Start the Clock
by Benjamin Rosenbaum
The real estate agent for Pirateland was old. Nasty old. It's harder to tell with Geezers, but she looked to be somewhere in her Thirties. They don't have our suppleness of skin, but with the right oils and powders they can avoid most of the wrinkles. This one hadn't taken much care. There were furrows around her eyes and eyebrows.
She had that Mommystyle thing going on: blue housedress, frilly apron, Betty Crocker white gloves. If you're going to be running around this part of Montana sporting those gigantic, wobbly breasts and hips, I guess it's a necessary form of obeisance.
She said something to someone in the back of her van, then hurried up the walk toward us. "It's a lovely place," she called. "And a very nice area."
"Look, Suze, it's your mom," Tommy whispered in my ear. His breath tickled. I pushed him.
It was deluxe, I'll give her that. We were standing under the fity-foot prow of the galleon we'd come to see. All around us a flotilla of men-of-war, sloops, frigates, and cutters rode the manicured lawns and steel-gray streets. Most of the properties were closed up, the lawns pristine. Only a few looked inhabited -- lawns bestrewn with gadgets, excavations begun with small bulldozers and abandoned, Pack or Swarm or Family flags flying from the mainmasts. Water cannons menacing passerby.
I put my hands in my pants pockets and picked at the lint. "So this is pretty much all Nines?"
The Thirtysomething Lady frowned. "Ma'am, I'm afraid the Anti-Redlining Act of 2035 --"
"Uh-huh, race, gender, aetial age, chronological age, stimulative preference or national origin -- I know the law. But who else wants to live in Pirateland, right?"
Thirtysomething Lady opened her mouth and didn't say anything.
"Or can afford it," Shiri called. She had gone straight for the ropeladder and was halfway up. Her cherry-red sneakers felt over the side for the gunnel running around the house. Thirtysomething Lady's hands twitched in a kind of helpless half-grasping motion. Geezers always do that when we climb.
"Are you poor?" Tommy asked. "Is that why you dress like that?"
"Quit taunting the Lady," Max growled. Max is our token Eight, and he takes aetial discrimination more seriously than the rest of us. Plus, he's just nicer than we are. I don't think that's aetial; I think that's just Max. He's also Pumped Up: he's only four feet tall, but he has bioengineered muscles like grapefruit. He has to eat a pound or two of medicated soysteak a day just to keep his bulk on.
Thirtysomething Lady put her hand up to her eyes and blinked ferociously, as if she were going to cry. Now that would be something! They almost never cry. We'd hardly been mean to her at all. I felt sorry for her, so I walked over and put my hand in hers. She flinched and pulled her hand away. So much for cross-aetial understanding and forgiveness.
"Let's just look at the house," I said, putting my hands in my pockets.
Her fingers twitched out a passkey mudra and the galleon lowered a boarding plank. Nice touch.
Frankly, we were excited. This move was what our Pack needed -- the four of us, at least, were sure of it. We were all tired of living in the ghetto -- we were in three twentieth-century townhouses in Billings, in an "age-mixed" area full of marauding Thirteens and Fourteens and Fifteens. Talk about a people damned by CDAS -- when the virus hit them, it had stuck their pituitaries and thyroids like throttles jammed open. It wasn't just the giantism and health problems caused by a thirty-year overdose on growth hormones, testosterone, estrogen, and androgen. They suffered more from their social problems -- criminality, violence, orgies, jealousy -- and their endless self-pity.
Okay, Max liked them. And most of the rest of us had been at least entertained by living in the ghetto. At birthday parties, we could always shock the other Packs with our address. But that was when all eight of us were there, before Katrina and Ogbu went south. With eight of us, we'd felt like a full Pack -- invincible, strong enough to laugh at anyone.
I followed the others into the galleon's foyer. Video game consoles on the walls, swimming pool under a retractable transparent superceramic floor. The ceiling --- or upper deck, I guess -- was thirty feet up, accessible by ropeladders and swingropes. A parrot fluttered onto a roost -- it looked real, but probably wasn't. I walked through a couple of bulkheads. Lots of sleeping nooks; lockers, shelves; workstations, both flatscreen and retinal-projection. I logged onto one as guest. Plenty of bandwidth. That's good for me. I may dress like a male twentieth-century stockbroker, double-breasted suit and suspenders, but I'm actually a found footage editor. (Not a lot of Nines are artists -- our obsessive problemsolving and intense competitiveness makes us good market speculators, gamblers, programmers, and biotechs; that's where we've made our money and our reputation. Not many of us have the patience or interest for art.)
I logged out. Max had stripped and dived into the pool -- or maybe it was meant as a giant bathtub. Tommy and Shiri were bouncing on the trampoline, making smart-aleck remarks. The real estate agent had given up on getting anyone to listen to her pitch. She was sitting in a floppy gel chair, massaging the sole of one foot with her hands. I walked into the kitchen. Huge table, lots of chairs and sitballs, enormous programmable foodcenter.
I walked out, back to the Lady. "No stove."
I ran one hand down a suspender. "I cook," I said.
I felt my jaw and shoulders tense -- I'm sick of being told Nines don't cook -- but then I saw her eyes. They were sparkling with delight. Indulgent delight. It reminded me of my own mother, oohing and aahing over brick-hard cookies I'd baked her one winter morning in the slums of Maryland, back when my aetial age was still tied to Nature's clock. My mother holding up the wedding dress she'd planned to give me away in, its lacy waist brushing my chin. One evening in college, when I'd looked up at the dinner table, halfway through a sentence -- I'd been telling her about The Hat On The Cat, my distributed documentary (a firebrand polemic for Under-Five Emancipation; how cybernetics would liberate the Toddlers from lives of dependence) -- and saw in her eyes how long ago she'd stopped listening. Saw that I wasn't Nine to her, but nine. Saw that she wasn't looking at me, but through me, a long way off -- towards another now, another me: a Woman. Big globes of fatty breasts dangling from that other-me's chest; tall as a doorway, man-crazy, marriageable; a great sexualized monster like herself, a walking womb, a proto-Mommy. She was waiting for that Susan, Woman-Susan, who would never show up.
"I cook," I said, looking away from the Lady's eyes. Putting my hands in my pants pockets. I could have used a hug, but Max was underwater and Tommy and Shiri were trying to knock each other off the trampoline. I went outside.
"We could bring in a stove module," the Lady called.
Outside, a pigeon was poking through the lawn. It was mangy and nervous enough to be real. I stood for a while watching it, then my earring buzzed. I made the Accept mudra.
"Why are you asking, Travis? Who do you think is wearing my earring?"
"She's not picking up. Her locator's off. I can't find her anywhere." When Travis was nervous, his voice squeaked. Now he sounded like a mouse caught in a trap.
I looked at the active tatoo readout on my left palm. Travis was home. I made the mudra for Abby. No location listed. "Stay there, Travis. We're on our way."
I ran up the plank. Max was dressed again, rubbing his dreadlocks with a towel from the poolside toweltree. Tommy and Shiri were sitting at a table with the Real Estate Lady, looking over paperwork in the tabletop display.
"We've got to go. A personal emergency has come up," I said. Max was at my side instantly.
"Listen, we want this place," Shiri said.
"Shiri, we all have to talk about it," I said.
"What's to talk about?" Tommy said. "It's awesome."
"This is the first place we've looked at," I said.
The Real Estate Lady was watching us with a guarded expression. I didn't want to say that Abby was missing. Not in front of her. Not in front of that can-you-really-be-trusted-to-look-after-yourselves-all-on-your-own-without-any-grownups attitude that came off her like a stink. I took my hands out of my pockets and balled them into fists. "You're being totally stupid!" I said.
"What's the emergency?" Max said quietly.
"I know what Travis and Abby would say," Tommy said. "They totally want a place like this. Let's just get it and we'll have the rest of the day free."
"We can go windgliding," Shiri said.
"Travis and Abby didn't even agree to getting a house yet, never mind this house," I said. I felt Max's hand on my shoulder.
"That's because they haven't seen it," Tommy said.
"What's the emergency?" Max said.
"There's probably been a train wreck and Suze has to make sure she's the first ghoul at her flatscreen," Shiri said.
"Screw you," I said and walked out of the house. I was shaking a little with adrenaline. I got in our clowncar and clicked on the engine. Max hurried out the door behind me. I slid over to the passenger seat and he got in to drive.
"We can pick them up later," he said. "Or they can take a cab. What's up?"
I made the Abby mudra and showed him my palm. "Abby's missing. Travis hasn't seen her, and she's not picking up."
Max pulled out into the street. "She left the house this morning early, with that old black-and-white camera you got her. She was going to shoot some pictures."
I flipped open the flatscreen in the passenger-side dash and logged in. "That's no reason for her to turn off her locator. I hope she didn't stay near the house -- a Nine walking around alone in the ghetto, taking photographs -- imagine how that looks."
We hummed and whooshed out of Pirateland, up a ramp onto I-90. "Abby wouldn't be that dumb," Max said. But he didn't sound too sure. Abby's impetuous, and she'd been melancholy lately. "Police?" he asked, after a moment.
I shot him a sharp look. The police are Geezers -- height requirements keep Under Twelves out of their ranks, and the Teens are mostly too uneducated and unruly. I didn't have any strings to pull with them, and neither did Max. "We wait until we have more data," I said. "Now shut up and let me work. Head home."
Most people have the notion that the public footage is this permanent, universal, easily searchable archive of everything that ever happens, clearly shot, from any angle. It's the job of people in my profession to help perpetuate that illusion. Actually, the networks are surprisingly spotty. There are millions of swarmcams wandering around in any major urban area, but they have a high failure and bug rate, and their pictures are grainy and indistinct -- only a lot of imaginative algorithmic reconstruction makes them viewable. There are plenty of larger cameras linked to the net, but often hidden in a byzantine maze of permissions and protocols. And there are billions of motion sensors, audio pickups, locator tags, and data traffic monitors added to the mix, but they're not well correlated with each other. In a few hours on a Sunday morning, one square mile of downtown Billings generates enough data to fill all the computers of the twentieth century, plus all the paper libraries of the centuries before. It's hell to search.
But I'm good. I had enough footage of Abby on file to construct a good bloodhound, and then I spawned a dozen of them and seeded them well. Pretty soon the hits started coming back. Abby had crossed the street in front of our house at 09:06, and turned her locator tag off -- on purpose, I imagined, since there was no error log. She'd stopped for bagels and udon in a deli on Avenue C at 09:22; shot pictures in the park until 09:56. She'd talked to a couple of Fifteens there and taken something from them. I couldn't see what, in the grainy gray swarmcam pictures, but it made the hair on the back of my neck rise.
From 10:03 I lost her; she'd gone up an elevator in a bank and disappeared. There's a network of private walkways and an aerial tram in that part of Billings that are poorly monitored. I had a cold feeling in my gut; that was a great way to lose me, if you were trying to.
I searched all the exits to those walkways and the tramway for Abby, buying a bunch of extra processing power on the exchange to run it faster. Nothing.
Max had entered among the spires and alleys of Billings. Dappled shadows of metal and translucent plastics and ceramics rippled over the clowncar. I looked out at the people walking through the corridors around us, all ages and sizes and colors. An old woman was walking slowly on a slidewalk just above us -- she must have been an aetial Ninety, which made her a hundred and twenty or so. Walking, slowly, under her own steam. You don't see that every day.
I went back to some old footage I had of a birthday party and grabbed a sequence of Abby walking. I built an ergodynamic profile of her and fed that to my bloodhounds.
Bingo. At 10:42, Abby had left the aerial tramway in disguise. Platform shoes, trenchcoat, false breasts and hips and shoulders -- she was impersonating a Fourteen or so. It looked ridiculous, like Halloween. She'd consulted a piece of paper from her pocket.
By 10:54 she was in a bad area. "Head for 30th and Locust," I told Max.
"I don't have anything yet that would warrant their attention. Nothing that proves she was coerced."
"So we need other backup," Max said grimly.
"Yeah." I looked up. "Can you get it?"
"I think so," he said. He made some Call mudras with one hand and started talking. "Hey, Dave, how you doing? Listen, man -- " I tuned him out as he made his calls.
My last shot of Abby was at 11:06. She was being hustled into a doorway by a gargantuan Fifteen. His hand was on her elbow. Biodynamic readouts from a few stray hospital swarmcams confirmed that her pulse was elevated. Should I send this to the police? Would it prove Abby was coerced? But what was she doing with the weird disguise and the sneaking around? Just slumming? Or would I get her in trouble?
"Parkhill and 32nd," I said to Max. My fingers were still and I was just looking at that last picture, Abby and the giant, him pulling her into darkness.
"Can you meet us at Parkhill and 32nd?" Max was saying. "Damn, I know, man -- that's why we need you..."
When we got there, five of Max's friends were waiting. Four were clearly from his gym. Two of them were probably Nines or Tens (one swarthy, one red-haired and freckled) and they were even musclier than Max, their heads perched like small walnuts on their blockbuster bodies. The other two were Pumped Up Teens -- maybe Fifteen or Sixteen. Their blond, slavic-boned faces sat on bodies like overstuffed family room sofas or industrial refrigerators: fingers the size of my forearm, thighs the size of my entire body. I wasn't sure how we were going to get them in the building.
And then there was the fifth -- an Augmented Three. She stood a little apart from the others, her tiny arms at her sides. They were clearly afraid of her. One soft brown eye scanned the clouds, and she had a beatific smile on her face. Her other eye was the glistening jewel of a laserlight connector, and there were other plugs and ports glistening in her brown scalp among her cornrows.
Max turned to me. He looked nervous, like he thought I was going to make fun of him. "That's my sister, Carla."
"Cool," I said quickly. He got out before I could say anything yet stupider, like "how nice that you've stayed close."
I opened my door and froze -- Carla was running toward us. "Max!" she warbled, and flung her arms around his waist, burying her face in his stomach.
"Hi, honey-girl," he said, hugging her back.
I glanced at my palm readout. It had gone blank. So had the flatscreen in the car. It was a safe bet nothing near Carla would be recorded. You could sometimes tell where Augmented Threes and Twos were in the public footage by tracking the blank areas, the little blobs of inexplicable malfunction that followed them around. I once did an experimental documentary on Under-Five Augmentation using that blanked-out footage. It was called Be Careful What You Wish For -- kind of a rueful, years-later followup to The Hat On The Cat.
"Carry me!" Carla said, and Max dutifully swung her tiny body onto his shoulders.
"Carla, this is Suze," Max said.
"I don't like her," Carla announced. Max's face went slack with fear, and my heart lurched. I grabbed the car door so hard my fingernails sank into the frame.
Carla exploded in giggles, then started to hiccup. "Just -- kidding!" She choked out between hiccups. "You guys are so silly!"
I tried to smile. Max turned, slowly, towards the door. It was a formidable steel monstrosity, the kind with a biodynamic access plate governing its security system. Those things are supposed to be off-net, more or less invulnerable to cybernetic hacking. Carla waved at it and it popped open. The four muscleboys crowded their way inside -- eager to get to Abby, and away from Carla -- and the three of us brought up the rear, Carla still perched on Max's shoulders.
The stairway was dark and rank -- it smelled like Teenagers, all their glands and excretions, smeared and sour. Most of the wallglow was dead, and one malfunctioning patch at the top of the stairs was flashing green and red, so that the bodies of the muscleboys ascended the stairs in strobed staccato.
The freckled gymrat was first to the doorway at the top. As he reached for the doorknob, we heard a long moan, and then a series of grunts. Almost snarls. And then, softer, a whimper -- a high, female whimper -- like the sound of someone tortured, someone in despair.
Carla started to cry. "I don't like it!"
"What is it, honeybaby?" Max said, his voice afraid. "What's behind that door?"
"Don't ask her that!" I barked. "Distract her, you idiot!"
"Max, should I make it go away?" Carla wailed. "Should I make them stop, Max?"
"No!" Max and I shouted at the same time.
"Max," I said as pleasantly as I could manage, "why don't you and Carla go play a nice game in the car?"
"But maybe I should --" Max said, looking at me from between Carla's tiny, shaking knees.
"Now!" I barked, and pushed past them.
Panting came from under the door, panting and groans. The muscleboys looked at me nervously. I heard Max's shoes clumping down the stairs behind me, and he started singing "The Itsy-Bitsy Spider."
"In!" I hissed, pointing at the door. The two overmuscled Nines threw their shoulders against it. It strained and buckled, but held. From inside the door came a strangled scream. The two Pumped-Up Teens braced themselves against the wall and each other, bent their knees, and crouched down with their shoulders under the Nine's butts. "Ready -- now!" called the biggest, and all four of them pushed. The door shot open, and the muscleboys tumbled and collapsed through it. I sprinted over their bodies, springing from a buttock to a shoulder to a back to another shoulder, and I was through.
On a tiger-skin throwrug in the midst of a pile of trash, two huge naked Fifteens looked up. The male's skin was a mass of pimples and grease; shaggy hair fell over his shoulders and muscles. The female was pinned under him, her gigantic breasts flopping to either side of her thin ribcage, her knees pinioned around his hips. Between the wiry forests of their public hair, a portion of the male's penis ran like a swollen purple bridge.
"Ewww!" I shouted, as they flopped down, pulling the tigerskin over themselves. "WHERE'S ABBY??"
"Hi Suze," said Abby drily from an overstuffed chair to my left. She wearing a white jumpsuit, and holding a pen and a paper notebook.
"What the hell are you doing?" I shouted.
"I might ask you the same." She motioned to the pile of muscleboys, who were struggling to their feet with dazed expressions.
"Abby! You disappeared!" I was waving my arms around like a Macromuppet. "Locator -- bad area -- disguise -- scary -- aargh!"
"Are you going to follow me around with a small army every time I turn off my locator?"
She sighed and put down her pencil and paper. "I'm really sorry," she called to the Fifteens. "My time was almost up anyway. Um, do you mind if we talk in here for a few minutes?"
"Abby, come on," I said. "They can't just stop in the middle. They have to, you know, finish what they were -- doing. Until it's finished their brains won't work properly."
"Okay," Abby said. "All right, ah -- thanks."
In the stairway, I said, "You couldn't just watch a porn channel?"
"It's not the same," she said. "That's all packaged and commercial. I wanted to interview them before and after. I have to know -- what it's like."
She paused on the stairs, and I stopped too. The muscleboys, muttering, went out onto the street, and we were alone in the flashing green and red light.
"Suze, I'm going to start the clock."
Like she'd poured a bucket of ice water down my spine. "You're what?"
"I'm going to take the treatments." She spoke quickly, as if afraid I'd interrupt her. "They've gotten much better in the past couple of years, there are basically no side effects. They're even making headway with infants. In five years, it looks like most babies won't have any arrestation effects at all, and -- "
Tears had sprung to my eyes. "What are you talking about?" I cried. "Why are you talking like them? Why are you talking like being like us is something to be cured?" I punched the wall, which hurt my hand. I sat down on the step and cried.
"Suze," Abby said. She sat down next to me and put her hand on my shoulder. "I love being like us -- but I want --"
"That?" I shouted, pointing up to the top of the stairs, where they were grunting again. "That's what you want? You'd rather have that than us?"
"I want everything, Suze. I want every stage of life --"
"Oh, every stupid stage, as designed by stupid God, who also gave us death and cancer, and --"
She grabbed my shoulders. "Suze, listen. I want to know what that up there is like. Maybe I won't like it, and then I won't do it. But Suze, I want to have babies."
"Babies? Abby, your eggs are forty years old --"
"Exactly! Exactly, my eggs are only forty years old, and most of them are still good. Who do you want to have the babies, Suze? The Geezers? The world is starting again, Suze, and I --"
"The world was fine!" I pulled away from her. "The world was just fine!" Snot and tears were running down my nose into my mouth, salty and gooey. I wiped my face on the sleeve of my stockbroker's suit, leaving a slick trail like a slug. "We were fine --"
"Oh baloney!!" I lurched to my feet, grabbing the railing for balance. "As if you're going to live with us in a galleon and fire water cannons and go to birthday parties! You're just not, Abby, don't kid yourself! You're going to be that!" I pointed up the stairs. "Sexual jealousy and sexual exchange economy and cheating and mutual-exploitation-and-ownership and serial monogamy and divorce and the whole stupid crazy boring..."
"Suze --" she said in a small voice.
"Just don't!" I said. "Don't drag it out! If you want to do it, do it, but then leave us alone! Okay? You're not welcome." I turned and headed down the stairs. "Get the hell out."
Max was standing at the bottom of the stairs. I didn't like the way he was looking at me. I brushed past.
The boys from the gym were in the car, eating yard-long submarine sandwiches with great gusto. Carla sat on the front steps, talking to a rag doll. She looked up, and her red jewel of an eye flashed -- for a moment it was as bright as looking into the sun at noon. Then she looked past me, into the sky.
"What are you afraid of?" she asked.
I leaned against the doorframe and said nothing. A wind came down the street and crumpled sheets of paper danced along it.
"I'm afraid of cows," she volunteered. "And Millie" -- she held up the rag doll -- "is afraid of, um, um, you know the thing where if you take all the money people spend and the way they looked at each other that day and you put it inside what the weather's going to do and then you can sing to cats and stuff? She's afraid of that."
I wiped my eyes on my sleeve. "Can you see the future, Carla?"
She giggled, and then she looked serious.
"You guys are all wrong about that. It's just a game you made up. There isn't any future."
"Do you like being Augmented?" I asked.
"I like it but Millie doesn't like it. Millie thinks it's scary but she's just silly. Millie wishes we were like people and trees and we didn't have to make things okay all the time. But then we couldn't play with bolshoiye-gemeinschaft-episteme-mekhashvei-ibura."
"Max is coming out with Abby four thousand five hundred and sixty-two milliseconds after I finish talking right now and projected group cohesion rises by thirty-six percent if you don't have a fight now so you should take the clown car and I'll give them a ride and I'd love to live with you but I know I'm too scary but it's okay but can I visit on Max's birthday?"
"Yes," I said. "You can visit on my birthday too."
"I can? I can?" She jumped up and hugged me, flinging her arms around my waist, pressing her cheek into my chest. "Wow, I didn't even know you'd say that!" She pulled away, beaming at me, then pointed to the car. "Okay, quick, go! Bye!"
I got in the car and clicked on the engine. Carla waved and she held Millie's arm and waved it too. The door behind her opened, I saw Max's shoe, and I drove off.
A quarter mile away from Carla, the flatscreen blinked on again, and my earring started buzzing like crazy. I told it to let Travis through.
"Abby's fine," I said. "She's with Max. They'll be coming home."
"Cool," Travis said. "Whew! That's a relief!"
"So Tommy and Shiri sent me video of the house. It looks awesome. Do you love it too?"
"Yeah, I love it." I was on I-90 now. Beyond the spires and aerial trams of Billings, I could see the funhouse suburbs spreading out before me -- windmills, castles, ships, domes, faerie forests.
"Cool, because I think they signed some papers or something."
"What? Travis, we all have to agree!" As I said it, it occurred to me that the only one who hadn't seen the place was Abby. I gripped the wheel and burst out crying.
"Travis!" I wailed. "Abby wants to start the clock!"
"Why didn't you say anything?"
"I was hoping you'd talk her out of it."
I took the exit for Pirateland, swooshing through an orange plastic tunnel festooned with animated skeletons climbing out of Davy Jones' lockers. "You can't talk Abby out of anything."
"But we've got to, Suze, we've got to. C'mon, we can't just fall apart like this. Katrina and Ogbu --" he was doing his panicstricken ratsqueak again, and suddenly I was very sick of it.
"Just shut up and stop whining, Travis!" I shouted. "Either she'll change her mind or she won't, but she won't, so you'll just have to deal with it."
Travis didn't say anything. I told my earring to drop the connection and block all calls.
I pulled up outside the galleon and got out. I found a handkerchief in the glove compartment and cleaned my face thoroughly. My suit, like the quality piece of work it was, had already eaten and digested all the snot I'd smeared on it -- the protein would probably do it good. I checked myself in the mirror -- I didn't want the Real Estate Lady to see me weepy. Then I got out and stood looking at the house. If I knew Tommy and Shiri, they were still inside, having discovered a rollerskating rink or rodeo room.
Parked at the side of the house was the Real Estate Lady's old-fashioned van -- a real classic, probably gasoline-burning. I walked over to it. The side door was slid open. I looked in.
Inside, reading a book, was a Nine. She was tricked out in total Kidgear -- pony tails, barettes, t-shirt with a horse on it, socks with flashy dangly things. Together with the Lady's Mommystyle getup, it made perfect, if twisted, sense. Personally I find that particular game of Let's-Pretend sort of depressing and pitiful, but to each her own kink.
She wrinkled her nose. "My mom, um, kinda doesn't really want me to tell that to strangers."
I rolled my eyes. "Give the roleplaying a rest, would you? I just asked a simple question."
She glanced at me. "You shouldn't make so many assumptions about people," she said, and pointedly lifted her book up in front of her face.
The clop-clop of the Lady's shoes came down the drive. My scalp was prickling. Something was not altogether kosher in this sausage.
"Oh, hello," the Lady said brightly, if awkwardly. "I see you've met my daughter."
"Is that your actual daughter, or can the two of you just not get out of character?"
The Lady crossed her arms and fixed me with her green-eyed stare. "Corintha contracted Communicative Developmental Arrestation Syndrome when she was two years old. She started the treatments seven years ago."
I realized my mouth was hanging open. "She's a clock-started Two? She spent twenty-five years as an unaugmented two-year-old?"
The Lady leaned past me into the van. "You okay in here, honey?"
"Great," said Corintha from behind her book. "Other than the occasional ignoramus making assumptions."
"Corintha, please don't be rude," the Lady said.
The Lady turned to me. I think my eyes must have been bugging out of my head. She laughed. "I've seen your documentaries, you know."
"Yes." She leaned up against the van. "They're technically very well done, and I think some of what you have to say is very compelling. That one with all the blanked out footage -- that gave me a real feeling for what it's like for those children who are wired up into the Internet."
An odd and wrongheaded way of putting it, but I limited myself to saying, "Uh -- thanks."
"But I think you're very unfair to those of us who didn't Augment our children. To watch your work, you'd think every parent who didn't Augment succumbed to Parenting Fatigue and sent their toddlers off to the government daycare farms, visiting only at Christmas. Or that they lived some kind of barbaric, abusive, incestuous existence." She looked over at her daughter. "Corintha has been a joy to me every day of her life --"
"Oh, mom!" Corintha said from behind her book.
" -- but I never wanted to stand in the way of her growing up. I just didn't think Augmentation was the answer. Not for her."
"And you thought you had the right to decide," I said.
"Yes." She nodded vigorously. "I thought I had the obligation to decide."
The Suze everyone who knows me knows would have made some sharp rejoinder. None came. I watched Corintha peek out from behind her book.
There was silence for a while. Corintha went back to reading.
"My friends still inside?" I asked.
"Yes," the Lady said. "They want the place. I think it fits six very comfortably, and -- "
"Five," I said huskily. "I think it's going to be five."
"Oh," the Lady looked nonplussed. "I'm -- sorry to hear that."
Corintha put her book down. "How come?"
"Oh, is that a rude question?" Corintha said.
"It's a bit prying, dear," the Lady said.
"Ah -- " I said. I looked at Corintha. "One of us wants to -- start the clock. Start the conventional biological aging process."
"Honey," said the Lady. "Sometimes if people -- change -- they don't want to live together any more."
"That's really dumb," said Corintha. "If you didn't even have a fight or anything. If it's just that somebody wants to grow up. I would never get rid of my friends over that."
"Would you let her talk? I'm trying to respect your archaic ideas of parent-child relationships here, Lady, but you're not making it easy."
The lady cleared her throat. "Sorry," she said after a moment.
I looked out at the mainmast and the cannons of our galleon. The rolling lawn. This place had everything. The trampolines and the pools, the swingropes and the games. I could just imagine the birthday parties we'd have here, singing and cake and presents and dares, everyone getting wet, foamguns and crazy mixed-up artificial animals. We could hire clowns and acrobats, storytellers and magicians. At night we'd sleep in hammocks on deck or on blankets on the lawn, under the stars, or all together in a pile, in the big pillowspace in the bow.
And I couldn't see Abby here. Not a growing-upwards Abby, getting taller, sprouting breasts, wanting sex with some huge apes of men or women or both. Wanting privacy, wanting to bring her clock-started friends over to whisper and laugh about menstruation and courtship rituals. Abby with a mate. Abby with children.
"There's a place over by Rimrock Road," the Lady said slowly. "It's an old historic mansion. It's not quite as deluxe or as -- thematic as this. But the main building has been fitted out for recreation-centered group living. And there are two outbuildings that allow some privacy and -- different styles of life."
I stood up. I brushed off my pants. I put my hands in my pockets.
"I want us to go see that one," I said.
Copyright © 2001 Benjamin Rosenbaum
Originally published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, August 2004.
Originally written for the Exquisite Corpuscle anthology, forthcoming from Wheatland Press.
"Start the Clock" is licensed under a Creative Commons License.
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