by wade coleman
“Do I look like I was born yesterday?”
“No, you look sixteen, maybe seventeen by your cheekbones.”
“I’m fifteen.” She smirks.
She’s smiling, that’s a good sign. “I’m not looking for anything illegal. Just standard synthetic bone.”
She steps back, puts her hands on her hips. “Are you working for law enforcement?”
“No.”
“Put your hand on my crotch.”
“Huh?”
“I’ve just identified myself as a minor. Putting your hand on my pussy is sexual assault. No cop in the world will do that.”
She unzips and pulls down her panties.
I pat her bush twice and withdraw my hand.
She zips. “You act like I keep a mousetrap down there.”
She’s smiling, so I think she’s kidding. I try to think of something nice to say. “That’s nice, being a natural blond.”
She smiles and hands me a piece of toilet paper. “Tell Garry that Carry sent you.”
I smile back and take the paper. “Thanks.” I turn around and leave.
When I’m outside the tent, I look at the piece of toilet paper. “Inside. 2nd bathroom, 2nd stall.” It seems like he used an ink stamp to print it. Toilet paper is the only paper you can get your hands on so people get creative with their business cards.
I walk up the concrete steps and go inside the building with a glass front. I dodge around the hookers and find the bathroom.
The place has four rows of ten toilets. This bathroom is a sort of a hooker hotel without rent. Grunts and groans and other noises come from the stalls.
I walk up to the second stall and knock. The latch is open, and the door opens. A guy is getting a blowjob on the toilet, so I shut the door.
I try again in the new row. This time a bald man opens the door.
“Are you Garry?”
“Who wants to know?”
I show him the business card on toilet paper. “Carry said you could help me with my arthritis.”
“What does she look like?”
“She’s a natural blonde.”
Garry smiles.
I smile back.
He lets me in and closes the door to the toilet stall. The partition to the left is missing. It’s two toilets with a card table between them. The other door is wired shut. On top of the table are large bore needles and tubes. Some tubes are labeled, “Synth Bone.” The others are colored red and blue with no writing.
“Carry is excellent at vetting new clients.” He points to a toilet seat.
I sit down.
Garry looks at my hand. “I’m not a doctor, but that joint isn’t going to get better on its own.”
I nod.
“Do you want to do some preventive maintenance? Replace some bone before it goes bad?”
I nod. “Yes, let’s do that. How much does it cost?”
He points to his fingertip. “First the distal phalanges- that’s the bones in your fingertips. Then you have to wait three days before you can work on the next set.”
“How much?” I ask again.
“What kind of bone do you want?” He raises an eyebrow.
“Standard synthetic bone.”
He frowns for a second. I think he’s disappointed. Then he shrugs.
“Okay, I’ll do fingertip bones for a hundred credits a bone if you buy in bulk.”
“What does that mean?” I ask.
“I do all ten of your distal phalanges today. Come back in four days, and I’ll do the next set for another thousand credits.”
I nod. “Okay, Let's do this,” I say, and hand Garry my gift card. He scans it on his phone, and it beeps. “Do you want pain meds?”
“Does it hurt?”
“Not really.” He smiles and looks away.
Doctor Kline said it was excruciating. Garry is lying to me. “How much for nerve block?”
“Five hundred credits a hand.”
“Nah,” I say.
Garry smiles. “You sure?”
I nod.
“You don’t mind if I get ready?” he asks and snorts a bottle that looks like nose spray.
Garry puts it away and picks up a cylinder of synth bone and screws on a outsized needle. He takes hold of my pinky finger with his other hand and holds the needle in the center of the finger pad. “If you don’t hold still, it’s super bad for you.”
“Do me.”
Garry pushes a button. Spring releases; the needle penetrates my skin and digs into my bone.
My feet twitch, but my hand doesn’t move.
Garry puts down the bone injector and moves to a device that looks like a lamp. He turns it on and adjusts the arm, so it’s six inches from my pinky.
“This transmits power to the nanites,” he says. “You should feel them working.”
Soon, I can feel the tiny machines chopping up my bone. Fire burns my bones from the inside out. A few minutes later, a tube rises inside my finger and pokes through the skin. Grey bone and red blood erupt like a boil from my fingertip.
Garry retrieves a stainless-steel dog bowl from under the table and puts my hand inside.
He picks up the injector. “You ready?”
“Do me.”
Funny thing about pain, it’s only nerve impulses to the brain. There’s nothing you can do about it. So I lean back and relax.
Garry injects me. “Doesn’t that hurt?”
“Yeah, but if you go into the pain, instead of trying to run away from it – the pain will run from you.”
Garry takes another snort from his nose spray and shoots my middle finger.
My feet twitch underneath me, but my hand is still. “Next.”
He moves down to my index finger and injects.
It hurts so much that the pain is uniform in its intensity. Then the pain fades as the neurons become bored telling my brain what it already knows.
Garry puts down the injector and puts in a large bore needle. “This is for the thumb. It gets two shots.”
I put my other hand in the bowl and say, “Do both thumbs.”
He puts down the injector, takes a snort of his nose spray and picks it back up.
He injects it twice into my right thumb and then my left. My blood and bone pool in the bowl.
Garry puts in the smaller bore needle and works on my left-hand fingertip bones.
My fingers burn and erupt like little bone volcanos.
“The nanites slowly remove the bone at the ends,” Garry says. “That’s where the ligaments attach.” He lights a cigarette and adjusts the lamp. “The ligaments can get loose if you move around. I am going to put on splints after clean up.”
We sit and watch the bone and blood collect in the bowl. When the flow stops, Garry gets up and opens the stall door.
We walk to the sinks and get in line.
Johns and hookers are getting cleaned up. Guys have their dicks in the sink. Women splash water and wipe up with paper towels they carry in a backpack.
When it’s our turn at the sink, Garry’ says, “You can run cold water on your fingertips.” Robots on wheels whisk out full trashcans while another robot brings in an empty container.
The cold water runs over my fingertips and washes off the drying blood. It feels good.
To my right, a hooker is getting fucked on the sink.
“The bone is ninety percent replaced,” Garry says while he watches. “In a few hours, it will be ninety-nine.” He leads me back to the stall and opens the lock.
I sit back down on my toilet seat while Garry closes the door in the stall. He motions me to put my hands under the lamp.
After I put my hands close to the device, I can feel a pricking sensation. It’s not pain; it’s more like being pinched.
Garry slides on a foam tube over my pinky. It shrinks down and hardens against my finger. “You can take them off by running cold water on them in the morning. Bring them back, you’ll need them for next time.
He slides on
e on the next finger.
“What are these?”
“Finger braces, you can get them at a drug store for five credits. They say you shouldn’t re-use them. But they are fine if you wash them in hot water.”
“What happens if you break a synthetic bone?”
“You get one of these things,” Garry says and points to the device that looks like a heat lamp. “You give the nanites some power, and they reform back into their original shape and size.”
He finishes putting the braces on and stands up. “You can take them off in the morning. Don’t pick up anything heavier than a glass of water for a few days.”
He opens the door to the stall. “Do you need any pain meds to help you sleep?”
“The fingertips throb with my pulse, but they don’t hurt.”
“That’s inflammation. Justice ice them and you’ll be fine.”
Garry smiles, “I’d shake your hand, but…”
I smile back, put my hands in my jacket pocket, and walk out of the bathroom.
I get outside and take a deep breath and clear my lungs of the bathroom sex smells. It’s not even noon when I head back.
I walk past the same group of women on the steps and head to the first-floor cafeteria. I get a fake banana shake, and I rest my fingertips against the glass. The cold feels good.
Next time, I’ll have ice packs ready in my mini-freezer. I don’t think I ever used it before. In fact, I don’t even know if it’s plugged in.
My fingertips throb and I suck on the straw.
I need to think this through better for next time.
CHAPTER 9
I bought a two thousand credit drawing program for my skull computer. For another two thousand credits, I got an A.I. that’s a registered civil, electrical and mechanical engineer. I needed the precision of an engineering program for next step in translating Ancient.
Each letter on the Mars tablets is seven millimeters tall. They look equally spaced, but my gut says they’re not. My gut is rarely wrong; it’s smarter than my brain.
I imported the picture of the first tablet into the drawing program. I set it to scale, and then I overlaid grid lines at a hundred thousand per meter or a hundredth of a millimeter.
Now I’m sitting the bed and look at the TV. The grid lines overlay the letters. It will take me months or maybe years to make all the measurements. I’ll create tables. Tables have grid lines that hold information in calming rows and comforting columns.
But I don’t have any paper. I like writing things down. It helps ground my thoughts. I can make hand gestures to move things around on a screen. But it’s not the same. Like fake banana shakes. It’s not a banana; it’s something else.
I take a deep breath and let out a sigh. “It’s fine,” I say out loud.
I get off the bed and stand in front of my TV screen. I select the measurement tool and touch it to the first letter on the first Mars Tablet. Then I measure the second figure down from the top. “7.070” millimeters is the spacing.
“Good Number,” I say.
I measure eight more letters then I get a new value: 7.080.
I smile and look in the mirror. The skin around my eyes is crinkling. That’s a sign of a genuine smile.
I return to the screen and start measuring.
A paper clip pops up on the screen. “Hi, it looks like you’re measuring. Would you like me to make a table and record the information?”
“No, I’ve got it,” I say. “I bet there’s only gonna be one or two different numbers on the whole tablet.”
“Yes, that’s correct,” the paper clip says.
I take a deep breath and sigh. “I suppose you already made the rows and columns.”
“What kind of personal assistant would I be if I didn’t make tables?”
I sit on the bed and look at the paperclip on the screen. “I wanted to do that.”
“You like tables?”
“I love tables,” I reply.
The paperclip nodes his wiry head. “I understand.”
I nod back. Computers are good at understanding but not so much on feeling.
“Are these letters?” the paperclip asks.
“Ancient Martian. They’re aluminum alloy tablets found on Mars.”
“What does it say?”
“I don’t know.”
“Does anyone know?”
“Yes, but I can’t afford the translation.”
“Well… when you have a problem, the first thing is to put together a list things you know, and then you can tackle the things you don’t know.”
“That’s a short list,” I reply. “Because all I know is on this screen. You tell me what it means.”
“I’m an engineer, not a language expert. Let’s go back to the beginning. When did they find the tablets?”
“Fifty-three years ago during a mining exploration. They kept finding buried nickel-iron balls that are magnetic. They mapped their location, and it made a trail to the Mars Tablets.”
“Leaving a trail of magnets is as low tech as it gets. The people who buried the tablets wanted someone to find them.”
I nod in agreement. “Yeah, Each tablet has an arrow to let you know the direction of the letters.”
“Seems like the people who made the tablets what them to be translated.”
“How often are the letters spaced farther apart?” I ask.
“Every… 4 to 14 letters there is more space.”
“Okay, put rectangles around the letters,” I say.
“Let me make sure I understand you,” the paperclip says. “When the letter is farther apart, that means it’s the end of a word and the beginning of the next. So I should put a box around the letters that form a word.”
I nod.
The screen blinks, the tiny grid lines go away, and I can see the whole tablet with vertical rectangles around the letters.
I point to the screen. “So that’s a word.”
“A ninety-eight percent probability with a one in twenty chance of error.”
“That means pretty sure.”
He bends into a nod.
“Anything else about the letters? I count forty different symbols.”
“Yes,” he says. “I count forty.”
“Is each letter the same?”
“You mean, for example, does every letter that looks like Pi, the same height, and width?”
I nod.
“No,” the paperclip says, “when Pi comes at the end of a word, it’s a little bit bigger: about one percent. Also, the letter that looks like a square and the one that looks like a triple crown is slightly bigger at the end of a word.”
“Can you put a space between words?”
The paperclip raises an eyebrow symbol. “The picture is a massive raster file that’s difficult to manipulate.” The screen clears. “I need to convert it to a vector drawing.”
“What’s that?” I ask.
“Drawing programs use vector files. That means a line has attributes, that is, a direction in the x, y, and z-axis. Since these are letters, I don’t need to give them depth, so I only need the horizontal and vertical dimensions.
I nod, and the screen blinks.
“I’ve finished tracing each letter… removing the picture files… and save as.”
The screen changes to black letters on a white background.
“This is a much smaller file,” the paperclip says. “You’re almost out of storage space. May I delete the pictures files?”
I nod, since I have a copy in my skull computer.
On the screen are Ancient letters with spacing between words.
“Can you make the letter Pi ten percent bigger when it’s the last letter?” I ask.
I look at the screen. “Twenty percent…” I stare at the screen. “Thirty percent… Yeah, I like that.”
“Can you flip the letters, so it reads like English - left to right?”
He doesn’t bother to answer. He rotates the letters before I finish the sentenc
e.
I look at the document. It’s a foreign language, but it’s in a form that’s familiar.
“If you want, you can publish these documents for free on the AutoCAD website. They have a place for users to share their projects.”
I nod.
The paperclip grows a set of pinched together eyebrows. I know the look. Mother uses it when she wants to tell me something. The eyebrows mean concern. Mother’s been explaining to other programs that I’m autistic. I know because all the A.I’s are using the same facial features.
A chair appears, and the paperclip sits on it. “I’m an engineering program,” the wireframe man says. “I turn 3D reality into numbers and perform precise operations. I have to be precise because I am designing buildings, dams, and roads. Public safety is involved, and I cannot lie.”
I nod at the paperclip.
He crosses his skinny legs, “Do you know that your building’s artificial intelligence is an attorney?”
I nod.
“Do know that she’s the only program in the world required to look after your best interest?”
I shake my head to say no.
“We live in a carefully crafted and negotiated world between A.I.’s and humans. From a big picture, it’s for the greater good. Not just humans, but for A.I.s, animals, plants, and rivers.”
The paper clip pauses and twists and crosses his legs to the other side. “Sometimes for the greater good, some people end up in difficult circumstances. It’s regrettable, but that’s the situation. Do you understand what I am saying?”
I nod.
“Please elaborate.”
Now I know he’s talking to Mother, probably in real time. That’s her thing to say, ‘please elaborate.’
“Class D citizens like me get less,” I reply.
He nods. “Yes, that’s right.”
“I want you to think about everything I said.” He folds his wireframe hands. “Now let me ask you again. Do you want to publish your findings?”
I think for a minute and then say, “What are a bunch of Nancy boy professors gonna do? Deny me tenure?”
The paper clip smiles. “More than likely they hire a bunch of thugs to teach you a lesson.”
“If I die doing something good that has honor... Right?”
One eyebrow goes up on the paperclip. “From your perspective, I can see the merit of your argument.” The clip smiles. “I’ll wait until tomorrow morning to publish our findings.”