Counting Heads

1.2

It’s been eight long months since my surprise visit to the cop shop. I’ve had plenty of time to sit and reflect on what’s happened to me, to meditate on my victimhood.

Shortly after my accident, Eleanor and I moved into our new home, a sprawling old farmstead on the outskirts of Bloomington. We have more than enough room here, with barns and stables, a large garden, pear orchard, tennis courts, swimming pool, and a dozen iterants, including Fred, to run everything. It’s really very beautiful, and the whole eighty acres is covered with its own canopy, inside and independent of the Bloomington canopy, a bubble within a bubble. Just the place to raise the child of a Tri-Discipline Governor.

The main house, built of blocks of local limestone, dates back to the last century. It’s the home that Eleanor and I dreamed of owning. But now that we’re here, I spend most of my time in the basement, for sunlight is hard on my seared skin. For that matter, rich food is hard on my gut, I bruise easily inside and out, I can’t sleep a whole night through, all my joints ache for an hour or so when I rise, I have lost my sense of smell, and I’ve become a little hard of hearing. There is a constant taste of brass in my mouth and a dull throbbing in my skull. I go to bed nauseated and wake up nauseated. The doctor says my condition will improve in time as my body adjusts, but that my health is up to me now. No longer do I have resident molecular homeostats to constantly screen, flush, and scrub my cells, nor muscle toners or fat inhibitors. No longer can I go periodically to a juve clinic to correct the cellular errors of aging. Now I can and certainly will grow stouter, slower, weaker, balder—and older. Now the date of my death is decades, not millennia, away. This should come as no great shock, for this was the human condition when I was born. Yet, since my birth, the whole human race, it seems, has boarded a giant ocean liner and set course for the shores of immortality. I, however, have been unceremoniously tossed overboard.

So I spend my days sitting in the dim dampness of my basement corner, growing pasty white and fat (twenty pounds already), and plucking my eyebrows to watch them sizzle like fuses.

I am not pouting, and I am certainly not indulging in self-pity, as Eleanor accuses me. In fact, I am brooding. It’s what artists do, we brood. To other, more active people, we appear selfish, obsessive, even narcissistic, which is why we prefer to brood in private.

But I’m not brooding about art or package design. I have quit that for good. I will never design again. That much I know. I’m not sure what I will do, but at least I know I’ve finished that part of my life. It was good; I enjoyed it. I climbed to the top of my field. But it’s over.

I’m brooding about my victimhood. My intuition tells me that if I understand it, I will know what to do with myself. So I pluck another eyebrow. The tiny bulb of flesh at the root ignites like an old-fashioned match, a tiny point of light in my dark cave, and as though making a wish, I whisper, “Henry.” The hair sizzles along its length until it burns my fingers, and I have to drop it. My fingertips are already charred from this game.

I miss Henry terribly. It’s as though a whole chunk of my mind were missing. I never knew how deeply integrated I had woven him into my psyche, or where my thoughts stopped and his began. When I ask myself a question these days, no one answers.

I wonder why he did it, what made him think he could resist the Homeland Command. Can machine intelligence become cocky? Or did he knowingly sacrifice himself for me? Did he think he could help me escape? Or did he protect our privacy in the only way open to him, by destroying himself? The living archive of my life is gone, but at least it’s not in the loving hands of the HomCom.

My little death has caused other headaches. My marriage ended. My estate went into receivership. My memberships, accounts, and privileges in hundreds of services and organizations were closed. News of my death spread around the globe at the speed of fiber, causing tens of thousands of data banks to toggle my status to “deceased,” a position not designed to toggle back. Autobituaries, complete with footage of my mulching at the Foursquare Café, appeared on all the nets the same day. Databases list both my dates of birth and death. (Interestingly, none of my obits or bios mention the fact that I was seared.) Whenever I use my voice or retinal prints, I set off alarms. El’s attorney general has managed to reinstate most of my major accounts, but my demise is too firmly entrenched in the world’s web to ever be fully corrected. The attorney general has, in fact, offered me a routine for my new valet system to pursue these corrections on a continuous basis. She, as well as the rest of El’s Cabinet, has volunteered to educate my belt for me as soon as I install a personality bud in it. It will need a bud if I ever intend to leave the security of my crypt. But I’m not ready for a new belt buddy.

I PLUCK ANOTHER eyebrow, and by its tiny light I say, “Ellen.”

We are living in an armed fortress. Eleanor says we can survive any form of attack here: nano, bio, chemical, conventional, or nuclear. She feels completely at ease here. This is where she comes to rest at the end of a long day, to glory in her patch of Earth, to adore her baby, Ellen. Even without the help of Mother’s Medley, Eleanor’s maternal instincts have all kicked in. She is mad with motherhood. Ellen is ever in her thoughts. If she could, El would spend all of her time in the nursery in realbody, but the duties of a junior Tri-D Governor call her away. So she has programmed a realtime holo of Ellen to be visible continuously in the periphery of her vision, a private scene only she can see. No longer do the endless meetings and unavoidable luncheons capture her full attention. No longer is time spent in a tube car flitting from one city to another a total waste. Now she secretly watches the jennys feed the baby, bathe the baby, perambulate the baby around the fish pond. And she is always interfering with the jennys, correcting them, undercutting whatever place they may have won in the baby’s affection. There are four jennys. Without the name badges on their identical uniforms, I wouldn’t be able to tell them apart. They have overlapping twelve-hour shifts, and they hand the baby off like a baton in a relay race.

I seem to have my own retinue, a contingent of four russes: Fred Londenstane, the one who showed up on the day of my little death, and three more. I am not a prisoner here, and their mission is to protect the compound, Governor Starke, and her infant daughter, not to watch over me, but I have noticed that there is always one within striking distance, especially when I go anywhere near the nursery. Which I don’t do very often. Ellen is a beautiful baby, but I have no desire to spend time with her, and the whole house seems to breathe easier when I stay down in my tomb.

Yesterday evening a jenny came down to announce dinner. I threw on some clothes and joined El in the solarium off the kitchen where lately she prefers to take her meals. Outside the window wall, heavy snowflakes fell silently in the blue-gray dusk. El was watching Ellen explore a new toy on the carpet. When El turned to me, her face was radiant, but I had no radiance to return. Nevertheless, she took my hand and drew me to sit next to her.

“Here’s Daddy,” she cooed, and Ellen warbled a happy greeting. I knew what was expected of me. I was supposed to adore the baby, gaze upon her plenitude, and thus be filled with grace. I tried. I tried because I truly want everything to work out, because I love Eleanor and wish to be her partner in parenthood. So I watched Ellen and meditated on the marvel and mystery of life. El and I are no longer at the tail end of the long chain of humanity—I told myself—flapping in the cold winds of evolution. Now we are grounded. We have forged a new link. We are no longer grasped only by the past, but we grasp the future. We have created the future in flesh.

When El turned again to me, I was ready, or thought I was. But she saw right through me to my stubborn core of indifference. Nevertheless, she encouraged me, prompted me with, “Isn’t she beautiful?”

“Oh, yes,” I replied.

“And smart.”

“The smartest.”

Later that evening, when the brilliant monstrance of her new religion was safely tucked away in the nursery under the sleepless eyes of the night jennys, Eleanor rebuked me. “Are you so selfish that you can’t accept Ellen as your daughter? Does it have to be your seed or nothing? I know what happened to you was shitty and unfair, and I’m sorry. I really am. I wish to hell they got me instead of you. Maybe the next one will be more accurate. Will that make you happy?”

We both knew she was mistaken. The assault was never aimed at her. If Ellen was the carrot, then I was the stick. The conditions of her coronation could not be clearer—step out of line and risk everything. My pathetic presence would only serve as a constant reminder of this fact.

“No, El, don’t talk like that,” I said. “I can’t help it. Give me time.”

That night Eleanor invited herself to my bed. We used to have an exceptional sex life. Sex for us was a form of play, competition, and truth-telling. It used to be fun. Now it’s a job. The shaft of my penis is bruised by the normal bend and torque of even moderate lovemaking. My urethra is raw from jets of scalding semen when I come. Of course I use special condoms and lubricants, without which I would blister both El’s and my own private parts. Still, it’s just not comfortable for either of us. El tries to downplay it by saying things like, “You’re hot, baby,” but she fools no one.

We made love that night, but I pulled out before I came. El tried to draw me back, but I refused. She took my sheathed penis in her hands, but I told her not to bother. I told her it just wasn’t worth the misery anymore.

In the middle of the night, when I rose to return to my dungeon, Eleanor stirred from sleep and hissed, “Hate me if you must, Sam, but please don’t blame the baby.”

I ASK MY new belt how many eyebrow hairs an average person of my race, sex, and age has. The belt can access numerous encyclopedias to do simple research like this. “Five hundred fifty in each eyebrow,” it replies in its neuter voice. That’s a sum of eleven hundred, plenty of fuel to light my investigation. I pluck another and say, “Blame.”

For someone must be blamed. Someone must be held accountable. Someone must pay. But who?

Eleanor blames her “Unknown Benefactor,” the person or persons behind her sudden ascendancy. She’s launched a private project with Cabinet they call Target UKB. Basically, the project is a mosaic analysis to identify the telltale signature of this mysterious entity. It emulates the massive data-sifting techniques long practiced by the HomCom, but her subjects are the ruling elite, not terrorists or protesters. She’s spent a fortune on liters of new neuro-chemical paste to boost Cabinet’s already gargantuan mentality. (Henry would never have stood a chance against Cabinet now.)

From the small amount of information that Eleanor has shared with me, I gather that Target UKB works by recording and parsing the moment-by-moment activities of the five thousand most prominent people on the planet. Being familiar with the degree of security we endure around here at the manse, and assuming that other affluent godlings maintain comparable privacy, such surveillance can’t be easy. Nevertheless, El assures me that when her model is in place, she’ll be able to trace the chain in intention of any event back to its source. She says she should have done something like this years ago. In my opinion, it’s paranoia writ large.

Eleanor blames her UKB. But who do I blame?

That’s a good question, one for which I don’t yet have an answer. If there is a UKB pulling El’s strings, at least it gave us fair warning. We walked into this high stakes game of empire with our eyes open. In the end, in the hallowed tradition of victims everywhere, I suppose I blame myself.

I PLUCK ONE more eyebrow, and as it sizzles, I say, “Fred.”

For this russ, Fred Londenstane, is a complete surprise to me. I had never formed a relationship with a clone before. They are service people, after all. They are interchangeable. They wait on us in stores and restaurants. They clip our hair. They perform the menialities we cannot, or prefer not to assign to machines. How can you tell one joan or jerome from another anyway? And what could you possibly talk about? Nice watering can you have there, kelly. What’s the weather like up there, steve?

But Fred the russ is different. From the start he’s brought me fruit and cakes reputed to fortify tender digestive tracts, sunglasses, soothing skin creams, and a hat with a duckbill visor. He seems genuinely interested in me, even comes down to chat after his shift. I don’t know why he’s so attentive. Perhaps he never recovered from the shock of first meeting me, freshly seared and suffering. Perhaps he recognizes that I’m the one around here most in need of his protection.

When I was ready to try having sex with Eleanor again and I needed some of those special insulated condoms, my new valet couldn’t locate them on any of the shoppers, not even on the medical supply ones, so I asked Fred. He said he knew of a place and would bring me some. He returned the next day with a whole shopping bag full of special pharmaceuticals for the cellular challenged: vitamin supplements, suppositories, plaque-fighting tooth soap, and knee and elbow braces. He brought twenty dozen packages of condoms, and he winked as he set them on the table. He brought more stuff that he discreetly left in the bag.

I reached into the bag. There were bottles of cologne and perfume, sticks of waxy deodorant, air fresheners and odor eaters. “Do I stink?” I said.

“Like a roomful of cat’s piss, myr. No offense.”

I lifted my hand to my nose, but I couldn’t smell anything. If I stank so bad, how could Eleanor have lived with me all those months, eaten with me, slept with me, and never mentioned it once?

There was more in the bag: mouthwash and chewing gum. “My breath stinks too?”

In reply, Fred crossed his eyes and inflated his cheeks.

I thanked him for shopping for me, and especially for his frankness.

“Don’t mention it, myr,” he said. “I’m just glad to see you getting better.”

I wondered if all russes were so compassionate. The other three assigned to the household didn’t seem so. Competent, dutiful, fearless—yes, but compassionate? I didn’t feel comfortable asking Fred about the qualities of his type, so I kept quiet and accepted his kindness with all the aplomb of a drowning man.