New Decameron Twenty-Five: Candas Jane Dorsey (Patreon)

The Card is The World

by Candas Jane Dorsey

The lab is mostly white: though the lime and brick colours on the sides of the cabinets and the bits of yellow wall are meant to alleviate the Kubrik-2001 vibe, somehow the white always dominates. The researchers wear environment-suits, like hazmat suits, that are not specially made, so both Amanda and Zachary look as if they are dressing in their parents’ overalls. 

The visitors to the lab are almost always tall men in suits. Pun unintended, because the white suits fit them perfectly, but their collars and ties show through the clear fronts of the helmets. That’s who runs things everywhere in those days (and come to think of it, only a few of the descriptors changed later). The Chair takes them through the public portions, and they crane their necks to try to see more of the restricted area. 

“Look at them,” says Zach. “They can’t even see us.”

“We’re inside big white paper bags,” says Amanda. “Of course they can’t.”

“Do they even try to make eye contact?” say Zach. 

As if to give him the lie, they are immediately called outside the lab to explain their research to the funders. The funders have decided to come in for a closer look. It takes about twenty minutes to get them into the outer lab, go through all the procedures, and that’s the fast version, not 100% safe.

The suits—the funders, the politicos, this is synecdoche not anthropomorphism, yet—are restive by then, but one of them is persistent.

“Why can’t we come in there and look at what you are doing up close?”

The others laugh obediently at the joke.

“Because if you make a mistake the nan will melt your faces,” says Amanda, not a joke, but she is only a woman in those days, and about four-foot-nine in the old measure, and they ignore her.

Zach hears her though, and he says quietly, “I will take you in if you like,” and although he is only this much taller than Amanda, he is a man of those days, and they hear him, just barely, and they go into the lab with him. 

This takes another hour, and by the time they are all sweating in the white suits and masks, mostly because just as in every other suit tour, they chose to shed only their suit jackets, skip the indignity, or possibly the unwelcome revelation, of stripping to their underwear. What they will put up with. Maybe, thinks Amanda, they are all secret fetishists, or secretly go commando, and they don’t want to show their genitals. 

She has just read the research that showed how the loudest howler monkeys have the smallest balls, and live in homosocial groups where they yell a lot and share the few females willing to put up with it, while the quiet, ballsy howlers hang out in inclusive, less hierarchical groups. It has changed her view of politics, and the funders, quite a bit.

It is now late in the afternoon, and many of the suited suits are restless. The alpha suit, who howled his way in here, still controls them, but the edges of their nodules of privilege and calm are fraying a bit. This is expressed in jokes and jostling that would do a schoolyard proud. 

“Well, at least the suit fits me, not like the little guy’s.”

“Her too.”

“Her? The tech?”

“She’s the lab lead. Shush.”

“Her?”

Amanda finds herself surrounded by three of the youngest, who are apparently still able to see her, and she is showing them how she manipulates nanoparticles, and how she programs them to do blood work, so she misses the moment. She saw it later on not-very-good security footage, but she has always regretted not seeing the actual thing.

She hears it, though. The little sound, the ringing of breaking glass, cuts through every other sound in the lab, and everyone turns. They all look at the broken vessel on the counter, and the hand of the alpha-suit, and the deep bright red on the white of the suit, but Amanda looks first at Zachary. She sees, through the transparent face guard, his wide, involuntary smile, and she sees him fold his fingers into a small fist he doesn’t use at all in the ensuing triage.

Afterward, he will swear it was the suit’s fault, in both senses of the word—that the head funder was trying to do something stupid that the suit wasn’t meant to prevent. By then the suit inside the suit has become something that is incapable of contradicting his story.

The in-depth profiles of Mr. Big and Tall and his lapse hardly even mentioned the carelessness of any other person. Nobody seemed to notice the breach in Zach’s suit, or the risks Amanda took when she helped them both. 

The coverage of them? It’s all about what Amanda and Zachary did earlier, how their lab cracked the nanotech. Who were they anyway? They were two short, nerdy scientists who would have fit really well into the Japanese anime trope. They had white coats. They had messy hair. They had glasses. They had wild, peripatetic gazes and perpetually sleep-deprived miens. They were so classic that Central Casting probably sent people over to take measurements whenever they had to cast a Mad Scientist in a movie. Especially in a comedy. They were, the commentators sometimes called them, those funny little people in the back lab.

Underestimate them at your peril.

Arthur Clarke famously said that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. What Amanda and Zachary were after was beyond that. They wanted advanced magic. They wanted magic that was magical even to magicians. They wanted nanotech to change rabbits into doves and red scarves into dragonflies and people into—well, what they wanted is moot now. 

But their crime, now. Their crime is to want anything. Anything at all.

Steps are taken to make sure they could want nothing. In the guise of saying that they will want for nothing, they are removed to a safe place. 

Safe. Ha.

*******

Isolation is relaxing, and no more white suits. Amanda’s own clothing is just as boring, but less sweaty. No helmet, no mask. The jail (er, rather call it the “safe isolation facility”) is a bit country-club, because of the guy Amanda and Zach call The Suit. So it’s not really possible to stop it when the paint in Zach’s cell starts turning colour on command, and crawls with patterns, and takes off down the hall to mate with some cleaning products from the more traditional secure ward where the regular plague cases lie on their ventilators. 

After a couple of days the ventilators start to change a little. Since most of them were 3D-printed by local high-school students, colour isn’t the indicator here. It’s more a kind of chunkiness in the seals, as if sugar crystals were growing on the flexible joints and flanges. By the end of the third day, the patients are breathing for themselves, the ventilators nanopatched into their throats and windpipes as if they’ve been Borged, but a little more plastic and less art-deco. The model is more like Lego, or Playmobil. The patients are getting a little tinge of iridescence, and they’re waking up feisty. This would be a problem if the medical staff weren’t going through some change of their own. The remaining N95 masks and the schoolkid kludges have long since melted, but so has the hair of some of the medical staff, the ones who used hair product. Their new hair is as fake-looking as Devo. It’s quite the pop-culture reference-soup when the media gets hold of it.

Amanda doesn’t change at all. Well, yes, she does, a lot, but it’s mostly organic. 

Zach also stays human enough to pass, mostly by an act of will. 

Then some boffins figure out the nano-locks, and the party is over for the A-to-Zed gang, as The Guardian starts to call them.

Some years pass. 

Some things change. 

Amanda and Zach don’t see the changes directly, but their colonies report back now and again, letters to Mom and Dad across one of the bigger generation gaps in history. But since Amanda and Zachary don’t keep diaries during that period, and most of that facility is now a rather nice ziggurat with hanging gardens of ever-blooming pansies on the sides, not much memory comes out of that period.

Amanda, herself, has more than a bit of amnesia, partly by choice and partly a palimpsest of other processes she has also forgotten. She and Zach mostly communicate through some Morse-like pulses and old-fashioned whispering through ventilator ducts.

They mostly survive by eating stuff they don’t want to remember later.

The synthesis from the desks and computers is particularly vile. Who knew beige tasted so bad? Comparatively, the organic matter reconstructions are almost palatable, and Amanda only goes Wendigo for a little while. It’s possible that Zach isn’t affected at all, not effect as we know it.

All this takes quite a while. Neither of them enjoys it. 

Somewhere in the middle, Amanda asks Zach if it was worth it. At the time they are lounging in some sort of nano-bean bag-chair in a conversation pit that reminds Amanda of her grandparents’ basement, back in the day.

Zach looks at her with his Uncanny-Valley face on and says, “What do you think?”

“Oh, for fuck’s sake,” she says.

“I do miss my favourite foods,” he says. “Maple syrup.”

“Sushi.”

“We could have sushi!”

“This kind? I pass. Don’t do your misdirection shit. Are you sorry you drove a test-tube into that asshole’s hand—and your own?”

“Not so much. I’m kind of sorry we got some on you. It’s the sort of thing that you should be able to choose.”

Amanda is in her Wendigo period. She starts to laugh and can’t stop, and Zach has to bring her out of it with a drench of something like water, but it turns her temporarily green.

“Get it the fuck off me,” she says.

“You’ll be able to photosynthesise.”

“The fuck off me! Now!” He does, and eventually she forgives him for having read The Child Garden at a vulnerable time in his adolescence.

“Seriously, Zee. What the fuck?”

“I forget what I thought back then,” says Zee. “A lot of cellular-level interventions under the bridge since then.”

She has her theories. Underestimate them at your peril. And all that. But she never finds out for sure if he was sorry.

Or if any of this is on purpose. After all, the version wasn’t really stable, and randomness is now always going to be a big problem of this stuff.

Some people show up, slosh some solvent over the nanos, and put them back into a rather slippery-surfaced solitary confinement. Which of course gets boring again. After learning to play the piano, taking up watercolour, practicing some kind of weird martial art from a book in the library, and tattooing most of her body surfaces in an upmarket version of jailhouse chic, Amanda is done.

Manda has to refuse co-operation a few times, and the last of these times, more years go missing than anyone wants, but at the end of the process, Manda and Zee are set free.

It has ceased to matter where they are. The old Sufi expression, “wherever you go, there you are,” had become Zach’s mantra long since. Everything is like that now.

*******

The get-out-of-jail party is thrown by the new, young ones to welcome their legendary colleague back to the world. Amanda, as usual, is a bit of an afterthought to them. It’s Zach who insists, and they will do anything for their nano-Mandela.

Old age has welcomed Amanda, and slowly transformed her, naturally mostly, added a feeble scattering of chin hairs and rougher skin, turned that thick robust hair a stark and elegant white. Manda is now a small, elegant silver fox, with a wispy sage’s beard, and affects a kind of faux-Confucian garb to enhance the image. They hope that their garb and mien evoke visions of the scholar in an elegant garden, though they have plenty of anecdotal proof that mostly those who see them are impatient for them to move faster. As now.

Manda climbs the porch stairs slowly, dot-and-carry, both booted feet solid on each step before stepping up to the next. Probably the party guests sidestepping to take the steps two at a time think that’s how old people go up and down, after a century of stairs. There’s a certain amount of truth to that, but in Manda’s case, it’s not because they can’t step up in the usual way. Carrying a lemon meringue pie takes concentration—and both hands—and the cane they usually use for balance has to stay hooked over an elbow.

The door to the house is open. The porch is large enough for a table and some chairs, where chatting guests lounge, ignoring Manda. On the rail sits a silent magpie who seems more interested—but maybe that’s just the pie. At Manda’s age, you tend to think it’s the pie, not the person. On the threshold crowd a bulldog and an orange cat, and behind them, a little old gnome of a person who has shrunk back into that cherubic roundness of face and fragility of body that cause youths to call them dear in stores and buses. But Zachary is as ferocious as Manda, and they have history that few of the ornamental attendees at this party even imagine. Underestimate them at your peril.

“You made it,” Zed says.

“No thanks to you,” Manda snaps. “Seriously, lemon meringue pie? I had to go halfway across town to source it, and then take a fucking taxi to get it here. A goddamn taxi. A gosh-darn taxi. Dang-nab it. Get those kids off my lawn and all that. You are a pain in the ass, birthday boy.”

“Yes,” said Zachary. “I totally am. I pride myself.”

They laugh. Manda surrenders the pie to one of the tall, sturdy, condescending guest who hovers behind Zachary. The guests momentarily crane to see who has shown up, though their gazes also seem to follow the pie.

Manda hugs Zachary. The dog, jealous, pushes at them, and one of the big guests pulls it away from the two tiny old people.

“Taurus, go lie down!” The dog looks back reproachfully, but pads obediently to its bed in a nook under the stairs.

“So you made it,” says Manda quietly. “You made it.”

“One hundred years,” says Zed. “The magic day.”

“I’m a hundred and one,” whispers Manda, with only a touch of snark. They are alone for a moment in the crowd, thinking of the ones who didn’t make it. A lot, really.

Inside, some of the guests are already morphing. Their masks flow up over their faces with the ease of long practice.

“Nano-natives,” Manda said. “Remember that stupid article?”

X grins. “And we are supposed to be ‘nano-immigrants’. As if we didn’t invent the frigging stuff.”

“Shhh,” says Manda. “They might hear us. Our NDAs haven’t expired—yet.” This is a joke they used for years. They don’t laugh so much as acknowledge it with a little snort and a head-toss.

“I’ll be going, after the party,” Zach says, and Manda kisses him on both cheeks, and says, “Mazel tov—I think?”

Zachary laughs and presses into their hand a tiny button. “Come too?”

“Thank you, my dear, I have other plans,” says Manda primly, and Zachary laughs so hard that a couple of tears escape.

For a moment, they are back there. “Remember what it was like in the old days, pulling apart the fabric of reality to see what was hiding behind the curtain?” says Manda. “How excited we were?”

“And then it was just us,” says Zachary, sobering. “Endlessly recursive. Endlessly doing the same things in the hope of a different outcome. Crazy for a long time. And besides, look at us now. These are our Old Days.”

“I’m not complaining,” says Manda. “Consider the alternative.”

But Manda puts the nanobutton into a pocket anyway. As they discovered back in the bad old days, it’s always an idea to have a contingency plan.

"Oh, by the way, be careful who eats that pie," Manda says.

"Oh, I have no plans to protect them," Zachary says. "They deserve what they get. They call me 'dear', you know. 'Dear'!"

For a moment his face is as it was the day he released the nanos into the wild. Manda shivers. They guess they have their answer now. And they know their face is the same as his. Wild, speculative, angry, random. 

And the partygoers, the tall perfect people, as usual don’t notice. They think of Zachary more as a mascot than as the one this bash is meant to honour. They bustle Zed and Manda into chairs as if there is no possible way people their age would want to stay standing, and bring drinks they didn’t ask for, and they try to put a paper crown on Zachary’s head. Zed bats it away with a laugh, and holds it in one tiny paw, chubby as the hand of a putti in a Renaissance painting. Poor Zed, so often overlooked too. Manda smiles grimly.

Manda remembers standing naked with Zach, within the circle of containment in the lab that day, feeling the magic suffuse them both. By the way Zachary reaches with one hand over to the other, to the scar marking the spot where Amanda touched him that day, Manda knows he is remembering too. Their gazes are knowing and triumphant. Dangerous.

The hazmat teams, the medicos, the other scientists, the lab supervisor and the department head, the police, the courts, the prisons, they all thought that The Suit was the vector, and all the rest, from A to Zed, was just collateral damage.

We are the vectors, that gaze says. 

Underestimate us at your peril.

Satisfied, Manda watches as the youth cuts the pie for everyone at the party. Watches them eat it. 

And, satisfied, watches everything change, one more time.

*******************************************************

"Pie?" he asks. "No, I'm only kidding."

"They overlooked them and they changed everything," Maya says, and grins. "But I'm glad you didn't get the lemon meringue pie. Or... would it really do that and change everything here?"

"Oh I think so," he says. "Stories are powerful and dangerous and change the world, you know that!"

"Yes," she says. "And that was a really good story. What else have we got?"

"We've got a little bit of Walter Jon Williams's new Praxis book," he says.

"What? You're kidding? Wow. Give it here right now." Maya makes a grab for it. "I love those. They have the best aliens. It can also mean a lawn. So funny. So clever. Such a great universe. Is it about Martinez or Sula?"

"Sula," he says.

"Oh wonderful. I love Sula best." Maya rubs her thumb. "I'd like to be the woman who calls herself Caroline, Lady Sula. When I grow up, that is. Did you read the story where she finally goes to Earth?"

"I've read all the Dread Empire's Fall books, including the short novels that are only available as ebooks. Now let's read this one. I don't even mind that it probably won't have food in it."

"I can't believe you said that," Maya teases, and they read.