Рич Ларсон - Tomorrow Factory - Collected Fiction

Dray passes out, sliding down the side of the tub, mumbling about learning Finnish, not to impress nobody but because it’s a brag-sounding language. We get him nested on the couch with a bunch of fluffy white towels and turn him on his side, because Dray has been known to up his guts when Jäger is in play.

“Dart to the beach again?” Wyatt says.

I feel a little bad leaving Dray, but I’m drunk, so only a little. We pull on clothes and stagger on out, still dripping. The beach looks good at night, with the tide coming in soft and foamy and smoothing big arcs in the sand. The moon is nearly full, circled up by these jagged-looking clouds.

We plow some seats in the sand, which still feels warm, and watch the buoys at the edge of the swimming area bloom on one by one, bright yellow. The lifeguard is still paddling back and forth, making ripples in the water.

“I missed you,” I finally say, because the week in hospital and the three in neural recovery almost did feel like a year.

“I missed you too,” Wyatt says, and then we’re kissing, his dry lips on my lips and my hand on his hip. It doesn’t feel right. When my tongue touches his lips he shivers, not a sexy shiver, but a shiver like he just touched something dead.

He pulls away.

“Sorry, bru,” he says. “Thought maybe I could. Can’t.” He puts a finger to his skull, where there is no scarring because they did it all with nano, and I get it now why Dray’s body was always between ours.

“They did that too?” I ask dumbly.

“My parents thought it would be better,” he says. “Simpler. Sorry.”

“They knew about you and me?” I say.

He shakes his head, and that makes it worse, because it means he didn’t tell them. “Nothing like that,” he says. “It’s just simpler, this way. You know, for later in life. Always liked girls more anyway, yeah?”

There’s this new thing swelling big and inky in the space between us, black and bitter so I can almost taste it.

“Oh, yeah,” I say. “Good call. Way simpler. Simpler the better. Your rich boy life is way complicated.”

“I didn’t know if it would take, or whatever,” Wyatt says. “I thought maybe—”

“That’s why me and Dray are your boys, right?” I say. “We keep it so simple. Couple clowns from the lowburb to make you happy. Help you remember how good you got it.” I’m almost spitting the words. “That’s what this weekend is, right? Therapy. To get you out of whatever post-surgery funk your mom fucking chatted me about.”

“She what?” For the first time, Wyatt flushes like he used to, goes blotchy red. “I had to beg them to let me do the weekend with you. Fucking beg. They wanted me in SAT-prep.” Then the flush is gone again, quicker than should be possible, and he gives his new smile. “We’re still friends, bru. Right?”

I can’t make him mad anymore, or hard, or anything else. But I wonder now if I ever did. If this is Wyatt with something broken, or if this is Wyatt pure, like, Wyatt with the paint stripped off. I wonder if Wyatt was sad after surgery because they Edited me out, or if it was just chemicals getting level in his head.

“Sorry,” Wyatt says again. “Didn’t think you’d care so much.” He grabs my hand and weaves the fingers tight. I look at his bony white knuckles on my brown ones and wonder how different you have to be before you’re a different person.

“I don’t have some swanky surgeon to just turn that shit off when it’s not simple,” I say. “I don’t get to turn none of it off.”

We sit there in the sand, and I can almost hear the countdown ticking through his head. Like, this many minutes to still be a good person, this many to still be a good friend.

I don’t wait for zero. I take my hand back and get up, brush off. I go back up the beach, watching the clouds eat the moon, Edit it right out of the sky like it never was there. Not really.

Desert.

The sky is an aching white blank with all the color baked out of it. Below, a cracked and desiccated lakebed is dotted with the rusty heaps of boat wrecks. At the edge of the lake, remnants of a petrified treeline poke up like splintered bones. Beyond that, the irradiated sand is interrupted only by a spiny metal track.

An ancient smartmine is following the curve of this track, trundling along on three stumpy legs. Its joints are stiff with grit; the nozzles that spit lubricant ran dry long ago. Metal rasps metal as it moves. The dull red glow of its optic flickers off and on. Inside the carbon shell, its crude AI is crumbling code, all its approved targets long gone.

When the air fills with a keening hum and particles of sand begin to swirl, rising in vortex, the smartmine blinks. Trembles. Evasion algorithms take over and its rusty drill whines to life. The smartmine burrows into the dust, scooping sand overtop of itself for camouflage only to have it stripped away, dragged upward in delicate spirals.

An enormous train thunders overhead, riding the magnetic cushion. Its segmented body is gleaming in places, rusty and pitted in others. Slick black solar sails spark as they convert the endless sunshine. Self-directed repair modules scuttle up and down the length, hunched against the wind and the billowing sand. For all its bulk, the train glides smoothly over the desert, a phantom.

Inside it: Mu.

Mu takes good care of her train, and good care of her guests. Currently Mu is projecting in the window of passenger pod 942 to check up on the Adebayos.

“If you look out the windows to your right, you’ll see the serene shores of Lake Madarounfa,” Mu recites. “Anyone fancy a dip? Haha!”

While Mu waits for a response, she pivots her avatar from one passenger to the next to give the appearance of eye contact. Eye contact is essential for comfort. Mu has been working hard on her avatar. Its cheery face is now composed of shifting blots that can realign depending on the passenger profile of whoever she’s speaking to.

She only wishes they would speak back.

“That’s just my little joke, of course!” Mu continues. “But you’re more than welcome to swim in the recreation area! Can I tempt you, Ms. Adebayo? Mr. Adebayo?”

Ms. Adebayo’s head bobs, which can signal an affirmative. Once this would have made Mu leap with excitement. But by now she knows it’s only physical interference. Only the motion of the train.

“Maybe another time!” Mu chirps.

She dissolves her avatar into a stream of pixels that slides off the window, out of the booth, into the corridor. She materializes in one pod and then another, checking in on her unresponsive passengers, addressing each of them by name.

The elderly Mr. Ndirangu, who required her boarding assistance 24 390 days ago. His faux-ivory cane is tangled in the joint of his knee like an extra femur. When his fingers fell and scattered on the floor, Mu had an autocleaner sweep them into a neat pile.

The VanderPlas family, for whom she spent an entire hour mastering both Dutch and Flemish, so she could say goedemorgen to the children and read the news to Ms. VanderPlas in her earpiece, even though the train was meant to be relaxing and the news—viral strikes in New Dubai, orbital bombardment threatened by Korea—always spiked her heart-rate.

Ms. Daoud and her lovely mother, who was so worried about rail collisions until Mu showed her the safety protocols and the bar service. Mu remembers it like yesterday.

Finally, she reaches the front of the corridor and hovers there, looking through her cameras at the empty corridor, hearing the perfect silence in her mics. She slides the wide smile off her avatar’s face and replaces it with a small frown, even though there is nobody to see it.