Gaia's Toys

by Rebecca Ore

  “I want to tell her I was an eco-terrorist.”

  “Then how do you explain me?”

  “Being an eco-terrorist doesn’t keep me from also having been a whore.”

  “Allison, don’t make things too complicated.”

  “Okay, but I’ve got to have ecological leanings to bring her out,”

  “That’s okay,” Mike said. “But you need to be more like a real drode head. If she made the mantises for drode heads, then she’s got a social theory about drode heads.”

  “You do think it’s her, don’t you?”

  “We thought it was Henry, but we found out what he’s doing. He’s trying to work out a way to get humans transferred to computers without killing the human who’s crossing.”

  “Is that illegal?”

  “It’s ecologically incorrect,” Mike said. “Perfect immortality for only part of the population could cause riots. People put up with differences in status because of different responsibilities, but if the rich lived forever and the poor died, then how long would the poor put up with that? Dying equalizes us. We’re all oil and ash in the end.”

  Yeah, but a drode head corpse has its borrowed equipment dissected out. I said, “Interesting couple.”

  “The wife thinks Dorcas is a joke,” ¿Mike said. “Dorcas does all her own endangered species maintenance, plus Henry’s. So Henry’s got more time to further his career.”

  “How did you find that out?” I asked.

  Mike said, “We got a job for one of Henry’s other postdocs and he jabbered like an old lady.”

  I said, “Amazing what a person does for a job.” Poor bitch, now I had to feel sorry for her.

  Hanging with drode heads didn’t take much doing. While my immediate building only contained me, about two blocks away, drode heads had established a beachhead in a former co-op, renting from the original tenants. I wondered if the owners got a tax break for renting to welfare people, but the immediate task was to begin riding home with them after work. Since I had been raped by a drode-head predator, I certainly was nervous enough to seem sincerely looking for folks to come downtown with.

  Drode heads congregated in a supermarket that took food stamps without being snotty about it. I suspected that the supermarket gave coin change, not scrip, but uncovering that wasn’t my mission. The supermarket offered free coffee. I said to the other bald people hanging around the coffee machine, “I’m new here.”

  A woman who looked about twenty asked, “Where do you live?”

  “In a loft on Hester.”

  “How?” the woman asked.

  “A friend who saw me out of prison. I don’t think it’s going to last a whole lot longer.”

  “You fuck a hair-head?”

  “Yes. but I was fucking him when I was a hair-head myself.”

  A man joined us and asked, “What do you want?”

  “I’m looking for people to ride downtown with. Just after I went through orientation, I got raped by some sleaze who advertised he wanted to talk to drode heads for research.”

  Two more drode heads came up and listened while getting themselves free coffee. I felt like this was a more critical test of my cover than when I ran it by Dr. Dorcas.

  “Where you working?” the man who first joined us asked.

  “Rockefeller University,” I said, suddenly uneasy.

  “You don’t have drode holes. One of those experimental systems?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Cut a bit of time off my sentence to take it.” I felt like a whore for real.

  “Shit,” the man said. “Hope they can retrofit. Open holes are a bitch to tend.”

  I said, “New system’s working out fine in me. And I have heard about retrofits.”

  They all looked at me as though I’d won the lottery, then the woman said, “If nobody in your building lives downtown, you might want to walk over to Fifty-seventh and Third. I work in the Windermere Gallery.”

  The man said, “We’ll find some other people.”

  They were concerned about me. I felt ashamed to be fooling them. But then, I was a drode head and got time off for cooperating, so I hadn’t lied to them too hard, had I?

  I stopped wearing my wig.

  When I went to the Windermere Gallery, I found out that the woman I’d met was an exhibit there, naked, no, covered in a plastic skin that imitated flesh and fed her movements into a virtual reality rig. She wore a helmet on that looked like a mantis’s head, transmitters antennas, radio controlled woman. The cartoon world she walked in showed up on a video display eight by twelves. A salesman came up to me about to tell me all about the control panel when he saw that I was bald.

  “We’re going home together,” I said. “When is she off duty?”

  “You don’t have holes,” the man said.

  “New system,” I said.

  “Could we do a remote pickup?” the man said. He walked over to the control panel and sent the drode-head woman walking back into the offices.

  I said, “I certainly hope not. Will she know who I am?”

  “I don’t know about the fugue state.”

  “I don’t have fugue states often myself.”

  “She seems to know what’s going on, but she doesn’t remember anything during the two weeks she comes here. I have some artists who are looking for new model drode heads. I’ll call your Welfare office. Same as Marcia’s, right?”

  Marcia. I hadn’t remembered the drode head’s name, or maybe I hadn’t bothered to ask. “I don’t think I can be reassigned. I’m working at Rockefeller University. The Welfare office wanted to really test my system on science stuff.”

  “You don’t work,” the man said. “You’re a drode head.”

  I said, “Before I was a drode head, I used to eat men alive.” Marcia came out then and tugged at my elbow.

  When we got to the street, she said, “Don’t argue with them.”

  “Sorry if it makes life difficult for you.”

  “You’re not wearing your wig.”

  “No, you don’t wear yours all the time either.”

  “Mine’s so obvious. Yours looks good enough to be real hair.”

  I said, “It is real hair. You want it?”

  “Your lover would be furious.”

  I said, “I don’t think so. I’ll tell him I lost it and he’ll buy me another one. Hell, if I’m a drode head, I ought to look like a drode head.”

  “We all keep our holes covered with adhesive patches, you know.”

  “I’ll put adhesive patches where I should have holes, then. Shit, will he call Welfare to try to get me? I think he’s a hacker rapist. You looked naked.”

  Marcia said, “I’m glad I won’t remember you said this.”

  At the subway stop, we gathered around with other drode heads until the paying computers cleared, then boarded for downtown. I wondered if the fugue state came from the system or from the organism, a self-blinding to keep the insults from piling up in memory. Then I realized I hadn’t remembered anything about my work today with Dorcas.

  Willie hadn’t been there, though. Perhaps our two weeks weren’t synchronized.

  That night, I dreamed of insects, many different insects, smarter and bigger than naturally evolved insects, insects walking humans on leashes, insects operating on humans stung to sleep. Mike held me as I floundered out of nightmare’s paralysis. “Do you know what I was working on today?”

  “Dorcas was doing a scan of grants in human DNA work,” Mike said. “Looking for adrenal and testicular information. Didn’t seem to have anything to do with insects.”

  The landscape in my dreams had been beautiful, I remembered now. manicured by insects. Dorcas today reminded me of something familiar, only I didn’t have time to remember before I went under the reading hood. Now I tried to think. Yes, she reminded me of Jergen the week before he disappeared.

  I said, “I fugued out during the sessions today.”

  Mike said, “You asked me to do it. Don’t worry. I�
��m monitoring what’s going on.”

  “Why do people fugue out?”

  “The information they process doesn’t make sense to the brain, so the brain, the daily personality, doesn’t remember it. That’s the best theory. Sort of like infancy memory loss.”

  I almost told him, I think it’s the trauma of having your personality overwhelmed, plus the daily insults from hair-heads. “Mike, a guy at the Windermere Gallery said he was going to call my Welfare Office to see about getting me assigned to an artist. Don’t let this happen.”

  Mike said, “Not even to protect your cover?”

  “Find a better way to protect my cover than that.”

  Mike ran his hands over my head and said, “We will. Go back to sleep now.”

  I closed my eyes, but I didn’t trust him as much as I had when we went sailing, as much as I needed to trust a man before I turned my life over to him. He’d sent me out to the drode heads. Had he known what he’d sent me out to find? Was this his way of being cruel or was he stupid?

  “Roll over and I’ll give you a backrub.”

  “I’m so vulnerable under the hood.”

  “I’m always watching. I’d get you out in no time.”

  I let him massage me and fell back into my dreams. A mantis soothed me. Not a nightmare, this time. I apologized to it for the mantis I’d killed.

  The drode heads were like pale copies of people, so inoffensive I had to suppress the urge to abuse them. We went around in a group, though one of the drode heads transferred to Manhattan said that country drode heads tended to be more integrated into the rest of life as poor kin to hair-heads.

  I realized Mike didn’t know what he’d done to send me to them, but Kearney, watching at the edges, must have wondered if Mike had lost his mind, because Mike, obviously under orders, said, “Don’t get too close to the drode heads. You’re not one of them really.”

  “Right,” I said. Mike wouldn’t shoot me, but he’d let Kearney know the instant I defected. I wished Mike needed me, really, as Jergen needed me to buffer him against his agoraphobia. I’d been too coarsened to notice something subtle like a phobia and flexible enough to have compensated without realizing what had been going on. Mike only needed me for a promotion, to prove he was a good case officer. And he wasn’t enough of a case officer to know that I really shouldn’t have been sent to take a closer look at the drode heads.

  I wished he’d been my perfect control, wise, bittersweet, then, seconds later, I was glad he wasn’t. If he’d had been perfect, then I would have been convinced that the way the world had treated me was justified. I hated Mike’s explanation that the world was full of people as fucked as I was, but of all the people I’d offered my alligence to, only Kearney seemed to be perfectly in control. And he was ready to kill me the instant I wavered. My cunt was born to have his hand up it as though I was his puppet.

  Hollow inside.

  Lucky for Mike, the drode heads weren’t organized. I felt like stomping them into a protest movement, but no, they were already overstomped, so I drifted with them between sessions under the hood. The Welfare Office and Mike kept me out of the art gallery, and I got Marcia to meet me downstairs when she finished displaying at the Windermere.

  Then someone tapped me on the shoulder at the grocery store that catered to drode heads and said, “Allison? I’m Willie.”

  “Willie?”

  “Willie. I found you when the hackers had you.”

  “What are you doing here?”

  “I was concerned about you.” Willie looked like the subdued drode head lost to the quirky insane side of his personality. “You’re working for Dorcas Rae.”

  I wondered how long this would take to get back to Kearney. “I’m assigned to Rockefeller University. I’m living with a guy who reports back to the guy who busted me.”

  Willie looked as though he and the Brazilian woman from the internal movie theatre had more questions they wanted to ask me, but he drifted back through the store.

  I went home and wondered if I’d just lost even more control of my life. Well, the first forty years had been interesting, fun even since I got thrills from being an uncaught fighting underdog.

  When I got home, I didn’t mention Willie to Mike. After dinner, I lay with my bald head in his lap as we listened to Charlie Mingus. Mike stroked my head gently as if the baldness was erotic. I finally said, “Drode heads are so dreary. This weekend, can I go to the rec mall alone?” I wanted to get away from them all, but in a monitored space, protected by camera eyes. The country within a hundred miles of Manhattan is too infested with people. If I’d had a hint of an active drode head underground, something more than the one or two isolated drode heads hiding out in the social margins and the minority who refused to wear wigs in public, I’d have rebelled, but my brain belonged to the Feds now. They were the meanest guys in my social universe now.

  Mike said, “Let us know if anyone approaches you.”

  I paused, then asked, “Approaches me at the mall?”

  “Yes.”

  “Mike, I feel like I’m drowning. If you need real proof, I’ve got to get Dorcas to brag, to do something.”

  “We need to turn her. She’s too expensively trained to just kill.”

  In the morning, I stuck my brain through the hood and into a theatre. Loba spoke to me from the screen, saying, “Allison, we can help you.”

  I said, “Against the Feds. Against Martin Fox’s friends. Where’s Willie?”

  Loba said, “He’s creating this security space.”

  “Let me finish my work for the Feds, then rescue me before they decide I’m too weird to live.”

  “We want you to find out how Dorcas Rae makes her insects, to see if she’d work for us. We think her insects fit our program quite well.”

  “What is your program?”

  “We’re a homeostatic control unit. If the industrial machines create monsters, we monsters get more freedom to act. If the technicians stop the industrial accidents, we don’t get funded. We provide an ecological balance.”

  Other than maybe she was mad, Loba hadn’t told me much of anything. “How do the insects fit in?”

  “The eco-terrorism depends too much on people. We already know that people aren’t reliable.”

  “But these are people-made insects.”

  “People started them, but they will be successful or not on their own. They’ll challenge people to fight them, even, perhaps, to cooperate with them.” Loba’s arms turned into little short nubs with fingers.

  I knew those were images of her true flesh arms. “Thalidomide?”

  “Yes.”

  “Can you tell me who you represent?”

  “Industrial accident victims.”

  “You could get legal compensation for the damages.” Loba said, “We did.”

  I figured it out now. “Your group funded the radical ecology people, didn’t you? You knew me from then.”

  “Yes.”

  “I could turn you into the Feds and they would love me forever.” I could, I could.

  “But we’re the group you’ve spent your life searching for.”

  “Can you save me from the Feds?” I shouldn’t have asked that. She could lie to me. The Feds could lie to me. I wondered how it would feel to have Kearney actually kill me. He’d come so close before. I imagined my corpse at Kearney’s feet, flaccid, eyes open and drying out. I’d been virtually dead since he’d pinned me with the searchlights. Could the dead body feel rot?

  “Whoever you work for, you’ve got to get Dorcas to trust you.”

  “Ah, yes, ma’am.” The next step was simple, then the decision tree sprouted wildly. I died in most of the branches. “We’ll stay in touch,” Loba said. She faded from the screen under groups of four letters. DNA code, I realized, for a virus.

  Another world waited. Après les moches.

  Dorcas said that. After me, the flies.

  Then I ran an assembler, but the data drained out onto the floor. �
��In case anyone is listening,” Dorcas said.

  I wanted to tell her that erasing me was evidence, but my body lay slack on the read table.

  Finally, I came to myself sitting up, sweating. A wasp in a jar buzzed angrily. Dorcas, both hands wrapped around the glass, moved the trapped wasp in circles, then toward me, away. Angry. I, too, was angry.

  I said, “So you do work with insects.”

  “Collaborating with them,” Dorcas said. “Will I live to get home?”

  I wondered what was in the wasp’s sting. “I don’t care, and I don’t really know.”

  “The wasp can tell if you’re lying or not.”

  “But I’m telling you, I don’t care enough about people to report you, whatever you’re doing.”

  “You were a professional liar before. That’s what the badger game is, a professional lie.”

  “I was busted, but I wasn’t what I said I was. I spiked trees.”

  “Would they sentence you to that for spiking trees?”

  “Well, yes. I had to defend myself a couple of times.”

  “You’ve killed people?”

  “I didn’t stay for a medic.” I was defending Jergen, not really murdering people.

  “Wouldn’t you have rather been stung to sleep?” Dorcas said. She turned the jar’s lid.

  “No, don’t, please,” I said, really scared now. The wasp seemed to be calmer.

  “If I could go to the Feds, would they give me a tenured position or kill me?”

  “I’m not connected with the Feds.” If I got mad, the wasp would react.

  “You said I was just a lab wife. You were right. If I went to the Feds, they’d pardon me. give me a lab, and dictate everything I did for the rest of my life.”

  “What are you going to do about it?”

  “I’m going to help the insects as fast as I can before something happens to me.”

  Loba needs to snatch her right now, I thought. I said, “I might be able to contact some of my old friends.”