Kiln People

Except that I somehow felt uneasy — unsure that anything “happy” was going on here. Despite the prospect of going home with a fat check for half a morning’s consultation, I had that hollow feeling. The one that always haunts me when a job feels unfinished.

3

Something in the Fridge

I parked by the Little Venice Canal and keyed myself aboard Clara’s houseboat, hoping to find her at home.

It suited Clara to live on the water. At a time when most people — even the poor — seem feverishly intent on building up their homes, maximizing both ornate space and possessions, she preferred spartan compactness. The river’s briny tide, its unsteady rocking, reminded her of the world’s instability — which she found somehow reassuring.

Like those bullet holes in the north bulkhead, streaming rays of summer illumination into the boat’s tiny salon. “My new skylights,” Clara called them, soon after we both managed to wrestle the gun out of Pal’s hands, that time when he broke down right there in front of us, the one and only time I ever saw our friend sob over his bad luck. The very day he got released from the hospital — the half of him that remained — in his shiny new life-support chair.

Later, as we were about to drive Pal home, Clara brushed aside his apologies. And from that moment she vowed to keep the perforations unpatched, treasuring them as valued “improvements.”

You can see why I would always come by the boat, too, whenever I feel punctured or let down.

Only this time, Clara wasn’t home.

Instead, I found a note for me on the kitchen counter.

GONE TO WAR, it said.

I muttered sourly. Was this payback for the way my zombie-self ditsrupted Madame F’s di

Then I recalled, Oh yes, a war. She did mention something a while back, about her reserve unit being called up for combat duty. For a battle against India, I thought. Or was it Indiana?

Damn, that sort of thing could last a whole week. Sometimes more. I really wanted to talk to her, not spend the time worrying about where she was and what she might be doing, out there in the desert.

The note went on:

Glancing toward her little sim-study, I saw light rimming the door. So, before departing, Clara must have made a duplicate, programmed to finish some homework assignment. No doubt I’d find a gray or ebony version of my girlfriend inside, swathed in the robes of a virtuality chador, laboring to fulfill some academic requirement in her latest major maybe Bantu Linguistics or Chinese Military History — I couldn’t follow the way her interests kept swerving, like a hundred million other permanent students on this continent alone.

Me, I was one of a vanishing breed — the employed. My philosophy: why stay in school when you have a marketable skill? You never know when it’ll become obsolete.

The magnetic latch released silently when I touched it, easing open the door of the study. True, her note asked me stay out, but I feel insecure sometimes. Maybe I was just checking to be sure that my biometrics still had full trust access, throughout the boat.

They did. And yes, there was her gray, studying at a tiny desk cluttered with papers and data-plaques. Only the legs showed — pasty-clay in texture but realistically shapely. Everything above the waist lay shrouded under holo-interactive fabric that kept bulging and shifting as the ditto waved, pointed, and typed with wriggling hands. Word mumbles escaped the muffling layers.

“… No, no! I don’t want some commercial hobby simulation of the Fizzle War. I need information on the real event! Not history books but raw debriefing transcripts having specifically to do with bio-crimes like TARP … Yes, that’s right. Real harm done to real people back when war was …

“I know the trial records are forty years old! So? Then adapt to the old data protocols and … Oh, you dim-witted excuse for a … and they call this artificial intelligence?”

I had to smile. Mere duplicate or not, it was Clara right down to the soul — cool in a crisis yet capable of great affection. And all too prickly toward the incompetence of strangers, especially machines. It did no good to lecture her that software avatars couldn’t be browbeaten like infantry recruits.

I found it curious — and maybe a bit creepy — how Clara could assign a duplicate to do classwork, yet never bother to inload the golem’s memories. How does that help you learn anything? All right, I’m old-fashioned. (One of my “endearing” qualities, she says.) Or maybe it’s hard to imagine what keeps a golem motivated, with no promise of rejoining its original at the end of the day.

Well, you do it too, sometimes, I thought. Didn’t you lend Clara an ebony last week, to help her with a term paper? Never came back, as I recall. Not that I mind.

I hope we had some good, scholarly fun.

Though tempted, I decided against bothering the homework-ditto. Clara liked specialists. This one would be all drive and intellect, toiling till its ephemeral brain expired. Again, it comes down to personality. Zingleminded focus on each task at hand, that’s my Clara.

The houseboat reflected this. In an era when people spend copious spare time lavishly furnishing their homes or building hobby-hoards, her place was severely efficient, as if she expected to shove off at a moment’s notice, heading toward some distant shore, or perhaps a different era.

Tools were evident, many showing handmade touches, like an all-weather navigation system worked into the grain of a carved mahogany walking stick or a set of formidable, self-targeting fighting bolas wrought from meteoritic nickel-iron. Or the his and hers armored chadors that hung from a nearby coatrack. Decorative outer layers of burnished titanium chain mail covered the real apparatus — a floppy cowl of plush emitters that could transport you anywhere you want to go in VR space. Assuming you had a good reason to visit that sterile digital realm.

Our matched set of chadors stayed here on the boat — the closest thing to a firm expression of commitment I had from her so far. That and a pair of solido-dolls of us hiking together on Denali — her straight brown hair cropped close, almost helmetlike, around a face that Clara always dismissed as too elongated to be pretty, though I had no complaints. To me she looked grown-up, a real woman, while my own too-youthful features seem forever pinched in a dark moodiness of adolescence. Maybe it’s why I overcompensate, working hard to keep a serious job, while Clara feels more free to explore.

Otherwise? No clutter of collectibles. No trophies from a hundred battlefields where her combatant dittoselves crawled through shellfire, charging laser positions in her team’s more famous matches.

At one level, I was involved with a college student. At another level, a warrior and international celebrity. So? Who hasn’t grown accustomed to living several lives in parallel? If humanity has one majestic talent, it’s an almost infinite capacity to get used to the Next Big Thing … then take it for granted.

I looked back at the note Clara left for me. Her thumbprint, bio-sculpted to resemble a familiar winking leer, marked the end, pointing to a second scrap of paper underneath: