Gaia's Toys

by Rebecca Ore

  I should have asked for this sooner. It wasn’t like an unremembered nightmare at all. In the next instant, I was sitting up on the read couch, my wig on, drinking tea. Dorcas must have given it to me before I came back completely. I understood real drode heads spent the entire two weeks they were on in fugue states, even if they weren’t under the helmet for all that.

  Dorcas saw me look at her and said, “Oh, hi, you back now?”

  “I won’t know until the end of the two weeks, will I?” I drank the tea. She’d done it the way I usually ask for it, enough sugar to crystallize at the bottom, no lemon or milk. I’d told her even if I didn’t remember telling her. I felt naked and helpless again. Maybe the fugue wasn’t such a good idea after all. I wondered if Willie and Loba out on the net could kill me with lethal programming or if that was a myth. Dorcas, maybe, would get the blame. But on her own, she could kill me with subtle poisons or malfunctioning nanotech, make it look like an accident. Or Mike could just shoot me. I suspected that lethal programming was a hacker’s myth, but the other risks were real enough.

  Dorcas said, “I’m sorry if I got you in trouble.”

  “I guess I deserved it,” I said, eating the sugar out of the bottom of the cup.

  Maybe the between-sessions fugue was a blessing, like forgetting nightmares. With it, a drode head only went down once into oblivion every month. I suspected my rig was experimental, indeed.

  Shit. Maybe Dorcas had no secrets. Maybe the Feds turned me over to Welfare for real?

  I finished the tea and wondered if Dorcas expected me to wash the teacups. She put her cup in a stainless steel dishwasher, no, probably a labware washer. I did the same and said, “I wish humans could be kinder to each other,” half meaning it, half throwing it out to see how Dorcas reacted.

  Dorcas said, “What we need is to be blended back into the ecosphere again, to be just another species among others, not the top consumer.”

  “How can a human do that?” Perhaps I was on the wrong side here. “I feel like I’m blended into the draft animal population myself, or into the machines.”

  “Perhaps you’re not part of the problem. You welfare people live low on the food chain. If you didn’t travel so much…”

  “The transportation pass? We only get free space when it’s available.” I thought I’d told her this already.

  “Perhaps we all should be more like drode heads,” Dorcas said. “Did you consume a lot as a badger game thief?”

  My, my, my, drode-headism as environmental stress reducer, I thought. “We had to be careful not to flaunt it.”

  “What would you like to have that you don’t have now?”

  “Twenty thousand acres of wilderness with a truly wild grizzly in it,” I said, looking at the wall clock. “Shit, five o’clock. I’ll have to wait.” No point in leaving until the subway crowds thinned out. My pass wasn’t good for peak times.

  Dorcas said, “I never knew you couldn’t ride during rush hours. None of my other drode heads told me this. What did they do if I let them out during rush hours?”

  “Nobody knows. The average model’s fugued out. Mill around? Go to a special drode head waiting room at Penn Station and just sit? Whatever, they don’t remember.”

  “Some of you won’t wear wigs.”

  “I heard about that in orientation,” I said. “It means eye-fuck hairheads. ”

  Dorcas said, “Would you really want twenty thousand acres of wilderness with a truly wild grizzly in it?”

  “Yes,” I said, wondering how the Feds would read their audit of this moment. I remembered seeing the last San Juan mother grizzly who would have taught her cubs to avoid humans, to only kill wild things, not men-tainted cattle and sheep. Trappers sent her to a captive breeding program. Her children haunt rec malls.

  “Isn’t the badger game urban?” Dorcas asked.

  “Aren’t cities wildernesses for humans?” I countered. “Men are wolves to men.”

  Dorcas said, “There’s no true wilderness now. What we call wilderness existed because we like some of our garden shaggy. No place on earth can resist us.”

  I said, “We’ve got technofixes for everything, even for wild humans like I was.”

  Dorcas said, “Ah,” but didn’t say anything further for a while. Then she said, “I could get you a mantis, if you like. One of the big ones.”

  “If you fix it with stimulants, not tranquilizers,” I said.

  “What’s wrong with the present ones?”

  I said, “I hate being tranquilized. I tore the head off the one the Feds tried to give me in rehab.” I thought I’d told her this already. She obviously didn’t listen to drode heads when she made conversation with them, first she’d forgotten about the transit passes, then she’d forgotten I told her this. Or had I? Perhaps I hadn’t.

  “Yes, now I remember. You told me when you were under the wire. I thought you might have been lying. The Feds are giving them out in rehab?”

  “You know, it takes me two passes to make an impression on you. Yes, the Feds brought me one to keep me calm after they busted and wired me. Otherwise I’d have been hysterical for days. You gonna listen to me or you gonna make conversation with a drode head and spend half your mind being satisfied with your liberality?”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Forget it. I’m obviously a sociopath and the head rig at least makes me useful to the community and all that.”

  “Allie, is what happened to you why you find wounded guy rescue movies so attractive?”

  “Shit, I tell you something when I’m here and you don’t listen. When I’m under, you sneak looks at my movies and try to analyze me.”

  Dorcas pulled her chin back like she was expecting me to hit her. I looked at the clock. Ten after five. Another five minutes, and I might get space on the subway, or I could walk home. Did the hackers we killed in Berkeley have friends in Manhattan? Dorcas said, “You’d like to leave, wouldn’t you? Too far to walk?”

  “I’m afraid some guy will play the badger game on me in reverse. I’m a drode head with an expensive wig.”

  “We could share a taxi. I’ll pay for it.”

  Shit, she’d see the loft and wonder what the fuck was going on. No, she’d just see the outside of the building, an industrial building converted to dwelling spaces downtown—store those industrial flesh components in old factory buildings. “Why not?”

  “You think I’ll be shocked at where you live?”

  “I’ve got a normal boyfriend. An artist.”

  “Is he nice?”

  “His trust fund keeps him from being a drode head. Otherwise…”

  She seemed pissed when I said that, and quickly asked, “Whose place is it?”

  “His.”

  Dorcas Rae had a whole house. We drove by it and she pointed it out, then went west and down town. “How did you find a rich boyfriend?” She sure was blowing her money on curiosity and this cabfare.

  “I actually completed some tricks in my day,” I said. We pulled up in front of the building. I saw Mike at the window and waved up at him, wondered if he’d signal me through the net in my brain, but no, he just waved. I waved back and got my keys out. “I’d invite you up, but he hates thinking about what I do for a living.”

  “That’s okay.” Dorcas sat in the taxi while I unlocked the front entrance door. The cab pulled away before I got upstairs. Mike said, “What was that all about?”

  “Dorcas paid for a cab.”

  “How’s it going?”

  “She’s finally starting to listen to me. I don’t know if she trusts me more or less. Were they supposed to know about the DNA audit?”

  “No, but security for you is different from security for a standard audit. If they ask their source in the Lab Practices Bureau, that person won’t know about you.”

  Turning on lukewarm water first, I took off my wig and leaned my head under the kitchen tap. Rinse that sense of failure right out. Cool that hot brain.

  Mike came
up behind me and began massaging my neck muscles, then, gently, my scalp. The ever-faithful hunting bitch had returned to her loving master. What he was doing felt good to my body, no matter what the brain’s attitude. I said, “She asked me what I wanted if I could have anything at all. I want twenty thousand acres of wilderness with a real wild grizzly in it.”

  His fingers paused, then continued their soft circles on my wet head. “That really is what you want, isn’t it?”

  “She pointed out that humans had eliminated true wilderness from the planet. Nothing could stop us if we didn’t want to stop.”

  “Don’t you think it speaks well of humans that we did spare some wilderness?”

  “We only spared it because it entertains us,” I said.

  Mike’s fingers shifted to my neck muscles, digging the tension out. Oh, subversive tension. He said, “A little more than a week and you’ll be off.”

  “For a little less than three weeks,” I said, pulling down a towel and drying my naked head. Mike sat down beside me, gave me a little hug, and turned on the TV to a football game.

  I laughed at that domestic cliché—hug woman, watch ball game. I said, “She’s the one who designed the insects.” Saying it out loud made me more sure.

  Mike’s head tracked a bit slowly away from the game. “Why do you say this? Could be Itaka. Could be someone who traded material with a Rockefeller researcher, someone at another lab.”

  I said, “Dunno precisely. But making mantises to calm people down seems like a female thing to do. And she keeps offering me one of my own. Twice, even after I told her I tore the head off mine.”

  “Um,” Mike turned his attention back to the game, then, during a commercial, looked back at me. “We’ve got to have proof before we can act.”

  “What will you do?”

  “We haven’t decided yet.” Evasive eyes darted to the left, then came back around to help the face tool up an earnest, honest look.

  “What’s proof?” I asked.

  The game came back on, but Mike, with a grimace, kept most of his attention on me. “She’s got to either use you to work on a gene design project for an unauthorized modification, or she’s got to tell you she designs the insects and you then follow through on verification, get a story about how she redid the mantis lung, whether the sequences are transferrable to other insects. Try to get her to show you the steps.”

  “I guess what you really wanted was for her to use my link in a design project.”

  “Then we’ve got to be sure she’s not protecting Itaka.”

  I said, “See if he wants to turn her in,” and let him return to his ball game. I found a CD I wanted to listen to, plugged in earphones, sat with my back to the wall, and listened to Bach’s “Goldberg Variations.” No one I’d ever met since my parents abandoned me ever believed I found Bach on my own.

  NINE

  AEROSOLS AND GESTALTS

  Dorcas Rae got another of the new model drode heads when Allie went on break. Normal people didn’t use the term break, they said their drode heads were on or off. Funny, Dorcas thought, I’m almost seeing it her way. Being under the read hood is her work. We force work out of people who’d otherwise be useless, Dorcas thought, but Allie’s limp body speaking impersonally at her made Dorcas uncomfortable. If she hadn’t talked to Allie, if Allie hadn’t come back to herself after the sessions, Dorcas could feel better.

  The new drode head, fortunately, wasn’t a talker, probably born to a Welfare family. Having another drode head relaxed Dorcas, just another impersonal pair of eyes and vocal cords, looking for patterns in the data. If this drode head watched a movie while Dorcas used his visual, she didn’t know about it. Dorcas suddenly wondered how was that done anyway? Did the visual cortex timeshare between the drode’s personality and Dorcas’s commands?

  She was sitting beside the drode head, scanning for information on how insects read their visual data when Henry came in. He sat down on another chair and said, “It really is a new system. A couple of labs have them, and the designer published a paper on the system in Welfare Management and Medical Practices.”

  Dorcas didn’t see that proved the new drode heads weren’t part of an audit, but then any Federal agency could read a drode head after the fact. Any timesharing on a Federal System—well, the IRS and the various Federal regulatory systems said they didn’t access data transactions without a warrant, but Dorcas wondered how one could know. And if hackers hacked your system and Feds captured the hacked material, of course, they had a warrant.

  “Do you know any way to erase memory of retrieval and analysis from a drode head?”

  Henry waved his hands as if the drode head was listening. Dorcas realized he could be listening, or listened through.

  How do I get a wasp to recognize human anger? How do I design a system without a computer-generated model wasp? Dorcas knew wasps reacted when creatures injured wasps, most likely to an aerosol pheromone. She wondered if the pathway could be adapted to adrenaline and testosterone. Dogs supposedly could smell fear, but testing proved the cuing was largely visual.

  “Have you got a problem?” Henry asked.

  “I wish sometime I had the wiring for direct computer access.” And rarely, but sometimes, Dorcas wondered if she wouldn’t be happier as a drode head.

  “You can always use a virtual rig. Retina painting gives about the same feel, I’ve heard.”

  “But virtual is slower.”

  “Maybe this procedure will be safe enough.” Henry waved at the man whose head was inside the helmet.

  “Maybe this has always been a way to keep track of how we spend our grants,” Dorcas said.

  Henry said, “Are you interested in coming over tonight?”

  “For your wife’s party? Henry, I don’t think so.”

  “If you don’t come, people will talk.”

  “I think you want to gloat at both of us.”

  “Dorcas, I’m proud of you both.”

  Dorcas remembered that Allie called her a lab wife. She didn’t reply to Henry for a few moments, but signed out of the system instead. The drode head pulled himself out of the helmet, sat up, and blinked at them.

  “I’m through for the day,” Dorcas told him.

  He didn’t speak, just nodded and looked for his coat. Dorcas had moved it while he was under and got it for him. Henry didn’t speak, either, just watched until the drode head left. Dorcas said, “I don’t have a gift for her.”

  Henry said, “She’d appreciate flowers, I think.”

  Dorcas didn’t think much about Henry’s Japanese-American wife. She was Henry’s rebuke to his grandfather’s people who didn’t really believe he could be Japanese. Dorcas wondered if the wife took Henry’s Orientalismo seriously, or if she didn’t care who Henry slept with as long as she was the legal wife. Because the Wife brought Henry children who looked almost genuinely Oriental, Dorcas knew she shouldn’t even fantasize about breaking up the marriage. “I suppose I could bring ikibana shears for a more substantial gift.”

  “The flower trimmers, not the heavy shears. She’s always losing flower trimmers and shears, but I bought a box of shears last time I was in Japan.”

  “Does she really like ikibana?” Dorcas ran a fantasy through her visual cortex, Henry’s wife, in a kimono, stabbed Dorcas with the flower scissors. Or snipped Dorcas’s jugular. Dorcas saw herself dying in Henry’s arms. Or alone in a comer while all the other partygoers concocted a story to protect the Wife. Flower scissors, wouldn’t the Wife know then that Dorcas and Henry were lovers? No, all she’d know was that Dorcas and Henry talked about her.

  “Of course, she likes ikibana, she’s Japanese.”

  But then, Dorcas wondered, why is she always losing the scissors and shears? “Flower scissors, I’ll come.”

  “Good,” Henry said. “That means all the lab postdocs and professors are coming.”

  Coup for you, Dorcas thought. How much madder should people get before her wasps stung them unconcious? Dor
cas wished she could run an aerosol analysis now, her anger just under the threshhold. What was she giving off that would trigger wasps?

  Perhaps, she should modify people, have them give off the pheromone that drew wasp attacks when they got too angry. What was too angry?

  Dorcas went downtown to an orchid and ikibana shop on Varick St. She realized she was near Allies loft and went by, curious as to what the wild drode head did in her time off.

  The bells to the various floors weren’t marked. Dorcas stood looking, trying to figure what floor Allie pointed to. A man came out of the building. Dorcas asked, “Which loft belongs to a man living with a drode head?”

  “I’ll give him a message. Who’s looking?”

  “Dr. Dorcas Rae. Actually…” Dorcas almost said, It’s the drode head I’m looking for, but somehow this sounded too quirky, somewhat perverse. More perverse than buying sharp edges for your lovers wife? “I’ll try back later. Just say Dr. Rae called.”

  “They’re off sailing,” the man said.

  “Sailing?” Dorcas could imagine a drode head in a recreation mall. She couldn’t imagine a drode head sailing. Sodium and chloride ions could corrode the connections, but then, the new system didn’t expose the connections. Sailing drode heads. She wondered if they could be connected to the sails through a computer, adjust the rigging as the wind pressed sensors on the main sail, the jib. One person could run a schooner, perhaps, with the right sensors and computer. “I suppose a drode head could make that easier.”

  The man smiled and said, “I’ll tell him you just stopped by.”

  “I… sure.”

  Henry’s wife had a Japanese name, but never used it, preferring to be called Mary. Even Henry complied, and the house only looked Japanese in the Style Memphis, industrial metals with bast fiber cushions, flower arrangements in stainless steel pots that seemed vaguely medical. Mary answered the door herself, looking young after her second child and first nanotech rejuvenation.

  Dorcas came inside carefully, the wrapped flower scissors against her midriff. She thrust them out at Mary who said, “So glad you could come. Henry says your work is quite good.”