Love Minus Eighty (14 page)

“It’s one forty-one,” Veronika corrected. Maybe it was petty, but she didn’t want those three points deducted. “Yeah, I’m familiar with it.”

Lycan shook his big head. “Meds aren’t the answer.”

Veronika couldn’t argue. The medical research industry was still trying, still claiming that some med going through clinical trials was going to change everything, but no matter how they messed with receptor sites, neurotransmitter levels, hormone levels, the mind always found its way back to baseline.

“For a while I thought Perion-e was the answer, then I started developing facial tics,” Lycan said.

“I worry about that.” That was the other problem. If a med worked at all, it came with a side effect—a cost that often was as bad as the problem it was meant to solve. Or worse. They’d conquered physical illness, conquered death for those who could afford it, but the mind was another animal altogether. Screwed-up minds always found a way to stay screwed up. Maybe that was because Chan-juan Yang had devoted her vast fortune to cheating physical illness and death. Maybe some other trillionaire needed to devote the same sort of resources to overcoming anxiety and despair.

“So how did you end up on that bridge?” Veronika asked. “Why that day instead of the one before or the one after?”

“I could ask you the same question,” Lycan said.

“Yes, you could.”

Lycan glanced at her. “All right. What were you doing on that bridge?”

What could she say? That she’d decided to save people more screwed up than she as a way to save herself? That sounded awfully narcissistic. Maybe it was narcissistic. Was she a narcissist? No, how could you be a narcissist with self-esteem as low as hers?

“How about we call it a draw?” Veronika finally answered. “I won’t ask you if you don’t ask me.”

They’d come to the elevator to High Town. Lycan stuck out his hand, and Veronika shook it as they stepped into the elevator.

“Of course that implies we’ll have another opportunity to ask each other. What do you think? You want to meet up again some time?”

Lycan considered. “Kind of an ‘I’m alive, what now’ club?”

“Exactly.”

Lycan tilted his head. “I actually enjoyed myself.” There was surprise in his tone, as if he’d never expected to utter those words again.

Veronika was surprised, and pleased. She’d been able to sink her teeth into these last few hours and get real nourishment. The elevator opened and they stepped out, back home in High Town. Unable to hide her satisfied grin, Veronika said, “I’ll meet you on the bridge—you know, The Bridge We Don’t Ask About. Saturday at noon.”

Lycan smiled. “All right.”

They said good-bye with a wave.

As she headed home, watching copters buzz in a blue sky scattered with high, steel-gray clouds, she felt light, energized. It wasn’t butterflies—she didn’t feel attracted to Lycan
in a romantic sense, but despite his prickly, depressive, obtuse nature, Veronika felt comfortable around him. She was sure she had just made a friend, and given the tragedy of their first meeting, that felt like magic. She would help Lycan learn to love life, or at least not despise it, and in doing so, teach herself as well.

An old woman peered down at her, squinting, frowning suspiciously, as if trying to penetrate some veneer.

“Hello,” Mira said.

“Hello.” There was even suspicion in her tone, as if Mira had come to her door uninvited and might be selling something.

“I’m looking for a companion.” She held up her hand as if Mira had tried to interrupt her. “Not a lover or anything like that. I’m too old for lovers, and for that I would need a man, in any case. I’m looking for a different sort of companion.”

“Okay,” Mira said when it was clear she wasn’t going to elaborate. “A friendship, you mean?”

The woman shook her head impatiently. “No. Deeper. Like family.”

That was perfect. A relationship she wouldn’t have to fake. Hope flickered uncertainly in her. Could she convince this
woman that she was best suited out of all the women here? “I think I understand. Like a daughter, or a granddaughter?”

“No. I don’t want to put a label on it.”

Mira was fairly sure “like family” was a label, but kept her opinion to herself. “Oh. All right.”

“Do you think you could love me”—she glanced up at the readout on the wall—“Mira? Could you love me so much you’d weep beside my deathbed?”

Mira’s first inclination was to blurt,
Yes, absolutely
, but that must be what everyone here said to her. It must sound profoundly insincere for a complete stranger to assure you that she would love you like family.

“I know I’m capable of loving deeply. My heart is open. I’d only know if I could love you for sure by spending time with you, cooking dinner with you, hearing about your life, sharing mine with you.”

The woman studied her, breathing heavily through her nose, her head bobbing with the palsy of old age. “Well, you’re out. Do you think I’d pay all that money with no guarantee?”

Mira could only get out one word as the woman reached up to send her back to oblivion, and the word was, “Shit.”

Central Park was alive with joggers, loungers, buskers, chess players, hustlers. As Rob crossed Strawberry Field toward the steps to High Town, he barely noticed anyone. He was deep in thought, thinking about how much his life had changed since the accident. It was as if he himself had died, and had been revived into an entirely different, far more unforgiving existence. When people asked what he did for a living, he couldn’t honestly answer that he was a musician, so he answered that he was a manual worker. He didn’t feel the swell of pride he used to feel telling people he was a musician. What friends he had were new as well. When he’d moved in with Lorelei in High Town, her friends had become his friends. He’d kept in touch with his burb friends, but if friendships took place primarily via screen, they tended to atrophy, because you don’t talk about core things, intimate things, via screen. When he broke up with Lorelei and moved back home, he lost most of his new High Town friends, and because he’d given up his
music, he lost touch with the friends he’d made playing Low Town clubs. What little time he had to socialize now he spent with Nathan and Veronika. They were High Towners, but they’d gone out of their way to cultivate a friendship with Rob. He was also friendly with some of the people at work, people on the opposite end of the economic spectrum from Nathan and Veronika, but besides Vince, he wasn’t sure he’d call them friends.

And then, of course, there was Winter.

He reached the bottom of the endless, twisting staircase leading up to High Town, grasped the railing, craned his neck to look up at High Town, and took a deep breath. His legs were going to be jelly. Still, part of him was looking forward to the climb. Saving the eighty-dollar elevator charge was his primary motivation for hoofing it, but as he took his first springing steps, he felt a strange freedom, like a raw-lifer living among the techies.

He got raw-lifers—he understood why someone might forsake all but the most basic tech, even though he wouldn’t willingly do so himself. You did gain something, always seeing things as they really were, being forced to stand face-to-face with someone every time you had something to say to them, even something trivial. People questioned whether there really was such a thing as technomie, if it did flatten out your emotions, dull your senses, to be wired all the time. He didn’t doubt it. What always tripped him up about raw-lifers was how they could choose to live without modern medicine. Rob had lived without it for most of his life, but not by choice. As far as Rob could see, medicine was the one area where there were no minuses to balance out the pluses. There was no downside whatsoever to having access to all that modern medicine had to offer.

In school, Rob had been taught that Chan-juan Yang was
the greatest person of the past century, a trillionaire who selflessly funneled her entire fortune into the medical research that ultimately conquered death. As an adult, he’d read a biography of Yang that was less laudatory. It depicted her as a selfish shut-in whose only concern was extending her own life. The book had been far kinder to Yo Wen Chan, the researcher who actually discovered how to revive the dead.

When he reached the halfway mark, winded but still feeling good, he cut through Brandywine Park, though it was a roundabout route to Park Avenue High and Zuckerberg, where he was meeting Veronika and Nathan, and an additional toll charge to boot. He’d be damned if he was going to climb to High Town and not see Brandywine Park, though.

Three dollars rolled off his account as he passed through the gate. It was a pittance; it took him five minutes of plucking parts at the reclamation center to earn that much, but in the new order of his life every expenditure was a defeat.

If anything was worth it, though, it was Brandywine Park. Rob chose a song from Six Anonymous to accompany his climb, wished he had a system to give him the full effect. With a system, the semitransparent pedestrium vanished, and you walked on air, six hundred feet above the roofs and streets of Low Town, passing islands of wilderness—copses of trees and vegetation set among winding staircases that looked to be made of silk thread—far too delicate to support a person.

Rob tried to ignore the readout on his handheld as he stepped onto a staircase and was charged another dollar and a half. As he climbed, the vista expanded farther. He found the patchwork of buildings, roads, parking lots, and parks that stretched to the horizons pleasing to the eye, the contrast between the busy ground and the silent, open sky in beautiful balance.

When he finally reached street level in High Town, he
realized the climb hadn’t been as bad as he’d anticipated. He was barely winded, actually. Having neither a vehicle nor money for public transport meant he was walking everywhere, and the muscles in his thighs felt harder and stronger because of it. There were upsides to living raw. Maybe one day he’d even stop missing his system.

Heading east, Rob suddenly felt like he was crawling as people soared by in their High Town shoes. He slowed further as he passed Backstreets on Fifth Avenue, recalling how he’d once told Lorelei that Backstreets was going to be the first club he played in High Town. He’d been so certain of how his life was going to unfold.

He spotted Nathan and Veronika up ahead. Nathan saw him, waved a greeting.

“Good to see you, Cousin.” Nathan squeezed Rob’s hand, looking at him like you would an old, dear friend you haven’t seen in a long time.

As usual, Veronika seemed nervous, ill at ease. Something about her gave Rob the impression she was always ill at ease.

They took an elevator toward the skywalks. Rob didn’t complain as fifteen dollars rolled off of his account balance—Nathan and Veronika seemed to keep track of what he spent when he was with them, and later dropped it into his account. Today that was a good thing, given that eating dinner in High Town with Nathan and his friends would cost two hundred easy, even if Rob drank nothing but water. While they rode, Nathan and Veronika resumed the debate they’d evidently been having when they met up with Rob.

“L-Dat’s algorithm pegged us at point eight-nine compatibility,” Nathan said. He looked to Rob. “Not that I put a lot of stock in those scores, because they assume everyone’s
telling the truth in their profiles, but still, point eight-nine! It seemed so promising until the first face-to-face.”

Rob nodded sagely. He had no idea what point eight-nine compatibility was, but didn’t want to seem ignorant.

“You just can’t tell through screens. The intangibles don’t come through,” Nathan said.

“Which intangibles are those?” Rob asked, mostly to be part of the conversation. “You mean like chemistry?”

“Yeah, chemistry, whatever that is.” Nathan waved his hands before returning them to his system, and whatever supplemental conversation he was having. “The thing is, compatibility algorithms are
fairly
effective for most people, despite their flaws. For me, they’re useless. Worse than useless—they’re counterproductive. I’m much more likely to click with a woman I meet in the wild. Take Winter, for example. I met Winter at work, when I went to her class to give a presentation on L-Dat.”

Rob felt a jolt of adrenaline at the mention of Winter’s name. He wanted to learn more about her, so he would have more substantial things to say the next time he visited, and Nathan was the person who could help him there, yet he was painfully aware of how Veronika glanced his way at the mention of Winter’s name, curious of how he would react, and how the half-dozen screens watching the action from a distance (friends of Nathan’s, he’d guessed) crept closer, not wanting to miss anything. He decided not to say anything; he’d wait for a less public moment to ask Nathan what Winter was like, and if Nathan seemed amenable, maybe ask to view some recordings of time they’d spent together. Rob had no doubt Nathan, who seemed like a true techie, recorded all of his waking moments. Of course in recent years who didn’t, besides people who didn’t own systems?

“You know, if the algorithms are misfiring that badly, I wonder if there’s a disconnect between the characteristics you’re attracted to in a woman and the characteristics that would lead you to a healthy relationship,” Veronika said.

“Oh, is that it?” Nathan raised his eyebrows.

“Either that,” Veronika went on, “or you’ve become so overwhelmed with all the possibilities, you’re incapable of settling for any one real, and therefore imperfect, woman. It’s a common problem; I see it in my clients all the time.”

“So do I,” Nathan said.

They stepped off the elevator, onto a skywalk, neither of them missing a beat.

“That doesn’t mean you’re immune to it. Just because we do this for a living doesn’t mean we’re aware of our own weaknesses.”

Rob sensed a subtext here. He wondered if Veronika and Nathan had gone out at some point. They didn’t seem like a good match—Nathan was suave and charming, Veronika kind of goofy—but he’d seen odder couples.