In the City

[Quincunx]

Author's note: Setting does borrow heavily from the comic series Transmetropolitan. I had re-invented the wheel to make a background world for Tzim, but this wheel was actually round. Look up the comics if you can tolerate excesses of vulgarity for the sake of an ethical political story.

 

It was a dark and stormy night. Acid rain, lashed sideways by the wind, slipped underneath non-corrosive hoods and ate away at sprinkler heads, while the alkaline anti-rain leaked from the sprinklers onto the apartments it was meant to protect. Every so often, a neon sign would be breached and flare into a vivid lightning cloud before shorting out; otherwise light only came from unchanging graveyard-shift ad screens. Inside Ludmila's apartment, rain dripped through the crawlspace, fell through her kitchen, and continued eating its way through the floor, drip, drip, drip, sizzzzzzle. Ludmila herself sprawled on a battered overstuffed loveseat, with every lamp in the apartment shut off, staring blankly out the window until the drip, drip, sizzzzzle, drip was intolerable. "Television!" she snapped, and the window became opaque, then changed to a text display: Promotional Air Time Not Yet Met - Programming Unavailable - Please Enjoy Our Fine Products. She hung one leg over the side of the loveseat as ads flashed onto the screen, ran one hand through her lanky braids, and sighed, "I need a man. . .forget that, they keep on hanging around after you want 'em gone. . .I need a kid."

Edited November 21, 2004 by Quincunx

[YanYanGanaffi]

*slips in quietly and takes a seat near the storyteller. Giving her a 'thumbs up' to silently show his like of the story's intro, he leans back and eagerly awaits more*

[Quincunx]

Next day, Ludmila stopped by a steel door nearly invisible under a shell of graffiti and pushed a credit card into a slot above the door handle. The door responded sluggishly but let her into a square hallway, facing a glassed-in cage with exchange trays and lurid red stickers: CAUTION! Inner air layer contains anthrax, Do Not Shoot The Glass. Behind the double panes perched a wrinkled-armed lady with Elvis coiffure and matching sideburns, trimming some stray hairs with a pill cutter. "Yeah?" she mumbled, before darkening the window with a complete financial and social record pulled from Ludmila's credit card. The picture on the driver's license was much paler and more gawky than the woman standing impassively in front of her life history.

 

Ludmila plunked a few marble-sized clumps of circuitry into the tray, then pushed it through the irradiation layer, over to the concealed cashier. "Turning in pregnancy suppressant and optimized hair growth for credit. Picking up phone with a local scanner override, no biggie, just wanna chat at work. And I should have enough left over for a new tribal."

 

"Barely," grunted the cashier, fingernails tapping on the other side of the glass. "Unless you want to get the new special, temp option renewable weekly. . ." The cashier paused, then continued with a hint of emotion, "won't need the phone for long, he'll be here and gone. Lets you keep the hair, although what you've got is gonna fall out since you took it out. You'd have to pass on the tribal anyway, we're out of everything but Ibo, Romanov, or Boston Brahmin. Real class."

 

The shop always had to be out of something, Ludmila thought. Aloud she agreed, and touched the payment button on her side of the display. The display updated, then the tray reopened on her side, containing one clump of circuitry, a pill not much smaller printed with the ancient two-shape logo for telephone, and a filthy plastic shotglass filled to the brim. She picked up the pill and shotglass of catalyst, downed them both with a sick look, then scooped up the hair optimizer and turned her back on the booth. Just inside the door, her credit card rolled out of another slot above the handle; she retrieved it and the cashier's cage became transparent again. "You say hello to your ma for me," croaked the cashier, while Ludmila waited for the door to open, absently scratching at the new, tingling receiver that had grown under her skin, just beneath her left earlobe.

[Quincunx]

A few of the street people knew better than to spit on the laboratory floor, but not enough, as they shuffled in a line through an irradiation curtain into the operating theater. Ludmila kept the helpful smile pasted on her face, handing out the plastic-wrapped packets of surgical gown and anaesthetic drink, while assessing how much overtime it'd take to mop all of the spit stains and city filth off of the floor. Janitors' strikes had hit the college every autumn for every year anyone could remember; the political students cared passionately about this and always held fundraisers to bribe the unions into breaking the strike early, but that never worked. True students, unlike janitors and (thankfully) teachers like Ludmila, drew no overtime pay. She took her place at the podium after directing one befuddled old man to his reclining hospital bed and retracting the robotic arm that had frightened him off of it.

 

"Take your surgical gown out of the packet and place it over your head. Wear it OVER YOUR REGULAR CLOTHES. Recline on the bed," she directed the volunteers. "Take the bottle. Pull the ring from the top of the bottle." Ludmila held up a bottle to the floating magnifier and pulled out the cork. "Yes, you may keep the ring. Drink from the bottle. . .now." She mimed drinking from her empty demonstration bottle. Slowly the room fell silent as the people drifted to sleep. When all of the volunteers were asleep, the robotic arms above each bed unfolded and descended, hovering just above the patients' faces. Ludmila stepped from behind the podium, over to a reclining operating table with a cadaver, instruments in a tray above the cadaver's head. She clipped a pair of wires to sockets embedded in her carpal bones, then spoke into a mouthpiece attached to the wires just above her wrist, "Begin Lesson. Diagnose Cornea." As she reached into the tray and selected an instrument, the robotic arms moved in unison to select the same instrument from their own trays.

 

With her other hand, Ludmila tapped a pattern onto the table. The phone under her skin vibrated slightly as it sought a signal that would pierce the operating theater's dampening field. She clamped her jaws but that didn't dampen the vibration. It beeped to signal a connection, and Ludmila swore.

 

"HELLO?"

 

Ludmila flinched from pain, but the robot arms overcame the human error. "WHISPER," she muttered, steadying her hand over the cadaver's eye.

 

A pause. "You got a subdermal, huh?"

 

"Yeah, I did. I'm at work, 'Chelle-fen--"

 

"I haven't been fen for months, 'Milla. Where HAVE you been?"

 

"Neither have I." Ludmila stuck her tongue out although this phone didn't have visual, and continued to examine the eye.

 

Another pause. "Ohhhhhh. . .'Milla, 'Milla, 'Milla. . .worst mistake you can make. Men are still pigs. I'm neuter now, loving every minute of it. You should. . . ," then Michelle's voice trailed off.

 

Ludmila lifted the back of her wrist to her mouth. "Begin Lesson. Cornea Transplant." She changed instruments slowly, gave Michelle time to compose herself. "I'm sorry, 'Chelle. I wouldn't give everything up for a man, you know it--I just want a kid. A baby. You know?"

 

Michelle did not know. While Ludmila and the robot arms squeezed old corneas and sutured new ones, while she ended the lessons and prompted the robots to release anti-anaesthetic, and while she paid the street people and urged them back out onto the street, Michelle told her ex-girlfriend exactly what type of idiocy she attached to that idea. After an hour and a half, Michelle started to run low on arguments and sighed into the phone, "All right. . .FINE. . .ruin your life, I don't care. You want me to introduce your anti-social ass to all the nice dependable one-night-stands, 'cause you don't want him hanging around, but you still want a good daddy. I mean good genes. Am I right? You want me to advertise a born-again fem who just wants a baby, who sounds like she's thirty-five years old and that better still be a lie, and get her a date?" Ludmila stopped mopping for a moment and checked her reflection in the window. One of her braids, loosened by the brief loss of hair optimizer, fell out as she watched and floated on the scummy surface of the mop bucket. "Well, I'll do it," Michelle stated, "just to prove that I AM the best matchmaker this filthy city's ever seen. Don't come crying to me when it doesn't work out, and I don't mean the relationship."

Edited November 24, 2004 by Quincunx

[Quincunx]

"Television!"

 

Promotional Air Time Met - Basic Channels. Please Enjoy Our Fine Programming. A transparent menu displayed on the window, backlit by real sunset, with a weather ticker predicting high light pollution and low burglary index for the next eight hours.

 

"Television, erotic."

 

Promotional Air Time Not Yet Met - Programming Unavailable - Please Enjoy Our Fine Products.

 

Ludmila turned her back on the explicit ads and surveyed her apartment. She partly unfolded the loveseat, so it was less of a couch but not quite a bed, and tugged the blanket to conceal some threadbare spots. In the kitchen, the ventilation fans whined and whirred, trying to clear out the fumes of triple-strength cleaning fluid. Fresh putty--not guaranteed for acid rain, but cheap and quick-drying--covered the cracks in the walls. A card table, covered with a satin sheet and set for two to dine, took up the space where her pile of unwashed laundry usually lay. "Shouldn't scare him off," she shrugged, and went into the bathroom to do battle with her new, short crop of hair, only to race out a few seconds later when the door announced a visitor. She skidded to a halt on a patch of water and hair gel, barefoot, flipped the towel back into the bathroom, slammed that door shut, and said, "Door, open!" In the doorway was a bundle of flowers. . .no, a bushel basket of flowers. . .no, a very small man holding a bushel basket of flowers. Ludmila gawked. So did he.

 

"Flowers are customary for the first date?" he asked.

 

She groaned inwardly. "Yes, they are. . .Come in, come in," and stepped aside. "Put them down. . .er. . .Well, there's space in the kitchen right now." She walked backwards into the kitchen with the flowers following, and helped him lower the heavy basket onto the floor. He wasn't so short when he wasn't carrying half his body weight in flora, and he had only a few loose petals stuck on his suit jacket. Also, he was very pale, almost luminous, and without obvious body machinery--but somehow, subtly, uninviting. "So," she began, "where did you get all these flowers? And how'd they survive the trip here?"

 

"Oh, they're a special hybrid, for low-oxygen environments," he explained. "I was going to get a regular-size bouquet, but these were ordered and not picked up, so my--"

 

Ludmila waited, and waited, and finally suggested, "Daughter? . . .Mother? . . .Boyfriend?. . ."

 

". . .boyfriend. . ."

 

Ludmila filled the new silence by thinking of how, exactly, she was going to get Michelle back for this. "So are you just dabbling, cheating on your myn, or. . ." she trailed off, ". . .Here to pass on your genes?"

[Quincunx]

"No spying! A great cook keeps his secrets," Zachariah proclaimed, and gently shooed Ludmila out of the kitchen. She stood by the doorway, sniffing the air. It didn't smell like any food she could identify, definitely not what she'd been planning to serve. However, once Zachariah had seen what was playing on the television, he'd bolted into the kitchen, and neither "Television dammit OFF, NOW!" nor presentation of an array of takeout menus had coaxed him out of there. Ludmila flipped her hands in exasperation, then retreated to her bedroom to change into something fancier. When she opened the door, he was waiting at the table, with dinner piled onto the plates and a large pan with more food sitting in the middle of the table.

 

"So," she said, sitting down, "what are these?"

 

"Pirogi," he said, looking puzzled.

 

Ludmila chased one of the little pastries with a fork until it stopped slipping around the plate, stabbed it, and sampled it. "I don't think I've ever eaten these before."

 

"The person who gave me your number, she said you were a pure strain. . ."

 

"I am, but what's that got to--" She stopped and looked up from trying to stab another pirogi. "You're pure strain too? Eastunion group? I'm a. . .a. . .Tzim-something-or-another, could get my driver's license if you're interested in spelling."

 

Zachariah brightened. "I was born and raised in the old way. You weren't? A shame, a shame." Automatically he refilled his plate and hers, relaxed his posture, and let the hint of a different language show in his voice. "We're Kozyols, married to more Kozyols. We used to live in the north and you in the south, but now we're all living in the same Purity district. Better to save a dollar than buy a gun, we say." Ludmila's expression faltered at every repetition of 'we'. "Truly there must be no time like now, that one of us is thinking of mending fences with your people. Don't you know that?"

 

"Nah. It was just a coincedence, my parents were both semi-eligible, and I got the right genes," Ludmila replied, "but I didn't use it for anything other than the free tuition. Single people don't qualify for lowered rents."

 

"That would be perfect," he said wistfully. "With the child, you would, and you could move in with my family. They would be overjoyed if I finally brought a woman to them," he smiled as Ludmila shook her head violently, "no, no, I would be gone just like you wanted. My boyfriend and I are going to move into the Living History Reservations, but we needed to show some contribution to the city before entering the system, and a pure strain child counts as a contribution for two people. According to the city's records, and what you can tell my family, I'll have died from a late-night burglary that became violent. They'll weep and mourn. . .I will miss them very much. . .but they will provide for our child, no matter what. Isn't that well-planned? Your friend, she is very wise."

 

Ludmila was struck dumb, fork still in hand. She stared helplessly at Zacariah, calmly eating his pirogi.

[Quincunx]

Behind the Walk-Ins booth at the rejuvenation clinic, Michelle twirled her index fingers, the right one spinning a needle-pointed sample gun, the left searching through the database encoded into her headset. She found a likely number and dialed. "Mister Luc?" she chirped into the mouthpiece, as his pre- and post-rejuvenation pictures flashed onto her retinas, along with his last dates of treatment. "Sugar, you still don't look a day over thirty. . .five. Yes, we guarantee thirty." Michelle flashed a cat's grin, amplified by Maori tattoos, and dropped the sample gun's handle into her hand with a flick of her wrist, needle pointed at the ceiling. "Yes, there'll be no studio fee if you make a walk-in appointment. Yes, there will be equipment fees, we do sterilize. See you in half an hour, honey." She shut off the connection, traded the sample gun for an old-fashioned ink pen, and filled in amounts on the paper receipt Mister Luc would receive before tuning back into the headset and crossing off another free checkup on his account. The pen twirled as she combed the database for another aging technophobe.

 

"'Chelle! Snap out of it!"

 

Michelle froze and the pen spun out of her fingers. "'Milla! What are you doing here? Do you know how long it's been!?!" She started to reach downwards but Ludmila darted after it herself.

 

"Three months of pure hell," Ludmila snarled, tapping the pen on the booth to emphasize her words. "I've never been so sick in my life, morning, noon, and night! Look at me! I've gone bulimic," she moaned. "And even if I have lost any weight from being half-starved, it's gone right back onto my--"

 

"I told you not to come crying to me when it didn't work out," Michelle purred. "How about you come back when it's all over, and I can see the baby?"

 

Ludmila reached inside her purse, slammed a small screw-top glass jar down on the booth in front of Michelle, and snapped, "It IS over."

 

Michelle quailed. She stared at the malformed little lump floating inside the jar, then raised her eyes to Ludmila. "My god. . .You did this. . ." Ludmila nodded twice, calmly. "How could you?!?! 'Milla. . .you can't do this. You can't even do this to a pet. You don't just kill them if they get in the way! And you certainly don't go around showing. . .that! . . .off to all your friends--"

 

"Not all of my friends," Ludmila interrupted. "Just the ones who can fix things. . .You love fixing things, 'Chelle. You fixed me up with a male who'd never sleep with me if I hadn't gotten him drunk. You fixed it so that I'd have a pure strain child and never checked the Rh factor--I told you about being sick? It wasn't morning sickness. Right now, 'Chelle, you're going to fix it so that this little thing, which does not deserve to die, as you pointed out, goes into the rejuvenation clinic and comes out in the pristine body of an eighteen-year-old," Ludmila raised her voice and bludgeoned down Michelle's protests, "and if you do not, I can take some of those receipts you have lying around, and add them to the handful I grabbed back when we were dating, and prove to the clinic how much you've been stealing. The fetus is large enough to give a usable sample. Start sampling."

[Quincunx]

Michelle reached out with a shaking hand and picked up the jar between thumb and forefinger. "Oh, sweetheart. . ." she quavered, looking more closely at the fetus, "your mother's horrible, she's a bully and a brute, but I can't sit here and let you die. . . ." She reached for the sample gun, holding it awkwardly while leaving her forefinger free, and strained to turn the screw cap before noticing the window of impermeable membrane set into the cap. Instead, she braced the jar against the arm cushion which customers usually occupied and touched the sample gun's muzzle to the cap. The needle sprung out from the muzzle, piercing through the membrane and top of the fetus, then retracted as the sample gun beeped once. Michelle focused on the 'New Client' form which the headset now projected, unconsciously spinning the sample gun again.

 

First Name:

 

"Oh, no, 'Milla. You have to name your baby yourself," Michelle frowned, and left that space blank.

 

Last Name:

 

Michelle made several attempts to spell Ludmila's last name, but eventually just recorded "Tzim" and vowed to call Ludmila promptly after this went to the lab.

 

Gender:

 

She lifted the jar and peered carefully between the spaghetti-thin legs before choosing "Fem".

 

Target Age:

 

'Eighteen', and after a moment's scowling consideration, 'Permanent'. She never wanted to see this girl again.

 

Additional Notes:

 

Michelle added 'Pure strain', hesistantly, and hovered over the 'Submit' choice for five minutes, looking past the display to the little jar sitting in the arm cushion. All at once she snatched up the jar before deleting the entire form in a temper. "No, 'Milla!" she cried aloud. "You're not getting away with this! Not that easy!" She thumbed the sample gun in the back, but reloaded the sample as soon as it fell out. "If you'll put me through this, then it's going to be my baby too." Laying her own arm flat in the cushion, she braced herself and touched the sample gun to her skin. The needle sprang out and in, Michelle clutched the jar in pain, the gun beeped. 'New Client' displayed again, and she rapidly refilled and verified the form. From the back of the sample gun, the sample ejected, this time barcoded. Michelle set it into the vacuum tube leading to the laboratory and started scanning the database for redial. Ludmila had called three months ago--

 

"You there! Sample girl!"

 

Master Luc thrust his arm into the booth, startling Michelle. She stopped the database, snapped into public mode, and settled his arm into the cushion, smiling, "I'm sorry, honey, you know how easy us young people get distracted." The vacuum tube sent up a new sampling container from the laboratory and sucked away the used one already sitting there.

[The Portrait of Zool]

Post-modernist fem.

 

Publish this.

[Peredhil]

I held off reading this until you'd posted a few times, because I know your writing by now - it's never enough and I want more.

 

Zool's right. Publish this as a short story in a magazine, if nothing else.

 

Or you could get someone like Ju-Lian of ROMB (Rules of Make Believe) to illustrate it. Her manga style would do this justice I think.

 

-P

[Quincunx]

In the darkened laboratory of the rejuvenation clinic, past the legal consultation rooms and the superficial surgery robots, Rajiv picked the barcoded sample out of the vacuum tube. He shook his hair out of his eyes before pushing the sample through a low-intensity laser curtain set into the lid of a waist-high glass tank. Inside the tank, the sample container sank into an opaque slurry of nutrient fluid and nanobots, and opened at an unnoticed signal while Rajiv set the timer atop the incubator. He walked over to the sink, chose a pop-top can of preserved sweet potato curry from the cabinet above it, pried off the top, and added water before returning to the incubator and setting it on the lid to cook. Inside the slurry, the nanobots generated heat scurrying among the particles of themselves and nutrients, dragging molecules to and fro as they rebuilt a single body from the mingled DNA. Rajiv had time to eat the curry and think about defrosting a dessert he'd hidden in the sample freezer before the timer beeped.

 

He twisted two clamps set onto the edges of the lid as a new, quicker countdown appeared on the timer and lifted the lid out of the irradiation ring in which it was mounted. A pair of feet and one ankle barely showed above the surface of the slurry. Rajiv plunged his hands through the antiseptic layer, grabbed hold of the ankles, and pulled the body out of the tank; the upper legs rose up all at once as they unfolded, then the torso passed into the higher-pressure atmosphere, then shoulders and neck came out together, last the arms and head as slurry poured out of the body's nose and mouth. He lay her facedown on a hospital bed to recover and settled the lid back in place, programming the incubator to reset and putting Mister Luc's sample in the time-release above the laser curtain. The timer beeped again, and Rajiv touched the new body gently on the shoulder. No response.

 

"Hey," he tried, "wake up." Still nothing. He frowned and went back to the cabinet above the sink, shook his hair out of the way and put on his headset. Slowly he picked his way through the menus, finger tapping on the fresh body's shoulder, until he found her incomplete file. "Tzim. . ." he tried again, "hey, fem, are you there? You free on Friday night?" That one never failed to get a reaction from the lady rejuvenates--sometimes it was even yes. Not this time, though. He pushed her onto her side and she stared back at him, alive but unresponsive. After many minutes in the menus, and pausing to drop Mister Luc's sample into the readied incubator, he connected his headset directly with Michelle's for two-way speechless communication. "'Chelle? You busy?"

 

Michelle shut off the music on her headset but still waved her pen in time with it while the clinic's teenaged flunkies picked up Mister Luc's lifeless body by wrists and ankles, and spoke without moving her lips, "I've got a cleanup out here but no customers waiting, what's the matter, honey?"

 

"Tell Recycling to save the body. I got a dud." She snapped her fingers at the flunkies, pointed her pen towards the spare hospital bed, and told her headset to fetch information from Rajiv's headset. The form for Ludmila's child displayed. "She ain't got insurance, right?" Rajiv confirmed, "so go wake her up and make sure there's a lawyer standing by so she don't get any ideas about a refund."

 

She groaned and signaled again to the flunkies, who scooped up the body from the bed and shuffled down the hallway toward the recycling bins. "No. . .You're right, no insurance, we don't have to rejuvenate her again, but she's not going to wake up. Yes, I know that we'll both be in trouble if her family wants to sue--sugar, I know! I'll fix it so nobody sues," Michelle continued, twirling the pen faster than usual. "Just finish the rejuvenation, get her clothed and out here."

 

"Got a problem with that, 'Chelle," Rajiv said. He flicked at his headset and turned on the external microphone. "I'll pick up the robe and show you," he said aloud, and Michelle heard the fresh eighteen-year-old body gasp, then scream and sob like an infant. "She's a total dud. Ain't nothing left to be fixed." He turned off the microphone. "I know you're good, but you can't make nothing out of nothing, and I'm--oof! . . .she kicked me, but I got her dressed--I'm gonna make sure I'm too sick to work for at least a week. And if she kicks me again I will be. Sending her out to you." Rajiv shut off the connection.

 

Michelle disregarded the headset and buried her face in her hands. "'Milla. . ." she sighed to herself, "if it takes me the rest of my life, I am going to get you back for this. . ."

 

--end chapter one--

Edited January 28, 2005 by Quincunx

[Sweetcherrie]

http://www.themightypen.net/public/style_emoticons/default/ohmy.gif Please don't stop.....I need the rest of this....