by Neil Clarke
“You know what I want to talk about, I assume.” Suzie passes over the vape. “Give me a cue. Where should we jump in?”
The swinging hammocks arrive at moment of synchronized periodicity; Tipper plucks the vape from Suzie’s hand. It’s THC extract, hints of green tea and tapioca. Tipper puffs judiciously. MJ juice always hits her hard.
“These past couple of days,” Suzie says, “you’ve been awfully distracted. Almost like you’d rather be somewhere else.”
Tipper weighs her answer. “I want to be here. Working for you.”
Suzie’s smile is unrevealing. “You come from where, Tipper? Originally, I mean. Near Phoenix, right?”
“I don’t really want to—”
“All right, all right, I’m only saying, you came here for a reason. You could’ve gone anywhere. So why the fair?” Before Tipper can answer, Suzie says, “I’ll put it this way. Was it for the boys?”
Instead of responding, Tipper sucks on the vape. Maybe she needs that THC after all.
“This new friend of yours,” Suzie says. “Our buddy Mister Longhair Lothario—”
“His name is Luke.”
“What do you think he’s looking for? A good time? A little innocent fun, screwing around with my ride?”
“He was just joking. I think he was only trying to get my attention.”
“Well, he’s got it, doesn’t he?” When Tipper offers to pass the vape back, Suzie waves it away. “I ever tell you how I came to the fair, Tip? Going way back?”
Tipper’s heard the story half a hundred times. “Your parents—”
“Yeah, yeah, my parents were crazy.” Suzie flicks dismissive fingers. “More like out of touch. Wanted me to be a doctor. I told them, ‘Mom, Dad, there are no doctors anymore. There were doctors when you were kids. Now there are machines, with human assistants.’ ‘Okay, Suzie,’ they said, ‘so be an engineer. Be the person who makes the machines.’ I told them the machines make all the machines. You see, they were stuck in the old way of thinking. You work hard, you study hard, you get a good job.
“Anyway.” Suzie folds her hands on her stomach. “That’s not what I’m talking about. Hold on to something heavy, girl, ’cause you’re about to sit through a teen girl’s worst nightmare. You’re about to hear an old lady talk about her first love.”
She opens a minifridge and pulls out a tea.
“First thing to point out, like it needs pointing out: this was a long damn time ago. If you think the Manual trend is hot, now, all these kids running around in pilot jackets and construction vests, hell, back then, this stuff was new. The golden era of applied robotics, everything a thousand times more efficient, exponential productivity gains forever, blah blah blah. We were all going to be rich and live in a new age of leisure, have all the free time in the world, wipe our butts with golden circuit boards, whatever. And suddenly, every guy in suburbia is dropping out of high school, hanging around in boilersuits and tool belts, refusing to talk to voice interfaces, and talking about how he wants to do ‘real work’ for a living. Wild.
“Well, okay, this one kid, my neighbor, he was the type. Eighteen years old, covered with burns, which he’d gotten by doing honest-to-God-welding. What did he weld? Who cares? This was the Fringe. This guy worked with his hands. That was cool. He used to run a service ripping brains out of appliances, washing machines, blenders, whatever you brought over. Stupidifying, he called it. Making smart machines less smart. Had this teller machine he’d reconstructed, totally transparent, so you could see it all working, Monopoly money going round and round these big rollers, the whole thing running by gears and weights. And here I was, this little nerd-girl, who’d spent her life memorizing shit no human needed to memorize anymore. So.”
Settling back with a brain full of vapor, Tipper can picture teenage Suzie, a squat girl lost in a giant concert T, shuffling around with a head full of Taylor polynomials and math rock.
“Now.” Suzie sips her tea. “Okay. One day this young rebel comes by with a proposition. He wants to go to the fair, just me and him, and try out this new ride they have there. Me?” Suzie sets her empty can on the floor. “I’m fifteen. He’s eighteen. I think this is the best idea I ever heard. Friday night comes, I lie to my parents, he picks me up—no autodrive for this guy—and off we go. I’ll paint the scene. The rides, they were totally different then. No AI. No protocols. The operator pulled a lever, it started up. He pushed the lever, it shut down. Simple.
“But this new ride? This was something special. The Gentle Giant it was called. Big legless guy, about thirty feet tall. Long arms, kind of like a gorilla. You’d get in, like a giant hamster ball, and he’d pick you up, and—well, there wasn’t much to it, really. He’d kind of wave you around, pass you from hand to hand. Nothing like the Scream-o-Saurus, that’s for sure.
“But me?” Suzie sat up. “My generation? This was brand new. This was scary. Because it wasn’t just a machine, like what we grew up on. It was thinking. It was deciding. It was unpredictable. And you were literally putting yourself in this robot’s hands.”
Suzie pauses, settling lower in her hammock.
“Well, as you can bet, there were lots of safety precautions. Full body pat-down, two riders only, waivers, harnesses, the whole thing. We go through the rigmarole. We get in the big ball. And while we’re waiting, we look up at the Giant’s face, and that’s when this boy tells me his plan.”
The ventilation fans have shut off, the air slowly growing warm with contained heat. Tipper tries to remember if she’s ever seen this ride, which sounds, as Suzie says, intensely boring. A big robot picking you up, then putting you down? So what?
“Well, my brave new boyfriend, it turns out he’s been studying.” Suzie takes out a new tea. “The Gentle Giant has a pretty sure grip. But this guy thinks, okay, maybe if we both get up at the same time, throw ourselves against the wall—maybe if we time it just right, he says, we can get the Giant to, in a phrase, drop the ball.”
“And then what?” Tipper narrows her eyes. “You would die? What’s the point?”
“Here’s the point. This ride was special. It was new. There were magazine stories. There were giant crowds. If the Giant screwed up, even just once—”
“But only because you guys broke the rules.”
“But that’s just it! I mean, picture it. A nice young girl, her handsome boyfriend, out on their very first date . . . maybe they’re a little foolish, but who isn’t at that age? And then suddenly, thanks to this crazy, unreliable robot . . . ”
Tipper sighs. Of course. It’s a typical Manual ploy. Do something insanely stupid, then blame it on a robot. They’ll do anything to sow distrust and fear.
“Sending a message,” Tipper says.
“Egg-xactly. Well, we’re sitting there, arguing, and all of a sudden, the ride starts up. At first, I can hardly tell what’s happening. The change is so gentle, so precise. Looking through the plastic, I see the fair sinking away. We’re up in the sky. Now the real excitement starts. Rising, dipping, whirling, flying. All of it amazingly smooth. It’s like being cradled, that’s what I keep thinking. Like being rocked to sleep in giant hands. I look over at my boy. I can see he feels it, too. Except he has a different reaction: It makes him angry.
“Around and around.” Suzie mimics the motion, sketching lemniscates with her can of tea. “Now it comes. My guy nudges me. Unlocks my harness. We stumble to the wall. ‘Get ready,’ he says.”
“Well?” Tipper prompts when Suzie falls silent.
“You know, I really liked that kid.” Suzie takes back the vape. “I can’t deny it. He was driven, he was passionate. I was fifteen.” She loads a cart, checks the light, lays down the vaper without tasting. “So we jumped together. Wham! Right into the wall.”
Her hands come together, palm to palm, making her hammock bounce and sway.
“First, there’s an awful feeling. Total vertigo. We lie together, pressed up against the plastic. Suddenly we’re floating, weightless.
The guy told me we’d be okay. Couple bruises, maybe a broken finger. We wouldn’t fall more than fifteen feet. But right then, I really believed it was happening. I really believed we were going to die.
“Stillness.” Suzie’s hand hovers. “We’re sinking. Then, suddenly, we start to rise. Slowly, like a baby in its father’s arms. We’re high up, now, looking down at the Giant’s face. It was a simple design, all metal, with big round eyes. I realized, then, he’d been in control the whole time. He really was gentle, more tender than any living thing. And I felt this incredible sense of sureness. I wanted to be him, you know? Like that robot. I want to be that strong, that caring. That reliable.”
Suzie remembers the vaper, considers it a moment, puts it back in its case. “So that was it for my big rebel romance. I looked at my boy. He was slamming himself into the wall, almost crying, shouting, ‘Help me, Suzie, help!’ And I just stared. Because it was suddenly so clear to me.” Suzie grins. “It was so obvious who was the better man.”
During peak hours, the fairway develops an edgy vibe. Fringe girls go slouching along in rancher outfits, homesteader gingham and cowgirl boots, the remnants of jobs so impossibly long gone that no one even remembers anything but the clothes. Their boyfriends sip from Big Gulp sodas spiked with groundbrew hallucinogens, recipes cooked up in underground labs hidden in tunnels made by well-digging drones. Sometimes one of them will pause and talk to Tipper. Sad boys, aimless boys, breathing in her face the caramelized fog of their illiterate conversation, breath rich with the stink of the flavored syrups they add to their drinks to mask the chemicals.
Tipper waits beside the Haunted House, in the little alley that leads to the trailers, clutching her phone like a plastic amulet. Above the gabled roof, the Scream-o-Saurus lifts a shrieking rider, chews him in foam jaws, and gulps him down its waterslide throat. A group of robospooks leave the House by a back door, two rubber-skinned frogmen and a stooped Dracula. They carry a limp figure between them, a damaged werewolf who dangles like a cadaver from their arms. Heading for the repair station, no doubt. It’s a perennial problem around the House. Rowdy boys like to kick and abuse the exhibits.
A kiddie ride like the Snake doesn’t see a lot of business at this hour, and Tipper’s been given the rest of the night off. She checks her phone, knowing it’s pointless. The only kind of phone Luke would use is the kind made of two cans and a string.
“Hey.”
Quiet suddenly, he’s here. Dark against the glare of the virtual arcade, he steps aside to let the crew of spookbots shuffle by. His pale skin glows an eerie yellow in the light of the nearby picnic area.
“Ready?” Hands in pockets, Luke tips his head toward the parking lots.
Tipper hesitates. “The thing is . . . ” Luke waits, expressionless, while she works up her nerve. “The thing is,” Tipper says, “do you kind of have a second? I sort of promised someone we’d meet with her first.”
“Someone?”
Before Tipper can answer, Luke gives a jump. Two shadows have manifested on either side of him, inhumanly still, crowding in like mafia toughs.
“Little boy?” The voice of the left figure is shrill. “You’ve been a bad boy, haven’t you? I can always spot a naughty little boy.”
Luke stumbles back as a woman steps forward, lifting a hand to her gashed and bleeding throat. It’s the Murdered Bride, one of Tipper’s favorites.
“Oh, you best beware, naughty boy. Mother is up above, watching us all.”
The Bride lifts her dark-ringed eyes to the House’s gothic facade.
Tipper laughs at Luke’s expression. “It’s okay. I know these guys.”
Hearing her voice, the two spookbots step back, edging into the light of the picnic area. The Murdered Bride tips her head back, sluicing blood, which dribbles down her décolletage into a culvert between her breasts. Next to her, the Mummy clutches his stray bandages, glints of eye and tooth and bone peeking through the windings on his head.
“Uhhhh,” says the Mummy, and then, at a skeptical glance from Luke, “Uhhhhh!”
Luke straightens his jacket. “What are these, your chaperones?”
“Kind of.” Tipper offers a hand. “Come on, this’ll only take a minute.”
“Mother hates for her children to be late.” The Bride shakes her head. And as Tipper draws Luke into the alley, the spookbots shuffle forward to escort them inside.
The Murdered Bride leads the way, to a service entrance concealed in a thorn-grown porte-cochere. The thorns retract, the door creaks open, revealing a tipsy staircase.
“Hurry, please.” The Bride lifts her skirts. “We mustn’t keep Mother waiting.”
Up to the second floor, down a dark main hall. The House is one of the newer rides, a collective artificial mind. Thirty rooms host seventy-two independent robots. The whole fantasia revolves around a gadget called the Morbid Eye, a pulpy, brainish thing that uses a compressed air system to levitate through the corridors. The Eye coordinates every system, HVAC to crowd flow to the spookbots themselves. Fishmen and lizardmen, ghouls and ghosts: The Eye leads them all, but only primus inter pares. The spookbots are communal, telepathic, autonomous. Carter once told Tipper that the Haunted House is a lot like an old computer program, every component neatly encapsulated. Even to the all-seeing Morbid Eye, the spookbots are mysterious and unpredictable, free-roaming ghosts in a grand machine.
“We’re very lucky.” The Bride pauses in the armory to adjust her skirts. “Mother will be taking her supper at this hour. She’s ever so much nicer when she’s feasting on a long slab of rare meat.”
Carter’s rooms are in the center of the House. Their little group enters a gloomy study. At the central desk, Carter waits to receive them, working at a toothsome and bloody steak. Like most of the ride, the furniture here is lightweight mycocore, cobbled together by the spooks themselves. With twenty-five humanoid robots on staff, they can knock together the whole mansion in a single day.
Carter has a heavy tome in her lap, dark shapes writhing on an embedded screen. She slaps it shut. “Evening, kids.”
The Murdered Bride bows over her chair.
“I’ve brought them, Mother, just as you asked. I do try to be a good girl. But now look at me, I’ve gone and bled all over my dress!”
“Yes, I see that. Okay, Bride, I’ll take it from here.”
Leering with horrible enthusiasm, the Bride takes the Mummy by the arm. “Thank you, Mother. I’m so glad I could be helpful. But do, oh do be strict with these two children. They’re very naughty, and spoiled, too.”
“I’ll keep that in mind, Bride, thanks.”
As they pass by Luke, the Mummy can’t resist a last comment.
“Uhhhhhh!”
Tipper turns to watch as the spookbots stagger out. What must it be like, she wonders, living in this place, year upon year, day and night? But the obvious answer makes her laugh: It must be like caring for a huge, deranged family.
“I won’t take a lot of your time.” Carter comes around the desk. “Suzie says she’s given you the night off. Guess you two are heading out for some puppy love.”
“Not exactly, ma’am.” Luke is curt. Tipper can feel him tensing beside her. Carter, too, goes unusually still.
“Right. Well. Before you do . . . whatever it is you’ll be doing, I have something I wanted to run by you.” Carter picks up the tome, flips to the embedded screen. Tipper braces for something shocking. But it’s only a spookbot in the display, snarling fangs and a drooping fabric tongue, a burst of hair over a ripped check shirt.
“Look familiar?” Carter sticks a toothpick between her teeth.
Luke considers the image, shrugs.
“No?” Carter swings the book from side to side, making sure they get a good look. “Well, this here, this is Puppy. Puppy’s a part of our team here at the Haunted House. Our resident werewolf, you might say. And I’ll let you in on a trade secret: He’s one of our most advanced and expensive machines. Puppy’s got a Croatian hair ext
rusion grid, a chemical-electric body-to-brain feedback module, a moral module based on the soul of a Border Collie. Puppy’s only wish in life is to bring thrills and joy to little boys and girls.”
Carter slaps shut the book.
“Here’s the rub. Two hours ago, while I was helping a sick visitor, someone walked in, held Puppy down, and poured fifty pounds of birdshot and epoxy down his throat. So I thought I’d inquire if y’all might know anything about that.”
Luke’s face is resolutely bland. Tipper remembers the troupe of spookbots who left the House when they came in.
“Is Puppy going to be okay?”
“Puppy?” Carter tosses the book onto the table. “Puppy’s built for this shit. Puppy’s also insured for a pretty purse of money. My concern goes way beyond Puppy. I’m talking to you, son, you and your friends. You’ve been spending a lot of time around the grounds.”
Luke blinks. “And?”
“And?” Carter grins, exposing an impressive spread of cigarette stains. “Y’all been having a good time?”
“We—”
Carter cuts him off. “You seemed to be having a good time last night, when you jammed up the gears of my friend’s ride.” “That was—”
“A joke. I know.” Carter raps the mycocore table. “I guess the kids who busted up my werewolf robot, they also thought they were playing a pretty funny joke.”
Luke’s eyes narrow. “I had nothing to do with that, ma’am. Ask Tipper.”
Carter’s nod is calm and slow, every bit as lazy as a branch of sage bobbing in a Sonoran wind. “Right. No one saw a thing. Pretty convenient how that works.”
Luke parts his lips, shows his palms, shakes his head. Carter sighs and pushes off the table. In the back of the room, there’s a multipaned window, looking down on the mansion’s central yard. Carter hits a button, and the panes wink and flicker, becoming screens that show views of different rooms. Moonlit bedchambers, grisly dungeons, hordes of gleefully screaming kids. The views are jumpy, jouncing like old horror flicks, and Tipper realizes she’s looking through the eyes of six dozen robots, the congregant POV of the House’s host of spooks.