by Peter Watts
“You left before I could explain everything.” Alyce handed the bottle over. Ostap pushed the cork with his fingertip until it plopped out and splashed down, bobbing in the wine like a buoy. She poured.
“I thought maybe you called me for something else,” Ostap said. He kept his eyes off the bed.
“People only call Superman when there’s trouble, O.” Alyce took a slug of the wine and swished it in her mouth. Swallowed. “They never call him to say everything’s great, you should come visit.”
“They should,” Ostap said. “They used to. We used to just visit.”
“If you want to call it that,” Alyce said, but there was a heat in the tips of her ears that wasn’t from the wine. She handed him the other glass.
“The first time we fucked was one week after I learned to walk. To the day.” Ostap tried to laugh. “Did you know that? I mean, what kind of Oedipal shit is that?”
Twitching his toes in the recovery room had been euphoria, standing on his own two feet, Elysium. As soon as he was cleared, he’d spent every second he could with the harness, tottering on a treadmill as his new nerves carved channels of motion and memory. One night Dr. Woodard had stayed with him, to show him where else his new nerves led.
“It wasn’t on my calendar,” Alyce said. “It just happened.”
And it had been over quickly, a confusion of sweat and heat that had nothing methodical, nothing logical about it. She hadn’t nodded thoughtfully or dashed notes on her tablet afterward.
“Nasty, brutish, and short,” was what she’d said, but smiling, wriggling back into her jeans. She’d put her hands around Ostap’s hips, where scars were still tender.
“I’ve had dreams about you,” Ostap had said, but in Polish, so she wouldn’t know it.
“Maybe I’m just a narcissist,” Alyce said now, to her wine glass. “Maybe Michelangelo wanted Il David.”
“You should have just let me find out on the fucking net,” Ostap said.
“Should I leave?” Alyce asked.
She sat on the hotel bed, rumpling crisp white sheets, and Ostap sat on the floor with his head leaned back against its foot. The wine was clinging in his dry mouth.
The last time he’d been in this city, every day had been stronger and faster and smoother. The augs had been synchronizing, the protein pumps sculpting muscles layer by layer. His new size had had him ducking under doorways and cramming into cars. They’d flown a redeye back to Warsaw for the final stretch of treatments, for last calibrations and probes and his hysterical mother, and he hadn’t been in Boston since.
“My parents,” Ostap said. “I’m going to have to tell them.”
“Where are they now?” Alyce asked.
“La Rochelle. Moved them there a few years ago.” He tipped his head back. “They always wanted to holiday there. I think they’re happy.”
“That’s good,” Alyce said. “When you’re old you deserve to be happy. You’ve put up with enough shit.”
You’re old, Ostap wanted to say. He wanted to ask her if she was happy.
“Maybe they are, maybe they’re not,” he said instead. “I’m wrong about that. Sometimes. I mean, I thought you and me were happy.”
“We were,” Alyce said. “Because we were riding a whirlwind, O. You know, the parties and the galas and the fashion consultants and hair stylists and booking agents. All those interviews. Hell, I even wore a dress.”
“I remember,” Ostap said. He’d worn a tailored suit, slashed in such a way as to display the nodes along his spine, and in a matter of weeks everyone wore them that way. “Movie stars and moguls,” he said. “That night in Chicago.”
“Rome, Dubai, New York.” Alyce shrugged. “They blend.”
“The Superman thing was just taking off,” Ostap pressed, because it was important somehow, important that she remember that one drunken night in Chicago they’d spent roving through the city in an autocab, searching for a phone booth. There were none left, so they’d ended up tinting the windows instead.
“We had a good run,” Alyce said. “And that year. Well. I’ll always remember that year.”
They were quiet for a moment, listening to what sounded like a full riot outside, hoarse screaming and one looping police siren. Ostap had turned the wallscreens off, but he could guess what was happening. He could guess that his net implant would be overloaded with calls, messages, demands when he lifted the block.
“What are they saying?” he finally asked. “I blocked the feed.”
“All the classics.” Alyce moved the dregs of her glass in a slow circle, tipping it just so. “Neo-reactionists flaring up all over. Abomination. Playing God. Things like that.”
“Playing Frankenstein,” Ostap said, and felt a dull triumph when her face went red.
“Yeah. All those.”
“It won’t change anything,” he said, then, when she looked at him shrewdly: “It won’t stop biomods. Developers will still be going after full integration.” He paused. “Maybe they’ll look at safer designs. Learn from your mistake.”
“Safety isn’t even in the equation when they’ve already killed a dozen candidates under Beijing. But they’re still only seeing success with the partial augs.” She reached for the bottle on the night-stand. “We were lucky with you, O. You might be the first, best. Last.”
“Do you remember the last time we talked face to face?” Ostap asked. “After your symposium.”
“Why are we talking about all this, O?”
“Because I always thought there would be time later.”
“There will be,” Alyce said. “I told you. There are options.”
“I need air,” Ostap said. He got up and walked to the wide window. He thought about two years as his hands found the cool glass, thought about two winging orbits of the planet around its sun. The door slid open and he stepped out onto the balcony, feeling stucco under his bare feet. The night air was cool and flapped at his clothes, slipped over his buzzed skull. The cityscape lights were like fractured stars.
The last time they’d spoken face-to-face, she’d pushed his lips off her neck and tightened her scarf.
“It cheapens our accomplishment,” she’d explained. “People are saying things, O. Finally built a better vibrator. They said that.” Her face had been red and angry in the dark.
“I don’t give a shit,” he’d said.
“Frankenstein didn’t make the monster so he could put his dick in it.”
Ostap had had nothing to say to that, even though every part of Alyce shrank, apologetic and ashamed, a heartbeat after. He still didn’t.
Someone had floated up a cam on a helium sack, drifting level with the balcony, and now it started to whirr and flash. Ostap looked down and saw its laser light playing across his chest, tracking every twitch like a sniper’s scope. He thought of hurling his empty glass with perfect velocity, smashing it against the cam to rain tiny fragments down into the street. They would love that.
The carmine dot skittered across his arm, up his neck. Ostap went back inside, sliding the door shut behind him.
The wine was nearly gone when Ostap came back in. Alyce had left just a sliver in the bottom of the bottle, as she’d always done, to avoid the feeling she was drinking too much. She had her arms crossed, pacing back and forth with just a hint of unsteadiness.
“Like I said, if we shut everything down right now, if we power down your augs and get you to the labs, your chances are good,” she was saying. “We can figure out what can be removed. What can’t. We’ll get you on dialysis, an arti-heart . . . ”
“You came and sat with me in recovery,” Ostap said. “After the last surgery. You smelled like, uh, like hand sanitizer.”
“You said I had coffee breath,” Alyce said, stopping.
“That too, yeah. Black coffee and hand sanitizer.” Ostap paused. “You had those Michelangelo paintings. Hellenic ideals, you talked about. All those trapezoids and abdomens.”
“Anatomically impossible, of cou
rse,” Alyce said. “All those opposing muscles groups flexing simultaneously. But beautiful.”
She’d dug further through the images, blowing up Grecian statues on the wall. A wasteland of cracked marble, mythological figures missing limbs, noses, genitals. She’d plucked at her throat with one finger, and murmured that it was too bad, how even gods decayed.
“You never asked me about the accident,” Ostap said, taking the wine bottle by the neck. “Not once in all these years.”
Alyce shook her head.
“Why?” Ostap asked, starting to pour, millimeter precise. “You’re a doctor. I know you’d seen GBS before. You knew the spinal damage wasn’t trauma.”
“I’d seen it,” Alyce agreed. “Yours looked early. Probably all but from birth, right?”
“Why?” Ostap repeated. “You had other candidates. Plenty of candidates. You had to know those tapes were doctored. That the accident story was bullshit.”
“I guess I wanted to make something from nothing.”
Ostap’s fingers tightened and a crack squealed through the bottle. Two droplets squeezed out and bloomed red on the carpet. He set the wine bottle down, delicate. “How God did it?” he asked.
“How God happened,” Alyce said. “We might have had better results with another candidate. We’ll never know. But you were perfect, O. You wanted it. No matter what happened.”
Ostap realized the wine was blurring her, smoothing the lines in her face, making her look almost how she did before.
“Thank you,” he said, because the last time he’d said it he was translating for his silver-haired father sobbing too hard for software to understand.
“Whatever you decide.” She put her hand flat against his ribs, where organs ready to crumble did their work under skin so thin, no composite casing. He looked at her desiccated lips. Graying hair. He looked at the hand on his flesh, their two bodies contrasted.
“It was anatomically impossible,” he said.
“But beautiful.”
Ostap undid the block and his head was a sudden deluge, blinking messages and interview probes and priority tags. He raked through the backlog of business. Mountain races, a sub-orbital parachute drop, a biomod boxing league, Accra promotions.
He gave nothing but green lights.
Small Medicine
Genevieve Valentine
“You remember your grandmother,” they’d said to Sofia when she was seven, and she’d looked up and said, “Not this one.”
Her parents always told it smiling, like it was clever of her to have noticed Grandmother had changed; who could have told the difference, they asked each other, and her grandfather nodded his familiar amazement, and in the corner the machine that wasn’t her grandmother looked back and forth with a smile.
Her grandmother died.
It’s all right that she did; grandparents die. Peter at school’s grandparents had died.
But Grandmother must have known Grandfather would miss her too much, because she had herself copied, and Mori made a version of her that was perfect enough for Grandfather.
That first time they brought Grandmother to see Sofia, the machine bent over a little, rested open hands on her knees like anyone did when they were trying to be friendly to a child they’d never met.
“I’m Theodosia. Your grandmother.”
You’re not my grandmother, she thought, held out her right hand on the end of an arm stretched as long as it could go.
It was a very brief pause before Grandmother reached out to meet her handshake; in life, she had always been polite.
They must have programmed her to love telling stories more than her real grandmother had, because whenever her parents took Sofia to visit, Grandmother got her alone as soon as she could and tucked Sofia up against her side for reading. (She was squishy, like flesh, but always the same temperature—a little cool in summer and a little warm in winter—and if you pressed your hand hard enough to her side there was a curved metal panel where ribs should be.)
She’d read stories about foxes and mermaids and ghosts, about whales and the birds that lived in cracks in the mountains.
When her parents weren’t around, Grandmother read books about Tom, who had problems at school: because some kids were mean, because they didn’t have a work assignment yet and weren’t sure what they were good at, because they had done something wrong on a test and felt guilty until they confessed to the kindly schoolmaster.
“What was Tom assigned?” Sofia asked once.
“The book doesn’t say, little Sofa,” said Grandmother. It had been her grandmother’s name for her. Neither of them really wanted her to say it, and it scratched.
“Did he like it?”
“Assignments are given because of what you’re good at, little Sofa, not because of what you like.”
Sofia didn’t know anyone like this (these were charity kids who lived at their schools, not like a normal school), and at first it was like the mermaid stories, but she thought about Tom more than she ever thought about ghosts.
She asked her parents once, while working on her homework (polymer sculptures, smokeswirls of blue and gray, she hated it) what would happen to Tom if he hated his work assignment.
Next time they went to visit Grandmother, she read a story about monkeys who never come down from the trees.
“I want a story about Tom,” Sofia said.
There was a little pause; under her shoulder, something inside Grandmother was whirring.
“I don’t know any stories about Tom,” Grandmother said. “Would you like a story about a rabbit that lives in the snow?”
That was strange, Sofia thought, a cloud gathering inside her just above her stomach, but she said, “Yes.”
Grandmother pulled her closer, and opened the book so it was half on her lap and half on Sofia’s, so Sofia could help her turn the pages. Sofia’s shoulder pressed into Grandmother’s side, Grandmother’s arm a cradle, slightly cool, on the back of her neck.
Grandmother was the one who noticed Sofia’s neck was swollen; she was the one who first mentioned that something must be wrong.
The pharmaceutical company has ads for it now, in public, on buses for people to think about alongside vocational training and designer bags. Sofia always ends up right in front of one; a law of public transit.
There’s a picture of a Victorian nursemaid, hustling some dour sepia-tone children into a Technicolor future as doctors smile into middle space; there’s copy about medicine finally being able to take care of them the way you would if you could.
NANIMED, they named it, and honestly somebody should be ashamed of that branding. (She can imagine the hundreds of hours of marketing meetings that led to someone finally caving in to that.) The promise underneath: Small Medicine. Big Difference.
The fine print isn’t very fine. The costs are significant, but they’ve never pretended this is a solution for the people. The results are glowing, the benefits immense, the side effects minimal.
There hasn’t been a single death in the nano program. There wouldn’t be.
At Mori, we know you care.
We know you love your family. We know you worry about leaving them behind. And we know you’ve asked for more information about us, which means you’re thinking about giving your family the greatest gift of all:
You.
Studies have shown the devastating impact grief has on family bonds and mental health. The departure of someone beloved is a tragedy without a proper name.
Could you let the people you love live without you?
If they’d brought Grandmother back just for her, it would have been simpler. Worse, but simpler.
But when they come to visit, her mother’s eyes still get misty when Grandmother stands up to embrace her. Grandfather still sits beside her as they watch TV at night, and when they all go out for dinner he holds her hand to help her in and out of the car. She doesn’t remember him ever doing that for her real grandmother; maybe he needs to do it now. Sofia doe
sn’t know if a robot’s balance is better or worse than hers.
Well, not hers. She has the best balance of anyone she knows. She can do a dozen cartwheels and never even be lightheaded. The nanos make sure.
But she’s also seen whole days go by when Grandfather asks her about school and watches movies with her father and give off-kilter advice to her mother and never looks once at the corner where Grandmother’s sitting, eyes shifting with the conversation but mouth never moving, or sometimes not even that.
(They haven’t explained to her yet that Grandmother has settings, that you can close her off whenever you’re tired of her. She’s new to her nanos; maybe they just didn’t want to give Sofia any ideas.)
Technically they’re in her system to regulate her antibodies and moderate her immune responses.
“You’re lucky you caught it when you did,” the doctor told her parents, and they nodded like they’d caught anything.
“What will happen to me now?” Sofia asked. She remembers thinking of Grandmother’s metal plate, even though she could feel that nothing like that had happened. She couldn’t feel that anything had happened at all.
But it had, because while the doctor explained to her parents the wonderful side effects of nanos, he smiled calmly and made a cut with his scalpel above her knee, and before she could even open her mouth to cry the skin was furling back together, smoothing over. It still stung (psychosomatic, every doctor since had said when she told them it hurt), but there was nothing left of the injury.
If it wasn’t for the stream of blood that was already drying up, you’d never know there had ever been a wound. No one would have believed her if she’d told them.
They take the family on a trip the next year to celebrate; Sofia had always been a little tired, a little sickly, before the nanos, just enough that the trip now felt like something her parents had been wanting to do, and she’d been holding them back.
The resort is at the top of the mountain, surrounded by wide lawns and dropping off to views of the city in the river valley below. Her parents go skiing. Her grandfather spends long afternoons in the conservatory, speaking to a woman who looks a little younger than he is, who smiles at his jokes sometimes and sometimes looks away when he’s talking, and he has to talk about something else to get her to look at him again.