by George R. R.
Carolyn and Candi joined us. We’d wondered in shoe training what Candi was doing here. She was a gentle—you’d have to say “delicate”— woman, whose civilian job was grief counseling. I suppose you have to be pretty tough to do that, actually.
She was also a natural leader for this sort of thing. She clapped once. “Let’s get these chairs in a circle,” she said to everyone. “Get sorted out boy-girl, boy-girl.”
Richard Lasalle was beet-red, with a large prominent erection. I was myself trying to think about anything else, running through prime numbers and tables of integrals.
None of the women were eager to sit next to him. Carolyn gave my hand a little tug and strode over to him, and stuck her hand out. “You’re Richard, aren’t you?” He nodded—”Dick” would not be a good choice— and she introduced herself and sat down. I took the other seat next to her and the pretty little blonde, Arlie, quickly perched on the other side of me, probably figuring I was “taken” and therefore safe. She crossed her perfect legs and hid her breasts behind folded arms.
Candi was the opposite, totally casual, leaning back, legs akimbo. Samantha and Sara, who had been in modest crouches, looked at Candi and unfolded.
“So let’s go around the circle and everybody come up with something important that you normally keep secret. After tomorrow, we won’t have any secrets.” Slow nods. “I should start it.” She paused for some time, rubbing her chin and the side of her face. “My clients, my patients, don’t know this. Why I became a grief counselor. I was once so devastated I, I killed myself.
“I jumped off a bridge. In Cape Cod in January. I was dead for ten or twelve minutes, but the water was so cold, they were able to bring me back.”
“What was it like?” Akeem said. “Being dead.”
“Nothing; I just went unconscious. I think the impact knocked me out.” She ran a finger between her breasts. “I woke up when they shocked my heart, in the ambulance.”
“You had a reason,” I said.
She nodded. “Watched my father die. We were on the interstate and the steering and the fail-safes cut out at the same time. We flipped and crashed into traffic. The air bags inflated, but the accident kept happening; another truck smashed into us and knocked us off an overpass. When we finally came to rest...my mother’s head was crushed and my father was drowning in his own blood. I wasn’t in too bad shape, but was pinned in place. I had to just hang there upside down and watch my father die. About two feet away.
“I couldn’t get his image out of my head. So I jumped off the bridge. And somehow wound up here. Lou?”
He shrugged. “God, I never had anything like that.” He shook his head a couple of times, looking down. “I was maybe thirteen. There was a gang my parents forbade me to hang around with, so of course I did. They thought I was out doing church stuff, but they never went, so I could fake it, I thought.
“These were junior goombahs, apprentice Mafia. I was the lookout while they did nickel-and-dime stuff. Robbing machines, shoplifting. Stealing cars for joyrides when people were careless enough to leave them unlocked.
“We got word that this old Jew who ran a news shop and candy store in the Bronx sold guns under the table. The back door looked like it would be easy enough to break in. So at one in the morning, I snuck down the fire escape and ran down a bunch of side streets to meet them.
“They knew for sure the old guy locked up and went home about ten. It was easy to crack the back door with a crowbar.
“This was the first thing we’d done where I wasn’t ‘the kid.’ A younger boy stood lookout, and I went in first, because I was still a juvenile. If something went wrong, I wouldn’t get hard time.
“I went in with a flashlight and started opening drawers, looking for guns. Well, I found one, but it was in the fist of the old Jew. He hadn’t gone home that night.
“I heard him cock the gun and swung around, and I guess dazzled him with the light. ‘Turn that off, boy,’ he said. But the guy with the crowbar had come up behind him and bashed his head with a two-handed swing. He went down like a log, but the guy kept hitting him. Then he picked the gun up off the floor and thanked me for thinking fast.
“We ransacked the place, wearing rubber gloves, but there were no other guns, nor anything else of much value. We couldn’t open or even move the cash box. We took a bunch of candy and cigarettes.
“The next day the newspaper reported the murder-robbery. I didn’t say anything to anybody. I could have called in anonymously and identified the murderer, but I was afraid.”
“He ever get caught?” Mel asked.
“Not that I know of. He went down for drug dealing and I went off to college. Now I’m here.”
Everybody looked at Arlie. “I got caught having sex. With the wrong person.” She looked at the floor. “By my husband. In our bedroom. I promised not to see this person again...not to seeher again.” She looked up with a trembling smile. “Details tomorrow.”
My turn. “I got caught jerking off?” Some nervous laughter. “I guess the worst thing ... it might seem even more trivial, to some. But it drove me crazy with guilt at the time, and it still bothers me, more than ten years later.
“I was, what, fifteen, walking down an alley, and I saw a turtle, which was rare. A pretty big box turtle. It pulled in its head and legs. I poked it with a stick and it just sat there, of course.
“On impulse, I picked up a brick and threw it down with all my might. The shell cracked open and the turtle squirmed around, all pale and bloody. I ran away as fast as I could go.”
After a pause, Candi said, “Yeah, I can see that. Even though my family used to fish for turtles and cut them up for soup. I grew up thinking of them as food.” She looked at Carolyn and raised her eyebrows.
She shook her head. “Guess I’ve led a sheltered life. Nothing sexy or violent. I did get caught masturbating, but my mother just laughed and told me to do it in my own room.
“There was a test, a chemistry final, when I was a junior in high school. A girl who worked in the office found a copy of it and sold it to me for ten bucks.
“That was bad enough; I mean, I’d never done anything like that before. But what was worse was that I already knew most of the answers— would’ve gotten a B, anyhow. And now this girl had proof that I was a cheat, and could tell anybody anytime.
“So I killed her.” She looked up and grinned. “Only in my dreams, actually.”
Richard had enlivened a grown-ups’ party by putting a laxative in the punch, but he used a bit too much, and put several people in the hospital. (Including himself, to deflect attention.)
Samantha stole money from her mother’s purse for years, whenever she came home drunk.
Mel played vicious tricks on his retarded brother.
Sara helped her father die.
Akeem struggled, and finally confessed that he had never believed in Allah, not even as a child, but had lacked the courage to admit it and leave the faith.
It was an exhausting and awkward two hours, but obviously necessary.
When we got the bell to get dressed, I was a little surprised to find that I wasn’t looking at the women sexually anymore. But there were a couple that perhaps I could love.
* * * *
We never went back to Fort Leonard Wood. The blacked-out bus took us to the St. Louis airport, where they gave us back the personal effects we’d surrendered a month before, laundered, and put us aboard a flight to Portobello.
The plane went over a lot of water, staying carefully away from Nicaraguan and Costa Rican airspace. Ngumi nations don’t have air forces; our flyboys would just disintegrate them. But they could still throw missiles at us.
It was nighttime when we landed, the air thick and greasy. The base was an unremarkable collection of low buildings, with the solid gleaming presence of the occasional soldierboy. They stood guard around the perimeter of the base, which they said had never been successfully attacked. I had to wonder how much damage an “unsuccessful�
� attack could do.
But that’s good. We would be spending a third of our lives here, somewhere underground, only dozens of miles from enemy territory. Nice to be safe behind a phalanx of invulnerable telepathic robots. Feel safe, anyhow.
Not really robots, and not completely invulnerable. Each was really an oversized, heavily armed suit of armor that was the telepresent avatar of one man or woman, who operated in instant concert with nine others. Each ten-person platoon was a telepathic family that, with training, would work as one powerful entity.
The enemy could destroy an individual soldierboy, but its operator, the mechanic, could instantly be switched to a reserve machine and be back in the field in minutes—or even seconds, if the backup was stored nearby. And whoever had destroyed the first one, they well knew, would get special attention from its replacement.
I suspected that was just propaganda, part of the mystique that personified the machines, to make them more effective psychological weapons. Any emotion that makes a human being dangerous, they had. But they couldn’t die, or even be hurt.
(The “hurt” part was not completely true, which was a closely guarded secret and perennial rumor. If a soldierboy was disabled and captured, the Ngumi would elaborately torture it in front of cameras, before destroying it.)
Americans laughed that off, saying that it might work with voodoo dolls, but not machines. You turn a machine off, it’s just a bag of bolts.
But you have to turn it off in time.
* * * *
Our quarters in Portobello were neat but perfunctory, and barely large enough to turn around in. But we wouldn’t be spending much time in them. Mechanics worked and slept, ate and drank and eliminated, without being unplugged, which took a certain amount of intrusive plumbing. But they didn’t open you up for that surgery until they knew whether you could be jacked.
The first day in Portobello, we were wheeled off one at a time for the most dramatic “routine” surgery known to medicine—the installation of cybernetic cranial implants, or jacks, as they were always called. It seems more dangerous than it is. They’ve done it a hundred thousand times, and it’s worked for about ninety thousand.
Of the one in ten for whom it doesn’t work, most simply go back to regular life, without the ambiguous gift of being able to share another’s mind and body totally. Some few for whom it doesn’t work become mentally or emotionally handicapped. Some few die.
The numbers are not published.
Being a physicist, I can figure out some numbers by myself. If something—jacking successfully—has a 90 percent chance of success, and if ten people do it, the probability of one of themfailing is one minus 0.9 to the tenth power, which equals 0.65. So 65 percent of the time, more than half, at least one of the ten is going to fail.
So logic would say “do eleven.” But what if all eleven made it? You’d have to pull one out, and that would be like a casualty, they say. It’s easier to add to a family than to subtract.
All ten of us made it, and spent the next two days in bed rest. The third day, we started exploring the gift.
The man who first led us through it, Kerry, was apparently a civilian, a therapist in his seventies.
“Your first time shouldn’t be with a beginner,” he said. We were back in a place like Room A, government-green walls, the hard chairs and tub of drinks, but with an addition: two couches waiting with a black box between them. Two cables snaked out of the black box.
“You’re all going to jack with me for a few minutes first. That will take about an hour for ten people. I don’t foresee any trouble, but if there is, best to have someone like me in the circuit.”
“Like you, sir?” Candi said.
“You’ll see why.” He looked at a clipboard. “Azuzi first.” Akeem stood and followed him to the couches.
“Close your eyes. Lie down.” He took a cable and planted the jack in the base of Akeem’s skull with a soft click. Then he sat on the edge of the other couch and did the same to himself.
He closed his eyes and rocked gently for a couple of minutes. Then he unplugged himself and Akeem.
Akeem shook his head and sat up with a shiver. “Oh. That was...extreme,” he whispered.
Kerry nodded. Neither of them elaborated. “Julian Class?”
I went over and lay down and faced the wall away from him. There was a little click when the jack touched the metal implant, and then I was sort of seeing double with my whole body.
It’s hard to describe accurately I still saw the wall, two feet away, but almost as clearly, I saw what Kerry was looking at, the group of mechanics staring back at him and me.
And all at once, I knew him, almost the way I knew myself. I could feel the body in his clothes as well as the clothes on his body; the somatic shifting of soft organs inside, and the complex array of muscle and bone—things that we feel all the time, but which become invisible with familiarity—small twinges and itches and deep pain in the right shoulder I’d have to, he’d have to, stop ignoring....
I remembered everything he routinely remembered about himself, bad and good and neutral. Comfortable childhood cut short by divorce, college a magnificent escape; a rewarding doctorate in developmental psychology Sex with two women and dozens of men. Somehow that didn’t seem even odd. Four years as a mechanic in Africa, driving trucks that got blown up regularly.
Like a memory of a memory, I could feel the union he’d felt with the other mechanics in his transportation platoon, and his longing for the sensation.
It was over with a click. I looked at him. “That’s why you’re doing this?”
He smiled. “Though it’s not the same. Like singing in the shower when you used to be in a choir.”
Carolyn was next, and when she sat back down next to me, she softly nudged me with her hip, and you didn’t need telepathy to know we were thinking the same thing.
One by one, the others had their sample.
“Okay,” Kerry said, “That was the first stage of your warm-up. Now we go to the next level.” We followed him into an adjacent room.
Ten of the so-called cages were lined up along the far wall. They were like recliners with lots of plumbing and electronics attached.
We wouldn’t have to do the plumbing until the end of Basic, since we wouldn’t be plugged in for more than a few hours at a time. When it became ten days, our usual monthly stint, we’d have to be fed and emptied automatically, which they said wasn’t bad once you got used to it.
The soldierboys we were going to be plugged into were in a vacant lot somewhere outside. For the first couple of days, we did “raise your right foot, raise your left foot” exercises; then walking and going up stairs. By the third day, we were jogging in formation, having crossed a major threshold: knowing you had to stop thinking about what you were doing, and just do it. Trust the machine. The machine is you.
Meanwhile, we started hooking up to each other in the evenings, without the soldierboys, one on one and then in larger groups.
Being with Carolyn was thrilling and a little scary—if anything, she felt even more strongly about me than I did about her. And we were so totally different—her intuitive intelligence versus my analytical nature, her streetwise emotionally jarring youth played out against the support and love I’d gotten from my family. Our bodies were different, not just in female/male matters; she was small and fast and I was neither. We enjoyed experimenting with each other’s bodies; she said every girl should have a dick of her own for a while. I enjoyed the strangeness of being her, and then the familiarity, though the first time I menstruated, it was like a shocking wound, even though I was ready for it. She was sympathetic but amused—”you big pussy”—and I eventually got over it, though I never got to the point, like her, of looking forward to it, as a kind of affirmation of “my” womanhood.
(None of the other women had that attitude, I came to find out. Sara and Arlie had suppressed ovulation for an indefinite length of time, and the other two didn’t especially like it, b
ut didn’t like the anti-fertility drugs either.)
Being linked to the others, male and female, was less intense than with Carolyn, though it was pretty sexual with Sara, Candi, and Mel. That was odd enough—Mel wasn’t like Kerry; he’d never had or desired sex with a man. When he was linked with me or one of the other guys, though, it was pretty obvious that he’d been suppressing a natural attraction to his own sex, and that’s something you couldn’t hide from another mechanic even if you wanted to. After some initial embarrassment, he didn’t want to hide it.
When we were just doing one-on-one, the other eight people’s life stories were pretty far away, like a novel you’d intensely studied in school. When we started doing threesomes and more, it was a lot more complicated. At first, you’d lose track of who—or where—the “I” was. With two, you could be in a state where both lives merged in a kind of selfless integration. I could do that with about half of them.
