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6. ST. LUDMILLA
Gabriel told Matthew Nowiki that I had been so desperate to prove I was still normal, I’d begged him to have sex with me. Actually begged. Like a prostitute offering her “wares” to a policeman to avoid arrest. Gabriel had been very clear with Matthew that my parts “didn’t feel right”—the implication being that something down there had been irregular, that Gabriel and his manhood had had a lucky escape.
According to Matthew (as relayed to me by Lilly), Gabriel had wanted to take me home early in the evening, but I hadn’t let him because I’d wanted to lose my “human virginity.” As if I’d been having sex with aliens and werewolves and centipedes for years and was trying to prove that I was still a real girl. “My human virginity.” This phrase captivated everyone. In an objective corner of my mind, it even captivated me, and I recognized how well it summed up my differences, my desperation, and how I’d abused Gabriel. That the latter two were entirely fabricated didn’t matter. And I was weird. Let’s face it. Everyone sensed that something had been off since I’d returned to school.
I didn’t go outside for lunch that week, but when I peeked through a second-floor window at the courtyard below, I could see and hear Lilly and my other friends gossiping with everyone else over the details and whether I was still, technically, a normal human. Maybe I would have done exactly the same thing if it had been someone else they were talking about. Even nice people didn’t want to commit themselves until a general consensus could be reached: Was I a perversion of nature to be shunned, or was I in the category of the meek and thus worthy of protection and sympathy? What if I was both?
So I was standing right behind Gabriel on the street corner outside Go Get ’Em Tiger. There was a tingle all up and down the meshline from the coffee, but this sensation was at war with the hot jitters rushing through me. Gabriel was slurping his coffee, and when he turned his head slightly, I saw his square jaw, his dark eyes beneath his blond hair. So handsome, but painful to look at now. Can’t he feel me standing here boring holes into his back with my eyes?
Four lanes of traffic came at us. In the closest lane was the huge City of LA driverless bus, so wide it almost didn’t fit in one lane.
I was overcome with thirst, which wasn’t real thirst but a side effect of internal imbalance. She wanted it so bad, and I gave it to her so hard, but it was weird down there …
I was so close to Gabriel that none of the other pedestrians could see my hands. They were crowded around, but all looking at the crosswalk light, or at the traffic.
How much of you is real?
I flexed my fingers. There was an irresistible gravity between my palms and his body.
It’s not really like virginity exactly.
So help me God, Jesus, and all the saints, I pushed him. The bus was bearing down on us, the last vehicle through the light, and I shoved him, both hands at his hips, every bit of strength I could muster in the move.
Gabriel had been taking a drink of coffee, off balance on one foot. He flew off the curb. I reached after him, as though trying to grab him back, as though I’d seen him tripping before he even realized it himself and was attempting to save him. Was I really trying to save him? I don’t know. What I do know is that Gabriel flailed wildly, the coffee going everywhere, and I accidentally grabbed one of his arms.
That kept him from dying, because I yanked him back toward me on reflex. The top half of Gabriel’s body was tugged to safety. The bottom half … well, the bus hit him full on. I mean, the bus was programmed to protect human life, including pedestrians, but what the hell was it supposed to do? If it came to an immediate stop, it would endanger everyone inside. So the bus passengers got a moderate jolt, and Gabriel got … all the rest. It was the most disgusting thing I’d ever seen, if you don’t count those few moments I was still conscious, when I saw the windshield break in front of me and the dashboard dislodge and go through my rib cage, taking out the vital organs in its path. I only saw that for a moment or two; I saw the whole Gabriel incident in full consciousness, from beginning to end.
The bus struck him and the sound was of something both firm and wet colliding with something very hard. Maybe like what you’d hear if you stomped on stalks of celery with heavy boots, or if you dropped a half-melted bag of ice from a second-story window onto concrete. He was shattered from the ribsdown. His hand, grasped tenuously in my own, was pulled free, and he was thrown a dozen feet as the bus screeched to an immediate halt.
“Oh my God!” I yelled.
Everyone was yelling some version of that. We rushed in a mass to his limp form lying half in the traffic lane, half on the sidewalk. His eyes were open, and as we all crowded around him, they fluttered closed. Not before he’d seen me, though. There was a moment: his eyes, my eyes, recognition.
More people were looking at me as someone called 911. A siren was already audible only blocks away.
“What happened?” one woman asked me. “You tried to pull him back, I saw you.”
“Did he fall, or did he jump?” someone else demanded urgently.
“I—I don’t know,” I stammered. “I just reached out …”
“You saved him.”
And just like that, I was not the villain of this moment but the hero.
7. GO GET ’EM AGAIN, TIGER
I think my parents suspected.
It was too much of a coincidence, me happening to be on hand at the time Gabriel was hit by a bus. Yet they asked me very little about that afternoon. I gave them the official version of events and we didn’t discuss it further. But as the days passed, I noticed they never mentioned to any of the other parents from school that I had been there, that I had tried to save Gabriel, just as I never mentioned it. The topic was a gray cloud that hovered in the air between us. Days turned into weeks and the cloud dissipated into a thin fog, but it never went away. They had decided, I suppose, that they would rather not know.
Now here I was, months later, with my mother driving me to school in silence. Sometimes we chatted in the car, in the way we had always done, but other times, like this one, there was nothing to say. I leaned against the door, my eyes half closed, and concentrated on my breath, in and out. Since the accident with Gabriel, I had learned to achieve a better state of equilibrium with the meshline. If I kept my body steady, my motions smooth, things felt almost normal—my lymph system, my lungs, my hormones. The doctors had told me I would get there eventually, and I had.
My mother smiled when we pulled up in front of the school. I was her broken girl, put back together now. “Have a good day, Milla.”
The moment I got out of the car, I sensed that something was different. For no clear reason, my heart rate increased. I knew he was there even before I turned around.
Gabriel. He was walking through the front door of the school, surrounded by friends who were welcoming him back. His time in the hospital hadn’t been kept a secret. Rumors had floated back to school weekly: the rift in his family when his father and mother decided to allow the doctors to use every tool at their disposal to save him; his grandmother’s disavowal of his parents and him; the fact that the bus had absolutely demolished his lower intestine, his liver, his pelvis. There was rampant speculation about whether he had a working penis or not. The most up-to-date rumors suggested his man parts were fake, but they still worked—a miracle of squishy biomachinery.
If he saw me, he gave no sign, but it took me an hour to get my body calmed. At lunch, I sat in my normal spot, at the rickety picnic table in the far corner of the courtyard, my back to everyone, alone. Sometimes Lilly and a few others sat with me out of a lingering sense of duty, but mostly they had given up. I’d stopped being friendly.
The newspaper that day carried the story of a hate crime in Boston against a woman who had just returned from the hospital, rebuilt. I scanned the words, then folded them away so only the crossword was showing. I had been chewing my sandwich methodically, staring at the half-finished puzzle, when Gabriel sat down across from me. I couldn’t help sweeping my gaze over his midsection, looking for any sign of what might be underneath his uniform pants. His face was the same, his blond hair a little longer, some light stubble on his chin, his dark eyes still beautiful, if I could ignore the uneasy mix of feelings they provoked in me.
I assumed people in the courtyard were staring at us, because I could hear multiple whispered conversations, but I was turned away, and I ignored them all. Gabriel unwrapped his own lunch and started eating across from me. He wasn’t avoiding my eyes, nor was he seeking them out. He was simply sitting there, an inescapable presence. I continued to chew, the food cardboard in my mouth.
“Why are you sitting here?” I muttered after a while.
He shrugged. Then, looking at me without malice, he said, “I saw you there.” He didn’t need to explain. I knew he meant at the scene of the accident. “And before, in the coffee shop.”
I forced down a bite of sandwich, made myself take a sip of water. For months I’d been living in a state of hopeless isolation with the knowledge of what I’d done. Hearing Gabriel say those words out loud made me feel wretched, guilty, caught.
But also relieved.
His gaze on me was searching. “Did you do it on purpose?” he asked.
He was giving me a chance to lie. But I had already died once in my life. Keeping this secret any longer would kill me again.
I met his eyes and I whispered, “Yes.”
All the parts beyond the meshline felt like jelly, unstable, dissolvable.
“It was … it was the most awful, evil thing,” I said. “And I did it.”
He stared at his burger for a little while. At last, meditatively, he said, “I hated you for months. I lay in the hospital, hating you. But … I did it on purpose too. After the movie, telling people. I wanted to … I don’t know …”
“Keep away from the freak?” I prompted, still in a whisper.
“Yeah.”
“Make it your story, not mine?”
“Yeah,” he agreed. “I kept thinking about my grandma finding out. I thought she’d get into the car and she’d just know—what we’d done, and what you are.”
It didn’t offend me to hear him say what you are. Because whatever I was, he was too. He’d been scared that people would learn about me, and he would be tainted by association: the guy who got off on machines; the guy who liked weirdos; the guy who had sex with the artificial girl because he couldn’t get anyone else. So he’d thrown me to the wolves preemptively. And I’d thrown him to the bus.
“I shouldn’t have told people,” he said.
“You shouldn’t have told people,” I agreed. “But I shouldn’t … It was …”
“You, like, martyred me for my beliefs,” he murmured, taking a bite of his burger. He licked a gob of ketchup from the corner of his mouth.
“You didn’t die,” I pointed out. “A martyr has to die.”
“Did you want me to die?” he asked. He was looking at me with open curiosity. I imagined him in the hospital, turning over this question in his mind.
I shook my head. Even a moment after I’d pushed him, I’d wanted so badly to take it back. Undo, Undo! If there had been such a button, I would have pushed it over and over, taking back the bus, the theater, my accident, everything.
“If I’d died, then I really would have been a martyr,” he went on, as if the idea pleased him. “Or even a saint. You’d have to light candles to me and memorize my life story, Milla.”
“Hagiography,” I told him. “That’s what you call the life story of a saint.”
“Yeah. I think I knew that,” he said around another mouthful of burger. “You’d have to memorize my hagiography and ask for my help warding off evil and interceding with God on your behalf and finding your lost keys and stuff.”
I smiled at that, and then, setting down my sandwich, I declaimed, “St. Gabriel. A true warrior of faith. Succumbed to temptation and slept with a cyborg, then became one himself.”
He laughed.
And there was nothing more to say about what had happened between us.
“Want my fries?” I asked. “I’m not that hungry.”
“Yeah.” He dumped the fries on his napkin, squeezed ketchup all over them. He ate the fries with an expression I recognized. He knew he liked fries and the taste was good, but they didn’t provide him with quite the same feeling he was used to. “Ugh. They’re like fry-flavored Styrofoam,” he said, his mouth full. “But coffee’s different now, isn’t it? It’s, like, way better.”
My eyebrow quirked up almost lasciviously. Coffee. “It tingles around the edges,” I told him, hearing dreaminess in my own voice, “like the coffee is eating the mesh, digesting it so—”
“—so it blends back into everything else,” he finished for me, in the same rapt tone. “Like the fake parts are starting to become real again.”
Yes. That was exactly what drinking coffee felt like now. It was why I’d been in that coffee shop in the first place.
“Have you had the coffee at Go Get ’Em Tiger since …?” I asked him.
“No. Is it special?”
“It’s like what you were describing,” I told him, “but ten times more.”
“Hm. Maybe we could go there sometime,” he suggested casually.
I snorted at that, sounding less like a barfing dog than usual. Laughs, snorts, coughs—they were all getting better. Was he really asking me out?
“Sure, we could get coffee,” I told him, “but don’t think that I’m going to have sex with a robot.”
It’s a popular myth that the most deadly animal in history is the human, because murder and war and genocide can be laid at the feet of our species. However, the deadliest animal is of course the mosquito.
Fortunately, both species can now be significantly improved.
—Erik Hannes Eklund, Chair of Bioethics and Species Design, Columbia University, in his opening remarks to first-year medical students, 2041
Let’s leap ahead a little more …
PART THREE (#ulink_c46d464d-8a0f-57b2-9416-c353c6cd952c)
Elsie Tadd woke up in a room she did not at first recognize, with a dry throat, a throbbing head, and aches and pains all over. It appeared to be nighttime when she first opened her eyes, but when she sat up on the edge of the cot with the faded patchwork quilt, she noticed a hint of sunlight coming in through the window up by the ceiling.
“Church basement,” she whispered, identifying her location.
This was the spare room of her father’s old church, where he would sometimes sleep if he stayed late to speak with parishioners or to work on a sermon. Elsie knew the room well, though she hadn’t seen it in a long time. Besides the little bed, there was an old desk and a couple shelves full of dusty books—mostly rare versions of the Bible. One wall was covered by a rather beautiful mural that had been painted by Elsie’s own mother. The painting depicted God, in radiant robes, up near the ceiling, and below him was Jesus, healing the ten lepers who had called out to him on the way to Jerusalem. In the Bible, the men had said, “Jesus, Master, have pity on us!” but Elsie had always wondered how they’d been sure it was Jesus and whether they might have started out with something like “Excuse me, young fellow with the beard. Are you that Jesus everyone’s been talking about?” or maybe they’d called out “Jesus!” really quickly and waited to see if he looked around. When she was younger, Elsie had spent hours in this room, drawing and doing her homework, and she’d imagined painting speech bubbles over the lepers’ heads and filling in their words.
“But how am I here?” she whispered, because her presence in the church basement didn’t make much sense. Elsie’s father had been the minister of the Church of the New Pentecost for all of Elsie’s life, until a year and a half ago. Since he’d lost his ministry, no one in their family had set foot in the place. Yet here she was. “Did I dream about Africa?” she murmured.
No. Africa was there, in her mind, though it was like a mirage that lost its shape when you tried to look directly at it. Still, she recalled details—the city of Tshikapa in the Congo, the feel of thick cardboard in her fingers as she held up her protest sign; wet, miserable heat; everyone chanting.
The church was silent around Elsie, but she could hear the distant whoosh-whoosh of auto-drones commuting across the city. Her little brother, Teddy, used to run around this room saying “Whoosh, whoosh, whoosh!” while pretending that he could fly.
Teddy. The image of her curly-haired, seven-year-old brother brought other images along with it: Elsie’s mother sweating in her blouse and skirt, her green eyes alight with energy, leading the chant. Teddy holding a sign as big as himself that read I Am GRATEFUL For The Hole In My Heart!
Elsie swallowed, which reminded her of her sore throat and by association of every other part of her body that hurt. She felt her face. There were no bandages, only several spots that were painful to the touch, including all the skin around her right eye. The eye itself felt uncomfortable and strained, though she could see out of it perfectly well. She pulled up her long skirt to find bandages covering both of her knees, with scabs poking out beneath the edges of the gauze.
Another trickle of recollection came, as if through a haze of painkillers: A fall on a rocky patch of ground. A trampling of feet. Her father on a makeshift stage, singing and lifting his arms. Teddy, singing next to Elsie with all his heart: I was made this way! Oh, I was made this way! And the sensation in Elsie’s chest, the feeling that came over her whenever she thought about Teddy’s birth defect—the hole between the chambers of his heart that made him tired and one day might kill him—the sense that a giant had taken hold of her and was squeezing her ribs.
Maybe there had been painkillers, lots of them.
Elsie let her skirt drop.
“There really was a hospital,” she whispered to God in the mural on the wall. She imagined a speech bubble above His head that said, “No argument here.”
More images crept out of the shadows. There had been a clinic in a small building of decaying plaster on the edge of amuddy town square, a banner announcing Malaria Prevention and Treatment for Birth Defects. A line of Congolese women and children, waiting to be seen. Aid workers watching with irritation as Elsie’s father ushered his followers out of trucks to take places in front of the hospital.
More. A little Congolese girl, with beautiful dark brown skin and a sad face, standing stoically while a doctor gave her an injection beneath her belly button. Elsie knowing what the injection was: Castus Germline, the reason her father had dragged them to the Congo. Save the Third World, even if the First World has been lost. Once inside the body of a young girl, Castus Germline would edit diseases out of all her eggs and edit in protections against malaria and other infections, so that her children’s and grandchildren’s health would be close to perfect. Elsie’s father chanting: Arrogance! Blasphemy! That’s not how God created me! Pointing at the tiny girl and the others waiting in line, enraged that no one in the hospital was listening. Elsie lifting her own protest sign—Why Do You HATE What You Are?—so she didn’t have to see the girl’s face, because that giant had been compressing her chest again.
The giant was squeezing her right now. She rose from the cot, fought off a spell of dizziness, and dashed out of the room into the cold hallway outside. Across the hall stood a little bathroom, which she stepped into in order to examine herself in the mirror over the sink.
Except the mirror was gone. Someone had pulled the whole medicine cabinet from the wall—recently, judging by the freshness of the broken plaster surrounding the large cavity that had been left over the sink. The cabinet was sitting on the floor with the mirror side toward the wall, as if the mirror had been offensive, as if it had been ordered to stand in the corner.
Elsie noticed deep scrapes on her elbows now, and these tugged more memories free: Congolese men pouring into the town square, rocks being thrown, people yelling. An old woman with her head wrapped in a brightly colored scarf, spitting at Elsie’s father, throwing clods of dirt. Elsie’s mother leaping forward.
“Mama,” Elsie whispered. “What happened to us?”
Elsie was afraid she already knew the answer. There had been another hospital, bright lights. People lifting Elsie onto a rolling bed, the endless floating of drugs in her bloodstream …
She reached for the medicine cabinet, to turn it around, but a sound from down the hall stopped her. It was her father’s voice, deep and soothing, and he was saying, “Elsie, are you awake? Come here to me, girl.”
“Daddy?” she asked, sticking her head out of the bathroom. It was slightly frightening to hear him in the stillness of the basement. She’d been hoping for her mother’s voice, she realized. Or Teddy’s.
“Daddy?” she called again. Elsie was fourteen years old. Calling her father Daddy was beginning to sound childish. Yet that was the only way she’d ever been allowed to address him.
He didn’t say anything else to her, but her father’s voice continued on in a murmur. She followed the sound down the hall and found him in the old storage room, among the props for the Christmas pageant and the Easter decorations, the extra folding tables and chairs, and stacks of out-of-date paper hymnals that had long since been replaced by tablets. The Reverend Mr. Tad Tadd, Elsie’s father, was kneeling in one corner of the room, facing a large plaster Jesus that had once hung on the wall in the room where Elsie had woken up, before one of its feet had fallen off. Elsie had thought the Jesus looked more roguish with one foot missing, and perhaps more historically accurate, considering his injuries on the cross; however, most people were not looking for roguishness or perfect realism in their Savior, Elsie’s mother had explained, and so the broken Jesus had been relegated to the storage room.
Her father, turned toward the wall, was murmuring to himself, with his personal Bible open in his hands. Elsie could catch only a word here and there. He might have been saying, “We are all the fish … You tried to tell me … Fish of different sorts, the fish …” Which made no sense, since her father did not care to eat fish of any kind. And yet he sounded as though he were holding up one end of a quite serious conversation with God.
