“Looks like this on-again, off-again love affair is one we’ll be tackling from both ends, not just from mine. Well, that’s one more thing we have in common. At the rate the amount of things we share is piling up, you’d think falling in love will be even easier this time.”
The look she gave him suggested she didn’t appreciate the sarcasm. “If you ask me, it’s the same challenge as before. Hope we succeed in humanizing you before the nanites rob you of what little remains that’s worth saving.”
He closed the door to the apartment behind them and grabbed her by the arm. “We’re walking fast now as part of that fight or flight response you were looking to trigger.”
“Yeah, I get that. You can start trying to be more human by easing up on the grip on my arm.”
“And risk losing you? What would that say about me?”
She smiled despite herself. “Your sense of humor may be your only hope.”
“If you’ll recall I only fall back on that in the face of a complete lack of other people’s humanity, starting with my parents.”
“That’s right. How could I forget? I guess we’ll be a better reality check for one another than we thought.”
TWENTY-ONE
“A Cadillac? If it doesn’t at least do two hundred miles per hour, don’t waste my time.”
“We need the trunk space.” Jane threw her suitcase inside the trunk, and then grabbed Mike’s and did the same with it when he refused to let up on his shock and indignation. “If the commercials are to be believed, they go as fast as any sports car.”
“The Big Brother media industry that gave us those commercials was also the one that ensured us we’d have a whole age of ubiquitous computing before nanites even came into their own, say twenty years from now.”
“History is even harder to pin down than car sales. Now get in.”
“Nope. I’m not going anywhere in that thing. A Porsche, maybe. We can just strap the suitcases to the roof. Better yet, a harrier jet. How am I supposed to get my adrenaline spike on in that thing?”
Five minutes later, with her at the wheel, he seemed to be feeling the sharp end of his adrenaline spike just fine, judging from his grimace.
“You mind telling me where we’re fleeing to next?” he said, sounding as if he was hoping that wherever it was, they’d get there soon.
“Now, where would the fun be in that?”
Every time he tried to peel his head off the head rest, she just stepped on the gas some more. “You realize this is a convertible, right?” he said. “If this thing rolls, the only thing the nanites will be able to do is the long overdue road repair Americans can no longer afford, now that we, too, are a third world country, secondary to corporations not paying their taxes.”
She zigzagged around the cars going eighty miles per hour that were standing still relative to them. “Maybe you should let me drive,” he said. “I’m the one that’s weaponized, you… I’m sorry, what is it you do in this relationship exactly besides point up my inadequacies and then verify them under a microscope?”
“I appreciate that dating a bioengineer can be a bit trying. But I can and will make you better. If you want to take your chances with someone who bakes cookies for a living…”
“I guess not every guy who wants to get over himself has a genie for a girlfriend, and I should be grateful.”
Veering around the latest “stalled” vehicle, she lost control of the car, throwing them onto two wheels.
He regarded the asphalt with his face just a few inches from the road. “They really do need to fix these streets. They have more holes in them than my Aunt Asta’s memory.”
She got the car back on four wheels and they both bounced on the seats from the impact of the final two wheels landing. “Shocks aren’t half bad,” he mumbled. “Try that in a Porsche. All you’ll get is a good ass reaming for your trouble.”
“How’s the fever?”
He put the back of his hand to his forehead. “Not bad. Can you take it up another notch?”
“Sure.” Jane hit the button and the hardtop started going up, along with the power windows.
“Hey! What are you doing? I was rather enjoying the wind in my face. The bugs in my mouth weren’t tasting half bad either.” He fished a dragonfly out of his mouth. “Did you ever try fried grasshoppers, speaking of? Was in China once, and… Oh, shit!”
She drove over the side of the bridge into the lake below. At least she thought it was a lake. It might have been a sea, or possibly an inland bay; the shoreline was a long ways away. They watched as the car sank in slow motion relative to their recent road velocity.
“I just thought we needed some quiet time,” she said.
“I thought we decided I needed an adrenaline spike to be right with the world again!”
“You’re trapped underwater in a car with a woman you say you can’t love in this body, who can kill you with a thought.”
He gulped. “So tell me how you plan to get over yourself,” she said.
Mike felt his forehead with the back of his hand. “Hey, look at that, the fever’s gone!”
“I think now would be a good time to be hot and bothered.”
“Now, Jane, you’re not being fair.” He struggled with the handle on the door. “Power locks with driver side override. God, I hate Cadillacs!”
“If you feel yourself getting hot all over again, that’s me, imagining your head getting bigger. I’m sure the nanites will have no trouble interpreting the message.”
“Jane, be reasonable! Wait, why don’t you try hypnotizing me? I’m half drunk on adrenaline anyway. How hard can it be?”
He felt his crotch. “Hey, I swear I was a whole other cup size a minute ago.” When she smiled he knew. “That’s so wrong.”
“If you can’t enjoy me, you certainly won’t be enjoying anyone else any time soon. She’ll get more action from a toothpick.”
“How do you expect me to love you when you’re this emotionally needy, huh? Answer me that!” Mike kept taking panicked glances of all angles of the inside of the car.
“We’re drowning here,” she said, eying the water seeping into the car. “How is it you can still find the time to be superficial, answer me that?”
He relaxed back into the seat after he’d decided there really was no way out of the car. “Some super soldier, you are, she said. Houdini could have found his way out of this locked box.”
“Not without drowning you,” he said, sighing.
They exchanged guilty glances. “Are you saying you’d rather die than risk my life?” she said. “Or are you saying, now that you’re part machine, you can’t live without your mechanic?”
He stared out the windshield.
She sighed. “I suppose if you have to think about it, that’s not a good sign.”
“I may be half nanites, but I’m not half computer, okay. Give me a few seconds for the weighted metrics. Okay, on balance, I’m thinking it’s sixty percent ‘would really miss you,’ forty percent, ‘I really need my mechanic’.”
She screamed so loud the windshield cracked. “You pick now to hit high C,” he said, trying feebly to squelch the sprouting geyser with his hands. “Who can hit high C at your age? Not even a friggin’ opera singer.”
“At my age?”
“Oh, God, I didn’t mean that the way it sounded.”
“Forget it. I’m over it, at least temporarily.”
“Why now? I thought for sure you’d never pass up an opportunity to guilt me into an early grave.”
“You’ll need all of your mind on saving us from those guys,” she said, pointing.
He looked out the windshield at the scuba divers coming at them with spear guns. “Relax, just some hobby fishing. Probably a pair of weekend warriors whose…” One of the spear guns one of them was holding fired and the spear came shooting through the windshield. “Well that sure as hell shoots a hole in that theory!”
“Can that nano do anything yet besides turn you into
super-asshole?”
“If they get amped up on the love hormone. You’re not exactly helping, Jane.”
“Yeah, well, wouldn’t expect too much help in that area right now. I suggest you make the most of adrenaline junkie mode, hope they can never get enough of a good thing.”
One of the divers drove his fist through the windshield and put his hand around Michael’s neck in a concerted effort to strangle him. Ironically, the fist-size hole in the windshield was being plugged up to a fair degree by his hand, which meant the car was just leaking more water now, but nothing that had reached horrific proportions. “Is he seriously trying to put a crimp in our repartee?” he said, somewhat breathlessly, plying a couple fingers off of his throat, if not the whole hand.
“I bet you appreciate the Cadillac engineering now. Let’s see the typical windshield take this kind of pressure without shattering.”
“Could you be less of a walking commercial right now? I swear you’d think they were doing a product tie in to make the most of the movie of our pathetic lives.”
“What are you trying to do?”
“Saw off his hand with your nail file.”
She shook her head. “Those nano are definitely no good outside of a love field.”
“What you want me to do, shake his hand?”
They watched the second diver swim around to the side and snap a picture, the flash nearly blinding them. “Hey, look, we even have our own documentary photographer,” he said. “Proof we’re interesting to everyone else if not to one another.”
“I think he’s just trying to blind us with the flashes.”
The second diver hit them with an unremitting flood light. “No, Jane,” Mike said, “I think they want to document our miraculous nano-getaway just in case we do escape and they have to figure out a better way to kill us next time, perhaps without your cooperation.”
Mike peeled the guy’s fingers the rest of the way off his neck at last and broke them, one by one. The guy hammered at the windshield with the fist of his free hand in a desperate attempt to rescue his broken-fingered hand. Finally he got the bright idea to pull the windshield out towards him, at which point it popped out. Mike gave him a helping hand, holding on to the windshield and swimming towards him with it as the water came flooding into the car.
Jane swore she saw the guy smile behind the scuba mask. Probably figuring that without breathing apparatuses they were done for.
The nanites inside them had other ideas.
Mike took the windshield and used its edges as a cutting tool, slicing through the diver with its pointy edges and his nano-infused strength. The diver’s body parts floated toward the surface, ambushed halfway before they could get there by giant bass Jane had no idea could get that big. She had picked the wrong time to swim to the surface for fear of getting confused with the rest of the fish food.
She threw a glance back at Michael. Saw him catch the harpoon fired at him from the second diver, which he then used to drive into said diver’s eye. The bass were quick to nibble on him as well.
She and Mike popped up at the surface a moment later. He said, gasping, “You know, it occurs to me that those guys could have been just trying to rescue us. I mean the harpoon through the windshield thing could have been an effort to pull the glass away so we could swim out. They might have figured they could share air hoses with us until we hit the surface.”
“What else do you have to support such a lame theory?”
“Ah, there’s no one else around. You think they’d just send a couple divers after us, when they could send an entire army?”
“You and that swelled head of yours. Though I have to admit, this time, what you say makes sense.”
“I guess you’re right about that love hormone being all important. If we plan to survive our own stupidity far less the bad guys, we might want to both work at it a little harder.”
They eyed one another testily.
An hour later they had made it to shore, and ten minutes after that, they were thumbing it along the roadway. To their mutual surprise the old man in the car that he must have had when he was eighteen stopped and let them in. “We weren’t expecting the first car to drive by to pick us up,” Michael said, hopping in the back. “But statistically speaking serial killers and sociopaths are on the rise, and it makes it way easier to thumb rides.”
The old man threw him a weary look in the rearview windshield and pulled back on to the road without saying anything. Michael noticed the priest’s garb and his collar on the front seat beside him.
“You’re a priest?” Again nothing. Maybe the guy was hard of hearing. “It’s just that we’ve been having some marital difficulties, in a manner of speaking. See, we aren’t actually married…” The priest’s eyes flitted up to the rearview mirror briefly, accusingly. “Maybe it’s better if I just start from the beginning.”
Jane just kept shaking her head and rolling her eyes. “The higher they are the harder they fall,” she mumbled. “Any more lame and I’ll be better off with a lucky rabbit’s foot at my side.”
“Ignore her. She thinks I can’t string two thoughts together since we fell out of love, like I haven’t been thinking on my feet my whole life. Well, like I was saying… back in the beginning, I had one arm, see… and the secret government agency I work for sent me to spy on her on account of she was growing arms in her basement. So I did that, rather well, I might add, even got her to love me, which is not as easy as you might think, even for a hunk like me, being as she’s such a bitch. Anyway, she shows me how she grows arms by injecting me with nano. The next thing I know I’m changing into a werewolf. I’m killing people wholesale, bad people, people trying to kill us, sent from yet other government agencies, though it isn’t entirely clear which government or which agency… Fast forward some more, I’m tearing apart Times Square, as a human, mind you, not as a werewolf, and the only way to escape the mortar fire was to change us into other people. So I did that. Of course, I had to kill the people whose bodies we were going to be using…”
The old man pulled the car to the side of the road. “I’m sorry. I’m having a crisis of faith, and this conversation is not helping.”
Michael and Jane climbed out either side of the car. Michael shouted, “Sorry!” after him as he drove off. They watched him do a U-turn and drive over the same bridge they had driven off of earlier, then, with a twist of the wheel and a hard foot down on the accelerator, he plummeted to the lake below. “Maybe it’s the bridge,” Michael said, “you know, some strange Bermuda Triangle effect that just makes people go crazy.”
Jane just shook her head. “You’re hopeless when you’re out of love with me. How did you last as long as you did before you met me?”
“It doesn’t matter how smart other people are if you shoot them before they shoot you.”
“I’ll keep that in mind. What now?” she said, looking around. “My hair’s a mess and I smell like a polluted lake.”
“That’s the most feminine thing I’ve heard you say. I didn’t think you did hair and nails.”
“I didn’t used to be self-conscious until you made me self-conscious.”
“Keep it up. I’m actually starting to think everything is my fault. I’ve been exposed to government brainwashing that wasn’t half as effective.”
They walked in silence along the road for as long as he could stand it. “God, I think you’re right. I’m not as smart as I used to be before I met you. Maybe the price you pay for these things inside your head is there’s no going back.”
“They’re just trying to motivate you to get with the program. They depend on you as much as you on them now.”
“Only you… you don’t depend on anybody, do you?”
“What’s the point? People just disappoint you sooner or later.”
“Don’t look now but we just killed directly or indirectly three people who were doing nothing more than trying to help us, the two scuba divers, and now the priest. And you still have time u
p in your head to feel sorry for yourself.”
“You’re right. It’s unconscionable. Maybe I am a self-centered callow bitch. All these dead bodies around us and all I can think of is bubble bath and those cute rubber duckies.”
“This is what tearing each other down does to people,” he said gesturing. “It creates every form of cognitive impairment imaginable, starting with low self-esteem and trailing into faulty memory, until our minds are nothing more than a temple of doom. And it’s not just our minds we can no longer hold together, but our personalities. We’re a lot more suggestible than people think. I advise we make a pledge to be kinder to one another, let the love take care of itself. Compassion is better than love, if you believe the Dalai Lama.”
“Fine. Truce. I can’t think under this sun, either. I’m losing track of what’s important, and what my priorities are. There have got to be more important things to think about right now than your character deficits. I concede I’m losing my mind right along with you.”
They looked at one another, speaking in tandem, “The frigging nano.”
“I can’t believe they’re trying to educate us on the importance of loving one another,” she said.
“How does a nanite, smaller than a fruit fly, get to condescend to me?” He held out his hand. “Don’t you dare take advantage of that set up.”
“Could be the other things we said.” She scratched her head. “I mean about the effects of the sun, and the price of picking on one another. I suppose it’s possible they had nothing to do with our slippery slope descent into self-lobotomy land.”
“Yeah, right. Maybe if you hadn’t started out as a genius, and I hadn’t had years of fighting just fine while partly dehydrated in the middle of an Afghan desert!” He groaned, though it came out more like a roar. “A fine mess you’ve gotten me into, Jane.”
“You realize if they find us now, we’re done for?”
“Always with the cup half-empty thinking.”
“Okay, let’s try this compassion thing. How does it work?”
He sighed, mostly to stall for time. It was straining his mind to recall the details of the Dalai Lama’s admittedly thin, breezily read book, which he, just as admittedly, skimmed. “Acts of kindness. Yeah, that’s right, perform lots of little acts of kindness. Eventually you hit a tipping point and you’re just enlightened.”
Nano Man Page 18
