The Touches Read online

  I let the last bird go, dispatch the drone to our lab’s twin in dirty. “Return to the lab for repairs,” I tell the robot, but it appears to be glitching, frozen. “Reboot,” I say.

  Nothing.

  Fine. I roll back down the boardwalk, cross past the barricade holding back the rising sea. The ripples in the air start up again, this time accelerating down the street towards me, the ripple of a camouflage’s slight delay. It’s on a collision course.

  I pull the joystick hard left, and whatever it is glances off my ball, throwing me rolling. I smash into the closest wall, and it caves and throws me into darkness.

  My ball’s emergency lights flash in my face. There’s a hissing air leak somewhere. The lights show me I’m inside the ruins of what used to be an ancient restaurant, one of those places where people in dirty used to congregate and pass germs, like airplanes and airports. The air smells like rotten fish and mold. I want to cry; if I can smell dirty that means everything in the air is in here with me. My chest throbs against the seat harness, but other than that, I’m not hurt. I roll the ball out of the crunching mess and emerge into the gray light.

  “Are you okay?” I hear a female voice over crackling speakers.

  I want to scream at her for not seeing me, but then I realize I left my camouflage mode on too. We couldn’t see each other. “The ball’s breached,” I say. Center left, where the air is hissing out. I hold my hand up to the hole, trying to plug the air.

  “Mine, too,” she says. She drops the camouflage. She’s holding her arm. Her hair is everywhere, come loose from the crash. She looks like Alicia, almost, except her eyes are black instead of blue, her nose more hooked.

  “Alicia?”

  She grimaces.

  “What are you doing out here?”

  “Never mind,” she says. “We have to get back to filtered air.”

  Panic surges up in me. I turn my bioball, message Nan to prepare a decontamination entry.

  “Wait!” Alicia says. She pushes her ball up to mine, lining up our breaches.

  “Do you have a patch?” I say. “What are you doing?”

  She puts a finger through, her fingertip on my palm.

  At first, I’m revolted. All the microbes from her hands, from everything she’s ever touched, cultured underneath her fingernails and attaching to me. Then the soft rub, the heat of her fingertip, the prickle of the virgin sensation. It feels like joy and pain at once, everything forbidden.

  Mosquitos hover around us. Are they my mosquitos, harmless? Or wild ones, carrying death?

  “I have to go,” I say, yanking my ball away, rushing back to decontamination with my palm pressed against the breach.

  My hand burns the whole way back, and I keep telling myself it’s not flesh-eating bacteria, it’s not a mosquito bite, it’s just touch. My third touch. The only one I remember.

  * * *

  Nan gasses me, burns the ball, and opens the inner door back into my cubicle with a roar. “You are now class five contaminated. Your permit to leave your cubicle is rescinded,” she says cheerily.

  “It was just my hand.” But I know that’s a lie. I know how bugs spread and cross-contaminate, and even the breeze of my breath can push bugs further than the initial contact area.

  “Permit rescinded,” Nan says, then leans in to hug me, wrapping me in cold plastic. Then she freezes around me, glitching.

  In a week, all that infected me should manifest itself, and if it kills me, Nan will be incinerated along with my body. I want to smash her into pieces already, this broken world along with her. Can’t we just bury it all? Instead, I hold her hand, mold it around mine where it burns. Her hand cools mine. I breathe deeply, the plastic smell of her.

  “Everything will be okay, Nan. Reboot.”

  “Welcome home, sunshine,” she says, as she reactivates and releases me.

  * * *

  When I get back to clean, Alicia is still hanging up by the ceiling. Fermat is coding DNA and squinting his eyes. I drop heavily into my chair and start composing a message to Telo about what happened. My eyes keep glancing up to Alicia’s hovering form, her translucent hands, the whorls of her fingertips. I want to talk to her about what just happened. We touched. I touched her real skin, traded microbiomes, contaminated myself. Surely, I’m infected. I take deep breaths and try to calm down.

  Trembling, I message Telo from my console. Something happened to me. I had to go into dirty. Video me? But I get his logged-out auto-response. I realize he’s in dirty. All of us are, but I’m used to thinking of everyone as somewhere else, out there, or nonexistent until they log into clean. But Telo could live in the dirty cubicle right next to me. I could have passed feet from his body. I could have touched him instead of Alicia.

  I wrench myself from that line of thinking. It’s forbidden for good reason, dangerous even without the superbugs out there, each of our microbiomes completely unused to the other’s. Microbiome shock alone could kill. Would I inflict that on someone I loved, just to feel their skin in real life? Before today, I would have said no.

  When I was in high school, I saw someone who was infected. She didn’t catch it from anywhere; it was her own bacteria that had mutated. It wasn’t killing her, exactly, but it was eating her slowly. Her avatar was unaffected, sleek black hair and perfect, bright eyes. But she kept closing them and putting her head on the desk, and her breaths sounded like she was gasping for air. None of us wanted to be around her, and come lunch time we scattered to be away from her. We knew, logically, we couldn’t catch anything in clean, but that didn’t stop our instincts from kicking in, the part of us that wanted to burn her up in her cubicle so that whatever she had went down with her. Even the teachers; they asked her to stay at her home in clean from then on.

  I get a message from Telo. Sorry, trouble at work. One of the kids had a problem and then her robot wouldn’t respond to me. I’m heading home now. Tell me all about it when I see you?

  Above me, Alicia’s avatar turns solid and the gravity algorithm kicks in, her hair flying up around her until she lands on the floor. She catches my eye, and her leg taps to a rhythm. Her dancing means her heart is racing as much as mine. Her avatar’s long hair is flat and sleek, but I know back in dirty, her hair is wild as a halo. Back in dirty, has she been infected?

  “Salipa,” she calls my name, holding out her hand from behind the lab equipment.

  I see Fermat, hunched over his screen. “Not here,” I say.

  I lead her outside into the hallway. Down the elevator, where we stand next to each other. She slips her hand into mine. It’s the same hand she touched before, and I don’t pull back. She’s nearly dancing again as we go out the glass doors to the fountain at the center of the Avenue of the Giants. The fountain trickles in a rhythmic, programmed loop. The water smells like nothing. Completely clean. Children are playing in the arcs of water, but back in dirty, they aren’t actually wet. They don’t have to worry about water being a petri dish full of killer bugs.

  Alicia’s hand slides up my arm. But it doesn’t feel like it did earlier, our hands finally naked atop each other. It feels dull, muted, her small hands feathers that have been covered in wax.

  I move away, breaking contact. “Are you okay?”

  She shrugs. “We’ve got a few weeks before we would get symptoms, Sal.”

  “What were you doing out there, anyways?” I walk towards the children, a little girl perching atop a ledge. Nothing here can hurt her. Be careful, I want to warn anyways. We’ve already lost so much.

  “I go outside sometimes.”

  “You were asking for something like this. You knew I was out there. Why weren’t you more careful?”

  “Please,” she says, touching me with that dull hand again, resting it on the hump of my stomach. She leans in, looking at my eyes, and then grabs me and kisses me. I don’t pull away. She feels just like Telo, the same algorithm.

  “Wait,” I say, gasping.

  She’s going to cry as she pul
ls back. Then she logs out, her hands frozen still reaching for me.

  * * *

  When I get home, Telo has programmed our living room the way I like, the light frozen in the fierce orange of sunset, the sound of waves hitting shore somewhere nearby, a double Brazilian hammock strung up in the center of the room underneath chandeliers. He’s glowing in the light.

  “Bad day at work?” he asks.

  I shed all my clothes. I’m naked and I need him, so I jump into the hammock, ignoring the pressure of my giant belly, and wave him in. Once he’s wrapped around me, I tell him what happened in dirty. I don’t tell him that it was like nothing I’d ever felt before, because the comparison would mean that I’d never felt it with him. I don’t tell him about Alicia’s kiss.

  “So now we just wait for the incubation period to end,” he says. “Maybe you get lucky.”

  “Lucky?” I say. “Everything around our cubicles in clean is devastated.”

  “Lots of people get lucky. Let’s hope for the best and cross that bridge when we come to it.”

  His response makes no sense. Lots of people? “You’re so calm about this,” I say.

  He shrugs into me. “Nothing else to do.”

  Something kicks me in the stomach hard. I gasp.

  “Are you okay?”

  “Just the baby.” The simulated kicks punch me a few times in the stomach, then they’re gone. I know, to increase bonding when they finally assign us the child, I should stop thinking of it as a simulation and start thinking of it as our child in there. I can’t help but wonder, “If I got infected and you lose me, would you keep the baby?”

  “Stop,” Telo says. “Trust me, you’ll be fine.”

  “If I can’t pick up robot slack, I might lose my research. But now I’m quarantined and I can’t go out again.”

  “I could go for you.” He puts his face in my neck, and he’s tangled around me. Back in my immersion ball in dirty, tiny electrical impulses prick my nerves, simulating his weight on my skin. Just like Alicia.

  “Telo, no. That’s just a hypothetical permission you have. If one of your kids is in danger and if their robot fails and it’s glitching too bad for you to log in. And that hasn’t happened yet. I would never ask you to risk yourself. It’s just data. I can start again when the robots stop glitching.”

  “And redo two years of work? Lose your grant? Could we still afford the baby?”

  “Telo,” I say, and I put my finger crosswise against his lips, shushing him. It’s the hand with the palm that has felt another person. I put his palm to mine above our heads, blocking out the light of the chandeliers. The waves soundtrack washes over us. I close my eyes and wish with all my being that it felt the same, that the same electricity would flow through me as when Alicia’s fingertip jolted me awake.

  “Don’t you want more from life?” I say, even though everything around us is a designed heaven: the waves, the light of sunset licking our skin, the hammocks and the slow rocking sensation.

  “Every single day I want more,” he says, and he grips me hard, like a secret is being dragged out of him he doesn’t want me to know, like he’s struggling to breathe.

  * * *

  I awake from Nan shaking me. “Hello, sunshine,” she says. “Time for food and voiding.”

  “Excellent,” I say.

  My arm has pinprick marks nestled in the crook. She’s been taking samples. I look towards the door, the decontamination chamber that lies just beyond. The lock screen is activated with a new code that says PERMANENT. What she does while I’m in clean.

  “My new power supply has arrived,” she says.

  It’s unpackaged, carefully placed on the floor by my immersion ball. “That’s great, Nan. Want to turn over so I can install it?”

  “Yes,” she says, and complies.

  I open up her back, pull out the old supply. I can hear it sparking. I click in the new one.

  “Reboot,” I tell Nan. But nothing. She stays bent over like that. When I ran her debug, it didn’t throw up any other hardware flags. Could the problem be something else? Are Nan’s glitches connected with the other robots’ errors?

  She looks broken in half. Suddenly my ten-by-ten cubicle in dirty feels empty and crushing. I wolf down my meal, log back into clean.

  * * *

  In clean, I’m still in the hammock, Telo asleep and logged out next to me. I can’t tell what time it is because the blinds are still programed to leak out sunset.

  If there was ever a time to log into his robot, it would be now. He’d given me the passcode when I gave him the digital key to my house, and never once had I been tempted to use it. But was he okay? Did I need to warn him about the robot glitches? Did I need to see him in real life even if I was embodied in a plastic humanoid? Did I need to tell him about Alicia?

  I say his cubicle number into the air, then the passcode.

  “Accept login?” I hear.

  “Accept.”

  His cubicle looks exactly like mine, but his robot seems to be working fine. My hands, the robot’s hands, aim and squeeze correctly.

  “Telo?” I say, and the bright robot voice saying my words startles me.

  He’s probably asleep in his immersion ball, but when I open the padded door, he’s not in there. He’s not in his cubicle. He’s gone out into the dirty world. I open and close my robot hands, grasping air.

  * * *

  In the morning, the news has figured it all out, about the glitching robots having all contracted a code virus. Usually the sick ones are robots that have been repeatedly logged into. They’re working on a fix.

  Telo still hasn’t come back by the time I leave for work.

  At work, Alicia is there, but translucent and her head down on her desk, the polite way to log out.

  “She said she was feeling sick,” Fermat says.

  “Feeling sick?” I say.

  He shrugs. “I don’t need her for this part anyways.”

  If she’s sick, was it something I contracted?

  And of course, my robot gathering samples is still frozen in place. It’s like dirty was infecting clean, spiraling out of control.

  Telo, are you okay?

  Yeah, just at work, I slept in this morning.

  Late night?

  The usual.

  When Fermat logs out to use the bathroom back in dirty, something comes over me and I hug Alicia, of course falling through her empty avatar, landing headfirst on her desk inside her. Through her translucent form, I see that she’s written something on a notebook. My name, over and over. Then at the end, a phone number. I pull the notebook through her avatar form. I call the contact, one trembling number at a time.

  “Have you used us before?” says the person who picks up.

  “Who is this?” I ask.

  The woman sighs, “Okay, new customer.” A moment’s pause. “Alright, I have your details and your account. Ten p.m. tonight. Just be sure that your robot is disabled and that your cubicle door can be accessed from the outside.”

  “In dirty?” I say, terrified.

  “Are you kidding me?” she says, and she hangs up.

  For the rest of the day, I watch my flocks on the drone monitors. The robots with useful digits are all glitching, not to be trusted near the test subjects. Was I to be trusted?

  The baby kicks again, and I grip the lab desk until it passes. When I think about the phone call, my heart skips a beat. I try to call the number back, cancel what I might have just signed up for, but the number is now disconnected.

  What was coming for me at my cubicle? A delivery? A replacement robot? A person? And despite myself, despite knowing what it would cost them, me being class five contaminated, I want it to be a person. I’m willing to ruin them.

  * * *

  When I get home, Telo is waiting for me. No hammocks this time, or sunset. Just the regular couches and afternoon light. He’s left the waves programming, which he usually does before he brings up something sure to cause an argumen
t, meant to calm me in advance. His avatar doesn’t register any of the visible effects of tiredness; he looks as perfect and unruffled as ever. But he yawns.

  My anger eclipses everything else. “Where were you last night?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You weren’t in your cubicle.”

  “You logged into my robot?”

  “You hypocrite. You log into mine all the time.”

  “I mean, I don’t mind, it’s just you never have before. Of course you can log in. But why last night?”

  I shrug. “Why aren’t you answering the question?”

  “Just the kids, obviously. With the robots down I had to help with some of the babies. What is wrong with you?”

  “You weren’t trying to help me with my research, were you?”

  “No, I was definitely not trying to help you.” He’s amused, smirking.

  I snort. I don’t know why I’m so angry. “I’m sorry,” I say. “It’s just—I needed you and you weren’t there. It’s glitch, I know. But anything could have happened to you.” I don’t mention my own guilt.

  “I’m here now.”

  He hugs me. I let myself be swept up. The projection clock on the mantel says nine o’clock.

  He yawns again. “Maybe we should go to bed early tonight,” he says, draping me over the bed in our bedroom. “Since we were both up late.”

  I shrug, trying to remain calm. “If you’re tired.”

  “You know you are, babycakes,” he says, nestling himself behind me. He spoons me, and we both close our eyes before we log out, our avatars back in clean locked together and shimmering.

  * * *

  In dirty, Nan is stuck folded over and motionless. Just in case, I point her camera towards the corner. My cubicle still says that it’s permanently locked, but it’s always been accessible from the outside, in case the government, scientists, or caretaker robots need to come in beyond the delivery chute. Some people are so paranoid about the bugs outside that they smash the screen, blowtorch the entrance shut. The occasion anyone would have to use it is so rare as to be ridiculous, but once, a cubicle row caught on fire and the drones couldn’t put it out. The people who had sealed themselves in burned in there, everyone else rolling their bioballs towards their new cubicle row. All of these people rolling through the smog-filled, ruined world, their own selves ruined, and now they could see each other, uglier, greasier, messier than their avatars.