The Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow (9 page)

“So you said.” I hadn’t really thought about this before. Dad was—Dad. He was all-seeing, all-knowing, all-powerful. He hadn’t just fathered me, he’d
designed
me. Of course, he’d designed me to patch all the bugs in his own genome, but—

“So as I said, we’ve cultured a lot of your plasm and run this on it. What we get looks like normal aging. Mitochondrial shortening. Maturity.”

“How big a culture?” I was raised by a gifted bioscientist. I knew which questions to ask.

“Several billion cells,” Inga said, with a toss of her hair. I could feel their discomfort again, worse than before.

“Right . . .” I did some mental arithmetic. “So, like, a ten-centimeter square of skin?”

The three of them grinned identical, sheepish grins. “It scales,” Inga said. “There’s a four-hundred-kilo gorilla running it right now. Stable for a year. Rock solid.”

I shook my head. “I don’t think so,” I said. “I mean, it’s very exciting and all, but I’ve already been a guinea pig once, when I was born. Let someone else go first this time.”

They all looked at each other. I felt the dull throb of their anxiety. They looked at me.

“We’ve been looking for someone else to trial this on, but there’s no one else with your special—” Wen groped for the word.

“There has to be,” I said. “Dad didn’t invent me on his own. There was a whole team of them. They all wanted to make their contributions. There’s probably whole cities full of immortal adolescents out there somewhere.”

“If we could find them, we’d ask them. But no one we know has heard of them. Chandrasekhar has put the word out everywhere. He swings a big stick. He said to ask if you know where your dad’s friends lived?”

“Dad had a huge fight with those people when I was born, some kind of schism. I never saw him communicating with them.”

“And your mother?”

“Dead. I told you. When I was an infant. Don’t remember her, either.” I swallowed and got my temper under control. Someday, someone was going to notice that even when I looked all pissed off, my antenna wasn’t broadcasting anything and I’d be in for it. They’d probably split me open and stick five more in me. Or tie me naked to a tree and leave me there as punishment for deceiving them. It’s amazing how cruel you can be when there’s a whole city full of people who’ll soak up your conscience and smooth it out for you.

“Chandrasekhar says—”

“I’m getting a little tired of hearing about him. What is it? Is it ego? You want to impress this big-shot doctor from the civilized east, prove to him that we’re not just a bunch of bumpkins here? We
are
a bunch of bumpkins here, guys. We live in the woods! That’s the
point
. What do you think
they’d
all say if they knew you were trying this?” I waved my arm in an expansive gesture, taking in the whole town. I knew what it was like to have a dirty little secret around there, and I knew I’d get them with that.

Inga’s face clouded over. “Listen to me, Jimmy. You started this. You came to us and asked us to investigate this. To cure you. It’s not our fault that answering your question took us to places you never anticipated. We’re busy people. There are plenty of other things we could be doing. We all have to do our part.”

The other two were flinching away from the sear of her emotion. I did what any wirehead would do when confronted with such a blast: I left.

- - -

There was a small crowd hanging around the Carousel as I got back to it. They weren’t exactly blocking the way, more like milling about, chatting, being pastoral, but always in the vicinity of my home. Someone came out of my outhouse: Brent. A moment later, I spotted Sebastien.

“We were hoping for a ride,” he said. “Brent was asking about it again.”

Uh-huh. “And these other people?”

My antenna wasn’t radiating sarcasm or anger, though my voice was full of both. He believed the evidence of his antenna and continued to treat me as though I was calm and quiet.

“Other riders, I suppose.”

“Well, I’m not giving any rides today,” I said. “You can all go home.”

“Is it broken again?”

“No,” I said.

“Oh,” he said.

Brent and Tina wandered up. Brent looked at me with his head cocked to one side. “Hi, Jimmy,” he said. “We want to go inside and ride around.”

“Not today. Try me again in a week.”

Tina put a hand on my arm. It was warm and maternal. It made me feel weird. “Jimmy, you know you have to bring her around to council if she’s going to stay here. It’s the way we do things.”

“She’s not staying,” I said.

“She’s stayed long enough. We can’t ignore it, you know. It’s not fair for you to ask us to pretend we didn’t see her. We all have a duty. Your friend can get the operation, or she can go.”

“She’s not staying,” I said.
Neither am I
is what I didn’t say.

“Jimmy,” she said, but I didn’t want to hear what she had to say. I shook off her arm and climbed the ramp up to my door, sliding it aside, stepping in quickly and sliding it shut behind me.

“Look, I’m a nest!” The entire pack had swarmed Lacey, perching on her arms, head, shoulders and chest. She was sitting in the front row of the theater, balancing. “These are some fun little critters. I can’t believe they lived this long!”

I shrugged. “Far as I can tell, they’re immortal.” I shrugged again. “Poor little fuckers.”

She shook off the pack. They raced around under the seats. They were starting to get squirrelly. I really should have been taking them out for walks more often. She came and gathered me in her arms. It felt good, and weird.

“What’s going on?”

“Let’s go, OK? The two of us.”

“You don’t mean out for a walk, do you?”

“No.”

She let go of me and sat on the stage. We were in the “future” set, which Dad said was about 1989, but not very accurate for all that. The lights on the Christmas tree twinkled. I’d wiki-tagged everything in the room, and the entry on Christmas trees had been deeply disturbing to me. All that
family
stuff. So . . . treehugger. Some of the wireheads did Christmas, but no one ever invited me along, thankfully.

“I don’t think that’s a good idea, Jimmy. It’s dangerous out there.”

“I can handle danger.” I swallowed. “I’ve killed people, you know. That last day I saw you, when they came for Detroit. I killed eight of them. I’m not a kid.”

“No, you’re not a kid. But you are, too. I don’t know, Jimmy.” She sighed and looked away. “I’m sorry about last night. I never should have—”

“
I’m not a kid!
I’m older than you are—just because I look like this doesn’t mean I’m not thirty-two, you know. It doesn’t mean I’m not capable of love.” I realized what I’d just said.

“Jimmy, I didn’t mean it like that. But whatever you are, we can’t be, you know, a couple. You can see that, right? For God’s sake, Jimmy, we’re not even the same species!”

It felt like she’d punched me in the chest. The air went out of my lungs and I stared at her, pop-eyed, for a long moment.

I felt tears prick at my eyes and I realized how childish they’d make me seem, and I held them back, letting only one choked snuffle escape. Then I nodded, calmly.

“Of course. I didn’t want to be part of any kind of couple with you. Just a traveling companion. But I can take care of myself. It’s fine.”

She shook her head. I could see that she had tears in
her
eyes, but it didn’t seem childish when she did it. “That’s not what I meant, Jimmy. Please understand me—”

“I understand. Last night was a mistake. We’re not the same species. You don’t want to travel with me. It’s not hard to understand.”

“It’s not like that—”

“Sure. It’s much nicer than that. There are a million nice things you can say about me and about this that will show me that it’s really not about me, it’s just a kind of emergent property of the universe with no one to blame. I understand perfectly.”

She bit her lip.

“That’s it, huh?”

She didn’t say anything. She shook her head.

“So? What did I get wrong, then?”

Without saying another word, she fled.

I went outside a minute later. My neighbors were radiating curiosity. No one asked me anything about the woman who’d run out of the Carousel and taken off. Her stuff was still in my little sleeping-space and leaned up against the stage. I packed it as neatly as I could and set it by the door. She could come and get it whenever she wanted.

- - -

The fourth scene in the Carousel of Progress is that late-eighties sequence. We had other versions of it in the archives, but the eighties one always appealed to Dad, so that was the one that I kept running most of the time.

Like I said, it’s Christmastime, and there’s a bunch of primitive “new” technology on display—a terrible video game, an inept automatic cooker, a laughable console. The whole family sits around and jokes and plays. Grandpa and Grandma are vigorous, independent. Sister and Brother are handsome young adults. Mom and Dad are a little older, wearing optical prostheses. Dad accidentally misprograms the oven and the turkey is scorched. Everyone laughs and they send out for pizza.

I always found that scene calming. It was supposed to be set a little in the future, to inspire the audience to see the great big beautiful tomorrow, shining at the end of every day (for a while, the theme of the ride had been, “Now is the best time of your life,” which seemed to me to be a little more realistic—who knew what tomorrow would be like?).

Dad believed in progress, I’ve come to realize. He made me because he thought that the human race would supplanted by something transhuman, beyond human. Like it would go, squirrel, monkey, ape, caveman, human, me. He was the missing link between the last two steps, the human who’d been modded into transhumanism.

But if Dad were alive today, he’d probably be learning from his mistakes with me and making a 2.0 version. Someone who made me look as primitive as I made Dad look. And twenty years after 2.0, there’d be a 3.0, a whole generation more advanced. Maybe twenty feet tall and able to grow extra limbs at will.

And in a thousand years, we’d still be alive, weird, immortal cavemen surrounded by our telepathic, shapeshifting, hyperintelligent descendants.

Progress.

- - -

I heard Lacey let herself in on the second night. I’d lain awake all night the first night, waiting for her to come back for her bedroll and her cowl. When she didn’t, I figured she’d found somewhere warm to stay. There had been a lot of treehouse seed in the air for the past four or five years, and the saplings were coming up now, huge, hollow root-balls protruding from the ground. They grew very fast, like all good carbon-sinking projects, but they had a tendency to out-compete the local species, so the wireheads chopped them down and mulched them when they took root. Still, you didn’t have to go very far into our woods to find one.

I spent the next day paying social calls on wireheads, letting their talk about crops and trade while away the hours, just spending the time away from home so I wouldn’t have to see Lacey if she came back for her things that day. But when I came home and said hello to the pack and made dinner, her pack was still by the door. At that point, I decided she wouldn’t come back for a while. Maybe she’d found a nice traveler to go caravanning with.

She let herself in quietly, but the pack was roused, and a second later I was roused too. My bedding still smelled like her. I was going to have to wash it. Or maybe burn it.

I sat up and padded through the gloom into the fourth scene. She was sitting in a middle-row aisle seat with her pack between her knees, watching the silent silhouettes of the robots in their Christmas living room.

I shrugged and turned it on. We watched them burn the turkey. They ordered out for pizza. They sang: “There’s a great big beautiful tomorrow/shining at the end of every day.” The Carousel rotated another 60 degrees and back to the beginning. The show ended.

“Safe travels,” I said to her.

She rocked in her seat as if I’d slapped her. “Jimmy, I have something I need to tell you. About that day in Detroit. Something I couldn’t tell you before.” She took a shuddering breath.

“You have to understand. I didn’t know what my parents were planning. They didn’t like you any more than your dad liked me, so I was a little suspicious when they told me to take my spidergoat and go and play with you over in the city. But things had been really tense around the house and we’d just had another blazing fight and I figured they wanted to have a discussion without me around and so they told me to do the thing that would be sure to distract me.

“I didn’t realize that they wanted me to distract you, too.

“They told me later that someone else had gone into town to lure your father away, too. The idea was the get both of you away from your defenses, to demolish your capacity to attack, and then to turn the wumpuses loose on the city until there was nothing left, then to let you go. But your dad got away, figured out what was going on, got into his plane and—”

She shut her mouth. I looked at her, letting this sink in, waiting for some words to come.

“They told me this later, you understand. Weeks later. Long after you were gone. I had no idea. They had friends in Buffalo who had the mechas and the flying platform, friends who were ideologically committed to getting rid of the old cities. They hated your dad. He had lots of enemies. They didn’t tell me until afterward, though. I was just . . . bait.”

I remembered how fast she had disappeared when the bombs started falling. And not into the mecha, which should have been the safest place of all. No, she’d gone out of the city.

“You knew,” I said.

She wiped her eyes. “What?”

“You
knew
. That’s why you scarpered so quickly. That’s why you didn’t get into the mecha. You knew that they were coming for us. You knew you had to get out of the city.”

“Jimmy, no—”

“Lacey, yes.” The calm I felt was frightening. The pack twined around my feet, nervously. “You knew. You knew, you knew, you knew. Have you convinced yourself that you didn’t know?”