“Mister Crane!” manages Bollweevil, startled. “A delightful surprise! How–how long were…?”
“Been waiting,” says Crane quietly. Crane’s always quiet. “Saving up.”
“Yes, you’ve taken great advantage of our rollover–”
“Never liked you.” Crane moves closer. “Word-counting, extortion, this little basement tyranny.”
“Not another word, Crane,” says Bollweevil coldly. He brushes the shotgun under the desk.
“Been saving,” says Crane, and brings his arm up.
Bollweevil’s jerking at the gun, but the fistful of exclamation marks is already exploding around him: a thunder of percussive silences. There’s blood in his ears. Crane walks forward, smiling, and Bollweevil’s screams are soundless.
“Please,” Bianca cringes, “Sophie, listen,” as water creeps from the carpet.
“The FUCK!” Sophie’s face is unpinches and pales. The vase of flowers implodes from the floor up onto the table. She draws back her hand.
“Please don’t get mad,” says Bianca.
“You’re on that shit again,” says Sophie. “That fucking drug.”
“Listen,” says Bianca. “You weren’t–weren’t supposed to be back yet…”
“Hey, what’s up?” Sophie retreats from the room. Her movements have a strange, lazy grace, alternated with an odd sharpness. Bianca remembers the first time she saw it: delight, fascination, this new perspective on how people move forward.
The rain’s fat, slow and hard, with a warmth behind it and the rising smell of bruised worms: a summer storm in winter. When each drop has its own weight and sound, thinks Edwidge as she shrugs up her thin hood, it’s easy to give them names and stories too.
There: Wilhelmina, who sings as she falls, to the adoration or envy of her fellows. There: Cruet and Sylvan, who touched at twelve thousand feet and were never apart again. There, Dmitri, who knows what the others don’t: that every raindrop, like every pearl, is born from a speck of dirt.
It’s midnight in Mendon’s lab, just as it should be. His shielded clocks tick straight on over the line between Greenwich Standard days, but those on the wall don’t. London, Paris, Istanbul, Beijing: they all say it’s five o’clock.
The webcam feeds confirm it. Dim winter afternoon in a Berlin window, late summer evening in Oahu. If you stuck a sword in a globe you’d hit one of them going in and the other going out, but there they are. Nobody anywhere has noticed.
Mendon flips on all the monitors at once and gazes, fearful, at the metastasis of the sun.
Wednesday, March 16, 2005
Remember you are light, and to light you shall return is a steel-framed plexiglass box containing seventy-three identical sexbots in five alternating rows. They are all masturbating. Pomeroy has offset their timings perfectly; every five minutes, when they orgasm, their heads thrash in a wave from left to right like wind on a field of grain.
“Your technique is beautiful,” says Gillian. “Why is the product so crass?”
Pomeroy smiles a little. “The definition of beauty lasts. That of crudity doesn’t. This will remain beautiful even after the batteries die.”
“You think a lot of your own work.”
“Yes. I do.”
“Do you have any ketchup?” asks Daisy politely.
“Not yet,” says Chester, “But we will–after I open a portal to the Ketchup Dimension!”
“What?”
ZAP! Chester selects a bottle of Red Gold Extra Fancy from the millions suddenly floating around them. “Anything else?” he asks.
“Well,” she says. “Maybe a pony?”
“No problem. Pony Dimension!” ZAP!
“I want one named Lightning,” says Daisy.
“They’re all named Lightning,” Chester assures her.
“Could we maybe,” says Daisy shyly, “I mean… is there a Fun Dimension?”
“Why don’t we find out,” smiles Chester, “together?”
But actually the Fun Dimension is full of Nazis!
When Jake was small he’d always end up on the floor, during attacks. It wasn’t that he couldn’t stand; something about the texture of carpet on his cheek was soothing. He tried to scratch his back on it, too, but that never worked. The itch was on the inside.
Asthma. Old enemy. He sits propped against a stack of pillows and watches the wall like a distant army, but then everything’s distant on low oxygen. Asthma’s a full-sensory experience, and the synaesthesia is taking him back in memory: detachment, his tight chest, dog-heavy legs and the strange plastic taste of albuterol.