thinking about how shoulders might join properly with wings.
Four days later, three bone superstructures hung low from the ceiling. A little too low. Christobal hit his head on a femur, and Farren washed the cut and closed it with a butterfly bandage.
He wondered if this was what being a father was like. He’d expected to feel hounded and pressured. Instead, he enjoyed jolting Christobal into new ideas. He liked the company. As he stepped back to admire his bandage job, he said, “Today will be long, slow work.”
“Muscles?”
Farren nodded. They worked on different sides of the shop, Farren using the steady rotation of an old shop drill that had been manufactured in the start-up days, and Christobal using a new tool Farren had printed the night before and bolted together. They both wore heavy gloves to avoid mishaps as they fed fishing string through a tube and watched the machines spin it from line into muscle. Then they heated the coils to lock in the tension and attached them to bone frames.
Wrap, coil, heat, hang, repeat, repeat, repeat.
One of Christobal’s lines snapped, a frightening moment in which Farren’s spare goggles earned their keep.
By lunchtime, Farren was exhausted. Not from strong effort but from the small physicality of precision movements and the strain of careful attention.
They strung up one of the skeletons with a length of coiled wire and wired power from the ceiling to jolt the ersatz muscle into contracting. It took multiple tries. “I don’t see how we can finish on time,” Christobal fretted.
“Maybe we can’t,” Farren said. “If you hurry, the work of creating takes longer.”
Christoba
l merely bit his lower lip and tweaked a connection. An hour later, both wings moved rhythmically. Each wing was at least as long as the delicate spine hung from the high roof of the workroom.
“Now we make the heart,” Farren said.
“It’s not a heart,” Christobal insisted.
“No blood. But oil and electricity. Not far off.” The boy had brought him the design, based on a biological heart but made to pump lubricants into the dragon’s wing and shoulder joints.
Farren still thought of it as a heart.
Farren had almost forgotten the exhausted elation that came with making a deadline. The dragon had the usual number of last-minute problems, including a tendency to twist right in all of the tests, and they had to overcorrect in a way that resulted in awkwardly canted flights. They stayed up until very early in the morning the day of the competition, printing freshly minted and slightly tweaked parts to shim into the final tail structure so the thing would fly straight.
The Tech football field had a track around it, lined with colorful tents and booths. The whole area seethed with the activity of nervous students and more nervous parents, with the bounce of newsbots and the chaos of small children and, here and there, a dog.
A gray-haired woman with Christobal’s tall, thin build and a long, thin face met them when they parked Farren’s van by the field. She extended her hand formally. “I’m Marina. Thank you for doing this.”
“Farren,” he replied. Her hand was like a bird’s foot, thin but strong enough to hold tight. “Perhaps I should thank you for loaning me your son.”
He realized he meant it, and covered his vulnerability by helping Christobal pull the wings free of the van. Marina led, holding the tip of the right wing up above her head while Farren walked in the middle and Christobal followed. Marina and Christobal’s sister, Isadora, had created a makeshift tent from sheets and printed supports. One of the sheets had a black and red dragon painted on it, the eyes and scales touched up with glitter. After they had all of the parts and spare parts and controls stacked and stashed inside the flimsy walls, Farren said, “The tent is fabulous. It may be the prettiest one here.”