“Not exactly. But they make my head feel bigger... heavier. Although I wouldn’t think they’d weigh that much. But it feels as if my neck is likely to snap if I don’t balance things correctly. I feel like the Elephant Man, afraid to lie down normally, my head about to crush my spinal cord. John said he was going to go find something. I don’t know where.”
“How are they attached?” He reached to touch one of the cylinders.
Daniel pulled away. “Better not—I don’t know if it’s safe. I don’t know how—I assume they’re stuck to the scalp.”
“I don’t see any burn marks or—sorry—melted skin. But the truly strange thing is the way they go right through your hair. Your hair isn’t flattened, cut, messed up in any way. In fact it looks perfectly combed. Don’t you even get—what is it they call it?—‘bed head’? What are these things anyway?”
The state of his hair seemed a trivial concern, but it strangely disturbed him to think about it. “The cylinders appear to be part of the equipment transferring the scenarios into our heads. I don’t understand much about it, but I think they place them on our skulls, and they’re the devices that deliver the information. But they’re not supposed to be attached. They’re wireless.”
“Was that a result of the explosion?”
“I have no idea. I didn’t really hear the explosion—I just woke up to the results. Were you in one of the labs?”
“No—they didn’t take me this time. They took Walter, and I guess they took John—at least I didn’t see him around for awhile. I’m sure John will figure out something to help you.” He sounded less than convinced. “Or maybe the roaches will just remove them when they send us all home.”
Daniel was shocked. “You really believe we’re going home?”
“I had a dream I went home. And I have faith. You have to have faith, Daniel—it’s too hard to live without it. Didn’t you say you have family? You have to have faith you’re going to see them again.”
“We don’t even know for sure how much time has passed, do we? What if we’ve traveled through time? Our families may be dead.”
“Why would you even think that?”
Suddenly the God of Mayhem was standing there between them, reaching out to touch them from his devastated Boston. Daniel couldn’t even guess how far in the future they were. The God’s seemingly compassionate eyes peered down from the separations in the multicolored layers of cloth. He might kill either of them simply because he had an impulse. Daniel turned his head, brought it back, and the image broke into scattered pieces. How was he going to tell Lenin about any of this?
“I don’t know, Charles. I just have a feeling.”
“It’s okay, I get—I don’t know—notions, myself. Because of the scenarios, and I think just because of being so far away from home and in this strange, unfathomable place. But evil will lie to you, you know that, don’t you? And everything about this place is pure evil and of the devil.”
“We can agree on that.”
“So tell me, tell me about your family, and how you came here. Tell me what’s troubling you.”
Daniel told Lenin then about his wife, and Gordon, and Gordon’s congenital heart disease and what it had meant, and how it had worn them all down.
“It was constant worry, constant self-examination. Were we being too protective and ruining his quality of life, or were we not being protective enough and putting him at serious risk? Most of the time we were just exhausted, getting him ready for another surgery, trying to convince him that the clear liquids we were feeding him were for his own good and that he shouldn’t cheat. He was just a kid, so of course he blamed us for not giving him the foods he wanted, and we’d tell him to be brave about it when he whined and then later we’d feel so terrible because why should a kid be asked to be that brave?
“They kept telling us to ‘treat him normally,’ but how can watching your child for signs of heart failure, developmental delays, and giving him all these medicines—how can that be normal? And if he throws up his medicine do you give him some more, or are you going to create an overdose? Or if he gets upset and spits half of it out? Sometimes I’d just want to shake him when he pulled a stunt like that.
“Neither one of us was getting enough sleep, and if his monitor went off we’d practically kill ourselves getting to his bedroom. And he hated going to the dentist, but some of the meds were pretty hard on his teeth, so he had to go more than most kids—he couldn’t afford an infection. And he’d get mad, and yell at us, and even though we shouldn’t have, sometimes we yelled back.
“His blue spells were the worst, when he couldn’t get enough air, and he’d start grunting, and we were both convinced that would be it, he was going to die on us right there.
“And at our lowest, I’m ashamed to say, we’d blame each other—things in our families, our genetics, things she might have taken during the pregnancy, early signs we might have missed—and the marriage deteriorated. Once she said we should have divorced before he was born, and at that moment I thought she was right—we never should have had him.”
“But a child, any child, is a gift. He wasn’t—you can’t look at your son as if he’s a broken toy.”
Daniel tried to keep the flash of anger to himself. “Of course not. Haven’t you ever weakened? Especially in a moment of great pain? You have to understand, I grieved for my son for years—for his pain and for what I knew would be our eventual loss of him—while he was still alive and it felt like more than I could take. I couldn’t imagine what it would be like when he was actually gone.
“But I became worse than that. My imagination, sometimes it could be such a hateful, evil thing. I’d see other people’s children, and I’d hear them playing, their voices joyful and excited, and-I don’t know, I’d imagine a car running them down, or I’d imagine them falling out of a tree, and it wasn’t a fearful image for me, it was an image of justice being done, because why should we go through this and not they? I imagined that if my boy was taken, someone else’s child needed to be taken as well, otherwise the world wasn’t right.”
“Daniel!”
“I know. I’m not proud of it. In fact I became so ashamed of myself I decided I shouldn’t be near my son or my wife anymore. They deserved better. The day the roaches took me I was sitting in an airport with a plane ticket that would take me to the other side of the country. I hadn’t boarded yet, but I think I probably was going to. I just needed to think about it some more. So I sat there while the others boarded, and they were calling my name, and I was thinking about whether I should stand up or not, when suddenly I was gone, and then in some giant insect’s horrible embrace, and on my way here.”
“Maybe you would have stayed. In fact, Daniel, I have great faith that you wouldn’t have gotten on that plane.”
“What difference does it make? My wife and son will never understand. As far as they know I just ran away like a coward. They will never know what happened to me.”
The lights flickered. An electrified twitter travelled through the residents. A great rumbling sound filled the space and more pieces of the ceiling fell. Then the lights went out with a rapidly descending whine. Residents began to scream. It sounded unnatural. It sounded like a screeching of metal.
After the initial shock Daniel knew he could not be seeing them as they actually were. It was a scene from the end of the Second World War, and the concentration camps had been liberated. Several men were being helped out of a building, impossibly emaciated, skin stretched across the sharp edges of skeletons, the eyes looking huge in near-fleshless sockets, and on each broad bony pelvis where the narrow legs dangled, genitalia displayed as if stuck on as an afterthought. Many of the survivors would die within weeks from disease and malnutrition.
Then his vision cleared and the skin vanished from the skeletons, leaving metal armature arms, articulated rod hands, and cages of metal ribs, pivot joints and wheels, cables, tubing, metal pan skulls with artificial blinking eyes, snapping jaws with te
eth attached. Lengths of gray human skin and pale muscle had been fastened to the frameworks in seemingly random arrangements.
The metal and flesh automations charged around the room in a panic, grabbing at each other, chattering and screaming in eerily human voices, their mechanical eyeballs jerking spastically as they acquired new glimpses of their changed realities.
“Daniel, Daniel,what is this?” The metal skull with the disturbingly alive eyeballs yapped in front of him, the mouth with all the wires and plastic and metal pieces used to articulate it.
It was Lenin’s voice. Daniel reached out and touched the Leninbot, felt the metal bits, the tubes, and the squishy bits he assumed to be flesh, but he was too squeamish to look at what he touched. “Charles? Is that you?” He noticed an alpha-numeric label on the metal piece which emulated a clavicle, and other such labels—maybe the same label?—on the upper left arm, and on one of the flat metal ribs. “What’s happened to you?”
“You, too, Daniel. Daniel, look at yourself.”
Daniel lifted his arm. The rods that made up the various phalanges, the hinge joints, the larger metal lengths where the radius and ulna should have been, responded minutely to commands he wasn’t aware of issuing. The arm turned, the fingers wiggled at him. Packed inside the arm’s framework were tubes, wires, heavier cable, junctions. And, etched onto the radius piece, the characters A-7713.
16
THEY WERE ALL men of metal and plastic now, all cyborgs now, automata, automations, androids, machines, robots, bots—none of the terms seemed all that right or acceptable or even possible. He considered whether it might be a trick—just another test, another experiment—but it didn’t have the feel of a trick. Nor did it feel as if it had just happened, that they had suddenly transformed as if by magic.
It might be a hallucination, but he suspected not. It had the ring of truth. It felt like a confirmation of the peculiar incompleteness he’d felt ever since he’d come here. They’d ruined him. They’d devastated him. He wasn’t even properly Daniel anymore. They’d taken his flesh, and now he was Danielbot, apparently only his brain left alive, but it probably wasn’t even his brain,was it? Perhaps they’d only stolen his thoughts.
He didn’t care that he was falling. He made a metallic sound as he hit the tile. A hollow thud and a rattle. He managed to sit up, metal arms holding onto metal legs, metal knees up. He leaned back against the wall and looked out.
The mechanical men he once knew but now could not recognize without their flesh continued to paw at each other in some sort of desperate attempt at recognition. They appeared to be both seeking familiar contact and trying to get away from these frightening, strange constructions. He recognized Lenin’s voice in the crowd but couldn’t determine which bot the voice was coming from. There were a few other vaguely familiar voices, but without a recognizable face to associate them to he wasn’t sure what they’d actually looked like.
Suddenly several humans in skin-tight, dark blue uniforms rushed out of the observation room. They were slight in build, tired-eyed, with pale complexions, and carried longish, rifle-looking devices. They should have been mechanical men as well—it was only fair.
One of the bots approached these men, reaching out a gleaming, jittery arm and hand. Clearly he meant no harm—he radiated confusion, desperation.
One of the men spun around, shouted, and fumbled at a protruding tab on his rifle. A bluish white bolt flashed between the two and the bot fell. The air smelled like a lightning strike and burnt electrical components.
The remaining bots scattered, some of them gathering nearby. Daniel closed his eyes. Was he still Daniel? He felt like no one else, but he was afraid not. He repeatedly slapped his hand against the floor, then stopped, hating its clatter.
“Gather up!” He opened his eyes. The same human who had shot the bot approached them, sweeping his rifle. “Gather up! Make a line!”
Daniel struggled to his feet. I’m not Daniel, he thought. Not Daniel, Notdaniel. The more he repeated it in his head the more the two words together sounded like a single name.
The bots moved back and forth hesitantly. He could sense their confusion. Where to start? And why were they being ordered around by other... by these humans? The man came closer, raising his weapon.
“Better dial it down, Nathan,” one of the other uniformed men said. “Looks like you killed this one.”
“Stop!” Falstaff was running their way from the back of the room. He hadn’t changed at all. “I can handle this!”
He watched as Falstaff pushed his way through the uniformed men. “I know them. I can handle this.” The uniformed men slowly, somewhat reluctantly, backed off.
“John?” the bot next to him said. It was Lenin, judging by the voice. “What is this? What’s happened to us?”
Falstaff was looking at the bot’s number. EH-7384. “Charles,” Falstaff said softly. “Just try to stay calm. There’s a lot... a great number of things we’ll all have to adjust to. Just give me a little time for explanations. We’re working on the power issue—once there’s sufficient power I think we can get you your old appearances back, then you’ll all feel a lot better.”
“Those fellows in the blue uniforms are the roaches, aren’t they,John?” Daniel said. “This is what the roaches really look like, when they’re not controlling how we see things. They’re just people. Which, apparently, we are not. And which, apparently, you are.”
“But we all saw them. They guarded us, took us down to the labs for our... our scenarios. They brought us here!” the Leninbot shouted.
“It was an illusion, Charlie. Probably using the same mechanism that made us look human to ourselves—am I correct, John?”
“Daniel—be careful.”
“Don’t call me that! I’m no more Daniel than you are!”
“What are you people talking about?” Charlie shouted. “John, what is he talking about?”
John grabbed Lenin and took him aside. “Daniel, just wait here.” A couple of the guards moved closer. He supposed he still cared whether they shot him or not, because he didn’t challenge them.
After several minutes of animated conversation with Lenin and some of the other bots, John returned.
“I’m sorry I lied to you, I really am. I know, I know, I lied to you all the time. I had to. Daniel—I—please, if you don’t want me to use that name, what should I call you?”
Daniel held up his arm. “You could just use my number—that’s what it’s there for, isn’t it?”
“Those numbers were meant for accurate records, matching... parts. We each have an implant,” he said. “Which allows us to see you as you see yourselves, as your originals. We initially tried working without them, but the guards have always tended to treat you... more sensitively, when you appeared... more like them.”
“I could have told you that—that was a lesson learned centuries ago.”
“But I’m not going to call you by that serial number. I can’t.”
“Then if you must call me anything, refer to me as the Danielbot. I’m no more than an avatar, really, a voodoo doll. I would have said that you and your people have reduced me to that, but I was never really more, was I? Only your lies convinced me that I was more. I was never Daniel, was I? I was never even human. Was I a recording of some kind?”
“More or less—his memories, his feelings, a simulation of how he perceived things. I am truly sorry to have lied, but how could I have told you the complete truth? How would you have reacted?”
“No one ever figures it out?”
“They begin to, over time, and I try to confirm little bits, I drop hints. My job is to advocate, to somehow minimize the trauma. Otherwise their personalities begin to go off the rails. We cannot bring an entire person into the future, nor should we. I’m sure you would agree with that. So we bring a recording taken at a specific time, with all your beliefs and your past.”
“And the real Daniel? The original?”
“He’s completely un
aware. His life goes on. But that recording is mapped here to an artificial brain, which we put into a body of sorts. It’s invaluable, the knowledge it has, and the recording is so structured that it blends more easily with other recordings—the subjects, the characters it is asked to play. We’ve learned so much. So much raw data about who we are, how we behave.”
“Why couldn’t you have kept it all in a computer? Why put us in bodies at all?”
“The project has been going on for many years. We tried all that. But without a body the personalities simply would not be completely convinced they were real—they would not behave normally. By adding a bit of actual flesh to those bodies we were able to access a certain level of human vulnerability, a physical awareness of their mortality.”
“Are you going to tell the others? Or is this supposed to be our little secret? Because I can’t promise...”
“Let me try to bring them along as best I can. I’ve always tried to do my best to help, under the circumstances. I’ve always tried to tell my charges details I thought might comfort them, or satisfy enough of their curiosity that they wouldn’t probe for more. I did that with Alan, with Walter, Charles, and certainly you. I’ve tried to make things better. Please let me continue to do that. This wasn’t supposed to happen this way. I’m afraid it’s going to be much too much for everyone.”
The Danielbot examined his arms. The workings were quite intricate and responsive. Even though they looked like bits of machinery, they felt completely correct, completely real. Here and there were circles and oblongs of human flesh, like pads on a piece of furniture, like upholstery made of meat.
“So I’m never going home, John. That’s pretty much the sum of it? No, don’t answer. My beautiful wife, my lovely son... you do realize, don’t you, that those memories were all I had to hold on to? And now to find out they don’t even belong to me? My family is alive in the past with the original Daniel and none of them, in fact, have anything to do with me. So I have nothing? What am I going to do, John? Could you explain that?”
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