Specimen Days

  “We’ll need a car,” he said.

  “You can get?”

  “I am a car. More or less.”

  He chose a vintage Mitsubishi parked in a weedy lot. He hoped it was a real one. Half of them were shells. Simon fingered the autolock, felt its numbers transmit. He punched them in and opened the door. It was a working car. He pulled the wires, started it. He let her in on the passenger side.

  She fastened her seat belt.

  He drove to the Henry Hudson Parkway and headed north. He said, “I can’t believe you did that.”

  She stared straight ahead, her long green fingers folded in her lap.

  The parkway was divided. Vintage cars on the right, hoverpods on the left. There were not many cars, but there was a steady stream of hoverpods filled with tourists. From within the clean, arctic light of the pods’ interiors people looked down at Simon and the Nadian, chugging along in the Mitsubishi. They must have wondered what this was supposed to be—a tattooed man in a Mets cap and two sweaters, driving in a compact car with a Nadian nanny. They must have been consulting their guidebooks.

  He said, “I hope you don’t mind my asking, but I’d like to know. What did you do on Nadia?”

  “I was criminal,” she said.

  “You’re kidding. You stole from people?”

  “I was criminal,” she said. She said nothing else.

  Ahead, the George Washington Bridge stretched illuminated across the river. He got onto the bridge. He said, “We should get rid of the car when we reach New Jersey. I’ll find us a pod.”

  She nodded. She kept her hands folded in her lap.

  They were halfway across when a drone voice sounded from overhead. “Ball doo behackle ober do doo rark.”

  “Not stop,” she said.

  “I wasn’t even considering it.”

  He punched the accelerator. The Mitsubishi groaned and went somewhat faster.

  “We’re probably screwed,” Simon said.

  Then the drone was alongside him, whirring at the window. It said, “Pull over to the right.”

  Simon swerved in the drone’s direction. It knocked against the window glass and spun out over the car. He could hear the sound its wings made against the roof, like a metal bee trapped in a bottle.

  The drone reappeared almost immediately in front of the car. The first beam shattered the windshield. Bright pebbles of glass flew everywhere.

  Simon shouted, “This is the breath of laws and songs and behavior.” He swerved to the right this time. The drone tracked him.

  “Duck,” he said to Catareen.

  She ducked. He ducked. The second beam burned a hole in the headrest where Simon’s head had been. The air smelled of hot plastifoam.

  With his head almost touching his knees, he could not see the road. The car careened, scraped against the guardrail. Catareen raised her head slightly above the dashboard and put a hand on the wheel. She helped guide the car back into its lane. Wind blew through the empty windshield.

  Another ray angled in, aimed at Catareen’s head. She bobbed just in time. It struck the console between driver and passenger seat. It sent up a minor flame, a curl of plastic smoke.

  Simon lifted his head high enough to see the road. The drone was not visible. Then it was. It was at his side again. He hit the brake. The tires screeched. The car shimmied. The drone’s ray shot straight across the hood.

  Simon accelerated and turned the wheel sharply. He steered into the hoverpod lane and clipped the front end of a pod. It sounded its horn. He saw that there was just enough space for the Mitsubishi on the shoulder to the pod’s left. He swerved onto the shoulder.

  The drone was behind them now. It tried to shoot out the rear windshield. It missed the first time, aiming too high, and sent its beam into New Jersey. The second time, it took out the rear windshield and struck the radio. Bruce Springsteen started singing “Born to Run.”

  Simon and Catareen were covered in glass. The hoverpods were trumpeting. The one just ahead applied its brakes, and Simon shot around and in front of it. The car was shuddering. It had not been made for this. Simon had not been made for this, either.

  Directly ahead, both lanes were empty, except for a hoverpod thirty yards away. Simon weaved from lane to lane as erratically as he could. A ray clipped his cheek. He felt the burn. He swerved sharply to the right as another ray shot through the baseball cap (sharp sudden smell of hot plastiwool) and glanced across his scalp. He couldn’t tell how badly he was hurt. He knew he was alive. He knew he could keep driving.

  The drone hovered just outside the empty place where the rear windshield had been. It emitted a low, metallic cough and flipped in midair. When it had righted itself, it let loose. This time it aimed too high and to the left, hitting the hoverpod that was now slowing down thirty yards ahead. The drone seemed to have gotten stuck. It shot the hoverpod seven times in quick succession. The first two shots drilled into the pod’s sleek white chassis, leaving two brown-edged smoldering holes the size of quarters. The third shattered a window and concisely killed a person who appeared to have been a Sino woman. The fourth killed the man who had been seated beside the woman and who had stood up when the previous beam killed her. The fifth and sixth shot out two more windows. The seventh entered through the shot-out window created by the sixth.

  Simon could see the chaos inside the pod. It was impossible to tell whether the driver had been hit. The pod careened to the right, caught an updraft, and blew sideways along the bridge until it stopped, blocking both lanes. It hovered there, four feet above the asphalt.

  The drone was on Catareen’s side now. “Get down,” Simon yelled. She dove into the footwell. The Nadians were fast. The drone’s ray sizzled on the suddenly empty passenger seat. Simon swerved again. The next ray struck the passenger door just below the place where the window had been.

  He knew what he had to do. He aimed the car directly at the hoverpod that was blocking both lanes. He said to Catareen, “Stay there,” and hit the accelerator.

  The hoverpod scraped loudly against the Mitsubishi’s top as they went under. It made a strange Velcro-ish sound. For a moment Simon felt the car hesitate as a living thing might hesitate, assessing its damage. He saw the white underbelly of the hoverpod. It was like passing under a whale.

  The end of the bridge was straight ahead. A sign said WELCOME TO NEW JERSEY.

  Then they were off the bridge and out of Old New York. The drone hovered behind them at the bridge’s boundary. It snapped its vids. Would it follow illegally? Simon felt the operator making a decision. There was the matter of the dead tourists, which would not be good for Infinidot. Was it better to break the law and go after Simon and Catareen by crossing a state line? Would the story be less damaging if it ended in an arrest?

  The drone turned and flew back toward Old New York. Drone operators were not well paid. They tended to sorrow and to the drugs that made sorrow more enjoyable. This one might have had a dram or two during the chase. He might have reached his limit. He must know that his job was lost already. He might be glad about it. Several robbery players on the Dangerous Encounters payroll had been drone operators who’d become discouraged. They tended to make good robbers.

  Simon and Catareen rattled on for a half mile or more. Bruce Springsteen sang “Born to Run” over and over on the radio. The innards were fused. Soon Simon pulled the car over into a weedy roadside emptiness. New Jersey wasn’t maintained. None of the eastern seaboard was, outside of the theme parks. The Council kept the Northeast crime-free but was not much interested in streetlights, unbroken roads, or other amenities this far from the Southern Assembly.

  The car shivered. It put out a heat shimmer. Simon brushed glass gravel from his shirtfront. He surveyed his personal damage. A brilliant red burn line ran from his right cheek to his right earlobe. He took off the cap and saw that he had acquired a part to the left of the center of his head. It wasn’t serious. The burns sizzled with a cauterized heat that was not unpleasant.

>   Catareen was looking straight ahead. She had folded her hands in her lap again.

  “We made it,” Simon said.

  “Yes,” she answered.

  “You’re good.”

  “And you.”

  “I exist as I am, that is enough. We have to figure out what to do next.”

  “Where go.”

  “Right. I know I said I’d try to get us a pod.”

  “Yes.”

  “Actually, that might be difficult. These old clunkers are no problem for me. Pod security is another matter entirely.”

  “We go in this?”

  “As far as we can. These things run on gas. They don’t have gas outside of Old New York.”

  “We go far as we can.”

  “If we’re lucky, if we’re very lucky, the car will get us through New Jersey. Once we’re in another state, I’ll see what I can do for us. Vehicularly speaking.”

  “We go what way?” she asked.

  “How would you feel about going to Denver?”

  “Denver.” She gave the name a whistling, fluty spin.

  “Hm. How exactly do I explain this? Short version. I’m a simulo. You know about simulos?”

  He waited for an answer. She seemed to have stopped speaking again. She stared straight ahead through the glassless windshield at the patch of dry grass and brush. A wrapper blew by. Gummi Bears.

  He said, “I’m experimental. I was made by a company called Biologe. Have you heard of them?”

  Nothing from Catareen. He continued. What else could he do?

  “Biologe missed out on the animal-genetics patents, where the big money was. It snapped up a few key human patents, sort of under the radar, when the legislation was still murky. But Biologe had trouble turning its patents into actual profits. Lots of potential PR problems, as I’m sure you can imagine. Their marketing people finally came up with what seemed like the perfect angle: humanoids for long-range journeys into space. Entities that would be resilient and dependable, capable of abstract reasoning, fully equipped to charm alien lifeforms, but not bothered by the prospect of a forty- or fifty-year trip from which there might be no return.

  “Still, it was dicey. Biologe subcontracted the work to obscure people with little start-up companies and paid them well but with the understanding that Biologe would disavow if an experiment turned ugly. One of these people was a freelance guy named Lowell, Emory Lowell, residing in Denver. Lowell figured out a way to excite certain cell lines into a marriage with old-fashioned circuitry. The core was mechanical, but from it sprang a biomass. Which formed humanly around the core. A little like a Chia Pet.”

  Chia Pet. How did he know that? Lowell must have slipped it into his circuits as a joke. He also seemed to know about PEZ, Mr. Bubble, and Bullwinkle the Moose.

  “Vintage novelty,” he told Catareen. “Little clay lambs and things that sprouted grass. Anyway. Biologe was running low on money by then, and they pressured Lowell to unveil his prototype sooner than he wanted to. Heated arguments ensued. He kept insisting that given another six months to a year he could fine-tune us, he could come up with an entity as resilient as flesh, with flesh’s truly remarkable ability to sustain and repair itself, that had none of the higher-level human qualities. Abstract thinking. Emotions. Because it would be immoral, by some accounts at least, to engender anything like that and shoot it into space.”

  Catareen looked ahead. Simon decided to assume she was listening.

  “There were some misfires, which were effectively hushed up. I was one of the third strain. By the time I was developed, Biologe had run out of time, patience, and cash, and they went right into production, over Lowell’s protests. There was a lot of hoopla about us, but we didn’t really catch on. Those big corporate contracts failed to materialize, and then space exploration itself more or less fell apart after Nadia. Biologe went belly-up. But rumor has it that Lowell is still out there, tinkering away. That he feels guilty about having created beings who are almost but not quite. That he’s figured out a way to manipulate the codes and make us…”

  She said, “Make what?” She’d been listening, then.

  “Well. A little more human, around the edges.”

  “You want?”

  “I want something. I feel a lack.”

  “Lack.”

  “I don’t know what to call it. I’m not really all that interested in feelings, frankly. Not of the boo-hoo-hoo variety. But there’s something biologicals feel that I don’t. For instance, I understand about beauty, I get the concept, I know what qualifies, but I don’t feel it. I almost feel it, sometimes. But never for sure, never for real.”

  “You want stroth,” she said.

  “Come again?”

  “Stroth. Cannot say other.”

  “Okay. Let’s say I suffer from a lack of stroth, then. I feel like there’s something terrible and wonderful and amazing that’s just beyond my grasp. I have dreams about it. I do dream, by the way. It hovers over me at odd moments. And then it’s gone. I feel like I’m always on the brink of something that never arrives. I want to either have it or be free of it.”

  “We go to Denver,” she said.

  “I have to go to Denver. I have something in my mind about June 21, this year. Just that date, in Denver. It’s this little buzzy, pulse-y thing that’s always there, like a song I can’t get out of my head. Marcus had it, too. It’s implanted, for some reason.”

  “We go to Denver,” she said again.

  “Denver is more than a thousand miles away. And there may be nothing there. Lowell is probably just doing some regular job someplace. Or dead. He wasn’t young when all this started.”

  “We see.”

  “All this I swallow, it tastes good, I like it well, it becomes mine.”

  “Yes,” she said.

  They drove without speaking through much of New Jersey. It grew dark. The stars came out. They couldn’t go quickly, what with the wind blowing into their faces through the shot-out windshield and the roads studded with holes deep enough for a toddler to hide in. Simon checked the gas gauge every three minutes. Every three minutes there was that much less. Bruce Springsteen sang on and on and on.

  They had no trouble in New Jersey, though. Sometimes a pod shot by, destined for the shopping and gambling palaces. Its occupants stared but hove on. They drove past mile upon mile of empty factories with jaggedly glassless windows, past row after row of derelict houses. Occasionally, they saw camps of Nadian squatters who lived in the houses and factories. The Nadians sat around fires that sent sparks up into the dark air. Outside a town that had, according to its sign, been called New Brunswick, the headlights illuminated a band of Nadian children on the roadside. They stood pinned by the headlights and gaped at the passing Mitsubishi. Their eyes were dazzling. Most were naked, but one had fashioned a dress out of food wrappers and what appeared to be bandages.

  Simon said to Catareen, “Do a lot of you wish you hadn’t come here?”

  “Some.”

  “Do you wish you hadn’t come here?”

  “I must come.”

  “Because you were a criminal on Nadia.”

  No answer. Back to staring and nostril flares.

  The car got twenty-three miles into Pennsylvania before the gas ran out. It hiccuped, stuttered, and stalled. Simon guided it to the shoulder. This being Pennsylvania, the roads were slightly better, but there would be other difficulties here. Pennsylvania had been subcontracted to Magicom, as part of a deal that included, more promisingly, Maine and most of eastern Canada. Pennsylvania was not a high-priority state, but still, Magicom enforced more laws than the New Jersey District Committee did. Here a human (what passed as a human) and a Nadian traveling together would excite more suspicion.

  The car had stopped among grassy fields bordered by trees. The night was quiet and very dark.

  Simon said, “End of the Mitsubishi.”

  Catareen blinked and breathed.

  He said, “We should get some sleep.
Not in the car. We should go out there and try to sleep a little. That sound okay to you?”

  “Yes.”

  They got out of the car and walked across a field to the trees. The ground was uneven. It smelled like the chlorophyll spray from the park but less strong. As they walked, Bruce Springsteen’s song grew fainter and fainter, until it dissolved entirely into the rustling semiquiet of the night.

  When they were among the trees, they spent some time finding a reasonable place to lie down. The ground was sticks and bracken. They cleared out an area at the trunk of a tree that curved slightly inward, so they could rest their heads against its bark. It was not what you’d call comfortable. It was what presented itself.

  Simon lay down on the newly cleared dirt. Catareen sat beside him. She did not lie down.

  He said, “Do you mind my talking to you so much?”

  “No,” she said.

  “It’s my programming. I get steadily friendlier until you set some sort of clear limit. Then I more or less settle in at that level of intimacy. Unless you indicate that you want less. I can ratchet down accordingly, if that’s what you want. This is one of the bugs Lowell was supposedly working on when Biologe went public with us. It’s a repress cap on my aggressive impulses. It’s meant to keep me from killing you.”

  “You must be kind,” she said.

  “Yeah. There’s no real emotion behind it. Does that bother you?”

  “No.”

  She might have been telling the truth. How could you know, with a Nadian?

  “So,” he said. “I guess you don’t like talking about your past, on Nadia.”

  Silence.

  He said, “But how about this? Do you have a family here? Did you have a family there?”

  Nothing.

  “Did you once have a family? Were you married? Kids?”

  More nothing.

  He said, “Do you think you can sleep?”

  “Yes,” she answered.

  “I fall on the weeds and stones, the riders spur their unwilling horses and haul close.”

  “Good night,” she said.

  “Good night,” he answered.

  He mounded a little dirt pillow for himself and folded his hands over his chest. After a while, he slept. He dreamed of a boy looking at a man who was looking out a window into the darkness in which the boy stood. He dreamed of a train that flew over a golden field, bound for some unutterably fabulous destination.