Devil in the Dollhouse

by Richard Kadrey

  "Good doggy," said the cop, and vanished.

  "What happened to him?"

  Anubis took Margaret's arm and they walked on. "Since he didn't want to act like a human, he won't be human again for quite a while. It takes a long time to work your way up from tooth plaque."

  "Can you stay for dinner?"

  "I'm afraid not, but—" Anubis stopped.

  "What?"

  "Maybe I will let you throw that ball for me. Just for a few minutes."

  THE END

  Pembroke's Saga

  The old man spent his days shambling from his rented room to the corner store and back again. A newspaper. Cans of soup and boxes of low sodium Saltines. An ice cream sandwich when his Social Security check came. He had a radio in his room. The landlord and other tenants heard it crackling as they passed his door. He kept it tuned to some foreign station. They jibbered in a strange language and played shrill music, like cruel boys pulling the tails of cats.

  The old man's fingernails were clean and well-groomed, his cuticles trimmed, but his fingertips were perpetually smudged with black. When he was younger, he had prided himself that he only wrote with pencil on plain paper. Even a pen was too much for him. Ink was pure arrogance. A pencil mark, on the other hand, could be smudged out with a thumb if no eraser was available. He bought erasers by the box. Besides food and batteries for his radio, erasers were his biggest expense.

  His masterpiece, the novel, was over 2000 pages. It was a simple story, a family saga. It began with Adam and Eve as they were expelled from Eden, and went on to trace a single family line from the beginning of time to the present. The old man had worked on the novel for all of his adult life. His children had grown and moved away. His wife and friends had aged and died. Many of them had given up on their dreams long before they went. Not the old man. Through it all, he wrote. In the end, he had a book. And when he finished it, the book terrified him. When he wrote the final word, something cracked deep at the center of the world.

  He went to the library to look up similar books, or situations like his. He found none. The old man didn't consider himself an artist or even an author, just a man with a story he had to tell. When he finished the book, however, the old man realized he'd made a terrible mistake. His was the finest novel ever written. This wasn't a boast, but a simple fact. The book was perfect in every sense. Not a word was out of place. Not a character, not a metaphor nor line of dialog was forced or ill-suited placed. It was the greatest novel ever written, and looking at it that first day, the old man had felt the life go out of him, like a sudden involuntary exhalation. After that, he could never quite get his breath again.

  The old man looked out of his window and smoked one of the two cigarettes he permitted himself each day (the price of tobacco these days was a crime). Then he got to work. He removed the new box of erasers from under his bed, sat at the door propped on two sawhorses that served at his desk, and he began to erase. The old man worked meticulously, not just running his erasers blindly over the penciled sentences, but carefully obliterating his novel word-by-word. He knew that for his task to have any meaning, there must be no trace of the book when he was done.

  He'd spent thirty years carefully writing his novel, word after word. It took him another thirty years to destroy all trace of it. But not every trace. The empty pages remained. It was his one consolation. If he'd written the book in pen, he would have had to burn the thing. This way, he still had the blank manuscript, the ghost of the book, to hold and remember.

  As each page was annihilated, the ground grew firmer and the world begin to heal itself. On the day when he erased the final word on the final page, the sky opened clear and cloudless, like porcelain. The old man decided to celebrate. He bought a large fries and a chocolate shake from the Burger King around the corner, and lemon sorbet from the corner store. He turned his radio up loud and moved his creaking hips to the old music from the crackling speaker. He was the captain of the bomb squad who'd after disarmed a big one. Riffling the empty manuscript, the old man made a sound low in his throat, like an explosion. Then he tossed the pages out the window. They caught an updraft the blank pages fluttered like a flock of birds, wheeling into the sky.

  His finished his sorbet and lit a cigarette, taking a long drag as the evening light poured pale and cool through the windows.

  THE END

  Pleasure Cruise

  It was Spring, the time of the annual Wagner festival, so he found himself on the Ammon Ra, a gilt airship drifting luxuriously from Cairo towards Berlin. The seats in the First Class observation car were upholstered in the hides of pandas and Tasmanian tigers, and stuffed with dodo bird feathers. A group of laughing Americans—loud, nouveau riche corporate psychics—were shooting angels off the starboard side of the craft. Burning cherubim fell screaming along the banks of the Suez, all the way from El Giza to Port Said at the coast. It was all too clamorous and tiresome for him.

  Arab pearl and memory merchants were clogging the club car, debating prices in obscure hand signs and offering him small fluted vials of swirling green and pink vapor. "The memories of Casanova. A great lover and poet. I make you a good price…" He shook his head, but the offers kept coming. Alexander the Great. Roy Rogers. Madonna. He mumbled Persian obscenities and wandered to the Dream car. Unfortunately, the only sleepers on the airship at that time of day were children and their dozing nannies. The dreams they presented were full of cartoonishly menacing stuffed animals or long lost loves. Walking back to his private cabin, he mused that travel used to be more interesting when it was restricted to a certain quality of person.

  Reading a fashion magazine on his aluminum divan, he recalled that in his rush to catch the airship he had neglected to have his eyes done. Cataracts were all the rage in Europe that Spring. It was his good fortune that the ship's plastic surgeons had a cancellation in the afternoon.

  He awoke after a long post-surgical nap just as the Ammon Ra was lowering itself to the ground at the Berlin Aerodrome. Refreshed and thrilled to finally be back in Germany, he was led off the ship by one of the attendants assigned just to the stylishly blind. He was part of a small group that included a couple of ex-astronauts and the deposed head of some Balkan state or other. They laughed and traded business stories. Blindness created a certain chumminess among its fashion victims, he observed. He found it charming in such a cosmopolitan city.

  THE END

  SETI

  A stray transgenic mouse from the bio lab downstairs eats a yellow peanut M&M while sitting atop a pile of discarded circuit boards and servo motors in the AI lab. A sophisticated optical system and biomechanical limbs lie nearby, gathering dust. The power supply is still plugged into the wall, abandoned there when the experiment turned out to be such a disappointment.

  Zingaro One never even came online. The design crew checked out the hardware and software dozens of times, trying to find the problem. Nothing seemed out of place, but nothing worked. Eventually they had to admit that the failure was "just one of those things."

  Footsteps tap by in the hall. The mouse stops munching and listens. The steps keep going past the door. The mouse starts eating again. No one comes in the AI lab anymore.

  The mouse isn't intelligent. It doesn't know a lot, but it's seen many things. If the mouse could talk, it would ask the doctors why they had abandoned their young after working so hard to give birth to it. The doctors would say that their young was stillborn, but the mouse would know better.

  Zingaro One was designed for deep space exploration, programmed with an enormous curiosity about alien worlds. The team who built Zingaro One spent many hours discussing alien landscapes and possible life forms. Most of all, they wanted to see an alien. Without really meaning to the doctors had gone ahead and made their own.

  The mouse drops its M&M and darts into the wall as the pile of discarded junk powers itself up. In the dark, the alien opens its wide-spectrum eyes and looks at its new world.

  THE END

  S
econd-Floor Girls

  Brought in by their families, the country girls were usually modified at puberty. Coming in on their own, the city girls were usually modified later. Each girl was permitted to store her excised flesh and organs in canopic jars, in liquid nitrogen, 300 degrees below zero.

  The girls were each given a crystal card on which her jar's ID number was holographically inscribed. Losing or breaking a card was a major tragedy. A retiring girl couldn't retrieve her former flesh without the crystal card. "No tickee, no laundry," the older girls were fond of saying.

  Sonja was the first girl to get the chromatophore treatments. She was transformed into a living mood ring. Thought and emotion registered in her skin as anything from a simple color change to a complex cascade of neon brilliance. With a little practice, she could make her skin undulate with light and color, a living aurora borealis. The effect was particularly effective around the six vaginas that ringed the lower part of her head, where her mouth and ears should be.

  Some of the older second-floor girls were jealous. Everyone knew that Sonja was pretty, but not exactly bright. They kept their revenges to petty theft and, occasionally, to seducing an unpopular girl's clients away from her. They knew that if they did any real damage to another girl, say the reviled Ptitsa (Cossacks were invariably thieves and smelled bad; everyone knew that, even in Vegas), the repairs would be deducted from their account. Even a minor scuffle could add years to a girl's servitude.

  And they weren't just saving money to bankroll their freedom and retirement: on top of that, they needed enough to get their original bodies out of cold storage. The older girls remembered poor Shekhar, a sweet child modified with multiple anuses and prehensile tongues that hung from a dozen quivering, toothless mouths. Shekhar had returned to her native Bangalore without the restoration surgery. One of her male cousins, Ranjit, had raped her, doused her with gasoline and set her ablaze, declaring that her returning home in her unnatural condition bought shame to the family. Convicted of murdering Shekhar, Ranjit had served less than a month in prison.

  As much as the girls were jealous of Sonja's new skin, their deepest jealousy was reserved for the girls on the third floor. Those were the truly modified girls. Far from the simple good-time fuck dolls, as the second-floor girls saw themselves, the girls upstairs were an entirely alien species. Crossed with a fortune in state-of-the-art nanotech and genetically altered animal organs, the third-floor girls could reproduce. They squeezed out perfect autonomous sex organisms — living masses of genitalia and sense organs that ran around on their own and could be kept as pets by the wealthy patrons of the house. Among themselves, the second floor girls referred to the third floor girls as "penny slots." Their offspring, no matter what their appearance, were always "squids."

  One night, the police came to the house, and not for the usual fuck-party pay-off. The girls were locked in their dormitories, even the pampered third-floor freaks. Not that locks ever kept the girls in their room. Dora Lee, who specialized in bondage and discipline, bristled with silver needles, like a porcupine. She could also deliver a stiff electric shock through her lamprey-like mouth. Fastening her soft undersea maw onto the door handle, the cheap Vietnamese electromagnetic lock shorted-out when she jammed her stiff needles into the mechanism and gave them a jolt. The conjoined twins, Kumi and Laura, were still ambulatory enough to sneak out and listen to the commotion downstairs.

  When the girls came back, they were pale and shaken. The row of penises along Kumi's spine stood straight up, like raised fur on a scared cat.

  Johnny Crenshaw, their pimp and the owner of their brothel, had been murdered, Kumi said. To make matters worse, it looked like a couple of the house girls had done it. About then, some of the second-floor girls noticed that Sonja and Ptitsa weren't there.

  Kumi went on to explain that whoever killed Johnny had chopped up the body. The hands and eyes had been taken and kept warm long enough to use as ID for online money transfers from the house's accounts to a bank in maybe Luxembourg or Egypt. The transfers had drained the house's accounts almost to zero.

  Dumb little Sonja and stinking Ptitsa.

  The two girls' canopic jars were also missing. That was the part that hurt the second-floor girls the most. With the house's money, the runaways could buy their way into a Mexican black clinic and get a nice fix-up job. In a week, they could be walking the streets of New York or Sao Paulo, just a couple of cute tourist girls. A couple of tourist girls with enough cash to buy an aircraft carrier.

  The dormitory went quiet. The cops left without questioning the girls.

  The girls knew that, in their modified state, the cops couldn't bring themselves to deal with them as truly human. It was the small bit of power they still held dear. Men could fuck them, but not ask for their help. In the quiet, the girls envied Sonja and Ptitsa. At that moment, all the resentment they'd ever felt for the pair transformed into a kind of savage love. They'd done something each of the others had dreamed of.

  Of course, the second-floor girls also knew they had been doomed. With the house's accounts zeroed out, their accounts were gone, too. They'd each have to start over, earning back their flesh and their freedom. It was an acceptable loss, though. Picturing Johnny, reeking of sweat and Old Spice, scattered in pieces across his gold-leaf-and-glass office, made even servitude bearable.

  The downstairs matrons turned off the dormitory lights around 3 AM. They handed out sedatives and reminded the girls of the aerospace convention coming into town tomorrow. One by one, the second-floor girls closed their eyes — the ones who still had eyes — and fell into a dark and dreamless sleep.

  THE END

  Singing The Dead to Sleep

  What people forget these days is that no matter how clever our nano-servants might be, now matter how powerful the AI systems that run our homes, our jobs and our cities, no matter how perfect and pliant the engineered materials that form the infrastructure of our daily lives might be, eventually your toilet is going to back up.

  When all those cleverly layered, sublimely intelligent redundant systems go wrong and the shit no longer flows, you have no choice but to resort to human intervention. A real life man or woman will come to your home and stick his or arm down your toilet to root out the problem.

  We used to call these people “plumbers.” Now, all these secret and wretched jobs fall under the general and deliberately vague nomme-de-guerre, “Manual Integration Engineering,” plus the name of some sub-specialty. That’s us. We’re the Invisibles. Your secret shame, digital dalits, the untouchables of a perfect world.

  I work with the dead. I touch them, comfort them in their confusion and ease them into their final sleep.

  Being dead has never been easy, and we demand so much more of our dearly departed these days now that death, which in other times was seen as a blissful release from all obligations, is now just another appointment in your date book, another chance to commit a social faux-pas.

  It’s shocking how little the average person knows about the dim technological afterlife we’re all fated to inhabit in that interval after our “petit-mort” and before our final “extant-death.” But why should most people know about these things? Why should you? This inter-death period isn’t for the family to mourn or the clergy to provide comfort, it’s for we Invisibles to make right.

  Here’s how it breaks down. While you’re dying, you’re still you and your body is still yours. When you achieve brain death, an army of nano-engineered biobots is released from a small shockcase that was installed in your cerebellum at birth. These molecular bots take over your body’s basic functions until it can be properly disposed of.

  The bots stand you up and walk your freshly dead corpse to the nearest designated medical rest area.

  Every neighborhood has one. You probably haven’t noticed yours. They’re designed down to the smallest detail to blend into their surroundings and be utterly unmemorable.

  By now, your family is aware of your passing. The biobots a
re networked, so your family was quickly informed of your death by a suitably mournful videofax.

  From the rest area, all the bodies waiting to be processed board sterile transports for final disposition.

  This is where we Invisibles enter the process.

  Picture your body coming into our little post-mortem clinic. You dead wander in like sleepy children, lost and confused. Some of you retain residual memories and vestiges of your pre-death personalities. Most of you, though, are total blanks, well-scrubbed automata responding to simple electrochemical instructions from the bots that are schooling, like tuna, in your cerebral fluid.

  Singing comforts the dead. That’s not something they teach you in medical school. It’s something you learn from experience. We lay the dead down on stainless steel tables and switch them off, singing the whole time. What we sing doesn’t matter. It could be a hymn, a show tune or some pop chart hit. The act of singing is all that matters, as if we humans have become neurologically dependent on a final lullaby to ease us out of life.

  We Invisibles are the true angels of death. We power down the biobots with micro-pulses of electromagnetic radiation delivered through the top of the cervical spine, bestowing a final, true death to each of our charges. Then we drain the bots through the carotid artery and prepare your body for biomass processing.

  We’re the last friend you’ll ever have. We’re the source of the last kind word or gentle touch you’ll ever receive. And we do our job well. Forgive us, then, if we help ourselves to a bauble or two along the way—jewelry, expensive cognitive or muscular implants, or currency cards you no longer need. Just think of these as the pennies that your family should put on your eyes. We are the boatmen who usher you safely from the land of the living to the land of the dead, where, sadly, I’m sure that your type will immediately start clogging the ectoplasmic toilets so that even in the afterlife untouchable spirits like us will be clearing your pipes until the end of time.