Gaia's Toys

by Rebecca Ore

“I’ve never cooked steaks before,” I said.

  “Jesus, what are you? An eco freak?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  He looked at his wife and smiled. If I got out of line, they’d turn me in.

  “Your wife said she’d pay me fifteen dollars a week on top of room and board and that I’d have evenings off, but that I’d take care of Lucy weekends when you went away.”

  George looked like he thought his wife was a bad bargainer. “We’ll get some video tapes on proper service. You do know how to operate a video, don’t you?”

  My brain plays itself on video if the connections are made, I thought, but I simply nodded.

  “You’re a runaway drode head,” George said. “No other kind of woman would have such short hair.”

  “You got it,” I said.

  “Better you work here than lie around collecting my tax dollars.”

  I remembered the man in the sandpit, the escaped drode head. “I always wanted to work, sir, but not as a drode head.”

  “Drode heads don’t work. We use brain capacity they could never tap on their own.”

  “Well, I’m working for you now, sir, so we can both be happy.”

  “Are your electrodes still active?”

  “It was an experimental net. sir.” No, you can’t get free net access through me, I decided. “Besides, I had a hacker fry the connections when I ran.”

  “Did you steal research property?”

  “I suppose you might think that, but I didn’t volunteer for anything other than simple drode holes.”

  “Hackers sometimes lie to drode heads about turning off the equipment. I’ll bring in some equipment from the office. We can open the ports again.”

  “I didn’t have ports. It was a new system that projected through skin. You’d need the matching read-head.”

  “Bummer.”

  “Actually, sir, I’m on a training exercise. If you’d like, you could call the Feds and ask to be routed through to the training facility near Pinehurst, North Carolina. Ask to speak to a Captain Kearney. Tell them Allison wants to know if the rules change after a month.”

  George forked his grey steak, looked at his wife. He Finally said, “Do you need this job?”

  I said, “For the purposes of the training exercise, I need a job.”

  “A woman can get better money than by babysitting.”

  “The licensed brothels want ID.”

  Ethyl pulled her lips tight and looked away from me. George said, “I can arrange to hack your head, edit out your working for us.”

  “Why don’t you think about all this when I’m out this evening?”

  Ethyl said, “You’ve got to clean up first.”

  After I cleaned up, I left the house and called from a public phone. Dr. Karen did have night hours. I said, “I’ve got an experimental subdermal rig. Are you interested in talking to me, or just plain drode heads?”

  “I think you should come right now,” Dr. Karen, a voice that could be either male or female, said. Perhaps this would be my bust, but I wondered if George and Ethyl would tell the house to forged me by the time I got back. I needed five dollars. Dr. Karen gave me the address of his/her office on Shattuck, a third-floor office.

  I was only four blocks away when I saw a mantis, but managed to keep it together until I got to Dr. Karen’s office.

  Dr. Karen matched his or her voice, male or female, I couldn’t tell. Three definite males in brighter-than-usual business suits were also in the room. They had white contacts over their irises, fake blind stares. One of them parted his coat, exposing wide suspenders. I looked at more electronic equipment than I’d seen since Kearney put the squid on my naked brain. Some of it was dusty, some looked like the three guys just brought it in. I looked at their suits again and realized they were exaggerations of real business suits, not quite right. The white eyes wiped any individual sense I could have of them. Their hair was slicked down and darkened. I could never identify them.

  “Allison? Is that your real name?”

  “Yes.”

  “Your phenotype doesn’t match any known records. Can we do a DNA scan?”

  “I was changed by nanotech. I don’t know if that would affect the DNA or not. I’m an escaped witness.”

  One of the boys in business suits sat down at a keyboard and flurried his fingers over it.

  Dr. Karen turned to another screen. “One Allison was supposed to have died in an atomic explosion in Louisiana.”

  “I was supposed to, but the Feds pulled me out. You have eco contacts?”

  “When you said you were an escaped witness, we set up a serious evasion program. We have managed to evade the Feds in the past. I’d like to put you in play.”

  “Can you find me a place to live? I thought I had a child care job. but they thought I was just a regular drode head when they hired me.”

  Dr. Karen said, “Better put her on satellite and use serious worm medicine.”

  A second suit sat down and entered data with a pen pad. “Can I get a look at my file? I’d like to know if people are watching me now.”

  “I don’t think so,” one of the three guys said.

  “No,” Dr. Karen said. “And go back tonight. They may prefer to pretend to have contacted the Feds and will tell you that no one ever heard of you.”

  I asked, “Can you check their long distance phone records?” but no one replied. One of the guys shoved fiber optic cable against his white contact lenses, like really long leeches dangling from his eyeballs.

  Dr. Karen scraped inside my cheek for squamous cells, “better than blood cells for full DNA,” and ran the scan. “You almost appear to be who you say you are, but alive, not dead. Nanotech alternations could account for the discrepancies.”

  I said, “I guess I’m too hot to hack.”

  Dr. Karen smiled, seeming for a second more like a woman. She/he said, “No one is too hot to hack.”

  “Could I have more than five dollars then?” I asked.

  “You agreed to five dollars.”

  “I agreed to an interview, a sociological interview for five dollars. I can jam your hacking.”

  “Full audiovisual display capacities?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Subdermal squid? My dear, yes, I think we could pay you twenty-five dollars to take a look at that.”

  The guy with the fiber optics attached said, “A look through that.”

  “Why do you guys do this?”

  Dr. Karen seemed about to correct me on the sex, but pursed her lips—I was beginning to see Dr. Karen as female—and said, “We believe curiosity is humanity’s highest attribute. Knowledge should move. If we want to know, we should know.”

  I’d heard hackers scavanged information to sell to pay for more curious explorations. The eco people went to them occasionally, but never trusted machine heads. “How long will it take? I’ve got to be back at the Reeses by midnight.”

  Dr. Karen said, “Perhaps you shouldn’t remember coming here.”

  “Time to play with the snakes,” the white-eyed guy with fingers on the keyboard said. The third guy dripped some fluid into the fiber optic guy’s eyes. I thought goggles would have worked better, would have allowed him to blink, but fiber optic leads to the contacts floating over the eyeballs certainly threw a tougher image.

  “We’ll have to shave your head,” Dr. Karen said, “but we’ll throw in a human hair wig for free.”

  Then I went blank.

  “Hi,” a voice said. “You’re new here.”

  “Who are you?”

  “I think I’m the Roanoke sewage treatment plant this week, except I’m also supposed to be looking for you. Sometimes I target bombs into Tibet.”

  I asked, “Where am I?”

  “In the system. I’m one of the people who’s been looking for you.”

  “Do the people monitoring me hear us talking?”

  “I don’t think anyone knows I can find my own private spaces in here.”
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  “Roanoke, you’re Eastern Standard Time, right? What time is it?”

  “I think it’s after midnight, but if I went where the data was, I wouldn’t remember.”

  “You’re a drode head?”

  “Yes.”

  “You hacked your own system?”

  “I started remembering a bit and found a way to go away from the bugs.”

  “Bugs?”

  Bugs—an emanation of beetles, not a word, not an image, an electronic gestalt of squirming hard shells, bugs making crazy. A visual of a mantis walked in through the electronic dark, calming the man gestalt, eating the other bugs. I felt my electric self tremble. Another nightmare victim.

  “Don’t you like mantises?” the mantis said in the drode head’s voice.

  “No,” I said. “I feel about mantises the way you feel about hallie bugs.” I didn’t know I knew about hallie bugs.

  “Allison, you’re leaking data I don’t think I want to know. I can’t quite figure out where you are. I’m going for help.”

  I felt the voice retreat. “Wait.”

  Another voice said, “Ghost in the machine.” The voice seemed to be in my real ears.

  In my mind’s ear, the male voice said, “I saw what you did to that mantis.”

  “Willie, are you going to help them track me down?” I said, not knowing quite how I knew his name.

  The voice outside said, “Flip us. It’s a trace.”

  I dreamed of headless mantis males fucking me. When I woke up, Dr. Karen was on top of me, me naked. It had a penis, thrust it hard into my cunt, then saw my eyes looking back.

  “Such erotic content,” he said. “I couldn’t resist and I didn’t think you’d mind.” His hand wiggled over to a switch. I tried to shove him away. “If you do mind, then…”

  Blackness again. Mantises. I thought I was screaming.

  When I woke up this time, the office was completely empty except for my clothes, twenty-five dollars, the wig, and a note saying, For what we got, twenty-five was worth it. See you around, Allison. Dr. Karen hadn’t been a woman turned man, nor a epicene man, but rather a teenaged boy claiming age with the degree, the sociology scam. A rutty, nasty teenaged boy. All of them rutty teenaged boys. I realized that only now, found the toilet, threw up, washed between my legs, threw up again.

  Did Willie see that? Did the Feds? I screamed, “Kearney, if you’re listening, you bastard, why didn’t you get me out of that?” Willie said he was leaving to get help.

  The walls absorbed my screams. Too late for any other office people to be around. Perhaps the nasty boys listened to me.

  Even though the sun was coming up, I went back to the Reeses. The house let me in.

  George saw me first.

  “Don’t you touch me,” I said.

  “I wouldn’t,” he said. “Some people prey on drode heads, catch them in the fugue state. Didn’t you know about them?”

  I shook my head. George said, “You’re safer if you go out with Ethyl or stay in the house. I’ve heard about hackers getting escaped drode heads.”

  “Yes,” I said. “You’re not going to hack me.”

  “I wouldn’t. I’m an honorable man. We won’t fire you, but we’d appreciate it if you guard yourself a bit more carefully.”

  “Did you call the Feds?”

  “Why should we want to turn you in? Lucinda needs a babysitter we can trust. You’ve been honest.”

  Ethyl came out then with Lucinda. They both stared at me, then George led them away, to explain, to make excuses. I didn’t even know where my room was, what to do next. The family came back out. George kissed Ethyl and went out the door. Lucinda came over and poked me in the legs, giggling. Ethyl said, “Looks like you could get some sleep. We’re going to let you have the morning off.”

  My room was over the garage, an all-in-one unit like a jail cell with tub, sink, and toilet standing exposed in the room.

  Lucinda giggled. Ethyl said, “I’ll call you for lunch.”

  “Thanks,” I said, somewhat grateful, ashamed of what I’d gotten done to me, how little I knew about my new condition.

  After they left me, I washed and washed, took the wig off, scrubbed the naked scalp, then lay belly down on the bed, afraid to sleep.

  Mantises and bugs. Nasty teenaged rich kids. The Feds had not been so brutal. Or had the Feds put the kids up to it?

  I thought about calling the Feds. Must have been Army Intelligence that had me. But as soon as I thought that, I felt stupid and childish. Here I was, finally, where the orphanage wanted me to go, working daycare for rich people. Maybe the Feds didn’t care. They could leave me taking care of little Lucinda until little Lucinda got her own computer to fit my neural net. I’d end up drooling under the wires, a scanning device for a Stanford University student.

  Raped and abused. All my life and it’s come to this. Kearney, Mike, why didn’t you find me?

  I fell asleep and dreamed of gunning down the Reeses and the boy hackers. Kearney told me I’d been a fool. I woke up just as I began to understand I was dreaming, but the feeling of being a fool didn’t go away. And this damned dream stayed with me, too.

  It was noon, duty time. I dressed, and, still in hiding, cooked lunch in my wig. I felt like I bled under it, but I only sweated. Cheap drode head polyester wig.

  FIVE

  WILLIE CUT AND DRIED

  The mantis sat on Willie’s knees, nibbling a katydid. Trying not to disturb the mantis, Willie felt in his pocket for the money he’d been saving from selling his plasma. Behind the house, the fields in their terraces lay dormant, but he’d heard that the company who owned the farm had thought about putting the fields to a winter crop. Willie didn’t much like the idea, having to hear the automatic tractors all year round.

  He’d thought once about stealing parts from the machines built into the terrace walls, but hadn’t. That was before he had the mantis.

  A memory. Memories running together. A woman’s voice. Looking for a brain pattern.

  He’d found the brain pattern, but he hadn’t. He’d found the brain pattern but hadn’t told the people operating him that he had. Hackers drove him out before he could figure where he was.

  Maybe. Maybe that’s what the people operating him wanted him to believe, he thought.

  The mantis spread its wings and sprayed him with more juice to stop his knees from moving so much. Willie had heard somewhere that people had tiny nostrils inside their air-breathing ones, little holes that soaked up pheromones. The mantis made good pheromones.

  Willie turned the mantis so it sat on his left thigh. It bopped out with an arm, cutting his thumb slightly, then trilled its wings with his agitation. He felt a twinge of anger—might be big, but it was still a damn bug—but the mantis calmed him down.

  “She hated you,” Willie said.

  The mantis felt cold and began climbing up Willie, shivering slightly. Willie took her inside and put her back in her tank under the heat lamp.

  He remembered the woman’s terror. War materials being moved, hunting a brain pattern. He wondered if his memories from the times under the electrodes were real, or distortions like bug hallucinations.

  Wars fought by machines. Brain patterns ran. Wasps put tiny humans in their nests. A voice that sounded like his target brain pattern screamed, Willie wondered how he got his dream of doing something. The mantis should have cured him of that, but maybe what the bug gave him stimulated him as well as calmed him.

  Time to sell the junk he’d smuggled back from Tibet on his first tour of duty. Then he’d have to find a keyboard hacker.

  Maybe his dream was impossible. Maybe the mantis was curing him slowly of his bug horrors. Willie bent over the mantis’s tank and breathed in deeply, then went to see his art stuff.

  Down in the cellar, Willie pulled his first idol from a box filled with moldy shoes, sweat-rankled socks, and old canning jars full of black slimed peaches.

  He brushed it off with a soft, new paintbrush li
ke he’d seen archeologists do on Public Television, then pulled on his wig and best clothes and rode his bicycle into Stuart, parked it, and used his welfare pass to get a train to Danville. He had to wait until the paying passengers got on, then the intercom announced eleven spots for pass carriers.

  At Danville, he switched to the East Coast maglev, standing room only for pass carriers, but he only had an hour and a half to the Outer D.C. Belt. The Capitol District commuter trains only accepted welfare passes between eight p.m. and midnight, so Willie had to buy a pass. Riding into Alexandria, he felt conspicuous even in his best clothes until he spotted a couple of other drode heads among the commuting bosses. Maybe he should transfer to a city where oddball money was easier to come by?

  Too far from home. Willie wished he’d brought his mantis. He felt hopeless. Bugs kept moving around the comers of his vision. But under his arm, he had the first Buddha.

  What did he think he was doing? The man in Old Town would call the police, would cheat him.

  No, Willie told himself, I’ve done okay until now. The man in Old Town has as much to lose as I do, maybe more. I used to be able to handle things real well. Willie tried to remember what that was like, back in the Army on the Tibetan Plateau.

  All he could remember is that he used to manage real well. He couldn’t remember how he’d done it, though.

  He got off in Alexandria at the King Street Station and remembered the number and street the bloodsucker woman in the Stuart plasma clinic gave him.

  The address was for a used bookstore. Willie went inside, the Buddha in its paper bag under his left arm. A man who either didn’t have the money for nano-rejuvenation or who believed his purposes were better served by looking fifty came out. He was grey haired, somewhat fleshy in the face, with slight jowls and loose flesh over his eyelids.

  Willie said, “I’m Jubbie Carter. I’m told Mr. Wilson is expecting me.”

  “I’m Jones. Mr. Wilson is no longer with us,” the man said in a voice that sounded like a New Yorker. “You have something you’d like me to appraise. Do you have a bill of sale for it?”

  “I left it at the house,” Willie said as he’d been told to say. “I’ll mail it to you, but we can write one up here with my address and all.”