Beatrice

Beatrice

1991 words

I

Beep. All the doctors and the machines and the scalpels set out. Beep. All the slime covering the cobwebby head. Beep. The cord, alien-looking, made within me, cut on sight to be disposed of in a container labeled human waste. Beep. Carried this far in the womb and delivered. Through the black windowpane comes the sun, hungry and impatient, pressed against glass. In the distance, construction cranes. Outside the room, monstera plants, free-standing desks where a nurse eats ramen while scratching lottery tickets. A watercolor painting of a tiger on a scroll. Shen Yun posters—coming soon to China. Obligatory clapping for a child cancer patient making it to a gray square of carpet and back. In every room, a clock.

II

I am to you 工人, as I am to the world. Here, in Shanghai, and in Los Angeles, and in Mumbai. There are many 工人, and very few 老板. You can see how even if you don't read Chinese you understand.

III

Our son, Nathan, is six weeks old. A life we tried to shelter only for a day. Only for a day and then a shooting occurred in our building. A bullet came inches above where our baby sleeps. Then a slur against Muslims was said on a podcast. Then I cut my finger cooking and he saw blood. Then he saw a woman breastfeeding while we were out for dinner, and I told Beatrice, "How can we protect him," and she told me, "I don't think it's the first time he's seen it."

It’s death. It’s debt. Perhaps postpartum is to blame. Since Beatrice is an android and never fully rests, she knows I leave at night. Even when her power’s cycled off, she knows on a subconscious level. She once told me she was jealous of my metal detector.

I leave for the beach to free my mind. I watch plane after plane zip through the smog-scum sky like scripted shooting stars. From Hong Kong to New York in less than 2 hours. From Earth to Moon and back in 24-hour spans. I have enough money on credit to fly some place and never come back. But only by myself.

Only in the night do I have the time to sweep the beach while it's still cool enough to be out of my nanosuit. There's something satisfying about old tech, something reassuring about its identity, its integrity, the way it feels. Being out in the oceanside wastes. Hearing the sad, deflating sounds whales make when crying. Across the discolored ocean, myriad lights, pink and blue and green, some from billion-dollar yachts, some from drudgeboats bagging up plastic by the ton blip and bounce between waves. And the Shanghai tower, now the Amazon tower. And the Tesla satellites, and the north star now the Trump Star, and all the neon colors throughout the lower wharf. Beep. Just a pull tab. Beep. An empty BIC lighter. Beep. A worthless heart-shaped locket with a stock photo inside.

* * *

The tropical fish in our waterbed follow me as I stand, as I turn off the alarm ringing in my ears via a virtual keyboard. I power on Beatrice, who gets out of bed cheerily. I open the blinds, ready-on my suit, which tethers to me from the charging pad, each tentacle-like connector reaching for my flesh across the room, morphing with my biology in an impossible way. A timer appears on my HUD with an estimated arrival to CattleCorps: 01:07:09. The suits AI system competes to tell me good morning.

Beatrice and I stand over Nathan’s crib like Jesus and Mary, dark orange light belting through the shades. We forget to water the plants. Nathan wakes and cries. I retrieve him from his crib and soothe him. I grab fruit from a hanging basket, a new one grows to replace it. Beatrice prepares me a dose of CLARITY™, extra strong. I partially unzip my suit to breastfeed Nathan while eating a banana, while listening to the news:

Another Species Officially Extinct, Scientists Say—This One Will Shock You!

When Nathan’s all through, I zip up and attach my BABYBUMP™, an external nanosuit attachment that provides a fully enclosed portable strap-on baby carrier.

"I'll take him tomorrow," Beatrice says.

"I don't like you taking him to America."

"He likes it there."

“No he doesn’t.”

“Hey,” she says.

Her gentle touch. Her soft reminder. It's the first time I've stopped to notice anything around me. I haven’t even looked in her eyes today. And now all I want is to stay home so badly. Neither of us can afford to.

“I know. Yeah, I know,” I say.

“I love you baby.”

“I love you too.”

IV

The Tech5 nanosuit, leased to me by my employer, is a full-body enhancement modification device. It will take me 72 years to pay off. I've been convinced it's quite necessary anymore to live on our sweltering planet. Flexible and fully climate-controlled. The minivan of our times. Wired to the body's central nervous system for HUD integration, personalization, GPS accuracy, data transfers, system updates; bioengineered fiberoptic feelers for automated maintenance, autohydration, fast-acting pain relief, hygiene, anti-anxiety CBD administration. Not to mention, the internet. Basically, as long as you aren't homeless, you have a nanosuit, and basically, as long as you aren't rich, you're working to pay it off.

A line of roughly 4,000 individuals waits along a busy road. My HUD reads rain soon today in Shanghai. Only 44°C out presently. Usually no more than a 5-minute boarding wait, the speedway, composed of over 90 million self-driving Teslas, has a 99.959996% safety rating. That's good for making it to work on time. A police officer shoots snot out of his nose down onto the highway.

A blue, double-wide, limo-like SUV arrives for our boarding group. I get in; my nanosuit securely wires me into my seat. 16 passengers in a seat to their own with a separating aisle. Across from me, a man in a Tech8 model suit in a virtual meeting. I shift to look out my window. The rain comes as predicted, straight down, straight like a simulation. Like nothing or anything could be real. I feel Nathan press against the glass of my stomach, looking out at the world with strange incredulity at the hoverbike food deliverers, the luxury apartment airblimps, the towers plastered in advertisements. The pink puffs of toxic clouds that look so pretty, like insulation. Halfway through our commute, the woman in front of me peeks over her seat and asks me if I’ll watch her bag. She stands to use the restroom. I laugh at the idea of someone stealing a purse and hightailing it off of a moving vehicle. I’m sure it’s been done before.

My suit informs me that my heartbeat per minute, with an audio preview of my actual heartrate--BEEP. BEEP. BEEP.--has increased 22 bpm as we approach my workplace.

V

CattleCorps. Powerplant. 8am.

The room brings in one cow at a time. The process works best that way. The cows are sedated in a previous room, and when by the time they reach me, their eyes large, black shiny grapes, their tongues swollen, drooling, wriggling eels, they’ll have also reached the end of the conveyer belt and, subsequently, their lives. Since the cows are all securely restrained, since 9 = 321, a tungsten wire, extra sharp, leveled perfectly, precisely beneath each cow’s jugular, is strung taut from each end of the large, spacious, mostly white room. All there is for me to do is wait for the conveyor belt to stop. And when the cow reaches that wire. When his eyes look around for grass or shade. When he passes gas in his final uncertain moment—I pluck. I pluck the wire like a harpist or like one of the Greek fates, and it never stops ringing in between cows. And it never fails to surprise me how calculated it all is for the head to never hit the ceiling, it may spin exactly the same amount of times every time, and all the blood rush past me, never hit me, so long as I stand on my X, to be collected and stored, and the body fall down the hole that opens in the ground, shredded for meat right then, and the head land on a pike that rotates every ten heads, for what purpose I’ve never asked, why we learn math, why we don’t, they do.

Roughly 1,000,000:1 more powerful than gasoline, and even 1,000:1 more powerful than nuclear energy, I’m told, scientists have found harnessing the power of killing, or, rather, relinquishing and capturing life right as it’s leaving a life source, to be the most powerful energy we know. That is to say that death is the strongest force there is.

VI

Thankfully, Nathan doesn’t have to witness all this while in the BABYBUMP™. Nathan’s well taken care of with juice and diaper changes in the CattleCorps. provided daycare.

On my way home from work, I have a streetdog and a bottled tieguanyin. Nathan sleeps in my suit womb. Since I haven’t received a reply back from Beatrice when I texted her at lunch, I wander around downtown before heading to the speedway. I check her location, she’s at LAX. I know sometimes they give androids a hard time at customs. Before leaving, I notice children surrounding a landed bat, prodding it with a stick. I remind them there is something wrong with an animal which usually flies but chooses not to. They go on their ways. A homeless leper with one arm appears from behind a sperm bank and 7-Eleven with a chittering grin. He asks me for the bat. I shrug.

I reach home and tuck Nathan in for the evening, but with still no reply back from my wife, I begin to worry.

As an escort, she flies to the United States where she’s guaranteed higher premiums, and where she can work nights while it’s still day in China. It’s not the most ideal situation, but there’s not much work for androids these days, especially not 00 models.

After holding for nearly 40 minutes, I finally get through to security. They have her held up at customs as I suspected. They won’t put me through to her; instead, I talk to an international liaison. Suspecting Nathan will be fine, I head to the beach.

VII

"Hey, hello? Hi, I've got an android here, service number 0093041."

"Okay.”

"Uh, well, Miss, or, Mr.—”

“Mrs.”

“Mrs., are you the owner of 0093041—”

“Beatrice,” I say.

“For the purposes of this call, is it ok if I refer to the subject by the serial number?”

I could hear her yelling in the background. I could imagine what they were doing to her, what they would be doing to her. I could see it all play out.

“No.”

“Ok, well, Bea-trice, was it? Beatrice is in US customs. She is far behind payment. That’s a Chinese issue, which I’m sure you’re aware of.”

I could hear the airport security metal detectors beep in the background. I could hear the departures for London and for Greece and for wherever but here.

“But what’s got her all caught up is $15,000 US dollars, in a secret compartment, a pearl necklace—has 0093041 had problems stealing before?”

Her crying. Her screaming. It got to me. It unwove me. And in the city there was a bomb. Or only just fireworks. And spaceships never hitting each other. And my HUD alerting me X AE A-XII Declared World’s First Quadrillionaire. And my HUD alerting me Nathan was awake.

"Look, I understand, but we're dealing with five monthly payments on 00930—Beatrice. Quite the sum debt. Now, that lands on you. But these Americans, they want to repossess her. "

Beep. A paperclip.