The Big Book of Science Fiction

by The Big Book of Science Fiction (retail) (epub)

  Everything in this silent movie is huge, angular, and skewed. Awesome pistons slide. Puffs of steam belch from floor grates. Faceless drones in prison pajamas trudge. Obese overseers crack bullwhips from steel balconies.

  Felix is summoned before his superior, Ivan, a tub of lard with a walrus mustache. Ivan orders Felix to clear out a musty storeroom to make room for new machines. Felix rolls up his sleeves and sets to work.

  He’s wrestling with a lathe when he notices something wedged between the lathe and a wall. (Moody backlighting here, and ominous organ chords.) Felix dusts off his discovery—a featureless black box, the size of a large dictionary. A bizarre unhealthy expression creeps over his face. There’s something about this box. That evening he furtively takes the box home under his coat. Legend card: DAYS PASS.

  Felix changes. He’s more dedicated to his work than ever, but he forgets to shave. He loses weight. His eyes are the eyes of a captured soldier. Legend: ONE MORNING…

  Felix comes to work looking even more haggard than before. His overcoat is bunched around him oddly. He takes it off and hangs it on a peg. His right hand has been replaced by a crude prosthetic claw. No sick leave. No word of explanation. Just the missing hand. And this obscene homemade claw at the end of the stump.

  The other workers are far too intimidated by him to ask what happened. No one talks to him anymore. But the whispering is thunderous. Inevitably Ivan invites Felix into the privacy of his cubicle. Cautiously, from across the desk, he asks a question. Title card: “WHAT HAPPENED?”

  Felix sits, half in shadow, mute as a stone, staring Ivan down. He’s still too high-minded to lie, but how can he tell his foreman that he fed his hand to a black box? Ivan looks down at the claw which could so easily make of bloody mess of someone’s throat.

  But the film breaks, the screen goes white, and the dream is done.

  The next afternoon I stopped at the Walgreens on the way to work and bought a clipboard and a stopwatch. People would talk to me if I wrote on a clipboard. It made the process look official.

  I used my stopwatch to time my walk from the punch clock to the building across the railroad track where I was pursuing my Quest. Twenty minutes wasted. I never punched in again. I was in blue sky.

  —

  I was tracing forward the path of a promising assembly, a computer keyboard. A conveyer took the keyboards down a narrow brick tunnel with an arched ceiling. I squeezed in beside the conveyer and moved sideways deeper and deeper into the tunnel, hoping to find out where it went. The tunnel went on and on, turning corners. The light was adequate, but my knees were going weak, and my back hurt from stooping under buttresses, and my mouth was dry from talking to myself. So I crawled in under the legs of the conveyer and took a nap.

  It was cozy under there. Rubber flaps hung down on either side to protect the works from dust. I slept on my side because of the rash on my back. A man with a Quest must sometimes endure rashes.

  The bad part was: as soon as I closed my eyes, I was dreaming again. In the dream I was lying on my back on the belt of the conveyer. It carried me along while I lay and watched the ceilings slide by. Then the belt stopped, and a man in white coveralls unfastened my right arm and set it aside. The belt started rolling again, and every time it stopped, another man in white would remove another part of me. The longer the dream went on, the less of me was left.

  I woke up disoriented and poked my head out through the rubber flaps. For a moment I thought I was looking down a vertical shaft. The bottom of the shaft opened into a deep bright chamber where women and men in white smocks and white slippers walked here and there on a white wall.

  When I got to my feet, I knew where I was—the computer section. Sliding beige partitions hung from slots in the ceiling, and everyone wore air filters over their mouths, for the protection of the printed circuits.

  The staff there treated me well. Showed me where to wash up, found a clean smock for me, and a mouth filter. Many of them had prosthetics. Artificial eyes were especially popular, the favored style being big black globes with little white pinholes. All the young women were happy to explain their work to a serious young man with a clipboard. But they kept pointing at things that were too small for me to see. I met a Southern Baptist girl named Jo Anne who had plugs on her wrists rather than hands. The plugs fit into micromanipulation boxes. My kind of girl.

  But I had no time for women. My Quest was upon me, and I was nearing the Finished Product. I could practically smell it. Final subassemblies were forming before my eyes. A steel rack entered the picture—two feet wide and a yard long. My old friends the video tubes showed up to be bolted inside the racks, three to a rack. The colored lights were mounted beside the tubes. The dozen roots of my twisting flow chart were converging into a trunk.

  Then I saw the panels. I was poking around a storeroom, and a freight elevator stacked with aluminum panels stopped at my level. The panels were four feet by eight, the biggest component yet. I resolved to stick with them like glue. Where they went, I would go. I sat on top of them and rode them up through the ceiling.

  The ride took me to ground level, to a room three stories tall. From my perch on the panels I could see row upon row and rank upon rank of aluminum cabinets, like those chemical outhouses you used to see. Not far from where I sat, a couple of technical types were running wires from a diagnostic cart through a service port in one of the cabinets. An inspection team.

  I got down and circled the nearest cabinet. There was an air-conditioning vent and some unconnected plumbing protruding from the base. But no door. Each side was bolted on. Once you were inside this outhouse, you were really inside.

  At one corner of one side was an insignia decal, a purple oval with one word inside it: AUTISTICON.

  So this was what I’d been doing with my life. I’d been a builder of Autisticons. This cabinet was an example of my handiwork. But what was it?

  I walked down a row of Autisticons and came to one that had a side panel detached, providing a view of the thing’s interior. The chamber was upholstered in black vinyl over a layer of foam. Here was the toilet, nested inside a black vinyl armchair. The toilet bowl peeked from a hole in the seat cushion. The toilet had no lid. But it did have restraining straps.

  The armchair seemed smaller than I remembered. A good size for a five-year-old. The buckles of the restraining straps had keyholes. They locked. Everything fit. Form followed function.

  Go on, I said to myself. Stick your head in. No one’s going to kang you in and run rapiers up your nose. Go on, Alex. It won’t burn your eyes out. Have a close look.

  An armature rose from one armrest to support a plastic desk. Built into the desk was the computer keyboard. Attached to the opposite armrest was a self-rinsing bowl, the kind you used to see on dentist’s chairs, for spitting. A red rubber tube dangled from the chamber’s ceiling. A duct for cold porridge, that was my conjecture. Cold porridge laced with tranquilizers. That made sense. A kid has to eat. It wouldn’t be humane to shut a child in a box without nourishment.

  Mounted at the top of the front panel were the video screens with the colored lights, facing the chair, angled down. Red, green, blue. And tucked under the screens, a video camera aimed at my head.

  I approached the diagnostic team. One of them was a short bald man with thick tortoiseshell glasses. He was holding a clipboard and smoking a pipe. He supervised the other mechanic. It was Mr. Bosch from my old department. He must have been promoted like me. He turned to face me.

  “Alex. You finally got here. Any questions?”

  “What are these things, Mr. Bosch?”

  He drew on his pipe and frowned. “These are teaching stalls. Computerized teaching stalls. For schools. Elementary schools.”

  “What do they teach?”

  “Whatever they’re teaching children these days.”

  “Why do they have toilets in them?”

  “So the children can shit, Alex.”

  “Why can’t the children go down
the hall to the bathroom?”

  “Because the children are strapped in. Because there isn’t any door.”

  That settled that. “And the cameras?”

  “To keep an eye on the children.”

  “You’re saying that the teachers watch the children on monitor screens?”

  “I didn’t say anything about teachers.”

  My heart was pounding for some reason, and my fists were clenched. I must have been upset. Mr. Bosch made a mark on his clipboard.

  “If you really want to see how these things are used,” he told me, “you should visit a modern elementary school. Most of them use Autisticons exclusively.”

  Perhaps he was right. Perhaps I should visit such a school. Perhaps such a visit was exactly the next step demanded by my Quest.

  The other inspector tapped my shoulder. I was in his way. I stepped aside, and he screwed hoses to the toilet pipes. He was testing the flush. I was finding it hard to breathe. My bones felt like soggy cardboard that might bend in ten places at any moment.

  Suddenly I wanted to kill Mr. Bosch. Him or myself. But what would that prove? And if I blew up the factory with dynamite? What would that prove? Precisely nothing. You can’t do shit with dynamite. You’ve got to be subtle, if you want to make a dent. You’ve got to be far more subtle than a human. You’ve got to be a machine. And beat them at their own game.

  “Mr. Bosch?”

  “Yes?”

  “What exactly do you do here?”

  “Me? I pick units at random, and I make measurements. If the measurements deviate from certain parameters, I record that on my forms. What are you doing here?”

  I held my face in my hands. It seemed to be an ancient ball of brittle rubber, cracked and weeping powder.

  “All right,” I said. “That’s enough. Wake me up now.”

  “What?” said Mr. Bosch.

  “Wake me up! I’ve seen enough. I don’t want to hang around for the gory parts.”

  “What are you talking about?” said Mr. Bosch. Except that it wasn’t Mr. Bosch at all. It was a total stranger, and I was shaking him by his shoulders and yelling into his face.

  “The dream! The dream! I want a different dream! Or I want you to wake me up!”

  “Leave me alone!” the stranger yelled back at me. “I don’t even know you!”

  I grabbed both of his arms in my steel-and-plastic fists and backed him up against an Autisticon.

  “Cut the crap, asshole. Wake me up.”

  A couple of inspectors pried me off of him. As soon as they let go of me, I fell to my knees and retched. I retched directly into the toilet bowl in the open cabinet. Sometimes a thing is right there when you need it.

  I stood up, wiped my mouth, and walked away. I found a dark corner of the loading dock and wept. I was making a fool of myself. I had no Quest. I was just a dumb Polack with delusions of sainthood.

  —

  I watched from the shadows while freight handlers prepared a shipment of Autisticons for transport. They wrapped each box in a sheet of foam and fastened the foam with copper straps. They nailed together fiberboard crates that held the Autisticons snugly. They wrangled the crates across metal ramps into the bellies of the waiting trucks.

  I walked over to the trucks. Down the narrow corridor between two of them, I could see Wrightwood Avenue baking in the summer sun. A strip of scraggly crabgrass grew between the sidewalk and the curb. A little yellow butterfly flitted past. I waited until no one was around and walked across one of the ramps into the van of a truck. I was going to visit an elementary school. It was part of my job.

  The crates were so tall, they nearly reached the van’s silvery inner roof. But there was just enough room for me to crawl in on top of them. I lay on my stomach across two of the crates. I rested my chin on my arms and waited.

  A scrape and a clank. Someone had moved the loading ramp. A squeal of hinges. Blackness. The slam of the driver’s door. The vibration of the engine.

  The truck lurched, paused, turned left, shifted gears. Braked at the Pulaski Street stoplight, turned north, and rumbled over the potholes. The crates jumped beneath me.

  Onto the expressway. Air keening past. I was on my way. Through corn country and cattle land. Across the dusk and into the night. Going west. Whenever I started seeing things in the dark, I’d take out my lighter and strike a flame. There in the steady blue glow would be my hand. There were the crates. There I was.

  I turned onto my side and fell asleep. It felt like falling too. Like falling into a deep dark well.

  I dreamed that I was a soldier in basic training, running an obstacle course. Bare trees beneath an overcast sky. Frosted brown earth that crackled beneath my boots. I jogged along, huffing out steam. All by myself. Perhaps I was being punished. My fingers and toes were numb. I crawled under some barbed wire and kept moving.

  I came to a barricade built of railroad ties. I climbed a rope to the top and threw my legs over. Then I got a surprise. The barricade’s far side was slick aluminum. I lost my grip and fell, feet first, down a steep chute like a playground slide.

  The chute leveled out and sent me spinning across the ice of a frozen pond. I slid to a stop on my belly. The ice felt thin. A blackbird flew past, scolding me. I tried to creep toward shore. The ice groaned and broke. I sank into the pond up to my armpits. My hands scrambled uselessly at the ice.

  Night fell. A sheet of new ice formed around my chest. The pond held me firmly in its jaws. I was in no further danger of drowning. The stars came out.

  An army jeep came toward the pond, blinding me with its headlights. It drove straight across the ice and stopped in front of me. The glare hurt my eyes. I waited to be rescued. But the jeep just sat there, idling its motor. Finally it honked its horn. It wanted me to get out of its way.

  “Go around!” I yelled at it. “Go around! You’ve got the whole pond!”

  I prayed for release. I woke up, fumbled for my lighter, lit another cigarette, went back to sleep. The air brakes hissed. We’d come to a weigh station at the Missouri border.

  Here the aged film of the dream scorches and snaps. I lose the visuals, but the soundtrack proceeds.

  I woke up coughing. There was a lot of smoke and a smell like burnt pork chops. Apparently the fiberboard crates were flammable. Apparently I’d barbecued myself. Luckily it happened at a weigh station. As soon as they found me, someone called an ambulance. Amidst loud expressions of anger and disgust.

  I wondered what I looked like, as I rode to the hospital. I’ll never know, because the ambulance wouldn’t show me a mirror, and because my eyes were gone. Boiled like two little green onions. The ambulance was a real moron. It wouldn’t shut up. It told me this long involved joke about a pet poodle that gets put in a microwave. What a creep.

  I wouldn’t have been so sensitive if I could’ve stopped thinking. Even at times when I wanted to stop—when I was charbroiling myself for example, or when mutant cicadas were chewing out my nerves—I’d go right on thinking, as if there were no tomorrow.

  —

  At the hospital I was wheeled on a squeaky gurney through hallways that reeked of mint. A radiologist with a stuffy nose fed me stale water from a paper cup. A fluoroscope buzzed. The radiologist turned me over and shot another exposure.

  The nurses took off my hands and bandaged me from head to foot. For days I did nothing but lie in a bed and pee into a catheter, filling up little plastic bags. Then my kidneys gave out, so they detoured my renal arteries into a noisy dialysis machine.

  Being blind required some adjustments. The first few days I tried desperately to remember what various things looked like. To fix them in my mind before they faded forever. But the more I tried to remember, the more I forgot. Eventually I gave up.

  When they took off my bandages, the skin went with them. The dermatologist had planned for this. He’d special-ordered a batch of new skin from a pharmaceuticals concern in Boston. It itched at first, but I was glad to have it.

 
; When my heart failed, the cardiologist had a new heart ready for me. And while they had my chest open, the hepatologist replaced my liver. New kidneys were still on order from a kidney shop in Amarillo. The food was great, and my job insurance was paying all the bills.

  When my visceral condition stabilized, the ophthalmologist connected up a new pair of eyes. Everything looked pastel—pearl grays and bleached aquas, the colors of bread mold. But hell, they were eyes. I’d get used to them.

  Then they gave me counseling. I needed a lot of therapy, because I was a very disturbed individual. I had a lot to learn about channeling my self-hatred into socially acceptable channels. But my therapists had great faith in me. If I worked hard, if I improved myself, I might someday perform a useful function. I might even become a delivery van or a dump truck. Being helpful to others is so important for rehabilitation.

  But the crucial thing in life, I feel, is to become more and more like a machine as you go on, and less and less like a person. You have to become a machine if you want to escape all that.

  2. SPRAYING FOR BUGS

  It was 1997, and I was working for the city of Tucson as an exterminator. My life was fairly simple. I’d given up on being a man, and was trying to function as a public works vehicle.

  PUBLICWORKSVEHICLEPUBLICWORKSVEHI

  I was south of downtown, driving the side streets around Stone, looking for an address. I watched for the numbers stenciled in yellow paint on the lampposts and checked them against my internal street map. My optics scanned the decaying city, translating walls and alleys and Dumpsters into vehicular simulation space. My tires rumbled over the sun-scorched gutter trash. My fender optics tracked the curbs. Traffic was sparse. There weren’t any pedestrians out, nor any drivers either. The city had grown nearly uninhabitable. The storm drains were choked, so the next winter flood would swamp the place and cripple city services for good. Piped water and wired power would recede into the fabled past. The more stubborn among the citizens were refusing to evacuate to the settlement camps. All the worse for them.