Fearful Symmetries (28 page)

And still she complained.

RAYiOS b0.8

I have power.

All components are functioning.

Next scheduled task: 7:00
P.M.
chemical check.

Monitoring for task override . . .

!!! Target child in pool

//OVERRIDE.

Delay task 1.00 hours.

Standby.

In the end it was Ross—the guy I’d fired—who put the final piece in place. People come into your life for a reason. It’s your job to figure out what it is. I ran into him in a Starbucks over in Mountain View where I’d just taken a meeting at Google (my own company having long before moved to Palo Alto). They were interested in licensing our decision-making algorithms in order to help them to sell people shit, but weren’t close to being serious enough about the package, and so I was in bullish mood as I turned from the counter with my triple espresso and spotted Ross in the corner. Any other time I’d have ignored him. It was clear from the notepad and laptop and iPhone spread around his table that he believed he was working, however, and that made me curious—curious, mainly, to make sure he wasn’t impinging on my territory. California law may declare that someone’s free to set up their own company doing the same thing as the one they just left, but my law—my rules—say different.

It emerged that he’d gotten out of the robotics business altogether and was now paddling in the classic retro swamp for so-called entrepreneurs who’ve got no fucking clue—pheromones. The biochemicals we release which are supposed to tell other people we’re feeling horny, or get them to feel the same way. Apparently his take was more sophisticated than that (or so he was keen to imply, as he had the balls to try to hit me up for venture funding right there and then) but once I’d established he wasn’t treading on my territory I took my leave, wishing him luck with enough irony to stun a goat.

On the drive home, however, I suddenly got it—the idea dropping into my head with such force that I had to pull off the highway.

I want to have sex with you
is not the only message pheromones send. They can communicate anger, too.

And fear.

Like, possibly, the fear experienced by a child who’s just fallen into a swimming pool.

Benny already had powerful olfactory sensors—a sense of smell is nothing more than a battery of chemical tests, conducted upon gases in the air. If we increased the range of the compounds he monitored, including a targeted range of biological molecules, the machine
might
effectively be able to monitor for emotional states, too.

I left the Bs behind when it came to names, and settled on “Ray.” Development on Ray was
tough
. I had never realized how subtle and sophisticated the sense of smell is, especially with substances in such minute quantities, and which are—it turned out—still little understood. I started to drink a little more than I had. Laura started to get on my nerves even more than usual. After a while I was spending so much of my time in R&D on pheromones that I began to believe my own perception of them had become heightened. I could tell ahead of time when Laura was going to start in on me, and pre-empt it with decisive counter-attacks. I could sense when she was bad-tempered—and, occasionally, detect small moments of contentment whose cause was never remotely clear to me.

On a few evenings during that period I could smell her fear, too.

Sometimes from very close up.

RAYiOS b0.8

I have power.

All components are functioning.

Next scheduled task: delayed 7:00
P.M.
chemical check.

Monitoring for task override . . .

!!! Target child is still in pool

//OVERRIDE.

Delay task additional 30.00 minutes.

Standby.

We got there. Kind of. To the brink, anyhow.

I wasn’t anywhere near one hundred percent happy, but to paraphrase the late, great man—if you’re real, then someday you’ve got to ship. Detecting pheromones isn’t a walk in the park even if you’ve got two drunk twentysomethings standing next to each other in a bar, or angry men facing each other down in a parking lot—hence why we’ve evolved a set of face and body language to flag our emotions, not to mention actual words, like “Fuck you,” with or without a question mark. Ray would be a significantly greater distance than this from any potential mishap, plus the chemicals would predominantly be released after the child was in the water. Sure, there are species that can allegedly detect signaling hormones from two miles away, but humans aren’t one of them—which means our pheromones aren’t even constituted for long-distance communication. Results were so patchy that we even experimented for a while with placing sensors all the way around the edge of the pool. Kind of worked, but not an elegant enough solution.

In the meantime I tinkered with ancillary upgrades, getting the body re-engineered to be even bigger and stronger and faster, so Ray could at least react with great speed and precision when he’d determined he needed to. (“He.” Of course not. “It.” But after a while it got hard to remember.) I enhanced the existing software monitoring how the kid looked and sounded in the pool. After a prolonged series of whines from Laura, I even got the techs to work up a beta that locked the machine to a particular kid’s genome, riffing off the fact that some pheromones contain just about enough information about phenotype to work on.

Why did she even want that? Get this—in case there were a bunch of kids in the pool, and more than one was in trouble. She wanted to be sure Ray would ignore the rest, and focus on her beloved brat. There’s a chip of ice in that woman that I can’t help but admire, even though—and it’s too late to be worth trying to hide this—I increasingly found myself wanting to hurt her. I don’t know even know why. I’m not a bad man. There’s just something about her. A switch gets thrown. Things happen.

But I kept a lid on it. Pretty much. Helped by the fact I was at the office a lot. Too much.

We got the systems to the point where Ray could detect alarm and fear chemical factors within thirty to forty seconds. How long it takes a child to drown in a pool is not something that has been subject to controlled experiments, unless those plucky Nazis got around to it way back when. We were never going to be able to give a guarantee, but then we never had (as a couple of lawsuits over the years had confirmed), and we’d already missed one product release cycle, and couldn’t afford to do it again.

A week ago I decided we’d done as much as we could. We needed some real world testing.

This morning Ray came to live with us.

RAYiOS b0.8

I have power.

All components are functioning.

Next scheduled task: twice-delayed 7:00
P.M.
chemical check.

Monitoring for task override . . .

!!! Target child remains in pool

//OVERRIDE.

Delay task additional 15.00 minutes.

!!! CAUTION: chemical factor recognized . . .

//EMERGENCY.

CATEGORY A OVERRIDE
.

Three hours ago I was feeling as at one with the world as I had in quite some time. I was in the kitchen, enjoying a large drink. I could hear the child splashing in the pool, with Ray poised to one side, constantly monitoring visual, audio and most of all, chemical broadcasts. I could see Laura lounging on a deck chair, in the twilight. I felt exhausted but buoyed up, ready to tackle the next level, as I always do when a given stage has been passed. But . . .

I could also see that Laura wasn’t watching the kid.

Sure, Ray was there to do that, though it was day one of testing and he was still in beta, so a good mom might want to keep at least half an eye out. And that wasn’t the point anyway. The point was she was looking at her phone.

The
point
was I saw her furtively glancing up toward the kitchen window, before settling down to type something, a sly little smile on her face.

I’m not a fucking moron.

I knew what was going on right away.

But . . . I should have been smarter. I should have waited. I should have calmed down. I should have thought about something else for long enough to settle my body, and allow it to back off on the signals it was broadcasting.

I did not.

I threw down the rest of my drink and went storming out there. Laura heard the kitchen door slamming. She sat up, hurriedly stuffing her phone into the pocket of her robe and freezing a fake smile onto her face.

“Hey, honey,” she lied.

The kid splashed on, oblivious—until he too saw me storming down toward the pool. I’ve almost always stayed my hand with him, despite everything, but he’s still seen enough to tell when daddy has realized there’s work to do in ensuring people understand and stick by his rules.

He froze, too.

Ray, though . . . he didn’t freeze.

He was on it. Fast, and decisively.

He sensed fear in the creature he was designed to protect, capturing the sharp chemical signals of alarm. At the same time, he caught the anger broadcast from one he had no feeling for, despite me being more his father than I’ve ever been of Laura’s child. Her brat’s not mine, you see, except in that I paid for it, like everything else. My seed wouldn’t plant, or maybe Laura’s body rejected it out of pure spite. So we used a donor.

So Ray has a feeling for him, and her, but not me.

Machines are simple things. They make quick, simple decisions.

They’re also powerful. And in Ray’s case, now so sophisticated that I’m not sure of his boundaries any more. I thought I’d understood them, but then—when I saw him turn and move quickly from the pool area toward me—I realized perhaps not.

I turned and walked quickly back to the house and went inside.

Ray came right up to the house, roving back and forth outside the kitchen, trying to get at the source of the anger. Behind him, back at the pool, I saw Laura pull out her phone and make a call. In other relationships it could have been a call to the police, or someone else who might help. It wasn’t.

Forty minutes ago I heard a car pull up outside the front of the house. She and the kid are now gone.

For now. But when I’ve got out of this situation, I’m going to go and find them.

Oh yes.

For the moment though it’s just me and Ray, and it’s dark. I tried moving around the house for a while, crawling under window height so he couldn’t see me, hoping to wait it out until he’d lost the scent, or else some other task override cut in. It hasn’t worked. Strength of purpose, a determination to succeed, has evidently been passed on from me to him. He’s locked on one particular course of action.

I eventually retreated back to my study area.

I locked all the doors, outside and in. But this is a nice house. Half those doors are made of glass.

I’m pretty sure I just heard one of them break, quietly, downstairs.

And dear god he moves fast.

RAYiOS b0.8

I have power.

All components are functioning.

Source of anger factor eliminated.

Compact and evacuate complete.

Standby.

10
A.M.
/ Client: Mr. P/ Subject: His son (16) Overdose

Terry needed a fresh ghost, so he dressed warmly and headed out, camera around his neck, syringes safely packed into the bag over his shoulder.

There were many places to look. People committed suicide in surprising places sometimes, such as a change room in a large department store, or the car park at a primary school, or under the pier at the beach, but more often they jumped from the tops of buildings, from bridges, from dams.

They jumped from the hospital roof too, staff as well as patients. But security could be tight, and once he’d been locked on a roof overnight and didn’t want to repeat that experience.

He drove to Culver’s Dam instead. Some nights he had a feeling for where the ghosts would be; other times it was research and asking questions.

He loved the hunt. He loved that there was a purpose to it but more than that, it proved time and time again that there was something BEYOND. That his mother did not blink out into nothingness.

Terry parked his car near the entrance to the dam bridge, water noise nearly deafening him. There was one car already parked there; a purple sedan. The bonnet was damp with water spray and cold to the touch so it had been there for some time. It could belong to a hydro engineer, manning switches, checking equipment, or to a sightseer (although in this cold no one would stay so long), or the car was abandoned, its driver over and into the hydrodam.

Feeling the cold, he gathered his camera and syringe bag and trekked to the bridge where he climbed the many stairs, feeling the tension in his thighs. A thick mist settled over the dam and in his hair and on his face. His hands felt frozen so he stuffed them into his pockets but found little warmth there.

Reaching the bridge, he could barely see three steps in front of him. Here, the water roar was so loud he could scream and no one would hear.

He set up his camera and looked through the view finder, seeking features amongst the water droplets.

He didn’t think much of those who killed themselves here. Poisoning the water supply, hurting others. Like those who threw themselves in front of a train, or over a wall at a shopping mall, or onto a busy street, it caused trauma to strangers that surely eased no passing and perhaps led to further suicides among those who saw or who felt responsible.

He saw nothing, so walked farther along, gazing through his viewfinder until he saw a middle-aged man, soaked to the bone, shivering with cold. Bare feet. Once their shoes were off it was too late to do anything.

“It’s an amazing view, isn’t it?” Terry said.

“Yeah, nice view,” the man said, glancing out as if seeing it for the first time. “Peaceful.”

“It’s like the end of the world, isn’t it? As if all life ends here,” Terry said. “As if nothing matters, no one cares.” His voice was gentle but it carried.

The man closed his eyes, gripping the railing. Terry hoped he wouldn’t have to get close to the edge. There was a chest-high fence, but he still felt vertigo at the thought.

“You like taking photos?” the man said. He squeezed his eyes shut, as if instantly realising the stupidity of the question.

“Yeah. It’s the one thing that keeps me going some days.”

The man leaned forward, looking over the edge. “I don’t really have anything like that. Are you a drinker?”

“Depends on what it is.”

“Whisky my dad left me. Last drops. He was an alcoholic.”

“Mine shot himself in front of me.”

They exchanged glances; both shrugged. “Go grab it for us? You’ve got shoes on.”

The man threw him the car keys.

Terry took a warm winter coat that was lying on the back seat of the purple car but could find no flask. The car was dirty, uncared for, and it smelt of pizza. Nothing in the glove box beyond official papers. No music, no letters, no photos, no devices.

When he returned to the top of the dam the man was over, so he had wanted privacy in his last moments and had gained it by sending Terry to look for the flask. The mist was thicker, more dank.

There. There it was. His flash was powerful and froze the ghost in place so he could suck up the mist into his syringe.

He stowed his equipment in the backseat, a sense of wellbeing overtaking him. It was always this way. Taking the spirits filled him with grace and kept him from going over himself, some days.

Terry didn’t want the man’s car, but was glad to have the coat.

His Aunt Beryl called up the studio stairs. “Are you decent?” She’d caught him once, shirt off, and she’d never forgotten it. “Come on up,” he said.

She appeared behind a bunch of purple hydrangeas, holding them out like an offering.

“This’ll bring a glow to your cheeks, you beautiful man. Although look at you! Picture of health!”

“You know I want pink or red flowers,” he said. He said it most times. “Purple gives off the wrong colour.”

She was a stupid woman. She understood him though, accepted him, and she had been his mother’s best friend. Her bright red fingernails were so long they curled down over the tips of her tanned, crooked, wrinkled fingers. She wore a lot of rings (including an ostentatious engagement ring, although her fiancé had died decades before), smelled of cigarette smoke and used Tabu perfume that made his studio reek. Her toenails were brightly painted as well and she wore sandals too small for her. Her cracked heels hung over the back and her toes stuck out the sides.

She owned the florist shop in the nearby mall. She wore a floral coat that she never washed, over a miniskirt far too short for her. Tabu perfume and old, old sweat. She collected unused flowers from the hospital and turned them into bouquets, charging full price, sometimes selling them to people who would take them back to the hospital.

He liked lots of flowers for his photos. They gave the impression of warmth and life and they provided a focus, a discussion point.

The funeral director texted >>We’re heading up now.<<

Terry had Aunt Beryl hide behind the black curtain and climb into the Mama Suit, black gloves stitched into the black curtain, so that she could hold the dead boy up without being seen. She hated it, she said. Hated it when they were cold, hated it when they got warm. But he needed her there, to hold the chin up, keep the shoulders back.

Teenagers often needed help sitting up.

It was good to meet clients at the entrance, not leave them waiting in the hallway with the dead loved one. Terry stood in front of the magnificent trompe l’oeil of The Bridge of Sighs, the concealed doorway leading not to a Venetian prison but to his studio.

“Here we are,” the funeral director said. Terry modelled the timbre of his own voice on this man’s; it was so perfectly kind, honest, and masculine. The funeral director’s judgement was excellent in deciding the level of service to be provided, but the final decision was Terry’s. “This is Mr. P. The father.” They never shared full names. “I’ve told him of the comfort you can bring him, in the fullest terms.”

“The mother?” Terry asked quietly.

“At home. Inconsolable.”

Terry’s mother would have been the same. She would not have functioned again, if he’d died before her.

“Come on, then,” Terry said. He led the man by the elbow, leaving the funeral director to roll in the trolley with the dead boy.

He gently lifted the boy into the chair in front of the black curtain, then nodded to the funeral director, who whispered, “You’re doing a good thing,” to the father and left.

Aunt Beryl took grip on the boy.

The father stood close, nervous, hesitant.

“You hold his hand while I set up,” Terry said. “Strong boy, wasn’t he? What did he like most? Was he a burger lover? Or a vegetarian? A lot of kids are these days.” Putting the client at ease was part of the job.

Terry pulled on some gloves, opened the fridge. There was champagne, cold, but not for this shoot or any like it. He took out the recently filled syringe. The ghosts leaked out of the needle if he left them in the fridge too long, forming yellow, viscous puddles on the shelf, like spilled egg yolk.

The father noticed nothing.

Terry bent over the boy and injected the syringe into the corner of his eye.

The boy twitched, and his cheeks reddened, chasing away the blue tones the overdose had given him.

Terry stepped behind his camera and took a quick dozen shots.

“Hold him if you like. Take him in your arms.”

Hesitantly, Mr. P stepped forward. “He’s warm. He feels warm.”

“It won’t last long. Make the most of it.”

Mr. P held his son close. Beryl knew to let go at that point, take her arms away.

“Say your goodbyes, then. Make him sigh.”

Mr. P whispered in his son’s ear until the coldness began to creep back. Terry took the boy and settled him into the chair.

“There.”

Mr. P was pale. “God. I don’t know if his mother would have wanted that or not.”

“But you got to say goodbye.”

“But it almost feels like . . . that empty feeling of fullness you get from eating a packet of potato chips.”

“The photos will make it worth it. You’ll see.”

“But he’s still dead, isn’t he?” Mr. P said.

Terry, a professional, kept his emotions in check. He would have given anything to have that moment with his mother, yet this man didn’t seem to appreciate what he’d been given.

It helped that he felt as if his mother was beside him, whispering in his ear. “Oh, you angel. Oh, such a good man.” This was what he worked for, beyond all the other benefits. This sense of benefaction.

Terry had been sixteen the first time he saw a ghost in the mist. His mother and Aunt Beryl ran the florist together then, and he helped with deliveries. This one was a rooftop memorial to a suicide. Terry’s father was long dead by then; “I love you son,” and then a deep sigh, then the gunshot, with Terry sitting beside him. Terry couldn’t remember a mist forming, but later, it was there. He knew that.

“Be careful near the edge,” his mother said. “Even an accident might be considered suicide if you deliberately put yourself in harm’s way.”

It was misty on the roof, rendering his vision unclear, and he rubbed at his eyes, the bouquet wedged under one arm. He squeezed his eyes tight, opened them, but the mist seemed even thicker. He saw a slumped figure, dejected, so very sad, and reached out to it, thinking to comfort this loner, this apparent outcast.

As he touched it, it seemed to snarl, to reach for him, and he jumped back, landing on the feet of the mourners behind him. Like many in grief, they were disconnected to their bodies and didn’t react.

Later, he managed to get hold of some CCTV footage of this suicide, and he watched it over and over again. The moment he looked for, beyond what the others saw (the death of a woman with post-natal depression) was the mist forming, like a small cloud rising from the ground and hovering on the rooftop. As he told his mother, “If I stare for long enough without blinking, I see a face or a figure.”

She was arranging flowers in a cut glass vase, her taste impeccable. She was like a delicate flower herself, Terry thought, pink and easily damaged. His father had been like a stick insect, attached to her, always wanting to draw her nectar. She said, “Oh, that poor woman, stuck in limbo. No heaven, no hell.” She was a great believer in such things. She liked to remain in a state of grace at all times, just in case she was taken suddenly.

“What about Dad? Is that where he is?”

“He didn’t die that way,” she said, in denial, always in denial, but Terry still had the tiny blood-spattered t-shirt he’d been wearing that day.

No one else could see what he saw. He read about a group of people who lived by diving and fishing, who trained their eyes to see better underwater, and he took up swimming, long laps along the bottom of the pool, eyes open. His mother on the side, holding a towel, terrified of not seeing his head bob up again.

Eventually he trained his eyes to look through the water and thus the mist, to see clarity beyond it.

He would use this skill to prove to himself that his mother’s death was accidental.

She and Beryl had always wanted to travel, especially once they were both widowed. They saved for years, then hired someone to take over the shop when they flew to Europe with their hair done, their lipstick on, their matching suitcases packed neatly, their promises to write often. He didn’t see them off. He was deep in a world of buying sex and selling drugs, where stories of his childhood meant nothing. He sold dreams to people, sold calm, sold respite, and lived well off the proceeds.

Two weeks later, Beryl called him, hysterical, the line bad, voices behind her that she tried to shush. His mother had drowned in a Venice lagoon, off the Ponte dell Liberta. Beryl said, “Come get us, Terry. Come bring us home,” but he was in no state to fly. In the end Beryl did it on her own. He’d sobered up by the time she landed.

It wasn’t until he saw his mother’s body he believed she was gone, and even then, he couldn’t reconcile what lay in the coffin with the woman he knew.

“It was an accident, wasn’t it?” he asked Beryl. “Tell me she didn’t want it.”

Because otherwise she’d be stuck there in the mist, graceless. She’d said to him, “Always resuscitate. Even if I’m a vegetable. I don’t ever want to be one of those people you see.” She was the only one he’d told about the mist.

“No, no, she didn’t want it! We were walking with all the other tourists. One minute we were talking, next minute she was over. She did not want it, Terry. All she talked about was the future, and you, and wanting to see how you fared. She wanted better for you.”

He drew a line then, under the man he was and the man he would be.

Beryl sat with him and held his hands at the funeral. There were so many flowers people sneezed uncontrollably, but Beryl said, “This is what she would have wanted.”

She handed him a camera. “Your mother took lots of photos, Terry. I know she’d want you to have this. Next up was the Bridge of Sighs. There’s proof she didn’t want it. She was so keen to see that place, and we never made it.” Beryl cried then, great snuffling sobs, and he left others to comfort her.