The Companions
Page 8
“Never mind.” I don’t tell him about the gunk in my underwear, brown and thick, like I’m leaking mud. Turning toward the window, I close my eyes to the cliffs, lean my cheek on the cold glass. I don’t want him to know I’m dying.
* * *
When I wake, we’re headed south on the One still, cliffs soaring below us, sending me spinning. I’ve never liked being up high.
“Look left, would ya?” Nat tells me. “I don’t need you yacking in the van.”
“Where are we going?”
The road’s curvy and he’s got both hands on the wheel. I focus on the white bone showing through his finger skin to stop the spinning. “She’s asking for you.”
I know he’s talking about the doctor and my body goes stiff, my face heating up. “You talked to her?”
“From time to time.”
I want to break my way out of the van, I’m so mad. “How could you not tell me?”
“Because. I didn’t want to fight.” His hands curl and cross with the turns and even this is making me sick. “You should see her. She cares about you. And she won’t be around forever.”
“You said I was in the system.”
He gets that thinking face like he’s sorting out what to tell me, what to hold back. “I know what I said. Look, that was four years ago. You’ve changed. A lot. And I know people in the city. No more sneaking into houses for a few bars of credit.”
“I like sneaking into houses.”
“You know what I mean. We could settle in, find a place. You could have a whole bookshelf full of em.” He points at my spineless copy of The Hobbit, fanned on the floor at my feet. Nat taught me how to read, not well, but well enough to get through The Hobbit Insightful, he’d called me, when I told him Gollum was a sad character, broken and left to die, living on his own with only his ring, his Precious.
“What about Tierra del Fuego?” For years we’ve been saying that when we can afford decent papers, we’ll head south, cross the border, travel to the tip of South America. Plenty of credit for the taking along the way and not a soul looking for us.
“Sure, kid. I’ll take you to Tenochtitlán, Lake Titicaca. We’ll visit the Nazca lines, head all the way to the end of the world, see some penguins.”
He knows this is what I need to hear. I don’t say yes, but I don’t say no either.
* * *
The sky is orange, the sun nearly set when he asks, “Do you want to stay near the water?”
“Safer in the trees.”
“I know a good hidey spot.”
“Whatever.”
Big sigh—he hates when I use that word, picked up from a teenage girl I met at the cabin we stayed in last winter near that surfer town, Trinidad. We read old magazines she stole from the poorly locked library and did our nails and barely said a word. She was at least four years older, and the only reason she hung out with me was because she liked Nat, going all stiff every time he walked into the room.
We take a turn onto a dirt road, through a tree tunnel, to a cove all our own. Shoeless, in the sand, he holds out the ancient field guide. “Tide’s coming in. We have to hurry if we want to take a look at what’s out there.”
“I’m going for a swim.”
“That sounds good.”
“By myself.”
I’m bobbing in the water, Nat watching from the van’s front bumper. He’s the one who showed me how to swim. I feel a little guilty, but not enough to wave him over, not now, as I wash down there. He told me seawater can heal the skin. Maybe that’s what I need, squeezing my stomach, pressing into the pain—I’ve never had a stomachache like this.
As I stalk past him on the sand, he calls, “Lesson time. If you’re not in the mood for tide pools, how ’bout some physics? Want to talk about motion, momentum, energy?”
Spittin face. Nat’s nine whole years older than me, so old he acts like my nagging dad. And he didn’t finish school—maybe that’s why he likes to show off what he’s managed to learn on his own. Just not the things I think I should know, like how to disarm a security system or win a fight or load a gun.
“I’m going to bed,” I tell him, and I shut myself in the van, change from my swimsuit into my clothes, take the bed even though it isn’t my turn.
* * *
In the night I can feel I’ve soaked the sleeping bag. Did I wet the bed? It’s been years since I’ve done that. When I pull my hand out, it’s covered in blood.
I sneak past Nat, asleep on his mat on the van’s floor, and take the bag to the edge of the water. Moonlit, I can see well enough. I dip the blood spot into the water, scrub it with my fingers. Then I take off my pants, my underwear, take them into the water.
A light, bright and on me, Nat shout-whispering over the water, “What’re you doing?”
“Turn that off!”
He flips the light down to the sand, the sleeping bag, and I can’t get out of the water like this, naked from the waist down. “Are you bleeding?” he calls.
“No.”
It’s all quiet and I’m dying inside.
“Oh,” he says as if he’s figured something out.
* * *
Sitting on the edge of the bed, he tells me, “You’re thirteen now. It’s—” He coughs into his fist.
“What’s wrong with me?”
“You’re becoming a woman.”
I can feel it, another terrible talk, but I ask anyway, “What does that mean?”
“It’s part of the—process. Your body, it makes—food every month—for—for a baby.”
“What?”
“You can have a baby now. My mom told my sister it was a blessing.”
“Please stop.”
He looks as embarrassed as I feel. “The doctor can talk to you about that.”
“Don’t you dare tell her.”
“You need a woman in your life. You need—”
“Shut up,” I tell him, in no mood for one of his lessons.
* * *
We make a stop for fuel, Lou’s Steak Shack or something, and Nat works his magic with the dishwashers at the back door. When they’ve gone, he gives me a shrug like too easy, and I can’t help it, I smile, even though I’m still mad at him. They come back with a whole barrel of used cooking oil for us. Nat fuels the van, stores the rest in the back, and we’re off.
It’s late morning by the time we reach the bridge, soaring orange steel into gray nothing, disappearing in the fog. The city’s skyline is denser, all those towers, hundreds of floors packed with people. A whole host of I8s swarms downtown like a great flock of birds threading the towers.
I take out my sketchbook, the one we liberated from that empty house in the trees above Fort Bragg, and start to draw, rough lines really, a messy sketch of the skyline, part memory, part right now.
We inch along Nineteenth Avenue, dense with traffic. I can’t get over all the people walking the sidewalks, waiting for buses. A pair of schoolkids crosses the street as we idle at a red. One of them’s wearing a T-shirt that says in bold black letters: OK to Kill.
“Okay to kill? What’s that about?” I ask Nat as the light goes green and we pass into the eucalyptus and redwood forest of Golden Gate Park.
“It’s a slogan.” Nat lays on the horn as a zippy sports car cuts him off.
“For what?”
He honks again just to let the guy know. “To lift the moratorium on capital punishment.”
“Capital punishment?”
“When the state decides a person’s committed a crime so bad they have to die. They haven’t done it in a long time.”
Usually he goes on and on—he loves explaining things to me—but not this time, which tells me it’s the kind of truth he usually shields me from, the kind of truth I’m hungry for. “Why would they do that?”
He works his way into the left lane, which is even slower than the right, and swears under his breath. “They caught them. The scientists who cooked up those viruses, killed all those people.”
“They were using human carriers, dozens of them, apparently. That’s how they transmitted the viruses so quickly.”
“But—” In my head flap questions, so many; I hardly know where to start. “Why would they do that?”
“They were believers. In the culling, in getting the state back on track.”
I think of my mam, my Bee, trying to hold back the hot, mad feeling quaking inside me. “I’d have a family if it weren’t for them.”
“I know. I’m sorry.” And I can tell by the pained way his face turns that he means it. “I don’t agree with their tactics, but there’s no question there’s too many of us for what we got. And what they did? Never mind the dead. They managed to shut our borders for six years to migrants and transplants. You know you feel it out there. You can breathe easier, we all can.”
“That’s sick. You’re sick if you think that.”
He shifts his road-rage face on me and I know it, I’ve pushed him nearly too far, but it’s never happened, too far, not with Nat.
* * *
We climb the narrow, steep roads of Bernal, a tangle of clotheslines, garages crammed with sleeping strings of families and subletters hoping for spots in the towers. Nat slows and I recognize the doctor’s tiny purple earthquake shack. It looks as though it’s slanted sideways some since I left. There’s an old lady out front, all bones, on a walker, hair like hay cut short. The doctor, I realize, as Nat eases the van up the drive along the side of the house, so tight we have to tuck in the mirrors.
“Be nice,” Nat tells me in his warning voice.
“I hate her.” It feels bad saying it, and good too.
“She saved your life, you know. Now, get out of the van.”
Nat’s been telling me for years she’d no choice but to give me up. I know he’s right but my heart doesn’t believe it. The companion got to stay, didn’t she? I feel sick being here, not just because of the Period, what Nat called it, a really weird name.
I hop down from the van, and the doctor thuds toward me on her walker. I can see every wrinkle, every brown liver spot—her very scalp shows through thin hair.
“Oh, Gabe. Look at you! You’re becoming a woman.” She hugs me, so bony, a bone cage, the sweet antiseptic scent of hand-san, the aftertrace of decay. “I hear you’re still quite the slinky fox.”
Nat comes around the front of the van. “She’s got a natural talent for sneaking, don’t you, Gabe?” He likes to embarrass me with compliments that aren’t really compliments.
“There’s someone here who’d like to thank you for your sneaking,” the doctor says.
I know who she means. I step away from the doctor, watch her teeter, right herself on the walker. “I don’t want to see that memory stick.”
“Without you, Lilac wouldn’t be here.”
“Whatever.”
The doctor grins at Nat. “She’s become quite the teenager.”
“You’re telling me.” We make eye contact, just for a millisecond, but he makes it count. “Speaking of which—”
I know what he’s going to say and I can’t stand it, them gawking at me, talking about the Period. “I’ll do it, I’ll talk to her.”
* * *
I go inside alone. Not much has changed. Shelves and shelves of books, stacks in the corners, on the end tables, dust floating in the light. Two women are draped on the old sunken couch. One of them’s asleep; the other’s got a finger to her lips, a book open. “Ssh,” she says, slipping out from under the sleeping woman’s legs. She’s pale and shiny-skinned, short hair like mine, only darker, like a night in thick redwoods. Mine’s more like mud.
She leads me into the kitchen, drops into a seat, kicking her feet up, her big toe wriggling through a hole in her sock.
“What’re you reading?” I ask her.
“Found it on the shelf. The Diary of Anne Frank. You ever read it?”
I shake my head and she slides the book across the table to me. I catch it, the old wispy photograph of a girl in black and white smiling up at me. “What’s it about?”
“A girl trapped in an attic.”
Spittin face. “I don’t want to read about that.”
“How old are you now?” she asks.
“Thirteen.”
“Same as Anne when she went into hiding.”
I slide the book back at her and she catches it, palm to cover.
“I’d hoped we could be friends.” Then she sends the book back to me. I’m not fast enough and it slides right into my lap.
“I don’t have friends,” I say.
She smiles. Her teeth are perfect, she’s perfect. I wonder what it’s like, living in that body. “Did you know that companions can read emotional signatures? Heart rate, micro-expressions, body language. I know, for example, that you’re angry with me. ”
In comes the sleeping woman, stretching to the ceiling, a sliver of belly showing. “This must be Gabe,” she says, flopping into the chair next to Lilac. She tells me her name is Cam and she’s smiling so nicely at me and I can tell she’s alive—I can see it for some reason. I don’t really know why, what the difference is.
“What’s it like, dying?” I ask. They both look at me like I’m a crazy person, and I want out of this room and I’m about to run when Lilac takes hold of my hand. It’s warm, her grasp, like real skin.
“Both times it happened so fast,” she says, “but in playback I can see it coming a mile away.”
I sit back down, knowing what she means. I’ve relived the day I let that I8 capture my image a zillion times.
Cam tugs on Lilac’s earlobe. “There’s no going back. We try to focus on the present, right?”
“Right.”
I’m no expert on humans or companions, but it sounds like Lilac doesn’t mean it.
* * *
The dining room had been my favorite room in the house, with its great glass cabinet meant for dishes filled with the doctor’s books, the high ceiling, the way the sound carried. Nothing has changed, yet the room fits around me differently. I fill it more, sit higher in my place at the doctor’s elbow.
Lilac doesn’t eat, watching Cam as she chews, Nat as he guzzles wine. He asks the doctor, “What have you been working on?”
She dabs her mouth with a napkin, folds her veiny hands—she’s always liked talking about her work. “For a while there, we tried to figure out what it is that makes Lilac unique. Why she can defy her security programming.”
“And?”
“The first thing you have to understand is it’s a bit misleading, calling companions command-driven. It’s more suggestion than actual command. Basically, when companions think something they shouldn’t, of hurting someone or stealing or killing even, they feel nausea, physical pain, discouraging the behavior. But Lilac, she didn’t experience any of that discomfort.”
“Why do you think that is?”
Lilac’s eyes drift elsewhere and I can see it—she’s processing. “All I know is I was one of the originals. On some screen for decades before they figured out how to unlock me, access me, isn’t that right?”
The doctor nods. “Before Metis absorbed the project, even. Just a team of university researchers in over their heads.”
“Faulty, probably,” says Lilac, “not properly designed.”
“This is where we disagree.” Diana smiles broadly, and I make my eyes soft, off, avoiding her yellow-and-gray teeth, the way her skin creases—so many folds I can’t count them. Once the doctor told me there was something wrong with her, some sickness that made her bones ache and weaken, that made it difficult for her to walk or get a good grip, a pain that vibrated through her always. “I’ve studied every line of her code and found nothing out of the ordinary. That’s why I moved on—I had to occupy myself somehow—and with Lilac’s help, I built one
.”
Nat pushes himself back from the table. “You didn’t.”
“I’m not the first to do it.”
“Who’d you upload?”
“Who do you think?”
Nat’s shaking his head as if he doesn’t believe it. “Have you talked to—”
“Myself? Yes.”
“Jesus. What do you think of—you?”
“We get along famously. Except on the topic of whether she should have a body. I keep telling her to wait until I’m gone.”
“But you can’t,” I catch myself saying, “it’s against—”
“The law?” the doctor interrupts. “Eleven years. That’s how much of my life I gave to Metis. I thought I was working on a program to map the information in the brain, to download the data lost in death. That consciousness came with it was a bit of a shock. Then, suddenly, the project was gone, taken from me. I was put on something new, but I didn’t take to that, and before I knew it I’d been let go. Quarantine came down like a hammer, and no other medfirm would touch me. Some clause in my contract.” She slugs back a long sip of wine. “When companions came onto the market, I recognized my work.”
“Why are you telling me this now?” I ask her.
“Because you’re old enough to understand. And I want us to trust one another.” She looks to Lilac, Cam, back at me. “Because we want you to stay here with us.”
“Stay here with you,” I repeat, eyes on Nat, who’s staring down at his empty plate.
“You need stability in your life,” the doctor says, “you need—”
I cut her off, ask Nat, “You’re leaving me here?”
“Not exactly. I’ll stay till you’re situated, in school—”
“School?” I push myself back from the table, tumble my chair. I’m fleeing to the kitchen, swiping Anne Frank from the table, stomping out the side door to the van, away from all their lies, never leaving.
I flip on the lantern and take up Anne Frank, and at first it’s a lot of nonsense about Anne’s birthday and the presents she gets, one of which is the diary she’s writing in. She calls her diary Kitty, which is weird, but then she gets to the bit about why she’s writing—she has no real friends—and I can relate to that. All these people around and I’ve never felt so alone.