Godlike Machines (27 page)

“Your brain ate it, though.”

I looked around, suddenly paranoid. There was no one. “Shhh. Yes. But I didn’t know that my brain would eat it when I let them install it.”

“So why’d you do it?”

I thought back. “I was a kid,” I said at last. “I’d just lost my Dad and my home. They were nice to me. They said that they’d leave me alone once I had the wire fitted. That was all I wanted.”

“Did you like it?”

“Having a wire? Well, not the worst thing in the world, having a wire. I never felt lonely. And when I was sad, it passed quickly. I think it would have been a lot harder without it.”

“So you think it’s therapeutic, then? Maybe I should get one after all.”

I turned around and took her hands. “Don’t, OK? Please. I like you this way.”

We got home and sat down in the theater seats. I thought we’d talk about it, but we seemed to have run out of words. I wished for a moment that we had matching antennae so I could know what she was feeling. That was pretty weird.

“Show me this play,” she said. “I fell asleep the other night.”

So I started it up. I’d done a major, three-year-long maintenance project on it that had just wrapped up, so it was running as good as new. I was proud of the work I’d done. I wished that Dad could see it. Lacey was nearly as good.

We sat through the opening scene and rotated around the arc of the circle by 60 degrees and went through the change to the roaring 20s, and the family’s kitchen was now filled with yarn-like wires coming off the ceiling light and leading to all the appliances. Dad was wearing a bow-tie now, and fanning himself with Souvenir of Niagara Falls fan. Dad wants to show us all his new modern appliances, and so they all switch on and start flapping and clacking while frenetic music plays in the background. Then a “fuse” blows—I looked this up, it means that he overloaded a crude breaker in the power-supply—and the whole street goes dark. A neighbor threatens to beat him, but then “Jimmy”-yes, Jimmy again—changes the fuse and the lights come back.

Mom and sister are getting into costume—there’s a Fourth of July party that night—and Dad has to join them, but he gets us to sing his song. I noted that Lacey tapped her toe as we went around the arc, and it made me feel very good.

After the show, I made us diner and Lacey told me more funny stories from the road. Then we crawled into bed and she enfolded me in her arms. We’d done that every night. I didn’t cry anymore, and it felt so good. Like something I’d always missed.

“They’re going to come for you,” I said, lying with my eyes open, feeling her arms around me.

“They are, huh?”

“Put a wire in your head.”

“And you don’t think I should do that.”

“I’ll go with you.” I swallowed. “If you want.”

She squeezed me harder. “I don’t think you’ll be able to carry this thing, do you?”

“I don’t mind.”

“Liar. You’ve been taking care of this thing for 20 years, Jimmy!”

“That was when I thought that Dad would come back for it. Doesn’t sound like he’ll come back now. Stupid terrorists.”

“Who?”

“The assholes who attacked Detroit. Whoever they were.” I noticed that she’d stiffened a little. “I thought they were thieves at first, after our stuff. But from what you say, it sounds like they were terrorists—they just wanted to destroy it all. We probably had the last mountain of steel-belted radials in the world, you know?”

She didn’t say anything for a bit. “I can go in the morning. We can stay in touch.”

“I want to go with you.” I surprised myself with the vehemence of it. “I need to get away from here. I need to get away from this
thing.”
I punched out at the wall at the edge of the bed, giving it a hard thump and sending the pack scurrying around in circles. “Fuck this thing. It’s a prison. It’s stuck me down here. Just another one of Dad’s stupid ideas.”

“You shouldn’t talk about your Dad that way. He was—”

“What? He was an asshole! Look at me! Do you think I want to be like
this
forever?”

“You told me that you thought you’d found a cure for it—”

I laughed. “Sure, sure. But I’ve thought that for 20 years. Nothing’s worked.”

She hugged me tighter. “It’s not all bad, is it? It could be worse. You could be getting old, like me. I get what I can out of the neutriceuticals, but you know, it gets harder every day. I can’t walk as far as I used to. Can’t see as well. Can’t hear as well. I’m getting wrinkled, I keep finding grey hairs—”

“Come on,” I said. “You’re a beautiful woman. You got to grow up. I’m just a little kid! I’m going to stay a little kid forever. You got to change. Not just change, either-
progress!
You got to progress, to get better and smarter and wiser and, you know,
more!”

“I’m just saying it’s not as good as you think it is.”

“You get to have sex!” I blurted. “You get to know what it’s like.”

“You’ve never?”

“Never,” I said. “Physiologically, I’m 11 or 12. No adult would have sex with me. And it’s not right for me to make out with little kids. The last girl I kissed was you, Lacey.”

“Oh, Jimmy,” she said. She stroked my hair. “I’m sorry. It’s hard to know how to think of you. Sometimes I think you’re just a little kid, but you’re actually a little older than me, aren’t you?”

“Yeah,” I said. “But my brain doesn’t age much either. It’s too plastic. I don’t get to build up layers of experience one on top of another—it slips out underneath. I really have to concentrate to think properly. The local scientists would be freaked out about this if they could be freaked out about anything. This is probably the only place in the world where never changing is considered to be a signal virtue.”

I realized that I was balling up my fists and so I relaxed them and took some deep breaths. Lacey was snuggled up against me and it was warm and good. I tried to focus on that, and not the yawning pit in my gut.

“You’re not going to take me with you, are you?”

She swallowed. “We’ll see.”

I knew what that meant.

I tried not to let her hear me cry, but it shook my ribs, and she hugged me harder. She didn’t say “I’ll take you with,” though. Of course not. She didn’t want to have a kid, an instant son.

I woke from a strange dream of kissing and sliding skin. I had a rock hard erection, like nothing I’d ever felt before. There was that itch again, in my belly, that I supposed meant “horny,” though I’d never felt it like this. Lacey had drooped away from me in her sleep and was lying on her back beside me. In the dim light of the pack’s glowing power-indicators, I could see her chest rising and falling, her nipples visible through the thin fabric of her night-shirt. I remembered what she’d looked like naked the other night. She must have noticed my reaction, because she’d changed in private every night since. I realized that that was what I’d been dreaming of.

I reached out with a tentative hand and let it barely graze over her breast. She didn’t stir. It felt soft, giving under my finger. My mouth was bone dry. I pulled back the coverlet. Her long t-shirt had ridden up, and I could see her legs all the way up to the curve of her hip. I touched her hip, stroking it with the same hesitancy. Warm. Jouncy-firm but giving. I touched her thigh. She muttered something and stirred.

I froze. She put one hand on her tummy, and her shirt rucked up higher. Now I could see all her hair down there. It was too dark to see anything more. I put my hand on her thigh again, halfway up. Her breathing didn’t change. I slid my hand higher. Higher still.

My smallest finger brushed up against something very soft and a little moist, something that felt like a warm mushroom.

“Jimmy?”

I knew that she was awake, fully awake. I snatched my hand away.

“God, I’m sorry Lacey.”

“What are you doing, Jimmy?”

“I —” I couldn’t find the words. It was too embarrassing, too weird. Too creepy.

“It was the sex talk, huh?”

I swallowed. I calmed myself down. I decided I could talk about this like a man of science. “I’m not quite physiologically there, when it comes to sex. I’m sort of stuck between the first stage of sexual maturity and childhood. Normally, it’s not a problem, but...” I ran out of science.

“Yeah,” she said. “I wondered about that. Come here, Jimmy.”

Awkwardly, I snuggled up to her, letting her spoon behind me.

“No,” she said. “Turn around.”

I turned around. I had my little boner again, and I was conscious of how it must be pressing against her thigh, the way her breasts were pressed against my chest. Her face was inches from mine, her breath warm on my lips.

She kissed me.

She kissed
exactly
like I remembered it, 20 years before. Slowly, with a lazy bit of tongue. Her teeth were warm in her mouth as I tentatively reciprocated. She took my hand and put it on her breast. Her nipple was a little bump in the center of my palm, the flesh of her breast yielding under my hand. I squeezed it and rubbed it and touched it, almost forgetting the kiss. She laughed a little and pulled her shirt up and pulled my face down to her breasts. I kissed them, kissed the nipples, unsure of what to do, but hearing her breath catch when I did something right. I tried to do more of that. It was fascinating. The pack roused itself and squirmed over us. I pushed them away.

She gave a soft little moan. Her hands roamed over my back, squeezed my butt. Her hand found my little boner. I gave a jolt, then another as she started to move her hand. Then I felt something like a sneeze, that started in my stomach and went
down.
There was sticky stuff on her hand.

“Wow,” I said. “I didn’t know I could do that.”

“Let’s find out what else you can do,” she said.

The next day was my scheduled day at the research station, but I didn’t want to leave Lacey alone in the Carousel, not now that Sebastien and Tina knew about her. They might come by to ask her some questions about her intentions.

Besides, there was the matter of what we’d done the night before. It had lasted for a long time. There was a lot I didn’t know. When we were done, I knew a
lot
more. And it was all I could think of, from the moment I woke up with the smells on me and the small aches here and there; while I was in the bathroom and pissing through a dick that felt
different
, gummy and sticky; while I was washing up and digging some grapefruits out of my storehouse for breakfast, slicing them open and grabbing water from the osmotic filter for the day.

Lacey was sitting up in bed, the pack arrayed around her, the sheet not covering her beautiful breasts. Her hair was in great disarray and her mouth was a little puffy and swollen from kissing.

“Good morning,” she said, and smiled at me, her little bow mouth widening into a giant grin.

I smiled back and handed her a grapefruit. I cuddled up to her as we ate and she laughed when I got a squirt of grapefruit in the eye. We didn’t say much, but then the Flea, who is also in charge of my calendar reminders, began to chitter at me to tell me it was time to go to the lab.

“What’s he want?”

“I’m supposed to see the researchers here. About my immortality. I go every couple of weeks and they do more tests, measure me. Whatever Dad did to my germline wasn’t documented anywhere public. He had all these buddies around the world who had treated themselves to make them immortal, and they were all refining the process. None of them seem to be anywhere that we can find them, so we’re trying to reverse-engineer them.”

“What kind of researchers would a place like this have? I’d have thought that they would be pretty hostile to R&D in a place that isn’t supposed to change.”

“Well, when the whole world is changing all the time, it takes a lot of R&D to respond to it so that you don’t change along with it. Some of them are pretty good. I looked up their bios. They were highly respected before they became wireheads. Mellowing out your emotions shouldn’t interfere with your science anyway.”

“Are they trying to cure your immortality or replicate it?”

I turned to look at her. “What do you mean? Cure it, of course.”

“Really? If they don’t want any change, wouldn’t it make sense to infect everyone with it?”

“It makes a perverse kind of sense, I suppose. If you were into conspiracy theories, it would be believable. But I know these guys-they don’t have it in them to lie to me, or to make me sad on purpose. That’s the good thing about living here: you can always be sure that the people around you are every bit as nice as they seem. Sincere.”

“If you say so,” she said. Even though she didn’t have an antenna, I could feel her skepticism. Fine, be skeptical. Wire-heads didn’t scheme, they just
did stuff,
that was what it meant to be a wirehead. She nuzzled my neck. I turned my head and we kissed. It was weird with the lights on.

I broke it off and said, “I’ve got to get to the lab.” The Flea was running in little circles and chiding me, making the point. I pulled on my jumpsuit and zipped it up.

“Will you be long?”

I shrugged. “Couple hours,” I said. “Don’t answer the door, OK? I mean, just lay low. Stay here. My neighbors—”

“I get it,” she said. “Don’t want to get kidnapped and wired up, right?”

“They won’t kidnap you. Just put the question to you and kick you out if you give the wrong answer.”

She opened her arms. “Come give me a kiss goodbye, my brave protector,” she said. I leaned in and let her give me a hard hug and a harder kiss. The hug felt like that first night, when it was just the chance to have a human being holding me; the kiss felt like the night before, when we’d done things I’d never given much thought to.

“Love you, Jimmy,” she whispered fiercely in my ear.

Dad used to say that a lot. “You too,” I said, because it was what I always said to him.

The sun was high and the day was crisp, the kind of weather that made you forget just how hot it could be in the summer. Drifts of colored leaves rustled around me as the bare trees sighed in the wind. The sun was bright and harsh. I’d been through many of these autumns, but I’d never had a day that felt this
autumnal,
this crisp and real and vivid.