He looked at Tam, trying to make out her face through the snow and her clear plastic visor. The suits were in whiteout mode, strobing a slow flicker that made it easy to pick a person out against the snow; defoggers blew over the visors, the mask’s ear pieces played pin-sharp reproductions of the defoggers from the other two masks, a white-noise symphony overlaid with the gusting wind.
“Even wolves don’t fuck in this,” Gretyl said. She was in the back, thumping at a mechanical keyboard she’d magneted to its skin, watching a screen projected against her mask. “Shit.” The wagon stopped. “Might as well stop, this thing’s gonna chase its tail until it runs out of juice.”
Seth’s butt vibrated with ghost sensation of wagon motors, That stopped, and there was just the sound of the wind, the blowers and the thrum of his pulse. He felt transient fear: where wolves fuck, snow blowing, ground saturated with carcinogens, sky a source of potential death. If he died here, no one would know. If they did know, almost no one would care. His father died when he was ten, his mother had been in jail since he was seventeen and they hadn’t spoken since he was fifteen. Natalie was... Natalie was gone. He had to admit she probably wouldn’t be back.
He was so small. They were pimples on the world’s face. Unwanted. Uninvited. Alone in snow, on their silly homemade wagon, in high-tech pajamas, where wolves fuck.
The feeling passed. It had contracted his sense of self to a pinprick and then expanded the world around him to a yawning gulf.
The world kept on expanding. It wasn’t just him that was tiny and insignificant. It was everything. Zottas, all they’d built. The world’s great cities. Humming networks of meaningless, totalizing money, endlessly and algorithmically shuffled. Deeds and contracts, factories and satellites, endless oil and stone, poison in the sky and carbon in the air. In a thousand years no one would give a shit. The universe didn’t care about humans. The wind didn’t care. The snow didn’t care. The fucking wolves didn’t care. If he froze and moldered to dirt, like Thetford’s rotting homes, it would be no better and no worse than living to 90 and going into the ground in a box with a stone over his head. It would be no better and no worse than what was coming for all those asshole zottas who thought they could speciate and overcome death.
Everything they did was human. Everything he did was human. Here, where wolves fucked, it didn’t mean anything; it meant everything.
“Awooo!” It was louder than he’d intended, but who cared? Tam and Gretyl’s gloves clonked their helmets, then the gain-control cut in. They stared, faces barely visible behind visors, suits strobing silently in swirling flakes. They were annoyed, hungry, needed to pee, and so did he but: “Awooo!” It came out louder this time.
“Come on, you wolves!” A wild laugh chased the words.
“Enough.” Tam’s voice had a warning note.
“It’s not enough. Come on, just try it. Seriously serious.”
“Seth, come on—”
Gretyl cut loose with a howl that made their visors rattle and left their ears ringing. “Fuck yeah!” She punched the air.
Tam heaved a sigh, looked from one to the other, wiped snow off Seth’s shoulders. She filled her lungs and howled. Seth joined. Gretyl joined. They howled and howled, in the place where wolves fuck, and Seth found himself with tears in his eyes, which he couldn’t wipe, but it didn’t matter. He was shedding his skin, leaving behind the last vestiges of default, the last shreds of belief that someday he’d forget this craziness and try to find a job and a place to live and hope no one took them away.
“I love you people.” He squeezed them so their visors clonked.
“Ow,” Tam said, but didn’t pull away. “You’re a jerk, but we love you, too.”
“Yeah,” Gretyl said. “Most of the time.”
“What do we do? Walk?”
“And end up frozen to death,” Gretyl said. “Snow can’t keep falling. Once it stops, we’ll ride home. Meantime, we shelter in cargo pods. If we each take one, we’ll be able to shin out of the suits to take a dump or eat, then get back inside to keep from freezing to death.”
“How would that work?” Seth said. “I mean, where do we poop?”
She rapped the engine’s cowl. “Not much room in these. But with care you could crap outside the suit, then get back inside, without getting crap on you. It’ll get on the outside of the suit, but that’s life in the big city. No worse than the stuff that gets stuck to it while we’re walking. We’ll wash them off when we get back.”
“I’ll strip off outside and hang my butt over the snow. The amount of snow on the ground now, there’s not going to be any airborne contaminants.”
“Suit yourself, but remember, there’s only so much power in these things and getting naked at minus twenty is going to suck heat out of your body that the suit’s going to have to put back or you’ll die of hypothermia. There might come a moment when you’re wishing you still had those amps in your battery – when your toes are turning black.”
“This conversation’s taken a delightful turn.” Tam jumped off the engine and sank to her knees. She swept her arms, mounding snow up. “We’re not going to walk very far through this. How about we try to tell someone where we are, and could use help?”
“I’ve got zero bars,” Gretyl said. “Been that way almost since we left Dead Lake. The aerostats probably landed themselves when the wind kicked up.”
“I packed a couple drones in the survival kit. Hexcopters, they can fight heavy wind, but they’re not going to get a geographic fix until the sky clears. Still—”
“Get one high enough and it might bounce a connection between us and Thetford,” Tam said. “There’s a good chance we’ll lose it – another decision we might regret later.”
“In summary: we should hide in these boxes, shit ourselves and wait out the weather.” Seth discovered the idea didn’t sound as horrible as it should. The revulsion he wasn’t feeling was part of the package of default-ness that he’d sloughed off.
“About right,” Tam said. “The weather isn’t ours to command. Physics is physics. Snow is snow. Batteries are batteries. Sometimes the best action is no action.”
[XII]
DIS FELT SWADDLED in cotton batting. Her thoughts veered toward panic or sorrow and she’d brace for the torrent of feeling, and it would fizzle. She’d tried anti-depressants as a kid, when her parents worried about her “moods.” She knew how it felt when her brain couldn’t make the chemicals that got her into that race-condition of things-are-bad-I-can’t-fix-them-that-makes-it-worse. That was a feeling like reality in retreat, colors bled out and fight gone from her limbs. They said it was a matter of “dialing in the dosage.” They said it was worse before advanced neurosensing that could continuously monitor her reactions. In practice, this meant spending the eighth grade reporting to the nurse’s office every hour to have a disposable electrode band wrapped around her forehead while she lay on a couch and let a machine draw blood. Her parents had to do it at home, including a session at 11:15 every night. They got so good at it that most nights they could take all their measurements without waking her. It helped that the drugs made her sleep like the dead.
A year ticked by. She got her first period, her first F (in math, always her best subject) and took her first beating, from a group of kids that included three girls who’d come to her birthday party the year before. They sensed her intolerable weakness. None of it left a mark. They told her the meds were working. She experienced vacant anxiety, a purely intellectual sense that things were terrible, but the terribleness didn’t matter. It was remote urgency. It made her feel sinister and unimportant.