Love Minus Eighty (6 page)

“So you must have died instantly. No pain.”

“No pain. At least, I don’t remember any.”

Her eyes went blank; the muscles in her face relaxed all at once.

Rob stood, stared down at her, his legs trembling, threatening to give way. “Shit. Oh, shit.” What was he going to tell his father?

The window slid silently over Winter. Rob watched from
the bottom of the blackest despair as the crèche retracted back into the wall. With nothing else to do, he left.

Nine thousand dollars, wasted. He’d have to lie to his father, tell him everything went swimmingly, that Winter had been incredibly understanding under the circumstances.

Who was he kidding? He couldn’t pretend everything was nifty for two minutes, let alone indefinitely. He could barely walk; he felt like there were fifty-pound weights around his ankles, a hundred-pound sack across his shoulders.

“
Idiot.
” Rob punched his palm. An old man with pink hair turned to look at him. Rob resisted giving the old prune the finger. Despite how he’d dreaded this visit, he’d also felt a flicker of hope that somehow it would make things, if not right, at least bearable. However Winter had reacted, there would have been some succor in facing her. Instead he was leaving with nothing. As he reached the exit, Rob slowed. He turned to face the enormous room, the walls broken into hundreds of boxes, the farthest rows the size of postage stamps. If he had money, he could simply go back and do it again, but he had nothing. He had worse than nothing—he was nine thousand dollars in debt.

Head down, Rob stepped through the exit into a cutting wind and swirling snow. Idris was waiting for him.

“Did you see her?”

“Yes, I saw her.”

“What did she say to you?”

“She told me to rot in hell,” he answered without thinking,

“Good for her.”

Rob walked off, Idris’s sobbing growing fainter with each step. He felt so disgusting, like he was leaving a foul odor in his wake that Idris could smell, even through a screen. He
had to do something; he couldn’t live with himself, trailing that odor. Maybe he should kill himself.

He wasn’t sure he was capable of killing himself, and even if he were capable, he couldn’t do that to his father.

His father had been right—the only possible absolution would come from facing Winter West. Which meant the answer was obvious. No matter what it took, he had to return and face Winter. Nothing else mattered.

He’d have to suspend his musical career for the time being, find reliable hourly work that paid. Otherwise it would take years to raise nine grand. He could cut expenses. Most of his money went to rent and system fees. He could go on living with his father, so rent wasn’t a problem. His biggest expense by far was his system.

There was no getting around it: he’d have to give up his system for a few months—suspend his account and pick up some ancient handheld for the unavoidable stuff like paying tolls.

All that was left was to tell his father what had happened. It was ironic—he had to face his father and ask his forgiveness, because he hadn’t been able to do so with Winter. He would, though; he would face Winter, and he would tell her. The certainty of that was all that allowed him to keep walking.

“Hi.” It came out phlegmy; the man cleared his throat. “I’ve never done this before.” He was a black man, maybe forty, tall and beefy. His eyes were soft and kind, jittery and shy, and he had an honest smile, though the smile couldn’t mask a melancholy he all but radiated.

“What’s the date?” Mira asked, still groggy.

“January third, twenty-one thirty-three,” the man said. Nearly thirty years had passed since Alex had waked her. She had no idea how long ago her brief encounter with the old man had been. Unless that had been part of her dream. No—there would have been no dream unless someone had waked her.

The man wiped his mouth with the back of his wrist. “I feel like I’m doing something wrong, being here.” He frowned. “Is it okay, for me to be visiting you? There’s no way to ask ahead of time.”

“I’m happy to have the company.”

The man gave her a big, sloppy smile. “I’m Lycan, by the way.”

“I’m Mira. Nice to meet you.”

“I can tell you’re an honest person, from your eyes.” Lycan had abysmal posture; Mira wondered how he could breathe sitting so slumped.

“I like to think I am,” Mira said.

“You’re the oldest woman in here, did you know that?” He shook his head. “I mean, not the oldest, since you’re only twenty-six, but the oldest based on your birth date. That’s why I chose you.”

“I see.” So she really was an antique. It made her feel terribly alone, and forgotten.

“You know, you wouldn’t know it from what’s coming out of my mouth, because I’m so nervous, but I’m actually very smart. I’m probably the smartest person you’ve ever met.” Lycan fell silent for a moment. “I’m talking too much. I’m sorry.”

“No, I like it,” Mira said. It allowed her precious time to think. When she was alive, there had been times in Mira’s life when she had little free time, but she had always had time to think. She could think while commuting to work, while standing in lines, during all of the other in-between times. Suddenly it was the most precious thing.

Lycan wiped his palms. “First dates are not my best moments.”

“You’re doing great.” Mira smiled as best she could, although she knew it must look forced. She had to get out of here, had to convince one of these men to revive her. One of these men? This was only the third person to revive her in the past thirty years, and if the first guy, the pervert, was to be believed, she’d become less desirable the longer she was here.

Mira wished she could see where she was. Was she in a coffin?
On a bed? She wished she could move her neck. “What’s it like in here?” she asked. “Are we in a room?”

“You want to see? Here.” Lycan held his palm a foot over her face; silver netting covered his hand, flashing words and images. It transformed into a mirror.

Mira recoiled. Her own dead face looked down at her, her skin gray, her lips bordering on blue. Her face was flaccid—she looked slightly unbalanced, or mentally retarded, rather than peaceful. A glittering silver mesh concealed her to the neck.

Lycan angled the mirror, giving her a view of the room. It was a vast hall. A lift was descending through the center. People hurried across beautiful bridges as crystal-blue water traced twisting paths through huge transparent tubes suspended in the open space, giving the impression of flying streams. Nearby, Mira saw a man sitting beside an open drawer, his mouth moving, head nodding, hands set a little self-consciously in his lap.

Lycan took the mirror away. His eyes had grown big and round.

“What is it?” Mira asked.

He opened his mouth to speak, then changed his mind, shook his head. “Nothing.”

“Please, tell me.”

There was a long pause. Finally, Lycan answered. “I’m sorry, the last thing I want to do is make you feel bad. It’s just that it’s finally hitting me at a gut level: I’m talking to a dead person. If I could hold your hand, your fingers would be cold and stiff.”

Mira looked away, toward the ceiling. She felt ashamed. Ashamed of the dead body that housed her.

“Is it bad?” he whispered, as if he were asking something obscene.

Mira didn’t want to answer, but she also didn’t want to
go back to being dead. “It’s hard. It’s hard to have no control over anything, not when I can be awake, or whom I talk to. And to be honest, it’s scary. When you end this date, I’m going to be gone—no thoughts, no dreaming, just nothingness. It terrifies me. I dread those few seconds before the date ends.”

Lycan’s eyes had filled with tears; he looked genuinely distraught at her plight, so Mira changed the subject, asking about Lycan’s family. He had a father and a sister, had never been married.

When Lycan asked about her, she avoided any mention of Jeannette. She told him she’d been an engineer in the military, that she loved Purple Fifth’s music and old 2-D Woody Allen movies. She’d been a retro girl, loving all things old and out of fashion, dressed in baseball caps and leg warmers, decorated her apartment with covers of old print magazines. She told Lycan her father died when she was young, but her mother was still alive. Then she remembered that her mother must be long dead as well.

“What if we fell in love, and you agreed to marry me?” Lycan said when she finished. “Would people sense you were too beautiful for me, and guess that I’d met you at a bridesicle place? We’d have to come up with a convincing story about how we met.”

“Bridesicle?”

Lycan shrugged. “That’s what people call this kind of place.”

Then even if someone revived her, she would be a pariah. People would want nothing to do with her.

“I’m afraid it’s time for me to say good-bye. Maybe we can talk again?” Lycan said.

Mira didn’t want to die again, didn’t want to be thrown
into that abyss. She had so much to think about, to remember. “I’d like that,” was all she said, resisting the urge to scream, to beg this man not to kill her. If she did that, he’d never come back. As he reached over to turn her off, Mira used her last few seconds to try to reach for a comforting memory, something involving Jeannette.

She remembered last Christmas Eve, just her and Jeannette curled up on the couch, watching an old romantic comedy starring Carly Coates and a willowy blond woman whose name Mira couldn’t remember.

The air was filled with the rumble of conversation, spiked with drunken laughter, set over music drifting out of a dozen doorways. The narrow streets were tight with people Rob’s age, the air sweet with the scent of popcorn and pastries and buttered lobster sticks, sold by shiny drones from mobile stands. How many nights had Rob spent down here with Lorelei? He had such positive associations with this part of High Town, yet tonight was turning out to be one of the most demoralizing of his life. He’d never really
needed
a job before; playing the lute had earned him what he needed, because he’d always needed very little.

Rob worked his way through the crowd of High Town Friday-nighters. The night style was heavy on checks at the moment—black-and-white checks, red-and-yellow checks. The tips on spiked boots were getting longer and sharper, and bald was getting popular, eyebrows as well as heads, though many were still sporting the giant-ball-of-hair look.

Pelicula was on the corner, bursting out from between two nondescript redbrick buildings like confetti. Rob had no reason to believe he had a better chance of landing a job there than at the last seven places he’d tried, although he used to hang out at Pelicula more than most of the others. Maybe he should have started at a superstore, or one of the factories out by his dad’s house, but the crappiest job in High Town paid better than a decent one in the Low, and nightclubs were what he knew, where he felt comfortable.

At the door, the greeter looked him up and down, eyed his old handheld, shook her head before he could open his mouth.

“I’m not looking to get in,” Rob said. “I’m looking for a job. Can I talk to the manager?”

The greeter shook her head again. She was perilously thin and absurdly tall, though part of that was her heels, which she boosted an additional inch as she shook her head. “They don’t hire unknowns.”

“I used to come here pretty often, with Lorelei Van Kampen.”

That sparked her interest. “If you get Lorelei to pop over, I’m sure she can get you an introduction to the manager.”

Rob folded his arms, wishing he hadn’t brought up Lorelei. “I can’t do that. Can’t you help me out?”

“Sorry, no,” the greeter said, and immediately turned to the couple behind Rob. Rob turned back toward the door, doing his best to ignore the glances from people in line who’d overheard the exchange.

Outside, he spotted a woman who looked familiar. She was small, with Anglo-Asian features, peering down the street as if looking for someone. Hadn’t he met her at some point? She’d been with a guy Lorelei knew. He needed an in, a connection. There was no way he was going to ask anyone
closely associated with Lorelei, but maybe he could capitalize on a loose connection.

His stomach twisting, Rob approached the woman. “Hi.”

The woman looked him up and down. “Do I know you?”

“I think so. Didn’t we meet in Pelicula a while back? I was with Lorelei Van Kampen.”

The woman rolled her eyes. “I seriously doubt that.” She went back to looking down the street.

It had been a very long night, and Rob was sick of being treated like shit just because he wasn’t wearing a system and was dressed for an interview instead of a night of doing bugs and dancing. “You doubt we’ve met before, or you doubt I was with Lorelei Van Kampen?”

The woman sighed heavily, but otherwise ignored him.

“You know, despite your staggering beauty and obvious charm, I really wasn’t trying to pick you up. I was just saying hello. We did meet before, and from what I remember, you were just about licking Lorelei’s boots clean to get her attention and approval.”

The woman whipped around to face him. Something scurried out of the black bag hooked to her belt, and before Rob could even identify it as a portable bodyguard, it had climbed up his pants and positioned itself right over his crotch. “What did you say?” she asked.

“Nothing,” Rob said. The synthetic bodyguard resembled a black, hairless rat with a silent, rotating blade in its mouth instead of teeth. Its little claws had a death grip on the fabric of his jeans.

“Correct answer.” She pressed her face close to his, her eyes blazing. “Get. Lost.”

As soon as the bodyguard was off, Rob scurried away, heading for the elevator to Low Town.

Maybe he should have worn his system, although it was now nothing but a dead sheath of synthetic skin. He could have told people it had malfunctioned and he had no idea why. It would have been comforting to have it on.

The elevator let him off on Forty-Second Street, and he was met by the blandness, the deadness of the city unenhanced by a system. It hurt, being without one. It physically hurt. Without the Esthetic Visual Enhancement the steel-and-glass of Pipkin Tower was a flat, featureless obelisk. The sidewalks were a gum-stained mess, the gutters caked with crud. When he got to the suburbs, the contrast between system and no system would get even starker as the landscape got grimier.