Time Was

by Steve Perry

  “Sounds very pleasant to me.”

  “But what about Roy?”

  “I’m sure he’d enjoying seeing moonlight on the water, as well.”

  “That’s not what I meant—though I’m certain you’re right about that point.”

  “What did you mean?”

  Psy–4 rose and began pacing. “I mean that he’s a child, a human child, and we’re going to make him immortal.”

  Stonewall sighed and began readying the equipment for attaching the next layer of steel to the bay doors. “You’re doing it again, Psy–4.”

  “What?”

  “Creating a problem to worry about where one didn’t exist a few moments ago.”

  Psy–4 walked up to Stonewall and gripped his arm. “What is it that causes human beings to create? I mean, everything from indoor plumbing to Van Gogh’s Starry Night and chocolate bars and The Idiot?”

  Stonewall only stared at him, his face revealing nothing.

  “Mortality,” said Psy–4. “From the moment a human child is held upside down by its ankles and smacked on the butt, he has a limited amount of time upon this earth. And eventually he will be made aware of the death that waits for him. I think it’s that certainty of life’s end that forces human beings to create, to use their hands or minds to leave a mark behind, something to tell the babies who will follow, ‘Hey, I was here, and this is what I left behind for you, and I hope you like it and remember me because of it.’ At some point, that knowledge of limited time sets in permanently, and they feel compelled to make their remaining days count as much as possible. Then you consider us. We don’t have the same kind of threat hanging over our heads that they do. We’ll never have to worry about dying of natural causes. If we can just avoid being murdered, we’ll live forever.”

  “So we weren’t ‘borne astride the grave,’ as Beckett put it?”

  Psy–4 snapped his fingers and pointed at Stonewall. “Exactly! We already possess what for humanity is only a dream. And what do we spend most of our time doing? Looking over our shoulders for more of Annabelle’s goons to come after us! Doesn’t that ever make you angry?”

  Stonewall shrugged but said nothing.

  “I find that I’m feeling a certain selfishness about my existence. I want to live forever. I want to watch generations of humanity come and go. I can’t wait to see what new advances they’ll come up with—and I think they will. For all their darkness, I think humankind is far too clever to allow itself to be wiped out.”

  “You’re straying from the point.”

  “I am? Oh—I guess so. Sorry.” He picked up his goggles and put on his welding gloves, then checked the blowtorch. “I don’t want Zac to leave us. If we can construct a body for Roy, then why not do the same thing for Zac?”

  “We’ve all been careful never to broach that subject with him. It was agreed that he would have to come to us with that wish.”

  Psy–4 put on his goggles, adjusted the tightness of his gloves, then sparked the blowtorch and adjusted the flame. “I just wish we didn’t have to make the choice for Roy. I hate to admit it, but there are times when I envy humankind’s mortality, the immediacy that it instills their existence with. It’s something we’ll never know.”

  “Part and parcel of our lot,” said Stonewall, dragging the next sheet of metal into place.

  “One way, Roy will lack the immediacy of existence that will compel him to leave his mark; the other way, he’ll have time for everything, and so the immediacy will be lost.”

  “But not necessarily the desire to make a difference. You still want to make a difference, don’t you?”

  “Of course.”

  “And you’ve adapted rather well to human behavioral patterns, if you don’t mind my saying so—why else do you insist on wearing the goggles and gloves? That torch could explode and it would do only minor damage.”

  “It’d still hurt.”

  “No arguments there.”

  Psy–4 pulled the goggles down so they hung around his neck. “You already know why I’m going on like this, don’t you?”

  “I knew as soon as you began to pace.”

  Psy–4 nodded. “Does that make me . . . evil?”

  “No. And I’d be lying to you if I didn’t admit that the thought crossed my mind, as well.”

  “Wishing that perhaps one of the Scrappers in the sewer wouldn’t survive?”

  “Of course. It would take care of all resultant problems. We wouldn’t have to worry about tracking down and purchasing the parts to build a body—parts that Annabelle Donohoe could undoubtedly trace within an hour of our purchasing them—”

  “It wouldn’t surprise me if she already has a system in place to track sales of robotic pieces.”

  “Nor I. Secondly, were one of the Scrappers to perish, we wouldn’t be saddled with the task of building a new body without Zac’s knowledge—I don’t like deceiving him any more than you do. You’ve got nothing to feel guilty about, Psy—4. No, it’s not a very nice thought, but it’s understandable. And you must keep in mind that we are not exactly in a nice situation at the moment. So don’t worry that a thought like that would cross your mind.” He reached over and placed a hand on Psy–4’s shoulder. “But if you start to think about causing—”

  “—no, never. I’m not Killaine. I do know their lives have value to them.”

  “Fine. But if—”

  “I’ll come to you right away.”

  “Very good.” Then: “So, are you going to use those goggles or not?”

  “You want them?”

  “No. Just, please, take them from around your neck if you’re not going to wear them. They make you look odd.”

  “You mean ‘goofy’?”

  “That word has never passed these lips—nor will it ever.”

  Psy–4 put the goggles back on and laughed, then extended the flame and began welding the steel into place.

  Itazura stood in the doorway of Radiant’s bedroom, watching as she sat before her vanity table combing her hair.

  “Why do you do that?” he asked her.

  “Do what?”

  “Use a mirror? You can’t see yourself.”

  She turned around, facing him with her eerily beautiful eyeless face. “Because the silver backing reflects more than images, Itzy. It reflects energy, as well.”

  “I didn’t know.”

  Radiant turned back toward the mirror and continued brushing her hair. “There’s a lot about me you don’t know.”

  “Like . . .?”

  Radiant paused, holding the brush mid-stroke, then pulled it from her hair and placed it on the vanity table. “Like the way I adore the textures and temperatures of color. I’ll bet you never thought about it that way before, did you? Colors having temperatures. But they do. And I can tell the shade, texture, and brightness of the color by the way it feels. Not only that, but at night when I lay in bed, I can hear things . . . the sighing of the moon, the thrumming of the darkness, the laughter of dreams, the silent breaths between raindrops. Every form of energy, natural or manufactured, biological or mechanical, has its own rhythms, its own sensations and smells and moods. Sometimes it overwhelms me. I can hear souls singing in the twilight, and the first pulsing of life in a newly conceived child. I can smell confusion. I can taste regret—and it’s not, surprisingly, a bitter taste; it has the flavor of a dewdrop from the petal of a dead rose blown across a dirty sidewalk on a chill autumn wind.”

  Itazura nodded his head. “So why spend so much time preening over yourself?”

  Radiant folded her hands on her lap and turned her face toward him. “Because I know that I’m beautiful, all right? I know it, I can feel it, I can imagine what I must look like . . . but I can’t see it.”

  “Poor little you,” said Itazura, with not a trace of sympathy in his voice.

  “I know how conceited and self-centered that must sound to you, how vain my behavior must seem to the others, but . . .”

  “But what?”


  “Once, about a year ago, right before we had to leave Montreal, I went for a walk down St. Catherine because I always enjoyed the sense of pride I felt coming off the old buildings in that area—they thought themselves grand things, those buildings did. Anyway, I was walking along, enjoying the buildings’ pride and the sidewalk’s excitement and the pulsing life of all the people who passed by, and then this . . . this twistedness shot into my skull and began to surge through all my senses.

  “An old beggar woman had grabbed my hand and was babbling to me in French, pleading for money. I have never before or since experienced such pure madness from a person, and it scared me. Not only because of her physical decrepitness, that I could sense right away, but because deep down, swimming beneath her madness like a body who falls through the ice and is swept along by the currents underneath, there was this . . . this . . . this quilt of fraying memories, and within that quilt I caught the whisper of a profound image of how and what she used to be, and I saw her, so young and alive, so vibrant, with so much to look forward to, and then it was gone. Poof, just like that. I don’t know if she went mad because of some hideous disease or because something happened to her that was so painful and terrible her mind couldn’t deal with it, but whatever the reason, for a moment I had a split sense of Her-Then and Her-Now, and the two of them together shocked me into a state of fear I’d never known. She thought of herself as ugly, both within and without, and that image of her so young . . . to Her-Now, it was just some picture in a magazine she’d seen once, she refused to believe that she had ever been anything other than what was Now. The madness made her believe in ugliness, and so she was. Ugly and pitiful. So I worry that I might . . . might lose my beauty someday. I think I’m entitled. Like it or not, none of you have ever experienced the core-deep depravity of true ugliness. But I have. So I preen. And I’ll keep preening, thank you very much. You rage over robots lacking a race memory; I’ll listen to the poetry beneath the everyday surface of the world. And if that still makes me seem vain and self-centered, then to hell with you.”

  Itazura came into the room, crossed over to Radiant, put his hand gently on her shoulder. “I’m scared, too.”

  She touched his hand. “Even ninety minutes is cutting it too close for my taste.”

  “I hate having to lie to Zac.”

  “No one’s actually lied yet.”

  “No—we’ve only concealed a large part of the problem.”

  “I prefer to think of it as reshaping the facts to form a more perfect truth.”

  Itazura smiled, then leaned down and kissed her on top of the head. “Whatever floats your boat, Sis.”

  “Itzy?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Do you think we’ll succeed?”

  “We have to.”

  “But do you think we will?”

  He touched her cheek. “We have to. There’s no other option.”

  “I don’t like having no options.”

  “Neither do I. But we have to think of the child.”

  “Yes,” said Radiant. “I have a feeling that the terror he’s known and lived with for so long makes my run-in with the beggar woman look a walk through the park.”

  “Depends on the park. If it’s a walk through Central Park at three in the morning, well, then—”

  Radiant giggled.

  “That’s what I was going for,” said Itazura.

  “Thanks, I needed to laugh.” Then: “Was there a particular reason you came here?”

  “Psy–4 and Stoner are just about finished with the welding. We need to go over the preliminary plans and see if changes need to be made.”

  “If Killaine will stop hovering long enough to—”

  “Zac sent her out on a job.”

  “So there is a Santa Claus!”

  “I don’t know if Zac would much appreciate the comparison, but, yes, Virginia, there is.”

  51

  * * *

  Sam Preston awoke with his head buried in his folded arms.

  He came awake with a start, pulling up so fast that he almost toppled over backward in the chair.

  He blinked, pulled in several deep breaths, and tried to get his vision to focus.

  Slowly, in bits and pieces of fragmented, blurred details, he was able to determine with some degree of certainty that he had fallen asleep at the console in the main lab.

  He checked the control board and saw that Roy was back online—no, scratch that: He was still online.

  He almost shut it down, then decided not to.

  The kid—

  —my son, my good boy—

  —didn’t have much longer left; he might as well get out there and fly the InfoBahn while he could.

  It, thought Preston to himself.

  Think of him as an it and you might just get through this without losing your mind.

  He pushed away from the console, made his way out through the door only he had the code to open, and stumbled his way through the secret corridor until he reached the foot of his hidden staircase.

  From there, it was touch and go, stumble and stand as he made his way up into his office.

  He tried not to think about Roy—let alone Roy’s mother—but the image of the child’s face the way it used to be kept drifting back into his thoughts.

  Time was, he would have been able to ignore the image, knowing as he did that the essence of the child was still alive and relatively well, awaiting the return of Robillard. Preston had planned on convincing Zac to construct a body for Roy, preferably another I-Bot being . . . and if Robillard refused, Preston had ways of forcing him.

  At least, that had been the original plan.

  Then came the phone call from Dr. Segriff with the nine dreaded words: “Sam, we need to talk about your test results.”

  Now it was two bodies Preston needed from Zac—screw it if they were I-Botic or not.

  He needed to live.

  And he needed to have his son with him.

  —no, not your son, not a him, he’s an it, remember?—

  —no good. Roy was his son, and Preston couldn’t think of him in any other way, no matter how hard he tried to or how merciful it would have been for him, and now Roy was less than three days away from extinction and Preston knew it was his own arrogant fault—

  —what was I thinking?

  Easy, he answered himself, you were thinking you had the world by the balls, weren’t you? Making a name and reputation for yourself by stealing another’s man’s ideas because you knew you were too foolish, inept, and incompetent to come up with anything on your own, then getting promoted on the basis of your duplicity, moving with the Big Boys—but especially the Big Gal, the Boss Lady, luscious Annabelle, who was all too ready to share her bed with you, and you were so ready to please. But neither of you counted on her getting pregnant, did you? Hell, no. But pregnant she became, giving birth to a bright little boy who, in turn, thought you were the bestest thing in the whole great big wide world. I love Daddy thiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiis much! By that time you’d moved on, started your own company, Big Guy. You were so safe and smug within the myopic borders of your world, and you never once gave a thought to being undone by an absurdity, did you? Because that’s what it was, an absolute, certified, A#1 in-goddamn-comprehensible absurdity. It was absurd to think that in this country, in this age, with so much wondrous medical technology there for the paying, that a little boy, a happy, radiant, inquisitive, healthy little boy with a giggle that brought tears to your eyes could die from a disease you’re supposed to get from kissing or burning your candle at both ends. Well, here’s a Muppet News Flash for you, Sam; it was possible for a four-year-old boy who loved to watch ducks and collect sea shells to feel bad, and then a bit worse, and then a whole helluva lot worse, and finally lousy in a way that required machines and tubes and pills and catheters and there was not nearly enough money in the fucking world to fix, and before you knew it you were sitting in the front pew at good ol’ St. Francis de Sales Church listen
ing to some second-rate, blue-haired organist eviscerate J. S. Bach’s “Sheep May Safely Graze” and dreading the moment when the two dozen children from your little boy’s preschool are going to stand up and sing “Let There Be Peace On Earth” because that’s when you were going to lose it and lose it bad and wonder how but mostly why something like this could happen. Just forget it, pal, just scratch that “why” business right off the list because there’s no making sense of some shit, and your nice manners and fine credit record and good insurance notwithstanding, it is possible—and you have a crisp, clean copy of Autopsy #A72–196 to remind you in case you forget—for a four-year-old boy to contract Epstein-Barr virus and have his immune system so quickly degraded that he acquires, in spite of your fine house and dazzling grin and that secured slot on the Fortune 500, a thing called acute interstitial pneumonia, then another thing called purulent exudate that gets lonely in a hurry and so invites pelvic venous plexis to come join the party and presto-change-o!—you’re looking at a little boy who in less than four weeks curls up into a wheezing skeleton and turns yellow and finally dies in a torturous series of sputtering little agonies, and you can’t even get to his bedside to hold his hand because of the tubes and wires and bandages and all the rest of the Close Encounters of the Third-fucking-Kind hardware dwarfing this room where all the numbers are zero and all the lines are flat, so when he dies it is without the final benefit of a warm, loving human touch tingling on his skin to let him know that you will always love him and will miss him every second of every hour of every day for the rest of your life . . .

  . . . but you’d done something the night he’d died at the hospital, hadn’t you? Long before the funeral, before anyone else saw his tiny, diseased body, you’d called your team in and told them exactly what to do, and they d obeyed your orders, hadn’t they? They’d expertly removed Roy’s brain from his ruined body and used some of that state-of-the-art equipment to imprint his consciousness into the sponge of a robotic brain, that lovely little glop of platinum-iridium, because it occurred to you that death wasn’t instantaneous, not at all; it moved through the body in stages. It occurred to you that it was possible to snatch a bunch of cells hours after somebody’d checked out and grow them in cultures. Death was a fundamental function; its mechanisms operated with the same attention to detail, the same conditions for the advantage of organisms, the same genetic information for guidance through the stages, that most people equated with the physical act of living. If it was such an intricate, integrated physiological process—at least in the primary, local stages—then there was no way to explain the permanent vanishing of consciousness. What happened to it? Did it just screech to a halt, become lost in humus, what? Nature did not work that way; it tended to find perpetual uses for its more elaborate systems. So you get to thinking that maybe human consciousness was somehow severed at the filaments of its attachment and then absorbed back into the membrane of its origin. Maybe that’s all reincarnation was: the severed consciousness of a single cell that did not die but rather vanished totally into its own progeny. And you reincarnated your son, didn’t you? Not only because you loved him but because you wanted to prove to all the nay-sayers once and for all that you were Zac Robillard’s equal . . . yet, still, you had to add a little something extra to save your worthless face in case it went wrong, and now look where it’s gotten you.