by Stanley Bing
“Okay, Sallie,” he said, as they reached the front patio again. “And, you know, thanks for your hospitality and everything.”
“Oh,” she said, a bit crestfallen. “It’s going to be like that, is it?”
“Tell Arthur . . .” Here he ran out of insincerity. “Tell Arthur whatever it is you tell Arthur, I guess.”
“I will. Of course I will,” said Sallie. “And it’s not good-bye, Gene,” she added in a bright and friendly voice. “It’s just so long for now. I have a feeling that we’re going to be . . . great friends.”
“Yeah! Of course!” he said. Gene searched for something else that might seem appropriate. “Hasta la vista, baby,” is what he came up with.
She laughed. So he did, too. And here she was enveloping him with that warm gaze again! It struck him like a sneaker wave, almost knocking him back into her. She was standing so close to him that he could feel the tickle of her breath. What a woman, he thought. On the one hand, everything within him was screaming to get out of there. On the other hand, he was strongly considering the possibility of a deep, wet kiss.
They rose and walked in silence across the patio, through the portico, and back out onto the endless courtyard, crisscrossed with lawns, paths, and shallow ponds, that made up the front of the property. As they made their way, Gene noticed that the artificial koi in the pond that led up to the front door were more agitated than they had been upon his arrival. The two, still hand in hand, paused for a moment to look at the turmoil in the shallow water. One of the largest fish had eaten the tail off a smaller one and was working its way up its torso all the way to its head. The mottled victim in red, black, and what had once been a creamy white, was being whittled away by the other piece by piece. It didn’t seem to notice, but continued swimming in its regular pattern—if perhaps a little more swiftly—its synthetic guts spilling out of its rear end, a blue, viscous liquid trailing along behind it, green and crimson fluids fouling its once-pristine scales.
Sallie saw Gene take this in and smiled. “Yes,” she said, following his appalled gaze. “Nothing works perfectly all of the time, does it. But sometimes things do.” They walked to the end of the path, where a gate opened onto the spacious driveways that led from the property to the gatehouse that guarded the community from the outside world, and from which he could grab an Uber for his trip back to the Hyperloop entry point.
Lucy appeared on the pathway next to them.
“Lucy! Bad girl! How did you get out?” said Sallie to the creature, very stern. She picked it up and held it out to Gene for caressing.
“Bye, Lucy,” said Gene, and he put out his hand. The thing kissed it. Its tongue was simultaneously rough and silky. It was not unpleasant. He regarded the pet with amusement and then raised his eyes to find Sallie gazing at him as a hungry wolf would eye a lamb chop. She put Lucy down gently and once again took his hand in hers.
“Do you have any idea how old I am, Gene?” She was looking down at his hand, kneading the fat part of his palm. He couldn’t see what she was thinking. He looked at the little wisps of hair at the nape of her neck, the way her tiny ear smartly concealed her extremely understated cranial implant.
“I have no idea, Sallie. It doesn’t really matter.”
“I’ve been married to that unpleasant old man in there for most of my life. A long time. Longer than you think. And believe me, he wasn’t always like that, you know. He was once splendid. The essence of life itself, believe me. A force of nature. Open. Dynamic. Generous. A creative dynamo. A beautiful swimmer. But there are only so many updates you can do. Only so many . . . additions. Deletions. Tune-ups. Then, you know, the tech—even the most amazing tech—reaches its limit, and you need a whole new . . . solution to the problem.”
“There is no solution to that problem,” said Gene, and then, from some part of himself that was just awakening, he added, “Maybe there shouldn’t be.”
There was nothing left to say, not safely. He waited for her to release his hand. Somewhere very close, he heard the writhing and splashing of one artificial koi ripping another to shreds. And as the possibly artificial birds sang high overhead, and the sweet little artificial lizard snored lightly at their feet, a sad cast went over Sallie’s eyes, and they retreated from him at last. After a very brief kiss, soft and gentle, on his cheek, she turned and half walked, half ran back up the pathway to the house, and Gene found himself outside the gates of the castle and in his Uber. In a very few minutes, he was back on the Hyperloop again, wondering what came next. Back in town, he got off at the station and instead of turning right, as he was supposed to do, he turned left and started walking—then running.
About a half mile down the road, his head began to hurt.
6
The Running Man
This wasn’t a headache. It was something much, much worse, inflicted by the communications apparatus in his mastoid bone answering to a higher power. If Gene could have torn it out, he certainly would have. But he could not. Wherever he went, there it was, and there was no off switch for the functions that were now being engaged to punish him for noncompliance. His head was well and truly scrambled, but still he lurched and stumbled on, his destination thoroughly unclear to him. Gene knew he was going away, true, but “away” is not a place, really, it’s more of an anti-place made up of every place except one. That one was clear to him. Building Eight. Bob. So that’s where he was going. He was going to Not Bob.
The implement behind his ear had gradually heated up the farther he got from his anti-destination and was now delivering agony to his entire being. As he ran, he touched the implant gingerly. Ouch. If it got much worse, could it set his hair on fire? That would certainly impede his progress.
The thing was also beginning to generate a distinct, disagreeable vibration that shot a sequence of neurological bolts through his spine all the way to the tips of his toes and the ends of his fingers. Made it hard to stay upright, let alone run. Perhaps most disquieting was the virtually imperceptible low-pitched tone the apparatus emitted every fifteen seconds or so. In the sky above him, he thought he might hear a very faint but intensifying growl. Drones! They knew where he was! This fucking thing in his head!
They were coming for him. He wept: big, wrenching sobs that almost overrode the electronic impulses that were shaking him to his core. Yet still he ran. Ran as if his life depended upon it, because now he fully believed that it did.
The human crunch in the center of the urban village dissipated. Traffic thinned out. The buildings and pathways got smaller, narrower. The surfaces of the roadways began to appear less geo-molded and more like the asphalt used in the century past. Gene stopped for a moment and realized that he was in the vicinity of whatever it was his subconscious mind had been seeking. What was it? What the heck was it? What had he forgotten that he could almost remember?
Because, yes, there was now this other thing happening. In the midst of all the fear, all the confusion and mounting rage that was sweeping over him in waves, his mind was chuckling and whirring with random images and thoughts and memories. That’s right, memories! Memories of people and places and sights and sounds they had tried to take away from him! Well, fuck that!
Now, what was that thing? It was on the tip of his mental tongue . . .
Imagine waking from a dream that immediately slips away when the first pastel light of morning hits your newly opened eyes. You know you have dreamed, but what? It was so real! But now . . . no. It’s gone, like mist that dissipates with the first appearance of the sun. The more you try to grasp it, the farther away the substance slips into the crevasses of your mind. Then all at once, a picture comes back to you. Then a couple of nonsensical words somebody uttered in the deepest cavern of your dream—and bang! There it is: the entire story, the feelings, the people and places, the whole dream world, revealed in one massive tide of recollection. How could you have possibly forgotten it? It was the most important thing in the world, producing the most powerful emotions as it was
unfolding—and then poof! It wasn’t there at all. Only now it was. Magic! And it was strong and real and would never again be forgotten.
Gene knew he didn’t have a moment to lose. They were right behind him. They were coming for him! And yet he fell to his knees with the force of the memory that slammed into him, determined to grab every last morsel of it. It was she. She was here. He had her now.
Livia! My God! Livia! How could he have forgotten Livia?
Now . . . who was Livia?
Gene stared into nothing that existed outside him. Now he knew. It was she he sought. And she was near—very near. He must find Liv. Liv would know what to do. He hauled himself to his feet and stumbled on, his brain on fire.
Across the campus, not too far away, Bob sat behind his desk, floating on the big silver tuffet. He was not pleased, for the most part. On the one hand, this was most inconvenient. On the other, just look at how his boy was blossoming into a young man! Kid had some cojones on him! God, I’m a genius, Bob thought. What have I wrought. A real person. But he maintained his sour expression for business purposes.
Bronwyn sat in the guest chair formerly occupied by Gene, who had done so well in his first post-reboot diagnostic and now was misbehaving so badly.
“I suppose you know this is all your fault,” said Bob.
“I’m sorry you’re disappointed,” said Bronwyn. Bob had certain human characteristics, she thought. And he was still a handsome man, with a tremendous amount of power that could possibly be used for good if you got him into the right place. In this case, she had something very specific to do, and she had to be careful how she went at it. It would be a shame if Gene had to die. Again.
Bob had fixed her with what he probably thought was a terrifyingly steely gaze. “You had to introduce him to your wacky friends,” he said in an obnoxious tone.
“The last iteration was moribund, Bob. You wanted him kick-started.” It would do no good to put up resistance to this nonsense, but she wasn’t going to lie down, either.
“Maybe,” said Bob. “But we didn’t need him to get the hots for one of them.”
“What can I say.” Bronwyn shrugged appealingly. “She is pretty fabulous. And he is a human being.”
“Well,” said Bob. “Not really.”
“You’ll catch him,” said Bronwyn. Bob shivered. Bee’s ability to read minds was kind of spooky sometimes. You could see it as a function of her ninth-gen cranial implant, he supposed, but that didn’t explain everything. It was kind of a turn-on, actually. Girl was cute. The fact that she occasionally hated his guts made her only more so. There was, of course, the significant difference in their ages. But nobody cared much about that anymore, with so many people up in their low triple digits and still in pretty good working order. And he had a long way to go before he hit that terrifying milestone.
“And what do we do with him then? Once we’ve got him back?” Bob inquired. “He’s scarcely better than the last time round now, and he has a whole lot more information, thanks to Sallie overstepping her bounds. Foolish woman.”
“What can I say,” said Bronwyn. “She’s a human being, too.”
“Bronny,” said Bob. “Sometimes your whole supertolerant thing can get kind of egregious.” But he said it kindly. And they shared a smile amid this evolving fuckup.
“I’d hate to have to trash him again,” said Bronwyn carefully, after a time. “We’re way over budget already.”
“Yeah, there’s that.” Bob munched his lip. “Just get him here,” he said at last. “I’ll charm the pants off him and see if I can close the deal before he really figures out what’s what.”
Good, thought Bronwyn, doing her best to maintain the neutral shell required to make Bob think everything was his idea. She gave him a little nod, this one with a small helping of sauce in it, and he responded appropriately. The air between them normalized, and Bronwyn relaxed a bit. The crisis was over. Gene would not be scrapped again.
All that remained, then, was for them to sit quietly and wait for developments. So that was what they did. After a little while, Edgar had some sandwiches brought in. Then Bob and Bronwyn simply hung out together in companionable silence, and grew closer.
The drones searching for their terrified prey were now flying in tighter circles. Gene could feel them breathing down his neck. Compounding his problem was the fact that he had stopped moving. He had arrived at what seemed to be his destination, since he was receiving no further internal impulses to move either forward or back. Lettering along the side of the low two-story brick building said “Indian Trail School.” He peered in the window.
Inside, lined up in three rows of pint-sized desk-seat combinations, were about thirty children under the age of ten. At the front of the room, behind a large wooden desk that could well have been more than a hundred years old, stood a small, dark-haired young woman who was clearly the teacher. She was regarding the class with an expression Gene couldn’t quite read. What a pretty girl this is, he thought. I wonder who she is. She seemed familiar. And then, quite suddenly: Of course she does! It’s Livia!
It was indeed Livia. Let’s see, thought Gene, looking her over. What do I know about this woman? Not very tall. About, maybe, five foot three, tops. No more than 110 pounds soaking wet. He found himself wondering what she would look like soaking wet. Had he seen her in that condition? Perhaps he had. He felt like it was possible. She was wearing a second skin of sleeveless black celulex that covered her down to her calves and up to just above her breastbone, plus a loose outer garment of some kind that conformed to her body as if it knew her intimately. Black studded boots from another time and place altogether.
Her hair was long on one side and colored a bright and festive magenta hue. On the other side of her head, it was very short, like a forest that had been knocked into stubble by a meteor blast. Nestled in the underbrush was a heavy-duty cortical implant studded with grommets. Sexy, he thought. Kind of old-fashioned. He wanted to touch it. Instead, he gently ran his fingers over the apparatus behind his own right auricle, which was now glowing a molten red and emitting short, porcine snorts every thirty seconds or so. The window was open, and he could hear her speak. Her voice was firm but light; musical, but with a twang of authority in it.
“Have all of you finished your reading?” Liv asked the class.
Gene looked over the children, most of whom were staring without expression into the air in front of their faces. They each had little implants behind their ears. Every now and then one would swipe the air in front of his or her face. Several appeared to be sleeping, their heads down on their desks. One young man sat on a stool in the corner, Gene noticed, sporting what looked like an old-fashioned conical dunce cap on his head, but a little shorter.
There was something else odd about the scene before him. Not a few of the children, some of them girls, had lost quite a bit of hair, and the tops of their heads gleamed through the little wisps that remained at the apex of their craniums. The room itself was very quiet as the young students engaged with their internal electronics.
Livia made her way out from behind that enclave and began strolling down the aisles of the classroom, touching one child on the shoulder here, another one there, leaning over a third to inquire about her progress. They all seemed quite comfortable but emotionally disengaged. As she reached the back of the room, she looked out the window and saw Gene, who stood up very straight as her gaze caught his. She smiled. He did, too. Then he fainted, falling straight down into a heap on the ground outside the schoolroom, his head buzzing like an angry hornet as the humming of the drones swelled in the skies just beyond sight.
7
Livia
He awoke to the twittering not of birds but of children. He was seated on the stool formerly occupied by the boy in the corner, with his back against the wall. The conical silver hat was on his head. The throbbing behind his ear and the bolts of neurological lightning had abated, and the intermittent snorting of the device had ceased. Liv was looking
at him with a concerned expression, her hands on her hips. The kids were gathered around, some giggling, others apparently amazed that something interesting was going on outside of their communications hardware. He felt above him to ascertain the nature of the weight that was on his head.
“Don’t remove it!” Liv cautioned. “It’s all that’s standing between you and whoever this Bob person is.”
Gene looked up at Liv from the kid-sized stool. “You know Bob?” he inquired.
“No. You kept talking about him. You certainly don’t like him very much.”
“He wants to steal my body and put the mind of an ancient geezer in it somehow.”
“Sure, Gene. Anyhow, the Jam Cap should do the job. I had to take it off Nelson here, but I’m sure he didn’t mind.” The entire class then looked over at the previous inhabitant of the Cap, who was now bouncing off the walls of the classroom, running around like a lunatic liberated from a straitjacket. The Cap had been a torture to the little fellow, since it was designed to cut off all connection to the Cloud. As a tool, it was utilized widely in schools and prisons as a pacifier for the mentally overstimulated; it was also a fairly severe punishment to those for whom being and connection were one and the same. It quite literally turned off their brains for a time, and for some, it was a terrifying penance. For Gene, however, it was a godsend. His mind was now quiet; his body no longer wracked with the penalty of failing to appear for the procedure Bob had in mind. And here was Liv. Liv! Wow, thought Gene. She is so pretty. Is she my friend?
“You don’t remember much of anything again, do you?” said Liv.
“Just a little,” said Gene. “I knew I had to find you.”
“You boys and girls can stream for the rest of the afternoon,” Liv said to the children, who immediately dispersed to their desks and submerged themselves again in their digital pursuits. “Don’t misbehave,” she said as she collected some of her things. She pushed a button on the side of the desk, and a synthetic creature styled to appear vaguely like a substitute teacher popped up from a panel in the back.