“This bus doesn’t go to your place, does it? I mean, you have to change buses,” Laurence said. Patricia admitted that this might be the case. “Well, I understand if you need to get home right away. But there’s a bar up here on the right that has an actual open fireplace, and they serve hot toddies and stuff. We ought to get you warmed up as soon as possible.”
The bar had a “hunting lodge” theme, complete with slabs of wood covering the walls and faux animal heads coming out of one wall that squicked Patricia at first. But they got a primo spot in front of the fireplace, and the scent of mesquite and woodsmoke was a rain antidote. The stereo played an album of acoustic covers of Steely Dan, featuring a bluesy female mezzo-soprano, and Patricia guessed it was called Steely Danielle.
Laurence brought Patricia a mug of hot chocolate and a shot of nice whiskey, which she could consume together or separately, her choice. She drank most of the hot chocolate and then sipped the whiskey to burn away the milky sweetness. The whiskey was sharp in the way that really nice cheese is sharp. She started to feel comfortable in her own skin again.
“I suspect I’m being punished for leaving my Caddy at home,” Patricia confessed.
This was not the first time Laurence had heard people talk about their Caddies as if they were jealous gods. He told her about all the odd superstitions — for lack of a better word — that people had about their teardrop-shaped computers. One person might believe his Caddy saved his marriage, and then you’d run into someone else whose Caddy destroyed her marriage, but she later decided it was for the best. People sold their houses and got rid of their cars because their Caddies showed them a simpler way to live. A few people even found God, actual God, thanks to their Caddies. People were attached to them in a way that nobody ever had been to their iPhones or BlackBerries.
“That’s not creepy at all,” said Patricia. She wondered if she should just throw it away.
“On the one hand, it’s finally fulfilling the promise of technology, of making your life easier,” Laurence said. “Simpler, or more full of excitement, depending on what you want. On the other hand, people are outsourcing some crucial life stuff to these things.”
“I notice you don’t have a Caddy.” Patricia’s whiskey glass was empty. She bought another round for herself and Laurence.
“I have three at home,” Laurence said. “I jailbroke one, and now it doesn’t work quite the same. There’s something about the OS that resists any kind of analysis. You can install Wildberry Linux on them and they work just like any other tablet, but nothing fancy.”
They fell into a long silence. The fire crackled and the Steely Dan cover CD reached its triumphant final track, which was predictably “Rikki Don’t Lose That Number.” Patricia felt like she should say something about why she’d been avoiding Laurence, in spite of her Caddy’s attempts to smush them together. She wasn’t sure what to say.
“That promise,” Laurence said out of nowhere. “The one that your friend made me agree to. Not the first one, the one where I go mute forever if I blab, but the other one.”
“Yeah.” Patricia tensed and felt a chill on the inside, in spite of the firelight and whiskey glow.
“It’s riddled with loopholes,” Laurence said. “Even apart from the fact that there’s no penalty for breaking it. I mean, I never should have agreed to it, and I wouldn’t have if I’d been less drunk. It’s not my job to police someone else’s self-esteem, not in any sane world. But in any case, it’s a meaningless promise.”
“How so?”
“I’ve been thinking about it a lot, and the wording is so imprecise that it’s not even a promise, in any real sense. I’m supposed to keep you from getting an unrealistically high opinion of yourself — but if, say, I happen to believe that you’re the coolest person I know, then I’m unlikely to think you’re overestimating your own coolness. It’s dependent on my own opinion, plus my estimation of what your opinion of yourself is. That’s a whole bunch of subjective criteria, right there. Add to that the fact that I only said I would do my best, which is yet another subjective judgment. If I made it my life’s work to break that promise, I’m not sure I could find a way.”
“Huh.” And now Patricia felt dumb, so Laurence had succeeded in crushing her ego after all. She should have seen that Kawashima was just creating one of his intentionally flimsy traps, where the real trap is that you fool yourself into believing the snare to be robust. But she also felt better — and then the part where Laurence sort of hinted that he thought she was the coolest person he’d ever met sank in as well, even if it was just a rhetorical supposition.
“And you know these people way better than I do,” Laurence said, “but it strikes me that this thing about Aggrandizement is a way of controlling you. They don’t want you to use your power, except for however they tell you to.”
At last, the rain stopped and Patricia had dried out except for her shoes. They headed for two separate bus stops, although their route coincided for four blocks. They hugged goodbye. When Patricia got home she gazed at her Caddy while brushing her teeth, like a blank mirror, and it filled her in on everything she’d missed. Before she sank into her bed, she tossed the Caddy back in her shoulder bag.
21
SOMETIMES LAURENCE ZONED out and imagined walking on another Earth-like planet. The weird gravity. The different mix of oxygen, carbon, and nitrogen in the air. Types of life that might defy our definitions of “plant” or “animal.” More than one moon, maybe more than one sun. His heart could burst, just with the newness of it: digging bare feet into soil that no human toes had ploughed, under a brazen sky that proclaimed all the things we had thought our limits were merely our prejudices. And then he snapped back, to the reality that his team was stuck: no closer to opening up the final frontier than a year earlier.
He would come out of his reverie to find another e-mail from Milton, who wanted progress reports that included actual progress. These e-mails contained phrases like “Humanity strides along a widening precipice.” Some days, Laurence struggled to motivate himself to go in to work, and once there, he couldn’t bring himself to leave.
When he talked to Serafina about his work, he kept the details vague — as far as Serafina knew, his team was working on a theoretical antigravity thing, that could yield some practical application years from now, if ever. But he longed to show off the finished product to Serafina, and spread his arms wide as the Pathway to Infinity burst open behind him. That would be the crowning moment of his life.
Which is why, when Priya said she wanted to be the first weightless person on Earth, Laurence scarcely hesitated.
PRIYA HAD THESE amazing hands that she gestured with when she talked, and it was like she was making shapes in your brain. Her fingers were long and rippled with indentations, and she wore chunky rings, with big fake sapphires. Plus pastel acrylic nails.
Sougata had been staring at Priya for weeks across the hAckOllEctIvE, watching her solder, wearing safety goggles that only made her look more elfin. She constructed some kind of wireless-enabled burrowing robot that could hide small objects where you’d never find them without the right PGP key.
Laurence was like, “You should sneak her up here and show her the antigrav, and the not-quite-antimatter. She’ll be yours forever, man.”
Anya and Tanaa fought against letting Priya inside their headquarters, on the grounds that she would tell everyone else in the hAckOllEctIvE, and there would be drama. The hackerspace had some cool people, but there were also people who still thought it was awesome to build your own two-second time machine.