I kept it rolling, though, through six or eight places, and eventually it rolled me into a West End club that looked as if it hadn’t been redecorated since the Nineties. A lot of peeling chrome over plastic, blurry holograms that gave you a headache if you tried to make them out. I think Barry had told me about the place, but I can’t imagine why. I looked around and grinned. If I was looking to be depressed, I’d come to the right place. Yes, I told myself as I took a corner stool at the bar, this was genuinely sad, really the pits. Dreadful enough to halt the momentum of my shitty evening, which was undoubtedly a good thing. I’d have one more for the road, admire the grot, and then cab it on home.
And then I saw Lise.
She hadn’t seen me, not yet, and I still had my coat on, tweed collar up against the weather. She was down the bar and around the corner with a couple of empty drinks in front of her, big ones, the kind that come with little Hong Kong parasols or plastic mermaids in them, and as she looked up at the boy beside her, I saw the wizz flash in her eyes and knew that those drinks had never contained alcohol, because the levels of drug she was running couldn’t tolerate the mix. The kid, though, was gone, numb grinning drunk and about ready to slide off his stool, and running on about something as he made repeated attempts to focus his eyes and get a better look at Lise, who sat there with her wardrobe team’s black leather blouson zipped to her chin and her skull about to burn through her white face like a thousand-watt bulb. And seeing that, seeing her there, I knew a whole lot of things at once.
That she really was dying, either from the wizz or her disease or the combination of the two. That she damned well knew it. That the boy beside her was too drunk to have picked up on the exoskeleton, but not too drunk to register the expensive jacket and the money she had for drinks. And that what I was seeing was exactly what it looked like.
But I couldn’t add it up, right away, couldn’t compute. Something in me cringed.
And she was smiling, or anyway doing a thing she must have thought was like a smile, the expression she knew was appropriate to the situation, and nodding in time to the kid’s slurred inanities, and that awful line of hers came back to me, the one about liking to watch.
And I know something now. I know that if I hadn’t happened in there, hadn’t seen them, I’d have been able to accept all that came later. Might even have found a way to rejoice on her behalf, or found a way to trust in whatever it is that she’s since become, or had built in her image—a program that pretends to be Lise to the extent that it believes it’s her. I could have believed what Rubin believes, that she was so truly past it, our hi-tech Saint Joan burning for union with that hardwired godhead in Hollywood, that nothing mattered to her except the hour of her departure. That she threw away that poor sad body with a cry of release, free of the bonds of polycarbon and hated flesh. Well, maybe, after all, she did. Maybe it was that way. I’m sure that’s the way she expected it to be.
But seeing her there, that drunken kid’s hand in hers, that hand she couldn’t even feel, I knew, once and for all, that no human motive is ever entirely pure. Even Lise, with that corrosive, crazy drive to stardom and cybernetic immortality, had weaknesses. Was human in a way I hated myself for admitting.
She’d gone out that night, I knew, to kiss herself goodbye. To find someone drunk enough to do it for her. Because, I knew then, it was true: She did like to watch.
I think she saw me, as I left. I was practically running. If she did, I suppose she hated me worse than ever, for the horror and the pity in my face.
I never saw her again.
Someday I’ll ask Rubin why Wild Turkey sours are the only drink he knows how to make. Industrial-strength, Rubin’s sours. He passes me the dented aluminum cup, while his place ticks and stirs around us with the furtive activity of his smaller creations.
"You ought to come to Frankfurt," he says again.
"Why, Rubin?"
"Because pretty soon she’s going to call you up. And I think maybe you aren’t ready for it. You’re still screwed up about this, and it’ll sound like her and think like her, and you’ll get too weird behind it. Come over to Frankfurt with me and you can get a little breathing space. She won’t know you’re there…"
"I told you," I say, remembering her at the bar in that club, "lots of work, Max…"
"Stuff Max. Max you just made rich. Max can sit on his hands. You’re rich yourself, from your royalty cut on Kings, if you weren’t too stubborn to dial up your bank account. You can afford a vacation."
I look at him and wonder when I’ll tell him the story of that final glimpse. "Rubin, I appreciate it, man, but I just…"
He sighs, drinks. "But what?"
"Rubin, if she calls me, is it her?"
He looks at me a long time. "God only knows." His cup clicks on the table. "I mean, Casey, the technology is there, so who, man, really who, is to say?"
"And you think I should come with you to Frankfurt?"
He takes off his steel-rimmed glasses and polishes them inefficiently on the front of his plaid flannel shirt. "Yeah, I do. You need the rest. Maybe you don’t need it now, but you’re going to later."
"How’s that?"
"When you have to edit her next release. Which will almost certainly be soon, because she needs money bad. She’s taking up a lot of ROM on some corporate mainframe, and her share of Kings won’t come close to paying for what they had to do to put her there. And you’re her editor, Casey. I mean, who else?"
And I just stare at him as he puts the glasses back on, like I can’t move at all.
"Who else, man?"
And one of his constructs clicks right then, just a clear and tiny sound, and it comes to me, he’s right.
(1985)
THE ONE WHO ISN’T
Ted Kosmatka
Ted Kosmatka was born and raised in Chesterton, northwest Indiana, where he worked for more than a decade in the steel industry. Moving with his family to the Pacific Northwest, he turned to video game writing, in particular scripting games and comics for the game producers Valve. His short stories have appeared in many venues, including Asimov’s, Nature, and Lightspeed, and he has been nominated for both the Nebula Award and Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award. His latest novel is The Flicker Men (2015), a quantum-mechanical thriller.
It starts with light.
Then heat.
A slow bleed through of memory.
Catchment, containment. A white-hot agony coursing through every nerve, building to a sizzling hum—and then it happens. Change of state.
And what comes out the other side is something new.
The woman held up the card. "What color do you see?"
"Blue," the child said.
"And this one?" The woman held up another card. Her face was a porcelain mask—a smooth, perfect oval except for a slight pointiness at her chin.
The child looked closely at the card. It didn’t look like the other one. It didn’t look like any color he’d ever seen before. He felt he should know the color, but he couldn’t place it.