by Peter Watts
“ . . . illegally downloaded . . . ”
His hands were covered in the sticky syrup from the coffee pods. Damn it. He went over to the kitchen sink, turned both taps on, hard, put his hands under the water. She kept talking. Fucking coffee.
“ . . . saved in the wires . . . ”
He kept the water running even after he pulled his hands away from the sink and put five more pods in the coffee maker. He pulled out three pods for her, putting them on the counter. Idiot. She wouldn’t be able to lift the cup. Fucking coffee. It took forever to brew. He needed a new machine. He pulled out the cup, took a sip, turned off the water.
He wasn’t sure she’d even noticed he was gone.
“I do not want you to be lost.”
If he could have, he would have tossed her out just then for that. But he knew her remaining leg and arm, though original and organic, were enhanced. Could still break every bone in his body. God, he knew. His memory chose that moment to remind him of just how he knew. He felt sick.
“Please.”
A sharp knock on the door.
She had never begged him. Never. Not even when he’d gotten drunk two months ago and begged her, begged her to tell him what she wanted from him in bed, tell him everything. Everything she could tell him that wasn’t wrapped up in some damn security agreement. She looked up at him, flickered her glance at the neat piles of wires, then up at him again, her eyes wide, blank. And then empty. Gone.
He opened the door.
The removal—he thought of other terms, repressed them—was swift, quiet. They handed him a few papers that he immediately tossed into the recycle shaft. No goodbyes, no tears. He’d had plumbers come by with more drama. They did not ask about the wires. He did not tell.
He hadn’t even needed to call anyone.
Friends.
When the email arrived from her, three weeks later, he almost deleted it.
It was almost certainly spam. Almost. Someone had hacked into her account, or her employers were using this as one last attempt to set up an interview with him. (He’d said no at least six times already; their last missive had assured him that legal measures would be necessary.) It wasn’t her. It couldn’t be her. He could still see her, her parts detached and on the floor, the neat rolls of wires before she was taken away to be—what? Melted? Reused? Buried? She’d said something. He hadn’t done a damn thing. Hadn’t listened. Hadn’t heard.
He’d lost her.
He hadn’t had much to lose.
He’d put the wires up on a shelf in the living room, where he could touch them, to remind himself just why he needed to forget her, to forget everything about her.
His chest hurt. He clicked open the email.
I should have let you help.
He placed his head in his arms for a long time.
N.
Six hours later, the wires were out of his house.
A month later, he told himself he’d forgotten her. Forgotten everything. Especially forgotten the image of her sitting on his floor, pulling out the wires from her arms, pulling out the things—he was not going to remember that email, not going to think about it—where she’d downloaded every fucking memory of them both. He’d moved on. Already put up a new profile on dating sites. Had signed up for kempo lessons. Was thinking about getting a dog.
He was on his third drink of the night when the knock came on the door. He ignored it. The knock came again. And again. He swore. One call from the neighbors and he’d be right back talking to authorities again. Damn it.
He saw the face, first, the suspiciously bright eyes. Something else you weren’t supposed to notice; something else he always did. The perfect skin. The bright tips of copper poking through her wrists.
He swallowed.
That was enough time for her to get inside and shut the door behind her. She hit four buttons on the keypad. I need to change that. The bolt slid shut. Not that it would stop any authority from entering. Or could have stopped this woman from entering, if she’d needed to. Wanted to. Not for long, anyway. Her eyes flickered back and forth through the room. Viewing. Recording. Downloading. She was shorter than N had been; thinner, with darker hair and skin.
“This place still isn’t clean.”
“Well, watch the woman you’re sleeping with commit suicide before your eyes and see how interested you are in cleaning.”
“James.”
“What the fuck do you want with me?”
His eyes closed.
“I want you to call me N.”
It was wrong. It was incredibly wrong. She wasn’t N. She was N. He’d already lost her, was already losing her. She was touching his face, his arms, his neck. He was running his hands down her arms, her back, her chest, feeling her skin, her not skin, her skin.
“Next time,” she whispered, “I’ll let you help.”
And without thinking, without feeling, he pulled her close, letting the wires in her wrists dig into his skin, kissing her before he started to lose her again.
God Decay
Rich Larson
There was new biomod ivy on the buildings, a ruddy green designed for long winters, but other than that the campus looked the same as it did a decade back. Ostap walked the honeycomb paving with his hands in his pockets, head and shoulders above the scurrying students. They were starting to ping him as he passed, raking after his social profile until he could feel the accumulated electronic gaze like static. Ostap had everything shielded, as was his agent’s policy, but that didn’t stop them from recognizing his pale face, buzzed head, watery blue eyes.
A few North Korean transfers, who’d been in the midst of mocapping a rabbit, started shrieking as they caught sight of him. The game was up. Ostap flashed his crooked grin, the most-recognized smile in athletics and possibly the world, and by the time he was at the Old Sciences building he had a full flock. The students were mostly discreet with their recording, not wanting to seem too eager for celebspotting points, but Ostap could tell they were waiting for something as he walked up the concrete wheelchair ramp.
“Accra 2036,” he said, linking his fingers for the Olympic rings. “We’re taking it all, right?”
Ostap let one massive palm drift along the rail, then flipped himself up and inverted to walk it on his hands. The flock cheered him all the way up the rail, balanced like a cat, and applauded when he stuck the twisting dismount. Ostap gave them a quick bow, then turned through the doors and into the hall. The sudden hushed quiet made him feel like he was in a cathedral.
Bioscientist-now-professor Dr. Alyce Woodard had a new office, but Ostap had expected that. He’d never grown attached to the old one, not when their few visits there were so engulfed by the days and nights in the labs, in temperature-controlled corridors and stark white rooms where the florescents scoured away shadows and secrets.
What Ostap hadn’t expected was how old Alyce had become. Her spine had a desk-chair curvature as she got up and crossed the floor, pausing the wallscreen with a wave of her hand. Her bodyfat sagged, her eyes were bagged. Ostap remembered her beautiful, and awful, an angel’s face floating above him with cold marble eyes and checklist questions. But that was before a long succession of tanned bodies and perfect teeth, and maybe she’d never been at all.
“O,” Alyce said, thin arms around his midsection just briefly. “Thanks for coming short notice.”
“It’s good to see you,” Ostap said. “Good to come back.” But it wasn’t; he felt like he was twenty-three again, stick-thin, draped boneless in a wheelchair.
“Training for Accra, now, huh?” Alyce scratched at her elbow. “And a citizen, this time around. I just saw the new ads, they’re still using that clip from the 2028 Games . . . ” She waved the wallscreen to play, and Ostap saw himself loping out onto the track, blinking in the sunlight, fins of plastic and composite gleaming off his back and shoulders. It was the 7.9 seconds that had put the name Ostap Kerensky into every smartfeed, his events plastered on billboards and replayed
ad nauseam on phones and tablets.
“The dash,” Ostap said. “They really don’t get tired of it.”
“Eight years on, you’d think they would,” Alyce said. Her smile was terse, but she watched, too. A cyclopean Pole, six foot five, noded spine and long muscled limbs. No warm-up, no ritual. On the gunshot he came off the blocks like a Higgs boson.
“The tracking camera fucking lost him,” Alyce quoted, because the commentators had long since been censored out. “It really fucking lost him.”
“That was some year,” Ostap said, trying to read her, but the new lines on her face made it harder, not easier.
She flicked the wallscreen to mute. “I saw the feed of that promotion you did in Peru, too.” Alyce was looking up and down him. “Exhibition match, or something? With that football club?”
“They’re hoping to open up the league to biomods next season, yeah.”
“Oh.” Her face was blank.
“The underground stuff is killing their ratings,” Ostap explained, to be explaining. “Nobody wants to watch pure sport any more, you know how it is. Blood doping, steroids, carbon blades, and now biomods. That’s what gets specs. I was talking to the—”
“O.” Alyce clenched, unclenched her teeth.
“Yeah?” Ostap’s voice was quieter than he wanted it.
“Do you remember when we stopped doing the scans together? It was about five years back.”
Ostap remembered. He’d been on the new suborbital from Dubai to LAX, struggling to fit the scanner membranes over all of his nodes with the seat reclined and Dr. Woodard chatting in his ear. He’d just climbed a high-rise, one of those sponsored publicity stunts, like the company who wanted him to run the Tour de France on foot. That offer was still sitting in the backlog waiting for a green light.
He’d been tired.
“I want to see you,” he’d said. “It’s been too long.”
“I’m sick of the cams, O,” she’d said. “You bring them like fucking flies. Just talk to me.”
So he had, about the dark-haired girls in barely-shirts and tight cigarette jeans, the cosmetically-perfected lips and tits, the girls who’d mobbed him at the airport. They all would have killed for a night of his time.
“You’re welcome,” Alyce had said, when he’d finished. “Still.”
“I’m sending the scan,” Ostap had said, because he had nothing else he could give her. He’d sent it before the suborbital peaked and the conversation crackled away, and after that, the conversations stopped.
“I remember,” Ostap said now, unsmiling. “We set it up to automate.”
Alyce moved to sit back against the desk, her hands veiny on the wood. “You look fine,” she said sadly. “You don’t even look thirty-three.” Ostap watched her mouth tightening.
“What’s wrong?” he asked.
“The augs are asking too much, O.” Alyce put a finger to her ribs. “The stress on your central nervous system, your organs. It’s been increasing. They’re all on their way out. Heart first, I’d think.” She was not wincing, not looking away. “Two more years is the projected max.”
Ostap felt the nodes like he hadn’t since the surgeries, felt the pulse of them deep in flesh. He felt the composite wrapping his spine, the membranes skimming under his skin, the fish-scale vents on his back and shoulders and neck. He felt the thrumming power, but now like a venom sack set to burst.
“Shit,” he said. “Shit.”
“I’m sorry,” Alyce said. “Have you experienced anything?”
“Don’t think so.” But it was hard to tell, now, hard to tell when his heart was skipping from blowing doxy rails, from adrenal rush, from a woman with the biomod fetish exploring every micrometer of his visible augs. The Superman was invulnerable.
“You don’t think so?”
“I don’t know,” Ostap snapped. “How am I supposed to fucking know, Dr. Woodard?” He hadn’t meant to call her that, but it came out on its own, like she was still the blue fairy in his ear whispering him through operation after operation as they flayed his nerves bare. She didn’t know he still dreamed about the final surgery, the sounds of scraping bone and machine.
“I’m sorry, O.”
Hell, the kind Hieronymus Bosch would have painted, eighteen excruciating hours of laser-guided scalpels and winches and needles. Under for some of it, locally anaesthetized for the rest. Needles in his skin and the tubes speared raw down his throat. He’d thought that had been price enough.
“How long have you known for?” Ostap finally asked.
“That it was a possibility, since the start. That it was happening?” Alyce paused. “A long time.” She folded her arms and it made her look small. “Should I have told you?”
“No,” Ostap said, but he wasn’t sure. The chant for the 2036 Games was looping endlessly across the wallscreen. Legends are made in America.
“Okay.”
Ostap put his hand up to his skull. “So why now?” he asked. “Why are you telling me now?”
The game in Peru, when he’d struck a volley out of the air for the first time and buried it back-corner, like he’d done it all his life, quick-synch nerves of his leg loaded with new muscle memories. On the bench it had gone numb for just a second, from his knee down.
“This fucking doctorate student got into my web-cache,” Alyce said. “I don’t know how, I thought it was all airtight. She found the records. The story’s going to break in a couple hours.”
“Alright,” Ostap said. “Alright.”
“Sorry, O.”
“What happens now?” Ostap asked.
Alyce gave a helpless shrug. “There are tests,” she said. “There are possibilities. Options. I’ve still got full access to the biolabs.”
Ostap left the office without saying goodbye. Digital maps to expensive hotels were already scrawling over his retinas, reminding him of their impeccable service, their luxury suites. He’d thought he would be here for a few days, maybe, a few days to catch up after so many years. He’d imagined walking with her on the steep, rough river-trails and catching her if she slipped.
Outside there was a student who wanted to speak Polish with him, whose shirt scrolled a list of Ostap’s world records down his back. Ostap mumbled a few words, shook his sweat-slick hand. Others were clutching fake memorabilia and raving about things he barely remembered doing. A few girls were fluffing fingers through sun-blonde hair, casually rolling waistbands lower on their hips, pursing their lips and trying to figure out bedroom eyes.
He went past them all like a zombie, and walked all the way to the university bus station before he remembered he’d ordered an autocab.
Twenty minutes later Ostap pushed into the lobby through a crush of mobbers, the ones who’d used complex algorithms to predict his preferred hotel, and there he had the privilege of watching the story break in realtime. The alert blinked yellow onto their retinas, vibrated tablets or phones for the migraine-prone and slow adopters, and small worlds turned upside down one by one. It shuddered through the jerseys and 3D-print face-masks and groping hands like a wave. Ostap would have been reading it himself if he hadn’t put up a datablock.
Silence and exclamations of disbelief started flickering back and forth like a light switch.
“Your finger here, sir,” said the shell-shocked concierge, holding out the pad for a signature. He had enough presence of mind to pretend it didn’t work, necessitating a fresh pad and leaving him with a small slice of Ostap Kerensky’s genetic material to slip into his pocket. Ostap knew all about that trick, but he didn’t give a cheerful wink or offer a hangnail. Not this time.
The whisper-silent elevator took him to the very top, and when the wallscreens in his suite flicked on to greet him, the story was everywhere. He told them to mute, but he still watched. Pictures of Alyce skittered around the room, her mouth in a deep frown, and Ostap could tell from the selection that the current spin was villain, deceiver. He saw footage of himself zipping into a custom wetsuit, ru
bbing petroleum jelly over his hands and cheekbones, flashing the cams a thumbs up before he waded into the water to set the new English Channel record.
Back to the 2028 Games again, when Ostap took the world by storm. 100 meter, 200 meter. High-jump. Still enough in the tank for decathlon. Bolt’s records were gone, Sterling’s record was shattered. Ostap watched it all flash by in sound bites, his story condensed for anyone living under a particularly large rock.
An incredibly promising young athlete, all but scouted from the womb, left crippled by a three-car collision when the driving AI in a cab glitched. A brilliant developer, born and bred for MIT, spearheading a team designing the most comprehensively integrated body augmentation the world had ever seen.
They’d found each other across the ocean, and it was so fucking perfect.
The sky was growing dark and the clips were starting to recycle when Alyce buzzed in his ear. He could barely hear her, even with voice ID.
“They’re at my fucking house,” she said, and then the next part got swallowed.
“They’re here, too,” Ostap said. He’d seen it on the screen, the termite swarm of reporters and spectators milling the base of the hotel.
“So am I,” she said. “Want to let me up before they crucify me?”
Ostap crossed to the balcony, palmed the glass door open. It looked like a party. People were all slammed up against each other, twisting and turning for better angles, cams flashing pop-pop-pop in the dark, hot white, miniature supernovas. He couldn’t see Alyce struggling through the crowd from her cab, not at this height, but he could tell where she was by the ripples. She’d barely made it five meters.
He called the hotel security detail to go bring her in, and ten minutes later she slumped through the door, hair tendrilled with static across a flushed face. She held up a bottle of Cannonball and sloshed it pointedly with a quarter of a smile.
“Probably safer here than anywhere else,” she said, while Ostap retrieved two glasses from the designer coffee table.
“Probably, yeah. They’re going to be burning cars soon.”
