“I, too, saw his digits display motility!” enthused a loud tenor voice.
“Fruit,” said a third voice.
A spheroid covered with coarse hair pressed against an appendage of the fuzzy gray entity. This object had weight, but was not heavy. The fuzzy gray entity grasped the hirsute spheroid.
“He crushed it—spectacularly so!” exclaimed the loud tenor voice.
“Can you hear me?” said the familiar voice.
The fuzzy gray entity realized that it was a he and that he was Eagle Sappline. He tried to raise his eyelids, but instead opened two irises. The face immediately before him looked like his own, albeit thinner and a few years older.
“It’s me,” said the doppelganger. “I’m Champ. Your son.”
Suddenly, Eagle Sappline remembered his resurrection and subsequent death.
“Guess I’m on again,” said the re-bodied man, seeing that he was seated in a chair in a cubicle within a big warehouse. Beside his parka-wrapped progeny stood R.J. the Third, clothed in silver wool, and a large black man who had a heavy overcoat and tiger-striped dreadlocks. The cold trio exhaled steam.
“What happened?” inquired Eagle. “I thought CCI was gonna take back the robot.”
“R.J. the Third and I snuck you over here, and Sagesse took out your wireless transmitters and receivers.”
“Sagesse is the big black guy with stupid hair?”
“Yep.”
Eagle swiveled his head to Sagesse. “Thanks.”
The black man nodded his head.
“Are they still looking for me?” the re-bodied man asked his son. “CCI?”
“CCI’s out of business.”
Eagle chirped.
Sagesse looked at Champ.
“He’s laughing,” explained the garbage man.
“What happened to them?” asked Eagle. “Robot revolt or something?”
Champ, R.J. the Third and Sagesse exchanged glances that seemed rather grave.
“And where the hell am I? Is this Nexus Y?”
“No,” the popinjay answered, “I am afraid that you are in New Queens.” The fellow turned his shameful face to the ground. “We had…no other options…but to bring you…here.”
Champ knelt beside the wooden armchair in which Eagle was seated and asked, “How do you feel?”
“Pretty good, I guess. Robot regular.”
R.J. the Third took a step toward the mannequin and leaned in close. “I have a question for you, Mr. Sappline.” The popinjay raised a finger into the air. “During the sixteen-month period of your second death, do you recall waking up in a cephalopod-like body inside a crater within a hollow moon, and summarily floating into the sun for some rather unhappy contemplations?”
Annoyed, Champ faced R.J. the Third. “CCI made that shit up—the Global Senate found the scripts for Dulande’s speech and that English pilot’s in a CCI vault.”
“Or!” exclaimed the popinjay. “Or the Global Senate fabricated the evidence to further discredit CCI after financing its destruction!”
“You spend too much time talking to those paranoid idiots in your fan club.” The garbage man turned his head and said, “No offense” to the big black French fellow who was a member.
Sagesse was uninterested in both the insult and the apology.
Eagle pondered the interim between his shutdown in the annexed fifth-floor kitchen and his re-resurrection a few minutes ago. “I don’t remember anything like that with squids or whatever.”
“And what exactly do you recall, hmmm?” inquired R.J. the Third, as if he were a lawyer from an old movie.
“Nothing,” replied the re-bodied man. “Dying—both times it happened—was like going to sleep, but without the going to the bathroom or the dreams to break things up and show you time’s passing.”
“See?” Champ said to R.J. the Third.
“This proves nothing!” The popinjay stepped back and scratched his short black hair. “It took some of the other infernally-damned gentlemen weeks—or months!—to recall the trauma of solar Hell, so perhaps—”
“Shut up,” barked Champ.
Pouting, R.J. the Third folded his arms.
Eagle surveyed his legs, arms and torso and saw that the chrome-plating had been covered over with flesh-colored foam latex and a tasteful amount of artificial hair. “You guys fixed me up.”
“Yeah,” said Champ. “I wanted you to blend in a little better—so you could do what you wanted without attracting too much attention.”
“This looks realer than that chrome,” remarked Eagle. “Why didn’t those idiots do it like this in the first place?”
“It seems that CCI had some agenda with wanting the mannequins to stand out so that people would start to get used to the idea of alternative bodies.”
“Got it,” said the re-boded man, uninterested in an explanation of that explanation. “Anything fun coming up? Parties or Super Bowls?”
A big grin illuminated Champ’s face. “I’m getting married.”
“Great!”
Eagle willed a smile to his face. The gears, antennae and pseudopodia beneath his eyes whirred, and as his mask crinkled, he felt a very faint tickling sensation.
“I can’t feel my face too good.”
“The gelware mask was totally ruined in the fire,” Champ said, “so the makeup artist who redid your body sculpted this one for you. It isn’t touch-sensitive like the other, but it looks real and’ll help you blend in.”
Eagle did not suppose that he had any other facial options and so said, “Great. Thanks.”
“Sure. Can you feel your hands? Sagesse took the gelware from your feet and rebuilt them.”
Eagle looked at his right hand, which contained a crushed kiwi, and wriggled his digits. The gelware index, middle and ring fingers relayed the cool, wet and coarse textures of the fruit, but his thumb and pinky were numb (though motile). Activating his other hand, he assessed the sensitivity of his remaining digits.
“Six out of ten,” announced the re-bodied man.
“Sixty percent,” said Sagesse.
“That was his guarantee,” R.J. the Third commented to Champ.
“So who’re you marrying?” asked Eagle. “That Texan with the pink hair?”
“Nope.”
“That snaky girl you live with who goes around with no shirt?” The re-bodied man recalled the sizable serpent tattoo that covered the woman’s torso. “She’s a wild one, you can tell. Nothing’s off-limits with a girl like that. Total buffet.”
“Not her,” responded Champ.
Eagle ruminated for a moment and thought of something horrible. “It better not be that lousy ex-wife who cheated on you. I’ll get in the way of that disaster.”
“It’s not her. It’s Douglas’s wife—his widow. Her name’s Molly.”
Guilt assailed the re-resurrected man. “But…but I killed her husband in that fire.”
“We don’t look at it that way. Nobody does. You and Douglas were firemen—that’s a dangerous job. You were both trying to save lives and an accident happened. You got a posthumous award for bravery, and so did he.”
Although Eagle still felt responsible for Douglas’s death, he was pleased to hear that his peers did not hate him. “How’d you two get together?”
“Molly saw me in the pool hall where the firemen go—I’m still on the team with Potato and Butch—they say ‘hi,’ by the way, though most people think you died permanently—and she remembered me from those nights we all went out. She came over and started talking to me, and we just got along great.”
Eagle pondered Douglas’s wife and recalled that she was friendly, pretty and laid-back, even though she seemed
like an intellectual. “Molly seemed real nice. And two hundred and ninety-nine times out of three hundred, black girls are good in bed.”
Sagesse did not seem thrilled by this comment.
“She’s a great companion,” remarked Champ.
“Does she live with you under the toilet? There enough room for two down there?”
“She’s got her own place, a nice one, and she owns a nightclub, too. She lets me do standup comedy there on Tuesdays.”
“Sounds like you made a damn good choice.”
“I think so.”
“It’s a good thing you’re handsome.”
“It gives me options.”
Eagle saw an antique gas motorcycle inside the cubicle on the opposite wall and pointed to it. “My dad had one of those when I was a kid, same exact model.” The re-bodied man recalled his father and a Mexican woman whose name he did not know seated upon the motorcycle. “The sound of that engine used to scare the hell out of me—like an angry dog or a pissed-off lion or something. I always thought it was gonna explode, which really cracked him up…” He stared at the artifact for a moment and added, “It’s not as big as I remember.”
Eagle flung the mashed kiwi into the warehouse. “I want to go over there and look at it. This thing ready to go? The robot?”
“Yes, but take it slow,” cautioned Champ.
The re-bodied man willed his shoulders forward, and the mannequin leaned forward; he willed his hands to the armrests, and the mannequin’s hands gripped the armrests; he willed his bent arms and legs to straighten, and the mannequin’s arms and legs straightened.
The re-resurrected man rose from his wooden seat.
“Seems like the robot’s working,” commented Eagle.
Champ’s eyes widened in terror. “No!”
Eagle’s vision blurred. The warehouse around him wobbled and turned green.
Champ turned to the black man and yelled, “Help him!”
“Merde.”
Sagesse hastened forward, trailing his tiger-striped dreadlocks.
Eagle touched his face, and the prosthetic mask crinkled. He withdrew his hands and saw that his fingertips were covered with green fluid.
“What the hell is—”
Eagle was a fuzzy gray entity…
…and then he was not.
Epilogue IV
Dedicated to My Mother
Winter, 2089 (twenty-nine years later)
The Breutschen sisters (dressed in iridescent black contour suits) and their husbands (clothed in dapper gray tuxedos) listened to the final notes resound within the lavender and gold Perfect Pitch Auditorium. Music dwindled and died, and soon, the orchestra was still. After five seconds of silence, the words “Thank you for attending the Lisanne Breutschen Retrospective” floated up from the outstretched arms of the conductor and sped toward Nancy’s face. Her twin Ellen took and squeezed her hand.
The audience stood, applauding the performers and the deceased composer.
Upon the stage, a Canadian maestro of incomparable skill motioned to Lisanne Breutschen’s daughters and said, “Please join me.”
A new surge of enthusiasm rippled through the crowd.
Nancy shook her head and said, “Thank you, Maestro, but no. This applause is for you, the musicians and my mother.”
The conductor nodded his head respectfully, turned back to the appreciative audience and bowed.
“You two should go up there,” suggested Nancy’s husband. “They’d like to see you.”
“This is a retrospective of our mother’s work: The audience should contemplate her life and her absence.”
“But they want to see you both—you’re a part of her.”
Irked, Nancy said, “We didn’t make this music.”
“You’re wrong about that,” said someone in the row behind the twin sisters.
The siblings turned around and saw a tall, sixty-year-old woman who had wrinkled sepia skin, silver hair and large dark eyes. “You two are the reason these pieces exist,” said the stranger.
“Did you know our mother?” asked Nancy.
The tall woman nodded. “We were close for a little while.”
The applause dwindled, and upon Nancy’s contact lenses, the words “Please Exit the Auditorium” sped intrusively towards her face, chased by the announcement, “The Gala Room is Now Open!” Triple-blinking to turn off the micropixels, she asked the stranger, “Are you Osa Karlsson?”
The tall woman was startled by the inquiry. “Um…yes. I am. She told you about me?”
“Yes.”
Lisanne had spoken of Osa Karlsson when her daughters had asked her what it meant to be in love.
“She spoke very highly of you,” added Ellen.
“That’s nice to hear,” said Osa. “I didn’t know if she ever—” Her voice dropped out, and she turned her head away from the twin siblings. Without another word, the tall woman in black walked to the aisle and left the auditorium.
Nancy remarked, “She must have been a very beautiful woman.”
* * *
At the end of a memorial reception that was filled with melancholic and beautiful toasts to the deceased composer, Nancy and her husband parted from Ellen and her spouse and took an air carriage to the airport, where they boarded a shuttle bound for Berlin.
* * *
Two brindled French bulldogs that were named Gunther and Harry tumbled with flopping tongues and bulging eyeballs toward the humans. Nancy and her husband dropped to their knees and, for twenty minutes, played with the maniacal canines.
The couple withstood the application of much slobber.
Soon, the petite blonde grew hungry (she had not eaten at the reception) and turned the den into a kitchen. Into the victualizer, she said, “Build: bite-sized boneless whole geese; herbs; hot. Build: bite-sized potatoes; butter; sour cream; chives; hot. Build: haricot verts; peach segments; roasted almonds; truffle oil; warm.” A green light on the marble wall-panel blinked, and the woman turned to her husband. “Is there something else you would enjoy?”
“That sounds good.”
Nancy tapped the blinking light, and the victualizer hummed a melody as it assembled the described foods with a ninety-eight percent waste-free protein-vitamin-fiber compound. Thirty-two seconds later, a glass platter emerged from the wall, bearing twenty miniature geese, ten tiny baked potatoes and forty haricot verts. Silver toothpicks jutted from a pincushion in the center of the dish.
The couple pierced, raised, chewed and swallowed the bite-sized whole potatoes, haricot verts and boneless geese. As they ate, they listened to broadcasts from the peace summit between the Global Senate and the Greater Free Republics, yet were not hopeful that the sleep wars in Asia, Africa and the Americas would end in the near future. For twenty minutes, the couple discussed the paintings that Nancy’s gallery had recently acquired, and for half that amount of time, they talked about the underground buildings that her husband was currently designing for a firm in Beijing.
After he swallowed the last miniature boneless goose, the architect said, “I’d love to watch something in the mote environment for a little while.”
“We should finish that experience we started last weekend,” suggested Nancy.
“The one with the resurrected fireman and that garbage man?”
“Yes. I’m curious to see what happens to them.”
“It’s pretty funny,” her husband said, “and those guys are really stupid.”
“They aren’t stupid. And I believe Barry Watts won an award for his performance.”
“Which one’s he?”
“The one who plays Champ.”
“The garbage man?” Her husband shrugged, unimpressed. “H
e’s mediocre.”
“He is a very handsome mediocre.”
Epilogue V
The Very Final Act from the Mote
Environment Experience entitled,
The 75% True Story of Champ and Eagle Sappline
(The Zenith Achievement in the History
of the Arts by R.J. the Third)
Clothed in blue flannel sleepwear, Nancy and her husband walked through a living wall and into the mote environment, the walls of which were black and filled with billions of micromagnetic processors.
“Do you want to sit in the center again?” asked the petite blonde, hoping for an unexpected answer.
“Yeah. I like being right in it, feeling it all around me as if I’m actually there.”
Nancy thought that sitting in the center of a mote environment was a bit taxing (one had to regularly pivot), but said, “Okay,” because it mattered more to her husband than it did to her.
The couple walked to the middle of the room, where the architect whistled a C-sharp and said, “Divan; two people.” An iris in the floor opened up, and the requested furniture inflated.
Husband and wife sat upon the trapped air and leaned against each other.
With concern in his gentle brown eyes, the man looked at his wife and asked, “Are you okay with today? The retrospective and everything…?”
Nancy had maintained her composure throughout the evening, excepting when the orchestra had played “The Overlapping Joys.” “It is sad,” she remarked, “but it has been three years. And it is wonderful that her music is appreciated by so many people…that she continues to have a presence and an impact even though she is gone.”
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