"So Threshold’s giving multiple orgasms out of the kindness of its heart? Come on."
He laughs. "Think it through, Kylie. Apply your mind to the question."
We don’t say anything for a bit, his hand resting on my boob. It feels good. Maybe he’s right. Maybe I’ve worked out more than I think.
"I guess NASA didn’t send guys to the moon just so I can fry an egg that doesn’t stick," I say. "Same way Threshold didn’t develop the Angel and Sweet Parting so Jessie-May could get an ice-cream."
He nods. "So although the Angel has its glitches, and you’ve been pointing them out eloquently, Kylie, you need to remember something. The final moments and feelings of ordinary people, they’re valuable too."
"As in, commercially saleable?"
"Sure. Nothing wrong with that, is there?"
I think for a moment. "So the goodbye smiles, they get paid for in advance, by whoever’s willing to pay for a good death cuz they’re scared of having a bad one? And health insurance is involved, cuz either you’re covered for it or you’re not? And all of that pays for Threshold to develop its real system? The secret Pentagon slash Silicon Valley brain-picking one, or whatever evil shit it is?"
"Woah, how did the word evil creep in there?" smiles Angus. "The project’s patriotic. And did you want Jessie-May to be the passenger screaming in agony? If the choice is that or an ice-cream, which would you choose for her? The ice-cream. Every time. No contest."
I take another long slow swig of Southern Comfort, haul some more nicotine into my lungs. I’m beginning to get a perspective on things here. I know it’s too late (I swallowed the gingko berry gum, didn’t I?), but at least I can see it. At least I’ve got some clarity.
"You’re an amazing person, Kylie," Angus says. "And I’m not just being a good host here. You really made something of your life. And your work on developing the system? The feedback you just gave on the Angel? It’ll prove useful, truly. You’ll be helping more people than you could dream of. You should be proud."
I think for a moment. "I’m not unhappy, I guess. But, well. It’s a shock. I wasn’t expecting this, is all."
"No-one ever is. Not really. But the system works better than you think. And you’d be wrong to believe that Threshold hasn’t thought it all through." He snuggles up and presses his face to my ear. We lie there for a while, just breathing, and then he whispers, "I love you, Kylie. I want you to know that."
My heart swells, huge and simple as the sun. I smile – why wouldn’t I? – and I hear the camera click.
"Was that for me, Kylie?" he whispers, soft. "Feels like it was."
No, I think. It was for me. It was me, saying goodbye, Life, it was nice knowing you. Thanks for having me. Weird, that acceptance thing. I seen it before from the outside, never quite got it. But now –
Yeah. I do. I absolutely do.
He kisses me again, gentle, on the lips. "So," he murmurs. "Are you good to go?"
And yes. Oh yes. To my surprise, and joy, I am.
(2012)
TENDER
Rachel Swirsky
Rachel Swirsky’s short fiction has been nominated for a number of awards, including the Hugo. In 2010, she won the Nebula for her novella The Lady Who Plucked Red Flowers Beneath the Queen’s Window and in 2013, she won it a second time for her short story If You Were a Dinosaur, My Love. Her latest novella is The Woman at the Tower Window (2019). Swirsky currently lives in Bakersfield with her husband.
The first time my love realized I might kill myself, he remade my arteries in steel.
He waited until I was asleep and then stole me down into the secret laboratory he’d built beneath our house. I pretended to be sleeping as he shifted lights and lenses until the room lit with eerie blue. Using tools of his own invention, he anaesthetized me, incised my skin, and injected me with miniature robots that were programmed to convert my arterial walls into materials both compatible with human life and impossible to sever.
It was not really steel, but I imagine it as steel. I imagine that, inside, I am polished and industrial.
Over the course of the night, he remade the tributaries in my wrists, my throat, my thighs. He made them strong enough to repel any razor. He forbade them from crying red rivers. He banished the vision of a bathtub with water spreading pink. He made my life impossible to spill.
I have recurring dreams of tender things dying in the snow. They are pink and curled and fetal, the kind of things that would be at home in my husband’s laboratory, floating in jars of formaldehyde, or suspended among bubbles in gestational tanks of nutritional gel.
Their skin has no toughness. It is wet and slick, almost amphibian, but so delicate that it bruises from exposure to the air. Their unformed bodies shudder helplessly in the cold, vestigial tails tucked next to ink-blot eyes. On their proto-arms, finger-like protrusions grasp for warmth.
They are possibilities, yearning, unfurling from nothingness into unrealized potential.
In my dreams, I am separated from them by a window too thick to break. I don’t know who has abandoned them, helpless, in the snow. Frost begins to scale their skins. Their mouths shape inaudible whimpers. I can’t get outside. I can’t get to them. I can’t get outside before they die.
My love replaced the bones of my skull with interlocking adamantine scales. I cannot point a gun at my ear and shoot.
So that I cannot swallow a barrel, he placed sensors in my mouth, designed to detect the presence of firearms. Upon sensing one, they engage emergency measures, including alarms, force fields, and a portcullis that creaks down to block my throat.
The sensor’s light blinks ceaselessly, a green wash that penetrates my closed lips. It haunts me in the night, bathing every other second in spectral glow.
One psychiatrist’s theory:
To commit suicide, you must feel hopeless.
To commit suicide, you must believe you are a burden on those you love.
To commit suicide, you must be accustomed to physical risk.
One, two, three factors accounted for. But a fourth forgotten: to commit suicide, you must be penetrable.
My love says he needs me, but he knows that I believe he’s deluded.
He would be better off with another wife. Perhaps a mad lady scientist with tangled red hair frizzing out of her bun and animé-huge eyes behind magnifying glasses. Perhaps a robot, deftly crafted, possessing the wisdom of the subtle alloys embedded in her artificial consciousness. Perhaps a super-human mutant, discovered injured and amnesiac in an alley, and then carried back to his lab where he could cradle her back to health. He could be the professor who enables her heroic adventures, outfitting her with his inventions, and sewing flame-retardant spandex uniforms for her in his spare time.
No poison: my vital organs are no longer flesh.
No car crash: my spinal cord is enhanced by a network of nanobots, intelligent and constantly reconfiguring, ensuring that every sensation flashes, every muscle twitches.
No suffocation: my skin possesses its own breath now. It inhales; it exhales; it maintains itself flush and pink.
"Please," he says, "Please," and does not have to say more.