But somehow, every time I saw one of the SUITs, my whole facade of rationalizations came crumbling down like one of my crappy buildings under a wrecker’s ball. They had an emotional effect on me out of all proportion to their reality.
And I swore there must’ve been more than the dozen that Carl had specified. They seemed to be everywhere. Indistinguishable from one another, they could’ve been an army whose members were uncountable due to their cookie-cutter identicalness.
Every time I decided to go to the john, it seemed, I’d encounter a SUIT in the corridors. There it would be, hovering mysteriously under a heating vent, perhaps sampling the output; or—far worse—pausing by a window as if looking out. (They were only registering drafts, I kept telling myself.)
I found myself instinctively hugging the wall farthest away from the mobile units, as if afraid that they would swing around at my approach and confront me with their faceless gaze, an array of sensors that would read my second-rate soul and report me to some heavenly OSHA.
When I went down to a corner of the lobby for a cigarette, a SUIT would always show up, most likely attracted by my illicit smoke. It would approach unnervingly close, though it never violated my interpersonal sphere of space, having been programmed, I assumed, to respect a person’s boundaries. It would hover remonstrantly, like the ghost of smokers past, sending its accusatory telemetry back to the mother CPU in the subbasement. I would always hastily stub out my cigarette and flee, with a feeling of guilt such as I hadn’t experienced since childhood.
And they even drifted into the cafeteria, spoiling any enjoyment I might have taken in my lunches. The SUITs had a habit of hanging around the trash cans, perhaps sampling airborne bacteria counts, and it became an exercise in nerves for me simply to deposit my empty paper cup under its headless scrutiny.
Once, one joined the serving line. Moving perfectly along with the flow of diners—none of whom seemed to share my unease, but instead pointed at the SUIT and laughed among themselves—it passed down the line of steam tables, sampling odors through its sleeves, filling its nonexistent belly with data for the Department of Health.
I soon came to fear and despise the female SUITs even more than the male ones. Their feminine clothing seemed a more elaborate mockery of their cybernetic hollowness than did that of the males. (The lack of any woman currently in my life, I realized, had something to do with this feeling.) The designers had even equipped each female SUIT with moderate, subtle curves of hip, waist and bust—a magnetic illusion of fertility—rendering further obscene their bodiless presence—at least in my eyes.
And because their empty skirts ended at knee height, their flying-carpet nature was even more apparent than with the male SUITs. They seemed to swoop down on me with more alacrity than the males, more predatory and harsh.
I’ll never forget the time I was standing at the supply cabinet, trying to find an old-fashioned eraser under all the disks and print cartridges. (I still liked to draft a few small plans by hand. It was about the only soothing activity connected with my job.) A female SUIT popped out from behind the cabinet, and I felt my heart jump like a rabbit inside my chest.
What it had been doing behind the supply locker, I couldn’t guess. (The space between the cabinet and the wall, by the way, was only a few inches. Apparently, the SUITs could alter their shape at will, shrinking to occupy the same dimensions as a regular suit of clothes flat on a hanger.) All I knew was that it seemed at that instant to be hurling itself at me like a giant bat or raptor of some sort, and I scrabbled backward like a frightened mouse.
Luckily, no one was there to witness my humiliation.
After a time, I tried explaining my feelings about the SUITs to Carl. But he only laughed, and shrugged it off.
“You’ve been working too hard,” he said, clapping a falsely hearty palm on my shoulder. And that was when the hallucination happened.
I saw Carl as a SUIT. His head grew translucent, transparent, then disappeared. His hands vanished, as did his feet in their shoes. Then there was nothing but an empty sack of clothing with its arm upraised to my shoulder.
Jerking back, I felt a shout beginning in my throat. But before it emerged, my vision returned to normal, and there was Carl again standing before me.
Now he looked genuinely concerned, if only for the smooth functioning of the workplace. “Mark—are you okay?”
I mumbled something. Carl seemed to come to a quick decision.
“Mark, you’re kind of bringing the whole office down lately. Your attitude, you know. I think what I’d like to do is switch you to nights. It would free up your workstation during the days too. We could pump out some extra specs that way. What do you say?”
What could I say? I could sense that it was either agree, or lose my job.
So I agreed.
The building that housed our firm was fifty stories tall, and held numerous other tenants.
But none of them seemed to work at night.
I was to be alone in the building with the SUITs and the janitor MICE.
The first night, I managed to make it up to our floor without encountering a single SUIT. I turned on every light in the office and locked the outer door.
When I at last dared to look up from my monitor, I saw a flock of shadows clustered outside the frosted glass of the hall door like an army of the undead.
The SUITs.
I slowly got up from my chair. I didn’t know what I was doing, or where I was going.
Then I heard the solenoid of the electronic lock click open, under orders from the building’s CPU.
I found myself in Carl’s office without memory of having run there, leaning against the closed door. With trembling hands, I grabbed a chair and shoved it under the doorknob.
It was several hours before they gave up and left. I could tell by the cessation of the muted rustling of fabric, as they brushed against one another. It was another several hours before I dared to open the door.
Somehow, I made it out of the building unmolested.
When I got home, I took several pills and went straight to bed.
Although I usually wore pajamas, that night I slept naked. Lying on a chair, my garments repelled me. Had I put them on, I was afraid of what the mirror would have shown.
When I woke from the drugged sleep, it was dark again, almost as if day had never been.
I got dressed, and left for work.
Why did I go?
At the time, I recall, I had lots of seemingly sensible reasons. The SUITs were ultimately under human control. They were simply innocent tools or devices, and hadn’t meant to hurt me. A feedback loop of some sort had developed, triggered by my unusual presence alone at night. The artificially intelligent software had fixed itself—a task it was perfectly capable of—and would be fine. I had to show up, or be fired. I had to show up, or admit that spooks and hallucinations had broken me.
Good logic. But none of these were the real reason, I now realize.
I wanted to see what the SUITs had to show me.
When I let myself into the building—there were no human security guards anymore, with the SUITs in place—they were waiting for me.
Just two, a male and a female.
But it was enough.
Flanking me, the SUITs conducted me to the elevator.
When its door opened, without my summoning it, they boarded with me.
Their shoulders brushed mine in the narrow confines of the elevator, substantial yet meaningless.
The door whooshed open on my floor.
The whole level was full of SUITs.
Scores and scores of them.
They were engaged in a perfect simulation of a normal day.
SUITs stood around the water cooler in attitudes of relaxed conversation. SUITs sat at desks in postures of typing and writing. SUITs moved to and fro on errands. SUITs opened and closed file drawers with invisible magnetic appendages. SUITs stood eagerly by the fax machine. SUITs bent paperclips in meditation o
r boredom. SUITs stapled papers. SUITs held clipboards and pens.
Fascinated, I stepped away from my escorts, who left me to join their fellows in their solemn stolen enactment. In a daze, I moved through the office.
In the conference room, a dozen SUITs sat around the long wooden table in earnest confab. One passed the metal water pitcher to another.
In the men’s john, SUITs stood at the urinals with their metal zippers down.
And in Carl’s office, two SUITs were screwing.
A female SUIT lay on its back on the desk, with a male SUIT pumping its vacant crotch against the empty skirt.
Thus did they reproduce.
I picked up a phone and dialed Sys-Ops. A recording came on.
“The Faber Building is currently under heuristic monitoring. No human personnel are available. If you wish to page a human operator, please call this number.…”
I dropped the handset, and the recording began to recycle tinnily.
Then I left the building.
The driver of the cab I hailed was a SUIT. Made of jeans, flannel shirt and leather jacket, not cut from the same elegant material as those in the Faber Building, he was a SUIT nonetheless.
I let him drive me to the airport, magnetic hands on the wheel, magnetic foot on the accelerator, and I tossed the fare in his magnetic lap.
The enormous concourse was filled with SUITs. SUITs behind the counters, SUITs dispensing coffee, SUITs manning the X-ray machine, SUITs wheeling suitcases!
A SUIT sold me a ticket on my credit card.
A ticket to far, far, far away.
A small island in the tropics, where there are no SUITs.
Because there is no one there but me.
And I go naked all day.
When Bruce Sterling contacted me for permission to reprint my story, “Stone Lives,” in his soon-to-be-historic Mirrorshades anthology, I was elated. This was the first reprint request I had ever received, and for what counted, depending on your definition, as either my first, second or third professional sale. Truly, I felt I had finally arrived on the real SF scene. Hugo and Nebula Awards lay glittering just around the corner of my career path. (Now, fifteen years later, I can laugh at my naiveté without too much ironic bitterness creeping into my guffaws.) So when Bruce wrote a short time later that he was hoping I’d let him switch his anthology choice from “Stone Lives” to “Skintwister,” I brashly refused. Let Bruce live with the hasty decision he had made, I thought. I’ll save “Skintwister” for best-of-the-year volumes and Hollywood options.
Needless to say, the story has never again seen the light of day until now. The resounding silence that greeted its original appearance was the first step of many on my long road of hubris- snuffing education in the ways of publishing.
My mate, Deborah Newton, helped me de-sappify the original ending of this tale, where all the protagonists exchanged hugs and kisses. She’s justifiably proud of her editorial touch, and I think she still expects her Hugo Award “Real Soon Now.”
Skintwister
Keats was wrong.
Beauty is not forever; and alone it is not even enough. Anything permanent is suspect. All is vanity and mutability, flash and eternal change. Fashion is truth, and truth fashion. That is all ye know, and all ye need to know. Society changes daily, hourly, and so must the individual, even if it’s to no purpose. As a visionary artist of the last century once sang when filled with ennui, “I wanna change my clothes, my hair—
“—my face.”
And the high priests of transformation, those perceived as the almighty trendsetters and arbiters, are in reality its most debased servants, unable to locate their true selves amid the welter of arbitrary change they foster. Ask the man who knows.
Yours truly, Dr. Strode.
The girl lay in bed like an anxious Madonna. I had forgotten her name. Here at the Strode Clinic, the patients came and went so quickly, and in such numbers, that I often lost track of their individuality. But Maggie Crownover, my head nurse, briefed me before we entered the girl’s private room.
“Hana Morrell is next, Doctor,” Maggie had said, all brisk efficiency. “She’s fourteen, a technician at the Long Island coldfusion station. Her credit’s solid. No organic defects. Strictly a makeover.”
“No organic defects” was an understatement. The girl was a perfect beauty.
Propped up on pillows, surrounded by bedside monitors, she nearly stole my breath away. Blonde hair like incandescent light filaments framed a heart-shaped face with skin the color of powdered pearls. Her eyes were an arresting gray, her nose had an insouciant tilt, her lips were a feature Rubens might have bestowed on his favorite model.
She smiled, and I thought, My God, how the hell am I going to improve on this face?
I extended my hand and we shook, slim hand strong in mine.
“Hello, Dr. Strode.”
“Ms. Morrell, good morning. I understand you’re here for a facial biosculpt.” I tried to keep any disapprobation out of my voice. Her credit was all I should be concerned with.
She nodded timidly, as if only in my presence had she realized what she was planning to do.
I spoke quickly and confidently, to get her over this last hump. She had signed the consent form already, and I wasn’t about to lose the easy fee she represented by allowing her to vacillate now.
“Let’s have a look at your new face, then, shall we.”
Maggie took her cue and stepped to the holocaster. A bust formed of light and color suddenly filled the air above the girl’s bed, translucent in the bright sunshine that flooded the private room and its luxurious furnishings.
Subtle disappointment welled up in my throat. Like a fool, I had thought that perhaps this girl would be different. Her beauty had misled me into thinking her desires would be commensurate. But she was like all the rest, following the latest trends as helplessly as a surfer caught in a tsunami.
The holo was a woman of vaguely Eurasian/Polynesian features: skin olive-bronze; epicanthic folds around the eyes; strong chin; thin lips; nose rather small; glossy hair jet-black. It had been assembled from stock graphics in real time on the clinic’s computer-aided-design system, under the direction of the patient. Ever since the amalgamation of Hong Kong into the Hawaiian-Japanese prosperity sphere last year, this face, or something almost identical, had been chosen by sixty percent of my female patients.
“Fine.… It will look wonderful on you,” I lied. Sick at heart with contemplating the natural beauty I was about to destroy forever, I moved toward her to get the whole thing over with.
“Wait,” she said nervously, before I could lay my hands on her face. “Could you just brief me once more on exactly what’s going to happen?”
Now I was starting to get annoyed. “I assume you’ve read the literature the clinic provides, Ms. Morrell. It’s all spelled out there.”
She smiled wanly, and I buckled.
“Okay. A quick refresher. I am going to peek you and initiate changes in your cells that will, more or less, return selected cells temporarily to an embryonic state.”
Her look of puzzlement made me sigh.
“Ms. Morrell, have you ever considered how you ended up with the face you now possess?”
A negative shake.
“During embryogenesis, your cells differentiated and accumulated in definite patterns. These patterns resulted from the play of energy as it was dissipated into the embryonic environment against various constraints. You might think of a mountain stream pulled along by gravity and being configured by the shape of the streambed and channel and rocks in the flow. Although all individuals share the same cell-adhesion mechanisms, your unique genes dictated the temporal and spatial constraints of your development, and hence your unique morphology. Following me so far?”
“Yes, I think so.”
“Very well. What I am about to do is influence your cells directly through Banneker psychokinesis. I am going to reawaken their potential for development—which, as an
adult, you have lost. By peeking selected sites, activating cell-loosening enzymes such as trypsin, and planting my own constraints in place of your predetermined genetic ones, I will rebuild your face in the shape you desire.”
Naturally bright, she had followed my more elaborate explanation with real understanding, and seemed to be losing her anxiety. “Exactly what’s going to happen to my old face?”
I tossed her a bone. “Good question, Hana. Under normal conditions, your epidermis is constantly sloughing off, as new cells are produced subcutaneously and rise to the surface to take the place of the old ones. On the average, a new cell takes a month to migrate to the surface. An extinct disease like psoriasis represents what happens when epidermal replacement occurs more frequently, say in a week. What I am going to provoke in your body is something like that. For roughly a week, you are going to look very ugly indeed, as your old features slough away and the new ones manifest themselves underneath. This is an uncomfortable but entirely safe process, and you will be monitored throughout. Also, I will be making daily adjustments based on how I read the changes. The treatment could even be conducted on an outpatient basis, if the temporary disfigurement weren’t so drastic.”
But then, I thought, I wouldn’t clean up on daily room charges.
“Are you gonna have to alter my bones?” she asked.
I considered the holo. “It appears not, although I could, by regulating your osteoblasts and osteoclasts. The face you’ve chosen goes well with your current skeletal structure.”
She opened her rosy lips for another question, but I cut her off, fed up with her vain hesitation. My bedside manner definitely had its rough edges today.
“Ms. Morrell. Either you want this treatment or you don’t. My training consists of eight years at Johns Hopkins and four more at the Banneker Institute itself. I have been running this clinic for ten years and have performed more biosculptures than you have fused atoms. Now, can we proceed? I have other patients to see.”
Strange Trades Page 28
