Michael Cunningham - Specimen Days

They walked across expanses of grass and weed. They passed once through an abandoned housing tract, neat rows of similar houses with the grass grown up around them. The houses had been one idea, endlessly repeated. Time and weather had bleached them, made them semitranslucent, like paper houses. There was a peculiar satisfaction in their silent sameness, in the way their modestly peaked rooflines cut like little teeth into the blank white sky. In their quiet ongoing collapse.

Near midafternoon they came upon a complex that shimmered above the road. It was a faux-Gehry silver oval fifty stories high, decorated with small extraneous bulges and, on its southern side, a forty-foot fin that angled halfheartedly in the direction of the sky. Under its sloping silver underside would be the garage area.

“So,” Simon said. “Civilization. This is probably one of the last inhabited complexes, this far west.”

“Yes.”

“Heavy security, I’m sure. But let’s think for a minute here.”

“Yes.”

“They wouldn’t let us into residential or business. We could probably slip into shopping, but they’d have their eyes on us every second.”

She said, “They make deliver here?”

“Deliveries? Sure. All the time.”

“That is not much guarded?”

“Probably not. So, you’re thinking we could hang around the delivery port and try to steal a cargo pod?”

“Yes.”

“Here’s the problem with that. I can’t assault anybody. I could steal a pod, but I can’t threaten a driver. My programming won’t allow it. I’d freeze up. I’d go into lockdown. If something really bad happened to somebody, I could shut down entirely.”

“You were robber in Old New York.”

“I could do that because the clients wanted me to. It was one of the only jobs I could get without a resume.”

“I can threaten.”

“So I’ve seen.”

“I threaten, you drive?”

“Yes. I can drive, no problem. I just can’t harm or threaten with harm any living creature with a spinal cord.”

“I threaten. You drive.”

“Well, let’s take a shot.”

They went to the base of the complex and stood at the edge of its plaza, which was veined with weedy cracks. This would be a low-rent complex, then. Its glass lobby doors were less than clean. A number of its titanium panels had fallen away. It was checkered with brown squares where the titanium had been.

Its security would not be high-quality. It might still be fitted out with the long-ago model that had claimed to identify everyone who entered but had in fact automatically questioned every third person and automatically stun-shot every fifty-first. This had been hushed up. Because replacing the systems would have been tantamount to admitting guilt, some of the older, less expensive complexes still had them.

“Deliveries would be around the back,” Simon said.

“We go,” she answered. “Sure. We go.”

At the rear of the complex a ramp curved down from ground level and terminated at a steel gate that would rise when a deliveryperson had been identified. It was empty now. In the vicinity, barrels of garbage glowed blue-white in the sun. This complex must have deactivated its toxic-disposal system to save money. It was probably hiring Nadians to remove the most lethal waste products. The Nadians would be dumping it in the fields Simon and Catareen had walked across.

She said, “We wait. We hide.”

“Where are we going to hide?”

“Barrels.”

“We shouldn’t get too close to that stuff, actually.”

“Short time.”

“If we don’t stay too long, I suppose the worst we’ll get is a little dizzy.”

“There is not other.”

He and Catareen crouched behind the barrels of toxic waste. Experimentally, Simon touched one with his fingertips. It was hot. From the barrels emanated a ghostly sheen, barely visible a quickening and brightening of the air. Simon wondered if the residents of the complex’s lower floors suffered headaches they could not explain. If their children were having trouble with their teeth.

After a while, they heard the hum of an approaching pod. Catareen stood quickly. “You wait,” she said. She darted out from behind the barrels and laid herself down in the middle of the ramp.

A moment later the deliverypod hove into view. The driver stopped several feet shy of Catareen’s prone form.

She lifted her head and looked at the pod driver. Simon could hear her say, “Please. Help, please.”

He heard the driver’s amplified voice from the pilot’s seat. “What’s the trouble?” It was the high, eager rasp of a teenager.

She raised one arm, waved a green claw limply in the air. “Please,” she moaned.

The driver would be deciding. Should he hover past her, go inside, and notify someone? Or should he intervene directly? Opinion was divided about helping Nadians. Some people refused categorically. Some were overly helpful, to counterbalance those who refused.

Simon could see the young man get out of the pod. He said silently, You are a good young man, I’m sorry your attitude is going to be changed.

The young deliveryman bent over Catareen. She hesitated, whispered something. Then she was on him. She wrapped her taloned hands around his neck. Because he was at least a foot taller than she, she planted her feet on his abdomen. She was very fast. She was lizardlike. For a moment Simon saw her as an animal, seizing prey. Then he ran out from behind the barrels.

The deli very man the delivery boy was white-faced and trembling in Catareen’s grasp. He had pale orange hair and a dusting of freckles.

He said, “Please don’t hurt me.”

Simon paused. His circuits hummed. The kid wanted to be hurt, didn’t he? He wanted it without knowing he did. Was that true? Or was Simon getting the signal wrong?

Simon said, “We’re not going to do anything to you you don’t want us to do.”

“Get inside,” Catareen said to the boy. “Passenger side.”

Quivering, the boy climbed into the pod with Catareen clinging to him like a fiendish child. Simon got into the pilot’s seat. He reversed the pod and hove onto the road. The boy sat beside him with Catareen ferociously crouched on his lap.

Simon saw that the boy had been delivering soymilk to the complex. Orange boxes of it were stacked neatly in the pod’s rear.

The boy said, “Please. Oh, please, take the pod. I won’t do anything.”

Simon paused. He needed to do the best thing for the boy. He’d shut down if he did harm. But he could not seem to determine whether the boy wanted to be spared or menaced.

Catareen said nothing. She held her talons to the kid’s scrawny neck.

When Simon tried to speak, he found that his voice was not working. He tried again. In a low tone he was able to say, “We’re just going to drop you off in a little while. You can walk back. You’ll be fine.”

His voice had taken on a mechanical laxity. He felt as if he were driving drunk. He devoted his attention to steering.

The boy whimpered in Catareen’s grasp. Simon drove as well as he could. He wavered slightly but was able to stay on the road.

When they saw a side road approaching, Catareen said, “Turn here.”

“Oh, God, oh, no,” the boy said. He must be thinking they meant to kill him.

He said, “Please, please, please.”

Simon went blank then. His workings ceased. He could see, but he could not move. He saw his hand frozen on the pod’s steering stick. He saw the side road go by.

Catareen said, “Not turn?”

He couldn’t speak. He could only sit as he was, frozen, watching. The pod drifted to the right. Simon couldn’t correct it. By the time Catareen understood that he had no powers of control, the pod had veered off the road and onto the dirt and grass of the shoulder. It shuddered slightly.