She told Ian about Abe and his departure from the city. She told Ian what she’d learned about the City Solicitor’s schemes. She told Ian about Isaac’s memorandum, about the Omega Missive and the dual-age phenomenon — mysteries that her television couldn’t solve. She told him about the Chamber of Commerce and the shut-down of the IPT, and how the whole thing had been orchestrated just to keep Ian and Tonto trapped in the city. She explained that the aerial drones, hovertanks, and explosive rockets of Chapter 23 had been commissioned by City Council to stop Ian and one of the people travelling with him, someone city councillors called “The One Foretold,” though which of Ian’s companions this might be she couldn’t say. She pointed out several troubling parallels between Socrates and Tonto, a slice of conversation in which the phrase “mirror images” had made an appearance.
She had explained that Socrates could kill — that he could destroy his target’s mind, obliterating his prey’s memory and forever erasing every trace of his victim’s existing personality. And while Vera couldn’t say for certain whether there had been a botched mindwipe in Ian’s past, she could predict at least a 90 per cent chance that, if Socrates ever found him, there’d be a thoroughly successful one in his future.
Ian had responded by saying “gosh.” And he’d meant it. He’d never thought of himself as anything special, but now he was the hub of headline-making events. Machinations swirled around him, immortal assassins pursued him, powerful government officials fussed about his movements, and an unstoppable ninja supermodel seemed to care a good deal about his well-being.
He had always thought of himself as perfectly average. He had to admit that recent evidence seemed to challenge this self-image.
“That’s why I sent the others upstairs,” Vera had said. “Whatever’s really going on, you’re at the centre of it. You’re the reason this is happening. The others have been pulled into this because of you. You can tell them as much as you like, but it’s got to be your choice.”
As for why a giant target seemed to float above Ian’s head, Vera shrugged. “Maybe you were mindwiped,” she suggested. “Maybe there’s something in your past that makes you dangerous. Someone’s afraid of what you’ll remember. Or maybe there really is a beforelife, and you actually can remember it. Who knows? Maybe someone in the government is trying to hide the truth from the public.”
As for which story was true, she couldn’t say. As shocking as it may seem, television doesn’t always reveal the truth.
There’s another possibility, Ian reflected. Maybe I really am crazy. Maybe the government doesn’t want escaped mental patients running around the city. Maybe I deserve to be committed, and maybe the people who are after me are just doing their jobs. A voice in Ian’s head assured him that this wasn’t the case. It also suggested that aerial drones and hovertanks might be classified as overkill if the goal was merely patient recovery. But really — how could he know?
Vera’s revelations had caught Ian like a boot to the brisket. And so he sat staring dully at a pile of broken machinery, feeling a growing sense of kinship with the matte grey lumps of cast-off metal. The everyday sounds of traffic, singing birds, barking dogs, passing pedestrians, and other civic phenomena wafted through the workshop window, indicating that life outside the shop was getting on with itself quite nicely, apparently unconcerned with the perils that loomed for Ian. Ian took as much comfort from this as you might take from a barbed-wire blanket.
Vera didn’t appear to notice. She’d switched gears and seemed to be saying something about connections between extra-sensory perception, appliance repair, and precognition, interrupted from time to time by ironically unpredictable mental sojourns into the foggy mists of TV. Ian was fairly sure that none of it made sense.
Then again, he was only half listening. The rest of his mind was stuck in memory lane.
It was stuck on Penny.
Penny would have been better at this, he reflected. She’d have been better at interviewing psychics; better at escaping from mental hospitals; better at solving mysteries about mindwipes and beforelives; better at managing Napoleons, reincarnated terriers, and mental patients who think they live in a novel. She’d always handled being alive better than Ian — the same would have to be true of being dead. Or being mindwiped. Or whatever the hell was happening.
It wasn’t that Penny’s résumé featured wide experience in these areas. It’s just that, where Ian only really hit his stride when embroiled in the pulse-pounding adventure that was paperwork and regulatory compliance, Penny had always been one of those rare, modular people who could fit comfortably into any situation. It was amazing to watch. She slipped into any role as though she were stepping into her favourite bedroom slippers. It was as though a clan of universal remotes and Swiss Army knives had married into the upper tiers of Penelope’s family tree, begetting descendants who’d taken a miss on evolution and just adapted to their surroundings on the spot.
Ian’s internal AV crew pressed his mental playback button, queuing up a series of flashbacks of roles that Penny had played.
She was an investment banker and a community volunteer. She blogged about Irish whisky. She convened neighbourhood book-club meetings, refereed dodgeball matches, and spent two Thursdays a month trying her best to learn Japanese. She baked prize-winning hazelnut macaroons. She was a knitter of misshapen scarves, an off-key shower soprano, a pinball wizard, and a director of Shulman & Faulks Global Securities. She played the flute. She was a bedtime imperialist with expansionistic views regarding mattress space and blankets. She was a novice auto mechanic. She was a snore-whistler. She was a crusader for every person’s right to eat peanut butter from the jar while wearing pyjamas.
She did lots of things that lots of people do. But when Penny did them — even when she messed them up — she seemed to be doing exactly what she was meant to do, as though the universe had carved out a special Penelope-shaped niche and she was filling it in the way that Nature intended.
She was a square peg in a square hole. A fish in water. As far as “being in her element” was concerned — well, you get the idea. Whatever Penny was doing, she was at home.
Psychologists might have chalked this up to self-actualization or the felicitous construction of Penny’s corpus amygdaloideum. Ian would have said that Penny was just being Penny. It’s how she was built. She was comfortable. It was sometimes hard to tell if she adapted to her surroundings or if the world instead adapted itself to her. But whatever the arrangement, Penny had always eased through life with all the cozy familiarity of an ancient family dog nestling into its favourite chair.
You’d be justified in feeling that this all sounds a bit cliché. That is because it does. Popular literature — both in Detroit and elsewhere — is up to its neck in overblown, maudlin accounts of Admirable Womanhood. Consider a few examples. There are bookshelves bursting with stories of Stalwart War Wives — women who bravely follow their husbands into battle or stoically keep the home fires burning. Whole forests have been sacrificed in the printing of tales of Shoulder-Padded Business Broads who are tigresses in the boardroom and minxes in the boudoir. There are libraries stuffed to the rafters with tales of Faithful Wives who dutifully await their sailor husbands, repelling entire armies of suitors through their subtle, feminine wiles. There are more accounts of Warrior Princesses, Adrenaline-Charged Mothers, Compassionate Nurses, Visionary Teachers, Vampire Slayers, Wise Crones, and Sturdy Suffragettes than you could accommodate with the Dewey decimal system, let alone fitting them into an expanded, revised, thirty-volume edition of The Feminine Mystique.
Plenty of these stories are bunk. Not because they feature strong female archetypes, but because their heroines are defined by their relationships to men. This sometimes happens because these stories come from the minds of young male writers whose long-standing, unresolved mother issues are working themselves out through pen and paper.
But sometimes these s
tories are true.
Penny’s story was true. Penny was real. She wasn’t some false, implanted memory Ian had dredged from the neural flows, and not a misremembered remnant from an attempt to wipe his mind. Ian was sure of it, regardless of what the matron, Tonto, and Peericks had suggested. Penny was real. She was the living, breathing, snoring, off-key-singing, bed-space-stealing, investment-banking reason Ian got up in the morning. She was real. She was spectacular, grand, and magnificently flawed. And he would find her. Vera said so.
And Penny would have been better at this, Ian repeated. She could have adapted. She would have handled life in Detroit better than Ian was handling it now.
Take this meeting with Vera. Had Penny been there instead of Ian, she would have gotten straight to the point, sorted through Vera’s predictions, worked out the mysteries about mindwipes and beforelives, and helped to cure Vera of her chronic state of temporal indigestion. And she’d probably have found Ian in time for dinner.
As for Ian — well, Ian was good with rules. Rules made sense. Even the rules that didn’t make sense made more sense to Ian than people. People were messy. And they were even more complicated when they spent part of their day taking little mental vacations into the future or the past.
Penelope could have handled Vera. As for Ian — well, he wasn’t even clear on whether Vera really could repair appliances.
“Are you any good with tools?” Vera asked.
“Hmm?” said Ian, still adrift.
Vera plunked herself onto a stool to Ian’s right. The workbench where they were seated served as the centrepiece of the dusty, windowless workshop in the back of Vera’s shop, and was currently strewn with an assortment of complicated tools and the wreckage of something that looked like a torpedo. This was topped with a large, tangled mass of brightly coloured wires that gave the impression that an aggressive strain of multicoloured angel hair pasta had claimed the region for its own. On the wall above the workbench there was a woodcut bearing the slogan “A tidy workspace is a safe workspace.”
This wasn’t a safe workspace. It was so crowded with disassembled gadgets and mechanical debris that it might have been a memorial to the Android Civil War of 18,002.46
“Tools,” Vera repeated, patiently. “Are you any good with them?”
“About average, I guess,” said Ian, who was.
“Great,” said Vera. “Pass me the hypo-thingamajig somethingorother.”
That isn’t really what she said. But it might as well have been, for all the meaning it held for Ian.
“It looks like a twisty pair of scissors,” she added, helpfully.
Ian looked doubtfully at the heap. He prodded a few likely-looking specimens. Nothing fit the bill. He slid a hand into the tangled mass of wires and levered up the first few strata. It looked exactly like the inside of a pile of tangled wires.
He bushwhacked through a few more feet of wire until he exposed the northwest corner of a scissor handle. He grabbed at it.
It grabbed back. Or it might have bitten him. Ian wasn’t sure exactly what had happened, but whatever had happened ached like a bitten tongue. He “ouched,” yanked his hand from the wires, and did a seated version of the little dance that people do when they stub a toe or hammer a thumb.
He mumbled a curse while thrusting a pair of mildly electrocuted fingers into his mouth. They tasted medium rare.
“Nice,” said Vera, in an eye-rolling tone. She reached across Ian, shoved herself shoulder-deep into the wires, and emerged with something that did, in fact, look like a pair of twisty scissors. They featured a pair of scissor handles connected to two copper prongs that curved together into a nine-inch double helix.
“They bit me,” said Ian, sulkily.
“Don’t be silly,” said Vera, ramping up the eye-rolling tone by a notch or two. She paused to tighten a nut on the helical scissors. “You probably touched a live wire or something,” she said. “Be more careful. Some of this stuff is valuable. Now pass the pliers, if you can.”
Ian passed the pliers.
“So, the ‘appliance repair’ thing isn’t just a front, then,” he observed, showing mastery of the obvious. “You really do repair appliances, I mean.”
“Well, yeah,” said Vera, crinkling her nose. She inserted her pliers and scissors into the backside of the torpedo. She gave a twist. Something inside went “clank,” and she grunted with craftswomanly satisfaction, set down her tools, and mopped her forehead. She stared at Ian briefly, as though wondering what he was. Her aspect shifted to the unfocused, dazed expression common to hungover college students in eight a.m. lectures.
Ian stared back. He had only known Vera for a few hours, but had already gotten used to her little mental vacations away from the here-and-now. He knew this meant she was watching television — possibly looking into the future or the past. It generally took no more than a minute for her to return to our regularly scheduled program.
“Appliances!” she yipped, snapping out of it. “Right. I fix them. It’s a knack — I see how the pieces fit together. It comes naturally. I guess that’s why I can see the future, or maybe the other way around.”
Ian stared at her with a complicated look that was one third “What do you mean?” and two thirds “Don’t bother explaining.”
“It’s what I said before,” said Vera, turning back to her tools and tinkering with a fist-sized object. “Television and appliance repair — they’re connected. Two sides of the same coin. TV gives me a talent for fixing things, and my talent for fixing things lets me use TV. It’s a chicken and egg thing. Screwdriver,” she added, shoving a hand under Ian’s nose.
Ian fielded the request.
“I can rebuild things because I can see their past and future,” said Vera, cranking a screw into the base of the torpedo. “I look into the past and see how machines originally fit together, and I look into the future to see how they’ll work when they’re repaired.”
She grunted with effort as she fiddled with something inside the torpedo.
“But the opposite’s true, too,” she said. “I can see the future and past because I can see how things fit together. Stick tab A into slot B, and the result is bound to be C. Set Ian down path A, he’ll achieve result Z. That sort of thing. I’ve never worried about the details. I see the future, I see the past, and if I look at a complicated bit of machinery” (here she gave an additional grunt of effort) “I know how it works, how to fix it, and what it’s for.”
“Neat,” said Ian, who liked to give credit where it was due.
“That last bit doesn’t usually work on people,” Vera added, picking up a device that might have been the fruit of the blessed union of a crescent wrench and a crowbar.
“Hand me the silvery cylinder by your elbow,” she said.
Ian oh-sured, located the object, and examined it in his hands. It looked like a complicated flashlight.
“What is it?” he asked.
“A Complicated Flashlight,” said Vera. “I built it last year. It makes organic fluids glow in the dark. Traces of blood, semen stains, that sort of thing. I suppose it’d come in handy for crime scene investigations.”
“Why’d you make it?” said Ian, flashing the light on and off with interest.
“Search me,” said Vera. “I must have seen it on TV. Now where was I?”
“Something about seeing what things are for,” said Ian, handing her the flashlight.
“Right,” said Vera.
She detached the lens and peered through it with one eye. “I can see what machines are for, but not people. People aren’t mechanisms — they’re not designed for a purpose. So no matter how tuned-in I am to the way things work, people are always a mess. Except for Tonto.”
This should, of course, be the part where Ian says something like “Huh,” or “What do you mean.” But Ian had seen Tonto in person, and anyone who had
done this knew that there were many things special about Tonto, starting with an outer crust that amounted to a tactical nuclear strike in the war between the sexes. Secondly, Ian was speaking to a medium, and Vera had foreseen whatever it was he’d planned to say. She carried on as though he’d said it.
“Yep, she has a purpose. Only one. It’s almost as though she was designed. Like a tool. Or a machine.” She puffed a breath across the flashlight lens and buffed it with her sleeve.
“You don’t mean that she’s —”
“No, she’s real enough — not a gynoid or anything. She’s flesh and blood. But it’s almost like she was made for one particular task, and nothing else. People aren’t supposed to be like that. They’re . . . well . . . they’re complicated. Messy. Not like spanners or datalinks or saronite reticulators or —”
“What’s her purpose?” said Ian.
“Protecting you. That’s what she’s for. That’s all she’s for. I know it doesn’t make sense. But it’s true. I’m sure of it. It’s almost as though she’s not even real. I mean — well, just look at her, for starters,” she said, her demeanour free of any trace of jealousy or resentment. “That’s just not right. But it’s more than how she looks. Much more. She has no depth. No spark. Barely any character at all. It’s as if she’s just a device — one that was built to keep you safe.”
This seemed more than a little unfair to Tonto, who had gone to bat for Ian numerous times.
“But it doesn’t make sense,” he added. “Tonto came out of the river twenty-five years before I did. She has a whole life of her own. She used to work as a model, she’s been a DDH guide for years and years, she has a personal life — I mean, I assume she does; we haven’t really talked about it. But Tonto’s not just some —”
“I see what I see,” said Vera, shrugging.
“You said yourself that TV can’t be trusted,” Ian protested. “You spent at least twenty minutes telling me that television only gives you vague impressions, and that you can’t really —”
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