Godlike Machines

by Johnathan Strahan

  “But the people who ran the research station got bored or went broke—they didn’t ever tell us peons—and one day they didn’t show up for work. We all kept coming in and cleaning the floors and keeping the machines running and signing for deliveries for a week, but then we figured that they weren’t coming back. So I hit the road again (the boyfriend didn’t last as long as the job) and now I’m here. And so are you!”

  She ate another burrito. She could really put them away.

  She told me more minutiae from the road, places she’d been and people she’d met, talking for a long, long time. So long that I started to shiver as the sun dipped low. The pack whined around me, climbing up on my lap and my shoulders and head. Lacey was oblivious to the passage of time, her cowl keeping her warm. I had one like it that I’d bought from a traveller a couple years before, but I didn’t wear it much-it was too big for me and it tripped me up a little.

  “We got to get going,” I said. “I’m freezing.”

  She stopped talking and looked around. There was something hunted in her look. She stood up and slapped at her cowl to knock the crumbs off it and then she looked around again.

  “So,” she said. “So. Nice to see you again, Jimmy. Really nice! You can send me email or something sometime if you want to. Good luck with everything.”

  I stopped folding up the tarp and putting away the leftovers. “Why? Where are you going?”

  She looked around for a third time, then pointed south. “That direction looks promising. Do you know what’s there?”

  I followed her finger through the woods. “About half a day’s walk will get you down to Jordan Lake. Nice places around there. Holiday cottages. Keep on going and you’ll hit Myrtle Beach, eventually. Might take you a week or two. Where are you headed, anyway?”

  “It was really great to see you.” She grabbed me in another one of those hugs, so fierce that I couldn’t breathe for a moment.

  “Where are you going?” I said again, once she’d released me.

  She felt in her cowl and found a hanky, blew her face on it and wiped away all the stuff she’d started leaking all of a sudden.

  “I just go,” she said, finally. “That’s all I’ve done for the past two years, Jimmy. I just go, and keep going. All the places are different, but they’re all the same, too. Nothing’s like what I’m looking for.”

  “What are you looking for?”

  “I don’t know, but I’ll know it when I see it. I just hope that I find it soon.”

  “If you go off that way, you’re going to end up walking all night before you get to a hotel.”

  She laughed. “I don’t really ... use ... hotels,” she said. “I stay out here, with all the nature. Product of my upbringing. Once a Treehugger ...”

  I hadn’t had a real conversation in ten years. It was a million to one chance, running into Lacey in the woods. Also: maybe she knew a little more about Detroit?

  “Why don’t you come over to my place?” I said at last. “I’ve got plenty of room. I promise you, my place isn’t the same.”

  She crouched down and looked in my eyes. “I don’t think that’s such a good idea, Jimmy,” she said. “But thank you.”

  We didn’t really argue. We hardly discussed it. But somehow, she ended up taking my hand and letting me lead her back home, ducking the occasional wirehead on the way.

  Back in Detroit, my dad had reconstructed the Carousel’s elaborate concrete ramp and queue area, but I didn’t have the resources to do that here, so to get up on my Carousel’s apron, you had to scramble up a chest-high wall that shielded the machinery beneath the stage and seats. I got myself up—the pack skittered up around me, scaling the wall as though it were horizontal—and then I helped Lacey up. Her hands were strong and her palms were dry, her fingertips calloused and raspy on my wrists.

  “This way,” I said, and led her inside.

  Of course, I wasn’t running the show at the time. I don’t, usually. Not that I have power woes—the cell that Dad fitted it with won’t run out of isotopes for a couple centuries yet, but it saves wear-and-tear on the parts, and those can be a bitch to replace.

  The Carousel is designed to seat six audiences at once, rotating continuously around the stage in 60-degree wedges.

  Between each stage is a little baffle that soaks up the noise from the adjoining set and provides a little space for the operators to hide out from the customers. At least, that’s how I used it. I suppose I could have set my bed up on one of the stages, or on the sloping auditorium aisles. I could have even removed some of the painstakingly restored seats. But all that felt wrong, after all the work that Dad put into getting it all so cherry and pristine.

  So I kept my bedroll in the gap between the first two scenes, and my clothes and things between the remaining gaps. The pack’s canisters were stashed under the stage in the third scene, which held a little maintenance hollow that we’d always kept tools and such in.

  Lacey laughed when I let her in. “You live here?”

  “I forget, did you ever get to ride this?”

  “No, but I remember when you brought it back. We all came out to watch the mechas carry it through our forest. You knocked down a bunch of trees to make way.”

  I shrugged. “It’s a wide load.”

  “So what’s it do?”

  I showed her, turning it on and then rushing to sit down next to her. The lights went down and the curtains parted, and a spotlight played over the old “General Electric” logo. I loved that logo. Imagine a time when there were companies that made their fortune being generally electrical! These days, electrical stuff was very specific indeed.

  The narration started. Dad told me that the actor’s name was Jean Shepherd, and I’d heard his spiel a billion times, so often that I sometimes mixed up his calm, warm baritone with my memory of my father’s voice, the two all blended in my infinitely plastic mind. The narrator welcomed us to Walt Disney’s Carousel of Progress and told us some of its history, then started with the real heavy philosophy: “The challenge always lies ahead. And as long as man dreams and works and builds together, these years too can be the best time of your life.”

  I looked at Lacey to see if she’d noticed the way that the voice over had just dropped that on us. The challenge always lies ahead. Progress! She was looking heavy-lidded, but attentive.

  The curtains parted and we got to the first scene. Dad-not my dad, the dad on stage-was wearing a cravat and fanning himself with a newspaper. The dog lay at his feet, doing comedy barks. Dad told us all about the miracle of his icebox (“holds 50 pounds of ice!”) and his gas lamps. Then the lights came up on the scrim scenes on the wings of the stage and we got to meet Mom, who was ironing. Mom complained that even though it only takes five hours to do the laundry with her new “wash day marvel,” her spare time is taken up with canning and cleaning the oven. This is supposed to be funny.

  Then the other side lit up and we got to meet Jimmy. Not me—the son. His name is also Jimmy. I’m sure it’s just a coincidence. After all, I’d been around for years before Dad got the Carousel. And Mom probably wouldn’t have let him name me after an old robot. Probably.

  Jimmy was looking through a stereoscope at pornography-well, pictures of hoochie-coochie girls—and Dad gave him a good-natured ribbing. I’d seen this scene hundreds of times, but this time, sitting next to Lacey, remembering our necking sessions, it made me a little uncomfortable.

  The remaining scenes introduced Sister (in a corset, worrying that she is “indecent”) and Grandma and Grandpa, listening to a “talking machine” with their pet parrot.

  Then it was over and the singing started, “There’s a great big beautiful tomorrow/Shining at the end of every day!” and the stage rotated. We came around to the next scene—the 1920s and electricity—and I heard a sound from Lacey, beside me. She was snoring. Her head was down on her chest and she was sleeping soundly. Her lips were parted a little and her face looked worried in sleep. I realized that she’d
looked worried since I’d met her.

  I got up and stopped the ride, resetting all the shows and powering them down. From the six slices of the Carousel, I heard the robots ceasing their spiels and going to sleep. The pack—who didn’t much care for the show-came out of hiding and began to race around the aisles, nipping at each others’ heels.

  Lacey was going to have to sleep somewhere. I hadn’t really thought about that. I went and checked out my narrow bed. I’d filled the space between two stages with a pile of pillows. It was comfortable enough. Did it smell bad? Maybe it did. The shower was outside, in a little prefab building I’d bought off a traveller, and I didn’t always remember to use it.

  Lacey probably had some kind of bed, anyway. I got up and grabbed her pack. It felt like it was full of rocks. Man, she had to be strong. Another perk of adulthood—of mortality.

  I gave her shoulder a little shake, and her head lolled and she snored. I gave her another shake, a little harder this time. Her eyes opened a crack, then she straightened up slowly and opened and closed her mouth a few times.

  “It’s been a long day,” she said. “Sorry, Jimmy.”

  I showed her my bed and she laughed. “It’s like the den of some burrowing animal.”

  I felt obscurely ashamed. Twenty years here and I had practically nothing to show for it. The pack’s new bodies. The maintenance I’d done on the Carousel. My pathetic pile of pillows.

  She put her arm around my shoulders and gave me a squeeze. “It’s great,” she said. “It’s just the kind of thing I would have loved, 20 years ago.” That made me feel even worse. I slumped.

  “Poor Jimmy,” she said. “You’re very generous to offer me a place to sleep, you know.”

  “Do you have a bed in your pack?”

  She nodded. “I do, indeed. But screw it. It’s a pain to set up. I don’t need it here. Besides, I’m so tired I could drop where I stand. Where’s the bathroom?”

  I told her, warning her to keep a low profile—I wasn’t sure how I was going to explain her to the cultists, who’d want her to get a wire in her head if she wasn’t just passing through—and started to dig through my clothes, looking for enough stuff to make another bed out of between two of the other theater-sections.

  She came back, shivering a little, clapping her hands together. “Cold around here at night,” she said, before casually pulling her cowl over her head, then stripping off her sweater—spidergoat silk, it looked like—and then her tights. Just as quick as that, she was naked.

  I’d never seen a naked woman before. I know that sounds silly, but physiologically, I was still a little kid. I didn’t have a girlfriend. Every now and again, I’d get a little curious about it, feel something that might be horniness, like an itch somewhere in my lower belly, but most of the time I didn’t think about sex. The cultists had plenty of sex, but behind closed doors. Once I’d seen some pornography that a traveller had brought through, but she’d snatched it away as soon as she noticed me eyeballing it, warning me that this wasn’t the kind of thing a kid like me should be looking at. I didn’t bother to explain my unique chronological circumstances.

  My eyes were flicking from one part of her to another. Her breasts. Her thighs. The curls at her pubis. I’d seen Dad naked every now and again, but not for decades. I’d seen pubic hair before, but it had never been this interesting. She had little tufts of hair in her armpits, too. So much hair!

  She seemed not to notice me staring, but she eventually turned away and bent to rummage in her pack. Her genitals winked at me as she did. I realized that I had an erection, a strange little boner in my pants. I got them now and again, and they were usually just a nuisance, something that got in the way.

  She straightened up, holding a long shirt that she slipped into. It hung down to her thighs.

  “All right,” she said. “Me to bed. You sleep left or right?”

  It took me a minute to get that she was asking me a question. I blinked a couple times. “What?”

  “Left or right side of the bed? I can do either.”

  I fumbled for words. “I’m going to sleep over there.” I pointed at the pile of clothes I’d been assembling.

  She clucked her tongue and crossed her eyes. “Don’t be stupid. There’s room for both of us there. I’m not going to put you out of your bed. Get in.”

  I hesitated.

  “Get in!” she said, clapping her hands.

  I turned away and awkwardly stripped down to my underpants and shirt. I worried again that I might smell. I didn’t wash my clothes all that often. They were wicking and dirt-shedding and had impregnated antibacterials, so I didn’t see why I should. But maybe I smelled. The cultists wouldn’t say anything. Wireheads didn’t notice that kind of thing.

  She clapped her hands again and pointed at the pillow. “March, young man!”

  Then I was whirling back in time. That was what Dad used to say when I was dragging my ass around. Had I told her that? Did she know it anyway? Had she guessed? Was it a coincidence?

  She repeated herself and pointed. I crawled into the bed. The pack bounded in after me, assuming their usual positions all around me, snuggling and burrowing among the pillows. She laughed.

  A moment later, the pillows shifted around me as she climbed in next to me. I tried to press myself up against my wall, giving her as much space as possible, but she gathered me in her arms and squeezed me like a teddy bear.

  “Good night, Jimmy,” she said. Her face smelled of soap and her hair smelled of woodsmoke. It tickled my cheeks. She kissed the top of my head.

  A weird thing happened then. I stopped thinking about her being naked. I stopped thinking about her being my old friend Lacey. Suddenly, all I could think about was how good this felt, being held to a soft bosom, enfolded in strong arms. Dad hugged me plenty. But I didn’t remember my mother. She’d died not long after I was born. Poisoned by Detroit. She hadn’t eaten her yogurt, didn’t get her microbes, and so her liver gave out. Dad barely talked about her, and the photos of her had vanished with Detroit itself, consumed by some wumpus and turned into arable land.

  Lacey squeezed me again, and I found that I was crying. Silently at first, then I must have let out a whimper because she went “Shhh, shhh,” and squeezed me harder. “It’s OK,” she murmured into my hair, and words like that, and rocked me back and forth, and then I was crying harder.

  I cried myself out there in the pillows, in Lacey’s arms. I don’t know what I wept for, but I remember the feeling as not altogether sad. There was some joy there, a feeling of homecoming in the arms of my old friend. The pack snuggled in among us, and they were ticklish, so soon we were both laughing and rocking back and forth.

  “Good night, Lacey,” I said.

  “Good night, Jimmy,” she said. She kissed the top of my head again and squeezed me harder and I let myself relax in her arms.

  The wireheads don’t mind the occasional houseguest, but anyone who’s going to actually live in the settlement needs to join the cult. They don’t want any violent, emotional, unpredictable people running around, making things difficult for them. The deal is a simple one: get the wire in your head, get free food, shelter, and community forever. Don’t get the wire in your head and you have to get out of town.

  You’d be surprised at how many people don’t want to play along with this system (I guess I count as one of those people). The cult’s gotten pretty good at spotting freeloaders who want to live in the peace and prosperity of the cult but don’t want to join up. These people seem to think that so long as they’re doing their share of the work, they should be able to stick around. What they don’t understand is that the work isn’t the important part: robots can do the heavy lifting, as much as we let them do of it.

  The important thing is the stability. Here in wirehead country, nothing important ever changes. New people come in. Old people die. Babies are born. Kids go to school—I went with them for a little while, in my wirehead days, but I decided I didn’t need to keep
going to classes after three or four years and no one seemed to mind. No one minds what anyone else does, once you’re a wirehead. Since we can all feel each others’ emotions, it’s impossible to resent someone without him knowing about it, and it’s impossible to feel guilty without letting others know it. Your whole attitude towards your neighbors is on permanent display, visible from a mile off (my own antenna seems to radiate a calm acceptance no matter what I’m feeling, and lets me know what others are feeling without swamping me with their emotions).

  The work gets done. “Progress” never happens. We’ve banished progress, here in the wirehead cult. That’s OK by me, I suppose. Who needs it?

  “So I had been living in Florida, up near Jacksonville, in wiki country,” Lacey said, over our breakfast. I kept a larder of fresh fruit in the maintenance space under the stage, and Lacey had been glad to help me slice up a couple of delicious fruit salads. I’d put up some yogurt a few days before and it was mature enough to pour overtop, with some sunflower seeds left over from the last autumn.

  “The city was good, but it got to me, all that change, all the time. I tried to garden a little patch of it, just a little spot where I could put up a house, but there were so many trolls who kept overwriting my planning permission with this idea for a motorcycle racing track. I’d revert their changes, they’d revert back. Then one of the Old Ones would come by and freeze my spot for a month and lecture us. Then they’d be back at Day 31. I only met them face to face once. I’d pictured them as old Florida bikers, leathery and worn, but they were teenagers! Just kids.”

  I looked away, at the blue sky overhead, visible through the riotous colors of the leaves.

  “Sorry,” she said. “You know what I mean, though. They were like, eight 16 year olds, and they’d built their bikes to burn actual hydrocarbons. These things made so much goddamned noise! Your old mecha was quieter! They rode them up to my house one day, left all six in my garden, among my flowers, growling, and rang my doorbell.

  “I had built a little gypsy caravan with flower-boxes and bright paint, all prefab vat-grown woodite, impervious to weather and bugs, watertight at the seams, breathing through a semi-permeable roof and floor. It was a really nice piece of engineering—my parents would have liked it!