She craned her neck, shoving stray elements of Seth off her lap. “Not like that. Maybe in Steve’s jacket, though.”
“Seth,” he said.
“Whatever.” She shook Seth by the shoulder, a little roughly. “Come on, Seth, time to go.”
* * *
They arrived at the station at 5:30, Hubert, Etc wearing Seth’s jacket, which was big on him, carrying his jacket under his arm. The first train rolled in and they shuffled in with bleary morning-shifters and wincing partiers. The people with jobs glared at the partiers. The people with jobs smelled good; the partiers did not, not even to Hubert, Etc’s deadened nose. During the zeppelin bubble, he’d had early mornings as they crunched on meaningless deadlines with the urgency of a car crash for no discernible reason. He’d ridden the first train into work. Hell, he’d slept in the office.
Seth’s comedown had plateaued. He was a perfect oil painting of Man with Drug Hangover, in grubby colors, a lot of shadow and cross-hatching. The cold air had turned his bare arms the color of corned beef, but Hubert, Etc didn’t feel bad about having commandeered his jacket. “Look at ’em,” Seth said in a stagey whisper. “So well-behaved.” They were Desi, Persian, white-bread, but all the same, all in their working peoples’ uniforms of respectability. A couple of the employed gave them shitty looks. Seth noticed, getting ready to pick a fight.
“Don’t,” Hubert, Etc said, as Seth said, “It’s the ultimate self-deception. Like they’re going to be able to change anything with a paycheck. If a paycheck could change your life, do you think they’d let you have one?”
It was a good line. Seth had used it before. “Seth,” he said, in a firmer tone.
“What?” Seth sat up straighter, looked belligerent. Toronto’s subways, like most subways, were places of civil inattention. It took a lot to get other people to overtly acknowledge you. Seth had done it. People stared.
Natalie leaned over and cupped her hand to Seth’s ear, hissed something. He clamped his mouth shut and glared, then looked at his feet. She gave Hubert, Etc a half smile.
“Where are we going?” she said. Hubert, Etc was cheered by that “we.” They’d been comrades-in-arms for the night and he had her contact details, but he’d been half expecting her to say that she was going home and leaving him with Seth.
“Fran’s?” he said.
She made a face.
“Come on,” he said. “It’s twenty-four hours, it’s warm, they don’t throw you out—”
“Yeah,” she said. “It’s a pit, though.”
He shrugged. He remembered when the last Fran’s had shut, when he was a teenager, and when the chain was rebooted as a hobby business by a lesser Weston, amid fanfare about the family and its connection to the city’s institutions. The new Fran’s felt haunted, and the feeling was, ironically, most intense during special events with live servers instead of automats. Live humans bearing trays of food highlighted the fact that the restaurant was designed for free-ranging, dumb robots and a minimum of human oversight. But it was cheap, and you could sit there a long time.
He wished he’d suggested somewhere cool. When he’d cared about this stuff, he’d had a continuous list of places where he would go if he had the money and someone to go with. Seth had that kind of list on tap, but he didn’t want to talk to Seth. He wished Seth would volunteer to go home and sleep off his trauma and drug residue. Which wasn’t going to happen, because this was Seth.
“Fine,” she said.
Her eyes glazed over and she looked at her lap, cupped her hand over the interaction surface on her thigh, checking her messages. This reminded Hubert, Etc to light up, and his own interface surfaces buzzed, letting him know about the things he should be doing. He dewormed his inboxes, flushing the junk and spum. He snooze-barred messages to bug him again later—something from his parents, an old girlfriend, some work he’d chased at a caterer’s.
They were almost at St Clair station now, and as they stood, one of the morning-shift people got into Seth’s space. He was a big guy, fair-skinned, freckled with a large, beaky nose and a conservative collar-length haircut. He wore a cheap overcoat with some kind of uniform under it, maybe medical. “You,” he said, leaning in, “are a mouthy little fuck, for someone who’s sponging welfare and partying all night. Why don’t you go get a fucking job?”
Seth leaned away, but the guy followed him, everyone swaying with the motion of the slowing train. Hubert, Etc’s adrenals found an unsuspected reservoir and goosed. His heart thundered. Someone was going to get hit. The guy was big, smelled of soap. There were cameras on the people and on the train, but he didn’t look like he gave a shit.
Natalie put a hand on the guy’s chest and pushed. He looked down in surprise at the slim, female hand on his chest, clamped his huge hand over her wrist. She whipped her free hand around, bashing him in the chest with her purse, which sprang open and sloshed cold vomit down his chest. She looked as disgusted as he did, but when he let go and stumbled back, she leaped through the closing subway doors, Hubert, Etc and Seth on her heels. They turned in time to see the guy sniffing his hand incredulously, his body language telegraphing I can’t believe you dumped a bag full of barf on me—
“Natalie,” Seth said on the escalators—the other passengers who’d gotten off gave them a wide berth. “Why was your purse full of sick?”
She shook her head. “I’d forgotten about it. I got sick when I saw—” She closed her eyes. “When I saw Billiam.”
“I’d forgotten it, too,” Hubert, Etc said.
“I hope nothing important fell out when I hit the guy,” she said. Her purse—medium-sized with a gitchy abstract pattern printed on its exterior vinyl—was slung across her body. She gingerly opened it, made a face, peered at its revolting depths. “I don’t know how the hell you start to clean this up. I’d throw it away except it’s got some stuff that should be washable.”
Seth wrinkled his nose. “Gloves and a mask. And someone else’s sink. Dude, what did you eat?”
She glared at him, but a little grin played at her lips. “Came in handy, didn’t it? Steve, we’ve had a shitty night. Do you think you could keep it low-key? Not picking fights?”
He had the grace to look ashamed. Hubert, Etc felt a spurt of jealousy jet from asshole to appetite, wanted to shove Seth down the escalator. He said, “None of us’re in the best shape. Some food will help. And coffium.”
Seth and Natalie both jolted at the mention of coffium. “Yesss,” Natalie said. “Come on.” She vaulted up, two big steps at a time. They cleared the turnstiles, stepped out into a blinking-bright morning, bustling with turned-out people doing Saturday morning shopping in turned-out showrooms. The rebuilt Fran’s had a narrow glass frontage between a bathroom remodeler’s salon and a place that sold giant concrete sculptures.
“Remember the Fran’s neon?” Hubert, Etc said. “It was such an amazing color, wild red.” He pointed to the LED-lit tube. “Never looks right to me. Makes me want to tweak reality’s gamma slider.”
Natalie gave him a funny look. They found a booth, the table lighting up with menus as they sat. The menus in front of each of them grew speech-bubbles as the automat’s biometrics recognized them and highlit their last orders, welcoming them back. Hubert, Etc saw Natalie had ordered lasagna with double garlic bread the last time, and it had been four years since she’d placed that order. “You don’t eat here often?”
“Just once,” she said. “Opening day.” She tapped the menu for a while, ordering a double chocolate malt, corned beef hash, hash browns, extra HP Sauce and mayo, and a half grapefruit with brown sugar. “I was a guest of the Weston’s. It was a family thing.” She looked him square in the eye, daring him to make a deal out of her privilege. “The neon sign? My dad bought it. It’s hanging in our cottage in the Muskokas.”
Hubert, Etc kept his face still. “I’d like to see it someday,” he said, evenly. He waited for Seth to say something.
“My name’s Seth, not Steve.” The shit-
eating grin was unmistakable. He reached across the table and twiddled Natalie’s order, dragging a copy of it over to his place setting.
“What the hell.” Hubert, Etc grabbed Seth’s order and copied it to his place setting, too. He tapped the large-sized coffium-pot, and Natalie smacked her palm down on the submit.
“Come on,” Natalie said. “Say it.”
Hubert, Etc said, “Nothing to say. Your family knows the Westons.”
“Yeah,” she said. “We do. We’re foofs.”
Hubert, Etc nodded as if he knew what that meant, but Seth had no shame. “What’s a foof?”
“Fine old Ontario family,” she said.
“Never heard the term,” Seth said.
“Me either.”
She shrugged. “You probably have to be a foof to know what a foof is. I got a lot of it at summer camp.”
The food arrived then, atop a trundling robot that docked with their table. They cleared its top layer, and it rotated its carousel for the next tray, then a third. The fourth had the coffium. Natalie set it on their table, and Hubert, Etc couldn’t help but admire her arm muscles as she set it down. He noticed she didn’t shave her armpits and felt unaccountably intimate in that knowledge. They sorted out the dishes and poured the coffee.
He plucked the nuclear-red cherry from the top of the whipped-cream mountain on his shake and ate it stem and all. Natalie did the same. Seth scalded his tongue on the coffium and spilled ice water in his haste.
Natalie used the edge of her plate as a palette and swirled together a beige mixture of HP Sauce and mayo. She forked up small mouthfuls of food swirled in the mixture.
“That looks vile.” Seth said it, not him, because he didn’t want to be a jerk. Seth was a portable, external id. Not always comfortable or appropriate, but handy nevertheless.
“It’s called the brown love.” She dabbed with a red-and-white striped napkin, waited for Seth to make an innuendo, which didn’t come. “Invented it in high school. You don’t want to try it, your loss.” She forked up more hash and pointed it at them. On impulse, Hubert, Etc let her feed it to him. It was surprisingly good, and the clink of the fork on his tooth made him shiver like an amazing piss.
“Fantastic.” He meant it. He prepared his own smear, using Natalie’s for color reference.
Seth refused to try, to Hubert, Etc’s secret delight. The food was better than he remembered, and more expensive. He hadn’t budgeted for the meal and it was going to hurt.
He pondered this, standing at the urinal and smelling his asparagus-y active-culture piss. Thinking of money, smelling the smell, he almost clamped down and ran out to get a cup to save some. Free beer was free beer, even if it did start out as used beer. All water was used beer. But it was down the drain before the thought was complete.
When he got back to the table, an older man sat next to Natalie.
He had shaggy hair, well cut, and skin with the luster of good leather. He wore a fabric-dyed cement-colored knit cardigan, with mottled horn buttons sewn on with hot pink thread. Beneath it, a tight black t-shirt revealed his muscular chest and flat stomach. He wore a simple wedding band and had short, clean, even fingernails, a kind of ostentatious no-manicure.
“Hi there,” he said. Hubert, Etc sat down opposite him. He extended a hand. “I’m Jacob. Natalie’s father.”
They shook. “I’m Hubert,” he said, as Seth said, “Call him ‘Etcetera.’”
“Call me Hubert,” he said, again. His external id was a pain in the ass.
“Nice to meet you, Hubert.”
“My father spies on me,” Natalie said. “That’s why he’s here.”
Jacob shrugged. “It could be worse. It’s not like I have your phone tapped. It’s just public sources.”
Natalie put her fork down and pushed her plate away. “He buys cam-feeds, real-time credit reports, market analytics. Like a background check on a new hire. But all the time.”
Seth said, “That’s creepy. And expensive.”
“Not so expensive. I can afford it.”
“Dad’s made the transition to old rich,” Natalie said. “He isn’t embarrassed by money. Not like my grandparents were. He knows he’s practically a member of a different species and can’t see why he should hide it.”
“My daughter is making a game of trying to embarrass me in public, something she’s been working on since she was ten. I don’t embarrass easy.”
“Why should you be embarrassed? You’d have to care what other people think of you in order to be embarrassed. You don’t, so you aren’t.”
Hubert, Etc felt embarrassed for them, felt like he should say something, if only so that Seth didn’t get all the mindshare. “I bet he cares what you think of him,” he risked.
They both grinned and the family resemblance was uncanny, down to the identical double dimple on the right side. “That’s why I do it. I’m proxy for every human beneath his notice. It’s not fun, either, despite what he thinks.”
“I don’t see you rejecting the privilege, Natty,” he said, putting an arm around her shoulders. She let him keep it there for a measured moment, then shrugged it off.
“Not yet,” she said.
His silence was eloquently skeptical. He moved her plate over to his place setting, tapped the table’s NO SHARING message and waved a contact on his sleeve over it, tapped out a pattern with his thumb and forefinger. He polished off the last of the corned beef hash and then reached for her shake. She stopped him and said, “Mine.” He settled for the dregs of her coffium.
“Are you going to invite your little friends over for a playdate, then?” He wiped his mouth and loaded the plates on the robot that re-docked with the table.
“You guys want a shower?”
Seth pounded the table, making the menu dance as it tried to interpret his instructions. “Come on, brother, we eat tonight!”
Hubert, Etc gave him an elbow jab. “Better count the spoons,” he said.
“They count themselves,” Jacob said. He did something with his sleeve and said, “The car’ll be around in a sec.”
[iii]
It wasn’t a carshare car, of course. The Redwaters were one of the big names—there’d been a Redwater mayor, Redwater MPs, a Redwater Finance Minister, any number of Redwater CEOs. The car was still small, not a stretch, but it was indefinably solid, skirted with matte rubber that covered the wheels. Hubert, Etc thought that there was something interesting underneath it. There were intriguing somethings about this car, and an inconspicuous Longines logo worked into the corner of the window glass. The suspension did something clever to compensate for his weight, actively dampening it, not like stone-age springs. He sat in a rear-facing jump seat, saw the windows weren’t windows at all. They were thick armor, coated with hi-rez screens. Jacob took the other jump seat and said, “Home.” The car waited until they were all seated securely and buckled in before it leapt into traffic. From his vantage the cars around them were melting out of their way.
“I don’t think I’ve ever traveled this fast in city traffic,” he said.
Jacob gave him a fatherly wink.
Natalie reached across the large internal compartment and gave her dad a sock in the thigh. “He’s showing off. There’s custom firmware in these, lets them cut the clearance envelope in half, which makes the other cars back off because we’re driving like unpredictable assholes.”
“Is that legal?” Hubert, Etc said.
“It’s a civil offense,” Jacob said. “The fines are paid by direct-debit.”
“What if you kill someone?” Seth got to the point.
“That’s a criminal matter, more serious. Won’t happen, though. There’s a lot of game theory stuff going on in the car’s lookahead, modeling likely outs and defectors and injecting a huge margin of safety. Really, we’re playing it safer than the stock firmware, but only because the car itself has got much better braking and acceleration and handling characteristics than a stock car.”
“And be
cause you’re terrifying other cars’ systems into getting out of your way,” Seth said.
“Right,” Natalie said, before her dad could object. He shrugged and Hubert, Etc remembered what she’d said about his being “old rich,” unconcerned by the idea that anyone would resent his buying his way through traffic.
They raced through city streets. Natalie closed her eyes and reclined. There were dark circles under her eyes and she was tense, had been since her dad turned up. Hubert, Etc tried not to stare.
“Where do you live?” Seth asked.
“Eglinton Ravine, by the Parkway,” Jacob said. “I had it built about ten years ago.”
Hubert, Etc remembered school trips to the Ontario Science Centre, tried to remember the ravine, but could only recall a deep forested zone glimpsed from the window of a speeding school bus.
The food he’d had from Fran’s weighed in his gut like a cannonball. He thought about the blood on his clothes and under his fingernails, mud on his shoes, crumbling to the upholstery. The car surged, his guts complained. They braked hard, and then merged with another lane of traffic, a whisper between them and the car behind, a tiny carshare whose passenger, an elegant Arabic-looking woman in office makeup, looked at them with alarm before they skipped to the next lane.
[iv]
The house was one of three in a row overlooking the ravine’s edge, at the end of a winding, rutted road overhung with leafy trees. The garage door slid aside as they pulled into the rightmost house. It shut and locked into place with huge, shining round rods sunk deep into the floor and ceiling and walls. The car doors gasped open and he was in a vast space beneath all three houses, brightly lit and dotted with vehicles. Jacob held his hand out to Natalie and she ignored him, then stumbled a little as she twisted to avoid him taking her elbow.
“Come on,” she said to Hubert, Etc and Seth and set off for the garage’s other end.
“Thanks for the ride,” Hubert, Etc called as he quickstepped after her. Jacob leaned against the car, watching them go. Hubert, Etc couldn’t make out his expression.
She took them up a narrow staircase to a large, messy room with sofas and a panoramic window overlooking the ravine—a green, steep drop-off with the Don River below, white and frothing as it cascaded to Lake Ontario. It smelled funky, old laundry and unwashed dishes, an overlay of scented candles. One wall was finger-painted from floor to ceiling and scribbled on with Sharpies and glitter and ballpoint.