by Joe Hill
“And then?”
“A bachelorette party. They hired him out for a stabbing. The whole crowd of them went at him with kitchen knives and meat cleavers. There was a power failure, but they were all so drunk they didn’t even notice. Do you remember all the blackouts we had last February? His rebuild program couldn’t connect with the server for repair instructions. He was dead for almost half an hour. Now he has the shakes and he forgets things. His insurance wouldn’t cover his injuries because there was a company rule against having more than two assailants at a time, even though everyone ignores it. He’s worse than completely broke, and the state board won’t renew his license. He can’t die for a living anymore, and he isn’t fit for anything else.”
“Have we agreed I shouldn’t offer you sympathy? I don’t want to overstep.”
She flinches, as from a biting insect. “I wouldn’t deserve your sympathy even if you had any to give. I’m a snotty, selfish, entitled little bitch. My dad lost everything, and I’m in a pissy mood because we’re not doing what I wanted for my birthday. He got me the best gift he could, and I was going to drop it in front of a train. Tell me that doesn’t sound ungrateful.”
“It sounds like the latest disappointment on a stack of them. Ancient religions used to tell people that letting go of yearning is the highest form of spirituality. But Buddha had it wrong. Yearning is the difference between being human and being a Clockwork. Not to want is not to live. Even DNA is an engine of desire—driven to copy itself over and over. Nothing spiritual about a hair dryer. What did you want to do for your birthday?”
“Me and my friends were going to the top of the Spoke at sunset to see the stars come out. I’ve only ever seen them in pay-per-vision streams. Never for real. We were going to drink Sparklefroth and shoot sparks and then ride Drop Bubbles back to earth. After, we were going to put on Hideware and go down to the Cabinet Carnivals. My friends all think I’m getting a new face today, because that’s what they got for their birthdays. No way that’s happening. My mom is so cheap I bet she won’t even buy me a new battery for my busted-ass Monowheel.”
“And you can’t tell your friends you can’t afford a new face right now?”
“I can—if I want pity for my birthday. But Sparklefroth tastes better.”
“I can’t help with the new face,” he says. “Theft is prohibited. But if you want to see the stars come out from the top of the Spoke, it isn’t too late. Sunset is in twenty-one minutes.”
Iris looks toward the silver needle puncturing the mustard-colored clouds. “You need a ticket and reservations for the elevator.” She has never been above the clouds, and they have never once cleared off in all her sixteen years. It’s been overcast in the city for nearly three decades.
“You don’t need an elevator. You’ve got me.”
She catches in place. “What malarkey is this?”
“If I can carry a four-hundred-kilo wheel, I’m sure I can carry a forty-two-kilogram girl up a few stairs.”
“It’s not a few. It’s three thousand.”
“Three thousand and eighteen. I will need nine minutes from the bottom step. A Drop Bubble is eighty-three credits, a glass of Sparklefroth is eleven, a table is only by reservation—but the gallery in the Sun Parlor is free to all, Iris.”
Her respiration has quickened. Rapid eye movements between himself and the Spoke telegraph her excitement.
“I . . . well . . . when I imagined it, I always thought I’d have a friend along.”
“You will,” he said. “What do you think you paid for?”
6.
The lobby is almost a quarter of a mile high, a dizzying cathedral of green glass. The air is cool and smells corporate. The glass barrels of the elevators vanish into pale clouds. The Spoke is so large it has its own climate.
They queue to pass through the scanners. The Clockwork guards might’ve been carved from soap, uniformed figures with featureless white heads and smooth white hands: a squad of living mannequins. Iris steps through the Profiler, which scans for weapons, biological agents, drugs, chemicals, threatening intentions, and debt. A low, discordant pulse sounds. A security Clockwork gestures for her to go through again. On her second pass, she clears the scanner without incident. A moment later Chip follows.
“Any idea why you tripped the Profiler?” Chip asks. “Debt? Or a desire to harm others?”
“If you’ve got debt, you can imagine doing harm to others,” she says. She raises the aquaball she still carries under one arm. “Probably it caught me thinking about what I want to do with my mermaid. I was remembering how we planned to eat sushi at my birthday party.”
“It’s a pet, not a snack. Try to be good.”
When Iris tilts her head back, she sees iridescent bubbles with people in them, hundreds of feet above her, floating here and there, pulling free of the clouds and drifting to earth. The sight of them—gleaming like ornaments on some impossibly huge Christmas tree—gives her an ache. She always thought someday she would ride in one herself.
Hammered-bronze doors open into the stairwell. Flights of black glass plates climb the walls, around and around, in a spiral that goes on into infinity.
“Get on my back,” Chip says, sinking to one knee.
“The last time someone gave me a piggyback, I was probably six,” she says, “someone” being her father.
“The last time I gave someone a piggyback,” he says, “was twenty-three years before you were born. The Spoke was still under construction then. I’ve never been up to the top either.”
She straddles his back, puts her arms around the plasteel of his neck. He rises fluidly to his full height. The first step lights up when he steps on it—and the second, and the third. He bounds up them in an accelerating series of white pulses.
“How old are you?” she asks.
“I came online one hundred and sixteen years ago, almost a century before your own operating system began to function.”
“Ha.” They’re moving so fast now that it makes her feel queasy. Her Monowheel doesn’t go this fast at top speed. He leaps three steps at a time, keeping a steady, jolting rhythm. Iris cannot bear to look over the glass retaining wall on her right, cannot look at the black nautilus swirl of steps below them. For a while she is silent, eyes squeezed shut, pressing herself into his back.
Finally, just to be talking, she asks, “Who was the first person to put a coin in your meter?”
“A boy named Jamie. We were close for almost four years. He used to visit me once a week.”
“That’s where the money is,” she says. “My dad had repeat clients, too. There was a woman who used to cut his throat every Sunday at one. She bled him dry, and he did the same to her—took her for every cent she had. How much did you squeeze good old Jamie for before he got bored of you?”
“He didn’t get bored. He died, when malware infected his enhanced immune system. He raved about cheap Viagra and Asian women who want English-speaking husbands for two awful days before the infection killed him. He was thirteen.”
She shivers, has heard horror stories about corrupted bioware. “Awful.”
“The price of being alive is that someday you aren’t.”
“Yeah. My meter is running, too. Isn’t that the whole point of birthdays? To remind you the meter is running down? Someday I’ll be dead, and you’ll still be making new friends. Carrying other girls up other stairways.” She laughs humorlessly.
“However old I myself may be, consider that in a very real sense my own life happens one token at a time, and there are sometimes days, or even weeks, between periods of activity. I’ve outlived Jamie by a hundred and three years in one sense. In another he spent far more time doing and being. And in still another sense, I’ve never lived at all—at least if we agree that life means personal initiative and choice.”
She snorts. “Funny. People pay you to come to life, and people paid my dad to die, but you’re both professional victims. You take money and let other people decide
what happens to you. I guess maybe that’s most work: being a victim for hire.”
“Most work is about being of service.”
“Same thing, isn’t it?”
“Some work is about lying down for others, I suppose,” he says, and she realizes he is leaping up the last flight of stairs to a wide black glass landing and another set of bronze doors. “And some work is about lifting people up.”
He opens the doors.
A dying sun spears them in a shaft of light, seals them in dusky amber.
7.
At first it doesn’t seem there are any walls. The Sun Parlor at the top of the Spoke is a small circular room beneath a lid of BluDiamond, as transparent as breath. The sun rests in a bed of bloodstained sheets. A bar of black glass, curved like the blade of a sickle, occupies the center of the room. A Clockwork gentleman stands behind it. He wears a bowler on the copper vase of his head, and his torso rides atop six copper legs, giving him the look of a jeweled, metal cricket in a hat.
“Are you here for the Danforth party?” the Clockwork attendant asks in a plummy voice. He presses fingertips of copper pipe together. “Ms. Paget, I presume? Mr. Danforth has checked in below with the others but indicated you would not be joining them this evening.”
“I wanted it to be a surprise,” Iris tells him . . . a lie so smooth that Chip can detect no trace of physiological change, no quickening of breath or alteration in skin temperature.
“Very good. The rest of your party is approaching in the elevator. If you would like to toast the maiden, you will be joined by the birthday girl in twenty seconds.” The Clockwork gestures at a collection of champagne flutes filled with Sparklefroth.
Chip picks up a flute and hands it to Iris just as a hatch slides open in the floor. The elevator rises into the room, a bronze cage containing a flock of twelve-year-old girls in party dresses and new faces, accompanied by a weary man in a nice sweater—the birthday girl’s father, no doubt. The grate opens. Chattering, laughing girls spill out.
“Are you sure you can’t kill people?” Iris asks. “Because they’re wearing about five thousand credits of Hideware on their faces, and I’m feeling murdery.”
“Nothing ruins a birthday party like a multiple homicide.”
“I should probably drink my Sparklefroth before the robowaiter introduces me as Ms. Paget, and they realize I’m crashing their party, and I get charged for a drink I can’t afford.”
“They’re not going to hear him,” Chip promises. “Get ready to shout happy birthday.”
“Sparklefroth, French chocolate cake, and bubble rides, as the sun goes down on the twelfth year of Ms. Abigail Danforth’s life!” cries the Clockwork waiter. “And happy day, your guests are all here, even—” But no one hears the last part of his statement.
Chip’s head spins on his neck, 360 degrees, around and around, and at the same time he emits a piercing bottle-rocket whistle. Red, white, and blue sparks crackle and fly from his ears. A Wurlitzer organ plays the opening chords of “Happy Birthday” from inside his chest at a staggering volume.
Iris lifts her glass like she belongs and shouts, “Happy birthday!”
The kids shriek “Happy birthday!” and rush to collect flutes of Sparklefroth, while the sparks pouring from Chip’s ears turn to cotton-candy clouds of pink and purple smoke. The girls sing. The room echoes with their gay noise. When the song is over, they erupt into gales of laughter and gulp Sparklefroth. Iris drinks with them. Her eyes widen. Her blond hair begins to lift and float around her head with electrical charge.
“Whoa,” she says, and reaches for Chip’s arm to steady herself.
A blue pop of electricity flies from her fingers. She twitches in surprise. Then, experimentally, she snaps her fingers. Another blue spark.
The party girls are zapping each other, provoking screams of hilarity and shock. The room is full of dazzle, flashing lights, loud crackling noises. It looks like Chinese New Year. Iris’s presence has already been forgotten. The Clockwork waiter believes she belongs, while the partygoers accept her as someone who just happened to be there when the celebration began, nothing more.
“I’m electric,” Iris says to Chip, her eyes wondering.
“Welcome to the club,” he tells her.
8.
As the Sparklefroth begins to wear off, Iris turns from the crowd of girls to watch the sun slip out of the sky. The low-voltage drink has left her frizzy-haired and frazzled, keyed up in a way that is not entirely pleasant. It’s the little girls in their Hideware. “Pampered bitches” is the phrase that comes to mind. Who buys thousand-token new faces for children?
The Hideware is a delicate, transparent mask that disappears when it adheres to the skin. New faces have moods, not features, and a person sees his or her own psychological projections. The birthday girl wears Girl-Next-Door. Iris knows it, because at one glimpse of her slightly upturned nose and her wry, knowing eyes, Iris felt almost overwhelmed by a desire to ask her something about sports. There’s a girl in Celebrity, another wearing Copy-My-Homework, a Tell-Me-Anything, a Zen Sunrise. If Celebrity comes over to her, Iris will probably ask her to autograph her boob. The great pleasure of Hideware is the opportunities it gives you to humiliate others.
“Do you see them all? In their awful new faces?”
“Why awful?” Chip asks.
“They’re awful because I don’t have one. They’re awful because I’m sixteen, and a sixteen-year-old shouldn’t envy a twelve-year-old.”
A face appears in the window next to hers, the ghostly reflection of a girl with bushy red hair and big ears. When Iris glances at her, she discovers that the redhead is wearing Tell-Me-Anything. Iris knows because she is seized by a sudden desire to blurt out the truth, that she lied about being part of their group so she could get a free glass of Sparklefroth. She quickly directs her stare back to the clouds, a turmoil of red and gold smoke.
“The sun is pretty dumb, huh?” says Tell-Me-Anything. “I mean, so it’s really there. So what?”
“Boring,” Iris agrees. “Maybe if it did something. But it just floats there making light.”
“Yeah. I wish it was hot enough to set fire to something.”
“Like what?”
“Like anything. The clouds. Some birds or something. Oh, well. After we get done with the stupid scenic part of the party we’ll have fun. After the stars come out, we get to ride in Drop Bubbles. I know a secret about you.” She says this last with no change in tone and waits with a sly smile for Iris to register it. Tell-Me-Anything continues, “The waiter thinks you’re part of our group. He asked if I wanted to bring you a slice of cake, and he called you Ms. Paget, but you aren’t Sydney Paget. She’s at a funeral. She couldn’t be here today. Here’s your cake.” She offers a saucer with a tiny round chocolate cake on it.
Iris accepts. She thinks, I’m having cake at the top of the Spoke while the sun goes down, just like I wanted. It is, oddly, even more delicious knowing she doesn’t belong.
“Are you going to ride down in a Drop Bubble? Sydney’s bubble is all paid for.”
“I guess if no one is using it,” Iris says cautiously.
“But if I tell, they won’t let you. What will you give me not to tell?”
A bite of cake sticks in Iris’s throat. It requires a conscious effort for her to swallow.
“Why would they let a Drop Bubble go to waste if it’s paid for?”
“They’re expensive. They’re so expensive. Mr. Danforth is going to ask about a refund when he goes downstairs. But if you wait and go right after us, you could float down and land and walk out before he can get his money back. He has to talk to customer service, and it’s a really long line. What would you do to keep me from telling?”
Iris hums to herself. “Tell you what, kid. Want a mermaid?” Lifting the aquaball under one arm to show it off.
The redhead wrinkles her nose. “Ugh. No thank you.”
“What then?” Iris asks, not sure why she’s indulg
ing her pint-size extortionist.
“Have you ever seen a sunset before? A real one?”
“No. I’ve never been above the clouds before.”
“Good. You aren’t going to see this one either. You have to miss it. That’s the deal. Liars don’t get to have all the goodies. If you want a free ride in a Drop Bubble, you have to close your eyes until I say. You have to miss the last of the sunset.”
Cake sits in Iris’s stomach like a lump of wet concrete. She opens her mouth to tell the little blackmailer to take a long walk out an open window.
Chip speaks first. “I have an alternative suggestion. I have recorded this conversation. How about we play it for Mr. Danforth? I wonder how he’ll feel about you tossing around threats and trying to cheat him out of his refund.”
Tell-Me-Anything totters back a step, blinking rapidly. “No,” she says. “You wouldn’t. I’m only twelve. You wouldn’t do that to a twelve-year-old. I’d cry.”
Iris turns and for the first time looks Tell-Me-Anything right in her false new face, lets herself be swept up by the full psychotropic force of her mask.
“If there’s one thing prettier than a sunset,” Iris says, “it’s seeing little shits cry.”
9.
The clouds shimmer, piles of golden silk. Chip registers 1,032 variations in the light, ranging from canary to a hue the color of blood stirred into cream. There are shades here he’s never witnessed, lighting up optic sensors that have not been tested since he was assembled in Taiwan. They watch until the sun drops into the slot of the horizon and is gone.
“I’m glad I got to see this. I’ll never forget it,” he tells Iris.
“Do you ever forget anything?”
“No.”
“You saved my ass from a twelve-year-old supervillain. I owe you.”
“No,” he says. “I owe you. Twenty more minutes, to be exact.”
A scattering of ancient stars fleck the gathering darkness. Chip knows all their names, although he has never directly seen any of them before.
