We, Robots

by Simon Ings

  “Nice idea, Ed: a motorcycle. What are you going to do with it? Hang it on the wall with the Klein?”

  He drank the rest of his beer, opened a new one and poured it thoughtfully into his glass. He watched the bubbles rising through it, then grinned at me as if he had made a decision. He had. In that moment I saw that he was lost, but not what I could do about it.

  “Isn’t it brilliant? Isn’t it just a fucker, that bike? I haven’t had a bike since I was seventeen. There’s a story attached to that.”

  “Ed—”

  “Do you want to hear it or not?”

  Caitlin came back in with the ice cream and served it out to us and sat down.

  “Tell us, Ed,” she said tiredly. “Tell us the story about that.”

  Ed held on to his glass hard with both hands and stared into it for a long time as if he was trying to see the past there. “I had some ace times on bikes when I was a kid,” he said finally: “but they were always someone else’s. My old dear—She really hated bikes, my old dear. You know: they were dirty, they were dangerous, she wasn’t going to have one in the house. Did that stop me? It did not. I bought one of the first good Ducatti 125s in Britain, but I had to keep it in a coal cellar down the road.”

  “That’s really funny, Ed.”

  “Fuck off, Mick. I’m seventeen, I’m still at school, and I’ve got this fucking projectile stashed in someone’s coal cellar. The whole time I had it, the old dear never knew. I’m walking three miles in the piss-wet rain every night, dressed to go to the library, then unlocking this thing and stuffing it round the back lanes with my best white shortie raincoat ballooning up like a fucking tent.”

  He looked puzzledly down at his plate.

  “What’s this? Oh. Ice cream. Ever ridden a bike in a raincoat?” he asked Caitlin.

  Caitlin shook her head. She was staring at him with a hypnotized expression; she was breaking wafers into her ice cream.

  “Well they were all the rage then,” he said.

  He added: “The drag’s enormous.”

  “Eat your pudding, Ed,” I said. “And stop boasting. How fast would a 125 go in those days? Eighty miles an hour? Eighty-five?”

  “They went faster if you ground your teeth, Mick,” Ed said. “Do you want to hear the rest?”

  “Of course I want to hear it, Ed.”

  “Walk three miles in the piss-wet rain,” said Ed, “to go for a ride on a motorbike, what a joke. But the real joke is this: the fucker had an alloy crankcase. That was a big deal in those days, an alloy crankcase. The first time I dropped it on a bend, it cracked. Oil everywhere. I pushed it back to the coal-house and left it there. You couldn’t weld an alloy crankcase worth shit in those days. I had three years’ payments left to make on a bunch of scrap.”

  He grinned at us triumphantly.

  “Ask me how long I’d had it,” he ordered.

  “How long, Mick?”

  “Three weeks. I’d had the fucker three weeks.”

  He began to laugh. Suddenly, his face went so white it looked green. He looked rapidly from side to side, like someone who can’t understand where he is. At the same time, he pushed himself up out of the wheelchair until his arms wouldn’t straighten any further and he was almost standing up. He tilted his head back until the tendons in his neck stood out. He shouted, “I want to get out of here! Caitlin, I want to get out!” Then his arms buckled and he let his weight go onto his feet and his legs folded up like putty and he fell forward with a gasp, his face in the ice cream and his hands smashing and clutching and scraping at anything they touched on the dinner table until he had bunched the cloth up under him and everything was a sodden mess of food and broken dishes, and he had slipped out of the chair and onto the floor. Then he let himself slump and go quite still.

  “Help me,” said Caitlin.

  We couldn’t get him back into the chair. As we tried, his head flopped forward, and I could see quite clearly the bruises and deep, half-healed scabs at the base of his skull, where they had cored his cervical spine for the computer connection. When he initialized Out There now the graphics came up live in his head. No more screen. Only the endless V of the perspective. The endless, effortless dip-and-bank of the viewpoint. What did be see out there? Did he see himself, hunched up on the Kawasaki Ninja? Did he see highways, bridges, tunnels, weird motorcycle flights through endless space?

  *

  Halfway along the passage, he woke up.

  “Caitlin!” he shouted.

  “I’m here.”

  “Caitlin!”

  “I’m here, Ed.”

  “Caitlin, I never did any of that.”

  “Hush, Ed. Let’s get you to bed.”

  “Listen!” he shouted. “Listen.”

  He started to thrash about and we had to lay him down where he was. The passage was so narrow his head hit one wall, then the other, with a solid noise. He stared desperately at Caitlin, his face smeared with Ben & Jerry’s. “I never could ride a bike,” he admitted. “I made all that up.”

  She bent down and put her arms round his neck.

  “I know,” she said.

  “I made all that up!” he shouted.

  “It’s all right. It’s all right.”

  We got him into bed in the back room. She wiped the ice cream off his face with a Kleenex. He stared over her shoulder at the wall, rigid with fear and self-loathing. “Hush,” she said. “You’re all right.” That made him cry; him crying made her cry. I didn’t know whether to cry or laugh. I sat down and watched them for a moment, then got to my feet. I felt tired.

  “It’s late,” I said. “I think I’ll go.”

  Caitlin followed me out onto the doorstep. It was another cold night. Condensation had beaded on the fuel tank of the Kawasaki, so that it looked like some sort of frosted confection in the streetlight.

  “Look,” she said, “can you do anything with that?”

  I shrugged.

  “It’s still brand new,” I said. I drew a line in the condensation, along the curve of the tank, then another, at an angle to it.

  “I could see if the dealer would take it back.”

  “Thanks.”

  I laughed.

  “Go in now,” I advised her. “It’s cold.”

  “Thanks, Mick. Really.”

  “That’s what you always say.”

  *

  The way Ed got his paraplegia was this. It was a miserable January about four months after Caitlin left me to go and live with him. He was working over in mid-Wales with Moscow Davis. They had landed the inspection contract for three point-blocks owned by the local council; penalty clauses meant they had to complete that month. They lived in a bed-and-breakfast place a mile from the job, coming back so tired in the evening that they just about had time to eat fish and chips and watch Coronation Street before they fell asleep with their mouths open. “We were too fucked even to take drugs,” Ed admitted afterward, in a kind of wonder. “Can you imagine that?” Their hands were bashed and bleeding from hitting themselves with sample hammers in the freezing rain. At the end of every afternoon the sunset light caught a thin, delicate layer of water-ice that had welded Moscow’s hair to her cheek. Ed wasn’t just tired, he was missing Caitlin. One Friday he said, “I’m fucked off with this, let’s have a weekend at home.”

  “We agreed we’d have to work weekends,” Moscow reminded him. She watched a long string of snot leave her nose, stretch out like spider-silk, then snap and vanish on the wind. “To finish in time,” she said.

  “Come on, you wanker,” Ed said. “Do something real in your life.”

  “I never wank,” said Moscow. “I can’t fancy myself.”

  They got in her 1984 320i with the M-Technic pack, Garrett turbo and extra-wide wheels, and while the light died out of a bad afternoon she pushed it eastward through the Cambrians, letting the rear end hang out on corners. She had Lou Reed Retro on the CD and her plan was to draw a line straight across the map and connect with the M4 at t
he Severn Bridge. It was ghostly and fog all the way out of Wales that night, lost sheep coming at you from groups of wet trees and folds in the hills. “Tregaron to Abergwesyn. One of the great back roads!” Moscow shouted over the music, as they passed a single lonely house in the rain, miles away from anywhere, facing south into the rolling moors of mid-Wales.

  Ed shouted back: “They can go faster than this, these 320s.” So on the next bend she let the rear end hang out an inch too far and they surfed five hundred feet into a ravine below Cefn Coch, with the BMW crumpled up round them like a chocolate wrapper. Just before they went over, the tape had got to “Sweet Jane”—the live version with the applause welling up across the opening chords as if God himself was stepping out on stage. In the bottom of the ravine a shallow stream ran through pressure-metamorphosed Ordovician shale. Ed sat until daylight the next morning, conscious but unable to move, watching the water hurry toward him and listening to Moscow die of a punctured lung in the heavy smell of fuel. It was a long wait. Once or twice she regained consciousness and said: “I’m sorry, Ed.”

  Once or twice he heard himself reassure her, “No, it was my fault.”

  At Southwestern Orthopaedic a consultant told him that key motor nerves had been ripped out of his spine.

  “Stuff the fuckers back in again then!” he said, in an attempt to impress her.

  She smiled.

  “That’s exactly what we’re going to try,” she replied. “We’ll do a tuck-and-glue and encourage the spinal cord to send new filaments into the old cable channel.”

  She thought for a moment.

  “We’ll be working very close to the cord itself,” she warned him.

  Ed stared at her.

  “It was a joke,” he said.

  For a while it seemed to work. Two months later he could flex the muscles in his upper legs. But nothing more happened; and, worried that a second try would only make the damage worse, they had to leave it.

  *

  Mile End Monkey House. Hanging upside down from a painful foot-hook, you chalk your hands meditatively, staring at the sweaty triangular mark your back left on the blue plastic cover of the mat last time you fell on it. Then, reluctantly, feeling your stomach muscles grind as they curl you upright again, you clutch the starting holds and go for the move: reach up: lock out on two fingers: let your left leg swing out to rebalance: strain upward with your right fingertips, and just as you brush the crucial hold, fall off again.

  “Jesus Christ. I don’t know why I come here.”

  You come so that next weekend you can get into a Cosworth-engined Merc 190E and drive very fast down the M4 (“No one drives themselves anymore!”) to a limestone outcrop high above the Wye Valley. Let go here and you will not land on a blue safety mat in a puff of chalk dust. Instead you will plummet eighty feet straight down until you hit a small ledge, catapult out into the trees, and land a little later face-first among moss-grown boulders flecked with sunshine. Now all the practice is over. Now you are on the route. Your friends look up, shading their eyes against the white glare of the rock. They are wondering if you can make the move. So are you. The only exit from shit creek is to put two fingers of your left hand into a razor-sharp solution pocket, lean away from it to the full extent of your arm, run your feet up in front of you, and, just as you are about to fall off, lunge with your right hand for the good hold above.

  At the top of the cliff grows a large yew tree. You can see it very clearly. It has a short horizontal trunk, and contorted limbs perhaps eighteen inches thick curving out over the drop as if they had just that moment stopped moving. When you reach it you will be safe. But at this stage on a climb, the top of anything is an empty hypothesis. You look up: it might as well be the other side of the Atlantic. All that air is burning away below you like a fuse. Suddenly you’re moving anyway. Excitement has short-circuited the normal connections between intention and action. Where you look, you go. No effort seems to be involved. It’s like falling upward. It’s like that moment when you first understood how to swim, or ride a bike. Height and fear have returned you to your childhood. Just as it was then, your duty is only to yourself. Until you get safely down again, contracts, business meetings, household bills, emotional problems will mean nothing.

  When you finally reach that yew tree at the top of the climb, you find it full of grown men and women wearing faded shorts and T-shirts. They are all in their forties and fifties. They have all escaped. With their bare brown arms, their hair bleached out by weeks of sunshine, they sit at every fork or junction, legs dangling in the dusty air, like child-pirates out of some storybook of the 1920s: an investment banker from Greenwich, an AIDS counselor from Bow; a designer of French Connection clothes; a publishers’ editor. There is a comfortable silence broken by the odd friendly murmur as you arrive, but their eyes are in-turned and they would prefer to be alone, staring dreamily out over the valley, the curve of the river, the woods which seem to stretch away to Tintern Abbey and then Wales. This is the other side of excitement, the other pleasure of height: the space without anxiety. The space without anxiety. The space without anxiety. The space without anxiety. The space without anxiety. The space without anxiety. The space without anxiety. The space with—

  *

  You are left with this familiar glitch or loop in the MAX ware. Suicide Coast won’t play any farther. Reluctantly, you abandon Mick to his world of sad acts, his faith that reality can be relied upon to scaffold his perceptions. To run him again from the beginning would only make the frailty of that faith more obvious. So you wait until everything has gone black, unplug yourself from the machine, and walk away, unconsciously rolling your shoulders to ease the stiffness, massaging the sore place at the back of your neck. What will you do next? Everything is flat out here. No one drives themselves anymore.

  (1999)

  MEMORIES AND WIRE

  Mari Ness

  Mari Ness lives in central Florida, “with a scraggly rose garden and large trees harboring demented squirrels.” Her short fiction and poetry have appeared in numerous print and online publications, including Tor.com, Clarkesworld, Lightspeed, Apex Magazine and Strange Horizons. Her poetry has also been nominated for the Rhysling and Dwarf Stars awards.

  He was losing her. Had been, almost since they’d met, really, but it wasn’t until he watched her pull a wire out of herself and methodically roll it into a small coil that it really hit him.

  She’d been straight with him from the beginning. Oh, not completely straight. She’d never told him anything about the accident, or what happened afterwards. He was pretty sure he didn’t want to know. And she’d never told him anything about her work. Not the government, he knew, not exactly, but something close to it: a major government contractor who worked in top secret doing the dirty work. That was something he didn’t want to know about either. What you can’t know, you can’t tell, he remembered from some old movie or other. He saw the new bruises on her remaining skin, the new plastic patches over the implants, and decided he really didn’t want to know.

  But about everything else. What she could do, what she couldn’t do. What she wanted and needed, exactly. Oxytocin, specifically: without a natural source her immune system would start rejecting the implants. Drugs could stabilize her system, but they had major side effects. So touch, mainly; sex as an addition. No emotional commitment. She thought they might have a certain intellectual compatibility but she would not have much time to talk. The job. She needed his touch. She would do what she needed for it.

  “Side effects?”

  “Death.”

  It was an incentive of sorts.

  He was of course open to pursue other relationships; she didn’t need to know the details.

  Surprisingly, out of this they had created, he thought, a friendship of sorts. Friendship. It was an odd word, not something he’d associated with women he’d slept with before. They were dates, girlfriends sometimes, but never friends.

  N—she preferred to be called jus
t that, N—was a friend.

  Of sorts.

  Who was now pulling a wire out of her arm.

  “Should you be doing that here?”

  “No.”

  The wire was not coming out cleanly. Drops of blood were falling on his couch. It was a cheap piece of crap, some microfiber thing he’d gotten on sale, and he wouldn’t mind tossing it, but—after a few seconds of debate, he stood up and hunted down an old towel, and returned and put it underneath her arm, to catch the blood.

  “Need help?”

  “No.”

  “Just as well,” he said, trying to make a joke of it. “My fingers are mostly good at going in you, not getting things out of you.”

  He regretted the words as soon as they left his mouth, but she did not seem to react. Then again, she never did, except when they were having sex, when she surprised him by almost seeming as if she meant it.

  She reached into her arm and began pulling at a second wire.

  “Let me help,” he said then.

  “No.”

  “At least let me get you something for it. Alcohol, some—”

  “It doesn’t hurt.”

  “Infection.”

  Two weeks ago, he’d turned on some show or other. She’d been reading her tablet with the intense focus he’d learned not to even try to interrupt; in some ways, he found it flattering that she was willing to do that, do some of her work in front of him—at least the non-high security stuff—but he also found the intensity almost unnerving, like a trance state except not really, and he couldn’t watch it, couldn’t even glance at it. After a few minutes, she’d come over to sit by him on the couch. A few minutes later, she had relaxed against him, not saying anything. He’d wrapped his arms around her. It had been—

  Nice. Normal.

  “My hands are clean.”

  “This place isn’t.”

  She went for medical checkups at least twice per month; some form of computer maintenance at least once a week. Part of that was her job. Part of that was that parts of her were fragile, very fragile. Even the parts that could rip him apart. And hideously expensive. Many of her parts would be recycled, afterwards. Possibly in other bodies. The very thought made him sick. She kissed him after he told her that.