by Peter Watts
A lot of families along here, Clarke figures. Adults don’t go in for evocations of the wild kingdom as a rule; it’s kind of hard to retain that esthetic once you’ve grasped the concept of irony.
Here it is: D-18. She taps the doorbell. A muffled musical chime drifts through the closed hatch; a reedy thread of music, a faint voice, the sounds of motion.
The hatch swings open. A stocky girl of about ten looks out at her from under spiky blond bangs. The music wafts around her from the interior of the compartment—Lex’s flute, Clarke realizes.
The smile dies on the girl’s face the instant she lays eyes on Lenie Clarke.
“Hi,” Clarke says. “I was looking for Alyx.” She tries a smile of her own on for size.
It doesn’t fit. The girl takes a stumbling step backward. “Lex…”
The music stops. “What? Who is it?”
The blond girl steps aside, nervous as a cat. Alyx Rowan sits blinded on a couch in the center of the room. One of her hands lowers the flute; the other reaches up to the mother-of-pearl ’phones covering her eyes.
“Hey, Lex,” Clarke says. “Your mom said you’d be here.”
“Lenie! You passed!”
“Passed?”
“Quarantine! They said you and psycho-man were locked up for tests or something. I guess you aced them.” A wheeled rectangular pedestal about a meter high squats in front of the couch, a little obelisk with the same opalescent finish as Alyx’s headset. Alyx sets her ’phones down on top of it, next to an identical pair already at rest.
Clarke limps into the room. Alyx’s face clouds instantly. “What happened to your leg?”
“Rogue squid. Rudder got me.”
Alyx’s friend mutters something from the corner of Clarke’s eye and disappears into the corridor. Clarke turns in her wake.
“Your friend doesn’t like me much.”
Alyx waves a dismissive hand. “Kelly spooks easy. One look and she just flashfeeds all the shit her mom ever spewed about you guys. She’s nice, but she doesn’t high-grade her sources at all.” The girl shrugs, dismissing the subject. “So what’s up?”
“You know that quarantine I was buzzing on about a while back?”
Alyx frowns. “That guy that got bitten. Erickson.”
“Yeah. Well, it looks like he came down with something after all, and the basic thumbnail is we’ve decided to invoke a kind of No Fish-heads policy in Atlantis for the time being.”
“You’re letting them kick you out?”
“I actually think it’s a good idea,” Clarke admits.
“Why? What’s he got?”
Clarke shakes her head. “It’s not really a medical thing, although that’s—part of it. It’s just—feelings are running kind of high right now, on both sides. Your mom and I thought it’d be better if your guys and our guys kept out of each other’s way. Just for a while.”
“How come? What’s going on?”
“Your mom didn’t—?” It belatedly occurs to Clarke that Patricia Rowan might have opted to keep certain things from her daughter. For that matter, she doesn’t even know how much of Atlantis’s adult population has been brought up to speed. Corpses aren’t keen on full disclosure just as a matter of general principle.
Not that Lenie Clarke gives a great crimson turd about corpse sensibilities. Still. She doesn’t want to get in between Pat and—
“Lenie?” Alyx is staring at her, brow furrowed. She’s one of the very few people to whom Clarke can comfortably show her naked eyes; right now, though, Clarke’s glad her caps are in.
She takes a couple of paces across the carpet. Another facet of the pedestal comes into view. Some kind of control panel runs in a strip just below its upper edge, a band of dark perspex twinkling with red and blue icons. A luminous jagged waveform, like an EEG, scrolls horizontally along its length.
“What’s this?” Clarke asks, seizing on the diversion. It’s far too big to be any kind of game interface.
“That? Oh.” Alyx shrugs. “That’s Kelly’s. It’s a head cheese.”
“What!”
“You know, a smart gel. Neuron culture with—”
“I know what it is, Lex. I just—I guess I’m surprised to see one here, after…”
“Wanna see it?” Alyx taps a brief tattoo on the top of the cabinet. The nacreous surface swirls briefly and clears: beneath the newly-transparent facade, a slab of pinkish-gray tissue sits within its circular rim like a bowl of fleshy oatmeal. Flecks of brown glass punctuate the pudding in neat perforated lines.
“It’s not very big,” Alyx says. “Way smaller than the ones they had back in the old days. Kelly says it’s about the same as a cat.”
So it’s evil at least, if not hugely intelligent. “What’s it for?” Clarke wonders. Surely they wouldn’t be stupid enough to use these things after—
“It’s kind of a pet,” Alyx says apologetically. “She calls it Rumble.”
“A pet?”
“Sure. It thinks, sort of. It learns to do stuff. Even if no one really knows how, exactly.”
“Oh, so you heard about that, did you?”
“It’s a lot smaller than the ones that, you know, worked for you.”
“They didn’t w—”
“It’s really harmless. It’s not hooked into life support or anything.”
“So what does it do? You teach it tricks?” The porridge of brains glistens like an oozing sore.
“Kind of. It talks back if you say stuff to it. Doesn’t always make a lot of sense, but that’s what makes it fun. And if you tweak the audio feed right it plays these really cool color patterns in time to music.” Alyx grabs her flute off the couch, gestures at the eyephones. “Wanna see?”
“A pet,” Clarke murmurs. You bloody corpses …
“We’re not, you know,” Alyx says sharply. “Not all of us.”
“Sorry? Not what?”
“Corpses. What does that mean, anyway? My mom? Me?”
Did I say that out loud? “Just—corporate types, I guess.” She’s never spent much time pondering the origin of the term, any more than she’s lost sleep over the etiology of chair or fumarole.
“Well in case you didn’t notice, there’s a lot of other people in here. Crunchers and doctors and just families.”
“Yeah, I know. Of course I know—”
“But you just lump us all together, you know? If we don’t have a bunch of pipes in our chest we’re all just corpses as far as you’re concerned.”
“Well—sorry.” And then, belatedly defensive: “I’m not slagging you, you know. It’s just a word.”
“Yeah, well it’s not just a word to all you fish-heads.”
“Sorry.” Clarke says again. A distance seems to open between them, although neither has moved.
“Anyway,” she says after a while, “I just wanted you to know I won’t be inside for a while. We can still talk, of course, but—”
Movement from the hatchway. A large stocky man steps into the compartment, dark hair combed back, eyebrows knotted together, his whole body a telegraph of leashed hostility. Kelly’s father.
“Ms. Clarke,” he says evenly.
Her guts tighten into a hard, angry knot. She knows that look. She knows that stance, she saw it herself more times than she could count when she was Kelly’s age. She knows what fathers do, she knows what hers did, but she’s not a little girl any more and Kelly’s dad looks very much in need of a lesson …
But she has to keep reminding herself. None of it happened.
PORTRAIT OF THE SADIST AS AN ADOLESCENT
ACHILLES Desjardins learned to spoof the skeeters eventually, of course. Even as a child he knew the score. In a world kept under constant surveillance for its own protection there were only watched and watchers, and he knew which side of the lens he wanted to be on. Beating off was not the kind of thing he could do in front of an audience.
It was barely even the kind of thing he could do in private, for that matter. He had, af
ter all, been raised with certain religious beliefs; clinging to the coattails of the Nouveaux Séparatistes, the Catholic miasma had persisted in Quebec long after it had faded into kitschy irrelevance everywhere else. Those beliefs haunted Achilles every night as he rubbed himself, as the sick hateful images flickered through his mind and hardened his penis. It barely mattered that the skeeters were offline, wobbling drunkenly under the influence of the magnetic mobiles he’d hung over his bed and desk and drawers. It barely mattered that he was already going to hell, even if he never touched himself again for the rest of his life—for hadn’t Jesus said, If you do these things even in your heart, then you have committed them in the eyes of God? Achilles was already damned by his own unbidden thoughts. What more could he lose by acting on them?
Shortly after his eleventh birthday his penis began leaving actual evidence behind, a milky fluid squirted onto the sheets in the course of his nightly debauchery. He didn’t dare ask the encyclopedia about it for two weeks; it took him that long to figure out how to doctor the inquiry logs so Mom and Dad wouldn’t find out. Cracking the private settings on the household Maytag took another three days. You could never tell what trace elements that thing might be scanning for. By the time Achilles actually dared to launder his bedsheets they smelled a lot like Andrew Trites down at the community center, who was twice the size of anyone else in his cohort and whom nobody wanted to stand next to at the rapitrans stop.
* * *
“I think—” Achilles began at thirteen.
He no longer believed in the Church. He was after all an empiricist at heart, and God couldn’t withstand so much as ten seconds’ critical scrutiny from anyone who’d already figured out the ugly truth about the Easter Bunny. Paradoxically, though, damnation somehow seemed more real than ever, on some primal level that resisted mere logic. And as long as damnation was real, confession couldn’t hurt.
“—I’m a monster,” he finished.
It wasn’t as risky a confession as it might have been. His confidante wasn’t especially trustworthy—he’d downloaded it from the net (from Maelstrom, he corrected himself; that’s what everyone was calling it now), and it might be full of worms and trojans even if he had scrubbed it every which way—but he’d also kellered all the I/O except voice and he could delete the whole thing the moment it tried anything funny. He’d do that anyway, once he was finished. No way was he going to leave it ticking after he’d spilled his guts to it.
Dad would go totally triploid if he knew Achilles had brought a wild app anywhere near their home net, but Achilles wasn’t about to risk using the house filters even if Dad had stopped spying since Mom died. And anyway, Dad wasn’t going to find out. He was downstairs, cowled in his sensorium with the rest of the province—the rest of the country now, Achilles had to keep reminding himself—immersed in the pomp and ceremony of Quebec’s very first Independence Day. Sullen, resentful Penny—her days of idolizing Big Brother long past—would have gladly sold him out in a second, but these days she pretty much lived in her rapture helmet. By now it must have worn the grooves right out of her temporal lobes.
It was the birthday of the last new country in the world, and Achilles Desjardins was alone in his bedroom with his confessor.
“What kind of monster?” asked TheraPalTM 6.2, its voice studiously androgynous.
He’d learned the word that very morning. He pronounced it carefully: “A misogynist.”
“I see,” TheraPalTM murmered in his ear.
“I have these—I get these feelings. About hurting them. Hurting girls.”
“And how do they make you feel?” The voice had edged subtly into the masculine.
“Good. Awful. I mean—I like them. The feelings, I mean.”
“Could you be more specific?” There was no shock or disgust in the voice. Of course, there couldn’t be—the program didn’t have feelings, it wasn’t even a Turing app. It was basically just a fancy menu. Still, stupidly, Achilles felt strangely relieved.
“It’s—sexy,” he admitted. “Just, just thinking about them that way.”
“What way, exactly?”
“You know, helpless. Vulnerable. I, I like the looks on their faces when they’re … you know…”
“Go on,” said TheraPalTM.
“Hurting,” Achilles finished miserably.
“Ah,” said the app. “How old are you, Achilles?”
“Thirteen.”
“Do you have any friends who are girls?”
“Sure.”
“And how do you feel about them?”
“I told you!” Achilles hissed, barely keeping his voice down. “I get—”
“No,” TheraPalTM broke in gently. “I’m asking how you feel about them personally, when you’re not sexually aroused. Do you hate them?”
Well, no. Andrea was really smart, and he could always go to her for help with his debugs. And Martine—one time, Achilles had just about killed Martine’s older brother when he was picking on her. Martine didn’t have a mean bone in her body, but that asshole brother of hers was so …
“I—I like them,” he said, his forehead crinkling at the paradox. “I like them a lot. They’re great. Except the ones I want to, you know, and even then it’s only when I…”
TheraPalTM waited patiently.
“Everything’s fine,” Achilles said at last. “Except when I want to…”
“I see,” the app said after a moment. “Achilles, I have some good news for you. You’re not a misogynist after all.”
“No?”
“A misogynist is someone who hates women, who fears them or thinks them inferior in some way. Is that you?”
“No, but—but what am I, then?”
“That’s easy,” TheraPalTM told him. “You’re a sexual sadist. It’s a completely different thing.”
“Really?”
“Sex is a very old instinct, Achilles, and it didn’t evolve in a vacuum. It coevolved with all sorts of other basic drives—fighting for mates, territoriality, competition for resources. Even healthy sex has a strong element of violence to it. Sex and aggression share many of the same neurological paths.”
“Are you—are you saying everyone’s like me?” It seemed too much to hope for.
“Not exactly. Most people have a sort of switch that suppresses violent impulses during sex. Some people’s switches work better than others. The switches in clinical sadists don’t work very well at all.”
“And that’s what I am,” Achilles murmered.
“Very likely,” TheraPalTM said, “although it’s impossible to be sure without a proper clinical checkup. I seem unable to access your network right now, but I could provide a list of nearby affiliated medbooths if you tell me where we are.”
Behind him, the Achilles’s bedroom door creaked softly on its hinges. He turned, and froze instantly at his core.
The door to his bedroom had swung open. His father stood framed in the darkness beyond.
“Achilles,” TheraPalTM said in the whirling, receding distance, “for you own health—not to mention your peace of mind—you really should visit one of our affiliates. A contractually guaranteed diagnosis is the first step to treatment, and treatment is the first step to a healthy life.”
He couldn’t have heard, Achilles told himself. TheraPalTM spoke directly to his earbud, and Dad couldn’t have stopped the telltale from flashing if he’d been listening in. Dad didn’t hack.
He couldn’t have heard TheraPalTM. He could’ve heard Achilles, though.
“If you’re worried about the cost, our rates—” Achilles deleted the app almost without thinking, sick to his stomach.
His father hadn’t moved.
His father didn’t move much, these days. The short fuse, the hair-trigger had rusted into some frozen state between grief and indifference over the years. His once fiery and defiant Catholicism had turned against itself with the fall of the Church, a virulent rage of betrayal that had burned him out and left him hollow. By the time
Achilles’s mom had died there’d barely even been sorrow. (A glitch in the therapy, he’d said dully, coming back from the hospital. The wrong promoters activated, the body somehow innoculated against its own genes, devouring itself. There was nothing he could do. They’d signed a waiver.)
Now he stood there in the darkened hallway, swaying slightly, his fists not even clenched. It had been years since he’d raised a hand against his children.
So what am I afraid of? Achilles wondered, his stomach knotted.
He knows. He knows. I’m afraid he knows …
The corners of his father’s mouth tightened by some infinitesimal degree. It wasn’t a smile. It wasn’t a snarl. In later years, the adult Achilles Desjardins would look back and recognize it as a kind of acknowledgment, but at the time he had no idea what it meant. He only knew that his father simply turned and walked down the hall to the master bedroom, and closed the door behind him, and never mentioned that night ever again.
In later years, he also realized that TheraPalTM must have been stringing him along. Its goal, after all, had been to attract customers, and you didn’t do that by rubbing their faces in unpleasant truths. The program had simply been trying to make him feel better as a marketing strategy.
And yet, that didn’t mean it had lied, necessarily. Why bother, if the truth would do the job? And it all made so much sense. Not a sin, but a malfunction. A thermostat, set askew through no fault of his own. All life was machinery, mechanical contraptions built of proteins and nucleic acids and electricity; what machine ever got creative control over its own specs? It was a liberating epiphany, there at the dawn of the sovereign Quebec: Not Guilty, by reason of faulty wiring.
Odd, though.
You’d have expected it to bring the self-loathing down a notch or two in the years that followed.
BEDSIDE MANOR
GENE Erickson and Julia Friedman live in a small single-deck hab about a hundred meters southeast of Atlantis. Julia has always done most of the housekeeping: Gene gets notoriously twitchy in enclosed spaces. For him, home is the open ridge: the hab is a necessary evil, for sex and feeding and those occasional times when his own darkdreams prove insufficiently diverting. Even then, he treats it the way a pearl diver of two hundred years past would treat a diving bell: a place to gulp the occasional breath of air before returning to the deep.