by Peter Watts
"A pet," Clarke murmurs. You bloody corpses…
"We're not, you know," Alyx says sharply. "Not all of us."
"Sorry? Not what?"
"Corpses. What does that mean, anyway? My mom? Me?"
Did I say that out loud? "Just—corporate types, I guess." She's never spent much time pondering the origin of the term, any more than she's lost sleep over the etiology of chair or fumarole.
"Well in case you didn't notice, there's a lot of other people in here. Crunchers and doctors and just families."
"Yeah, I know. Of course I know—"
"But you just lump us all together, you know? If we don't have a bunch of pipes in our chest we're all just corpses as far as you're concerned."
"Well—sorry." And then, belatedly defensive: "I'm not slagging you, you know. It's just a word."
"Yeah, well it's not just a word to all you fishheads."
"Sorry." Clarke says again. A distance seems to open between them, although neither has moved.
"Anyway," she says after a while, "I just wanted you to know I won't be inside for a while. We can still talk, of course, but—"
Movement from the hatchway. A large stocky man steps into the compartment, dark hair combed back, eyebrows knotted together, his whole body a telegraph of leashed hostility. Kelly's father.
"Ms. Clarke," he says evenly.
Her guts tighten into a hard, angry knot. She knows that look. She knows that stance, she saw it herself more times than she could count when she was Kelly's age. She knows what fathers do, she knows what hers did, but she's not a little girl any more and Kelly's dad looks very much in need of a lesson...
But she has to keep reminding herself. None of it happened.
Portrait of the Sadist as an Adolescent
Achilles Desjardins learned to spoof the skeeters eventually, of course. Even as a child he knew the score. In a world kept under constant surveillance for its own protection there were only watched and watchers, and he knew which side of the lens he wanted to be on. Beating off was not the kind of thing he could do in front of an audience.
It was barely even the kind of thing he could do in private, for that matter. He had, after all, been raised with certain religious beliefs; clinging to the coattails of the Nouveaux Séparatistes, the Catholic miasma had persisted in Quebec long after it had faded into kitschy irrelevance everywhere else. Those beliefs haunted Achilles every night as he milked himself, as the sick hateful images flickered through his mind and hardened his penis. It barely mattered that the skeeters were offline, wobbling drunkenly under the influence of the magnetic mobiles he'd hung over his bed and desk and drawers. It barely mattered that he was already going to hell, even if he never touched himself again for the rest of his life—for hadn't Jesus said if you do these things even in your heart, then you have committed them in eyes of God? Achilles was already damned by his own unbidden thoughts. What more could he lose by acting on them?
Shortly after his eleventh birthday his penis began leaving actual evidence behind, a milky fluid squirted onto the sheets in the course of his nightly debauchery. He didn't dare ask the encyclopedia about it for two weeks; it took him that long to figure out how to doctor the enquiry logs so Mom and Dad wouldn't find out. Cracking the private settings on the household Maytag took another three days. You could never tell what trace elements that thing might be scanning for. By the time Achilles actually dared to launder his bedsheets they smelled a lot like Andrew Trites down at the community center, who was twice the size of anyone else in his cohort and whom nobody wanted to stand next to at the rapitrans stop.
"I think—" Achilles began at thirteen.
He no longer believed in the Church. He was after all an empiricist at heart, and God couldn't withstand so much as ten seconds' critical scrutiny from anyone who'd already figured out the ugly truth about the Easter Bunny. Paradoxically, though, damnation somehow seemed more real than ever, on some primal level that resisted mere logic. And as long as damnation was real, confession couldn't hurt.
"—I'm a monster," he finished.
It wasn't as risky a confession as it might have been. His confidante wasn't especially trustworthy—he'd downloaded it from the net (from Maelstrom, he corrected himself; that's what everyone was calling it now), and it might be full of worms and trojans even if he had scrubbed it every which way—but he'd also kellered all the I/O except voice and he could delete the whole thing the moment it tried anything funny. He'd do that anyway, once he was finished. No way was he going to leave it ticking after he'd spilled his guts to it.
Dad would go totally triploid if he knew Achilles had brought a wild app anywhere near their home net, but Achilles wasn't about to risk using the house filters even if Dad had stopped spying since Mom died. And anyway, Dad wasn't going to find out. He was downstairs, cowled in his sensorium with the rest of the province—the rest of the country now, Achilles had to keep reminding himself—immersed in the pomp and ceremony of Quebec's very first Independence Day. Sullen, resentful Penny—her days of idolizing Big Brother long past—would have gladly sold him out in a second, but these days she pretty much lived in her rapture helmet. By now it must have worn the grooves right out of her temporal lobes.
It was the birthday of the last new country in the world, and Achilles Desjardins was alone in his bedroom with his confessor.
"What kind of monster?" asked TheraPal 6.2, its voice studiously androgynous.
He'd learned the word that very morning. He pronounced it carefully: "A misogynist."
"I see," TheraPal murmered in his ear.
"I have these—I get these feelings. About hurting them. Hurting girls."
"And how do they make you feel?" The voice had edged subtly into the masculine.
"Good. Awful. I mean—I like them. The feelings, I mean."
"Could you be more specific?" There was no shock or disgust in the voice. Of course, there couldn't be—the program didn't have feelings, it wasn't even a Turing app. It was basically just a fancy menu. Still, stupidly, Achilles felt strangely relieved.
"It's—sexy," he admitted. "Just, just thinking about them that way."
"What way, exactly?"
"You know, helpless. Vulnerable. I, I like the looks on their faces when they're...you know..."
"Go on," said TheraPal.
"Hurting," Achilles finished miserably.
"Ah," said the app. "How old are you, Achilles?"
"Thirteen."
"Do you have any friends who are girls?"
"Sure."
"And how do you feel about them?"
"I told you!" Achilles hissed, barely keeping his voice down. "I get—"
"No," TheraPal broke in gently. "I'm asking how you feel about them personally, when you're not sexually aroused. Do you hate them?"
Well, no. Andrea was really smart, and he could always go to her for help with his debugs. And Martine—one time, Achilles had just about killed Martine's older brother when he was picking on her. Martine didn't have a mean bone in her body, but that asshole brother of hers was so...
"I—I like them," he said, his forehead crinkling at the paradox. "I like them a lot. They're great. Except the ones I want to, you know, and even then it's only when I..."
TheraPal waited patiently.
"Everything's fine," Achilles said at last. "Except when I want to..."
"I see," the app said after a moment. "Achilles, I have some good news for you. You're not a misogynist after all."
"No?"
"A misogynist is someone who hates women, who fears them or thinks them inferior in some way. Is that you?"
"No, but—but what am I, then?"
"That's easy," TheraPal told him. "You're a sexual sadist. It's a completely different thing."
"Really?"
"Sex is a very old instinct, Achilles, and it didn't evolve in a vacuum. It coevolved with all sorts of other basic drives—fighting for mates, territoriality, competition for resou
rces. Even healthy sex has a strong element of violence to it. Sex and aggression share many of the same neurological paths."
"Are you—are you saying everyone's like me?" It seemed too much to hope for.
"Not exactly. Most people have a sort of switch that suppresses violent impulses during sex. Some people's switches work better than others. The switches in clinical sadists don't work very well at all."
"And that's what I am," Achilles murmered.
"Very likely," TheraPal said, "although it's impossible to be sure without a proper clinical checkup. I seem unable to access your network right now, but I could provide a list of nearby affiliated medbooths if you tell me where we are."
Behind him, the Achilles's bedroom door creaked softly on its hinges. He turned, and froze instantly at his core.
The door to his bedroom had swung open. His father stood framed in the darkness beyond.
"Achilles," TheraPal said in the whirling, receding distance, "for you own health—not to mention your peace of mind—you really should visit one of our affiliates. A contractually-guaranteed diagnosis is the first step to treatment, and treatment is the first step to a healthy life."
He couldn't have heard, Achilles told himself. TheraPal spoke directly to his earbud, and Dad couldn't have stopped the telltale from flashing if he'd been listening in. Dad didn't hack.
He couldn't have heard TheraPal. He could've heard Achilles, though.
"If you're worried about the cost, our rates—" Achilles deleted the app almost without thinking, sick to his stomach.
His father hadn't moved.
His father didn't move much, these days. The short fuse, the hair-trigger had rusted into some frozen state between grief and indifference over the years. His once-fiery and defiant Catholicism had turned against itself with the fall of the Church, a virulent rage of betrayal that had burned him out and left him hollow. By the time Achilles' mom had died there'd barely even been sorrow. (A glitch in the therapy he'd said dully, coming back from the hospital. The wrong promoters activated, the body somehow innoculated against its own genes, devouring itself. There was nothing he could do. They'd signed a waiver.)
Now he stood there in the darkened hallway, swaying slightly, his fists not even clenched. It had been years since he'd raised a hand against his children.
So what am I afraid of? Achilles wondered, his stomach knotted.
He knows. He knows. I'm afraid he knows...
The corners of his father's mouth tightened by some infinitesimal degree. It wasn't a smile. It wasn't a snarl. In later years, the adult Achilles Desjardins would look back and recognise it as a kind of acknowledgment, but at the time he had no idea what it meant. He only knew that his father simply turned and walked down the hall to the master bedroom, and closed the door behind him, and never mentioned that night ever again.
In later years, he also realised that TheraPal must have been stringing him along. Its goal, after all, had been to attract customers, and you didn't do that by rubbing their faces in unpleasant truths. The program had simply been trying to make him feel better as a marketting strategy.
And yet, that didn't mean it had lied, necessarily. Why bother, if the truth would do the job? And it all made so much sense. Not a sin, but a malfunction. A thermostat, set askew through no fault of his own. All life was machinery, mechanical contraptions built of proteins and nucleic acids and electricity; what machine ever got creative control over its own specs? It was a liberating epiphany, there at the dawn of the sovereign Quebec: Not Guilty, by reason of faulty wiring.
Odd, though.
You'd have expected it to bring the self-loathing down a notch or two in the years that followed.
Bedside Manor
Gene Erickson and Julia Friedman live in a small single-deck hab about two hundred meters southeast of Atlantis. Julia has always done most of the housekeeping: Gene gets notoriously twitchy in enclosed spaces. For him, home is the open ridge: the hab is a necessary evil, for sex and feeding and those occasional times when the his own darkdreams prove insufficiently diverting. Even then, he treats it the way a pearl diver of two hundred years past would treat a diving bell: a place to gulp the occasional breath of air before returning to the deep.
Now, of course, it's more of an ICU.
Lenie Clarke emerges from the airlock and lays her fins on an incongruous welcome mat laid to one side. The main compartment is dim even to rifter eyes, a grey-on-grey wash of twilight punctuated by the bright chromatic readouts on the comm board. The air smells of mould and metal; more faintly, of vomit and disinfectant. Life-support systems gurgle underfoot. Open hatches gape like black mouths: storage; head; sleeping cubby. An electronic metronome beeps somewhere nearby. A heart monitor, counting down.
Julia Friedman steps into view.
"He's still—oh." She's taken off her diveskin in favor of a thermochrome turtleneck that mostly covers her scars. It's strange to see rifter eyes atop dryback clothing. "Hi, Lenie."
"Hi. How's he doing?"
"Okay." She turns in the hatchway, sags with her spine against the frame: half in darkness, half in twilight. She turns her face to the darkness, to the person within it. "Could be better, I guess. He's asleep. He's sleeping a lot."
"I'm surprised you could even keep him inside."
"Yeah. I think he'd rather be out there, even now, but…he's doing it for me, I think. Because I asked him." Friedman shakes her head. "It was too easy."
"What was?"
"Convincing him." She takes a breath. "You know how much he loves the outdoors."
"Are Jerry's antibiotics helping?"
"Maybe. I guess. It's hard to say, you know? She can always say he'd be worse without them, no matter how bad it gets."
"Is that what she's saying?"
"Oh, Gene hasn't talked to her since he came back. He doesn't trust them." She stares at the deck. "He blames her for this."
"For being sick?"
"He thinks they did something to him."
Clarke remembers. "What exactly does he—?"
"I don't know. Something." Friedman glances up: her armored eyes lock onto Clarke's for an instant, then slide off to the side. "It's taking a long time to clear up, you know? For a simple infection. Do you think?"
"I don't really know, Julia."
"Maybe ßehemoth's mixing things up somehow. Making things worse."
"I don't know if it works like that."
"Maybe I've got it too, by now." Friedman almost seems to be talking to herself. "I mean, I'm with him a lot…"
"We could check you out, if you wanted."
Friedman looks at her. "You were infected, weren't you? Before."
"Only with ßehemoth," Clarke says, careful to draw the distinction. "It didn't kill me. Didn't even make me sick."
"It would have, though. Eventually. Right?"
"If I hadn't got my retrofits. But I did. We all did." She tries a smile. "We're rifters, Julia. We're tough little motherfuckers. He'll pull through. I know it."
It's not much, Clarke knows. Reassuring deception is all she can offer Julia Friedman at the moment. She knows better than to touch; Freedman's not keen on physical contact. She'd endure a comforting hand on the shoulder, perhaps—even take it in the spirit in which it was intended—but Grace Friedman is very selective with her personal space. It's one of the few ways in which Clarke feels a kinship with the woman. Each can see the other flinch, even when neither does.
Friedman looks back into the darkness. "Grace says you helped get him out of there."
Clarke shrugs, a bit surprised that Nolan would give her the credit.
"I would've been there too, you know. Only…" Friedman's voice trails off. The hab's ventilators sigh into the silence.
"Only you think maybe he'd have been better off where he was," Clarke suggests.
"Oh, no. Well, maybe partly. I don't know if Dr. Seger's as bad as they think, anyway."
"They?"
"Gene and—
Grace."
Ah.
"It's just, I didn't know…I didn't know if he'd even want me there." Friedman flashes a rueful smile. "I'm not much of a fighter, Lenie. Not like you, not like—I just kind of roll with the punches."
"He could have been with Grace all along if he'd wanted to, Julia. He's with you."
Friedman laughs, a bit too quickly. "Oh, no. That's not what I meant." But Clarke's words seem to have perked her up a bit.
"Anyway," Clarke says, "I guess I'll leave you guys alone. I just wanted to stop by, see how he was doing."
"I'll tell him," Friedman says. "He'll appreciate it."
"Sure. No problem." She bends to retrieve her fins.
"And you should come by again, when he's awake. He'd like that." She hesitates, looking away; chestnut curls obscure her face. "Not many people come by, you know. Except Grace. Saliko was by a while back."
Clarke shrugs. "Rifters aren't big on social skills." And you really ought to know that by now, she doesn't add. Julia Friedman just doesn't get it, sometimes. It's as though, scars and history notwithstanding, she's a rifter in name only, an honorary member allowed past the gate on her husband's credentials.
Which begs the question of what I'm doing here, she realizes.
"I think they take him too seriously sometimes," Friedman says.
"Seriously?" Clarke glances at the airlock. The hab seems suddenly, subtly smaller.
"About, you know. The corpses. I hear Saliko's feeling a little odd now, but you know Saliko."
He thinks they did something to him...
"I wouldn’t worry about it," Clarke says. "Really." She smiles, sighing inwardly at her own diplomacy.
Comforting lies get far too easy with practice.
It's been a while since she's let Kevin take her. He's never been all that good at it, sadly. He has a harder time keeping it up than most kids his age, which actually isn't all that uncommon among the local bottom-feeders. And the fact that he's chosen a frigid bitch like Lenie Clarke to practice his moves on hasn't helped the dynamic any. A man afraid to touch: a woman averse to contact. If these two have anything in common, it's patience.
