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Unreal City, Under the brown fog of a winter dawn |
Spring, technically. Seven-thirty on a dreary Monday in the cruelest month. Normally one of the few hours of the day you could guarantee I would be asleep. Instead I'm slumped in an armchair in my bathrobe, curled up around a mug of bad coffee, looking out onto a chilly day. The canal is pocked with rain; boat traffic chugs slowly by as people struggle to get their canopies up. Rain drips and mutters against the façade of my building, searching blindly for a way in. It clatters tinnily down the waterspouts and ticks against the glass balcony doors. Out in the middle of the channel, a tall sailboat passes, a ghostly blur in the drizzle. Inside it's dim enough that the geckos are still lit. One has crawled with dumb Martin-seeking perseverance up the back of my chair and now sits above me, gently glowing. As it happens I'm neither drawing nor reading, and would just as soon have it dim. If Brutus were here, the gecko would clamber stolidly down the chair back again, leaving me to my solitude, but this is the one hour of the day I encourage him to get out of the house and stretch himself.
Forgetting-again!-how awful my own coffee is, I take another sip, and grimace. The disadvantage of a home built to take perfect care of you is that you get used to perfection, while forgetting how to achieve it yourself.
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"What is that noise?" The wind under the door |
Both gecko lights in the living room pause for a fraction of a second, quivering; a sheen of UV filter gathers on the glass doors like a foggy breath and passes off again: and Brutus is back, poured into this body of brick and glass and wire. Nobody else would even notice his return, but to me it's as obvious as the difference between studying a man's face, and catching his eye.
Brutus says, astonished to find me awake.
"It wasn't my idea," I grumble. "We were afflicted with not one but two Urgent Messages this morning. One of them was for you," I say, with a meaningful glance at the vidscreen, whose camera was Brutus' usual point of view. "A certain spirited lady."
Outside, the wind picks up, pushing the rain harder against my windows. The light in the room wavers slightly as Brutus fiddles with the UV filter values in the smartglass. It's a nervous habit.
he asks, although he ought to know
me better.
"My dear sir, I am a gentleman! You will find it unread in the usual place."
Some say you can't tell when a being that moves at light speed is "hurrying." They're wrong.
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= Who
is the third who walks always beside you? When I count, there are only you and I together. . . |
I take another sip of swill, grimace, and shamble into the kitchen to pour the rest down the sink. Brutus busies himself with the kitchen imp, making something drinkable.
he asks.
"An unexpected contract proposal.” Rain gurgles down the gutters outside my balcony and sluices into the canal, an endless spatter, each drop immediately dissolving into the main, like a life disappearing into history. "Brutus, if you could download into any body in the world, what would you choose?"
he shoots back. That makes me
smile—no mean feat for me before eight on a Monday morning.
"Tactfully put. But these walls don't count. If you could be poured into any form at all—Belladerma robot, a mechanical leopard, a dolphin in the southern seas—what would you choose?"
I turn my head and look directly into the vidscreen on the living room wall. "What?"
I blink. "'Out of body I shall never take/ But such a form as Grecian blimpsmiths make. . .' You remain a creature of mysterious depths, old mole. I suppose it makes sense. Who doesn't want to fly? But you like a few walls too. Windows to fiddle with. Structure."
An amphibicopter courier roars by, slapping my transparent balcony doors with a crocodile's tail of wake.
"I ask because I got a very odd proposition today from a very polite contractor with a poor grasp of intercontinental time differences." The aroma of Brutus' exquisitely blended coffee begins to seep through the apartment, giving me hope. "He has a wealthy client—a very wealthy client—who wants a rather peculiar service. He doesn't want me to put an AI into his house; he wants me to take one out."
| There is the empty chapel, only the wind's home. |
"It's not that I don't understand the impulse. Even I thought about going offline for a while, in a schoolboy way. There's something to be said for boiling life down to its essentials. If some rich Japanese businessman wants to withdraw from the sphere, who am I to stop him? There can be balance in solitude; in emptiness.
"But the house, now: the house is something different. To take that intelligence and cut it from its body—"
"Exactly," I say.
The kitchen imp trundles into the living room with my coffee on its back.
"I suppose I could make another body for the AI. Something small and portable. A toy replica of the real house, for instance. AIs scale pretty easily; it would hardly notice the difference, would it? If all the fixtures worked, the lights and so forth."
Brutus says.
"They're willing to pay a lot of money."
The filters on the windows darken almost to black. Gleaming gecko lights freeze, shining through a screen of philodendron. Back in the kitchen, my second cup of coffee stops perking. "I turned down the job," I say.
"I turned it down." The windows clear. I sip the coffee the imp brought. It's exquisite. "Recommence perking, Brutus my friend." And he does.
| These fragments I have shored against my ruins. |
My mother used to love coffee. When I was young—before everything that happened—coffee was the smell of Sunday morning. Our house wasn't smart enough to make it, so Dad used to get up and pad around in a dressing gown, meticulously mixing Mom's favorite blend with an engineer's dogged precision. I like to sneak off with the coffee bag, bury my face in there and breathe deep, so the rich burned-nut smell fills me up from belly to eyes.
Mom's sick now, and drinks mostly chamomile tea.
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The
river's tent is broken: the last fingers of leaf Clutch and sink into the wet bank. |
The kitchen imp pauses, a little tick in the midst of fussing over my second cup of coffee. Dread spills through me. "Brutus? Brutus!"
he responds drily.
"You're alright, aren't you? All systems normal? Full speed and capacity?"
"Because at the first sign of trouble—"
"Cahir didn't feel that bad either."
Brutus gives me the Anxious Dog:
"Very funny," I grouch.
The rain is coming down harder now, drumming into the canal with a deep, insistent sound, like an old floor waxer running in the next moon. At the merchant pier down the waterline from me the morning crowds have melted into doorways and coffee shops. The far side of the canal blurs into a grey haze of rain and fog mixed together. Oregon weather in New York.
Brutus says.
"Me too," I say.
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My
nerves are bad tonight. Yes, bad. Stay with me. Speak to me. Why do you never speak. Speak. |