Gaia's Toys

by Rebecca Ore

  “As long as it isn’t listed as stolen merchandise, I’ll be happy for you to mail me your purchase receipt later.” Wilson reached out for the paper bag, pulled it off the statue, sat the statue down by a computer.

  “I got it in Tibet,” Willie said. “When I was in the service.” He realized he’d said more than Jones needed to know. But then the girl at the plasma parlor could give Jones the same story.

  Jones pulled out a camera, scanned the sculpture into the computer, then said, “Computer, scan, compare, quiet report.”

  “What databases?” Willie said. He’d bought this sculpture, but some of the others were loot.

  “Interpol, North American, Japanese, other countries that are in a position to fuss.” Jones smiled.

  The computer screen flickered impossibly fast, then cleared, not stolen.

  Then automatic request for potential offers: two.

  “You know already you can sell it?” Willie asked.

  “Perhaps. Two’s not an impressive number.”

  “How many Tibetan buddhas are there for sale?” Willie asked.

  Jones looked at his, fleshy lids half closing his eyes. “How many Americans were in Tibet during the war? How much of Tibet didn’t get looted?”

  “I thought it was a particularly good-looking statue,” Willie said, “even if it don’t got lots of jewels and gold plate.”

  “I’d appraise it at sixty dollars. If you want me to sell it, I’d have to deduct 20 percent as a commission.”

  “Could you make it an even fifty?”

  “Should I write you a check?”

  “No.” Willie knew then he’d get cheated.

  “Well, then for cash, I’d have to make it forty-five dollars.”

  Willie used his welfare pass to get to D.C., so the trip only cost him the D.C. transit fare. “I’d like you to waive the cash discount in the future.” He sounded in his own ears like his captain.

  “If I’m able to sell this piece, I’ll consider dropping the cash discount,” Jones said. “Automatic offers aren’t sure things. People could have forgotten to purge their request files.” He opened a drawer, pushing back his tweed jacket so Willie could see the gun in his belt. Thick fingers counted out the money, a five-dollar coin, two twenty-dollar bills.

  Willie got an erection. He could afford a whore. Then his vision went dim with bugs in the comers.

  Jones said, “I see you’re very excited to have some cash. I’m sure you’ll need more soon.”

  Willie said, “I’ll manage.”

  “If you would like to do further business with me, please call me collect,” Jones said. “I’ll deduct half from any possible sale, take the loss if we can’t sell your property.”

  “Thank you,” Willie said, not feeling particularly grateful. But he now had almost a hundred dollars between this and the money back in Virginia. He put the two bills in the pouch on his belt and the coin in his front pocket, the one he’d sewn up with new cloth.

  He started to worry about city thieves, but nobody would expect a drode head to have so much money.

  At the maglev station, he had to wait because the train already had its quota of free riders, even standing. He bought a sandwich out of the five-dollar coin, heard people standing behind him muttering about freeloaders, then got on the next train with his welfare pass. Willie got a seat this time all the way through the dark to Danville.

  If he had the scanning computer and the access codes to the stolen art system and the computerized art bids, he could offer his pieces directly to the buyers. He knew he was cheated by Mr. Jones. The bitch in the plasma shop wouldn’t do him any good for a direct contact, but perhaps the hacker who’d gotten busted with him when Willie tried to sell his contacts might know someone who knew someone.

  At the Stuart station, Willie left his bike locked and went to the little late night fritter place where he’d met his hacker the first time.

  His friend wasn’t there, but Willie spotted a friend of the local hackers named Little Red. Little Red was a nanotech damage case worth $10 million. He never talked about anything. When the small hacker units in the county were all busted, Little Red wasn’t among them. But Little Red didn’t testify against them either. Little Red, who’d been eighteen when he got frizzled, was now a tiny thirty-something guy. The company’s settlement for shriveling up his legs and spine, Little Red told everyone, was just the cost of doing business. The company offered a free rebuild instead, but neither Little Red nor the local jury wanted to settle for that. Little Red could get rebuilt whenever he’d trust nanotech again, but he’d get to keep his $10 million.

  From under his feedstore cap, Little Red watched Willie come in. He nodded at Willie, then turned back to his deep fried pigs ears. Being only about four feet tall, Little Red could make a meal out of what would have been another man’s snack.

  The man behind the counter looked at Willie and sighed. No tip from this one. “Can I help you?”

  Willie knew he could get veggie fried things for stamps, but decided he wanted to buy real food. He leaned over the counter and said, “Couple of tacos.”

  The counter man said, “Can you pay real money?”

  Willie pulled out the change from his five, then decided he was close enough to home and pulled out one of the twenties. He must have been leaning over the counter pretty fiercely because the counterman backed away and looked at where the defense module must be.

  Willie leaned back and put the twenty in yet another pocket, worrying slightly that he might forget all the pockets he’d spread his money through.

  “Willie, that’s not a whole lot of money,” Little Red said. He talked to Willie’s reflection in the mirror on the wall over the cookers.

  “I sold something I bought in Tibet and found out about an entire system of scanning art to see if it’s stolen, of computerized bids for pieces.”

  Little Red gnawed on the gristle part of a pig’s ear. Willie wondered if he’d surprised Little Red. Little Red said, “You need money, Willie. Have you thought about suing the Army? Didn’t they promise you an education?”

  “I could have gotten one I don’t remember,” Willie said. “The bugs messed me up considerable.”

  “Or sue them for not treating you better,” Little Red said.

  “I’m a drode head. You don’t do anything, either, do you, Little Red, other than play with the money you got for being messed up? Didn’t stop the nanotech company.”

  “ ‘Cost of doing business.’ ”

  “We could both be doing better than this,” Willie said. “But we’re lazy Appalachians.”

  “This isn’t Appalachia,” the counterman said with some anger, perhaps, Willie thought, as much for not being included in the conversation as for the regional slur.

  Little Red said, “No, Appalachia starts uptown. We’re in cracker country.”

  Willie said, “I’d have put better use to ten million dollars.”

  Little Red put his pig’s ear down and turned to Willie, not talking to the mirrored Willie, but looking directly at the real man. “God, Willie, that’s downright nasty. What happened to you?”

  “I got cheated today.”

  “You been getting cheated for a ton of years. Why’s it a problem now?”

  “I think the mantis pheromones are counteracting the war bug terror.”

  “Well, Willie, see you around. You paying off the bitch in the plasma parlor?”

  Willie felt his face turn hot. He wouldn’t look at Little Red direct or in the mirror.

  “Well, tonight you insulted me,” Little Red said, getting off his stool and patting Willie on the back. “Maybe you can work up to bigger things.” Little Red squeezed Willie’s shoulders and hobbled out on his shoes of different heights, his crooked spine covered in a leather jacket.

  Willie worried that Little Red stole his money, but felt something stuck in his belt.

  He finished his tacos quickly against closing time, then went back to his bike, flipp
ed the generator on, and rode home before trying to read Little Red’s message.

  On a napkin. Little Red wrote down a phone number, 555-6676-9. Willie threw the number in his disguised walnut cupboard and went to feed his mantis.

  The mantis made him glad, easy with the world, but Willie realized, floating in its love, that what he felt now didn’t just come from the mantis.

  Welfare wanted him for sessions in the morning, but he’d be free again in two weeks. First free day he’d do it.

  In two weeks, all he remembered of his time under was searching for the brain pattern again, but not finding it. And no one rifled his memories. And no one had broken into his house. Odd. Willie thought as he dialed 555-6676-9, that he’d never remembered being audited, but now he remembered that he hadn’t been audited.

  He heard a voice and tried to speak, but the voice, one he didn’t recognize, didn’t appear to have ears attached. It said, “Willie, ride up Route 8 and call me again at the phone booth at the Parkway.”

  Willie rode his bicycle up Floyd Mountain. His knees ached, he pushed the bike a lot, but he finally got up. No way he could get home by dark. He saw the phone booth at the Blue Ridge Parkway and dialed 555-6676-9 again, wondering if he should have dialed 703 first because what had been a local call in Patrick wouldn’t be a local call here. But the phone rang, another recorded voice answered and asked Willie to wait for a phone call.

  No sooner than Willie hung up than the phone rang. A live woman said, “Willie, we’ll pick you up.”

  Willie wondered if this had all been a ruse to get him away from his house so Little Red could send robbers after his Tibetan sculptures. “Okay.”

  A electric van glittering with photovoltaic panels pulled out from behind the abandoned motel. Little Red called out, “Willie, come on.”

  Willie wheeled his bicycle over. Hands hauled it up, and Willie followed his bike into the van. He sat down beside the battery compartment and said, “You can run it off batteries, too?”

  “We use as much sun as we can get,” the van driver, the woman from the recorded message, said.

  “These are very expensive,” Willie said.

  The woman smiled at Little Red. Little Red said, “Willie, we’re both rich. Got it the same way.”

  The woman said, “Not quite the same way, Willie. Little Red is a nanotech disaster. I’m a chemical spill.”

  “ ‘Cost of doing business,’ ” Willie said. He looked at the woman, wondering where her damage was. Nothing was visibly wrong with her other than she was too skinny.

  Little Red said, “Willie, leave the irony to us.”

  Willie said, “Chemical spill, what’s wrong with you?”

  “My child died. I’m sterile.”

  “Dead child’s sort of bad, but most women have to pay to get sterile. Except drode heads,” Willie said.

  “Red, Willie wasn’t being ironic,” the woman said. “He sincerely believes that what happened to us and to him was the cost of doing business.”

  “If I’d worked at it harder, I could have fought off the hallie bugs. The people turned me into a drode head made better use of me than I could make for myself. At least, just after the Army.”

  “Jesus, Willie,” Little Red said. “You really believe that, we’ll take you back down the mountain.”

  Willie said, “I was knotted up with terror. If I got a hardon, ’scuse me, ma’am, I saw bugs. Women made me feel like bugs were crawling on me. The government made me unscared.”

  The woman said, “They lobotomized you. They have you tranquilized by an insect now.”

  “My mantis eats other bugs. She’s a good insect.”

  Little Red said, “He’s just running a program. He’s really as pissed as we are.”

  Willie said, “I’m going to work out a plan.”

  The woman started the electric van, and they drove into Floyd by the signs to the Genuine Twentieth Century Hippie Village and the Beds and Breakfasts lodges with parking lots full of expensive electric and gas cars, no junkers there.

  The van pulled off down a dirt road and went through rhododendron scrub to a clearing studded with photovoltaic panels, grids, electric cookers, and three geodesic domes with stove pipe sticking out their tops.

  Little Red said, “Laurel, looks good.”

  “We can move it all in seven vans.”

  Willie said, “The domes, too?”

  “Yeah, but we’d have to buy new waterproofing tape for between the panels,” Laurel said.

  “What are you?” Willie said.

  “Industrial accident gypsies,” Laurel said. An ancient woman, tinier than Little Red, hobbled out. She had flippers instead of arms.

  For an instant, Willie wondered if she had survived from the thalidomide damage in the mid-Twentieth Century. She seemed ancient enough, but only nanotech could have kept anyone alive that long.

  “Thalidomide?” Willie asked. Then he wondered how he knew about thalidomide.

  The tiny old woman said, “Yes.” She had what Willie thought of as a Mexican accent.

  Willie said, “God, you must be very old.”

  “Not so old, Willie,” Laurel said. “Some places sold thalidomide over the counter into the late nineties.”

  Willie felt coldly stupid, then smarter than he should have been, confused. He wanted to have his own plan. Now, these people picked him up and put him into their plan, like a chess piece.

  Willie didn’t know he knew anything about chess. But then he knew how to spell pheromone. “So, what do you want from me?”

  Little Red said, “Your memories of the last couple times under the hood.”

  “I’ve got locks on.”

  “We won’t use the electrode holes,” the tiny woman with seal flipper told him. “We’ll pick up the signals from around them.”

  Willie said, “You’ve got a squid?” He’d heard squids worked best against bare brains.

  Laurel said, “It’s not that kind of squid and besides you’ve been modified to output to electrodes.”

  “They’ll audit me eventually. I’ve gone to Washington on my pass. I’ll make other trips there if I can’t find a better way to sell my Tibetan things.”

  “They won’t find a thing,” Laurel said.

  “You’re going to wipe my memories.”

  Little Red said, “We can do that without chemicals.”

  “Post-hypnotic suggestion,” the little Hispanic woman said.

  Laurel said, “Or we can set his memories to wipe before an audit, but trust him until then. Why do you want money?”

  “So I can get off the dole.”

  “What if I told you they don’t want you off the dole. Someone would have to develop true artificial intelligence to get from a computer what they get from you linked with a computer. And the brighter you are, the better they can use you.” Willie thought Laurel was being a trifle intense for a woman. “I’m just one drode head. Surely they can spare me.”

  “What if you had enough money? Do you have a plan?” Little Red asked.

  “If I had enough money, I’d come up with a plan,” Willie said. “Can we quit standing around arguing and go inside? I thought you wanted to know about the program for art bids.”

  The Hispanic woman said, “A program for art bids?”

  Little Red nodded.

  Laurel said, “Why don’t we just hack that today, see if we can get the bidding up on some of Willie’s Tibetan art.”

  “I’ve got to be home tonight,” Willie said. “To take care of my mantis.”

  Little Red said, “Willie, we don’t use unwilling links, so if all you want is better prices for your loot, then we’ll try to help you. But we think we can help you with that plan.”

  “It wouldn’t be my plan,” Willie said.

  “Do you remember audits?” the Hispanic woman asked.

  “I’m remembering more and more,” Willie said.

  Laurel said, “Do you like remembering?”

  “Yes,” W
illie said. “Otherwise, I’ve lost half my life to the fugues.”

  “I might try to find another way to block the audit than tampering with your memories, then,” Laurel said. She opened the door to the closest geodesic dome. Willie went up some stairs to the interior floor. The space was weird, a circle, almost, about 16 feet across, stuffed with electronic gear. Willie recognized the squid immediately—a black cone that looked like some visual cross between a de-tentacled biological squid and a dunce cap, with a three-inch cable coming off the top. He could imagine it sucking a brain and shuddered.

  Now he had to sit under it. “I’m going to be screwed,” he said.

  The Hispanic woman said, “You’ve already been fucked. What’s a screwing?”

  Willie sat down in the chair under the squid. Laurel taped over his drode holes and then spread jelly over his head. Her fingers felt kind, then condescending.

  As the squid dropped onto Willie’s head, Little Red asked, “Willie, what do you remember about the fence in Washington?”

  He remembered that the fence was in Alexandria, not the District. “It was off King Street in Old Town, Alexandria.” He knew he wasn’t walking into the shop again, but he reheard his conversation with Jones along with the click of a keyboard. When Willie got to the memories of Jones speaking to activate the computer, the memories slowed down, went backward, played again.

  Laurel’s voice said, “Voice-activated. We can do a normal synthy of Jones’s voice.”

  From under the hood, Willie asked, “What’s that?”

  “Obviously the computer would recognize Jones’s voice. But it would also have to recognize a tape. So we have to modify the voice.”

  Little Red said, “There may be other signals. Let’s look for a mouse.”

  Willie backed up and began again. He looked harder at Jones’s hands that he ever remembered doing.

  “Will I remember this?”

  “Do you want to?”

  “Dunno.” He hung in the scene while Laurel, the Hispanic woman, and Little Red tried to see how they’d get into Jones’s system.

  Willie, being idle, thought about the brain pattern he’d been looking for. Laurel said, “Hey, Willie, cut it out. We don’t need to know that.”