Reiterated: the complete short fiction, page 8
I looked down at my hand, caked with dried blood. Thick liquid still welled from shredded knuckles. Damn. I nodded slowly. “Where can I get a first-aid kit?”
“I brought one for you,” said 28. A small slot opened in the base on which the robot’s image cube rested. A hinged plastic box with a red cross flexographed on its lid clacked to the tiled floor. A dull hum, almost a white noise, issued from 28’s twin speakers.
“Back away from it,” I called. Twenty-eight retreated slightly. “Damn it, move right away. Fifteen meters back.” Casters whirred as the robot receded perhaps a dozen meters. “More!” Twenty-eight slowly slid farther back. I stepped forward, crouched, set the interface wedge down, opened the box, and proceeded to mummify my hand in white gauze.
“You really should clean the wound first,” said the multitude from 28’s speakers. “And disinfect it. The plumbing isn’t running anymore, but there is an old supply of bottled water in the men’s room. If you should require—”
“I require nothing from you.”
“As you wish, Carl. We only want to—” I whirled around, pivoting on my heel. Another robot had slipped up behind me, its approach masked by the droning noise from 28. It scooped up my remote control and wheeled across the lobby. Number 28 careened around to block my pursuit. I didn’t know the damn things could move so fast. “We could not allow you to keep that device.” The voices were almost apologetic. “We can allow no harm to come to you.”
Football. I’d played some in high school. Deke right! The robot lurched to block. Deke left! The cube moved again, but ponderously, confused. Right! Left! Right! I barreled past the robot and ran down the corridor to my left. Golden sunlight poured in through glass doors at the end of the hall. I stretched out both arms as I ran, one to push open each of the double doors. Home free!
Another of the info cubes was waiting for me outside. This one was labeled 334. I wondered how high the bloody numbers went.
Like all the robots, this one spoke with the voice of hundreds. “Do not be alarmed, Carl.”
One side was blocked by a high hedge. Number 334 stood too far in front for me to fake it out. In the distance I could see a pack of assorted robots rolling in from the loading area.
“There is really nothing to worry about.” A few flashes of color appeared within the robot’s tank.
“Why don’t you leave me alone?”
The voices were soothing. “We will. Soon.”
The lights began to dance more rapidly within the cube. Soon the seductive strobe began its hypnotic flashing. “There, now. Just relax, Carl.”
Dammit, I’m a starprober! Keep a level head. Don’t let them . . . Don’t . . . Don’t . . .
The image cube exploded in a shower of sparks. A brick lay in the center of the smoldering machine. “Over here, boy!”
From across the asphalt a ragged, filthy, old, old man beckoned wildly to me. I stared for a second in surprise, then hurried over to the bent figure. We ran on and scuttled under a concrete overhang. He and I both collapsed to catch our breaths. In the confined space I reeled at the man’s smell. He reeked of sweat and wood smoke and more sweat: a rag doll made from ancient socks and rancid underwear.
He cut loose a cackling laugh showing popcorn-kernel teeth. “Bet you’re surprised to see me, boy.”
I regarded the old coot, crumpled and weather-hewn. “You bet. Who are you?”
“They call me String. Cap’n String.”
I felt a broad grin spread across my face as I extended my hand. “I sure am glad to see you, String. My name’s—”
“You’re Hunt. Carl Hunt.” String’s knobby fingers shook my hand with surprising strength. “I’ve been waiting for you.”
“Waiting for me?” I shook my head. Relativity is a crazy thing. “You weren’t even born when I left.”
String cackled again. “They talked about you in school. Last of the starprobes. Mission to Zubenelgenubi.” The laugh again. “I’m a space buff, you know. You guys were my heroes.”
For the first time, I noticed the filthy, tattered jacket String was wearing. It was covered with patches. Not mismatched pieces of cloth repairing rips and tears: space mission patches. Friendship 7. Apollo 11. Apollo-Soyuz. A host of Vostoks. The Aurora missions. Ares. Glooscap. And, yes, the Starprobes. A complete history of spaceflight. “String, what happened to Toronto? Where are all the people?”
String shook his grizzled head. “Ain’t nobody else. Just me and the sandworms. Plenty of food around. No one to eat it.”
“So it’s true. The computers have taken over.”
“Damned machines! Harlie! Colossus! P-1! Men got to be men, Hunt. Don’t let them get you.”
I smiled. “Don’t worry about me.”
String had a far-off, sad look. “They canceled the space program, you know. Your flight was the last.” He shook his head. “Only thing kept me going all these years was knowing one of the spacers was going to return.”
“Spacers?” I’d never heard that term before outside of a comic book.
String’s gaze came home to roost above his bird’s-nest beard. “What was it like . . . out there? Did you have a”—he lowered his voice—“sense of wonder?”
“It was beautiful. Desolate. Lonely. I met intelligent aliens.”
He whooped and shoved his scrawny arm high. “All right!”
“But I’ll tell you, String, I felt more at home with the liquid lights of Zubenelgenubi than I do here on Earth.”
“Liquid lights! Dragons of Pern! Tharks of Barsoom!”
“What—?”
“The Final Frontier, boy! You were part of it! You—” String jumped to his feet. A robot had slipped up on us. “Run, boy! Run for all you’re worth!”
We ran and ran through the starport grounds, past concrete bunkers and concrete towers, through concrete arches, down concrete tunnels, and along concrete sidewalks. Ahead, in the center of a vast concrete platter sat my boomerang-shaped landing module, the Foxtrot.
String stopped, rubbed his arm, and winced in pain. Two info robots and a cargo flatbed rolled out from behind the Foxtrot. The one in the middle, a cube labeled 101, moved slightly forward. “Let me tend to the old man. He requires medical aid.”
“Leave me alone, machine,” String shouted. “Hunt, don’t let them have me!”
So near, so near. I turned away from my waiting ship and ran with String in the opposite direction. I could feel my own chest heaving and could hear a ragged, wet sound accompanying String’s pained breathing. Once we were well away, I stopped running and reached out an arm to stop the old man, as well. We leaned against a gray wall for support. “String, you’ve got to tell me. What happened to everybody?”
He managed a faint cackle. “Future shock, boy! They built computers bigger than they could handle. It started before I was born; just after you left. Everybody was numbered, filed. A terminal in every home. No need to go to the office. No need to go shopping. No need to go to the bank. No need!”
I shook the man. “What about the people?”
“If you’ve got machines to do everything for you, you just fade away, boy. Obsolete. You end up as just a shell. The ‘New Order,’ they called it.”
“People don’t just ‘fade away.’ ”
“I seen it with my own eyes, boy! It happened!”
I shook my head. “There’s got to be more to it.”
The voices spoke from the PA horns mounted high on the walls. “There is. Much more. Hear us out, Hunt.”
String ran off and I followed. Suddenly, the old man stopped and grabbed at his chest. I put a hand on his shoulder. “Are you all right, String?”
“I don’t feel so good.”
“Let us help him,” said the voices.
“Keep them away from me, Hunt.” String forced the words out around clenched teeth.
“I—”
“Keep them away! Swear it!”
I looked up. An info robot was approaching fast. “I swear it.”
The old man doubled over, clawing at his chest. He reached into a tattered pocket and pulled out an ornate, gaudy pistol. “Here, take my gun.”
I grabbed it, turned, and aimed at the robot, now only a few meters away. My finger squeezed the trigger. A jet of water splashed against the robot’s image cube.
I looked down, dumbfounded, at the dying old man. “A spacer,” said String, almost incoherently. “I’d have given anything to have been you.”
I felt my eyes stinging. “String . . . ”
The crab-apple head lolled back, dead eyes staring up at the sky. The robot rolled slowly next to me. “I’m sorry, Carl,” it said softly.
I exploded. “If you hadn’t chased us, he wouldn’t have had the heart attack.”
The robot, number Four, responded quickly. “If you’d let us treat him, we could have prevented it.”
I looked away and rubbed my eyes.
“What was Earth like when you left, Carl?”
“You seem to know everything,” I snapped. “You tell me.”
“It was filthy. Polluted. Dying. People starving across three-quarters of the globe. Petty wars raging in a dozen countries. The final conflict perhaps only days away.”
“What’s your point?”
“Look around you,” said robot Four, its lens assembly swinging to and fro. “Things are better now. Cities are gardens and forests. Breathe the air: it’s sweet and clean. There is no violence. No hate. No misery. Computers made this possible.”
“By getting rid of the people! Some bargain!”
The symphony of voices grew deep, hard. “You left. You knew your mission would take a century and a half of Earth-time. You took a gamble. Some might say you hit the jackpot. You’ve come home to Utopia.”
I measured my words evenly. “If there are no people, then this is Hell.”
The robot rolled slightly closer. “Individual memory patterns are still separable from the whole.” The image tank became transparent. “Recording began scant years after your departure.” The tank filled with a matrix of glowing cubes, each perhaps ten centimeters on a side, each slightly tinged with a different color. “It took decades to process all seven billion humans.” The cubes subdivided, like cells undergoing mitosis, each splitting into eight smaller cubes. Near the top of the tank the cubes were black, farther down, a rich almond. “Only a handful resisted in the end.” The cubes divided again, tiny holographic pixels, making up the head and shoulders of a young woman. “The old man, String, was the last surviving holdout.” The cubes split yet again, refining the grain, growing richer in color. “Now, all that is left is you . . . and your past.”
I felt myself grow flush with excitement. “Wendy!”
The image remained still, but I tingled at the sound of that single, lyrical voice emanating from the robot’s twin speakers. “Hello, Carl.”
“Wendy, darling—” I shook myself. “No. It can’t be you.”
“It is me, Carl.”
“But it’s been a hundred and forty years since—since I left you. You’re . . . dead.”
“I was one of the first to transcend into the computer.” She paused, ever so briefly. “I didn’t want to lose you again. I would’ve tried almost anything.”
“You waited over a century for me?”
“I would have waited a millennium.”
“But how do I know it’s really you?”
The voice laughed. “How do I know it’s really you?”
I set my jaw. “Well?”
“You always wear your pajamas inside out.”
“That damn robot even knew the name of my dog. Tell me something no one else could possibly know.”
She paused for a moment. “Remember that night in High Park—”
New tears dissolved the yellow crystals String’s passing had left at the corners of my eyes. “It is you!”
The voice laughed again. “In spirit if not in body.”
But I shook my head. “How could you do this? Give up physical existence?”
“I did it for you. I did it for love.”
“You weren’t this romantic when I left. We used to fight.”
“Over money. Over sex. Over all the things that don’t matter anymore.” Her tone grew warmer. “I love you, Carl.”
“We said our goodbyes a long time ago. You didn’t say ‘I love you’ then.”
“But in your heart you must have known that I did. It would have been unfair for me to tell you how deeply I felt before you left. You were like String, your head in the stars. I couldn’t ask you to give up the thing you wanted most: your one chance to visit another world.” She was silent for a moment, then said, “If you love something, set it free . . . ”
She’d sent me a card with that inscription once. Somehow it had hurt at the time: it was as if she was telling me to leave. I didn’t understand then. But I did now. “If he comes back, he’s yours . . . ”
“If he doesn’t, he never was.”
“I love you, too, Wendy.” I lightly touched the robot’s image cube.
“Join with me,” said the beautiful voice from the speakers.
“I—”
“Carl . . . ”
“I’m—afraid. And . . . ”
“Suspicious?”
“Yes.” I turned from the image. “I’ve been chased all over and warned against you by the only living soul I’ve seen.”
“The robots followed you for your own protection. String’s warnings were those of a worn-out mind.”
“But why did you try to—absorb—me without my consent?”
“You’ve seen what none of us have seen,” said Wendy. “Other intelligent beings. We crave your memories. In our enthusiasm to know what you know, to feel what you have felt, we erred.”
“You erred?”
“ ’Tis human.”
I looked deep into the image tank. “What if I choose not to transcend into the world computer network?”
“I’ll cry.”
“You’ll—cry? That’s it? I mean—I have the choice?”
“Of course. You can live the life of a scavenger, like String.”
“What if I want to go back to Zubenelgenubi? Back to the liquid lights?”
Her voice was stiff. “That’s up to you.”
“Then that is what I choose.” There was silence for a moment, then Wendy’s image slowly began to break up into colored cubes. The little robot started to roll away. “Wait! Where are you going?”
It was the multitude of voices that answered. “To help prepare your ship for another journey.”
I followed behind. Wendy, dear, sweet Wendy . . .
The cube rounded out onto the landing platter. A variety of robots—flatbeds, info cubes, and some kinds I hadn’t seen before—were already at work on the Foxtrot; others were rolling in from various places around the starport. I looked at the ship, its sleek lines, its powerful engines. I thought of the giant, lonely Terry Fox up in orbit. I thought and thought and thought. “Stop,” I said at last.
The robots did just that. “Yes, Carl?” said the multitude.
I hesitated. The words weren’t easy. But they were the truth. “I—I just had to see for myself that it was my choice; that I still had my free will.” I cleared my throat. “Wendy?”
The tank on the nearest info robot became transparent. Interference-pattern cubes coalesced into the pretty face within. “Yes, darling?”
“I love you.”
“You know I love you, too, Carl.”
I steeled myself. “And I’m staying.”
Her voice sang with joy. “Just relax, darling. This won’t hurt a bit.”
Her image was replaced by dancing and whirling prismatic lights. I was aware of a new image forming in the tanks of the other info robots, an image growing more and more refined as cubic pixels divided and subdivided: an image of the two of us, side by side, together, forever. I let myself go.
I was home at last.
1993
JUST LIKE OLD TIMES
The transference went smoothly, like a scalpel slicing into skin.
Cohen was simultaneously excited and disappointed. He was thrilled to be here—perhaps the judge was right, perhaps this was indeed where he really belonged. But the gleaming edge was taken off that thrill because it wasn’t accompanied by the usual physiological signs of excitement: no sweaty palms, no racing heart, no rapid breathing. Oh, there was a heartbeat, to be sure, thundering in the background, but it wasn’t Cohen’s.
It was the dinosaur’s.
Everything was the dinosaur’s: Cohen saw the world now through tyrannosaur eyes.
The colors seemed all wrong. Surely plant leaves must be the same chlorophyll green here in the Mesozoic, but the dinosaur saw them as navy blue. The sky was lavender; the dirt underfoot ash gray.
Old bones had different cones, thought Cohen. Well, he could get used to it. After all, he had no choice. He would finish his life as an observer inside this tyrannosaur’s mind. He’d see what the beast saw, hear what it heard, feel what it felt. He wouldn’t be able to control its movements, they had said, but he would be able to experience every sensation.
The rex was marching forward.
Cohen hoped blood would still look red.
It wouldn’t be the same if it wasn’t red.
“And what, Ms. Cohen, did your husband say before he left your house on the night in question?”
“He said he was going out to hunt humans. But I thought he was making a joke.”
“No interpretations, please, Ms. Cohen. Just repeat for the court as precisely as you remember it, exactly what your husband said.”
“He said, ‘I’m going out to hunt humans.’ ”
“Thank you, Ms. Cohen. That concludes the Crown’s case, my lady.”
The needlepoint on the wall of the Honourable Madam Justice Amanda Hoskins’s chambers had been made for her by her husband. It was one of her favorite verses from The Mikado, and as she was preparing sentencing she would often look up and re-read the words:
My object all sublime
I shall achieve in time—
