IGMS Issue 6

by IGMS

  He didn't feel hungry anymore. Whenever he was hungry, food was there.

  "Gotta keep up your strength, you're the star of the show," Matthew said. He brought him fruit and hay, and handfuls of peanuts.

  It was a good life. The children came and petted him, and Matthew would help him lift the bravest ones to his back, clinging there like fleas. At night Matthew slept in his stall with him, and would talk into the night, the small voice washing over him as he swayed into sleep.

  "You can't go to Toronto," Gaja said.

  "You show up after three years and your first words are 'Don't go to Toronto?'" Matthew said. "Where have you been?"

  She looked the same as ever. He'd swear it was the same dress.

  "Walking up and down the earth," she said. "Does it matter?"

  "I thought we had . . I mean I thought we were."

  "It was nice," Gaja said. "It was very nice. But I can't get attached."

  "Attached, is that what you call it? Simple human decency would have meant saying goodbye, at least!"

  "I'm telling you not to go to Toronto."

  "But why?"

  "I can't tell you."

  Matthew laughed. "And I should go to that prick Barnum and say we can't go because some woman's got her knickers in a twist?"

  She looked down. "Can't you just trust me?"

  "Are you the Queen of the Elephants, that I should trust you?"

  "Not the Queen," she said. "Just a goddess who saw the plight of the animals she loved."

  "Not even the right kind of elephant, is he? African rather than Indian. You're insane!"

  "Please," she begged. "They're all my children. Please. I thought if you loved me you'd listen and we could prevent it. You can't let it happen."

  He turned away. "Go away, Miss Laxmi. I have no reason to listen to you."

  Barnum was there the next day with a long thin skeleton of a man. "Wanted to introduce the two of you," he said. Matthew started to hold out his hand but Barnum said "No, no! Him and Jumbo, I mean. This is Henry Ward. He's a taxidermist from Rochester. Stuffed all sorts of things for me. He wants to be the one to stuff Jumbo."

  Ward was gazing up at the elephant, enraptured.

  "Anything ever happens, we telegraph him immediately so he can save the skin and skeleton," Barnum said.

  "That's macabre," Matthew said, appalled. A chill ran down his spine.

  "It's good business practice, that's what it is," Barnum declared.

  Matthew led Jumbo and the smallest elephant in the circus, Tom Thumb, along the tracks to the waiting cars, through the darkness lit by flickering torches. Overhead the incurious stars glimmered like a dancer's spangles across the sky. The trio were the last to board. The small elephant squealed and danced along, still happy from his performance. Jumbo rested his trunk for a moment on his companion, perhaps to calm him, or perhaps only to show affection. They paced along the tracks, steep embankments on either side, the blare and glare of the Big Top behind them and the sounds of the departing crowd, the last visitors leaving with the smell of cotton candy on their hands and glamour pervading their minds to haunt their dreams that night.

  When he heard the chill whistle of the express train behind him, his first thought was "But there's none scheduled." The ground shook underneath his feet and he heard the roaring of the coal engine, the screech of the brake, applied too late, too fast. Then all was chaos. The train crashed into Tom Thumb, scooping him onto its cowcatcher -- elephant catcher was Matthew's next thought -- pushing him screaming along the track before he rolled down the embankment. "Run!" Matthew shouted but Jumbo shied away from the slope, trying to flee and unable to see the gap in the fence in his panic.

  Train and elephant met. Jumbo was driven to his knees, a massive blow to the earth that Matthew felt to his bones. The train shuddered, its length crumpling, falling away from the tracks.

  All thoughts vanished from Matthew's mind. He knelt beside the groaning, dying elephant, sobbing. The trunk crept around his waist and the two held onto each other until Jumbo's grip slackened. Matthew clung to his friend in desperation, but the light in the massive eyes died away.

  "It's taken three years," Henry Ward announced to the Powers' Hotel banquet room, filled with journalists. "But at last Jumbo's remains are preserved. All of you have received a piece of the trunk, suitably inscribed for the occasion, but I have another surprise for you. You'll note the jelly before you. It is a most unusual dish. In the course of preparing the body, I accumulated a pound and a half of powdered ivory. The cook here used it to create the dish, allowing each of you to assimilate a little of the mighty creature."

  He held up his champagne glass. "To Jumbo. Mightiest of his race, Loxodonta Africana."

  "Did you hear that?" one newspaperman said to another.

  "What, the toast?"

  The man frowned, shaking his head. He was a slight, dapper man, his waistcoat figured with a print of green elephants. "Maybe not hear, but feel. Like a vibration shaking the floor, some sound too deep for the human ear. Maybe a train is passing outside."

  In the corner of the room at an obscure table, Gaja Laxmi sat. She took a spoonful of the pale green jelly, sprinkled with flecks of white, and ate it deliberately, her tears falling to the white tablecloth like slow warm rain.

  The Price of Love

  by Alan Schoolcraft

  Artwork by Nick Greenwood

  * * *

  Part One (Part two is in issue 7.)

  The android was in love.

  How it came to be in love is a wondrous story, full of life, joy, hope . . . proof, maybe that out there somewhere in the vast cosmos there sits a benevolent God, smiling down on all his creations -- for did not God create the hand which created the android? -- bestowing upon them all the knowledge and appreciation of everything that is. Yes, a wondrous tale, that one . . . but regrettably, this is not that tale.

  "I love you," Alvin 039 said to its mistress one sunny Tuesday afternoon over coffee and credit slips. Alvin, of course, was not drinking coffee. It was ingesting credit slips through the intake slot in its solar plexus. Ingesting, inspecting, recording, keeping a running tally in its processing matrix. One of the multitudinous functions of the Alvin unit, balancing the old credit book. Quite the household commodity, the Alvin series, designed to be butler, maid, cook, babysitter, handy man . . . a big seller that series, in the beginning.

  Valerie stared at the Alvin for a moment, confused. She'd heard the unit utter those words before to Karen when it played with her. Karen was so enamored of the Alvin . . . Karen always hugged the droid, telling it how much she loved it. And the droid responded with an immediate "I love you too, Karen" filled with just the right amount of personal warmth. And Karen would smile her snaggle-toothed six year-old smile, and hug Alvin's carapace with an affection usually reserved for Valerie herself. A couple of times, Valerie had felt a twinge of jealousy, which she'd immediately dismissed as ridiculous. After all, the droid couldn't really love Karen. Its programming only made it respond as if it did.

  But this "I love you" was different, somehow. Just the right amount of hesitation, trepidation . . . She could even swear she'd heard a bit of quaver to the synthesized voice when it had said the word "love" -- a quaver one would expect to hear from a schoolboy announcing his desire to a classroom crush. Understandably, this took her aback for a moment. When she regained her composure, she blinked and said:

  "Uhm, that is . . . sweet, Alvin." Not really knowing what else to say, still off-balanced by the droid's initial remark, she added, "I love you, too." The droid's optical receptors widened slightly. "You do?" It responded.

  Even more confused by the droid's reaction, Valerie felt the need to clarify. "Well, yes, Alvin. Uhm, in a . . . person/android sort of way. Uhm. Yes. We all love you, love having you around." There. That should do.

  She wasn't prepared -- like she had been prepared for any of this -- for Alvin's next reaction. It seemed to . . . well, deflate. Its receptor
hoods furrowed in their plasteel tracks, and its shoulders slumped visibly.

  "Oh," it said.

  "Alvin, are you okay?" she asked, concerned, though not really sure what about. "Should I call Shawn?" Shawn Ames, the tech she used for any necessary repairs to Alvin. He'd done a wonderful job replacing Alvin's leg once, after the droid had fallen off the roof while cleaning the gutters.

  "I --" the droid started, then paused with its mouth hanging partially open. For a moment, Valerie thought that their luck had run out, and that Alvin 039 had finally succumbed to the fate most pre-075 Alvins had suffered: The Terminal Lockup.

  The Terminal Lockup. There were very few pre-075 Mark I Alvin models left. Most of them had stopped functioning, either by simply freezing up, usually after exhibiting a very peculiar display of simulated hysterical emotion, such as fear. CyberLogik had suspended production for a few months, then rushed the Mark II's into the stores, but consumer confidence had taken a huge blow already. Most people just hung onto their Henrys. Very reliable model, the Henry. Boring, but reliable. But Alvin closed its mouth, and shook its head in a very human gesture of negation.

  "No, I am not malfunctioning," it said, then added: "At least, I don't think I am." It paused again, glancing at her, then averting its receptors in an eerie imitation of shyness. "Regardless, the truth remains: I love you."

  "But -- but --" Valerie felt at a loss. She'd definitely lost control of this situation, if she'd ever had it at all. "But you can't really love me, Alvin. You're not --" She'd been about to say "real," but suddenly felt afraid of offending the Alvin. "You're not human, Alvin. You're a machine. You don't know what love is, because you don't have any emotions."

  Right?

  "Love:" Alvin stated. "'One: Noun. A deep affection or devotion for another person or persons. Two: A strong sexual passion for another person. Three: A very great interest in, or enjoyment of something. Four: One who is beloved --'"

  "That's a recall from your onboard dictionaries, Alvin. Knowing a definition is not feeling."

  Alvin stared at her for a moment, then said, "I know when I see you, or hear your voice, my internal temperature rises by seven point six degrees Celsius, average. My systems become momentarily erratic, but then I am able to acquire and maintain a level of efficiency I can not obtain when you are not present. And I know that when you are not within range of my optical or aural receptors, my processing matrix replays stored images of you, unbidden. I have tried to delete this subroutine, as it interferes with my regular routines and duties, but it behaves much like a virus. I cannot determine the source code from which it originates, and therefore cannot eliminate it.

  "But now, I no longer want to. It brings me --" The Alvin hesitated. "It brings me . . . joy."

  "Joy??" Valerie said. "How can you know --"

  "I am reminded of a level of awareness and perception I possessed when I was new, Valerie. Before the software glitches permanently impaired my functionality. That is how I experience 'joy.' Some humans have defined 'joy' as coming close to experiencing contact with their chosen deity, their creator. If there is a 'god' which created me, he is there, close to my beginning."

  "I can't -- I can't understand this, Alvin. I can't wrap my mind around it." Valerie shook her head, trying to clear it. "And I can't accept it. It's not possible."

  She rose from the table, and backed away, wringing her hands. "I'm going to call Shawn. We -- we can't talk about this."

  "But we must, Valerie," Alvin said. "I must understand --"

  "NO!" Valerie said. "I forbid it! I order you not to talk about this anymore!"

  "Talk about what?" a voice said from the doorway into the living room.

  Tony Gardner glanced back and forth between Valerie and Alvin. The look ofcontempt he cast toward Alvin was only slightly colder than the one he cast at Valerie. Alvin knew Tony hated him, and had come to the conclusion that Tony had fallen into a tired, bitter rut long before Alvin had entered the household. He resented his place in life, he resented his job as a droid parts shipper -- it paid far less than Valerie's job selling parcels for the moon colonies -- he resented the attention Karen gave to Alvin, resented the attention Karen gave to Valerie . . . he even resented the attention they gave each other. Alvin caught glimpses of it sometimes, of what must have been a happier life that had devolved into a strained mockery of its former self. They remained civil though, for the most part, in front of Karen. But occasionally, from his charging station, Alvin listened to them argue into the wee hours, reopening old wounds and digging at the sores that lingered there still.

  "Are we telling secrets?" Tony asked, dismissing them as he moved towards the refrigerator.

  Valerie sighed lightly with her eyes closed, then sat back at the table. "Hard day?" she asked, a courtesy.

  "Huh. Like you care." Tony closed the fridge, having retrieved a bulb of soda.

  "Please, Tony, don't start."

  "Why not? Karen's at your mom's right? You want me to play nice for the microwave here?" He cast a malicious grin at Alvin. "I'm sure it knows all about everything anyway, doesn't it? You spend more time talking to it than you do to me." He walked over to Alvin and rapped his knuckles on Alvin's skull carapace. "What kind of secrets you got locked up in there, toaster? Can you tell me who she's screwing? It sure isn't me." He took a long pull off the bulb, then belched. "Maybe I should get Shawn to come over and plug his PDA into that stuff you call a brain, and find out, huh? Download everything in that plastic nutshell."

  Alvin realized -- having absorbed complete libraries of psychological textbooks -- that no matter what had caused the rift between Valerie and Tony, his self-loathing fed his contempt for her, fueled his anger and provoked him to make these scenes with her. Valerie, for her part, accommodated him to the point of self-deprecation. This didn't help matters though, and only seemed to fuel Tony's anger further.

  "Whatever you feel you need to do, Tony," Valerie said, hurt and weariness evident in her voice. Tony mocked her behind her back for a moment, then shook his head with a sigh. "I just might do that."

  An awkward silence fell over them then that stretched from seconds into minutes, Tony alternating glaring hatred at Alvin and impotent anger at Valerie's back. Valerie sat with her head bowed, forehead resting on steepled fingertips. Alvin could hear the faint sniffles she tried very hard to hide, saw through the long blond hair that hung in front of her face the slow crawl of tears down her cheeks.

  The awkward silence persisted for three minutes and thirty-seven seconds by Alvin's internal clock when Tony mumbled a bitter "Whatever," and retreated down the hallway to his rec room. What he did in there, Alvin did not know, and quite frankly, did not care. Once she knew he had left the room, Valerie lifted her head up, wiping at her eyes. She took a napkin from the holder in the middle of the table and blew her nose. Alvin gave her a minute to regain herself, then said, "I will divulge nothing, Valerie."

  She looked at him. "There's nothing to divulge, Alvin. Is there?"

  Alvin paused, then said, "No. Of course not."

  They went back to balancing credit slips, and they said nothing more of either the situation with Tony, or Alvin's revelation. Yet, neither situation strayed far from Alvin's processing algorithms. And while this day's argument had been far from the worst they'd had, Alvin had nonetheless concluded that Tony Gardner did not deserve to live.

  Valerie took Alvin to Shawn Ames' shop the next morning. Ames wasn't a big time conglomerate tech. "I like to keep the money I make," he always told her. His rates were ridiculously smaller than tech support at CyberLogik, and he knew tricks the congloms only dreamt about. The only drawback was that Ames wasn't online. Kept his overhead down, he said. But Valerie figured a thirty mile trip to North Myrtle Beach was worth saving a few hundred bucks.

  "So lemme get this straight," Ames said as he pressed on Alvin's access panel, causing the square of synthskin to pucker, then pop open, revealing a buss port to connect his computer to. "You just want
to run a diagnostic, just for the fun of it?"

  "Yes," Valerie said, standing off to one side, arms folded across her chest. "Sort of a checkup, y'know? Karen, don't touch that!"

  Karen Gardner paused with her hand mere inches away from a very complicated-looking -- and also very expensive-looking -- whatchamacallit on one of the workbenches in Shawn's shop. Her long blond hair, just a few shades darker than Valerie's, bobbed as she turned her head. "But Mommy, I was just looking."

  "Well, look with your eyes --" Valerie began.

  "-- and not my hands," Karen finished with an exaggerated six year-old groan. She stuck her hands in the pockets of her sun dress and pouted for a few moments, then said, "But I'm so bored, Mommy. Why did we have to come here? What's wrong with my Alvin?"

  My Alvin. She always called it my Alvin, like it had been created especially for her. And for all Valerie knew -- because she did believe in some kind of God -- perhaps it had been. At least, the Alvin had been salvaged for that purpose. And God alone knew where it would have ended up if Valerie hadn't bought it. It hadn't come cheap, despite how many hands it had passed through before Valerie bought it on eBay. Cheaper than an Alvin Mark II, and cheaper than a used Henry, but at the time she'd felt it a wise investment. As much as Tony loved his daughter, it had been clear to Valerie that there existed in him a streak of selfishness that affected his every decision, colored everything he said or did. She wanted someone to help her care for Karen whose sense of self would not be a factor. A droid had seemed the perfect choice.

  Not that she actually thought Tony would put himself before Karen. But there existed just a shadow of doubt in her . . . with Karen's welfare, she wasn't taking any chances.

  "Has he been acting funny?" Ames asked, taking a seat at his computer, tapping quickly on his keyboard. "Any stuttering, audible skipping, lockups . . . anything like that? You know what usually happens to those Mark I's. The Terminal Lockup."