Gaia's Toys

by Rebecca Ore

  Its human was back—the mantis felt Willie’s warm hands and began wriggling its abdomen. Willie’s breath vibrated the air and warmed the mantis’s eyeballs. He put the mantis down on the kitchen table, on old newspaper, and it shat, then began stroking music out of its legs. The lungs, attached to the thorax and wing muscles, sucked air in, puffed air out. Willie sighed. The mantis walked off the paper and wrapped its legs around Willie’s forearm, the warmth of it.

  Willie looked down at the mantis and said, “I bet you got the bugs out, too.”

  The mantis felt the man vibrate the air, and it moved its head so the two focus areas of each eye, where the eye facets were smaller and thicker, caught Willie—the human’s jelly eyes, the mobile flesh flaps, four of them. But still the mantis knew the man in a dim way, this pattern, these particular eyelids, lips, teeth, pores filled with red clay particles and black Roanoke dirt.

  The mantis twisted slightly and rubbed human soothing sounds from its legs, then misted the air slightly with a pheromone that made them both happier.

  Willie remembered the day the mantis came stepping through his door when he opened it, as though it had been invited. Just as he began to scream—bug even if not bugshaped—the mantis made its music.

  Wild or escaped recombinant-DNA insect tranquilizer military tool? Willie never found out for sure, but a couple of other dole people had them as pets already. None of us talk much about them, but there’s mantis kibble on the market, so I suspect they’re made creatures.

  Male or female? Neither Willie nor the mantis knew.

  The five-dollar credit chip made Willie itchy. He had it in his pocket when he called his caseworker. “Hi, Eileen, it’s me, Willie. I need to talk to you.”

  “What about, Willie?”

  “Well, about doing something, getting off the dole.”

  “Willie.”

  He remembered that she’d told him once that he had a good brain, but not enough determination to run it on his own. They’d been mad at each other that day, over something like him selling tap time to a private computer programmer who picked his electrode cap locks. Man wasn’t caught with Willie’s head in a vice, but when the wire patrollers caught him and another dole brain running a modem steal on the Reader’s Digest database, he told them Willie’d laid for him, too. “So, this time, I check with you, make sure I don’t do anything illegal.”

  “Willie, I’d love to see you get off the dole, okay. Now, can you come up with a plan?”

  He was thirty-four years old—how the hell was he going to get someone to hire him, dole brain for seven years, military before that. “Or at least do something besides sit around between plug-in times.”

  “It’s not a job, it’s an adventure.” That phrase floated through his mind. Like everyone said, he had plenty of free time between being blanked out into a computer. He fingered the five-dollar chip as Eileen said, “Willie, I can’t come up with a plan for you. If you come up with a plan that’s legal, I’ll do my best to help you implement it, okay?”

  “Okay.” He’d walk into town, take a train to a public tap and check out databases on jobs, IQ tests. Five dollars should buy something. Maybe he’d sell the mantis, if there was a market for mantises.

  As he hung up, the mantis walked into the room and played its music. “No, baby, I can’t sell you.”

  He got his wig out of the three-hundred-year-old walnut cupboard he’d painted with blue enamel when he realized Welfare wanted him to sell all his valuables. As he glued on the wig, he realized wouldn’t sell the cabinet nor the mantis—he’d be truly poor then. But he could sell the Tibetan art. He never looked at it anyway, not part of his cultural matrix as a man who owned his own brain might say. The wig covered his electrode caps. He checked himself in the mirror, tugged the wig to make sure the wig stayed put.

  Town was a ways, but he walked, fast so the cold could get him through his Welfare cast-off coat. The plasma center was in an old storefront—chrome plate peeling off the trim, whitewash blanking the windows. They never said anything about welfare. Stuart was a small town so they probably knew. The girl took his fingerprints and sat him down at a chair. He slipped his left arm under the cuff. The chair hummed, calculating his weight, setting up, then the needle and tube dropped out of the side of the chair arm. The girl inserted it into Willie’s vein after the cuff inflated. From there on, it was automatic.

  The chair would spin the plasma off the blood cells, mix the cells with saline solution, and return the washed cells to Willie’s arm. But it took a human to put the needle in. Or else, Willie decided, she was cheaper than a program and sensors capable of finding all veins. It was cheaper to use a human brain to scan handwriting than work up a computer to do that.

  The blood drained down, red and warm, into the chair, then, about thirty minutes later, as Willie was dozing off, pushed back into Willie’s veins his blood cells, some bent, mashed, suspended in chilly saline that tickled and chilled.

  He took a alcohol patch from the container when the needle retracted and held it against the needle hole. The girl had him sign for his second five-dollar chip of the week.

  He said, “Where would a man go if he needed to sell some Tibetan sculptures?”

  “Know a man,” she said. “In D.C. Yeah, but…” She shrugged thin shoulders. “I know another man closer, easier to deal with for a man with your connections.”

  “Can’t hook up through these trodes. They put in screaming locks. Even Welfare can’t cut out the message to Central. They just check to make sure I’m on time for dole duty.”

  “Sorry. I’ll tell him it’s impossible.”

  Willie shuddered, partly from the cold plasma dumped in his veins, partly from thinking about round, gas-squirting bugs. “What about the guy in D.C.?”

  “He runs a shop in Old Town,” the girl said. “I’ll call him, give me a name or something.”

  “Mr. Jubbie Carter,” Willie said.

  The girl said, “You know I’m supposed to report a welfare man’s earnings if I know. From the plasma, anything else.” She’d get a cut of whatever deal he ran with the guy in Washington, a cut off of informing.

  Willie said, “Could you give me two fours for these fives?”

  The plasma center bitch took the money and handed him back a five and three ones, not smiling at all. Willie smiled and said, “I don’t have anything at my house, you know. I’ll take up just one thing at a time.” He’d always lie to the bitch about what he had and what he had left. Be just like her to let him sell everything, then inform on him so he’d lose his money. But money could be hid easier than sculptures.

  Something in the big world was going on and he wanted to know why it bled into his work memories. He could get four dollars a week from plasma without fuss, buy keyboard time into a data base. Too bad he couldn’t hook up through his dole ’trodes. But if he tried to steal brain time again, Eileen had told him, they’d give him bug hallucinations. Willie never asked if the hallucinations would be in reality from bug gas or data demons through computer chips. Only bug he wanted to see more of was his mantis.

  I’m going to come up with a damn plan.

  He put on his coat and walked home.

  TWO

  TO YOU PEOPLE WHO MUST LIVE

  IN THE FUTURE I AM MAKING

  When I turned forty-three, I was Mattie Higgins, driving on fake ID and plate-grown fingerprints to New Orleans. The car trim, I’d been told, would explode when triggered by the right radio code. A 12-gauge shotgun, broke open and trigger up, rode like a person sitting beside me, Mr. Gun and his human girlfriend.

  The barrel had been sawed off precisely as short as any state I went through allowed. Even though I’d fitted the gun with a shoulder pad, I hated to fire that big a load.

  In Picayune, I pulled off the Interstate and parked the Xhoshiba at an old Winn Dixie and bought a six pack of maize beer and two cans of organic peanut and chile soup, then changed from the dress and heels to jeans and a teeshirt g
reasy with oil laced with something that broke cordite molecules—in case I had to shoot someone. My heels needed resoling badly. I heated up a can of soup in the car’s microwave and put Yo Secuve on the stereo. The soup cost too much, but I preferred true agricultural product.

  A truck full of swamp Cajuns pulled up, post-survivalist survivors bristling with old Ash-95’s, needle barrels beside the slug barrels. The barrel ends looked like tortured metal faces with no noses—one steel eye bruised down to a tiny dot.

  I smiled at them and memorized the plate number, in case they were in the way when I came back out of Louisiana. Drive, woman, I told myself, you’ve got bombs to plant. I donated can metal at the store crusher, then drove back onto the Interstate, seventeen hours out of Washington, just a lone middle-aged woman driving fast, shotgun on the seat beside her, too old, too short, and too slight to be a physical threat. Would have looked suspicious to be alone and unarmed.

  Last night’s nightmare replayed me trying to surrender to an orphanage. In the nightmare, I could never find the orphanage. In reality, I’d thought I was quite mature to look for an orphanage when my parents abandoned me in a river park. But I refused to tell the Cincinnati cops anything. Maybe prepping me for the drode world was the cops’ and orphanage’s payback for me not informing on my biologicals.

  The orphanage numbered me, mapped my DNA and retinas, and sent me to play on educational machines. Orphanage educational machines produced students numerate and literate enough to be good scanners.

  Machines fought formal wars. Humans fought little non-wars. I’ve battled to be more than a dole idiot scanning handwritten memos into computers. The long dream of the twenty-first century collapsed when the owners realized people bred at their own cost, but machines took capital. Making a computer to read brain output was cheaper than building pure artificial intelligence. Brains came preprogrammed with all sorts of equations we didn’t have to be conscious of to use.

  I refused to be a computer’s bio-component. I believed in tools people could build for themselves, a world rebuilt by people using those tools. Since my late teens, I’d been an eco-warrior. The Movement gave me my first kind lover and a real education.

  Now, disguised by middle age and a lower mid-line car, I merged in the Interstate flow at 90 MPH, the flat land around us cropped four times a year for fibers, oil, and feed meals, clear tubes running down out of the booster tanks as if the land were in intensive care.

  Cruise by balloon-tired combines eating strips wider than half an Interstate.

  Did the Picayune clerk have the flat affect of this overcropped land? The Pearl River lay walled in concrete—whoosh, behind me now. Now refineries—rock oil, vegetable oil, fish, bird and mammal fat, we bum it all. Crematories sold human fat as a side product. We had plenty of dead people. Welfare dole electrodes bring on brain infection to drode heads who don’t keep clean. Sweat-vectored AIDS wasn’t as lethal as the sexual varients, but it cropped weaker humans.

  I switched lanes for the Canal Street exit, the fool sky raining on me. Minutes later, on Canal Street, I pulled over and put the shotgun in its case.

  Illicher—what the Government called my kind. The high tech Survivalists call us Luddites, although we don’t kick personal computers, okay. I pulled back out and drove into my hotel’s garage building, punched the ticket clock for hanging storage. Clamps came down on my car’s front end and hoisted it up like a bug in forceps, trunk down.

  I had wondered if the new African cars were built to hang—obviously, yes. Hang them all, I thought as the hoist lifted the car up to the rails that whirled cars around like clothes at a personal dry cleaners.

  The bombs stayed in the car. I wore the trigger—looking like a gold jewel dangling from an earring post.

  The Movement always used my ambiguous look, not African-American, not completely white. Being small disarms people. I don’t, though, remember my parents as being particularly small or dark. Actually, I don’t remember my folks much better than I remember my nightmares. They dumped me after I began giving them grief like a eight-year-old might. I’ve figured since they lived in the cracks like Movement people, perhaps much more illegal—hustles and scams, scutwork that required more conscious judgement than a drode head and machine could give.

  The State proved a lousy mother. I ran when I realized the nice surgery scheduled for my fifteenth birthday was for the computer interface module. If I’d screwed up at eight by surrendering to an orphanage, I’d be smarter at fourteen. I wasn’t going to have wires in my head, no route for brain infections for this girl, not me.

  From age fifteen, I’ve been a figment of other people’s nightmares and fantasies. Renegade children live on theft and machine sex shows. Tolerated by the government, we provided a threat to more compliant urban masses. Buy more cops, we’ll protect you from the kids.

  But the police gun down kid gangs from time to time, as if shooting us made us more dangerous. I looked back once. A terrified adult shot at me as though I’d explode and take out his whole neighborhood.

  Oh, well. Inside me, an eight-year-old girl walks forever through Cincinnatti hunting for an orphanage. I wish she’d joined a kid gang early enough for that life to have seemed normal.

  So, now, I was traveling in eco bombs. My own horrors locked in my skull bones, I made other people’s nightmares come true.

  Enough of me. Did I say that AIDS was to Africa what the Black Plague was to my European ancestors?

  Did I say that to run a high-tech, ecologically sound world, a micromanaged environment, the controllers have to both believe their instruments and be looking for what else might be wrong, even if the corrections cost them? No humans are that egoless or honest or consistent.

  So, we bomb tech back when we suspect the instruments show problems the controllers refuse to face. People die. So what? People were already dying. The individuality of people is as real and insignificant as the individuality of snowflakes.

  I went into the hotel and gave them the fake fingerprints, then went up to shower in hot salt water, turning under the spray. Fresh for the hair—membrane distilled.

  The bed I’d ordered was a cotton-stuffed mat covered with pure linen ticking. I stripped, turned off the air-conditioning, and lay down, finally tired.

  Bombs away. Tech against tech. I paid the demons at night. Oil burned on the Mississippi. I died in the explosion. After I died, I wandered around trying to be dead, trying to find an afterlife that would take me.

  I woke during the night, paralyzed by dreads I couldn’t quite remember, sweating. Someone once told me dreams were the body trying to warn the intellect, but if my nightmares came from the body, then I wished I didn’t have one. I lay listening to a midnight trumpet playing jazz until I slept again.

  In the morning, rain slid through the ambient humidity, instantly recycled on the pavements. As I slid into my hose and shoes, I wondered if I’d live to get cancer from all the carcinogens dissolved in the city rain.

  Probably not. I wiggled into a dress and went downstairs for breakfast. Today, I’d relax and be a tourist, wouldn’t care if killers from all the factions followed me. The car would dangle, the bombs disguised as plastic seat trim. Returning to it was the hard part. Then, I’d worry, be careful.

  I went through crowds of night people going back to their beds at sunrise. Beds or coffins—New Orleans pasty pale vampires feed on tourists who go home thrilled by their neck scars. Look, Henry, authentic fang marks.

  As significantly individual as snowflakes—these pale exhuman beings, these dark animated corpses. No, not really zombies and vampires. Too many people—that’s what made me fantasize zombies and vampires out of tired strippers, musicians, bartenders, and dole heads. Dole heads were true technological zombies. Too many people—planet, I have promised you relief. Turning the human surplus into the living dead isn’t good enough.

  I remembered the dream of being dead with no place to go, neither oblivion or heaven. Not even hell. My dead dream
self asked what should I do now?

  Push the dream away. Today I am a daytripper, too prim for the night shows, open bar doors displaying naked flesh swirling over the bar, teasing those gametes into more reproduction.

  We can’t live with the consequences of those gamete actions. Bomb the oil, pollute once, not forever. Break the dams that hold back the ocean. Tear down the levees and let the Mississippi run wild. Drag the solar reflectors out of orbit. Bring in the water that belongs here as the ice caps melt. Cut the human numbers.

  I was Tech, once, but it requires too much honesty. Micro-managing the ecosphere requires perfect ego control.

  But understand, I was a nervous kid renegade until I learned to shoot. Firing a .410 shotgun made me charitable to my neighbors. The 12-gauge made me realize that killing could be painful.

  The clerk in the sex goods and liquor store was scowling at the television as a techno-punk and a Catholic argued. He saw me looking and went service-people bland, but I knew he hated one or the other of the debaters.

  “So, who bothers you?” I said.

  “All ideologues,” he said, deciding not to give a damn about my opinions either.

  I bought a vibrator, artificial jissom, and a bottle of Scotch from him. Just a tourist, out to have a good time, even if, in true Techie fashion, excessively private.

  I went back to my room and used the vibrator to sex out the nightmare tensions. Going out for lunch, I felt post-coitally languid, soothed by fake prostate secretions. Too tired to walk far, I ate expensively on a credit card set to erase its records in three days.

  Tomorrow, I’d contact the man who’d get me into the refinery. If he didn’t show, I could always take out a sea levee and drown the city. That one was a suicide mission, but then I was just another human snowflake, wasn’t I?