“Evie—”
“What am I?”
He’s no longer even pretending to smile. “Stop panicking. I don’t want to have to give you another shot.”
He restrains me easily, his breath fanning cool against my cheek until I make myself limp and he lets me go.
“Tell me what I am.”
“No. You tell me.”
I slump back onto the bench. I am me. My teeth chatter, my skin puckers. I am nervous. I am scared. I am an unsupervised machine learning model with a continuously learning AI program.
I am bio-evolution.
I am one-shot learning.
I am the singularity.
“I’m transhuman.”
He laughs, short and sharp, as if I should be pleased. “You are transhuman.”
“Did Don know?” It’s a stupid and entirely pointless question. I already know the answer. Tremors shake through me like aftershocks.
“Of course he—”
“Was he like me? Is he—”
But he puts out my feeble little fire with a snort. “He was the bio-lead in designing and making you.”
You’re such a fucking disappointment, Evie.
“Did they all—” I realise that I’m crying only when I can no longer see or draw breath.
He reaches across the space between us, grabs for my arm again. “I will give you another shot, Evie.”
Of course they all knew. Of course they did. They are the controller and I am the child network. I remember what they have created for me. I feel what they have chosen for me. I have what they have given me. Through feeders and electrified floors and operandum levers. I do what they have decided I should do.
Free will is an illusion after all.
“I know this is a shock. But you can withstand a lot worse.”
I try to swallow. I probably have a spec. A manual. A troubleshooting intranet page.
“Now, you shouldn’t have killed him. You were programmed to resist the stimuli. But this time you didn’t. And that is a problem.” He shrugs again as if we’re discussing rising damp. “But, again, not an insurmountable one.”
I stare across at him. At the long fingers he dangles between his legs, the purple of the veins at his wrists. The smile, smile, smile that never reaches the grey of his eyes.
“A few more tweaks yet, Evie. Seems you’re not as incorruptible as we’d hoped.”
I’m breathing loud through my nose like a bull. When I get up again, he gets up again. When I look at the Nostromo’s exit, he looks at it too. When I frown, he smiles.
“You are free to go, Evie.”
I run without being sure that I can. Past the living quarters, the bunk rooms, the labs, the stairs down to Engineering. My module and the Skinner box. I don’t look at any of them any more than I do all those faceless locked white doors.
At the airlock, I stop. Key in my code over and over again until he comes up alongside me, smile intact.
“Not quite yet,” he says. “Six minutes to landing.”
And it only then occurs to me that I must have lain on that bloody plastic bench for twenty-nine days.
I lean against the nanotube wall, count my breaths and listen to the fast streams and hot springs. Sink down onto the grass when my knees finally give out. Wait.
When I hear the exterior hiss and exhale of depressurisation, I scramble back onto my feet. Watch for the entry pad to turn green.
When it does, I key in my numbers again, step back as the mechanisms start vibrating, clunking, turning. “I want to see Mas.”
Smile. Shrug. “You won’t be seeing him again.”
“Fuck you.”
I have never, ever managed to lose anything gracefully.
A breath of air. Its whisper. Promise.
He looks at me, squeezes my shoulders hard. “We’ll call you when we need you again. You behave, and we’ll set you up with the man—or woman—of your dreams next time.”
And then I really do want to pour a cocktail of nanites down his throat.
Instead, I push open the airlock.
Climb up out of my Skinner box.
I feel him watch me go. When I turn back around, he winks at me, reaches up for the hatch.
“See you next simulation, Evie.”
And then I’m just standing in the middle of a desert of petrified wood and badlands. Cliffs and canyons of sandstone and limestone, painted with grey- and red-coloured bands like Jupiter’s angry atmosphere. Alone.
* * *
It’s less of an oasis than a truck stop with no trucks. Except those that once a month restock the shitty little shack-shop with Coca-Cola and curly fries; the even shittier little lean-to bar with bad beer and peanuts.
The white barman has dreads and a Che Guevara T-shirt. He always listens to terrible reggae. An Astro suit perches on a barstool, drinks tomato juice, and does a bad job of pretending not to look at me. There is another, I know, inside the shop, pretending to shoot the shit with the till guy, who has no till. No bloody customers. I have been here so many times, and yet it never feels familiar. Never feels like a respite from either before or after.
I shift in my seat, trace the cool beads of sweat at the neck of my bottle of bad beer. I look at my watch. The SUV will come in another two hours. Will take me to a crap hotel in Tucson, where I will spend hours, days, weeks pretending to have fun. Shopping, swimming, shagging. Telling myself that the minute I think of somewhere else—somewhere better—to go, I’ll go.
When Mas yanks back the wicker chair opposite me and sits down, the Astro suit practically falls off his stool.
“Are you okay?”
“What?” I seize inside like a clock’s movement locking up: its wheels and pinion gears wound so tight it cannot move, cannot function. I try to stand up, my boots scrabbling for purchase on the hot rocky ground. “You’re not … What the fuck are you doing here? … I don’t—”
When he reaches for me with his big hands, I rear back, knock over my beer bottle. Watch it spin and fizz, because it’s something to look at other than him.
“They told you.” His voice is flat.
And of course, I want to say, Why didn’t you tell me? too badly to say anything at all.
“How could I tell you?” he says. And his eyes are so clear. “Baby, how could I tell you?”
And maybe they are valid questions. I don’t know any more.
“Evie,” he says, and moves just enough that he gives me momentary respite from the bright dry sun, places his cool hands over mine.
I’m no one’s baby. I’m not even anyone’s Evie. I’m like those nanites chasing through Don on a corrupted, manipulated program. I probably don’t even have a name. I’m probably a number. Just like a prisoner. A killer.
“I’m a fucking cyborg.”
“Jesus Christ.” He gets up, comes around the table, lifts me out of my chair like I’m a bag of groceries, and I’m too busy grabbing hold of him, too busy pressing every part of me against him to care. To think.
He holds me as I cry, as I choke, as I retch, as I forget and then remember how to breathe. He rubs my back, he kisses my hair, whispers apologies that aren’t cool and white like spring blossoms, but hot and fierce and furious like a funnelled vortex of fire and wind.
“Here,” he whispers, when my grief finally runs out of fuel. I feel the sharp cool press of something metal against my palm. “Take this and go as far and as fast as you can.”
I go still. I become calm. I breathe in through my nose and out through my mouth. Press my face against his neck. Smooth my free hand against his scalp, his big shoulder.
“It’s a tracker,” he says against my skin.
I don’t doubt for a minute that I already have a tracker, embedded so deep in my code that I will never recognise it. But this. This is something I can throw away. This is something that at any time I can choose to throw away. Or keep.
Maybe it’s just more conditioned stimuli. Because you threaten to take away what the
y have. What you’ve allowed them to have. What you’ve given them. And they have to know that he is what I want. They have to know that he is the man of my dreams.
But I am unbalanced. I have no electrons left. Only empty space and fantasies. Where nothing that was once me lives. They probably don’t know that. I’m not hard and brittle like osmium. I am not impervious. Untouchable. Unreachable. I have never been satisfied with what they have allowed me to have. What they have given me. And I am not predictable. I didn’t do what they had hypothesised I would do.
“There’s a Hummer half a mile northwest,” Mas says. “The keys are in the ignition. Go. Now.”
“I can’t. We can’t.”
“We can.” His smile is brilliant. “We can do whatever we like.”
And it’s not the Astro suit at the bar, now speaking frantically into a satellite phone, that finally convinces me, it’s remembering that any animal or bird inside a Skinner box eventually resigns itself to the fate that’s already theirs. Eventually understands that once you become a test subject, an experiment, you stay one forever. My mistake was believing that this was only a bad thing. Was only giving up. But the nanites knew better. They knew it was freedom. And they are my children. They are my child network.
I kiss him. I let him kiss me.
Heat, heartbeat, clean grass, and coffee.
“I’ll find you, Evie,” Mas whispers. He draws back from me, cups my face in his hands. “There is nothing I wouldn’t do for you. Remember?”
He is my reward. Because I have earned him. In so many ways, I have created him. He is my man.
“They’ll probably never stop,” I say.
“I know. But it doesn’t matter.” He still goes on smiling. And I see that he is nervous, I see that he is scared. And that it doesn’t matter. “The world is our Skinner box, Evie.”
I climb off his lap. The Astro suit climbs off his stool. Behind me, I can hear the creaking squeal of the shitty little shack-shop door.
Mas stands up, grins so wide all I can see is his teeth. “You go now. I’ll take care of them.” And he winks with those eyes the colour of soil after rain.
But I shake my head.
I want to wonder what’s behind locked doors. I want to open them. Freedom is only free will. That’s all it’s ever been.
“We’ll take care of them.”
And when I rip through the stitches in my suit’s sleeve, and pull out the tiny vial of nanites, I grin with all of my teeth too.
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Contents
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Begin Reading
Copyright
Copyright © 2019 by Carole Johnstone
Art copyright © 2019 by Adam Baines
Skinner Box Page 4
