Scotch

She could still smell a faint hint of scotch on his breath. It smelled expensive, the way truffles shaved over the too-small plate of something she couldn’t pronounce smelled expensive earlier. She hadn’t expected him to take her to dinner beforehand or to engage her in an ordinary conversation, one couples used to have all the time. One some couples probably still had over cocktails and overpriced pretty meals too small for anyone actually hungry. The kind of meal she could never afford to share with her husband, even if he were not a Blank now.

She cringed at the memory of him, the last one, after he was ‘restructured,’ as they’d told her in that clinical way they had at the Center. As if the person in front of them was trying to return merch that wasn’t functioning right. Something a few lines of code could fix and then they’d resell it to someone younger, with fewer tokens to spare. Gregory had looked at her the way one looks at furniture. He did not know her. She knew, of course, that he wouldn’t recognize her, wouldn’t recognize anyone once they R’ed him, but to see that cool gaze land on her and scan her like that, no heat in it, no mischief or anger, no emotion at all…. That nearly killed her.

The door didn’t make a sound as the man opened it without once looking to see if she’d follow. He didn’t need to. She had sought him out after all. She’d made this arrangement.

The room was too cheerfully lit, every fixture throwing wide bands of light onto the white rug and the white bulky chairs, making the space seem more hospital than hotel. She glanced quickly at the clock on the wall, a simple, neo-modernist affair–white, black hands, a sliver of chrome completing the circle–just after midnight.

She felt the man’s hand on her arm and she didn’t protest, didn’t flinch away from it. He pushed her toward the couch–also white, but much softer than she thought it would be–and she sank into the cushions, suddenly wishing it were less soft. She didn’t want anything here to be soft.

“I was married once,” he said matter of factly, his breath close to her cheek. His hand wrapped around her much smaller one, fingers twisting the slim gold band on her finger in slow circles.

She let him take the ring off, and it hurt as he did it. She’d never taken it off, not once in over a decade of being married. She looked at her hand, her ring finger weirdly misshapen around the slim too-white line, the flesh bulging out, puffy. She remembered how easily it slid on when he’d done it–just the two of them and the court clerk, a youngish male with whiskers that made him look cat-like, though he lacked grace in everything else. He stammered as he spoke their vows for them to repeat, his face coloring. Gregory smiled at the clerk then, kindness curving his lips, making tiny lines around his hazel eyes. How she’d loved him then. And for every day after, until Bran.

She didn’t want to think about that now. She just had to make it through this next hour. If only Gregory hadn’t tried to hack that sonofabitch at the guard house. They could have survived on the two visits a month they were permitted. She could have learned to live with the rarity of it until maybe Bran changed, only of course he wouldn’t change. Not without the surgery. Not without the implant they couldn’t afford. Because what good was a child who couldn’t speak? Only she always suspected he could. He just chose not to. Hell, if she could choose not to speak ever again, she would. She’d likely choose worse too, had there been no Bran. The silent child in a world so full of noise, she’d wished everybody would just shut the hell up. Permanently. The ads, the billboards, the people and their fucking screens, and their god awful music--all of it noise. Just so much noise pounding into her head from every direction.

She just wanted her old life back, the one where her near-empty fridge didn’t talk to her to remind her of its emptiness, where the lights changed in that subtle way and without all the beeping, where it was still the bloody clerks smelling of cheap perfume that annoyed her in the stores instead of the damn merchandise streaming directly into her brain. Her color scheme. Her sizes. Nothing she could afford ever again, but the system had no way of knowing that. The dumb tech didn’t give a shit that nobody hired spouses of Blanks. Not even the dingiest diners, as those were suddenly cool again–a nostalgic trip down memory lane for the crypto-rich. Buying their five-dollar milkshakes with an infinitesimal percentage of some new Alt.

She’d even applied at the Center itself, the same week she was there to say goodbye to Gregory. A Tuesday, because she knew the docs would be occupied with new patients that day. Because she needed to not run into anyone who knew who she was, but of course they did anyway. The data-tech smiled uneasily when he scanned her, a weird half-smile that only tugged the left corner of his too-pink mouth up. And he wouldn’t look her in the eye after that, not once.

“I’m not paying you to daydream, Miss,” the man’s voice reached her, husky but cold. So unlike Gregory’s or Bran’s. So unlike any voice of someone she knew and liked and felt warmth from.

“I’m sorry. I’m new to this.” She glanced up at the man, then pointed to the wet bar. “Would it be alright if we have a drink first?” He stood, a fluid unfolding of the limbs, surprisingly graceful for his age, and moved to the bar. She knew from his profile that he was in his late sixties, and clean. Beyond that, she only had access to the portion of his crypto wallet they’d agreed on, translating to a week with Bran, and a very short list of things he liked done to him in bed.

She heard the tinkling of ice and the trickle of water. She wished she could make her own drink, much fuller than what she could see of the few swallows worth of brown liquid sloshing over ice. The man was meticulously slicing a sliver of lime, and something about the way he did that repulsed her. Such a small thing, really, but the way he held the knife handle was wrong, delicate. And he was sawing through the lime as if it were bone–slow, weak. She’d have hacked up a dozen of them by now, had she been allowed to do it herself.

She let her eyes roam around the immense space, lingering on the details, cataloguing. The heavy embroidered drapes, gold threads through the indigo, a darker shade of Van Gogh. The old-fashioned brass-footed tub, bathed in the light of candles she didn’t recall him lighting, a thin stream of water running into the mounds of foamy bubbles, ruining them. She forced herself to finally look through the open french doors at the large low bed.

“Here.” The man set her glass down on a floating glass table, coaxing it to come closer to her, so she wouldn’t have to move. She’d hated these floater things since the first time she saw one in her sister-in-law’s newly remodeled loft. Betsy was so very proud of it then, first of its kind and all. She didn’t get the attraction then and she didn’t get it now, years later, when they were as ubiquitous as ocular implants. At Betsy’s that night, she was terrified to put her drink on the damn thing, afraid it would fall and spill on the too-shiny polished glass floor–slick black with indigo and pink swirls in it, another thing Betsy was proud of–so she’d held her glass of perfectly chilled Chablis in her hand, wishing for that evening to end. And so many others after that.

She felt the couch move and smelled him again, scotch and perfume and money. That’s what it was then, the way real money smelled for those who still had enough of it to never have to worry about things she worried about. Food things and not being able to get a dog for Bran before they took him away things; and not being able to look good for Gregory things on the rare evenings she felt the heat in her and wanted him to notice her the way he did the Enhanced in all the ads.

She couldn’t enhance a freckle, never mind a whole body part, the way these people did. The way this man sitting next to her with his scotch and his silk suit and his unlined face undoubtedly had. She wondered briefly if that other part of his was also unblemished, unwrinkled for its age, capable. She looked down, her gaze skimming the smallish tent in his lap and she had to stifle a giggle at the insanity and the inexorable simplicity of it all. With all their implants and alts and floating furniture and their wrinkle-free faces and perfectly manscaped pits, these ageless men still had to buy a warm body for the night. A hole to stick their E-peckers, class A, first-of-their-kind into. A pecker is a pecker is a pecker. She smiled a small, private smile and leaned into the man. “What do I call you then? Profile 2743 or something more personal?”

“You can call me Gregory, if it suits you,” he said, his too-young face unsmiling. He probably couldn’t bloody smile if he had wanted to for all the crap stretching his skin from the inside. She wanted to punch him, slap him around the face, smash the old-school chic crystal tumbler off the stupid fucking floating bench thing, as she had every goddamned recent improvement over their lives. Only it wasn’t. Not for those like her. And Gregory. And Bran. These pesky conveniences for the few who couldn’t care less if the rest of them had to resort to eating squirrels and, when things were bad enough, their neighbors’ dogs. That’s why she could never get Bran a dog. Too terrified they’d eat it or that someone else would.

“Well, will it be suitable, for a whore?” She heard the faint metallic ding of her wedding ring hitting the polished floor. The man watched the ring he’d thrown. It bounced then twirled like a top. “I was the one who processed him. That’s why I picked you,” he said, looking at her full on now, a flicker of pride in his eyes. Gray, dull, devoid of life; of happy.

She didn’t recall reaching for the drink glass, or the sound it made when it crashed full force into his too-high cheekbone. Not a flesh and bone sound, but something stronger, sturdier. Not strong enough though. His head flapped to the side, surprisingly red blood streaming out of an uneven gash, his eyes shocked and suddenly full of fear or madness, she wasn’t sure which. He grabbed at her arm, but the glass, now broken, was still in her hand, and she slashed at him, unthinking, enraged. She slashed and slashed, the man no longer looking at her or touching her, his dull gaze vacant, the too-soft couch splattered a pattern of VR-brilliant, shiny red. Almost pretty, she thought dully to herself, and before she lost her nerve, activated the transfer to her wallet, held the screen to his face to confirm via the very convenient retinal scan and clicked ‘accept.’

She’d added a bonus with enough zeros on the end to buy a life insurance policy. For Bran. Calmly, she gulped down the almost full glass of scotch the tiny-peckered Enhanced next to her no longer had any need of. She turned off the lights and shut off the water trickling into the bathtub, leaving the candles as they were, burning softly, slowly, the room less real somehow in their light. She found a mirror and stared at herself. Slim, pale, with tired eyes, but very much alive and not covered in blood.

She turned at the groan from the couch, the man lying on it looking lumpy, hands over his face. The tent in his pants was gone now, fear drawing his most prized enhancement in, she guessed.

“Nano-pecker. I’ll call you nano-pecker in my head, when I look back on this. That will suit me, you over-enhanced, slug-brained, puss-hearted, clammy-fingered, nano-peckered ape.”

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