All the Birds in the Sky

by Charlie Jane Anders

  In spite of Reginald’s insistence that the Caddy was not at all creepy, his hard sell was in itself kind of creepy. He sounded like someone who had just joined a cult. Patricia vowed that she would never, ever buy a Caddy. Ever.

  Two days later, Patricia was in the Caddy store, near Union Square. It was narrow, with curving walls that drew you toward the counter at the back, like a stream curving around some rocks. The walls seemed to glow. Patricia picked up a Caddy from the display on one wall, and the screen flared to life. There was a swirl of colors, and then it resolved into a wheel shape. The wheel had swirls coming out of its center, sort of like a Daoist symbol, and each of them got bigger at her touch. They included things like Communication, Orientation, Self-Expression, and Introspection.

  She paid for the Caddy with her ATM card and felt like a total wanker. Next she would go get some giant square dark glasses and a medallion that changed color depending on how recently she got laid. God.

  Still, it was a fun toy—and at this point she would try anything to make herself feel less claustrophobic and self-absorbed. Although there was something perverse about buying a device that offered a huge “Introspection” wedge, in the hope that it would make her more social.

  That night, Patricia sat in bed and played with her new Caddy. It was not that different from a standard tablet, except for the guitar-pick shape, and the way it insisted on asking demented questions to customize your experience. Like, “Would you rather lose your sense of smell or taste? When was the last time you were glad you stayed up late?” There was a checkbox to disable the questions, but everybody said they made it work a million times better and they tapered off after a day.

  And sure enough, after a few days, the Caddy was steering her oh-so-gently toward happy accidents and little discoveries. There was that little egg-themed restaurant in Hayes Valley, where everybody sat in egg chairs and ate egg dishes, from Scotch eggs to Chinese-style egg tarts. And drank cocktails with egg yolks. The whole place was an allergy waiting to happen, but it was also warm and cozy and there was a faint smell of butter and sugar in the air, making her feel like she was in her grandma’s kitchen and five years old.

  The Caddy helped Patricia to figure out which bus to take to avoid being late for work, and when one of her mary janes broke a strap, the Caddy steered her to a hole-in-the wall place that fixed it on the spot. Within a few days, Patricia had a low-level awareness of what a dozen or so people in her life were up to at any given moment, without feeling overwhelmed. She managed to grab lunch with a very apologetic Taylor and make time for an ice-cream conference with Deedee and Racheline.

  Then something weird happened. Right around the time Patricia had gotten used to the Caddy and started thinking of it as an extension of her personality rather than an appliance—after about five days, in other words—she started running into Laurence. A lot. At lunch, at dinner, at tea, on the bus, in the park. At first, it didn’t seem like a big deal, since San Francisco was a tiny town, but after a couple days, it felt weird. She would see Laurence, say hi and mumble a few awkward words, and then bail. And then the process would repeat, a couple hours later. She would think he was stalking her, except that she was the least stalkable person ever. The third day, she tried shaking up her routine, going for vegan soul food in the Outer Sunset, and somehow Laurence was there, too, going to some kind of Musée Mécanique revival.

  “Uh, hey again,” he said. He started to say something else, but seemed to think better of it.

  She was already saying “Hey” and turning back to talk to Taylor.

  She wasn’t trying to avoid Laurence, exactly. But at the same time, she wasn’t dying to hang out with someone who had promised Kawashima that he would keep her from getting a swelled head. She already had enough people giving her shit for Aggrandizement, she didn’t need a friend who was sworn to tear her down. Of course, this had been Kawashima’s plan all along: If he’d told Patricia she wasn’t allowed to hang out with Laurence any more, she’d have been pissed, and would have hung out with Laurence anyway. So instead, Kawashima tells Patricia to hang out with Laurence all she wants—then enlists Laurence’s aid in cutting her down to size. Thus ensuring she’ll never want to see him again. That she saw through this ploy did not prevent it from working perfectly.

  On her break at work, she picked up her Caddy and scrawled, “What’s the deal with Laurence?” with her finger. The Caddy responded by telling her some facts about Laurence, including some physics prize he’d won at MIT. She couldn’t help feeling like the Caddy understood perfectly well what she was asking, and was just playing dumb.

  She decided to leave the Caddy at home. And for a whole day, her life was boring again, just missing the bus and not connecting with her friends and not having time to grab dinner in the middle of running errands. The rain started as she was heading home for the night and she had forgotten her umbrella, and there was no place to buy one. And of course she had to run ten blocks to catch the bus—which left just as she got there. She waited another half an hour, under a disintegrating canopy, for the next bus, and when she staggered on board, drenched as a sponge, the only empty seat was next to Laurence.

  “Oh shit,” Laurence said. “You are fucking soaked. Jesus, I’m so sorry. That is fucked up.” He gave her his nice cotton hoodie to use as a towel. She tried to say it was cool and he didn’t have to do that, but he kept shoving it at her.

  “Thanks.” Patricia patted herself with the hoodie as best she could. “At least the heat wave finally broke.”

  “This bus doesn’t go to your place, does it? I mean, you have to change buses,” Laurence said. Patricia admitted that this might be the case. “Well, I understand if you need to get home right away. But there’s a bar up here on the right that has an actual open fireplace, and they serve hot toddies and stuff. We ought to get you warmed up as soon as possible.”

  The bar had a “hunting lodge” theme, complete with slabs of wood covering the walls and faux animal heads coming out of one wall that squicked Patricia at first. But they got a primo spot in front of the fireplace, and the scent of mesquite and woodsmoke was a rain antidote. The stereo played an album of acoustic covers of Steely Dan, featuring a bluesy female mezzo-soprano, and Patricia guessed it was called Steely Danielle.

  Laurence brought Patricia a mug of hot chocolate and a shot of nice whiskey, which she could consume together or separately, her choice. She drank most of the hot chocolate and then sipped the whiskey to burn away the milky sweetness. The whiskey was sharp in the way that really nice cheese is sharp. She started to feel comfortable in her own skin again.

  “I suspect I’m being punished for leaving my Caddy at home,” Patricia confessed.

  This was not the first time Laurence had heard people talk about their Caddies as if they were jealous gods. He told her about all the odd superstitions—for lack of a better word—that people had about their teardrop-shaped computers. One person might believe his Caddy saved his marriage, and then you’d run into someone else whose Caddy destroyed her marriage, but she later decided it was for the best. People sold their houses and got rid of their cars because their Caddies showed them a simpler way to live. A few people even found God, actual God, thanks to their Caddies. People were attached to them in a way that nobody ever had been to their iPhones or BlackBerries.

  “That’s not creepy at all,” said Patricia. She wondered if she should just throw it away.

  “On the one hand, it’s finally fulfilling the promise of technology, of making your life easier,” Laurence said. “Simpler, or more full of excitement, depending on what you want. On the other hand, people are outsourcing some crucial life stuff to these things.”

  “I notice you don’t have a Caddy.” Patricia’s whiskey glass was empty. She bought another round for herself and Laurence.

  “I have three at home,” Laurence said. “I jailbroke one, and now it doesn’t work quite the same. There’s something about the OS that resists any kind of analysi
s. You can install Wildberry Linux on them and they work just like any other tablet, but nothing fancy.”

  They fell into a long silence. The fire crackled and the Steely Dan cover CD reached its triumphant final track, which was predictably “Rikki Don’t Lose That Number.” Patricia felt like she should say something about why she’d been avoiding Laurence, in spite of her Caddy’s attempts to smush them together. She wasn’t sure what to say.

  “That promise,” Laurence said out of nowhere. “The one that your friend made me agree to. Not the first one, the one where I go mute forever if I blab, but the other one.”

  “Yeah.” Patricia tensed and felt a chill on the inside, in spite of the firelight and whiskey glow.

  “It’s riddled with loopholes,” Laurence said. “Even apart from the fact that there’s no penalty for breaking it. I mean, I never should have agreed to it, and I wouldn’t have if I’d been less drunk. It’s not my job to police someone else’s self-esteem, not in any sane world. But in any case, it’s a meaningless promise.”

  “How so?”

  “I’ve been thinking about it a lot, and the wording is so imprecise that it’s not even a promise, in any real sense. I’m supposed to keep you from getting an unrealistically high opinion of yourself—but if, say, I happen to believe that you’re the coolest person I know, then I’m unlikely to think you’re overestimating your own coolness. It’s dependent on my own opinion, plus my estimation of what your opinion of yourself is. That’s a whole bunch of subjective criteria, right there. Add to that the fact that I only said I would do my best, which is yet another subjective judgment. If I made it my life’s work to break that promise, I’m not sure I could find a way.”

  “Huh.” And now Patricia felt dumb, so Laurence had succeeded in crushing her ego after all. She should have seen that Kawashima was just creating one of his intentionally flimsy traps, where the real trap is that you fool yourself into believing the snare to be robust. But she also felt better—and then the part where Laurence sort of hinted that he thought she was the coolest person he’d ever met sank in as well, even if it was just a rhetorical supposition.

  “And you know these people way better than I do,” Laurence said, “but it strikes me that this thing about Aggrandizement is a way of controlling you. They don’t want you to use your power, except for however they tell you to.”

  At last, the rain stopped and Patricia had dried out except for her shoes. They headed for two separate bus stops, although their route coincided for four blocks. They hugged goodbye. When Patricia got home she gazed at her Caddy while brushing her teeth, like a blank mirror, and it filled her in on everything she’d missed. Before she sank into her bed, she tossed the Caddy back in her shoulder bag.

  21

  SOMETIMES LAURENCE ZONED out and imagined walking on another Earth-like planet. The weird gravity. The different mix of oxygen, carbon, and nitrogen in the air. Types of life that might defy our definitions of “plant” or “animal.” More than one moon, maybe more than one sun. His heart could burst, just with the newness of it: digging bare feet into soil that no human toes had ploughed, under a brazen sky that proclaimed all the things we had thought our limits were merely our prejudices. And then he snapped back, to the reality that his team was stuck: no closer to opening up the final frontier than a year earlier.

  He would come out of his reverie to find another e-mail from Milton, who wanted progress reports that included actual progress. These e-mails contained phrases like “Humanity strides along a widening precipice.” Some days, Laurence struggled to motivate himself to go in to work, and once there, he couldn’t bring himself to leave.

  When he talked to Serafina about his work, he kept the details vague—as far as Serafina knew, his team was working on a theoretical antigravity thing, that could yield some practical application years from now, if ever. But he longed to show off the finished product to Serafina, and spread his arms wide as the Pathway to Infinity burst open behind him. That would be the crowning moment of his life.

  Which is why, when Priya said she wanted to be the first weightless person on Earth, Laurence scarcely hesitated.

  * * *

  PRIYA HAD THESE amazing hands that she gestured with when she talked, and it was like she was making shapes in your brain. Her fingers were long and rippled with indentations, and she wore chunky rings, with big fake sapphires. Plus pastel acrylic nails.

  Sougata had been staring at Priya for weeks across the hAckOllEctIvE, watching her solder, wearing safety goggles that only made her look more elfin. She constructed some kind of wireless-enabled burrowing robot that could hide small objects where you’d never find them without the right PGP key.

  Laurence was like, “You should sneak her up here and show her the antigrav, and the not-quite-antimatter. She’ll be yours forever, man.”

  Anya and Tanaa fought against letting Priya inside their headquarters, on the grounds that she would tell everyone else in the hAckOllEctIvE, and there would be drama. The hackerspace had some cool people, but there were also people who still thought it was awesome to build your own two-second time machine.

  “We’re doing serious research here,” said Tanaa. “Nothing is a toy. Well, except for Six-Fingered Steve.” She gestured at the tiny tap-dancing robot, who heard his name and made jazz hands with too many digits. Disturbing, as always.

  “This is a top-secret research facility, disguised as a clubhouse,” concurred Anya, who was wearing jodhpurs and riding boots, plus a puffy T-shirt with Debbie Harry on it, with a belt around Debbie’s neck. Anya had just dyed her hair candy pink.

  Laurence and Sougata both looked around the loft, with the exposed ceiling beams and posters for The Gossip and James Bond movies, plus beanbags and a corduroy sofa. The disco ball doubled as a security system. The “clubhouse” disguise was very cunning indeed.

  Soon enough, Priya was flexing one long, sparkly finger at Six-Fingered Steve and watching him dance. “His reaction time is impressive,” she said with only a slight Punjabi accent. “I would have given him some kind of central gyro, for balance.”

  After a couple hours hanging out and tinkering, Priya was like part of the group and she swore on all that was unholy not to tell anybody else about their hideaway. Laurence explained to her about the antigravity thing: “The goal is to negate gravity, to change the spin of all the electrons in your body so that your mass is effectively shunted somewhere else.”

  “Like another dimension,” Priya said. “Because of the theory that gravity is a stronger force in other universes.”

  “Yes,” said Tanaa. “So you would still be here, but your mass would be elsewhere.”

  “All of this is just a means to an end, though,” added Sougata. “We think if we can solve the gravity problem, we can create stable worm—” Anya kicked him and he coughed and said, “pie. Worm pie.”

  “Mmm,” said Priya, “worm pie. My favorite.”

  “It’s a delicacy,” said Laurence. “Someplace. We don’t know where, but we’re going to go there and enter a contest, once we’ve perfected our recipe.”

  A couple weeks passed. Everybody got used to having Priya around. Meanwhile, the team finally had some real success with the machine. First a golf ball, then a baseball, then a boiled egg, then a hamster named Ben—they all let slip their surly bonds at the flick of a button, then returned to normal weight at a second button press.

  In theory, a person could crouch on the glowy white disk, with the giant red nozzle aimed at it, and be bathed in the full effect of the antigravitation rays.

  “But I’d want to do a lot more testing before doing any human subjects experimentation,” said Anya.

  “Can I try it?” Priya said. “I want to be the first weightless person on Earth, so my name can be misspelled in every record book, forever and ever.” Anya started to protest, but then Priya said, “Conventional Newtonian gravitation is so last year.”

  Everybody giggled. Priya always knew just the right thi
ngs to say.

  The others looked at Laurence, who slowly nodded. “Yes,” he said. “I think we can make that happen.”

  An hour later, Laurence was frantically dialing Patricia, praying that she hadn’t left her cell phone at home or turned it off for some witchy festival. She picked up, and he started talking immediately. “Hey, I desperately need your help. We have tampered with forces that people were not meant to fuck around with, and we seem to have pushed Sougata’s girlfriend into another plane of existence, where we have no way of locating her or even proving that she still exists, and we’ve basically exhausted all scientific options and don’t worry I won’t tell the others about your secret, just please help.”

  “Wait a minute,” Patricia said. “Sougata has a girlfriend now?”

  “We didn’t account for the extra mass, and the correspondingly greater level of attraction in the other universe,” said Laurence, as if that answered her question.

  “I’ll be there in a few,” Patricia said. “I’m just up the street.”

  When Patricia got to the cement blockhouse and Laurence came down to let her in, she barely had time to impress upon him the fact that his friends must not find out about her skills. No matter what.

  “Sure, sure,” said Laurence. “Of course. Soul of discretion. No worries at all. Just please, please, if you can, please help. I will be in your debt forever.” He was climbing the stairs behind her and as they reached the top step, Patricia turned and practically glared at him.

  “Never, ever say that to me.” Incandescent.

  “Say what?”

  “The thing about being in my debt. It has a different meaning for me than it does for most people.”

  “Oh. Oh, right. Okay. Well, I will be super-grateful. Anyway, it’s over here.”

  Sougata, Anya, and Tanaa stared at the shining white circle under the big ray-gun barrel, and didn’t acknowledge Patricia’s arrival until she was standing next to them.

  “What’s she doing here?” Sougata said.