Fourth Wall
~ Andy Havens, 2005
“Why a dragon?”
Ted waited while Stan disengaged himself from a pack of (Ted guessed) major stockholders. They seemed to have the requisite combination of interest and ignorance that, in Ted’s experience, marked those who had money invested in a project, but not much skin.
“Ted!” Stan was still shaking someone else’s hand when he recognized who had asked the question. The din in the room was that rumble-bumpy-sounding mixture of too many people talking too loud in a too small space. Because everyone is almost shouting, you can’t understand anyone except a person with their face inches away from yours who is almost shouting.
“Ted,” Stan repeated, finally free of this particular crowd of well wishers. “You made it! That’s great. I wasn’t even sure I had the right address!”
“You didn’t,” Ted semi-shouted back. “But Professor Burke forwards a bunch of my stuff every month or so. I only got the invitation the day-before-yesterday. That’s why I didn’t RSVP.” He paused for a moment to drink a bit of his lemon-lime soda. All this not-quite-yelling made his throat sore.
“Anyway,” Ted repeated, “Why a dragon?”
“Ah! You’re the first person to ask that. Mostly they ask about our first contract.” Stan gestured behind his shoulder to a group of men and women in full-on business dress who were talking to a reporter from some cable news finance program. There was a lot of wide-gesturing by one fellow in a dark gray suit, with much nodding and occasional small-gesturing by the other corporate tribes people.
“The submarine people, right?” Ted asked. He’d read something about the submarine people in “USA Today” on his flight into
“Right… them.” Stan couldn’t seem to stop smiling. Ted didn’t blame him. Ted should smile. His major-major project looked like it was going to go off with a huge bang. And he was engaged to possibly the most perfect person Ted had ever met. Caitlyn was drop-dead gorgeous, had two PhDs in some kind of sociology that promised to cure poverty within the next fifteen minutes, and never, ever made Ted feel awkward and stupid. Most beautiful women made Ted feel awkward and stupid. Even the not-so-beautiful ones had the same affect. Hell, even ugly men often made Ted feel awkward and stupid.
The noise got worse for some reason. Ah. Another twelve people had just showed up. The lobby of the hotel had seemed big when Ted checked in that day around
“So,” Ted tried a third time, “Why a dragon?”
“Right! Well… for most people, molecular engineering and oceanic topographical surveying and retinal surgery are about as sexy as… well…”
“Molecular engineering, oceanic topographical…”
“Right! Exactly!” Stan grabbed Ted’s elbow, knocking a bit of lime soda onto his sport’s coat, and turned him to fact the object at the center of tonight’s crowded gala.
From up close, it looked very much like a huge, cubic fish tank. With a dragon the size of dachshund curled up around a chunk of uneven rock at its center.
As Ted watched, the dragon turned its head slowly from side to side and rolled a shoulder like a swimmer loosening up before a race. The bat-like wings, folded along its side, lifted and fell with its breath. They seemed to Ted like they were floating on liquid.
Stan pulled Ted closer to the tank, within a foot of the glass. Although dozens of people were watching the creature inside, few ventured that close to the glass cube.
It is pretty freaking big, reasoned Ted. When standing that close, the tank almost seemed to lean over you from above. It had to be at least fifteen feet tall. And although the glass of the walls was clearly solid, having a creature of myth staring at you from less than ten feet away was somewhat… unnerving.
“Watch,” Stan said into Ted’s ear. As if he hadn’t been watching already. Stan took his had away from Ted’s elbow and made an elaborate gesture that reminded Ted of sign language. Immediately, a small door slid back in the base of the cube. It hadn’t been visible before, but now opened to reveal a black space beneath the glass floor. The huge cube was sitting on a base of some black, opaque substance that Ted assumed was stone or some plastic composite. The hole seemed to drop down into this base, and while Ted was still trying to decide how the device had recognized Stan’s gesture, a bunny popped out.
The bunny was your standard, white, cute, pet rabbit. He took one little hoppy-step away from the hole – which promptly slid shut – and began to test the air with his pink little nose.
Motion! “Ah!” The noise from the crowd around the cube was a dozen simultaneous expressions of surprise. Ted took a step back, noticing that even Stan seemed a bit startled by the dragon’s take-off. It had been almost instantaneous. Ted had been looking at the rabbit and had only seen the dragon rise out of the corner of his eye. But it had been fast, he was sure of that.
Now, though, the dragon was flying. Circling the cube in diagonal loops near the top of the enclosure. More and more people were turning toward the center of the room, and the noise level seemed to have dropped off a bit. Ted could hear the dragon’s wings beat, softly, as it banked and rolled. Ted was reminded of ice skaters. Speed and grace, constricted by the bounds of a closed space.
The rabbit noticed the movement, too. At first, it froze. It seemed to want to make itself smaller… head down low against its chest… rear legs quivering. But then the dragon let out a cry – something between the caaww! of a crow and a woman’s scream – and the rabbit ran.
The prey’s dodging and sprinting had nothing of the predator’s grace. Pure terror bulged from the round, pink eyes whenever the rabbit stopped for a moment to change direction. The dragon didn’t seem to change its pattern, but just dipped lower every third or forth circuit. Each time it did that, the rabbit wrenched to a stop and ricocheted off in another direction.
More and more of the people surrounding the tank fell silent. Ted could still hear other conversations, beyond the row of onlookers, but they were distant. He could clearly hear the scatter and pop of pebbles as the rabbit churned the grit on the floor of the tank.
“She’s toying with it,” Stan muttered. His smile – which never stopped, Ted noticed – was a little different. Less rock-star-surrounded-by-groupies, more… proud father.
Finally, the dragon cut out of a looping roll and hung mid-air, wings outstretched, near the top of the tank. Ted knew it was his imagination, but he seemed to hear the rabbit’s heart beating… fast like the vibration of a sewing machine or a lawn-mower.
The birdlike scream, again. People near the tank visibly flinched. Then, still graceful as a dancer, the dragon folded its wings against its side and dropped straight down fifteen feet. The rabbit tried to reverse direction, but was caught on two-inch long claws and between jaws like an alligator’s. The dragon wrenched its head just as it struck and hurled the rabbit against the transparent wall of the tank, directly opposite from where Ted and Stan stood. The people on that side – some of whom being the aforementioned submarine people – jumped backwards as the bloody animal thump-smacked against the glass and fell. A splotch of blood and fur dripped down the wall, clearly visible from every angle.
The dragon swooped over the twitching rabbit and picked it up with one claw, throwing it again to land among the rocks in the center of the tank. After a final circuit around the top of the tank, the lizard landed, still graceful, atop the pile of stone and sat quietly, fanning itself with its wings. One of the rabbit’s legs jerked a few more times and then was still. The dragon leaned low, rolled the body of the rabbit away with its nose, and curled up, resting, as it had been earlier.
The applause was slow to start, but eventually everyone around the tank was clapping and a few were even cheering.
If they were cheering for the dragon, thought Ted, that would just be sad.
But they weren’t cheering for the dragon, he knew. As did Stan, whose smile was broader than Ted had ever seen.
Ted saw the crowd behind Stan part, and Caitlyn shouldered through, coming to stand with an arm around Stan’s waist. She had red-blonde hair, skin as white as bone, green eyes and a slim, fey body that never hurried. She smiled a bit blankly at Ted, and then recognized him.
“Ted! You made it! Stan had me check the RSVPs last night and we were pissed you weren’t gonna show!” Her voice was out of character with the rest of her. She was a Southie, born and raised in a part of
She also didn’t care that everyone assumed she was Irish Catholic. Five or six generations ago, her family had been mostly Welsh and Anglican. At some point in the late 19th century, they’d stopped being Anglican and started being Presbyterian. At some point in the late 20th century, she’d stopped being Presbyterian and started going to synagogue with Stan. She was planning on converting. Although, she had once told Ted, you can’t really convert to Judaism. You were always going to do it, so it wasn’t conversion. And you didn’t talk about it. It was like not spelling out “God.” Converting to something that you couldn’t convert to was so totally in keeping with Caitlyn’s personality that Ted had laughed out loud when she’d tried to explain it.
She leaned over and hugged Ted with one arm, the other still around Stan’s waist. “What did you think of the show?” she asked.
“Cheery,” he replied. Then he paused, and all three said in unison, “Cheery, but violent.” They all laughed at the Monty Python reference and Ted wondered why he hadn’t made the effort to come back to
All except Stan and Caitlyn.
It made Ted sad. To see them here like this, so much like how they’d been when they’d all met. A frozen couple from the “good times” of Ted’s youth. After he’d escaped from the horrors of childhood and puberty… before he’d been tricked into the cubicles of corporate engineering.
“Why doesn’t it eat the rabbit?” someone behind Ted asked.
Stan turned and answered, “She had one earlier this evening, during the official press conference. So she’s not hungry.”
“She?”
Ted turned and looked at the questioner. It was one of the submarine suits.
“Yes,” Stan said. “She. Male dragons aren’t as pretty. And they tend to be very skittish around crowds. The females have much brighter coloring and are more flirtatious. As long as you don’t tap on the glass. She hates that.”
“She.” The suit was drinking whiskey, straight. Ted could smell it from five feet away.
Stan’s smile dropped a fraction, but he was just disappointed… not really upset. “Yes. Again, yes. She. The more you put into something like this, the better. I can tell you where she was born and captured, what her siblings looked like, how many times she’s been in heat, what her favorite food in the wild was… it all goes into the programming.”
“Ah,” said the suit. He took a sip of his very aromatic whiskey and nodded. “But we don’t really care about that program. We don’t need it. It’s fine for… this,” he gestured with his glass at the crowd, the lights, the waiters. “But we just need the box. When do we get the box?”
Now Stan actually stopped smiling. He disengaged Caitlyn’s arm from around his waist and put his hand on the suit’s arm. Stan said something into his ear that Ted couldn’t hear, and the two of them went off into the crowd of other suits, Stan talking and they nodding.
“Jacques Cousteau would have been disappointed in those fucking drones,” Caitlyn said. Ted looked away from Stan and down into her green eyes. He had thought he’d loved her, once. A long time ago. He’d even said something to that affect once, when drunk. But she’d heard it from many and many a better man, and had steered him home, ego intact, with a clear understanding of their friendship. He’d been embarrassed the next day, and had never mentioned it again, and had always been glad that he hadn’t done anything so stupid as to endanger that friendship… or Stan’s.
“Yeah,” he replied. “For marine seismologists, they seem pretty dull.”
Caitlyn barked a loud laugh and a few people near them turned to stare. She waved them away like you would a deer fly and they went back to their own conversations.
“He never answered my question,” Ted said. He still had to talk a bit louder than he liked, but the show seemed to have subdued people in some way. The room was still a bit quieter, even though the action was over.
“What question?” she asked.
“Why a dragon?”
“Ah. That’s easy. I made him do it.”
“You?” Ted was pretty sure that Caitlyn could make any man – except Stan – do what she wanted. Stan wasn’t, as Caitlyn had put it to him once, “testosterone poisoned,” which is one of the reasons she loved him so much.
“Sure. He started the demo program with ideas of special-effects wizardry. Gleaming spheres and explosions… views of canyons from above… space stuff… all wicked boring and very two-and-a-half-D. I told him he needed something with no fourth wall.”
“No fourth what?”
“Fourth wall. It’s a theatre term. What’s between the stage and the audience. All video, which is a flat version of theatre, has a fourth wall. The frame around your TV. The curtains at the movies. The tall, bald man in front of you keeps picking his ear. It all relies on ‘willful suspension of disbelief’ in order to maintain the narrative illusion.”
“Right. Which is why the movies are better than video.”
She gave him a short stare for a moment then said, “Right. Bigger screen. Better acoustics. Less distraction. No phone, no cat, no upstairs neighbor with a wooden leg.”
Ted smiled at that. It was a reference to his first apartment in
“So,” she continued. When you get into fully realized, three-dimensional projection, you have a choice. Either do another version of video, but with true depth, or…”
“Emulate something that doesn’t require disbelief.”
She smiled and touched him on the nose. “It came down to either Elsie or stupid birds.”
“Elsie? The dragon’s name is Elsie?”
“What’s wrong with Elsie?” She looked hurt.
He shrugged, but pushed on. “It’s a cow name.”
Her mouth fell open and she looked truly gob-slapped. “A cow?”
He chuckled a bit, not unhappy to have gotten a shot in. “Yes. A cow. Elsie. Cow’s are always named Elsie or Daisy or Bertha or…”
“You prick!” she slapped him on the shoulder and he pretended that it hurt a bit, which it didn’t.
Stan came back from his chat with the submarine people.
“You two been catching up on old times?”
Caitlyn made a sour face. “We’re not old enough to have old times.”
“No,” Ted said. “She was just telling me why you went with a dragon instead of stupid birds.”
Stan nodded and snared a drink from a passing waiter. He took a pull and wiped his mouth on the back of his hand. “Yeah. She wouldn’t let me do birds. No… what was it you said?”
“No élan.”
“Ah,” said Ted. “There must be élan.”
Stan grinned (the smile was back) and gestured at the room around them. “They’re all fascinated. She was right, of course, about the dragon. Nobody cares about the frame rate or the variable opacity or the sensors…”
“Which have nothing to do with the tank, either,” put in Caitlyn.
“Of course not,” Stan continued. “They look into the tank and see a small dragon living in a… what do you call an aquarium with no water?”
“A terrarium,” answered Ted.
“Exactly. We all had a weird friend who had a pet lizard or snake or something as a kid. Right? So we all know what to expect from the big, glass box. Some sand or cedar chips on the floor. A bowl of stagnant, nasty water. Some bugs or pellets in a tin dish. And on a branch or a rock…”
“The ‘weird pet kid,’” put in Ted. “Who, as you know, was me.”
Caitlyn punched Stan in the arm this time as he pulled a slightly guilty look. “I forgot. Was it a snake?”
“Iguana.”
“It’s legal to own an iguana?”
“I don’t know. I never asked the nice man at the pet store. If it was illegal, he wasn’t doing a very good job of keeping the iguana business under the counter.”
Stan nodded. “Anyway, sorry about the crack.”
“It’s OK,” said Ted with a wave of his hand. “I was weird. So were my parents. It just didn’t seem weird to us at the time.”
“It never does,” said Caitlyn. “I mean, we don’t seem weird to us now, but lots of people probably think we are.”
“Not for long.”
“What do you mean by that, Stan?” she asked.
“When you’re as rich as that big, glass cube is going to make us, you can’t be weird.”
That shut her up for a moment.
Ted broke the silence. “Right. At most, you’re eccentric.”
Stan nodded, deep in thought. Caitlyn squeezed Ted’s arm, blew them each a kiss, and went off to find the ladies’ room.
Before Ted could say anything more, a group of four people who all looked far too awake for this time of night swept in and began asking Stan questions about the tank. He gave Ted the sign language version of, “I’ve got to talk to these twits for a few, but I’ll be back soon.” Ted nodded, and was left almost alone by the glass cube, as only a few others remained standing near it. None of them were looking in. They were just there. Having conversations.
Ted walked up close to the glass, so close that he could feel his breath coming back on him. The dragon – Elsie – seemed to be asleep. Curled into a somewhat fetal ball, wings stretched back behind it… her. But when Ted looked closely, he could see that her eyes weren’t completely closed, and her front, right paw was moving slightly.
He bent down to look even closer and saw that she was drowsily tracing geometric patterns with her claw. Squares, spirals, triangles… all sketched from blood that had pooled in a hollow of the rock on which she lay.
* * * * * *
In bed that night, while Stan was trying to calm himself down by reading a boring business magazine, Caitlyn kept talking.
“It really went well, I think.”
“Ymmm. Yep. Sure.”
There was a pause. She had a book in her lap, too, but it wasn’t even open. Stan slept nude, but she wore a white nightgown that would have made Ted think of Victorian heroines who run out onto the moor to escape… whatever.
“It looked completely real,” she continued. “Even to the techies from the military think tank. I heard one of ‘em saying he couldn’t see any cropping errors, and the light absorption model was perfect.”
“It’s ah… yeah…”
She didn’t seem to notice that he was paying almost no attention. If you’d watched them at intervals throughout their long relationship, you would have found that this happened all the time. Caitlyn was, and knew she was, a verbal thinker. She couldn’t just work things out in her head. She needed to voice them. Stan knew this. And she knew he knew, but also knew that he knew enough not to comment unless she asked him a direct question. Like now:
“Is Ted seeing anybody?”
The rising phonemic tone at the end of the sentence cued him that his presence was required in the conversation.
“Say again?”
“Ted. Is he seeing anybody?”
Stan frowned and searched his internal archives. “Nnnnnoo…” he drawled. “Not that I’m aware of. I think Kathy or Nolan would have let us know when we got his address from them.”
“His old address. If they didn’t know he’d moved off campus, they might not know if he’s seeing anybody.”
They were both quiet for a moment. Stan’s brain working, and Caitlyn’s finger tapping on the spine of her current “New York Times Best Seller List” trade paperback.
“You know,” Stan finally said. “I’m not sure I’ve ever heard of him dating anyone. He’s painfully shy around women.”
“Not around me, he’s not,” said Caitlyn. With not pronounced nwat both times, of course.
But then she looked as if she’d just thought of something. “But you’re right. He’s good with us, and with other couples… But I’ve seen him go mental around single women.”
“I know he’s not gay,” stated Stan with finality.
“So do I,” said Caitlyn. Before Stan could venture down the very obvious path behind that statement, she pushed on. “I think we should help him out. He’s a great guy, good sense of humor, cute enough and certainly smart. He just has trouble getting a conversation started.”
“We should set him up? But we don’t know anybody in
“Who does?”
They were both silent for awhile. Stan had just picked up the magazine when she snapped her fingers.
“I’ve got it.”
“What are you, Sherlock Holmes?”
“No. I have better legs than Sherlock Holmes.”
“Can’t argue with that. So what’ve you got?”
“Give him the beta. And have Terry load it up with a younger, cuter, sassier version of Gina.”
Stan put the magazine down altogether and turned to actually look at her for the first time in this conversation. “Give him the beta.”
“Yah. What were we going to do with it?”
“I was going to put Elsie in it and put it in our lobby.”
“It’s too small for Elsie.”
“So we make her smaller.”
“You don’t want the beta to be seen by the outside world. It’s too small, and it’s still got some of the gen two bugs. Give it to Ted. He helped us out a lot a few years back.”
“I know, I know. I was there.”
“So. Maybe Gina would help him learn how to… talk to girls.”
“Like a relationship sim.”
“Yah. Exactly”
Stan chewed on a nail, thought and waited. Apparently he waited to long, as Caitlyn finally leaned over and smacked him on the back of his head.
“OK,” he said quickly. “I’ll have Terry load up Gina and update the drivers from the latest build and… whatever… he’ll know what to do.”
Caitlyn nodded and opened her book. “I think Ted’ll get a kick out of it,” she said as she started to read. “It’s got the feel of a good school prank. Yah?”
“Yuh…hmm…”
* * * * *
After the big “tank party,” as he’d thought of it, Stan spent a few more days in town saying “Hi” to friends who’d stayed in Boston and popping into his old haunts. It only served to remind him how out of touch you could get in just five or six years.
A week later he was thinking, You shouldn’t get jet lag just flying from
So as he drove up the street in suburban Kenmore, he was feeling like it was time to go to bed, even though it was only about 7pm. Pulling into his covered parkway spot he noticed two dark blue vans parked across the street from his place.
Ted got his duffle out of the trunk, and went around the back of his small, rented house. He never used the front door; it was easier to keep the bolt and chains up and have a security coded entrance around back, where the doorway was covered with a small roof.
Small roof over door in Buffalo good, he thought, as always, as he approached. He keyed in his password and pressed his thumb to the print detector plate and waited for the pleasant, low chime to tell him it was OK to go in.
No chime.
The display read “CLEAR,” which was right. He tried the thumb plate again. The display blinked off, and then “CLEAR” again. Still no chime.
Sound circuit must be fucked up, he thought.
He opened the screen door and wedged himself between it and the back door. A moment’s fumbling with the doorknob, and he shouldered the heavy wooden door open into the kitchen. He could see the display of the security panel across the room, and it, too read, “CLEAR.”
Just as he let his duffle bag thwump to the kitchen floor, he heard tires screech and squeal out front. He ran across the narrow kitchen, through the tiny foyer (“boot room,” his friend Casey called it) and pulled the curtains on the front window back. The two dark blue vans were peeling out, tearing down Dushane at about 50 miles an hour.
Ted let the curtains fall back and thought, Fucking kids.
Then he turned to his right, towards the living room, and saw the tank.
It was nowhere near as large as the one from the hotel lobby. Maybe only 10 feet long, 4 feet deep and 4 feet high. Set up on a 2 foot high slab of the same, black rock-or-plastic substance. There was an envelope scotch-taped to the side nearest the front door.
He pulled off the envelope and opened it to find a store-bought greeting card. On the outside, it had a photo of a good-looking, well dressed, James Bond type, leaning against the hood of an expensive looking car. A gorgeous blonde stood behind him with her arms around one of his. He was smiling and looking at his expensive watch. The caption below read, “For the man who has everything…”
Ted opened the card, and inside was a penny, heads-up, taped to the middle of the card. “You can never have too much good luck,” it read. “Happy Birthday.”
What a dumb-ass card, Ted thought.
The phone rang and Ted put the card and envelope down on the small coffee table that had been shoved up against the wall to make room for the tank.
Interrupting the second ring, he said, “Yeah. This is Ted.”
“Ted! It’s Stan!”
Ah, thought Ted. Now two and two make five.
“Stan. I think I have something that belongs to you.”
“Did belong to me, Ted. Did. Not anymore. Now it’s yours.”
“Don’t these things cost…”
“The big ones do, yeah. A hundred-thousand dollars or so. Before programming costs cut in. Which I don’t care about anymore, since we’re just selling the… Shut up. Anyway. If we were going to market these small ones, though, it would be more like twenty-five or thirty grand.”
Ted paused, letting that sink in. “So why,” he asked, “are you giving one to me?”
“It’s an experiment that Caitlyn cooked up.” Stan sounded out of breath. Like he was excited. Like he’d been running or something. Like…
Ted checked the Caller ID on his phone; “CELLULAR CALLER NUMBER BLOCKED.”
“That was you in the blue vans,” Ted said. Not a question.
“We thought you wouldn’t be home for another couple hours. My plane got delayed a bit, and the boys didn’t want to do it without me there. Seemed to think you wouldn’t believe that they were breaking into your house for your own good if’n I wasn’t there in person to back the story up. Can’t say I blame them.”
Ted shook his head and half grinned, half grimaced. Standard MIT friend, prank bullshit. Hack someone’s security. Leave them a “present” that was usually more trick than treat.
Pranking was part of a geek code almost as complicated as that of medieval chivalry. First, you couldn’t actually hurt anyone. Not physically, not academically, not legally (much) not financially (much). Embarrassment was fine, usually mandatory. The prank had to be clever. It had to be slick. And the fewer people who knew about all the “levels,” the better. Wheels within wheels within mazes within boxes within tin cans.
“So I get a dragon now, too?” Ted finally asked Stan.
“Nope. You get a… well… I’ll let you figure it out. We’ve already connected it up to your grid, but Pankaj thought it needed more bandwidth than your cable line. Plus, we don’t trust the utils, do we? Anyway, we tapped into nearby white-fiber so you shouldn’t notice much lag at all. There may still be some though. Especially early on during the… learning curve stage. Before the system hockey-sticks.”
Three questions occurred to Ted simultaneously, but he asked only the important one. “You tapped a white line? Stan? Into my place? Is this going to get me cop-fucked?”
“Moi? Get tu arrested? Oh ye of little faith. You know the old railroad tracks just two blocks down toward
“Yeah.”
“Back in ninety-seven Qwest dropped eight parallel white strands four feet under the right-of-way of the Buffalo-Niagara line. It junctions at an original backbone node on Suny Buffalo’s
“Christmas Eve?”
“You got it. So… how many?”
“I don’t know.” He figured quickly in his head. How many gigabytes per second a line of G3, “white” fiber optic cable could handle. How many people live around
“How many?” Stan repeated. Ted could hear the traffic noise outside Stan’s van.
“I’m going to guess three.”
There was a moment of silence. “I forget, Teddy boy, that you are a true sharpened bone. The answer is three. A bit less than three full bore, actually. That third line is only pinging about forty percent full load. But that’s because some of the big local plexes have converted to a high-compression data driven voice model.
“I’d heard about that, but didn’t know the percentages.”
“Anyway. Close enough. What that means is, there is more than twice as much bandwidth available in your neighborhood as is needed even at the highest traffic moment of the year. Most days they barely touch strand-o numero duo.”
“Which leaves me with…”
“A full strand all your own. Directly plugged into the backbone through the
That took a few beats to sink in.
“Ted?” Stan sounded like he was on the highway, now. More Doppler in the background noise. “Ted?” He also sounded a little worried. Like will Ted take this in the spirit intended, or is he going to be a dick.
“Yeah, Stan. I’m here. I’m just kinda freaked out.”
“Why would that be, Ted?”
“Because the audio on my alarm system is busted.”
“Shit. I’ll send Lenny back to fix that.”
“No big deal. I don’t have anything…” Ted paused. “What will the university think?”
“They already think it’s Qwest. Or whoever the hell owns Qwest these days.”
“I think it’s Sprint.”
“Isn’t Sprint owned by somebody else now?”
“Who the fuck can keep that shit straight. I think it’s AT&T, though.”
“That’s ironic. But I thought somebody just bought… Never mind. Anyway, you’re in the clear. No worries. I promise The university thinks line eight is a checker and repeater for LD voice traffic.”
“And what does Qwest… or whoever… think it is?”
Stand was quiet for a moment. That was worrisome.
“Stan…” pushed Ted. “What have you done, Stan.”
“It’s not really illegal, Ted.”
“Stan.”
“OK, OK. Qwest doesn’t know it’s there at all.”
“How can they not know I’m tapped into their fucking fiber!?”
“Since lines four through eight have never been touched, they have no sensing software set up on them. When they got close to hitting three the first time, they set up the monitoring and billing software to check against the switch on three, so that when that line pinged for the first time, they didn’t lose any volume. When they get close to eighty percent ping on three, they’ll hook up four. And so forth.”
“And when will they be close to filling up number seven and checking number eight?”
“About thirty years. Unless someone comes up with a phenomenally successful, bandwidth-hog app before then.”
Pause. “High-res porno shot in 360-degree, Matrix-style surround-cam?”
“Hmmm.” Stan paused. “That might do it. But the compression software gets better every year, too. One of my guys says that they’ll actually never even get to the seventh strand. His data shows compression values more and more…”
“What is this for,” Ted interrupted. “Why a big glass box and the mother of all bandwidth taps?”
“It’s a gift. From me and Caitlyn.”
“A gift.”
“Yes. A gift. We really appreciate the help you gave us a few years back, and…”
“That was nothing.”
“Fuck ‘nothing.’ We call it driving three-hundred miles at a moment’s notice to testify…”
“Look. You’d have done the same for me. I was there when you started out. That Klauwaski guy…”
“Klausinsky.”
“Whatever. The Anti-Santa, I believe Caitlyn dubbed him. He was stealing your shit. Just because he got funding earlier and was involved peripherally gave him no right…”
“Ted.” Very softly, Stan interrupted. “We don’t need to go over all that again. We were right, he was wrong. You helped prove that. The court told him to stop using our stuff without our say-so and he is now, I believe, humping tenure at Northwestern. So. Caitlyn and I want you to have… this.”
Ted paused for quite a bit before asking, “And what is, ‘this?’ My own dragon?”
Stan laughed quietly. “Oh, no, Ted. Something much more dangerous.”
“Well, at least tell me how to…”
But the line was dead. Ted tried calling back, but got, “The cellular number you are calling is either turned off or…”
Ted dialed Bocci’s Pizza from memory and ordered a medium sausage pie. Then he put down the phone and surveyed his living room. He’d never had a lot of furniture, so the big, glass box didn’t put as much of a crimp in his décor as it would have in most people’s houses. The coffee table, as has been noted, was against the front wall, beneath the windows. And they’d had to move the footstool in front of his wing chair back against the hearth. But, other than that, it had been positioned very nicely. It looked like a huge, glass, neo-retro-mod-Bauhaus sort of… thing.
The top plane was about six feet off the floor, which meant he could just see over it. It was centered nicely along the long axis of the room. He could sit on the couch and watch his TV without any trouble. It was just… there. Instead of a lot of nothing in the middle of his living room, there was now a lot of… well… slightly more solid nothing. The black base was matte and unobtrusive. Whatever Stan and his gang had done to hook the thing up to the Net was completely invisible. Ted supposed it was under the black box and that the cables must go through his basement or something.
He took his duffle bag upstairs, unpacked, and threw his clothes down the laundry chute. He put his travel stuff away and checked to see if he had a clean dress shirt for tomorrow. Yup. Blue. Fine. Clean socks, underwear, undershirt. Nothing really to do tonight except order a pizza, get a shower, go to sleep and…
He jogged back downstairs and paused to look at… it… again. He ran a hand along all four vertical sides and along the top edges. He felt the corners and the line where it met the base and it all just felt like glass. There were no visible controls. No hum of fans or click of relays. No hint of ozone smell.
Feeling foolish, standing there bare-chested, he made the only sign-language gesture he knew (well, one of two, but the other was more suited to traffic); index and middle finger extended, repeatedly pinching to touch the thumb. Translation: “duck.”
Apparently, “duck,” was not a visual signal that the apparatus recognized as a key.
Shrugging, Ted went up for a quick shower; Bocci’s always took at least forty minutes. He dried off while going down cellar to get his dirty laundry into the washing machine in the basement. Just as he started the load, he heard the doorbell ring. He pulled on a pair of sweat pants from the dirty pile, trotted upstairs and opened the front door enough to tell the guy he needed to find his checkbook.
“C’mon in for a second, if you want.”
“Thanks. It’s getting cold and I didn’t wear any jacket or anything.”
Ted came back with a checkbook from the study and saw the pizza guy standing a few feet inside the doorway, staring past the half-wall that separated the foyer from the living room. Staring at the tank.
“That’s a big tank, man,” the guy said as Ted finished the check and ripped it out of the book.
“Yeah.”
“What are ya gonna put in there? Fish or something?”
“Yeah. Fish or something. I haven’t decided yet.”
“Oh. Well…” he looked down, tucked the check into his pocket and said, “Thanks for the tip, man,” and headed back out into the night.
“Or something,” Ted muttered to himself and went to eat his pizza in front of the television, all the time feeling the transparent bulk of his new housemate, standing silent to his left.
When he slept that night, he dreamed of dragons living by a river.
* * * * *
The next morning when he came downstairs he stopped to look at the tank again. Still nothing. Perfectly clear. No knobs. No buttons. Very anti-tech-high-tech. Like those Macs with flat screens on swing arms a few years back.
He ate breakfast, got changed, and on his way out the door, hollered over his shoulder, “Have a nice day, Giant Glass Slab! See through you when I get home tonight.”
Since he was outside and unlocking his car, he didn’t hear the tank say, “Ted?”
* * * * *
Work that Monday was… work. As his dad used to say, “If it was fun all the time, they’d call it ‘camp’ and make you pay them.” He thought of Dad’s sayings often. It was funny, because for years he hadn’t even thought of them. But once he’d become entombed (as he thought of it) in his first “real” job, all the old zingers had come back to haunt him:
· You’ll never go broke if you always bet on “dumb.”
· You’ll often do for money what you’d never do for fun.
· If you can’t tell who the dumbest monkey in the room is… it’s you.
· Never pet a burning dog.
That last one always confused him, but he supposed it was sound advice. He also supposed that it would eventually make sense to him.
Why does Stan get a fun job and I get to design better ways of keeping corporate data safe from hackers and disgruntled employees? Ted thought. Because I wanted a safe job and a decent place and an OK car and he lived in a burlap sack under a bridge for five years while pursuing his dream.
He remembered a conversation with his Dad about a year after he’d taken the job.
“What is it you do again, Ted?”
“I write software that lets people’s networks share the data they want without opening themselves to crap they don’t want.”
“Gatekeeper stuff, it sounds like.”
“That’s a good way of putting it.”
“Is it fun?”
“It pays good.”
“Not much fun.”
“How much fun was it being the head accountant for a public school system for fifteen years?”
“It came with a good pension.”
“Not much fun.”
“No,” Dad had admitted. “But you always liked the computer stuff so much. You and Goober…”
“Gunther.”
“Whatever. The German kid. You were always writing those game programs and putting your mom’s Christmas letter in weird fonts and stuff.”
“I can’t get a job crafting goofy looking Christmas cards, Dad.”
“I know. You just need to find something… with more…”
“I’m fine, Dad.”
And he was fine. And he was easily amused, and just about as introverted as someone could be and still function in an ever more populous society. Which meant he didn’t feel lonely often. More often than when he’d been in school, but he’d been surrounded by people then. Which hadn’t made him comfortable… just not lonely. In fact, he’d been violently uncomfortable with some of the living conditions at times.
Why, he continued in his vein of whiny thought, did Stan get the great girl?
But he knew the answer to that one, too. Because Stan, while a geek, is not a dweeb.
Out of nine hours at work that day, he spent three in meetings, two on the phone, one at lunch and the rest checking email. He didn’t actually get any work done at all. Par for the course.
* * * * *
As soon as he entered the boot room that night, he could tell that something was different. The quality of light in his living room was unusual. He took off his jacket as he climbed the two steps into the living room, and saw that he now had another, smaller living room in the middle of his own living room.
He remembered the first time Stan had showed him the original, one-foot-cube prototype for his display system. The images inside were perfectly three dimensional, and not at all semi-transparent, as they had been in all the other previous 3D display experiments. The effect had been entirely, completely life-like.
“Creepy,” he’d told Stan as he circled the cube, examining again and again the virtual model of a flower that dripped tiny drops of dew onto the virtual floor of the box.
“Ain’t it?” Stan had been so clearly torqued up and on the edge of happy hysteria.
“It even seems to reflect the ambient room light,” Ted had commented.
“Not ‘seems,’ bro. It does reflect ambient.”
That had floored Ted as almost no other detail of the system could have.
“How the fuck did you manage that? Sensor arrays? Telepathy? Virtual black-cat bone?”
“Nope. It’s actually a byproduct of the process itself. For some commercial uses we may have to install some light sensors to actually compensate and remove the effect.”
“Jeez. But for most applications…”
“Yeah. You can use the display for point light, diffuse glow, even out-of-box spot.”
Again, Ted was floored. “You can shine a light OUT of the thing?”
“Well, crap, sure. If you’ve got true, interior adjustable reflectivity, all you need is…”
“An internal light source, which is core anyway, and then you just bank it…”
“Off a more reflective portion of the display.” Pause. “Ted, you get this shit quicker than some of the guys who’ve been here for eighteen months. You sure you don’t want to come work for me?”
That had been an uncool moment. Ted knew that he’d never be the creative force that Stan was. He also knew that he would go crazy as a cog in Stan’s machine. They’d been such good friends… still were… that would screw it up big time.
Ted knew that, too. “Sorry, sorry, I know,” he’d said. “But if I decide I need some security code for one of these muthas…”
“I’ll consult.”
“Good. Now, check this out.”
Stan leaned forward, took a deep breath, and then blew onto the cube like it was a birthday cake topped with candles. The petals on the flower rippled, a drop of dew spun away from the stem, and the whole thing leaned slightly away from the force of Stan’s breath.
He’d looked up at Ted with a, Whaddya think of them apples? look.
“Sound activated or did you push a button,” was all Ted had said.
Stan laughed. “You’re too fucking smart for my own good. Sound.”
Ted nodded. “Still… pretty cool. You could hook up a bunch of different sensors and really fake people into a greater sense of… what do you call it again?”
“Solidacity.”
“Right. ‘Solidacity.’ The belief that something that’s not there really is.”
“And the belief that you can fuck with it.”
“Power to the people,” had been Ted’s comment. After that night, he hadn’t seen any of the other test models until the night of the dragon.
And now he had one in his living room. And it was a living room in his living room.
He sat down on his footstool and put his nose almost up against the glass. Yup. It was a small living room, all right. About one-fifth scale, he thought. Hardwood floor with a really nice oriental run. Bookshelves filled with tiny books and a few gimcracks. A couch, a love seat, a wing chair with ottoman on the oriental. Floor lamps on either side of the sofa. A small, roll-top desk with an antique-y looking wooden chair against one of the glass walls. A baby grand piano and bench in the opposite corner. Another floor lamp, this one a Tiffany, near the piano. A magazine rack between the couch and the love seat. He could even see a few magazines tucked in there. No TV. No stereo that he could see.
Basically, it looked like a room from a very detailed doll house. The difference in the lighting that he’d noticed was from the Tiffany lamp. It was on, and threw a very soft, diffuse pattern of subtly colored light out into his living room.
Cool, but… so what? A dragon that flew around and ate bunnies was cool. You couldn’t do that with balsa wood and Testors paint. But a doll house?
Ted stood up and looked down at the room in the tank. He clapped his hands twice. Nothing. Stan had rigged all the lighting in a school auditorium to a Clapper once. Not this time.
“Hello?” he said, feeling foolish.
Nothing.
Fuck it, he thought. If Stan wants to play it slow, I’ll play it slow.
He got some leftover pizza from the fridge, heated it in the microwave, and ate it on the couch in front of the TV. He had about two-hundred or something satellite channels, and didn’t really watch any one program all the way through. Some sports, some news, some entertainment stuff, some videos.
He had started to drift off while watching the History Channel and was in that weird, semi-floaty state of almost asleep when he heard her voice:
“Ted! You’re home!”
Shit-fuck-what? was the rough translation of what his brain said as he came out of his black-and-white, WWII-newsreel induced slumber.
He almost fell off the couch as he sat up too quickly and looked for the sound of the voice.
“Down here, Ted,” said the voice again.
He looked down, and there she was. A nine-inch tall woman standing on the oriental run in the living room in the tank in his living room.
The first thing that struck him was her hat. She was wearing an off-white (Taupe? his brain sparked. Ecru? Fawn?) beret. It mostly covered her quite-short, straight, dark-brown hair and matched the color of her jacket. The jacket looked like suede.
She took off the jacket and draped it on the back of the wing chair. She was wearing a white silk blouse underneath it and black pants. Slacks, Ted thought. Women call them slacks, I think.
She looked up and raised an eyebrow. He actually could see her raise one eyebrow. Like Mr. Spock. Ted could do that, too. He didn’t now, though.
“Close your mouth, Ted. You look like a fish, and I’m the one in the tank, so that ain’t right.”
Her voice was a little raspy. A little Katherine Hepburn, maybe? he thought.
He closed his mouth. Then it hit him.
“How the fuck did you know my mouth was open?”
“Ah. Stan said you were a quick study and not easily fooled by the wiles of modern science.”
She took off the beret, put it on top of the coat, and sat down on the love seat, tucking her legs up underneath her, one arm thrown over the back of the chair.
“Stan said…”
“Yeah. Stan. He said you’re a quick study. He likes you, you know. A lot. Even though you never call him.”
He could see the tiny buttons on her tiny blouse. He could see that she was wearing four rings, one of them on her left thumb, all of them silver. She was wearing pearl studs in her ears. He couldn’t tell if they were pierced or clip on… but then, he wouldn’t have been able to had she been a real woman, actual size.
“I never call him,” Ted repeated.
“No. Never. You never call anyone.”
He thought about it. Other than his dad on Fathers’ Day… she was right. He talked to people when they called, but…
“So,” he finally said.
“So… nothing,” she replied. She unfolded one leg and sat more firmly on the other.
No reply from Ted. She did the eyebrow again. Ted just kept staring.
“That’s really not polite, Ted,” she said, after about 30 seconds of complete silence.
“What? Checking out the detail level of a display unit?”
She shook her head. “Don’t start that right away, please Ted? I know what I am, so you don’t need to revert to ‘reality’ every time you don’t know exactly what to say.”
That miffed him a bit. “What do… I don’t… I wasn’t…”
“Yes you were,” she said quietly. A touch of scold in her tone. “If you don’t want to talk, that’s fine. But don’t talk to me like I’m a badly scanned picture of Heather Locklear or something. Don’t talk to me like you’d talk to pet. If you do that, I’ll leave.”
That messed with his head. But he was just cheesed off enough to take her up on it.
“So leave, Miss Pixels.”
She gave him a dead-cold look, flipped him the bird with the thumb-ring left hand, and stood up. She walked halfway towards the wall with the bookcase, then stopped to come back for her coat and hat.
Ted watched as she spun on one foot and headed back toward the wall. As she was about to hit the wall, she put out her free hand at about the level a doorknob would have been. And where a doorknob suddenly was. While she was touching it, an entire doorway appeared that Ted had never seen before. She stepped through, and as soon the door shut behind her (with a slight bang), it disappeared again.
Ted sat there for a moment, unsure of what to do.
Before he could decide, the door appeared again. She walked back into to her/his living room, strode quickly to the Tiffany lamp, turned it off, and left again. This time, there was a distinct slam when she shut the door.
Ted waited for five minutes. Not doing anything. Just sitting and looking at the now dark living room, as the sounds of the war in the Pacific droned on in the background.
* * * **
One thing you could say for Ted. Though quiet, he was stubborn. For almost two weeks he neither touched nor spoke to the tank. And, as the girl inside had pointed out, he did not call anyone about it either.
Stan, on the other hand… not so patient.
When the phone on his desk at work rang, Ted answered as always, “Ted Martin.”
“’Ted Martin,’” a falsely deep, anchorman voice echoed back at him.
“Stan. What’s up?” Stan wasn’t good at voices.
“Sorry, man. I just get a kick out of your responsible corporate monotone. Call me at the office sometime and see how I answer.”
“You own your office, Stan,” Ted reminded him.
“Yeah, yeah. What? They’d fire you if you picked up the phone and said, ‘Ted’s House of Mirth, may I bring you joy?’”
“Pretty much, yeah.”
“Bummer.”
There was a pause. “Stan. What’s up? You called me.”
“You gotta work or something?”
“No. Not really. Just wondered what’s up.”
Then Ted remembered what was up.
“The tank. You’re calling about the tank.”
Hearing Stan giggle like a little boy always made Ted smile, even when he was the target of the amusement.
“Not the tank, buddy,” Stan said after he stopped giggling. “Claire.”
“Ah. Claire. So that’s her name.”
“You didn’t… oh, shit. Caitlyn is gonna kill me.”
“Why, Stan? What has…”
But Stan had clicked off. Ted got his work number off his PDA and called him back. “Pandora Technologies, how may I direct your call?” asked the pleasant, feminine voice.
“Stan Kline, please.”
“I’m sorry, Mr. Kline is in a meeting.”
“Bullshit he’s in a meeting. I was talking to him eight seconds ago.”
“I’m sorry but…”
Ted hung up and went deeper into his files. Another number. Either cellular or direct dial.
“Hi, this is Stan. Sorry I can’t take your…” Shit.
Ted sat there, tapping absently on his desk phone’s handset.
Claire. He thought. That’s French for “light.” That’s pretty cute.
He called his boss and said he was taking off a bit early. Like now. No problem, as his boss really had no idea what he did, just that it always got done on time and under budget. Ted saw his boss four times a year, basically. And that was fine. He mostly talked with other people at his “job grade level” who never talked to their bosses either. Sometimes he wondered if his boss ever talked to his boss, whom Ted had met once in three years, even though the guy worked just two floors up.
All the way home, through nicely sparse,
As soon as he got into the boot room he hollered, “Claire? Are you in there?”
Nothing. He kicked off his shoes, pulled off the tie, threw the jacket on the couch and sat down next to it.
“Claire?” he said, this time more softly.
Nothing.
“Maybe I could leave her a message,” he murmured.
“Hi, this is Claire,” the tank said. With that metallic-echo tone that seems to come standard on all answering machines. “I’m not home right now. Or I am, but I’m doing something else. Something suspicious, you’re thinking, since I would obviously run from any ordinary task to take your call. Be that as it may…” Beep.
“Claire,” Ted started. Then stopped. “Claire. It’s Ted. Just wanted to say, ‘Hi’ and… well… I guess that’s it. See you later.”
There was a slight click, and then silence. He sat there for a few more minutes, and then decided he might as well change into play clothes. So he went upstairs and did just that.
He got online and checked movie times at the nearby second-run theatre. Just a buck, matinees for fifty cents. You can’t shake a stick at that. Some idiot comedy he hadn’t seen was playing at
The movie was well worth fifty cents. Afterward he stopped and grabbed some Chinese food at Chef Tong’s. Spicy chicken and black bean. And then Dairy Queen. And then home.
He paused to look into the tank. The Tiffany light was on, but there was no one in the room. He shrugged and went to put the unfinished half of his Blizzard in the freezer.
The voicemail light on his kitchen phone was blinking, so he pushed the button.
“Message one: Ted. Hi. It’s me. Claire. Sorry I haven’t… well… whatever. I popped in after I got home from work and you were out. Give me a call when you get back.”
OK, thought Ted. That’s pretty weird.
“Message two: Ted. Claire again. I never gave you my number, did I? It’s 833-21512. The new
Ted shrugged and dialed the number. The phone rang twice, and, “Hello?”
“Claire?”
“Ted?”
“Yeah.”
“You got my message.”
“Sure. Yeah. I was out at the movies.”
Pause. “You’re home early, then.”
“No. I took off work around three.”
“You sick?”
“No. Just…” he remembered why he left early. Because he’d learned her name and thought it might be a password. A code. Some cryptologically meaningful phoneme.
“Just what?”
“Just felt like playing hooky, you know?”
“Sure. I get like that. Mental health day.”
“Exactly.”
Another pause. This one longer.
“How was the movie?” Claire finally asked.
“It was dumb. But for fifty cents, you know… not bad.”
“Yeah. The entertainment value index.”
“The what?”
“How much you’ll pay for amusement. Ten bucks for a first-run flick. Seven-fifty for first-run matinee. Fifteen for the DVD. Three bucks to rent. A buck at the cheapies. Or free on HBO in the hotel when you’re on the road.”
“That’s how you rate movies?”
“Partly,” she answered. “My brother and I also use the sliding ‘fun ‘n’ film’ scale.”
“What’s that?”
“It’s… shit,” she interrupted herself.
“What?”
“Hang up the fucking phone and I’ll meet you in our living rooms.”
Click. He looked at the phone and felt like a total nob. He’d just been having a conversation with a piece of software that lived in his house.
From around the corner of the kitchen he heard her. “Ted?”
He quickly put the phone back on the hook and jogged into the living room.
There she was, standing in her little doorway, one hand on the frame and the other holding a cordless phone. She moved into the room and the door disappeared. She put the phone down on the little desk and sat down on the love seat. Same position as before, both legs tucked under her.
Tonight she was dressed much more casually. Jeans, grey sweatshirt with a big “C” on the front. Barefoot. Same pearl earrings, though.
He sat down on the couch and leaned back, arms crossed on his chest.
“So, it’s gonna be like that, Ted?” she said, flipping her bangs out of her eyes with one hand.
“Like what?”
She pointed at him. “Your body language basically screams, ‘I am in control and I will not be trifled with.’ Or, ‘With me you will not trifle,’ if you’re a preposition Nazi.”
Ted looked down at himself. He hadn’t meant to communicate anything with his body language. He had just sat down.
“I just sat down,” he said.
Claire whispered something that he didn’t quite catch.
“What?” he asked, leaning forward a little bit.
“I said, ‘Men!’ like it was a curse word, which is how women almost always say, ‘Men!’ when they’re frustrated with them.”
“Why would you be frustrated with me? I just sat down.” He wasn’t mad. Just a bit confused.
“Look at how I’m sitting, Ted.”
He did. One arm on back of the love seat, the other in her lap. Legs, as we said, underneath her.
“You’re sitting,” he said.
She sighed. “You are a tough nut,” she said. “Did you ever play sports as a kid?”
“Not really,” he replied. “Some ultimate Frisbee. One year of track. Running, mostly.”
“Running. One of the solitary sports.”
“Solitary sports?”
“Right. Non team activities. Sports you play alone. Running, climbing, swimming, golf, bowling…”
“Wait a sec,” he interrupted. “You play golf with other people.”
“No you don’t,” she said, shifting one leg out from underneath her. “You play by yourself in the presence of other people who are playing by themselves.”
“Ah.”
“So. No team sports. Did you sing in a choir?”
“No.”
“Did you play in a band?”
“No.”
“And in your current job you write network security software.”
“Yeah. But how did you know that?”
“It’s on your company’s website.”
“Sure.”
At which point the fourth wall came down again. Like one of those big, vault doors in movies about bank robbers or spies. The kind of big, metal wall with three-inch diameter pins in the bottom that fit into holes in the concrete floor of the hall. The hero rolls under the door and you’re sure one of those pins is going to go right through his hand as he reaches back to pull through his hat or his knapsack or…
“Ted? You’ve gone completely blank.”
“What? Oh. Yeah. Sorry.” Maybe it was the spicy black bean sauce, but he was sweating slightly. He rubbed his palm on his head and scrunched his eyes shut tight.
“What’s wrong, Ted? You got a headache or something?”
He opened his eyes and looked at her. Very cute, very well put together. Not gorgeous. Not a porn queen. A tight, athletic body that stretched her jeans nicely. Her skin was very pale, and her hair about ten shades of medium brown all at once. The very short haircut was cute in a still very feminine way. Same pearl earrings, right.
“Ted…”
He rubbed his head again. “I’m sorry. I’m just not used to having…”
“…Someone in your living room?”
That made him stop and think. He’d been about to say… not used to having a conversation with a nine inch tall, virtual chick who’s been surfing my company’s website. But, now that he thought about it, he may have never actually had a guest in his house. In just about three years. He went over to Craig’s once in awhile. And he’d been out a few times with Ivan and Carla. But he hadn’t ever had anyone over to his place. It had never occurred to him to ask.
“Yeah. It’s… I don’t know. It didn’t ever… You know.”
She hopped both legs back onto the seat cushion and turned to face him directly, leaning forward on the arm of the love seat.
“Ted? I was kidding. Don’t freak. I assumed you were going to make some crack about the state of my electronic being.”
He shook his head a bit. “Actually, I was.”
She nodded. “I’m glad you didn’t. ‘Cause it’d be like reminding someone they’re black, or a girl or tall. It’s just not cool.”
He nodded. “Not cool. Right.”
She waited for him to say something, and when he didn’t, she went on. “Anyway. I was asking about sports and band and shit because it’s pretty clear that you’re socially…”
“Retarded?” he filled in with a half grin.
She barked a quick laugh and covered her mouth. “I wasn’t going to say that. Seriously. Maybe ‘inexperienced’ or something like that.”
“Caitlyn told me all the time that I was a social retard.”
“That’s harsh.”
“Not from her. She’s really good with people, but doesn’t like all the stuff you’re supposed to do that’s just social fluff. She’ll get into a really deep talk with someone she barely knows and ask them shit like, ‘How much money do you make?’ or ‘How many people have you had sex with?’”
Claire pulled a little face and said, “It sounds to me like she may be a bit socially retarded, too.”
Ted shook his head. “No. I accused her of that once. She said she her social skills weren’t retarded, just mutated.”
They were quiet a minute. Then:
“You really like her, don’t you?”
He nodded. “Sure. What’s not to like? She’s smart as hell, gorgeous, and doesn’t make people feel stupid or unattractive just because she’s neither.”
“Do you love her?”
Ted had been looking off at the windows. Now he turned to faced her, at one level marveling how objects in her living room picked up shadows from the yard as a car went by on the street. On another level wondering about the interaction programming behind this conversation. On another, thinking about whether he wanted to answer the question honestly. And whether or not he even knew the answer.
“I don’t know,” he finally said. “I don’t think so.”
“Why not?” Now she was curled up in a ball, arms around her legs, chin resting on one knee, one foot up on the armrest. How can chicks sit like that? Ted thought for about the thousandth time in his life.
“Because,” he answered, “When you love someone, aren’t you supposed to hurt all the time if you’re not with them or if you can’t have them or whatever? Isn’t being without them supposed to be the worst fucking feeling there is?”
She leaned her head to one side. The angle was perfect to let him see that her ears were, in fact, pierced.
“Ted,” she said. “You can’t define a thing by describing what its absence is not.”
His right eyebrow went up. “Care to repeat that?”
“Sure. If you have no pie…”
“Pie…” he interrupted.
“Sure. Pie. Apple pie. A la mode if you like.”
He paused. Pie. OK. “Yes. A la mode, please.”
“So. If you have no pie. And it makes you sad. And I say, ‘Why are you sad?’ And you say, ‘Because I have no pie.’ And I ask you, ‘What is pie?’ And you say, ‘Well… Not having pie is not like not having cable TV.’ How does that help me?”
Long pause. Finally, “Can I get a beer, Claire? Will you be here when I get back?”
She tipped her head to one side and frowned a bit. “Do you want me to be here when you get back?”
“Sure. Yeah. I mean… I’m just thirsty. And… a bit warm. Maybe getting flu or something. And I had spicy Chinese food. And I need to go to the bathroom. It’s just that the last time you left…”
“You didn’t see me for two weeks.”
“Right.”
She shook her head. “Go get a beer. I’ll be here. It’s not that late and I don’t have to get up until nine or so tomorrow.”
He nodded and went to the kitchen. And then to the bathroom, since that’s where the toilet is. And then back to the kitchen, because he’d forgotten the beer. And then back to the living room.
* * * * *
“Ted. You want a coke or something? I’m making a run.”
“No. Thanks. I’m cool.”
Sanja waved to him over the wall of his cube as he headed off to get his own coke. Once again Ted thought, It’s no fair that they set out free coffee but not free pop. Only the old farts drink coffee. Everybody under the age of forty here drinks their weight in Coke or Mountain Dew every week and shells out 75 freaking cents per can, when the machine doesn’t eat your dough in the first place.
His whiny, inner rant was interrupted by the phone.
“Ted Martin.”
“’Ted Martin.’ It’s Claire Dumont.”
“Why does everybody make fun of how I answer the phone?”
“It just sounds so serious. Like you’re a cop or something.”
“I am in security, in a way.”
“In a way. Remind me to call someone else if the house is being robbed.”
“Thanks. I can take care of myself.”
“Sure. You’ll brain them with the “Visual CX Bible” you’ve got under the couch.”
“Hey. I don’t wanna kill the burglar. Just knock him out.”
She laughed.
“Are you busy?” she asked.
“Not so to speak.”
“Can you get off and over the
“Sure. Where? Why?”
“I’ll tell you where. You have to come to figure out why.”
“Give me a clue.”
“First the where. You know Bell Hall?”
“Sure.”
“Room 1003.
“Sure. Now the clue….”
“OK.” Pause. “You’re going to meet my boss.”
* * * * *
The night before, they’d discussed Darwin, Turing and tarts.
“According to Turing,” Claire told him, “You could probably fool someone for a short while. A quick chat about the weather or something ubiquitous. But after a few minutes, most people would begin to suspect even the most advanced computer of being ‘not people.’”
"Especially if the computer kept using words like ‘ubiquitous.’"
"Piss off."
They’d been, as usual, in their living rooms. Ted was kicked back, lying on the couch, she was sitting on her piano bench, feet up on the coffee table.
“I guess,” Ted replied, “That Mr. Turing never got a chance to plug twenty-seven IntelDeccas into a parallel array, load them up with Semtech’s KbT4, and string the mutha across a solid state data cube with the Library of Congress held in stat memory.”
“You speak of Kirk Jr.,” she said, buffing the top of the coffee table in a circular motion with her gym-socked feet.
“And that was four years ago.”
She frowned.
“What?” he said. “I’m not making fun. I’m not being rude. We’re talking about stuff that interests me. If I was a lumberjack, we’d talk about… I don’t know…”
“Transvestitism”
“Exactly! I’m not trying to put you down, just… talking about related… topics.”
“I guess it’s like when
“Ah.”
“So you see what I’m saying?”
“Not really, no. It doesn’t bother me at all that umpty-ump generations ago my family walked on their knuckles and ate bugs from under logs.”
“It doesn’t? Not even a little?” she peeked out from under her bangs as she said this.
He shrugged. “Why should it? I’m not so different from an ape. I’m an animal, for sure. The similarities are pretty obvious. Why should it matter if I evolved from a monkey or sprang full-blown from the head of Zeus?”
“It shouldn’t. But some people were upset about it.”
Now he frowned. “I guess that maybe they felt deprived of a certain uniqueness.”
“How so?”
“If people descend from apes, how are we any better than them? We take pride in our human ancestors. Should we take less pride in our simian relatives? And if man is made in God’s image…”
“Does that make God a monkey…”
“Something like that. Lots of people have very well developed ideas about why their own life is much more important than everybody else’s. When
“Artificial?” with one eyebrow way up.
He didn’t get it.
“Sure,” he nodded. “That fits. Here we are, almost angels. God’s only creature with soul. Set above the beasts. If that’s part of what makes you feel good about yourself, running headlong into evolution can ruin your world view.”
"But it doesn’t bother you?"
"It’s been part of my world view since birth. I assume that I feel just as superior about my ego as did Victorian creationists. But I feel superior based on breeding, rather than anthrodeism."
"You just made that word up."
"Did not."
She tapped her head. "Library of Congress, remember?"
"Shit. Yeah. OK. Sorry."
She gave him a three count, shook her head and muttered, "You are such a friggin’ tool."
"What? I didn’t… you aren’t connected to the LOC, are you?"
Negative shaking of small, cute, virtual head.
"OK. You got me. But could you?"
She slid down off the piano bench and stretched out on the floor, scratching the back of one calf with the top of her other foot. She absentmindedly tapped her head with a ballpoint pen and pondered. He gave her time to think; didn’t chime in just to fill the space.
Finally she replied, "Yeah. If I needed to."
"Need?"
"Yes. Need."
Now it was his turn to think quietly. What would she need? What would put her in a jam that would require an, Oh, shit! I’ve gotta download the Library of Congress! response. He shook his head a little and got up to go get something to drink.
"Get me a beer while you’re in there," she called after him. It was a regular joke between them, and had been for weeks now. For quite some time after he’d started talking to her, he’d had a hard time telling when she was joking, and when she was just being… herself. He’d sometimes laugh, and she’d look hurt. Or he’d give her a serious answer, only to turn his head and see her giggling, silently, one cuff of a sweatshirt clamped in her mouth to keep quiet. After awhile, though, he got to know the jokes from the not-jokes.
He returned to the living room and put a cold bottle of Heineken on top of the glass case. Beads of moisture ran down the side and began to pool on top of the small room.
Claire looked up and made a, "You will clean that up, dick-head," face. He nodded without taking a pause in his long pull of beer.
After another few minutes of quiet, broken only by two gulps and a quiet belch, she said, "I wonder if it’ll ever be like that for me?"
"Like what for you?"
"Like you with the apes thing."
He didn’t get it. "I don’t get it," he said.
She stood up, stretching a little, and sat on the love seat, as close to him as the wall of glass would allow.
"It doesn’t bother you. The evolution thing. You said it yourself; you grew up with the idea. So it’s no big whoop. Like the world being round for post-Galileans. Like for post-Columbians. Like…"
"Like Pop-Tarts for post-toasties."
Pause. Scrunchy-face. "That was very, very bad."
"I’m sorry."
"You aren’t."
"No. But I’m a little buzzed."
"Puns are only a mild neurosis. I should count my blessings."
She leaned back and lay down on the seat of the chair. Her legs dangled over the side, and he could see that one of her socks was about to fall off.
"So…" she said. He couldn’t see her face. It was hidden behind the back of the love seat. Her voice even sounded a little muffled, a bit more distant than it had when his view of her mouth wasn’t blocked. He experienced a moment of mild vertigo, an appreciation for the programming.
"So?" he replied.
"So," she went on, "Maybe someday people will interact with virtuals just as if they’re people. It won’t be a big deal because it’ll happen all the time. In ten years, all this ‘tank junk’ will be old school. Totally East Coast. My descendents will live in real rooms, with hidden projectors embedded in the walls."
"Or they’ll get around in small vehicles controlled by their own programming. Or be projected by roaming nano that isn’t ever even seen or felt by us house apes."
That stopped her for a sec. "Yeah," she finally replied.
They were quiet for another few minutes. He sipped the last of the beer. Her sock finally fell off her dangling foot and landed on the floor of her living room with a barely audible puhf.
"So it’ll be normal," she said.
"What will be?"
"My having a human for a friend."
"Hey," he mumbled, standing up slowly. "Don’t lay that on me." He took her Heineken