By this point, Frankie’s arms were trembling and even when empty, her wheelbarrow wobbled from side to side. The scent of this building was of hay and sweet manure, like a stable.
When Frankie and the keeper finished carting in the supplies, the keeper dumped her final load of pumpkins into the sleeping chamber. On the other side of the gate, the gorillas sniffed and snorted air in loud gusts. They pressed in against the bars until the gate clanked in its frame. Frankie stayed back a few feet, while the keeper stepped out of the sleeping chamber, clanged shut the door behind her and pressed the button to roll up the gate.
They knuckled in, grey and large and huffing with happiness. A sense of inertia, heat and weight.
Each scooped up as many pumpkins as possible, piling them up in their arms and then walking upright, carrying them away from the others to eat. A young female picked up two large pumpkins and then, not satisfied, stuck a third between her knees and waddled away, her legs swiveling around the pumpkin, like a heavy woman in too tight a skirt. A few feet away from the others, she put her prizes down, rumbling happily in her chest. She palmed a pumpkin with ease and tapped it on the ground, cracking it open like an egg, then began spooning out the fibers and seeds with her fingers, slurping it all in like spaghetti.
The silverback, after he’d scooped clean one half of a pumpkin, turned the shell over in his hands, investigating it. He lifted it, then fit it carefully over the top of his head, like a hat, like a wig.
Transformed into a redhead, he turned to look deadpan at each of his wives.
They snorted at him, then looked away. The amusement of long married couples.
Frankie followed the keeper back to the bonobo building. She’d kept a running count of the apes she’d seen so far—eight gorillas, 12 chimps, no idea how many orangutans. All this, plus the 14 bonobos. If each orangutan consumed eight pounds of food a day, each gorilla must eat at least 10. She remembered once seeing a hippo in a zoo wade into what looked like a small sea of hay and take its first bite with the efficient grace of a marathoner. Feeding all these great apes must require several hundred pounds of food a day. She understood why Bellows would choose to 3-D print as much food as possible.
They now ferried pumpkins into the bonobo building, dumping them in one of the offices. After her last load, she paused by the kitchen. The 3-D printer was busy extruding a gleaming papaya, stacked beneath were maybe 20 food cartridges. She didn’t see other food cartridges on the shelves nearby, instead just plates and pans and human food. She stepped forward to open the fridge. The fridge hummed, its shelves filled with hamburger and milk and salad.
When the keeper walked by, she asked, Where’s all the bonobo food?
The keeper said, Pantry.
She walked to the pantry. Inside were shelving units, packed with food cartridges, the logo of 3M repeated endlessly. She took two steps inside—far enough to see the next set of shelves filled with them also—and then backed out, reassured.
Twenty Eight
By the time the keeper dismissed her at the end of the evening—the Foundation ready for the storm—Frankie was wobbling slightly as she carried the stuff she needed, clothes and food, into the bonobo building. She’d sleep here until the storm was over, since the dust would make it difficult to get from her apartment to the building.
Inside, she found Stotts had already set up a cot for her in one of the offices in the building. She pulled off her shoes and sweater, lay down and fell asleep.
In the middle of the night, she woke—her bladder full—and remembered the storm. After visiting the bathroom, she headed toward the enclosure, to see if the storm had arrived. The rasping snore of one of the bonobos echoed down the hall. It sounded like Mr. Mister.
In the research room, she stopped in front of the door to the enclosure and said, Ok Door, open.
The door unlocked and she stepped out into the empty space. The overhead lights snapped on, blinding, so she said, Ok Lights, off.
With a metallic clunk, the lights turned off. In the darkness, the enclosure felt spooky, a deserted auditorium at night. With the glass roof closed, the echo was perfect, the rustle of her clothes, the rasp of her breath. She sniffed the air and looked up. Of course there was nothing to smell, aside from the normal fragrance of fruit, manure and cleaning products. Above, the stars were clear and bright.
She sat down, leaning back against the wall, hoping to stay awake until the dust storm arrived. The image in her mind was of howling winds and groaning walls, small objects flying about.
Sitting there, she half-dozed, images in her head of endless piles of pumpkins and wheelbarrows. At one point, she startled up, unsure of what had woken her or how much time had passed.
The quiet complete. Profound. The silence of a dream.
No traffic, no voices, no wind. Nothing except the breath in her throat. Above her, half the stars were gone.
She blinked up at the sky. At first she assumed the object between her and the stars was a cloud, then noticed how clean the line was, like a giant piece of paper creeping majestically forward across the night sky.
She looked over at the tourists’ viewing area. One by one the lights along the path blurred, then disappeared, wiped from view, from existence. This silent darkness sliding forward along the path, erasing object after object, until only the enclosure remained—this building the last in all the world.
The storm arrived in this way, not with noise or fury, but instead like fog, a creeping absence of sound and light and vision. Like death or anesthesia, an inching thief.
Staring upward, she imagined all that dirt, that dust, hanging in the air above her, thousands of feet of it, higher than she could see or imagine, the sheer weight of it all. For a moment she felt how truly tiny she was, how utterly insignificant.
Then she stood up and shook herself. Heading off to bed, she concentrated instead on the fact that she was inside, the lights and heat on, the fridge full, the sink working—that cozy sense of comfort that came from being warm and safe during a storm, that sense of being privileged and smart.
STORM: DAY 1
Twenty Nine
In the morning, when she woke, every muscle in her body was stiff with exhaustion. With some effort, she rolled over.
Turning on her Lenses she found the number of percent signs and other stray characters littering her Lenses had proliferated overnight into a pile that obscured the bottom 20% of her vision. She peered over this pile as though over bifocals, then turned her Lenses off.
Without Lenses, the world looked bare—no readouts, ads or cursors—but at least she could see.
Shuffling down the hall and through the locked door into the interaction area, she found Stotts in the kitchen. His hair was still wet from the shower, while she hadn’t yet brushed her teeth. The feeling was jarring, like going to the office in her jammies. They both minimized eye contact for the first minute. These days of the storm, she realized, would be a bit intimate.
He was prepping the food for the bonobos, cutting up the printed papaya into smaller slices. Perhaps he was trying to make the identical globs of printed food appear more like hand-cut real fruit.
The printer beside him hummed busily, its head zipping back and forth extruding fruit.
Stotts jerked his chin toward the printer, Can you load that up with more cartridges?
Reaching down to grab some cartridges from the shelf under the printer, she had to stretch into the stiffness of her muscles. The cartridges were wrapped in mylar with symbols declaring the contents vegan and kosher.
As her fingers touched the mylar wrapping, she felt a sharp pain.
Ow, she said and looked at her fingers.
Stotts said, Yeh, watch out for static. One of the problems of dust storms.
Static?
He said, All that dust above us, rubbing against itself. It’s like . . . well, like mi
llions of tiny feet scuffing around on a giant shag rug.
She ripped the mylar off, revealing the cartridge which had pictograms on it showing how to load it. With so many companies being international, pictograms had become their own language, an attempt to reunite Babel or at least to reduce the costs of printing directions. These pictograms made the two steps look simple, however when Frankie turned to the printer it didn’t look like the pictogram.
He said, During the 1930s Dust Bowl, in order to drive during a storm, people had to hangs chains off the bumper to ground the car. Otherwise the first person to step out could get defibrillated.
She gave him a confused look.
He said, You know, the car has these pistons pumping, building up static and it’s driving on rubber wheels so the static can’t discharge. First person to step out—kzat.
Ahh, she said and stepped to the other end of the printer to examine it from that angle.
Using the knife, he scraped the slices of papaya off the cutting board into a bucket on the floor.
This end of the printer also looked wrong. Pictograms just as capable as words of bungling communication.
Seeing her confusion, Stotts reached over with one hand and clicked open that end of the printer for her. Now it looked like the pictogram.
He said, You can tell the storm is big. The shocks are already bad.
She loaded the cartridge and lined up more in the feeder basket.
He pointed his chin toward the cup of coffee and baby bottle sitting on the counter, Can you bring Mama’s coffee and Tooch’s milk to them, then start hiding fruit around the enclosure?
Picking up the warm cup of coffee, she inhaled its scent. She asked, Will you pour me a cup?
He said, Daisy worked you hard, huh?
For a moment she couldn’t imagine who this was, then remembered the keeper’s name. She grunted.
She walked down the hall to the sleeping chamber where the bonobos chirped greetings to her from their hammocks. Tooch took the bottle from her, rolling onto his back and nursing from it with enthusiasm. Mama took her first sip of coffee, exhaled and settled back.
Lugging the bucket of fruit, Frankie stepped into the enclosure. The lights clicked on at her entrance. She stopped, assuming at first she’d opened the wrong door because she stood in a large room with beige walls.
The dust pressed against the glass—the color of paint selected by hotels averse to making any statement at all. The only difference was this paint swirled subtly. On the roof, the dust had built up, turning the glass a dark brown. At seven A.M., it was as dark as dusk inside the enclosure.
She hid the fruit in the nooks and crannies of the enclosure. When she was done, she pressed the button to open the gate to the sleeping chamber. The bonobos stepped out one by one, Mama first, all of them subdued. They looked around at the erased world and then began to search for the food, staying a few feet from the walls as though uneasy about what might be on the other side.
When they found the printed fruit, they turned it over in their hands, then ate it, their expressions similar to hers during her years of endo, when she chewed through piles of spinach and lentils, wishing for steak and ice cream.
Hungry, she returned to the kitchen to drink her coffee and cook herself a burger for breakfast. Not having brought any buns from her apartment, she sandwiched the burger between two chocolate bars, the heat of the meat making the chocolate sag as though tired. She had to eat quickly because her fingers kept poking holes through the melting bars. She thought this might be the best burger she’d ever eaten.
Stotts drank his coffee, watching her. He missed no detail of the grease and chocolate that dribbled down her arms, his face a study in politeness. Afterward she sucked the mess off of each finger, then cleaned herself up as best as she could and headed back into the enclosure.
*
The static got worse. Inside the enclosure, the cement floor and metal climbing structure were grounded. However when Frankie climbed onto the tire, she dawdled for a second, looking at the swirling dust outside, before she reached from the ungrounded tire to the climbing structure. The zap of static was strong enough that she yanked her hand back and hissed through her teeth. When she reached again, she got a second shock almost as big, but this time she held on and pulled herself into the structure.
She turned her Lenses on in order to read the temperatures of the females’ sexual swellings. To see over the debris littering the bottom of her screen, she had to tuck her chin in and peer out the top of her eyes. As soon as she’d figured out Marge’s temperature was the highest, although only by half a degree, she turned the Lenses off again. Even though Marge probably wouldn’t ovulate for a day or so, she settled down to watch her.
30 minutes later, while Mr. Mister and Marge mated, she said, Ok Bindi, transcribe. Time and date stamp. Mr. Mister and Marge mating. Penile entry.
Since she couldn’t read the transcription with her Lenses off, she said, Ok Bindi, read back transcription.
Her EarDrums started speaking, her BodyWare’s voice garbled and sing-song as though drunk, the consonants mushy. It said, Tine an date stamp. Missed her. Missed her, and margin may ding.
Ok, stop, she said.
She spoke her notes slower this time for transcription, then played them back. The result, if anything, was more indecipherable.
She tried transcribing twice more, enunciating as though for someone just learning English. When that didn’t work, she rebooted out of frustration—pressing her Bindi for the count of three while saying, Ok Bindi, power off.
There was a small beep, a mechanical click from somewhere near her nose and the silence in her ears got deeper.
Impatiently she counted out 10 seconds, then turned her BodyWare back on. Her EarDrums began to make that background fizzy start-up sound. The last time she could remember rebooting—after getting a new implant—the initialization sequence had finished within a few seconds. This time, after two minutes, her EarDrums were still fizzing and had yet to give the trademark Road Runner meep-meep that signaled the system was online. Frustrated, she powered down again, waiting longer before powering back up. After trying this a few more times, she just left her BodyWare off. She’d take written notes instead. Perhaps the static shocks she’d gotten had worsened whatever problem her system had.
She couldn’t remember the last time she’d left her BodyWare off. She surveyed the unenhanced world, knowing nothing more than what her senses told her and her memory recalled. The sensation was a bit like skinny-dipping, a vulnerability that heightened all sensation.
She needed pen and paper to take notes and so she lowered herself from the climbing structure and dropped to the ground. Reaching the door, she grabbed its knob and said, Ok Door, open. She took a half step forward at the same time and plowed into the door when it remained locked.
Behind her, she heard the bonobos explode into breathy laughter. She glanced at them with dignity and they huffed harder.
She turned her BodyWare back on. Even though her system wouldn’t finish booting up, after a few moments, the door recognized her as human and unlocked at her command. She retrieved a notepad and pen, returned to the enclosure and powered off her BodyWare again.
Goliath and Lucy were still giggling. They sat down next to her, patting her head.
To stop the bonobos from running off with either notepad or pen, she tucked them into her bra whenever she wasn’t writing. Seeing her hide these interesting toys, the bonobos kept trying to sneak their hands down her shirt. She slapped them away.
Each time any of them climbed onto the ungrounded tire swing, their hair would begin to stand up from the electricity. As soon as they touched anything other than the tire, there would be an audible kzat and the bonobo would yip in pain. Soon none of them would climb anywhere near the swing.
Thirty
The first sign of
trouble came midmorning.
The lights in the enclosure began clicking off, then turning back on, then dimming down, then turning all the way up. Shifting through every possible level. Frankie looked up at the lights, wondering what Stotts was doing.
The avatar appeared on the wall. 10:48 A.M., she announced, The pencil terrifies the hand.
Frankie blinked then glanced around, but none of the bonobos were signing anything. She looked out to the tourist area to see if anyone was pressing the keys on the kiosk, but of course there was nothing there but swirling dust, the tourists long gone.
The avatar spoke calmly, her hands signing each word, the volume high. She stated with great confidence, 10:48 A.M. Avocados are morphed with lichen.
Frankie stared.
The avatar paused, her eyes bright and friendly. She opened her bonobo lips to reveal her flat human teeth. She asked, 10:48 A.M. Can a pinched cat climb the coal?
Above, the lights clicked on and off.
The avatar said, 10:48 A.M. After a tongue moans, the flute reverts.
Her sign-language gestures were confident, her voice serious. The effect was unsettling, like a well-dressed lunatic.
The bonobos turned away so at least they could lower the visual volume. This was the way they reacted when children slapped willy-nilly at the buttons on the kiosk.
Meanwhile Stotts opened the door. He yelled, You playing with the building controls?
No, she said, What’s going on?
He gestured her inside. She lowered herself from the structure and dropped, careful not to touch the swing. As she neared the door, the bonobos watched with interest. Stotts, however, held the door open for her so she stepped through easily.
The lights inside clicked on and off. The avatar inside the room was talking.
Theory of Bastards Page 21
