You are left with this familiar glitch or loop in the MAX ware. Suicide Coast won’t play any farther. Reluctantly, you abandon Mick to his world of sad acts, his faith that reality can be relied upon to scaffold his perceptions. To run him again from the beginning would only make the frailty of that faith more obvious. So you wait until everything has gone black, unplug yourself from the machine, and walk away, unconsciously rolling your shoulders to ease the stiffness, massaging the sore place at the back of your neck. What will you do next? Everything is flat out here. No one drives themselves anymore.
(1999)
MEMORIES AND WIRE
Mari Ness
Mari Ness lives in central Florida, "with a scraggly rose garden and large trees harboring demented squirrels." Her short fiction and poetry have appeared in numerous print and online publications, including Tor.com, Clarkesworld, Lightspeed, Apex Magazine and Strange Horizons. Her poetry has also been nominated for the Rhysling and Dwarf Stars awards.
He was losing her. Had been, almost since they’d met, really, but it wasn’t until he watched her pull a wire out of herself and methodically roll it into a small coil that it really hit him.
She’d been straight with him from the beginning. Oh, not completely straight. She’d never told him anything about the accident, or what happened afterwards. He was pretty sure he didn’t want to know. And she’d never told him anything about her work. Not the government, he knew, not exactly, but something close to it: a major government contractor who worked in top secret doing the dirty work. That was something he didn’t want to know about either. What you can’t know, you can’t tell, he remembered from some old movie or other. He saw the new bruises on her remaining skin, the new plastic patches over the implants, and decided he really didn’t want to know.
But about everything else. What she could do, what she couldn’t do. What she wanted and needed, exactly. Oxytocin, specifically: without a natural source her immune system would start rejecting the implants. Drugs could stabilize her system, but they had major side effects. So touch, mainly; sex as an addition. No emotional commitment. She thought they might have a certain intellectual compatibility but she would not have much time to talk. The job. She needed his touch. She would do what she needed for it.
"Side effects?"
"Death."
It was an incentive of sorts.
He was of course open to pursue other relationships; she didn’t need to know the details.
Surprisingly, out of this they had created, he thought, a friendship of sorts. Friendship. It was an odd word, not something he’d associated with women he’d slept with before. They were dates, girlfriends sometimes, but never friends.
N—she preferred to be called just that, N—was a friend.
Of sorts.
Who was now pulling a wire out of her arm.
"Should you be doing that here?"
"No."
The wire was not coming out cleanly. Drops of blood were falling on his couch. It was a cheap piece of crap, some microfiber thing he’d gotten on sale, and he wouldn’t mind tossing it, but—after a few seconds of debate, he stood up and hunted down an old towel, and returned and put it underneath her arm, to catch the blood.
"Need help?"
"No."
"Just as well," he said, trying to make a joke of it. "My fingers are mostly good at going in you, not getting things out of you."
He regretted the words as soon as they left his mouth, but she did not seem to react. Then again, she never did, except when they were having sex, when she surprised him by almost seeming as if she meant it.
She reached into her arm and began pulling at a second wire.
"Let me help," he said then.
"No."
"At least let me get you something for it. Alcohol, some—"
"It doesn’t hurt."
"Infection."
Two weeks ago, he’d turned on some show or other. She’d been reading her tablet with the intense focus he’d learned not to even try to interrupt; in some ways, he found it flattering that she was willing to do that, do some of her work in front of him—at least the non-high security stuff—but he also found the intensity almost unnerving, like a trance state except not really, and he couldn’t watch it, couldn’t even glance at it. After a few minutes, she’d come over to sit by him on the couch. A few minutes later, she had relaxed against him, not saying anything. He’d wrapped his arms around her. It had been—
Nice. Normal.
"My hands are clean."
"This place isn’t."
She went for medical checkups at least twice per month; some form of computer maintenance at least once a week. Part of that was her job. Part of that was that parts of her were fragile, very fragile. Even the parts that could rip him apart. And hideously expensive. Many of her parts would be recycled, afterwards. Possibly in other bodies. The very thought made him sick. She kissed him after he told her that.
"For me, then."
"If it bothers you, you may leave."
"It’s my apartment," he said.
She began rolling up the second wire.
"Isn’t that one of the arms where you still—"
It was.
He’d made a point, when they were together, of kissing both, caressing both, fucking both, as if he couldn’t tell. As if they both were real, equal. In a way they were. But one—one arm still had skin. Her skin. He’d run his tongue over it enough to know the difference.
She could probably break his leg with a single finger. Then play the video that had led up to this moment, every sound, every expression, everything she had seen, downloaded, analyzed, to the police, who would immediately charge him with Violation D.
He didn’t finish the sentence.
"Ok. Look. Can you at least give me a reason?"
"I believe Meteors is on."
From time to time she’d let slip bits about her past life. Before. He had not listened much, at first, but gradually a few small pictures began to float in his head, of what she had been. Before. A musician who had wanted her songs to live on, who had apparently given that up—he never knew the reason—for law school. A very ordinary state law school; she’d never had much money. She’d been paying off debts. She would always be paying off debts. He began downloading some of the songs she mentioned and playing them when she arrived. He thought he felt her relax more after this, linger on their kisses a little longer. Sometimes he ordered the viewer to play movies. Her silver-blue eyes—goddamn they look real, unless you’re kissing her you’d probably never notice, or think they’re just contacts—would flicker to the screen, to him, and back again. It was almost a smile.