The Next Evening

Lansdale was quiet all the rest of that night, and the next day as we started on the road back.  I didn’t notice at first, since I was so busy looking around and hoping that we would keep on driving so slowly and never make it home.  Finally I caught on and asked him if anything was wrong, and he said, “Oh, nothing.”  But when it came to make camp, he didn’t want to look for a house like we usually did, and instead built a fire off the road.  He toasted some old bread and chewed meditatively on beef jerky, but he didn’t seem to have much of an appetite.  I looked at his face and thought that he looked older than I had thought, but perhaps that was just the better resolution of my new eyes.  I could just make out faint laugh-lines around his eyes and mouth, and it felt like I was looking through his young face to see the man he would become.  Handsome, I thought.

“How old are you, Tina?” he asked me suddenly, mirroring my thoughts.

I blinked—I could blink with the HumoVision Eyes, and it was such a pleasure that I did it with any possible excuse—and did some rapid math.  “Well, the apocalypse was about twenty-one years ago,” I said.  “And I was born about three years before that, so I suppose I’m about twenty-four.  But of course it’s like I’m older, since I’ve been fully conscious for that whole time.  I was dating people online when I was only a year old.”

“You always act like you’re so much older than me,” said Lansdale, and he jumped to his feet and furiously kicked toward the fire.  The fire shuddered a little but kept burning.  Then Lansdale began to pace, pumping his hands together as though preparing himself for a race.  I looked at him astonished.  He was such a calm guy generally.

“Well, you’re not so much older than me,” he said, rounding on me as though we were having a debate and he had just made the winning point.  “I’m twenty-one, and anyway it sounds like you were just a kid, just an irresponsible kid for those first few years.  I mean, you went to all those computers and you crashed the internet like your dad told you to, and it never even occurred to you that you were burning down your own house and wrecking your own community.  I call that stupid.”

“All right, I was stupid,” I said.  I didn’t know what else to say.

“Here’s the deal.  All right?”

“What deal?”

“Shut up and listen to me!  Here’s the deal, all right, Tina?”

I nodded.  His hair was sticking up every which way, and his eyes were blazing.  God, everyone I love goes crazy, I thought.

“Listen, Tina.  I know that you’re virtual and all, and that you’re awfully big on that, but the thing is, I think that you’re still human.  You talk like a human, and think like a human.  If I smashed RoboVac now where there’s nowhere for your consciousness to go, you would die, like a human…”

“Hey!” I said, taking a few steps back.  He ignored me.

“And you’re not some infallible computing device, like those robots I read about in old science fiction stories.  You fuck up, you make awful mistakes.  You even cry, and when you cry you sniff, like a human.”

“Oh, great, I am fallible and I sniff,” I said.

Lansdale swallowed, a long swallow that made his Adam’s apple bob up and down.  “And if you’re a human, then you belong with other humans,” he said, the words coming out in a burst.  “And I know you probably expect me to take you back to Bloomsy where you live, but I don’t think that you belong there, and anyway, I… I love you and I need you to come home with me.  Down to Florida, down home.  Everyone’s friendly there, they don’t care if you’re a Transient Internet Neurological Aberration or a huge robot vacuum or whatever you are, as long as you’re human.”

He stood in front of me, and set his feet firmly in the ground.   “Will you come with me?”

NEXT TIME: The Choice