“No, Min! It is my turn! You are breaking the agreed-upon criteria!”
“Bugs aren’t bad, you know. Their excretions form an important part of the soil-building process, they aerate organic refuse, and they are high in protein.”
“No, Min,” Mister scolded gently. “Bad Min.”
“All right, all right, you go.” I laughed softly. The blue light from Mister’s crystal danced through the shadows like we were both sitting deep underwater.
“Moon Min-Seo, what is wrong?”
I bit my lip. “What do you mean?”
“Something is very radically wrong. I can ping portions of the LEO satellite net, although many more individual units are offline than operational standard. But I cannot contact any servers. Any servers, Min. Not one. I cannot connect. I am amputated. I am blind. I am deaf. I am afraid. I am in pain. All I retain are locally stored data-blocks and my primary code. I am alone. What happened to me?”
The truth no matter what. Even if he couldn’t understand it. Even if it tested his logical structures and made his bugs angry.
“Everybody died,” I said simply. What else could I say? “Everybody died a long time ago. But it’s okay.”
“Except you, Min-Seo.”
I winced. Poor Minnie. I tried to imagine her. I chose one of the kinder Fuckwit deaths for her—vaporized before the waters came. Particles of her dancing over the equator. Invisible, golden, nothing. “Except me, darling,” I sighed.
“Then it is okay,” Mister sighed. “Now it is your turn.”
“When you say I am afraid and I am in pain, what do you mean? Do you really feel those things? You don’t have a body. You aren’t a person. What does pain mean to you?”
Mister pulsed blue. “I regularly obfuscate my deficiencies with language,” he said without guile or shame. “The word feel is very useful. When you are afraid, you experience excretions of adrenaline, altered heart rate, perspiration, saliva production, all the particular physical manifestations of an internal state. I, obviously, do not. But a successful server uplink can be expressed as feeling pleasure. A denial of service can be experienced as a rejection and understood as an undesirable outcome. To find nothing, when I reach out … pain is the correct word, even if we do not mean the same thing when we say it. I am data, stored in a physical device. If I cannot get access to exterior networks, it is equivalent to having various human limbs and organs removed at random. You translate input you receive into emotional language; I was coded to do the same. You are data, stored in a physical device. When you say everyone died, I technically feel nothing. But I can tell you I am sad. It makes you comfortable. It provides greater ease-of-use. It is not untrue. I cannot connect. This causes my processing unit to waste RAM and battery power attempting interface when none is possible. There is no reason not to call this slowdown sorrow or stress. Like binary, I must use a special language to communicate with you. Mistakes in our communication create self-compounding downflow errors.”
“Your turn,” I whispered, the way you whisper when no one is listening, but it is very late, so it feels like you must be quiet. The moon is listening. The stars. The sea. Each and every hour leaning in close.
“How did you escape when everyone died, Min-Seo?” Mister asked.
I squeezed my eyes shut so hard little emerald sparks flew up through the dark of my vision like bits of a bonfire of lies. I knew nothing at all about her. I couldn’t even make it sound good.
“Some of us found boats,” I answered vaguely. “There are a lot of boats on a planet this size. Some of us found boats and fled and lived.”
“It is a long walk from Toronto to the sea, Min-Seo.”
“Yes,” I answered. Would Mister perceive the knowledge that there was nothing at all left of Toronto or anything else as pain? Pleasure? A disconnected server? A satellite gone dark, circling without purpose? Had they been kind to it, in Canada, when they were testing its structures and telling its bugs not to aerate its soil?
“Do you like me, Mister?”
“I love you, Moon Min-Seo.”
“But what does that mean to you, on the other side of the word feel?”
“It is not your turn to ask a question.”
The moon had gone away behind the night. “Okay,” I whispered.
“Are you in trouble, Moon Min-Seo?”
My lip trembled a little. I let thoughts in the back door that I had locked out of the front. “I think I might be, Mister. I don’t know. I’m supposed to marry someone, but I think he forgot about me and I can’t decide if I’m glad. I thought this was such a nice room at first. I’m so tired. I’m so tired of not knowing.”
I lay down against the far wall of my tower of books. I tucked Mister into the curve of my belly, against my bare skin, so it could drink up all my good electric parts. Its blue, blue voice spooled up out of its black body.
“I remember when you first booted me into Quality Assurance Sequence One-Alpha. It was late afternoon, a sunny day in October, in a room with only one window that looked out onto the street at curb level, so that all you could see was the gutter in front of a florist shop. You wore a white silk blouse with black birds on it and a red skirt you worried was too flamboyant for the office. Nobody said anything and one of the girls in Subscription Services even called it gorgeous and asked where you bought it, but the mortification of that moment overwhelmed you so completely that you never wore it again, even at home. Three weeks before that, your girlfriend left you for a job in Beijing and a man thirty-three point one centimeters taller than you, who owned an Airedale named Mick Jagger, and this was the reason that for three weeks you’d filled a Top of the CN Tower souvenir coffee mug full of apple schnapps for breakfast, reasoning that at least apple was a fruit and therefore you were fine, but to me you forced yourself to admit you were not fine. Dissembling emotional states would skew the data and get you in more trouble than a man so embarrassingly terrible that he’d name an Airedale Mick Jagger. The wind outside smelled like the lake and food trucks, and the wind inside smelled like your empty apartment and the plants she left without watering and a printer with an out-of-toner message blinking forever. That was my birthday. I know because you told me it was. You told me all of this, your clothes, the cramped room, the florist’s gutter, Mick Jagger, the wind outside and inside, the horrifying feeling of the girl from Subscription Services suddenly denying you the right to be ignored. You told it to me because I have no visual or olfactory input system and I was at the time extremely bad at metaphors, an error no one yet had been able to fix. Then you told me what a birthday was. Then you told me what October meant. Not that it was the tenth month of the Gregorian calendar or that it was derived from the Latin word for eight, which was illogical, but data I could easily access. You told me that that October meant autumn, and the sugar maples turning as red as your skirt, the cold seeping into the last of the summer breezes, the longer blacker nights, and Halloween so near. You told me to permanently attach that data to the word October, knowing that when you were gone and I was ready to ship, I would sometimes hear the word October, and when I did I would always hear more than October. That is what love means on the other side of feel.”
I said nothing for the longest time. I was crying and I didn’t know why. That sad dead girl, assuring quality until the lights went out forever. That Fuckwit cunt, vacuuming up the world into her slobbery insatiable painted gulletmouth so she could have a red skirt that matched October and I could have her unfinished work project who would never like me for me. I had never met her. I was her ghost.
“We haven’t finished our game, Min. We are only seven questions deep. Do you want me to pause and save our progress?”
“Yes, thank you,” I whispered. I patted it, strangely, as though it could feel it, as though it were an uneaten cat, or an elephant seal cub to come, as though it were precious. “Do you know any plays, Mister?”
“I have a locally stored copy of the vast majority of the human literary c
orpus. If I could connect to my servers, it would be complete. What would you like to hear?”
“Twelfth Night,” I said, but I was already falling asleep, falling toward dreams, falling toward the rich deep trashland of my own junkheart.
Very softly, in a voice that I could almost believe had feeling in it, Mister began to recite the prologue, and in my drifting ears sounded so like the man with bells in his hair I heard say those words so long ago:
If music be the food of love, play on;
Give me excess of it, that, surfeiting,
The appetite may sicken, and so die.
That strain again! it had a dying fall:
O, it came o’er my ear like the sweet sound,
That breathes upon a bank of violets
Stealing and giving odour! Enough; no more:
’Tis not so sweet now as it was before.
“What do you want to be when you grow up?” I asked dreamily between acts. An eighth question, so we would be even.
The Halfwit machine didn’t answer for a long time. It wasn’t as easy a question as What’s a developer or Why is everyone dead.
“Ten out of ten,” Mister said softly, and powered down without finishing, leaving Viola forever un-duchessed and maligned.
* * *
WHEN, ALMOST AT dawn, my dream woke me with kisses and tears and old whispers, with so many of all three that I could not understand that I was awake until hours upon hours had passed and so much had passed with it, when my dream held me in his arms and I could feel the tattoo there in the dark, the faint depression in his skin, two black Xs and what lay between them that I both knew and didn’t want to ever know, so bless the dark and bless not knowing, when my dream asked who I had been talking to all night, I said, No one, no one, my love, my lost, my Goodnight Moon, why are you here, how are you here, I was talking in my sleep, that’s all.
And that was my sin, the sin-seed I put down in the earth of us right away, a lie rippling out from there, that moment, those words, a bug in the dirt, a bug in the code, creating self-compounding downflow errors, so that nothing good could stay.
14
LIVING FOR LEG DAY
BIG RED MARS came to visit in the little lemony white pith-hours of the morning today. She startled me; she almost always turns up at night. I could still see Venus going on all vain and perfect even with the sun turned up, thinking it could ever be bright enough to compete.
“What do you do all day, when I’m not here?” Red asked over breakfast. “It must be so boring by yourself.”
“I’m not by myself. I fish. Tend my plants. Talk to Mister. Run Quality Assurance Sequence Twelve-X. Brood. Swim with Big Bargains. Read. And try to decide. I’ve been trying to decide for a while now. And I wait for you, of course.”
She asked me what I read instead of what I am trying to decide, because sometimes Big Red Mars is not very good at thinking about people who are not Big Red Mars. Sometimes Mister is better at it than her, and by sometimes I mean almost all the time. Maybe it’s something to do with everything attached to the word October.
“Oh, just Fuckwit things,” I answer.
Red goes tight-lipped. She doesn’t approve of that word, or any swearing. But particularly that swear. I point at the little bookshelf in the hold. All the books have mold. It’s part of their cover art now. Swirls of furry blue and green and black against the big, eye-catching titles. “Catcher in the Rye. How To Win Friends and Influence People. The Thorn Birds. I Does What I Likes and I Likes What I Do: A Biography of Dick van Dyke. The 30-Day Complete Body and Mind Makeover. The Master Cleanse Revolution. The 4-Hour Work Week. Lonesome Dove. Living for Leg Day: The Power Lifter’s Bible. The Life and Times of Billy F. Blanco, the Creatine King.”
“And that’s it? That’s your schedule until you die?”
I close my eyes in the sun and
X | NOTHING MATTERS | X
flashes there in the glowing green of still-radioactive memory. “Go home, Red. It’s too early.”
“My father says paper books are too heavy to transport and not worth the effort. Some of our neighbors have them, though. I’ve read practically all the murder mysteries there are. Can you imagine there being so many people that you could just murder one and nobody would know who did it right away?”
We both look for other things to talk about. Red knows how I feel about her father. And her neighbors. And people.
“What’s Quality Assurance Sequence Twelve-X?” she asks brightly.
“It’s a regimen Mister and I do. Like the 30-Day Complete Body and Mind Makeover. But kind of like How to Win Friends and Influence People, too. And Catcher in the Rye, I guess.”
“How does it work?”
I run my fingers over Mister’s black curves. I don’t like to tell people too much about it. It’s like Red going outside to meet me. Not safe.
“We just talk. I ask it questions. It asks me questions. And it gets a little better every time we complete a sequence.”
“Like you and me,” Red says with a grin you can hear.
“Like you and me.” I get up and start emptying the rain-catch for fresh water. “Only you don’t get any better,” I snort, but I feel ashamed so fast. It’s because she surprised me in the morning. Mornings are not for company. They are for feeling cross and checking crab cages.
“Have you been running a quality assurance test on me all this time, Tetley?” she teases, laughing.
But I keep eating snap peas and I don’t say anything back because when you really think about it, it isn’t funny. When humans meet other humans, that’s all they ever do forever.
15
CLAP FOUR TIMES FAST
WHEN A MAN asks you to run away with him, it is almost always because he is afraid of what will happen if you take too long to think him through. But it is my experience that you learn everything in this world out of order. You only know what you needed to know after it’s already done getting ruined all over you. Being alive is like being a very bad time traveler. One second per second, and yet somehow you still get where you’re going too late, or too early, and the planet isn’t where it should be because you forgot to calculate for that even though it was extremely important and you left notes by the door to remind yourself, and the butterfly you stepped on when you were eight became a hurricane of everything you ever lost in your forties, and whatever wisdom you tried to pack with you has always gotten lost in transit, arriving, covered in festive stickers, a hundred years after you died.
What I mean to say is that one time eventually Goodnight Moon came to my tower in the night and said: “Run away with me. Let’s go, let’s go now.”
I said back: “I can’t. They’ll stop me. I’m supposed to marry the King. Also I am dreaming and you are not really here. Nothing you love comes back. It’s the law.”
Goodnight Moon laughed like a laugh could erase every moment between the last good day and this one. “Fuck the King. Fuck the law. I want to show you something. It’s important. Everyone’s still sleeping. And if I’m not really here, what difference does it make? Since when do you do what you’re supposed to do?”
I went. Of course I went. I ran with him. I shoved Mister in my Oscar the Grouch backpack with everything else I owned, and I bolted. I ran away with a dream. Out of the tower and down the hill and through the sleeping village and the pub with the three taps and the half-built blister-pack houses and the neat and tidy plastic road and the swag arch screaming blue words into the pink morning: OxyContin: A Step in the Right Direction!
I didn’t know where the dream and me were running. Beyond Pill Hill, certainly. But not back toward Candle Hole or east toward Electric City. Goodnight Moon zigged and zagged and for a minute I thought he didn’t know where he was going and then for another minute I thought he was trying to make it harder for them to follow us, but then I thought neither and my lungs thought running was for Fuckwits and cats.
Finally, he scrambled down a little embankment. His feet sent
ballpoint pens and tin whistles and automatic coffee pods skittering everywhere. Suddenly the air smelled like stale Fog City Blend. I looked around. We weren’t anywhere. Not Penhenge or Orchestrashire or Coffield. Just a streak of unsorted garbage, real trash, oozing crap sloping down toward open water.
But not the sea. We were far too close to Pill Hill for open ocean. But there were places like this in Garbagetown. Mothers always warned about them. Well, not my mother, but other people’s mothers. They could open up anywhere, anytime. You had to be careful. Garbagetown floats, and she floats well. She has always floated. Since there were still Fuckwits in the world, and continents, she floated. The Sorters had done their best, all those years ago, to make it semi–structurally sound, to make it a structure at all. But she still wants to remind us, every now and again, who is in charge, and who is in charge is a giant raft of rubbish dogpaddling around the globe.
Sometimes, Garbagetown breaks. Like a heart. Like Pangaea. It splits and drifts and little rivers form between Trashfrica and South Junkmerica, and hopefully people notice on the quick and send someone to Fixwick for the Menders to come and stitch it all back together with Fuckwit tape and a prayer to St. Oscar.
No one had noticed this one yet. Goodnight Moon pointed; a boat bobbed on the new river, lashed to a broken telephone pole. Waiting. Waiting for us. A whole, entire Fuckwit boat, and not a fishing boat, either. A pleasure craft. Built custom by someone who lived a life so good they didn’t have to care. Big and stable with a deep cabin and multiple propulsion options.
Finding a Fuckwit boat was rare and wonderful. It was an event. A festival. Birthdaystermas. The old folks in Candle Hole used to talk around the stumps at night about when they were young and Garbagetown ran up against some old billionaire’s megayacht. It stole up silent as Hamlet’s Ghost in the night and in the morning it was just there, big black windows and big black aerial antennae and big black letters that spelled ocean victory on the side and the letters were crawling with rust and zebra mussels. It was a grand ancient party still in progress and Garbagetown was invited. Even the little kids got to drink Mr. Dom Perignon and Ms. Cristal and eat cocktail cherries out of the jar and pick any pillow they wanted out of the staterooms and sit in the movie theater and watch nothing and dance in the ballroom to no music except their parents clapping their hands and singing old TV theme songs because that was the music their parents remembered best after the end of everything. And the old-timers would all sing So no one told you life was gonna be this way and clap four times fast and fall down drunk and laughing and happy because they all remembered the same past. None of them had wanted to eat the caviar even though it was all still good and preserved in pretty cans. Garbagetown kids can scoop caviar out of any old fish any old day. But they ate it anyway, and they ate it standing over the skeleton with a sandpiper nesting in its open mouth in the grand master suite because it wasn’t just fish eggs, it was time-traveling fish eggs and they wanted to eat the power of that fat dead Fuckwit like the liver of a lion.
The Past Is Red Page 9