Wetware

by Craig Nova

  “Do you think you could do something with it?”

  “Yeah,” said Briggs. “I think so.”

  “When?” he said.

  “Pretty fast,” said Briggs. “Almost right away.”

  “No kidding?” said Phillips. “Well, that’s good. Why don’t you come back to work? I think there’s a place for you. Particularly if you can come up with something fast. Do you think it will work—I mean, what you can come up with?”

  “Yes,” said Briggs.

  “No kidding?” said Phillips. “And fast, too. Hmpf.”

  Now Briggs worked on machines that were self-replicating, just as von Neumann had imagined. Other planets, other worlds. Often, late at night, when he was lonely, he had the impulse to add something, but he resisted it, and instead he worked on a method to make sure no one could tamper with the machines, but as he did so he realized he was up against the fact that nothing was ever won by being defensive: all wars had been won by offense and by new technology. So, while he did the best he could, he was aware that someone would start working soon to find a way around the things he did.

  Leslie Carr called one night. She asked Briggs how he was doing, and he said he was all right. How about her? She was quiet on her end. After a while, she said, “I’ve been better.” He nodded. Well, that was to be expected. Could he ask her a question? Who had made her so bitter? Who had seduced her in such a way as to make her so angry? She was silent again. Then she said, “Wendell Blaine.”

  “The banker?” said Briggs.

  “The ex-banker,” said Carr. “Did you see that he resigned?”

  “Yes. I was curious about that,” said Briggs.

  “Yeah, well, I guess he got his,” said Carr. There was a plaintive hope in her voice.

  “Do you think so?” said Briggs.

  “That’s one of the reasons I called. I was wondering if you knew anything about it?” said Carr.

  “Me?” said Briggs.

  “Well,” said Carr. “It was just a thought.”

  Carr was quiet on her end.

  “Carr?” he said.

  “I was wondering if Kay told you something,” said Carr. “Anything. Maybe she mentioned something about Blaine . . . ”

  “All I know is what I read in the papers,” said Briggs.

  “Well,” said Carr. “I just thought I’d call.”

  Briggs looked for news of Blaine, although there wasn’t much. Blaine spent a lot of time looking for young musicians, now that he was retired. He traveled often. There were rumors that he had made a fool of himself over a young woman, a pianist, in Brazil.

  So Briggs did his work. He made some money. At night the clock listened to his breathing, and from time to time, when he rolled over, he saw the radiance of her Spandex outfit, the gleam in her short blond hair, her cheerful expression, her Midwestern freckles and large teeth. Then he tried to go back to sleep, but still the hours between midnight and dawn often ran slower than at other times, as though dragging something: memory, old desires, hopes that had come to nothing. Finally he got rid of the clock, although the peacefulness of the apartment didn’t bring relief so much as it increased the intensity of an undefined longing.

  At work, the sounds of the old mill building had a reassuring quality, and when he stood in the hall, he could look down on what had been the floor of the machine shop, although now it was filled with the blue glow from the monitors that lined the room from one side to another. At the end of the floor were a coffee machine and a pool table where people took breaks.

  From down below, Briggs heard a shout. It was keen, sudden, a sound that came from an argument. He guessed that it was bound to happen as more and more men and women paired off, and he supposed that couples would argue, even at work. He got up and went into the hall. From here he saw the black floor of the lobby, and the black, horseshoe-shaped desk where a guard sat. Some people were standing around the guard, who spoke to a woman. She was trying to get past him, and when he questioned her, all she said was that her name was Gloria. Gloria, she said. She was wearing a red dress, a short one. Even from a distance, Briggs noticed that she had a glow, a quality that was hard to be precise about, but was still obvious. The guard shook his head at her and she started yelling, trying to push by, and when he stood up and put out his hand, she broke free.

  Phillips came out of his office, too. He carried some papers, which he had been reading when he’d heard the noise from below. Other people came out of their offices, too, drawn toward the commotion. Down below, the woman came across the floor, her stomach swelling under the red dress. Briggs guessed she wasn’t more than six or seven months pregnant, her belly firm and high. As she came, she yelled some garbled words, which she repeated, and each time she went through it again, she shouted louder. She came to the metal stairway and started climbing, still looking upward, searching the faces that stood along the upper walkway, all of them peering down with a curiosity perfectly imbued with alarm. She called out, “Briggs. Briggs. Where is Briggs?”

  “Stop her,” said the guard. “For Christ’s sake, will someone grab her?”

  She turned up the stairs, one hand on the banister, her face turned up. She was carrying a shopping bag, and she held it as though it were the only thing she had in the world.

  “My name’s Gloria,” she said as she came up the stairs. “Gloria. Does that mean anything to you?”

  The woman kept climbing, her feet hitting the metal mesh of the steps, her eyes going from one face to another.

  “Are you Briggs?” she asked one man.

  “No,” said the man, but he didn’t offer to point him out.

  “Up here,” said Briggs. “What can I do for you?”

  “Are you Briggs?” she said.

  She stopped now, panting on the landing as she held her sides.

  “I’m Briggs,” he said. “What can I do for you?”

  “Oh,” she said. “Thank God. They wouldn’t let me in. He said you would help me. If I ended up like this. Look.”

  She put her hands on her firm stomach.

  “Can you see this?”

  “Yes,” said Briggs.

  “He said if I needed anything to contact you,” she said. “You know, Jack. You know Jack, don’t you?”

  She looked right at him.

  “Well,” she said. “Are you going to help?”

  “What’s this?” said Phillips.

  “He said you’d help,” said Gloria. “If I had trouble or needed money, I should come to you. That’s why I’m here.”

  She took the next couple of steps up to the top.

  “Well?” she said.

  Briggs looked out the window. At the end of summer, the river was slick and green. He saw that some dark, yet still compelling thing was floating against the bank. Briggs knew it was there by the birds that funneled over it like black checks. A dead dog, perhaps, or maybe something larger. At the horizon, long pennants drifted away from smokestacks, and through the yellowish smoke, birds appeared and disappeared. He tried to watch them as they dipped and turned on his side of the smoke, and he found it hard to explain why their disappearance left him straining. He guessed it was because they reminded him of something that he had always depended upon, but that was nevertheless slipping away. He went on staring out the window, trying to make sense of the landscape, but all he could think was, Jack. Jack.

  “Can you handle this?” said Phillips.

  Briggs swallowed. The men and women who had come out to the top of the stairs now turned away, although many wished they could stay.

  “What?” said Briggs.

  “Can you handle this?” said Philips. “Do you want some help? Someone to show this young woman out?”

  “No,” said Briggs.

  “They better not push me around,” said Gloria. “I’m tired of that. They push me this way. They push me that way.”

  “Briggs?” said Phillips.

  “I don’t think you can help,” said Briggs.

&n
bsp; Phillips shrugged.

  “Well, okay,” he said. Then he glanced down at the papers in his hand and turned away, back toward his office, although he looked over his shoulder.

  “You don’t mind my coming here, do you?” said Gloria.

  “I think you better come in,” said Briggs.

  CHAPTER 15

  October 1, 2029, afternoon

  GLORIA’S SHOPPING bag had moving images on it, two rainbow trout that swam from one side of the bag to the other, where, at the end, as though it were the side of an aquarium, they peacefully turned to glide back the other way. Rainbow trout with a bright red streak on the side. Briggs and Gloria went down the street, and he kept looking at the fish on the surface of her bag. Every now and then a mayfly nymph rose from the bottom of the image and tried to make it to the surface, but one of the trout picked it off. Briggs watched with subdued fascination, since it was one predictable action he could count on. Everything else left him afraid. As he watched the transit of the fish, he thought of something else that scared him each time they turned, as though they described the path of his own thoughts.

  Briggs knew he was obligated to go to the police. Women weren’t supposed to get pregnant in this way, and if one did, it was a capital offense. He imagined them arresting her, binding her wrists, pushing her down on a chair in one of those dreary halls of a holding pen. The worst would be the process from there, the administrative hearing, the genetic testing, the rest. And then, finally, sooner or later, she would realize where all of it was going. He knew that long, desperate legal procedures ground people down, and at the end she would be left with nothing more than the overwhelming fatigue in which a human being obeys the last brief orders. Sit down. Put out your arm.

  They went on walking in the air of fall. The smokiness of it, while mildly claustrophobic, still carried a lingering warmth from the summer months, and something else too, which he guessed was the promise of harvest, of fields that were stripped of what they had produced and then were burned over. Maybe that was what made the smoky afternoons of fall so complicated, a mixture of fruitfulness and scorched earth. Up ahead he saw the illuminated globes that stood in front of the police station.

  Concrete steps led up to a frosted-glass door with black letters on it. Scrap paper blew along the street, and a woman paced back and forth in front of the steps, obviously determined to take some action but equally afraid to do so. Above her, by the door, stood two officers. They leaned against the walls of the entrance, uniforms wrinkled, faces unshaved. They looked as if they were working long shifts, twelve, fourteen hours. Maybe more. They glanced toward the horizon, and then their eyes swept back to the pacing woman, not so much with curiosity as with a variety of emotional gravity. Soon they’d have to go down there and ask her what the problem was.

  Gloria said, “Ouch. Wait. I’ve got a stitch.”

  She touched Briggs’s hand. He looked up at the police.

  “It kicks sometime,” said Gloria. “It’s such a funny feeling. Ow. There it is.”

  She didn’t smile, though.

  “Here,” she said. She reached out for his hand. “Do you want to feel?”

  “Look,” he said. “Let’s just sit down here until you feel better, all right?”

  They sat down. Her shopping bag wrinkled as she put it next to her, but then she moved it because it was between them. The policemen came down the steps, and the light-textured soles of their boots made a fatigued hush, hush, hush.

  “What’s the trouble?” said one.

  “Do you need help?” said the other.

  “I think we’re okay,” said Briggs.

  “I didn’t ask you,” said the first. “I asked her. You aren’t pregnant, are you?”

  “No,” said Briggs.

  “Well?” said the first.

  “It’s just a stitch,” said Gloria.

  The policeman shrugged.

  “When are you due?” he said.

  “Two months. Maybe more.”

  They both looked away, not actually suspicious so much as habitually used to not believing anything that was said to them.

  “All right,” said the first.

  “Are you the father?” said the other to Briggs.

  “He’s a friend of the father,” said Gloria.

  “Where’s the father?” said the other.

  “I don’t know,” said Gloria.

  “Christ,” said the first cop. “Hey. You.” He pointed at the woman who was walking back and forth. “Yeah, you. What’s the trouble?”

  “Me?” said the woman.

  “Christ,” said the first cop to the other. “I’m going across the street for a cup of coffee. You coming or not?”

  Briggs watched them go, both in black, swinging from side to side as they went. In the park at the end of the street he saw the trees. They had lost their leaves early this year, and so the prospect before him was one of the yellow horizontal line of the river, the silver clutter of the trees, and then the yellow sky. As he watched those fish swim back and forth in the advertisement on the side of Gloria’s bag, he thought of the next thing that left him afraid: that more than two people had been adding things to Kay and Jack.

  Any number could have been adding things. He had been vain, he guessed, in his ability to discover one of them, and this vanity had stopped him from considering whether or not there were others. Someone totally unknown, a technician, a disgruntled employee, anyone with a bone to pick. It was almost pointless to try to discover who it had been, since his quandary wasn’t so much who they were as what he was going to do about the young woman who was sitting next to him, panting in the fall air.

  Gloria’s skin had a moist glow to it.

  “I didn’t want to have this baby,” she said. “The instant I found out, I went to the pharmacy and got something.” She took Briggs’s hand. “It didn’t work.”

  “What do you mean?” said Briggs.

  She looked at him as though he was being dense.

  “I told you,” she said. “Then I went to see a doctor. And you know what she said? She even showed me the pictures. The baby is attached to me, inside, in a way that would start bleeding, a lot of bleeding, if they got rid of it. No one wants to risk that kind of bleeding. See? She said it was one in a million.”

  “One in a million,” he said. “Was there anything else unusual?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “That’s all they told me.”

  He sat there, trying to feel a little of the afternoon sunlight on his face, but the shadow of the building had swept over them, and all he felt was the approach of the cold months. Even now, in the gray-purple shadow, he sensed the worst nights of January, when everything had a kind of arctic stasis. Then he thought that he should contact Gloria’s doctor, but he knew from his own work that the doctor would only be able to tell him what had happened, not why. In the shadow, the trout on Gloria’s bag seemed clearer, more perfectly colored. The mayfly nymphs were gray, with the texture of silk.

  “Come on,” he said.

  “Where are we going?” she said.

  “My place,” he said. “It’s not so bad.”

  “Are you sure?” she said.

  He picked up the bag, where the fish finned back and forth, waiting for the next mayfly.

  “Yes,” he said. “I’m sure.”

  “Do you have a lot of room?”

  “No,” he said. “Just a living room and a bedroom.”

  “Where am I going to sleep?” she said.

  “In the bedroom,” he said. “I’ll sleep on the sofa.”

  CHAPTER 16

  0ctober 2029

  BRIGGS OFTEN came home and heard Gloria taking a bath. The apartment was scented with the soap she used, and as she sat in the tub she let hot water trickle in to keep the temperature constant. She sat in the early-fall light that came in the window, her belly seeming to float in the soapy foam like a firm island. When she heard the door open, she said, “Briggs. Don’t you want to
see? Look.”

  The water made a plash as she moved, trying to get comfortable, or when the baby kicked. He stood in the doorway.

  “Briggs?” she said.

  “Yes,” he said.

  The light made her skin seem not pale so much as white and glowing, and under the soap her growing nipples were the color of dark cherries.

  “Will you wash my back?” she said.

  “Sure,” he said.

  “Don’t be shy,” she said.

  “I’m not shy,” he said.

  “Yes, you are,” she said. “You can look at me. I want you to look at me. See? That way we’re in it together. Not a lot, but a little bit.”

  He picked up the soap and ran it across her back, going over the muscles there, up the crease in the middle of her neck, down to the water, where her skin disappeared into the damp and shiny swelling of her hips.

  “Hmmm,” she said. “That’s good. You’d think that after this, I wouldn’t be interested in sex at all, but I think about it all the time.”

  She stood up, the water rushing over her white skin in sheets, and as she dripped he handed her a towel. He dried her back, too, helped her out of the tub. She stretched out on the bed and he rubbed her stomach and legs, her breasts with oil. He did it slowly, watching the light from the window fall across her skin. In the slick warmth of the oil he had the sensation of not being able to tell where she ended and where he began. Then he put on her shoes for her, kneeling in front of her bare legs and stomach.

  On the bulletin board in the kitchen was a list of basic food groups. He wanted to make something good, since the best part of the day was when they put food on the table in the small kitchen and she ate with good appetite. They talked about how much weight she had gained, how much exercise she was getting, how she was sleeping. She didn’t sleep very well.