Live Without a Net

by Lou Anders

  The next day she and the boy showed up. He followed her, taking a Personal Rapid Transit car. He had no clear plan except to plead with her to listen to him. Because without her, how could he tell whether he was going mad?

  And was he? If she said “No, I didn’t feel anything,” then it would confirm that he’d gone Funny. Friday was his birthday. Today was Tuesday. Nothing magical about the eightieth birthday. Supermentation didn’t happen like clockwork on the eightieth. But now that he thought about it, he could see the signs: he was becoming rigid and doddering. The garden, for one thing. Crossbreeding wooly thyme, and hunting Mrs. Murchie’s cats. Puttering with exotic shade ground-covers and winter-hardy lemon trees. Why not just buy lemons? Put down Astro Turf? He was slipping into knowing too much about too little. It was always the first sign of those who were about to join the legion of the Lost.

  The autoguided car zipped out of the city, and he overrode its questions about Destination. He didn’t know. He made his choice of exits from the guideway, depending on the woman in front of him. She was the key, somehow.

  Because what if he wasn’t crazy? What if there were two choices when you got old? One was the funhouse. The other was Something More. He was the first generation of oldsters after the Change. It was just possible, wasn’t it, that after fifty years of experience, there was an alternative to getting Lost?

  He took the last few blocks on foot. Dobchek watched as the woman and her son disappeared into a small house in an exurban development. A sad little bungalow with a garden in need of pruning.

  On her front porch, he forced himself to knock before he lost his nerve, then knocked again.

  She opened the door, recognized him, and started to close it in his face.

  “Please,” he said. “I’ve come all this way.”

  She held up a small handheld pager. “All I have to do is push a button, and the security guard will be here.”

  “I have no problem with that,” replied Dobchek. “I mean you no harm. I just want three minutes of your time. Then I’ll go away, I promise.”

  She occupied the doorway stiffly, all angles and resistance. Her fortyish cheeks and jaws had a few deep lines, supporting her face like girders. He wished she would smile, but why should she? It was just that he thought he knew her. Knew her loneliness, her yearning. He realized how delusional that sounded.

  Clutching her security device, she waited for him to have his say and leave.

  He took a deep breath. “A few days ago in the museum I felt something with you and the youngster. We were almost killed, and you tend to bond with people in circumstances like that. But I’m an old man. I’ve seen tragedy, and this was different.”

  Her face hadn’t changed. His time was ticking by.

  “I felt I knew you and your son… . He is your son, isn’t he?” She didn’t answer. He had to get on with it. “What I felt was that I knew you. That you were somebody. That I was somebody—somebody who mattered. And since I’d never seen you before, I thought the feeling I had was significant. But I also thought I might be getting—” He hesitated to use the term Funny. “I thought I might be getting delusional in my old age.”

  He wasn’t getting through. He looked out at her straggly garden, thinking how he’d like to tidy it up a bit. “Maybe I should quit teaching if I’m too old,” he said, aware that he was rambling, unable to stop it. “My employer has a policy for me in a memory care condo, in case I ever need it. Maybe it’s time.” He paused. “Unless you felt something. You see?”

  He hadn’t meant to share personal things. Why would she care? But what else was he going to say? I want to hold your hand?

  “I’m sorry,” she said, softening a bit, but closing the door a little farther. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  From behind her came a voice: “I do.”

  The boy came forward to stand by his mother’s side. The resemblance between them was strong: strawberry blond, straight hair. Bright brown eyes. Except the boy’s ears stuck out prominently as if they were scanning for broadcasts.

  Around a wad of chewing gum he said, “It was like we needed each other.”

  The woman frowned. “I don’t think we need strangers, Russell.”

  She started to close the door.

  “Wait!” Dobchek held out a hand to stop her, but withdrew the gesture quickly. “What if we do?”

  Through a foot-wide opening, the mother watched him guardedly.

  He had to give voice to his most tenuous theories. Give body, perhaps, to his fantasies. “What if,” he said, “our somatics are incomplete somehow? What if”—here he was just giving form to the thought that had been nudging at him for days—“what if the smarter our bodies get, the more they long for something more?” He instantly realized that she would misinterpret that. “I don’t mean in the conjugal sense,” he added quickly. “I never think about that anymore.” He dared a smile. “Or not very much, anyway. But what if something greater arises as the result of somatic knowing. The body—the knowledgeable body—might yearn for something like … like a higher communion. Even just standing together in a museum.”

  “No,” the boy said. “You have to touch.” He looked up at his mother. “Without mittens.”

  The woman’s face was closing down. He saw that she was upset by his standing on her porch, by the boy’s intrusion, perhaps by Dobchek’s pitiful story. But when he looked more closely, he saw tears gathering along the lids of her eyes. She gazed at him, not bothering to wipe them.

  “Yes,” she said. “Yes, I felt it.”

  He thought that this was the answer to the question he’d first asked her. He took it for his answer, the one that meant he wasn’t Funny or Lost after all.

  But then, what was he?

  “My name’s Tara,” she said, extending her hand.

  It was Friday, March 30, 2061. Dobchek’s eightieth birthday.

  And he was having a party.

  Dobchek fussed with the plate of cheese and crackers. Put it in the middle of the table. Too isolated. Put it on the corner. Too self-conscious. Put it on the counter. Yes, casual elegance.

  Overall, the apartment looked tacky. Only the garden made it decent. He risked opening the door to the courtyard. The afternoon sun, surprisingly warm, peeked over the apartment roof, sending a brief shaft of sunlight into the woolly thyme.

  He saw a movement in the bushes. The cats. He sighed, imagining scratched-up piles of his genetically designed thyme. Russell charged out the door. “Hey, Mr. Dobchek—cats!”

  Tara smiled. “He loves animals.”

  “Those aren’t animals. Those are cats.” Dobchek glanced at the clock. It was a quarter after. No one else was coming.

  He should have invited more people, there were always no-shows for parties, as far as he remembered from the time Before. But the guest list had been a strain anyway: the Chief of Curriculum at the college, his dentist, the mail carrier. And at the last moment, Mrs. Murchie, because it had been her idea to have a party, even if it was a joke.

  Tara settled herself at the kitchen table, looking out the door into the garden. “It’s all so tidy. Very nice.”

  Dobchek saw it through her eyes: overshaped, overtended. A square of sunlight fell on the flagstones, creating a patch of color. That was a nice surprise. Perhaps surprise was part of what was missing from his life. From all of their lives.

  He sat down at the dinette set. “I’ve been thinking,” he began.

  A silly beginning. Old people were always thinking. But he stumbled on, feeling Tara’s permission to speak, to fumble into what he knew.

  “I’m the first, you know. I’m in the vanguard, the first wave of people to hit old, old age. I was thirty when I did the Change. But I grew from a different soil than you did. I can remember the days when the world had a Net. When it was all connected. Not perfectly, but instantaneously, chaotically.” He smiled nostalgically. “It was quite something.”

  Russell was crawling through the per
iwinkle, calling “Here, kitty kitty!”

  He went on: “Maybe my mind still harbors some predilection for those days. Maybe it’s filling the gap.”

  “Gap?” Tara asked, tracing a tea stain on the dinette set with her hand.

  “It wouldn’t be like the old Net. Just a limited connection, but maybe a more profound one. Maybe it’s just filling the niche that exists. It isn’t solving a problem. Evolution isn’t directed toward anything, it just exploits what’s at hand.”

  “Evolution?” The lines were back in her face.

  “Not in the classic sense. But what if people my age are starting to enter a metamorphosis that makes them able to connect with others chemically, through touch?”

  He glanced at her hands resting on the table.

  She saw him looking. Smiled. “So you think it’s just your generation?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe our memories of the old Net, of not being so damned isolated and alone, make it more likely that the elderly will make the leap.”

  “But we all felt something,” she said. “Even Russell.”

  Dobchek nodded. “I’ve been thinking about that. What if the old are the catalysts? What if we can initiate—perhaps lead? And suppose it’s a change everyone will eventually go through, at least if they’re lonely enough.”

  “Like me?” she asked.

  Dobchek watched Russell chasing through the undergrowth. “Or open enough to surprise.”

  A knock at the door.

  Party guests? Dobchek rose, hurrying to open the door. There stood Mrs. Murchie. She shouldered past him. “I brought some of the neighbors,” she announced.

  And sure enough, Dobchek recognized the two others: Mr. Kaku and Mrs. Lessinger. He nodded at them. He’d nodded at them for forty years in the hallway, and at the mailbox, and never knew them.

  They stood in his kitchen, not touching the food. Most people preferred store-wrapped food, which made sense: the terrorists liked to use poison.

  Looking at the room full of people, Dobchek felt strangely emotional. No one had stood in his kitchen since Alicia died. Too long, too long. Perhaps all this talk about something more was nothing other than the yearning for simple human company. Yet he thought it went beyond that.

  “Got one!” Russell shouted, cradling a cat in his arms.

  The guests filed outside to see the cat, to inspect the garden. The winter afternoon was shirtsleeve warm. Everyone seemed happy to discover the garden, maybe happy to be at a real party instead of a teleconference.

  Mrs. Murchie stepped off the flagstone path and traipsed over the thyme. “Springy,” she said, a smile denting the side of her face. It gave Dobchek a stab of regret, but he let it go. The thyme would toughen up with use.

  The group watched as afternoon shade fell down the long shaft of the bricked-in courtyard. They were standing roughly in a circle. Mrs. Murchie said, “We didn’t bring any gifts,” acknowledging in her way that it was a birthday party.

  Russell was standing in the kitchen doorway, munching cheese. “I thought we were going to hold hands,” he blurted.

  Everyone looked at Dobchek, as though he should shush the boy.

  Instead, Dobchek waved Russell over to his side.

  “If you will indulge an old man,” he said, “I’d like to give Russell’s suggestion a run.” He took a deep breath, and decided to risk looking stupid. Or Funny.

  “Sometimes,” he continued, “an old man gets a little lonely. So, if you wouldn’t mind too much, I’d just like us all to hold hands for a moment.”

  The six of them seemed frozen like statues in a long-forgotten garden. He knew his idea was unexpected, and not exactly welcome.

  He felt happy, though. Stimulated and uncertain. Alive. As though they were setting out on a sea crossed by winds from far latitudes. As the oldest one here, he’d be the navigator. Or the bird, seen far out to sea, leading them to land. But what land?

  He expected to be surprised.

  Tara smiled at the group, and shrugged in a disarming manner. She held out her hands to Mr. Kaku and Mrs. Murchie. Slowly, Mrs. Murchie clasped that hand. And then Dobchek’s hand. Putting down the cat, Russell came forward to join in.

  Then one by one, they took each other’s hands. It was a fragile ring, of nobody very special, just a couple of oldsters joined by the curious and the lonely, drawn to a garden amid apartment towers. But they reached around the circle, closing the gaps between them. And as they did so, Dobchek felt it once again, that long-gone sense of connection, tentative and yet vital, part cognition, part emotion. As though this circle were somehow a community.

  And perhaps now it was.

  Charles Stross is a Hugo-and Nebula-award shortlisted SF writer and tech jounalist. He is the author of the short story collection Toast (Cosmos Books, 2002) and the novel Singularity Sky (Ace, August 2003). His forthcoming novels are The Atrocity Archive (Golden Gryphon, February 2004), The Iron Sunrise (Ace, August 2004), A Family Trade (Tor, December 2004) and The Clan Corporate (Tor, December 2005). He lives in Edinburgh, Scotland.

  ROGUE FARM

  Charles Stross

  It was a bright, cool March morning: mare’s tails trailed across the southeastern sky toward the rising sun. Joe shivered slightly in the driver’s seat as he twisted the starter handle on the old front loader he used to muck out the barn. Like its owner, the ancient Massey Ferguson had seen better days; but it had survived worse abuse than Joe routinely handed out. The diesel clattered, spat out a gobbet of thick blue smoke, and chattered to itself dyspeptically. His mind as blank as the sky above, Joe slid the tractor into gear, raised the front scoop, and began turning it toward the open doors of the barn—just in time to see an itinerant farm coming down the road.

  “Bugger,” swore Joe. The tractor engine made a hideous grinding noise and died. He took a second glance, eyes wide, then climbed down from the tractor and trotted over to the kitchen door at the side of the farmhouse. “Maddie!” he called, forgetting the two-way radio clipped to his sweater hem. “Maddie! There’s a farm coming!”

  “Joe? Is that you? Where are you?” Her voice wafted vaguely from the bowels of the house.

  “Where are you?” he yelled back.

  “I’m in the bathroom.”

  “Bugger,” he said again. “If it’s the one we had round the end last month …”

  The sound of a toilet sluiced through his worry. It was followed by a drumming of feet on the staircase; then Maddie erupted into the kitchen. “Where is it?” she demanded.

  “Out front, about a quarter mile up the lane.”

  “Right.” Hair wild and eyes angry about having her morning ablutions cut short, Maddie yanked a heavy green coat on over her shirt. “Opened the cupboard yet?”

  “I was thinking you’d want to talk to it first.”

  “Too right I want to talk to it. If it’s that one that’s been lurking in the copse near Edgar’s pond, I got some issues to discuss with it.” Joe shook his head at her anger and went to unlock the cupboard in the back room. “You take the shotgun and keep it off our property,” she called after him. “I’ll be out in a minute.”

  Joe nodded to himself, then carefully picked out the twelve-gauge and a preloaded magazine. The gun’s power-on self-test lights flickered erratically, but it seemed to have a full charge. Slinging it, he locked the cupboard carefully and went back out into the farmyard to warn off their unwelcome visitor.

  The farm squatted, buzzing and clicking to itself, in the road outside Armitage End. Joe eyed it warily from behind the wooden gate, shotgun under his arm. It was a medium-size one, probably with half a dozen human components subsumed into it—a formidable collective. Already it was deep into farm-fugue, no longer relating very clearly to people outside its own communion of mind. Beneath its leathery black skin he could see hints of internal structure, cytocellular macroassemblies flexing and glooping in disturbing motions. Even though it was only a young adolescent, it was already the size of an antique heavy
tank, and it blocked the road just as efficiently as an Apatosaurus would have. It smelled of yeast and gasoline.

  Joe had an uneasy feeling that it was watching him. “Buggerit, I don’t have time for this,” he muttered. The stable waiting for the small herd of cloned spidercows cluttering up the north paddock was still knee-deep in manure, and the tractor seat wasn’t getting any warmer while he shivered out here, waiting for Maddie to come and sort this thing out. It wasn’t a big herd, but it was as big as his land and his labor could manage—the big biofabricator in the shed could assemble mammalian livestock faster than he could feed them up and sell them with an honest HAND-RAISED NOT VAT-GROWN label. “What do you want with us?” he yelled up at the gently buzzing farm.

  “Brains, fresh brains for Baby Jesus,” crooned the farm in a warm contralto, startling Joe half out of his skin. “Buy my brains!” Half a dozen disturbing cauliflower shapes poked suggestively out of the farm’s back and then retracted again, coyly.

  “Don’t want no brains around here,” Joe said stubbornly, his fingers whitening on the stock of the shotgun. “Don’t want your kind round here, neither. Go away.”

  “I’m a nine-legged semiautomatic groove machine!” crooned the farm. “I’m on my way to Jupiter on a mission for love! Won’t you buy my brains?” Three curious eyes on stalks extruded from its upper glacis.

  “Uh—” Joe was saved from having to dream up any more ways of saying “fuck off” by Maddie’s arrival. She’d managed to sneak her old battle dress home after a stint keeping the peace in Mesopotamia twenty ago, and she’d managed to keep herself in shape enough to squeeze inside. Its left knee squealed ominously when she walked it about, which wasn’t often, but it still worked well enough to manage its main task—intimidating trespassers.

  “You.” She raised one translucent arm, pointed at the farm. “Get off my land. Now.”

  Taking his cue, Joe raised his shotgun and thumbed the selector to full auto. It wasn’t a patch on the hardware riding Maddie’s shoulders, but it underlined the point.