Wetware

by Craig Nova

  Four shower heads were lined up at the end of the room, all of them dripping in a different cadence. Kay dropped her jumpsuit in front of the lockers and then turned to the mirror opposite them, where she appeared in a silver and flecked darkness: pale skin, her damp face, the shape of her ribs, the indentation of the backs of her arms where the thin triceps were defined. She looked around and, as discipline, she named the objects in front of her: mirror, bench, shower. Drip. Drop. Odors. Like dirty socks. Then she looked back at herself and thought, Am I attractive?

  A drop of sweat fell from her forehead and splashed on her leg, the silver track of it disappearing along her calf.

  Oh, darling, she thought, please. As she stood there in the gloomy space, she was convinced that she could get relief from her desperation in only one way: in her lover’s touch, or his odor, or that look in his eyes which came from the fact that he wanted to have a child with her, and that this desire came not out of his sense of duty but because he loved her so much that he wanted to mix his blood with hers. Oh, darling, she thought. I want to believe that is the way it will be.

  “Which one are you going to use?” said the attendant, who came up with a small cart on which there were three suits. They all were of one piece and made of thin material, although two of them looked newer and were obviously better made. The better-made ones were actually uglier than the original models, since they were covered with long chaotic shapes and colors.

  “The Burton, that’s this one,” said the attendant, “It’s the cheapest. Twenty-buck deposit. It hasn’t got the connections that the others have, like the Magnin, but if you don’t have the dough, it’s the best you can hope for.”

  The attendant was about thirty and had dirty hair.

  “I’ll take the Burton,” said Kay.

  “That’s what I thought. You can’t fool me, although some of them try. Where’s the twenty?”

  Kay’s jumpsuit lay across the narrow bench in front of the lockers, and Kay reached down to take the last of her money out of the pocket of it. The bill was damp.

  “Here,” said the attendant. “One Burton.”

  Kay rolled up the first leg of the suit and put one foot in, pointing the toe to do so, and then she unrolled the thin material, about as thick as a film, really, pulling it up over her calf and knee, doing the first leg and then the second, the material fitting her perfectly, molding to her knees, her thighs, her stomach. She stuck her arms in, too. Pulled the suit up to her neck. Then she looked at herself in the mirror. The sleek material took the light so as to define her in luminescent smears on her shoulders, her arms, her legs. The attendant said, “Come here.”

  Kay stepped closer to him, and she took out a tube of clear electrolyte gel, which she put on the plug at the end of the belt of the suit.

  “Sometimes the contact isn’t good,” said the attendant. “This helps. All right. There.”

  Kay heard the sound of the water dripping. She swallowed and took a deep breath.

  “All right,” said Kay. “Thanks.”

  Outside, Kay and Hart stepped into a cubicle in which stood a couch about the size of a double bed. It had a disposable cover, and while it was not of the best quality, it still smelled clean. Hart stretched out and plugged his belt into the receptacle on the wall at his side. Overhead a small light glowed. Then it turned green: all set on his side. Kay plugged in too, feeling a little of the gel on her hand, a moisture that seemed familiar. Smooth on the fingers. Damp. The light overhead on her side blinked, a little longer than it did above Hart, and then it turned green. She guessed her connection was slower than Hart’s.

  Her skin felt as though she had been sprayed with cologne and now stood in a slight breeze. This, she guessed, was the setup, the registration with skin chemistry. She and Hart lay side by side. His eyes were almost yellow, speckled like a butterfly’s wing. She had never seen a butterfly, but she knew that she wanted to. His pupils expanded. The cool thrill on her skin grew more uniform. As she waited, as she looked into the eyes of the man who lay next to her, she tried to make the necessary changes in the code of the game.

  Looking for a way to do it was like a dream of a room where she had grown up. As she reached out to the top of a dresser, a brush was right there where she had left it. She felt the familiar heft, the balance. The code spiraled open.

  “Are you ready?” said Hart.

  “Not quite,” said Kay.

  “Nervous?” said Hart.

  “A little. I guess. Wait. Just wait a minute,” she said.

  “Well, okay,” he said.

  Kay knew that what was required was a particular playfulness just when things were at their most difficult, so as to be able to be inspired just when you were most distracted. She also knew there was an enormous difference between information and experience, and she wondered how to compensate for this. She had the theory, but what had she actually done with it? Nothing. She was looking for a pattern in the code, a key to it, like a dictionary, or the smallest detail, like a fractal, that would be repeated over and over again. She hoped that this would be a matter of recognition, a variety of empathy. Or maybe it was better to say that she would recognize it out of instinct. She would understand, but not through words or formulas or anything abstract. She would know it at first touch. Like putting on an old shirt.

  She wished it were a little cooler in this room, and a little less smoky. It was getting hotter. Little drops of sweat, the color of mineral oil, formed on her lip.

  Jack sat at the foot of the couch and looked out into the room where the other machines were. A woman went by in a tight red suit, her hips swinging in smoke and in the noise the players made as they came close to the breaking point. Jack watched the woman’s hips, the light playing on the skin-tight material. The woman looked over her shoulder at him, and in a little while she came back, closer this time.

  “So, how’s it going?” he said to Kay.

  “I’m working on it,” she said.

  “Well, all right,” he said. He turned and looked into the room again, at the glitter through the clouds of smoke. “I’ve got things to do.”

  Kay looked into Hart’s eyes.

  “I’m ready,” he said.

  “Please,” she said.

  “How much are we going to bet?” he said.

  “Well, if you’ll just wait—” she said.

  “No,” he said. “Now. Give me a figure.”

  She was still looking: Was that it, that line there? Was that loop what she was looking for, the method of construction, the format that ran through it all?

  “You tell me,” she said.

  He gave her a number.

  “If I agree,” she said, “will you give me a few minutes?”

  “Five,” he said. “Isn’t that generous?”

  “All right,” she said. “You’re on.”

  Jack watched the woman in the red suit.

  Surely there had to be some order that expressed what she believed to be true: that underneath it all things made sense, and that the way they made sense, such as the neat arrangement of strands of polymers, for instance, or the shape of crystals of mica that one saw in a meteor, all implied some perfection that only needed to be understood. It was a matter of perception. So where was it? She went down one line of code and then another, just like someone shopping in a place where the items for sale were in bins that you could pick over and then discard. She came to a section that she was convinced was Briggs’s work. Clean. To the point. Precise. He probably wasn’t aware that he had conveyed this knowledge to her, but that was what had happened, in the same way that she knew what his most secret dreams and desires were, and what she felt now was a keen sense of intimacy. It made her feel so close to him.

  The first change was the hardest, because she wasn’t certain about it, not really, and she hoped it wouldn’t come back to cause trouble. For instance, she didn’t want to end up with the game giving her the horrors. She tried another change, tentatively at first,
and as she worked through the code, feeling a sense of empathy and security, too, her impulse to take chances grew. The effort left her calm, as though what she was doing here wasn’t a matter of skill, but of understanding and wisdom. She closed her eyes as she worked through the possibilities, going through the loops for the logic of the thing. And as she made the changes, the game began to do the registration over again.

  “Wait a minute,” Hart said.

  “What?” she said. “I thought you were ready. Let’s start.”

  “Oh shit,” he said. “Wait. Wait.”

  His hand reached for his belt, where his suit was plugged in, but midway there he froze.

  She looked into his eyes and guessed that the thing she had done was right, although if she had to do it again, she would have worked through it a little differently. She suspected she could take some other shortcuts, or find some more graceful solutions, and now she considered those other methods, which really were empathetic with the method by which she had been produced. At its heart, the game was orderly and pretty simple.

  Hart said, “Oh no. Ah no. No.” His voice seemed to sink. “Oh no.”

  CHAPTER 7

  March 25, 2029

  HART HAD taken chances before, and often he had done so because of his love for his daughter. It was difficult to describe what she meant to him, but he could feel it when he went without so that she could have a little something extra. He wanted to give her things that made her happy: clothes, trips, anything that would give her a better chance than he had. Her name was Sally. She had freckles, red hair, and green eyes.

  Hart had been in enough bad places to have learned the mental discipline to confront the most dire state of mind. He could dismiss it as delusion, just nerves, too much coffee, a mood that produced an imprecise way of seeing things. He had good reasons to feel this way, too, where the games were concerned, since he had devoted his life to their construction and their integrity. So, when he suspected a detail was off, he had something to fall back on: the discipline of facing up to distress. How many times had he come right up to the edge of panic? He couldn’t even count. The important thing was to take a deep breath. Look at things clearly. Start at the top.

  As he looked at Kay, though, he had the suspicion that playing with her was a mistake. So he started again, taking a deep breath, trying to be disciplined. Was everything he had ever believed nothing more than a sappy delusion, just phrases and details that he had invested with substance by repeating them in safe circumstances?

  The machine did the registration a second time. This was unusual but not unheard of. The games were delicate, and there were all kinds of scales that needed to be addressed: humidity, skin chemistry, the cologne one wore, even the slight psychoactive elements that were in the skin from the bad nightmare a player had had the night before. Hart never liked registration, since it left him with the feeling of being watched. Unpleasant, but necessary.

  Like any gambler, he knew the odds on all kinds of things, and the prospect of anything unpleasant came in terms of one out of a hundred or one out of a thousand or one out of a million. The probability of its not happening was the thing that made it hard for him to see what was happening. After all, what were the odds that the machine was doing anything more than a complicated registration? Maybe Kay had never played this version before, and the machine needed to get a good take on her. It was to his advantage, really, since if everything was hooked up as it should be, why then he would be able to do his best. What he was troubled by was the notion that ill will was the operating principle of the games, or of this one: it had a metaphysical risk that he hadn’t noticed before. He tried to explain it away, like a medieval religious commentator in the days of the plague.

  The game was Arctica X. It was one of the survival series, and in this one, he and his opponent would appear as people who had been dropped into the Arctic. Each player had a limited number of tools and only a little knowledge, too, such as which lichens were edible, and how one went about killing a polar bear. There were meteorological elements too, low temperatures, freezing rain, hard-packed snow, high winds, icy white-outs. But the real danger lay in bands of primitive people, all armed with spears and with the knowledge of traps, and they were out there, watching, trying to find you. Hart noticed right off that the world itself seemed to be revolted by his presence, as though he were a freak of some kind. He understood the environment not by its harshness, but by its hostility to him. He felt like some doomed creature that had fallen out of favor with the gods. He dismissed this as mere superstition, but there it was.

  He started with the basics. Territory was something you wanted to control. The first thing was shelter, since if you couldn’t get through the night, you couldn’t do much about anything else. In this climate he had to make something out of the packed snow. The construction method was simple but beautiful. You made a circle and then you cut blocks of snow out of it and made the first layer, like bricks, but the thing that made the construction work was to cut this first row on the bias, from the surface to the top of the first brick at the end of the first row. This made the other bricks of snow spiral around, getting closer and closer to the top of a dome. The dusk was increasing: the sky in the west was turning a purple-blue, but even that was odd, since the color looked like something he had only seen as a kid, when he had found a man frozen to death in an alley, and had looked at the hue of the skin under the man’s fingernails. How did the game know this color?

  Hart had a piece of pressure-flaked obsidian, but when he tried to cut into the snow, it broke off at the handle. Had there been a crack he had missed? Wasn’t that the first rule? Check the tools you had for imperfections. As he stood there looking at the black stump, he felt the cold seeping into his clothes, and he was certain, too, that he heard the squeak of sealskin boots on the snow. And then he could smell the stink of an animal, a polar bear, which had been eating something rotten, some dead fish it had found. He heard it, too, the sound of its breath coming with a stinky ah-huh, ah-huh, ah-huh.

  The primitive people came over a ridge, their silhouettes black against the oddly colored dusk. Hart knew what the ornaments the primitive people wore were made out of, and one of them even held up a necklace so that he could get a good look. Behind him the animal’s claws made a rattling scratch on the frozen snow. He saw some smoke, like a strand from a cigarette, which must have been from a shelter someone else had made. He guessed it was Kay’s place.

  He started walking in her direction, his shoes making a squeak in the snow, which he felt in his teeth. The wind blew and he had the sensation of struggling against it, as though it were almost fluid, as though it came out of a fire hose. His fingers were numb. Would she listen? Didn’t she have a heart?

  Then the primitive people followed. And as they did, they signaled to each other, holding up their hands. He knew he had seen them do this before, but he couldn’t remember what they meant. He stopped. The wind blew. One of the primitive people was leading a young woman by the hand, and now he pulled back her hood so as to reveal her red hair, her freckles, her green eyes. How had they gotten his daughter? She stood there, watching. He called out, telling her to close her eyes, that there was nothing to be seen here.

  “Close your eyes,” he screamed. “Sally, don’t watch what they do to me. Do not watch.”

  “Dad,” she said. “Stop them. Why won’t you stop them?”

  “Don’t watch. Darling. Don’t watch.”

  One of the primitive people took out a hand-flaked knife, which didn’t have any cracks and which they used with such skill.

  By this time Hart was up, off of the couch, sitting back, staring at Kay.

  “I’ll take the money,” she said.

  “How did that happen?” he said.

  “How?” she said. “You lost. That’s what happened.”

  “Something was different,” he said.

  “Pay her the money,” said Jack.

  Both Kay and Hart looked up at th
e display at the top of the game, which showed how the wins and losses were figured. The odds were figured not on the outcome, but on the varieties of outcome, or combinations of events, like a trifecta. It was a lot of money. Other gamblers in the room stopped when the word spread that Hart had taken such a loss.

  Hart didn’t bother to change his clothes. He pulled on his coat, over the suit, and went to the door. And there, at the entrance, he saw the bell, the rope of it hanging down like the tail of some dead thing. As he looked at it, he could imagine that hard, poignant sound when it had been rung off the rocky coasts of South America or Africa. He could imagine the coasts, shimmering in the heat, the gray or black mountains in the distance like some humped-up, ill-meaning presence. He thought of the shrieking of the birds on those coasts, the busy conglomeration of them at once vital and yet so intent on their own existence as to leave the people who saw them with a sense of vulnerability. He tried to imagine the bell breaking the tedium of those watches, which had been observed even in those hot, dry afternoons, when everyone wanted to sleep. He stood there looking at it, thinking of the freedom that it suggested: long sea voyages, the ability to disappear from ordinary life, to get away.

  Outside, when he couldn’t pay what he owed, they’d probably kill him. He had always thought he would be able to stay one jump ahead of the interest, one jump ahead of the bank. He had been wrong. The Money Men were already waiting for him. At least his daughter wouldn’t be there to watch.

  Kay stood at the door and watched him go, pushing her wet hair away from her forehead. It was chilly outside, and she stepped back to get away from the air that came in through the open door, and as she did, she looked up at the kiosk that was inside. It was covered with gimmicks, promotional devices for other games that were about to be released. They came in different shapes and sizes. For instance, there was one like a matchbook from a survival series called Pacifica. Another looked like a fan that a coquettish woman might have used in Asia. It was constructed from red paper, folded like an accordion, between two pieces of wood that were painted gold. Kay wasn’t so sure about the fan, but she picked up a gimmick from Pacifica.