Authors: John M. Cusick
“I promise.”
She rolled her eyes. “You’re not so different from most guys, you know.” She pushed open his door. “Now get out, ya bum.”
Charlie stepped onto the street. He leaned in through the open window. “Thank you, Rebecca.”
She smiled, unsure of what to say — then blew him a starlet kiss. “See you around, stud.”
Number 750 ½ had a dirty rust-colored exterior. A series of peg-like buttons lined the foyer wall, letters
A
through
Z
. Charlie pressed
P
.
“Yes?” a girl’s voice answered. She had a thick Latino accent.
“We’re here to see May.”
“No one here by dat name.”
Charlie pressed the button again.
“Please. I need her to help my friend.”
“She no here. Dank you. Good-bye.”
“What do we do?” Rose asked.
“I don’t know.”
“Your friend have number?” The voice came back.
“I’m sorry. What?”
“She have number? On her hand? Your friend?”
“Number on her hand?”
Rose held up her hands. There were no numbers. Charlie looked closely. “Let me see your palm,” he said, taking her hand. He examined her mole. If he turned it and squinted . . .
“Yes!” Charlie said, pressing the button. “She has a number.”
“I do?” Rose said, stretching the skin. “Where?”
“What her number?”
“It’s a one. She’s got a number one on her palm.”
“Just a one?”
“Just one,” Charlie said.
There was a long pause. When the voice spoke again, the accent was gone. “OK, come on up.”
There was a growling buzz, and the door unlocked. They climbed a flight of dingy stairs, passed graffitied walls. Empty bottles and Styrofoam cups gathered in the corners. At last they came to the door marked
P.
It was open a crack.
The apartment was neat and white. Black-and-white photos of old buildings hung on the walls. There was a coffee table with magazines, a couch, and folding chairs. It looked like a doctor’s office.
Six couples were waiting. Charlie recognized Martin Clark, another sophomore from Saint Seb’s, and Derek Fini from homeroom. Derek had his birthmark; Martin a wiry, almost alien frame and gaunt features. The other four, boys Charlie didn’t recognize from Saint Seb’s, were overweight, pimpled, or pasty. Each was unappealing in some way, but next to each sat a gorgeous girl, a bombshell knockout devotedly stroking his hand, or holding his arm, or resting her hand on his knee.
As they came through the door, a dozen pairs of eyes raised to meet them.
“Oh.” The word escaped Rose’s lips like a bubble, floating up to the ceiling.
“Let’s grab a seat.”
They sat across from Derek and a platinum blonde with a supermodel figure, his Companion. She was identical to Paul Lampwick’s.
“Hey, Charlie,” Derek said. He held his Companion’s hand in a death grip. She didn’t seem to mind. “I didn’t know you had one.”
Rose and Charlie exchanged an awkward look.
Derek looked back and forth between them, then nodded. “Oh. I get it. She’s brand-new, huh? Yeah. I got mine last week. I’m asking for the full boat. Kissing, touching, everything. Well, I know you can’t do
everything
with them. But you can do a lot without a . . . you know.”
“What’s your name?” Rose asked Derek’s Companion. Her face brightened as she turned to Rose.
“Hello, I’m Lily.” She extended a hand to shake.
“Rose,” said Rose. Lily went back to staring into space.
Derek beamed. “Isn’t she the greatest?”
Lily looked like a zombie. All the girls did. The pale brunette holding Martin’s arm looked half-asleep. There were only a few models. Sitting across the room next to a boy with ears like car doors was another Lily. There were two identical chocolate-skinned brunettes. Two with midnight-black hair and cream complexions.
Rose remembered her nightmare — the rows and rows of bodies. She hadn’t seen their faces, but now she could. Rows of blondes, rows of brunettes, rows of girls with hair like an oil slick. And their names, too. Lily. Others came to her like petals drifting to the ground. Violet. Daisy. Sakora’s little flowers. Standing in a row.
But there were no other Roses.
“Is this . . . is this what I’m like?” she whispered in Charlie’s ear.
“No,” Charlie whispered back. “Not at all.”
At the far end of the room a heavy metal door squealed open. A short girl with a black bob appeared. She was dressed in overalls, a tie-dye T-shirt, and loose sneakers. She pulled off a pair of industrial welding gloves and grinned.
This,
Charlie thought,
must be May Poling.
The black-market Companion tech.
“All righty, folks, who’s next?”
Derek raised his hand.
May’s liquid blue eyes scanned the room and came to rest on Charlie and Rose. Her mad-scientist grin faltered.
“Whoa, hold everything.” She was at their side in three steps. “Who is this
vision
?”
“Uh . . .” Charlie said.
“May Poling.” She shook Rose’s hand. “I’m a Pisces, and very good with my hands. And you are”— she looked Rose up and down —“absolutely
marvelous.
”
Rose’s cheeks turned the color of her hair. “Oh . . . thank you.”
“Come, you first,” she said, pulling Rose to her feet. “You may bring your boy with you,” she added, waving vaguely at Charlie.
“But . . .” Derek said. “But we’ve been here an hour.”
“Tut-tut, Mr. Fini. All in good time.”
The adjoining room was lined with worktables. Shelves of metallic parts covered the walls. If the waiting room was like a doctor’s office, the lab was an auto garage. Loops of wire slung from the ceiling, and clunky equipment beeped and hummed and flashed tiny lights. Some of it still bore faded pink cherry blossoms, though the insignia had been scratched out or, in one case, painted with a red bull’s-eye.
“You’ll have to pardon the mess,” May said. She noticed Charlie staring at her equipment. “Yeah, OK, I took some souvenirs when I quit Sakora. Call it ideological differences.
‘Solutions for Life,’
” she said in a snotty voice. “As if life was a problem! Please, have a seat. Let’s chat.”
They sat on a sagging mustard couch. May dropped into a rolling chair and tipped back, propping her sneakers on a bench.
“So the first thing you need to know is that I believe in
choice,
” May said. “I think a girl ought to choose for herself what sort of touching is OK and what isn’t. So what I do here, I do for the Companion, not for the dude.”
Charlie cleared his throat. “We’re not here about that.”
May looked at Charlie, then at Rose. “Who’s your boy?”
“Charlie Nuvola,” Charlie said. “And I’m not her boy.”
May raised an eyebrow.
“And she’s not my girl,” he added quickly. “We’re just friends.”
“And is that the problem?”
Rose cleared her throat. “I lost my boy.”
May’s face went serious. “How?”
“He doesn’t want me anymore.”
May scratched her nose. “Why not?”
Charlie shifted in his seat.
“Because he couldn’t have sex with me,” Rose said.
May considered this. “Go on.”
“I want to know if you can get him out,” Rose said. She tapped her temple. “Out of here.”
“Ah.”
“Ever done it before?” Charlie asked.
Her thoughtful scowl broke into a grin. “No. But I can’t wait to try.”
Charlie sat back. Rose squeezed his hand. “Um, how much do you charge for that?” he said. “I don’t have a lot of money.”
“I work pro bono. Or, pro boner, as some of the boys say.” She rolled her eyes.
“Boys.”
Charlie shook his head to clear it. He was finding it hard to follow her meaning. “I feel sort of . . . weird.”
May leaned forward. “Oh, yeah, don’t mind that. You’re just a little stoned.” She laughed, a tumbling, excited titter. “I’m sorry, I should have told you. It’s all thanks to old Bessie here.” She rapped her fist against a tin water jug with a thick black extension cord connected to the base. “There’s weed up here in the neck. It’s calibrated so only the THC burns. No smoke. Just sweet goodness.” She favored them with a loopy grin. “Pretty great, huh?”
Rose eyed the dented canister. It looked nothing like Charlie’s dad’s equipment. “You’ve got weeds in there?”
Another titter, this one even higher. “Oh, sweetie. We do need to educate you, don’t we?”
“Jesus.” Charlie rubbed his temples. “It’s like there are cotton balls in my head.”
May took a dramatic breath. “Yeah, it’s pretty good stuff. I can sell you some if you want. . . .”
“No.” His words were slow, sluggish. “Just . . . do the thing so we can get out of here.”
“Suit yourself.” May ambled over. “Stand up, angel. Let’s take a look at you.” She tugged a flashlight from her
tool belt. She was a few inches shorter than Rose, and stood on tiptoe to shine the light in her eyes.
“I don’t feel . . . stoned,” Rose said. “I mean, I certainly don’t feel like there’s cotton balls in my head.”
“No talking during the examination.” She flicked off the tiny light and held it in her teeth. Rose could smell her breath — soda and corn chips. She kneaded Rose’s temples.
May mumbled unintelligibly.
“I didn’t understand that.”
“You won’t feel stoned,” May said, taking the flashlight from her mouth, “because you don’t have those receptors. In fact, you don’t have any receptors at all. Your lungs are just a pair of bellows.” Her eyes wandered over Rose’s chest. May grinned. “Nice ones, by the look of it.”
Charlie stood. “I’m going for a walk.”
“Bring me back a candy bar,” May called after him. “And MoonPies! Bring back MoonPies, too! Poor guy,” she said once Charlie was gone. “Some people really tweak out. All right, sister. Up on the operating table, please.” She gestured to the high, skinny bed by the window. “Make yourself comfortable.”
Rose stretched out. “Will this hurt?”
May leaned over Rose’s stomach to adjust the blinds. Sunlight fell across the bed in stripes.
“I’m not exactly sure,” she said, scootching a stool to the bedside. “I’ve never done this before. But it’s all the same operating system. Sakora is sophisticated, but not
that
sophisticated. Believe me, I know.”
“Are you
sure
you know what you’re doing?”
May smiled. Her eyes were like wobbly puddles of blue behind her thick glasses. “Honey, if I can unlock sixty lines of randomly generated code to override the Intimacy Clock, I’m sure I can cure a broken heart.”
“There’s something wrong with my
heart
?”
May paused. “Sweetness, is your satellite link disconnected?”
Rose looked away. “I . . . broke it. The voice kept telling me to go back to David. So I jumped in a lake.”
May scowled. “You could have killed yourself.” She sighed. “Still, I can’t blame you. Voice in your head telling you everything you do is wrong. I can relate, being a Catholic.” She laughed at her joke.
“Thank you for doing this,” Rose said.
May slipped her glasses into the pocket of her overalls. Her eyes were small but pretty, the big blue pools shrinking to tiny crystals, fractured by veins of green.
“So here’s the deal. I can’t just pop open your hood and start poking around with a pair of pliers. It doesn’t work that way. Companions are programmed noninvasively, through light and sound. Part hypnosis, part fiber optics, part . . . I don’t know, subliminal messaging.” She held the flashlight over Rose’s right eye, then her left. “Just lie back and think of London, sweetie.”
The light began to flash.
“Am I supposed to feel something . . . ?”
“You will. Trust me.”
Flash-flash. Flash-flash.
“I don’t feel anything.”
“Don’t look at me; look at the light.”
Flash-flash. Flash-flash-flash.
“Just ones and zeros,” May said, almost whispering. Almost melodic. “Ones and zeros. Off and on. Left and right. East and west.”
Flash-flash. Flash-flash.
“On and off.”
Flash-flash.
Flash.
There was nothing but light. The light before life.
Rose heard voices.
“Number?” Husky, low, tired.
“One.” High, clipped, familiar.
“One?”
“The first in her series. The first and only.”
“Town?”
“Westtown, Mass.”
The husky one yawned. “OK, what’s the name on the record?”
“David Sun.”
“As in Sun Enterprises? Is he the mogul’s kid?”
The clipped voice paused. “Yes, I believe so.”
“Lucky guy.”
“In more ways than one.”
“What’s the model?”
“A new model.” The clipped voice was breathless, full of delight. “She’s Rose.”
“Very good, Mr. Foridae.”
“I’ll be watching this one very closely.”
For a moment no sounds, just the light, the light that blocked out everything, oppressive, so heavy on her eyes. Light like stone.
“OK. Shall I upload her?” the tired voice asked.
“Yes. Do it now.”
The light began to flicker, to flash.
Gasps of black — penetrating, delicious, empty gaps to breathe in.
Flash-flash. Flash-flash-flash.
Breathe, Rose, breathe in.
Breathe in!
Rose sat up, gasping.
“Whoa there!”
May pulled her flashlight away and placed a steadying hand on her back. Rose felt as if a hand had reached inside her — or a pair of pliers — and clasped and twisted and crushed her insides. She clutched her chest, gasping, feeling her heart and bellows and diodes popping back into place.
“What was that?”
“Reprogramming,” May said. She eased her back onto the bed with gentle pressure. “Lie down.”
“It was awful.”
“I’m sorry. I’ve never seen that happen before.”
“I saw . . . light. And heard voices.”
“Stimuli linked to the moment of conception.” She spoke low, talking to herself. Her fingers prodded Rose’s face, her scalp. “Fascinating.”