My best summers had passed by the time I met Carter. That sounds strange now, doesn’t it? I think my best summer was with Carter, of course. However, when I was a girl, our “best summers” were those designated between the age of first menstruation and twenty-two. I had not been assigned to mate and breed. Those must have been lean years.
It was said that some men bribed High Fathers and High Mothers to get the wives of their choice. These men would have sex with these girls but not in a way that they could possibly get pregnant. In a year, a man could buy himself a new wife and on and on.
We didn’t deal in money as the Old World did but we still had rich people. They were usually High Fathers or High Mothers. Captains of sailing ships did well and still do. Since there were so few, doctors and dentists lived very well even as the Old World fell. The privileged possessed things or skills people still wanted. The progeny of privileged families courted each other. With the help of a High Mother or High Father, marriages were arranged to get into doctors’ families. Maker apprenticeships for young men or women were bargained for. Everyone who got close to the people with coveted skills bettered their lives.
The richest man in the City that I knew of did not sell plankton paste and eels. He was the captain of a container ship that had run aground during a shatter storm. The ship was known as the Cook Majestic. Its name was painted across its stern, though it was too rusty to be majestic and I don’t think the captain’s name was Cook. The container ship held a wealth of tampons, machine parts and toilet paper. He was a younger man when he drove that ship into the mud.
It was rumored he’d killed and ate his crew before he found his way to the City. Just before he drank himself to death he claimed to be eighty years old. He died guarding the last of his treasure with a machine gun. He wanted for nothing except he lived in fear and could never leave his ship. The Cook Majestic became his world. One of the ship’s remaining containers held reading glasses, the one thing no Citizen needed.
I’m sure that all sounds insane to you, now. I mention these things because the life I lived with Carter, however short it was, broke the strange rules of an odd time. The Fathers and Mothers made the rules. I broke them. Carter suffered for it. I should have seen it coming.
I have told my first lie in this story. If a biography is to be useful it must be true. Therefore, it’s time for a confession. If I don’t tell the truth of the matter, there is little point in telling it at all.
I did see the end coming. I knew Carter and I were doomed before I knew his name. I understood the risks but I was lost to him the moment he smiled at me. He was helpless, too. I smiled back. That’s all it took. The winds that fill our sails are fickle. The way forward is unsure. When I look back on my life I see how tenuous and fragile each thread of the web we weave really is. We were all spiders in those days. Spiders do not live long.
The Fathers and Mothers had their ancient rules but biology is far older than their holy text. The need to feel another against your body, even if only for a short time, is bigger than all the problems of the world. I’m sorry to say it but the Fathers and Mothers weren’t all wrong. Even if the rules were sometimes applied unevenly, they intended their rules for everyone. But young love isn’t about right and wrong. It’s about nothing more than itself.
I was nearing thirty. Carter was my one and only chance at young love.
Here’s an idea you can never explain to a machine: even if I was wrong and careless, I did the right thing when I reached for Carter and kissed him. I was right when I took his hand in mine. I was right when I brought his palm to my breast.
As powerful as the Fathers and Mothers were, no one can close a flower to the sun.
5
Carter lived in the third tower with a roommate. He had been chosen to reproduce once, at sixteen. However, the union was not fruitful. His marriage was dissolved after one year and he was assigned to Maintenance.
Infertility was a common problem then. Sperm counts went down at the end of the world and stayed down. Some people whispered speculations that the culprit was something the Fathers and Mothers put in the soup so new babies wouldn’t suck up too many resources. Maybe it was the Blight or breathing monster pollen or bio-terror. It might have been sadness that gave us fewer babies. Fewer babies meant even more hopelessness.
For some reason, when women failed to get pregnant…well…they failed. The Fathers and Mothers said it was never the man’s fault. To suggest something like that would have been an unforgivable insult. To blame a woman for not becoming a mother was a normal thing back then. If they failed to get pregnant, women were ill. Men were merely unlucky and could try again, especially if they had goods to trade and High Fathers and High Mothers to bribe.
School vids lectured us about stress as if getting packed into the towers, never having choices and doing what we were told was irrelevant to our levels of anxiety. We strained to be polite at all times, of course. Obsequiousness was a virtue. If we couldn’t have children, we could at least be polite. Since there were so few children the young women who did get pregnant were treated like queens. They carried their babies everywhere. When they were pregnant, the women were fawned over. When they gave birth, they were revered. It was as if they proved a near impossible thing could be done.
Those women made me feel worse. Not that it was their fault. I was jealous. Couples who reproduced got larger rooms, more food and higher status. They were blessed by the Fathers and Mothers while the rest of us remained disappointments. I never even got a chance at a family. The assignment of a husband never arrived.
“The hand that rocks the cradle rocks the future!” was a saying then. Something like that. When the present is terrible all anyone ever talks about is the future.
To soothe us, the Fathers and Mothers invested resources in music. The public address system was never quiet during the day. There was always the sound of running water behind the music. My mother said it was supposed to keep Citizens calm and passive though it often made me want to pee. There were no voices because that might lead to pride. The Fathers and Mothers didn’t mind pride from new mothers and fathers bouncing new babies in their laps but, for some reason, other sorts of pride were considered seditious. When the High Mother wasn’t lecturing us on some obscure phrase from the holy text, the music played on. The instruments made sounds that reminded me of slow, sad voices.
Carter could work from home, as I did, most of the time. As a liaison, most of his days were spent watching vids from helmet cams and advising drones in conformity etiquette. I didn’t understand Carter’s job then. I saw no arrests. No violence threatened to bring down the haven the Fathers and Mothers had built. Not that I could see, anyway.
I often wondered what Carter’s apartment looked like. He wasn’t as high up in the Far Tower. He didn’t have my view, though I suppose he could watch the entire City through his screens. He’d seen the City’s dirty underside and I had not. As I lay on my bunk at night, I thought how narrow it was. My bed was impractical for two — for mere sleeping, at least.
After I met Carter, I stretched out on my deck under the moon. Instead of watching the stars, I turned to see his building. He was on the far side and down on the forty-eighth floor. There was no way to see him or signal him. There was something tantalizing about his proximity that made the ache of his absence worse. Love denied is a pleasant ache though I would not have said so at the time. He was alive and sleeping nearby, so close yet so far. Or perhaps he lay awake, too, thinking how close I was and how much closer I could be.
There is an old saying. I don’t know its origin. Maybe it was something the girls whispered among themselves. “I’m close! I’m close.” Just before orgasm, that was the thing to say. I don’t know why a warning was necessary, but often, in my brief encounters with Carter, those were the only words spoken, first by me and then him.
There is a rich sweetness in the ache of anticipation. My mother said people used to feel that way about food.
“Really?” I asked, quite stunned.
“Well…I don’t know if they really meant it,” Mom admitted. “That was before the Blight. If we had chocolate over strawberries again, that bit of deliciousness might bring that feeling back. Oh…and croissants stuffed with Nutella. I remember that from when I was very young.”
“What’s that?”
“Sh. Sorry! Sh!”
Carter risked being with me because he thought the next revolution would come sooner than it did. From the moment we first met, he was sure the City was already in its last days.
“Soon,” he told me, “the City will belong to the drones. Some of us will become machines.”
“I already feel like I’m a machine.”
“You don’t understand,” Carter said. “They’ll have it all. They’ll be it all. We might become their servants. Maybe we already are. Or they’ll let us die out like all the species we replaced.”
“How long will we have together?” I asked.
“That’s the thing. Nobody knows the machine mind. NI is too different from us.”
I had many questions but Carter kissed each one away. That was the correct thing to do. Answers could wait. We had to make the most of our time together.
His timing wasn’t quite right but he wasn’t far wrong. I’m sure he thought that, by the time we were discovered, our secret wouldn’t matter anymore.
I hoped that, if we did get pregnant, all would be forgiven by the Fathers and Mothers. I thought it would all work out somehow. Perpetuating the species was more important than our trespasses. The Fathers and Mothers would have to agree to let us live together and be a family. As a mother, I might even become a Mother and, as a father working in Maintenance, Carter might even have risen to the station of High Father someday. I fantasized that the machines would leave us alone to live as we pleased.
I wasn’t old, but I wasn’t young enough to plead ignorance. All I had was a pulsing need and fantasy. In the dark, lying in bed sleepless, the desire grew. I called it capital L, Love. Mom called it small l, loneliness.
The Fathers and Mothers took away many words. I told Mom they couldn’t take away Love.
“Things being as they are,” Mom said, “we might be better off without it.”
Love didn’t matter in the end. Before I could begin a bundle of cells that might make a baby and rock the foundations of the future with our progeny, the drone who represented the High Council came for me. Maintenance came for Carter, too. The drone put him in the same place the Fathers and Mothers left all those forgotten words.
I lived. Before the drone was done, I thought my mother might be right about leaving Love for dead.
6
I was at work, transferring files on my screen for various departmental approvals and storing copies on data sticks for safekeeping. Then the power went out. The grid was down after curfew each night but the power was pretty steady during the day. I waited for a few minutes and, though the windmills turned furiously out in the Bay, the power didn’t return.
I wasn’t worried. If I couldn’t work, I thought I might as well go for a run and wait for Carter near the end of the trail. We had found a tiny clearing where the moss was deep. Before the currents switched and the cool wind blew in off the sea, I would close my eyes and imagine we were in a big soft bed.
We’d grown bolder with time. At first, our meetings were urgent and as brief as possible. In the weeks that followed, we couldn’t help ourselves. We would strip naked and start slowly. Afterwards, we wouldn’t even rush to dress again. We lay entwined, wishing we could stay in the forest forever.
Despite the sunlight dancing across the waves, my deck’s steel storm shutter rolled down. I was so confident Carter and I were bound to be free to do as we wanted (at least for a little longer) I didn’t even think of Maintenance at the time. I thought of shatter storms, supercells and tornadoes.
The apartment’s sudden darkness was no problem. Aside from giving perfect vision, my contacts had several useful features. Mag and macro were standard, as was thermal vision. Integration with my Vivid’s system allowed me to see my work screens. There were no signs in the City. All Citizens had Vivid. The corneal implants could help me find my way home, identify faces by name and, of course, see in the dark. Only the public vid screens were so old that they weren’t integrated with Vivid.
But Vivid failed me when the drone arrived. My apartment door opened and a blinding light shone in on me from the corridor. I’d lived in Vivid’s world since I was four years old. I had never been blinded. My contacts wouldn’t take a picture. The record function was dead, as well. The room filled with that searing light. Even Vivid’s simple dimming function didn’t work.
I blinked and put a hand in front of my face to try to stop that light. My hand glowed red and I could see the bones of my fingers. “What’s going on?”
But I already knew.
A cool hand enveloped my outstretched wrist and gripped me hard. I tried to pull away but that proved impossible.
“Now, now,” a deep, soothing voice said, “let’s not have any drama, Miss Cruz. I wouldn’t want to traumatize your radius and ulna. The human wrist is very vulnerable. It articulates nearly as well as my own, although my wrist can rotate 360 degrees. If that were to happen, your wrist would be damaged, probably irrevocably. So many little bones in there.”
I stopped struggling.
“Good. You understand.”
The Maintenance drone shut off the light and the steel shutters raised. All other power to the room stayed off. The robot’s black head rotated 360 degrees, scanning the room. “Would you like to be seated, Miss Cruz?”
My knees shook. I’d like to say I was more defiant but I had to sit or I might have fallen. “Yes. That would be lovely. Thank you, sir.”
The robot stayed in front of me, blocking my way to the closed door. One of its four arms snaked out and snagged the chair from the desk. “Please,” it said. “Be seated.”
I sat and trembled and waited as the drone circled me slowly. It had finished the scan of my small room but continued its bio scan.
“I’d like to have a Father or Mother present,” I said. “Whoever is available — ”
“Pardon me for interrupting, but I’m afraid no one is available at this time. However, I am told I am a pleasant conversationalist.”
“This isn’t a good time for me to talk.”
“Why is that?”
“It just isn’t, sir.”
“Assertion without argument,” it said smoothly. “That won’t do. And the tension in your jaw when you speak suggests to me that when you call me ‘sir,’ you do so ironically. Hardly polite.”
“I’m required to be polite at all times,” I said. “I don’t think I am necessarily required to relax my jaw.”
The drone pulled the only other chair in the room toward it and sat opposite me. I heard the creak of the chair under the machine’s great weight. Its knees touched mine. I recoiled.
“I am sorry you are so uncomfortable around me, Miss Cruz. I’m really only here for a chat.”
“What do you want?”
“My name is Mr. Sy Potter.”
“What do you want?”
“Mister…?”
“What do you want, Mr. Potter?”
“Call me Sy.”
“That would be too familiar.”
“Do you know the origin of my name, Miss Cruz?”
“You mean like a family ancestry?”
A few drones looked like near-perfect replicas of humans but those were rare because their creation took too many resources. I seldom saw one in person. Many robots are all wires and exposed gears and rusty surfaces. This Maintenance drone, however, was a great armored hulk that barely squeezed through the door.
Sy Potter laughed and I had goose bumps. (I’ve never seen a goose, but that’s what my mother called the phenomenon.) As silky and smooth as its voice was, Sy Potter’s laughter sounded off, like a wheezing man laughin
g into a pail.
The low functioning bots never laughed. Many didn’t even have voice boxes. Less advanced drones picked up on social cues and non sequiturs to know when it was appropriate to laugh. The sentient ones knew when to laugh but they still couldn’t seem to make it sound right.
“Miss Cruz?”
“Yes, Sy?”
“You amuse me.”
“Okay. I guess.”
“I am going to ask you to calm down. All that will happen is we’re going to talk. No harm will come to you.”
It’s impossible to tell if a drone is telling a lie. You only find out when it’s too late.
“What do you want to talk about?”
“Your friend, Carter, of course. I’ve just come to talk about him. And you. Together.”
“We aren’t together. I only know his name. We go running together sometimes. That’s not technically a crime, is it?”
“He has already confessed, Miss Cruz.”
“How do I know that?”
“It’s enough that I know he confessed.” The drone’s big cam shifted toward my face until it stopped an inch from my nose. “It is enough that I know when you are lying to me.”
7
“Now, where were we before I went off topic?” it asked.
Maintenance drones don’t forget the topic of conversation. It was a social grace designed to make me feel comfortable. People enjoy fallibility in others but, coming from a battle bot, the ruse was too obvious. I trembled more.
“My name. That was the topic.”
“Mr. Sy Potter.”
“Yes. Thank you so much for that,” it said. “I love to hear my name spoken by a human.”
“You love things?” I spoke without thinking.
The big lens pushed in a little closer and rotated with a low whir. The bot’s eye was so close, its housing was a blur. My vision had never blurred before — not since I was three, anyway.
The drone ended its silence by clearing the throat it didn’t have. The effect was almost comical. Under different circumstances, I would have laughed.
Robot Planet, The Complete Series (The Robot Planet Series) Page 3