by Peter Watts
Carrie bites her bottom lip. “All right. Where will you hide?”
Ruth wishes she had thought to bring her gun, but she hadn’t wanted to spook Carrie and she didn’t anticipate having to fight. She’ll need to be close enough to stop the man if he turns out to be the killer, and yet not so close as to make it easy for him to discover her.
“I can’t hide inside here at all. He’ll look around before going into the bedroom with you.” She walks into the living room, which faces the back of the building, away from the street, and lifts the window open. “I can hide out here, hanging from the ledge. If he turns out to be the killer, I have to wait till the last possible minute to come in to cut off his escape. If he’s not the killer, I’ll drop down and leave.”
Carrie is clearly uncomfortable with this plan, but she nods, trying to be brave.
“Act as normal as you can. Don’t make him think something is wrong.”
Carrie’s phone rings. She swallows and clicks the phone on. She walks over to the bedroom window. Ruth follows.
“This is Carrie.”
Ruth looks out the window. The man standing at the corner appears to be the right height, but that’s not enough to be sure. She has to catch him and interrogate him.
“I’m in the four-story building about a hundred feet behind you. Come up to apartment 303. I’m so glad you came, dear. We’ll have a great time, I promise.” She hangs up.
The man starts walking this way. Ruth thinks there’s a limp to his walk, but again, she can’t be sure.
“Is it him?” Carrie asks.
“I don’t know. We have to let him in and see.”
Ruth can feel the Regulator humming. She knows that the idea of using Carrie as bait frightens her, is repugnant even. But it’s the logical thing to do. She’ll never get a chance like this again. She has to trust that she can protect the girl.
“I’m going outside the window. You’re doing great. Just keep him talking and do what he wants. Get him relaxed and focused on you. I’ll come in before he can hurt you. I promise.”
Carrie smiles. “I’m good at acting.”
Ruth goes to the living room window and deftly climbs out. She lets her body down, hanging onto the window ledge with her fingers so that she’s invisible from inside the apartment. “Okay, close the window. Leave just a slit open so I can hear what happens inside.”
“How long can you hang like this?”
“Long enough.”
Carrie closes the window. Ruth is glad for the artificial tendons and tensors in her shoulders and arms and the reinforced fingers, holding her up. The idea had been to make her more effective in close combat, but they’re coming in handy now, too.
She counts off the seconds. The man should be at the building . . . he should now be coming up the stairs . . . he should now be at the door.
She hears the door to the apartment open.
“You’re even prettier than your pictures.” The voice is rich, deep, satisfied.
“Thank you.”
She hears more conversation, the exchange of money. Then the sound of more walking.
They’re heading towards the bedroom. She can hear the man stopping to look into the other rooms. She almost can feel his gaze pass over the top of her head, out the window.
Ruth pulls herself up slowly, quietly, and looks in. She sees the man disappear into the hallway. There’s a distinct limp.
She waits a few more seconds so that the man cannot rush back past her before she can reach the hallway to block it, and then she takes a deep breath and wills the Regulator to pump her blood full of adrenaline. The world seems to grow brighter and time slows down as she flexes her arms and pulls herself onto the window ledge.
She squats down and pulls the window up in one swift motion. She knows that the grinding noise will alert the man, and she has only a few seconds to get to him. She ducks, rolls through the open window onto the floor inside. Then she continues to roll until her feet are under her and activates the pistons in her legs to leap towards the hallway.
She lands and rolls again to not give him a clear target, and jumps again from her crouch into the bedroom.
The man shoots and the bullet strikes her left shoulder. She tackles him as her arms, held in front of her, slam into his midsection. He falls and the gun clatters away.
Now the pain from the bullet hits. She wills the Regulator to pump up the adrenaline and the endorphins to numb the pain. She pants and concentrates on the fight for her life.
He tries to flip her over with his superior mass, to pin her down, but she clamps her hands around his neck and squeezes hard. Men have always underestimated her at the beginning of a fight, and she has to take advantage of it. She knows that her grip feels like iron clamps around him, with all the implanted energy cells in her arms and hands activated and on full power. He winces, grabs her hands to try to pry them off. After a few seconds, realizing the futility of it, he ceases to struggle.
He’s trying to talk but can’t get any air into his lungs. Ruth lets up a little, and he chokes out, “You got me.”
Ruth increases the pressure again, choking off his supply of air. She turns to Carrie, who’s at the foot of the bed, frozen. “Call the police. Now.”
She complies. As she continues to hold the phone against her ear as the 911 dispatcher has instructed her to do, she tells Ruth, “They’re on their way.”
The man goes limp with his eyes closed. Ruth lets go of his neck. She doesn’t want to kill him, so she clamps her hands around his wrists while she sits on his legs, holding him still on the floor.
He revives and starts to moan. “You’re breaking my fucking arms!”
Ruth lets up the pressure a bit to conserve her power. The man’s nose is bleeding from the fall against the floor when she tackled him. He inhales loudly, swallows, and says, “I’m going to drown if you don’t let me sit up.”
Ruth considers this. She lets up the pressure further and pulls him into a sitting position.
She can feel the energy cells in her arms depleting. She won’t have the physical upper hand much longer if she has to keep on restraining him this way.
She calls out to Carrie. “Come over here and tie his hands together.”
Carrie puts down the phone done and comes over gingerly. “What do I use?”
“Don’t you have any rope? You know, for your clients?”
“I don’t do that kind of thing.”
Ruth thinks. “You can use stockings.”
As Carrie ties the man’s hands and feet together in front of him, he coughs. Some of the blood has gone down the wrong pipe. Ruth is unmoved and doesn’t ease up on the pressure, and he winces. “Goddamn it. You’re one psycho robo bitch.”
Ruth ignores him. The stockings are too stretchy and won’t hold him for long. But it should last long enough for her to get the gun and point it at him.
Carrie retreats to the other side of the room. Ruth lets the man go and backs away from him towards the gun on the floor a few yards away, keeping her eyes on him. If he makes any sudden movements, she’ll be back on him in a flash.
He stays limp and unmoving as she steps backwards. She begins to relax. The Regulator is trying to calm her down now, to filter the adrenalin out of her system.
When she’s about half way to the gun, the man suddenly reaches into his jacket with his hands, still tied together. Ruth hesitates for only a second before pushing out with her legs to jump backwards to the gun.
As she lands, the man locates something inside his jacket, and suddenly Ruth feels her legs and arms go limp and she falls to the ground, stunned.
Carrie is screaming. “My eye! Oh God I can’t see out of my left eye!”
Ruth can’t seem to feel her legs at all, and her arms feel like rubber. Worst of all, she’s panicking. It seems she’s never been this scared or in this much pain. She tries to feel the presence of the Regulator and there’s nothing, just emptiness. She can smell the sweet, sickly smell of bur
nt electronics in the air. The clock on the nightstand is dark.
She’s the one who had underestimated him. Despair floods through her and there’s nothing to hold it back.
Ruth can hear the man stagger up off the floor. She wills herself to turn over, to move, to reach for the gun. She crawls. One foot, another foot. She seems to be moving through molasses because she’s so weak. She can feel every one of her forty-nine years. She feels every sharp stab of pain in her shoulder.
She reaches the gun, grabs it, and sits up against the wall, pointing it back into the center of the room.
The man has gotten out of Carrie’s ineffective knots. He’s now holding Carrie, blind in one eye, shielding his body with hers. He holds a scalpel against her throat. He’s already broken the skin and a thin stream of blood flows down her neck.
He backs towards the bedroom door, dragging Carrie with him. Ruth knows that if he gets to the bedroom door and disappears around the corner, she’ll never be able to catch him. Her legs are simply useless.
Carrie sees Ruth’s gun and screams. “I don’t want to die! Oh God. Oh God.”
“I’ll let her go once I’m safe,” he says, keeping his head hidden behind hers.
Ruth’s hands are shaking as she holds the gun. Through the waves of nausea and the pounding of her pulse in her ears, she struggles to think through what will happen next. The police are on their way and will probably be here in five minutes. Isn’t it likely that he’ll let her go as soon as possible to give himself some extra time to escape?
The man backs up another two steps; Carrie is no longer kicking or struggling, but trying to find purchase on the smooth floor in her stockinged feet, trying to cooperate with him. But she can’t stop crying.
Mom, don’t shoot! Please don’t shoot!
Or is it more likely that once the man has left the room, he will slit Carrie’s throat and cut out her implant? He knows there’s a recording of him inside, and he can’t afford to leave that behind.
Ruth’s hands are shaking too much. She wants to curse at herself. She cannot get a clear shot at the man with Carrie in front of him. She cannot.
Ruth wants to evaluate the chances rationally, to make a decision, but regret and grief and rage, hidden and held down by the Regulator until they could be endured, rise now all the sharper, kept fresh by the effort at forgetting. The universe has shrunken down to the wavering spot at the end of the barrel of the gun: a young woman, a killer, and time slipping irrevocably away.
She has nothing to turn to, to trust, to lean on, but herself, her angry, frightened, trembling self. She is naked and alone, as she has always known she is, as we all are.
The man is almost at the door. Carrie’s cries are now incoherent sobs.
It has always been the regular state of things. There is no clarity, no relief. At the end of all rationality there is simply the need to decide and the faith to live through, to endure.
Ruth’s first shot slams into Carrie’s thigh. The bullet plunges through skin, muscle, and fat, and exits out the back, shattering the man’s knee.
The man screams and drops the scalpel. Carrie falls, a spray of blood blossoming from her wounded leg.
Ruth’s second shot catches the man in the chest. He collapses to the floor.
Mom, mom!
She drops the gun and crawls over to Carrie, cradling her and tending to her wound. She’s crying, but she’ll be fine.
A deep pain floods through her like forgiveness, like hard rain after a long drought. She does not know if she will be granted relief, but she experiences this moment fully, and she’s thankful.
“It’s okay,” she says, stroking Carrie as she lies in her lap. “It’s okay.”
[Author’s Note: the EchoSense technology described in this story is a loose and liberal extrapolation of the principles behind the technology described in Qifan Pu et. al., “Whole-Home Gesture Recognition Using Wireless Signals,” The 19th Annual International Conference on Mobile Computing and Networking (Mobicom’13) (available at http://wisee.cs.washington.edu/wisee_paper.pdf). There is no intent to suggest that the technology described in the paper resembles the fictional one portrayed here.]
Tender
Rachel Swirsky
The first time my love realized I might kill myself, he remade my arteries in steel.
He waited until I was asleep and then stole me down into the secret laboratory he’d built beneath our house. I pretended to be sleeping as he shifted lights and lenses until the room lit with eerie blue. Using tools of his own invention, he anaesthetized me, incised my skin, and injected me with miniature robots that were programmed to convert my arterial walls into materials both compatible with human life and impossible to sever.
It was not really steel, but I imagine it as steel. I imagine that, inside, I am polished and industrial.
Over the course of the night, he remade the tributaries in my wrists, my throat, my thighs. He made them strong enough to repel any razor. He forbade them from crying red rivers. He banished the vision of a bathtub with water spreading pink. He made my life impossible to spill.
I have recurring dreams of tender things dying in the snow. They are pink and curled and fetal, the kind of things that would be at home in my husband’s laboratory, floating in jars of formaldehyde, or suspended among bubbles in gestational tanks of nutritional gel.
Their skin has no toughness. It is wet and slick, almost amphibian, but so delicate that it bruises from exposure to the air. Their unformed bodies shudder helplessly in the cold, vestigial tails tucked next to ink-blot eyes. On their proto-arms, finger-like protrusions grasp for warmth.
They are possibilities, yearning, unfurling from nothingness into unrealized potential.
In my dreams, I am separated from them by a window too thick to break. I don’t know who has abandoned them, helpless, in the snow. Frost begins to scale their skins. Their mouths shape inaudible whimpers. I can’t get outside. I can’t get to them. I can’t get outside before they die.
My love replaced the bones of my skull with interlocking adamantine scales. I cannot point a gun at my ear and shoot.
So that I cannot swallow a barrel, he placed sensors in my mouth, designed to detect the presence of firearms. Upon sensing one, they engage emergency measures, including alarms, force fields, and a portcullis that creaks down to block my throat.
The sensor’s light blinks ceaselessly, a green wash that penetrates my closed lips. It haunts me in the night, bathing every other second in spectral glow.
One psychiatrist’s theory:
To commit suicide, you must feel hopeless.
To commit suicide, you must believe you are a burden on those you love.
To commit suicide, you must be accustomed to physical risk.
One, two, three factors accounted for. But a fourth forgotten: to commit suicide, you must be penetrable.
My love says he needs me, but he knows that I believe he’s deluded.
He would be better off with another wife. Perhaps a mad lady scientist with tangled red hair frizzing out of her bun and animé-huge eyes behind magnifying glasses. Perhaps a robot, deftly crafted, possessing the wisdom of the subtle alloys embedded in her artificial consciousness. Perhaps a super-human mutant, discovered injured and amnesiac in an alley, and then carried back to his lab where he could cradle her back to health. He could be the professor who enables her heroic adventures, outfitting her with his inventions, and sewing flame-retardant spandex uniforms for her in his spare time.
No poison: my vital organs are no longer flesh.
No car crash: my spinal cord is enhanced by a network of nanobots, intelligent and constantly reconfiguring, ensuring that every sensation flashes, every muscle twitches.
No suffocation: my skin possesses its own breath now. It inhales; it exhales; it maintains itself flush and pink.
“Please,” he says, “Please,” and does not have to say more.
He is crying very quietly. A few tears. A few gulpi
ng breaths.
Apart from the intermittent flash of the sensors in my mouth, our room is black and silent. I have been lying in bed for six days now. In the morning, he brings me broth and I eat enough to quiet him. In the afternoons, he carries up the robotic dog, and it energetically coils and uncoils its metal tail-spring until I muster the strength to move my hand and pat its head.
In the night, we lie beside each other, our skin rough against the sheets. He reaches for my hand where it lies on my pillow. His touch is so much. I can’t explain how much it is. Sensation fills my whole world, and I have so little world left to fill. My body has been strengthened by nanobots and steel, but my mind continues to narrow, becoming less and less. Something as consuming as his touch is so overwhelming that it is excruciating. It’s like all the warmth of the sun hitting my skin at once.
“Please,” he repeats in a murmur.
Next morning, when I wake, he has programmed the nanobots to construct a transparent wall behind my eyes. No bullet, no pencil, no sword can penetrate them to find my brain.
There are so many ways to die.
The accidental: A slick of water, a slip, and the head cracks on the bathtub, shower, kitchen sink. Hands pull the wrong pair of medicines from the cabinet. Feet rest on the arm of the couch, near the blanket thrown over the radiator. The throat contracts around a piece of orange peel, inhaled instead of swallowed, on a day when one is home alone.
The unusual: exploding fireworks, attacking dogs, plummeting asteroids, crashing tsunamis, flashing lightning, striking snakes, whirling tornados, splintering earthquakes, engulfing floods, dazzling electrocution, grinning arson.
The science fictional: robots, and aliens, and zombies, and Frankenstein’s monster, and experiments gone wrong, and spontaneous nuclear reactions, and miniature black holes, and tenth dimensional beings of malevolent light.