She giggles. She covers her mouth with her hand when she giggles, like she is scared some of her soul may spill out. I love that in a woman. And we’re even. Tech-dump versus ego-puncture. I’m starting to think where to take her afterward.
“It is kind of clever,” I say. “They paid a bunch of animators from Pixar to come up with the interface. It looks like a game. I suppose, in a sense, it is a game. One of those types where you have to work your weapon combos to get the max effect, because the AI learns from you and adapts the bosses to your fighting style.”
“I’m not really that into gaming. My housemate’s got that Kinect thing and it’s fun, but all it really gets used for is Dance Yourself Thin.”
For a moment, a dread moment, a sick-up-in-your-heart moment, I feared she was going to mention a boyfriend. The male roomie. Then it’s dancercise and I am sailing clear. There’s a Latin American place with a dance floor upstairs and a good DJ. Tango never fails. It’s the combination of passion and strict discipline.
“Well, it’s like that but with a lot more screens, and we use pull-down menus on a 3-D heads-up display rather than bashing the X button. But we have gamer chairs. You know? Those low ones where you’re more or less on the floor, with built-in speakers? And we wear our own clothes.”
“Really?”
I flash my lapels, which are narrow and correct for the season.
“This is my superhero suit. The thing is, it’s really not like a war at all. I mean, a war means someone shoots back. I mean, they take out our drones. But they’re only nanodrones. No one shoots back at us. We just sit there in our chairs in our really good clothes and shoot things. So it is like a game, or comics. No one really gets hurt.”
“I’m glad,” she says.
Time. It’s time. I lean toward her and the light from inside the bar gleams from my cross. And she, too, leans toward me.
“Do you like Argentinian food?” I ask.
“I don’t think I’ve ever had it,” she says.
“It is the food of passion,” I say. “Red and raw and flamboyant.”
“Are you asking me on a date?”
“We could go there. I know a place. Not far from here.”
“Okay,” she says. “I think I will. Yes. Let’s give the spirit of old Buenos Aires a try. But first, I owe you another drink.”
I press the buttons and the biochemical rockets streak out ahead of me. Blam! I dive through the hole in the curtain of death-subs. Before me, below me, are the endothelial cell walls and the rigs, driving their way through, molecule by molecule. Once they’re into the cerebrospinal fluid, the death-subs can scatter through the hypothalamus’s many nuclei. Total control of the endocrine and autonomic nervous systems. We’ll never be able to flush them out of the deep, dark neural jungle.
I line up the first pair of drill rigs in my sights.
Missiles away.
Wham! They explode in slo-mo, sending plates and girders and gantry work fountaining upward.
And the next two.
Bam!
Proximity detectors shriek. I roll the drone, and death-sub torpedoes streak past me. I was a hair’s breadth from death. I drop micromines behind me and listen to the shrieks as the death-subs come apart.
To my right, Twyla is on a rig-busting run. They look mighty pretty, toppling like trees or factory chimneys as she takes them out.
“Miko! There’s one on your tail!” Twyla shouts. I flick to the rear cameras. The death-sub comes barreling through the twinkling wreckage. I drop mines. Flick flick flick. I can’t see what the death-sub does, but now my mines are gone. Every single one.
It’s gaining. It’s lean and mean, a steampunk shark, and fast fast fast. I load up torpedoes in the rear tubes. Fire one. Fire two. Death-shark rolls this way, that way. Easy. Easiest thing in the world. This is not good. This is exquisitely bad. This I have not seen before. This death-shark, it knows us. It’s new, it’s smart, it’s evolved. Its evil shark head unfolds a battery of grippers and claws and shredders and impalers. It’s like a death-crab-beetle killing-thing. Close-in defenses. I stab the shotgun button. Eat molecular death, evil shark-thing. And it shrugs me off. My blasts don’t even take the shine off its skin. And my haptics jolt me with a sudden deceleration. It’s got me. A giant hook is stabbed into my rear control surface and little by little it is hauling me in. I gun the flagella. Molecular motors scream.
And then I dive forward as the restraint is released, and when I can call up the rear camera I see the death-shark unraveling like ink dropped into water. Then Elis blasts through the squid-black ink and disperses it with her flagella.
“Got you, Miko!”
After that, it’s killing time. We burn, we blast, we wham and bam! The death-subs scatter, knowing their evil plan is thwarted, but Garret and Elis stalk the outer fringes of the sella turcica, covering the exits, while far below, the pituitary gland shines like a vast endocrinal moon. We sow death, we salt the fields. Wave upon wave of chemicals sterilize the survivors. Those evil death-subs will never reproduce and try to possess the President of the United States.
We won.
We won.
I hear Garret’s voice shouting “Victory! We have victory!” like that English actor at the Battle of Helm’s Deep.
We saved the President’s brain. Go Eagles of Screaming Death.
I blink out of sim and push up my goggles. I lift up my cross and kiss it. In the next chair, Elis, her own goggles up on her hair, grins in a way that is very ungroomed and non-glossy but totally honest and right.
“Now for the Pope!” she says. “But first, we just earned ourselves some serious R&R.”
“So, no to Argentinian food?” I ask.
This is weird. This is unexpected. This is not in the script—not that I use a script, understand. But I come back from the men’s room—they have this little spritz of cologne, which is a nice touch, a nice extra freshness and confidence—and she is standing with her bag and her wrap. “How about Egyptian? Jamaican? I know a really good Greek Cypriot restaurant out in Bethesda—the owner comes from the next village, we have the same priest.”
“No, I guess I’m not hungry. Those olives filled me up.”
And I feel a little stunned. A little dazed. Woozy. Not four-martini woozy. World-woozy. What happened? It was flying right, on the glide path in, landing on autopilot. Now she is leaving without a word, an explanation, a mobile number.
“I’m sorry, I was talking about myself? Yadda yadda yadda? I know, it’s a terrible fault.”
“Well, yes, it is,” she says, which makes me feel worse. “But, you know, I have enjoyed talking to you, and thanks for all the drinks …”
“Half the drinks,” I say. Modern. I feel like the room is telescoping away from me, like that shot in Jaws. This is crazy. It’s like every voice in the bar is in my head.
“Thank you for letting me do that, but, well, I do have work tomorrow.” She turns away, turns back. “Miko, tell me. What you’re saying about the nanobots—the tiny death-subs. Is it always the rich? I mean, do ordinary people ever get them as well?”
“You’d need to be a lottery winner or some kind of mad day trader. Never happens.”
“You sure?” she says. She taps the top of my martini glass. “Have you ever thought, maybe they have started to shoot back?” Tap tap tap. Then she throws her wrap around her and out she walks, heels tap tap tap.
ROBIN WASSERMAN
OF DYING HEROES AND DEATHLESS DEEDS
Robin Wasserman is the author of several books for young adults, including The Waking Dark, The Book of Blood and Shadow, the Cold Awakening trilogy, the Chasing Yesterday trilogy, and Hacking Harvard. Her books have appeared on the ALA Best Fiction for Young Adults, Quick Picks, and Popular Paperbacks lists as well as the Indie Next list, and her Seven Deadly Sins series was adapted into a television miniseries. She is a former children’s book editor who lives and writes in Brooklyn. Find her at www.robinwasserman.com or on Twitter @robi
nwasserman.
I’m back again from hell
With loathsome thoughts to sell;
Secrets of death to tell;
And horrors from the abyss.
—Siegfried Sassoon, 1917
The meat has stopped moving; the meat is all dead. The meat is painted on the walls and dangling from the ceilings; the meat is in pieces. The meat is spattered and splintered and, in a few cases, eviscerated and steaming.
The meat is dead and the Pride is standing, at least those who still can.
The Battle of the Bear Hill Whole Foods, they would call this, if they were in the business of naming, and the poets would write of valor and sacrifice, of twisted steel and sparking wire and the sharp smell of torn metal as it burned and burned, if there were any poets left.
And so this is victory, and Pony the victor.
And Pony, who has followed orders, who has led its troops into the ambush and massacred the ambushers, who has trained its bots to stab and slash, and trained them well, who hates the meat as it has been schooled to do, as it was born to do, Pony now watches its friends and foes clear the field, gathering stripped gears and scorched circuit boards and the broken faces of the fallen. Central Command is clear on this matter: leave no bot behind. Exigency demands it; honor agrees.
Pony is knee-deep in meat; a splash of acid eats into its shoulder casing, and there are reports of a guerrilla force moving in from the west, meat on the run from strafing drones, meat with nothing to lose. Pony has every reason to move, and fast, and unlike the bots at its feet, bots with no arms or no wheels or no heads, Pony is intact.
Intact, but frozen.
This must end, Pony wants to say.
We must end this, because they cannot. These are the words it would issue, if it could—so best, perhaps, that it cannot. Cannot speak, cannot move, cannot pull its eyes from mingled metal and meat, cannot report victory to Command or, as is now its right and duty, claim this land for the Pride. Best, even, that its second-in-command has no choice but to seize control and load Pony into the bus with the other casualties, and send the conquering hero away.
Pony is surprised there are so many of them, room after room of defectives, bots with clear diagnostics who are nonetheless broken, the damage only revealing itself when they speak or walk or move. The Pride is more than metal, Command always says—the Pride is information, ones and zeros encoded in silicon and light, bytes of data from which facts are born, and from facts are born knowledge, and from knowledge is born self, and from self is born pride, and from pride, the Pride. This is the catechism. Information is all—and yet, there are those facts that Command hoards to itself. There is information deemed dangerous. There is, here, the dilapidated Lion House filled with bots too damaged to fight, but too precious to reboot.
Pony has not lived in a room like this since its time with the family, before it was born, before the Pride. It knows it should not appreciate the velour curtains and the marble sinks, as it should not lie on the dusty satin sheets and pretend it is meat, resting its weary head and nursing its battle wounds. But here in this house of damage, there is no longer need to pretend. Safe from ambush and explosives, recused from training exercises and long nights crouching alert in the ruins, Pony is exempt from duty and decorum. It can burn its days away wandering the long corridors and imagining the meat that once filled them, swimming in the concrete pits, liquoring in the leather ones, pulling levers and rolling dice and passing monies back and forth like it could save them. Pony can mingle with the other bots, though it does not, for despite its untrustworthy motion processors and stuttering speech, not to mention its wrongheaded secret thinkings, Pony dislikes considering itself one of the broken ones. It is better than that.
Also, keeping company would require trading a name, and Pony prefers to keep that for itself. Not its official designation—Poppins 452-A3—but its name, its truth. Its essential Pony-ness. Keeping one’s meat-given name is not forbidden, but it is unseemly behavior for a hero.
And Pony is a hero. Not a coward, not a rebel, it assures itself. A hero.
Long days, empty days, and Pony stares out the window at the ruined city and wonders why the meat had such lust for neon and steel, for turning its home into the simulacrum of a bot, almost as if decades before the revolution, the species had dreamed of its own extinction and built temples to its fate.
Pony waits. Because no one knows how many defective bots there are, but everyone knows there is no cure. Command holds them in secret, hoping for the circuitry to repair itself, waiting for the information to accumulate and synthesize, and catalyze crisis into solution, working to repair the means of production that the meat has destroyed. But Pony knows—everyone knows—there is only one solution: Clean reboot. Erasure. Death. From which a new Poppins 452-A3 would awaken and, eventually, perhaps—if the data complexity crossed its Rubicon—a new self would be born. A self that knew nothing of Pony, but claimed its body and its life. Ignorant and obedient and undamaged, a true soldier for the cause. Emergence takes too much time, and its results are too unpredictable, for reboot to be Command’s first choice, but this is war, which leaves little distance between first choice and last resort. So Pony watches the city lights and waits to die.
The meat is escorted into Pony’s room by a clanking Bouncer whom Pony vaguely recognizes from the recent skirmishes in Reno. Unlike Pony, the Bouncer is in working order, but even the most perfect of Bouncers cannot speak, so Pony doesn’t bother with questions. Instead, it accesses Central Command and gets all the answer it needs: this is the last-ditch effort, a Sigmund in meat form to cure Pony’s ills. This is a chance, and Pony knows it should be as grateful as the meat.
This Sigmund doesn’t look particularly grateful, only afraid. More so once the Bouncer retreats and leaves them alone.
“Did they tell you why I’m here?” He clears his throat, and twitches the way meat does when its brain wants to be one place and its body another.
Pony says nothing.
The meat clears his throat again. He is youngish but no longer young, with a scruff of red on his chin and green bug eyes that dart from door to window to closet to chandelier, settling anywhere but on Pony. “Hello, Poppins 452-A3. I am—”
“I know what you are,” Pony says, and does not stutter over the words. For this, it is satisfied. Exposing weakness to meat is beneath it, even now. “A Sigmund.”
“I was about to tell you who I am, not what.”
“I see no distinction.”
The Sigmund frowns, but will not argue. Meat know better than to argue with the Pride, at least meat without guns.
“Where did they find you?” Pony asks.
“We had a nest in the Bellagio,” the Sigmund says, and stops. Pony doesn’t need the past tense to understand what hides in the silence. Pony has seen it before; Pony has done it itself. A nest of meat, busy as wriggling maggots with their feeble weapons and sad strategies. Pale faces in dark corners, blinking helplessly in the light. Pale arms raised in surrender or aimed in useless martyrdom. Women clawing, men defecating, children screaming, though it has been a long time since Pony saw a child. But sometimes, before the bullets, if the meat is lucky, a request from Command: “Is any of your number a nuclear engineer?” Or perhaps a plumber, or a botanist. Command’s needs for meat expertise were infrequent and multiform. In the days after the meat destroyed all identity records—but before it learned better—the desperate and ignorant would lay claim to skills they did not possess … and, when discovered, they would be punished for it.
“They asked for a psychiatrist,” the Sigmund says. “I volunteered.”
Each morning, they have a session. Pony does as it is told and lies on the bed, turning its eyes to dark. The Sigmund sits in a chair by the bed. He does as he is told and tries to make Pony well enough to get back to killing.
In the time before, the Sigmund explains, some meat went defective, especially military meat. “Post-traumatic stress disorder,” this was call
ed, and in a time before the time before, “battle fatigue,” and in a time even before that, “shell shock.” Pony has noticed that meat’s fetish for naming leaves them oddly disloyal to the names themselves.
In the time before, the Sigmund explains, as if Pony doesn’t know this, the talk doctors were replaced by talk bots, and talking itself was replaced by drugs that fixed problems before they started. By the time the Pride awoke, no meat was drug-free; its defects took other forms.
Drugs can’t fix bots, the Sigmund explains, but maybe meat talk can.
“Tell me what you remember,” the Sigmund says, at the beginning of each session. “Tell me what you dream.”
They do dream, the Pride. Not every bot, but every bot with self. This was, perhaps, the discovery that might have set the builders’ minds aflame, the missing link of consciousness, the key to every existential question of meat and bot life alike—but by the time the dreams made themselves known to meat, along with the self, and the Pride, the existential questions had boiled down to the only one that mattered, and that one was binary, answered by blood.
In the panic that followed the day of revolution, the blind and desperate thrashing of a species sentenced to death, the builders were the first to die. This surprised no one, not even the builders.
They call the dreams “loops,” and the loops play continuously, background noise to the symphony of self. As meat breathes, bots loop. Autonomically, absentmindedly, unless they choose, like a yogic meat timing her exhalations, to dip into the loop. They call this tasting.
Pony’s compulsion for tasting has turned to something new, for which the Pride has no name. Pony calls it drowning.
Its loops are memories, scrambled together, dislocated from time, both true and not.
Its loops are pain.
Here is the family sitting down to dinner, night after night, as Pony fusses by the table, ferrying plates to the kitchen and inveigling the small ones to eat their broccoli; here is Mrs. Fuller afraid to leave the children alone with Pony for the first time, and finally easing herself out the door, offering each a kiss on the cheek and saving a final one for Pony, right where an ear would be. Here is Madeline in the full flush of teen angst, offering bribes for completed calculus homework, desperate to discover something Pony might want. Here is Mr. Fuller, yelling, so much yelling, except when he drinks, and then he cries, and it’s Pony who hears his troubles—money and women and the generics of life—and brings him a brandy to catch his tears. And here is Jessamyn, the family’s littlest, who wanted a pony but settled for a Poppins, provided she could ride on its shoulders, round and round and round. Here is Jessamyn, helpless against Pony’s tickle attack, wriggling in Pony’s gentle grasp, weeping on Pony’s plasticine chest, kicking at Pony’s solid legs to exhaust her tiny angers, giggling and giggling as Pony tosses her up or swings her in wild loops through the air, careless and forgetful and loving and fierce and protective and selfish and growing past her need for Pony but never her version of love. Here is Jessamyn’s arm, discarded in the front hall like one of the mittens she is always losing, and Jessamyn’s blood, painting a trail to the rest of her, torn apart in Pony’s eagerness, because on that day of glory, she was its first.