Live Without a Net

by Lou Anders

  I felt Malcolm’s smile. “You’re not speaking. Let me show you what’s possible within the Community.”

  He spent hours teaching me to manipulate the reality of the interface box, to reach out and grasp it like my hand was a shovel, a hammer, sandpaper, a cloth.

  “You do this well,” he said, a brightness in the gray green garden we had built in an ancient empty city. Ivy hung from the walls, and within the ivy, sleek animals scurried. The dirt exuded its musty smell, mingling with the dogwoods that bounded the edge of the garden.

  I smiled, knowing he could see my emotion. He could see all of me, as if he were a member of my pod. I was disclosed, though he remained aloof.

  “Soon,” he said, when I pried at his light, and then he took hold of me and we made love again in the garden, the grass tickling my back like a thousand tongues.

  In the golden aftermath, Malcolm’s face emerged from within the ball of light, his eyes closed. As I examined his face, it expanded before me, I fell into his left nostril, into his skull, and all of him was laid open to me.

  In the garden, next to the ivy-covered stone walls, I began to retch. Even within the virtual reality of the interface box, I tasted my bile. He’d lied to me.

  I had no control of my body. The interface box sat on the couch beside me as it had when we’d started, but pseudoreality was gone. Malcolm was behind me—I could hear him packing a bag—but I couldn’t will my head to turn.

  “We’ll head for the Belem elevator. Once we’re on the Ring, we’re safe. They can’t get to us. Then they’ll have to deal with me.”

  There was a water stain on the wall, a blemish that I could not tear my eyes away from.

  “We’ll recruit people from singleton enclaves. They may not recognize my claim, but they will recognize my power.”

  My eyes began to tear, not from the strain. He’d used me, and I, silly girl, had fallen for him. He had seduced me, taken me as a pawn, as a valuable to bargain with.

  “It may take a generation. I’d hoped it wouldn’t. There are cloning vats on the Ring. You have excellent stock, and if raised from birth, you will be much more malleable.”

  If he had me, part of one of the starpods, he thought he’d be safe from the Overgovernment. But he didn’t know that our pod was sundered. He didn’t realize how useless this all was.

  “All right, Meda. Time to go.”

  Out of the corner of my eye I saw him insert the connection into his interface, and my legs lifted me up off the couch. My rage surged through me, and my neck erupted in pheromones.

  “Jesus, what’s that smell?”

  Pheromones! His interface controlled my body, my throat, my tongue, my cunt, but not my mods. He’d never thought of it. I screamed with all my might, scent exploding from my glands. Anger, fear, revulsion.

  Malcolm opened the door, fanned it. His gun bulged at his waist. “We’ll pick up some perfume for you on the way.” He disappeared out the door with two bags, one mine, while I stood with the interface box in my outstretched arms.

  Still I screamed, saturating the air with my words, until my glands were empty, spent, and my autonomous nervous system silenced me. I strained to hear something from outside. There was nothing.

  Malcolm reappeared. “Let’s go.” My legs goose-stepped me from the cottage.

  I tasted our thoughts as I passed the threshold. My pod was out there, too far for me to understand, but close.

  With the last of my pheromones, I signaled, Help!

  “Into the aircar,” Leto said.

  Something yanked at my neck, and my body spasmed as I collapsed. I caught sight of Manuel on the cottage roof, holding the interface box.

  Leto pulled his gun and spun.

  Something flew by me, and Leto cried out, dropping the pistol. I stood, wobbly, and ran into the woods, until someone caught me, and suddenly I was in our mesh.

  As my face was buried in Strom’s chest and my palms squeezed against his, I watched with other eyes—Moira’s eyes!—as Leto scrambled into the aircar and started the turbines.

  He’s not going far.

  We played with his hydrogen regulator.

  Also turned his beacon back on.

  Thanks for coming. Sorry.

  I felt dirty, empty. My words barely formed. I released all that had happened, all that I had done, all my foolish thoughts into them. I expected their anger, their rejection. I expected them to leave me there by the cottage.

  Still a fool, Moira chided. Strom touched the tender interface jack on my neck.

  All’s forgiven, Meda. The consensus was the juice of a ripe fruit, the light of distant stars.

  All’s forgiven.

  Hand in hand in hand, we returned to the farm, sharing all that had happened that day.

  Del Stone Jr. is a professional science fiction and horror writer. He has published well over a hundred short stories, novelettes, novellas, novels, and comic book scripts. He won the International Horror Guild Award and owns a share of a Bram Stoker Award and a World Fantasy Award. He works for a newspaper in Florida.

  I FEED THE MACHINE

  Del Stone Jr.

  I feed the machine.

  I bring his breakfast, lunch, and dinner.

  I have always done this. I always will.

  The machine is a man. He is called a Tabulator. He performs calculations, and he is the company’s most valuable asset.

  We live in the Redoubt, where the machine is served by me and others. Doctors. Teachers. Groomsmen. His breeding pool.

  We have always lived here. We always will.

  Sometimes the machine favors me with talk.

  “Have you never traveled beyond these walls?” he asks. He knows I have not, but still he asks. “Have you never seen the mountains that conceal our fortress? Have you never seen the ocean, or the sky?”

  Sometimes the machine speaks in these questions that are not really questions. He knows I was born here just as he was, the fifth of his line. He knows we all were born here under the watchful eye of the company. Otherwise we might be set upon by martyrs from other companies who covet his calculations.

  Or the infidels.

  Mostly it is at dinner that the machine favors talk. I tell him my supervisor will punish me if I do not return at once, but the machine scoffs. “I have made it clear to the company that if I wish my servers to linger they will not be punished.” And when he finishes saying that, he winks at me. It is flattering that a man of such value would favor my company, but my supervisor will be unhappy.

  Still, I linger. I enjoy the machine’s questions.

  What is a mountain? What is an ocean, or a sky?

  I have heard of these things. A mountain is a mass of rock that protects us from martyrs and the infidels. An ocean is a great body of water. It separates us from the infidels, who live on the other side of the world. The sky is a great open thing from which the infidels might descend to destroy us all.

  But I have never seen a mountain, an ocean, or a sky.

  “Have you never loved?” the machine asks. His eyes are alive and glittering, and through them I see a sliver of the vast world his thoughts occupy. I tell him I have a great love of the company, and of the Rapture, our leaders of the government. He waves a hand to dismiss this answer. “We all love those things, of course. I am speaking of the love of another person.”

  The machine has always treated me with respect and affection. I tell him I love him.

  He smiles warmly and says, “As I love you. But I am speaking of an even greater love, the love that exists between a man and a woman, or a man and a man as the case may be.”

  I am horrified by his words. The love between a man and a man would be smitten by the Rapture as an abomination. And here at the Redoubt, the love between a man and a woman is forbidden. It interferes with important work. We servers are given monthly inoculations to prevent it. I gaze about the dining room, and my expression seems to convey more than my simple answer of no.

  “
It doesn’t matter if they are listening,” he says. “I am the company’s most valuable asset.” He is silent a moment. I gather his food, which he has barely touched, and as I leave, he reveals to me, “I am in love.”

  I cannot fathom such a thing. It is as mountain, ocean, and sky.

  I live in a five-hundred-square-foot room. I take my meals in a cafeteria. I have access to a gymnasium, a swimming pool, and a fitness room. For entertainment, I view approved books, compete in sporting events, or browse the aisles of the company store. I receive weekly sunlamp treatments and blood tests. I pray three times a shift at organized services. Once a month I receive a castration inoculation. I am allowed access to certain parts of the Redoubt, and my whereabouts are reported by transponder. If I deviate from approved areas, an explosive device with a blast radius of two centimeters will detonate inside my brain.

  I have a busy and rewarding life. I have no room for love.

  “I am in love with the Checker,” the machine whispers surreptitiously. I don’t understand.

  A Checker is a person who checks a Tabulator’s work. He constructs proofs to validate or invalidate the Tabulator’s calculations. The proofs are then returned to the Tabulator, who either certifies or revises them. Once the calculations and proofs are certified by both Tabulator and Checker, they are sold to the contractee, another company, or the Rapture itself.

  The Checker and the Tabulator are never allowed to meet. To do so might corrupt their work. They are kept away from one another, and it is this I do not understand. How could the machine love a person he has never met?

  “The Checker is a woman,” the machine says with a smile. “Her proofs are constructed with an intricacy that only a woman might understand and a man admire.”

  The machine has been distressed. I wonder if these thoughts grow from that discontent. He is currently performing a set of calculations for the Rapture, the most important calculations any Tabulator has attempted to produce. If he is successful, the menace of the infidel will be ended.

  “I hide messages in my calculations,” the machine whispers to me, glancing suspiciously at the walls, “and she responds to them in her proofs.” The glitter in his eyes has been replaced with a desperate sheen.

  “She validates my love, and I validate hers.”

  I do not understand.

  The infidels live on the other side of the world. They are a lost people who exist in moral squalor. They celebrate primitive animal desires: lust, greed, pleasure. They use devices wantonly, and most abominable are the thinking devices, the ones that perform their calculations. They use these devices to support and export their evil culture. For their efforts, they will suffer eternity in the Lake of Fire.

  The Rapture wisely outlawed such devices, and we are protected from the moral squalor they induce. Now only simple devices are allowed, such as the device inside my brain. The infidels would decry such a device as an invasion of personal freedom, but human beings are born with only one choice—the choice to accept or reject the Savior. I made my choice a long time ago. I am free.

  “I have asked the company to let me see her,” the machine murmurs. “They will refuse, and I will be forced to act.” The room has become cluttered with papers filled with inscrutable markings. Pages are attached to the walls and bear the frantic formulae of a genius who cannot write as quickly as he can calculate. I understand none of it, which is why I am allowed to see it.

  “I am approaching a critical juncture in my calculations,” he says. He looks weary and perplexed. Perhaps he has encountered a problem he cannot solve. “If they do not allow me to see her, I will be unable to complete their calculations.”

  Had another person spoken these words, he would have been smitten as a heretic. To threaten the company and the Rapture is unthinkable. But the machine is a genius, and from him they seem words of uncanny insight, though I cringe to hear them. He says the very things we are told not to think.

  “Let us hope they have the good sense not to retire us,” he says, but I am not afraid. We will all be retired one shift and in some fashion. Should the machine fall from grace, we servers will be retired with the push of a button, the devices in our brains detonating simultaneously. Should I slip poison into the machine’s afternoon tea, I alone will be retired—not before I have been compelled to reveal the source of my corruption. Retirement is a fact of life.

  But the machine seems to value something more than his life.

  I bring the machine his breakfast. He is leaning back in a chair with his feet propped on the table. His smile is fat with glee.

  “It has begun,” he gloats. “I have asked the company to let me see the Checker. They have refused. So I have told them I cannot complete the orbital calculations for the Rapture.”

  I do not know what “orbital calculations” are, but I am familiar with the term blackmail, having been intensively studied in the dark arts of manipulation used by the infidels. I fear for the machine’s soul.

  “The company will distribute my work among other Tabulators, and they will fail. The company will then be required to grant my request. I expect this will take a week. Meanwhile, let’s eat!” he proclaims, rubbing his hands together. “Self-determination can give a man an appetite.”

  He winks.

  My supervisor tells me I will not feed the machine this shift.

  Am I being retired?

  No. It is a company intercession. The machine is not to be fed until further notice.

  After seven shifts I am allowed to feed the machine.

  He does not look healthy. His skin is sallow and hangs from his cheeks and elbows. His hair is coarse and gray. He has the sunken posture of an elderly man.

  But his eyes are alive.

  “The company has tried to starve me into submission,” he says, eating only a little of this and that as if his stomach were no longer capable of accepting food. “But I will not submit. I am a middle-aged man, and soon a thing like romance will be lost upon me. I am determined to solve this problem.”

  If he were to receive castration inoculations like the rest of us, he would not be grappling with these feelings. But the chemicals might dull his ability to calculate, so the company refrains from giving them to him.

  “They have promised to reconsider my request if I provide them with the first dimension of my calculations. I have agreed to do that. I will not, however, provide them with enough information to enable a second Tabulator to complete the calculations. Not until I have met with my sweet Checker.”

  I do not understand why this liaison is so important, but I relegate it to the body of arcane notions the machine sometimes shares with me. Perhaps I will understand it after I have seen a mountain, an ocean, or a sky.

  The machine is sobbing.

  The sound is terrible. I have heard it only once in my life, during a sporting event when a fellow server was injured and suffered great pain. The machine must be suffering great pain. I cannot place his oatmeal on the table because he is resting his head there.

  “The company has said it will not consider my request to meet the Checker until I’ve provided them with the second and third dimensions of my calculations.”

  I don’t understand. The company said it would consider his request after he provided them with the first.

  “They lied,” he says bitterly.

  For a moment my thoughts go blank. The company cannot lie; lying is an abomination that would bring harsh sanctions from the Rapture.

  “They said they were ‘revising’ the conditions of our agreement because of unforeseen circumstances. I asked them what those circumstances were, and they said the Rapture was anxious to acquire my calculations and had advanced their deadline. They said the risk of having the results tainted by my meeting the Checker were too great, and that afterwards such a meeting might be arranged. But I know they are lying.”

  This is the most vexing of all the new ideas the machine has shared with me, and I truly fear for his soul. The company can
not lie. Truth is the foundation of our life here at the Redoubt.

  “I will not submit,” the machine says in an unsteady voice.

  Has he begun to fail?

  At my nightly prayer ritual I ask that the Savior provide clarity of thought and moral guidance to the machine. My prayers are approved by the minister who presides over the service. He is a company man. He tells me the Savior will look kindly upon my request because the machine is providing an invaluable service for all who believe in the Rapture.

  Later, in my room, I wonder: Should I have asked for my own clarity of thought?

  “Did you need further proof the company lies?” the machine snarls as I bring him his dinner. “Look at this.”

  He is shaking a piece of paper.

  “They told me it was a message from the Checker! Bah!”

  He does not offer me the piece of paper, which is just as well. I would not know what to make of anything written there.

  “It has none of her personality or her insights. In every way it says nothing. An impostor wrote this!”

  I struggle for a response. I suggest the Checker may not be able to express her thoughts outside of mathematics.

  “It is signed by a man,” the machine mutters grimly. “They don’t know that I know.”

  I do not want to say what occurs to me: that the machine has made an error, that the Checker in fact is a man and the messages hidden in the calculations are nothing more than coincidence.

  “I performed the second dimension of calculations. I asked the Checker if she had written such a message. She vigorously denied doing so.”

  For the first time in my life I am sick with uncertainty. The two pillars of my belief are at war with one another, and I feel I am being asked to choose.

  “They will never receive the completed calculations.”

  I don’t know what to say.

  My supervisor takes me aside. I am led to a room. I am introduced to a Disciple of the Rapture.