Love Minus Eighty (7 page)

“Excuse me.” The screen of a pretty, fully-shaven woman was floating alongside him. “How are you today? Nifty?”

“Seminifty at best,” Rob said, smiling wanly, wondering if she could possibly be hitting on him. That would be nice in a way, though he couldn’t afford to go out with someone, even if he’d felt like it.

“I’m trying to find the Winkle Systems outlet. I know it’s around here somewhere.” She three-sixtied her screen, then faced him again.

Rob gave her a puzzled look. “Can’t you query your system? I don’t have one.”

“I noticed,” she said. “I was wondering why.”

He shrugged, trying to look carefree but feeling like a turd that needed to be washed into the sewer, like the turds that seemed to be everywhere now that his system wasn’t filtering out all but the ones in his immediate path. “I don’t know, I guess I’ve got other priorities for my money right now.”

“You know, you can get a basic one for almost nothing. Why don’t you come to Winkle with me? I can show you—”

An ad. It wasn’t a woman, it was a Goddamned ad. “Oh,
you’re kidding me. Get lost, you lousy shit-screen.” He walked away. The screen followed, launching into a flat-out sales pitch now that it had been outed. Out of habit he reached for his system to block the damned thing, but his fingers found nothing but his shirt. Without a system he had no way to block it (if he’d been wearing one, it would have filtered the damned thing out to begin with), so all he could do was ignore it as it rattled on. He broke into a jog, but the ad kept pace, speeding up its pitch, talking faster than any human could.

Mindlessly, he reached for his system
again
, trying to open a screen to escape the thing. He barked a curse. How long would it be before he finally stopped instinctively reaching for his system?

In his first break of the day, a micro-T glided down, wrapped around the outside of a tube like a butterfly clinging to a branch. Rob ran to catch it, hopped in behind the old women who had flagged it. He headed for a seat, leaving the ad on the outside looking in, its beautiful face frowning. From his seat he watched it glide away in search of another defenseless sucker.

“Sir? Please pay six dollars.” The micro-T’s drone operator startled him; its head was rotated one hundred eighty degrees, looking back at Rob with its big, round, lidless eyes. The micro-T wasn’t moving; he’d forgotten that the old handheld he’d salvaged from a discard site didn’t have automatic debit capability. It wasn’t much more than a toy, really. He couldn’t pop a screen with it, couldn’t block anyone, couldn’t alter what he saw or smelled or felt. Sheepishly Rob stepped up front, pressed the handheld’s screen to the micro-T’s interface.

As they pulled away, rising up, the shell twisting and turning but the passenger compartments constantly rotating to
remain level with the ground, Rob noticed the old woman looking at the handheld wrapped around his knuckles. He slid it into his pocket like a dirty secret. When he’d picked it out of a ten-buck clearance bin it had been caked with dust; it had probably been dumped down a High Town recycling tube ten years earlier, and had sat on the shelves ever since.

A black despair settled over Rob as they headed toward the suburbs, the sun rising behind them. Without his system he felt slow and stupid. And
empty
. It was like he didn’t recognize himself. Rob was gone, and this other guy—this
loser
—was in his place. For the hundredth time, he reminded himself that this was only temporary, that what mattered was making things right with Winter.

The micro-T cleared a ridge and the Manhattan skyline rose outside Rob’s window. It was dominated by the towers of High Town—the Second Life Building, CDC Headquarters, Porter Rise—porous, colorful spirals reaching toward the clouds, caught in a vast web of bridges and platforms and tubes. Rob smiled wistfully, remembering how as a child he’d referred to them by their colors—the green building, the orange building, the pink building. Lemieux Bridge burst from the east side of High Town and touched down on the New Jersey side of the Hudson like a chrome rainbow, while light copters, flitting like silent mosquitoes, peppered the sky. Private islands crowded the river and bay, like alien invaders wading to shore.

How could he have thought for a moment that he belonged up there in any permanent way?

The clunky steel towers of Low Town, embarrassingly straight and solid, huddled in the dimness below. The amputated stubs of the Empire State Building and Freedom Tower were lost in the shadows of the underside of the platform.

He tried to picture the city as it had been a century earlier, with no High Town at all. He remembered the first time he’d seen a picture of the old Manhattan in school, in the days before dwindling oil supplies and the soft apocalypse caused people to abandon their cars and squeeze into the cities and close-in suburbs by the millions. From what Rob understood, the tubes, plus solar, wind power, etcetera, meant that the know-how was there for everyone to spread back out like it used to be, but the money wasn’t there to build it all. So only raw-lifers and the very poor lived far outside the cities now.

The slowing of the micro-T snapped him out of his reverie. He was in New City, the end of the line. New City had been named so long ago that the founders had no idea what a joke the name would become. Rob didn’t relish the seven-mile walk to his dad’s house.

First, though, he would stop at the tubes to get some groceries. Dad kept telling him he didn’t need to, but it felt wrong not to contribute. He was living rent free; the least he could do was buy some food once in a while.

Rob felt the loss of the city most keenly while wading among the tubes, which looked like brightly colored, chest-high mushroom stalks surrounded by screens sporting logos and blaring advertisements. In the city there were actual stores, with actual merchandise right there. Once, there’d been stores in the suburbs as well, but as he’d learned in school, they died during the soft apocalypse. Their corpses were everywhere, some rotting, others converted to housing. Now if you lived far out of the city, your stuff was shot to you at high speed in maglev tubes. Unless you lived too far out, in which case you were fucked. Although if you lived that far out, you probably couldn’t afford to pay anyway.

He headed straight for the biggest tube, the only one that
had a line. The line for Superfood, the fed’s answer to hunger, purchased from vast ocean farms. It didn’t taste that bad, really, despite all the jokes. Even paella would probably begin to taste bad if you ate it three meals a day. When it was his turn, he worked the screen—which had no words, just pictures to serve a semi-illiterate clientele. Then he slumped onto a bench and waited while some drone twenty miles away assembled his order.

A blue jay flapped by, searching for breakfast. Instead of enjoying its flight as he used to do, Rob watched it with envy. Along with guilt, envy was a common emotion these days. He envied everyone, everything. He was used to bad things happening, used to setbacks. How many times had he auditioned for a gig and been turned down? His natural response was to shrug it off, stay positive. He never imagined a situation where he screwed up so badly it would be impossible to make it right, it would be unthinkable to shrug it off. Running someone over required him to stay in a perpetual state of mourning. If he laughed too loud, no matter the situation, it would seem insensitive. Not that he ever felt like laughing.

When the orange light flashed, Rob pushed himself up from the bench. He swiped his index finger over the ID port and his groceries dropped down the delivery chute.

With the straps of the disposable grocery pack digging into his shoulders he walked along the churned-up blacktop of Route 304, the solar plant rising to his left, the collectors like hundreds of giant magnifying glasses raised on poles, the ground below a smooth silver field. To his right, the sun was setting behind pod-style apartment high-rises, the pods worn and cracked, stacked haphazardly along zigzagging walkways. Beyond the pods, the reclamation center sat at the base of Ramapo Mountain, the gargantuan mountain of trash.
He’d once read that ninety percent of the mountain was actually composed of discarded microchips, but that was hard to believe.

Rob stopped, set the groceries in the road, swung one arm and then the other in a big circle to ease the burning in his shoulders as he stared at the reclamation center. Vince, his friend since childhood, worked at the reclamation center, and could probably get Rob a job there. Lots of hours. Shitty pay, but not as shitty as the other options available to him. Walking distance from home. It made perfect sense, even if it was grueling, tedious work under extremely unpleasant working conditions, from what Vince had told him. It was probably time to call Vince. Rob picked up the groceries and kept walking.

Two miles later, he passed one of the enormous pilings that supported Percy Estate, and the pink sky disappeared. Many of the residents of these private estates that stood high above the clustered burbs never set foot in the towns beneath—they flew back and forth to High Town in copters. Rob rarely noticed the latticed roof over his old neighborhood anymore, just took as a given that all of his childhood memories were set in a mottled half-light, and sometimes in full shadow, because at times even the filtered sunlight vanished, hidden behind the stables, the guesthouse, or the main tower residence of Percy Estate. Occasionally the sun would move behind the Percy Estate’s pool, and Rob’s neighborhood was bathed in a shimmering, dreamlike bluish light. When that happened, kids in the neighborhood used to send messages to each other and they’d all run outside, thinking it was the coolest thing.

Lycan came back. He told her it had been a week since his first visit. Mira had no sense of how much time had passed. A week felt the same as thirty years. It didn’t feel as if
no
time had passed, though. It wasn’t an eyeblink, although by all rights it should be, since she was dead in the interim.

“Just out of curiosity I visited a few other women. They weren’t nearly as interesting as you. Modern women can be so shallow, so unwilling to seek a common ground. I don’t want a relationship that’s a struggle—I want to care about my wife’s needs, and have her care about mine.”

“I know just what you mean,” Mira said, in what she hoped was an intimate tone. As intimate as her graveyard voice could manage.

“That’s why I sought you out. I thought, why not a woman from a more innocent time? The woman at the orientation said choosing a bridesicle instead of a live woman was a generous thing—you were giving life to someone who’d been
cheated of hers. It’s nice to think I’d be doing something good for someone, and you’ve been in line longer than anyone here.”

Mira had been in line a long time. Although it had only been, what, about half an hour since she died? It was difficult to gauge, because she didn’t remember dying. Mira tried to think back. Had her accident been near the city, or had she been on remote assignment? Had she done something careless to cause the accident? Nothing came, except memories of what must have been the weeks leading up to it.

“It’s so easy to talk to you,” Lycan was saying. “Out in the world, I’m so uncomfortable around women. My heart races. But I open up with you. If you weren’t in that drawer, you probably wouldn’t give me a second glance, though.”

Mira could see he was fishing, that he wanted her to say he was wrong, that she would give him a second glance. It was difficult—it wasn’t in her nature to pretend that she felt something she didn’t. But she didn’t have the luxury of honoring her nature.

“Of course I would. You’re a wonderful man, and good-looking.”

Lycan beamed. “Some people just spark something in you, make you breathe faster, you know? Others don’t. It’s hard to say why, but in those first seconds of seeing someone”—he snapped his fingers—“you can always tell.” He held her gaze for a moment, something that was clearly uncomfortable for him, then looked at his lap, blushing.

“I know what you mean,” Mira said. She tried to smile warmly, knowingly. It made her feel like shit.

There was a constant murmur of background chatter this time.

“… through life and revival, to have and to hold…”

“What is that I’m hearing? Is that a marriage ceremony?” Mira asked.

Lycan glanced over his shoulder, nodded. “They happen all the time here. It’s kind of risky to revive someone otherwise.”

“Of course,” Mira said. She’d been here for decades, yet she knew nothing about this place.

Vince met him outside the front gate of the reclamation center. “Nifty?”

“Not even close,” Rob said, falling into step beside Vince. His back still ached from the previous day, and he felt unnaturally drowsy, like he’d been drugged or was getting sick. Vince didn’t look tired, though he’d been working at the reclamation center since he finished his last year of free education at sixteen. “Do you adjust to this after a while? I’m so tired I can barely keep my eyes open.”

Vince shrugged. “I wouldn’t say you adjust. You just get used to being tired.”

Ramapo Mountain loomed beyond the reclamation center. It was conically shaped, if you discounted the huge bite taken from the left side. Vince had said they’d have the whole thing processed in another ten years, and move on to another site. Maybe that was why the building looked temporary, constructed
of a molded quilt of plastics and metals they were reclaiming from the mountain, the ceiling barely a foot above Rob’s head.

In the staging room Rob stashed his clothes in a locker, pulled on a hazard skin, and fixed the filter over his mouth and nose. Then it was out to his station on the floor, past the drones doing the heavy work, tearing open plastic shells and steel cases to expose corroded batteries, circuits, magnets, all the tasty morsels Rob and his superior human fine motor skills would remove and sort. Not that there weren’t drones that could do what he did, but they were so expensive to purchase and operate that it was cheaper to pay Rob.