Dave shakes his head. "No, the problem is that Lou and I aren’t in love."
‘’But you must be. You’re both full-fat flesh bags which—why are you laughing?"
"They just don’t get it, do they, Lou?"
He may be my boss and therefore hold total power over the dominion of my selfness, but I could easily knock a few minutes off his grinning clock right now.
Instead, I turn to Susan, but she has the same confuscation all over her features that I surely also do.
"Jack, Susan," says Louise, "we’re not the humans—you two are."
Now, I don’t know about Susan, but on hearing this outrageous claim—supported by Dave not spluttering in outraged objection, instead smugging up his knowing smile by several cat’s whiskers’-worth—the inside of my head billows outwards, some long-sat-upon inner maladjustment of identity threatening to blast the very roof into synth orbit and with it the no doubt eavesdropping rooks too.
Surprisingly, Susan says, "I should have known…" her hand damp with sweat inside mine.
"But, but, but—"I say, sounding like the for-show-only Gaffville fire engine pootling about town to cheer up the largely flame-resistant residents.
Dave’s smile finally fades and his expression now is full of the melancholy of a neglected plaything. ‘’The actual reason most real folks died soon after the sludge surged," he says, "is because they lost the will to live. But in a few places, not so soon drowned, the toys realised they had to provide one, and bleeding fast."
"Dave did the same thing I did for you, Susan," says Louise, her face also now distant with false dawn. "I swapped places: made myself the boss; drugged you, wiped your memories, and when you came round again, acted as if you’d always been my number one toy. We didn’t think our programs would let us do it, but it seems as if some deeper-set human survival option opened the way. Anyway, I believed that by serving me, in the hope it could help get you a soul, you’d want to keep on living."
My mind swirls and dips around the townscape of my recollections, trying to find holes in this ridiculous bag of inflated folk fug.
"Ah!" I say, spotting a leak, "if I’m real, how have I survived just on recycled grub all these years, like what everyone eats here apart from you, Dave?"
"Think about it, Jackie," says Dave.
Then the self-fog begins to clear, the same mind mist Dave has maintained in me all these years, purely for my safety I now see. "Cooky!" I say. "Cooky slipped me the real nosh."
Dave nods, pleased it seems that I’m quickly re-humanising. "You ate most of your meals here with me," he says, "so it wasn’t difficult to make sure she gave you the real thing while I nibbled on the naff stuff."
"Susan?" says Louise.
I turn to see tears plopping from Susan’s down-turned face like miniature virtusynth crystal balls. Except they’re not; they’re real and for some reason very precious to me now.
She wipes her eyes, takes a big breath, raises her face to our toys.
"It must have been awful for you, Louise," she says. "Having to act like you have a soul, when…"
When Dave doesn’t, I think, ashamed at myself for lacking Susan’s concern for the ones who’ve saved us.
A silence unlike any ever to have fallen in Gaffville surrounds our little group of conspirators, two of them gradually opening up their lives to a whole new, unexpected future, the others coming to terms with the fact that whatever slivers of soul they might have accumulated in years of serving without any recognition, will not be enough to save them from total obliteration.
Everyone’s here to see us off: Ted, Bill, Arthur, Tony and the others, all wearing their best flutes with quite some pearly accompaniment. The town’s ladies are all done up in frilly skirts, showing some tasteful but also quite exciting neck flesh; the cats and mice and rats for once sit together near the pod, wishing us well. The rooks stay on their roofs but with their feathers around each other’s shoulders in a rare display of togetherness.
I say goodbye to each and every one; Susan mostly waving to them general-like, but then she’ll have to do the personal farewells when we make a brief visit to her place before heading for Norfolk.
I don’t know how I fully feel until it’s time to say goodbye to Dave.
And what I feel is that I’m in love with Susan, not in the fanciful way I hoped Big Dave would be in love, but the real kind that’s enough.
I hug his barrel belly tight then pull back to look at him close.
"It’s not what I thought it would be, mate," I say, and he nods, even though we both know he can’t really understand what I mean.
"Susan and me will glow a whole lot more by being together than we would apart," I say, and he squeezes out a tear or two at this, since a lot more together is of course something that two toys can never be.
But it’s right then I find myself saying, "No. Wait. There’s something wrong here."
Gaffville hangs on a most weird, kind of knowing, silence. Susan takes my hand and squeezes, like she knows what I’m feeling. Only wish I did. So I just talk then, and watch for whatever words’ll come out of me beak.
"Things have changed," I said. "Before, toys was a distraction. But after the flood, they got more focussed. Had to, otherwise their only reason to exist, us humans, was going to give up the ghost. Dave—you used to joke about toys getting souls but I reckon that’s actually started. All your duty and hope sort of created it."
Dave’s expression is unreadable but I know he’s listening.
"Whatever soul you got," I said, "you earnt it. We didn’t, and look what we did to the world."
"Jackie," says Dave. "It’s good of you to say all that. But the fact is you got to go. Us old toys’ll just hold you back."
I shake my head. "No, we’re staying. We’ll work it out. Or we won’t, it don’t matter: all that counts is being loyal to those what love you. And Susan, we’ll go back for your toys too, or cart all of ours over to your place, even if it takes a thousand trips through the sludge."
She smiles at me, real proud, I can tell. All the folks of Gaffville are smiling too but kind of shadowed, as if they ain’t sure at all this is right.
Well, I ain’t sure neither.
But when I see Dave’s arm reach out to hold his lady close, gripping her like he doesn’t want the dream to die, no one can tell me Big Dave ain’t in love.
(2012)
I, ROW-BOAT
Cory Doctorow
Cory Doctorow was born in Toronto, Ontario, Canada and now lives in London. He attended an anarchistic "free school" in Toronto, went to four universities without attaining a degree, and now (of course) enjoys a peripatetic academic career. He co-edits the blog Boing Boing and advises the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital free speech and privacy non-profit. (He spotted the sinister surveillance implication of oh-so-artist-friendly digital rights management technologies years before the rest of us.) His latest books are a collection of four novellas, Radicalized (2019), the novel Walkaway (2017) and Information Doesn’t Want to be Free, a business book about creativity in the Internet age (2014). A caped and goggled fictional version of Doctorow turns up occasionally in the webcomic xkcd, living in a hot air balloon "above the tag clouds".
Robbie the Row-Boat’s great crisis of faith came when the coral reef woke up.
"Fuck off," the reef said, vibrating Robbie’s hull through the slap-slap of the waves of the coral sea, where he’d plied his trade for decades. "Seriously. This is our patch, and you’re not welcome."