by Rebecca Ore
Dorcas almost said, but I don’t spend hours limp while other people use my brain as a scanning device. “Do other drode heads feel like you do?”
“Most of them were never independent operators,” Allie said. She looked at the wall clock and said, “You didn’t spend much time logged on.”
“I was looking for some grants to apply for. You put the information on a disc for me. Thanks.”
Allie waved her hands in front of her face as though shooing Dorcas off. “Really, you hate to think of yourself as a bigot. Bet you considered getting me a mantis and all that, pet for the poor drode head.”
“You don’t want one?”
“Yeah, yeah, shit. Did I tell you…”
“Who’s Willie?”
“A friend. We meet on the net. He’s another drode head somewhere survived enough to learn ways around the system.”
“Like you?”
“Shit, if I weren’t in the system, I’d be an undocumented babysitter. Sorry if I bitched on you.”
Dorcas wondered if the movie had provided enough vicarious power to relax Allie. “Well, it was your first day here. I’m sure you were a little nervous.”
Allie put her hands over her face and said, “I hate being helpless.”
Dorcas realized it was unusual for a drode head to be able to read texts. “You can read?”
“Oh, yeah. Thing prisoners do for each other. Helps pass the time.”
“Did you have any other options besides the badger game?”
“The badger game worked for years.”
“You’d get old eventually.”
“Then I’d be the mama screaming for the husband and brothers to stop. My mama never got caught.”
“I thought prison was supposed to rehabilitate people.”
“I’m rehabilitated. I don’t con guys anymore.”
Dorcas said, “I’ll see you tomorrow.”
“You think you’ll get one of those grants?”
“I generally get one out of eight that I apply for. Henry will be the recipient of record, senior author, et cetera. You know how that goes.”
“Nope, but it sounds rotten to me, lab wife.” Allie saluted Dorcas as though the postdoc was an officer and went out the door. “See you tomorrow.”
Dorcas pushed a light pen against her desk, her fingers sliding down the pen, then turning the pen over, sliding down, turning the pen over. She hoped Henry would come over to her house so they could talk in private. Perhaps the Feds bugged her house. They could write words on their bodies.
But she should call Welfare to complain. Dorcas never met such an aggressive drode head in her life. She picked up the phone and asked to be connected to the local Welfare office. “Welfare, East Side Manhattan.”
“This is Dr. Dorcas Rae. You’ve sent us a new drode head named Allison. The one with the experimental pickup. I’m getting too much personality.”
“Dr. Rae, we’ll debug Allison. She’s just through indoctrination.”
“She told me she was a sociopath.”
“Well, yes, but she’s nonviolent toward women.”
“You normally don’t send female drode heads to this lab.”
“We’ve alerted Dr. Itaka. Give the woman a few days to settle down, remind Dr. Itaka she won’t be attached physically to the machine.”
“I’d like a different drode head. You’re normally quite cooperative.”
“We’re testing Dr. Itaka to see if he’s recovered from his idiosyncrasy.”
Dorcas wondered if Allie would pull herself out of the helmet and tear Henry’s dick off if he raised that polyester tunic. “Why don’t you tell Henry that she’s not attached to the helmet?”
“We’ve told Dr. Itaka that he should not molest this woman.”
Dorcas wondered why Henry hadn’t mentioned that to her. “Thanks.”
“We’ll talk to Allie and modify her if necessary.”
“Thanks.”
EIGHT
THE POST-DEATH SYNDROME
“She made me,” I said. “She knows I’m not a real drode head.” Lying on my back after being in the read hood made me claustrophobic, so I mounted Mike, pushing against him with my hands, grinding pelvis to pelvis, not really aroused, feeling him inside me also less than aroused. I would rather have hit him than this. “She knew I was an agent. I was trying to save things, so why did you keep flashing messages to me on the movie screen?”
He put his hands on my bald head. “Let’s stop this. You aren’t interested in sex. You’re mad at me. Let’s go for a walk.”
I let him drop out and said, “Fuck it, Mike.” I pulled on pants, a sports bra, a sweatshirt, the human hair wig Ethyl Reese bought me in Berkeley. Welfare issued me a loft. Who lived there before, I didn’t know, but I suspected that my loft, like the neat apartment on the military base, was a material seduction. Slot Mike in the loft, put my favorite foods in the refrigerator and freezer, my favorite plants in the windows, and I’d home in after my day as a data processing unit. Space in Manhattan cost plenty, but these days I tended toward claustrophobia. My head could decompress in a loft. The Feds knew what drode heads craved.
“Do you know how frustrating it is to decide to work for the Feds and have the target make me the very first day?” I asked Mike when I was dressed.
“I’m here for you. We can discuss it.”
“Control officer.”
“We knew it would be difficult. If you hadn’t gotten yourself raped, the helmet would be a little less traumatic, but, hey, you could be dead.”
“The helmet’s not traumatic. It’s not being able to fool some dumb bitch stuck in continuous postdocs. So, what do you think?”
“We need to scan all labs more often. Bet both doctors Dorcas and Henry use Federal materials and grants on pirate projects.”
“Yes, but it isn’t your butt lying down muscle-locked. It’s like having nightmares without being able to wake up when I wanna. And I’m not forgetting.”
“See, your prior experiences do aggravate your concern.”
“She could kill me.”
“You’d come out from under the helmet fighting.”
“I didn’t in Berkeley.”
Mike didn’t answer.
A large hornet droned against the loft glass, bumping, backing off, bumping. Mike and I stopped and looked at it. “What is that?” I asked Mike of the hornet.
“I don’t know. Some of them carry modified venoms. Maybe it’s a drug dealer’s carrier gone astray.”
“Manhattan’s nuts. People buying and selling pet bugs. Whole neighborhoods of drode heads. Why aren’t we living in a drode head neighborhood? Don’t you think this will make Dorcas suspicious?”
“Allison, these first days are hard, I know.”
Mike seemed excessively calm, which put me in an anxiety spiral. “But she made me as an agent. Somehow they knew about the audit. Your security sucks.”
“If she really made you, then pretend to side with her. Tell her the cover story is a lie. Tell her the truth.”
And get gunned down with doctors Rae and Itaka? I should be numb to dying, I’d had so many near deaths. But, no, I wanted to have my own nice apartment, my control lover. “I want to make her feel guilty.”
“About what?”
“About the way she sees drode heads.”
“Look, Allison, you’re not like most drode heads. Most of them are reasonably contented with their lives. We don’t let people abuse them. I shot the hacker who raped you.”
Yeah, Mike, but not in time. “I don’t like going in and being made as a plant the first day. Then getting some lecture from you when I do what I can to save the situation. I didn’t want her to know I knew she knew. Now you’re insisting that I shouldn’t be anxious.”
“She complained about you. Are you sure you’re not being a bit abrasive?”
“She knew she had to complain, otherwise we’d know she suspects.”
The odd hornet went away. I walked to the
back of the loft, fifty-five feet from the window and squatted with my back against the wall, facing the space in front of the window. Mike came over and squatted about five feet away.
“Yeah, Mike, give me space.”
“You want to go camping your next free period?”
“Outside or inside?”
“Or have you ever been sailing?”
“No, I never got involved with the whale rescue people.” What was this, my interrogation?
“We could sail out from City Island, go to Montauk. I can get us a sloop.” He sounded wistful.
Shit, he really liked sailing. “You must want to go sailing.”
“Yes.”
“And I won’t get claustrophobic in some little cabin?”
“The view will make up for it.”
“You miss sailing, Mike?”
He looked over at me as though afraid I’d want to deny him a pleasure. “If you don’t want to, it’s okay. But there’s lots of space around a boat.”
I was a mean bitch, but I didn’t like feeling like a mean bitch all the time. “Okay, Mike, arrange it.”
“I was an Olympian sailor,” he said. Took me a few seconds to figure out what he was talking about, commercial sports not being all that critical for eco-warriors.
“Gives us both something to look forward to,” I said. “So let’s go for a walk now.” Maybe Mike found monitoring me tedious, fucking me a chore. Old Mike was a controlled control officer, except for that moment when he proposed a sailing holiday.
We took the elevator down to the lobby and walked down to the Staten Island Ferry, then walked along the Battery toward a saxophone s jazz. An old man played under a streetlight, no open instrument case, no sign that he wanted money. Eyes closed, he just played.
Then I saw the cheap wig. A drode head played saxophone while the Hudson flowed to the ocean, bearing ships full of sewage over sturgeon.
We stayed until his eyes opened, focused on my wig and Mike’s own hair. The drode head pulled the saxophone out of his mouth and said, “Excuse me, folks, but I wasn’t playing for you.”
Mike said, “We appreciate it anyway.”
“You appreciate whatever you want, don’t you?” the drode head said.
I said, “Mike, let’s go on, so the man can play alone.”
“Sorry,” Mike said. After we’d gone fifty feet uptown, we heard the saxophone playing a dirge behind our backs.
“Mike, how often will someone with a job live with a drode head?”
“It’s fairly common in Manhattan. Among liberals. But mostly drode heads do marry each other.”
“Shave your head, then. Get a cheap wig. We’ll be less conspicuous. Or do you explain me to the neighbors as an off-the-books servant?”
“We rented the loft because we thought it would be easier for you. Most agents serving as pseudo-drode heads need space between sessions.” Mike said. “But if you really want, I’ll have us moved into a welfare neighborhood.”
“It’s okay, Mike. I just don’t like having screwed up so much. I haven’t done anything right since…” Since New Orleans? Since I was eight?
Ever?
Mike put his arm around me and we walked a looping walk together as though we were stoned or drunk, just being silly like kids who weren’t in danger of getting gunned down. We moved uptown. Mike seemed to know where we were going, so I just held on to him, which was rather fun.
We stopped in a bar. Mike had found one filled with a mix of drode heads and working people. One man who didn’t bother with a wig was saying, “The Feds provide the garret, the part-time job, what more does a painter need?”
I said to Mike, “Does anyone leave the dole?”
Mike said, “Some of these people are real painters.” He steered me up to the bar where a live bartender mixed our drinks. Robots don’t have the judgement necessary to handle all of a bar’s possible problems.
We couldn’t talk about my mission in public. I wondered if Mike brought me here to shut me up, or if he had a non-trig side, bit of an artiste, perhaps. Mike asked, “So, do you like New York?”
I said, “I never lived here before. Closest I came was the Catskills.”
“You’re from Ohio?”
Ohio—hopeless place for me. “My earliest memories are of factories and scrub pines and oaks. River locked in between dams and factories. People making pilgrimages to various healers and preachers. Cops shooting at us. My Ohio. I don’t know if I was born there or not, just most of my memories came from there. My parents drove me across a bridge to Louisville for the Derby. That’s my earliest memory, going to the Kentucky Derby.”
“You know, all these people you think should have helped you, they’re only people. Like you.”
I said, “But their parents didn’t dump them on the street at age eight.” Not a damn civics lecture, Mike, I was beginning to have fun.
“Someone took you to the orphanage. The orphanage fed you, educated you. And I am glad we didn’t just lock you in prison for the rest of your life. I’m here for you, Allison.”
“No, no, no, I took myself to the orphanage.” I smiled at Mike like I’d made a joke, wondering if now I knew too much to live for a court date. Probably. “What do you think happens next?”
“You go back to work tomorrow.”
As we walked home, I said, “You monitored the entire session?”
“Yes. Who’s Willie?”
“One of the drode heads you had looking for me while I was in Berkeley. He found me when I was getting raped. He was worried about me and got space in the system to come looking.”
“Oh,” Mike said. “But we used ex-military guys with security clearances to look for you. Well, I worry about you, too, Allison. I can’t help everyone who might need it, but I can help you.” He opened the door to our building.
I pushed the elevator button and said, “I bet you say that to all your spies.”
He said, “Your main bad guys were those parents who abandoned you. And Martin Fox.”
“I wondered if they really abandoned me or if they’d left me in the park to get over my tantrum. Maybe they were planning to come back for me and I abandoned them?”
“Allison, I don’t know why you need to think that. They could have looked for you. There’s no record of anyone trying to find you.”
“But I wasn’t registered at birth. They were outlaws of some kind.”
“So, what kind of parents were they?”
As we got off the elevator, I said, “I don’t remember.”
Next day, I went into work and played ashamed in front of Dr. Dorcas. I said, “I’m sorry I was so rude yesterday.”
“Welfare said you were new at this.”
I’d heard that Welfare told her I’d be reconditioned if I gave her further grief, but I didn’t say anything, just took off my wig, slid under the hood, and began to watch a movie.
A man slid into a seat beside me. He said, “Don’t say anything. You tell them I found you yesterday? Just nod.”
I nodded. The movie screen went blank. The man had plastic caps over his drode holes. He looked intensely Appalachian, high cheekbones, thin long nose, thousand-yard stare. If he had a security clearances, but was a drode head, he had to be a war casualty.
“Yes, I got hit by hallie bugs,” he said. Of course, he could read my mind, we were both inside each other’s minds.
“In my private space,” the man said. “Are you really okay? Friends of Jergen’s want to know.”
“Jergen turned state’s evidence. Are these friends of Jergen’s also friends of Martin Fox’s?”
“What are you hunting for?”
Don’t think about the mission. I tried to walk away from this man, but he caught up with me.
“Are you going to report me to Mike?”
“Shit, how can I not report you to Mike. He’s reading me right now. I told him that you’d found me in Berkeley, then again here.”
“No, today, as far as he knows you�
��re at the movies. It’s very easy to fake someone being at the movies. Easier to fake than being blanked.”
A woman with no arms joined us. “I’m Loba, we helped you in the past through Joe and Miriam. Perhaps we can help you now. How happy are you to be working for the Federals now?” She looked Hispanic. Somehow I knew the real woman was small even though in her projection, she looked quite tall. “They’ll audit me. They’ll know about you.”
“But this will register as your dream tonight. What’s so dangerous about the insects?”
How dare they give me dreams. I didn’t need more nightmares. “They’re an unlawful gene-hack by someone at Rockefeller University, probably funded through a misappropriation of Federal grant money.”
Suddenly, we were back in the movie theatre, but watching my capture and interrogation on the screen. Shit, and I couldn’t wake up even to be paralyzed and terrified. “Not like Jergen then, not a volunteer. But you don’t want to die,” Loba said.
“The insects are an ecological hazard,” I said. “I haven’t sold out completely.”
The man, who I knew to be Willie, said, “I love my mantis. She’s made me more confident.”
I said, “The Feds say drode heads who have mantises become more ambitious. But I hate being drugged, manipulated.” The screen showed me killing mine. “Loba, when Jergen turned himself in, you abandoned me. Martin Fox planned to kill me. What was I to do?” I wondered what they’d do to me. I still didn’t want to die.
“So what, you’re afraid of dying. But we haven’t decided what to do with you yet,” Loba said, answering my thought, not my willing question. I was back alone in my movie theatre. The screen was playing final credits. Mike subtitled across the bottom, She’s been talking out loud while you were at the movies. She isn’t quite sure what you are.
For a horrible instant, I wondered if Mike knew about the people who’d stolen me away from my movie, but realized he was talking about Dorcas Rae.
I said, “Why don’t you just blank me? I’m a bit tired of the movies.”
Play possum, why not? I expected a strange dream tonight, and being conscious of time passing with people plotting in chronoflow was nerve-wracking.
The last subtitle was You’re right. It would be better.
