“So there’s another planet we can fuck up,” he said.
Cat didn’t say anything. She pulled her slate out of her purse. Finn had messaged her: Why would they clap for me? Her cigarette dangled from her lower lip as she tried to come up with a witty response.
“Or they’ll build, like, space highways.” Everyone laughed.
Cat wrote, Because if it weren’t for you, they’d never have gotten there! Hit send. Slid her slate back into her purse.
“Don’t be a slave to the machines,” Michael said.
“Who’s a slave?” Cat pretended to blow smoke into his face. He laughed and wrapped his arms around her and pulled her in close to his chest. Cat nearly dropped her cigarette on him in surprise. He was her first boyfriend since she’d come to college, and he was constantly surprising her with unannounced kisses and touches or unpredictable outbursts of emotion. He was nothing like the boys she’d known in high school—he was smarter, wilier, and Cat could never grasp hold of him, or of what he wanted from her.
He wasn’t like Finn, either. “You check that fucking slate more than anyone I know,” Michael said, his hand pressing into the curve of Cat’s waist. Michael didn’t even own a comm slate, just a beat-up disposable phone that he folded up in his wallet.
“It’s because I’m more important than you,” Cat said.
Michael laughed, leaned in, kissed her.
* * * *
Later that night, Cat drove Michael back to his apartment. He was drunk from taking whiskey shots with a group of electrical engineers who’d been slumming it down at the bar, and the entire way home he kept leaning his head on her shoulder, singing old folk songs into her ear, songs about death and loss. His two favorite subjects.
Cat shook her head so that her hair flew across his face. “Stop,” she said. “You’re making me depressed.”
Michael leaned away from her, against the passenger-side door, and laughed. “I don’t fuck much with the future.” His voice slurred. “You do it too much. That way lies only sorrow.”
Cat fixed her gaze out the windshield. The lights of the city twinkled and flashed as she drove along the misty freeway.
“Well?” said Michael. “What do you say to that?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” She drummed her fingers against the steering wheel. They hadn’t dated that long but she already knew he got like this whenever he was drunk.
“Oh, you know. The Disasters were a warning. We let things get out of hand and everything went to seed but we’re up to our old tricks again, like we never learn. We’re sticking humans on Mars! That’s not going to end well. And all the automatons I’ve seen around town. It’s borderline slavery—”
“You weren’t alive for the Disasters,” said Cat. She wanted to change the subject. The topic of automatons was not one she ever wanted to discuss with Michael—and she certainly didn’t want to discuss it tonight. “How would you know what it was like before?”
“Let’s not fight,” Michael said. “I’m just saying there’s beauty in analog, is all. You liked that mixed tape I gave you.”
At this, Cat smiled in spite of herself. The damned mixed tape. Michael had shown up at her apartment, the mixed tape in one hand, a bouquet of sunflowers in the other. He’d wrapped the mixed tape in homemade paper—his trademark, she later learned from Lucinda. Watch out for the homemade paper, Lucinda had told her. It means he’s trying to get in your pants. But she let Cat listen to the tape on her restored tape player anyway.
“You did.” Michael laughed, kicked his feet up on the dashboard. “I knew it.”
“Oh, shut up.”
Michael laughed again and refolded his legs under the seat. Then he leaned across the car and kissed Cat on the neck. She swatted him away. The car swerved between lanes, but there was no one out on the road. The headlights danced across the mist.
Michael slid back down in his seat and started singing again, softly, under his breath. Cat drove until they came to the exit. She recognized the song. It had been on the mixed tape he made for her: all ancient music, nothing recorded after the 1940s. Another trademark of his.
The streetlights blinked red and amber. The sky was violet with light pollution. Cat drove Michael back to his apartment, but it was not Michael she thought about.
* * * *
A few days after the Mars landing, Cat went down to the vice stand where she worked as a vice girl. It was fashionable at the time, if you were pretty enough and didn’t actually need a job, to work as a vice girl. (Those girls who did need jobs, who didn’t have parents who were engineers or corporate CEOs, tended to work in the university archives.) Cat worked only part-time. She told her parents she was a receptionist for the philosophy department.
The vice stand was a little one-room glass building set into a wide, black parking lot that ran up against the interstate. The back walls were lined with mirrors and rows of overpriced and overtaxed cigarettes. Cat worked at night, and she started her shift as the sun set: on that particular evening the air was charging up for an early summer storm. The palm trees in the parking lot whipped back and forth in the wind. The sky was a peculiar yellowish purple, and occasionally the entire world whited out for half a second from the sheet lightning.
Cat didn’t feel particularly safe in her little glass box on the interstate, sitting perched on a stool in the center of the room, wearing a bright, backless dress and a pair of heels. She was supposed to roll cigarettes as she waited for a customer to pull up in front of the stand—roll cigarettes and wave at the cars driving by. Instead, the storm churning up outside, she surreptitiously checked the weather report on her slate, holding it underneath the table laid out with canisters of tobacco and rolling papers and elaborate, designer cartons. The storm was expected to pass over the city without doing any major damage, and there was no call for a curfew. Yet.
By the time the rain began to fall, smearing the freeway lights and the neon across the panes of glass, any nervousness and excitement from the storm had faded away. Working in the vice stands was boring. None of Cat’s friends who sat scattered across the city in their own glass boxes talked about this boredom. Cat rolled another cigarette and slid it into a slim cardboard carton, watching the pattern of rain slip and slide down the glass. She let one of her shoes drop off her foot. A car, sleek and black and reflecting the vice stand’s bright neon lights, pulled up outside. The customer bell chimed.
Cat jumped up, felt around with her bare foot for her lost shoe. She picked up the umbrella they kept next to the table and popped it open. The doors slid silently open, and a spray of rainwater splashed across her face. She smiled anyway. The car’s driver’s-side window dropped down, and a man with messy hair, wearing an expensive-looking black suit, leaned out and squinted against the rain. An LCD monitor glowed on his dashboard—it was one of those expensive programmable cars. Completely automated.
“Pack of Lucky Strikes,” the man said, handing over his bank card. “How’re you doing this evening? Keeping dry? You look cold.”
Cat smiled. It was colder outside than she expected, and the sound of rain beating against the asphalt much louder. The man smiled back. “I hope to hell you have someone waiting at home to warm you up,” he said. “It’d be a shame otherwise.”
“I might.” Cat laughed the way she’d seen other girls do it, the way that was becoming more and more natural as time went on: she tossed her hair, flashed her teeth, and made certain her eyes lit up all the while. Otherwise, her laughter sounded forced and fake. And fakeness was the sort of thing the vice stands worked to avoid. When Cat was first hired, her manager sat her down at one of the headquarter offices and said, “If people wanted to buy cigarettes from a machine, we’d save a whole lot of the money we lose off human error, and stock these things with robots. So you better act interested in every fucking customer.” And Cat had blinked and wrung her hands under the table and wondered what she had gotten herself into.
The man shooe
d her back toward the stand. Cat tottered inside, oily rainwater splashing up around her ankles. The dress was so thin it felt as though she weren’t wearing anything at all. She plucked a pack of Lucky Strikes off the shelf, ran his card through the computer, and took a deep, preparatory breath before going back out into the rain. The misty wind blowing off the freeway whipped her hair into her face as she handed the cigarettes and the card over to the man.
“Thanks, darling.” The man fell back against his car seat, slapped the pack against his palm a few times, slid two cigarettes out. Handed one to her. “Hope that keeps you warm till you get home,” he said.
“Thanks,” said Cat. “I hope I can light it in this weather.” She laughed again and pushed her hair out of her face. It was a stupid joke. She tucked the cigarette behind her ear and went back inside. They always gave her free cigarettes. She kept them in a cheap metal cigarette holder, saving them for when she went out to the bars, so she wouldn’t have to pay the exorbitant taxes on a new pack.
So it was a boring job, but it had its perks.
Around midnight, Michael’s rattling Volvo pulled up outside the stand. The rain still fell steadily across the freeway. Cat had rolled so many cigarettes she could no longer feel her fingers. She didn’t feel like talking to him right now. It was exhausting, being someone’s girlfriend. But his car sat idling in the lot, and for that reason alone she picked up the umbrella and went out into the storm.
“Working hard?” Michael leaned out into the shimmering neon haze. The lights from the stand smoothed out the gaunt features of his face. He almost looked like Finn, pale and dark-eyed. Cat ruffled his hair.
“Are you going to buy something or not?” she asked.
“I don’t know if I can afford to buy cigarettes right now. Really just came to see you.” He grinned.
“I’m not giving you anything for free.” As she spoke, Cat was suddenly overwhelmed by a dizzying rush of sadness. She took a step backward, held out a hand to steady herself. She missed Finn. She missed him with a strength and a ferocity she had not thought possible. Where had that come from? Michael looked too much like him. He looked too much like him even though he didn’t act like him at all. And the Martian landing had her thinking about him more. Cat wrapped her arms around her torso. Out on the freeway the cars zoomed by, kicking up a froth of dirty rainwater. Occasionally, someone honked, flashed their headlights. She heard the neon sizzling in the sign overhead.
“You okay?”
“Yeah.” Cat smiled. Her eyes did not light up. “Just damp.”
“Yeah, I can imagine.” Michael ducked back into the darkness of the car and reemerged brandishing a flask. “Gentleman Jack. Drink up.”
Cat took a sip. It scalded the back of her throat. But she did feel a momentary warmth in her core. She handed the flask back to Michael.
When Cat came home from work later that night, Michael was sitting on the couch in the living room of her shabby apartment, watching videos on her laptop. Lucinda had let him in. Cat stood in the entryway, shaking the water droplets from her hair. He closed the laptop and gazed at her, leaning his head back against the wall. He didn’t look like Finn anymore. Cat slipped off her shoes and sat down beside him and immediately he began to kiss her, slowly at first and then more urgently. “Lucinda went to bed,” he told her, kissing along her neck. Cat closed her eyes. She had not stopped thinking about Finn all evening: the kiss in her bedroom, the moment right before she accidentally found the switch on the back of his neck. She had thought about that moment so often during the past few years it had dried out. It was stale, like old, odorless potpourri. But she still went back to it, because it was the only one.
What she wanted, what she really wanted more than anything, was for Finn to kiss her, and not the other way around.
Michael pushed her down so she was lying on her back. She slipped her hands up inside his sweater. He jumped.
“Your hands are cold,” he whispered. Cat didn’t say anything in return.
Michael kissed her more and more urgently. He peeled off the layers of her clothes. Cat felt a distracting twinge of guilt, as though she were caught in an act of betrayal. Only she was not certain whom she was betraying. If it was Michael, or if it was Finn.
* * * *
After that first out-of-season storm, the usual May heat crept back around the college campus, making the bougainvillea and jasmine that hung off the old, broken-down telephone poles wilt and wither. The college was in a part of the city that hadn’t been destroyed during the Disasters, and so it hadn’t been reconstructed, either, like the neighborhoods Cat had visited as a child.
The air buzzed, the way it always did in the summer.
On one especially sunny afternoon Cat decided to ride her bike to the little clapboard snow cone stand on the corner. It was just hot enough to be a crazy idea, but Cat was in a crazy mood: nostalgic and wild. The sort of mood where you eat snow cones and pretend you’re ten years old again.
As she rode down the sidewalk, the hot wind blustering across her face, she wove around the detritus of the past: the crumbling concrete, the abandoned houses overgrown with wild grass and dandelions. Only half a mile away all the buildings gleamed with reinforced metal and hurricane-proof glass, their sleek lines cutting silver gashes across the canvas of the sky. Only half a mile away the entire world was brand-new.
There was no line at the stand, and after Cat received her snow cone from the automated machine, she wheeled her bike to the little city park across the street. She let her bike drop down in the silky bluegrass, and then she sat on a cement bench overlooking a tangle of wild morning glories wilting in the heat. She nibbled on her snow cone, the condensed milk eating away holes in the sugary, blackberry-flavored ice. It was all turning back into syrup faster than she would have liked. Sweat dripped down the back of her neck.
As she ate, Cat heard giggling coming from behind a row of hibiscus bushes. A rustling. Then the bushes ripped open in a flurry of leaves and bright pink and orange flowers, and a little girl burst out, her face and hands streaked with mud. The little girl giggled again. She turned back around to face the bushes, which still rustled and shook and vibrated.
An android stepped out.
Cat nearly dropped her snow cone on her knees. The android clapped his gleaming metal hands together. He laughed. The newsfeed had been talking about this all year, how androids built from the updated schematics of the old post-Disaster automatons were becoming more affordable, how middle-class families snatched them up as nannies. But Cat had never seen one before today.
The android looked old-fashioned. He had narrow, lithesome limbs, but he still moved with a strange jerky motion, one Cat noticed in the mass-produced androids she had seen in history videos. When he laughed, though, a light seemed to switch on beneath the thin metal of his face. This made the little girl jump up and down and screech with delight.
The android was like Finn, and he was not like Finn.
Finn. Cat sighed. She used her spoon to crunch the snow cone’s melting ice up with the condensed milk, but when she took a bite she could hardly taste it. She was too distracted by the android and the little girl, wishing she could watch them but not wanting to seem rude. So she listened instead. The android kept laughing. Finn had never laughed that much when she was a child—when she was that little girl’s age. Still, she had considered him her best friend.
There was a butterfly flurry of yellow fabric as the little girl blazed past Cat’s park bench, the android trundling along behind her. Cat looked up from her snow cone. The android paused, looked at her, and tilted an invisible hat in her direction.
“Ma’am,” he said. His voice had a metallic twang to it, like a steel guitar.
Cat smiled, lifted up her snow cone cup in response.
When the android turned away from her to follow after the little girl, Cat saw a string of numbers emblazoned across his back. A manufacturer’s label. 7829H-23. The twenty-third android out of a set of
a hundred. Or was it a thousand? It was standard, but Cat could never remember the base amount.
Finn didn’t have a manufacturer’s label.
Cat had looked for it once. When she was maybe thirteen, fourteen. She had convinced Finn to go swimming with her in the river, the water cold and green-black-gray and tipped occasionally with white froth from the rocks jutting up out of the bed. Finn had removed his shirt. When he waded out into the water, Cat hung behind, looking at the ridge of his spine. It looked just like her own spine, only paler. No numbers.
“Finn,” Cat had called out. He turned around. Cat put one foot in the water, jumped back at the surprising coldness of it.
“Yes?”
“You don’t have a number across your back,” Cat said. “Like the Disaster automatons.”
Finn blinked at her. For a moment Cat thought a shadow had gone across his face, like a cloud sliding across the sun. But then she decided she had just imagined it.
“No,” he said. “I don’t.”
Cat carefully put another foot in the cold water. She inched forward. “I thought most robots had a manufacturer’s ID.”
“I don’t have one,” Finn answered. “I believe I’m one of a kind.”
Cat closed her eyes and splashed forward in the water, wanting to get all the cold over with. She shrieked as her skin prickled into goose bumps. Finn stood motionless, his own skin still smooth.
“So you don’t know who ma . . . where you’re from?” She was glad he didn’t have a manufacturer’s ID—she didn’t like to think of him as being made, even then. Still, sometimes she asked her father for details. He never supplied them.
“I’m from Kansas.” The stock response.
I’m from Kansas. The last words she remembered from that day before the cold shocked her system out of order. Back in a city park in the middle of a very hot afternoon, Cat closed her eyes and thought of all the times she had asked her father about Finn’s background. It’s of no concern to little girls. Or, when her parents had started acting weird about her friendship with Finn, right before they sent her off to that high school in the town: He was made by a colleague of mine. That’s all you need to know.