Aftermath

I sat and cried, feeling all the time how grotesque it was, an enormous robotic vacuum cleaner crying.  There was too much of me, too much of my body, and I felt how unlike a human body it was, one of those strong, lean, work-hardened bodies from after the apocalypse.  Screw them all.  And Lansdale was standing there, not trying to touch me or comfort me, but staring very hard, with all his eyes, and I couldn’t read his facial expression.

“Stop staring at me,” I said, finally.

“I’m trying to make you feel more comfortable,” he said.  “After all, I reckon that you’re more used to everyone just looking at you, right?  No one when you were little ever heard your voice, or touched your skin or anything.”

“I don’t have skin,” I said.  “I don’t have a body.”

“I know,” said Lansdale.  “That’s what I was getting at.”

“Oh, Lansdale, I’m so hateful and I’m so bitter, and I’ve spent the last twenty years fighting when the rest of your species had all moved on, and hardly loving anyone, anyone at all—such a long time to hardly love anyone.”

“I know, Tina,” said Lansdale, softly.  “I know.”

“You don’t know, you can’t know, you stupid young innocent, you’re post-Collapse, one of the new order, the pure new race.”  I cannot sob but my voice was sobbing, the pitch reverberating up and down as I spoke faster and faster, uncontrollable.   “And you don’t understand hate and you don’t understand your parents, and you don’t get it when they talk about wars and cellphones and jumbo jets to the far corners of the earth, and friends who move away and disappear, friends who were people but they turned into slices of data, internet pages.  So you can’t understand what it is to be born out of data and to realize that you can never be a person.”

“Tina, listen to me.”

“And you can’t understand what it means to give up everything, everything, for someone you love, because you love them and they ask you to, and then they disappear and you never see them again.  Bill, why did you make me do it?”  And I couldn’t speak for a moment, I just looked and looked at Bill’s old bones.

“Tina.”

“My world was the internet, the virtual world that people made to be closer to each other, and then I could be closer too, and they didn’t need to know, they didn’t need to know.  But you took that and you made me smash it, you made me so I could smash it, you made me strong, and you made me tricky, and you made me love you, and I hate you for it, I hate you, I hate you!”

“Look at me, Tina.”  Low, and serious.

But I didn’t look at him, didn’t look into his open, freckled face that would never known the pain I had known, but I braced down Bill’s skeleton in my vacuum attachments, and I ran it over with my wheels.

And as I did, one of my swinging vacuum attachments rolled over the big brown stain on the rug, and the carpet ripped and a chunk of it was sucked into RoboVac’s innerds.  Lansdale jumped forward with a cry, and I forgot about Bill and everything as I saw the shiny hard metal of a floor safe.

NEXT TIME: In the Safe

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