“Buy you dinner?” he asked. He didn’t flinch when he looked at me.
From the angle of the light outside, I realized it was nearly sunset. “As long as we can get it someplace standing up.”
* * *
That meant street meat, and three hot dogs with everything were the best food I’d ever tasted. Numair drank beer but he didn’t eat pork, so he ate potato chips and watched me lean forward so the chili and onions didn’t drip down my filthy shirt. I knew it was ridiculous, but I did it anyway. It felt like preserving my dignity to care. What dignity? I wasn’t sure. But it still mattered.
“I’m sorry,” Numair said. “I’m really sorry. If I’d realized you didn’t know about Rose—I just never imagined. You two were so close. And you never mentioned her—I figured you didn’t want to talk about her.”
“I didn’t.” We’d had a fight, I wanted to say. Something to absolve myself of not checking. But when she stopped logging in, I figured she’d just decided to cut me off. She wouldn’t be the first, and I knew she had another life. A wife. We’d talked about telling her she was having an affair.
And then she’d just … stopped messaging. People fall out of social groups all the time. It happens. I guess somebody more secure wouldn’t have assumed they were the problem. But I was used to being the problem. Numair’s the only friend I have left from the gang I hung around with all the time in grad school.
I swallowed hot dog, half-chewed. It hurt. He handed me an open can of soda, and I washed the lump down. “How’d she die?”
She hadn’t been old. I mean, she hadn’t skinned old. But who knew what the hell that meant, in the real world.
“She killed herself,” Numair said, bluff and forthright. Which was just like him.
I staggered. Literally, sideways two steps. I couldn’t catch myself because the last hot dog was balanced against my chest on the pristine cast. I already had the instinct to protect that food. I guess you don’t have to get too hungry to learn fast.
“Jesus,” I said, and felt bad.
He made a comforting face. And that was when I realized that if he could see me, he wasn’t skinning. “Numair. You came all the way down here for me?”
“Charlie. Like I’d let an old friend go down without some help.” He put a hand on my shoulder and pulled it back, frowning. He looked around, disgusted. “You know, you hear on the news how bad it is out here. But you never really get it until you see it. Poisoned environment, whatever. But this is astounding. Look, we can get you a hearing. Appeal your status. Maybe get you a new number. You can stay with Ilona and me until it’s settled.”
There were horror vids about this sort of thing. The baselines lived outside of social controls, after all. There was nothing to keep them from committing horrible crimes. “You’re going to take in a baseline? That’s a lot of trust. I’m a desperate woman.”
He smiled. “I know you.”
* * *
Ilona only knew me as a skin, but when I showed up at her house in the unadorned flesh, she couldn’t have been nicer. She, too, had turned off her skinning so she could see me and interact. I could tell she was uncomfortable with it, though—her eyes kept flicking off my face to look for the hypertext or chase a link pursuant to the conversation, and of course there was nothing there. So after a bit she just showed me the bathroom, brought me clean clothes and a towel, and went back to her phone, where (she said) she was working on a deadline. She was an advertising copywriter, and she and Numair had converted one corner of their old house’s parlor into an office space. I could hear her clicking away as I stripped off my filthy clothing and dropped it piece by piece into the bathroom waste pail. It was hard, one-handed, and it was even harder to tape the plastic bag around my cast.
It had never bothered me to discard ruined clothing before, but now I found it anxiety-inducing. That’s still good. Somebody could wear that. I set the shower for hot and climbed in. The water I got fell in a lukewarm trickle; barely wetting me.
They probably skinned it hotter when they showered.
I tried to linger, to savor the cleanliness, but the chill of the water in a chilly room drove me out to stand dripping on the rug. As I was dressing in Ilona’s jeans and sweatshirt, the sound of a child crying filtered through.
I came out to find Numair up from his desk, changing a diaper in the nook beside the kitchen. His daughter’s name was Mercedes; she’d always been something of a little pink blob to me. I came up to hand him the grease for her diaper rash and saw the spotted blood on the diaper he had pushed aside.
“Christ,” I said. “Is she all right?”
“She’s nine months old, and she’s starting her menses,” he said, lower lip thrust out in worry. I noticed because I was looking up at the underside of his chin. “It’s getting more common in very young girls.”
“Common?”
With practiced hands, he attached the diaper tabs and sealed up Mercedes’ onesie. He folded the soiled diaper and stuck it closed. “The doctor says it’s environmental hormones. It can be skinned for—they’ll make her look normal to herself and everyone else until she’s old enough to start developing.” He shrugged and picked up his child. “He says he treats a couple of toddlers with developing breasts, and the cosmetic option works for them.”
He looked at me, brown eyes warm with worry.
I looked down. “You think that’s a good enough answer?”
He shook his head. I didn’t push it any further.
* * *
They put me to sleep in their guest room, and fed me—unskinned, the food was slop, but it was food, and I got used to them not being able to see or talk to me at mealtimes. After a week, I felt much stronger. And as it was obvious that Numair and Ilona’s intervention was not going to win me any favors from Revenue, I slowly came up with another plan.
I couldn’t find Jean-Khalil under the bridge. His fire circle was abandoned, his blankets packed up. He’d moved on, and I didn’t know where. Good deed delivered.
You’d think, right? Until it clicked what I was missing.
I showed up at the free clinic first thing next Tuesday morning, just as Dr. Tankovitch had suggested. And I waited there until Dr. Tankovitch walked in and with her, his gaunt hand curved around a cup of coffee, Dr. Jean-Khalil Samure.
He didn’t look surprised to see me. My clothes were clean, and the cast was only a little dingy. I’d shaved, and I was surprised he recognized me without the split lip and the swelling.
“Jean-Khalil,” I said.
I guessed accosting the clinic doctors wasn’t what you did, because Dr. Tankovitch looked as if she might intercept me, or call for security. But Jean-Khalil held out a hand to pause her.
He smiled. “Charlie. You look like you’re finding your feet.”
“I got help from a friend.” I frowned and looked down at my borrowed tennis shoes. Ilona’s, and too big for me. “I can’t do this, Jean-Khalil. You’ve got to help me.”
I’m sure the clinic had all sorts of problems with drug addicts. Because now Dr. Tankovitch was actively backing away, and I saw her summoning hand gestures. I leaned in and talked faster. “I need your tax number,” I said. “You’re not using it. Look, all I need is to get back on my feet, and I can help you in all sorts of ways. Money. Publicity. I’ll come volunteer at your clinic—”
“Charlie,” he said. “You know that’s not enough. The way you live—the way you have been living. That’s a lie. It’s not sustainable. It’s addictive behavior. If everybody could see the damage they’re doing, they’d behave differently.”
I pressed my lips together. I looked away. Down at the floor. At anything but Jean-Khalil. “There’s a girl. Her name is Rose.”
He looked at me. I wondered if he knew I was lying. Maybe I wasn’t lying. I could find somebody else, skin her into Rose. Maybe she’d have a different name. But I could fix this. Do better. If he would only give me the chance.
“You’re not using it,” I said.
“A girl,” he said. “Your daughter?”
“My lover,” I said.
I said, “Please.”
He shook his head, eyes rolled up and away. Then he yanked his hand out of his pocket brusquely. “On your head be it.”
I was not prepared for the naked relief that filled me. I looked down, abjectly, and folded my hands. “Thank you so much.”
“You can’t save people from themselves,” he said.
The Man Who Sold the Moon
CORY DOCTOROW
Cory Doctorow is the coeditor of the popular Boing Boing website (boingboing.net), a cofounder of the Internet search-engine company OpenCola.com, and until recently was the outreach coordinator for the Electronic Frontier Foundation (www.eff.org). In 2001, he won the John W. Campbell Award as the year’s Best New Writer. His stories have appeared in Asimov’s Science Fiction, Gateways, Science Fiction Age, The Infinite Matrix, On Spec, Salon, and elsewhere, and have been collected in A Place So Foreign and Eight More and Overclocked. His well-received first novel, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, won the Locus Award for Best First Novel; his other novels include Eastern Standard Tribe, Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town, the bestselling YA novel Little Brother, and Makers. Doctorow’s other books include The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Publishing Science Fiction, written with Karl Schroeder, a guide to Essential Blogging, written with Shelley Powers, and Content: Selected Essays on Technology, Creativity, Copyright, and the Future of the Future. His most recent books are a new nonfiction book, Information Doesn’t Want to Be Free, and a new novel, For the Win. He has a website at www.craphound.com.
Here he offers us a fascinating examination of how one small technological innovation can, over the course of a lifetime, end up building a significant stepping-stone for the future.
Here’s a thing I didn’t know: there are some cancers that can only be diagnosed after a week’s worth of lab work. I didn’t know that. Then I went to the doctor to ask her about my pesky achy knee that had flared up and didn’t go away like it always had, just getting steadily worse. I’d figured it was something torn in there, or maybe I was getting the arthritis my grandparents had suffered from. But she was one of those doctors who hadn’t gotten the memo from the American health-care system that says that you should only listen to a patient for three minutes, tops, before writing him a referral and/or a prescription and firing him out the door just as the next patient was being fired in. She listened to me, she took my history, she wrote down the names of the anti-inflammatories I’d tried, everything from steroids to a climbing buddy’s heavy-duty prescription NSAIDs, and gave my knee a few cautious prods.
“You’re insured, right?”
“Yeah,” I said. “Good thing, too. I read that knee replacement’s going for seventy-five thousand dollars. That’s a little out of my price range.”
“I don’t think you need a knee replacement, Greg. I just want to send you for some tests.”
“A scan?”
“No.” She looked me straight in the eyes. “A biopsy.”
I’m a forty-year-old, middle-class Angeleno. My social mortality curve was a perfectly formed standard distribution—a few sparse and rare deaths before I was ten, slightly more through my teens, and then more in my twenties. By the time I was thirty-five, I had an actual funeral suit I kept in a dry-cleaning bag in the closet. it hadn’t started as a funeral suit, but once I’d worn it to three funerals in a row, I couldn’t wear it anywhere else without feeling an unnameable and free-floating sorrow. I was forty. My curve was ramping up, and now every big gathering of friends had at least one knot of somber people standing together and remembering someone who went too early. Someone in my little circle of forty-year-olds was bound to get a letter from the big C. There wasn’t any reason for it to be me. But there wasn’t any reason for it not to be either.
Bone cancer can take a week to diagnose. A week! During that week, I spent a lot of time trying to visualize the slow-moving medical processes: acid dissolving the trace of bone, the slow catalysis of some obscure reagent, some process by which a stain darkened to yellow and then orange and then, days later, to red. Or not. That was the thing. Maybe it wasn’t cancer. That’s why I was getting the test, instead of treatment. Because no one knew. Not until those stubborn molecules in some lab did their thing, not until some medical robot removed a test tube from a stainless steel rack and drew out its contents and took their picture or identified their chemical composition and alerted some lab tech that Dr. robot had reached his conclusion and would the stupid human please sanity-check the results and call the other stupid human and tell him whether he’s won the cancer lottery (grand prize: cancer)?
That was a long week. The word cancer was like the tick of a metronome. Eyes open. Cancer. Need a pee. Cancer. Turn on the coffee machine. Cancer. Grind the beans. Cancer. Cancer. Cancer.
On day seven, I got out of the house and went to Minus, which is our local hackerspace. Technically, its name is “Untitled-1,” because no one could think of a better name ten years ago, when it had been located in a dirt-cheap former car-parts warehouse in Echo Park. When Echo Park gentrified, Untitled-1 moved downtown, to a former furniture store near Skid Row, which promptly began its own gentrification swing. Now we were in the top two floors of what had once been a downscale dentist’s office on Ventura near Tarzana. The dentist had reinforced the floors for the big chairs and brought in 60 amp service for the X-ray machines, which made it perfect for our machine shop and the pew-pew room full of lasers. We even kept the fume hoods.
I have a personal tub at Minus, filled with half-finished projects: various parts for a 3D-printed chess-playing automata; a cup and saucer I was painstakingly covering with electroconductive paint and components; a stripped-down location sensor I’d been playing with for the Minus’s space program.
Minus’s space program was your standard hackerspace extraterrestrial project: sending balloons into the upper stratosphere, photographing the earth’s curvature, making air-quality and climate observations; sometimes lofting an ironic action figure in 3D-printed astronaut drag. Hacker Dojo, north of San Jose, had come up with a little powered guidance system, but they’d been whipped by navigation. Adding a stock GPS with its associated batteries made the thing too heavy, so they’d tried to fake it with dead-reckoning and it had been largely unsuccessful. I’d thought I might be able to make everything a lot lighter, including the battery, by borrowing some techniques I’d seen on a performance bike-racing site.
I put the GPS on a workbench with my computer and opened up my file of notes and stared at them with glazed eyes. Cancer. Cancer. Cancer.
Forget it. I put it all away again and headed up to the roof to clear my head and to get some company. The roof at Minus was not like most roofs. Rather than being an empty gravel expanse dotted with exhaust fans, our roof was one of the busiest parts of the space. Depending on the day and time, you could find any or all of the above on Minus’s roof: stargazing, smoking, BASE jumping, solar experiments, drone dogfighting, automated graffiti robots, sensor-driven high-intensity gardening, pigeon-breeding, sneaky sex, parkour, psychedelic wandering, Wi-Fi sniffing, mobile-phone tampering, ham radio broadcasts, and, of course, people who were stuck and frustrated and needed a break from their workbenches.
I threaded my way through the experiments and discussions and build-projects, slipped past the pigeon coops, and fetched up watching a guy who was trying, unsuccessfully, to learn how to do a run up a wall and do a complete flip. He was being taught by a young woman, sixteen or seventeen, evidently his daughter (“Daaad!”), and her patience was wearing thin as he collapsed to the gym mats they’d spread out. I stared spacily at them until they both stopped arguing with each other and glared at me, a guy in his forties and a kind of miniature, female version of him, both sweaty in their sweats. “Do you mind?” she asked.
“Sorry,” I mumbled, and moved off. I didn’t add, I don’t mean to be rude, just worried abou
t cancer.
I got three steps away when my phone buzzed. I nearly fumbled it when I yanked it out of my tight jeans pocket, hands shaking. I answered it and clapped it to my ear.
“Mr. Harrison?”
“Yes.”
“Please hold for doctor Ficsor.” A click.
A click. “Greg?”
“That’s me,” I said. I’d signed the waiver that let us skip the pointless date-of-birth/mother’s maiden name “security” protocol.
“Is this a good time to talk?”
“Yes,” I said. One syllable, clipped and tight in my ears. I may have shouted it.
“Well, I’d like you to come in for some confirming tests, but we’ve done two analyses and they are both negative for elevated alkaline phosphatase and lactate dehydrogenase.”
I’d obsessively read a hundred web pages describing the blood tests. I knew what this meant. But I had to be sure. “It’s not cancer, right?”
“These are negative indicators for cancer,” the doctor said.
The tension that whoofed out of me like a gutpunch left behind a kind of howling vacuum of relief, but not joy. The joy might come later. At the moment, it was more like the head-bees feeling of three more cups of espresso than was sensible. “Doctor,” I said, “can I try a hypothetical with you?”
“I’ll do my best.”
“Let’s say you were worried that you, personally, had bone cancer. If you got the same lab results as me, would you consider yourself to be at risk for bone cancer?”
“You’re very good at that,” she said. I liked her, but she had the speech habits of someone who went to a liability insurance seminar twice a year. “Okay, in that hypothetical, I’d say that I would consider myself to be provisionally not at risk of bone cancer, though I would want to confirm it with another round of tests, just to be very, very sure.”
“I see,” I said. “I’m away from my computer right now. Can I call your secretary later to set that up?”
“Sure,” she said. “Greg?”
The Year's Best Science Fiction, Thirty-Second Annual Collection Page 28