She still didn’t hear the sound of jackbooted footsteps marching in lockstep, and a tentative spin of her senses down along the hallways behind both doors revealed nothing untoward. But her luck wouldn’t hold out forever. And Badger Girl would heal again before long.
She clambered back up on top of the lab bench and tore the panel out of the ceiling vent. The odds were too good that she’d be spotted—either by one of Poison Dart’s minions or a security camera—if she left by one of the regular doors.
How had she gotten in here in the first place?
It didn’t matter now, did it? She put her arms up in the vent and braced them on either side. She was about to pull her body up inside when Badger Girl’s voice stopped her: “Lian.”
That name again. Cerebrelle looked down, jaw set and tight. But Badger Girl was still on the floor, her broken arm cradled against her chest. Her slack face betrayed thin lines and wrinkles far beyond what her age warranted. Working for Poison Dart was hard on more than just the conscience, apparently. A tendril of pity stirred in Cerebrelle’s heart, and she couldn’t bring herself to choke it out entirely. “Badger Girl, stay down. You were my sidekick once, whatever that’s worth now. And I don’t want to see you get hurt any worse.”
“Badger Girl?” Badger Girl’s eyes went wide, then crimped shut. Her head dropped back onto the floor. “Lian, I haven’t—this is worse than I thought.”
She had an opening to make her getaway, but Cerebrelle couldn’t tamp down worry for her former sidekick long enough to convince her body to make a break for it. She took her arms out of the duct and dropped down beside Badger Girl. “What? What’s worse?” A thought ricocheted to the forefront. “Are you under deep cover? Badger Girl, are you in danger?” She began constructing escape routes that would let her maneuver Badger Girl’s greater weight over a long distance while still minimizing their odds of being discovered and intercepted.
But Badger Girl interrupted her before she could chase down that line of thought. “Lian, no one’s called me Badger Girl for ages now.” Badger Girl—Evvy—dragged her jacket sleeve across her face. Was she crying? Evvy had never cried, in or out of uniform. Cerebrelle stared at the wet smears under her eyes. “I’m thirty-one years old, Lian. I’m not anything girl anymore. I go by Sun Bear now. I have for, I don’t know. Forever.”
Cerebrelle was still looking at the teary streaks on Evvy’s face. Molecules of prolactin and encephalin spun and collided in every drop, a plain mark of authenticity: real emotional tears, not fakes nor a reflexive response to the dust adrift in the demolished lab. She got caught in the Brownian motion of the particulates suspended in the air around her for a moment before she realized what Evvy was saying. “What? I don’t understand.”
Evvy gestured to the room around her with her good arm. “What do you think this is, Lian? Where do you think you are? This was Poison Dart’s lab a decade ago. We took him down together, but that was—Jesus, that was so long ago. He’s not even called Poison Dart anymore.” She put her hand over her eyes. “His name is Plasmid, and he’s reformed or something. He even works with Alpha Particle and Beta Ray sometimes.” A ragged laugh burst out of her, and a bubble of snot burst on one nostril. “God, Lian, he brought frittatas to last year’s Protector Christmas party, and you asked for the recipe.”
“I don’t understand,” Cerebrelle repeated. She looked down at the nebula of shattered glass all around her, at the unwoven network of wires and the deep snowbanks of dust. “That isn’t right. I had a mission . . .”
“Yeah. You did.” Evvy dragged herself to her knees, which brought her nearly to the level of Lian’s face. “And you finished it, and you went home, and you did a lot more missions, and you retired. Except you didn’t really know how to quit, did you? You had to keep chasing that power trip, until there wasn’t any room left in your giant brain for you.”
Cerebrelle reached behind her. The heavy black countertop offered support, but the swarms of delocalized electrons in the aromatic rings of the phenolic resin begged her to chase them through probability clouds, and she yanked her hands back. “Evvy, stop it—”
“Sure, I’ll stop. As soon as you can tell me my birthday. Or my last name.” Evvy’s black brows crashed together. “Or your last name, Lian. Come on. Just a word—one word. I’ll wait.” She folded her arms across her chest, and the broken elbow slipped back into place with a sickening crack.
Lian stared down at her. Inside her brain, neurons fired; rich, oxygenated blood poured into her cerebral cortex. She dug for answers, but came up empty-handed.
Lian staggered away from Evvy, and sat down hard atop the server bank when her knees gave out. A puff of dust went up in her wake. Evvy caught her before she could drop all the way to the floor and crushed her into an embrace. Lian could smell blood and sweat on the shoulder of Evvy’s stained jacket. “I don’t . . .” she said, “I don’t know what to do now.”
“I’ll take you home.” Evvy pulled back, put her arm around Lian’s shoulders. It was an odd, backward gesture; Lian had always been the mentor, the leader. An uncomfortable echo of how things were supposed to be. “Does Craig know?”
“Craig?” Lian asked, and Evvy’s face fell.
• • •
Evvy parked in front of a little brownstone house. Lian thought it looked familiar and knew, through some blunted instinct, to look under the front leg of the painted Adirondack chair on the porch for a spare key. She stood in front of the door in the civvies Evvy had bought for her and felt the lines of the key cut into her hand. Her face felt too cool without the familiar contour of a mask to cover it.
Evvy offered, not for the first time, to go in with her, but Lian shook her head. “I’ll talk to the other Protectors,” Evvy said. “And some of the auxiliaries too, especially the Piconauts.” She cracked half a smile. “Maybe even Plasmid. One of them will be able to help you, Lian, I’m sure of it.”
Lian smiled back, even though she didn’t understand the joke. She put the key in the lock, and it turned without a sound.
The house was dark and quiet and cool. Lian slipped off her boots and left them paired tidily on the floor by the door. She paused by the staircase to watch a Jeep drive past the bay window in the front room. Someone she knew drove a Jeep like that, but she couldn’t quite put a finger on who it was.
Something she didn’t understand drove her up the narrow staircase to the second floor, where the door on the left was cracked just enough to admit her with a tiny creak.
There was a man sleeping in the bed—a man with a broad open face marked by deep furrows between the brows and a fine web of lines framing each eye. On the dresser beside him was an orange bottle of pills, its lid partially ajar, and a half-empty water glass.
When she sat down opposite him on the bed, he rolled away from her, leaving two brown hairs behind on the pillow. She picked them up, then reached out and ran a hand through his curls. —One, two, three— Lian started counting faster. She had a long way to go.
Aimee Ogden is a former biologist, science teacher, and software tester. Now she writes stories about sad astronauts and angry princesses. Her poems and short stories have appeared in Asimov’s, Fantasy & Science Fiction, Daily Science Fiction, Baen.com, Persistent Visions, and the Sockdolager.
Meeting Someone in the 22nd Century or Until the Gears Quit Turning
Jennifer Pullen
I
First comes love
The first time Greg asks Sandra out, she doesn’t hear a word he says. She works at a bookstore, although “works” might be a charitable term, because what she really does is sit at a desk reading the books she’s supposed to be selling. Greg’s been coming to the bookstore for weeks, browsing and staring, with a feeling approaching desperation, at her bare feet propped up on the desk. Her perpetually-chipped blue nail polish and the calluses on her heels and her face as she leans back in her chair reading, feel like the sight of land to a sailor. He loves the way she bites her lower lip when sh
e turns the page and, as the hours go by, the way her curly red hair gets progressively more rumpled by her grabbing it and rubbing furiously whenever she gets to a particularly exciting part of the book. She’s doing just that when he comes up to the counter with a copy of Cat’s Cradle in hand and asks if she would mind ringing up his book and also coming to coffee later.
She continues inflicting trauma on her hair. His mouth feels full of saliva. He swallows and sets the book on the counter. He tries again. “Coffee?” She looks up from her book at last and frowns at him. He smiles. She reaches out with one bare foot, hits a button on the cash register, and makes it ding. She says, “Eleven dollars and fifty cents.” He starts to swipe his thumb over the scanner and then changes his mind and takes cash out of his pocket. Maybe she’ll touch his hand when she takes the money. She didn’t hear him the second time he asked her out, either; he’s sure of it. He doesn’t even want the book. He already owns Cat’s Cradle. It was just the first book he saw on the big center display. Back at home, he drank some peppermint schnapps in preparation for this moment, this day, asking her out. She takes his money and then stares at him for a moment. He feels her eyes on his freckles, on his hair with that weird cowlick in the middle he hates. He feels her deciding that he’s probably one of those weird guys who plays with action figures and lives in his mother’s basement. He doesn’t live in his mother’s basement.
“If we’re going to go out, you should know I’m a cyborg,” she says.
“Cyborgs are cool,” he says.
She puts his money in the cash register and bags his book. She tells him to pick her up at seven in front of the bookstore, for dinner not coffee, because she’ll be hungry. She also tells him to stop staring at her feet—it’s creepy. He thought cyborgs were just a myth used to excuse protests against the government. He thought all the fear was just a sort of Uncanny Valley situation. He wonders if she’s really a cyborg.
• • •
Back at home, Greg rearranges his house, including his sock drawer, five times. He doesn’t actually expect her to want to come to his house or to look at his sock drawer, but if she does, he wants it to be neat and tidy. He tries to work. He’s a comic book artist, and he’s supposed to be drawing Wolverine having a nightmare about Jean Gray, but he keeps finding himself giving Jean Gray curls and blue nail polish. He drinks some more peppermint schnapps. Joe at the Marvel offices told him men didn’t drink peppermint schnapps, only women and mobsters in cartoons. Greg drinks it anyway because it tastes like gum, and back when he was a kid, before he knew better, he used to eat chewing gum. All that decades-old gum twists in his stomach. He thinks he might throw up.
He shows up at the store twenty minutes before seven and paces on the sidewalk just around the corner so she won’t see him and think he’s a loser or desperate. He wishes he smoked so that he’d have something to do while waiting. He stares at his watch until all the hands align and goes to wait outside the bookstore. She’s already there, tapping her foot. She’s put on some improbably-spiked purple heels with her jeans and T-shirt. Those shoes must be why she always goes barefoot.
“You are exactly thirty-seven seconds late,” she says.
He tells her he’s sorry, but he also can’t help but be curious about how she came up with such a precise number. He holds out his arm and she takes it. He leads her down the road to a little American sushi place that serves meatloaf and cheeseburger sushi, among other oddities. At dinner, he talks about his work and she talks about the secret strategy for making sure you always get the books you want (stashing them in the wrong section because no one at the store actually bothers to re-organize things more than once a week) and about her childhood in Seattle, where she used to throw candy at seagulls.
“Are you really a cyborg?” he asks.
“The original,” she says.
“I thought ‘cyborgs running the world’ was just something the anti-government nuts came up with,” he says.
“Well, I don’t think the men in the big house are cyborgs, but I’m the genuine article.” She takes a bite of her meatloaf sushi and washes it down with a swallow of Cherry Coke.
He reaches out and lightly pinches her arm.
“You feel real to me, and I bet you’d bleed if you bit your tongue,” he says.
“I’m a cyborg, not an android, silly. A cyborg is just a person who is partially machine.” She flicks a wasabi covered French fry at him. He dodges it.
“What part?” he asks.
“My heart,” she says.
• • •
At the doorway of his apartment (she insists on walking him home) he hugs her, and she pulls his head down, pressing his ear to her chest.
“I tick not thud,” she says.
He opens his door and she follows him in. He pours her some wine and hides the schnapps. She mercifully stays away from his sock drawer but picks up his action figure collection, manipulating Spider-Man’s poseable limbs. She tells him that she was born with a heart problem, that whenever she ran or laughed she could feel her heart slamming itself against her chest like it wanted out. She had to sit still and calm, and never ever have sugar. Her heart got more and more erratic every year, until finally, she had to lie in bed hooked up to a machine as she waited for a transplant small enough for her tiny little body. Her father was a scientist at a robotics lab. He got permission—probably through bribes or something equally unsavory—for the first purely mechanical child-sized heart prototype to be put into her body.
“If life was a comic book, you’d be a superhero,” he says.
“Maybe I am,” she says.
• • •
Later in the living room she kisses him, and he can feel her pulse in her lips; and it’s so regular—not speeding up, not slowing down—but she kisses him hard and fast, and he eases her down onto the couch. He wonders what it must be like to never be able to have your heart beat faster. But she breathes out with a sigh just like any other woman when he bites gently at the nape of her neck. Afterwards, he rests his head on her breasts and thinks about praying a thankful prayer—if only he believed in a god.
“Tick-tock,” she says.
II
Then comes marriage
Sandra and Greg move in together six months after they start dating. Greg loves the way she makes sure to beat him home by exactly five minutes every day so she can greet him at the door with a kiss. She makes him throw away all the clocks because she keeps perfect time. It’s true. She can put noodles on the stove, take an exactly-ten– minute-long shower, and emerge, dripping and naked, just in time to take the pasta off the stove. He hides the clocks and she breaks the oven timer. He lets her tell him, every day, exactly how many minutes they’ve been together. When they are in bed together, he imagines that if he touches her just right he’ll be able to make her heart skip a beat. He keeps trying. She says she can feel minutes tick by and turn into hours. Greg doesn’t know if he should believe her, but he wants to.
He starts drawing his own comic series on the side, one about a woman he calls the Mistress of Time, who throws gears like ninja stars and can stop the world from spinning. Sandra’s father, the robotics geek, comes to visit. He’s impressed by Greg’s drawings, says they show real imagination. Greg feels happier than he should that her father is impressed by him. One evening, Sandra’s father pulls him aside and tells him about the cyborg thing, as though it’s news. He says no one yet knows all of the long-term effects of a person being part mechanical. He wants Greg to understand. Greg pats his shoulder reassuringly, and then promptly forgets about the conversation. Sandra is magnificent, and that’s all he cares about.
• • •
Six months after they start living together, Greg buys Sandra an engagement ring with a heart-shaped stone. He takes her back to the American sushi place and gets down on one knee.
She takes one look at the ring and says, “Wow, I could fry ants with this.”
But the second thing she says is yes, and
she wears the ring on a chain around her neck. Several times a day, she brings it out to look at, turning it this way and that so it will catch the light. Greg loves the way she smiles softly when she does that, the way she watches the light refracting through the stone like she’ll find a secret there. That look is how he knows she really wants to marry him, despite the fact that she’d compared the ring to the tool of a serial-killer-to-be. She says she wants the wedding invitations to have pictures of gears on them—the inside of a clock laid bare. She also wants the invitations to say: On the 24th of June, Come See the Normal Guy Marry the Amazing Clockwork Woman. He says no. But then he lets her have everything else she wants.
He goes through the day at work and draws women in spandex who save the world, and every single one of them has Sandra’s face. He’s spent so much of his life living the ordinary and drawing the extraordinary, and she makes him feel like his two worlds are running together. He decides to create the art for their wedding invitations, to make the invitations look like pages in his comic book, The Mistress of Time.
• • •
Two days before the wedding, Greg and Joe are at Joe’s apartment talking about the bachelor party, when Greg’s cell phone rings. Joe has marvelous plans to take Greg to the video arcade and get really drunk. Greg answers his phone, but Joe keeps talking about vintage pinball and how nothing really compares to touching the machines, to really seeing the wheels spin and the balls fly around. Digital stuff just isn’t the same.
“Pinball places never had booze when I was a kid. I wonder if they’ll let us call a stripper, too,” Joe says.
Behind the Mask Page 8
