by Peter Watts
“But what of your own? Is the Sentin adapting according to prescribed rates? Do you experience any difficulty breathing? Sleeping? Any changes in appetite? In some cases patients feel a craving for batteries, silver coins, even Christmas tree tinsel when it’s in season.”
“I’m still human,” I tell her.
She sighs. “If you’re having trouble adjusting, or anxiety, I can recommend a support group. Denial will only undermine compatibility.”
“I don’t need a support group. I’m pregnant.”
She stares out at me with cold, gray eyes and I wonder if she’s a ghost too, transitioning to better understand and study. “Congratulations,” she says. “And you’re concerned about how the Sentin may interfere with fetal development?”
“I’m concerned the fetus is Sentin.”
She opens the file on her lap. Pinned to the inside is the faxed sheet from my husband’s physician. I can make out only two works upside down: Wife: Uncannyism.
“Oh,” she says. “That’s not as interesting.”
She tosses the folder aside, stuffs the blood samples and the hair she took into a biohazard bag, and hands me my purse.
“The baby?” I ask.
“Is fine. Sentin can mimic reproductive organs, but not their functions. Men eventually go sterile, women experience early onset menopause. It’s why we don’t currently recommend the procedure to anyone under the age of 35. That will change one day, but for now . . . ” she suggests a few websites and medical journals, but her mouth is a tight line. She has other appointments, other patients. She thanks me for coming in and congratulates me a second and third time.
I call my husband from the car.
We name her Chandler, a family name on his side. By her fourth birthday, my husband is a frayed patchwork of flesh. We learn that he sinks immediately to the bottom of a pool should he fall in. When we visit the ocean, I am careful to keep him on the side away from the waves though he assures me he could walk along the bottom collecting scotch bonnets and limpets. He promises me a lettered olive, whole, for which I have been searching. I almost tell him to dive in after it, to scour the sea for the skeletons of mollusks, and to only come back to me when he has completed his quest. It would take years, I think. Years enough for me to forget. When he comes back to me, a silver ghost on a silver charger, his banner flying, I will have forgotten his brown eyes, his dark hair. I will know him by the tasks I set: peel a lemon in one long strip, hit the smoke detector in just the right spot with the broom, kiss me just so on the back of my neck. Make me laugh; make me cry. String the unstringable bow.
Chandler is not the only one in her Kindergarten class with a ghost for a parent. Matching compatibility has improved: there are fewer fatalities and more elective procedures. Within a few years, they believe that ordinary transplants will be the exception rather than the rule. Chandler introduces us to her friend Tom and then Mr. and Mrs. Tom’s Parents. His mother’s skin gleams like pale moonlight and I hear the inexplicable clink of her fingers as she ruffles my daughter’s hair. I pull Chandler against me as my husband’s ghost grasps her hand in both of his and shakes it up and down.
“A pleasure,” the ghost says, “a pleasure.”
Mr. Tom’s Dad and I sip apple juice and watch as my husband and his wife discuss the difficulties of metal detectors. She insists that he look into the ID program and proudly pulls hers from her wallet.
“Within a century,” I say. “We could all be like that.”
Tom’s Dad nods. His skin is almost as pale as his wife’s, though his cheeks flush when he speaks. “They’re beautiful, aren’t they?”
Some nights I wander the house alone and barefooted, later counting the long hairs which tangle between my toes. To my daughter, my husband and her father are the same being and she is too young for me to contradict her. One vacation, she learns how to knock a hammer just so into the tip of a Queen Conch, to break the vacuum between shell and snail, to pull its meat gasping into the sun. She sits on the side of the boat and giggles as her father ties ropes and life preservers around his middle.
“The ocean is so deep here,” he says. “It would take me ages to walk back.”
The guide doesn’t think I notice, but he glances from me to the ghost, to Chandler and back again.
“She takes after her father,” I say.
He reaches as if to touch her skin, to examine its texture, but instead leans far over the side of the boat, splashing the knife in the water. He hands the shell to my daughter and joins me under the boat’s canopy.
“It would take a long, long time,” he says, “to climb out of one of the blue holes.”
“Assuming you didn’t get crushed first,” I say.
“Pressure is the same all around. It’s air spaces you need to worry about. You hold your breath, dive down. It hurts. You learn to balance, it doesn’t hurt anymore.”
“You should write fortune cookies.”
He shrugs. “It’s just science.”
At the airport my husband is pulled to the side. They pass the wand over his arms and legs, over his head. The security guard asks if my husband would mind waiting.
“No problem,” the ghost says.
Chandler and I wait on the other side. There are a dozen men now, a few women. They each take turns with the wand. They run their hands up his arms and legs. They touch his hair, his face.
I tell Chandler to tie her shoes. Then to retie them.
“Are they doing it just to be safe?” Chandler asks.
“They’re just curious,” I tell her.
“It’ll be better,” she says. “When one day we’re all the same.”
I hold her hand in mine. Tan against pale. “Maybe,” I say.
Chandler is fifteen when they find the tumor. It curls against her heart like a question. The doctors say they can remove it, but surgery has risks that other options do not. I tell them no, as the ghost says yes. The doctor leaves us and we stare at each other across the white linoleum.
“You would risk letting her die over something so small,” he says.
We decide to let her make her own decision and follow the doctors into her room. They explain the risks, the potential complications of various procedures. When she asks about Sentin, they tell her the procedure is irreversible, and there are always unanswered questions: her ability to have children, the shifting compatibility of a developing body.
The ghost and I wait. I know he expects me to attempt to sway her, to tell her that she will be stepping into a shell which believes she is something other than herself. He expects me to call on her sympathy and describe how I will walk barefoot through her room, brushing her hair from the floor, how I will see each loss as the punctuation to betrayal.
The knowing hurts as much as the waiting hurts. As our daughter considers her future, the ghost grips his seat in his gray hands. He rocks back and forth and I find myself rocking too. Back and forth, and the white floor between our chairs is a horizon disappearing and reappearing beyond the crest of a wave.
“What do you think?” my daughter says.
My husband opens his mouth to speak, his gray lips stretching across gray teeth. Last night I heard a faint pop as the last of his molars fell out upon his pillow. It was warm against my skin, and so small in my hand I forgot how it was ever alive.
Come From Away
Madeline Ashby
“Get up,” her boss said, in her bones. “Hwa. Go. Go Jung-hwa. Stop generating so much delta pattern and wake up.”
“Top of the morning to you, too.” Hwa rolled over. This whole constant contact thing between her and the chief of urban tactics had to stop. So what if her new employer had bought a whole city. There had to be limits. Boundaries. Boundaries, that was the right word. That was the word that came up all the time in the United Sex Workers of Canada handbook. She missed working for them. They had boundaries. You could be a bodyguard without signing on for a bunch of other crap, like Daniel Síofra rousing you from
a sound sleep just because he felt like it, on a morning when your stomach felt like the Great Wave off Kanagawa and your mind was just the poor dumb bastard trapped in the rowboat beneath it.
Oh, Christ, she was so hung over.
“You’re not at home,” Síofra said.
“No. I’m at my teacher’s.”
“ . . . Excuse me?”
“My tae kwon do teacher’s. We got to drinking. Toasting absent friends.” Toasting her dead brother. Toasting his trophies. They’d even broken out the screech, sometime around one in the morning. Jesus wept.
“You are aware that today is a school day?”
“I’m aware.”
“And you’re aware that you are now employed to watch out for one Joel Lynch, heir to the CEO position at Lynch, the company which just purchased this entire city, including the secondary school he attends?”
“Yup. That’s a big 10-4.”
“And that he’s been getting death threats?”
“From beyond the Singularity. Real Terminator shit. It’s clear as fucking mud.”
A long-suffering sigh vibrated through her bones from somewhere across the city. Probably the crystalline perfection of Tower Five, as far as possible from the rust and grime of Tower One. Hwa tried to imagine her boss hidden behind walls of glass and maps, directing the city with a twitch of his long fingers. A crossing signal here. A seemingly random outburst of music there. She imagined him plucking it like an instrument until it sang with activity.
“I have a present for you.”
“Is it a bacon roll? Because I could do with a bacon roll, right about now.”
“ . . . I don’t even know what that is.”
“It’s a thing for people who don’t have nanites doing repair work on their livers every time they toast absent friends.”
“ . . . How did you know I have those?”
Hwa smiled despite her headache. “Just a hunch. When do I get my present?”
A knock sounded at the door. Hwa picked her way across the living room and peered through the peephole. A courier in yellow stood in the hallway, looking terrified to touch the buzzer. “Now,” her boss said.
“I hate these things,” Hwa said.
“They’re the latest model. And perfect for someone without other augments.”
“They’re . . . ” Hwa wiggled her fingers in front of her new specs. As she did, the device scanned the scars on her knuckles and filed them away in some silvery somewhere that was probably just a data-barge rusting off the coast of one former Eastern bloc nation or another. DAMAGED, the glasses said, and pointed helpful blinking arrows at her fingers and wrists and shins and feet and anywhere else she looked. DAMAGED. Like she didn’t know that much already.
“They’re loud,” she said, finally.
“They’re the quietest on the market.” Síofra actually sounded a little hurt. Like he’d gone to the trouble of picking out something great and fucked it up instead. Which was exactly what had happened.
“Don’t worry. I’ll get used to it.” Hwa scanned the main entrance. The specs told her where every little camera and microphone was. They lit up snitch yellow on the map. She could pick out the angry kids (red halos), the sad ones (blue), the baselines (green), and the ones who were making out with each other (grinding columns of deep purple).
“We should have gotten them for you sooner. But for someone like you, someone who’s lived for so long without . . . ”
“Without any augments,” Hwa said. “Without any help.”
“Most of these devices are designed to work alongside other services, other technologies. But you’re different.”
If by “different,” he meant “poor,” then he was onto something. It wasn’t that Hwa had some moral or aesthetic commitment to living free of augmentation. The programmable tissues that spontaneously healed her classmates after hockey practice would have been much appreciated where her liver was concerned. But Sunny had never found money for that kind of thing. At least, not when it came to Hwa. Hwa was a bad investment. The lasers that were supposed to fix the stain running down her face had only made things worse. So why throw good money after bad?
“The good thing is, now I can see what you see.”
Hwa snorted. “You know I’ll be shutting these off when I’m in the girls’ locker room, right?”
“Could you say that a little louder, please? I’m not sure the PTA heard you.”
“Oh, come on,” Hwa said. “You’re not worried about the PTA. You work for Lynch, and Lynch pays the wages. They’d offer you a two-fer on the Lindgren twins, if they could.”
She directed her gaze to a pair of blonde girls wearing varsity volleyball jackets over their uniforms. They reclined against the opposite wall, chests out, knees up, all shiny hair and white teeth and laughter. They were everybody’s number one fantasy. If you didn’t want to fuck them, you wanted to be them. Hwa didn’t need a subscription to any one vision of reality or another to see that much.
“Not interested.”
“Liar.”
“Can we not discuss this, please? We’re being recorded, you know. For quality assurance purposes.”
Hwa examined the floor. Her tights had a run in them down her good leg. She inspected the damage idly, twisting her leg this way and that, but her specs had nothing to say about it.
“Much better.”
“Did you like high school?” What a stupid question. Hwa had no idea why she’d asked that. Where was Joel, anyway? It was getting late.
“I don’t know,” Síofra said. “I doubt I hated it as much as you do.”
“Yeah, well, I still can’t believe I let you con me into coming back to this place.”
“Better late than never. We were lucky to find a candidate for this position who lacked both a diploma and a prison record.”
“Yeah, that’s some luck, all right.”
Across town, Síofra laughed. Hwa felt it as a tickle across her skull that skittered all the way to the base of her spine as sure as if someone had run a finger down there. She twitched against the wall.
“Hwa?”
Hwa opened her eyes to see Joel standing in front of her, blazer laid neatly across one arm, school tie in a tight little knot she couldn’t help but want to mess up. Christ, he was even wearing the Krakens logo tie pin. The tie pin. Like he didn’t already look enough like the skinniest little Tory ever.
Right then and there, Hwa decided she had to get the boy in some trouble before the trouble found him, first.
“Hwa? Are you okay?”
The warning bell rang. Hwa shoved herself off the wall and teetered only a little. “I’m fine,” she said. “Let’s get to physics.”
“Were you talking to Daniel?”
“Yeah.” She raised her voice slightly so her boss would be sure to hear it. “But he should be working, and we should be, uh . . . learning, I guess.”
Joel blinked, as though he were not truly listening. Then he nodded to himself, fished in his bag, and pulled out a pouch of electrolytes. Orange flavored. Or so she assumed. There was a cartoon of a smiling orange on it, which was holding a glass of orange juice. Which sort of made it the Orange Jesus, holding out its blood and offering salvation of the breakfast beverage variety. Joel grinned and wiggled Orange Jesus in her face. It was the first time she’d ever seen him really smile. He put the pouch in her hand. “Daniel says you should drink this. For your hangover.”
There was a basic problem on the desk when they got to class. At least, Joel said it was pretty basic: “It’s Moore’s Law,” he said. “About exponential growth in computational ability. Didn’t you cover exponents in Grade 8 algebra?”
Hwa tried to remember Grade 8. She’d turned fourteen that year, and had a general memory of fourteen sucking worse than the other years for some reason. Oh, yeah: because her mother wouldn’t shut up about how her first single had gone platinum, when she was fourteen. And then she’d talk about pink champagne and parties and music produce
rs and how to fend them off, always making certain to end her stories with something like, “Not that you’ll ever have that problem, Hwa-jeon.”
Hwa-jeon. It was a dessert in Korea. When she was little, Hwa thought her nickname being a dessert meant she was sweet and special, a nice treat at the end of a nice person’s day. Then she asked Sunny to make it for her.
<
“Hwa?”
“Huh?” Hwa blinked at Mr. Branch, who was peering at her with his head cocked. In the specs, his emotions didn’t register like the students’ did. Maybe the faculty all had theirs screened out. Not exactly sporting. “What? Sorry. Were you talking to me?”
“Yes. I was asking you where your homework was. I was calling the roll for missed assignments. Five hundred words on one problem you’d like science to solve?”
Hwa frowned. “What?”
“Your homework—”
“You call the roll for missed assignments?”
“We went over this during the syllabus review yesterday,” Mr. Branch said. “When assignment are not sent to me by the start of class hours, I will call for them in case they’ve been forgotten.”
Hwa arched her left eyebrow. “In case they’ve been forgotten,” she said, slowly and deliberately. She turned her face to a little the right, just so he’d be sure to see the stain. Just like that, his lip twitched. A little ugly went a long way, with beautiful people. “Don’t you think that’ll make your students feel bad? Like, ashamed of themselves?” She plucked at her tartan tie. “I mean, we wear uniforms and everything, but this isn’t a Catholic school. Shame isn’t really a teaching tool.”