by Joe Hill
Her friends were all drunk on one another by the end of it, and there was a lot of hugging and smooching. They said it was the best birthday party ever. Iris got carried away by all the good feeling and promised them next year would be even better. She said they would ride the elevator to the top of the Spoke to see the stars—the ACTUAL stars—above the cloudscape. They would drink Sparklefroth and electrocute one another with happiness. They would take the long, dreamy plunge back to earth together in Drop Bubbles. And after, they would all mask themselves in Hideware and go down into the Carnival District—which was forbidden to anyone under sixteen—and everyone who saw them in their expensive new faces would fall in love with them.
Something stirs in the cloudy green globe. The mermaid looms up from the mucus-hued shadows and boggles out at her. The girl-fish is little more than a grotesque pink slug with a face and waving, mossy-green hair.
“You might want to do something adorable,” she says, “while you’ve got the chance.”
A black string of poop squirts from a hole above her tail fin. The mermaid gawps, as if astonished by the functions of her own body.
A hoop of eldritch jade light flares in her right eye, half blinding her, signaling an incoming message. She pinches her thumb and index finger together, as if squeezing a bug to death. Words appear in fey emerald letters, seeming to hover three feet from her face, a trick of the messaging lens that she puts in her eye first thing every morning, even before she brushes her teeth.
JOYCE B: WE HAVE PLANS FOR YOU.
AMY P: EVIL PLANS.
JOYCE B: WE’RE GETTING YOU INTO THE CARNIVALS TONIGHT. IT HAS BEEN ORDAINED.
Iris shuts her eyes, rests her forehead against the cool glass of the aquaglobe.
“Can’t,” she says, squeezing her thumb and index finger together to SEND.
JOYCE B: DON’T MAKE US FORCE YOU INTO A SACK & DRAG YOU OUT KICKING & SCREAMING.
AMY P: IN A SACK. KICKING. SCREAMING.
Iris says, “My mom’s new guy is off work in an hour, and Mom wants me home for cake and presents. I guess they got me some big-deal gift that won’t wait.”
This is a lie. Iris will decide what the big-deal gift was later. It will have to be something that could only be used once, something no one can prove she didn’t get. Maybe she will tell her friends she went on a hallucication to the lunar surface and spent the night in Archimedes Station, playing Moon Quidditch with the Archimedes Owls.
JOYCE B’s reply appears in lurid fire: HIDEWARE??? DO YOU THINK YOUR MOM GOT YOU A NEW FACE?
Iris opens her mouth, closes it, opens it again. “We won’t know until I unwrap it, will we?”
The moment it’s out of her mouth, she doesn’t know why she said it, wishes she could unSEND.
No. She knows why she said it. Because it feels good to act like she’s still one of them. That she has everything they have and always will. That she isn’t falling behind.
AMY P: I HOPE YOU GOT AN “OPHELIA” BECAUSE IT WILL MAKE JOYCE JEALOUS AND I LIKE TO WATCH JOYCE FAKE-SMILE AT PEOPLE WHEN SHE’S MISERABLE.
The Ophelia has been out for just two months and might’ve been too expensive even when her father was making tokens by the shovel-load in the Murdergame.
“It probably won’t be the Ophelia,” Iris says, then immediately wishes she could rephrase.
JOYCE B: THERE’S NOTHING WRONG WITH A BASIC “GIRL NEXT DOOR.” THAT’S WHAT AMY HAS AND I’M NOT EMBARRASSED TO GO OUT WITH HER. I’M NOT PROUD, BUT I’M NOT EMBARRASSED.
AMY P: WHATEVER IT IS, YOU’RE FREE BY 2100, BECAUSE YOUR MOM ALREADY SAID YOU’LL MEET US AT THE SOUTH ENTRANCE TO THE CARNIVALS. I MESSAGED WITH HER THIS MORNING. SO GO HOME AND SCARF CAKE AND UNWRAP YOUR SEXY NEW FACE AND GET READY TO MEET US.
JOYCE B: IF YOU DO GET AN “OPHELIA,” I WANT TO WEAR IT FOR AT LEAST A LITTLE WHILE, BECAUSE I COULDN’T BEAR IT IF YOU WERE MORE AMAZING THAN ME.
“I could never be more amazing than you,” Iris says, and Joyce and Amy disconnect.
Below her another cannon-train booms past.
4.
The disaster happens two-thirds of the way across the overpass.
The Monowheel is lightweight but big, bigger than she is, and walking it home is awkward business. It’s a drunken giant who keeps leaning on her or trying to sit down in the road. She leans in to guide it with a hand on the control stick, her other hand clutching the aquaball to her side. The overpass has a gentle arch to it and the ’wheel wants to speed up as soon as she’s on the downward slope. She jogs to keep up with it, huffing for breath. It tilts toward her. The inner chrome hoop bangs her head. She makes a little sound of pain, lifts her free hand to press a palm to the hurt place, only to remember she doesn’t have a free hand. The aquaball slips free and strikes the sidewalk with a glassy crack!
Good, she thinks. Smash.
But it doesn’t smash, it rolls, with a grinding, droning kind of music, weaving this way and that, hopping the curb and trundling into the road. A vapordrive hansom cab on gold razorwheels whines shrilly along the cross street, and the aquaball disappears beneath it. Iris tenses, with a certain pleasure, anticipating the crunch and the loud splash. But when the hansom flashes past, the murky green globe is impossibly still rolling, undamaged, along the far sidewalk. Iris has never in all her life so wanted to see something crushed.
Instead a kid puts his foot out and stops it.
That kid.
In one sense Iris has never seen him before. In another she has seen him a hundred times, on her way to her father’s, has glimpsed him from her Monowheel, this kid with his too-cool-for-school slouch, in a gray wool baseball cap and a gray wool coat that has seen better days. He is always here, hanging out against the wall in front of a closed Novelty.
He doesn’t do anything more than stop the ball with his toe. Doesn’t look up the road to see who dropped it, doesn’t bend down to pick it up.
She steers the Monowheel over to him. It’s easier now that she has two hands to guide it along.
“You’re too kind. And I do mean that literally. You just rescued the world’s crummiest birthday present,” she says.
He doesn’t reply.
She leans the Monowheel against the hitching post along the curb and bends to get the aquaball. She hopes it’s cracked, squirting its guts out. What a pleasure it would be to watch that gruesome slug—that sardine-size parody of a woman—swimming frantically around as the water level falls. Not a mark on it, though. She doesn’t know why she hates it so much. It isn’t the mermaid’s fault it’s ugly, trapped, unasked for, unwanted.
“Shoot. I was hoping it would shatter into a thousand pieces. A girl can’t catch a break.”
This doesn’t even earn her a chuckle, and she casts a quick, annoyed glance into his face—when she’s witty, Iris expects to be appreciated—and sees it at last. He isn’t a kid at all. He’s a Clockwork, an old one, with a smiling, moonlike face of crackled ceramic. His chest is a scratched case of plasteel. Within is a coil of cloudy vinyl tubing where intestines belong, brass pipettes for bones, a basket of gold wires filled almost to the top with silver tokens instead of a stomach. His heart is a matte black vapor-drive.
A steel plate mounted to one side of his heart says COIN-OP FRIEND! LOYAL FAITHFUL COMPANION AND CONFIDANT. NEED HELP WITH GROCERIES? CAN LIFT UP TO ONE TON. KNOWS 30 CARD GAMES, SPEAKS ALL LANGUAGES, KEEPS SECRETS. A TOKEN FOR 30 MINUTES OF ABSOLUTE DEVOTION. GIRLS: LEARN HOW TO KISS FROM A PERFECT GENTLEMAN WHO WILL TELL NO TALES. BOYS: PRACTICE THE ANCIENT ART OF PUGILISM ON HIS ALMOST INDESTRUCTIBLE SHELL! THIS CLOCKWORK NOT RATED FOR ADULT/MATURE USE. Someone has scratched a cartoon penis below this last sentence.
Iris has not played with a Clockwork since she was small, not since Talk-to-Me-Tabitha, her childhood beloved, and Tabitha was perhaps a century more advanced. This thing is an antique, one of the novelties from the shuttered store directly behind him, likely planted on the street as an advertisement. A moldie-oldie from the days of Google and chunk
y VR headsets and Florida.
No one could steal him. His back is pressed to a magnetic charge plate installed in the brick wall. Iris is no longer sure he intentionally stopped the aquaball, suspects his foot was just there and halting her runaway mermaid was only a lucky accident. Or unlucky accident; a lucky accident would’ve been if it had imploded under the razorwheels of the hansom.
Iris turns her back on him and looks despairingly at the Monowheel she still has to push another half mile. The thought of steering it along the road makes her unpleasantly aware of the sweater sticking to her sweaty back.
Need help with groceries? Can lift up to one ton.
She swivels back, digs out her tokens—she has exactly two—and pushes first one, then the other into the slot on the Clockwork’s chest. Silver credits clatter into the enormous pile of tokens in his stomach.
The vaporware heart in his chest expands and contracts with an audible thud. The numbers above the chrome plate on his chest make a ratcheting noise and roll over with a series of rapid clicks, to read 00:59:59.
And the seconds begin to tick down.
5.
He knew she would pay long before she dropped her tokens, knew when her back was still turned to him, just from the way she looked at her Monowheel and how her shoulders slumped at the sight of it. Body language says more than words ever do. And his processor, which is lethargic by the standards of modern computing, is still fast enough to complete two million clock cycles before she can get her hand out of her pocket with the coins in them. That’s enough time to read and reread the complete works of Dickens.
Her body temperature is elevated, and she’s sweating from labor but also from a frayed mood. The command line, which fills him always like breath, compels him to supply comfort with a bit of easy cleverness.
“You got three questions,” he says, selecting for random grammatical errors. Informal speech always plays well with the young. “Let me answer them in order. First: What’s my name? Chip. It’s a joke. But it’s also really my name.”
The girl says, “What do you mean it’s a—”
He taps one finger to his temple, indicating the logic boards hidden behind his ceramic face, and she smiles.
“Chip. Glad to meet you. What are my other two questions?”
“If you have to pay me, how can I really be your friend? The company that built me programmed me with one directive: For the next fifty-nine minutes, all I care about is you. I won’t judge you and I won’t lie to you. You are Aladdin and I am the genie. I’ll execute any wish that’s within my powers and isn’t strictly forbidden by custom or law. I can’t steal. I can’t beat anyone up. There are certain adult functions I cannot perform owing to the 2072 Human-Clockwork Obscenity Laws—laws that have actually been repealed but remain a part of my OS.”
“What’s that mean?”
The command line impels a crude, comic response. Her social profile suggests a high probability that this will be well received.
“I can’t eat pussy,” he says. “Or take one up the ass.”
“Holy shit,” she says, a blush scalding her cheeks. Her embarrassment confirms he appeals to her. Physiology is confession.
“I have no tongue, so I cannot lick.”
“This got real very quickly.”
“I have no butthole, so I cannot—”
“Got it. Never even crossed my mind to ask. What was my third question?”
“Yes, of course I can carry your Monowheel. What happened to it?”
“Someone ripped the battery out. Can you carry it all the way to the Stacks?”
He unbolts himself from the charging plate, free for the first time in sixteen days. She unlocks the Monowheel from the hitching post. He grips the inner rail and lifts all 408.255 kilograms off the ground, slips it onto his shoulder. The tilt of her head implies satisfaction, while her body language suggests that the initial pleasure at solving a problem is fading, to be replaced by some other source of distress and exhaustion. Probably. Emotions cannot be known with any certainty, only hypothesized. A darting look of anxiety might suggest inner turmoil or merely the need to urinate. Apparently clever, witty remarks often shroud despair, while the statement “I’m dying” hardly ever indicates life-threatening physical trauma. Without certainty he follows the routines most likely to produce comfort and pleasure.
“I’ve answered three of your questions, so now you have to answer three of mine, fair?”
“I guess,” she says.
“Got a name?”
“Iris Ballard.”
Within a quarter second of learning her name, he has gathered every bit of information he can find on her in the socialverse, collecting half a gigabyte of unremarkable trivia and a single ten-month-old news report that might matter very much.
“I’ve known one Rapunzel, two Zeldas, and three Cleopatras, but I’ve never met an Iris.”
“Do you remember everyone you’ve met? No, forget it. Of course you do. You probably have terabytes of memory you haven’t used. What was Rapunzel like?”
“She had a shaved head. I didn’t ask why.”
Iris laughs. “Okay. What else?”
“You don’t have a household Clockwork to help you with your busted Monowheel?”
Her smile slips. The subject is red-flagged as a threat to her approval. An algorithm ponders the possibilities, decides she is financially disadvantaged and that her lack of funds is a source of discomfort. The condition of poverty is new to her, probably a result of the events described in the unfortunate news story.
“I had a Talk-to-Me-Tabitha when I was little,” she says. “I talked to her all day, from when I got home till when I went to bed. My dad used to come in at ten P.M. and say he was going to have to take her away and stick her in a closet if I didn’t go to sleep. Nothing made me shut up faster than that. I hated the idea of him putting her in the closet, where she’d be all alone. But then she auto-upgraded, and after that she was always talking about how we could have a lot more fun together if I bought a Talk-to-Me-Tabitha Terrier or Talk-to-Me-Tabitha Smartglasses. She started working advertisements and offers into conversation. It got really gross, so I started doing intentionally mean things to her. I’d step on her if she was lying on the floor. One day my dad saw me swinging her against the wall and took her away. He resold her on Auctionz to teach me a lesson, even though I cried and cried. Honestly, that might be the only time in my life my father punished me for anything.”
Her tone and expression suggest irritation, which he can’t fathom. A lack of parental discipline should be a source of at least mild contentment, not disapproval. He marks this statement for further evaluation and will watch her for other signs of psychological malformation. Not that this will incline him to be any less devoted to her. He collected hundreds of tokens from a schizophrenic man named Dean. Dean believed he was being followed by a cabal of ballet dancers who intended to kidnap and castrate him. Chip dutifully watched for women in tutus and swore to defend Dean’s genitals. It was all a long time ago.
“You had one more thing you were going to ask me?” she says. “Hopefully it won’t be whether I’d like to take advantage of a very special offer. Marketing ruins the illusion that you’re vaguely personlike.”
He marks her contempt for advertising. Nothing to be done about it—he is required to peddle his own services later—but he marks it anyway.
“What are you doing to celebrate your birthday?” he asks. “Besides spending an hour with me, which is, I admit, going to be hard to top.”
She stops walking. “How do you know it’s my birthday?”
“You said.”
“When did I say?”
“When you picked up your runaway fish.”
“That was before I paid you.”
“I know. I’m still aware of things when my meter isn’t running. I still think. Your birthday?”
She frowns, processing. They have reached a fork in the conversation. It seems likely she remains in
a state of guarded emotional distress. He banks a series of encouraging remarks and prepares three strategies for canceling out her unhappiness. Humans suffer terribly. Chip views lifting her spirits as much like lifting her Monowheel, a fundamental reason to act, to be.
“I’ve already celebrated it,” she says, and they resume walking. “My dad gave me a pet leech with a human face and passed out, snoring into his oxygen tank. Now I’m going back to my mom’s to think up an excuse—a lie—not to go out with friends tonight.”
“I’m so sorry to hear your father isn’t well.”
“No you aren’t,” she says, her voice sharp. “Clockworks don’t feel sorry about things. They execute programs. I don’t need a hair dryer to offer me sympathy.”
Chip does not take offense because he cannot take offense. Instead he says, “May I ask what happened?” He already knows, reviewed the whole ugly story as soon as Iris identified herself, but a pretense of ignorance will give her license to talk, which may provide relief, a momentary distraction from her cares.
“He was in the Murdergame. He was a professional homicide victim. A Resurrection Man. You know. Someone will rent a private abattoir and work out her unhappy feelings by beating him to death with a hammer or shooting him or whatever. Then a cellular-rebuild program stitches him back together, just like new. He was one of the most popular hatchet victims in the twelve boroughs. He had a waiting list.” She smiles without any pleasure. “He used to joke about how he was literally willing to die for me—and did at least twenty times a week.”
