Only takes a second to realise i’m trapped in an infinity loop. i should have stopped her before she came in here. my head feels like it’s cracking. The pain is blistering hot. i scream and grab my head in both hands to stop it from exploding. The scream is magnified and bounces around like a million echoes in the loop. Everything in here is a cave of infinity mirrors, reflecting everything back to itself. Only i am the image and the mirror and each iteration of both. Subject and object. i fall to the floor. Oh, the pain. As i convulse on the floor, i see, through the corner of my eye, Lesley cover my face with a pillow.
White hot supernova, synapses breaking, an explosion, the universe tearing apart.
I wake up and she’s beside me in bed, we’re both naked. My head feels like I have the mother of all hangovers, as if I drank all the tequilas in the world. She rests her head on my chest.
‘Did you sleep well?’ she asks as if nothing happened.
‘Have you got any Vicodin?’ I sit up and the world is spinning around me.
‘Get dressed and follow me.’
The world shatters into tiny pieces floating around my bed. I shake my head and tiny fractals swim in and out of focus. It takes a minute or two before the pictures coalesce into one coherent world. It feels good to be back. I’m so thirsty and I drink straight from the pitcher beside me.
I find her in the corridor and follow her to her father’s room. I can barely stay upright. Doctor Cranmer sits on the bed, a stethoscope around his neck. There’s a shiny aluminium suitcase on the floor before him. He looks at Ms Stubbs.
‘Morning doctor,’ she says.
‘It’s not a very good morning. It appears your father is dead,’ he replies in an even voice.
‘What a pity,’ she says with a shrug. ‘Old people, hey.’
‘I find it rather curious that his oxygen mask is on the floor.’
The doctor stands up and walks towards Ms Stubbs. He looks at her then at me. I pretend as though I don’t remember him from our first encounter. I act like a good little bod.
‘I suppose my services are no longer needed here,’ says Doctor Cranmer.
‘You served my father well. I don’t see any reason this association should end. Because of my gratitude, as his sole heir I will double your monthly retainer for life and hope to keep your services,’ she says, her face neutral and cold.
‘It is always a pleasure to serve the Stubbs. If you will excuse me, I have to record this death by natural causes.’ He bows slightly and walks to the door, dragging his aluminium case behind.
We’re left staring at her father’s body on the bed. His eyes are wide open in shock.
‘One more thing, doctor, since you work for me now,’ she says.
‘Anything,’ he replies.
‘This.’ She points to the electrode transference device on my head.
‘I can remove it straight away,’ Doctor Cranmer says, stepping back into the room.
‘On second thoughts, I think I’ll keep it. It looks rather nice, don’t you agree, Simon?’
The doctor sighs and turns to leave once more. It’s at this moment I realise that she owns me now. Certain secrets will come out, like how the old man changed his will yesterday to include HostBod4401 as the sole heir and beneficiary to his estate. Lesley doesn’t know it yet, but there’s going to be a battle for that money. For now, all I have to do is to stay alive.
(2014)
SCANNERS LIVE IN VAIN
Cordwainer Smith
Paul Myron Anthony Linebarger (1913–1966) was an East Asia scholar whose godfather was the Chinese nationalist Sun Yat-sen. In 1943, he was sent to China to coordinate military intelligence operations, and became a close confidant of Chiang Kai-shek. In 1947 he moved to the Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies in Washington, DC, where he used his experiences in the war to write the book Psychological Warfare (1948), regarded by many in the field as a classic text. By the end of his career he was doing work for the CIA and was considered the leading black-ops propagandist in the Western hemisphere. He also wrote science fiction under the pseudonym Cordwainer Smith – a secret that only came out after his death. Of his fiction Frederik Pohl wrote: "In his stories, which were a wonderful and inimitable blend of a strange, raucous poetry and a detailed technological scene, we begin to read of human beings in worlds so far from our own in space and time that they were no longer quite Earth (even when they were the third planet out from Sol), and the people were no longer quite human, but something perhaps better, certainly different." Linebarger died of a heart attack in 1966.
Martel was angry. He did not even adjust his blood away from anger. He stamped across the room by judgment, not by sight. When he saw the table hit the floor, and could tell by the expression on Luci’s face that the table must have made a loud crash, he looked down to see if his leg was broken. It was not. Scanner to the core, he had to scan himself. The action was reflex and automatic. The inventory included his legs, abdomen, chestbox of instruments, hands, arms, face and back with the mirror. Only then did Martel go back to being angry. He talked with his voice, even though he knew that his wife hated its blare and preferred to have him write.
"I tell you, I must cranch. I have to cranch. It’s my worry, isn’t it?" When Luci answered, he saw only a part of her words as he read her lips: "Darling… you’re my husband… right to love you… dangerous… do it… dangerous… wait…"
He faced her, but put sound in his voice, letting the blare hurt her again: "I tell you, I’m going to cranch."
Catching her expression, he became rueful and a little tender: "Can’t you understand what it means to me? To get out of this horrible prison in my own head? To be a man again—hearing your voice, smelling smoke? To feel again—to feel my feet on the ground, to feel the air move against my face? Don’t you know what it means?"
Her wide-eyed worrisome concern thrust him back into pure annoyance. He read only a few words as her lips moved: "… love you… your own good… don’t you think I want you to be human?… your own good… too much… he said… they said…"
When he roared at her, he realized that his voice must be particularly bad. He knew that the sound hurt her no less than did the words: "Do you think I wanted you to marry a scanner? Didn’t I tell you we’re almost as low as the habermans? We’re dead, I tell you. We’ve got to be dead to do our work. How can anybody go to the up-and-out? Can you dream what raw space is? I warned you. But you married me. All right, you married a man. Please, darling, let me be a man. Let me hear your voice, let me feel the warmth of being alive, of being human. Let me!"
He saw by her look of stricken assent that he had won the argument. He did not use his voice again. Instead, he pulled his tablet up from where it hung against his chest. He wrote on it, using the pointed fingernail of his right forefinger—the talking nail of a scanner—in quick cleancut script: Pls, drlng, whrs crnching wire?
She pulled the long gold-sheathed wire out of the pocket of her apron. She let its field sphere fall to the carpeted floor. Swiftly, dutifully, with the deft obedience of a scanner’s wife, she wound the cranching wire around his head, spirally around his neck and chest. She avoided the instruments set in his chest. She even avoided the radiating scars around the instruments, the stigmata of men who had gone up and into the out. Mechanically he lifted a foot as she slipped the wire between his feet. She drew the wire taut. She snapped the small plug into the high-burden control next to his heart-reader. She helped him to sit down, arranging his hands for him, pushing his head back into the cup at the top of the chair. She turned then, full-face toward him, so that he could read her lips easily. Her expression was composed. She knelt, scooped up the sphere at the other end of the wire, stood erect calmly, her back to him. He scanned her, and saw nothing in her posture but grief which would have escaped the eye of anyone but a scanner. She spoke: he could see her chest-muscles moving. She realized that she was not facing him, and turned so that he could see her lips.