Credit: Tristan Schane
"Do you hate these things as much as I do?" I ask the dog. I am sitting on the floor again. It shifts its large shaggy head onto my lap. Its breath has a tangy, sewer smell. I scratch behind its ears while it makes groaning noises. Together we try to forget Belinda White.
A fat man with thin hair and thick glasses wanders over to where I'm mingling with the dog. "Hey, I remember you. You're … you're …"
"Joe Hall," I say, without standing.
"Joe! Joe! Geez it's been a long time! How've you been keeping?" He doesn't remember me. I don't remember him either. He senses this. "Bob … Bob Martin."
I stop scratching the dog to reach up and shake his hand. His grip is firm, desperate. Now I remember him: golden once, starting centre for the basketball team, top OFFSA wrestler in the 83 kilogram class, senior class president, regular organiser of fun disease-oriented fundraisers, and steady consort to the voluptuous Carolyn Wickers, heiress to the calorie-empty, high-sodium Cheesy Snack line of children's lunchables, certified inoculated-at-birth against herpes and HIV, and proud subscriber to the Orvo Ethra, once-a-year birth control implant. They married shortly after graduation. This is their house, their party — their dog.
"So tell me Joe, what line of work are you in?"
The phrasing and timing of his question tells me that he is not in any line of work, and that this bothers him.
He rubs his eyes with the heels of his hands. "I was consulting for this clean-air-for-kids thing at the university," he says. "Some offshoot of our Tasty Treats division. I was supposed to be sub-contracting promotional domes and doing PR. But mostly I just sat in on a lot of teleconferenced meetings. Carolyn set up most of it." He glances off towards some furniture. "But then the whole project just kind of petered out."
The dog coughs and rolls its head. I resume scratching it.
Bob again looks to the furniture. "I know she just sets that shit up to keep me out of her corporate hair. I guess you'd call them placebo projects, mercy chores … pretty pathetic, I know."
A high-backed, motorised chair begins to turn.
"So exactly what is it you do, Joe?" Bob leans down to rest his hands on his thighs. Talking has made him out of breath.
"My title is Ninth Degree Virtual Remote Intelligent Prosthetics Controller," I say. "It sounds a lot more technical and impressive than it really is though. Right now I'm stuck in this 14-year excursion on Ganymede."
The notion that I cannot be in two places at once tiptoes past in the shadows.
The wide, honeycombed bank of cylindrical pods often makes Li think of a Tokyo beehive hotel. But today, for some reason, she imagines a Lego-like array of missile silos. Inside, packed in cool pressure-distributing therma-gel, turning every eight minutes like meat on a rotisserie, nourished by intravenous and esophageal drips, lungs sucking oxygen-rich liquid fluorocarbons, hearts thumping to the metronomic pace of beta-blockers and implanted cardioverter-defibrillators, muscles stretching and tensing to the programmed exercise regimes of subcutaneous nerve stimulators, the travellers' bodies wait. Li likes to imagine they are waiting to be born, again.
The ocular monitor on pod 18 is indicating REM activity; EEG confirms it. Li enters a code and the pod door opens with a depressurising hiss. Like a long, soft tongue protruding, a tray extends and unfurls. The naked, abundantly catheterised body of a man lies before her. Li begins to massage around the tubes in his neck and chest.
Bob, a maintenance technician, tiptoes up behind her. "You get some kind of kick out of, like, touching these guys, or what?"
Li, absorbed in her therapeutics, has not noticed his approach. His question has an accusatory tone that makes her skin feel dirty. "They are like babies," she explains. "They like being touched; they need to be touched."
"Hey, I need it too," says Bob. "I like to be touched too. I'd even be willing to touch you back." He winks.
Even were he not old and so overweight, Li knows she would still find him repugnant. Afraid the sleeping man will sense her rising tension, she withdraws her hands. She takes three deep breaths before speaking. "How is your wife today, Bob?" she asks. "How is Carolyn?"
Bob glances up at a special pod near the top of the hive. "Dead, as far as I'm concerned," he answers. "Long past gone."
Li resumes her caressing manipulations. "Strange you should feel that way," she says, "because admissions found her to be not only highly creative and aware, but well suited to the rigors of entanglement — in the top fraction of a percentile, actually."
Bob huffs and takes a step closer. "Yeah, well, first off, all that junk on her head makes her seem a lot smarter than she ever was. And second off, if she's so brilliant and talented and everything, how come she had to pay for the trip. I mean, like, shouldn't they be paying her or something?"
Li smells his body odour and wonders how this is possible in a sterile environment with strong sanitising protocols. "From what I have heard, they would have been happy to compensate her. But being a wealthy woman, she declined. She wanted to make a donation." Li resists the urge to tell him rumour has it that his job, a job he is by any benchmark ill-equipped to perform, was only given to him in deference to his wife's wishes before she left, as a stipulation of her generosity.
A left-axis deviation in the sinus rhythm on the EKG monitor catches Li's attention and she returns to the task at hand. Bob leans in to watch her work. "Please give me some room," she says.
"So you ever see one of those little critters they upload these guys into?" asks Bob, without moving. "They showed me one as part of my training. Christ, the thing still gives me nightmares."
Li is too busy to comment now. The sinus rhythm is deteriorating.
"Goddamn things look like some kind of creepy-crawly cross between a spider and a millipede," Bob adds. "I mean, I know they're really just tiny robot-like super-computers made out of nanites and carbon fibre and whatnot, but it totally freaked me out. It looked so alive, like something you Japanese would maybe eat. Man, I can't believe I once wanted to do what this guy does."
Li catches Bob's hand before it can touch the body. "Please be quiet."
Tent-shaped T-waves, usually indicative of hyperkalemia, lead her to scan the blood serum potassium level. Even though it is normal, she reduces it in a feeding solution that drizzles into his arm.
The man's lips begin to move. At first it appears to her as if he is trying to suckle the tracheal hose through which oily, blue fluids flow in and out of his lungs. Then Li realises he is trying to speak.
P-waves dissolve into a bizarre idioventricular rhythm that makes her think of a rollercoaster. Tiny spikes appear, then flatten, as the defibrillator embedded in his chest begins to prod his heart. The man continues to try to speak. His lips grow cyanic.
Li knows that he is dying. It takes a five-digit code to extract the tubing and fluid from his lungs. "Breathe," she says, slapping him on the sternum. "Talk to me." She places her ear close to his lips. Saliva and blue liquid bubble into it. Li listens. His mouth tickles her earlobe, his words trickle down the walls of her auditory canal and into her tympanic membrane.
Bob bends closer, and then blanches. "Is he like waking up or something?"
Li embarrasses technology by pressing her ear to the man's ribs. "No, not waking," she says. "Dreaming …"
