by Lee S. Hawke
The worry dissolves into laughter. She walks closer, shaking her head. “Well done!” she says, genuinely. “You really had me just then.” Then, moving quickly and awkwardly, she leans over and gives him a quick hug. He’s so stunned by the press and the feeling of sudden warmth that he’s still sitting there like used hardware when she releases him just as quickly and sits down before she can think.
He blinks, slowly. “Uh, thank you,” he says. He realises he’s still grinning like an idiot and hastily rearranges his face to something more neutral. He hopes he doesn’t look constipated. “So, uh, how are you?”
He didn’t bother checking his file before the meeting this time. But the man who’d handed him his drugs today had helpfully reminded him that this session was meant to be about physical bonding and touch. It’s also a reminder that they’re being monitored, and the newborn ease sinks into discomfort again. He suddenly wonders if that’s why she hugged him.
“What’s wrong?” Susan asks.
It takes him a while to work the words out. “Nothing,” he says. He tries to smile weakly. The result must be frightening, because she edges away from him slightly. Seeing that is enough to make him crumble. “It’s really nothing,” he says, looking down at his knees. He waves his hand halfheartedly through the air. “It’s just… all of this.”
She reaches forward and catches the hand he’s left lying limply on his lap. The warmth comes rushing back. At that moment, he decides that even if she’s just doing this because they’ve been told to, he doesn’t care. It does feel good. Warm, uncomfortable, unnatural, but good. He turns his hand to hers, palm up, and they watch their interlacing fingers like children discovering a rare but beautiful beetle. “I’ve been thinking,” she says, staring at their hands, “I really like movies.”
Richard automatically thinks of the government’s VIRTUOS and winces. Her eyes widen comically. “Not those movies!” she says. Her grip tightens on his fingers. “The ones on stream. You know, old classics.”
He eyes her in disbelief. “Like the space tales and urban westerns?”
She actually blushes. It’s the first time he’s seen it, and he decides it’s endearing, if odd. “They’re not all that different,” she tries to defend herself. “Anyway, I was thinking about the way most of them end. With a death, or with a kiss.” The blood is still in her cheeks, but she’s smiling again. “Sometimes both.”
“I don’t want to die,” Richard says. He’s not joking, but she laughs anyway. And then, she deliberately moves forward, hesitantly, until he’s overwhelmed with her physicality. At this distance, he can see the pores in her forehead, smell the light scent of sweat and electronics. She breathes, and he feels the wet warmth of it hit him in the face. Part of him wants to scramble backwards, off the couch, out of the room. Then she stops, so close now that even his fight or flight instincts scramble and he simply freezes.
“Then how about a kiss?” she whispers, and their lips are almost touching anyway, and he suddenly remembers that if holding hands feels good, hopefully this will feel better. So he leans forward. Her lips are dry. So are his, the hazards of living in a constantly climate-controlled environment. So he goes deeper, seeking out the same soft, strong warmth that enfolded his hands. He finds it. And finds teeth. They scrape lightly against his and he shivers at that intimacy, of bone on bone.
She pulls back first, but slowly, a gentle disentanglement. He feels the cold rush in where she was. They stare at each other from across the couch. “Well,” he says lightly, because he can’t stand the silence anymore. “That was interesting.”
She has an odd expression on her face. “Do you think we were doing it wrong?” she asks him honestly. The question crushes something he didn’t realise lived inside him. “I don’t know if that’s how they do it in the movies.”
Privately, he thinks that maybe that’s because movies are fictional and the people who made them were uncivilised, underdeveloped barbarians, but he finds his bravery in words that she once spoke to him. “Maybe we just need to relax,” he says. “After all, it’s ok to fail the first few times you try something different. Isn’t it?”
The look on her face melts. She nods slowly. “I think you’re right,” she says gravely. And they practice again, and again, and again, until the bell rings at 15 minutes.
* * *
Richard thinks about the hands and the kisses all week, and decides that the movies are a lie. He also decides to be righteously annoyed about that because he needs to distract himself from the knowledge that this is the last week, the last meeting before the assignment.
When he steps into the room this time, she’s waiting for him. He sees that knowledge on her face as well, and suddenly their fledgling intimacy vanishes and they’re back to four weeks ago, trying for a conversation overshadowed by the knowledge of what’s to come. He clears his throat. “Hello,” he says, and sits down.
She smiles awkwardly. “Hi.”
If this was a chat window, there would be blinking dots in front of both of them. He tries to rack his brain for everything he’s learned in the last few weeks, anything at all to start off the conversation and break the tension. “What do you like?” he asks abruptly.
She blinks. “Sorry?”
He mentally kicks himself in the head. “What do you like?” he asks, slower this time. “To do, I mean? Besides Sweet Hammer and watching space tales.”
Her shoulders relax slightly. She pulls her feet up onto the couch and wraps her arms around her knees. It feels a little like she’s building a fortress against him, but at least she’s still speaking. “Music,” she says reflectively. “Sometimes I just listen to music.”
It’s a start. “What type of music?”
She hesitates, and then lets it come out. “Heavy metal,” she says, a challenging look in her eyes. “Rock. Anything with a beat. When I’m at work the office plays classical, and I can’t stand it. So when I get back I turn my earpiece up loud and blow my eardrums out. How about you?”
Richard smiles. This feels better. “That sounds awesome,” he says, honestly. “And it’s VIRTUOS for me. I love the Mount Everest one. You can actually smell the air, it’s so clear. And there’s nothing but you and the mountain and the climb.”
“Everest,” she says, surprised.
“What?” He feels suddenly defensive. “Didn’t pick me for a mountain climber?”
She smiles wryly. “Did you pick me for a heavy metal fan?”
He honestly can’t say that he did.
“Come,” she says. “Tell me something else about you that I wouldn’t guess.”
By the time the bell rings, he’s almost forgotten the assignment. And he knows that she likes the Pizzaworld VIRTUOS, hates one of her coworkers with a passion, and sometimes listens to rap.
* * *
The last week goes by very, very, fast.
It’s night when he cautiously steps out of his room. He still has to take a moment to brace himself against the outside world, against the shrieking hot wind and the heavy air. It’s easier than the first time he did it, when he’d actually had to stop and look up how to get out of the building he’d lived in for the last seven years. It still feels like the first time though, with his beating heart and nervous sweat.
Richard huddles into his jacket and walks quickly to the waiting government car. The door opens as soon as he steps close, a quiet automatic whirr that reminds him of the sound of a coffee machine. When he slides gingerly into the seat, it continues humming, processing and adjusting for his weight. The entire car is lined in datacloth. If he wanted to, he could sync it with his eyepiece and project a workspace. He doesn’t.
There are no rules for this section of the journey, but it somehow feels wrong to launch himself into Sweet Hammer this time. He stares outside the windows instead. The roads are completely shadowed: after all, the car AIs don’t need light to tell where they’re going. It’s the apartments that glow, reaching up to the sky in massive towers. He
twists and sees his own receding in the distance. He can’t pick out where his room is. There are no windows.
The car winds across the city. He looks up and sees a train whip past like a snake. It curves away from him into the distance, small lights marking the track. He’s never seen it before, in all of the trips to and fro. He wonders.
The car turns, and they follow the train into the night.
The city is big, but with the automated traffic it only takes forty-five minutes to get to the labs. He spends the time watching for the train like a distant star as it loops around buildings and vanishes, reappearing again in the distance like a taunt or a challenge. He’s feeling surprisingly calm and non-sweaty when the car finally stops and the door whispers open.
This ends very quickly when he steps through into the lab. It’s night, and the skeleton staff are all suited up like he might be hazardous. They watch him through the blank bubbles protecting their heads, waving him through corridor after corridor until he would be lost if it wasn’t for the map in the files tracking signals through his eyepiece. Then he turns a corner and almost jumps out of his skin. One of the suits is waiting for him, a glass extended like they’re holding poison. He gulps it, grateful for the assistance. The drugs taste different this time. More potent. He’s feeling lightheaded and relaxed again by the time he reaches a small cubicle. A connector sits outside. He presses his fingers to it and speaks with his real voice. “Hello,” he says awkwardly. “Uh, it’s me. Richard.”
The connector blinks red, and then green. The door slides open. And there she is.
She’s undressed already, her clothes folded neatly on the floor. The cubicle is a far cry from their meeting room, empty except for its four walls, the bed, and the dim, warm light that makes him squint to see her.
“Hi,” she says. There’s a tiny curve to her lips. He feels the urge to kiss it. The door slides shut behind him. He doesn’t notice it cutting off his escape. The room is gently heated, and he feels overdressed with her looking up at him. He quickly takes his shirt off, hesitates for a moment, and then slips off the regulation pants and sits down gingerly on the bed with her.
“Hi,” he says back. Her eyes are dilated in the semi-darkness. She looks so beautiful that he leans forward to kiss her without thinking. The drugs thrum in his system like heated blood. He pulls back and leans his forehead against hers. The heating in the room pales in comparison to the warmth he feels emanating from her skin. “Are you ok?” he asks softly.
She nods. Her naked eyebrows brush his. She opens her mouth to speak but something stops her. Instead, she sighs lightly as he reaches out and touches her shoulder gently, cautiously. He doesn’t realise that he’s done it until he feels her underneath his fingers, rippling, alive. It reminds him suddenly of the words that spill out of her despite herself. It’s all right. I’m a software coder at Isla. I really like movies. Heavy Metal. Rock. Anything with a beat. She reaches for him then and he hears himself gasp. He forgets everything - the government’s VIRTUOS, the manual, the awkwardness. He can feel the throbbing of his blood pool and pull, beating out an insistent rhythm that he can’t ignore. Hypnotised, drunk, he moves with it, and she does too.
* * *
Richard wakes with a sour taste in his mouth. He is disoriented to find himself alone, despite having woken up alone every day for the past seven years. He’s back in his apartment. The suits must have been waiting outside for them the moment they drifted off, arms wrapped around each other, limbs intertwining like data cables. It makes him feel unreal somehow, like it never happened at all.
A gentle pinging sound vibrates his earpiece. He opens his eyes again, this time directly into his inbox. He has been paid in days off. He’s guessing she would have been too, that perhaps she’s waking up at exactly this same time, somewhere across the city.
Before he can think, he’s pulling up her file. Her address is marked right under her age and fertility readings. The next thing he knows, he’s blinking into a map of the city. The course charts itself out for him like a snake. Without a government car, it would take him almost two hours to walk. But there’s a train...
He stops. He blinks again, and the map goes away. He sits up on the recliner. Why does he want to see her again? The assignment is finished. By the Government’s standards, it probably went extraordinarily well. The only thing they need now is to monitor for pregnancy. If there isn’t one, he’ll be brought in again for another assignment. If there isn’t one again, another man will be DNA matched and chosen from the hundreds of apartments littering the dark city.
The thought makes him feel like he’s swallowed a power cord.
He decides to distract himself from things that he can’t control. He eats his breakfast paste and throws himself into Sweet Hammer with a vengeance. Soon, he realises that the days off are a mistake. For the first two, he loses himself in VIRTUOS and Sweet Hammer. He scales Everest again but finds the simulation of aching muscles to be less satisfying than the memories of semi-darkness and sweat and the burn of his hips and hers. After that he spends far too much time thinking about Susan. How talking in real life is so different from the chat windows that he opens up everyday with his supervisor. How even Facetalk can’t compare with seeing her shoulders tense, her knees clasp, her body move towards his. How he’s never really listened to music much, preferring VIRTUOS every time, but now he suddenly wants to know what heavy metal sounds like and he wants her to show him.
The thoughts stay in his head, and they coil, and coil, until one night he finds himself searching for her through the user directory. He has all of her details, it’s not hard. Before he can stop himself, he blinks at her name automatically and a chat window pops up. The same one that failed to materialise the first time they met. Richard sits on his recliner, tries very hard not to think about what he’s doing and what it means, and waits.
Two minutes later, the connection symbol blinks.
Hello again, he says, before he can stop himself. I didn’t think you’d connect.
I didn’t think you would either. How… how are you?
It’s somehow easier to lie and tell the truth at the same time in text. Restless. Bored. Ok. How are you?
I’m pregnant.
Richard sits back and doesn’t know how to feel. On the one hand, they don’t have to try again. On the other hand, they don’t have to try again.
Isn’t that great? It worked. We did it.
The thought warms him. We did.
And then, the dreaded blinking dots fill the screen. Richard panics. He can’t think of anything to say, despite living his life on these transparent screens. Without her presence there to anchor him, the signals to read, he can’t even guess at what she’s thinking. Until she tells him.
Anyway, I’m really tired. Maybe we can chat tomorrow?
Maybe, he says, but she’s already disconnected.
* * *
Three weeks go by. He finds he’s missing the oddest things. The way she smelled. The way she laughed to break up the silence and awkwardness, and how differently she laughed when they were sharing a joke. Because he’s a little bit slow, it takes him the three weeks to realise that he’s missing her. And that he wants to see her again, in the flesh, where there are no chat windows to run away from and no way to disconnect.
As soon as he makes the decision, the rightness of it settles into him like a second skin. He blinks, and the train timetable comes up. He waits until night, impatience skittering his concentration. He makes two mistakes before his supervisor, Kathryn, tells him abruptly to log out and come back tomorrow with a fresh head. He logs out, stands up, and walks to the nearest train station.
The wind fights him every step of the way, but he fights back. The only time he falters is when he sees the station, high up, with only a single lift built to transport goods. It trembles underneath his feet as it ascends, the air howling around it. When he reaches the station, he holds onto the safety rails and doesn’t look down.
&nbs
p; The train comes. It’s loud. He wasn’t expecting it to be so loud. He feels it before he sees it, the rumbling of the tracks rippling through the station, up his feet and into his chest. Up this close the train looks less like a snake and more like a dragon. A monstrous relic from a monstrous age. The door opens and he forces himself to walk into its empty belly. And then he promptly falls onto his face as the train starts again and the motion sends him flying to the back.
Richard grimly wedges himself against the wall and uses the empty seats to climb up, feeling like he’s scaling a mountain. And then he holds on for the strangest thirty minutes of his life, feeling the train shudder like a living thing around him, feeling like the only soul left in the world. This is what she does every day, he thinks, and suddenly he understands her.
When the train finally stops at her station, his knees are aching with the force of keeping himself upright. He keeps walking anyway, following the map blinking in his eyepiece. She’s not far away.
Her building is old. The security system seems even older, almost ancient. He doesn’t even know if his software is compatible with it, so he knocks on the door instead, feeling the impact of metal against flesh and bone. “Hello,” he says to the waiting camera. “My name is Richard.”
There is a heart-stopping minute. The seconds trickle past in silence. Fear floors him, without the drugs he feels weak. But before his knees melt to water and he turns away, the door slides open, and she’s behind it.
“Come in,” she says. She’s smiling. She’s shocked that he’s here. He’s shocked too. They’re both far too shy for people who have tasted each other’s skin. But they’re there. Both there. Without the government, without drugs, without obligations.
Richard smiles back, brilliantly, and disconnects his eyepiece.
THE GREY WALL
Once, there was a little boy.
