Wetware

by Craig Nova

KAY SAT down at the machine. In addition to the familiarity of it, she was aware of something else too, and while she struggled to be precise, it was still difficult to articulate just what it was, even though she had the vocabulary. In fact, the entire sensation was so odd that it frightened her. Large. Big. Overwhelming. But this didn’t come close. Now, when she sat down again, she had a variety of longing, or of what she imagined someone might feel in a church. Or perhaps her state of mind might be one that came from discipline and fasting, or spending time without speaking, or any of the many other methods of trying to feel . . . Again she faltered. Feel what? Connected to something that was enormous, that existed in such a way as to be at the essence of everything there was, at once so large as to be frightening, and yet having a reassuring quality that she perceived as light and warmth perfectly colored by an enormous scale and unimaginable distances. In fact, sitting there, looking through the code, and then reaching out, into the deeper sections of distant machines in South America, Poland, Germany, in the cities of London, New York, Evanston, Berkeley, she had the contradictory sensation of warmth and mystery that was perfectly combined with the ominous.

  She sat there for a moment and started to hum. Jack turned to listen. She began to sing quietly.

  “When you wake you shall have,” she sang, “hushabye, don’t you cry, blacks and bays, dapples and grays, coach and six white horses . . . ”

  “What’s that?” said Jack.

  “Oh, just an old song,” she said. “Do you like it?”

  “Yes,” he said. “I do.”

  She went over to the bed, where Jack had a little stub of pencil and a scrap of paper, the wrapper from a candy bar that someone had thrown in the wastebasket. He was drawing a graph, and there were some equations written along the bottom in a script that was like the one that architects used. Neat, clear, precise. He had discovered that there was a way to estimate the area under the curve . . .

  Kay rolled her eyes up and sneezed.

  “Oh,” she said.

  “God bless you,” said Jack.

  She put her hand to her head.

  “Are you all right?” said Jack.

  “Sure,” she said. “A little headache. My eyes are itchy. Too much excitement, I guess.”

  “I know what you mean,” said Jack. He put his hand on her forehead.

  Kay pulled back the covers and got into bed.

  “I’m going to rest for a little,” she said.

  “Sure,” said Jack. “That’s the ticket.”

  She rustled in the covers.

  “Jack,” she said.

  “What?” he said without looking up from his scrap of paper.

  “Where are we going to get some money?” she said.

  Jack looked out the window.

  “We’ll think of something,” he said.

  KAY SLEPT while the radiators in the room clinked like iron manacles, and when she sat up, alarmed at the sound, she saw that Jack was sitting at the screen of the cheap computer. Kay turned her head toward the radiators. The sound seemed coldly vibrant, and when she tried to think of what it reminded her of, she thought of visions she had only experienced in her dreams, the sound of a slave ship belowdecks, or the finality of steel bars being swung shut behind her. Jack was intent on a page he had found, and when she sat up, letting the sheet fall away from her, she saw that it was The Single Man’s Guide to Women.

  The Guide was divided into various sections, and Jack looked at one now that dealt with the correct way for men to move. It had clips of old actors, Cary Grant, Brad Pitt, and Miguel de Sorrento, and the narration pointed out the curiously fluid and keenly graceful locomotion of them all, not jumpy, not abrupt, but smooth. Jack watched for a while and then tried it out, walking across the room, head up, shoulders not noticeably squared, not braced, but still emphasizing, with a fluid movement, the way his shoulders hung. He looked good, and she thought that he would be terrific in evening clothes, although she had only seen pictures of this.

  He caught her staring at him and said, “How do I look?”

  “Oh, Jack,” she said. “Don’t be vain.”

  He smiled at her. It was obvious that he had read a section about smiling, and when he smiled now, he was irresistibly charming. Then he went back to the screen, where he scrolled through the possibilities before choosing Conversation, which gave him advice about what was amusing and pleasing and what was gloomy and oppressive. He went through the sample dialogues, showing his smile. Then he turned to a link labeled Sex. She saw him nodding, intrigued if not mildly surprised, but still pleased and happy.

  “Kay,” he said.

  “What?” she said.

  “Do you think a woman would like that?” he said, holding up the screen for her to see.

  She blushed.

  “Yes,” she said. “Yes. I think that might be nice.”

  “That’s what I think,” he said.

  He scrolled through more pages.

  “Well, Jack,” she said, “what are you planning?”

  “Not much,” said Jack.

  CHAPTER 2

  March 22, 2029, 3:30 A.M.

  LET THE people at work try to come after me, Briggs thought. But he couldn’t maintain this attitude very long, and after the short emotional lift of defiance, the warmth of it drifted away like a shot of liquor that elevated his mood, only to leave him a little more troubled than when he had first taken the drink. Liquor or something worse.

  Briggs’s apartment building was a brownstone with a stoop, and it had shutters over the windows, trees in the street, flower boxes from which a cascade of flowers fell. It was in a section of town that was charming and disreputable, where students lived. Briggs was on the tall side, and he had short hair and a small scar on one cheek, a little quarter-moon shape at the side of one eye. If he answered an ad in the paper for an apartment, the landlord would be glad to have him as a tenant. Briggs inspired confidence, but after having taken a deposit, the landlord would instantly wonder just what it was that Briggs really did. He seemed competent, but the question was always, competent at what?

  The glass of the front doors of Briggs’s building had beveled edges, and in the afternoon, when the sun was out, the hall was filled with bits of rainbow. The colored flecks reminded Briggs of an old dance hall with a globe covered with mirrored squares, where dancers clung to one another beneath the dappling light. When he saw these evanescent specks of light, he imagined the rustle of sequins on a dress like spectral confetti, the heavy brush of a woman’s hair across his face . . .

  When he came into his building from the street, he smelled the odor of fried steak and onions, cabbage soup. Not good, but still comforting.

  The concierge had an apartment at the rear of the little hallway next to the stairs. Briggs saw her sitting on a chair in front of her open door. She wore blue jeans, and red eye shadow, and she treated her hair with a dye that made it glow in the dark. On a hook in the apartment behind her, she had hung a black leather jacket with a decal on it, but it was a little unfashionable, a little out-of-date, and people who wore those jackets were in that zone where the previously cool men and women had slipped back to being only moderately hip.

  “Hey, Briggs,” she said. “How are things?”

  What could he say to that? He shrugged.

  “Fine,” he said.

  He climbed the stairs to his apartment, hearing the sound of his feet and smelling the musk the young woman wore. Then he put his key into his lock, hearing the cold ratchet of the tumblers. He dropped his satchel on the sofa and sat down. What he wanted was to go to sleep, since he had been up all night and all day, too, not tired now so much as intoxicated by fatigue. Maybe he could stretch out here, but he didn’t want to wake up in his clothes, feeling the grit of his beard.

  His apartment had a kitchen, a bedroom, and a living room. A plant was in the corner of the living room next to the sofa, which was a comfortable one with big cushions. In the bookshelves there were some books and
technical manuals: The Principles of Artificial Life; DNA and Source Code for Professionals; Gene Sequencing for the Practical Man; the Harvard Technical Series (Viruses, The Varieties of Cytosil, Procedures for the Biological Engineer, Cost Estimates in Artificial Life). Piled up on the floor were some catalogs from discount houses he had used when he had been working on a per-piece basis at home.

  Next to the bed was the clock, which had the shape of a young, athletic woman dressed in Spandex. The Spandex was very tight, but somehow it made her seem generic, if only because it smoothed out the shape of her calves, the slight bulge of her stomach, the strength of her shoulders. She had freckles and short blond hair, a Midwestern, corn-fed way about her that made him think of Kansas, of Iowa. Rolling hills and green crops. Big blue skies and clouds dragging along, gray on the bottom, fluffy on top. The clock sat on a bench with her legs crossed, meditation-style, the GE logo on her arm. She could talk, but not move. Briggs had spent some time hot-wiring the clock when he had first gotten it, but he hadn’t been able to add much, not really, just the ability to speak in platitudes, to offer the most conventional comments about things. Briggs and the clock were polite to one another and they tried to do their best, but it was like talking to a calendar that had a thought for the month printed next to a picture of a dog. What could he expect? It was just a GE clock, no matter what he had done to it. Sometimes the clock trembled with frustration that she couldn’t do more.

  He sat down on the bed and fell asleep with the sense of warm darkness sweeping over him, not from the side or from his feet or head, but all together, as though he had fallen into a tepid liquid. He liked sinking into the warmth of it, and midway to the bottom, dreams started just at the edge of his vision, and then they closed in. He slept in his clothes with his feet on the floor.

  At two-thirty in the morning he heard the clock say, out of the darkness of the room, “Briggs. You’ve got a message.”

  He sat up.

  “Who’s it from?” said Briggs.

  “Work,” she said. “You told me to wake you if something came from work.”

  He had been sound asleep, and if it had been pleasant to slip into the warmth of it before, he now had the sensation of having been underwater, and that he had come up fast and had traveled a long way. The quick ascent had left him nauseated. When he sat on the edge of the bed, he was concerned about what had been in the green water he had risen through, vague shadows like sharks or other creatures, unknown, but just waiting to take a bite. He tried to shake off the ugly memory, which left him feeling like someone who was universally suspected.

  “Some technician called,” said the clock. “Something about growing platforms.”

  “Oh,” he said.

  “You look worried,” she said. “Is something wrong? Would you like to talk about it?”

  “It’s hard to explain,” he said.

  “Try me,” she said.

  He knew right where it was going, just as she did. They would come up against the same blank wall as always. She would end up saying that there was no crying over spilled milk, that there was more than one way to skin a cat, and so on, and he would sit there in the onslaught of the conventional, nodding, yes, yes, that’s true, but there is another element here . . .

  He shrugged. “I don’t know,” he said.

  “You don’t know what?” she said.

  “Where to begin,” he said.

  “How about at the beginning,” she said. “That’s the usual place, isn’t it?”

  “Yes,” he said. “If I knew where the beginning really was.”

  “Take it one day at a time,” she said. “Rome wasn’t built in a day. So, what is it?”

  He sat there blinking, running a hand across his face, hearing the staticlike sound of his beard. It wasn’t so hard to get this far, to admit this much, but to go on from here, to put the rest of it into words, left him with a sense of futility. What good would it do to put it into words?

  “Did they say what they wanted to see me about?” he said. “At two-thirty in the morning?”

  “No,” she said.

  He sat there, trying to think. He suspected that at the heart of his mistake had been the fact that he had gone on feeling when he should have . . . what? When he should have cultivated the ability not to feel. To act dead. No, to be numb. Who got into trouble by feeling nothing? If you felt nothing, your armor was complete.

  He tried to shake off the mild nausea that came from waking up too quickly. He thought of that sense of a rapid ascent from the bottom of a green sea where those shapes were concealed.

  “Start at the beginning,” the clock said. “See? What happened first?”

  He got up and went into the bathroom and turned on the shower. The steam rose in filaments, like cigarette smoke.

  “Briggs?” the clock called out after him. “Do you hear me? You’ve got to learn to listen better than you do. You’ve always got your head in a cloud. What was the first thing? It’s as simple as one, two three . . . Isn’t it?”

  He looked in the mirror, at the salt-and-pepper color of his beard.

  “So?” said the clock from the other room. “The first thing.”

  “Just a dream,” said Briggs. “I guess that’s it.”

  “I don’t dream,” said the clock. “So I wouldn’t know about that.”

  “I don’t mean a dream that you have when you’re asleep. I mean one that you pursue.”

  He stood for a moment, looking into his own eyes. He hadn’t done this for a while, and he guessed it was because he had gotten into the habit of avoiding things, particularly his habitual expression, which, as far as he was concerned, was that of a man who has cooked the books and is counting the days until it comes out. Still, as he stood here now, looking into his own green eyes, he tried to see a physical detail that betrayed the first hint of disaster. Could it be something as obvious as an expression in an eye? He guessed not, but one thing he knew for sure: you can pursue a dream only to have the unpleasant surprise of discovering that it is coming after you. That was the change he guessed he saw in his eyes: not the keen expression of the hunter, but the wary, quick glance of the hunted.

  Maybe he was wrong about the beginnings of disaster. Maybe if you had an ounce of sense you could see trouble coming, like those scenes in the old movies where a steam locomotive appeared at the edge of a prairie. At first all you saw was a distant wisp, but soon it revealed itself as a column of black smoke made up of discrete pulses impelled upward with all the brute force of a machine. Then the engine itself arrived, as black as coal and gleaming like it too, releasing steam with a hussssh, and of course with the engineer blowing the whistle.

  Maybe he should start with the psychoactives again. They worked, in a way, but he had the feeling of something in his brain, funguslike and dreary, and yet with an interest of its own. That was the difficulty with the psychoactives, sweet as they could be at times. They didn’t illuminate. Instead they damped everything down. He didn’t notice the small weight they added the first day, but after the first week he began to feel the accumulation. Like water dripping into a bucket. And as the weight increased, as the sense of being smothered became stronger, as though he were under a blanket, he thought that the drugs were just a quiet method of telling him to shut up.

  Briggs looked around for the toolkit he almost always carried. It had a couple of adapters, some Med-liner, protective gel, generic antibiotics. It all fit into a small leather case that he carried in his pocket. Then he went to the door and the clock said, “Good luck, huh? Is there anything I can do?”

  “I’m afraid not,” said Briggs. “I’ll see you later. Take care.”

  “Yeah,” she said. “Sure. Every cloud has a silver lining.”

  Briggs hesitated at the door, just about to say, Don’t bank on it, but then he went over the threshold.

  Briggs found a gypsy taxi. He sat in the backseat, beneath the torn headliner that hung like black pendants, and looked out the window as
they went along the river. The water was the color of graphite, and the black swirls always formed in the same shape. The lights from the city on the other side of the river lay in streaks of yellow and red, but the reflection had a cold cheer, like the bright signs in a closed-up carnival.

  “The high pressure is going to come in,” said the driver. “A stationary high.”

  “It’ll blow over,” said Briggs.

  “Naw,” said the driver. “High pressure lingers, you know?”

  The driver stopped in front of the Galapagos building and Briggs got out and smelled the scent of iodine and heard the slow, labored breathing of the logo above the door. The most important thing was not to anticipate anything, or to imagine the consequences of events that weren’t going to happen. He believed that there was a difference between fear and anxiety. Anxiety was just a phantom, a fantasy that existed because of one’s emotional state, but fear was another matter. Fear had an object, something real. The trick was to be able to tell what was anxiety and what was fear.

  CHAPTER 3

  March 22, 2029, 3:30 A.M.

  BRIGGS STOOD at the door of Galapagos. He opened it and stepped into the cloud of cleaning mist. It was a fish-belly color, somewhere between white and sickly gray, about six inches thick, and it smelled like a combination of Clorox and wax. The cloud was laid down at 3 A.M., and it hung over the stone floor for about a half hour before it was sucked away by little vents in the bottom of the walls. It left the floor with a bright shine, like polished onyx.

  Briggs went to the end of the lobby, his shoes making spirals in the mist and a noise too, a tock, tock, tock that reminded him of something. Chambering a round. That was it. Chambering a round and putting on the safety. Brass hulls, copper tips. It was funny the way things didn’t work out sometimes. For instance, those high-speed rail guns had never come to anything, and people were still using gunpowder. After all these years.

  A security guard sat at the black, horseshoe-shaped desk. His name was Jackson, and he was a retired military man who was glad to get the job to supplement his pension. The cleaning mist had a medical drawback, and a lot of the late-night guards complained about respiratory problems. The shine was good, though. No one could deny that. Jackson appeared to be floating on a cloud.