Up The Tower (21 page)

“He thinks I'm his mother!”

He is thinking all kinds of things, believe me.

Victor could think all day long and not get tired of it. Once he had been in a place without thought, but that was gone now that he had the WAKE UP. There was nothing and then there was the WAKE UP, and before that there had been some other things that made him awfully good at killing people around his mother.

Someone stomped up from behind them. “Jesus Christ. Is he a goddamn cyborg?”

At the door now was a small woman with a complex piece of tech in her hands. Or was it her hand? That was interesting. Did she have a metal chest and collarbones and femurs like he did as well? She might have many things like he did, and a few like he didn’t. He could see from her frame that they were different. Wasn’t everyone? That was the way.

Oh, she had a name. Everything and everyone had a name of course, but this one had a name in Victor's mind somewhere. It was sort of fresh, too, which made it easy to consider but hard to remember. Like the names of paintings in museums you had just left.

Something dinged. The elevator.

“We can go!” said Mom, rushing inside. “We can go straight up.”

Victor backed in, staring carefully at the new dark woman. Was her name rock? Or would it be Rock? There were letters and then there were LETTERS, and Victor had each kind in his own name and so he should know which was which and where they should go.

He pushed Mom into the elevator and stood in front of this new woman with the metal hand. This was very brave. He would be rewarded later. That was how Moms worked.

“Victor?” said Mom. “What are you doing, Victor? Victor...hon.” She let in a ragged, laughing breath. “Let Ore in. She has all the data. Remember, hon? The data that you need to take? We can all go up. It’ll be no problem.”

Ah, Ore. That was her name. That was a bit like Rock, wasn’t it? Rocks could be dangerous in the wrong hands, like most things. This Ore certainly had a wrong hand. Why was it metal? Was she trying to be dangerous like Victor was sometimes dangerous?

How had he known he was dangerous?

Was it dangerous to have someone dangerous around him being dangerous when he was with his mother? There was so much danger to danger. So many variables to consider.

“She can go later, Mom. It’s you and me now.”

His voice was sort of metallic and tonguey, and he could tell that it bothered Mom by the way she recoiled when he spoke. Spittle dripped down his chest.

The girl with the metal hand—her name was Ore, yes—she opened her hand and closed it. It clanged and threatened.

“You let me through, man, or I’ll run through you. I’m
going
up that elevator.”

Ore pressed forward and Victor shot her in the side. A narrow slice of her hip fell out behind her. She fell to a knee, gripping the wound. Blood splattered down.

“You slock,” Ore grunted. “You goddamn metal slock.”

“Let her pass, Victor honey.” This was Mom now. Her voice was being very, very Mom. She touched him on the shoulder. Wow. “Let her pass. Let her in the elevator with us.”

“I don’t
want
to be in an elevator with her. She is
yelling
.”

“That’s all right, Victor. She’s my friend, hon. Mommy’s friend, all right? Don't touch Mommy's friend, that's not how you
treat
me.” Mom shuddered and let out weird cracking sobs. “You have to let her in. You have to do this. It’s what I want.”

Victor looked between his Mom and Ore. He troubled over the debate beginning. Did Mom know what was best? Of course she did. She was Mom. How would she not know that? He watched Mom blink away tears. Tears of happiness, of course. She was so happy they were together.

“I just...I don’t know that she and I ought to be together, Mom. She is yelling. She is
mean
to me.”

“Yes, Victor hon. Okay. Why don’t you wait, then?”

“Wait?”

“I’ll take her up, and send her away for you. And then I’ll come back down and grab you. How does that sound?”

“You can’t
leave
me, Mom. You can’t—”

Tight, hard crushing on his shoulder. He yelped, squealing in pain. A baby’s cry. He was a baby, he would cry like a baby. He staggered and dropped into the wall, firing his gun out and up. But not towards Mom, no! Not toward her. She was sacred. Like a cow. Like a sacred Mom cow.

She was gone. The elevator dinged up and they were gone. Roaring up at her, Victor broke open the elevator door with his foot. Bones shattered there. That was too bad.

Could he grow them back?

You could grow anything back, or if you couldn’t, then you could replace it.

Wires ratcheted upward—he grabbed one, swinging, following the elevator up. Flesh burned off his hands.  Floors zoomed past. Working, gripping, swinging, he climbed. The cabin was not so very far above him.

He fired in a corner of the cabin and heard Mom scream. That was all right. He wasn’t going to
hurt
her, she was his
Mom
. You couldn’t hurt your Mom. No one could really hurt her. He fired and fired again.

The metal started peeling away. He reached up, grabbing edges and folding it. An opening—he could get it!

There were screams. Everyone so excited.  He reached through the hole with his gun and one of them kicked his gun away. That was smart. Who had done that who was so smart? Mom was often smart, but then so probably too was whoever Mom hung out with. He lifted up his other hand, and they stomped on his fingers.

God, that hurt. He had trouble hanging on. What were they thinking, doing that? He opened his mouth—stop, he wanted to say. Another kick, under his mouth this time, and off went his jaw. Tongue hanging loose like a towel on a rack.

Lordy whoo, but that hurt. Where was God? His brother? Where was his brother God to help him?

He lifted up, and Ore kicked him in the face. Brain matters clanged around on the metal of his skull. Ore hopped around, holding her foot. He rolled into the cabin entirely. Ore picked up his gun and shot him in the chest. Clang, clang. A weird sort of vibration, spreading out around his body, the force dissipating.

The elevator dinged. Top floor.

“Please, Victor,” said Mom. “Please, son. Just let Mommy past, okay? Let us get by.”

Victor shook his head slowly. He tried to say a few things but without his tongue it was all just slobber and blood.

I’m very sorry, all of you. You’re out of time. If there’s something you can hold on to, you might want to do it.

Mom’s voice, desperate. “What does that mean?”

And then everything began to shake and lean and tumble and break.

* * * * *

A
na’s relationship with her family was complex, at best.

When she was young, her mother had entered her into beauty contest after beauty contest. Ana's talent had been singing, but really her talent was being pretty (inasmuch as the judges deemed children as pretty). She could not sing worth a damn.

She won contests in her neighborhood and then her area. Then, she was a finalist three times in the city. This was a big deal, if only because there were so many contestants and so many gauntlets to run through. Ana didn’t think that little girls really cared that much about being pretty—she didn’t think that they cared about anything except what their parents told them to care about, and even that much was iffy. But everyone cared about being famous, and plenty of folks floating into their homes on the screens started with beauty contests. Girls and boys, both. Kadaya Sarin started with beauty contests. What a star. Like an immortal angel.

So she would spend weekends with her mother, who gussied her up and did her hair and her make-up all day Saturday. Then on Sunday, her mother would ask Ana to do all of it again by herself. Sometimes Ana could and sometimes she could not. If she could not, she would be reprimanded—she was special, appearance was important, and her appearance had to be exceptional.

At school, her grades were important. If something didn’t come easily to her, then she was doing it wrong. Shame was expected and encouraged. Once, in the fourth grade, she came home with a report card full of excellent marks. Smiling pretty (everything had to be pretty in her home), she handed it to her father, who was sitting at the kitchen table with a few drinks in him already.

He looked at it, smiled, handed it back, and asked, “Now, how are you going to do this again next year?”

Of course, she hadn’t thought about it yet, and she told him so.

“I expect a plan before the night’s over, then. You can’t let up, Ana. You can’t let anyone get the edge but you.”

Besides beauty contests, there were sports. They cycled her through several for a period of years—softball, basketball, drillball, heatsink, soccer, and cardio-ride, before finally settling on tennis.

Tennis was chosen mostly, she suspected, because of its ability to show her off. They could put her in skirts and rather-too-tight tops, and men would take note. Playing tennis in college, on a scholarship that paid for a quarter of her tuition, was how she had met Raj.

When she was fourteen, her father died. He was never a kind man. Calling his wife a useless old hag was a favorite pastime of his.

She would make him a roast, Ana's mother, and it would be a few degrees off perfect—too little salt, too much.

"You're just a useless old hag, aren't you?" he would say, smacking his wife on the side of her head.

It was, you could even say, almost a sort of playful slap. The kind you might see boys delivering to each other on the arms after a good joke—only it was always directed to the same spot, right above her ear. Her mother would slide backward, not responding. Even though her shoulders were withdrawn and her chin summarily attached to her chest, it seemed almost like she held her head up high. She took her shaming with pride. No one else could take it like she did.

After her father died, there was a vacuum. A hole, and someone could fill it. Ana could fill it. It would be nothing to dismiss the role she had already—pretty little trophy daughter. She was only what her parents had created her to be in the first place. Her existence was already a vacuum. To instead use herself to fill another vacuum was nothing at all.

After the funeral ended, Ana found her mother in the bedroom. She was sitting over a picture of her husband, of Ana's father, crying. Crying over that man. It filled Ana with disgust.

"Stop crying," she told her mother, smacking her on the back of her head. "You're just a useless old hag, aren't you?"

Her mother was shocked for a moment, and then straightened up. Given her sick pride again. Knowing how to act. Roles completed.

It was nothing to fill in for a man. Nothing at all.

* * * * *

U
pstairs from where Samson had murdered Storey—and he knew he had murdered her, there was not any other way to think of it—the nanotech slime was still trying to fix the breaking Tower in the wake of the aftershock. Huge parts of the Tower’s structure now were gone, absorbed by the nanotech. The slime burned down the carbon for fuel to make more of itself in its attempts to heal the Tower’s structure. This absorption had left enormous  gaps in the walls and floor. The slime, no doubt, would eat up its own repairs soon to fix the holes that it had made. Wind throttled at Samson as he carried Partner up.

It would have been an impossible task even an hour before, carrying up Partner. But now the robot was so damaged, so many pieces missing, that Samson did it with ease. The stairwell leaned terribly, the building leaned even more, but he stepped up bit by bit.

The nanotech slime filled out the room in front of the stairwell again, attempting to repair the damage to its repairs. There was only so much it could do. Samson laid Partner down on top of the long white slime.

Samson wasn’t really sure what the nanotech of the Tower could fix or not, but the theory felt sound in his mind:

- The nanotech was made to fix mechanical and electrical bits.

- Partner was made of mechanical and electric bits.

- Partner could be fixed by the nanotech.

“You’ll have to tell it what to do, Partner.”

“
Yes
.” Its voice was weak now, echoing through the torn remains of its chest cavity. “Repairs. Very smart. Good Dude.”

The slow, white wave of the nano slime swept over Partner. For a moment, stupidly, Samson was afraid the copbot would drown. And then the slime ebbed away, as if it had been sucked up and eaten. Partner’s shell was reformed, all new parts with a slight blue sheen to them.

“Ah, Partner-Samson.” It stood up slowly, knees creaking. “That was a good idea.”

Something dead, or dying, now come back to life. Samson backed away from Partner. Horror overtook him; horror only at himself.

I knew you, boy
.

He knew that Storey had. He knew even that she had every right to want him dead. His morality wasn’t anything to do with good or evil, just keeping himself alive. Who was left for there to die besides Samson?

There was Ore.

Samson had known Storey better than he knew his own sister. How about that.

You want his sister? Go get her.

She would have been dead, slaughtered with his parents, if she hadn’t smartened up to what a jinx Samson was. Garrett and the Crowboys died because they worked with Samson. Storey knew Samson; Storey died. There was a whole Tower full of dead folks using tech Samson had grafted onto them.

And this copbot...it hadn’t been safe since Samson had known it. Not so long ago, Samson had been about to kill it.

“Where do we go now, Partner-Samson?”

“Don’t call me that,” he said. “I don’t know. It doesn’t matter where I go, all right? None of it matters.”

He turned to the open space of the outside. There was a support he could use to steady himself. So much there in the city; so much falling apart.

“Partner Samson—”

“You’re not my partner. Stop calling me that.”

“Partner-Good-Dude Samson, we must—”

“I am
not
your partner. I am not a Good Dude. I am not your friend. No one is my friend.
No one
can be my friend, do you understand? Everyone close to me
disappears
. They
die
. I've never had any friends. I won’t have any friends. I won’t have
any
.”