by Cat Rambo
Why romances? There's something about the formulaic quality of the series she likes. She writes for Shadow Press's superhero line, amuses herself by writing in the men of Superb Squadron, one by one, as bad lovers and evildoers. She has little fear they'll ever read one and recognize themselves. She also writes superhero regencies, daring women scientists and explorers, steam-driven plots to blow up royalty, Napoleonic spies and ancient supernatural crystals quarried by emerald-eyed dwarves from the earth's heart.
She works on one now, pausing on the love scene. She writes a kiss, a caress, and stops. She thinks of the feel of lips on her own skin and gives way to the urge to trigger her programming, leaning over the desk, feeling orgasms race along her artificially enhanced nerves.
She touches her face, feels the tears there.
Downstairs in the Danger Room, she works through drills, smashes fast and hard into punching bags, dodges through closing barriers, jump and leaps and stretches herself until she is sore.
The door whispers open and the Sphinx enters. Without a word, she joins the practice.
Is Ms. Liberty showing off or trying to escape? She moves in a blur, demonically fast, she moves like a fluid machine come from the end of Time, she moves like nothing she's ever seen, forging her own identity moment by moment. And feels the Sphinx's skin, inches from her own, fever warm, an almost-touch, an almost-whisper.
"Is this the thing," Ms. Liberty says to the Sphinx, "that it matters because you will only sleep with females?"
"I will only sleep with someone," the Sphinx says, twisting, turning, cartwheeling, "who knows who they are."
Ms. Liberty's arms fall around the other woman, who is iron and velvet in her embrace. Then Ms. Liberty pushes away, stammers something incoherent, and rushes from the room.
The Sphinx looks after her, waits for hours in the room, gives up the vigil as dawn breaks. Several stories above, Ms. Liberty saves the twenty thousand words she's written, a love scene so tender that readers will weep when they read it, weep just as she does, saving the file for the last time before sending it to her editor.
Ms. Liberty lets X cook her dinner. This is a mistake for most beings. X has flexible and fairly wide definitions of "food," and she has no discernible theory of spices. But for a cybernetic body, fuel is fuel, and sensation is sensation. There are no unpleasant physical sensations for Ms. Liberty. All she has to do is make a simple modification, performed by mentally saying certain integer sets.
She knows that she can do the same with her emotions. She could make loneliness bliss, frustration as satisfying as completing a deadline. But would she be the same person if she did that? Is she a person? Or just a set of desires?
She eats chili and bread sandwiches, washes them down with a glass of steaming strawberry-beef tea. X has produced candies studded with dangerous looking sugar shards colored orange and blue and yellow and green. Inside each is a flake of something: rust, brine, coal, alderwood.
Ms. Liberty eats them meditatively, letting the flavors evoke memories.
Rust for the first day she met X, when they fought against the Robotic Empress. Brine for the Merboy and his sad fate. Coal for the day they fought the anti-Claus and gave each other gifts. Alderwood has no memory attached and it scents her mouth, acts as a mental palate cleanser. She goes upstairs and writes five chapters set in Egypt, and a heroine in love with the dusky native guide. At midnight she eats the chocolate-flavored flatbread X slides under the door and writes another 2,000 words before lying down to recharge and perform routine mental maintenance.
She pushes herself into sleep as smoothly as a drawer closing. Her last thought is: is she a superhero or just programmed that way?
They fight Electromargarine, the psychedelic supervillain.
A band of intergalactic pirates.
Super-intelligent orcas from the beginning of time.
The actual Labia League, which turns out to be supervillains who refer to themselves as supervillainesses.
Alternate universe versions of themselves.
A brainwashed set of superheroes.
A man claiming to speak for Mars.
A woman claiming to speak for Venus.
A dog claiming to speak for the star Sirius.
And all the time, Ms. Liberty keeps looking at the Sphinx and seeing her look back.
Dr. Arcane has her own set of preoccupations. There's Zanycat's hero-worship, Kilroy's chemical dependency, and whatever guilt rides Rocketwoman. Zenith suspects the last is some death. She tries to figure out who, tries to observe where Rocketwoman's eyes linger, which conversations shade her voice with regret (all of them, which is a little ominous), how she looks when reading the morning newspaper.
Dr. Arcane catches her in the hallway, hisses in her ear, "Listen, Charisse, I need for you to tell me who dies. If it's me, I won't be angry, I just want to get my affairs in order."
"I can't tell you," Rocketwoman says. She looks away, avoids Zenith's eyes.
Zenith snarls with frustration, She doesn't like not knowing, it's the one thing in all the world that can make her truly angry.
Plus all that stuff about the sanctity of the timeline that time-travelers spill out is hooey. You can alter time, and many people have. If it was as fragile as all that, you'd have reality as full of holes as Brussels lace. No, when you change time you just split the timeline, create an alternate universe. The unhappy future still remains, but at least it's got (if you've done it right) a happy twin to balance it out. This is, in fact, why most travelers appear and Zenith is sure that Charisse is no exception. She's here to change something. She's just not saying what.
They fight something huge and big and terrifying. That's par for the course. That's what superheroes do, whether they're programmed by three almost-adolescents in lab coats or by centuries of a culture's honor code or by some childhood incident that set them forever on this stark path.
Dr. Arcane fights because she likes the world.
Rocketwoman fights because she's seen the future.
X fights because her friends are fighting.
Zanycat fights because it's what her family does.
Kilroy fights because there's nothing better to do until she gets to return home.
The Sphinx fights because she doesn't want to be a supervillain.
Ms. Liberty thinks she fights for all these reasons. None of these reasons. She fights because someone wanted a sexy version of Captain America. Because someone thought the country was worth having someone else fight for. Because a woman looks sexy in spandex facing down a flame-fisted villain.
Because she doesn't know what else she should be doing.
Because her instincts say it's the right thing to do.
Ms. Liberty finishes her novel, sends it off, starts another about a bluestocking who collects pepper mills and preaches Marxism to the masses. She spends a lot of time pacing, a lot of time thinking.
X has discovered paint-by-numbers kits and is filling the rooms with paintings of landscapes and kittens, looking somewhat surreal because she changes the numbers all around.
Zanycat is about to graduate high school and has been scarce. Next year she'll be attending City College, just a few blocks away, and they all wonder what it will be like. Zenith remembers being student and superhero—it's hard to do unless you're well-organized.
Kilroy has joined AA and apologized to several villains she damaged unnecessarily while fighting intoxicated. Before each meal, she insists on praying, but she prays to her own, alien god, and an intolerant streak has evidenced. She's apparently a fundamentalist of her own kind and believes the Earth will vanish in a puff of cinders and ash when the End Times come. That's why she's been working so hard to acquire money to get off-world, lest she be caught in the devastation.
Ms. Liberty goes to Reede and Mode to find fabric for a new costume. There's a limited range to the fabrics—not much call for high-end fashion in super-science, but she comes across a silvery gray that looks good. She finds
blue piping for the wrists and neck, not because she wants the echo of red, white, and blue, but because she likes blue and always has. And it makes her eyes pop. The super-robots take her measurements. They'll whip it up while she runs her next errand.
There are some places that are neutral territory for superheroes and villains. A few bars, for example, and most churches. And this hair salon, high atop the Flatiron Building. Arch rivals may face down there and simply step aside to let the other have first crack at the latest Vogue Rogue.
"My friends keep trying to push me to try something different, Makaila," she tells the hairdresser.
"Do you want to try something different?" the hairdresser demands, putting her hands on her hips. She has attitude, cultivates it, orders around these beings who could swat her like a fly, drain her soul, impale her with ice and kill her a thousand other ways, as though they were small children. And they enjoy it, they sink into the cushioned chairs and tell her their woes as she uses imaginarium-reinforced blades to snip away at super-durable hair, self-mending plastic. Usually she just trims split ends.
Ms. Liberty looks at the tri-fold mirror and three of her look back. She thinks that this is the first time she's decided to alter herself, step away from the original design. She thinks of it as modernization—a few decades of crimefighting can date you, after all.
Here's the question, she thinks. Does she want to be a pretty superhero? Is that what being a superhero means to her?
And here's another question: what is a superhero's romance? She's been writing them as though they were any other love story, writ a bit larger, with a few more cataclysms and laser-guns in the background. Girl meets boy, there's a complication, then she gets her man. But what does the superwoman do after she's got him? Does she settle down to raise supertots or do they team up to fight crime? Can you have your cake and eat it too, as Marie Antoinette, the Queen of Crime, would insist?
Her makers thought sex was a worthy goal, a prime motivator. And instead all they'd done was make her start to question her body. And now she was questioning her own mind the same way, wondering if she wanted love or sex, and what the difference was.
Her three faces stare and stare from the mirror and she hesitates, conscious of the waiting Makaila. Finally, she says, "I want it short and easy to take care of" and leans back in the chair.
They fight:
Shadow elementals.
A team of super-scientists.
A group of sub-humans.
A cluster of supra-humans.
Ms. Liberty's creators in zombie form.
A villain who will not reveal her name.
The hounds of the Lord of the Maze of Death.
A rock band.
A paranoid galaxy.
A paranoid galaxy's child.
A paranoid galaxy's child's clone.
A witch.
And in the end, everything turns out fine, except for the hovering death that Rocketwoman still watches for, that Dr Arcane still watches her watching for. The Sphinx and Ms. Liberty do go to bed together, after issues and problems and misunderstandings, and at that point we fade to black and a few last words from our sponsor, along with X in the shape of a giant candy bar.
"Every woman knows she's a woman," Ms. Liberty says. "She's a woman. And every hero is a hero. They're a hero. That's who they are."
Afternotes
This story uses characters from a novel I wrote in grad school, The Furies. Unfortunately the book was lost somewhere along the way to today, and all I've got are the chapters that went into my thesis. Those characters themselves were based on characters I'd run in several superhero roleplaying games (primarily the Champions system). I hope to recreate the novel at some point but this story is a very truncated version of some of its events.
The title itself was inspired by F. Scott Fitzgerald's "Bernice Bobs Her Hair" although the subject matter is more than a little different. I'm fascinated by superheroes, and a sucker for any fiction that contains them. And half the fun of writing superhero fiction is coming up with the names.
The story begins in Barnaby's Pizza, an establishment in South Bend, Indiana, where my gaming group ate an awful lot of meals over the years.
10 NEW METAPHORS FOR CYBERSPACE
1. My Grandmother's Kitchen
Databases hang like commemorative plates on the HTML wall, advertisement gilt gleaming on their edges except for the General Patton limited edition, which holds a gunmetal trim of spiky security. Search engines purr like appliances, popping up results while a dishwasher chugs in censorship, scrubbing its links clean of revolutionary references. Underfoot, carpet flickers, old e-mail messages woven into the warp and weft of its threads, scattered with cookie crumbs. Every week there's garbage collection, hexagonal bins full of old files wheeled to the curb, ready to be collected.
2. The Garden of Eden
Infomercial butterflies flutter here and there, obscuring knowledge or distorting it through the stained glass shimmer of their wings. Applets dangle from the trees and there are animals everywhere, rabbits quick as web-services and lions protecting copyrights, birds weaving nests of random statistics. Somewhere in the verdant, glassy grass an ASP slithers like a virus, whispering forbidden, encrypted words.
3. A Crazy Quilt
Embroideries of data links elaborate each patch, signaling its access type with their pattern, cross-stitch for unimpeded access near French knots of one-time passwords. The fabric tells the access fee, public denims and burlap against slicker subsidized sites made of mercerized cotton or flashy R-rated satin.
Punch through the folds to the infrastructure built of bed linens, layers of uncountable threads, a wooly blanket of processes scratchy to the touch.
4. Minkler's Hardware Store, ca. 1980
Here in this room, high ceilinged and sporting a fan whispering daily headlines as it spins above the clerk named Archie, the minutiae are kept, shining bolts and nuts and washers and nails and screws in tiny partitioned drawers. The system jolts with a database's corruption, and silvery data spills in a spray across the wood-grained floor, whose whorls and burls tell the story of the Net's history.
5. A Flaming Cave
Flickers of every color, great leaping pyres and half seen shimmers betraying the movements of others in the data stream. See how hotly that corporate database shines? Touch it and you'll be burned, consumed within your mind like a phoenix.
6. A Medieval Village
Perhaps it's more like a Disney conception of a medieval village: the rustic inn with a McDonald's logo that serves as main access for the neighborhood, a baudy wench wearing a corporate slogan across her cleavage, the coachman outside a financial access point winking sly stock tips. Teams of white Percheons pull wagonloads of integers, lumbering by in an instant that seems slower than molasses.
7. A 12 Year Old Girl's Closet
Oh, pink, pink, relentless pink! Spangles of information everywhere, Hello Kitty stickers sponsored by Sanrio and Sony, poster blogs depicting the latest American Idol, fuzzy spam filters full of lint and bubble gum integers. Each drawer opens with its own perfume, lemon for media biographies, cinnamon for the cooking network, cedar sawdust for history and, hidden beneath the bed, the heavy musk and patchouli of porn.
8. A Mall Pet Store
Normal, for the most part, except for the startling way the aquariums float loose and drift around the store. Data fish move from one domain's tank to another, intermingling, frilled fans of checksums becoming tattered as they corrupt each others' integrity. To buy the data, you must purchase a container—anti-virus bubbler optional.
9. A Grandfather Clock
Hear the hour chiming? Each time zone perceives it differently, the boom of PST, the bang of Eastern Standard. Tap a numbered sector of its face and the area expands, letting you drill down through history. Somewhere a hacker mouse runs up and down the shiny wood, pursued by software with a carving knife.
10. The Junkyard
This is where t
he abandoned data goes to die and in its rot, daisies of projected theories and Tetris-variants spring up, nourishing themselves on nitrogen-rich bytes of information. That rusted, useless car was once Google's pride, but now they're elsewhere in a cybernetic demolition derby, creating new colossal wrecks to host more flowers and hybrid metaphors.
Afternotes
After hearing William Gibson speak, I started thinking about cyberspace and how his vision of it has affected speculative literature. It made me wonder what other metaphors might be used for it, since it seemed like everyone else had adopted his and let it shape their perception. Different metaphors might lead to an entirely different definition of cyberspace, and so I tried to come up with interesting ones. As a former network security expert, I may have had too much fun writing it, as is often the case with list pieces.
Many figures are drawn from my life. I grew up within walking distance of Minkler's Hardware. The fish store is the one in Scottsdale Mall, circa 70s, South Bend, Indiana. My grandmother's kitchen was hung with commemorative plates, which I now own in turn.
This piece originally appeared in Abyss & Apex, under editor Wendy S. Delmater.
MEMORIES OF MOMENTS,
BRIGHT AS FALLING STARS
The orange boxes lay scattered like leaves across the med complex's rear loading dock, and my first thought was "Jackpot." It'd been hard to get in over the razor wire fence, but I had my good reinforced gloves, and we'd be long gone before anyone noticed the snipped wires.
But when we slunk along under the overhanging eaves, close enough to open the packages, it turned out to be just a bunch of memory, next to impossible to sell. Old unused stuff, maybe there'd been an upgrade or a recall. It was thicker than most memory, shaped like a thin wire.
So after we'd filled our pockets, poked around to find anything else lootable, and slid out smooth and nice before the cops could arrive, we found a quiet spot, got a little stoned, and I did Grizz's back before she did mine. I wiped her skin down with an alcohol swab and drew the pattern on her back with a felt-tip pen. It came from me in one thought, surged up somewhere at the base of my spine and flowed from my fingertips through the ink. Spanning her entire back, it crossed shoulder to shoulder.
