Accidental Creatures (3 page)

She lifted a hand to cover her mouth, and found that her face was wet. She was crying. Silent tears spilled down her face and dripped off her chin.

Behind a drugstore Helix sat on a milk crate, staring at the pavement between her shoes, seeing not the cloncrete but that waitress' face; her eyes wide, her mouth gaped in shock, in horror. She'd seen. She'd seen what Helix was, and that was why Helix was always so very careful not to be seen. In her mind she heard the shrieks and cries of her classmates as they surrounded her on the playground, Chet and Carla and Tim and Darron darting in from the circle to each grab one of her arms and then run, around and around, laughing, spinning her until she was sick and her arm sockets were sore. She remembered the whirling faces, contorted with joyous hate, and their voices, like the harsh cries of birds, calling, calling, in monotonous cacophony, “Freak Girl! Freak Girl!” And she, the eye of the vortex, screaming back, wordlessly, just screaming and screaming, her mouth open wide to show all of them her gleaming fangs.

Hector had rescued her. His first visit came the same day as the playground incident. He brought her a comic book — Clone Avengers number ninety-eight. He didn’t talk about adoption that first day. His third visit, he asked her to be his daughter. She’d been floored, mystified, but too desperate to escape her situation to question his kindness, and she never had cause to, after she went to live with him. He worked hard, it was true, and sometimes she was lonely, but he’d given her everything he could. That it wasn’t enough was her failure, not his.

He’d been up all night last night, working on some problem, fiddling with equations on his multi-processor, his face glowing green from the numbers and symbols floating in the air before him. He called them the keys to life. She didn't understand it; remained forever curious but exactly what it was that he actually did stayed well outside her grasp. All she ever saw was the multi-processor, his fingers restlessly striking keys — a far cry from the steady rhythm of the data entry work she sometimes did. Of course that was just when he was at home. Most of the time he was at the lab, and she had never been there, even though it was in the very building where they lived. She didn't even have the door number, floor number or the transceiver extension. He couldn't be disturbed when he was in the lab, she assumed, but she'd never asked, never asked for any of those things and he had never offered them, either. And this morning she’d stood in the hallway as he stumbled off to the shower, “Aren't you going to get some sleep?"

He smiled faintly and shook his head. “No, I've got to go in. I'll just get cleaned up and rummage something up for breakfast.” His smile turned more wistful still, "sure wish we had some of those pastries around.” He loved the raspberry and cream cheese danishes the bakery downstairs made. And so she'd donned his coat and made her sojourn down to the public level,walking across the inlaid marble floors, looking up, as always, at the frescoes that graced the arches of the ground floor gallery. She wore Hector’s raincoat then, too. She always did, when she went out. She had to stand in line at the bakery counter, surrounded by working men and women, normal men and women, waiting for their morning croissant or bagel or whatever. The clerk behind the counter barely looked up as she spoke.

“Six raspberry and cream-cheese danishes, two cups of coffee,“ she uttered with painstaking minimalism, her lips moving as little as possible, to reveal as little as possible. The raincoat forced her to juggle coffee cups and bag all the way to the elevators and all the way up. An elderly woman in stately blue wool smiled up at her and said, ”You need three hands."

“I have more than that,” she wanted to say, scream, shout. “I have more, oh, so much more than that.” But she only smiled thinly in mute acknowledgement.

Hector was just coming out of the shower when she got back, vigorously toweling his coarse blond hair, his white shirt partially buttoned and sticking to his damp skin. “Hey, where'd you go?” he asked, and then spied the telltale white bag on the table. “Oh, wow, thanks. Raspberry?”

“Yeah, and coffee.”

“Good, coffee,” he pried off the filmseal on one of the cups and breathed in the rich steam with gratitude.

“I don't know how you do it,” said Helix, “You practically live on that stuff.” Hector shook his head, and bit into a pastry, “I'm just going to put in an appearance today,” he mumbled,

“Graham's been paying a lot of attention to the project lately, so I'd better, but I'll come home early and get some sleep.”

Helix nodded. Early, that would be before eight. “Still, you should take a vacation. You must get time off, don't you?”

“Sure, but-”

“We could take a trip somewhere, the ocean maybe. I saw a holoclip yesterday, of the pacific ocean, the waves. I'm tired of sitting around here all the time.” The truth was she'd felt more and more lately like she should be someplace else, but she couldn't think where.

“Maybe you should attend university.”

“I do.”

“On the holonet, sure, but maybe you should attend the physical plant somewhere, Mercy or Michigan.”

“Why?”

Hector shrugged, “To get to know people, you know, face to face.” Suddenly uncomfortable, Hector stared at the table. “You're grown now, you know.”

“You think I should move out?”

“No! No. But you could commute, to Mercy anyway. I'm an alumnus, I'm sure I could get you in.”

“But I don't know what I want to do, and I don't want to waste your money.”

“I've got enough.”

“It just seems so extravagant, to go to school, when I can have it come to me for free. Besides, sitting in a classroom with all those people, I don't think... I'm not ready for that.” Hector gazed at her, and said nothing. “Well,” he said, “I'd better be going. I'll see you later.”

“Okay.”

As he was leaving, she said, “Why can’t we go on vacation?”

He stopped and looked back at her from the open door, “Because then Graham would assume that I'm through with the project, and I'm not.”

The door shut behind him and Helix gathered the empty cups and threw them in the trash, put the bag with the remaining pastries in it on the kitchen counter and wiped off the table. Then she flopped on the polyhide couch and switched on the holotransceiver. The prism, a thick, triangular column of glass sitting on the coffee table, glittered with reflected light from the transceiver, and the holoweb appeared before her.

She flipped aimlessly through the entertainment sector, catching fragments of old movies, bits and pieces of soaps, sitcoms and direct to network holofilms.

She selected the interactive drama subgroup and dialed in to We Are the World, her favorite soap. There was still a slot open for Natasha, and she grabbed it. Natasha was a wealthy business woman, the creator of Entranced Parfum, and a former wife of Olin Thatcher, the ruthless communications mogul. Natasha knew how to get what she wanted, always.

Today Natasha was meeting with her attorney in the murder case. She was innocent, at least that was what Helix believed. Samantha, the key witness for the prosecution, came out of one of the offices. The two women stood in the waiting room, staring at each other. “I hope you're paying him well, Natasha,” said Samantha, “he's going to earn every penny defending you're worthless hide.” Helix/Natasha flashed her a tight lipped smile. “Not only is Walter West an excellent attorney, he's also a man of high principles. He's representing me because he wants to see justice done.”

“Justice? You kill a man and then sleep with his wife! You call that justice?”

“You'd like to see me locked up, wouldn't you? That way I'd be out of the way, and you could move in on Amanda yourself. That's what you want, isn't it?”

“You bitch!” shouted Samantha, “I hope you fry!” Whoever was playing Samantha was a rank amateur, to blow so quickly. They could have bandied insults for several minutes more, but now the confrontation was forced to a climax. Natasha/Helix stepped up quickly and slapped Samantha across the face. Then leaned even closer and whispered,

“Don't ever talk to me like that, you little two-bit piece of gutter trash, or I'll-”

“You'll what, poison me? Like you did Lago?”

Natasha glared at her. “Think what you want, I'll have my day in court.” A secretary popped out of the office, “Ms. Ettelle? Mr. West will see you now” Natasha looked Samantha over with withering disdain, “I have to go now.”

“You haven't heard the last of this, I assure you,” Samantha said to her retreating back. By the end of the episode, Samantha was pushing for Natasha's arrest, insisting that she was violent and dangerous. Oops, thought Helix, shouldn't have slapped her. “Don't worry,” said Natasha to her lawyer,

“I'll think of something.” Of course she, Helix, didn't have to. That was for the poor shlub that played her next.

Guilty over her dalliance, Helix switched over to the educational region and scurried down the menus to the corporate tax law seminar. As she scrolled through the most recent updates on preadjusted deficit deductions, she reached over to the end table, picked up a nail file and smoothed the rounded edges of her fingernails. She liked to keep her nails in good shape. Sometimes she painted them and sat in front of the mirror in her room, legs crossed, back arched, arms waving like seaweed, hands dancing like schools of little red fish.

An hour was about all she could take of tax laws. Helix climbed back out of the educational well and accessed her mail. A few pieces of direct mail had wormed their way past her filters, too-bland-to-be-real faces assuring her of the benefits of subscription to one or another access group. One didn’t even bother with the pretense of personal communication, showing simply a vista of palm trees and brilliant blue surf. A voice over said, “Isle Oblique, it's better than being there.” Helix dumped these messages and moved on to a letter from a friend, a text file. “Good morning, Helix, it’s Night Hag. What you been up to? Call me.”

Helix dialed Night Hag’s number. Her page circuit was open, but she didn’t answer until the seventh beep. “Helix, hi.” The holographic image of a slender woman with long, straight dark hair and olive toned skin appeared before Helix. She was reclining on a white vat leather chair. She wore black jeans, a black leather jacket, and round, opaque sunglasses.

“How do you like it?”

Oh, Helix liked it. A lot. “It’s cool.”

Night Hag grinned. “Cool would be what? Menacing? Dangerous? Chilled?”

“Dangerous, tough.”

“Oh good. Tough is good.”

The last time Helix had “seen” Night Hag, she was blond and dressed in leopard skins and white silk. The time before that she was a man in spats and a fedora. Night Hag changed constructs a lot. A lot of people did. It was easy, just pick out an image from the zillions of pictures in warehouses all over the net. There were even clubs you could join, Face of the Month, Columbia House, Backgrounds R Us. What you saw when you talked to someone on the net was no indication of what that person actually looked like. Some people felt it set them free to express who they really were. Helix had used constructs a few times, but she hadn’t felt that way. She’d felt as if she were hiding, which of course she was. She was always hiding. Kind of takes the entertainment value out of it, and so she preferred a blank mask. Let them use their imaginations; she could be secure in the knowledge that whatever they dreamed up, it would not be the truth.

“So what’s up?” asked Helix.

“That’s what I was going to ask you. I haven’t heard from you in days. You don’t write, you don’t call. What, you can’t pick up the transceiver?”

“There just hasn’t been much to say. Nothing’s going on, that’s all.”

“Tsk, tsk, tsk. A young woman like you, with nothing to do. That’s too bad. You oughta get out more.”

“I don’t like out.”

“How do you know? When was the last time you actually left that apartment?”

“This morning, actually.”

“Really?” Night Hag’s construct raised its eyebrows in surprise. “Where did you go?”

Helix pursed her lips. “I went down to the first floor lobby to buy danishes.”

Night Hag’s construct shook its head and rolled its eyes. “Oh, Helix. Dear. You have got to get over this. I know you have a good relationship with your father and all, but, you’re a grown woman. Get out of there! Get some independence.”

“Why should I go anywhere? I’ve got the whole world right here in my living room.”

“No, no you don’t. The net, it’s lies and illusions, mostly. You think you know me. You think we’re friends. But you have no idea what I really look like, and for all you know, I’ve made up everything I’ve ever told you about myself. If we were in the same room together talking, there’d be a whole second conversation going on. One that we can’t have, not even with the constructs, maybe not even with true visual contact. The conversation between our bodies and our faces, the sensation of sharing space and time. That’s what’s out there, Helix. That’s why you have to go, because that’s where the truth is.”

Helix laughed ruefully. “You sound like my father. He was just this morning talking about me going to school on an actual campus.”

Night Hag’s construct tilted its head thoughtfully. “School, hmm. Is that what you want?”

“I don’t know,” Helix sighed with exasperation. “I don’t know what I want.”

“But you want something, don’t you?”

“Y-yes,” Helix admitted, “only I don’t know what.”

“That’s why you should get out of there. You’ll never know as long as you remain dependent on Hector. Maybe you should get a job. Live independently for a while.”

“Oh yeah, jobs are just falling from the sky out there. You checked the unemployment rate lately? It’s still holding steady at fifty percent.”

“What about vatdiving? They’re always hiring people for that. And you live in Detroit, where most of the plants are. I bet you could get a job diving without even using Dr. Martin’s influence.”

“He wouldn’t like it. He probably wants me to do something more, you know, cerebral.”

“But the point is not what he wants, it’s what you want.”