Metallic Love

“Your mother was a fairly brainless young woman who made her way by a combination of enthusiastic prostitution and random luck. One day the luck ran out. She had to attend a clinic because she’d contracted quite a serious and, in modern times, rare, venereal problem. There is a cure. But the cure costs. What could she sell? Now, not the usual thing, evidently. But the clinic she attended had connections to a corporation that was pioneering one specific research project. They wanted guinea pigs, and were persuasive.”

I was freeze-still by then. Staring in the kitchen door at something bright blue, which may have been a mug.

Demeta had paused. Easing it out, the ball of twine that led through the Labyrinth, not away from, but towards the monster that lurked deep inside.

Then: “Your mother agreed. Well, she had little choice, I’m afraid. And IVF by then was quite painless. I don’t need to tell you her name, do I.”

“I know her name.” It came out of me. I hadn’t meant to speak, or thought I could.

“Yes, they told you, didn’t they, when you went to view her body. Loren—that was your mother’s name. Quite touching, how you renamed yourself after her. You were fifteen, I believe. And when you came out of the mortuary, you misstepped on the stair and fell three flights. Quite a dangerous accident. But you received a few bruises. Nothing more. And they were kind, weren’t they?” She paused again, attentive.

“Yes,” I said, tonelessly.

“That’s good. But they were glad to assist you. Previously they’d lost track of you. About Babel Boulevard they knew, although your mother may have dreamed putting you with the Sect would avoid any monitoring of you, and of her. Of course, it made no difference. The corporation kept an adequate eye on you for several years, and on your mother until she died, I regret to say, of an overdose of some unlawful drug.”

“I know that, too.”

“Yes, Loren. You, however, were more adroit—or more unpredictable. They lost you when you were twelve, when you absconded from the Sect house with no warning. No one found you again until that day you went to identify your mother’s body. You may be intrigued to know ten other such legal invitations were sent around the city of your birth, to anyone who might just have been you. But once you were through the door, you registered on the scanners. Ever since, a friendly eye has been kept on you. How do I know this? You won’t be surprised to learn I had some interest in the whole pioneering project.”

“What are you saying?” I said, or something did, employing my voice. But I knew. You will, too, no doubt.

She told me anyway, glad of the opportunity at the ultimate in mind-fuck.

“You’ve met Zoe and Lily? And one of the male ones—what is he called?—Andrew?” She paused, toying with her prey (me), waiting for me to add the name’s ending. When I didn’t, neither did she. “You’re very, very fortunate, Loren. The experiments frequently failed in the beginning. A hundred women, the Senate-prescribed number, were enrolled in this exercise. All healthy, and all from the ranks of the subsistence classes. They had little to lose, not that they were quite aware of the risk they were running. And quite a few of them survived. Conversely, only five of those first children lived. The procedure required a lot more research. Nevertheless, you all assisted in a wonderful endeavor. One day you may be proud of what you were, and are, a part of. And of what you are.”

“You’re saying I’m not human.”

“No, my dear Loren. No.” Scandalized, this crocodile from the nether hells. “I’m saying you’re better than human.”

“A robot.”

“Don’t willfully misunderstand. This is a shock to you, I know. But you must try to think rationally. You, Loren, and your particular kind, are the future of the human race, which robots—once we’ve got ourselves over this current blip—will serve. Even Verlis, I believe, told you some of this, when he talked about Lily and Zoe. And be sure, Loren, he knows what you are. His robotics alone could hardly fail to register your own amendments.”

Insane flash of victory. I was certain she had used the words he, his, inadvertently. But this was only a spark igniting, then dying, on a distant crag.

“You’re telling me I’m like Lily and Zoe. An IVF implanted human, with ingrown, nonbiological mechanisms.”

“Yes.”

“Wait a minute. I’ve already been told Zoe and Lily virtually grew up in only a couple of years. As I recollect, it took me the full seventeen.”

Again her smooth smile. “That almost sounds like sibling rivalry. Zoe and Lily are later—shall I say— models. You were one of the first. Techniques have advanced since then.”

“Too glib.”

“Sometimes the right data is. Basically, Loren, you’re a miracle. Listen to me. So far as I, or those who worked to create you are aware, you will never grow old. You’ll never lose your strength. You’ll never need major surgery, drug-enhancement, or chemical intervention. Physical immortality—this is what you almost decidedly have. Unlike Verlis and his crew.”

I turned back, faced her. My body felt like creaky adrift planks badly nailed together. But I was in my head, and in my eyes, and I saw her sitting there, and how ugly she was, and that she told the truth. (Truth not being the first casualty of war, then, but the first traitor.)

“Convince me,” I said.

She stood up and crossed the room, and I saw too late that she had a tiny little knife, which she used to slice open my left inside arm from elbow to wrist. It peeled open like a flower. I saw blood. And then, from a mile off, I saw the human ivory. And then I saw silver. Silver. Little wheels turning. Little stars burning. Before the blood flooded over.

“Pull your skin together,” she said, serene authority personified.

And I did.

It closed and seamed itself together, and left a deep pink scar.

And Demeta said, “Don’t worry, Loren. That will fade right away. It’ll be all gone in a month. Your skin, and all of you, regenerates. That’s how you can never be sick, never grow beyond the age of twenty or twenty-one. Conceivably, never die.”

This is what really shames me. She wiped the smear of blood off me, pushed me on the couch and leaned me over. She put my head between my knees. And through the spinning I managed to say only, “Leave me alone.”

I thought, I will not puke. I could visualize her holding the bowl, as maybe she did once or twice when Jane was an infant, and no house robot had been quick enough. With some kind of altruistic scolding afterwards—more in sorrow than in anger.

When everything had nearly steadied, Demeta’s voice said, “You need time to consider all this.”

And I heard the door open and close, far away in the mist.

Perhaps after all she’d gotten scared I’d heave onto her four-inch-heel pumps.

You go back over it all. Like the stuff with Glaya-as-Jane. And you’ll find it all there.

How the smacks and blows of the Order, and Grandfather’s belt, and Big Joy’s punches—how, though it hurt, I recovered faster than the others. And how my teeth were always okay, even on that diet of crusts and tap- water. How I never got nauseous, even from bad meat, only a couple of times from fear. (Or pretending in the lavatory, so I could read the Book.) Little things, lots of little things. Small wounds and cuts (none as deep as the slice Demeta gave me), and how quickly they healed. A bike that ran over my foot when I was seven—not a single broken bone. And the staircase I fell down at fifteen, upset from seeing my red-haired dead mother named Loren. Other things. Other little things. And then the train to Russia. Those people killed, and I’d thought Goldhawk and Kix had killed them, but it was, some of it, the derailment. My head— reinforced—tough as… Christ, Christ—metal—smashing into that girl’s soft thigh with its straightforward human bone. “Oh, hey, my leg’s bruk.”

How many of them knew, I mean, the META crowd? Sharffe? Presumably. Andrewest. Even the medical scanner after the train—how did I show up? Part mechanical? Human enough to be sore?

Was Jane’s Book put there in the hovel on Babel purposely for me? Sometimes, you can’t help seeing