Sense of Wonder: A Century of Science Fiction

by Leigh Grossman

  I held them in my hands, there in his little room, all ten of them when he spilled them on the bed. To celebrate he jumped up so high he smacked his head on the ceiling again and again, which made them ceiling tiles dance and flip over and spill dust all over the room. “I flashed just one, a single one,” says he, “and a cool million was what he said, and then I said what if ten? And he laughs and says fill in the check yourself.”

  “We should test them,” says I.

  “We can’t test them,” he says. “The only way to test it is to use it, and if you use it then your print and face are in its memory forever and so we could never sell it.”

  “Then sell one, and make sure it’s clean.”

  “A package deal,” he says. “If I sell one, and they think I got more by I’m holding out to raise the price, then I may not live to collect for the other nine, because I might have an accident and lose these little babies. I sell all ten at once, and then I’m out of the green card business for life.”

  But more than ever that night I am afraid, he’s out selling those greens to those sweet gentlebodies who are commonly referred to as Organic Crime, and there I am on his bed, shivering and dreaming because I know that something will go most deeply wrong but I still don’t know what and I still don’t know why. I keep telling myself, You’re only afraid because nothing could ever go so right for you, you can’t believe that anything could ever make you rich and safe. I say this stuff so much that I believe it, and I don’t really, not down deep, and so I shiver again and finally I cry, because after all my body still believes I’m nine, and nine-year-olds have tear ducts very easy of access, no password required. Well he comes in late that night, and I’m asleep he thinks, and so he walks quiet instead of dancing, but I can hear the dancing in his little sounds, I know he has the money all safely in the bank, and so when he leans over to make sure if I’m asleep, I say, “Could I borrow a hundred thou?”

  So he slaps me and he laughs and dances and sings, and I try to go along, you bet I do, I know I should be happy, but then at the end he says, “You just can’t take it, can you? You just can’t handle it,” and then I cry all over again, and he just puts his arm around me like a movie dad and gives me play-punches on the head and says, “I’m gonna marry me a wife, I am, maybe even Mama Pimple herself, and we’ll adopt you and have a little spielberg family in Summerfield, with a riding mower on a real grass lawn.”

  “I’m older than you or Mama Pimple,” says I, but he just laughs. Laughs and hugs me until he think I’m all right. Don’t go home, he says to me that night, but home I got to go, because I know I’ll cry again, from fear or something, anyway, and I don’t want him to think his cure wasn’t permanent. “No thanks,” says I, but he just laughs at me. “Stay here and cry all you want to, Goo Boy, but don’t go home tonight. I don’t want to be alone tonight, and sure as hell you don’t either.” And so I slept between his sheets, like with a brother, him punching and tickling and pinching and telling dirty jokes about his whores, the most good and natural night I spent in all my life, with a true friend, which I know you don’t believe, snickering and nickering and ickering your filthy little thoughts, there was no holes plugged that night because nobody was out to take pleasure from nobody else, just Dogwalker being happy and wanting me not to be so sad.

  And after he was asleep, I wanted so bad to know who it was he sold them to, so I could call them up and say, “Don’t use those greens, cause they aren’t clean. I don’t know how, I don’t know why, but the feds are onto this, I know they are, and if you use those cards they’ll nail your fingers to your face.” But if I called would they believe me? They were careful too. Why else did it take a week? They had one of their nothing goons use a card to make sure it had no squeaks or leaks, and it came up clean. Only then did they give the cards to seven big boys, and two held in reserve. Even Organic Crime, the All-seeing Eye, passed those cards same as we did.

  I think maybe Dogwalker was a little bit vertical too. I think he knew same as me that something was wrong with this. That’s why he kept checking back with the inside man, cause he didn’t trust how good it was. That’s why he didn’t spend any of his share. We’d sit there eating the same old schlock, out of his cut from some leg job or my piece from a data wipe, and every now and then he’d say, “Rich mans’ food sure tastes good.” Or maybe even though he wasn’t vertical he still thought maybe I was right when I thought something was wrong. Whatever he thought, though, it just kept getting worse and worse for me, until the morning when we went to see the inside man and the inside man was gone.

  Gone clean. Gone like he never existed. His apartment for rent, cleaned out floor to ceiling. A phone call to the fed, and he was on vacation, which meant they had him, he wasn’t just moved to another house with his newfound wealth. We stood there in his empty place, his shabby empty hovel that was ten times better than anywhere we ever lived, and Doggy says to me, real quiet, he says, “What was it? What did I do wrong? I thought I was like Hunt, I thought I never made a single mistake in this job. in this one job.”

  And that was it, right then I knew. Not a week before, not when it would do any good. Right then I finally knew it all, knew what Hunt had done. Jesse Hunt never made mistakes. But he was also so paranoid that he haired his bureau to see if the babysitter stole from him. So even though he would never accidentally enter the wrong P-word, he was just the kind who would do it on purpose. “He doublefingered every time,” I says to Dog. “He’s so damn careful he does his password wrong the first time every time, and then comes in on his second finger.”

  “So one time he comes in on the first try, so what?” He says this because he doesn’t know computers like I do, being half-glass myself.

  “The system knew the pattern, that’s what. Jesse H. is so precise he never changed a bit, so when we came in on the first try, that set off alarms. It’s my fault, Dog. I knew how crazy paranoidical he is, I knew that something was wrong, but not till this minute I didn’t know what it was. I should have known it when I got his password, I should have known. I’m sorry, you never should have gotten me into this, I’m sorry, you should have listened to me when I told you something was wrong. I should have known, I’m sorry.”

  What I done to Doggy that I never meant to do. What I done to him! Anytime, I could have thought of it, it was all there inside my glassy little head, but no, I didn’t think of it till after it was way too late. And maybe it’s because I didn’t want to think of it, maybe it’s because I really wanted to be wrong about the green cards, but however it flew, I did what I do, which is to say I’m not the pontiff in his fancy chair, by which I mean I can’t be smarter than myself.

  Right away he called the gentlebens of Ossified Crime to warn them, but I was already plugged into the library sucking news as fast as I could and so I knew it wouldn’t do no good, cause they got all seven of the big boys and their nitwit taster, too, locked up good and tight for card fraud.

  And what they said on the phone to Dogwalker made things real clear. “We’re dead,” says Doggy.

  “Give them time to cool.” says I.

  “They’ll never cool,” says he. “There’s no chance, they’ll never forgive this even if they knew the whole truth, because look at the names they gave the cards to, it’s like they got them for their biggest boys on the borderline, the habibs who bribe presidents of little countries and take off cash from octopods like Shell and ITT and every now and then kill somebody and walk away clean. Now they’re sitting there in jail with the whole life story of the organization in their brains, so they don’t care of we meant to do it or not. They’re hurting, and the only way they know to make the hurt go away is to pass it on to somebody else. And that’s us. They want to make us hurt, and hurt real bad, and for a long long time.”

  I never saw Dog so scared. That’s the only reason we went to the feds ourselves. We didn’t ever want to stool, but we needed their protection plan, it was our only hope. So we offered to testify how we di
d it, not even for immunity, just so they’d change our faces and put us in a safe jail somewhere to work off the sentence and come out alive, you know? That’s all we wanted.

  But the feds, they laughed at us. They had the inside guy, see, and he was going to get immunity for testifying. “We don’t need you,” they says to us, “and we don’t care if you go to jail or not. It was the big guys we wanted.”

  “If you let us walk,” says Doggy, “then they’ll think we set them up.”

  “Make us laugh,” says the feds. “Us work with street pools like you? They know that we don’t stoop so low.”

  “They bought from us,” says Doggy. “If we’re big enough for them, we’re big enough for the dongs.”

  “Do you believe this?” says one fed to his identical junior officer. “These jollies are begging us to take them into jail. Well listen tight, my jolly boys, maybe we don’t want to add you to the taxpayers’ expense account, did you think of that? Besides, all we’d give you is time, but on the street, those boys will give you time and a half, and it won’t cost us a dime.”

  So what could we do? Doggy just looks like somebody sucked out six pints, he’s so white. On the way out of the fedhouse, he says, “Now we’re going to find out what it’s like to die.”

  And I says to him, “Walker, they stuck no gun in your mouth yet, they shove no shiv in your eye. We still breathing, we got legs, so let’s walk out of here.”

  “Walk,” he says. “You walk out of G-boro, glasshead, and you bump into trees.”

  “So what?” says I. “I can plug in and pull out all the data we want about how to live in the woods. Lots of empty land out there. Where do you think the marijuana grows?”

  “I’m a city boy,” he says. “I’m a city boy.” Now we’re standing out in front, and he’s looking around. “In the city I got a chance, I know the city.”

  “Maybe in New York or Dallas,” says I, “but G-boro’s just too small, not even half a million people, you can’t lose yourself deep enough here.”

  “Yeah, well,” he says, still looking around. “It’s none of your business now anyway, Goo Boy. They aren’t blaming you, they’re blaming me.”

  “But it’s my fault,” says I, “and I’m staying with you to tell them so.”

  “You think they’re going to stop and listen?” says he.

  “I’ll let them shoot me up with speakeasy so they know I’m telling the truth.”

  “It’s nobody’s fault,” says he. “And I don’t give a twelve-inch poker whose fault it is anyway. You’re clean, but if you stay with me you’ll get all muddy, too. I don’t need you around, and you sure as hell don’t need me. Job’s over. Done. Get lost.”

  But I couldn’t do that. The same way he couldn’t go on walking dogs. I couldn’t just run off and leave him to eat my mistake. “They know I was your P-word man,” says I. “They’ll be after me, too.”

  He’s right but I don’t care. “I was in for twenty percent of rich,” says I. “So I’m in for fifty percent of trouble.”

  All of a sudden he sees what he’s looking for. “There they are, Goo Boy, the dorks they sent to hit me. In that Mercedes.” I look but all I see are electrics. Then his hand is on my back and he gives me a shove that takes me right off the portico and into the bushes, and by the time I crawl out, Doggy’s nowhere in sight. For about a minute I’m pissed about getting scratched up in the plants, until I realize he was getting me out of the way, so I wouldn’t get shot down or hacked up or lased out, whatever it is they planned to do him to get even.

  I was safe enough, right? I should’ve walked away, I should’ve ducked right out of the city. I didn’t even have to refund the money. I had enough to go clear out of the country and live the rest of my life where even Occipital Crime couldn’t find me.

  And I thought about it. I stayed the night in Mama Pimple’s flophouse because I knew somebody would be watching my own place. All that night I thought about places I could go. Australia. New Zealand. Or even a foreign place, I could afford a good vocabulary crystal so picking up a new language would be easy.

  But in the morning I couldn’t do it. Mama Pimple didn’t exactly ask me but she looked so worried and all I could say was, “He pushed me into the bushes and I don’t know where he is.”

  And she just nods at me and goes back to fixing breakfast. Her hands are shaking she’s so upset. Because she knows Dogwalker doesn’t stand a chance against Orphan Crime.

  “I’m sorry,” says I.

  “What can you do?” she says. “When they want you, they get you. If the feds don’t give you a new face, you can’t hide.”

  “What if they didn’t want him?” says I.

  She laughs at me. The story’s all over the street. The arrests were in the news, and now everybody knows the big boys are looking for Walker. They want him so bad the whole street can smell it.”

  “What if they knew it wasn’t his fault?” says I. “What if they knew it was an accident? A mistake?”

  Then Mama Pimple squints at me—not many people can tell when she’s squinting, but I can—and she says, “Only one boy can tell them that so they’ll believe it.”

  “Sure, I know,” says I.

  “And if that boy walks in and says, Let me tell you why you don’t want to hurt my friend Dogwalker—”

  “Nobody said life was safe,” says I. “Besides, what could they do to me that’s worse than what already happened to me when I was nine?”

  She comes over and just puts hare hand on my head, just lets her hand lie there for a few minutes, and I know what I’ve got to do.

  So I did it. Went to Fat Jack’s and told him I wanted to talk to Junior Mint about Dogwalker, and it wasn’t thirty seconds before I was hustled on out to the alley and driven somewhere with my face mashed into the floor of the car so I couldn’t tell where it was. Idiots didn’t know that somebody as vertical as me can tell the number of wheel revolutions and the exact trajectory of every curve. I could’ve drawn a freehand map of where they took me. But if I let them know that, I’d never come home, and since there was a good chance I’d end up dosed with speakeasy, I went ahead and erased the memory. Good thing I did—that was the first thing they asked me as soon as they had the drug in me.

  Gave me a grown-up dose, they did, so I practically told them my whole life story and my opinion of them and everybody and everything else, so the whole session took hours, felt like forever, but at the end they knew, they absolutely knew that Dogwalker was straight with them, and when it was over and I was coming up so I had some control over what I said, I asked them, I begged them, let Dogwalker live. Just let him go. He’ll give back the money, and I’ll give back mine, just let him go.

  “OK,” says the guy.

  I didn’t believe it.

  “No, you can believe me, we’ll let him go.”

  “You got him?”

  “Picked him up before you even came in. It wasn’t hard.”

  “And you didn’t kill him?”

  “Kill him? We had to get the money back first, didn’t we, so we needed him alive till morning, and then you came in, and your little story changed our minds, it really did, you made us feel all sloppy and sorry for that poor old pimp.”

  For a few seconds there I actually believed that it was going to be all right. But then I knew from the way they looked, from the way they acted, I knew the same way I knew about passwords.

  They brought in Dogwalker and handed me a book. Dogwalker was very quiet and stiff and he didn’t look like he recognized me at all. I didn’t even have to look at the book to know what it was. They scooped out his brain and replaced it with glass, like me only way over the line, way way over, there was nothing of Dogwalker left inside his head, just glass pipe and goo. The book was a User’s Manuel, with all the instructions about how to program him and control him.

  I looked at him and he was Dogwalker, the same face, the same hair, everything. Then he moved or talked and he was dead, he was somebody els
e living in Dogwalker’s body. And I says to them, “Why? Why didn’t you just kill him, if you were going to do this?”

  “This one was too big,” says the guy. “Everybody in G-boro knew what happened, everybody in the whole country, everybody in the world. Even if it was a mistake, we couldn’t let it go. No hard feelings, Goo Boy. He is alive. And so are you. And you both stay that way, as long as you follow a few simple rules. Since he’s over the line, he has to have an owner, and you’re it. You can use him however you want—rent out data storage, pimp him as a jig or a jaw—but he stays with you always. Every day, he’s on the street here in G-boro, so we can bring people here and show them what happens to boys who make mistakes. You can even keep your cut from the job, so you don’t have to scramble at all if you don’t want to. That’s how much we like you Goo Boy. But if he leaves this town or doesn’t come out, even one single solitary day, you’ll be very sorry for the last six hours of your life. Do you understand?”

  I understood. I took him with me. I bought this place, these clothes, and that’s how it’s been ever since. That’s why we go out on the street every day. I read the whole manual, and I figure there’s maybe ten percent of Dogwalker left inside. The part that’s Dogwalker can’t ever get to the surface, can’t even talk or move or anything like that, can’t ever remember or even consciously think. But maybe he can still wander around inside what used to be his head, maybe he can sample the data stored in all that goo. Maybe somebody he’ll even run across this story and he’ll know what happened to him, and he’ll know that I tried to save him.

  In the meantime this is my last will and testament. See, I have us doing all kinds of research on Orgasmic Crime, so that someday I’ll know enough to reach inside the system and unplug it. Unplug it all, and make those bastards lose everything, the way they took everything away from Dogwalker. Trouble is, some places there ain’t no way to look without leaving tracks. Goo is as goo do, I always say. I’ll find out I’m not as good as I think I am when somebody comes along and puts a hot steel putz in my face. Knock my brains out when it comes. But there’s this, lying in a few hundred places in the system. Three days after I don’t lay down my code in a certain program in a certain place, this story pops into view. The fact you’re reading this means I’m dead.