Asimov's SF, Oct/Nov 2005

by Dell Magazine Authors

  "Stop it!” He stood up and pinned the toy down on its back. “Don't you ever talk like that! If you ever...” He grabbed it up and went tromping down the hall, quaking the suspension trailer with his heavy steps. He slid open the bathroom door and turned on the light, and held the servo head first down the toilet. “You ever wonder what's down there, huh? You want to be flushed away forever? You can have all the eyes you want, it won't do you no good down where the sun don't shine!"

  "Jacob!” His wife stood in the door in her nightgown, not fully awake, a pretty woman with the hair of a gargoyle. “What are you doing?"

  "Oh, hi honey.” He grinned and got to his feet, wiping the toy off on his shirt. “Just playing around. Did you ever do something stupid, and then ... get caught?"

  "What's wrong?” she asked.

  All the life had gone out of the toy. Toby must be awake, or at least, not dreaming. Jacob put it gently in the sink. “Nothing's wrong,” he said, not bothering to meet her eyes. She was gone so quickly she seemed to vanish. He followed her swift footsteps into Toby's room, leaned on the doorway and watched as she sat on the edge of the bed and woke her son squinting in the bright light.

  "Toby, are you all right? What happened?"

  "What?"

  "Do you feel all right?"

  "Uh huh. Turn it off."

  "What happened? Were you playing with the servo?"

  "No.” He wriggled away from her and put the pillow over his face.

  "Were you having a bad dream?"

  "Uh-uh."

  "Were you talking to Daddy?"

  "Uh-uh."

  "No, it was Scorpy, that's who I heard. What was Scorpy saying to Daddy?"

  "I don't know. Goodnight."

  "Don't you want to tell me? Hmm?” Toby pretended to be asleep. His mother watched him with a stubborn look on her face. Jacob turned the light out.

  "Let him get some sleep, Emily.” She brushed past him on her way to the bathroom. When he caught up with her she was at the sink fidgeting nervously with the servo. She looked more frightened than angry now, almost ready to cry.

  "You know what's funny,” said Jacob. “Toby is the only one who isn't paranoid about it."

  "I'm not jumping at shadows. I could hear your voices. I don't know what you were saying, but you were losing it, and it scared me. And now you won't tell me...."

  "I'll tell you right now.” He took the toy from her and led her by the hand. “Come on. I'll tell you what happened, but don't be disappointed if it all amounts to nothing."

  He led her to the kitchen, folded a table down from the wall and brought out two folding chairs from the nook behind the refrigerator. She sat drooping, staring at the Formica while he set down a couple of cold bottles of Cheer, a mild beer made from a chocolate-barley hybrid. Lately it seemed every serious conference took this form, there had been so many of them, so that being agitated at this hour just led to being here out of habit.

  "I really need you to level with me,” said Emily, pushing away her Cheer as Jacob sat down across from her. “I know something's not right."

  "It's me. I lost my temper. At a toy. You know how I am when I don't get enough sleep. We're taking out this new servo tomorrow, and it's a tough one. I've been up all night with it, and then this toy jumps up on my desk and starts bothering me."

  "So you take it out on him. Whose idea was this, anyway? You of all people...."

  "I wasn't mad at Toby."

  "You changed his whole life, do you realize that? We did this to him. He's the one who's got something stuck in his mind and he can't get it out, and it bothers you?"

  "I know, I know. But it wasn't Toby I was yelling at. You saw him. He was asleep. He was dreaming. That's all it was, a dream. They told us this might happen, remember? It's perfectly normal. You practice something all day, you dream about it at night. But of course, when the implant dreams, it sets the servos in motion...."

  "Has this happened before?"

  "Not like this. I mean, little things—but you should have seen the way it was chasing all over the place. It almost trashed itself down the toilet before I caught up with it."

  "And it was talking?"

  "Yeah.” Jacob licked his lips and seemed to be looking for something. He found the bottle of Cheer and popped it open. “It's funny how that is. He can do things when he's dreaming that he can't do yet when he's awake.” He took a swig and suddenly felt buoyed up by the sight of her complete, wide-eyed attention.

  "It's not just the talking,” he continued. “It's the way it moves, like an animal. When he's awake you can see him thinking, now this foot, now that foot, but when he's asleep, he's totally out of body. Already you can see the genius he's going to be some day. Us old timers, we think we're good, but not a one of us can ever touch what he'll be able to do without even thinking."

  Emily reached for her Cheer and fumbled with the cap. “And this has been going on how long?"

  Jacob shrugged and tried to look casual. “It's just been little spurts. By the time I go to wake you, it's over."

  "What does he say, when he talks?"

  "Just nonsense. Jabbering."

  "Is he afraid?"

  "Hell no. He's having fun."

  "But the way he chased around, it doesn't sound like he's acting normal."

  "That's what a dream is, honey. It's him, and it's not him. You're not all there when you dream, just a piece."

  "We'll have to log this in the morning."

  "Sure. Log it."

  "And we'll make an appointment with Dr. Avery ... Jake?"

  "Okay."

  "What is it you're not telling me?"

  "I don't want us to blow it for him. This is his future."

  "Doesn't it scare you sometimes? Now that we've seen things go wrong. Remember Clara's boy? That awful stutter."

  "That's what I'm talking about. She panicked. Maybe if she'd given it more time..."

  "Are you kidding? Could you imagine if Toby ... no human being could stutter like that. And the worst thing was the fear in that poor child's eyes. I almost wanted to pull the plug on Toby right then."

  "Why didn't you?"

  "Maybe I should have."

  "No, but it would have been wrong. And you knew that. Throw away his future because of what might happen? There's bound to be growing pains."

  "Growing pains? Jacob, Jacob, sometimes it sounds like you've been working for the company too long."

  "Like hell. I hate ‘em as much as anybody. I'm stuck with ‘em, but Toby isn't. They foot the bill, and Toby gets a ticket out."

  "That's not what the contract says."

  "Okay, he works it off, and then he's out. He'll be so in demand. And even when he works it off, it won't be in some hell hole like this. He can take his pick. He'll be mining Jupiter some day."

  "I so want to believe you. There was a time when I could listen to you talk.... “She seemed to choke up, and took a swig from the bottle. “But after the way they messed up Clara's boy..."

  "He fell through a loophole."

  "She'll never pay it off. She's a slave for life."

  "She panicked."

  "Like it was her fault. No medical reason. That was the ruling. No medical reason to pull the plug."

  "I'm not saying it's right she should get stuck with the bill. I'm just saying maybe the experts know what they're doing sometimes. And if it really was a remediable condition, if it really was..."

  Emily laughed in that way she had that made Jacob feel ridiculous. He sighed and said, “You can go wrong either way, let's agree to that much. If we protect him too much, that wrecks his future, too. Toby's a fighter. And he's got your brains, and that's a powerful combination. Things can go wrong, so what's new? That's what brains are for, you work around, you practice, you find a way. I'd go for it if I wasn't too old for the operation. I wish to God I'd had the chance. I would have given my life...."

  He suddenly lost the power of speech and sat staring blindly, his lips agape. Emily
touched his arm. “Sure you would,” she said. “We both want what's best.” She got up from the table and as she passed by him she said, “Are you coming?” He shook his head and looked after her as she walked down the hall, her voice fading. “We'll talk later, a good long talk, why I shouldn't panic, how bad it has to be before we eat the bill, why women always get screwed...."

  He sat dumbfounded for a moment, then stirred to life wondering what she meant by that. He was too tired to try to make sense of things now, but too wide awake to just sit there, so he went to the fridge and picked up a couple of real beers by their plastic retainer rings, and with the same hand scooped up the servo toy from the shelf beside them. Then he made his way quietly down the length of the trailer, stopped at his office and picked up a wastebasket, dumping its contents on the floor.

  Out on the fire escape he sat on the wastebasket, leaning back on the rail to soak up a little breeze from the air conditioner leaking out through the screen. From his unit, five stories up, he had a good view of the compound. The streets were lit up too brightly for his taste. Night should be a time to get a break from ugliness, but here the fear of shadows ruled.

  Jacob's neighborhood consisted of row after row of units just like his, single-wide trailers stacked eight high on racks that looked too flimsy. Out behind him someplace was the substation where he worked, and where the night shift was at it even now, the workers hung along the walls like slabs of meat, goggle-eyed and twitching in their harnesses like lunatics, while off in the city their robotic telepresences labored away as if they had souls of their own.

  On a night like this, with a good moon, he could see past the rows of trailer stacks, the electrified fence, the dead zone and beyond, all the way to the ruins of the city.

  Most of the city was dark, but there were active sectors strung with lights, and a smoky flicker casting a silhouette of skyline where, presumably, a controlled burn was taking place.

  He sat like that for a long time, with one eye on the servo for signs of life. There was probably nothing to worry about, anyway. The little monster might be done dreaming itself into being for the night, and besides, the thing was so delusional there was no reason to believe it could remotely operate Toby, and no reason to worry Emily about it.

  Yet he couldn't just walk away and leave it alone. He kept running into the same dead ends. Even if all the servos were deactivated, he couldn't deactivate the implant in Toby's brain. And to give it all up, because of a bad dream—no way. And the fact that dropping out of the program meant he and Emily would have to eat the expenses had nothing to do with it, and if she didn't know him better than that, that's her problem, the hell with it.

  He tilted his head back, took another suck of air from an empty can, then went around again, around and around. Suddenly he seemed to wake up and stood painfully, cracking his back and legs into a new position. He put the servo under the wastebasket, weighed it down with a flower pot whose flower was long dead. He went inside, blind at first in the darkness, and entered Toby's room without even a click of the knob. On his knees he opened the box of servo toys, and one by one removed their battery packs. Back in his office he dug around in the closet till he found the cords he used to secure stuff when the trailer was being moved. He picked out a long one and went back out to the fire escape where he sat on his heels and set the wastebasket aside. Working clumsily, he made a double loop harness in the end of the rope, but when he went to slip it over the servo's body it suddenly sprang to life, slipped past him, up the wall and onto the underside of the next landing of the fire escape.

  "Hold on a minute! I've been waiting for you.” He shoved the wastebasket back against the farthest corner and sat down, arms folded. “I've got another proposition for you. Want to hear it? Remember our last deal? Worked out pretty good for you, didn't it? Here's another one."

  "What time is it?"

  "Oh, still got a couple more hours till midnight. What are you doing up there? That's a long way to fall."

  "You tried to rope me."

  "What are you worried about? Nothing should scare you. If something gets scary, all you've got to do is pop out into one of your other bodies. You're being as stupid as I was when I was going to flush you down the toilet. That was pretty dumb, huh?"

  "So what's with the rope?"

  "I was just trying it on for size when you woke up. You're going to need it. ‘Cause, see, I sat here and thought about it until I finally figured out what's troubling you."

  "Don't say I'm Toby."

  "I'm not saying that. I know you're not Toby. You're a completely different life form in your own right. And something's driving you crazy, and you think it's Toby, but that's not it. You want to know what it is?"

  "When he opens his eyes..."

  "No, hell, that's nothing. We all go through that. His awake life is your dream life. This is your reality right here. Let the other go. The problem is you're not satisfied with this life, and I don't blame you. What can you do all night but run around like a bug? That would drive me crazy, too. What you want is a little adventure."

  "What kind of adventure?"

  "I need somebody small and quick-witted to steal a certain item from a certain potbellied Kennie Calhoun that lives two units below us. He's the guy that once accused Toby of molesting his cat, not that you'd care about that. Interested?"

  "Steal what?"

  Jacob rubbed his mouth. “Let's just say an artifact. A functioning artifact. From the city."

  "What city?"

  "What do you mean ‘what city'? That city! Way over there. See the lights?"

  Not-Toby turned to look, craned this way and that, seemed to be having difficulty focusing on such distance. Jacob slowly reached down for the cord, but Not-Toby turned back and said, “That's a city?"

  "You mean you don't know? See, and then you wonder why I mistook you for somebody's dream. You're not only clueless, you don't even know what's missing. Don't you ever wonder what all this is? How it got here? How you got here?"

  "I thought this was the city."

  "No way. This is crap. That's the city. Not just a city. Omaha. Before the collapse, it was the center of the civilized world. Don't you even know what happened?"

  "How should I know?"

  "Okay, I'll tell you. There was once a great and mighty civilization here, and the Omahonians were right in the middle of it. They had power, they had knowledge, they had wealth. They could do things we can't even think of doing today. But it was all uneven. Like, they had a spurt of intelligence and created a computer network that spanned the whole world. Then little pockets of stupidity broke out all over the place, hacked it all down with their computer viruses.

  "And then it happened again, worse, same kind of thing, with the power to create life. That's why we can't ever get anywhere. It started out great, new life forms, but you had to be smart to do it, but pretty soon it was all automated so almost anybody could do it, and not just the usual greedy bastards, but gene-hackers, making life for the hell of it. Like things adapted to live in sewers. That was a big one. Turn ‘em loose in cities. See who can out-compete. And things they called hack-attackers. Every time they figured out how to eradicate one kind, a new breed would crop up. Microbes, too, that ate away stone and mortar. Foundations collapsed. Sink holes opened up. Pockets of gas.

  "It all happened just as people were about to launch out into the solar system. There was life on one of those moons, too. Can't get back to it. Afraid to touch it, now. It's going to take us a hundred years, maybe two hundred to clean up the mess.

  "Now look at us, living in a sterilized, fenced-in blast pit. It's pathetic. The only thing worse is that hell hole that used to be a city. I see it every day. Even though I'm not really there, I'm just working through the servo, still when these things are crawling all over it, it's like they're crawling all over me, long slimy things with lots of legs and little faces, oh God, the faces!"

  He stood up and walked around in a circle. “They've got th
ese little faces, you've got to feel sorry for them, but you've got to smash ‘em up as you go. There's this mucous that drips from the ceilings and grabs at things, and there's these...

  He stopped talking and suddenly became aware of the grimace on his face. “Well, anyway,” he went on, sitting back down, “Like I said, there's some marvelous stuff down there, too. Once in a while you turn up artifacts. Not just artsy stuff for rich people—there's technology in there too. I told you how advanced they were.

  "You're supposed to turn that stuff over, but old Kennie, he found something he figured was too good not to keep for himself, and he found a way to smuggle it back into the compound. Okay, he's had his fun, now it's our turn to have it. What do you say?"

  "But what is it?"

  "It's an artifact ... It's...” He felt the pocket of his T-shirt and pulled out his VR glasses. “Do you know what this is?"

  "For games."

  "Yeah, so you can see the game world, right? And not just games. You can make a place and feel like you're in it, but that's just virtual reality. You know what that means?"

  "Not really there."

  "That's right. Because these are too primitive. But old Kennie, what he found down there was a pair of Actual Reality glasses. When he'd see something with it, it would become real. But does he share it? No. Here I've got a family to feed, and all he does with it is keep his cooler stuffed with beer.” Jacob couldn't stifle himself from laughing at that, a laugh that ended in a foul-tasting belch.

  "So here's the plan. I lower you down on the rope. You go in through the cat door..."

  "I can just climb down."

  "No, because the guy right below us is spooked. He puts out traps for little crawly things. Better to lower you down."

  "But then where do I go once I'm in?"

  "There should be a shoebox under his bed. That's where he keeps it."

  "How do you know that?"

  "I work with the guy every day. I know how he thinks. If he had the most valuable thing in the world, he'd keep it in the dumbest possible place thinking no one would ever look there. Now let's go, before he wakes up."