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Easter 2142
Two years ago I found something out that made me terribly unhappy.
It wasn't something I could imagine talking about. For six weeks
I carried this thing inside me until I was all withered up, like
a stick inside. I couldn't find a way to touch things anymore. I
tried to back out of the camping trip Abuela and I take every year
with the Chans, but she wouldn't let me. We were hiking in the Appalachians.
On the fifth day of our trip we were camped beside a lake. I couldn't
sleep, so I slipped out and went down to the water. It was dark
and cold and lifeless. Evan came up beside me. He had heard me slip
out and had come to see if he could help. I tried to tell him I
was fine, but the lie caught in my throat and I started to cry.
I cried and cried and cried, horrible jerking sobs that shook my
whole body. I cried a whole lake of coldness and darkness. And Evan,
who is normally so cheerful and kind of goofy, was very quiet. He
put an arm around me and let me cry for a very long time. I couldn't
stop saying "I'm sorry!" I'm sorry I'm sorry I'm sorry.
It's okay, he said. Usually I forget that he lived through the Warming.
When he was a child, he and Nancy and Jeanine saw horrors I will
never face.
It's all right to cry, he said. Sometimes life hurts.
*
Easter Sunday, 2142. I am kneeling on the dock at the Drowned
Lands, cleating the bow rope of Abuela's Zodiac and smiling at a
little solemn-eyed girl. I guess she's around three, but I'm not
a good guesser. Her parents are still chatting with the waiter inside;
I can see them dimly through the smoked glass of the café
door. "Hey," I say, smiling at the kid. "Didja just
have breakfast?"
She doesn't smile back. "Mouse eggs," she says.
It's on the kid's menu. Little seaweed whiskers and thin-whipped
sausage for the tail. "I used to come here with my grandmother
when I was little and I always ordered that one," I say. With
the Zodiac secured, I start up toward the café. "I think
I'll have that today."
"You can't," she says, and at last a shy smile creeps
onto her face. "You're big." I grin at her and
she pulls a bashful handful of her brown hair across her eyes. I
start to ruffle her hair, which I always used to hate when I was
a kid.
Except I stop in shock. The pinkie on her left hand has been chopped
off and replaced with a metal one. I can't bring myself to touch
her.
*
It's twenty minutes earlier and I am buzzing along the canal in
the Zodiac. The canal runs east-west, and at this hour you get long
morning light over everything. It's a soft blush on the old concrete
buildings. The colors are brighter on newer things, the jetties
and walkways and bridges strung like nets between buildings. Brushed
ceramic and blown steel take the stain of dawn like the puffy clouds
overhead, in streaks of pink and gold.
Even early the canal is humming. On the sides of the channel are
zodiacs like mine, gondolas, old flat-bottomed outboards, expensive
all-wood lapstrake rowboat recreations, sail-boards (with and without
motors). The middle of the cannel is for bigger craft, keelboat
and aquapods. A police amphibicopter idles overhead like a heron
waiting to strike.
There are plenty of easy cheap eats on the water. Burger Barge
and Samosas Under Sail and the U.S.S. Calzone. Personally,
I need the meth roast at the Drowned Lands in the worst way. Like
Abuela I am photoactivated, cursed with the Morning Person gene.
This would be fine if I didn't live a Night Person lifestyle. So
I find myself a Doesn't Sleep Much Person. You would think, she
said crabbily, the science that cured the common cold and put a
university campus on the moon would be able to erase the need to
spend a third of your life unconscious.
> Mammal.
> Oh, shut up, M.
> Mammal mammal mammal.
> In a world where I'll be waiting seventy years for a decent
job opening because my mother's generation will be playing full-contact
lacrosse into their second century, you'd think I wouldn't have
to feel like my heart was pumping pancake syrup every morning.
> Fresh air and exercise is good. Or going to bed earlier.
I would complain about having a smug familiar, but it's pretty obvious
that they catch their personalities from us, like colds or mumps,
so I guess I only have myself to blame.
Someone waves at me from the deck of the Lucky Junk! It's
one of the Seven Skinny Sons who works the pawn boat. He's tickling
a fish out of the gullet of their cormorant. I'm not the only person
to wonder if Old Fat Mrs. Chee doesn't keep bands around her sons'
throats too. For the record, nobody's sure there are exactly seven
of them. We just assume.
The cormorant, done for the morning, flops indignantly to the bow
and spreads his wings out to dry. The Lunky Junk! watches
me go by. We're old pals; I fell off her once when I was a kid,
forcing a rescue from one of the Skinny Sons. "Hey!" I
shout. The old boat winks. These days I need that little benediction
every time I go up the canal.
*
John XXVI doesn't move a lot of product in NY, but still plays
pretty big back home. Two years ago he . . . re-issued? Reconfirmed?
Covered? Clement's decree that robots don't have souls.
> M?
> Now, Laia, what wouldst thou have me do?
> Do you have a soul?
> I don't think so.
> Do you want one?
> I'm not sure. Should I?
Since the days of Pfeifer and Steve Potter, Abuela says, we've
been pretty sure that you need a body to achieve consciousness.
Or at least, it definitely helps. The first step in creating "me"
is to bump into the edges where Me stops and Not Me begins. Allen
Hobby took it as axiomatic that consciousness-volition, emotion,
motivation (and lust and charity and that feeling you get when someone
at a party is wearing exactly the same frosty rig as you)-would
always manifest far sooner if the cpu was seated in a body than
if it was running in a featureless machine connected to the datasphere.
> I think you'll need a body if you want a soul, M.
> I have a body.
> What?
> You.
*
It's seventy-five minutes later and I'm heading back to Abuela's
apartment. She's probably spent the whole time going through her
correspondence with her Administrative Intelligence. I guess working
hard is the price you pay for ruling the world. She's a Warming
survivor and she shows all the classic symptoms of the generation:
hard-working, high-achieving, anxious, always waiting for the axe
to fall. You can see her struggling not to ask why I don't try and
do something more purposeful with my life. Generally, the Survivors
think my cohort is lazy and decadent. Which we are, compared to
them.
But then they had a world to save. We're just waiting for ours
to wind down.
*
They have taken the little girl's pinkie off right at the root,
leaving just a sliver of reinforced bone to socket the artificial
digits. Her parents will have to keep buying new prosthetics as
she gets bigger. That's putting your money where your beliefs are.
I'm sure they think they are doing the best thing they can to prepare
her for the world she will grow into.
*
It's the exact same moment. The girl's parents are still chatting
with the waiter inside; I can see them dimly through the smoked
glass of the café door.
And when I think of a snake I can see them as red ghosts.
And when I think of an owl I can see the little girl, but this
time with a purple face and hands where her sunscreen is.
I used to eat at the Down and Out; now I get my coffee at the Drowned
Lands Cave.
The little girl and I look at one another. We both stop smiling.
We are both unclean.
*
It's seventy minutes later. The canal is noisy. Did I mention that?
Chugging engines, the slap and splash of water everywhere, people
yelling cheerfully to one another, the deep throbbing whine of the
police amphibicopter as it peels off and heads heavily down a side
canal. And of course, over everything, the constant shrieking of
seabirds, grey and black ones wheeling overhead and perched on window
ledges and scavenging for scraps. One settles briefly on my bow.
> Ring-billed gull, Larus Delawarensis.
> Thanks.
She knows the name, but she is no kin to that bird. I am. The bird
and I are meat, and what meat means. I could club it with an oar
and it would fluff in a spray of feathers, its hollow wingbones
splintering like mine might in a 'copter accident tomorrow. No back-ups
for us (unless you count the pale copies the very rich can make,
but I remain unconvinced.)
That gull and I are trapped in four dimensions, not just three.
Maybe that's the pressure that squeezes consciousness out of us.
Maybe "I" is just the name we give that thing that doesn't
want to die.
*
If he weren't worth caring about, it wouldn't hurt so much. Nancy
wouldn't be so angry. Abuela wouldn't be so grim. There would be
no therapist working with Cloudmaker, there would be no for-evan.com.
That's the second time someone has disappeared on me. I don't seem
to be getting used to it.
*
A courier shoots by on a one-foot, drenching me in his rooster
tail. "Dammit! Mephista!"
> License look-up already in progress.
I flash the courier one unenhanced middle finger but he doesn't
seem to care. Abuela tells me it has always been this way.
> Jaime Gertz. Uploading specs to Won't Get Laid.
How long?
> One week. Does he have a girlfriend on the ring?
> <working>… Two.
My day improves. Solidarity in sisterhood.
*
It's forty minutes earlier. I am working on my second meth roast
and my head is beginning to clear. I have a film on the table in
front of me and Mephista and I are re-arranging clues for the thousandth
time, trying to figure out what the hell happened to my friend Evan.
I am staring stupidly at a long list of Japanese teas cross-referenced
against the meaning of the character in Sencha's puzzle. I send
out a query in search of a user profile, feeling like a character
in that ancient Link story, "The Girl Detective."
The little bell over the café door jingles and Isaiah 3
shuffles in, smiling. He is old and black and blind. Rumor has it
he can resurrect the dead. He's always very friendly, but everybody
gives him a wide berth.
*
It's Easter Sunday, 2135. I am standing on a dock again. This time
my mother is stepping into a rowboat on a river in Spain. She is
going offline.
"So I guess this is it," I say. My frosty new moving
tat winds around my shoulders. I can feel it on my skin like the
prickle of lizard's feet.
"You'll find me someday."
"No, I won't. That's what going offline means."
"I'm sorry," she says. But I'm seventeen and I'm not
buying that for a second.
"Yeah, well. Your choice," I say. I'm almost too angry
to allow a last hug, but I force myself to lean forward. The moving
tat creeps under the strap of my halter top and clings to the edge
of my collar blade. My mother looks at it for a long moment.
She can't bring herself to touch me.
"Goodbye," she says.
*
Evan never flinched from touching. Yes, he fell in love too often
and too easily. But if that was his weakness, he paid for it with
his life; and it was his strength too.
What I think is, sometimes it's all right to cry. Sometimes life
hurts.
Goodbye, Evan
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