The Heart Goes Last (21 page)

Maybe he’d found out something about Positron, something really bad. Dangerous chemicals in the chickens, and everyone was eating them? Surely not, those chickens were organic. But maybe the chickens are part of some terrible experiment, and Stan discovered it and was going to warn everyone. Could that be the reason they wanted him dead? If so, he really was a hero, and she was proud of him.

And what happened to the bodies, really? She’d never asked; she must have known that it would be crossing a line. Is there even a cemetery in Consilience? Or Positron Prison? She’s never seen one.

She wipes her nose on the serviette, a cloth one with a robin embroidered on it in tiny stitches. Aurora reaches across the sunny-nook table, pats her hand. “Never mind,” she says. “It will be all right. Trust me. Now, finish your breakfast, and we’ll go shopping.”

“Shopping?” Charmaine almost shouts. “What in the heck for?”

“The funeral,” says Aurora in the mollifying voice of an adult to a balky child. “It’s tomorrow. You don’t have a single stitch of black in your entire wardrobe.”

“You’ve been going through my closet!” Charmaine says accusingly. “That’s not your right, that closet is my private –”

“It’s my job,” says Aurora more strictly. “To help you get through this. You’ll be the star feature, everyone will be looking at you. It would be disrespectful for you to wear … well, pastel flowers.”

She has a point, thinks Charmaine. “Okay,” she says. “I’m sorry. I’m on edge.”

“It’s understandable,” says Aurora. “Anyone would be, in your place.”

There has never been anyone in my place, Charmaine thinks. My place is just too weird. And as for you, lady, don’t say
understandable
to me, because what you understand is nothing. But she keeps that perception to herself.

After lunch is over, Stan gets the tour. Or Waldo gets the tour. Waldo, Waldo, drill it into your head, he tells himself. He hopes to fuck there’s no other Stan in this unit, because then he might make a slip. Someone would call his real name and his head would snap up, he wouldn’t be able to stop himself.

Budge leads Stan and the rest of the team along a long hallway, blandly painted, blandly tiled. On the walls there are glossy photographs of fruit: a lemon, a pear, an apple. Round white-glass light fixtures. They turn a corner, turn another corner. No one teleported in here would have a clue where he was – what city, what country even. He’d just know he was somewhere in the twenty-first century. All generic materials.

“So, there’s basically six divisions,” Budge is saying, “for the standard economy-class models: Receiving, Assembly, Customization, Quality Control, Wardrobe and Accessories, and Shipping. Past that door you have Receiving, but we won’t bother going through, there’s nothing to see, it’s just guys unloading boxes from the transport trucks.”

“How do the trucks get in?” asks Stan, keeping his voice neutral. “I never saw any big trucks driving through the streets of Consilience.” It’s a scooter town; even cars are a rarity, reserved for Surveillance and the top brass.

“They don’t come through the town,” says Budge casually. “This place is an extension, built onto the back of Positron Prison. The back portway of Receiving opens onto the outside. ’Course, we don’t let any of those truckers come in here. No information exchange, that’s the policy– no gawkers, no leakers. As far as they know they’re delivering plumbing fixtures.”

Now that’s interesting, Stan thinks. An outside portal. How can he wangle a job in Receiving without appearing overly eager about it?

“Plumbing fixtures,” he says with a chortle. “That’s good.” Budge grins happily.

“The boxes have only the parts,” says Kevin. “Made in China like everything else, but it doesn’t pay to assemble them over there and ship the bots here. Not enough quality control.”

“Plus there would be breakage,” says Gary. “Too much breakage.”

“So they come in units,” says Budge. “Arms, legs, torsos, basically the exoskeleton. Standard heads, though we do the customizing and skinning here. There’s a lot of special orders. Some of the end users are very specific in their requirements.”

“Fetishists,” says Kevin.

“Stalkers,” says Tyler. “They’ll get one made with the face of someone they’re hot for but can’t have, such as rock stars, or cheerleaders, or maybe their high school English teacher.”

“It can get sleazy,” says Budge. “We get some demand for female relatives. We even had a great-aunt once.”

“That was a gross-out,” says Kevin.

“Hey. Everyone’s different,” says Derek.

“But some are more different than others,” says Budge, and they all laugh.

“The info storage chips are already installed, and the voice elements, but we have to 3-D-print some of the neural connections,” says Gary. “On the custom jobs.”

“We put the skin on last,” says Tyler. “That’s a skilled operation. The skin’s got sensors, it can actually
feel
you. With the more expensive line, it can get goose bumps. When you’re in contact, up close and personal, it’s really hard to tell the difference.”

“But after you’ve seen one of them being assembled, you can’t shake the knowledge,” says Budge. “You know it’s just an
it
.”

“They’ve done double-blind tests though,” says Gary. “Real ones and these. These had a 77 percent success rate.”

“They’re aiming for 100 percent,” says Kevin, “but no way they’ll ever get there.”

“No way,” Budge echoes. “You can’t program the little things. The unexpecteds.”

“Though there’s these settings on them,” says Kevin. “You can push Random and get a surprise.”

“Yeah,” says Tyler. “She says, ‘Not tonight, I’ve got a headache.’ ”

“That’s no surprise,” says Kevin, and they laugh some more.

I need to come up with some jokes, Stan thinks. But not yet: they haven’t accepted me completely. They’re still reserving judgment.

“Up ahead we’re coming to Assembly,” says Budge. “Have a look, but we don’t need to go in. Remember car factories?”

“Who remembers those?” says Tyler.

“Okay, movies of them. This guy does nothing but this, that guy does nothing but that. Specialized. Boring as hell. No latitude for error.”

“Get it wrong and they can have a spasm,” says Kevin. “Flail around. That’s not pretty.”

“Bits can come off,” says Gary. “I mean bits of you.”

“One guy got clamped. He was stuck like a trapped rat for fifteen minutes, only it was more like a gyroscope. It took an electrician and three digital techs to unplug him, and after that his dick was shaped like a corkscrew for the rest of his life,” says Derek.

They laugh again, looking at Stan to see if he believes this. “You’re a sicko,” Tyler says to Derek affectionately.

“Think of the upside,” says Kevin. “No condoms. No pregnancy woes.”

“No animal was harmed in the testing of this product,” says Derek.

“Except Gary,” says Kevin. More chuckles.

“This is it, in here,” says Budge. “Assembly.” He uses his card key to open a double door, with a notice on it warning against dust and digital devices, these last to be turned firmly off, because, as the sign says, delicate electronic circuits are being activated.

Assembly lines are what Stan would expect to see, and that’s what he does see. Most of the work is being done by robotics – attaching one thing to another, robots making other robots, just like the assembly at Dimple Robotics – though there’s a scattering of human overseers. There are moving belts conveying thighs, hip joints, torsos; there are trays of hands, left and right. These body parts are man-made, they’re not corpse portions, but nonetheless the effect is ghoulish. Squint and you’re in a morgue, he thinks; or else a slaughterhouse. Except there’s no blood.

“How flammable are they?” he asks Budge. “The bodies.” It’s Budge who seems to have the authority. And the card key for the doors: Stan must take note of which pocket he keeps it in. He wonders what other doors that key can open.

“Flammable?” says Budge.

“Supposing a guy is smoking,” says Stan. “Like, a customer.”

“Oh, I don’t think they’ll be smoking,” says Tyler dismissively.

“Can’t walk and chew gum at the same time,” says Derek.

“Some guys like a smoke, though,” says Stan. “Afterwards. And maybe some talking, just a few words, like ‘That was awesome.’ ”

“At the Platinum level it’s an option,” says Tyler. “The lower-tech models can’t make small talk.”

“Fancy language costs extra,” says Gary.

“There’s a plus though, they can’t pester you, like, did you lock the door, did you take the garbage out, all of that,” says Budge.

A married man then, Stan thinks. He’s overcome with a wave of nostalgia: it smells like orange juice, like fireplaces, like leather slippers. Charmaine once said things like that to him, in bed
. Did you lock the door, honey?
He warms toward Budge: he, too, must once have led a normal life.

Black flatters me, thinks Charmaine, checking herself in the powder room mirror. Aurora had known where to take her shopping, and though black has never been her colour, Charmaine’s not negative about the results. The black suit, the black hat, the blond hair – it’s like a white chocolate truffle with dark chocolate truffles all around it; or like, who was that? Marilyn Monroe in
Niagara
, in the scene right before she gets strangled, with the white scarf she should never have worn, because women in danger of being strangled should avoid any fashion accessories that tie around the neck. They’ve shown that movie a bunch of times on Positron TV and Charmaine watched it every time. Sex in the movies used to be so much more sexy than it became after you could actually have sex in the movies. It was languorous and melting, with sighing and surrender and half-closed eyes. Not just a lot of bouncy athletics.

Of course, she thinks, Marilyn’s mouth was fuller than her own, and you could use very thick red lipstick then. Does she herself have that innocence, that surprised look?
Oh! Goodness me!
Big doll eyes. Not that Marilyn’s innocence was much in evidence in
Niagara
. But it was, later.

She widens her eyes in the mirror, makes an
O
with her mouth. Her own eyes are still a little puffy despite the cold teabags, with faint dark semicircles under them. Alluring, or not? That would depend on a man’s taste: whether he’s aroused by fragility with a hint of smouldering underneath, or perhaps by a hint of a punch in the eye. Stan wouldn’t have liked the puffy-eyed look. Stan would have said, What’s wrong with you? Fall out of bed? Or else, Aw, honey, what you need is a big hug. Depending on which phase of Stan she’s remembering.
Oh, Stan. …

Stop that, she tells herself. Stan’s gone.

Am I shallow? she asks the mirror. Yes, I am shallow. The sun shines on the ripples where it’s shallow. Deep is too dark.

She considers the black hat, a small round hat with a little brim – sort of like a schoolgirl hat – that Aurora said was just right for a funeral. But does he have to wear a hat? Everyone did, once; then hats disappeared. But now, inside Consilience, they’re appearing again. Everything in this town is retro, which accounts for the large supply of black vintage items in Accessories. The past is so much safer, because whatever’s in it has already happened. It can’t be changed; so, in a way, there’s nothing to dread.

She once felt so secure inside this house. Her and Stan’s house, their warm cocoon, their shelter from the dangerous outside world, nestled inside a larger cocoon. First the town wall, like an outside shell; then, Consilience, like the soft white part of an egg. And inside Consilience, Positron Prison: the core, the heart, the meaning of it all.

And somewhere inside Positron, right now, is Stan. Or what used to be Stan. If only she hadn’t … what if, instead … Maybe she herself is a kind of fatal woman, like Marilyn in
Niagara,
with invisible spider webs coming out of her, entangling men because they can’t help it, and the spider can’t help it either because it’s her nature. Maybe she’s doomed to be sticky, like chewing gum, or hair gel, or …

Because look what she’s done without meaning to. She’s caused Stan’s funeral, and now she has to go to it. But she can’t reveal her guilt at the funeral, she can’t cry and say,
It’s all my fault.
She’ll have to behave with dignity, because this funeral will be very solemn and pious and reverential, it will be the funeral of a hero. What the whole town believes, because it was on the TV, is that there was an electrical fire in the chicken facility, and Stan died to save his fellow workers.

And to save the chickens, of course. And he did save them: no chicken had perished. That fact has been emphasized in the news story as making Stan even more truly heroic than if he’d saved just people. Or maybe not more heroic, only more touching. Sort of like saving babies: chickens were little and helpless too, though not so cute. Nothing with a beak can be truly cute, in Charmaine’s opinion. But why is she even thinking about Stan saving chickens? That fire was made up, it had not in any way happened.

Stop dithering, Charmaine, she tells herself. Get back to reality, whatever that turns out to be.

The doorbell’s chiming. She teeters down the hall on her black high heels: it’s Aurora, who slipped out earlier to change into her funeral outfit. Behind her, waiting by the curb, is a long dark car.

Aurora’s wearing a Chanel-style suit, black with white piping: way too boxy for her figure, which is boxy anyway. Dump the shoulder pads, Charmaine finds herself thinking. The hat is a sort of modified shovel design that does nothing for her, but no hat could. It’s like her face is stretched like a rubber bathing cap over a large bald head. Her eyes are way too far to the sides.

When Charmaine was little and
recession
was a dirty word and not a fact of life, Grandma Win told her that no one should be called ugly. Instead, such people should be called unfortunate. It was just good manners. But years later, when Charmaine was older, Grandma Win also told her that good manners were for those who could afford them, and if an elbow in the ribs for the person trying to barge in front of you was what it took, then an elbow in the ribs was the tool you should use.