Expiration Day (11 page)

Poor Dad. That hour I don't think he knew where to look. At me? Or at
me
? No, I don't think he could even look Mum in the eye, so he just stared at the floor, mostly.

Mum, though, she was great. She got into it quite quickly, and started making helpful comments. She'd brought an old family photo album along, and was comparing what she saw in the screen with Great-Aunt Jane, who'd had a collarbone to die for, or directing Doctor Thompson to the fall of Granny Liz's shoulders—very shapely they were, too, and so, subtly, the doctor worked in a little of this ancestor or that distant cousin. For years, there'd been Mum … and Dad. That was all. Now, suddenly I was part of a family, stretching back over generations.

Eventually Doctor Thompson was done.

“Reverend Deeley, I think you ought to look, now. You have a very lovely daughter, who is about to blossom into a delightful young woman. But I need you to tell me if by accident we are about to create the spit and image of your detested Aunt Maureen, who blighted your formative years. Or whatever psychological scar it is—I don't even know if you had an Aunt Maureen, or if she was a witch or a saint.”

Dad looked up at the screen, then at me, then back to the screen.

“I'm sorry, but I don't find this … process … at all comfortable. Can you put some clothes on the image, please.”

A few strokes of the stylus, and I was wearing a modest white bikini. Mmm, nice … I made a mental note—it went on my shopping list.

“That's better,” said Dad. “I'm pleased to confirm she looks nothing like my witch-aunt Maureen. Not that I had a witch-aunt Maureen.”

And then, “You're going to be even lovelier, Tan. But still unmistakably you.”

Which made Mum shed a little tear.

Doctor Markov came in then, and we had some fun, dressing me up some more, in different styles of clothing, to see what looked good on me. It was like being in Oxford Street again, but this time, everything
fit
.…

Doctor Markov asked me for my AllInFone and copied some of the images over.

“This'll help you over the next months, while you're getting ready for the exchange.”

 

 

I was lying on a couch, straight out of any movie psychiatrist's consulting room. I was being “calibrated,” I suppose. I remember a few of the questions.

“What's your favorite insect?”

“Ladybird.”

“Whom do you admire more, William the Conqueror or Napoleon Bonaparte?”

“Napoleon.”

“What is the square root of three?”

“Er, about one point seven something.”

“What one item would you take from your burning house?”

“My table tennis bat.”

“Which do you fear more, height or caves?”

“Caves.”

“What is the next in the series: Apple, Banana?”

“Er, Clementine.”

“Which is more valuable, a cockroach or a beetle?”

“Cockroach.”

And then, more tricky …

“You are the mother of three children, facing death. You are given the choice, to choose one child to live, or one child to die. What do you do?”

“Choose one child to live.”

“You find a small sum of money in the street. Do you keep it for yourself or try to find the owner?”

“Keep it.”

“You find a plain gold wedding ring in the gutter. Do you keep it for yourself or try to find the owner?”

“Find the owner.”

It went on for an hour or more. At the end I was utterly exhausted. And baffled. How was this a … calibration?

 

 

We ended up all together with the two doctors, Markov and Thompson. Doctor Markov had some advice.

“We need to go away and build Miss Deeley's new body. It will take some months, and it's a fairly major revision, four calendar years in a single exchange. People will notice, especially as you've missed the main opportunity for a revision, which is the summer holiday. So you'll have to find ways to disguise the extent of the changes. That's one reason we gave you the images of you as you're going to be, so you can start to make yourself over.…

“Some pieces of advice, then. The first is to start avoiding those who know you well, even if they know you're a robot. It's quite upsetting for people to be faced with a sudden change, so you need to provide them with the longest gap you can.…

“Then you should dress and walk to minimize the perceived change. Before the exchange, wear tall shoes, pad your clothing. After the exchange, wear flat soles, shapeless clothing.…”

There was a lot of advice, too much to take in. But they gave us a booklet with all the main points in it. And a helpline.

Big deal.

None of it solved my biggest problem.

How to fool John …

Saturday, February 24, 2052

How to fool John …

I gave it a lot of thought over the next few days. It was very important that John shouldn't … find out. It would spoil it, between us. Not that there was an
us
. I mean that it would spoil things between him and me. I wanted to make things different, yes, but
better
. For us. By which I mean him. And me.

Oh, Zog! Can't you tell? I'm such a bad robot. Such a bad, bad robot. Because I've got a crush on a human boy. Still. After all that's happened. After all this time.

While he … he's falling for my best friend Siân. And I think she's falling for him. At any rate, she's our singer, while John plays guitar and I struggle with a bass that's still far too big for me. But I'm starting to make it do what I want, which is more than I can say for
her
.

She's a rubbish singer. Her voice wobbles, and she can't really hit the notes. It doesn't seem to matter to John, though. He grins a lot, and when she's not looking, he stares at her chest.

Idiot! Why won't you stare at my chest?

Well, I know the answer to that. Because I haven't got one. Because it hasn't been delivered yet. Not literally, of course, because I'll have to go back to Oxted when my revision's ready.

And then I've got a problem, because the next day I'll be about ten centimeters taller and I'll have a pretty decent chest. And I'll see John, and he'll say, “Oh, hi, Tania, wow, where did
that
come from, oh I guess you must have just had a revision, so you were a robot all along, nice knowing you (not), come along, Siân, we're going, good-bye.” Slam.

Maybe I didn't think it through all the way, but doing nothing wasn't an option, and I really did want to be able to play the bass.

In the meantime, we rehearse at weekends in the church hall, and John comes out on the train because the instruments belong to the church, and there's nowhere for us to practice near John's parents' place, and it wouldn't be fair to make the girls travel.

Why does it hurt so much?

I want to be with John. John wants to be with Siân. Siân wants to be with John. Both of them put up with me, probably because it's my dad's church hall, and my dad's instruments, and just maybe because I'm turning into a half-decent bassist.

Where does all this pain come from? This sweet pain that comes whenever I'm with John, but pain for all that, because he is … attracted to someone else.

I'm just a copy, I know. A copy of a real human. Not real. So this pain can't be real pain. It must be a copy of real pain. A good copy, because it really hurts. There's that word again. Real.

 

 

There was a name Amanda mentioned. John Entwistle. I followed links through the TeraNet, and came to The Who. From The Who, to
My Generation
.

Such bass playing.… Alone, I practiced, till my fingers hurt with the stretching. I dug out clips of this giant, his fingers blurring in a complex two-handed dance that left me baffled and awestruck. And then, little by little, I felt the rhythms fall into place.

Then I stopped, Amanda's voice urgent in my inner ear. Find your own style, she seemed to say once more. So I moved on, learning from others, but grateful to this other, long-dead John for the inspiration of his legacy.

“I look pretty tall, but my heels are high.” Indeed they are. Perhaps not the full ten centimeters, but some of the way. I started to carry out some of the subterfuges suggested by Doctor Markov. Mostly just subtle padding. Mum helped with a little bit of sewing, and more important, by saying “stop,” before I overdid anything.

But it wasn't going to be enough. John wasn't going to be fooled by a pair of high heels and a bit of padding, even half-blinded by his infatuation with Siân.

I needed something else.

But what?

 

 

And then John himself provided the answer.

At the end of one evening he stopped us as we were packing our gear away.

“Siân, Tania. I've got something to say. It's important.”

We turned and waited. He looked upset.

“I … can't come anymore. To these practices.”

Both Siân and I gasped our disbelief. John held up a hand to shush us, and told us to just listen and not say anything.

“This is the last one. Mum and Dad have put a stop to it. We're not very well-off, you know, and it's been very expensive coming out here every weekend. I don't get a huge allowance, 'cause we can't afford it. The shop doesn't bring much money in, you see, after all the outgoings are taken care of. And last week, I didn't have enough for the fare, so I borrowed some money from the till, without telling them. So we were short at the end of the day. Quite a lot short. I think Dad knew, but he didn't say anything. I see him watching me now, though. I can't … borrow … anymore. He'd know. And I don't want to, now. He doesn't trust me anymore, and I've spoiled everything.”

He was in tears, and before I knew it, the three of us were sitting in a line, John in the middle, and Siân and me on his right and his left, holding him tight. We held that pose for an endless time, or at least until Dad came around, a sudden clatter that made us spring guiltily apart. He was wondering why we hadn't locked up and gone home yet.

Spoilsport.

You know, Zog, for all that my dear John was a petty thief, and for all that Siân was hugging him, too, it just felt good to be holding him as his tears flowed. Oh, yes, there was a part of me selfishly glad that at last I could freely hug the object of my desire. But there was another, bigger part of me that was simply glad that when he needed to be hugged, I was there to help make the hurt go away.

Thursday, March 14, 2052

So the band fell apart, just like that.

But I knew I wasn't going to let John go, not at all just like that. He'd need a lot of patience, and he might not want to talk. He'd be ashamed of what he'd done. Neither Siân nor I had used the word thief, but I know I'd thought it, and surely he would, too.

So I started looking for him on the TeraNet straightaway.

He was hiding.

“Not Home,” according to his mood indicators. Fine. Be like that. But I'm going to send you messages anyway.

“Hiya, John-boy Czern. Pls wave back. Raven.”

“Tania2GingerMop. Hail from a friend. And a gentle rain.”

I know it's not Shakespeare, but it was the sort of shorthand we used with each other. A kind of code we shared.

After a couple of days, he sent me a message. No words, but a cartoon of an old-fashioned floor mop, upside-down, with all the cleaning strands ginger. He'd sketched on it a couple of cartoon eyes—bright blue of course—but droopy. Sad and ashamed, no doubt about that message.

Still, he was talking to me, after a fashion.

So I sent him a cartoon back. A Raven, with one wing outstretched, with the mop beneath the wing.

It was a pretty rubbish drawing, but it got the message across.

So I started hunting for drawing programs on the TeraNet, and filtered to find those that came with adaptable artwork.

Tucked in there were the 3-D rendering programs, because I wasn't as skillful as John with filtering. One of them claimed to be able to apply “skins” to image streams. What was that, then? You know how it is with searches, Zog, or maybe not. Maybe you have proper AI searches that can eliminate all the wrong answers. If you do, then your life must get boring, because I just love following these side trails.

Intrigued, I followed, and discovered a clever piece of software that would overlay elements of a picture with equivalent elements from another picture. There was more, much more, but the long and short of it was that I could create an image of myself as a raven, by taking a picture of myself, mapping it to a picture of a raven, and blending the two in whatever proportion I chose: 100 percent me, 100 percent raven, or any mix in between.

I laughed, and did just that. It was weird. Definitely me, and definitely a raven, too. Then I discovered that I could vary the mix over the body, to give a raven's head on my body, and then I inverted the mix to put my head on a raven's body. Seamless.

It was so good I nearly hit
SEND
.

My hand hovered over the key, something nagging at the back of my mind. Suzi Quatro …

I saved the raven for later, and dug out the photo of Suzi, and this time the skinner made a perfect job. Yes, that was along the right lines, but still I felt I was missing something. Something I could
use
.

Then it hit me. The blurb said “image streams.” That meant moving pictures. Like my webcam. So I blended Suzi Quatro onto my webcam feed, and suddenly there was Suzi-plus-me in my room, all rock chick and bass, with raven hair, looking at my webcam.

One more step.
Where
had I filed the images I'd brought back from Oxted?

It was still on my AllInFone, and that was what I needed.

So, what did 80 percent me, 20 percent me-plus look like?