Strange Trades (38 page)

I thought I knew, but I still asked, “How’s it float like that?”

“Superconducting wires woven into the fabric. Just like the mag-lev train you hopped to work this morning. It rides the steel frame of the building on magnetic lift. The wires give it its shape, too. Combination of stiffness and interactive fields. And all its sensing circuits, cameras, probes and chips are incorporated right in the material too. Oh, and its power pack as well.”

“Well, all right, why can’t it look like a normal robot?”

“Why should it? It doesn’t need a body because it doesn’t have to lift or move anything. But it’s got to be roughly humanoid so that it can efficiently monitor the same body space that the average worker occupies. The building management might have decided to let loose another horde of MICE, but the building’s crawling with MICE already. So they went with this. And wrapping it in clothing makes it familiar. It’s an elegant design. Whimsical, too.”

“It’s terrifying. It reminds me of a ghost.”

Carl laughed. “C’mon, Mark, don’t be superstitious! Here, poke it. Go ahead, it doesn’t mind.”

Suiting his actions to his words, Carl jabbed a finger into the thing. It bobbled backwards on its magnetic fields, then righted itself.

I came up tentatively to the SUIT and tried the same thing.

My finger encountered the sensation of yielding flesh beneath the fabric. Although I knew it was just an electromagnetic simulation of skin and blood, it was almost indistinguishable from poking a living body, save for its lack of warmth.

I shivered, and stepped back. Had I seen the SUIT start to raise its arms, as if against me…?

Shaking my head, I said, “No, I’m sorry, Carl, I really don’t like it.…”

“You’re just jealous because it’s wearing—or made of—better clothing than you own.”

This was true. The manufacturer had chosen a beautiful designer outfit to modify.

“How many of these things are there?”

“Oh, a dozen or so. There’re even female ones.”

“No!”

“Sure. Skirt, frilly blouse, jacket, floppy bow tie. Equal employment opportunities for sensing devices too, you know.”

Suddenly, the SUIT began to drift away. Its legs, of course, didn’t bend in walking movements—and thank God for that! It simply floated silently away like a specter, its empty arms slightly bent at the elbow.

“How did you get it in here?”

“I phoned Sys-Ops and told them to send it to your office, to check a funny smell with its chemosensors. It must’ve finished just now.”

“Someone down in Sys-Ops is guiding these all the time?”

“Not at all. The SUITs run off the server without human intervention most of the time. It’s only if something turns up that the heuristics can’t deal with that a live operator is called. Doesn’t happen that often either. At least not yet.”

I paused to consider everything Carl had told me. In the end, I supposed, the SUITs were just one more thing I didn’t like about my job.

“Well, please don’t ever send one of those things in again when I’m in the middle of concentrating. It’s very disturbing.”

Once again Carl laughed. “Oh, now that you know what they are, you’ll get used to them.”

But he was wrong.

The next few months were among the most hectic and enervating of my life. I was burdened and overburdened with work on a dozen projects, each one of them more reprehensible than the last.

Our firm wasn’t the biggest contractor in our particular job arena, and it wasn’t the smartest. There were competitors out there who could both outspend and outthink us. Practically the only way we could get work was to underbid. And that resulted in cutting some pretty sharp corners.

In the weeks after I first saw the SUIT, I had to make the following compromises:

Switch to a lower grade of concrete for the foundations of a new airline terminal.

Cut back as far as I dared on the number of structural beams in a hotel walkway.

Substitute a thousand two-pane windows for the requested three-pane ones.

Use PVC piping in place of copper.

Find a source of used bricks when new ones had been promised.

Every such morally dubious action I was forced to take left me feeling more and more hollow. I lay awake nights, wondering how I had ended up in such a position. I wanted to quit, but just couldn’t convince myself to do it. The paycheck was too regular, my lifestyle too secure. I tried to tell myself that everyone made such compromises, no matter where they worked. That no one was getting hurt with this second-class material even though they had expected to receive first-class goods. That the difference was minimal, undetectable, would never be noticed by the occupants of the shoddy structures.

But somehow, every time I saw one of the SUITs, my whole facade of rationalizations came crumbling down like one of my crappy buildings under a wrecker’s ball. They had an emotional effect on me out of all proportion to their reality.

And I swore there must’ve been more than the dozen that Carl had specified. They seemed to be everywhere. Indistinguishable from one another, they could’ve been an army whose members were uncountable due to their cookie-cutter identicalness.

Every time I decided to go to the john, it seemed, I’d encounter a SUIT in the corridors. There it would be, hovering mysteriously under a heating vent, perhaps sampling the output; or—far worse—pausing by a window
as if looking out
. (They were only registering drafts, I kept telling myself.)

I found myself instinctively hugging the wall farthest away from the mobile units, as if afraid that they would swing around at my approach and confront me with their faceless gaze, an array of sensors that would read my second-rate soul and report me to some heavenly OSHA.

When I went down to a corner of the lobby for a cigarette, a SUIT would always show up, most likely attracted by my illicit smoke. It would approach unnervingly close, though it never violated my interpersonal sphere of space, having been programmed, I assumed, to respect a person’s boundaries. It would hover remonstrantly, like the ghost of smokers past, sending its accusatory telemetry back to the mother CPU in the subbasement. I would always hastily stub out my cigarette and flee, with a feeling of guilt such as I hadn’t experienced since childhood.

And they even drifted into the cafeteria, spoiling any enjoyment I might have taken in my lunches. The SUITs had a habit of hanging around the trash cans, perhaps sampling airborne bacteria counts, and it became an exercise in nerves for me simply to deposit my empty paper cup under its headless scrutiny.

Once, one joined the serving line. Moving perfectly along with the flow of diners—none of whom seemed to share my unease, but instead pointed at the SUIT and laughed among themselves—it passed down the line of steam tables, sampling odors through its sleeves, filling its nonexistent belly with data for the Department of Health.

I soon came to fear and despise the female SUITs even more than the male ones. Their feminine clothing seemed a more elaborate mockery of their cybernetic hollowness than did that of the males. (The lack of any woman currently in my life, I realized, had something to do with this feeling.) The designers had even equipped each female SUIT with moderate, subtle curves of hip, waist and bust—a magnetic illusion of fertility—rendering further obscene their bodiless presence—at least in my eyes.

And because their empty skirts ended at knee height, their flying-carpet nature was even more apparent than with the male SUITs. They seemed to swoop down on me with more alacrity than the males, more predatory and harsh.

I’ll never forget the time I was standing at the supply cabinet, trying to find an old-fashioned eraser under all the disks and print cartridges. (I still liked to draft a few small plans by hand. It was about the only soothing activity connected with my job.) A female SUIT popped out
from behind the cabinet
, and I felt my heart jump like a rabbit inside my chest.

What it had been doing behind the supply locker, I couldn’t guess. (The space between the cabinet and the wall, by the way, was only a few inches. Apparently, the SUITs could alter their shape at will, shrinking to occupy the same dimensions as a regular suit of clothes flat on a hanger.) All I knew was that it seemed at that instant to be hurling itself at me like a giant bat or raptor of some sort, and I scrabbled backward like a frightened mouse.

Luckily, no one was there to witness my humiliation.

After a time, I tried explaining my feelings about the SUITs to Carl. But he only laughed, and shrugged it off.

“You’ve been working too hard,” he said, clapping a falsely hearty palm on my shoulder. And that was when the hallucination happened.

I saw Carl as a SUIT. His head grew translucent, transparent, then disappeared. His hands vanished, as did his feet in their shoes. Then there was nothing but an empty sack of clothing with its arm upraised to my shoulder.

Jerking back, I felt a shout beginning in my throat. But before it emerged, my vision returned to normal, and there was Carl again standing before me.

Now he looked genuinely concerned, if only for the smooth functioning of the workplace. “Mark—are you okay?”

I mumbled something. Carl seemed to come to a quick decision.

“Mark, you’re kind of bringing the whole office down lately. Your attitude, you know. I think what I’d like to do is switch you to nights. It would free up your workstation during the days too. We could pump out some extra specs that way. What do you say?”

What could I say? I could sense that it was either agree, or lose my job.

So I agreed.

The building that housed our firm was fifty stories tall, and held numerous other tenants.

But none of them seemed to work at night.

I was to be alone in the building with the SUITs and the janitor MICE.

The first night, I managed to make it up to our floor without encountering a single SUIT. I turned on every light in the office and locked the outer door.

When I at last dared to look up from my monitor, I saw a flock of shadows clustered outside the frosted glass of the hall door like an army of the undead.

The SUITs.

I slowly got up from my chair. I didn’t know what I was doing, or where I was going.

Then I heard the solenoid of the electronic lock click open, under orders from the building’s CPU.

I found myself in Carl’s office without memory of having run there, leaning against the closed door. With trembling hands, I grabbed a chair and shoved it under the doorknob.

It was several hours before they gave up and left. I could tell by the cessation of the muted rustling of fabric, as they brushed against one another. It was another several hours before I dared to open the door.

Somehow, I made it out of the building unmolested.

When I got home, I took several pills and went straight to bed.

Although I usually wore pajamas, that night I slept naked. Lying on a chair, my garments repelled me. Had I put them on, I was afraid of what the mirror would have shown.

When I woke from the drugged sleep, it was dark again, almost as if day had never been.

I got dressed, and left for work.

Why did I go?

At the time, I recall, I had lots of seemingly sensible reasons. The SUITs were ultimately under human control. They were simply innocent tools or devices, and hadn’t meant to hurt me. A feedback loop of some sort had developed, triggered by my unusual presence alone at night. The artificially intelligent software had fixed itself—a task it was perfectly capable of—and would be fine. I had to show up, or be fired. I had to show up, or admit that spooks and hallucinations had broken me.

Good logic. But none of these were the real reason, I now realize.

I wanted to see what the SUITs had to show me.

When I let myself into the building—there were no human security guards anymore, with the SUITs in place—they were waiting for me.

Just two, a male and a female.

But it was enough.

Flanking me, the SUITs conducted me to the elevator.

When its door opened, without my summoning it, they boarded with me.

Their shoulders brushed mine in the narrow confines of the elevator, substantial yet meaningless.

The door whooshed open on my floor.

The whole level was full of SUITs.

Scores and scores of them.

They were engaged in a perfect simulation of a normal day.

SUITs stood around the water cooler in attitudes of relaxed conversation. SUITs sat at desks in postures of typing and writing. SUITs moved to and fro on errands. SUITs opened and closed file drawers with invisible magnetic appendages. SUITs stood eagerly by the fax machine. SUITs bent paperclips in meditation or boredom. SUITs stapled papers. SUITs held clipboards and pens.

Fascinated, I stepped away from my escorts, who left me to join their fellows in their solemn stolen enactment. In a daze, I moved through the office.

In the conference room, a dozen SUITs sat around the long wooden table in earnest confab. One passed the metal water pitcher to another.