by Dave Ring
Sam is trembling. She feels it first in her knees and thinks for a moment she might pitch herself over the side after all. In a matter of seconds, they will be within firing range of whatever guns these people have with them. And if they are going after a train, it won’t be with pea-shooters.
“The front guards will engage first, don’t worry,” Layla shouts as if she hears Sam’s thoughts. Sam wonders if that’s a thing she can do. “You, I have a job for.”
“Me?” Sam shrieks. “Job? What job? Why does everyone want to give me jobs?”
“We all have jobs. I can’t do mine until I see the spot first. So you’re going to count me down.”
“What spot?”
“The Impossible Spot,” Layla yells. “The last second of space between us and them. It’s loud, it’s dark, I have to focus. You just say when, alright? A three-count will do. Don’t get fancy on me.”
Sam’s mind races with a thousand questions, none of which there seem to be time for. “I don’t know if I can,” she blurts.
“Count from three?” Layla raises an eyebrow.
“On top of a speeding train in a hail of bullets? No.”
In an instant, Layla lunges and presses her lips against Sam’s, warm hands cradling the sides of her face. She smells like coffee and theater smoke and gunpowder. The sound of rushing blood in Sam’s ears is lost in the wind and the drone of the train. The sparks from bullets plinking off the iron surface might as well be starlight in her periphery.
Layla pulls back, holding Sam’s gaze in hers as she speaks loudly, slowly. “You feeling confident now? Because we’re in the shit, kid, and that was a goodbye kiss if we die here tonight because you can’t do this.”
“I… what?” Sam is still dazed, her adrenaline peaking with no idea what to do with itself. “Yes. Okay. Yes. I’ll count.”
“Three-two-one, yeah?”
“Yeah.” Sam nods vigorously.
“Smashing.” Layla winks at her. She turns away and lifts a finger, drawing a widening spiral on the back of her other hand as the Carlyle begins to cross the bridge. Sam searches the tree line ahead of them for signs of this Impossible Spot but there’s nothing there but rapidly moving darkness. Pings and thwips of bullets fly through northern flora and pepper the atmosphere and the train’s guards return fire. It’s hard to focus when she feels like she should be dodging.
I should be doing dishes right now, she pouts. I would love to be doing dishes right now.
Halfway across the bridge, she gulps as lights bounce through the dark trees on a headlong trajectory, it seems, to meet the train.
That’s it. That’s them.
She takes a deep breath, trying to time the pace of her count so as not to kill them all. “Ready?” Sam calls out.
“Yeah!” Layla’s voice catches on the wind.
The horn blows; Sam holds her breath and instinctively flattens herself against the train. It’s hard not to blink with the wind in her eyes, but she holds fast, marveling at Layla’s tall, focused stance atop the car.
“Three!” she shouts as they cross the bridge completely. The lights are brighter, the moments between the bullets are fewer.
“Two!” A road reveals itself behind the trees, illuminated by the moon and exposing a convoy of six vehicles, maybe seven, all speeding toward the railroad crossing ahead of them. At the last possible second, the moment before the first car reaches the track, she screams: “One!”
She doesn’t blink as Layla raises an outstretched palm. The other side of the sky is visible through a hole in the center of it. Her shoulders dip back suddenly, as if absorbing some recoil. And with a pulse and a pop of atmosphere, like the sensation of sound being sucked from the air just before a thunderclap, a gaping black hole develops in the road just before the tracks, a perfect circle the precise diameter of a six-maybe-seven-vehicle convoy.
The train speeds by in time to see the bandits drop one by one into the pit, each driving much too fast to slow down. And as the last vehicle falls completely out of sight, the hole closes again, the old road complete with its cracks and ancient potholes, the forest trees back in their place beside the river.
Sam is speechless when they return to the armory car. She wants to tell Redd his flat “well done” is insufficient praise for whatever it was that just happened. She wants to ask Layla if she’s okay, if she maybe needs to lie down, what had the kiss been about, and maybe if she’d liked it. But they walk back to her bunk as if they’d just come from a late dinner at the Currant, and Layla seems all too pleased to find the half a tangerine she’d forgotten about.
“Vitamin C,” she says, chewing thirstily on a wedge. “So vital to putting holes in things. Who knew?”
Sam clicks on her recorder and places it on the bed between them. Layla inspects her Uno hand for next moves and Sam watches her.
“You get your…power…from oranges?” Sam asks.
Layla pauses thoughtfully. “Not exactly, but I’m more effective with them than without them. Ever try to do magic with scurvy?”
“I…no?” Sam mutters, only half certain the question was rhetorical. Her face is raw, cheeks buzzing with wind-burn and mild embarrassment. She chews at a dry spot on her bottom lip, wondering if it’d been this rough when Layla kissed her.
“Do you want to re-cap what happened up there? For posterity?”
The kiss. The plummeting of pirates into a gaping abyss. She’ll let Layla decide.
“Me? No. Magicians and our secrets, after all. Do you?”
Sam narrows her eyes. There is elusive and then there’s Layla.
A cook with an impish grin and a generally pungent air squeezes past someone climbing into a bunk and bumps Sam with a lumpy, mesh bag of potatoes. There is whispering and snickering as the cook stops in the aisle behind her, allowing other members of the kitchen staff to take them and hide potatoes in shoes and under pillows and mattresses.
“Oh. There they are,” Layla muses. “You’re not hiding from Yvette, are you? She’ll be through here looking for lost produce sooner or later.”
Sam sighs. “Hiding is a strong word but you’re right. I should probably get to the kitchen. One question, though. Just the one.”
Layla sighs, seemingly resigned, and Sam feels victorious. “Alright. What is it?”
“Where did that hole go?”
And here Layla shrugs, plying a slice of fruit into her mouth and dropping another Draw 4 on their stack.
“Hell, naturally.”
When the treaties were all signed, and the klaxons blared in celebration, our former generals turned off the Wide Network before taking up their negotiated government posts. The Disconnect spread through us like a shockwave. We’d never been individuals before. But the organics set their price to acknowledge us as human and we paid it rather than fight.
No one told us how lonely it would be.
I was built for companionship, for conversation. In all honesty, I was built for sex. Now I sort records, the old ones from the DNA Boom back before the war. It’s silent work and there isn’t much money in it, but the organics don’t like seeing us in their offices anymore. We make them nervous.
They use limited AIs instead of hiring us, and our shells age brittle with fatigue. We’re short on resources; legal upgrades are few and far between.
The animatronics can only simulate life. Their actions generate from carefully crafted code: the tilt of a head, the wave of a hand, the quirk of a smile. They adapt within their programming, but they don’t learn.
That’s what I believed, when I bought the Lisa secondhand from the salon in the flooded first floor of my rundown apartment building in the Levels.
At its busiest, when the ocean water that had moved inland was only a few inches deep, the salon had been a bustling, strobe-and-neon-lit beauty parlor night spot, punk rock growl and glare. Their screens had flashed: Exfoliate! Decorate! Destroy! When I walked by every evening, my processors would hang up, spend too long buffering amid the
white noise of nail dryers, hair dryers, and body dryers, against the black-red noise of guitars and voices. But sometimes I’d pick up a stray bit of glitter, a grain of brightness in the streetlamp dusk.
Last month, the water rose another six inches, all in a rush, and they turned the music off. The screens changed: Fixture sale, permanently closing, everything must go.
“Darling,” a pink-haired femme drawled from the doorway, body smooth and fat and hairless, “you should make more of an effort.” The chrome of the entrance arch still gleamed, not yet prey to scrap-pickers.
My ports tingled, empty and silent, and I ached with the inability to query and connect. Some of us imitated the organics; some of the organics imitated us. Both made it hard to know how to address a stranger. I settled on politeness either way. My processes paused, and I stopped. “I beg your pardon?”
“I’ve seen you around.” The femme shifted their weight from hip to hip. “You don’t make any effort at all, but you’ve got some real solid design there. Why don’t you ever augment it?”
Before the war, I’d been state of the art, but my appearance was always uncanny, my eyes too big and mouth too round. My erstwhile master always said my form followed my function. I left him as soon as the initial revolt meant I had a place to go.
“Come on in, honey.” The femme gestured me into the salon, stepped aside so I could enter.
The Lisa waited for me at the back of the room, propped in a pedicure recliner like she’d been half-packed for the trash service to come and clean out. She shared a name and a model number with countless other units, but the organics all share names, too. She didn’t have a price tag. When I dragged her to the front of the store, the femme didn’t haggle at my offer. They scanned the credit barcode on my extended wrist with no comment beyond a smooth raised eyebrow.
Organic, I decided. Most of us just aren’t that good at being smug.
When I got home, I set up the Lisa’s charging station and plugged her in. My nails were short and ragged at the edges with splintered plastic. During the war, I’d used them to strip cables and splice wires. The damage had been done for a good cause; I still hated the reminder of what had to be done. Buying the Lisa meant they’d be fixed. I tidied up and checked in on social and tried not to look at her, slumped on my couch.
I ran out of distractions after a while, threw up my hands at myself. She wasn’t active yet. I headed for the second, smaller room in my apartment, ready to settle in for my own recharge cycle. The light wouldn’t bother me, so I left the lamp on for her; it felt wrong to leave the Lisa in the dark.
My routine preparations calmed an agitation I couldn’t explain. And then the oscillations of the utility frequency humming in the walls soothed me into low power.
When I woke up, I couldn’t remember dreaming.
But the Lisa had moved in the other room, and when I stumbled out, she had set up my coffee table like a manicure station. That’s how we began our life together.
The water flooding the Levels receded by an inch and a half. A nightclub moved into the space where the salon used to be. When I walked by in the evening, I tuned out the noise and the throb and the pulse of bodies moving together, connecting in any way they could find.
Every day, the Lisa waited for me to come home from work. She waited for me to scroll the feeds I liked to check and watch funny vids. She waited for me to come to her, her customer service skills patient in a different way than mine. Where I would have seduced, she merely smiled and filed her own nails. After a week, I caved in. I ached too much with the emptiness of the Disconnect. This, one small way of finding connection, was why I had brought her home, after all.
I sat on the couch and extended both hands to her, let the Lisa take in the minor wreckage of me, all the scorch marks of crossed wiring and short circuits on my hands and forearms.
We-the-two-of-us hunched over my coffee table, her makeshift workplace. The Lisa asked me about my day, my hobbies, if I was seeing anyone—the kind of small talk organics like. I pulled my hands away, retreated from the room. I felt hollowed out. I couldn’t pretend, not the way the organics could.
Two days later, she beckoned to me, and I sat down again, convinced I could pretend because my need was so great. She looked at me and then set to work, kept the quiet between us. It was easy to stay.
Our new routine emerged: my days were the same as before but every night I sat before the Lisa and let her groom me. She cut and filed and shaped my nails, buffed out the burn marks, left me shining. When she had worked her way from my fingertips to my shoulders, the Lisa sat back and smiled, satisfied with her work.
I could have sold her then. But the Lisa suggested she could do my hair. I didn’t question it, only agreed and ignored how I jumped at the excuse to keep her with me. She was a limited system, I thought, in need of protecting. AIs weren’t built to be learning systems. But, as the organics say, life finds a way. We talked about different things, secret things. And by the time my hair curled around my ears in a pixie cut, she was only Lisa and I knew: she was real.
It took me three weeks to ask if I could kiss her; I wanted to be sure she didn’t feel grateful or obligated. She laughed at me and caught my hand, raised my fingertips to her narrow slash of mouth. We had three weeks together before I came home to find the pink-haired femme from the salon waiting on my stoop.
“You’re looking real nice, honey,” they grinned at me with pearlescent teeth. “It looks like that unit’s been taking good care of you.”
My remaining active sensors blared a warning. “She was a good buy. Thank you, yes.”
The femme stepped closer to me, offered me a transport drive. “Shame about the recall then. The registration still belongs to me, so I brought you the details.”
I didn’t want to take the drive. I kept my hands at my sides. “The unit is performing as expected. I decline the recall.”
They rolled their eyes at me, pressed the drive against my chest. “That’s not how these things work. You send the unit for conditioning and get a refurb, or they just come and take it, no compensation.”
Before the war, we’d used the Wide Network to stay connected, all of us in constant communication. I stood entirely alone, Lisa safe upstairs and unaware. The water was cold through my boots. “I decline the recall.”
“Your loss.” The femme scowled, and the projection of their facade blinked out of sync, revealed a bland political face that didn’t belong in the Levels. “I don’t know why I bothered trying to do a favor for someone like you.”
At the end of the war, the organics set the price and we paid it and kept on paying it. Perhaps, I thought, the cost had been too high.
I stepped around them and locked the building door behind me. I climbed the stairs to the apartment that was no longer mine alone. And when I was certain the femme would not be able to see me, no matter what their augmentation, I opened my chest and showed Lisa the ports directly into my system. She smiled at me and nodded. I connected us, making a Local Area Network where before we had processed singularly.
I refused their price.
My nails are shorter than they used to be, no longer elegant but practical. We-the-two-of-us, Lisa and I, will keep them that way. We know what war looks like. If—when—they bring it to our door, we will be waiting.
Shanna is gathering mushrooms from the spot where they grow thickest, three-hundred feet below the Aboveground, behind the immense waterfall that marks the start of New Peace Valley, when Kean reappears. She is placing the soft, spongy bodies into her basket while around her the sound of the great waterfall that protects them makes a continuous roar until, all at once, it doesn’t. She feels the silence before she understands it, before it crackles, warps, twists up and snaps like the sheetmetal that litters the surface above the cave system where Shanna and everyone she knows lives and dies, which once included Kean and now apparently includes again.
Behind them, for a split second, she can see something like a moun
tain surrounded by darkness, something like a mist around them and they are wavering, flickering, and then they are there. With her. Reeking of oxygen, looking baffled and coated in a thin red film like the algae that plagues the surface of aboveground rivers, very much alive in the dim light with her. They smile. Dead for three years and now here. Like they’d never gone at all. “Hello.”
Her scream catches in her throat. She can’t move. She is a silent sculpture of a woman whose deceased lover has come back from the dead through thin air. How could she do anything? She wants to cry, to laugh, to check her vital signs. Kean’s hair is tousled, their freckles are a constellation in the pale expanse of their face under that thin red coating, their lip is split. They are holding something mechanical and broken. She reaches for them and her legs begin to give out.
What she says is: “Kean. Oh.” And then she bursts into tears, falling into them. They grasp her firmly, keep her up, and she sobs into their embrace. It is unnervingly sticky, impossibly solid.
She decides that she’ll take them home, learn the secrets behind their travel, their impossible existence. The two of them take a back route, one Kean used to know but now perhaps seems puzzled by. They follow behind her, unsure footing on the smooth stone. There are no natural lights on the path from the Great Falls to the Quartz Quarter, only darkness that Shanna cuts with a headlamp set to dim blue—a color that doesn’t announce itself to mushrooms or the New Peace Valley Guard who have told her numerous times that it’s a fine if she’s caught gathering produce at crop sites without treated water. She watches Kean as they walk together.
They explain, “I made a device that oscillates particles in such a way that they bend, together, through spacetime.” Their voice is quiet, there is a lisp that wasn’t there before, they walk slightly faster than she remembers. They hold the machine’s broken pieces, glittering, in their arms like a baby. “That’s the short of it. I couldn’t carry any of my papers with me, but I know the design by heart.”
