Specimen Days

Simon and Catareen rattled on for a half mile or more. Bruce Springsteen sang "Born to Run" over and over on the radio. The innards were fused. Soon Simon pulled the car over into a weedy roadside emptiness. New Jersey wasn't maintained. None of the eastern seaboard was, outside of the theme parks. The Council kept the Northeast crime-free but was not much interested in streetlights, unbroken roads, or other amenities this far from the Southern Assembly.

The car shivered. It put out a heat shimmer. Simon brushed glass gravel from his shirtfront. He surveyed his personal damage. A brilliant red burn line ran from his right cheek to his right earlobe. He took off the cap and saw that he had acquired a part to the left of the center of his head. It wasn't serious. The burns sizzled with a cauterized heat that was not unpleasant.

Catareen was looking straight ahead. She had folded her hands in her lap again.

"We made it," Simon said. "Yes," she answered. "You're good." "And you."

"I exist as I am, that is enough. We have to figure out what to do next."

"Where go."

"Right. I know I said I'd try to get us a pod."

"Yes."

"Actually, that might be difficult. These old clunkers are no problem for me. Pod security is another matter entirely."

"We go in this?"

"As far as we can. These things run on gas. They don't have gas outside of Old New York."

"We go far as we can."

"If we're lucky, if we're very lucky, the car will get us through New Jersey. Once we're in another state, I'll see what I can do for us. Vehicularly speaking."

"We go what way?" she asked.

"How would you feel about going to Denver?"

"Denver." She gave the name a whistling, fluty spin.

"Hm. How exactly do I explain this? Short version. I'm a simulo. You know about simulos?"

He waited for an answer. She seemed to have stopped speaking again. She stared straight ahead through the glassless windshield at the patch of dry grass and brush. A wrapper blew by. Gummi Bears.

He said, "I'm experimental. I was made by a company called Biologe. Have you heard of them?"

Nothing from Catareen. He continued. What else could he do?

"Biologe missed out on the animal genetics patents, where the big money was. It snapped up a few key human patents, sort of under the radar, when the legislation was still murky. But Biologe had trouble turning its patents into actual profits. Lots of potential PR problems, as I'm sure you can imagine. Their marketing people finally came up with what seemed like the perfect angle: humanoids for long-range journeys into space. Entities that would be resilient and dependable, capable of abstract reasoning, fully equipped to charm alien life-forms, but not bothered by the prospect of a forty- or fifty-year trip from which there might be no return.

"Still, it was dicey. Biologe subcontracted the work to obscure people with little start-up companies and paid them well but with the understanding that Biologe would disavow if an experiment turned ugly. One of these people was a freelance guy named Lowell, Emory Lowell, residing in Denver. Lowell figured out a way to excite certain cell lines into a marriage with old-fashioned circuitry. The core was mechanical, but from it sprang a biomass. Which formed humanly around the core. A little like a Chia Pet."

Chia Pet. How did he know that? Lowell must have slipped it into his circuits as a joke. He also seemed to know about PEZ, Mr. Bubble, and Bullwinkle the Moose.

"Vintage novelty," he told Catareen. "Little clay lambs and things that sprouted grass. Anyway. Biologe was running low on money by then, and they pressured Lowell to unveil his prototype sooner than he wanted to. Heated arguments ensued. He kept insisting that given another six months to a year he could fine-tune us, he could come up with an entity as resilient as flesh, with flesh's truly remarkable ability to sustain and repair itself, that had none of the higher-level human qualities. Abstract thinking. Emotions. Because it would be immoral, by some accounts at least, to engender anything like that and shoot it into space."

Catareen looked ahead. Simon decided to assume she was listening.

"There were some misfires, which were effectively hushed up. I was one of the third strain. By the time I was developed, Biologe had run out of time, patience, and cash, and they went right into production, over Lowell's protests. There was a lot of hoopla about us, but we didn't really catch on. Those big corporate contracts failed to materialize, and then space exploration itself more or less fell apart after Nadia. Biologe went belly-up. But rumor has it that Lowell is still out there, tinkering away. That he feels guilty about having created beings who are almost but not quite. That he's figured out a way to manipulate the codes and make us…"

She said, "Make what?" She'd been listening, then.

"Well. A little more human, around the edges."

"You want?"

"I want something. I feel a lack."

"Lack."