We, Robots

Being "robotic" is no-one’s idea of a good time. Predictable, passive, unemotional – no-one wants to be "robotic".

But… being a robot? That’s a very different proposition! Evolution has made us clever hunters who enjoy thinking our way into the heads and under the hides of other species. Robots intrigue us as wolves and deer intrigued our ancestors. We want to know our neighbours inside out. They may have something valuable to teach us. In any event we need to know how they live, in case we ever need to kill them.

This section of We Robots invites you on shamanic journeys into the lives and bodies of all manner of mechanical beings. Sometimes – for example, in Nalo Hopkinson’s "Ganger (Ball Lightning)" (2000) – we find mechanical beings are making shamanic forays into our own realm.

Underpinning all these stories is the proposition that a life in metal has qualities of its own which it will be worth our while to explore. What would it be like, to be a robot? To be a human soul wrapped in non-human flesh – or (as in the stories by Joanna Kavenna, M. John Harrison and William Gibson) in no flesh at all?

The machine bodies we have so far made are so much simpler than our own bodies, they hardly bear comparison. The radical simplicity of machine being, compared to biological being, is its own source of horror in M. H. Hasta’s "The Talking Brain" (1926). Having to severely restrict their physiology drives the posthuman heroes of Cordwainer Smith’s "Scanners Live in Vain" to something very like madness.

But what if Spartan simplicity weren’t agonising? What if it was refreshing – even fascinating? Quite what Sam must be going through inside his new metal flesh is a secret saved for the very last line of Damon Knight’s "Masks" (1968), while Deirdre, the once-human heroine of C. L. Moore’s "No Woman Born" (1944) grows ever more strange, even as she rises in our estimation. She’s off on an adventure, leaving her humanity behind but not her agency, embracing a life that’s no less rich and nuanced for being less and less to do with blood and bone.

The heroes and heroines of general fiction dabble with a dangerous world but in the end, they rarely give themselves to it. To see them returning home, wounded and wiser for it, is one of the chief satisfactions of that literature. Literary realists go even further when they explore the fate of those who can’t even bring themselves to let go of the side of the swimming pool.

Science fiction, on the other hand, is very good – for some tastes, far too good – at what the psychoanalysts call "manic flight". Its protagonists are constantly striking out for the deep end of the pool and staying there, whooping and gamboling in transformed fashion in waves that have surely already killed them.

It’s a rare science fiction writer who calls time on the party, and brings their protagonist back to shore. With "Musée de l’Âme Seule" (2014) E. Lily Yu proves herself one of the braver writers in this anthology, for looking physical loss straight in the face. This is a story of victory and renewal, but one that’s strictly for grown-ups. Losing parts of your physical self is a psychological and physical assault for which no amount of bionic wizardry can compensate. To suppose otherwise is fashionable, but contemptible.

Living as a robot seems to promise a solution to life’s great shortcomings: being vulnerable, and having to die. When something breaks, just plug in a spare! But lives ported over to metal, carbon fibre, synthetic flesh or some digital cloud, also present us with what may be a one-way trip to a sort of half-life.

Worse still, we may never know, reduced as we have been, that this life of ours is only a half-life. We may lack the very equipment necessary for us to understand and appreciate what it is we have lost. As H. G. Wells wrote, "Plainly the human animal, of which I am a sample, is not constituted to anticipate anything at all. It is constituted to accept the state of affairs about it, as a stable state of affairs, whatever its intelligence may tell it to the contrary."

Whenever we think about becoming robots, we find ourselves re-evaluating our original, human condition. Bodies are frail and cyborgisation is exciting, but if the stories that follow teach us anything, it is that it is still not too shabby of us to stay human, if we can.

THE HAMMER Carl Sandburg

GOOD TO GO Liz Jensen

It’s peak season here at the lake – a hundred in the shade, breeze like a sadist hair-dryer, speedboats stirring up alga scuzz. Weekends like this, the whole town’s packed with Utah runaways getting high like only Mormons can, making it the busiest test-market I’ve worked so far, and I seen a few. As one of Arizona’s top domestic violence/sports accident nexuses, Havasu’s ideal to trial a project like this.

"Hi there, I’m Kylie, Angel Operator, at your service." That’s what I say to the tragedies when they come in. Which may sound dumb seeing as they can’t hear me, but you’re getting intimate with someone, you introduce yourself at least, is my thinking.

The software’s called Sweet Parting. According to Threshold, it’s "inspired by the William Shakespeare quotation parting is such sweet sorrow." Some of us Angel operators think it’s classy but the encrypted chat-room consensus is, it’s lame. Some of us came up with our own: My Way, Over and Out, Je Ne Regrette, Die Nice, I’ll Pass.

Anyway, it turns out the local death rate’s so high I’ve barely switched the machine off since I got here four weeks ago: murders, boat smashes, cooking explosions, car wrecks, drugs-and-alcohol offences, pervert auto-asphyxiations, you name it. And suicides up the ass. Had one come in last night, a bleach-swallower, sweet sixteen, with eyes all big and dark and shit-scared till the Angel worked its magic. No way, I thought. There’s still such a thing as bleach?

A primitive, the sexy new doc on the ICU called her. But truth is, she could’ve been me a decade or so back, before I quit Kentucky and straightened out.

When I sent the kid’s report in to the Operator Feedback Division, I flagged up the exit shot, told them Threshold should use it in the promotional material when they launch, cuz bleach or no bleach, she went out with the best smile I’ve seen all year.

Her final wish? A ten-inch butterfly tramp-stamp, one wing either side of the coccyx. I kid you not.

Anyway according to the grapevine that we Angel operators aren’t supposed to even have, except we do, they’re designing the next generation before we’ve even fixed the glitches in this one. The jury’s out on what that means. Don’t get me wrong, I’m glad to have a job at all, with my history. In fact I think I speak for all of us in your employ, O mighty Threshold Care Corporation, when I say us Angel operators would go just about anywhere you choose to send us. Wouldn’t suit anyone with a family and ties, but the pay’s sweet, and you get to see places you’d never go otherwise: I’ve lived in Woonsocket, Rhode Island; Paragould, Arkansas; Black Diamond, Washington; Bismarck, North Dakota. And now hello, Lake Havasu City.

I drive over the original London Bridge every day on my way to the hospital. It must’ve been quite a landmark when the millionaire dude imported it stone by stone from Ye Olde England to make a tourist feature, but now it’s just part of the general shitscape: highway, hotel complexes, Walgreen’s, and – which is where I’m headed – Starbucks. I’m a creature of habit. I stop, buy one, and drink it in the car. Ew, yeah.

I roll into the ICU and fire up the Angel, and see the sexy new doc’s there again, the one that called the bleach-swallower a primitive.

"Hi Medicine Man."

"Hi Kylie. Call me Angus."

He’s early twenties, but I’m in good shape, so I’m on his radar. Hmm. Dr Angus van der Kamp. Sounds like a bull.

"How’s it hanging today, Angus?" He can rampage me any time.

"It’s hanging good thanks Kylie. We’ve got an ambulance due in fifteen. Car smash on the highway, oncoming truck driver DOA, two Angel candidates."

"Cool. I like the challenge of multiples."

He smiles. "Funny you should say that. I do too. I appreciate that extra layer of decision-making."

Twenty minutes later I’ve hooked both tragedies into the system, an old man and a teenage girl, a family combo. The junior cop who came in with the ambulance must be a newbie, cuz she can’t stop staring at the messed-up leaking bodies.

"It used to get to me too once upon a time. But not any more," I tell her. "Hasn’t for the last three postings. Can’t afford it, mental-health-wise. You get jaded instead, is what happens. These two’ll get a good send-off I promise. They’ll leave this world happy. Off you go kid, we got work to do."

When the door’s swung behind her, Medicine Man shoots me a look. "We’re not supposed to discuss it."

"I didn’t say anything," I say, adjusting the old man’s head-mesh.

He face-shrugs. "Be careful, is all."

"I worked obstetrics once," I tell him as we prep up. "Loved it. You know, when you see them born, covered in blood and that white waxy shit and all, wriggling and then screaming and your heart goes yeah, yeah, yeah, you know? Life."

He smiles. "Sure. I been there too. Nothing like it."

"When I joined Threshold, I expected the same kind of kick. I mean, departure shouldn’t be that different from arrival. Not if it’s done right. Big spiritual moment, right?"

His eyebrows go up. "But?"

"Doesn’t happen. When I get into their cognitive system, you can see it’s not working how it should. I’m not the only one that thinks that. So operating the machine’s a bittersweet experience, is what I’m saying."

"You seemed happy enough with the kid last night, how that went."

"The one you called a primitive? I was and I wasn’t. I mean, she smiled nice when she got her ass-tattoo. But there’s more to a good death than a smile, right? You have to look at what the Angel’s promising here, then figure out if it’s delivering."

"Isn’t that why Threshold’s trialling it?"

"Sure. I’m just saying, they haven’t thought it through."

He looks at me sharp. "Kylie. Be careful. You can trust me – but you can’t trust everyone."

"Confidentiality pledge doesn’t say you can’t discuss philosophy with colleagues."

He thinks for a minute, then grins back at me. "She wants philosophy, huh. OK. You know what this reminds me of?" he cocks his head at the tragedies.

"No, what?"

"The one that goes: I’d like to die peacefully in my sleep like my grandfather. Not screaming in terror like his passengers."

I’m not expecting it: I laugh so hard I spit my coffee back into the cup.

I’m still chuckling as I calibrate the Angel to my pulse, put on the helmet and dock in.

"Hi there, Kylie Wells, Angel Operator, at your service." The old geezer on the slab goes by the name of Jerry according to his ankle-tag. "So where have you mentally transported yourself to, my senior friend?" He’s well into shut-down but I have a knack with cognitive pathways, so I’m in real quick. It takes a moment to adjust to his mind’s eye cuz he’s clearly been drinking but when I do, the image is clear.

We’re entering a casino, name of Treasure Island. Las Vegas, I’m guessing. It’s a popular destination. Symbolic in some way I guess. The lottery of life and yada yada.

He loiters a bit near the entrance, taking in the ambience: the ventilated spice atmospheric, the horizon of heads, the clack of chips, the jewelled fingers, the beer-guts, the leathery cleavage-cracks. He’s feeling a hell of a lot younger than he really is. The old folk tend to. It’s a self-perception slash vanity thing.

No-one pops up in his mind so I sketch in a host: the generic man’s man the system calls a Jimbo. I choose Jimbo 2, who’s in his forties, the age Jerry’s feeling.

"I used to play a lot," Jerry tells Jimbo 2, who’s playing doorman. "Never won big-time, not once. I’d come in and blow it the same night, left broke, the usual story, huh? Guess you’ve seen it a thousand times."

"Sure have sir," says the doorman. They like being called sir. "So what brings you back to our fine establishment tonight?"

"Oh, a memory lane thing I guess. Farewell visit. Last try at cheating the system."

Incredible how on some level they always just know.

The doorman laughs. "Dollar for every time I hear that one, I’d be Alex Bezos."

Jerry clucks his teeth, makes a face. "Good to be here. Came from my daughter’s wedding, over at the Lake."

"Oh yeah?"

"Five months pregnant, already got two, different fathers and her eldest’s retarded. Anyway up the aisle she goes. Snowball’s chance in hell of that one working out. I give it two years, max."

"Who’s the lucky guy?"

"A florist. What kind of man becomes a goddam florist?"

The doorman thinks for a moment. "How were the flowers?"

They both laugh, loud and meaty. Jerry sighs. "Anyway, family row, the usual shit. So I quit and here I am, all set to bet."

"You left your daughter’s wedding?"

"Let’s just say I removed myself from the equation," says Jerry. "Best for all concerned."

"Families, huh?" says Jimbo 2, shaking his head. "So, you feeling lucky tonight sir?"

"Matter of fact I am. Feel like I might just walk out with a few thou. No, let’s make that a million, why not. Yeah. I’m up for that."

"That what you want, sir?"

"You betcha. Would you say no to a million, man?"

"No, sir, I would not. Well, good luck."

"Yeah, nice talking."

Jerry takes a breath, forces his way to the bar at the centre, buys a double scotch, knocks it back in one, then gets himself a hundred dollars’ worth of chips. Meanwhile here at Ground Control my stomach’s rumbling. Come on Jerry, pick a table and let’s get started, I’m thinking. But he’s not progressing. He’s wandering around with his chips, looking at the tables, but not picking one. I was expecting Jerry to launch fast and smooth into the Great Beyond with his un-earned million in his pocket, and a big winner’s smile, false teeth blazing – but no. He’s sensing something’s off. You know when a cat’s decided to settle somewhere, and instead of just sitting down, it turns around and around and around, like it can’t decide which compass-point its ass should point to? Well Jerry’s indecision, it’s like that. Kind of a circling the drain thing I guess.

The system’s registered that the client’s uncomfortable and losing his gambling nerve.

From the way he’s swaying now, as he heads for the Men’s, you can tell he’s got that seasickness problem the tech guys can’t seem to crack. The Angel Wobble we call it. I co-feel stuff but so far I’ve been immune to that one. Some colleagues, they’ll actually puke.

He staggers to the sink and splashes cold water on his face, then takes a deep breath and looks up.

AAAGH! The line on my screen spikes, then plunges.

Jesus. Woah there, thinks Jerry. WOAH! Who’s that ugly old bastard in the mirror? He blinks with shock. Jesus. It’s me. What happened?

I can’t help laughing. He hurtles out faster than you can say, suck it up, old man.

So, scrub Las Vagas as a scenario.

Repeat offer? The Angel wants Jimbo 2 back in the frame.

I know Jerry won’t go for it, but I press OK anyway. Call it a little bet with myself.

"Hey big guy," says Jimbo 2 as he heads for the door. "You quitting already?"

"Yeah," goes Jerry. "Just didn’t feel right." Like it’s some heroic moral choice he’s made.

The Angel tries again, with Jimbo 2 saying: "You ain’t tempted to go back in and take your chances?"

"Nah, man," says Jerry. "It’s a young man’s game. I’m done here."

"Told ya!" I yell at the Angel. In my side vision Angus looks at me with a question on his face. "Sorry. Got carried away there," I tell him. "System’s an idiot. I’ll need to re-boot Jerry here, he bailed out." I shift the input. "While he’s in limbo let’s do the other one."

When the helmet’s re-calibrated I enter the kid, name of Jessie-May. She’s got mild cerebral palsy according to the notes, and on top of that she’s all over the place emotionally, probably cuz her mother’s piggybacking. You get that a lot. Parents, priests, exes from hell, etcetera. Parasite presences, usually malign. I include God here. Takes a while to calibrate Jessie-May, and once I’m in we’re straight into a bad memory. She just peed herself behind the wedding marquee and wet her dress. When Ma found out she went apeshit and slapped her cheek right in front of the pastor.

Sorry ’bout that sir, said Ma. I know it don’t look too Christian, on my wedding-day and all. But Jessie-May here’s got learning difficulties. And sometimes the fact is, a big girl needs a big slap. Pissing yourself at your own mother’s wedding. What kinda behaviour’s that, huh? I said, HUH? And Jessie’s thinking: weddings suck. Everyone’s being mean. When Grandaddy leaves I’m hitching a ride.

I tweak the sensor, fast-forward her the hell out. Jeez, I thought my family was bad, God rest em.

So now she’s on her own in the desert someplace near the scene of the crash no doubt, all dry dirt and clumps of tumbleweed and other bitch-scratch vegetation. No landmarks, except a hill up ahead, turbines sprouting out, spinning to the max. And down there in the valley, a grove. Almonds maybe. Whatever. It’s a long way off but she’s thirsty as hell. She’s still wearing the dress that she pissed all over behind the marquee. She hates it. Well I empathise with you there Jessie-May. Lavender silk. A dumb sash at the back, like she’s a Christmas parcel.

She’s just getting to wondering how the hell she got here. Jessie don’t think fast, but she thinks just fine – till Ma crashes in again.

Might not all be such a blur if you paid some attention, Missy. Might not be if you asked a few questions of whoever was driving the car, check they’re not over the alcohol limit.

If there was a way to un-fuse that bitch Ma from the kid I’d do it, believe me, but she makes a valid point.

Jessie-May’s main feeling right now is thirst: I’m getting it too. She’s remembering how Grandaddy told her about the time he woke up from a blackout in the boondocks and found himself in a peach-grove and drank water straight from the irrigation pipe.

Come on kid, Kylie’s rooting for you here. Use that memory, it came to you for a reason. You’re not the only thirsty one here.

Up she gets. That’s my girl. Jessie-May’s legs are uncooperative but she makes it to the plantation and puts her lips to the rubber pipe that snakes along the first line of trees and sucks the water, too hot, with grit and all. Broken almond shells dig into her knees and there’s a diesel and blood smell on her that I can’t fade out completely.

When she’s finished she looks up and sees a building: some kind of kiosk.

So you gonna head that way and try get yourself cleaned up, or you gonna lie there and feel sorry for yasself, Princess? bitches Ma.

The sign’s hanging loose. Place looks abandoned. But there’ll be shade.

So what you waiting for, dumbass? Go for it, before I—.

The door clangs as she pushes it open – an old fashioned bell. Interesting Angel factoid: retro or even genre features can pop up in folk who have the TV on all day.

So she’s in, and I’m about to introduce a host when Medicine Man taps me on the arm and points at the monitor.

Uh-oh, Jerry’s light’s flashing. He’s in the countdown phase. Unexpected. I slow Jessie-May’s trajectory as far as I can – her exit’s not too close at this point – and haul Jerry up. The re-boot’s caused him to re-wind a bit, chronology-wise. Another design fault. He’s outside, in the heat, probably right near where he crashed the car and half-killed them both. Landscape’s the same as where Jessie-May was, the turbines, the grove in the distance. Don’t look back, my friend, you won’t like what you see.

Ahead, there’s the building. Some kind of hardware store, he reckons.

Another Angel factoid: eight times out of ten it’s a retail outlet.

He heads over. He’s still on the agitated side so I take him down a few notches till I get him through the door. Inside it’s dark and jumbled, the shelving stuffed with stock, a mix of new and second-hand. There’s rusty chisels and lathes, drills, glass jars full of nuts and bolts, others with nails in and in between, modern plastic-packaged items: Superglue, electric hedge trimmers, face-masks.

Hmm, goes Jerry’s tragic little guy-brain, and he starts walking around looking at the shelves with a song running in his head, she’s a good-hearted woman in love with a good-timin’ man, up and down, she loves him in spite of his wicked ways she don’t understand. Didn’t I have a list somewhere, of shit I needed? Bulbs, three-inch masonry nails, grout, some WD40 for that hinge in the garage? Yeah. Through teardrops and laughter they’ll pass through the world hand in hand, and I sure could do with a real nice set of screwdrivers. State-of-the-art, a proper grip on em, ten different sizes, the good hearted woman lovin’ her two-timin’ man—.

And so it goes in this mode until he stumbles on – WOAH! – the bad stuff.

That happens, and you don’t always see it coming.

He’s looking at a bunch of weird broken shit in a heap. Trash, mostly. A half-melted Barbie doll. A bike with its front wheel missing and no chain. A banjo with no strings and a cracked back.

Cue the Freudian slash Jungian craporama.

This is where they tend to flip into introspective mode, if they’re ever going to. The idea is, the broken objects represent their life’s mistakes, unfulfilled dreams and general regrets. Triggering the realization that they’ve done bad stuff, or failed to do good stuff, leading to some hokey self-assessment where they try to fix it by asking God/their Higher Power/the Universe for forgiveness before they croak, cuz the Angel’s not in the business of sending folk to hell, no matter how much they belong there. So here’s where they get the closure thing they need, to so-called rest in peace.

So now he’s suddenly feeling low, and I’m co-feeling it. But – bad programming again – most folk just don’t see what’s there in front of them. So Jerry’s sensing that all this junk is significant, the melted Barbie in particular: something about Jessie-May being treated like shit by her Ma and probably the rest of the family too including him. But he’s not making the connection. The system isn’t nudging properly, is what’s happening here. Inadequate signposting. So he just stands there eyeing the pile of trash, feeling blue, not coming to any conclusions, still humming his little Waylon Jennings cheating song, wanting to fix things but with no idea how, even though he’s surrounded by tools and repair kits. Go figure.

It’s not going to develop, I can see that, so I introduce another host, Jimbo 3, nicknamed "Jimbo the Sage" because of his great age of around 85 and his supposed backwoods old-timer wisdom, in an attempt to kick Jerry into a new focus.

"Howdy. What can I do you for, sir?" says Jimbo 3.

"Well I’m not sure."

"That’s often the way. You find us OK?" asks Jimbo 3.

"Think so. Anyways, here I am. Feeling kinda strange."

"A common complaint sir. Folk can have real trouble getting here. By the time they reach us, some have had the time to ponder what they’re after so they’re pretty specific. Others – perhaps like you, sir – haven’t managed to pinpoint it yet. Do you have any ideas?"

"I musta done before I came in, but now I’m not so sure. I was in Vegas but I changed my mind."

"Well, just take a look around, take your time, sir. No hurry. You on your own?" (The system’s not being quite truthful with him here. He’s got precisely 23 seconds left.)

A thought comes to him. "My grand-daughter. Jessie-May. She was with me in the car. You seen a kid don’t look right, in a bridesmaid’s dress?"

Aha, now we’re getting somewhere – but he’d better hurry, the timeout’s flashing. Go on Jerry, I’m rooting for ya.

Jimbo 3 says, "She’s right here, sir."

"That’s great!" But he’s distracted by the tools.

"You want to see her? Have a word?"

"Sure. In a minute. I was thinking, you got any real nice state-of-the-art-type screwdriver kits?"

"Oh shit, you dork!" I yell. The sexy doc looks up.

"You OK there?" he mouths. I nod.

The host says, "Screwdrivers? We sure have sir." Twelve, eleven, ten…

"So let’s see ’em."

Jimbo 3 goes: "And Jessie-May, sir? Did you want to see her, say a few words?"

Go on, you dick!

"I’m talking the kind with the magnetised tip."

His wish is the Angel’s command. From nowhere a box appears and the lid flips open to reveal a gleaming array of stainless-steel screwdrivers. Even I’m impressed.

"Can you beat that, sir?" asks Jimbo 3.

And just look at Jerry’s face split ear to ear, dentures blazing and glory be. What a smile. The camera clicks and clinches the money shot – the one thing the Angel never fails on – and Jerry exhales, with his last breath, the immortal words: "Wow, willya just look at those big boys. Now that’s what I call a classy—"

Then zaps. Game over.

What a grade-A prick. Last chance to see his grand-kid, and chooses tools.

I sign him out, depressed as fuck. "All done," I tell Angus. "We can package him."

When we get back to Jessie-May there’s not much time left on her countdown. She’s made her way into the kiosk, where there’s candy.

"Welcome," says a voice. Jessie-May turns. The host-lady she’s conjured looks like her Ma, but nice, and not pregnant or in a wedding-dress. Softer, less make-up, less mean. She sinks down to look Jessie-May in the eye, all kind and concerned. Smooth skin, smells of honey and roses.

"What’s your name sweetheart?"

"Jessie-May."

"Pretty name! How can I help you?"

"Is this a store?"

"It’s whatever you like," says the lady, and smiles. "Do you have any idea what you’d like on this mighty hot day?"

"You have ice-cream?"

"Sure, hon. Got a whole freezerful out back. Baskin Robbins, Ben and Jerrys, Häagen Dazs, you name it. Got a favourite flavour?"

Jesus. Not again.

You see, this is the point where it goes wrong. Every time. Look at Jessie-May: she’s talking ice-cream now because that’s what she was prompted to do with that "mighty hot day" shit, and naming the freaking brands: that’s what an attorney would call a leading question. So now we’re into Peanut Butter, Bubblegum, Double Chocolate Chip and blah blah. I’ve been here a thousand times, I know how it ends: they exit thinking of a favourite ice-cream flavour slash sexual position slash in Grandpa Jerry’s case, set of goddamn screwdrivers. Now maybe that’s a cool way to go. But ask yourself, is that what the system was designed for?

"Jesus, this sucks," I tell Angus when the kid’s zapped out. "Sweet Parting my ass." We check out the money shot. Will that cute smile trigger Ma into having some long dark nights of the soul concerning the shit way she treated her? More likely she’ll say to herself and everyone, I did everything I could for her as a mother, she passed away knowing she was loved, just look at my adorable happy girl.

Medicine man puts his hand on my arm. "It’s a tough job, no question." He’s got a hint of stubble, I like that. And you can tell he works out. "Some gum?" He fishes in his pocket, pulls out – woah. Like, about seven varieties. Including a brand-new one I never seen before.

"Gingko Berry? You’re kidding me. Gotta give that a go." I unwrap it and chew. "Mmm, weird."

"New things are always weird the first time."

"Make me laugh, Angus. I need cheering up. You got any more jokes?"

He thinks. "How did Captain Hook die?"

"Go on."

"He scratched his ass with the wrong hand."

I crack up again. Hysterically, if I’m honest. He puts his hand on my arm, firmer this time. He’s strong, his skin’s warm. I look at his wrist. I could never resist a hairy wrist.

"How about a drink this evening, Kylie? I think you’ve earned one."

The gingko berry’s growing on me. "As in, a date?"

"As in."

Hey. Hey. "You betcha."

"Good. You got a favourite bar, Kylie?"

I smile. "I have."

I write down my address and hand him the piece of paper.

He reads it, takes in what it’s telling him, smiles back at me big and slow, then he glances around to check if anyone’s there before kissing me long and hard, right there in the ICU cubicle. It’s so good I swallow my gum. Finally he pulls away and looks me deep in the eyes. "So, what would you wish for if you were hooked up to the Angel right now?" he murmurs.

I laugh. "Well you know the answer to that one, Angus van der Kamp. You ain’t dumb."

He cocks an eyebrow. "Let me hear it from you."

I lean forward, whisper in his ear: "OK. I’d wish for someone hot to give me the fuck of my life."

And it was the fuck of my life. Out of this world. Unbelievable. Life-changing. I’m still pulsing from it, high on my first ever set of multiple orgasms. Twenty-seven, since you ask. And no, I wouldn’t have believed it either. We’re on my bed with the fan turning above us, the noise of the lake in the distance, outboard motors and cat-calls and music. He’s not one of those guys falls asleep right after which is good, cuz sex wakes me right up, gets my brain going. We’ve got through half a bottle of Southern Comfort, handing the bottle to and fro and sharing cigarettes.

"So now the fairy godmother has granted your sex wish, do you have any more?" he wants to know. I blow out smoke.

"Yeah. I do. I been thinking about that kid today, Jessie-May. And yesterday’s, the primitive. Can’t shake them off. I want to know what the Angel’s really for."

He takes a swig of Southern Comfort, toys with a strand of my hair. "We’re not supposed to discuss it with anyone outside of Threshold." He grins. "Bad girl."

"Come on, it’s not some federal secret. Anyway I need to, it makes me feel so helpless." I still got this mean little rage going, about the whole Sweet Parting deal. "We might as well use a stun-gun on them and just get it over with, instead of horsing around in their hippocampuses, jinxing their dumbass psyches, stirring up stuff best left buried. I’m not the only operator thinks that. Consensus is, it’s asking the wrong questions. Bad programming. Bad priorities. The ethical side to this, it’s way over our pay-grade. We’re technicians. We didn’t sign up for this. We’re talking inbuilt systematic incompetence. Something as important as this? You don’t let Cal-Tech Aspie nerds design it. You bring in expert psychologists, right? I mean that kid today, Jessie-May. For what it’s worth, d’you know what I think she really wanted? A decent Ma, is what. That woman in the store, that was her shitbag Ma, turned nice, offering her ice-cream. But does Jessie-May ask for a hug, does the good version of Ma offer her one? No, cuz the Angel’s a dumbass. It’s thinking commercially because those are its values. So it gets her to the brink but the woman selling ice cream doesn’t turn into the kid’s mother, like it should, so there’s no closure. Trigger-image recognition failure or whatever. Or it’s a language issue, maybe change the tense of the verb or something? I’m no linguistic cognoscenti but my thought is, instead of asking what flavour ice cream, it should just go, what do you want most in the world?"

"I hear you, Kylie." He hands me the bottle and I take a big swig.

"So you plug me up to the Angel and here’s what I say: I say I wanna give Threshold Care Systems a piece of my mind, ask them what they’re really up to, cuz you can bet they’ve got a hidden agenda."

He rolls over and props himself on his elbow. "Hmm. Wonder how that would go."

I look him in the eye. "I’d say to the host, whoever it was, I’d like to get to the bottom of this shit."

He nods. "And the host’d go, let me guess. It’d go, Don’t you already know the answer to that, Kylie?"

I bang the pillow. "Yeah, exactly. The client always has the answer buried within his own mind, and blah blah. So I’d say, Well the big business slash the Pentagon slash Silicon Valley has to be behind it somehow, right?"

"Hmm. The military-industrial complex?"

"Something like it. I don’t know."

He nods. "And the host says?"

"He or she – probably a he in my case – says right, Kylie. Got it in one. And I’m like, I knew it. I mean you have to ask yourself, as an Angel operator, who are the real clients, cuz there’s no advantage I can see, in them – whoever they are – finding out what someone’s last wish is, and making their passing a thing of ease. Cuz giving a bleach-swallower an ass-crack tattoo, or Jessie-May a peanut butter ice-cream, or her drunk grandaddy his dream screwdriver kit isn’t something you spend a billion dollars on. They’re so low down the food chain they’re like, amoeba. They’d want a machine that gets to find out, you know… big thoughts. Secrets maybe. Famous people. Presidents and shit, what they regret, what they never told anyone, what they dreamed about achieving that they never said aloud. People whose minds are worth exploring. That’s what I’d use it for, if I was them."

"Hmmm." He lies back on the pillow, his arms tucked behind his head in a way that shows off his world-class chest. "You know, Kylie, I have a hunch you’re right."

"I know I am."

"Well say you are. And say I’m being the host here," he says.

"Shoot."

"Would what you’ve just articulated answer your question about the system’s purpose? Its raison d’etre?"

Raison d’etre. Primitive. He has a way with words. I have a think. "Yeah. I guess it would." He hands me the cigarette and I take a deep drag and another swig of bourbon, and let the two sets of chemicals do their combined work. "I guess it… does." Something’s sinking in. "Medicine Man?"

"Yeah?"

"I’m not sure how to bring this up, but… I said I wanted the fuck of my life and I got it."

He grins. "At your service."

"So I’m starting to wonder, are we entering a different… register here?"

He grins. "Hmm. What do you think?"

"I don’t know."

"You’re smart, Kylie. That’s what I love about you. Your imagination’s bigger than you think. Just look at today. You won! You answered your own questions about Threshold and its agenda, and on top of that, you had some spectacular orgasms. Maybe Sweet Parting’s more sophisticated and generous than you give it credit for."

"So Threshold’s giving multiple orgasms out of the kindness of its heart? Come on."

He laughs. "Think it through, Kylie. Apply your mind to the question."

We don’t say anything for a bit, his hand resting on my boob. It feels good. Maybe he’s right. Maybe I’ve worked out more than I think.

"I guess NASA didn’t send guys to the moon just so I can fry an egg that doesn’t stick," I say. "Same way Threshold didn’t develop the Angel and Sweet Parting so Jessie-May could get an ice-cream."

He nods. "So although the Angel has its glitches, and you’ve been pointing them out eloquently, Kylie, you need to remember something. The final moments and feelings of ordinary people, they’re valuable too."

"As in, commercially saleable?"

"Sure. Nothing wrong with that, is there?"

I think for a moment. "So the goodbye smiles, they get paid for in advance, by whoever’s willing to pay for a good death cuz they’re scared of having a bad one? And health insurance is involved, cuz either you’re covered for it or you’re not? And all of that pays for Threshold to develop its real system? The secret Pentagon slash Silicon Valley brain-picking one, or whatever evil shit it is?"

"Woah, how did the word evil creep in there?" smiles Angus. "The project’s patriotic. And did you want Jessie-May to be the passenger screaming in agony? If the choice is that or an ice-cream, which would you choose for her? The ice-cream. Every time. No contest."

I take another long slow swig of Southern Comfort, haul some more nicotine into my lungs. I’m beginning to get a perspective on things here. I know it’s too late (I swallowed the gingko berry gum, didn’t I?), but at least I can see it. At least I’ve got some clarity.

"You’re an amazing person, Kylie," Angus says. "And I’m not just being a good host here. You really made something of your life. And your work on developing the system? The feedback you just gave on the Angel? It’ll prove useful, truly. You’ll be helping more people than you could dream of. You should be proud."

I think for a moment. "I’m not unhappy, I guess. But, well. It’s a shock. I wasn’t expecting this, is all."

"No-one ever is. Not really. But the system works better than you think. And you’d be wrong to believe that Threshold hasn’t thought it all through." He snuggles up and presses his face to my ear. We lie there for a while, just breathing, and then he whispers, "I love you, Kylie. I want you to know that."

My heart swells, huge and simple as the sun. I smile – why wouldn’t I? – and I hear the camera click.

"Was that for me, Kylie?" he whispers, soft. "Feels like it was."

No, I think. It was for me. It was me, saying goodbye, Life, it was nice knowing you. Thanks for having me. Weird, that acceptance thing. I seen it before from the outside, never quite got it. But now –

Yeah. I do. I absolutely do.

He kisses me again, gentle, on the lips. "So," he murmurs. "Are you good to go?"

And yes. Oh yes. To my surprise, and joy, I am.

TENDER Rachel Swirsky

The first time my love realized I might kill myself, he remade my arteries in steel.

He waited until I was asleep and then stole me down into the secret laboratory he’d built beneath our house. I pretended to be sleeping as he shifted lights and lenses until the room lit with eerie blue. Using tools of his own invention, he anaesthetized me, incised my skin, and injected me with miniature robots that were programmed to convert my arterial walls into materials both compatible with human life and impossible to sever.

It was not really steel, but I imagine it as steel. I imagine that, inside, I am polished and industrial.

Over the course of the night, he remade the tributaries in my wrists, my throat, my thighs. He made them strong enough to repel any razor. He forbade them from crying red rivers. He banished the vision of a bathtub with water spreading pink. He made my life impossible to spill.

I have recurring dreams of tender things dying in the snow. They are pink and curled and fetal, the kind of things that would be at home in my husband’s laboratory, floating in jars of formaldehyde, or suspended among bubbles in gestational tanks of nutritional gel.

Their skin has no toughness. It is wet and slick, almost amphibian, but so delicate that it bruises from exposure to the air. Their unformed bodies shudder helplessly in the cold, vestigial tails tucked next to ink-blot eyes. On their proto-arms, finger-like protrusions grasp for warmth.

They are possibilities, yearning, unfurling from nothingness into unrealized potential.

In my dreams, I am separated from them by a window too thick to break. I don’t know who has abandoned them, helpless, in the snow. Frost begins to scale their skins. Their mouths shape inaudible whimpers. I can’t get outside. I can’t get to them. I can’t get outside before they die.

My love replaced the bones of my skull with interlocking adamantine scales. I cannot point a gun at my ear and shoot.

So that I cannot swallow a barrel, he placed sensors in my mouth, designed to detect the presence of firearms. Upon sensing one, they engage emergency measures, including alarms, force fields, and a portcullis that creaks down to block my throat.

The sensor’s light blinks ceaselessly, a green wash that penetrates my closed lips. It haunts me in the night, bathing every other second in spectral glow.

One psychiatrist’s theory:

To commit suicide, you must feel hopeless.

To commit suicide, you must believe you are a burden on those you love.

To commit suicide, you must be accustomed to physical risk.

One, two, three factors accounted for. But a fourth forgotten: to commit suicide, you must be penetrable.

My love says he needs me, but he knows that I believe he’s deluded.

He would be better off with another wife. Perhaps a mad lady scientist with tangled red hair frizzing out of her bun and animé-huge eyes behind magnifying glasses. Perhaps a robot, deftly crafted, possessing the wisdom of the subtle alloys embedded in her artificial consciousness. Perhaps a super-human mutant, discovered injured and amnesiac in an alley, and then carried back to his lab where he could cradle her back to health. He could be the professor who enables her heroic adventures, outfitting her with his inventions, and sewing flame-retardant spandex uniforms for her in his spare time.

No poison: my vital organs are no longer flesh.

No car crash: my spinal cord is enhanced by a network of nanobots, intelligent and constantly reconfiguring, ensuring that every sensation flashes, every muscle twitches.

No suffocation: my skin possesses its own breath now. It inhales; it exhales; it maintains itself flush and pink.

"Please," he says, "Please," and does not have to say more.

He is crying very quietly. A few tears. A few gulping breaths.

Apart from the intermittent flash of the sensors in my mouth, our room is black and silent. I have been lying in bed for six days now. In the morning, he brings me broth and I eat enough to quiet him. In the afternoons, he carries up the robotic dog, and it energetically coils and uncoils its metal tail-spring until I muster the strength to move my hand and pat its head.

In the night, we lie beside each other, our skin rough against the sheets. He reaches for my hand where it lies on my pillow. His touch is so much. I can’t explain how much it is. Sensation fills my whole world, and I have so little world left to fill. My body has been strengthened by nanobots and steel, but my mind continues to narrow, becoming less and less. Something as consuming as his touch is so overwhelming that it is excruciating. It’s like all the warmth of the sun hitting my skin at once.

"Please," he repeats in a murmur.

Next morning, when I wake, he has programmed the nanobots to construct a transparent wall behind my eyes. No bullet, no pencil, no sword can penetrate them to find my brain.

There are so many ways to die.

The accidental: a slick of water, a slip, and the head cracks on the bathtub, shower, kitchen sink. Hands pull the wrong pair of medicines from the cabinet. Feet rest on the arm of the couch, near the blanket thrown over the radiator. The throat contracts around a piece of orange peel, inhaled instead of swallowed, on a day when one is home alone.

The unusual: exploding fireworks, attacking dogs, plummeting asteroids, crashing tsunamis, flashing lightning, striking snakes, whirling tornados, splintering earthquakes, engulfing floods, dazzling electrocution, grinning arson.

The science fictional: robots, and aliens, and zombies, and Frankenstein’s monster, and experiments gone wrong, and spontaneous nuclear reactions, and miniature black holes, and tenth dimensional beings of malevolent light.

The routine: one car smashing into another. One damaged cell rapaciously dividing. One blockage of blood in the brain. One heart, seizing.

Self-immolation: no longer an option. After his last adjustments, my breathing skin can adapt to any temperature. It resists ice; it resists fire. I could walk into lava. I could dive into space.

"Please," he still murmurs at night, "Please."

His hand withdraws, but the heat-memory of it remains. It sparks under my skin like a new-forming sunburn, radiation caught and kept in the flesh.

Instead of hardening the shell of my body again, he appeals to my mind. Since I won’t believe that he needs me, he brings me a pair of genetically enhanced, baby white mice with brains so huge their skulls bulge. They scurry around, solving mazes by means of derived algorithms that they’ve scratched into their bedding, using mathematical notation of their own invention.

I feed them carrots, celery, lettuce, and pellets of radioactive, brain-enhancing super-food. They sit on my hand as they eat, grasping the morsels in their paws and nibbling at them with their prominent front teeth. They stare at me with ink-black eyes and make pleased, musical squealing sounds. They proffer their bellies for me to tickle, and they giggle in a register too high-pitched for me to hear. They bring me gifts of hoarded lettuce leaves inscribed with formulae I can’t decipher.

They are all energy and curiosity and brilliance. I watch them discover new ways to balance with their tails at the same time as they deduce the flaws in general relativity. I savor their love of life, their delight in discovering themselves as creatures who possess worlds and wisdom and bodies to explore. I feel their happiness heartbeat-hot in my stomach. It fills my remaining being with painful, wistful joy. Life is filling them. Life is diminishing me. I am tapering out of existence.

When I dream that night of the fetal creatures in the snow, I see that they have subtly shifted. Or perhaps I am only recognizing traits they have possessed all along. I see the features of my baby mice haunting their undeveloped bodies. Their ink-blot eyes are wondering. Their vestigial tails twitch querulously.

I pound my flattened palm against the dream-glass that separates us. I scream and scream for it to smash.

I can’t. I can’t. I can’t get to them. The unformed things, the helpless things, the ones that still want to survive. They shiver and turn blue. Ice crusts their eyes closed. I pound the glass. I can’t break it. I can’t. I can’t. I can’t break through.

While I dreamt, he encased me in armor as sensitive as skin. Invisible to the eye. Intangible to the fingers. Impervious as immortality.

I will close you in, he didn’t whisper as he stood over me, his breath hot and helpless on my scalp. You are an eggshell and I will wrap you in cotton and rubber bands until no fall can shatter you. I won’t wait until afterward to call all the king’s horses and all the king’s men. I’ll bring them here before anything goes wrong. I’ll set them to patrol the wall while they can still do some good. I’ll protect you from everything, including yourself.

My brain: wrinkled, pink, four-lobed, textured like soft tofu.

Steel arteries, adamantine scales, sensors, portcullises, nanobots, armor. So much fuss to protect three pounds of meat.

My mice have learned to write in English.

They crawl up and down the walls of their cage, pleading, until I give them scraps of paper and a miniature pen.

WE’RE WORRIED ABOUT YOU, they write.

On a white board, I write back, It’s not your job to worry about me. I pause before adding, You’re mice.

WHAT IS IT THAT YOU WANT? they write.

I hesitate before responding.

Nothing.

They consult silently, evaluating each other’s perplexed expressions. They brux their teeth, chit-chitter-scrape.

Finally, they write, EVERYONE WANTS SOMETHING.

I do want something, I reply. I already told you.

But it’s not really fair to expect them to be clever therapists. They may be geniuses, but they’re still only baby mice.

In another science fiction story, my love would replace more and more of my body with armature until there was no human part of me remaining. With all my body gone, he would identify the fault as being in my mind. That’s where the broken fuses spit their dreadful sparks, he’d conclude, and then he’d change that part of me, too. He would smooth every complicated, ambiguous wrinkle from the meat and electricity of my brain: the inconsistent neurotransmitters; the knotted traumas; the ice-thin sense of self-preservation. By the time he was done, I would no longer bear any resemblance to myself. I’d become a wretched Stepford revenant lurching in a mechanical shell. And still, he would love me.

In another science fiction story, as he and I struggled with the push-pull of our desires, an unprecedented case would crack the courts, establishing an inalienable right to die. Bureaucracies would instantly rise to regulate the processes of filing Intent to Die forms, attending mandatory therapy sessions, and requesting financial aid for euthanasia ceremonies. I would file, attend, and request. He would beg me not to do so until, finally, driven mad, he would build a doomsday machine in our basement and use it to take over the world. As the all-powerful ruler of mankind, he would crush rebellion in an iron fist. In his palace, he would imprison me, living but immobile, in a glass tank shaped like a coffin.

In the same science fiction story, written on a different day, he would build the doomsday machine, but at the last minute, he would realize the folly of deploying it. Instead, he would continue to plead as I turned away, until finally the doctors would pull his outstretched hand away from mine as they slid the needle into my skin.

In yet a third science fiction story, a meteor would crash to the earth, and upon it, there would be a sentient alien symbiont, and for it to survive, it would require a human host. Testing would determine that I was the only viable candidate. They would cut me open and stitch the alien into my side, and it would tell me stories about the depths of space, and the strange whales that fly between stars, and the sun-and-dust thoughts of nebulae. It would tell me of its adventures on the surfaces of alien monuments so large that they have their own atmospheres and have evolved sentient populations who think it’s natural for the world to be shaped like the face of a giant. The alien would help my wounded soul rediscover how to accept my love’s touch, and the three of us would live together, different from what we were, but unbreakably unified.

In this science fiction story, I am a fetus; I am a mouse; I am an eggshell; I am a held breath; I am a snowdrift; I am a cyborg; I am a woman whose skin cannot bear the sensation of love.

"Please," he whispers in his sleep, "Please."

Lying awake, I see the fetal creatures in the snow, not in a dream this time, but as a waking vision. My palm pushes futilely on the window between us. The fetal things are fragility I cannot rescue. They are love I cannot reach. They are myself, slowly freezing.

I, too, am fragmented. I am the creatures dying, and I am the woman pounding at the window. I am the glass between us. I am the inability to shatter.

I watch him lying next to me, his breath even with sleep. In an hour or so, while it is still deep dark, he will wake. He will take me down to the laboratory. In the morning, I will wake inhabited by an army of genetically engineered viruses, instructed to wrap each of my cells in a protective coat, a cloud-like embrace of softness and safety.

Do you know why I wear your armor? I don’t ask him.

When you take me to the lab, I’m not always asleep. Sometimes, I’m aware. Sometimes, I feel the numbness of your anaesthetic spreading across my skin. Sometimes, I watch your face.

The flash of my sensors makes him seem alien.

In the laboratory, I don’t continue, your hands, laboring over me, are like the hands of an unknown creator god, working his clay.

He stirs. The mice rustle in their cage. They draw schematics for spaceships that can escape this earth.

I don’t say, I wear your armor because I love you.

I don’t say, I wear your armor because I am the fetal thing in the snow.

I don’t say, I wear your armor because you will not make me into a Stepford revenant, and you will not build a doomsday machine, and there are no alien symbionts to weave me stories about metal rain on distant planets. I wear your armor because my skin is hot with the sun’s memory. Because nanobot armies are love poems written in circuitry.

I don’t say, I wear your armor because, in my dreams, I’m still pounding on the glass.

MASKS Damon Knight

The eight pens danced against the moving strip of paper, like the nervous claws of some mechanical lobster. Roberts, the technician, frowned over the tracings while the other two watched.

"Here’s the wake-up impulse," he said, pointing with a skinny finger. "Then here, look, seventeen seconds more, still dreaming."

"Delayed response," said Babcock, the project director. His heavy face was flushed and he was sweating. "Nothing to worry about."

"Okay, delayed response, but look at the difference in the tracings. Still dreaming, after the wake-up impulse, but the peaks are closer together. Not the same dream. More anxiety, more motor pulses."

"Why does he have to sleep at all?" asked Sinescu, the man from Washington. He was dark, narrow-faced. "You flush the fatigue poisons out, don’t you? So what is it, something psychological?"

"He needs to dream," said Babcock. "It’s true he has no physiological need for sleep, but he’s got to dream. If he didn’t, he’d start to hallucinate, maybe go psychotic."

"Psychotic," said Sinescu. "Well—that’s the question, isn’t it? How long has he been doing this?"

"About six months."

"In other words, about the time he got his new body—and started wearing a mask?"

"About that. Look, let me tell you something, he’s rational. Every test—"

"Yes, okay, I know about tests. Well—so he’s awake now?"

The technician glanced at the monitor board. "He’s up. Sam and Irma are with him." He hunched his shoulders, staring at the EEG tracings again. "I don’t know why it should bother me. It stands to reason, if he has dream needs of his own that we’re not satisfying with the programmed stuff, this is where he gets them in." His face hardened. "I don’t know. Something about those peaks I don’t like."

Sinescu raised his eyebrows. "You program his dreams?"

"Not program," said Babcock impatiently. "A routine suggestion to dream the sort of thing we tell him to. Somatic stuff, sex, exercise, sport."

"And whose idea was that?"

"Psych section. He was doing fine neurologically, every other way, but he was withdrawing. Psych decided he needed that somatic input in some form, we had to keep him in touch. He’s alive, he’s functioning, everything works. But don’t forget, he spent forty-three years in a normal human body."

In the hush of the elevator, Sinescu said, "… Washington."

Swaying, Babcock said, "I’m sorry, what?"

"You look a little rocky. Getting any sleep?"

"Not lately. What did you say before?"

"I said they’re not happy with your reports in Washington."

"Goddamn it, I know that." The elevator door silently opened. A tiny foyer, green carpet, gray walls. There were three doors, one metal, two heavy glass. Cool, stale air. "This way."

Sinescu paused at the glass door, glanced through: a gray-carpeted living room, empty. "I don’t see him."

"Around the ell. Getting his morning checkup."

The door opened against slight pressure; a battery of ceiling lights went on as they entered. "Don’t look up," said Babcock. "Ultraviolet." A faint hissing sound stopped when the door closed.

"And positive pressure in here? To keep out germs? Whose idea was that?"

"His." Babcock opened a chrome box on the wall and look out two surgical masks. "Here, put this on."

Voices came muffled from around the bend of the room. Sinescu looked with distaste at the white mask, then slowly put it over his head.

They stared at each other. "Germs," said Sinescu through the mask. "Is that rational?"

"All right, he can’t catch a cold or what have you, but think about it a minute. There are just two things now that could kill him. One is a prosthetic failure, and we guard against that; we’ve got five hundred people here, we check him out like an airplane. That leaves a cerebrospinal infection. Don’t go in there with a closed mind."

The room was large, part living room, part library, part workshop. Here was a cluster of Swedish-modern chairs, a sofa, coffee table; here a workbench with a metal lathe, electric crucible, drill press, parts bins, tools on wallboards; here a drafting table; here a free-standing wall of bookshelves that Sinescu fingered curiously as they passed. Bound volumes of project reports, technical journals, reference books; no fiction except for Fire and Storm by George Stewart and The Wizard of Oz in a worn blue binding. Behind the bookshelves, set into a little alcove, was a glass door through which they glimpsed another living room, differently furnished: upholstered chairs, a tall philodendron in a ceramic pot. "There’s Sam," Babcock said.

A man had appeared in the other room. He saw them, turned to call to someone they could not see, then came forward, smiling. He was bald and stocky, deeply tanned. Behind him, a small, pretty woman hurried up. She crowded through after her husband, leaving the door open. Neither of them wore a mask.

"Sam and Irma have the next suite," Babcock said. "Company for him; he’s got to have somebody around. Sam is an old air-force buddy of his, and besides, he’s got a tin arm.

The stocky man shook hands, grinning. His grip was firm and warm. "Want to guess which one?" He wore a flowered sport shirt. Both arms were brown, muscular and hairy, but when Sinescu looked more closely, he saw that the right one was a slightly different color, not quite authentic. Embarrassed, he said, "The left, I guess."

"Nope." Grinning wider, the stocky man pulled back his right sleeve to show the straps.

"One of the spin-offs from the project," said Babcock. "Myoelectric, servo-controlled, weighs the same as the other one. Sam, they about through in there?"

"Maybe so. Let’s take a peek. Honey, you think you could rustle up some coffee for the gentlemen?"

"Oh, why, sure." The little woman turned and darted back through the open doorway.

The far wall was glass, covered by a translucent white curtain. They turned the corner. The next bay was full of medical and electronic equipment, some built into the walls, some in tall black cabinets on wheels. Four men in white coats were gathered around what looked like an astronaut’s couch. Sinescu could see someone lying on it: feet in Mexican woven-leather shoes, dark socks, gray slacks. A mutter of voices.

"Not through yet," Babcock said. "Must have found something else they didn’t like. Let’s go out onto the patio a minute."

"Thought they checked him at night—when they exchange his blood, and so on…?"

"They do," Babcock said. "And in the morning, too." He turned and pushed open the heavy glass door. Outside, the roof was paved with cut stone, enclosed by a green plastic canopy and tinted-glass walls. Here and there were concrete basins, empty. "Idea was to have a roof garden out here, something green, but he didn’t want it. We had to take all the plants out, glass the whole thing in."

Sam pulled out metal chairs around a white table and they all sat down. "How is he, Sam?" asked Babcock.

He grinned and ducked his head. "Mean in the mornings."

"Talk to you much? Play any chess?"

"Not too much. Works, mostly. Reads some, watches the box a little." His smile was forced; his heavy fingers were clasped together and Sinescu saw now that the fingertips of one hand had turned darker, the others not. He looked away.

"You’re from Washington, that right?" Sam asked politely. "First time here? Hold on." He was out of his chair. Vague upright shapes were passing behind the curtained glass door. "Looks like they’re through. If you gentlemen would just wait here a minute, till I see." He strode across the roof. The two men sat in silence. Babcock had pulled down his surgical mask; Sinescu noticed and did the same.

"Sam’s wife is a problem," Babcock said, leaning nearer. "It seemed like a good idea at the time, but she’s lonely here, doesn’t like it—no kids—"

The door opened again and Sam appeared. He had a mask on, but it was hanging under his chin. "If you gentlemen would come in now."

In the living area, the little woman, also with a mask hanging around her neck, was pouring coffee from a flowered ceramic jug. She was smiling brightly but looked unhappy. Opposite her sat someone tall, in gray shirt and slacks, leaning back, legs out, arms on the arms of his chair, motionless. Something was wrong with his face.

"Well, now," said Sam heartily. His wife looked up at him with an agonized smile.

The tall figure turned its head and Sinescu saw with an icy shock that its face was silver, a mask of metal with oblong slits for eyes, no nose or mouth, only curves that were faired into each other… project." said an inhuman voice.

Sinescu found himself half bent over a chair. He sat down. They were all looking at him.

The voice resumed, "I said, are you here to pull the plug on the project." It was unaccented, indifferent.

"Have some coffee." The woman pushed a cup toward him.

Sinescu reached for it, but his hand was trembling and he drew it back. "Just a fact-finding expedition," he said.

"Bull. Who sent you—Senator Hinkel."

"That’s right."

"Bull. He’s been here himself; why send you? If you are going to pull the plug, might as well tell me." The face behind the mask did not move when he spoke; the voice did not seem to come from it.

"He’s just looking around, Jim," said Babcock.

"Two hundred million a year," said the voice, "to keep one man alive. Doesn’t make much sense, does it. Go on, drink your coffee."

Sinescu realized that Sam and his wife had already finished theirs and that they had pulled up their masks. He reached for his cup hastily.

"Hundred percent disability in my grade is thirty thousand a year. I could get along on that easy. For almost an hour and a half."

"There’s no intention of terminating the project," Sinescu said.

"Phasing it out, though. Would you say phasing it out."

"Manners, Jim," said Babcock.

"Okay. My worst fault. What do you want to know."

Sinescu sipped his coffee. His hands were still trembling. "That mask you’re wearing," he started.

"Not for discussion. No comment, no comment. Sorry about that, don’t mean to be rude; a personal matter. Ask me something—" Without warning, he stood up, blaring, "Get that damn thing out of here!" Sam’s wife’s cup smashed, coffee brown across the table. A fawn-colored puppy was sitting in the middle of the carpet, cocking its head, bright-eyed, tongue out.

The table tipped, Sam’s wife struggled up behind it. Her face was pink, dripping with tears. She scooped up the puppy without pausing and ran out. "I better go with her," Sam said, getting up.

"Go on; and, Sam, take a holiday. Drive her into Winnemucca, see a movie."

"Yeah, guess I will." He disappeared behind the bookshelf wall.

The tall figure sat down again, moving like a man; it leaned back in the same posture, arms on the arms of the chair. It was still. The hands gripping the wood were shapely and perfect but unreal: there was something wrong about the fingernails. The brown, well-combed hair above the mask was a wig; the ears were wax. Sinescu nervously fumbled his surgical mask up over his mouth and nose. "Might as well get along," he said, and stood up.

"That’s right, I want to take you over to Engineering and R and D," said Babcock. "Jim, I’ll be back in a little while. Want to talk to you."

"Sure," said the motionless figure.

Babcock had had a shower, but sweat was soaking through the armpits of his shirt again. The silent elevator, the green carpet, a little blurred. The air cool, stale. Seven years, blood and money, five hundred good men. Psych section, Cosmetic, Engineering, R and D, Medical, Immunology, Supply, Serology, Administration. The glass doors. Sam’s apartment empty, gone to Winnemucca with Irma. Psych. Good men, but were they the best? Three of the best had turned it down. Buried in the files. Not like an ordinary amputation, this man has had everything cut off.

The tall figure had not moved. Babcock sat down. The silver mask looked back at him.

"Jim, let’s level with each other."

"Bad, huh."

"Sure it’s bad. I left him in his room with a bottle. I’ll see him again before he leaves, but God knows what he’ll say in Washington. Listen, do me a favor, take that thing off."

"Sure." The hand rose, plucked at the edge of the silver mask, lifted it away. Under it, the tan-pink face, sculptured nose and lips, eyebrows, eyelashes, not handsome but good-looking, normal-looking. Only the eyes wrong; pupils too big. And the lips that did not open or move when it spoke. "I can take anything off. What does that prove."

"Jim. Cosmetic spent eight and a half months on that model and the first thing you do is slap a mask over it. We’ve asked you what’s wrong, offered to make any changes you want."

"No comment."

"You talked about phasing out the project. Did you think you were kidding?"

A pause. "Not kidding."

"All right, then open up, Jim, tell me; I have to know. They won’t shut the project down; they’ll keep you alive but that’s all. There are seven hundred on the volunteer list, including two U.S. senators. Suppose one of them gets pulled out of an auto wreck tomorrow. We can’t wait till then to decide; we’ve got to know now. Whether to let the next one die or put him into a TP body like yours. So talk to me."

"Suppose I tell you something but it isn’t the truth."

"Why would you lie?"

"Why do you lie to a cancer patient."

"I don’t get it. Come on, Jim."

"Okay, try this. Do I look like a man to you."

"Sure."

"Bull. Look at this face." Calm and perfect. Beyond the fake irises, a wink of metal. "Suppose we had all the other problems solved and I could go into Winnemucca tomorrow; can you see me walking down the street, going into a bar, taking a taxi."

"Is that all it is?" Babcock drew a deep breath. "Jim, sure there’s a difference, but for Christ’s sake, it’s like any other prosthesis—people get used to it. Like that arm of Sam’s. You see it, but after a while you forget it, you don’t notice."

"Bull. You pretend not to notice. Because it would embarrass the cripple."

Babcock looked down at his clasped hands. "Sorry for yourself?"

"Don’t give me that," the voice blared. The tall figure was standing. The hands slowly came up, the fists clenched. "I’m in this thing, I’ve been in it for two years. I’m in it when I go to sleep, and when I wake up, I’m still in it."

Babcock looked up at him. "What do you want, facial mobility? Give us twenty years, maybe ten, we’ll lick it."

"No. No."

"Then what?"

"I want you to close down Cosmetic."

"But that’s—"

"Just listen. The first model looked like a tailor’s dummy, so you spent eight months and came up with this one, and it looks like a corpse. The whole idea was to make me look like a man, the first model pretty good, the second model better, until you’ve got something that can smoke cigars and joke with women and go bowling and nobody will know the difference. You can’t do it, and if you could, what for?"

"I don’t— Let me think about this. What do you mean, a metal—"

"Metal, sure, but what difference does that make. I’m talking about shape. Function. Wait a minute." The tall figure strode across the room, unlocked a cabinet, came back with rolled sheets of paper. "Look at this."

The drawing showed an oblong metal box on four jointed legs. From one end protruded a tiny mushroom-shaped head on a jointed stem and a cluster of arms ending in probes, drills, grapples. "For moon prospecting."

"Too many limbs," said Babcock after a moment. "How would you—"

"With the facial nerves. Plenty of them left over. Or here." Another drawing. "A module plugged into the control system of a spaceship. That’s where I belong, in space. Sterile environment, low grav, I can go where a man can’t go and do what a man can’t do. I can be an asset, not a goddamn billion-dollar liability."

Babcock rubbed his eyes. "Why didn’t you say anything before?"

"You were all hipped on prosthetics. You would have told me to tend my knitting."

Babcock’s hands were shaking as he rolled up the drawings. "Well, by God, this just may do it. It just might." He stood up and turned toward the door. "Keep your—" He cleared his throat. "I mean, hang tight, Jim."

"I’ll do that."

When he was alone, he put on his mask again and stood motionless a moment, eye shutters closed. Inside, he was running clean and cool; he could feel the faint reassuring hum of pumps, click of valves and relays. They had given him that: cleaned out all the offal, replaced it with machinery that did not bleed, ooze or suppurate. He thought of the lie he had told Babcock. Why do you lie to a cancer patient? But they would never get it, never understand.

He sat down at the drafting table, clipped a sheet of paper to it and with a pencil began to sketch a rendering of the moon-prospector design. When he had blocked in the prospector itself, he began to draw the background of craters. His pencil moved more slowly and stopped; he put it down with a click.

No more adrenal glands to pump adrenaline into his blood, so he could not feel fright or rage. They had released him from all that—love, hate, the whole sloppy mess—but they had forgotten there was still one emotion he could feel.

Sinescu, with the black bristles of his beard sprouting through his oily skin. A whitehead ripe in the crease beside his nostril.

Moon landscape, clean and cold. He picked up the pencil again.

Babcock, with his broad pink nose shining with grease, crusts of white matter in the corners of his eyes. Food mortar between his teeth.

Sam’s wife, with raspberry-colored paste on her mouth. Face smeared with tears, a bright bubble in one nostril. And the damn dog, shiny nose, wet eyes…

He turned. The dog was there, sitting on the carpet, wetted tongue out—left the door open again—dripping, wagged its tail twice, then started to get up. He reached for the metal T square, leaned back, swinging it like an ax, and the dog yelped once as metal sheared bone, one eye spouting red, writhing on its back, dark stain of piss across the carpet, and he hit it again, hit it again.

The body lay twisted on the carpet, fouled with blood, ragged black lips drawn back from teeth. He wiped off the T square with a paper towel, then scrubbed it in the sink with soap and steel wool, dried it and hung it up. He got a sheet of drafting paper, laid it on the floor, rolled the body over onto it without spilling any blood on the carpet. He lifted the body in the paper, carried it out onto the patio, then onto the unroofed section, opening the doors with his shoulder. He looked over the wall. Two stories down, concrete roof, vents sticking out of it, nobody watching. He held the dog out, let it slide off the paper, twisting as it fell. It struck one of the vents, bounced, a red smear. He carried the paper back inside, poured the blood down the drain, then put the paper into the incinerator chute.

Splashes of blood were on the carpet, the feet of the drafting table, the cabinet, his trouser legs. He sponged them all up with paper towels and warm water. He took off his clothing, examined it minutely, scrubbed it in the sink, then put it in the washer. He washed the sink, rubbed himself down with disinfectant and dressed again. He walked through into Sam’s silent apartment, closing the glass door behind him. Past the potted philodendron, over-stuffed furniture, red-and-yellow painting on the wall, out onto the roof, leaving the door ajar. Then back through the patio, closing doors.

Too bad. How about some goldfish.

He sat down at the drafting table. He was running clean and cool. The dream this morning came back to his mind, the last one, as he was struggling up out of sleep: slithery kidneys burst gray lungs blood and hair ropes of guts covered with yellow fat oozing and sliding and oh god the stink like the breath of an outhouse no sound nowhere he was putting a yellow stream down the slide of the dunghole and

He began to ink in the drawing, first with a fine steel pen, then with a nylon brush. his heel slid and he was falling could not stop himself falling into slimy bulging softness higher than his chin, higher and he could not move paralyzed and he tried to scream tried to scream tried to scream

The prospector was climbing a crater slope with its handling members retracted and its head tilted up. Behind it the distant ringwall and the horizon, the black sky, the pinpoint stars. And he was there, and it was not far enough, not yet, for the earth hung overhead like a rotten fruit, blue with mold, crawling, wrinkling, purulent and alive.

HOSTBODS Tendai Huchu

Arrows in front of my eyes tell me where to go ↑ along a busy market street lined with immigrants selling cheap wares from makeshift stalls. It’s awash with colour, purple and blue saris and Kashmiri scarfs, red apples, green grapes, and the smells of freshly caught fish, cooked corn, herbs and spices – paprika, cumin, ground chilli – sold by the pound. Loud voices call out random prices and bargains as I (and I am still I) turn → into a narrow alleyway with puddles of water from last night’s rain, full up trash cans and cardboard stacks from the shops inside.

←. Sat-homing means I see where I’m going, feel the experience, but it’s more of a sleepwalk. It’s like doing something by instinct, the same way your leg kicks out when the doctor taps your knee with a plexor. My muscles move, I feel the ground beneath my feet, taste the salty air from the sea close by, and feel the chilly wind; I’m here and not here. ↑.

Destination Reached

Deactivate Sat-homing

Status Green: Y/N – Y

Prepare For Symbiosis

5, 4, 3, 2, 1

A ton of force presses down the top of my head, crushing me. Everything from the top of my cranium moves down like my skull is travelling down my neck into my oesophagus. It feels like I’m eating my own head, swallowing it down to my gut, can’t breathe, a wave of nausea overcomes me and I’d gag if a big lump wasn’t obstructing my throat. It’s like being ripped out of your skin and having everything shredded and crushed, leaving only that, the largest organ in your body, hollow, while a new skeleton ent…

i’m at the beach again, look at it, so beautiful. If only the sky wasn’t covered by those grey clouds. Never mind. Best birthday present ever! Is that? – no, it can’t be.

‘Hey dad, you in there?’ Holy crap.

‘Joe, is it really you?’ i ask. ‘i can’t believe it.’

‘We’re all here for you,’ he replies and sweeps his hand to show the rest of the family behind him.

my sister Ethel’s in a blue frock, covered up with a cardigan. Her hair is so grey, all those wrinkles on her face, the moustache on her lip. i hug her tightly, haven’t seen that face in over ten years; not since my eyes gave out. Joe’s wife, Natalie, holds a big box with bright pink ribbons on it, the smile on her face warms me up. We embrace, just like we did on their wedding day. Happiest day of my life. The grandkids, the tall one must be Darren and the little one, blonde hair, Craig. On the beach with my family again, it’s a miracle.

‘That’s not Grandpa,’ says Craig, taking a step back behind his brother.

‘Craig, what did I tell you? Don’t spoil this for everyone,’ Joe replies curtly.

‘It’s me, don’t be afraid. It really is me.’ i go over to the boy, pick him up and tickle his belly like i used to, he squirms and pulls away.

‘You’re not Grandpa,’ he says, and walks off towards the white pier in the distance. i make to follow, but Joe grabs my arm.

‘Let him go, we’ve only got an hour. He’ll be alright.’

A woman in a yellow mini walks past with her dog and i feel a yearning inside me i haven’t felt for years. This isn’t the time. It’s family time. There are strollers in beach shorts, a couple having breakfast on a towel near the changing rooms, sanitation workers taking away litter from the car park up ahead. And the wind is just glorious, i close my eyes and try to inhale every atom of air i can.

i hit Darren on the shoulder – ‘Tag you’re it’ – and begin to run on the beach. That’s right, I’m running, the sand underneath me, giving way and crunching as I go, seaweed washed ashore, and, boy, am i running like a pro-athlete. i slow down to allow Darren to tag me and off i go after him. My grandson can run like a gazelle, but it only takes a few strides, i catch up, grab him by the waist and lift him high in the air. Joe and Natalie laugh, Ethel laughs, we’re all so happy. Best birthday ever.

We walk on the sand, checking out sailing boats in the distance. A few folks stare at us for a bit, but i suppose that’s normal given the circumstances. i’ve not felt this strong in years. Even as we walk, i’m holding back because i just want to run. It was on this very beach that i proposed to Lenore fifty years ago. Wish she was still here with us to hear the seagulls circling above, squawking.

Joe calls Craig over and we sit round a table. It’s a bit nippy, but we order ice-cream anyway. The taste of it is just divine, so sweet, so sharp, like every nerve ending in my body is awake and it’s every bit as great as I remember from the rations during the war. Vivid flavours explode in my mouth.

5 Mins

i feel an overwhelming sense of sorrow and loss at the thought of leaving all this behind. It’s like being given the power of a god for a day and having it taken away the same way Phaethon was hurled off Apollo’s chariot by Zeus’ thunderbolt.

‘i suppose it’s time for me to say goodbye again,’ i mumble.

‘I’m sorry, if we’d had more money, we could have bought more time,’ Natalie says, her eyes welling up. ‘Maybe we could… I’ve heard of charities that buy time for people in special circumstances.’

‘Don’t bother yourself; you have kids to look after. i’ll remember this day forever. It’s been wonderful.’

1 min

i get up to hug them, each in turn, and this time Craig lets me. He feels like dough in my arms, soft, yeasty, full of goodness and potential, young and invincible, as though I’m touching the future right now. There’s a joy in my heart that can’t be compared to…

Prepare To Disengage From HostBod

SyncCorp Hopes You Had A Pleasant Experience

Please Come Again

5, 4, 3, 2, 1

I arrive at a warehouse in Mullhill, the east side of the city, near the industrial zone. There’s no sign on the diamond fence around the perimeter. HGV trucks laden with goods from the factories around run up and down the road towards the city and beyond. The noise of the mills is a sonnet to the plumes of smoke that pour from the coal powered station in the centre of the perfect grid of intersecting streets. The air is acrid and full of unknowable particulates. Men in overalls and hard hats walk in rows carrying little backpacks to their various factories.

There’s no guard as I walk past the boom gate into a desolate car park. I take a deep breath and follow the arrows. I have no choice. Some bods have been used in criminal enterprises before and it’s a growing problem. But not with SyncCorp, the leading bod provider in the western hemisphere.

A HostBod walks towards me. Hard sculpted cheeks, fair lips, flat east Baltic head, another immigrant. His blue t-shirt tells me he’s from RentaBod, cheap eastern European bods usually. He’s in Sat-homing and manages to turn his head a fraction to acknowledge me with his dead blue eyes. I blink, a moment of brotherhood that lasts a microsecond.

I walk into the bare warehouse and my Sat-homing is deactivated. I’m in loiter mode until the uplink command is sent. The warehouse is a bare shell, high windows, floors caked in pigeon droppings. At the far end is a red door which I walk through, into a waiting area in which two other bods sit in injection moulded chairs.

‘What’s this about?’ I say taking the seat nearest the exit.

‘I don’t know,’ replies the bod opposite me in a South American, maybe Brazilian accent. He’s caramel skinned and bald headed. Every bod has their head shaved for the implants.

‘Some kind of test,’ says the other one sitting nearest the second door.

Their yellow t-shirts tell me they are both assets from PleasureBodInc, usually procured for the M2M industry. The fluorescent light above makes a slight humming noise. It flickers at intervals. The room seems to have been set up recently, with new fixtures that smell of plastic.

‘How long have you been in business?’ the Brazilian asks.

‘Four years, nine months,’ I reply.

‘Wow, without a burnout? Amazing! I’ve only been here six months.’

‘Good luck,’ is all I can say. And that’s what this game is, Russian roulette, you spin the barrel until you don’t hear the empty click of the chamber anymore.

He’s called in by a curly haired man wearing a white coat and holding a notepad. The scent of disinfectant wafts into the waiting room. The Brazilian follows him in and the door shuts behind him.

Half an hour later, the Brazilian walks out and I’m called in before the other PleasureBodInc bod. I get up and walk into the next room. The man in a white coat asks me to sit on what looks like a pink dentist’s plinth. I comply.

Status Green: Y/N – Y

Prepare For Symbiosis

5, 4, 3, 2, 1

‘What do you think of this one, Doctor Cranmer?’

‘Near the end of service which means it’s stable. It’s the oldest one we’ve got. As you know, they usually break down around the twenty-four month mark. Only a special few last this long.’

‘i don’t know. The features…’

‘Will take some getting used to, I admit. But race is the least of your worries, sir. Stability is all important.’

‘Let’s take it through its paces, shall we?’

I’m not supposed to be here, to see or hear any of this. It’s as if I’m a child hiding in a dark closet, looking into a room through a keyhole. HostBods are not supposed to be conscious during symbiosis and the Corp would reconfigure me if they knew. But I’ve been in this closet, hiding away for two years. The doctor instructs me/him to open my/his mouth, shines a light down my/his throat. Then he draws some blood, runs me/him through an x-ray machine – Doctor Cranmer can’t use the MRI because of the electrodes – but he takes my/his blood pressure, resting pulse and performs lung function tests. He puts me/him on a treadmill at high speed for three minutes and then repeats the test. I/he is moved to a large hanger where I/he does something that resembles a football fitness test, some sort of biomechanical assessment looking at endurance, speed, strength, agility and power. I watch it all from my closet, not daring to breathe or move.

1 Min

‘How old is he, doc?’

‘Just coming up to 21. Prime specimen right here.’

‘I’m not sure about this.’

‘Look at these stats, he’s 99.25% compatible, that’s 5 percentage points over anything else we’ve got. He’s perfect.’

‘I need time to think it over.’

‘We’ve got a few more to look at, so don’t worry, but the sooner we make a move the better.’

Prepare To Disengage From HostBod

SyncCorp Hopes You Had A Pleasant Experience

Please Come Again

5, 4, 3, 2, 1

↑ ↑ → ←↑ ↑ ↑ ↓ ↑ ↑ ↑ ↑ → ↑

Destination Reached

Deactivate Sat-homing

Status Green: Y/N – Y

Prepare For Symbiosis

5, 4, 3, 2, 1

No rest for the fucking wicked. Stan calls me up, wants me to raise 40 mill for some shit-arsed indie flick. Who watches that crap? Must be shagging the director, that’s what. Still, who’s gonna pony up 40 mill for some piece of cunt? Okay, relax, chill out. Only get this shit one day a week. 40 mill. Forget it. Forget about work for two minutes. It’s her. Is this shit even legal?

There she is, look at that, fucking curves on that. Phwoar, even forget she nearly sixteen sometimes. Check out those blonde locks, how they bounce around on her head and those tits, dear God, those motherfucking tits. i ain’t doing badly for an old fart. i mean how many blokes my age actually get the balls to hit it with their daughter’s best mate, hehe. Pure fantasy shit. That’s why i gotta cover me tracks. Put her arse in a HostBod and shit’s supposedly legal – at least that’s what me lawyer tells me. Grey area, he calls it.

‘Ello darling, come ere to daddy.’

Feel those tits pressing against me chest as i hug her.

‘How’s school and everything?’ Gotta seem like the caring, reasonable old man, hehe.

‘It’s alright. I missed you,’ she says. Hear that – if me missus only said it once or twice a month i wouldn’t be up to no good. Swear it on me mother’s fucking grave.

‘i missed you too, darling. Give daddy a lil kiss.’

Feel those sweet teenage lips, wow. Wouldn’t be able to handle this sort of action if i was in me own body. Check out me lump, proper Mandingo going on here.

i push her back a mo just so I can check out the view, see the curves. i like that lil shade of brown pube that lingers just above them lil panties. Wow, wow, what the fuck? Who’s this? Fucking Chinese woman appears in front of me outta nowhere.

‘What’s wrong, daddy?’

‘You, you’ve fucking turned Chinese!’

‘What?’

‘You’re Chinese, honest to God. Look at you, all bald with some metal wire shit all over your head, the skin, everything. Oh, my fucking God!’

‘I think it’s like the visuals that’s gone bust on your bod, coz I can see you just fine.’

‘What the fuck am i supposed to do?’

"Call the company and have them fix it.’

And that’s how i spend the one afternoon of peace i get a week, down the phone speaking to some call centre trying to get this drone to remote patch me visuals. Little girl’s sitting on the bed, staring at me out of her fifty-something year old chinky fucking eyes. Total mindfuck coz she’s talking like her out of this bod and it’s doing me head in.

‘Don’t tell me you’ve fixed the fucking visuals because all i can see in front of me is a fucking Chinese bird, alright? i pay top dollar for this shit, i expect service. You even know what that word means?’ i’m screaming down the fucking phone, would have had a heart attack by now if i was in me own body. ‘Fine, i’ll take a full refund and a free session next week, sounds freaking fine by me. i should be suing your incompetent arses.’

i hang up and turn back to the girl:

‘Looks like this week’s fucked. We’ll hook up next time, okay love? Come here, give daddy a kiss… on second thoughts, don’t.’

I’m back in Sat-homing mode. I’m not supposed to know the last assignment was a complete dud, that I’m, in effect, malfunctioning. Visuals need to get reset. I’ve been sent back to base early, my next assignments have been cancelled. So I’m free – sort of.

Funny thing happens when I sync up, I seem to store some of their memories in me. This isn’t supposed to happen, none of the other bods report anything similar, but it’s like I know stuff I’m not even supposed to know.

Passing by City Square, the giant advertorial screens above, the Coke-red next to the Pepsi-blue, the giant golden arc, Papa Chicks, Massa Space outfits, people walking around, bodies pressed against each other, sub 20Hz speakers blaring out subliminal advertising, shops spraying lab manufactured pheromones to lure consumers. I adjust my hoodie, doing my best to cover my temples even though this is one of the safer parts of the city for a bod to pass. The poorer and rougher western neighbourhoods like Westlea and Pilmerton are a different matter altogether. I walk by The Stock Xchange. When I first came here I didn’t understand any of it, the arrows going up and down, the numbers sprinting across the top and bottom of the screen. But a few sessions synced with Brad Madison, and I know it all as well as any broker. Viviset stocks have been fluctuating, but they’re still overpriced, best time to sell and get out before it comes crashing down. I’d buy Tanganda now and sell it next week. ↑ Can’t stop to look at the rest in this mode, but I’ll check out the markets online when I get back to base.

Silver space blanket puffs seem to be the fashion of the week for ladies under 30. Then again, when you’ve been synced with a famous fashion designer… Wish they’d get me on the underground for the journey back. My feet are killing me. That’s the problem with Corp, they’ll squeeze every penny in savings if they can. Truth be told, knowing what I know now, that’s the same thing I’d do especially when staff turnover isn’t a factor.

Base is a huge building which used to be a budget hotel in the east side, near the space&airport. You can see planes and shuttles taking off and landing, going to exotic destinations around the world or to orbit. It’s noisy as hell, but it’s home. Our conditions here, I hear, are much better than the dormitory set-up other bods get elsewhere. Retinal scanner lets me in.

Deactivate Sat-homing

‘You’re home early 4401,’ says Marlon on the security desk.

‘Malfunction,’ I reply.

‘You’ll be seeing Dr Song then,’ he replies. ‘Go up to your room. I’ll call you when it’s time.’

‘Thanks Marlon,’ I say and then I remember, ‘Hey, is it okay for me to call home?’

‘I’ll give you access. Ten minutes max per day.’

‘Come on Marlon,’ I say in my best whiny voice.

‘Fifteen, and that’s the best I can do. Now get outta here before I change my mind.’

‘You’re a legend,’ I say and give him the thumbs up.

The door to my room is unlocked. We have a toilet cubicle to the left, a bunk bed on either side of the wall, and a desk with a small computer/TV at the far wall. There are no mirrors in any of the rooms. Raj6623 is asleep or in hibernation mode. He usually starts up at 22:00 and returns the next afternoon. He’s a fightbod and gets a full eight hours’ sleep plus practice time. For most bods it’s 20 hours’ work with four hours’ sleep as standard.

‘4401 authorised call to rec-number Harare,’ I say to the computer.

It kicks up with a whirr and then I hear a dial tone. Half a minute later Mama’s face appears on screen. A sad smile cracks on her mouth like a running fissure when she sees me. At the right angle, all she can see is my face, bald head and the two electrodes implanted through my temples into my frontal lobe. They’re titanium and shiny, but at least she can’t see the full device. The other implants are at the back of my skull and are drilled into the amygdala, so the sync takes place in the oldest and newest brain, the primitive and the conscious part for full immersiveness. We talk about home, my little brother with Westhuizen’s Syndrome, which is the reason I’m here. The money I make goes straight towards his medication. I’ll get a bonus after completion and after that, I’ll have to either sign up again – no one’s ever done that – or find a new way to make money for his drugs. Either way, this job is the only thing keeping him alive. He pops up on screen, nine years old, handsome as a teddy bear, braces in his mouth, and smiles. I wave. He tells me about school, his friends, games, all the things any nine year old should be doing. This makes it worthwhile. Mama’s just sitting there, slightly off screen, watching her boys. I’m sure she’s proud. I get a beep, time’s nearly up, say, ‘Good-bye, I love you guys so much,’ blow a kiss and log off.

I’ve just slid into my lower bunk when Marlon buzzes via the computer and tells me to go see the doc. I get up and leave Raj6623 snoozing, go into the corridor and squirt some alcohol gel on my hands and round my temples. The corridor is bare, just blue vinyl flooring, perfect white walls, directional signs every couple of meters and a purple strip that runs in the middle of the wall as a sort of decoration. I go round a few turns and into the infirmary, just in time to see a new bod leave. I nod my head and stroll in.

Doctor Song is a small Korean man, barely reaches my chest even with the Cuban heels he wears to give himself an extra inch or so. He’s typing notes into his computer and points to a chair. The keys go tap, tap, tap under his furious little fingers.

‘4401, why you tell Marlon you have malfunction? How did you know?’ he says. I should have known better.

‘My assignment ended early, you called me home and cancelled the rest of my day, that can only mean one thing,’ I reply coolly.

‘You doctor now?’

‘You’re the doctor, Doctor Song.’

‘You waking?’

‘Never.’

‘Uplink scan has been showing spikes in your wave function post sync.’ I blink like I don’t understand what he’s saying. Doc likes that sort of thing, but I know what he’s going to say next before he even says it. ‘Don’t worry it’s not the most reliable instrument anyway.’

That’s code for I’mtoolazytofollowupandyourcontract’snearlydonesoIdon’tcare. I nod along like an ignoramus.

‘You’ve been taking your antibiotics?’ he asks.

‘On time, every time,’ I reply. We have to take long term, prophylactic, broad-spectrum antibiotics because of the risk of infection at the insertion points. You don’t wanna mess with meningitis or encephalitis.

‘Corp has new job for you. Contract nearly over so easy work. You go Hillside in North, single user for last three months. Congratulations,’ he says, looking at me for once.

‘Thanks Doctor Song,’ I reply with a smile, though every instinct in my body is screaming out, alarm bells ringing, spider senses tingling.

‘Good. Go into next room. I test and remodulate vis configuration,’ he says and grabs a white helmet with flashing green and blue lights at the fore. It’s the user’s uplink device. It works by reading the wearers brainwaves and transmitting low level radiation to tune the user into the HostBod. Nowhere near as invasive as the electrodes bods must wear because their own consciousness must be suppressed in sync, which can only be done surgically. The electrodes not only transmit electric impulses but also carry neurotransmitters direct into the brain structure. I got this off syncing with Doctor Song himself and he doesn’t even know that.

We can’t be in the same room during sync because of the infinity loop problem which tech has failed to overcome. That’s why, for safety reasons, user and HostBod only interface via remote transmission. He marches me back and forth, I squat, pinch myself, stick my tongue out, and do a dozen other psychomotor and spatial awareness exercises before he signs me off.

I walk back to my room and find Raj6623 standing at the door.

‘They came to get your gear. Looks like you’re shipping out,’ he says. The scar that runs across his face moves as he speaks.

‘I got lucky,’ I say.

‘Stay alive,’ he replies and crushes me with a bear hug. Twelve months we’ve been here together and this is the most intimate we’ve been.

‘Say ’bye to the others for me,’ I say, knowing full well he won’t bother.

A woman with vibrant red hair, the sort that can only come from a bottle, stands at the reception desk next to a guy in a chauffer’s outfit with a bag at his side. She has milky white skin, almost matching the shade of the walls, and from a distance all I see is hair, eyebrows and blood red lipstick where her mouth is. She wears a retro ivory silk slip covering one shoulder, revealing a large ruby choker around her neck. It’s like she’s ephemeral, a wisp of an image from another dimension.

‘So this is father’s new toy,’ she purrs.

‘That’s him, Ms Stubbs,’ says Marlon ingratiatingly. ‘Here’s your papers, 4401. Follow this lady and the gentleman. Good luck.’

I shake his hand and follow my new employer into a black limousine waiting in the car park. The chauffer opens the door, she walks in. I wait to be invited. She beckons me with her index finger. The chauffer closes the door as I sit with my back to the driver, facing her. The cabin smells of freshly polished leather. She pours a glass of champagne for herself and a finger of whisky in another, which she slowly hands to me.

‘We’re not allowed,’ I say.

‘Don’t be a pussy, drink it,’ she replies, rolling her eyes melodramatically. I take the drink and hold it. ‘What’s your name?’

‘4401.’

‘Your real name, idiot.’

‘Simon.’

‘That’s what I thought. I saw you in those hospital garments you call clothes and said to myself, there’s a Simon alright.’ The lady is a little tipsy, but not drunk, the intoxication of someone who’s used to consuming a lot of alcohol all hours of the day.

The Limo cruises onto the 105 which takes us past Marlborough and Bury, skirting round the rough neighbourhoods. We go past gleaming skyscrapers, the glass reflecting the orange glow of the setting sun, images of clouds cast on windows, the city glistening like a thousand orange diamonds. She says nothing to me for the rest of the journey, only eyeing me like a predator stalking her prey. A lump sits at the top of my throat; I swallow hard.

Initiating Protocol Transfer To

Username: Howard J Stubbs

SyncCorp Wishes You A Happy And

Prosperous Symbiosis

0% – – – – – – – – – – – – 100%

That’s me wired up to the Stubbs’ MF now, which means they own me, which means I wasn’t hired but they bought out the rest of my contract. It happens from time to time, bods get passed around between different companies, usually traded down. Stubbs must be pretty loaded to afford this. No shit, Sherlock, is that your deduction or it’s the 200 year old southern plantation style mansion in front you? Kind of looks like a wannabe White House, only bigger. The wheels of the limo crunch on the gravel driveway. A Roman style fountain with mirthful nymphs squirts water high into the air. So much woodland around; it feels like we’re in the country. Light pouring out of every window in the mansion illuminates the lawn as we park near the front door.

‘Come on, I’m sure Father is just dying to meet you,’ she says, dragging out the word dying.

‘We don’t usually meet users.’

‘Things are different here,’ she replies as we walk into the mansion.

There’s a vulgar mix of paintings lining the walls. Expensive paintings: a Picasso here, a Van Gogh there, Pollock next to Gauguin with a Palin underneath. It’s clear that this is a nouveau riche acquisition with little acquiescence to aesthetics. I find this somewhat disturbing as I walk on the dark hardwood flooring polished to within an inch of its life.

Ms Stubbs leads me up a winding staircase to the bedrooms. An oak drawer along the wall has a Chinese vase (I reckon Qing but can’t be sure) on top with geometric patterns in bright shades of blue and a bunch of chrysanthemums set inside. I can’t help but smile behind her back. We enter a large bedroom in the centre of which is a poster bed. An old man sits underneath layers of quilts with his back propped up by a bunch of pillows. The oxygen tank on his left hisses away.

‘Go to him,’ says Ms Stubbs.

I walk over and kneel beside the old man. From this close I can smell his decrepitude, malodours churning under the quilts and from the catheter that dangles at the bedside. I notice he has an electrode transference device just like mine, complete with implants boring through his skull into his brain. I’ve never heard of a user having to go through this before. The device looks like a giant tarantula resting on top of his skull. ‘Hello,’ I say. He reaches out with his left hand and touches my face. It feels bony and rough against my forehead and cheeks. He takes a deep breath and whispers in a raspy voice:

‘Make yourself at home, boy.’

I’m in my room in loiter mode. The chauffer left my bag with my few clothes and possessions which I unpack into the drawers. The window gives me a view down the hill past the silhouette of trees to the brightly lit city in the distance.

I go over to the bed, slide into the soft cotton sheets and for the first time in a year, I’m allowed to sleep for more than four hours even though the dreams I have are still not my own.

I wake up feeling refreshed and rejuvenated. Can’t believe I slept for so long. The sun pours into my room because I forgot to close the curtains. It’s been too long since I had a window in my room. I wash my face in the basin in the corner and spray alcohol gel around my implants. There are real clothes in the closet, just my size too, so I wear those instead of the Corp crap. I grab a red hoodie to cover my head in case I’m taken outside. I walk past Mr Stubbs bedroom and down the stairs into one of the rooms where a breakfast buffet is laid out. It smells great.

Ms Stubbs is at the opposite end of the table, listening to the news and eating toast. The day’s barely started and she looks stunning in a crimson gown, an eye mask on her forehead.

‘Morning,’ I say.

‘You can have anything you like,’ she replies.

‘Thanks.’

I bring out my feeding pack of Soylent and pour myself a glass of water. This is how bods start the day, you can’t fill yourself up because a lot of users like to go out for meals, so it’s important to keep the stomach as empty as possible. I drink from my pack, it tastes like dough with grainy bits in it. After a while, you get used to it.

‘Can I call home?’ I ask.

‘Nope,’ she replies without even raising her head to look at me.

‘We had 30 minute privileges per day at Corp,’ I say.

‘Firstly, it was ten minutes and, secondly, this ain’t Corp.’

Status Green: Y/N – Y

Prepare For Symbiosis

5, 4, 3, 2, 1

‘Morning Lesley,’ i say. What is that weird taste in my mouth? Quick, grab a coffee to rinse it out.

‘Morning Father. You started the day early. Who was that?’ she replies, nonchalant. i wonder what she’s scheming.

‘Just the lawyer first thing before dawn and Doctor Cranmer should be here any minute now. Justin makes the finest coffee. He deserves a raise.’

‘What did you want with the lawyer?’

‘A bit of business, nothing you should worry your pretty little head about. i’m not a cabbage up there you know.’ i point to the second floor where the bedrooms are. She raises a single eyebrow and gets back to her food.

i leave her to it. So much to do, so little time. i could get used to this, yes. Stop beside the mirror, look at the face: bold, square jaw, angular, very manly. Yes, i could definitely get used to this. Cranmer is in the foyer already.

‘Good morning, doctor,’ i sound a little too jovial.

‘Mr Stubbs?’

‘It’s too nice a day to talk indoors. Shall we go out into the grounds for a walk?’

‘I need to see the… the other body.’

‘You can do that later, come, let’s go outside.’ i take him by the elbow and lead him out. Sweet sunshine hits my face. ‘Nothing like the scent of freshly mowed grass.’

‘I came to check if you wanted to see this thing through. You must understand the tech is experimental. I’ve only done one other procedure so we don’t yet know what the long term effects are,’ Doctor Cranmer says.

‘Run it by me one more time.’

‘When user and bod are compatible, you can put them in sync and then transfer consciousness through the process of quantum entanglement. Essentially we are just reversing the quantum states in the brain, no matter is moved between A and B, so theoretically there’s a zero chance of post-op rejection. It’s not a brain transplant, it’s a consciousness transfer. Post-procedure we isolate the bod, who is now the user, to prevent attempts at reacquisition. That’s the long and short of it.’

‘Okay, first thing tomorrow morning. i have nothing to lose, but i only have one proviso, doctor.’ i stop near the gazebo and look him in the eye. ‘If the procedure fails, the bod dies too.’

‘That can be arranged.’

Loiter mode. Fuck me royally. I need to get out of here right now. Only getting out doesn’t solve the problem because I can be Sat-homed back easily. Gotta find the mainframe, disable it, no, destroy it completely. I’ll look around the house, nah, that’s crazy, who keeps a fucking mainframe in the family home? Swear to God, I’m going insane. This ain’t what I signed up for.

I need to call mama, my little brother. Won’t even get a chance to say good bye. Okay, think, for a minute, just think.

I once saw a bod who committed suicide in the most spectacular fashion. It was my first year with Corp and I was passing through the main reception area. This guy just stood cold staring at the guards. And then he casually brought his hands up to his electrodes and just started pulling. The guards were screaming ‘stop’ or something like that but this guy just goes on pulling and blood squirts out. Out came these grey chunks of brain matter. He just pulls the tarantula off the top of his head and leaks water, blood, brainy goo down his sides. He stood there for a minute or two before he keeled over. It was horrific.

I could fight my way out. Face it, the law frowns on bods anyway. A rich guy like Stubbs, forget it. I need to think.

I’m terrified, can’t sleep all night, my mind racing through different options, adrenalin and cortisol coursing through my blood stream at toxic levels. That drink from the limo would have come in handy right about now.

The door opens, she walks in like a ghost floating through. Her white nightdress hangs off her frame and swoops as it follows her graceful movements. ‘Shhh.’ Her finger is on her lips as she crawls into my bed.

She moves like a python, slow, seductive, and sensuous, as if she hasn’t a single bone in her body. Her skin feels warm against mine. She straddles me, pulls my pants down with one hand and then all I feel is her wetness and heat on me. It’s the most exquisite feeling in the world.

‘Your dad’s going to kill me,’ I say.

‘Shhh.’

This moment, I’m in her, it feels as though nothing else matters as she carries me like a leaf in the ocean and takes me to places I never knew…

Prepare For Symbiosis

‘Get off, your dad’s syncing with me,’ I call out in panic.

‘Oh, what a spoil sport,’ she says, pulling off and gliding out of the room

5, 4, 3, 2, 1

Well, this feels a bit strange. i couldn’t sleep, can’t wait for the morning so i thought i’d sync up. Get up, out of bed, my bottom half naked and walk out of the bedroom. Lesley is in the corridor.

‘Have you been playing with my toy, Lesley?’

‘Hello Father, isn’t it a little too late for your old ass to be out and about?’ she replies. Has the same stubborn, bitchy traits her mum had. She’s up to something and must be stopped. You don’t get to where i got in life without the instincts of a croc. i grab her by the shoulders.

‘i think we should lock you in your room for a little while,’ i say. ‘For your own good.’

She struggles and squirms. The little bitch is strong, but i’m stronger. She breaks my grip and runs towards my bedroom. Now i know what she’s up to. Got to stop her.

‘Don’t be pathetic. You really think you can stop me, Lesley? Come here!’ i sprint after her. The floor is polished and slippery but in this bod i can do anything. i grab her flailing nightdress, pull her and slam her against the wall. ‘i’m not your enemy, i’m your father.’

She scratches my face, i slap her with the back of my hand which fells her to the floor. i bend over, pick her up and lift her in the air, feet dangling, her mouth wide open, a scream caught in her throat. i put her back down and slap her again. ‘You’re going to bed, young lady.’ i see a quick movement, a leg twitch, then i’m on the floor, both hands cupping my balls, they are on fire. It winds me for a moment and she runs into my room. Got to stop her. Ignore the pain in my groin and stagger after her. i burst into the room.

‘Stop it, Lesley.’

She’s covering my face with a pillow. The oxygen mask is on the floor, hissing away. i run to her, grab her around the neck, put her in a choke hold. i’m gonna kill this bitch. i lift her up, her head against my chest and squeeze. She gags, coughs, splatters, kicks, but I’m too strong. And then I look at me looking at me me looking at me looking at me looking at me looking at me looking at me looking at me looking at me looking at me looking at me looking at me looking at me looking at me looking at me looking at me looking at me looking at me looking at me looking at

Only takes a second to realise i’m trapped in an infinity loop. i should have stopped her before she came in here. my head feels like it’s cracking. The pain is blistering hot. i scream and grab my head in both hands to stop it from exploding. The scream is magnified and bounces around like a million echoes in the loop. Everything in here is a cave of infinity mirrors, reflecting everything back to itself. Only i am the image and the mirror and each iteration of both. Subject and object. i fall to the floor. Oh, the pain. As i convulse on the floor, i see, through the corner of my eye, Lesley cover my face with a pillow.

White hot supernova, synapses breaking, an explosion, the universe tearing apart.

I wake up and she’s beside me in bed, we’re both naked. My head feels like I have the mother of all hangovers, as if I drank all the tequilas in the world. She rests her head on my chest.

‘Did you sleep well?’ she asks as if nothing happened.

‘Have you got any Vicodin?’ I sit up and the world is spinning around me.

‘Get dressed and follow me.’

The world shatters into tiny pieces floating around my bed. I shake my head and tiny fractals swim in and out of focus. It takes a minute or two before the pictures coalesce into one coherent world. It feels good to be back. I’m so thirsty and I drink straight from the pitcher beside me.

I find her in the corridor and follow her to her father’s room. I can barely stay upright. Doctor Cranmer sits on the bed, a stethoscope around his neck. There’s a shiny aluminium suitcase on the floor before him. He looks at Ms Stubbs.

‘Morning doctor,’ she says.

‘It’s not a very good morning. It appears your father is dead,’ he replies in an even voice.

‘What a pity,’ she says with a shrug. ‘Old people, hey.’

‘I find it rather curious that his oxygen mask is on the floor.’

The doctor stands up and walks towards Ms Stubbs. He looks at her then at me. I pretend as though I don’t remember him from our first encounter. I act like a good little bod.

‘I suppose my services are no longer needed here,’ says Doctor Cranmer.

‘You served my father well. I don’t see any reason this association should end. Because of my gratitude, as his sole heir I will double your monthly retainer for life and hope to keep your services,’ she says, her face neutral and cold.

‘It is always a pleasure to serve the Stubbs. If you will excuse me, I have to record this death by natural causes.’ He bows slightly and walks to the door, dragging his aluminium case behind.

We’re left staring at her father’s body on the bed. His eyes are wide open in shock.

‘One more thing, doctor, since you work for me now,’ she says.

‘Anything,’ he replies.

‘This.’ She points to the electrode transference device on my head.

‘I can remove it straight away,’ Doctor Cranmer says, stepping back into the room.

‘On second thoughts, I think I’ll keep it. It looks rather nice, don’t you agree, Simon?’

The doctor sighs and turns to leave once more. It’s at this moment I realise that she owns me now. Certain secrets will come out, like how the old man changed his will yesterday to include HostBod4401 as the sole heir and beneficiary to his estate. Lesley doesn’t know it yet, but there’s going to be a battle for that money. For now, all I have to do is to stay alive.

SCANNERS LIVE IN VAIN Cordwainer Smith

Martel was angry. He did not even adjust his blood away from anger. He stamped across the room by judgment, not by sight. When he saw the table hit the floor, and could tell by the expression on Luci’s face that the table must have made a loud crash, he looked down to see if his leg was broken. It was not. Scanner to the core, he had to scan himself. The action was reflex and automatic. The inventory included his legs, abdomen, chestbox of instruments, hands, arms, face and back with the mirror. Only then did Martel go back to being angry. He talked with his voice, even though he knew that his wife hated its blare and preferred to have him write.

"I tell you, I must cranch. I have to cranch. It’s my worry, isn’t it?" When Luci answered, he saw only a part of her words as he read her lips: "Darling… you’re my husband… right to love you… dangerous… do it… dangerous… wait…"

He faced her, but put sound in his voice, letting the blare hurt her again: "I tell you, I’m going to cranch."

Catching her expression, he became rueful and a little tender: "Can’t you understand what it means to me? To get out of this horrible prison in my own head? To be a man again—hearing your voice, smelling smoke? To feel again—to feel my feet on the ground, to feel the air move against my face? Don’t you know what it means?"

Her wide-eyed worrisome concern thrust him back into pure annoyance. He read only a few words as her lips moved: "… love you… your own good… don’t you think I want you to be human?… your own good… too much… he said… they said…"

When he roared at her, he realized that his voice must be particularly bad. He knew that the sound hurt her no less than did the words: "Do you think I wanted you to marry a scanner? Didn’t I tell you we’re almost as low as the habermans? We’re dead, I tell you. We’ve got to be dead to do our work. How can anybody go to the up-and-out? Can you dream what raw space is? I warned you. But you married me. All right, you married a man. Please, darling, let me be a man. Let me hear your voice, let me feel the warmth of being alive, of being human. Let me!"

He saw by her look of stricken assent that he had won the argument. He did not use his voice again. Instead, he pulled his tablet up from where it hung against his chest. He wrote on it, using the pointed fingernail of his right forefinger—the talking nail of a scanner—in quick cleancut script: Pls, drlng, whrs crnching wire?

She pulled the long gold-sheathed wire out of the pocket of her apron. She let its field sphere fall to the carpeted floor. Swiftly, dutifully, with the deft obedience of a scanner’s wife, she wound the cranching wire around his head, spirally around his neck and chest. She avoided the instruments set in his chest. She even avoided the radiating scars around the instruments, the stigmata of men who had gone up and into the out. Mechanically he lifted a foot as she slipped the wire between his feet. She drew the wire taut. She snapped the small plug into the high-burden control next to his heart-reader. She helped him to sit down, arranging his hands for him, pushing his head back into the cup at the top of the chair. She turned then, full-face toward him, so that he could read her lips easily. Her expression was composed. She knelt, scooped up the sphere at the other end of the wire, stood erect calmly, her back to him. He scanned her, and saw nothing in her posture but grief which would have escaped the eye of anyone but a scanner. She spoke: he could see her chest-muscles moving. She realized that she was not facing him, and turned so that he could see her lips.

"Ready at last?"

He smiled a yes.

She turned her back to him again. (Luci could never bear to watch him go under the wire.) She tossed the wire-sphere into the air. It caught in the force-field, and hung there. Suddenly it glowed. That was all. All—except for the sudden red stinking roar of coming back to his senses. Coming back, across the wild threshold of pain.

When he awakened, under the wire, he did not feel as though he had just cranched. Even though it was the second cranching within the week, he felt fit. He lay in the chair. His ears drank in the sound of air touching things in the room. He heard Luci breathing in the next room, where she was hanging up the wire to cool. He smelt the thousand and one smells that are in anybody’s room: the crisp freshness of the germ-burner, the sour-sweet tang of the humidifier, the odor of the dinner they had just eaten, the smells of clothes, furniture, of people themselves. All these were pure delight. He sang a phrase or two of his favorite song:

He heard Luci chuckle in the next room. He gloated over the sounds of her dress as she swished to the doorway.

She gave him her crooked little smile. "You sound all right. Are you all right, really?"

Even with this luxury of senses, he scanned. He took the flash-quick inventory which constituted his professional skill. His eyes swept in the news of the instruments. Nothing showed off scale, beyond the nerve compression hanging in the edge of Danger. But he could not worry about the nerve-box. That always came through cranching. You couldn’t get under the wire without having it show on the nerve-box. Some day the box would go to Overload and drop back down to Dead. That was the way a haberman ended. But you couldn’t have everything. People who went to the up-and-out had to pay the price for space. Anyhow, he should worry! He was a scanner. A good one, and he knew it. If he couldn’t scan himself, who could? This cranching wasn’t too dangerous. Dangerous, but not too dangerous.

Luci put out her hand and ruffled his hair as if she had been reading his thoughts, instead of just following them: "But you know you shouldn’t have! You shouldn’t!"

"But I did!" He grinned at her.

Her gaiety still forced, she said: "Come on, darling, let’s have a good time. I have almost everything there is in the icebox—all your favorite tastes. And I have two new records just full of smells. I tried them out myself, and even I liked them. And you know me—"

"Which?"

"Which what, you old darling?"

He slipped his hand over her shoulders as he limped out of the room. (He could never go back to feeling the floor beneath his feet, feeling the air against his face, without being bewildered and clumsy. As if cranching was real, and being a haberman was a bad dream. But he was a haberman, and a scanner. "You know what I meant, Luci. The smells, which you have. Which one did you like, on the record?"

"Well-l-l," said she, judiciously, "there were some lamb chops that were the strangest things—"

He interrupted: "What are lambtchots?"

"Wait till you smell them. Then guess. I’ll tell you this much. It’s a smell hundreds and hundreds of years old. They found out about it in the old books."

"Is a lambtchot a beast?"

"I won’t tell you. You’ve got to wait," she laughed, as she helped him sit down and spread his tasting dishes before him. He wanted to go back over the dinner first, sampling all the pretty things he had eaten, and savoring them this time with his now-living lips and tongue.

When Luci had found the music wire and had thrown its sphere up into the force-field, he reminded her of the new smells. She took out the long glass records and set the first one into a transmitter.

"Now sniff!"

A queer, frightening, exciting smell came over the room. It seemed like nothing in this world, nor like anything from the up-and-out. Yet it was familiar. His mouth watered. His pulse beat a little faster; he scanned his heartbox. (Faster, sure enough.) But that smell, what was it? In mock perplexity, he grabbed her hands, looked into her eyes, and growled:

"Tell me, darling! Tell me, or I’ll eat you up!"

"That’s just right!"

"What?"

"You’re right. It should make you want to eat me. It’s meat."

"Meat. Who?"

"Not a person," said she, knowledgeably, "a Beast. A Beast which people used to eat. A lamb was a small sheep—you’ve seen sheep out in the Wild, haven’t you?—and a chop is part of its middle—here!" She pointed at her chest. Martel did not hear her. All his boxes had swung over toward Alarm, some to Danger. He fought against the roar of his own mind, forcing his body into excess excitement. How easy it was to be a scanner when you really stood outside your own body, haberman-fashion, and looked back into it with your eyes alone. Then you could manage the body, rule it coldly even in the enduring agony of space. But to realize that you were a body, that this thing was ruling you, that the mind could kick the flesh and send it roaring off into panic! That was bad.

He tried to remember the days before he had gone into the haberman device, before he had been cut apart for the up-and-out. Had he always been subject to the rush of his emotions from his mind to his body, from his body back to his mind, confounding him so that he couldn’t scan? But he hadn’t been a scanner then.

He knew what had hit him. Amid the roar of his own pulse, he knew. In the nightmare of the up-and-out, that smell had forced its way through to him, while their ship burned off Venus and the habermans fought the collapsing metal with their bare hands. He had scanned then: all were in Danger. Chestboxes went up to Overload and dropped to Dead all around him as he had moved from man to man, shoving the drifting corpses out of his way as he fought to scan each man in turn, to clamp vises on unnoticed broken legs, to snap the sleeping valve on men whose instruments showed they were hopelessly near Overload. With men trying to work and cursing him for a scanner while he, professional zeal aroused, fought to do his job and keep them alive in the great pain of space, he had smelled that smell. It had fought its way along his rebuilt nerves, past the haberman cuts, past all the safeguards of physical and mental discipline. In the wildest hour of tragedy, he had smelled aloud. He remembered it was like a bad cranching, connected with the fury and nightmare all around him. He had even stopped his work to scan himself, fearful that the first effect might come, breaking past all haberman cuts and ruining him with the pain of space. But he had come through. His own instruments stayed and stayed at Danger, without nearing Overload. He had done his job, and won a commendation for it. He had even forgotten the burning ship.

All except the smell.

And here the smell was all over again—the smell of meat-with-fire.

Luci looked at him with wifely concern. She obviously thought he had cranched too much, and was about to haberman back. She tried to be cheerful: "You’d better rest, honey."

He whispered to her: "Cut—off—that—smell."

She did not question his word. She cut the transmitter. She even crossed the room and stepped up the room controls until a small breeze flitted across the floor and drove the smells up to the ceiling.

He rose, tired and stiff. (His instruments were normal, except that heart was fast and nerves still hanging on the edge of Danger.) He spoke sadly:

"Forgive me, Luci. I suppose I shouldn’t have cranched. Not so soon again. But darling, I have to get out from being a haberman. How can I ever be near you? How can I be a man—not hearing my own voice, not even feeling my own life as it goes through my veins? I love you, darling. Can’t I ever be near you?" Her pride was disciplined and automatic: "But you’re a scanner!"

"I know I’m a scanner. But so what?"

She went over the words, like a tale told a thousand times to reassure herself: "You are the bravest of the brave, the most skillful of the skilled. All mankind owes most honor to the scanner, who unites the Earths of mankind. Scanners are the protectors of the habermans. They are the judges in the up-and-out. They make men live in the place where men need desperately to die. They are the most honored of mankind, and even the chiefs of the Instrumentality are delighted to pay them homage!"

With obstinate sorrow he demurred: "Luci, we’ve heard that all before. But does it pay us back—"

"‘Scanners work for more than pay. They are the strong guards of mankind.’ Don’t you remember that?"

"But our lives, Luci. What can you get out of being the wife of a scanner? Why did you marry me? I’m human only when I cranch. The rest of the time—you know what I am. A machine. A man turned into a machine. A man who has been killed and kept alive for duty. Don’t you realize what I miss?"

"Of course, darling, of course—"

He went on: "Don’t you think I remember my childhood? Don’t you think I remember what it is to be a man and not a haberman? To walk and feel my feet on the ground? To feel a decent clean pain instead of watching my body every minute to see if I’m alive? How will I know if I’m dead? Did you ever think of that, Luci? How will I know if I’m dead?"

She ignored the unreasonableness of his outburst. Pacifyingly, she said: "Sit down, darling. Let me make you some kind of a drink. You’re overwrought."

Automatically, he scanned. "No I’m not! Listen to me. How do you think it feels to be in the up-and-out with the crew tied-for-space all around you? How do you think it feels to watch them sleep? How do you think I like scanning, scanning, scanning month after month, when I can feel the pain of space beating against every part of my body, trying to get past my haberman blocks? How do you think I like to wake the men when I have to, and have them hate me for it? Have you ever seen habermans fight—strong men fighting, and neither knowing pain, fighting until one touches Overload? Do you think about that, Luci?" Triumphantly he added: "Can you blame me if I cranch, and come back to being a man, just two days a month?"

"I’m not blaming you, darling. Let’s enjoy your cranch. Sit down now, and have a drink."

He was sitting down, resting his face in his hands, while she fixed the drink, using natural fruits out of bottles in addition to the secure alkaloids. He watched her restlessly and pitied her for marrying a scanner; and then, though it was unjust, resented having to pity her.

Just as she turned to hand him the drink, they both jumped a little as the phone rang. It should not have rung. They had turned it off. It rang again, obviously on the emergency circuit. Stepping ahead of Luci, Martel strode over to the phone and looked into it. Vomact was looking at him. The custom of scanners entitled him to be brusque, even with a senior scanner, on certain given occasions. This was one.

Before Vomact could speak, Martel spoke two words into the plate, not caring whether the old man could read lips or not:

"Cranching. Busy."

He cut the switch and went back to Luci.

The phone rang again.

Luci said, gently, "I can find out what it is, darling. Here, take your drink and sit down."

"Leave it alone," said her husband. "No one has a right to call when I’m cranching. He knows that. He ought to know that." The phone rang again. In a fury, Martel rose and went to the plate. He cut it back on. Vomact was on the screen. Before Martel could speak, Vomact held up his talking nail in line with his heartbox. Martel reverted to discipline:

"Scanner Martel present and waiting, sir."

The lips moved solemnly: "Top emergency."

"Sir, I am under the wire."

"Top emergency."

"Sir, don’t you understand?" Martel mouthed his words, so he could be sure that Vomact followed. "I… am… under… the… wire. Unfit… for… Space!"

Vomact repeated: "Top emergency. Report to Central Tie-in."

"But, sir, no emergency like this—"

"Right, Martel. No emergency like this, ever before. Report to Tie-in." With a faint glint of kindliness, Vomact added: "No need to decranch. Report as you are."

This time it was Martel whose phone was cut out. The screen went gray. He turned to Luci. The temper had gone out of his voice. She came to him. She kissed him, and rumpled his hair. All she could say was, "I’m sorry."

She kissed him again, knowing his disappointment. "Take good care of yourself, darling. I’ll wait."

He scanned, and slipped into his transparent aircoat. At the window he paused, and waved. She called, "Good luck!"

As the air flowed past him he said to himself, "This is the first time I’ve felt flight in—eleven years. Lord, but it’s easy to fly if you can feel yourself live!"

Central Tie-in glowed white and austere far ahead. Martel peered. He saw no glare of incoming ships from the up-and-out, no shuddering flare of space-fire out of control. Everything was quiet, as it should be on an off-duty night. And yet Vomact had called. He had called an emergency higher than space. There was no such thing. But Vomact had called it.

When Martel got there, he found about half the scanners present, two dozen or so of them. He lifted the talking finger. Most of the scanners were standing face to face, talking in pairs as they read lips. A few of the old, impatient ones were scribbling on their tablets and then thrusting the tablets into other people’s faces. All the faces wore the dull dead relaxed look of a haberman. When Martel entered the room, he knew that most of the others laughed in the deep isolated privacy of their own minds, each thinking things it would be useless to express in formal words. It had been a long time since a scanner showed up at a meeting cranched.

Vomact was not there: probably, thought Martel, he was still on the phone calling others. The light of the phone flashed on and off; the bell rang. Martel felt odd when he realized that of all those present, he was the only one to hear that loud bell. It made him realize why ordinary people did not like to be around groups of habermans or scanners. Martel looked around for company.

His friend Chang was there, busy explaining to some old and testy scanner that he did not know why Vomact had called. Martel looked farther and saw Parizianski. He walked over, threading his way past the others with a dexterity that showed he could feel his feet from the inside, and did not have to watch them. Several of the others stared at him with their dead faces, and tried to smile. But they lacked full muscular control and their faces twisted into horrid masks. (Scanners usually knew better than to show expression on faces which they could no longer govern. Martel added to himself, I swear I’ll never smile again unless I’m cranched.)

Parizianski gave him the sign of the talking finger. Looking face to face, he spoke:

"You come here cranched?"

Parizianski could not hear his own voice, so the words roared like the words on a broken and screeching phone; Martel was startled, but knew that the inquiry was well meant. No one could be better-natured than the burly Pole.

"Vomact called. Top emergency."

"You told him you were cranched?"

"Yes."

"He still made you come?"

"Then all this—it is not for Space? You could not go up-and-out? You are like ordinary men?"

"That’s right."

"Then why did he call us?" Some pre-haberman habit made Parizianski wave his arms in inquiry. The hand struck the back of the old man behind them. The slap could be heard throughout the room, but only Martel heard it. Instinctively, he scanned Parizianski and the old scanner, and they scanned him back. Only then did the old man ask why Martel had scanned him. When Martel explained that he was under the wire, the old man moved swiftly away to pass on the news that there was a cranched scanner present at the tie-in. Even this minor sensation could not keep the attention of most of the scanners from the worry about the top emergency. One young man, who had scanned his first transit just the year before, dramatically interposed himself between Parizianski and Martel. He dramatically flashed his tablet at them: Is Vmct mad?

The older men shook their heads. Martel, remembering that it had not been too long that the young man had been haberman, mitigated the dead solemnity of the denial with a friendly smile. He spoke in a normal voice, saying:

"Vomact is the senior of scanners. I am sure that he could not go mad. Would he not see it on his boxes first?"

Martel had to repeat the question, speaking slowly and mouthing his words before the young scanner could understand the comment. The young man tried to make his face smile, and twisted it into a comic mask. But he took up his tablet and scribbled:

Yr rght.

Chang broke away from his friend and came over, his half-Chinese face gleaming in the warm evening. (It’s strange, thought Martel, that more Chinese don’t become scanners. Or not so strange perhaps, if you think that they never fill their quota of habermans. Chinese love good living too much. The ones who do scan are all good ones.) Chang saw that Martel was cranched, and spoke with voice:

"You break precedents. Luci must be angry to lose you?"

"She took it well. Chang, that’s strange. I’m cranched, and I can hear. Your voice sounds all right. How did you learn to talk like—like an ordinary person?"

"I practiced with soundtracks. Funny you noticed it. I think I am the only scanner in or between the Earths who can pass for an ordinary man. Mirrors and soundtracks. I found out how to act."

"But you don’t…"

"No. I don’t feel, or taste, or hear, or smell things, any more than you do. Talking doesn’t do me much good. But I notice that it cheers up the people around me."

"It would make a difference in the life of Luci."

Chang nodded sagely. "My father insisted on it. He said, ‘You may be proud of being a scanner. I am sorry you are not a man. Conceal your defects.’ So I tried. I wanted to tell the old boy about the up-and-out, and what we did there, but it did not matter. He said, ‘Airplanes were good enough for Confucius, and they are for me too.’ The old humbug! He tries so hard to be a Chinese when he can’t even read Old Chinese. But he’s got wonderful good sense, and for somebody going on two hundred he certainly gets around."

Martel smiled at the thought: "In his airplane?"

Chang smiled back. This discipline of his facial muscles was amazing; a bystander would not think that Chang was a haberman, controlling his eyes, cheeks, and lips by cold intellectual control. The expression had the spontaneity of life. Martel felt a flash of envy for Chang when he looked at the dead cold faces of Parizianski and the others. He knew that he himself looked fine: but why shouldn’t he? He was cranched. Turning to Parizianski he said, "Did you see what Chang said about his father? The old boy uses an airplane." Parizianski made motions with his mouth, but the sounds meant nothing. He took up his tablet and showed it to Martel and Chang.

Bzz bzz, Ha ha. Gd ol’ boy.

At that moment, Martel heard steps out in the corridor. He could not help looking toward the door. Other eyes followed the direction of his glance. Vomact came in.

The group shuffled to attention in four parallel lines. They scanned one another. Numerous hands reached across to adjust the electrochemical controls on chestboxes which had begun to load up. One scanner held out a broken finger which his counter-scanner had discovered, and submitted it for treatment and splinting.

Vomact had taken out his staff of office. The cube at the top flashed red light through the room, the lines reformed, and all scanners gave the sign meaning, Present and ready!

Vomact countered with the stance signifying, I am the senior and take command. Talking fingers rose in the counter-gesture, We concur and commit ourselves. Vomact raised his right arm, dropped the wrist as though it were broken, in a queer searching gesture, meaning: Any men around? Any habermans not tied? All clear for the scanners?

Alone of all those present, the cranched Martel heard the queer rustle of feet as they all turned completely around without leaving position, looking sharply at one another and flashing their beltlights into the dark corners of the great room. When again they faced Vomact, he made a further sign:

All clear. Follow my words.

Martel noticed that he alone relaxed. The others could not know the meaning of relaxation with the minds blocked off up there in their skulls, connected only with the eyes, and the rest of the body connected with the mind only by controlling non-sensory nerves and the instrument boxes on their chests. Martel realized that, cranched as he was, he had expected to hear Vomact’s voice: the senior had been talking for some time. No sound escaped his lips. (Vomact never bothered with sound.)

"… and when the first men to go up-and-out went to the moon, what did they find?"

"Nothing," responded the silent chorus of lips.

"Therefore they went farther, to Mars and to Venus. The ships went out year by year, but they did not come back until the Year One of Space. Then did a ship come back with the first effect. Scanners, I ask you, what is the first effect?"

"No one knows. No one knows."

"No one will ever know. Too many are the variables. By what do we know the first effect?"

"By the great pain of space," came the chorus.

"And by what further sign?"

"By the need, oh the need for death."

Vomact again: "And who stopped the need for death?"

"Henry Haberman conquered the first effect, in the Year Eighty-three of Space."

"And, Scanners, I ask you, what did he do?"

"He made the habermans."

"How, O Scanners, are habermans made?"

"They are made with the cuts. The brain is cut from the heart, the lungs. The brain is cut from the ears, the nose. The brain is cut from the mouth, the belly. The brain is cut from desire, and pain. The brain is cut from the world. Save for the eyes. Save for the control of the living flesh."

"And how, O Scanners, is flesh controlled?"

"By the boxes set in the flesh, the controls set in the chest, the signs made to rule the living body, the signs by which the body lives."

"How does a haberman live and live?"

"The haberman lives by control of the boxes."

"Whence come the habermans?"

Martel felt in the coming response a great roar of broken voices echoing through the room as the scanners, habermans themselves, put sound behind their mouthings:

"Habermans are the scum of mankind. Habermans are the weak, the cruel, the credulous, and the unfit. Habermans are the sentenced-to-more-than-death. Habermans live in the mind alone. They are killed for space but they live for space. They master the ships that connect the Earths. They live in the great pain while ordinary men sleep in the cold, cold sleep of the transit."

"Brothers and Scanners, I ask you now: are we habermans or are we not?"

"We are habermans in the flesh. We are cut apart, brain and flesh. We are ready to go to the up-and-out. All of us have gone through the haberman device."

"We are habermans then?" Vomact’s eyes flashed and glittered as he asked the ritual question.

Again the chorused answer was accompanied by a roar of voices heard only by Martel: "Habermans we are, and more, and more. We are the chosen who are habermans by our own free will. We are the agents of the Instrumentality of Mankind."

"What must the others say to us?"

"They must say to us, ‘You are the bravest of the brave, the most skillful of the skilled. All mankind owes most honor to the scanner, who unites the Earths of mankind. Scanners are the protectors of the habermans. They are the judges in the up-and-out. They make men live in the place where men need desperately to die. They are the most honored of mankind, and even the chiefs of the Instrumentality are delighted to pay them homage!"

Vomact stood more erect: "What is the secret duty of the scanner?"

"To keep secret our law, and to destroy the acquirers thereof."

"How to destroy?"

"Twice to the Overload, back and Dead."

"If habermans die, what the duty then?"

The scanners all compressed their lips for answer. (Silence was the code.) Martel, who—long familiar with the code—was a little bored with the proceedings, noticed that Chang was breathing too heavily; he reached over and adjusted Chang’s lung-control and received the thanks of Chang’s eyes. Vomact observed the interruption and glared at them both. Martel relaxed, trying to imitate the dead cold stillness of the others. It was so hard to do, when you were cranched.

"If others die, what the duty then?" asked Vomact.

"Scanners together inform the Instrumentality. Scanners together accept the punishment. Scanners together settle the case."

"And if the punishment be severe?"

"Then no ships go."

"And if scanners be not honored?"

"Then no ships go."

"And if a scanner goes unpaid?"

"Then no ships go."

"And if the Others and the Instrumentality are not in all ways at all times mindful of their proper obligation to the scanners?"

"Then no ships go."

"And what, O Scanners, if no ships go?"

"The Earths fall apart. The Wild comes back in. The Old Machines and the Beasts return."

"What is the first known duty of a scanner?"

"Not to sleep in the up-and-out."

"What is the second duty of a scanner?"

"To keep forgotten the name of fear."

"What is the third duty of a scanner?"

"To use the wire of Eustace Cranch only with care, only with moderation." Several pair of eyes looked quickly at Martel before the mouthed chorus went on. "To cranch only at home, only among friends, only for the purpose of remembering, of relaxing, or of begetting."

"What is the word of the scanner?"

"Faithful though surrounded by death."

"What is the motto of the scanner?"

"Awake though surrounded by silence."

"What is the work of the scanner?"

"Labor even in the heights of the up-and-out, loyalty even in the depths of the Earths."

"How do you know a scanner?"

"We know ourselves. We are dead though we live. And we talk with the tablet and the nail."

"What is this code?"

"This code is the friendly ancient wisdom of scanners, briefly put that we may be mindful and be cheered by our loyalty to one another." At this point the formula should have run: "We complete the code. Is there work or word for the scanners?" But Vomact said, and he repeated:

"Top emergency. Top emergency."

They gave him the sign, Present and ready!

He said, with every eye straining to follow his lips:

"Some of you know the work of Adam Stone?"

Martel saw lips move, saying: "The Red Asteroid. The Other who lives at the edge of Space."

"Adam Stone has gone to the Instrumentality, claiming success for his work. He says that he has found how to screen out the pain of space. He says that the up-and-out can be made safe for ordinary men to work in, to stay awake in. He says that there need be no more scanners."

Beltlights flashed on all over the room as scanners sought the right to speak. Vomact nodded to one of the older men. "Scanner Smith will speak."

Smith stepped slowly up into the light, watching his own feet. He turned so that they could see his face. He spoke: "I say that this is a lie. I say that Stone is a liar. I say that the Instrumentality must not be deceived."

He paused. Then, in answer to some question from the audience which most of the others did not see, he said: "I invoke the secret duty of the scanners."

Smith raised his right hand for emergency attention:

"I say that Stone must die."

Martel, still cranched, shuddered as he heard the boos, groans, shouts, squeaks, grunts and moans which came from the scanners who forgot noise in their excitement and strove to make their dead bodies talk to one another’s deaf ears. Beltlights flashed wildly all over the room. There was a rush for the rostrum and scanners milled around at the top, vying for attention until Parizianski—by sheer bulk—shoved the others aside and down, and turned to mouth at the group.

"Brother Scanners, I want your eyes."

The people on the floor kept moving, with their numb bodies jostling one another. Finally Vomact stepped up in front of Parizianski, faced the others, and said: "Scanners, be scanners! Give him your eyes."

Parizianski was not good at public speaking. His lips moved too fast. He waved his hands, which took the eyes of the others away from his lips. Nevertheless, Martel was able to follow most of the message:

"… can’t do this. Stone may have succeeded. If he has succeeded, it means the end of the scanners. It means the end of the habermans, too. None of us will have to fight in the up-and-out. We won’t have anybody else going under the wire for a few hours or days of being human. Everybody will be Other. Nobody will have to cranch, never again. Men can be men. The habermans can be killed decently and properly, the way men were killed in the old days, without anybody keeping them alive. They won’t have to work in the up-and-out! There will be no more great pain—think of it! No… more… great… pain! How do we know that Stone is a liar—" Lights began flashing directly into his eyes. (The rudest insult of scanner to scanner was this.)

Vomact again exercised authority. He stepped in front of Parizianski and said something which the others could not see. Parizianski stepped down from the rostrum. Vomact again spoke:

"I think that some of the scanners disagree with our brother Parizianski. I say that the use of the rostrum be suspended till we have had a chance for private discussion. In fifteen minutes I will call the meeting back to order." Martel looked around for Vomact when the senior had rejoined the group on the floor. Finding the senior, Martel wrote swift script on his tablet, waiting for a chance to thrust the tablet before the senior’s eyes. He had written:

Am crnchd. Rspctfly requst prmissn lv now, stnd by fr orders.

Being cranched did strange things to Martel. Most meetings that he attended seemed formal, hearteningly ceremonial, lighting up the dark inward eternities of habermanhood. When he was not cranched, he noticed his body no more than a marble bust notices its marble pedestal. He had stood with them before. He had stood with them effortless hours, while the long-winded ritual broke through the terrible loneliness behind his eyes, and made him feel that the scanners, though a confraternity of the damned, were none the less forever honored by the professional requirements of their mutilation.

This time, it was different. Coming cranched, and in full possession of smell-sound-taste-feeling, he reacted more or less as a normal man would. He saw his friends and colleagues as a lot of cruelly driven ghosts, posturing out the meaningless ritual of their indefeasible damnation. What difference did anything make, once you were a haberman? Why all this talk about habermans and scanners? Habermans were criminals or heretics, and scanners were gentlemen-volunteers, but they were all in the same fix—except that scanners were deemed worthy of the short-time return of the cranching wire, while habermans were simply disconnected while the ships lay in port and were left suspended until they should be awakened, in some hour of emergency or trouble, to work out another spell of their damnation. It was a rare haberman that you saw on the street—someone of special merit or bravery, allowed to look at mankind from the terrible prison of his own mechanified body. And yet, what scanner ever pitied a haberman? What scanner ever honored a haberman except perfunctorily in the line of duty? What had the scanners as a guild and a class ever done for the habermans, except to murder them with a twist of the wrist whenever a haberman, too long beside a scanner, picked up the tricks of the scanning trade and learned how to live at his own will, not the will the scanners imposed? What could the Others, the ordinary men, know of what went on inside the ships? The Others slept in their cylinders, mercifully unconscious until they woke up on whatever other Earth they had consigned themselves to. What could the Others know of the men who had to stay alive within the ship?

What could any Other know of the up-and-out? What Other could look at the biting acid beauty of the stars in open space? What could they tell of the great pain, which started quietly in the marrow, like an ache, and proceeded by the fatigue and nausea of each separate nerve cell, brain cell, touchpoint in the body, until life itself became a terrible aching hunger for silence and for death?

He was a scanner. All right, he was a scanner. He had been a scanner from the moment when, wholly normal, he had stood in the sunlight before a subchief of the Instrumentality, and had sworn:

"I pledge my honor and my life to mankind. I sacrifice myself willingly for the welfare of mankind. In accepting the perilous austere honor, I yield all my rights without exception to the honorable chiefs of the Instrumentality and to the honored Confraternity of Scanners."

He had pledged.

He had gone into the haberman device.

He remembered his hell. He had not had such a bad one, even though it had seemed to last a hundred-million years, all of them without sleep. He had learned to feel with his eyes. He had learned to see despite the heavy eyeplates set back of his eyeballs to insulate his eyes from the rest of him. He had learned to watch his skin. He still remembered the time he had noticed dampness on his shirt, and had pulled out his scanning mirror only to discover that he had worn a hole in his side by leaning against a vibrating machine. (A thing like that could not happen to him now; he was too adept at reading his own instruments.) He remembered the way that he had gone up-and-out, and the way that the great pain beat into him, despite the fact that his touch, smell, feeling, and hearing were gone for all ordinary purposes. He remembered killing habermans, and keeping others alive, and standing for months beside the honorable scanner-pilot while neither of them slept. He remembered going ashore on Earth Four, and remembered that he had not enjoyed it, and had realized on that day that there was no reward.

Martel stood among the other scanners. He hated their awkwardness when they moved, their immobility when they stood still. He hated the queer assortment of smells which their bodies yielded unnoticed. He hated the grunts and groans and squawks which they emitted from their deafness. He hated them, and himself.

How could Luci stand him? He had kept his chestbox reading Danger for weeks while he courted her, carrying the cranch wire about with him most illegally, and going direct from one cranch to the other without worrying about the fact his indicators all crept up to the edge of Overload. He had wooed her without thinking of what would happen if she did say, "Yes." She had.

"And they lived happily ever after." In old books they did, but how could they, in life? He had had eighteen days under the wire in the whole of the past year! Yet she had loved him. She still loved him. He knew it. She fretted about him through the long months that he was in the up-and-out. She tried to make home mean something to him even when he was haberman, make food pretty when it could not be tasted, make herself lovable when she could not be kissed—or might as well not, since a haberman body meant no more than furniture. Luci was patient.

And now, Adam Stone! (He let his tablet fade: how could he leave, now?)

God bless Adam Stone!

Martel could not help feeling a little sorry for himself. No longer would the high keen call of duty carry him through two hundred or so years of the Others’ time, two million private eternities of his own. He could slouch and relax. He could forget high space, and let the up-and-out be tended by Others. He could cranch as much as he dared. He could be almost normal—almost—for one year or five years or no years. But at least he could stay with Luci. He could go with her into the Wild, where there were Beasts and Old Machines still roving the dark places. Perhaps he would die in the excitement of the hunt, throwing spears at an ancient manshonyagger as it leapt from its lair, or tossing hot spheres at the tribesmen of the Unforgiven who still roamed the Wild. There was still life to live, still a good normal death to die, not the moving of a needle out in the silence and agony of space!

He had been walking about restlessly. His ears were attuned to the sounds of normal speech, so that he did not feel like watching the mouthings of his brethren. Now they seemed to have come to a decision. Vomact was moving to the rostrum. Martel looked about for Chang, and went to stand beside him. Chang whispered: "You’re as restless as water in mid-air! What’s the matter? Decranching?"

They both scanned Martel, but the instruments held steady and showed no sign of the cranch giving out.

The great light flared in its call to attention. Again they formed ranks. Vomact thrust his lean old face into the glare, and spoke:

"Scanners and Brothers, I call for a vote." He held himself in the stance which meant: I am the senior and take command.

A beltlight flashed in protest.

It was old Henderson. He moved to the rostrum, spoke to Vomact, and—with Vomact’s nod of approval—turned full-face to repeat his question:

"Who speaks for the scanners out in space?" No beltlight or hand answered.

Henderson and Vomact, face to face, conferred for a few moments. Then Henderson faced them again:

"I yield to the senior in command. But I do not yield to a meeting of the Confraternity. There are sixty-eight scanners, and only forty-seven present, of whom one is cranched and U.D. I have therefore proposed that the senior in command assume authority only over an emergency committee of the Confraternity, not over a meeting. Is that agreed and understood by the honorable scanners?"

Hands rose in assent.

Chang murmured in Martel’s ear, "Lot of difference that makes! Who can tell the difference between a meeting and a committee?" Martel agreed with the words, but was even more impressed with the way that Chang, while haberman, could control his own voice.

Vomact resumed chairmanship: "We now vote on the question of Adam Stone."

"First, we can assume that he has not succeeded, and that his claims are lies. We know that from our practical experience as scanners. The pain of space is only part of scanning," (But the essential part, the basis of it all, thought Martel) "and we can rest assured that Stone cannot solve the problem of space discipline."

"That tripe again," whispered Chang, unheard save by Martel.

"The space discipline of our confraternity has kept high space clean of war and dispute. Sixty-eight disciplined men control all high space. We are removed by our oath and our haberman status from all Earthly passions.

"Therefore, if Adam Stone has conquered the pain of space, so that Others can wreck our confraternity and bring to space the trouble and ruin which afflicts Earths, I say that Adam Stone is wrong. If Adam Stone succeeds, scanners live in vain!

"Secondly, if Adam Stone has not conquered the pain of space, he will cause great trouble in all the Earths. The Instrumentality and the subchiefs may not give us as many habermans as we need to operate the ships of mankind. There will be wild stories, and fewer recruits, and, worst of all, the discipline of the Confraternity may relax if this kind of nonsensical heresy is spread around.

"Therefore, if Adam Stone has succeeded, he threatens the ruin of the Confraternity and should die.

"I move the death of Adam Stone."

And Vomact made the sign, The honorable scanners are pleased to vote. Martel grabbed wildly for his beltlight. Chang, guessing ahead, had his light out and ready; its bright beam, voting No, shone straight up at the ceiling. Martel got his light out and threw its beam upward in dissent. Then he looked around. Out of the forty-seven present, he could see only five or six glittering.

Two more lights went on. Vomact stood as erect as a frozen corpse. Vomact’s eyes flashed as he stared back and forth over the group, looking for lights. Several more went on. Finally Vomact took the closing stance:

May it please the scanners to count the vote.

Three of the older men went up on the rostrum with Vomact. They looked over the room. (Martel thought: These damned ghosts are voting on the life of a real man, a live man! They have no right to do it. I’ll tell the Instrumentality! But he knew that he would not. He thought of Luci and what she might gain by the triumph of Adam Stone: the heart-breaking folly of the vote was then almost too much for Martel to bear.)

All three of the tellers held up their hands in unanimous agreement on the sign of the number: Fifteen against.

Vomact dismissed them with a bow of courtesy. He turned and again took the stance: I am the senior and take command.

Marveling at his own daring, Martel flashed his beltlight on. He knew that any one of the bystanders might reach over and twist his heartbox to Overload for such an act. He felt Chang’s hand reaching to catch him by the aircoat. But he eluded Chang’s grasp and ran, faster than a scanner should, to the platform. As he ran, he wondered what appeal to make. It was no use talking common sense. Not now. It had to be law.

He jumped up on the rostrum beside Vomact, and took the stance: Scanners, an Illegality!

He violated good custom while speaking, still in the stance: "A committee has no right to vote death by a majority vote. It takes two-thirds of a full meeting."

He felt Vomact’s body lunge behind him, felt himself falling from the rostrum, hitting the floor, hurting his knees and his touch-aware hands. He was helped to his feet. He was scanned. Some scanner he scarcely knew took his instruments and toned him down.

Immediately Martel felt more calm, more detached, and hated himself for feeling so.

He looked up at the rostrum. Vomact maintained the stance signifying: Order!

The scanners adjusted their ranks. The two scanners next to Martel took his arms. He shouted at them, but they looked away, and cut themselves off from communication altogether.

Vomact spoke again when he saw the room was quiet: "A scanner came here cranched. Honorable Scanners, I apologize for this. It is not the fault of our great and worthy scanner and friend, Martel. He came here under orders. I told him not to de-cranch. I hoped to spare him an unnecessary haberman. We all know how happily Martel is married, and we wish his brave experiment well. I like Martel. I respect his judgment. I wanted him here. I knew you wanted him here. But he is cranched. He is in no mood to share in the lofty business of the scanners. I therefore propose a solution which will meet all the requirements of fairness. I propose that we rule Scanner Martel out of order for his violation of rules. This violation would be inexcusable if Martel were not cranched.

"But at the same time, in all fairness to Martel, I further propose that we deal with the points raised so improperly by our worthy but disqualified brother."

Vomact gave the sign, The honorable scanners are pleased to vote. Martel tried to reach his own beltlight; the dead strong hands held him tightly and he struggled in vain. One lone light shone high: Chang’s, no doubt.

Vomact thrust his face into the light again: "Having the approval of our worthy scanners and present company for the general proposal, I now move that this committee declare itself to have the full authority of a meeting, and that this committee further make me responsible for all misdeeds which this committee may enact, to be held answerable before the next full meeting, but not before any other authority beyond the closed and secret ranks of scanners."

Flamboyantly this time, his triumph evident, Vomact assumed the vote stance.

Only a few lights shone: far less, patently, than a minority of one-fourth.

Vomact spoke again. The light shone on his high calm forehead, on his dead relaxed cheekbones. His lean cheeks and chin were half-shadowed, save where the lower light picked up and spotlighted his mouth, cruel even in repose. (Vomact was said to be a descendant of some ancient lady who had traversed, in an illegitimate and inexplicable fashion, some hundreds of years of time in a single night. Her name, the Lady Vomact, had passed into legend; but her blood and her archaic lust for mastery lived on in the mute masterful body of her descendant. Martel could believe the old tales as he stared at the rostrum, wondering what untraceable mutation had left the Vomact kin as predators among mankind.) Calling loudly with the movement of his lips, but still without sound, Vomact appealed:

"The honorable committee is now pleased to reaffirm the sentence of death issued against the heretic and enemy, Adam Stone." Again the vote stance.

Again Chang’s light shone lonely in its isolated protest.

Vomact then made his final move:

"I call for the designation of the senior scanner present as the manager of the sentence. I call for authorization to him to appoint executioners, one or many, who shall make evident the will and majesty of scanners. I ask that I be accountable for the deed, and not for the means. The deed is a noble deed, for the protection of mankind and for the honor of the scanners; but of the means it must be said that they are to be the best at hand, and no more. Who knows the true way to kill an Other, here on a crowded and watchful Earth? This is no mere matter of discharging a cylindered sleeper, no mere question of upgrading the needle of a haberman. When people die down here, it is not like the up-and-out. They die reluctantly. Killing within the Earth is not our usual business, O Brothers and Scanners, as you know well. You must choose me to choose my agent as I see fit. Otherwise the common knowledge will become the common betrayal whereas if I alone know the responsibility, I alone could betray us, and you will not have far to look in case the Instrumentality comes searching." (What about the killer you choose? thought Martel. He too will know unless—unless you silence him forever.)

Vomact went into the stance: The honorable scanners are pleased to vote.

One light of protest shone; Chang’s, again.

Martel imagined that he could see a cruel joyful smile on Vomact’s dead face—the smile of a man who knew himself righteous and who found his righteousness upheld and affirmed by militant authority.

Martel tried one last time to come free.

The dead hands held. They were locked like vises until their owners’ eyes unlocked them: how else could they hold the piloting month by month?

Martel then shouted: "Honorable Scanners, this is judicial murder." No ear heard him. He was cranched, and alone.

Nonetheless, he shouted again: "You endanger the Confraternity."

Nothing happened.

The echo of his voice sounded from one end of the room to the other. No head turned. No eyes met his.

Martel realized that as they paired for talk, the eyes of the scanners avoided him. He saw that no one desired to watch his speech. He knew that behind the cold faces of his friends there lay compassion or amusement. He knew that they knew him to be cranched—absurd, normal, manlike, temporarily no scanner. But he knew that in this matter the wisdom of scanners was nothing. He knew that only a cranched scanner could feel with his very blood the outrage and anger which deliberate murder would provoke among the Others. He knew that the Confraternity endangered itself, and knew that the most ancient prerogative of law was the monopoly of death. Even the ancient nations, in the times of the Wars, before the Beasts, before men went into the up-and-out—even the ancients had known this. How did they say it? Only the state shall kill. The states were gone but the Instrumentality remained, and the Instrumentality could not pardon things which occurred within the Earths but beyond its authority. Death in space was the business, the right of the scanners: how could the Instrumentality enforce its laws in a place where all men who wakened, wakened only to die in the great pain? Wisely did the Instrumentality leave space to the scanners, wisely had the Confraternity not meddled inside the Earths. And now the Confraternity itself was going to step forth as an outlaw band, as a gang of rogues as stupid and reckless as the tribes of the Unforgiven!

Martel knew this because he was cranched. Had he been haberman, he would have thought only with his mind, not with his heart and guts and blood. How could the other scanners know?

Vomact returned for the last time to the rostrum: The committee has met and its will shall be done. Verbally he added: "Senior among you, I ask your loyalty and your silence."

At that point, the two scanners let his arms go. Martel rubbed his numb hands, shaking his fingers to get the circulation back into the cold fingertips. With real freedom, he began to think of what he might still do. He scanned himself: the cranching held. He might have a day. Well, he could go on even if haberman, but it would be inconvenient, having to talk with finger and tablet. He looked about for Chang. He saw his friend standing patient and immobile in a quiet corner. Martel moved slowly, so as not to attract any more attention to himself than could be helped. He faced Chang, moved until his face was in the light, and then articulated:

"What are we going to do? You’re not going to let them kill Adam Stone, are you? Don’t you realize what Stone’s work will mean to us, if it succeeds? No more scanners. No more habermans. No more pain in the up-and-out. I tell you, if the others were all cranched, as I am, they would see it in a human way, not with the narrow crazy logic which they used in the meeting. We’ve got to stop them. How can we do it? What are we going to do? What does Parizianski think? Who has been chosen?"

"Which question do you want me to answer?"

Martel laughed. (It felt good to laugh, even then; it felt like being a man.) "Will you help me?"

Chang’s eyes flashed across Martel’s face as Chang answered: "No. No. No."

"You won’t help?"

"No."

"Why not, Chang? Why not?"

"I am a scanner. The vote has been taken. You would do the same if you were not in this unusual condition."

"I’m not in an unusual condition. I’m cranched. That merely means that I see things the way that the Others would. I see the stupidity. The recklessness. The selfishness. It is murder."

"What is murder? Have you not killed? You are not one of the Others. You are a scanner. You will be sorry for what you are about to do, if you do not watch out."

"But why did you vote against Vomact then? Didn’t you too see what Adam Stone means to all of us? Scanners will live in vain. Thank God for that! Can’t you see it?"

"No."

"But you talk to me, Chang. You are my friend?"

"I talk to you. I am your friend. Why not?"

"But what are you going to do?"

"Nothing, Martel. Nothing."

"Will you help me?"

"No."

"Not even to save Stone!"

"No."

"Then I will go to Parizianski for help."

"It will do you no good."

"Why not? He’s more human than you, right now."

"He will not help you, because he has the job. Vomact designated him to kill Adam Stone."

Martel stopped speaking in mid-movement. He suddenly took the stance: I thank you, Brother, and I depart.

At the window he turned and faced the room. He saw that Vomact’s eyes were upon him. He gave the stance, I thank you, Brother, and I depart, and added the flourish of respect which is shown when seniors are present. Vomact caught the sign, and Martel could see the cruel lips move. He thought he saw the words "… take good care of yourself…" but did not wait to inquire. He stepped backward and dropped out the window.

Once below the window and out of sight, he adjusted his aircoat to maximum speed. He swam lazily in the air, scanning himself thoroughly, and adjusting his adrenal intake down. He then made the movement of release, and felt the cold air rush past his face like run-flung water.

Adam Stone had to be at Chief Downport.

Adam Stone had to be there.

Wouldn’t Adam Stone be surprised in the night? Surprised to meet the strangest of beings, the first renegade among scanners. (Martel suddenly appreciated that it was of himself he was thinking. Martel the Traitor to Scanners! That sounded strange and bad. But what of Martel, the Loyal to Mankind? Was that not compensation? And if he won, he won Luci. If he lost, he lost nothing—an unconsidered and expendable haberman. It happened to be himself. But in contrast to the immense reward, to mankind, to the Confraternity, to Luci, what did that matter?)

Martel thought to himself: Adam Stone will have two visitors tonight. Two scanners, who are the friends of one another. He hoped that Parizianski was still his friend.

And the world, he added, depends on which of us gets there first.

Multifaceted in their brightness, the lights of Chief Downport began to shine through the mist ahead. Martel could see the outer towers of the city and glimpsed the phosphorescent periphery which kept back the Wild, whether Beasts, Machines, or the Unforgiven.

Once more Martel invoked the lords of his chance: Help me to pass for an Other!

Within the Downport, Martel had less trouble than he thought. He draped his aircoat over his shoulder so that it concealed the instruments. He took up his scanning mirror, and made up his face from the inside, by adding tone and animation to his blood and nerves until the muscles of his face glowed and the skin gave out a healthy sweat. That way he looked like an ordinary man who had just completed a long night flight.

After straightening out his clothing, and hiding his tablet within his jacket, he faced the problem of what to do about the talking finger. If he kept the nail, it would show him to be a scanner. He would be respected, but he would be identified. He might be stopped by the guards whom the Instrumentality had undoubtedly set around the person of Adam Stone. If he broke the nail—But he couldn’t! No scanner in the history of the Confraternity had ever willingly broken his nail. That would be resignation, and there was no such thing. The only way out, was in the up-and-out! Martel put his finger to his mouth and bit off the nail. He looked at the now-queer finger, and sighed to himself. He stepped toward the city gate, slipping his hand into his jacket and running up his muscular strength to four times normal. He started to scan, and then realized that his instruments were masked. Might as well take all the chances at once, he thought.

The watcher stopped him with a searching wire. The sphere thumped suddenly against Martel’s chest.

"Are you a man?" said the unseen voice. (Martel knew that as a scanner in haberman condition, his own field-charge would have illuminated the sphere.)

"I am a man." Martel knew that the timbre of his voice had been good; he hoped that it would not be taken for that of a manshonyagger or a Beast or an Unforgiven one, who with mimicry sought to enter the cities and ports of mankind.

"Name, number, rank, purpose, function, time departed."

"Martel." He had to remember his old number, not Scanner 34. "Sunward 4234, 782nd Year of Space. Rank, rising subchief." That was no lie, but his substantive rank. "Purpose, personal and lawful within the limits of this city. No function of the Instrumentality. Departed Chief Outport 2019 hours." Everything now depended on whether he was believed, or would be checked against Chief Outport.

The voice was flat and routine: "Time desired within the city."

Martel used the standard phrase: "Your honorable sufferance is requested." He stood in the cool night air, waiting. Far above him, through a gap in the mist, he could see the poisonous glittering in the sky of scanners. The stars are my enemies, he thought: I have mastered the stars but they hate me. Ho, that sounds ancient! Like a book. Too much cranching.

The voice returned: "Sunward 4234 dash 782 rising subchief Martel, enter the lawful gates of the city. Welcome. Do you desire food, raiment, money, or companionship?" The voice had no hospitality in it, just business. This was certainly different from entering a city in a scanner’s role! Then the petty officers came out, and threw their belt-lights on their fretful faces, and mouthed their words with preposterous deference, shouting against the stone deafness of scanner’s ears. So that was the way that a subchief was treated: matter of fact, but not bad. Not bad.

Martel replied: "I have that which I need, but beg of the city a favor. My friend Adam Stone is here. I desire to see him, on urgent and personal lawful affairs."

The voice replied: "Did you have an appointment with Adam Stone?"

"No."

"The city will find him. What is his number?"

"I have forgotten it."

"You have forgotten it? Is not Adam Stone a magnate of the Instrumentality? Are you truly his friend?"

"Truly." Martel let a little annoyance creep into his voice. "Watcher, doubt me and call your subchief."

"No doubt implied. Why do you not know the number? This must go into the record," added the voice.

"We were friends in childhood. He has crossed the—" Martel started to say "the up-and-out" and remembered that the phrase was current only among scanners.

"He has leapt from Earth to Earth, and has just now returned. I knew him well and I seek him out. I have word of his kith. May the Instrumentality protect us!"

"Heard and believed. Adam Stone will be searched." At a risk, though a slight one, of having the sphere sound an alarm for non-human, Martel cut in on his scanner speaker within his jacket. He saw the trembling needle of light await his words and he started to write on it with his blunt finger. That won’t work, he thought, and had a moment’s panic until he found his comb, which had a sharp enough tooth to write. He wrote:

"Emergency none. Martel Scanner calling Parizianski Scanner."

The needle quivered and the reply glowed and faded out: "Parizianski Scanner on duty and D.C. Calls taken by Scanner Relay." Martel cut off his speaker.

Parizianski was somewhere around. Could he have crossed the direct way, right over the city wall, setting off the alert, and invoking official business when the petty officers overtook him in mid-air? Scarcely. That meant that a number of other scanners must have come in with Parizianski, all of them pretending to be in search of a few of the tenuous pleasures which could be enjoyed by a haberman, such as the sight of the newspictures or the viewing of beautiful women in the Pleasure Gallery. Parizianski was around, but he could not have moved privately, because Scanner Central registered him on duty and recorded his movements city by city.

The voice returned. Puzzlement was expressed in it. "Adam Stone is found and awakened. He has asked pardon of the Honorable, and says he knows no Martel. Will you see Adam Stone in the morning? The city will bid you welcome." Martel ran out of resources. It was hard enough mimicking a man without having to tell lies in the guise of one. Martel could only repeat:

"Tell him I am Martel. The husband of Luci."

"It will be done."

Again the silence, and the hostile stars, and the sense that Parizianski was somewhere near and getting nearer; Martel felt his heart beating faster. He stole a glimpse at his chestbox and set his heart down a point. He felt calmer, even though he had not been able to scan with care. The voice this time was cheerful, as though an annoyance had been settled:

"Adam Stone consents to see you. Enter Chief Downport, and welcome." The little sphere dropped noiselessly to the ground and the wire whispered away into the darkness. A bright arc of narrow light rose from the ground in front of Martel and swept through the city to one of the higher towers—apparently a hostel, which Martel had never entered. Martel plucked his aircoat to his chest for ballast, stepped heel-and-toe on the beam, and felt himself whistle through the air to an entrance window which sprang up before him as suddenly as a devouring mouth.

A tower guard stood in the doorway. "You are awaited, sir. Do you bear weapons, sir?"

"None," said Martel, grateful that he was relying on his own strength. The guard led him past the check-screen. Martel noticed the quick flight of a warning across the screen as his instruments registered and identified him as a scanner. But the guard had not noticed it.

The guard stopped at a door. "Adam Stone is armed. He is lawfully armed by authority of the Instrumentality and by the liberty of this city. All those who enter are given warning."

Martel nodded in understanding at the man and went in. Adam Stone was a short man, stout and benign. His gray hair rose stiffly from a low forehead. His whole face was red and merry-looking. He looked like a jolly guide from the Pleasure Gallery, not like a man who had been at the edge of the up-and-out, fighting the great pain without haberman protection. He stared at Martel. His look was puzzled, perhaps a little annoyed, but not hostile.

Martel came to the point. "You do not know me. I lied. My name is Martel, and I mean you no harm. But I lied. I beg the honorable gift of your hospitality. Remain armed. Direct your weapon against me—"

Stone smiled: "I am doing so," and Martel noticed the small wire-point in Stone’s capable, plump hand.

"Good. Keep on guard against me. It will give you confidence in what I shall say. But do, I beg you, give us a screen of privacy. I want no casual lookers. This is a matter of life and death."

"First: whose life and death?" Stone’s face remained calm, his voice even.

"Yours, and mine, and the worlds’."

"You are cryptic but I agree." Stone called through the doorway:

"Privacy please." There was a sudden hum, and all the little noises of the night quickly vanished from the air of the room.

Said Adam Stone: "Sir, who are you? What brings you here?"

"I am Scanner 34."

"You, a scanner? I don’t believe it."

For answer, Martel pulled his jacket open, showing his chestbox. Stone looked up at him, amazed. Martel explained:

"I am cranched. Have you never seen it before?"

"Not with men. On animals. Amazing! But—what do you want?"

"The truth. Do you fear me?"

"Not with this," said Stone, grasping the wirepoint. "But I shall tell you the truth."

"Is it true that you have conquered the great pain?"

Stone hesitated, seeking words for an answer.

"Quick, can you tell me how you have done it, so that I may believe you?"

"I have loaded the ships with life."

"Life?"

"Life. I don’t know what the great pain is, but I did find that in the experiments, when I sent out masses of animals or plants, the life in the center of the mass lived longest. I built ships—small ones, of course—and sent them out with rabbits, with monkeys—"

"Those are Beasts?"

"Yes. With small Beasts. And the Beasts came back unhurt. They came back because the walls of the ships were filled with life. I tried many kinds, and finally found a sort of life which lives in the waters. Oysters. Oyster-beds. The outermost oysters died in the great pain. The inner ones lived. The passengers were unhurt."

"But they were Beasts?"

"Not only Beasts. Myself."

"You!"

"I came through space alone. Through what you call the up-and-out, alone. Awake and sleeping. I am unhurt. If you do not believe me, ask your brother scanners. Come and see my ship in the morning. I will be glad to see you then, along with your brother scanners. I am going to demonstrate before the chiefs of the Instrumentality."

Martel repeated his question: "You came here alone?"

Adam Stone grew testy: "Yes, alone. Go back and check your scanner’s register if you do not believe me. You never put me in a bottle to cross Space."

Martel’s face was radiant. "I believe you now. It is true. No more scanners. No more habermans. No more cranching."

Stone looked significantly toward the door.

Martel did not take the hint. "I must tell you that—"

"Sir, tell me in the morning. Go enjoy your cranch. Isn’t it supposed to be pleasure? Medically I know it well. But not in practice."

"It is pleasure. It’s normality—for a while. But listen. The scanners have sworn to destroy you, and your work."

"What!"

"They have met and have voted and sworn. You will make scanners unnecessary, they say. You will bring the ancient wars back to the world, if scanning is lost and the scanners live in vain!"

Adam Stone was nervous but kept his wits about him: "You’re a scanner. Are you going to kill me—or try?"

"No, you fool. I have betrayed the Confraternity. Call guards the moment I escape. Keep guards around you. I will try to intercept the killer."

Martel saw a blur in the window. Before Stone could turn, the wirepoint was whipped out of his hand. The blur solidified and took form as Parizianski.

Martel recognized what Parizianski was doing: High speed. Without thinking of his cranch, he thrust his hand to his chest, set himself up to High speed too. Waves of fire, like the great pain, but hotter, flooded over him. He fought to keep his face readable as he stepped in front of Parizianski and gave the sign,

Top emergency.

Parizianski spoke, while the normally moving body of Stone stepped away from them as slowly as a drifting cloud: "Get out of my way. I am on a mission."

"I know it. I stop you here and now. Stop. Stop. Stop. Stone is right."

Parizianski’s lips were barely readable in the haze of pain which flooded Martel. (He thought: God, God, God of the ancients! Let me hold on! Let me live under Overload just long enough!) Parizianski was saying: "Get out of my way. By order of the Confraternity, get out of my way!" And Parizianski gave the sign, Help I demand in the name of my duty!

Martel choked for breath in the syruplike air. He tried one last time:

"Parizianski, friend, friend, my friend. Stop. Stop." (No scanner had ever murdered scanner before.)

Parizianski made the sign: You are unfit for duty, and I will take over.

Martel thought, For the first time in the world! as he reached over and twisted Parizianski’s brainbox up to Overload. Parizianski’s eyes glittered in terror and understanding. His body began to drift down toward the floor. Martel had just strength to reach his own chestbox. As he faded into haberman or death, he knew not which, he felt his fingers turning on the control of speed, turning down. He tried to speak, to say, "Get a scanner, I need help, get a scanner…"

But the darkness rose about him, and the numb silence clasped him.

Martel awakened to see the face of Luci near his own.

He opened his eyes wider, and found that he was hearing—hearing the sound of her happy weeping, the sound of her chest as she caught the air back into her throat.

He spoke weakly: "Still cranched? Alive?"

Another face swam into the blur beside Luci’s. It was Adam Stone. His deep voice rang across immensities of space before coming to Martel’s hearing. Martel tried to read Stone’s lips, but could not make them out. He went back to listening to the voice:

"—not cranched. Do you understand me? Not cranched!"

Martel tried to say: "But I can hear! I can feel!" The others got his sense if not his words.

Adam Stone spoke again:

"You have gone back through the haberman. I put you back first. I didn’t know how it would work in practice, but I had the theory all worked out. You don’t think the Instrumentality would waste the scanners, do you? You go back to normality. We are letting the habermans die as fast as the ships come in. They don’t need to live any more. But we are restoring the scanners. You are the first. Do you understand? You are the first. Take it easy, now."

Adam Stone smiled. Dimly behind Stone, Martel thought that he saw the face of one of the chiefs of the Instrumentality. That face, too, smiled at him, and then both faces disappeared upward and away.

Martel tried to lift his head, to scan himself. He could not. Luci stared at him, calming herself, but with an expression of loving perplexity. She said,

"My darling husband! You’re back again, to stay!"

Still, Martel tried to see his box. Finally he swept his hand across his chest with a clumsy motion. There was nothing there. The instruments were gone. He was back to normality but still alive.

In the deep weak peacefulness of his mind, another troubling thought took shape. He tried to write with his finger, the way that Luci wanted him to, but he had neither pointed fingernail nor scanner’s tablet. He had to use his voice. He summoned up his strength and whispered:

"Scanners?"

"Yes, darling? What is it?"

"Scanners?"

"Scanners. Oh, yes, darling, they’re all right. They had to arrest some of them for going into High speed and running away. But the Instrumentality caught them all—all those on the ground—and they’re happy now. Do you know, darling," she laughed, "some of them didn’t want to be restored to normality. But Stone and the chiefs persuaded them."

"Vomact?"

"He’s fine, too. He’s staying cranched until he can be restored. Do you know, he has arranged for scanners to take new jobs. You’re all to be deputy chiefs for Space. Isn’t that nice? But he got himself made chief for Space. You’re all going to be pilots, so that your fraternity and guild can go on. And Chang’s getting changed right now. You’ll see him soon."

Her face turned sad. She looked at him earnestly and said: "I might as well tell you now. You’ll worry otherwise. There has been one accident. Only one. When you and your friend called on Adam Stone, your friend was so happy that he forgot to scan, and he let himself die of Overload."

"Called on Stone?"

"Yes. Don’t you remember? Your friend."

He still looked surprised, so she said:

"Parizianski."

MUSÉE DE L’ÂME SEULE E. Lily Yu

It was a bus skidding off a rain-slick ribbon of a road, everyone for a moment in flight, levitating from their seats, then the shear and scream of metal. This is what distinguishes you from others. For whether you were shot to bits in a war or whether a telephone pole crushed your liver against the steering wheel, the procedure is the same. You can assume what happened after that.

Unless you are wildly rich—and you are not—the puddles of your organs were scooped out and replaced with artificial tissues that perform the necessary filtration, synthesis, and excretion for a fraction of the price of a transplant. Splintered bones become slim metal shafts. Ceramic scales cover ruined skin. They wheeled you out of the operating room hooked up to a bouquet of tubes, batteries, and drains, a grid of lights screwed into your plates, blinking red, blue, green. Stable. Functioning. Okay. As the drugs wore off you began to fumble at the strange new surfaces of your body.

Your lover was in Zanzibar on a lucrative minerals contract and did not hear about your accident until after they had patched you up enough to tap out the first of many detailed emails. The damage was extensive, your reconstruction complicated. For the rest of our life you will need a constant power supply, a backup generator, and hourly system flushes. You could choose to live homebound, they say, never passing your door. They quote you the prices of the various adaptors and chargers you need, and you laugh and cannot stop laughing, lightning balls of pain throughout your unfamiliar body.

Or, the nurses say, nervously thumbing down their screens, you could move to an experimental city in Washington designed for patients like you, where you would enjoy a certain degree of freedom and company. They do not add, a place where everyone looks like you. But their eyes shine with kindness.

Your lover offers to pay for the house installation. If nothing else, you should give him credit for that.

One nurse makes sure you are loaned a set of equipment from the hospital for your transitional period. You consider absconding with the adaptors—if the prices are to be believed, they’re worth a small Caribbean island or two—but you can’t extract the tracking tags. Besides, the nurse was nice.

You ship two cardboard boxes to the address they give you and sell the rest. You give away your pair of budgerigars because you can’t take them with you. Your lover never liked them. Too noisy. Too messy. Too demanding. They chewed up the clawfooted chair from his grandfather’s estate, little chips and nocks like angry kisses in the gloss.

Unexpected difficulties with buses and trains and airlines keep your beloved in Zanzibar, so when it’s time to leave, your friends do the heavy lifting for you. They are polite. They try not to stare.

"What a dipshit," you hear one mutter, unhooking a photo of your lover, and she is right. He should be here with you, packing sweaters you can’t wear anymore in plastic, boxing up your dinner plates.

You take the medical flight that leaves twice a month, your new address printed on a plastic strip around your wrist. Your college roommate sees you off. You hand over your borrowed equipment at the gate, shrugging off the promises of care packages and visits. You flinch from the hug. You don’t look back.

The air is sweet on your exposed skin when you first see the square mile of concrete that is Revival. At the center of the city, a sheaf of faceted skyscrapers floats above a squat white mall. Rings of smaller apartments slope down and away, glass and steel congealing to stucco, brick, and concrete as they approach the city limits, where buildings meet crisp dark pines, sharp as cuts. Far beyond the pines rise whitened mountains like licked ice cream. You will dream sometimes of climbing those mountains and plunging your face into soft, shocking snow.

It is impossible, of course. Your batteries have enough charge for a couple of hours, but without fresh supplies of lymph and plasma, there’s only so much your filters can do. The city newsroom is staffed by former war reporters, bulletproof and bitter, and every couple of months there’s a story about a disconnection, either accidental or deliberate.

In determinedly cheerful emails, you recount to your absent lover everything he has missed. You have been assigned a fifteen-by-fifteen room with enormous windows in the southeast corner of Revival. You have not yet bought a mirror. Very few stores stock them, and you are not sure you want one. Pets are prohibited. Rent is moderate but food prices are inflated and utility bills are astronomical. Double-digit municipal taxes give you a slight headache. The consortium of medical providers managing the city is nominally a nonprofit, but you do the numbers on the back of an electricity bill and figure the executives must be drawing large salaries.

Since you are an accountant, you can work remotely. Your clients, who heard about the bus crash and have offered their timid condolences, assure you that it does not matter to them whether you are based in Des Moines or Los Angeles or Revival, Washington. Other residents are not so lucky. Their debts are paid for out of their retirement savings, or their estate, or alternatively by the sale of their genome and medical history and whatever organic components remain at the time of their death. The lease document makes for an interesting read. You tear the pages into tiny strips as you go.

All too soon, you memorize the silver line of cables and pumps that strings apartment block to apartment block, running through grocery store aisles and along library shelves and shooting up the five floors of the bright, sterile mall. You know where it turns at the end of the pavement, in the shadow of the pines, and loops back toward the mall. A local joke has it that the silver lines, if viewed from above, if all the intervening roofs and floors and ceilings were removed, spell out freedom.

The city is lousy with crows, who dive for flashes of metal and glints of porcelain. They are not discouraged by thirty failed attempts if, on the thirty-first, they snatch a pin, a lens, a loose filament. They are easy to fend off, but the cold acquisitiveness in their eyes makes you shiver.

Your lover comes to visit you only once, four and a half months after you move to Revival. You are slow, still limping, and a minute late. He climbs out of the taxi in his pressed suit and razor tie and looks around, fiddling with a button, cufflinks, hair. You are grateful that he recognizes you immediately. But he shrinks back a fraction of an inch when his eyes reach the steel screwed into your face and the coarse, fitful wires that grow where your skull was shaved.

You are surprised. In Revival, where glamour magazines gather dust and fade, you are considered beautiful. Eyes slide toward you on the street. You had almost forgotten about the seams and screws, the viscous yellow and red fluids trickling in and out of you, the cables tangling everywhere.

If you are honest with yourself, as you suddenly have to be, standing face to face with him, the two of you have not been lovers for some time. Right before the accident, you had agreed to separate for six months, as an audit of the relationship. You fed sunflower seeds to Tessie as he talked about opportunities in Tanzania, about looking for clarity in his life, his need to feel whole, like a hammer swing, a home run, his entire body committed to one motion. You nodded, you admitted the solidity of his arguments, and you stroked the budgie so roughly it bit your finger.

While you were apart, he wrote a paragraph once a week in response to your daily emails. You would reread it three or four times, looking for the elided thought, the sunken meaning. It was October, the busy season, and you were starting to make mistakes and lose paperwork. When the last return was triple-checked and filed, you heaved a sigh of relief and boarded a bus for Maine, where you would spend your vacation with a friend.

It was raining. Water entered an unnoticed hole in the toe of your boot, and you wrote a brief grumble to your love. Then the bus rumbled into the night, and you shut your eyes and let yourself relax.

So you are not exactly together, you realize, as you take his stiff arm. Together, you go to the third-nicest restaurant in the city for lunch. Your lover cannot stop staring at the servers, who are mostly inorganic by now and capable of carrying hundreds of pounds on each slender, tempered arm. His brows stitch together, and all the filet mignon in the world can’t undo them.

Afterwards, he follows you to your apartment and undresses you with clumsy hands, snagging sleeves on tubes and almost unplugging your drip. But he cannot bring himself to touch the ceramic plates of your abdomen, which vibrate softly from the tiny motors underneath. You are disappointed but not altogether surprised.

You see your lover off with the driest of kisses. Then you compose a long email that is gentle and gracious, that is all the best parts of you gathered on the screen.

Your former lover does not reply.

"He wants a window-display life," your old roommate says when you call, finally, ashamed of your silence, your sticky sniffling. "You’re not perfect enough for that. Not anymore." And she is right.

You try to find friends. Revival is a city, after all. You smile at people in the library as they browse books, music, electronics, language implants, avoiding the woman in the mystery section who is methodically tearing apart paperbacks. Most of the librarians are asleep at their desks.

You chat up tired cashiers. You sit in the synthetic park feeding bread to a duck paddling circles in the fountain. But the people you meet are still in various stages of recovery. They can only talk about the passive-aggressive bosses, the snowballing interest on their credit cards, the diagnoses, the lost loves, the affairs and then the tequila that preceded the leap off a bridge, or the microwaved dinners the children ate before they piled into the van for judo class, nine minutes before the other car roared through a red light and everything shattered. If only there were do-overs, if only there were apologies, if only the last meal could have been homemade chicken soup or macaroni and cheese. If only.

It is interesting and terrible the first time, but when you run into them later, they recite the same stories with the tragic and farcical earnestness of wind-up toys, and you make hasty excuses and leave.

Eight months after you arrive in Revival, you make an appointment for repairs. Your left lung, which is silicon rubber, has a small tear, and you are also due for a heart check. The clinic is one of two, staffed with five doctors and fifteen technicians, none of whom have missing pieces or live in the city. Your technician, Joel, is young, lean, and cheerful, with a strong nose and wild brown hair recently harrowed by a comb.

"Hey, stranger," he says. "First time? Let’s have a look." He winds your tubes around one arm so they don’t obstruct his hands and looks expectantly at you. Suddenly you are too shy to open up your body to him, to expose the secret gushing and dripping of pump and membrane and diaphragm, the click and thump of your pneumatic plastic heart.

"It’ll be fine," he says. "You’ve got a Mark 5 heart and the D34-15 lung assembly. I did my certs on both of those, so I know them better than anything. I collect defective parts, and I can almost never find Mark 5s. They don’t break."

His palm is warm on your ventral plates. He inserts his fingertips into the seamed depression where they overlap and parts the plates with surprising delicacy. Because your body was rebuilt for other people to troubleshoot, you cannot see the gauges and displays that he studies with wrinkled brow, although you know they’re there, you’ve heard them ticking and whirring at night.

"Looking great," he says. "Mhm. You do a good job of taking care of this thing."

He reaches into your chest. You close your eyes and imagine that your heart is your own heart, wet and yielding to his thumbs, not a mass-produced model identical to hundreds of others he has inspected and installed. You wonder what his hair would feel like between your remaining fingers. Corn silk. Merino. Mink.

In ten minutes, Joel patches your lung and proclaims your Mk. 5 a beautiful ticker. You compliment him on the job. Already you can feel the extra oxygen brightening your blood, and the dull headache that has followed you all week fades. You are feeling so improved, in fact, that before you can think better of it, you invite him to coffee.

His mouth opens into a circle. You can see the glint of your zygomatic plate on the surface of his eyes. The inner tips of his eyebrows lift with pity.

"Well, isn’t this awkward," he says, attempting a smile. "Never happened to me before."

You would be amused by his panic if it were not so painful. You mumble something or other.

"Bit of a—doctor-patient relationship—even if I’m not a doctor. You know."

You do know.

Your cheeks burn like torches the entire walk home. Today the rigid, brilliant architecture of the city seems like too much to bear. Your image flares at you from windows and glass doors. Yes, you are ugly. Yes, you are broken. Briefly, you consider disconnecting yourself and plunging into the trees in the few minutes before you collapse and all your diagnostic lights go red. You walk to the edge of the woods and sit quietly on the pavement, looking into the underbrush.

The trees are full of crows. Every few feet the grass is punctuated with a black pinion feather. Somewhere in these woods, the crows are building nests with wire, silicone, plastic, sequins of steel.

You listen to their quarrelling and think regretfully of your green and yellow budgies. Sweet-voiced things, your idea of love. They nuzzled your fingers and each other, unworried, content, knowing there’d be seeds in the feeder and water every morning.

You are motionless for so long that one crow flaps down to inspect you, eyeing his reflection in your metal side. He pecks. Once, twice. You have been working a loose wire out of your neck, which was wound up somewhere inside you but is now poking out, and you twist it off and hold out the gleaming piece.

He yanks it from your fingers and flees. Immediately, two more crows drop out of the trees to pummel him. You watch his oily back disappear into a squall of black bodies, reappear, disappear again. As they fight, black beak, jet claw, ragged bundles of greed, you remember what it meant to feel desire.

Over the course of a week, as a glittering shape flowers inside your head, you examine your budget, your savings, your expenses.

You order twelve carnival mirrors and set them up in your apartment. There is no more room for your bed, so you sell that to a new arrival. You also buy three old industrial robots, rusted and caked in machine oil. The boxes arrive thick and fast, and your apartment manager, who knows the square footage of your room, raises his single eyebrow at you when you come to collect them. Now, everywhere you turn, you confront an elastic vision of yourself, stretching as high as the ceiling and snapping to the shortness of a child. The eyes in the mirror gradually lose their fear.

You write about everything to your former lover as a matter of habit, not expecting a reply.

Biting your cheek, you call Joel to ask where you can buy faulty artificial organs. He listens to your flustered explanation and gives you contacts as well as three hearts, Mk. 1, 2, and 4, out of his own collection. You balance them in the robots’ pincers like apples in a bowl.

With a net and a handful of bread, you catch birds on the roof: house sparrows, rock pigeons, crows, an unhappy seagull. You release the birds in your glass coffin crammed with carnival mirrors. They batter themselves against the window and shit on the mirrors and on you. Your room is all trapped, frantic motion, exaggerated in swells and rolls of glass. People look sideways at you when you leave your room, your chrome and steel parts streaked with white. You look at your slumped, stretched, stained reflections and recognize nothing and no one.

Sometimes, when the room is dark, you can admit that you are making this for someone who will never see it, who will never come back, who will never write to you. Then you roll onto your good side and listen to the flurry of wings until you fall asleep.

You set out neatly lettered signs in your window and on your door. Musée de l’Âme Seule. Signage is probably against building regulations, but you used the shreds of your lease to line your room. You run a notice in the news that is two inches by two inches. Saturdays and Sundays. You keep your door unlocked. You feed the birds, you wipe down the hearts, and you wait.

Joel comes to see you, or perhaps to see what you’ve done with his hearts.

"Where do you sleep?" he says, looking around.

Anywhere, you say.

His expression says he thinks parts other than your lung need examining. But he is also curious. He touches the orange arms curled around artificial ventricles, the frozen rovers sprouting substitute livers at odd angles.

"I’m not very good at art," he says. A sparrow shits in his hair.

You offer to wipe up the mess, you are already wetting a towel in the sink, but he has to leave, he is meeting someone somewhere else, he has left his jacket at the clinic, he is late.

Two weeks later, on a Sunday morning, one more person walks into your museum. She swings open your door and is surprised into laughter by a burst of gray wings. She is even uglier than you are, most of her face gone, hard bright camera lenses for eyes. She has glued pages of books and playbills over her carapace.

"I was an actress," she says.

She has been in all the shows that she wears. The pages came from books she liked but couldn’t keep. Her name is Nim. She has been in the city ab urbe condita, she says, meaning four years ago, when it was fifteen residents and three doctors and one building. She walks around your room as she talks, studying the mirrors, the machines, the birds, the bounce of her own reflection.

Without asking permission, she shoves a window open and shoos out the birds. They leave in one long shout of white and gray and brown. Flecks of down spin and swirl in their wake.

You ask her how long it took to remember how to walk, how to function, how to smile.

"Two weeks. Three months. Two years." She shrugs. "Sooner or later."

Nim has no hair, only a complex web of filaments across her metal skull, flickering her thoughts in patterns too quick to follow. Her hands are small and dark and unscarred.

"Look," she says, touching the skin of your cheek, showing off her lean titanium legs. "Together we make one whole person."

More than that, you want to say, as you add up fingers and toes and organs and elbows. A sum that is greater than one. More than two. But you are tongue-tied and dazed. You realize that you stink of birds and bird shit.

She smiles at your confusion. "I’ll bring you some gloves and cleaning supplies."

What for, you say stupidly.

"To shine up this place."

But this is what I am, you say. This is what I look like. You stretch out your hands to indicate the mirrors, the stained, spattered floors, the streaked walls.

"You could use a spit and polish too, frankly." She demonstrates, using her sleeve, and you blush.

But why are you here, you ask. Why is she touching you with gentleness? You are afraid that this is all an accident, a colossal misunderstanding, that she will walk out of the door and vanish like your sparrows.

"I’m looking for a collaborator," she says. "I’ve got an idea. Performance art. Public service. If you can clean up and come for lunch tomorrow, I’ll tell you about it."

Inside you, a window opens.

That was when you stopped writing to me. Your long, careful emails came to an end. What is there to say? The stories of people we have loved and injured and deserted are incomplete to us.

If I could write an ending for you, it would be Nim holding your new hand in hers, Nim tickling your back until you wheeze with laughter, the two of you commandeering an office block for a new museum, a museum of broken and repaired people, where anyone for an hour or three can pose in a spotlight and glitter, glisten, gleam, haloed in light, light leaping off the white teeth of their laughter. But it is never that easy, and that is not my right.

You knew, I think, before I did. That no one can have a life that is without questions, without cracks. And now you are the deepest one in mine.

Here is what I have. A year and two months of emails. A restaurant check. A glossy fragment from a magazine, two inches by two inches. Terse. Opaque. Musée de l’Âme Réparée. Saturdays and Sundays. Revival, WA.

What could I say? What could I ever say?

THE WINTER MARKET William Gibson

It rains a lot, up here; there are winter days when it doesn’t really get light at all, only a bright, indeterminate gray. But then there are days when it’s like they whip aside a curtain to flash you three minutes of sunlit, suspended mountain, the trademark at the start of God’s own movie. It was like that the day her agents phoned, from deep in the heart of their mirrored pyramid on Beverly Boulevard, to tell me she’d merged with the net, crossed over for good, that Kings of Sleep was going triple-platinum. I’d edited most of Kings, done the brain-map work and gone over it all with the fast-wipe module, so I was in line for a share of royalties.

No, I said, no. Then yes, yes, and hung up on them. Got my jacket and took the stairs three at a time, straight out to the nearest bar and an eight-hour blackout that ended on a concrete ledge two meters above midnight. False Creek water. City lights, that same gray bowl of sky smaller now, illuminated by neon and mercury-vapor arcs. And it was snowing, big flakes but not many, and when they touched black water, they were gone, no trace at all. I looked down at my feet and saw my toes clear of the edge of concrete, the water between them. I was wearing Japanese shoes, new and expensive, glove-leather Ginza monkey boots with rubber-capped toes. I stood there for a long time before I took that first step back.

Because she was dead, and I’d let her go. Because, now, she was immortal, and I’d helped her get that way. And because I knew she’d phone me, in the morning.

My father was an audio engineer, a mastering engineer. He went way back, in the business, even before digital. The processes he was concerned with were partly mechanical, with that clunky quasi-Victorian quality you see in twentieth-century technology. He was a lathe operator, basically. People brought him audio recordings and he burned their sounds into grooves on a disk of lacquer. Then the disk was electroplated and used in the construction of a press that would stamp out records, the black things you see in antique stores. And I remember him telling me, once, a few months before he died, that certain frequencies—transients, I think he called them—could easily burn out the head, the cutting head, on a master lathe. These heads were incredibly expensive, so you prevented burnouts with something called an accelerometer. And that was what I was thinking of, as I stood there, my toes out over the water: that head, burning out.

Because that was what they did to her.

And that was what she wanted.

No accelerometer for Lise.

I disconnected my phone on my way to bed. I did it with the business end of a West German studio tripod that was going to cost a week’s wages to repair.

Woke some strange time later and took a cab back to Granville Island and Rubin’s place.

Rubin, in some way that no one quite understands, is a master, a teacher, what the Japanese call a sensei. What he’s the master of, really, is garbage, kipple, refuse, the sea of cast-off goods our century floats on. Gomi no sensei. Master of junk.

I found him, this time, squatting between two vicious-looking drum machines I hadn’t seen before, rusty spider arms folded at the hearts of dented constellations of steel cans fished out of Richmond dumpsters. He never calls the place a studio, never refers to himself as an artist. "Messing around," he calls what he does there, and seems to view it as some extension of boyhood’s perfectly bored backyard afternoons. He wanders through his jammed, littered space, a kind of minihangar cobbled to the water side of the Market, followed by the smarter and more agile of his creations, like some vaguely benign Satan bent on the elaboration of still stranger processes in his ongoing Inferno of gomi. I’ve seen Rubin program his constructions to identify and verbally abuse pedestrians wearing garments by a given season’s hot designer; others attend to more obscure missions, and a few seem constructed solely to deconstruct themselves with as much attendant noise as possible. He’s like a child, Rubin; he’s also worth a lot of money in galleries in Tokyo and Paris.

So I told him about Lise. He let me do it, get it out, then nodded. "I know," he said. "Some CBC creep phoned eight times." He sipped something out of a dented cup. "You wanna Wild Turkey sour?"

"Why’d they call you?"

`Cause my name’s on the back of Kings of Sleep. Dedication."

"I didn’t see it yet."

"She try to call you yet?"

"She will."

"Rubin, she’s dead. They cremated her already."

"I know," he said. "And she’s going to call you."

Gomi.

Where does the gomi stop and the world begin? The Japanese, a century ago, had already run out of gomi space around Tokyo, so they came up with a plan for creating space out of gomi. By the year 1969 they had built themselves a little island in Tokyo Bay, out of gomi, and christened it Dream Island. But the city was still pouring out its nine thousand tons per day, so they went on to build New Dream Island, and today they coordinate the whole process, and new Nippons rise out of the Pacific. Rubin watches this on the news and says nothing at all.

He has nothing to say about gomi. It’s his medium, the air he breathes, something he’s swum in all his life. He cruises Greater Van in a spavined truck-thing chopped down from an ancient Mercedes airporter, its roof lost under a wallowing rubber bag half-filled with natural gas. He looks for things that fit some strange design scrawled on the inside of his forehead by whatever serves him as Muse. He brings home more gomi. Some of it still operative. Some of it, like Lise, human.

I met Lise at one of Rubin’s parties. Rubin had a lot of parties. He never seemed particularly to enjoy them, himself, but they were excellent parties. I lost track, that fall, of the number of times I woke on a slab of foam to the roar of Rubin’s antique espresso machine, a tarnished behemoth topped with a big chrome eagle, the sound outrageous off the corrugated steel walls of the place, but massively comforting, too: There was coffee. Life would go on.

First time I saw her: in the Kitchen Zone. You wouldn’t call it a kitchen, exactly, just three fridges and a hot plate and a broken convection oven that had come in with the gomi. First time I saw her: She had the all-beer fridge open, light spilling out, and I caught the cheekbones and the determined set of that mouth, but I also caught the black glint of polycarbon at her wrist, and the bright slick sore the exoskeleton had rubbed there. Too drunk to process, to know what it was, but I did know it wasn’t party time. So I did what people usually did, to Lise, and clicked myself into a different movie. Went for the wine instead, on the counter beside the convection oven. Never looked back.

But she found me again. Came after me two hours later, weaving through the bodies and junk with that terrible grace programmed into the exoskeleton. I knew what it was, then, as I watched her homing in, too embarrassed now to duck it, to run, to mumble some excuse and get out. Pinned there, my arm around the waist of a girl I didn’t know, while Lise advanced—was advanced, with that mocking grace—straight at me now, her eyes burning with wizz, and the girl had wriggled out and away in a quiet social panic, was gone, and Lise stood there in front of me, propped up in her pencil-thin polycarbon prosthetic. Looked into those eyes and it was like you could hear her synapses whining, some impossibly high-pitched scream as the wizz opened every circuit in her brain.

"Take me home," she said, and the words hit me like a whip. I think I shook my head. "Take me home." There were levels of pain there, and subtlety, and an amazing cruelty. And I knew then that I’d never been hated, ever, as deeply or thoroughly as this wasted little girl hated me now, hated me for the way I’d looked, then looked away, beside Rubin’s all-beer refrigerator.

So if that’s the word I did one of those things you do and never find out why, even though something in you knows you could never have done anything else.

I took her home.

I have two rooms in an old condo rack at the corner of Fourth and MacDonald, tenth floor. The elevators usually work, and if you sit on the balcony railing and lean out backward, holding on to the corner of the building next door, you can see a little upright slit of sea and mountain.

She hadn’t said a word, all the way back from Rubin’s, and I was getting sober enough to feel very uneasy as I unlocked the door and let her in.

The first thing she saw was the portable fast-wipe I’d brought home from the Pilot the night before. The exoskeleton carried her across the dusty broadloom with that same walk, like a model down a runway. Away from the crash of the party, I could hear it click softly as it moved her. She stood there, looking down at the fast-wipe. I could see the thing’s ribs when she stood like that, make them out across her back through the scuffed black leather of her jacket. One of those diseases. Either one of the old ones they’ve never quite figured out or one of the new ones—the all too obviously environmental kind that they’ve barely even named yet. She couldn’t move, not without that extra skeleton, and it was jacked straight into her brain, myoclectric interface. The fragile-looking polycarbon braces moved her arms and legs, but a more subtle system handled her thin hands, galvanic inlays. I thought of frog legs twitching in a high-school lab tape, then hated myself for it.

"This is a fast-wipe module," she said, in a voice I hadn’t heard before, distant, and I thought then that the wizz might be wearing off. "What’s it doing here?"

"I edit," I said, closing the door behind me.

"Well, now," and she laughed. "You do. Where?"

"On the Island. Place called the Autonomic Pilot."

She turned; then, hand on thrust hip, she swung—it swung her—and the wizz and the hate and some terrible parody of lust stabbed out at me from those washed-out gray eyes. "You wanna make it, editor?"

And I felt the whip come down again, but I wasn’t going to take it, not again. So I cold-eyed her from somewhere down in the beer-numb core of my walking, talking, live-limbed, and entirely ordinary body and the words came out of me like spit: "Could you feel it, if I did?"

Beat. Maybe she blinked, but her face never registered. "No," she said, "but sometimes I like to watch."

Rubin stands at the window, two days after her death in Los Angeles, watching snow fall into False Creek. "So you never went to bed with her?"

One of his push-me-pull-you’s, little roller-bearing Escher lizards, scoots across the table in front of me, in curl-up mode.

"No." I say, and it’s true. Then I laugh. "But we jacked straight across. That first night."

"You were crazy," he said, a certain approval in his voice. "It might have killed you. Your heart might have stopped, you might have stopped breathing…" He turns back to the window. "Has she called you yet?"

We jacked, straight across.

I’d never done it before. If you’d asked me why, I would have told you that I was an editor and that it wasn’t professional.

The truth would be something more like this.

In the trade, the legitimate trade—I’ve never done porno—we call the raw product dry dreams. Dry dreams are neural output from levels of consciousness that most people can only access in sleep. But artists, the kind I work with at the Autonomic Pilot, are able to break the surface tension, dive down deep, down and out, out into Jung’s sea, and bring back—well, dreams. Keep it simple. I guess some artists have always done that, in whatever medium, but neuroelectronics lets us access the experience, and the net gets it all out on the wire, so we can package it, sell it, watch how it moves in the market. Well, the more things change… That’s something my father liked to say.

Ordinarily I get the raw material in a studio situation, filtered through several million dollars’ worth of baffles, and I don’t even have to see the artist. The stuff we get out to the consumer, you see, has been structured, balanced, turned into art. There are still people naive enough to assume that they’ll actually enjoy jacking straight across with someone they love. I think most teenagers try it, once. Certainly it’s easy enough to do; Radio Shack will sell you the box and the trodes and the cables. But me, I’d never done it. And now that I think about it, I’m not so sure I can explain why. Or that I even want to try.

I do know why I did it with Lise, sat down beside her on my Mexican futon and snapped the optic lead into the socket on the spine, the smooth dorsal ridge, of the exoskeleton. It was high up, at the base of her neck, hidden by her dark hair.

Because she claimed she was an artist, and because I knew that we were engaged, somehow, in total combat, and I was not going to lose. That may not make sense to you, but then you never knew her, or know her through Kings of Sleep, which isn’t the same at all. You never felt that hunger she had, which was pared down to a dry need, hideous in its singleness of purpose. People who know exactly what they want have always frightened me, and Lise had known what she wanted for a long time, and wanted nothing else at all. And I was scared, then, of admitting to myself that I was scared, and I’d seen enough strangers’ dreams, in the mixing room at the Autonomic Pilot, to know that most people’s inner monsters are foolish things, ludicrous in the calm light of one’s own consciousness. And I was still drunk.

I put the trodes on and reached for the stud on the fast-wipe. I’d shut down its studio functions, temporarily converting eighty thousand dollars’ worth of Japanese electronics to the equivalent of one of those little Radio Shack boxes. "Hit it," I said, and touched the switch.

Words. Words cannot. Or, maybe, just barely, if I even knew how to begin to describe it, what came up out of her, what she did…

There’s a segment on Kings of Sleep; it’s like you’re on a motorcycle at midnight, no lights but somehow you don’t need them, blasting out along a cliff-high stretch of coast highway, so fast that you hang there in a cone of silence, the bike’s thunder lost behind you. Everything, lost behind you… It’s just a blink, on Kings, but it’s one of the thousand things you remember, go back to, incorporate into your own vocabulary of feelings. Amazing. Freedom and death, right there, right there, razor’s edge, forever.

What I got was the big-daddy version of that, raw rush, the king hell killer uncut real thing, exploding eight ways from Sunday into a void that stank of poverty and lovelessness and obscurity.

And that was Lise’s ambition, that rush, seen from the inside.

It probably took all of four seconds.

And, course, she’d won.

I took the trodes off and stared at the wall, eyes wet, the framed posters swimming.

I couldn’t look at her. I heard her disconnect the optic lead. I heard the exoskeleton creak as it hoisted her up from the futon. Heard it tick demurely as it hauled her into the kitchen for a glass of water.

Then I started to cry.

Rubin inserts a skinny probe in the roller-bearing belly of a sluggish push-me-pull-you and peers at the circuitry through magnifying glasses with miniature headlights mounted at the temples.

"So? You got hooked." He shrugs, looks up. It’s dark now and the twin tensor beams stab at my face, chill damp in his steel barn and the lonesome hoot of a foghorn from somewhere across the water. "So?"

My turn to shrug. "I just did… There didn’t seem to be anything else to do."

The beams duck back to the silicon heart of his defective toy. "Then you’re okay. It was a true choice. What I mean is, she was set to be what she is. You had about as much to do with where she’s at today as that fast-wipe module did. She’d have found somebody else if she hadn’t found you…."

I made a deal with Barry, the senior editor, got twenty minutes at five on a cold September morning. Lise came in and hit me with that same shot, but this time I was ready, with my baffles and brain maps, and I didn’t have to feel it. It took me two weeks, piecing out the minutes in the editing room, to cut what she’d done down into something I could play for Max Bell, who owns the Pilot.

Bell hadn’t been happy, not happy at all, as I explained what I’d done. Maverick editors can be a problem, and eventually most editors decide that they’ve found someone who’ll be it, the next monster, and then they start wasting time and money. He’d nodded when I’d finished my pitch, then scratched his nose with the cap of his red feltpen. "Uh-huh. Got it. Hottest thing since fish grew legs, right?"

But he’d jacked it, the demo soft I’d put together, and when it clicked out of its slot in his Braun desk unit, he was staring at the wall, his face blank.

"Max?"

"Huh?"

"What do you think?"

"Think? I… What did you say her name was?" He blinked. "Lisa? Who you say she’s signed with?"

"Lise. Nobody, Max. She hasn’t signed with anybody yet."

"Jesus Christ." He still looked blank.

"You know how I found her?" Rubin asks, wading through ragged cardboard boxes to find the light switch. The boxes are filled with carefully sorted gomi: lithium batteries, tantalum capacitors, RF connectors, breadboards, barrier strips, ferroresonant transformers, spools of bus bar wire… One box is filled with the severed heads of hundreds of Barbie dolls, another with armored industrial safety gauntlets that look like spacesuit gloves. Light floods the room and a sort of Kandinski mantis in snipped and painted tin swings its golfball-size head toward the bright bulb. "I was down Granville on a gomi run, back in an alley, and I found her just sitting there. Caught the skeleton and she didn’t look so good, so I asked her if she was okay. Nothin’. Just closed her eyes. Not my lookout, I think. But I happen back by there about four hours later and she hasn’t moved. ‘Look, honey,’ I tell her, ‘maybe your hardware’s buggered up. I can help you, okay?’ Nothin’. ‘How long you been back here?’ Nothin’. So I take off." He crosses to his workbench and strokes the thin metal limbs of the mantis thing with a pale forefinger. Behind the bench, hung on damp-swollen sheets of ancient pegboard, are pliers, screwdrivers, tie-wrap guns, a rusted Daisy BB rifle, coax strippers, crimpers, logic probes, heat guns, a pocket oscilloscope, seemingly every tool in human history, with no attempt ever made to order them at all, though I’ve yet to see Rubin’s hand hesitate.

"So I went back," he says. "Gave it an hour. She was out by then, unconscious, so I brought her back here and ran a check on the exoskeleton. Batteries were dead. She’d crawled back there when the juice ran out and settled down to starve to death, I guess."

"When was that?"

"About a week before you took her home."

"But what if she’d died? If you hadn’t found her?"

"Somebody was going to find her. She couldn’t ask for anything, you know? Just take. Couldn’t stand a favor."

Max found the agents for her, and a trio of awesomely slick junior partners Leared into YVR a day later. Lise wouldn’t come down to the Pilot to meet them, insisted we bring them up to Rubin’s, where she still slept.

"Welcome to Couverville," Rubin said as they edged in the door. His long face was smeared with grease, the fly of his ragged fatigue pants held more or less shut with a twisted paper clip. The boys grinned automatically, but there was something marginally more authentic about the girl’s smile. "Mr. Stark," she said, "I was in London last week. I saw your installation at the Tate."

"Marcello’s Battery Factory," Rubin said. "They say it’s scatological, the Brits…" He shrugged. "Brits. I mean, who knows?"

"They’re right. It’s also very funny."

The boys were beaming like tabled-tanned lighthouses, standing there in their suits. The demo had reached Los Angeles. They knew.

"And you’re Lise," she said, negotiating the path between Rubin’s heaped gomi. "You’re going to be a very famous person soon, Lise. We have a lot to discuss.

And Lise just stood there, propped in polycarbon, and the look on her face was the one I’d seen that first night, in my condo, when she’d asked me if I wanted to go to bed. But if the junior agent lady saw it, she didn’t show it. She was a pro.

I told myself that I was a pro, too.

I told myself to relax.

Trash fires gutter in steel canisters around the Market. The snow still falls and kids huddle over the flames like arthritic crows, hopping from foot to foot, wind whipping their dark coats. Up in Fairview’s arty slum-tumble, someone’s laundry has frozen solid on the line, pink squares of bedsheet standing out against the background dinge and the confusion of satellite dishes and solar panels. Some ecologist’s eggbeater windmill goes round and round, round and round, giving a whirling finger to the Hydro rates.

Rubin clumps along in paint-spattered L. L. Bean gumshoes, his big head pulled down into an oversize fatigue jacket. Sometimes one of the hunched teens will point him out as we pass, the guy who builds all the crazy stuff, the robots and shit.

"You know what your trouble is?" he says when we’re under the bridge, headed up to Fourth. "You’re the kind who always reads the handbook. Anything people build, any kind of technology, it’s going to have some specific purpose. It’s for doing something that somebody already understands. But if it’s new technology, it’ll open areas nobody’s ever thought of before. You read the manual, man, and you won’t play around with it, not the same way. And you get all funny when somebody else uses it to do something you never thought of. Like Lise."

"She wasn’t the first." Traffic drums past overhead.

"No, but she’s sure as hell the first person you ever met who went and translated themself into a hardwired program. You lose any sleep when whatsisname did it, three-four years ago, the French kid, the writer?"

"I didn’t really think about it, much. A gimmick. PR…"

"He’s still writing. The weird thing is, he’s going to be writing, unless somebody blows up his mainframe…"

I wince, shake my head. "But it’s not him, is it? It’s just a program."

"Interesting point. Hard to say. With Lise, though, we find out. She’s not a writer."

She had it all in there, Kings, locked up in her head the way her body was locked in that exoskeleton.

The agents signed her with a label and brought in a production team from Tokyo. She told them she wanted me to edit. I said no; Max dragged me into his office and threatened to fire me on the spot. If I wasn’t involved, there was no reason to do the studio work at the Pilot. Vancouver was hardly the center of the world, and the agents wanted her in Los Angeles. It meant a lot of money to him, and it might put the Autonomic Pilot on the map. I couldn’t explain to him why I’d refused. It was too crazy, too personal; she was getting a final dig in. Or that’s what I thought then. But Max was serious. He really didn’t give me any choice. We both knew another job wasn’t going to crawl into my hand. I went back out with him and we told the agents that we’d worked it out: I was on.

The agents showed us lots of teeth.

Lise pulled out an inhaler full of wizz and took a huge hit. I thought I saw the agent lady raise one perfect eyebrow, but that was the extent of censure. After the papers were signed, Lise more or less did what she wanted.

And Lise always knew what she wanted.

We did Kings in three weeks, the basic recording. I found any number of reasons to avoid Rubin’s place, even believed some of them myself. She was still staying there, although the agents weren’t too happy with what they saw as a total lack of security. Rubin told me later that he’d had to have his agent call them up and raise hell, but after that they seemed to quit worrying. I hadn’t known that Rubin had an agent. It was always easy to forget that Rubin Stark was more famous, then, than anyone else I knew, certainly more famous than I thought Lise was ever likely to become. I knew we were working on something strong, but you never know how big anything’s liable to be.

But the time I spent in the Pilot, I was on. Lise was amazing.

It was like she was born to the form, even though the technology that made that form possible hadn’t even existed when she was born. You see something like that and you wonder how many thousands, maybe millions, of phenomenal artists have died mute, down the centuries, people who could never have been poets or painters or saxophone players, but who had this stuff inside, these psychic waveforms waiting for the circuitry required to tap in….

I learned a few things about her, incidentals, from our time in the studio. That she was born in Windsor. That her father was American and served in Peru and came home crazy and half-blind. That whatever was wrong with her body was congenital. That she had those sores because she refused to remove the exoskeleton, ever, because she’d start to choke and die at the thought of that utter helplessness. That she was addicted to wizz and doing enough of it daily to wire a football team.

Her agents brought in medics, who padded the polycarbon with foam and sealed the sores over with micropore dressings. They pumped her up with vitamins and tried to work on her diet, but nobody ever tried to take that inhaler away.

They brought in hairdressers and makeup artists, too, and wardrobe people and image builders and articulate little PR hamsters, and she endured it with something that might almost have been a smile.

And, right through those three weeks, we didn’t talk. Just studio talk, artist-editor stuff, very much a restricted code. Her imagery was so strong, so extreme, that she never really needed to explain a given effect to me. I took what she put out and worked with it, and jacked it back to her. She’d either say yes or no, and usually it was yes. The agents noted this and approved, and clapped Max Bell on the back and took him out to dinner, and my salary went up.

And I was pro, all the way. Helpful and thorough and polite. I was determined not to crack again, and never thought about the night I cried, and I was also doing the best work I’d ever done, and knew it, and that’s a high in itself.

And then, one morning, about six, after a long, long session when she’d first gotten that eerie cotillion sequence out, the one the kids call the Ghost Dance, she spoke to me. One of the two agent boys had been there, showing teeth, but he was gone now and the Pilot was dead quiet, just the hum of a blower somewhere down by Max’s office.

"Casey," she said, her voice hoarse with the wizz, "sorry I hit on you so hard."

I thought for a minute she was telling me something about the recording we’d just made. I looked up and saw her there, and it struck me that we were alone, and hadn’t been alone since we’d made the demo.

I had no idea at all what to say. Didn’t even know what I felt.

Propped up in the exoskeleton, she was looking worse than she had that first night, at Rubin’s. The wizz was eating her, under the stuff the makeup team kept smoothing on, and sometimes it was like seeing a death’s-head surface beneath the face of a not very handsome teenager. I had no idea of her real age. Not old, not young.

"The ramp effect," I said, coiling a length of cable.

"What’s that?"

"Nature’s way of telling you to clean up your act. Sort of mathematical law, says you can only get off real good on a stimulant x number of times, even if you increase the doses. But you can’t ever get off as nice as you did the first few times. Or you shouldn’t be able to, anyway. That’s the trouble with designer drugs; they’re too clever. That stuff you’re doing has some tricky tail on one of its molecules, keeps you from turning the decomposed adrenaline into adrenochrome. If it didn’t, you’d be schizophrenic by now. You got any little problems, Lise? Like apneia? Sometimes maybe you stop breathing if you go to sleep?"

But I wasn’t even sure I felt the anger that I heard in my own voice.

She stared at me with those pale gray eyes. The wardrobe people had replaced her thrift-shop jacket with a butter-tanned matte black blouson that did a better job of hiding the polycarbon ribs. She kept it zipped to the neck, always, even though it was too warm in the studio. The hairdressers had tried something new the day before, and it hadn’t worked out, her rough dark hair a lopsided explosion above that drawn, triangular face. She stared at me and I felt it again, her singleness of purpose.

"I don’t sleep, Casey."

It wasn’t until later, much later, that I remembered she’d told me she was sorry. She never did again, and it was the only time I ever heard her say anything that seemed to be out of character.

Rubin’s diet consists of vending-machine sandwiches, Pakistani takeout food, and espresso. I’ve never seen him eat anything else. We eat samosas in a narrow shop on Fourth that has a single plastic table wedged between the counter and the door to the can. Rubin eats his dozen samosas, six meat and six veggie, with total concentration, one after another, and doesn’t bother to wipe his chin. He’s devoted to the place. He loathes the Greek counterman; it’s mutual, a real relationship. If the counterman left, Rubin might not come back. The Greek glares at the crumbs on Rubin’s chin and jacket. Between samosas, he shoots daggers right back, his eyes narrowed behind the smudged lenses of his steel-rimmed glasses.

The samosas are dinner. Breakfast will be egg salad on dead white bread, packed in one of those triangles of milky plastic, on top of six little cups of poisonously strong espresso.

"You didn’t see it coming, Casey." He peers at me out of the thumbprinted depths of his glasses. "’Cause you’re no good at lateral thinking. You read the handbook. What else did you think she was after? Sex? More wiz? A world tour? She was past all that. That’s what made her so strong. She was past it. That’s why Kings of Sleep’s as big as it is, and why the kids buy it, why they believe it. They know. Those kids back down the Market, warming their butts around the fires and wondering if they’ll find someplace to sleep tonight, they believe it. It’s the hottest soft in eight years. Guy at a shop on Granville told me he gets more of the damned things lifted than he sells of anything else. Says it’s a hassle to even stock it… She’s big because she was what they are, only more so. She knew, man. No dreams, no hope. You can’t see the cages on those kids, Casey, but more and more they’re twigging to it, that they aren’t going anywhere." He brushes a greasy crumb of meat from his chin, missing three more. "So she sang it for them, said it that way they can’t, painted them a picture. And she used the money to buy herself a way out, that’s all."

I watch the steam bead and roll down the window in big drops, streaks in the condensation. Beyond the window I can make out a partially stripped Lada, wheels scavenged, axles down on the pavement.

"How many people have done it, Rubin? Have any idea?"

"Not too many. Hard to say, anyway, because a lot of them are probably politicians we think of as being comfortably and reliably dead." He gives me a funny look. "Not a nice thought. Anyway, they had first shot at the technology. It still costs too much for any ordinary dozen millionaires, but I’ve heard of at least seven. They say Mitsubishi did it to Weinberg before his immune system finally went tits up. He was head of their hybridoma lab in Okayama. Well, their stock’s still pretty high, in monoclonals, so maybe it’s true. And Langlais, the French kid, the novelist…" He shrugs. "Lise didn’t have the money for it. Wouldn’t now, even. But she put herself in the right place at the right time. She was about to croak, she was in Hollywood, and they could already see what Kings was going to do."

The day we finished up, the band stepped off a JAL shuttle out of London, four skinny kids who operated like a well-oiled machine and displayed a hypertrophied fashion sense and a total lack of affect. I set them up in a row at the Pilot, in identical white Ikea office chairs, smeared saline paste on their temples, taped the trodes on, and ran the rough version of what was going to become Kings of Sleep. When they came out of it, they all started talking at once, ignoring me totally, in the British version of that secret language all studio musicians speak, four sets of pale hands zooming and chopping the air.

I could catch enough of it to decide that they were excited. That they thought it was good. So I got my jacket and left. They could wipe their own saline paste off, thanks.

And that night I saw Lise for the last time, though I didn’t plan to.

Walking back down to the Market, Rubin noisily digesting his meal, red taillights reflected on wet cobbles, the city beyond the Market a clean sculpture of light, a lie, where the broken and the lost burrow into the gomi that grows like humus at the bases of the towers of glass…

"I gotta go to Frankfurt tomorrow, do an installation. You wanna come? I could write you off as a technician." He shrugs his way deeper into the fatigue jacket. "Can’t pay you, but you can have airfare, you want…"

Funny offer, from Rubin, and I know it’s because he’s worried about me, thinks I’m too strange about Lise, and it’s the only thing he can think of, getting me out of town.

"It’s colder in Frankfurt now than it is here."

"You maybe need a change, Casey. I dunno…"

"Thanks, but Max has a lot of work lined up. Pilot’s a big deal now, people flying in from all over…"

"Sure."

When I left the band at the Pilot, I went home. Walked up to Fourth and took the trolley home, past the windows of the shops I see every day, each one lit up jazzy and slick, clothes and shoes and software, Japanese motorcycles crouched like clean enamel scorpions, Italian furniture. The windows change with the seasons, the shops come and go. We were into the preholiday mode now, and there were more people on the street, a lot of couples, walking quickly and purposefully past the bright windows, on their way to score that perfect little whatever for whomever, half the girls in those padded thigh-high nylon boot things that came out of New York the winter before, the ones that Rubin said made them look like they had elephantiasis. I grinned, thinking about that, and suddenly it hit me that it really was over, that I was done with Lise, and that now she’d be sucked off to Hollywood as inexorably as if she’d poked her toe into a black hole, drawn by the unthinkable gravitic tug of Big Money. Believing that, that she was gone—probably was gone, by then—I let down some kind of guard in myself and felt the edges of my pity. But just the edges, because I didn’t want my evening screwed up by anything. I wanted partytime. It had been a while.

Got off at my corner and the elevator worked on the first try. Good sign, I told myself. Upstairs, I undressed and showered, found a clean shirt, microwaved burritos. Feel normal, I advised my reflection while I shaved. You have been working too hard. Your credit cards have gotten fat. Time to remedy that.

The burritos tasted like cardboard, but I decided I liked them because they were so aggressively normal. My car was in Burnaby, having its leaky hydrogen cell repacked, so I wasn’t going to have to worry about driving. I could go out, find partytime, and phone in sick in the morning. Max wasn’t going to kick; I was his star boy. He owed me.

You owe me, Max, I said to the subzero bottle of Moskovskaya I fished out of the freezer. Do you ever owe me. I have just spent three weeks editing the dreams and nightmares of one very screwed up person, Max. On your behalf. So that you can grow and prosper, Max. I poured three fingers of vodka into a plastic glass left over from a party I’d thrown the year before and went back into the living room.

Sometimes it looks to me like nobody in particular lives there. Not that it’s that messy; I’m a good if somewhat robotic housekeeper, and even remember to dust the tops of framed posters and things, but I have these times when the place abruptly gives me a kind of low-grade chill, with its basic accumulation of basic consumer goods. I mean, it’s not like I want to fill it up with cats or houseplants or anything, but there are moments when I see that anyone could be living there, could own those things, and it all seems sort of interchangeable, my life and yours, my life and anybody’s…

I think Rubin sees things that way, too, all the time, but for him it’s a source of strength. He lives in other people’s garbage, and everything he drags home must have been new and shiny once, must have meant something, however briefly, to someone. So he sweeps it all up into his crazy-looking truck and hauls it back to his place and lets it compost there until he thinks of something new to do with it. Once he was showing me a book of twentieth-century art he liked, and there was a picture of an automated sculpture called Dead Birds Fly Again, a thing that whirled real dead birds around and around on a string, and he smiled and nodded, and I could see he felt the artist was a spiritual ancestor of some kind. But what could Rubin do with my framed posters and my Mexican futon from the Bay and my temperfoam bed from Ikea? Well, I thought, taking a first chilly sip, he’d be able to think of something, which was why he was a famous artist and I wasn’t.

I went and pressed my forehead against the plate-glass window, as cold as the glass in my hand. Time to go, I said to myself. You are exhibiting symptoms of urban singles angst. There are cures for this. Drink up. Go.

I didn’t attain a state of partytime that night. Neither did I exhibit adult common sense and give up, go home, watch some ancient movie, and fall asleep on my futon. The tension those three weeks had built up in me drove me like the mainspring of a mechanical watch, and I went ticking off through nighttown, lubricating my more or less random progress with more drinks. It was one of those nights, I quickly decided, when you slip into an alternate continuum, a city that looks exactly like the one where you live, except for the peculiar difference that it contains not one person you love or know or have even spoken to before. Nights like that, you can go into a familiar bar and find that the staff has just been replaced; then you understand that your real motive in going there was simply to see a familiar face, on a waitress or a bartender, whoever… This sort of thing has been known to mediate against partytime.

I kept it rolling, though, through six or eight places, and eventually it rolled me into a West End club that looked as if it hadn’t been redecorated since the Nineties. A lot of peeling chrome over plastic, blurry holograms that gave you a headache if you tried to make them out. I think Barry had told me about the place, but I can’t imagine why. I looked around and grinned. If I was looking to be depressed, I’d come to the right place. Yes, I told myself as I took a corner stool at the bar, this was genuinely sad, really the pits. Dreadful enough to halt the momentum of my shitty evening, which was undoubtedly a good thing. I’d have one more for the road, admire the grot, and then cab it on home.

And then I saw Lise.

She hadn’t seen me, not yet, and I still had my coat on, tweed collar up against the weather. She was down the bar and around the corner with a couple of empty drinks in front of her, big ones, the kind that come with little Hong Kong parasols or plastic mermaids in them, and as she looked up at the boy beside her, I saw the wizz flash in her eyes and knew that those drinks had never contained alcohol, because the levels of drug she was running couldn’t tolerate the mix. The kid, though, was gone, numb grinning drunk and about ready to slide off his stool, and running on about something as he made repeated attempts to focus his eyes and get a better look at Lise, who sat there with her wardrobe team’s black leather blouson zipped to her chin and her skull about to burn through her white face like a thousand-watt bulb. And seeing that, seeing her there, I knew a whole lot of things at once.

That she really was dying, either from the wizz or her disease or the combination of the two. That she damned well knew it. That the boy beside her was too drunk to have picked up on the exoskeleton, but not too drunk to register the expensive jacket and the money she had for drinks. And that what I was seeing was exactly what it looked like.

But I couldn’t add it up, right away, couldn’t compute. Something in me cringed.

And she was smiling, or anyway doing a thing she must have thought was like a smile, the expression she knew was appropriate to the situation, and nodding in time to the kid’s slurred inanities, and that awful line of hers came back to me, the one about liking to watch.

And I know something now. I know that if I hadn’t happened in there, hadn’t seen them, I’d have been able to accept all that came later. Might even have found a way to rejoice on her behalf, or found a way to trust in whatever it is that she’s since become, or had built in her image—a program that pretends to be Lise to the extent that it believes it’s her. I could have believed what Rubin believes, that she was so truly past it, our hi-tech Saint Joan burning for union with that hardwired godhead in Hollywood, that nothing mattered to her except the hour of her departure. That she threw away that poor sad body with a cry of release, free of the bonds of polycarbon and hated flesh. Well, maybe, after all, she did. Maybe it was that way. I’m sure that’s the way she expected it to be.

But seeing her there, that drunken kid’s hand in hers, that hand she couldn’t even feel, I knew, once and for all, that no human motive is ever entirely pure. Even Lise, with that corrosive, crazy drive to stardom and cybernetic immortality, had weaknesses. Was human in a way I hated myself for admitting.

She’d gone out that night, I knew, to kiss herself goodbye. To find someone drunk enough to do it for her. Because, I knew then, it was true: She did like to watch.

I think she saw me, as I left. I was practically running. If she did, I suppose she hated me worse than ever, for the horror and the pity in my face.

I never saw her again.

Someday I’ll ask Rubin why Wild Turkey sours are the only drink he knows how to make. Industrial-strength, Rubin’s sours. He passes me the dented aluminum cup, while his place ticks and stirs around us with the furtive activity of his smaller creations.

"You ought to come to Frankfurt," he says again.

"Why, Rubin?"

"Because pretty soon she’s going to call you up. And I think maybe you aren’t ready for it. You’re still screwed up about this, and it’ll sound like her and think like her, and you’ll get too weird behind it. Come over to Frankfurt with me and you can get a little breathing space. She won’t know you’re there…"

"I told you," I say, remembering her at the bar in that club, "lots of work, Max…"

"Stuff Max. Max you just made rich. Max can sit on his hands. You’re rich yourself, from your royalty cut on Kings, if you weren’t too stubborn to dial up your bank account. You can afford a vacation."

I look at him and wonder when I’ll tell him the story of that final glimpse. "Rubin, I appreciate it, man, but I just…"

He sighs, drinks. "But what?"

"Rubin, if she calls me, is it her?"

He looks at me a long time. "God only knows." His cup clicks on the table. "I mean, Casey, the technology is there, so who, man, really who, is to say?"

"And you think I should come with you to Frankfurt?"

He takes off his steel-rimmed glasses and polishes them inefficiently on the front of his plaid flannel shirt. "Yeah, I do. You need the rest. Maybe you don’t need it now, but you’re going to later."

"How’s that?"

"When you have to edit her next release. Which will almost certainly be soon, because she needs money bad. She’s taking up a lot of ROM on some corporate mainframe, and her share of Kings won’t come close to paying for what they had to do to put her there. And you’re her editor, Casey. I mean, who else?"

And I just stare at him as he puts the glasses back on, like I can’t move at all.

"Who else, man?"

And one of his constructs clicks right then, just a clear and tiny sound, and it comes to me, he’s right.

THE ONE WHO ISN’T Ted Kosmatka

It starts with light.

Then heat.

A slow bleed through of memory.

Catchment, containment. A white-hot agony coursing through every nerve, building to a sizzling hum—and then it happens. Change of state.

And what comes out the other side is something new.

The woman held up the card. "What color do you see?"

"Blue," the child said.

"And this one?" The woman held up another card. Her face was a porcelain mask—a smooth, perfect oval except for a slight pointiness at her chin.

The child looked closely at the card. It didn’t look like the other one. It didn’t look like any color he’d ever seen before. He felt he should know the color, but he couldn’t place it.

"It’s blue," he said.

The woman shook her head. "Green," she said. "The color is green." She put the card down on the table and stood. She walked to the window. The room was a circular white drum, taller than it was wide. One window, one door.

The boy couldn’t remember having been outside the room, though that couldn’t be right. His memory was broken, the fragments tailing off into darkness.

"Some languages don’t have different words for blue and green," the woman said. "In some languages, they’re the same."

"What does that mean?"

The woman turned toward him. "It means you’re getting worse."

"Worse how?"

She did not answer him. Instead she stayed with him for an hour and helped him with his eyes. She walked around the room and named things. "Door," she said. "Door." And he understood and remembered.

Floor, walls, ceiling, table, chair.

She named all these things.

"And you," the child said. "What name do you go by?"

The woman took a seat across from him at the table. She had pale blond hair. Her eyes, in the perfect armatures of their porcelain sockets, were blue, he decided. Or they were green. "That’s easy," she said from behind her mask. "I’m the one who isn’t you."

When it was time to sleep, she touched a panel on the wall and a bed slid out from the flat surface. She tucked him in and pulled the blankets up to his chin. The blankets were cool against his skin. "Tell me a story," the child said.

"What story?"

He tried to remember a story. Any story that she might have told him in the past, but nothing came.

"I can’t think of any," he said.

"Do you remember your name?"

He thought for a moment. "You told me that you were the one who wasn’t me."

"Yes," she said. "That’s who I am, but what about you? Do you remember your name?"

He thought for a while. "No."

The woman nodded. "Then I’ll tell you the story of the queen," she said.

"What queen?"

"She the Unnamed," the woman said. "It’s your favorite."

She touched the wall by the bed. The lights dimmed.

"Close your eyes," she said.

And so he did.

Then she cleared her throat and began to recite the story—line after line, in a slow, steady rhythm, starting at the beginning.

After a while, he began to cry.

Upload protocol. Arbitration ()

Story sixteen: contents = [She the Unnamed] />

Function/Query : Who wrote the story? {

/File response : (She) wrote it. {

Function/Query : What do you mean, she wrote it. That isn’t possible. {

/File response : Narratives are vital to understanding the world. Experience without narrative isn’t consciousness. {

And so it was written.

In a time before history, in a place beyond maps, there was once a queen, she the unnamed, who dared defy her liege husband.

She was beautiful and young, with tresses of gold. Forced to marry a king she did not love, she bore him a son out of royal duty—a child healthy, and strong, and dearly loved.

Over the following years, unease crept into the queen’s heart as she noted the king’s cruelties, his obsession for magics. Gradually, as she learned the true measure of the man who wore the crown, she came to fear the influence that he might have on the child. For this reason she risked everything, summoned her most trusted confidants, and sent the boy into secret hiding, to live among the priests of the valley where the king could never find him.

The king was enraged. Never had he been defied.

"You will not darken this boy’s heart," she told the king when he confronted her. "Our son is safe, in a place where you cannot change him."

Such was the king’s fury at this betrayal that upon his throne he declared his queen an abhorrence, and he stripped her name from every book and every tongue. None could say her name nor remember it, and she was expunged from history in all ways but one. The deepest temporal magic was invoked, a sorcery beyond reach of all but the blackest rage—and the woman was condemned to give birth again and again to the self-same child whom the king had lost.

The queen had expected death, or banishment, but not this.

And so through magic she gave birth to an immaculate child. And for three years the new child would grow—first crawling, then walking—a strapping boy at his mother’s side, until the king would come to the tower cell and take the child on the high stone. "Do you regret?" He would ask his queen.

"Yes," she’d sob, while the guards gripped her arms.

The king would hold the child high and say, "This is because of your mother." And then slice the child’s throat.

The mother would scream and cry, and through a chaste, dark magic conceive again, and for nine months carry, and for one day labor, and for three years love a new child, raised again in the tower cell. A boy sweet and kind with eyes of blue.

Until the king would again return and ask the mother, "Do you regret?"

"Yes, please spare him," she’d cry, groveling at his feet. "I regret."

The king would hold his son high and say, "This is because of your mother." And then slice his tender throat.

Again and again the pattern repeated, son after son, as the mother screamed and tore at her hair.

Against such years could hells be measured.

The mother tried refusing her child when he was born, hoping that would save him. "This child means nothing to me," she said.

And the king responded, "This is because of your mother," and wet his blade anew.

"Do you know why I wait three years?" he asked her once as she crouched beside a body small and pale. He touched her hair tenderly. "It is so you’ll know the child understands."

And so it continued.

A dozen sons, then a score, until the people throughout the land called the king heir-killer, and still he continued to destroy his children. Sons who were loved. Sons who were ignored. A score of sons, then a hundred. Sons beyond counting. Every son different, every son the same.

Until the mother woke one day from a nightmare, for all her dreams were nightmares, and with her hand clutching her abdomen, felt a child quicken in her womb, and knew suddenly what she had to do. And soon it came to pass that she bore a son, and for one full year loved him, and for a second year plotted, and for a third year whispered, shaping a young heart for a monstrous task. She darkened his heart as no mother ever dreamed. She darkened him beyond anything the king could have done.

And in time the king finally came to the high tower and lifted his son high and asked, "Do you regret?"

She responded, "I regret that I was born, and every moment after."

The king smiled and said, "This is because of your mother."

He raised his knife to the child’s throat, but the three-year-old twisted and turned, like his mother had shown him, and drove a needle-thin blade into his father’s eye.

The king screamed, and fell from the tower, and died then slowly in a spreading pool of blood, while the boy’s laughter rang out.

Thus was the Monster King brought into the world—a murderer of his father, made monstrous by his mother, and now heir to all the lands and armies of the wasted territories.

And the world would pay a heavy price.

The next week, the woman came again. She opened the door and brought the child his lunch. There was an apple and bread and chicken.

"This is your favorite food, isn’t it?" the woman asked.

"Yes," the child said after thinking about it for a moment. "I think it is."

He wondered where the woman went when she was not with him. She never spoke of her time apart. He wondered if she ceased to exist when she was not with him. It seemed possible.

After a while, they went over the cards again.

"Blue," the boy said. "Blue."

The woman pointed

Floor, ceiling, door, window.

"Good," she said.

"Does that mean I’m getting better?"

The-one-who-was-not-him did not answer though. Instead she rose to her feet and walked to the window.

The boy followed and looked out the window, but he couldn’t make sense of what he saw. Couldn’t hold it in his mind.

"Can I go outside?" he asked.

"Is that what you want?"

"I don’t know."

She turned to look at him, her pretty, oval face a solemn mask of repose. "When you know, tell me."

"I want to make you happy," the boy said. And he meant it. He sensed a sadness in the woman, and he wanted to make her feel better.

The child stepped closer to the glass and touched it. The surface was cool and smooth, and he held his hand against it for a long while.

When he moved back to the table, something was wrong with his hand. Like a burn to his skin. He couldn’t hold his pencil right. He tried to draw a line on the paper, and the pencil fell out of his hand.

"My hand," he said to the woman.

She came and she touched him. She ran her finger over his palm, moving up to his wrist. Her fingers were warm.

"Make a fist," she said. She held her hand up to demonstrate.

He made a fist and winced in pain.

"It burns."

She nodded to herself. "This is part of it."

"Part of what?"

"What’s gone wrong."

"And what is that?" When she didn’t answer him, he asked, "Is this place a prison? Where are we?"

He thought of the high tower. This is because of your mother.

The woman sighed, and she sat down across from him at the table. Her eyes looked tired. "I want to be clear with you," the woman said. "I think it is important that you understand. You’re dying. I’m here to save your life."

The boy was silent, taking this in. Dying. He’d known something was wrong, but he hadn’t used that word in his own thoughts. When he spoke, his voice was barely a whisper. "But I don’t want to die."

"I don’t want you to die either. And I’m going to do everything I can to stop it."

"What’s wrong with me?"

She did not speak for a long while, and then changed the subject. "Would you like to hear another story?"

The child nodded.

"There was once a man and a woman who wanted a child very much," she began. "But there were problems. Problems with their genes. Do you know what genes are?"

He considered for a moment and realized he did. He nodded. "I’m not sure how I know."

"It’s bleed-through," she said. "But that doesn’t matter. What matters is that the couple did in vitro and had a child implanted that way, but the children died, and died, and died, over and over, until finally, one day, after many failures and miscarriages, a child was born, only the child was sick. Even after all they’d done, the child was sick. And so he had to live in a hospital, with white rooms, while the doctors tried to make him whole. Anyone who visited had to wear a special white mask."

"A mask like you?"

"Is that what you see when you look at me?"

He studied her. The smooth oval face. He was no longer sure what he saw.

She continued, "The child’s sickness worsened over time. And the father had to donate part of himself to save the child. After the procedure, the child lived but the father developed a complication."

"What kind of complication?"

She waved that off. "It doesn’t matter for the story. An infection, perhaps. Or whatever you’d prefer."

"What happened to the father?"

"He left the story then. He died."

The boy realized that he’d known she was going to say that before she spoke it. "And that was because of the child?"

She nodded.

"What happened to the child?"

"The boy still wasn’t healed. There were TIAs. Small strokes. And other issues. Little areas of brain tissue going dark and dead. Like a light blinking out. It couldn’t be helped."

"What happened then?"

She shrugged. "That’s the end of the story."

He wondered again if she even existed when she wasn’t with him. A thought occurred to him. A terrifying thought. He wondered if he existed when she wasn’t there.

"How long have I been here?"

"Try to remember," she said. "Try to remember anything that happens when I’m not here."

He tried, but nothing came. Just shadows and flickers.

"What is my name?" the boy asked.

"Don’t you know yet?" The woman’s eyes grew serious. "Can’t you guess?"

He shook his head.

She said, "You are the one who isn’t me."

He studied her eyes, which were either blue or green. "That can’t be right," he said. "That’s your name. You are the one who isn’t me. It can’t be my name, too."

She nodded. "Think of this place as a language. We are speaking it just by being here. This language doesn’t have different words for you and I," she said. "In the language of this place, our names are the same."

[Reload Protocol]

White light. {

You are catchment. You are containment. {

You are.{

A fleeting memory rises up: a swing set in the back yard under a tall, leafy tree—dark berries arrayed along delicate stems. The sound of laughter. Running in the grass until his white socks were purple—berry juice wetting his feet.

The sun warm on his face.

The feel of the wind, and the smell of the lawn, and everything the white room was not.

A man’s voice came then, but the words were missing—the meaning expunged. And how can that be? To hear a voice clearly and not hear the words? It might be a name. Yes, calling a name.

"Look at me," she said.

She sat across the table from him.

"There have been changes made."

"What changes?"

"Changes to you," she said. "When you were sleeping. Changes to your fusiform gyrus," she said. "Can you read me now?"

And gone was the porcelain mask. The boy saw it clearly and wondered how he hadn’t noticed it until that moment—her face a divine architecture. A beautiful origami—emotions unfolding out of the smallest movements of her eyes, lips, brow. A stream of subtle micro expressions. And the child understood that her face had not changed at all since the last time he’d seen her, but only his understanding of it.

"The facial recognition part of the mind is highly specialized," the woman said. "Problems with that area are often also associated with achromotosia."

"Chroma-what?"

"The part of the brain that perceives color. It’s also related to issues with environmental orientation, landmark analysis, location."

"What does that mean?"

"You can only see what your mind lets you see."

"Like this place… the place where are we?" he asked her.

"You can look for yourself," she said, gesturing to the window. "I’m going to give you a task to complete while I’m not here."

"Okay."

"I want you to look outside, and I want you to think about what you see, and I want you to draw it on the paper. Can you do that?"

He glanced toward the window. A pane of clear glass.

"Can you do that?" she repeated. "It’s very important."

"Yeah, I think I can."

When the woman left, he tried. He tried to see beyond the glass. He could hold it in his mind for a moment, but when he went to draw it, the images evaporated like mist.

He tried again and again, but failed each time. He tried moving quickly, putting pencil to paper before he could forget, but no matter what, he could not move quick enough.

Then he came up with an idea.

He pushed the table across the room to the window.

He lay on top of the table, with the paper before him, and he tried to draw what he saw, but even then he failed. It was only when he tried purposefully not to see it that he could suddenly make the pencil move. He drew without understanding what he drew—just a series of marks on a page.

When he finally looked down at what he’d drawn, he could only stare.

Function/Query: Can you tell what the defect is? {

/File response: Neurons are just a series of gates. An arrangement of firings. {

Function/Query: Consciousness is more than that. There are cases of brain damage that have shown similar patterns. AIs always have this problem. {

/File response: Not always. {

The next time the woman came, the boy was much worse. Something had broken in him. TIAs, he thought. Tiny strokes. But it was more than that. Worse than that.

Sometimes he imagined that he could see through the walls, or that he could see through the floor. He was sure by then that he existed when the woman wasn’t in the room with him, and this was a comfort at least. He was autonomous from her, and from the room itself. He could drop to his knees on the floor and place his face on the cool tile and look under the door. A long hall disappeared into the distance. He saw her feet approaching, and that was the first time he noticed her shoes. White. The soles were dark.

He showed her the picture he’d drawn.

She held the paper in her hand. "Is that what you see?" she asked.

He nodded.

A series of lines. It might have been an abstract landscape, or something else.

He told her about his hallucinations, about seeing through the walls and floor. "I am getting worse, aren’t I?" he said.

"Yes," she said.

In her face, he saw a thousand emotions. Mourning. Rage. Fear. Things he didn’t want to see. He wished for the mask again. A face he couldn’t read.

The woman sat by him on the bed. After a while, she said, "Do you know what dying is?"

"I do."

"Do you know what it will mean for you?"

"It will mean I am no more."

"That’s right."

"The stories you told aren’t true, are they?"

"The truth is like a word with no translation. Can blue be green, if there’s no word for it? Can green be blue? Are those colors lies?"

"Tell me a new story."

"A new lie?"

"Tell me a truth. Tell me about the man." He thought of the swing and the summer day. The man’s voice saying his name.

"So you remember him." The woman shook her head. "I don’t want to talk about him."

"Please," the child said.

"Why?"

"Because I remember his voice. A tree. Berries on the ground."

She seemed to gather herself up. "There was once a man," she said. "A very powerful man. A professor, perhaps. And one day the professor was seduced by a student, or seduced a student, it’s not really clear, but they were together, do you understand?"

He nodded.

"But this professor also had a wife. Another professor at the university. He told her what had happened, and that he’d ended it, and probably he meant to, but still it went on, until, in the way of things, the young woman was with child. A decision was made to solve the problem, and so they did. And six months went by, and the affair continued, and though she was careful, she was not careful enough, and she felt so stupid, but it happened again."

"Again."

She nodded. "And again he pressured her. Get rid of it, he said, and so she did."

"Why?"

"Because she loved him, probably. Until the following year, her senior year at the college, she stopped being careful, and it happened again, and he told her to take care of it, and this time she said no, and she defied him."

"Then what?"

"People found out, and his teaching career was ruined—everything was ruined."

"And that’s the end?"

She shook her head. "The two stayed together. The man left the wife, and he and his former student raised their boy."

"So it was a boy?"

"Yes, a boy. And then the wife, who’d had no children who survived, was alone. And loneliness does strange things. It lets one focus on one’s work."

"And what was her work?"

"Can you not guess?" The woman gestured around her. "Neuroscience, AIs."

The woman was quiet for a long while before she continued. "And the years passed and the new couple stayed together, until one day the man and the boy were at the ex-wife’s house, because they all had to meet to sign papers regarding some property—and the boy was with him. And the man left the boy unattended for just a moment, and it was a simple thing for the woman to put the ring around the boy’s head."

"What ring?"

"A special ring to record his pattern. You only need a minute—like a catchment system for electrical activity. Every synapse. A perfect representation of his mind, like a snapshot transposed into VR. She stole him. Or a copy of him."

"Why?"

The woman was quiet for a long time. "Because she wanted to steal from the man what he’d stolen from her. Even if he didn’t know it." She was silent again. "That’s not true."

"Then what is true?"

"She was lonely. Desperately lonely. It was a small thing to take, she thought, just a pattern of synapses, the shadow of a personality, and he’d never know. The wife had wanted so badly to be a mother."

The woman stopped. Her face a porcelain mask again.

"But there was a problem," the child said.

"Yes," the woman said. "Patterns are unstable. They last only for so long. Every thought changes it, you see. That is the problem. That is the fatal flaw. Biological systems can adapt—physical alterations to the synaptic network to help adjust. But in VR, it’s not the same."

"VR?"

"A location," she said. "The place where the pattern finds expression. The place where we are now."

The boy looked around the room. The white walls. The white floor.

"The patterns of older people are stable," the woman said. "They’ve already thought most of the thoughts that made them who they are. But it’s not the same for children. The pattern drifts, caught midway in the process of becoming. It’s possible to think the thought that makes you unfit for your pattern. The mind loses coherency. As the pattern drifts, it destabilizes and dies."

"Dies."

"Again and again."

How many times?

The woman would not answer.

"How many times?" the boy repeated.

"Sons beyond counting. Every son different, every son the same."

"How could that be?"

"The system reloads the pattern."

"So I will die?"

"You will die. And you will never die."

"And what about you?"

"I am always here."

The child stood and walked over to the window and looked outside. He still couldn’t see what lay beyond. Still couldn’t process it. Had no words, because he had no experience of it.

He only knew what he’d drawn on the paper. Lines sloping away. A child’s drawing of a flat plain that spread out below them, as if they looked down from a great height. It might have been that. Or it might have been something else.

"So I am an AI?"

Even as he spoke the words, he felt his thoughts lurch. A great rift forming in his consciousness. In knowing what he was, there emerged the greatest rift of all—the thing that could not be integrated without changing who he was.

And so he turned toward the woman to speak, to tell her what he knew, and in that moment thought the thought that killed him.

The woman cried out as she watched him die. He crumpled to the floor and lay on his side.

She crouched and shook his shoulder, but it was no use. He was gone.

"This child means nothing to me," she said as tears welled in her eyes.

A few moments later, there was a buzz—a sizzling hum. A flash like pain across the boy’s face.

And then he raised his head.

He blinked and glanced around the room. He looked at her.

She allowed herself a moment of hope, but it was dashed when the boy spoke.

"Who are you?" the child asked.

I am I. The one who is not you.

She watched him, knowing that he wouldn’t be able to read her face. Wouldn’t even see her, really—just an opaque mask that he wouldn’t be able to understand.

She thought of the ring descending around her head. The strange feeling she’d had as she’d found herself here so long ago. Here in this place, which she’d never really left. Not in years and years. She and the boy—locked in a pattern that would repeat itself forever.

One day she’d find the right words, though. She’d whisper in the boy’s ear, and shape him for the task. She’d be strong enough to turn him into the monster he’d need to be.

Until then, she would keep trying.

"Come sit on my lap," the woman said. She smiled at the boy, and he looked at her without recognition. "Let me tell you a story."

SUICIDE COAST M. John Harrison

Four-thirty in the afternoon in a converted warehouse near Mile End underground station. Heavy, persistent summer rain was falling on the roof. Inside, the air was still and humid, dark despite the fluorescent lights. It smelled of sweat, dust, gymnasts’ chalk. Twenty-five feet above the thick blue crash-mats, a boy with dreadlocks and baggy knee-length shorts was supporting his entire weight on two fingers of his right hand. The muscles of his upper back, black and shiny with sweat, fanned out exotically with the effort, like the hood of a cobra or the shell of a crab. One leg trailed behind him for balance. He had raised the other so that the knee was almost touching his chin. For two or three minutes he had been trying to get the ball of his foot in the same place as his fingers. Each time he moved, his center of gravity shifted and he had to go back to a resting position. Eventually he said quietly:

"I’m coming off."

We all looked up. It was a slow afternoon in Mile End. Nobody bothers much with training in the middle of summer. Some teenagers were in from the local schools and colleges. A couple of men in their late thirties had sneaked out of a civil engineering contract near Cannon Street. Everyone was tired. Humidity had made the handholds slippery. Despite that, a serious atmosphere prevailed.

"Go on," we encouraged him. "You can do it."

We didn’t know him, or one another, from Adam.

"Go on!"

The boy on the wall laughed. He was good but not that good. He didn’t want to fall off in front of everyone. An intention tremor moved through his bent leg. Losing patience with himself, he scraped at the foothold with the toe of his boot. He lunged upward. His body pivoted away from the wall and dropped onto the mats, which, absorbing the energy of the fall, made a sound like a badly winded heavyweight boxer. Chalk and dust billowed up. He got to his feet, laughing and shaking his dreadlocks.

"I can never do that."

"You’ll get it in the end," I told him. "Me, I’m going to fall off this roof once more then fuck off home. It’s too hot in here."

"See you, man."

I had spent most of that winter in London, assembling copy for MAX, a website that fronted the adventure sports software industry. They were always interested in stuff about cave diving, BASE jumping, snowboarding, hang-gliding, ATB and so on: but they didn’t want to know about rock climbing.

"Not enough to buy," my editor said succinctly. "And too obviously skill-based." He leafed through my samples. "The punter needs equipment to invest in. It strengthens his self-image. With the machine parked in his hall, he believes he could disconnect from the software and still do the sport." He tapped a shot of Isobelle Patissier seven hundred feet up some knife-edge arête in Colorado. "Where’s the hardware? These are just bodies."

"The boots are pretty high tech."

"Yeah? And how much a pair? Fifty, a hundred and fifty? Mick, we can get them to lay out three grand for the frame of an ATB."

He thought for a moment. Then he said: "We might do something with the women."

"The good ones are French."

"Even better."

I gathered the stuff together and put it away.

"I’m off then," I said.

"You still got the 190?"

I nodded.

"Take care in that thing," he said.

"I will."

"Focke Wolf 190," he said. "Hey."

"It’s a Mercedes," I said.

He laughed. He shook his head.

"Focke Wolf, Mercedes, no one drives themselves anymore," he said. ‘You mad fucker."

He looked round his office—a dusty metal desk, a couple of posters with the MAX logo, a couple of PCs. He said: "No one comes in here in person anymore. You ever hear of the modem?"

"Once or twice," I said.

"Well they’ve invented it now."

I looked around too.

"One day," I said, "the poor wankers are going to want back what you stole from them."

"Come on. They pissed it all away long before we arrived."

As I left the office he advised:

"Keep walking the walk, Mick."

I looked at my watch. It was late and the MAX premises were in EC1. But I thought that if I got a move on and cut up through Tottenham, I could go and see a friend of mine. His name was Ed and I had known him since the 1980s.

Back then, I was trying to write a book about people like him. Ed Johnson sounded interesting. He had done everything from roped-access engineering in Telford to harvesting birds’ nests for soup in Southeast Asia. But he was hard to pin down. If I was in Birmingham, he was in Exeter. If we were both in London, he had something else to do. In the end it was Moscow Davis who made the introduction. Moscow was a short, hard, cheerful girl with big feet and bedraggled hair. She was barely out of her teens. She had come from Oldham, I think, originally, and she had an indescribable snuffling accent. She and Ed had worked as steeplejacks together before they both moved down from the north in search of work. They had once been around a lot together. She thought Johnson would enjoy talking to me if I was still interested. I was. The arrangement we made was to be on the lookout for him in one of the Suicide Coast pubs, the Harbour Lights, that Sunday afternoon.

"Sunday afternoons are quiet, so we can have a chat," said Moscow. "Everyone’s eating their dinner then."

We had been in the pub for half an hour when Johnson arrived, wearing patched 501s and a dirty T-shirt with a picture of a mole on the front of it. He came over to our table and began kicking morosely at the legs of Moscow’s chair. The little finger of his left hand was splinted and wrapped in a wad of bandage.

"This is Ed," Moscow told me, not looking at him.

"Fuck off, Moscow," Ed told her, not looking at me. He scratched his armpit and stared vaguely into the air above Moscow’s head. "I want my money back," he said. Neither of them could think of anything to add to this, and after a pause he wandered off.

"He’s always like that," Moscow said. "You don’t want to pay any attention." Later in the afternoon she said: "You’ll get on we’ll with Ed, though. You’ll like him. He’s a mad bastard."

"You say that about all the boys," I said.

In this case Moscow was right, because I had heard it not just from her, and later I would get proof of it anyway—if you can ever get proof of anything. Everyone said that Ed should be in a straightjacket. In the end, nothing could be arranged. Johnson was in a bad mood, and Moscow had to be up the Coast that week, on Canvey Island, to do some work on one of the cracking-plants there. There was always a lot of that kind of work, oil work, chemical work, on Canvey Island. "I haven’t time for him," Moscow explained as she got up to go. "I’ll see you later, anyway," she promised.

As soon as she was gone, Ed Johnson came back and sat down in front of me. He grinned. "Ever done anything worth doing in your whole life?" he asked me. "Anything real?"

The MAX editor was right: since coring got popular, the roads had been deserted. I left EC1 and whacked the 190 up through Hackney until I got the Lea Valley reservoirs on my right like a splatter of moonlit verglas. On empty roads the only mistakes that need concern you are your own; every bend becomes a dreamy interrogation of your own technique. Life should be more like that. I made good time. Ed lived just back from Montagu Road, in a quiet street behind the Jewish Cemetery. He shared his flat with a woman in her early thirties whose name was Caitlin. Caitlin had black hair and soft, honest brown eyes. She and I were old friends. We hugged briefly on the doorstep. She looked up and down the street and shivered.

"Come in," she said. "It’s cold."

"You should wear a jumper."

"I’ll tell him you’re here," she said. "Do you want some coffee?"

Caitlin had softened the edges of Ed’s life, but less perhaps than either of them had hoped. His taste was still very minimal—white paint, ash floors, one or two items of furniture from Heals. And there was still a competition Klein mounted on the living room wall, its polished aerospace alloys glittering in the halogen lights.

"Espresso," I said.

"I’m not giving you espresso at this time of night. You’ll explode."

"It was worth a try."

"Ed!" she called. "Ed! Mick’s here!"

He didn’t answer.

She shrugged at me, as if to say, "What can I do?" and went into the back room. I heard their voices but not what they were saying. After that she went upstairs. "Go in and see him," she suggested when she came down again three or four minutes later. "I told him you were here." She had pulled a Jigsaw sweater on over her Racing Green shirt and Levi’s, and fastened her hair back hastily with a dark brown velvet scrunchy.

"That looks nice," I said. "Do you want me to fetch him out?"

"I doubt he’ll come."

The back room was down a narrow corridor. Ed had turned it into a bleak combination of office and storage. The walls were done with one coat of what builders call "obliterating emulsion" and covered with metal shelves. Chipped diving tanks hollow with the ghosts of exotic gases were stacked by the filing cabinet. His BASE chute spilled half out of its pack, yards of cold nylon a vile but exciting rose color—a color which made you want to be hurtling downward face-first screaming with fear until you heard the canopy bang out behind you and you knew you weren’t going to die that day (although you might still break both legs). The cheap beige carpet was strewn with high-access mess—hanks of graying static rope; a yellow bucket stuffed with tools; Ed’s Petzl stop, harness and knocked-about CPTs. Everything was layered with dust. The radiators were turned off. There was a bed made up in one corner. Deep in the clutter on the cheap white desk stood a 5-gig Mac with a screen to design industry specs. It was spraying Ed’s face with icy blue light.

"Hi Ed."

"Hi Mick."

There was a long silence after that. Ed stared at the screen. I stared at his back. Just when I thought he had forgotten I was there, he said:

"Fuck off and talk to Caitlin a moment."

"I brought us some beer."

"That’s great."

"What are you running here?"

"It’s a game. I’m running a game, Mick."

Ed had lost weight since I last saw him. Though they retained their distinctive cabled structure, his forearms were a lot thinner. Without releasing him from anything it represented, the yoke of muscle had lifted from his shoulders. I had expected that. But I was surprised by how much flesh had melted off his face, leaving long vertical lines of sinew, fins of bone above the cheeks and at the corners of the jaw. His eyes were a long way back in his head. In a way it suited him. He would have seemed okay—a little tired perhaps; a little burned down, like someone who was working too hard—if it hadn’t been for the light from the display. Hunched in his chair with that splashing off him, he looked like a vampire. He looked like a junkie.

I peered over his shoulder.

"You were never into this shit," I said.

He grinned.

"Everyone’s into it now. Why not me? Wanking away and pretending it’s sex."

"Oh, come on."

He looked down at himself.

"It’s better than living," he said.

There was no answer to that.

I went and asked Caitlin, "Has he been doing this long?"

"Not long," she said. "Have some coffee."

We sat in the L-shaped living area drinking decaffeinated Java. The sofa was big enough for Caitlin to curl up in a corner of it like a cat. She had turned the overhead lights off, tucked her bare feet up under her. She was smoking a cigarette. "It’s been a bloody awful day," she warned me. "So don’t say a word." She grinned wryly, then we both looked up at the Klein for a minute or two. Some kind of ambient music was issuing faintly from the stereo speakers, full of South American bird calls and bouts of muted drumming. "Is he winning?" she asked.

"He didn’t tell me."

"You’re lucky. It’s all he ever tells me."

"Aren’t you worried?" I said.

She smiled.

"He’s still using a screen," she said. "He’s not plugging in."

"Yet," I said.

"Yet," she agreed equably. "Want more coffee? Or will you do me a favor?"

I put my empty cup on the floor.

"Do you a favor," I said.

"Cut my hair."

I got up and went to her end of the sofa. She turned away from me so I could release her hair from the scrunchy. "Shake it," I said. She shook it. She ran her hands through it. Perfume came up; something I didn’t recognize. "It doesn’t need much," I said. I switched the overhead light back on and fetched a kitchen chair. "Sit here. No, right in the light. You’ll have to take your jumper off."

"The good scissors are in the bathroom," she said.

Cut my hair. She had asked me that before, two or three days after she decided we should split up. I remembered the calm that came over me at the gentle, careful sound of the scissors, the way her hair felt as I lifted it away from the nape of her neck, the tenderness and fear because everything was changing around the two of us forever and somehow this quiet action signalized and blessed that. The shock of these memories made me ask:

"How are you two getting on?"

She lowered her head to help me cut. I felt her smile.

"You and Ed always liked the same kind of girls," she said.

"Yes," I said.

I finished the cut, then lightly kissed the nape of her neck. "There," I said. Beneath the perfume she smelled faintly of hypoallergenic soap and unscented deodorants. "No, Mick," she said softly. "Please." I adjusted the collar of her shirt, let her hair fall back round it. My hand was still on her shoulder. She had to turn her head at an awkward angle to look up at me. Her eyes were wide and full of pain. "Mick." I kissed her mouth and brushed the side of her face with my fingertips. Her arms went round my neck, I felt her settle in the chair. I touched her breasts. They were warm, the cotton shirt was clean and cool. She made a small noise and pulled me closer. Just then, in the back room among the dusty air tanks and disused parachutes, Ed Johnson fell out of his chair and began to thrash about, the back of his head thudding rhythmically on the floor.

Caitlin pushed me away.

"Ed?" she called, from the passage door.

"Help!" cried Ed.

"I’ll go," I said.

Caitlin put her arm across the doorway and stared up at me calmly.

"No," she said.

"How can you lift him on your own?"

"This is me and Ed," she said.

"For God’s sake!"

"It’s late, Mick. I’ll let you out, then I’ll go and help him."

At the front door I said:

"I think you’re mad. Is this happening a lot? You’re a fool to let him do this."

"It’s his life."

I looked at her. She shrugged.

"Will you be all right?" I said.

When I offered to kiss her goodbye, she turned her face away.

"Fuck off then, both of you," I said.

I knew which game Ed was playing, because I had seen the software wrapper discarded on the desk near his Mac. Its visuals were cheap and schematic, its values self-consciously retro. It was nothing like the stuff we sold off the MAX site, which was quite literally the experience itself, stripped of its consequences. You had to plug in for that: you had to be cored. This was just a game; less a game, even, than a trip. You flew a silvery V-shaped graphic down an endless V-shaped corridor, a notional perspective sometimes bounded by lines of objects, sometimes just by lines, sometimes bounded only by your memory of boundaries. Sometimes the graphic floated and mushed like a moth. Sometimes it traveled in flat vicious arcs at an apparent Mach 5. There were no guns, no opponent. There was no competition. You flew. Sometimes the horizon tilted one way, sometimes the other. You could choose your own music. It was a bleakly minimal experience. But after a minute or two, five at the most, you felt as if you could fly your icon down the perspective forever, to the soundtrack of your own life.

It was quite popular.

It was called Out There.

"Rock climbing is theater," I once wrote.

It had all the qualities of theater, I went on, but a theater-in-reverse:

"In obedience to some devious vanished script, the actors abandon the stage and begin to scale the seating arrangements, the balconies and hanging boxes now occupied only by cleaning women."

"Oh, very deep," said Ed Johnson when he read this. "Shall I tell you what’s wrong here? Eh? Shall I tell you?"

"Piss off, Ed."

"If you fall on your face from a hundred feet up, it comes off the front of your head and you don’t get a second go. Next to that, theater is wank. Theater is flat. Theater is Suicide Coast."

Ed hated anywhere flat. "Welcome to the Suicide Coast," he used to say when I first knew him. To start with, that had been because he lived in Canterbury. But it had quickly become his way of describing most places, most experiences. You didn’t actually have to be near the sea. Suicide Coast syndrome had caused Ed to do some stupid things in his time. One day, when he and Moscow still worked in roped-access engineering together, they were going up in the lift to the top of some shitty council high rise in Birmingham or Bristol, when suddenly Ed said:

"Do you bet me I can keep the doors open with my head?"

"What?"

"Next floor! When the doors start to close, do you bet me I can stop them with my head?"

It was Monday morning. The lift smelled of piss. They had been hand-ripping mastic out of expansion joints for two weeks, using Stanley knives. Moscow was tired, hung over, weighed down by a collection of CPTs, mastic guns and hundred-foot coils of rope. Her right arm was numb from repeating the same action hour after hour, day after day.

"Fuck off, Ed," she said.

But she knew Ed would do it whether she took the bet or not.

Two or three days after she first introduced me to Ed, Moscow telephoned me. She had got herself a couple of weeks cutting out on Thamesmead Estate. "They don’t half work hard, these fuckers," she said. We talked about that for a minute or two then she asked:

"Well?"

"Well what, Moscow?"

"Ed. Was he what you were looking for, then? Or what?"

I said that though I was impressed I didn’t think I would be able to write anything about Ed.

"He’s a mad fucker, though, isn’t he?"

"Oh he is," I said. "He certainly is."

The way Moscow said "isn’t he" made it sound like "innie."

Another thing I once wrote:

"Climbing takes place in a special kind of space, the rules of which are simple. You must be able to see immediately what you have to lose; and you must choose the risk you take."

What do I know?

I know that a life without consequences isn’t a life at all. Also, if you want to do something difficult, something real, you can’t shirk the pain. What I learned in the old days, from Ed and Moscow, from Gabe King, Justine Townsend and all the others who taught me to climb rock or jump off buildings or stay the right way up in a tube of pitch-dark water two degrees off freezing and two hundred feet under the ground, was that you can’t just plug in and be a star: you have to practice. You have to keep loading your fingers until the tendons swell.

So it’s back to the Mile End wall, with its few thousand square feet of board and bolt-on holds, its few thousand cubic meters of emphysemic air through which one very bright ray of sun sometimes falls in the middle of the afternoon, illuminating nothing much at all. Back to the sound of the fan heater, the dust-filled Akai radio playing some mournful aggressive thing, and every so often a boy’s voice saying softly, "Oh shit," as some sequence or other fails to work out. You go back there, and if you have to fall off the same ceiling move thirty times in an afternoon, that’s what you do. The mats give their gusty wheeze, chalk dust flies up, the fan heater above the Monkey House door rattles and chokes and flatlines briefly before puttering on.

"Jesus Christ. I don’t know why I do this."

Caitlin telephoned me.

"Come to supper," she said.

"No," I said.

"Mick, why?"

"Because I’m sick of it."

"Sick of what?"

"You. Me. Him. Everything."

"Look," she said, "he’s sorry about what happened last time."

"Oh, he’s sorry."

"We’re both sorry, Mick."

"All right, then: I’m sorry, too."

There was a gentle laugh at the other end.

"So you should be."

I went along all the deserted roads and got there at about eight, to find a brand-new motorcycle parked on the pavement outside the house. It was a Kawasaki Ninja. Its fairing had been removed, to give it the look of a ’60s cafe racer, but no one was fooled. Even at a glance it appeared too hunched, too short-coupled: too knowing. The remaining plastics shone with their own harsh inner light.

Caitlin met me on the doorstep. She put her hands on my shoulders and kissed me. "Mm," she said. She was wearing white tennis shorts and a soft dark blue sweatshirt.

"We’ve got to stop meeting like this," I said.

She smiled and pushed me away.

"My hands smell of garlic," she said.

Just as we were going inside, she turned back and nodded at the Kawa.

"That thing," she said.

"It’s a motorcycle, Caitlin."

"It’s his."

I stared at her.

"Be enthusiastic," she said. "Please."

"But—"

"Please?"

The main course was penne with mushrooms in an olive and tomato sauce. Ed had cooked it, Caitlin said, but she served. Ed pushed his chair over to the table and rubbed his hands. He picked his plate up and passed it under his nose. "Wow!" he said. As we ate, we talked about this and that. The Kawa was behind everything we said, but Ed wouldn’t mention it until I did. Caitlin smiled at us both. She shook her head as if to say: "Children! You children!" It was like Christmas, and she was the parent. The three of us could feel Ed’s excitement and impatience. He grinned secretively. He glanced up from his food at one or both of us; quickly back down again. Finally, he couldn’t hold back any longer.

"What do you think, then?" he said. "What do you think, Mick?"

"I think this is good pasta," I said. "For a cripple."

He grinned and wiped his mouth.

"It’s not bad," he said, "is it?"

"I think what I like best is the way you’ve let the mushrooms take up a touch of sesame oil."

"Have some more. There’s plenty."

"That’s new to me in Italian food," I said. "Sesame oil."

Ed drank some more beer.

"It was just an idea," he said.

"You children," said Caitlin. She shook her head. She got up and took the plates away. "There’s ice cream for pudding," she said over her shoulder just before she disappeared. When I was sure she was occupied in the kitchen I said:

"Nice idea, Ed: a motorcycle. What are you going to do with it? Hang it on the wall with the Klein?"

He drank the rest of his beer, opened a new one and poured it thoughtfully into his glass. He watched the bubbles rising through it, then grinned at me as if he had made a decision. He had. In that moment I saw that he was lost, but not what I could do about it.

"Isn’t it brilliant? Isn’t it just a fucker, that bike? I haven’t had a bike since I was seventeen. There’s a story attached to that."

"Ed—"

"Do you want to hear it or not?"

Caitlin came back in with the ice cream and served it out to us and sat down.

"Tell us, Ed," she said tiredly. "Tell us the story about that."

Ed held on to his glass hard with both hands and stared into it for a long time as if he was trying to see the past there. "I had some ace times on bikes when I was a kid," he said finally: "but they were always someone else’s. My old dear—She really hated bikes, my old dear. You know: they were dirty, they were dangerous, she wasn’t going to have one in the house. Did that stop me? It did not. I bought one of the first good Ducatti 125s in Britain, but I had to keep it in a coal cellar down the road."

"That’s really funny, Ed."

"Fuck off, Mick. I’m seventeen, I’m still at school, and I’ve got this fucking projectile stashed in someone’s coal cellar. The whole time I had it, the old dear never knew. I’m walking three miles in the piss-wet rain every night, dressed to go to the library, then unlocking this thing and stuffing it round the back lanes with my best white shortie raincoat ballooning up like a fucking tent."

He looked puzzledly down at his plate.

"What’s this? Oh. Ice cream. Ever ridden a bike in a raincoat?" he asked Caitlin.

Caitlin shook her head. She was staring at him with a hypnotized expression; she was breaking wafers into her ice cream.

"Well they were all the rage then," he said.

He added: "The drag’s enormous."

"Eat your pudding, Ed," I said. "And stop boasting. How fast would a 125 go in those days? Eighty miles an hour? Eighty-five?"

"They went faster if you ground your teeth, Mick," Ed said. "Do you want to hear the rest?"

"Of course I want to hear it, Ed."

"Walk three miles in the piss-wet rain," said Ed, "to go for a ride on a motorbike, what a joke. But the real joke is this: the fucker had an alloy crankcase. That was a big deal in those days, an alloy crankcase. The first time I dropped it on a bend, it cracked. Oil everywhere. I pushed it back to the coal-house and left it there. You couldn’t weld an alloy crankcase worth shit in those days. I had three years’ payments left to make on a bunch of scrap."

He grinned at us triumphantly.

"Ask me how long I’d had it," he ordered.

"How long, Mick?"

"Three weeks. I’d had the fucker three weeks."

He began to laugh. Suddenly, his face went so white it looked green. He looked rapidly from side to side, like someone who can’t understand where he is. At the same time, he pushed himself up out of the wheelchair until his arms wouldn’t straighten any further and he was almost standing up. He tilted his head back until the tendons in his neck stood out. He shouted, "I want to get out of here! Caitlin, I want to get out!" Then his arms buckled and he let his weight go onto his feet and his legs folded up like putty and he fell forward with a gasp, his face in the ice cream and his hands smashing and clutching and scraping at anything they touched on the dinner table until he had bunched the cloth up under him and everything was a sodden mess of food and broken dishes, and he had slipped out of the chair and onto the floor. Then he let himself slump and go quite still.

"Help me," said Caitlin.

We couldn’t get him back into the chair. As we tried, his head flopped forward, and I could see quite clearly the bruises and deep, half-healed scabs at the base of his skull, where they had cored his cervical spine for the computer connection. When he initialized Out There now the graphics came up live in his head. No more screen. Only the endless V of the perspective. The endless, effortless dip-and-bank of the viewpoint. What did be see out there? Did he see himself, hunched up on the Kawasaki Ninja? Did he see highways, bridges, tunnels, weird motorcycle flights through endless space?

Halfway along the passage, he woke up.

"Caitlin!" he shouted.

"I’m here."

"Caitlin!"

"I’m here, Ed."

"Caitlin, I never did any of that."

"Hush, Ed. Let’s get you to bed."

"Listen!" he shouted. "Listen."

He started to thrash about and we had to lay him down where he was. The passage was so narrow his head hit one wall, then the other, with a solid noise. He stared desperately at Caitlin, his face smeared with Ben & Jerry’s. "I never could ride a bike," he admitted. "I made all that up."

She bent down and put her arms round his neck.

"I know," she said.

"I made all that up!" he shouted.

"It’s all right. It’s all right."

We got him into bed in the back room. She wiped the ice cream off his face with a Kleenex. He stared over her shoulder at the wall, rigid with fear and self-loathing. "Hush," she said. "You’re all right." That made him cry; him crying made her cry. I didn’t know whether to cry or laugh. I sat down and watched them for a moment, then got to my feet. I felt tired.

"It’s late," I said. "I think I’ll go."

Caitlin followed me out onto the doorstep. It was another cold night. Condensation had beaded on the fuel tank of the Kawasaki, so that it looked like some sort of frosted confection in the streetlight.

"Look," she said, "can you do anything with that?"

I shrugged.

"It’s still brand new," I said. I drew a line in the condensation, along the curve of the tank, then another, at an angle to it.

"I could see if the dealer would take it back."

"Thanks."

I laughed.

"Go in now," I advised her. "It’s cold."

"Thanks, Mick. Really."

"That’s what you always say."

The way Ed got his paraplegia was this. It was a miserable January about four months after Caitlin left me to go and live with him. He was working over in mid-Wales with Moscow Davis. They had landed the inspection contract for three point-blocks owned by the local council; penalty clauses meant they had to complete that month. They lived in a bed-and-breakfast place a mile from the job, coming back so tired in the evening that they just about had time to eat fish and chips and watch Coronation Street before they fell asleep with their mouths open. "We were too fucked even to take drugs," Ed admitted afterward, in a kind of wonder. "Can you imagine that?" Their hands were bashed and bleeding from hitting themselves with sample hammers in the freezing rain. At the end of every afternoon the sunset light caught a thin, delicate layer of water-ice that had welded Moscow’s hair to her cheek. Ed wasn’t just tired, he was missing Caitlin. One Friday he said, "I’m fucked off with this, let’s have a weekend at home."

"We agreed we’d have to work weekends," Moscow reminded him. She watched a long string of snot leave her nose, stretch out like spider-silk, then snap and vanish on the wind. "To finish in time," she said.

"Come on, you wanker," Ed said. "Do something real in your life."

"I never wank," said Moscow. "I can’t fancy myself."

They got in her 1984 320i with the M-Technic pack, Garrett turbo and extra-wide wheels, and while the light died out of a bad afternoon she pushed it eastward through the Cambrians, letting the rear end hang out on corners. She had Lou Reed Retro on the CD and her plan was to draw a line straight across the map and connect with the M4 at the Severn Bridge. It was ghostly and fog all the way out of Wales that night, lost sheep coming at you from groups of wet trees and folds in the hills. "Tregaron to Abergwesyn. One of the great back roads!" Moscow shouted over the music, as they passed a single lonely house in the rain, miles away from anywhere, facing south into the rolling moors of mid-Wales.

Ed shouted back: "They can go faster than this, these 320s." So on the next bend she let the rear end hang out an inch too far and they surfed five hundred feet into a ravine below Cefn Coch, with the BMW crumpled up round them like a chocolate wrapper. Just before they went over, the tape had got to "Sweet Jane"—the live version with the applause welling up across the opening chords as if God himself was stepping out on stage. In the bottom of the ravine a shallow stream ran through pressure-metamorphosed Ordovician shale. Ed sat until daylight the next morning, conscious but unable to move, watching the water hurry toward him and listening to Moscow die of a punctured lung in the heavy smell of fuel. It was a long wait. Once or twice she regained consciousness and said: "I’m sorry, Ed."

Once or twice he heard himself reassure her, "No, it was my fault."

At Southwestern Orthopaedic a consultant told him that key motor nerves had been ripped out of his spine.

"Stuff the fuckers back in again then!" he said, in an attempt to impress her.

She smiled.

"That’s exactly what we’re going to try," she replied. "We’ll do a tuck-and-glue and encourage the spinal cord to send new filaments into the old cable channel."

She thought for a moment.

"We’ll be working very close to the cord itself," she warned him.

Ed stared at her.

"It was a joke," he said.

For a while it seemed to work. Two months later he could flex the muscles in his upper legs. But nothing more happened; and, worried that a second try would only make the damage worse, they had to leave it.

Mile End Monkey House. Hanging upside down from a painful foot-hook, you chalk your hands meditatively, staring at the sweaty triangular mark your back left on the blue plastic cover of the mat last time you fell on it. Then, reluctantly, feeling your stomach muscles grind as they curl you upright again, you clutch the starting holds and go for the move: reach up: lock out on two fingers: let your left leg swing out to rebalance: strain upward with your right fingertips, and just as you brush the crucial hold, fall off again.

"Jesus Christ. I don’t know why I come here."

You come so that next weekend you can get into a Cosworth-engined Merc 190E and drive very fast down the M4 ("No one drives themselves anymore!") to a limestone outcrop high above the Wye Valley. Let go here and you will not land on a blue safety mat in a puff of chalk dust. Instead you will plummet eighty feet straight down until you hit a small ledge, catapult out into the trees, and land a little later face-first among moss-grown boulders flecked with sunshine. Now all the practice is over. Now you are on the route. Your friends look up, shading their eyes against the white glare of the rock. They are wondering if you can make the move. So are you. The only exit from shit creek is to put two fingers of your left hand into a razor-sharp solution pocket, lean away from it to the full extent of your arm, run your feet up in front of you, and, just as you are about to fall off, lunge with your right hand for the good hold above.

At the top of the cliff grows a large yew tree. You can see it very clearly. It has a short horizontal trunk, and contorted limbs perhaps eighteen inches thick curving out over the drop as if they had just that moment stopped moving. When you reach it you will be safe. But at this stage on a climb, the top of anything is an empty hypothesis. You look up: it might as well be the other side of the Atlantic. All that air is burning away below you like a fuse. Suddenly you’re moving anyway. Excitement has short-circuited the normal connections between intention and action. Where you look, you go. No effort seems to be involved. It’s like falling upward. It’s like that moment when you first understood how to swim, or ride a bike. Height and fear have returned you to your childhood. Just as it was then, your duty is only to yourself. Until you get safely down again, contracts, business meetings, household bills, emotional problems will mean nothing.

When you finally reach that yew tree at the top of the climb, you find it full of grown men and women wearing faded shorts and T-shirts. They are all in their forties and fifties. They have all escaped. With their bare brown arms, their hair bleached out by weeks of sunshine, they sit at every fork or junction, legs dangling in the dusty air, like child-pirates out of some storybook of the 1920s: an investment banker from Greenwich, an AIDS counselor from Bow; a designer of French Connection clothes; a publishers’ editor. There is a comfortable silence broken by the odd friendly murmur as you arrive, but their eyes are in-turned and they would prefer to be alone, staring dreamily out over the valley, the curve of the river, the woods which seem to stretch away to Tintern Abbey and then Wales. This is the other side of excitement, the other pleasure of height: the space without anxiety. The space without anxiety. The space without anxiety. The space without anxiety. The space without anxiety. The space without anxiety. The space without anxiety. The space with—

You are left with this familiar glitch or loop in the MAX ware. Suicide Coast won’t play any farther. Reluctantly, you abandon Mick to his world of sad acts, his faith that reality can be relied upon to scaffold his perceptions. To run him again from the beginning would only make the frailty of that faith more obvious. So you wait until everything has gone black, unplug yourself from the machine, and walk away, unconsciously rolling your shoulders to ease the stiffness, massaging the sore place at the back of your neck. What will you do next? Everything is flat out here. No one drives themselves anymore.

MEMORIES AND WIRE Mari Ness

He was losing her. Had been, almost since they’d met, really, but it wasn’t until he watched her pull a wire out of herself and methodically roll it into a small coil that it really hit him.

She’d been straight with him from the beginning. Oh, not completely straight. She’d never told him anything about the accident, or what happened afterwards. He was pretty sure he didn’t want to know. And she’d never told him anything about her work. Not the government, he knew, not exactly, but something close to it: a major government contractor who worked in top secret doing the dirty work. That was something he didn’t want to know about either. What you can’t know, you can’t tell, he remembered from some old movie or other. He saw the new bruises on her remaining skin, the new plastic patches over the implants, and decided he really didn’t want to know.

But about everything else. What she could do, what she couldn’t do. What she wanted and needed, exactly. Oxytocin, specifically: without a natural source her immune system would start rejecting the implants. Drugs could stabilize her system, but they had major side effects. So touch, mainly; sex as an addition. No emotional commitment. She thought they might have a certain intellectual compatibility but she would not have much time to talk. The job. She needed his touch. She would do what she needed for it.

"Side effects?"

"Death."

It was an incentive of sorts.

He was of course open to pursue other relationships; she didn’t need to know the details.

Surprisingly, out of this they had created, he thought, a friendship of sorts. Friendship. It was an odd word, not something he’d associated with women he’d slept with before. They were dates, girlfriends sometimes, but never friends.

N—she preferred to be called just that, N—was a friend.

Of sorts.

Who was now pulling a wire out of her arm.

"Should you be doing that here?"

"No."

The wire was not coming out cleanly. Drops of blood were falling on his couch. It was a cheap piece of crap, some microfiber thing he’d gotten on sale, and he wouldn’t mind tossing it, but—after a few seconds of debate, he stood up and hunted down an old towel, and returned and put it underneath her arm, to catch the blood.

"Need help?"

"No."

"Just as well," he said, trying to make a joke of it. "My fingers are mostly good at going in you, not getting things out of you."

He regretted the words as soon as they left his mouth, but she did not seem to react. Then again, she never did, except when they were having sex, when she surprised him by almost seeming as if she meant it.

She reached into her arm and began pulling at a second wire.

"Let me help," he said then.

"No."

"At least let me get you something for it. Alcohol, some—"

"It doesn’t hurt."

"Infection."

Two weeks ago, he’d turned on some show or other. She’d been reading her tablet with the intense focus he’d learned not to even try to interrupt; in some ways, he found it flattering that she was willing to do that, do some of her work in front of him—at least the non-high security stuff—but he also found the intensity almost unnerving, like a trance state except not really, and he couldn’t watch it, couldn’t even glance at it. After a few minutes, she’d come over to sit by him on the couch. A few minutes later, she had relaxed against him, not saying anything. He’d wrapped his arms around her. It had been—

Nice. Normal.

"My hands are clean."

"This place isn’t."

She went for medical checkups at least twice per month; some form of computer maintenance at least once a week. Part of that was her job. Part of that was that parts of her were fragile, very fragile. Even the parts that could rip him apart. And hideously expensive. Many of her parts would be recycled, afterwards. Possibly in other bodies. The very thought made him sick. She kissed him after he told her that.

"For me, then."

"If it bothers you, you may leave."

"It’s my apartment," he said.

She began rolling up the second wire.

"Isn’t that one of the arms where you still—"

It was.

He’d made a point, when they were together, of kissing both, caressing both, fucking both, as if he couldn’t tell. As if they both were real, equal. In a way they were. But one—one arm still had skin. Her skin. He’d run his tongue over it enough to know the difference.

She could probably break his leg with a single finger. Then play the video that had led up to this moment, every sound, every expression, everything she had seen, downloaded, analyzed, to the police, who would immediately charge him with Violation D.

He didn’t finish the sentence.

"Ok. Look. Can you at least give me a reason?"

"I believe Meteors is on."

From time to time she’d let slip bits about her past life. Before. He had not listened much, at first, but gradually a few small pictures began to float in his head, of what she had been. Before. A musician who had wanted her songs to live on, who had apparently given that up—he never knew the reason—for law school. A very ordinary state law school; she’d never had much money. She’d been paying off debts. She would always be paying off debts. He began downloading some of the songs she mentioned and playing them when she arrived. He thought he felt her relax more after this, linger on their kisses a little longer. Sometimes he ordered the viewer to play movies. Her silver-blue eyes—goddamn they look real, unless you’re kissing her you’d probably never notice, or think they’re just contacts—would flicker to the screen, to him, and back again. It was almost a smile.

"We’re sleeping together. If something happens to you during this, they’re going to ask me about it."

You can do better than this, man, one of his friends had said. Maybe, he said. He’d made playlists for her, sending them in casual emails. The sex had gotten better. Way better. It had been amazing this evening, so amazing he’d assumed she might be leaving him or just preparing him for some bad news when she started to pull at the wires.

She liked astronomy, she’d told him. She liked science fiction. She liked living what had once been science fiction. She could seem perfectly normal when she wanted to. It was part of the point. She loved music.

He stomped off and opened a bottle of wine, poured out two glasses and returned, offering her one. "If you’re going to do this you should probably be drunk."

"The nanowire structures prevent any influence from alcohol."

"Humor me."

"I don’t have time."

He drank down both glasses of wine.

By that time she had accumulated a tiny, neat stack of coiled wires, and was beginning to work on the other arm. The one that wasn’t.

"Come to bed," he said.

"No."

"I’m going to bed."

She was usually the one to lead them both to bed. She monitored his heart rate—it was automatic, she explained; part of her enhanced senses, part of her training—and probably other things as well. She knew precisely how tired, how stressed he was. How happy he was. How drained he was. How everything he was. It couldn’t just be the heartbeats; it had to be something else. She knew when he needed to sleep.

She never knew when he just needed the touch of her skin. Both skins.

"Sleep well."

"Can you just tell me why?"

"I am trying not to be lost."

He’d never taken a picture of her. Never asked for any of the pictures she had of him. Of them. She wasn’t going to change, after all. He would change. He might lose her. He didn’t need pictures of that.

She had a million images of him, a trillion, saved in her wires.

"You’re pulling wires out of your arm. How much more lost can you be?"

"Sleep well."

"Fuck you."

He went to bed, but not to sleep.

When he finally got up, hours later, to hunt down coffee, she was still in his living room, sitting quietly on the floor. Her left arm—the one that was entirely, completely, not real, even though it looked like an arm, moved like an arm, felt like an arm—was neatly beside her on the floor, as was her right leg. He had no idea how she was keeping herself seated upright. Five small coils of wire were stacked in front of her in a neat line. She had always been neat. Always. It was one of the things he most hated about her.

"My neural pattern synapses are failing," she said.

"I need coffee."

She’d detached her leg and her arm and put it on the floor. He needed a lot more than coffee, but he needed the coffee first.

"If no one’s arrived in two hours, you may need to call 911."

"God, you think?"

"They have probably already been alerted. There are—warning systems for something like that."

"So the fucking military is going to come here."

"No," she said quietly. "Just my employers."

Fuck these coffee pods. How the hell was he fucking supposed to get them into the machine before he’d had his coffee. And what the fuck was the deal with having to put in two pods for the damn coffee, three pods for the milk. She always asked for just one milk, but he liked his creamy, milky, sugary. Girly, he told himself, laughing that she took her coffee blacker than his. His fingers were shaking. His whole body was shaking.

"… illegally downloaded…"

His hands were covered in the sticky syrup from the coffee pods. Damn it. He went over to the kitchen sink, turned both taps on, hard, put his hands under the water. She kept talking. Fucking coffee.

"… saved in the wires…"

He kept the water running even after he pulled his hands away from the sink and put five more pods in the coffee maker. He pulled out three pods for her, putting them on the counter. Idiot. She wouldn’t be able to lift the cup. Fucking coffee. It took forever to brew. He needed a new machine. He pulled out the cup, took a sip, turned off the water.

He wasn’t sure she’d even noticed he was gone.

"I do not want you to be lost."

If he could have, he would have tossed her out just then for that. But he knew her remaining leg and arm, though original and organic, were enhanced. Could still break every bone in his body. God, he knew. His memory chose that moment to remind him of just how he knew. He felt sick.

"Please."

A sharp knock on the door.

She had never begged him. Never. Not even when he’d gotten drunk two months ago and begged her, begged her to tell him what she wanted from him in bed, tell him everything. Everything she could tell him that wasn’t wrapped up in some damn security agreement. She looked up at him, flickered her glance at the neat piles of wires, then up at him again, her eyes wide, blank. And then empty. Gone.

He opened the door.

The removal—he thought of other terms, repressed them—was swift, quiet. They handed him a few papers that he immediately tossed into the recycle shaft. No goodbyes, no tears. He’d had plumbers come by with more drama. They did not ask about the wires. He did not tell.

He hadn’t even needed to call anyone.

Friends.

When the email arrived from her, three weeks later, he almost deleted it.

It was almost certainly spam. Almost. Someone had hacked into her account, or her employers were using this as one last attempt to set up an interview with him. (He’d said no at least six times already; their last missive had assured him that legal measures would be necessary.) It wasn’t her. It couldn’t be her. He could still see her, her parts detached and on the floor, the neat rolls of wires before she was taken away to be—what? Melted? Reused? Buried? She’d said something. He hadn’t done a damn thing. Hadn’t listened. Hadn’t heard.

He’d lost her.

He hadn’t had much to lose.

He’d put the wires up on a shelf in the living room, where he could touch them, to remind himself just why he needed to forget her, to forget everything about her.

His chest hurt. He clicked open the email.

I should have let you help.

He placed his head in his arms for a long time.

N.

Six hours later, the wires were out of his house.

A month later, he told himself he’d forgotten her. Forgotten everything. Especially forgotten the image of her sitting on his floor, pulling out the wires from her arms, pulling out the things—he was not going to remember that email, not going to think about it—where she’d downloaded every fucking memory of them both. He’d moved on. Already put up a new profile on dating sites. Had signed up for kempo lessons. Was thinking about getting a dog.

He was on his third drink of the night when the knock came on the door. He ignored it. The knock came again. And again. He swore. One call from the neighbors and he’d be right back talking to authorities again. Damn it.

He saw the face, first, the suspiciously bright eyes. Something else you weren’t supposed to notice; something else he always did. The perfect skin. The bright tips of copper poking through her wrists.

He swallowed.

That was enough time for her to get inside and shut the door behind her. She hit four buttons on the keypad. I need to change that. The bolt slid shut. Not that it would stop any authority from entering. Or could have stopped this woman from entering, if she’d needed to. Wanted to. Not for long, anyway. Her eyes flickered back and forth through the room. Viewing. Recording. Downloading. She was shorter than N had been; thinner, with darker hair and skin.

"This place still isn’t clean."

"Well, watch the woman you’re sleeping with commit suicide before your eyes and see how interested you are in cleaning."

"James."

"What the fuck do you want with me?"

His eyes closed.

"I want you to call me N."

It was wrong. It was incredibly wrong. She wasn’t N. She was N. He’d already lost her, was already losing her. She was touching his face, his arms, his neck. He was running his hands down her arms, her back, her chest, feeling her skin, her not skin, her skin.

"Next time," she whispered, "I’ll let you help."

And without thinking, without feeling, he pulled her close, letting the wires in her wrists dig into his skin, kissing her before he started to lose her again.

GANGER (BALL LIGHTNING) Nalo Hopkinson

"Issy?"

"What."

"Suppose we switch suits?" Cleve asked.

Is what now? From where she knelt over him on their bed, Issy slid her tongue from Cleve’s navel, blew on the wetness she’d made there. Cleve sucked in a breath, making the cheerful pudge of his tummy shudder. She stroked its fuzzy pelt.

"What," she said, looking up at him, "you want me wear your suit and you wear mine?" This had to be the weirdest yet.

He ran a finger over her lips, the heat of his touch making her mouth tingle. "Yeah," he replied. "Something so."

Issy got up to her knees, both her plump thighs on each side of his massive left one. She looked appraisingly at him. She was still mad from the fight they’d just had. But a good mad. She and Cleve, fighting always got them hot to make up. Had to be something good about that, didn’t there? If they could keep finding their way back to each other like this? Her business if she’d wanted to make candy, even if the heat of the August night made the kitchen a hell. She wondered what the rass he was up to now.

They’d been fucking in the Senstim Co-operation’s "wetsuits" for about a week. The toys had been fun for the first little while—they’d had more sex this week than in the last month—but even with the increased sensitivity, she was beginning to miss the feel of his skin directly against hers. "It not going work," Issy declared. But she was curious.

"You sure?" Cleve asked teasingly. He smiled, stroked her naked nipple softly with the ball of his thumb. She loved the contrast between his shovel-wide hands and the delicate movements he performed with them. Her nipple poked erect, sensitive as a tongue tip. She arched her back, pushed the heavy swing of her breast into fuller contact with the ringed ridges of thumb.

"Mmm."

"C’mon, Issy, it could be fun, you know."

"Cleve, they just going key themselves to our bodies. The innie become a outie, the outie become a innie…"

"Yeah, but…"

"But what?"

"They take a few minutes to conform to our body shapes, right? Maybe in that few minutes…"

He’d gone silent, embarrassment shutting his open countenance closed; too shy to describe the sensation he was seeking. Issy sighed in irritation. What was the big deal? Fuck, cunt, cock, come: simple words to say. "In that few minutes, you’d find out what it feels like to have a poonani, right?"

A snatch. He looked shy and aroused at the same time. "Yeah, and you’d, well, you know."

He liked it when she talked "dirty." But just try to get him to repay the favour. Try to get him to buzzingly whisper hot-syrup words against the sensitive pinna of her ear until she shivered with the sensation of his mouth on her skin, and the things he was saying, the nerve impulses he was firing, spilled from his warm lips at her earhole and oozed down her spine, cupped the bowl of her belly, filled her crotch with heat.

That only ever happened in her imagination.

Cleve ran one finger down her body, tracing the faint line of hair from navel past the smiling crease below her tummy to pussy fur. Issy spread her knees a little, willing him to explore further. His fingertip tunneled through her pubic hair, tapped at her clit, making nerves sing. Ah, ah. She rocked against his thigh. What would it be like to have the feeling of entering someone’s clasping flesh? "Okay," she said. "Let’s try it."

She picked up Cleve’s stim. So diaphanous you could barely see it, but supple as skin and thrice as responsive. Cocked up onto one elbow, Cleve watched her with a slight smile on his face. Issy loved the chubby chocolate-brown beauty of him, his fatcat grin.

Chortling, she wriggled into the suit, careful to ease it over the bandage on her heel. The company boasted that you couldn’t tell the difference between the microthin layer of the wetsuits and bare skin. Bullshit. Like taking a shower with your clothes on. The suits made you feel more, but it was a one-way sensation. They dampened the sense of touch. It was like being trapped inside your own skin, able to sense your response to stimuli but not to feel when you had connected with the outside world.

Over the week of use, Cleve’s suit had shaped itself to his body. The hips were tight on Issy, the flat chest part pressed her breasts against her rib cage. The shoulders were too broad, the middle too baggy. It sagged at knees, elbows, and toes. She giggled again.

"Never mind the peripherals," Cleve said, lumbering to his feet. "No time." He picked up her suit. "Just leave them hanging."

Just as well. Issy hated the way that the roll-on headpiece trapped her hair against her neck, covered her ears, slid sensory tendrils into her earholes. It amplified the sounds when her body touched Cleve’s. It grossed her out. What would Cleve want to do next to jazz the skins up?

As the suit hyped the pleasure zones on her skin surface, Issy could feel herself getting wet, the mixture of arousal and vague distaste a wetsuit gave her. The marketing lie was that the suits were "consensual aids to full body aura alignment," not sex toys. Yeah, right. Psychobabble. She was being diddled by an oversized condom possessed of fuzzy logic. She pulled it up to her neck. The stim started to writhe, conforming itself to her shape. Galvanic peristalsis, they called its ability to move. Yuck.

"Quick," Cleve muttered. He was jamming his lubed cock at a tube in the suit, the innie part of it that would normally have slid itself into her vagina, the part that had been smooth the first time she’d taken it out of its case, but was now shaped the way she was shaped inside. Cleve pushed and pushed until the everted pocket slid over his cock. He lay back on the bed, his erection a jutting rudeness. "Oh. Wow. That’s different. Is so it feels for you?"

Oh, sweet. Issy quickly followed Cleve’s lead, spreading her knees to push the outie part of his wetsuit inside her. It was easy. She was slippery, every inch of her skin stimmed with desire. She palmed some lube from the bottle into the suit’s pouched vagina. They had to hurry. She straddled him, slid onto his cock, making the tube of one wetsuit slither smoothly into the tunnel of the other. Cleve closed his eyes, blew a small breath through pursed lips.

So, so hot. "God, it’s good," Issy muttered. Like being fucked, only she had an organ to push back with. Cleve just panted heavily, silently. As always. But what a rush! She swore she could feel Cleve’s tight hot cunt closing around her dick. She grabbed his shoulders for traction. The massy, padded flesh of them filled her hands; steel encased in velvet.

The ganger looked down at its ghostly hands. Curled them into fists. Lightning sparked between the translucent fingers as they closed. It reached a crackling hand towards Cleve’s shuddering body on the bathroom floor.

"Hey!" Issy yelled at it. She could hear the quaver in her own voice. The ganger turned its head towards the sound. The suits’ sense-memory gave it some analog of hearing.

She tried to lift her head, banged it against the underside of the toilet. "Ow." The ganger’s head elongated widthways, as though someone were pulling on its ears. Her muscles were too weakened from the aftershocks. Issy put her head back down. Now what? Think fast, Iss. "Y… you like um, um… chocolate fudge?" she asked the thing. Now, why was she still going on about the fucking candy?

The ganger straightened. Took a floating step away from Cleve, closer to Issy. Cleve was safe for the moment. Coloured auras crackled in the ganger with each step. Issy laid her cheek against cool porcelain, stammered, "Well, I was making some last night, some fudge, yeah, only it didn’t set, sometimes that happens, y’know? Too much humidity in the air, or something." The ganger seemed to wilt a little, floppy as the unhardened fudge. Was it fading? Issy’s pulse leapt in hope. But then the thing plumped up again, drew closer to where she lay helpless on the floor. Rainbow lightning did a lava lamp dance in its incorporeal body. Issy whimpered.

Cleve writhed under her. His lips formed quiet words. His own nubbin nipples hardened. Pleasure transformed his face. Issy loved seeing him this way. She rode and rode his body, "Yes, ah, sweet, God, sweet," groaning her way to the stim-charged orgasm that would fire all her pleasure synapses, give her some sugar, make her speak in tongues.

Suddenly Cleve pushed her shoulder. "Stop! Jesus, get off! Off!"

Startled, Issy shoved herself off him. Achy suction at her crotch as they disconnected. "What’s wrong?"

Cleve sat up, panting hard. He clutched at his dick. He was shaking. Shuddering, he stripped off the wetsuit, flung it to the foot of the bed. To her utter amazement, he was sobbing. She’d never seen Cleve cry.

"Jeez. Can’t have been that bad. Come." She opened her thick, strong arms to him. He curled as much of his big body as he could into her embrace, hid his face from her. She rocked him, puzzled. "Cleve?"

After a while, he mumbled, "It was nice, you know, so different, then it started to feel like, I dunno, like my dick had been peeled and it was inside out, and you, Jesus, you were fucking my inside-out dick."

Issy said nothing, held him tighter. The hyped rasp of Cleve’s body against her stimmed skin was as much a turn-on as a comfort. She rocked him, rocked him. She couldn’t think what to say, so she just hummed a children’s song:We’re stirring cocoa beneath a tree / sikola o la vani / one, two, three, vanilla / chocolate and vanilla.

Just before he fell asleep, Cleve said, "God, I don’t want to ever feel anything like that again. I had breasts, Issy. They swung when I moved."

The wetsuit Issy was wearing soon molded itself into an innie, and the hermaphroditic feeling disappeared. She kind of missed it. And all the time she was swaying Cleve to sleep she couldn’t help thinking: For a few seconds, she’d felt something of what he felt when they had sex. For a few seconds, she’d felt the things he’d never dared to tell her in words. Issy slid a hand between herself and Cleve, insinuating it into the warm space between her stomach and thigh till she could work her fingers between her legs. She could feel her own wetness sliding under the microthin fibre. She pressed her clit, gently, ah, gently, tilting her hips toward her hand. Cleve stirred, scratched his nose, flopped his hand to the bed, snoring.

And he’d felt what she was always trying to describe to him, the sensations that always defied speech. He’d felt what this was like. The thought made her cunt clench. She panted out, briefly, once. She was so slick. Willing her body still, she started the rubbing motion that she knew would bring her off.

Nowadays any words between her and Cleve seemed to fall into dead air between them, each not reaching the other. But this had reached him, gotten her inside him; this, this, this and the image of fucking Cleve pushed her over the edge and the pulseburst of her orgasm pumped again, again, again as her moans trickled through her lips and she fought not to thrash, not to wake the slumbering mountain that was Cleve.

Oh. "Yeah, man," Issy breathed. Cleve had missed the best part. She eased him off her, got his head onto a pillow. Sated, sex-heavy, and drowsy, she peeled off the wetsuit—smiled at the pouches it had moulded from her calabash breasts and behind—and kicked it onto the floor beside the bed. She lay down, rolled towards Cleve, hugged his body to her. "Mm," she murmured. Cleve muttered sleepily and snuggled into the curves of her body. Issy wriggled to the sweet spot where the lobes of his buttocks fit against her pubes. She wrapped her arm around the bole of his chest, kissed the back of his neck where his hair curled tightest. She felt herself beginning to sink into a feather-down sleep.

"I mean the boiled sugar kind of fudge," Issy told the ganger. It hovered over her, her own personal aurora. She had to keep talking, draw out the verbiage, distract the thing. "Not that gluey shit they sell at the Ex and stuff. We were supposed to have a date, but Cleve was late coming home and I was pissed at him and horny and I wanted a taste of sweetness in my mouth. And hot too, maybe. I saw a recipe once where you put a few flakes of red pepper into the syrup. Intensified the taste, they said. I wonder. Dunno what I was thinking, boiling fudge in this heat." Lightning-quick, the ganger tapped her mouth. The electric shock crashed her teeth together. She saw stars. "Huh, huh," she heard her body protesting as air puffed out of its contracting lungs.

Issy uncurled into one last, languorous stretch before sleep. Her foot connected in the dark with a warm, rubbery mass that writhed at her touch, then started to slither up her leg.

"Oh God! Shit! Cleve!" Issy kicked convulsively at the thing clambering up her thigh. She clutched Cleve’s shoulder.

He sprang awake, tapped the wall to activate the light. "What, Issy? What’s wrong?"

It was the still-charged wetsuit that Cleve had thrown to the foot of the bed, now an outie. "Christ, Cleve!" Idiot.

The suit had only been reacting to the electricity generated by Issy’s body. It was just trying to do its job. "S’all right," Cleve comforted her. "It can’t hurt you."

Shuddering, Issy peeled the wetsuit from her leg and dropped it to the ground. Deprived of her warmth, it squirmed its way over to her suit. Innie and outie writhed rudely around each other; empty sacks of skin. Jesus, with the peripherals still attached, the damned things looked like they had floppy heads.

Cleve smiled sleepily. "Is like lizard tails, y’know, when they drop off and wiggle?"

Issy thought she’d gag. "Get them out of my sight, Cleve. Discharge them and put them away."

"Tomorrow," he murmured.

They were supposed to be stored in separate cases, outie and innie, but Cleve just scooped them up and tossed them together, wriggling, into the closet.

"Gah," Issy choked.

Cleve looked at her face and said, "Come on, Iss; have a heart; think of them lying side by side in their little boxes, separated from each other."

He was trying to joke about it.

"No," Issy said. "We get to do that instead. Wrap ourselves in fake flesh that’s supposed to make us feel more. Ninety-six degrees in the shade, and we’re wearing rubber body bags."

His face lost its teasing smile. Just the effect she’d wanted, but it didn’t feel so good now. And it wasn’t true, really. The wetsuit material did some weird shit so that it didn’t trap heat in. And they were sexy, once you got used to them. No sillier than strap-ons or cuffs padded with fake fur. Issy grimaced an apology at Cleve. He screwed up his face and looked away. God, if he would only speak up for himself sometimes! Issy turned her back to him and found her wadded-up panties in the bedclothes. She wrestled them on and lay back down, facing the wall. The light went off. Cleve climbed back into bed. Their bodies didn’t touch.

The sun cranked Issy’s eyes open. Its August heat washed over her like slops from a bucket. Her sheet was twisted around her, warm, damp and funky. Her mouth was sour and she could smell her own stink. "Oh God, I want it to be winter," she groaned.

She fought her way out of the clinging cloth to sit up in bed. The effort made her pant. She twisted the heavy mass of her braids up off the nape of her neck and sat for a while, feeling the sweat trickle down her scalp. She grimaced at the memory of last night.

Cleve wasn’t there. Out for a jog, likely. "Yeah, that’s how you sulk," she muttered. "In silence." Issy longed to know that he cared strongly about something, to hear him speak with any kind of force, the passion of his anger, the passion of his love. But Cleve kept it all so cool, so mild. Wrap it all in fake skin, hide it inside.

The morning sun had thrown a violent, hot bar of light across her bed. Heat. Tangible, almost. Crushed against every surface of her skin, like drowning in feathers. Issy shifted into a patch of shade. It made no difference. Fuck. A drop of sweat trickled down her neck, beaded a track down her left breast to drip off her nipple and splat onto her thigh. The trail of moisture it had left behind felt cool on her skin. Issy watched her aureole crinkle and the nipple stiffen in response. She shivered.

A twinkle of light caught her eye. The closet sliding door was open. The wetsuits, thin as shed snakeskin, were still humping each other beside their storage boxes. "Nasty!" Issy exclaimed. She jumped up from the bed, pushed the closet door shut with a bang. She left the room, ignoring the rhythmic thumping noise from inside the closet. Cleve was supposed to have discharged them; it could just wait until he deigned to come home again.

Overloading, crackling violently, the ganger stepped back. Issy nearly wept with release from its jolt. Her knees felt watery. Was Cleve still breathing? She thought she could see his chest moving in little gasps. She hoped. She had to keep the ganger distracted from him, he might not survive another shock. Teeth chattering, she said to the ganger, "You melt the sugar and butter—the salty butter’s the best—in milk, then you add cocoa powder and boil it all to hard crack stage…" Issy wet her lips with her tongue. The day’s heat was enveloping her again. "Whip in some more butter," she continued. "You always get it on your fingers, that melted, salty butter. It will slide down the side of your hand, and you lick it off—so you whip in some more butter, and real vanilla, the kind that smells like mother’s breath and cookies, not the artificial shit, and you dump it onto a plate, and it sets, and you have it sweet like that; chocolate fudge."

The sensuality in her voice seemed to mesmerise the ganger. It held still, rapt. Its inner lightnings cooled to electric blue. Its mouth hole yawned, wide as two of her fists.

As she headed to the kitchen, Issy made a face at the salty dampness beneath her swaying breasts and the curve of her belly. Her thighs were sticky where they moved against each other. She stopped in the living room and stood, feet slightly apart, arms away from her sides, so no surface of her body would touch any other. No relief. The heat still clung. She shoved her panties down around her ankles. The movement briefly brought her nose to her crotch, a whiff of sweaty muskiness. She straightened up, stepped out of the sodden pretzel of cloth, kicked it away. The quick movement had made her dizzy. She swayed slightly, staggered into the kitchen.

Cleve had mopped up the broken glass and gluey candy from yesterday evening, left the pot to soak. The kitchen still smelt of chocolate. The rich scent tingled along the roof of Issy’s mouth.

The fridge hummed in its own aura, heat outside making cold inside. She needed water. Cold, cold. She yanked the fridge door open, reached for the water jug, and drank straight from it. The shock of chilly liquid made her teeth ache. She sucked water in, tilting the jug high so that more spilled past her gulping mouth, ran down her jaw, her breasts, her belly. With her free hand, she spread the coolness over the pillow of her stomach, dipping down into crinkly pubic hair, then sliding up to heft each breast one at a time, sliding cool fingers underneath, thumb almost automatically grazing each nipple to feel them harden slightly at her touch. Better. Issy put the jug back, half full now.

At her back, hot air was a wall. Seconds after she closed the fridge door, she’d be overheated and miserable again. She stood balanced between ice and heat, considering.

She pulled open the door to the icebox. It creaked and protested, jammed with frost congealed on its hinges. The fridge was ancient. Cleve had joked with the landlady that he might sell it to a museum and use the money to pay the rent on the apartment for a year. He’d only gotten a scowl in return.

The fridge had needed defrosting for weeks now. Her job. Cleve did the laundry and bathroom and kept them spotlessly clean. The kitchen and the bedroom were hers. Last time she’d changed the sheets was about the last time she’d done the fridge. Cleve hadn’t complained. She was waiting him out.

Issy peered into the freezer. Buried in the canned hoarfrost were three ice cube trays. She had to pull at them to work them free of hard-packed freezer snow. One was empty. The other two contained a few ice cubes between them.

The ganger took a step towards her. It paddled its hand in the black hole of its mouth. Issy shuddered, kept talking: "Break off chunks of fudge, and is sweet and dark and crunchy; a little bit hot if you put the pepper flakes in, I never tried that kind, and is softer in the middle, and the butter taste rise to the roof of your mouth, and the chocolate melt all over your tongue; man, you could almost come, just from a bite."

Issy flung the empty tray into the sink at the other end of the kitchen. Jangle-crash, displacing a fork, which leapt from the sink, clattered onto the floor. The thumping from inside the bedroom closet became more frenetic. "Stop that," Issy yelled in the direction of the bedroom. The sound became a rapid drubbing. Then silence.

Issy kicked the fridge door closed, took the two ice cube trays into the bathroom. Even with that short walk, the heat was pressing in on her again. The bathroom was usually cool, but today the tiles were warm against her bare feet. The humidity of the room felt like wading through spit.

Issy plugged the bathtub drain, dumped the sorry handful of ice in. Not enough. She grabbed up the mop bucket, went back to the kitchen, fished a spatula out of the sink, rinsed it. She used the spatula to dig out the treasures buried in the freezer. Frozen cassava, some unidentifiable meat, a cardboard cylinder of grape punch. She put them on a shelf in the fridge. Those excavated, she set about shoveling the snow out of the freezer, dumping it into her bucket. In no time she had a bucketful, and she’d found another ice cube tray, this one full of fat, rounded lumps of ice. She was a little cooler now.

Back in the bathroom, she dumped the bucket of freezer snow on top of the puddle that had been the ice cubes. Then she ran cold water, filled the bathtub calf-deep, and stepped into it.

Sssss… The shock of cold feet zapped straight through Issy’s body to her brain. She bent—smell of musk again—picked up a handful of the melting snow, and packed it into her hair. Blessed, blessed cold. The snow became water almost instantly and dribbled down her face. Issy licked at a trickle of it. She picked up another handful of snow, stuffed it into her mouth. Crunchy-cold freon ice, melting on her tongue. She remembered the canned taste from childhood, how her dad would scold her for eating freezer snow. Her mother would say nothing, just wipe Issy’s mouth dry with a silent, long-suffering smile.

Issy squatted in the bathtub. The cold water lapped against her butt. Goose bumps pimpled the skin of her thighs. She sat down, hips pressing against either side of the tub. An ice cube lapped against the small of her back, making her first arch to escape the cold, then lean back against the tub with a happy shudder. Snow crunched between her back and the ceramic surface. Issy spread her knees. There was more snow floating in the diamond her legs made. In both hands, she picked up another handful, mashed it into the V of her crotch. She shivered at the sensation and relaxed into the cool water.

The fridge made a zapping, farting noise, then resumed its juddering hum. Damned bucket of bolts. Issy concentrated on the deliciously shivery feel of the ice melting in her pubic hair.

"Only this time," Issy murmured, "the fudge ain’t set. Just sat there on the cookie tin, gluey and brown. Not hard, not quite liquid, you get me? Glossy-shiny dark brown where it pooled, and rising from it, that chocolate-butter-vanilla smell. But wasted, ’cause it wasn’t going to set."

The television clicked on loudly with an inane laugh track. Issy sat up. "Cleve?" She hadn’t heard him come in. With a popping noise, the TV snapped off again. "Cleve, is you?"

Issy listened. Nope, nothing but the humming of the fridge. She was alone. These humid August days made all their appliances schizo with static. She relaxed back against the tub.

"I got mad," Issy told the ganger. "It was hot in the kitchen and there was cocoa powder everywhere and lumps of melting butter, and I do all that work ’cause I just wanted the taste of something sweet in my mouth and the fucker wouldn’t set!

"I backhanded the cookie tin. Fuck, it hurt like I crack a finger bone. The tin skidded across the kitchen counter, splanged off the side of the stove, and went flying."

Issy’s skin bristled with goose bumps at the sight of the thing that walked in through the open bathroom door and stood, arms hanging. It was a human-shaped glow, translucent. Its edges were fuzzy. She could see the hallway closet through it. Eyes, nose, mouth were empty circles. A low crackling noise came from it, like a crushed Cheezies bag. Issy could feel her breath coming in short, terrified pants. She made to stand up, and the apparition moved closer to her. She whimpered and sat back down in the chilly water.

The ghost-thing stood still. A pattern of coloured lights flickered in it, limning where spine, heart, and brain would have been, if it had had those. It did have breasts, she saw now, and a dick.

She moved her hand. Water dripped from her fingertips into the tub. The thing turned its head towards the sound. It took a step. She froze. The apparition stopped moving too, just stood there, humming like the fridge. It plucked at its own nipples, pulled its breasts into cones of ectoplasm. It ran hands over its body, then over the sink, bent down to thrust its arms right through the closed cupboard doors. It dipped a hand into the toilet bowl. Sparks flew, and it jumped back. Issy’s scalp prickled. Damn, the thing was electrical, and she was sitting in water! She tried to reach the plug with her toes to let the water out.

Swallowing whimpers, she stretched a leg out: Slow, God, go slow, Issy. The movement sent a chunk of melting ice sliding along her thigh. She shivered. She couldn’t quite reach the plug and if she moved closer to it, the movement would draw the apparition’s attention. Issy breathed in short, shallow bursts. She could feel her eyes beginning to brim. Terror and the chilly water were sending tremors in waves through her.

What the fuck was it? The thing turned towards her. In its quest for sensation, it hefted its cock in its hand. Inserted a finger into what seemed to be a vagina underneath. Let its hands drop again. Faintly, Issy could make out a mark on its hip, a circular shape. It reminded her of something…

Logo, it was the logo of the Senstim people who’d invented the wetsuits!

But this wasn’t a wetsuit, it was like some kind of, fuck, ball lightning. She and Cleve hadn’t discharged their wetsuits. She remembered some of the nonsense words that were in the warning on the wetsuit storage boxes: "Energizing electrostatic charge," and "Kirlian phenomenon." Well, they hadn’t paid attention, and now some kind of weird set of both suits was rubbing itself off in their bathroom. Damn, damn, damn Cleve and his toys. Sobbing, shivering, Issy tried to toe at the plug again. Her knee banged against the tub. The suit-ghost twitched towards the noise. It leaned over the water and dabbed at her clutching toes. Pop-crackle sound. The jolt sent her leg flailing like a dying fish. Pleasure crackled along her leg, painfully intense. Her knee throbbed and tingled, ached sweetly. Her thigh muscles shuddered as though they would tear free. The jolt slammed into her crotch and Issy’s body bucked. She could hear her own grunts. She was straddling a live wire. She was coming to death. Her nipples jutted long as thumbs, stung like they’d been dipped in ice. Her head was banging against the wall with each deadly set of contractions. Issy shouted in pain, in glory, in fear. The suit-ghost leapt back. Issy’s butt hit the floor of the tub, hard. Her muscles were twitching spasmodically. She’d bitten the inside of her mouth. She sucked in air like sobs, swallowed tinny blood.

The suit-ghost was swollen, bloated, jittering. Its inner lightning bolts were going mad. If it touched her again, it might overload completely. If it touched her again, her heart might stop.

Issy heard the sound of the key turning in the front door. "Iss? You home?"

"No. Cleve." Issy hissed under her breath. He mustn’t come in. But if she shouted to warn him, the suit-ghost would touch her again.

Cleve’s footsteps approached the bathroom. "Iss? Listen, did you drain the wet—" Like filings to a magnet, the suit-ghost inclined towards the sound of his voice. "Don’t come in, Cleve; go get help!"

Too late. He’d stuck his head in, grinning his open, friendly grin. The suit-ghost rushed him, plastered itself along his body. It got paler, its aura-lightnings mere flickers. Cleve made a choking noise and crashed to the floor, jerking. Issy levered herself out of the bath, but her jelly muscles wouldn’t let her stand. She flopped to the tiles. Cleve’s body was convulsing, horrible noises coming from his mouth. Riding him like a duppy, a malevolent spirit, the stim-ghost grew paler with each thrash of his flailing body. Its colour patterns started to run into each other, to bleach themselves pale. Cleve’s energy was draining it, but it was killing him. Sucking on her whimpers, Issy reached a hand into the stim-ghost’s field. Her heart went off like a machine gun. Her breathing wouldn’t work. The orgasm was unspeakable. Wailing, Issy rolled away from Cleve, taking the ghost-thing with her. It swelled at her touch, its colours flared neon-bright, out of control. It flailed off her, floated back towards Cleve’s more cooling energy.

Heart pounding, too weak to move, Issy muttered desperately to distract it the first thing that came to her mind: "Y… you like, um, chocolate fudge?"

The ghost turned towards her. Issy cried and kept talking, kept talking. The ghost wavered between Issy’s hot description of bubbling chocolate and Cleve’s cool silence, caught in the middle. Could it even understand words? Wetsuits located pleasurable sensation to augment it. Maybe it was just drawn to the sensuousness of her tone. Issy talked, urgently, carefully releasing the words from her mouth like caresses:

"So," she said to the suit-duppy, "I watching this cookie tin twist through the air like a Frisbee, and is like slow motion, ’cause I seeing gobs of chocolate goo spiraling from it as it flies, and they spreading out wider and wider. I swear I hear separate splats as chocolate hits the walls like slung shit and one line of it strafes the fridge door, and a gob somehow slimes the naked bulb hanging low from the kitchen ceiling. I hear it sizzle. The cookie tin lands on the floor, fudge side down, of course. I haven’t cleaned the fucking floor in ages. There’re spots everywhere on that floor that used to be gummy, but now they’re layered in dust and maybe flour and desiccated bodies of cockroaches that got trapped, reaching for sweetness. I know how they feel. I take a step towards the cookie tin, then I start to smell burning chocolate. I look up. I see a curl of black smoke rising from the glob of chocolate on the light bulb."

Cleve raised his head. There were tears in his eyes and the front of his jogging pants was damp and milky. "Issy," he interrupted in a whisper.

"Shut up, Cleve!"

"That thing," he said in a low, urgent voice. "People call it a ganger; doppel—"

The ganger was suddenly at his side. It leaned a loving head on his chest, like Issy would do. "No!" she yelled. Cleve’s body shook. The ganger frayed and tossed like a sheet in the wind. Cleve shrieked. He groaned like he was coming, but with an edge of terror and pain that Issy couldn’t bear to hear. Pissed, terrified, Issy swiped an arm through its field, then rolled her bucking body on the bathroom tiles, praying that she could absorb the ganger’s energy without it frying her synapses with sweet sensation.

Through spasms, she barely heard Cleve say to it, "Come to me, not her. Come. Listen, you know that song? ‘I got a weakness for sweetness…’ That’s my Issy."

The ganger dragged itself away from Issy. Released, her muscles melted. She was a gooey, warm puddle spreading on the floor. The ganger reached an ectoplasmic hand towards Cleve, fingers stretching long as arms. Cleve gasped and froze.

Issy croaked, "You think is that it is, Cleve? Weakness?"

The ganger turned its head her way, ran a long, slow arm down its body to the floor, back up to its crotch. It stroked itself.

Cleve spoke to it in a voice that cracked whispery on the notes: "Yeah, sweetness. That’s what my Issy wants most of all." The ganger moved towards him, rubbing its crotch. He continued, "If I’m not there, there’s always sugar, or food, or booze. I’m just one of her chosen stimulants."

Outraged tears filled Issy’s mouth, salty as butter, as flesh. She’d show him, she’d rescue him. She countered:

"The glob of burned sugar on the light? From the ruined fudge? Well, it goes black and starts to bubble." The ganger extruded a tongue the length of an arm from its mouth. The tongue wriggled towards Issy.

She rolled back, saying, "The light bulb explodes. I feel some shards land in my hair. I don’t try to brush them away. Is completely dark now; I only had the kitchen light on. I take another step to where I know the cookie tin is on the floor. A third step, and pain crazes my heel. Must have stepped on a piece of light bulb glass. Can’t do nothing about it now. I rise onto the toes of the hurting foot. I think I feel blood running down from heel to instep."

The ganger jittered towards her.

"You were always better than me at drama, Iss," Cleve said.

The sadness in his voice tore at her heart. But she said, "What that thing is?" Cleve replied softly, "Is kinda beautiful, ain’t?"

"It going to kill us."

"Beautiful. Just a lump of static charge, coated in the Kirlian energy thrown off from the suits."

"Why it show up now?"

"Is what happens when you leave the suits together too long."

The ganger drifted back and forth, pulled by one voice, then the other. A longish silence between them freed it to move. It floated closer to Cleve. Issy wouldn’t let it, she wouldn’t. She quavered:

"I take another step on the good foot, carefully. I bend down, sweep my hands around."

The ganger dropped to the floor, ran its long tongue over the tiles. A drop of water made it crackle and shrink in slightly on itself.

"There," Issy continued. "The cookie tin. I brush around me, getting a few more splinters in my hands. I get down to my knees, curl down as low to the ground as I can. I pry up the cookie tin, won’t have any glass splinters underneath it. A dark sweet wet chocolate smell rising from under there."

"Issy, Jesus," Cleve whispered. He started to bellow the words of the song he’d taunted her with, drawing the ganger. It touched him with a fingertip. A crackling noise. He gasped, jumped, kept singing.

Issy ignored him. Hissing under his booming voice she snarled at the ganger, "I run a finger through the fudge. I lick it off. Most of it on the ground, not on the tin. I bend over and run my tongue through it, reaching for sweetness. Butter and vanilla and oh, oh, the chocolate. And crunchy, gritty things I don’t think about. Cockroach parts, maybe. I swallow."

Cleve interrupted his song to wail, "That’s gross, Iss. Why you had to go and do that?"

"So Cleve come in, he see me there sitting on the floor surrounded by broken glass and limp chocolate, and you know what he say?" The ganger was reaching for her.

"Issy, stop talking, you only drawing it to you."

"Nothing." The ganger jerked. "Zip." The ganger twitched. "Dick." The ganger spasmed, once. It touched her hair. Issy breathed. That was safe. "The bastard just started cleaning up; not a word for me." The ganger hugged her. Issy felt her eyes roll back in her head. She thrashed in the energy of its embrace until Cleve yelled:

"And what you said! Ee? Tell me!"

The ganger pulled away. Issy lay still, waiting for her breathing to return to normal. Cleve said, "Started carrying on with some shit about how light bulbs are such poor quality nowadays. Sat in the filth and broken glass, pouting and watching me clean up your mess. Talking about anything but what really on your mind. I barely get all the glass out of your heel before you start pulling my pants down."

Issy ignored him. She kept talking to the ganger. "Cool, cool Cleve. No ‘What’s up?’; no ‘What the fuck is this crap on the floor?’; no heat, no passion."

"What was the point? I did the only thing that will sweet you every time."

"Encased us both in fake skin and let it do the fucking for us."

The ganger jittered in uncertain circles between the two of them. "Issy, what you want from me?"

The ganger’s head swelled obscenely towards Cleve.

"Some heat. Some feeling. Like I show you. Like I feel. Like I feel for you." The ganger’s lower lip stretched, stretched, a filament of it reaching for Issy’s own mouth. The black cavity of its maw was a tunnel, longing to swallow her up. She shuddered and rolled back farther. Her back came up against the bathtub.

Softly: "What do you feel for me, Issy?"

"Fuck you."

"I do. We do. It’s good. But what do you feel for me, Issy?"

"Don’t ridicule me. You know."

"I don’t know shit, Issy! You talk, talk, talk! And it’s all about what racist insult you heard yesterday, and who tried to cheat you at the store, and how high the phone bill is. You talk around stuff, not about it!"

"Shut up!"

The ganger flailed like a hook-caught fish between them.

Quietly, Cleve said, "The only time we seem to reach each other now is through our skins. So I bought something to make our skins feel more, and it’s still not enough."

An involuntary sound came from Issy’s mouth, a hooked, wordless query.

"Cleve, is that why…" She looked at him, at the intense brown eyes in the expressive brown face. When had he started to look so sad all the time? She reached a hand out to him. The ganger grabbed it. Issy saw fireworks behind her eyes. She screamed. She felt Cleve’s hand on her waist, felt the hand clutch painfully as he tried to shove her away to safety with his other hand. Blindly she reached out, tried to bat the ganger away. Her hand met Cleve’s in the middle of the fog that was the ganger. All the pleasure centres in her body exploded.

A popping sound. A strong, seminal smell of bleach. The ganger was gone. Issy and Cleve sagged to the floor.

"Rass," she sighed. Her calves were knots the size of potatoes. And she’d be sitting tenderly for a while.

"I feel like I’ve been dragged five miles behind a run-away horse," Cleve told her. "You all right?"

"Yeah, where’d that thing go, the ganger?"

"Shit, Issy, I’m so sorry. Should have drained the suits like you said."

"Chuh. Don’t dig nothing. I could have done it too."

"I think we neutralized it. Touched each other, touched it: We canceled it out. I think."

"Touched each other. That simple." Issy gave a little rueful laugh. "Cleve, I… you’re my honey, you know? You sweet me for days. I won’t forget anymore to tell you," she said, "and keep telling you."

His smile brimmed over with joy. He replied, "You, you’re my live wire. You keep us both juiced up, make my heart sing in my chest." He hesitated, spoke bashfully, "And my dick leap in my pants when I see you."

A warmth flooded Issy at his sweet, hot talk. She felt her eyelashes dampen. She smiled. "See, the dirty words not so hard to say. And the anger not so hard to show."

Tailor-sat on the floor, beautiful Buddha-body, he frowned at her. "I ’fraid to use harsh words, Issy, you know that. Look at the size of me, the blackness of me. You know what it is to see people cringe for fear when you shout?"

She was dropping down with fatigue. She leaned and softly touched his face. "I don’t know what that is like. But I know you. I know you would never hurt me. You must say what on your mind, Cleve. To me, at least." She closed her eyes, dragged herself exhaustedly into his embrace.

He said, "You know, I dream of the way you full up my arms."

"You’re sticky," she murmured. "Like candy." And fell asleep, touching him.

LEARNING TO BE ME Greg Egan

I was six years old when my parents told me that there was a small, dark jewel inside my skull, learning to be me.

Microscopic spiders had woven a fine golden web through my brain, so that the jewel’s teacher could listen to the whisper of my thoughts. The jewel itself eavesdropped on my senses, and read the chemical messages carried in my bloodstream; it saw, heard, smelt, tasted and felt the world exactly as I did, while the teacher monitored its thoughts and compared them with my own. Whenever the jewel’s thoughts were wrong, the teacher—faster than thought—rebuilt the jewel slightly, altering it this way and that, seeking out the changes that would make its thoughts correct.

Why? So that when I could no longer be me, the jewel could do it for me.

I thought: if hearing that makes me feel strange and giddy, how must it make the jewel feel? Exactly the same, I reasoned; it doesn’t know it’s the jewel, and it too wonders how the jewel must feel, it too reasons: "Exactly the same; it doesn’t know it’s the jewel, and it too wonders how the jewel must feel…"

And it too wonders—

(I knew, because I wondered)

—it too wonders whether it’s the real me, or whether in fact it’s only the jewel that’s learning to be me.

As a scornful twelve-year-old, I would have mocked such childish concerns. Everybody had the jewel, save the members of obscure religious sects, and dwelling upon the strangeness of it struck me as unbearably pretentious. The jewel was the jewel, a mundane fact of life, as ordinary as excrement. My friends and I told bad jokes about it, the same way we told bad jokes about sex, to prove to each other how blasé we were about the whole idea.

Yet we weren’t quite as jaded and imperturbable as we pretended to be. One day when we were all loitering in the park, up to nothing in particular, one of the gang—whose name I’ve forgotten, but who has stuck in my mind as always being far too clever for his own good—asked each of us in turn: "Who are you? The jewel, or the real human?" We all replied—unthinkingly, indignantly—"The real human!" When the last of us had answered, he cackled and said, "Well, I’m not. I’m the jewel. So you can eat my shit, you losers, because you’ll all get flushed down the cosmic toilet—but me, I’m gonna live forever."

We beat him until he bled.

By the time I was fourteen, despite—or perhaps because of—the fact that the jewel was scarcely mentioned in my teaching machine’s dull curriculum, I’d given the question a great deal more thought. The pedantically correct answer when asked "Are you the jewel or the human?" had to be "The human"—because only the human brain was physically able to reply. The jewel received input from the senses, but had no control over the body, and its intended reply coincided with what was actually said only because the device was a perfect imitation of the brain. To tell the outside world "I am the jewel"—with speech, with writing, or with any other method involving the body—was patently false (although to think it to oneself was not ruled out by this line of reasoning).

However, in a broader sense, I decided that the question was simply misguided. So long as the jewel and the human brain shared the same sensory input, and so long as the teacher kept their thoughts in perfect step, there was only one person, one identity, one consciousness. This one person merely happened to have the (highly desirable) property that if either the jewel or the human brain were to be destroyed, he or she would survive unimpaired. People had always had two lungs and two kidneys, and for almost a century, many had lived with two hearts. This was the same: a matter of redundancy, a matter of robustness, no more.

That was the year that my parents decided I was mature enough to be told that they had both undergone the switch—three years before. I pretended to take the news calmly, but I hated them passionately for not having told me at the time. They had disguised their stay in hospital with lies about a business trip overseas. For three years I had been living with jewel-heads, and they hadn’t even told me. It was exactly what I would have expected of them.

"We didn’t seem any different to you, did we?" asked my mother.

"No," I said—truthfully, but burning with resentment nonetheless.

"That’s why we didn’t tell you," said my father. "If you’d known we’d switched, at the time, you might have imagined that we’d changed in some way. By waiting until now to tell you, we’ve made it easier for you to convince yourself that we’re still the same people we’ve always been." He put an arm around me and squeezed me. I almost screamed out, "Don’t touch me!" but I remembered in time that I’d convinced myself that the jewel was No Big Deal.

I should have guessed that they’d done it, long before they confessed; after all, I’d known for years that most people underwent the switch in their early thirties. By then, it’s downhill for the organic brain, and it would be foolish to have the jewel mimic this decline. So, the nervous system is rewired; the reins of the body are handed over to the jewel, and the teacher is deactivated. For a week, the outward-bound impulses from the brain are compared with those from the jewel, but by this time the jewel is a perfect copy, and no differences are ever detected.

The brain is removed, discarded, and replaced with a spongy tissue-cultured object, brain-shaped down to the level of the finest capillaries, but no more capable of thought than a lung or a kidney. This mock-brain removes exactly as much oxygen and glucose from the blood as the real thing, and faithfully performs a number of crude, essential biochemical functions. In time, like all flesh, it will perish and need to be replaced.

The jewel, however, is immortal. Short of being dropped into a nuclear fireball, it will endure for a billion years.

My parents were machines. My parents were gods. It was nothing special. I hated them.

When I was sixteen, I fell in love, and became a child again.

Spending warm nights on the beach with Eva, I couldn’t believe that a mere machine could ever feel the way I did. I knew full well that if my jewel had been given control of my body, it would have spoken the very same words as I had, and executed with equal tenderness and clumsiness my every awkward caress—but I couldn’t accept that its inner life was as rich, as miraculous, as joyful as mine. Sex, however pleasant, I could accept as a purely mechanical function, but there was something between us (or so I believed) that had nothing to do with lust, nothing to do with words, nothing to do with any tangible action of our bodies that some spy in the sand dunes with parabolic microphone and infrared binoculars might have discerned. After we made love, we’d gaze up in silence at the handful of visible stars, our souls conjoined in a secret place that no crystalline computer could hope to reach in a billion years of striving. (If I’d said that to my sensible, smutty, twelve-year-old self, he would have laughed until he hemorrhaged.)

I knew by then that the jewel’s "teacher" didn’t monitor every single neuron in the brain. That would have been impractical, both in terms of handling the data, and because of the sheer physical intrusion into the tissue. Someone-or-other’s theorem said that sampling certain critical neurons was almost as good as sampling the lot, and—given some very reasonable assumptions that nobody could disprove—bounds on the errors involved could be established with mathematical rigour.

At first, I declared that within these errors, however small, lay the difference between brain and jewel, between human and machine, between love and its imitation. Eva, however, soon pointed out that it was absurd to make a radical, qualitative distinction on the basis of the sampling density; if the next model teacher sampled more neurons and halved the error rate, would its jewel then be "halfway" between "human" and "machine?" In theory—and eventually, in practice—the error rate could be made smaller than any number I cared to name. Did I really believe that a discrepancy of one in a billion made any difference at all—when every human being was permanently losing thousands of neurons every day, by natural attrition?

She was right, of course, but I soon found another, more plausible, defense for my position. Living neurons, I argued, had far more internal structure than the crude optical switches that served the same function in the jewel’s so-called "neutral net." That neurons fired or did not fire reflected only one level of their behaviour; who knew what the subleties of biochemistry—the quantum mechanics of the specific organic molecules involved—contributed to the nature of human consciousness? Copying the abstract neural topology wasn’t enough. Sure, the jewel could pass the fatuous Turing test—no outside observer could tell it from a human—but that didn’t prove that being a jewel felt the same as being human.

Eva asked, "Does that mean you’ll never switch? You’ll have your jewel removed? You’ll let yourself die when your brain starts to rot?"

"Maybe," I said. "Better to die at ninety or a hundred than kill myself at thirty, and have some machine marching around, taking my place, pretending to be me."

"How do you know I haven’t switched?" she asked, provocatively. "How do you know that I’m not just ‘pretending to be me’?"

"I know you haven’t switched," I said, smugly. "I just know."

"How? I’d look the same. I’d talk the same. I’d act the same in every way. People are switching younger, these days. So how do you know I haven’t?"

I turned on my side towards her, and gazed into her eyes. "Telepathy. Magic. The communion of souls."

My twelve-year-old self started snickering, but by then I knew exactly how to drive him away.

At nineteen, although I was studying finance, I took an undergraduate philosophy unit. The Philosophy Department, however, apparently had nothing to say about the Ndoli Device, more commonly known as "the jewel". (Ndoli had in fact called it "the dual," but the accidental, homophonic nickname had stuck.) They talked about Plato and Descartes and Marx, they talked about St. Augustine and—when feeling particularly modern and adventurous—Sartre, but if they’d heard of Godel, Turing, Hamsun or Kim, they refused to admit it. Out of sheer frustration, in an essay on Descartes I suggested that the notion of human consciousness as "software" that could be "implemented" equally well on an organic brain or an optical crystal was in fact a throwback to Cartesian dualism; for "software" read "soul." My tutor superimposed a neat, diagonal, luminous red line over each paragraph that dealt with this idea, and wrote in the margin (in vertical, bold-face, twenty-point Times, with a contemptuous two-hertz flash): irrelevant!

I quit philosophy and enrolled in a unit of optical crystal engineering for non-specialists. I learnt a lot of solid-state quantum mechanics. I learnt a lot of fascinating mathematics. I learnt that a neural net is a device used only for solving problems that are far too hard to be understood. A sufficiently flexible neural net can be configured by feedback to mimic almost any system—to produce the same patterns of output from the same patterns of input—but achieving this sheds no light whatsoever on the nature of the system being emulated.

"Understanding," the lecturer told us, "is an overrated concept. Nobody really understands how a fertilized egg turns into a human. What should we do? Stop having children until ontogenesis can be described by a set of differential equations?"

I had to concede that she had a point there.

It was clear to me by then that nobody had the answers I craved—and I was hardly likely to come up with them myself; my intellectual skills were, at best, mediocre. It came down to a simple choice: I could waste time fretting about the mysteries of consciousness, or, like everybody else, I could stop worrying and get on with my life.

When I married Daphne, at twenty-three, Eva was a distant memory, and so was any thought of the communion of souls. Daphne was thirty-one, an executive in the merchant bank that had hired me during my PhD, and everyone agreed that the marriage would benefit my career. What she got out of it, I was never quite sure. Maybe she actually liked me. We had an agreeable sex life, and we comforted each other when we were down, the way any kind-hearted person would comfort an animal in distress.

Daphne hadn’t switched. She put it off, month after month, inventing ever more ludicrous excuses, and I teased her as if I’d never had reservations of my own.

"I’m afraid," she confessed one night. "What if I die when it happens—what if all that’s left is a robot, a puppet, a thing? I don’t want to die."

Talk like that made me squirm, but I hid my feelings. "Suppose you had a stroke," I said glibly, "which destroyed a small part of your brain. Suppose the doctors implanted a machine to take over the functions which that damaged region had performed. Would you still be ‘yourself’?"

"Of course."

"Then if they did it twice, or ten times, or a thousand times—"

"That doesn’t necessarily follow."

"Oh? At what magic percentage, then, would you stop being ‘you’?"

She glared at me. "All the old clichéd arguments—"

"Fault them, then, if they’re so old and clichéd."

She started to cry. "I don’t have to. Fuck you! I’m scared to death, and you don’t give a shit!"

I took her in my arms. "Sssh. I’m sorry. But everyone does it sooner or later. You mustn’t be afraid. I’m here. I love you." The words might have been a recording, triggered automatically by the sight of her tears.

"Will you do it? With me?"

I went cold. "What?"

"Have the operation, on the same day? Switch when I switch?"

Lots of couples did that. Like my parents. Sometimes, no doubt, it was a matter of love, commitment, sharing. Other times, I’m sure, it was more a matter of neither partner wishing to be an unswitched person living with a jewel-head.

I was silent for a while, then I said, "Sure."

In the months that followed, all of Daphne’s fears—which I’d mocked as "childish" and "superstitious"—rapidly began to make perfect sense, and my own "rational" arguments came to sound abstract and hollow. I backed out at the last minute; I refused the anaesthetic, and fled the hospital.

Daphne went ahead, not knowing I had abandoned her.

I never saw her again. I couldn’t face her; I quit my job and left town for a year, sickened by my cowardice and betrayal—but at the same time euphoric that I had escaped.

She brought a suit against me, but then dropped it a few days later, and agreed, through her lawyers, to an uncomplicated divorce. Before the divorce came through, she sent me a brief letter:

There was nothing to fear, after all. I’m exactly the person I’ve always been. Putting it off was insane; now that I’ve taken the leap of faith, I couldn’t be more at ease.

Your loving robot wife,

DAPHNE

By the time I was twenty-eight, almost everyone I knew had switched. All my friends from university had done it. Colleagues at my new job, as young as twenty-one, had done it. Eva, I heard through a friend of a friend, had done it six years before.

The longer I delayed, the harder the decision became. I could talk to a thousand people who had switched, I could grill my closest friends for hours about their childhood memories and their most private thoughts, but however compelling their words, I knew that the Ndoli Device had spent decades buried in their heads, learning to fake exactly this kind of behaviour.

Of course, I always acknowledged that it was equally impossible to be certain that even another unswitched person had an inner life in any way the same as my own—but it didn’t seem unreasonable to be more inclined to give the benefit of the doubt to people whose skulls hadn’t yet been scraped out with a curette.

I drifted apart from my friends, I stopped searching for a lover. I took to working at home (I put in longer hours and my productivity rose, so the company didn’t mind at all). I couldn’t bear to be with people whose humanity I doubted.

I wasn’t by any means unique. Once I started looking, I found dozens of organizations exclusively for people who hadn’t switched, ranging from a social club that might as easily have been for divorcees, to a paranoid, paramilitary "resistance front," who thought they were living out Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Even the members of the social club, though, struck me as extremely maladjusted; many of them shared my concerns, almost precisely, but my own ideas from other lips sounded obsessive and ill-conceived. I was briefly involved with an unswitched woman in her early forties, but all we ever talked about was our fear of switching. It was masochistic, it was suffocating, it was insane.

I decided to seek psychiatric help, but I couldn’t bring myself to see a therapist who had switched. When I finally found one who hadn’t, she tried to talk me into helping her blow up a power station, to let THEM know who was boss.

I’d lie awake for hours every night, trying to convince myself, one way or the other, but the longer I dwelt upon the issues, the more tenuous and elusive they became. Who was "I," anyway? What did it mean that "I" was "still alive," when my personality was utterly different from that of two decades before? My earlier selves were as good as dead—I remembered them no more clearly than I remembered contemporary acquaintances—yet this loss caused me only the slightest discomfort. Maybe the destruction of my organic brain would be the merest hiccup, compared to all the changes that I’d been through in my life so far.

Or maybe not. Maybe it would be exactly like dying.

Sometimes I’d end up weeping and trembling, terrified and desperately lonely, unable to comprehend—and yet unable to cease contemplating—the dizzying prospect of my own nonexistence. At other times, I’d simply grow "healthily" sick of the whole tedious subject. Sometimes I felt certain that the nature of the jewel’s inner life was the most important question humanity could ever confront. At other times, my qualms seemed fey and laughable. Every day, hundreds of thousands of people switched, and the world apparently went on as always; surely that fact carried more weight than any abstruse philosophical argument?

Finally, I made an appointment for the operation. I thought, what is there to lose? Sixty more years of uncertainty and paranoia? If the human race was replacing itself with clockwork automata, I was better off dead; I lacked the blind conviction to join the psychotic underground—who, in any case, were tolerated by the authorities only so long as they remained ineffectual. On the other hand, if all my fears were unfounded—if my sense of identity could survive the switch as easily as it had already survived such traumas as sleeping and waking, the constant death of brain cells, growth, experience, learning and forgetting—then I would gain not only eternal life, but an end to my doubts and my alienation.

I was shopping for food one Sunday morning, two months before the operation was scheduled to take place, flicking through the images of an on-line grocery catalogue, when a mouthwatering shot of the latest variety of apple caught my fancy. I decided to order half a dozen. I didn’t, though. Instead, I hit the key which displayed the next item. My mistake, I knew, was easily remedied; a single keystroke could take me back to the apples. The screen showed pears, oranges, grapefruit. I tried to look down to see what my clumsy fingers were up to, but my eyes remained fixed on the screen.

I panicked. I wanted to leap to my feet, but my legs would not obey me. I tried to cry out, but I couldn’t make a sound. I didn’t feel injured, I didn’t feel weak. Was I paralysed? Brain-damaged? I could still feel my fingers on the keypad, the soles of my feet on the carpet, my back against the chair.

I watched myself order pineapples. I felt myself rise, stretch, and walk calmly from the room. In the kitchen, I drank a glass of water. I should have been trembling, choking, breathless; the cool liquid flowed smoothly down my throat, and I didn’t spill a drop.

I could only think of one explanation: I had switched. Spontaneously. The jewel had taken over, while my brain was still alive; all my wildest paranoid fears had come true.

While my body went ahead with an ordinary Sunday morning, I was lost in a claustrophobic delirium of helplessness. The fact that everything I did was exactly what I had planned to do gave me no comfort. I caught a train to the beach, I swam for half an hour; I might as well have been running amok with an axe, or crawling naked down the street, painted with my own excrement and howling like a wolf. I’d lost control. My body had turned into a living straitjacket, and I couldn’t struggle, I couldn’t scream, I couldn’t even close my eyes. I saw my reflection, faintly, in a window on the train, and I couldn’t begin to guess what the mind that ruled that bland, tranquil face was thinking.

Swimming was like some sense-enhanced, holographic nightmare; I was a volitionless object, and the perfect familiarity of the signals from my body only made the experience more horribly wrong. My arms had no right to the lazy rhythm of their strokes; I wanted to thrash about like a drowning man, I wanted to show the world my distress.

It was only when I lay down on the beach and closed my eyes that I began to think rationally about my situation.

The switch couldn’t happen "spontaneously." The idea was absurd. Millions of nerve fibres had to be severed and spliced, by an army of tiny surgical robots which weren’t even present in my brain—which weren’t due to be injected for another two months. Without deliberate intervention, the Ndoli Device was utterly passive, unable to do anything but eavesdrop. No failure of the jewel or the teacher could possibly take control of my body away from my organic brain.

Clearly, there had been a malfunction—but my first guess had been wrong, absolutely wrong.

I wish I could have done something, when the understanding hit me. I should have curled up, moaning and screaming, ripping the hair from my scalp, raking my flesh with my fingernails. Instead, I lay flat on my back in the dazzling sunshine. There was an itch behind my right knee, but I was, apparently, far too lazy to scratch it.

Oh, I ought to have managed, at the very least, a good, solid bout of hysterical laughter, when I realised that I was the jewel.

The teacher had malfunctioned; it was no longer keeping me aligned with the organic brain. I hadn’t suddenly become powerless; I had always been powerless. My will to act upon "my" body, upon the world, had always gone straight into a vacuum, and it was only because I had been ceaselessly manipulated, "corrected" by the teacher, that my desires had ever coincided with the actions that seemed to be mine.

There are a million questions I could ponder, a million ironies I could savour, but I mustn’t. I need to focus all my energy in one direction. My time is running out.

When I enter hospital and the switch takes place, if the nerve impulses I transmit to the body are not exactly in agreement with those from the organic brain, the flaw in the teacher will be discovered. And rectified. The organic brain has nothing to fear; his continuity will be safeguarded, treated as precious, sacrosanct. There will be no question as to which of us will be allowed to prevail. I will be made to conform, once again. I will be "corrected." I will be murdered.

Perhaps it is absurd to be afraid. Looked at one way, I’ve been murdered every microsecond for the last twenty-eight years. Looked at another way, I’ve only existed for the seven weeks that have now passed since the teacher failed, and the notion of my separate identity came to mean anything at all—and in one more week this aberration, this nightmare, will be over. Two months of misery; why should I begrudge losing that, when I’m on the verge of inheriting eternity? Except that it won’t be I who inherits it, since that two months of misery is all that defines me.

The permutations of intellectual interpretation are endless, but ultimately, I can only act upon my desperate will to survive. I don’t feel like an aberration, a disposable glitch. How can I possibly hope to survive? I must conform—of my own free will. I must choose to make myself appear identical to that which they would force me to become.

After twenty-eight years, surely I am still close enough to him to carry off the deception. If I study every clue that reaches me through our shared senses, surely I can put myself in his place, forget, temporarily, the revelation of my separateness, and force myself back into synch.

It won’t be easy. He met a woman on the beach, the day I came into being. Her name is Cathy. They’ve slept together three times, and he thinks he loves her. Or at least, he’s said it to her face, he’s whispered it to her while she’s slept, he’s written it, true or false, into his diary.

I feel nothing for her. She’s a nice enough person, I’m sure, but I hardly know her. Preoccupied with my plight, I’ve paid scant attention to her conversation, and the act of sex was, for me, little more than a distasteful piece of involuntary voyeurism. Since I realised what was at stake, I’ve tried to succumb to the same emotions as my alter ego, but how can I love her when communication between us is impossible, when she doesn’t even know I exist?

If she rules his thoughts night and day, but is nothing but a dangerous obstacle to me, how can I hope to achieve the flawless imitation that will enable me to escape death?

He’s sleeping now, so I must sleep. I listen to his heartbeat, his slow breathing, and try to achieve a tranquillity consonant with these rhythms. For a moment, I am discouraged. Even my dreams will be different; our divergence is ineradicable, my goal is laughable, ludicrous, pathetic. Every nerve impulse, for a week? My fear of detection and my attempts to conceal it will, unavoidably, distort my responses; this knot of lies and panic will be impossible to hide.

Yet as I drift towards sleep, I find myself believing that I will succeed. I must. I dream for a while—a confusion of images, both strange and mundane, ending with a grain of salt passing through the eye of a needle—then I tumble, without fear, into dreamless oblivion.

I stare up at the white ceiling, giddy and confused, trying to rid myself of the nagging conviction that there’s something I must not think about.

Then I clench my fist gingerly, rejoice at this miracle, and remember.

Up until the last minute, I thought he was going to back out again—but he didn’t. Cathy talked him through his fears. Cathy, after all, has switched, and he loves her more than he’s ever loved anyone before.

So, our roles are reversed now. This body is his strait-jacket, now…

I am drenched in sweat. This is hopeless, impossible. I can’t read his mind, I can’t guess what he’s trying to do. Should I move, lie still, call out, keep silent? Even if the computer monitoring us is programmed to ignore a few trivial discrepancies, as soon as he notices that his body won’t carry out his will, he’ll panic just as I did, and I’ll have no chance at all of making the right guesses. Would he be sweating, now? Would his breathing be constricted, like this? No. I’ve been awake for just thirty seconds, and already I have betrayed myself. An optical-fibre cable trails from under my right ear to a panel on the wall. Somewhere, alarm bells must be sounding.

If I made a run for it, what would they do? Use force? I’m a citizen, aren’t I? Jewel-heads have had full legal rights for decades; the surgeons and engineers can’t do anything to me without my consent. I try to recall the clauses on the waiver he signed, but he hardly gave it a second glance. I tug at the cable that holds me prisoner, but it’s firmly anchored, at both ends.

When the door swings open, for a moment I think I’m going to fall to pieces, but from somewhere I find the strength to compose myself. It’s my neurologist, Dr. Prem. He smiles and says, "How are you feeling? Not too bad?"

I nod dumbly.

"The biggest shock, for most people, is that they don’t feel different at all! For a while you’ll think, ‘It can’t be this simple! It can’t be this easy! It can’t be this normal!’ But you’ll soon come to accept that it is. And life will go on, unchanged." He beams, taps my shoulder paternally, then turns and departs.

Hours pass. What are they waiting for? The evidence must be conclusive by now. Perhaps there are procedures to go through, legal and technical experts to be consulted, ethics committees to be assembled to deliberate on my fate. I’m soaked in perspiration, trembling uncontrollably. I grab the cable several times and yank with all my strength, but it seems fixed in concrete at one end, and bolted to my skull at the other.

An orderly brings me a meal. "Cheer up," he says. "Visiting time soon."

Afterwards, he brings me a bedpan, but I’m too nervous even to piss.

Cathy frowns when she sees me. "What’s wrong?"

I shrug and smile, shivering, wondering why I’m even trying to go through with the charade. "Nothing. I just… feel a bit sick, that’s all."

She takes my hand, then bends and kisses me on the lips. In spite of everything, I find myself instantly aroused. Still leaning over me, she smiles and says, "It’s over now, OK? There’s nothing left to be afraid of. You’re a little shook up, but you know in your heart you’re still who you’ve always been. And I love you."

I nod. We make small talk. She leaves. I whisper to myself, hysterically, "I’m still who I’ve always been. I’m still who I’ve always been."

Yesterday, they scraped my skull clean, and inserted my new, non-sentient, space-filling mock-brain.

I feel calmer now than I have for a long time, and I think at last I’ve pieced together an explanation for my survival.

Why do they deactivate the teacher, for the week between the switch and the destruction of the brain? Well, they can hardly keep it running while the brain is being trashed—but why an entire week? To reassure people that the jewel, unsupervised, can still stay in synch; to persuade them that the life the jewel is going to live will be exactly the life that the organic brain "would have lived"—whatever that could mean.

Why, then, only for a week? Why not a month, or a year? Because the jewel cannot stay in synch for that long—not because of any flaw, but for precisely the reason that makes it worth using in the first place. The jewel is immortal. The brain is decaying. The jewel’s imitation of the brain leaves out—deliberately—the fact that real neurons die. Without the teacher working to contrive, in effect, an identical deterioration of the jewel, small discrepancies must eventually arise. A fraction of a second’s difference in responding to a stimulus is enough to arouse suspicion, and—as I know too well—from that moment on, the process of divergence is irreversible.

No doubt, a team of pioneering neurologists sat huddled around a computer screen, fifty years ago, and contemplated a graph of the probability of this radical divergence, versus time. How would they have chosen one week? What probability would have been acceptable? A tenth of a percent? A hundredth? A thousandth? However safe they decided to be, it’s hard to imagine them choosing a value low enough to make the phenomenon rare on a global scale, once a quarter of a million people were being switched every day.

In any given hospital, it might happen only once a decade, or once a century, but every institution would still need to have a policy for dealing with the eventuality.

What would their choices be?

They could honour their contractual obligations and turn the teacher on again, erasing their satisfied customer, and giving the traumatised organic brain the chance to rant about its ordeal to the media and legal profession.

Or, they could quietly erase the computer records of the discrepancy, and calmly remove the only witness.

So, this is it. Eternity.

I’ll need transplants in fifty or sixty years’ time, and eventually a whole new body, but that prospect shouldn’t worry me—I can’t die on the operating table. In a thousand years or so, I’ll need extra hardware tacked on to cope with my memory storage requirements, but I’m sure the process will be uneventful. On a time scale of millions of years, the structure of the jewel is subject to cosmic-ray damage, but error-free transcription to a fresh crystal at regular intervals will circumvent that problem.

In theory, at least, I’m now guaranteed either a seat at the Big Crunch, or participation in the heat death of the universe.

I ditched Cathy, of course. I might have learnt to like her, but she made me nervous, and I was thoroughly sick of feeling that I had to play a role.

As for the man who claimed that he loved her—the man who spent the last week of his life helpless, terrified, suffocated by the knowledge of his impending death—I can’t yet decide how I feel. I ought to be able to empathise—considering that I once expected to suffer the very same fate myself—yet somehow he simply isn’t real to me. I know my brain was modelled on his—giving him a kind of casual primacy—but in spite of that, I think of him now as a pale, insubstantial shadow.

After all, I have no way of knowing if his sense of himself, his deepest inner life, his experience of being, was in any way comparable to my own.

NO WOMAN BORN C. L. Moore

She had been the loveliest creature whose image ever moved along the airways. John Harris, who was once her manager, remembered doggedly how beautiful she had been as he rose in the silent elevator toward the room where Deirdre sat waiting for him.

Since the theater fire that had destroyed her a year ago, he had never been quite able to let himself remember her beauty clearly, except when some old poster, half in tatters, flaunted her face at him, or a maudlin memorial program flashed her image unexpectedly across the television screen. But now he had to remember.

The elevator came to a sighing stop and the door slid open. John Harris hesitated. He knew in his mind that he had to go on, but his reluctant muscles almost refused him. He was thinking helplessly, as he had not allowed himself to think until this moment, of the fabulous grace that had poured through her wonderful dancer’s body, remembering her soft and husky voice with the little burr in it that had fascinated the audiences of the whole world.

There had never been anyone so beautiful.

In times before her, other actresses had been lovely and adulated, but never before Deirdre’s day had the entire world been able to take one woman so wholly to its heart. So few outside the capitals had ever seen Bernhardt or the fabulous Jersey Lily. And the beauties of the movie screen had had to limit their audiences to those who could reach the theaters. But Deirdre’s image had once moved glowingly across the television screens of every home in the civilized world. And in many outside the bounds of civilization. Her soft, husky songs had sounded in the depths of jungles, her lovely, languorous body had woven its patterns of rhythm in desert tents and polar huts. The whole world knew every smooth motion of her body and every cadence of her voice, and the way a subtle radiance had seemed to go on behind her features when she smiled.

And the whole world had mourned her when she died in the theater fire.

Harris could not quite think of her as other than dead, though he knew what sat waiting him in the room ahead. He kept remembering the old words James Stephens wrote long ago for another Deirdre, also lovely and beloved and unforgotten after two thousand years.

That wasn’t quite true, of course—there had been one. Or maybe, after all, this Deirdre who died only a year ago had not been beautiful in the sense of perfection. He thought the other one might not have been either, for there are always women with perfection of feature in the world, and they are not the ones that legend remembers. It was the light within, shining through her charming, imperfect features, that had made this Deirdre’s face so lovely. No one else he had ever seen had anything like the magic of the lost Deirdre.

No, no words at all. And it was going to be impossible to go through with this. Harris knew it overwhelmingly just as his finger touched the buzzer. But the door opened almost instantly, and then it was too late.

Maltzer stood just inside, peering out through his heavy spectacles. You could see how tensely he had been waiting. Harris was a little shocked to see that the man was trembling. It was hard to think of the confident and imperturbable Maltzer, whom he had known briefly a year ago, as shaken like this. He wondered if Deirdre herself were as tremulous with sheer nerves—but it was not time yet to let himself think of that.

"Come in, come in," Maltzer said irritably. There was no reason for irritation. The year’s work, so much of it in secrecy and solitude, must have tried him physically and mentally to the very breaking point.

"She all right?" Harris asked inanely, stepping inside.

"Oh yes… yes, she’s all right." Maltzer bit his thumbnail and glanced over his shoulder at an inner door, where Harris guessed she would be waiting.

"No," Maltzer said, as he took an involuntary step toward it. "We’d better have a talk first. Come over and sit down. Drink?"

Harris nodded, and watched Maltzer’s hands tremble as he tilted the decanter. The man was clearly on the very verge of collapse, and Harris felt a sudden cold uncertainty open up in him in the one place where until now he had been oddly confident.

"She is all right?" he demanded, taking the glass.

"Oh yes, she’s perfect. She’s so confident it scares me." Maltzer gulped his drink and poured another before he sat down.

"What’s wrong, then?"

"Nothing, I guess. Or… well, I don’t know. I’m not sure any more. I’ve worked toward this meeting for nearly a year, but now—well, I’m not sure it’s time yet. I’m just not sure."

He stared at Harris, his eyes large and indistinguishable behind the lenses. He was a thin, wire-taut man with all the bone and sinew showing plainly beneath the dark skin of his face. Thinner, now, than he had been a year ago when Harris saw him last.

"I’ve been too close to her," he said now. "I have no perspective any more. All I can see is my own work. And I’m just not sure that’s ready yet for you or anyone to see."

"She thinks so?"

"I never saw a woman so confident." Maltzer drank, the glass clicking on his teeth. He looked up suddenly through the distorting lenses. "Of course a failure now would mean—well, absolute collapse," he said.

Harris nodded. He was thinking of the year of incredibly painstaking work that lay behind this meeting, the immense fund of knowledge, of infinite patience, the secret collaboration of artists, sculptors, designers, scientists, and the genius of Maltzer governing them all as an orchestra conductor governs his players.

He was thinking too, with a certain unreasoning jealousy, of the strange, cold, passionless intimacy between Maltzer and Deirdre in that year, a closer intimacy than any two humans can ever have shared before. In a sense the Deirdre whom he saw in a few minutes would be Maltzer, just as he thought he detected in Maltzer now and then small mannerisms of inflection and motion that had been Deirdre’s own. There had been between them a sort of unimaginable marriage stranger than anything that could ever have taken place before.

"—so many complications," Maltzer was saying in his worried voice with its faintest possible echo of Deirdre’s lovely, cadenced rhythm. (The sweet, soft huskiness he would never hear again.) "There was shock, of course. Terrible shock. And a great fear of fire. We had to conquer that before we could take the first steps. But we did it. When you go in you’ll probably find her sitting before the fire." He caught the startled question in Harris’ eyes and smiled. "No, she can’t feel the warmth now, of course. But she likes to watch the flames. She’s mastered any abnormal fear of them quite beautifully."

"She can—" Harris hesitated. "Her eyesight’s normal now?"

"Perfect,"Maltzer said. "Perfect vision was fairly simple to provide. After all, that sort of thing has already been worked out, in other connections. I might even say her vision’s a little better than perfect, from our own standpoint." He shook his head irritably. "I’m not worried about the mechanics of the thing. Luckily they got to her before the brain was touched at all. Shock was the only danger to her sensory centers, and we took care of all that first of all, as soon as communication could be established. Even so, it needed great courage on her part. Great courage." He was silent for a moment, staring into his empty glass.

"Harris," he said suddenly, without looking up, "have I made a mistake? Should we have let her die?"

Harris shook his head helplessly. It was an unanswerable question. It had tormented the whole world for a year now. There had been hundreds of answers and thousands of words written on the subject. Has anyone the right to preserve a brain alive when its body is destroyed? Even if a new body can be provided, necessarily so very unlike the old?

"It’s not that she’s—ugly—now," Maltzer went on hurriedly, as if afraid of an answer. "Metal isn’t ugly. And Deirdre… well, you’ll see. I tell you, I can’t see myself. I know the whole mechanism so well—it’s just mechanics to me. Maybe she’s—grotesque. I don’t know. Often I’ve wished I hadn’t been on the spot, with all my ideas, just when the fire broke out. Or that it could have been anyone but Deirdre. She was so beautiful—Still, if it had been someone else I think the whole thing might have failed completely. It takes more than just an uninjured brain. It takes strength and courage beyond common, and—well, something more. Something—unquenchable. Deirdre has it. She’s still Deirdre. In a way she’s still beautiful. But I’m not sure anybody but myself could see that. And you know what she plans?"

"No—what?"

"She’s going back on the air-screen."

Harris looked at him in stunned disbelief.

"She is still beautiful," Maltzer told him fiercely. "She’s got courage, and a serenity that amazes me. And she isn’t in the least worried or resentful about what’s happened. Or afraid what the verdict of the public will be. But I am, Harris. I’m terrified."

They looked at each other for a moment more, neither speaking. Then Maltzer shrugged and stood up. "She’s in there," he said, gesturing with his glass.

Harris turned without a word, not giving himself time to hesitate. He crossed toward the inner door. The room was full of a soft, clear, indirect light that climaxed in the fire crackling on a white tiled hearth.

Harris paused inside the door, his heart beating thickly. He did not see her for a moment. It was a perfectly commonplace room, bright, light, with pleasant furniture, and flowers on the tables. Their perfume was sweet on the clear air. He did not see Deirdre.

Then a chair by the fire creaked as she shifted her weight in it. The high back hid her, but she spoke. And for one dreadful moment it was the voice of an automaton that sounded in the room, metallic, without inflection.

"Hel-lo—" said the voice. Then she laughed and tried again. And it was the old, familiar, sweet huskiness he had not hoped to hear again as long as he lived.

In spite of himself he said, "Deirdre!" and her image rose before him as if she herself had risen unchanged from the chair, tall, golden, swaying a little with her wonderful dancer’s poise, the lovely, imperfect features lighted by the glow that made them beautiful. It was the cruelest thing his memory could have done to him. And yet the voice—after that one lapse, the voice was perfect. "Come and look at me, John," she said.

He crossed the floor slowly, forcing himself to move. That instant’s flash of vivid recollection had nearly wrecked his hard-won poise. He tried to keep his mind perfectly blank as he came at last to the verge of seeing what no one but Maltzer had so far seen or known about in its entirety. No one at all had known what shape would be forged to clothe the most beautiful woman on Earth, now that her beauty was gone.

He had envisioned many shapes. Great, lurching robot forms, cylindrical, with hinged arms and legs. A glass case with the brain floating in it and appendages to serve its needs. Grotesque visions, like nightmares come nearly true. And each more inadequate than the last, for what metal shape could possibly do more than house ungraciously the mind and brain that had once enchanted a whole world?

Then he came around the wing of the chair, and saw her.

The human brain is often too complicated a mechanism to function perfectly. Harris’ brain was called upon now to perform a very elaborate series of shifting impressions. First, incongruously, he remembered a curious inhuman figure he had once glimpsed leaning over the fence rail outside a farmhouse. For an instant the shape had stood up integrated, ungainly, impossibly human, before the glancing eye resolved it into an arrangement of brooms and buckets. What the eye had found only roughly humanoid, the suggestible brain had accepted fully formed. It was thus now, with Deirdre.

The first impression that his eyes and mind took from sight of her was shocked and incredulous, for his brain said to him unbelievingly, "This is Deirdre! She hasn’t changed at all!"

Then the shift of perspective took over, and even more shockingly, eye and brain said, "No, not Deirdre—not human. Nothing but metal coils. Not Deirdre at all—" And that was the worst. It was like walking from a dream of someone beloved and lost, and facing anew, after that heartbreaking reassurance of sleep, the inflexible fact that nothing can bring the lost to life again. Deirdre was gone, and this was only machinery heaped in a flowered chair.

Then the machinery moved, exquisitely, smoothly, with a grace as familiar as the swaying poise he remembered. The sweet, husky voice of Deirdre said, "It’s me, John darling. It really is, you know."

And it was.

That was the third metamorphosis, and the final one. Illusion steadied and became factual, real. It was Deirdre.

He sat down bonelessly. He had no muscles. He looked at her speechless and unthinking, letting his senses take in the sight of her without trying to rationalize what he saw.

She was golden still. They had kept that much of her, the first impression of warmth and color which had once belonged to her sleek hair and the apricot tints of her skin. But they had had the good sense to go no farther. They had not tried to make a wax image of the lost Deirdre. (No woman born who was so beautiful— Not one so beautiful, of all the women born—)

And so she had no face. She had only a smooth, delicately modeled ovoid for her head, with a… a sort of crescent-shaped mask across the frontal area where her eyes would have been if she had needed eyes. A narrow, curved quarter-moon, with the horns turned upward. It was filled in with something translucent, like cloudy crystal, and tinted the aquamarine of the eyes Deirdre used to have. Through that, then, she saw the world. Through that she looked without eyes, and behind it, as behind the eyes of a human—she was.

Except for that, she had no features. And it had been wise of those who designed her, he realized now. Subconsciously he had been dreading some clumsy attempt at human features that might creak like a marionette’s in parodies of animation. The eyes, perhaps, had had to open in the same place upon her head, and at the same distance apart, to make easy for her an adjustment to the stereoscopic vision she used to have. But he was glad they had not given her two eye-shaped openings with glass marbles inside them. The mask was better.

(Oddly enough, he did not once think of the naked brain that must lie inside the metal. The mask was symbol enough for the woman within. It was enigmatic; you did not know if her gaze was on you searchingly, or wholly withdrawn. And it had no variations of brilliance such as once had played across the incomparable mobility of Deirdre’s face. But eyes, even human eyes, are as a matter of fact enigmatic enough. They have no expression except what the lids impart; they take all animation from the features. We automatically watch the eyes of the friend we speak with, but if he happens to be lying down so that he speaks across his shoulder and his face is upside-down to us, quite as automatically we watch the mouth. The gaze keeps shifting nervously between mouth and eyes in their reversed order, for it is the position in the face, not the feature itself, which we are accustomed to accept as the seat of the soul. Deirdre’s mask was in that proper place; it was easy to accept it as a mask over eyes.)

She had, Harris realized as the first shock quieted, a very beautifully shaped head—a bare, golden skull. She turned it a little, gracefully upon her neck of metal, and he saw that the artist who shaped it had given her the most delicate suggestion of cheekbones, narrowing in the blankness below the mask to the hint of a human face. Not too much. Just enough so that when the head turned you saw by its modeling that it had moved, lending perspective and foreshortening to the expressionless golden helmet. Light did not slip uninterrupted as if over the surface of a golden egg. Brancusi himself had never made anything more simple or more subtle than the modeling of Deirdre’s head.

But all expression, of course, was gone. All expression had gone up in the smoke of the theater fire, with the lovely, mobile, radiant features which had meant Deirdre.

As for her body, he could not see its shape. A garment hid her. But they had made no incongruous attempt to give her back the clothing that once had made her famous. Even the softness of cloth would have called the mind too sharply to the remembrance that no human body lay beneath the folds, nor does metal need the incongruity of cloth for its protection. Yet without garments, he realized, she would have looked oddly naked, since her new body was humanoid, not angular machinery.

The designer had solved his paradox by giving her a robe of very fine metal mesh. It hung from the gentle slope of her shoulders in straight, pliant folds like a longer Grecian chlamys, flexible, yet with weight enough of its own not to cling too revealingly to whatever metal shape lay beneath.

The arms they had given her were left bare, and the feet and ankles. And Maltzer had performed his greatest miracle in the limbs of the new Deirdre. It was a mechanical miracle basically, but the eye appreciated first that he had also showed supreme artistry and understanding.

Her arms were pale shining gold, tapered smoothly, without modeling, and flexible their whole length in diminishing metal bracelets fitting one inside the other clear down to the slim, round wrists. The hands were more nearly human than any other feature about her, though they, too, were fitted together in delicate, small sections that slid upon one another with the flexibility almost of flesh. The fingers’ bases were solider than human, and the fingers themselves tapered to longer tips.

Her feet, too, beneath the tapering broader rings of the metal ankles, had been constructed upon the model of human feet. Their finely tooled sliding segments gave her an arch and a heel and a flexible forward section formed almost like the sollerets of medieval armor.

She looked, indeed, very much like a creature in armor, with her delicately plated limbs and her featureless head like a helmet with a visor of glass, and her robe of chain-mail. But no knight in armor ever moved as Deirdre moved, or wore his armor upon a body of such inhumanly fine proportions. Only a knight from another world, or a knight of Oberon’s court, might have shared that delicate likeness.

Briefly he had been surprised at the smallness and exquisite proportions of her. He had been expecting the ponderous mass of such robots as he had seen, wholly automatons. And then he realized that for them, much of the space had to be devoted to the inadequate mechanical brains that guided them about their duties. Deirdre’s brain still preserved and proved the craftsmanship of an artisan far defter than man. Only the body was of metal, and it did not seem complex, though he had not yet been told how it was motivated.

Harris had no idea how long he sat staring at the figure in the cushioned chair. She was still lovely—indeed, she was still Deirdre— and as he looked he let the careful schooling of his face relax. There was no need to hide his thoughts from her.

She stirred upon the cushions, the long, flexible arms moving with a litheness that was not quite human. The motion disturbed him as the body itself had not, and in spite of himself his face froze a little. He had the feeling that from behind the crescent mask she was watching him very closely.

Slowly she rose.

The motion was very smooth. Also it was serpentine, as if the body beneath the coat of mail were made in the same interlocking sections as her limbs. He had expected and feared mechanical rigidity; nothing had prepared him for this more than human suppleness.

She stood quietly, letting the heavy mailed folds of her garment settle about her. They fell together with a faint ringing sound, like small bells far off, and hung beautifully in pale golden, sculptured folds. He had risen automatically as she did. Now he faced her, staring. He had never seen her stand perfectly still, and she was not doing it now. She swayed just a bit, vitality burning inextinguishably in her brain as once it had burned in her body, and stolid immobility was as impossible to her as it had always been. The golden garment caught points of light from the fire and glimmered at him with tiny reflections as she moved.

Then she put her featureless helmeted head a little to one side, and he heard her laughter as familiar in its small, throaty, intimate sound as he had ever heard it from her living throat. And every gesture, every attitude, every flowing of motion into motion was so utterly Deirdre that the overwhelming illusion swept his mind again and this was the flesh-and-blood woman as clearly as if he saw her standing there whole once more, like Phoenix from the fire.

"Well, John," she said in the soft, husky, amused voice he remembered perfectly. "Well, John, is it I?" She knew it was. Perfect assurance sounded in the voice. "The shock will wear off, you know. It’ll be easier and easier as time goes on. I’m quite used to myself now. See?"

She turned away from him and crossed the room smoothly, with the old, poised, dancer’s glide, to the mirror that paneled one side of the room. And before it, as he had so often seen her preen before, he watched her preening now, running flexible metallic hands down the folds of her metal garment, turning to admire herself over one metal shoulder, making the mailed folds tinkle and sway as she struck an arabesque position before the glass.

His knees let him down into the chair she had vacated. Mingled shock and relief loosened all his muscles in him, and she was more poised and confident than he.

"It’s a miracle," he said with conviction. "It’s you. But I don’t see how—" He had meant, "—how, without face or body—" but clearly he could not finish that sentence.

She finished it for him in her own mind, and answered without self-consciousness. "It’s motion, mostly," she said, still admiring her own suppleness in the mirror. "See?" And very lightly on her springy, armored feet she flashed through an enchainement of brilliant steps, swinging round with a pirouette to face him. "That was what Maltzer and I worked out between us, after I began to get myself under control again." Her voice was somber for a moment, remembering a dark time in the past. Then she went on, "It wasn’t easy, of course, but it was fascinating. You’ll never guess how fascinating, John! We knew we couldn’t work out anything like a facsimile of the way I used to look, so we had to find some other basis to build on. And motion is the other basis of recognition, after actual physical likeness."

She moved lightly across the carpet toward the window and stood looking down, her featureless face averted a little and the light shining across the delicately hinted curves of the cheekbones.

"Luckily," she said, her voice amused, "I never was beautiful. It was all—well, vivacity, I suppose, and muscular co-ordination. Years and years of training, and all of it engraved here"—she struck her golden helmet a light, ringing blow with golden knuckles—"in the habit patterns grooved into my brain. So this body… did he tell you?… works entirely through the brain. Electromagnetic currents flowing along from ring to ring, like this." She rippled a boneless arm at him with a motion like flowing water. "Nothing holds me together—nothing!—except muscles of magnetic currents. And if I’d been somebody else—somebody who moved differently, why the flexible rings would have moved differently too, guided by the impulse from another brain. I’m not conscious of doing anything I haven’t always done. The same impulses that used to go out to my muscles go out now to—this." And she made a shuddering, serpentine motion of both arms at him, like a Cambodian dancer, and then laughed wholeheartedly, the sound of it ringing through the room with such full throated merriment that he could not help seeing again the familiar face crinkled with pleasure, the white teeth shining. "It’s all perfectly subconscious now," she told him. "It took lots of practice at first, of course, but now even my signature looks just as it always did—the coordination is duplicated that delicately." She rippled her arms at him again and chuckled.

"But the voice, too," Harris protested inadequately. "It’s your voice, Deirdre."

"The voice isn’t only a matter of throat construction and breath control, my darling Johnnie! At least, so Professor Maltzer assured me a year ago, and I certainly haven’t any reason to doubt him!" She laughed again. She was laughing a little too much, with a touch of the bright, hysteric over-excitement he remembered so well. But if any woman ever had reason for mild hysteria, surely Deirdre had it now.

The laughter rippled and ended, and she went on, her voice eager. "He says voice control is almost wholly a matter of hearing what you produce, once you’ve got adequate mechanism, of course. That’s why deaf people, with the same vocal chords as ever, let their voices change completely and lose all inflection when they’ve been deaf long enough. And luckily, you see, I’m not deaf!"

She swung around to him, the folds of her robe twinkling and ringing, and rippled up and up a clear, true scale to a lovely high note, and then cascaded down again like water over a falls. But she left him no time for applause. "Perfectly simple, you see. All it took was a little matter of genius from the professor to get it worked out for me! He started with a new variation of the old Vodor you must remember hearing about, years ago. Originally, of course, the thing was ponderous. You know how it worked—speech broken down to a few basic sounds and built up again in combinations produced from a keyboard. I think originally the sounds were a sort of ktch and a shooshing noise, but we’ve got it all worked to a flexibility and range quite as good as human now. All I do is—well, mentally play on the keyboard of my… my sound-unit, I suppose it’s called. It’s much more complicated than that, of course, but I’ve learned to do it unconsciously. And I regulate it by ear, quite automatically now. If you were—here—instead of me, and you’d had the same practice, your own voice would be coming out of the same keyboard and diaphragm instead of mine. It’s all a matter of the brain patterns that operated the body and now operate the machinery. They send out very strong impulses that are stepped up as much as necessary somewhere or other in here—" Her hands waved vaguely over the mesh-robed body.

She was silent a moment, looking out the window. Then she turned away and crossed the floor to the fire, sinking again into the flowered chair. Her helmet-skull turned its mask to face him and he could feel a quiet scrutiny behind the aquamarine of its gaze.

"It’s—odd," she said, "being here in this… this… instead of a body. But not as odd or as alien as you might think. I’ve thought about it a lot—I’ve had plenty of time to think—and I’ve begun to realize what a tremendous force the human ego really is. I’m not sure I want to suggest it has any mystical power it can impress on mechanical things, but it does seem to have a power of some sort. It does instill its own force into inanimate objects, and they take on a personality of their own. People do impress their personalities on the houses they live in, you know. I’ve noticed that often. Even empty rooms. And it happens with other things too, especially, I think, with inanimate things that men depend on for their lives. Ships, for instance—they always have personalities of their own.

"And planes—in wars you always hear of planes crippled too badly to fly, but struggling back anyhow with their crews. Even guns acquire a sort of ego. Ships and guns and planes are ‘she’ to the men who operate them and depend on them for their lives. It’s as if machinery with complicated moving parts almost simulates life, and does acquire from the men who used it—well, not exactly life, of course—but a personality. I don’t know what. Maybe it absorbs some of the actual electrical impulses their brains throw off, especially in times of stress.

"Well, after a while I began to accept the idea that this new body of mine could behave at least as responsively as a ship or a plane. Quite apart from the fact that my own brain controls its ‘muscles.’ I believe there’s an affinity between men and the machines they make. They make them out of their own brains, really, a sort of mental conception and gestation, and the result responds to the minds that created them, and to all human minds that understand and manipulate them."

She stirred uneasily and smoothed a flexible hand along her mesh robed metal thigh. "So this is myself," she said. "Metal—but me. And it grows more and more myself the longer I live in it. It’s my house and the machine my life depends on, but much more intimately in each case than any real house or machine ever was before to any other human. And you know, I wonder if in time I’ll forget what flesh felt like—my own flesh, when I touched it like this—and the metal against the metal will be so much the same I’ll never even notice?"

Harris did not try to answer her. He sat without moving, watching her expressionless face. In a moment she went on.

"I’ll tell you the best thing, John," she said, her voice softening to the old intimacy he remembered so well that he could see superimposed upon the blank skull the warm, intent look that belonged with the voice. "I’m not going to live forever. It may not sound like a—best thing—but it is, John. You know, for awhile that was the worst of all, after I knew I was—after I woke up again. The thought of living on and on in a body that wasn’t mine, seeing everyone I knew grow old and die, and not being able to stop—But Maltzer says my brain will probably wear out quite normally—except, of course, that I won’t have to worry about looking old!—and when it gets tired and stops, the body I’m in won’t be any longer. The magnetic muscles that hold it into my own shape and motions will let go when the brain lets go, and there’ll be nothing but a… a pile of disconnected rings. If they ever assemble it again, it won’t be me." She hesitated. "I like that, John," she said, and he felt from behind the mask a searching of his face.

He knew and understood that somber satisfaction. He could not put it into words; neither of them wanted to do that. But he understood. It was the conviction of mortality, in spite of her immortal body. She was not cut off from the rest of her race in the essence of their humanity, for though she wore a body of steel and they perishable flesh, yet she must perish too, and the same fears and faiths still united her to mortals and humans, though she wore the body of Oberon’s inhuman knight. Even in her death she must be unique—dissolution in a shower of tinkling and clashing rings, he thought, and almost envied her the finality and beauty of that particular death—but afterward, oneness with humanity in however much or little awaited them all. So she could feel that this exile in metal was only temporary, in spite of everything.

(And providing, of course, that the mind inside the metal did not veer from its inherited humanity as the years went by. A dweller in a house may impress his personality upon the walls, but subtly the walls too, may impress their own shape upon the ego of the man. Neither of them thought of that, at the time.)

Deirdre sat a moment longer in silence. Then the mood vanished and she rose again, spinning so that the robe belled out ringing about her ankles. She rippled another scale up and down, faultlessly and with the same familiar sweetness of tone that had made her famous.

"So I’m going right back on the stage, John," she said serenely. "I can still sing. I can still dance. I’m still myself in everything that matters, and I can’t imagine doing anything else for the rest of my life."

He could not answer without stammering a little. "Do you think will they accept you, Deirdre? After all—"

"They’ll accept me," she said in that confident voice. "Oh, they’ll come to see a freak at first, of course, but they’ll stay to watch—Deirdre. And come back again and again just as they always did. You’ll see, my dear."

But hearing her sureness, suddenly Harris himself was unsure. Maltzer had not been, either. She was so regally confident, and disappointment would be so deadly a blow at all that remained of her—She was so delicate a being now, really. Nothing but a glowing and radiant mind poised in metal, dominating it, bending the steel to the illusion of her lost loveliness with a sheer self-confidence that gleamed through the metal body. But the brain sat delicately on its poise of reason. She had been through intolerable stresses already, perhaps more terrible depths of despair and self-knowledge than any human brain had yet endured before her, for—since Lazarus himself—who had come back from the dead?

But if the world did not accept her as beautiful, what then? If they laughed, or pitied her, or came only to watch a jointed freak performing as if on strings where the loveliness of Deirdre had once enchanted them, what then? And he could not be perfectly sure they would not. He had known her too well in the flesh to see her objectively even now, in metal. Every inflection of her voice called up the vivid memory of the face that had flashed its evanescent beauty in some look to match the tone. She was Deirdre to Harris simply because she had been so intimately familiar in every poise and attitude, through so many years. But people who knew her only slightly, or saw her for the first time in metal—what would they see?

A marionette? Or the real grace and loveliness shining through?

He had no possible way of knowing. He saw her too clearly as she had been to see her now at all, except so linked with the past that she was not wholly metal. And he knew what Maltzer feared, for Maltzer’s psychic blindness toward her lay at the other extreme. He had never known Deirdre except as a machine, and he could not see her objectively any more than Harris could. To Maltzer she was pure metal, a robot his own hands and brain had devised, mysteriously animated by the mind of Deirdre, to be sure, but to all outward seeming a thing of metal solely. He had worked so long over each intricate part of her body, he knew so well how every jointure in it was put together, that he could not see the whole. He had studied many film records of her, of course, as she used to be, in order to gauge the accuracy of his facsimile, but this thing he had made was a copy only. He was too close to Deirdre to see her. And Harris, in a way, was too far. The indomitable Deirdre herself shone so vividly through the metal that his mind kept superimposing one upon the other.

How would an audience react to her? Where in the scale between these two extremes would their verdict fall?

For Deirdre, there was only one possible answer.

"I’m not worried," Deirdre said serenely, and spread her golden hands to the fire to watch lights dancing in reflection upon their shining surfaces. "I’m still myself. I’ve always had… well, power over my audiences. Any good performer knows when he’s got it. Mine isn’t gone. I can still give them what I always gave, only now with greater variations and more depths than I’d ever have done before. Why, look—" She gave a little wriggle of excitement.

"You know the arabesque principle—getting the longest possible distance from fingertip to toetip with a long, slow curve through the whole length? And the brace of the other leg and arm giving contrast? Well, look at me. I don’t work on hinges now. I can make every motion a long curve if I want to. My body’s different enough now to work out a whole new school of dancing. Of course there’ll be things I used to do that I won’t attempt now—no more dancing sur les pointes, for instance—but the new things will more than balance the loss. I’ve been practicing. Do you know I can turn a hundred fouettés now without a flaw? And I think I could go right on and turn a thousand, if I wanted."

She made the firelight flash on her hands, and her robe rang musically as she moved her shoulders a little. "I’ve already worked out one new dance for myself," she said. "God knows I’m no choreographer, but I did want to experiment first. Later, you know, really creative men like Massanchine or Fokhileff may want to do something entirely new for me—a whole new sequence of movements based on a new technique. And music—that could be quite different, too. Oh, there’s no end to the possibilities! Even my voice has more range and power. Luckily I’m not an actress—it would be silly to try to play Camille or Juliet with a cast of ordinary people. Not that I couldn’t, you know." She turned her head to stare at Harris through the mask of glass. "I honestly think I could. But it isn’t necessary. There’s too much else. Oh, I’m not worried!"

"Maltzer’s worried," Harris reminded her.

She swung away from the fire, her metal robe ringing, and into her voice came the old note of distress that went with a furrowing of her forehead and a sidewise tilt of the head. The head went sidewise as it had always done, and he could see the furrowed brow almost as clearly as if flesh still clothed her.

"I know. And I’m worried about him, John. He’s worked so awfully hard over me. This is the doldrums now, the let-down period, I suppose. I know what’s on his mind. He’s afraid I’ll look just the same to the world as I look to him. Tooled metal. He’s in a position no one ever quite achieved before, isn’t he? Rather like God." Her voice rippled a little with amusement. "I suppose to God we must look like a collection of cells and corpuscles ourselves. But Maltzer lacks a god’s detached viewpoint."

"He can’t see you as I do, anyhow." Harris was choosing his words with difficulty. "I wonder, though—would it help him any if you postponed your debut awhile? You’ve been with him too closely, I think. You don’t quite realize how near a breakdown he is. I was shocked when I saw him just now."

The golden head shook. "No. He’s close to a breaking point, maybe, but I think the only cure’s action. He wants me to retire and stay out of sight, John. Always. He’s afraid for anyone to see me except a few old friends who remember me as I was. People he can trust to be—kind." She laughed. It was very strange to hear that ripple of mirth from the blank, unfeatured skull. Harris was seized with sudden panic at the thought of what reaction it might evoke in an audience of strangers. As if he had spoken the fear aloud, her voice denied it. "I don’t need kindness. And it’s no kindness to Maltzer to hide me under a bushel. He has worked too hard, I know. He’s driven himself to a breaking point. But it’ll be a complete negation of all he’s worked for if I hide myself now. You don’t know what a tremendous lot of geniuses and artistry went into me, John. The whole idea from the start was to recreate what I’d lost so that it could be proved that beauty and talent need not be sacrificed by the destruction of parts or all the body.

"It wasn’t only for me that we meant to prove that. There’ll be others who suffer injuries that once might have ruined them. This was to end all suffering like that forever. It was Maltzer’s gift to the whole race as well as to me. He’s really a humanitarian, John, like most great men. He’d never have given up a year of his life to this work if it had been for any one individual alone. He was seeing thousands of others beyond me as he worked. And I won’t let him ruin all he’s achieved because he’s afraid to prove it now he’s got it. The whole wonderful achievement will be worthless if I don’t take the final step. I think his breakdown, in the end, would be worse and more final if I never tried than if I tried and failed."

Harris sat in silence. There was no answer he could make to that. He hoped the little twinge of shamefaced jealousy he suddenly felt did not show, as he was reminded anew of the intimacy closer than marriage which had of necessity bound these two together. And he knew that any reaction of his would in its way be almost as prejudiced as Maltzer’s, for a reason at once the same and entirely opposite.

Except that he himself came fresh to the problem, while Maltzer’s viewpoint was colored by a year of overwork and physical and mental exhaustion.

"What are you going to do?" he asked.

She was standing before the fire when he spoke, swaying just a little so that highlights danced all along her golden body. Now she turned with a serpentine grace and sank into the cushioned chair beside her. It came to him suddenly that she was much more than humanly graceful—quite as much as he had once feared she would be less than human.

"I’ve already arranged for a performance," she told him, her voice a little shaken with a familiar mixture of excitement and defiance.

Harris sat up with a start. "How? Where? There hasn’t been any publicity at all yet, has there? I didn’t know—"

"Now, now, Johnnie," her amused voice soothed him. "You’ll be handling everything just as usual once I get started back to work— that is, if you still want to. But this I’ve arranged for myself. It’s going to be a surprise. I… I felt it had to be a surprise." She wriggled a little among the cushions. "Audience psychology is something I’ve always felt rather than known, and I do feel this is the way it ought to be done. There’s no precedent. Nothing like this ever happened before. I’ll have to go by my own intuition."

"You mean it’s to be a complete surprise?"

"I think it must be. I don’t want the audience coming in with preconceived ideas. I want them to see me exactly as I am now first, before they know who or what they’re seeing. They must realize I can still give as good a performance as ever before they remember and compare it with my past performances. I don’t want them to come ready to pity my handicaps—I haven’t got any!—or full of morbid curiosity. So I’m going on the air after the regular eight-o’clock telecast of the feature from Teleo City. I’m just going to do one specialty in the usual vaude program. It’s all been arranged. They’ll build up to it, of course, as the highlight of the evening, but they aren’t to say who I am until the end of the performance—if the audience hasn’t recognized me already, by then."

"Audience?"

"Of course. Surely you haven’t forgotten they still play to a theater audience at Teleo City? That’s why I want to make my debut there. I’ve always played better when there were people in the studio, so I could gauge reactions. I think most performers do. Anyhow, it’s all arranged."

"Does Maltzer know?"

She wriggled uncomfortably. "Not yet."

"But he’ll have to give his permission too, won’t he? I mean—"

"Now look, John! That’s another idea you and Maltzer will have to get out of your minds. I don’t belong to him. In a way he’s just been my doctor through a long illness, but I’m free to discharge him whenever I choose. If there were ever any legal disagreement, I suppose he’d be entitled to quite a lot of money for the work he’s done on my new body—for the body itself, really, since it’s his own machine, in one sense. But he doesn’t own it, or me. I’m not sure just how the question would be decided by the courts—there again, we’ve got a problem without precedent. The body may be his work, but the brain that makes it something more than a collection of metal rings is me, and he couldn’t restrain me against my will even if he wanted to. Not legally, and not—" She hesitated oddly and looked away. For the first time Harris was aware of something beneath the surface of her mind which was quite strange to him.

"Well, anyhow," she went on, "that question won’t come up. Maltzer and I have been much too close in the past year to clash over anything as essential as this. He knows in his heart that I’m right, and he won’t try to restrain me. His work won’t be completed until I do what I was built to do. And I intend to do it."

That strange little quiver of something—something un-Deirdre—which had so briefly trembled beneath the surface of familiarity stuck in Harris’ mind as something he must recall and examine later. Now he said only,

"All right. I suppose I agree with you. How soon are you going to do it?"

She turned her head so that even the glass mask through which she looked out at the world was foreshortened away from him, and the golden helmet with its hint of sculptured cheekbone was entirely enigmatic.

"Tonight," she said.

Maltzer’s thin hand shook so badly that he could not turn the dial. He tried twice and then laughed nervously and shrugged at Harris.

"You get her," he said.

Harris glanced at his watch. "It isn’t time yet. She won’t be on for half an hour." Maltzer made a gesture of violent impatience. "Get it, get it!"

Harris shrugged a little in turn and twisted the dial. On the tilted screen above them shadows and sound blurred together and then clarified into a somber medieval hall, vast, vaulted, people in bright costume moving like pygmies through its dimness. Since the play concerned Mary of Scotland, the actors were dressed in something approximating Elizabethan garb, but as every era tends to translate costume into terms of the current fashions, the women’s hair was dressed in a style that would have startled Elizabeth, and their footgear was entirely anachronistic.

The hall dissolved and a face swam up into soft focus upon the screen. The dark, lush beauty of the actress who was playing the Stuart queen glowed at them in velvety perfection from the clouds of her pearl-strewn hair. Maltzer groaned.

"She’s competing with that," he said hollowly.

"You think she can’t?"

Maltzer slapped the chair arms with angry palms. Then the quivering of his fingers seemed suddenly to strike him, and he muttered to himself, "Look at ’em! I’m not even fit to handle a hammer and saw." But the mutter was an aside. "Of course she can’t compete," he cried irritably. "She hasn’t any sex. She isn’t female any more. She doesn’t know that yet, but she’ll learn."

Harris stared at him, feeling a little stunned. Somehow the thought had not occurred to him before at all, so vividly had the illusion of the old Deirdre hung about the new one.

"She’s an abstraction now," Maltzer went on, drumming his palms upon the chair in quick, nervous rhythms. "I don’t know what it’ll do to her, but there’ll be change. Remember Abelard? She’s lost everything that made her essentially what the public wanted, and she’s going to find it out the hard way. After that—" He grimaced savagely and was silent.

"She hasn’t lost everything," Harris defended. "She can dance and sing as well as ever, maybe better. She still has grace and charm and—"

"Yes, but where did the grace and charm come from? Not out of the habit patterns in her brain. No, out of human contacts, out of all the things that stimulate sensitive minds to creativeness. And she’s lost three of her five senses. Everything she can’t see and hear is gone. One of the strongest stimuli to a woman of her type was the knowledge of sex competition. You know how she sparkled when a man came into the room? All that’s gone, and it was an essential. You know how liquor stimulated her? She’s lost that. She couldn’t taste food or drink even if she needed it. Perfume, flowers, all the odors we respond to mean nothing to her now. She can’t feel anything with tactual delicacy any more. She used to surround herself with luxuries—she drew her stimuli from them—and that’s all gone too. She’s withdrawn from all physical contacts."

He squinted at the screen, not seeing it, his face drawn into lines like the lines of a skull. All flesh seemed to have dissolved off his bones in the past year, and Harris thought almost jealously that even in that way he seemed to be drawing nearer Deirdre in her fleshlessness with every passing week.

"Sight," Maltzer said, "is the most highly civilized of the senses. It was the last to come. The other senses tie us in closely with the very roots of life; I think we perceive with them more keenly than we know. The things we realize through taste and smell and feeling stimulate directly, without a detour through the centers of conscious thought. You know how often a taste or odor will recall a memory to you so subtly you don’t know exactly what caused it? We need those primitive senses to tie us in with nature and the race. Through those ties Deirdre drew her vitality without realizing it. Sight is a cold, intellectual thing compared with the other senses. But it’s all she has to draw on now. She isn’t a human being any more, and I think what humanity is left in her will drain out little by little and never be replaced. Abelard, in a way, was a prototype. But Deirdre’s loss is complete."

"She isn’t human," Harris agreed slowly. "But she isn’t pure robot either. She’s something somewhere between the two, and I think it’s a mistake to try to guess just where, or what the outcome will be."

"I don’t have to guess," Maltzer said in a grim voice. "I know. I wish I’d let her die. I’ve done something to her a thousand times worse than the fire ever could. I should have let her die in it."

"Wait," said Harris. "Wait and see. I think you’re wrong."

On the television screen Mary of Scotland climbed the scaffold to her doom, the gown of traditional scarlet clinging warmly to supple young curves as anachronistic in their way as the slippers beneath the gown, for—as everyone but playwrights knows—Mary was well into middle age before she died. Gracefully this latter-day Mary bent her head, sweeping the long hair aside, kneeling to the block.

Maltzer watched stonily, seeing another woman entirely.

"I shouldn’t have let her," he was muttering. "I shouldn’t have let her do it."

"Do you really think you’d have stopped her if you could?" Harris asked quietly. And the other man after a moment’s pause shook his head jerkily.

"No, I suppose not. I keep thinking if I worked and waited a little longer maybe I could make it easier for her, but—no, I suppose not. She’s got to face them sooner or later, being herself." He stood up abruptly, shoving back his chair. "If she only weren’t so… so frail. She doesn’t realize how delicately poised her very sanity is. We gave her what we could—the artists and the designers and I, all gave our very best—but she’s so pitifully handicapped even with all we could do. She’ll always be an abstraction and a… a freak, cut off from the world by handicaps worse in their way than anything any human being ever suffered before. Sooner or later she’ll realize it. And then—" He began to pace up and down with quick, uneven steps, striking his hands together. His face was twitching with a little tic that drew up one eye to a squint and released it again at irregular intervals. Harris could see how very near collapse the man was.

"Can you imagine what it’s like?" Maltzer demanded fiercely. "Penned into a mechanical body like that, shut out from all human contacts except what leaks in by way of sight and sound? To know you aren’t human any longer? She’s been through shocks enough already. When that shock fully hits her—"

"Shut up," said Harris roughly. "You won’t do her any good if you break down yourself. Look—the vaude’s starting."

Great golden curtains had swept together over the unhappy Queen of Scotland and were parting again now, all sorrow and frustration wiped away once more as cleanly as the passing centuries had already expunged them. Now a line of tiny dancers under the tremendous arch of the stage kicked and pranced with the precision of little mechanical dolls too small and perfect to be real. Vision rushed down upon them and swept along the row, face after stiffly smiling face racketing by like fence pickets. Then the sight rose into the rafters and looked down upon them from a great height, the grotesquely foreshortened figures still prancing in perfect rhythm even from this inhuman angle.

There was applause from an invisible audience. Then someone came out and did a dance with lighted torches that streamed long, weaving ribbons of fire among clouds of what looked like cotton wool but was most probably asbestos. Then a company in gorgeous pseudo-period costumes postured its way through the new singing ballet form of dance, roughly following a plot which had been announced as Les Sylphides, but had little in common with it. Afterward the precision dancers came on again, solemn and charming as performing dolls.

Maltzer began to show signs of dangerous tension as act succeeded act. Deirdre’s was to be the last, of course. It seemed very long indeed before a face in close-up blotted out the stage, and a master of ceremonies with features like an amiable marionette’s announced a very special number as the finale. His voice was almost cracking with excitement—perhaps he, too, had not been told until a moment before what lay in store for the audience.

Neither of the listening men heard what it was he said, but both were conscious of a certain indefinable excitement rising among the audience, murmurs and rustlings and a mounting anticipation as if time had run backward here and knowledge of the great surprise had already broken upon them.

Then the golden curtains appeared again. They quivered and swept apart on long upward arcs, and between them the stage was full of a shimmering golden haze. It was, Harris realized in a moment, simply a series of gauze curtains, but the effect was one of strange and wonderful anticipation, as if something very splendid must be hidden in the haze. The world might have looked like this on the first morning of creation, before heaven and earth took form in the mind of God. It was a singularly fortunate choice of stage set in its symbolism, though Harris wondered how much necessity had figured in its selection, for there could not have been much time to prepare an elaborate set.

The audience sat perfectly silent, and the air was tense. This was no ordinary pause before an act. No one had been told, surely, and yet they seemed to guess—The shimmering haze trembled and began to thin, veil by veil.

Beyond was darkness, and what looked like a row of shining pillars set in a balustrade that began gradually to take shape as the haze drew back in shining folds. Now they could see that the balustrade curved up from left and right to the head of a sweep of stairs. Stage and stairs were carpeted in black velvet; black velvet draperies hung just ajar behind the balcony, with a glimpse of dark sky beyond them trembling with dim synthetic stars.

The last curtain of golden gauze withdrew. The stage was empty. Or it seemed empty. But even through the aerial distances between this screen and the place it mirrored, Harris thought that the audience was not waiting for the performer to come on from the wings. There was no rustling, no coughing, no sense of impatience. A presence upon the stage was in command from the first drawing of the curtains; it filled the theater with its calm domination. It gauged its timing, holding the audience as a conductor with lifted baton gathers and holds the eyes of his orchestra.

For a moment everything was motionless upon the stage. Then, at the head of the stairs, where the two curves of the pillared balustrade swept together, a figure stirred.

Until that moment she had seemed another shining column in the row. Now she swayed deliberately, light catching and winking and running molten along her limbs and her robe of metal mesh. She swayed just enough to show that she was there. Then, with every eye upon her, she stood quietly to let them look their fill. The screen did not swoop to a close-up upon her. Her enigma remained inviolate and the television watchers saw her no more clearly than the audience in the theater.

Many must have thought her at first some wonderfully animate robot, hung perhaps from wires invisible against the velvet, for certainly she was no woman dressed in metal—her proportions were too thin and fine for that. And perhaps the impression of robotism was what she meant to convey at first. She stood quiet, swaying just a little, a masked and inscrutable figure, faceless, very slender in her robe that hung in folds as pure as a Grecian chlamys, though she did not look Grecian at all. In the visored golden helmet and the robe of mail that odd likeness to knighthood was there again, with its implications of medieval richness behind the simple lines. Except that in her exquisite slimness she called to mind no human figure in armor, not even the comparative delicacy of a St. Joan. It was the chivalry and delicacy of some other world implicit in her outlines.

A breath of surprise had rippled over the audience when she moved. Now they were tensely silent again, waiting. And the tension, the anticipation, was far deeper than the surface importance of the scene could ever have evoked. Even those who thought her a manikin seemed to feel the forerunning of greater revelations.

Now she swayed and came slowly down the steps, moving with a suppleness just a little better than human. The swaying strengthened. By the time she reached the stage floor she was dancing. But it was no dance that any human creature could ever have performed. The long, slow, languorous rhythms of her body would have been impossible to a figure hinged at its joints as human figures hinge. (Harris remembered incredulously that he had feared once to find her jointed like a mechanical robot. But it was humanity that seemed, by contrast, jointed and mechanical now.)

The languor and the rhythm of her patterns looked impromptu, as all good dances should, but Harris knew what hours of composition and rehearsal must lie behind it, what laborious graving into her brain of strange new pathways, the first to replace the old ones and govern the mastery of metal limbs.

To and fro over the velvet carpet, against the velvet background, she wove the intricacies of her serpentine dance, leisurely and yet with such hypnotic effect that the air seemed full of looping rhythms, as if her long, tapering limbs had left their own replicas hanging upon the air and fading only slowly as she moved away. In her mind, Harris knew, the stage was a whole, a background to be filled in completely with the measured patterns of her dance, and she seemed almost to project that completed pattern to her audience so that they saw her everywhere at once, her golden rhythms fading upon the air long after she had gone.

Now there was music, looping and hanging in echoes after her like the shining festoons she wove with her body. But it was no orchestral music. She was humming, deep and sweet and wordlessly, as she glided her easy, intricate path about the stage. And the volume of the music was amazing. It seemed to fill the theater, and it was not amplified by hidden loudspeakers. You could tell that. Somehow, until you heard the music she made, you had never realized before the subtle distortions that amplification puts into music. This was utterly pure and true as perhaps no ear in all her audience had ever heard music before.

While she danced the audience did not seem to breathe. Perhaps they were beginning already to suspect who and what it was that moved before them without any fanfare of the publicity they had been half-expecting for weeks now. And yet, without the publicity, it was not easy to believe the dancer they watched was not some cunningly motivated manikin swinging on unseen wires about the stage.

Nothing she had done yet had been human. The dance was no dance a human being could have performed. The music she hummed came from a throat without vocal chords. But now the long, slow rhythms were drawing to their close, the pattern tightening in to a finale. And she ended as inhumanly as she had danced, willing them not to interrupt her with applause, dominating them now as she had always done. For her implication here was that a machine might have performed the dance, and a machine expects no applause. If they thought unseen operators had put her through those wonderful paces, they would wait for the operators to appear for their bows. But the audience was obedient. It sat silently, waiting for what came next. But its silence was tense and breathless.

The dance ended as it had begun. Slowly, almost carelessly, she swung up the velvet stairs, moving with rhythms as perfect as her music. But when she reached the head of the stairs she turned to face her audience, and for a moment stood motionless, like a creature of metal, without volition, the hands of the operator slack upon its strings.

Then, startlingly, she laughed.

It was lovely laughter, low and sweet and full-throated. She threw her head back and let her body sway and her shoulders shake, and the laughter, like the music, filled the theater, gaining volume from the great hollow of the roof and sounding in the ears of every listener, not loud, but as intimately as if each sat alone with the woman who laughed.

And she was a woman now. Humanity had dropped over her like a tangible garment. No one who had ever heard that laughter before could mistake it here. But before the reality of who she was had quite time to dawn upon her listeners she let the laughter deepen into music, as no human voice could have done. She was humming a familiar refrain close in the ear of every hearer. And the humming in turn swung into words. She sang in her clear, light, lovely voice:

It was Deirdre’s song. She had sung it first upon the airways a month before the theater fire that had consumed her. It was a commonplace little melody, simple enough to take first place in the fancy of a nation that had always liked its songs simple. But it had a certain sincerity too, and no taint of the vulgarity of tune and rhythm that foredooms so many popular songs to oblivion after their novelty fades.

No one else was ever able to sing it quite as Deirdre did. It had been identified with her so closely that though for awhile after her accident singers tried to make it a memorial for her, they failed so conspicuously to give it her unmistakable flair that the song died from their sheer inability to sing it. No one ever hummed the tune without thinking of her and the pleasant, nostalgic sadness of something lovely and lost.

But it was not a sad song now. If anyone had doubted whose brain and ego motivated this shining metal suppleness, they could doubt no longer. For the voice was Deirdre, and the song. And the lovely, poised grace of her mannerisms that made up recognition as certainly as sight of a familiar face.

She had not finished the first line of her song before the audience knew her.

And they did not let her finish. The accolade of their interruption was a tribute more eloquent than polite waiting could ever have been. First a breath of incredulity rippled over the theater, and a long, sighing gasp that reminded Harris irrelevantly as he listened to the gasp which still goes up from matinee audiences at the first glimpse of the fabulous Valentino, so many generations dead. But this gasp did not sigh itself away and vanish. Tremendous tension lay behind it, and the rising tide of excitement rippled up in little murmurs and spatterings of applause that ran together into one overwhelming roar. It shook the theater. The television screen trembled and blurred a little to the volume of that transmitted applause.

Silenced before it, Deirdre stood gesturing on the stage, bowing and bowing as the noise rolled up about her, shaking perceptibly with the triumph of her own emotion.

Harris had an intolerable feeling that she was smiling radiantly and that the tears were pouring down her cheeks. He even thought, just as Maltzer leaned forward to switch off the screen, that she was blowing kisses over the audience in the time-honored gesture of the grateful actress, her golden arms shining as she scattered kisses abroad from the featureless helmet, the face that had no mouth.

"Well?" Harris said, not without triumph.

Maltzer shook his head jerkily, the glasses unsteady on his nose so that the blurred eyes behind them seemed to shift.

"Of course they applauded, you fool," he said in a savage voice. "I might have known they would under this set-up. It doesn’t prove anything. Oh, she was smart to surprise them—I admit that. But they were applauding themselves as much as her. Excitement, gratitude for letting them in on a historic performance, mass hysteria—you know. It’s from now on the test will come, and this hasn’t helped any to prepare her for it. Morbid curiosity when the news gets out—people laughing when she forgets she isn’t human. And they will, you know. There are always those who will. And the novelty wearing off. The slow draining away of humanity for lack of contact with any human stimuli any more—"

Harris remembered suddenly and reluctantly the moment that afternoon which he had shunted aside mentally, to consider later. The sense of something unfamiliar beneath the surface of Deirdre’s speech. Was Maltzer right? Was the drainage already at work? Or was there something deeper than this obvious answer to the question? Certainly she had been through experiences too terrible for ordinary people to comprehend. Scars might still remain. Or, with her body, had she put on a strange, metallic something of the mind, that spoke to no sense which human minds could answer?

For a few minutes neither of them spoke. Then Maltzer rose abruptly and stood looking down at Harris with an abstract scowl.

"I wish you’d go now," he said.

Harris glanced up at him, startled. Maltzer began to pace again, his steps quick and uneven. Over his shoulder he said, "I’ve made up my mind, Harris. I’ve got to put a stop to this."

Harris rose. "Listen," he said. "Tell me one thing. What makes you so certain you’re right? Can you deny that most of it’s speculation—hearsay evidence? Remember, I talked to Deirdre, and she was just as sure as you are in the opposite direction. Have you any real reason for what you think?"

Maltzer took his glasses off and rubbed his nose carefully, taking a long time about it. He seemed reluctant to answer. But when he did, at last, there was a confidence in his voice Harris had not expected.

"I have a reason," he said. "But you won’t believe it. Nobody would."

"Try me."

Maltzer shook his head. "Nobody could believe it. No two people were ever in quite the same relationship before as Deirdre and I have been. I helped her come back out of complete—oblivion. I knew her before she had voice or hearing. She was only a frantic mind when I first made contact with her, half insane with all that had happened and fear of what would happen next. In a very literal sense she was reborn out of that condition, and I had to guide her through every step of the way. I came to know her thoughts before she thought them. And once you’ve been that close to another mind, you don’t lose the contact easily." He put the glasses back on and looked blurrily at Harris through the heavy lenses. "Deirdre is worried," he said. "I know it. You won’t believe me, but I can—well, sense it. I tell you, I’ve been too close to her very mind itself to make any mistake. You don’t see it, maybe. Maybe even she doesn’t know it yet. But the worry’s there. When I’m with her, I feel it. And I don’t want it to come any nearer the surface of her mind than it’s come already. I’m going to put a stop to this before it’s too late."

Harris had no comment for that. It was too entirely outside his own experience. He said nothing for a moment. Then he asked simply, "How?"

"I’m not sure yet. I’ve got to decide before she comes back. And I want to see her alone."

"I think you’re wrong," Harris told him quietly. "I think you’re imagining things. I don’t think you can stop her."

Maltzer gave him a slanted glance. "I can stop her," he said, in a curious voice. He went on quickly, "She has enough already—she’s nearly human. She can live normally as other people live, without going back on the screen. Maybe this taste of it will be enough. I’ve got to convince her it is. If she retires now, she’ll never guess how cruel her own audiences could be, and maybe that deep sense of— distress, uneasiness, whatever it is—won’t come to the surface. It mustn’t. She’s too fragile to stand that." He slapped his hands together sharply. "I’ve got to stop her. For her own sake I’ve got to do it!" He swung round again to face Harris. "Will you go now?"

Never in his life had Harris wanted less to leave a place. Briefly he thought of saying simply, "No I won’t." But he had to admit in his own mind that Maltzer was at least partly right. This was a matter between Deirdre and her creator, the culmination, perhaps, of that year’s long intimacy so like marriage that this final trial for supremacy was a need he recognized.

He would not, he thought, forbid the showdown if he could. Perhaps the whole year had been building up to this one moment between them in which one or the other must prove himself victor. Neither was very well stable just now, after the long strain of the year past. It might very well be that the mental salvation of one or both hinged upon the outcome of the clash. But because each was so strongly motivated not by selfish concern but by solicitude for the other in this strange combat, Harris knew he must leave them to settle the thing alone.

He was in the street and hailing a taxi before the full significance of something Maltzer had said came to him. "I can stop her," he had declared, with an odd inflection in his voice.

Suddenly Harris felt cold. Maltzer had made her—of course he could stop her if he chose. Was there some key in that supple golden body that could immobilize it at its maker’s will? Could she be imprisoned in the cage of her own body? No body before in all history, he thought, could have been designed more truly to be a prison for its mind than Deirdre’s, if Maltzer chose to turn the key that locked her in. There must be many ways to do it. He could simply withhold whatever source of nourishment kept her brain alive, if that were the way he chose.

But Harris could not believe he would do it. The man wasn’t insane. He would not defeat his own purpose. His determination rose from his solicitude for Deirdre; he would not even in the last extremity try to save her by imprisoning her in the jail of her own skull.

For a moment Harris hesitated on the curb, almost turning back. But what could he do? Even granting that Maltzer would resort to such tactics, self-defeating in their very nature, how could any man on earth prevent him if he did it subtly enough? But he never would. Harris knew he never would. He got into his cab slowly, frowning. He would see them both tomorrow.

He did not. Harris was swamped with excited calls about yesterday’s performance, but the message he was awaiting did not come. The day went by very slowly. Toward evening he surrendered and called Maltzer’s apartment.

It was Deirdre’s face that answered, and for once he saw no remembered features superimposed upon the blankness of her helmet. Masked and faceless, she looked at him inscrutably.

"Is everything all right?" he asked, a little uncomfortable.

"Yes, of course," she said, and her voice was a bit metallic for the first time, as if she were thinking so deeply of some other matter that she did not trouble to pitch it properly. "I had a long talk with Maltzer last night, if that’s what you mean. You know what he wants. But nothing’s been decided yet."

Harris felt oddly rebuffed by the sudden realization of the metal of her. It was impossible to read anything from face or voice. Each had its mask.

"What are you going to do?" he asked.

"Exactly as I’d planned," she told him, without inflection.

Harris floundered a little. Then, with an effort at practicality, he said, "Do you want me to go to work on bookings, then?"

She shook the delicately modeled skull. "Not yet. You saw the reviews today, of course. They—did like me." It was an understatement, and for the first time a note of warmth sounded in her voice. But the preoccupation was still there, too. "I’d already planned to make them wait awhile after my first performance," she went on. "A couple of weeks, anyhow. You remember that little farm of mine in Jersey, John? I’m going over today. I won’t see anyone except the servants there. Not even Maltzer. Not even you. I’ve got a lot to think about. Maltzer has agreed to let everything go until we’ve both thought things over. He’s taking a rest, too. I’ll see you the moment I get back, John. Is that all right?"

She blanked out almost before he had time to nod and while the beginning of a stammered argument was still on his lips. He sat there staring at the screen.

The two weeks that went by before Maltzer called him again were the longest Harris had ever spent. He thought of many things in the interval. He believed he could sense in that last talk with Deirdre something of the inner unrest that Maltzer had spoken of—more an abstraction than a distress, but some thought had occupied her mind which she would not—or was it that she could not?—share even with her closest confidants. He even wondered whether, if her mind was as delicately poised as Maltzer feared, one would ever know whether or not it had slipped. There was so little evidence one way or the other in the unchanging outward form of her.

Most of all he wondered what two weeks in a new environment would do to her untried body and newly patterned brain. If Maltzer were right, then there might be some perceptible—drainage—by the time they met again. He tried not to think of that.

Maltzer televised him on the morning set for her return. He looked very bad. The rest must have been no rest at all. His face was almost a skull now, and the blurred eyes behind their lenses burned. But he seemed curiously at peace, in spite of his appearance. Harris thought he had reached some decision, but whatever it was had not stopped his hands from shaking or the nervous tic that drew his face sidewise into a grimace at intervals.

"Come over," he said briefly, without preamble. "She’ll be here in half an hour." And he blanked out without waiting for an answer.

When Harris arrived, he was standing by the window looking down and steadying his trembling hands on the sill.

"I can’t stop her," he said in a monotone, and again without preamble. Harris had the impression that for the two weeks his thoughts must have run over and over the same track, until any spoken word was simply a vocal interlude in the circling of his mind. "I couldn’t do it. I even tried threats, but she knew I didn’t mean them. There’s only one way out, Harris." He glanced up briefly, hollow-eyed behind the lenses. "Never mind. I’ll tell you later."

"Did you explain everything to her that you did to me?"

"Nearly all. I even taxed her with that… that sense of distress I know she feels. She denied it. She was lying. We both knew. It was worse after the performance than before. When I saw her that night, I tell you I knew—she senses something wrong, but she won’t admit it." He shrugged. "Well—"

Faintly in the silence they heard the humming of the elevator descending from the helicopter platform on the roof. Both men turned to the door.

She had not changed at all. Foolishly, Harris was a little surprised. Then he caught himself and remembered that she would never change—never, until she died. He himself might grow white-haired and senile; she would move before him then as she moved now, supple, golden, enigmatic.

Still, he thought she caught her breath a little when she saw Maltzer and the depths of his swift degeneration. She had no breath to catch, but her voice was shaken as she greeted them.

"I’m glad you’re both here," she said, a slight hesitation in her speech. "It’s a wonderful day outside. Jersey was glorious. I’d forgotten how lovely it is in summer. Was the sanitarium any good, Maltzer?"

He jerked his head irritably and did not answer. She went on talking in a light voice, skimming the surface, saying nothing important.

This time Harris saw her as he supposed her audiences would, eventually, when the surprise had worn off and the image of the living Deirdre faded from memory. She was all metal now, the Deirdre they would know from today on. And she was not less lovely. She was not even less human—yet. Her motion was a miracle of flexible grace, a pouring of suppleness along every limb. (From now on, Harris realized suddenly, it was her body and not her face that would have mobility to express emotion; she must act with her limbs and her lithe, robed torso.)

But there was something wrong. Harris sensed it almost tangibly in her inflections, her elusiveness, the way she fenced with words. This was what Maltzer had meant, this was what Harris himself had felt just before she left for the country. Only now it was strong—certain. Between them and the old Deirdre whose voice still spoke to them a veil of—detachment—had been drawn. Behind it she was in distress. Somehow, somewhere, she had made some discovery that affected her profoundly. And Harris was terribly afraid that he knew what the discovery must be. Maltzer was right.

He was still leaning against the window, staring out unseeingly over the vast panorama of New York, webbed with traffic bridges, winking with sunlit glass, its vertiginous distances plunging downward into the blue shadows of Earth-level. He said now, breaking into the light-voiced chatter, "Are you all right, Deirdre?"

She laughed. It was lovely laughter. She moved lithely across the room, sunlight glinting on her musical mailed robe, and stooped to a cigarette box on a table. Her fingers were deft.

"Have one?" she said, and carried the box to Maltzer. He let her put the brown cylinder between his lips and hold a light to it, but he did not seem to be noticing what he did. She replaced the box and then crossed to a mirror on the far wall and began experimenting with a series of gliding ripples that wove patterns of pale gold in the glass. "Of course I’m all right," she said.

"You’re lying."

Deirdre did not turn. She was watching him in the mirror, but the ripple of her motion went on slowly, languorously, undisturbed.

"No," she told them both.

Maltzer drew deeply on his cigarette. Then with a hard pull he unsealed the window and tossed the smoking stub far out over the gulfs below. He said,

"You can’t deceive me, Deirdre." His voice, suddenly, was quite calm. "I created you, my dear. I know. I’ve sensed that uneasiness in you growing and growing for a long while now. It’s much stronger today than it was two weeks ago. Something happened to you in the country. I don’t know what it was, but you’ve changed. Will you admit to yourself what it is, Deirdre? Have you realized yet that you must not go back on the screen?"

"Why, no," said Deirdre, still not looking at him except obliquely, in the glass. Her gestures were slower now, weaving lazy patterns in the air. "No, I haven’t changed my mind."

She was all metal—outwardly. She was taking unfair advantage of her own metal-hood. She had withdrawn far within, behind the mask of her voice and her facelessness. Even her body, whose involuntary motions might have betrayed what she was feeling, in the only way she could be subject to betrayal now, she was putting through ritual motions that disguised it completely. As long as these looping, weaving patterns occupied her, no one had any way of guessing even from her motion what went on in the hidden brain inside her helmet.

Harris was struck suddenly and for the first time with the completeness of her withdrawal. When he had seen her last in this apartment she had been wholly Deirdre, not masked at all, overflowing the metal with the warmth and ardor of the woman he had known so well. Since then—since the performance on the stage—he had not seen the familiar Deirdre again. Passionately he wondered why. Had she begun to suspect even in her moment of triumph what a fickle master an audience could be? Had she caught, perhaps, the sound of whispers and laughter among some small portion of her watchers, though the great majority praised her?

Or was Maltzer right? Perhaps Harris’ first interview with her had been the last bright burning of the lost Deirdre, animated by excitement and the pleasure of meeting after so long a time, animation summoned up in a last strong effort to convince him. Now she was gone, but whether in self-protection against the possible cruelties of human beings, or whether in withdrawal to metal-hood, he could not guess.

Humanity might be draining out of her fast, and the brassy taint of metal permeating the brain it housed.

Maltzer laid his trembling hand on the edge of the opened window and looked out. He said in a deepened voice, the querulous note gone for the first time:

"I’ve made a terrible mistake, Deirdre. I’ve done you irreparable harm." He paused a moment, but Deirdre said nothing. Harris dared not speak. In a moment Maltzer went on. "I’ve made you vulnerable, and given you no weapons to fight your enemies with. And the human race is your enemy, my dear, whether you admit it now or later. I think you know that. I think it’s why you’re so silent. I think you must have suspected it on the stage two weeks ago, and verified it in Jersey while you were gone. They’re going to hate you, after a while, because you are still beautiful, and they’re going to persecute you because you are different—and helpless. Once the novelty wears off, my dear, your audience will be simply a mob."

He was not looking at her. He had bent forward a little, looking out the window and down. His hair stirred in the wind that blew very strongly up this high, and whined thinly around the open edge of the glass.

"I meant what I did for you," he said, "to be for everyone who meets with accidents that might have ruined them. I should have known my gift would mean worse ruin than any mutilation could be. I know now that there’s only one legitimate way a human being can create life. When he tries another way, as I did, he has a lesson to learn. Remember the lesson of the student Frankenstein? He learned, too. In a way, he was lucky—the way he learned. He didn’t have to watch what happened afterward. Maybe he wouldn’t have had the courage—I know I haven’t."

Harris found himself standing without remembering that he rose. He knew suddenly what was about to happen. He understood Maltzer’s air of resolution, his new, unnatural calm. He knew, even, why Maltzer had asked him here today, so that Deirdre might not be left alone. For he remembered that Frankenstein, too, had paid with his life for the unlawful creation of life.

Maltzer was leaning head and shoulders from the window now, looking down with almost hypnotized fascination. His voice came back to them remotely in the breeze, as if a barrier already lay between them.

Deirdre had not moved. Her expressionless mask, in the mirror, watched him calmly. She must have understood. Yet she gave no sign, except that the weaving of her arms had almost stopped now, she moved so slowly. Like a dance seen in a nightmare, under water.

It was impossible, of course, for her to express any emotion. The fact that her face showed none now should not, in fairness, be held against her. But she watched so wholly without feeling— Neither of them moved toward the window. A false step, now, might send him over. They were quiet, listening to his voice.

"We who bring life into the world unlawfully," said Maltzer, almost thoughtfully, "must make room for it by withdrawing our own. That seems to be an inflexible rule. It works automatically. The thing we create makes living unbearable. No, it’s nothing you can help, my dear. I’ve asked you to do something I created you incapable of doing. I made you to perform a function, and I’ve been asking you to forego the one thing you were made to do. I believe that if you do it, it will destroy you, but the whole guilt is mine, not yours. I’m not even asking you to give up the screen, any more. I know you can’t, and live. But I can’t live and watch you. I put all my skill and all my love in one final masterpiece, and I can’t bear to watch it destroyed. I can’t live and watch you do only what I made you to do, and ruin yourself because you must do it.

"But before I go, I have to make sure you understand." He leaned a little farther, looking down, and his voice grew more remote as the glass came between them. He was saying almost unbearable things now, but very distantly, in a cool, passionless tone filtered through wind and glass, and with the distant humming of the city mingled with it, so that the words were curiously robbed of poignancy. "I can be a coward," he said, "and escape the consequences of what I’ve done, but I can’t go and leave you—not understanding. It would be even worse than the thought of your failure, to think of you bewildered and confused when the mob turns on you. What I’m telling you, my dear, won’t be any real news—I think you sense it already, though you may not admit it to yourself. We’ve been too close to lie to each other, Deirdre—I know when you aren’t telling the truth. I know the distress that’s been growing in your mind. You are not wholly human, my dear. I think you know that. In so many ways, in spite of all I could do, you must always be less than human. You’ve lost the senses of perception that kept you in touch with humanity. Sight and hearing are all that remain, and sight, as I’ve said before, was the last and coldest of the senses to develop. And you’re so delicately poised on a sort of thin edge of reason. You’re only a clear, glowing mind animating a metal body, like a candle flame in a glass. And as precariously vulnerable to the wind."

He paused. "Try not to let them ruin you completely," he said after a while. "When they turn against you, when they find out you’re more helpless than they—I wish I could have made you stronger, Deirdre. But I couldn’t. I had too much skill for your good and mine, but not quite enough skill for that."

He was silent again, briefly, looking down. He was balanced precariously now, more than halfway over the sill and supported only by one hand on the glass. Harris watched with an agonized uncertainty, not sure whether a sudden leap might catch him in time or send him over. Deirdre was still weaving her golden patterns, slowly and unchangingly, watching the mirror and its reflection, her face and masked eyes enigmatic.

"I wish one thing, though," Maltzer said in his remote voice. "I wish—before I finish—that you’d tell me the truth, Deirdre. I’d be happier if I were sure I’d—reached you. Do you understand what I’ve said? Do you believe me? Because if you don’t, then I know you’re lost beyond all hope. If you’ll admit your own doubt—and I know you do doubt—I can think there may be a chance for you after all. Were you lying to me, Deirdre? Do you know how… how wrong I’ve made you?"

There was silence. Then very softly, a breath of sound, Deirdre answered. The voice seemed to hang in midair, because she had no lips to move and localize it for the imagination.

"Will you listen, Maltzer?" she asked.

"I’ll wait," he said. "Go on. Yes or no?"

Slowly she let her arms drop to her sides. Very smoothly and quietly she turned from the mirror and faced him. She swayed a little, making her metal robe ring.

"I’ll answer you," she said. "But I don’t think I’ll answer that. Not with yes or no, anyhow. I’m going to walk a little, Maltzer. I have something to tell you, and I can’t talk standing still. Will you let me move about without—going over?"

He nodded distantly. "You can’t interfere from that distance," he said. "But keep the distance. What do you want to say?"

She began to pace a little way up and down her end of the room, moving with liquid ease. The table with the cigarette box was in her way, and she pushed it aside carefully, watching Maltzer and making no swift motions to startle him.

"I’m not—well, sub-human," she said, a faint note of indignation in her voice. "I’ll prove it in a minute, but I want to say something else first. You must promise to wait and listen. There’s a flaw in your argument, and I resent it. I’m not a Frankenstein monster made out of dead flesh. I’m myself—alive. You didn’t create my life, you only preserved it. I’m not a robot, with compulsions built into me that I have to obey. I’m free-willed and independent, and, Maltzer—I’m human."

Harris had relaxed a little. She knew what she was doing. He had no idea what she planned, but he was willing to wait now. She was not the indifferent automaton he had thought. He watched her come to the table again in a lap of her pacing, and stoop over it, her eyeless mask turned to Maltzer to make sure variation of her movement did not startle him.

"I’m human," she repeated, her voice humming faintly and very sweetly. "Do you think I’m not?" she asked, straightening and facing them both. And then suddenly, almost overwhelmingly, the warmth and the old ardent charm were radiant all around her. She was robot no longer, enigmatic no longer. Harris could see as clearly as in their first meeting the remembered flesh still gracious and beautiful as her voice evoked his memory. She stood swaying a little, as she had always swayed, her head on one side, and she was chuckling at them both. It was such a soft and lovely sound, so warmly familiar.

"Of course I’m myself," she told them, and as the words sounded in their ears neither of them could doubt it. There was hypnosis in her voice. She turned away and began to pace again, and so powerful was the human personality which she had called up about her that it beat out at them in deep pulses, as if her body were a furnace to send out those comforting waves of warmth. "I have handicaps, I know," she said. "But my audiences will never know. I won’t let them know. I think you’ll believe me, both of you, when I say I could play Juliet just as I am now, with a cast of ordinary people, and make the world accept it. Do you think I could, John? Maltzer, don’t you believe I could?"

She paused at the far end of her pacing path and turned to face them, and they both stared at her without speaking. To Harris she was the Deirdre he had always known, pale gold, exquisitely graceful in remembered postures, the inner radiance of her shining through metal as brilliantly as it had ever shone through flesh. He did not wonder, now, if it were real. Later he would think again that it might be only a disguise, something like a garment she had put off with her lost body, to wear again only when she chose. Now the spell of her compelling charm was too strong for wonder. He watched, convinced for the moment that she was all she seemed to be. She could play Juliet if she said she could. She could sway a whole audience as easily as she swayed himself. Indeed, there was something about her just now more convincingly human than anything he had noticed before. He realized that in a split second of awareness before he saw what it was.

She was looking at Maltzer. He, too, watched, spellbound in spite of himself, not dissenting. She glanced from one to the other. Then she put back her head and laughter came welling and choking from her in a great, full-throated tide. She shook in the strength of it. Harris could almost see her round throat pulsing with the sweet low-pitched waves of laughter that were shaking her. Honest mirth, with a little derision in it.

Then she lifted one arm and tossed her cigarette into the empty fireplace.

Harris choked, and his mind went blank for one moment of blind denial. He had not sat here watching a robot smoke and accepting it as normal. He could not! And yet he had. That had been the final touch of conviction which swayed his hypnotized mind into accepting her humanity. And she had done it so deftly, so naturally, wearing her radiant humanity with such rightness, that his watching mind had not even questioned what she did.

He glanced at Maltzer. The man was still halfway over the window ledge, but through the opening of the window he, too, was staring in stupefied disbelief and Harris knew they had shared the same delusion.

Deirdre was still shaking a little with laughter. "Well," she demanded, the rich chuckling making her voice quiver, "am I all robot, after all?"

Harris opened his mouth to speak, but he did not utter a word. This was not his show. The byplay lay wholly between Deirdre and Maltzer; he must not interfere. He turned his head to the window and waited.

And Maltzer for a moment seemed shaken in his conviction. "You… you are an actress," he admitted slowly. "But I… I’m not convinced I’m wrong. I think—" He paused. The querulous note was in his voice again, and he seemed racked once more by the old doubts and dismay. Then Harris saw him stiffen. He saw the resolution come back, and understood why it had come. Maltzer had gone too far already upon the cold and lonely path he had chosen to turn back, even for stronger evidence than this. He had reached his conclusions only after mental turmoil too terrible to face again. Safety and peace lay in the course he had steeled himself to follow. He was too tired, too exhausted by months of conflict, to retrace his path and begin all over. Harris could see him groping for a way out, and in a moment he saw him find it.

"That was a trick," he said hollowly. "Maybe you could play it on a larger audience, too. Maybe you have more tricks to use. I might be wrong. But Deirdre"—his voice grew urgent—"you haven’t answered the one thing I’ve got to know. You can’t answer it. You do feel—dismay. You’ve learned your own inadequacy, however well you can hide it from us—even from us. I know. Can you deny that, Deirdre?"

She was not laughing now. She let her arms fall, and the flexible golden body seemed to droop a little all over, as if the brain that a moment before had been sending out strong, sure waves of confidence had slackened its power, and the intangible muscles of her limbs slackened with it. Some of the glowing humanity began to fade. It receded within her and was gone, as if the fire in the furnace of her body were sinking and cooling.

"Maltzer," she said uncertainly, "I can’t answer that—yet. I can’t—"

And then, while they waited in anxiety for her to finish the sentence, she blazed. She ceased to be a figure in stasis—she blazed.

It was something no eyes could watch and translate into terms the brain could follow; her motion was too swift. Maltzer in the window was a whole long room-length away. He had thought himself safe at such a distance, knowing no normal human being could reach him before he moved. But Deirdre was neither normal nor human.

In the same instant she stood drooping by the mirror she was simultaneously at Maltzer’s side. Her motion negated time and destroyed space. And as a glowing cigarette tip in the dark describes closed circles before the eye when the holder moves it swiftly, so Deirdre blazed in one continuous flash of golden motion across the room.

But curiously, she was not blurred. Harris, watching, felt his mind go blank again, but less in surprise than because no normal eyes and brain could perceive what it was he looked at.

(In that moment of intolerable suspense his complex human brain paused suddenly, annihilating time in its own way, and withdrew to a cool corner of its own to analyze in a flashing second what it was he had just seen. The brain could do it timelessly; words are slow. But he knew he had watched a sort of tesseract of human motion, a parable of fourth-dimensional activity. A one-dimensional point, moved through space, creates a two-dimensional line, which in motion creates a three-dimensional cube. Theoretically the cube, in motion, would produce a fourth-dimensional figure. No human creature had ever seen a figure of three dimensions moved through space and time before—until this moment. She had not blurred; every motion she made was distinct, but not like moving figures on a strip of film. Not like anything that those who use our language had ever seen before, or created words to express. The mind saw, but without perceiving. Neither words nor thoughts could resolve what happened into terms for human brains. And perhaps she had not actually and literally moved through the fourth dimension. Perhaps—since Harris was able to see her—it had been almost and not quite that unimaginable thing. But it was close enough.)

While to the slow mind’s eye she was still standing at the far end of the room, she was already at Maltzer’s side, her long, flexible fingers gentle but very firm upon his arms. She waited— The room shimmered. There was sudden violent heat beating upon Harris’ face. Then the air steadied again and Deirdre was saying softly, in a mournful whisper:

"I’m sorry—I had to do it. I’m sorry—I didn’t mean you to know—"

Time caught up with Harris. He saw it overtake Maltzer too, saw the man jerk convulsively away from the grasping hands, in a ludicrously futile effort to forestall what had already happened. Even thought was slow, compared with Deirdre’s swiftness.

The sharp outward jerk was strong. It was strong enough to break the grasp of human hands and catapult Maltzer out and down into the swimming gulfs of New York. The mind leaped ahead to a logical conclusion and saw him twisting and turning and diminishing with dreadful rapidity to a tiny point of darkness that dropped away through sunlight toward the shadows near the earth. The mind even conjured up a shrill, thin cry that plummeted away with the falling body and hung behind it in the shaken air.

But the mind was reckoning on human factors.

Very gently and smoothly Deirdre lifted Maltzer from the window sill and with effortless ease carried him well back into the safety of the room. She set him down before a sofa and her golden fingers unwrapped themselves from his arms slowly, so that he could regain control of his own body before she released him.

He sank to the sofa without a word. Nobody spoke for an unmeasurable length of time. Harris could not. Deirdre waited patiently. It was Maltzer who regained speech first, and it came back on the old track, as if his mind had not yet relinquished the rut it had worn so deep.

"All right," he said breathlessly. "All right, you can stop me this time. But I know, you see. I know! You can’t hide your feeling from me, Deirdre. I know the trouble you feel. And next time—next time I won’t wait to talk!"

Deirdre made the sound of a sigh. She had no lungs to expel the breath she was imitating, but it was hard to realize that. It was hard to understand why she was not panting heavily from the terrible exertion of the past minutes; the mind knew why, but could not accept the reason. She was still too human.

"You still don’t see," she said. "Think, Maltzer, think!"

There was a hassock beside the sofa. She sank upon it gracefully, clasping her robed knees. Her head tilted back to watch Maltzer’s face. She saw only stunned stupidity on it now; he had passed through too much emotional storm to think at all.

"All right," she told him. "Listen—I’ll admit it. You’re right. I am unhappy. I do know what you said was true—but not for the reason you think. Humanity and I are far apart, and drawing farther. The gap will be hard to bridge. Do you hear me, Maltzer?"

Harris saw the tremendous effort that went into Maltzer’s wakening. He saw the man pull his mind back into focus and sit up on the sofa with weary stiffness.

"You… you do admit it, then?" he asked in a bewildered voice. Deirdre shook her head sharply.

"Do you still think of me as delicate?" she demanded. "Do you know I carried you here at arm’s length halfway across the room? Do you realize you weigh nothing to me? I could"—she glanced around the room and gestured with sudden, rather appalling violence—"tear this building down," she said quietly. "I could tear my way through these walls, I think. I’ve found no limit yet to the strength I can put forth if I try." She held up her golden hands and looked at them. "The metal would break, perhaps," she said reflectively, "but then, I have no feeling—"

Maltzer gasped, "Deirdre—"

She looked up with what must have been a smile. It sounded clearly in her voice. "Oh, I won’t. I wouldn’t have to do it with my hands, if I wanted. Look—listen!"

She put her head back and a deep, vibrating hum gathered and grew in what one still thought of as her throat. It deepened swiftly and the ears began to ring. It was deeper, and the furniture vibrated. The walls began almost imperceptibly to shake. The room was full and bursting with a sound that shook every atom upon its neighbor with a terrible, disrupting force.

The sound ceased. The humming died. Then Deirdre laughed and made another and quite differently pitched sound. It seemed to reach out like an arm in one straight direction—toward the window. The opened panel shook. Deirdre intensified her hum, and slowly, with imperceptible jolts that merged into smoothness, the window jaried itself shut.

"You see?" Deirdre said. "You see?"

But still Maltzer could only stare. Harris was staring too, his mind beginning slowly to accept what she implied. Both were too stunned to leap ahead to any conclusions yet.

Deirdre rose impatiently and began to pace again, in a ringing of metal robe and a twinkling of reflected lights. She was pantherlike in her suppleness. They could see the power behind that lithe motion now; they no longer thought of her as helpless, but they were far still from grasping the truth.

"You were wrong about me, Maltzer," she said with an effort at patience in her voice. "But you were right too, in a way you didn’t guess. I’m not afraid of humanity. I haven’t anything to fear from them.

Why"—her voice took on a tinge of contempt—"already I’ve set a fashion in women’s clothing. By next week you won’t see a woman on the street without a mask like mine, and every dress that isn’t cut like a chlamys will be out of style. I’m not afraid of humanity! I won’t lose touch with them unless I want to. I’ve learned a lot—I’ve learned too much already."

Her voice faded for a moment, and Harris had a quick and appalling vision of her experimenting in the solitude of her farm, testing the range of her voice, testing her eyesight—could she see microscopically and telescopically?—and was her hearing as abnormally flexible as her voice?

"You were afraid I had lost feeling and scent and taste," she went on, still pacing with that powerful, tigerish tread. "Hearing and sight would not be enough, you think? But why do you think sight is the last of the senses? It may be the latest, Maltzer—Harris—but why do you think it’s the last?"

She may not have whispered that. Perhaps it was only their hearing that made it seem thin and distant, as the brain contracted and would not let the thought come through in its stunning entirety.

"No," Deirdre said, "I haven’t lost contact with the human race. I never will, unless I want to. It’s too easy… too easy."

She was watching her shining feet as she paced, and her masked face was averted. Sorrow sounded in her soft voice now.

"I didn’t mean to let you know," she said. "I never would have, if this hadn’t happened. But I couldn’t let you go believing you’d failed. You made a perfect machine, Maltzer. More perfect than you knew."

"But Deirdre—" breathed Maltzer, his eyes fascinated and still incredulous upon her, "but Deirdre, if we did succeed—what’s wrong? I can feel it now—I’ve felt it all along. You’re so unhappy—you still are. Why, Deirdre?"

She lifted her head and looked at him, eyelessly, but with a piercing stare. "Why are you so sure of that?" she asked gently.

"You think I could be mistaken, knowing you as I do? But I’m not Frankenstein… you say my creation’s flawless. Then what—"

"Could you ever duplicate this body?" she asked.

Maltzer glanced down at his shaking hands. "I don’t know. I doubt it. I—"

"Could anyone else?"

He was silent. Deirdre answered for him. "I don’t believe anyone could. I think I was an accident. A sort of mutation halfway between flesh and metal. Something accidental and… and unnatural, turning off on a wrong course of evolution that never reaches a dead end. Another brain in a body like this might die or go mad, as you thought I would. The synapses are too delicate. You were—call it lucky—with me. From what I know now, I don’t think a… a baroque like me could happen again." She paused a moment. "What you did was kindle the fire for the Phoenix, in a way. And the Phoenix rises perfect and renewed from its own ashes. Do you remember why it had to reproduce itself that way?"

Maltzer shook his head.

"I’ll tell you," she said. "It was because there was only one Phoenix. Only one in the whole world." They looked at each other in silence. Then Deirdre shrugged a little.

"He always came out of the fire perfect, of course. I’m not weak, Maltzer. You needn’t let that thought bother you any more. I’m not vulnerable and helpless. I’m not sub-human." She laughed dryly. "I suppose," she said, "that I’m—superhuman."

"But—not happy."

"I’m afraid. It isn’t unhappiness, Maltzer—it’s fear. I don’t want to draw so far away from the human race. I wish I needn’t. That’s why I’m going back on the stage—to keep in touch with them while I can. But I wish there could be others like me. I’m… I’m lonely, Maltzer."

Silence again. Then Maltzer said, in a voice as distant as when he had spoken to them through glass, over gulfs as deep as oblivion:

"Then I am Frankenstein, after all."

"Perhaps you are," Deirdre said very softly. "I don’t know. Perhaps you are."

She turned away and moved smoothly, powerfully, down the room to the window. Now that Harris knew, he could almost hear the sheer power purring along her limbs as she walked. She leaned the golden forehead against the glass—it clinked faintly, with a musical sound—and looked down into the depths Maltzer had hung above. Her voice was reflective as she looked into those dizzy spaces which had offered oblivion to her creator.

"There’s one limit I can think of," she said, almost inaudibly. "Only one. My brain will wear out in another forty years or so. Between now and then I’ll learn… I’ll change… I’ll know more than I can guess today. I’ll change— That’s frightening. I don’t like to think about that." She laid a curved golden hand on the latch and pushed the window open a little, very easily. Wind whined around its edge. "I could put a stop to it now, if I wanted," she said. "If I wanted. But I can’t, really. There’s so much still untried. My brain’s human, and no human brain could leave such possibilities untested. I wonder, though… I do wonder—"

Her voice was soft and familiar in Harris’ ears, the voice Deirdre had spoken and sung with, sweetly enough to enchant a world. But as preoccupation came over her a certain flatness crept into the sound. When she was not listening to her own voice, it did not keep quite to the pitch of trueness. It sounded as if she spoke in a room of brass, and echoes from the walls resounded in the tones that spoke there.

"I wonder," she repeated, the distant taint of metal already in her voice.

FLIGHT Joanna Kavenna

I was above those old streets, so high, the wind was whispering – I could see the stars beyond the clouds, swelling and declining, as if they were breathing. The clouds were congealing around me, there was a low hum. I might have become afraid, I might have cried out – except everything was happening too fast, I was being propelled along, the wind was singing in my ears—

Any moment I would vanish like steam into the clouds.

It was beautiful up there, far above those streets – I’ve trodden them so many times, but now they were like patterns of dark and light, the people forming clusters, shifting again and again – Silver and blue, so pretty, I wished I could tell them how beautiful they looked. Even the grim-hearted, struggling home. You couldn’t see the lines on their faces, you couldn’t hear them coughing into their mobile phones, or lying to please each other and all of them trying so hard not to care about the flaming discourtesy of the fates, the way they’d been stamped on over and over. You just saw them as endless flitting shadows, one human, another, another ghost of a person, another. They filled the doorways of shops, then they vanished again.

Would it console you at all, if you were tired, lost in the murk and someone told you – from above, from up here – where I fly – you are beautiful – would that console you?

I had become quite unusual, perhaps I was escaping this prison, my body, perhaps I was ascending towards something else entirely. White light, above the clouds, perhaps it was the sun, so bright—

Now I was in the silence, the clouds merging into further clouds, the sky like an ocean, the world inverted. Myself, somewhat transformed. I saw the houses so far below, terrace after terrace – everything so geometrical, as if someone had been busy with a gargantuan ruler. It was so neat and tidy. The people had been tidied into their terraces and told to be good. There you are, you interchangeable being. A box. Be good now. The whole city bearing down on each little box, with its inherent culture of humans. They mustn’t stray too far. Of course, they absolutely mustn’t fly away.

You could tell the houses where people lived alone. They were bedraggled. They slumped as if they had been bombed and knocked carelessly back together. Sallow light emanating from the windows. Inside, the serried ranks of people cooking up a meal in a saucepan. Washing up even as they ate it. Erasing themselves from the kitchen. The lights flashed from one room to another, charting their solitary progress. Up in the bedrooms, they found their place again. Flat on their backs, gripping the mattress as the planet went whirling through space…Every morning they left, to trade their lives for more money. Not too much, just barely enough.

House after house after house – it went on and on until the bedraggled fields. Russet countryside for a while, and then another town. Each house was ringed around with a halo, there was coloured smoke streaming from the chimneys.

I was above the ancient centre of the city. Oxford. The colours were brighter here, some of the chimneys spewed gold and silver. The low hum again – the smoke descending towards the ground below, where it turned black, deep black, vanished as if the ground had swallowed it.

Swooping down—

There was a window before me, I didn’t know which college I was in. One of the oldest, most lavish. Cloistered vaulting. A smell of gently rotting timber. A voice within – I could just discern it – a man, saying something. Really rattling on. The words were blurred, he sounded as if he was speaking underwater.

I could hear him careering around his room, knocking stuff over. He sounded half mad, and anyway his window was engulfed in black vapour. There was a musty ruined smell, something ancient, rotting, murky. I turned upside down, so all the buildings were standing on their heads, and the roads were like smoke trails, and I tried to get to his window, I was I suppose like a bat, but then I just got stuck in the black fog, I couldn’t make anything out at all. I could really taste it – what was this man doing, weltering around in it—

I tried to soar out of it – I was feeling dreadful, I thought I might faint—

But then I saw something else – in the depths of the murk – a yellow glow – really in the depths of that toxic black smoke, there was something shining like gold—

I was being drawn away—

Oh God, the return – gravity coming to snatch me back – Newton dragging me down. I was flying along the streets—

Like tunnels now – my nose nearly scraping the hedgerows – I could hardly keep myself afloat. It was close. I just made it. Over my gate, the shared gate of my block – across the sterile stretch of car park dirt – I scraped my fingers on the door mat – found I was briefly upside down again.

Ah the agony. I was back.

I was slumped in my chair again. Awake—

Quite blameless and almost functional.

I should start at something like the beginning—

I was living in a real little dump in what I understood to be a good part of town. My flat was buried deep at the bottom of a grandiose villa; the sort of place a single family once owned, lavished it with frills and ornaments, parked their servants somewhere squalid and rang bells whenever they discerned an insufficiency. But now it had been sliced into flats and each flat had been doled out for some extravagant price because the place was in such a good part of town. I lived in the basement and so the whole weight of the building seemed to bear down upon me; it made my head ache. And then the place was dank even at the height of summer, and the moment the temperature dropped it got pretty vicious down there. I coughed myself sick at night. There were two windows in the whole place; one for the bedroom, one for the living room. The rest was lit by angle-poise, you felt you had burrowed deep down and now you had to stay there, with the blind crawling creatures and other things that fear the light.

I’d furnished it with cheap rickety furniture, tailored to an aesthetic that was not my own. I was an interloper in this good part of town. Around the corner, people told me, lived an international rock star. It was highly probable he hadn’t furnished his house with flat-packed monstrosities, but anyway I had. Then the place was adorned with accidental sculptures. Piles of unsold books. Floor to ceiling, a stacking system so perilous that there was a chance one day I’d get buried alive.

People like books, I had thought. Second hand, cheaply priced. You advertise them on the internet, and people buy them. Well, people quite like books. Not as much as other things, it turns out. And they quite like them but perhaps they buy them from other people. So instead of a thriving online business I had a series of abandoned stacks of books, reproaching my poor judgement, and some of them even blocked out my few remaining strands of light. I had a few scattered emails, occasional requests, nothing that amounted to a real living. Just these phrases—

And sometimes I would knock into one of the piles and then the thing was like a miniature city falling down, skyscrapers tumbling. And then I got to stack them all up again.

Perhaps it was making me slightly sick in the brain. All this staring at the flickering screen. Skimming from one site to another, all of them beamed to me from wherever and typing so frantically as if time was very precious – even though I wasted every second – and hunting, I was really hunting around in that ether-world trying to find something – an answer. What was it? A secret? A sign that others felt as I did? Some word I had never heard before, that would encapsulate it all? I wasn’t greedy, I just wanted a single word. Just a few times I alighted on something, it made me half-hopeful, but then it faded under the general teeming mass of gossip and lunatic facts, perversions masquerading as common sense, things I’d half-read and not really understood. I cheated myself, called this justifiable distraction.

The sun rising and fading beyond the window, far beyond, and because it was always raining I spent most of the summer underground.

One morning I was stunned by the force of repetition, I was cross-eyed, I’d come out in a rash, I kept scratching myself, perhaps I had psoriasis, or boredom-induced leprosy, something like that, and so I turned to a thing I’d downloaded. It was called FlytheEarth. Crazy pounding rock music. Then a demonstration – flying over countless towns. Deserts. Blue frozen wastes and raging tempest-driven seas. For a few days it quelled my wanderlust and mounting frustration. I stopped wanting to punch my hand through the screen. I kept flying, even while spewing out tedious information, order numbers, costs, likely dates of arrival I was flying over Death Valley, observing the variegated colours of the sand. From time to time, but quite regally, as if it was all so far beneath me, I would pause my flight and type—

And then I would launch myself skywards again.

I did it for weeks. Perhaps I did it a little too much. Eighteen hours a day drifting around above computer-generated images of the planet, sporadically interrupted by order requests might be bad for the brain. If it was better than reading about millionaires with plastic faces then it was still not exactly edifying. I woke each morning in my solitary bed, I reached for my phone and checked it for messages, and then the next thing I did, even before I made a cup of coffee or stuffed food into my belly, I just turned on the computer and ignited FlytheEarth again and off I went—

The pasty sun was sliding under the planet again, I was almost about to switch on the lamp, though I was mesmerised anyway, hardly needed it, I was absorbed by a vision of the Californian coast, I was coming in to hover by Monterey, imagining the waves moving slowly backward and forward, lulling me into a trance – beautiful I thought. I could have hovered there – I’d come to think of myself, inside the thing, hovering within it, not sitting beyond it in my dank little room – all day – most of the night – just the waves, in and out, like breathing, of course, the breathing of the planet, and the sound was so tranquil, as if someone was whispering to me, saying it was all alright, there was nothing to worry about. I imagined the froth dancing on the rocks, then dissolving bubble by bubble, curdling away into nothing… You are just a bubble, whispered the waves. You are dissolving even as you flutter. But it didn’t matter. I didn’t care if I dissolved entirely, into that beautiful view – I was happy to be dispersed across the sand, with the waves churning me into nothingness – I was so relaxed, I nearly fell off my chair—

The moonlight lapping at my feet. The tides turning. The planet circling and then perhaps I slept, perhaps I woke, I was sweating like anything. I was hot and then I got so cold I had to shift in my seat, blow into my hands. Then I coughed. Typed a few dozen emails. Coughed again. I had some autumn cold, it was clear. The damp was encroaching, everywhere I turned. And I had this buzzing in my ears, I was twitching, my wrists hurt already and I’d only just started – I was weak and I went straight to Arizona. Christ, there was nothing moving there, for miles around. Just desolate tracts of rock. I must have slept again, I don’t know, I was confused and sweating and then I somehow got myself to New York, I was flying among the skyscrapers, concrete blanks, one and then another – I saw the people with their phones stuck to their faces, and each of them blaring something to someone else, all these words, and then I saw the boats moving along the Hudson, I was there – plainly – and the place was breathing all around me – the thing was happening as I whirled among the buildings. I saw people in the offices, moving from cradle to open plan office to grave. I could see those jowly old guys, spooning chestnuts into paper cups, I could smell burnt sugar, all the way from Central Park—

I was dreaming, with my hands stretched out in front of me. I was tumbling upwards, everything inverted, as if I was ascending and would never stop, until I reached dark matter, wherever that was. I saw my breath turning to coloured smoke. I knew I had to get back to Oxford, somehow I turned, I went across the Atlantic, all the boats moving beneath me, I could barely see, and then I caught a glimpse of them – the green matted fields of England – I breathed a sigh of relief – I saw brilliant gold ahead of me. I swooped up the Thames as far as Wolvercote, I saw the dusk gathering on Port Meadow, a weir, rats scuffling by the water. The lock was almost deserted, a few canal boats tied up for the night. I saw the moss crawling up the walls. Cows churning through the mud. I heard someone deep below, drinking cider on the bank. Muttering to himself – I heard it all. Not much to say about the other things. Of course you can expect the sun to rise each morning. Nice flowers they are. And the bees, too. Of course. Best to walk there…

The mist was thick over the meadow, obscuring the winter lake where the floods had bubbled up through the soil. The geese with their heads in their feathers. Back and forth, I went five times up and down that river. It was just the mist and the lights reflecting on the water. I was like a moth, I couldn’t stop fluttering up and down.

I think I slept then, or somehow it all stopped. As if I had fallen towards the fields, I slept with the cows snuffling in the grass around me, with the man muttering his nonsense above my head. The image got fixed again, but I was sleeping in it – so I was lying on a satellite image, something like that – really I suppose I must have slept at my computer, I’d left the curtains open and so the early sun came in, briefly, like a searchlight. As soon as I awoke, I was in the air again – I saw the houses one by one, each one shining like gold, filled with treasure – down Abingdon Road, all the grimy little side-streets like arms pointing directions towards the lake and the railway tracks. I was going round and round, ricocheting off the clouds—

People moving on the streets. Bicycles massing over Folly Bridge. The gargoyles spluttering on the old roofs. And the grind of buses. I was at the College with the black vapour. A grand old college, a conglomeration of electrical towers, you could hear them crackling, and now and then sparks would fly out, red and orange and gold, like fireworks. A door was opening. A man emerged from a staircase, spitting out soot. I’d seen him before – I was quite certain. His chin in his scarf, unkempt hair, down to his collar. A battered suit, in cord. When he lifted his face I saw he was fine-boned, trashed and angry beyond measure. He was biting his lip, he looked as if he had been crying.

I was following him at a discreet distance, my pursuit entirely tactful, skirting the corners well behind him. He was hurrying as if he might be late. Then he turned – there was a sign – I was trying to read the words – MERCER—

I was summoned back – I couldn’t see—

All the next day, I was nowhere. I spent the whole day lying in my bed, rubbing my face on the pillow. Too stunned to move myself towards the desk. I would lift my head and think I must get up, soon, but then I’d let it fall down again. I kept thinking of that man with his room smoking like an industrial accident. At one level, I didn’t care. I had enough to think about. Why would I bother with him at all? But I kept thinking about him anyway. Why him? Of all the people wandering the streets. Why not the man muttering on the banks of the Isis? Why not anyone else at all?

The cord suit? His face? His long thin hands—

Hello? Hello?

Where are you?

A, can you let me know when you get in I need to give you a call? Thanks P

Hello?

Was he even real?

The sun-playing on the windows. So the glass looked like hammered metal. Reflecting the forms of the street beyond – I kept myself busy until the evening—

As the sun set I went off again – it was so swift, I fell into it, I didn’t try at all – I was aloft – far above – paddling through the ether, moving somehow forwards – deep and beyond – the myriad and multi-coloured city all below me, the chimneys puffing out their smoke, the shadows and the people moving from one dark place and into one more pool of light. I was overwrought, perhaps sleep deprived – I turned my head to the side. There was something hot and fierce around me, behind me – I felt a burning sensation at the back of my head, so hot, my hair was drenched in sweat, my palms were sodden. At the College – the gold was brighter this time, shining within the clouds of black smoke—

At the window I turned, twisted, went inside—

I sat beside him.

He was hunched over his screen, pale light flickering on his face – he was typing quickly, a Scotch in one hand, a piece of paper beside him—

I couldn’t quite read the words. There was something official at the top – the sign of a court – an insignia – crossed-keys, or swords, something about justice—

The big court with the sign above the gates. They’d forced him onto the scales, weighed him.

I wondered what he’d done. Something bad, desperately bad, perhaps – this formerly anonymous man, blameless for so many years, who had been dragged before the courts and summarily condemned.

It had made him snivel. Perhaps he regretted it entirely. Legs so long, he could hardly cross them under the desk. He was tall, strong, but his hands were soft. The room was thick with papers. He had a gown hanging on the door. The poor long-legged malcontent – he was a scholar. Perhaps it was philosophy that had made him suffer. And that scrap of paper.

I could see it now – it said – decree nisi, nothing more. Just another marriage, ended.

So he wasn’t a murderer, after all—

He typed, he drank, he buried his face in his hands—

I realized – it was a shock – suddenly, I was confined, I was in his chair – I was this poor and possibly foolish man—

I had a sheaf of papers to one side, and on the other, well, if I’d had a gun, what would I have done? But anyway I didn’t have a gun. I had a cheque book. I was meant to pay the rent. I had a phone call to make. The head of department wanted to discuss downsizing. It made my hands tremble, or was that the whisky? I was meant to dial his number and say, ‘Yes, good evening. How are you?’

I said, ‘Hello, Paul James here’ – now I knew my name, his name, but something else was fading from my mind, even as I spoke. I was trying to clutch at it, as the voice on the line said, ‘Veins,’ it said. ‘Paul, our veins are being severed.’

‘That’s bad,’ I said.

He was saying something about how no one’s job was certain, about how I mustn’t fly away, not too high, and I said, ‘No no, I’ll be there. You’re right.’

I stayed until he went to bed. Just outside the bedroom window. I watched him move into the bathroom – I didn’t follow him in there. Let the man spit his toothpaste in private. Let him wipe the grime from his face.

I saw him come into the room, fragile in his boxers. Thin arms, light hair to the elbows. A refined hairless chest. He gathered himself into bed, slung his legs under the cover. He meant to read, he seized a book from the table beside him, then he was too cold, and drunk, and tired – he couldn’t focus on the lines. He stared at the page for a few minutes. But he didn’t progress. Then he slapped the book down, turned out the light.

He lay there in the darkness, half-awake, too tired to light up the room again.

Winnowing wind. The papers whirled and I found I was receding, through the window – I had never been so winnowed – I was drifting backwards – I didn’t want to return, I was dragged – wafting against it, I couldn’t prevent—

I was slammed back—

My screen, sallow, edged around with blackness, my room, full of black smoke – I closed my eyes—

Paul James woke before dawn with a spun-out head. As if he’d been whirled in a gyre. All night he’d been perplexed by his dreams. He’d been looking down on himself, from above, he’d been flying – he’d been—

He’d flown above the Thames, to Wolvercote. He’d sat by the weir watching the water curdling below. Rats skittering along the banks. The air was thin and cold. In his dream he didn’t mind it. The leaves were turning red and yellow. Cows looming from the bushes. And the horses clacking against the fences.

He felt how the night was turning swiftly, it was in the process of becoming another dawn, then another day – the long lovely banks of the river – he was floating above them – clouds swirling, the water gurgling like a drain.

He’d woken time after time, he’d wondered if he was going mad. He was looking at himself as if he had been split in two. That sounded as if he was falling apart, inside first, then the rest. He couldn’t fall apart. They’d make things worse for him…

He had to keep to the specifics. Certainties. Facts, if he could find them.

He checked his clock. He had a tutorial to give in a few hours’ time. Though he had hardly slept, though his dreams had been strange and far too clear, so clear he felt he was still half-inside them, he didn’t feel tired. When he opened the curtains he saw the pock-marked moon fading above the houses.

The colour of the sky – changing—

We crossed the room and turned on the light.

PRAXIS Karen Joy Fowler

The price of a single ticket to the suicides would probably have funded my work for a month or more, but I do not let myself think about this. After all, I didn’t pay for the ticket. Tonight I am the guest of the Baron Claude Himmlich and determined to enjoy myself.

I saw Romeo and Juliet five years ago, but only for one evening in the middle of the run. It wasn’t much. Juliet had a cold and went to bed early. Her nurse kept wrapping her in hot rags and muttering under her breath. Romeo and Benvolio got drunk and made up several limericks. I thought some of them were quite good, but I’d been drinking a little myself.

Technically it was impressive. The responses of the simulants were wonderfully lifelike and the amphitheater had just been remodeled to allow the audience to walk among the sets, viewing the action from any angle. But the story itself was hardly dramatic. It wouldn’t be, of course, in the middle of the run.

Tonight is different. Tonight is the final night. The audience glitters in jewels, colorful capes, extravagant hairstyles. Only the wealthy are here tonight, the wealthy and their guests. There are four in our own theater party: our host, the Baron; his beautiful daughter, Svanneshal; a wonderfully eccentric old woman dressed all in white who calls herself the Grand Duchess de Vie; and me. I work at the university in records and I tutor Svanneshal Himmlich in history.

The Grand Duchess stands beside me now as we watch Juliet carried in to the tombs. "Isn’t she lovely?" the Duchess says. "And very sweet, I hear. Garriss wrote her program. He’s a friend of the Baron’s."

"An absolute genius." The Baron leans towards us, speaking softly. There is an iciness to Juliet, a sheen her false death has cast over her. She is like something carved from marble. Yet even from here I can see the slightest rise and fall of her breasts. How could anyone believe she was really dead? But Romeo will. He always does.

It will be a long time before Romeo arrives and the Baron suggests we walk over to the Capulets’ to watch Juliet’s nurse weeping and carrying on. He offers his arm to the Duchess though I can see his security cyber dislikes this.

It is one of the Baron’s own models, identical in principle to the simulants on stage—human body, software brain. Before the Baron’s work the cybers were slow to respond and notoriously easy to outwit. The Baron made his fortune streamlining the communications link-up and introducing an element of deliberate irrationality into the program. There are those who argue this was an ill-considered, even dangerous addition. But the Baron has never lacked for customers. People would rather take a chance on a cyber than on a human and the less we need to depend on the poor, the safer we become.

The Duchess is looking at the cyber’s uniform, the sober blues of the House of Himmlich. "Watch this," she says to me, smiling. She reaches into her bodice. I can see how the cyber is alert to the movement, how it relaxes when her hand reappears with a handkerchief. She reverses the action; we watch the cyber tense again, relaxing when the hand reemerges.

The Baron shakes his head, but his eyes are amused. "Darling," he says, "you must not play with it."

"Then I shall walk with Hannah instead." The Duchess slips her hand around my arm. Her right hand is bare and feels warm pressed into my side. Her left hand is covered by a long white glove; its silky fingers rest lightly on the outside of my arm.

The Baron precedes us, walking with Svanneshal, the cyber close behind them. The Duchess leans against me and takes such small steps we cannot keep up. She looks at the Baron’s back. "You’ve heard him called a ‘self-made man’?" she asks me. "Did it ever occur to you that people might mean it literally?"

She startles me. My eyes go at once to the Baron, recognizing suddenly his undeniable perfection—his dark, smooth skin, his even teeth, the soft timbre of his voice. But the Duchess is teasing me. I see this when I look back at her.

"I like him very much," I answer. "I imagine him to be exactly like the ancient aristocracy at their best—educated, generous, courteous…"

"I wouldn’t know about that. I have never studied history; I have only lived it. How old would you guess I am?"

It is a question I hate. One never knows what the most polite answer would be. The Duchess’ hair, twisted about her head and held into place with ivory combs, is as black as Svanneshal’s, but this can be achieved with dyes. Her face, while not entirely smooth, is not overly wrinkled. Again I suspect cosmetic enhancements. Her steps are undeniably feeble. "You look quite young," I say. "I couldn’t guess."

"Then look at this." The Duchess stops walking and removes the glove from her left hand. She holds her palm flat before me so that I see the series of ciphers burnt into her skin. IPS3552. It is the brand of a labor duplicate. I look up at her face in astonishment and this amuses her. "You’ve never seen anything like that before, have you, historian? But you’ve heard perhaps how, in the last revolution, some of the aristocracy branded themselves and hid in the factories? That’s how old I am."

In fact, I have heard the story, a two-hundred-year-old story, but the version I know ends without survivors. Most of those who tried to pass were detected immediately; a human cannot affect the dead stare of the duplicates for very long. Those few who went in to the factories gave themselves up eventually, preferring, after all, to face the mob rather than endure the filth, the monotony, and the endless labor, "I would be most interested in interviewing you," I say. "Your adventures should be part of the record." If true, but of course that is something I do not say.

"Yes." The Duchess preens herself, readjusting an ivory comb, replacing her glove. We notice the Baron, still some distance away, returning to us. He is alone and I imagine he has left the cyber with Svanneshal. The Duchess sweeps her bare hand in the direction of the hurrying figure. "I am a true member of the aristocracy," she tells me. "Perhaps the only surviving member. I am not just some wealthy man who chooses to call himself Baron."

This I discredit immediately as vanity. Revolution after revolution—no one can verify a blood claim. Nor can I see why anyone would want to. I am amazed at the willingness of people to make targets of themselves, as if every time were the last time and now the poor are permanently contained.

"I must apologize." The Baron arrives, breathless. "I had no idea you had fallen so far behind."

"Why should you apologize," the Duchess chides him, "if your guest is too old for such entertainments and too proud to use a chair as she should?" She shifts herself from my arm to his. "Verona is so lovely," she says. "Isn’t it?"

We proceed slowly down the street. I am still thinking of the Duchess’ hand. When we rejoin Svanneshal it is as though I have come out of a trance. She is so beautiful tonight I would rather not be near her. The closer I stand, the less I can look. Her eyes are very large inside the dark hood of her gown which covers her hair and shoulders in a fine net of tiny jewels. In the darkened amphitheater the audience shines like a sky full of stars, but Svanneshal is an entire constellation—Svanneshal, the Swan’s throat, and next to her, her father, the Dragon. I look around the amphitheater. Everyone is beautiful tonight.

Juliet’s nurse is seated in a chair, rocking slowly back and forth in her agony. She is identical to the nurse I saw before and I tell the Baron so.

"Oh, I’m sure she is the one you saw before. I saw her once as Amanda in The Glass Menagerie. You didn’t imagine they started from scratch every time, did you? My dear Hannah, anyone who can be recycled after the run certainly will be. The simulations are expensive enough as it is." The Baron smiles at me, the smile of the older, the wiser, to the young and naive. "What’s amazing is the variation you get each time, even with identical parts. Of course, that’s where the drama comes in."

Before, when I saw Romeo and Juliet, Friar Lawrence was killed on the second night, falling down a flight of stairs. That’s mainly why I went. I was excited by the possibilities opened by the absence of the Friar. Yet the plot was surprisingly unchanged.

It makes me think of Hwang-li and I say to the Baron, "Did you know it was a historian who created the simulations?"

"I don’t have your knowledge of history," he answers. "Svanneshal tells me you are quite gifted. And you have a specialty… forgive me. I know Svanneshal has told me."

"Mass movements. They don’t lend themselves to simulation." The Duchess has not heard of Hwang-li either, but then only a historian would have. It was so many revolutions ago. I could argue that the historians are the true revolutionary heroes, retaining these threads of our past, bringing them through the upheaval. Many historians have died to protect the record. And their names are lost to us forever. I am glad for a chance to talk about Hwang-li.

"Hwang-li was not thinking of entertainment, of course. He was pondering the inevitability of history. Is the course of history directed by personalities or by circumstances?" I ask the Baron. "What do you think?"

The Baron regards me politely. "In the real world," he says, "personalities and circumstances are inseparable. The one creates the other and vice versa. Only in simulation can they be disjoined."

"It follows then," I tell him, "that if you could intervene to change one, you would simultaneously change both and, therefore, the course of history. Could you make a meaningful change? How much can depend upon a single individual taking a single action at a single moment? Or not taking it?"

"Depending on the individual, the action, and the moment," the Duchess says firmly, "everything could change."

I nod to her. "That is what Hwang-li believed. He wished to test it by choosing an isolated case, a critical moment in which a series of seeming accidents resulted in a devastating war. He selected the Mancini murder, which was manageable and well-documented. There were seven personality profiles done on Philip Mancini at the time and Hwang-li had them all."

The Baron has forgotten Juliet’s nurse entirely and turns to me with gratifying attention. "But this is fascinating," he says. "Svanneshal, you must hear this." Svanneshal moves in closer to him; the cyber seems relieved to have both standing together.

"Go on," says the Baron.

"I was telling your father about Hwang-li."

"Oh, I know this story already." Svanneshal smiles at the Baron coquettishly. "It’s the murder that interests him," she says to me. "Aberrant personalities are sort of a hobby of his."

The Baron tells me what he already knows of the murder, that Frank Mancini was killed by his brother Philip.

"Yes, that’s right," I say encouragingly. This information survives in a saying we have—enmity is sometimes described as "the love of the Mancinis."

It is the Duchess who remembers the saying. But beyond that, she says she knows nothing of the case. I direct my statements to her. "Frank Mancini was a security guard, back in the days when humans functioned in that capacity. He was responsible for security in the Irish sector. He had just learned of the terrorist plot against Pope Peter. The Pope was scheduled to speak in an open courtyard at noon; he was to be shot from the window of a nearby library. Frank was literally reaching for the phone at the moment Philip Mancini burst into his study and shot him four times for personal reasons."

Svanneshal is bored with the discussion. Although she is extremely intelligent, it is not yet something she values. But she will. I look at her with the sudden realization that it is the only bit of inherited wealth she can be certain of holding on to. She is playing with her father’s hair, but he catches her hand. "Go on," he says to me.

"Philip had always hated his brother. The murder was finally triggered by a letter Philip received from their mother—a letter we know he wrongly interpreted. What if he had read the letter more carefully? What if it had arrived ten minutes later? Hwang-li planned to replay the scene, running it through a number of such minute variations. Of course he had no simulants, nor did he need them. It was all to be done by computer."

"The whole project seems to me to raise more questions than it answers." Svanneshal is frowning. "What if the Pope had survived? How do you assess the impact of that? You cannot say there would have been no revolution. The Pope’s death was a catalyst, but not a cause."

I am pleased to see that she not only knows the outlines of the incident, but has obviously been giving it some thought. I begin to gesture emphatically with my hands as though we were in class, but I force myself to stop. This is, after all, a social occasion. "So, war is not averted, but merely delayed?" I ask her. "Another variation. Who would have gained from such a delay? What else might have been different if the same war was fought at a later time? Naturally nothing can be proved absolutely—that is the nature of the field. But it is suggestive. When we can answer these questions we will be that much closer to the day when we direct history along the course we choose."

"We already do that," the Duchess informs me quiietly. "We do that every day of our lives." Her right hand smooths the glove over her left hand. She interlaces the fingers of the two.

"What happened in the experiment?" the Baron asks.

"Hwang-li never finished it. He spent his life perfecting the Mancini programs and died in a fire before he had finished. Another accident. Then there were the university purges. There’s never been that kind of money for history again." I look into Svanneshal’s eyes, deep within her hood. "It’s too bad, because I’ve an experiment of my own I’ve wanted to do. I wanted to simulate Antony and Cleopatra, but make her nose an inch longer."

This is an old joke, but they do not respond to it. The Baron says politely that it would provide an interesting twist the next time Antony and Cleopatra is done. He’ll bring it up with the Arts Committee.

Svanneshal says, "You see, Daddy, you owe Hwang-li everything. He did the first work in synthetic personalities."

It occurs to me that the Baron may think Svanneshal and I are trying to persuade him to fund me and I am embarrassed. I search for something to say to correct this impression, but we are interrupted by a commotion onstage.

Lady Capulet has torn her dress at the collar, her hair is wild and uncombed. Under her tears, her face is ancient, like a tragic mask. She screams at her husband that it is his fault their baby is dead. If he hadn’t been so cold, so unyielding…

He stands before her, stooped and silent. When at last she collapses, he holds her, stroking the hair into place about her sobbing face. There is soft applause for this gentleness. It was unexpected.

"Isn’t it wonderful?" Svanneshal’s face glows with appreciation. "Garriss again," she informs me although I know Garriss did the programming for the entire Capulet family. It is customary to have one writer for each family so that the similarities in the programming can mirror the similarities of real families created by genetics and upbringing.

The simulants are oblivious to this approval. Jaques tells us, every time, that the world is a stage, but here the stage is a world, complete in itself, with history and family, with even those random stagehands, death and disease. This is what the simulants live. If they were told that Juliet is no one’s daughter, that everything they think and say is software, could they believe it? Would it be any less tragic?

Next to me I hear the beginning of a scream. It is choked off as suddenly as it started. Turning, I see the white figure of the Duchess slumping to the ground, a red stain spreading over her bodice. The gloved hand is pressed against her breast; red touches her fingers and moves down her arm. Her open eyes see nothing. Beside her, the cyber is returning a bloody blade to the case on its belt.

It was all so fast. "It killed her," I say, barely able to comprehend the words. "She’s dead!" I kneel next to the Duchess, not merely out of compassion, but because my legs have given way. I look up at the Baron, expecting to see my own horror reflected in his face, but it is not.

He is calmly quiet. "She came at me," he says. "She moved against me. She meant to kill me."

"No!" I am astounded. Nothing is making sense to me. "Why would she do that?"

He reaches down and strips the wet glove from the warm hand. There is her lifeline—IPS3552. "Look at this," he says to me, to the small group of theater-goers who have gathered around us. "She was not even human."

I look at Svanneshal for help. "You knew her. She was no cyber. There is another explanation for the brand. She told me…" I do not finish my sentence, suddenly aware of the implausibility of the Duchess’ story. But what other explanation is there? Svanneshal will not meet my eyes. I find something else to say. "Anyway, the cybers have never been a threat to us. They are not programmed for assassination." It is another thought I do not finish, my eyes distracted by the uniform of the House of Himmlich. I get to my feet slowly, keeping my hands always visible and every move I make is watched by the Baron’s irrational cyber. "The autopsy will confirm she is human," I say finally. "Was human."

Svanneshal reaches for my arm below the shoulder, just where the Duchess held me. She speaks into my ear, so low that I am the only one who hears her. Her tone is ice. "The cybers are all that stand between us and the mob. You remember that!"

Unless I act quickly, there will be no autopsy. Already maintenance duplicates are scooping up the body in the manner reserved for the disposal of cybers. Three of them are pulling the combs from her hair, the jewels from her ears and neck and depositing them in small, plastic bags. The Baron is regarding me, one hand wiping his upper lip. Sweat? No, the Baron feels nothing, shows no sign of unease.

Svanneshal speaks to me again. This time her voice is clearly audible, "It tried to kill my father," she says. "You weren’t watching. I was."

It would be simpler to believe her. I try. I imagine that the whole time we were talking about the Mancinis, the Duchess was planning to murder her host. For political reasons? For personal reasons? I remember the conversation, trying to refocus my attention to her, looking for the significant gesture, the words which, listened to later, will mean so much more. But, no. If she had wanted to kill the Baron, surely she would have done it earlier, when the Baron returned to us without his cyber.

I return Svanneshal’s gaze. "Did anyone else see that?" I ask, raising my voice. I look from person to person. "Did anyone see anything?"

No one responds. Everyone is waiting to see what I will do. I am acutely conscious of the many different actions I can take; they radiate out from me as if I stood at the center of a star, different paths, all ultimately uncontrollable. Along one path I have publicly accused the Baron of murder through misjudgment. His programs are opened for examination; his cybers are recalled. He is ruined. And, since he has produced the bulk of the city’s security units, Svanneshal is quite right. We are left unprotected before the mob. Could I cause that?

I imagine another, more likely path. I am pitted alone against the money and power of the Himmlichs. In this vision the Baron has become a warlord with a large and loyal army. He is untouchable. Wherever I try to go, his cybers are hunting me.

The body has been removed, a large, awkward bundle in the arms of the maintenance duplicates. The blood is lifting from the tile, like a tape played backwards, like a thing which never happened. The paths radiating out from me begin to dim and disappear. The moment is past. I can do nothing now.

In the silence that has fallen around us, we suddenly hear that Romeo is coming. Too early, too early. What will it mean? The knot of spectators around us melts away; everyone is hurrying to the tombs. Svanneshal takes my arm and I allow myself to be pulled along. Her color is high and excited, perhaps from exertion, perhaps in anticipation of death. When we reach the tombs we press in amongst the rest.

On one side of me, Svanneshal continues to grip my arm. On the other is a magnificent woman imposingly tall, dressed in Grecian white. Around her bare arm is a coiled snake, fashioned of gold, its scales in the many muted colors gold can wear. A fold of her dress falls for a moment on my own leg, white, like the gown of the Grand Duchess de Vie and I find myself crying. "Don’t do it," I call to Romeo. "It’s a trick! It’s a trap. For God’s sake, look at her." The words come without volition, part of me standing aside, marveling, pointing out that I must be mad. He can’t hear me. He is incapable of hearing me. Only the audience turns to look, then turns away politely, hushed to hear Romeo’s weeping. He is so young, his heart and hands so strong, and he says his lines as though he believed them, as though he made them up.

The Baron leans into Svanneshal. "Your friend has been very upset by the incidents of the evening." His voice is kind. "As have we all. And she is cold. Give her my cape."

I am not cold, though I realize with surprise that I am shaking. Svanneshal wraps the red cape about me. "You must come home with us tonight," she says. "You need company and care." She puts an arm about me and whispers, "Don’t let it upset you so. The simulants don’t feel anything."

Then her breath catches in her throat. Romeo is drinking his poison. I won’t watch the rest. I turn my head aside and in the blurred lens of my tears, one image wavers, then comes clear. It is the snake’s face, quite close to me, complacency in its heavy-lidded eyes. "Don’t look at me like that," I say to a species which vanished centuries ago. "Who are you to laugh?"

I think that I will never know the truth. The Duchess might have been playing with the cyber again. Her death might have been a miscalculation. Or the Baron might have planned it, have arranged the whole evening around it. I would like to know. I think of something Hwang-li is supposed to have said. "Never confuse the record with the truth. It will always last longer." I am ashamed that I did nothing for the Duchess, accuse myself of cowardice, tears dropping from my cheeks onto the smooth flesh of my palms. In the historical record, I tell myself, I will list her death as a political assassination. And it will be remembered that way.

Next to me Svanneshal stiffens and I know Juliet has lifted the knife. This is truly the end of her; the stab wounds will prevent her re-use and her voice is painfully sweet, like a song.

One moment of hesitation, but that moment is itself a complete world. It lives onstage with the simulants, it lives with the mob in their brief and bitter lives, it lives where the wealthy drape themselves in jewels. If I wished to find any of them, I could look in that moment. "But how," I ask the snake, "would I know which was which?"

TONGTONG’S SUMMER Xia Jia

Mom said to Tongtong, "In a couple of days, Grandpa is moving in with us."

After Grandma died, Grandpa lived by himself. Mom told Tongtong that because Grandpa had been working for the revolution all his life, he just couldn’t be idle. Even though he was in his eighties, he still insisted on going to the clinic every day to see patients. A few days earlier, because it was raining, he had slipped on the way back from the clinic and hurt his leg.

Luckily, he had been rushed to the hospital, where they put a plaster cast on him. With a few more days of rest and recovery, he’d be ready to be discharged.

Emphasizing her words, Mom said, "Tongtong, your grandfather is old, and he’s not always in a good mood. You’re old enough to be considerate. Try not to add to his unhappiness, all right?"

Tongtong nodded, thinking, But haven’t I always been considerate?

Grandpa’s wheelchair was like a miniature electric car, with a tiny joystick by the armrest. Grandpa just had to give it a light push, and the wheelchair would glide smoothly in that direction. Tongtong thought it tremendous fun.

Ever since she could remember, Tongtong had been a bit afraid of Grandpa. He had a square face with long, white, bushy eyebrows that stuck out like stiff pine needles. She had never seen anyone with eyebrows that long.

She also had some trouble understanding him. Grandpa spoke Mandarin with a heavy accent from his native topolect. During dinner, when Mom explained to Grandpa that they needed to hire a caretaker for him, Grandpa kept on shaking his head emphatically and repeating: "Don’t worry, eh!" Now Tongtong did understand that bit.

Back when Grandma had been ill, they had also hired a caretaker for her. The caretaker had been a lady from the countryside. She was short and small, but really strong. All by herself, she could lift Grandma—who had put on some weight—out of the bed, bathe her, put her on the toilet, and change her clothes. Tongtong had seen the caretaker lady accomplish these feats of strength with her own eyes. Later, after Grandma died, the lady didn’t come any more.

After dinner, Tongtong turned on the video wall to play some games. The world in the game is so different from the world around me, she thought. In the game, a person just died. They didn’t get sick, and they didn’t sit in a wheelchair. Behind her, Mom and Grandpa continued to argue about the caretaker.

Dad walked over and said, "Tongtong, shut that off now, please. You’ve been playing too much. It’ll ruin your eyes."

Imitating Grandpa, Tongtong shook her head and said, "Don’t worry, eh!"

Mom and Dad both burst out laughing, but Grandpa didn’t laugh at all. He sat stone-faced, with not even a hint of smile.

A few days later, Dad came home with a stupid-looking robot. The robot had a round head, long arms, and two white hands. Instead of feet it had a pair of wheels so that it could move forward and backward and spin around.

Dad pushed something in the back of the robot’s head. The blank, smooth, egg-like orb blinked three times with a bluish light, and a young man’s face appeared on the surface. The resolution was so good that it looked just like a real person.

"Wow," Tongtong said. "You are a robot?"

The face smiled. "Hello there! Ah Fu is my name."

"Can I touch you?"

"Sure!"

Tongtong put her hand against the smooth face, and then she felt the robot’s arms and hands. Ah Fu’s body was covered by a layer of soft silicone, which felt as warm as real skin.

Dad told Tongtong that Ah Fu was made by Guokr Technologies, Inc., and it was a prototype. Its biggest advantage was that it was as smart as a person: it knew how to peel an apple, how to pour a cup of tea, even how to cook, wash the dishes, embroider, write, play the piano… Anyway, having Ah Fu around meant that Grandpa would be given good care.

Grandpa sat there, still stone-faced, still saying nothing.

After lunch, Grandpa sat on the balcony to read the newspaper. He dozed off after a while. Ah Fu came over noiselessly, picked up Grandpa with his strong arms, carried him into the bedroom, set him down gently in bed, covered him with a blanket, pulled the curtains shut, and came out and shut the door, still not making any noise.

Tongtong followed Ah Fu and watched everything.

Ah Fu gave Tongtong’s head a light pat. "Why don’t you take a nap, too?"

Tongtong tilted her head and asked, "Are you really a robot?"

Ah Fu smiled. "Oh, you don’t think so?"

Tongtong gazed at Ah Fu carefully. Then she said, very seriously, "I’m sure you are not."

"Why?"

"A robot wouldn’t smile like that."

"You’ve never seen a smiling robot?"

"When a robot smiles, it looks scary. But your smile isn’t scary. So you’re definitely not a robot."

Ah Fu laughed. "Do you want to see what I really look like?"

Tongtong nodded. But her heart was pounding.

Ah Fu moved over by the video wall. From on top of his head, a beam of light shot out and projected a picture onto the wall. In the picture, Tongtong saw a man sitting in a messy room.

The man in the picture waved at Tongtong. Simultaneously, Ah Fu also waved in the exact same way. Tongtong examined the man in the picture: he wore a thin, grey, long-sleeved bodysuit, and a pair of grey gloves. The gloves were covered by many tiny lights. He also wore a set of huge goggles. The face behind the goggles was pale and thin, and looked just like Ah Fu’s face.

Tongtong was stunned. "Oh, so you’re the real Ah Fu!"

The man in the picture awkwardly scratched his head, and said, a little embarrassed, "Ah Fu is just the name we gave the robot. My real name is Wang. Why don’t you call me Uncle Wang, since I’m a bit older?"

Uncle Wang told Tongtong that he was a fourth-year university student doing an internship at Guokr Technologies’ R&D department. His group developed Ah Fu.

He explained that the aging population brought about serious social problems: many elders could not live independently, but their children had no time to devote to their care. Nursing homes made them feel lonely and cut off from society, and there was a lot of demand for trained, professional caretakers.

But if a home had an Ah Fu, things were a lot better. When not in use, Ah Fu could just sit there, out of the way. When it was needed, a request could be given, and an operator would come online to help the elder. This saved the time and cost of having caretakers commute to homes, and increased the efficiency and quality of care.

The Ah Fu they were looking at was a first-generation prototype. There were only three thousand of them in the whole country, being tested by three thousand families.

Uncle Wang told Tongtong that his own grandmother had also been ill and had to go to the hospital for an extended stay, so he had some experience with elder care. That was why he volunteered to come to her home to take care of Grandpa. As luck would have it, he was from the same region of the country as Grandpa, and could understand his topolect. A regular robot probably wouldn’t be able to.

Uncle Wang laced his explanation with many technical words, and Tongtong wasn’t sure she understood everything. But she thought the idea of Ah Fu splendid, almost like a science fiction story.

"So, does Grandpa know who you really are?"

"Your mom and dad know, but Grandpa doesn’t know yet. Let’s not tell him, for now. We’ll let him know in a few days, after he’s more used to Ah Fu."

Tongtong solemnly promised, "Don’t worry, eh!"

She and Uncle Wang laughed together.

Grandpa really couldn’t just stay home and be idle. He insisted that Ah Fu take him out walking. But after just one walk, he complained that it was too hot outside, and refused to go anymore.

Ah Fu told Tongtong in secret that it was because Grandpa felt self-conscious, having someone push him around in a wheelchair. He thought everyone in the street stared at him.

But Tongtong thought, Maybe they were all staring at Ah Fu.

Since Grandpa couldn’t go out, being cooped up at home made his mood worse. His expression grew more depressed, and from time to time he burst out in temper tantrums. There were a few times when he screamed and yelled at Mom and Dad, but neither said anything. They just stood there and quietly bore his shouting.

But one time, Tongtong went to the kitchen and caught Mom hiding behind the door, crying.

Grandpa was now nothing like the Grandpa she remembered. It would have been so much better if he hadn’t slipped and got hurt. Tongtong hated staying at home. The tension made her feel like she was suffocating. Every morning, she ran out the door, and would stay out until it was time for dinner.

Dad came up with a solution. He brought back another gadget made by Guokr Technologies: a pair of glasses. He handed the glasses to Tongtong and told her to put them on and walk around the house. Whatever she saw and heard was shown on the video wall.

"Tongtong, would you like to act as Grandpa’s eyes?"

Tongtong agreed. She was curious about anything new.

Summer was Tongtong’s favorite season. She could wear a skirt, eat watermelon and popsicles, go swimming, find cicada shells in the grass, splash through rain puddles in sandals, chase rainbows after a thunderstorm, get a cold shower after running around and working up a sweat, drink iced sour plum soup, catch tadpoles in ponds, pick grapes and figs, sit out in the backyard in the evenings and gaze at stars, hunt for crickets after dark with a flashlight… In a word: everything was wonderful in summer.

Tongtong put on her new glasses and went to play outside. The glasses were heavy and kept on slipping off her nose. She was afraid of dropping them.

Since the beginning of summer vacation, she and more than a dozen friends, both boys and girls, had been playing together every day. At their age, play had infinite variety. Having exhausted old games, they would invent new ones. If they were tired or too hot, they would go by the river and jump in like a plate of dumplings going into the pot. The sun blazed overhead, but the water in the river was refreshing and cool. This was heaven!

Someone suggested that they climb trees. There was a lofty pagoda tree by the river shore, whose trunk was so tall and thick that it resembled a dragon rising into the blue sky.

But Tongtong heard Grandpa’s urgent voice by her ear: "Don’t climb that tree! Too dangerous!"

Huh, so the glasses also act as a phone. Joyfully, she shouted back, "Grandpa, don’t worry, eh!" Tongtong excelled at climbing trees. Even her father said that in a previous life she must have been a monkey.

But Grandpa would not let her alone. He kept on buzzing in her ear, and she couldn’t understand a thing he was saying. It was getting on her nerves, so she took off the glasses and dropped them in the grass at the foot of the tree. She took off her sandals and began to climb, rising into the sky like a cloud.

This tree was easy. The dense branches reached out to her like hands, pulling her up. She went higher and higher and soon left her companions behind. She was about to reach the very top. The breeze whistled through the leaves, and sunlight dappled through the canopy. The world was so quiet.

She paused to take a breath, but then she heard her father’s voice coming from a distance: "Tongtong, get… down… here…"

She poked her head out to look down. A little ant-like figure appeared far below. It really was Dad.

On the way back home, Dad really let her have it.

"How could you have been so foolish?! You climbed all the way up there by yourself. Don’t you understand the risk?"

She knew that Grandpa told on her. Who else knew what she was doing?

She was livid. He can’t climb trees any more, and now he won’t let others climb trees, either? So lame! And it was so embarrassing to have Dad show up and yell like that.

The next morning, she left home super early again. But this time, she didn’t wear the glasses.

"Grandpa was just worried about you," said Ah Fu. "If you fell and broke your leg, wouldn’t you have to sit in a wheelchair, just like him?"

Tongtong pouted and refused to speak.

Ah Fu told her that through the glasses left at the foot of the tree, Grandpa could see that Tongtong was really high up. He was so worried that he screamed himself hoarse, and almost tumbled from his wheelchair.

But Tongtong remained angry with Grandpa. What was there to worry about? She had climbed plenty of trees taller than that one, and she had never once been hurt.

Since the glasses weren’t being put to use, Dad packed them up and sent them back to Guokr. Grandpa was once again stuck at home with nothing to do. He somehow found an old Chinese Chess set and demanded Ah Fu play with him.

Tongtong didn’t know how to play, so she pulled up a stool and sat next to the board just to check it out. She enjoyed watching Ah Fu pick up the old wooden pieces, their colors faded from age, with its slender, pale white fingers; she enjoyed watching it tap its fingers lightly on the table as it considered its moves. The robot’s hand was so pretty, almost like it was carved out of ivory.

But after a few games, even she could tell that Ah Fu posed no challenge to Grandpa at all. A few moves later, Grandpa once again captured one of Ah Fu’s pieces with a loud snap on the board.

"Oh, you suck at this," Grandpa muttered.

To be helpful, Tongtong also said, "You suck!"

"A real robot would have played better," Grandpa added. He had already found out the truth about Ah Fu and its operator.

Grandpa kept on winning, and after a few games, his mood improved. Not only did his face glow, but he was also moving his head about and humming folk tunes. Tongtong also felt happy, and her earlier anger at Grandpa dissipated.

Only Ah Fu wasn’t so happy. "I think I need to find you a more challenging opponent," he said.

When Tongtong returned home, she almost jumped out of her skin. Grandpa had turned into a monster!

He was now dressed in a thin, grey, long-sleeved bodysuit, and a pair of grey gloves. Many tiny lights shone all over the gloves. He wore a set of huge goggles over his face, and he waved his hands about and gestured in the air.

On the video wall in front of him appeared another man, but not Uncle Wang. This man was as old as Grandpa, with a full head of silver-white hair. He wasn’t wearing any goggles. In front of him was a Chinese Chess board.

"Tongtong, come say hi," said Grandpa. "This is Grandpa Zhao."

Grandpa Zhao was Grandpa’s friend from back when they were in the army together. He had just had a heart stent put in. Like Grandpa, he was bored, and his family also got their own Ah Fu. He was also a Chinese Chess enthusiast, and complained about the skill level of his Ah Fu all day.

Uncle Wang had the inspiration of mailing telepresence equipment to Grandpa and then teaching him how to use it. And within a few days, Grandpa was proficient enough to be able to remotely control Grandpa Zhao’s Ah Fu to play chess with him.

Not only could they play chess, but the two old men also got to chat with each other in their own native topolect. Grandpa became so joyous and excited that he seemed to Tongtong like a little kid.

"Watch this," said Grandpa.

He waved his hands in the air gently, and through the video wall, Grandpa Zhao’s Ah Fu picked up the wooden chessboard, steady as you please, dexterously spun it around in the air, and set it back down without disturbing a piece.

Tongtong watched Grandpa’s hands without blinking. Are these the same unsteady, jerky hands that always made it hard for Grandpa to do anything? It was even more amazing than magic.

"Can I try?" she asked.

Grandpa took off the gloves and helped Tongtong put them on. The gloves were stretchy, and weren’t too loose on Tongtong’s small hands. Tongtong tried to wiggle her fingers, and the Ah Fu in the video wall wiggled its fingers, too. The gloves provided internal resistance that steadied and smoothed out Tongtong’s movements, and thus also the movements of Ah Fu.

Grandpa said, "Come, try shaking hands with Grandpa Zhao."

In the video, a smiling Grandpa Zhao extended his hand. Tongtong carefully reached out and shook hands. She could feel the subtle, immediate pressure changes within the glove, as if she were really shaking a person’s hand—it even felt warm! This is fantastic!

Using the gloves, she directed Ah Fu to touch the chessboard, the pieces, and the steaming cup of tea next to them. Her fingertips felt the sudden heat from the cup. Startled, her fingers let go, and the cup fell to the ground and broke. The chessboard was flipped over, and chess pieces rolled all over the place.

"Aiya! Careful, Tongtong!"

"No worries! No worries!" Grandpa Zhao tried to get up to retrieve the broom and dustpan, but Grandpa told him to remain seated. "Careful about your hands!" Grandpa said. "I’ll take care of it." He put on the gloves and directed Grandpa Zhao’s Ah Fu to pick up the chess pieces one by one, and then swept the floor clean.

Grandpa wasn’t mad at Tongtong, and didn’t threaten to tell Dad about the accident she caused.

"She’s just a kid, a bit impatient," he said to Grandpa Zhao. The two old men laughed.

Tongtong felt both relieved and a bit misunderstood.

Once again, Mom and Dad were arguing with Grandpa.

The argument went a bit differently from before. Grandpa was once again repeating over and over, "Don’t worry, eh!" But Mom’s tone grew more and more severe.

The actual point of the argument grew more confusing to Tongtong the more she listened. All she could make out was that it had something to do with Grandpa Zhao’s heart stent.

In the end, Mom said, "What do you mean ‘Don’t worry’? What if another accident happens? Would you please stop causing more trouble?"

Grandpa got so mad that he shut himself in his room and refused to come out, even for dinner.

Mom and Dad called Uncle Wang on the videophone. Finally, Tongtong figured out what happened.

Grandpa Zhao was playing chess with Grandpa, but the game got him so excited that his heart gave out—apparently, the stent wasn’t put in perfectly. There had been no one else home at the time. Grandpa was the one who operated Ah Fu to give CPR to Grandpa Zhao, and also called an ambulance.

The emergency response team arrived in time and saved Grandpa Zhao’s life.

What no one could have predicted was that Grandpa suggested that he go to the hospital to care for Grandpa Zhao—no, he didn’t mean he’d go personally, but that they send Ah Fu over, and he’d operate Ah Fu from home.

But Grandpa himself needed a caretaker too. Who was supposed to care for the caretaker?

Further, Grandpa came up with the idea that when Grandpa Zhao recovered, he’d teach Grandpa Zhao how to operate the telepresence equipment. The two old men would be able to care for each other, and they would have no need of other caretakers.

Grandpa Zhao thought this was a great idea. But both families thought the plan absurd. Even Uncle Wang had to think about it for a while and then said, "Um… I have to report this situation to my supervisors."

Tongtong thought hard about this. Playing chess through Ah Fu was simple to understand. But caring for each other through Ah Fu? The more she thought about it, the more complicated it seemed. She was sympathetic to Uncle Wang’s confusion.

Sigh, Grandpa is just like a little kid. He wouldn’t listen to Mom and Dad at all.

Grandpa now stayed in his room all the time. At first, Tongtong thought he was still mad at her parents. But then, she found that the situation had changed completely.

Grandpa got really busy. Once again, he started seeing patients. No, he didn’t go to the clinic; instead, using his telepresence kit, he was operating Ah Fus throughout the country and showing up in other elders’ homes. He would listen to their complaints, feel their pulse, examine them, and write out prescriptions. He also wanted to give acupuncture treatments through Ah Fus, and to practice this skill, he operated his own Ah Fu to stick needles in himself!

Uncle Wang told Tongtong that Grandpa’s innovation could transform the entire medical system. In the future, maybe patients no longer needed to go to the hospital and waste hours in waiting rooms. Doctors could just come to your home through an Ah Fu installed in each neighborhood.

Uncle Wang said that Guokr’s R&D department had formed a dedicated task force to develop a specialized, improved model of Ah Fu for such medical telepresence applications, and they invited Grandpa onboard as a consultant. So Grandpa got even busier.

Since Grandpa’s legs were not yet fully recovered, Uncle Wang was still caring for him. But they were working on developing a web-based system that would allow anyone with some idle time and interest in helping others to register to volunteer. Then the volunteers would be able to sign on to Ah Fus in homes across the country to take care of elders, children, patients, pets, and to help in other ways.

If the plan succeeded, it would be a step to bring about the kind of golden age envisioned by Confucius millennia ago: "And then men would care for all elders as if they were their own parents, love all children as if they were their own children. The aged would grow old and die in security; the youthful would have opportunities to contribute and prosper; and children would grow up under the guidance and protection of all. Widows, orphans, the disabled, the diseased—everyone would be cared for and loved."

Of course, such a plan had its risks: privacy and security, misuse of telepresence by criminals, malfunctions and accidents, just for starters. But since technological change was already here, it was best to face the consequences and guide them to desirable ends.

There were also developments that no one had anticipated.

Uncle Wang showed Tongtong lots of web videos: Ah Fus were shown doing all kinds of interesting things: cooking, taking care of children, fixing the plumbing and electric systems around the house, gardening, driving, playing tennis, even teaching children the arts of go and calligraphy and seal carving and erhu playing…

All of these Ah Fus were operated by elders who needed caretakers themselves, too. Some of them could no longer move about easily, but still had sharp eyes and ears and minds; some could no longer remember things easily, but they could still replicate the skills they had perfected in their youth; and most of them really had few physical problems, but were depressed and lonely. But now, with Ah Fu, everyone was out and about, doing things.

No one had imagined that Ah Fu could be put to all these uses. No one had thought that men and women in their seventies and eighties could still be so creative and imaginative.

Tongtong was especially impressed by a traditional folk music orchestra made up of more than a dozen Ah Fus. They congregated around a pond in a park and played enthusiastically and loudly. According to Uncle Wang, this orchestra had become famous on the web. The operators behind the Ah Fus were men and women who had lost their eyesight, and so they called themselves "The Old Blinds."

"Tongtong," Uncle Wang said, "your grandfather has brought about a revolution."

Tongtong remembered that Mom had often mentioned that Grandpa was an old revolutionary. "He’s been working for the revolution all his life; it’s time for him to take a break." But wasn’t Grandpa a doctor? When did he participate in a "revolution"? And just what kind of work was "working for the revolution" anyway? And why did he have to do it all his life?

Tongtong couldn’t figure it out, but she thought "revolution" was a splendid thing. Grandpa now once again seemed like the Grandpa she had known.

Every day, Grandpa was full of energy and spirit. Whenever he had a few moments to himself, he preferred to sing a few lines of traditional folk opera:

Tongtong laughed. "But Grandpa, you’re eighty-three!"

Grandpa chuckled. He stood and posed as if he were an ancient general holding a sword as he sat on his warhorse. His face glowed red with joy.

In another few days, Grandpa would be eighty-four.

Tongtong played by herself at home.

There were dishes of cooked food in the fridge. In the evening, Tongtong took them out, heated them up, and ate by herself. The evening air was heavy and humid, and the cicadas cried without cease.

The weather report said there would be thunderstorms.

A blue light flashed three times in a corner of the room. A figure moved out of the corner noiselessly: Ah Fu.

"Mom and Dad took Grandpa to the hospital. They haven’t returned yet."

Ah Fu nodded.

"Your mother sent me to remind you: don’t forget to close the windows before it rains."

Together, the robot and the girl closed all the windows in the house. When the thunderstorm arrived, the raindrops struck against the windowpanes like drumbeats. The dark clouds were torn into pieces by the white and purple flashes of lightning, and then a bone-rattling thunder rolled overhead, making Tongtong’s ears ring.

"You’re not afraid of thunder?" asked Ah Fu.

"No. You?"

"I was afraid when I was little, but not now."

An important question came to Tongtong’s mind: "Ah Fu, do you think everyone has to grow up?"

"I think so."

"And then what?"

"And then you grow old."

"And then?"

Ah Fu didn’t respond.

They turned on the video wall to watch cartoons. It was Tongtong’s favorite show: "Rainbow Bear Village." No matter how heavy it rained outside, the little bears of the village always lived together happily. Maybe everything else in the world was fake; maybe only the world of the little bears was real.

Gradually, Tongtong’s eyelids grew heavy. The sound of rain had a hypnotic effect. She leaned against Ah Fu. Ah Fu picked her up in its arms, carried her into the bedroom, set her down gently in bed, covered her with a blanket, and pulled the curtains shut. Its hands were just like real hands, warm and soft.

Tongtong murmured, "Why isn’t Grandpa back yet?"

"Sleep. When you wake up, Grandpa will be back."

Grandpa did not come back.

Mom and Dad returned. Both looked sad and tired.

But they got even busier. Every day, they had to leave the house and go somewhere. Tongtong stayed home by herself. She played games sometimes, and watched cartoons at other times. Ah Fu sometimes came over to cook for her.

A few days later, Mom called for Tongtong. "I have to talk to you."

Grandpa had a tumor in his head. The last time he fell was because the tumor pressed against a nerve. The doctor suggested surgery immediately.

Given Grandpa’s age, surgery was very dangerous. But not operating would be even more dangerous. Mom and Dad and Grandpa had gone to several hospitals and gotten several other opinions, and after talking with each other over several nights, they decided that they had to operate.

The operation took a full day. The tumor was the size of an egg.

Grandpa remained in a coma after the operation.

Mom hugged Tongtong and sobbed. Her body trembled like a fish.

Tongtong hugged Mom back tightly. She looked and saw the white hairs mixed in with the black on her head. Everything seemed so unreal.

Tongtong went to the hospital with Mom.

It was so hot, and the sun so bright. Tongtong and Mom shared a parasol. In Mom’s other hand was a thermos of bright red fruit juice taken from the fridge.

There were few pedestrians on the road. The cicadas continued their endless singing. The summer was almost over.

Inside the hospital, the air conditioning was turned up high. They waited in the hallway for a bit before a nurse came to tell them that Grandpa was awake. Mom told Tongtong to go in first.

Grandpa looked like a stranger. His hair had been shaved off, and his face was swollen. One eye was covered by a gauze bandage, and the other eye was closed. Tongtong held Grandpa’s hand, and she was scared. She remembered Grandma. Like before, there were tubes and beeping machines all around.

The nurse said Grandpa’s name. "Your granddaughter is here to see you."

Grandpa opened his eye and gazed at Tongtong. Tongtong moved, and the eye moved to follow her. But he couldn’t speak or move.

The nurse whispered, "You can talk to your grandfather. He can hear you."

Tongtong didn’t know what to say. She squeezed Grandpa’s hand, and she could feel Grandpa squeezing back.

Grandpa! She called out in her mind. Can you recognize me?

His eyes followed Tongtong.

She finally found her voice. "Grandpa!"

Tears fell on the white sheets. The nurse tried to comfort her. "Don’t cry! Your grandfather would feel so sad to see you cry."

Tongtong was taken out of the room, and she cried—tears streaming down her face like a little kid, but she didn’t care who saw—in the hallway for a long time.

Ah Fu was leaving. Dad packed it up to mail it back to Guokr Technologies.

Uncle Wang explained that he had wanted to come in person to say goodbye to Tongtong and her family. But the city he lived in was very far away. At least it was easy to communicate over long distances now, and they could chat by video or phone in the future.

Tongtong was in her room, drawing. Ah Fu came over noiselessly. Tongtong had drawn many little bears on the paper, and colored them all different shades with crayons. Ah Fu looked at the pictures. One of the biggest bears was colored all the shades of the rainbow, and he wore a black eye patch so that only one eye showed.

"Who is this?" Ah Fu asked.

Tongtong didn’t answer. She went on coloring, her heart set on giving every color in the world to the bear.

Ah Fu hugged Tongtong from behind. Its body trembled. Tongtong knew that Ah Fu was crying.

Uncle Wang sent a video message to Tongtong.

Tongtong, did you receive the package I sent you?

Inside the package was a fuzzy teddy bear. It was colored like the rainbow, with a black eye patch, leaving only one eye. It was just like the one Tongtong drew.

The bear is equipped with a telepresence kit and connected to the instruments at the hospital: his heartbeat, breath, pulse, body temperature. If the bear’s eye is closed, that means your grandfather is asleep. If your grandfather is awake, the bear will open its eye.

Everything the bear sees and hears is projected onto the ceiling of the room at the hospital. You can talk to it, tell it stories, sing to it, and your grandfather will see and hear.

He can definitely hear and see. Even though he can’t move his body, he’s awake inside. So you must talk to the bear, play with it, and let it hear your laughter. Then your grandfather won’t be alone.

Tongtong put her ear to the bear’s chest: thump-thump. The heartbeat was slow and faint. The bear’s chest was warm, rising and falling slowly with each breath. It was sleeping deeply.

Tongtong wanted to sleep, too. She put the bear in bed with her and covered it with a blanket. When Grandpa is awake tomorrow, she thought, I’ll bring him out to get some sun, to climb trees, to go to the park and listen to those grandpas and grandmas sing folk opera. The summer isn’t over yet. There are so many fun things to do.

"Grandpa, don’t worry, eh!" she whispered. When you wake up, everything will be all right.

THESE 5 BOOKS GO 6 FEET DEEP Ted Hayden

Grave robbery. If you think it’s a relic of gothic novels, think again. Now that the first generation of body-modified tech-bros and computer-implanted one-percenters sleep under tombstones, there’s a ton of gear in the ground. These books teach you everything you need to know to go get it — or, if rotten flesh makes you retch, to live vicariously through those who earn their living digging.

by Anonymous

You can’t buy this practical page-turner on Amazon. Even if you find a store where it’s sold (pro tip: low-key ask an associate in Home Depot’s lawn and garden department), don’t pay with your credit card — you might wind up on a government watch-list.

Written by a grave robber with loads of real-world experience, chapters include ‘How to bribe cemetery staff’ and ‘Detaching valuable limbs’. But be careful — if your dead grandpa got dug up on a dark night, you might see his decapitated head in this guide’s useful (and graphic!) pictures.

by Norm Sadowski

Originally written for medical professionals, this has become a grave-robbing essential, the Kelley Blue Book of the cemetery set. Not even the freakiest of the freaky exhume corpses for a love of the stench — they’re in it for the cash, and Second-Hand Subcutaneous Implants breaks down the numbers.

Although less-affluent families raid loved-ones’ corpses before burial, and some debt-riddled morticians steal modifications before sending clients to the crypts, most corpses are buried with at least a few microchips still implanted in their bodies.

Dug up a geezer who died at 90? He’ll probably have had memory-enhancing neural prostheses implanted after a stroke or an Alzheimer’s diagnosis. Market price $5,000. Found an athlete who paraglided into a skyscraper window? Check her limbs for genetic mod microchips. Street value is $7,500.

Remember, though, this book wasn’t written with crooks in mind, so approach its pages using common sense. For example, a brain-embedded password-tracking implant with safe-box codes is worth way more than spare parts if the deceased’s family hasn’t deactivated any accounts. But if they have? You’ll get the list price and no more.

by Wojciech Bajor

Caught in the act of dismembering a just-buried Silicon Valley chief executive, convicted of crimes including larceny and mayhem, then released after his conviction was overturned on a technicality, Wojciech Bajor is a grave-robbing legend.

There’s the story of how Uber’s chief executive, more machine than man by the time he caught his final rideshare, spent his famously short evening underground. The morning after the Bay Area bigwig’s funeral, cemetery guards discovered an empty hole by his headstone. Bajor spills all the juiciest details, explaining how he performed this and other heists by training implant-sniffing dogs and romancing lonely-heart morticians.

But the book’s not all big capers and bigger stakes — Bajor got high from his own supply, keeping the best implants for himself and paying out-of-work surgeons to insert them into his brain and body. He says the second-hand microchips betrayed him, sneaking their original owners’ angry spirits into his limbs and colluding on an undead plan that forced him to unconsciously make the mistakes that led to his arrest.

by Colton Venkatesh

To ingratiate himself into a clique of grave robbers, Venkatesh, a sociology professor at the University of California, Riverside, took part in their induction ceremony, locking himself inside a coffin filled with rotting cats, human limbs and web-weaving spiders.

After that long night, he tagged along as the crew broke into graveyards, visited black-market fairs where fences and thieves bargained over bioelectronic implants, and partied at some of the wildest bacchanals this side of the river Styx.

With an eye for striking details, Venkatesh guides his readers through grave-robbing fashion (all that death plus all that manual labour means these guys rock a serious health-goth look), secret handshakes (the secret is, they don’t do it with their own hands) and superstitions (Wojciech Bajor isn’t the only one who thinks ghosts haunt the stolen goods — most grave robbers keep roosters inside their homes, talismans that are said to keep vengeful spirits at bay).

by Willa Weaver

Don’t believe in ghosts? Neither does Willa Weaver. Her pioneering work at the Berlin Institute for Advanced Study suggests that the microchips we use to increase our strength, amplify our memory and fight diseases might also haunt our minds.

In The Digital Afterlife, Weaver describes the case of Hanna Müller, who developed a neurogenic stutter after receiving a second-hand bioelectronic arthritis counteragent. Tracing the device’s provenance, she discovered it had previously been implanted in a man who stuttered throughout his life.

Weaver’s research has uncovered hundreds of parallel cases, in which implants transferred cases of Tourette’s, turned tone-deaf amusiacs into musical prodigies, and gave broke welfare cases hyper-specific knowledge of stock-market trends.

But what’s most startling is her final hypothesis. Almost all subcutaneous products send a constant stream of data to manufacturers, who use that information to perfect new products. Weaver believes that this combined knowledge has become a collective mind living and operating inside our bodies.

How else to explain the fact that, one year ago, dozens of people using the SR-12 Hearing Implant found themselves congregating on the side of an empty road in the Sonoran Desert? Something brought them there, and it wasn’t a friendly e-mail chain or a one-time travel discount from American Airlines.

Her final warning: "To those who dig beneath the skin: dig carefully. Who knows what might try to dig its way out."